Cairo Message: Hamas Won't Bend Because It Wasn't Beaten, Rising Anti-Semitism, Israel: No Negotiations During Rocket Fire, Southerners Irate After Returning Home To Renewed Rocket Fire

Southerners Irate After Returning Home To Renewed Rocket Fire

Residents and mayors in southern Israel expressed frustration with their government after returning to their homes late last week, only to find themselves under Hamas rocket fire once again, as fighting resumed over the weekend.

Many Israelis streamed home after Israel and Palestinian factions agreed on a three-day truce starting Tuesday morning, and Home Front Command officials lifted restrictions in a bid to return normalcy to the region.

However, as rocket launches and Israeli airstrikes resumed with the expiration of the truce on Friday morning, southerners once again found themselves under fire.

Sderot Mayor Alon Davidi accused Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon of failing to bring security to southern Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.

“The renewal of the fire make it clear to anyone who still doubted that Hamas does not feel beaten, and even worse, it has no fear of the IDF,” he said. “This is what happens when the defense minister doesn’t supply the goods and doesn’t bring security to the residents of southern Israel. It can’t be that the minister speaks in lofty terms about how aggressively Israel will respond if Hamas dares renew its fire, but when it happens, we are witnesses to the weak response.”

Some residents who returned to their homes on the border with Gaza were forced to flee again northward as Hamas renewed its rocket fire, the newspaper reported.

“We will stay in the north until the army commits to us that it is totally safe to return home, and when we have a solution to the rockets and the tunnels,” a resident of Kibbutz Erez said.

“I felt that they told us to return for no reason,” Kibbutz Nirim resident Tomer Bar-Gil,10, wrote in a letter published in the popular tabloid. “They told us that we could return to live here, but they actually returned us to an unsafe place.”

Haim Yalin, the head of the Eshkol Regional Council, said that 10 missiles had hit Eshkol since the end of the ceasefire, bringing life once again to a standstill.

“Children are stuck in their homes, in protected rooms, instead of running around on the grass and enjoying themselves in swimming pools during summer vacation…The government of Israel cannot shirk its responsibility to protect the security of its residents. The prime minister and defense minister promised that they would not accept fire on Israel. This isn’t a political promise, this is a basic responsibility of a government toward residents of a democratic state.”

After Israel agreed to the truce following 29 days of fighting, pulling back troops and saying they had destroyed the threat of cross-border tunnel raids, many in the south expressed misgivings, leading government and military officials to assure them that all was safe.

Signs Of Resurgent Worldwide Antisemitism

When and how will this pandemic of antisemitism end? The last time it was this bad in Europe, it ended in genocide. Today the Palestinians, the darlings of the international media and “human rights community,” call openly for another Jewish genocide, and nonetheless never lose favor with the intelligentsia and elites.

The moral myopia is as pandemic as Jew-hatred is becoming. Neither shows any sign of abating.

Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV channel in late July broadcast a Friday sermon in which an imam issued a chilling threat to Jews: “We will not leave a single one of you alive. Our doctrine in fighting you is that we will totally exterminate you. We will not leave a single one of you alive.” Such savagery may be expected from Hamas, but a similarly virulent antisemitism is becoming increasingly common all over the world.

Last week, the Swedish Social Democrat Omar Omeirat, a Muslim and a candidate for town council in Filipstad, wrote on his Facebook page:

The entire Muslim world is sitting and watching while our brothers and sisters in Palestine are slaughtered by the Jewish pigs.

In a late July Friday sermon in Italy, the imam Abd Al-Barr Al-Rawdhi denounced the Jews, reminding his audience of several of the enormities ascribed to them in the Qur’an, and then prayer:

Oh Allah, bring upon them that which will make us happy. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and kill them to the very last one. Do not spare a single one of them. Turn their food to poison, make the air they breathe blazing hot, make their slumber full of grief, and make their days black. Oh Allah, plant fear in their hearts.

A shop in Antwerp refused a woman to serve because she was Jewish, a cafe in Liege has a sign hung with the message “Dogs are welcome, Jews are not,” and in Brussels slogans like “Death to the Jews” were chanted during a demonstration. And on Facebook, we see calls every day of hatred against the Jewish people.

The Daily Mail reported that “304 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the UK between January and June – a 36 per cent rise compared to the same period a year ago.” Among these were groups of Muslim men driving through Manchester and not only chanting “Heil Hitler,” but throwing what the Mail described as “missiles” at Jews walking along the street. In London, “a Jewish boy riding a bicycle had a stone thrown at his head by a woman in a niqab.”

Australia’s Daily Telegraph reported that on Wednesday, “Jewish children as young as five were subjected to a terrifying racial attack when thugs stormed their school bus and threatened to slit their throats. Screaming ‘Kill the Jews’ and ‘Heil Hitler’ the louts jumped on the bus packed with about 30 students, from kindergarten to year 12, who were on their way home from school.” They also shouted, “We are going to cut your throats and slice your throats open.”

The young attackers appear to have been non-Muslim, but the Israeli action in Gaza was clearly central to their motivation, as they yelled, “Palestine must kill you Jews.” Their terrorizing of these children thus illustrates how the increasingly violent, thuggish and authoritarian Left eagerly does the bidding of Islamic supremacists and jihadists.

Jerusalem Says No Negotiations Under Fire, Six Rockets Hit South Since Midnight

Jerusalem says no negotiations under fire; six rockets hit south since midnight; Palestinian FM says PA will sue Israel for war crimes; 8 Palestinians killed since Saturday, including senior Hamas official

The Times of Israel is liveblogging events as they unfold through Sunday, August 10, the 34th day of Operation Protective Edge. The IDF continued its air campaign against Hamas and other terror targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday as terrorists fired dozens of rockets at Israeli communities. Israel said it would not negotiate with Hamas at the indirect talks in Cairo unless or until the rockets stop.

