Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat The October 7 Attack, Time And Again, Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified
Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau said in an October 24, 2023 show on LBC TV (Lebanon) that Hamas is prepared to repeat the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” Operation time and again until Israel is annihilated. He added that Palestinians are willing to pay the price and that they are “proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Hamad said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: “Everything we do is justified.”
Palestinians demonstrated against Hamas in northern Gaza on Tuesday, in what appeared to be the largest protest against the militant group since its attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Video obtained by CNN showed large crowds, estimated to be thousands of people by a CNN journalist on the ground, marching through the streets of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, chanting “For god’s sake, Hamas out,” “Hamas terrorists” and “We want an end to the war.”
A message shared on social media appeared to call for nine anti-Hamas demonstrations across Gaza on Wednesday, with the protest organizers saying, “our voices must reach all the spies who sold our blood.”
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Related video Doctor in Gaza reveals night of horror when IDF resumed strikes
“Let them hear your voice, let them know that Gaza is not silent, and that there is a people who will not accept to be eradicated,” the message continued.
CNN has not been able to verify the original source of the message.
The protests come after the death toll in Gaza surpassed 50,000 on Sunday, according to the health ministry in the enclave, with no end in sight.
The territory, home to 2.1 million Palestinians, fell under the militant group’s control in 2007 after a 2006 election and brief civil war with Fatah, a rival Palestinian faction that is the backbone of the Palestinian Authority.
Northern Gaza has been hit hard by the military offensive Israel launched in response to the October 7 attacks. Seventeen months of war have reduced much of the enclave to rubble, making it impossible for aid agencies to reach the battered north.
[The CNN Report continues]
Israel has often accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid delivered to the enclave to “rebuild its war machine,” something the militant group denies.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Sunday that no food, water, medicines, or fuel had entered Gaza in three weeks, marking a longer siege than what was in place in the first phase of the war.
“Every day without food inches Gaza closer to an acute hunger crisis,” UNRWA said in a social media post on Sunday.
Khader Al-Za’anoun of Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, contributed reporting.
Today, Israelis are celebrating the 77th independence day of the State of Israel, the reborn nation state of the Jewish people. This year, as last, our celebrations are muted as we remain deeply traumatized by the barbaric massacre Hamas carried out on Oct. 7 and the war we have been forced to fight as a result.
As long as 59 hostages — some alive, others already murdered in captivity — remain held by Hamas in Gaza, the scars of Oct. 7 cannot begin to heal. Their families are desperate. Those whose loved ones are dead need them home, to bury them, to mourn, and to rebuild their lives that have been on hold for 18 months.
The families of living hostages endure anguish every minute of every day. We know from returned hostages that those still in captivity are subjected to beatings, torture, and starvation. Hamas psychologically tortures their families further by releasing twisted propaganda videos featuring their loved ones. It is an ongoing war crime and people of conscience the world over need to scream from the rafters to demand their release.
Among the hostages is Edan Alexander, 21, an American citizen. I know that patriotic Americans — from the president on down — cannot stand by while a fellow citizen is held captive by a depraved and psychopathic terrorist organization. As long as Edan and 58 other Israelis remain kidnapped, our nation feels a deep hole in its collective heart.
Anyone who wants this war to end must do everything possible to bring the hostages home. Hamas could release them immediately, without any deal. If it cared at all about its own people, it would. If it valued Palestinian lives even a fraction as much as Israelis value ours, it would act. Instead, it launched a brutal attack, knowing it would bring yet another self-inflicted tragedy upon the Palestinians.
Every returned hostage I have spoken to has said the same thing: the Hamas terrorists who held them do not care about human life. Their highest goal is death through jihad; every death is, to them, a martyrdom to be replaced by the next.
Contrast that with Israel, whose founding we celebrate today. Our culture celebrates life. L’chaim — to life — we say when toasting. “Whoever saves a life saves the world entire,” the Talmud teaches.
[The Daily News Op- Ed continues]
So too are those of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which backs Hamas and seeks nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, spread global chaos, and pursue Israel’s destruction. But for Iran, Oct. 7 has backfired. In its aftermath, Hezbollah has been decimated, the Assad regime in Syria has fallen, and Iran’s own missile bombardments on Israel were thwarted by Israel and its allies. Meanwhile, Israel has shown resilience; its GDP rising despite the war and projected to rise further.
The essence of Israel remains today what it was 77 years ago: to sanctify life, to protect the Jewish people, and to enable them to thrive. Our highest priority at this moment is the release of the 59 remaining hostages. Without them, we are incomplete. For Israel’s birthday, the greatest gift the world could give us is to keep up the pressure on all parties to do whatever it takes to bring them home.
To that we would say: l’chaim. To life.
Tishby is a two-time New York Times best-selling author and served as Israel’s first-ever special envoy for combating antisemitism. Tishby recently founded Eighteen to combat antisemitism and inspire Jewish pride.
Palestinians in Gaza again protested against Hamas on Wednesday after the initial wave of protests died down earlier this month amid Hamas threats and brutal violence against those who participated.
Crowds of Palestinians marched in Beit Lahia, which is in northern Gaza, on Wednesday chanting “Hamas out, out!” and “We don’t want a Qatari tent—we want to live in freedom.” Other chants included, “Yes to love, no to terrorism, yes to peace” and “Deliver the message… all of Hamas is garbage.”
One protest leader explained, “We want to live in peace—we don’t want more wars.” Based on videos of the protests, it appears hundreds may have been in attendance.
Soon after the protests started, members of Hamas showed up in masks with pro-Hamas messages on posters such as “Beit Lahia with the resistance.” Photos and videos of the pro-Hamas agitators circulated on Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned social channels. However, the protesters quickly kicked out those who aimed to distort what the aims of the protests truly were.
Hamas, which brutally seized full control of Gaza in 2007, sparked the current war in the Palestinian enclave when it invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages. The ensuing conflict has resulted in massive losses for Hamas but also created a humanitarian crisis among Gazan civilians.
Anger with Hamas among Gaza’s population is widespread. A recent poll from the Institute for Social and Economic Progress showed that only 6 percent of Gazans want Hamas to exclusively rule the enclave after the war, and even fewer said they would vote for them if elections were held today. However, 38 percent expressed support for a unity government, which would presumably include Hamas in power as part of a coalition with other Palestinian factions.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Another statement, released by the clans of Shuja’iyya in northern Gaza, read, “We call on you to take to the streets in a popular march of anger rejecting the continuation of the war, and demanding the lifting of Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip, so that life can return to its people and our ongoing suffering can come to an end.”
However, after a little less than a week of continuous protests, they died down , partly due to Hamas threats and violence against those who took part in them.
Additionally, there were reports of death threats and even attempted executions and kidnappings by Hamas targeting those participating in the protests. Hamas officials have also reportedly called activists and threatened them not to join that Friday’s protests, which were supposed to be a part of a “Day of Rage.”
Hamas reportedly tortured a 22-year-old man, Uday Rabie, to death for speaking out against the group and attending the protests. Rabie’s brother, Hassan, told CNN that “They took him, they kept torturing him.” Rabie was reportedly tied by the neck with a rope
“They handed him over to me, and told me, in these words,” Hassan said. “This is the fate of everyone who disrespects Al-Qassam Brigades and speaks ill of them.”
Israel’s yes Studios announced on Monday that its gripping documentary featuring self-shot and mostly exclusive real-time footage to chronicle the Hamas terrorist attack at the Supernova electronic music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, is now streaming globally on Amazon’s Prime Video.
Titled “#NOVA,” the documentary is entirely comprised of video and audio footage filmed by festival attendees themselves, for example on their cellphones, that detail minute-by-minute how the deadly massacre unfolded. Hamas terrorists infiltrated the music festival in southern Israel, murdering more than 350 people and kidnapping 44 others. Fourteen of the hostages have since returned home to Israel alive while 17 were killed in captivity.
Among the 251 total hostages abducted from Israel by Hamas terrorists during their deadly Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel, 59 are still being held in captivity in the Gaza Strip. Monday marks 18 months since the attack.
“‘#NOVA’ is one of our most talked-about and controversial films, and always attracted a huge amount of interest when we held exclusive screenings at selected international venues,” Sharon Levi, managing director of yes Studios, said in a released statement on Monday. “We are therefore honored that this extraordinary documentary has just arrived on Prime Video, making it readily available to meet the significant ongoing global demand that we know still exists.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“#NOVA” was produced by Kastina Communications for yes Docu, with Dan Pe’er directing. Yes Studios is the documentary’s international distributor.
Pe’er volunteered to help survivors immediately following the Oct. 7 attack at the music festival, which was held in Re’im, Israel, close to Israel’s border with Gaza. The event was attended by more than 3,500 people. Pe’er collected videos and audio clips from festival survivors related to the attack and arranged the footage chronologically before approaching Kastina Communications to create “#NOVA.”
The documentary aired in Israel in December 2023 on yes TV. Guy Lavie, vice president of documentaries at yes TV, previously explained that “#NOVA” features “solely real-time footage, much of it exclusive — and with no testimonials nor commentaries,” capturing “the genuine emotions and horror endured by thousands of music lovers, their families, and indeed our whole nation.”
Hamas has quietly removed thousands of names from its official casualty reports in Gaza, prompting fresh scrutiny of the accuracy of the death toll figures that have been widely cited by media and international organizations since the start of the Palestinian terrorist group’s war with Israel.
An analysis, conducted by Salo Aizenberg of the US-based nonprofit Honest Reporting and first reported on by the Telegraph, revealed that 3,400 individuals listed as killed in earlier updates released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in August and October 2024 no longer appear in the March 2025 report. Among those missing from the latest list are 1,080 children.
“Hamas has manipulated the number of fatalities they report since the start of the war, overcounting civilian deaths and concealing combatant losses,” Aizenberg told The Algemeiner.
“I took all the unique deaths and ID numbers from the August and October lists. I combined them. I removed duplicates and then compared it to the March list. And there were 3,400 names that didn’t appear,” he said. “In my mind, the 1,080 children are particularly notable.”
Aizenberg said the systematic inflation of civilian death tolls by Hamas is not a new phenomenon. “They have done this in every round of conflict. For example, in 2009’s Cast Lead, Hamas initially claimed that 1,300 Palestinians died and only about 50 were combatants. Months later Hamas admitted that in fact 600-700 were their fighters,” he said.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner at the time.
The debate over casualty figures was intensified by a February 2025 article published in the medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that Gaza’s true death toll could be as high as 64,000. That estimate was based on a statistical extrapolation using “capture-recapture” methods applied to a subset of the ministry’s data. The researchers behind the study said they only used what they called “hospital-recorded deaths” from June 2024 and asserted that these records were the most verified.
But Aizenberg said that claim does not hold up to scrutiny. He reviewed the same June dataset used by the Lancet study and found that 881 names in that core group were later removed in the March update. In his view, this undermines the foundation of the statistical model used to estimate excess mortality.
“They do this very careful statistical analysis, taking three lists and doing capture, recapture from vetted lists of hospital recorded deaths,” Aizenberg said. “And then I took their June list that they used again [in the February report] and I found 881 were also removed from the March list. So even after a really careful study [its] core data sources are not valid.”
Past reports have noted that the casualty forms used to populate the lists could be submitted online by anyone with access to a Google Form, raising concerns about verification protocols.
Despite these issues, some international entities, including the United Nations, and news outlets have continued to cite the figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, occasionally with the disclaimer that the numbers could not be independently confirmed.
Fox said such caveats are insufficient and that the deletions from Hamas’s own published records have, in his view, stripped away any plausible justification for continuing to rely on the ministry’s figures. “It is malpractice and deeply irresponsible on the part of any media organization still using them. There is simply no excuse for repeating them as credible,” he said.
Hundreds of people have taken part in the largest anti-Hamas protest in Gaza since the war with Israel began, taking to the streets to demand the group step down from power.
Masked Hamas militants, some armed with guns and others carrying batons, intervened and forcibly dispersed the protesters, assaulting several of them.
Videos shared widely on social media by activists typically critical of Hamas showed young men marching in the streets of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza on Tuesday, chanting “out, out, out, Hamas out”.
[The BBC Report continues]
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands displaced since Israeli military operations resumed with air strikes on 18 March.
One of the protesters, Beit Lahia resident Mohammed Diab, had his home destroyed in the war and lost his brother in an Israeli airstrike a year ago.
“We refuse to die for anyone, for any party’s agenda or the interests of foreign states,” he said.
“Hamas must step down and listen to the voice of the grieving, the voice that rises from beneath the rubble – it is the most truthful voice.”
Footage from the town also showed protesters shouting “down
There was opposition to Hamas long before the war, though much of it remained hidden for fear of reprisals.
Mohammed Al-Najjar, from Gaza, posted on his Facebook: “Excuse me, but what exactly is Hamas betting on? They’re betting on our blood, blood that the whole world sees as just numbers.
“Even Hamas counts us as numbers. Step down and let us tend to our wounds.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, during which around 1,200 people, mainly civilians, were killed and 251 others taken hostage.
Israel responded to the attack with a military offensive in Gaza to destroy Hamas, which has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, the Hamas-run health ministry said.
Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million population has also been displaced, many of them several times.
An estimated 70% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed in Gaza, healthcare, water and sanitation systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
with Hamas rule, down with the Muslim Brotherhood rule”.
Hamas has been the sole ruler in Gaza since 2007, after winning Palestinian elections a year prior and then violently ousting rivals.
Open criticism of Hamas has grown in Gaza since war began, both on the streets and online, though there are still those that are fiercely loyal and it is hard to accurately gauge how far support for the group has shifted.
More than 100 movie theaters across the United States will release on Friday a scathing documentary that examines how antisemitism exploded on college campuses, social media, and the streets across America starting the day after Hamas-led terrorists went on a deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
From Briarcliff Entertainment and award-winning filmmaker Wendy Sachs, “October 8” dives deep into the surge of antisemitism in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, while Israel was still counting the number of people murdered and taken hostage by the terrorist group.
The documentary shows that on Oct. 8, 2023 — just one day after the largest massacre of Jews to take place since the Holocaust — people across the US were already trying to justify and celebrate the Hamas atrocities and use them as an excuse to spread hatred against Jews and Israel. It features footage from Time Square, New York, where less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack, thousands gathered to protest against Israel and applaud Hamas for murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages ranging in age from nine months to 93 years old.
“Rather than the outrage being directed against those slaughtering the Jews, the outrage was being directed at the Jews for objecting to being slaughtered,” says author and podcast host Dan Senor in the documentary.
After sharing harrowing footage from the Oct. 7 massacre and testimony by survivors, the documentary scrutinizes how Hamas has been celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists for orchestrating the attack and exposes how the anti-Israel narrative promoted by the US-designated terrorist organization has become mainstream on college campuses through its numerous ties to student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). It is estimated that SJP has roughly 200 branches on college campuses across the country.
Sachs was visiting her daughter at the University of Wisconsin on Oct. 7, 2023, and learned about the terrorist attack through the images and videos shared on television and social media. “It was horrifying and gutting,” she told The Algemeiner. “I think we all as the Jewish diaspora community felt completely gutted, as if a generational trauma had been unleashed.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Other topics examined in the documentary include the demonization of Israel by human rights groups and the media – such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN Women — the publishing of false news about Israel, and the normalization of violence against Jews online. The documentary also condemns the widespread silence by celebrities about the Oct. 7 attack and Hamas’s hostage-taking, in comparison to the public outrage expressed after schoolgirls in Nigeria were abducted by Boko Haram in 2014.
“I felt completely betrayed by Hollywood,” actress Debra Messing says in the film.
Sachs conducted more than 80 interviews for the documentary and spoke to college students and professors, politicians, social media experts, antisemitism experts, journalists, academics, and celebrities.
Filming for “October 8” was completed in October 2024, when there were still 101 hostages being held by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. There are currently 59 Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza and at least 35 are dead.
Sachs told The Algemeiner one thing she hopes viewers realize after seeing “October 8” is that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism today. There is no gray anymore.”
“And that the exceptionalizing of Israel has really led to this moment,” she added. “We see it in the bias that we see in the media. We see it from NGOs, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the propaganda being fed to young people. It is the perfect storm that has led to this moment, where this irrational obsessive hatred of Israel has led to Hamas being celebrated as freedom fighters rather than as terrorists. And that’s really what I want people to walk away with — to understanding that when they see ‘Zionists Not Allowed’ [signs], that means ‘Jews Not Allowed.’”
Mousa Abu Marzouk is a longstanding member of Hamas leadership. He doesn’t exactly lead from the front: he’s based in Qatar while Palestinians in Gaza face the consequences of his movement’s bloodlust. But he said something last month that gave me déjà vu.
Unlike some of his colleagues, who have said they would repeat Oct. 7 again and again (and for what it’s worth, I think we should believe them), Abu Marzouk told the New York Times that had he known what the ramifications of Oct. 7 would be, he wouldn’t have supported the attack. “If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been Oct. 7,” he said.
This isn’t the first time someone in the Arab world has attacked Israel, brought horrifying consequences upon their people, and then expressed regret. After the 2006 Lebanon War, which started when Hezbollah invaded Israel, killed eight soldiers and captured two, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah told Lebanese TV “We did not think, even 1%, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. If I had known… that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Not that Nasrallah learned from his mistake. Hezbollah’s response to Oct. 7 was to rain down thousands of missiles on Israel before facing terrible consequences itself. This time, it wasn’t just the Lebanese people who suffered: Nasrallah’s funeral was a couple of weeks ago.
[The New York Daily News op-ed continues]
Why for example, 77 years later, are Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the region still called refugees? I’m not talking about those suffering from the current war Hamas imposed on them. But why are permanent towns in Palestinian territories still called “refugee camps”?
The assumption is: Israel is temporary, and we are therefore refugees until its destruction. But that assumption has not destroyed Israel. It has merely held back the Palestinians. In 2025, the path to prosperity and progress for Palestinians will not be paved by fantasies of undoing the outcome of the war of 1948, yet another war that Israel did not start but had to win.
Time and again, the Palestinians have been sacrificed by their leaders in self-created Nakbas, and their fake friends keep cheering, consciously or subconsciously influenced by both old Soviet propaganda and age-old tropes of theological antisemitism. But none of that does any good for the Palestinians themselves.
The so-called “resistance” movement has failed. Israel and Jews around the world suffer as well, as antisemitism surges to record levels. But no one suffers more for these self-inflicted catastrophes than Palestinians themselves.
And in 2023, just as the prospect of a regional peace deal building on the Abraham Accords looked within reach, Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the biggest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. The consequences of that were predictable.
What is clear is that attacking Israel and seeking its destruction has not brought a single tangible gain for Palestinians, only self-inflicted Nakbas. Those in the West who support the Palestinians need to stop cheering on self-inflicted destruction and get real. Israel is not going anywhere. Attacking it has only made Palestinian reality worse with every passing year.
Tishby is a two-time New York Times best-selling author and served as Israel’s first-ever Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization.
For months, leaders of Hamas have defended the militant group’s decision to launch the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, even though it ignited a devastating Israeli offensive that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and reduced the territory to rubble.
Hamas has declared “victory” over Israel, and some of its officials have vowed that their fighters will carry out more Oct. 7-style attacks in the future.
But now one of Hamas’s top officials is publicly expressing reservations about the assault, which also touched off a humanitarian crisis that displaced nearly two million and led to critical shortages of food and health care.
[The New York Times Report continues]
His comments suggest that there are differences among Hamas officials over the party line on Oct. 7 and its consequences. They also indicate that the frustrations of Palestinians in Gaza who say the attack has made them endure extraordinary suffering are having some impact within the Hamas leadership.
Mr. Abu Marzouk’s comments were similar to those made by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in the aftermath of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. The scale of the destruction in that conflict led Mr. Nasrallah to concede that his group would not have kidnapped and killed several Israeli soldiers at the time had it known it would set off such a strong response.
In the coming days, Israel and Hamas are expected to start a discussion about the second phase of the cease-fire in Gaza, which calls for a permanent end to the fighting, a full Israeli withdrawal, and the release of more Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. But delays in starting those talks coupled with disputes over the implementation of the first phase have reinforced fears that the truce could fall apart and the war could restart.
Mr. Abu Marzouk, who spent years living in the United States, has long been seen as one of the more pragmatic figures in Hamas. The war has exacted a heavy price on his family, with his 77-year-old brother, Yousef, killed in the fighting.
“He’s not a nihilist,” said Stanley Cohen, a lawyer and longtime friend of Mr. Abu Marzouk based in New York. “He would not support any action that he believed would bring unprecedented, wholesale retaliation by anyone on the people.”
Mr. Abu Marzouk said that Hamas’s survival in the war against Israel was itself a “kind of victory.” He also likened Hamas to an average person fighting Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion: if the untrained novice survived Mr. Tyson’s punches, people would say he was victorious, he said.
In absolute terms, he said it would be “unacceptable” to claim Hamas won, especially considering the scale of what Israel inflicted on Gaza.
“We’re talking about a party that lost control of itself and took revenge against everything,” he said, referring to Israel. “That is not a victory under any circumstances.”
The Israeli military has claimed that it has conducted its air and ground campaigns in Gaza in accordance with international law, and that it was carrying out attacks against Hamas, which the United States and other countries have designated a terrorist group. But legal experts have accused Israel of using force in a way that resulted in the deaths of too many civilians.
Mr. Abu Marzouk also suggested there is some openness within the Hamas leadership to negotiate the future of the group’s weapons in Gaza, a thorny issue that other Hamas officials have said is off limits.
“We are ready to speak about every issue,” he said, when asked about the weapons. “Any issue that is put on the table, we need to speak about it.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
As the talks over the second phase of the cease-fire have been held up, Israeli and American officials have increasingly spoken about extending the first phase.
Releasing some more hostages and prisoners during an extension of the first phase, Mr. Abu Marzouk added, could be discussed. But he clarified that, under any circumstances, Hamas would demand far more prisoners in exchange for each hostage because the group considers the remaining Israeli hostages to be soldiers. He mentioned 500 and 1,000 prisoners as possible figures for each hostage.
During the first phase, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have been released, but the number of prisoners released per hostage has generally not exceeded 50.
Mr. Abu Marzouk said Hamas was also open to releasing all hostages at the same time, if Israel was willing to free the thousands of Palestinians in its prisons, end the war and withdraw from Gaza.
“We’re ready to have a comprehensive deal,” he said.
Israeli officials have previously dismissed proposals to exchange all hostages for all prisoners.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting to this article.
The bipartisan bill directs the U.S. Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when investigating acts of Jew-hatred on campus.
“In the continued aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and Iran, we have seen college campuses across our nation become hotbeds of antisemitism where Jewish students’ rights are being threatened,” Scott said. “It’s critical the Department of Education has the tools and resources it needs to investigate antisemitism and root out this vile hatred wherever it rears its ugly head.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
The Senate version of the act has 32 co-sponsors, including Schumer, who was not a co-sponsor of the previous Senate version.
Jewish groups such as the the Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations of North America have also endorsed the legislation.
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) reintroduced the House version of the bill in the lower chamber earlier in February.
The Palestinian Authority (PA)’s official daily admitted that Hamas terrorists disguised themselves as civilians and used civilian homes to launch attacks, thus deliberately increasing casualties in Gaza.
Moreover, the PA called Hamas insolent for only putting on uniforms during the ceasefire in order to take credit.
Headline: “Shame branches out from faith”
“When three female Israeli hostages were released, Hamas members recently appeared armed and masked in their army uniforms, and in a completely flashy manner! Over the last 15 months of the war, we have not seen any of these activists in these uniforms. They were dressed in civilian shirts and pants, wore sandals (!!) [parentheses in source], and some were in pajamas. From among people’s homes – as Al-Jazeera TV presented them – they fired their [RPG] rockets at the occupation army’s vehicles, and retreated behind these homes. This matter, in addition to the racist and violent Israeli response to these rockets, is what contributed to increasing the losses among civilian residents of the slaughtered Gaza Strip…
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
This comes on the heels of another such admission by the official PA daily last week, that Hamas was using human shields:
“The Fatah Movement said that Hamas…placed itself at the disposal of Iran and other regional axes, and…caused the destruction of the Gaza Strip and more than 200,000 children, women, men, Martyrs, missing, wounded, and prisoners, behind whom it sought shelter instead of defending them and their homes…”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 12, 2025]
Nevertheless, it is important not to be fooled. The PA has not changed its true tune. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas still believes terrorist murderers are “heroic role models” and the PA still fully supports terror.
The PA’s true motivation for criticizing Hamas is political competition, and a desire to be given power in the Gaza Strip.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.
It’s a response from Dr. Denis MacEoin to the motion put forward by The Edinburgh Student’s Association to boycott all things Israeli, in which they claim Israel is under an apartheid regime.
Denis is an expert in Middle Eastern affairs and was a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Here’s his letter to the students.
TO: The Committee Edinburgh University Student Association.
May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain ‘s great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University . Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field. I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote.
I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel .
That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.
[The Quora Letter continues]
It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.
Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is.
That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population).
In Iran , the Bahai’s (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran ? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa . They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks were able to do in South Africa.
Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.
On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.
In Israel , women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid.
Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home.
It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran , where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief.
Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?
University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak.
I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel . I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens.
Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , Yemen , and Iran . They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahai’s…. Need I go on?
The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side.
Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument.
They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930’s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it?
Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense. I have given you some of the evidence.
It’s up to you to find out more.
Harvard University has settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that blighted its reputation while feeding an impression that Ivy League universities have become bastions of anti-Jewish hatred and pro-terror ideologies.
As previously reported by the Algemeiner, Harvard was sued, separately, both by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (The Brandeis Center) and Students Against Antisemitism (SAA) in 2024. The Brandeis Center alleged that the university’s neglecting to discipline a professor whose mistreatment of Israeli-Jewish students was confirmed by a third-party investigator violated civil rights protections mandated by federal law. SAA, citing similar legal infractions, alleged that the university failed to quell an explosion of antisemitic behavior on the campus, including harassment and hate speech.
Harvard initially fought the suits in court, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and a “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.
With the settlement, which comes one day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant —Harvard avoids a lengthy legal fight that would have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.
“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”
Per the agreement, it will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.
According to the Harvard Crimson, one plaintiff, Shabbos Kestenbaum, has declined to be a party to the settlement agreement and chosen to pursue an independent legal remedy, as well as representation by a new attorney.
All other parities commended the outcome of the case as progress.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
SAA attorney Marc Kasowtiz told Reuters, “These measures are going to very, very protective of the interests and rights of Jewish students on the Harvard campus.”
Harvard University is not the first elite university to settle a claim brought by Jewish students.
In June, Columbia University settled a lawsuit in which it was accused of abdicating its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year. The resolution of the case included Columbia’s hiring “Safe Passage Liaisons,” who will monitor protests, and “walking escorts,” who will accompany students whose safety is threatened around the campus. Other details of the settlement included “accommodations” for students whose academic lives are disrupted by protests and new security policies for controlling access to school property.
In July, New York University (NYU) agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of money to settle a lawsuit brought by three students who sued the school for responding, allegedly, to antisemitic discrimination “with deliberate indifference.” Like Harvard University, NYU agreed to formally recognize Zionism as a component of Jewish identity.
There was a staggering 340 percent increase in total antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022, according to newly unveiled research from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Announced on Monday, the new report presented by the two groups to Israeli President Isaac Herzog also showed that antisemitic incidents skyrocketed globally last year by nearly 100 percent compared to 2023.
Researchers chose to analyze data starting in 2022 in order to assess a year without a major event inflaming antisemitism, namely the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The report documented similar levels of antisemitic incidents growing in both North America and Europe last year. The United States saw an increase of 288 percent over the totals of 2022, while antisemitic atrocities in Canada rose by 562 percent. Meanwhile, incidents in France surged by over 350 percent, and the United Kingdom experienced a spike of 450 percent, with nearly 2,000 acts of antisemitism in the first half of 2024 alone.
In Asia, the report found a new emergence of antisemitism in a region with previously fewer incidents. Chinese social media sites featured a boost of antisemitic content and conspiracy theories which Israel’s embassy in the state called a “tsunami.” Japan and Taiwan saw anti-Israel protests and Nazi salutes, both formerly rare.
The report found mixed results in South America, where Chile’s antisemitic incidents increased 325 percent, but Argentina saw a slight decrease. Anti-Israel statements from Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also provoked tension with the Jewish state and an increase in online antisemitism.
In South Africa, antisemitism increased by 185 percent, while Australia saw a jump of 387 percent.
Analyzed at a global level, the report found that 41 percent of incidents featured antisemitic propaganda, 15.5 percent included violence, and approximately 25 percent focused on Israel.
The research also showed online antisemitism surged, increasing over 300 percent. Analysts found that classical antisemitism made up 38.5 percent of reported content, Holocaust denial accounted for 21.1 percent, and anti-Zionist material reached comprised 15.4 percent.
At an event held at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, two leaders from the World Zionist Organization (WZO) — chairman Yaakov Hagoel and Raheli Baratz, head of the group’s Department for Combating Antisemitism and Community Resilience — and two from the Jewish Agency (JAFI) — chairman Maj. Gen. (Res.) Doron Almog and Yigal Palmor, director of international relations — gave the report to Herzog.
“The report indicates a serious increase in antisemitism worldwide. Social networks have become central platforms for spreading hatred and antisemitism under the guise of freedom of expression,” Herzog said in a statement. “Calls to boycott Israel, especially when combined with ancient and ugly hatred against the Jewish people, are rapidly degenerating into violent outbursts to the point of harming Jewish property, body, and soul. I emphasize again: the hatred of antisemitism never ends with Jews alone and is a threat to democracy and the entire free world.”
Herzog urged all governments around the world to “act together to combat the phenomenon and educate for dialogue, tolerance, and mutual respect.”
Hagoel discussed the impact of antisemitism in the West Bank.
“In the Palestinian Authority, they continue to amplify hatred against Jews and the state of Israel, feeding antisemitic content in textbooks and the media, raising a generation that sanctifies death, terror, and hatred,” Hagoel said. “History has taught us repeatedly [that] antisemitism may start with Jews, but it never ends with them. The next stop is the entire Western world, which is under threat of the values it claims to represent.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“The 340 percent increase in antisemitic incidents poses a real threat to the foundations of Western democracy, where the new antisemitic discourse erodes the fundamental values of democratic society and creates cracks in the wall of pluralism and tolerance,” Baratz said.
Baratz also explained how the use of the term “anti-Zionism” acted as a mask to conceal conventional antisemitism.
“The data shows that while traditional antisemitic expressions are being pushed to the margins, the term ‘Zionism’ and its derivatives have become a new code for expressing hatred towards Jews,” Baratz said. “This is not a coincidence — it is a deliberate change in language aimed at making antisemitism socially acceptable. When a person or organization uses the term ‘anti-Zionist,’ they are often not expressing a legitimate political position but rather are reviving historical antisemitic patterns under a contemporary guise of legitimacy.”
View the full reporthttps://indd.adobe.com/view/ed4ae435-f10f-455a-9773-1d5076ab9963
In a world grappling with a resurgence of antisemitism, a new documentary seeks to confront the issue head-on, positing an unsettling take on the motivations behind the world’s oldest hatred through the insights of Rawan Osman, a Syrian-Lebanese antisemite-turned-Zionist.
“Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred,” directed by Canadian-Israeli filmmaker Raphael Shore, interweaves historical analysis with contemporary events through the voices of clerics, historians, sociologists, and cultural commentators, including the late British Chief Rabbi Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, author Yossi Klein Halevi, Israel’s antisemitism envoy Michal Cotler-Wunsh, and journalists Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray. It argues that antisemitism stems not from a perception of Jewish inferiority, but rather from resentment of Jewish excellence and moral leadership.
Osman — who founded “Arabs Ask,” a forum designed to challenge preconceived notions about Judaism and Israel among Arabs, and who describes herself as an Arab Zionist — narrates the movie.
Born in Damascus, Syria, she was raised in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and later lived in Saudi Arabia and Qatar before eventually settling in Germany. Her first encounter with a Jewish person was when she moved to Strasbourg, France in her twenties. In her words, the encounter prompted her “first and last panic attack.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Still, she noted, these groups achieved what the world, including the US and Israel, could not, emphasizing that the removal of Assad had to come from within Syria, as an external force taking him down would have turned him into a martyr.
Though Osman approached the recent changes with caution regarding their impact on Israel’s relations with its neighbors, she remained hopeful. “While I watch myself together with Rav Shalom Shwartz and Rav Shore on the big screen, I feel that peace between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria might come in my lifetime after all,” she told The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian Authority itself has revealed that Hamas turns hospitals into military interrogation facilities. As proof, on Facebook, the PA posted a summons issued by Hamas to a Gazan to report to Nasser Hospital to be interrogated by Hamas’ military intelligence.
The post was made by the former official spokesman of the PA Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri. Moreover, Al-Damiri criticized Hamas for continuing to use hospitals for “summonses, interrogations, and extortions”:
Text posted on Facebook by Adnan Al-Damiri:
“FYI
Read the summons, its date, the sender and the recipient.
How, when, and where Hamas’ militias summon a citizen in Gaza in the name of the State of Palestine. They order him to come to a security interrogation office at Nasser Hospital (note where) [parentheses in source]. The summonses, interrogations, and extortions continue in whatever remains of the hospitals.”
Text in picture cited by Al-Damiri:
“State of Palestine
Ministry of Interior and National Security
Internal Security Force
Summons
To Citizen: Shadi Subhi Al-Suweiti, aka: Abu Subhi
Address: Khan Yunis/Al-Mawasi
Under the law of the State of Palestine and in accordance with our vested authority, you are to report to:
Premises: Nasser Medical Center
Office: Public Relations
On: Wednesday
Date: 16 October 2024
At: 11:30 AM
Attendance is mandatory and legally binding.
Bring your ID card or passport.”
[Adnan Al-Damiri, Facebook page, December 27, 2024]
Israel has been libeled for committing war crimes at Gazan hospitals, with the World Health Organization saying that it was “appalled” at Israeli operations there. What the WHO should be appalled at is Hamas’ use of hospitals as military centers.
Israel has not just the right but the obligation to pursue the terrorists who turn medical facilities into dungeons. And the international community should be focusing its efforts at dismantling the Hamas forces that do so rather than continuously libeling Israel.
Hostages held in Gaza were subjected to torture, including sexual and psychological abuse, starvation, burns and medical neglect, according to a new report by the Israeli Health Ministry that will be submitted to the United Nations this week.
The report is based on interviews with the medical and welfare teams which treated more than 100 Israeli and foreign hostages, most of whom were released in late November 2023, in a brief truce between Israel and Hamas. Eight hostages were rescued by the Israeli military.
The hostages include more than 30 children and teenagers, a few of whom were found to have been bound, beaten or branded with a heated object, according to the report addressed to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and published late on Saturday.
Women reported sexual assault by the captors, including at gunpoint. Men were beaten, starved, branded, held bound in isolation and denied access to a bathroom, the report said. Some were denied treatment for injuries and medical conditions.
[The Reuters Report continues]
A fresh bid to secure a Gaza ceasefire including a hostage deal has gained momentum in recent weeks, although no breakthrough has been reported as yet.
The war began with Hamas’ October 2023 attack, in which 1,200 people were killed, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel’s subsequent campaign against Hamas has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Palestinian health officials, displaced nearly all of Gaza’s population and reduced much of its territory to rubble.
Israeli authorities are investigating allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees arrested during the war.
Columbia University is facing an uproar after it was revealed that Professor Joseph Massad, who described the Hamas-led massacre of Israelis last Oct. 7 as “astounding,” “awesome,” and “incredible,” is slated to teach a spring semester course on Zionism, prompting calls for his dismissal from Israeli colleague Shai Davidai, who condemned Massad’s continued employment as evidence of the university’s “moral and intellectual bankruptcy.”
The news also prompted adjunct professor Lawrence Rosenblatt to announce his resignation, echoing Davidai’s criticism by declaring that Columbia has lost not only its “moral compass but its intellectual one.”
The undergraduate class, titled History of the Jewish Enlightenment in 19th Century Europe and the Development of Zionism, will also examine the peace process between Israel, Arab states, and the Palestinian national movement, alongside a “historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict,” according to a description of the course on Columbia’s website.
Massad drew outrage shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack when he published an article on the Palestinian propaganda outlet The Electronic Intifada. He described the invasion, which included the killing of 1,200 people and the taking of 253 hostages, as a “major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies” that dealt a “death blow” to Israeli confidence in its military.
Massad also expressed his wish that the evacuation of some 300,000 Israelis from their homes in Israel’s north and south as a result of the onslaught would turn into a “permanent exodus.”
“They may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe,” he wrote.
Davidai, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia, expressed outrage that someone who openly expressed “jubilation and awe” over the Hamas-led atrocities would be allowed to teach a class on Zionism.
“The fact that someone like Joseph Massad, who openly celebrates the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, who has talked about Jewish supremacy, and who has shown up to protest [in] anti-Jewish and anti-Israel and anti-American protests on campus, would teach a class about Zionism tells you everything that you need to know about not just the moral bankruptcy of Columbia University, but also the intellectual bankruptcy,” Davidai told The Algemeiner.
“I would never want to take a class about racism from someone who is racist, with someone who is sexist about sexism, with someone who is homophobic or transphobic about the LGBTQ movement, and I would definitely not want to take a class about Zionism from an avowed anti-Zionist,” Davidai went on. “I am not looking to be indoctrinated. I always want to be educated.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
It went on, however, to reaffirm the university’s commitment to the “principles of free expression and the open exchange of viewpoints and perspectives through opportunities for constructive dialogue.”
The statement noted that the course is an elective, and not a required course, and is one of three on Zionism and the history of Israel.
A rigorous analysis published on Saturday of Hamas authorities’ death statistics in Gaza shows they were vastly inflated and methodologically flawed.
The report by the London-based Henry Jackson Society security think tank breaks down the figure of about 44,000 deaths since Oct. 7, 2023, that the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza has published, and which international media have reported without scrutiny.
The scale of civilian deaths in Gaza is a key element in a legal and propaganda attempt by Israel’s enemies to isolate it internationally using false allegations of genocide.
The figure, which does not distinguish between civilians and the 17,000 terrorists Israel says it has killed in Gaza, also includes about 5,000 people who die of natural causes each year, states the report.
“This report raises serious concerns that the Gaza MoH figures have been overstated,” wrote Andrew Fox, an analyst who specializes in defense, the Middle East and disinformation, who wrote the report for the Henry Jackson Society.
The report was reported on Saturday in mainstream media, including the New York Post and The Telegraph, whose article the Israel Foreign Ministry reposted on X.
‘Questionable Counting’
“The data behind their figures contains natural deaths, deaths from before this conflict began and deaths of those killed by Hamas itself; it contains no mention of Hamas combatant fatalities; and it overstates the number of women and children killed,” reads the report, titled “Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza.”
[The JNS Report continues]
On Dec. 10, Hamas’s Government Media Office wrote that nearly 44% of 44,758 reported fatalities in the Gaza Strip were children. The report disputes this data, showing cases of adults being listed as children. The document also shows that the Government Media Office, which says its data come from the health ministry, routinely inflates the share of women and children in the statistics.
The health ministry data also shows that men have been misclassified as women, the Fox report states. “In the August 2024 list, 103 names were marked as female who had a male first name (e.g. Mohammed).”
The report comes as Israel is on trial for alleged genocide at the International Court of Justice and prosecutions for alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court against Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel and the United States, among other countries, have categorically rejected and condemned those charges.
Israel’s advocates have said that even Hamas’s unreliable statistics, when combined with the Israeli estimates on the number of terrorists killed in the Gaza Strip, reveal a relatively low rate of civilian deaths. Considering the urban warfare conditions of the Gaza Strip, and Hamas’s strategy of using civilian shields, Israel’s defenders say the statistics reflect a major effort to avoid civilian loss of life during IDF operations to dismantle Hamas and free Israeli hostages.
An estimated 6,000 Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting another 250. About 100 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip, though dozens of them are believed to have died. Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks for a ceasefire. The condition of the hostages is unknown as Hamas has not allowed aid organizations, including the Red Cross, to visit them.
To his students, Ahmad al-Khatib was a deputy principal at an elementary school in Gaza run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. To Hamas’s military wing, documents say, he was something else entirely: an infantryman operating out of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
The military wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, kept meticulous records of its fighters, tracking the weapons they were issued and regularly evaluating everything from their fitness to their loyalty.
Mr. al-Khatib, an employee of the U.N. agency since 2013, was among them: Secret internal Hamas documents shared with The New York Times by the Israeli government say that he held the rank of squad commander, was an expert in ground combat and had been given at least a dozen weapons, including a Kalashnikov and hand grenades.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The agency’s schools in Gaza have become a flashpoint in the current conflict. Close to 200 UNRWA facilities have been struck since the war began, many of them schools.
Israel claims that Hamas has used the buildings for military purposes and to hide its fighters, making them legitimate targets under international law. But the United Nations says that Israeli strikes on schools have likely violated the law by causing disproportionate harm to noncombatants.
Among the seized records are secret Hamas military plans that show that the Qassam Brigades regarded schools and other civilian facilities as “the best obstacles to protect the resistance” in the group’s asymmetric war with Israel. The documents also list two schools in particular that were to be used as redoubts where fighters could hide and stash weapons in a conflict.
The Israeli government shared the documents at The Times’s request, after Israeli officials had circulated a list of 100 UNRWA workers it alleged were militants. The Times asked for documents specifically related to school employees, who, as a sizable subset of the agency’s employees, offer a window into the evidence behind Israel’s claims.
The seized records — coupled with interviews of current and former UNRWA employees, residents and former students in Gaza — offer the most detailed evidence yet of the extent of Hamas’s presence inside UNRWA schools. In several cases, educators remained employed by UNRWA even after Israel provided written warnings that they were militants.
The group’s presence in education appears to have extended beyond Gaza’s borders: In September, Hamas announced the death of its leader in Lebanon — a school principal and a former head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union in that country.
Israel has long accused UNRWA of doing too little to prevent infiltration by Hamas. Earlier this year, Israel alleged that 18 of the agency’s workers participated in the Oct. 7 attack, and several countries that fund UNRWA suspended donations.
In October, the Israeli Parliament passed legislation aimed at shutting down UNRWA’s Gaza and West Bank operations, and it has recently briefed diplomats from countries that fund UNRWA on the documents shared with The Times.
While Israel asserts that other aid agencies could perform UNRWA’s functions, humanitarian officials worry that the abrupt transition Israel seeks could be catastrophic.
UNRWA has said it takes allegations that staff members were militants seriously. In response to the Times inquiry into the documents, UNRWA officials said that the agency had put one employee on administrative leave and that the United Nations had requested more information from Israel on about 10 others.
Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner general, said the agency had struggled to get information from Israel that would allow it to act on the allegations. He added pointedly that it was “extraordinarily interesting” that the Israeli government had not chosen to share the materials with the agency itself.
But he also acknowledged that UNRWA lacked the resources to independently investigate such allegations.
“We have always been clear that we are not an intelligence or security type of organization,” Mr. Lazzarini said in an interview.
Israeli officials, for their part, said that the United Nations had tried to minimize the problem. They have expressed frustration about how the United Nations responded when Israel shared detailed intelligence earlier this year about the 18 UNRWA workers it accused of participating in Oct. 7.
“The U.N. seems intent on portraying this problem as a few bad apples, rather than acknowledging that the tree is rotten,” said Amir Weissbrod, the foreign ministry’s deputy director for international organizations.
Basem Naim, a spokesman for Hamas, declined to comment.
The Times could not reach most of the educators named in the documents because their phone numbers were not working, they did not respond to messages on social media, and it is difficult to track down people in a war zone where Israel largely bars reporters from entering.
Residents of Gaza said in interviews that the idea that Hamas had operatives in UNRWA schools was an open secret. One educator on Israel’s list of 100 was regularly seen after hours in Hamas fatigues carrying a Kalashnikov.
[The New York Times Report continues]
In 2017, UNRWA discovered a tunnel that passed under the Maghazi Prep B Boys School in central Gaza. The agency said at the time that it had lodged a protest with Hamas over the tunnel and had moved to seal entrances.
Seized records say that the principal of the school, Khaled al-Masri, is a Hamas member who was issued an assault rifle and a handgun, and he is pictured standing in front of a Hamas banner on Facebook.
He remains on UNRWA’s staff, the agency says, but is under investigation for a social media violation.
This February, Israeli officials said, their forces conducted a raid on a tunnel shaft next to another UNRWA school, which led underneath the school to a nearly half-mile-long tunnel equipped with weapons. Seized Hamas records list that principal, Mohammed Shuwaideh, as a deputy squad commander with engineering expertise.
Mr. Lazzarini, the UNRWA official, said that the mere existence of an adjacent shaft did not necessarily implicate the principal. Nevertheless, on Nov. 13, the same day that The Times questioned UNRWA about Mr. Shuwaideh, he was put on administrative leave.
The United Nations has no way to verify that its employees are not members of Hamas or other militant groups, said James Lindsay, who served as UNRWA’s general counsel until 2007.
“The U.N. has been unable and or unwilling to eliminate Hamas militants and their supporters, as well as those from other terrorist groups, from their ranks,” Mr. Lindsay said. “UNRWA hiring practices and the makeup of the labor pool from which UNRWA draws its employees suggests to me that the numbers the Israelis are talking about are probably pretty close to the truth.”
Even for criminal background checks, UNRWA relies on employees to self-report and provide confirmation of a clean record by way of a letter from the “de facto authorities.” In Gaza, that means Hamas, and before Hamas took over in 2007, it meant the Palestinian Authority.
The most serious effort to investigate potential Hamas members within the agency’s employees came after Israel accused the 18 UNRWA workers of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack. In those cases, Israeli officials said they provided video and sensitive intelligence that they say backed up their claims. (A 19th name was dropped after officials said he was misidentified.)
For nine of the workers, the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services said there was insufficient evidence to take action. But a copy of its report, which was never made public, says it did not consider evidence that Israel provided about their “alleged membership of the armed wing of Hamas or other militant groups.”
U.N. investigators ultimately only found that the other nine “may have” been involved. (In one case, investigators were shown video of the worker throwing a dead Israeli into an S.U.V.)
Still, an UNRWA spokesman said that almost all of the employees were terminated or put on leave.
Khalil al-Halabi, a former UNRWA official in Gaza, argued that punishing the entire agency and everyone it serves over the misdeeds of some employees was unfair. But he said that the actions of militant-linked workers were causing enormous damage to the agency.
“It’s a disaster,” said Mr. al-Halabi, who has been critical of the Oct. 7 attack. “They’re essentially giving Israel a pretext to shut UNRWA down.”
One of Saudi Arabia’s top religious figures gathered for a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., with as many as 150 Jewish, Christian, Muslim and political leaders to discuss promoting greater peace in the Middle East.
Mohammed Al-Issa, a former justice minister in Saudi Arabia and now secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), said on Tuesday that “Oct. 7 was a crime” and that the terrorist attacks “cannot be accepted by Muslims at all.”
He said that “we cannot justify the holding of hostages and call for the immediate release of all the hostages,” adding “we want the war in Gaza to end and all the hostages to be freed.”
The MWL is the world’s largest non-government Muslim organization.
Attendees at the interfaith gala, held at the National Postal Museum on Capitol Hill, included Rabbi David Saperstein, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and director emeritus of the Religious Actions Center of Reform Judaism; and Jonathan Kessler, a former senior executive at AIPAC who now works as CEO/founder at Heart of a Nation.
The only legal recourse that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, have to fight the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court is to surrender and go to trial, an expert on the laws of war said during a Friday webinar.
Geoffrey Corn, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and chair of criminal law and director of the Texas Tech University School of Law’s military law and policy center, and Gabriel Noronha, a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America and former special adviser on Iran at the U.S. State Department, discussed the implications of the warrants on the JINSA webinar.
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“This is one of the ironies here—the validity of these charges as legitimate claims of violations of international criminal law can only truly be tested by trial, but to test by trial, you have to submit to a jurisdiction you think is inherently invalid,” said Corn, who is also a distinguished fellow at JINSA and a member of its Gaza assessment and hybrid warfare task forces.
While the chances of Netanyahu or Gallant turning himself into the ICC willingly are slim, Corn said that the ramifications of the warrants, sought by Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor, and granted by the court, are more profound politically and diplomatically than legally.
“This reinforces every critic of Israel,” Corn said. “It can and it will be used as confirmation of the worst narratives of what Israel has done in this conflict, with no real opportunity for rebuttal or to demonstrate the overreach that people like me perceive to be at the heart of this accusation.”
Corn added that the charges will “mean what people want it to mean, without ever being fully litigated.”
He added that the evidence that Khan presented, that Netanyahu and Gallant carried out a policy of starvation in Gaza and orchestrated crimes against humanity, posed “a very low bar.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“I think this is all premature,” he said.
Had Khan “come out when he announced the effort to charge Hamas leadership and said, ‘I’m also concerned about what Israel is doing. I’m going to stay focused on that and continue to interact with them and decide later whether I think they’re credibly investigating what may have been violations of the law,’ I think that would have been a very credible statement,” Corn said. “But that’s not what he did.”
The ICC is only meant to step in, Corn said, when states are incapable or unwilling to investigate themselves. But Israel has a history of investigating its own officials and practices, including prosecuting one of its own prime ministers and a president, he said.
Criminal law is a weapons system that can be used to positive effect when battling impunity at the international crimes level, according to Corn.
“But like any weapons system, it’s subject to abuse or misuse,” he said. “The real issue is, when you vest institutions and individuals with discretion to leverage the weapon system, the bar should be extremely high on them following the principles of law and the institution that they serve.”
Corn said that Khan’s rush to seek warrants, on the same day that he was scheduled to fly to Israel to meet with officials there, “is an abuse of the institutional ethos that the court was actually founded on.”
‘Completely derail’ ICC efforts
Noronha said during the webinar that he anticipates that the United States will impose immediate and heavy sanctions on the ICC, Khan and others affiliated with the court once a new Congress takes over and President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House on Jan. 20.
U.S. officials warned Khan and the court that pursuing Israeli officials was to be done at their own peril, he said.
“There have been a number of senior conversations between Senate leadership” and Khan, where “they warned very specifically that this would be the outcome, that it would be basically full political warfare from the United States against the ICC if they went down this path,” Noronha said.
The “tragedy” of Washington’s pending, aggressive pursuit of the ICC is that “it’s going to change the nature of the court,” he said. It will also “completely derail the ICC efforts against” Russian President Vladimir Putin and “against warlords in Africa,” he added.
The ICC was built not for “difficult political questions, on which there are split opinions and on which the international community is divided,” Noronha said.
By extending the court beyond its legal mandate into the political realm, the ICC “no longer will have a broad perception of legitimacy among the actors who are supposed to be enforcing it,” according to Noronha.
The U.S. Departments of State and Justice can “engage in outreach to all of our partners and ask them to basically have statements indicating that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Gallant are free to visit countries and that they will not abide by this particular ruling,” he said.
That particular avenue is time-consuming and “requires a lot of diplomatic bandwidth, and it does not often bear a lot of fruit in foreign legal jurisdictions,” he said.
Noronha added that “more coercive methods” are likely more effective, including mandatory diplomatic and economic penalties for any state that attempts to enforce the warrants.
Lisa Schwartz is an associate professor at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Leonard Friedman is a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, Shmuel Ben-Gad is a reference and collection development librarian at Gelman Library, Joshua Glazer is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Deborah Wassertzug is a reference and instruction librarian at Himmelfarb Library, Rachelle Heller is a research professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Barry R. Chiswick is a professor at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Elliott School of International Affairs, Robert Eisen is a professor at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, David Ettinger is a librarian at Gelman Library, Adam Friedman is a professor at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and Lisa Leibow is an assistant professor at the College of Professional Studies.
In response to the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine op-ed on Oct. 28, we, the members of GW Faculty and Staff Against Antisemitism and Hate, believe it is critical to underscore that advocacy for justice must prioritize the well-being and dignity of every individual, including both Palestinian and Jewish students, as well as all other communities on campus. Inclusivity is the foundation for all students to pursue their education without fear or bias. Advocacy for justice goes hand in hand with careful analysis of historical and political context, and this obligation is particularly applicable in a university setting. We fully support the right to free speech, political expression and the discussion of complex global issues. But the role of faculty extends beyond simply endorsing free speech; it includes the responsibility to model respectful and evidence-based discourse and to provide a safe and inclusive academic environment.
We must be vigilant in ensuring that discussions do not devolve into inflammatory, misleading or factually incorrect language that marginalizes, alienates or threatens specific communities on campus. The FSJP’s op-ed reference to Israel’s “bombing campaigns in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen” blatantly fails to teach members of the GW community to critically evaluate the nature of the crisis of the Israel-Hamas war. It ignores the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, and the killing and holding of hostages in Gaza for over 400 days, some of whom are American citizens. Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 men, women and children, including 46 Americans and citizens of more than 30 countries, on Oct. 7. As of today, there are an estimated 97 remaining hostages, many assumed dead, including seven Americans. Nor does the FSJP op-ed acknowledge the roles of terrorist organizations, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and all proxies of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, in the conflict. Since the day after Hamas launched the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon has fired more than 10,000 missiles into Northern Israel, displacing tens of thousands of its citizens, while the Houthis have disrupted world-wide trade in the region through its launching of missiles and drones into the Red Sea, from within Yemen. On Apr. 13 and Oct. 1, Iran attacked Israel directly with hundreds of ballistic missiles launched at the country. If not for Israel’s defense systems, tens of thousands of civilians could have been killed or injured.
Equally important, it is crucial that activism on campus does not allow for the normalization of antisemitic speech, symbols or actions, or any other forms of hate, like the signage seen in the encampment referring to the “final solution” or telling the multi-ethnic citizens of Israel to “go back to Europe”. The FSJP op-ed stated “Participants were peaceful, welcoming and disciplined” when the reality was far from the truth. In one of President Granberg’s statements on the encampments she wrote “However, when protesters overrun barriers established to protect the community, vandalize a university statue and flag, surround and intimidate GW students with antisemitic images and hateful rhetoric, chase people out of a public yard based on their perceived beliefs, and ignore, degrade, and push GW Police Officers and university maintenance staff, the protest ceases to be peaceful or productive. All of these things have happened at GW.”
[The GW Hatchet Op-Ed continues]
Our shared commitment as educators is to cultivate an environment where justice is pursued in a manner that respects all identities. In this pursuit, we envision a campus where students feel supported in exploring their beliefs within a framework of empathy, integrity and mutual respect.
We invite our FSJP colleagues to join us in a face-to-face, facilitated discussion to share our perspectives and the mutual desire to educate our students to be reflective, critical thinkers. Let us ALL strive to make GW a beacon of inclusive justice that rises above division, building solidarity across differences to confront hate in all its forms.
The violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week was a premeditated and coordinated attack orchestrated with extremist networks linked to a former employee of the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), a group tracking online disinformation told The Algemeiner on Monday.
The Network Contagion Research Institute’s analysis of open-source intelligence and social media also “revealed that protests around the Maccabi Tel Aviv game in Amsterdam was not isolated but part of a broader, coordinated effort,” said the group’s co-founder, Joel Finkelstein.
Amsterdam resident Ayman Nejmeh, who identified himself on social media as a former UNRWA employee, “has emerged as a key organizer, coordinating protest actions against Jewish targets,” Finkelstein added.
Hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans, who were visiting the Dutch capital for a game against the local Ajax team, were attacked by Arab and Muslim mobs on Thursday night, landing several in the hospital. It marked the largest mass-scale antisemitic incident in the Netherlands since the Holocaust, with attackers throwing firecrackers and stun grenades, calling for a “Jew hunt,” and forcing Israelis to say “Free Palestine” before beating them up.
Earlier, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were recorded chanting anti-Arab slogans and removing a Palestinian flag, prompting some news outlets to frame the ensuing violence as a response. But Israel had issued a warning to Dutch security services ahead of the game that violence was likely to unfold after Islamic groups appeared to be coordinating a multifront attack on social media.
According to Finkelstein, the phone number of the Syrian-born Nejmeh was listed as an admin for one WhatsApp group utilized by the Palestinian diaspora group, PGNL. Nejmeh took over the group from Palestinian-Dutch national Amin Abou Rashed, who was arrested last year on suspicion of funneling funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“If Nejmeh is scrubbing his social media of these past affiliations, it does raise significant questions about why,” Finkelstein said.
Last month, Israel’s parliament passed legislation banning UNRWA from operating in Israel and stopping Israeli authorities from cooperating with the organization, citing the UN agency’s ties to Hamas and what critics described as its “poisonous influence” in the Middle East.
Marcus Sheff, head of IMPACT-se, a research institute monitoring UNRWA, said the findings were further evidence of the refugee agency’s corruption.
“It’s shocking that the organizer of this brutal assault is yet another former UNRWA teacher, funded by American taxpayers for years,” Sheff told The Algemeiner.
The Israeli government and research organizations have publicized findings showing numerous UNRWA-employed teachers were directly involved in Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, while many others openly celebrated it.
The Algemeiner could not independently verify whether Nejmeh, who moved to the Netherlands from Syria in 2018, held a teaching role at UNRWA or served in another capacity.
“Time and again, we have seen UNRWA staff, including school principals, exposed as active terrorists. If there were any lingering doubts after Oct. 7, this serves as another stark proof of a deep-seated rot within UNRWA’s organizational culture,” Sheff added
Years before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas’s leaders plotted a far deadlier wave of terrorist assaults against Israel — potentially including a Sept. 11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper — while they pressed Iran to assist in helping achieve their vision of annihilating the Jewish state, according to documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Electronic records and papers that Israeli officials say were recovered from Hamas command centers show advanced planning for attacks using trains, boats and even horse-drawn chariots — though several plans were ill-formed and highly impractical, terrorism experts said. The plans anticipate drawing in allied militant groups for a combined assault against Israel from the north, south and east.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Translation:
Strategy to build an appropriate plan to Liberate Palestine
• What are the appropriate fronts for liberation, and where will each front move?
• If other forces intervened and participated with us, what would the battle and coordination look like?
• What are the targets that we should occupy, neutralize, or destroy?
— Translation of title page and bullets 4-6 from documents obtained by The Washington Post, shown above.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday said the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself “against Iran and all its proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.”
“We’re doing everything we can to ease the suffering of all the people from this war against Hamas and that Hamas started,” Biden said at a White House meeting with Jewish religious leaders.
In the letters written in 2021, Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar mounts a vigorous appeal to several senior Iranian officials — including the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei — for additional financial and military support, pledging that, with Iran’s backing, he could destroy Israel completely in two years.
“We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal,” states a June 2021 letter with apparent signatures by Sinwar as well as five other Hamas officials.
In the letters, Sinwar does not provide details of how he intended to destroy Israel. Israeli and other Middle Eastern officials say Tehran was surprised by the attack on Oct. 7, and angry at Sinwar for not revealing his intentions in advance. But they contend that both Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah knew that Hamas was making preparations for a major assault. “It was their shared strategy to attack Israel,” one analyst said. U.S. and Israeli analysts believe that Iran provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas’s military wing and increased its support in 2023.
Tehran declined to involve itself directly in Hamas’s fight after the Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel. Since then, as the conflict expanded to include Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel and IDF strikes on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen — and, in recent weeks, a land invasion of southern Lebanon — Iran has been pulled ever deeper into the conflict, including with two massive aerial assaults on the Jewish state.
Israel’s war in Gaza meanwhile has killed more than 42,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. In Lebanon, the death toll is more than 2,000 and growing.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
The railway line is designated for transporting fuel, which is a weak point in the event of a train explosion after moving inside one of the cities (a moving bomb).
— Translation, upper left, from documents obtained by The Washington Post, shown above.
But, in the months preceding the attack, Hamas envisioned going much further, a planning document suggests. A 36-page computer slide presentation created in late 2022 and discovered at a Hamas outpost in northern Gaza on Nov. 10 lays out options and scenarios for attacking Israel across multiple fronts, with targets ranging from military command centers to shopping malls.
The Arabic document, titled, “Strategy to build an appropriate plan to Liberate Palestine,” contains dozens of maps, photographs and schematics depicting the movement of Hamas fighters against Israeli targets, and a possible sequence for attacks.
“We present to you this vision, which talks about the appropriate strategy for liberation in the near future, God willing,” the presentation’s preamble states.
Intelligence from thousands of photos, maps
According to the presentation, the attack plans were based on a “large database” that included more than 17,000 photographs — from satellite images to photos of Israeli cities and landscapes taken by drone cameras or gleaned from social media postings. Among the images displayed are the layouts of Israeli air bases and military installations and diagrams showing the flight patterns of commercial aircraft using Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
The presentation outlines three possible attack vectors, and suggests tactics to deceive Israeli security officials and confuse their response. The plans include a mix of low-tech operations, some of which were used on Oct. 7, and others that appear to be more aspirational.
Among the latter was a plan to destroy a Tel Aviv skyscraper. The document identifies as possible targets the Moshe Aviv Tower, a 70-story building that is Israel’s second tallest, as well as the Azrieli Center complex which comprises three skyscrapers, a large shopping mall, train station and cinema. The plan notes the nearby presence of the IDF headquarters building and suggests that the collapse of a nearby high-rise could crush the military facility as well.
Translated:
If this tower is destroyed in one way or another, an unprecedented crisis will occur for the enemy, similar to the crisis of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
— Translation, lower right, from documents obtained by The Washington Post, shown above.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
An essential part of any operation, the document says, would be “linking and preparing the external fronts (Lebanon, Syria, and Sinai) and agreeing on mechanisms for communicating peacefully and in war.”
Hezbollah did begin firing rockets into northern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, barrages that inflicted hundreds of casualties and prompted the evacuation of nearly 100,000 Israeli civilians. But the militant group — assessed to have tens of thousands of fighters and up to 100,000 missiles before the fighting commenced — declined to launch a full-scale assault.
Seeking Iran’s buy-in, and more
Sinwar, renowned for his paranoia about leaks, apparently opted to refrain from sharing his ultimate attack plans with Hamas’s chief benefactors in Beirut and Tehran. But the Hamas leader was crystal clear about his ultimate intention: the destruction of the state of Israel. He repeats the point multiple times in the captured letters and asks Iranian officials to help him in his quest.
A series of letters dated in June 2021 are essentially pleas to Iran’s leaders to send more money and provide training for a division’s worth of new fighters.
The letters, signed by Sinwar and other Hamas leaders in Gaza, are addressed to Khamenei as well as Ismail Qaani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force — an elite unit that oversees Iran’s far-flung network of proxy militias — and Sayed Izadi, the Quds Force’s Beirut-based head of Palestinian operations. Izadi was one of three Iranian officials killed in an Israeli military strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, on April 1. The letters were found in January in Sinwar’s command bunker in Khan Younis, Israeli officials said.
In the letters, Sinwar describes the extensive damage sustained by Hamas during clashes with Israel in May 2021, and asks the Iranians to make up for the losses and help the group prepare for much larger battles to come.
“We are in dire need of your standing with us with all strength, determination, support and backing; first to restore our strength and what has been exhausted in this confrontation or what has been targeted, and to develop our capabilities many times over,” he writes in the letter to Qaani.
Translated:
When thinking about the liberation plan, a fast and light vehicle must be found that you can use infantry weapons from it in order to preoccupy the military sites and vehicles along the borders as a secondary attack. The Pharaohs’ chariot can be used for this mission.
— Translated, bottom left, from documents obtained by The Washington Post, shown above.
The details of the request are laid out in two of the letters: financial assistance for Hamas, totaling $500 million, paid in monthly installments over two years, and Iranian training and equipment to support an additional 12,000 Hamas fighters.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Iranian officials have publicly supported Hamas’s avowed goal for the destruction of Israel, and they expressed no reservations about the methods used on Oct. 7, noted Farzin Nadimi, an Iran expert and senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.
“Iran trained Hamas and encouraged them to do exactly the things they did on Oct. 7,” Nadimi said. “Their goal was to get to the core of the Israeli state and crush it.”
At the same time, Tehran has generally sought to use proxy forces to carry out operations against Israel, rather than risking a direct attack that might lead to a military confrontation with a technologically superior foe.
“Iran’s goal is to delegitimize Israel, not to help Hamas achieve an impossible military victory,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “Horrific images of Palestinian suffering is precisely how they’ve sought to delegitimize Israel.”
Hamas’s relations with Iran have always been complex. A Sunni Islamist group, Hamas sought for years to buffer the influence of Shiite-ruled Iran, said Udi Levi, an expert on Hamas financing who has examined around 100 documents seized by the Israeli military inside Gaza over the course of the war. Since 2014, documents show a shift in the relationship, with Hamas courting more Iranian support. Iran in turn showed more interest in directing how money was spent, Levi added.
“It became more and more aggressive,” he said of Iran’s oversight. “The Iranians found a way to be more influential on Sinwar and the Hamas leadership in Gaza.” The documents shed no new light on if or how Iranian money was delivered to Gaza, but the typical channels include informal money exchanges and cryptocurrencies, Levi said.
The documents obtained by The Post include detailed notes from meetings where Hamas officials apparently discussed routine governmental responsibilities and expenditures, such as sanitation and fuel shortages.
But they also describe what analysts and intelligence officials have seen as a potential motive for the surprise Oct. 7 assault. Minutes from an October 2023 politburo meeting depict Hamas leaders bemoaning the improvement in relations between Israeli and Arab Gulf states, a trend that would “open the door for Arab and Islamic countries to descend on the same path, and will increase the complications of the resistance project,” the document notes.
For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.
Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.
The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”
The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.
The documents, which were verified by The Times, lay out the main strategies and assessments of the leadership group:
Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack, which it code-named “the big project,” in the fall of 2022. But the group delayed executing the plan as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate.
As they prepared arguments aimed at Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders said that Israel’s “internal situation” — an apparent reference to turmoil over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plans to overhaul the judiciary — was among the reasons they were “compelled to move toward a strategic battle.”
In July 2023, Hamas dispatched a top official to Lebanon, where he met with a senior Iranian commander and requested help with striking sensitive sites at the start of the assault.
The senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to prepare; the minutes do not say how detailed a plan was presented by Hamas to its allies.
The documents also say that Hamas planned to discuss the attack in more detail at a subsequent meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, but do not clarify whether the discussion happened.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The Israeli military, in a separate internal report obtained by The Times, concluded the documents were real and represented another failure by intelligence officials to prevent the Oct. 7 attack. The Times also researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.
The discovery of these records has set off recriminations among Israel’s intelligence agencies. The internal military review of the documents questioned why Israel’s spies failed either to obtain them before Hamas launched its attack or to discern the strategy they describe. While Israel did obtain Hamas’s battle plans before the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli commanders repeatedly dismissed the idea that Hamas had the ability or intention to imminently carry them out.
The Israeli military declined to comment. Hamas and Hezbollah did not respond to requests for comment. Iran’s Mission to the United Nations denied the claims made in the minutes.
“All the planning, decision-making and directing were solely executed by Hamas’s military wing based in Gaza, any claim attempting to link it to Iran or Hezbollah — either partially or wholly — is devoid of credence and comes from fabricated documents,” the Iranian statement said.
Talking in Code
The documents first hint at the operation in January 2022, when the minutes show that Hamas leaders discussed the need to avoid getting dragged into minor skirmishes to focus on “the big project.” Israeli intelligence officers found that Hamas leaders repeatedly used the same phrase in similar contexts, but the officers did not understand what the term meant until reading the documents after the assault, according to two Israeli officials familiar with intelligence about Hamas commanders.
The minutes do not provide a clear list of every person at each meeting, but they state that Mr. Sinwar attended all of the discussions, while his deputy joined at least three. Several military commanders referred to by only their noms de guerre are also listed as having attended.
Israeli intelligence analysts, according to several Israeli officials and the military’s assessment of the documents, concluded that Hamas’s top military leaders, Muhammad Deif, Marwan Issa and Muhammad Sinwar, were among those listed by nickname. The Palestinian analyst with knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings also said he believed the minutes showed Mr. Deif was present.
During a meeting in April 2022, the leaders celebrated how the tensest parts of the Muslim month of Ramadan had passed without major escalation, helping Hamas to “hide our intentions” and “camouflage the big idea (our big project).” They spoke about conserving ammunition and carrying out “a large and convincing disguise and deception process.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Gathering in September 2022, the leadership council seemed ready to begin the attack within a month, during the Jewish high holidays, and Mr. Sinwar reviewed the latest battle plans. The documents do not explain why the attack was postponed, but a recurring theme is the Hamas leadership’s effort to enlist support for the operation from Iran and Hezbollah.
Courting Allies
In December 2022, a new far-right government took office in Israel, returning Mr. Netanyahu to power. Hamas leaders noted at a meeting the following month that they needed time to assess the government’s behavior, saying that Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister known for his provocative actions toward Palestinians, had already made a contentious tour of the Aqsa mosque compound.
The leaders predicted that the actions of the government “will help us with moving toward the big project” by attracting the attention of Hamas’s allies and bolstering support for their attack.
At a meeting in May 2023, Mr. Sinwar and his colleagues expressed relief at having passed another Ramadan without getting sucked into a minor confrontation with Israel, despite tensions at the Aqsa mosque and a brief escalation between Israel and Islamic Jihad.
Once again, they seemed ready to finalize plans for the attack. According to the minutes, the leaders debated whether to launch it on Sept. 25, when most Israelis would be observing Yom Kippur, the most hallowed day in the Jewish calendar, or on Oct. 7, which coincided that year with the Jewish holy day of Simchat Torah. The leaders stressed the importance of avoiding any major escalation with Israel that would upset their final preparations.
“We need to control the behavior of Islamic Jihad and others factions, so that we do not resort to provocations that would ruin our project,” the minutes said. In addition, Hamas would aim to convey the impression that “Gaza wants life and economic growth.”
In the same meeting, the leadership council said they wanted to carry out the attack by the end of 2023 because Israel had announced it was developing a new kind of laser that could destroy Hamas rockets more efficiently than its current air-defense system.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The minutes also undercut reports of a breach between Hamas’s Gaza leadership and its Qatar-based political leader, Mr. Haniyeh. The minutes show that the leaders shared sensitive information with Mr. Haniyeh, briefed him on “the big project” and decided that of Hamas’s overseas leadership, only he should be informed of meetings that Mr. al-Hayya hoped to hold with Hezbollah and Iran.
The August minutes — the final document seen by The Times — reported that Mr. al-Hayya had told the senior Iranian commander, Mr. Izadi, that Hamas would need help with striking sensitive sites during “the first hour” of the attack.
According to the document, Mr. Izadi said that Hezbollah and Iran welcomed the plan in principle, but that they needed time “to prepare the environment.”
As a result, Hamas’s leaders seemed hopeful that their allies would not leave them “exposed,” but they accepted that they might need to carry out the attack alone. The entrenchment of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, as well as the growing Israeli presence in the Aqsa mosque compound, “can’t make us be patient,” the August document said.
Mr. al-Hayya’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but in an interview with The Times last year, he described the October attack as “a great act” that “woke the world up from its deep sleep.”
In the end, Iran did not directly strike Israel until months after Hamas’s attack, and Hezbollah came to Hamas’s aid only on Oct. 8, after Israel had begun to restore control over its borders. Hezbollah continued to distract the Israeli military from Gaza by firing rockets into Israel. The confrontation led to an all-out war in which Israel assassinated Mr. Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders and invaded the group’s strongholds in southern Lebanon.
Hamas was more successful in its efforts to mislead Israel. In the early hours of Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence officers spotted that Hamas fighters had embarked on an unusual maneuver. But they dismissed its significance, concluding that it was a training exercise or a defensive maneuver.
“It is estimated that Hamas is not interested in escalation and entering into a confrontation at the present time,” read a top secret memorandum circulated by intelligence officers at 3:17 a.m., and later reviewed by The Times.
The leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, has become fatalistic after nearly a year of war in Gaza and is determined to see Israel embroiled in a wider regional conflict, U.S. officials said.
Mr. Sinwar has long believed he will not survive the war, a view that has hindered negotiations to secure the release of hostages seized by his group in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
His attitude has hardened in recent weeks, U.S. officials say, and American negotiators now believe that Hamas has no intention of reaching a deal with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also rejected proposals in the negotiations and added positions that have complicated the talks. U.S. officials assess that he is mainly concerned about his political survival and might not think a cease-fire in Gaza is in his interests.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Since the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah began last month, the group has not launched a major counterattack on Israel, much less opened an offensive front. Israeli and U.S. officials say Israel has destroyed half of the militia’s arsenal and killed many of its leaders.
Israeli troops moved into southern Lebanon this week, after a nearly monthlong bombing and sabotage campaign that included a strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas, unleashed a missile barrage against Israel on Tuesday in response to the killing of Mr. Nasrallah. But most of the missiles were shot down or failed to do any real damage.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The pace of Israeli operations in Gaza has slowed, as Israeli leaders have shifted their attention to the north. Israeli forces are now in just a few positions in Gaza, including what they call the Philadelphi Corridor between the enclave and Egypt. While Israel has not launched a major raid into civilian areas of Gaza for weeks, it still conducts daily airstrikes targeting Hamas.
As a result, the toll on civilians in Gaza continues. In a 24-hour stretch on Wednesday and Thursday, the Israeli military killed 99 Palestinians in the enclave, local health officials said, one of the highest death tolls in months.
Talks to broker a cease-fire in Gaza and release the Israeli hostages have broken down. Mr. Netanyahu has added demands and revived some that had previously been dropped, frustrating international negotiators. And Mr. Sinwar has become far more inflexible, U.S. officials say.
His actions and motivations have long been a focus of the American intelligence community. But after Oct. 7, the spy agencies intensified their work on the Hamas leader, forming a targeting cell to study and hunt him.
For months, intelligence agencies have assessed that Mr. Sinwar has a fatalistic attitude and cares more about inflicting pain on Israelis than helping Palestinians. U.S. officials will not discuss their recent intelligence collection on him, but the view that his attitude is hardening comes from officials studying his negotiating stances and classified reports.
Mr. Sinwar’s position stiffened this summer after Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas based in Qatar and one of the chief negotiators. Mr. Haniyeh was a more conciliatory negotiator who was interested in making a deal, and U.S. officials say he was willing to push back against Mr. Sinwar’s more extreme demands. Israel’s decision to kill a top Hamas leader who was negotiating a cease-fire infuriated the group and Mr. Sinwar, according to U.S. officials.
Some Israeli officials have questioned whether Mr. Sinwar is still alive. U.S. and Israeli officials acknowledge there is no definitive proof of life. There have been no audio or video recordings from him for months.
On Sept. 13, Hezbollah released a letter that Mr. Sinwar sent in support of Mr. Nasrallah. Some Hamas officials, speaking elliptically, suggested that it was written outside Gaza by someone else, with Mr. Sinwar’s approval. It was not handwritten, unlike other communications that have been verified to come directly from him.
But American officials said they had no evidence he was dead, and in fact senior U.S. officials said they thought he was alive and making critical decisions for Hamas.
[The New York Times Report continues]
A senior U.S. official said Iran’s actions over the past few months had sent a clear message to Mr. Sinwar: “The cavalry is not coming.”
Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and Edward Wong reported from New York and Washington. Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department. He is the author of the book “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.” More about Edward Wong
While the United Nations has called for the return of the hostages in the past, its secretary-general, António Guterres, finally condemned Hamas for not allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit the hostages in Gaza.
It represents the first time that he’s publicly condemned the terrorist organization for not allowing the Red Cross to see the hostages. It has been almost a year since Oct. 7.
“I’d like to condemn the fact that the Red Cross is not even allowed to visit those hostages,” he said. “This is something clear in international humanitarian law.”
Guterres also reiterated his call for the immediate release of the remaining 101 hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.
He somewhat condemned the rocket barrage attack against Israel on Tuesday, in which as many as 200 rockets were fired at the Jewish state, forcing Israelis throughout the country to shelter. However, he didn’t call out Iran by name or even specifically mention the rocket attacks.
In a post on X, Guterres wrote: “I condemn the broadening of the Middle East conflict with escalation after escalation. This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.”
In response, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel, posted on X: “You’ve gotta be kidding. You condemn ‘the broadening’?! You just aren’t able to blurt the simple words, ‘I condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran who just shot roughly 180 deadly ballistic missiles towards the citizens of Israel.’ Quit.”
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants has acknowledged that the top Hamas commander in Lebanon, whom the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed in an airstrike on Monday, was employed as one of its teachers.
The revelation came as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which was established in 1949 to provide humanitarian and social services to Palestinian refugees, continued to face allegations from Israel, US lawmakers, and nonprofit research institutions that it was infiltrated and compromised by Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that rules Gaza and openly seeks the Jewish state’s destruction.
Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed along with his wife, son, and daughter, in an Israeli strike that targeted their house in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. The IDF and Israel Security Agency (better known as Shin Bet) confirmed Sherif’s death in a joint statement, describing him as “head of the Lebanon branch of the Hamas terror organization” who coordinated with Hezbollah, another terrorist group that wields significant influence across Lebanon.
“Sherif was responsible for coordinating Hamas’s terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives. He was also responsible for Hamas’s efforts in Lebanon to recruit operatives and acquire weapons,” the joint Israeli statement read. “He led the Hamas terrorist organization’s force build-up efforts in Lebanon and operated to advance Hamas’s interests in Lebanon, both politically and militarily.”
Beyond his senior role with an internationally designated terrorist organization, Sherif also worked for UNRWA, according to the agency, which also noted in a statement on Monday that he was suspended in March due to his affiliation with Hamas.
Sherif “was an UNRWA employee who was put on administrative leave without pay in March, and was undergoing an investigation following allegations that UNRWA received about his political activities,” the agency said.
Later, the agency’s chief, Philippe Lazzarini, denied knowing of Sherif’s position in Hamas’s military hierarchy.
“The specific allegation at the time was that [he was] a part of the local leadership … I never heard the word commander before,” he told reporters in Geneva. “What’s obvious for you today, was not obvious yesterday.”
According to some reports, Sherif was head of UNRWA’s teachers’ union, although The Algemeiner could not immediately verify that detail.
The latest revelations about Sherif will likely fuel concerns that UNRWA has struggled to screen terrorists out of its staff.
Last month, UNRWA fired nine employees after discovering evidence “sufficient” to prove their participation in Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. However, that number may only be a minute portion of UNRWA employees who are members of or continue to collaborate with terrorist organizations.
Israel has maintained that the agency still employs some 450 terrorist operatives in Gaza. Many countries, including the US, paused funding to UNRWA amid allegations that the agency aided Hamas terrorists.
UNRWA has insisted that its links to terrorist groups are not systemic and do not negate its humanitarian purpose, arguing its aid work in Gaza is crucial to alleviating the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
As The Algemeiner has reported previously, at least two UNRWA teachers from Gaza participated in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, one of whom was heard saying on an intercepted transmission that “we have female hostages, I captured one.” Another — who was an UNRWA elementary school teacher as well as a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Rafah Brigade — celebrated infiltrating Israeli territory during a phone call to family members, saying, “I’m inside! I’m with the Jews.”
Separately, an investigation by UN Watch found that a group of 3,000 teachers working in Gaza for UNRWA glorified and celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom across southern Israel in an internal Telegram group.
On Monday, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters that Sherif had been placed on administrative leave without pay “as soon as UNRWA received information about his possible involvement with Hamas at a senior level” and was never reinstated.
“As soon as information was received — in this case, from the Israeli government — action was taken,” Dujarric told reporters. “Anyone who works for the UN and engages in terror, terror-like activity is unacceptable and outrageous and an insult to all UN staff members around the world.”
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva posted on X/Twitter saying that news of Sherfi’s connection to the UN agency “proves that there is a deep problem in UNRWA, the way they do due diligence about who they are hiring.”
Before Oct. 7, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) published numerous reports revealing the complicity of UNRWA schools in terrorist activity in the Middle East. From math and theology to literature and science, UNRWA content taught in the Palestinian territories has been found to promote hatred for Jews and Israel, indoctrinating students as young as six to commit their lives to “martyrdom” and inter-generational war. Compromise with Israelis is described as betraying Palestinian identity, while suicide bombings are portrayed as intrinsic to it and a prerequisite for entry into heaven.
Antisemitic and violent themes taught in Palestinian schools administered by UNWRA, as well as their employment of teachers linked to terrorist organizations, fostered the extremism that underpinned the Oct. 7 massacre, Impact-se chief executive officer Marcus Sheff told a US congressional committee in January.
“We know that UNRWA employees took part in this massacre, but these were not a few bad apples, rather, the institutional bowel is rotten,” Sheff told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee on Oversight and Accountability. “How do we know? We know by researching UNRWA’s educational infrastructure. In it, textbooks teach that Jews are liars and fraudsters that spread corruption, which will lead to their annihilation. Students are taught about cutting the necks of the enemy, that a fire massacre of Jews on a bus is celebrated as a barbecue party.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Israel has discovered that Hamas used UNRWA facilities in Gaza, including its schools, to run operations and attacks against the Jewish state and to store weapons, both in and under UNRWA institutions. The Israeli military claimed that in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Hamas terrorists were found in UNRWA’s central logistics compound alongside UN vehicles.
“Lies and corruption have been built into UNRWA from the very beginning,” Romirowsky told The Algemeiner. “The organization’s ever expanding missions revolving around the slippery term ‘rehabilitation’ and its unilateral redefinition of ‘refugee’ to include all Palestinians and their descendants meant that from the start, it was going to be corrupted for local gain and would play along for its survival. It kept Palestinians in stasis, inculcating a perpetual victimhood mentality.”
American Jewish Committee (AJC) today welcomed a sweeping report that found the City University of New York (CUNY) is ill-equipped to handle rampant antisemitism at many of its campuses.
The report, commissioned last year by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, found that CUNY’s handling of antisemitism complaints across its 25 campuses is inconsistent, confusing, and in need of a complete overhaul.
“This report confirms what we long have been hearing, especially after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, that antisemitism is a persistent problem at many CUNY schools,” said Laura Shaw Frank, Director of AJC’s Center for Education Advocacy. “It offers a comprehensive blueprint for how Jewish students and faculty can feel safe and protected while protecting academic freedom and free expression.”
The purpose of the report, written by Jonathan Lippmann, New York’s former chief judge, was not to assign blame for past incidents, although he noted he “did find enough blame to go around” for how prior incidents were handled. Rather, Lippmann and his team from the Latham & Watkins law firm set out to determine how CUNY currently handles antisemitism complaints and issue recommendations on how to better this process.
Among its key findings and recommendations:
Some CUNY policies and procedures are outdated and do not conform with current law, leading to confusion about how to file an antisemitism complaint.
Some CUNY students do not feel safe on campus, because they were forced to walk through active protests to attend classes. Lippman wrote that CUNY must strengthen its “time, place and manner” restrictions for protests, which he said would also protect the rights of students who peacefully protest.
CUNY must better address the use of social media, following repeated instances of groups using CUNY accounts to “advance inappropriate hate speech.” Lippmann called CUNY’s social media policies “woefully dated” and said it needed to make clear the consequences of violating those policies.
CUNY must respect the First Amendment rights of faculty and students but hold accountable those who engage in antisemitism.
[The AJC Report continues]
“Given how deep and systemic the problem of antisemitism has been at CUNY, it is now in a position to effect meaningful change without delay or excuses,” AJC New York Director Josh Kramer said. “Jewish students and faculty deserve no less.”
CUNY was among about 75 institutions that attended the College and University Presidents Summit on Campus Antisemitism in Washington this week. The summit was hosted by AJC, Hillel and the American Council on Education.
AJC has created a toolkit for university administrators in response to a spike in antisemitic incidents on college campuses nationwide and offered specific recommendations for the 2024-25 academic year.
AJC is the global advocacy organization for the Jewish people. With headquarters in New York, 25 regional offices across the United States, 15 overseas posts, as well as partnerships with 38 Jewish community organizations worldwide, AJC’s mission is to enhance the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel and to advance human rights and democratic values in the United States and around the world. For more, please visit www.ajc.org.
An independent review ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul has found that the City University of New York needs to “significantly” overhaul and update its policies in order to handle the levels of antisemitism and discrimination that exist on its campuses.
CUNY campuses have been a center of pro-Palestinian activism for years, which Jewish students and elected officials have said sometimes manifests as antisemitism. Since the Hamas attack on Israel last October, there have been dozens of arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators on CUNY campuses, including at an encampment at City College in April that was shut down by the city police.
The review, which was commissioned by Ms. Hochul last October after a surge in hate and bias incidents and was released on Tuesday, documented inconsistencies and a lack of oversight in how CUNY’s 25 campuses handled complaints of antisemitism and other bias among students and staff members.
But the review, which included interviews with more than 200 people over 10 months, also found that it was a “small, vocal minority of individuals” responsible for antisemitic incidents, and not a widespread problem.
The report’s author, Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of New York, offered more than a dozen recommendations to improve the campus climate, including the creation of a new CUNY center devoted to efforts to combat hate.
CUNY said that it had already begun to put some of the recommendations into effect, including approving the anti-hate center, which will be called the Center for Inclusive Excellence and Belonging. Ms. Hochul said on Tuesday that she was directing CUNY to enact all of them.
“We look forward to working on implementing Judge Lippman’s recommendations to redouble our efforts and build on our progress to create a more inclusive campus environment for students, faculty and staff,” Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, the CUNY chancellor, said in a statement.
While his investigation focused on policy shortcomings and did not provide a rundown of antisemitic complaints, Judge Lippman wrote in a letter to Ms. Hochul attached to his report that there had been “an alarming number of unacceptable antisemitic incidents targeting members of the CUNY community.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Yehudit Meira Biton, 40, welcomed the report’s recommendations. She said she withdrew from Brooklyn College in 2022 after hearing repeatedly from instructors in her mental health counseling master’s program that Jews were white oppressors and therefore not welcome to talk about their own history of oppression. Ms. Biton is Afro-Latina and an Orthodox Jew; she said that when she complained, nothing happened.
“I’m very happy that they are finally doing something,” she said.
But Parima Kadikar, a third-year student at CUNY School of Law and member of the law school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, rejected the report and the effect it could have at a time when universities are cracking down on student protests.
“The report disingenuously smears student activism and threatens to overhaul students’ rights to call for Palestinian lives and liberation,” she said.
It was the bullet holes in the Port-a-Potties that pushed me over the edge.
I wasn’t going to write about this. Because non-Jews don’t want to hear about it. After all, hasn’t Israel killed all those people in Gaza? And then they blew up pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and bombed the country. When are these heinous Semites going to stop?
When the world stops hating Jews. And that ain’t never going to happen.
The security was heavier than the airport. That’s what it’s like to be a Jew these days, you fear for your life. Congregate and you never know. They went through every item in the handbag of the woman in front of me. EVERY ITEM!
And after getting through the metal detector I waited in line for a short film and…
I’d like to tell you I was overwhelmed, viscerally affected, BUT I’D SEEN THE MOVIE! It wasn’t brand new.
But if you were unprepared, you would have been shocked. Positively shocked I tell you!
Now although they’ve got items from the festival, the essence of the exhibition is testimony from survivors. On video screens placed throughout the premises. And the stories…
There was this whole story about the rapes and the dismemberment, about killing women while they were being raped, and how the women’s groups of the world haven’t come out and denounced this, how they’ve stayed silent.
After all, it’s Jews.
I know, I know, you’ve heard enough from the Jews. They’ve got all the money, they’ve got all the power, can’t they shut up, stop complaining?
Now let’s be clear. EDM festivalgoers are a self-selecting group. Almost always young, with a kumbaya vibe. They go to an oftentimes secret location to get high and dance and marvel at their surroundings. These are not terrorists, they’re peace-loving and…
Hamas invades.
People just don’t get it. They think it’s tit for tat. That the Israelis are no different from the terrorists, from Hamas, but that is patently untrue.
Hamas soldiers picking up Israeli phones to call and tell their parents they’ve murdered Jews. This was a rampage, and Hamas was enjoying it! It was almost a party!
As for escaping… It was mostly luck. What you chose to do. A woman in a refrigerator lived, but the terrorists shot up those hiding amongst garbage bags in a dumpster.
And people are running and bullets are whizzing by…
This is the world we live in. One in which we sit back and judge but have no idea what is going on. Then again, you have to be worried about getting shot in school in America.
You’re just minding your own business, and your life is at stake. And it’s not just one disaffected teenage student, it’s a legion of terrorists, and their goal is to eliminate you, eradicate you from the earth!
That’s what non-Jews don’t understand. This isn’t a skirmish, this is about extermination. From the river to the sea. These Arabs want Israel gone, completely. As for a two state solution, fuhgeddaboudit.
[The Lefsetz Letter continues]
But the Israelis are no different from Hamas or Hezbollah.
Yeah, right.
Most people don’t want to see bad things. And I don’t think I can convince you otherwise. But go to this exhibition, watch the movie. If for no other reason than you’ll be exposed to, learn about man’s inhumanity to man.
And if you’re Jewish let’s be clear, you think you’re safe, but you’re not. Rust never sleeps, nor does antisemitism.
Standing in line reminded me of summer camp. Los Angeles is the land of assimilation, but when you’re together with other Jews…it’s palpable. It’s both lively and heavy. Enjoy it, because you never know when it will end.
Life goes on, but not for all of us.
It was amazing to see the people dancing at a festival subsequent to the Nova atrocity. You’ve got to keep on living, it’s all you can do.
But you can never forget. Because your brain won’t let you.
Let me be clear, I thought these days were behind us, I thought we’d evolved to a more egalitarian society, where we could all live in harmony, at least better than we used to.
But the Berlin Wall fell, Russia was liberated, and now we’ve got Putin.
As for Hezbollah, they’re willing to sacrifice themselves, to die for the cause. Ditto Hamas. How do you fight that?
As students return to campus across the country this fall, colleges and universities face the pressing issue of how to deal with ongoing and alarming antisemitism. These are not isolated incidents but rather a broader problem straining the fabric of higher education institutions.
The original sin for many campuses was their tepid (or lack of) response in the aftermath of the brutal terror attack against Israel on Oct. 7. That void was filled by vitriol and hate, fueling a campus pressure cooker until the issue exploded uncontrollably, like a five-alarm fire. The question as the new school year starts is: will the simmering embers break out again, or have campuses done enough to fully extinguish the flames?
