The finger, always the finger: a member of the Hamas delegation, Salah el-Bardaweel, talks during a press conference in Cairo on Wednesday.
* For the first time, Gaza militants fire phosphorus shell at Israel
Hudna is not Ceasefire
 According to Islamic law, a hudna can only be agreed to in order to allow the Muslim forces to gather strength.Â
Jihad is thicker than citizenship. “Arab village in Negev to host latest major protest against IDF strikes,” by Yoav Stern for Haaretz, or JW
Today everyone’s talking about a ceasefire in Gaza. With the UN proposing one and Israel demurring, the public, unaware of anything much about Gaza, Hamas, or Israel, blithely puts Israel in the dock. Yet during the last “ceasefire,” when rockets continued to land in Israeli civilian centers, there was a noticeable silence on the part of the international community. It seems it’s okay to drag Israel back from an attack on a massively financed and armed terrorist entity (and if Hamas isn’t a terrorist entity, it’s hard to know what it is), but just not right on to demand the same sort of action on the part of the terrorists. Don’t forget, Israel isn’t the only one refusing a ceasefire at this point: Hamas is rejecting one too, and for dishonest reasons.
There are things going on here that half the world just doesn’t get. All those clamoring for a ceasefire think all other parties understand the word just like they do. They’d be wrong. The secular Arabic press, such as the international newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat, uses the standard Arabic term for a cessation of fire: waqf al-nar or waqf itlaq al-nar. That is a literal translation, and it means exactly what ceasefire means in English and other languages. But Hamas don’t talk about a cessation of fire, because that would be to introduce a term from the Western political vocabulary into their discourse, and they can’t do that.








