Stop blaming Israel for Gaza's humanitarian crisis.
And a humanitarian crisis, while disheartening, is not anywhere near the same as genocide or ethnic cleansing.
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The cries for Israel to end its response to the Hamas-led Palestinian terror attacks on October 7th are growing by the hour.
Some politicians and bureaucrats are more subtle about faulting Israel for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Others are more explicit, like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who on Monday said that “what’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s a genocide” which “hasn’t happened at any other moment in history” except one time: “when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”
Never mind the perverse psychological manipulation of using the Jews’ worst atrocity against the Jewish state. The point is, while Israel’s operations in Gaza have created rampant destruction and thousands of deaths, the Jewish state is — on the whole — not in any way, shape, or form to blame for it.
If anything, the Israelis should be given a standing ovation for the humanitarian measures they have implemented in Gaza, such as:
Assisting Gazans with evacuations and protecting humanitarian corridors with tanks and soldiers
Delivering tons of aid to the strip’s hospitals
Agreeing to inspect more aid and opening an additional border crossing for it
Taking a plethora of precautions before and during airstrikes
There was a remarkable report in last weekend’s edition of Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, which said that, just days after the October 7th attacks, American three-star Marine Lieutenant General James Glynn showed up in Israel to advise the Jewish state on its strategy.
A ground operation in Gaza, the Americans said, was too costly and not worth the squeeze. They predicted a dire 20 Israeli deaths each day. As of today, the actual number is less than two per day. Meanwhile, on the Palestinian side, Israel has achieved an unworldly combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio, which is believed to be approximately one-to-one.
“Even if we were to take Hamas’ statistics as accurate — and there is no reason why we should, because we don’t do that with Putin or ISIS — war is hell and every individual civilian death is a tragedy,” said Andrew Roberts, a British member of parliament. “But speaking as a military historian, less than two-to-one is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare, where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields. And it’s a testament to the professionalism, ethics, and values of the Israel Defense Forces.”
John Spencer, who served for more than 25 years in the U.S. military, reaching the rank of major, asserted that “Israel has taken more steps to avoid harming civilians than any other military in history,” adding that such lengths would set a new standard that other Western militaries would struggle to follow in the future.1
Amid a myriad of other baseless accusations, people have claimed that Israel cut the water supply to Gaza. In reality, the Israelis simply redirected the water they provide to Gaza (despite having no international obligation to do so) to the southern part of the strip because it became more crowded with evacuees.
If you want to know why some Gazans lack access to good water, a Hamas propaganda video shows the terror group bragging about their “ingenuity” by literally cutting water pipes, donated by Europe, out of the ground. Why? You know, to manufacture more rockets.
There are also the multitude of United Nations agencies and bureaucrats who continue to fault Israel for the lack of humanitarian aid entering Gaza. For months now, COGAT (Israel’s liaison for civilians in the Palestinian territories) has been documenting that various humanitarian agencies continue to demonstrate an inability, incompetence, or unwillingness to distribute the aid throughout Gaza. Seemingly endless amounts of it are sitting in parking lots in the strip, already checked by Israel, waiting to be brought to Gazan civilians.
Of course, this is just the tip of the embarrassing iceberg for the UN. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing intelligence, recently said that more than 30 staffers from the notorious UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) participated in the October 7th terror attacks, that 185 UNRWA employees are known to be active in Hamas’ military wing, and that more than a thousand UNRWA workers are connected to Palestinian terror groups.
But hey, that is not even the worst of it. Last week the IDF found a Hamas data center directly under UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza, yet UNRWA claimed it knew nothing about it. Really? How stupid do they think the world is to believe that you do not know what the hell is happening under one of your billion-dollar organization’s most important buildings?
“UNRWA paid the electric bills for Hamas’ cyber command,” one Twitter user joked.2
Furthermore, UNRWA insisted that they rigorously vet Gazan staff according to the UN list of terrorist groups. There is just one totally insignificant minor detail: The UN does not classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. In the gracious words of Martin Griffiths, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator:
“Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course as you know. It is a political movement.”
Many countries have paused funding to UNRWA (or so they said), prompting many of the people who once called to “defund the police” in their countries, to profusely advocate for restoring funding to UNRWA — a level of hypocrisy that defies even the most basic logic and reason.
