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GAZA WAR DIARY: 9 APRIL 2024

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The withdrawal of almost all Israeli forces from Gaza in what is being called a “redeployment” has us worried. Very worried. Add to that the continued Hamas rocket fire at the Gaza Envelope settlements, including those that were massacred on October 7, and what you have is a general feeling of confusion and disconnect with the unexplained (unexplainable?) moves of our government and our armed forces.

I am not alone. Gadi Yarkoni, mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council which includes the settlements bordering Gaza, has told Ynet News that no one in the government or the IDF has given him any explanation, and all have been unavailable to his urgent inquiries about where the rocket fire is coming from and who is responsible. “How will we go home?” he asks.

In the meantime, the Biden administration is forcing Israel to supply the Hamas rocket launchers with more and more aid – 350 trucks a day!! Photos show the souks of Rafah bursting with fresh produce and every other kind of food for sale. There is no progress on hostage negotiations, and there won’t be because Hamas expects the Biden Administration to force Israel to surrender, so why should they give an inch? Today Israeli military spokesmen said that they can live with 150,000 Gazans coming back to Northern Gaza, which is what the Americans are demanding in their so-called “hostage negotiations.”

In the meantime our hostages continue to be tortured, even as the aid trucks roll in, and roll in, and roll in, and the talks go on, and on, and on.

Confronted by a violent minority demanding we give up and give in (the number of hostage families involved in these “demonstrations” has been calculated as less than 10 out of 134); hostility from allies that are the source of our weapons; the threat of Iran entering the conflict to exact “revenge”, is it any wonder Israel is finding it difficult, if not impossible, to protect its interests?

I feel the depth of pain in Mr. Yarkoni’s question. When will Israelis be able to go home? This was brought home to me in a very special way over the last few days which I spent in a hotel in Jerusalem attending events connected to the joyous occasion of the circumcision ceremony of my great-grandson.

It was a four star hotel near Malcha called the Yehuda Hotel. Still, as soon as I checked in, I immediately noticed some very strange things going on there I’ve never seen in those kinds of hotels. For example, older people playing games at a card table set up in the lobby who never seemed to leave. Laundry racks with drying clothes all along the corridor of rooms on the first floor. Children sitting outside hotel rooms in groups every evening playing games. And at the lavish hotel breakfast, I noticed children coming in very early with school backpacks, filling plastic containers with food to take with them, even though a sign clearly said that guests should refrain from taking food outside the dining room. And then there was this: on the Yehuda Hotel’s website, they say there are no rooms available, and yet when I called, there was no problem making reservations.

Everything fell into place when it suddenly dawned on me who these people are: evacuees from the North. These are people who for six months have been living in this strange situation where they are permanently cramped into hotel rooms. Yes, the hotel is luxurious and the food is good. But from the sad and listless faces of the adults and children, one sees that they would be only too happy for this “vacation” to finally end, and to be able to go home again.

Dear Mr. Netanyahu: When will the people of Northern and Southern Israel be able to go home again? When will you be able to forcefully bring home to the American administration that their concern for the Gazans is destroying the people of Israel? That they are preventing us from subduing the murderers and their accomplices, taking out the last missile launchers in Gaza, and destroying Rafah together with the last Hamas battalions that threaten our people? When?

Despite the IDF’s spectacular successes on the battlefields, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. The Israeli people need to go home again. I need to feel that I am home again. Because right now, it doesn’t feel that way at all.

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5 comments on “GAZA WAR DIARY: 9 APRIL 2024”

  1. KD

    Apart from anything else that could be said about this, the Israeli military leaders better be careful that they don’t end up fighting a war on two fronts. They have an opportunity here to eliminate the enemy in the south as an effective fighting force, and if there’s even a chance that they could end up fighting in an all-out war in the north in the near future, then (purely from a military perspective) they’d better end Hamas now. If they don’t do it now, then they could *really* regret it later on.

  2. Hagai

    Subject: Biden’s War Against the Jews. His decades-long antipathy toward Jews and Israel.

    The President’s War Against the Jews
    Biden claims he is a lifelong friend of the Jewish people and a Zionist, but these empty words are cover for a decades-long antipathy.

    By Julie Strauss Levin | March 27, 2024
    Julie Strauss Levin is a Virginia-based attorney who served on the Governor’s Commission to Combat Antisemitism.

    For some American Jews, the months since Oct. 7 have felt like a horror movie, as they watch, with increasing alarm, as our president—for whom many voted, and in whom many placed inviolable trust—seemed to, moment after crucial moment, throw Israel under the bus.
    Earlier this month, a U.N. report from its Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General revealed what Israel has been saying for months, namely that Hamas committed the most vile sexual violence and torture on Oct. 7, and such treatment likely continues to be perpetrated on hostages. Experts from the U.N.—an organization that is routinely hostile to the Jewish state—actually found “clear and convincing information that some [hostages] have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.”

