Marching into a trap?

The Inferno, Day Four

From the IDF: 23:50 - “A plane with advanced ammunition landed at night at the Nebatim base. The ammunition is designed to allow significant strikes and preparation for other scenarios. We are grateful for American backing and assistance to the IDF in particular, and to the State of Israel in general, during this challenging period. Our common enemies know that the cooperation between the armies is stronger than ever, and is a key part of ensuring regional security and stability.”

This is a long newsletter—I should have published it this morning and then updated throughout the day, as I did the past two days—or is it three? I’m losing track of time. I’ll do that tomorrow.

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Main events

The Gaza skyline, as I type:

Hamas beheaded infants:

Sickening reports emerged on Tuesday about an attack on the Kfar Aza kibbutz as an Israeli general called it “a massacre.” Major General Itai Veruv said: “You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms and how the terrorist kills them. It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre, it’s a terror activity. It is something that I never saw in my life. It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, and grandmothers in the pogroms in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history.”

The Israeli-based news channel i24News quoted soldiers who said they had found beheaded babies in the kibbutz bordering the Gaza Strip. A reporter leading a camera through the destruction said: “It’s hard to explain exactly the mass casualties that happened right here. The Israeli military says they still don’t have a clear number. But I’m talking to some of the soldiers and they say what they’ve witnessed as they’ve been walking through these different houses, these different communities—babies, their heads cut off—that’s what they said. Families completely gunned down in their beds.”

Beheaded infants.

In 2011, there was a massacre in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children—Yoav, age 11, Elad, age 4, and Hadas, their 3-month-old daughter—were murdered. I was in Israel at the time—with Tim Mak, in fact, who has been a guest on our podcast and is now in Ukraine. Because we’re journalists, we went to Itamar, where we learned a detail that hadn’t been widely reported: the newborn baby had been decapitated. I wrote about this here:

… Anyone who in any way tries to rationalize or minimize this or to suggest that this is a fitting punishment for anything needs to go out and look at a three-month-old baby and ask himself what it would take to climb over a fence, climb in a window, and cut off that child’s head. If that act seems an “understandable” reaction to a political grievance to him, I don’t think we can have much of a conversation.

I have not changed my mind.