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Netanyahu: Be Ready for 'Prolonged' Gaza War

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benjamin-netanyahu-speech__13223894__mbqftemplateidrenderscaledpropertybildwidth465Signaling an escalation of Israel’s Gaza operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis Monday to be ready for a “prolonged” war, and the military warned Palestinians in three large neighborhoods to leave their homes and head immediately for Gaza City.

The warnings came on a day of heavy Hamas-Israeli fighting in which nine children were killed by a strike on a Gaza park where they were playing, according to Palestinian health officials — a tragedy that each side blamed on the other.

Israeli tanks also resumed heavy shelling in border areas of Gaza, killing five people, including three children and a 70-year-old woman, and wounding 50 in the town of Jebaliya, which was among the areas warned to evacuate, the Red Crescent said.

Many Jebaliya residents said they did not dare attempt an escape. Sufian Abed Rabbo said his extended family of 17 had taken refuge under the stairway in their home.

“God help us. We have nothing to do but pray,” the 27-year-old told The Associated Press by phone. “I don’t know who left and who stayed, but in our street, we are all very scared to move.”

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In Israel’s Desperate Hour, Obama Leads from Behind

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

“We have your back,” President Obama told Israelis when he visited that embattled country recently. Way back, apparently. Mr. Obama’s administration famously claimed to “lead from behind” in overthrowing Libya’s strongman, Khaddafi. Young Sergeant Benjamin Anthony spoke to the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Washington Summit this week. Sgt. Anthony described a different vision of leadership. Ahalai he gave as the Hebrew word for “after me.” Officers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) they should lead from the front. That used to be America’s idea of leadership, too.

You cannot say Secretary John Kerry isn’t alert to his opportunities. He sees another chance to be a peacemaker. He is rushing to the Mideast to broker a cease-fire. Sgt. Anthony says Israel needs a victory over HAMAS terrorists who have been hiding rockets in schools and hospitals.

Kerry wants Israelis to stop trying to root out those who have sent more than 9,000 rockets into Israel. Canada’s National Post recently reported that the UNWRA—the world body’s refugee agency—closed down a school it was operating in Gaza after a cache of HAMAS rockets was discovered next door. The UN bureaucrats did what they usually do: they turned the rockets over to “local authorities.” In Gaza, that means they gave the rockets back to HAMAS. The cartoonist wasn’t kidding when he said HAMAS means “hiding among mosques and schools.”

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Iran Calls on Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas to ‘Ink Defense Pact’ Against Israel

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Photo Credit: YouTube / Screenshot

Photo Credit: YouTube / Screenshot

By Joshua Levitt.

Iran’s semi-official state news agency Fars on Tuesday cited Commander of Iran’s Basij Force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, as calling on the “resistance groups in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon to sign a defense treaty to help and support each other” against Israel.

“We ask the resistance forces in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon to endorse a defense pact so that an attack on any of them will be an attack on all of them and if the Zionist regime makes an aggression against any of them, all of them will grow united to confront it,” Naqdi said in Tehran on Monday night.

Fars’s brazen headline, ‘Iran Urges Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese Resistance Groups to Ink Defense Pact,’ was further confirmation of accusations made by U.S. Congressman Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that Tehran’s foreign policy is “subversive, sectarian, and set on goals that would come at the expense of U.S. interests in the region.”

Pundits have long accused Iran of working through its proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, but Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza has brought what had been said in private out into the open, with Iranian leaders proudly announcing that they have been supplying Hamas with missiles and drones, even as Iranian diplomats try to convince the world they are peaceful nation deserving of a nuclear program.

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Photo Credit: twitter / Benjamin Netanyahu

Photo Credit: twitter / Benjamin Netanyahu

Watch: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Just Issued A Powerful Warning About Terrorism To The World

By Justin Koski.

On Tuesday, a U.N. delegation led by secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with Israel’s leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the visit, Netanyahu showed the Secretary evidence of the Hamas rockets that have been raining down from Gaza for the past few weeks.

The Prime Minister also showed detailed photos of the locations in Gaza where Hamas had dug tunnels inside a kindergarten and near a school.

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Ted Cruz Questions Whether Obama 'Launched An Economic Boycott Of Israel'

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Photo Credit: Business Insider

Photo Credit: Business Insider

Freshman firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned on Wednesday whether President Barack Obama has effectively “launched an economic boycott of Israel,” after the Federal Aviation Agency’s decision to bar all flights into and out of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport for the past two days.

The Obama administration forcefully shot back at the charge, with State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf calling it “ridiculous and offensive.” She rejected any assertion the FAA’s move was at all politically motivated, saying it was only done to protect American citizens and carriers.

For its part, Cruz’s office released a lengthy statement on his behalf, blasting it out to reporters with the subject line, “Did President Obama Just Launch an Economic Boycott of Israel?” He claimed, as some in the Israeli government have over the past two days, that it effectively hands the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas a victory.

“Aiding Hamas while simultaneously isolating Israel does two things. One, it helps our enemy. Two, it hurts our ally,” Cruz said in the statement.

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Netanyahu Says Israel Will Hit Hamas Hard

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Ibraheem Abu MustafaIsrael’s leader says the country will exert “great force” against Gaza’s Hamas rulers after the Islamic militants rejected a truce agreement.

