Hamas accepted a truce!
Hamas accepted a truce!
Hamas accepted a truce!

Awesome! Does that mean that they're going to stop the rocket fire on Israeli civilians? No actually there were more barrages and injuries this morning:

Two soldiers and a civilian were lightly wounded by shrapnel on Sunday evening when four mortar shells fired from the Gaza Strip landed in the Sha'ar Hanegev region of the western Negev. In addition, at least one Kassam rocket landed near Sderot an hour later. The latest ceasefire violations were one of many for the day. Earlier, IDF soldiers patrolling the Gaza border near the Kissufim crossing came under fire, and before that four Kassams and a number of mortar shells were fired at the South from the Strip. Troops returned fire into Gaza, and no casualties or damage were reported in the attack.

Well that sucks. Israel is now talking about retaliatory strikes, going so far as to warn about "disproportionate" responses (if they're going to get accused of that anyway they might as well make it official).

So declarations of a truce are premature. But of course Hamas is eventually going to have to accommodate Israel somehow. What are they going to do? Start another war? Hamas's declarations of victory aside - and mainstream media parroting of those claims aside as well - Hamas knows they got dismantled. Most of their time is being spent figuring out why. Their claims to victory are just pathetic nudge-wink phrases - pro forma slogans so that their leftist Western fans can keep vicariously wallowing in glorious resistance:

Hamas's Academic Cheerleaders [incl. Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, Fawaz Gerges, Joseph Massad, Muqtedar Khan, Mark LeVine, et al.]... If further proof was needed that the field of Middle East studies is marred by a politicized, morally vacuous approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the reaction of many of its leading lights to the current war in Gaza should suffice. According to these self-appointed arbiters of international law, Israel's military campaign against Hamas following the firing of over 6,000 rockets at Israeli civilian targets since 2005 is unjustified. Hamas, they tell us, is not a terrorist organization bent on Israel's destruction, but rather a national liberation movement that seeks only the noble founding of a Palestinian state. Either that or its leaders, all evidence to the contrary, can be negotiated with and cajoled into moderation. They insist Israel recognize that Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, even as they deny any responsibility on the part of Gazans for electing a terrorist government.

These are the same people who insist that chanting "throw Jews into gas chambers" is just over-exuberant anti-Zionism because the protesters actually mean Israelis.

Anyway - yes Hamas got beat, yes they know it, no their Western Israel-hating sycophants will never admit it. A truce will eventually be declared. It won't be a total Israeli victory - Shalit won't be involved - but it will be more than Israel had before Cast Lead. And when that happens these tools will use it as "proof" of an Israeli defeat. Because a 100-to-1 kill ratio, a wealth of on-the-ground intelligence, and a halt to rocket fire - that's the very essence of a "defeat."

References and previously after the jump...