Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Finally, a reporter actually reports about Hamas firing from hospitals and UNRWA schools

On Sunday, the IDF published evidence that Hamas tunnels were built during the construction of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza.

Indonesia strongly denied the accusation.

In a rare example of real journalism, The Telegraph (paywalled) reports:

Hamas terrorists were making a “last stand” in a hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night in a showdown witnessed by a Telegraph reporter.
Israeli warplanes, tanks and infantry cornered the last remains of a 1,000 strong battalion of the terrorist group’s forces holed up in the Indonesian Hospital and a nearby school...in the northern town of Beit Hanoun.
“They talk the talk, but they don’t walk so good,” said Lieutenant Colonel Blick of the Israeli 551 Reserve Paratroop Battalion, which escorted The Telegraph to the front line on Tuesday.
Pointing to the plumes of dust rising about 2km to the south, Lt Col Blick said fewer than 100 Hamas fighters were taking shelter in the Indonesian Hospital, the last survivors of a thousand-strong unit.
“They fought when we came in but folded after a day. Their command lines were cut. Now, where you can see the dust rising, in the hospital, they are making their last stand,” he said.
One of the soldiers took reporters to see a Hamas rocket launcher, dug into the garden of a house just a few yards from a pool where children would have played. The launcher was so hidden that it would have been close to impossible to spot by drone.

Most agree that the Indonesian Hospital is empty now of patients and is simply being used by Hamas to wage war. Taking it down with an air strike to finish the fighting must surely be tempting, but the IDF knows that would hand its enemy a propaganda coup.
At one point on The Telegraph’s embed, the tempo of gun and mortar fire coming from the Indonesian Hospital increased and was answered with a massive blast from a nearby tank.
None of the soldiers flinched. They’re inured to it. “We’re making tapes so we have them to fall asleep with after the war,” joked one.
Lt Col Ido pressed home the asymmetric nature of the war, saying: “They are hiding inside schools. Just 10 minutes ago, we had a serious battle with a group of Hamas inside the school that they built tunnels in. They fill it with the IEDs. Now the leadership of this battalion is hiding inside the hospital”.
The hospital is empty, something Israeli forces have verified with drones and other “tactical measures”, he said, adding: “They are firing on us from this hospital. So I think the world should understand what we are dealing with… they are terrorists. Can you imagine the Israeli state or England or Germany putting rockets inside their cities, in the City of London?”

In this accompanying video, the reporter says that there was fire from a UNRWA school (the subtitles took out the word "UNRWA.")

Clearly, Hamas chooses schools and hospitals as covers for their tunnels - we showed evidence of a large tunnel directly underneath an UNRWA school yesterday.

Yet hardly any reporters even consider that the tunnels are the targets as they report on Israel apparently targeting civilian buildings.

This is not just bad journalism but irresponsible journalism. If reporters did their jobs, Israel could flatten the Indonesian Hospital and newspapers would describe how Hamas cynically turned it into a military target. But because the media tries to be even-handed between a terror group and a democracy, soldiers' lives are endangered by having to exchange fire with terrorists hiding in hospitals and schools.

The only reason Israel bombing the terror stronghold hat formerly acted as a hospital would be a "propaganda coup" is because most media aren't doing their jobs.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Israel haters claim Israel has no legal right to "self defense." As usual, the arguments are bogus.

(Disclaimer: This is a wonky legal post, and I'm not a lawyer. But, as always, I show my work. I'll correct any mistakes.)

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Demonizing Israel, tweeted:

ON ISRAEL's #SelfDefense

Under Int'l Law Israel's actions in Gaza cannot qualify as self-defense

In int'l law, Self-Defense is a term of art, with a narrower meaning than in common language.

Under Article 51 of UN Charter, self-defense means :
(1) legitimate use of force
(2) by a state to protect itself against an attack
(3) from another state.

Under Article 51, use of force in self-defense is permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State. Threats from armed groups from within occupied territory give state the RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF, but not to wage war against the state from which the armed group emanates.

In line with established ICJ jurisprudence, in the case of the oPt: Israel cannot invoke the right to Self Defense under the UN Charter against threats emanating from the territory it occupies, and against the protected [Palestinian] population (ICJ, 2004).

Indeed, the ICJ ruled (in the advisory opinion on the defensive wall in Judea and Samaria) that Article 51 of the UN Charter doesn't apply because of the technical reason that the Article is only concerned with actions between two states.

But that doesn't mean Israel doesn't have the right to defend itself.

Firstly and most importantly, Israel does not occupy Gaza by any reasonable definition of the term. But even without Gaza being occupied, Albanese and many other antisemites argue that since Gaza is not a UN recognized state, Israel still has no right to self defense.

How bizarre!

It is fascinating that they invoke the non-state status of "Palestine" when it suits their needs. Because by the same criterion, there is no occupation altogether, even in the West Bank, since occupation by definition (which is only defined in the Hague Conventions of 1907) is only of territory belonging to a "High Contracting Party" - meaning a state!

At any rate, while the ICJ decision says that the narrow definition of self defense does not apply to Israel in the West Bank, it states clearly in paragraph 141:

The fact remains that Israel has to face numerous indiscriminate and deadly acts of violence against its civilian population. It has the right, and indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the life of its citizens.

The Israeli High Court also discussed the ICJ ruling and stated that it was not only problematic legally, but ultimately irrelevant:

Israel's duty to defend its citizens and residents, even if they are in the area, is anchored in internal Israeli law. The legality of the implementation of this duty is anchored in public international law, as discussed, in the provisions of regulation 43of The Hague Regulations. In The Beit Sourik Case, this Court did not anchor the military commander's authority to erect the separation fence upon the law of self defense. The Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice at the Hague determined that the authority to erect the fence is not to be based upon the law of self defense. The reason for this is that §51 of the Charter of the United Nations recognizes the natural right of self defense, when one state militarily attacks another state. Since Israel is not claiming that the source of the attack upon her is a foreign state, there is no application of this provision regarding the erection of the wall (paragraph 138 of the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice at the Hague). Nor does the right of a state to self defense against international terrorism authorize Israel to employ the law of self defense against terrorism coming from the area, as such terrorism is not international, rather originates in territory controlled by Israel by belligerent occupation. This approach of the International Court of Justice at the Hague is not indubitable (many sources given - EoZ). It stirred criticism both from the dissenting judge, Judge Buergenthal (paragraph 6) and in the separate opinion of Judge Higgins (paragraphs 33 and 34). .... We find this approach of the International Court of Justice hard to come to terms with. It is not called for by the language of §51 of the Charter of the United Nations (see the difference between the English and French versions, S. Rosenne 291 General Course on Public International Law 149 (2001)). It is doubtful whether it fits the needs of democracy in its struggle against terrorism. From the point of view of a state's right to self defense, what difference does it make if a terrorist attack against it comes from another country or from territory external to it which is under belligerent occupation? And what shall be the status of international terrorism which penetrates into territory under belligerent occupation, while being launched from that territory by international terrorism's local agents? As mentioned, we have no need to thoroughly examine this issue, as we have found that regulation 43 of The Hague Regulations authorizes the military commander to take all necessary action to preserve security. The acts which self defense permits are surely included within such action. We shall, therefore, leave the examination of self defense for a future opportunity.

