Israeli troops are poised to enter Gaza, but Western governments are encouraging delay:
The US and several European governments are quietly pushing Israel to hold off on launching a ground invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s release of two hostages, fearing that the incursion will all but scuttle efforts to secure additional releases for the foreseeable future, a senior diplomatic official told The Times of Israel.
The Western governments currently pressuring Israel each have citizens among those unaccounted for and believe that the more time that passes, the harder it will be to secure the hostages’ release, the official said.
The senior diplomatic official said that the governments recognize that a ground invasion is very likely and are not telling Israel not to launch one at all, but rather hold off to try and see if additional diplomatic efforts can succeed.
Hamas, playing Joe Biden like a violin–not that that is difficult–released two American hostages, giving Biden a foreign policy “victory.” But the reality is that the fate of all of the kidnap victims is in the hands of Hamas. There is no point is allowing the terrorists to manipulate Israeli policy.
Israel’s first order of business should be exacting revenge against Gaza for the horrors of October 7. Most if not all of Gazan society has collaborated with Hamas over nearly two decades to turn that polity into the most hellish place on Earth, with a culture that is utterly dominated by Jew-hatred. Killing all the Jews between the river and the sea has long been the sole goal of Gaza’s foreign and domestic policies.
After World War II, many Germans claimed that they didn’t know about the Holocaust. Some of them may have been telling the truth. On the other hand, no one who lives in Gaza can have been ignorant of that polity’s genocidal purposes. Further, while Hamas, like the Nazi Party, is the duly elected government of Gaza, Hamas actually got a majority of the vote, which the Nazis never did. So Gazan “civilians,” assuming there are any, need to experience the full wrath of Israel’s revenge. The situation is the same as what obtained in Germany in 1945: Gazans need to experience the full horror of war, so that the survivors’ memories of October 7 will always provoke a shudder, and no Gazan will ever again propose wiping out the Jews.
So, yes, Israel must kill everyone who is associated with Hamas in any way, so that that organization will never rise again. But the first order of business should be revenge against the Gazans who for years have been working to exterminate Israel’s Jews. And it should begin now.
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