Reaping the Harvest of Martyrdom

"...It's hard to negotiate with genocidal terrorists. Those people need to be removed, and Israel's going to keep targeting those people. You could see an escalation here. In a perfect world, they can reach a diplomatic solution and end this, or at least come to some sort of pause in fighting or de-escalation. But you're dealing with some of the worst people on the planet, and they have hostages that are still being held. They have rockets that are still coming into their country and civilians that are still being killed.
And so they have to act accordingly."

"There's a war. And Ismail Haniyeh, I've said this many times, and the rest of his comrades, the rest of his fellows in Hezbollah, Hamas and all other terrorist organizations, they issued their own death warrants on the morning of October 7, and those death warrants will be completed and carried out, regardless of what other options are on the table."

"Israel has to get back some of its deterrence. This, to a certain extent, achieves that. It sends a clear message that enemies of Jerusalem are not safe in Beirut, they're not safe in Israel, in Tehran, and they're not safe anywhere in the world."

"It also shows significant weakness in Iran; it shows that they are overly confident. It shows that they cannot protect those individuals that they host, and it probably leads to a heightened sense of anxiety and vulnerability in Iran, in Lebanon and elsewhere."

Dr. Casey Babb, senior fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Ottawa/International Fellow, Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv

A woman walks amid vehicles next to a billboard of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian (R) and late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at the Valise square in Tehran, August 1, 2024. (AFP)

 

Wholly correct in one sense, half-wrong in the speculative announcements of a pinpoint aerial attack via legacy media reporting on the death in Tehran of the political chief of Hamas. Which followed on the assassination of another terrorist leader, Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur, eliminated by an airstrike in a Beirut suburb. That assist to fulfill the desired wishes of Palestinian terrorists to become martyrs who ascend to Paradise, welcomed by 72 virgins was earned when Shukur ordered a rocket attack on the Israeli Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams where a dozen young Druze Israelis were killed in a sportsfield.

 

Fouad Shukur a Hezbollah top commander

The error of assuming that Ismail Haniyeh was killed soon after attendance at the grand inauguration of Iran's new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, by a missile strike, was corrected a day later when it was revealed that an explosive device had been smuggled into a guest house in Tehran where visitors important to the Islamist theocracy were domiciled in grand style. A 'guest house' furthermore that was always under heavy guard. Nonetheless, months earlier someone, somehow, smuggled an incendiary device into the guest apartment frequented by Ismail Haniyeh, an honoured guest of Tehran.

On this occasion a remote control was triggered for detonation, once the Hamas political leader was in residence. A special love gift from the nation mourning the savagery visited on 1,200 Israelis on October 7, courtesy of Hamas which, while its orgy of sadism and slaughter was ongoing, calculated that 240 hostages from southern Israel on Gaza's border would make a fine statement of contempt for the Jewish state and a salutary advantage in future prisoner exchanges.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was quoted as saying in a speech commemorating Shukur, "Do they expect that Hajj Ismail Haniyeh will be killed in Iran and Iran will remain silent? We ... have entered a new phase that is different from the previous period." Israel "will have to wait for the anger of the region's honourable people".

Western media tend to report the Gaza war through a Hamas/Hezbollah lens. As though Israel initiated the war in Gaza, and not the despicably sadistic schemes of terrorist groups to attack Jewish civilians in lieu of directly facing the Israeli military. Their modus operandi is to enact horrendous atrocities against Israel's population to provoke the Israel Defense Forces into a response while the terror groups shield themselves within their own civilian population, then cry out to the world to condemn Israel for responding, by striking their command bases amidst vulnerable populations.

Hamas began the process that would lead directly to a declaration of war. Their own plan to dispatch thousands of terrorists into Israeli territory to inundate farm villages and kibbutzim and conduct mass rapes and wholesale slaughter complete with dismemberment of captured women, murder of infants and the elderly could not be interpreted as anything but an invitation to war. A war they calculated would produce a significant number of Palestinian civilian deaths to enhance their propaganda against Israel for genocide, in the West.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said fervent prayers over Haniyeh's coffin in a ceremony held at Tehran University, the Republic's new president, Masoud Pezeshkian beside him as the coffin was placed in a truck to be taken to Azadi Square for a public mourning. When just days before Haniyeh had arrived in Tehran for the inauguration of the new president, where they greeted one another with great affection, along with leaders from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

Israel made a pledge in the wake of October 7. That it would not rest until all those associated with the unspeakable human carnage forced on Israel would pay the price of its inhumanity. Israel's initial battle was with Hamas for initiating the conflict in Gaza. Which led Hezbollah to begin bombing and threatening Israel, at the obvious behest of its patron, the Islamic Republic. Over 6,000 bombs have been lobbed at Israel by Hezbollah. It is restraint that held Israel from invading and bombing Lebanon once again.

 

Israel's pledge to destroy those that would destroy it, and its citizens is no more play of words, and it never  has been. Slowly but surely all those who visit dire harm on Jews and on Israel will pay the price for their death cult. From Mohammed Deif onward they will all pay the tariff of barbaric deadly attacks targeting a country and a nation that no longer brooks assaults against its own, for there is no impunity against Islamist atrocities committed against a people that prefers peace, but is prepared to respond with deadly force against those who deny its right to existence.

 

Hamas fighters on an Israeli tank captured in the 7 October attack   Getty Images