Of course, the court is correct. The idea that a state can defend itself from another state but not from non-state terrorism is absurd.

But to an extent, the entire discussion is moot - because (as implied here) Israel has not based its legal arguments for Gaza wars primarily on the UN Charter paragraph 51 anyway!

Israel wrote, concerning Operation Cast Lead in 2009, "Israel’s right to use force against Hamas was triggered years ago, when Palestinian terrorist organisations, including Hamas, initiated the armed conflict which is still ongoing."

For Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Israel also said it was part of a continuous war against armed groups, and only mentioned self-defense (without invoking Article 51) as a secondary reason:

The confrontation between Israel and these terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip satisfies the definition of armed conflict under international law. The 2014 Gaza Conflict was simply the latest in a series of armed confrontations, precipitated by the continuing attacks perpetrated by Hamas and other terrorist organisations against Israel. After previous periods of intense fighting (including in 2009 and 2012), Hamas agreed to ceasefires, each of which it later breached, leading to Israel’s resumption of responsive military action to defend its population from attacks. Hamas’s attacks leading up to the 2014 Gaza Conflict were thus part of a larger, ongoing armed conflict. But even if one were not to consider the 2014 Gaza Conflict part of a continuous armed conflict justifying Israel’s use of force both previously and during this time, Hamas’s armed attacks against Israel in 2014 would independently qualify as an armed attack triggering Israel’s inherent right of self-defence.

In short, the right to self-defense is inherent for everyone, not based on Article 51. This is quite obvious. Which just proves that those who obsess over Article 51 to give the impression that Israel cannot defend itself are simply being malicious and antisemitic by claiming that Israel uniquely is not legally allowed to defend itself.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/07 Links Pt2: Praising the Slaughter of Babies, the Rape of Women and the Beheading of Civilians Is a Stain on Humanity; Yes, Obama Is Complicit

From Ian:

Praising the Slaughter of Babies, the Rape of Women and the Beheading of Civilians Is a Stain on Humanity

There is an inescapable moral chasm between those who publicly rejoice in the purposeful massacre of innocent civilians and those who seek to avoid harming them. There is a moral chasm between those who use non-combatants as human shields and those who are deterred by their use. There is a moral chasm between those who proudly broadcast their desecration of life for all the world to see, and those who unequivocally lament the inadvertent loss of any innocent life as a tragedy.

There is a moral chasm between those who positively celebrate the inhuman war crimes of rape, torture, mutilation, burning alive and child-killing, and those who would immediately prosecute any person found to have committed such heinous crimes. The contrasting world views are presented nowhere more starkly than in the rallying call of Hamas leaders themselves: "We love death as our enemies love life."

It is a stain on our common humanity that so many seem to have lost sight of the moral distance between Hamas and Israel. Advocating for the welfare of innocent Palestinians must go hand in hand with a clear-eyed condemnation of the barbarity of Hamas.

Jonathan Tobin: Obama’s moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel encourages hate

In times of crisis, the public looks to its most revered leaders for insight and wisdom. But in the case of Barack Obama, the man who is, although nearly seven years into retirement, still America’s most popular living public figure, politician and Democrat, what passes for wisdom is not only unwise but amoral.

After weeks without saying much of anything about the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel on Oct. 7, the 44th president has weighed in on the subject while appearing on a podcast hosted by former staffers Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vieter. In the wake of the greatest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the most brazen example of terrorism on the international stage since 9/11 and amid a shocking spike in antisemitism, it’s likely that many among the nearly two-thirds of American Jewry who were faithful supporters of Obama were hoping that he would say something to bring them comfort or at least take a strong stand in support of the Jewish state.

If you were looking to Obama for moral clarity, however, you came to the wrong shop. According to the former president, the main takeaway from Oct. 7 is that as bad as Hamas is, Israel is just as bad. “You have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree,” he declared. That means acknowledging, he continued, “that what Hamas did was horrific and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”

In Obama’s moral universe, Israel’s alleged sins are as grievous as those of Palestinian terrorists who were cheered by their own people and their foreign enablers for depraved acts, including rape, torture, the murder of entire families and the kidnapping of as many as 240 men, women and children who were dragged back to Gaza. No stern judgments about terrorism or its backers from Obama. He thinks what’s needed is “an admission of complexity.”

Fueling pressure on Biden
While the comments of former presidents can often be dismissed as irrelevant to present-day discussions, the same cannot be said for anything uttered by Obama. He remains enormously influential among Democrats, especially among the large number of his former staffers who hold positions of influence in the government of President Joe Biden. Whether or not that amounts to Obama pulling the strings in his former vice president’s administration, there can be no doubt that when he speaks, everyone in the White House listens.

What’s more, it comes at a time when Biden’s stance in support of Israel and its goal of eliminating Hamas is under fire from his party’s base, causing both the president and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to try to balance that with demands for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting that would benefit Hamas. Polls show Biden losing to former President Donald Trump in key battleground states largely due to his losing support from minority and young voters who are more likely to be hostile to Israel. In that context, Obama’s proclamation of neutrality in the war between Israel and Hamas sends a message to the White House that if Biden wants another term—and withdrawing from the 2024 race is anathema to the president, even if many Democrats are hoping for it—then he will have to start distancing himself from the Jewish state.

