Free Republic

Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri says Cairo's offer 'provides the needs of all sides.' Egypt does not have any plans to revise its ceasefire proposal to end the fighting in Gaza, Foreign Minister Sameh Shukrisaid in a joint press conference with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius in Cairo. "It provides the needs of all sides and we will continue to offer it, hoping to get their support as soon as possible," said Shukri, referring to the initiative rejected by Hamas. On Friday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked France to use its influence on Hamas allies such as Turkey and Qatar to...

Israel’s military goals for Operation Protective Edge are clear: restore quiet, and pound Hamas’s operation capabilities. Its diplomatic/political aims are murkier. What exactly does Jerusalem have in mind for Gaza, the day after? Netanyahu’s goals for the operation, which he has repeated almost every time he has met a microphone over the last 11 days, are to restore quiet, and deliver a significant blow to Hamas. “Hamas left us no choice but to broaden and intensify the campaign against it,” he said in a brief statement to the nation Tuesday evening, before yet another security cabinet meeting. “This is what...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is set to arrive in Israel on Saturday to assist with efforts to reach a truce between Israel and Hamas. The unexpected announcement was made as the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting Friday on the Gaza crisis. All 15 member states expressed serious concern over the escalation, and called for a cease-fire. In a phone conversation between Ban and Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister objected to the UN chief's comparison over the past few days between the rockets fired by Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces' activities in Gaza. "There isn't any symmetry...

The greatest challenge facing Israel in its current battle against Hamas is the world’s absurd moral equivalence between a righteous democracy trying to protect its citizens from indiscriminate rocket fire and a genocidal terror organization committed to murdering Jews and destroying the State of Israel. Last week I published a column criticizing the Obama Administration for its calls for mutual restraint on the part of both parties, as if Israel and Hamas can in any way be compared. I received criticism and pushback from personal friends who work in the Administration saying I was misrepresenting what the Obama Administration had...

Israeli President Shimon Peres on Friday told Pope Francis that Israel’s Operation Protective Edge “aimed to bring an end to two killing methods – the rockets from the sky and the tunnels from under the earth.” Peres told the Pope: “We have discovered two tunnels which were supposed to enable them enter into the heart of civilian life and kill indiscriminately.” “Fortunately we discovered it on time and prevented the murder,” he said. “Right now the main thing we are doing is to put an end to these tunnels and we are trying to see how to limit the confrontation,...

Nothing plays better in the mainstream media these days than wailing Gazans, mourning their dead from Israeli missile strikes responding to the unprovoked deluge of Hamas rockets on the Jewish state. As Ben Wedeman (CNN) recently reported from Jabalia, “There is no Iron Dome in Gaza to protect civilians.” But Gaza civilians most need protection from Hamas. Its leaders intentionally jeopardize their lives by embedding rocket-launching and ammunition storage sites in schools, mosques and hospitals located in civilian neighborhoods. In Gaza, recruits for martyrdom in the holy war against Israel are urged to gather on rooftops. They are instructed by...

The Washington Post‘s correspondents covering Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza reported that during Thursday’s five-hour humanitarian ceasefire, they saw men moving rockets into a mosque, a clear violation of international rules of war. On Friday, buried toward’s the end of The Post’s dispatch from the front, the newspaper reported what one of its correspondents saw during the break in fighting: “During the lull, a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment. But they could be seen moving small rockets...

A day after UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, admitted that it had discovered 20 Hamas rockets at one of its schools, Israel’s UN Ambassador said he was certain that more such facilities housed Hamas weaponry. “Yesterday, UNRWA admitted that it mysteriously found 20 missiles in one of its schools,” Ambassador Ron Prosor said on Friday in an emergency Security Council session on Gaza. “I’m sure that if UNRWA takes the time to check its other facilities, it will discover that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hamas is...

UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will leave Saturday for the Middle East to help mediate the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a U.N. official said Friday. Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman also said at a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the conflict in Gaza that a ceasefire is "indispensable" for urgently needed humanitarian efforts to succeed. He said the U.N. refugee agency was already stretched to its limit. The Palestinian U.N. ambassador threatened to go to U.N. and international courts, which would likely include the International Criminal Court, if the Security Council doesn't act to...

How exactly does the IDF dismantle Hamas’s offensive tunnels, some 60-feet-deep, over a mile long, with multiple exits. The tunnel threat, the unknowingness of it, has eclipsed the threat of rockets in Israel’s war with Gaza. This may change in the future, if detection methods improve. For now, though, after narrowly thwarting a mega-attack in the Eshkol region on Thursday, Israel has sent in troops to find, probe, and destroy the underground arteries that stretch beneath the border, all along the border. Brig. Gen. Miki Edelstein, the Gaza division commander, told reporters near an offensive tunnel discovered in October 2013...

