Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, February 29, 2024

We don't know exactly what happened in the stampede on Al Rashid street - but we do know Palestinians are lying (update)

The IDF on Thursday reported that as aid trucks were brought into northern Gaza on Thursday morning, Gazan residents gathered around the trucks, acting violently and looting the supplies.

"Early this morning, during the entry of humanitarian aid trucks into the northern Gaza Strip, Gazan residents surrounded the trucks, and looted the supplies being delivered," the IDF confirmed. "During the incident, dozens of Gazans were injured as a result of pushing and trampling."

According to the reports, some of the masses neared the IDF troops in a dangerous fashion, threatening to harm the troops.

The soldiers, whose job it was to allow safe distribution of the aid, felt threatened by the masses and responded with live fire.

The IDF released a video showing the crowds massing around the aid trucks, some climbing on top of them, but it doesn't show the shootings or any panicked fleeing to my eye.

It seems likely that some people fell off the trucks and some might have been crushed.

The reporting in Arab media is quite different:

In a new massacre committed by the Israeli occupation tanks and artillery strikes, at least 104 civilians were killed and dozens were injured today while waiting for food aid in Al-Rashid Street southwest of Gaza City.

Medical sources said that occupation forces opened heavy machine-gun fire towards thousands of citizens from the northern Gaza Strip, specifically from Gaza City, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun, who were waiting for the arrival of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid in Al-Rashid Street southwest of Gaza City, resulting in the killing of over 104 persons.

104 dead from troops shooting? Machine gun fire? And other reports claim artillery as well.

Others are now claiming 150 killed.

One site claims to have video of the "massacre" - but it shows nothing, no gunshots or even panic.

ما حدث صباح اليوم فعل أكثر من وصفه بالمجزرة الكبيرة بحق المواطنين الذين كانوا ينتظرون وصول المساعدات بالقرب من دوار النابلسي على شارع الرشيد .. حتى اللحظة هناك عدد كبير من الشهداء ، واصابات غالبيتها تعرضت للبتر ، المشهد مفجع للغاية داخل مجمع الشفاء الطبي ،، أعداد كبيرة من… pic.twitter.com/AdUpcmhGW9
— الحـكـيم (@Hakeam_ps) February 29, 2024

All we know is that the IDF did shoot at some people. 104 or 150 is an insanely huge number to be killed. Normally as soon as the first shots ring out everyone else scatters.

With hundreds of people there, one would expect to find lots of videos being shared on social media of the shootings. The most gruesome photo I could find shows several bodies, but I cannot see any gunshots - their injuries seem more consistent with a stampede than shootings.

I count seven or eight bodies in an Al Jazeera video.

What seems most likely is that some - maybe dozens - of Palestinians were killed in a stampede, perhaps as they were crowding around the trucks and perhaps fleeing the IDF defensive shooting. Even if the stampede was running away from live fire, there wouldn't be that many dead, because it was an open area and high casualty deadly stampedes only happen in spaces where the crowds have nowhere to go.

Palestinian officials are inflating the death count by an order of magnitude, which they have been doing since the beginning of the war as we saw in the Al Ahli Islamic Jihad rocket explosion. They look at any incident where civilians are killed as an opportunity to demonize Israel, a higher priority than saving lives or grieving.

There was at least one tragic incident this morning. But there is no way that over a hundred people died.

UPDATE: The IDF says it hit no more than 10 people and shot at their legs. They say it was a separate incident and not connected with the convoy.

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Jordan's Foreign Minister called out Israel as the only guilty party on October 7.

Adopting Hamas talking points, Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi justified what he called the “Al-Aqsa Flood” massacre on October 7th, saying it must be looked upon in "context" of Israeli actions against Palestinians.

This came during a press conference with his Austrian counterpart, Alexander Schallenberg, in Amman.

A reporter asked Al Safadi why he is only calling for Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, "Why haven't you called on Hamas to release the hostages, and maybe lay down their arms so that this war could end?"

Al-Safadi didn't answer the question. Instead, he dissembled for a couple of minutes, falsely claiming that "the whole Arab world condemned the killings of Israeli civilians on October 7." This is an absolute lie. Most official statements were of "concern" over "escalation of violence on both sides" while the Arab world itself was supportive of the attacks as "legitimate resistance." Outside of the UAE and Bahrain, who issued clarifying statements days later after Israeli complaints on their "all lives matter" statements, I don't see any Arab nation condemning Hamas. Including Jordan.

He then falsely compared this faux condemnation to the lack of condemnation of Israeli officials for the "killing of 30,000 Palestinian civilians." Yes, he called 12,000 Hamas terrorists "civilians."

Al-Safadi then claimed that there can be no peace without a Palestinian state as he continued to refuse to call for Hamas to release hostages or lay down their arms.

But that wasn't the worst part.

He then added this disgusting addendum: “We have to remember that October 7th did not happen out of a vacuum, there's a context,” and he then went through a laundry list of supposed Israeli crimes. He then said that if Palestinians don't get a state, there will be more October 7ths in coming years, justifying not only last year's massacre but peremptorily justifying whatever outrages Palestinian terrorists do in the future.

All of this was said in fluent English.

There are scores of separatist movements in the world demanding their own state. No one says that violence is justified in their pursuit of their goals. Only for Palestinians are world leaders saying, sure, what can you expect, of course they will be violent forever unless they get their demands met.

Schallenberg, for his part, did not say anything to disagree with al-Safadi's words, and he even thanked Safadi "for the warm welcome and thought-provoking discussions."

I'm tweeting Schallenberg to ask whether blaming Jews for being slaughtered is considered "thought provoking" to him.

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02/28 Links Pt2: A never again moment — again; Israel, Indonesia were on track to normalize ties before Oct. 7; The Jews of West Point

From Ian:

What Jews Mean to America

Taking a long view of Jewish history, Meir Soloveichik observes that there is nothing especially surprising about the surge of anti-Semitism in the U.S. since October 7. What is surprising, he writes, are the “stalwart, public defenses of Jews” from public figures. Soloveichik believes such attitudes have deep roots in the American founding, and are summed up in Abraham Lincoln’s description of Americans as God’s “almost chosen people,” by which he meant that

America is not biblical Israel’s replacement; it does not seek to supersede or supplant the Jews. It does not envy Israel’s eternity but seeks to learn from it and be blessed by it; it is biblical Israel’s imitator, learning the lessons of Israel’s story. Whereas other nations saw in Jewish eternity a reminder of their own ultimate demise, America, as Lincoln argued, learned from the biblical story that it could hope that it would not “perish from the earth” if it remained true to its covenantal calling. The phrase “almost chosen people” warns and inspires America, implicitly embracing the faith that, despite centuries of exile, God’s covenant with the original “chosen people” remained.