Seen in that light, Obama’s podcast comments should be viewed with trepidation by supporters of Israel. Should Biden heed Obama and choose to use the leverage of U.S. military aid to put the brakes on the Israel Defense Forces’ operations in Gaza, it would allow those who perpetrated the crimes of Oct. 7 to both escape justice and maintain their despotic rule over the Strip.

National Review Editorial: Yes, Obama Is Complicit

Obama entered office in 2009 as one of the most hostile presidents to Israel in the history of American relations with the Jewish state. Meeting with the leaders of major Jewish organizations, he said he would intentionally attempt to create more distance between the U.S. and Israel. “When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states,” he said, the Washington Post reported. All his policy of “daylight” accomplished was to convince Palestinians to demand more concessions before negotiating a peace deal, and to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more suspicious of signing a deal based on security guarantees from Obama. Even as Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly rebuffed Obama on peace talks, his administration consistently pointed the finger at Israel as the primary barrier to getting a deal. This, even after the PA signed a unification agreement with Hamas, which ruled Gaza but was splintered from the government.

In Obama’s second term, his foreign policy was focused primarily on securing a nuclear deal with Iran. Much of the criticism of the deal has focused on what was in it — i.e., that it delivered billions in sanctions relief while allowing Iran to bolster its conventional military and preserve a glide path toward a nuclear weapon. What is more overlooked is the fact that in its desperate pursuit of the nuclear deal, the Obama administration turned a blind eye toward Iran’s malign behavior around the globe, despite its being the leading state sponsor of terrorism. This included funding, training, and transferring weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, a 2017 investigative report by Politico revealed, “In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.” Money raised by the drug trafficking helped fund Hezbollah’s terrorism against Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere.

This should have been no surprise given that one of the key players in crafting Iran policy was Robert Malley, who had been sidelined from the 2008 Obama campaign after it was revealed that he met with Hamas. (Malley served as President Biden’s special envoy for Iran and was trying to revive the nuclear deal before he was suspended by the State Department over an investigation into his security clearance.)

At the end of the Obama administration, Hamas was much richer, stronger, and more accepted than at the start of his administration.

Obama may have had more subtlety than Representative Ilhan “It’s all about the Benjamins” Omar, but the antisemitic rhetoric we’re hearing today was mainstreamed during his administration. He appointed Chuck Hagel as secretary of Defense; Hagel had once lamented that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here” and repeatedly slammed “lobbyists” and “money” for working against the Iran deal rather than considering American interests.

Obama was indeed complicit in the troubling events of our times. But if he’s going to reflect on his own failed legacy, he should leave the rest of us out of it.

Obama's comments on Israel-Hamas war 'nothing short of disgusting': Josh Hammer

Newsweek's Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer has branded former US president Barack Obama's comment that “nobody’s hands are clean” in relation to the ongoing Israel -Hamas war as “disgusting”.

“This is a former president of the United States while there are 15, 20 American hostages currently being held in the worst American hostage crisis since, as you alluded to, the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis,” he told Sky News host Rita Panahi.

“To have a former president get up there and try to both sides this thing, you know, it’s nothing short of disgusting.”

The former president weighed in on the conflict during a recent interview with Pod Save America.

The conflict that began with Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 has divided opinions across the world.

Videos From Pro-Hamas Rally Where Paul Kessler Was Killed Show Just How Vile His Attackers Are

A 69-year-old Jewish man, Paul Kessler, was murdered Sunday when a pro-Hamas agitator attacked him during a demonstration in Thousand Oaks, California. According to an eyewitness who spoke to RedState on condition of anonymity due to fears for their family's safety, it appeared that Kessler was targeted by members of the pro-Hamas group who had protested at the same corner the Sunday prior, possibly because police were called at that time after one of the pro-Hamas agitators brandished a gun.

The man holding the flag in the photo above allegedly lifted up his shirt to show that he had a pistol in his waistband during the October 29 protest at the same corner (Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Westlake Boulevard, just north of the 101 Freeway). Police were called to the scene, but the man left before they arrived.

This Instagram video, which was published October 30, shows the tone of that event, which carried over to the day Kessler was attacked and killed.

During the November 5 protest, eyewitnesses say that this man led an older gentleman over to the corner with the Shell station (across from where the bulk of the pro-Hamas faction were located), to where Mr. Kessler was, as if he was pointing Kessler out to the older gentleman.

The pro-Hamas faction were located on the southwest corner of the intersection, in front of Paul Martin's American Grill.

Eyewitnesses, who have shared this information and their photos and videos, say the attack happened within five minutes of the time the agitators went to the corner where Kessler was. The eyewitness doesn't have video of the moment the attack occurred, but says that the gray-haired, bearded man in khaki pants is the man who confronted Kessler then hit him in the head with the bullhorn.

In this video, a different witness tells law enforcement that Kessler was "decked" but a Hamas supporter tells officers that Kessler "slipped."

UNRWA accidentally shows tunnel under its schools

UNRWA tweeted photos showing damage to their schools in Gaza.

Two of them show clear sinkholes - indicating pretty strongly that there are Hamas tunnels directly underneath the schools.

This picture is very clear - the pavement doesn't even appear to have been damaged (much?) by an airstrike, it looks like it simply caved in:

Something destroyed a tunnel underneath.

Let's look a little closer:

Here's another that shows an obvious sinkhole that would not look like that if there wasn't an empty space underneath,.

UNRWA has, in the past, condemned Hamas for placing weapons in its schools. But it only does that when the violation is undeniable. It seems unlikely that they will say anything negative to Hamas about this - because, in the end, they are on Hamas' side.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Gaza-based Al Mezan Center for Human Rights issued a report summarizing the first three weeks of the war.

As far as I can tell,this "human rights" organization has never condemned the murder of any Jews, and this report continues that tradition.

In fact, it denies it.

Here is its only mention of the October 7 events:

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli occupation forces have continued to launch a massive and unprecedented military aggression across the air, land and sea against the Gaza Strip, in which they violated civilians and civilian objects, killed and injured thousands, including horrific mass killings in hospitals, churches, centers and shelters, and destroyed thousands of housing units, and 70% of the population was displaced from their homes, with an announced Israeli decision to stop supplies of electricity, food, water, and fuel.

This widespread aggression came as an act of revenge hours after a military attack carried out by the Palestinian factions on the same Saturday morning, declaring that it came in response to the escalation of Israeli violations against the Palestinian people...

This absurd characterization of the events of October 7 prove that Al Mezan is not at all interested in telling the truth, but rather parroting terrorist propaganda. There is no daylight between their report and what Hamas claims. In fact, Al Mezan claims that the Hamas Ministry of Health is undercounting civilian victims of the war.

Which is not surprising, because members of the NGO have links to both the PFLP and Hamas terror groups.

Even so, Al Mezan is funded by the European Union, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UN-OCHA.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/07 Links Pt1: Paul Kessler's death investigated as homicide, hate crime after altercation with pro-Palestinian protesters; U.N. Teachers Celebrated Hamas Massacre

From Ian:

Gadi Taub: We Will Defend Ourselves

What Hamas has now done has not just buried the two-state solution and killed all hopes for peace in our lifetime, or in our children’s lifetime. It has also tripped the wire that triggers the deepest of Jewish fears, the fears that run so deep that they precede reflection or even verbalization. That is why you hear from most of the left what you would normally hear only from the right: calls to see this all the way through to the complete destruction of Hamas as a functioning organization.

Modern antisemitism has learned to hide in its moral opposite: the language of human rights. Old blood libels claimed Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for the baking of matzot, the Passover bread. Contemporary blood libels claim the IDF is uniquely murderous and deliberately kills Palestinian children to satisfy its bloodlust. The form is new, but the content is not.

The contemporary versions are peddled by organizations claiming to uphold human rights, while undermining the universality of that principle, which is its very essence. They do this by applying one standard to the Jewish state, and another to all others, especially those belonging to groups with a postmodern moral badge of official victimhood, which supposedly grants them a waiver from moral imperatives.

This corruption of morality relies on marginalizing the evidence of the actual behavior of such groups toward their own members (especially gays, women and nonbelievers), toward minorities in their midst (such as Jews and Christians) as well the outside world.

This application of double standards has caused Israel to voluntarily impose on its army a stricter code than any other army does, a task made all the more difficult by the increasing sophistication of its enemies in manipulating these very vulnerabilities. As Benjamin Netanyahu succinctly put it: We use rockets to protect our women and children. They use women and children to protect their rockets.

Israel should be done with this game. It is an immoral one, and it has enabled our murderous enemies to escape responsibility. It has led to the sacrifice of our own men to save the lives of those who would turn their own children into cannon fodder. Israel should insist that those who have tied together Jewish children with rope then burned them alive, will not manipulate us in the name of human rights. It should insist that only those who put their own children in harm’s way to protect the weapons they use against our innocent civilians, are responsible for their safety. It should insist that Hamas has committed crimes against humanity and we will not sustain its rule under the guise of “humanitarian aid.” International law prescribes that if the enemy does not separate civilians from combatants it alone bears responsibility for the lives of the innocent. Israel should insist on that rule and not flinch.

This is a chance to begin restoring moral clarity, and the gore from this attack, much of which was recorded by Hamas’ sadistic antisemitic terrorists, should serve to remind us of this.

Those who have not lost their conscience to the auto-immune disease of wokeism, to conformity and cowardice, would do well to leverage the horror that befell Israel to clean their own house, too. It is, perhaps, not yet too late to save the Judeo-Christian tradition from the self-inflicted destruction of postmodern pseudomorality.

I watched Hamas hack innocents to death. The worst part was their glee

Over the span of 43 minutes, I watched 138 humans be murdered or witnessed their corpses, many brutalized beyond recognition and others clearly tortured, in the direct aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.

That’s 3.2 bodies per minute— and less than 10 per cent of the more than 1,400 people killed that day.

The Consulate of Israel in Toronto screened the footage, taken from a mix of body cameras, dashboard cams, CCTV tapes, and victims’ cell phones, some used by Hamas to record and livestream their sadism, for a small group of media on Monday. Not everyone made it through the full 43 minutes, with others moved to tears and outbursts of emotion.

There were babies. Toddlers. So many children of all ages. Young men and women dressed for a music festival, not the wanton slaughter that saw their bloodied bodies piled atop one another in scenes reminiscent of some of the Holocaust’s worst images.

Parents. The elderly. A dad who, attempting to hide from Hamas attackers with his sons, all three of them still in their underwear, was blown up by a grenade in front of his children. The two young boys, covered in blood, crying, throwing themselves on the ground in grief, as a Hamas gunman raids the family’s fridge and takes a swig of soda. One of the sons’ panicked voice as he realizes he can no longer see out of one eye.

The man’s wife as kibbutz security bring her to identify her husband’s remains. The moment she literally collapses and has to be dragged away from the scene, thrashing wildly, her legs folding under her like every bone had simply vanished from her body.

A family attempting to decipher whether the burned remains in front of them, skirt hiked up above bare genitals, is the loved one they’re looking for.

The literal streams of blood, the hacked off arms and legs, the infant missing part of its skull, brain leaking out. The dog shot over and over again as its limbs splay in every direction until they don’t anymore. Mickey mouse pyjamas on a young corpse, skull fragments on floors, victims shot point blank. So much blood.

But none of what I’ve detailed so far was the worst part of those 43 minutes. The worst part was the glee.

The pure jubilation of Hamas terrorists as they filmed themselves killing and torturing; their excited voices bragging about their atrocities. The videos of them playing with victims’ heads with their feet, and excitedly shooting out the tires of a kibbutz’s ambulance before massacring its residents.

I’ll never forget the gore, but it’s the look of euphoria and pride in the terrorists’ eyes, cheering for the cameras as if they were the ones partying at a music festival that day, that will haunt me.

Days after Amnesty International issued its absurd report accusing Israel of "apartheid," I wrote that the exact same playbook could be used to falsely accuse Israel of genocide as well.

The "apartheid" slander really started to gain steam at the infamously antisemitic 2001 UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance NGO Forum, which launched an NGO strategy of isolating Israel through boycotts, legal attacks and accusations of apartheid. First there were annual "apartheid week" events on colleges, where modern antisemites linked the words "Israel" and "apartheid" in the minds of a generation of college students. Once that took hold, first fringe and the mainstream NGOs like HRW and Amnesty pretended that where there's smoke, there must be fire, so they twisted the definition of "apartheid" just to fit Israel and issued large reports filled with false examples and lies to "prove" their pre-determined conclusion.

Even the most articulate Israel-haters cannot defend the definition when challenged by someone outside their bubble of hate. Their strategy is to repeat the lie often enough that everyone assumes it must be true, because the average person doesn't want to believe that prestigious human rights defenders are obsessed antisemitic liars.

