“Oct 7 2023”

I visited Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, one desolate rainy morning during the first Intifada. I was a writer for Time, and on that day, Jamil Hamad, Time’s Palestinian stringer, drove me down to Gaza from my hotel in East Jerusalem.

On the Nablus Road, we passed the shell of a burnt-out Israeli school bus. Jamil’s car had blue Palestinian license plates and a big sign in the windshield that said PRESS. He spread a checkered black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh on the dashboard, just to make sure, but the shebab (young Palestinians) threw stones at us anyway. They did it satirically—their rough little joke. We ducked and flinched and laughed at them and waved. The boys had good arms. I told Jamil the Yankees could recruit pitchers here.

In a number of statements since Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel, US President Joe Biden stated that Hamas does not represent all the Palestinian people. “I think Israel understands that a significant portion of Palestinian people do not share the views of Hamas and Hezbollah,” Biden said in an interview with CBS.

Biden’s claim was repeated by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told Jordan’s King Abdullah and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. In a phone call with Abbas, Blinken “expressed continuing US support for the Palestinian people, stressing that Hamas terrorists do not represent Palestinians or their legitimate aspirations for self-determination and equal measures of dignity, freedom, security, and justice,” according to a State Department readout.

Hamas released two Israeli women held hostage in Gaza on Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed.

The release of the two hostages, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper, was confirmed by the ICRC after Hamas released a statement earlier about the release.

Having exposed the rise in antisemitism since 2009 and the haters who perpetuate it, I knew the Jew hatred would escalate once Hamas left a trail of 1,400 murdered Israeli babies, moms and dads, seniors and children following its barbaric acts of two weeks ago.

The Israeli government on Monday screened for 200 members of the foreign press some 43 minutes of harrowing scenes of murder, torture and decapitation from Hamas’s October 7 onslaught on southern Israel, in which over 1,400 people were killed, including raw videos from the terrorists’ bodycams.

The IDF just screened 43 minutes of horrors from the Hamas massacre on October 7 for foreign journalists. I was not there, my colleague @cjkeller8 was.

Here is the one minute of footage approved for mass publication at this point, barring most of it out of respect for the dead. pic.twitter.com/UDmQSrkYBL

— Amy Spiro (@AmySpiro) October 23, 2023

Sir Mark Rowley has called for changes in the law around policing extremism as he said officers cannot be expected to “enforce taste and decency”.

In the Metropolitan Police commissioner’s first comments following criticism of officers’ failure to intervene when pro-Palestine protesters chanted “jihad”, Sir Mark warned there were gaps in the law that meant extremist groups were able to steer around laws and propagate “some pretty toxic messages”.

The TPS will cave if TO’s Islamists decide to loot & riot.

Editors’ Note: Gaza Hospital Coverage

On Oct. 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.

Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.

The shofar is sounded at Yonge and Bloor, where a coalition of Jewish groups have blocked the intersection in protest against Israel.

One interpretation is that the shofar stirs conscience and summons feelings of humility. #cdnpoli #Toronto #Palestine #Gaza pic.twitter.com/Dx0v2UAUWo

— Caryma Sa'd – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) October 23, 2023

Do you think the crocodile will eat you last? Because that’s how you’ll find out if the crocodile will eat you last.

In an interview today, Sunday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog revealed materials found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists, including training materials for the use of chemical warfare agents, intended to be used by the terrorist organization in its murderous rampage against innocent civilians.

A USB key found on the body of a Hamas terrorist who infiltrated Israeli territory was found to contain detailed instructions on creating chemical weapons and implementing their use among the civilian population. The source of the document is a manual from the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization dated 2003, and its discovery indicates both the connection between the organizations and the intention of the Hamas terrorist organization to use chemical weapons to cause mass casualties – as ISIS had planned in the past.

Al-Qaida and Islamic State (IS) have called on their followers to strike Israeli, US and Jewish targets, raising the prospect of new terrorist violence in the Middle East or the west.

In a series of statements over the past two weeks, affiliates of al-Qaida congratulated Hamas on its “invasion of Israel”, a reference to the terrorist attacks that killed 1,400 people, mainly civilians, on 7 October.

The Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has caused a humanitarian crisis and so far killed more than 4,500 people, according to medical authorities in the Hamas-controlled territory, has provoked outrage across the Islamic world.

President Joe Biden’s approach to the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine is fueling mounting tensions at the U.S. government agency most involved in foreign policy: the State Department.

Officials told HuffPost that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his most senior advisers are overlooking widespread internal frustration. Some department staff said they feel as if Blinken and his team are uninterested in their own experts’ advice as they focus on supporting Israel’s expanding operation in Gaza, where the Palestinian militant group Hamas is based.

Joe ain’t running anything.

h/t Mauser