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ISRAEL

No one can now deny the evil that is Hamas Story by Stephen Pollard

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/no-one-can-now-deny-the-evil-that-is-hamas/ar-AA1yFavM?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=3e049c2261804ef0ac98245c7e89fbe2&ei=13

Two weeks ago the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the years since 1945 the images of the inmates have become part of the fabric of history, documenting the evil of which some of our species are capable.

We may now be used to seeing them, but the pictures of starved, emaciated bodies, barely more than skeletons, have never lost the power to shock.

As a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have had both to report and to confront anti-Semitism.

The battle against Jew hate has become the driving force of my professional life. Sometimes it has felt as though the Jewish people were banging our heads against a brick wall – such as when the response of so many self-described “progressives” to the barbarity of October 7 has been to demonstrate not against the barbarity but against the victims of that barbarity.

In that context, I have spent time asking myself if the scenes in Gaza and the terrible state of the latest hostages to be released might cause them to indulge in some self-reflection, or even a sense of shame that they have been marching in support of the terrorists who inflicted this evil.

I doubt it. These are the people, after all, who we have now learnt applied to the police at 2.50pm on October 7 2023 for permission to march against Israel the following week – making their application while the massacre was still in progress.

The footage of Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy could have come straight from 1945.

The only difference was the presence of their Hamas captors; the Nazis had fled the camps by the time they were liberated.

Who really wants ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Middle East? If you marched on demos saying ‘Crush Israel’, then you can hardly complain about Trump’s mad vision for Gaza. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/08/who-really-wants-ethnic-cleansing-in-the-middle-east/

A new definition of chutzpah just dropped. It’s people thinking they can spend 16 months crying ‘Crush the Zionist entity!’ and then wring their hands over the threat of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s protesters thinking they can wail ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – shorter version: erase Israel – and then accuse others of wanting to ‘cleanse’ the Middle East of ‘problematic’ people. It’s an activist class that is consumed by a burning hatred for the very idea of a Jewish homeland thinking it can lecture its opponents on the importance of respecting other people’s homelands.

I can stomach some hypocrisy, but I draw the line at pontifications on ‘forced removal’ from a political set that dreams of removing the Jewish State from the family of nations. Behold the orgy of sanctimony that has greeted Donald Trump’s nutty proposals to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip so that he might turn it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. We’ll come back to Trump’s vision, if you can call it that. But first we need to take down the idea that he has unforgivably put ‘ethnic cleansing’ on to the agenda for the Middle East, for the truth is that the West’s influential Israel-loathers did that long ago.

The fury over Trump’s Gaza idea is intense. He proposed resettling its population so that the Americans might go in and remake the place. We will ‘rebuild’ this ‘demolition site’, he said. The right-thinking are horrified. He’s flouting all the ‘established laws’ of international relations, says the Guardian. One wonders where this white hot fury was during earlier crusades of ‘nation-building’. From Bosnia to Libya, Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington and its allies dispatched local leaders, caused mass exoduses of people, and assumed the godly right to remake said country in their own ‘democratic’ image. And the Guardian often supported it. Keep your wigs on, people – Trump is not the first US president to propose ‘rebuilding’ a nation.

Still the cries of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have come thick and fast. Trump’s proposal would amount to an ‘alarming escalation’ in the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’, says Human Rights Watch. The UN also says it is ‘ethnic cleansing’. The left has been Trump’s noisiest critic. We know Israel has been ‘plotting the violent removal of Gaza’s surviving population’, says one commentator, and now these ‘genocidal’ ambitions are being abetted by the American president. Student radicals at Columbia University in NYC are damning Trump for ‘advocating for ethnic cleansing’ – a ballsy position for a campus where just a few months ago Jewish students were being told to fuck off back to Poland.

What’s exasperating about all this is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.

The End of ‘Palestine’ Donald Trump reminds the world that ideas have sell-by dates by Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/end-of-palestine

Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.

Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.

Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.

Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.

Gazans waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

What if they won’t go, or if the Egyptians and Jordanians won’t take them? They’ll take them, said Trump. Ah, he’s talking big, but it’s not real, say the experts—after all, he’s a real estate guy, and he’s pretending it’s just another property deal to pressure Hamas—Mar-a-Gaza. You can’t move a million people just like that, says an American electorate that elected Trump because he promised to deport tens of millions of illegal aliens who crossed the U.S. border in the last four years. He’s nuts says the D.C. foreign policy crowd: He’ll destabilize Egypt and Jordan, and undermine America’s best Arab friends and allies in the region.

