Is Valerie Obama's Mommy? (See 1 and 1a below.)
Allegedly, Jack Kingston was defeated because he was a 22 year incumbent and yet Buddy Carter was elected notwithstanding the fact he is a longtime politician. Go figure.
From my perspective, once politicians began relying on professional 'handlers' rather than their own instincts and ignoring what "Give Em Hell Harry" knew all along - be yourself, let the public see the real person, just about everything political has suffered
The latest local election cycle failed to inform. To reach audiences, politicians feel compelled to deliver their ad messages through technological means and short sound bites. It all becomes a mud fight.
No wonder voters are repulsed.
While this has been happening we are told by our president's spokesperson everything is more 'tranquil' and Obama cannot find a 'smidgen' of scandal. On what planet are they living?
I do not claim to be unbiased but the last time I took my head out of the sand I saw a world falling apart because Obama decided America was too prominent, too arrogant, too omnipotent and the world was left to fill the vacuum he helped create.
Now planes fall from the air, incessant rockets descend on a loyal ally Obama tells must restrain themselves, Iraq and Syria are in a state of civil war, the IRS and other agencies are about destroying our freedom and our borders leak like a sieve.
Meanwhile, our president continues fund raising, blaming others and ducking the buck that Truman always kept on his desk. We are now told our golf playing president is preparing for another Martha's Vineyard vacation so he can collect his thoughts.
Get ready for two more years of Obama's feckless and inept ideological leadership.
But have no fear. Obama has accomplished purposeful his goal - hope is gone but at least he brought about radical change and displayed contempt for constitutional principles.
===
IDF update. (See 2 below.)
===
Jewish Hollywood liberals are too enamored with Obama to stand up for Israel!
Hollywood Liberals Stand Down for Israel
Once again Israel is being forced to defend itself from the terrorists who run Gaza. Once again Israel has had to drop bombs and send tanks and ground troops into Gaza to blow up tunnels and destroy the missile sites Hamas has been using to rain hundreds of rockets down on Israel's farms and cities. And once again the Jews of Hollywood are silent. (See 3 below.)
===
When diplomacy fails, try money.
Bribing terrorists is stupid and rewards them for their incompetence and aggression..
No wonder the world is in a mess
When a child acts in a manner that is untenable I suggest a parent would be foolish to give into their petulance but that is just what diplomats constantly propose.
When did bribery ever work and even if it temporarily does the end game eventually results in more bribery.
But then our former Sec. of State made this cogent observation - what difference does it make?
None if you believe failure, lying and lunacy is preferable to competence, honesty and sanity. (See 4 below.)
===
Perhaps God continues to produce miracles in favor of Israelis:
More Miracles!
==="The Shabak (Israel's Equivalent of the FBI) Interrogated some of the captured high ranking terrorists of HAMAS and has found out that all of the 45 tunnels found so far all lead into towns in Israel some of them have even been shown to pass right under homes of civilians in the towns !!!! HAMAS Terrorists planned on using these tunnels on the first night of Rosh Hashana - The Jewish New Year... they planned to send some 200 terrorists through each tunnel as everyone was gathered for the evening festive meals on the night of Rosh Hashana especially since some communities ate the meal together in a main community dining hall!!! They planned to murder many many Jews and to take over the small towns in Israel that were within close vicinity to Gaza!!! An AMAZING MIRACLE has been granted to ISRAEL - Hamas did not plan on entering into War with Israel at this time and only because of the 3 kidnapped boys - which was done without their initial involvement did their plan become known!!!!"
Dick
1) How Our World Fell Apart
By Ed Klein
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
—W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
—W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Wherever we look today—from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East to the post-Cold War frontier in Ukraine to the South China Sea to our border with Mexico— our world appears to be falling apart.
This naturally raises a serious question in the minds of many people: If America, the indispensable nation, had been doing its job of holding the global system together, couldn’t this chaos and anarchy have been avoided?
The simple answer is, yes.
But if you listen to Hillary Clinton, the unraveling of the international order was inevitable under the leadership—or lack of leadership—of Barack Obama. As I reported in my book “Blood Feud,” Hillary places the blame for the sorry state of the world squarely on the man in the Oval Office.
“The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time,” she complained to a group of friends shortly after she left her post as secretary of state. “That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f******g tiller.”
That may be true as far as it goes. But it begs the larger question: what about Hillary herself? Doesn’t she share culpability for our botched foreign policy?
After all, she was our chief diplomat from 2009 to 2013, and as such, she was present at the creation of the Obama foreign policy. She logged nearly a million miles roaming the world as the person in charge of American diplomacy. And now she wants to cash in those frequent flier miles for a trip to the White House in 2016.
In the view of most foreign policy experts to whom I have spoken, Hillary has little or nothing to show for her million-mile sprint as secretary of state.
“The simple consensus about Hillary Clinton’s tenure at state is: Meh,” said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “By her own standards she accomplished little, and in the areas she highlighted as most important to her—rights for women and religious minorities, Israeli-Palestinian peace and halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program—she batted zero…. And Iran is now closer to a nuclear weapon than ever before.”
During Hillary’s time at Foggy Bottom, Bill Clinton urged her to create a legacy of major accomplishments, such as brokering a peace settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. However, Hillary is essentially a detail person, not a big thinker, and therefore she never became a strong influence in the strategic management of foreign policy.
What’s more, Hillary had a dysfunctional relationship with the White House. The small cabal around Barack Obama—particularly political strategist David Axelrod and consigliere Valerie Jarrett—weren’t about to let Hillary make grand strategy.
“Obama’s three most important foreign policy advisers were David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and John Brennan, deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism [Brennan has since been appointed director of the CIA]," said Vali Reza Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “…Whenever Hillary went on a trip to, say, Saudi Arabia, Brennan would go along, and the Saudis treated him as the person who really mattered, not Hillary.”
The current triumvirate that runs foreign affairs—Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador who is now Obama’s national security adviser, and Secretary of State John Kerry—are widely dismissed as lightweights by foreign policy experts. And yet, these three people are currently calling the shots in Obama’s leading-from-behind style of non-leadership.
Just before Caroline Kennedy took up her post as ambassador to Japan, she invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to lunch at her Park Avenue apartment in New York City. Caroline wanted to know from Hillary, the former secretary of state, what she could expect from the Obama administration.
“Don’t expect to get your real marching orders from State,” Hillary said. “The way the Obama government works, everything important in foreign policy comes from the White House. And Valerie [Jarrett] pretty much runs the show down there. You’ll feel Valerie breathing down your neck all the way to Tokyo. She’s going to have a lot to say about how you represent our country in Japan, and believe me, she won’t be shy about it.”
According to the Clintons, who later described their lunch with friends, Caroline was stunned by this news.
It should come as a sobering wake up call to the rest of us.
1a) Obama to World: Drop Dead
The most provincial U.S. president in at least a century.
Asked on "Meet the Press" Sunday whether this was the lowest moment in U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War, America's robo-Secretary of State John Kerry replied: "We live in an extremely complicated world right now, where everybody is working on 10 different things simultaneously." Well, not everyone.
As the world burns, the president spent this week fiddling at fundraisers in the living rooms of five Democratic Party fat cats in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. As White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri famously explained, changing the president's fundraising schedule "can have the unintended consequence of unduly alarming the American people or creating a false sense of crisis."
A screen grab taken on July 13, 2014 from a video released by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram and obtained by AFP shows the leader of the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau (C). Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Alarmed? Who's alarmed? What false sense of crisis? Vladimir Putin's masked men in eastern Ukraine shot Malaysia Airlines Flight 17's 298 people out of the air just about the time Israel and Hamas commenced their death struggle, not long after the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham occupied a third of Iraq within seven days. Now ISIS is cleansing Mosul of its Christians.
If news coverage defined reality, you'd think the civil war in Syria was over. There just isn't space to fit it all in. The homicidal Islamic fanatics of Boko Haram may soon establish state like control of northern Nigeria, as ISIS has in Iraq. Last week the April kidnappers of the world's now-forgotten "our girls" gunned down another 44 Nigerians, then days later killed 100 more in villages abandoned by the Nigerian army. After Boko Haram grabbed a German citizen in Gombi, Germany's foreign ministry said it was "aware of the case."
On Monday, Barack Obama showed up on the White House lawn to make clear that he, too, is aware of what's going on. Addressing the war in Gaza for about three minutes, Mr. Obama urged "the international community to bring about a cease-fire that ends the fighting." He said, "I have asked John,"—that would be our squirrel-on-a-wheel secretary of state—to "help facilitate" that. That is a foreign policy whose arc begins and ends with the phrase, "stop the killing."
More revealing, though, was what Mr. Obama said on the airliner shoot-down and Russia's role. "If Russia continues to violate Ukraine's sovereignty," he said, and if it still backs the separatists who are becoming "more and more dangerous" not just to Ukrainians "but the broader international community," then "the costs for Russia" will increase.
What does this mean? Mr. Putin will really be in hot water with the U.S. president if one of his proxies does something worse than shoot a passenger jet out of the sky?
Here's what it means. It means that "the situation," as the White House routinely euphemizes all the world's chaos, is going to get worse. It means in the next two years many more people are going to die, and not necessarily in the places where they are dying now. Why should it stop?
The president and his team need not worry about injecting a false sense of crisis. This being the 100th anniversary of 1914, more than a few people are wandering in and out of commemorative World War I events, their head swimming with Yeats's lamentation that "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
On Sunday, another telling event slipped in. Bosnian Muslims buried 284 bodies recently found in a mass grave from the Balkans war in the 1990s. That war was a genocide taking place on post-World War II European soil, which didn't stop until the U.S. acted to end it. Now with Dutch bodies strewn across Ukraine, president-in-waiting Hillary Clinton ludicrously says, "Europeans have to be the ones to take the lead on this."
As a White House veteran of the Milosevic slaughters in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Mrs. Clinton knows Europe won't act until the U.S. leads. Europe today mainly wages war on Google, Microsoft and Intel. Its leaders won't do much more than hope nothing like a Flight 17 happens one morning in the subways or on the streets of their capitals. Hope alone won't protect them or us.
This week the original 9/11 Commission put out an update on global terrorism. The report says the "complacency" that led to 9/11 "is happening again."
How, then, to explain someone who claims he can run the country and a troubled world out of his back pocket while he flies from fundraiser to fundraiser? Barack Obama is the most provincial U.S. president in at least a century. The progressive Democrats who displaced the Clinton machine in 2008 and came to power with Mr. Obama have no interest beyond consolidating political and electoral power inside the U.S. Not even the White House of Lyndon Johnson, the ultimate pol, was so purely politicized.
The fundraising is a frantic effort to protect this new Democratic voter machine. The world doesn't vote, so the world doesn't matter. Unless, of course, the American people in November decide that a world defined by events like Flight 17 does matter.
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2)
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As Operation Protective Edge entered its 17th day on Thursday, the IDF saw significant gains but stated that more time is needed to achieve its mission objectives in Gaza. Overnight operations saw the IDF take at least 150 terror suspects prisoner after they surrendered to Israeli forces in the neighborhoods of Khan Younis and Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The prisoners will be transferred to the Shin Bet for questioning regarding the movements and operations of Hamas in Gaza, said IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Moti Almoz. Army Radio reported that some of the prisoners have already been r eleased after questioning. Renewing operations after a lull that allowed for the Red Cross to carry out humanitarian activities, the IAF destroyed 35 targets overnight while ground forces discovered several more tunnels. The discoveries bring the number of tunnels intended for terrorist activity that the IDF has uncovered to 31. As the tunnels are dangerous and difficult to destroy, IDF forces have only destroyed nine of the tunnels thus far. The IDF stated that more time will be needed to uncover and destroy the terror tunnels in Gaza, which the army has stated is its primary goal in its Gaza operations. Several firefights ensued between Hamas terrorists and IDF forces overnight. According to Army Radio, ground forces called in an airstrike after terrorists attempted to escape from a tunnel shaft. The IDF reported a direct hit on the enemy. In a separate incident, paratroopers engaged two terrorists, killing both. No fatalities were reported by the IDF in last night's operations in the Gaza Strip. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
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TRANSCRIPT:
Even before the recent Israeli ground and air operations in Gaza, the BDS movement – that would stand
for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – was gaining traction… not just in France, or Germany, or Oman:
right here in America.
BDS is being sold – as everything evil and stupid is being sold these days – as a moral good. The
argument goes like this: Israel, a nation formed in response to the cold, concrete reality of extermination,
has let its economic and military power go to its head. They, now, are the oppressors; they now are
Goliath in a main battle tank facing a brave Palestinian David with a rock in his hand; they now are the
racists. They now – Israel – are the Nazis.
Are they?
Here is Israel at the time of its formation by the United Nations in 1948. Actually, you can’t see it on
this map because it’s so small – smaller than the state of New Jersey.
On that same year, the Arab nations surrounding the new country attacked what was then mostly small
farming communities and tried to drive the Jews into the sea.
But The Israelis won.
The Arabs tried it again in 1967. The Jews beat them again. Then, in 1973, the Arabs tried again,
launching a sneak attack on the holiest Jewish holiday – and the Jews won again.
Israel’s territorial gains did not come from Israel attacking the Arabs. They came from Israel being
attacked by the Arabs.
And Israel has always tried to give the land back in exchange for peace, as it did when it voluntarily
returned the Sinai Peninsula – which is bigger than Israel itself – back to the Egyptians who had tried
to attack them from the Sinai, and likewise, they gave the Gaza Strip back to the Palestinians who
had attacked them – from the Gaza strip.
Since then, thousands – thousands! -- of rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel from school
yards and orphanages and hospitals in -- Gaza.
How many rockets and mortars would you allow to fall on your house by neighbors that have been
swearing to kill you for 65 years? How many times will someone keep hitting you before you hit back?
The Palestinians daily call for the Jews to be driven into the sea. The Jews have one of the most
sophisticated militaries in the world. They could drive the Palestinians into the sea any time they wanted
to. They don’t.
The instant that Hamas or Hezbollah get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they will do with it what they
do every day with their rocks and mortars and missiles. They will use it. On Israel. The Israelis have an
estimated 500 nuclear weapons and could destroy the Arabs any time they chose. They don’t.
Those are not Nazis. Those are moral, civilized people.
Israel is an island of civilization in a sea of barbarity, and that is why it is being targeted. Uncomfortable
with those words, “civilization” and “barbarity?” Well, in Israel women can do whatever they please –
including leading the state of Israel. In the surrounding Arab nations women are treated as chattel. They’re
just property: useful for creating sons and carrying things.
In Israel, homosexuals are tolerated and celebrated as individuals – why, just as if they were real people!
In the surrounding Muslim nations they are hung from construction cranes in public squares. In Israel,
scientists at the University of Haifa are studying In-homogeneous tachyon dynamics. The latest scientific
invention in the Arab world is a buzzer that goes off when a Muslim falls asleep against his prayer rug.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was used, in the main successfully, against racist South Africa.
Racist South Africa used brutal force to suppress people along racial lines.
Israel, on the other hand, is the only nation in the entire Middle East where Arabs have a free and fair
vote. Israel allows Israelis of any ethnicity to be elected to the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament – including
Arabs. So: If you’re in favor of equal rights for women, legal protections for homosexuals, advances in
science, the arts and medicine, and political access and personal rights guaranteed by law -- you
definitely should support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – for every nation in the region EXCEPT
Israel.
Finally, I’ll just say this – because this is really what drives this whole thing. It is absolutely true that
criticizing the actions of the State of Israel is not in itself anti-Semitism. Israel is as subject to criticism
and condemnation as any other nation on earth.
But you cannot understand Israel’s actions without understanding the pervasive, unrelenting, hate that
surrounds that outpost of civilization. From Hezbollah rockets made in Iran, to BDS sanctions made in
Berkeley and Santa Monica, the attacks on this country and its people cannot be understood without
getting to the bedrock essence of the nasty, petty, small and mean-spirited emotion that drives anti-
Semitism.
And that emotion is Envy.
Genesis, Chapter 26, verses 12 through 16:
And Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. The LORD blessed him, and
the man became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy. He had possessions of
flocks and herds and many servants, so that the Philistines envied him. (Now the Philistines had stopped
and filled with earth all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father.)
And Aby melech said to Isaac, “Go away from us, for you are much mightier than we.”