Antisemitism on campus cannot be attributed to a single individual or a handful of haters, nor limited to areas with few Jewish students or communities. Antisemitism reared its ugly head in places like New York, which has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel.
For example, Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism recently issued a report finding “serious and pervasive” problems and proposing urgent, broad changes. The federal Department of Education found that the City University of New York failed to protect Jewish (and Muslim) students from the turmoil that ensued on campuses in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and issued a corrective action plan.
These examples illustrate that this is not simply a problem of college presidential leadership but a broader cultural issue that requires change at every level. In higher education’s longstanding system of shared governance — where trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, and students all play a role in driving institutional culture and norms — addressing the issue effectively requires collective effort and accountability from everyone.
It’s encouraging that the governor and policymakers in New York are keeping this issue on the front burner. However, despite all the attention, we may miss a crucial opportunity for real change. If we simply return to the status quo after the headlines fade, we will have failed not only our Jewish students, but also the broader educational community that strives for meaningful inclusion.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Real transformation requires a commitment to reshaping institutional culture from the ground up. It’s now up to all of us to ensure that this moment becomes a turning point, not a missed opportunity.
Early this summer, Amin Abed, a Palestinian activist who has spoken out publicly about Hamas, twice found bullets on his doorstep in northern Gaza.
Then in July, he said he was attacked by Hamas security operatives, who covered his head and dragged him away before repeatedly striking him with hammers and metal bars.
“At any moment, I can be killed by the Israeli occupation, but I can face the same fate at the hands of those who’ve been ruling us for 17 years,” he said in a phone interview from his hospital bed, referring to Hamas. “They almost killed me, those killers and criminals.”
Mr. Abed, who remains hospitalized, was rescued by bystanders who witnessed the attack, but what happened to him has happened to others throughout Gaza.
The bodies of six Israeli hostages recovered last month provided a visceral reminder of Hamas’s brutality. Each had been shot in the head. Some had other bullet wounds, suggesting they were shot while trying to escape, according to Israeli officials who reviewed the autopsy results.
But Hamas also uses violence to maintain its control over Gaza’s population.
Some Palestinians have been injured or killed as Hamas wages an insurgent style of warfare that risks Palestinian lives to strike the Israeli military from densely populated areas. Others have been attacked or threatened for criticizing the group. Some Palestinians have been shot, accused of looting or hoarding aid.
Much international attention has focused on Israeli hurdles to delivering aid to Palestinians, its military operations that have killed tens of thousands of people and a bombing campaign that has reduced cities to rubble. American officials have repeatedly expressed deep frustration with Israel for those failures, too, as well as for not providing basic security in the territory.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Hamas built access points to its extensive tunnel network inside homes. An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood.
To some Palestinians, an Israeli airstrike on July 13 targeting the senior military commander Muhammad Deif and another Hamas military leader is an example of the perils civilians face.
Israeli officials say that Mr. Deif had entered a villa in a designated humanitarian zone to meet with a Hamas commander who was hiding there. Some 70 Palestinians were killed in the assault, including many women and children, according to the Gazan health ministry. Israel later declared Mr. Deif dead, but Hamas has disputed the claim.
Munir al-Jaghoub, an official in the Fatah party in the West Bank, blasted Israel for the deaths. But he also condemned Hamas.
“Any soldier who wants to bear arms is required to protect civilians, not to hide among civilians,” he said in a televised interview.
Hamas officials rejected criticisms that the group put civilians in harm’s way and suggestions that it should keep its fighters away from towns and cities.
“There’s no such thing as being outside residential areas in Gaza,” said Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official. “These pretexts, primarily made by the Israeli occupation army, are meaningless.”
‘Shut Him Up’
Palestinians who protest face the threat of immediate retaliation.
On Saturday, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate blasted the “policy of intimidation and threat” facing some journalists in Gaza after a group of gunmen stormed the home of Ehab Fasfous, a reporter and social media activist. While the syndicate did not explicitly name Hamas, it left little doubt that it was behind the raid on Mr. Fasfous’s home in the southern city of Khan Younis.
In its statement, the organization said it viewed the raid with “great severity” and that journalists and their families should be protected.
[The New York Times Report continues]
“There is no liberation movement that has freed its people without paying a big price in terms of civilians,” he said.
But some U.S. and Israeli officials said their intelligence assessments indicate that Mr. Sinwar is more interested in inflicting pain on Israel than uplifting the Palestinian people.
“He’s not calculating the impact on human beings or property,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “He is calculating on bringing the Israelis down a notch and freeing Palestinian prisoners.”
‘It Was Horrific’
Hamas also hides hostages among Palestinian civilians, with devastating consequences.
In early June, Israel planned a mission to rescue four of the dozens of living hostages who remain in Gaza. But civilians in the densely populated Nuseirat area proved a complicating factor.
The Israelis sent in rescue vehicles on June 8, and when one was damaged, Hamas militants moved in on it. A firefight broke out, and commandos called in the Israeli air force, which began striking the neighborhood.
The hostages were ultimately rescued. But more than 270 Palestinians were killed, according to the Gazan health ministry, though it has proved impossible to determine with certainty how many were Hamas fighters and how many were innocent bystanders.
Many Palestinians are angry at Israel for conducting the raid. But others said they knew that Israel would try to rescue its people, no matter the toll.
“I’m totally against mixing prisoners and civilians,” said Kareem, a lawyer who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used to avoid retribution from the Hamas authorities. “We saw what the operation resulted in. It was horrific. A very high price.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Mr. Thawabteh, the director general of the Hamas-run government media office, said the government still employs thousands of people, helps distribute aid and organizes Friday prayers. Security services continue to try to enforce the law, he added.
Government-run emergency committees help secure aid and maintain order, Mr. Thawabteh said.
“The government in Gaza is living through a time of challenges,” he said. “But it’s still in place carrying out its duties every day.”
Hamas is not the only group active in Gaza. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally that participated in the Oct. 7 terror attacks, remains strong. Armed gangs and neighborhood committees operate throughout the territory, with some also making threats and carrying out revenge attacks.
American officials say the groups operate with the implicit blessing of Hamas, though its precise level of oversight and control of them varies from group to group.
But Mr. Sinwar is the unchallenged leader of Gaza. While his day-to-day control of the government is attenuated, as he tries to avoid being captured or killed by Israel, he still sets the broad goals and policies for Gaza, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.
Aid agencies trying to deliver humanitarian relief to Gaza acknowledge Hamas’s continued control. Aid convoys must coordinate their efforts with local Hamas leaders, or risk the aid not getting through.
Efforts to have Gazans who are aligned with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority help secure aid convoys have fallen apart. American officials say Hamas hostility and threats on those convoys shut down the effort.
Looting has afflicted several Gazan cities after Israeli forces pulled out. Some of the looters may have been hungry people trying to feed their families. Others may have had more base motivations.
Israeli and American officials say Hamas has tried to stop the looting, but often with brutal tactics.
In some instances, according to U.S. officials, people accused of looting have been shot in the leg. In one incident, a group of Hamas members beat people accused of stealing aid and spray-painted the word “thief” on the back of one of them, according to the Israeli military.
To some Palestinians, the rough justice has added to a climate of fear.
Mr. Abed, 35, the Palestinian critic of Hamas who was beaten in July, was attacked after writing on social media and speaking to news media, including The New York Times, and believes that Hamas’s leaders want to make an example out of him.
On Wednesday, Mr. Abed left Gaza for the first time in more than two decades, one of dozens of wounded and ill people whom Israel permitted to travel to the United Arab Emirates for treatment.
“I feel terrible that I’ve left our family and people behind, but at the same time, I feel safe for the first time in 17 years,” he said in a voice message from his hospital bed in Abu Dhabi. “There’s no one that wants to kill, arrest or follow me.”
We’d still be talking about it and we’d never get over it.
What you’ve got here is a documentary on the Nova Music Festival, you know, in the Israeli desert on October 7th, where people were killed, raped and taken hostage.
Now the truth is war is not like in the movies. There’s no soundtrack. There’s no arc. No buildup to a crescendo. The sun is out, the light is bright, and WHAT THE F*CK IS HAPPENING!
The rockets are in the air… And no one is concerned. First and foremost, many attendees are high. This is Israel, the land of the Iron Dome. You’re safe, right?
Wrong.
Now we’ve been taught that not only is the United States the greatest country on the planet, but those in the rest of the world are the other. Maybe we’ll let some people from England and Ireland pass, after all they speak the same language. But what is astounding, what you’ll notice right away, is these people are just like you and me.
Assuming you’re in your twenties.
This is before commitment, obligation. Before the big job. Before marriage and kids. When you’ll drive all night to a location you just learned about to party until the sun rises, and even thereafter.
They’ve got tattoos, stringy hair. And they radiate intelligence and awareness and togetherness. This is not class warfare, this is kumbaya.
And then…
Not only are revolutions now televised, but so is war. Everybody’s got a smartphone camera, documenting their life.
[The Lefsetz letter continues]
So if you watch this movie, and most people won’t, because it’s launching on 9/24 on Paramount+, a streaming outlet so crummy that the parent company was sold at a near fire sale price (but it is on BBC2 on 9/26), and we’ll pay for Netflix, and Amazon Video is baked into Prime, but beyond that everything is expendable, and Paramount+ is way down the list of desirability.
And most people don’t want to see this stuff.
First and foremost they hate the blood. There’s a warning at the beginning of the film, but what ensued was not what I thought would be shown. You’ve got people literally running for their life, you’ve got people being shot… Once again, it’s not orchestrated like a Hollywood movie. It’s just hours and hours of…
Being on your own.
The IDF was caught flat-footed, no one knew what was going on. The attendees were calling law enforcement, and if they could even get through, the people they spoke to didn’t believe them, certainly were not amped up about it.
So first and foremost you’ll be confronted with the security lapse. The vaunted Israeli military… Failed. Someone was responsible.
And then there’s Hamas.
[The Lefsetz letter continues]
Free link: https://wapo.st/4dm6pOV
My inbox is filled with stuff like this. Pointing to the number of views of Trump’s debate closing on YouTube… That’s one of the talking points, along with railing against ABC and the moderators, which makes no sense if Trump truly did clean the floor with Harris.
But my point here is in a world where there are multiple news sources, and people only consume what they agree with, one cannot change people’s views on the war in Gaza. Impossible. I haven’t been able to do it.
Then again, how important is it to most people?
Of course it’s about antisemitism, because you don’t see equivalent protests about the deaths in Syria and Sudan, but if you’re a member of the group attacked…
Just like Black people tell their kids to beware of “driving while Black,” we Jews are brought up being reminded by our parents about antisemitism.
Of course it’s worse for the Blacks, because they’re easily identifiable. But any minority ultimately comes up for abuse. It can be as simple as living in a northern city as opposed to the rural south, or even living in California. Not that I want to make all these equal, I just want to illustrate that if you believe you’re immune, you’re dreaming.
Or as Martin Niemöller so famously put it:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
So most people won’t be incentivized to watch “We Will Dance Again.” You’ve got to have Paramount+, and if you’re not an EDM fan, or a Jew, why take the time?
Used to be different. In the three network era. If it made it on to TV, millions of people saw it. That’s something we lost with cable and the internet.
But once you see Hamas in the movie… Your opinion might change. You still might talk about innocent Palestinians, but this is what the Israelis are up against. Not only did Hamas attack out of the blue without provocation, they employ a vitriol and complete lack of feeling for humanity that thank god we do not see in the U.S. But if you watch this movie, you do see it. Which is why people should.
I could give you my position on the Gaza conflict…
Hell, I’ll tell you that I’ve got no time for Netanyahu and the settlements, but when terrorists are challenging your right to exist, what are you supposed to do?
[The Lefsetz letter continues]
Absolutely not. They were undercutting the Supreme Court before this all happened. And the religious right that has pushed the settlements and the rightward policies of the government…thank god their children now have to go into the army. What’s fair is fair.
You’ve got talking heads in this movie say they’ll never forget it. This day, what they saw. And you hear this all the time, but…
When Hamas is throwing hand grenade after hand grenade into your shelter, when you wake up and find out you’re covered in dead bodies, no wonder people have survivor’s guilt, no wonder some of the survivors have committed suicide in the ensuing year.
As for one of the hostages from the Nova festival, at the end of the film it’s said that Hersh Goldberg-Polin was taken captive, his fate unknown, but now we know he’s dead. Shot in a tunnel 65 feet below ground by Hamas.
This is what the Israelis are up against. This is what Hamas has been doing with all the money sent to aid the citizens of Gaza. This is the uncomfortable truth the pro-Palestinian people refuse to acknowledge.
But those damn Jews.
Loud-mouthed and entitled. Who do they think they are?
They’re just like you. They want to live in peace and prosper. But this lifestyle was threatened. What do you want them to do?
I don’t know if you can eradicate Hamas. I don’t know if you can get rid of the tunnels. I don’t know if you can get rid of hatred of Israel in Gaza. It’s thorny.
But this war is not one-sided.
Let me ask you again, what would you do if you were attacked, if your loved ones died? What is enough for you to put down your arms, to stop fighting? You’re never going to forget your fiancé. Are you ready to swallow your pain, put down your arms, get over it?
That’s what I’m asking you.
And when you watch this movie you might ask yourself this question too.
But in an age where there’s a firehose of media, it’s hard to get people’s attention for anything. Herd mentality rules. The American cowboy, the rugged individualism this nation was built upon, has been sacrificed for groupthink.
The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charges relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (the October 7 Hamas Massacres), involving the murders and kidnappings of countless innocent civilians, including American citizens, which was the culmination of Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism and violence against Israel and its allies, including American citizens. The defendants are either deceased or remain at large.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists, led by these defendants, murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians. This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American. We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
“Yahya Sinwar and the other senior leaders of Hamas are charged today with orchestrating this terrorist organization’s decades-long campaign of mass violence and terror — including on October 7th. On that horrible day, Hamas terrorists viciously massacred nearly 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, including over 40 Americans, kidnapped hundreds more, and used sexual violence as a weapon of brutality,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “Since that horrific day, we have worked to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, and we will not rest until all those who kidnapped or murdered Americans are brought to justice. Our thoughts continue to be with the families of all the victims of this barbaric terrorist attack.”
[The Justice Department Report continues]
The defendants charged in the complaint are all senior leaders of Hamas who have orchestrated, overseen, and supported Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism, including the October 7 Hamas Massacres. They and their co-conspirators control all aspects of the terrorist organization, including its political and military branches, known as the Politburo and Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (al-Qassam Brigades).
Ismail Haniyeh was the chairman of Hamas’s Politburo from 2017 until his reported death on or about July 31. Prior to 2017, Haniyeh was the deputy chairman of the Politburo and the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Haniyeh was based principally in Turkey and Qatar.
Yahya Sinwar, also known as Abu Ibrahim, 61, is the leader of Hamas. Previously, beginning in approximately 2017, he was the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and is one of the founders of the al-Qassam Brigades. Sinwar is based principally in the Gaza Strip.
Mohammad Al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif and al Khalid al-Deif, was the commander in chief of the al-Qassam Brigades, a position he held from in or about 2002 until his reported death on or about July 13. Al-Masri was based principally in the Gaza Strip.
Marwan Issa, also known as Abu Baraa, was the deputy commander of the al-Qassam Brigades from approximately 2007 until his reported death on or about March 10. Issa was based principally in the Gaza Strip.
Khaled Meshaal, also known as Abu al-Waleed, 68, was the chairman of Hamas’ Politburo from approximately 2004 to 2017 and is now the head of Hamas’ diaspora office — effectively responsible for Hamas’ official presence outside of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Meshaal is based principally in Qatar.
Ali Baraka, 57, has been Hamas’ head of National Relations Abroad since approximately 2019, and was previously Hamas’s representative in Lebanon. Baraka is based principally in Lebanon.
Hamas has pursued its objectives through innumerable acts of brutal terrorist violence, including launching thousands of rockets specifically targeting civilian populations; suicide bombings of restaurants, markets, public transportation systems, and other public spaces; and military-style attacks on towns and residential communities. Hamas’s campaign of terrorism has killed and wounded citizens of Israel, the U.S., and many other countries.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas committed its most violent, large-scale terrorist attack to date — the October 7 Hamas Massacres. Hamas targeted civilian populations with a barrage of rockets, before waves of Hamas terrorists breached the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, infiltrated Israel, and launched attacks on civilians, by land, sea, and air. Hamas sent thousands of armed fighters into southern Israel, where they carried out the massacres of over a thousand people and the kidnappings of more than 200 others. Hamas terrorists attacked civilians, firing handguns, assault rifles, and handheld rocket launchers, in small residential communities in Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Nir Oz, Nahal Oz, Re’im, Holit, Zikim, Kerem Shalom, Sufa, and others; the Israeli town of Sderot; and a music festival held near Re’im; among other places. Armed Hamas operatives attacked and shot civilians, including children, sometimes with machineguns and sometimes at point blank range, and weaponized sexual violence against Israeli women, including through rape and genital mutilation. Hundreds of civilians, including Americans, and Israeli soldiers, were killed and wounded; other victims, including Americans, were kidnapped, taken hostage, and brought into Gaza by Hamas. As of the date of the complaint, over 40 American citizens were among those murdered, and at least eight American citizens were taken hostage or remain unaccounted for. Most recently, Hamas executed a U.S. citizen who was taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7 Hamas Massacres and remained in captivity until he was murdered.
[The Justice Department Report continues]
Hamas raises money to fund its terrorist activities through a variety of methods, including by soliciting and receiving cryptocurrency payments, advertising the ostensible anonymity of such transactions. Since 2019, Hamas’ military wing has used social media and other platforms to call for cryptocurrency contributions from supporters abroad, including in the United States, to Hamas-controlled virtual wallets, explicitly acknowledging that those payments would be used to fund Hamas’ campaign of violence. Through these mechanisms, Hamas has received tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency payments to fund its activities.
The complaint unsealed today charges each of the defendants with: conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization resulting in death, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison; conspiring to provide material support for acts of terrorism resulting in death, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison; conspiring to murder U.S. nationals outside the United States, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison; conspiring to bomb a place of public use resulting in death, which carries a maximum penalty of death or life in prison; conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction resulting in death, which carries a maximum penalty of death or life in prison; conspiring to finance terrorism, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
The FBI is investigating the case.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sam Adelsberg, Jacob H. Gutwillig, Sarah L. Kushner, Michael D. Lockard, Ben Arad, and Samuel L. Raymond for the Southern District of New York and Trial Attorneys Alicia Cook and C. Alexandria Bogle of the Justice Department’s National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting the case.
A complaint is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Israel said early Sunday that it had recovered the bodies of six hostages captured during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that ignited the Gaza war, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents had led a high-profile campaign for the captives’ release.
The military said the six were killed shortly before Israeli forces were to rescue them and that the bodies were found in a tunnel beneath the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The news sparked calls for mass protests by families of the hostages who said they could have been returned alive in a cease-fire deal.
Goldberg-Polin and four other hostages were taken from a music festival where Palestinian militants killed scores of people. The sixth was captured from a nearby farming community.
Here’s a look at the hostages:
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
The native of Berkeley, California, lost part of his left arm to a grenade blast in the Oct. 7 attack. In April, a Hamas-issued video showed him with his left hand missing, sparking new protests in Israel urging the government to do more to secure his and others’ freedom.
His parents, U.S.-born immigrants to Israel, became perhaps the most high-profile relatives of hostages on the international stage. They met with U.S. President Joe Biden, Pope Francis and others and addressed the United Nations, urging the release of all hostages.
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On Aug. 21, his parents addressed a hushed hall at the Democratic National Convention — after sustained applause and chants of “bring him home.”
“This is a political convention. But needing our only son — and all of the cherished hostages — home is not a political issue. It is a humanitarian issue,” said his father, Jon Polin. His mother, Rachel, who bowed her head during the ovation and touched her chest, said: “Hersh, if you can hear us, we love you, stay strong, survive.”
[The AP News Report continues]
Eden Yerushalmi, 24
The Tel Aviv-born Yerushalmi loved spending summer days at the beach and was studying to become a Pilates instructor, according to the Hostage Families Forum, which has been leading advocacy efforts for the captives’ release.
She was working as a bartender at the open-air Tribe of Nova music festival. When Hamas’ initial rocket attack set off air raid sirens she sent a video to her family, saying she was leaving the party. During the attack, she called the police and was in contact with her sisters over the next four hours, the forum said.
“They’ve caught me,” were her last words to them.
Carmel Gat, 40
The occupational therapist from Tel Aviv was “full of compassion and love,” and enjoyed solo travel, rock concerts and the band Radiohead, according to the forum.
She was staying with her parents in Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the hardest-hit communities, when militants broke into their home and kidnapped her on the morning of Oct. 7. Her parents were killed in the attack.
Hostages who were released during a cease-fire in November said she taught them meditation and yoga exercises to help them survive in captivity.
Alexander Lobanov, 33
Lobanov was a married father of a two-year-old and a five-month-old baby born while he was in captivity. He was also kidnapped from the music festival, where he had worked as a bar manager.
The forum, citing witnesses, said he helped evacuate people from the festival and ran with others before being abducted. It said the others managed to escape.
Almog Sarusi, 27
The forum described Sarusi as a “vibrant, positive person who loved traveling around Israel in his white jeep with his guitar.” He was at the music festival with his girlfriend of five years, who was killed in the attack.
The forum said Sarusi stayed with her after she was wounded, and was then abducted.
Ori Danino, 25
The Jerusalem-born Danino was the eldest of five siblings and planned to study electrical engineering. “Ori was known for his ambition, love for people, and was beloved by all. He loved nature and was very handy,” the forum said.
It said he was kidnapped from the Nova festival while driving back and trying to help others to escape.
National Basketball Association legend Shaquille “Shaq” O’Neal this past weekend sent a heartfelt video message in English and Hebrew to survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre and bereaved families.
The 52-year-old, whose trophy shelf includes three titles with the Los Angeles Lakers and one with the Miami Heat, delivered the greeting to Timberlane Camp in Toronto, which is hosting young people who went through the Hamas-led attack on the northwestern Negev and families affected by the tragedy.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“Camp Timberlane! Hello! Shalom! This is Shaquille O’Neal. I just wanted to give you guys a shout out and let you know I love you. To all the amazing children from the OneFamily, I know you came from far, far away. Hope you’re having a good time. We love you so very much. Thank you for coming, and we’ll talk to you soon. All right.” O’Neal said, before switching to Hebrew.
“Shalom. Baruch Hashem [Praise God]. L’Shanah Tovah [Have a happy new year]. Shabbat Shalom.”
Visit this People4Peace.net page to view People4Peace videos including its Eyes on the Lies, Eyes on History, Eyes on the Evidence, Eyes on the Evil, Eyes on the Protests, Eyes on Hypocrisy, Eyes on Horror, Eyes on Pride, Eyes on the Hostages, Eyes on the Desecration, LGBTQ+ persecution and newest series, Or is it just your hatred of the Jews, that tell the truth about Hamas and its Hezbollah, Houthi and Iran Axis of Terror allies.
Children in Gaza Hamas and Islamic Jihad use summer camps to brainwash children instilling a dangerous message and to weaponize children — to murder Jews!
Neighbors Who Kill Imagine the terror of living next to neighbors who vow to kill you and your family and your friends?
Eyes on Hypocrisy – Victims of War To the pro-Hamas protestors: why aren’t you protesting for the civilian victims in the dozens of war zones around the globe? Is it because you only love certain civilians? Or is it just your hatred of Jews?
Eyes on the Evil – Children of Hate (an update) Watch Mark Levin’s reaction to history repeating itself as the insidious Hamas summer camp is eerily similar to the Hitler Youth Nazi training camp.
Eyes on the Protests – Brainwashed Summer Camps usually focus on fun. Why are protestors supporting a terrorist organization that brainwashes their own children?
Eyes on the Evil – Children of Hate The similarities between the Nazi Youth and Hamas-led military indoctrination of children is chilling and horrifying. Where’s your outrage?
Eyes on the Evidence– Hamas Weaponizes Rape Hamas terrorists on October 7 carried battle orders to do this. Hostages still held are still being rapes, including children.
New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres condemned the virulent anti-Israel protests in Washington DC during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit.
Torres shared a photo of an anti-Israel protester holding up a sign showing a mushroom cloud that said, “Allah is gathering all of the Zionists for a Final Solution.”
Torres posted on X, “The Free Palestine movement is not about freeing Palestinians. It is about pursuing a ‘final solution’ against the world’s only Jewish State, which is home to half of the world’s Jewish population.”
He added, “When antisemites reveal their antisemitism by calling for a genocide against Jews, believe them.”
During the demonstration, protesters attempted to storm the Capitol, burned US flags and an effigy of Netanyahu and defaced public monuments.
Other Democratic politicians condemned the demonstrations, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Harris called the anti-Israel protests “despicable” and “unpatriotic.”
[The The Jewish Voice News Report continues]
Harris’s statement continued, “I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way.”
She concluded, “I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear: Antisemitism, hate and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.”
Chuck Schumer said, “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Exalting them and burning the American flag is disgraceful and wrong, and defacing public property is illegal. Hateful and antisemitic messages and threats against Jews have no place in America and must be universally condemned.”
Two civilians were killed and others wounded after rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli territory from the Khan Younis humanitarian zone on Wednesday night fell short, hitting the area of the UNRWA ‘Al-Qarara’ school in Khan Younis, the IDF said on Thursday.
“Following the failed shooting, a number of injuries were detected in the area of the school and reports were received from representatives of international aid organizations about the death of two civilians and a number of other injured civilians,” the army stated.
“In light of this, and in coordination with the Coordination and Liaison Headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces and the World Health Organization (WHO), the injured civilians were referred for primary care at the International Medical Corps (IMC) field hospital that was established during the fighting in the Deir al-Balah region,” the IDF continued.
“The terrorist organization Hamas regularly violates international law, while systematically exploiting civilian buildings and the civilian population as human shields for terrorist actions against the State of Israel,” the army added.
IDF finds tunnel shaft, weapons in child’s bedroom in Rafah
Israeli forces located a tunnel shaft, weapons and night vision equipment in a children’s bedroom during operations in the Tel al-Sultan and Shabura areas of Rafah in southern Gaza, the IDF said on Wednesday.
Israeli forces are continuing to press the offensive in the former Hamas strongholds of Rafah and Khan Younis, as well as in the central Strip.
Footage of the tunnel shaft and weapons located in the children’s bedroom by the 932nd Battalion. Credit: IDF.
In his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commended the Rafah operation’s low civilian casualty rate.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Dozens of terrorists killed, 50 terror sites destroyed in Khan Younis
In Khan Younis in recent days, Israeli forces killed dozens of terrorists and dismantled 50 terrorist infrastructure sites.
The IDF’s decision to re-enter Khan Younis was driven by new intelligence on the existence of undiscovered Hamas tunnels in the area, an uptick in rocket attacks from the city and attempts by the terrorist group to reorganize there.
The IDF informed Gaza residents on Monday that it was about to enter the city, and called on the remaining population of eastern Khan Yunis to move to the newly adjusted humanitarian zone, using text messages, phone calls and Arabic-language media broadcasts.
Over the past 24 hours, the IAF struck over 60 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including military structures and terrorist infrastructure.
July 23
title: Welcome to the WILD WEST BANK
by Zach Sage Fox
Free Palestine? I went to see ‘Palestine’… and almost didn’t make it out alive. After asking questions on the streets of Ramallah for less than an hour, a group of Palestinian men threatened to kill us if we didn’t delete our footage. This is what we were able to recover… Welcome to the WILD WEST BANK. If you want the world to know the TRUTH about what Israelis are dealing with every day, please repost and share this with EVERYONE you know.
Concerned states, special envoys, national coordinators, and representatives tasked by their governments to counter antisemitism, in cooperation with international bodies, offer the following best practices, which have proven to be effective guidelines in formulating public policy.
These legally non-binding guidelines, adopted in Buenos Aires, Argentina, include policies to monitor and combat antisemitism that can be implemented and adapted to a wide variety of national, regional, and cultural contexts.
We urge all states and international bodies, as well as civil society, to embrace and use these practices, many of which already form the basis of regional and country-based action plans. These guidelines can be applied everywhere, not only in societies with Jewish communities.
SPEAK OUT – Governments and political leaders should denounce antisemitism swiftly, clearly, and unequivocally, whenever and wherever it occurs. This applies to the domestic and international arenas, including regional and international organizations.
AVOID POLITICIZATION – Antisemitism can appear across the political spectrum and should be rejected without political bias and regardless of its origin.
ADOPT and IMPLEMENT – Governments and international bodies should adopt and implement strategies and action plans that engage all relevant ministries and public authorities at all levels of governance. This should be done in consultation with Jewish communities, civil society, field researchers, and other relevant stakeholders. Such policies should be assessed periodically and updated as needed.
APPOINT and EMPOWER – Governments and international bodies should consider appointing national coordinators, special envoys, or designated officials. Such officials can proactively address antisemitism as a cross-cutting public policy challenge and should be provided with the necessary authority, empowerment, and resources to be effective.
UNDERSTAND and DEFINE – In order to combat antisemitism, governments need tools to understand its various manifestations. The legally non-binding “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism” is an important internationally recognized instrument used by over 40 U.N. member states since its adoption in 2016. In addition, hundreds of sub-national public authorities, universities, sports bodies, NGOs, and corporations rely on it.
PROTECT – There are few roles more central for governments than the security and welfare of their populations. Jewish communities are targets of physical threats and attacks from both foreign and domestic sources. Governments, working together with Jewish communities, should provide appropriate protection and security enhancements that safeguard and sustain Jewish communal life. Religious freedom and protection also encompass safeguarding unhindered religious practice.
COLLECT – Policies should be in place to support the uniform collection of data documenting incidents of antisemitism as well as the perceptions of antisemitism among Jewish communities and the broader public. Such information, drawn from community-based sources, when possible, allows for evidence-based understanding of trends and sources.
ENFORCE – Enforcement of hate crime and anti-discrimination laws is critical and should take place within legal frameworks that protect civil liberties and human rights, such as freedom of expression. Enforcement conveys the broader message that antisemitism is unacceptable, has consequences, and cannot be tolerated.
EDUCATE – Education is vital for identifying and countering antisemitism, including Holocaust remembrance and countering Holocaust denial and distortion, an especially pernicious form of antisemitism. It has also proven effective in sensitizing law enforcement. Education about Jewish culture and contributions to society demystifies Jews and Judaism. Many countries and intergovernmental organizations have linked their efforts against antisemitism to broadening appreciation of Jewish heritage and fostering Jewish life.
CULTIVATE A WHOLE-OF-SOCIETY COMMITMENT – Countering antisemitism requires a whole-of-society commitment that includes the active participation of civil society. Collaboration; bridge-building; nurturing trust among faith, civic, and cultural leaders; and fostering mutual understanding are essential, particularly since antisemitism is not solely a threat to Jews. It can endanger members of other minority groups, democratic values, and national security and stability.
ENGAGE SOCIAL MEDIA – Antisemitism, like other forms of group hatred and disinformation, is widespread and mutating online. It has real world consequences and can lead to radicalization to violence. Stakeholders should oppose antisemitism online, stay educated on evolving trends, increase transparency about antisemitic content, assess impacts on vulnerable communities, and find solutions, within the context of existing legal frameworks.
STRENGTHEN INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION – Coalition-building and international cooperation are paramount to effectively monitor and counter antisemitism. In an interconnected world where hate respects no borders, transnational cooperation can identify threats, raise awareness, broaden the use of best practices, and more effectively and proactively coordinate responses
ENDORSEMENTS
ARGENTINA Ambassador Maria Fabiana Loguzzo
Special Representative for the fight against Antisemitism and Head of Delegation to IHRA
AUSTRALIA
Dr Simon Twisk
Ambassador to Argentina
AUSTRIA Antonio Martino
Director of the Department for Fostering Austrian-Jewish Cultural Heritage and Combatting Antisemitism
BELGIUM Isabelle Leclercq
Chairperson of the Belgian interfederal mechanism of coordination for combatting antisemitism
BULGARIA Nevyana Miteva
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs
CANADA Deborah Lyons
Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism
COUNCIL OF EUROPE
Alexandre Guessel
Special Representative of the Secretary General on Antisemitic, Anti-Muslim and other forms of religious intolerance and hate crimes
CROATIA
Sara Lustig
Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Croatia for Holocaust Issues and Combating Antisemitism
CYPRUS Ambassador Evangelos Savva
Ambassador to the United States
CZECHIA Ambassador at Large Robert Řehák
Ambassador Robert Rehak, Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, Interfaith Dialogue and Freedom of Religion
ECUADOR President Daniel Noboa
President of Ecuador
ESTONIA Ringo Ringvee
National coordinator of measures against anti-Semitism
EUROPEAN COMMISSION Dr.h.c. Katharina von Schnurbein
Coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life
FINLAND Tiina Jortikka-Laitinen
Ambassador for Human Rights
FRANCE Ambassador Isabelle Rome
Ambassador-at Large for Human Rights and the International Dimension of the Holocaust
Mathias Dreyfuss
Deputy head of DILCRAH, the Interministerial Delegation for the fight against racism, antisemitism and anti-LGBT hate
GERMANY Dr. Felix Klein
Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism
Ambassador Dr. Robert Klinke
Special Representative for Relations with Jewish Organisations, Issues relating to Antisemitism, International Sinti and Roma Affairs, Holocaust Remembrance
GREECE Ambassador Chryssoula Aliferi
Special Envoy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Combatting Anti-Semitism and for the Protection of Holocaust Remembrance
ISRAEL Michal Cotler-Wunsh
Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism
ITALY Pasquale Angelosanto
Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism
LITHUANIA
Ambassador Arvydas Daunoravičius
Ambassador-at-large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania
LUXEMBOURG Michel Heintz
Interministerial delegate responsible for coordinating policies to combat racism, anti-Semitism and anti-LGBTIQ+ hatred
NETHERLANDS Eddo Verdoner
National Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism
NORWAY Øystein Lyngroth
Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion and Belief, MFA Department of Human Rights, Democracy and Gender Equality
ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES Fernando K. Lottenberg
Commissioner to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism
ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY AND CO-OPERATION IN EUROPE Rabbi Andrew Baker
Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office on Combating Anti-Semitism
PARAGUAY Ambassador Victor Verdún
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs
POLAND Jan Łazicki
Plenipotentiary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs for contacts with the Jewish Diaspora, and Head of Delegation to IHRA
PORTUGAL Ministry of Foreign Affairs
ROMANIA Ambassador Bogdan Mazuru
Special Representative of the Government of Romania for the remembrance policies and for the fight against antisemitism and xenophobia
Dragoș Hotea
Coordinator of the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the implementation of the 2024-2027 National Strategy for Preventing and Combating Anti-Semitism, Xenophobia, Radicalization and Hate Speech
SERBIA Ministry of Foreign Affairs
SLOVAKIA Ambassador Peter Hulenyi
Director General of the MFA Directorate-General for International Organisations and Human Rights
Martin Kačo
Directorate-General for Political Affairs
SLOVENIA
Dr. Marko Rakovec
Director General, Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, Head of the Slovenian Delegation to IHRA
SPAIN Jaime Moreno
Coordinator of the Spanish National Plan against Antisemitism and Head of Delegation to IHRA
SWEDEN Ambassador Torsten Ericsson
Ambassador of Sweden to Argentina
UNITED KINGDOM Lord John Mann of Holbeck
UK Government’s independent advisor on antisemitism
Lord Eric Pickles
UK Government Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues
UNITED STATES Ambassador Deborah E. Lipstadt, Ph.D.
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism
Human Rights Watch, an NGO better known for its anti-Israel positions, broke form on Wednesday to release a report documenting war crimes committed on Oct. 7.
The goal of the report, “Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault on Israel,” was to record “the nature and extent” of humanitarian law violations committed by terrorists on that day, in which some 1,200 Israelis, most civilians, were killed and 251 taken hostage.
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“Palestinian armed groups committed a widespread attack directed against the civilian population, meeting the definition required for crimes against humanity,” said an HRW spokeswoman in a press briefing on Monday ahead of the report’s release.
“We have further found that the killing of civilians and taking hostages were all central aims of the planned attack, and not actions that occurred as an afterthought or as a plan gone awry, or as isolated acts, for example, perpetrated by unaffiliated Palestinians from Gaza,” the spokeswoman said.
It found that five terrorist groups took part: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Fatah-associated Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Human Rights Watch devoted a lengthy section in the document to its methodology. It said it conducted 144 mostly in-person interviews in Israel in October and November 2023. It interviewed others remotely, including 94 survivors and witnesses from the Oct. 7 assault.
It also talked to family members of victims and survivors, Gazans, foreign workers and Arab Israelis, which it referred to in its report as “Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
The NGO also verified more than 280 videos and photographs taken during or just after the Oct. 7 invasion. One of its researchers attended a screening of the 45-minute video that had been compiled by the Israeli government mainly using footage from Hamas GoPro cameras and cellphones.
Human Rights Watch underscored the efforts it made to independently verify material.
“To determine the location of each video and photograph, researchers matched landmarks with available satellite imagery, street-level photographs, or other visual material,” the report said.
“Where possible, Human Rights Watch used the position of the sun and any resulting shadows visible in videos and photographs to estimate the time the content was recorded at. Researchers also confirmed that each piece of content had not appeared online prior to October 7, using various reverse search image engines,” it added.
HRW said it didn’t make use of interrogation videos of captured terrorists by Israeli authorities, claiming the “inherent unreliability” of such videos.
“All prisoners must be treated with dignity and not exposed to public curiosity, and such videos often use or encourage the use of torture or other forms of ill-treatment,” HRW said (italics in original).
In the interrogation videos released by the IDF, no signs of torture or physical abuse were evident as the terrorists offered up lurid details of their actions on Oct. 7, including murder and rape.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“Between October 7, 2023, and July 1, 2024, the hostilities resulted in at least 37,900 Palestinians killed, and 87,060 others injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. That figure includes an unreported number of Palestinian armed group fighters,” it said in the background section.
“As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated in December 2023, ‘International humanitarian law cannot be applied selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.’”
The CIA has assessed that the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is coming under increased pressure from his own military commanders to accept a ceasefire deal and end the war with Israel, CIA Director Bill Burns told a closed-door conference on Saturday, according to a source who attended.
Sinwar, the key architect of the October 7 massacre in Israel, is not “concerned with his mortality” but is facing pressure about being blamed for the enormity of the suffering in Gaza, Burns said at the conference, the source said.
US intelligence officials believe Sinwar is hiding in the tunnels beneath his birthplace, Khan Younis in Gaza, and is the key decision maker for Hamas on whether to accept a deal.
Burns – who for months has conducted feverish negotiations as the Biden administration’s point person – said it was incumbent on both the Israeli government and Hamas to take advantage of this moment, more than nine months since the war started, to reach a ceasefire.
But the internal pressure Sinwar is now facing is new in the past two weeks, including the calls from his own senior commanders who are tiring of the fight, Burns said, according to the attendee who was granted anonymity to discuss the off-the-record conference.
The CIA director was speaking at the annual Allen & Company summer retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, sometimes called a “summer camp for billionaires” because of its glitzy guest list of tech moguls, media titans and senior government officials who are invited to the secretive week-long event.
The CIA declined to comment.
The increased pressure on Sinwar comes as Hamas and Israel have agreed to a framework deal that that President Joe Biden laid out at the end of May. That’s what US officials have said is being used as the basis to an agreement to end the fighting.
Burns had just returned from his latest trip last week to the Middle East to try to further the negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal, meeting with mediator counterparts from Qatar and Egypt, as well as Israel’s head of foreign intelligence.
On Saturday Burns said that there is a “fragile possibility before us” and that the chances of a ceasefire being agreed are greater than they have been, months after a brief temporary truce saw dozens of hostages freed in November. But he emphasized that the final stage of negotiations are always difficult.
[The CNN Report continues]
‘Gaps to close’
“There are still gaps to close, but we’re making progress, the trend is positive,” Biden said on Thursday, “and I’m determined to get this deal done and bring an end to this war, which should end now.”
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Thousands are believed missing under the rubble and hundreds of thousands more face disease, famine and lack of shelter, according to aid organizations.
Beyond the enormous amount of detail being hashed out in the potential agreement, talks are routinely slowed by the difficulties of getting messages to and from Sinwar as Israel tries to hunt him down.
Of the three most senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, Israel is believed to have found and killed just one: Marwan Issa, the second in command of the military wing. Its military chief, Mohammed Deif, was targeted by Israel in a bombing on Saturday that killed almost 100 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more, according to Palestinian health officials.
Neither Israel nor the US has determined whether Deif was successfully targeted.
[The CNN Report continues]
In Hamas communications seen and reported recently by the Associated Press, senior Hamas leaders inside Gaza called on external figures from the group to accept Biden’s ceasefire proposal, citing heavy losses and dire conditions in Gaza.
Perhaps an indication of their eagerness to end the fighting, Hamas recently backed off their key demand that a ceasefire agreement include assurances it would then lead to a permanent ceasefire, long a sticking point in the talks that Israel had refused.
Netanyahu then insisted that any deal must allow Israel to return to fighting until its war objectives are met.
That means a pause in the fighting could start, which would see both some Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners released, before Israel re-launches military operations.
The framework Biden proposed says that a permanent ceasefire would be negotiated during the first phase of a pause in the fighting, which would continue as long as negotiations do.
On the same day the Burns was speaking, Netanyahu said at a news conference that he would not move “one millimeter” from the framework laid out by Biden while claiming Hamas had requested 29 changes to the proposal, but he refused to make any.
There are still “tough issues to resolve,” a source familiar with the talks told CNN after Burns’ meetings in Doha. A second source agreed, saying there’s “still a long time to go.”
The documents include notes instructing terrorists ahead of the invasion to show no mercy towards captured or wounded Israelis, and urging them to mutilate their bodies.
By World Israel News Staff
Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7th were provided with notes on how to treat captured Israelis, and language training preparing them to given verbal instructions in Hebrew, according to a recent report.
According to a report by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog group which monitors antisemitic incitement in the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s military intelligence revealed last week that the IDF has obtained documents provided by Hamas to its terrorists ahead of the October 7th invasion, to prepare them for their encounters with Israelis.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“This enemy of yours is a disease that has no cure other than cutting off heads and cutting out hearts and livers,” read a note found in the pocket of one terrorist, apparently written by a Hamas commander.
Other documents revealed at Monday’s briefing included basic Hebrew-language instruction, transliterating Hebrew words into the Arabic alphabet, so as to enable terrorists to memorize key words and phrases in Hebrew.
The phrases include “Don’t talk,” “You are a captive,” “Calm down,” “I don’t understand,” and “where is the commander.”
Some of the phrases listed, however, included commands for Israeli prisoners to expose themselves, potentially hinting at a degree of premeditation in the sexual assaults and gang rape which took place during the October 7th invasion and afterwards towards captive Israelis.
“Take off your pants” and “Take off your clothes” were among the instructions transliterated from Hebrew to Arabic, along with “Women here,” and “Spread your legs.”
While Hamas has alluded to atrocities committed during the October 7th invasion, the terror group has denied either encouraging sexual assault or condoning it.
Media outlets around the world hailed the choice of new Iranian President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian, as if he was a cross between Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Jesus.
It’s hard to find an article about Pezeshkian that does not stick the word “moderate” in front of his name.
This characterization is not only “moderate”-ly wrong. It is downright dangerous.
“God-willing, we will try to have friendly relations with all countries except Israel,” Pezeshkian said in a quote that is the essence of antisemitism.
When he spoke to Hassan Nasrallah, the Iranian-backed head of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, Pezeshkian revealed his true unmoderate views to the world:
[The Honest Reporting Post continues]
Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 7, Iran itself attacked Israel on April 13, and it continues supporting a six-front war against the Jewish state.
If you call him a moderate, it legitimizes attacks on Israel, past and present.
Iranian intransigence is currently preventing the cease-fire in Gaza that the Western world wants.
Iran is moving full speed ahead to acquire nuclear weapons while calling for Israel’s destruction. That is as far away from moderate as it gets.
The media influences public opinion, which in turn yields operative steps by governments who instead of pressing Iran to stop supporting terror, will embolden the Islamic Republic as it makes the world increasingly volatile.
It’s time for the media to start reporting the facts instead of terrorist-backed propaganda.
Shabbat Shalom,
Gil Hoffman
Executive Director and Executive Editor
In a startling revelation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have uncovered an extensive network of multi-level tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border, showcasing Hamas’s advanced underground infrastructure. This discovery, which includes tunnels with three different levels, has taken Israeli security forces by surprise.
An exclusive report by Israel Hayom sheds light on a recent IDF operation that has exposed dozens of tunnels crossing from Gaza into Egypt. Among these, several were found to have up to three underground levels, a discovery that has surprised Israeli military and security establishments. These tunnels, described as “Hamas’ oxygen pipeline,” have allowed the group to significantly enhance its capabilities over the years since the IDF’s withdrawal from the area.
The sophisticated infrastructure developed undetected, not only under Israeli surveillance but also despite Egyptian border control efforts. This network has played a crucial role in Hamas’s transformation into a formidable fighting force.
The IDF is expanding its search perimeter around the corridor, operating under the assumption that more tunnels remain hidden. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to Israel Hayom the discovery of three-story tunnels extending from Gaza into Egyptian territory. The army’s efforts to locate additional passages are ongoing.
Approximately three weeks ago, The Washington Post reported that Israel had identified 20 tunnels crossing into Egypt along the Philadelphi Corridor (the border with Egypt), with the IDF having destroyed 14 of them. The report suggested that an estimated 20 more tunnels may still be undiscovered between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
CNN announced Wednesday that it would no longer use a Gaza freelancer whose ties to Hamas were exposed by HonestReporting.
Abdel Qader Sabbah photographed himself with a senior Hamas leader, served in a Hamas-run body to which he also provided work, praised terrorists, and shared anti-Israeli propaganda online, an HonestReporting investigation revealed.
Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, CNN has given a prominent platform to news reports by Sabbah, who has also worked for the Associated Press, and the exposure of his links to the terror group casts a long shadow over the network’s vetting procedures and journalistic standards.
“This freelance journalist has provided material used in stories for us and other outlets over the past nine months, during which time our own journalists have been barred from entering Gaza independently,” a CNN spokesman told HonestReporting. “We have reviewed this material carefully and are comfortable that it meets our standards. However, we were not aware of this individual’s historical social posts and recognize that they are highly offensive. In light of this, we will no longer be using his material going forward.”
Sabbah is the 11th journalist reassigned, suspended or fired due to HonestReporting since August 2022.
The following details are based on a survey of Sabbah’s social media activity, predominantly on Facebook, where his connections and bias have been hidden in plain sight.
Abdel Qader Sabbah’s Links to Hamas
[The Honest Reporting Report continues]
In the photo, the two men are seen smiling, and the post caption reads in Arabic: “This morning, with commander Abu Khaled Al-Zahar, literature teacher…”
Sabbah — whose Facebook bio mentions “military service” in 2013 — also posted a photo of himself wearing the uniform of the “General Training Directorate,” a body that’s officially under the Palestinian Authority’s police and Interior Ministry. In Gaza, however, these government agencies are de facto run by Hamas.
In 2013, then Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh paid an official visit to the training directorate, where he scrutinized an honor guard and “praised the role of the General Directorate…in developing and qualifying the cadres of the Ministry of Interior and National Security.”
It appears that Sabbah also provided work to the Hamas-run body. In March 2023, he boasted online about making a promotional video for the Directorate’s academy, which according to MEMRI, trains members of Hamas’ security apparatuses. His video was shared on the official page of the Hamas-run interior ministry.
In 2014, he praised as a “hero” Hamas’ suicide bomber Izz A-Din Al-Masri, who had blown himself up in a Jerusalem restaurant in 2001, killing 16 people, including children. Sabbah’s praise came as Israel returned the terrorist’s body to the Palestinian Authority 13 years later.
And in 2013, he posted a commemoration photo for Hamas’ “Khan Younis martyrs:”
Sabbah also had no qualms about sharing media censorship instructions during the 2021 conflict with Israel. One of the guidelines he had shared read in Arabic: “Not filming the sites of the fighters, and the places where rockets and mortar shells are launched.”
A few days earlier, he shared a post that read in Arabic: “May God curse the raped Zionists.”
[The Honest Reporting Report continues]
No Due Diligence?
We asked CNN whether it did a background check of Sabbah before hiring him, keeping in mind that there are only two bad answers to this question:
Yes, which means the network knowingly uses biased reporters.
No, which means the network hasn’t done its due diligence.
Their answer indicated the latter.
The network disturbingly said it was “comfortable” with Sabbah’s agenda-driven work, which included faulty reports on the non-existent Gaza “famine” or on the death toll of Gazan journalists, without mentioning that some were affiliated with Hamas and other proscribed terror organizations
The network added, however, that due to the exposure of Sabbah’s “highly offensive” social media posts “we will no longer be using his material going forward.”
We have asked and not yet received answers to the same questions from AP, which according to its database used Sabbah’s photos from Gaza in October-November 2023. These included destroyed buildings and wounded Palestinians in a hospital. It’s unclear whether Sabbah still works for the agency.
What’s clear is that someone like Abdel Qader Sabbah cannot be considered an objective journalist. His posts expose him as a Hamas mouthpiece, at best, or a serviceman affiliated with a proscribed terror group, at worst.
A respectable news outlet should not trust his reports, let alone pay him for them.
The United Nations has opened an investigation into allegations that its special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories accepted an all-expense paid trip to Australia from various pro-Hamas groups.
In November 2023, Francesca Albanese allegedly traversed around the Australian continent on a trip whose high price tag was covered by anti-Israel organizations, according to documentation acquired by UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that monitors the UN.
Albanese initially landed in Sydney and subsequently enjoyed flights into Melbourne, Adelaide, and Canberra, as well as Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand. The glamorous excursion is estimated to have cost a staggering $22,500.
The UN Investigations Division of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) told UN Watch last week that it had alerted the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the allegations of financial impropriety levied at Albanese.
In a letter sent to UN leadership last month, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer outlined evidence based on multiple sources indicating that Hamas-supporting organizations funded Albanese’s trip to Australia, which has been experiencing an alarming spike in antisemitic incidents since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA), an organization that lobbies Australian politicians on behalf of the pro-Palestinian cause, claimed on its website that it “sponsored Ms. Albanese’s visit to Australia” to speak at its annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture in Adelaide. During the lecture, Albanese thanked AFOPA for “organizing such a busy visit,” in which she met with numerous Australian politicians and foreign ministry officials.
Free Palestine Melbourne (FPM) and Palestinian Christians in Australia (PCIA) both claimed to have “supported her visit to Victoria, ACT [Australian Capital Territory] and NSW [New South Wales].” Both groups also publicly declare that they participate in explicit lobbying of Australian politicians in an attempt to “change their minds” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While on her visit, Albanese served as a keynote speaker at a PCIA fundraiser. FPM encourages politicians to endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel on the international stage economically and politically as the first step toward the Jewish state’s eventual elimination.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Albanese’s anti-Israel comments have earned her the praise of Hamas officials in the past.
Additionally, in response to French President Emmanuel Macron calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel the “largest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century,” Albanese said, “No, Mr. Macron. The victims of Oct. 7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.”
Video footage of the Oct. 7 onslaught showed Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas celebrating the fact that they were murdering Jews.
Nevertheless, Albanese has argued that Israel should make peace with Hamas, saying that it “needs to make peace with Hamas in order to not be threatened by Hamas.”
The UN did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
After the atrocities of last October, Israel had a right to defend itself. So much we may concede. But the killing rage it visited upon the innocents of Gaza was indefensible.
It has bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killed 37,000 people, 70 per cent of whom were women and children, and set dogs on Gazan detainees.
It has starved Gaza, a charge for which Benjamin Netanyahu may face an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
So runs the folk story of Jewish genocide. It has been related by international bodies, politicians and the broadcast media, which pumps pictures of civilian suffering – and only civilian suffering – into our homes. The problem is that it is untrue.
Every aspect has been either disproven or cast into irretrievable doubt. The Al-Ahli hospital was bombed not by Israel but Islamic Jihad. The 37,000 casualty figure is not reliable – the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio now likely stands at about 1:1, a historically low figure – and the number of women and children has been downgraded even by the UN.
There is no case for “genocide” (the International Criminal Court president clarified that Palestinians had a “plausible right to be protected from genocide”, not that “the claim of genocide was plausible”). To this we can now add a further development: the claim of mass starvation in Gaza has been thrown out.
[The Telegraph Op-ed continues]
Nobody would argue that war isn’t war. In Tel Aviv last week, I drank with a paratrooper officer who had been fighting in Gaza the previous day. His soldiers had been exposed to asbestos in the rubble and several had become infested with lice.
Palestinians had surrendered while strapped with explosives, he said, and children had fired on his men. In almost every abandoned house he had found an Arabic copy of Mein Kampf, common as dictionaries.
Such is the nature of this conflict. It is impossible to fight such an enemy without bringing some catastrophe upon the heads of civilians. But what alternative did Israel have?
Propaganda is hardly new. Looking back on the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell recalled: “I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts… Eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
And antisemitism has always been based on falsehoods. Just as Hitler wanted to eliminate a supposedly malevolent race for the good of the world, modern Islamists and progressives wish to eliminate a supposedly malevolent country for the sake of regional peace. Which brings us back to the UN.
The mobilisation of the West in favour of Hamas is as mendacious as it is shameful. It exposes the progressive elites as guilty of the very racism they decry. Howard Jacobson parodied them best: “I have nothing against Jews individually, I only hate them by the country.”
Jake Wallis Simons is the editor of The Jewish Chronicle
Read the New York Times news coverage carefully enough, and the subtle language tricks that the paper’s reporters and editors use to excuse Hamas and demonize Israel start to seem less subtle, more blatant and outrageous.
Two recent articles provide examples of the Times’s techniques.
One Times dispatch, from a university in Brussels, is by the Times bureau chief there, Matina Stevis-Gridneff.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
Elsewhere in the same dispatch, we hear that, “The three Jewish students disagreed on politics, expressing views ranging from mostly pro-Palestinian to largely siding with the Israeli government line.” Some editor should have edited out “line.” There’s an asymmetry between “pro-Palestinian” and “largely siding with the Israeli government line.” Why not just “pro-Israel,” or, if the Times insists on going down the road of accusing people of taking a party line, what about “siding with the Palestine Liberation Organization line”?
Another Times article, by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, is about a Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. That article explains in passing that, “Hamas has constructed a network of tunnels beneath Gaza to shield the group from Israeli surveillance and attack.”
That seems like an awfully benign, to the point of inaccurate, way of describing the reason Hamas built those tunnels. It might also be said that Hamas built the tunnels so they could pursue, under cover of secrecy, their mission of killing Jews and wiping Israel off the map. It could be said that the tunnels also advanced the Hamas purpose of hiding from the rest of the world the scale to which they were looting Gaza’s economy and diverting humanitarian aid resources for military use. The “shield…from Israeli attack” language the Times uses makes it sound like the tunnels are defensive, when in fact the tunnels were offensive, used to conceal preparations for attacks on Israel that were perpetrated by Hamas.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
Stevis-Gridneff describes herself in her Times bio as having been “born and raised in Athens, Greece” and educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Being educated and raised outside the U.S. may contribute to the anti-Israel tilt, though you can certainly acquire an anti-Israel tilt from inside plenty of American universities, too.
As the Times tries to grow by amassing an international readership, and also adds more international staff, it’ll face a choice between chasing anti-Israel readers in Europe and elsewhere, or serving readers based in America. Americans in general, if not necessarily the left-leaning Times audience, are more likely than many European elites are to sympathize with Israel. In other words, the Times can try to be the Guardian, or it can try to be the New York Times, but it’s perilous to try to be both at the same time. American readers will notice and will get annoyed by the bias.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The founder of a radical anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activist group said she does not want Zionists “anywhere” in the world while speaking in defense of a person who called for “Zionists” to leave a crowded subway car in New York City.
Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of Within Our Lifetime, wrote on Twitter/X on Thursday that “We don’t want zionists in Palestine, NYC, our schools, on the train, ANYWHERE.”
“This is free speech,” she continued, “it is saying we don’t want racists here.”
Zionism refers to the belief that there should be a Jewish state in some part of the land of Israel.
Kiswani later emphasized that “Even believing in the ‘two state solution’ makes you a Zionist whether you realize it or not.” This includes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, she claims, because “he’s a puppet and doesn’t challenge its [Israel’s] right to exist.”
Eitan Fischberger, a communications analyst and former Staff Sargent in the Israel Defense Forces, responded to Kiswani’s statement saying “Somebody help me: What do you call it when people want to ethnically cleanse the Jews from everywhere on Earth?”
But Kiswani argued back, “Zionist does not mean Jewish. Most Zionists in the US are Christian.”
Kiswani’s statements came in response to backlash caused by a fellow anti-Israel activist yelling, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist… this is your chance to get out…,” while on a crowded subway car earlier this month.
The suspect, an unidentified man, is being searched for by the New York Police Department. Police reportedly intend to charge him with coercion and possibly a hate crime charge.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Then, in May, at a rally, she declared, “Biden is the oldest president in our entire history,” Kiswani said, “He is going to die soon!” It was followed by overwhelming excitement and cheers from her fellow rally-goers.
Her organization, Within Our Lifetime, was behind the recent protests at the Nova Music Festival exhibit, which was about the more than 300 civilians slaughtered by Hamas while at a music festival.
The protest included several instances of antisemitism, prompting widespread condemnation, including from US President Joe Biden and progressive members of Congress.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter/X “The callousness, dehumanization, and targeting of Jews on display at last night’s protest outside the Nova Festival exhibit was atrocious antisemitism – plain and simple.”
On Oct. 7, as the Hamas-led attack on Israel was unfolding, many Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza to celebrate what they likened to a prison break and saw as the sudden humiliation of an occupier.
But it was just a temporary boost for Hamas, whose support among Gazans has been low for some time. And as the Israeli onslaught has brought widespread devastation and tens of thousands of deaths, the group and its leaders have remained broadly unpopular in the enclave. More Gazans have even been willing to speak out against Hamas, risking retribution.
In interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza residents in recent months, a number of them said they held Hamas responsible for starting the war and helping to bring death and destruction upon them, even as they blame Israel first and foremost.
One Gazan, Raed al-Kelani, 47, said Hamas always acts in its own interests.
“It started Oct. 7, and it wants to end it on its own terms,” said Mr. al-Kelani, who worked as a civil servant for the former Palestinian Authority government in Gaza, which was run by a rival faction to Hamas before Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007.
“But time is ticking with no potential hope of ending this,” he added. Mr. al-Kelani now makes meals and distributes food aid in shelters for displaced Gazans. “Hamas is still seeking its slice of power,” he said. “Hamas does not know how to get down from the tree it climbed.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Now, polling has become even more difficult, with most of the 2.2 million Gazans displaced multiple times by the war, constant breakdowns in communications and constant Israeli military offensives.
Still, some recent surveys reflect the weak or mixed support in Gaza for Hamas and its leaders. In some cases, contradictory results underline the complications in surveying a transient population during the fog of war.
In March, a survey by the West Bank-based Institute for Social and Economic Progress asked Gazans how they felt about Hamas leaders. About three-quarters opposed Yahya Sinwar, the group’s Gaza-based leader, and a similar share opposed Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s political leader in exile.
“When you realize six months in or seven months in that Gaza is completely destroyed, your life as a Gazan is completely destroyed, that’s where people are coming from when they are not supportive of Sinwar or Haniyeh,” said Obada Shtaya, a Palestinian and a founder of the Institute for Social and Economic Progress.
Other polls painted a more mixed picture. A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Gaza and published this past week showed that support in Gaza for Hamas leaders is slightly higher, and that the share who are satisfied with Hamas leadership in the territory has risen since December.
But it also showed that support for Hamas continuing to govern the territory had declined slightly in the past three months.
Basem Naim, a Hamas spokesman, said that public support for Hamas in Gaza was no less than 50 percent. That includes Hamas members in Gaza — which he said numbered more than 100,000 — and their families.
“Are there people in Gaza who blame Hamas? Of course,” he told The Times. “We aren’t saying that 100 percent of Gaza residents are Hamas supporters or are happy with what happened,” he added.
[The New York Times Report continues]
In 2021, Palestinian parliamentary elections were delayed indefinitely after Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, the president of the Palestinian Authority, raised concerns about possible Israeli government constraints on the voting. However, there were also suggestions at the time that Mr. Abbas may have delayed because he was worried about Fatah losing ground.
Mr. Naim blamed Israel and the United States for disrupting past Palestinian elections.
One Gaza resident who in recent months fled to Egypt with her family said that she hears regularly from friends and family that they do not want the war to end before Hamas is defeated in Gaza. She said Hamas had prioritized its own aims over the well-being of the Palestinians they purport to defend and represent.
“They could have surrendered a long time ago and saved us from all this suffering,” said the woman, who asked not to be named for fear of possible retribution if her criticism were made public.
Even for Palestinians who chafed under Hamas’s iron grip on Gaza for more than a decade, Oct. 7 gave them a feeling, at least initially, that this was a battle of liberation from Israeli occupation. Much of Gaza’s population are either refugees or descendants of refugees who fled their homes in present-day Israel after they were expelled or forced to flee during the war surrounding the establishment of the Israeli state. They have never been allowed to return.
When Hamas attacked Israel, most Gazans supported that “form of resistance,” said a 26-year-old lawyer from Gaza who also asked not to be named.
“But what we don’t support is them continuing with this war when they have not accomplished any of the goals they set out to accomplish,” the lawyer said. “This isn’t resistance. This is insanity.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
The more that Hamas pushed those objectives rather than ending the war quickly, Gazans said they felt other Palestinians were winning their freedom at their expense.
“I do not want to sacrifice my life, my home and house for anyone,” Ameen Abed, a resident of Jabaliya in northern Gaza, said at the time of one of the prisoner releases.
“Who are you to impose this kind of life on me? My home has gone because someone’s imprisonment will end after four months, why?” he said. “What did I benefit from?”
While Hamas and even the Israeli hostages were in the underground tunnels, he said, Gazans were above ground with no protection from Israeli and U.S.-made bombs dropped over their heads every day. That is an oft-heard complaint by Hamas’s critics in Gaza.
“There is uncontrolled anger against Hamas,” he said. “It threw the Palestinian people into the bottom of the well.”
n the Gaza Strip, the harsh reality for LGBTQ+ Palestinians under Hamas rule is one of severe persecution and brutality.
Hamas, the Islamist organization that governs Gaza, enforces Sharia law, under which homosexuality is not merely illegal, but punishable by extreme measures — including torture and execution.
This oppression starkly contrasts with the freedoms enjoyed by LGBTQ+ individuals just across the border in Israel, where the queer community is protected by laws, and is fully integrated into society.
Being queer in Gaza and in Palestinian controlled regions is a perilous existence
For LGBTQ+ Palestinians in Gaza, life is a constant peril. Human rights organizations have documented numerous cases where Hamas has executed individuals suspected of being gay or lesbian. These executions are often publicized through videos and photos as a method of instilling fear and demonstrating the regime’s strict adherence to its interpretation of Sharia law. The intent is clear: to eliminate any form of dissent and maintain a strict moral code as defined by their interpretation of Islamic law.
Hamas’ treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals includes brutal practices such as executions and torture, and the US State Department confirms that both Hamas — and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — persecute gay people. Reports of this oppression are distressingly common. Such acts are not only a violation of basic human rights, but also a clear indication of the regime’s intolerance and cruelty towards LGBTQ+ individuals.
A desperate flight to safety — queer Palestinians must get out in order to be “out”
Faced with such severe repression, scores of LGBTQ+ Palestinians risk their lives annually to escape to Israel. The journey is fraught with danger. They must evade detection by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, navigate the perilous border, and often rely on clandestine networks to seek refuge. The contrast between the two regions is stark: in Israel, LGBTQ+ individuals find legal protection, social acceptance, and community support that are entirely absent in Gaza.
Israel offers a sanctuary where LGBTQ+ rights are enshrined in law. The state provides comprehensive healthcare, including for LGBTQ+ individuals, and there is significant representation and advocacy for the community. Israel ranks among the top countries in the world with the highest percentage of LGBTQ lawmakers and politicians. Israeli cities like Tel Aviv are known globally for their vibrant LGBTQ+ scenes, where Pride parades and public celebrations are common, symbolizing the freedom and acceptance that are standard in Israeli society.
The grim irony of asylum seeking…
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Notably, the voices of protestors who accuse Israel of human rights violations are completely silent about the actual human rights violations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority against their own people — especially in the LGBTQ+ community.
Moreover, it is essential to recognize the bravery of LGBTQ+ Palestinians who speak out against the regime, often at great personal risk for themselves and their loved ones. Their voices are crucial in highlighting the human rights abuses they endure and advocating for the freedoms they seek.
A call for compassion and justice; Hamas targets Palestinian LGBTQ along with targeting Israelis
The harsh treatment of LGBTQ+ Palestinians under Hamas is a grievous violation of human rights that demands urgent attention. While the geopolitical complexities of the Israeli Palestinian conflict are immense, the basic human rights of LGBTQ+ individuals should not be overshadowed. Their suffering is a stark reminder of the brutality faced by marginalized groups under oppressive regimes.
In a world where LGBTQ+ rights are increasingly recognized as fundamental human rights, the plight of LGBTQ+ Palestinians under Hamas is a call to action. It is a call for compassion, for justice, and for the global community to stand against the persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation. Their journey from fear to freedom highlights the profound impact of living in a society that respects and protects the rights of all its citizens, regardless of their identity — and puts the differences between Israel and Hamas in stark contrast.
Yuval David is an Emmy and Multi-Award-Winning Actor, Filmmaker, Journalist, and Jewish LGBTQ+ activist and advisor. A creative and compelling storyteller, on stage and screen, news and across social media, Yuval shares the narrative of Jewish activism and enduring hope. Follow him on Instagram and X.
A disturbing new video shows the moments when five female Israeli soldiers, covered in blood, were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 at the Nahal Oz base in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip.
In the video, Hamas terrorists force the young women, some of whom are teenagers, against a wall and threaten to kill them. The video was edited to remove graphic images of multiple dead bodies lying around them.
In the midst of dozens of Hamas terrorists surrounding and yelling at the girls, a terrorist appears to call them “beautiful.” Additionally, there is debate over whether one of the terrorist referred to the captives as what amounts to a sex slave or if he was saying the word “young woman,” which sounds similar.
“The video of the female observers’ abduction is a wake-up call to the civilized world,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which released the video on Wednesday, wrote on X/Twitter. “We must condemn those actions and we cannot abandon the hostages held captive for 229 days.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists kidnapped over 250 people and murdered 1,200 others during their surprise invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7. About 125 hostages, including the five women in the video, remain unaccounted for, either dead or alive in Gaza. The rest have either been rescued by Israeli forces or released as part of a temporary ceasefire last year.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum argued the video shows why “the Israeli government and the international community can’t waste another moment.” It concluded, “We must get back to the negotiation table today! #BringThemHomeNow.”
One of the hostages, Naama Levy, can be seen pleading with the terrorists, saying, “I have friends in Palestine.”
Levy participated in a program called Hands of Peace in 2022, which was a three-week dialogue-based program for American, Israeli, and Palestinian teenagers. During a speech she gave at the program, she explained the reason she joined Hands of Peace: “I wanted to hear the other side. We live so close to each other but we never actually get to talk to one another.”
The other hostages in the video have been identified as Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa, Liri Albag, and Karina Ariev.
Women who have been released from Hamas captivity have said they experienced sexual assault and other forms of torture in Gaza.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Frantzman added, “The women were unarmed, and despite many warnings from the women, who served as IDF [Israel Defense Forces] observers monitoring screens watching Gaza, the brass did not stay alert to the rising Hamas threat.”
The video comes amid rising pressure on Israel’s government by the families of hostages to come to a deal to secure their release. Many of the families do not believe the government, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has done enough to reach a deal.
Messages sent to mediators by Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar show that as far as he’s concerned, the more civilians die in Gaza the better.
He sees such deaths as working “to his advantage,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The Journal reviewed “dozens of messages” Sinwar sent to ceasefire negotiators and others in which “he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas.”
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” said Sinwar in a message sent recently to Hamas officials looking to make an agreement via Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, the Hamas leader, citing civilian deaths in national-liberation conflicts in Algeria, said, “these are necessary sacrifices.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
In February, during a push for a ceasefire, Sinwar sent a message to Hamas officials telling them to avoid concessions and push for permanently ending the war as “high civilian casualties” would place global pressure on Israel, the Journal reported.
Sinwar’s calculations so far have proven correct as western countries, including Israel’s closest ally, the United States, have largely condemned Israel over the war’s civilian death toll.
U.S. President Joe Biden has been pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a permanent ceasefire. Netanyahu has so far resisted.
On Monday, the United Nations Security Council passed a U.S.-drafted resolution for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate release of the remaining Israeli hostages.
Israel representative to the United Nations Reut Shapir Ben-Naftaly said at the vote that it was the “genocidal jihadists who started this war” and “blame must be placed where it belongs.” Yet, Hamas has never been held responsible, she added.
She stressed that Israel will free the hostages and dismantle Hamas’s terrorist capabilities. “Once these goals are met, the war will end,” she said.
In an Oct. 30 address to the nation, Netanyahu warned western nations of the dangers of failing to hold Hamas to account for its cynical use of civilian casualties.
Hamas must be held “responsible for the double war crime it commits every day by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians while using Palestinians civilians as human shields,” he said.
“Because as long as Hamas’s use of Palestinian human shields results in the international community blaming Israel, Hamas will continue to use it as a tool of terror, and so will others,” he said.
The founder of the Palestinian movement in the run-up to the Second World War was a proud Nazi and friend of Adolf Hitler.
Haj Amin al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the religious leader of the Muslims in what is now Israel but was then called Palestine, and, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, governed under a British Mandate.
It was Husseini who turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.
Husseini decided it was against Islamic sharia law to allow Jewish sovereignty over even an inch of what had previously been Ottoman territory, which he decreed was forever religious Muslim land, part of an endowment, or “waqf,” to be held in trust for Allah.
He opposed the creation of any Jewish state, regardless of how small, even if it was part of a two-state solution that offered a far larger percentage of the land to a state for the Palestinians.
Husseini spent the war years in Berlin as Hitler’s guest, plotting to extend Hitler’s genocide against Jews from Europe to the Middle East. He participated in the genocide of Jews and others in the Balkans.
For this, he was designated a Nazi war criminal at the end of the war, and had to escape to Egypt to avoid being tried and hanged.
Following his death, he was succeeded by his mentee Yasser Arafat, who relied on terrorism against civilians as his primary methodology for destroying the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Arafat turned down offers of a two-state solution because he could never accept the existence of a state for the Jewish people.
Following Arafat’s death in 2004, there was an election for the Palestinian Legislative Council, between Fatah and Hamas. Hamas won the 2006 elections, and polls to this day show far greater support for that Islamist group than for the somewhat more secular Fatah.
The Hamas charter is antisemitic to its core, blaming the Jews for most of the world’s evils, from the French and Russian revolutions to both of the two world wars: “There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.” (Article 22).
[The TJV Op-Ed continues]
They do hate Israel and its primary ally, the United States, because they are free market, Western states.
Consequently, they support the enemies of these enemies, who in this case are the Palestinians. In previous wars, the left supported the Viet Cong, Pol Pot, North Korea and Cuba.
It has always been more about identifying with the alleged perpetrators — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara — than with the alleged victims.
Of course, there are Gazan civilians who are deserving of left-wing (and other) support. Justifiable criticism of Israel is also legitimate.
But fabricated disproportionate criticism of Israel at the same time as disproportionate support for Palestinians, to the exclusion or minimization of others, is not fair – or accurate.
It is Hamas, not Israel, that is responsible for much, if not all, of the victimization of Palestinian civilians. Israel can and should be criticized for civilian casualties that were preventable – in the “fog of war” many are not — or that are their fault.
But none of this explains or justifies the singular focus of the left on the Palestinians and Israel.
Nor does the false claim that Israel is a “colonial” or “settler” state explain the passionate hatred directed against Israel by the left.
There are real colonial, settler states such as New Zealand, which has been quite critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinians.
No one demonstrates against New Zealand, Turkish-occupied Cyprus, or Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
The disproportionate focus on the Palestinians and Israel can be explained only by bigoted hatred of the nation state of the Jewish people and its alliance with the US, and the wish to see them brought down.
Four more hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7 were declared dead by the Israeli military — including three older men seen in a Hamas video begging to be released. Monday’s announcement heightens pressure on the Israeli government to agree to a U.S. cease-fire proposal that could secure the return of the hostages still held in Gaza and end the eight-month war.
About 80 hostages in Gaza are believed to be alive, alongside the remains of 43 others. In the days since President Joe Biden announced the cease-fire proposal Friday, Israel has seen some of its largest protests calling on the government to bring them home. Although Biden said the proposal was Israeli, the Israeli leadership has appeared to distance itself from the plan, vowing to keep conducting military operations against Hamas until the militant group is destroyed.
[The AP News Report continues]
Their bodies are still being held by Hamas, and the cause of death was not immediately known. Hamas claimed in May that the other hostage pronounced deceased, Nadav Popplewell, died after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike, but provided no evidence. Popplewell was over 50.
“We are checking all of the options. There are a lot of questions,” Hagari said.
Cooper, Metzger and Peri were all age 80 or older. They appeared in a video in December released by Hamas under the title, “Don’t let us grow old here.” In the video, the three men appear gaunt, wearing thin white T-shirts.
“We are the generation who built the foundation for the state of Israel,” Peri said, noting that all the men had chronic illnesses. “We do not understand why we have been abandoned here.”
Cooper was an economist and one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, according to the hostages forum. Metzger helped to found the kibbutz winery and Peri built the community’s art gallery and sculpture garden.
Nir Oz was among the hardest-hit towns near the border with Gaza during the Hamas attack Oct. 7, when Palestinian militants stormed Israel, killing some 1,200 people and hauling around 250 hostages back to Gaza.
The news late Monday came after an announcement earlier in the day that the body of a presumed hostage, Dolev Yehud, 35, was found in a community near the Gaza border that Hamas militants had attacked on Oct. 7. Yehud was thought to be among scores of hostages held in Gaza until Monday, when the military announced the discovery of his body and said he had been killed in the initial attack.
Israeli bombardments and ground operations in Gaza have killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Israel has been expanding its offensive in the southern city of Rafah, once the main hub of humanitarian aid operations. The Israeli invasion of Rafah has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians facing widespread hunger.
Shortly after the events of October 7, when Hamas attacked, killed, raped, and mutilated 1200 Israelis in southern Israel, including babies, a graduate student at my university in Canada (I am retired, but still receive university email), sent a message to our president and senior administrators. The message, forwarded to others in the university community, lamented the suffering of Palestinians and claimed that the accusations and videos of murder and rape by Hamas were not true; they were creations by Israel using AI.
Remember, this was well before the full force of the Israeli response to the Hamas massacre.
I thought of this incredible example of blindness to the truth when I read a recent New York Times article on the limits of moralism in the Middle East by Ross Douthat.
Douthat questions the Israeli government’s decisions, both before and after October 7, but he is especially critical of the pro-Hamas campus protestors for not seeing the truth of Hamas’ rule in Gaza, and for being comfortable in supporting a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.
I thought of this blindness again when I read another recent article that makes the same point in the Times of Israel, based on an interview with Salmon Rushdie by the German tabloid newspaper Bild. In referring to the protesters’ demand to liberate Palestine, Rushdie finds it strange that progressive youth would support a fascist terrorist group like Hamas. He adds that although he has long been a supporter of a Palestinian state, it would likely become an authoritarian Islamist regime like Afghanistan.
In fact, Hamas’ 16 year rule over Gaza has shown the terror group to be against all progressive societal norms, including a free press, gender equality, LGBQT+ rights, and free democratic elections. On the other hand, the latest Economist Magazine Democracy Index 2023 (eiu.com) clearly indicates that Israel is still the only democracy in the Middle East.
Established in 2006, the annual Democracy Index includes 60 numeric scores measuring electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Countries are categorized as one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
For 2023, only 24 countries are full democracies, 50 are flawed democracies, 34 are hybrid regimes, and 49 are authoritarian regimes. Both the US and Israel are at the upper end of the flawed democracy range, the US ranking 29 and Israel 30.
Of the 20 countries listed for the Middle East and North Africa for 2023, only Israel is a democracy. Morocco and Tunisia are hybrid regimes while the rest are authoritarian. Turkey is a hybrid regime, “Palestine” has an authoritarian ranking, while authoritarian Saudi Arabia is number 150 and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is last at 167.
That the two million Israeli Arabs (20 percent of Israel’s population) participate fully in Israel’s electoral process does not matter when it comes to labeling Israel an apartheid regime, for we live in a post-truth world in which lies are easy to disseminate with the help of the Internet and social media.
Instead of lauding Zionism as the decolonizing effort of an oppressed indigenous people, the Jews (who have always lived in the Holy Land) are colonialists. Instead of recognizing that more than half of Israeli Jews stem from Jewish refugees forced out of Muslim countries, all Jews in Israel are Europeans. Instead of sanctioning Hamas for the genocidal organization that it openly and proudly claims to be, Israel is accused of genocide when it defends itself.
Whether in relation to the blood libel, or the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or any one of a number of imagined conspiracies, lies have been the heart of antisemitism through the centuries. Today the technology used may be different, but the lying continues.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.
A new exhibition in New York City that features items and firsthand videos from the Hamas terrorist attack at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is not meant to be political and sets out to ensure that the massacre is remembered, according to organizers of the project.
“I think the events of Nova are not only being forgotten — they’re being ignored,” Jewish record executive and entrepreneur Scooter Braun, who helped bring the exhibit to New York after its 10-week run in Tel Aviv, told CBS’s Sunday Morning. He added that the exhibit has nothing to do with politics and is instead “about music.”
“Why are musicians not screaming from the top of their lungs that music should be a safe place?” he asked. “Just stop for a minute and ask yourself, on either side, do kids dancing deserve to die? And the answer is no. So just give [the exhibit] an opportunity and have empathy in your heart for all sides.”
The exhibit, titled “Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still,” takes a venue over 50,000 square feet near the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan and attempts to recreate the scene of the deadly terrorist attack at the music festival.
Artifacts taken from the site of the Hamas massacre are featured in the exhibit, including bullet-riddled bathroom stalls, scorched cars, signage, attendee tents, and personal belongings left behind such as shoes, clothes, and hats. The exhibit also highlights testimonies from survivors of the terrorist attack and a photo gallery of those murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7. Over 360 festival-goers were killed by Hamas that day and more than 40 others, including American citizens, were taken as hostages back to the Gaza Strip.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“Yet, the Nova festival had over 360 people killed, over 40 taken hostage. It’s the biggest massacre at a music festival in history and no one was saying anything,” Braun noted. “I just felt like I needed to do something.”
Nova survivor Daniel Dvir, 23, who hid from Hamas terrorists in a tree, also spoke to Sunday Morning, as did Hannie Ricardo, the mother of 26-year-old Nova victim Oriya Lipman Ricardo. Hannie talked about her daughter and other victims of the attacks saying, “They were radiant people, happy people. And they were butchered, massacred, raped, mutilated by monsters.”
“It was a wakeup call for the Jewish people,” she added. “We had to go to Gaza, to take care that we won’t be massacred again.” When asked about the Gazans affected by the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas terrorists controlling the Palestinian enclave, she said, “I don’t appreciate any loss of life, but if a terrorist hides behind them, what can we do?”
“Nova: Oct. 7 6:29 AM, The Moment Music Stood Still” is located at 35 Wall Street in New York City. It opened to the public on April 21 for a four-week long presentation.
Leaders of 16 countries, including many whose citizens were taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, issued a statement on Thursday backing U.S. President Joe Biden’s May 31 ceasefire proposal, calling on the Gaza-based terror group to “close this agreement.”
“There is no time to lose,” read the statement signed by the leaders of Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Thailand and the United Kingdom. The United States also signed the statement.
“As leaders of countries deeply concerned for the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, including many of our own citizens, we fully support the movement towards a ceasefire and hostage release deal now on the table and as outlined by President Biden on May 31, 2024,” the text said.
Noting that Jerusalem is “ready to move forward” with the terms proposed by Biden on Friday, the world leaders stressed that the deal would lead to an “immediate ceasefire and rehabilitation of Gaza together with security assurances for Israelis, and Palestinians, and opportunities for a more enduring long-term peace and a two-state solution.”
“At this decisive moment, we call on the leaders of Israel as well as Hamas to make whatever final compromises are necessary to close this deal and bring relief to the families of our hostages, as well as those on both sides of this terrible conflict, including the civilian populations,” the statement continues.
“It is time for the war to end, and this deal is the necessary starting point,” it concludes.
Earlier on Thursday, Saudi Arabia’s Asharq al-Awsat daily reported that Hamas had rejected the deal, claiming it differed significantly from what was outlined by Biden last week.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
During a closed-door meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers he would “not describe the details of the deal,” adding however that Biden’s portrayal of Israel’s position was “not accurate.”
“I am not willing to stop the war,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying. “We can stop the fighting for 42 days in order to return hostages, but we will not give up on total victory.”
When Hamas released video last month of Keith Siegel, an American-Israeli hostage held in Gaza, it was the first sign in months that he was still alive. His wife, Aviva Siegel, couldn’t bring herself to watch it.
“It would be too difficult for me to see the sadness in Keith’s eyes,” Ms. Siegel said in an interview in New York last week, where she was meeting with António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations.
Ms. Siegel, 63, was held captive with her husband until late November, when she was one of 105 hostages released as part of a cease-fire deal. They were taken from their home at Kibbutz Kfar Azza on Oct. 7 during the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
Nearly eight months into the war, the families of hostages have grown increasingly alarmed. Mr. Siegel, who is 65, has a medical condition, and Israeli soldiers have recently recovered the remains of several hostages in Gaza. For months, Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been trying to get Israel and Hamas to accept a deal for another cease-fire and exchange of captives.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Ms. Siegel said that they were denied food and water, while their captors ate, and that she lost over 20 pounds.
She said her captors would hit and push her, blindfold her and pull her by the hair. They shaved Mr. Siegel’s body to humiliate him, she said. The hostages were not allowed to talk.
The captors would play mind games with them, telling them that Israel had ceased to exist, Ms. Siegel said.
Ms. Siegel expressed empathy for Gazans and said she wished Israelis and Palestinians could eventually live alongside each other in peace. She has been alarmed by what she said was a global lack of focus on the hostages.
“Something really bad happened, and we need the world’s help,” she said.
Ms. Siegel often remembers her last conversation with Keith. When the time came for her release from Gaza, she initially refused to leave without him, she said, but soon realized she had to.
“I asked Keith to be strong for me, and I said, ‘I’ll be strong for you’ — and that’s what’s keeping me alive,” she said.
Israel scored a rare and significant victory over the Arab Group at the World Health Assembly, as an amendment that the Jewish state introduced to a longstanding resolution of the international forum passed unexpectedly on Wednesday.
The Israeli-drafted amendment calls for the release of the hostages whom Hamas and other terrorists continue to hold in Gaza and denounces the militarization of hospitals by armed Gazan groups. The resolution, as amended, passed on Friday.
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The World Health Assembly is the forum through which the 194 member states of the World Health Organization govern the United Nations agency and it is the highest international health policy-setting body.
During the assembly’s annual session in Geneva this week, Israel offered the amendment to a resolution, which has passed every year since 1968 and which criticizes Israel for the state of health in Palestinian-controlled territories.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“A decision on health that does not demand the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, who are held by a terrorist organization, raped and tortured, is an unforgivable moral failure,” the Israeli diplomat added.
The Israeli amendment “calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held in Gaza, including children, women and older persons, and condemns the use, by armed groups, of health facilities, including hospitals and ambulances, that endangers the civilian population.”
The amendment received a wide range of support—from traditional allies, like the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, to countries that often oppose Israel in international forums, such as Iceland, Spain and the Philippines. (Israel barred the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem from serving residents of the Palestinian Authority, after Spain recognized an independent Palestinian state last week.)
The resolution passed on Friday by a 102-6 vote, with 28 abstentions and 41 absences. Among those who abstained were Iran, Syria, Turkey and Libya, which are typically expected to vote against the Jewish state at all times.
The assembly passed a separate Gaza-related resolution on Friday, calling on “all parties to fully comply with their obligations” under the 1949 Geneva conventions, and ensure “unimpeded, safe and unobstructed” passage for medical personnel.
That resolution was already passed by consensus during a World Health Organization executive board special session in December and held U.S. support.
Asher Salmon, a physician and head of international relations at the Israeli Health Ministry, was elected to a three-year term on the World Health Organization’s executive board, during the session on Friday.
European member states of the World Health Organization endorsed his candidacy. Salmon will be among the 34 members of the board, whose powers include outlining policy and setting the U.N. agency’s priorities.
The Palestinians and their allies opposed Salmon’s candidacy. That included Syria, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen and Tunisia, all of which have documented violations of human and health rights.
“I intend to work together with all member states,” Salmon stated. “I believe that health crosses borders and that through health, we can promote solidarity and peace among nations.”
Israel said Wednesday it had achieved “tactical control” over the boundary that separates Gaza and Egypt, a significant success for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly described control of the area as an objective for Israel in Gaza.
An official with the Israel Defense Forces, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief reporters, said that while Israel does not have “boots on the ground” throughout the boundary, known as the Philadelphi corridor, its control means Israel can “cut off” Hamas supplies via underground tunnels in the corridor.
“It means we have the ability to cut off the oxygen line that Hamas has used for replenishing and movement in and around that area,” the official said, adding that about 20 cross-border tunnels had been found in the area.
The IDF announcement came amid intensifying international condemnation of Israel’s ongoing offensive in Rafah, just north of the Philadelphi corridor, after a strike at a tent camp on Sunday killed at least 45, and amid no sign of an end to fighting. A senior Israeli official said on Wednesday that the war in Gaza could last the rest of this year, prompting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to say there was an urgent need to plan for the “day after” the war.
Israeli military control of the Philadelphi corridor could complicate political relations with Cairo, risking a landmark 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty that has led to a half-century of coexistence.
The corridor is a buffer zone and a no man’s land about nine miles long and several hundred yards wide that stretches from the southernmost tip of Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has not had a troop presence along the border since 2005, when the country withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian officials did not publicly respond to the IDF announcement. A former Egyptian official familiar with negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, said that the Israeli military presence in the buffer zone appeared to violate the Camp David Accords of 1978, the U.S.-brokered agreements that led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.
U.S. officials have expressed frustration with Israel’s war efforts in recent weeks. Speaking in Moldova on Wednesday, Blinken told reporters that Israel urgently needs a “clear plan” for after the war in Gaza ends that can ensure the enduring defeat of Hamas.
Blinken had been asked about comments made by Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national security adviser, who had told Kan public radio Wednesday that he was expecting “another seven months of fighting” to destroy Hamas and other militant groups, adding that 2024 would be “a year of war.”
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Eyewitnesses contacted by The Washington Post on Wednesday said Israeli tanks had pushed closer into central Rafah, accompanying an intense air operation that has led to what they described as a near-constant thud of airstrikes and other explosions. Responding to questions about those reports, the Israeli military said Wednesday that it “does not share the location of its forces.”
The witnesses said tanks were near the Awda roundabout in central Rafah and had taken up positions in western parts of the city, including the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, the site of Sunday’s strikes.
Israeli forces expanded a cordon around Rafah on Wednesday, according to Mohammad al-Mughair of the civil defense forces in Gaza. “We expect that the Tal al-Sultan camp will be stormed,” Mughair said. Residents in that neighborhood said Israeli forces were increasing surveillance of the area using unmanned vehicles.
Ellen Francis, Kelly Kasulis Cho, Lior Soroka, Kareem Fahim, Claire Parker and Hajar Harb contributed to this report.
“We are looking into the possibility that weapons stored in the compound next to our target may have ignited the fire,” the official said.
“It should be noted Hamas has been operating from this area since October 7,” he added, noting that a Hamas rocket launcher was located 47 meters away from the compound targeted on Sunday night.
The attack, which targeted a structure in Tal as-Sultan in northwest Rafah, was based on intelligence indicating the presence there of Yassin Rabia, the commander of leadership in Judea and Samaria, and Khaled Nagar, a senior official in Hamas’s Judea and Samaria headquarters.
The military official emphasized on Tuesday that the strike occurred 1.5 kilometers away from the humanitarian evacuation zone established by the IDF.
Rabia managed the whole of Hamas’s terror activity in Judea and Samaria, transferring funds and planning attacks, as well as conducting attacks himself in 2001 and 2002 that killed IDF soldiers.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
The military also has intelligence reinforcing the suspicion that Hamas weapons were stored nearby and caught fire after the strike, he added.
The source stressed that the possibility that secondary explosions caused the fire remains a working assumption at this point and the investigation into the matter is ongoing.
The investigation is being conducted by the IDF General Staff fact-finding mechanism, which according to the military is an independent professional body.
However, he said that the weapon used in the strike was not capable of causing a fire of this kind, adding that the IDF has much experience in deploying this type of munition.
“Our war is against Hamas. It’s not against the people of Gaza,” said the official.
“This is a very tragic incident that occurred. We have to understand why it occurred. And we have to understand how we prevent this kind of incident from [occurring again],” he said.
On Tuesday afternoon, IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told reporters that “our munition alone could not have ignited a fire this size … We used the smallest munition that our jets can use.”
“The fire that broke out was unexpected and unintended. This was a devastating incident that we did not expect. We’re investigating what caused this fire,” Hagari said, stressing that the strike targeted a “closed” terrorist structure almost a mile from the Al-Mawasi Humanitarian zone.
The military spokesman continued, “There may have been weapons in the area. Our signals intelligence intercepted phone calls reinforcing this possibility that weapons stored in a nearby compound caught fire.”
He assured that the “investigation will be swift, comprehensive and transparent. Our war is against Hamas, not the people of Gaza. This is why we convey deep sorrow over this loss of life.”
The Israeli military suspects that munitions or some other combustible substance caused a secondary explosion and subsequent fire at a complex housing displaced Gazans in Rafah, following an airstrike aimed at two top Hamas terrorists.