A prominent American Jewish organization is denouncing The Washington Post for posting an animated cartoon on its YouTube channel depicting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu beating a Palestinian infant. The caricature is aimed at apportioning blame equally between Israel and Hamas for the suffering of Gazan civilians. It was created by Ann Telnaes, one of the newspaper’s editorial cartoonists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared its outrage over the cartoon. In a statement released to news agencies on Friday, the center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the clip was “disgusting.” "It is disgusting that The Washington Post would present an animated...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday said a broad international coalition is supporting Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, in its tenth day, as the Israel Defense Forces began a ground operation overnight to destroy Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Speaking at the start of a special cabinet meeting, in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said he “spoke with major world leaders” and “explained to them the impossible situation the State of Israel was facing and our need to defend our people. Since then, through constant, methodical diplomatic and media activity, we have been creating the international space – which is not self-evident – so...

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said on Thursday he is certain that Hamas terrorists rejoiced in the deaths of four children killed on Wednesday in Gaza when the IDF targeted a “nearby shipping container used in the past by Hamas security forces,” according to a witness. “I have no doubt that Hamas was celebrating when these children were killed,” he told CNBC’s John Harwood. “No one in Israel was celebrating when these children were killed.” Confronted about charges that Israel is using “vastly, disproportionate force” in its war against Hamas, Dermer said the Jewish state does everything...

President emphasizes backing of Jewish state’s right to defend itself against rocket fire, says current offensive focused on tunnels. President Barack Obama said Friday that he encouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to minimize civilian deaths in Israel’s ground push into Hamas-ruled Gaza, while letting him know that the US supports Israel’s right to self defense “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders,” Obama told reporters at the White House. The US president said he spoke by phone with Netanyahu earlier in the day, over the sounds of sirens going off in the background in Tel Aviv, and...

Netanyahu said the military's primary goal would be to destroy underground tunnels used by Hamas to attack the Jewish State. The announcement came hours after Israeli ground troops and tanks struck more than 100 terror targets in Israel's first major ground offensive in Gaza in just over five years. “Since there is no way to deal with the tunnels only from the air, our soldiers are doing it now from the ground," Netanyahu said at the opening of an emergency cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem Post reported. “We decided to launch the action after we tried all the...

Many tunnels have already reached Israeli land, and systems that could have been deployed to detect the digging of tunnels into Israel are no longer helpful. Israel must identify and destroy the complex tunnel infrastructure of Gaza to prevent future kidnappings and terrorist activity “before disaster occurs,” a geologist and defense expert told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. The advice comes from a man with an impressive track record. Langotsky, now 80 years old, is a renowned Israeli geologist and defense expert, During his IDF service, Langotsky received two Israel Defense Prizes, one personal and one together with his unit, as...

The Israel Defense Forces are currently operating on the ground in several areas throughout the Gaza Strip, from north to south, a senior IDF office said on Friday morning. After entering the strip at a number of points along the border on Thursday night, infantry and armored forces made their way to predetermined points in agricultural areas of the strip. By morning they were on the outskirts of populated areas. The immediate objective of the operation was for the forces to establish themselves in commanding positions, from which they could operate against tunnels running from the strip into Israel. Before...

Thousands of Israeli soldiers backed by tanks poured into the Gaza Strip on Thursday night, escalating a 10-day military operation to try to destroy Hamas’s weapons arsenal, rocket firing abilities and tunnels used to send terrorists from the Palestinian territory into Israel. The goal of the ground operation was to restore security for Israel’s citizens by stopping Hamas attacks, Israeli diplomatic sources said, and not to reconquer Gaza and oust Hamas. The high-stakes move was compelled by Israel’s growing exasperation over unrelenting rocket fire and followed the collapse of Egyptian-led efforts to broker a cease-fire. It also came after a...

Israel’s inner cabinet decided on expansion of military activities on Tuesday, after Egypt’s cease-fire efforts failed; news media were told a decision would only be made Friday morning. The Israel Defense Forces ground operation in the Gaza Strip began after the inner cabinet met in secret on Thursday night in Tel Aviv. In a deceptive maneuver intended to give the impression that no significant expansion of the military operation would happen in the next 24 hours, Israeli officials told reporters the security cabinet would only be meeting on Friday morning. A senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the...

"The prime minister and the defense minister have ordered the IDF to begin a ground operation in order to damage the underground terror tunnels constructed in Gaza leading into Israeli territory. "Such a tunnel was used earlier this morning by Hamas terrorists to enter Israeli territory, with intent to case massive harm to Israeli civilians. "The IDF successfully thwarted this attempt at terrorism as well. The prime minister and the defense minister have ordered the IDF to make preparations for expanding the ground operation. The order to act tonight has been approved by the security cabinet, after Israel agreed to...