My prediction that the same thing would happen with "genocide" is coming true. But this time, it has accelerated from 20 years to two months.

"Genocide" has been the theme of countless anti-Israel demonstrations so far, and now Ishaan Tharoor is doing his job by making the antisemitic slander part of everyday conversation, using classic propaganda methods, in his "Today's worldview" column in the Washington Post.

Let's take this apart:

In protests around the world, in the corridors of the United Nations and in the angry chambers of social media, one word is getting louder and louder: genocide. That’s what critics of Israel’s offensive against the Islamist group Hamas say the Jewish state is doing in its ravaging of the Gaza Strip, which is home to some 2.3 million Palestinians. Over the weekend, demonstrators slathered a White House gate in red paint, in a message to the Biden administration about the perceived blood on its hands for its staunch support for Israel. In condemning Israel’s actions, governments in Brazil, South Africa and Colombia, among others, have all explicitly invoked “genocide” to explain their outrage.

Just because professional Israel haters use the word does not give it validity. But Tharoor wants to, by suggesting that "genocide" is Israeli policy by quoting angry (and sometimes profoundly stupid) Israeli officials livid about the October 7 massacre - and purposefully lying about President Herzog's statement: "The Israeli president suggested that civilians in the Hamas-controlled territory are not 'innocent'," Tharoor says, yet in the very event where Herzog said that Gazans were partially responsible for Hamas being in power - an undoubtedly true statement - he explicitly said “Of course there are many, many innocent Palestinians."

However, the ill-considered statements of some Israeli officials are not government policy, and they are not IDF policy. Pretending that the idiotic Amichai Eliyahu statement that Israel could drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza has any relationship with Israeli policy is rhetoric but has no basis in reality - yet that is Tharoor's main argument.

Because he never defines "genocide" he never gives the reader the opportunity to judge whether the definition fits. As with apartheid, genocide has a legal definition: specific "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

There is no Israeli intent, and no evidence of any such intent, to destroy Palestinians as a people. And Tharoor knows this.

So he plays loose and fast by hinting that Israel's seeming loosening of its rules of engagement compared to previous Gaza wars indicates intent:

Israel contends that it takes steps to limit civilian casualties and targets only militant positions, though that claim is difficult to square against a catalogue of Israeli strikes on crowded civilian neighborhoods, hospitals and U.N. facilities. “Although Israeli officials insist that each strike is subject to legal approval, experts say the rules of engagement, which are classified, appear to include a higher threshold for civilian casualties than in previous rounds of fighting,” my colleagues reported.

Indeed, there is a difference between this war and previous wars. Previously, the goal was to deter Hamas. Now, the goal is to destroy Hamas. That is a valid and legal military goal.

Hamas is hiding its entire organization - weapons, command and control, communications, leadership - in hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza apartments, schools and hospitals. To achieve the legal military objective of destroying Hamas involves attacking those tunnels. No army is legally obligated to engage in hand to hand fighting on the enemy's turf, risking thousands of its own soldiers, in order to avoid civilian casualties. The only thing Israel can do is warn residents to get out of the way so it could attack Hamas' infrastructure.

If you recall, Israel did exactly that. For three weeks. Even though there are Hamas strongholds in the south of Gaza, Israel has largely avoided attacking there so Gaza civilians can be saved.

Once all the residents are warned, and given enough time to evacuate, the proportionality calculation changes. This is also international law. Otherwise, civilian human shields become a valid defense, which is nonsensical.

Israel is adhering to every aspect of international law to minimize civilian casualties while pursuing its primary military objective. No one has suggested a better way to destroy Hamas. Every civilian casualty from is Hamas' responsibility under international law.

The charge of genocide against Israel is doubly grotesque.

The subtext of Israel's critics is that Israel should not really destroy Hamas - even though Hamas' own goals are explicitly genocidal in its intent. Their slanders of "genocide" are meant to allow a truly genocidal group to keep trying forever.

And, of course, using the term "genocide" against Jews who were the victims of the Holocaust that spawned that term is pure antisemitism. Comparing the deaths in Gaza during a just and legal war with the purposeful destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis cannot be regarded as anything but Jew-hatred.

Ishaan Tharoor is knowingly playing his part - acting as a bridge between the fanatic anti-Israel protesters and the eventual 200 page reports by Amnesty and HRW that will declare Israel to be "genocidal." He is laying the groundwork so that people will associate Israel with genocide the way the antisemites of a decade ago did the same with "apartheid."

Both of those programs are aimed only at the Jewish state. And we all know why.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The incomparable Imshin found this video on TikTok posted yesterday:

The children are on a rooftop in Gaza.

"Are you afraid of the bombings and planes?"
"NO!"
"Do you want to die as martyrs?"
"YES!"

The hashtags on the TikTok post were

🔴Here_are_the_children_of_Gaza
🔴They_do_not_fear_death
Their slogan is
🔴We_are_not_afraid_of_death
🔴We_are_all_martyrs☝️✌️

This is not just child abuse.

This is child abuse that a significant number of Palestinians are proud of.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The conflict is not about "occupation" or "apartheid" or "nakba." It has ALWAYS been about Jew-hatred.

Arab and Muslim antisemitism have been around for a while. For example, James Augustus St. John in "From Egypt and Mohammed Ali Or Travels in the Valley of the Nile" (1834) he explains that the term "Yahoodi" (Jew) was the worst insult a Muslim could muster when attacking an opponent.

And Jews from Morocco to Persia suffered discrimination and daily abuse throughout the Muslim world.

This, of course, included Palestine, as seen in this 1869 travelogue:

Antisemitism by Arabs in Palestine pre-dated "occupation" and the "nakba" and Zionism itself.

If you look at Hamas' own reasons for starting the current war, in Arabic they have been quite clear: besides wanting to take hostages for a trade to release their prisoners, they say that the war is to stop the "Judaization of Jerusalem. "

The kidnappings were tied to a hostage swap. But the massacre were entirely because of Jews living and praying in Jerusalem without fear. Hamas wants the Jews to be fearful in Israel, in the hope that they will run away. (There are lots of articles in Arabic media claiming that there is a huge exodus of Jews from Israel.)

