Free Republic

While Islamic Jihad remains an Iranian protégé, Hamas decided two and a half years ago to break with Iran and return to its natural Arab and Sunni home. This decision was sparked by the Iranian-backed Syrian government’s slaughter of its largely Sunni citizens, which generated pressure to sever ties from both fellow Palestinians and Arab states. But Hamas also thought this move wouldn’t exact too high an economic price, thanks to the support it received from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government. That calculation collapsed when Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was ousted last year; Egypt’s new government is waging war on the...

Israeli security forces have been put on heightened alert after two Palestinians were killed during a massive protest in the West Bank. The victims were among an estimated 10,000 people who clashed violently with soldiers and border police at a checkpoint in Qalandiya, between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Israel said today it had deployed thousands of security forces were deployed in and around Jerusalem to "deal with any disturbances". Sky's David Bowden in Ashkelon, near Israel's border with Gaza, said: "After Friday prayers who knows what might happen. We are coming to the end of Ramadan. All of this is boiling...

Israeli security forces shot dead a Palestinian man and wounded 150 other people Thursday night during a massive protest in the West Bank against Israel's military offensive in Gaza, Palestinian officials said.

Hamas and Palestinian Authority call for "day of rage" over Israeli assault on Gaza after two Palestinians killed in overnight riots north of Jerusalem. Hamas leaders, both in Gaza and abroad, have called for the start of the third intifada - or Palestinian uprising - after violent riots with live fire erupted throughout Jerusalem and the West Bank last night. Violence flared up as thousands of Palestinians took to the streets, rioting and protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Approximately 10,000 people marched from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where they clashed with Israeli police. In Gaza, Hamas TV played pro-intifada songs, while...

Simon Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper on Thursday slammed the Huffington Post and reporter Sophie Jones, its Middle East correspondent, for the sensationalist headline, “‘They Just Wanted to Kill as Many People as Possible.”’ Cooper said the headline, accusing Israel of targeting civilians in its current war against Hamas in Gaza, and Jones’s reporting, “takes the art of lying and self-delusion to new depths.” The Huffington Post article quoted Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, the IDF’s official spokesman, describing Israel’s policy and procedure to warn civilians before striking Gaza targets, but then accused Israel of targeting...

There is a growing consensus in the United States and around the world that the way to end the Israel-Gaza war is to disarm Hamas. President Obama seems to be the only hold-out. On July 24, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a resolution calling on the Obama Administration to make the disarming of Hamas a central part of any cease-fire proposal. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, is spearheading this effort together with Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Ben Cardin of Maryland. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed on July 15 to...

First, the reassuring news: Americans’ pro-Israel sentiments remain near an all-time high, according to Pew’s latest numbers, and CNN measures public support for Israel’s recent actions against Hamas at a robust (57/43). Gallup’s latest nationwide survey, however, shows a much closer split on the righteousness of Israel’s defensive military campaign — although only a fractional minority is willing to defend Hamas’ terror campaign: According to Gallup’s internals, self-identifying Republicans are the primary reason Israel’s actions attract plurality support in this poll. GOP-leaners back Israel’s actions by a whopping 44-point margin; the numbers turn upside-down among independents (-10), and especially...

Americans are divided in their views of whether Israel's actions against the Palestinian group Hamas is "mostly justified" or "mostly unjustified," but they widely view Hamas' actions as mostly unjustified. Those results are similar to what Gallup measured 12 years ago during another period of heightened Israeli-Palestinian violence, and they are consistent with Americans' generally more positive views of the Israelis than of the Palestinians.

Thousands of Hamas-linked terrorists planned to invade Israel on the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), which begins on September 24, according to an Israel security source. First reported by Ma'ariv, then in English by i24news, “thousands of terrorists were meant to cross over to Israel from Gaza through the tunnels and kill and kidnap as many Israelis as they could. The source added that the army learned about the huge planned attack during the interrogations of Hamas prisoners, captured during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.” Reports state that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed his cabinet about the foiled plot...