Such attitudes, Soloveichik argues, bolster both American sympathy and antipathy toward Zionism:
It is not merely that many Americans of faith support Israel but that Israel’s story supports faith. Many religious Americans . . . find in Israel the vindication of traditional Western, and especially American, beliefs. Israel’s story is seen as the ultimate indication that “God exists; he drives history; he performs miracles in real time; God’s word in the Bible is true.”

It is only with this in mind that we can truly understand the intense hatred directed at Israel from the American left. . . . Progressives elementally understand that Israel, ancient and modern, is a profound source of inspiration in the way America sees itself as a covenantal people. Many progressives, meanwhile, are driven by the fierce belief that America has never been a nation dedicated to a great idea, . . . and its story is entirely a tale of evil and oppression. Woke progressives hate Israel because they hate America; they work, above all, to undermine the notion that America can consider itself a covenantal nation, and they therefore hate the embodiment of the original covenantal nation.

This is why the more the righteousness of Israel’s current cause is revealed, the more agitated and angry the anti-Semites become. Thus we have those who claw at posters of child hostages, destroying evidence of the evil of Israel’s enemies.

Benny Morris: The NYT Misrepresents the History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine published a long article, titled “The Road to 1948,” drawn from a conversation among six professors, three Arab and three Jewish. But even the composition of the panel fits what Benny Morris terms the article’s “misleading attempt to project even-handedness,” as two of the Jewish participants betray a sharply critical attitude toward Zionism, while the three Arab scholars “almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.” Morris also notes:
Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance.

Morris dissects the article’s numerous errors, half-truths, and omissions. For instance:
Emily Bazelon, [the piece’s moderator and editor], informs readers that the first bout of violence took place when the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem “turned into a deadly riot,” in which “five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed.” Neither she nor any of the panelists mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted “nashrab dam al-yahud” (“we will drink the blood of the Jews”). Nor does she tell us that the crowd shouted, “Mohammad’s religion was born with the sword,” according to the eyewitness Khalil al-Sakakini, a Christian Arab educator.

The other errors are more severe still, but I found this point about the Bir Zeit University sociologist Salim Tamari especially noteworthy:
Tamari blithely dismisses the [1948] war by saying that the Palestinians and the Arab states were weak and that “the Arab defeat was almost a foregone conclusion.” But this only seems true in retrospect. In May 1948, the American and British intelligence services predicted an Arab victory.

Tamari and the others thus seem to go beyond the standard academic argument that Israel independence was built on the terrible and inhuman mass-dispossession of Palestinians. They also want to defend the collective honor of the four Arab armies that lost to a group of Jews they outnumbered and outgunned.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh: A never again moment — again

All of this is reminiscent of the “denial spectrum” witnessed in response to the Holocaust — including distortion, minimization and trivialization. It is echoed in the contextualization of the Oct. 7 attacks, which seeks to offer understanding of the perpetrators, paving the way for justification, dressing up mass murder as “resistance.”

All these arguments have now become common. But it’s the response from institutions and organizations that were created and entrusted to uphold and protect the international rules-based order and human rights that have been most shocking: U.N. Secretary General António Guterres contextualized the massacre by saying it “did not occur in a vacuum.” A former director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division disputed the veracity of the Oct. 7 attacks and the atrocities committed.

Meanwhile, American university presidents were unable to determine if calling for the genocide of Jews in the “context” of Oct. 7 violated their codes of conduct, whereas calling for the genocide of any other group would have almost certainly been considered such a violation. Instead, a Cornell University professor was “exhilarated” by the massacre; the director of the campus sexual assault center at a Canadian university disputed whether any sexual violence had been committed on Oct. 7; and a column in the Yale University student paper was edited to remove the line “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”

No wonder a recent Harvard-Harris poll in the U.S. found that 66 percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 believed Oct. 7 was genocide, while an astounding 60 percent believed the assault could be “justified.”

In the streets, protestors around the world, including in countries that designated Hamas a terror entity, have justified the “resistance,” echoing the genocidal Hamas charter with their chants of “from the river to the sea” — and it takes just one look at a map of Israel to understand this is a call for its annihilation. Unfathomably, the spectrum of responses has now “legitimized” a tsunami of antisemitic attacks — of Jews and all those who support Israel’s right to defend herself.

Unequivocal condemnation — without a “but” at the end of the sentence — remains the only ethical response to the barbaric war crimes and crimes against humanity that were perpetrated on Oct. 7. Silence, denial, contextualization, justification and anything in between points to a shocking collapse of morality, of the rules-based international order, of the mechanisms, institutions and principles established in the aftermath of the Holocaust, so that “never again” would become a reality.

Alarmingly, we are at a never again moment — again.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Contrary to popular antisemitic belief, Jews are not “white Europeans” who so rudely colonized land where “Palestinian” Arabs had lived for thousands of years. First of all, Jews are neither European nor white. Secondly, one cannot colonize one’s own land. Thirdly, “Palestinian” Arabs did not live in pre-state Israel for thousands of years.

It’s all a big, fat lie.

Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst Joseph E. Katz, citing a 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report out of London, writes:

“The Jewish presence in ‘the Holy Land’ -- at times tenuous -- persisted throughout its bloody history. In fact, the Jewish claim -- whether Arab-born or European-born Jew -- to the land now called Palestine does not depend on a two-thousand-year-old promise. Buried beneath the propaganda -- which has it that Jews ‘returned’ to the Holy Land after two thousand years of separation, where they found crowds of ‘indigenous Palestinian Arabs’ -- is the bald fact that the Jews are indigenous people on that land who never left, but who have continuously stayed on their ‘Holy Land.’ Not only were there the little-known Oriental Jewish communities in adjacent Arab lands, but there had been an unceasing strain of ‘Oriental’ or ‘Palestinian’ Jews in ‘Palestine’ for millennia.”