90 Gaza sites hit since midnight

Israel has struck 90 targets inside the Gaza Strip since midnight, as efforts continue to restore a ceasefire, Channel 2 reports.

At the start of the cabinet meeting earlier today, the prime minister repeated Israel’s stance that “it would not negotiate under fire,” and emphasized that the military campaign was ongoing.

Secret Cairo Message: Hamas Won't Bend Because It Wasn't Beaten

Cairo sent a secret message to Jerusalem Saturday night, Aug. 9, saying that Egypt had been unable to bring Hamas around to any compromise because “you [Israel and the IDF] haven’t hit them hard enough.” Therefore, there was no point in sending Israel’s envoys back to the Egyptian capital for negotiations on a durable ceasefire, because they would be coming on a fool’s errand.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelled their departure, after understanding the import of the message: The Egyptian ceasefire initiative proposed by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had nowhere to go, until Israel’s armed forces clobbered Hamas’ military wing, Ezz e-Din Al-Qassam, into submission.

After their price for a ceasefire was rejected, Hamas and Islamic Jihad considered dropping out of the negotiating track. But meanwhile, on Friday, Aug. 8, they went back at their old practice of shooting rockets at the Israeli population, while also reserving the option to ramp the barrage up or down as it suited their plans.
By Sunday morning, Aug. 10, the short 72-hour respite for southern Israeli was over and the diplomatic impasse in Cairo had evolved into a diplomatic void.

From the first week of the IDF ground operation in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s leaders had been groping for a way out of the hostilities. Half a dozen ceasefires were declared – and violated by Hamas, who viewed the effort as a sign of Israeli weakness.

The prime minister and defense minister Moshe Ya’alon had counted on the 72-hour ceasefire, which expired Friday morning, providing Hamas commanders with a chance to come out of their bunker hidey-holes and view the devastation on the Gaza Strip surface. They would then be shocked into throwing in the towel – or so it was hoped.

But instead, Hamas commanders immediately seized on the ruins as an opportunity to parade the Palestinians of Gaza to the world as victims of “Zionist” inhumanity, of which they hands were entirely clean.

By now, Netanyahu and Ya’alon appear to be stumped for a policy.

All their military and political maneuvers, including their decision to limit the IDF ground incursion in the Gaza Strip last month to a depth of no more than one kilometer, failed to wrest the tactical initiative of the war from Hamas or bring harm to its military wing.

Friday, when Hamas resumed its rocket barrage Friday, it was in good shape, unlike the Gazan population, to embark on a war of attrition and keep it going for weeks, if not months.

The inhabitants of the communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip were cast into a depressing uncertainty. After living under rocket attacks of varying intensity for 14 years, many decided to finally pull up roots, when promises by the prime minister and army leaders, that the bane was finally over and they could live in peace and safety, went out the window.

IDF generals warned Sunday morning of the dangers to the Gaza communities of a protracted period of indecision. They recalled the situation on the eve of the 1967 Six Day War, when the army stood ready, day after day, to rebuff Arab aggressors around its borders, while the late Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dithered and the Chief of Staff, the late Yitzhak Rabin, couldn’t take the suspense.

Today, too, IDF divisions stand at their staging posts, ready and willing - just as soon as they get the order - to drive deep into the Gaza Strip and finally dislodge the fundamentalist Palestinian orchestrators of the senseless violence emanating for so many years from this sliver of territory.
If this order goes out, then, perhaps, Egypt may find Hamas more amenable to negotiating some sort of durable cessation of hostilities and an end to the destruction.

Iraq: ISIS Executed At Least 500 Yazidis

Islamic State militants have killed at least 500 members of Iraq's Yazidi ethnic minority during their offensive in the north, Iraq's human rights minister told Reuters on Sunday.

Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said the Sunni militants had also buried alive some of their victims, including women and children. Some 300 women were kidnapped as slaves, he added.

"We have striking evidence obtained from Yazidis fleeing Sinjar and some who escaped death, and also crime scene images that show indisputably that the gangs of the Islamic States have executed at least 500 Yazidis after seizing Sinjar," Sudani told Reuters.

Sinjar is the ancient home of the Yazidis, one of the towns captured by the Sunni militants who view the community as "devil worshipers".

"Some of the victims, including women and children were buried alive in scattered mass graves in and around Sinjar," Sudani said.

The Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, has prompted tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians to flee for their lives during their push to within a 30-minute drive of the Kurdish regional capital Arbil.

The militant group, which arrived in northern Iraq in June, has routed Kurds in its latest advance, seizing several towns, a fifth oilfield and Iraq's biggest dam - possibly gaining the ability to flood cities and cut off water and power supplies.

Also see:

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Rocket Fire Continues

Palestinian Sources: Teens' Killing Planned, Funded By Hamas

Hillary Clinton Blasts 'Unfair' World Reaction Over Gaza, Cites Anti-Semitism As Factor

Asked if the Israeli response was disproportionate, she replied: “Israel was attacked by rockets from Gaza. Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult. Of course Israel, just like the United States, or any other democratic country, should do everything they can possibly do to limit civilian casualties. We see this enormous international reaction against Israel. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.”

She said anti-Semitism was a factor in the unfair international reaction against Israel: “There are a number of factors going into it. You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what’s going on in Europe today.