Hamas has been publishing lots of videos showing them shoot volleys of rocket to Israel.
But some of them also show rockets falling short - in Gaza.
Here's one from last night:
And this one from yesterday shows a smoke trail that reveals a corkscrewing rocket:
And here's one more with at least 3 rockets falling short (smoke trail of one or two and two rocket lights going down)
These aren't the small rockets of years past. These are very large missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.
When they fall in Gaza, they will cause damage, injuries and death.
And they have. Plenty of Gazans have been killed over the years from errant Hamas rockets, even much smaller ones.
The IDF estimates as many as 30% of rockets are falling short in Gaza.
When the media parrots the Gaza Health Ministry - Hamas- claims of civilian victims of Israeli rockets, keep in mind that they are very possibly from Hamas rockets.
But they will never admit that.
UPDATE: From the IDF:
WATCH as a Hamas rocket aimed at Israel misfires and falls back into Gaza.
But this isn't the 1st time—Hamas misfired 350 rockets in the last 3 days.
These rockets result in the deaths of innocent Gazan civilians.
Social media has been filled with anti-Israel statements from people who say that their expertise in morality and the Middle East comes because they are Jews by an accident of birth.
A large number of American Jews are Jews in name only.
Fully 27% of Jews do not call themselves Jewish by religion - and the number increases to 40% for those under 30.
Nearly 50% of US Jews hardly ever do anything associated with Jewishness.
25% of US Jews say they have hardly any Jewish friends.
Only 11% of Jews who don't identify with Judaism as a religion give charity to Jewish causes.
Not surprisingly, the Jews who have the least to do with Judaism are the ones who hate Israel the most. 18% of "Jews of no religion" support BDS, far more than the average.
Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask what levels of Jewish education Jews in America had. It seems obvious that those who know the least about their own religion and history are the ones who are the most likely to hate Israel now, and many of those get a thrill out of identifying "as a Jew" to buttress their ignorant opinions of Israel.
The survey is sad. It shows an American Jewish community that has utterly failed at attracting and keeping young people (with the exception of Orthodoxy.) Although most Jews still strongly support the Jewish state, the survey shows a growing disconnect between American Jews and Israel.
It shows exactly where the "As a Jews" are coming from.
I don't think it is going to happen. The people of Lebanon would not tolerate a Hezbollah starting a war now when they are in such bad shape from COVID and the country being on the brink of bankruptcy. They are still upset over the 2006 war.
But Hezbollah follows the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader, and Iranian media has been talking for weeks about how weak Israel is and how it will be destroyed soon. They wrote lots of stories about the Syrian anti-aircraft missile that ended up near Dimona, about a chemical factory fire in Haifa. Iranian media is following the events in Israel on a minute by minute basis. The Ayatollah Khamenei has been tweeting a lot about Israel.
Hezbollah rockets are much more powerful and accurate than Hamas rockets. And they have 150,000 of them, of varying types.
Hassan Nasrallah can invent an excuse to start shooting and claiming that Israel started it. Only last week he warned Israel not to make any aggressive moves.
Let's hope this doesn't happen, but if Israel is too cautious in confronting Hezbollah, Khamenei might interpret that as weakness and think he has an opportunity.
Articles extolling rocket fire, celebrating dead Israelis, exhorting Israeli Arabs to start an uprising, promises for more bloodshed.
Here's the English version, directed at the Western anti-Israel, primarily leftist audience:
Here, the emphasis is on victimhood, quoting Ilhan Omar and Tayyip Erdogan on how awful Israel is, and "defending" Al Aqsa.
The two messages are exactly opposite. And the West insists on believing what Palestinians say in English without realizing that everything is propaganda - in both languages.
It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the United States of a full-blown Saudi-Israeli peace agreement or even of significant steps in that direction. The 9/11 attacks announced that a doctrine of radical intolerance had taken deeper root inside the Muslim world than we had realized—a doctrine that seeks to wall off Muslim societies from non-Muslim influences. The Emiratis, the lead players in the Abraham Accords, see peace with Israel as part of a multipronged effort to refute this intolerant view of Islam and Muslim history. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab country and, thanks to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina, one of the most influential countries in the entire Muslim world. It has also long been the fortress of conservative Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic literalism. If the country toward which all Muslims pray five times a day, and to which some 2 million make annual pilgrimages, develops openly friendly relations with the Jewish state, the implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere would be profound.
Yet the Biden administration has forbidden its officials from even using the term “Abraham Accords,” which, under the influence of the Realignment, it abhors. Because the accords are politically popular, even in Democratic circles, the administration will refrain from expressing its abhorrence frankly, and will look for every opportunity to claim that it looks favorably on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In reality, however, the Biden team has no intention to expand the Abraham Accords, whose very existence is a blot on the Democrats’ record. It refutes the dogma preached by the Obama administration that peace between Israel and the Arab world must begin with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.
More importantly, the accords are also a threat to the Realignment itself. The Saudi-Israeli thaw resulted in part from the sense of threat they share about the rise of Iran, and the increasing unreliability of the American security guarantee. A strong partnership between Riyadh and Jerusalem would inevitably become the primary node of opposition to the Realignment from within the American alliance system. A desire to end any unsupervised discussion of expanding the Abraham Accords is probably an additional reason why the Biden administration devoted its first days in office to publicly disparaging Mohammed bin Salman and privately pressing him to kowtow to Tehran. “Do not dare assist Israel” was another implicit command that the Khashoggi values barrage delivered to Riyadh.
When Biden took office, he faced a fork in the road. On one path stood a multilateral alliance designed to contain Iran. It had a proven track record of success and plans of even better things to come, as the recent act of sabotage at Natanz demonstrated. The alliance’s leading members were beckoning Biden to work against a common foe, but also to promote greater cooperation and possibly even an official peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other path stood the Islamic Republic, hated by its own people and, indeed, by most people in the Middle East. It offered nothing but the same vile message it had always espoused. Standing with it were all of the most malignant forces in the Middle East, who either look directly to Tehran for leadership or thrive on the chaos it sows.
Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.
As Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana reported, Ben-Shabbat didn't take Sullivan's hostile dressing down in silence. He responded appropriately, "As the sovereign, Israel is handing the events responsibly and in a measured way despite the provocations."
Ben-Shabbat added, "International intervention serves as a prize to the rioters and their dispatchers that had hoped that international pressure would be exerted against Israel."
Less than 24 hours after their phone call, Hamas proved Ben-Shabbat was right. With a tailwind from the White House, Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum: Remove your security forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. or you'll live to regret it. In other words: Give up your sovereignty over Jerusalem by six or else.
Lo and behold, shortly after 6 p.m., the air raid sirens sounded throughout Jerusalem and its environs as Hamas attacked the capital with rockets from Gaza. As the evening progressed Arab Israelis in Ramle and Lod and other mixed cities carried out what can only be called a pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. They burned yeshivot, schools and apartment buildings and beat and tried to lynch Jews that fell in their paths. After they were done, they went to the local hospital emergency room, threw rocks at the medical staff and patients and tried to kill the Arab Israeli doctors and nurses on the scene for "collaboration" with the Jews.
The medical staff had to evacuate with the patients to protected areas while the police dispersed the attackers with stun grenades – in the ER.
The official readout of Biden's national security adviser concluded by mentioning that Sullivan, "expressed the Administration's commitment to Israel's security."
A bit more "commitment" like this and Israel will find itself in short order fighting a regional war.
Since Israel’s establishment, Palestinian leaders have missed countless opportunities to make peace and secure a state because of their rejectionist attitude. From a purely political standpoint, their adamant refusal to accept Israel costs them more in negotiating power every year. For example, the negotiating standpoint after the UN’s Partition Plan would have been far more advantageous for the Palestinians than where it stands today – and in almost every single subsequent peace offer, the Palestinians chose to sabotage their own future in terms of land, self-determination, cooperation with Israel and, yes, Jerusalem.
