Hamas announced shortly before the expiration of the 72-hour cease-fire at midnight Wednesday that it will be extended five days, even though the truce was broken by rocket shortly after 9 p.m. and again two hours later.
All of the rockets landed in open areas or were intercepted by the Iron Dome system. The IDF did not retaliate.
Hamas announced the extension after three days of unconfirmed reports that there was no chance of Israel and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists groups agreeing to terms for a long-term truce.
The White House revealed Wednesday that President Barack Obama has been directly involved in the cease-fire to the extent that he spoke by telephone with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about the truce on Wednesday. The content of the conversation was not detailed, but it is a fair guess that if Obama took time from his vacation at Martha’ Vineyard, Mass. to call the Prime Minister, it was not just to wish him well.
Obama has been half-supporting Israel since the beginning of the war, constantly saying that Israel has the right to defend itself from rocket fire, as if Netanyahu needs the United States to tell him, but tsk-tsking the alleged death toll of civilians used by Hamas as human shields and exploited by terrorists who used residential neighborhoods, mosques, U.N. schools and hospitals to launch rockets at Israel.
Hamas has provided one reason for the inflated number of civilian deaths. It stated during the war that all of fighters are civilians, which is a neat way of rewriting the dictionary.
While the president is anxious to put himself in a position of power in the Middle East, he was a lot more open and honest about the threat or rocket fire when he was running for office in 2008. He visited rocket-battered Sderot at the time and said, as seen and heard in the video below, “if someone was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I am going to do everything in my power to stop them, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
Would Obama really stop rocket attacks on his daughters by negotiating with the attackers?