How Goes The War

"Hamas's end is near. For your future."

"Anyone who can present information that could help us arrest the individuals who brought destruction and ruins to the Gaza Strip will be rewarded."

Israel Defense Forces

"[Jerusalem cannot comment on the] various intelligence means [used to keep tabs on Sinwar and other terrorists]."

"We certainly will continue making every effort to bring them to justice and to get our hands on all of the monsters responsible for the October 7 massacre."

Israeli PMO spokesman Eylon Levy

Palestinian fighters hold weapons above their heads as they surrender near the Kamal Adwan hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. Photo by Israeli Army/ AFP via Getty Images

During an operation in the northern Gaza Strip, in the area of Kamal Adwan Hospital, some 70 terrorists with Hamas surrendered to Israeli forces, laying down their weapons in the process. Soldiers had located a building  used by Hamas operatives and a 'military' officer and after a fight the terrorists were killed. In Gaza City Shejaiya neighbourhood and Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip battles continue to rage, the IDF reporting "many terrorists" killed.

Soldiers searched a school complex in Shejaiya "that served as a central focus of the fighting of the Hamas Shejaiya Battalion" and proceeded to destroy the compound's infrastructure, as well as engaging with the Hamas operatives there as well. IDF soldiers discovered weapons and grenades in the Khan Yunis area where they destroyed two tunnel shafts, a rocket launch pit, and a weapons warehouse.

Terrorist infrastructure was demolished by the IDF near the Jabalia refugee camp, and weapons were located and destroyed. A Hamas sniper identified by ground forces was eliminated by a helicopter gunship. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to fire rockets into Israel, leading to warning sirens sounding in border communities.

The death toll for Israeli soldiers killed since the ground operations in the Gaza Strip began on October 27 rose to 116 with the death of Maj. Elisha Levinshtern, 38, killed in action. Since the conflict began on October 7 -- that fateful day when terrorists and ordinary Palestinian civilians flooded across the broken border from Gaza into southern Israel to attack border towns and villages, slaughtering at will, raping and mutilating, taking hostages back into Gaza -- a total of 445 Israeli troops have perished.

 

Flyers dropped by the IDF detailing rewards for information on Hamas leaders' whereabouts, December 14, 2023

(photo credit: according to Article 27 A of the Copyright Law)

The Israel Defense Forces dropped flyers in the coastal enclave, urging Palestinians to  help remove Hamas from the enclave's leadership, promising up to $400,000 in reward money for information leading to the apprehension of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar; $300,000 for intelligence on his brother, commander Muhammad Sinwar; $200,000 for information on Rafa'a Salameh, commander of the Khan Yunis Battalion; and $100,000 for information leading to Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas's al-Qassam Brigades 'military' wing.

 

The reward-offering flyers promised strict confidentiality, included an Israeli telephone number to call, and the username of an account on the Telegram messaging app. IDF troops last week had surrounded the residence in Gaza of Sinwar, believed to live in Khan Yunis in the southern Strip. "His house is not a fortress and he can escape but it's only a matter of time before we get to him", Prime Minister Netanyahu promised.

Thought to be one of the masterminds of the October 7 savagery that devastated southern Israel kibbutzim and a music festival with some three thousand young Israeli attendees where the terrorists ran down fleeing festival-goers, mass rape took place, and hundreds were slaughtered, it is felt that Sinwar who eluded capture last week, may attempt an escape into Egypt through entry points under mosques.

The Hamas Religious Endowment Ministry ordered the opening of mosques to accept displaced persons, a slight diversion from their usual use as storage areas for caches of military weaponry. Those corridors, it is feared, could provide Sinwar with an escape route, along with other senior Hamas leadership members.

"Yahya Sinwar is the face of evil", said IDF International Spokesperson Lt.Col. Richard Hecht, who informed journalists that Sinwar and his entire command team were in Israel's sights.

Yahya Sinwar Gaza Strip chief of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, waves to Palestinians during a rally to mark the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day), in Gaza, April 14, 2023. (credit: REUTERS/IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA)

Israeli Hostages in Gaza : The World Urging a Ceasefire

"It seems one of the reasons they don't want to turn women over that they have been holding hostage and the reason this pause fell apart is that they do not want these women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody."

U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller

"[All the while, Hamas's leadership was working on a plan that would] change the entire equation."

"Hamas's goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such."

"This battle ... did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation."

Khalil al-Hayya, senior Hamas official

"[Hamas knew it would] pay a price [for its actions and was] ready to pay it."

"We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs."

"Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation."

"[October 7 was] just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth."

Ghazi Hamad, senior Hamas leader

Palestinian terrorists drive back to the Gaza Strip with the body of Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen who was murdered at the Supernova music festival on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Ali Mahmud)

 

A week ago, Hamas's chief representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, a member of its politburo stated: "A war of liberation is coming, not just another October 7". With all of this, obvious evidence of Islamofascists prepared to continue their attacks against Israel, looking to future opportunities once the current conflict has settled down in whichever way it will, the world still demands that Israel cease its advances toward its goal of destroying the terrorist group Hamas.

The alternative is, of course, returning the Israel Defense Forces to Israeli territory, and allowing Hamas to regroup and continue its ongoing deadly war against Israel. The great minds that are busy petitioning Israel to think of the massive destruction it is forced to engage in, with its determination to destroy the Hamas infrastructure which has enabled it to give shelter to its operatives while launching attacks against Israel and its citizens from the tunnels used as weapons depots, think no further than halting a conflict, unconcerned over the security of the state of Israel.

Mobs of shouting, disruptive, violent and threatening Palestinians and other Arab Muslims who have infiltrated the West, march in displays of raging hatred, inciting against Israel as a 'genocidal' nation destroying the lives of Palestinians, and in the process threatening the lives of local diaspora Jews, calling for a 'ceasefire', their raging ire resonating with the politicians who depend on their votes and who in turn do nothing to insist that a conflict half a world away should not be brought to the cities of Europe and North America.

 

A State Department official says the U.S. suspects one reason Hamas is refusing to release its remaining female hostages is to prevent them from revealing the horrors they experienced in captivity. (GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)

And in view of the influence of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation of the United Nations and the penchant for both the General Assembly and the Security Council to hold Israel solely accountable for all that goes wrong in the Middle East and in particular between the Palestinians and Israel, strenuously call for restraint, proportionality and a ceasefire, finding Israel guilty on all counts of accusations as an 'apartheid', oppressive state, an 'occupying' authority. In truth a country and a nation defending its right of existence.

There was a temporary truce to enable humanitarian aid to reach the dire needs of the Palestinians, and to allow civilians with citizenship in other countries to exit Gaza. Israel was loathe to agree to it in the certain knowledge that Hamas terrorists would find opportunities to exit Gaza, and sure enough the mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar managed to find help in smuggling himself out of Gaza City where his house had been surrounded by IDF troops with a mission to find and arrest him.

The truce enabled Israel to forge an agreement with Hamas for the return of Israeli abductees, and over a period of almost a week Israeli hostages, mostly women and children and foreign agricultural workers were released in exchange for three times the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons for crimes against Israel. For the last exchange representing several extensions, Hamas refused to return ten women and two children. And then Hamas "violated the framework" by resuming hostilities.

Worse, it failed to "meet its obligation to release all hostage women" and children; an estimated twenty women remain hostages in Gaza; speculation that releasing them would release to the world at large the sight and sound of women who were forced to endure brutality of a depth most sane minds could never envision. Aside from torture and sexual depravities, some may be near death, or have been murdered, as many others have been. 

Released hostages and families of hostages held in Gaza meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the war cabinet on December 5, 2023. (Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum)