Day: December 14, 2023

The National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and co-authoring agencies warn that Russian Foreign Intelligence …

Three Options for Israel to End the War in Gaza  Newsweek

Top Biden administration officials labored Wednesday to try to reach a last-minute deal for wartime aid for Ukraine by agreeing to Senate Republican demands to bolster U.S.-Mexico border policies, with urgency setting in as Congress prepared to depart Washington with the impasse unresolved.

The commander of Russia’s airborne troops is facing calls for his firing amid evidence that a newly formed division in his command suffered “exceptionally heavy losses” and failed to achieve its objective during its combat debut in Ukraine, according to a Western intelligence assessment.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A senior Hamas official told Al-Monitor Monday that the terrorist organization could recognize Israel as a way to end the ongoing war between the two, set off after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7 and massacred 1,200 people, including the elderly and infants.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, the deputy leader of the Hamas political bureau, spoke solely within the context of rejoining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which turned into the Palestinian Authority (PA) after the 1995 Oslo Accords.

He told the Washington, D.C.-based Arabic news site, “We seek to be part of the PLO and respect its commitments…. You must follow the official position. The official position is that the Palestine Liberation Organization has recognized the State of Israel.”

Hamas and the PA have held reconciliation talks on and off for years, mostly under Egyptian aegis, but even after agreements were made they never came to fruition.

The extremist Islamic Iranian proxy had rejected the PLO’s supposed recognition in 1993 of Israel’s right to exist, which paved the way for the PA’s establishment.

The PA’s legislature never ratified the recognition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said several times since the current war began that the only difference between Hamas and the PA is that while Hamas only talks of the military option to destroy Israel, the PA is trying to do so using the “salami approach,” taking first what “slices” Israel voluntarily gives up.

Abu Marzouk spoke from Doha, Qatar, as he is part of the Hamas leadership that lives abroad, removed from hardships of the Palestinians in a Gaza under siege as the IDF seeks to destroy the terrorist group so it can never threaten Israel again.

It is unclear if Hamas heads in Gaza, including their chief, Yahya Sinwar, had prior knowledge of Abu Marzouk’s weakening of the rejectionists line, let alone agreed with it.

Two days after the interview, Hamas political head Ismail Haniyeh, who also lives in Doha, announced that the group was “open” to discussing any initiatives that lead to stopping the war, without “excluding the Palestinian resistance from any future arrangements.”

Abu Marzouk is the official who told the BBC in an interview last month that Hamas did not kill civilians, children or the elderly in Israel on the day its men invaded over 20 Gaza envelope communities and a dance rave. This, despite the massive amount of evidence to the contrary that Israel had already gathered of hundreds such deaths, including footage from GoPro cameras worn by the terrorists themselves as they attacked, and clips that they uploaded to the internet immediately afterward.

The post Senior Hamas official hints at recognition of Israel to end the war appeared first on The Jewish Voice.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Government spokesman Eylon Levy, who has been interviewed countless times by hostile media around the world since the war with Hamas began October 7, said that even talking “nonstop” of the atrocities Hamas committed did not prepare him for the sights he finally saw for himself at Kfar Aza on Wednesday.

Interviewed this time by Israel National News, Eylon said, “I’ve been talking non-stop on tv and radio about the atrocities of 10/7, but nothing really prepares you to visit the scene of the massacre itself.”

“Nothing can really prepare you for going up to a house and seeing that they’ve written on the door: ‘human remains on the sofa. Not ‘bodies on the sofa’ – ‘human remains on the sofa.’ And you can only imagine what happened to the poor couple inside the house that that was all that was found of them,” he said.

Seeing all the burned houses and rubble around, he noted, “There are a few pennies that drop.”

“We’ve been talking for two months about fuel inside Gaza…the international aid agencies keep warning that Gaza is going to run out of fuel in the next 24 hours…And I knew that Hamas burned people alive. I didn’t realize that they had done so with jerrycans of fuel that they had brought in from Gaza. The world presses Israel to let fuel into Gaza and they took fuel from Gaza!”

“It’s one of those realizations, you get home, you sit down, take a deep breath and say ‘Wow, I didn’t know this can still keep getting so much worse.’”

Eylon stated that “one of the constant challenges” in presenting Israel’s side to the world was “not to become mechanical” in repeating the facts of what occurred. His tour of one of the worst-hit kibbutzim on the Gaza border, where Hamas terrorists murdered between 52 and 60 residents, most of them infants and children, of the 1,200 slaughtered that day, will help him “really feel it, not only know it,” he said, and keep it “fresh” when speaking to the press.

He acknowledged that “There is no amount of evidence you can present that will make some people admit what happened because they can’t bring themselves to admit what their heroes in the Hamas death squads did on October 7.” Levy posited that they are “a small, vocal minority of deniers,” and that the main “challenge” regards the rest of the world, to explain “why they have to keep strong and not lose their nerve.”

They have to be reminded that they said on the day of the Hamas invasion, that they stand with Israel and agree that Hamas must be dismantled, he said, because some are waffling as a result of the scenes of human suffering they are seeing in Gaza “as a result of Hamas declaring this war and fighting it from inside urban [i.e., civilian] areas.”

“It’s our job,” he noted firmly, “to remind them why we are fighting and…of what they know and what they themselves have said: that this war must end with the end of Hamas. Because the consequences of inaction, the consequences of letting an army of terror get away with those barbaric atrocities, will be too much for humanity to bear.”

The spokesman, who went viral after raising his eyebrows in astonishment at a journalist who asked if Israel was exchanging three Palestinian security prisoners for each Israeli hostage Hamas agreed to release last month because Israel valued Palestinian lives less, when this was a Hamas demand, said that “no matter how silly” some press questions were, he would persevere in his task since “giving up was not an option, because we have to continue until victory.”

The post ‘Hamas used fuel to burn Jews alive, now the world tells us to let more fuel into Gaza’ appeared first on The Jewish Voice.