This week, the Washington Post exposed evidence of Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami, a UNRWA social worker by profession. On October 7th, he took a road trip into Israel’s Kibbutz Be’eri with a friend wielding a semi-automatic rifle, and the two were recorded on camera carrying a dead Israeli’s body toward a car.
“I wonder if abduction of Israelis comes in the job description of an UNRWA social worker?” asked one Twitter user.3
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini did not comment on the Washington Post’s report, probably because it implicates the UN in what appears to be a systemic leadership failure and results in subordinating UNRWA to Hamas’ diabolical forces.
Lazzarini and his colleagues only talk when they have comments about Israel, such as the remarks this week that the Jewish state has been waging “an expanded, concerted campaign aimed at destroying UNRWA” which is “a long-term political goal because it is believed that if the aid agency is abolished, the status of the Palestinian refugees will be resolved once and for all — and with it, the right of return. There is a much larger political goal behind this.”4
It is one thing to keep quiet about damning, credible allegations about the agency you run. It is a whole other thing, and nothing short of fraudulent, to victim-blame Israel for, at best, your inexplicable negligence, and at worst, your conscious complicity. But such is the UN, a deeply troubled, corrupt, outdated, and unethical organization.
This is why I contend that the UN, its agencies like the World Court and World Health Organization, the countries that fund the UN, and the people who donate money to Palestinian “humanitarian” organizations which are actually farces for terrorism fundraising — all of these people are among those chiefly responsible for the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Then there is the Israel’s so-called friends in the U.S. government, which have put Israel in impossible predicaments. I am old enough to remember when former President Barack Obama demanded that members of the Muslim Brotherhood be provided seats at his “New Beginnings” speech in Egypt in 2009, thus elevating this fascist, antisemitic organization’s stature over that of former Egyptian President Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, who refused to attend (probably fearing for his life).
Despite Obama preaching about democracy and freedom in this speech, a few weeks afterward he refused to support the Iranian “Green Movement” which calls for democracy and peaceful change in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Again Obama chose to side with fascist antisemites, and yet again in 2011, when he allowed Jew-hating Egyptian President Mohamed Mohamed Morsi Eissa al-Ayyat to transfer of weapons from Egypt to Hamas in Gaza.
Speaking of the Egyptians, they have been preparing for the worst-case scenario in Rafah, the southern Gaza city on the border of Egypt, in which Israel is planning a major operation to dismantle what the Israelis claim are a quarter of Hamas’ battalions there.5
This “worst-case scenario” is the possible breakout of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula following the IDF operation in Rafah, despite Israel’s promises to Egypt and the U.S. that the operation in Rafah will only be done after evacuating more than a million displaced people and moving them to the center of the strip.
But instead of allowing the Palestinians to shelter in the vast Sinai desert after the Israel-Hamas war broke out (which Hamas started), the Egyptian army has reportedly started construction work in eastern Sinai through a contracting company, in order to create a safe area isolated from the Gaza border that can receive as many as 300,000 displaced persons in the event of mass migration potentially resulting from IDF activities in Rafah.
Egypt also advanced a tank battalion to the area to deter displaced Palestinians from breaching the border fence. A few years ago, the Egyptian army opened fire on Palestinians who tried to break through the border fence, but it will have difficulty stopping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with live fire, unless Egypt wants to commit mass murder while the world is watching.
To summarize: The Egyptians are only interested in helping the Palestinians with temporary shelter if the Palestinians dangerously succeed in illegally passing into Egypt and somehow overcome the Egyptian tank battalion that is awaiting them. What great humanitarian work.
Much of this lunacy is fueled by the media, which wants us to naively think that they are a responsible, non-biased, well-intentioned group of people who uphold only the most sincerest values of “the Fourth Estate.”
In reality, the media is mostly a group that I call “the scribes.” It is just a lot of people who, frankly, do not have a clue about what they do and say. As Ernie Adams, Director of Football Research for the New England Patriots, says: “If you’re not in the building, you don’t really know.”6
For example, the media keeps telling us about the number of innocent Palestinian deaths, which is fine, but why don’t they also mention the scores of Palestinians who have survived because Israel has taken unbelievable measures to protect them? Could it be that much of the media ranges from inept to unmindful? Or could it be that they are covertly rooting for one of the sides? No less, for the world’s fifth-most active terror group?
Finally, there are the Palestinians themselves. I am not victim-blaming and I have no doubt that there are thousands of them who are truly innocent, uninvolved, and helpless.
But there is also a weighty group of them who have helped turned Gaza into an Islamic jihadist fortress predominantly using civilian infrastructure. And we know that Gazans are dying, at least in part, because Palestinian terrorists use their own people as human shields, and because their launched rockets indiscriminately intended for Israel oftentimes don’t make it out of Gaza.
Yet so many people are acting (implicitly or explicitly) like every single death is Israel’s fault. When civilians volunteer to be human shields, they automatically become legitimate military targets according to international law. In many cases, they are used as human shields against their own will, which is a gross violation of international law. (But it was Israel, not Hamas, that was brought in front of the World Court.)
Patients at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, for instance, reportedly died due to a power outage that began as the IDF entered the complex, which was being used to host hostages and for Palestinian terrorists to seek shelter. The IDF has routinely offered humanitarian aid to each hospital it is forced to raid and orders evacuations to protect innocents. Hamas, meanwhile, relies on civilian casualties for Western sympathy. Who do you think cut the power?
“Israel still has my full support to fight, as long as it takes, until the last Hamas terrorist is taken out,” said Hussain Abdul-Hussain, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “If the world wants to spare Palestinian lives, let it convince Hamas to surrender. Hamas is a cancer. Its existence threatens Israel and Arabs and Muslims equally. Decimating Hamas should have been the job of Arabs and Muslims, but when we don’t do it, someone else will have to.”7
The other story we can reasonably tell is that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas, according to a variety of recent polls from different sources, to the same degree and in the same way the Germans supported the Nazis. But, when allied troops entered Germany, the townsfolk removed their German flags and said in unison that they are not Nazis.
The idea that all Palestinians are innocent, uninvolved, and helpless is part of some twisted calculus that ignores both an extensive amount of history and the present-day reality. Some (hopefully most) are innocent, uninvolved, and helpless, and if you want to support them, consider listening to the advice of Israeli Arab, Jonathan Elkhoury:
“You need to know what you are calling for. Because, as of right now, the support that you’re calling for is support for the Hamas terrorist organization. And Hamas not only oppresses their own people, the Palestinians, but they also oppress minorities. I’m not only talking about the LGBTQ-plus people, but also Christians that are suffering from Hamas’ rule since 2007 when they took power, and also other Muslims who do not believe in the way that Hamas operates.”
“Hamas makes sure that minorities under their rule are not able to live as who they are. And this is what you are calling for — the continuation of a terrorist regime that oppresses its own people. It is also making the lives of Israelis miserable. Is this what you are calling for? Does one people’s freedom mean another people’s destruction? Because your call is doing just that.”8
And yet, so many people are not accusing Hamas of attempting to commit genocide, when it is in the terror group’s public charter that they desire to deliberately kill as many Israelis and Jews as possible.
“We don’t even need to accuse Hamas because they admit that they are genocidal enterprise. They admit that their October 7th attacks were motivated by genocidal aims. They are backed by the Iranian government, which seeks to annihilate the entire Jewish People,” said Pierre Poilievre, a Canadian politician.
There is another way to think about all of this, as Dr. Barry Tigay, a retired psychologist and entrepreneur, so eloquently put it:
“If Hamas had not perpetrated the worst atrocities imaginable against Israel; if Egypt and other countries had opened their borders to allow displaced Gazans a place of refuge; if UNRWA, the UN, and human rights organizations had stood up to genocidal Hamas instead of supporting them; if Gazans had refused to be subjugated by radical Islamists; if world leaders actually led in support of human rights and humane values, things could have been different.”
“But we live in a world of corruption, weakness, antisemitism, tribalism, and failures. Of all the malign, compromised forces operating in the Middle East, Israel is the most true, brave, and right.”9
“Urban warfare expert says Israeli military taking unprecedented steps to protect Gaza civilians.” Fox News.
AIPAC on X
Lt. Col. (R) Peter Lerner on X
Tamedia
Yoni Ben Menachem
“The Dynasty: New England Patriots” on Apple TV+
Hussain Abdul-Hussain on X
Jonathan Elkhoury on Instagram
Barry Tigay on X
Brilliant article. Should be compulsory reading material for all politicians. As for the UN, Israel must expell every single one of them. As for the Palestinians I care as much about their welfare as the Muslim world cares about the welfare of Israelis and Jews worldwide. There should be no aid, no water, no food, no medicine, no power entering Gaza until the Hamas nazis release the hostages and surrender.
The FACTS defend Israel. LIES accuse Israel.