Hamas didn't say that this war was a reaction to the "siege." It was not for Palestinians killed in clashes in the West Bank. No, their main justification for murdering 1400 people was Jews visiting the holiest Jewish sites.in security. Their very name for the massacre and war is "Al Aqsa Flood."

They are telling you it is about Jews as explicitly as they can.

Even so, people like Barack Obama pretend this is about "occupation" or "justice" or whatever. They are just projecting their own hate of Israel on Hamas.

If there was no "occupation," Hamas would have attacked anyway.

Because Hamas hates Jews living in their historic homeland.

This is not exactly a secret. Read Hamas' genocidal charter! (And no, it was never changed.)

Or look at this scene from a 2014 Hamas rally, where they burned a stereotypical religious Jew in effigy.

Anyone who bothers to look can see that Jew-hatred is Hamas' main motivation. And that it is not limited to Hamas, either.

The infamous Mufti of Jerusalem started pushing the "Al Aqsa is in Danger" lie 99 years ago. At the time, he was trying to stop Jews from praying at the Western Wall - and all Palestinians, not just Hamas, consider Jews praying there to be desecrating it today.

The conflict has always been about hatred of Jews.

Every few decades, the Arabs come up with new excuses for murdering Jews to tell the gullible West, since they have to pretend not to be antisemitic to their Western partners. In the 1920s-30s it was "Jewish immigration." In the 1940s-50s it was the "refugees." In the 1960s-90s it was "statelessness." Since then it was "occupation." Since 2009 it was the "Gaza siege." Since last year it was "apartheid."

All of those things are excuses to cover up the real reason for attacks on Jews that have been consistent for over a century: age-old hatred of Jews not acting like meek second class citizens under Muslim rule. And as we have seen, Jews have always been despised under Muslim rule, even if they were sometimes tolerated.

Part of the instant historical revisionism of the past 30 days has been to erase the obvious antisemitism of Hamas massacring every Jew they could find and pretending that they had some sort of valid reason. In a way, this excuse-finding is at least as disgusting as those who deny the murders altogether. At least the deniers are embarrassed at what Hamas did; but the protesters and pundits are justifying it.

No, history didn't start on October 7. But it isn't "complicated." The entire reason for the conflict is Arab hatred for Jews, and everything else is an elaborate attempt to avoid acknowledging that, probably because Western intellectuals are loathe to label most Arabs as bigots. So the "experts" keep looking for other reasons, the Arabs keep pretending those reasons are valid, and the inconsistencies that prove them wrong (like Palestinians refusing every plan that would give them a state, or Israel withdrawing from Gaza) just spawn new, ever convoluted theories.

As opposed to the easily debunked excuses the "experts" like to bring, Jew-hatred is the only consistent explanation for how Palestinian Arabs have acted for their entire history. Even the Oslo process fits in perfectly with Arafat's "phased plan" to destroy Israel, something Arafat admitted, and Mahmoud Abbas has not done anything to contradict it.

Hamas Jew-hatred is the only reason we have a war today.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/06 Links Pt2: Take them at their word; Hamas has shown the world who they truly are, and this is a gift; UNRWA staffers praised Hamas’s 7/10 massacres

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: Take them at their word

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, at the United Nations in New York, just bluntly threatened individual American officials with violence: “I say frankly to the American statesmen, who are now managing the genocide in Palestine, that we do not welcome [an] expansion of the war in the region. But if the genocide in Gaza continues, they will not be spared from this fire.”

I don’t think Mr. Amir-Abdollahian would come into our country to issue such a direct threat to American leaders had the Biden administration not assigned Robert Malley to reboot the atrocious but then-inert Iran Deal. Had it not lifted oil export sanctions—resulting in a multibillion-dollar windfall to Tehran. Had it not tried to ransom American hostages from Iran at $1.2 billion a captive. Had it not restored hundreds of millions of dollars in support to the West Bank and Gaza. Had it not allowed U.S. aid and remittance dollars to Lebanon to seep into Hezbollah coffers. Had it not dropped past American declarations that the Houthis were a terrorist organization, and had it not ignored rather than retaliated for dozens of attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq by Iranian surrogates.

We should also take at his word one Ghazi Hamad. He’s a high official in Hamas and one of their PR megaphones. And in an Oct. 24 Lebanese television interview, Hamad boasted: “We must teach Israel a lesson… and we will do this again and again. The Al Aqsa Flood [the Oct. 7 attack] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth… It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation… On Oct. 7, on Oct. 10, on October one-millionth, everything we do is justified….”

Hamad was quite clear on the motivation for his envisioned million more murder sprees: “The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood and tears.”

So Hamad is promising more beheading, executions, rape and mutilation. I don’t think Hamad—apparently waging endless jihad against Israeli civilians from a safe distance in Beirut—got the message about the much-heralded American “two-state solution” of mutual co-existence. In other words, Hamad has no problem adhering to the Hamas-charter agenda of wiping out Israel: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nations, and must be finished.”

So is this final solution to Israel the “from the river to the sea” envisioned by our campus activists? Our Turkish NATO ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan, at a huge public rally, praised the Hamas mass murderers as “freedom fighters.” He declared the Israeli response to the Hamas apparat a “massacre,” and threatened to send the Turkish army to Gaza and to hit Israel with a swarm of missiles and bombs—or as he put it, his military can “come at any night unexpectedly.” (He issued the same sort of threat not long ago to NATO member Greece.)

Hamas has shown the world who they truly are, and this is a gift

Hamas did not just attack – it slaughtered and recorded the slaughter with joy and pride. That is a message we understand. We understand Hamas’s intent. We also understand now that Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets that they intend to use against us. It is also clear that Iran is developing the nuclear bomb with the intent of using it against the Jews. What was unthinkable is already here. Hamas has given us that sight.

Jews outside Israel, too, have been offered this gift: Allies and friends of the Jews are, in reality, neither this nor that. Jews were among the first to support Black Live Matter, but how does that group view Jews? Can you name any gay organization that has stood up for Israel against barbarous murder? Yet Jews are beyond doubt some of the biggest boosters for gay rights.

And of course the universities, which Jews have attended in mass numbers to integrate into America – it’s fair to say that the universities have been, and still are, extremely unsupportive of Jews on campus or in the world. We now read of American Jews buying guns in record numbers, and a possible turn to the political Right after 100 years of voting Democrat.

Do these Jews see now? Have they accepted the gift of sight?