The incident resulted in the deaths of Palestinian civilians, and an investigation is ongoing.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had been tracking Hamas commanders Yassin Rabia and Khaled Najjar prior to the strike on the compound in the Tel Sultan neighborhood in western Rafah on Sunday night. According to IDF intelligence, the area had been utilized for Hamas activities, including a nearby rocket launcher.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Initial investigations by the IDF indicate that the two small missiles alone would not have been sufficient to ignite the fire. The probe suggests that ammunition, weapons, or other materials stored in the vicinity may have caused a secondary explosion and the resulting fire.
A senior IDF official provided further details on the investigation to i24 News: “On Sunday night, the IDF eliminated senior Hamas terrorists based on intelligence information. Tragically, a fire killed a number of civilians. The strike zone was one kilometer away from the humanitarian area, which was not in tents but in structures.”
He added, “We used 17-kilogram munitions, the smallest we could, but something else caused the fire near the target. Despite the tragedy, we are trying to understand what started the fire.”
An astute friend recently observed that today’s crisis in the Middle East boils down to one question about two dates: Which historic moment is likelier to be reversed: 1948 or 1979?
The dates are references to the creation of the state of Israel and, 31 years later, the Iranian revolution. The implication of the question is that it’s one or the other: The Jewish state and the Islamic republic cannot permanently coexist, at least so long as the latter seeks to destroy the former. Recent days have brought two potential vehicles for their downfall into focus.
There was, first, the announcement from Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, that he would apply for arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel.
The decision is unlikely to ever lead to any arrests, much less to criminal convictions: The Biden administration has already denounced the decision, and even countries less friendly to Israel are unlikely to arrest the leader of a nation with nuclear weapons and a powerful intelligence agency.
But the announcement forms part of the same broad strategy that Israel’s adversaries believe will ultimately be the downfall of the state: international delegitimization and isolation, leading to gradual internal collapse or external conquest. Even Khan’s decision to seek the arrest of three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu and Gallant is of a piece with the overall strategy, as it places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
But the dangers to Israel from moves at the I.C.C. — or, for that matter, from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various kinds of arms embargoes — are minimal. Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not “settler-colonialists.” Jews believe they are originally from the land of Israel because they are. And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anticolonialist struggle in history, starting during the Roman era, if not the Babylonian Captivity before it.
As for the idea that Israeli Jews should return, like the Algerian French pieds-noirs, to the lands of their forebears — where, and what, is that? The lands of Russian pogroms, or Arab massacres, or the Holocaust? Israel’s harshest critics tend to miss the point, but Israelis don’t: They have nowhere else to go, a fact underscored by the waves of hatred now engulfing Jewish diasporic communities. The more pressure is exerted on Israel to relent in the face of its enemies, the more Zionism it will generate. Nothing so crystallizes Jewish identity as these daily reminders of bigotry.
For Iran, the principal threat to the regime comes from within and below. It is easy to forget that before the 2022 mass protests over headscarves and women’s rights more broadly, there was the 2019 mass protests over the price of fuel and the 2018 protests over economic conditions. Or that, 10 years earlier, there was the 2009 Green Revolution over the stolen election, or the Iranian student protests of 1999.
Though the regime has proved adept at suppressing dissent through ultraviolent means — my colleague Nick Kristof has written powerfully about the use of mass rape as a means of suppressing opposition (something that somehow failed to generate much outrage at places like Columbia or Berkeley) — the increasing frequency and durability of these protests should tell us something.
Two things, in fact: The stock of public anger at the regime keeps rising as the bases of its support keep dwindling. With the death of Raisi, that dwindling base may, at the same time, be dividing. An informal law of economics, named for the late Herbert Stein, holds that “trends that can’t continue won’t.” It should be a law for political survival, too.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
For Iran’s rulers, the risks are graver. They’ve always claimed to be the vanguard of an Islamic revolution, but they seem to have forgotten that revolutions have a history of consuming their own. Iran’s people, by and large, don’t want to be Islamists. But Israel wants, and will fight, to remain itself.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
It’s time to find common ground across the chasm that divides the pro-Palestinian students on our university campuses from so many others there. One of the primary purposes of any university education is to apply critical thinking in an orderly process to bridge gaps of understanding and opinion between people. Isn’t one of the purposes of these United States of America, to observe foreign conflicts but not to import them to harm us here? Isn’t the best energy of the American Dream in our efforts to live civilly together, while yet protecting our own cultural, ethnic, and national identities? It’s called a melting pot, not a shouting pot, right?
One of the outstanding features of our American Dream has been for our communities to check their grievances at the border and work within our nation’s rich history of pluralism to advocate for their particular point of view. While passionate advocacy is common, the use of violence and hostility toward “other” groups should be condemned by all Americans. If we look at other foreign disputes between peoples, we see that they often do not come as hostile baggage on an airplane to the United States. Instead, in America we prize E pluribus unum, one nation created out of many. The American Dream involves tolerance and mutual understanding while valuing individual cultural identities, the diversity of religions, and national origins.
For example, the longstanding conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was historically as full of hate, violence, death, and injury as one could ever imagine. And yet in the United States, it did not lead to widespread violence or clashes. While there were some isolated incidents, the Catholic and Protestant communities of the United States have lived together constructively and in peace. The vast amounts of bloodshed and hatred between Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan have generally not led to any substantial amount of violence in the United States.
The lesson from these and other examples is that our society provides an opportunity for reconciliation and coexistence, even between groups with deep-seated historical animosities. It requires a committed effort by community leaders, government officials, and the public to denounce hate, promote understanding, and create an environment where all Americans feel safe, respected, and heard. It takes leadership:
Our universities should be the incubators for this dialogue. Some have done better than others in reinforcing our American traditions. Such a meeting place of ideas historically has been a core purpose of any university. College is where we travel from our hometowns and families, experience others, and learn to live with them for the rest of our lives.
The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is unlikely to go away in our lifetimes, but we can certainly hope that the appalling violence we are currently witnessing will soon end. Let me agree with several things: the death and injury of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza is beyond awful. The Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank should be able to achieve their goal of autonomy and elect their own government to live in peace with all their neighbors.
But the same must be true for the State of Israel. The highest responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens. When terrorists crossed over the fence and power-glided into civilian communities in the south of Israel, they killed, raped, and injured nearly 2000 Israeli civilians who were living peaceful lives, many at the Nova Music Festival for Peace. They did it carrying Hamas battle orders to inflict the maximum hatred, violence, and atrocities on those victims. Don’t believe me? Look at the video evidence from the body cams of the Hamas terrorists here and here and here. These atrocities are not lies, they are eyewitnessed truth recorded by the perpetrators themselves. They are provable and have been proven. Process that. Understand what it means about intent. The Hamas terrorists are proud of October 7th. They paraded the rape victims through Gaza City as thousands cheered their “great victory.”
It is necessary for any decent human being who wants to live in a world at peace to understand exactly what happened on October 7, and that Israel, in defense of its civilian citizens, cannot allow such atrocities to ever happen again. As President Biden said today, “Antisemitic hate speech has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere else in our country. As Americans, we cannot stay silent as Jews are attacked, harassed, and targeted. We must also forcefully push back attempts to ignore, deny, distort, or revise the history of Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust or Hamas’ murders and other atrocities committed on October 7th — including the appalling and unforgivable use of rape and sexual assault to terrorize and torture Jewish women and girls.”
Let us also recognize that Israel is not going away. One can argue this pragmatically, in terms of its nuclear deterrence, its sophisticated, well-provisioned, and highly active army, navy, and air force. One can also argue it ethically, morally, and historically. Israel has been the only homeland of the Jews, continuously over millennia. More than two thousand years ago, when the pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph, walked from Nazareth to Bethlehem to be counted in the occupying Roman census, they and baby Jesus were recorded as Jews. The area known as Judea for thousands of years was not named by coincidence. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob appear not just in the Jewish and Christian Old Testament and the Quran as prophets and disciples. They were Jews. They spoke Hebrew. They lived in what is now known as Israel. When the Jews escaped from Pharaoh, they went back home.
2.1 million Israeli citizens are Arabs, the majority of them Palestinian Muslims. That’s 21% of the Israeli population. Each has every right of an Israeli citizen. They include highly educated engineers, brain surgeons, members of the Israeli parliament, business people, architects, and academics. They have by far the best educational opportunities in the Middle East, and they receive them freely. Listen to the voices of Arabs living in Israel, who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, who believe in their country and are determined to defend it. See hereand here and here and here.
Why have civilian deaths happened in Gaza? Hamas, a terrorist organization that began as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, regularly in its Charter states that its goal is to kill all the Jews, kill all the Israelis including the Muslim Israeli citizens who live there. It aims to impose an Islamic Sharia Caliphate worldwide, initially extending across North Africa and up into Spain, where it existed hundreds of years ago. Do the Spanish and Portuguese people want this? Of course not.
Hamas are self-avowed absolutists. They are terrorists. They are a cult that prizes death over life. They believe it is their right to bring death to their people, who rise in stature by being involuntarily martyred to the Hamas cause. Israel does not seek death. Most civilized human beings in the world believe in life, family, truth, love, peace, and prosperity. Many Jews, and I am one of them, oppose the hard right tactics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the frequent violent tactics of the settlers on the West Bank. As I write this, I still believe in a two-state solution, but it is unreasonable to suggest that any government should negotiate with a neighbor that killed 1200 of its citizens and kidnapped over 200, including old women with Alzheimer’s, babies, toddlers, and women. Ask yourself why the Egyptians have fortified their border with Gaza for many years to keep Hamas out. Read the Hamas Charter, the one they don’t want you to see in English translation: here. And remember that Hamas are proxies of Iran. They receive Iranian money, weapons and training. The fascist Iranian theocratic state and their proxies throw opponents off roofs, disfigure women with acid for showing their hair, and regularly hang LGBTQI people in public. Be careful what you wish for.
The greatest catastrophic genocide in human history in terms of the headcount of the men, women and children murdered was the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. 6 million people were murdered, almost all of them because they were born Jewish. The Nazis ran an industrial genocide, with gas chambers and firing squads, burning people alive in barns, hanging them, and cremating them in a quest for ethnic purity. Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman realized that you cannot sit down with such people. In fighting the Nazis, many innocent German civilians died. In fighting Imperial Japan, many innocent Japanese civilians died. These things are awful. War is always awful. But nobody ever said that those were not justifiable wars for freedom, for self-determination, for safety, for world peace and to protect the innocent. After 9-11, no sane person said the United States should not go after Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or ISIS because they systematically hid behind civilians.
The victims in Gaza have been used as human shields by Hamas terrorists and their weaponry. Hamas built an underground tunnel network bigger than the New York subway system. That’s where Hamas used the imported concrete that should have built housing. Their published policy of Death to the Jews is far from adhering to the rules of war. It is the opposite: a cowardly call for the genocide of an entire people. The taking of hostages is disgusting. The way they were taken and the seven months they have been held is inhuman. It ought to be and is unacceptable to Israel, as the government of the country of which they are citizens. Imagine if Hamas had done this in Ohio. Would you have demonstrated for the U.S. to sit quietly and wait for the next attack?
Let us remember that the purpose of a university, beyond any subject studied, is to teach critical thinking. It is to study the diversity that exists within humanity and to create communities of coexistence which respect and honor different traditions, beliefs and cultures while creating a greater whole through tolerance and understanding. University leaders, start your motors! Lead on this, and call the meetings. Students, listen with your biggest ears. We promise to do the same. Let our great universities grow from this confrontation and not shrink into ghettos that hate each other, defecate in the bushes, deface community buildings, shout, and throw fists. No more useful fools. No more sheep. No more cult of death. We can do better, and our great American experiment shows that progress is possible. God bless. At www.people4peace.net, we are right there with you.
Author: Peter Samuelson, People 4 Peace Chairman, Media executive, philanthropist, producer of 27 motion pictures, some award winning. Father of 4
It is surely one of the most important skills to teach. How can a high proportion of our young adults think that a bunch of terrorist thugs who decapitate civilians, kidnap hostages, rape little girls as a policy, and set alight fathers in front of their children… are freedom fighters, let alone a government? Yet thousands of the Millennial and Gen Z young adults we are counting on to run the world in future, think exactly that. They seem to have lost their moral compass, and cannot tell truth from lies. So what do we do?
At People4Peace (P4P), a US-based 501(c)(3), our viral campaign uses Hamas’ own bodycam footage to show irrefutably what they actually are: a terrorist organization. Following the tragic 10/7 massacre of Israelis by thousands of Hamas terrorists, global sympathy flowed towards the innocent Israeli victims. This compassion lasted ten minutes. And when Iran launched three hundred missiles at Israel, the receiving country was urged to show restraint. Really? Did anyone suggest restraint after 9-11, Pearl Harbor, after the Blitzkreig of the Nazis through Europe?
The Israeli government blocked the full, horrific evidence from the 10/7 attack. We do ourselves no favors by suppressing the truth. We have Hamas bodycam footage, Israeli security camera recordings, survivor videos, intercepted cellphone traffic and social media posts by the Hamas terrorists themselves. These are ongoing appalling and barbaric crimes. The decision to block was a significant error: It caused an information vacuum quickly filled by Hamas propaganda and lies. P4P has created messages exposing the truth about Hamas. Be careful watching these samples: don’t do so if you carry PTSD.
WARNING: THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS GRAPHIC FOOTAGE FROM THE 10/7 MASSACRE:
Eyes On The Lies.
After the 10/7 attack, Hamas attempted to distort the crimes committed by their terrorists. P4P responds with this message:
WARNING: THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS GRAPHIC FOOTAGE FROM THE 10/7 MASSACRE:
October 7.
Many future messages will address other lies and misrepresentations by Hamas. The bombing of Gaza elicited an immediate international backlash against Israel’s attempt to eradicate the terrorists. The sophisticated tunnel network of Hamas, as long as the New York subway system, resulted in the use of large bombs that led to shocking scenes of destruction and civilian casualties. The global outcry for an immediate ceasefire was swift, overshadowing the plight of the Israeli victims and hostages from the 10/7 attack. The misreporting of the bombing of a Gaza hospital further swayed public opinion against Israel. Regrettably, the death of Israeli hostages and World Central Kitchen aid workers, alongside the ongoing human catastrophe for civilians in Gaza have contributed to a plummeting decline in global opinion of Israel. The IDF promptly acknowledged responsibility for each tragic accident, whereas Hamas persists in denying its role in the 10/7 attack, misrepresenting civilian casualties, and employing innocent civilians as human shields. They promise to inflict their barbarity again and again, and proudly state repeatedly that their goal is to kill the Jews and re-establish the Caliphate that once imposed Sharia as far west as Spain.
Lost amidst the fog of war is the fact that the conflict began when Hamas violated an existing ceasefire by launching a sneak attack during a Jewish holiday on a predominantly civilian population, including women, elderly men, children, and even family pets. Over 1100 people were massacred, and 250 hostages were seized by Hamas terrorists, kidnapped to Gaza, where they were paraded through the streets amidst huge crowd and public humiliation.
Hamas capitalized on the information void by circulating horrific footage of Gaza bombings interspersed with some from unrelated conflicts, offering no explanation for the extensive airstrikes. Consequently, many worldwide, particularly in Muslim regions, believe that Israel initiated an unprovoked attack on Gaza, denying the occurrence of 10/7 altogether, and ignoring the tragic truth that Hamas routinely uses its women and children as human shields. When President Truman ended the war with Imperial Japan, when Churchill bombed Nazi German cities, when civilians died in eliminating the leadership of Al Qaeda and Isis, those deaths were all tragic, but while mourning innocent civilian deaths, few questioned the first, most important right and obligation of every government: to eliminate existential threats to its citizens.
Thus far, Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah are winning the war for our young adults’ minds. If you can help push out our videos, please do so. The gloves must come off before they kill the Jews and set fire to more babies in their cribs. P4P is dedicated to a just peace between Israel and Palestinians who accept Israel’s right to exist. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are clearly not partners for peace. Until then, Israel must continue its efforts to keep its citizens safe and hold Hamas accountable for 10/7, the deaths of innocent Israelis and of those Gazans they used as human shields. Truth is truth. Can we please help our young adults apply critical thinking?
Author: Peter Samuelson, People 4 Peace Chairman, Media executive, philanthropist, producer of 27 motion pictures, some award winning. Father of 4.
Educating for Peace: Sharing Factual Perspectives on the Middle East.
Mission Statement:
To be a leading voice in educating and enlightening audiences worldwide about the Middle East, particularly regarding Israel’s challenges and rights. We envision a future where misinformation is combated with facts, and peace is pursued through understanding and informed dialogue.
People4Peace is dedicated to fostering understanding and peace in the Middle East through education and dissemination of accurate, vetted information. In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, diverse professionals united as People4Peace (“P4P”) to counter Antisemitism and misinformation surrounding the formation and existence of the State of Israel. P4P strives to share and amplify factual perspectives and promote a narrative that supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself and the hope for a “two-state solution.” As such, P4P is devoted to supporting efforts to achieve a just and sustainable peace for Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East.
P4P focuses on targeted outreach to communities and demographics to share balanced perspectives as the need for such information dictates.
People4Peace acts as a voice to educate and enlighten audiences worldwide about the Middle East, particularly regarding Israel’s challenges and the threat of Antisemitism to Jews around the globe. We envision a future where facts combat misinformation, and parties pursue peace through understanding and informed dialogue.
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Your support helps People4Peace share and amplify balanced perspectives and correct misinformation about the impacts of Antisemitism and to foster a just and sustainable peace for Israel and its neighbors.
Indian-British author Salman Rushdie took aim at anti-Israel protesters in the West Sunday and warned against the formation of a Palestinian state.
Speaking with the German paper Bild, Rushdie backtracked on his past support of Palestinian statehood, arguing that the formation of such a state today would lead to a “Taliban-like” regime under Hamas and controlled by Tehran.
“But if there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state,” Rushdie said. “a satellite state of Iran.”
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“When it slides into antisemitism and sometimes even support for Hamas, then it becomes problematic.”
It all started with them,” Rushdie continued, saying that Israel’s critics must acknowledge that Hamas is to blame for the current war in Gaza.
The 76-year-old novelist was born to a Kashmiri Muslim family in India, and immigrated to Britain at the age of 17.
Distancing himself from his Muslim heritage and identifying for most of his life as an atheist, Rushdie sparked controversy in the Islamic world with his 1988 book The Satanic Verses.
The book prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The controversy ultimately led to a major diplomatic row between Tehran and London.
In 2022, an American Shi’ite Muslim man of Iranian heritage stabbed Rushdie 10 times during a lecture in New York State, apparently in response to Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa.
By rights, this should be the moment that the humanitarian case against Israel’s campaign in Gaza goes into terminal collapse. From now on, there can be no equivocation. Those who persist in opposing the war based on the number of civilian casualties are either ignorant or arguing in bad faith. Or both.
Earlier this month, the United Nations halved its assessment of the numbers of women and children killed in Gaza. Then: 9,500 women and 14,500 children dead. Now: 4,959 women and 7,797 children. In a further seven months’ time, perhaps another few thousand will be resurrected.
A moment’s thought reveals that it is impossible to quickly produce reliable figures. People might be missing but, in the chaos of war, how do the authorities know they haven’t fled, gone into hiding, or died of natural causes? Casualties may be buried under collapsed buildings, vapourised, burnt, or so disfigured that it would take complex forensic analysis to identify them. That is why it took months for Israeli investigators to arrive at a final figure for the victims of October 7, with some remaining unaccounted for.
With war raging, this kind of detailed work is impossible. Yet for months, the UN has trusted figures produced by the same savages who butchered poor Shani Louk and drank chilled water from an Israeli fridge while watching a dying young boy comforting his little brother who was missing an eye. At long last, it has taken a first step towards sanity. But it continues to rely on figures from Hamas as a touch-point.
Do those sanctimonious UN officials not realise how ridiculous they look? Have they forgotten how war works? Two decades after our invasion of Iraq, death tolls remain intensely disputed, ranging enormously from 100,000 to 600,000. Yet we’re expected to believe that Hamas, as it squats underground with its Jewish sex slaves, has the professionalism to provide statistics within hours, reliable to the single digit.
[The Telegraph Op-Ed continues]
This is why Gazan civilians are barred from the safety of the tunnels, even though the whole population would fit inside them. This is why they do not have a single air raid shelter. Hamas’s leaders have been doing their best to get their people killed on camera, then fabricated the figures. They have been doing so to brainwash the international media, political leaders, celebrities and the protesters on our streets, to believe the lie of Israeli “genocide”. They want Jerusalem to be pressured to stop the war, leaving them to plot the next act of savagery.
Every humane heart must bleed for Gaza. Even a single innocent death is appalling. But unless you are a pacifist, the tragedy of the individual civilian in a warzone – no matter how heartrending – is not what sways the argument. What should do so is the bigger picture. It is the principle of a just war, which always involves civilian casualties. Israel did not choose this conflict any more than Britain chose to fight Nazi Germany. Such is the curse of the world that democracies are sometimes faced with an ugly enemy and the only way to respond is with force. Churchill knew this. So does Israel. Do we?
Those of sound judgment must insist that the emperor has no clothes. The Jewish state is estimated to be killing proportionately fewer civilians than any other democracy in the history of warfare. To argue otherwise is simply wrong. Now let’s talk about destroying jihadism.
Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of ‘Israelophobia’
American artist and influencer Montana Tucker on Friday participated in a ‘NOVA’ dance tribute in Kibbutz Re’im in memory of the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
Tucker was joined by survivors of the Supernova music festival, where Palestinian terrorists killed 364 revelers, and members of the Israeli Dance Studio, which lost four people in the terror invasion.
“Lately, I have been separating my music and my activism. This gave me a way to bring the two together. Not only will we dance again, we’re dancing again now,” Tucker told JNS on Thursday.
As part of her trip to Israel organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), Tucker will be meeting with survivors, displaced children from Israel’s north and south and relatives of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
On Saturday, she will sing Israel’s national anthem (‘Hatikva’) in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square at the weekly rally demanding their release.
“I sang Hatikva many times but never in Israel. It is so special and powerful to be singing it, especially in Hostage Square with the families of the captives,” Tucker said.
[The Jewish New Syndicate Report continues]
Tucker, who addressed nearly 300,000 supporters of Israel at a Washington rally in November, said Jews in America have come together in a way that has rarely been seen before.
“Most Jews are trying to fight this, every single one of us. We need to understand that it does not matter if you are one percent Jewish or don’t support Israel. If you were Jewish during the Holocaust, you had no power. Never again is now,” Tucker said.
Her message to the people of Israel and world Jewry is one of hope and longing for brighter days.
“We might be small, but we are mighty. For centuries, people have tried to wipe Jews from the face of Earth. We always survived and persevered,” Tucker said.
“We are strong and resilient. We must unite, stand together. It’s us against the world and we will prevail,” she added.
Hannie Ricardo’s daughter, Oriya, was murdered on October 7, 2023, at the massacre at the Nova Music Festival. Below is an edited version of a speech that Hannie delivered to mark Yom Hazikaron and Mother’s Day — her first without Oriya.
Since I was a young girl, I have been invited to participate in memorial ceremonies — to read a poem or to sing a song. For many years, I have stood with parents who lost their dear ones, holding their hands and supporting them.
I am taking part in this memorial ceremony today for the first time in my life as אמא שכולה, a mother who lost the most precious thing in life — my daughter.
I dedicate my words today in memory of my beloved Oriya, who gave me 26 years of light, love and happiness, and to her close friends, the couple Sharon Refai and Shahar Manzur, and the brave Eli Refael, Sharon’s brother who came to rescue them and he, too, was murdered with them; and in memory of Roya and Norrelle Manzuri, Ron Zarfati, Ron Yehudai, the best friends Mapal Adam and Hilly Solomon, Omri Aharak, Yarden Buskila, and all the beautiful people who were brutally murdered on October 7, at the Nova Music Festival.
Never again — the couplet of words I heard since my childhood — have become, since the October 7 massacre, a concept empty of content. Now more than ever, we must fill it up with stronger content.
Never again means that we, as Jews, must be united in the understanding that we are here by right and not by grace, not by the grace of people, nor other religions, or the shameless UN, which gives the impression that its entire role is to lend a hand to the haters of the Jewish people, whomever they are.
Never again means to stop apologizing for our existence or making excuses for anything we do to keep our nation striving and flourishing — and above all, protecting ourselves.
Never again means that no rabbi tells his students to hide their Judaism because he is afraid of violent mobs, as many did in Nazi Germany and its affiliates.
Never again is to make your voice heard individually and in a group.
Never again means that it is time to take responsibility, face the voices calling for our destruction, and fight this in any way possible.
Never again. It means you do not ignore the signs before you, or dismiss them as “it will pass” — because they will not, unless you do something.
Never again means you recognize and understand that Islamic terrorism is the Nazi oppressor of the 21st century, and all those students, professors, and their ardent supporters are just like Hitler’s “Brown Shirts,” who controlled the streets with terror and extreme violence, using the Jews as an excuse.
Never again. I used to say that every time I thought of my ancestors that were victims of Jew-hatred under the Nazi occupation, and were gassed and burnt in Auschwitz. Never again, I tell myself, every time I break to pieces, knowing I have lost my daughter to Jew-hatred and Islamic terrorists who murdered her only because she was a Jew.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
And I will end with the words I chose to end the Oratorio Kaddish Oriya and Terezin, which I wrote and dedicated to Oriya, and which will be premiered on October 7, 2024, at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv:
אוריה, האם את שומעת? זאת אני, אלייך קוראת. אמא מתגעגעת, ותפילה אלייך נושאת.
עשי שלום עלינו, אוריה, שלום עלינו ועל כל ישראל, ונאמר אמן
And I will repeat in English so everyone can understand:
Oriya, can you hear me? It is me, calling you. Mom misses you and carry a prayer to you:
Make peace upon us, Oriya, upon us and all of Israel, and we shall say Amen.
Hannie Ricardo is an Israeli musician, historian, and educator. She has a Master’s degree in Jewish History, focusing on Holocaust studies, and has studied singing privately in Israel, Italy, and Germany. She has performed as a singer in festivals and private events in Israel, Europe, the Far East, and the US.
A Palestinian columnist writing in Arabic in a Qatai newspaper declared this week: “We do not want a ceasefire, we want ongoing war. Victory is at hand.”
Palestinian journalist Samir Al-Barghouti, writing in the Qatari daily Al-Watan, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), made the case for war to continue as a means to highlight the Palestinian cause.
Al-Barghouti argued that the world had forgotten about the Palestinians until the October 7 terror attack, but now — thanks to the spectacular violence, and to protests in the west, the “free world” is united behind the Palestinians:
O heroes of the resistance in Gaza, thank you. You showed the whole world how honor takes precedence to life, how faith stands fast in the face of weapons, how blood triumphs over pain and how the free believer stands tall in the face of the bullet. You proved with your resistance that peoples who surrender have never been safe and have no future, whereas peoples who fight for their freedom and honor will surely achieve their destination someday…
O people of Gaza, history has never seen a people braver than you, more patient than you [in the pursuit of] the truth, or more generous in sacrificing for the sake of Allah. O our people in Gaza, despite the martyrs and wounded, you are the springboard of the hoped-for national future of the Arabs and Muslims… No matter how deep the wound, we will continue to resist, because this enemy understands only the language of force. Even if Palestine sacrifices millions of martyrs and wounded, we will continue to resist. We do not want a ceasefire, we want ongoing war. Victory is at hand…
Hamas has repeatedly broken ceasefires — including the ceasefire that had been in place prior to its unprovoked attack on October 7, and a truce in November for hostage releases.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
After shouting about Israel and “genocide” — and touting Hamas’ casualty numbers with no verification and obvious flaws — the UN changed its mind this weekend. The old numbers (up to May 6, 2024) looked like this:
34,735 dead, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children. [You could, if you wished, extrapolate the number of men/terrorists, but the UN wasn’t going to help you.]
The new numbers (May 8, 2024) are:
24,686 people, including 10,006 men, 4,959 women, and 7,797 children
There is always fog, but the UN acceptance of Hamas casualty figures led directly to South Africa’s complaint to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of genocide. The ICJ declined to say there was genocide, but Israel was still smeared again across the international media.
The UN and others ignored the work of John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, and a follower of the nuances and statistics of Israel’s war in Gaza. He has given a master class over the past six month on evaluating military to civilian casualties in urban warfare, and the unprecedented steps that Israel took to minimize those casualties.
His numbers boil down to this:
The current (March 31) Hamas-supplied estimate of over 31,000 does not acknowledge a single combatant death (nor any deaths due to the misfiring of its own rockets or other friendly fire). The IDF estimates it has killed about 13,000 Hamas operatives, which would mean some 18,000 civilians had died, a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.
According to other sources, Spencer notes, civilians usually account for 80-90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, the AP reported some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists.
How did it happen that theoretically neutral/reliable sources including the AP, Reuters, NPR, the UN itself swallowed those blatantly false Hamas numbers whole and ignored an actual expert in the field?
On October 7, Hamas and its friends entered Israel and killed 1,163 people — a verified number. The victims included a baby who died 14 hours after birth, and a 94-year-old woman. The world was horrified by the numbers and the manner of their death, which included rape, torture, and the burning of people alive.
The world was similarly horrified to discover that 240 people, including Americans, had been dragged into Gaza — most living but some already dead.
Israel’s initial military response was met with a degree of understanding around the world.
Hamas had a dilemma — but also a war strategy to turn the tables.
Having built its military infrastructure under streets, houses, schools, mosques, and UNRWA facilities, Hamas was assured that Israeli action to clear those spaces of terrorist operatives would kill the human shields sitting above. (Especially after Hamas warned Gazans not to flee and fired on Palestinian civilians using the “safe passage” route.)
In fact, Hamas planned it that way. The more civilians that died, the more Israel would be seen as an out-of-control monster, killing the defenseless in retribution. Committing “genocide.”
And Hamas’ strategy worked.
The first big test was at the Al-Ahli Hospital, where an explosion killed people outside the building. The Gaza Health Ministry (run by Hamas) claimed 500 dead from an Israeli air strike on a protected site. Media around the world went with it. Later evidence showed it was caused by an errant Palestinian rocket aiming for Israel, and that the casualty figure was closer to 50 than 500.
At that point, the “narrative” changed: “I don’t think the question will ever get fully resolved using open source intelligence,” an assistant professor of political science opined. If actual evidence won’t let you blame Israel and politics won’t let you blame Hamas, best to call it foggy and move on.
That’s how it worked. And the numbers caused the flood.
In January, it was the ICJ.
In February, President Biden said Israel’s response was “over the top,” and began to institute sanctions on individual Israelis and Israeli companies that he intimated were only the beginning.
And, indeed, in May, as Israel geared up for the Rafah battle, the administration announced the withholding of weapons already approved for delivery by Congress. There was also the blackmail/bribe strategy of offering Israel intelligence information if it would limit its incursion. The UN vote elevating Palestinian status was likely a way member states could slap at Israel without repercussions.
Israel is likely to do what it has to do to defend its people. The UN through UNRWA has already shown itself to be an accessory to Hamas and a participant in Hamas war crimes — both in Israel and against its own people. Later, when the “fog of war” dissipates, and the outcomes are closer to the John Spencer model than the Hamas model, the UN should find itself in the dock.
The number change is an attempt to deflect its guilt.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
Imagine that the campus protesters got their wish tomorrow: Not just “Cease-fire Now” in Gaza, but the creation of a “Free Palestine.” How free would that future Palestine be?
This isn’t a speculative question. Palestinians have had a measure of self-rule in the West Bank since Yasir Arafat entered Gaza in 1994. Israel evacuated its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority that same year and Hamas won legislative elections the next.
How much freedom have Palestinians enjoyed since then? They and their allies abroad argue they’ve had none because Israel has denied it to them — not just by refusing to accept a Palestinian state, but also through road closings, land expropriations in the West Bank, an economic blockade of Gaza and frequent Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas.
There’s partial truth to this. Israeli settlers have run riot against their Palestinian neighbors. The Israeli government imposes heavy and unequal restrictions on Palestinians, as my colleague Megan Stack has reported in painful detail. The frequent mistreatment of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints is a long-running disgrace.
At the same time, Israeli leaders have repeatedly offered the creation of a Palestinian state — offers Arafat and Abbas rejected. Charges of an Israeli economic blockade tend to ignore a few facts: Gaza also has a border with Egypt; many goods, including fuel and electricity, flowed from Israel to Gaza up until Oct. 7; much of the international aid given to Gaza to build civilian infrastructure was diverted for Hamas’s tunnels, and Hamas used the territory to start five wars with Israel in 15 years.
But there’s an equally important dimension to Palestinian politics that is purely domestic. When Abbas was elected in 2005, it was for a four-year term. He is now in the 20th year of his four-year term. When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, it didn’t just defeat its political rivals in Fatah. It overthrew the Palestinian Authority completely in Gaza after a brief civil war and followed it up with a killing, torture and terror spree that eliminated all political opposition.
Perhaps the absence of Palestinian democracy shouldn’t come as a shock. The regime established by Hamas isn’t merely autocratic. It’s more like the old East Germany, complete with its own version of the Stasi, which spied on, blackmailed and abused its own citizens.
“Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, would not tolerate even a whiff of dissent,” The Times’s Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman reported on Monday. “Security officials trailed journalists and people they suspected of immoral behavior. Agents got criticism removed from social media and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. Political protests were viewed as threats to be undermined.”
Even this doesn’t quite capture the extent of Hamas’s cruelty. Consider its treatment of gay Palestinians — a point worth emphasizing since “Queers for Palestine” is a sign sometimes seen at anti-Israel marches.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
Would an independent Palestinian state, living alongside Israel, improve its internal governance? Not if Hamas took control — which it almost certainly would if it isn’t utterly defeated in the current war. And what if the protesters achieved their larger goal — that is, a Palestine “from the river to the sea”?
We know something about what Hamas intends thanks to the concluding statement of a conference that it held in 2021 about its plans for “liberated” Gaza. Any Jew considered a “fighter” “must be killed”; Jews who flee could either “be left alone” or “prosecuted”; peaceful individuals could either be “integrated or given time to leave.” Finally, “educated Jews” with valuable skills “should not be allowed to leave.”
In other words, what the campus protesters happily envisage as a utopian, post-Zionist “state for all of its citizens” would under Hamas be one in which Jews were killed, exiled, prosecuted, integrated into an Islamist state or pressed into the servitude of a Levantine version of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. Those same protesters might rejoin that they don’t want a future to be led by Hamas — but that only raises the question of why they do absolutely nothing to oppose it.
This is not the first generation of Western activists who championed movements that promised liberation in theory and misery and murder in practice: The Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975 to the cheers of even mainstream liberal voices. Mao Zedong, possibly the greatest mass murderer of the past 100 years, never quite lost his cachet on the political left. And magazines like The Nation eulogized Hugo Chávez as a paragon of democracy.
These attitudes are a luxury that people living in safe and free societies can freely indulge. Israelis, whose freedom is made more precious by being less safe, can be forgiven for thinking differently.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
A group of Jewish Columbia students has written an emotional and forceful public letter that takes on one of the most divisive issues on college campuses: whether opposition to Israel should be equated with antisemitism.
In the letter, the students argue that “Judaism cannot be separated from Israel.” They also charge that anti-Zionist Jews who deny Israel’s right to exist and stand with pro-Palestinian protesters “tokenize themselves” and try to delegitimize the experiences of Zionist Jews on campus.
Some of the students who signed the letter, which had 540 signatories as of Thursday morning, have already spoken publicly against Columbia for the antisemitism they say they have faced there. One student testified before Congress about the issue; others have been counterprotesters at pro-Palestinian rallies. Others have not spoken out before.
In all, by Thursday the letter was signed by just over 10 percent of the estimated 5,000 Jewish undergraduates and graduate students at Columbia and its affiliated colleges. All signatories gave their names, college affiliation and year of graduation, unlike some public letters, that allow for anonymous signatures.
Titled “In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University,” the letter represents the views of students who state that they love Israel, even though they do not always agree with the actions of the Israeli government.
“Our love for Israel does not necessitate blind political conformity,” the letter stated. “It’s quite the opposite. For many of us, it is our deep love for and commitment to Israel that pushes us to object when its government acts in ways we find problematic.”
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The letter did not specifically critique any Israeli actions, stating that “our visions for Israel differ dramatically from one another.” Yet, it continued, “we all come from a place of love and an aspiration for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
The letter comes as Columbia copes with a deeply divided campus reeling from two recent police interventions against pro-Palestinian activism on campus, including the takeover of a campus building that resulted in more than 200 arrests. On Monday, Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president, canceled the main graduation ceremony, citing security concerns, and the main campus remains in a state of partial lockdown.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Most of the signatories, the open letter stated, “did not choose to be political activists.” But they have felt compelled to speak because they feel demonized “under the cloak of anti-Zionism” and forced to publicly defend their Jewish and Zionist identities.
“We proudly believe in the Jewish People’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity,” they wrote. “Contrary to what many have tried to sell you — no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”
“We are proud to be Jews, and we are proud to be Zionists,” they wrote.
Mr. Baker wrote the letter, along with Eliana Goldin, Eden Yadegar and Rivka Yellin. Mr. Baker said in an interview that the letter began circulating among students on Saturday and that he expected the number of signatories to grow.
“This letter was about amplifying Jewish voices that have been silenced for seven months and about making very clear that there is a unified Jewish community on campus,” he said.
In the letter, the students said they felt betrayed and hurt by the views of many of their fellow students, and by the treatment some Zionist students faced at the encampment that took over a Columbia lawn for two weeks before being removed by police. The protesters who set up the tents have demanded, among other things, that the university divest from Israel.
The letter said that students were not surprised when one of the encampment’s leaders, Khymani James, said that “‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’ and that they were lucky he was “not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
Pro-Palestinian student organizers with Columbia’s encampment disavowed those comments, which were made in January, and Mr. James apologized. He has been suspended from school and banned from campus.
Maryam Alwan is an organizer with Columbia’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which was suspended last fall. She said in a recent interview: “I think that antisemitism is horrible, but I don’t think that using the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism as an excuse to crack down on pro-Palestine advocacy is justifiable or related in any sense.”
The letter, though, disputes that distinction.
“If the last six months on campus have taught us anything, it is that a large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism, and subsequently does not understand the essence of the Jewish People,” the students wrote. “Yet despite the fact that we have been calling out the antisemitism we’ve been experiencing for months, our concerns have been brushed off and invalidated.”
The students ended the letter on a note of conciliation, saying they want to work to repair the campus together.
“While campus may be riddled with hateful rhetoric and simplistic binaries now, it is never too late to start repairing the fractures and begin developing meaningful relationships across political and religious divides,” they wrote. “Our tradition tells us, ‘Love peace and pursue peace.’”
In Our Name: A Message from Jewish Students at Columbia University
To the Columbia Community:
Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are well-meaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia University, who are connected to our community and deeply engaged with our culture and history. We would like to speak in our name.
Many of us sit next to you in class. We are your lab partners, your study buddies, your peers, and your friends. We partake in the same student government, clubs, Greek life, volunteer organizations, and sports teams as you.
Most of us did not choose to be political activists. We do not bang on drums and chant catchy slogans. We are average students, just trying to make it through finals much like the rest of you. Those who demonize us under the cloak of anti-Zionism forced us into our activism and forced us to publicly defend our Jewish identities.
We proudly believe in the Jewish People’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity. Contrary to what many have tried to sell you – no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.
Our religious texts are replete with references to Israel, Zion, and Jerusalem. The land of Israel is filled with archaeological remnants of a Jewish presence spanning centuries. Yet, despite generations of living in exile and diaspora across the globe, the Jewish People never ceased dreaming of returning to our homeland — Judea, the very place from which we derive our name, “Jews.” Indeed just a couple of days ago, we all closed our Passover seders with the proclamation, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
Many of us are not religiously observant, yet Zionism remains a pillar of our Jewish identities. We have been kicked out of Russia, Libya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Poland, Egypt, Algeria, Germany, Iran, and the list goes on. We connect to Israel not only as our ancestral homeland but as the only place in the modern world where Jews can safely take ownership of their own destiny. Our experiences at Columbia in the last six months are a poignant reminder of just that.
We were raised on stories from our grandparents of concentration camps, gas chambers, and ethnic cleansing. The essence of Hitler’s antisemitism was the very fact that we were “not European” enough, that as Jews we were threats to the “superior” Aryan race. This ideology ultimately left six million of our own in ashes.
The evil irony of today’s antisemitism is a twisted reversal of our Holocaust legacy; protestors on campus have dehumanized us, imposing upon us the characterization of the “white colonizer.” We have been told that we are “the oppressors of all brown people” and that “the Holocaust wasn’t special.” Students at Columbia have chanted “we don’t want no Zionists here,” alongside “death to the Zionist State” and to “go back to Poland,” where our relatives lie in mass graves.
This sick distortion illuminates the nature of antisemitism: In every generation, the Jewish People are blamed and scapegoated as responsible for the societal evil of the time. In Iran and in the Arab world, we were ethnically cleansed for our presumed ties to the “Zionist entity.” In Russia, we endured state-sponsored violence and were ultimately massacred for being capitalists. In Europe, we were the victims of genocide because we were communists and not European enough. And today, we face the accusation of being too European, painted as society’s worst evils – colonizers and oppressors. We are targeted for our belief that Israel, our ancestral and religious homeland, has a right to exist. We are targeted by those who misuse the word Zionist as a sanitized slur for Jew, synonymous with racist, oppressive, or genocidal. We know all too well that antisemitism is shapeshifting.
We are proud of Israel. The only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is home to millions of Mizrachi Jews (Jews of Middle Eastern descent), Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Central and Eastern European descent), and Ethiopian Jews, as well as millions of Arab Israelis, over one million Muslims, and hundreds of thousands of Christians and Druze. Israel is nothing short of a miracle for the Jewish People and for the Middle East more broadly.
Our love for Israel does not necessitate blind political conformity. It’s quite the opposite. For many of us, it is our deep love for and commitment to Israel that pushes us to object when its government acts in ways we find problematic. Israeli political disagreement is an inherently Zionist activity; look no further than the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms – from New York to Tel Aviv – to understand what it means to fight for the Israel we imagine. All it takes are a couple of coffee chats with us to realize that our visions for Israel differ dramatically from one another. Yet we all come from a place of love and an aspiration for a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
If the last six months on campus have taught us anything, it is that a large and vocal population of the Columbia community does not understand the meaning of Zionism, and subsequently does not understand the essence of the Jewish People. Yet despite the fact that we have been calling out the antisemitism we’ve been experiencing for months, our concerns have been brushed off and invalidated. So here we are to remind you:
We sounded the alarm on October 12 when many protested against Israel while our friends’ and families’ dead bodies were still warm.
We recoiled when people screamed “resist by any means necessary,” telling us we are “all inbred” and that we “have no culture.”
We shuddered when an “activist” held up a sign telling Jewish students they were Hamas’s next targets, and we shook our heads in disbelief when Sidechat users told us we were lying.
We ultimately were not surprised when a leader of the CUAD encampment said publicly and proudly that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that we’re lucky they are “not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
We felt helpless when we watched students and faculty physically block Jewish students from entering parts of the campus we share, or even when they turned their faces away in silence. This silence is familiar. We will never forget.
One thing is for sure. We will not stop standing up for ourselves. We are proud to be Jews, and we are proud to be Zionists.
We came to Columbia because we wanted to expand our minds and engage in complex conversations. While campus may be riddled with hateful rhetoric and simplistic binaries now, it is never too late to start repairing the fractures and begin developing meaningful relationships across political and religious divides. Our tradition tells us, “Love peace and pursue peace.” We hope you will join us in earnestly pursuing peace, truth, and empathy. Together we can repair our campus.
Note: over 300 Columbia students signed as of May 7, 2023
Yesterday, President Daniels provided an update on the Homewood campus protest to students, faculty, and staff. We hope you’ll read the message in its entirety below to understand the reasons why President Daniels is calling for an immediate end to the encampment.
Sincerely,
The Johns Hopkins Alumni Association
Dear Johns Hopkins Community,
I am sharing with you the message I sent earlier today to the members of the Hopkins Justice Collective and student protesters who are encamped on our Homewood campus.
As I did earlier this week, I chose to speak directly to the protesters, who include members of our community and those unaffiliated with Hopkins, to share the reasons why we are calling for an immediate end to the encampment, which contravenes multiple university policies and codes.
As we head into the final weeks of the academic year and look forward to celebrating our newest graduates at Commencement later this month, we are committed to maintaining a campus environment that values free speech, but also where everyone feels safe and welcome.
Sincerely,
Ron Daniels
Dear Hopkins Justice Collective members and student protesters,
I am writing at a critical juncture in the protest. I appreciated the opportunity to meet with several of you on Monday evening at the start of the encampment you initiated on the Beach and to speak together in an open and constructive way about the purposes of your protest, including your desire to conduct the protest and any programming in a way that would ensure no violence, injury, or anti-Semitic expression.
I am writing today to reiterate the reasons why the encampment is so problematic and why I am calling on you to end it.
First, we believe that the encampment creates conditions that are risky to the health and safety of you and others in the community. I recognize from our conversation that many of you do not intend to jeopardize campus safety. You indicated that you seek to use the encampment to increase attention to the plight of the Palestinian people and to persuade the university to accept your demands. But by walling off a significant portion of the Beach for a dense cluster of tents, you block visibility and increase the risk of violence and/or injury to you or others at the university. This risk is compounded by the broad calls you have made on social media and elsewhere for people not affiliated with the university to come to the Beach to lend support to your cause. Further, we are concerned with your call on social media for “tables, masks, chains, locks, sandbags, tents, pallets, goggles, gloves, tarps, sheets, zip ties, PVC piping, 2×4 nails, trash bags, hammers.” Because of your insistence that everyone in the encampment always remain masked, the identity of these people, their motivations, and their respect for our diverse community and the spaces in which we learn and dwell cannot be known to you or to the people with the responsibility to protect you.
We believe that the risks to personal safety from these conditions are real and will only increase with time. Over the past two weeks, at encampments at other institutions, we have seen altercations between protesters and counter-protesters and accusations of hateful slurs that have spiraled out of anyone’s control. Here at Hopkins we have already received reports of concerning incidents, including physical assault and vile hate speech.
We know from our own experience at Hopkins that encampments and occupations have the clear potential for unintended and even violent consequences. This happened at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s, when a student dwelling in a semipermanent shelter to protest South African Apartheid suffered serious burns when another student set the structure on fire. And it happened again during the 2019 occupation of Garland Hall, when student protesters reported incidents of assault, including one in which a faculty member and others broke into Garland Hall and had a dangerous physical altercation with protesters.
The second reason for our concern with the encampment goes to its inconsistency with the core values of the university. You well know my commitment to ensuring the broadest possible protection for free speech and inquiry at the university. This commitment has been as important as ever since October 7. We know that there is a range of sincerely held and different views in our community on the nature of the war in Gaza and the multidecades conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and neighboring states. Because this issue for many is connected to their core religious identity, the issue is even more freighted. Many in our community have family members who dwell in the region and have been killed or injured. Inevitably, the broad protection accorded speech on our campus has meant that some members of our community will find the claims and slogans made by participants in the debate offensive and hurtful. Nevertheless, absent speech that directly calls for violence or injury against protected class groups, we have neither punished nor condemned anyone’s speech.
We recognize that the encampment is useful in seizing our attention. It forces us to confront different frames or narratives on the conflict. But that is as far as it goes. By physically demarcating a space and by gathering, studying, and chanting with only those people who subscribe to a similar worldview on an incredibly complex subject, you fail to honor the university’s foundational imperative for conversation across difference, for conversation that aims to test, evaluate, and understand competing claims. An encampment of this nature cannot help but reduce the capacity of those within it to see the common humanity of those who are outside its perimeter. Instead of recognizing and drawing strength from our diversity, we veer to a community of rigid solitudes, a community defined by suspicion, distrust, and, in the extreme, hatred. Along the way, our common humanity is lost.
I acknowledge that it is hard work to stage sustained protest. But I believe the much harder work is to now move beyond the shouting, the slogans, the call and response, and to engage in a rigorous and open-minded way with the university community on the agenda for change that you propose. Along the way, you will need to marshal facts and evidence. You will need to meet the arguments and ideas of others who disagree–perhaps vehemently–with some of your claims. That is the hard work of the university and, indeed, of liberal democratic society. That takes courage, determination, and decency. You have seized attention but created a stand-off in which the next step–as we have seen at other universities–often has consequences that are dangerous and damaging for everyone involved.
I am urging you to change course. To move toward a solution born of good-faith dialogue and mutual respect so that the Beach is fully restored to its place as a destination for the use of all our students. As I shared with your representatives in our long conversation on Monday night, I remain open to further meetings toward a peaceful resolution. In the meantime, we will take additional steps as necessary to protect the safety of the community, including moving forward with appropriate disciplinary and legal actions.
Over the past few weeks, dramatic scenes of mob action have unfolded across dozens of campuses across the United States.
Large groups of students, faculty and professional agitators have taken over major swaths of quads and other areas to voice support for the Hamas terror organization and to intimidate pro-Israeli and Jewish students. These protests have often taken the form of encampments in central locations on university grounds, which have prevented Jewish students from accessing classes and other facilities.
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In several cases, the catatonic response of the university administration has encouraged these protesters to escalate their tactics, including the destruction of property, physical violence against students, seizure of buildings and even holding university staff against their will. Chants in support of Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, bombing Israel and general terrorist action have been the consistent soundtrack in the background of all these protests.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
On the surface level, there is a series of student groups that are organizing these protests—the most prominent among them being Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). “SJP has no U.S. revenue service (IRS) status and most of the money sources are hidden, which raises major concerns,” Steinberg said. “There is simply no transparency about who is funding them.”
Hatem Bazian, the founder of SJP, is one of the clearest links between these protests and terror organizations. Bazian was previously a major fundraiser for the Ohio-based nonprofit Kindhearts, which was censured in 2006 by the U.S. Treasury Department for giving money to Hamas. Kindhearts settled with the Treasury Department and was dissolved in 2012 over the 2006 case.
Bazian was also a prominent advocate and speaker for the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which shut down after it was found liable in civil court in 2004 for its support of Hamas. “Hatem Bazian, the head of SJP, has clear connections to various terror organizations,” Steinberg told JNS.
A recent report by the New York-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) shed some light on the source of SJP’s funding. ISGAP found the central donors to be Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC); Tides Foundation; American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), its parent organization Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP); and JVP.
Bazian is also a co-founder of AMP. AMP is currently under investigation by the Virginia Attorney General after being accused of being a reincarnation of the IAP. Its former executive director, Abdelbaset Hamayel, and its current one, Osama Abuirshaid, were IAP board members and directors, respectively.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
JVP’s support of the student protests has been used to deflect the claims of antisemitism that have gone hand in hand with the demonstrations. “It’s being presented as a peace movement, that there are Jews involved, that it’s not antisemitic. But when people chant ‘globalize the intifada,’ it’s very clear,” said ISGAP director Charles Small.
Another major financial backer of the student protests has been the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which according to NGO monitor is “closely linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).” PFLP is recognized as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Israel and others.
According to the Israeli National Bureau for Counter-Terror Financing, Samidoun plays a leading role in the PFLP’s anti-Israel propaganda efforts, fundraising and recruiting activists. Several members of Samidoun are also members of the PFLP, including the chief coordinator of Samidoun, Khaled Barakat, and the organization’s international coordinator, Charlotte Kates.
Overall, ISGAP has tracked “over $3 million a year going to various pro-Palestinian student groups” from “a constellation of terror-affiliated organizations” to Columbia University.
‘Campaigns led by Palestinian organizations’
Investigating the funding structure for the parent companies backing student groups like SJP and WOL, several prominent backers come up, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations.
According to the New York Post, both of these organizations have contributed millions of dollars to the JVP, WOL and other pro-Palestinian groups. U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) is one of the primary recipients of their donations. USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows, and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
These paid agitators have emerged in multiple university protests as the most aggressive and intense rioters. They have often been instigators of escalatory action by the student protesters. In January, a paid USCPR fellow was detained for blocking the route of U.S. President Joe Biden’s motorcade. At Yale, USCPR’s fellow Craig Birckhead-Morton was arrested on Monday and charged with first-degree trespassing for occupying the school’s Beinecke Plaza. Another USCPR fellow named Malak Afaneh, also a fellow at CAIR-SFBA (Council on American-Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area) rose to prominence for disrupting a dinner for third-year law students at the home of Erwin Chemerinsky, the Jewish dean of Berkeley Law School, to stage an anti-Israel protest.
However, some experts believe that the Soros and Rockefeller links are overblown and not critical in the face of the much clearer connections that student groups have with terrorist organizations. “I think that the Soros connection is much less clear than people want it to be,” Steinberg said. “The relation is certainly not direct and very muddled by political interests.”
The final source of financial support for pro-Palestinian activism on campus is foreign governments. The nature of this support is much less direct than what is seen with various NGOs, and no direct paper trail between specific protests and foreign interests has been reported.
That being said, there has been an undeniable influx of money from overseas into the most prestigious universities in America, which may explain both the radicalization of the student body and the soft response from the administration. For almost 20 years, a central player in this development has been Qatar.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
In 2020, Najat Al-Saied, a researcher from the UAE, published a report on Alhurra, a U.S. government-owned Arabic-language satellite TV channel, titled “Qatar and the Funding of American Universities.” According to Al-Saied, Qatar sought to ally the Muslim Brotherhood ideology with the progressive left movement on campuses by adopting several commonplace slogans like “political correctness” and “racist thinking,” to signal political alignment.
By 2012, Qatar had spent more than $1.5 billion to finance education initiatives in 28 universities across America and became the largest external funder of education in the United States. As of 2019, Qatar regularly spends $405 million a year to finance activities at six American universities with branches in Doha.
In 2020, American author and translator Raymond Ibrahim published a report showing that Qatar had invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford. Ibrahim further showed that Qatar used its influence at the schools to promote Islamic studies and to specifically suppress the study of other Middle Eastern minorities including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yazidis, Kurds and Druze.
Al-Saied gave two central interests for Qatar in funding U.S. higher education. One was a desire to spread Islamic thought into the West and inculcate the American student body in Islamic theology, proselytizing being a core tenant of Wahabi Islam. The other interest was political, which was to alienate the United States from the Arab coalition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates and Bahrain.
The after-effects of this approach can be seen today as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party seeks to shift Washington from its traditional alliance with the Sunni Gulf States.
The Qatari government has openly denied any connection to the student protests on American campuses. Its ambassador recently posted on X that “Qatar does not influence these universities, and we have nothing to do with anything that happens on their home campuses in the U.S.”
More than a quarter of the people arrested when police cleared pro-Palestinian protesters out of an occupied building at Columbia University on Tuesday night were not affiliated with the school, the NYPD said.
An initial analysis by police found that of the 112 people arrested at Hamilton Hall, 80 were affiliated with Columbia. The remaining 32 were neither students nor faculty, the NYPD told the New York Jewish Week.
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report continues]
The arrested protesters ranged in age from 18 to 64, according to a joint statement from the NYPD and mayor’s office, and they face charges including burglary, criminal mischief, resisting arrest, trespassing and disorderly conduct. Adams said in a statement that the figures made clear “the extent to which outsiders were actually present.”
The numbers came amid mounting revelations about the identities of people who participated in the protests at Columbia. At least one person arrested was affiliated with the university’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionist group that has joined the encampment movement, according to a JVP spokesperson.
At least two unaffiliated protesters who were involved in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment have been identified: One is Lisa Fithian, 63, a longtime progressive activist who was spotted in footage of the Hamilton takeover, according to the New York Times. The other, Nahla Al-Arian, was cited by Adams in an interview with National Public Radio. Neither was among those arrested.
“What really was a tipping point for me was when I learned that one of the outside agitators’ … husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges,” Adams told NPR on Thursday. “I knew I could not sit back and state that I’m going to allow this to continue to escalate.”
Al-Arian visited the encampment on April 25; her husband, Sami Al-Arian, was arrested in 2003 for allegedly supporting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, which is based in Gaza. He was not convicted but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in 2015 and was deported to Turkey.
Nahla Al-Arian told the Associated Press that she visited the encampment but did not engage with the protesters. Her husband posted a photo on X showing her sitting outside a protest tent.
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report continues]
Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, has asked the police to remain on campus until May 17, two days after commencement ceremonies are slated to take place.
The number of unaffiliated protesters among those arrested raises questions about how they accessed the campus. Entry was restricted to those with a Columbia ID, though at previous points since the encampment went up, ID holders were allowed to bring guests to campus.
After Hamilton Hall was occupied and barricaded, the access rules were tightened further, excluding everyone but students who live on campus and essential personnel. Columbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Police also cleared protest encampments at the City College of New York and New York University. Neither is a closed campus, and those arrested at both of those schools included a large number of non-students.
At the City College of New York, 68 of the 102 protesters arrested, or 60%, were not students, police said.
The student protesters at Columbia had previously collaborated with external pro-Palestinian groups, including hardline organizations. In March, students held an unauthorized “Resistance 101” event in campus housing that saw speakers praise Hamas. Speakers at the event included leaders of the pro-Palestinian groups Within Our Lifetime and Samidoun, both of which back terror groups.
Israeli student Maya Platek was selected as student body president of Columbia University even amid intense anti-Israel protests on campus.
Platek will serve as president of the student body for the 2024-2025 academic year.
She declared her determination to fight for the rights and safety of Jewish students and is a member of Students Supporting Israel (SSI), an organization whose stated name is to support pro-Israel voices at Columbia.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
In the past week and a half, violent anti-Israel protests have shaken the Manhattan campus, with a rabbi recommending that Jewish students depart campus and stay at home.
Following a congressional hearing on Columbia’s administration’s handling of antisemitic incidents, president Minouche Shafik declared that there would be hybrid learning-both in-person and remote classes-until the end of the semester.
Many Jewish students criticized the move as penalizing Jewish students rather than the anti-Israel students and faculty who were creating an unsafe environment.
Platek called out those responsible for fostering antisemitism on campus, and said, “Our classmates and professors choose to manipulate history in order to demonize us as people have done all throughout history.”
She added, “They choose to rewrite our identity in order to justify terrorist regimes. They choose to cheer in our pain and in our suffering, and they choose to delegitimize the only Jewish state in the world when there are dozens of Christian and Muslim ones.”
“They choose to advocate for our removal from this campus over our nationality. That is discrimination,” Platek declared.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League on Saturday called on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to apologize after she accused some Jewish students of being “pro-genocide” in a statement on antisemitism.
“It is patently false and a blood libel to suggest that ANY Jewish students are ‘pro-genocide,’” tweeted ADL CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt, charging Omar with putting students’ lives at risk.
“It is gaslighting to impute that Jewish people are somehow at fault for being harassed and menaced with signs and slogans literally calling for their own extermination,” wrote Greenblatt.
“It is abhorrent that a sitting member of Congress would slander an entire group of young people in such a cold, calculated manner,” he said.
In an interview with a local Fox News television station following a visit to the unauthorized anti-Israel protest encampment at Colombia University on Friday, Omar had said: “It is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe.”
“We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide,” she said.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Hirsi was one of more than 100 people arrested and summoned for trespassing after a group of demonstrators set up the “Gaza solidarity encampment” at Columbia to protest Israel’s war with Hamas terrorists in Gaza following the murder of some 1,200 people and the kidnapping of more than 250 men, women and children in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Omar said on April 20 that she was “enormously proud” of her daughter’s arrest and subsequent suspension, writing on X that Hirsi’s actions sought to push “her school to stand against genocide.”
Comedian Bill Maher blasted the apparent “narcissism” of pro-Palestine activists Friday following a recent wave of contentious protests on college campuses nationwide.
Pro-Palestinian protesters and activists staged several demonstrations on college campuses, roadways and bridges following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks against Israel by Islamic terror group Hamas. Maher criticized “social justice warriors” who are concerned more with their image than the cause they claim to be advocating for during his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“I’m not saying there aren’t sincere passions about Gaza, especially among people from the region, but social justice warriors, for a lot of them, it seems like it’s more about the warrioring than about whatever the cause is,” Maher said.
“If you really cared about apartheid so much, which Israel does not actually practice — Arabs there vote, they serve in Parliament, they sit on the judiciary — wouldn’t you start with this? With the hundreds of millions of women in the world who live under a true apartheid: a gender apartheid of the most brutal kind?” he asked. “I’ll wait.”
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
Maher slammed anti-Israel protesters for “cosplaying as revolutionaries.” The comedian told activists they will not successfully convince others of their cause by inconveniencing their jobs or families.
“And finally, new rule: someone needs to tell the people who block traffic in the name of a cause, ‘No one likes you,’” Maher said to the laughter of his audience. “And you’re probably hurting your cause.”
Maher noted that pro-Palestinian activists demanding a ceasefire of the war at the Gaza Strip staged obstructive demonstrations on roads and bridges in cities including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle. He said most “normies” have children and jobs, calling protesters “pretty dumb” and “kind of privileged” for thinking they can change minds by making others “late to pick up their kids from daycare.”
Maher also said the surge of anti-Israel protesters “most resemble” presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who he described as a “fat guy from Florida.” He called Trump “history’s greatest attention whore” and said the former president is “always finding some new injustice.”
Media reports that the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was “plausibly” accused of genocide are inaccurate, Joan Donoghue, a judge and former president of the main United Nations judicial arm in The Hague, said in an interview with the BBC on Thursday.
The court never decided that South Africa’s claim that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” despite an avalanche of media reports to that effect, and a slew of diplomats, who interpreted the court’s ruling that way.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“I’m glad I have a chance to address that, because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa” she told the BBC show HARDtalk.
“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” Donoghue said. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
“It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide,” she added. “But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”
Donoghue’s term on the bench expired a few days after the court delivered its initial ruling on Jan. 26.
Following the ruling—and what the judge called the misreported “shorthand” in the media—Israel was widely accused of genocide and lawsuits charged other countries with abeting Israeli genocide, or failing to stop the Jewish state from committing genocide.
After a follow-up South African case, the U.N. court instituted provisional measures on March 28 that ordered Israel to ensure without delay that humanitarian assistance was being scaled and sped up in its delivery to Gaza.
It also ruled that Israel must ensure that the Israel Defense Forces avoids violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including by preventing delivery of humanitarian assistance.
The U.N. high court has yet to rule on South Africa’s initial claim that Israel is committing genocide. It is not expected to do so for months.
As encampments of anti-Israel protesters spring up on a growing number of campuses across the country bringing with them instances of antisemitism, Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) are threatening to condition federal funding for universities as part of a push for more stringent federal oversight and monitoring of campus antisemitism, Jewish Insider has learned.
The lawmakers plan to introduce the College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability (COLUMBIA) Act, which would allow the Department of Education to impose a third-party monitor for antisemitic activity on any campus receiving federal funding. Schools that do not adequately cooperate with monitoring could potentially lose their federal funding.
Compliance with such monitoring would, under the proposed legislation, be a condition of receiving continued federal funds; the monitor would release quarterly public reports on the progress that schools have made in addressing antisemitism and providing recommendations to federal, state and local lawmakers and officials.
“As we have seen over the last half a year since October 7, campus antisemitism is at an all-time high, and American universities are not capable of handling it when left to their own devices,” Torres said in a statement, alleging that there are “blatant violation[s]” of Jewish students’ civil rights occurring at colleges across the country “and the federal government cannot allow this to continue unchecked.”
[The Jewish Insider Report continues]
“Rising antisemitism on our college campuses is a major concern and we must act to ensure the safety of students,” Lawler said in a statement. “I’m proud to work with my friend and colleague Ritchie Torres on legislation that will impose a third-party antisemitism monitor on college campuses to ensure protections are in place and oversee any troubling action by college administrators. If colleges will not step up to protect their students, Congress must act.”
Similar independent monitor systems have been previously utilized by the federal government, most prominently in response to cases of police misconduct.
Columbia University announced on Friday that it had barred from its campus a leader in the pro-Palestinian student protest encampment who declared on video in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Video of the incendiary comments resurfaced online Thursday evening, forcing the school to again confront an issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide: the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.
The student, Khymani James, made the comments during and after a disciplinary hearing with Columbia administrators that he recorded and then posted on Instagram.
The hearing, conducted by an administrator of the university’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, was focused on an earlier comment he shared on social media, in which he discussed fighting a Zionist. “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,” he wrote.
A Columbia administrator asked, “Do you see why that is problematic in any way?”
Mr. James replied, “No.”
He also compared Zionists to white supremacists and Nazis. “These are all the same people,” he said. “The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. It’s all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
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And, Mr. James said, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
In announcing their decision to bar Mr. James from campus, the university did not make clear if he had been suspended or permanently expelled.
Other protest groups condemned the comments and pointed out that one student’s statements do not reflect the tenor of the movement as a whole. But the remarks were widely shared on social media and go to the heart of a question that has animated criticism of the protests: How much of the movement in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza is tainted by antisemitism?
College administrators have pledged to Congress that they will take swift action against hateful attacks on Jewish students and antisemitic threats. “I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences,” Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, told congressional leaders last week.
On Friday, a school spokesman said, “Calls of violence and statements targeted at individuals based on their religious, ethnic or national identity are unacceptable and violate university policy.”
Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the center for Jewish campus life, described Mr. James’s statements as dangerous. “I think students who make comments like that don’t belong on campus,” he said.
Noa Fay, 23, a first-year student at the School of International and Public Affairs, said she was shocked by the “unabashedness” of the video. “It’s one of the more blatant examples of antisemitism and, just, rhetoric that is inconsistent with the values that we have at Columbia,” she said. “I was mostly very surprised to see that it was just so out in the open.”
Early Friday morning, Mr. James posted a statement on social media addressing his comments. “What I said was wrong,” he wrote. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.” He noted that he made these comments in January before he become involved with the protest movement and added that the leaders of the student protests did not condone the comments. “I agree with their assessment,” he wrote.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and a Barnard College graduate, said she found Mr. James’s comments awful and upsetting but she added that it was clear his views did not represent those of the other campus protesters.
Ms. Ellman-Golan said that in her 10 years as an organizer, there were always people who tried to inject hateful messages into public action, and that such messages tended to be amplified by those looking to smear entire movements.
“For people who want to believe that characterization, that our movements are inevitably and permanently hostile to us as Jews, this is catnip, right?” she said. “It’s irresistible.”
A spokeswoman for Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, said in a statement that the organization was glad Mr. James had realized he was wrong and had acknowledged that his words were harmful.
“We believe that all people have the capacity to transform — many of our own members once supported Israel’s violence against Palestinians,” the statement said, adding that “within the movement we are committed to holding one another accountable to respecting the dignity of all human beings.”
One student protester who is Jewish and who has spoken to Mr. James about the video said she believed he was committed to nonviolence and acceptance of all people. She said that he had reacted emotionally after being trolled online and that it was unfair that his decision to vent his frustration on social media was being used against him.
It remains unclear how many students are directing the Columbia protests, but Mr. James, 20, emerged as a public face of the demonstrations this week when he led a news conference to assert the demands the movement is making of the Columbia administration.
“This encampment — a peaceful, student-led demonstration — is part of the larger movement of Palestinian liberation,” Mr. James said at the conference.
In his biography on X, he calls himself an “anticapitalist” and “anti-imperialist.”
Mr. James was raised in Boston, and graduated from Boston Latin Academy, according to a 2021 interview with The Bay State Banner.
He told The Banner that at Columbia, he planned to study economics and political science. “The ultimate destination is Congress,” he said.
As a graduate of Columbia College (Class of 1991) and a peace activist who lives in Israel, I am watching videos and reports from my alma mater’s campus and wondering what I would have done if I were a student there now.
I am an activist and have been all my life. I believe strongly in the ability of grassroots movements and peaceful protest to change the world.
When I first moved to Israel, my activism was focused on feminism and religious pluralism. Today, however, I strongly believe the most pressing issue in Israel-Palestine today is solving the conflict.
Since well before the current extremist right-wing Israeli government was elected, I have been demonstrating against the occupation (later also the Nation-State Law declaring Israel officially a Jewish state) and working for Jewish-Palestinian partnership within Israel’s borders. My debut novel, “Hope Valley,” is about the friendship between a Palestinian Israeli woman and a Jewish Israeli woman in the Galilee.
I am a very active member of Standing Together, a movement of Palestinian-Israelis and Jewish-Israelis working in complete partnership towards an end to the occupation, Palestinian self-determination and a more equal, just and peaceful society within Israel. I am involved in a variety of groups and organizations committed to a vision of peace, justice and equality for all people on the land from the “River to the Sea.”
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Op-Ed continues]
And when you call out, “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here!” you are fomenting violence against and silencing other Columbia students. You may disagree with them, but does that mean they have no right to inhabit your shared campus — or even live? Do you think I, an activist in the struggle for peace and equality for all in Israel-Palestine, have a right to live?
Make no mistake; I have no problem with the keffiyehs you wear or the Palestinian flags you wave. But why is nationalist self-determination good for Palestinians and not Jews? Why is living in the Diaspora good for Jews and not Palestinians? And why do Palestinians have a right to live in security, but Jews do not? Unlike you, I do not even consider myself a nationalist. But I do believe in people’s right to live in safety, and I do not believe in double standards.
While I am an activist advocating for Palestinian rights, I also advocate for Jewish rights. While I march for a ceasefire, I also march with the families of the hostages and am volunteering to translate into English testimony from the Oct. 7 massacre — which is absolutely horrifying, even if there are those who deny it happened.
While I protest many of my government’s policies now and in the past, I do not think Jews have a moral obligation to commit suicide rather than enter sometimes tragic gray areas that are part of defending a country. Turning the other cheek is not expected of anyone anywhere. Why expect it only of Jews?
While you in the United States demand that we be sacrificial lambs, you inhabit and benefit from a country unequivocally acquired through colonialism and grown through slavery. This is not the case with Jews in Israel (although the British may have had colonialist aspirations by being here), even if agenda-driven pseudo-historians try to convince ignorant students that it is.
Israel is far from perfect. I am outraged at the Jewish-supremacist, messianic, theocratic, anti-democratic direction in which the country is currently headed. But the answer is to try and change that direction, not call for the country’s destruction.
I understand and relate to your show of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. The situation there is heartbreaking and devastating. But so is the situation here in Israel. The scale is just different, for a variety of reasons that are just as much the fault of Palestinian leadership as Israeli.
Our political leadership on both sides are using us all as pawns in this bloody conflict. It must end. They must agree on a political solution, and we, the grassroots from both nations, must demand this.
If you from abroad want to demand something, demand a resolution of the conflict and peace in the region, not the annihilation of one side. As has been often stated – there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6. What there wasn’t was a political direction from either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership to achieve long-lasting peace.
The situation here is so much more complex than you care to understand. There is a bloody conflict going on, with people suffering and dying on both sides in brutal ways, not just in the past months but for the past century. One who studies the history and present will know that both sides are culpable and responsible for the conflict and its resolution.
Student activists, I too question the Zionist project. I grew up on the Zionist narrative. But when I discovered I had been told only part of the story, my answer was not to believe the Palestinian narrative over the Zionist one — because it, too, is only part of the story. The answer is to acknowledge both stories and both people’s suffering and try to find a way to hold it all and everyone’s humanity.
My ideal is for us to all live in peace and dignity on this land from the River to the Sea. That means two states, with perhaps down the line more open borders and cooperation — if we do the work to reconcile and heal. That is what my Zionism is about. Not Jewish supremacy or theocracy or even having a Jewish state; it is about having a safe place for Jews to live. But not at the expense of another nation. And so, my vision for this place would have to be safe for everyone.
And so, if I were at Columbia today, I would not join your protests. Because now I know I do not have to choose sides. I do not even have to buy into the idea of “sides.” This is a battle between those who support violence and an all-or-nothing approach to this conflict, and those who want to find a way for us to all win out by sharing this land. It saddens me deeply that you are choosing — perhaps out of latent Jew-hatred — the way of violence and hate instead of cooperation and mutual understanding.
There are people living here in this very real place. We are not a theoretical idea. And some of us are Palestinians and Jews who are working together tirelessly to make our vision of peace and equality a reality. If you want to promote peace on this land, please support our work. What you are doing now undermines it.
Haviva Ner-David
is rabbinic founder of Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body, and Soul, on Kibbutz Hannaton. She is a certified spiritual companion with a specialty in dreamwork, working with couples and individuals. She is the author of “Dreaming Against the Current: A Rabbi’s Soul Journey,” and the novels “Hope Valley” and “To Die in Secret. “
Columbia University played an important role in my life. I spent five years in the graduate school and the school of international affairs studying for my doctorate. My mentors – Professors J.C. Hurewitz, Mark Kesselman, Charles Issawi, and others – gave me a sound foundation in the study of international relations and the Middle East.
In those years Columbia lived up to its reputation as one of the finest universities in the United States.
Dissent and protest have always been a part of the Columbia experience. I remember watching in fascination as Columbia became the epicenter of protest against the Vietnam War. The campus was always alive, as was the debate and discourse among faculty and students.
Indeed, Columbia’s core curriculum for undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences has provided generations of students with the tools for critical thinking about ideas – democracy, freedom, respective responsibilities of state and society – and the importance of respectful debate.
[The Haaretz Op-Ed continues]
Even more, some of these protestors, as well as some on the campus, are extolling what Hamas did on October 7, thus associating themselves with the slaughter and rape and hostage taking. Some are calling for “1,000 October 7s” or for a “global Intifada” whose significance goes far beyond the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Were the protestors on the campus or outside criticizing Israel over the killing of significant numbers of Palestinian civilians, were they to demand an immediate ceasefire, or were they protesting Israeli practices regarding humanitarian aid, they would surely be within their rights. Were they to insist that the university assure fair representation on panels and in conferences on the Israel-Palestine conflict, so that their voices could be heard, they would surely be within their rights. But these are not what some of the protestors are all about.
The protestors outside the gates and some on campus have attempted to hijack the protest. They have directed their venom and aggression at Jews, supporters of Israel, and anyone else who doesn’t buy into their murderous rhetoric.
I almost never post anything on social media other than articles I have written or articles by others that are worth reading. But I posted two questions the other day that demand responses from serious people who seek peace and reconciliation, and especially from the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, the representatives of the Palestinian people:
“Where are those in the Palestinian, Palestinian-American, and pro-Palestinian community who should be telling those who support Hamas and threaten Jewish students that they are hurting the Palestinian cause? At a minimum, why have you failed to condemn them and their tactics?”
As the Columbia administration and other universities grapple with this challenge, it is also important for American Jewish leaders to keep their focus on protecting free speech and academic freedom and ensuring the safety of all students – Jewish and non-Jewish – on college campuses.
It is wrong to advise students to go home and stay home. It is wrong to advise students not to apply to the best universities. It is wrong to pull support from these universities. It is wrong for politicians to try to capitalize on the situation. And it is wrong for the prime minister of Israel to make incendiary comments comparing the situation on American college campuses to Nazi Germany.
Let Columbia and other universities figure this out. Now is a time to double down on higher education and to defend the very values that universities like Columbia have been instilling in their students – critical thinking and debate about ideas and inclusivity, designed to foster creative and respectful discourse that defines a liberal education.
There is no one-size-fits-all playbook for dealing with protests that go beyond civil discourse. Each college and university is a community in which it takes the commitment of faculty, students, and administrators to try to ensure that a few intemperate activists and outside agitators do not hijack legitimate protest.
Those of us who care about peace in the Middle East and civil discourse on our college campuses must rally to support those administrators, faculty, and students who seek to advance education in an atmosphere free of threats and intimidation. We need to support and strengthen this community within our colleges and universities.
Daniel Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During a thirty-year career in diplomacy, he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and to Egypt. Twitter: @DanKurtzer
We call for the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for over 200 days. They include our own citizens. The fate of the hostages and the civilian population in Gaza, who are protected under international law, is of international concern.
We emphasize that the deal on the table to release the hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza, that would facilitate a surge of additional necessary humanitarian assistance to be delivered throughout Gaza, and lead to the credible end of hostilities. Gazans would be able to return to their homes and their lands with preparations beforehand to ensure shelter and humanitarian provisions.
We strongly support the ongoing mediation efforts in order to bring our people home. We reiterate our call on Hamas to release the hostages, and let us end this crisis so that collectively we can focus our efforts on bringing peace and stability to the region.
You’re reading the John McWhorter newsletter, for Times subscribers only. A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.
Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.
I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.
I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?
Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.
Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.
I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.
On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.
Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.
But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.
“Incorrectly, students conflate the civil rights movement with what is going on in Palestine and have digressed, unfortunately, because of an orthodoxy promoted by many of my colleagues that there are the oppressors and the oppressed,” he said. “And how you identify oppressors is how white and how rich they are. Fairly or unfairly, Israel is seen as ground zero for whiteness in how wealthy they are.”
[text of video below]
SCOTT GALLOWAY: It’s complicated. I think, one, young people have a healthy gag reflex on what people our age think. I think that’s healthy.
[The Real Clear Politics Report continues]
While it might sound paranoid, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong, I think we are being manipulated, specifically the youth, whose frame for the world is TikTok. If you look at TikTok, there are 52 videos that are pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian for every one served on Israel. I think we’re being manipulated. I think Americans are easier to fool than to convince they’re been fooled. If I were the CCP, I’d do exactly the same thing. Social media is sowing division and polarization in our society.
…
Well, Jordan was coordinating anti-drone and missile technology airborne, coordinating with Israel. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it ends up, was supportive of Israel. I’d ask these far-left groups on campus, what do their Arab brothers and sisters know that you don’t?
This is, like I said, I’ve absolutely never seen anything like it. It is rattling to Jews across the nation. I’d like to think that America is steadfast here. I think the Biden administration has done a great job. But I think young people, over time, will look back and regret their views on it. Again, I think there are outside forces at work here.
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.
“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said she was hit in the left eye by a Palestinian flag held by a demonstrator. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.
[The New York Times Report continues]
There’s a certain eagerness in some media stories to highlight Jewish students who have joined the protests as a way of acquitting anti-Israel groups of charges of antisemitism. But as Jonathan Chait astutely noted in New York magazine, “this does not settle the question of their relation to antisemitism any more than ‘Blacks for Trump’ puts to rest concerns about Republican racism.”
Others have suggested that some of the more aggressive expressions of antisemitism have come from outside agitators rather than from students themselves. Maybe, though there’s plenty of evidence of atrocious student behavior. But that still leaves open the question of why these students regularly chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” which (if they didn’t know it before) they know now is an incendiary call to violent action against Jews.
The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?
What goes for the student demonstrators is true of faculties, too. At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” Oct. 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question as to where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students — including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia — supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors?
I asked Crispe and Tartak if they had given thought to leaving Yale. “I have to stay,” Tartak told me. Crispe felt similarly. “I’m going to stay around Yale to support my peers as long as I need to,” he said. But he also had regrets.
“I entered Yale extremely proud to be one of the first Hasidic Jews to go as an undergraduate,” Crispe said. “I looked forward to sharing experiences with students from diverse backgrounds while living proudly in my own skin. What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it.”
Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.
Dear White Americans and Gen Zs who support or tolerate Hamas supporters on US campuses, a gentle reminder from a credible Arab Muslim voice from the Middle East: You are supporting a terror group with the same Islamist/ Muslim brotherhood pathological creed that brought down the twin towers in Manhattan in 2001. You would not survive a day in Gaza under Hamas, which demands that ‘infidels’ live with dignity only if they are subordinate to Islamists. You would not endure a day under the rule of these radicals.
(The X Post continues)
only to exploit the freedoms there to engage in activities that will ultimately endanger you as well? Take it from someone who knows how much hate this ideology instills in your heart, listen to those who overcome it. I am a credible voice who understands the region, the religions, and the language. I implore you to wake up because you are next. With concern, Loay Alshareef
In an incredible and rare admission, Fatah has corroborated what Israel has been saying all along: that Hamas is responsible for turmoil connected to the distribution of humanitarian aid sent into Gaza.
A Fatah TV anchor reported that throughout the war, Hamas has been committing what is essentially a triple crime — it has attacked and killed aid workers in order to control aid distribution, stolen the food and water for itself, and caused food prices to skyrocket.
Fatah-run Awdah TV host: “Hamas’ persecution of any party who is a source for distributing the [humanitarian] aid or securing it began from the start of the war, as Hamas persecuted well-known figures and teams of volunteers on the ground in mid-October [2023].
(The Algemeiner Report Continues)
Part of an interview on Al-Jazeera TV from the Gaza Strip is shown:
Woman from the Gaza Strip: “The aid isn’t reaching all the people.”
Al-Jazeera TV reporter: “Few things are arriving and they [Hamas] claim they are distributing them.”
Woman: “It is all to their [own] homes. Let Hamas catch me and shoot me and do what they want to me.”
[Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Facebook page, April 1, 2024 — emphasis added]
This is a damning indictment by Fatah, exposing Hamas’ heinous actions against humanitarian aid workers and Palestinian civilians in need of food.
World powers were quick to decry Israel for an inadvertent tragedy that killed several World Central Kitchen personnel.
These same authorities and media outlets must now condemn Hamas with equal vigor for its intentional murder of aid workers. A failure to condemn Hamas for intentional murder by the countries and organizations who condemned Israel for the accidental killing would expose once again a glaring double standard by international bodies, and especially the media, that unfortunately has accompanied this entire war.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is PMW’s Founder and Director. A version of this article originally appeared at PMW.
Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023, rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) annual audit of hate incidents that targeted the Jewish community.
The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents last year — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.
“Antisemitism is nothing short of a national emergency, a five-alarm fire that is still raging across the country and in our local communities and campuses,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement on Tuesday. “Jewish Americans are being targeted for who they are at school, at work, on the street, in Jewish institutions, and even at home.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Other figures were equally staggering, with assaults and vandalism rising by 45 percent and 69 percent, respectively, while harassment soared by 184 percent. Antisemitic incidents on college campuses, which The Algemeiner has continued to cover extensively, rose 321 percent, disrupting the studies of Jewish students and leaving them uncertain about the fate of the American Jewish community.
“The massive volume of incidents we documented in 2023 took many forms, including bomb threats and swatting campaigns, all aimed at terrorizing the community by disrupting services and activities and synagogues and other Jewish institutions across the country,” said Oren Segal, vice president of ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Our tracking of a swatting network enabled ADL to offer crucial intelligence to law enforcement, ensuring accountability for perpetrators while also preemptively alerting targeted communities and mitigating potential harm.”
The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terror group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports. At Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.
“Despite these unprecedented challenges, American Jews must not give in to fear,” Greenblatt added in Tuesday’s statement. “Even while we fight the scourge of antisemitism, we should be proud of our Jewish identities and confident of our place in American society. It may not feel so right now, but we have many more allies than enemies. And we call on all people of good will to stand with their Jewish friends and neighbors. We need your support and your allyship.”
Saudi Arabia has accused Iran of instigating the conflict in Gaza to undermine progress in reaching a normalization agreement between Riyadh and Jerusalem.
In an interview with Israeli public broadcaster Kan News on Sunday, a source from the royal family also said that Tehran promotes terrorism and suggested that Riyadh played a role in thwarting Saturday night’s drone and missile attack against Israel by the Islamic Republic and its proxies.
Notably, a recap of the interview is published prominently on the House of Saud website, which covers the royal family.
“Iran is a nation that endorses terrorism, and the world should have curtailed it much earlier,” the Saudi royal said.
In its first-ever direct attack on the Jewish state, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles on Saturday night, with the vast majority of them intercepted by Israel and allied militaries. The Kan interview appears to be the first Saudi acknowledgment that it helped fend off the attack, along with the United States, United Kingdom, Jordan and France.
The Iranian attack was in response to an alleged Israeli airstrike in Damascus earlier this month that killed a top Quds Force commander.
In what the article describes as a “subtle” acknowledgment, the source told Kan News that the Saudi air defenses automatically intercept “any suspicious entity” that enters its airspace, which could be a reference to attacks from Iran’s terror proxy the Houthis in Yemen.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“Two days before the attack, Iranian officials briefed counterparts from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries on the outlines and timing of their plan for the large-scale strikes on Israel so that those countries could safeguard airspace, the officials said. The information was passed along to the U.S., giving Washington and Israel crucial advance warning,” according to the Journal article.
“With an Iranian attack all but certain, the White House ordered the Pentagon to reposition aircraft and missile-defense resources to the region and took the lead in coordinating defensive measures between Israel and Arab governments, according to the senior Israeli official,” the article continued.
“The challenge was to bring all those countries around Israel” at a time when Israel is isolated in the region, the official said. “It was a diplomatic issue.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas led a mass invasion of southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, wounding thousands more and kidnapping some 250 others, of whom more than a hundred remain in captivity.
Riyadh put U.S.-brokered Israeli normalization talks on ice after the Oct. 7 massacre and amid the ensuing war, but has maintained that a deal is still on the table.
The Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza says it has “incomplete data” for one-third of the Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented from its current war against Israel.
The acknowledgment in a report on the social networking app Telegram last week raises anew questions about the veracity of its casualty count from the war.
The April 6 report said that Hamas had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 recorded Palestinian deaths it claims, and is missing one or more key data points including identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death.
In a report three days earlier, the ministry admitted the “incompleteness” of 12,263 records. It was not immediately clear why, after three more days, that figure dropped to 11,371.
Before its admissions of incomplete data, the ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.
David Adesnik, director of research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said, “The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work.
[The Jewish News Sybnicate Report continues]
“Moreover, this control of data extends beyond the statistics provided by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, as there is also a deliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists who have been killed by Israel in the war,” he added.
The Israel Defense Forces has said that at least 13,000 of the Palestinians killed in the war against Hamas in Gaza, and another 1,000 slain inside Israel during the Oct. 7 invasion, were terrorists.
Last month, a statistics expert asserted the Hamas claim that 70% of the casualties of the war were women and children was “statistically impossible” and “not reliable at all.”
While Israel has shown flexibility in the hopes of arriving at a hostage deal, Hamas has impeded an agreement, Matthew Miller, the U.S. State Department spokesman said on Monday.
“Israel moved a significant way in submitting that proposal,” Miller said during the department’s press briefing. “There was a deal on the table that would achieve much of what Hamas claims it wants to achieve, and they have not taken that deal.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Indirect talks that took place in Cairo, Doha and Paris ended on April 8.
Hamas said on Saturday that it reaffirms “our adherence to our demands and the national demands of our people,” with “a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation army from the entire Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced to their areas and places of residence, intensification of the entry of relief and aid and the start of reconstruction.”
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Mossad stated jointly on Sunday of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader in Gaza, that “The rejection of the proposal by the three mediators, which included the most significant flexibility on Israel’s part, proves that Sinwar does not want a humanitarian deal and the return of the hostages.”
“Israel will continue to strive to realize the objectives of the war with Hamas with full force and leave no stone unturned to return the 133 hostages from Gaza forthwith,” they added.
The IDF estimates that more than 30 of those hostages are no longer alive.
Over the past month, fighting inside Gaza has continued as described in previous reports: low intensity guerrilla warfare. Hamas and other groups conduct small-scale raids or ambushes against Israeli units and Israeli forces reciprocate. Israel has withdrawn almost all its forces from the Gaza Strip, including those in the Khan Yunis area. At present, the only permanent Israeli presence is along a line separating the northern Gaza Strip and Gaza City from the rest of the Gaza Strip. Instead of establishing a permanent presence, Israeli forces have launched a number of large raids into areas they had previously vacated. The most important and successful of these was conducted at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Acting on information that a group of terrorists had returned to Shifa Hospital to use its facilities, an Israeli force returned to the location and surrounded it. There were reportedly about 6,500 civilians in the hospital grounds, and at least 600 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, including several high-ranking officials from the political, administrative ,and military organs of those organizations.
To facilitate the operation, the IDF opened an exit route for the civilians, which included a filtration passage that enabled the detection of terrorists as they attempted to use it to escape. Along the route, leading south from Gaza City along the coast, the IDF placed food and water supplies at a series of locations for civilians to take as they passed. Especially important, given the hot weather (above average for this time of year), was the water.
The Israeli forces operating in the hospital cleared a few buildings (special forces teams combed the buildings room by room) and then brought in medical equipment (respirators, surgical equipment, etc.) and supplies, as well as Israeli doctors and medical staff. They then helped the Palestinian medical staff transfer their patients from other buildings into the cleared ones, and combed the evacuated buildings as well. In two of the buildings fighting intensified as most of the terrorists inside conducted a defensive battle. They were armed with assault rifles, light machine guns, hand grenades and explosive charges, and used hospital machines and other medical equipment to build barricades. These are the two buildings that are shown as severely damaged in media reports.
Meanwhile, other forces from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad assembled from across their hideouts in Gaza City and attempted unsuccessfully to break through the Israeli cordon to reach the hospital.
The battle ended when the last terrorist inside the hospital had been killed or surrendered. All together, inside and outside the hospital about 210 terrorists (including a few suicide bombers) were killed and about 555 surrendered (another approximately 365 individuals were detained and released after it was clarified they were ordinary civilians). As noted, some of those arrested were high-ranking members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. No civilians were killed in the fighting. Large stockpiles of weapons were captured, as well as the equivalent of about $3.25 million in Israeli shekels, Jordanian dinars and American dollars. Three Israeli soldiers were killed, and a few dozen wounded during this battle.
The fact that so many terrorists, senior commanders and officials had congregated in the hospital suggests (as some of them admitted in video recordings of their interrogations) that they felt safe there and were completely surprised by the Israeli action.
Simultaneously with the hospital operation, a similar operation was conducted by Israeli forces in Khan Yunis. A neighborhood that had been taken, cleared and evacuated by Israeli forces was raided again, netting dozens of killed or captured terrorists who had returned to the evacuated area.
Also, over the past week Israeli forces have increased their raids into the Nuseyrat area in central Gaza, between Khan Yunis and Gaza City. To date, Israeli forces have not attempted to conduct a full-scale operation in this area, conducting only limited ground raids and air strikes. Since the last report more than six weeks ago, 15 Israeli soldiers were killed and approximately 1,000 Hamas and other armed groups’ terrorists were killed.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
To summarize: there are definitely insufficient supplies of food in some areas inside the Gaza Strip, but not because of Israel. There are areas where food is sufficient, even plentiful. The problem is internal distribution, which is plagued by a mixture of incompetence, corruption and deliberate actions by Hamas.
