Colonel Kemp: Israel Must Not Listen to the Bidenites But Continue Devastating Hamas

The Bidenites would like a ceasefire now, for obvious electoral reasons. To be able to announce that the war in Gaza is over would be presented, however preposterously, as a “victory” for Biden and Harris, and they assume would gain the latter votes. They are putting pressure on Netanyahu to agree now for a deal with Hamas that would free the hostages and bring a ceasefire to Gaza. It’s a deal, argues British Colonel Richard Kemp, that Israel should forthrightly reject. He believes that now is the time for the IDF to go all in, dismantling the last remnants of Hamas now trying to regroup in the north of the Strip. More on Colonel Kemp’s view can be found here: “Harris doesn’t know how to defeat Hamas. Israel should press the advantage,” by Richard Kemp, Telegraph, October 21, 2024:

With Hamas’s hard-line leader out of the picture, is it now time for Israel to sue for peace? Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think so and have together fired the starting gun for what will no doubt be another round of intensive pressure on Israel to end the war.

In both cases their judgement so far in this war has not been unimpeachable. For example, Biden and Harris demanded that the IDF should not enter Rafah earlier this year and threatened “consequences” if it did. Prime Minister Netanyahu was having none of that and, in the face of domestic political and military opposition as well, ordered an offensive against Hamas inside Rafah. With minimal civilian casualties, that move destroyed the rump Hamas military formations in the city and severed the terrorist lifeline beneath the Egyptian border….

Last March, when the IDF was making plans to enter Rafah, where Hamas had seen its numbers increase with fighters who had fled from Gaza City and Khan Yunis, President Biden tried to dissuade the IDF; he said that if he IDF entered Gaza, this would constitute crossing a “red line” and might lead to a cut in American military aid. Vice President Harris similarly said that an IDF takeover of Rafah was not “viable,” and if the Israelis went ahead, there would be “consequences” — an obvious veiled threat. Israel went ahead anyway. Within three weeks, almost the entire population of Rafah — one million people — was safely evacuated to areas where the IDF had set up “humanitarian zones,” both in Al-Mawasi and in parts of Khan Yunis. It took only three weeks. The Israelis managed to do what the Bidenites claimed could never be done. The IDF proceeded over the summer to defeat and destroy four Hamas battalions in Rafah. It then took control of the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land along the Gazan border with Egypt, sealing off the tunnels through which, for years, Hamas had been smuggling weapons from Egypt into Gaza And on October 17, the IDF killed the Hamas mastermind, Yahya Sinwar.

In Colonel Kemp’s view, Biden and Harris have been wrong before, and are wrong now, in the advice they have been giving the Israelis. Now is the time for the IDF, fresh from its achievement in killing Sinwar, to press ahead in the north, where a few thousand Hamas fighters are trying to regroup. It’s the last area in Gaza where the IDF has not completely subdued the enemy, and it must not leave Hamas, however reduced in numbers, still standing, able to proclaim triumphantly to the Arabs that the terror group had “not yielded to the Zionist enemy.” No matter how much pressure Biden and Harris try to apply, the IDF must ignore it, and proceed to mop up the enemy forces in the north, of whom there are only a few thousand left alive and unwounded, from an original force, pre-October 7, of some forty thousand. Of those forty thousand, about twenty thousand are known to have been killed, and many thousands more have been wounded so severely as to be rendered hors combat. Don’t stop now, Colonel Kemp urges, and fortunately, despite the Bidenites, Israel likely won’t.