Trump is Forcing the World to Face Its Hypocrisies on the Palestinians and Gaza Trump’s radical Gaza plan—U.S. ownership, mass relocation, and a “Riviera” rebuild—forces the world to confront long-ignored Palestinian hypocrisies. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/07/trump-is-forcing-the-world-to-face-its-hypocrisies-on-the-palestinians-and-gaza/

You could see heads exploding in the Middle East, the international media, and among Republicans and Democrats during President Trump’s February 4 joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he raised stunning new proposals for the U.S. to take over, “own,” and rebuild the Gaza Strip so it can become “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump also repeated his earlier call to relocate two million Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan.

Predictably, Trump’s critics harshly condemned his proposals, calling them unrealistic, imperialism, ethnic cleansing, morally bankrupt, etc. But just like their rejection of Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, his critics offered no solutions for the hypocrisies Trump raised about the Gaza crisis.

On February 5, Trump’s advisers responded to questions about Trump’s new Gaza ideas. White House Press Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt noted that President Trump has not committed to sending troops to Gaza and will not spend U.S. funds rebuilding it. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz said President Trump’s ideas would “bring the entire region to come with their own solutions.”

Yesterday, the president clarified but also doubled down on his new Gaza proposals. In a February 6 Truth Social post, the president said no U.S. soldiers would be needed for his plan, Israel would turn over Gaza to the U.S. after the fighting ends, and Palestinians would be resettled in a safer area. President Trump added about his Gaza reconstruction proposal:

“The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the world, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

Trump’s out-of-the-box ideas to solve the Gaza crisis are part of his radical Middle East strategy, which is much broader, more serious, and more ambitious than his predecessor’s confusing and feckless policies, which caused the deterioration of Middle East security.

At the heart of President Trump’s radical Middle East strategy is his belief that the world must face and resolve several hypocrisies about the Palestinians and Gaza.

Even the anti-Trump Wall Street Journal editorial board believes this. Although it unsurprisingly slammed Trump’s new Gaza proposals as “preposterous,” the Journal’s editorial board conceded in a February 5 editorial that the president’s Gaza ideas “have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.”

71-Year-Old Israeli Grandfather Recounts His Horrific Experience as a Captive of Hamas “Every day increases fear, danger, and suffering.” by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/71-year-old-israeli-grandfather-recounts-his-horrific-experience-as-a-captive-of-hamas/

Luis Har is a 71-year-old Israeli grandfather who was taken from his home at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on October 7, 2023 by Hamas terrorists. He was finally freed from captivity in the Gazan city of Rafah in “a daring military operation” carried out by the IDF in February 2024. More on his story, which he recently told to the newspaper Maariv, can be found here: “Most Hamas terrorists were drugged, completely inhumane, rescued hostage says,” by Sherry Makover-Balikov, Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2025:

“The hostages today are suffering from prolonged hunger,” released hostage Luis Har said in an interview with Maariv.”Hamas takes all the aid,” he continued. “I was there; I know what delaying the deals means. Every day increases fear, danger, and suffering. We must not wait, and we must not delay because every passing day increases the concern that, in the end, there will be no one left to bring back.”Har, who was abducted on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, was later freed in a daring military operation in Rafah in February 2024. In his interview, he described the terrifying moments of his abduction, his prolonged captivity in the home of a Hamas operative in southern Gaza, and his eventual rescue and return to Israel….

Har said the captors’ treatment of the hostages varied. “There were some moments of humanity, but not the majority. Most of them were either drugged or completely inhumane.”

“The man of the house, for example, took care of us and made it a point to reassure us that we would be okay. He said, ‘If there’s peace between us, I’ll come to your kibbutz to eat pizza at your place.’ That doesn’t negate the brutality of him and the others, who constantly threatened and shouted. They thought our situation would end in two or three days, but suddenly it became long-term.”

How Hamas Plans To Foil Trump’s Gaza Plan by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21377/hamas-plans-trump-gaza-plan

Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

Hamas does not want any US intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The terrorist group, together with Iran’s terror proxies, fear that this would disrupt their Jihad (holy war) against Israel.

For the Trump plan to succeed, the US must insist on the removal of Hamas from power and the disarming of all the terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

It will take several years to rebuild the Gaza Strip and make it habitable once again. The Trump administration will be gone by then. The biggest fear is that a future US administration will fail to block the return of terrorists to the rebuilt Gaza Strip.