Katz goes on to cite Reverend James Parkes, an authority on relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Middle East. In 1949, Parkes assessed what he called the Jews’ “real title deeds” censuring the Zionist movement for its failure to stress that the Land of Israel has NEVER been without Jews.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar-Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained the Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement. This page of Jewish history found no place in the constant flood of Zionist propaganda.... The omission allowed the anti-Zionists, whether Jewish, Arab, or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry trying to re-establish a two thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period. It allowed a picture of The Land as a territory which had once been "Jewish," but which for many centuries had been "Arab." In point of fact any picture of a total change of population is false....

It seems possible, even probable, that the failure of Zionist Movement to depict the Jewish presence in the Land in its proper context, is what led to the myth à la mode that Jews are “white” Europeans who up and stole “Palestine” from poor peaceful Arabs who’d lived there for “centuries.” The fact is that there has been a continual Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. There was never a time when there were no Jews living in the Land of Israel, and in fact there is robust evidence that there were significant numbers of Jews living in the Land, throughout time.

Katz tells us that despite physical violence against Jews in the Holy Land by post-Roman Christians, there were over forty Jewish communities that could be traced to the 6^th century, comprising "twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan Valley.”

In 438 CE, says Katz, Galilean Jews declared an end to the exile when Empress Eudocia allowed Jews to once again pray on the Temple Mount. Archaeological findings, Katz tells us, bear testimony that in 614 CE, the Jews fought alongside invading Persians to overwhelm the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem. Yet when the Arabs seized Jerusalem two decades later, they found a city with a strong Jewish identity. The prevailing culture of Jerusalem was Jewish. Despite all the foreigners who had come and gone, raping and pillaging Jewish land, the Holy City remained Jewish in everybody’s minds. Because it was, is, and always will be.

Katz goes on to describe the tragedy that was life for the Jews under Arab Muslim invaders and occupiers. Spoiler Alert: it wasn’t good for the Jews. And still, the Jews, as stiff-necked as their reputation, clung on to the Holy Land, however they could. Sometimes they couldn’t, against their will. So they wandered the earth, and some of them settled in Europe, praying to return.

Other Jews however, never left but stayed in the Land of Israel. They stayed and stayed. It was hard. But they stayed in the Land, their indigenous territory. Only here could they fulfil the commandments.

And here is where people get stuck. They don’t understand or don’t want to understand that Jews and the Land of Israel are indivisible. The Jews have to be in Israel. This is commanded of them by God.

We pray “Shema Yisrael!” Listen Israel! The Jews are called “Israel.” The Land of Israel literally means "Land of the Jews."

Even in faraway non-Jewish lands, the Jewish people are synonymous with the Land. They read the same prayers with variations related specifically to living outside the Land, outside the place where Land and Jews are one. And still, these exiled Jews are tied to the Land in ways that can never be undone. All Jews are. We all have that holy connection.

When a European minyan, a quorum of ten, prays for rain, they are praying for rain in Israel. When a Jew in Cleveland eats bread, he says an after-blessing, thanking God for giving him the Land of Israel, and praying for the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, speedily in our time.

The enemy in Gaza and under the PA has none of this weighty history, and no valid claim to any land at all. They are but an odd admixture of people who call themselves “Palestinian” while claiming Jewish land—it’s right out of the Roman playbook. But there are censuses. And people with brains can think for themselves. The enemy is a liar and a thief, or rather a wannabe thief, because the land will never be theirs.

The Land will always be Jewish land, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Even after October 7, even now, there is nothing that can ever change this singular fact: The Land of Israel belongs to the Jews, forever.

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SpyTalk writes:

What has made the war in Gaza so much deadlier and destructive than Israel’s previous operations against Hamas is the combination of its use of artificial intelligence, which generates more targets than ever before, and the IDF’s relaxation of rules limiting strikes against non-military targets and civilians, according to little noticed statements by current and former IDF officials, as well as an investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian +972 online magazine and the Hebrew-language news site, Sikha Mekomit, or Local Call.

According to the IDF’s official website (which was down on Saturday), the military’s intelligence branch created its AI-assisted targeting directorate in 2019. The website disclosed it employs an AI-assisted target creation platform called Habsora in Hebrew (the Gospel, in English) in the IDF’s war against Hamas “to produce targets at a fast pace.”

In an interview published a few months before the Gaza war, retired Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who stepped down as the IDF’s chief of staff last year, described the AI-assisted targeting platform as “a machine that processes vast amounts of data faster and more effectively than any human, translating them into actionable targets.”

To illustrate the impact that the system has had on targeting, Kochavi said that before the platform was created, the IDF’s intelligence branch would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. “Once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day,” Kochavi said.

There have been a number of articles like this that claim that AI is helping the IDF kill more civilians. They base their claims by relying on the ignorance of people about AI, about the IDF and natural hatred for Israel that overwhelms any attempts at fairness.

All of the articles mention this much larger number of potential targets being identified. What very few say is that the ultimate decision on what will be hit is made by humans.

As Bloomberg reported in its own biased piece before October 7:

Though the military won’t comment on specific operations, officials say it now uses an AI recommendation system that can crunch huge amounts of data to select targets for airstrikes. Ensuing raids can then be rapidly assembled with another artificial intelligence model called Fire Factory, which uses data about military-approved targets to calculate munition loads, prioritize and assign thousands of targets to aircraft and drones, and propose a schedule.
While both systems are overseen by human operators who vet and approve individual targets and air raid plans, according to an IDF official, the technology is still not subject to any international or state-level regulation. Proponents argue that the advanced algorithms may surpass human capabilities and could help the military minimize casualties, while critics warn of the potentially deadly consequences of relying on increasingly autonomous systems.

Generating targets based on AI is exactly the same as generating targets based on other kinds of intelligence, just much faster. There is no change in procedures. There is no change in policy. If anything, these AI tools can minimize mistakes.

These articles all have the same pattern. They call upon "experts" who know literally nothing about the IDF or its policies, and then spin nightmare scenarios where "with the push of a button" the IDF could choose to have the machines take over and make all the decisions.

The SpyTalk article relies on two retired, anonymous CIA officials who compare Israel's AI with Vietnam War-era technology used by the US. Really.

They say things like:

“In war, AI systems require the ingestion of quality inputs of intelligence at a massive level,” he said. “This is particularly true for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems input. But that’s not effective when you have little current intel on the enemy, who is hiding underground and who doesn’t maneuver as armies do, but rather as insurgents amidst a civilian population.”

If the old method took a week to identify a target, how timely would that information be by the time the target is attacked? Isn't a system that identifies them faster going to be inherently more accurate?

And, yes, targets are now underground. AI doesn't make that issue worse than it was, and arguably it can identify entrance and exit points of tunnels much better than humans can by identifying people entering one building and exiting another, for example, of seeing when cell phone signatures jump from one place to another. Of course computers would do a better job than humans would.

And, again, humans review the AI data for accuracy, just as they would have reviewed the recommendations of humans beforehand. There is literally no difference - except that this is much better.

Another criticism often leveled at AI is that it is sometimes impossible to understand how it reaches a decision. But this is something that Israel recognized and appears to have fixed long ago. Bloomberg says:

Many algorithms are developed by private companies and militaries that do not disclose propriety information, and critics have underlined the built-in lack of transparency in how algorithms reach their conclusions. The IDF acknowledged the problem, but said output is carefully reviewed by soldiers and that its military AI systems leave behind technical breadcrumbs, giving human operators the ability to recreate their steps.

In other words, the "experts" are basing their knowledge of AI on playing with ChatGPT rather than understanding the state of the art.

These same "experts" predicted thousands of IDF deaths and Gaza cities being deathtraps. Ai isn't the only reason that the IDF performance has surpassed expectations, but it is a major one.

The effectiveness cannot be denied. Hamas deaths outnumber IDF deaths by a 50-1 ratio even when Hamas deploys teams of only two or three people at a time while there will be at least 10 IDF soldiers deployed on any given mission.

West Point's Articles of War blog summarized things nicely last year:

One encouraging aspect is that it seems the IDF seeks to use tools that complement human decision making, rather than as substitutes for the human factor. It is important to maintain a human in the loop in order to promote accountability, because we are not fully aware of the capabilities and the risks of AI tools. In this regard, Israel is setting a positive example that should be followed.

Too many articles on Israel's use of AI are based on science fiction scenarios of robots running amok. The IDF has been researching AI for over a decade, and it applies its own moral code to the tools as it does for every other tool. They've thought through these problems, and solved them, way before the "experts" started charging consulting fees for their uninformed opinions.

(h/t Martin)

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02/28 Links Pt1: Hamas’s Death Cult Comes to America; Poll: Large majority of Americans support Israel in war against Hamas; Hamas's Human Shields Strategy

From Ian:

The General Who Believes in Winning Wars

Hacohen is not a believer in peace with the Palestinians, but he does not think violence alone can solve Israel’s strategic dilemmas. Two days before I met him, the MEF group had been in the north of Israel, looking through binoculars into the dread stillness of communities that had been ghost towns since early October. The naked eye could spot a white building on a far ridge, a U.N. post 80 meters inside of Lebanese territory where Hezbollah staged a military demonstration in April of 2023. The evacuation of 60,000 Israelis from 43 towns within 5 kilometers of the border had created a free-fire zone for the Shiite jihadists, who have blown up over 500 Israeli houses since October, and severely wounded a 15-year-old in Kiryat Shmona earlier that same day. Without an Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, Iran-backed militants seemed unlikely to withdraw to the Litani River, their farthest permitted position under the worthless U.N. Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 Lebanon war.

Hacohen does not think such an invasion will be easy. “First of all it is a mountainous area,” he said. “We must learn from the Allied forces, the United States and the British in their march under the command of Patton from Sicily to Monte Casino. It took them too much time. … The Germans succeeded to stop them for nine months in Monte Casino.” Southern Lebanon “is a land, a very specific infrastructure, and a terrain giving all conditions for a small army to stand against a huge army,” he said.

Even if Hezbollah were chased back to the Litani, Hacohen thinks that peace would be unlikely to dawn over northern Israel, or any other part of the country for that matter, because so much of the Jewish state would still be within range of Hezbollah’s surviving arsenal. “They intentionally build themselves so that they can fight even by losing that southern part of Lebanon. They have depth,” Hacohen warned. Hezbollah would be able to bombard the center of Israel even if the IDF made it all the way to Beirut. “The idea that [Hezbollah] can go ahead with warfare, even though they are defeated in the battlefield, it is one of the [things] explaining the difference between the 1967 war and now,” he said.

There was one more crucial layer of complication: The Lebanese army, like the Palestinian Authority security forces, is a project of the United States, meaning Israel’s closest ally is now supporting two regional military forces who see their paramount foe as Israel, and provide practical support and political cover for Iranian-backed terror militias. “We must admit that there is huge strategic embarrassment for Israel,” Hacohen said.

“The first solution is to be aware about the dilemma,” he explained. The way out of the morass might involve careful diplomacy with the U.S., clever war-planning, and a high national threshold for chaos—above all, it means steeling the Israeli public for a second unprecedented national crisis in six months.

If Hacohen is optimistic about anything, it is the Israelis themselves, who “decided to fight for the honor of the Jewish people” after Oct. 7. Hacohen, who says he has 50 family members on active IDF duty, credits the army’s successes in Gaza to the rank-and-file rather than their commanders. The IDF had spent three decades avoiding massive face-to-face combat. Its soldiers have now dismantled three-quarters of Hamas’ brigades and chased its terrorists through hundreds of miles of cramped and booby-trapped tunnels without any sag in morale.

Hacohen used an unlikely example to illustrate how this fight for survival might change Israel. During World War II, Marlene Dietrich’s “Lili Marleen” became a favorite of both Allied and Axis soldiers. Dietrich, who as Hacohen noted performed in Israel in 1960, knew that she was the last female voice that thousands of young men would ever hear. In light of her significance to the deadliest event in human history, a postwar career in Hollywood proved unsatisfying to Dietrich, who opened a club that veterans from across America flocked to. The German actress, like the soldiers who had heard her over the radio and who now came to hear her sing in person, realized that the war had been more than just an episode, and that it had become a defining aspect of her own identity.