While the Palestinians never had Jerusalem – even east Jerusalem, which was under occupation by Jordan – their actions today demonstrate why they never will. For that, they have only themselves to blame.
The recent uptick in violence began at the start of Ramadan with a disturbing TikTok trend of Arabs assaulting Jews and filming it. The response was an equally disturbing pushback of far-right Israeli Jews who rioted in Jerusalem, even chanting “death to Arabs.” But neither of these activities came from nowhere. The Kahanist Right in Israel has been emboldened by vile racist leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who maneuvered their way into the Knesset to the great shame of our entire nation.
Yet on the other side, we have entire generations raised on glorifying violence against Jews. Most recently, we see Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority all ramping up their incitement to violence, with the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, Iran, dousing the entire situation with kerosene and lighting the match.
Iran-allied Palestinians even recently put up billboards with Iran’s slogan for Jerusalem Day at the entrance to Kalandiya in the West Bank. This is far from the first time Palestinians have promoted Iranian propaganda, but it is a clear and continued indicator of where Palestinian alliances lie – and they aren’t with their fellow Arab states.
The PA prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh is very happy that people are dying, because that has "returned the Palestinian issue to the agenda of the world's priorities."
This is important to understand. Since the Abraham Accords, Palestinians have been feeling irrelevant - the worst feeling for them.
They felt that the world no longer cared about them - which is largely true since they couldn't even fix their own issues and kept blaming everything on Israel. The Arab world has been sick and tired of the Palestinian issue for years, unless it helps their own political agendas.
Instead of working towards peace, the Palestinian Authority wanted to feel important, to be cover stories in Time magazine and the New York Times.
As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA has worked to incite violence in Jerusalem for weeks before Ramadan. TV music videos glorified martyrdom. They know this stuff works on heir people. Sure enough, it did - starting with the TikTok attacks on religious Jews.
So they again started the "cycle of violence," quite consciously. And this led up to rockets and bombing Gaza - which, interestingly, doesn't hurt the Palestinian Authority one bit.
Now that they easily manipulated the anti-Israel media and politicians to condemn Israel for imagined crimes of "ethnic cleansing #SheikhJarrah" and "targeting civilians in Gaza," they are ecstatic.
How does it help them?
It doesn't. But Palestinians live in a zero sum game world, and they literally believe that anything that hurts Israel helps them.
It is a caveman mentality. The UAE doesn't have it, but many Arabs do - when Israel looks bad, somehow that helps its enemies.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh actually bragged that his rockets managed to disrupt some Yom Yerushalayim celebrations.
It would be a pathetic joke if it didn’t mean that Hamas and other Palestinian groups want to kill Jews to feel relevant. Much better to feel important than to feel impotent.
There are no winners in such a worldview. And until Palestinians realize that Israelis feeling secure is a prerequisite to peace, there will be none.
As news came that two women in Ashkelon had been murdered as
a result of direct hits to their homes, my son wrote the following on our
family Whatsapp group in the Hebrish shorthand typical of my 12 EFL children: “A
jeep full of an Arab family just drove by the bus stop blaring their horn,
fingers in v shape out the window.”
“Where was this?” I asked.
It was on a main thoroughfare in Jerusalem, on Derech
Hevron, in broad daylight. And it’s not the first time this has happened, but
something that happens whenever they managed to pick off one or more of us:
They cheer when we die. They cheer when we die and we do nothing to deter them.
While my son was writing this to me, a friend in Ashkelon
was sharing phone footage and voice recordings from a female friend, describing
the devastation surrounding her. Two 20-story buildings on either side of her
building had taken direct hits. Every window of every car, up and down her
street, had been shattered from the impact of the twin blasts. The footage she
recorded with her phone showed a man down on the ground, shaking uncontrollably,
with obliterated buildings and the rubble of what was once a hardware store, surrounding
him.*
As my friend was sharing these items with me, he was
debating whether or not to travel to a suburb of Jerusalem for a bar mitzvah.
