Image 01 Image 03

Gaza Tag

According to recent Israeli security assessments, more than a third (420 out of 1,027) of the terrorists released in a November 2011 swap for captive soldier Gilad Schalit have gone back to planning terror attacks. As noted by senior Israeli security officials, some of these freed murderers have taken up leadership roles in Hamas in Gaza, from where they are “working with Iran to execute terrorists attacks and kidnappings.”

One of our Top Ten "Fun" posts for 2017 concerned Muhammad Hemada Walid al-Quqa, the Hamas explosives chief who accidentally blew himself up. It's what's often called a "work accident." There was just another supposed work accident by another senior Hamas terrorist, who shot himself in the head while inspecting his weapon. Or at least it's being claimed it was an accident.

The Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula has been attacking the Egyptian military and is responsible for massacres of civilians. There has been a symbiotic relationship between ISIS and Hamas, which controls the adjoining Gaza strip. Military supplies from Iran and Hezbollah are smuggled through the Sinai into Gaza for Hamas, and Hamas is accused by the Egyptians of helping ISIS. Many of Hamas' best fighters have defected to ISIS, as The Times of Israel reported in February 2017:

The Israeli army blew up an attack tunnel, "stretching from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said in the deadliest incident in the coastal enclave since the 2014 Gaza war," reported the Times of Israel Monday.

Hamas provoked the 2014 Gaza war through relentless rocket launches at Israel. In retaliating, Israel faced a dilemma -- Hamas used the Gaza civilian population as human shields. Hamas also intimidated journalist into trying to cover up this human shield strategy so that the media focused primarily on the civilians killed or injured when Israel attacked rocket launch sites. And it worked. Civilian casualties (which were exaggerated by Hamas-controlled Gaza health authorities) created a media and international firestorm meant to limit Israel's ability to defend itself.

Public executions by Hamas in Gaza are quite common. But some are more equal than others, and the public execution today has received quite a bit of attention, in fact more than Hamas wanted. The execution was livestreamed -- apparently against Hamas wishes -- by the Gaza Now News Agency from a window in a building overlooking the execution site. The background is that the three men executed were allegedly involved in the killing of a senior Hamas terror planner in March, as we reported at the time, Senior Hamas Terror Planner Mazen Faqha Assassinated in Gaza:

Mazen Faqha was a Hamas official responsible for organizing a 2002 suicide bombing attack in Israel. Found guilty and given a life sentence for the crime that killed nine people and injured scores more, he was among the over 1000 terrorists—many of them also with blood on their hands and serving life sentences—released in 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange to free hostage IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. Faqha was deported to Gaza. From there, according to Israeli officials, he became a “key planner” in setting up Hamas terror cells in the West Bank, directing them as they organized and launched deadly terror attacks against Israelis.

Breaking the Silence (BtS)—Shovrim Shtika in Hebrew—is a group of Israeli veterans who collect and disseminate ‘testimonies’ of alleged breaches of military ethics which they claim were witnessed and perpetrated by soldiers while they were serving in the West Bank and Gaza. BtS activists present themselves as patriotic Zionists who love their country. They also defend their organization as a whistleblower that works to keep the state moral by speaking out against IDF atrocities committed against Palestinians. But the reality is that BtS has long been discredited as a fringe group that acts to “fuel BDS.” The group once garnered a fair share of admirers during its formative years. Today it’s rejected by most of the Israeli mainstream public.

Hamas, the terrorist group dedicated to Israel's destruction, in the Gaza Strip has a new leader, and it shouldn't be surprising that he's a convicted murderer. Convicted of the murder of other Palestinians who had been accused of helping Israel, Yehya Sinwar was imprisoned in 1989 and served 22 years until he was released six years ago as part of the deal to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Sinwar is on the U.S. "Specially Designated [Terrorist] Nationals" List.

We know that media outrage and exaggeration, combined with biased anti-Israel Non-Governmental Organizations and U.N. agencies, form a strategic asset for terrorist groups like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The international reaction to Israeli self-defense measures ignores actual international legal standards, and substitutes completely politicized measures, such as "disproportionality." That term does not mean that one side suffers more than the other in a war; rather it is a case by case measure of whether the threat to innocent civilians in a particular military strike is disproportionate to the military value to be achieved. Israel goes to extraordinary measures to comply with the laws of war, but it doesn't matter to the media and the anti-Israel propaganda machine. Hamas and Hezbollah deliberately store and fire rockets from civilian areas for this very reason. http://youtu.be/A_fP6mlNSK8

Terrorist group Hamas plans to conduct public executions in Gaza in an attempt to bring down crime. Ismail Jaber, the group's attorney general, said he wants them to "take place before a large crowd." Hamas has thirteen men waiting for their execution after the courts convicted them "of murder connected to robberies." Officials can seek the death penalty for "collaborators, murderers and drug traffickers." If Hamas conducts the executions, the numbers could push them past Saudi Arabia. The kingdom houses 31.5 million people and executed 153 in 2015. Hamas will commit more death penalties since they have a population on 1.8 million.

It's beginning to look like it will be another hot summer in Israel. There was a bus explosion near Jerusalem earlier today. At first there was confusion as to whether it was a bomb or some technical failure. Police have just confirmed that it was a small bomb, though it remains unclear as of this writing if it was planted or a suicide bombing. https://twitter.com/MickyRosenfeld/status/722106508297781248 https://twitter.com/MickyRosenfeld/status/722097364958388224

In a post last December we highlighted the history of Israel’s prisoner exchanges with various Palestinian armed factions. As we noted:
For the past three decades, Israel has been forced to exchange scores of incarcerated terrorists for a mere handful of its POWs. In the majority of these lopsided prisoner swaps the Israeli soldiers had already been killed and came home in body bags. And in many cases the freed terrorists have gone on to perpetrate further terror attacks”.
Israeli soldiers, either dead or alive, have proven to be valuable bargaining chips. So basically, as we discussed, Palestinian terror organizations have been running a prisoner-exchange extortion racket. Now it looks like Israel may again be forced to pay a steep price for several of its civilians too. On Friday, Hamas publicly claimed for the first time that it was holding two Israeli men in captivity.

The hypocrisy of this administration with respect to Israel can, at times, be stunning. One of those times was in August of 2014, in the middle of the Israeli military operation known as Operation Protective Edge, which was designed to stop rocket-fire emanating from Gaza. A school run by UNRWA, the UN agency that is supposed to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian Arab refugees and their second, third, and fourth generation descendants, was hit by shelling. It was well-known at that time that Gaza's Hamas rulers were firing on Israel from positions within civilian areas, and that the UNRWA schools were basically doubling as rocket warehouses. Despite this knowledge, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said at the time that the US was "appalled" by the "disgraceful shelling," that Israel "must do more to meet its own standards," and that "the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians."