Where are the "innocent" Gazan civilians?

 

At this hostage release "ceremony", the Gazans young and old

are relating to the hostages in the worst possible demeaning way.

The War in Gaza is Over - NO IT'S NOT

The Gaza war is practically over and all that's left are a few hostage - prisoner ransom swaps and, hoopa, it's all over "'cept the cryin'" – NO IT’S NOT

Reporter Yoav Zeiton in this morning's Ynet daily: "This morning in Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynet we are revealing what can be published about the IDF's extraordinary preparations in the south, and it is worth putting on the table:

1. Hamas was not defeated in the war - far from it; the month-long ceasefire caused it to reorganize and not abandon the idea of ​​attacking Israel

2. Many thousands of its operatives returned from the south of the Gaza Strip to the north with the withdrawal from the Netzarim axis and were among the half million Gazans who did so

3. Those thousands of terrorists found many hundreds of terrorists there in Gaza City and its suburbs, and they rebuilt company and battalion structures

4. Hamas collected a large amount of explosives from the remnants of the retreating IDF in the past month, thus trapping explosive sites and creating new weapons for its forces

5. In addition, Hamas has networked surveillance cameras at key points in the Gaza Strip, raised drones for collection and scanning, and re-manned Its units with new commanders

‏6. Hamas also located and targeted quite a few rocket launchers that remained in the Gaza Strip, in the background of the 4 launches in the past week in Buraij and Rafah

‏7. The military wing's operatives are preparing tunnels that the IDF did not locate, also for possible targets for attack, and are renovating damaged tunnels

‏8. Let us recall:

‏a. There are commanders in Hamas that the IDF and Shin Bet were sure had been eliminated, and who have come back to life

‏b. The strategic decision made by Hamas in the first month of the war when it realized that Hezbollah had abandoned it: to withdraw most of its terrorists to the cities of the displaced and to preserve as much weaponry as possible

9. In addition, Hamas is also strengthening its control through the municipalities in the Gaza Strip, providing municipal services to the Gazans and collecting taxes from the distribution of food and fuel aid that Israel brings in, in order to pay its operatives

10. The IDF, on the other hand, is completing preparations for a broad ground and air operation, including with reserve brigades: "Hamas is very damaged with gaps in manpower and weapons, but there is still a lot of work to overcome it militarily”

40,000 Palestinians evacuated from Refugee Camps in Samaria

 For full article see https://worldisraelnews.com/40000-palestinians-evacuated-samaria-as-idf-deploys-tanks-in-jenin/

IDF tanks rolled into the Palestinian Authority city of Jenin in northern Samaria on Sunday, marking the first time since the Second Intifada that Israeli armored units have operated in the area.

An IDF spokesperson later confirmed that tanks were operating in the area as part of the ongoing Israeli counter-terror operation in Samaria.

Since January 21st, Israeli forces have killed more than 70 terrorists and detained 300 suspects in Operation Iron Wall, carried out in the Jenin district of northern Samaria and Tulkarem and nearby Nur al-Shams in western Samaria.

The operation was launched after Palestinian Authority security forces failed to take control of Jenin from rogue terror groups and following the January 6th shooting attack in Samaria that left three Israelis dead.

Later on Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz (Likud) discussed the expansion of Operation Iron Wall, saying that some 40,000 Arab residents have been evacuated from the targeted areas of the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur al-Shams, which are now empty of residents.”

Furthermore, Katz said the Israeli military will remain in parts of Jenin and Tulkarem for an extended period of time, without giving a deadline for their withdrawal.

During the recent operations, Katz added, IDF forces have shut down operations by the terror-linked United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). “UNRWA operations in the camps have also been halted,” Katz said.

“We will not return to the previous reality. We will continue to clear refugee camps and additional terror hubs to dismantle the battalions and terror infrastructure of radical Islam, which were built, armed, funded, and trained by Iran’s axis of evil in an attempt to establish an eastern terror front against the settlements of Samaria, the security barrier, and major population centers in Israel.”

