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‘It Makes No Sense’: Experts Puzzled By Biden Admin’s Claim That Rafah Invasion Wouldn’t Help Israel Defeat Hamas

Published

2 months ago

8 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JAKE SMITH

 

The Biden administration’s claim that an Israeli invasion into Rafah would not help the nation defeat Hamas or secure a hostage release deal “makes no logical sense,” several experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that Israel cannot achieve a “sustainable and enduring defeat” against Hamas by invading Rafah, also claiming that it could jeopardize ongoing negotiations to free the hostages in Gaza. Experts told the DCNF that the claim doesn’t hold water as a military operation is the only way to pressure Hamas into reaching a hostage deal and eventually achieve victory over the terror group.

“An enduring defeat of Hamas certainly remains the Israeli goal, and we share that goal with them,” Kirby said. “Smashing into Rafah, in [Biden’s] view, will not advance that objective, will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”

Two high-level defense experts and a former senior U.S. official told the DCNF that Kirby is mistaken and that the only way to ensure Hamas is defeated is through military operations.

“Kirby is wrong,” Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based defense think tank, told the DCNF. “Only the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) patient, well-planned and well-executed operation has been successful in smashing Hamas and releasing hostages, to date.”

“You can’t defeat Hamas with good vibes and nice words. You defeat them on the battlefield through munitions, through kinetic action,” Executive Director of Polaris National Security and former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the DCNF.

Kirby and State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller have said that the administration believes if Israel chooses to push into Rafah, it will weaken their hand in negotiations to secure a deal to release the hostages currently held in Hamas captivity. Israel has been negotiating with Hamas through international meditators, including the U.S., for months to reach a deal that would see a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza region in exchange for their release.

“We actually think that a Rafah operation would weaken Israel’s position, both in these talks and writ large,” Miller said on May 9.

“If I’m Mr. Sinwar, and I’m sitting down in my tunnel … and I’m seeing innocent people falling victim to major significant combat operations in Rafah, then I have less of an incentive to want to come to the negotiating table,” Kirby told reporters, referring to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the military branch of Hamas.

Hamas is unlikely to be more inclined to move the hostage deal along if Israel doesn’t invade Rafah as the terrorist group isn’t concerned with the wellbeing of Palestinians in the region, experts told the DCNF. The IDF has accused the terrorist group of using civilians as human shields and embedding itself within population centers.

“It’s preposterous. It stands in the face of all the evidence we’ve actually seen in this conversation,” Noronha told the DCNF. “There’s been nothing that the White House has released that makes room for any kind of justification for what they’re claiming from the podium.”

The lack of military pressure from Israel would make Hamas less incentivized to reach a hostage and ceasefire deal, Shoshana Bryen, defense analyst and senior director of The Jewish Policy Center, told the DCNF. Hamas agreed to one ceasefire deal in November after coming under intense stress from Israeli forces, but the deal quickly fell apart in December.

“The only serious negotiating Hamas did was in the very early days when Israel’s fury was evident and accepted by most of the world,” Byren told the DCNF. “Hamas leadership saw that it might be defeated on the battlefield, so it permitted a ceasefire and released hostages. Since that time, the Biden administration has worked to constrain Israel — up to and including the withholding of arms approved by Congress.”

“Hamas isn’t stupid. As long as the Biden administration works to constrain Israel, Hamas doesn’t have to give anything,” Byren said.

Experts who spoke to the DCNF also took issue with Kirby claiming that Israel does not need to push into Rafah because Hamas has largely been crippled by Israeli forces since Oct. 7.

“It’s like saying, ‘Oh, we did chemotherapy for a month. We got 80% of the cancer, we’re good to go. We’ll just leave now.’ Again, it makes no sense,” Noronha told the DCNF.

“When someone announces that they want to kill you, they train to kill you, they arm to kill you, they teach their children that if the adults don’t finish the job in this generation, the children are expected to do it in the next generation,” Bryen told the DCNF. “When they say, ‘100 October 7s,’ they’re not kidding.”

Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah crossing bordering Egypt on Tuesday, saying that it was a vital chokepoint to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza, according to The Wall Street Journal. The IDF is moving further into the eastern corridors of Rafah, but has not yet gone into Rafah city, where the bulk of the more than one million refugees are located, according to The Associated Press.

Biden said during a CNN interview on Wednesday that the administration has not seen Israel cross a line in Rafah, but warned of consequences, including halting military aid, if Israel launches a full-scale invasion.

“If Israel had listened to the White House [since the war began], 18 Hamas terrorist battalions would still be standing, dozens of senior Hamas terrorist leaders would still be alive directing terror operations, dozens of Israeli and foreign hostages would still be languishing in the helm of Hamas captivity and Hamas would still be in charge planning the next October 7,” Dubowitz told the DCNF. “The Biden administration’s pressure on Israel has only prolonged the war and the suffering on both sides.”

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Boris Johnson lobbies Trump at RNC to back down from peace talks on Ukraine

Published on July 19, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

The former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a flying visit to the Republican National Conference this week, in a mission to persuade Donald Trump to continue the war in Ukraine.

Pictured with Trump on Tuesday, Johnson said he had spoken to Trump about Ukraine, adding, “I have no doubt that he [Trump] will be strong and decisive in supporting that country and defending democracy.”

With Trump, his vice president pick JD Vance, and even Senator Lindsey Graham calling for an end to the proxy war against Russia, Johnson is making a second attempt to sabotage a realistic peace in Ukraine.

Johnson’s war record

Boris Johnson has used the war in Ukraine to cement a legacy for himself as a sort of latter-day Winston Churchill. Mere weeks after Russia’s invasion, he made another flying visit – this time to Kiev.

The reason for his unscheduled arrival in the office of the then-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky was that a peace deal had been agreed between Ukraine and Russia.

Brokered in Istanbul, Turkey, its existence was confirmed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was party to the negotiations.

It was Johnson who urged Zelensky to throw this peace deal in the garbage, giving assurances that the U.K., U.S., NATO, and the EU would back Ukraine to victory in the war instead.

That would have completely ended the credibility of Ukrainian and Western propaganda that Russia was planning to conquer Ukraine and then further expand its empire into more of the former Soviet Empire slave states.

However peace comes now, it is unlikely to be agreed on the generous terms rejected by the sudden, last-minute intervention by Boris Johnson, who hosted the neo-Nazi Azov battalion in the U.K. Parliament in May. It is a strange “Churchill” indeed who waves a flag inspired by the Waffen-SS.

Ukraine – ‘functionally destroyed’

Johnson is responsible instead for a policy which has seen Ukraine “functionally destroyed as a country,” as JD Vance said in December 2023. The likely future U.S. vice president noted the terrible losses and declining population of Ukraine, saying, “The average age of a soldier in the Ukrainian army right now is 43.”

Pointing out the futility of continuing to send money to Ukraine, Vance sensibly asked, “What is 61 billion dollars [more] going to accomplish that a hundred billion hasn’t?”

His announcement as Trump’s VP pick, along with Trump’s miraculous survival of Saturday’s assassination attempt, has proven doubly alarming to all those whose futures are staked on that of Project Ukraine.

The end times

There can be no surer sign of the end times – whether for Ukraine or more generally – than career warmonger Lindsey Graham calling for peace.

In remarks which will likely ruin Boris Johnson’s day, Politico reported on July 17 that the childless senator had begun to echo the Trump/Vance line to stop the war in Ukraine.

“I want to end this war in Ukraine, and it’s going to be a diplomatic solution,” said Graham, adding “it’s going to take a guy like President Trump to bring this war to an end honorably.”

Graham echoed the emerging, if limited, realist viewpoint of Trump and Vance, repeating the charge that neither NATO nor Europe have been meeting the costs of their own security arrangement.

That has been paid for by the U.S., and according to Graham, that too must end. “NATO needs to pay more,” he said, recalling Vance’s speech in April in which he charged Europe of “failing to stand on its own two feet.”

The massive cost of providing the security umbrella through NATO to Europe is one reason for a revision of U.S.-European security policy. Downstream of this is the urgent need for Europe – including the U.K. – to rediscover the art of diplomacy.

Politicians such as Boris Johnson face humiliation in any peace deal with the Russians. The German and French leadership, and that of the EU itself together with many member nations, have all been totally committed to humiliating, weakening, and breaking up Russia, the regime change removal of its president, and the total victory of Ukraine. None of these goals were ever remotely realistic.

