Hamas’s military wing, al-Qassam Brigades, has claimed that seven of the hostages it is holding were killed when Israel bombed Gaza’s largest refugee camp on Tuesday.
At least 50 people were killed and more than 150 injured in the Israeli airstrikes on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, according to hospital figures and the local health ministry, which is run by Hamas.
“As Gaza turns red, so could crucial battleground states”
There’s been quite the pressure campaign until now from Islamic organizations on the Biden administration.
But this time it comes from a Muslim Dem group issuing an official “ultimatum” threatening a Republican victory. And I do mean “ultimatum.” This is the title: “2023 Ceasefire Ultimatum”.
This has all the symptoms of a devastating global conflict
As Israel continues to mourn and Gaza continues to be turned into rubble, many in the Middle East are coming to a grim realisation: that things could soon become much, much worse. Huge tectonic shifts now threaten to rupture the status quo — and even spark a global war.
U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel
TWO MONTHS BEFORE Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.
After her release from two weeks of Hamas captivity, 85-year-old Yochaved Lifshitz described being marched for several kilometers underground by her captors through “a giant system of tunnels, like spiderwebs.” Few other Israelis had seen the Gaza Strip’s storied tunnel complex, but many are now going to get the chance.
Israeli Defense Forces that pressed several miles into Gaza beginning last Friday are forced to contend with a sophisticated labyrinth of underground tunnels and bunkers constructed over several decades by Hamas, hiding fighters, weapons, and more than 200 Israeli hostages. The elaborate system is believed to extend for hundreds of miles and, in some locations, lies several hundred feet below ground. Military experts who have studied Hamas call the tunnels a formidable defensive system that would be incredibly costly for Israeli troops to neutralize, even after several weeks of heavy bombardment targeting the network.
The IDF on Wednesday night released a recording of a conversation between a Hamas commander and a Gazan citizen revealing how Hamas takes fuel from hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
🔴IDF exposes a conversation between a commander of Hamas’s Western Jabaliya Battalion and a Gazan resident, with the participation of the director of the Indonesian Hospital about how Hamas steals fuel from hospitals at the expense of Gazan civilians pic.twitter.com/nZZ8Det6DH
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) November 1, 2023
On his recent visit to Israel, President Joe Biden insisted that most Palestinians oppose Hamas’s barbaric efforts against the Jewish state. At the same time, back in Washington, D.C., a mob of 300 broke into the Capitol. While the intruders resembled people you might see frequenting your local organic food co-op, they grabbed headlines because they described themselves as Jews protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, wearing shirts proclaiming, “Not In Our Name.”
In the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel, fliers depicting the hostages have become ubiquitous. But in cities and on college campuses across the globe, anti-Israel protesters have removed them.
“KIDNAPPED,” the posters say, in big block letters above pictures of people taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, urgent reminders of the men, women and children still being held hostage in Gaza.
But on college campuses and in cities around the world in recent weeks, people have been caught tearing them down.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” a man says in a video posted on social media as he watches two young people at the University of Southern California shove wadded-up posters into the trash.
FOR the first time in my adult life I am ashamed of my country.
This past weekend I was inundated with messages from friends abroad asking if it was any longer safe to come to London.
Last week, with 120 votes in favor, 15 against and 45 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly passed a shameful resolution calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian corridors in Gaza — without condemning the crimes of Hamas. While four European countries voted against and fifteen abstained (including Germany), France approved a UN General Assembly resolution that makes not even mention of Hamas’s crimes. At the recent European Summit in Brussels, the heads of state and government did not make the call for “humanitarian pauses” conditional on the release of the Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.
Wolf Blitzer tried to shame Israel on Tuesday’s CNN News Central for a strike that took out a top Hamas commander because he was hiding at a refugee camp. Thankfully, retired Major General Dana Pittard would eventually remind him that any civilian casualties that resulted from the strike would be Hamas’s fault.
“Israel is a country that has no place in our land,” Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told the Middle East’s LBC International news network on Tuesday. “We must remove that country.”
“It constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation and must be finished.” Hamad added, completely unnecessarily after the attacks on Israeli civilians we all witnessed on the weekend of October 7, “We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”
Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on Oct 7 has understandably been described as Israel’s ‘9/11’ moment.
Leaving more than 1,400 people dead, it was in fact many times worse than al-Qaeda’s terror attacks in the United States two decades ago. In the wake of those attacks in 2001, fuelled by a desire to destroy terrorist threats and assert strength on the international stage, the US invaded Afghanistan and later Iraq.
While those wars raged, eventually leaving at least 400,000 dead, the terrorism threat metastasised, growing in scale, scope and sophistication across the globe.
Police in New York have arrested a Cornell University student who is accused of posting violent threats to Jewish classmates over the weekend.
In a series of posts to a website called Greekrank, a user with the name “hamas” threatened to shoot Jewish students at the prestigious university.
Patrick Dai, 21, is in his third year at the university.
Police say he made threats to bring a gun to campus and rape Jewish women and “behead any Jewish babies”.
You might have a difficult time convincing Olga Goldberg there is no anti-Semitism in 2023 Toronto.
One bruise is on her face where she was punched. Another, figuratively, at least, is in her heart because she never thought her beloved hometown would become unsafe simply because she’s Jewish.
But that’s what has happened in Toronto. It’s a dangerous place for Jews now.
Every target in Gaza struck by Israeli jets has been assessed in advance to minimise civilian deaths, the chief of staff of the air force has said in its highest-level defence of the scale of Palestinian casualties.
Brigadier General Eyal Greenbaum said every strike went through 11 or 12 stages of approval before it was authorised. He insisted that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were closely following rules of war that demand the rate of civilian deaths be proportional to the importance of the military target being struck.
