Melanie Phillips
Substack, Feb. 21, 2025
“… those looking to him to rescue America from the depredations of the left should not be blind to his flawed attitude to monstrous world leaders — his belief that in every conflict lies a potential deal to be negotiated in which he will emerge the victor.”
After the heartbreak comes a profound anger. The return from Gaza of the bodies of the murdered Israeli hostages, nine month-old Kfir and four year-old Ariel Bibas— after a grotesque Hamas propaganda stunt displaying their coffins and with the subsequent discovery that what was assumed to be the body of the children’s mother, Shiri, was in fact an unidentified corpse — has triggered in the already deeply traumatised Israeli people a bottomless grief and a demand for justice at long last.
Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were also murdered on October 7 2023. The suffering of her husband Yarden, who was released from Hamas captivity only three weeks ago, is unconscionable.
Oded Lifshitz, aged 83, whose body was returned with the Bibas children and who had made it part of his routine living near the Gaza border to drive countless Arabs from Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel, had his kindness repaid when they burned down his home, took him and his wife hostage and then murdered him.
The fate of all the other individuals slaughtered, raped, tortured, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped into Gaza in the October 7 atrocities is no less shattering….SOURCE