Tag Archives: Ismail Haniyeh

Taking Out The Leadership

Posted on by

Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, was killed early Wednesday morning in Tehran according to The New York Post. He was in Tehran Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president. Ismail Haniyeh moved to Qatar in 2019, having lived in the Gaza Strip previously. Qatar has generally been the safe haven for many of the Hamas leaders, so why are they playing a role in the peace negotiations with Israel?

The article reports:

Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas officials, was was killed in Iran by an alleged airstrike carried out by Israel at his Tehran residence on July 31, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president.

Born in the then Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip in 1963, Haniyeh had been a prominent member of Hamas since the 1980s and, in 1989, spent three years imprisoned by Israel during the first Palestinian uprising.

Upon his return to Gaza in 1997 after spending years in exile with other Hamas leaders, Haniyeh was appointed leader and President of the Political Bureau of Hamas, solidifying his influence and power within the organization.

In 2006, President Mahmoud Abbas appointed Haniyeh as Palestinian prime minister after Hamas won the most seats in national elections. He was then elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017 and was widely considered Hamas’s overall leader until his death.

Before the killing, Israel vowed to eliminate Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders following the terror group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state where 1,200 people were killed.

An Israeli airstrike killed three of Haniyeh’s sons and four of his grandchildren, who were traveling in a car through Gaza’s Shati refugee camp to visit family on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Fitr in April 2024.

A controlled strike taking out senior leadership is probably a good way to deal with Hamas. False claims of genocide against Israel make actually eliminating the problem difficult.

 

Things That Make Middle East Peace Difficult

Posted on by

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article yesterday about the collapse of an underground tunnel going into Israel that was being repaired. The article reminds us that in the last Israeli war, Israel destroyed thirty or more tunnels built by Hamas for terror attacks into Israel. The collapse of the tunnel as it was being repaired killed seven Hamas members.

The article reports what was said at the funeral of these Hamas members. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s deputy chief, said:

There are heroes east of Gaza City, digging the rocks and building tunnels. And west of Gaza, heroes are testing rockets every morning and every day and it is all preparations.

Under the ground and above the ground, in tunnels and above the ground and into the sky, with rockets and in the sea and everywhere, it is the permanent preparation for the sake of Jerusalem and Palestine, and for the sake of the intifada of Jerusalem and the sake of our people.

If the people who are supposed to negotiate peace are celebrating people who were killed repairing a tunnel to be used for terrorism, the chances of actually negotiating anything that would result in peace are slim to none.

Just as a side note, the crowds for the funeral of the Hamas members were so large that people were standing on a roof to see the funeral procession. The roof collapsed.

Until Hamas terrorists are no longer celebrated, there is no reason Israel should even consider making peace with the ‘Palestinians.’ Thus far, giving up land for peace has only provided Hamas with more places to launch rockets against Israel and build terrorist tunnels. Why in the world should they be given more land in the name of peace?

Don’t Believe Everything You See

Posted on by

One of the things that happens when there is a war in the Middle East is that the war is always fought on two fronts–the military front and the propaganda front. Unfortunately, the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends in Hamas are very skillful in manipulating the press.

Yesterday Breitbart.com reported that a report on CNN by Sara Sidner on the death of a child in Gaza strongly implied that Israel rocket fire was responsible for the fatality. New information shows that was probably not the case.

The article at Breitbart reports:

The dead child was paraded before the cameras during the visit of Egyptian prime minister Hisham Kandil, who kissed the dead child in the presence of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.

The first problem with this is that Israel did not fire any rockets into Gaza during the visit of Prime Minister Kandil–the only rockets in the air were coming from Gaza going into Israel. The second problem is that the Palestinian Center for Human Rights did not list the child as a victim of an Israeli airstrike.

The article quotes a website called the Elder of Ziyon who provides further information:

Put this together with the fact that Hamas and other terror groups were firing rockets throughout Friday morning while the IDF did not, plus the fact that over 100 rockets have fallen short in Gaza (both using past performance and IDF statistics as proof), and the fact that the shrapnel in the video matches almost exactly the shrapnel damage we have seen from rocket fire into Israel, and it is very clear: this child was killed by Gaza rocket fire, not by Israel.

Unfortunately, there is a history of Hamas faking civilian deaths in an attempt to move public opinion to their side.

The article article cites one example:

Hamas has a well-established pattern of faking civilian deaths in Gaza, even as it seeks civilian deaths in Israel (and fakes that, too, pretending it is firing at military targets). Last week, Breitbart News caught Hamas using a month-old photo of a dead Syrian boy and claiming he had been killed by Israel–a double irony, since the Assad regime that killed the boy hosted Hamas for years before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.

The thing to remember about the missiles from Israel that are landing in Gaza is the reason they are being fired.

CBN News reported today:

Hundreds of Israelis gathered to pray for their country as Hamas continued to launch rockets into Israel and the Israeli Air Force carried out strikes on terror targets.

The terrorist group intensified its missile barrages against southern Israel over the weekend. More than 560 rockets have slammed into Israel so far, with another 300-plus intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile batteries.

The rockets fired from Gaza are aimed at civilian targets in Israel. Those rockets are fired from civilian centers–near mosques and schools–using civilians as shields. The Israelis have to aim carefully to avoid civilian casualties–they are not always successful. Hamas is aiming at civilian targets. This will not end until Hamas stops firing missiles into Israel. Unfortunately, they may not be ready to do that.

Enhanced by Zemanta