All posts tagged: Hamas terrorists

Foreign Office staff told to not describe Hamas as ‘terrorists’ | Politics | News

Foreign Office staff told to not describe Hamas as ‘terrorists’ | Politics | News

Published by skeptic

Foreign Office officials were told describing Hamas as “terrorists” was an “obstacle to peace” during a training session. Civil servants were also told Israel was a “white, settler colonialist nation”, according to whistleblowers. The Foreign Office has said many of the views expressed in the meeting are “wrong” and do not reflect the Government’s position. Academics from King’s College, London, led the training seminar at the Foreign Office’s headquarters in Whitehall, according to The Jewish Chronicle (JC). One expert is reported to have told attendees that there could be “no future without Hamas”, the same publication reports. Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Britain as well as in the European Union and in countries including the United States. Membership and expressing support for the group is llegal in the UK and punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The seminar was attended by around 100 government officials, mainly online via a security vetted Microsoft Teams network, according to the JC. Several speakers are reported to have told officials that Hamas’s political wing …

The GOP’s Great Betrayal on Ukraine Aid

The GOP’s Great Betrayal on Ukraine Aid

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On January 17, House Speaker Mike Johnson led a candlelight vigil at the Capitol to mark the recent passing of the 100th day of hostage-holding by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Members of Congress assembled shoulder to shoulder with families of hostages. The Republican speaker delivered a heartfelt speech. “We must stand together in solidarity with the Jewish people,” he said. “And we will, from the synagogues in Brooklyn to the country churches of my home in northwest Louisiana, from the Senate to the House—we support Israel, believing that we can overcome the darkness with light.” This weekend, Congress sees another 100-day anniversary go by—this one dating from when President Joe Biden requested $106 billion in emergency defense aid for Israel and Ukraine, as well as additional funding for border enforcement. For those 100 days, Congress has refused to act on Biden’s request. The main obstacle is the House of Representatives, and within the House, the pro-Trump MAGA caucus that toppled the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. The MAGA caucus then vetoed McCarthy’s most eligible successors, eventually …

Israel After Netanyahu – The Atlantic

Israel After Netanyahu – The Atlantic

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It was October 7, and men with guns were hunting Nir Gontarz’s son. Amir, age 23, had been at the music festival that was ambushed by Hamas terrorists from the air. Now he was on the run, sending panicked messages to his father. A professional journalist, Nir tried calling the usual sources for help—politicians, the army, the police. He soon realized that no rescue was coming. Then, scrolling through live updates from the scene of the slaughter on social media, he saw a photograph of someone he thought might be able to help. Yair Golan, a 61-year-old ex-general and former leftist politician, had no business being in the war zone. But there he was, on site, in his old uniform. In desperation, Nir called Golan’s mobile and explained his son’s predicament. The general’s response: “Send me his location and I will bring him to you.” Half an hour later, Nir received another clipped message: “Link-up in one minute. Don’t worry.” Nir’s son was safe. Amir Gontarz wasn’t the only one Golan rescued that day. He …

We Must Not Forget the Hostages

We Must Not Forget the Hostages

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A truism of national security is that leaders constantly face a dilemma in which neither choice is good. In wartime especially, that choice can be excruciating. Today, Israel’s leaders confront just such a challenge: hostages. Hamas has imposed a war on Israel, one set in motion by the gruesome atrocities committed by the Gaza-based Islamist group. In the October 7 attack, Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,300 Israelis in their homes, at their workplaces, and at a music festival, riddling babies with bullets and mutilating bodies of others; they took scores of survivors back to Gaza as hostages. Amid the horror and carnage, those hostages must not be overlooked or forgotten. Israel’s ethos has always been shaped by a sense that its enemies—seeking the Jewish state’s destruction—must understand that for any cost they might impose, they will pay 50-fold. But another part of that ethos insists that no Israeli is abandoned. That instinctive mindset has in the past produced a number of prisoner swaps, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision in 2011 to trade more …

What Hamas Wants – The Atlantic

What Hamas Wants – The Atlantic

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“Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?” That was the question posed by the headline of a Vanity Fair exposé published in October 2014. The investigative report laid out a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border. The plan: to use underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when the communities would be at their most vulnerable. As one intelligence source put it, the operation had two goals: “First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.” The Israel Defense Forces subsequently confirmed this reporting to other media outlets, but not the specific date. The tunnels were real. But at the time the massacre-that-wasn’t received little additional media coverage. It seemed too cinematic and convenient. Maybe it was a Hamas pipe dream that was never operational. Or maybe it was a worst-case scenario concocted …

Why Did Hamas Choose Now to Attack Israel?