The point of Dietrich’s story is that “if you are a real warrior, a real general, participating in a war that is almost like independence warfare, it is just the highlight of your life,” Hacohen said almost wistfully. “After that, just to be something else, it is not really to respect what happened in that huge challenge that you overcame.”

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fought in such a war for their national existence since Oct. 7. How they understand what they’ve fought for and why could determine the country’s future as much as any geopolitical event. Against a sometimes-bleak horizon of official failure and looming conflict, the strength of Israel’s people is perhaps the most important remaining unknown.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib: The Origin of Hamas's Human Shields Strategy in Gaza

Hamas believed that as a people's militia and a righteous religious resistance group against the Israeli occupation, it had a moral right to operate amongst the population from which it derived its strength, legitimacy, and fighters.

Unfortunately, and horrendously, this strategy ultimately failed and brought unspeakable death and suffering upon the people of Gaza. Over time, and in past and current wars, the IDF became less risk-averse and more willing to tolerate civilian casualties in pursuit of high-value targets and military infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes and bombardment would regularly hit and destroy entire neighborhoods, commercial areas, schools, mosques and hospitals.

While it is true that Hamas would use these places for its activities, it unfortunately became exceptionally easy for the IDF to justify civilian casualties, wrongful deaths, and questionable actions by blaming Hamas for embedding itself amongst civilian populations and infrastructure.

Hamas's immoral decision to normalize the self-described "human shields" strategy has not only been incredibly destructive for Gaza's civilian population. It has also proved ineffective as the IDF loosened its rules of engagement to allow for more risky and deadly strikes on Hamas targets.

Multiple things are true simultaneously: The Israeli military kills civilians in its pursuit of militants and subsequently attempts to absolve itself of moral and operational responsibility by blaming Hamas's use of Gazans as human shields. And Hamas absolutely disregards the safety and well-being of Gazans by deliberately and nefariously placing its infrastructure and armaments among civilians and crowded neighborhoods and cities throughout the Gaza Strip. The group gives itself the right to be anywhere it deems necessary in Gaza because the interests of the "resistance" far outweigh any harm done to innocent civilians in pursuit of the supposed "greater good" and the "liberation of Palestine."

What began as Nizar Rayan's human shields strategy to protect militants' houses from Israeli bombing has sadly and ironically ended up with Hamas turning innocent and uninvolved Gaza civilians into its own "collateral damage."

Noah Rothman: Hamas’s Death Cult Comes to America

‘We love death like our enemies love life.” That chilling mantra, expressed a decade ago by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, has since become the terrorist outfit’s unofficial motto. “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves,” Hamas official Ali Baraka told a Russian interviewer less than a week after the October 7 massacre. “The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.”

Neither Haniyeh nor Baraka, who respectively reside in Qatar and Lebanon, were speaking for themselves. Both are sufficiently removed from the war to which they’ve consigned Gaza’s people that they have little reason to anticipate their own glorious martyrdom. They are, however, happy to see their charges massacred in furtherance of the death cult Hamas has erected around itself. That cult extends well beyond the borders of the Gaza Strip, as the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell sadly illustrates.

Bushnell announced himself as an active-duty U.S. airman when he approached the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. There, he declared his opposition to “genocide,” dowsed himself in a flammable liquid, and set himself alight. He died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Bushnell seems to have captured the hearts of Americans who are predisposed to share Bushnell’s outlook on Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and the Biden administration’s support for it. Their praise for his act of violence is evidence of both the depravity cultivated by Hamas’s obsessive bloodlust and an unspoken but apparently widespread desire to see more violence follow it.

“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice!” declared Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024. Indeed, the outright support (bordering on advocacy) for Bushnell’s suicide seems most common among Ph.Ds. Prolonged exposure to post-colonial agitprop explains a statement attributed to Biden “administration staff.” In an open letter, the fifth column in the White House explained that Bushnell’s “act of protest” represents “a stark warning for our nation” — a “haunting reminder for those who refuse to change course,” namely Joe Biden.

What is this sort of advocacy meant to achieve other than to convince other naïve, blinkered radicals to commit similar acts of violence — acts that may not be limited to self-harm? We’re left with no other conclusion, particularly given the strained efforts to maintain that Bushnell was of entirely sound mind when he committed this atrocity.

On Monday, Joe Biden said - while eating ice cream - that he was hopeful for a "ceasefire" by next week.

"We're close," President Biden told reporters. "We're not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we'll have a ceasefire."

It was a very stupid thing to say.

Once Biden said that he thought a deal was close, that made Hamas far less likely to agree to a deal.

Everyone in every Western government that deals with the Muslim world, from Presidents down through the grunts in the foreign ministries, really needs to take a basic course in honor/shame culture.

When Hamas leaders read this report, they felt that they were being manipulated. They want any agreement to look like they are the ones making the demands, not meekly following others. Their "honor" demands this.

When Biden said that they were close to an agreement that made Hamas look weak, in their minds.

Indeed, when they rejected the proposed agreement, they practically said so:

Another Hamas official, Ahmad Abdelhadi, said that the group was sticking to its demand that Israel agree to a long-term cease-fire and that leaks about the talks were designed to pressure Hamas to soften its position.

“We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” Mr. Abdelhadi said Tuesday in a televised interview with al-Mayadeen, a Lebanese broadcaster.

Qatar, for all its faults, understands the basics of what you say publicly when dealing with a group where honor is a paramount concern.

Qatar, a key mediator in the talks, also expressed caution on Tuesday, saying it could not comment on Mr. Biden’s view that negotiators were nearing an agreement.

“The efforts are ongoing; all the parties are conducting regular meetings,” Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari foreign ministry, told reporters in Doha. “But for now, while we certainly hope it will be achieved as soon as possible, we don’t have anything in our hands so as to comment on that deadline.”

It appears that Biden wanted to look, especially in an election year, like he was leading the effort and getting results. His ego and ambition got in the way of the goal.

