Clearing the tabs ...
Federal prosecutors charged Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and five senior members of the group with planning and carrying out years of terrorist attacks in Israel, including the Oct. 7 massacre, according to a sweeping complaint unsealed on Tuesday.
The criminal complaint, originally filed in New York in February, implicated two other senior members of Hamas not previously thought to be directly involved in the attacks. It also listed the number of Americans believed to have died at 43.
Ed: I may have more to say about this tomorrow, but for now, why would we demand that Israel offer concessions to mass-murder defendants?
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REPORTER: What did Biden mean when he said Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu isn't doing enough to secure a hostage deal?
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 3, 2024
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: I don't know. pic.twitter.com/zJjxrgHTaV
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President Joe Biden has grown increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu — his vexation obvious over the weekend when he responded with a curt “no” to a reporter who had asked whether the Israeli prime minister was doing enough to close the deal.
That bluntness came as no surprise to some of Biden’s senior aides, who have watched the president sour on his Israeli counterpart over the belief that Netanyahu is extending the war to remain in power, according to two officials not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.
Since abandoning his reelection bid, Biden has viewed achieving a cease-fire deal before the election as a sure way to bolster his own legacy — and to help Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances this November, the officials said. A Harris win would also burnish Biden’s chapter in the history books.
Ed: That's clearly been Biden's priority since October 7 -- not Israeli deaths, not Israel's security and not even the 43 Americans murdered by Hamas.
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REPORTER: "Do you have any plans to speak to Prime Minister Netanyahu?"
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 3, 2024
BIDEN: "Eventually."
REPORTER: "This week? Tomorrow? Wednesday?"
BIDEN: "Eventually."
(Yesterday, Biden was blaming Netanyahu for not doing enough) pic.twitter.com/DAdUgUuaSh
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On Monday, the president and vice president were in the White House Situation Room with negotiators plotting a new, yet-to-be-detailed deal to secure the remaining hostages’ release – confounding Goldberg
“People seem to have forgotten that Hamas has rejected every proposal put forward by the United States and Israel,” he told The Post. “Hamas and its sponsors prefer to murder hostages. That is the reality we face.”
“It’s been ‘Take it or Leave It’ for months,” Goldberg added. “Israel takes it, Hamas leaves it. And in return Israel gets pressured and Hamas and its sponsors get rewarded.”
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DOOCY: "In the president's public comments, why is he harder on Benjamin Netanyahu than he is on the terrorist leader of Hamas?!"
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 3, 2024
Karine Jean-Pierre is almost too confounded to answer. pic.twitter.com/JFpdrl2VpA
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The White House declared Tuesday that its latest, Israel-backed hostage deal proposal includes an IDF withdrawal from heavily populated areas along the Philadelphi Corridor, a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel must indefinitely maintain a presence along the Egypt-Gaza border stretch.
“The deal itself, including the bridging proposal that we started working with… includes the removal of Israeli Defense Forces from all densely populated areas… in phase one… and that includes those areas along and adjacent to that corridor,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a briefing with reporters. “That’s the proposal that Israel had agreed to.”
However, Kirby declined to clarify whether this means that the US supports allowing Israeli troops to remain in less densely populated areas along the Philadelphi Corridor during the six-week, first phase of the deal.
Ed: Should we buy this? It sounds like spin from a White House that has essentially burned its bridges with Netanyahu's office.
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The United Kingdom’s decision to suspend arms sales earmarked for Gaza is shameful and will not “change Israel’s determination to defeat Hamas,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.
Hamas is “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1,200 people on October 7, including 14 British citizens,” he wrote in an English-language post on X.
“Just as Britain’s heroic stand against the Nazis is seen today as having been vital in defending our common civilization, so too will history judge Israel’s stand against Hamas and Iran’s axis of terror... With or without British arms, Israel will win this war and secure our common future,” Netanyahu wrote.
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