Last night Hezbollah resumed launching rocket into Israel. The (Muslim) holiday break lasted for only 2 of the 3 day Eid Al-Adha festival. The IDF also refrained from most attacks in Lebanon. Israeli observers noted that Hezbollah did not stop shooting on Jewish holidays. Hezbollah is setting the tone.
More important was the publication of a paper by 2 Columbia University Business School professors that analyzed the accusations against Israel regarding using starvation as a weapon of war. I was not surprised to see that such accusations were totally Fake News (But Mass Senator Elizabeth Warren still cited those fakes as an excuse for boycotting Netanyahu’s future appearance in the US Congress). To be more specific, the professors found that food aid delivered over the entire period was averaging to 3,300 calories per day. The normal sustenance in Gaza was 2,100 calories / day. Soldiers in World War 1 received 3,200 calories in 1914. By 1917 German soldiers were getting only about 1,000. That was considered very low for soldiers, but NOT starvation. The problem is, of course, that this is all months after Hamas made a successful campaign of lies from the issue and the whole world was pressuring Israel to allow more (unnecessary) aid to be delivered. Hamas confiscated the extra aid and resold it at a profit and world leaders ignored that fact.
A related issue is that the US is going to decommission that Gaza aid pier. It cost billions of dollars to put in place. It, along with those air drop missions, is a magnificent example of waste of federal funding that occurs when elected officials fail to examine problems thoroughly. Israel told the US at the time that the problem was not the amount of aid, but the corruption in distributing it. (This doesn’t excuse the Israeli government for failing to establish a separate safe network for aid distribution due to other political issues. But it‘s just another example of political bungling).
Wetherhorn 