The decision was made for him almost immediately when the residents of Ashkelon
received a notice from the mayor of that town, telling people to stay home. My
friend gave up on traveling to the bar mitzvah, but thought he’d go to the mom
and pop grocery store to pick up some fruit and vegetables. Just then, the
sirens began to wail once more. And then more sirens.
Some of us become inured. We figure whatever happens, happens.
So after a few minutes of mulling it over, my friend wrote, “If I'm not back in
half an hour, you can have the scoop.”
What could I do but laugh at that, and yes, gallows humor is
a necessary coping mechanism. And also, for some of us, it remains a bit
surreal until such time as it becomes all too real, and perhaps a person won’t
survive to know that, God forbid. But yeah, if a missile has one’s name on it,
God forbid, there isn’t much you can do.
My friend, in fact, moved from Jerusalem to Ashkelon during
one of the heavier barrages of missiles not too many years ago. He wanted to be
with our people in the periphery, who suffer the most from our “cousins” in
Gaza. This was a way he could contribute, just by being there, one of them,
strengthening our Jewish presence in that part of the country. I admire that,
and I wish others would emulate him.
But here I am in Gush Etzion, another important part of our
country, a place that deserves to be strengthened with a greater Jewish
presence. Even at this distance, I heard the booms when the missiles hit
Jerusalem and its environs, some ten miles away from us. Had I not heard those
booms, it would not matter. The attacks affect us all in many ways, no matter
where in Israel we live. Whatsapp is a lifeline for our family, and every
morning and evening, we are checking on our children in the south, our children
in Jerusalem. We worry. We worry what will happen. We are all, to one degree or
another, hyper-vigilant.
And so I wonder, and wonder some more, each time this
happens: What is the solution?
We cannot turn the clock back to before Ariel Sharon did the
unthinkable and expelled thousands of Jews from their homes, though he promised
not to, though we the people, voted against the move. Ariel Sharon empowered
the Arabs, and now they cannot be deterred, short of turning Gaza into a
parking lot. And if we were to do so, the fallout on world Jewry could
potentially be very bad, at this time of burgeoning antisemitism.
Meantime, the world is not on our side.
What is the solution? Do we do it anyway? Would our
government have the chops to order it done?
My friend, the one in Ashkelon, suggested we bomb the fancy
malls, restaurants, and shopping centers in Gaza, so the before and after
photos get shared in the media, so that at last the world can see that Gaza is
NOT, contrary to popular world belief, a concentration camp. But it wouldn’t
matter. It wouldn’t matter. They will show the dead Arab children, the dead Arab
pregnant women, and not our own. They will present the facts in the wrong
order: “Israel Bombs Gaza in Retaliation for Rocket Attacks,” and not “Gaza Shoots Missiles into Israel, Israel Retaliates.”
They hate us. They hate us because we are Jews. They back
the people who are murdering us, who send colorful balloons with attached
incendiary devices to tempt our children so that they might be blown to
smithereens. Our children are not children to them, but vermin. Because our
children are Jewish. And that makes us subhuman to them. And so our murderers,
those who rise up to kill us in every generation and at every chance they get, are lionized by the world.
They are apparently sorry that Hitler, yemach shmo, did not finish the job. Biden shows it when he
restores funding to UNRWA and the PA and even tops it up some more by the millions. He shows it when he begs Iran—desperately—to
let him give them more money so that the mullahs can obliterate us with the weapons they
will build with America’s help. And American Jews voted for this--they voted for these things when they overwhelmingly voted for Biden.
As I write this, the IDF has coined a new name for the
newest in a long line of operations meant only to stop the rockets until the
next time. Because everyone knows they can’t be stopped for good unless we take
the ultimate step of obliterating Gaza. That new name is Operation Guardian of
the Walls, a clear reference to the walls that surround the Old City of Jerusalem,
the supposed center of our current conflagration. In a nutshell, Arab tenants
refused to pay rent to their Jewish landlords, and after many years of hashing
it out in court, they’re being evicted.