Why Did Hamas Choose Now to Attack Israel?

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A U.S. intelligence officer once told me that his boss would often send back his reports about Iranian terror operations with one crucial question: Why now? Why were the Iranians hatching this particular plot now, instead of last year or five years in the future? This question is good, and the answer is the beginning of any good strategic analysis. But the analyst was frustrated. Even in intelligence, it is possible to overthink things. “Why now?” he said. “Because they are a fucking terrorist group. And all they do, every day, is think of ways to kill Americans and our allies. Sometimes that’s all there is to it.” Hours after Hamas broke through the Gaza barrier, I asked whether we were witnessing Step One of a plan that would perhaps involve Hezbollah and a front in the north—and even further moves that would threaten to break Israeli defenses altogether. Israel rapidly reinforced its northern border to prevent that, and according to reports, Hezbollah was warned that any shenanigans would be answered with the leveling of …

‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’

‘Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.’

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The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family were trapped inside a safe room in their house on the Israel-Gaza border when they heard gunshots outside. Tibon speaks Arabic, so he knew what was happening. Hamas terrorists had somehow made it into their Israeli village. Tibon spoke with me and my colleague Yair Rosenberg about the experience, and in this episode of Radio Atlantic we hear Tibon’s story—hiding out with his two young children, their improbable rescue—and his first, raw thoughts about why this happened to them. Listen to the conversation here: The following is a transcript of the episode: Amir Tibon: Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle. It’s almost like this [whistles]. Hanna Rosin: Amir Tibon lives in a community in Israel, right near the Gaza border. Mortars fly overhead once in a while, but the family has a routine for that. Amir, his wife, and their two young girls go to a reinforced safe room …

Amir Tibon on How His Family Survived the Hamas Massacre

Amir Tibon on How His Family Survived the Hamas Massacre

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When I first heard that Israeli civilians were being massacred on the country’s Gaza border, I thought of my friend Amir Tibon. Amir is an exceptionally talented journalist who is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and has devoted his life and skills to humanistic coverage of what can often be a dehumanizing region. His writing includes award-winning reporting on efforts to achieve a two-state solution and a biography of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. On Sunday, I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. That’s because Tibon lives in Nahal Oz, a small community bordering Gaza that has no Iron Dome missile defense to protect it. On Saturday, it came under mortar fire from above and was invaded on the ground by Hamas terrorists. During their incursion into Israel, they murdered more than 900 Israelis, while brutalizing and kidnapping many others, most of them civilians. The death toll is continuing to rise. Tibon and his family survived the indiscriminate slaughter, but only after enduring a horrifying ordeal. Just before he put his two …

Images of the Mass Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas

Images of the Mass Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas

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More accounts are emerging of kidnappings, rapes, and torture committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. So far, at least 150 Israelis, most of them apparently civilians, were kidnapped by Hamas gunmen and stolen across Israel’s border with Gaza. Among the kidnapped are elderly women and small children. Human rights groups are tracking these kidnappings as evidence of war crimes. Within hours of the attacks on Saturday, photos and videos began to circulate showing the mass murder of Israeli civilians—including people killed in their cars, and left dead on the ground in the streets and at a bus stop—as well as the kidnapping of children, young women, and the elderly. Two widely circulated videos have sparked outrage because of the  the apparent sexual assaults they depict, the Times of Israel reports. One video shows a woman who appears to have been beaten and who seems to be bleeding into her shorts being forced out of a Jeep in Gaza. The other video shows a woman, later identified by her family as 22-year-old Shani Louk, stripped …