Dr. Eado Hecht, a senior research fellow at the BESA Center, is a military analyst focusing mainly on the relationship between military theory, military doctrine, and military practice. He teaches courses on military theory and military history at Bar-Ilan University, Haifa University, and Reichman University and in a variety of courses in the Israel Defense Forces. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
Patrick Dai, 21, formerly a junior at Cornell University and originally from Pittsford, New York, pleaded guilty today to posting threats to kill or injure another person using interstate communications.
“This defendant is being held accountable for vile, abhorrent, antisemitic threats of violence levied against members of the Cornell University Jewish community,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “In the elevated threat environment that we have seen since Oct. 7th, we have been vigilant and stand ready to hold perpetrators of hate crimes accountable. Antisemitic threats of violence are unacceptable in our society, and we will not tolerate this conduct. Particularly at institutions of higher learning, people should feel safe to pursue educational opportunities. The Justice Department takes seriously our obligation to protect students from hatred and harassment and will continue to use every tool available to ensure that students are able to feel safe and secure.”
“Patrick Dai used the internet to make horrific threats to kill and injure Jewish students attending Cornell University. The federal felony conviction he sustains today underscores that those who break the law by making violent threats will be found and prosecuted, even if they attempt to hide by posting anonymously,” said U.S. Attorney Carla Freedman for the Northern District of New York. “The rapid and coordinated investigation by the FBI, New York State Police and Cornell University Police led to Dai’s identification and arrest in a matter of days, bringing relief to both his classmates and the community he terrorized by his actions. His guilty plea today means he will be held accountable for his threats against members of his own Cornell University community.”
[The Office of Public Affairs Report continues]
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Geoffrey J. L. Brown, Stephen C. Green and Michael D. Gadarian for the Northern District of New York are prosecuting the case, with assistance from the Justice Department’s National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section and with assistance from the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section.
Nili Margalit, 42, on a tour of Europe to raise awareness of the 133 Israeli hostages still in captivity, told France’s Le Point magazine on Monday that it was Palestinian Arab civilians, not Hamas, who abducted her from her home in Nir Oz on Oct. 7.
JNS TV | Freed #Hamas hostage #MiaSchem describes her time as a captive of the terrorist group.
Alex @traiman explains the bigger implications.
WATCH NOW on JLMinute!https://t.co/HGGbrQf37e
— Jewish News Syndicate (@JNS_org) January 2, 2024
“They negotiated with Hamas to sell me. When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel,” she said.
She was then transferred to a car at the border and taken to Khan Yunis. At that point, she was “sold” to Hamas.
Margalit was taken to a “reception room” in a tunnel, which held about 30 people, some of whom she recognized from Nir Oz.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel,” she said.
Margalit described the day of the attack. At 6:30 am she jumped up when she heard the alarms warning of incoming rockets and ran to her safe room. WhatsApp messages flooded in, some warning of terrorists in her kibbutz.
At 9:00 am, the terrorists, actually civilians, reached her home. They set fire inside her house and pulled her out of her safe room.
They put her on a golf cart, covered her in a white sheet and drove her to the Gaza Strip border.
She was surrounded by shouting Palestinian Arab civilians with Kalashnikov rifles.
A spokesman for the political wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, admitted during an IDF interrogation that the terror group uses “all hospitals in the Gaza strip” for its operations and that it tried to hide the fact that one of its rockets struck Al-Ahli Arab Hospital at the beginning of the war.
In footage released by the IDF on Monday, Tarek Abu Shaluf states that the explosion at Al-Ahli hospital on 17 October was caused by “a local rocket”, but that “we said it was Israeli”.
“To erase this story, the movement [Islamic Jihad] made some moves, it made up a story that the rocket belonged to the occupation [Israel] and that the target was the [hospital] building,” Abu Shaluf says on camera.
“They relied on some of the stories from the international stories, from the international press.”
A statement released by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, immediately after the blast claimed the explosion was caused by an Israeli rocket that fell short and hit the hospital, killing more than 500 Palestinians.
Israel stated the misfired rocket came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and released drone footage and communications intercepts to supporting this. US officials investigating the explosion said the information indicated Israel was “not responsible” for the blast.
However, by the time this information had been released and analysed, international media outlets had reported Israel was behind the deadly explosion.
This false version of events swiftly spread on social media, with correspondents at major news outlets including the BBCsuggesting Israel was responsible.
[The Jewish Chronicle Report continues]
When asked by the interrogator which hospitals Islamic Jihad and Hamas operate out of, Abu Shaluf said “all of the hospitals” in Gaza “because there is internet there 24 hours, there is electricity 24 hours”.
He added that the groups occupy one or two rooms in each ward without needing to shut down an entire department.
The Al-Ahli Hospital explosion sent shockwaves around the world at the start of the war, with the misreporting strongly influencing public opinion at the time.
Immediately after the explosion, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison, who was reporting live from Israel, told viewers: “It’s hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes.”
Hamas quickly claimed that “the massacre at the Baptist Hospital is a crime of genocide” and blamed Israel. It also called on Arab and Islamic countries to “intervene immediately” and urged Arabs in Judea and Samaria to attack Israeli forces to “avenge the massacre”.
Jonathan Munro, the deputy chief executive of BBC News, later said Donnison “was wrong to speculate about the cause of the explosion of the hospital” but insisted: “At no stage did he actually say it was caused by the Israelis.”
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records. It is unclear why, after just three more days, the number fell to 11,371 — a decrease of more than 900 records.
Prior to its admissions of incomplete data, the health ministry asserted that the information in more than 15,000 fatality records had stemmed from “reliable media sources.” However, the ministry never identified the sources in question and Gaza has no independent media.
Expert Analysis
“The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. For months, U.S. media have taken for granted that the ministry’s top-line figure for casualties was reliable enough to include in daily updates on the war. Even President Biden has cited its numbers. Now we’re seeing that a third or more of the ministry’s data may be incomplete at best — and fictional at worst.” — David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research
“It is important to recognize that Hamas is deeply invested in shaping the narrative that emerges from Gaza, particularly regarding the number of casualties in the war. Moreover, this control of data extends beyond the statistics provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry, as there is also a deliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists who have been killed by Israel in the war, potentially numbering more than 10,000.” — Joe Truzman, Senior Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal
A Record of False Claims
On October 16, the health ministry told global media that an Israeli airstrike was responsible for an explosion that killed 500 Palestinians at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza. U.S. media quickly reported the story even though it became clear within hours there was no evidence to support claims of an airstrike or a death toll close to 500. Soon, evidence emerged showing that a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists was nearly certain to have caused a blast in the hospital’s parking lot. An unclassified U.S. intelligence report on October 18 said the blast likely caused between 100 to 300 deaths, and it leaned towards casualty estimates at “the low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum.”
Nevertheless, the health ministry does not identify the individuals who died as a result of errant Palestinian fire, even though the Israel Defense Forces reported that 12 percent of rockets fired during the first month of the war fell inside Gaza — more than 1,000 total misfires.
Columbia University has suspended and evicted from campus housing four members of an anti-Zionist student group that held an unauthorized event which featured a member of a Palestinian terrorist organization.
The members of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) helped to plan and organize “Resistance 101,” which took place on March 24 and had as its keynote speaker Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Khaled Barakat, according to The Columbia Spectator. Per the suspension, the students are barred from living on campus and attending class. Access to other campus facilities, including dining halls, is also in abeyance pending the final outcome of the disciplinary process.
Founded in 1967, the PFLP is an international terrorist group that has carried out attacks against Israeli civilians and opposed negotiating with the Jewish state to establish peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The group’s acts of terror included hijacking civilian airplanes and mass shootings. It was officially designated as a terrorist organization by the US Department of State in 1997.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
The Columbia University Apartheid Divest Coalition is a proxy group created by members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is currently serving a suspension for numerous violations of school rules. On Thursday, The Spectator reported that members of the coalition who have been suspended said their punishments are needlessly severe.
“Columbia is making us homeless, taking away our campus jobs, our sole source of income, taking away our scholarships,” one of the students promulgated during Thursday’s protest. Another said, “I received 24-hour notice that I, a full-scholarship, federal-work-study-receiving student with disabilities and housing accommodation, will be evicted from my university housing. This was all done with no hearing and no semblance of due process shame on Columbia.”
In Friday’s statement, Shafik defended the punishments, explaining that “rules and policies matter” and that “the university will only thrive if we can build a strong foundation of respect — both for each other and for our rules.”
The suspensions followed numerous allegations that, since Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, the university has refused to address antisemitic rhetoric and violence on campus and allegedly coddled students engaging in antisemitic behavior.
In February, a student group, Students Against Antisemitism (SAA), claimed in a lawsuit filed with the help of the StandWithUs Legal Center for Justice that pro-Hamas students beat up five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library and that another attacked a Jewish student with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“I am being persecuted by Columbia, which is retaliating against me based on groundless complaints,” Davidai said in a lengthy statement posted on X/Twitter last month. “I spoke up against the university. And now the university is weaponizing an internal investigation to silence me. In so doing, Columbia reveals the depths of its hostility toward its Jewish community: ‘How dare a Jewish professor speak up on behalf of Jewish students who are under siege!’”
In an emotional hearing at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, former hostages held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza recounted harrowing tales of sexual harassment and abuse, as families of those still held captive pleaded for the Israeli government to do more to secure their release.
“As hard as it is to say, every girl there goes through sexual harassment one way or another,” said Mia Regev, who was freed in November after 50 days in captivity. Fighting back tears, she urged lawmakers to take action, saying, “Your job is to bring them back home.”
Sharon Aloni-Cunio, also released in November, said “the fear is endless” for female captives. “To be a woman in captivity is to be in constant fear; it can’t be described in words,” she told the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women’s Status and Gender Equality. “The terrorist is the sole arbiter of your fate.”
She added: “The feeling of helplessness is one I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Each moment feels never-ending and every movement of the terrorists causes stomach cramping because who knows what might happen.”
Mothers and sisters of the remaining hostages stood with their loved ones’ pictures outside the committee room, some of them wearing clothes that appeared to be stained with blood. Liri Albag’s mother, Shira, said at the start of the hearing, “She’s in hell. Does anyone understand what it means to be in hell?”
“Our daughters experience daily suffering there. They are harmed in body and soul. My Liri was, and still is — I don’t know because I have no information about her — a slave in the homes of Gazans,” she said.
“All the decision-makers — you need to understand that every day you witness the rape that happens in Gaza,” she continued. “These girls are raped daily and everyone ignores them. You close your eyes. I hear Liri every day screaming for help: ‘Mom, save me already.’ Liri’s soul is crushed, and I cannot speak about what has happened to her body.”
Yaffa Ohad, the aunt of Noa Argamani, attended the hearing instead of Argamani’s mother, who is dying of cancer. Ohad fainted during the hearing and required medical attention. Before she fainted, Ohad said since the testimony of Amit Soussana, the first hostage to go public with her testimony of sexual torture during her captivity, had “wiped the family out. The thoughts will not leave us alone.”
Soussana, a 40-year-old lawyer from Kfar Aza, told the New York Times that her Hamas captor forced her to perform a “sexual act on him” at gunpoint among other incidents of sexual assault, in a child’s bedroom.
Ohad also said that, due to the recently released confession of a Palestinian terrorist who said he raped Israeli women, “our days and nights have been intolerable.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people and took 253 others as hostages during their Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Over 100 hostages were released in November as part of a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas brokered by foreign mediators.
Tuesday’s hearing underscored the mounting pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to strike a deal with Hamas for the release of the civilians and soldiers still held in Gaza. Some relatives accused officials of failing to act with sufficient urgency as the 134 hostages approach 200 days since their captivity.
No government ministers attended the session.
“We have all been exposed to the testimonies. We need to bring them home. It is in our hands,” committee chairwoman Pnina Tamano-Shata said.
While the focus was on the plight of female hostages, families said male captives also face severe mistreatment.
The UN concluded in a report released last month that there is “clear and convincing information” that Hamas is perpetrating sexual violence against hostages in Gaza. The same UN report also found that Hamas likely committed widespread acts of gang-rape and torture against women on Oct. 7.
Mounting evidence has documented Hamas’ systematic use of torture and sexual violence, including mass rape, against the Israeli people during the onslaught.
Videos taken by Palestinian terrorists and released in Arabic show themselves in civilian clothing barricading in and around Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City while firing guns and explosives at Israeli soldiers — a different story than the one that Hamas and its allies have told the world in English.
For the last two weeks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been operating in and around Al-Shifa, the largest medical facility in Gaza before the current war, after Palestinian terrorists regrouped there following Israel’s operation in the compound in November.
In the fall, Israel had provided weeks of warning prior to entering the complex. “They [the terrorists] left there because they knew we were coming,” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said. “And this time, we did something else.”
Israel has long said Al-Shifa was home to Hamas’ main base of operations, as well as cover for the terrorist group’s complex tunnel system and a hideout for fuel, water, food, and other supplies that were being withheld from Gaza’s civilian population. According to the US, Hamas used the medical facility to run military operations and even hold hostages seized by the terrorists during their Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
The IDF on Monday withdrew from Al-Shifa after a two-week raid, claiming Israeli soldiers killed more than 200 gunmen and captured about 900 suspects, of whom more than 500 were confirmed to be terrorist operatives.
Despite Article 19 of the Geneva Convention stating that “protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy,” some news reports framed Israel’s operation as a “massacre” that targeted doctors and patients rather than terrorists. Additionally, Hamas has told reporters in English language outlets that there were no militants in Al-Shifa.
[The Algemeiner Reportcontinues]
Other video, released by Hamas, shows terrorists firing mortars at Israeli troops around Al-Shifa, with the following caption added by an X/Twitter user: “Qassam mortar barrages crush the Zionists’ pigs in the vicinity” of Al-Shifa.
Meanwhile, Hamas has openly acknowledged its presence at Al-Shifa — in Arabic.
“Since Monday dawn, we have been engaged in fierce clashes with enemy forces in Al-Shifa Hospital, and we have caused deaths and injuries among its ranks,” the terrorist group said in a statement last month.
In its latest raid on the medical complex, the IDF said some “very significant” Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders were captured. At least four Hamas leaders were killed — including the deputy commander of its Gaza City rocket unit and an operative who helped plan a terror attack that killed four Israelis.
Hamas commander Raad Thabet was also killed in the raid. Hagari described Thabet as one of the most senior Hamas military commanders who had been in close contact with the terrorist group’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar and military wing head Mohammed Deif.
If you are a true pro-Palestinian, you should condemn Islamic terror group Hamas. You should demonstrate against Hamas. You should want better education for children in Gaza, not indoctrination. You should clearly say that you do not stand by what happened to Israeli women on October 7.
Last week we had a conversation in the European Parliament about women rights, about rape as a weapon of war and about antisemitism in Europe. This was my contribution.
[The New York Times Report continues]
[The Instagram Post continues]
We must have a society with mutual respect. We must have the courage to defend European values.
As member of European Parliament, I will always be a voice for justice and equality.
The economy of the Gaza Strip has been ravaged by the Hamas terror group, whose years-long rule over the Palestinian enclave has devastated the lives of the local population independent of Israeli military operations, according to a new study.
The Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli think tank, released a new report showing the detrimental impact that Hamas has had on the livelihoods of Palestinians in Gaza. According to the study — titled “The Palestinian Economy and Palestinian Workers on the Eve of the Iron Swords War” — gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Gaza was roughly the same as that in the West Bank in 2005 at $17,700, right before Israel fully withdrew all its soldiers and civilian settlers from Gaza. Once the withdrawal occurred, however, GDP per capita dropped drastically, falling to $5,500, or only about 30 percent of GDP in the West Bank.
The numbers since then have only gotten worse in Gaza, where the unemployment rate has skyrocketed, reaching well above even the high rate in the West Bank.
For the 25-34 age range, for example, the unemployment rate for Palestinians in the West Bank is 10 percent. In Gaza, the figure stands at 46 percent.
In the 35-44 and 45-54 age ranges, according to the study, Palestinians in the West Bank have an unemployment rate at around 6 percent, while in Gaza it is more than 20 percent.
For women in Gaza, unemployment across age groups sits around 25 percent on average.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Economic activity in Gaza is down 87 percent, while in the West Bank it has decreased by 24 percent, which the study said is “a result of the cancellation of work permits for over 90 percent of the Palestinian workers employed in Israel.”
Following Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, when Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, killed over 1,200 people, and took 253 others as hostages, Israel for security reasons canceled the permits of more than 130,000 workers, including many in the construction industry — a move that has also hurt Israel.
In sum, the new report painted a bleak picture of what Hamas’ brutal rule has inflicted upon Gazans, as well as the intense work that will be needed to rebuild Gaza once the war ends. Israel has made clear that any post-war arrangement in Gaza must not include Hamas in power.
Peter Samuelson, Founder of People4Peace, leads a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit as a voice to educate and enlighten audiences worldwide about the Middle East, particularly regarding Israel’s challenges and the threat of Antisemitism to Jews around the globe.
I had seen the signs. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists waving their colors and banners down the road from me across the freeway overpass. Rising tides of anti-Israel actions on college campuses. Antisemitic tropes thrown around casually and without truth. Then October 7 happened. It seemed like we were all cast back into the 1940s when Jews were last subject to mass slaughter.
I quickly convened professionals from law, media, education, the sciences, government relations, psychology and communications to unite and form People4Peace to help tell the stories of real people in the wake of the horrific Hamas attacks on civilians. Our coalition went public using traditional media, digital channels and social platforms to emphasize Hamas’ much stated goal — the genocide of the Jewish people — on the one hand and the values that have guided American foreign policy since World War II on the other.
Our website is stocked daily with verified news articles, trending stories, hostage information, humanitarian spotlights, videos, talking-points, and more, to counter the diatribe of lies and misinformation spread virally. We feature real and honest voices who are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, Israeli and Western. Truth, not lies. And we quote Hamas’ words when it makes genocidal statements, vowing to repeat its terrorism while hiding behind and under innocent children.
Since 10/7, some of us have seen the shocking video footage of the murders by thousands of Hamas terrorists from Gaza who invaded Israel and brutally killed over 1,200 people. We have seen Hamas bodycam footage of infants killed in their beds, women raped and their bodies desecrated, civilians — including the elderly and the disabled — tortured and maimed. Two Hundred Twenty victims from more than 40 countries abducted to Gaza as hostages by butchers following the written battle commands of Hamas.
When 85-year-old Israeli hostage Yocheved Lifshitz was released she described her experience as “hell.” Even as Hamas continues to hold nearly 100 hostages, younger Americans especially seem to have forgotten that Israel has a right to exist and the obligation to defend itself against terror. Likewise, they also don’t seem to understand that Hamas has time and again rejected peace with Israel, instead using Palestinian civilians as human shields, which is a war crime. When and why was critical thinking discarded?
Until it is eliminated, Hamas continues to remain the greatest threat to Palestinian self-determination and the Palestinian right to live in dignity and peaceful coexistence with its neighbor.
Israel cannot negotiate with the murderers of its children. At the same time, American youth have shown growing dissatisfaction with Israel and are confused by historical events, as reported in a December 2023 Economist/YouGov poll showing 50% of 18-29 demographic either believes the Holocaust is a myth (20%) or are unsure (30%). A growing segment of this age group also thinks that 10/7 was a hoax or false flag operation, giving credence to the unprecedented mis- and dis-information online.
In the coming weeks People4Peace will be releasing important information to identify exactly why young people under 30 are responding as they are.
Our study will be used to develop key messages to correct misinformation and then deploy partners with access to that demographic to distribute messages to counter the rhetoric.
In order to address Israel’s “messaging problem” to counter anti-Zionism and antisemitism, better understand why young people are vulnerable to misinformation, and produce well-crafted, well-tested messages to persuade today’s younger generations, we have employed a research team that has many decades of experience in public messaging, psychology, and the study of the unconscious mind.
Our experts are using empirical data to understand how messaging connects with targeted audiences and we believe we are the only organization that has identified the specifics to study and report these findings. We will create and deliver even more powerful and effective messaging.
Many of us realize Hamas presents a clear and present danger to the U.S., Israel, and the world. Our study will inform the next generation so that they can recognize the truth, and finally believe it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Media executive, philanthropist, producer of 27 motion pictures, some award winning. Father of 4.
The claim that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” is often used as a defense by anti-Israel activists. Even if this were true — and in most cases, it is not — the claim still presupposes that by virtue of not being antisemitic, anti-Zionism is therefore a normal and legitimate political position.
Anti-Zionism, however, is a fundamentally illegitimate and abhorrent ideology in its own right.
Having fulfilled its purpose with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and its acceptance at the United Nations, “Zionism” means that the Jewish State should continue to exist — like every other internationally-recognized country.
The term Zionism has no relevant meaning anymore, besides upholding the continued existence of Israel.
The “anti-Zionist” movement today demands the opposite. Aside from being an explicit rejection of the entire post-World War II international order in its call to destroy a long-standing UN member state, anti-Zionism is functionally a call for the death, expulsion, or subjugation of all Israel’s Jewish citizens.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
The despicable ideology of anti-Zionism comes in two variants, both of which are based on distinct delusions that nevertheless would lead to the same horrific outcome.
The first and more honest of these strains is that of the Arab and Muslim world, which generally believes, incorrectly, that all Israeli Jews are foreign “colonialists” and therefore all dual citizens with second passports, and that if they are killed and terrorized enough, the remainder will eventually decide it is not worth the trouble and return to their countries of origin.
In fact, 20% or less of Israel’s population have more than one passport; most Israelis were born there and have never lived anywhere else. Additionally, Israelis have no common country of origin, and no country would be willing to take in millions of Jewish refugees. Finally, Jewish national identity is real, and Jews are deeply attached to Israel, so Israelis will fight resolutely and, because they have nowhere to go, desperately in its defense.
This strain of anti-Zionism, which encompasses almost the entire Palestinian national movement, has made it quite clear for decades in word and deed that the entirety of the land “from the river to the sea” must be cleansed of Jews, one way or another.
The October 7 massacre and kidnapping and the consequent humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a result of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas are the direct result of this strain of anti-Zionism. So is the entire nearly century-long Palestinian predicament. Anti-Zionism, not Zionism, has been the cause of every Palestinian refugee and death since before the establishment of Israel.
The second strain of anti-Zionism is the even more delusional Western form, the advocates of which insist that all they want is to dissolve Israel into a single “democratic” state of Palestine, with equal rights for both Jews and Arabs. Of course, there is no prospect of any such “democratic” Palestine: only the brutal, theocratic dictatorship of the terrorist organization Hamas or the thuggish autocracy of the PLO.
These Western anti-Zionists are apparently unaware that fewer than 10% of Palestinians support such a goal. Moreover, not only is much of the Palestinian national movement eliminationist, as mentioned above, but according to surveys on traditional antisemitic beliefs unrelated to Israel or its activities, Palestinians are among the most antisemitic people in the world.
Why Israel’s Jews would repudiate their national identity and suicidally dissolve their state to become a minority among such a people, is a question these anti-Zionists appear too detached from reality to answer.
The bottom line is that Israel has existed as a legal fact for 75 years, and calling for its destruction or dissolution is extreme, immoral, illegitimate, and a recipe for endless violence.
If the massacres and kidnappings on October 7 and the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s war of self-defense in Gaza are not desirable outcomes — and if people still believe in the international order and the illegitimacy of advocating genocide and the destruction of recognized UN member states — then anti-Zionist advocacy of any sort must be socially and politically stigmatized regardless of whether anti-Zionism is considered antisemitic.
*Oved Lobel is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).
The party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is now blaming Hamas for the “catastrophe” unfolding in the Gaza Strip in the wake of the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The criticism from Fatah, which also includes swipes at Hamas leadership living lavishly in Qatar and the group’s ties to Iran, comes after Hamas denounced the appointment of new Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa, according to the Jerusalem Post.
[The Fox News Report continues]
Fatah also said, “[I]t seems that the comfortable life that this [Hamas] leadership lives in seven-star hotels has blinded it from what is right,” and questioned why they would reside outside of the Gaza Strip while Palestinians face a “brutal war of extermination.”
Hamas, following the appointment of Mustafa on Thursday, argued it was an “individual decision” that creates a “deepening of division at a pivotal historic moment,” the Post reported.
Hamas reportedly called for a unified leadership and “free, democratic elections.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas appoints Mohammad Mustafa as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on March 14. (Reuters/Palestinian president office)
In a statement announcing the appointment, Abbas asked Mustafa – his longtime economic adviser – to put together plans to re-unify administration in the West Bank and Gaza, lead reforms in the government, security services and economy, and fight corruption.
“The United States will be looking for this new government to deliver on policies and implementation of credible and far-reaching reforms. A reformed Palestinian Authority is essential to delivering results for the Palestinian people and establishing the conditions for stability in both the West Bank and Gaza,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said.
Mustafa was born in the West Bank town of Tulkarem in 1954 and earned a doctorate in business administration and economics from George Washington University. He has held senior positions at the World Bank and previously served as deputy prime minister and economy minister. He is currently the chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund.
Information on the latest poll of American attitudes on Israel, Hamas, and Gaza can be found here: “Vast Majority of American Voters Back Israel in War Again Hamas, New Poll Reveals,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, February 28, 2024:
A heavy majority of respondents — 78 percent — agreed that Hamas needed to be removed from governing Gaza. Asked about who should administer the territory after the war, 34 percent answered Israel, while 39 percent expressed support for a new authority created by Arab states. Only 28 percent believed that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) should govern in a post-war scenario.
Nearly four out of five Americans polled believe that Hamas should be removed altogether from any future position of authority in Gaza. As for alternatives, more than one-third wanted Israel to administer Gaza (which the Israelis do not want to do; they only want to ensure that Hamas does not make a comeback in the Strip). Nearly 40 percent want the Arab states — meaning the rich Arab states that will be largely responsible for the reconstruction in Gaza that will take years — to appoint a new authority in Gaza, neither Hamas nor the PA, but a group of technocrats whom the Arab donor states can keep a close eye on, making sure that there is no repetition of the colossal corruption that has been such a feature of Hamas rule in Gaza, where just three of its leaders — Khaled Meshaal, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mousa abu Marzouk — managed to steal for themselves a total of $11 billion. And Americans are suspicious, too, of the Palestinian Authority, because it has been a despotism ruled by the corrupt Mahmoud Abbas, who with his sons Tarek and Yasser has acquired a family fortune of $400 million. Abbas is in the nineteenth year of his four-year-term. When dissidents against his rule acquire a following, he does not hesitate to murder them, as he ordered the murder of the late Nizar Banat. Only 28 percent of those polled saw any role at all for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war ends.
The poll also examined voter attitudes towards the wider region, with 80 percent agreeing that US forces in the Middle East are facing attacks from local terrorist groups. US President Joe Biden’s policy towards Iran has also attracted significant criticism, with 54 percent answering that the US response to attacks launched by Iranian-backed terrorist organizations in Yemen, Syria and Iraq had been “too weak.” Pressed further on whether Biden’s Iran policy had been “successful,” 61 percent answered negatively….
More than half of those polled think that Biden has been “too weak” in responding to attacks by Iran-backed terrorists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It is obvious that the attacks on the Houthis have had no effect in slowing down, much less in ending, attacks by the Houthis on commercial shipping near and in the Red Sea.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
However, a majority of 18-24 year olds — 53 percent — expressed backing for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza irrespective of whether the hostages are released, while the majority of older voters remained opposed. Among the over 55s, more than 80 percent said they were opposed to a ceasefire absent the release of the hostages….
This is the only response that is a bit worrisome. A slight majority — 53 percent — of the youngest voters support an immediate ceasefire, whether Hamas releases the hostages or not. Clearly the freeing of the hostages does not loom as large in the minds of the young as it does among the older people polled, A reflection, perhaps, of the wisdom that some say comes with age?
More than half of the young voters, in the 18-34 age groups, want Israel to continue its ground invasion, which means, since the poll was taken on February 20-21, they support an attack on Hamas operatives in Rafah.
The younger voters are still on Israel’s side. The two key figures are these: Of the 18-24 age group, 72 percent support Israel, and of the 25-34 age group, 66 percent support Israel. And that is despite the malign coverage in so much of the media.
I recently watched a YouTube video filmed last year in which a Jewish woman tried to have a respectful conversation with a virulently anti-Israel student at UC Berkeley.
I was in awe of her courage, grace and cogent arguments. She didn’t need to be there, on a campus where a riot recently broke out against Jewish students in response to an Israeli speaker, and in a city whose school district is now being accused of knowingly tolerating “antisemitic bullying,” according to a federal complaint.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Op-Ed continues]
A prolific actress, producer and activist, Tishby, a Tel Aviv native now living in Los Angeles, has completed her second book, “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew,” co-written with best-selling author Emmanuel Acho and available in late April.
Witnessing Tishby’s bravery also made me think about actress and activist Debra Messing. Like Tishby, she confronts vicious antisemites with resilience and grace.
Messing, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, spoke at the Nov. 14 rally for Israel in Washington, D.C., and recently visited Israel. She sat with soldiers and victims of Oct. 7, simply offering to listen to their stories. I adore Messing for this, and for the fact that she is constantly posting Instagram videos reminding all of us, especially young Jews, not to be afraid.
And then there’s my childhood friend Mandana Dayani, a visionary entrepreneur and creator and co-founder of the “I am a voter” organization, which promotes democracy by encouraging people to vote.
Dayani, who escaped post-revolutionary Iran as a little girl with her family, also recently traveled to Israel, visiting the remains of devastated kibbutzim in the south and speaking with victims of Oct. 7. Dayani is fearless when it comes to exposing antisemitism and defending (and celebrating) Jews and Judaism, especially on social media. She shares this wonderful fearlessness with Tishby and Messing.
I decided to ask each of these extraordinary women two simple questions. Of course, the female victims of Oct. 7, the female IDF soldiers and medics, the mothers and wives of slain soldiers and so many more Israeli women are heroes who should be honored each day.
But day in and day out, women like Dayani, Messing and Tishby are battling antisemites and putting much on the line in defense of Israel and the Jewish people. Their responses to my questions reminded me of “Eshet Chayil,” King Solomon’s tribute to the Jewish woman in the Book of Proverbs, which begins by asking, “A woman of valor who can find? Her value far exceeds that of gems.”
Q: For years, you have been targeted online by relentless antisemites. From where do you derive such admirable courage and clarity to confront one antisemite or ill-informed person after another?
Mandana Dayani: “Everything I have ever done has been rooted in my commitment to upholding humanity and advocating for more rights for more people. And as we see misinformation being weaponized to divide us and propaganda being deployed with the clear agenda to delegitimize Israel and dehumanize Jews, I refuse to be a participant in the dissemination of more hate and divisive language in this world.
“Progress is not taking rights from one group of people to give them to another. The violence and targeting of Jews today is not activism. It is a witch-hunt fueled by bots, propaganda and an alarming mental health crisis around the world.
“[The Jewish News Syndicate Op-Ed continues]
“When people ask me how I’m such a strong woman, I literally brush them off and send them to my mother, because she is the fiercest woman I have ever met. She’s never met a fight that she didn’t want to take on and it’s always for what she thought was right. I think I get my strength from her, along with my sisters, my dad and my entire family.
“I also have a very strong compass of what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s why I’m unmovable on those issues. I don’t get fazed out by bad comments or when people attack me. I just know that we need to be strong and united and fight for what we know is right.
“There is an unprecedented level of Jew-hate that is rising right now and the only way that we can fight against it is to be firmly planted in who we are and stand up against it and not be afraid. So, I honestly attribute all of that to my mother, Yael Artzi. She is just incredible.”
Q: How has your identity as a Jewish woman inspired and informed your tireless advocacy on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people?
Dayani: “My identity as a mother and activist is deeply rooted in the influences of the strong, brave matriarchs of my family. Our family was held together by their unwavering courage, fortitude and commitment to upholding the traditions that defined us.
“So many of the values of our culture—welcoming the stranger, tikkun olam [repairing the world], compassion, curiosity, hope, resilience and a commitment to upholding family and community—all define my activism.
“My advocacy has always tried to perpetuate these values and to bring in others to do the same—to advocate for humanity as a collective. I sort of see advocacy like a Shabbat dinner table—we always leave the door open and seats available at the table so others can feel welcome and join in.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Op-Ed continues]
“As someone who fled the terrorist leadership of my homeland [Iran] for the opportunity to live safely as a Jew, I believe that my safety and security are inextricably linked to Israel. And I am never going to stop advocating for a world free of that same terrorism that seeks to destroy all the values I mentioned above and democracies around the world.”
Messing: “I was raised by two very proud Zionist parents. They taught me that it is our responsibility as Jews in the Diaspora to protect Israel. I was taught that Israel is precious.
“I am a proud Jew and it is impossible for me to see the massacre of our people by a terrorist group and not scream out that it is wrong. I know our history of persecution and feel a new potent unity amongst our very diverse Jewish community. I will always stand with the Jewish people and the Jewish homeland. We are all intertwined.”
Tishby: “I talk about my identity a lot in my first book. My identity was shaped more as a secular Zionist than as being Jewish. I grew up in a very secular family, I always tell people I had never been to a synagogue before I moved to Los Angeles. It’s a beautiful thing because it allowed me to reach my Jewish identity from an independent place and find it for myself.
“I think that living in America as a Jewish person, as an Israeli, after taking being Jewish for granted for so many years, allowed me to connect to it at an entirely different level.
“I did an event a couple of years ago and this rabbi came up to me and said, “I read your book, and do you know why God invented America? So, Israelis can remember that they’re Jewish.”
I started laughing, but it resonated with me because my Jewish identity was essentially shaped after moving to the Diaspora and finding for myself how brilliant and inspiring and beautiful and smart and deep, ancient, diverse and poetic our culture and traditions are. It is such a blessing.”
Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X and Instagram @TabbyRefael.
The vast bulk of American voters back Israel in its bid to oust Hamas from Gaza, with clear majorities expressing support for Israel’s ongoing military operations alongside opposition to a ceasefire that does not involve the release of more than 100 hostages still held captive by the terrorist group, according to a new Harvard-Harris poll released this week.
Asked whether they back Israel or Hamas more in the current conflict, 82 percent of voters chose Israel. A further 68 percent agreed that Israel was trying to avoid inflicting civilian casualties in Gaza as it seeks to eradicate Hamas from the territory.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
A heavy majority of respondents — 78 percent — agreed that Hamas needed to be removed from governing Gaza. Asked about who should administer the territory after the war, 34 percent answered Israel, while 39 percent expressed support for a new authority created by Arab states. Only 28 percent believed that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) should govern in a post-war scenario.
The poll also examined voter attitudes towards the wider region, with 80 percent agreeing that US forces in the Middle East are facing attacks from local terrorist groups. US President Joe Biden’s policy towards Iran has also attracted significant criticism, with 54 percent answering that the US response to attacks launched by Iranian-backed terrorist organizations in Yemen, Syria and Iraq had been “too weak.” Pressed further on whether Biden’s Iran policy had been “successful,” 61 percent answered negatively.
The poll results are likely to cheer Israeli leaders and Jewish communities in the US amid a major spike in antisemitism and visceral attacks, especially on college campuses and on social media, on the Jewish state’s right to exist in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the poll in a riposte on Tuesday to Biden’s claim in a TV interview that Israel is going to lose support globally because of its “incredibly conservative government.”
“We have significant support in this area,” Netanyahu said. “This gives us another source of strength to continue our war against Hamas until total victory.”
While concern has been regularly voiced since Oct. 7 about growing hostility to Israel among younger voters, the Harvard-Harris poll demonstrated solid levels of support among these demographics, if not quite as concentrated as among older voters.
Among 18-24 year olds, support for Israel stood at 72 percent, and at 66 percent among voters aged 25-34. More than 90 percent of voters over 55 declared their support for Israel.
However, a majority of 18-24 year olds — 53 percent — expressed backing for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza irrespective of whether the hostages are released, while the majority of older voters remained opposed. Among the over 55s, more than 80 percent said they were opposed to a ceasefire absent the release of the hostages.
On whether Israel’s ground invasion should continue, 57 percent of voters in the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups were in favor.
The Harvard-Harris poll was conducted on Feb. 21-22 with a survey of 2,022 registered voters.
Why won’t antisemitism die, or at least die down? In the months following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents increased substantially. The Anti-Defamation League, which keeps track, says they tripled in the U.S. over the previous year, although its criteria also changed to include anti-Zionism. But from 2019 to 2022, the amount of people with highly antisemitic attitudes in the U.S. had nearly doubled, the ADL found. In Europe, Human Rights Watch warned in 2019 of an “alarming” rise in antisemitism, prompting the European Union to adopt a strategic plan for fighting it two years later.
No one can say definitively why the pre–Gaza War surge happened when it did. The salience of groups like the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 probably played a role, as did the influence of figures like the troubled rapper turned designer Kanye West. Historically, antisemitism has been a side effect of populism, which traffics in us-vs.-them stereotypes. Social media allows antisemitic influencers to recruit and communicate directly to followers, getting around the filtering bottleneck of the legacy media. The murder of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, by a shooter enraged at Jewish groups providing aid to immigrants, was the painful lowlight of this era.
It can be hard to think clearly and reason calmly about antisemitism. For 15 million Jews around the world, its resilience engenders fear, pain, sadness, frustration, and intergenerational trauma going back to the Holocaust and beyond. The superficial sense of security that many Jews feel on a daily basis in the contemporary world turns out to be paper-thin. Jews know enough of their own familial stories to realize that in historical terms, such moments of safety have often been fleeting, followed by renewed persecution. Sitting in my office in leafy Cambridge, Mass., a proud citizen of the freest country in the world, in which Jews have been safer than in any other country in history, I am not free of emotion on the topic. Nor could I be.
[The Time Magazine Op-Ed continues]
The problem with blaming religion is that antisemitism today is no longer driven primarily by Christianity. Although antisemitism can still be found among Christians, in the U.S. and around the world, most contemporary believing Christians are not antisemites. The old theological condemnation of the Jews for killing Christ has been repudiated by nearly every Christian denomination.
Nor does antisemitism among Muslims primarily reflect the classical Islamic claims made against the Jews, such as the accusation that the Jews (and Christians) distorted Scripture, resulting in discrepancies between the Bible and the Koran. Jews in Muslim lands mostly fared better than in Christian Europe. Until the 20th century, those Jews occupied a complex, second-class status, protected alongside Christians as “people of the book” and also simultaneously subject to special taxes and social subordination. The tropes of modern Europe’s antisemitism—of Jews’ power and avarice—mostly came to the Middle East late, through Nazi influence. Even the prevalence of antisemitism among Islamist groups like Hamas isn’t primarily driven by religion. Rather, it is part of their politically motivated effort to turn a struggle between two national groups for the same piece of land into a holy war.
It emerges that far from being an unchanging set of ideas derived from ancient faiths, antisemitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Antisemitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances.
In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.
A crucial reason why is surely that Jews were the most salient minority group living among Christians for the bulk of European history—and Europe was the heartland of historical antisemitism. The practice of projecting immediate social fears and hatreds onto Jews grew from the human need to treat some nearby group of people as the Other. (Muslims and Asians eventually also became subject to projection and fantasy, a practice dubbed Orientalism by the literary scholar Edward Said.) Once Jews had become the go-to targets for exemplifying societal ills, the habit stuck.
In this way, crucially, antisemitism is not and has never been about actual Jews so much as antisemites’ imagination of them. Because antisemitic ideology isn’t accountable to real-life facts, its content can be altered and changed as a society’s worries and moral judgments shift. Antisemitism’s capacity to keep its familiar character while also channeling new fears is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself.
[The Time Magazine Op-Ed continues]
The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists. This view preserves vestiges of the trope that Jews exercise vast power. It creatively updates that narrative to contemporary circumstances and current cultural preoccupations with the nature of power and injustice.
Concerns about power and justice are, in themselves, perfectly legitimate, much like past concerns about the effects of unfettered capitalism on working people—or for that matter, condemnations of elitism. So it is important to distinguish carefully between critiques of power that deserve serious consideration and the antisemitic ways in which those critiques may be deployed.
That caution is especially important because Israel, the first Jewish state to exist in two millennia, plays a central role in the narrative of the new antisemitism. Israel is not an imaginary conspiracy but a real country with real citizens, a real history, a real military, and real political and social problems that concern relations between Jews and Palestinians. It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel. Its power, like any national power, may be subject to legitimate, fair criticism.
It is also essential not to tar all critics of Israel with the brush of antisemitism, especially in wartime, when Israel, like any other war-waging power, is properly subject to the strictures of international humanitarian law. To deploy the charge of antisemitism for political reasons is morally wrong, undermining the horror of antisemitism itself. It is also likely to backfire, convincing critics of Israel that they are being unfairly silenced.
At the same time, Israel’s history and current situation confound categories that are so often used today to make moral judgments—categories like imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. And because people’s ideas about Israel typically draw on older, pre-Israel ideas about Jews, criticism of Israel can borrow, often unconsciously, from older antisemitic myths.
To understand the complicated, subtle character of the new antisemitism, notice that the concept of imperialism was developed to describe European powers that conquered, controlled, and exploited vast territories in the Global South and East. The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor. The application of these categories to Israel is a secondary development.
[The Time Magazine Op-Ed continues]
The upshot is that while a well-meaning person, free of antisemitism, could describe Israel as colonialist, the narrative of Israel as a settler-colonial oppressor on par with or worse than the U.S., Canada, and Australia is fundamentally misleading. Those who advance it run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by condemning the Jewish state despite its basic differences from these other global examples—most important, Israel’s status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.
To emphasize the narrative of Jews as oppressors, the new antisemitism must also somehow sidestep not only two millennia of Jewish oppression, but also the Holocaust, the largest organized, institutionalized murder of any ethnic group in human history. On the right, antisemites either deny the Holocaust ever happened or claim its scope has been overstated. On the left, one line is that Jews are weaponizing the Holocaust to legitimize the oppression of Palestinians.
During the Gaza War, some have argued that Israel, having suffered the trauma of the Holocaust, is now itself perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic. Yet the genocide charge is especially prone to veering into antisemitism because the Holocaust is the archetypal example of the crime of genocide. Genocide was recognized as a crime by the international community after the Holocaust. Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.
[The Time Magazine Op-Ed continues]
Notwithstanding these serious concerns, Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda. The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.
Israel’s stated war aims are to hold Hamas accountable for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and to get back its citizens who are still being held captive. These aims are lawful in themselves.
The means Israel has used are subject to legitimate criticism for killing too many civilians as collateral damage. But Israel’s military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war. There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.
To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack. The child is equally innocent, and the parents’ sorrow equally profound. As a matter of international law, however, the difference is decisive. During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.
These relevant facts matter for putting the genocide charge into the context of potential antisemitism. Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.
The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills. Oppression is real. Power can be exercised without justice. Israel should not be immune from criticism when it acts wrongfully. Yet the horrific history and undefeated resilience of antisemitism mean that modes of rhetorical attack on Israel and on Jews should be subject to careful scrutiny.
Just because antisemitism is a cyclical, recurring phenomenon does not mean that it is inevitable nor that it cannot be ameliorated. Like any form of irrational hate, antisemitism can in principle be overcome. The best way to start climbing out of the abyss of antisemitism is to self-examine our impulses, our stories about power and injustice, and our beliefs.
Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of the new book To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People
Residents of Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip and Rafah in the south took to the streets on Tuesday night to protest against Hamas leaders amid the ongoing war with Israel. Since the beginning of the conflict, there have been several protests by Gazan residents against the terrorist organization, but this is still a rather exceptional event.
In footage circulated on Palestinian social networks, residents are documented calling out against Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and against the organization’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, who continues to live in luxury in Qatar.
Top ArticlesRead MoreA ‘Tiny House’ at Berlin’s film festival offered a safe space to talk about the Israel-Hamas war
The protesters also shouted for humanitarian aid, saying, “We need food, we need flour, Sinwar and Haniyeh, stay away from us, you thieves.”
They were also heard calling out against Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon: “Hamdan, leave Lebanon; the people are the victims. With spirit and blood, we will redeem you, Gaza.”
When I went to sleep on Oct. 6, it was both Shabbat and Simchat Torah — Jewish days of rest and celebration. I awoke on Oct. 7 to a barrage of frantic messages: “Her friend is missing.” “Over 100 held hostage.” “My step-father’s friend was killed.” “600 killed. Now 1,000 killed. Now 1,200 killed.” I wrote to my family in Israel and held my breath.
Young women were disfigured, their bodies paraded into trucks by masked men, their pants bloodied. Children cried for their parents as entire families were slaughtered. Communities, neighborhoods, villages, once full of life, were ravaged by death and destruction. A concert for peace ended in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
I grew up asking: How could anybody deny the Holocaust when survivors still live today?
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, I ask the same question: How could anybody deny the violence of Oct. 7 when it was livestreamed?
Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians — not military targets, civilians — was not done in secret. It was not done under the guise of virtue, nor were its horrors denied by its perpetrators. It was recorded and posted online, designed for the world to see.
And the world did see it. From thousands of miles away, videos were broadcasted on every news channel, plastered on every social media platform, flooded in every family Whatsapp group. The worst moments of the victims’ lives were documented and shared with the world. Their families lost any privacy they could hope for, any dignity of respecting their final moments.
Shortly thereafter, swarming the same social media platforms on which the gruesome images of Oct. 7 spread, came another unexpected reaction: denial.
Rape was used as a weapon of war, yet that rape was denied by the same groups who once promised to “believe all women.” “The weaponization of rape” has become a popular narrative as “Oct. 7 truthers” share viral conspiracies denying that sexual violence occurred in Hamas’ brutal attack.
[The NY Daily News Op-Ed continues]
As anti-Jewish violence has been denied throughout our history, it is denied again today.
In 2024, the slaughter of innocents should not be up for debate. Rape should not be up for debate. This ensuing conflict cannot be reduced to a spectator sport, one where we pick our side and deny the humanity of our supposed opposition. Dignity cannot be reserved for those on our “team.” And any lasting peace will not come by picking teams, for that matter. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians will continue for as long as the humanity of either people is rejected. Empathy exists in no small supply, and suffering is not zero-sum.
Our generation is meant to be one of fixers. We are meant to fight for justice where those before us have enabled injustice. We are meant to see past the veil of bigotry and ignorance, standing together for progress.
But, as too many flirt with the antisemitism of our past, progress is tenuous.
More than 100 days after Oct. 7, several young women remain hostages in Gaza. Their posters have been torn down, and their names have been forgotten. In this, the true meaning of feminism, of progressivism, of humanity and decency for all has been abandoned. Why?
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he saw an “extraordinary opportunity” in the next few months for Arab nations to achieve normalization with Israel, but emphasized a Palestinian state was a part of this process, if not a condition.
“Virtually every Arab country now genuinely wants to integrate Israel into the region to normalize relations…to provide security commitments and assurances so that Israel can feel more safe,” Blinken said during the Munich Security Conference.
“And there’s also, I think the imperative, that’s more urgent than ever, to proceed to a Palestinian state that also ensures the security of Israel,” he added.
The Biden Administration has been in talks with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel along with the establishment of a Palestinian State.
In the past, President Biden has said that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority could rule Gaza after the war, a possibility that Israeli Prime Minister has refused, citing the PA’s ties with terrorist groups.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
However, Israeli ministers including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have rejected a Palestinian State and said it would be a “reward” for murdering and capturing Israelis on October 7th.
“Everybody who talks about a two-state solution — well, I ask, what do you mean by that?” Netanyahu said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “Should the Palestinians have an army? … Should they continue to educate their children for terrorism and annihilation? Of course, I say, of course not.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he saw an “extraordinary opportunity” in the next few months for Arab nations to achieve normalization with Israel, but emphasized a Palestinian state was a part of this process, if not a condition.
“Virtually every Arab country now genuinely wants to integrate Israel into the region to normalize relations…to provide security commitments and assurances so that Israel can feel more safe,” Blinken said during the Munich Security Conference.
“And there’s also, I think the imperative, that’s more urgent than ever, to proceed to a Palestinian state that also ensures the security of Israel,” he added.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
While at the Munich Security Conference, Blinken spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about a hostage deal, which has been stalled recently, and achieving a pause in fighting to allow more humanitarian aid to reach Gaza.
Prior to the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7th, Israel was headed toward a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, and although the issue of Palestinian statehood was mentioned then it has increasingly been seen as an absolute condition before normalization can be achieved.
In late January, Riyadh’s foreign minister said Saudi Arabia will not entertain normalization talks with Israel that are not predicated on a path to Palestinian statehood, the oil-rich kingdom’s most explicit statement yet linking a deal with Israel to the two-state solution.
Speaking with CNN, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud ruled out normalization talks with Israel, unless they are accompanied by what host Fareed Zakaria called a “credible and irreversible path to a Palestinian state.”
“That’s the only way we’re going to get a benefit,” said Prince Faisal.
However, Israeli ministers including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have rejected a Palestinian State and said it would be a “reward” for murdering and capturing Israelis on October 7th.
“Everybody who talks about a two-state solution — well, I ask, what do you mean by that?” Netanyahu said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “Should the Palestinians have an army? … Should they continue to educate their children for terrorism and annihilation? Of course, I say, of course not.”
“Bad,” said Novik, 77, who was a senior policy adviser to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. “I’d say that I don’t remember such a decisive moment. We are at a fork in the road, which can take us to untold troubles or potentially promise a new horizon. I’m afraid that we’re going to slide in the wrong direction and pay the price for it before we wake up to it.”
So Novik is no Pollyanna. But with war raging in Gaza, he is looking beyond the fighting for a pathway toward a diplomatic solution that could lead to two states, Israeli and Palestinian. It’s a decades-old vision that more than one politician, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has called dead on arrival.
In 2021, as a member of the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, Novik was part of a team of former security chiefs, military brass and top government advisers who wrote a defense of the two-state solution called “Initiative 2025.” The document said that even though such a solution seemed beyond the horizon, it remained the only way to ensure Israel’s security and future as a strong Jewish democracy.
Novik is sticking to those conclusions despite an Israeli government that is opposed to Palestinian statehood, and polling showing that just 35% of Israeli Jews support a two-state solution. The Biden administration is also pressing for an eventual two-state outcome, in a plan that could potentially include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,
In our conversation, I wanted to know: Given the distrust, the bloodshed, the current mood of Israelis, the far-right policies of their government and the past failures of negotiations toward two states, how does any politician build a coalition and public support for anything less than an iron fist in Gaza and a tighter grip on the West Bank?
Novik, a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, answered by describing the self-interests of Israel and its Arab neighbors, the frustrations of average Palestinians, a new role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the grim alternatives for Israel if the two sides in the conflict are unable to separate.
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report continues]
The Egyptians were astonished that they were willing to cooperate with a strategy whereby Hamas withdraws from governing the street and invites the Palestinian Authority to man the ministries of government and run the place. There was a whole roadmap for the gradual steps that would lead to the Palestinian Authority’s restored management of Gaza. We developed it jointly with the Egyptians and we were in contact with Saudis, Iraqis and even with the Trump administration in Washington. [Trump aide] Jared Kushner and [U.S. special envoy] Jason Greenblatt went to Cairo for a presentation of the plan and Greenblatt made a public announcement that it’s time for the Palestinian Authority to come back.
What did the Israeli government think of the plan?
Benjamin Netanyahu had given a green light to the discussion but had a change of heart and was sabotaging the plan. And the plan was just discarded and became a footnote to history. But it’s the exact same plan that is now being constructed by the administration in Washington, only under, on the one hand, more favorable conditions, and, on the other, more complicated.
What are the favorable conditions?
There is a very powerful Arab coalition that is more willing to engage in this endeavor. The Arab coalition is willing to engage in Gaza rehabilitation and serve as the crutches while the Palestinian Authority is in such a miserable state, and help the P.A. gradually come back and run the Gaza Strip, fund the rehabilitation and reconstruction and even put boots on the ground to replace the IDF until the Palestinian Authority can train and equip new units.
Why are they more amenable to that now?
They too were awakened to a wrong premise: that one can pay lip service to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and live happily ever after. Oct. 7 demonstrated to them that their strategic interests, security, and internal stability are affected by violence in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. So Saudi Arabia, which used to be quite passive, are now willing to engage in diplomacy, managing Gaza and revitalizing the Palestinian Authority. They were all so tired of the P.A. until Oct. 6. Now they realize that being tired is not an action plan.
Another myth was that you can leapfrog over the Palestinians into the arms of the Arabs around the region like in the Abraham Accords.
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report continues]
The unthinkable brutality on Oct. 7 did not produce an urge for it, but stay tuned. In all studies that I’ve seen, Israelis are saying — which is perhaps surprising — that force alone will not give us stability. In order not to give up security we need a combination of strength and diplomacy. In Israel, the term “political arrangements” is the new substitute for “peace agreement,” which lost all legitimacy for now. People wish to see a combination of diplomacy and strength which gives an alternative leadership a lot to work with, should they wish to.
Is that alternative leadership on the horizon? Because after events like these, you would think people would get more frightened, more right-wing, less open to, you know, political arrangements.
It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions but what we saw over the last four months is not necessarily how it really will evolve. When I look at the last four months, we are in phase three of the collapse of public support for the current leadership. Phase one was the nine months preceding Oct. 7 when 65 percent of the public opposed the government’s [judicial overhaul] initiative. Phase two was obviously Oct.7. itself, when the most common characterization was “abandonment” — abandonment by the army, and abandonment by the government. And the third phase was post-Oct. 7, when the government was missing in action, and it fell on civil society to deal with the needs of those affected, including the relatives of those who were kidnapped or killed or those who were evacuated from the south and from the north.
The visible result of those three phases is the collapse of the current coalition in the polls. The current coalition mustered a 64-seat majority in the [120-seat] Knesset. Now it’s about 44-45 [in polls], while the opposition is way over 70. I’m not suggesting that if elections were held tomorrow these would have been the results, but I think that the current coalition is done.
And the fact is that the most extreme right has not gained a single vote since Oct. 7, with all the anger and fear and despite an unprecedented rise in hate for Arabs, Palestinians and Israeli-citizen Arabs.
I am thinking of the American Jew who felt the two-state solution was inevitable but now feels listen, if you risk turning any of these territories over to Palestinian leadership, you are just inviting another Oct. 7. Why would separation make Israel safer over the alternative, which is military domination over both territories?
[The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Report continues]
So in my judgment, separation is inevitable.
Your colleague at the Israel Policy Forum, Michael Koplow, has written that if the United States and the Europeans recognize a Palestinian state without first working out the details it “will backfire with Israelis, will backfire with Palestinians, and will make a two-state outcome more rather than less remote.”
If recognition of a Palestinian state comes out of context, it will make people in Washington and elsewhere feel good about themselves. But it would do nothing for Palestinians, because in general they are done with gestures. And the reason that the younger generation, which doesn’t carry the scars of the Second Intifada like their parents, advocate violent resistance rather than political resistance, is because the younger generation doesn’t believe the situation will get any worse.
Meaning a credible path toward a two-state solution gives them something to lose, assuming they or their leadership are willing to accept less than the river to the sea.
In one situation, the terrorist is the hero of the neighborhood because he’s the only one who stands up to the occupation. In the other situation, the same terrorist in the same neighborhood risks what they have gained in independence. Will they help him get safe haven, or are they going to snitch on him in order not to lose?
Will the young Palestinian who can suddenly go abroad, can go to university, sees his life changing, sees his dignity restored — will he risk it because the extremists have a different vision?
I want to return to the security question — what assurances can you give an Israeli who says the risks of the inevitable future you see are worse than the current arrangement?
It’s a very serious question and I would answer it with the question Begin raised before he agreed to withdraw from the Sinai in order to have peace with Egypt: In the worst-case scenario, will we be able to rectify the situation at a reasonable cost? Are we going to be okay? And he was persuaded by the defense professionals that the answer is yes.
This same question has to be asked about Palestinian statehood. If worse comes to worst, if this Hamas or another Hamas wins elections in a post-peace Palestine and decides that it is not satisfied with less than everything, are we able to rectify the situation at a reasonable cost? We spent a year and a half with a huge team of all disciplines with thousands of years of experience around the table in developing security arrangements for that eventuality.
And again, always the bottom line is we don’t do it because we trust them. We do it because it serves our vision of Israel.
Aviva Siegel, a former hostage who was released from Gaza after being abducted with her husband by Hamas terrorists on October 7, testifies to the horrific crimes – including sexual assault – committed against hostages in Gaza.
via News12
THE AUTHORS
Steny H. Hoyer, a Democrat, represents Maryland’s fifth district in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the former House Majority Leader. Richard P. Schifter is the chairman of the American Jewish International Relations Institute. Hoyer worked closely with his co-author’s late father, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Richard Schifter, to support Soviet refuseniks and the State of Israel.
Just a few days ago, a Hamas tunnel network – complete with a data center, living quarters, industrial battery power banks, and other vital operational infrastructure – was found beneath United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s (UNRWA) Gaza Headquarters. The news came out not long after reports that twelve UNRWA employees likely participated in Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack. These revelations are appalling but unsurprising, particularly given estimates that around 1,200, or one tenth, of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza have ties to Hamas and its affiliates. The UN must not only investigate this grave oversight but also reckon with the anti-Israel bias that has long plagued its institutions.
The UN’s predisposition against Israel has never been more apparent – or more harmful – than it is today, but it’s nothing new. In 1975, the UN passed Resolution 3379, which falsely equated Zionism with racism and apartheid in South Africa. Critically, the resolution established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR). Along with the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories (SCIIHRP), these UN institutions pursue an explicitly anti-Israel agenda. Although Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991, the anti-Israel infrastructure it created remains.
For decades, these entities have churned out anti-Israel propaganda that reinforces the false equivalency between Zionism and racism, which protestors around the world have repeated countless times since October 7.
[The Semafor Report continues]
Some sympathetic to Hamas now demand to hear directly from the survivors to confirm that rape took place. Aside from the grim fact that Hamas murdered or took captive most of its victims, the idea of forcing survivors to speak about their trauma – especially publicly – defies legal necessity and the treatment of rape survivors in modern society.
The UN’s failure to rectify its maltreatment of Israel also undermines innocent Palestinians. Hamas often siphons UNRWA humanitarian aid for its own malicious ends. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while imperfect, can better serve Palestinians than an agency with ties to the terrorists ruling over them. Recognizing that UNRWA is the only agency capable of aiding Palestinians right now, once the war is over, the UN ought to dissolve UNRWA and transfer its resources and responsibilities to the UNHCR without diminishing any aid for Palestinians. It should also dismantle the infrastructure which spews propaganda seeking to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish State.
Certainly, Hamas, whose charter states its mission is to “fight Jews and kill them,” can draw comfort from a UN that also tries to vilify Israel. As the recent UNRWA debacle revealed, the UN’s opposition to Israel can lead to direct support for those who seek to destroy the world’s only Jewish democratic state.
If we’re to prevent that unspeakable outcome, the UN must take an objective look not only at what happened on the ground on October 7 but also at what happens in its own halls every day.
Whereas, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel and brutally murdered 1,200 men, women, and children, injured thousands, and took 240 hostages including babies and children;
Whereas Israeli police have gathered thousands of testimonies from eyewitnesses of Hamas violence on October 7, 2023, including countless instances of rape, gang rape, sexual mutilation, and other forms of sexual violence, and are continuing to gather evidence;
Whereas photographic evidence, forensic medical units, and morgue workers have identified bodies subjected to mutilation and trauma consistent with sexual assault and rape, including shattered pelvises;
Whereas eyewitness accounts from survivors of the attacks and Hamas body camera footage in Israel’s southern communities and the Nova music festival in Re’im document gang rape and genital mutilation;
Whereas terrorists captured by Israeli security forces admitted they had been ordered by Hamas leaders to carry out sexual violence against Israeli civilians;
Whereas it has been reported that many victims of rape and sexual assault on October 7th, were murdered by the Hamas perpetrators and are unable to provide testimony;
Whereas released Israeli hostages have reported instances of sexual assault or abuse that occurred while held hostage by Hamas;
Whereas Israel’s police, in coordination with Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, has launched investigations to build cases on charges of mass murder, rape, torture, and bodily mutilation of civilians during the Hamas attacks;
Whereas human rights lawyers, criminologists, and researchers leading the “Israeli Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children” have concluded that Hamas terrorists “weaponized violence against women” to inflict physical and psychological trauma;
Whereas rape and sexual violence have, throughout history, been used as weapons of war around the world to terrorize and subvert populations;
Whereas rape and sexual violence have serious and difficult mental, physical, and emotional impacts on victims, their families, and communities; and
Whereas some international bodies have been slow to condemn Hamas brutal actions on October 7th, and in some cases, failed to explicitly mention instances of sexual and gender-based violence against women: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) condemns all rape and forms of sexual violence as weapons of war, including those acts committed by Hamas terrorists on and since October 7th;
A watchdog group’s investigation found that terrorist group Hezbollah and other US-sanctioned entities have accounts with paid checkmarks on X, the Elon Musk-owned social network that still resides at the twitter.com domain.
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit that is critical of Big Tech companies, said in a report today that “X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is providing premium, paid services to accounts for two leaders of a US-designated terrorist group and several other organizations sanctioned by the US government.”
After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk started charging users for checkmarks that were previously intended to verify that an account was notable and authentic. “Along with the checkmarks, which are intended to confer legitimacy, X promises various perks for premium accounts, including the ability to post longer text and videos and greater visibility for some posts,” the Tech Transparency Project report noted.
[The Arstechnica Report continues]
It’s possible for US companies to receive a license from the government to engage in certain transactions with sanctioned entities, but it doesn’t seem likely that X has such a license. X’s rules explicitly prohibit users from purchasing X Premium “if you are a person with whom X is not permitted to have dealings under US and any other applicable economic sanctions and trade compliance law.”
In all, the Tech Transparency Project said it found 28 “verified” accounts tied to sanctioned individuals or entities. These include individuals and groups listed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as “Specially Designated Nationals.”
“Of the 28 X accounts identified by TTP, 18 show they got verified after April 1, 2023, when X began requiring accounts to subscribe to paid plans to get a checkmark. The other 10 were legacy verified accounts, which are required to pay for a subscription to retain their checkmarks,” the group wrote, adding that it “found advertising in the replies to posts in 19 of the 28 accounts.”
We contacted X today and will update this article if we get a comment. Our email to press@x.com triggered the standard auto-reply from press+noreply@twitter.com that says, “Busy now, please check back later.”
Update at 4:28pm ET: After this article was published, X issued the following statement: “X has a robust and secure approach in place for our monetization features, adhering to legal obligations, along with independent screening by our payments providers. Several of the accounts listed in the Tech Transparency Report are not directly named on sanction lists, while some others may have visible account check marks without receiving any services that would be subject to sanctions. Our teams have reviewed the report and will take action if necessary. We’re always committed to ensuring that we maintain a safe, secure and compliant platform.”
[The Arstechnica Report continues]
An Iran state media account, @PressTV, was verified in 2016 and currently has a gold checkmark. The account’s original verification was long before Musk bought Twitter, but the gold checkmark “suggests it may be paying X for Verified Organization status” under the payment tiers implemented by Musk, the TTP report said.
Press TV is an English-language channel of Iran’s state broadcaster, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). “Press TV is a Specially Designated National subject to Iran sanctions from a 2018 executive order and secondary sanctions, according to OFAC’s database,” the report said. “IRIB is also a Specially Designated National subject to sanctions under the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012 and secondary sanctions.”
The TTP said that other accounts listed in its report are tied to sanctioned individuals or entities from Iran, Libya, Iraq, and Russia. These include news agencies, as well as groups designated by the US as terrorists such as the Iran-backed Harakat al-Nujaba militia.
One of the sanctioned individuals that had a blue checkmark is “Bashar Sabawi Ibrahim Hasan Al-Tikriti—a son of the Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the half-brother and advisor to the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein,” the report said. That account did not have a blue checkmark today.
Jon Brodkin Jon has been a reporter for Ars Technica since 2011 and covers a wide array of telecom and tech policy topics. Jon graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism and has been a full-time journalist for over 20 years.
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It’s been seven years since I escaped my embattled city of Gaza and came to the U.S. On Thanksgiving, my mother sent me a photo of a felled 16-ft. tree in southern Gaza, where my family has been sheltering these last weeks. Ten of my relatives are standing on asphalt, surrounding the trunk, and one of them is hacking off its limbs. It’s impossible to obtain cooking gas, and this tree is now the firewood that will allow them to prepare their next meal.
Since Hamas’s atrocious attacks on Oct. 7—leaving around 1,200 people dead, the largest mass killing of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—the systems that supply Gaza’s food, water, and medicine are in urgent decline as Israel carries out its ongoing bombardment of Gaza in return. At least 27,000 Palestinians have died since, thousands of whom are reportedly Hamas fighters, and some 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people displaced along with tens of thousands of Israelis by ongoing rocket fire from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Much of Gaza is now reduced to rubble. But the sense of disorder and emergency in the Strip today stretches much further into the past.
Since Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, the bustling and beautiful streets I knew have been dominated by terrorist chaos. Hamas is driven by an ideological stand originating in the concept of annihilating the state of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic Palestinian one. In striving to make this a reality, Hamas has continued to normalize violence and militarization in every aspect of public and private life in Gaza. They have in the process obliterated the chances of a successful Palestinian state alongside Israel, even if the prospect of one had increasingly looked dim amid successive Israeli governments that worked against that.
We lived in my father Imad’s family building and saved money for nearly 18 years until we were able to build our own house in the north of Gaza. The first sign that Hamas was building tunnels underneath our house came in July 2013, while the house was under construction. Our soon-to-be new neighbor, Um Yazid Salha, got in touch with my mother Saadia to ask why my brother Hamza and I always come to the site after midnight.
[The Time Report continues]
The day after we inspected the house, Um Yazid called to say that the men had returned in the night. My mother didn’t want me to go, but I put on my clothes and headed alone to the unfinished home. When I reached the iron door of the house, I began to hear the movement of people inside. I knocked on the door. A masked person opened the door and asked me to step back a bit. Then he closed the door behind him and asked who I was. I defiantly told him that I am the owner of the house. “Who are you?” I asked.
Meeting masked men is something we are used to in different aspects of Gazan life. We argued. I told him my uncle, who was a member of Hamas and prosecutor in its government, would stop them from building a tunnel. The masked man insisted they would continue as they pleased. He said I should not be afraid and that this would just be a small closed room to remain buried underground. No one can enter or exit. He said that only in the case of an Israeli ground invasion in this area and the displacement of residents would these rooms be used to supply weapons.
“We don’t want to live above a stockpile of weapons,” I told him, just before he forced me to leave.
[The Time Report continues]
When something goes unspoken for so long, it begins to feel impossible that the truth will ever be known. I always looked forward to a time in the future when my family and others like us would be allowed to speak about these tunnels, about the perilous life Hamas has forced upon Gazans. Now that I am determined to speak openly about it, I don’t know if it even matters.
My family evacuated to the south shortly after Oct. 7. Months after, we received photos of our house and neighborhood, both of which are in ruins. I may never know if the house was destroyed by Israeli strikes or fighting between Hamas and Israel. But the result is the same. Our home, and far too many in our community, were flattened alongside priceless history and memories.
And this is the legacy of Hamas. They began destroying my family home in 2013 when they built tunnels beneath it. They continued to threaten our safety for a decade—we always knew we might have to vacate at a moment’s notice. We always feared violence. Gazans deserve a true Palestinian government, which supports its citizens’ interests, not terrorists carrying out their own plans. Hamas is not fighting Israel. They’re destroying Gaza.
Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) on Sunday spoke to Channel 12 News’ US correspondent Yuna Leibzon about his support for Israel.
“For me personally, it’s been just incredibly easy to be on the right side. And I believe the right side is with Israel. Some people call that moral clarity. It is my job as a senator to be on the right side on any issue, and especially after October 7, there’s only one clear, right side and that’s with Israel,” said Fetterman.
On the protests against him, Fetterman said, “If you’re going to protest and demanding a ceasefire, why aren’t you instead demanding that the hostages be brought home? And why aren’t you demanding that Hamas surrenders?”
“If you brought home the hostages, and if Hamas surrenders and puts down their guns, all of the death and the trauma and the damage would stop at that very moment, and then we can talk about a ceasefire. But until Hamas is effectively neutralized, I could never support a ceasefire or until every last hostage is brought back home,” he added.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
More recently, anti-Israel protesters showed up outside Fetterman’s office, chanting accusations of genocide. He, in turn, responded by waving an Israeli flag from the roof of the building.
On a sunny January day, dozens of Israelis and Palestinians crowded into a small house in a town outside Bethlehem, as their compatriots fought in the Gaza Strip, to talk about a subject that has become nearly taboo in their cities and towns:
How to build a lasting peace.
“This thing is not appropriate in the community we live in,” said Aya Sbeih, a Palestinian member of the group that was meeting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Combatants for Peace. “So I keep it a secret.”
Many peace groups have been struggling since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which have hardened the positions of many Israelis and Palestinians. But some activists, including those in Combatants for Peace, have quietly started to resume their work.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Chen Alon, a co-founder of Combatants for Peace, encountered that early one day when a neighbor stopped to ask, “Have you finally sobered up?” That is an expression that, since Oct. 7, some Israelis have been using to describe their abandonment of the political left.
Mr. Alon, a former Israeli military officer who refused to serve in 2002 over his objections to the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, suggested they get coffee to talk it over. But questions have also come from within activists’ homes.
Jamil Qassas, the president of the Palestinian side of the organization, said a relative had recently challenged him about the group. “What’s the role of the organization right now?” he was asked. “Are the Israeli members participating in the war?”
Mr. Qassas led Palestinians in clashes with Israeli forces during the first intifada, but renounced violence after he began working in Israel and came to conclude that not all Israelis were enemies. He assured his relative that Combatants for Peace maintains its antiwar stance, and that nonviolence remains a basic principle, including for Israeli members.
“I know there are lots of people who don’t accept what I do,” he acknowledged.
Amid a pervasive atmosphere of distrust in which each side accuses the other of having no real interest in peace, the meetings at the group’s office in the town of Beit Jala offer refuge for new members and veteran volunteers alike.
[The New York Times Report continues]
“We would talk about the most difficult things,” Mr. Qassas said, “but at least we stayed together and kept going.”
Both activists, despite the resistance they face, cling to hope that when the conflict finally ends, “we will be the infrastructure, the community upon which our joint life will be built,” Mr. Alon said.
“If I have sobered up,” he said, “it’s in knowing that violence won’t solve anything.”
When Clarence B. Jones joined Martin Luther King’s team as a speechwriter and lawyer in 1960, he knew that the Civil Rights Movement needed white allies. And so, at demonstration after demonstration, he would seek out the white attendees and ask them why they were there.
Many told him they were Jewish, and there to honor their grandparents who had died in the Holocaust.
“I went back and I told Martin,” Jones, 93, recalled in a Friday interview. “He said, ‘Are you kidding?’”
Forwarding the News
Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis of the crisis each day.
[The Forward Report continues]
“With this ad, we hope to continue to spread Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of unity and equality at a time in which the country needs it most,” Kraft said in a statement.
A storied career
Jones spent years working with King, including by helping the civil rights icon draft his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. By 1968, when King was assassinated, Jones was dividing his time between advising King and working in finance, after becoming the first Black investment banking partner on Wall Street at Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt.
He would later serve as a negotiator during the 1971 riot at Attica prison, and eventually came to own a share in the New York Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper in New York City. He married Charlotte Schiff, a leader of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the mother of Richard Schiff, the Jewish actor known for playing Toby Ziegler on The West Wing.
Richard Schiff recalled attending Black Panther Party meetings as a child. “I stood out a little bit,” he quipped to the Independent in 2007.
(Jones is currently married to Lin Walters.)
[The Forward Report continues]
“I’m glad that I have lived long enough to partner with Robert K. Kraft and FCAS to continue to spread the message to the widest possible audience,” Jones said in a statement released by Spill the Honey, which is also promoting the Super Bowl ad.
The script of the advertisement itself remains a closely guarded secret. The Canadian Jewish News detailed the filming of another advertisement reportedly planned to be aired during the Super Bowl, about a Massachusetts synagogue dealing with a bomb threat, but the Kraft foundation has only promoted news of the ad featuring Jones.
Views on Israel, racial justice
Jones has also been a staunch supporter of Israel, and expressed some contrarian views on contemporary racial justice advocacy. In a 2014 speech at the Israeli consulate in New York City, Jones defended Israel from claims that it was “racist” or “an apartheid state.”
Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah had a side job as a commander in Hamas’s anti-tank missile units until 2022, evidence retrieved by the IDF revealed, the IDF’s spokesperson for Arabic media, Avichay Adraee, announced on Sunday.
“In the morning, a journalist on Al Jazeera, and in the evening, a terrorist in Hamas!” wrote Adraee on X.
Leading British rabbi against Rafah invasion: ‘If I said nothing, I couldn’t live with myself’
“During operations by our forces several weeks ago inside one of the Hamas camps in the northern Gaza Strip, a laptop belonging to someone named Muhammed Samir Muhammed Wishah, born in 1986 from Bureij, was seized where it is clear from the documents that Muhammed Wishah is a prominent commander in the anti-tank missile units in the military wing of Hamas.”
At the end of 2022, Wishah transferred to work in the field of research and development in Hamas’ aerial units, according to Adraee.
[The Jerusalem Post Report continues]
Last month, IDF Spokesperson R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari presented evidence that two journalists killed by the IDF in Gaza were actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
When Shin Bet asked Hamas Nukhba terror commander known as Abu al-Baraa during interrogation if he had a message for his fellow Hamas fighters, he said, “I recommend everyone surrender, your fate is death.”
Abu al-Baraa told Shin Bet that he and his troops intended to surrender when the IDF entered their tunnel in Khan Younis, even though they were armed with Kalashnikovs, RPGs and improvised explosive devices.
He told Shin Bet, “We came to the decision that we don’t want to fight and as soon as the army comes we will turn ourselves in.”
Abu al-Baraa added, “We sat in the room, we put all the weapons outside, outside the room. And the army came and took all the weapons. We sat and waited. When the army arrived, we raised our hands and surrendered.”
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
Netanyahu reiterated that Israel aims to achieve nothing less than “total victory” in Hamas, and that he rejects any hostage deal that would require a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza.
According to an Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) survey, 60% of Israelis believe the war should continue until Hamas is eliminated even if that means that not all of the hostages return.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, also known as “The Green Prince,” the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has joined Israel’s public diplomacy campaign amid Israel’s war against the terror group.
Yousef, who rejected terrorism and went to work helping fight against it, arrived in Israel and toured the areas of the Oct. 7 massacre in the Western Negev.
Referring to Hamas’s Charter calling for the genocide of Jews, he said, “The people that wrote the Hamas Covenant are a bunch of lunatics,” adding, “The Arab world needs to pay attention to the dangers within.”
Hamas, he said, “does not care about people. In effect, they are sacrificing the lives of children and non-combatants in order to achieve cheap political goals. The concept of jihad must be stopped, and it must be stopped now.”
Yousef has been a vocal critic of any negotiations with Hamas and since Oct. 7 has called on Israel to destroy the terror group.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“Hamas must have a timeframe—a month or two or six months—to return the hostages, and if they don’t return the hostages within the time frame, Israel must execute top Hamas leaders in prison, especially the mass murderers,” said Yousef in a video message posted online.
“When I say execute top Hamas leaders, I mean no exceptions. That includes my own father, the co-founder of the Hamas movement. In this war, there are no exceptions,” added Yousef. “I made a mistake, 10 or 15 years ago, when I saved his life many times…he was supposed to die for his actions. I saved his life. Things did not change, things got worse,” he added.
He warned that Hamas is intentionally dragging out negotiations to extend the ceasefire with Israel.
“Hamas is going nowhere, and if we continue to negotiate with them, they will continue stretching these negotiations, taking us into a rabbit hole that will never end. And this is their goal: to get away with their crimes. We cannot allow this to happen,” he stressed.
During pro-Palestinian marches in the Western world, we have seen several minority groups, including “indigenous” people, who identify with the Palestinians and their claim to be the displaced natives in Israel.
But there are other indigenous people who view things differently.
The Indigenous Coalition For Israel (ICFI) is one organization that aims to change the narrative, consisting of individuals from the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa. The ICFI has just launched an office that will be housed within the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem.
Native Americans
Ryan Bellerose, a native Canadian of the Metis mixed-race community, told me that “the false narrative concerning the Israel-Palestinian conflict has easily taken hold amongst many indigenous peoples.”
He feels that many have misunderstood what the term “indigeneity” means. He spoke about how the Jewish people’s ethnogenesis took place in the Levant, just like the Native Americans’ took root in the Americas. He noted that even if Jews lived in the Diaspora at times, their cultural identity “evolved” in the Middle East.
Some on the Palestinian side claim that they have Canaanite roots. Bellerose argued that the Palestinians are “not doing much” to actively preserve or upkeep this Canaanite culture despite the claim.
Bellerose feels that indigenous Americans are still feeling the “residual effects” of a genocide, and can therefore learn a lot from the Israeli example, where Jewish society was “rebuilt” after the Holocaust.
He also cited Israel’s Hebrew revival as a good example of decolonization, and hopes that other groups that have lost their native languages, such as his ancestral Cree, will be able to revive theirs as well.
New Zealand Māoris
Dr. Sheree Trotter is a New Zealand Māori. She said that while some Māori Iwi (clans), including the biggest one, Ngapuhi, issued statements supporting Israel, there is no uniform view across the group.
She noted that there are still many Māori who are pro-Palestinian, among the indigenous minority who are 16.5% of New Zealand.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
She said that during the Cold War era, the Soviets, Cuba, and other forces allied with the now-ruling African National Congress (ANC) party were anti-Zionist, and this legacy has remained. The ANC has been in power since 1994.
She noted how South Africa chose not to support their Miss Universe candidate when the competition was held in Israel in 2021.
“But we still do have diplomatic relations with Israel,” she noted.
“Jews are indigenous to the land and the Palestinian claim is a very self-harming approach as it rejects Jewish indigeneity,” she said. And indigenous people around the world who know the true history of Israel likely agree with her.
Avi Kumar is a Holocaust historian/journalist from Sri Lanka. He has lived in many countries and speaks 11 languages. He has written about a variety of topics in publications worldwide.
Israel Defense Forces soldiers operating in the heart of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza discovered a large tunnel, one where Hamas had held a around a dozen hostages, the military revealed on Wednesday.
Troops from the IDF’s 98th Division, working alongside combat engineers from the elite Yahalom unit, located the approximately 1,000-yard-long tunnel while exploring an underground labyrinth composed of numerous branches.
On Jan. 21, the IDF announced that the 98th Division unearthed and destroyed a nearby tunnel branch of similar size. There, some 20 hostages had been kept in a central chamber that included five prison cells.
The newly-discovered tunnel likewise contained a chamber that included barred prison cells, as well as bathrooms and a space used by Hamas guards. The IDF noted that three of the approximately 12 hostages who were kept in the newly discovered Khan Yunis tunnel have since “returned to Israel.”
As part of the operation, 98th Division and Yahalom troops “fought in the tunnel against terrorists, broke through the blast doors and neutralized explosives,” the military said, adding that forces also seized weapons and documents related to Hamas operations.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
One hundred five hostages, mostly women and children, were released last year as part of a ceasefire deal that Hamas broke when it refused to hand over the last group of captives.
Last month, the Times reported that Hamas’s tunnel network was more extensive than previously thought, with new assessments indicating it has upwards of 5,700 entry shafts.
Following intensive combat in Khan Yunis during recent weeks, Israel now believes Hamas built between 350 and 450 miles of subterranean terror infrastructure, up from a previous estimate of 250 miles.
The IDF has damaged or rendered inoperable some 20% to 40% of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure in Gaza, according to a Wall Street Journal report published on Jan. 28 that cited Israeli and U.S. officials.
Israel has called securing the freedom of the hostages abducted to Gaza a key goal in its war against Hamas, so many in the country were shocked on Tuesday when it emerged that at least a fifth of the captives were already dead.
The news was likely to worsen a furor in Israel, where a debate over the government’s course of action in Gaza regarding the hostages has become divisive.
Israeli intelligence officers have concluded that at least 30 of the remaining 136 hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on Oct. 7 have died since the start of the war, according to a confidential assessment that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The bodies of two other dead Israelis, killed in 2014 during a previous war between Israel and Hamas, have been held in the territory ever since, bringing the total number of slain hostages inside Gaza to at least 32.
The Israeli government late on Tuesday released a statement saying that only 31 had been confirmed dead; the discrepancy between the two numbers could not be immediately reconciled.
“We have informed 31 families that their captured loved ones are no longer among the living and that we have pronounced them dead,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, said Tuesday after The Times published a report about the previously undisclosed hostage deaths.
Four officials said that Israeli intelligence officers were also assessing unconfirmed information that indicated that at least 20 other hostages may have also been killed.
[The New York Times Report continues].
More than 240 hostages were captured by Hamas and its allies during the Oct. 7 raid on southern Israel, prompting Israel to retaliate with massive airstrikes and then a ground invasion. Roughly half of the hostages have been freed, almost all during a temporary truce in November, when they were exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails.
Since that truce, the Israeli government has said that its military operations in Gaza would pave the way to further hostage releases. Officials have argued that every Israeli military success places Hamas under more pressure to negotiate another exchange, and makes the military better able to rescue the remaining captives by force.
But scores of survivors and families of the hostages have said that the military campaign is endangering their loved ones’ lives. They want the government to make it a priority to reach a new hostage deal instead of pressing ahead with the invasion, lest their relatives be killed in the crossfire. Only one hostage has been freed by an Israeli military rescue operation.
The debate over the hostages has become particularly acute in recent days, as negotiations over another cease-fire deal — mediated by Egypt and Qatar — have gathered momentum.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Asked for comment, the Israeli military said in a statement that it was “deploying all available resources to locate and retrieve as much information as possible regarding the hostages currently held by Hamas.”
A spokeswoman for the main alliance of hostage families, Liat Bell Sommer, said the alliance was seeking an immediate deal.
“We are aware that there are bodies in Hamas captivity. We are also aware that every day the hostages are held in Hamas tunnels is a death sentence to them,” Ms. Sommer said.
Other hostages may have also already died, but the military has yet to declare them dead because it needs to attain absolute proof before telling their families, according to Avi Kalo, who led a military intelligence department that dealt with prisoners of war and missing people.
“When it comes to the decision about whether to declare a prisoner of war, or a missing person, dead, Israeli intelligence needs 100 percent certainty,” said Mr. Kalo.
“Such a terrible message must not be conveyed except in the case of absolute and final knowledge,” he added.
The Israeli military’s assessment did not conclude that any of the dead hostages were killed in Israeli strikes. But some of the hostages freed in November have said that they fear those still in Gaza could be killed in Israeli salvos. At least one freed hostage said the relentless Israeli bombardment at times felt as menacing as the threat posed by her captors.
“Many times I told myself that, in the end, I will die from Israel’s missiles and not from Hamas,” said Sahar Kalderon, speaking in an interview last December, weeks after being released. Her father remains captured inside Gaza.
“What about my father, who has been left behind?” she said in the interview. “I ask of everyone who sees this: Please, stop this war; get all the hostages out.”
Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman
Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley
Montana Tucker, the renowned singer/songwriter and social-media influencer, took a powerful stance at the 2024 Grammys, using her platform to raise awareness about the 136 Israeli hostages still held captive by Hamas terrorists in Gaza, according to a report on Sunday in The Hollywood Reporter. Tucker, with millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram, arrived at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles wearing a nude corset gown adorned with an oversized yellow ribbon, boldly displaying the message, “Bring Them Home,” THR reported. This striking fashion statement follows the trend initiated at the 2024 Golden Globes, where celebrities wore yellow ribbons as a symbol of solidarity with the hostages.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
Montana Tucker’s activism extends beyond her striking fashion choices. The singer has been committed to leveraging her influence to promote Holocaust education and combat anti-Semitism. In a notable appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show last March, Tucker shared her personal connection to the cause, being the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. As was indicated in the Hollywood Reporter, she expressed a desire to honor her late grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor and used to wear a pin that read, “Never forget, never again, I’m a survivor.” For Tucker, advocating for those in captivity aligns with her broader mission of ensuring that the world never forgets the atrocities of the past.
The initiative to wear yellow ribbons at prominent events has been orchestrated by the Israeli hostage advocacy organization “Bring Them Home.” At the Golden Globes, the coordination of yellow ribbons was led by Ashlee Margolis, the founder of The A List, a Beverly Hills-based branding agency, according to the Hollywood Reporter. This concerted effort aims to draw attention to the plight of the Israeli hostages and elicit support from the global community.
Montana Tucker’s fashion statement at the 2024 Grammys transcends the typical red carpet glamour, serving as a poignant reminder of the ongoing humanitarian crisis involving Israeli hostages. By boldly displaying the “Bring Them Home” message on her yellow ribbon, Tucker amplifies the voices of those held captive and continues her dedicated advocacy for Holocaust education and the fight against anti-Semitism. As celebrities leverage their platforms for meaningful causes, the yellow ribbon movement emerges as a symbol of solidarity and a call for justice on the international stage.
They included people or entities that “have directly or indirectly engaged in actions or policies that threaten the security or stability of the West Bank,” take “actions that intimidate civilians in the West Bank with the purpose or effect of forcing displacement actions in the West Bank,” or make moves “that constitute human rights abuses or violations and actions that significantly obstruct, disrupt or prevent efforts to achieve a two-state solution.”
In December, Blinken announced U.S. visa restrictions on a number of extremist Israeli settlers.
[The Politico Report continues]
If past patterns hold, the new sanctions are likely to be more punishing in that they will likely include freezes on financial assets the settlers may hold in the United States, among other penalties.
The State and Treasury Departments are expected to issue details Thursday on the sanctions and how financial institutions should approach the issue, according to the documents.
The Biden administration has stepped up support for Palestinians after staunchly backing Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, most notably by pushing for more humanitarian aid to enter the enclave.
In recent weeks, as Netanyahu’s government has stiff-armed American attempts to wind down the war and the U.S. develops “day after” scenarios, Washington has shifted its approach to weigh Palestinian concerns more.
Reuters photographer Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa thought he could get away with mischaracterizing himself again.
He already fooled Reuters into employing him as a journalist after he infiltrated into Israel with murderers, kidnappers, and rapists on October 7.
Fayq boasted in a video revealed by HonestReporting that he broke into homes in Sderot as men were kidnapped and a dog was killed. In the video he posted on Instagram Live, Fayq called upon Gazans to enter Israel and take some “settler women” for themselves.
This did not stop Reuters from leading its 2023 Year In Pictures with Fayq’s photograph of an IDF soldier being taken from a tank by an angry mob.
Then Fayq tried to paint himself as a victim, raising money for himself on Gofundme, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform.
HonestReporting led a campaign on social media and worked behind the scenes, noting that Gofundme’s terms of service prohibit content that “promotes behavior…in support of terrorism, hate, violence.”
Within 24 hours, the page was taken down.
When journalists cross the line and become terrorists fighting Israel, there must be zero tolerance.
That also applies to Qatar’s state-run TV channel, Al Jazeera.
This week, the IDF revealed evidence obtained from a laptop found in Gaza that Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah held a senior role in the terrorist group’s anti-tank unit, including photographs of him teaching young jihadis how to fire anti-tank missiles and make incendiary devices.
Another Al Jazeera journalist, Ismail Abu Omar, was found to have accompanied Hamas terrorists into Israel on October 7. In footage Omar himself posted, he can be seen inside Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Like Abu Omar and Fayq, Hassan Eslaiah of CNN and AP infiltrated into Israel and participated in the massacre.
A friend of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Eslaiah was fired from CNN and AP after HonestReporting’s expose.
But there has been no word from Reuters about Fayq, who also must be held accountable.
No military fighting an entrenched enemy in dense urban terrain in an area barely twice the size of Washington D.C. can avoid all civilian casualties. Reports of over 25,000 Palestinians killed, be they civilians or Hamas, have made headlines. But Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.
In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I say this not to put Israel on a pedestal or to diminish the human suffering of Gazans but rather to correct a number of misperceptions when it comes to urban warfare.
[The Newsweek Op-Ed continues]
Third, one of the best ways to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare is to provide warning and evacuate urban areas before the full combined air and ground attack commences. This tactic is unpopular for obvious reasons: It alerts the enemy defender and provides them the military advantage to prepare for the attack. The United States did not do this ahead of its initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, which involved major urban battles to include in Baghdad. It did not do this before its April 2004 Battle of Fallujah (though it did send civilian warnings before the Second Battle of Fallujah six months later).
By contrast, Israel provided days and then weeks of warnings, as well as time for civilians to evacuate multiple cities in northern Gaza before starting the main air-ground attack of urban areas. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employed their practice of calling and texting ahead of an air strike as well as roof-knocking, where they drop small munitions on the roof of a building notifying everyone to evacuate the building before a strike.
No military has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.
The IDF has also air-dropped flyers to give civilians instructions on when and how to evacuate, including with safe corridors. (The U.S. implemented these tactics in its second battle of Fallujah and 2016-2017 operation against ISIS in Mosul.) Israel has dropped over 520,000 pamphlets, and broadcast over radio and through social media messages to provide instruction for civilians to leave combat areas.
Israel’s use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.
The IDF also conducted daily four-hour pauses over multiple consecutive days of the war to allow civilians to leave active combat areas. While pauses for civilian evacuations after a war or battle has started is not completely new, the frequency and predictability of these in Gaza have been historic.
[The Newsweek Op-Ed continues]
Some have argued that Israel should have waited longer to start its war, should have used different munitions and tactics, or should not have conducted the war at all. These calls are understandable, but they fail to acknowledge the context of Israel’s war against Hamas, from the hundreds of Israeli hostages to the daily rocket attacks on Israeli civilians from Gaza to the tunnels, and the real existential threat of Hamas poses Israel and its citizens, who live within walking distance of the warzone.
To be clear, I am outraged by the civilian casualties in Gaza. But it’s crucial to direct that outrage at the right target. And that target is Hamas.
It is outrageous that Hamas spent decades and billions of dollars building tunnels under civilian homes and protected areas for the sole purpose of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. It is outrageous that Hamas does not allow civilians in their tunnels, that Hamas says and takes actions to create as many civilian deaths as possible—both its own and Israeli. The atrocities committed on Oct. 7 are outrageous. That Hamas fights in civilian clothes, intermixed within civilians, and launches rockets at Israeli civilians from Palestinian civilian areas is outrageous.
The sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas. For Israel’s part, it’s taken more care to prevent them than any other army in human history.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project and host of the “Urban Warfare Project Podcast.” He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War and co-author of Understanding Urban Warfare. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
Israeli soldiers discovered an underground tunnel running beneath a cemetery in Khan Yunis, the Israel Defense Forces said on Monday.
The tunnel was located directly below the Bani Suheila cemetery by troops from the IDF’s 98th Division. Bani Suheila was one of several cemeteries the army was accused of desecrating in recent Western media reports.
“While investigating the tunnel, the forces came across explosives, sliding doors and blast-proof doors, and eliminated terrorists who were inside,” the IDF statement said.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
The IDF said the shaft was one kilometer long and 20 meters below the cemetery, adding that it was part of a larger underground network.
Combat engineers destroyed the tunnel.
In mid-January, the IDF confirmed it was operating in cemeteries where intelligence indicated that the bodies of Israeli hostages may have been buried.
“The IDF conducts precise hostage rescue operations in the specific locations where information indicates that the bodies of hostages may be located,” the army said in a statement to NBC News at the time. “The hostage identification process, conducted at a secure and alternative location, ensures optimal professional conditions and respect for the deceased. Bodies determined not to be those of hostages are returned with dignity and respect.”
The military’s statement added, “If not for Hamas’s reprehensible decision to take Israeli men, women, children and babies hostage, the need for such searches for our hostages would not exist.”
Khan Yunis, Gaza’s second-largest city, is regarded as a personal stronghold of Hamas leader in the Strip Yahya Sinwar, whose family lives there. Ground forces recently completed their encirclement of the city.
Around 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on Oct. 7. The number of men, women and children held captive in Gaza by Hamas is now believed to be 136, although some of them have been murdered while in captivity.
A United Nations team has arrived in Israel to examine reports of sexual violence during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 even as Hamas and some critics of Israel continue to reject evidence that such assaults occurred.
Israeli officials have said that Hamas terrorists brutalized women throughout their incursion into southern Israel and have complained that U.N. leaders and others have been slow to condemn sexual assaults.
The U.N. visit comes after multiple news organizations reported allegations of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack. In a Dec. 28 article, The New York Times documented a pattern of gender-based violence in the attack and identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appeared to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
The U.N. team “aims to give voice to survivors, witnesses, recently released hostages and those affected; to identify avenues for support, including justice and accountability; and to gather, analyze and verify information,” said a statement issued Wednesday by the office of Pramila Patten, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, who is leading the visit.
While the Israeli government has welcomed Ms. Patten’s team, which arrived Sunday night, it has refused to cooperate with another U.N. body investigating Oct. 7 atrocities, accusing it of anti-Israel bias.
Hamas, which the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group, denies that Palestinian fighters sexually assaulted women during the attack.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The police also said they found Sapir’s bag where she said she had been hiding, and women’s clothing near where she said the rapes occurred. And three severed heads were found farther away, near the bodies of assailants in military fatigues, Israeli officials said, without providing more detail.
In a separate interview, Yura Karol, 22, who was hiding next to Sapir, had told The Times he barely lifted his head but also saw a woman raped and killed while surrounded by armed men, some wearing military fatigues. Reached again last week, he repeated the account.
Asked why the Israeli police released only part of Sapir’s testimony, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent and spokeswoman, said, “We needed to show the world, which unbelievably didn’t believe us about sexual violence, and on the other hand, we needed to protect the investigation.”
The other witness who has been scrutinized is Raz Cohen, a security consultant who has described seeing a rape at a different location to several news outlets. Critics have questioned his credibility because he did not say he witnessed such an attack in his very first interviews with reporters, on Oct. 9.
Mr. Cohen started talking about witnessing rape in interviews the next day. He spoke to The Times in November, and said he saw five men in civilian clothes rape and kill a woman while he was hiding in a dried-up streambed.
Critics have pointed out that he went further in other interviews than he did with The Times to describe the terrorists as civilians.
A friend who was hiding with him, Shoam Gueta, also told The Times he saw a group of men sexually assault and kill a woman. Reached again last week, he repeated the account.
In his very first interviews with the media, Mr. Cohen described the terror of seeing people being massacred around him and hiding for his life. Asked this month why he had not mentioned rape at first, Mr. Cohen cited the stress of his experience, and said in a text message that he had not realized then that he was one of the few surviving witnesses. He declined to be interviewed again, saying he was working to recover from the trauma he suffered.
Kateryna Busol, a Ukrainian lawyer specializing in international law, including crimes against women, said a slight variation in eyewitness testimony “does not necessarily invalidate the witness’s experience.”
“It’s natural after such a traumatic experience to have certain blind spots and to fluctuate in the way certain aspects of the event are remembered,” she said.
The Times article also described visual evidence and interviews with witnesses, soldiers and volunteer medics who together said they found more than 30 bodies of women and girls with signs of sexual violence or mutilation, including at kibbutzim and military bases struck by heavily armed gunmen wearing combat fatigues.
The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, they did not conduct autopsies or collect other forensic evidence. Experts say it is not unusual for such evidence to be minimal in cases of wartime sexual violence.
The Times article described the case of Gal Abdush, a mother of two who was killed along with her husband after fleeing the rave, and her family’s anguish over the uncertainty. Based on video of how her body was found, Israeli police officials said they believed she had been raped, and some members of the Abdush family said they feared the same.
“It seems to me, and I really hope I’m wrong,” said Zvika Alter, a brother-in-law, in early December, “that she was raped.”
Since the publication of the Times article, a few family members have denied or cast doubt on that possibility, including another brother-in-law who said he spoke to Ms. Abdush’s husband before he was killed. Critics have also seized on an Instagram comment by Miral Alter, Zvika’s wife and one of Ms. Abdush’s sisters, suggesting that The Times misled the family about the focus of the article.
Ms. Alter, whom The Times had not interviewed before the article was published, deleted the comment shortly after posting it. But critics circulated images of it to assert falsely that the family had renounced the article.
Last week, Ms. Alter told the Times that she was upset her post had been used to question whether Hamas sexually assaulted women and that when she made it, she had been “confused about what happened” and was trying to “protect my sister.”
“Did she suffer? Did she die right away?” she said. “I want to hope she didn’t suffer, but we will never know.”
In addition to the work of the U.N. team now in Israel, several investigations into the allegations of sexual violence are unfolding. The Israeli police have been collecting information. So has a civil commission led by Israeli academics. And a separate U.N. commission has called on the public to submit information.
Israeli activists and their allies abroad have expressed anger over what they consider the U.N.’s slow response. “Me too, unless you’re a Jew!” protesters have shouted at demonstrations in Tel Aviv.
The U.N. team led by Ms. Patten plans to spend about two weeks in Israel and the occupied West Bank interviewing witnesses and analyzing medical and forensic information. Ms. Patten’s office said she will share some initial findings after the mission ends in mid-February, with additional information expected to be included in her office’s annual report on sexual violence in conflict.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
There’s been a lot of criticism of Israel recently for purportedly rejecting a two-state solution for sharing the territory of what was once the British Palestine Mandate between two peoples. The truth is more complex. As a Palestinian who genuinely yearns for a two-state solution and an improvement in living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, I believe this truth must be told: It is Israel
—and the Zionist Jewish community preceding independence—that consistently offered compromise, dialogue, and a two-state solution. And it is Palestinian demagogues valuing personal power over the good of their people who have rejected these openhanded offers—in favor of endless strife and the desire that the Jewish community be completely destroyed.
It is the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement that has betrayed the Palestinian people and consistently opposed peace. Unfortunately, the views of the antisemitic Palestinian political heads often overshadow the voices of real Palestinians who yearn for peace. Their voices only rarely are heard, as in a recent protest in Gaza in which women and children protested against Hamas, blaming the terrorist organization for the tragedy of their lives and showcasing the divide between the people and their leaders.
[The Newsweek Op-Ed continues]
When the British Peel Commission proposed a partition of Palestine in 1937, the Jewish leadership, in a spirit of compromise, accepted it, despite the small size of the proposed Jewish state. But in what would become a recurring theme, this gesture of peace was met with outright rejection from the Arab community. This wasn’t just a refusal of terms; it was a refusal even to entertain the possibility of peaceful coexistence by Palestinian leaders like Haj Amin el-Husseini, who went on to serve as a Nazi collaborator in World War II, recruiting Balkan Muslims for the S.S.
When the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide the Mandate into Jewish and Arab states in 1947, the Jewish community joyously accepted their proposal. Yet tragically, the Palestinian Arab leadership again rejected even a small Jewish state in the territory. They then invited the armies of seven neighboring Arab countries to invade and destroy the newborn Jewish state in what became Israel’s War of Independence.
The trend continued with the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which Israeli leaders generously allowed a genocidal terrorist group called the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), run by the mastermind mass murderer Yasser Arafat, to take control over most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The year 2000 was a critical juncture. At the Camp David Summit, Israel extended an unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood. They were once again met with Palestinian leadership’s refusal—and the eruption of the bloody Second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings that killed almost a thousand Israeli civilians.
The betrayal shattered any illusion of a commitment to a peaceful resolution from the Palestinian side.
[The Newsweek Op-Ed continues]
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regarding a two-state solution reveals a harsh reality: Israel has consistently made genuine efforts toward peace, only to be met with rejection, treachery, and blood-curdling violence by the Palestinian side. This pattern of refusal, particularly epitomized by groups like Hamas, has been the real obstacle to peace.
It’s time to acknowledge this truth bluntly. Those who claim to desire peace must confront and challenge the rejectionist elements within Palestinian society, including Hamas. We need to get rid of the Palestinian establishment who have ruled for 15 years without actually representing the Palestinian people. Only then can we hope to forge a path toward a peaceful, two-state future.
Eid is a Palestinian human rights activist. He lives in the West Bank.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
(January 28, 2024 / JNS) Hundreds of Palestinians evacuating from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip chanted “Down with Hamas” on Saturday in a video posted on social media by Israeli authorities as cracks in the terror group’s control of the enclave continue to grow.
The video was posted on social media by the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit within the Israeli Defense Ministry which coordinates civilian issues between the Israeli government, military, international organizations and the Palestinian Authority.
“Exclusive footage: Myriads of Gazans evacuate to a secure humanitarian area, chanting ‘Down with Hamas.’ The video was captured in the new passage in western Khan Younis, enabling Gaza residents to access the Al-Muwasi humanitarian area,” tweeted COGAT.
COGAT
@cogatonline
Myriads of Gazans evacuate to a secure humanitarian area, chanting “Down with Hamas.” The video was captured in the new passage in western Khan Younis, enabling Gaza residents to access the Al-Muwasi humanitarian area. pic.twitter.com/oTCeD76gnn
According to COGAT official Maj.-Gen. Rasan Aliyan, “In recent days, we have been seeing more and more evidence of public criticism voiced by the residents of Gaza against the Hamas terrorist organization. The residents of the Gaza Strip rightly prefer their own well-being and the safety of their children to the continued strengthening of Hamas militants and the terrorist activities that harm them and their future.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
At least 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas currently holds 136 men, women, children and soldiers captive in Gaza. Some people remain unaccounted for as Israeli authorities continue to identify bodies and search for human remains.
Frequently Asked Questions
Click here to view a downloadable PDF.
Updated: November 22
Question: What are the details of the hostage deal Israel agreed to?
Answer: On November 21, Israel agreed to a U.S.-brokered deal to free 50 women and children being held hostage by Hamas in exchange for a four day pause in the fighting and the release of some 150 Palestinian prisoners. Aid trucks with humanitarian supplies will continue to enter Gaza during this pause, and fuel will also be allowed in. This agreement is a direct byproduct of the tremendous progress of Israel’s military operation to degrade and destroy Hamas, and is further proof that sustained Israeli military pressure on Hamas is essential for gaining the release of hostages.
More Information: Even as the hostages are expected to be released, almost 200 remain in Gaza, being held captive by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups. The United States and international community must continue to demand the immediate and unconditional release of all the hostages. The kidnapping of 240 hostages was part of Hamas’ despicable and brutal ISIS-like attack of October 7. Ripping people from their homes – including women and children – is a barbaric war crime and a violation of both international law and basic humanity. The U.S. must give Israel the resources, diplomatic support, and time required for the IDF to achieve its war objectives: free all the hostages, ensure Hamas can never again commit another massacre, and drive Hamas out of power.
Question: What is Israel’s goal for the operation in Gaza?
Answer: Israel intends to eliminate Hamas’ military capabilities and end its ability to govern Gaza. Israel must ensure that Hamas can never again carry out atrocities against Israeli families.
More Information: This is an unprovoked war by Hamas on Israel. This isn’t a war of Israel’s choosing, but a war Hamas and Iran made necessary. This unprecedented attack requires an unprecedented response by Israel.
Question: Is now the time for a ceasefire?
Answer: Calling for a ceasefire now paints Israel as the aggressor and would allow Hamas to stay in power. Israel must be given the time and support it needs to destroy Hamas as a military force and remove it from power. There will never be peace while Hamas is in control of Gaza.
More Information: A ceasefire is in effect a maintenance of the status quo, allowing Hamas to continue to use Gaza as a launching pad for terrorism against Israel. Calling for a ceasefire now is to deny Israel’s right to defend its citizens from terrorism. Hamas is still launching rockets at Israel and holding over 240 Israelis and foreign nationals hostage. Israel has every right to wage a defensive war against Hamas and continue its operation until Hamas is fully defeated.
Question: Are Israel’s actions in Gaza illegal?
Answer: Israel, like every nation, has the absolute right to self-defense. Israel is acting according to international law after the unprovoked attack by Hamas.
More Information: Israel is defending itself and undertaking military action to achieve specific, legitimate military aims. Israel exclusively targets Hamas and other terrorist groups while taking unparalleled steps to avoid civilian casualties. The terrorist organization violates international law by deliberately using its civilians as human shields.
[The AIPAC Report continues]
Question: Is Israel illegally displacing Gaza residents?
Answer: Israel has asked Gaza residents to voluntarily move south to protect their own lives. This is both legal and moral.
More Information: Israel needs to dismantle Hamas infrastructure in northern Gaza and has asked residents to leave temporarily to avoid the fighting. International law specifically allows the involuntary temporary removal of persons to meet a military imperative and enhance the safety of civilians. Egypt has refused to open its crossing with Gaza to allow civilians to leave.
Question: Is Israel illegally imposing a siege on Gaza? Israel cannot deny food, water or electricity to Gaza.
Answer: No. The U.S. and Israel worked together to establish a safe zone in southern Gaza for civilians and a corridor to bring humanitarian aid, including food, water, and medical supplies, from Egypt into Gaza. In the past, Hamas has stolen and repurposed international aid for its terror purposes, including on October 16th when it stole fuel and medical equipment from UNRWA. Under international law, a military force is not required to supply its enemy.
More Information: Hamas destroyed the main border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered as well as electric lines supplying power to the Gaza Strip. Hamas has prepared for this war for months, stockpiling resources including food, fuel, water, medical supplies, and more. Hamas chooses not to share the resources with Gazans in need, using it for terror purposes instead. America must ensure aid is delivered to civilians and not stolen by Hamas.
Question: Is Israel employing white phosphorus munitions?
Answer: Israel categorically denied reports that it has used white phosphorus in its war against Hamas. Reuters reported a statement from the Israeli military, saying: “The current accusation made against the IDF regarding the use of white phosphorus in Gaza is unequivocally false.”
More Information: White phosphorus is deployed by militaries to mark targets or create smoke screens, though it can also cause severe burns and start fires. The United States military has previously used white phosphorus, including during the war in Iraq. The use of white phosphorus munitions is not banned under international law.
Question: What are “humanitarian pauses” and is Israel providing them?
Answer: Humanitarian pauses are brief stops in the fighting intended to allow humanitarian assistance to enter and reach certain areas in Gaza. Israel has allowed for “humanitarian pauses” to facilitate the flow of humanitarian assistance into the Gaza Strip and allow civilians to leave areas of heavy fighting. On November 9, the United States and Israel announced that the IDF will implement daily four-hour pauses of military operations to facilitate additional humanitarian aid. Humanitarian pauses must be limited in time and location, include protections to ensure aid is distributed exclusively and effectively to civilians and not stolen by Hamas, and not interfere with Israel’s right to defend its citizens and achieve its military objectives. On November 21, Israel agreed to a four day pause in the fighting to facilitate the release of 50 hostages held by Hamas.
More Information: A humanitarian pause is not ceasefire. Calling for a “ceasefire” is to call for an indefinite termination of hostilities that would leave in place the status quo, prevent Israel from achieving its military objectives, and ensure Hamas remains in power and able to attack Israel again in the future. There was a ceasefire in place on October 6 before Hamas’ unprovoked attack on October 7; a ceasefire now would only enable Hamas to carry out further attacks on Israel.
Question: Did Hamas use Shifa Hospital for military operations?
Answer: Yes. It has been an open secret for years that Hamas uses the Shifa Hospital complex as a command-and-control center, embedding its terrorist infrastructure within and underneath the hospital. Hamas embeds itself within hospitals, schools, mosques, and other civilian infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip — intentionally using civilians as human shields to deter Israeli attacks. Shifa Hospital is believed to be a key location in Hamas’ tunnel network, sitting above underground infrastructure capable of housing hundreds of terrorists. President Biden said: “One thing that’s been established is that Hamas does have headquarters, weapons, materials below this hospital and I suspect others.” This has been confirmed independently by U.S. intelligence sources, and the IDF has published evidence of Hamas’ use of the hospital, including video footage of hostages being brought there, caches of weapons discovered, and tunnels within the complex.
More Information: Under international law, it is a war crime to use a hospital as a military facility. Using civilian infrastructure for military purposes turns it into a legitimate military target. In 2016, during the United States’ war on ISIS, the Al Salem hospital complex in Mosul was used by ISIS as a base of operations and command-and-control headquarters. Coalition aircraft conducted a precision strike on the hospital to target the terrorists firing from the hospital complex, acting in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict. Western countries cannot succumb to terrorist blackmail and allow the brutality and criminality of terrorist organizations to shield them from legitimate military strikes.
American-led negotiators are edging closer to an agreement in which Israel would suspend its war in Gaza for about two months in exchange for the release of more than 100 hostages still held by Hamas, a deal that could be sealed in the next two weeks and would transform the conflict consuming the region.
Negotiators have developed a written draft agreement merging proposals offered by Israel and Hamas in the last 10 days into a basic framework that will be the subject of talks in Paris on Sunday. While there are still important disagreements to be worked out, negotiators are cautiously optimistic that a final accord is within reach, according to U.S. officials who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The hostages have been in captivity since Oct. 7, when Hamas gunmen stormed into Israel and killed an estimated 1,200 people and seized about 240 more in the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. Israel’s military retaliation since then has killed more than 25,000 people, most of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. It is not clear how many of those killed in Gaza were Hamas combatants.
The short-lived truce in November, brokered by Mr. Biden along with Qatar and Egypt, resulted in a seven-day pause in the fighting in exchange for the release of more than 100 hostages by Hamas and about 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held by Israel. About 136 people seized on Oct. 7 remain unaccounted for, including six American citizens, although about two dozen of those are presumed to be dead.
The deal now coming together would be more expansive in scope than the previous one, officials say. In the first phase, fighting would stop for about 30 days while women, elderly and wounded hostages were released by Hamas. During that period, the two sides would work out details of a second phase that would suspend military operations for roughly another 30 days in exchange for Israeli soldiers and male civilians being held. The ratio of Palestinians to be released from Israeli prisons is still to be negotiated but that is viewed as a solvable issue. The deal would also allow for more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
While the agreement would not be the permanent cease-fire that Hamas has demanded for the release of all hostages, officials close to the talks believe that if Israel halts the war for two months, it would likely not resume it in the same way that it has waged it until now. The truce would provide a window for further diplomacy that could lead to a broader resolution of the conflict.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Two days later, the president sent Mr. McGurk to the region, where he met with Gen. Abbas Kamel, the chief of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service and the nation’s second most powerful official, as well as Sheikh Mohammed of Qatar. The talks were complicated when Israeli media played a tape apparently of Mr. Netanyahu privately calling Qatar’s role as mediator “problematic” because of its relationship to Hamas, prompting Qatar to call the remarks “irresponsible and destructive.”
Mr. McGurk returned to Washington on Friday and met with Mr. Biden in the Oval Office along with Mr. Burns and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who has also been traveling in the region. With his advisers next to him, Mr. Biden then separately called President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Sheikh Mohammed.
“They affirmed that all efforts must now be made to conclude a deal that would result in the release of all hostages together with a prolonged humanitarian pause in the fighting,” the White House said in its summary of the call with Mr. Sisi.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker.
To understand the secret negotiations, New York Times reporters spoke to more than a dozen diplomats and officials from seven nations and the Palestinian Authority.
Top officials from at least 10 different administrations are trying to forge a head-spinning set of deals to end the Gaza war and answer the divisive question of how the territory will be governed after the fighting stops.
The narrowest set of major discussions is focused on reaching a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This would involve the exchange of more than 100 Israeli hostages held by Hamas for a cease-fire and thousands of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails.
A second track centers on reshaping the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. American and Arab officials are discussing overhauling the leadership of the authority and having it take control of Gaza after the war ends, assuming power from Israel and Hamas.
In a third track, American and Saudi officials are pushing Israel to agree to conditions for the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi Arabia forging formal ties with Israel for the first time ever.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Officials from the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar are discussing a deal that would pause the fighting for up to two months. In November, the parties agreed to a brief pause that resulted in Hamas releasing more than 100 hostages.
In one proposal, the hostages would be released in phases during a pause of up to 60 days in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel. Some officials have suggested Israeli civilians would be released first, in exchange for Palestinian women and minors detained by Israel.
Then captured Israeli soldiers would be exchanged for Palestinian militant leaders serving long-term sentences.
Diplomats on various sides say they hope that more detailed discussions could be held during the pause about a permanent truce that might involve the withdrawal of most or all Israeli troops, the departure of Hamas’s leaders from the strip and a transition of power to the Palestinian Authority. For now, Israel and Hamas have each rejected some of those conditions.
To try to advance these negotiations, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, plans to meet in Europe in the coming days with senior Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari counterparts.
Some observers hope that the World Court’s call on Friday for Israel to comply with the Genocide Convention will give momentum and political cover to Israeli officials who are pushing internally to end the war.
2. Overhaul the Palestinian Authority
The Palestinian Authority briefly controlled Gaza after Israeli troops left in 2005, but Hamas forced it from power two years later. Now, some want the authority to return to Gaza and play a role in postwar governance. To make that idea more appealing to Israel, which opposes it, there is a push by the United States, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to overhaul the authority and change its leadership.
Under its current president, Mahmoud Abbas, 88, the authority is widely perceived as both corrupt and authoritarian. Mediators are encouraging him to take a more ceremonial role and to cede executive power to a new prime minister who could oversee Gaza’s reconstruction and reduce corruption. U.S. officials say the goal is to make the authority a more plausible administrator of a future Palestinian state. Israeli officials also assert that the authority needs to change its education system, which they say does not promote peace, and end welfare payments to those convicted of violence against Israelis.
Some critics of Mr. Abbas want him replaced by Salam Fayyad, a Princeton professor credited with modernizing the authority during a stint as prime minister a decade ago, or Nasser al-Kidwa, a former Palestinian envoy to the U.N. who broke with Mr. Abbas three years ago. But diplomats say Mr. Abbas is pushing for a candidate over whom he has more influence, like Mohammad Mustafa, his longtime economic adviser.
[The New York Times Report continues]
These new terms were first voiced publicly by Mr. Blinken after he met with Prince Mohammed in a desert tent camp in Saudi Arabia this month. He delivered them to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel after flying from there to Tel Aviv. He reiterated them again in a public talk at Davos, Switzerland, as did Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser.
Mr. Netanyahu has publicly rejected that proposal — pledging recently to maintain Israel’s military control of the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza. Many Israelis support that, although some U.S. officials wonder whether it is an opening bargaining position by Mr. Netanyahu.
To reassure the Saudis and the Palestinians, some officials have suggested a U.N. Security Council resolution, backed by the United States, that would enshrine the Palestinians’ right to sovereignty. But the idea has yet to gain traction.
There is also the question of whether the Biden administration can deliver a Senate-approved mutual defense treaty to Prince Mohammed. Some Democratic senators have already raised concerns about such a treaty. And the chances that Republican senators will oppose it are expected to grow as the November U.S. presidential election draws closer.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Abu Dhabi, and Edward Wong from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Aaron Boxerman, Adam Rasgon and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv; Farnaz Fassihi from New York; and Julian E. Barnes from Washington.
Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley
The United Nations on Friday fired 12 of its employees in Gaza and began an investigation into them after accusations by Israel that they had helped plan and had participated in the Oct. 7 terrorist assault that left about 1,200 Israelis dead and more than 240 others captured.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The accusations quickly led the United States, one of UNRWA’s largest donors, to temporarily halt funding to the organization. UNRWA, which provides social services in the Gaza Strip, has been the principal agency overseeing the distribution of aid to Gazans amid a dire humanitarian crisis in the territory that has worsened through months of war since the Oct. 7 attack.
“The United States is extremely troubled by the allegations that 12 UNRWA employees may have been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel,” the State Department said in a statement.
The United States is the biggest donor to the agency, providing it with $340 million in 2022 and several hundred million dollars in 2023.
Three Israeli defense officials said military intelligence officers have collected an enormous trove of information after Oct. 7, and in the past two weeks they matched it with a second cache of intelligence that solidified an assessment that the UNRWA employees had been involved in the attack.
UNRWA was created to provide aid to millions of Palestinians across the Middle East whose families fled or were forced from properties during the wars surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948. Since Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and then ousted a rival faction from Gaza a year later, the group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and other countries, ceded many of its civil responsibilities to UNRWA.
The agency employed about 13,000 workers, most of them Palestinians, before the war began.
Israel and the U.N. have each accused each other of acting in bad faith since Israel launched its war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault. The U.N. has accused Israel of slowing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the embattled enclave, and Israel has said the world body has promoted Hamas’s propaganda.
Those recriminations, however, are less politically sensitive than the accusation that humanitarian workers could have engaged in an act of terror, an allegation being taken seriously by the U.N. leadership, the United States and the European Union.
to limit the harm to civilians, and to aid workers, in the conflict. More than 100 U.N. employees have been killed since the start of the war, the most the world body has suffered in a single conflict.
[The New York Times Report continues]
U.N. leaders have repeatedly urged Israel to do more U.N. officials have also warned in stark terms that ordinary residents of Gaza are at risk of starvation and are experiencing a spike in infectious diseases as the weather gets colder.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the E.U.’s top diplomat and vice president of the European Commission, said he was “extremely concerned” about the allegation that U.N. employees had been involved in the terrorist attacks. He said the commission was in contact with UNRWA and expected it to take immediate measures against the staff involved.
Additional reporting was contributed by Gaya Gupta and Adam Sella
“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”
There is politics here, as everywhere. A two-state solution is dismally unpopular in Israel. A Gallup poll found backing for it among 25 percent of Israelis. The Israel Democracy Institute posed the question to Jewish Israelis with even more torque: Would you support a two-state solution if it were the only way to continue receiving American assistance? A majority said no.
Perhaps the only thing as unpopular in Israel right now as a two-state solution is Netanyahu himself. A recent Maariv poll found 28 percent of Israelis believe Netanyahu is still suited to be prime minister. If elections were held today, his party would be crushed. There are few paths to victory, much less absolution, for him, but this is one of the few that might work: persuade Jewish Israelis he’s the only leader tough enough to beat back American and European pressure to form a Palestinian state.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.
Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.
Is there antisemitism on campuses? Absolutely. But I visit colleges constantly. Antisemitism isn’t what is bringing most of those students out to the rallies. Antisemitism is not why most 18- to 29-year-olds see Israel as the aggressor nation. Antisemitism is not why the images and facts out of Gaza horrify. They are opposed to the Israel they know: an Israel that has no interest in peace — that has actively sabotaged efforts at peace — and that can imagine no security for itself absent the endless control of Palestinian lives.
Which is one reason I think the response to the protests on campus has been misguided. This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is.
Netanyahu’s comments reflect a reality: There is no two-state solution in the offing. This is a region gripped by fury and fear and grief and hate. Gaza is rubble and Israeli hostages remain in captivity and the dead are legion. I am sympathetic to those in the region who rage at Americans who insist on fantasizing about a partition that they themselves will not live within. I would not, as an Israeli, want to live next to a state where most people applauded the massacre of my neighbors. I would not, as a Palestinian, want to live next to a state that had just flattened my home and killed tens of thousands of my countrymen.
But there was nothing inevitable about the seeming impossibility of peace. It was built out of political decisions on both sides. It was built by suicide bombers and Hamas leaders. It was built by messianic settlers and Benjamin Netanyahu. And it is not in America’s interest to support Netanyahu as long as that is the vision he is pursuing, which he freely admits, even now. Biden knows an Israel that Gen Z does not. But Gen Z sometimes seems to be listening more closely to what Israeli leaders are saying than Biden is.
Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 27, 2024, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The United Nations’ highest court said on Friday that Israel must take action to prevent acts of genocide by its forces in Gaza and must let more aid into the enclave. But the court did not call on Israel to immediately suspend its military campaign.
The ruling, by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, was an initial step in a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Though the court has no means of enforcement, the closely watched case has deep resonance for both sides, and added to international pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s war against Hamas.
Initial reaction among Palestinians was mixed, with the Palestinian Foreign Ministry saying the court had “ruled in favor of humanity and international law,” while some people criticized the judges for not ordering a stop to the war.
[The New York Times Report continues]
In a packed courtroom earlier this month, lawyers for South Africa argued that Israel had meant to “create conditions of death” in Gaza and demanded that the court order an emergency suspension of the military campaign.
Israel’s lawyers argued that the country’s military had worked to preserve civilian lives in Gaza. Israel also said it had given civilians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before invading in late October and, after freezing aid delivery at the start of the war, later enabled its daily supply.
In its 29-page interim ruling, the court said that Israel must take actions to ensure that its soldiers and citizens adhere to the U.N. genocide convention, and must report back within a month to show how it is complying with the instructions.
The court is not expected to issue a ruling on the broader genocide charge for years.
Tomorrow, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we join nations around the world and pause to mourn one of the darkest chapters in human history, when six million Jews were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s. We also grieve the Roma, Sinti, Slavs, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ individuals, racial minorities, and political dissidents who were abused or killed. And we honor the courage of survivors and the heroism of people who bravely stood up to the Nazis, risking everything to save innocent lives.
This year, the charge to remember the Holocaust, the evil of the Nazis, and the scourge of antisemitism is more pressing than ever. On October 7 Hamas terrorists unleashed pure, unadulterated evil on the people of Israel, slaughtering approximately 1,200 innocent people and taking hundreds more hostage – including survivors of the Shoah. It was the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.
In the aftermath of Hamas’s vicious massacre, we have witnessed an alarming rise of despicable antisemitism at home and abroad that has surfaced painful scars from millennia of hate and genocide of Jewish people. It is unacceptable. We cannot remember all that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust experienced and then stand silently by when Jews are attacked and targeted again today. Without equivocation or exception, we must also forcefully push back against attempts to ignore, deny, distort, and revise history. This includes Holocaust denialism and efforts to minimize the horrors that Hamas perpetrated on October 7, especially its appalling and unforgiveable use of rape and sexual violence to terrorize victims.
Under my presidency, and our first-ever National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, we are continuing to condemn and fight antisemitism at every turn. Because sadly, these events remind us that hate never goes away. It only hides until it is given a little oxygen. And we must each do our part to ensure that hate in all its forms has no safe harbor anywhere in the world. It is our shared moral responsibility to stand up to antisemitism and hate-fueled violence at home and abroad and to make real the promise of “Never Again.”
It was a promise my father first instilled in me at our family dinner table, educating my siblings and me about the horrors of the Shoah. It is a lesson I have passed down to my children and grandchildren by taking them to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, so they could understand for themselves the depth of this antisemitic evil and the complicity of silence or indifference. And it is a message that I have strived to honor during my visits to Israel and by inviting Holocaust survivors and Jewish hostage families to the White House – so the entire nation bears witness.
On this somber International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we hold the Jewish community and the people of Israel close in our hearts. We recommit to carrying forward the lessons of the Shoah, to fighting antisemitism and all forms of hate-fueled violence, and to bringing the hostages home. And we remember the enduring strength, spirit, and resilience of the Jewish people – even in the darkest of times.
A federal jury today convicted a Michigan man for conspiring with others and defacing Temple Jacob, a Jewish synagogue in Hancock with swastikas and symbols associated with The Base, a multi-state, white supremacist group.
Nathan Weeden, 23, of Houghton, was convicted of one count of conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any person in the exercise of their rights and one count of intentionally defacing, damaging or destroying religious property because of the race or ethnic characteristics of individuals associated with that property. Weeden’s co-conspirators, Richard Tobin, of New Jersey, and Yousef Barasneh, of Wisconsin, both previously pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the incident. Barasneh testified in the trial against Weeden.
“This defendant shamelessly desecrated Temple Jacob when he emblazoned swastikas — a symbol of extermination — on their Temple walls,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Such conduct is unacceptable and criminal under any circumstances but doing so in furtherance of a self-described ‘Operation Kristallnacht’ conspiracy is beyond disgraceful. Antisemitism has no place in our society, and the Justice Department will aggressively prosecute white supremacists who seek to threaten and intimidate others from exercising their federally and constitutionally protected rights.”
“Today’s swift conviction sends a strong message that hate will not be tolerated in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” said U.S. Attorney Mark Totten for the Western District of Michigan. “No one should be the target of hate because of their race, ethnicity, religion or any other status. When hateful words become hateful acts, my office will use every tool we have to protect the public and secure justice.”
“People of all faiths deserve to feel safe in their communities,” said Special Agent in Charge Cheyvoryea Gibson of the FBI Detroit Field Office. “The FBI and our law enforcement partners will continue to hold those accountable whose hate-filled aggression violates the civil rights of others. For law enforcement to safeguard against hate and violence, we request the public’s assistance in reporting suspicious or threatening behavior by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or submitting a tip online at tips.fbi.gov/home.”
[The Press Release from the Department of Justice continues]
In September 2019, Weeden, Tobin and Barasneh, all members of The Base, used an encrypted messaging platform to discuss vandalizing property associated with African Americans and Jewish Americans. Weeden and his co-conspirators dubbed their plan, “Operation Kristallnacht,” which in German means “Night of Broken Glass.” This term referenced events that took place on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, in which Nazis murdered Jews and burned and destroyed their homes, synagogues, schools and places of business. Weeden carried out this plan on Sept. 21, 2019, when he spray-painted swastikas and symbols associated with The Base on the outside walls of Temple Jacob.
A sentencing hearing will be scheduled at a later date. A federal district court judge will determine any sentencing after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
The FBI investigated the case with assistance from ATF and the Hancock Police Department.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler for the Western District of Michigan and Trial Attorney Eric Peffley of the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section prosecuted the case.
In the wake of the global rise of antisemitism, a new campaign against Jew-hatred launched Tuesday with the participation of influential Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities, athletes and opinion makers.
The project, named “New Year, New Voices,” which has already launched several videos on social media, includes model Cindy Crawford, actresses Connie Britton, Ginnifer Goodwin, Debra Messing, Jennifer Morrison, Jaimie Alexander, Rebecca Gayheart and Emmanuelle Chriqui, singers Lance Bass and Montana Tucker, actors David Arquette, Brett Gelman and Kevin Weisman, TV personality Colton Underwood, actor and singer Bryan Greenberg; gymnast Nia Dennis, former basketball player Zach Randolph, entrepreneur Scooter Braun, DJ Caroline D’Amore and others.
In a video posted on Instagram, uploaded with the description “We have a powerful flow of new influential voices joining us in solidarity,” the celebrities say, “It’s a new year with new voices joining us every day” to stand against antisemitism.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
The signatories include Madonna, Chris Rock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gal Gadot, Jack Black, Isla Fisher, Jerry Seinfeld, Bradley Cooper, Tyler Perry, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Courtney Cox, Jessica Biel, Orlando Bloom, Tiffany Haddish, Will Ferrell, Brooke Shields and Chelsea Handler.
In an open letter, the stars praised Biden for his “unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people, who have been terrorized by Hamas since the group’s founding over 35 years ago, and for the Palestinians, who have also been terrorized, oppressed and victimized by Hamas for the last 17 years that the group has been governing Gaza.
“We all want the same thing: Freedom for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace,” the letter reads. “Freedom from the brutal violence spread by Hamas. And most urgently, in this moment, freedom for the hostages.”
In a separate initiative, more than 300 musicians from across the globe will record a rendition of Madonna’s “Like A Prayer,” in a show of solidarity with Israel, including artists from the United States, Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Chile, Germany and the Netherlands.
The project, titled “Bring Them Home,” is led by Israel’s Koolulam social-musical initiative that works to foster unity through mass-singing events.
Some 700 Hollywood entertainment professionals previously signed an open letter expressing unconditional backing for Israel’s war against terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, actor and film producer Michael Douglas and actress Gal Gadot are just a few of those behind the missive, posted by the Creative Community for Peace, a California-based organization founded in 2011 that works to counter antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the entertainment industry.
“This is terrorism. This is evil. There is no justification or rationalization for Hamas’s actions. These are barbaric acts of terrorism that must be called out by everyone. They are a terrorist organization whose leaders call for the murder of Jews everywhere,” said that letter of Hamas.
The White House released the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism last May in response to a dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents. No one could have foreseen that the strategy would be tested so soon by the response to the horrors of October 7.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
This summer, AJC began working with the Small Business Administration (SBA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and other agencies to implement the National Strategy, signing a Strategic Alliance Memorandum with SBA. Reflective of this work, Federal agencies issued rapid statements of support and solidarity shortly after the October 7 attacks. The USDA even helped organize groups of American farmers and volunteers to travel to Israel to harvest crops that otherwise would have withered.
AJC has been in constant contact with the Department of Education to relay its concerns, flag cases, and help make sure that antisemitic incidents are recorded. The Department’s Office for Civil Rights has specified that Title VI’s protection from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin extends to students who are or are perceived to be Jewish. The Department released an updated complaint form to make filing a complaint easier and pivoted its commitment to hold listening sessions in schools to have “interventions” with the most problematic educational spaces in America.
AJC’s CEO Ted Deutch made recommendations to the Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism on Capitol Hill in October. Since then, he has kept regular correspondence with Senators and Congressional representatives on both sides of the aisle, and has pushed them to fully implement the National Strategy and support Israel and the Jewish people.
Countering antisemitism is a whole-of-society effort. It requires all of us to act and make our voices heard. Indeed, the National Strategy does not just include action items for Federal agencies, it includes recommendations for every sector of American society.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Since October 7, there have been frightening levels of antisemitism on college campuses. We must urge university presidents to take proactive steps against antisemitism on campus by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, and taking concrete steps to protect Jews on campus, as recommended in the National Strategy.
IHRA’s Working Definition is the most concise, accurate, and globally recognized definition of antisemitism. It is a proven tool for recognizing and fighting antisemitism.
The National Strategy is a detailed, thoughtful document that dedicates a broad range of governmental and non-governmental resources to the fight against Jew hatred. It represents the most serious Presidential commitment to fighting antisemitism in history.
Congressional Democrats on Wednesday delivered their latest rebuke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, aligning behind a symbolic declaration that the U.S. remains staunchly supportive of a Palestinian state as part of any ultimate resolution to unrest in the Middle East.
As the Senate prepares to take up a potential emergency spending package with funds for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and border security, a group of 49 Senate Democratic caucus members led by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) offered an amendment reiterating that U.S. policy favors a two-state solution. The proposal is a clear pushback against Netanyahu’s recent rejection of that approach, giving Democrats a fresh opportunity to channel their frustration with his conservative government.
“The prime minister’s statements last week, I think, accelerated our efforts and also turbocharged our efforts,” Schatz told reporters, adding that he will offer the amendment as part of the national security package’s floor consideration but would not insist on a floor vote. Schatz indicated that future pieces of legislation on the floor may offer another chance to insist on a recorded vote.
[The Politco Report continues]
“It has been consistent US policy since 1948, but President Trump raised some questions about it. He didn’t say it wasn’t our policy, but maybe it’s time: We haven’t reaffirmed it legislatively for quite a while,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).
Added Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) of a possible Trump return to the Oval Office: “It is in some sense another example of trying to batten down the hatches and secure some basic positions before the storm, if there is one.”
There are other efforts to push back on the Israeli government by Democrats. A group of 18 members of the conference are already on board with an amendment led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) that would set certain conditions on aid to Israel.
“The Van Hollen amendment has a lot of momentum and a lot of co-sponsors,” Schatz said. “That is not a particularly radical proposition.”
But there appears to be little indication any Republicans would support Schatz’s push, despite his contention that “the two-state solution remains bipartisan” — but Republicans simply attach “more caveats to it.”
Asked about the calls to condition aid to Israel, moderate GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) said “I get it” but “one thing that we need to keep in mind is how fluid everything is.”
“None of us are unsympathetic to [the death toll] but how you [condition aid], I think, is part of the big challenge that we have,” she said in an interview.
A delegation of survivors of the Oct. 7 Supernova music festival massacre arrived in France this week for what the Israeli Foreign Ministry described as a “special outreach mission.”
The delegation includes Michal Ohana, 27, Yuval Vakanin, 24, Itai Razumenko, 25 and Israel Defense Forces Lt. Col. Eitan, 41.
Some 364 people were murdered at the outdoor rave near Kibbutz Re’im, Israel, attended by 3,500 partygoers—nearly one-third of the 1,200 people killed by Hamas terrorists during their mass invasion of the northwestern Negev. Many were wounded, and at least 40 were taken back to Gaza as hostages. There have been widespread reports of rape and sexual abuse during the attack.
During the visit to Paris, members of the delegation were slated to meet with senior parliamentary officials and members of the Jewish community, with student organizations and youth leaders.
“In these twisted days when Israel is accused of genocide, it is our duty to tell the truth about what happened on Oct. 7 above all else. We went through an inhuman massacre and the world must not close its eyes,” said Ohana.
Added Razumenko: “My family experienced the Holocaust and World War II. Humanity has not learned a lesson. What we went through on Oct. 7 should not happen to anyone.”
The delegation also met with Arthur Denovo, president of the Bataclan Massacre Victims Organization, which was founded after the coordinated Islamic State terror attacks in France in November 2015.
Mr. Pfeffer is a senior correspondent for Haaretz and the author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
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Just over 100 days ago, Benny Gantz was the leader of a small Israeli opposition party. Now, in a shared office inside a nondescript building within the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, Mr. Gantz is helping lead Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as a member of the war cabinet formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr. Gantz spends his days poring over operational plans, not just of the ongoing campaign in Gaza but also of contingencies for a war that may erupt with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite organization, on Israel’s northern border.
But the most complex challenge facing Mr. Gantz sits with him at the war cabinet table: Mr. Netanyahu. He has accused the prime minister numerous times in the past of dividing Israeli society. And since the war began, Mr. Gantz’s opinion of Mr. Netanyahu — and his estimation of the damage he is causing Israel — has sunk even lower, according to Gantz aides and political allies interviewed for this piece. Several security officials and foreign diplomats were also interviewed about Mr. Gantz.
Mr. Gantz, 64, is in a unique and contradictory position. He is now, essentially, the grown-up in the room of the Israeli government. Many if not most Israelis, as well as Israel’s allies, look to him to prevent the radical moves being urged by the government’s far-right members. At the same time, according to polls, he is also the man most likely to replace Mr. Netanyahu and his disastrous government. To manage that transition and set the stage for a potential successful premiership will require political deftness, ruthlessness and, above all, an acute sense of timing.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
Soldiers under his command describe him as brave under fire but deliberate in his decision-making off the battlefield, favoring consensus. He even acquired the nickname Benihuta, a play on his name and an Aramaic-Hebrew word for “laid-back.”
To his superiors, he was the epitome of a paratrooper: respectful of authority, commanding through example without raising his voice. He was fast-tracked through a series of command postings. At 42, he was promoted to major general, and a year later, in 2002, put in charge of the Israel Defense Forces’ Northern Command.
But after that his career appeared to falter, with two dead-end postings. He seemed to lack the burning ambition and political acumen needed to reach the very top of the greasy pole.
He made it there anyway.
A dispute in 2009 between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the I.D.F. chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi over who should become I.D.F. deputy chief of staff resulted in a compromise candidate: Mr. Gantz. It was supposed to be his last posting, and he retired in November 2010. But a series of scandals tainted the leading candidates for the top job, and he was called back to serve as chief of staff. Once again, and not for the last time, it was Mr. Gantz’s even temperament that got him the job.
Though many of the men who preceded him as commander of the armed forces ran for office after stepping away from the military, Mr. Gantz’s future in politics when his four-year term in that role ended was far from certain. Many thought he didn’t have the mettle. Though he apparently had reservations regarding Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak’s plans for attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as a cabinet minister has confirmed to me, as I.D.F. chief of staff, his professional disagreements with his political masters remained hidden from the public.
As the 2019 election neared, the absence of a candidate on the center-left capable of challenging Mr. Netanyahu led a group of political operatives to strongly encourage Mr. Gantz to run. As the former I.D.F. chief of staff, he was already widely respected by the Israeli mainstream.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
In polls since Oct. 7, National Unity has surpassed Likud in popularity. When polled about his suitability for prime minister, Mr. Gantz outstrips Mr. Netanyahu, at times by over 20 percentage points nationwide.
Mr. Gantz has refused to give interviews since Oct. 7, eschewing even off-record briefings. But his very presence in the innermost decision-making forum has reassured Israelis. Mr. Gantz is said to have stood against the urgings of the generals, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, to launch a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon. He advocated the hostage release agreement with Hamas, which generals initially rejected because it included a temporary truce during which Hamas could relieve its exhausted fighters.
Mr. Gantz has stuck to bland statements in public. His greatest political asset in a polarized society may be remaining a blank canvas upon which Israelis can project their aspirations.
According to conversations with diplomats for this piece, foreign officials reach out to Mr. Gantz to serve as a counterweight to Mr. Netanyahu. In such conversations, according to people close to him, when asked about the two-state solution, he responds that we’re in a new world and that the old phrase no longer applies, preferring instead to say “two separate entities.” It’s an example, his aides say, of Mr. Gantz’s effort to stay aloof from conflict with Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Gantz’s way of selling any future concessions to the Palestinians to Israelis is to wrap them in security necessities. During his period as defense minister, he was also a rare senior minister to meet with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
If — or more likely when — Mr. Gantz decides to leave the war cabinet and take his party back into the opposition, it will mean a crossroads for Israel’s future. It could well be the moment that opens the floodgates of protest, which have been largely shut because of the war, and bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis, including many reservists returned from the battlefield, to the streets to demand Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation.
Mr. Gantz knows full well that he is currently the most popular candidate for prime minister. But he is up against a master of political survival who will stop at nothing to hold on to power. How Mr. Gantz charts his next moves in the coming weeks and months will determine not just his own political fate but also that of the country he has served for the last half-century.
Ever since Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, critics have accused it of blockading and immiserating the territory — turning it, as they say, into an “open-air prison.”
The charge was always preposterous. Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Gazans were often treated in Israeli hospitals for cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Israel provided Gaza with much of its electricity and other critical goods even after Hamas came to power in 2007.
Now, as Israeli troops uncover more of Gaza’s vast underground city, the falsity of the accusation has become even more apparent.
According to a report this month in The New York Times, Israeli defense officials now estimate that Hamas’s tunnels measure between 350 and 450 miles in a territory that’s just 25 miles long. (By comparison, the London Underground is only 249 miles long.) Some of Gaza’s tunnels are wide enough for cars; some are more than 150 feet deep; some serve as munitions depots; others are comfortably kitted out as command bunkers.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
The tunnels also help explain the level of destruction that Israel has wreaked on Gaza since the war began. If Hamas hides the bulk of its fighters and munitions in the tunnels, Israel somehow has to find, search and destroy those tunnels. If Hamas builds the entrances to those tunnels inside private homes, schools or hospitals, those places all become military targets.
And if there are nearly 6,000 such entrances, the destruction is all but guaranteed to be epochal — just as it was in Mosul when the United States assisted Iraq in destroying ISIS (which was much less deeply entrenched there than Hamas is in Gaza) over nine months in 2016 and 2017. I don’t recall “Cease-Fire Now” demonstrations on college campuses back then.
It’s possible that Israel could fight with more discrimination to spare Palestinian lives while still destroying Hamas’s ability to make war. If so, it behooves Israel’s constant critics to explain precisely how, and to do so in a way that doesn’t let Hamas off the hook. Otherwise, the tragic reality of this war is that it is going to be catastrophic for Gaza — not because Israel wills it, but because Hamas spent years of cynical efforts to make it so.
Hamas could have averted this tragedy if it had turned Gaza into an enclave for peace rather than terror. It could have averted it if it had not started four previous rounds of war against Israel. It could have averted it if it had honored the cease-fire that held on Oct. 6. It could have lessened the blow against Gazans by fighting in the open, not behind civilians. It could have eased it by releasing all of its hostages. It could end it now by surrendering its leaders and sending its fighters into exile.
Till then, something I wrote in October holds true now: Hamas bears the blame for every death in this war.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
“Decolonize Palestine” and “Colonizers Back to Europe” are the demands of pro-Palestinian activists at protests that erupted in North America and Europe after October 7. Based on the lie that Israel is a European colonial-settler enterprise, these slogans ignore the fact that more than 50 percent of Jews living in Israel today are from the Middle East, many violently expelled from the Arab/Muslim world after the establishment of Israel. Moreover, these slogans deny the historic connection between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people, and fail to acknowledge the continuous presence of Jews in the Holy Land through the centuries.
Indiscriminate rocket attacks from Lebanon on northern Israel, by the terrorist group Hezbollah, have accompanied the current war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. On reading that Kibbutz Bar’am, located close to the border, was one of many Israeli sites evacuated, I remembered my first visit to Israel 45 years ago. It was a 10-month sabbatical visit to Haifa with my wife and children.
We bought a small car that we used extensively for day trips to archeological sites, mainly in Galilee, and the very first site we visited, Bar’am, stunned me. Here was the ruin of a large synagogue, an architectural gem, built in the 3rd century CE, and used as a synagogue for centuries, perhaps as late as the 13th century!
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Palestine is the name given Judea by the Romans in 136 CE, as punishment after the failed Bar Kokhba revolt. The Arab conquest of Palestine took place in 637 CE, when Umar Al Khattab captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. Now, in a deliberate inversion of the truth, the indigenous homeland of the Jews is “occupied” when Jews live there.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.
The progressive worldview favors moral binaries such as oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and indigenous, etc. Instead of moving beyond the relevance of race, progressives claim that we need it in order to make sense of the world. In fact, the two groups that focus primarily on race are racists and progressives.
Where do Jews fit into this reductive calculus?
Jews are not racially homogeneous, but progressives don’t seem to appreciate that. Most Jews in the West are “white-passing” and well-off, so progressives throw them in with the list of oppressors. When looking at Palestinians, these uninformed progressives believe they see relatively weak, poor BIPOC people. If there is a conflict between powerful “white” people and poor brown people, the progressive worldview requires that they stand with the latter.
However, unlike American Jews who are largely of European descent, 55% of Israeli Jews are either Sephardi or Mizrahi. The former descend from Jews exiled during the Spanish Inquisition, and the latter are from North African and Middle-Eastern Jewish communities. They are not white. There are, for example, about 160,000 Black Jews living in Israel who emigrated from Ethiopia.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
Progressives do not acknowledge the more than 3,000 years of history and Jewish life on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, because it does not fit with their image of what indigenous people look like. If Palestinians are the weaker, browner people in this conflict, then they must have had their land stolen by the stronger, whiter group. Facts don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter.
This is the psychology animating the protests on college campuses and elsewhere across the country.
The fact that progressives use the whiteness of some Jews as an argument against Jewish indigeneity in Israel is especially repugnant. The only reason that white Jews exist is because Jews fled persecution in their ancestral homeland and bred with local populations in Europe. When progressives and antisemites make this argument, they are using the effects of ethnic cleansing against the actual victims of ethnic cleansing.
Some will claim that Israel is a pariah among nations because it is an apartheid state. However, this claim does not survive scrutiny. Twenty percent of Israel’s population is Arab. Arab Israelis vote, sit as judges in Israel’s courtrooms, and as legislators in Israel’s parliament. Moreover, they have equal rights — the same rights as every Jewish citizen — and they have more freedoms than citizens of any other state in the region. For example, they can attend the Middle East’s only gay pride celebrations in Tel Aviv.
So why do progressives protest when Israel defends itself, but not when Hamas beheads homosexuals in Gaza? Why do progressives protest the accidental and unintentional killing of civilians in Gaza but not the 230,000 civilians killed during the ongoing, decade-long Syrian civil war? Why have they not protested the 150,000 civilians killed in Yemen?
The most common explanations offered for this selective outrage are that these protestors are just virtue signaling hypocrites or that they are antisemites. And sure, some of them are. But it is too easy to simply dismiss them all in this manner.
[The Algemeiner Op-Ed continues]
Students are encouraged to become activists, and told that “silence is violence.” For too long, the rest of us didn’t see the harm in the hypersensitivity to microaggressions, the self-flagellation of “white fragility” and “doing the work” of renouncing their privilege, or confessing their oppression. The harm is now apparent, and it’s scary.
What is the solution?
As they say, sunshine is the best disinfectant. The reason that terror apologists take down posters of children kidnapped by Hamas is because it shows the lie of their misplaced allyship. Those images create a painful cognitive dissonance that these progressives prefer to suppress. Make progressives keep tearing them down. Project them on buildings. Let those images haunt their dreams and weigh upon their conscience.
The Supreme Court recently invalidated affirmative action policies, but the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit policies designed to increase intellectual diversity on college campuses. These schools should publicly commit that they will stop hiring terror apologists, and that their employment contracts will require that professors not abuse their power by imposing their beliefs upon students. Let’s not forget that higher education in the US is a business, susceptible to the same market pressures as other businesses.
After the shocking testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT before Congress, donors are now aware of what is going on at these schools. They should continue to speak with their checkbooks. Students who value intellectual freedom on campus should divert their applications to institutions that welcome a diversity of opinions rather than the superficial diversity of complexion that these bastions of DEI have fostered.
Kenneth Blake teaches Critical Thinking and Government at a private high school in northern California.
New York City will offer new curriculum materials on antisemitism and Islamophobia in its public schools and train principals and teachers on how to have difficult conversations about politically charged issues, officials said on Monday in response to criticism that the system has done too little to address the Israel-Hamas war.
In higher education, colleges like Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have faced a backlash over their responses to the war. A speech announcing the new effort by the city’s schools chancellor, David C. Banks, illustrated how difficult it has been for K-12 leaders to stay out of the fray.
“The way through this moment is not to malign our students or to impose our own ideologies on them — or to bury our heads in the sand,” Mr. Banks said on Monday. “We must educate our students, and sometimes our staff.”
He added: “We cannot and will not have schools where students feel like they can do whatever they want without accountability for their actions.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
After the episode at Hillcrest in November, in which hundreds of students filled the halls during a protest against the teacher, who had posted support for Israel on social media, Mr. Banks had condemned the disorder as unacceptable. But he also called for understanding that many students had been exposed to painful images of the war on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Several groups of Jewish families and educators criticized his response.
“The riot at Hillcrest did not occur in a vacuum,” Karen Feldman, a social studies teacher in Manhattan, said at a rally of frustrated parents and educators soon after the Hillcrest protest. “What event will be dangerous, harmful, hurtful enough to demonstrate a strong commitment to change the anti-Jewish climate?”
Officials said on Monday that a new principal had been named at Hillcrest in the wake of the incident and was “charting a productive path forward.” Several teachers — including the one who was targeted — had recommended him, officials said.
Mr. Banks said that school staff members would also be retrained on the system’s discipline policies, after hearing that some principals have felt “disempowered” to impose punishment. He also acknowledged that “we cannot leave it to social media” to teach students.
Across the city’s public schools, Muslim and Arab American educators have sought more support from officials as civilian deaths in Gaza mount.
The New York Civil Liberties Union wrote in a letter to Mr. Banks last month that it had also received several reports from students who have faced “bullying, harassment, and disciplinary sanctions” after making pro-Palestinian statements.
The organization said it was concerned that the chancellor’s own messages on the war — including an email warning to teachers on rules for political speech ahead of a local rally for a cease-fire — could create “a chilling effect on both students and teachers’ expressive rights in support of Palestine, or even questioning the actions of the Israeli government.”
Mr. Banks said in his speech that the system would aim to better distinguish between respectful “disagreement — and hate.”
A delegation of prosecutors from countries that had citizens murdered or kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 gathered in Israel on Monday, in what could be a precursor to a criminal case against the Palestinian terror group.
The Israeli Justice Ministry announced the trip on Sunday, which features representatives from the United States, Germany, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Bulgaria, Japan, Australia, and Denmark.
“Following the efforts that the Justice Ministry has been leading in the international legal arena since the events of October 7, the arrival in Israel of senior members of the legal and prosecution systems operating in the international arena is another pillar in the efforts to promote the use of enforcement measures against senior Hamas officials and operatives,” said the Director General of the ministry, Itamar Donnenfeld.
On the trip, representatives toured kibbutzim that Hamas rampaged to see the scale of the damage and conducted meetings with family members of those currently being held hostage in Gaza. Donnenfeld said it “will be an opportunity to present a clear, accurate and unmediated picture of the heinous crimes that Hamas has committed, not only against Israelis, but against all of humanity.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
At the meeting, many of the European diplomats criticized Israel for its actions during the defensive war against Hamas. Josep Borrell, Europe’s top diplomat, said, “The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip cannot be any more dire. We must start talking about clear plans for reaching a two-state solution … What other solutions are they thinking of? Getting all the Palestinians to leave? Killing them?” Representatives from France and Germany echoed Borrell’s calls for a two-state solution.
Hamas terrorists entered Israel on October 7, temporary taking over villages and military bases en route to their slaughter of more than 1,200 civilians and the kidnapping of more than 240 people from Israel and the countries represented in the meeting.
Despite copious evidence Hamas perpetrated atrocities against Israelis on October 7th, there is a growing movement in the United States that denies the massacre or blames it on Israel, The Washington Post Reports.
Although Hamas has admitted and even boasted about committing the massacre with its leaders threatening repeat attacks, and even though the terrorists filmed the crimes on their GoPro and smartphone cameras, a small but increasing number of Americans believe that Israel killed its own people and blamed Hamas as a pretext for committing genocide in Gaza.
In the three months since Hamas invaded Israel’s southern communities in a campaign of rape, torture, and murder that left 1,200 dead and 240 people captured, conspiracy theorists on TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, and 4chan are calling it a “false flag” operation committed by Israel against Israelis.
The Wall Street Journal profiled a holistic healer and self-proclaimed pacifist in South Carolina Mirela Monte who subscribed to a Telegram group called Uncensored Truths with 2,958 subscribers.
Monte became convinced by the group that October 7th was a false flag created by both Israel and the United States to justify genocide against Palestinians.
“It’s pure evil,” she said. “Israel is like a mad dog off a leash.”
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
The trend resembles the denial of the Holocaust, one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history.
October 7th denial has similarities to the false belief that 9-11 was planned and carried out by the Israeli Mossad and the United States to justify going to war abroad.
There’s a built-in audience that wants to deny that Jews are the victims of atrocity and furthers the notion that Jews are secretly behind everything,” said Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer at NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute).
Only one American higher education institution adopted the world’s leading definition of antisemitism in 2023, down from 2022, according to a new report by Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a US antisemitism watchdog.
“Only Boston University’s student government has adopted the IHRA working definition in 2023,” CAM said on Monday in a statement. “These figures help put into context the atmosphere on college campuses that led to high-profile incidents of antisemitism on the campuses of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the George Washington University, Cooper Union College, and Cornell University, just to name a few.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“American colleges need to be proactive in helping Jewish students feel safe and accepted on campus, when nearly three quarters of Jewish college students have experience antisemitism since the beginning of the school year. We must take action,” CAM CEO Sacha Roytman said. “The best path forward includes robust educational programs that raise awareness about antisemitism, including the incorporation of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, so schools as well as local, state, and federal governments can properly identify, monitor, and act on antisemitic incidents.”
US higher education institutions are not the only ones declining to adopt the IHRA definition. Last August, UK based nonprofit Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) reported that it has yet to be embraced by 43 of Britain’s leading universities, including University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), which has for years been the site of numerous antisemitic incidents. In 2016, for example, its Palestine Society hosted a lecture in which the featured speaker compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
Israel’s war against Hamas is seeding hate, and a two-state solution is needed, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Monday amid escalating international pressure on Israel to work toward a long-term political road map to peace.
Commenting before a day of intense diplomacy in Brussels — where European foreign ministers are gathering alongside counterparts from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Arab League — Borrell said he knows that Israel has “a different stand.”
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Israeli troops had stormed al-Khair Hospital in western Khan Younis and detained medical staff, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra called the health situation in Gaza “catastrophic and indescribable.” The Washington Post was unable to verify the report.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said he is proud of his historic efforts to block Palestinian statehood, has repeatedly rejected the idea. A Palestinian state is an “existential danger” to Israel, he reiterated Sunday, vowing to continue to oppose it as long as he is prime minister.
But the bloodshed of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and devastating pace of civilian casualties in Israel’s ensuing war have revived a push for a two-state solution. The notion of two states for two people is broadly supported in the international community, including by the United States and the United Nations.
“I think that we have to stop talking about the peace process and start talking more concretely about the two-state solution process,” Borrell said ahead of the meetings in Brussels, where he will present a 12-point plan to revitalize the Middle East peace process.
The plan “aims to address the conflict and occupation that preceded the Gaza war and that, if left unaddressed, must be expected to lead to further wars,” according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.
“There is no credible comprehensive solution other than an independent Palestinian State living side by side with Israel, in peace and security, with full normalization and substantive development of security and economic cooperation between Israel, Palestine and the region,” it said. It called for the establishment of a “Preparatory Peace Conference” at “the earliest opportunity” to discuss a lasting solution.
Middle Eastern countries represented in Brussels on Monday have also been working on plans to end the conflict, with Saudi Arabia explicitly tying normalization of relations with Israel to a credible path to Palestinian statehood.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
“Only total victory will ensure the elimination of Hamas and the return of all our hostages,” Netanyahu said in a statement, adding that he had emphasized this position in a call with President Biden over the weekend.
War in Gaza is making childbirth a nightmare
On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a meeting with the relatives of hostages that the operation in Khan Younis is “in full swing” and that “there are preliminary indications that we have reached the most sensitive Hamas locations,” he said.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
“This night could be one of the most difficult nights,” he said. “We barely escaped.”
During the early days of its assault on the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces demanded that residents move south into Khan Younis and Rafah for shelter. Khan Younis, once considered safe, now has some of the heaviest fighting, and Rafah is increasingly running out of resources as more and more displaced people stream in.
In another corner of Khan Younis, 31-year-old Muhammad al-Zarie, who was residing with his brothers in a tent near the city center, spoke of the ceaseless echoes of strikes and shelling resonating through the night and morning hours.
“We don’t know where we will go if they advance farther. Thousands of displaced people arrived in the morning, and there is no place for them in this camp,” he said. “The army instructed us to head to al-Mawasi, and we are here, but this area is no longer safe.”
Israeli lawyer, actress, model and beauty queen Linor Abargil, who won the Miss World title in 1998, has spoken out against the silence of women’s organizations in the wake of the murder, sexual assault and kidnapping of women by the Hamas terror organization.
“On Oct. 7, we witnessed the most horrible massacres, atrocities, rape, mutilation—the worst human behavior,” Abargil said at an event organized as part of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“I turned to all my colleagues and friends worldwide, as well to the leading women’s rights organizations, to expose this terrible event, certain that they would speak out and condemn this unspeakable event. And what did I discover? That there is a discriminatory approach— violence against one woman doesn’t equal violence [toward] another,” she said.
“Their silence, apathy and oblivion shocked me to the core. They even had the cheek to ask for evidence when it was all there to see. There is no need for more proof, it’s all out there to see,” she added.
The event, titled “Women at the Forefront of the Global Peace and Security Agenda” and organized by Israel, was also attended by Tatiana Kotlyarenko, an international expert in gender-based violence and human trafficking, Qanta Ahmed, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and Anastasiya Dzyakava, adviser on human online safety.
Abargil shared how at a young age she, too, was assaulted, and what helped her survive and speak up.
“I was invited to speak all over the world. I gave lectures, and I spoke about the fact that we women truly understand the world and its needs. I found out that this world of men, weapons and war doesn’t understand that women can work without agendas…[and] politics and rise above all this. I decided to dedicate my life to this cause. And it’s been my life’s journey [for] the past 20 years,” she said.
“Hamas established a new evil strategy: Openly abusing mostly the female hostages, and also men, mutilating them—not in secret and not in the dark. Everything was filmed. Anyone who doesn’t speak up against this is silently complicit in sexual violence against all women, not just Israeli women,” she continued.
“For the first time, I really feel alone. I was stuck. As a victim, I had the support that someone had my back. And now I stand here at Davos. With that empty feeling of being alone,” she said.
“The world is silent and not a word has been said…[But] I will not be silent. I will show you what took place on Oct. 7. I will continue my fight to protect women. Hamas are not freedom fighters. They are inhuman terrorists of the worst evil kind.”
War cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot appeared to criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s management of the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, suggesting in an interview Thursday that talk of complete victory over the terror group was unrealistic and indicating that new elections should be held within months to restore public trust in government following the devastating October 7 attacks.
Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Channel 12’s “Uvda” program, which also touched on about the personal toll the war has taken on him and his family. Eisenkot’s son, Master Sgt. (res.) Gal Meir Eisenkot, 25, was killed while fighting in Gaza in early December, followed by his nephew, Sgt. Maor Cohen Eisenkot, 19, a day later.
The interview with Eisenkot aired hours after Netanyahu rejected the idea of holding elections in the middle of a war that he has said could well continue into 2025 and vowed to “bring about a complete victory” over Hamas in response to the Gaza-ruling terror group’s October 7 attacks, when thousands of terrorists went on a killing spree across southern Israel, massacring 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking some 240 as hostages.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
Eisenkot’s National Unity party agreed to join Netanyahu’s coalition on an emergency basis in a demonstration of political unity after the October 7 terror onslaught.
Asked whether Israel’s current leadership is telling the public the truth, Eisenkot responded simply, “No.”
Failure and responsibility
He also appeared to take a jab at Netanyahu’s refusal so far to take direct responsibility for the October 7 intelligence, military and leadership failures.
“I am already at the stage and at an age where I do not any particular leader with my eyes closed, and I judge a man by his decisions and the way he leads the country,” he said. He noted that he does not rely personally on Netanyahu in the stewarding of the war but, rather, on the collective decisions made by the war cabinet.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
He also appeared to criticize Netanyahu’s refusal to hold high-level discussions regarding postwar planning in Gaza.
“You have to show leadership in the ability to tell the truth to people, the ability to chart a path,” he told “Uvda.” “You have to think about what’s next,” he said.
And he expressed concern about the government’s handling of the war and deep dismay about what he called “an ambush” of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi at a recent cabinet meeting. “I was pretty shocked by that show — it looked like an ambush, not spontaneous… It was very disrespectful, to put it mildly.”
Elections soon, to restore trust
Eisenkot also said elections should be held in the coming months to renew the public’s trust in leadership.
“It is necessary, within a period of months, to bring the Israeli voter back to the polls and hold elections in order to renew trust, because right now there is no trust,” said Eisenkot.
“As a democracy, the State of Israel needs to ask itself after such a serious event, ‘How do we continue from here with a leadership that has failed us miserably?’” Eisenkot continued.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
This week, Halevi said that “the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past.”
Eisenkot recalled prioritizing the Hezbollah threat over Hamas in 2018-19, toward the end of his 2015-2019 term as chief of staff, when the IDF tackled what he recalled were six Hezbollah tunnels that penetrated into Israel in what was called Operation Northern Shield. He said Hezbollah had 6,000 Radwan fighters training for a major attack in the north at the time.
At present, he said, Hezbollah terror chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah “does not want” a war, and neither does Israel. Nonetheless, he did not rule out the potential for escalation to war.
‘The alternative is hell’
Asked about the death last month of his youngest son Gal, Eisenkot said, “The mornings and nights have become more difficult, but for me at least, there is no alternative because I know that the alternative is bad personally, bad as a family, and therefore, it’s something I have to remind myself of every day. I feel I have to [keep going]. The alternative is hell.”
Gal Eisenkot was killed after a bomb exploded in a tunnel shaft near soldiers in the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza on December 7, 2023. He was rushed in critical condition to a hospital in Israel, where he died of his injuries.
Eisenkot said he knew that Gal, a member of the 551st Brigade’s 699th Battalion, and his crew “were going on a mission to take over buildings, which would allow access to the [Hamas] leadership, where there would be hostages [and hostages’] bodies.”
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
Prioritize hostages
Asked about reports that Netanyahu delayed the November truce by a week as he sought better terms, Eisenkot made clear that he urged acceptance of the deal. “I said that if they didn’t do the deal, I’d get up and leave.”
He also said he attempted in vain to persuade his leadership colleagues to accept Hamas terms for one more group of releases on the eighth day of the deal, even though Hamas was proposing to include the bodies of three dead hostages, and not to honor other terms regarding which categories of hostages, including women, would be freed that day. Eisenkot said he knew that once the truce collapsed, the prospect of releasing those who might have gone free that day would be dimmer, and that attempting to negotiate further deals would be harder. The truce indeed collapsed, and no new deal has been attained since.
On the remaining hostages, Eisenkot told “Uvda” that there would be no Entebbe-like operation to save them.
A daring rescue like the 1976 operation by an Israeli elite commando squad that saved 98 hostages from Palestinian and German terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda, “will not happen,” he said.
On June 27, 1976, the terrorists hijacked an Air France jet flying from Tel Aviv to Paris diverting to Entebbe airport in Uganda, where the hijackers were welcomed by dictator Idi Amin. The legendary mission claimed the lives of four hostages and that of Yoni (Yonatan) Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s older brother, who led the rescue squad.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
He said the next pause will likely be longer “by three or four times, but after that, [the fighting would resume and] the war objectives will still be in effect.”
Eisenkot said returning the hostages needs to be the central priority, more urgent than destroying Hamas. Israel had utterly failed to protect those who were killed and abducted on October 7. “And so I have no question as to which mission is the more urgent and greater priority.”
He also said the IDF must avoid harming the hostages in Gaza even at the price of passing up an opportunity to eliminate Sinwar. “For me, there’s no dilemma: For me, the mission to save civilians comes before killing the enemy. The enemy can be killed afterward.”
He said that he would “pick up my things and leave” his coalition position if the plight of the hostages were not addressed as a priority. “I know what my red line is,” he said. “It relates to the hostages… and also to the way that this war must be run.”
Asked about reports that Sara Netanyahu has urged families of hostages not to publicly protest against the government’s handling of the crisis, he said he feels he has “no right” to tell the families what to do or not to do. When meeting the families, he said, he has told them to do what they think is right.
The future
Asked, “Are you convinced that Netanyahu is not seeking as long a war as possible [in part to avoid a reckoning over the events of October 7]?” Eisenkot paused for several seconds and then said, “I hope not… If I were to reach that conclusion, I wouldn’t stay another minute.”
“What interests me is how to advance Israel’s security and ensure that the deaths of my son and others were not in vain,” he said.
Asked about his political future, he said, “I am part of a party but I know how to make my own decisions, too.” (Eisenkot entered politics, joining Gantz’s party, in August 2022.)
Asked repeatedly whether he could or should be prime minister, he said the question was “not relevant” and “I don’t think about it today.”
Rather, he said, he was trying “to be strong” in the wake of his son’s death and to “contribute and have an influence” for the good of Israel. He said Gal “was always the most opposed to my entry into politics,” but that, during the war, “I heard him speaking completely differently.”
The Israeli Defense Forces are monitoring Hamas attempts to rebuild its fighting battalions in the northern Gaza Strip, which the army had declared as stripped of military capabilities, with some battalions significantly restored.
The IDF has been downsizing its reserve forces in the northern Gaza Strip in recent weeks, and in the past few days has begun pulling back regular-duty forces, including parts of the Golani Brigade, armored brigades and special units.
Division 162 remains in the northern Gaza Strip to secure the large area which, when the IDF’s ground maneuver began, was the territory of several of Hamas’ battalions, including the a-Shati, Shujaiyeh and Jabalya battalions.
‘Unlawful, unethical, horrifying’: IDF ethics expert on controversial Hannibal Directive
The strongest man in Gaza: Inside the mind of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar
Hamas says Israel won’t inspect hostage medicine shipment; Netanyahu: ‘IDF is responsible’
[The Haaeretz Report continues]
Earlier this week, the Air Force and the army’s 5th Brigade attacked in a-Shati, after the IDF had declared that it had completed the neighborhood’s occupation and had incapacitated the battalion.
In the same encounter, the army killed nine terrorists who were preparing for an attack on IDF forces in the area. The army announced on Wednesday that its forces had returned to operating in the a-Shati camp, killing terrorists and destroying terror infrastructure.
Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi warned political leadership behind closed doors that the IDF was facing the “erosion of the achievements it has accomplished so far in the war” because no strategy was put in place for the Gaza Strip after the end of the war. Halevi warned that “we may have to operate again in areas where we have already completed the fighting.”
A senior security official who recently presented the IDF’s view on the extent of the harm to Hamas said that “Hamas suffered a very serious blow to its military wing,” but added: “withdrawing the forces and ending the fighting now will enable Hamas to rehabilitate its military arm in a way that will continue to threaten the IDF and Israel’s Gaza border communities.”
The IDF attempted to minimize the importance of a barrage of 25 rockets fired at the town of Netivot on Tuesday. Some in the army claimed that this was a quick and spontaneous volley which stemmed from Hamas’s fear that the IDF would reach the launchers.
Other defense sources familiar with the events believed that the shooting was indicative of the Hamas’ regained control in the northern Gaza Strip, though not a return to the same capabilities it had on the eve of the war.
The army said on Wednesday that it had demolished a compound in the center of the Gaza Strip from which the barrage was fired. According to the IDF, some of the launch stations in the destroyed compound were loaded with rockets and ready to fire.
In videos from 7 October, the body of a young woman is lying face down in the back of a pickup truck, stripped to her underwear, one leg bent at an unnatural angle. One of the men sitting next to her pulls her long hair as armed men around him shout praises to God.
Footage of the lifeless corpse of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old Israeli-German national, paraded around the streets of Gaza was some of the first to surface on 7 October, as the scale of the horror visited on sleeping families in kibbutzim neighbouring the strip and people partying at a nearby rave started to become clear.
In the more than three months since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, the atrocities the militants committed have been well documented. Israel is still grappling with the trauma: entire families burned alive, torture and mutilation, children and elderly people ripped from the arms of their loved ones, seized as hostages.
Emergency responders risked their lives in the fighting on 7 October and several days afterwards to rescue the wounded and retrieve the dead. The chaos meant there were significant failings in preserving evidence of gender-based violence and what is coming to be seen as the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war by Hamas.
[The Guardian Report continues]
Zaka, Israel’s emergency response organisation, usually works in cooperation with police at the scenes of terrorist attacks so the authorities can gather evidence before Zaka removes the bodies. Many have said since the attack that they wished they had realised at the time that, although they were trying to treat the dead with respect, they were also contaminating crime scenes. Most Zaka workers are conservative ultra-Orthodox men: several have said that they “didn’t think of rape at all”.
The victims’ bodies were also released as quickly as possible from morgues to their families for the swift burial required by Jewish tradition, and crucial evidence buried with them.
Some posthumous forensic examination is still possible, but it is unlikely that the full extent of the gender-based violence committed on 7 October will ever be known.
The Guardian spoke to a Zaka volunteer, Simcha Greeneman, who said in one kibbutz he had come across a woman who was naked from the waist down, bent over a bed and shot in the back of the head. In another house, he discovered a dead woman with sharp objects in her vagina, including nails.
At the Shura military base in central Israel, where most of the dead were taken, the reservist Shari Mendes, who was tasked with washing the female bodies and preparing them for burial, told reporters: “We have seen women who have been raped, from the age of children through to the elderly.
“We were in such a state of shock … Many young women arrived in bloody shrouded rags with just their underwear, and the underwear was often very bloody. Our team commander saw several soldiers who were shot on the crotch, intimate parts, vagina or shot in the breasts,” she added.
The most detailed witness account of rape is from a young woman who attended the Supernova music festival, where more than 350 young people were killed. The witness, who was shot in the back, said she was hiding in vegetation just off route 232 when a large group of Hamas gunmen arrived, who between them raped and killed at least five women.
“They laid a woman down and I understood that he is raping her … They passed her on to another person,” she told police in a video reviewed by the Guardian. “And he cuts her breast, he throws it on the road and they are playing with it.”
One raped woman was “shredded to pieces” and another “stabbed repeatedly in the back while she was being raped”, the same witness said in an interview with the New York Times. The witness has provided police with photographs of her hiding place, and another survivor hiding in the same spot has testified that he saw at least one woman being raped.
One of the festival’s organisers, Rami Shmuel, who returned to the scene the day after the attack, has described finding the bodies of three young women “naked from the waist down, legs spread”.
“One had the face burnt,” he said. Another was “shot in the face” while the last had been “shot all over the lower part of her body”.
One woman who survived gang rape at the rave was being treated for severe mental and physical trauma, police said, and was in no condition to speak to investigators.
[The Guardian Report continues]
Linking suspects in custody to specific crimes was likely to be very difficult, Halperin-Kaddari said, although Israel intends to open criminal proceedings as soon as possible.
Individual victims will be able to file complaints amounting to crimes against humanity charges against Hamas at the international criminal court in The Hague, and the court is also expected to open a specific investigation into sexual violence on 7 October.
Halperin-Kaddari said: “An international investigation has more potential because the level of evidence is not as high as that in criminal proceedings, where you have to have a specific individual and specific victim and prove what happened beyond all reasonable doubt.
“To prosecute the overall scope of the atrocities and the degree of cruelty … We have enough for that already.”
I was raised in a multicultural Denver neighborhood, where as a child one could hear Spanish, Yiddish, and other languages just walking down the street — our own Tower of Babel. Many friends and neighbors from all backgrounds would enjoy Sabbath and holiday dinners in our family home. Our door was always open to everyone who needed a safe haven and a warm meal. The dining room table would miraculously grow to accommodate our guests.
Education was also very important in my family, especially since my parents did not have opportunities to attend college. I was sent to religious school on the weekends to study Jewish history and Hebrew.
But much to the dismay of my parents, I was expelled when I was 12 years old.
I was not allowed back because I told the rabbi that he was a chauvinist for not allowing me on the pulpit with my twin brother to study the Torah. As part of my punishment, I was not permitted to have a bat mitzvah which signifies that a young woman has attained adulthood under Jewish law.
It was a confusing time for me. On one hand, I was taught to be an advocate for those who did not have a voice and now I was penalized for exercising my rights. I’ve come to understand that people have the right to protest, to share their views, but not at the expense of other’s safety and well-being.
Though I was banned for few years from religious school. I was able to participate in an educational tour in Israel as a high school student. I studied at Hebrew University, explored archeological sites, lived on a kibbutz, and pondered the existential question of whether I was an American Jew or a Jewish American. That question was put to rest once I returned back to the United States.
Being a proud Jewish American was ingrained into my upbringing, into the very fabric of how our family lived our lives and served our nation. My father, a child survivor of four concentration camps, came to Colorado because it reminded him of his home in Hungary, but with bigger mountains. He joined the U.S. Army out of a sense of gratitude and loyalty for his new country which he wanted to defend and protect, especially our freedom to practice any religion without fear of retribution or death.
[The Op-Ed from Combat Anti-Semitism continues]
My father died in 2016 and I can’t imagine what he would say today. Would he warn us or would he still believe in the kindness of neighbors?
I’m an American Jew. The United States is my home and I want to feel safe. I want everyone to feel safe. It was how I was raised.
The op-ed was authored by Saralyn Mark, MD, a Washington, D.C.-based physician and founder/president of iGIANT (impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies) and SolaMed Solutions, LLC. She is a frequent media contributor and author of “Stellar Medicine: A Journey Through the Universe of Women’s Health” and host of the “Always Searching” podcast. Dr. Mark is also a member of the People4Peace Steering committee.
The Israeli government’s website showing the horrors of the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel has received significant online traffic in the week since its launch, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The website — https://saturday-october-seven.com/ — has already garnered more than 43 million views, including around half a million that led to people exploring the site’s content about the Oct. 7 atrocities.
The site, which includes disturbing videos and pictures of the crimes committed, contains a warning: “Extreme viewer discretion is advised.”
The IDF launched the site in partnership with Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate the day before the start of South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with committing “genocide” in Gaza.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
In order to maximize its reach, including among pro-Hamas activists demonstrating across the West, the site builders plugged in keywords like “South Africa” and “genocide” so it would appear in their search feeds.
Moshik Aviv, head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, said that when the site launched the goal was to “commemorate and recall the terrible atrocities that were carried out against the citizens of Israel on the black Saturday of Oct. 7.”
“We will continue to act so that the citizens of the world will be unable to remain indifferent to the terrible massacre that we experienced,” Aviv continued. “This is an important public diplomacy and diplomatic tool that presents severe crimes against humanity.”
Aviv added that the website will assist in Israel’s defense against South Africa’s case at the ICJ and in its public diplomacy efforts more broadly.
“This site will assist the State of Israel in its mission of reminding the world that we are the victim of the unprecedented terrorist event that we experienced,” he said.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said on Tuesday the kingdom could recognize Israel if a comprehensive agreement were reached that included statehood for the Palestinians.
“We agree that regional peace includes peace for Israel, but that could only happen through peace for the Palestinians through a Palestinian state,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Asked if Saudi Arabia would then recognize Israel as part of a wider political agreement, he said: “Certainly.”
Israeli surgeon hopes to bring movement back to amputees from Oct. 7 massacre
Saudi Arabia is interested in securing Israeli-Palestinian peace
Prince Faisal said securing regional peace through the creation of a Palestinian state was “something we have been indeed working on with the US administration, and it is more relevant in the context of Gaza.”
After the eruption of war last October between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas that rules Gaza, Saudi Arabia put on ice US-backed plans for the kingdom to normalize ties with Israel, two sources familiar with Riyadh’s thinking said, in a swift reordering of its diplomatic priorities.
The two sources told Reuters there would be some delay in the US-backed talks on the normalization of Saudi-Israel ties, which is seen as a key step for the kingdom to secure what it considers the real prize of a US defense pact in exchange.
Before Oct. 7, when Iran-backed Hamas fighters launched an attack on southern Israel, both Israeli and Saudi leaders had signaled they were moving steadily towards establishing diplomatic relations that could have reshaped the Middle East.
One tunnel in Gaza was wide enough for a top Hamas official to drive a car inside. Another stretched nearly three football fields long and was hidden beneath a hospital. Under the house of a senior Hamas commander, the Israeli military found a spiral staircase leading to a tunnel approximately seven stories deep.
These details and new information about the tunnels, some made public by the Israeli military and documented by video and photographs, underscore why the tunnels were considered a major threat to the Israeli military in Gaza even before the war started.
But Israeli officials and soldiers who have since been in the tunnels — as well as current and former American officials with experience in the region — say the scope, depth and quality of the tunnels built by Hamas have astonished them. Even some of the machinery that Hamas used to build the tunnels, observed in captured videos, has surprised the Israeli military.
The Israeli military now believes there are far more tunnels under Gaza.
[The New York Times Report continues]
For the Israeli military, the tunnels are a subterranean nightmare and the core of Hamas’s ability to survive. Every strategic goal of Israel in Gaza is now linked to wiping out the tunnels.
“If you want to destroy the leadership and arsenal of Hamas, you have to destroy the tunnels,” said Daphné Richemond-Barak, a tunnel warfare expert at Reichman University in Israel. “It’s become connected to every part of the military missions.”
Hamas has invested heavily in the tunnels since it does not have the resources or numbers to fight the Israeli military in a conventional war. The group uses the tunnels as military bases and arsenals, and relies on them to move its forces undetected and protect its top commanders.
One 2022 document showed Hamas budgeted $1 million on the tunnel doors, underground workshops and other expenses in Khan Younis.
Israeli intelligence officials recently assessed that there were about 100 miles of tunnels just under Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city, where Israeli forces are now in heavy fighting. Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, had a home in Khan Younis.
[The New York Times Report continues]
One soldier, speaking on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons, said he oversaw the destruction of about 50 tunnels in Beit Hanoun. All of them were booby-trapped, he said. The soldier, an officer in the combat engineers, said his unit had found bombs hidden in walls and a massive explosive device that was hard-wired to be remotely activated.
soldier, who was a reservist and has since been discharged, said the device had been made in a factory and had a serial number on it. If it had gone off, the bomb would have killed anybody in the tunnel and directly outside it, he said.
Hamas released a video in November showing how it lured a group of five Israeli soldiers to a tunnel entrance in Beit Hanoun and then used a roadside bomb to kill the soldiers.
Ms. Richemond-Barak said Hamas had imported the tactic from Syrian rebels who killed dozens of government troops in a tunnel attack in 2014 in Aleppo.
On Jan. 8, Israeli soldiers took journalists to see three tunnel shafts in central Gaza — one inside a one-story farm building on the outskirts of Bureij, the second inside a civilian steelworks on the edge of Maghazi and a third inside a shed near the steelworks.
The shaft in the steelworks was the deepest and most sophisticated. It descended roughly 30 yards and was fitted with some kind of elevator. The soldiers said it was used to transport munitions parts that were molded in the steelworks. A bucket of shells or rocket heads lay nearby. The soldiers said the shells were based on a template of a yellow U.S.-made mortar shell inscribed with the words “20 mm mortar shell; Lot 1-2008.”
The soldiers did not allow journalists into the shaft, citing the risk of explosions, but said Hamas would carry the munitions parts into the tunnel to transport them to another part of the tunnel network, where they would be fitted with explosives.
The tunnel was said to lead to a nearby shed made from corrugated iron. The journalists were escorted to that shed, where they saw 10 large rockets that were roughly three yards long and painted olive green. The rockets were contained in long oblong cages, possibly used to transport them.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Hamas has improved its ability to conceal the tunnels, but the senior official said the Israeli military had figured out one of the group’s operating models. The official called it the “triangle.” Whenever the Israeli military finds a school, a hospital or a mosque, soldiers know they can expect to locate an underground tunnel system beneath them, the official said.
Destroying the tunnels is not an easy task, the official said. They need to be mapped, checked for hostages and not just damaged but made irreparable. Recent attempts to demolish the tunnels by flooding them with seawater have failed.
The official estimated it could take years to disable the tunnel system.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman
Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley
In a speech marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, Rep. Ritchie Torres likened protesters who have celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres to white people in the Jim Crow era who celebrated after the lynching of Black people.
“I was profoundly shaken not only by Oct. 7, but by the aftermath,” Torres, a Black Bronx Democrat, said Friday in a speech at Central Synagogue, a prominent Reform congregation in midtown Manhattan. “I found it utterly horrifying. To see fellow Americans openly cheering and celebrating the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And for me, the aftermath of Oct. 7 revealed a barbarity of the American heart that reminded me of an earlier and darker time in our nation’s history, a time when the public mobs of Jim Crow would openly celebrate the lynching of African Americans.”
Protests have proliferated since Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and brutalized thousands more in an invasion from Gaza. They have grown as Israel has waged a war in Gaza to eliminate the terror group, and especially as casualties mounted: So far, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
A number of the protests have decried the Oct. 7 violence on Israelis, but others have skated over the initial massacres or have embraced Hamas and described its atrocities as resistance.
Torres, a member of the progressive caucus in Congress, has garnered a reputation as an unstinting supporter of Israel. He has duked it out online with fellow progressives in debates over Israel, a dynamic that has only intensifiedsince Oct. 7. Torres is heavily funded by AIPAC and donors aligned with the pro-Israel lobby, and spoke at a massive rally for Israel in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 14.
[The Jewish Telegraph Agency Report continues]
Central is a locus for some of the city’s wealthiest liberal Jewish families, many of whom are also firm supporters of Israel. Dr. Shonni Silverberg, the synagogue president, introduced Torres as a champion of progressive priorities as well as an advocate for Israel, and noted that he is the first openly LGBTQ representative elected from the Bronx.
“Ritchie remains steadfastly focused on the priorities of his South Bronx constituents, expanding access to safe and affordable housing, rebuilding New York economically and ensuring that no child goes hungry and that all receive a good education,” she said. “But he has also shown himself both in and out of Congress to be a great friend of the American Jewish community and Israel.”
Israel’s war against Hamas entered its 102nd day on Tuesday, with rocket-alert sirens sounding in western Negev communities.
Over the past 24 hours, IDF forces located some 100 rocket installations and 60 ready-to-launch rockets in the area of Beit Lahiya in the north, close to the Israeli border. The troops killed dozens of terrorists during the activity.
Nine terrorists were also eliminated in the northern Shati Camp along the Mediterranean coastline.
The operations in northern Gaza come as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced an official end to heavy combat operations in that part of the territory.
“The intensive maneuvering phase in the north of the Gaza Strip has ended, and in the south it will also end soon,” Gallant said on Monday evening.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
At the same time, the IDF is continuing its push into the Hamas stronghold of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, where over the past 24 hours, an attack helicopter hit an “observational device” threatening troops, according to the military.
Meanwhile, the IDF death toll in Gaza has risen to 190 since the start of the ground operation on Oct. 27, with the announcement on Tuesday morning that 21-year-old Sgt. First Class (res.) Nitzan Schessler was killed in battle in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday. This was followed by the publication on Tuesday afternoon of the death of Sgt. Maj. (res.) Noam Ashram, 37, from Kfar Saba, who died from wounds sustained during a battle in the central Gaza Strip on Dec. 29.