For the US, the past 10 days have witnessed dozens of attacks on US troops in Syria and Iraq by radical Islamic proxies supplied and financed by Iran.

The Iranian ambassador to the UN, in a public speech, threatens the US. Many Americans have accepted the gift of sight, but has Joe Biden? Just now the US has launched two air assaults against Iranian weapons facilities in Syria, but President Biden makes no threat or promise against Iran. Iran threatens the US, but not vice versa. Has America accepted the gift of sight?

Finally, for all those who have lived in or otherwise benefited from Western civilization, the hundreds of millions, in fact the billions of people in all inhabited continents of the globe, North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia: Do you think that the Islamicists, the fundamentalists, those who believe in the necessity of worldwide Islam, attack the Jews and no more?

Do you feel they will leave Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, to continue in their non-Islamic faith? Do the people of Sweden feel that they will successfully integrate more than 1,000,000 Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa?

Do the people of Paris, London, or Berlin, truly believe that violent demonstrations against Israel and astounding rises in hate crimes against local Jews will leave them untouched? Will the Evangelicals of Brazil and the Catholics of Argentina support the barbarians or civilization? All of these people have benefited so much through Western civilization, but will they defend it now?

All these groups have been offered the gift of sight.

Let them not be deluded. Let them not be confused that the barbarism has been visited solely upon a small people in an obscure corner of a tiny state in the middle of one chaotic region of the world. And let them “send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee” (John Donne, 1624).

Brendan O'Neill: The absolution of Hamas

Is Hamas now getting its talking points from Harvard University radicals? Something’s going on.

On 7 October, the day of Hamas’s apocalyptic pogrom against the Jews of southern Israel, 34 student groups at Harvard rushed out an open letter absolving Hamas of guilt for the ongoing horror. We ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’, said the self-righteous mob from the leafy, luxurious, non-blood-spattered lawns of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Israel is ‘the only one to blame’ for what is happening today, they said (my emphasis).

Got that? Even as the neo-fascists of Hamas were still shooting, stabbing and burning alive hundreds of people for the offence of being Jews in Israel, privileged poseurs at Harvard were breezily decreeing that these monsters were not really guilty of the war crimes they were committing. Guilt laid with the victim. Israel was to blame.

Fast forward two weeks and Ghazi Hamad of Hamas’s political bureau was saying the same thing. Almost word for word. In an interview on Lebanese TV, Mr Hamad said ‘the existence of Israel is what causes all [the] pain, blood and tears. It is Israel, not us’. ‘We are the victims…’, he continued, and ‘therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do’.

Shorter: Israel is the only one to blame. Sound familiar? We in Hamas might have slit the throats and incinerated the families, but Israel was entirely responsible for it. Ring any bells?

It is indistinguishable from what the preening Israel damners at Harvard said. Though at least the Hamas official waited a fortnight before monstrously blaming Israel for the racist barbarism visited on its people by his organisation – the Harvard lot were doing that before the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in 75 years was even over. You couldn’t ask for a more searing indictment of the academy than the fact that some of America’s cleverest kids at its most Ivy League of universities were quicker to make excuses for Hamas’s anti-Semitic slaughter than Hamas itself.

Of course, we cannot know if Mr Hamad actually read the terrorist apologetics penned by Harvard’s overeducated fools. (I wouldn’t be surprised, though – the letter made waves around the world and sparked a furious debate about who’s to blame for the bloodshed in the Middle East.) And yet it seems unquestionable to me that Hamad’s grotesque opportunism, his self-infantilising disavowal of responsibility for the heinous crimes committed by his own men, was influenced by the chatter of Western elites. The absolution of Hamas, the pardoning of it for its own pogrom, was enacted here before the same shameful utterances were made by Hamad.

It is time to ask ourselves if our woke elites are not just Hamas’s useful idiots, but its unofficial spindoctors. Not just excuse-makers for Islamist barbarism, but authors of the very justifications the Islamists offer up for their barbarism. Beyond the Harvard apologism, we’ve seen commentators ceaselessly provide ‘context’ for the October pogrom. ‘Israeli barbarism begets barbarism’, they snivellingly cry. 7 October was ‘a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime’, say the Democratic Socialists of America. So not a direct result of Hamas’s own careful planning and execution, but of Israel’s temerity to exist. Your throat is to blame, not my knife. As a writer for Haaretz said, ‘It’s the context, stupid!’ has been the abject howl of far too many in the ‘global left’.

Ecstasy and Amnesia in the Gaza Strip

There has been a larger cause that has at least in part appropriated the anti-Israel cause the same way global jihad did the last time, the same way the Soviet bloc did the time before that, and the same way unrepentant fascists did the time before that. A global program of anti-colonialism and left identity politics has taken up the existence of Israel as the worst example of white, European colonialism on the planet, and the Palestinian cause as its rightful, justice-bringing nemesis. The result has been the same: an unfinished project of national liberation, which is solvable for pragmatists, is instead reframed as a cosmic struggle against an evil entity whose existence stands in the way of the path to justness.

If there was a specific moment when that cause helped kick the next catastrophe into motion, it was during a few fevered months of 2021, when every major human-rights group started issuing glossy reports accusing Israel of practicing apartheid.

The faulty reasoning, poor data, and circular research methods of these reports have been the subject of numerous other essays and won’t be the subject of this one. What’s important is the timing. The fact that so many organizations came up with portentous announcements about a threshold being crossed at almost the exact same time, without any apparent coordination among them, is telling. The legal status of the territories changed drastically when they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. Arguably it changed again with the creation of Israel’s civil administration there in the early 1980s. It certainly changed again radically with the implementation of the Oslo II agreement over the course of 1996-97. The freedom of action that the IDF granted itself at the end of the second intifada in Area A of the West Bank, which had been off limits to Israeli forces during the Oslo years, arguably constituted another legal change.

But nothing whatsoever changed in 2021, or the year before, or even the decade before. How then did so many reputable organizations discover a new legal category that Israel violated at the same time? No doubt some of their motivation emerged from the fear that Arab-Israeli normalization was going to continue and in so doing bury the Palestinian issue. Mostly, though, it demonstrates how much anti-Israel activism in the West is a social activity, a moral pose, always maneuvering under the twin shadows of Western imperialism and the Shoah, that requires periodic reaffirmations of faith. And nothing lightens the burden of imperialism and the Shoah simultaneously like imagining the victims of the latter as bearers of the sins of the former.