Israel halted its fire for six hours Tuesday after accepting an Egyptian truce proposal. But with Hamas continuing to launch rockets into Israel, it resumed strikes in the afternoon.

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The Peace Process Is a Game Israel Can’t Win

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Photo Credit: FrontPageMagNo matter what terrorist atrocity was committed against Israel yesterday, the call goes out for a return to the peace process today. For two long decades of terror that has never changed.

Diplomacy is a strange twisted business of lies, deceit and badly mixed drinks served at hotel bars that are a year away from being blown up. The motives are so twisted that everyone often ends up doing the opposite of what they set out to do. But even by the standards of international diplomacy where mixed motives and terrible ideas stew in a solid gold pot for years before they explode, the peace process between Israel and the PLO terrorists is in a horrible class of its own.

The one thing that everyone involved in the process, from the PLO terrorists to the Israelis to the international diplomats who arrive with a Bluetooth in one ear and a talking point in the other, can agree on is that it will never work. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not in a million years.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re about to stop.

Israel realized it wasn’t working a few years in after buses began blowing up more often than they were arriving on time. And the PLO can’t reach a final agreement because it’s not an independent actor. From its earliest days, before the Six Day War, it was a puppet of other countries. It’s still a projection of state power by Muslim countries in the region who want to perpetuate a conflict with Israel without spending too much money on bombs and guns.

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U.N. Experts Trace Recent Seized Arms to Iran, Violating Embargo

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / HEINZ-PETER BADERA U.N. expert panel has concluded that a shipment of rockets and other weapons that was seized by Israel came from Iran and represents a violation of the U.N. arms embargo on Tehran, according to a confidential report obtained by Reuters on Friday.

The finding comes just days ahead of the next round of negotiations in Vienna between Iran and six world powers aimed at securing a deal that would gradually lift international sanctions on Tehran — including the arms embargo — in exchange for curbs on the controversial Iranian nuclear program.

Despite Israel’s public statements that the seized arms were destined for Gaza — an allegation that Gaza’s governing Islamist militant group Hamas dismissed as a fabrication — the experts said the weapons were being sent to Sudan.

The experts do not speculate in the report about why the arms were being sent to Sudan, a country which Western diplomatic and intelligence sources have told Reuters has in the past been a conduit for Iranian arms shipments to other locations in Africa, as well as the Gaza Strip.

The experts said the Israeli U.N. mission wrote to the U.N. Iran Sanctions Committee on March 13 about “the transfer of rockets, mortars and related materiel from Iran to Sudan.”

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Unreal: Obama Admin Urges Israel To Show “Restraint” In Hunt For Teens Kidnapped By Palestinian Terrorists…

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Photo Credit: Weasel Zippers Washington (AFP) – The United States on Wednesday called on both Israel and the Palestinians to show restraint as Israelis tightened their grip on the West Bank hunting for three kidnapped teenagers.

“We recognize this is an incredibly sensitive and difficult circumstance on the ground, and we feel all sides should exercise restraint,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters.

Israeli troops have pressed their biggest arrest operation in years, imposing a tight lockdown on huge swathes of the West Bank in the hunt for the three boys kidnapped six days ago.

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Poof, the Magic Settlements!

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Photo Credit: Jewish Policy CenterWhen Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) signed a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, a recognized terrorist group that calls in its Charter for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, the State Department’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, observed, “It’s hard to see how Israel can be expected to negotiate with a government that does not believe in its right to exist.”

Despite the obvious truth of this statement, Secretary of State John Kerry blamed Israel. As he told the Congress, “700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem. And poof! That was sort of the moment.”

Again the claim is that “magical” settlements can “magically” destroy a major peace negotiation. Somehow, the PA promoting hatred and violence, not arresting terrorists, allying itself with Hamas, refusing to accept Israel as a Jewish state are not the destroyers of peace – it is the announcement of the construction of Jewish homes within the boundaries of settlements that existed when Oslo began. Specifically, in Gilo, a southern Jerusalem neighborhood of 40,000, which would remain part of Israel under any conceivable peace agreement.

Apparently, an alleged Palestinian desire for peace and statehood alongside Israel magically evaporated – poof! – at that moment.

Yet, if Palestinians’ urgent objective was to end settlements, they could do no better than rapidly negotiating with Israel the establishment of a Palestinian state from which they could exclude Jews. But this is precisely what they won’t do, because the price is acceptance of the Jewish state of Israel and an end of claims and conflict with it.

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White House Sidesteps Questions About Releasing Spy Jonathan Pollard

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Photo Credit: AP/Ayala Bar

Photo Credit: AP/Ayala Bar

White House spokesman Jay Carney sidestepped a question about whether the U.S. is weighing the possibility of an early release for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for concessions in the Mideast peace talks.

Carney did not respond directly when asked Monday afternoon if he would break with previous administrations, which have emphatically stressed that Pollard not be considered a bargaining chip in any negotiations with the Israelis.

“What I’ll say is that I have nothing new about Jonathan Pollard that I haven’t said in the past, which is that he was convicted of espionage and he is serving his sentence,” Carney told reporters Monday during his daily press briefing.

“When it comes to the Middle East peace process and the work being done with both parties to try to move the process forward, there’s a lot of complicated moving parts,” he added.

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