By MAYA YAUL EGOZI

THE WRITER takes in requests and coordinates the delivery of packages to soldiers and civilians in the South and North of the country.© (photo credit: Amit Egozi)

As I sit at the volunteer center in Petah Tikva, it’s been nine days and counting; and I’ve been coordinating donations and needs. Volunteers are pouring in, bringing an abundance of supplies, equipment, and funds. The willingness of people to help is overwhelming, and it showcases the true beauty of the Israeli spirit.

Read more…

The West Must Stand United Against Both Hamas and Iran

by Con Coughlin, GATESTONE  •  October 17, 2023 at 5:00 am

• The precise details of Iran’s direct role in authorising the attack are gradually coming to light, with officials involved in the investigation insisting that both Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah (a terrorist organization Iran controls) were involved in the planning of the Hamas terrorist operation.
• Read more…

T. Belman.  Biden is visiting Israel today. Israel will not be able to start the ground offensive so long as he is here .

State Department Press Release

President Biden has appointed former Ambassador David Satterfield as the Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues. Special Envoy Satterfield will lead U.S. diplomacy to urgently address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including work to facilitate the provision of life-saving assistance to the most vulnerable people and promote the safety of civilians, in coordination with the United Nations and U.S. partners. He will lead a whole-of-government campaign to mitigate the humanitarian fallout of Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel, supporting critical efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. His role builds on the long-standing U.S. commitment to supporting peace and stability in the region.

Read more…

T. Belman. The world does not want to solve the humanitarian crises by removing the Palestinians from Gaza because that would mean that Israel would reclaim sovereignty there and it would mean the end of the TSS.  Thus the world is working to protect the Palestinian cause and is using a future humanitarian crises to achieve its end.

At a minimum Israel should push the Paelstinians to the bottom 10% of Gaza and reclaim sovereignty over the rest and absolutely refuse to allow the Palestinians to return. The water israel has agreed to be allowed in should be limited to the bottom 10%. It will encourage people to go there.

PM’s inner circle has indicated that it hasn’t thought that far ahead, leading US officials to warn that failing to do so could result in IDF being bogged down in Gaza indefinitely

By JACOB MAGID Today, 2:26 am

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center left) and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv after talks on October 16, 2023 ((Haim Zach / GPO)

US President Joe Biden’s administration has privately been pressing Israel in recent days to flesh out its strategy for the day after it completes its stated war goal of toppling Hamas, a US official and an Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Monday.

Read more…

T. Belman.  The bad news is that a resolution for a ceasefire will pass tomight. Remember the UNSC has not called for a ceasefire in Ukraine since the war began. Luckily its not a Chapter VII resolution which is binding. But it will add to the propaganda war being waged against Israel.

4 countries vote with Moscow; four — including the US — vote against and six abstain; members will vote on second resolution proposed by Brazil, which does pan Hamas, on Tuesday

By AFP and JACOB MAGID    Today, 6:15 am

<
Illustrative: A meeting of the United Nations Security Council on New York City on September 21, 2023. (Bryan R. Smith/AFP)<

The UN Security Council on Monday rejected a Russian resolution calling for a ceasefire to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza with delegates refusing to back a motion that did not single out Hamas for its surprise onslaught in Israel that left at least 1,400 people dead.

The council huddled as Israel readied for an expected ground assault on the Gaza Strip, after air and artillery strikes that officials say have killed at least 2,750 people.

Read more…

By Marisa Herman, NEWSMAX    |   Monday, 16 October 2023 05:32 PM EDT

President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are working overtime to force Israel to open water, electricity and food for Gaza – a move that puts at risk the 199 hostages being held there under dire circumstances.

Israel has placed a siege on Gaza following a brutal Hamas’ terror attack that killed over 1,300 Israelis.

“We have a long history of dealing this and sieges work,” an Israeli security source told Newsmax.

Read more…

By Dick Morris on October 16, 2023

U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken are about to cave to Hamas. They now say that the U.S. expects Israel to allow “humanitarian” aid to cross into Gaza. To facilitate the aid, hundreds of trucks are lined up on the Gaza border with Egypt waiting to cross.

Deborah Glick, columnist for the Jerusalem Post and a leading expert on the region, said that “These trucks, if permitted to enter, will not be inspected in any significant way.

Read more…

By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS

As Hamas goes, so with it go many of the following related Western pretensions.

The Passions of 9/11, Redux

It has been 22 years since we saw crowds throughout the Middle East celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians—and since newspapers had daily “idiot watch” notices of American intellectuals defending radical Islamist mass murderers. And now the madness is back again, and we are witnessing the recrudescence of normalizing radical Islamic terrorists abroad.
Read more…

“Former PLO leader Yasser Arafat was a close confidant of Simon Malley [Malley’s father] and said to be an unofficial “godfather” to Robert Malley….“There’s so much misinformation about them,” Malley said about the Hamas leaders with whom he was in regular contact. “I speak to them, my colleagues speak to them, None of them are crazy, they have their own rationality. Within their own system … they’re very logical.” “

By  Isabel Vincent, NY POST Oct. 14, 2023,

Robert Malley — the State Department bureaucrat and former Iran special envoy who is mysteriously on leave for allegedly mishandling classified information — grew up with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as his unofficial “godfather” and once wrote that the Israeli treatment of Arabs was “shameful.”

Malley is under probe, along with members of his Iran negotiating team, by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for allegedly “compromising ties to the Iranian regime.”

Read more…

If Netanyahu fails to stand up to the United States, if he buckles, the pressure from Washington won’t stop.

By Caroline Glick Oct 16/23

(JNS) On Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan all announced that the United States expects Israel to permit “humanitarian aid” into Gaza.

The implications of this position are devastating for Israel. According to reports, there are “hundreds of trucks” lined up on the border in Egypt to enter the Gaza Strip carrying so-called “humanitarian aid.” These trucks, if permitted to enter, will not be inspected in any significant way. There is no reason to believe they are carrying baby formula and foodstuffs that will be delivered to the needy. There is every reason to believe they are carrying war materiel and jihadist fighters who have arrived to augment Hamas.

Read more…

By Victor Rosenthal     October 16, 2023

Volumes could, and will be, written about how Israel allowed herself to be raped by Hamas on 7 October 2023. But to focus on the forest rather than the trees, I see two major failures:

The first was the reliance on interconnected automated systems to secure the border, replacing traditional human observers and patrols. In exceptional situations, humans can take initiative and act outside of the system. They can act alone when communication is cut off, and they can recalibrate themselves to entirely new operational environments that were previously unexpected. A military unit can be designed to operate together under centralized control, but individual soldiers can also fight independently if they must.
Read more…

Daniel Greenfield, 16 Oct 12:25 AM

Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the Hamas rape of girls, murder of babies and kidnapping of children as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance”.

The national organization which has 200 chapters on campuses across North America put out a ‘toolkit’ which explained that the Jewish victims were “not civilians” and could be freely targeted.

Its poster for a ‘Day of Resistance’ featured an image of the paraglider that Hamas terrorists had used to massacre and rape young Israelis at a music festival.
Read more…

By Naomi Kahn, REGAVM– October 15, 2023

In an interview with Mark Austin of Sky News, Dr. Bassem Naim, Director of Political and International Relations for Hamas, insisted today (Wednesday) that no Israeli civilians have been killed in this week’s attack on southern Israel, and claimed that world media had fallen prey to Israeli propaganda. When challenged by Austin, Naim clarified: “We have to redefine what ‘civilian’ means.” Every Jewish Israeli – even the infants that were butchered in their beds – is a combatant, a soldier, and a legitimate target. Every means of eliminating Jewish Israelis is legitimate (including beheading, burning, raping, mutilating) – because every man, woman and child among them is a “settler” (no matter where they live) who “set fire to the Arab village of Huwara,” “a cyber-spy, a soldier not wearing a uniform.”

Read more…

The denial of Israel’s right of self-defense needs to stop now<

By Anne Bayefsky, TOI            Oct 15 2023

The butchery of 1,300 Israelis in a single day and the UN response to the atrocity have made one fact crystal clear. The United Nations has Jewish blood on its hands. Its role as an enabler of Palestinian terrorism must be front and center in the days ahead as its agents seek to deny the Jewish state the existential right of self-defense and fuel a global antisemitic pogrom.

Read more…

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, meets with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi at Al-Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo, Sunday Oct. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)<

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi uses his meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to falsely claim that Egypt never persecuted its now no longer existent Jewish minority.

“You said that you are a Jewish person,” Sissi says to Blinken in remarks in front of reporters. “I am an Egyptian person who grew up next to Jews in Egypt. They have never been subjected to any form of oppression or targeting and it has never happened in our region that Jews were targeted.”

Read more…

The political rationale of the Gaza conflict can be expressed in the inexorable logic of an almost mathematical algorithm—studiously ignored by Israel’s policy-making echelons

by Martin Sherman, IDSF October 15, 2023

“The enemy of …conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events”—John Kenneth Galbraith

Saturday 7^th of October marked the demise of conventional wisdom and of “respectable” Establishment perceptions regarding the conflict over the Gaza Strip. Decades-old precepts were washed away in a deluge of blood. The idea of Palestinian self-rule (the two-state solution), along with the notion of “managing the conflict” (a.k.a. “mowing the lawn”, or “kicking the can down the road”) were swept away by the gory events of this week.

Read more…

by Eran Lahav, IDSF OCT 15/23

Israel is at war. This is not a slogan, this is the reality. This is a war on our home.

Unfortunately, Israel is accustomed to battles, wars and military operations – but what we saw this Saturday, October 7, 2023 – is completely different from what we have known until today.Israeli citizens were kidnapped, handcuffed as Kalashnikov canes were attached to their heads, to their bodies – elderly, children, women, entire families, soldiers, young people, party goers – who went like cattle to the slaughter and were kidnapped by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations.The murderous Hamas and Jihad terrorists, entered the kibbutzim and towns, occupied them without warning, murdered people in their homes, shot at people in the middle of a party, burned houses, looted property, separated children from their parents – a terrible massacre that reminded of dark days from immemorial times
Read more…

Is Israel really violating international law in the war against Hamas? The Biden administration, the EU, the UN, Arab nations and others have begun to wage a campaign to restrain Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas in Gaza. The campaign is based on allegations that there is a contradiction between Israel’s military operations and the laws of war. To understand the nature of these claims, and what the laws of war require from Israel, as well as from the nations waging this campaign against Israel, Caroline spoke with Prof Avi Bell. Bell is a world expert on the laws of war and international humanitarian law.

Also See:  Blinken has ‘very productive meeting’ with Saudi crown price amid Gaza war crisis regional tour

and Saudi officials meet Abbas in Ramallah

Biden Losing the Balance of Power as Key Middle Eastern Ally Shifts Toward Iran: Report

By C. Douglas Golden, JNS  October 15, 2023 at 6:59am 

It wasn’t too long ago that, after the success of former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, we were talking about the previously unheard-of thought of normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations — something which would be a coup for both American and, quite frankly, Joe Biden.Leave it to weakness in the Middle East — particularly in regards to Hamas in the wake of last Saturday’s attack and the ongoing war between the terror group and the Jewish state — to put an end to that.
Read more…