My good friend William Teach noted that NBC News decided to take its cue from all of the pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas Twitter bots out there, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth that some poor, poor Palestinians were killed during the rescue, blaming a “failure of negotiations.”

“What we saw yesterday is actually failure of the negotiations,” Yossi Mekelberg, an associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said in a phone interview with NBC News.

“Had there been a cease-fire, these hostages would already have been at home, and the civilians that were killed yesterday would be alive,” Mekelberg said.

There was a ceasefire in place, right up through October 6^th. Had Hamas not broken that, those hostages would have always been at home, and the civilians killed in the rescue missions would still be alive. Continue reading →