This could be exactly what Israel needs to quell the inane calls for an immediate ceasefire.

Hamas will be unable to honor Israel’s gift.  They don’t care about humanitarian aid, or those suffering at their hands.  Either Israeli or Arab.  Once they’ve violated the 3 hour suspension, the PR War will again swing against them…. for a day or so.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israel announced Wednesday, Jan. 7 a three-hour daily halt in military operations from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. as a goodwill gesture for the passage of humanitarian aid. Israel will suspend attacks in certain areas – though not the entire territory - to allow people to get supplies. The measure takes immediate effect.

UPDATE:

From: Ynetnews.com

A number of reports from the Strip paint a picture of very difficult humanitarian conditions, not least because of Hamas itself. The suspicion is that the group’s operatives have seized control of any supplies passing through the crossings – including those sent by Israel and international organizations.

Reports say Hamas takes a cut out of all aid that arrives, including flour and medicine. Supplies intended to be distributed without gain among the population are seized by the group and sold to the residents, at a profit to the Hamas government.

One such incident was recorded Monday, when a convoy of trucks carrying supplies through the Kerem Shalom crossing was opened fire upon and seized by Hamas gunmen. Similar incidents occurred with trucks carrying fuel.

It seems U.S. Diplomats, at the U.N., are still suffering from a rare occurrence of Common Sense.  Let’s hope it’s chronic…

From: NewsMax

Despite intense pressure from a group of Arab dignitaries at United Nations headquarters, the Bush administration refused to climb on board a growing movement to cease or at least suspend its support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad met for almost two hours with a group of Arab foreign ministers who had traveled to NYC to get some movement from the United Nations on the Gaza crisis.

The group, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had been lobbying various UN bodies since early morning.

While expressing “sympathy” for the Arab position, diplomats say Khalilzad held firm on the White House demand that any halt to the Israeli invasion not simply amount to a breather for Hamas to re-arm.

Exiting his meeting with the Arab ministers, Khalilzad expressed concern that any action the Security Council takes does not repeat the mistakes made in the Lebanon in 2006.

Intelligence sources claim that Hezbollah used its truce with Israel to more than double its stockpile of mortars and missiles.

“We saw in Lebanon that the ceasefire was violated and used to re-arm. We don’t want to see it happen again.” [...]  (emphasis added)

Enough said…

Bolton 2012

The diplomacy he favors is exactly what Condi Rice has been pursuing for years.

“Present the Iranian regime with a clear choice” by using carrots and sticks to induce Iran to give up its nuclear aspirations. What does Mr. Obama think Mr. Bush and the Europeans have been doing? Does he really think his smooth talking will achieve more than Europe’s smoothest talkers, who were in fact talking for us the whole time?

[...]  Read the whole article at WSJ.

Get these people a few airplanes, headed for Gaza.  Throw them a party.  And once the planes are in the air, shoot them down.

From: JihadWatch

They call them “martyrdom operations,” of course, and to call them that is entirely Qur’anically correct in light of the verse that guarantees Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). But that verse also, and the promise it conveys, should keep at the forefront of our minds the fact that when Iran boasts of signing students up for “martyrdom,” they are actually signing them up to die while committing mass murder.

An update on this story. “Over 70,000 students sign up for martyrdom operation list,” from IRNA, January 5 (thanks to Sr. Soph):

Tehran, Jan 5, IRNA — More than 70,000 students from universities throughout Iran have signed up on the list to conduct ‘Esteshhadi’ (martyrdom seeking)operations.Announcing this at a press conference on Monday, Director of the Public Relations Department at Students’ Basij Organization Esmaeel Ahmadi said that the students will act as part of Esteshhadi battalions….

Yes, you read that correctly.  AntiWar protest.

If Israel agrees to a ceasefire will Hamas, before removing them from power and killing significant numbers of their fighters, then Israel will suffer the same fate as the 2006 Lebanon fiasco.  The U.N. and the global community will allow Hamas to regroup, rearm, and expand their power.

From: Gateway Pundit

They want the war to stop in Gaza.
But, that doesn’t mean they necessarily want peace.

People in Lebanon stage a rally in front of the US embassy and a sit-in outside the UN building in Beirut to decry Zionists’ slaughtering of innocent people in Gaza Strip. (Fars News)

People in Lebanon stage a rally in front of the US embassy and a sit-in outside the UN building in Beirut to decry Zionists’ slaughtering of innocent people in Gaza Strip. (Fars News)

They also hauled out the grenade launchers. (Fars News)

Israeli troops have begun to advance into Gaza.  Good hunting to the men and women of the IDF.

And on a more comical note…. From: Gateway Pundit

A Hamas spokesman said tonight that the terror group had repelled an Israeli advance into Gaza.
The Khaleej Times reported:

The armed wing of Hamas said on Saturday its fighters had repelled a patrol of Israeli special forces troops trying to cross the border into the Gaza Strip.

A spokesman for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades told AFP that fighters spotted an unspecified number of special forces trying to enter the Shijaiyah border neighbourhood of eastern Gaza City at around 1 am (2300 GMT Friday).

He said the fighters fired six mortar rounds at the Israelis, who returned fire with small arms and retreated. He said there were no casualties.

A spokesman told AFP the Israeli army was “not familiar with the incident,” adding that no soldiers had crossed into Gaza since the beginning of Israel’s air campaign against Hamas on December 27.