The other concern is that he used the term "ceasefire" and not "pause" or "truce." "Ceasefire" has been the stated desire of Israel's haters. Since he was speaking off the cuff, this may or may not have been intentional, but it is certainly concerning.

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!

Gaza is where the world's double standards for Jews and double standards for Muslims intersect

It has been 144 days.

Not one human rights organization, not one major media outlet, not one world government, not one UN agency has publicly called on Arab countries to open their borders for Gazans in a war zone to flee.

This is unlike every other war in modern history. Millions of Ukrainians, Syrians, Somalians, Sudanese and other refugees flee war zones all the time and the world's human rights organizations and editorialists relentlessly call for borders to be opened and for refugees to be treated humanely.

Except for Gaza.

And as far as I can tell, not one reporter - not one! - has bothered asking HRW and Amnesty and Gisha and UNRWA - or even the State Department or white House - what their official position is on Egypt's and Jordan's refusal to allow any Gazans to seek safety within their borders.

It is astonishing. Not a single major group, organization, pundit or nation who claim to care about the welfare of the civilians of Gaza is willing to even express a passing public criticism of Egypt's and Jordan's quite public proclamations that they will not allow a single Palestinian to flee to safety.

There are two overlapping sets of double standards for Gaza.

One is discussed quite a bit: antisemitism. The very charge of "genocide" that is only hurled at Israel and no other nation at war can only be explained by hatred of Jews. The demands that Israel behave in ways that no one else is expected to are antisemitic. The suspicion that Israel's statements are suspect, that their claims and evidence must be corroborated before they can be believed no matter how much evidence is produced, is classic antisemitism where Jews are considered shifty and always scheming.

The other double standard is Islam-phobia, the very real fear of Islam that has been exhibited in the West since the 19th century, not to be confused with "Islamophobia."

No one wants to admit it aloud, but there is a great fear in the West of upsetting Muslims, who are regarded as irrational creatures who might just decide to attack you if you make them angry. And many Muslims take full advantage of this fear, threatening violence or terrorism that could somehow result if they don't get their way.

If anyone would publicly call on Egypt to open its borders to Gazans, the Egyptian government would react with great anger - it would suspend relations with any country, it would expel or imprison any human rights workers, it would embark on a smear campaign against any pundits, it would self-righteously say that its policy is the most humane policy possible for Palestinians and no one would dare contradict them.

And Islam-phobia ensures that no one wants to shame Egypt or prompt such reactions. "Speaking truth to power" only applies to power that doesn't act irrationally or violently. It directly leads to the deaths of thousands of civilians.

The violence we are now seeing in Western cities and campuses, ostensibly in defense of Palestinians, is partly a result of Western reluctance to appear "Islamophobic" in acting against the lesser offenses of "only" blocking major transportation routes.

No one wants to criticize Palestinians for overwhelmingly supporting the mass murder of Jewish civilians. Calls for a "ceasefire" begin and end with Israel. Calls for Hamas to release hostages are pro forma and forced, while calls for Israel to stop fighting and allow Hamas to win are strident and angry.

This overlapping of Islam-phobia and antisemitism has some surprising commonalities. In both cases, context is anathema.

No one wants to compare how Egypt is expected to act with Gazans with how they are expected to act with other people seeking refuge from war.

No one wants to compare Israeli actions with the behavior of the US and Britain and Germany in various Muslim theatres of war.

Almost no one wants to seriously publish the IDF's extensive controls in place to minimize civilian harm and how difficult that is in an urban war with Hamas hiding beneath civilians. Very few seriously compare Israel's actions with real international law, instead creating new rules for Israel that have never been applied anywhere else.

Gaza is where the double standards for Jews and the double standards for Muslims intersect.

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!

One year ago, UN Women reported that "Nearly one-third of Ukraine’s population have been forced to flee their homes. Around 60 per cent of the 7.7 million internally displaced adults are women while 90 per cent of the 5.6 million refugees who fled Ukraine are women and children, making it one of the most gendered displacement crises of our times."

The men stayed to fight and they sent the women and children to safety. Which is what normal people do during wartime.

The contrast with Gaza could not be starker.

Instead of trying to protect the women and children, Hamas wants them to die. The men hide underground and leave the women and children to protect them from IDF bombs.

And the Arab world is complicit with this sick mentality. Without exception, they are all insisting that Gaza civilians be forced to stay in Gaza, most of them against their will.

Ukrainian refugees are welcome in the Czech Republic, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere. Egypt builds walls and stations tanks to keep Gaza refugees out.

UNHCR created an entire infrastructure for Ukraine refugees. UNRWA simply accepts that Gazans imprisoned , without even attempting to move them to their other areas of operation in the West Bank or Jordan.

Muslims love to explain how much they cherish their women, that the hijab is a sign of respect and keeps women safer (it doesn't.) But here is a real world case where women and children could have been in relative safety in neighboring Arab countries.

Not only does no one want them - they are gaslighting them to say that being stuck in Gaza is for their own good, that it helps the Palestinian cause.

Because anything that can be blamed on Jews is considered a win to them.

The mentality has been so thoroughly accepted that hardly anyone questions it. Palestinians just act this way, and Egyptians just act this way, and Jordanians just act this way, ad Gazans who disagree must be silenced. Human rights groups and the UN and other NGOs simply accept that Palestinians are perhaps the first civilians in the history of warfare who are forced to stay in a war zone and no one blames their neighbors living only a couple of miles away for building a huge wall to keep them out. And their leaders would prefer that they die than live elsewhere.

This is the opposite of chivalry. This is honor killing on a massive scale, where each dead civilian considered by Palestinians and their supporters to be not a tragedy but a net positive for the Palestinian national movement.

Martyrdom is honorable. Escaping is shameful. It is a truly sick psyche.

And if you think that this somehow makes sense, then explain why the world treats Ukrainian civilians so much differently.

(h/t Irene)

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!

02/27 Links Pt2: Everyone Knows What You Mean When You Say ‘Zionist’; Jewish conspiracy myths are an attack on democracy; Liberated from Dhimmitude

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Everyone Knows What You Mean When You Say ‘Zionist’

The point of the Harvard task force is to take people on campus who have the desire and the credibility to fight anti-Semitism and force them into quicksand committees where their criticism will remain internal in perpetuity. Harvard seeks to silence and co-opt its critics. Pay close attention to whether other elite schools do any better.