If that happens, it will be a matter of time before the Gaza Strip once again becomes a large base for jihadists not only from Hamas, but other Islamist terror groups for whom Israel and the US are the Number 1 target.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has responded to US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by threatening to resort to violence against Americans.

In a statement, Hamas said that the Palestinians will “confront the plan with resistance and necessary force.”

This threat is directed not only against the US, but also against Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, many of whom would be happy to move to another place where they could live in security and peace. Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

Terrorists released by Israel leave prison as millionaires By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/terrorists-released-by-israel-leave-prison-as-millionaires/

Many terrorists released by Israel are millionaires, flush with cash from years of receiving monthly Palestinian Authority “pay for slay” stipends, an analysis by a Jerusalem-based watchdog group revealed on Wednesday.

Palestinian Media Watch posted a list of all 734 terrorists scheduled for release from Israeli prisons in the first phase of the hostages-for-ceasefire agreement with Hamas, together with their “salaries”—the dollar amounts each terrorist had received from the Palestinian Authority’s so-called Martyrs’ Fund while incarcerated.

In total, the terrorists received $141,837,087, or more than half a billion shekels. Of those, 316, or nearly half, received more than a million shekels. (Palestinian Media Watch created a program to crunch the numbers, inputting all the relevant P.A. criteria—crime, marital status, number of children, etc., to determine the size of their stipends.)

“It’s a tremendous force driving terror,” Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch’s founder and director, told JNS.

First, it signals to Palestinians that these terrorists weren’t working in a vacuum, but were acting in the name of the P.A.

Second, the wealth places the terrorists in an honored position in Palestinian society, in fact, “Palestinian terrorists are the most honored people in Palestinian society,” he said.

“When they’re introduced, and in interviews, even years after they were released from jail, they’re called Asra [“Prisoner”]. That’s their title. It’s like an ambassador. It’s actually similar to POW [prisoner of war]. They have a different word for criminal prisoners. For the P.A., they’re legitimate fighters, even if they killed women and children,” Marcus said.

Trump’s call to resettle Gazans could end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all Alex Traiman

https://www.jns.org/trumps-call-to-resettle-gazans-could-end-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

U.S. President Donald Trump, sitting alongside Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a geopolitical earthquake on Tuesday, doubling down on calls to resettle “1.7 or 1.8 million” Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip.

The calls go beyond any concept of “total victory” that Netanyahu has verbalized and possibly even considered at any point during the current war with Hamas in Gaza. A little more than a week ago, the questions on the table were whether Israel could ever return all of its hostages and who would rule Palestinians living in Gaza on the “day after” the war.

Trump—in the way only he could do—has stated what should have been patently obvious to a normal observer but unspeakable for any world leader: Gaza is completely uninhabitable, and its residents will need to be resettled elsewhere.

If Trump’s suggestions come to pass, it will not only represent a “total victory” beyond even Netanyahu’s wildest imagination but represent the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, removing any parity of numbers between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

If successful, calls for Israel to permanently cede land for the creation of a Palestinian state within the Jewish biblical homeland will end, and Israel will finally win the conflict. Jews would then be the overwhelming majority and Palestinians a smaller ethnic minority, removing once and for all the phony claims that Israel is an apartheid state.

Trump even hinted that America may support full Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (commonly known in the international community as the “West Bank”). “We’re discussing that … and people do like the idea. We haven’t taken a position on it yet, but we’ll be making one probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”

If America recognizes Israeli sovereignty in the provinces of Judea and Samaria, then it will permanently slam the door on the failed Oslo Accords and the two-state paradigm that the Palestinians never wanted in the first place.

The president, who worked extremely well with Israel’s prime minister during the 45th administration, has previously succeeded in breaking paradigms in the region with the brokering of the historic Abraham Accords agreements in the fall of 2020.

In his remarks in the Oval Office, Trump stated tersely that he will “never win a Nobel Prize” for his groundbreaking role in brokering the unthinkable agreements.

He is now bringing his unconventional thinking back to the region just days into a new term and looking for an end to the conflict that began when Hamas penetrated Israel’s border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 men, women and children in the south, and kidnapping to Gaza more than 250 others in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Trump acknowledged that many “want to deny that Oct. 7 took place, just as many want to deny the Holocaust took place.”

