AP Photo/Fatima Shbair
"I realized that we were in a nightmare, in hell."
The above realization came from Maha, a 34-year-old Palestinian woman from Gaza City, who told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that she was at first "ecstatic" when she learned that "Hamas fighters [were] inside Israeli territory and fighting with all their might." Then reality hit Maha like a ton of bricks:
But as the picture became clearer, and I saw that there were Israeli prisoners, I realized that we were in a nightmare, in hell.
Lesson to be learned: When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
In the aftermath of the brutal terrorist strike by Hamas against Israel, the horror of the barbaric attack left the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with no other viable option than to exact revenge in Gaza, the Hamas haven. As the IDF's relentless counterstrike continues via air, it appeared on Wednesday that Israeli forces were all but ready to launch a ground invasion of the Strip.
An unnamed Israeli official vowed not only that Gaza would be "razed to the ground," but also that the densely-populated Strip will "eventually become a city of tents."
Here's more:
The security official told Channel 13 News no buildings will remain in the region, saying, “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents.”
It comes as tens of thousands of Israeli troops have massed at the border with Gaza in what could presage a sweeping ground invasion of the strip.
Israeli military officials warned they had “created an iron wall of tanks, helicopters and aircraft” around Gaza as they continued to carry out strikes on the region from the air late on Tuesday night.
Maher, a 48-year-old resident of Gaza City, like Maha, was also surprised by the Hamas abduction of Israeli citizens.
I didn’t think for a moment that the attack was planned. But when we learned about the number of fatalities on the Israeli side, we understood that it was a planned operation, and then Hamas issued an official announcement about the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ war.' For the Palestinians in Gaza, the events and the abduction of Israelis were a big surprise.
Still, Maher insisted, Hamas took prisoners "only to force the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.” He explains that this war is intended to “preserve Palestinian national honor.”
Uh-huh. Now do the murder of 40 babies, some of whom were beheaded, Maher. Why did your "heroic fighters" commit those international war crimes, along with allegedly raping women and killing Israelis in front of their families? We'll wait.
Maher predictably played the "This is all Israel's fault" card.
I don’t support Hamas’s positions, but this war is a direct result of the siege on Gaza and the occupation by the enemy. Israel has been occupying our Palestinian lands since 1967. We all know very well that they are not interested in negotiations with the Palestinians. That’s the only option we have left – to fight.
Obscene nonsense.
Honorable fighters fight; abhorrent terrorists commit despicable crimes against humanity.
The Bottom Line
As the world watches the Middle East, Joe Biden — the most incompetent president in U.S. history — try as he might, continues to make a loathsome fool out of himself with respect to the Israel-Hamas War, while far-left congressional Democrats continue to embarrass themselves in all of their anti-Semitic, Palestinian-apologist "glory."
Remember the days when the United States government could be counted on as a voice of reason and steadying force when international crises broke out? Me, too — barely.
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RELATED ARTICLE
BY STEPHEN GREEN | P J MEDIA
AP Photo/Yousef Masoud
When the shock from the Hamas terror invasion of southern Israel wore off, my first thought was, “WTAF were they thinking?” I did not use an acronym. I was in front of my sink, putting toothpaste on my toothbrush, and I just blurted out all the words.
What we’ve learned since Saturday morning’s bloodfest has only grown worse, including reports of 40 murdered babies — several of whom had been beheaded. There are still too many scenes around the West, like Tuesday night in Georgetown, where student protestors could be heard chanting “From the river to the sea” and “Long live the Intifada.” The latter is a call for the murder of Israeli Jews. The former is a call to wipe Israel off the map. But aside from our moral superiors on the Left and their predilection for genocidal antisemites, the moral condemnation from around the world was swift and it is growing.
How bad is it, really? After Hamas bragged that, yes, of course, we got help from Iran — CDR Salamander detailed on Tuesday how Hamas could never have funded such an operation off the backs of poor and oppressed Gazans — Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denied giving Hamas any such help in planning Saturday’s invasion.
Hamas went full ISIS. Don’t they remember what happened to ISIS? Khamenei remembers, and it’s safe to assume he doesn’t want his regime to suffer the same fate that now awaits Hamas.
Gaza “will soon be a tent city,” Israeli Defense Force (IDF) spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Tuesday evening. “That is to make sure that Hamas at the end of this war won’t have any military capabilities by which they can threaten or kill Israeli civilians.”
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told IDF soldiers that Jerusalem has “removed every restriction” on destroying Hamas in comments that came “as Israeli airstrikes hit the family home of Mohammed Deif — the reclusive leader of Hamas’ military wing.”
Hamas wanted an Old Testament war and now they’re going to get one.
WTAF were they thinking?
The same could be asked of al Qaeda in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States was filled “with a terrible resolve,” to borrow a quote from a different war. Whatever the long-term frustrations and failures were with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bill Whittle reminded me during Tuesday’s Right Angle taping that we killed 80,000 jihadis over there instead of over here.
But the most notorious example of “WTAF were they thinking?” occurred on Dec. 7, 1941.
Imperial Japan was outmatched by the U.S. in every way that could matter in a long war. We had more manpower, far more industrial might, and a wealth of natural resources that Tokyo’s militarists could only dream of stealing from somewhere else. Nevertheless, they wanted war with America as part of their imperial ambition to sweep Western colonialists out of Asia and the Pacific and replace them with their own.
Toyko’s Plan A was for a short war. They believed that we had gone soft and that if they sank our fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor, we would sue for peace.
What was Plan B, if Plan A failed to force Washington to the negotiating table?
There was no Plan B.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the devious sneak attack on our forces stationed at Pearl, warned his political masters that the strike would allow him to “run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.”
Not much more than three years after Pearl Harbor, Gen. Curtis Lemay’s B-29 bomber fleet darkened Japan’s skies and burned her cities, nearly unopposed. Admiral Nimitz’s rebuilt navy freely roamed Japan’s coast, with carrier aircraft taking out targets on land at will.
“I fear that all we have done,” Yamamoto is supposed to have said after Pearl Harbor, “is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Indeed. WTAF was Tokyo thinking? WTAF was Hamas thinking?
Hamas started this war in a way that made Yamamoto’s infamous surprise attack look positively tame. Israel has always enjoyed far more combat power than it had ever dared use against a group like Hamas — the IDF had long been the Levant’s sleeping giant. Hamas’ atrocities last weekend ensure that the Palestinians of Gaza will now feel the full and terrible force of an awakened Israel.
