Ranger from the North

John Hinderaker:

This is what happens when you start a war. Hamas’s fighters hide within civilian infrastructure, hospitals being a notorious example, so naturally such infrastructure is damaged. And of course, it is Hamas that has the power to bring destruction and disease to an end by surrendering.

Again, no acknowledgment that Hamas started this war, and that Israel needs to attack Rafah because that is where many thousands of Hamas fighters have now congregated. Can the conflict be ended at this point? Sure, Hamas just needs to surrender. The idea that the hardship that Hamas has brought on its own people somehow requires Israel to accept defeat in the war is ridiculous.

Ed Morrissey:

It has become very clear that Biden's a lot more worried about Dearborn than about the survival of an ally under constant attack for almost two decades by a barbaric terrorist army. The White House has done nothing to demand our own hostages back, or to hold Hamas accountable for kidnapping them while murdering thirty-plus Americans on October 7. It's not the Israelis creating a 'perception of daylight,' but Biden and the rest of the Kabul Bug-Out authors making sure everyone sees the 'daylight' they're creating from Israel.

Make no mistake about the message sent by the UN Security Council. It just voted to vindicate terrorism, human-shield strategies, and hostaging in a breathtaking contradiction to the norms of conflict. Hamas initiated hostilities with the most barbaric large-scale terrorist attack, conducting a planned operation of mass rapes, murders, pillaging, and kidnappings aimed at non-combatants. Rather than demand the return of those kidnapped and a surrender of war criminals as a condition of a cease-fire, the United Nations has instead put the onus on the aggrieved party to stop fighting a war it didn't start in the first place.

These international students, the large majority from countries with little freedom of speech and little or no tradition of academic freedom, are the shock troops of anti-Semitism. True, they bring some leftist students along with them. But the most anti-Semitic universities, like Harvard, Penn and MIT, are also the ones with the most foreign students from anti-Semitic countries. This was illustrated by the fact that when violently anti-Semitic students assaulted Jewish students at MIT, isolating them in the library and trying to break down the doors to get at them, MIT declined to expel the anti-Semitic thugs. Why? For fear that they would be deported.

Abraham Wyner:

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

Via Scott Johnson.

Jazz Shaw:

I have some bad news for Osama Hamdan. This is a war and it's a war that Hamas started. You don't surrender in a war when you are winning. Bibi Netanyahu has been clear about that from the first day of the counteroffensive. Hamas can either surrender en masse or be destroyed. And if that means that Gaza has to be smashed until there are no two stones left standing one atop the other, so be it. If Israel were to evacuate at this point, Hamas would simply start recruiting and rebuilding and they would go back to launching terror attacks against Israel with the full backing of Iran.

It's fairly obvious that Hamas wouldn't even be bothering with these sham negotiations if they didn't offer the chance to buy some time. The terror group is counting on international pressure on Israel and the United States to eventually force Bibi to relent and pull back. Sadly, much of the international press and pro-Hamas activists in America and at the UN are playing into that strategy right on cue. But at least for the time being, Netanyahu is standing strong and refusing to back down.

Ed Morrissey:

This emphasizes a truth about warfare, asymmetrical and otherwise, that keeps getting lost in this conflict in particular. And that truth is: War is hell. That's why people shouldn't start wars, but it's also why wars have to be fought to their conclusion, which is either capitulation or collapse, when the aggressor is determined to annihilate the other through war. Until the full "price" of war is felt by the people who start them, then they will keep starting them as long as they remain in the grip of their annihilationist fantasies. Only when it becomes clear that such wars will result in total destruction short of capitulation will the disincentives against war work properly.

John Hinderaker:

Why 40 hostages? Why not all of them? Why should Israel even discuss a proposal that does not include a total release of kidnap victims? And how about a Hamas surrender? Normally, when a country starts a war and then loses it, if it wants the fighting to stop it has to surrender. It is bizarre that some people take seriously the idea that Hamas should survive the war it foolishly started.

# posted by Ranger @ 1:19 PM