Ir reality, Hamas are cowards.  When they’re not rioting in the streets, using women and children as shields, or targeting Israeli civilians with rocket and mortar attacks, they’re hiding like children.

Hamas is only strong when Israel is bound by a ceasefire.  Once the IDF is on the scene, Hamas couldn’t repel a ham sandwich, if Israel wanted to feed it to them…

We can all rest easy knowing that Iran will have a nuke in 2009.  You know, that State that funds Hamas…  And the next administration’s solution is not to stop them, but to put Israel under a nuclear umbrella.  That should work.

From: Jawa

I don’t know why the folks over at MEMRI claim that palestine-info is an unofficial website for Hamas. Last time I checked, it was one of their official websites. But like a lot of what Hamas does, they set up “independent” spinoffs. This is one of them. MEMRIBLOG:

On January 1, 2009, the unofficial Hamas website www.palestine-info.info (hosted by Emirnet-Emirnet in the UAE) posted an article titled “Time Has Come to Expand the War against the Jews and Use WMDs.”

The title of the post also indicates that non-Jews supporting Israel should also be targeted.Not that this is shocking or anything. If Hamas had WMD they’d use them.

These people are sweethearts…

From: Israel Matzav

The UN announced earlier this week that 51 ‘civilians’ have been killed in the fighting in Gaza. Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook explain that Hamas seeks civilian casualties on its own side - as well as on ours.

The goal is to convince Palestinians, including women and children, not to fear death but even to face it at the front to protect Hamas fighters. Hamas’s placement of its military installations and fighters among civilians reflects this ideology, and has led to these 51 deaths.

A Hamas representative in the PA legislative council this year expressed pride in the fact that women and children are used as human shields in fighting Israel. He described it as part of a “death industry” at which Palestinians excel, and explained that the Palestinians “desire death” with the same intensity that Israelis “desire life.”

The following is the full text of the comments by Hamas representative Fathi Hamad: “For the Palestinian people death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life.”

But I’m sure that Hamas would never want to cause a humanitarian crisis of that magnitude…. They probably won’t even aim for the nukes.

From: Gateway Pundit

On Tuesday Gaza terrorists shot several rockets 40 kilometers into Israel for the first time.
Israel’s largest southern city Beersheba with a population of 186,000 came under attack.

YNet News reported on this frightening development.

For the first time– Terrorists hit Beersheba with rocket fire from Gaza reaching deeper into Israel than ever before.

Beersheba, a city of 186,000, is 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip and was thought to be out of reach from rocket fire!
This was a frightening development in the Islamist war against Israel.
What this means is that the Islamic radicals have the ability to reach Beersheba and potentially the town of Dimona and the Israeli nuclear facilities.
The Times Online reported, via Drudge:

There were growing fears in Israel last night that Hamas missiles could threaten its top-secret nuclear facility at Dimona.

Rocket attacks from Gaza have forced Israelis to flee in ever greater numbers and military chiefs have been shaken by the size and sophistication of the militant group’s arsenal.

In Beersheba, until a few days ago a sleepy desert town in southern Israel, there is little sign of the 186,000 inhabitants. Schools are closed and the streets of shuttered shops echo with the howl of sirens warning of incoming rockets.

Israeli planes, meanwhile, began a new stage yesterday in their offensive on Gaza, killing Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas official. The one-tonne bomb in Jabaliya is also understood to have killed two of his four wives and four of his twelve children. More than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the six days of Israeli attacks.

…Israeli officials say that Hamas has also acquired dozens of Iranian-made Fajr-3 missiles with an even longer range. Many fear that as the group acquires ever more sophisticated weaponry it is only a matter of time before the nuclear installation at Dimona, 20 miles east of Beersheba, falls within its sights. Dimona houses Israel’s only nuclear reactor and is believed to be where it stores warheads for its nuclear missiles.

Israel’s worst nightmare is that soon all its cities will be within range either of the Hezbollah Katyushas arrayed on the Lebanese border to the north or the increasingly sophisticated missiles stockpiled by Hamas to the south. Both groups have links to Israel’s archenemy Iran.

Israel has said that its aim is to smash Hamas’s rocket-firing capability but also to topple the hardline Islamist regime that seized power in the Gaza Strip last year after bloody street battles with its secular rivals Fatah. Until that goal is achieved, many in Beersheba are packing their bags and heading for Tel Aviv or Eilat.

“Maybe 30 or 40 per cent of people have left the city,” said Ron Shukron, 26, running one of the few grocery shops still open. As he spoke a siren echoed through the empty streets. As he spoke a siren echoed through the empty streets. With only 15 seconds to take cover, he stepped under a reinforced support beam in the ceiling. Seconds later came the dull thud of a rocket exploding on the edge of town.

Previously, the Gaza terrorists did not have the capability to reach Beersheba.
In the past the Islamists were only able to shoot rockets 11-12 kilometers:

White Line– Mortar shells – 3 kilometers
Green Line– 115 mm rockets (Qassam 2) – 6-7 kilometers
Yellow Line– 90 mm rockets (Qassam 1) – 9 kilometers
Red Line– 115 mm improved rockets – 11-12 kilometers
Orange Line– Future Qassam development – 12-14 kilometers
Brown Line– 122mm standard Katyusha rockets (Grad) – 20.4 kilometers
(JCPA)

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