Hamas Version of Ceasefire: Kidnapping

IDF soldier show terror tunnel to journalists

IDF tank brigade prepares to enter Gaza

Girlfriend of slain IDF hero cries as his casket is carried

Soldier salutes as IDF tank moves toward Gaza

IFD infantry walk toward Gaza

Israeli Soldier Kidnapped in Gaza, IDF Says - Yaakov Lappin    

A Hamas attack on IDF soldiers in southern Gaza, which occurred after the start of a humanitarian truce, ended with the kidnapping of a soldier, the IDF said.
Terrorists emerged from a tunnel and a suicide bomber detonated himself near soldiers. Heavy exchanges of fire ensued before one of the soldiers was kidnapped, a senior army source said.
(Jerusalem Post)


Clueless in Gaza -Charles Krauthammer, MD

The American interest is to endorse and solidify this emerging axis of moderate pro-American partners (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, and the Palestinian Authority) intent on seeing Islamist radicalism blunted and ultimately defanged.

Yet America's secretary of state doesn't see it.

Remember the complaints that the heartless Israelis were not allowing enough imports of concrete for schools and hospitals? Well, now we know where the concrete went — into an astonishingly vast array of tunnels for infiltrating neighboring Israeli villages and killing civilians. (More than half a million tons, estimates the Israeli military.)
 Lifting the blockade would mean a flood of arms, rockets, missile parts and other implements of terror for Hamas. What is an American secretary of state doing asserting that Hamas cannot cease fire unless it gets that?  Whatever his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas's war criminality. Which makes his advocacy of Hamas's terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a wall-to-wall Arab front wants to see it gone — but a moral disgrace.
[Jewish World Review]


The Images Missing from the Gaza War - Uriel Heilman
    
We've seen rubble, dead Palestinian children, Israelis cowering during rocket attacks, and Israeli military maneuvers. What we haven't seen are practically any images of Hamas fighters inside Gaza.
     
We know they're there: Someone's got to be launching those 2,800 rockets into Israel. If we're able to see images from both sides of practically every other war, why is Gaza an exception?
    
For many viewers, the narrative of this war must appear quite straightforward: Powerful Israel is bombarding defenseless Palestinians. That's understandable when there are hardly any photographs of Palestinian aggressors.
     
If media outlets are suppressing images of Hamas fighters using civilians as shields, and using schools and hospitals as bases of operation, then people watching around the world are only getting half the story. And where I come from, a half-truth is considered a lie.
(JTA)

Gaza's Tunnel Wars - Avi Issacharoff
    
Soldiers speak of an extensive network of tunnels, bunkers and caches, which allow Hamas to fight with minimal exposure themselves. The Hamas operatives move from one tunnel to another, emerging each time from a different hole, fire, then disappear again.
    
One officer told me about a network of defensive tunnels the IDF faced in Hiz'aa, in southern Gaza. Hamas dug three tunnels along three streets, with numerous entrances and exits. "Every time they fired at us from a different place. Small squads of two or three people. We decided to put smoke into one of the shafts, and suddenly saw smoke rising from dozens of places along these three streets."
    
One can assume that, in the eight years since the Second Lebanon War, Hizbullah has accelerated its digging project on defensive tunnels within Lebanon and attack tunnels into Israel. Eight years of work can mean that, in the next war, we will find Hizbullah fighters emerging from tunnels deep inside Israel.
(Times of Israel)


Questions for the International Media in Gaza - David Bernstein
    
How do you feel about the Spanish journalist who said Hamas would kill any journalist if they filmed rocket fire?
     
Were you aware that Hamas chose to execute dozens of anti-war protesters in Gaza?
The writer is a professor at the George Mason University School of Law.
(Washington Post)


The Quest for the Demilitarization of Gaza - Jodi Rudoren
 
After years in which Israel's prevailing approach to Gaza was a simple "quiet for quiet" demand, there is growing momentum around a new formula, "reconstruction for demilitarization."

Said one senior Israeli official, "If you can, through this operation, significantly weaken them militarily, if you can reinforce with them the thinking that it's not in their interest to shoot rockets into Israel, and if you can have the international community on board to prevent Hamas from rearming, these are elements of an endgame."
    
Dore Gold, a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, said demilitarization had worked elsewhere in the Middle East, pointing to UN Security Council Resolution 687, which required Saddam Hussein to give up weapons of mass destruction after the First Gulf War in 1991, and President Bashar al-Assad's agreement in Syria to turn in chemical weapons last summer. Gold said that in demilitarization, Netanyahu now had "a very clear strategic goal." 
(New York Times)


Israel Is Standing Against the Onslaught of International Jihad
- Deborah Danan interviews Col. Richard Kemp
     
Hamas' use of human shields is possibly the key element of their strategy. So you see images of dead babies, women screaming about their children, and no reality can overcome those images. It is heart-wrenching. The problem is that there's no reference, no open-mindedness to the fact that the only reason that these children have been killed is because of Hamas' aggression towards Israel.
Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp is the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
(Algemeiner)


Israel Is Fighting on Behalf of the Free World - Bob Fredericks
 
"Israel in the Middle East is fighting on behalf of the free world," declared Mosab Hassan Yousef, the outspoken son of Hamas leader Hassan Yousef. "Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians, or the lives of Israelis, or Americans; they don't care about their own lives," Yousef told CNN. "They consider dying for their ideology a way of worship."
    
"Their goal is to conquer the globe and build an Islamic state on every inch of the globe....[Hamas] is willing to sacrifice as many Palestinian lives as it takes."
    
"Hamas is not seeking co-existence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and taking over. And by the way, the destruction of the State of Israel is not Hamas' final destination. Hamas's final destination is building the Islamic caliphate, which means an Islamic state over the rubble of every other civilization."  
(New York Post)
*