The German government has sought to criminalize the anti-war AfD, which was the second most popular party in Germany in the recent EU elections.

READ: Germany’s vice chancellor refuses to rule out criminalizing anti-globalist AfD party

Its finance minister Robert Habeck admitted, amidst a domestic financial crisis, that he had sent all the money to Ukraine.

France’s Emmanuel Macron has made reckless statements promising to send French troops to fight Russia, and the outgoing foreign minister of the U.K. David Cameron privately admitted in late June that the British pro-Ukraine war position was “fixed” and would not change with the election of a Labour government.

Cameron was right. It has not changed. On July 10 it was reported that the new Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised Ukraine £3 billion a year ($3.88 billion) “for as long as it takes.”

EU Chief Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen has consistently called for the ousting of Valdimir Putin and for the war to continue. She famously stated in September 2022 that “Putin will fail and Ukraine and Europe will prevail.”

Staking the political future of Europe on the impossible goal of Ukrainian victory was a reckless and unforced error, which lent an air of gravitas to a political class bereft of sane initiative.

The EU has recently selected a second pantsuited militant as its chief diplomat. Kaja Kallas, former leader of the tiny Baltic state of Estonia, called for the breakup of Russia mere weeks ago, and pledged support for “Ukraine’s victory” at last week’s NATO summit.

Kallas’ statement of 2022, reported in the U.K.’s pro-war Daily Telegraph

Europe has lost the art of diplomacy, and its leaders stand to lose all credibility as their Ukrainian war ends. This war made them appear serious, albeit serious about a delusion which promised only more death, and the dangerous potential of escalation to all out nuclear war.

To be faced with reality for these people is to be faced with political extinction. Relations with Russia will be normalized, as in the real world neither Russia nor Europe can hope for much of a future in the absence of resumed diplomatic and energy links.

It seems strange to say it, but these are strange times. The political leadership of pro-Ukraine Europe is fighting for its life to prolong a war that will risk the lives of everyone else. It is implacably opposed to peace, as this means political suicide.

Like their counterpart in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, these are politicians for whom peace spells doom. It is for this reason they will do anything in their power to prevent peace breaking out.

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Israel Dropped 8 Tons Of Explosives, Killing Dozens Of Civilians In Bid To Kill Hamas Leader

Published on July 17, 2024

By

Palestinians react at the site of a damaged house that was hit in Israeli bombardment on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 16, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty Images)

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By ROBERT SCHMAD

 

After years of hunting a top Hamas terrorist, Israeli forces dropped a massive payload of bombs on his suspected location Saturday and killed a large number of civilians in the process, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Israeli air force dropped the eight 2,000-pound bombs on a compound in southern Gaza in an attempt to kill Hamas’ top military leader, Mohammed Deif, killing dozens of civilians in the process, according to the WSJ. Israel had tried and failed seven times to kill Deif prior to its most recent attack, and, though military officials are still investigating the bomb site, they are confident Deif is dead.

“I witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen in my nine months in Gaza,” Scott Anderson, Gaza-based director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, told the WSJ. Gaza health authorities, which are controlled by Hamas and typically don’t distinguish between civilian and military casualties, say that more than 90 people were killed and 300 were wounded in the bombing, including women and children.

Israeli officials claim they killed several Hamas members in the strike, the WSJ reported. Hamas denies that Dief died in the bombing. (RELATED: IDF Claims Over 100 Hamas Fighters Killed After Wrapping Up Operation In Terrorist Stronghold)

Israeli officials believe Deif was a major player in orchestrating the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that killed 1,200 people in Israel, according to the WSJ.

The area surrounding the compound was home to a market, a water source and a soup kitchen serving refugees, according to the WSJ. Israeli forces acknowledged that the area they bombed was inhabited by civilians, though they blamed the casualties on Hamas for hiding among the people.

President Joe Biden froze the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel in May over concerns about the collateral damage they can cause, though the United States is still sending 500-pound bombs, The Times of Israel reported. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN in an interview, referring to the 2,000-pound munitions.

Mahmoud Abu Amer, who was roughly 100 yards away from the bomb site, described the explosion as “like a fiery belt” and said that he “saw people falling in front of me,” according to the WSJ.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. The Israeli Defense Forces referred the DCNF to the nation’s public diplomacy desk, which also did not return a request for comment.

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