One reason these institutions feel comfortable operating in such bald bad faith is that much of the media follows suit and speaks euphemistically, very much including the New York Times. For example, when explaining what got Claudine Gay into trouble in December, the Times writes: “On Dec. 5, she testified before a congressional committee and gave legalistic answers when asked whether Harvard would punish students who called for the genocide of Jews.”

She “gave legalistic answers,” you see. What actually happened is that she excepted calling for the mass murder of Jews from the rules against harassment and would not say that Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish state. (She deleted the word “Jewish” from the formulation, in fact—an act that made very clear where she stood on both questions.)

The Times also describes some of the social exclusion Jewish students are feeling at Harvard: “Some Jewish students say they have given up their kipas, or skullcaps, for baseball hats. They say they now keep their Zionist beliefs to themselves in classrooms and residence halls.”

Gotta be careful not to show your Zionist kippas and your Zionist phylacteries while making your Zionist blessings and reading your Zionist Talmud or lighting your Friday night Zionist candles.

Yesterday, University of California, Santa Barbara, student president Tessa Veksler showed the many signs around campus aimed at “Zionists.” The formulation was generally some version of “Zionists not allowed” or “Zionists not welcome.” That “Zionists not welcome” message was also found somewhere else: carved into a door next to a mezuzah. In case the graffiti wasn’t clear enough, the scribbler drew an arrow pointing from the message to the mezuzah.

No one is just finding out that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Everyone already knew that. But many people were content to lie about this fact and claim ignorance. There is no real debate about what people mean when they say “Zionists.” There is only the low-rent kabuki theater that passes itself off as debate at various U.S. colleges and in the pages of the New York Times. Similarly, administrators at Harvard are not failing; they are succeeding wildly at what they believe to be their jobs. And that’s why competent members of their task forces keep resigning.

Lipstadt: Jewish conspiracy myths are an attack on the very nature of democracy

Speaking about her work as an antisemitism envoy she joked: ‘Business is booming, I work in a growth industry but I must be one of the only people praying for a recession.’

But then she got serious. Calling antisemitism ‘a conspiracy myth’ rather than theory ‘as sometimes theories turn out to be true’ she said that she had spent the last few weeks speaking to world leaders – including UK politicians – to warn them to open their eyes to the danger not just to Jewish communities but to the fabric of society.

‘We are dealing with a multi-layered hatred with a multi layered impact,’ she said. ‘It is a threat to democracy; anyone who accepts the conspiracy myths that Jews control the media and the government has essentially given up on democracy.

‘And then there are the bad actors who use antisemitism as a means of making democracies look like failed states. In the beginning of 1960, in West Germany, newly rebuilt synagogues had swastikas painted on the outside and Jewish cemeteries were desecrated; people were sure it was done by Nazis and there was a valid question raised in the West – are the Nazis back? It made some question whether Germany could be a reliable partner for peace.

‘We found out many years later that this was engineered by the KGB and it was because they wanted to make Germany look liked a failed state. Antisemitism is a way of stirring up the pot. Of course, no one can create something that isn’t there but it can be built up so that it becomes a threat to democracy. And from there it becomes a threat to national stability.

‘There is so much active disinformation and it doesn’t have to work for it to be successful. In mid-October Hamas declared a ‘day of rage’ and many schools were closed and parents kept their children home from school – and I am not being critical of them for this – but although nothing happened it was a complete success for them because we were threatened.’

Noah Feldman: The New Antisemitism

Israel’s stated war aims are to hold Hamas accountable for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and to get back its citizens who are still being held captive. These aims are lawful in themselves.

The means Israel has used are subject to legitimate criticism for killing too many civilians as collateral damage. But Israel’s military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war. There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.

To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack. The child is equally innocent, and the parents’ sorrow equally profound. As a matter of international law, however, the difference is decisive. During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.

These relevant facts matter for putting the genocide charge into the context of potential antisemitism. Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.

The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills. Oppression is real. Power can be exercised without justice. Israel should not be immune from criticism when it acts wrongfully. Yet the horrific history and undefeated resilience of antisemitism mean that modes of rhetorical attack on Israel and on Jews should be subject to careful scrutiny.

Just because antisemitism is a cyclical, recurring phenomenon does not mean that it is inevitable nor that it cannot be ameliorated. Like any form of irrational hate, antisemitism can in principle be overcome. The best way to start climbing out of the abyss of antisemitism is to self-examine our impulses, our stories about power and injustice, and our beliefs.

A video saying Jews eat Christian children's blood, and sells their flesh, doesn't violate X/Twitter policies

Here is a video that the far-right antisemites share among each other which showed up on Twitter/X.

It takes an audio of a person pretending to be a Jew, with an absurd caricature of a Jewish accent, being interviewed by some Jew-hater and claiming to "admit" that Jews kill children on Passover, use their blood for making matzah and then sell their flesh to slaughterhouses (for "shekels") where "goyim" eat their own children.

They superimpose the audio with absurd pictures, including a map of butchers in a Jewish area of New York state.

I, and many others, reported this to X.

Here's their response:

After reviewing the available information, we want to let you know ShannonCam82757 hasn’t broken our safety policies. We know this isn’t the answer you’re looking for. If this account breaks our policies in the future, we’ll notify you.

You can block the account, which means they won’t be able to follow you, see your Tweets, or message you.

Reports like this inform our policies, and we’re always reviewing them and how we apply them. We hope you'll continue to make reports if you see things that might break our policies.

Here’s a summary of what isn’t allowed on Twitter, according to our safety policies.

Threatening violence against someone or a group of people
Celebrating or praising violence
Harassing someone or encouraging people to harass someone
Wishing harm on someone
Promoting violence, threatening, or harassing people because of their identity (like race or gender)
Promoting or encouraging suicide or self-harm
Images or videos that show sexual violence and assault
Child sexual exploitation
Threatening or promoting terrorism or violent extremism

We know we don't always get it right. So if you think we made a mistake, you can report them again.

If the classic blood libel, extended to even more grotesque depths, isn't antisemitic, then what is?

