It was hard to argue with my interlocutor in Israel who made this ominous statement: “Iran would prefer the entire population of Gaza to be killed.”
It would fit perfectly with the mullahs’ propaganda purposes.
In Israel, she told me, many are wondering what victory actually looks like in Gaza because they are not fighting anything resembling a conventional enemy. And not, unfortunately, for the first time.
She added, “There’s no one there to surrender,” meaning the Hamas leadership, those who are surviving, who hide out in tunnels of their own making more or less oblivious to what is going on around them. It’s hard to know how they would react and how much authority they would have in the first place.
Gaza is very much a tribal society, I was reminded, divided into clans whose leaders much perforce ally themselves with Hamas. It’s also hard to know what percentage of Gazans support Hamas, but they have never rebelled against them.
The terror organization has controlled Gaza since 2007—two years after it was given back to the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority by Israel despite considerable controversy. It was then that Hamas brutally broke the back of the PA, an organization now reviled in Gaza as much as the Israelis.
The mood on the ground in Israel, I was told, has become progressively bleaker, if that’s possible. Their defense ministry is said to be looking for new creative ways to handle the situation.
Meanwhile, no one is sure exactly how many hostages have been taken. The number has been put at 150, but is assumed to be larger because the identification of the dead has been difficult. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Hamas has been producing propaganda videos of its own of the kidnapped children to show its “compassion.” According to the Jerusalem Post, one clip goes as follows:
“In English, a man tells the child, ‘say ‘bismillah’ (in the name of Allah).” The child repeats ‘bismillah.’
“‘Yallah, drink,’ the man tells the child. The child then proceeds to take a sip.”
Who says this isn’t a religious war?
And it promises to be expanding, even to the United States.
As a native New Yorker now living in Tennessee, I stared in horror Oct. 14 at cable news footage of the Pro-Palestinian... more like “Kill the Jews”... demonstrations in the city of my birth that still has the most Jews of any city in the world.
One of the commentators, I think it was Sarah Carter, who had been present in person for the demonstrations at Hunter College and elsewhere, wondered which of the enraged protestors, some students, some considerably older, might be Hamas agents themselves, prepared to do unconscionable violence.
Good question.
From the looks of them and their behavior, it could have been almost any of them, or all.
I started to think, as I had frequently during this conflagration, what a nightmare President Joe Biden and his cohorts had created with the open Southern Border, allowing virtually unsupervised entry of citizens of well more than a hundred countries, many of them sworn enemies of the United States.
Admittedly, I was just told Israelis are now highly appreciative of the support being given—munitions resupply and now two aircraft carriers in the vicinity—by President Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, although they were regarded skeptically in the past.
Perhaps these men can now reconsider their policies at the Southern Border—for the safety of Americans this time.