In the last 24 hours, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched continuous attacks on Israel from Gaza.
The IDF is operating in response to these attacks by striking terror targets and operatives in Gaza.
It’s how it is everywhere. You don’t pay rent, you get
booted out. Nowhere else in the world would you have world condemnation for the
lawful, rightful eviction of BUMS who
refuse to pay the rent.
But we are Jews. And the world hates Jews. They don’t think
we have a right to our lawful property in our indigenous territory. They don’t
think we have a right to be in Jerusalem, our holy city for thousands of years.
And actually, it’s not that they don’t think we have the right to these things.
It’s that they hate us so much that they want us to be without shelter,
without homes, without any sort of life at all. They want us dead. And they
want to give the spoils to those who shoot missiles at us and cut us down in the streets.
By the time this goes into print, a lot will have happened.
But it is all fairly predictable. The Israeli government will retaliate because
now they have to, because Israeli citizens have been killed. But the actions we
take will fall way short of solving the problem. Because everyone knows we won’t
turn Gaza into a parking lot. And the ones who are most keenly aware of this
are the Arabs themselves—the ones shooting missiles into Jerusalem, those
sending balloons to burn our crops and hurt our children, the ones cheering and
flashing the victory sign in broad daylight on major Jerusalem thoroughfares to ordinary Jewish Israelis waiting to take the bus home after a long day of work.
It grinds my gut. And I know I am not the only one. We wait and
wait and wait some more. We wait for the government that will solve this problem.
We wait for God.
*Note that I did not share these privately shared phone items here. If it’s not approved
by government censors, I don’t share it, because “Loose lips sink ships.” No
desire to help the enemy improve its aim. (The clips I did share here have been
cleared for publication.)
As I write here in Jerusalem, sirens have sounded and explosions have been heard. It appears that rockets were fired by Hamas at the city. I am posting this now before finding out what is happening.
Further to my piece here yesterday about the Jerusalem riots, here’s some more information you won’t read in the venomously slanted media coverage which continues to obscure the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement and attacks that sparked these disturbances and which continues falsely to blame Israel instead for its behaviour. In this twisted reporting, much of the British and American media continue to parrot the Palestinians’ narrative which, as always, seeks to obscure their own murderous and bigoted aggression by pretending that their Israeli victims are the aggressors while the Arabs are merely defending themselves.
While the Israeli police have struggled to contain the continued Arab rioting, as you can read in these accounts here and here, this is what the senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad tweeted: People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it here and just cut off (their heads). It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state. You shall find the strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists. The Jews have spread corruption and have acted with arrogance, and their moment of reckoning has come. The moment of their destruction at your hands has arrived.
Anyone spot the little word here that the British and American media somehow always miss? Yup, he’s inciting against the Jews. Not Israelis — Jews. Because the Palestinian Arabs’ war against Israel is a war against the Jews, as it has been for the past hundred years. This is something that liberal media and politicians simply refuse to acknowledge or report. When they refer to Palestinian “resistance”, they are describing Palestinian Jew-hatred; and when they talk about Israel’s “disproportionate” responses, they are describing Israel’s determination to defend its people against the intended mass murder of Jews.
In the riots on the Temple Mount, everything is coordinated: The ideological line is that of the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation on the ground and the incitement is handled by Hamas, the Islamic Movement, and some Arabs in eastern Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, as usual, is along for the ride. The goal is to move the conflict onto religious lines after the nationalist issue turned out to be insufficient for a conflagration. The way to do this is through the same old lie, "Al-Aqsa is in danger."
This claim has served as the catalyst for terrorist attacks, rioting, and now a semi-uprising whose purpose is to weaken Israel's hold on and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The discourse that radical Islam drags the world into focuses almost entirely on the Temple Mount's holy status for Muslims. No one mentions that the state of the Jewish people, which recaptured the holiest place in Judaism in 1967, then placed it in the hands of a competing religion, Islam, for which it is only the third-holiest site. There is no example of another concession like this in interfaith relations anywhere in the world.
Today, one often hears the false charge that Israel is ‘building tunnels under the Temple Mount‘, or that, ‘The Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger of being bombed and destroyed. This is a true and serious Zionist threat’. There are dire warnings about how the ‘Jews invade the Mosque’ and even that Jews are ‘injecting chemical substances into the walls of the mosque in order to cause its corrosion’. This article examines one of the lesser-known origins of these myths and legends: remarks of the British politician Alfred Mond in 1921 which, though he subsequently clarified them, were purposefully distorted by the Arab leadership as a justification for violence for decades after.
Who was Alfred Mond?
Sir Alfred Moritz Mond (1868 – 1930), industrialist, plutocrat, politician and philanthropist, knighted as the 1st Baron Melchett, was born to parents who had immigrated to Great Britain from Germany. Although both his parents were born of Jewish parents, they did not consider themselves practicing Jews and he was not raised as a Jew. His wife, Violet (sister of the Foreign Office muralist Sigismund Christian Hubert Goetze), was also of Jewish heritage but her parents had converted. They were married in the Anglican Church and the children were raised as Christians.
Mond’s father, Ludwig, was a chemist and had emigrated from Germany to England in 1862. He developed a process for processing soda ash and later, another for extracting nickel. After founding a chemical engineering firm he became extremely wealthy in that he discovered that adding 3.5 per cent nickel to steel greatly increased its strength. Alfred was a director in his father’s businesses and expanded them. In 1926, he brought about the merger of four separate companies to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the world’s largest industrial corporations at the time and became its first chairman. He was one of the wealthiest Englishmen at the time.
He involved himself in politics and sat as Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1923, becoming a member of David Lloyd George’s government as First Commissioner of Works from 1916 to 1921 and Minister of Health (with a seat in the cabinet) from 1921 to 1922. He then switched party and sat in Parliament from 1924 to 1928. Upon his death the obituary of The Times noted he had triumphed over ‘a bad voice, a bad delivery, and a presence unimpressive to all but the caricaturists’.
Although not identifying as Jewish, nevertheless, Mond was frequently the victim of antisemitic attacks in Parliament. T.S. Elliot’s poem, ‘A Cooking Egg‘, published in 1920, includes these lines: ‘I shall not want Capital in Heaven, For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond: We two shall lie together, lapt / In a five per cent Exchequer Bond,’ and he was targeted by Henry Hamilton Beamish (an early promoter of the Madagascar Plan for Jewish deportation to that island of the east coast of Africa) and his The Britons group which, in a poster, ‘The Jews’ Whose Who’, attacked Mond as a traitor to England.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, part of Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, proudly lists its rocket attacks for Monday:
1: The bombardment of the usurped Majdal (Ashkelon) with 4 missiles.
2: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) with 3 missiles.
3: Shelling the Zionist settlements inside our occupied lands with rockets and mortar shells from all the governorates of the Gaza Strip.
4: Shelling the usurped Majdal with 3 missiles
5: The bombing of the usurped Sderot with 6 missiles.
6: The usurped Kissufim was bombed with 5 mortar shells.
7: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with 5 mortar shells.
8: Shelling Nahal Oz with 3 mortar shells.
9: Shelling the usurped Kissufim with 3 missiles.
10: The usurped Sderot was bombed with a missile
11: The bombing of the third eye (?) with 4 missiles
12: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
13: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
It is a revolution until victory
These are the "moderates" that the world says is ready for peace with Israel.
Note that they call all Israeli towns "settlements."
Here's the photo-illustration on their site, proudly portraying lots of rockets dropping on an Israeli civilian community while residents - who are all soldiers - flee:
Meanwhile, Hamas has abandoned its pretense of only attacking "military sites" when they shoot rockets. They made up that excuse once when the UN lightly chided them for indiscriminately attacking civilians, so for years they claimed that their rockets were only aimed at "military sites" in Sderot or Ashkelon. Now they proudly admit they are targeting civilians, as this press release from this morning shows:
* 05:30 Al-Qassam Brigades launch a large missile strike on the occupied city of Ashkelon.
* 04:17 Al-Qassam Brigades fire a missile burst at the Zionist Yad Morkhai usurped
* . 02:35 Al-Qassam Brigades bombard usurped Miflasim with two heavy mortar shells
* 01: 00 Al-Qassam Brigades bomb Sderot with two rocket-propelled grenades
* Between 23:30 and 00:00, Al-Qassam Brigades bombed the usurped Zionist Sderot with two missiles.
Islamic Jihad's press releases of each rocket attack look practically the same.
There is no difference between Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Just because two are explicitly Islamist and one is more secular, they all agree that attacking civilians is perfectly fine.
Ashraf has no idea if his family was killed by Israel or Hamas. He just wants to bury them.
But the New York Times later interviewed another relative, Bashir. He is convinced it was an Israeli missile, and Israel is solely responsible for all suffering:
But as the conflict expanded and the airstrikes began, it quickly became deadly.
In Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, the Masri family was grieving for two young boys who were killed on Monday evening. Ibrahim, 11, and Marwan, 7, had been playing outside their home when a missile struck, according to their uncle, Bashir al-Masri, 25.
For Mr. Masri, the attack showed that Israel had no concern for civilian life.
“They target buildings with children, they target ambulances, they target schools,” he said by telephone. “And all the world, beginning with America, says that people in Gaza are terrorists. But we are not terrorists. We just want to live in peace.”
He also called on Israel to end a blockade on Gaza that has placed heavy restrictions on goods and materials, lest they be used to make weaponry. The blockade, coupled with similar restrictions by Egypt, has crippled Gaza’s economy and led to high unemployment.
“God knows how we live in Gaza — and the number one reason is the Israeli siege,” said Mr. Masri, who is one of the roughly 50 percent of Gazans without work. “They want to kill us. But they cannot.”
Suddenly, the media switches from a grieving relative with no idea how his family was killed into another who is practically a Hamas spokesperson repeating anti-Israel talking points word for word who is certain he knows Israel is behind it.
Hamas makes a point of letting Gazans know that they cannot say anything outside the party line.
It is also possible that the Gaza stringer for the NYT, Iyad Abuheweila, gave him leading questions like "What do you think about the inhuman Israeli blockade?" The New York Times reporters could not enter Gaza so they fully relied on the local stringer to get the quotes.
Either way, there is intense pressure from Gaza officials to control the narrative, and threatening residents happens often.
If the New York Times was truly interested in reporting the truth, they would have mentioned the IDF denial of shooting that rocket, and that many Gaza rockets have killed Gaza kids over the years, and that the other Mr. Masri had no idea where the missile came from. Instead they gave him a platform to propagandize on behalf of those who killed his family.
(CORRECTION: originally I thought both newspapers interviewed the same person. h/t Israellycool.)
Yom Hevron is not as well known as Yom Yerushalayim, but perhaps it should be.
The Six Day War didn't only liberate the holiest city for Jews, but it also liberated the second holiest city - and the city that has the third holiest site as well.
Hebron has been sacred to Jews even longer than Jerusalem was, ever since Abraham buried Sarah there.
Judea and Samaria are filled with places that Jews (and some Christians) are familiar with from childhood. It has far more Biblical sites than Israel within the Green Line.
Bethlehem is where Rachel is buried. Shiloh is where the tabernacle (the portable proto-Temple) was kept for 369 years. Bet El is where Jacob had his famous dream.
All of these sites, which had been Judenfrei during the 19 years of Arab rule, became available for Jews to visit and live, all soon after Jerusalem was liberated.
It is something to celebrate - especially since much of the world wants to take them all away again.
Sharansky reasons that until there is a fundamental internal transformation of Palestinian Arab society that embraces democracy, there can be no realistic negotiations. He roundly condemns Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a terrorist. He views his successor Mahmoud Abbas as a pale and equally corrupt reflection of his predecessor. Sharansky is under no illusions about Palestinian leaders. He believes that they still are wedded to the goal of Israel's elimination. Sharansky underscores his point by quoting Soviet dissident and creator of the USSR's hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov: "Never trust a government more than it trusts its own people."
Sharansky comes down hard on the Iranian regime as ideologically the most dangerous of enemies, claiming that he is in agreement with prominent Iranian analysts such as, Uri Lubrani, the last Israeli unofficial ambassador to Iran; Dr. Bernard Lewis, the most accomplished western Islamic scholar, and Ron Dermer, the long-serving Israeli ambassador to the US. Sharansky has sharp words of condemnation for Barack Obama; he accuses the former US President of having abandoned Iran's dissidents by his refusal to offer even verbal support for anti-regime demonstrators during their nationwide protests in 2009.
Sharansky... is a fierce critic of the "new" campus-based anti-Semitism, and catalogues several programs that Israeli and some American Jews have developed to lend courage to Jewish-American youths to defend, fight back, and celebrate their Jewish identity in the face of radical Jew-haters as well as self-hating American Jews who serve as a poisonous brew that eventually destroy both the institutions of democracy and the freedoms of individual liberty.
Former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer suggested Sunday that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.”
“People have to understand that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians. It’s true because of numbers and also because of their passionate and unequivocal support for Israel,” Dermer said in an onstage interview at a conference organized by Makor Rishon, a news outlet affiliated with the national religious community
The interview marked Dermer’s first public remarks since he ended a marathon seven-year term in January as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, where he became known for having the ear and “brain” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Dermer was lauded for using that relationship to play a key role in advancing several pro-Israel decisions taken by the Trump administration. However, the premier and his ambassador were accused of undermining Israel’s traditional bipartisan support in Washington by cozying up to the Republican party where the ideological differences of opinion on Israel are minimal, while alienating Democrats — the party supported by the vast majority of American Jews and whose last president Barak Obama sparred regularly with Jerusalem on a number of key issues.
In a wide-ranging interview, the former envoy was pressed on whether Netanyahu had placed too much emphasis on evangelical Christians in the US.
Dermer dismissed the suggestion and argued that Israel actually hasn’t designated enough time in engaging with evangelical Christians.
My friend, former Ambassador Ron Dermer, is 100% correct. I am someone who saw things for 3 years from the inside-way, way in the inside. From my perspective, Israel does indeed have a lot to be grateful for as a result of the leadership of @Netanyahu. https://t.co/bJTrMegad7
— Jason D. Greenblatt جيسن غرينبلات (@GreenblattJD) May 10, 2021
Nikki Haley: Ex-UN Ambassador: What Countries Say Behind Closed Doors | Rubin Report
18 far left radicals have signed onto a bill vilifying the Jewish state, threatening to pull aid.
Why?
Because Israel is enforcing her laws attempting to stop rioters from burning down Jerusalem.
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Weekend long read
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1) At the INSS, Raz Zimmt analyses the situation in Iran. “Alongside
growing criticism of the supreme leader, there has also been a
significant...
The p...
Weekend long read
-
1) At the INSS, Raz Zimmt analyses the situation in Iran. “Alongside
growing criticism of the supreme leader, there has also been a
significant...
The p...
Jews and Kurds face common threats
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Jews and Kurds affirmed their solidarity in London last week as the Kurdish
enclave in north-eastern Syria was overrun by regime forces. Both peoples
sha...
The Past and the Future
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Dry Bones Golden Oldie, from 2003 posted by Sali. Enjoy.
The News gets crazier every day. It will be interesting to see what the
future brings. It seems...
The Palestine entity - 1960
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From FRUS:
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XVII, Near East,
1961–1962
34. Circular Telegram From the Department of State to Ce...
Now What?
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Today, Jews cannot walk down the street in North America, Europe, or even
Australia without the possibility of being spat on, beaten, or even
murdered. Cou...
Closing Jews Down Under Website
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With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
It is and it isn’t an easy decision after 10 years of constant work. The
past...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
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Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
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