That was thousands of years before there was a religion called Islam. And when the Israelis, as a
gesture of peace and goodwill, turned over the Gaza Strip in 2005 the first thing these modern-day
philistines did was smash the windows of the greenhouses that had been handed to them by other
people’s labor. Once again, they filled wells in the desert with sand.
Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, by far the safest home the Jews have ever known was
here in America. No doubt there was anti-Semitism here, but with a few exceptions it was golf-course
anti-Semitism: disgraceful, but a long, long way from the pogroms and the death camps. Why was
America such a safe home for the Jews? Well, because up until very recently --- 2008 let’s say – envy
was not admired here in America. “Coveting” wasn’t sold here as a virtue, either.
So, to the American Jews who voted in huge numbers for the man who was personal friends
of Palestinian terrorist – Rhashid Khalidi – to babysit his children – to the American Jews that
watched and supported Occupy Wall Street as it smashed crystal windows and denounced
Jewish bankers; to the American Jews who continue to vote for an ever more powerful state
when no one in the world has more to fear from powerful states like the National Socialist
German Workers Party or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; to those American Jews who
watched through the 1930’s and 40s and ask, “how could they have let that happen?” I would
simply say, “How can you let this happen? Why do so many of you vote for this to happen –
pay for it to happen?”
Tea Party Conservatives, like me – genuine
friends of Israel and the Jewish people – look
at you and think “It’s obvious you’ve lost your
minds. Have you lost your souls as well?”
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4) New Push To Lure Hamas Into Truce Washington, Allies Try to Assure Hamas itsEconomic Demands Will be AddressedBy JAY SOLOMON in Cairo,
Palestinian families in southern Gaza flee their homes amid violence. Associated
Press
The Obama administration, Israel and other Middle East allies are refashioning an Egyptian cease-
fire proposal to assure Hamas that Gaza's economic interests would be addressed if the Islamist
group stops rocket attacks, senior U.S. and Arab officials said.
These diplomats outlined a two-stage plan as the 16th day of Israel's military offensive brought
intense fighting to southern Gaza, raising the Palestinian death toll to nearly 700 and the Israeli toll
to 35 in a conflict in which Hamas's military wing has shown surprising strength.
Under the plan, Israel and Hamas would agree to stop military operations in the coming days. And
the U.S. and the international community would then move quickly to begin talks on a longer-term recovery program for the impoverished coastal enclave.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said there have been "steps forward" in the diplomacy aimed at ending the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Can the U.S. help broker peace? Aaron David Miller, Wilson Center vice president for new initiatives, joins the News Hub with Sara Murray. Photo: Getty Images.
Secretary of State John Kerry outlined the emerging proposal during more than two hours of
discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and a
separate hourlong meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.
U.S. officials said they expect Mr. Kerry to remain in the region until the weekend.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, rejected a cease-fire proposal put forward by Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah Al Sisi last week, saying it wasn't consulted and that the offer didn't go far enough to lift
Egypt's and Israel's economic siege of Gaza or free Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Further strikes hit Gaza City on Tuesday night as Israel continues its offensive against Hamas. Elsewhere, the UN Secretary General met with the Israeli Prime Minister in Tel Aviv. Mark Kelly reports.
The battle lines between Israeli and Hamas are playing out across social media in efforts to drum up support. WSJ's Lisa Fleisher explains on digits. Photo: Getty Images.
"There was a cease-fire deal that only one side
agreed to," said a senior U.S. official who traveled to
Israel and Egypt with Mr. Kerry on Wednesday. "The
question is how do we get to where the violence can
be stopped and then we get to these deeper issues."
Offering Hamas incentives such as economic aid and
freer movement of goods into Gaza and eased
restrictions on movement could meet with Israeli
resistance unless it could be monitored to keep out
weapons or Hamas is disarmed.
Israel launched its military operations in Gaza to d
egrade Hamas's rocket arsenal and network of
tunnels that Hamas fighters are increasingly using to
carry out attacks against Israelis.
U.S. officials have argued to Mr. Netanyahu that
Israel's military has gone a long way toward achieving
those aims since the offensive began July 8.