Tia Goldenberg, Associated PressJuly 25, 2014 A network of tunnels Palestinian militants have dug from Gaza to Israel — dubbed "lower Gaza" by the Israeli military — is taking center stage in the latest war between Hamas and Israel. Gaza's Hamas rulers view them as a military game changer in its conflict with Israel. The Israeli military says the tunnels pose a serious threat and that destroying the sophisticated underground network is a key objective of its invasion of Gaza. Israel has known about the tunnels for several years, but has been hard-pressed to find an effective way to block...

Israel’s Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu revealed on Thursday that Hamas was intending to attack Israel from dozens of tunnels in a coordinated simultaneous attack. At the beginning of Thursday’s special cabinet meeting the prime minister said, “These tunnels enable the enemy to open a multi-pronged offensive and carry out a massive terror attack inside Israel.” The attack Hamas was planning, the officials say, “would have made Israel drop to its knees.” They added that even the tunnels destroyed until now takes away from Hamas a strategic asset the terror group has been working on for years. Hamas has prepared a...

20:37 IST Israeli ministers have rejected ceasefire terms presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Channel 2 reports. The ministerial vote was unanimous, it says. Earlier, it was reported that ministers were adamant that they would not accept a ceasefire that left the threat posed by Hamas’s terror tunnels unresolved.

Channel 10 reports that the diplomatic-security cabinet "flatly rejects" American proposals for a week-long humanitarian halt to fighting.

Sami Turgeman says army has uncovered and is disabling most terror tunnels dug under Israeli border Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip are weakening and losing morale “in all parameters,” the commander of IDF forces in southern Israel said Friday, but added that the troops on the ground needed more time to completely root out terror tunnels burrowing into Israel.

“This was a not-so-subtle message delivered by the el-Sissi regime that the ties between the United States and Egypt have cooled considerably,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TheBlaze on Wednesday. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki brushed off any concerns about the security screening, tweeting that Kerry was focused on the objective of his mission – securing a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. The Jewish-American news site the Algemeiner termed the incident “symbolic,” describing it in part as “humiliation in Egypt.” The International Business Times observed that foreign governments “normally trust U.S....

Diplomatic-security cabinet "flatly rejects" American proposals for a week-long humanitarian halt to fighting, seeks changes to terms. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's security cabinet has rejected proposals for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and is seeking changes to the plans, a government source said on Friday. US Secretary of State John Kerry has been pushing for a halt to 18 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Full details of the proposed truce have not been released, but the government official, who declined to be named, said Israel wanted modifications before agreeing to any end to...

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, calls out CNN’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza as irresponsible and one-sided.

As my colleague, senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak pointed out, Friday afternoon, CNN made a huge deal of Israel rejecting a "cease-fire deal" based on CNN's made-up premise that there was some sort of a deal. Pollak writes quite correctly that "there was no deal, but a mere proposal" and "there was no indication Hamas would agree to the terms." This deal CNN speaks of never existed. CNN is making it up because CNN knows that inaccurately reporting news of Israel walking away from a "deal" will make Israel look unreasonable and villainous. To make matters much, much worse for Israel,...

Secretary of State John Kerry failed on Friday to achieve a ceasefire between Israel and forces loyal to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Security Cabinet unanimously rejected the latest ceasefire proposal, which called for only a week-long cessation of hostilities. This is only the latest in a series of ceasefire proposals advanced by the United States and its regional allies the either Israel or Hamas have rejected. “The agony of events on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, all of them together, simply cannot be overstated,” Kerry said in a statement in Cairo on Friday announcing...

Amidst news the Israelis have turned down secretary of State Kerry’s latest, apparently Qatar-inspired, ceasefire, not to mention the other day’s nauseatingly familiar anti-Israel fusillade from the mega-Orwellian UN Human Rights Council, comes word that Hamas had been planning a gigantic attack on Israel this September via its dozens of tunnels.From the Gatestone Institute [1]: Hamas had apparently been preparing a murderous assault on Israeli civilian targets for the coming Jewish New Year Holiday, Rosh Hashanah, which begins on September 24, according anonymous sources in the Israeli security services, as reported today [2] by the Israeli daily Maariv.The Hamas...