    In reaction, Joe Biden’s State Department chose to level the charge of sexual abuse—at Israel. Recently, IDF Brig.-Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi recounted his meeting with a senior State Department official—since identified as Jill Hutchings, director of the Office of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs—who proceeded to accuse Israel of “systematically sexually abusing Palestinian women.” The State Department’s claim was based on information from Hamas pushed by Al Jazeera—which ended up deleting the story after it proved to be fabricated.

    Indeed, Biden briefly expressed empathy with Israel after the heinous attack. But since then, along with his Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Biden has been working at breakneck speed to undermine, if not fully impede, Israel in its existential battle against the Iran-funded Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists—a campaign that has now extended to official blood libels about deliberate Israeli campaigns of genocide, famine and starvation, killing babies, and sexual abuse—culminating in the administration’s betrayal of Israel and siding with Hamas at the Security Council on Monday. In the blink of an eye, Biden has gone from framing Hamas as “pure, unadulterated evil” to putting immense pressure on Israel to stand down.
    That pressure is not of recent origin.

    More than 40 years ago, Joe Biden prompted one of the most famous phrases ever uttered by an Israeli prime minister. In a private session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1982, Sen. Biden threatened Prime Minister Menachem Begin with cutting off U.S. aid if Israel did not stop its “settlements” in Judea and Samaria.

    Begin replied: “Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

    Biden briefly expressed empathy with Israel after the heinous attack. But since then, he has been working at breakneck speed to undermine, if not fully impede, Israel in its existential battle.
    Biden’s scorn for Israel’s current PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, is significantly more vocal, referring to Netanyahu as a “bad f****ing guy” and an “a**hole”—language that is difficult to imagine him using about any other leader of a friendly foreign state. More recently, as he swaggered his way out of the State of the Union, doing his whispering, leaning-in shtick, Biden told Blinken and others, “I told him, Bibi, and don’t repeat this, but you and I are going to have a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting.” Biden knew he was on a hot mic and admitted as much. He wanted the world to know what he thinks of Israel’s PM, and to broadcast that he was putting the squeeze on Israel to force it to forgo its ability to defend itself. In fact, this has been Biden’s posture from day one.
    Biden has made downgrading Israel and elevating the Palestinians, while also using them as a pressure tool against Israel, central to his policy in the region. Upon taking office and despite the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits the U.S. from sending certain taxpayer dollars to the PA until it stops funding terrorism, Biden rewarded Palestinian terrorism with U.S. taxpayer monies ultimately amounting to almost a billion dollars. America First Legal Foundation (where I am senior counsel), filed suit against Biden and Blinken on behalf of Congressman Ronny Jackson, Stuart and Robbi Force, parents of Taylor Force, the U.S. Army veteran murdered at the hands of a Palestinian terrorist in 2016, and Sarri Singer, herself a victim of Palestinian terrorism in 2003, for violating the TFA. Judge Kacsmaryk recently denied the government’s motion to dismiss, and the case is pending. The court found the plaintiffs have standing to sue Biden and Blinken because each plaintiff has suffered an injury (heightened likelihood of physical harm or death when visiting Israel) that is fairly traceable to the defendants’ conduct (funding the PA which pays terrorists and incentivizes terrorism), and that each plaintiff’s injury is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision by the court (stopping the flow of monies to the PA reduces terrorist acts).

    Biden knows that payments to the PA incentivize and reward terrorists and the PA’s terrorist operations; his actions reveal he doesn’t care. The same applies to Secretary of State Blinken. His State Department revealed in a March 2022 fact sheet that, “since April 2021, the United States has provided over half a billion dollars in assistance for the Palestinians, including more than $417 million in humanitarian assistance for mainly the descendants of Palestinian refugees through UNRWA.” Is it a coincidence that even prior to Hamas’ heinous Oct. 7 attack, there had been a significant increase in terrorist acts since Biden and Blinken took office? In the first half of 2023 alone, there were more than 3,600 Palestinian terrorist attacks, surpassing all of 2022.

    Biden has what’s known as a whole-of-government approach in his embrace of the Palestinians at the expense of Israel, mobilizing multiple executive branch agencies to work across individual silos to implement an integrated policy. Just last year, his Department of Homeland Security ceremoniously handed over to the PA a 2,700-year-old spoon dating back to the Assyrian empire describing the conveyance as a “historic repatriation.” The State Department’s George Noll, chief of the Office of Palestinian Affairs, described the spoon as an “example of Palestinian cultural patrimony” and that the transfer was a “historic moment between the American and Palestinian people.” This attempt to manufacture an ancient “Palestinian” lineage in the Land of Israel while denying the right of Jews to settle in their ancestral homeland was clear.