Hamas's political chief, Khaled Meshaal, said in Qatar
on Wednesday his movement was open to a "pause"
in fighting on humanitarian grounds but demanded
guarantees that Gaza's economic interests would be
addressed through the opening of trading routes into
Gaza and the easing of financial restrictions that
affect Hamas's leaders.
Mr. Meshaal didn't indicate whether the emerging
proposal would be enough for Hamas to stop its
rocket attacks. Mr. Kerry has been using Qatar and
Turkey as conduits through which to engage with
Hamas on the cease-fire proposal.
"We will not accept any initiative that does not end the blockade on our people and that does not
show respect to their sacrifices," Mr. Meshaal said. "Everyone wants us to accept a cease fire and
then negotiate for our rights. We reject this."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Israel's Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Reuters
In Gaza's streets, neither side appeared ready to back down. Israeli forces battled heavily armed
militants around the southern city of Khan Younis. People fleeing their homes described heavy tank
shelling, airstrikes and small-arms fire.
At Nasser Medical Center, the main hospital in Khan Younis with a trauma center, patients streamed
in by ambulance and private car, many nursing gaping shrapnel wounds and broken limbs.
Israel said three of its soldiers died in Gaza on Wednesday,
bringing to 32 the number killed since the army launched i
ntensive aerial bombardments on July 8 and a ground
assault that began Thursday. Three civilians have died in
Israel—the latest a worker from Thailand who was killed
Wednesday when a rocket fired from Gaza struck an
agricultural collective in Hof Ashkelon, according to an o
fficial of that region.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said the Palestinian death toll
rose by 72 to 693 killed, with more than 4,200 wounded. The
dead included 166 children and 67 women, it said.
In Geneva, U.N. Human Rights Council voted to open an
inquiry into Israel's military action. The U.S. was alone on
the 47-member council voting against the move.
Mr. Netanyahu's office called the decision "a travesty," reiterating that Hamas and its allies put
Gaza's civilians in harm's way by operating among them.
Hamas's surprising military strength has complicated cease-fire efforts by bolstering the group's
resolve to end Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, its main demand.
As long as Israeli troops had refrained from entering Gaza, Israel's Iron Dome missile defense
system kept most Israelis out of harm's way.
WSJ's Nick Casey provides this first-hand look at a damaged hospital that was struck in Gaza Monday. Israel said fighters from Hamas, the militant group it's been targeting, were storing anti-tank missiles "in the immediate vicinity."
But by launching a ground incursion last week, Israel shifted to terms of engagement and a l
andscape very familiar to Hamas fighters.
Israeli military officials acknowledged this week that the abilities of Hamas's military wing were
unexpected. Hamas fighters are better-equipped and better-trained than in previous clashes in 2009
and 2012, said an Israeli military officer who requested anonymity.
The militants are using a strategy of avoidance, relying on snipers and improvised explosive devices
to hit Israeli forces rather than engaging in face-to-face fighting where they would be at a big
disadvantage, he said. They have infiltrated Israel through five cross-border tunnels, even as the
army moves to destroy others.
Rocket fire from Gaza caused the U.S. and other countries Tuesday to suspend flights to Tel Aviv.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration late Wednesday lifted restrictions on American carriers.
An Israeli tank moves near the border with Gaza on Wednesday. Agence France-
Presse/Getty Images
By standing up to the current Israeli offensive, Hamas has at least for the moment transformed
simmering dissatisfaction among Gazans into anger at their neighbor, interviews with residents of
the coastal strip suggest.
"God bless them for resisting," said Tamer Abu Noquera, a 44-year-old municipal employee in Khan
Younis, who described himself as a critic of Hamas.
Through the first part of this year, Gaza's rulers were losing an estimated $30 million in monthly
revenue from the closure of its tunnels with Egypt, through which it smuggled a wide variety of
consumer goods, a Hamas official said. Its authority at home was under strain.
For Hamas and nearly all Palestinians living in Gaza, ending or softening the blockade of Gaza is a
key to ending the fighting, said Omar Shaban, a Palestinian political scientist from Gaza-based
research group Palthink for Strategic Studies.
"They must be given something they can lose if there is a war," Mr. Shaban said. "Imagine that the
war ends without good conditions in the cease-fire. Then we can simply accept war in another two
years."
—Asa Fitch in Jerusalem contributed to this article.
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