It seems like X won't bother to take anything down unless it has a swastika or a photo of Hitler. And their algorithm or people working on this don't know any better.

This is as big fail as one can imagine. And it has real life consequences, especially now that antisemitism is hitting record highs.

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!

More than half of "journalists" killed in Gaza were linked to terror groups. At least 13 were actual terrorists.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published an analysis of the 131 names that Hamas has identified as being "journalists" killed in Gaza during the war.

They found that 13 of them were members of armed terror groups and at least 54 of them were linked to terror groups. (The count the Palestinian Authority as a terror group, I don't think that is quite so definite so I'm not counting those.)

As the IDF reported, one of the "journalists," Muhammad Samir Muhammad Washah, was a commander in the anti-tank missile unit of Hamas’ military wing. They found his laptop in a tunnel.

The full report lists all of the dead alleged journalists and describes their affiliations. Many of whom never seem to have actually done any journalism, and they might have received their job titles after they died, so Hamas could gain more points by claiming Israel killed more journalists. The International Federation of Journalists lists 103 killed.

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!

02/27 Links Pt1: Palestinian Incitement Is Central to Hamas’s Sadistic Wars; Israeli officials puzzled by Biden’s optimism on ceasefire; We need to talk about Gen Z’s Palestine mania

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Palestinian Incitement Is Central to Hamas’s Sadistic Wars

I don’t know that I’ve ever made my way through something as hard to read as the comprehensive report released last week by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. Titled “Silent Cry: Sexual Crimes in the October 7 War,” the report lays out in gruesome detail what we know—not what is theorized or assumed, but what is known—about Hamas’s depravity on and after October 7.

People who still doubt and deny these atrocities aren’t searching for evidence, and it’s clear they never were. Despite that, the value in documenting Hamas’s barbarousness for posterity is obvious. In addition, the report was delivered to the United Nations, which has a special obligation to read it and act on it because it has a unique level of culpability in the crimes.

I don’t mean simply the fact that UN employees participated in the attacks, though that is certainly part of the picture. The report reveals something truly catastrophic about the society over which the UN has presided as its primary steward.

Palestinians in Gaza have been brainwashed beyond hatred to the point of sadistic reprogramming, and it is incumbent on the world to intervene.

The report is available online here, and readers can decide for themselves the level of detail they are prepared to handle. But one quote in particular has haunted me ever since I first read the report. An emergency responder on the scene described the mutilation of the victims this way: “There’s almost no body they were satisfied with (just) shooting.”

There is abundant eyewitness testimony, but the Gazans who carried out those crimes went to great lengths to leave no doubt. Victims—both men and women, but mostly women—were found with nails, grenades, knives, iron bars, and gunshot wounds in their genitals. There was, in fact, an overriding obsession with sexual torture and mutilation along with rape, and often with family members forced to watch. It is all consistent with the many videos Hamas took themselves of terrorists dragging mostly naked women through the streets as onlookers cheer. Internal organs were mutilated as well, and some victims were beheaded.

Put it this way: You know something is truly demonic when phrases like “just murdered” or “just raped” appear in a report.

'October 7, part two:' Iran plans for terror during Ramadan, Israel charges

Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are trying to use Ramadan to inflame the region to achieve another October 7 disaster against Israel, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned on Tuesday.

According to Gallant, they hope to provoke Palestinians in the West Bank, Hezbollah, Arabs, and Muslims across the region to attack and turn their rage on Israel, using the Temple Mount and tensions in the West Bank as an excuse.

The defense minister has been a leading voice for smashing Hamas and earlier in the war, tried to convince the war cabinet to launch a preemptive strike on Hezbollah.

Gallant calls for reducing tensions
However, at this point, he believes that fighting the war without hesitation must go hand in hand with reducing tensions in areas where there is no reason for there to be tensions.

This means Gallant is strongly against National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s push to reduce access to the Temple Mount for certain Israeli-Arabs or Palestinians during Ramadan, though this time he did not mention Ben-Gvir by name.

Further, he has pushed for over a month to allow Shin Bet-approved Palestinian West Bank workers to return to their Israeli employees.

Before the war, there were around 210,000 Palestinian West Bank workers constantly going to work for Israelis, with the number of those who committed terror attacks in single digits.

A vast number of terror attacks over the years have been committed by Palestinians who break through the security barrier illegally.

Based on these consistent factors, both the IDF and the Shin Bet have consistently recommended returning Palestinian West Bank workers, as opposed to Palestinian Gaza workers, which all authorities currently oppose.

Netanyahu and Biden clash over claim Israel losing world support

Israel risks losing the world's support if it keeps with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "incredibly conservative government," US President Joe Biden said in an appearance on the late-night show Seth Meyers on Monday night, where he joked about his age and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories before turning serious to discuss Israel and Gaza.

Netanyahu appeared to reply to Biden later on Tuesday, saying in a recorded address that "since the beginning of this war, I have been leading the diplomatic front, whose mission it is to block pressure exerted on Israel, while simultaneously gaining support."

Biden said it's a principle agreement that there will be a ceasefire while the hostages are released. He said Netanyahu agreed they would not engage in fighting during Ramadan, a point the Prime Minister later contested.

Biden said Netanyahu made him a commitment that they're going evacuate significant portions of Rafah before beginning ground operations.

“That gives us time to begin to move in directions that a lot of Arab countries are prepared to move in," Biden said, saying Saudi, Jordan, Egypt, and six other countries were ready to recognize Israel.

'Take advantage of the opportunity'
Biden said Israel has to take advantage of an opportunity to have peace and security for Israelis, and Palestinians who are being used as pawns by Hamas.

“I think that if we get that temporary ceasefire, we're going to be able to move in a direction where we can change the dynamic," Biden said.

Biden issued cautious criticism of Netanyahu and Israel's government.

"If it keeps us up without this incredibly conservative government they have and Ben-Gvir and others… they're going to lose support from around the world," Biden said.

At least 50 anti-Biden protestors were arrested inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Myers' NBC studio is, according to Jewish Voices for Peace NYC, an organizer of the protest.

.@POTUS: "You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist. I'm a Zionist. Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe." pic.twitter.com/dKjnxkopDh
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) February 27, 2024