‘Israel fought back bravely’

In the press briefing after the meeting between the two leaders, Trump called the Oct. 7 assault “an all-out attack on the very existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland.” Then he went on to praise Israel’s response to Oct. 7.

Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Own’ Gaza By Robert Spencer And refuses to repeat failed policies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-says-u-s-will-own-gaza/

We are living at a truly momentous time in history. Donald Trump illustrated that yet again on Tuesday evening during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “You have to learn from history,” Trump declared and proceeded to upend the political order that has prevailed in the Middle East for decades. It is a multiply failed order and new approaches are very, very long overdue, but no one has dared to question it and suggest new solutions. Until now.

The most momentous announcement of this most momentous of press conferences was Trump’s declaration that Hamas would not be permitted to regain control of Gaza and that, in fact, the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip… we will own it.” He also reiterated his insistence that 1.7 million Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, explaining several times that this was necessary because the failed policies of the past should not and must not be applied yet again.

Hamas, Trump said, had ruled Gaza for years and offered no options for the Palestinian people beyond bloodshed and death. He sketched out a vision of a restored Gaza that would be an international area, populated not just by Palestinian Arabs but by people from all over the world who would be able to enjoy its renaissance as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

When asked if this meant that he was rejecting the possibility of a “two-state solution,” Trump said that he wasn’t addressing that at all, but merely saying that the old policies of the past had failed and that new solutions needed to be tried. He and Netanyahu also both expressed confidence that Saudi Arabia would soon normalize relations with Israel, which would have a seismic effect upon the Muslim Middle East, as it has shown unremitting hostility to Israel ever since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.

How Western governments are funding the persecution of Jews We know UNRWA has intimate links with Hamas, so why are we giving it money? Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/03/how-western-governments-are-funding-the-persecution-of-jews/

The British government helped to fund the persecution of a British Jew. That’s the takeaway from Emily Damari’s revelation that she was held in an UNRWA facility for some of the hellish time she spent in Hamas captivity. Keir Starmer’s Labour government pumps millions of pounds into UNRWA. Money that will be used, in part, for the upkeep of UNRWA’s buildings. Buildings like the one in which Ms Damari was held by the neo-fascist militia of Hamas. It may have been indirect, it may have been unwitting, but British government money, our money, went to an organisation whose facilities were used to tyrannise a British Jew. And we need to talk about that.

Emily Damari is the young British-Israeli woman who was abducted from her home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz during the Hamas-led pogrom of 7 October 2023. She was held hostage for 471 days, finally being freed on 19 January as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. In a phone call with Starmer on Friday, she revealed that for some of the 15 months she spent in the captivity of that army of anti-Semites, she was held on premises belonging to UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). We don’t know how Starmer responded, but hopefully he said something like: ‘What?! The aid agency I just gave millions to?’

For that, almost unbelievably, is what happened. Three days before his chat with Ms Damari, three days before being informed that this citizen of the country he leads was held by racist terrorists in an UNRWA facility, Starmer’s government awarded an additional £17million for the Palestinian territories, much of it to UNRWA. Anneliese Dodds, Starmer’s minister for development, gushed about the ‘vital role’ UNRWA plays in Gaza and haughtily instructed Israel to back off and let it play that role. One of the roles it seems to have played, wittingly or otherwise, is the provision of facilities for Hamas, including for the purposes of criminally depriving a British Jew of her liberty. How ‘vital’ is that?

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of all this. British taxpayers helped to fortify buildings in which Hamas committed war crimes. British taxpayers helped to fund one of the dens of anti-Semitism in which our fellow citizen was held captive for the ‘crime’ of being a Jew in Israel. Where is the outrage? Where are the pained editorials in the liberal press? It is a testament to the moral indifference of Britain’s cultural elite that we can discover a British woman was held hostage in UNRWA facilities days after our government handed UNRWA yet more money and no one bats an eyelid.

If Starmer was shocked by Ms Damari’s revelation, he has no right to be. For everyone who has been paying attention knows that UNRWA has been thoroughly compromised by its intimate links with Hamas. Other hostages have likewise said they were held in UNRWA buildings. It’s possible some of these hostages were seized by UNRWA’s own employees during the orgy of barbarism that was the 7 October pogrom: at least nine UNRWA staff members are suspected of having taken part in that fascistic atrocity. ‘I’m inside, I’m inside with the Jews’, an UNRWA-employed teacher reportedly said as he invaded Israel on that day of bloodshed.