The Israeli Defense Forces (‘IDF) hit Hamas in the Gaza strip yesterday.


In one operation, the Israeli Air Force hit Beit Lahiya (below), injuring at least 15 Palestinians.

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In a different operation, one Hamas gunman was killed and two were wounded during a battle with IDF troops in northern Gaza.

Hamas now seeks belated credit for terrorist attacks that killed dozens, and injured many Israelis in the West Bank, according to a Hamas web site.


The terrorist group now claims responsibility for nine attacks that killed 26 Israelis, and injured scores of others, from 2002 until 2005.

Verification of this claims is difficult, partly because competing Palestinian terrorist groups also claimed responsibility for many of these attacks.

Sami Abu Zuhri, the Hamas official nabbed by EU officials in 2006 trying to smuggle a suitcase full of €600,000 – US$800,000 from Egypt into Gaza now is now ‘unendorsing’ Barack Obama for U.S. President.


According to Reuters, Zuhri alleged that:

“Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win,” Zuhri said.

Fascinating words from a man who openly praised a deadly attack by a Palestinian guman on Jewish religious students studying at a Yeshiva in Jersusalem. In March, the Zuhri lauded the deadly massacre as a “heroic attack.”

U.S. presidential candidates neither need, nor want the support of terrorists like Hamas, its supporters, and heinous attacks against innocent civilians.

Photo credit: BBC

Retired U.S. diplomats who are member of a vehemently anti-Israel lobbying group on Washington, D.C. met with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip today.


The anti-Israel lobby, Council for the National Interest (CNI), included Richard Viets, a retired former number two U.S. diplomat in Israel in its contingent. Viets was also U.S. ambassador to Jordan in the early 1980s.

The ‘meeting’ is nothing more than a public relations stint by Hamas’ Haniyah, a man who once called a Hamas suicide attack that killed 9 civilians in Tel Aviv “an act of self-defense.”

Did the INC tell Hamas to free Israel’s Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israel soldier who was taken by Hamas while on guard duty inside Israel? Did it denounce Hamas’ terror, weapons, and financial ties to Iran?

Don’t bet on it. Viets was quoted as saying that the anti-Israel group went to Gaza to “educat[e] ourselves better about the situation here in order to return home and to explain to our countrymen the reaction and the views of what we heard.” In other words, to act as P.R. spokesmen for a group which has remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups for years.