Hamas Isn't Desperate for a Truce - Avi Issacharoff
Hamas has become the darling of the Arab media, a popular hero that has rained rockets on Tel Aviv and Haifa. While it may be frustrated by its inability to inflict Israeli casualties, Hamas is basking in its newfound popularity.
Hamas doesn't seem to be in a panic or on the verge of collapse. Most people who come into contact with Hamas these days are under the impression that it doesn't want to stop the fighting without a significant achievement.
(Times of Israel)
Living under Fire: Israelis Stand Tall - Michael Widlanski
We're concerned but not frozen by fear. We're vigilant. We live our lives as best we can, knowing that thriving is the best revenge against those who hate us.
Iron Dome is now scoring over a 90% interception rate, but no defense is perfect. When enemies keep shooting at you, you eventually have to disarm them.
(New York Post)
Hamas Rejects Cease-Fire - Ian Lee and Jethro Mullen
Israel has accepted an Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire with Hamas, but the militant group rejected it. Hamas' Qassam Brigades dismissed any talk of a cease-fire, saying its battle with "the enemy" will "increase in ferocity and intensity." Rocket fire has continued from Gaza into Israel.
(CNN)
Iron Dome Changes Calculus - Griff Witte and Ruth Eglash
Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system has proved remarkably successful at intercepting the incoming fire. The system is widely credited here with allowing Israel to endure more than 1,000 rocket attacks in the past week without a single fatality as of Monday night.
To Israeli security officials, the success of Iron Dome is akin to that of the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank, which they say helped bring an end to an onslaught of suicide bombings in the early 2000s.
(Washington Post)
Boy Saves Great-Grandmother - Tovah Lazaroff
David Khashdi, age 7, likely saved his great-grandmother's life when he helped her into the protected room in her Ashdod home, seconds before a rocket hit outside, shattering all the windows and blasting a hole in the living room wall.
(Jerusalem Post)
Israeli 5-Year-Olds Know the Siren Drill - Alona Ferber
After one week of rocket sirens, Eva Ira's five-year-old daughter knows the drill. She knows that when the siren blares, she has to go somewhere safe, whether the shelter in her kindergarten, or her bedroom. "It's like a game for her," she says. At night, however, her daughter is frightened. "One of us sleeps in the room with her every night."
(Ha'aretz)
Reflections on Gaza from an Israeli Mother - Avital Leibovich
Midnight, and the sirens are blaring. The kids are long asleep. I have one minute to wake them up and get them to our shelter. Whom do I carry there first?
It is precisely as a mother that my heart goes out to the innocent Palestinians in Gaza. A cruel and inhumane Hamas regime endangers their lives in the name of radical jihad.
(Wall Street Journal)
Iran: The Power behind Hamas - Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall
Iran is an arsonist, inflaming the conflicts in the Middle East. Since the "Pillar of Defense Operation" in 2012, Iran has been investing heavily in improving the quantity and quality of the rockets in the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad arsenals. Its endgame is to preserve its influence via its proxies and to use the Palestinian organizations as Iran's first defense line.
The Iranian rockets include Grad, Fajr-3 and the longer-ranged Fajr-5, M-75, and M302 rockets which have reached the Haifa region. Iran also provided Hamas with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and drone technology. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force coordinates the smuggling, shipping and delivery of the weapons to Gaza, the training in Iran and in Lebanon, and the transfer of funds.
The longstanding disregard of Iran's export of revolution and terror has fostered a situation where Iran holds a threatening posture toward vital U.S. and Western interests.
The writer is a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Center.
(Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)
The Palestinian Blessing - Bret Stephens
As of Monday, Hamas had fired more than 1,000 missiles at Israel, aimed more or less indiscriminately, without inflicting a single Israeli fatality. It isn't every enemy whose ideological fanaticism is exceeded by its military and technological incompetence.
Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank is supposed to be a bystander in this conflict. But he made his sympathies known when, within a day or two, he accused Israel of "genocide" and "war against the Palestinian people as a whole."
Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against the Palestinian refugee town of Yarmouk a year ago and then starved out the remaining residents. More than a quarter-million Palestinians living in Syria for decades have also been made refugees. Yet last month Abbas congratulated Assad on his re-election.
(Wall Street Journal)
Netanyahu: No Gaza in the West Bank - David Horovitz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set out his worldview at a press conference in Hebrew on Friday. He indicated that he sees Israel standing almost alone on the frontlines against vicious Islamic radicalism, while the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism.
Given the march of Islamic extremism across the Middle East, he said, Israel simply cannot afford to give up control over the territory immediately to its east, including the border between Israel and Jordan, and the West Bank and Jordan.
Netanyahu answered those who argue that holding onto territory for security purposes is less critical in the modern technological era, and argued by contrast that the closer your enemies are, physically, to your borders, the more they'll try to tunnel under those borders and fire rockets over them.
"If we were to pull out of Judea and Samaria, like they tell us to, there'd be a possibility of thousands of tunnels" being dug by terrorists to attack Israel, he said. The West Bank is 20 times the size of Gaza. Israel, he said, was not prepared "to create another 20 Gazas" in the West Bank.
(Times of Israel)
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