Free Republic

There is a growing consensus in the United States and around the world that the way to end the Israel-Gaza war is to disarm Hamas. President Obama seems to be the only hold-out. On July 24, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a resolution calling on the Obama Administration to make the disarming of Hamas a central part of any cease-fire proposal. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, is spearheading this effort together with Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Ben Cardin of Maryland. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed on July 15 to...

First, the reassuring news: Americans’ pro-Israel sentiments remain near an all-time high, according to Pew’s latest numbers, and CNN measures public support for Israel’s recent actions against Hamas at a robust (57/43). Gallup’s latest nationwide survey, however, shows a much closer split on the righteousness of Israel’s defensive military campaign — although only a fractional minority is willing to defend Hamas’ terror campaign: According to Gallup’s internals, self-identifying Republicans are the primary reason Israel’s actions attract plurality support in this poll. GOP-leaners back Israel’s actions by a whopping 44-point margin; the numbers turn upside-down among independents (-10), and especially...

Americans are divided in their views of whether Israel's actions against the Palestinian group Hamas is "mostly justified" or "mostly unjustified," but they widely view Hamas' actions as mostly unjustified. Those results are similar to what Gallup measured 12 years ago during another period of heightened Israeli-Palestinian violence, and they are consistent with Americans' generally more positive views of the Israelis than of the Palestinians.

Thousands of Hamas-linked terrorists planned to invade Israel on the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), which begins on September 24, according to an Israel security source. First reported by Ma'ariv, then in English by i24news, “thousands of terrorists were meant to cross over to Israel from Gaza through the tunnels and kill and kidnap as many Israelis as they could. The source added that the army learned about the huge planned attack during the interrogations of Hamas prisoners, captured during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.” Reports state that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed his cabinet about the foiled plot...

Tia Goldenberg, Associated PressJuly 25, 2014 A network of tunnels Palestinian militants have dug from Gaza to Israel — dubbed "lower Gaza" by the Israeli military — is taking center stage in the latest war between Hamas and Israel. Gaza's Hamas rulers view them as a military game changer in its conflict with Israel. The Israeli military says the tunnels pose a serious threat and that destroying the sophisticated underground network is a key objective of its invasion of Gaza. Israel has known about the tunnels for several years, but has been hard-pressed to find an effective way to block...

Israel’s Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu revealed on Thursday that Hamas was intending to attack Israel from dozens of tunnels in a coordinated simultaneous attack. At the beginning of Thursday’s special cabinet meeting the prime minister said, “These tunnels enable the enemy to open a multi-pronged offensive and carry out a massive terror attack inside Israel.” The attack Hamas was planning, the officials say, “would have made Israel drop to its knees.” They added that even the tunnels destroyed until now takes away from Hamas a strategic asset the terror group has been working on for years. Hamas has prepared a...

20:37 IST Israeli ministers have rejected ceasefire terms presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Channel 2 reports. The ministerial vote was unanimous, it says. Earlier, it was reported that ministers were adamant that they would not accept a ceasefire that left the threat posed by Hamas’s terror tunnels unresolved.

Channel 10 reports that the diplomatic-security cabinet "flatly rejects" American proposals for a week-long humanitarian halt to fighting.

Sami Turgeman says army has uncovered and is disabling most terror tunnels dug under Israeli border Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip are weakening and losing morale “in all parameters,” the commander of IDF forces in southern Israel said Friday, but added that the troops on the ground needed more time to completely root out terror tunnels burrowing into Israel.

“This was a not-so-subtle message delivered by the el-Sissi regime that the ties between the United States and Egypt have cooled considerably,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TheBlaze on Wednesday. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki brushed off any concerns about the security screening, tweeting that Kerry was focused on the objective of his mission – securing a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. The Jewish-American news site the Algemeiner termed the incident “symbolic,” describing it in part as “humiliation in Egypt.” The International Business Times observed that foreign governments “normally trust U.S....

Diplomatic-security cabinet "flatly rejects" American proposals for a week-long humanitarian halt to fighting, seeks changes to terms. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's security cabinet has rejected proposals for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and is seeking changes to the plans, a government source said on Friday. US Secretary of State John Kerry has been pushing for a halt to 18 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Full details of the proposed truce have not been released, but the government official, who declined to be named, said Israel wanted modifications before agreeing to any end to...

