By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM, Dec 14 (Reuters) – Israel’s offensive on Gaza has deterred Hamas from new hostilities despite its claims of victory and the front is now at its quietest in 20 years, a senior Israeli military officer said.

Vastly lopsided shelling exchanges over eight days killed 170 Palestinians and 6 Israelis before the Nov. 21 truce brokered by Egypt.

The Islamist militant group Hamas, which for the first time managed to fire rockets towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the conflict, says it won in the absence of an Israeli ground invasion that might have toppled its Gaza administration.

The officer said Hamas should be allowed to save face after failing to inflict more pain on the Jewish state.
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You never let a serious crisis go to waste…. What I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. – Rahm Emanuel

The Palestinian leadership, abetted by many Western governments, has now torn up every agreement made with Israel… By essentially unilaterally declaring the existence of an Arab Palestine, the world has abrogated that [Oslo] agreement. – Prof. Barry Rubin

The Palestinian Authority is a fictional entity. It continues to exist only because of the IDF…. We should let it fall apart…. – Prof. Efraim Inbar

The recent decision to announce approval for construction of thousands of housing units in the E1 area east of Jerusalem in response to the Palestinian unilateral bid for statehood at the UN reflected yet another grave error of judgment by the Israeli authorities.
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Im Tirzu

NIF-funded organizations are at it again. B’tselem, Adalah, Gisha, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel are claiming that IDF soldiers defending Israel against endless terrorist rocket attacks are war criminals.

by Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen, PJ Media

The Obama administration is sending mixed signals again: their words point one way; their actions, another.

The White House stated its opposition to the Palestinian Authority (PA) bid for non-member state status in the UN, but declined to mobilize its and Israel’s traditional allies. It also appears the administration pressured senators to reject three amendments to the Defense Authorization bill that would have penalized the PLO, the UN, and countries receiving U.S. foreign assistance that voted against the U.S. position. One rejected amendment would have shut off all PA funding if the Palestinians seek to take Israel to the International Criminal Court.

Thus while voicing support for Israel, the administration actually gave its backing to Mahmoud Abbas in his successful UN bid to change Palestine’s status.
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A word to rioting Muslims

By MARK LANDLER, MICHAEL R. GORDON and ANNE BARNARD, NYT

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Tuesday that the United States would formally recognize a coalition of Syrian opposition groups as that country’s legitimate representative, in an attempt to intensify the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to give up his nearly two-year bloody struggle to stay in power.

Mr. Obama’s announcement, in an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News on the eve of a meeting in Morocco of the Syrian opposition leaders and their supporters, was widely expected.

But it marks a new phase of American engagement in a bitter conflict that has claimed at least 40,000 lives, threatened to destabilize the broader Middle East and defied all outside attempts to end it. The United States had for much of the civil war largely sat on the sidelines, only recently moving more energetically as it appeared the opposition fighters were beginning to gain momentum — and radical Islamists were playing a growing role.
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