ISIS Beheads 70 Christians -The Media is Silent

 Total silence from International media over this atrocity.

Four Coffins

(Thanks to Rachel O'Donoghue, Jerusalem Post)

 It was not just the presence of the four coffins that made the spectacle an echo of the savagery of October 7. It was the festive atmosphere—the casual, almost celebratory way a community gathered to watch a terrorist group display the bodies of murdered Jews. A society so desensitized to terroristic violence that even the sight of coffins holding two dead babies did not shock. Did not horrify. 

Quite the opposite. It was a cause for celebration.

The mothers and fathers of Gaza brought their children to watch. To gawk. To clap. At the sight of dead Jews.

Mainstream media outlets barely acknowledged the sheer depravity of Thursday morning’s spectacle, offering only the most muted references to the macabre show in Khan Yunis.

Sky News, for instance, summarized the scene with an almost clinical detachment: “Four black coffins were displayed on a stage” before being “put into vehicles and driven away as masked members of Hamas and other factions looked on.” A bizarrely sanitized description for what was, in reality, a horrifying public exhibition of murdered civilians.

CNN at least had the journalistic integrity to acknowledge the “propaganda backdrop with slogans in Arabic, Hebrew, and English”—but conspicuously failed to mention the crude mural of Netanyahu as a blood-sucking vampire looming over the coffins. ABC News cropped its accompanying photo so that only one Hamas terrorist remained in the frame, reducing the entire event to just two paragraphs—one of which described a Red Cross official “signing documents” as part of the so-called handover.

References to the crowd were fleeting. If mentioned at all, it was merely as “crowds gathered,” with no photographs to accompany the words. One of the most honest assessments came from an AFP report, but even then, it was buried in the final paragraph:

“Large speakers blasted chants, as children and youth pressed themselves around a table where fighters displayed a large automatic rifle and its long ammunition belt, as well as anti-tank mines.”

Yet not a single major news outlet thought it relevant to report that Hamas had invited families to watch—and that they eagerly did, gathering with music and celebration. Not a single journalist spoke of the carnivalesque atmosphere. Not a single reporter noted the chilling detail that all four coffins were the same size, as though a child-sized casket would have made the heartbreak too explicit.

Israel has been repeatedly criticized for its supposed lack of a “day-after” plan for Gaza, for failing to put forward a roadmap that would lead to Palestinian statehood.

But Thursday morning’s gruesome display provides the most unflinching answer to that demand:

Israel cannot be expected to solve what is clearly a deep-rooted, generational problem in a society that treats the murder of its civilians as family entertainment.

Related Tags #Israel; #Gaza; #media; #hostagel #Hostage Deal

Hamas baby killers and a broken global moral compass

 Full article at https://www.jns.org/the-hamas-baby-killers-and-a-broken-global-moral-compass/

 As much as anything else, two little red-haired boys and their mother symbolized the barbaric cruelty of the Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The video of a terrified Shiri Bibas, 32, clutching and comforting her two children—Ariel, 4, and Kfir, just 9 months old at the time—as they were being pushed away by Hamas terrorists into captivity in Gaza should haunt the conscience of humanity in much the same way as some of the most iconic images of the Holocaust.

But it did not. Or at least, it didn’t do so sufficiently to prevent a sizable portion of the international community from thinking of their captors as the good guys in the war that the Palestinians started on Oct. 7. Now, 500 days after that infamous and tragic date, as their fate has been revealed, we are also being forced to come to terms with the extent of the moral failure of the world to respond appropriately to this brazen act of genocidal terrorism.

To much of the world, the Bibas children were just Zionist propaganda, not human beings who were brutalized for the crime of being Jewish. Their likenesses were not to be tolerated—let alone viewed with sympathy. Posters of them and others kidnapped by Hamas were put up around the world only to be torn down by brazen antisemites.