A total of 524 soldiers have been killed since the war began on Oct. 7.
In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.
But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.
It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
It’s obscene because it’s historically hypocritical. The United States, Britain and other allied nations killed a staggering number of German and Japanese civilians on the path to defeating the regimes that had started World War II — often known as the Good War. Events such as the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo, to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were tragic and far more indiscriminate than anything Israel stands accused of doing. But no serious person holds Franklin Roosevelt to be on a moral par with Adolf Hitler. What the Allies did were acts of war in the service of a lasting peace, not genocide in the service of a fanatical aim.
The difference? In war, the killing ends when one side stops fighting. In a genocide, that’s when the killing begins.
It’s obscene because of its strange selectivity. Reasonable people can argue that Israel has been excessive in its use of force, or deficient in its concern for Palestinian civilians, or unwise in thinking through the endgame. I disagree, but fine.
But how curious that the discussion has turned to genocide (and did so from almost the first day of the war) because it’s the behavior of the Jewish state that’s in question. And how telling that the accusation is the same one that rabid bigots have been making for years: that the Jews are, and have long been, the real Nazis — guilty of humanity’s worst crimes and deserving of its worst punishments. A verdict against Israel at the I.C.J. would signal that another international institution, and the people cheering it, has adopted the moral outlook of antisemites.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution as “this infamous act.”
“The abomination of antisemitism,” he warned, “has been given the appearance of international sanction.” Maybe the I.C.J. will make a similar mistake. If so, the shame and disgrace will rest with the accusers, not the accused.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
After spending over three months fighting Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip, Channel 13 correspondent Roi Yanovsky posted online Monday about the luxurious conditions he witnessed in Gaza City that contrasted sharply with the way life in the coastal enclave is usually described.
“Some first impressions after 100 days of reserve duty ended officially yesterday,” he began. “Gaza is seen as a backward area, ‘the most crowded in the world’ that has been under Israeli ‘siege’ for years. There is no bigger lie than this. Gaza is a modern, beautiful and developed city – with large and well-equipped houses, wide boulevards, public spaces, a promenade by the sea, and parks. It looks much better than any Arab city from the Jordan River to the sea; it resembles Tel Aviv far more than Kafr Qassem or Umm Al Fahm.”
“And of course it’s very far from being ‘the most crowded in the world,” he continued, an allusion to how the city is regularly although incorrectly described by foreign media.
[The Jewish Voice Op-Ed continues]
There is a map of Israel in almost every home, school and public institution that simply calls the whole land “Palestine” in which no Jewish city exists, he wrote. It is part of Hamas’ ideology that the Gazans have imbibed “since age zero.”
Remal in Gaza Strip Luxury Life for Laughing Palestinians
Does this look like an “open-air prison” to you?
Does this sound like an “ongoing genocide” for 40 years:
“Each of Gaza City’s 10 neighbourhoods have their own rhythm and reputation. There’s the Remal neighbourhood,… pic.twitter.com/88Z3JI4Wq5
— James Porrazzo (@JamesPorrazzo) October 12, 2023
In addition, “In all the neighborhoods we were in, there are ready-made Hamas military compounds – weapons, tunnels, explosives, launch sites, all inside residential houses.”
There is no way that the residents didn’t realize what Hamas was doing, Yanovsky continued.
“I find it hard to believe that the parents in the kindergarten where there was a tunnel shaft in one of the places we were in didn’t know that. Who chooses to send their children to a kindergarten that is used as a terrorist infrastructure?” he asked.
Despite all the negative stories you read #Ireland, in #TheGazaYouDontSee the business confidence is booming for those with money.
The new Infinity Café opening soon in Gaza City, is right next to the new Motor One luxury car showroom on al-Rashid St. Roundabout 17 Gaza City. pic.twitter.com/2ikiTOo8vE
— Kilkenny Friends of Israel (@KilkennyOf) August 22, 2023
The IDF has said that on average, every other house in Gaza is a legitimate military target due to the weaponry or terror tunnel entrances found within them.
A residential villa in Khan Younes, south Gaza Strip, before 7 October 23.#TheGazaYouDontSeehttps://t.co/USTvoIwjxj pic.twitter.com/Z6GhzYo0Cm
— Imshin (@imshin) January 15, 2024
Israel told all civilians to leave Gaza City, he reminded his readers, to prevent their being hurt or killed, and the announcements are still plastered everywhere in the area. Therefore, “Those who decided to stay in the combat zones are either Hamas members in various positions or people who consciously decided to stay in the areas used by Hamas for combat, and what happens is their own fault.”
For the past three months, college campuses have been an ideological battleground. The carnage in southern Israel and Gaza has produced reverberations among student bodies across the country, including on Long Island. Coverage of student responses has overwhelmingly centered on campus hostilities between Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian students. Antipathy, however, is not inevitable. The raging discord defining our current relationship can be reversed if Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian students take the integral yet uncomfortable first step toward creating joint spaces for civil interaction.
Ordinarily, interactions between our two peoples on university campuses occur in less than hospitable environments, if at all. Beyond protests and counter-demonstrations, milieus which inherently produce animosity, most Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli students are unlikely to ever interact, let alone in a civil environment. Recognizing this, students across the country have attempted to overcome decades of entrenched social boundaries through Atidna International, the first joint, university-based peace and dialogue organization for Jewish/Israeli and Arab/Palestinian students.
[The Guest Essay From Newsday continues]
The aptitude for decades of interfaith bridge-building in Nassau and Suffolk counties proves that Long Island’s universities have the capability to become national leaders in our peoples’ joint struggle to unify; however, that requires students to first extend the olive branch. Only by Jews/Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians civilly engaging one another can we begin to comprehend the “other” as part of our family, hence breaking down decades of ingrained misconceptions and enmity. We urge our Long Island university peers to take the first step toward grassroots reconciliation by joining our unifying mission.
This guest essay reflects the views of Elijah Kahlenberg and Jadd Hashem, students at the University of Texas at Austin and president and vice president, respectively, of Atidna International.
What does Israel do in Gaza? Does the IDF deliberately rape, torture, and murder Palestinian civilians, as Hamas did to the Israelis at the dance party and in the kibbutzim? Does the IDF take delight in killing, in as sadistic a way as possible, as many Gazan civilians as it can?
No, of course not. The IDF tries instead, to minimize civilian casualties. It has no desire to harm the truly innocent. Unfortunately, Hamas wants to maximize those civilian casualties and exploit that result to undermine Israel’s standing in the world.
Whenever it can, the IDF warns civilians away from areas about to be targeted. These warnings are enormous undertakings. When the IDF had concluded that it was first going to concentrate its war-making in northern Gaza, it dropped 1.5 million leaflets on that area, urging inhabitants to move south of the Wadi Gaza, to avoid the most intense fighting that was about to begin in the north. 900,000 Gazans ultimately heeded the warning, and headed south on the north-south corridor of Salah al-Din Street. Hamas fired on and killed, some of the Gazans trying to move south, to keep their civilian shields trapped in the north.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
As of January 6, the IDF believes it has killed about 9,500 Hamas fighters. As of January 4, the Palestinian Ministry of Health claimed a total of 22,500 dead; it does not provide a breakdown between civilians and soldiers killed.
Using these figures, we find that at most there have been 13,000 civilian deaths and 9,500 combatant deaths, for a ratio of 130:95, which is far lower than 2: 1, and perhaps the lowest such civilian-to-combatant ratio in a war since such records have been kept. It is no wonder that British Colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in the world.”
So let the spectacle begin at the ICJ in The Hague. South Africa claims that Israel is “committing genocide” in Gaza. Israel should begin by noting how the Palestinian population of Gaza went from 410,00 to 1.3 million during the time Israel “occupied” the Strip.
It should note, further that the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) increased from 600,000 in 1967 to three million today. There was no “genocide” in either place. But what about now? Israel should mention how Hamas tries to increase civilian casualties among its people, by placing its weapons, its rocket launchers, and its fighters in and around and under— the 300-mile network of tunnels —civilian structures, to use its civilians as human shields.
The Israeli legal team at the ICJ should present the evidence of all the ways that the IDF attempts to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza: first, by warning Palestinians away from those parts of Gaza that were soon to be targeted by, for example, dropping 1.5 million leaflets in northern Gaza; second, by providing maps both in emails and in a million leaflets dropped south of the Wadi Gaza, showing places in southern Gaza that were not going to be targeted by the IDF, places where Palestinians would be relatively safe until further notice; third, in warning Palestinians away from specific buildings, including schools, mosques, apartment and office buildings, through messaging, telephoning, and the “knock-on-the-roof” technique.
Lay it all out for the august judges in a solemn conclave assembled at the ICJ. Tell the justices about how the ratio of civilians to combatants killed by the IDF in Gaza is 130:95, or less than 2 to 1, far below what has been recorded in previous wars anywhere in the world. And let those justices hear about the wounded Hamas fighters who since the Gaza War began have been treated in Israeli hospitals, and their lives saved as a result.
All of that evidence shows a clear lack of “intent” by the IDF to commit genocide. It fatally vitiates the claim, made by South Africa, that the Jewish state has been “genocidal” in its conduct of the war against Hamas killers in Gaza.
(i24) Israel is acting in self-defense following the Hamas atrocities on October 7, a German state official said on Friday, announcing the country will intervene on Israel’s behalf at the Hague, where the Jewish state defends itself against South Africa’s charge of “genocide.”
German government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit emphasized Berlin’s commitment to the UN Genocide Convention, signed in 1948 in response to the Holocaust.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“On October 7 2023, Hamas terrorists brutally attacked, tortured, killed and kidnapped innocent people in Israel,” the statement read. “Hamas’s goal is to wipe out Israel. Since then, Israel has been defending itself against the inhumane attack by Hamas.”
“The Federal Government firmly and expressly rejects the accusation of genocide that has now been made against Israel at the International Court of Justice. This accusation has no basis whatsoever.
As the Israel-Hamas war drags on in its second month and shows no sign of abating, many Westerners have drawn comparisons between the state of Israel and Jim Crow-era America or apartheid South Africa. In their telling, Israelis are the white people, Palestinians are the black people, and the ethics of the conflict mirror the ethics of Jim Crow and apartheid.
Once framed this way, the correct view becomes obvious. Israelis: racist oppressors. Palestinians: noble victims.
This view of the Arab-Israeli conflict has lodged itself deeply in the Western psyche. It is why organizations like Amnesty International condemn Israel as an “apartheid state” despite the glaring differences between Israel and the canonical example of apartheid South Africa. It is why Black Lives Matter chapters across America came out in reflexive support of Hamas mere days after the terror group slaughtered 1,200 Israelis in the most gruesome ways imaginable. And it is why Ta-Nehisi Coates, considered by many to be America’s leading public intellectual on race, recently called Israel a “Jim Crow regime” and compared cities in the West Bank to Baltimore and Chicago.
But close-to-home analogies rarely explain distant events. These analogies, while convenient and easy to understand, do more to mislead than to inform. Nowhere has this been truer than in comparisons between the Israeli-Arab conflict and the West’s racial and colonial history.
[The Op-Ed from the Free Press continues]
Nor should we regard such projects as similar to the projects of Christopher Columbus or Hernán Cortés. It would be easy to stop Columbus mid-voyage and tell him to turn back to Europe. But you’d have to be heartless to tell an ex-slave sailing to West Africa in 1840 to turn around and go back to Mississippi, or to tell a Jewish refugee sailing to the British Mandate in the 1940s to turn around and go back to Europe (though the British did, in fact, do just that).
A key difference between the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict and South African apartheid is that Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank—checkpoints, movement restrictions, and so forth—are rooted in legitimate security concerns rather than racism. Because the word security has been dulled through overuse, it is crucial to remember what it really means. Security means preventing what happened on October 7—which Hamas has promised to do over and over if given the chance. No function of the state could be more important.
Some critics of Israel will be quick to point out that defenders of South African apartheid also used “security” as a justification for the apartheid system. The difference is that in the case of South Africa, it was a false pretext. In apartheid South Africa, marriage (and even sex) between blacks and whites was punishable by prison time. South African officials would decide your race (and therefore your fate) by running a comb through your hair. If it ran all the way through without too much resistance, you were considered legally white.
These policies, which lie at the core of apartheid South Africa, were the result not of security concerns but of an ideological obsession with racial classification and a horror at the thought of “race-mixing.” Such policies would be unthinkable in Israel, where Arab Israelis are full citizens, enjoying the right to vote, serve in the Israeli parliament and the Knesset, and even sit on the Supreme Court.
[The Op-Ed from the Free Press continues]
As for tactics, there is nothing in the history of mainstream African American political activism analogous to Hamas’s use of its own people as human shields; their use of a civilian hospital as a torture chamber; their denial of resources to their own people despite billions of dollars in international aid; their system of cash rewards to incentivize suicide bombings against civilian targets; their indiscriminate rocket fire on civilians; their practice of taking children and the elderly as hostages; and the combination of millenarianism and genocidal bloodlust evoked in their founding charter.
If you’d like to defend Hamas, then go ahead. But do not take the easy way out by making farcical comparisons between the black freedom struggle and Palestinian nationalism or between European colonialism and Zionism.
During the Hamas attacks of 7 October, Israeli girls and women – ranging from young children to elderly people – were subjected to gang-rape and humiliating sexual assaults. Some of their corpses were violated. Hostages who have been released have reported on sexual violence that they and other captives endured while being held in Gaza. We, as human rights advocates in the fight against gender-based violence and antisemitism, were deeply troubled – and remain so – by the slow response of international organisations, governments and civil society to these horrific occurrences.
Some groups initially hesitated, or posted and then retracted the information, citing the need for further evidence in a situation where obtaining such documentation is inherently challenging. This reaction is in stark contrast to the global gender-based violence movement’s typical emphasis on the importance of listening to and believing survivors’ accounts.
[The Guardian Report continues]
We feel compelled to ask: why is this situation any different to when other women have faced similar violence? What accounts for the clear reticence to speak out? The only difference is the perception that these were Jewish – and were perceived by some as somehow deserving – victims. (The victims included non-Jewish women, but the vast majority were Jews.)
The silence that followed was more than just concerning; it suggests a deeper issue of antisemitism that must be acknowledged and addressed. This apparent reluctance to believe the accounts of Jewish women, a stark deviation from the global commitment to believing survivors and condemning such acts, mimics patterns of Holocaust denial, perpetuating a cycle of antisemitism by furthering the stereotype of Jews as untrustworthy. Such denial of Jewish women’s experiences is a significant anomaly and needs to be called out for what it is: a stark manifestation of deep-seated antisemitism.
The use of sexual violence as a tool of war is undeniably on the rise. Ignoring or delaying a response to credible reports of such horrific acts inadvertently validates the acts. It not only denies justice to the victims, but also emboldens the perpetrators.
[The Guardian Report continues]
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media: the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. We always strive to be fair. But sometimes that means calling out the lies of powerful people and institutions – and making clear how misinformation and demagoguery can damage democracy.
From threats to election integrity, to the spiralling climate crisis, to complex foreign conflicts, our journalists contextualise, investigate and illuminate the critical stories of our time. As a global news organisation with a robust US reporting staff, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective – one so often missing in the American media bubble.
Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
South Africa, which brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a U.N. body in The Hague, should “sit this one out,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said on Wednesday at an Orthodox Union lunch on Capitol Hill.
The Pennsylvania Democrat, who has developed a reputation as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, said that Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7 cannot be compared to Israeli self-defense and critics of the Jewish state should not accuse the latter of asymmetrical response.
“Who are they really fighting? It’s a group of cowards. They hide in tunnels. They hide behind civilians. They attack, kill and mutilate children, women,” he said. “Stop talking about ‘proportion.’”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Israel is scheduled to present its side of the case to the court on Friday.
A clip of Fetterman’s comments criticizing South Africa went viral on social media overnight, with right-wing accounts that have large followings suggesting that Fetterman was referring to attacks on white farmers in South Africa as genocide.
“Did John Fetterman (D) just call out the white genocide in South Africa?” wrote an account called End Wokeness to its 2.1 million followers. Elon Musk, who owns X, shared the End Wokeness post with his 168.9 million followers. “He is right,” Musk wrote.
“A great deal of South Africa’s best farmland is owned by white farmers, as a result of the eviction of black farmers when the country was ruled by a white minority,” Fox News reported.
“Although South Africa now has majority rule, land ownership remains a contentious issue, with parties like the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters mobilizing supporters and urging the government to seize white-owned land without compensation and return it to black families,” it added.
Others have claimed that black South Africans aim to commit genocide against white South Africans, and on Aug. 22, 2018, then-President Donald Trump posted, “I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. ‘South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.’”
The Anti-Defamation League calls the theory “a longstanding (and false) white supremacist claim.”
“For decades, white supremacists globally were cheerleaders for the institutionalized white supremacy of apartheid in South Africa. They have reacted bitterly to the end of the racist policy, and to the progress South Africans have made in pursuit of racial equality and reconciliation,” the ADL wrote.
“White supremacists have seized upon some of the farm-related violence in South Africa since the end of apartheid to peddle a propaganda campaign that exaggerates and distorts the situation to imply that South African whites are imperiled,” it added.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“Hamas is anathema to peace,” he added. “We’ll never have a stable, two-state solution, we’ll never have any peace for Israel until they are fully eliminated.”
Until the morning of Oct. 7, the town of Sderot in southern Israel was a parable of hope and success. Less than a mile from the Gaza border, it emerged a few years after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as a haven for Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic persecution — from North Africa, Kurdish lands, Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. I am a second-generation Israeli; my parents found refuge in Israel from Iran.
Those people forged a city brimming with cultural richness, industrial vitality and a spirit of coexistence.
The trials of those who built Sderot were indeed traumatic but did not define them. The city’s residents devoted themselves to moving on and forging a flourishing future built on educating the next generation.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
Nevertheless, the Israeli government, alongside municipalities from our region, tried to help Gazans where we could, embarking on projects to ease those hardships. These initiatives included offering job opportunities in agriculture and industry within Israel and a proposed, but unrealized, industrial zone aimed at providing jobs for thousands of Gazan residents.
Everything changed on Oct. 7. Nothing in our history could have prepared us for that day, when Hamas launched an unprecedented assault against the population of Israel, killing about 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals in a brutal rampage that included taking about 240 hostages back to Gaza and systematic sexual assaults.
Our region was devastated. My friend and colleague Ofir Libstein, the head of the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, who spearheaded the industrial zone project, was slain defending his town, Kfar Aza. Sderot lost at least 50 people, including eight members of our police department who died that day trying to protect our city.
As Israel fought to recover control of the area and as Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel intensified, my administration and I were faced with the gut-wrenching decision to evacuate our city and its 36,000 inhabitants. In just a few days, we relocated men, women and children to shelters all over Israel. Some 6,000 residents remain amid an excruciating silence, punctured by still-recurring alerts for Hamas rockets overhead.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
It is undeniable that this war has brought a heavy cost to both sides. We trust the Israel Defense Forces’ commitment to minimizing civilian casualties and safeguarding our soldiers and hostages, but even the most ethical and advanced military cannot avoid tragic outcomes when facing an enemy that uses its own people as human shields.
The world must understand that Israel’s fight is existential, that we will not cease until the Hamas threat is eradicated. The collective memory of Sderot’s people as refugees, the roots they planted and the homes they built are powerful testaments to our existence — we have no place else to go.
Equally important is our commitment to rescue the hostages languishing in captivity in Gaza — 136, although two dozen are presumed dead — including Sderot’s Michel Nisenbaum, who was abducted while trying to save his granddaughter from the Hamas onslaught.
As we move forward, I urge the world to recognize our agony and resolve to ensure it is never repeated. Our community has suffered immensely, and it’s time to guarantee us the basic security that every human being deserves.
Let us uphold the dreams of the refugees who built Sderot, to build better lives for themselves and for their children. We hope for the same for Gazans, who must also recognize that the people of Sderot will not bow to adversity. Conflicts end once we all recognize each other’s humanity and strive to uphold it.
An NBA star offered his support to an Israeli actor and IDF reservist wounded in the line of duty in Gaza, penning a Hebrew prayer for his recovery.
Washington Wizards forward Deni Avdija is the only Israeli player in the NBA (National Basketball Association). The 6’9” A-Grade player, in the top 40 for field goals, was #9 in the 2020 draft. Nicknamed “Turbo,” the 23-year old writes messages in Hebrew on his basketball shoes in support of Israel.
This Monday he sent get well wishes, handwritten on his game shoes, to TV’s Fauda star Idan Amedi, who was wounded that day while on IDF reserve duty in Gaza.
On Yom HaShoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in 2021, Avdija’s shoes carried the message: “Yizkor” (Remember). He has previously drawn Stars of David on his shoes, and the slogan: “Am Yisrael Chai” (the Nation of Israel Lives).
“My heart is with Israel,” Avdija says. On Monday’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Avdija wrote (in Hebrew) on the midsole of his orange Nikes: “For the recovery of Idan, son of Tova, Amedi” (traditional Jewish prayers for healing always include the ailing person’s mother’s name).
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
Previous to Amedi’s injury, he posted a video in which he asserted: “We fully comprehend why we are here. We are here to protect our children, our families, and our homes. And I promise you that we won’t surrender until we win.” Refuah Shelayma, Idan ben Tova (Complete healing, Idan son of Tova)!
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday called on Israel to work with moderate Palestinians and neighboring countries on plans for postwar Gaza, saying they were willing to help rebuild and govern the territory but only if there is a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”
The U.S. and Israel are united in the war against Hamas but sharply divided over Gaza’s future, with Washington and its Arab allies hoping to revive the long-moribund peace process, an idea that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners sharply oppose.
[The AP News Report continues]
Israel, he added “must be a partner of the Palestinian leaders who are willing to lead their people” and live “side by side in peace with Israel.” Settler violence, settlement expansion, home demolitions and evictions “all make it harder, not easier, for Israel to achieve lasting peace and security.”
U.S. officials have called for the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to take the reins in Gaza. Israeli leaders have rejected that idea but have not put forward a concrete plan beyond saying they will maintain open-ended military control over the territory.
Blinken has said that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey agreed to begin planning for the reconstruction and governance of Gaza once the war ends. The leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority are set to meet Wednesday in Jordan’s southern Red Sea city of Aqaba.
Israel is aware of the exact whereabouts of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ chief in Gaza, but is refraining from carrying out a military strike because the terror leader has surrounded himself with dozens of hostages as human shields, Israeli media reported on Monday.
Former Israeli military intelligence head Amos Yadlin told Israel’s public radio, Kan, that Sinwar’s location, in the tunnels under Khan Younis in southern Gaza, was known but that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was holding back from taking action because of his use of the hostages as human shields.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Another image shows an IDF soldier, sitting on a sofa allegedly in the living room of the Hamas leader’s house with the Israeli flag hanging on the wall behind him and the inscription: “In memory of Emanuel Falka,” an IDF soldier killed in Gaza last month.
Of the 240 people kidnapped from southern Israel by Hamas terrorists and brought to Gaza on Oct. 7, 136 hostages remain in Hamas’ custody, including 23 bodies. Over 1,200 people were also murdered that day, mostly civilians.
Hostages who were freed during the temporary Israel-Hamas truce at the end of November revealed a chilling interaction in which Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 massacre, spoke to them in nearly unaccented Hebrew, promising their safety. “Hello, I am Yahya Sinwar. You are the most protected here. Nothing will happen to you,” he greeted them.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who was one of the first hostages to be released in October, recounted a direct encounter with Sinwar in Gaza in which she confronted the terror chief about his actions. “Sinwar was with us about three to four days after we got there,” Lifshitz said. “I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed of himself, to do such a thing to people who were advocates for peace for many years? He didn’t answer. He remained quiet.”
Hamas deputy leader Salah al-Arouri was killed in an explosion attributed to Israel in Beirut last week along with six other senior operatives. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the top terrorist’s death.
New York, NY, January 10, 2024 … In the three months since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, U.S. antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed, reaching a total of 3,283 incidents between Oct. 7 and Jan. 7, according to ADL’s (the Anti-Defamation League) preliminary data. This represents a 360-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior, which saw 712 incidents.
The preliminary three-month tally is higher than the total number of antisemitic incidents tracked in any year in the last decade, except for calendar year 2022, when the total number of incidents reached a historic high of 3,697. Since Oct. 7, there was an average of nearly 34 antisemitic incidents per day, putting 2023 on track to be the highest year for antisemitic acts against Jews since ADL started tracking this data in the late 1970s.
[The ADL Report continues]
60 incidents of physical assault.
553 incidents of vandalism.
1,353 incidents of verbal or written harassment.
1,317 rallies, including antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the state of Israel and/or anti-Zionism.
“In this difficult moment, antisemitism is spreading and mutating in alarming ways,” said Greenblatt. “This onslaught of hate includes a dramatic increase in fake bomb threats that disrupt services at synagogues and put communities on edge across the country.”
[The ADL Report continues]
Jan. 4 – A high school basketball game in Yonkers, NY, was canceled after antisemitic slurs were hurled at players from a competing team.
Jan. 3 – Antisemitic postcards were sent to the entire Newburyport, MA city council as well as the city’s mayor. The postcards had an antisemitic caricature as well as language saying that “the Holocaust never happened.”
Jan. 3 – Chicago police said 40 to 50 pieces of antisemitic propaganda was found on several cars in the Andersonville neighborhood.
Jan. 3 – At least six Jewish temples in San Diego County were threatened after someone sent a message saying a bomb was hidden in their buildings. The local synagogues were among 91 total Jewish houses of worship in California that were targeted that day.
Jan. 1 – A teenager wearing an IDF sweatshirt was harassed at the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, NJ. The assailant pushed the victim and said, “you’re a whore,” and “free Palestine.”
Jan. 1 – A Portland, Ore. woman was arrested in Chicago on multiple felony hate crimes and criminal defacement charges after swastikas were found on a Jewish school and multiple businesses.
Dec. 21 – Amazon suspended an employee who slipped a note into a customer’s order that read, “Death to Zionists.”
Dec. 20 – Phoenix police said antisemitic papers were found at the site of an arson fire that damaged multiple businesses.
Dec. 19 – A nationwide swatting spree targeted nearly 200 Jewish institutions over one weekend in what appeared to have been a coordinated effort by an entity outside of the United States, according to the FBI.
GENEVA (8 January 2024): UN experts* have called for full accountability for the multitude of alleged crimes committed against civilians in Israel in the 7 October attacks, and cooperation with investigators.
The allegations include grave violations of international law, including killings, hostage-taking, and torture including sexual torture. Across 22 villages approximately 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals were killed. Thousands more were injured. An estimated 240 adults, children and infants were taken hostage.
“As armed Palestinian groups rampaged through communities in Israel bordering the Gaza strip, thousands of people were subjected to targeted and brutal attacks, the vast majority of whom were civilians,” the experts said. “The growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence is particularly harrowing.”
The UN experts said individuals were allegedly burnt alive in their homes or bomb shelters. Some bodies were found decapitated or mutilated or both. Many bodies had signs of trauma consistent with executions. Many bodies had injuries consistent with beatings at or near the time of death.
Allegations of sexual torture include rapes and gang rapes, sexual assaults, mutilations and gunshots to genital areas. Female bodies were found with their clothing pulled up to their waists, with underpants removed or torn or stained with blood.
[The United Nations Report continues]
The experts welcomed the release of 110 hostages while expressing deep concern for those still being held and called for their immediate and unconditional release.
“We are deeply conscious of the active conflict in Gaza and Israel and the severe humanitarian crisis. We urge all parties to agree a ceasefire, abide by international law, and investigate any crime alleged during the armed conflict,” the experts said.
The experts recall their previous statement on the need for independent and impartial investigations for all rights violations, including those in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
They have already raised these issues through a letter addressed to the State of Palestine as the official UN Observer State and party to relevant human rights and humanitarian law treaties. A copy of the letter was also sent to the de facto authorities in Gaza [Hamas] which claimed responsibility for the overall attack and bears command responsibility as well as has human rights obligations in light of their exercise of government-like functions. A copy was also sent to the Government of Israel, which has territorial jurisdiction over the crimes.
Violence that included sexual atrocities committed during the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 in Israel amounts to war crimes and may also be crimes against humanity, two United Nations human rights experts said on Monday, following months of frustrated accusations from Israel and women’s groups that the U.N. was ignoring the rape and sexual mutilation of women during the Oct. 7 invasion.
Alice Jill Edwards, a special rapporteur on torture, and Morris Tidball-Binz, a special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said the growing evidence of sexual violence in the day’s wide range of “brutal attacks” was “particularly harrowing,” noting allegations of sexual assault, gang rape, mutilation and gunshots to the genital areas.
In a statement, they called for “full accountability for the multitude of alleged crimes,” and urged all parties to agree to a cease-fire, abide by international law, and investigate any crimes alleged to have occurred during the fighting.
“These acts constitute gross violations of international law, amounting to war crimes which, given the number of victims and the extensive premeditation and planning of the attacks, may also qualify as crimes against humanity,” they said. “There are no circumstances that justify their perpetration.”
Israeli officials say about 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 taken hostage on Oct. 7. Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been gathering evidence of cases of sexual violence but have not specified a number. Hamas has denied the accusations of sexual violence.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Reporters interviewed witnesses who described seeing women raped and killed along a highway, reviewed photographs that showed a woman’s corpse with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin, and spoke with volunteer medics and Israeli soldiers who came across at least 24 bodies of women and girls in at least six houses, some mutilated, some tied up, and many naked and alone.
Three days after the Times investigation was published, Hamas said in a statement that the group’s leaders “categorically deny such allegations” and called it a part of Israel’s attempt to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians.
Hamas fighters’ “religion, values and culture” forbid such acts, and the short duration of the attack before the attackers withdrew to Gaza made the allegations implausible, the group said in the statement issued Dec 31. It said it would welcome any international inquiries into the allegations.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem and Reim, Israel; Adam Entous reported from Washington; and Edward Wong reported from Amman, Jordan, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Israel said its military is starting to shift from a large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip to a more targeted phase in its war against Hamas, and Israeli officials have privately told their American counterparts that they hoped the transition would be completed by the end of January, U.S. officials said.
Israel’s disclosure came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was expected in Israel to press officials there to curtail their campaign in Gaza and to prevent the war from spreading across the region, particularly in the aftermath of an Israeli strike last week that killed senior Hamas leaders in Lebanon and as Hezbollah said one of its commanders was killed in a strike in the country.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said the new phase of the campaign involved fewer troops and airstrikes. U.S. officials said they expected the transition to rely more on surgical missions by smaller groups of elite Israeli forces that would move in and out of population centers in the Gaza Strip to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels.
“The war shifted a stage,” Admiral Hagari said Monday in an interview. “But the transition will be with no ceremony,” he added. “It’s not about dramatic announcements.”
He said Israel would continue to reduce the number of troops in Gaza, a process that began this month. The intensity of operations in northern Gaza has already begun to ebb, he added, as the military shifts toward conducting one-off raids there instead of maintaining wide-scale maneuvers.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Still, Israeli officials have made clear to U.S. officials that, while they hope to complete the transition by the end of the month, the timeline is not fixed. If Israeli forces encounter Hamas resistance that is stiffer than expected, or discover threats that they did not anticipate, the size and pace of the withdrawal could slow, and intensive airstrikes could continue, they said.
President Biden has strongly supported Israel’s war in Gaza, in which the Israeli military, armed with American weapons, has killed about 23,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
But Mr. Biden has come under pressure internationally, and from within his own administration, to rein in Israel’s campaign, launched after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 hostages were seized.
Mr. Biden told aides last month that he wanted the Israelis to make the transition around Jan. 1. The Israelis presented the Americans with their own transition timeline. Upon hearing it, Mr. Biden’s aides urged the Israelis to move more quickly.
With the transition now underway, there is a growing sense of urgency among Israeli and American officials to come up with plans to restore and maintain public order in the Gaza Strip as Israeli troops accelerate their withdrawal.
Israeli officials have told their American counterparts that they envision a loose network of local mayors, security officials and leaders from prominent Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip stepping in to provide basic security in the near term in the areas where they live. These local leaders, according to Israeli officials, could oversee the distribution of humanitarian aid and enforce day-to-day order.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Israel’s plans have generally lacked detail, amid public disagreement among members of the government about how much control Israel should retain over Gaza after the war. Some have called for Israeli civilians to resettle the territory, while others, like the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, have ruled out an Israeli civilian presence.
To provide security in the Gaza Strip in the medium and long term, U.S. officials have proposed retraining members of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. U.S. officials said they believed that there are at least 6,000 members of these forces in the Gaza Strip but retraining them will take many months, and it is unclear whether Israel will accept their deployment or how the local population will receive them.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Mr. Blinken has visited a half-dozen countries in the region since landing in Turkey on Friday and has spoken to leaders in each of them about how they might help in a postwar Gaza. He expects to speak with Israeli leaders about the ramping down of the war and how the strip might function in the coming months, a State Department official on the trip said.
Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley
Adam Entous is a Washington-based investigative correspondent and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Before joining the Washington bureau of The Times, he covered intelligence, national security and foreign policy for The New Yorker magazine, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. More about Adam Entous
Tension has spiked across Israel’s northern border over the past week following the alleged killing by Israel of Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in a suburb of Beirut.
This escalation comes nearly three months into fighting that erupted along the Israel-Lebanon border in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
“The situation is already essentially war—they [Hezbollah] are killing our soldiers and bombing our houses. The reality is completely untenable for anyone who lives in the north,” said Tal Finkelstein, a resident of the northern city of Kiryat Shmona.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
The issue of the Hezbollah tunnel network was thrown into the limelight in 2018 when Israel launched “Operation Northern Shield.” Over a period of six weeks, the IDF exposed six tunnels dug from Lebanon into Israel.
According to the IDF, these tunnels were “designed to secretly transport Hezbollah terrorists into areas near Israeli communities in the northern Galilee and to then to attack those communities.” The largest tunnel, originating in the southern Lebanese town of Ramiyah, was 260 feet deep—equivalent to a 22-story building—more than 3,000 feet long and extended nearly 250 feet into Israel. It featured air-conditioning, phone lines, rail tracks and staging grounds for cross-border invasions.
According to Maj. (res.) Tal Beeri, head of research at the Galilee-based Alma Research and Education Center, the discovery of these tunnels overturned the military thinking that the rocky terrain of southern Lebanon would present a major obstacle to the development of a substantial tunnel system by Hezbollah.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues].
“In our assessment, these polygons mark Hezbollah’s staging centers as part of their ‘defense’ plan against an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Each local staging center possesses a network of local underground tunnels. Between all these centers, an infrastructure of regional tunnels was built, interconnected [with] them,” said Beeri.
This assessment was a product of correlating reports of construction or fortification work with no visible above-ground work, and areas marked on the map.
“They [Lebanese civilians] didn’t understand why Hezbollah was stopping them from approaching [these areas]. What they could see resembled construction work, sand, digging and concrete in the area. But nothing was being built above ground. They saw Iranians and other foreign nationals that they later realized were North Koreans,” said Beeri.
According to the Alma report, both North Korea and Iran were central to the design and construction of the tunnel network. The initial tunnel-digging projects began in the early ’80s and greatly ramped up in the late ’90s under North Korean supervision.
“North Korean advisers significantly assisted Hezbollah’s tunnel project. Hezbollah, inspired and supported by the Iranians, saw North Korea as a professional authority on tunneling, based on the expansive North Korean experience that has accumulated in building tunnels for military use since the 1950s,” said Beeri.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Tactical tunnels, of the type that were discovered in “Operation Northern Shield,” are usually based near Lebanese villages and are primarily used by infantry soldiers to move secretly, and then emerge quickly for an attack before returning to rearm and rest. Another type are the proximity tunnels, similar to tactical tunnels but designed to get Hezbollah fighters near the Israeli border, from where they can attack. A final type, called explosive tunnels, are filled with explosives and are placed in strategic positions to be remotely detonated when IDF troops approach.
The current threat
The extensive nature of the currently known Hezbollah tunnel system raises concerns about unknown tunnels leading into Israel. Over the past years, many residents of northern towns close to the Lebanese border have reported hearing sounds of construction work under their communities.
“When we said they were digging, the military told us we were imagining things, and we don’t know if all the tunnels were found then,” Yaniv Turgeman, chairman of the committee of Moshav Stula in the Upper Galilee said in a recent interview. Addressing these concerns, IDF Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, head of Northern Command, said this week that soldiers are “conducting searches to locate any terrorist infrastructure both above and below the ground. If a threat is identified, we will not keep it a secret from anyone.”
As fighting on the northern border continues to escalate, the threat of Hezbollah’s tunnels becomes ever more relevant. As a result of the fighting, several Israeli soldiers have been killed and over 80,000 civilians have been evacuated from the northern communities. Hezbollah announced the death of 143 of its fighters since the outbreak of the hostilities on Oct. 7.
“We are not returning to the previous situation,” Chief of Staff Halevi said in a statement last week, emphasizing that the army is preparing for combat in Lebanon to drive Hezbollah away from the border.
The IDF says it has completed an operation in a central Gaza neighborhood, where troops located tunnel shafts, booby-trapped homes and weapons.
Troops of the 646th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade and elite Yahalom combat engineering unit were operating in the neighborhood over the past week, in an area dubbed by the IDF “the towers neighborhood” after its high-rise buildings.
“The buildings of the neighborhood were used as anti-tank missile and machine gun fire positions,” the IDF says.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
The IDF says troops also found a warehouse and chemical lab used to manufacture weapons.
Combat engineers destroyed the Hamas infrastructure, including tunnels in the area.
Eden Yerushalmi was taken from the Supernova festival 91 days ago. Her sister, Shani, has no doubt that she’ll come home.
“When her phone died, I said, ‘I hope they shoot her, I hope it’s quick.’” Shani Yerushalmi, 25, from Tel Aviv, told JNS. “I never thought they’d kidnap her.”
Hamas terrorists kidnapped Shani’s sister Eden, a 24-year-old Pilates teacher, from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7.
On that day, rockets began raining down on Israel at 6:30 a.m. Eden, who was working as a bartender at the festival, phoned her mother to inform her that the event had been stopped and she’d soon be home.
An hour later, Eden called again.
“I was woken up by the sound of my mother screaming over the phone,” Shani recounts, as terrorists had opened fire on revelers.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Eventually, someone approached the car, an Israeli man urging her to flee in the direction of a forested area.
“I thought I had lost my little sister as her phone had died. Shortly after that, I got a call from an unknown number. Eden had taken a friend’s phone.”
“She told me she’d separated from the Israeli man and that he’d been caught,” said Shani.
Eden remained in the bush, in a fetal position, for hours.
“At one point, ants were crawling up her face and biting her. I yelled at her not to cry. I knew if she did they’d find her but they did anyway,” Shani said.
“I told her that the police were on the way. We called the army; no one came.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Ta’ala, a term of exaltation in Arabic, means Allah “the most high.”
During the whole conversation, Shani had set herself up in her bedroom, away from the noise and hysteria of the rest of the family. She was unaware of the scope of Hamas’s massacre, and that some 240 persons had been abducted into Gaza, including 40 from the Supernova festival.
Shani admitted feeling relief that her sister was not killed on the spot, hoping she would not be held captive alone and that the sheer magnitude of the crisis would create sufficient pressure to secure the release of all the hostages.
In November, 105 Israelis and foreign nationals were indeed freed as part of a week-long ceasefire with Hamas, a ceasefire the latter soon breached.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Shani says she remains hopeful that a new negotiating process will result in her sister’s release.
The terrorists “were supposed to free young women on the day the truce ended. Some say that they didn’t because they did not want them telling what happened in Gaza,” Shani said.
“I hope there was no rape, but if so, some could already be three months pregnant. We need to have them released now,” she added.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“She wasn’t injured when they caught her. She did not pose a threat to them. They had no reason to hurt her. But we’re not dealing with rational beings,” she said.
“Eden was strong on Oct. 7. She had all the right reflexes to stay alive,” she added. “I know she is just as strong in captivity. She wants to survive and she will be back.”
When we woke up on October 7 to the stories of the barbarity of Hamas, when we heard about the hostages, when we saw the footage of the obliterated homes on various kibbutzim, when we were told the massive death toll and saw kidnappings before our very eyes, when we heard about grotesque snuff videos on Facebook, it all seemed so surreal – an outlier even for a nightmare.
Last month I was in Israel, which is my homeland. I withstood a rocket attack. I stood in the ruins, in rooms and homes that were melted by the incendiary devices and thermobaric bombs, all of them charred to the darkest possible blacks. Some of the floors and walls still had blood spattered about them. If you looked up at the ceilings, you saw hundreds of holes created by the shrapnel of grenades. Many homes were leveled, save for the “safe rooms” which seemed to withstand the cataclysms.
[The Op-Ed from the Hollywood Reporter continues]
They began feeling it well before October 7, when the people chanting “Jews will not replace us” were lauded as “very fine people” by an American president. But now, the openness of the Jew hatred has grown — with the appalling testimony of university presidents looking for “context” in the calls for the genocide of the Jews, and protests in the streets of America and on university campuses, some that go as far as supporting Hamas itself.
Intellectually, I suppose most Israelis understand that this rabid hatred toward Jews is more loud than pervasive. But that clamor makes it possible for Hamas and their acolytes to gloat. Jew-hating has become, once again, normalized. Nothing like this has been seen since Nazis rallied in Madison Square Garden in the late ’30s.
And so, we need to ask ourselves, is there anything that can be done? Is there anything that we can do? Is there anything that I can do?
There has been a kind of eerie quiet from Hollywood about this, a kind of caution not to offend any section of the country or even the world. I love the Writers Guild of America — it’s my beloved union and they have done right by me — but their lack of immediate response to what happened in Israel, their inability to condemn Hamas instantaneously, was indicative of this wariness.
The (relative) silence from the entertainment community at large can only serve to embolden the haters. Antisemitism has never really been seen as a real thing – it is, to many, a relic of a past before our lifetimes.
But there is needed now, more than ever, a dedicated mission to combat antisemitism. I am not saying that every individual in Hollywood has to go out and fight this war. Many of us are busy beating other worthy drums. But our institutions absolutely need to get into the fray. By that, I mean the major studios, networks and streamers — those with the real power to spread the word. They have a chance to make a difference. This is what America does better than anybody on the planet. Influence through art.
[The Op-Ed from the Hollywood Reporter continues]
There has never been a studio movie about the Six-Day War, maybe the greatest David versus Goliath military victory of the 20th century. The raid on Entebbe, one of the most brilliant hostage rescues in history, got some love back in the ’70s on NBC (which beat every other network in a race to tell the story), but since then only indie films have wanted to touch the story. O Jerusalem, about the creation of the state of Israel (which had very positive Arab characters), was funded entirely with foreign money. Years ago, a major studio wanted to make Mila 18, based on the Leon Uris book about the Jewish fight in the Warsaw ghetto. But in the end, the studio heads didn’t have the courage to make a movie about heroic Jews. It just lingered, and then petered away.
What we should be hoping to see are movies and TV shows that highlight the extraordinarily powerful resistance the Jewish people have had against the forces that have long tried to destroy them. And we need those films to also highlight Jewish humanism. These are the kind of films that spit in the face of antisemitism.
Probably the finest of this sort of film is Munich, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 depiction of the revenge that the Israelis sought out against the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972. No, let me rephrase that – it’s about the justice that was sought. Here was a movie about strong Jews refusing to bend to those who would eradicate them. The film’s greatness, outside of the obvious artistic merits, is that Steven and the writers Eric Roth and Tony Kushner took time to explore the toll that comes with taking life and how outside-of-the-Jewish-mindset that is. One character, who has a hard time coming to terms with being an assassin, says, “We are supposed to be a righteous people. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish.” And yet, the validity of the mission is never undermined in the movie. Jewish strength and Jewish morality are combined in the same scene.
We need more movies like Munich. But the truth is that many are scared to make them. Over the years, I have often tried to make Israel-centric films, and I have been stopped every time. If the Holocaust isn’t somehow at the center of the film, it barely stands a chance of being made – even with big stars attached. Over the years, the greenlighting authorities have been squeamish about alienating audiences. “How will it play in France?” “How will it play in Germany?” “We don’t want protestors at our gates.” “Munich would never have been made it if it didn’t have one of the greatest and most successful directors in history behind it.”
[The Op-Ed from the Hollywood Reporter continues]
Of course, what is always in question is the way in which the war is conducted. In my opinion, Bibi Netanyahu does not represent Jewish or even Israeli values, and there has to be much greater attention paid to getting humanitarian aid to the Gazan population and, more to the point, to the Palestinian plight in general.
But one thing is certain. Antisemitism has to come to an end. That may be naive and pie-in-the-sky. But that doesn’t mean we should not try.
Rod Lurie is a filmmaker whose credits include 2000’s The Contender, 2019’s The Outpost and the forthcoming film The Senior.
Israel said on Wednesday that in November it had dismantled a tunnel below Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the medical facility that Israel and allies have said Hamas used as a shield for a vast underground militia complex.
The 250-meter tunnel, about 273 yards, was dismantled without damaging the hospital, the Israeli military said in a statement. The tunnel “led to a number of significant terrorist centers and was used for carrying out terrorist operations,” the military said.
[The New York Times Report continues]
On Tuesday, newly declassified American intelligence revealed that U.S. spy agencies believe Hamas and another Palestinian group used the hospital to command forces and hold some hostages. A senior intelligence official said American intelligence agencies obtained information that Hamas fighters had evacuated the complex days before the hospital operation, and that the assessment remains firm despite questions from some news organizations about Hamas’s presence there.
Israel has been criticized for failing to produce evidence of specific claims made in the lead-up to the raid on the hospital, including that it would discover a sophisticated underground command center and access points to the tunnel from inside the hospital’s wards. Israel did not provide evidence to back those specific claims, because, the military said, it was unable to fully excavate the tunnel because it was booby-trapped.
Images released by the Israeli military clearly show extensive tunnels, but not how they were used.
Ms. Munder, 78, is a retired resident of Nir Oz, Israel. She spent 50 days as a hostage in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
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The first time I went to Gaza was in 1967.
As a 22-year-old living in the small agricultural kibbutz of Nir Oz, a mile east of the Israeli border with the territory, I would wake up early in the morning to tend to the fields, pick apples in the orchard and work in the day care center.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
I have happy memories from that day, and in the years that followed, my interactions with Gazans grew. I met Gazan businessmen who traded with my brother-in-law in the city of Be’er Sheva and who came as guests to my home in Nir Oz. I sat alongside them in the traffic on weekend journeys to Tel Aviv. For a time, you could imagine that we were destined to live together.
Nevertheless, we expected that Gaza would eventually return to the Egyptians in exchange for peace and normalization but hoped that the ties with Gazans would remain. After the Camp David Accords left Israel in control of Gaza and the failure of Oslo led to the bloodshed of the second intifada, our hopes for coexistence were extinguished. By the time Israel disengaged unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 and sealed the border, we were strangers once again. I could feel the old shadows slowly returning to Nir Oz as Hamas took power.
On Oct. 7, masked Hamas gunmen burst into the bomb shelter inside my home and kidnapped me; my daughter, Keren; and my grandson, Ohad. My husband, Abraham, was knocked out trying to stop the screaming men from entering the safe room and was taken away separately from us. He is still in captivity, his condition unknown. Hamas also killed my son, Roy, as he tried to defend Nir Oz.
Later that day I was back in Khan Younis, 56 years after my trip to the beach.
Over the next 49 days, I spent most of my time locked in a small room on the second floor of a hospital. My jailer, who went by Mohammad, called himself a soldier of Hamas, but he didn’t look like a soldier. I was being guarded by a man in civilian clothes and held against my will in a civilian building.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
What I do know is that I will not go to Gaza a third time. Perhaps one day Israelis will again take a trip to the beach in Gaza or host merchants over coffee at their homes. I hope our two peoples can finally live in peace, side by side. And I know that if Hamas remains in power, that will never happen.
Ruti Munder, 78, is a retired resident of Nir Oz, Israel. She spent 50 days as a hostage in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
I was born in Gaza Strip in the late 1990s, one of six children. At the time, the Palestinian Authority was the ruling party. My father, like most people in Gaza, was sick of the PA’s corruption and was waiting for any alternative. Hamas promised “change and reform” and they won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006. One year later, I awoke to the sound of gunfire. Hamas gunmen were fighting Fatah, and they ended up killing of more than 600 Palestinians. It became clear very quickly that Hamas was not the “change and reform” that we hoped for.
To silence dissent, Hamas terrorized the citizens of Gaza. On the way to the Dar-Alarqam school I attended in the al-Shujaiya neighborhood near the Israeli border, a group of masked men carrying Kalashnikovs would check each car. At the end of the year, masked men opened offices in our school to promote Hamas’s military camps and register students.
I graduated and began my studies at the Islamic University of Gaza, along with future Hamas leaders and current members. All art classes were replaced with radical Islamic teachings, and the elections of the student councils and clubs were only open to Hamas members, who hoarded all the privileges and distributed all the grants between themselves.
Voicing dissent was not an option. Hamas has a no tolerance policy for criticism or objections to any of its policies. Even discussion is forbidden Any journalist who objects or criticizes a policy is suspended and investigated. Demonstrations are strictly prohibited. Freedom of speech in Gaza is a fantasy. The dirtiest tool Hamas uses to silence citizens is character assassination through online campaigns accusing dissenters of working for hostile bodies or committing immoral acts. Hamas also routinely breaks into the homes of people deemed disloyal and humiliates them in front of their family and neighbors.
[The Op-Ed from Newsweek continues]
I will never forget my first day in jail—walking up the steps listening to screams of my colleagues, most of them fellow students, who had been arrested before me. I was held under arrest for 21 days and subjected to various types of torture. I was beaten with batons and sprayed with cold water in the late winter night hours. My friends didn’t fare much better. A Christian friend was in the next cell and I could hear them screaming at him, “You are a Christian and you don’t like the situation? Then go to another country!”
After we were released, most of those who participated in the demonstrations emigrated away from Gaza. There was no hope for any change in the current situation. We suffered ongoing harassment by Hamas members. Some died trying to leave, like Tamer Al-Sultan, a pharmacist whose crime was asking for a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
People’s living conditions got worse. The wealth gap expanded even further. We protested again in 2023 and were crushed in the same manner as in 2019. I was arrested again by Hamas last year and held for 14 days, this time in a small cell with no bed, no window, and barely enough space to sit down. I was released on bail on the condition that I not take part in any further demonstrations.
[The Op-Ed from Newsweek continues]
Now I know better. After criticizing Hamas for its horrific actions on Oct. 7, I made friends with Israelis for the first time in my life. It turns out that many of them, like me, just want this conflict to end so they can live in peace. These friendships opened my eyes to their suffering. I now have a better understanding what they are thinking, and have decided never to make judgments before listening to the other side.
I hope my new friends feel the same way about the many Gazans living under the boot of Hamas’s oppression.
We Palestinians have a saying: “Hope is born from the womb of suffering.” I hope that after the war, that after Hamas been defeated, we can create a real, lasting peace for both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Many Gazans are praying for this, too.
Hamza Howidy is a Palestinian from Gaza City. He is an accountant and a peace advocate.
Matthew Miller, the U.S. State Department spokesman, rejected calls on Tuesday from two Israeli ministers for Palestinians to be permanently resettled outside of Gaza and for Israel to re-establish Jewish communities within the Strip.
“This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible,” Miller stated. “We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“We have been clear, consistent and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel,” he said.
The United Nations estimates that some 1.8 million people have been internally displaced in Gaza, about 80% of the population. Egypt has generally refused to allow Gazans to cross into its territory, citing concerns that the population will not be allowed to return when the war concludes.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has previously said that “there must be no enduring internal displacement” of Palestinians from Gaza and that they should be allowed to return to their homes as soon as conditions permit.
While the United States rarely condemns Israeli political figures by name, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have repeatedly drawn the ire of the State Department and American Jewish groups for hard-line positions on Palestinian issues.
In March, the State Department said that Smotrich’s comments were “repugnant” after he called for a Palestinian village to be “wiped out,” and many U.S. Jewish groups refused to meet with him during a visit to Washington, D.C., later that month.
(AP) — An Israeli woman who recently returned from captivity in the Gaza Strip says she was groped by her Palestinian kidnapper and lived in constant fear throughout the weeks she was held hostage.
Mia Schem, a 21-year-old dual citizen of Israel and France, was attending a music festival in southern Israel when Hamas militants burst across the border and raided the event site on Oct. 7. More than 300 people were killed and dozens taken hostage.
She was released on Nov. 30 during a weeklong cease-fire.
In an interview broadcast Friday on Israel’s Channel 13 TV, Schem said she was captured after she got out her friend’s burning car. She said her captor began touching her upper body inappropriately and only stopped after she screamed and he noticed that she had been shot in the arm and badly wounded.
“I started screaming, going crazy,” she said. “There were burnt vehicles, bodies.”
While in captivity, she was held in a house with a family and watched around the clock by the father, Schem said. She said his constant staring made her uncomfortable and fearful that he might try to harm her. The man’s wife did not like her and sometimes denied her food for days at a time, she said.
[The AP NewsReport continues]
Schem made international headlines when Hamas released a video of her in captivity days after she was taken hostage. In the video, she lay in bed as someone bandaged her right arm, and she says she wants to go home. At the time, it was the first sign of life from the hostages.
Schem said she barely slept during her time as a hostage because she was so terrified, and that she also did not shower or receive any medications. She said her captor’s children occasionally came in to look at her “like I’m some animal in a petting zoo.”
Schem said she was taken from the home into a tunnel and held with other hostages during her final days in captivity.
During this time, she said she knew she would soon be released. Schem said she was kept with six or seven people in a small room and received just one piece of pita bread a day. She said she feels guilty because of the other hostages she left behind.
Schem broke down during the interview, saying she still has not come to terms with her return as she processes the ordeal. “I can’t get it out of my head,” she said.
In an Instagram post, former Friends star David Schwimmer strongly criticized deniers of Hamas sexual assaults on Israelis on and after October 7th.
According to forensic evidence and testimony from October 7th survivors and released hostages, Hamas terrorists committed repeated rape and mutilated genitals of both women and men.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
“I served on the Board of Directors for The Rape Foundation for almost 20 years, and have been an advocate for child and adult survivors of sexual violence for almost 30,” Schwimmer began.
He described his extensive work with children, teens, men, and women who, with proper treatment “went on to lead incredibly loving, healthy and productive lives.”
Schwimmer added, “One crucial aspect I learned early on about the healing process, and for justice to be served by the criminal offenders, is that the survivor be BELIEVED.”
He then added that while many individuals and organizations have fought on behalf of survivors of sexual abuse, he noticed that a number of them were silent on the issue of Hamas sexual violence on October 7th.
Schwimmer wrote, “Why do so many REFUSE TO BELIEVE — despite all the evidence on camera and in testimony — the women, children, and men brutally assaulted by terrorists on Oct. 7th?”
“Where is their outrage?”
“In the weeks and months that followed, it became clear that their activism, their advocacy, is conditional.”
“They’ll fight like hell for ALL victims of sexual violence — unless they’re Jews.”
“For many of them, denying it even happened is a convenient way of avoiding compassion and personal responsibility.”
“Perhaps this article will finally make them realize they got it wrong, and come to terms with their unconscious bias.”
“Because — as they know better than most — their refusal to believe the survivors has RE-TRAUMATIZED them, as well as their families, friends, and those of us who did believe them.”
“But they can use their voice now.”
“And it would be great to know who the real allies are.”
Lahav 433 which is investigating Hamas sexual crimes on October 7th has 1,000 statements and 60,000 video clips with possible evidence of sexual violations.
In addition, doctors examining freed hostages have declared that at least 30 report having been the victim of sexual crimes and many show physical evidence of sexual abuse.
A split in Hamas is widening as some senior officials realize that the terrorist group will not remain in Gaza after the war.
Hamas’s “Qatari” camp, led by Khaled Mashaal and Musa Abu Marzouk, views exile as inevitable, while the “Iranian” camp led by Yahya Sinwar and Saleh Arouri remains defiant on staying in Gaza.
“It is clear that Hamas internalizes the fact that it will have to give up its rule in the Gaza Strip and even hand over the keys to a new and different Palestinian entity that will be based mainly on the Palestine Liberation Organization,” said an Arab source involved in talks between Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and several Arab countries.
“Official and semi-official talks” have been taking place in Qatar in recent days, joined by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
The Arab source stressed, “These understandings come mainly from the ‘Qatari group’ in Hamas.
“We were very surprised to see how far the Hamas members who are in Qatar went and came close to the Fatah and PLO positions,” the source added.
Hamas officials in the “Qatari camp” “express a great willingness to join the PLO and now it remains mainly to conclude the conditions for this,” the source said, adding that Sinwar bitterly opposes the Qatari talks and is “furious with his colleagues.”
This is why Sinwar recently sent several letters to Hamas leaders in Qatar trying to convince them he had effective control of the Gaza Strip.
“Sinwar forbids any discussion of the question of the day after the day that does not take place with his consent or in his presence,” the Arab source said.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
“It’s not for nothing,” the Arab source said, that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority refuse to accept the term “technocrat government” but are now ready to discuss a Palestinian unity government including the PLO. But the split between Hamas’s Qatari and Iranian camps prevents this.
Meanwhile, the UAE has signaled its preference for Mohammed Dahlan. Dahlan, once a high-level figure within Fatah, was the Palestinian Authority’s Gaza “strong man” when Hamas violently seized control of the Strip in 2007. But as Dahlan regained influence within Fatah, he had a falling out with PLO/P.A./Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas and was expelled from the party in 2011. He was later tried in absentia in Ramallah on charges of corruption, charges which Dahlan denies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out letting Hamas or Fatah control Gaza after the war. However, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi recently wrote on the Saudi website Elaph that Israel was prepared to work with moderate figures in both Gaza and the Palestinian Authority.
Israeli forces stormed the site in November, drawing intense international scrutiny and criticism.
U.S. spy agencies believe that Hamas and another Palestinian group fighting Israel used Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to command forces and hold some hostages, according to new American intelligence declassified on Tuesday.
The hospital was the focus of a large Israel Defense Forces effort in November to take control of the facility, an operation that came under intense international scrutiny and criticism.
Israeli officials said Hamas had built a vast complex under the hospital, making it a legitimate military target. But critics said the military operation effectively cut off and shut down a crucial part of Gaza’s medical network with little evidence that Hamas was using the hospital as a command post.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday that the American government continued to believe that Hamas used the hospital complex and sites beneath it to exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold “at least a few hostages.”
American intelligence agencies obtained information that Hamas fighters had evacuated the complex days before the multiday operation, destroying documents and electronics as they left, the senior intelligence official said.
After the operation, the Israeli military took reporters to a shaft at the complex leading to a tunnel network. Later, the military showed the tunnels underneath the hospital.
[The New York Times Report continues]
While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.
Some had hoped that the operation to take the hospital could result in the rescue of some of the hostages taken by Palestinian fighters during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel. No hostages were rescued, but Israeli officials found the bodies of two hostages at or near the complex, officials have said.
The new American intelligence assessment says the Israeli assessment was at least partially correct that some hostages were held at or under the complex. But those hostages appear to have been moved as Hamas evacuated.
One of France’s leading Jewish intellectuals is promoting a petition initiated by a group of students, several from Muslim backgrounds, calling for Oct. 7 — the date of the Hamas terrorist pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 taken hostage — to be named as the “World Day Against Antisemitism.”
Marek Halter, a Polish-Jewish novelist and film-maker, announced his support for the petition over the weekend. “I was contacted by a few young people, mostly from immigrant backgrounds,” Halter said, according to the news outlet Valeurs Actuelles. “Upset by the events of Oct. 7 on the Gaza border, they wished to launch an appeal for this date to become a world day against antisemitism.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Halter earlier endorsed a separate call to recognize Oct. 7 as a day of “mass feminicide” because of the crimes of rape and sexual torture inflicted on an as yet inconclusive number of women captured by the terrorists. In a statement co-authored with actors Charlotte Gainsbourg and Isabelle Carré, Halter asserted that the “violence committed against these women corresponds in every respect to the definition of feminicide, i.e. the murder of women or girls because of their sex.”
In a classroom decorated with Hebrew and Arabic letters, a group of third graders — their eyes closed, their hands placed facing up on their laps — took a deep breath in unison.
“And exhale,” a teacher told them.
The students, a mix of Jews and Arabs, attend Max Rayne Hand in Hand School in Jerusalem, one of six such bilingual institutions in Israel dedicated to the proposition that Israelis and Palestinians can learn and live together in peace. On a recent day this month, soon after a temporary cease-fire in Gaza collapsed and the prospect for peace seemed more distant than ever, the students were meditating.
If regional peace seemed momentarily unobtainable, at least they could try for inner calm.
Schools across Israel, most of them divided along lines of religion and language, are struggling with how to help students cope emotionally during the deadliest conflict in a generation. At Hand in Hand schools, where every class has two teachers — a Hebrew speaker and an Arabic speaker — the conversation about the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war unfolding in Gaza sounds markedly different than in other schools.
[The New York Times Report continues]
That has only strengthened the resolve of the schools’ leaders. “It’s possible to be together, it’s preferable to be together, and it’s also the right thing to do,” said Gezeel Jarroush Absawy, the principal of the Hand in Hand elementary school in Haifa.
To that end, the schools emphasize processing individual and generational trauma. They present history through the lenses of both Israelis and Palestinians, and foster relationships between Arabs and Jews in childhood in the hope that they can extend into adulthood.
“We need to be friends with each other and not fight,” one student at the Jerusalem school said in Arabic. “We can live in peace,” said another in Hebrew. “Even older people and children can accept each other so we can be safe,” said another Arabic-speaking student.
The schools’ approach differs sharply from that of many schools in Israel, where a far-right government is pushing a nationalist curriculum. And it is particularly different from that in the Hamas-controlled schools that operated before the war in Gaza, where by law all classrooms were segregated by gender, girls were required to wear religious dress and textbooks did not recognize the state of Israel.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Like their children’s teachers, the parents worried about what would happen to their fragile community in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7. When Arab and Jewish parents sat down together for the first time after the attack, Ms. Ben-Nun and Ms. Karkabi asked everyone to share why they had chosen to attend the session. “We came to listen,” they recalled parents saying one after another.
The parents said they were exhausted, devastated, anxious and angry. But they also expressed a shared vision of the future, in which Israelis and Palestinians would be real partners.
“The complexity is still there, and I expect it to be there,” Ms. Karkabi said. “We don’t always agree with each other, but we hear each other.”
But everything at Hand in Hand is not meditation and deep conversation. Blink and it is an ordinary school. Students fumble with their backpacks, do gymnastics at recess and race to class at the song that marks the next period.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Along the way, Ben’s father drove them past apartment buildings with Israeli flags displayed outside, and another with a sign that read, “Give Peace A Chance.” Ben, 9, talked cogently about his anxiety about the war, and how his favorite subject recently switched from science to art.
“My best friend is Arab,” he said as he looked out the car’s window. “It feels fun, a religious Jew being friends with an Arab.”
The boys like going to the library together and playing soccer. But, Ben added, things are also stressful.
“It’s kind of hard to believe that there’s literally people getting killed right now,” he said as his father pulled up to the front of the school. “And here, it’s just like, chill. Another normal day.”
Arriving at school, Ben grabbed his bag and hopped out of the car. The boy’s father gave him a kiss goodbye on the head, and Ben ran into the school — hoping to find his best friend.
Investigators build legal case documenting ‘systematic and unprecedented cruelty’ with echoes of Adolf Eichmann trial
NIR OZ, Israel—Eitan Cunio heard the militants enter his house and watched as gasoline seeped under the door of the safe room where he sheltered with his wife and two children.
His 1-year-old daughter was crying as the family’s home in Kibbutz Nir Oz was set alight and smoke began entering the room. Cunio put wet sheets at the bottom of the door and told his family they would stay inside rather than be killed or kidnapped. If we die, we die together at home, he said.
Before passing out, Cunio sent a tearful voice note to a friend in his community: “Brother, it’s horrible. We are going to die.”
Months have passed since the October day Israelis call Black Sabbath, when Hamas-led militants rampaged into Israel from Gaza, an attack that officials say killed some 1,200 people and included acts of torture, mutilation and sexual violence. Israeli investigators are now using some 200,000 photographs and videos and 2,000 witness testimonies to reconstruct what happened, with an eye toward building a legal case against those responsible that would meet international standards and provide a definitive historical accounting of the Oct. 7 attack.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Israel’s investigation is expected to yield a trial that would be the country’s most significant since the early 1960s, when Israel captured, tried and hanged former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann for his central role in the Holocaust.
“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” said Roi Sheindorf, former deputy to the attorney general. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”
The Israeli police are examining testimonies from captured militants, footage from cameras obtained from them, social media, and vehicle dashboards and security cameras throughout southern Israel, as well as materials seized in Gaza.
One challenge for the investigation, legal analysts say, is that the collection of forensic evidence was limited in the aftermath of Oct. 7, while the Israeli military was engaged in combat in the area for days after the attack.
More than 21,000 Palestinians have since died in airstrikes and fighting between the Israeli military and Hamas, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. The number doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
An accompanying goal of Israel’s investigation could also be preserving history, much like the Eichmann trial laid out Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the world and began a process for witnesses to come forward en masse to speak of the horrors they experienced.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Militants posted videos of some of the killings and kidnappings on victims’ social media pages, where friends and family watched. When militants forced their way into Noam Elyakim’s home, they shot him in the leg, then took his wife’s phone and livestreamed the family being taken hostage on Facebook. In another instance, Shay Shimoni saw a video posted by militants of her 75-year-old mother dead in a pool of blood. The Journal viewed both videos, which are no longer online.
New details about sexual violence also are emerging. Investigators initially found no rape survivors, but at least three women have since come forward to the Ministry of Welfare saying they experienced sexual violence, said Ayelet Razin Bet Or, a former government official helping with the investigation.
One witness saw militants gang rape a woman and then cut off her breast, according to police testimony viewed by the Journal. First responders said they saw signs of sexual violence, including women found naked or with their underwear pulled down or tops removed.
The Journal saw images taken by a first responder of a naked woman with a knife and three nails in the crotch area, women whose clothing was partially or entirely removed and women with blood from the crotch area. In another image provided by the first responder, a woman’s breast was almost entirely sliced off. Her shirt was ripped away and she had a knife wound in the neck. In two other photos a naked man was found gagged and shot and one photo showed a man’s eyeball had been removed.
Shari Mendes, 62, a reservist in the Israeli army who helped identify bodies after Oct. 7, said people were shot in the head so many times they were disfigured.
First victims
Three miles east from the Gaza border in Kfar Aza, a community of 950, militants on paragliders landed in a sports field where later that day residents planned an annual kite-flying festival.
The festival, which over the years became a peace gesture to Gazans, was organized by Aviv Kutz, 53, his wife Livnat, 49, and their three teenage children. They hoped that Gazans would see the kites and fly their own in return, according to Aviv’s father, Benny Kutz.
The family had eaten dinner together the night before, a rare luxury as the children lived away from home. Rotem, 18, was serving in the army and Yonatan, 16, and Yiftach, 14, were at boarding school.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Around 7 a.m., Gil Taasa and his two sons ran from his house to a bomb shelter yards from the front door, according to a video camera capturing their movements, which has since been added to a video compilation shown by Israel to world leaders and journalists.
Seconds later, a militant threw a grenade inside.
Taasa told his sons not to be scared and jumped on top of the grenade to shield them. He died, his limp body slumping out of the entrance to the shelter, according to the video.
Koren and Shay ran back into the house, where a militant entered the kitchen.
“Daddy!” said one of the boys in disbelief.
“Daddy’s dead, Shay,” Koren said, according to a video from inside the kitchen.
“I know I saw,” Shay said.
“I think we are going to die,” his brother appears to reply, according to video footage inside their father’s home which was included in the video that Israel created.
Shay was badly injured during the grenade explosion and couldn’t see out of one eye. Koren attempted to care for his brother’s wounds with a wet towel and used Google Translate to try to communicate with two militants.
He pleaded for them to kill him instead of his brother. The militants decided to leave, telling the boys to stay put, adding: “If you move, we will kill you.”
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Sexual assault
At the festival, Hamas militants began to sexually assault women, witnesses told the police. Fighters took women back to Gaza with them, and in one example, paraded the half-naked body of a female festival goer in the back of a pickup, according to a widely shared video on Telegram.
In a recording of a phone call that morning, militants driving in Israel cheered as one of them talked about raping a woman.
“I am going to f— her, I am going to f— her,” he told another person on the line, according to an unverified recording shared with the Journal by Israeli officials.
At Eitan Cunio’s community Nir Oz, the heat and smoke in his shelter had become so intense, he and his wife began to say goodbye to their two daughters, Ofri, 4 and Stav, a year and nine months. They all passed out.
At about 1 p.m., Eitan Cunio regained consciousness as a friend phoned to say he was coming to get them.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Five members of Eitan Cunio’s family were released in last month’s exchange for Palestinian prisoners, but his twin brother and his younger brother and girlfriend are still being held, according to Israeli authorities.
‘Open up’
In Netiv HaAsara, Sabine Taasa heard a knock on her door: “Open up, it’s me, Koren.”
Standing at the door were her youngest sons covered in blood and shrapnel wounds. They had run from their father’s house and were on the verge of collapse, according to a video Sabine later took inside her shelter. Her youngest son’s eye was full of blood and he had a large wound on the back of his leg.
At least three members of the community’s emergency-response team of volunteers soon arrived. Before evacuating, she ran to Gil Taasa’s house where she found his body in a pool of blood. Flies rested on his face.
She cried and hugged him, before collapsing herself and being carried away.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Sabine Taasa provided testimony to the police investigation and now wants justice. Four attackers were captured at Netiv HaAsara, and she is hopeful she will be able to confront Gil Taasa’s killers.
“I want to stand in front of them and identify them with my son,” she said. “That is Koren’s wish.”
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) may not be an expert on the Middle East, but in her Christmas tweet, she managed to describe the situation in Bethlehem at least half-correctly, even if she didn’t know what quite what she was saying.
In the controversial tweet, AOC lambasted Israel and declared that both Jesus and the Palestinian Arabs were victims of “right-wing forces.”
According to the congresswoman’s revisionist version of history, Jesus—like Palestinian Arabs today—faced “the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents” and “was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power.” And nowadays, she continued, “right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians…”
When Rep. Ocasio-Cortez referred to “right-wing forces violently occupying Bethlehem,” she obviously meant the Israelis. Evidently her staff never bothered to inform her that, in fact, Israel is not occupying Bethlehem, “violently” or otherwise. There is no Israeli military governor or administration in Bethlehem any more—they all left back in 1995, as part of the Oslo II agreement. It is the Palestinian Authority (PA), not Israel, that occupies Bethlehem.
[The Jewish Journal Commentary continues]
Some factions of the PA still bear names that came straight out of the Marxist lexicon of the 1960s, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. PA chairman-for-life Mahmoud Abbas earned his Ph.D. (if it can be called that) in Moscow, where he wrote a dissertation arguing that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax.
But Arab and Muslim regimes do not neatly fit into Western political categories, and the PA’s specific policies on hot-button issues that divide right from left in the U.S. today suggest that the Palestinian Arab leadership is far from Ocasio-Cortez’s camp.
Abortion, for example. It’s illegal under the PA, except in the rare cases where it’s necessary to save the mother’s life. The PA bans abortion even in cases of incest or rape. Not only that, but according to PA law, a woman whose life is endangered by her pregnancy must have “written approval” from “her husband or guardian” before proceeding with an abortion.
Or separation of church and state. The PA recognizes no such concept. On the contrary, Article 4 of the PA’s Constitution states that “Islam is the official religion in Palestine.” Article 4 also says “The principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be a principal source of legislation.” Imagine Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction if someone were to propose making Christianity the “official religion” of the United States, with the Bible as its main source of legislation.
[The Jewish Journal Commentary continues]
In short, by every criterion that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez uses to judge political and social issues, the Palestinian Authority regime that occupies Bethlehem represents what she would consider “right wing.” By all logic, she should oppose with every fiber of her being.
So why does she still support them? Is AOC’s hostility to Israel so all-consuming that she is willing to discard every principle or policy dear to her in order to be able to promote the Palestinian Arab cause?
Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.
Julia Haart, a fashion designer and author who stars in the Netflix show My Unorthodox Life, told Israeli media on Thursday that she is frustrated that some feminists and supporters of the LGBTQ+ community refuse to condemn the Hamas terrorist organization that perpetrated the Oct. 7 deadly massacre in southern Israel.
Haart, who is also the co-owner of the international fashion talent management Elite World Group, is in Israel with some of her children touring the country and the Gaza Strip to learn firsthand about the Hamas atrocities that took place in October. She traveled with troops from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Gaza and filmed footage of civilian homes that housed weapons used to attack Israel, such as grenades, bombs, and rocket launchers. She also met with families of those taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 and spoke with an Arab Muslim commander in the IDF who denounced the actions of Hamas.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Haart’s journey of leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is explained in My Unorthodox Life. She has four children, who include a non-religious bisexual app creator and a Shabbat-observant Instagram influencer and TikToker. The show’s second season premiered on Netflix in Dec. 2022.
The entrepreneur told ILTV that she hopes to continue using her fame and public platform to support Israel and help the world learn the truth about the Jewish state during its ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “I needed to come here; I needed to show my physical support,” she said. “I needed to let people know that this country is a bastion of democracy and freedom, and that I will stand behind it with every ounce of strength in my body.”
“I believe in destiny and fate, and I think perhaps all the fame that we acquired may be for this particular reason,” she added. “Maybe the reason my Netflix show was successful, maybe the reason I had to become a public figure, was so the day that the Jewish people were in danger, I could utilize my voice, and my children could do the same, to help klal Israel [the nation of Israel]. To be sitting on my couch yelling would not have the same effect.”
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.
One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.
As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.
Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.
Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.
The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.
A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.
That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.
In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.
“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”
Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.
“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”
‘Screams without words’
Sapir, a 26-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.
She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.
She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.
About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.
“It was like an assembly point,” she said.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
[The New York Times Report continues]
He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”
Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.
Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.
“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”
Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.
Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”
Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.
A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.
One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.
Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.
[The New York Times Report continues]
In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.
The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.
According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.
Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.
A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.
Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.
“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”
There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.
[The New York Times Report continues]
“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.
Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.
But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.
The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.
A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.
But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.
The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.
The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.
Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.
“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”
A new report painstakingly documents a campaign of coordinated sexual violence by Hamas in graphic detail. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late.
The New York Times published a lengthy investigation on Dec. 28 detailing dozens of cases of rape, mutilation and torture by terrorists who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7. The authors concluded that the targeting of women, men and children “were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence.”
Although the investigation described specific and horrifying incidents in graphic detail, the general picture that emerged was not a new one. We have known for months that terrorists conducted a coordinated campaign of sexual violence as part of the devastating Oct. 7 attacks that were designed to traumatize and humiliate the Israeli public.
[The Forward Op-Ed continues]
Israeli pain as a threat to Palestinian suffering
To some, the centuries of conflict in the Middle East can be reduced to a story of oppressor and oppressed.
To one camp, the Palestinians are the world’s ultimate victims, permanent refugees whose entire existence is defined by the Israeli occupation.
To the other, it is the Israelis who must be forever on guard, ever-victimized by Palestinian terrorists and the many states that materially support them.
[The Forward Op-Ed continues]
To acknowledge Israeli pain and suffering in particular threatens the reductive worldview in which victim and oppressor are the only categorizations that really matter. Because if individual Israelis can be victims as well as members of a nation that has occupied another’s territory for decades — and if individual Palestinians can be at once suffer under occupation and be capable of committing horrific acts of terrorism — then the entire house of cards collapses on itself.
It is true that the extent to which sexual violence featured in the Oct. 7 attack was at first unclear. In the attack’s immediate aftermath, authorities’ focus was on identifying and burying the dead with dignity, not fastidiously documenting evidence sexual violence. Delays in reporting the evidence that did emerge allowed bad actors and skeptics alike ample time to spread disinformation and denial.
But even after ample reports concretely proved that Hamas had engaged in planned, systematic sexual violence against Israelis, the reductive victim-oppressor mindset pushed the world to ignore it.
[The Forward Op-Ed continues]
Those who view one group of people as a perpetual victim and the other as the embodiment of evil are bound to ignore any evidence of suffering that does not align with one’s idea of who is the ultimate victim. This erases the complicated experiences of the nuanced individuals who comprise both sides and gets us nowhere closer to a resolution. Reducing one side to “oppressor” and the other to “oppressed,” as the Harvard poll demonstrates, leads to justifying violence extremism, not dealing with the messy business of peacefully solving the problem.
Mirit Ben Mayor, an Israeli police chief superintendent quoted by the Times, chalked the sexual violence of Oct. 7 up to “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
So, too, is the denial of their suffering. Acknowledging the carnage of Oct. 7 won’t bring any of the victims back, ease the suffering of survivors or do anything to change the fact that war is worse than hell. It will not get us closer to solving the conflict.
But if we can’t acknowledge the documented suffering of innocent victims, even when we find their pain to be inconvenient to our view of the world, we’re in for a very dark future indeed.
The Israel Defense Forces’ search for terror tunnels is being aided by a trove of intelligence seized by soldiers, namely 65 million digital files and a half-million physical documents, the IDF disclosed on Thursday.
Tasked with sorting through the intelligence finds is Amshat, a unit within the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate. Amshat is the Hebrew acronym for “Document and Technical Means Collection Unit.”
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
When the research team collated the data, the important link between the map and the key was created—making it possible to locate and destroy tunnel shafts in the field.
In addition, a document was seized with the location of a hidden weapons stockpile in the Beit Hanoun area. After analyzing the document, Amshat was able to direct ground forces to the location of the armaments cache, which was destroyed.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said on Thursday that troops were fighting in tunnels underneath Khan Yunis, Hamas’s stronghold in the southern Gaza Strip.
Hagari said finding the tunnel shafts, destroying Hamas terror infrastructure and the killing of terrorists is a lengthy process.
“These are ambitious but important war aims because there is no other way to defeat Hamas, and it will take time,” he said.
After Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis in the most barbaric ways imaginable, perpetrated horrific sexual violence, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians – it’s hard to imagine anyone excusing – or even worse – celebrating this attack.
Unfortunately, many have.
These celebrations and attacks on Jewish communities and institutions have caused a major uptick in antisemitism worldwide. If we are going to counter this post-October 7 surge, we must identify the forces driving it. There are four big lies we must tackle head-on if we are going to be successful.
The first is the notion that “From the River to the Sea” means the liberation of Palestinians or a secular binational Palestinian state. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a rallying cry for the erasure of the State of Israel and its people.
[The Jerusalem Post Report continues]
When testifying before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews inherently violates their respective codes of conduct. Instead, they equivocated, saying that it would depend on the context, or that it would not be actionable unless it targeted individuals.
It’s no wonder that since the October 7 attack, “more than half of Jewish college students across the United States say they feel less safe on their campus,” according to Hillel.
FBI director Christopher Wray told lawmakers on December 5 that there has been a 60% year-over-year increase in reported hate crimes after October 7, with most of that increase driven by crimes against Jews. As Wray has previously noted, although Jews make up just 2.4% of the United States population, they are the victims of nearly 60% of religious-based hate crimes.
The four big lies seek to delegitimize Israel and Zionism in order to legitimize attacks against Israelis and Jews.
We must fight these lies with the truth and moral clarity that this moment requires. We must show the resolve and determination to make our voices heard, and our battle must continue long after Israel wins this war.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had caused “unintended harm” to “uninvolved civilians” in two strikes this week on a densely packed Gaza Strip neighborhood, where, the local health authorities said, dozens were killed.
It was a rare admission of fault by the military over its conduct of the war. The military said it was targeting Hamas on Sunday when it launched two strikes on the central Gazan community of Al Maghazi, which has been flooded with Palestinians uprooted by war and crammed into homes by the dozen.
“A preliminary investigation revealed that additional buildings located near the targets were also hit during the strikes, which likely caused unintended harm to additional uninvolved civilians,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.
“The I.D.F. regrets the harm to uninvolved individuals, and is working to draw lessons from the incident,” the statement said.
Israel has come under growing international pressure to scale back its heavy air and ground campaign in Gaza, where more than 20,000 people have been reported killed, after a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
[The New York Times Report continues]
An Israeli broadcaster, Channel 12, reported on Wednesday night that, in a draft decision, a one-vote majority of justices favored striking down an amendment to a basic law that would prevent judges from overturning government decisions and appointments on the grounds that they are unreasonable, part of a wider judicial overhaul that divided the country.
The New York Times has not obtained a copy of the document, and Channel 12 did not publish it in full.
On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Israel’s courts said that “the writing of the ruling is not yet complete.” The court was expected to rule by mid-January, the legal deadline for two retiring justices to file their decisions.
In the months before the war, Mr. Netanyahu’s drive to reduce the authority of the judiciary brought the country to the brink of political paralysis. Now, the prospect that the court might overturn a law directly limiting its own authority has resurrected the specter of a constitutional crisis in a country engaged in its biggest war in decades.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Israelis opposed to the changes — including many reserve soldiers in the armed forces — at times brought Israel to a near standstill before the Hamas attack.
The critics also included two prominent Israelis who are now in the war cabinet: Benny Gantz, a longtime rival of Mr. Netanyahu’s; and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who warned that the political crisis was emboldening Israel’s enemies. Mr. Netanyahu had tried to fire Mr. Gallant after he called for a pause in enacting the overhaul, only to reverse the decision amid mass protests.
Mr. Gantz’s partnership with Mr. Netanyahu and his allies has been tenuous from the start, marked by divisions and mistrust, political analysts say, and it might not survive an added crisis.
The renewed political turmoil in Israel came as it pursued its goal of destroying Hamas in Gaza. But as in Al Maghazi, civilians were paying a heavy toll.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 40 people near a hospital that the society operates in southern Gaza, one of the last functioning medical facilities in the enclave. Most of those killed around Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis were displaced people seeking shelter, said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the organization.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Israelis also learned on Thursday that a woman believed to be a hostage in Gaza had, in fact, been killed in the initial Hamas attack. The woman, Judih Weinstein Haggai, 70, died on Oct. 7, her family and Kibbutz Nir Oz said in statements on Thursday. Ms. Haggai’s husband, Gadi Haggai, had also been listed as a hostage, but last week it was announced that he, too, was killed that day.
Patrick Kingsley, Anushka Patil and Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian politics since 1990. Her latest book is “The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for its Inner Soul.” More about Isabel Kershner
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.
[The New York Times investigation continues]
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
[The New York Times investigation continues]
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.
[The New York Times investigation continues]
Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.
[The New York Times investigation continues]
Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.
[The New York Times investigation continues]
There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.
Every Christmas season, the mainstream media publishes several news articles and opinion pieces that seek to reinvent history by claiming that Jesus was Palestinian (or, at the very least, born in Palestine), and that the present-day experiences of Palestinians in the Holy Land are akin to the experiences of the Holy Family at the time of Jesus’ birth.
In effect, these pieces divorce the story of Jesus from its ancient Jewish context, and re-settle it within a modern political milieu.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
In The Guardian and the Washington Post, Reverend Isaac is quoted as saying that “If Jesus was born today, he’d be born under the rubble of Gaza,” essentially removing Jesus’ Jewish identity and making him a member of present-day Palestinian society.
In the Associated Press, Reverend Isaac is similarly quoted as saying that “We see Jesus in every child that’s killed [in Gaza].”
This sentiment was also expounded upon in an NPR program where one guest stated that “If you look for Jesus today, he is in Gaza.”
Instead of implicitly connecting Jesus to contemporary Palestinian society, the Irish Examiner went so far as to claim that “Jesus was a Jewish Palestinian refugee,” while a guest on CNN’s Christmas Day programming referred to Jesus as a “Palestinian Jew.”
You don’t need a degree in ancient history to understand why referring to Jesus as “Palestinian Jew” is a misnomer.
Along with Jesus’ newly found Palestinian identity, some media outlets also drew comparisons between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the treatment of the Holy Family by Herod and the Romans.
On NPR, one guest drew a parallel between the Roman occupation of Judea and Israel’s current control over the West Bank. He blatantly disregarded the fact that Bethlehem falls under the authority of the Palestinian Authority, and that the Romans were foreign occupiers, while Israel is an indigenous state.
Similarly, both NPR and the Religion News Service ran absurd comparisons between the descent of Jesus’ family to Egypt in order to escape Herod’s bloodlust, and Israel’s ordering Palestinians in northern Gaza to move south for their own safety as the IDF works to rout Hamas from the north.
If mainstream media organizations are willing to serve as platforms for the re-invention of Jesus, it is no surprise that anti-Israel news organizations also did so.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
On social media, the “Jesus was Palestinian” narrative also spread like wildfire, with many being much more blatant in their erasure of Jesus’ Jewish identity.
On Instagram, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted a story which claimed that Jesus “was born in modern-day Palestine”; compared Israel to the Romans; and absurdly asserted that “this high Christian holiday is about honoring the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians.”
That would certainly be something to note as there are currently no “Jewish Palestinians.”
On X (formerly Twitter), independent journalist Richard Medhurst posted a rant with the headline “Remember this Christmas that Jesus is Palestinian,” while UN-accredited activist Mohamad Safa tweeted that Christmas is the celebration of “the birthday of a Palestinian man.”
Former Dutch parliamentarian Arnoud van Doorn even went to the extreme of posting an antisemitic illustration of Jesus on the cross, wrapped in Palestinian symbols and surrounded by soldiers, with the caption “They killed him again. Merry Christmas.”
It is not uncommon for people to read their personal experiences into Biblical stories and texts, drawing inspiration and comfort in times of need.
However, the replacement of Jesus’ Jewish background with a modern-day Palestinian identity goes beyond textual interpretation, serving as a means of discrediting both the Jewish state as well as erasing the indigenous connection between contemporary Jews and the Holy Land.
The French Catholic priest who developed an international reputation for his pioneering research into the Nazi “Holocaust by bullets” in Ukraine has spoken out forcefully against the antisemitic attitudes coloring criticism of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
“I always say: if there were no Jews in Israel, few people would look out for the Palestinians,” Father Patrick Desbois told the French language service of Israeli broadcaster i24 on Tuesday.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Desbois was particularly irked by repeated claims on social media over the Christmas holiday that Jesus himself would be persecuted by Israel were he still alive.
“If he had lived in 1942, Jesus would have been deported to Auschwitz, and if he had been born today, he would be the target of missiles or be a hostage in Gaza,” Desbois remarked, referring to the seizure of more than 200 people during the Oct. 7 pogrom carried out by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel.
Desbois insisted that the motive behind such messages was political, not religious.
“What we see in Bethlehem today, this need to affirm that Jesus was not Jewish, is political,” he argued. “Hamas has always officially supported Christians, but not in Gaza.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“I do not forget, either, and we never talk about it, that the Palestinians in Gaza, who were not locked in cages as we believe, were circulating a lot, and a number participated in the genocide of the Yazidi minority in Iraq in 2014 alongside the jihadists,” said Desbois, whose efforts have encompassed advocacy on their behalf. “Others also participated in the Yazidi slave trade.”
In an extensive interview with The Algemeiner in 2018, Desbois articulated his view that the fundamental goal of antisemitism has not changed since the Nazi era.
“The Nazis wanted to eliminate every last Jew, even the babies and the old people,” he said. Now, he continued, “they say to the Jews, ‘get out of France,’ ‘get out of Germany,’ ‘get out of Britain,’ ‘get out of Palestine.’ And at the end, who will stay?”
(Daily Caller) Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a Christmas Eve message Sunday that got her into hot water for comparing Jesus Christ to modern day Gazans.
“In the story of Christmas, Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents. He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power. Mary and Joseph, displaced by violence and forced to flee, became refugees in Egypt with a newborn waiting to one day return home. Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians, so much so that the Christian community in Bethlehem has canceled this year’s Christmas Eve celebrations out of both safety and respect,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram.
“And yet, also today, holy children are still being born in a place of unspeakable violence — for every child born, of any identity and from any place, is sacred. Especially the children of Gaza,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez added.
The “right-wing forces” occupying modern-day Bethlehem in the New York Democrat’s tale is presumably a reference to Israel, however the city was handed over by Israel to the Palestinian Authority back in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords, The Jerusalem Post noted. There is also further irony in that Jesus was born in the Roman client kingdom of Judea, which was named after the Jewish people, PBS noted. It was only after the 2nd century CE that due to a major Jewish revolt, the Romans renamed the land Palaestina [Palestine] after the Philistines in order to sever any Jewish connection to the land, the Jewish Virtual Library explains.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
Another Twitter user, Harriet, concurred with Kornbluh’s assessment and added, “And no mention of hostages and rape. The Jew hate is really showing here.”
Thank you for writing to me about Hamas’ unprovoked terrorist attack against Israel and kidnapping of hostages. I fully condemn Hamas’ violent activity, reaffirm Israel’s right to protect itself, support the swift passage of President Biden’s emergency supplemental request for Israel’s security, and urge all parties to prioritize human rights and the safety of innocent civilians, especially children.
As a Senator from New York and member of the Senate Armed Services and Select Intelligence Committees, the safety and security of Israel is one of my foremost foreign policy priorities. Since this conflict began, I have consistently engaged with high ranking American and Israeli officials and my colleagues to ensure that Israel has the resources it needs to protect itself and its citizens. I called on the Biden Administration to transfer Iron Dome batteries to Israel, stand ready to quickly assist with Israeli requests for Iron Dome interceptors and other defense articles, coordinate with Egypt and Israel to provide humanitarian aid to Gazans, coordinate transportation out of Israel for American citizenswho wanted to return to the U.S., anddelivered floor speeches encouraging the Administration to prioritize hostage recovery. I also cosponsored a resolution condemning Hamas and reaffirmingIsrael’s right to self-defense and the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security. Throughout the conflict, my office has worked directly with family members of those taken hostage or those having difficulty finding transportation out of Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank.If you or a loved one are experiencing a similar situation, please visit my website and click “Help,” where you will see information for American citizens in Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank, or emailcasework@gillibrand.senate.gov.
