According to a recent report, 3,840 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian civil war—more than were killed during the second intifada. But neither Mahmoud Abbas nor Arab-Israeli parliamentarians have said a word about these deaths in public. Edy Cohen comments:

The causes of death [enumerated in the report] ranged from artillery shelling to shootings to torture in the regime’s infamous prisons across the country. . . . The [same report] also said that 1,682 Palestinians are still missing, their fates unknown. According to some assessments, these Palestinians were either killed at some time during the bloody civil war or—“in the best case”—are still in prison. . . . .

The Yarmouk refugee camp, which was home to tens of thousands [of Palestinians], was utterly demolished over the course of the war. Before the camp was destroyed, the Assad regime laid siege to it. During that time, images of emaciated Palestinians began emerging in Syrian opposition media outlets.

Despite these horrors, not one official in the Palestinian Authority (PA) publicly condemned the Assad regime. [But when] a Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorist from Gaza is killed by IDF soldiers while trying to plant a roadside bomb or trying to breach the border fence, the Arab and Western worlds are apoplectic. The Arab League issues its familiar condemnation; the consistently hostile Kuwait denounces Israel at the UN and tries to convene the Security Council; Mahmoud Abbas requests international protection for the Palestinians; and all of these reactions are covered around the clock by the Arab and Western press. . . .

Throughout the war in Syria, Abbas’s silence on the plight of the Palestinians there has been deafening. He has never repudiated Bashar al-Assad or Iran for killing Palestinians. He seeks the best of all possible worlds: support from both Iran and the Arabs. It appears he has been successful. During the atrocities perpetrated in Iraq several years ago, a downtrodden Yazidi woman held a placard that said: “The tragedy of the Yazidi people is that the Jews aren’t their enemy.”

The same can be said of the tragedy of Syria’s Palestinians.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.