Yet now that Hamas has announced that the bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir are to be handed over to Israel this week as part of the first phase of ceasefire/hostage deal that has, at least for the moment, halted the fighting, attitudes toward the fate of the Bibas family has become an unavoidable test of our common humanity.

Vestiges of decency

That is a test that much of the international community is failing miserably. And it’s important for the rest of us, even as we mourn for the Bibas family, to take note of this and ask why it should be so.

It’s not just that Hamas wants to destroy Israel and commit genocide against its population. The terror group that, contrary to the claims of former President Joe Biden, has the backing of most Palestinian Arabs. Its “fighters” and the Palestinian civilians who followed in their wake when Israeli communities were attacked on Oct. 7, engaged in an orgy of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping in a way that made it clear that they had shed any vestige of humanity or decency.

More than that, it boasted proudly of these bestial crimes by posting photos and videos of their actions on social media to make it clear that their attack was a trailer for what they aim to do to the rest of Israel—or at least it did so before their foreign supporters perversely began to deny any of it actually happened.

When stated that way, the atrocities of Oct. 7 are, as awful as they were, still something of an abstraction. But when you look at the images of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir as they cowered in the face of their kidnappers after their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz was attacked, we see it in a different light. They are not just statistics. They are human beings with whom anyone can identify.

That’s why so many decent people came to care so much about them.

We knew that Yarden Bibas—Shiri’s husband and the children’s father—had left their house’s safe room in a futile attempt to save his family, and had also been kidnapped. 

Motivation for antisemitism

Regardless of the details of the crime that we don’t yet know, the unavoidable truth is that a toddler, an infant and their mother were all murdered by their Palestinian captors.

Once we arrive at that sad conclusion, it is incumbent on us to ponder how it is that even after learning about this so many people, including a large number of those who consider themselves progressives, humanitarians and opposed to barbarism, still support Hamas and oppose Israel.

Muslim and Arab sympathy for the Palestinians, coupled with a long tradition of Jew-hatred so prevalent in the Islamic world, is part of the reason. But throughout the West, this development is the result of the spread of toxic leftist ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that pointedly excludes Jews from its alleged crusade for better treatment of minorities.

It is also why so many college and university students, especially those attending elite schools, have come to believe that the Bibas family simply doesn’t fall into the category of people who deserve the empathy of fellow human beings. As was the case for European fascist and Nazi ideologues a century ago, left-wing intellectuals and those who have fallen under their influence believe that Israelis and Jews are undeserving of compassion.

It didn’t matter to them that Gaza wasn’t “occupied” on Oct. 7. The fact that every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement had been withdrawn from the Strip in 2005 and that since 2007, it had been an independent Palestinian state run by Islamist terrorists was irrelevant.

A broken moral compass

For generations, decent people have wondered how it was that the citizens of what was arguably the most civilized and scientifically advanced society in Europe—Germany—behaved as they did during the Holocaust. The answer was that they didn’t believe in the humanity of the Jews. 

But at the heart of the argument are those who take the side of the Hamas baby killers and spread hatred for a moral and democratic Israel, as well as for the Jewish people. Not for the first time in world history, antisemitism has provided a justification for the murderers of Jewish children.

How the Media Dodges Responsibility

 *A donkey was tied to a tree. One night a ghost cut the rope and released the donkey.

*The donkey went and destroyed the crops in an adjacent farmer's land. Infuriated, the farmer's wife shot the donkey and killed it.

*The donkey's owner was devastated at the loss. In reply, he shot dead the farmer's wife.

*Angered by his wife's death, the farmer took a sickle and killed the donkey's owner.

*The wife of the donkey's owner got so angry that she and her sons set the farmer's house on fire.

*The farmer, looking at his house turned into ashes, killed the wife and children of the donkey's owner.

*Finally, when the farmer was full of regret, he asked the ghost as to why did it kill them all?