In this way, a national movement motivated less by a vision of its own liberation than by a vision of its enemy’s elimination received another global tailwind as toxic as the previous fascist, Soviet, and jihadist ones. The upshot has been the same. The three years preceding October 7 were a period of unbridled optimism among Palestinian intellectuals. Israel was rotting, losing its legitimacy, and couldn’t possibly sustain itself, they knew. An outbreak of violence in May 2021 led many of them to conclude that a comprehensive Palestinian struggle against the Zionist entity in all its manifestations was finally taking form. The violence came to be seen as part of a “unity intifada,” whereby rockets from Gaza, low-intensity combat with settlers and the IDF in the West Bank, and a week of Jewish-Arab rioting inside Israeli cities were all seen as separate fronts of the same fight—Palestinian natives rebelling however they could against an Israeli colonial imposition.

It was a horrible misreading of the situation, not least because of the evolving relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Less than two months after the May events, an independent Arab party joined a coalition government for the first time in Israel’s history, a clear sign that Israel was not rotting or losing legitimacy, a sign reinforced by those growing ties between Israel and other Arab nations around the same time. Ultimately, what appeared to Palestinians to be an emerging global consensus that Israel was an essential evil—not a state or a society whose actions might arouse controversy and opposition but an irredeemably malignant presence on the international scene whose food and language were themselves tainted by its sin—was as dazzling, and ultimately blinding, as previous attempts from outside the region and its conflicts to jam the Palestinian cause into a rigid ideological framework.

In other words, the righteousness and unfounded certainty of victory preceding 1947, 1967, and 2000 were back, and the scene was set for widespread ecstasy when, on the morning of October 7, the partisans of the Palestinian cause worldwide woke up to the news of the Hamas atrocity in southern Israel. In the immediacy of overwhelming passion that momentarily cast aside all thoughts of consequences, they exulted. Examples are so numerous and will likely be so familiar to most readers by now that they need not be described at length. There was the Hamas fighter who called his parents from Israel to tell them “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” to which both parents wept with joy and pride. There was the history professor at Cornell who shouted, “It was exhilarating, it was energizing,” at a celebratory march the next week. There was the British Palestinian woman who crowed on TV that “Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity—nothing ever.” These emotions were further inflamed by the name of the Hamas operation, “al-Aqsa Flood,” geared to bring in the emotions relating to Jerusalem, even though the fighting was nowhere close to it; for the same reason, Hamas leaders promoted propaganda claiming that Israel was planning to destroy the mosque.

And yet passion subsides and ecstasy is fleeting. The exultation spurred by the October 7 massacre is already fading, and the now-familiar sense of loss kicking in. At the moment, the war is contained in Gaza, though no one can guarantee that it won’t spread to the West Bank and beyond. The price for Israel will be high, and Israel is far from blameless in the string of events that brought it about. But the price for the Palestinians will be much, much higher, and much of what will be lost will be unrecoverable. And if the present generation follows its predecessors and transforms that loss into a story of victimization that papers over the defeat and the excitement that preceded it, odds are good that one day yet another in the chain of Palestinian disasters will appear again.

Here is a section of COGAT's latest humanitarian report on Gaza. It shows how Hamas controls fuel for hospitals, shoots rockets from near water infrastructure, hides in medical facilities, and limits travel for injured Gazans to Egypt.

The humanitarian situation is analyzed by Israeli professionals based on the analysis of local system capabilities, ongoing dialogue with international and local entities, examination of civil systems' behavior in the Strip over many years (during normal and emergency times), and additional information sources. Following is our situation report, as opposed to publications by Palestinian bodies serving the Hamas narrative of the humanitarian crisis:

The energy issue is central considering its implications on other essential systems. However, this sector is also the most controlled by Hamas.

Throughout the war, we have witnessed that Hamas supplies hospitals with diesel fuel only every two days. They do so in order to keep the hospital administrations feeling that they are on the verge of collapse. Statements from hospital managers prove this point, as they issue statements about supply lasting for another day or two, while in fact, the hospitals have been functioning for a month now.

All essential facilities: hospitals, desalination plants, wells, etc. have alternative energy infrastructure in the form of solar energy systems and generators operated using diesel provided by Hamas.

Beyond the existing information regarding diesel supply, it is clear that Hamas cynically prioritizes essential facilities according to their interest. Yesterday (11.4.23), Hamas held a screening of its military wing on the walls of Shifa Hospital.Hospital managers testify that they have in their possession diesel supply, which is provided by Hamas every few days.

Hamas utilizes hospital infrastructures extensively, in several ways:-Hamas misuses hospital infrastructures for terrorist activities. We have already exposed the terrorist infrastructures in Shifa Hospital - the central hospital in the Strip, Sheikh Hamad Hospital (the Qatari Hospital), and the Indonesian Hospital. Additional information was published by the IDF spokesperson. -

Hamas' terrorist infrastructure burdens the hospitals, siphoning off energy, oxygen, food, and supplies.-

Hamas operates near medical facilities and ambulances in order to protect themselves, using the sickly as human shields.

The diesel supply in the Strip is managed by Hamas. They transfer fuel every other day to allow hospitals to function for 24-48 hours until the next supply, thus creating the impression of a managed crisis.

Egypt allowed the evacuation of wounded people for medical treatment. In the last two days, Hamas has been preventing it.International organizations provide medical aid to hospitals in the Strip. So far, they coordinated the entry of 113 trucks carrying medical equipment and drugs.

All hospitals have alternative energy production capabilities.

There is no water shortage in Gaza as of this writing.The water sources for the Strip remained mostly unchanged throughout the war:Two water mains from Israel (Bani Suheila and Birkat Sa'id) continue to supply water to the southern part of Gaza,providing over a million liters of water per day. 90% of the water supply is provided from internal infrastructures in Gaza - water pumps and desalination facilities.

Despite the importance of water sources, Hamas exploits these infrastructures to launch rockets and install terrorist infrastructures. For example, it launches rockets from sites near the desalination facility built by UNICEF with international funding. This facility provides water to 250,000 Gazans on a daily basis, and nevertheless, Hamas chose to place rocket launchers there.

There are sufficient food reserves for the near future; there is no food shortage.International organizations continue to bring food to the Strip through the Rafah crossing. So far, the entry of 201 trucks of food has been coordinated.