The presumed “imminent” ceasefire in Gaza is imminent no longer. According to The Guardian, negotiations collapsed at the eleventh hour last night as a result of “internal conflicts” on both sides, making a meeting of minds impossible.
While this is bad news for Israel, on whose cities rockets have rained down perpetually ever since the Jewish state agreed to pull its settlements out of Gaza, it is worse news for the Palestinians. Of the roughly 140 casualties that have resulted so far from the current conflict, 135 are on the Palestinian side of the ledger. Worse still, the casualties include children, a fact that pro-Palestinian groups like the Palestinian Center for Human Rights are only too happy to exploit, if not exaggerate, in their coverage of what they term “the Israeli offensive.”
It’s a sad story regardless, but apt to get sadder. As The New York Times reported on Monday, the Palestinians are embracing Hamas more tightly than ever. Daily shows of solidarity with the terrorist group include a new hit song whose lyrics read:
Strike a blow on Tel Aviv!
Don’t let the Zionists sleep! We don’t want a truce or a solution!
Oh, Palestinians, you can be proud!
The words, which apparently come tripping off the tongue, dovetail nicely with Hamas’s charter, which includes this aspirational Hadith, or chant:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.
The Palestinians’ newfound fervor for Hamas’s “protection against the Israeli scourge” is remarkable when you consider were Hamas places its ammunition depots and artillery sites: close to schools, mosques, hospitals, and other venues which ensure that Israeli counterstrikes will inflict maximum collateral damage on the civilian population. The current death toll in Gaza would be much higher were it not for the surgical precision of the Israeli strikes.
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