*The ghost replied, "I killed nobody. I just released a donkey that was tied to a rope. It is all of you who released the devils within you which resulted into everything bad that occurred thereafter."

*Today's media is like that ghost. It keeps releasing donkeys on a daily basis. And people react and argue with each other, hurt each other, without having a second thought.

*In the end, the media dodges all responsibilities. So, it's our responsibility to not react on every donkey released by the media and preserve our relationship with our friends, relatives and community.

PA cancels ‘pay for slay’ - Really?

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The ‘pay-for-slay’ program refers to the PA’s policy of providing financial support to terrorists who carry out attacks against Israelis.

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree on Monday ending the notorious “pay-for-slay” program, which provides stipends to jailed Palestinian terrorists and the families of slain terrorists.

Despite this decision, widely perceived as part of an overture to the Trump administration, a PA spokesman has reported that Ramallah is creating an alternative mechanism for funding jailed terrorists and the families of slain terrorists. (Again trying to deceive the rest of the world?)

Although Abbas indicated Monday he was ending this program, the PA’s WAFA outlet reported that the payments are merely being transferred from the Ministry of Social Development to the National Palestinian Economic Empowerment Institution, an entity under PA control.

Additionally, families of terrorists will remain eligible for financial aid under the same criteria as needy families.

A decision was made to fool Israel into ceasing its policy of deducting tax funds from payments to terrorists and their families. (Who are they kidding?)

Before this decision, there was already a downward trend in the payments terrorist families received for attacks. According to research, the  payments under the “pay-for-slay” program decreased by 30 to 40% in 2024, despite an expected increase.

Col. (res.) Adv. Maurice Hirsch, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, identified several factors contributing to this decline.

a)  bureaucratic difficulties have arisen since Red Cross representatives have been barred from visiting prisons.

b)  Hirsch stated, “The economic pressure on the Palestinian Authority has reached an unprecedented level. According to new data from the Finance Ministry, Israel has deducted approximately NIS 3 billion from PA funds as of November 2024.”

c) the ongoing war in Gaza, which has disrupted the transfer of funds and the documentation required to access them.

Our New Neighbours?

 If these are to be our new neighbours, 

then at least we have a common language!!

Terror Finance at the US State Department and USAID

MEF research finds that the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations involved with designated terrorist organizations.

Executive Summary

• The Middle East Forum’s multi-year study of USAID and State Department spending has uncovered $164 million of approved grants to radical organizations, with at least $122 million going to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters. Billions more of federal monies has been given to leading American aid charities which have consistently failed to vet their terror-tied local partners, and show little interest in improving their practices, to the apparent indifference of the federal government.

• Millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.

• USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be “cleansed” from the “impurity of the Jews,” among dozens of other chilling examples. USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.

• State Department money has been handed to radical domestic groups such as the Tides Foundation, which members of Congress have accused of funding pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish violence in college campuses across America.

• Easily manipulated and complicit fellow travelers, including major aid organizations such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services, as well as advocacy organizations such as InterAction, serve as important vehicles, sometimes knowingly, for terror-tied Islamists, both in the United States and abroad. These charities are dependent on federal funding, receiving billions of taxpayers’ dollars.

• Federal funding subsidizes efforts by domestic Islamists involved with Hamas, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Turkish regime, to abrogate rules and scrutiny in the United States intended to tackle the threat of terror finance.

• Records of federal funding, particularly through USAID, are obfuscated by deficient disclosure practices, deleted data, and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions of dollars given to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorism-stricken areas of the globe.

• Over the past year, USAID’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has served as a lone voice of internal concern over USAID’s funding systems, warning about the failure of current procedures to identify awardees’ links to violent extremism, obfuscation by foreign NGOs and UN agencies, and the clear risk of abuse of the vetting and funding systems by “armed groups.” Should USAID be merged into the State Department, as current reports indicate will happen, it is vital that the observations and analysis of the USAID OIG are not lost.

•