    Oct. 7 didn’t temper this obscenity. Just one day after the Oct. 7 slaughter, Blinken, in concert with Turkey, called for a cease-fire by an X post—on the evening of Oct. 8. Blinken deleted the post about 12 hours later, but the message was loud and clear: Stand down and remain victims. Two days later, Biden’s National Security Council spokesman called on Israel to show restraint and take only “necessary and proportionate action” to defend itself.

    The inconvenient truth is that there was a cease-fire on Oct. 6. Hamas broke it with financial and military assistance from Iran—a terrorist state that is now flush with billions in sanctions relief as a direct result of Biden’s disastrous policy of gifting the Islamic Republic with cash, some of which he helpfully provided barely a month after the October terror attack. And, on Nov. 14, the administration extended a sanctions waiver allowing Iran to access $10 billion. U.S. spokesmen have been repeatedly unable to deny that monies delivered by Biden to Iran weren’t used in funding the Oct. 7 attack because, of course they were.

    As if funding Hamas through Iran weren’t bad enough, Biden made it a top priority to help maintain open supply lines to Gaza while also looking the other way as Hamas intercepts and hijacks 60% or more of the humanitarian aid from the many thousands of aid trucks coming into the Strip since the start of the war. Hamas either keeps the aid for its terrorists or sells it to noncombatants at exorbitant prices. This is being reported almost daily from multiple sources, with social media videos corroborating the reports of Hamas’ theft of the cargo. Instead of condemning Hamas for the aid crisis, Biden blames Israel for what his secretary of state has claimed is an “acute food insecurity” crisis in Gaza supposedly affecting “100% of the population.” Biden also ignores that Hamas steals the fuel aid to fire rockets and operate its tunnels. When thousands of Gazans swarmed some 30 food delivery trucks in Gaza and a deadly stampede ensued, IDF aerial footage corroborated the IDF’s account, showing that Hamas was directly to blame, and fired on Palestinians—and yet both the media and the Biden administration have continued to blame Israel, in order to further their repulsive, evidence-free narrative.

    During his State of the Union address, Biden didn’t demand that aid also be given to the hostages Hamas holds and abuses, nor did he demand their release. He certainly did not laud Israel for its unparalleled efforts to avoid civilian casualties and facilitate aid transports. None of those realities fit Biden’s anti-Israel rhetoric. Instead, Biden boldly lied, accusing Israel of making humanitarian assistance a “secondary consideration or a bargaining chip” and chiding Israel that “protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.” As a bonus, Biden also endorsed Hamas’ fake casualty numbers.

    Not content with false and inflammatory rhetoric libeling Israel, or with displays of U.S. support for Gaza such as using the military to air-drop supplies, Biden used his address to announce an emergency mission to send U.S. military to build a temporary pier on the coast of Gaza to deliver aid to Gaza. A Pentagon spokesman later shared some details about the 1,000 Army and Navy servicemen to be deployed to deliver some 2 million meals a day into Gaza—giving direct support and comfort to Hamas, whose own construction company was put in charge of building the pier, which will be financed and operated by Qatar, at the Biden administration’s request. Under U.S. law, giving money to a Hamas-affiliated construction company would certainly qualify as providing material support to a designated terrorist group—which is apparently fine now, as long as the U.S. government is writing the checks.

    Earlier in February, however, Biden sanctioned four Jews in Judea and Samaria, while ignoring Palestinian terrorists and the PA that supports them. These terrorists have been responsible for hundreds of attempted and successful lethal terrorist attacks in the West Bank since Oct. 7. Jews have been responsible for zero such attacks. Days later, three Israeli banks stated they were suspending the bank accounts of these four individuals to comply with the sanctions. This month, Biden’s Department of Treasury announced new sanctions, this time against three Jews and two farms. These sanctions freeze assets, prevent the individuals from getting visas, and block Jews from accessing the U.S. financial system.

    If the goal is the appearance of evenhandedness, one might imagine that Biden would also sanction the family of the PA policeman who murdered two Jews, a teen and a volunteer medic, at a gas station in Eli in Judea and Samaria end of February. Nope. Instead, Blinken declared Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as being inconsistent with international law, reversing the “Pompeo doctrine,” which asserted that Jews have a historical and legal right to live in this area of their ancestral homeland.