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, calls out CNN’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza as irresponsible and one-sided.

As my colleague, senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak pointed out, Friday afternoon, CNN made a huge deal of Israel rejecting a "cease-fire deal" based on CNN's made-up premise that there was some sort of a deal. Pollak writes quite correctly that "there was no deal, but a mere proposal" and "there was no indication Hamas would agree to the terms." This deal CNN speaks of never existed. CNN is making it up because CNN knows that inaccurately reporting news of Israel walking away from a "deal" will make Israel look unreasonable and villainous. To make matters much, much worse for Israel,...

Secretary of State John Kerry failed on Friday to achieve a ceasefire between Israel and forces loyal to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s Security Cabinet unanimously rejected the latest ceasefire proposal, which called for only a week-long cessation of hostilities. This is only the latest in a series of ceasefire proposals advanced by the United States and its regional allies the either Israel or Hamas have rejected. “The agony of events on the ground in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, all of them together, simply cannot be overstated,” Kerry said in a statement in Cairo on Friday announcing...

Amidst news the Israelis have turned down secretary of State Kerry’s latest, apparently Qatar-inspired, ceasefire, not to mention the other day’s nauseatingly familiar anti-Israel fusillade from the mega-Orwellian UN Human Rights Council, comes word that Hamas had been planning a gigantic attack on Israel this September via its dozens of tunnels.From the Gatestone Institute [1]: Hamas had apparently been preparing a murderous assault on Israeli civilian targets for the coming Jewish New Year Holiday, Rosh Hashanah, which begins on September 24, according anonymous sources in the Israeli security services, as reported today [2] by the Israeli daily Maariv.The Hamas...

IDF Opens Hospital for Palestinians, Hamas Prevents Access The IDF has opened a temporary hospital for Palestinians on the Israeli side of the Erez Crossing. Even as terrorists fire rockets at Israel, the hospital is treating wounded civilians in cooperation with the Red Crescent. Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza, has prevented Palestinians from entering Israel in order to reach the hospital.Click for video: Israeli doctors treat wounded Palestinians at an IDF hospital near Gaza.

Egypt's Air Sinai has continued its scheduled flights to Israel, despite the cancellation of flights by numerous American and European airlines, according to Calcalist. The Egyptian carrier runs four weekly flights to Ben-Gurion International Airport. The decision to continue flying to Israel must have been made at the highest echelons, and is meant to send a message to Hamas, which Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi regards with disdain, Calcalist reported. The Egyptian decision has prompted harsh criticism by many Arab web users on social networks.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary of State John Kerry and the foreign ministers of Great Britain and France all are rushing to achieve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Their motive — to end civilian suffering and restore stability to the area — is noble. The images of the wounded and dead resulting from the conflict are indeed agonizing. However, these senior statesmen can be most helpful now by doing nothing. To preserve the values they cherish and to send an unequivocal message to terrorist organizations and their state sponsors everywhere, Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas in...

Hamas is not an isolated player. It is part of a Muslim Brotherhood regional alliance bankrolled by the Emirate of Qatar. The last year has not been good for this alliance. In 2011-12, they were riding high. They had come to power in Egypt and in Tunisia and seemed fairly placed to triumph in Syria too. Hamas elected to back what looked like an emergent Muslim Brotherhood power bloc – and drew away from its alliance with Iran. Not much is left of all that. Egypt and Tunisia are gone. In Syria, only the regime, Islamic State and the Kurds...

Slandered, despised, insulted, degraded, Israel is nonetheless winning its war against Hamas. The number of rocket attacks launched by the terror group each day has been halved. The IDF is uprooting the underground tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle weapons, contraband, and terrorists in and out of the Gaza Strip. On Wednesday evening, Israel’s Channel Two newscast carried footage of Hamas terrorists surrendering to the IDF. The jihadists carried white flags. They stripped to their shorts, proving they were not wearing suicide belts. These are facts Hamas does not want you to know, images Hamas does not want you to see....