    Biden’s February national security memorandum also imposes unprecedented and new conditions on military assistance to Israel. While framed as a means to ensure that a country receiving U.S. military aid comports with international humanitarian law when using U.S. weapons, it clearly sets its sights on Israel, requiring Israel within 45 days to submit a report proving compliance with international law or potentially lose military aid. Not long after the memorandum’s issuance, and in lock step, more than three dozen House Democrats sent a letter to Biden citing the memorandum and arguing that Israel’s entry into Rafah could violate the terms of the memorandum. They know, as does Biden, that Rafah is key to Israel’s offensive to eradicate the remaining Hamas battalions, whose survival will allow Hamas to rule Gaza unopposed once Israel withdraws.

    Biden owns this war imposed on Israel. The president inherited a Middle East marked by a bankrupt Iran and amicable relations between Israel and Arab countries with more in the works, thanks to President Trump’s historic Abraham Accords. Biden reversed course, enriched Tehran, funded terrorists and destabilized the Middle East—setting the stage for Oct. 7.
    Biden shows no sign of reversing even one of his deadly failures. Instead of taking responsibility for his policy mistakes, he blames Israel for not going further and providing Iran with a launching pad on its border by establishing a Palestinian state. Perversely, the attacks of Oct. 7 have only led Biden to kick his effort to establish a Palestinian state into high gear.

    Biden claims Hamas is different from the Palestinians. But an overwhelming majority of Palestinians, whether in Gaza or Judea and Samaria, cheered the Oct. 7 atrocities. Videos show Palestinians handing out candy in celebration, and a November 2023 research poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) found, “[a]n overwhelming percentage of Palestinians support the October 7 massacre (75%), reject coexistence with Israel (85.9%), are committed to creation of a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ (74.7%) as the end of the Israeli Palestinian conflict … there is more support for the 10/7 massacre from the Palestinians resident in Judea and Samaria (83.1%) than those residing in the Gaza Strip (63.6%).”

    Regardless of Biden’s wishes, the “river to the sea” crowd isn’t interested in living in peace next to a Jewish state: They don’t believe Israel should exist at all. While Israel’s cabinet overwhelmingly rejected Biden’s push for a so-called Palestinian state, with strong backing from 99 of the 120 members of the Knesset also voicing their rejection, Biden and his administration continue to push their animus against the Jewish state while fueling rampant antisemitism in America. Biden’s silence, at his State of the Union, about the alarming rise of antisemitism throughout the United States, including the glorification of Hamas terrorism and intimidation and physical violence perpetrated against Jews in America’s towns and cities, was deafening. That’s because his party’s loyal foot soldiers among college and university administrators and professors or their K-12 equivalents, the media, Democratic politicians, or leftist NGOs, include a large number of anti-Semites, who live openly and happily in the Democratic Party. As Ryan Mauro, Capitol Research Center national security analyst explained, “The disturbing reality is that Hamas’s allies in the U.S. have a significant foothold in the non-profit sector. Major left-wing organizations are funding Hamas’s sympathizers and those who indirectly help Hamas by waging a political war against Israel.”

    It was 50 years ago in 1973, when then-Sen. Biden was in Israel, sitting with PM Meir. Biden recalled her saying to him that he “look[ed] so worried.” She assured him not to worry, sharing “We have a secret weapon in our conflict with the Arabs. You see, we have no place else to go.” Perhaps it took these 50 years for Biden to figure out how to exploit Meir’s words about Israel’s “secret weapon” to effectuate the ouster of the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland.
    Whether Biden and his party are blinded by ideology, lack moral clarity, or both, the fact remains that the battle that Israel is fighting has existential stakes, not only for the Jewish state but for all Western civilization—regardless of party affiliation. Those who understand what is at stake in this fight must stand with Israel in her battle to achieve total victory—not only against Hamas and its barbaric ideology but also against those in high places in our own country who support them.

  4. golda

    for over 60 years I have watch as neighboring arab countries attack Israel, and Israel responds,
    and successes unfold;
    the minute Israel allows America and her government to play negotiator , as Bibi has allowed moron Biden to do, Israel has given herself to be played to terrorist demands.
    when will Israel stop allowing herself and her citizens to be used.
    Until all hostages are returned, Israel should bomb and flatten all of Gaza, and there is NOTHING to negotiate.
    I don’t need to know what next steps Israel will take, its no ones business but Israels .
    come on, who in their right minds discusses with news reporters and so called foreign allies (?)
    their next steps.
    what other country does this?
    your government and its military has ‘dreck’ under their helmets.
    and those demonstrators should be arrested for sedition.
    Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan have to be rolling over in their graves!

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