I also vehemently condemn any and all forms of antisemitism and hate.We have already seen elevated rates of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes since the conflict began. That is why I recently sent a letter to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees calling for $500 million for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program in the final appropriations bill and called on the Administration to provide increased funding for the program in any supplemental appropriations bills. I advocate annually for this program, which provides grants to nonprofit institutions and houses of worship to enhance their security. I have also called on the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation to continue to prioritize the safety and security of individuals and organizations vulnerable to violence, especially antisemitic violence, as this conflict evolves.
I will continue to work with both sides of the aisle, the Biden Administration, and our Jewish community in New York and across the nation to promote Israel’s security and sovereignty.
Thank you again for writing to me about protecting Israel and rescuing hostages held in Gaza. I hope that you keep in touch with my office. For more information on my efforts, please visit my website at http://gillibrand.senate.gov.
THE MEDIA (e.g., CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) are saturated with reports of damage and death inflicted by Israel on Gaza. Thousands have died. Whole neighborhoods have been destroyed. Food, water, electricity, and fuel are dangerously scarce. As Israel’s incursion to rescue hostages and eliminate Hamas proceeds, thousands more Gazans and Israeli soldiers will die, as may many hostages still held by Hamas. There are calls for a ceasefire by the UN and others to avoid a hu- manitarian catastrophe.
According to this narrative, Hamas has no say in this. But that is not true. Hamas holds over 100 hostages, whom they are strategically releasing to gain time. But their time is limited. They are surrounded by a superior force. They can stall, they can inflict damage, but they cannot win. They can hide among and below their citizens, inflicting death and destruction, not just on Israeli soldiers but inviting the same for themselves and innocent Gazans who live in their midst. They gain time to do this better by the pauses they are buying with innocent human beings they should never have kidnapped in the first place.
As a founding member of People4Peace (www.people4peace. net), an organization created after October 7, I offer a different narrative, one that will save thousands of lives and safeguard the remaining hostages: Hamas can sue for peace and surrender. They would champion their cause by showing, through this self-sacrifice, that they care about their fellow Gazans. This would garner world sympathy at a lower human price than they are now exacting. Through an intermediary that both sides can work with, Hamas can release all the hostages. Further, they can offer to aban- don their tunnels and let the Israeli troops in. The members of Hamas would then be allowed to leave Gaza, alive. The Gazans can return to their homes. After they return, a third party can take over. Israel will have the right to inspect for weapons but be sub- ject to oversight by that party so that everything Israel does is above board. Israel destroys all rockets, tunnels, weapons, and ammunition. After a certain time, Gaza gains autonomy and even self-rule, perhaps in conjunction with the West Bank, if they agree to remain unarmed.
Israel is coming. In the end, after bloodshed and destruction, the tunnels, rockets, and weapon caches will be destroyed. All Hamas can gain by continuing to delay and fight is to kill more Israelis, but at the cost of the lives of the innocent Gazans they live among. Is killing Israelis (a goal explicitly stated in Hamas’s charter) worth the lives of their fellow Gazans? Are their fellow Gazans innocent civilians or just mere hostages to be sacrificed on the altar of their “cause”?
If Hamas were to make such a deal, they would eliminate Israel’s reason for bombing and unleashing its armed forces in Gaza. The destruction of life and property ends. Israel gets what it says it wants. Hamas saves its fellow Gazans and becomes the self-sacrificing peacemaker. Gazans gain security and self-rule.
All Hamas needs do is sacrifice their power to save their fellow Gazans. Will they? Are they worth more than the people they claim to be doing this for? If they don’t surrender, they are saying that their control of Gaza is paramount. We all know that Hamas will not consider, let alone offer, such a solution. For Hamas, the only solution is destruction of the Jewish state, as explicitly stated in their charter. So Hamas will insist on fighting a war they instigated and which they will lose, where the main casualties are their own people.
Hamas consciously chooses death and destruction for its people to prolong its power.
But this time, we all know their days are numbered.
So why impose death and mayhem on innocents? ■
Joel Weinberger is a clinical psychologist, professor, and author of the award-winning The Unconscious: Theory, Research and Clinical Implications. His work has appeared in Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, and Tedx Talks.
In April 2022, during his Senate primary campaign in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman spoke enthusiastically about his unqualified support for Israel and said he did not consider himself a “progressive” when it came to his views on the Jewish state.
“Whenever I’m in a situation to be called on to take up the cause of strengthening and enhancing the security of Israel or deepening our relationship between the United States and Israel, I’m going to lean in,” Mr. Fetterman, then the lieutenant governor, told Jewish Insider at the time. When it came to far-left Democrats who harshly criticized Israel, he added, “I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense.”
So as the left has turned against Mr. Fetterman in recent weeks, branding him #GenocideJohn for his unequivocal support of Israel’s fierce retaliation against Hamas in response to the group’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, the senator has dug in.
[The New York Times Report continues]
It all marks a shift in Mr. Fetterman’s image, even if the “progressive” label was never a perfect fit for him. In 2018, Mr. Sanders called Mr. Fetterman an “outstanding progressive” as he endorsed his campaign for lieutenant governor. Mr. Fetterman, an early backer of Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid, used to introduce himself at political events as “a Democrat and a progressive.”
The Pennsylvania senator said he still aligns with many progressive goals, including a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, legalizing marijuana and abolishing the Senate filibuster.
But he said he no longer relates to the overarching label of “progressive” — especially as the left has become more interested in demanding what he described as “purity tests.”
“It’s just a place where I’m not,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.
“I’m not critical if someone is a progressive,” he added. “I believe different things.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Still, the backlash has been blistering. Demonstrators have shuttered streets in front of his district offices demanding his support for a cease-fire. A group of former campaign staff members wrote an anonymous letter calling his support for Israel a “gutting betrayal” of what they had believed to be his values. And progressives have expressed frustration that Mr. Fetterman, of all people, has rallied to support Israel rather than the Palestinians whose plight they have made their cause.
Melissa Byrne, who worked on Mr. Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and is now an organizer for liberal causes, accused Mr. Fetterman of “trying to have it both ways,” claiming to be a progressive only when it helped him electorally.
“He’s here for the vibes,” she said. “You should at least be honest and say, ‘Hey, I called myself a progressive because we wanted to raise more money. We needed to win.’”
[The New York Times Report continues]
Mr. Fetterman, for his part, said he has always prided himself on passing his own internal common sense test before bowing to the demands of his party or his base. Outside his Senate office, for instance, he displays a flag honoring American prisoners of war and another proclaiming L.G.B.T.Q. pride. “I’m pretty sure I’m the only senator that has both,” he said. “Can’t it be possible that it’s really appropriate to stand for both?”
But it is on the issue of Israel where Mr. Fetterman is as flummoxed by members of the left as they are by him.
“I do find it confusing where the very left progressives in America don’t seem to want to support really the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society,” he said of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
As for the gripes of anonymous former members of his campaign staff, Mr. Fetterman said that “it’s difficult to respect somebody’s opinion if they’re not going to attach their name to it.” None of his current Senate aides have raised concerns about his political stances, he said.
Still, Mr. Fetterman said he is not completely surprised that he is not satisfying the same Democratic voters who were outraged in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy after Mr. Sanders left the race.
“This bizarre purity thing, where people were offended that I was embracing Secretary Clinton when we have Trump on the other side?” Mr. Fetterman said. “How did that work out for you?”
The late Elie Wiesel recounted a stirring Hasidic legend to illustrate the insidious and ever-mutating scourge of antisemitism. The evocative story unfolds in a dimly lit inn late one night, where two revered Hasidic masters, Rebbe Elimelekh of Lizhensk, and his brother, Reb Zushya of Anipoli, are both immersed in their Torah studies, their faces illuminated by flickering candlelight as they delve into the sacred texts.
This tranquil scene is shattered when a group of drunken antisemites burst in. Their raucous laughter and uncouth conversation suddenly goes quiet as they spot the two rabbis studying quietly in the corner. Without warning, they unleash their fury on the hapless Reb Zushya, who is subjected to a vicious and relentless beating.
The attack is unexpected and brutal, but Reb Zushya endures it in stoic silence, until he eventually collapses unconscious on the floor, and the assailants momentarily go off to find another drink, their craving for violence temporarily satiated.
In these few fleeting moments of respite, Rebbe Elimelekh, moved by a profound sense of empathy and brotherly love, gently shifts his brother to where he had been sitting at the table and positions himself in Reb Zushya’s place on the floor, so that he will bear the burden of suffering on his brother’s behalf when the antisemites return.
But his act of self-sacrifice goes unnoticed by the returning drunkards. In their alcohol-fueled daze, they fail to recognize the switch, and once again direct their cruelty towards Reb Zushya — who is now seated at the table — thinking that he is the other rabbi, and inflicting yet further pain on the innocent sage.
Wiesel, with his unique brand of irony and insight, observes that this tale is emblematic of the broader narrative of Jewish history, serving as a potent metaphor for the relentless and often irrational nature of antisemitism. The story poignantly underscores the futility faced by Jews as they attempt to evade persecution, revealing how, despite efforts to change and adapt in order to protect themselves, they have historically been confronted with persistent hostility and violence in whatever guise they have chosen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this story over the past few weeks, in particular because one of the most prominent aspirations behind the establishment of a Jewish state was to forge a sanctuary that could offer security and protection from persecution, not just in Israel but for Jews all over the world.
The idea was that a new reality — namely, a country Jews could call their own after 2000 years of dispersion — would precipitate a change in Jewish fortunes. A strong, independent Israel would place the Jewish people on an equal footing with other peoples, fostering a sense of global parity and, ideally, mitigating the scourge of antisemitism. “Never Again!” became the slogan associated with a strong and secure Israel firmly within the family of nations.
But, as it turned out, even though Reb Zushya moved from his spot on the floor to a seat at the table, he still got beaten up. Rather than this monumental change for Jews being the game-changer that neutralized antisemitism, Israel’s existence and actions have been leveraged by those who are drunk with antisemitism as the new justification for their prejudice, and for unleashing more violence against Jews — now called Zionists.
[The Algemeiner Report continues].
And again, I don’t hear any calls for Russia to be undone as a country, or Syria, or Myanmar, or Zimbabwe, or Sudan — and the list goes on and on — even after tough images emerge from each of these countries, or countries of their foes, because of actions they have taken. Only Israel suffers the indignity of being called illegitimate. This means that the line between political critique and ugly bigotry has become dangerously blurred.
The argument that “Anti-Zionism is Not Antisemitism” is a cornerstone mantra of many anti-Israel groups, who insist that all criticism of Israeli policies and Zionist ideology is entirely separate from antisemitic sentiments.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
A remarkable Midrash on Parshat Vayigash reflects on the moment when Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. This Midrash draws a profound lesson about judgment and rebuke from the dramatic Biblical scene, declaring “Woe to us from the day of judgment, woe to us from the day of rebuke,” after noting that when Joseph revealed his true identity, his brothers are struck with fear and were unable to respond. If such was the reaction to Joseph’s revelation, says the Midrash, how much more intense will be the ultimate Divine rebuke, when every individual is confronted with the truth of their actions?
The celebrated mussar giant, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Chasman, explores a puzzling question arising out of this Midrash: What exactly was the rebuke that Joseph gave his brothers? On the surface, Joseph appears to comfort and reassure his brothers, not rebuke them.
Rabbi Chasman explains that the very act of Joseph revealing himself and saying “I am Joseph” was itself a profound and terrifying rebuke. It forced the brothers to come face to face with the error of their ways over the past 22 years, from their initial irrational jealousy of Joseph, to the sale into slavery, to the pain they caused their father — and all because they had fallen into the trap of unjustified bias, which resulted in them embracing a false narrative and perpetuating self-serving lies. In that moment of Joseph’s revelation, their misjudgments and mistakes were laid bare, as they realized that their actions had not been driven by righteousness, but by hatred and prejudice.
In Rabbi Chasman’s reading, the Midrash reveals an eternal truth — that hatred hiding behind feigned righteous virtue will ultimately be exposed for what it is: hatred, pure and simple. Just as Joseph’s brothers were eventually forced to confront the reality of their own bigotry when Joseph told them who he was, so too, in the fullness of time, all Jew-hating bigots who claim to oppose Israel for humanitarian reasons will be confronted with the harsh truths of their warped beliefs and their immoral actions.
Protestors gather at the offices of the United Nations Women on November 27, 2023 in New York City. The group Bring Them Home Now held a protest to observe International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to bring attention to the Israeli women who were allegedly raped during the terror attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7th.
We have all seen the horrors that have resulted from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel’s civilians and defense forces, and Hamas’ horrifying use of civilians and hostages as human shields in the ensuing conflict. But when it comes to these terrorists’ use of sexual violence against women as a tool of war, the silence has been deafening.
Why is it so hard to acknowledge this reality and simply say “Rape is wrong. In any context, at any time.” Even for those who disagree with Israel’s response to Hamas’ attacks, this should not be difficult. But it seems like it is.
[The New York Daily News Report continues]
And as a Jewish woman, I have long stood up for all victims of bigotry and hatred, whether it is antisemitism or Islamophobia, racial bias, hatred directed against members of the LGBTQ community, or any other group who faces discrimination.
Our entire city and state are deeply enriched by our diversity. Here in Queens, the World’s Borough, we are a microcosm of the global society. Our efforts to uphold justice locally can serve as a model for addressing injustices globally.
So I cannot understand the lack of collective outrage, and I cannot remain silent about the sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.
[The New York Daily News Report continues]
Protestors gather at the offices of the United Nations Women on November 27, 2023 in New York City. The group Bring Them Home Now held a protest to observe International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to bring attention to the Israeli women who were allegedly raped during the terror attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7th.
The sexual violence against women by Hamas is not just alarming; it is a call to action for every individual and organization who says they are committed to human rights and dignity. As Hillary Clinton said, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Why is it so hard to uphold this principle when those women are Israeli?
And you do not need to be deeply committed to the safety and security of Israel — as I am — to do so. This issue transcends religious or political affiliations, ideologies, or where you stand on the war. It is about standing up against sexual violence and rape.
[The New York Daily News Report continues]
Shany Granot-Lubaton holds up a photo of a hostage as protestors gather at the offices of the United Nations Women on November 27, 2023 in New York City. The group Bring Them Home Now held a protest to observe International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to bring attention to the Israeli women who were allegedly raped during the terror attack by the militant group Hamas on October 7th.
Those of us committed to fighting sexual violence have a moral obligation to stand up against such atrocities wherever they occur. Our collective voice is powerful tool to advocate for the rights and dignity of all victims of sexual assault and gender-based violence.
Together, we must ensure that the horrors faced by these women are not forgotten. Outrage is the proper response here, so let’s stand in solidarity on that point for all women. The time for silence is over; the time for action is now.
Katz has served as the district attorney of Queens since 2020.
Jewish comedian and actress Chelsea Handler teamed up with Israeli activist and author Noa Tishby to share a message on Friday in support of Israel and to address the “misinformation out there” that is being spread about the Jewish state.
Handler — who has a history of criticizing Israel; promoting notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan, for which she then apologized; and endorsing for Congress an anti-Israel activist — clarified at the start of the clip that she and Tishby are “pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas, and it is OK to question Israel’s policies and still be pro-Israel.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Days after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel, Handler, whose father is Jewish, released a statement condemning Hamas and its “barbarism,” while also calling for peace for all Palestinians and Israelis. She added, “while Palestinians have seen their share of terror, Israelis and Jews throughout our world are seeing ours now, once again. I am for human rights and denouncing terror.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“I don’t understand because progressives should love Israel,” said Handler, who has visited the Jewish state, met and interviewed former President Shimon Peres, and even headlined a comedy fundraiser in Tel Aviv in 2015.
Tishby then listed the ways in which Israel is the only democracy and progressive country in the Middle East, where its citizens have free speech, freedom of religion, and the ability to criticize the government. “Do you like gay weddings? You know the fun kind without straight people. So does Israel,” Handler added. She also jokingly said, “I love to ski topless [and] I would like to continue doing so” when Tishby noted that Israel offers women rights that other countries in the region do not.
“Israel is our greatest defense in the Middle East for all of Western democracy and Western values,” Handler said. “If Israel goes down, guess who they’re coming for next?”
“If you value being a progressive, just make sure that you stay informed,” Tishby concluded the clip by saying, right before Handler urged viewers to “stay informed” by following Tishby on social media.
(TJV NEWS) Raz Ben Ami, a 57-year-old German-Israeli hostage, has initiated legal proceedings against the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), alleging the organization’s abandonment of its responsibility toward Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas.
The lawsuit underscores a historical pattern of perceived inhumanity by the ICRC toward Jews and points to the rejection of numerous appeals from Ben Ami’s family to send essential medication for her reported battle against brain tumors during her 54-day captivity. Tragically, while Ben Ami was eventually released, her husband Ohad remains captive, having been abducted with her from Kibbutz Be’eri.
[The Jewish Voice Report Report continues]
In light of these allegations, the legal action seeks accountability from the ICRC for its perceived failure to uphold its humanitarian obligations and responsibilities towards Israeli hostages held in captivity. The broader implications of this case echo concerns about the impartiality and efficacy of international humanitarian organizations in addressing crises and safeguarding the well-being of those affected.
(New York Jewish Week) – The day before winter break starts is often an exciting one at school, with pizza parties, movies in class and other laid-back activities. But at SAR Academy, a Modern Orthodox K-8 day school in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, the air was abuzz for a different reason: Their congressman, Ritchie Torres, was stopping by for a visit to reaffirm his support for Israel.
Torres, a Democrat who is an outspoken ally of Israel in Congress and online, was a guest of honor at SAR’s morning assembly, where the entire school community comes together to say Tehillim — psalms said for healing and protection — and sing prayers for Israel and the Jewish people, in a daily ritual that began the Monday morning after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
For the students at SAR Academy, Torres is something of a celebrity, having visited the school a handful of times in the past few years and even traveling to Israel with the school’s principal, Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, last year on a Jewish Community Relations Council trip. The congressman, who was previously a member of the New York City Council, was greeted with uproarious applause — some students held posters reading “The Bronx Loves Ritchie Torres,” while others stopped him for a selfie or tried to give him homemade crafts.
“I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres, 35, told the group of nearly 1,000 students and faculty. “It’s moments like these that we’re reminded that what matters most, and most in life is family, and friendship and faith.”
SAR Academy students lined up to take selfies and shake hands with the congressman, Dec. 22, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
It was a stark contrast from the reception Torres got Thursday night at a different Jewish venue, the 92NY Jewish cultural center on the Upper East Side. There, while discussing his recently passed bill to assign a special envoy for the Abraham Accords, the peace deals between Israel and Arab countries, he was interrupted by anti-Israel protesters who shouted, among other things, “Ritchie Torres, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
At SAR, however, it was all smiles for the Bronx native, who first traveled to Israel in 2015 with UJA-Federation New York and the JCRC when he was first elected to city council, and who has been a prominent supporter since.
“When I’m in my district in a place like SAR, I’m warmly received,” Torres told the New York Jewish Week. “Obviously, among anti-Israel activists, I’m considered controversial. But in life, you have to fight for what you believe in.”
[The Jewish Telegraph Report continues]
“This is really exciting for me,” eighth-grader Hannah Goldstein, the student council president, told the New York Jewish Week. “There’s a lot going on in Israel and there’s a lot of arguments about what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s really special to have someone come that’s representing America and representing the Bronx and say, ‘This is what I’m standing up for.’”
Torres told the students he saw them as being part of shaping a more peaceful future for Israel.
“The future of the Middle East is neither pro-Israel nor pro-Arab — the future of the Middle East is both pro-Israel and pro-Arab,” Torres said in his remarks. “We are here at SAR because the students represent the future leaders of our society. These students are going to fight to create a world where all the children of Abraham — Jews, Christians and Muslims — can coexist in peace and prosperity. Yours is the generation that’s going to realize the Abrahamic dream and build on the foundation of the Abraham Accords.”
The students didn’t shy away from asking tough questions. One middle-schooler asked Torres what more he and the U.S. government could and will do to support Israel, while an elementary-aged boy wondered if Torres would consider supporting a country who has attacked Israel in the past if they were to need aid one day.
To the first question, Torres answered that Congress was working on a security assistance bill for the replenishment of aid to the Iron Dome. And to the second question, Torres urged the student to draw distinctions between people and their governments, especially when thinking about supporting Palestinians in a path towards peace while holding Hamas accountable.
It was Torres himself who suggested a meeting with the day school students. “SAR is an iconic institution,” he told the New York Jewish Week about why he thought it was important to visit the school. “These students are going to be the future leaders who are going to be fighting for the world that is envisioned by the Abraham Accords, they’re going to be living in the world that we’re describing here today.”
Torres then turned to the students and said: “All of you are fighting for the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and the right of Israel to defend itself against an existential threat. It’s an honor to be a righteous ally in that cause.”
The massacre at Be’eri was not a single outburst of violence, over in a terrifying instant. It was a prolonged rampage, in which dozens of terrorists roamed freely through a pastoral village, killing methodically and with cruelty.
A 10-week New York Times investigation into what happened at Be’eri, based on interviews with scores of survivors and witnesses as well as on videos, text messages and recordings of phone calls, revealed a nightmare that lasted from just after dawn until well into the next day.
For a nation founded as a safe haven for Jews, the atrocities of Be’eri stand out as a defining trauma of the Oct. 7 attacks. An estimated 1,200 people died after Hamas and its allies surged across the border that day, provoking an Israeli campaign in Gaza that has killed roughly 20,000 people.
We interviewed more than 80 survivors, victims’ relatives, village leaders, soldiers and medics, and verified more than nine hours of security camera footage as well as phone and bodycam video shot by Gazans. We also reviewed more than 1,000 text messages and voice recordings, and used three-dimensional footage of Be’eri taken by Treedis, an Israeli software company, in the days after the massacre to reconstruct several sites where people were killed.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Hamas gunmen and their allies focused their attack on the western parts of the village, the area closest to Gaza. They ransacked those neighborhoods house by house, systematically setting fire to scores of homes, killing many of those they found inside and abducting others.
In the center of the village, the gunmen slaughtered most of the people hiding inside a besieged health clinic. On the eastern flank of Be’eri, another squad of attackers gathered 14 hostages inside a ransacked home and used them as human shields during a standoff with Israeli forces; some of the hostages were killed in the crossfire, during a delayed and chaotic military response.
Residents were shot in their bedrooms, on the sidewalk, and under trees, where they lay like rag dolls in a heap. Others were trapped in burning buildings, their bodies found charred beyond recognition. The oldest victim was 88, and the youngest was less than a year old.
If there was method to the assault, there was also randomness to it. Some residents who hid in bathrooms or shrubbery survived while many who sheltered in safe rooms were killed.
Spouses lost lifelong partners. Parents lost children. Children lost parents.
Hadar Bachar, a poised 13-year-old who had planned to spend the day at a village festival, was determined to save her father after he was shot.
From the safe room, she made a video call to the ambulance service, which it recorded and later shared with the family.
[The New York Times Report continues]
6:56 a.m.: A Rampage Begins
Hamas gunmen approaching the kibbutz gate.
Note: The surveillance camera clock is set one hour behind.
Kibbutz surveillance footage, via the Israeli military
Surveillance footage shows the first Hamas militants emerging from the woods on the edge of Be’eri shortly after sunrise. There were two of them, clad in combat uniforms and carrying assault rifles. They crept cautiously toward the village entrance, one wearing a green Hamas bandanna and the other a back-to-front cap.
Many residents were already awake, jolted from sleep roughly 25 minutes earlier by an unusually intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. The rockets had been mostly intercepted by Israel’s air-defense system, and some villagers resumed their Saturday routines.
One man was out jogging. Several loaded their cars with bicycles, ready for a day in the countryside. A team of chefs had begun to prepare breakfast at the dining hall.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The kibbutz was founded on the night of Oct. 5, 1946, one of 11 Jewish outposts established at the same time in an area largely populated by Arabs. In 1948, Arabs and Jews fought over the area during a war that forged the boundaries of the new state of Israel.
Egypt captured a sliver of nearby coastal land that became known as the Gaza Strip, and Be’eri became an Israeli border town, a short drive from Gaza’s eastern edge.
Israel occupied Gaza during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, withdrawing its troops in 2005 to allow Palestinians to run the territory. Hamas, an Islamist group opposed to Israel’s existence, seized power there in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to place Gaza under a crippling blockade.
Ever since, Be’eri has been on the frontline of several wars between Israel and Hamas. Whenever Hamas fired rockets from Gaza, families hurried into rocket-proof safe rooms, often a child’s bedroom.
Yet in a country that had shifted to the right, Be’eri was also known as a left-wing stronghold, filled with those who still believed in peace with the Palestinians. Some helped transport Gazans to and from medical treatment in Israel.
The yellow village gate embodied the sense of sanctuary that Be’eri offered its residents. It was a safe haven. Until that morning.
Using the butt of his rifle, one Hamas gunman smashed the window of the empty guardroom beside the gate.
He climbed inside. A second gunman hid in the trees.
The attack begins.
Kibbutz surveillance footage, via the Israeli military
Less than 20 seconds later, Benayahu Bitton, 22, approached Be’eri from the main road in a dark gray sedan, along with two friends.
The three had spent the night at a rave held roughly two miles away. Minutes earlier, Hamas gunmen had attacked the rave, and they fled.
Now, they were at the threshold of the nearest refuge they could find: the yellow gate of the Be’eri kibbutz.
The gate began to open.
[The New York Times Report continues]
They retreated to a dentist’s clinic, one of them shot and gravely wounded. Ms. Hunwald, the nurse, rushed through the streets to treat him.
On the village messaging app, residents repeatedly wondered why they had been left to fend for themselves.
Why is there no army in the kibbutz? Is anyone dealing with the terrorists?
07:33
Is the army here? where are they
10:42
Where is the army? How long could it take to send forces by helicopter?
11:37
What’s going on with the army???
13:59
The Israeli military had been overwhelmed by the scale of the Hamas attack. The main army headquarters in the area had been breached. Troops were ambushed on a main road, restricting access to almost all the affected kibbutzim, including Be’eri.
A small group of police officers managed to reach Be’eri at 7:37 a.m., driving an unmarked car. Security footage shows them parking near the entrance and dashing chaotically into the village.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Scores arrived at the village’s side entrance, most in cars and one riding a horse-and-cart. At first, they heaved themselves over the 10-foot fence, one of them with a cigarette casually dangling from his lips.
Then one man kicked open a pedestrian gate, allowing the intruders to enter more easily. Young men, wearing T-shirts and jeans, sprinted inside. An elderly man with a white beard, leaning on two walking sticks, followed after them.
Entering the kibbutz.
Kibbutz surveillance footage, via the Israeli military
By now, a small group of Israeli special forces had arrived by helicopter. They tried to fight their way through the kibbutz, but were heavily outnumbered. One soldier was shot dead, and another was wounded by a gunshot to the chest, according to two members of the unit and a civilian who accompanied them.
By late morning, they had retreated to the main gate, where they tried to repel a new wave of attackers. Footage from the gate shows Israeli soldiers shooting at a car of militants, two of whom flee before the car catches fire.
[The New York Times Report continues]
For roughly four hours, the Bachar family hid in their safe room unnoticed. They silenced their phones and communicated with relatives by text and whispered voice notes. Unable to venture outside, they relieved themselves in a pot whenever they needed the bathroom.
By 11:23 a.m., a group of men was trying to break inside the safe room, according to messages sent by the family and their friends.
While safe rooms have reinforced walls designed to protect against rocket fire, they usually have no locks. They were never intended to keep out intruders.
So when the intruders tried to wrench the door open, Mr. Bachar could only grab its handle from the inside, struggling to keep the door shut.
That is when one of the attackers began firing at the door, piercing it.
One burst hit Carmel in the hand and abdomen.
A second burst struck Mr. Bachar’s legs.
Wounded and exhausted, Mr. Bachar fell back into the room, expecting the attackers to enter.
Instead, smoke began to seep under the door. The attackers had set their home on fire.
Desperate for air, the Bachars opened the window, which was protected by reinforced iron shutters. Minutes later, the attackers blasted open the shutters, throwing in grenades and firing on the family.
The grenades wounded Hadar and her father.
12:05 p.m: Running Out of Air
Smoke rising from fires set across a nearby kibbutz.
Kibbutz surveillance footage, via the Israeli military
A few houses down the street, Rinat Even, the social worker, texted her final goodbyes to friends and relatives.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The defense of the clinic had given Ms. Hunwald and two other medics time to treat some volunteers hurt in the raid. While one died, Ms. Hunwald and her team managed to save two — one hit in the back, and another hit in the pelvis.
Ms. Hunwald left a religious community to be with Einat Kornfeld, also 38, after they met as conscripts in the military. The couple moved to Be’eri five years ago, and had expected to spend the day playing and flying kites with their four children, ages 2 through 9.
Instead, Ms. Kornfeld was in the safe room with their children as attackers wandered near their home. After one child wet himself, the family lay for hours in a pool of urine.
Ms. Hunwald was crouched in a bathroom at the clinic, waiting for the gunmen to find her.
It’s over for me.
Nirit Hunwald
I love you. You’re my whole life
Einat Kornfeld
You made my life the best it could be
Nirit Hunwald
We were lucky to have each other
Einat Kornfeld
Another medic begged for mercy. The gunmen shot her dead.
Over the next few minutes, they killed three more people at the clinic, strafing its walls with gunfire.
One man survived after burrowing himself beneath a sink and pretending to be dead.
The gunmen didn’t check the bathroom where Ms. Hunwald hid.
3:25 p.m.: ‘Take Them All to Gaza’
The couple had thought they were safe after fleeing the massacre at the nearby music festival. Instead, they found a village under lockdown, facing a similar attack.
[The New York Times Report continues]
By then, bodies lay strewn on sidewalks across the village. More than 120 homes stood smoldering or in ruins. Scores of cars had been burned to ashen husks. Two first responders said they found a dead woman tied to a tree, naked.
At least 25 people had been abducted to Gaza.
As the sun set, a soldier spotted and photographed several half-naked bodies lying under a line of trees.
There were four of them: a woman, a man and two teenage boys — all curled into a fetal position.
(New York Jewish Week) – The day before winter break starts is often an exciting one at school, with pizza parties, movies in class and other laid-back activities. But at SAR Academy, a Modern Orthodox K-8 day school in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, the air was abuzz for a different reason: Their congressman, Ritchie Torres, was stopping by for a visit to reaffirm his support for Israel.
Torres, a Democrat who is an outspoken ally of Israel in Congress and online, was a guest of honor at SAR’s morning assembly, where the entire school community comes together to say Tehillim — psalms said for healing and protection — and sing prayers for Israel and the Jewish people, in a daily ritual that began the Monday morning after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
For the students at SAR Academy, Torres is something of a celebrity, having visited the school a handful of times in the past few years and even traveling to Israel with the school’s principal, Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, last year on a Jewish Community Relations Council trip. The congressman, who was previously a member of the New York City Council, was greeted with uproarious applause — some students held posters reading “The Bronx Loves Ritchie Torres,” while others stopped him for a selfie or tried to give him homemade crafts.
[The New York Jewish Week Report continues]
At SAR, however, it was all smiles for the Bronx native, who first traveled to Israel in 2015 with UJA-Federation New York and the JCRC when he was first elected to city council, and who has been a prominent supporter since.
“When I’m in my district in a place like SAR, I’m warmly received,” Torres told the New York Jewish Week. “Obviously, among anti-Israel activists, I’m considered controversial. But in life, you have to fight for what you believe in.”
He said no amount of criticism could deter him from his support for Israel, which sets him apart from other young members of Congress, particularly representatives of color.
“I believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and I believe in the U.S.-Israel relationship and I’m never going to waver from that belief,” Torres added.
[The New York Jewish Week Report continues]
After Torres and Israeli Consul General Aviv Ezra greeted the student body with brief remarks, they held a small press conference of sorts with members of SAR’s student council, a group of about 10 students representing each grade at the school.
“This is really exciting for me,” eighth-grader Hannah Goldstein, the student council president, told the New York Jewish Week. “There’s a lot going on in Israel and there’s a lot of arguments about what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s really special to have someone come that’s representing America and representing the Bronx and say, ‘This is what I’m standing up for.’”
When news of the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants reached Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, many took to the streets in celebration, distributing sweets and cheering fighters as they paraded hostages through the enclave.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
A survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a Ramallah-based think tank, found that one in five Gazans polled blamed Hamas for their suffering in the war. The survey, completed in early December, also found that support for Hamas, which has ruled the enclave with an iron fist for years, had increased slightly since Oct. 7, with 42% of respondents choosing it over other Palestinian parties.
In the West Bank, which is far from the fighting in Gaza, by contrast, support for Hamas more than tripled between September and early December, when 44% of respondents said they backed the group, according to the survey.
“Gaza, which usually gives Hamas greater support, is showing more criticism of Hamas than the West Bank. There is more questioning of the decision to go to war,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the think tank and a professor of political science based in Ramallah.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
“Damn Hamas,” said a hairdresser originally from Gaza City who is now sheltering in Rafah, near the Egyptian border. “May God be my witness: If I see Ismail Haniyeh, I will hit him with my slippers,” she said, referring to Hamas’s political leader. Throwing slippers or shoes at somebody is considered highly insulting in the Arab world.
The woman is one of about 1.9 million people, around 85% of the Gaza Strip’s population, who fled their homes because of the war and are now internally displaced. Like many Gazans, she said she worries she may never be able to return home.
“Next week, we may end up in Sinai,” the desert region across the Egyptian border, she said. “What for? What did the resistance do for us?”
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
The clip was widely shared by Gazans on social media, prompting Hamas authorities to issue a public statement: “We warn against publishing any pictures, videos or materials that are offensive to the image of the steadfastness and unity of our people in Gaza.”
Despite the rising discontent with Hamas, residents of Gaza are unlikely to openly challenge the group while the war is continuing.
“ I hate Hamas, the government. I never respected them. But the militants? I believe in them so much, they are sacrificing their souls for the sake of Palestine,” said a 36-year-old banker from Gaza City.
[The Wall Street Journal Report continues]
Such simmering opposition raises questions about the group’s long-term hold over the strip.
Hamas is “in a war, they are fighting back and defending themselves,” said Abusada, the political scientist, who left Gaza for Cairo last month. “But once the war is over, you will hear more and more criticism against Hamas.”
Israel on Thursday firmly rejected a Hamas demand to permanently halt fighting before releasing any more hostages being held by terrorists in Gaza, as talks in Cairo for a truce deal appeared to make little progress.
A Hamas official told AFP that “a total ceasefire and a retreat of the Israeli occupation army from the Gaza Strip are a precondition for any serious negotiation” on a hostage-prisoner swap.
Israel has repeatedly rejected any such proposition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated on Thursday the longstanding position in no uncertain terms: “We are fighting until victory. We will not stop the war until we achieve all its goals — completing the destruction of Hamas, and releasing all of our hostages.”
Netanyahu added that he was giving Hamas a “very simple choice: surrender or die. They do not have and will not have any other option.”
He added that “after we destroy Hamas, I will work with all my power to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel” — an apparent indication that he does not intend to step down or publicly take responsibility for the failures that enabled Hamas’s October 7 massacres.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
On Tuesday, Herzog told a gathering of foreign diplomats that “Israel is ready for another humanitarian pause and additional humanitarian aid in order to enable the release of hostages. And the responsibility lies fully with [Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya] Sinwar and the leadership of Hamas.”
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
The White House’s National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said Wednesday that the talks are “very serious discussions and negotiations, and we hope that they lead somewhere.” He made the comment to reporters aboard Air Force One while traveling with US President Joe Biden.
Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups took around 240 hostages into Gaza on October 7 during their murderous rampage through southern Israel, in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed. In response, Israel launched a military campaign against the terror group in the Strip, beginning its ground offensive in late October.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims at least 20,000 people in the Strip have been killed since the start of the war, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes those killed by failed Palestinian rocket launches. Israeli officials have said over 7,000 of those killed in Gaza are Hamas operatives. The IDF says 137 soldiers have been killed during the ground offensive so far.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says that since the end of the temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on December 1, the military has killed more than 2,000 Hamas operatives in strikes and during ground combat.
This brings the military’s estimates of Hamas fighters killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war to around 8,000. Another 1,000 Hamas terrorists were killed in Israel on October 7, during the terror group’s onslaught.
“We have increased the number of troops fighting in east Khan Younis, and we are fighting there with determination, with five infantry brigades, and combat engineers, with an emphasis on the underground fighting,” Hagari says in an evening press conference.
On the north, Hagari says, “Hezbollah has turned southern Lebanon into a combat zone and continues to endanger the future of the entire state of Lebanon for Hamas and Iran.”
“We will continue to work to distance Hezbollah from the border,” he adds.
Israel’s military said it has learned that its forces had come close to finding three hostages before they were mistakenly killed by Israeli troops in Gaza last week, an episode that has roiled the country and raised pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to quickly reach a deal to free Hamas’s remaining captives.The news was the latest to emerge since the fatal shooting of the three hostages, who were unarmed and bearing a makeshift white flag. Israel’s military has been quick in disclosing details of the shooting, which it said violated its rules of engagement.
In a briefing late Wednesday, Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said that five days before the deadly hostage shooting, Israeli forces had been patrolling the area where they now know that the hostages were held.
They engaged in a firefight with Palestinian militants and sent a combat dog equipped with a GoPro camera into a building for reconnaissance. The military said Palestinian fighters shot the dog, and the Israeli soldiers prevailed in the fight, killing the militants.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The three young hostages, shirtless and holding the makeshift white flag, exited a nearby building, the Israeli military said, citing a preliminary investigation. One of the Israeli soldiers, mistaking them for a threat, opened fire, killing two of them and wounding the third, according to the military.
The third hostage fled into the building, from which a cry in Hebrew for help could be heard. The battalion commander ordered the forces to hold their fire. But the wounded hostage later re-emerged, after which he was fatally shot, the military said.
Admiral Hagari pledged that the Israeli military would continue to investigate the shooting, which the military’s chief of staff called a clear violation of the open-fire policy. He added that the military was investigating why the GoPro footage was not immediately reviewed.
[The New York Times Report continues]
After their deaths, many in Israel have demanded that Mr. Netanyahu do more to secure the release of the more than 100 hostages, mostly men, who are still held in Gaza.
That includes declaring a pause in fighting, or a cease-fire, like the one that ended on Dec. 1. During that halt, Hamas released over 80 Israeli hostages and 24 foreign nationals, while Israel released some 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
by Avi Greenstein, CEO of the Boro Park Jewish Community Council.
Dear Congressman Goldman,
We are taught In Pirkei Avos to “Speak little and do a lot.” We’ve been watching you in the two months since the October 7th massacre in Israel, and you’ve been a model to this dictum.
Over the past two months, millions of people around the world have taken to streets, some to support Israel, but many to express criticism of Israel’s just war. While these protesters have a constitutional right to free speech, it was a troubling moment of truth for us to watch who was siding with those who committed the horrific acts on that day and those who stood firmly with the side of good and righteousness.
Congressman, you were one of those who stood with truth. You were on the forefront of those stating unambiguously that the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th brands them as barbaric terrorists. You have also stated clearly that Israel had the moral duty to defend itself and that anti-Semitism has no place in the United States.
But these words were followed by actions.
[The op-ed continues]
Congressman, thank you for the moral clarity you express that there can be no ceasefire while Hamas holds hostages and retains the ability to continue its terrorism against Israel.
Thank you for realizing that Hamas was who started this war, and that Israel had the right to end this war on its own terms.
It is interesting that the above teaching in Pirkei Avos is followed by, “and receive all people with a pleasant countenance.” You are to be lauded for your willingness to listen respectfully to all sides of a dispute. Yet, you maintain a strong moral compassion between good and evil during those conversations, as you displayed during your recent virtual town hall meeting.
This ability is impressive, and for this we are grateful.
Handcuffed and dazed, she struggles to exit the trunk of the Jeep. She’s barefoot and limping. She’s bleeding near her temple. Her ankle is cut.
Her grey sweatpants are bloodied. At gunpoint, she is dragged by her long brown hair into the vehicle. A crowd looks on. The car speeds off.
That is the last time, captured in a video taken on Oct. 7, that Naama Levy, 19, was seen alive. She is among 17 female hostages aged 18 to 26 still held by Hamas somewhere in Gaza.
Their families fear the worst.
“Time is running out for Naama,” said Levy’s mother Ayelet Levy Shachar. “Time is running out for the vulnerable young women being held hostage at the hands of those who torture and abuse them.”
Shachar was referring to the mounting evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women and men during the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
But sexual assault appears not to have been confined to Oct. 7. Two Israeli doctors, who have been treating released hostages, and an Israeli military official familiar with the matter confirmed to USA TODAY that some released hostages revealed they suffered violent sexual assaults in captivity.
[The USA Today Report continues]
“My mother almost fainted here (during the cabinet meeting), because she knows what’s going on there. She saw what was done to men,” said the daughter of another freed hostage.
The Israeli military official said that, just as authorities know that many women were sexually assaulted during the Supernova music festival and at their homes on Oct. 7, “we know they were raped in Hamas captivity.”
Why were the Hamas attacks so brutal?Were the killers high on the drug Captagon?
[The USA Today Report continues]
Thirty-three American senators wrote a letter in mid-December to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres urging the international body to launch an immediate independent investigation into Hamas’ use of sexual assault on Oct. 7. Volker Turk, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights, has claimed that Israel has blocked his team’s investigators.
Five volunteers and first responders who collected and helped identify the bodies of those killed during the attacks on Oct. 7 said they observed multiple signs of obvious and incontestable sexual assault. This included women naked from the waist down, with their legs splayed or underwear torn. USA TODAY was shown photographs and video that appeared to corroborate these assertions, which have been backed up by forensic pathologists.
“We went from house to house and never knew what were going to find,” said Nachman Dickstein, a volunteer for ZAKA, a search and rescue group that works close with Israel’s military and government.
Israeli medical professionals and morgue workers said many women who died on Oct. 7 were found with broken legs and pelvic bones. They said that the severity of the mutilations they examined were such that it was not always possible to distinguish female from male victims. At least one survivor of the attack who was at the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7 near Gaza has told Israel police that she witnessed a gang rape.
Despite this evidence, Hamas has consistently denied accusations it used sexual violence on Oct. 7. It has claimed the allegations are part of an attempt by Israel to distract from its mass killings of civilians in Gaza. International human rights groups waited two months before finally condemning the sexual violence.
[The USA Today Report continues]
“We are living in this believe-all-women era, and somehow that philosophy vanished very quickly when we’re talking about Israeli women,” she said. “It’s really hard not to see that as ingrained antisemitism, ingrained bias that leads people not to want to believe these voices.”
Still, one of the doctors treating the freed hostages said establishing whether sexual assault has taken place is not a straightforward exercise. For a start, physical evidence in the form of body fluids, cuts and bruises can disappear quickly while verbal testimony from victims can take months, years and even decades to materialize.
“The first few days after the hostages were released, they mostly talked about how they lacked adequate food. Then they started to talk about how kids were separated and left in isolated rooms on their own. Then they talked about the aggressiveness of Hamas and how some of the sick and elderly were refused their medications. Finally it was physical violence. It was step-by-step, which is usually how sexual violence testimony goes.”
The doctor said it took decades in Israel before soldiers who were abducted and sexually assaulted during the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and a coalition of Arab countries led by Egypt and Syria started talking about their experiences.
[The USA Today Report continues]
Later, they may encounter something – a particular place, person or event, for example – that acts as a trigger and enables them to recall specific information that has been stored away in their brain about the assault, Hopper said.
Defense attorneys will often point to a victim’s delayed memory recall or inconsistencies in those recollections to try to cast doubts on the victim’s credibility. But research suggests that as few as 5% of reports of sexual assault are false, Hopper said.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, a freed hostage who was held by Hamas in Gaza, told Israeli broadcaster Kan that three women held hostage with her told her stories of being sexually abused by their captors.
However, Goldstein-Almog, 48, did not indicate whether she herself was sexually assaulted.
One of the doctors treating freed hostages said one of the clearest pieces of evidence for how the hostages who remain in captivity may be being treated by Hamas is Levy, the bloodied 19-year-old woman who was caught on video being bundled into the back of the Jeep at gunpoint.
Shachar, her mother, said she struggles to watch the video of her daughter, who she has described as a “joyful” sweet-natured character who likes to dance with her friends, enjoys athletics and dreams of a career in diplomacy.
Each moment is the most indescribably gripping pain Shachar has ever felt. Her heart is shattered. Her nights are haunted by the absence.
Contributing: Michael Collins and Maureen Groppe. Illustrations by Veronica Bravo/USA TODAY.
US Secretary of State Blinken takes issue with what he says is the international community’s sole focus on making demands of Israel regarding the war in Gaza while remaining silent on Hamas’s own agency in the conflict.
“What is striking to me is that even as we hear many countries urging an end to this conflict… I hear virtually no one demanding of Hamas that it stop hiding behind civilians, that it lay down its arms, that it surrender. This would be over tomorrow if Hamas does that,” Blinken says.
“How can it be that there are no demands made of the aggressor, and only demands made of the victim. It would be good if there was a strong international voice pressing Hamas to do what is necessary to end this,” he adds.
The secretary insists that “any other country in the world faced with what what suffered on October 7 would do the same thing.”
When pro-Hamas students at Manhattan’s prestigious New School blocked the entrance to campus last week, they were also trampling the memory of the Zionist scholar who co-founded the university, and of the refugees from Nazi genocide who served as its core faculty for decades.
For several hours on December 4, dozens of extremists physically prevented fellow-students from entering, waved Palestinian flags, and falsely accused Israel of committing genocide. One student walking by the pro-Hamas protesters told reporters that they encircled her and shouted accusations about her being a “colonizer.”
The protest was organized by the campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has praised the October 7 pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, in which over 1200 Israelis were massacred, tortured, raped, or beheaded, with hundreds more abducted.
Before ditching class and picking up their bullhorns, the students should have taken a few minutes to read up on the history of their own school.
I wonder if they know, for example, that the university was co-founded by the philosopher Horace M. Kallen, who was one of the earliest leaders of the American Zionist movement. Kallen lectured and wrote tirelessly in support of creating a Jewish state in the Holy Land.
The New School’s Jewish roots don’t end there. In the 1930s, when many American universities refused to help German Jewish scholars who were trying to flee the Nazis, the New School stepped up. It created a new division, the University in Exile, for the specific purpose of rescuing fugitive professors.
[The Jewish Journal Op-Ed continues]
Despite protests by New School faculty members, prominent U.S. universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Yale, sent delegates to take part in celebrations at the University of Heidelberg in 1936. It was part of the broader tragedy of Ivy League schools cultivating friendly relations with Nazi Germany.
As for Zionism and Israel, New School co-founder Kallen was far from the only Zionist in the New School’s illustrious history. Stella Adler, a strong supporter of Israel, chaired its drama department, and among her students was Marlon Brando, an equally ardent Zionist. Brando later recalled how the refugee scholars “enriched the city’s intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time.”
New School drama alumni Ben Gazzara and Shelley Winters were active in a pro-Israel group in Hollywood; a statement they and other entertainers drafted—back in 1976—warned that Israel was “the target of total planned destruction” by its Arab enemies. Another alum, Walter Matthau, famously clashed with Vanessa Redgrave over her film supporting Palestinian terrorists.
In short, American Zionists and European Jewish refugees made the New School what it is today. They must be spinning in their graves at the spectacle of New School students cheering on the mass murderers of Israeli Jews and slandering the Jewish state.
Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.
The 13-year-old will have to read a book and then write a report about Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who saved more 62,000 Hungarian Jews during the war, a judge ruled.
A 13-year-old boy who was arrested and accused of planning a mass shooting at an Ohio synagogue will have to write a book report on a Swiss diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish people during World War II, a family court judge ruled.
The teen, who is not being named because of his age, was charged with misdemeanor inducing panic and misdemeanor disorderly conduct after allegedly making a detailed plan to shoot members of Temple Israel in the city of Canton, south of Akron.
The teen pleaded “true,” the juvenile equivalent of guilty, to all counts on Friday, NBC affiliate WKYC of Cleveland reported.
Stark County Family Court Judge Jim James gave the teen a year of probation and ordered that he read a book and then write a report about Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who saved more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II, according to the news station.
[The NBC News Report continues]
Although his arrest happened before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, his charges come amid an increase in antisemitic attacks in the United States.
Decimated neighborhoods. Injured children. Terrorized festivalgoers running for their lives. Since the brutal war between Israel and Hamas began nearly three months ago, Maddy Miller, a 17-year-old high school senior in Dallas, Texas, has been trying to make sense of the horrific scenes unfolding daily on her phone.
“I’ll just open TikTok or Instagram and it’s like,‘here’s a clip from inside Israel or inside Palestine,'” Miller said. “SometimesI just need to sit down for like 10 minutes and actually figure out what’s happening. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s fake.”
In February 2022, the war in Ukraine began to play out on Tik Tok and Instagram. The conflict in the Middle East is now the second war to be viewed in vivid, and often intimate, vignettes on social media, where 51% of younger Gen Z teens get their news, according to a Deloitte survey. The war between Israel and Hamas has also sparked a tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation, which is reaching American teens like Miller.
[The CBS News Report continues]
Media literacy classes
As part of every lesson, Brandon Jackson teaches students the tools needed to spot misinformation, which is false or misleading, and disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive. He also tests his students using real-world examples of fake videos that circulate on social media.
“The whole point of this is to analyze large international news events,” Jackson told his students. “How does information change when you’re looking at it on social media? Is it manipulative?”
Despite the technological edge young Americans have over older generations, Stanford University researchers Sam Wineburg and Joel Breakstone say teenagers’ ability to identify misinformation on social media is concerningly low.
[The CBS News Report continues]
“The video purported to claim to show voter fraud in the United States,” Breakstone explained. “If you did a quick internet search, within 30 seconds you could discover that the video actually showed voter fraud in Russia. However, out of those more than 3,000 students, how many students actually discovered the link to Russia? Three. That’s less than one-tenth of 1%.”
The experiment
A CBS News investigation revealed how quickly mis- and disinformation is reaching teenage accounts on social media. In an experiment, a team of journalists set up three different profiles on Instagram and TikTok.
One account searched simple terms on Israel; another searched simple Palestinian terms; and the last account searched both. Each alias also followed several accounts with more than 1,000 followers and “liked” a handful of posts for each one.
[The CBS News Report continues]
“The same tip that I give every single time is to slow down,” said Evon. “Look for authenticity; look for the source; look for evidence; look for reasoning and to look for the context.”
“More dangerous paths”
From the highly publicized resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania, to high school walkouts in San Francisco and New York City, the war has undeniably created a tense climate in schools nationwide. Reports of antisemitic and Islamophobic threats and violence have soared.
“It doesn’t feel like we’re living in 2023. Feels like we’re living in Nazi Germany,” one student said.
Experts like Evon, Breakstone and Wineburg said false or misleading information can intensify the already heated debates about this conflict.
“When young people are developing their views about the world, false claims alter that,” Evon said. “They drag people down more dangerous paths.”
[The CBS News Report continues]
Response from TikTok
CBS News discussed the experiment findings with spokespeople from TikTok. After the team sent the company links to examples of misinformation, those posts were removed.
“TikTok works relentlessly to remove harmful misinformation, and partners with independent fact-checkers who assess the accuracy of content in more than 50 languages,” a TikTok spokesperson said. We’ve removed more than 131,000 videos for misinformation since the start of the Israel-Hamas war and direct people searching for content related to the conflict to Reuters.”
[The CBS News Report continues]
Response from Meta about Instagram
“We’ve taken significant steps to fight the spread of misinformation using a three-part strategy – remove content that violates our Community Standards, flag and reduce distribution of stories marked as false by third-party fact-checkers,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We also label content and inform people so they can decide what to read, trust and share.”
McGill University in Quebec, Canada has banned its Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) chapter from using the school’s name after the campus group posted on social media a statement that cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
SPHR described Hamas’ atrocities — which included the murder of 1,200 people, numerous rapes, and taking 240 people hostage — as “heroic.”
“The university cannot be, or seen to be, associated with a celebration of the taking of civilian hostages,” university spokesperson Susan Murley told The Montreal Gazette. “This post by SPHR was antithetical to the university’s values and stands to undermine the important work aimed at bringing our community together through the Initiative Against Islamophobia and Antisemitism.”
Murley added: “The university has clearly indicated to the SSMU [Students’ Society of McGill University] that the revocation should not be interpreted as the university taking a position on the Middle East and emphasized that the university would act in exactly the same manner in regard to any club that used the McGill name when posting content of a similar nature.”
SPHR — a Canadian equivalent of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that earlier this month accused school officials of having “the blood of 20 000 [sic] Palestinians on their hands” — is refusing to abide by the university’s order. In a statement, the group told the Gazette that it is “rejecting this name change” and charged that the ban “is just another blatant way to smear the only group on campus which is representing Palestinian students.”
McGill University has made numerous attempts to combat antisemitic speech on campus, threatening even to disaffiliate with SSMU, the school’s student government, over a referendum it scheduled to declare that Israel is conducting “genocidal bombing campaigns” in Gaza and demand that the university end partnerships with businesses described in the referendum as “complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
In the latest controversy, SSMU is charged with officially withdrawing the group’s affiliation with SPHR. The student government has so far not chosen to contest the university’s decision, according to a statement issued on Monday.
“We regret to announce that SPHR will no longer be able to use the McGill name,” its executive committee said. “We continue to take our role as liaison between student groups and the administration seriously and will continue to investigate avenues for remedial action.”
This will be my last column for the year, and it will be more personal than most. It’s an effort to explain, to myself as much as to readers, why I can’t stop writing about Oct. 7 and its aftermath.
A few weeks ago, my mother was watching footage of a Jewish student being taunted and mobbed by anti-Israel demonstrators at Harvard after he tried to film them. “I was born in hiding,” she told me. “I don’t want to die in hiding.”
My mother was born in Milan in 1940, to a family that had fled the Bolsheviks in Moscow and then, a few years later, the Nazis in Berlin. She was baptized to avoid suspicion; one of her earliest memories is of being abruptly hidden under a nun’s habit. It was only after the war, after she arrived in New York as a refugee, that she learned she was Jewish. America, to her, was the land in which you didn’t have to hide.
That’s no longer true. Well before Oct. 7, Jews were tucking their Stars of David under their collars or hiding their kipas under baseball caps to avoid being shunned or harassed. Synagogues and Jewish community centers were under constant armed guard. The ultra-Orthodox — who, courageously, do not hide their identity from anyone — were routinely assaulted in their communities by bullies who think it’s fun to sucker-punch a Jew. But that reality was shamefully underreported by news organizations that otherwise see themselves as champions of the marginalized and oppressed.
Everything that was true before Oct. 7 became more so after it. Hate crimes against Jews, which had nearly quintupled in the previous 10 years, also quintupled from Oct. 7 to Dec. 7 compared to the same period in 2022. Subtext became text: “Gas the Jews” was the chant heard from protesters at the Sydney Opera House, “From the river to the sea” from the quads of once-great American universities. The same students who had been carefully instructed in the nuances of microaggressions suddenly went very macro when it came to making Jews feel despised. The same progressives who erupted in righteous rage during #MeToo became somnambulant in the face of abundant evidence that Israeli women had been mutilated, gang-raped and murdered by Hamas. The same humanitarians who cried foul over migrant “kids in cages” at the southern U.S. border didn’t seem particularly bothered that Israeli kids were being held in tunnels, or that posters with their names and faces were routinely torn down on New York street corners.
[The Opinion Piece from the New York Times continues]
Where does all this hatred come from? If your answer is Israel, then, to borrow a line I once heard from Leon Wieseltier, you aren’t explaining antisemitism; you’re replicating it. No self-respecting liberal would argue that Islamophobia is understandable because Muslims perpetrated the attacks of Sept. 11 and other atrocities. But somehow the types of excuses that are unthinkable when it comes to some minorities become “essential context” when it comes to Jews.
As it is, the single-minded loathing of Israel is another expression of antisemitism. Turkey flies F-16s in bombing runs against Kurds — while relying on U.S. security guarantees backed up by nuclear weapons — and progressives shrug. But after Israel experienced the equivalent of more than a dozen Sept. 11s on a single day, some progressives instantly cheered it as an act of justified “resistance.”
This side of the left, perhaps larger in cultural influence than it is in number, has the moral credibility of David Duke. Much of the right, with its dog-whistling obsession with “replacement theory” and its conspiracy theories about nefarious “globalists,” is no better. The fact that each side is in denial about its bigotry makes it that much more pernicious and pervasive. When progressives think the most despicable name in the world is Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right thinks it’s George Soros, we have a problem.
There’s a historical pattern. In the early 1920s, the most important scientist in Germany was Albert Einstein, the most important politician was Walther Rathenau and the most important philosopher was Edmund Husserl. All Jews. They wound up exiled, murdered or shunned. Today, the U.S. secretaries of state, Treasury and homeland security are Jewish, as is the majority leader in the Senate and the president’s chief of staff.
Too often in Jewish history, our zenith turns out to be our precipice. Too often in world history, that precipice is also the end of free society itself. Antisemitism is a problem for democracy because hatred for Jews, whatever name or cause it travels under, is never a hatred for Jews only. It’s a hatred for distinctiveness: Jews as Jews in Christian lands; Israel as a Jewish state in Muslim lands. Authoritarians seek uniformity. Jews represent difference.
I don’t think my mom will die in hiding. I wonder about my kids. America has been good to Jews since 1655, when the Dutch West India Company rebuked Peter Stuyvesant for refusing trade permits to some Jewish newcomers in what was then New Amsterdam. But if there’s one lesson of Jewish history, it’s that nothing good stays — and why we still say, at the end of every Passover Seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues.
When pro-Hamas students at Manhattan’s prestigious New School blocked the entrance to campus last week, they were also trampling the memory of the Zionist scholar who co-founded the university, and of the refugees from Nazi genocide who served as its core faculty for decades.
For several hours on December 4, dozens of extremists physically prevented fellow-students from entering, waved Palestinian flags, and falsely accused Israel of committing genocide. One student walking by the pro-Hamas protesters told reporters that they encircled her and shouted accusations about her being a “colonizer.”
The protest was organized by the campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has praised the October 7 pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, in which over 1200 Israelis were massacred, tortured, raped, or beheaded, with hundreds more abducted.
Before ditching class and picking up their bullhorns, the students should have taken a few minutes to read up on the history of their own school.
I wonder if they know, for example, that the university was co-founded by the philosopher Horace M. Kallen, who was one of the earliest leaders of the American Zionist movement. Kallen lectured and wrote tirelessly in support of creating a Jewish state in the Holy Land.
The New School’s Jewish roots don’t end there. In the 1930s, when many American universities refused to help German Jewish scholars who were trying to flee the Nazis, the New School stepped up. It created a new division, the University in Exile, for the specific purpose of rescuing fugitive professors.
Unlike today’s protesters, who hurl the term “genocide” at anybody they dislike, the refugee scholars who taught at the New School knew from first-hand experience what it’s like to be persecuted by a genuinely genocidal regime.
[The Journal Commentary Continues]
Despite protests by New School faculty members, prominent U.S. universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Yale, sent delegates to take part in celebrations at the University of Heidelberg in 1936. It was part of the broader tragedy of Ivy League schools cultivating friendly relations with Nazi Germany.
As for Zionism and Israel, New School co-founder Kallen was far from the only Zionist in the New School’s illustrious history. Stella Adler, a strong supporter of Israel, chaired its drama department, and among her students was Marlon Brando, an equally ardent Zionist. Brando later recalled how the refugee scholars “enriched the city’s intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time.”
New School drama alumni Ben Gazzara and Shelley Winters were active in a pro-Israel group in Hollywood; a statement they and other entertainers drafted—back in 1976—warned that Israel was “the target of total planned destruction” by its Arab enemies. Another alum, Walter Matthau, famously clashed with Vanessa Redgrave over her film supporting Palestinian terrorists.
In short, American Zionists and European Jewish refugees made the New School what it is today. They must be spinning in their graves at the spectacle of New School students cheering on the mass murderers of Israeli Jews and slandering the Jewish state.
More than 400 Jewish facilities across the US have received false bomb threats over email since Saturday, according to the Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish non-profit organization.
Oren Segal, Vice President of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, told CNN they believe one person or a small number of individuals were behind the series of threats.
The email messages contained several similarities, Segal – who had seen the messages – told CNN, including the nature of the alleged threats, and variations in the name of a group claiming to be responsible for them.
While the threats were all deemed to be hoaxes, Segal added, “the Jewish community doesn’t take any threat lightly. We don’t have the luxury to ignore them.”
[The CNN Report continues]
“The FBI is aware of the numerous hoax incidents wherein a bomb threat at a synagogue is made. The FBI takes hoax threats very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” the agency said.
“While we have no information to indicate a specific and credible threat, we will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”
The incidents are happening days after the end of Hanukkah and amid a spike in threats against the Jewish community documented since October, when the war in Gaza began.
The bomb threats and swatting incidents made against Jewish institutions saw a 541% increase this year over 2022, according to the Secure Community Network.
Threats reported across the country
[The CNN Report continues]
He added the state intelligence center and anti-terrorism unit are working with the FBI to investigate the source of the threats and the hate crimes unit is working with religious leaders across the state.
The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama said in a Facebook post they responded to a bomb threat at the Congregation Mayim Chayim. The office said the threat was not credible and the area is “considered safe.”
The Roswell Police Department in Georgia also reported on Facebook two local synagogues received threats. They found nothing suspicious, according to the Facebook post.
And in central Alabama, six Jewish institutions received bomb threats, according to a Facebook post from the Jewish Federation of Central Alabama. “The actual threat level was deemed low but we must always respond out of an abundance of caution,” wrote the group.
The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks.
Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told us they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners.
Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim.
Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women were sexually targeted by their attackers.
[The BBC News Report continues]
In the video, the woman known as Witness S mimes the attackers picking up and passing the victim from one to another.
“She was alive,” the witness says. “She was bleeding from her back.”
She goes on to detail how the men cut off parts of the victim’s body during the assault.
“They sliced her breast and threw it on the street,” she says. “They were playing with it.”
[The BBC News Report continues]
A statement he made through a support organisation describes it as “inhuman”.
“Some women were raped before they were dead, some raped while injured, and some were already dead when the terrorists raped their lifeless bodies,” his statement says. “I desperately wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.”
Police say they have “multiple” eye-witness accounts of sexual assault, but wouldn’t give any more clarification on how many. When we spoke to them, they hadn’t yet interviewed any surviving victims.
Hamas has rejected Israel’s accusation that its men sexually assaulted women during the attacks.
Israel’s Women’s Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and that they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment.
“But very, very few. The majority were brutally murdered,” she said. “They aren’t able to talk – not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media.”
[The BBC News Report continues]
“I spoke with at least three girls who are now hospitalised for a very hard psychiatric situation because of the rapes they watched,” Minister May Golan told me. “They pretended to be dead and they watched it, and heard everything. And they can’t deal with it.”
Israel’s police chief Yaacov Shabtai said that many survivors of the attacks were finding it difficult to talk and that he thought some of them would never testify about what they saw or experienced.
“Eighteen young men and women have been hospitalised in mental health hospitals because they could no longer function,” he said.
Others are reportedly suicidal. One of those working with the teams around survivors told the BBC that some had already killed themselves.
[The BBC News Report continues]
Hundreds of bodies were collected from the attack sites by volunteers.
Investigators admit that in those first chaotic days after the attacks, with some areas still active combat zones, opportunities to carefully document the crime scenes, or take forensic evidence, were limited or missed.
“For the first five days, we still had terrorists on the ground in Israel,” May Golan said. “And there were hundreds, hundreds of bodies everywhere. They were burned, they were without organs, they were butchered completely.”
“This was a mass casualty event,” police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told journalists at a briefing.
“The first thing was to work on identifying the victims, not necessarily on crime scene investigation. People were waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones.”
[The BBC News Report continues]
Teams here told us they’d seen clear evidence of rape and sexual violence on the bodies coming in, including broken pelvises from sustained violent abuse.
“We see women of all ages,” one of the reservists on the forensic team, Captain Maayan, told the BBC. “We see rape victims. We see women who have been through violation. We have pathologists and we see the bruises, we learn about the cuts and tears, and we know they have been sexually abused.”
I ask her what proportion of the bodies she’s handled show signs of this.
“Abundant,” she said. “Abundant amount of women and girls of all ages.”
The number of victims is hard to define, partly because of the state of the bodies.
[The BBC News Report continues]
“We see definite patterns,” she told me. “So it wasn’t incidental, it wasn’t random. They came with a clear order. It was […] rape as genocide.”
Avigayil agrees there were similarities in the violence visited on the bodies that arrived at the Shura base.
“There are patterns in that groups of women from the same place were treated in a similar manner,” she said.
“There might be a set of women who were raped in one way, and we’re seeing similarities in the bodies; and then a different set that were not raped but shot multiple times in the exact same pattern. So it seems that different groups of terrorists had different forms of cruelty.”
“This was a premeditative, systematic event,” police chief Yaacov Shabtai told journalists.
David Katz from Israel’s cyber crime unit which is involved in the investigation, told journalists that it was too early to prove that sexual violence was planned as part of the attack, but that data extracted from the phones of the Hamas attackers suggested that “everything was systematic”.
“It would be reckless to say we can already prove it […] but everything that was done there was done systematically,” he said. “Nothing happened by coincidence. Rape was systematic.”
[The BBC News Report continues]
“Israel on 7 October is not the same country that woke up the following morning,” said police chief Yaacov Shabtai.
Amid the horror of what happened to women here, Captain Maayan from the Shura identification unit says the hardest moments are when she sees “the mascara on their eyelashes, or the earrings they put on that morning”.
[Editor’s note from People4Peace: Instead of blaming others, Israel assumes responsibility for its tragic error. Hamas would not have admitted anything and/OR would have blamed Israel; Hamas did just that when the misfire from inside Gaza hit one of its own hospitals. Further, Would any Hamas commander have delivered the educational lecture that the Israeli general did? And make it public? More to the point and in the first place, the illegal seizure of hostages by Hamas should never have taken place. None of this diminishes this tragedy. What happened is awful. But it points to the differences between an organization dedicated to murder and a nation-state engaged against its will in the horrors of war. People4Peace mourns this tragic loss of life and extends its sincerest sympathies and deepest condolences to the families.]
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stressed the army’s rules of engagement to troops in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, two days after soldiers mistakenly shot to death three hostages in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood.
Speaking to soldiers of the 99th Division, he stressed that people holding a white flag in surrender must not be fired upon, and that even enemy fighters, if they put down their weapons and raise their hands, must be taken prisoner, not shot.
“You see two people, they have their hands up and no shirts — take two seconds,” Halevi said to the soldiers, referring to Friday’s tragic incident, where all three hostages were shirtless — signaling they were not wearing explosive belts — and one was waving a white flag. Halevi said on Saturday that the soldiers who shot the three had opened fire in breach of IDF protocols.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
The IDF has said that according to an initial investigation, the three hostages had been in that building for some of the time after they escaped Hamas captivity or were abandoned by their captors. IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the military was also investigating another building the three hostages may have stayed in.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
Immediately following the incident, the IDF sent new protocols to ground troops for the possibility of more hostages managing to flee captivity.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
The IDF has carried out an initial probe into the tragic incident, finding that the soldier who opened fire upon misidentifying the three men as terrorists did so against protocols, as did the soldier who killed the third man, according to a senior officer in the Southern Command.
Cyber mimics life, as Iran uses Lebanese hackers to attack its bête noire.
Israel’s critical infrastructure is under threat from an Iranian proxy hacking group operating in Lebanon.
Iran’s partnership with armed militant groups throughout the Middle East is well documented. Less widely known is its collaboration with extranational hackers, like “Polonium” (aka “Plaid Rain”), which since 2021 has seemingly operated with the sole purpose of attacking Israel.
According to Microsoft, in the spring of 2022 alone, Polonium spied on more than 20 Israeli organizations across commercial, critical, and government sectors, including transportation, critical manufacturing, IT, finance, agriculture, and healthcare.
Now the group seems to have taken a step up. On Dec. 4, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warned that Polonium has targeted further critical infrastructure sectors, including water and energy. And besides espionage, the Directorate wrote, “a trend to implement destructive attacks has recently been identified.”
Dark Reading has reached out to Israel’s Ministry of Defense for further details, but has not yet received a reply.
Polonium’s M.O.
From a country with only a few, relatively quiet APT groups — Volatile Cedar, Tempting Cedar, and Dark Caracal — one may be tempted to underestimate Polonium.
[The Dark Reading Report continues]
And rather than packaging these backdoors as a monolith, the hackers divided them up into fragments – tiny files, each with limited functionality. For example, one dynamic link library (DLL) file would be responsible for screen grabs, and then another took care of uploading them to a C2 server. “The idea is to split functionalities into various components, so that individual components look less suspicious to security software,” explains Matias Porolli, malware researcher at ESET.
Even as Polonium evolved its tools and tactics in recent months, it still stuck to this formula.
[The Dark Reading Report continues]
Iran’s Proxy Cyber War
[The Dark Reading Report continues]
That its attackers are not always the ones pulling the strings only makes defending against them that more difficult, says Maria Cunningham, director of threat research ReliaQuest. “Russia is often the first nation-state that comes to mind here,” she says, though “an interesting modus operandi is often displayed by threat actors attributed to North Korea which may well look criminal in nature at first glance.”
“This can provide plausible deniability for the attacker; for the defender, it can limit attribution and, more importantly, hinder the understanding of what might come next in the attacker’s armory,” she says.
I’m a writer. A Jewish comedy writer. I know, hardly a rarity. In fact, one of the most oft-asked questions I get during the Q&A portion of speaking engagements is why I think Jews have always been so prominent in the world of comedy.
Indeed, the numbers are staggering. Because in every corner of literature, vaudeville, film, radio, and television, not to mention nightclub and theater stages, contributions by Jews have eclipsed their percentage of the population by far.
My cliché answer? Humor is a mindset—a coping mechanism, if you will—that has enabled us to survive the persecution we’ve withstood through the centuries. A deflection of sorts from the horrors of pogroms, expulsions from so many countries, the Holocaust, and the more subtle gentlemen’s agreements that tacitly made it impossible for a Jewish family to move into certain communities. As my friend Rob Reiner said when asked what was at the root of Jewish comedy: “Fear.”
For the most part, this fear occurred before I was born. So, while I listened politely to my grandparents, who fled the shtetls of Europe and immigrated to this country in search of opportunity, it was academic. I regarded their stance—that whenever there’s trouble in the world, the Jews will ultimately be blamed—as paranoia.
I thought it was understandable. They had lived through it. Yet I had an emotional detachment. I grew up in an assimilated time when a lot of my Jewish friends were admitted to Ivy League schools, people of all religions were using the word “schmuck,” and Sandy Koufax was nationally applauded for refusing to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. I considered myself the beneficiary of the pains previous generations had endured and the sacrifices they had made. I had the luxury of being able to look out at the unthreatening world around me and make a living by joking about it.
Then came October 7—when the fear became present. When the unheeded warnings relegated to the past visited us with an unannounced vengeance. When the 78-year-old vow made after the liberation of Auschwitz of “Never again!” came rushing forward, and we realized that “again” was now.
I grew up in an assimilated time when a lot of my Jewish friends were admitted to Ivy League schools, people of all religions were using the word “schmuck,” and Sandy Koufax was nationally applauded for refusing to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.
It was also the day I found it impossible to focus on my work. As if it would be blasphemous to even look for anything funny when such savagery was rendered upon so many who were doing nothing more than enjoying their lives.
Television was my drug of choice. I watched continually as every day presented a new beat in an unfolding war story. Maps and military strategy found their way into dinner conversations with friends. So did the thoughts of a country the size of New Jersey possibly fighting a war on multiple fronts. As did the discovery of a Hamas command base in the tunnels below Gaza hospital.
As upsetting as it was, no matter how many times I promised myself I’d stay away, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, go into my home office, turn on the news, and learn, for instance, that a man named Paul Kessler died after being hit over the head with a megaphone at a pro-Israel demonstration in Los Angeles. And find out just how prevalent the spread of anti-Semitism at those very same universities my friends had gotten into was. Like the rally flaunting swastikas with chants of “Heil Hitler!” outside a dorm at a Midwestern state university.
Or Osama bin Laden’s letter, justifying his attack as a response to America’s support of Israel, getting millions of likes on TikTok, in great part from young people who get their information on fast-paced apps designed to allow bits of information to go viral without context. Or validity. And though the first instinct of the comedy writer in me is to marvel at the ingenious lines constructed by supreme wits like Groucho Marx and Dorothy Parker, it was the words of the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi that were now resonating:
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are … the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”
Which exemplifies another war of sorts, the one between the conflicting narratives being advanced on different TV channels or from one social-media site to another. I no longer know how to react to the varied editorial slants and misinformation masquerading as reportage. Last weekend my wife, Robin, and I were in a restaurant, and the two couples at the table next to ours were vehemently arguing over the hostage exchange with four different sets of “facts.”
In my quest for actual facts, I turn to Web sites such as People4Peace.net and the American Jewish Committee. A few weeks ago, I live-streamed a conversation that our rabbi, David-Seth Kirshner, had with Jonathan Greenblatt (the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League) in search of the truth about what’s really happening in Israel and Gaza.
I also wait. Frightened to think where all this will lead. Frightened that we have a grandson who will soon be applying to colleges. Frightened as my grandparents were when they said, “If it happened, it can happen again.” And silently wondering when I’ll feel comfortable enough to be funny again.
Alan Zweibel, an original Saturday Night Live writer, is the Thurber Prize–winning author of 11 books, including the cultural memoir Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier
Comedian Bill Maher’s Dec. 15 segment on his HBO “Real Time” show.
And finally, New Rule
I know it’s supposed to be that magical time of year but maybe what we all really need right now is a good dose of realism.
I see a lot of nativity scenes when I’m out as you always do before Christmas.
And I can’t help thinking about where that manger really is. It’s in the West Bank on Palestinian land controlled by the Palestinian authority. In 1950 the little town of Bethlehem was 86 percent Christian now it’s overwhelmingly Muslim.
And that’s my point tonight, things change. To 2.3 billion Christians there can be no more sacred site than where their Savior was born but they don’t have it anymore. And yet no Crusader Army has geared up to take it back.
Things change. Countries boundaries empires. Palestine was under the Ottoman empire for 400 years, but today, an Ottoman is something you put under your feet.
The city of Byzantium became the city of Constantinople became Istanbul. Not everybody liked it but you can’t keep arguing the call forever.
The Irish had the entire island to themselves but the British were starting an Empire and well the Irish lost their tip. They blew each other up over it for 30 years, but eventually everybody comes to an accommodation except the Palestinians.
Was it unjust that even a single Arab family was forced to move upon the founding of the Jewish state? Yes. But it’s also not rare.
Happening all through history all over the world and mostly what people do is make the best of it.
After World War II 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia because being German had become kind of unpopular.
A million Greeks were shoved out of Turkey in 1923, a million Ghanaians out of Nigeria in 1983, almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962, nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago. Was that a perfect fit?
And no one knows more about being pushed off land……than the Jews. Including being almost wholly kicked out of every Arab country they once lived in.
-Yes TikTok fans. Ethnic cleansing happened both ways. In Fiddler on the Roof the family is always moving to stay one step ahead of the Cossacks but they deal with it. When they’re leaving Anatevka they say “Hey, it wasn’t so great anyway.” “Come on. Like other countries don’t have roofs -you could fiddle on.
Now that’s not how they really felt but they were coping. They coped. Because sometimes that’s all you can do.
History is brutal and humans are not good people. History is sad and full of wrongs but you can’t make them unhappen because a paraglider isn’t a time machine.
People get moved and yes colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn’t do it by asking. There’s a reason Saudi Arabia’s flag is a sword.
Kosovo was the cradle of Christian Serbia then it became Muslim. They fought a war about it in the ’90s but stopped. They didn’t keep it going for 75 years.
There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine. In 1947, ’93, ’95, ’98, 2000 2008. And East Jerusalem could have been the capital of a Palestinian state that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza.
Arafat was offered 95 percent of the West Bank and said no. The Palestinian people should know, your leaders and the useful idiots on college campuses who are their allies are not doing you any favors by keeping alive “The River to the Sea” myth.
I mean where do you think Israel is going? Spoiler alert, nowhere. It’s one of the most powerful countries in the world with the 500-billion-dollar economy, world’s second-largest tech sector after Silicon Valley, and nuclear weapons. They’re here they like their bagel -with a shmear get used to it.
What’s happening to Palestinians today is horrible and not just in Gaza in the West Bank too. But wars end with negotiation and what the media glosses over is–It’s hard to negotiate when the other side’s bargaining position is you all die and disappear.
I mean the chant “From the River to the Sea. Yeah let’s look at the map. Here’s the river here’s the sea. Oh I see it means you get all of it. Not just the West Bank which was basically the original UN partition deal you rejected because you wanted all of it and always have.
Even though it’s indisputably also the Jews’ ancestral homeland. And so you attacked and lost. And attacked again and lost. And attacked again and lost. As my friend Dr. Phil says “How’s that working for you?
Look at what Mexico used to own—all the way up to the top of California. But no Mexican is out there chanting, ‘From the Rio Grande to Portland, Oregon.’ Because they chose a different path. They got real and built a country that’s the world’s 14th biggest economy now. Because they knew the United States wasn’t going to give back Phoenix any more than Hamas will ever be in Tel Aviv.
One of the leaders of Hamas says…I’m sorry who’s the one with imaginary dreams? If I give you the benefit of the doubt and say your plan for a completely Jew-less Palestine isn’t that all the Jews should die.
What is the only other option? They move. You move all the Jews. Okay I got to warn you there’s gonna be some kvetching. You move all the Jews and we do this with what? A fleet of trucks called Jew-haul. And to where are we moving this entire country? Texas? Sure they have room. and I guess we could put the Wailing Wall on the border and kill two birds with one stone.
The official Telegram channels of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist organizations were blocked this week on all devices using Apple’s iOS.
The channels were the main propaganda outlets of the U.S.-designated terrorist groups, which used Telegram to share videos of kidnappings and killings of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Apple’s decision came after a U.S.-based NGO, the Zachor Legal Institute, approached it with a request to block the channels.
Google has taken a similar action on its Android devices, blocking two Hamas channels and the three PIJ and PFLP channels as well.
In October, Apple and Google took similar action against Hamas propaganda channels.
The discovery of U.N. and USAID sacks being used by Hamas to construct terror tunnels in Gaza raises new questions about the security of humanitarian aid falling into the hands of the Islamist group.
Israeli soldiers recently made an unusual discovery in a tunnel underneath Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. Behind the tunnel’s concrete walls were large sacks belonging to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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The sacks were filled with sand, possibly intended to stabilize the tunnel before a concrete layer was added.
The Israel Defense Forces officer whose unit made the discovery related: “When the excavator dug down, we could see that there were first sacks and then the tunnel. We went to look at the tunnel closely and saw sacks there with UNRWA and an American aid organization markings on them. There was no aid in these sacks, no flour or anything else.”
It is not known how many such sacks were used as soldiers did not enter the tunnel, which was subsequently destroyed. But the commander confirmed that dozens of sacks were exposed.
The sacks “were found in several places in the tunnels; at least in two places that I witnessed myself,” the unit commander said. “I was not shocked to discover this, after all, we have known for years that part of Hamas’s method is to use aid funds for terror purposes.”
UNRWA is a U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees and their descendants. USAID is an independent agency of the U.S. government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance.
Questions raised
[The JNS Report continues]
Asked about the discovery of the UNRWA sacks, IMPACT-se chief operating officer Arik Agassi stated: “It is not surprising to find weapons hidden in UNRWA bags and it isn’t the first time that Hamas tunnels were discovered under UNRWA schools.”
The discovery casts significant doubts on UNRWA’s capacity to operate independently within the conflict, Agassi added.
USAID ceased all aid to Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza at the Palestinian Authority’s request in 2019. The move was in response to legislation that would have allowed victims of Palestinian terrorism to sue the P.A. in U.S. courts.
However, the U.S. has provided 500,000 pounds of food assistance and made plans for $100 million in aid to Gaza since the current ground war began.
At least 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on Oct. 7.
Yosef Haddad, an Arab Israeli Zionist activist, posted a video of his putting up photos of hostages in front of the office of Progressive Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and hanging an Israeli flag over her Palestinian one.
Haddad introduced the post and the video by saying, “This is what happened when I got to hang the posters of the hostages on the door of Rashida Tlaib’s office.”
He stood in front of the congresswoman’s office and called her antisemitic because Tlaib “refused to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas…and turns a blind eye to the atrocities Hamas committed on the 7th of October.”
Haddad held up posters of Israeli child hostages, “Those children were kidnapped by Hamas, and Rashida Tlaib doesn’t say anything…anything? Seriously?
Haddad then stuck the posters on the wall outside of her office and said, “Here, I’m putting up these posters for her so she doesn’t forget that there are babies in Gaza kidnapped by Hamas…maybe this (the poster) will make her change her mind.”
He spoke to the camera, addressing Rashida Tlaib, “Don’t be a hypocrite. Stop lying. Call for the immediate release of the hostages in Gaza…the release of every hostage kidnapped by the terrorist organization.”
Haddad then unfurled an Israeli flag and said, “If you want to free Palestinians, free them from the terrorist organization Hamas.”
“Oh and Rashida Tlaib you should be ashamed. Even today you haven’t deleted your tweet about the hospital. People who follow you today will think that Israel bombed the hospital and killed 500 Palestinians when of course you know it was Islamic Jihad. Shame on you Rashida Tlaib.”
He then put the Israeli flag on her door, cover the Palestinian one and said, “I really hope she doesn’t take this down.
However, 5 minutes later, not only had the Israeli flag disappeared, but the pictures of the hostages were also taken down.
Hadid repeated, “Shame on you Rashida Tlaib.”
In addition to not rescinding her false accusation that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza, Tlaib has also refused to condemn Hamas for the October 7th massacre and didn’t apologize for using the expression, “From the River to the Sea,” a chant that calls for the elimination of Israel.
As a result, Congress passed a motion in early November to censure Rashida Tlaib for her statements and actions.
Clara Haras was 17 years old, living in Nazi-occupied Tarnopol, Poland, when a German officer told her he’d save her family under the condition that she have sex with him. He proceeded to rape her. The Nazis then brutally executed her grandparents, mother, father, two little sisters and a brother. Somehow, she summoned the will to survive the next four years of terror. But for the next 60 years, she lived with the nightmare of unspeakable trauma. Yet she never abandoned her Jewish identity.
[The CNN Report continues]
And then on October 7, never again happened. When Hamas attacked Israel, they used tactics that have been used to subjugate Jewish women and women worldwide for centuries, as they systematically carried out rape and sexual violence on Israeli women and girls. From the early 20th century pogromsto the Holocaust, rape was routinely used as a weapon of war against the Jewish people to torture, terrorize and suppress us.
For more than two decades, I have fought to embolden victims of rape and empower those who have been sold into the commercial sex trade, sometimes by their own family members. I am often asked why I work to combat gender violence. My response is always the same: My grandparents are Holocaust survivors and their experiences had a deep impact on my life and left me with the responsibility to stand up against hate.
I was raised with a deep understanding that injustice happens in a vacuum of silence. If people don’t speak up, evil operates with impunity. In the wake of October 7, I have chosen to speak up. But not everyone has.
There is overwhelming evidence that the October 7 attacks included horrific and widespread gender-based violence, including rape and sexual mutilation.It includes forensic examinations of numerous Israeli victims’ bodies mangled by acts of rape and sexual torture. It includes testimony by survivors of the attacks who witnessed Hamas terrorists raping and mutilating women.
[The CNN Report continues]
November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women came and went, and many remained silent. As I’ve continued to advocate for some of New York’s most vulnerable women and girls these past two months — and as I simultaneously speak out for the women and girls in Israel whose voices were taken from them on October 7 — my grandfather’s often-uttered phrase echoes in my ears: “There’s no question the Nazis were evil monsters, but I blame the bystanders.”
My grandfather felt profoundly betrayed by the people who had a voice and did not use it. He understood the existential evil of the Nazis, but felt most betrayed by the neighbors, the shop keepers and the friends who stood silent. He never accepted that humanity was unwilling to help.
[The CNN Report continues]
There’s no question that what happened on October 7 evoked the Holocaust in its barbarity. It has also evoked Holocaust denial as people demand proof and evidence of the terror and sexual violence. Organizations whose mission is to combat gender-based violence should be among the loudest voices. We always stand with survivors, even in the most controversial cases where there is little proof other than a survivor’s word.
Stand up for the victims and survivors of October 7. Stand up for those still in captivity. If you do not, your silence compounds the pain of the survivors, the erasure of the murdered, the anguish of their families. Your silence empowers the perpetrators. Each of us has a voice, however small.
Call the White House, or your senator or your representative in Congress. Tell them the return of the hostages is a priority for you and a priority for humanity. Demand a full investigation into the sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists. Never again should the world enable atrocities with silence. It is time to use your voice.
Editor’s Note: Alexi Ashe Meyers is an attorney and advocate working in New York City. She has started a movement to bring attention to the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas.
Other than hardened anti-Israel zealots and supporters of Hamas, few have questioned the need for Israel to take military action to defend its citizens after the depredations of Oct. 7. But the Israel Defense Forces have come under intense criticism about the way it is conducting the war in the Gaza Strip, with allegations of excessive force and even indiscriminate attacks. Some former Western military officers have joined the chorus of condemnation, suggesting the IDF should adopt the tactics of coalition forces in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the outcomes of both campaigns, perhaps neither provides the ideal template for how jihadists can be defeated.
Amid this growing reproof from afar, I have not yet heard one single realistic proposal for an alternative way of operating that would reduce civilian harm while still achieving the necessary objectives. That tells me that the IDF has no choice but to prosecute this conflict along current lines, despite the terrible loss of civilian life. But given the ill-informed accusations and wide-ranging misunderstanding of how the IDF is actually operating in Gaza, it is worth a closer look at what the IDF has been doing to mitigate harm to civilians.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
Hamas fighters and their infrastructure are comprehensively embedded in all populated areas of the Gaza Strip, and frequently relocate both above and below ground according to the movements of the IDF and the civilian population. The terrorists have utilized the predominantly urban areas to afford maximum cover and facilitate concealed approach and escape routes.
Hamas has constructed an extensive network of underground tunnels to gain protection for terrorists, to move fighters and equipment, to store weapons, to house command and control facilities, as well as to launch attacks and carry out ambushes. Some of these tunnels have been fitted with heavy blast doors to afford greater protection and frustrate assaulting troops. They are booby-trapped and rigged with explosives, early-warning devices and surveillance cameras. I have been into the tunnels during this conflict and can confirm that this network adds exponentially to the already immense challenges of fighting in urban areas, recognized by military professionals as perhaps the most demanding of all battle environments. Indeed, I am not aware of any comparable purposely built underground complex that any armed forces have had to tackle in any other conflict.
Hamas’s tactics are based on the exploitation of the civilian population of Gaza. Their above-ground infrastructure utilizes protected locations, including a large number of schools, hospitals and mosques for weapons storage, fighting positions, and tunnel access and egress. They have similarly used office and commercial facilities, shops and residential buildings. I have been briefed by combat troops on the ground that in some areas as much as every house and in other areas every other house contains elements of terrorist infrastructure; and I have been shown, for example, children’s bedrooms used to store grenades, anti-tank missiles and other munitions.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
This daunting combination of concurrent and conflicting challenges, coupled with the fact that Hamas systematically uses Gazans as human shields, and operates within and beneath civilian infrastructure, means that it is literally not possible to achieve the objectives of defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages without the tragic consequence of civilian casualties and the regrettable destruction of civilian property from both ground and air. No army in the world would be able to do so, no matter what tactics they employed, and indeed no other army has ever done so in any comparable conflict.
Furthermore, Hamas’s form of operations—most of which directly and intentionally contravene the laws of armed conflict—also explain the necessity for the IDF to act with immense combat power when required and to operate with force across all areas of Gaza. No place in the Strip is devoid of terrorists and their munitions unless and until the IDF has cleared and secured them.
I have been briefed on IDF techniques and training for mitigating harm to civilians by commanders, staff officers and lawyers. I have also spoken to a large number of air and ground combat troops, and all have shown a clear understanding of the IDF rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict, as well as the personal and unit dedication to adhere to them. For example, I was present recently at a conference of operational commanders inside the Gaza Strip at which they discussed in great detail measures to avoid harm to civilians while attacking enemy positions in the close vicinity of a school that was being used for refuge by civilians. It was clear to me that the determination to protect civilian life was at the forefront of these commanders’ minds, in their planning and in their direction of tactical operations.
[The Jewish News Syndicate Report continues]
The IDF is also working hard to alleviate civilian suffering by facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid. That includes daily pauses in fighting and the opening of humanitarian corridors and humanitarian relief zones. The IDF enables the supply of hundreds of tons of aid each day, and current constraints on aid delivery are due not to IDF-imposed restrictions but to the capacity of U.N. aid organizations. The IDF is striving to make the flow of aid more effective than it has been so far, including potentially opening an additional crossing point into Gaza. These efforts show Israel’s commitment to humanitarian assistance, despite its often negative impact on military operations. The fact is that unilateral humanitarian pauses and creation of corridors provide a military advantage to Hamas; additionally, there is no doubt that some of the aid delivered into Gaza is appropriated by terrorists.
Information and intelligence shortcomings, operational mistakes, human error, miscalculations and technical malfunctions occur in all wars, and sometimes tragically lead to loss of civilian life and indeed to fratricide (“friendly fire” or “blue on blue”). I have witnessed and been involved in several such events in other conflicts. Inevitably, dreadful incidents of this nature have occurred in this war, too. When errors or unlawful activity are suspected, the IDF uses its Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism (which I have observed in action) to learn lessons, prevent repetition, and, if appropriate, refer cases to the Military Advocate General for further investigation.
Based on my own military experience in similar types of conflict and on my direct observations throughout the first three months of this war, in my opinion, the IDF has taken all reasonable measures to achieve its mission while minimizing harm to the civilian population and maximizing humanitarian relief. Nor are Israel’s military objectives optional or negotiable. To eliminate the potential for a recurrence of another Oct. 7-like massacre, which Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly threatened, Hamas’s fighting capabilities must be destroyed; its ability to continue firing lethal rockets into the Israeli population must be denied; and every possible effort must be made to rescue the hostages.
IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says the military has discovered a large tunnel network in Gaza City, below the so-called Palestine Square.
He says troops of the 401st Armored Brigade, the Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit, and the Air Force’s Shaldag unit recently completed the capture of the Palestine Square area.
“The Palestine Square area houses Yahya Sinwar’s office, government offices, assets of senior Hamas officials, and there is a network of terror tunnels,” Hagari says.
Kibbutz Nir Oz00:00/04:53
Hagari says that the troops, using “accurate intelligence,” located the network of “strategic tunnels” in the area, which he says connect to Shifa Hospital.
“This is the area of the main command center, where senior Hamas members were on October 7 and during the fighting, and during the fighting, they moved to other areas,” he says.
He says the troops are continuing to investigate the tunnel network in the area.
LONDON — A Tanzanian national who had been missing since being taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 has been confirmed dead, Tanzania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced.
Joshua Mollel, 21, was a Tanzanian student who had been working as an agricultural intern at a kibbutz near Israel’s border with Gaza on Oct. 7, Tanzanian officials said.
“We have been informed by the Government of Israel that Joshua Mollel, a Young Tanzanian who was studying in Israel, and with whom we lost contact since October 7 2023, and with whom the Government has been making great efforts to obtain information on since then, was killed immediately after being captured by a group of Hamas on October 7th,” January Makamba, Tanzania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced on X, formerly known as Twitter.
[The ABC News Report continues]
Mollel’s body is believed to still be held by Hamas within the Gaza Strip, according to the Israel Foreign Ministry.
In a Facebook post, Kibbutz Nahal Oz sent condolences to Mollel’s family.
“This evening, we were informed that Joshua Luito Molal [sic], who was declared missing since 7th October, was kidnapped to the Gaza Strip and murdered,” announced Kibbutz Nahal Oz in the post. “His body is held by Hamas… May his memory be a blessing.”
At least 1,200 people were killed and 6,900 others injured when Hamas launched its surprise terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office. In Gaza, more than 18,600 people have been killed and more than 50,500 injured, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.
[The ABC News Report continues]
Eyat Shlein, Head of Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation (MASHAV) said they learned of Mollel’s death “with great sorrow.”
FOX News correspondent Gillian Turner reports on how hostage families are warning of rape by Hamas militants on ‘Special Report.’
A recently released Hamas hostage’s revelation of sexual violence against her fellow captives appears to refute anti-Israel progressives who tend to downplay or dismiss terrorists’ atrocities.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, was held hostage by Hamas with three of her children for 51 days following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israelis.
Her husband and eldest daughter were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the attack.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, was held hostage with three of her children by Hamas for 51 days following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on innocent Israelis. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)
[The Fox News Report continues]
“I heard the testimony directly from girls and heard things second hand,” Goldstein-Almog said. “Some of the sexual violence happened well into our time in Gaza, not in the first week.”
“But the way their bodies were desecrated, they don’t know how they will deal with that. It happened weeks into their time in Gaza,” she said.
“If they were released earlier, they would’ve been saved from experiencing sexual violence,” Goldstein-Almog added.
Goldstein-Almog said they “heard three stories firsthand of women saying they were sexually abused and we heard an additional story.” She added that “presumably, there are more instances” of sexual violence by Hamas.
Briahna Joy Gray, a former spokesperson for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, tweeted, “‘Believe all women’ was always an absurd overreach: woman should be heard, claims should be investigated, but evidence is required.” (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
The former hostage also said she “was threatened once when they thought I was wandering around and looking free” in the first apartment they were taken to and that “there was a threat that” she would “be handcuffed, but it didn’t happen.”
“I said I have kids and nothing happened to me,” Goldstein-Almog said. “It was the only time I felt under threat [of sexual violence].”
A spokesperson for the Biden administration State Department noted earlier this month that one of the reasons Hamas does not want to release women hostages is because “they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them.”
[The Fox News Report continues]
“The same is true of the allegations out of Israel,” Gray wrote in a Dec. 4 tweet. “But also, this isn’t a ‘believe women’ scenario bc no female victims have offered testimony.”
“Zionists are asking that we believe the uncorroborated eyewitness account of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in odd, fetishistic terms,” Gray continued in a subsequent tweet.
“Shame on Israel for not seriously investigating claims of rape and collecting rape kits,” she added.
Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was torched after she clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash over the lack of widespread condemnation of Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Washington state Democrat suggested that wasn’t true, and claimed she had already condemned Hamas’ treatment of women, before quickly turning the conversation back to Israel.
“But I think we have to remember Israel is a democracy. That is why they’re a strong ally of ours. And if they do not comply with international humanitarian law, they are bringing themselves to a place that makes it much more difficult strategically for them to be able to build allies, to keep public opinion with them, and frankly, morally, we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says,” Jayapal said.
“With respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. I’m asking you about Hamas,” Bash said.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal was torched after she clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash over the lack of widespread condemnation of Hamas’ use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the Oct. 7 attacks. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The lawmaker said she had already answered the question and added, “We have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children.”
[The Fox News Report continues]
“This is horrific and across the world, we must stand with our sisters, families, and survivors of rape and sexual assault everywhere to condemn this violence and hold perpetrators accountable,” Jayapal said.
Neither Jayapal nor Gray immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Houston Keene is a politics writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Houston.Keene@Fox.com and on
In 2015, Egypt flooded tunnels between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula with seawater.
The IDF has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’ tunnel complex in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday citing unnamed US officials, adding that the process would likely take weeks.
Some Biden administration officials have said the process could help destroy the tunnels, where Israel believes the terrorist group is hiding hostages, fighters and munitions, the Journal reported. Other officials have expressed concerns the seawater would endanger Gaza’s fresh water supply, the newspaper reported.
[The JPost Report continues]
Unclear how well the flooding method will work
[The JPost Report concludes]
The process could take weeks and therefore could allow Hamas’s fighters to evacuate, potentially taking the hostages with them. However, it isn’t clear whether Israel would wait until all hostages are returned.
[Editor’s Note: Security & Terrorism Expert Malcolm Nance (@Malcolm Nance) raised concerns over Gaza Health Ministry casualty reports on Nov. 27, posting to X “in Islam decedents should be buried within 24 hours. So precisely who had time to identify, document, prep, dig, and inter 16,000 KIA? The human evidence of the casualties would be overwhelming & obvious to the eye.” and “My assertion is the declared numbers don’t match the observed effort. According to HAMAS there should be dead victims EVERYWHERE in the streets or being buried in dozens of new mass graves.” and “FYI Destruction of buildings DOES NOT equate to accountable deaths” and “destruction of buildings does not equate to accountable deaths.”]
The war between Israel and Hamas rages not only within Gaza, where Israel has a decisive advantage, but also on the battlefield of public opinion, where Hamas seems to be winning. Among the most important and contested items in this information war is the number of Gazan civilians killed.
The military action in Gaza has tragically resulted in many civilian deaths, including children, mainly because Hamas deliberately embeds itself inside and under Gazan cities. Hamas’s human shield strategy, which its leaders acknowledge, is deliberately intended to lead to elevated civilian deaths, thereby ratcheting international pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire that would leave Hamas intact.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
The UN reported on Dec. 5 a cumulative total of 16,248 Gazan fatalities, 1,041 more than it reported on Dec. 2. Inexplicably, however, over the same period the UN reported 1,353 new fatalities among women and children — even more than the number of new deaths those days. To square the figures, Hamas would have us believe that the cumulative number of men of any age killed in Gaza declined by 312, from 4,563 to 4,251, over these three days.
Similar numerical manipulations can be found in many other daily reports. For example, on Oct. 19, the UN reported that the cumulative fatality figure rose by 307, while on the same day the number of children newly reported killed increased by 671 — somehow hundreds more than the total new fatalities.
On Oct. 26, the UN reported an increase of 481 cumulative fatalities, but newly reported women and children killed increased by 626 that day. On Oct. 29, the UN reported 302 more cumulative fatalities, but the number of newly reported women and children killed increased by 328. To swallow these figures, one would have to accept that Israel killed not a single adult male on any of those days.
There are statistical improbabilities found on several other days, too, when Hamas claims that fewer than 5% of newly reported deaths were men — six out of 216 on Oct. 31, four out of 306 on Nov. 7, and 44 out of 929 on Dec. 7. Based on these numbers, Hamas effectively claims that the IDF is doing everything possible (and more) not to kill combatants, or any men at all.
While casualty numbers can be fluid amid a war, the consistent one-sided nature, magnitude, and frequency of the numerical anomalies suggest Hamas is inflating the number of women and children killed in a manner that cannot be explained by statistical margins of error or identification lags, as some may contend. It is simply not believable that, from one day to the next, and on multiple occasions, fewer than one in 20 previously unidentified or newly found bodies were men.
Press reports from Dec. 5 indicate that the IDF believes the total death count of approximately 15,000 Gazans appears accurate, but that the figure includes more than 5,000 Hamas members, mostly men. On Dec. 9, Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi said that at least 7,000 terrorists have been killed. These figures haven’t been independently verified, but the balance it would imply between men, women and children makes much more sense than Hamas’s figures.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Any casualty estimate that takes into account Hamas deaths would starkly contradict the notion that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately, let alone the libelous charge of genocide. While the human cost of the war Hamas forced upon Israel undeniably remains high, it is time for the UN, NGOs, and political leaders to stop using Hamas figures in their assessment of the conflict.
Instead, these numbers must be seen for what they are: the propaganda of a terrorist group that has announced its intention to commit a “million” Oct. 7 massacres.
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken criticized the delay in the United Nation’s response to reports of Hamas’ sexual violence on October 7th and said the atrocities were “beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
The group’s ethics and policy director, Hadas Ziv, said, “What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times.”
ISRAELI LAWMAKER CALLS UN SECRETARY-GENERAL A ‘SPOKESMAN FOR HAMAS’
An Israeli combat medic also reported to the Associated Press shortly after the beginning of the war that many of the bodies of both men and women showed unmistakable signs of sexual assault, including blood around the groin and limbs distorted in odd angles.
After 50 days of silence on the issue, the United States declared on December 1st that they were opening an investigation into Hamas sexual crimes on October 7th.
This announcement came only after extensive pressure from Israel and Jewish women’s groups.
Guterres’ statement was criticized strongly by Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, who questioned why proven cases sexual violation should still need to be “investigated.”
Erdan noted the hypocrisy: “Surprisingly when it comes to the claims of Hamas and the ‘Gaza Ministry of Health’ against Israel regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza, for him there is no doubt and no need for ‘investigations.’”
David Katz, who works at the Israel Police’s criminal investigation division, said the police have witness testimony, video evidence, and photographs of victims’ bodies attesting to sexual assault. Israeli officials, first responders, and morgue workers also substantiate the rapes by Hamas jihadists during the Oct 7 attack.
Bilal Ziyadne, 18, a Bedouin hostage freed along with his sister, Aisha, describes how Hamas kidnapped his family even though they were Arabs.
He recounted to Channel 13, “I told them we were Arabs. They said to us, even though we’re Arabs, they’re kidnapping us.”
Bilal and Aisha are the only two members of their family who have been freed so far.
Hamas also kidnapped Bilal’s older brother Hamza and his father Youssef, who are still being held in Gaza.
Bilal reported that during his captivity, he and his sister had no idea there were other hostages taken.
[The Jewish Voice Report continues]
One relative, Abdul Ziyadne, 29, was killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th when he was camping on Zikim beach, and his body had been shot so many times, that it looked as if it had been “smothered” by bullets.
Another relative, Yosef Ziyadne 48, showed heroism when he rescued 31 Nova music festival attendees into his 14-seater minivan and managed to escape Hamas gunfire.
You have seen the video of my daughter Naama Levy. Everyone has. You have seen her dragged by her long brown hair from the back of a Jeep at gunpoint, somewhere in Gaza, her gray sweatpants covered in blood. You may have perhaps noticed that her ankles are cut, that she’s barefoot and limping. She is seriously injured. She is frightened. And I, her mother, am helpless in these moments of horror.
[The Free Press Report continues]
Before that day, every video our family had taken of Naama was joyful—dancing with friends, laughing with her three siblings, and simply enjoying life. Naama is only 19, but she’ll always be my baby girl. A girl who truly believes in the good of all people. She enjoys athletics and dreams of a career in diplomacy, and her greatest passion is helping those in need. As a girl, she was a member of the “Hands of Peace” delegation, which brings together American, Israeli, and Palestinian youths to promote global social change.
[The Free Press Report continues]
It has been deeply disturbing to see the United Nations and feminist organizations refuse to acknowledge that Hamas raped and committed appalling sexual crimes against women, simply because the victims are Jewish. It took two months for some to finally admit the scale and the brutality of the horror. Meanwhile, Israeli experts are gathering the evidence. Shari, a volunteer worker at the Shura military morgue, told The Washington Post about what she documented: “We saw many women with bloody underwear, with broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises.”
[The Free Press Report continues]
On Monday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that one of the reasons Hamas doesn’t want to release the young female hostages “is they don’t want these women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.”
Everyone knows exactly what he means.
What would you do if your daughter were being held hostage by violent rapists and murderers for two months? Perhaps the better question is: What wouldn’t you do?
[The Free Press Report continues]
In addition to being Naama Levy’s mother, I’m also a primary care doctor and the team physician for Israel’s women’s soccer team. I work with young women, and I understand the medical risks of spending every day in darkness, without enough nutrition or medical care or even basic hygiene. As a mother, I simply worry: Did my daughter’s captors give her a clean change of clothes, or is she still sitting in the same bloody sweatpants she was abducted in?
[The Free Press Report continues]
The seventeen female hostages are not bargaining chips to be debated by diplomats. They are daughters, and one of them is mine. My primal scream should be the scream of mothers everywhere. Bring her home now!
Ayelet Levy-Shachar is Naama’s mother. She is a primary care physician for families and for the Israeli women’s soccer team. She is a mother of four and lives in Ra’anana.
In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
[The Free Press Report continues]
Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.
I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.
Just as disturbing as such incidents—and there are too many to recount—has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.
Testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill showed that they had been well-briefed by the lawyers their universities retain for such occasions.
[The Free Press Report continues]
The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated “the brutality of racist violence in this country” and gave her an “acute sense of vulnerability.” She was “reminded, again, how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.” In nothing that Gay said last Tuesday did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.
In a memorandum to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. . . . I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”
[The Free Press Report continues]
Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.
Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.
Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff:
Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?
Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?
Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.
Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”
Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!
Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.
[The Free Press Report continues]
A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity.
For German academics of Jewish heritage, particularly those who had married gentiles and converted to Christianity, it was disorienting.
The case of Victor Klemperer, a convert to Christianity married to a gentile, is illustrative. A veteran of World War I, Klemperer was appointed Professor of Romance Languages and Literature at Dresden University of Technology in 1920. “I am nothing but a German or German European,” Klemperer wrote in his diary, one of the most illuminating testaments of the German Jewish nightmare. Throughout the 1930s, he maintained that it was the Nazis who were “un-German.” “I. . . feel shame for Germany,” he wrote after Hitler had come to power. “I have truly always felt German.”
Yet the atmosphere at German universities grew steadily more toxic even for the most assimilated of Jews.
In April 1933, under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, all Jewish civil servants, including judges, were removed from office, followed a month later by university lecturers. Klemperer recorded his agonized reaction in his diary:
March 10, 1933. . . . It is astounding how easily everything collapses. . . wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, never-ending propaganda. On Saturday. . . I heard a part of Hitler’s speech in Königsberg [the East Prussian university at which Immanuel Kant had spent his life]. . . I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling. . . . How long will I retain my professorship?
Klemperer managed to hang on to his chair for another two years. On May 2, 1935, however, the blow fell:
On Tuesday morning, without any previous notification—two sheets delivered by post. “On the basis of para 6 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service I have. . . recommended your dismissal.”. . . At first, I felt alternately dumb and slightly romantic; now there is only bitterness and wretchedness.
Five months later, to add insult to injury, he was barred from the university library reading room “as a non-Aryan.” What followed was a kind of relentless whittling away of his rights as a citizen.
[The Free Press Report continues]
He remained in Dresden after the occupation of eastern Germany. It was not long before he began to notice resemblances between the language of the new Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Third Reich. Like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, Klemperer understood that the totalitarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left had fundamentally similar characteristics. In particular, they loved to impose Newspeak on those they subjugated.
Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way. A few examples will suffice.
SS Oberführer Konrad Meyer, a professor of agronomy at the University of Berlin, was one of the experts who helped devise Heinrich Himmler’s “General Plan East” (Generalplan Ost) which, in the expectation of victory over the Soviet Union, was supposed to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south. Meyer’s version proposed establishing three vast “marcher settlements” with around five million German settlers. The fate of the peoples currently living there would be either annihilation or ethnic cleansing.
[The Free Press Report continues]
The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.
The Holocaust remains an exceptional historical crime—distinct from other acts of organized lethal violence directed against other minorities—precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities. That is why American universities cannot regard antisemitism as just another expression of “hate,” no different from, say, Islamophobia—a neologism that should not be mentioned in the same breath. That is why Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible.
That is why rational minds recoil from her argument that antisemitism on the Harvard campus is tolerable so long as genocide is not being perpetrated.
[The Free Press Report continues]
Niall Ferguson is a trustee of the University of Austin, as well as Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of, among many works, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (Penguin).
Disclaimer: This essay is a work of fiction. The author is a white Jewish male in his 60s. He is not a teenage African-American co-ed. But he is a novelist with a number of titles to his name, so he makes up stories and invents characters for a living. Well, not exactly a living. Okay, that’s your trigger warning if emotional distress and cultural grievance has already set in and you are grinding down what’s left of your teeth.
Dear Mom and Dad,
My first semester of college is almost over. Exams start this week with organic chemistry. Can you believe it? Your daughter’s dreams of one day becoming a doctor are underway! I promised I would not waste this opportunity, and I haven’t.
That’s mainly why I haven’t written these past two months—long hours of studying and making new friends. But there was another reason. A little disturbing, which is why I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t want you to worry.
Okay. Please sit down. So here goes . . . there was this student group on campus comprised of mostly white boys from the south who are opposed to diversity on our campus. They say that Blacks have taken scholarships and grants away from more deserving white kids. They feel that African-Americans and other people of color are inferior. They also say that we are prone to violence, and demanding of government handouts. They say that George Floyd gave African-Americans a blank check to vandalize businesses and intimidate white people.
It’s just gross.
Well, they started making their feelings known in a much more aggressive manner. Protests outside of the main library; sit-ins at the President’s office; disruption of classes; scheduled walk-outs; blocking the entrance to the student center; shoving Black students; racist graffiti everywhere: “Blacks get out!”; “First George Floyd, you’re next!”; “Take your welfare elsewhere!”
[The Jewish Journal Essay continues]
You’ll love this part. My roommates. You met all three of them on move-in day. All white girls, right—they stood by me throughout the entirety of this campus unrest. And some white football players I know from one of my classes escorted me to the dining hall and libraries.
In fact, most white kids supported students of color in different ways (someone baked me cupcakes with smiley faces as frosting!). They all wanted us to know that they had our backs, and they openly rejected the racist hatemongers. They even scheduled a nighttime vigil where everyone held candles and chanted songs from the Civil Rights era.
It gets better: The President of the university, a white female, made it clear almost immediately that the First Amendment does not protect such harassing, harmful, despicable speech. “Lynch Blacks!” She said this university is better than that, and she and the administration won’t tolerate it. The actions of the students and faculty violated not only the university’s Code of Conduct, but broke the trust that students and parents have that safety, mutual respect, and a collegial environment will be given the highest priority.
[The Jewish Journal Essay continues]
Almost immediately after the surreal murder of Jews in southern Israel on October 7, large crowds of masked pro-Hamas sympathizers have been parading around campus, threatening and intimidating Jews, spreading fear, calling for a global “Jihad!” (everyone knows what that means!), ripping down those hostage posters, and basically doing some of the same things that the white racists were doing to us.
[The Jewish Journal Essay continues]
As a black girl, I am sensitive to racism, of course. But I know about antisemitism, and read about the Holocaust. And yet I have never seen anything like this, hatred so overt, a lynch mob in search of Jews. And nobody seems to want to help. They are looking the other way. I don’t know what to make of it all.
The Jews are standing alone. So much for their white privilege.
On that unpleasant note, I must get back to the books. But I’ll see you for Christmas after finals. Maybe I’ll have better news.
Your loving daughter,
Latifa
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”
The president of Harvard University apologized in an interview with the school’s student newspaper after facing widespread condemnation for her disastrous congressional testimony this week, in which she and other university presidents failed to explicitly say calls for genocide of Jewish people constituted bullying and harassment on campus.
“I am sorry,” Harvard University president Claudine Gay said to The Harvard Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”
The apology came just days after Gay, the president of the University of Pennsylvania and the president of MIT testified at a House committee hearing focused on antisemitism on campus, to widespread criticism that they have not done enough to ensure the safety of Jewish students and others at their respective schools.
Harvard, UPenn and MIT have all come under fire – along with other US academic institutions – over perceived inaction against antisemitism on their campuses, especially in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the subsequent war.
[The CNN Report continues]
Gay told the Harvard student paper that she regretted what she said.
“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she said to The Crimson.
“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay told the newspaper. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
[The CNN Report continues]
Flood of criticism
Gay has faced plenty of calls to resign, most notably from Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate who has been a vocal critic of how universities have addressed antisemitism on campus
“Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses,” Ackman wrote in a post on X earlier this week, “exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.”
[The CNN Report continues]
Underscoring the anger at the three university presidents’ testimony, on Friday a bipartisan group of more than 70 US lawmakers sent a letter to board members of all three universities, demanding the dismissal of Gay and the presidents of UPenn and MIT.
“Given this moment of crisis, we demand that your boards immediately remove each of these presidents from their positions and that you provide an actionable plan to ensure that Jewish and Israeli students, teachers, and faculty are safe on your campuses,” the lawmakers wrote.
[The CNN Report continues]
“I was not focused on – but I should have been – the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil. Plain, and simple,” Magill said in a video posted on X. “I want to be clear: A call for genocide of Jewish people … would be harassment or intimidation.”
Unlike Gay, however, Magill has not apologized for her testimony.
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip—It is incredibly difficult for them to say so in public, but many Palestinians in Gaza are furious with Hamas, their de facto rulers who invited a brutal Israeli backlash by launching the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Daily Beast was told to stop reporting and forced to delete videos while working on this story, but we can report that residents of Gaza say they have been robbed, silenced, and betrayed by Hamas.
As lawlessness rises in the smoldering rubble of Gaza, one resident said Hamas operatives stole valuables from her and other women.
[The Daily Beast Report continues]
When The Daily Beast was talking to a group of people about their attitude toward Hamas and their feelings about the prisoner swaps, an agent from the Interior Ministry in civilian clothes approached and asked us to stop the interviews and delete our recordings.
Another Hamas agent inside a hospital in Gaza also asked The Daily Beast to delete videos showing the crowds of injured people in a hospital corridor.
“There is no democracy in Gaza when you want to speak against Hamas or its de facto government. We fear they will arrest us during the war, or after the war if we spoke against them. They can easily kill us even, and tell the world we are spies,” said Hasan Ahmed, 39, who was in the hospital with his injured brother.
“My brother needs his bandages changed daily. They attend to some of their patients promptly, but when it comes to my brother, they change the bandages every two or three days. This has reached a point where maggots have emerged from the wound. I shouted at the nurses, creating chaos until they reluctantly changed the dressing. I have to repeat this process every two days to save my brother’s hand from amputation.”
[The Daily Beast Report continues]
“My neighbor saw police attacking potential thieves and killed one of them. Not sure if the killing was because they stole the items or because they are one of the spies,” he said. “Before they went to attack Israel on Oct. 7, they should have ensured that Gaza was flooded with food and medical items. People here will die of hunger.”
Even those with family members who supported the Hamas attack on Israel have been left feeling badly let down.
Um Ahmed, 55, who lives in al-Nuseirat refugee camp in southern Gaza, said her son joined the raid over the border on Oct. 7 despite her warnings. She hasn’t heard from him since, but says he has been spotted in a prison in Jerusalem.
She wants to know why Hamas has failed to secure his release in exchange for the Israeli hostages. “Hamas recently conducted a swap deal, releasing prisoners in the West Bank. However, our sons, captured on Oct. 7, remain in Israeli jails. We live in uncertainty about their well-being,” she said.
“Hamas has lost support in Gaza. Now it strives to gain favor in the West Bank, recognizing its failure here. People in Gaza fear Hamas, and the organization’s efforts are concentrated on winning support elsewhere.”
Israeli authorities have collected significant evidence to back up claims that men were also subjected to sexual assault by Gaza terrorists during the October 7th invasion, a rape survivors’ advocacy group claims.
[The World Israel News Report continues]
During the interview, Sherer said that the ongoing Israeli police investigation into sex crimes by Gaza terrorists in Israel has revealed significant evidence that Israeli men were also raped during the invasion of October 7th.
“There was sexual violence and rape in these communities in the south of Israel. We have a few living survivors – not a lot – of both genders. It didn’t only happen to women, it happened to men as well.”
“Aside from finding bodies of people who were murdered, a lot of the bodies were mutilated. Terrorists made sure to disgrace these people and dishonor them.”
On Monday, Shelly Harush, the police commander leading the investigation into sexual violence on October 7th, told a Knesset committee hearing that over 1,500 testimonials of rape or evidence of rape have been collected thus far.
[The World Israel News Report continues]
After nearly two months, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently announced an investigation into the sex crimes of invading Gaza terrorists.
“There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted,” Guterres tweeted. “Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere.”
When the temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel collapsed on Friday, it was because of the women. The deal had been that Hamas would free most of the remaining women and children in its captivity in exchange for a pause in fighting. Hamas still holds 137 Israeli hostages, among them 17 women. In talks last week, Hamas refused to send a list of the next batch of women—apparently around 10—to be released, but suddenly offered to start discussing the release of elderly men instead.
The Israelis were stunned. “Our deal was [releasing] the women,” one senior Biden administration official told me about the collapse and the Israelis’ thinking. “We’ll take the men, sure, but they’re not going to jump the line.” Still, Hamas refused to release the remaining women in its custody, the ceasefire collapsed, and we’re now back to watching the resumption and expansion of Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
But why did Hamas refuse to release the rest of the female captives? Speaking on Monday during his daily briefing, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that “it seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over that they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is because they don’t want these women to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.”
[The Puck Report continues]
But a second senior administration official disputed that reasoning. “I don’t think Hamas gives a flying fuck” about what the hostages say when they’re released, this official contended. “What I understand is, part of the assumption is just that they don’t want to release them because they want to continue to abuse them.”
The War’s #MeToo Moment
These allegations come at a time when the Israeli government has been pushing hard the stories of Hamas’s serial, systematic rape of Israeli women on October 7. Testimony given by police, first responders, and survivors of the massacre tell a horrifying and gruesome story: women’s bodies that were found stripped naked and bleeding from their genitals; women who had knives, nails, and other objects shoved into their vaginas; women who had their breasts lopped off while still alive; women whose pelvises were broken from the sheer force of the sexual assault; women who had been gang-raped, executed, and then had their faces and genitals mutilated. “We certainly understand why our Israeli partners would be coming to the conclusion” that these women had been brutally raped, one senior administration source told me.
There were also cases of Israeli men who were raped or had their genitalia cut or shot off. In one case, a dead person’s genitals were so badly mutilated that investigators couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman.
We are hearing more about the sexual violence of October 7 now for several reasons. In part, this is because the evidence took time to collect—there are very few surviving victims, and some of the survivors, it seems, are still in Hamas custody. In part, the Israeli government looks to be abandoning its early attempts to shield its already traumatized population from the details. In the first days and weeks after October 7, Israeli media showed interviews with first responders who, though utterly shaken by what they had seen at the Nova rave and in the kibbutzim, spoke elliptically about the “abuse” and desecration of the bodies they had seen. Israeli news outlets were very careful about what they shared about the rapes, sometimes even adding that they had decided not to print certain details. The public had been traumatized enough, the thinking went, and telling them about such horrors would just be counterproductive at a time when the country needed to band together.
[The Puck Report continues]
And that, it seems, is the point: to make Hamas even more impossible to defend, to make the Israeli campaign against the terror organization harder to criticize, and to undermine the credibility of international organizations who have been criticizing the Israeli government. Israeli women were brutalized on October 7, and now they will help the Israeli government regain the moral high ground it has lost over the last two months.
Emma Goldberg and Marc Tracy talked to more than two dozen Jewish Americans, including those within the same families, about their views on Israel.
Marc Kornblatt prepared uneasily last month for his daughter, Louisa, to arrive for 10 days with the family. Her homecomings once brought the comfort of movie nights and card games, but this year was different.
Mr. Kornblatt sang under his breath some lyrics from “West Side Story”: “Get cool, boy.” He and his wife discussed: How would they greet their child? Would they acknowledge the emotional distance, the slights that had piled up from afar?
He and his wife, Judith, had moved away from Madison, Wis., to live in Tel Aviv, where they felt a real sense of belonging as Jews. Around the same time, their daughter, attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, came to oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
[The New York Times Report continues]
For at least a half-century, American Jews — the substantial majority of whom tend to be liberal and vote Democratic — have largely supported the Jewish state across the spectrum of age, partisanship and religious denomination. Recent polling suggests that that is changing.
Even before the war, younger American Jews were generally less attached to Israel than their elders, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. (Most of the people interviewed for this article did not identify as Orthodox, a small segment of the American Jewish population who tend to have a stronger attachment to Israel than others do.)
A survey that the Democratic pollster GBAO Strategies conducted in November, a few weeks after the start of the war, for the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, found a striking generation gap in American Jews’ attitudes toward President Biden’s strong support for Israel: Eighty-two percent of those 36 or older supported the president, but only 53 percent of those 18 to 35 felt that way.
Jim Gerstein, who conducted the survey, said that younger American Jews have little or no memory of an underdog Israel surrounded by enemy states or terrorized by suicide bombings. Instead, they grew up when Israel had developed into a thriving economic and regional military power, backed by the United States and largely insulated from its neighbors — a perspective that inclined them to judge Israel more harshly, especially under the conservative leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Jewish voters are very liberal, and younger Jews even more so, and hold a different perspective of Israel than older generations,” he said.
‘How do I bridge this?’
The parents of Mr. Schwartz, the Columbia student, said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.
“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.
Still, he said he felt that his son’s education downplayed “the fact that Israel is and has been surrounded by terrorists who do want to destroy them.”
Jonathan Taubes, who grew up in a right-leaning modern Orthodox community in New Jersey, understands that his own perception of Israel is starkly different from that of his parents, who remember the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. His mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Recently, she went to visit Mr. Taubes in Brooklyn, and began discussing her fears of anti-Jewish hatred as soon as she walked into his apartment.
Mr. Taubes, 30, felt torn between wanting to comfort his mother and feeling uneasy with her exclusive focus on Jewish pain.
“I was sort of trying to hold both sides — a progressive left one, and a defensive Jewish one,” he explained. “It’s a feeling of discomfort, like, how do I manage this, how do I bridge this?”
“There’s this feeling of being alienated from the world, but then the added layer of strife and division within our own family,” Mr. Taubes added. “It’s an extra layer of pain.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
“I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” she said. “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”
As Ms. Kornblatt’s political views were shifting, her parents moved in the opposite direction, becoming so attached to Israel that they decided in 2019 to make it their home.
The Kornblatt parents had long felt a unique sense of comfort when spending time in Israel, and realized during a visit to Tel Aviv that they might want to put down roots there. Louisa’s older brother Jake Kornblatt, 35, who is politically aligned with their parents, also made Tel Aviv his permanent home.
“We felt like, for the first time, we weren’t going to be the other,” the elder Mr. Kornblatt said.
What he hadn’t expected, he added, was that moving to Israel would bring on a new kind of isolation. “When I moved to Israel, all of a sudden I was a Jew and colonialist and apartheid lover,” he said, referring partly to comments from American friends and students on social media.
[The New York Times Report continues]
“Has there been racism, has there been a lot of injustice, have there been war crimes potentially? Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”
Jake Kornblatt, with his wife, Tamar Asnko
His sister seems to have “this idea of this insidious plan of Zionists coming in and wanting to subjugate people,” he said. “Has there been racism, has there been a lot of injustice, have there been war crimes, potentially? Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”
He disagrees with her use of the word apartheid to describe Israel. “If you use this type of language, the other side is not going to be able to listen to you,” he said.
Tamar Asnko, 36, an Israeli Jew who is married to Jake, said she doesn’t agree with Louisa on everything, though she found their recent discussions in Tel Aviv interesting.
Ms. Asnko moved to Israel from Ethiopia when she was 4, and Israel is the only place she calls home. “It’s complicated,” she said. “There isn’t black and white here. There’s a middle ground. I feel like people who don’t live here don’t understand the middle ground.”
In the final days of her visit, Louisa Kornblatt felt tension in her parents’ home. She walked into the apartment after volunteering to help Palestinian families harvest olives in the West Bank. She gave her father a hug and noticed that he didn’t hug her back.
Mr. Kornblatt told his daughter that he was hurt that she would use her precious time on a visit with family to volunteer in the West Bank. “Does this have to be the time?” she recalled him asking her, to which she replied: “Yeah, this is the time.”
In the final 45 minutes before departing for the airport, as Ms. Kornblatt was packing, the family had one last noisy argument about what political solutions to the war were possible. Then they walked outside to get her a taxi, and hugged one another.
“I didn’t leave with any doubt that my family loves me,” Ms. Kornblatt said.
Hamas drugged hostages seized from Israel during the terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre as they were being released “so that they would look happy” to the outside world, according to Israel’s Health Ministry.
Dr. Hagar Mizrahi, head of the ministry’s general medicine division, told Israeli lawmakers on Tuesday that Hamas terrorists gave tranquilizer pills to the captives who were set to be freed from captivity in Gaza as part of a temporary ceasefire deal in order to make them appear calm and happy.
Speaking to the Health Committee of Israel’s parliament, known as the Knesset, Mizrahi specifically named the drug Clonazepam. The drug — known as Clonex in Israel and sold under the brand names Klonopin and Rivotril elsewhere — is used to prevent and treat various mental health issues, including bipolar mania and anxiety disorders.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Dozens of the hostages, who included the elderly and young children, were recently released as part of a temporary week-long ceasefire and hostage-prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas. The arrangement ended on Friday when both sides could not reach an agreement to extend the truce.
Israeli health authorities have examined the freed hostages and found they suffered severe weight loss during their captivity in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas.
On Tuesday, Mizrahi highlighted the cruel treatment that the hostages suffered at the hands of the terror group.
“In the hospitals, forensic doctors documented the war crimes left on the returnees” Mizrahi told Israeli lawmakers. “Some of the crimes are starvation, lack of medical treatment, and prolonged shackles.”
The Health Ministry representative added: “War crimes were also documented, the main of which was the lack of adequate medical treatment. There was certainly evidence of this. There were cases of poor feeding that I ask not to expand on — not only because of the secrecy but also because of the meaning it has on the people who are there.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Thomas Hand, the father of nine-year-old Emily Hand who was released by Hamas during the ceasefire, revealed last week that his daughter initially cried herself to sleep and spoke in a whisper because she was conditioned in captivity not to make any noise.
The State Department revealed Monday the reason why Hamas continues to hold hostages underground is the Gaza Strip. More specifically, why they are refusing to release female hostages.
According to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, the Iranian backed terrorist organization isn’t releasing additional female hostages, who were violently taken from their homes and a music festival in Israel on October 7, because they know and have experienced too much while in captivity. In other words, they don’t want them speaking out about what has been done to them.
[The Town Hall Report continues]
Hamas is still holding a number of Americans hostage. The White House claims they are still working to get them home.
One of my oldest childhood memories is from the day I learned how to color the Egyptian flag. It started out like any other school day in Cairo, until my kindergarten teacher told us that it was a very special day for Egypt: It was the first anniversary of Sinai Liberation Day, which marked the end of the war with Israel and the restoration of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai.
[The Newsweek Report concludes]
This all culminated on Oct. 7, when the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, along with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched a terrorist attack against Israel out of the Gaza Strip, killing more than a thousand innocent civilians and taking more than 200 hostages back to Gaza. In response, Israel declared war against Hamas, with the objective of fully demilitarizing the Gaza Strip and liberating the hostages. And around the world, pan-Islamist organizations mobilized large demonstrations to exert political pressure on Israel and erode public support for its right to defend itself.
Massive disinformation campaigns have been launched on social media platforms, exhibiting the hallmarks of structured communication campaigns and fielding clever soundbites and reductionist talking points to achieve the same goal.
These talking points are not about defending the Palestinian right to self-determination. They have descended into an outright defense of Hamas, including rampant justifications of the atrocities of Oct. 7.
As someone whose family fought Israel valiantly on the battlefield, this cannot stand.
It is not a defense of Palestinian rights to justify atrocities, even those committed in their name.
It is time for all stakeholders to shoulder their historical responsibility to reclaim control of the Palestinian cause. It is time for governments and international organizations to call out the IRGC campaign of hybrid and proxy warfare and expose its political and financial links.
It is time we all stood up for peace and against terrorism. It is time to put an end to turmoil in the Middle East: the tragic headlines, the terrorist attacks, the wars, the funerals, the flag-draped coffins, the hatred and the disinformation. If there is one silver lining in all of this, it is the prospect of peace—a meaningful, sustainable peace that puts an end to all the hatred and suffering.
I saw it in my childhood, and I know I can see it again today.
Israeli actress Gal Gadot blasted the international community for its silence about rape and sexual violence that Israeli women experienced by the hands of Hamas terrorists during the deadly massacre that took place in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
In an Instagram post on Sunday, the Wonder Woman 1984 star said “the world has failed the women of Oct. 7” and called for the immediate release of every female hostage seized by Hamas during the terror group’s onslaught.
“We say we believe women. Stand with women. Speak out for women,” she wrote in her statement. “Within hours of the Oct. 7 attack, the first blood-chilling video emerged of Shani Louk being paraded naked and defiled by her proud assailants. Yet two months later women are still hostage to these rapists and the world has failed to call this situation what it is: an urgent emergency that demands a decisive response.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
A new report from The Sunday Times in the United Kingdom included chilling testimonies about sexual violence, including gang rape, that Hamas terrorists carrying out on their victims during the Oct. 7 attacks. Israeli forensic teams who examined the bodies of those murdered by Hamas that day said they found multiple signs of rape and torture.
amNY: Now shifting to the Israel-Hamas conflict, even with many hostages being released in recent days there’s still well over 100 in captivity. I know you’ve talked about getting the hostages home being a big priority for you, is there anything that you can do in your position to expedite their return?
Sen. Gillibrand: Yes, I can keep their stories alive. I’ve gone to the floor three times to tell their stories about who is being held hostage. The children, the babies, the families, the mothers. Talk about their lives, talk about who they are, to make sure that the news media and the national consciousness does not lose sight of these innocent lives that are being held and may not survive if they’re continuously held. So we need those hostages home, there’s still nine Americans being held hostage. This is something every American citizen should care about, regardless of how you see this conflict. And so I am talking about the hostages, often in news media on the Senate floor and lifting up their stories, so they will not be forgotten.
amNY: With nearly 15,000 Palestinians already killed since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and near daily demonstrations here in the city calling for a ceasefire, at what point would you support a more permanent end to the fighting?
Sen. Gillibrand: I would support an end to the fighting as soon as we can get the hostages home and as soon as we can have resolution. What has to happen is humanitarian pauses are fine for hostage release, and if hostages are being released every day, we can support humanitarian pauses. But I think, frankly, when people use the term ceasefire, they’re thinking more broadly about an end to the conflict, which I also want to see an end to the conflict. But what a ceasefire actually means is that Israel can’t get those hostages back. It can’t fight against Hamas. It can’t stop bombs coming across their border. It can’t stop missiles. It can’t do anything to protect its country, can’t protect Israel, can’t protect Israelis. Hamas has said it would like a ceasefire so that it can invade Israel again and steal more hostages and kill more people. They have said they will do this over and over and over again. So a ceasefire is not good for innocent vulnerable Palestinians. It’s not good for any Israeli citizen. It just means Hamas wins.
amNY: Do you think there’s another way that innocent Palestinians can be protected and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza as well?
Sen. Gillibrand: Well, we’re getting 100 trucks in a day, which is what the aid organizations asked for. But we need the Arab allies to take refugees. Like we really need Egypt to open the Rafah Gate, open the border, let refugees come for whatever time it takes for this conflict to end. We need Jordan, we need Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, all to take refugees until the conflict is over. That’s the safest way to defeat Hamas and protect innocent Palestinians. We also are hoping to vote on a supplemental bill of $10 billion of humanitarian aid.
Kept in the dark. Forced to sit in silence. Fed only meager rations. These and even more chilling scraps of information are beginning to show how hostages survived in Hamas captivity.
Around 240 people, from infants to octogenarians, were taken hostage during Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. Dozens have been freed but many more remain missing, presumed to be held by the Palestinian militant organization and other groups in Gaza, as the warring sides resume battle.
[The CNN Report continues]
Under the terms of the deal between Israel and Hamas, most of those released are women, children and foreign workers. As of Friday, only one adult Israeli man – who also had Russian citizenship – had been released and no members of the Israeli military. Hostages are believed to be spread across locations and in the hands of different groups. It’s already seeming that not all hostages were treated the same way; the story of each new person recovered will add to the understanding.
Kept in the dark amid ‘nonstop bombing’
Adina Moshe was dragged from her safe room at home in Israel, taken to Gaza and forced into tunnels five stories underground, her nephew Eyal Nouri said.
“They took her inside the tunnels … she walked, bare feet in the mud of the tunnels,” he told CNN of the first hours of her captivity. “It was very hard to breathe. They marched [for] hours in the tunnels.”
Moshe said his aunt was held in an underground room where the lights were switched on for only two hours a day. The darkness was literal and also figurative, Nouri said. Deprived of any information, their other senses and imaginations became keener.
“They didn’t know anything about what happened above,” Nouri said. “They just heard the nonstop bombing until the day before their release. Suddenly, there was amazing silence and they knew something was going to happen but they didn’t know what.”
[The CNN Report continues]
“It’s her birthday on the 17th of [November]. She will be 9,” he said. “She won’t even know what day it is. She won’t know it’s her birthday. There will be no birthday cake. No party, no friends. She will just be petrified in a tunnel under Gaza. That is her birthday.”
[The CNN Report continues]
“That’s terrifying. Being pulled, dragged, pushed … under gunfire probably,” Hand said. An estimated 40-50% of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged, independent researchers say, and the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Wednesday up to 1.8 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are thought to be internally displaced.
Hand was right about Emily losing track of time. Released on the 50th day of captivity inside what she called “the box,” the little girl told her father she thought she had been gone for a year.
Forced to endure in silence
“The most shocking, disturbing part of meeting her was she was just whispering, you couldn’t hear her. I had to put my ear on her lips,” Hand said of Emily. “She’d been conditioned not to make any noise.”
Both Emily and Hila dared only to whisper, even once they were back with their families. Three days later, Hand said he could hear Emily from about a meter (three feet) away when she talked, but when she cried she buried herself under bedclothes and was almost silent.
[The CNN Report continues]
Fed survival rations
Captives ate the same food as the guards, according to Lifshitz, who was released with her neighbor on October 24.
Grandmother Ruth Munder told Israel’s Channel 13 conditions got worse as the captivity went on, and as Israel’s vise on Gaza tightened. UN officials have warned of “massive outbreaks of infectious disease and hunger” in the enclave due to Israel’s strict blockade on all imports beyond a small amount of humanitarian aid.
At the beginning, a guard brought chicken, rice, canned goods and cheese for the hostages. “When we got up we had tea and in the evening once again tea and sweet things for the children,” Munder said, “until the economic situation started to be bad and people were hungry.”
Adina Moshe said in her tunnel room, “They were fed only rice, some beans from cans, which they tried to avoid eating so as not to have stomachache,” her nephew reported.
[The CNN Report continues]
Thai former captive Uthai Saengnuan said his concern was with his countrymen still in captivity.
Physical and mental wounds
Eitan, the 12-year-old, was beaten when he arrived in Gaza, his aunt also said. “Perhaps I was naïve but I thought he would be well-treated. But no, they are monsters,” she said of his Hamas captors.
Emily Hand said she was not hit and her father said he believed harsh voices were enough to make her do what was wanted.
When her friend Hila talks of her captivity, it’s like she’s describing a scene from a movie she watched, not something she went through herself, her uncle Yair Rotem told CNN.
“She’s a little bit distant now, she’s a little bit cold,” he said. “She talks about things that happened like it’s in third person, like it happened to someone else. She’ll say she saw horrible things, but she says it with a straight face.”
The father of a Thai hostage who spoke to his son after he was freed said he sounded in good health and good spirits. “He suffered from bugs biting him while in captivity,” Chumpron Jirachart, father of Manee Jirachart, told CNN.
[The CNN Report continues]
“You can see on her body that she was dragged from place to place, that she was handcuffed,” he said. “She has chemical wounds from not treating her basic needs.”
First steps to recovery
Rehabilitation will take time. Former detainees may experience a range of layered psychological impacts including anxiety, depression, disorientation, grief, post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt, experts say.
Many hostages lost their homes in the October 7 attacks; as they return, some are also finding out how many of their friends and relatives were killed.
[The CNN Report continues]
But their patients were strong and determined.
“Over the last five days, we met children who were initially withdrawn and lost, and after a day or two, they were already running around the ward, playing and laughing.”
Israel said Friday it believed 137 hostages taken captive on October 7 remained in Gaza.
The disowned son of a Hamas co-founder on Thursday evening called on Israel to kill his father along with all leaders of the Palestinian terror group, saying that failure to do so would result in the terrorists “ethnically cleansing humanity.”
Mosab Hassan Yousef — the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who was most recently released from an Israeli prison in July of this year after spending 21 months in detention — said that it was incumbent on Israel to set a definitive timeline for the release of all hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and that if the timeline is not met, the country should proceed to eliminate top Hamas leaders, including his own father.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Yousef warned that now that most of the women and children had been returned, Hamas was likely to attempt to extend the truce as long as possible so that it could recalibrate and rearm. The rest of the hostages still in Gaza, averred Yousef, should be treated as “war prisoners” and Israel’s efforts should be centered on eradicating the terror group.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Hamas “ethnically cleansed close to 20 communities based on their race, ethnicity, and religion, and this is what defines genocide,” he said of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“Their first crime was genocide. Their second crime was taking human shields,”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“There’s a big difference,” he said, and added that the war “should not be measured by how many died on each side.”
[The Algemeiner Report concludes]
“They lied when they said they are a Palestinian resistance group,” Yousef said of Hamas. “They are a religious group waging holy war against the whole world, not only Israel. They want to dominate the globe.”
View a YouTube video of the full hour plus talk by Mosab Hassan Yousef (Courtesy of CBN News).
Four people were killed and five were wounded Thursday, one of them seriously, in a terror shooting attack claimed by Hamas at the entrance to Jerusalem, police and medics said.
One of those killed was a civilian who fired at the terrorists and was mistaken by other responders for one of the shooters.
The victims were named later as Livia Dikman, 24, Ashdod rabbinical judge Elimelech Wasserman, 73, and Hannah Ifergan, who was in her 60s. The civilian hit by friendly fire was named as Yuval Doron Castleman, 38.
According to police, at around 7:40 a.m., two Palestinian gunmen got out of a vehicle on Weizmann Boulevard at the main entrance to the capital and opened fire at people at a bus stop.
Police said two off-duty soldiers and an armed civilian in the area returned fire, killing the two terrorists. Both soldiers had been on a break from fighting in the Gaza Strip, and were heading back to the front line when the attack occurred.
[The Times of Israel Report continues]
“Surveillance camera footage shows the shooting attack at the entrance to Jerusalem this morning. Two people were killed, and at least seven others were hurt. Two off-duty soldiers and an armed civilian shot the terrorists dead. pic.twitter.com/CwucVb5IV7
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) November 30, 2023
The Mevasseret Zion resident was critically wounded and later declared dead.
The terrorists were named as brothers Murad Nemer, 38, and Ibrahim Nemer, 30, residents of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher. According to the Shin Bet security agency, the pair were Hamas members and previously jailed for terror activity.
Murad was jailed between 2010 and 2020 for planning terror attacks under directions of terror elements in the Gaza Strip and Ibrahim was jailed in 2014 for undisclosed terror activity, the agency said.
On Thursday afternoon, Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack and hailed the perpetrators as “jihad-waging martyrs.”
The terror group said that the assault came in response to Israel’s war against it in Gaza and the killing of two children in the West Bank’s Jenin on Wednesday. Adam al-Ghoul, 8, and Basel Abu al-Wafa, 15, as well as two senior terror commanders, were killed yesterday by Israeli forces in Jenin. Hamas claimed 15-year-old al-Wafa as one of its members.
[The Time of Israel Report continues]
The bus stop was the scene of a deadly bomb attack almost exactly a year ago.
Separately on Thursday, two reservist soldiers were lightly hurt in a car-ramming attack at a checkpoint in the northern Jordan Valley, the Israel Defense Forces said.
Troops at the scene shot the suspected Palestinian assailant dead.
Thursday’s attacks came as a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip was holding for the sixth day.
Tensions in Israel and the West Bank have been high since October 7, when some 3,000 terrorists burst through the Gaza border into Israel in a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and seizing some 240 hostages.
Israel responded with an aerial campaign and subsequent ground operation with the goal of destroying Hamas and ending its 16-year rule over Gaza, and securing the release of the hostages.
The IDF has continued to operate throughout the West Bank and police have been on high alert in Israel, in light of concerns about a possible escalation of violence following the release of Palestinian security prisoners in the exchange for abducted Israeli hostages.
Solidarity for victims of sexual assault should trump other politics.
Of all of the horrors coming out of the Israel-Hamas conflict, among the most horrible are the barbaric murders, rapes, sexual assaults, and kidnappings of women and young girls in Israel during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. And yet, deepening this distressing event, there has been a disheartening silence about, or worse, denial of these evils; reticence from the voices here at home in the U.S. who have, in the recent past, embraced other women who needed their support. Israeli and Jewish women find themselves isolated. For the past three decades, women have stood up for other women. When our sisters’ bodies and dignity were targeted and violated, women and allies of all ages and backgrounds organized, supported, and spoke out. Except somehow, not this time.
Since Oct. 7, there has been overwhelming evidence that Israeli women and young girls were not “just” slaughtered, but raped, assaulted, tortured, and kidnapped. This is not overstating things—from our work as prosecutors, lawyers, and feminists, we understand what it takes to build a solid criminal case for sexual assault. Here, there is voluminous evidence, more than what is typically available. While many victims cannot speak for themselves—they are either dead or being held hostage—survivor accounts and videos made by the perpetrators themselves speak for them.
[The Slate Commentary continues]
Another survivor saw terrorists gang-raping a woman who was alive until she was shot in the head by a man who was still raping her when he fired. Before she was killed, the witness saw them cut her breast off.
We heard from a grandmother who watched helplessly as her daughter was raped and then murdered.
A combat paramedic found two young girls executed in their bedroom, at least one of whom had been raped. Her pants were down toward her knees. There was semen on her back. She was shot in the head. Israeli officials are reporting evidence of widespread torture and rape as they continue the painstaking work of trying to identify bodies, many burned beyond recognition.
[The Slate Commentary continues]
Historically, women have been at the forefront of advocacy. Here in the U.S., we demanded safety for victims of sexual assault in campus “Take Back the Night” marches in the 1990s. We advocated for women in other countries, creating hashtag and social media campaigns like #BringOurGirlsHome in 2014 to demand the return of 276 Nigerian girls abducted by the jihadi militant group Boko Haram. In 2017, we protested Donald Trump’s sexism and misogyny by the millions at the Women’s March. The #MeToo movement saw us sharing our stories to combat a culture rife with sexual harassment and assault. We supported Christine Blasey Ford when she testified against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing in 2018. We marched when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. We strive to center women of color and Indigenous women, whose stories don’t always receive the respect they deserve. Again and again, we have demanded that women be believed, because we know that all too often, women’s stories are unfairly questioned and ignored.
[The Slate Commentary continues]
The victims of the Oct. 7 attack stand excluded from the world’s sisterhood. In the face of overwhelming real-time documentation, murmurs of support are few and far between. We must ask ourselves, from a place of empathy, for all who suffer: Does our outrage about rape and abuse depend on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim? Is rape acceptable, even justifiable, if the victims live in a nation whose policies you disapprove of? Can we blame these victims, many but not all of whom are Israeli, for what happened to them? If the answer to these questions is no, as it should be, then we must all speak out about the violence, no matter who it is perpetrated against or where they live. To express moral outrage and legal horror at the offenses perpetrated on women in Israel is not tantamount to approving the governing Netanyahu coalition, nor does it signal support for the bombings in Gaza. It is simply to assert the long-standing feminist argument that our bodies are not to be weaponized in global conflicts. Acknowledging these atrocities does not diminish the suffering of Palestinian women in Gaza. It is essential to reaffirming our shared humanity.
Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast
Mimi Rocah is the district attorney of Westchester County, New York, and a former federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York.
Tamara Sepper is the executive producer at CAFE and Vox Media and a former state prosecutor.
Jennifer Taub is a professor at Vermont Law School. She is the author of Other People’s Houses and the co-author of Corporate and White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials.
Joyce White Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC as well as the co-host of two podcasts, #SistersInLaw and The CAFE Insider.
Julie Zebrak is a former Department of Justice attorney and a seasoned political consultant, writer, organizer, and fundraiser
A report by Rachel Johnson, a contributing editor of The Evening Standard
I couldn’t sit through Schindler’s List when the children were little and found even March of the Penguins, when an egg rolls from the snug of the daddy penguin’s crotch to freeze solid on the ice, a truly tough watch.
No way then could I sit through the 43 minutes spliced together by the Israeli state of the atrocities of 7/10 to provide real-time testimony of brutality and slaughter on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.
[The Standard Report continues]
He was right. All too quickly, 7/10 has become an argument about who was writing history and not what had happened, which was becoming a matter of opinion and not of fact.
[The Standard Report continues]
The small private screening of the Hamas House of Horror film took place at RUSI, in Whitehall, in the institute’s dignified circular library, on a screen in front of mahogany shelves lined with military history and bronze busts of famous generals. I sat between my colleagues Nick and Tom Swarbrick, with Stephen Fry right behind, occasionally emitting a musical moan during a botched beheading, and Owen Jones in front.
[The Standard Report continues]
Now, while I agreed when he said he refused to breakdown his empathy for the suffering of others — ie the many thousands killed in Gaza — by selectively focusing only suffering of some — ie the far fewer victims of the massacre — I disagreed with him on the following.
We were not there as part of a propaganda exercise but to “bear witness” (the title of the film). No instructions from the podium needed. The film spoke for itself.
[The Standard Report continues]
A couple of days later, I went on the anti antisemitism march. I’m not Jewish, I do have Jewish antecedents but I didn’t go for that.
I stood in the cold drizzle because callers to my show say they are frightened; they say they want to leave the capital, and they say they’d be safer in Israel than on the streets of London, clogged with righteous students in keffiyeh waving their Palestinian flags from Amazon and chanting “from the river to the sea”.
[The Standard Report continues]
To conclude. I didn’t want to see the film. I didn’t want to go on the march. I didn’t even want to write this.
Sometimes you have to show up, and this is one of those times.
Some of the hostages were held in sweltering tunnels deep beneath Gaza, while others were squeezed into tight quarters with strangers or confined in isolation. There were children forced to appear in hostage videos, and others forced to watch gruesome footage of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack. They bore physical and psychological wounds.
As some hostages captured that day in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel have been released, they have relayed these and other stories of their captivity to family members. While their individual experiences differ in some details, their accounts share features that corroborate one another and suggest that Hamas and its allies planned to take hostages.
The New York Times interviewed the family members of 10 freed hostages, who spoke on behalf of their relatives to relay sensitive information.
The relatives who spoke to The Times described how the freed hostages, many of them children, were deprived of adequate food while in Gaza. Many said they had received just a single piece of bread per day for weeks. Others were fed small portions of rice, or pieces of cheese. The Red Cross said it was denied access to the hostages.
Many of the hostages who have returned to Israel in the past week — part of a cease-fire deal between Israel and the armed group Hamas to trade hostages for Palestinian prisoners and detainees — have come home malnourished, infested with lice, ill, injured and deeply traumatized.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The surprise of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7 and the abduction of so many people at once has been described as a national trauma for Israel, but it is also trauma borne by individuals.
In the attack, more than 1,200 people were killed and 240 were taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, Israel has ordered a siege of Gaza, cutting off supplies of water, food and fuel to enclave. It has also launched air and ground campaigns that have killed more than 13,000 people, the Gazan health ministry estimates.
For the hostages, it has been a series of horrors — first the attack, then the abduction and then captivity itself.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Many of the family members interviewed, particularly the relatives of children whose parents or siblings remain in captivity, were reluctant to share the most incriminating details of their captivity lest the militants retaliate against the hostages still in their custody.
Others cautioned that they were reluctant to pry too much too soon, or to share publicly the most disturbing details in an effort to preserve their relatives’ privacy and to keep them from being retraumatized.
More than 100 hostages held in the Gaza Strip have been released since they were taken in the cross-border Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
Estimates for the total number of hostages seized in the attack that left some 1,200 people dead in Israel have shifted over the course of the war. As of Thursday, 143 hostages remain in Gaza, according to numbers provided by Israel, but the country has not given the full basis for its estimates.
The demographics and nationalities of the hostages believed to be remaining in Gaza — and exactly how many have died while in captivity — remains unclear. Israel has estimated that the majority of those remaining have Israeli citizenship and are men, including soldiers. It’s unclear how many of the remaining hostages may be in the Israeli military. Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens remain hostages, according to the White House.
Here is a list of the hostages released so far and what is known about those who remain.
Number of hostages who have been freed so far: 104
Israel and Hamas initially agreed on a four-day deal that would pause hostilities to exchange captives. The deal, which began Nov. 24, has since been extended multiple times, allowing for the release of more hostages. The United States has pushed for a broader deal that could also encompass the release of men and military personnel.
72 Israeli and dual-national hostages have been released as part of the exchange deal began on Nov. 24. As of Wednesday, Israel has released more than 200 Palestinian prisoners — all women or teenagers.
3 Israeli-Russian dual nationals were released as part of a separate agreement between Hamas and the Kremlin.
A total of 24 foreign nationals — 23 Thai and one Filipino — were released, which also came outside of the exchange deal.
Before the deal, at least five hostages were freed — four were released by Hamas, and one was rescued in an Israeli operation.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Number of hostages estimated remaining in Gaza: 143
More than 240 people were believed to be abducted Oct. 7.
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said Thursday that 145 hostages are still being held in Gaza, and the subsequent release of two hostages would bring that number to 143. Of those, there are 132 Israelis or dual nationals and 11 foreign nationals.
The majority of the hostages, 117, are men, Levy said. There are now an estimated 26 women in the group. Israel said there are 10 hostages who are more than 75 years old, including husbands of elderly women who have already been released.
Fewer than 10 Americans remain in captivity in Gaza, according to White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. So far two Americans — Abigail Edan, 4, and Liat Beinin Atzili, 49, have been released.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Names of Israeli and dual-national hostages released since the deal
Nov. 24: The day the pause began, Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that 13 Israelis were released.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Names of foreign national hostages released since the deal
Some other foreign nationals — mostly Thai — have also been released since the pause in fighting began.
[The Washington Post Report continues]
Names of hostages who were released or freed before the deal
Before the pause in fighting, Hamas released four hostages, in two batches in October. Americans Judith Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, were released on Oct. 20. Hamas said this was for “humanitarian reasons,” without elaborating.
Yocheved Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper, Israeli women in their 70s and 80s, were released on Oct. 23, for what Hamas called “crushing humanitarian reasons.” Their husbands remain in captivity.
Israel said one of its soldiers who was taken in the Hamas incursion was released after a rescue operation in late October. The soldier was identified as Pvt. Ori Megidish.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned Wednesday that the recentrise in antisemitism across the country is leaving Jewish Americans to feel “left alone,” and that antisemites are “taking advantage of the pro-Palestinian movement to espouse hatred and bigotry toward Jewish people.”
[The Washington Post Report continues]
“I am speaking up to issue a warning informed by lessons of history, too often forgotten,” said Schumer, who is Jewish. “No matter where we stand on the war in Gaza, all of us must condemn antisemitism with full-throated clarity wherever we see it before it metastasizes into something even worse.”
During a 40-minute speech on Nov. 29, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) added that the threat of rising antisemitism was a crisis. (Video: The Washington Post)
Schumer listed attacks on Jewish people throughout history: from ancient attacks in Egypt through the Nazi regime in World War II, the 1972 killings and kidnappings of Israelis at the Munich Olympics to an event last week at Hillcrest High School in Queens, where students targeted a Jewish teacher. That teacher, whom Schumer declined to name, was in the Senate chamber for the speech at the majority leader’s invitation. “I am truly honored that she accepted my invitation,” Schumer said. “That is true courage.”
[The Washington Post Report continues]
“At a time when white supremacists and white nationalists take advantage of this moment to sow confusion and promote antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, misstating what antisemitism is harms all of our work for justice and endangers our communities,” Fox said in a statement to The Washington Post. “This is reprehensible.”
Notably, Schumer cautioned in his speech that “many” of the people expressing antisemitism in America were “people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.” After referring to protests against violence directed toward Black, Hispanic, and Asian people, as well as members of the LGBTQ community, Schumer said that “in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”
[The Washington Post Report continues]
On the Senate floor, Schumer said that his “heart breaks for the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed or are suffering in this conflict.” But the ultimate blame, he said, belonged with Hamas, which “knowingly invited an immense civilian toll during this war.”
Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, is the Senate majority leader.
[The Op-Ed continues]
The solidarity that Jewish Americans initially received from our fellow citizens in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has since waned, drowned out by other, more disturbing voices, even from some we considered allies, while hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed.
Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish-owned businesses that have nothing to do with Israel have been boycotted and vandalized. Jewish students on college campuses have been harassed and assaulted with alarming frequency. A Jewish high school teacher in Queens told me about being forced to hide in a locked office from student protesters who were demanding that she be fired because she attended a rally supporting Israel.
[The Op-Ed continues]
What happened last week at the Queens high school is an example of crossing that threshold. Walking out of school to march in support of Palestinians is completely legitimate. But forcing a Jewish teacher to hide because she had attended a rally in support of Israel is antisemitism, pure and simple.
[The Op-Ed continues]
Take my own family story. Only in America could an exterminator’s son grow up to be the first Jewish party leader in the Senate.
But many of my family members elsewhere met more tragic ends.
[The Op-Ed continues]
Of course, criticizing the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic. Over the years, I have vehemently disagreed with many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, especially his administration’s encouragement of settlements in the West Bank, gravely harming prospects for a two-state solution, which I support. I have also been among those who have said that Israel must act according to international law and that humanitarian assistance for Palestinians is critical.
[The Op-Ed continues]
America has always been exceptional. But when it matters most, are we still a nation that can defy the course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled and massacred over and over again?
I believe the answer can and must be a resounding yes.
And I will do everything in my power — as Senate majority leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being — to make it so.
Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today delivered a major address on antisemitism on the Senate floor. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks as prepared for delivery, which can also be viewed here:
Today, I come to the floor to speak on a subject of great importance: the rise of antisemitism in America.
I feel compelled to speak because I am the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America; in fact, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official ever in American history.
And I have noticed a significant disparity between how Jewish people regard the rise of antisemitism, and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it.
To us, the Jewish people, the rise of antisemitism is a crisis — a five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.
For so many other people of good will, it is merely a problem, a matter of concern.
Today, I want to use my platform to explain why so many Jewish people see this problem as a crisis.
But before I get into that, I want to offer two important caveats about what this speech is not. This speech is not an attempt to label most criticism of Israel and the Israeli government generally as antisemitic. I don’t believe that criticism is. And this speech is also not an attempt to pit hate towards one group against that of another.
I believe that bigotry against one group of Americans is bigotry against all, and that’s why I have championed legislation like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which targets violence against Asian-Americans, and the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which provides funding to help all houses of worship — churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras — protect themselves from extremists.
When President Trump called for a Muslim ban during the first weeks of his presidency, I held an emergency press conference to protest the ban alongside a Muslim mom and four of her daughters, all dressed in chadors, who said they feared they might never see their father again.
It was a deeply distressing moment, and I’m an emotional sort. I began to cry. President Trump saw me crying on TV and gave me a nickname, “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.”
I was — and am — proud of that moniker. The growing and vibrant Arab American community is a vital part of our nation and of my city, and I condemn — unequivocally — any vitriol and hatred against them.
We tragically saw where such hatred can sometimes lead in Vermont this week. This is unacceptable.
But today, I want to focus my remarks on antisemitism because it hits so close to home for me — and because I believe this moment demands it.
I have just said what this speech is not. So what IS this speech about?
I want to describe the fears and anxieties of many Jewish Americans right now, particularly after October 7th, who feel there are aspects of the debate around Israel and Gaza that are crossing over into antisemitism, with Jewish people being targeted simply for being Jewish, and having nothing to do with Israel.
I want to explain, through the lens of history, why this is so dangerous. The normalization and exacerbation of this rise in hate is the? danger many Jewish people fear most.
And finally, I want to suggest how and why I hope that all Americans of good will can come together and do a better job of condemning such views and behavior.
But first, let’s establish the facts. There is no question that antisemitism is a serious problem in America:
In general, Jewish Americans represent 2 percent of the U.S. population, yet we are the targets of 55 percent of all religion-based hate crimes recorded by the FBI. This problem has been steadily worsening in recent years, but after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, hate crimes against Jewish Americans have skyrocketed.
The Anti-Defamation League estimates that antisemitic incidents have increased nearly 300 percent since October 7th. The NYPD has recorded a 214-percent increase in New York City.
After October 7th, Jewish Americans are feeling singled out, targeted, and isolated. In many ways, we feel alone.
The solidarity that Jewish Americans initially received from many of our fellow citizens was quickly drowned out by other voices.
While the dead bodies of Jewish Israelis were still warm, while hundreds of Jewish Israelis were being carried as hostages back to Hamas tunnels under Gaza, Jewish Americans were alarmed to see some of our fellow citizens characterize a brutal terrorist attack as justified because of the actions of the Israeli government.
A vicious, bloodcurdling, premeditated massacre of innocent men, women, children, the elderly – justified!
Even worse, in some cases, people even celebrated what happened, describing it as the deserved fate of quote “colonizers” and calling for quote “glory to the martyrs” who carried out these heinous attacks.
Many of the people who have expressed these sentiments in America aren’t neo-Nazis, or card-carrying Klan members, or Islamist extremists. They are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.
Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all.
But apparently, in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.
The largely Ashkenazi survivors of decades of pogroms in Imperial Russia, the Holocaust under Nazi Germany, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; the Mizrahi, who were forcibly evicted from Arab countries, and their descendants; the many Sephardim who were scattered across the Mediterranean after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 1400s – do they not deserve the solidarity of those who advocate for the rights and dignity of the oppressed, given the long history of persecution of the Jewish people throughout the world?
Many of those protesting Israeli policy note the at least 700,000 Palestinians displaced or forced from their homes in 1948, but they never mention the 600,000 Mizrahi Jews across the Arab world who were also displaced, whose property was confiscated, whose lives were threatened, who were expelled from their communities.
The hope at the time was that there would be two states. A Jewish State and a Palestinian State living side-by-side. The plan was for the State of Israel to absorb the Jewish people in Arab lands, and the new Palestinian State to absorb the Palestinians who now lived in Israel. In fact, Israel did absorb the displaced Jewish people of Arab lands, but the Arab nations instead sanctioned the United Nations to set up refugee camps for the Palestinians, refusing to accept the possibility that any of them would ever be relocated.
Several times throughout history, Israeli prime ministers called for a return to close to the pre-1967 borders established by the United Nations plan. Those calls were rejected by Yasser Arafat, the PLO, and the wider Arab community.
Many, if not most, Jewish Americans, including myself, support a two-state solution. We disagree with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his administration’s encouragement of militant settlers in the West Bank, which has become a considerable obstacle to a two-state solution.
The reason why I invoke this history about the founding of the Israeli State is because forgetting or even deliberately ignoring this vital context is dangerous. Some of the most extreme rhetoric against Israel has emboldened antisemites who are attacking Jewish people simply because they are Jewish, independent of anything having to do with Israel.
Those who are inclined to examine the world through the lens of the oppressors versus the oppressed should take note that the many thousands of years of Jewish history are defined by oppression.
From October 7, 2023 in Southern Israel to 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh to 1999 at the Los Angeles JCC to 1986 at Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul to 1974 at Netev Meir Elementary School in Ma’alot to Yom Kippur, 1973 in the Golan Heights to 1972 at the Munich Olympics and Lod Airport to 1967 at the Straits of Tiran to the 1940s and 30s in Germany and Central Europe to the 1800s in the Pale of Settlement to 1679 in Yemen to 1492 in Spain, 1394 in France, 1290 in England to the Crusades of the Middle Ages to 629 in Galilee to the Year 73 in Jerusalem to 586 BC in Judea 722 BCE in Samaria…and the Thirteenth Century BCE in Egypt the Jewish people have been humiliated, ostracized, expelled, enslaved, and massacred for millennia.
To paraphrase lines recited year every year, century after century, at Passover over the seder table: “This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. […] In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.”
For Jewish people all across the world, the history of our trauma going back many generations is central to any discussion about our future.
Too many Americans, especially in our younger generation, don’t have a full understanding of this history. Because some Jewish people have done well in America, because Israel has increased its power and territory, there are people who feel that Jewish Americans are not vulnerable, that we have the strength and security to overcome prejudice and bigotry, that we have, to quote the language of some, become the “oppressors.”
In fact, antisemitic conspiracy theories often weaponize this very dynamic by pitting what successes the Jewish people have achieved against them, and against their fellow countrymen.
But for many Jewish Americans, any strength and security that we enjoy always feels tenuous. No matter how well we’re doing, it can all be taken away in an instant.
That’s just how it is. We only have to look back a century, a few generations, to see how this can happen.
Growing up, I remember my grandfather telling me that he rooted for Germany over Russia in World War I because Germans treated the Jewish people so much better than Russia did. In the early 1900s, German Jews were one of the most secure and prosperous ethnic communities in Europe.
But in the span of a decade, all of that changed. When the Nazis first marched in the streets and held rallies decrying the so-called international financiers, war profiteers, and communists, many Germans of good will either stayed silent, or marched alongside them, not necessarily realizing what they were aiding and abetting.
But when Adolf Hitler took the podium just a few years later at the Reichstag, it was clear by then that the terms “international financiers, war profiteers, and communists” represented the Jewish people — who Hitler called “parasites” feeding on the body and productive work of other nations.
By bits and pieces, the Nazis softened the ground rhetorically for what Hitler eventually stated was his true goal: “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
And so many of those Germans of good will, who marched in the early years of Hitler’s ascension, stayed on the sidelines after his horrifying intent was made clear.
The end result, as we all know, was the most targeted and systematic genocide in human history. Six million Jewish people were exterminated in a few years while others turned a blind eye.
History shows that antisemitism is deeply embedded in Europe. I have always said it is the poison of European society — just as racism against Black Americans is the poison of our society.
And while we are thankfully a far ways away from Nazi Germany today, this is why many Jewish people worry about the marches today, especially in Europe.
What may begin as legitimate criticism of Israeli policy?,? or even a valid debate over other religious, economic?,? and political issues, can sometimes cross?? into something darker, into attacking Jewish people simply for being Jewish.
Obviously, many of those marching here in the U.S. do not have any evil intent, but when Jewish people hear chants like “From the river to the sea,” a founding slogan of Hamas, a terrorist group that is not shy about their goal to eradicate the Jewish people, in Israel and around the globe, we are alarmed.
When we see signs in the crowd that read “By Any Means Necessary,” after the most violent attack ever against Israeli civilians, we are appalled at the casual invocation of such savagery.
When we see protesters at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade compare the genocide of the Holocaust equivalently to the Israeli army’s actions to defeat Hamas in self-defense of their people, we are shocked.
And when we see many people and news organizations remain neutral about the basic absurdity of these claims and actions, we are deeply disappointed.
More than anything, we are worried — quite naturally, given the twists and turns of history — about where these actions and sentiments could eventually lead.
Now, this is no intellectual exercise for us. For many Jewish people, it feels like a matter of survival, informed once again by history — in this case, very personal history.
Take the story of my own family.
My grandfather came to Ellis Island at a very young age from Eastern Europe, without an education or a penny to his name. He was a street urchin, stealing apples off pushcarts just to survive, but he dreamt of a brighter future for himself and for his family.
My grandfather ended up with the paper workers in Utica, New York, and helped form the union there, but he lost his job in the lead-up to World War II, so he came back to New York City and bought a little exterminating business.
His son — my father — followed in his footsteps and eventually took over that exterminating business. My father struggled in that job, barely making ends meet. But together with my mother, he provided a stable and loving home in Brooklyn for my siblings and me, where we were able to flourish.
And because of the tolerance and openness and opportunity that courses through all of American life, I now stand before you as the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, the highest elected office a Jewish person has ever attained in the history of this country.
Only in America could an exterminator’s son grow up to be the first Jewish party leader in the Senate.
But it must also be said: this is not the norm in the grand and long scheme of Jewish history.
While my grandfather came to America and encountered opportunity, many of his siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and other family members remained behind in Eastern Europe.
When I was still a young boy, I was told why many branches of our family tree stopped growing forever.
In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, then part of Galicia, they asked my great-grandmother — the matriarch of the family, and the wife of a locally revered rabbi — to gather her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren on the porch of her home, which was in the town square.
As more than 30 people gathered on the porch, aged 85 years old to 3 months, the Nazis forced the remaining Jewish citizens of the town to gather around and watch.
When the Nazis told my great-grandmother, “You are coming with us,” she refused – and they machine-gunned down every last one of them. The babies, the elderly, and everybody in-between.
This story resonated deeply in my heart when I first started learning the details of the October 7th massacre in Israel. I was in China with a bipartisan delegation of my fellow Senators, trying to get President Xi Jinping to open up Chinese markets to American companies and stop the flow of fentanyl across our borders.
As the horrors of October 7th started coming into focus, the Israeli ambassador to China shared with me the story of what she heard had just happened in one of the kibbutzim, called Be’eri.
Hamas terrorists entered the kibbutz early on October 7th and killed more than 120 Jewish residents, from the elderly to babies.
Sadly, it was not the first time I had heard of such evil being committed against Jewish people.
Most, if not all, Jewish Americans know stories similar to that of my family. And most, if not all of us, learned this story at a young age. It will be imprinted on our hearts for as long as we live.
All Jewish Americans carry in them the scar tissue of this generational trauma, and that directly informs how we are experiencing and processing the rhetoric of today.
We see and hear things differently from others because we are deeply sensitive to the deprivation and horrors that can follow the targeting of Jewish people — if it is not repudiated.
Which brings me back to today.
While many protesters no doubt view their actions as a compassionate expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people, for many Jewish Americans, we feel in too many instances, some of the most extreme rhetoric gives license to darker ideas that have always lurked below the surface of every question involving the Jewish people.
Antisemites have always trafficked in coded language and action to define Jewish people as unworthy of the rights and privileges afforded to other groups.
I believe there are plenty of people who chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” not because they hate Jewish people, but because they support a better future for Palestinians.
But there is no question that Hamas and other terrorist organizations have used this slogan to represent their intention to eliminate Jewish people not only from Israel, but from every corner of the Earth.
Given the history of oppression, expulsion, and state violence that is practically embedded in Jewish DNA, can you blame Jewish people for hearing a violently antisemitic message, loud and clear, any time we hear that chant?
We shouldn’t accept this sort of language from anybody any more than we accept other racist dog whistles — like invoking “welfare queens” to criticize safety net programs, or calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.”
And that also goes for extreme right-wing Jewish settlers who also use deplorable language, and who don’t believe there should be any Palestinians between the river and the sea.
Antisemites are taking advantage of the pro-Palestinian movement to espouse hatred and bigotry towards Jewish people. But rather than call out this dangerous behavior for what it is, we see so many of our friends and fellow citizens, particularly young people who yearn for justice, unknowingly aiding and abetting their cause.
And worse, many of our friends and allies whose support we need now more than ever during this moment of immense Jewish pain have brushed aside these concerns. Suddenly, they do not want to hear about antisemitism, or the ultimate goal of Hamas. When I have asked some of the marchers what they would do about Hamas, they don’t have an answer. Many don’t seem to care.
And so Jewish Americans are left alone — at least in our eyes — to ponder what this all means, and where it could lead.
Can you understand why Jewish people feel isolated when we hear some praise Hamas and chant its vicious slogan? Can you blame us for feeling vulnerable only 80 years after Hitler wiped out half of the Jewish population across the world while many countries turned their back? Can you appreciate the deep fear we have about what Hamas might do if left to their own devices?
Because the long arc of Jewish history teaches us a lesson that is hard to forget: ultimately, that we are alone.
As a teenager, growing up halfway across the world from Israel in Brooklyn during the 1950s and 60s, I remember feeling that aloneness myself.
When many of the world’s airlines boycotted Israel so that they could maintain business with the Arab world, I admired Air France because only they would fly to Israel. I even preferred Coca-Cola to Pepsi because they did business in Israel, and refused to participate in any biased boycott. Later, I remember walking in solitary silence to class at James Madison High School with a transistor radio held to my ear, listening to the news reports about the Six-Day War and praying to God that Israel would survive.
On top of feeling alone, the second dominant feeling that Jewish people have endured throughout history has been the sting of the double standard, which is the way the world has practiced antisemitism over and over again.
To Jewish people, the double standard has been ever present and is at the root of antisemitism. The double standard is very simple:
What is good for everybody, is never good for the Jew. When it comes time to assign blame for some problem, the Jew is always the first target.
And in recent decades, this double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world treats Israel differently than anybody else.
That double standard was made clear to me when I was in college.
I remember the day when the great and articulate Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, was invited to come lecture on campus, while the Students for a Democratic Society and the Progressive Labor Party were waging a campaign against Israel’s right to exist.
Two thousand people gathered in a large auditorium to see Ambassador Eban, and the members of SDS and PLP sat in the gallery and hung a banner saying: “Fight the Zionist Imperialists.”
When the members of the SDS and the PLP tried to shout him down, Eban pointed his finger up at the protesters in the gallery, and with his Etonian inflection, he calmly but strongly delivered a statement I will never forget, and that I will paraphrase now.
He said: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery. Every time a people gets their statehood, you applaud it. The Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Zambian, you applaud their getting statehood. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it — and that is the Jewish people. We Jews are used to that. We have lived with a double standard through the centuries. There were always things the Jews couldn’t do… everyone could be a farmer, but not the Jew. everyone could be a carpenter, but not the Jew. Everyone could move to Moscow, but not the Jew. And everyone can have their own state, but not the Jew. There is a word for that: antisemitism, and I accuse you in the gallery of it.”
And the protesters slinked off.
This double standard persists today in America, and it is once again leaving Jewish people feeling isolated and alone.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, an attack on defenseless civilians, the elderly, women, and babies, a good number of people skipped over expressing sympathy for the victims in their haste to blame the attack on the past actions of the Israeli government. Can anybody imagine a horrific terrorist attack in another country receiving such a reception?
And when Hamas terrorists actively hide behind innocent Palestinians, knowing that many of those civilians will die in the Israeli response, why does the criticism for any civilian deaths seem to fall exclusively on Israel, and not at all on Hamas?
My heart breaks for the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed or are suffering in this conflict, and I have urged the Israeli government to minimize civilian casualties on many occasions.
But by committing such heinous atrocities on October 7th before sneaking back into their tunnels underneath hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza, Hamas has knowingly invited an immense civilian toll during this war, exploiting the double standard that so much of the world applies to Israel.
Of course, let me repeat: that does not relieve Israel of the responsibility to protect innocent Palestinian lives, and I have been among the first to tell Israeli leaders they must act according to international law. I am also fighting for critical humanitarian aid for Palestinians — that this Senate, under my leadership, is working to deliver.
So I rise in this chamber today. I am speaking up to issue a warning, informed by the lessons of history.
No matter what our beliefs are, no matter where we stand on the war in Gaza, all of us must condemn antisemitism with full-throated clarity whenever we see it before it metastasizes into something even worse.
Because right now, that’s what Jewish Americans fear most.
The spike in antisemitism we are experiencing right now in America began after the worst instance of violence committed against Jewish people since the Holocaust. The vitriol against Israel in the wake of October 7th is all too often crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations in this country — if ever.
Which is why we need to name it clearly any time we see it:
After October 7th, when boycotts were organized against Jewish businesses in Philadelphia that have nothing to do with Israel — that is antisemitism!
After October 7th, when swastikas appeared on Jewish delis on the Upper East Side — that is antisemitism!
After October 7th, when protesters in California shouted at Jewish Americans, “Hitler should’ve smashed you!” — that is antisemitism!
After October 7th, when a Jewish U.S. Senator was violently threatened for her views on Israel — that is antisemitism!
After October 7th, when students on college campuses across the country who wear a yarmulke or display a Jewish star are harassed, verbally vilified, pushed, and even spat upon and punched — that is antisemitism!
After October 7th, when an author in a prominent left-wing magazine labeled the pro-Israel rally in Washington a “hate rally” — that is antisemitism! I attended the rally because I believe there should be a place of refuge for the Jewish people. Not because I wish violence on Palestinians, or any other people.
And after October 7th, when students at Hillcrest High School in Queens ran rampant in the hallways and demanded the firing of a teacher just because attended a rally supporting Israel, and forced her to hide in a locked office for hours while staff struggled to regain control — that is antisemitism!
Walking out of school to march in support of Palestinians is completely legitimate. But forcing a Jewish teacher to remain — as she described — locked in an office because she attended a rally in support for Israel is antisemitism, pure and simple.
In fact, that teacher is sitting in the gallery today. I invited her to come and listen, and I am truly honored that she accepted my invitation. That is true courage… and I believe it shows just how strongly so many Jewish Americans feel about this issue.
She has requested anonymity, which I ask everybody present, and everybody in the media, to please respect.
But I say to her from the bottom of my heart: Thank you for being here, and thank you for caring.
I have just listed a few of the so many examples of how pure, unadulterated antisemitism has dramatically increased since October 7th.
But the roots of pluralistic, multiethnic democracy are deep in America. This is a place where Jewish people have been able to flourish alongside so many other immigrant groups.
We must never lose sight of just how special that is. Nor must we ever stop fighting for it.
All Americans share a responsibility and an obligation to fight back whenever we see the rise of prejudice of any type in our midst. To preserve this nation as a promised land of refuge, as a land that honors the dignity of every individual, as the land of opportunity for all.
So my plea to the American people of all creeds and backgrounds is this:
First, learn the history of the Jewish people, who have been abandoned repeatedly by their fellow countrymen — left isolated and alone to combat antisemitism — with disastrous results.
Second, reject the illogical and antisemitic double standard that is once again being applied to the plight of Jewish victims and hostages, to some of the actions of the Israeli government, and even to the very existence of a Jewish state.
Third, understand why Jewish people defend Israel — not because we wish harm on Palestinians, but because we fear a world where Israel is forced to tolerate the existence of groups like Hamas that want to wipe out all Jewish people from the planet. We fear a world where Israel, the place of refuge for Jewish people, will no longer exist. If there is no Israel, there will be no place, no place for the Jewish people to go when they are persecuted in other countries.
As an adult, I remember watching my grandfather, one of the few in his family to survive the Holocaust, become overwhelmed by emotion and break down in tears when he saw Israel for the first time.
This had nothing to do with politics, or with money, or with racism, or with oppressive colonial power. It was deeply human.
The emotional catharsis of a man whose family was uprooted and exterminated, finally stepping foot in a place of refuge for his people.
So many of my aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, would be alive today had Israel existed before World War II.
Many Jewish Americans fear what the future may bring, based on the repeated lessons of history.
Many Jewish Americans see clear antisemitism in the double standard that is being wielded by too many opponents of Israel, and we see it in attacks on Jewish people simply for being Jewish, apart from anything having to do with Israel.
And perhaps worst of all, many Jewish Americans feel alone to face all of this, abandoned by too many of our friends and allies in our greatest time of need, as antisemitic hate crimes skyrocket around the country.
I implore every person and every community and every institution to stand with Jewish Americans and denounce antisemitism in all of its forms, especially the double standard that has been wielded against the Jewish people for generations to isolate us.
The time for solidarity must be now. Nothing less than the future of the American experiment hangs in the balance.
Building a more perfect union, one that fulfills our founding ideals, is our longest and most solemn struggle as a country. And as Americans, we are called to do all we can to achieve that higher standard.
We are stewards of the flames of liberty, tolerance, and equality that warm our American melting pot, and make it possible for Jewish Americans to prosper alongside Palestinian Americans, and every other immigrant group from all over the world.
Are we a nation that can defy the regular course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled, and massacred over and over again?
I believe the answer can and must be a resounding, “Yes.”
And I will do everything in my power — as Senate Majority Leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being — to make it happen.
Nov 29 (Reuters) – An 85-year-old Israeli woman abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7 and set free two weeks later said she met its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar while in captivity and asked him how he was not ashamed for having acted violently against peace activists like herself.
[The Reuters Report continues]
“Sinwar was with us three to four days after we arrived,” Lifshitz told the Hebrew-language Davar newspaper. “I asked him how he is not ashamed to do such a thing to people who all these years have supported peace.”
“He didn’t answer. He was silent,” she said.
[The Reuters Report continues]
On her release, she turned to shake the hand of a masked captor. Asked why, she replied: “They treated us gently and met all our needs.”
Jewish actor and comedian Jon Lovitz, who has strongly backed Israel during its war against Hamas terrorists, had some choice words for his critics amid a global rise in antisemitism since the outbreak of the conflict launched by Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
“I’m speaking out because I feel I must. The world doesn’t like it when Jews fight back. Tough s—t,” The Benchwarmers star wrote Tuesday on X/Twitter.
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
“I support Israel standing up for itself and destroying Hamas,” Lovitz tweeted. “So the Palestinians and Israelis can be free from Hamas terrorists who don’t care about anyone, Israelis or Palestinians. It’s not genocide.. it’s war. A war Hamas deliberately started. Knowing Israel would retaliate and knowing innocent Palestinian civilians would be killed. They don’t care.”
[The Algemeiner Report continues]
Lovitz also revealed in a new interview with Fox News that the only antisemitism he experienced in Hollywood has been “from other Jews,” adding that he lost movie roles for being Jewish.
The reason the Hamas-Israel war can be hard for outsiders to understand is that three wars are going on at the same time: a war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group, a war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future and a war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies.
But before we dig into those wars, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind about them: There’s a single formula that can maximize the chances that the forces of decency can prevail in all three. It is the formula that I think President Biden is pushing, even if he can’t spell it all out publicly now — and we should all push it with him: You should want Hamas defeated, as many Gazan civilians as possible spared, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his extremist allies booted, all the hostages returned, Iran deterred and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank reinvigorated in partnership with moderate Arab states.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
The first and most obvious of the three is the latest round of the century-long battle between two indigenous peoples — Jews and Palestinians — over the same land but now with a twist: This time the Palestinian side is not being led by the Palestinian Authority, which since Oslo has been committed to reaching a two-state solution based on the borders that existed before the 1967 war. It’s being led by Hamas, a militant Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating any Jewish state.
On Oct. 7, Hamas embarked on a war of annihilation. The only maps it carried were not of a two-state solution but of how to find the most people in the Israeli kibbutzim and kill or kidnap as many of them as possible.
While I have no doubt that ending Hamas’s rule in Gaza — something every Sunni Arab regime except Qatar is quietly rooting for — is necessary to give both Gazans and Israelis hope for a better future, the whole Israeli war effort will be delegitimized and become unsustainable unless Israel can do it with much greater care for the Palestinian civilians. The Hamas invasion and the rushed Israeli counterinvasion are unleashing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza that is only underscoring how much Israel needs a legitimate Palestinian partner to help govern Gaza in the morning after.
The second war, very much related to the first, is the struggle within the Palestinian and Israeli societies over their respective longer-term visions.
Hamas argues that this is an ethnic-religious war between primarily Muslim Palestinians and Jews, and its goal is an Islamic state in all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, it’s winner take all.
There is a mirror image of Hamas’s extremist views on the Israeli side. The Jewish supremacist settlers represented in Netanyahu’s cabinet make no distinction between those Palestinians who have embraced Oslo and those who embrace Hamas. They see all Palestinians as modern-day descendants of the Amalekites. As Mosaic magazine explained, Amalekites were a tribe of desert raiders mentioned often in the Bible who inhabited today’s northern Negev, near the Gaza Strip, and lived by plunder.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that some Jewish settlers simply cannot stop talking about rebuilding settlements in Gaza. They want a Greater Israel from the river to the sea. Netanyahu embraced these far-right parties and their agenda to form his government and now cannot banish them without losing his grip on power.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
And while Arab allies of America and Israel are not democracies — and do not aspire to be — their leaders are all on a journey away from the old model of building legitimacy through resistance — resistance to Israel, to America, to Iran and Iranian-backed Shiites — and toward building their legitimacy on delivering resilience for all their people (through education, skills and growing environmental awareness) so they may realize their full potential.
That is not Iran’s agenda. The raw power dimension is over who will be the hegemon, i.e. the big dog, in the region — Shiite Iran, tied to Russia and extending its reach to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, or Sunni Arab-dominated Saudi Arabia in a tacit alliance with Bahrain, the U.A.E., Jordan, Egypt and Israel and all backed by America. In this third war, Iran’s goal is to drive the United States out of the Middle East, to destroy Israel and to intimidate America’s Sunni Arab allies and bend them to its will.
In this war, America is projecting its power through our two aircraft carrier groups now stationed in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran is countering us with what I call landcraft carriers — a network of proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Iraq serving as platforms for launching rocket attacks on U.S. forces and Israel every bit as lethal as those from our aircraft carriers.
This third war started to escalate on Sept. 14, 2019, when Iran launched an audacious, unprovoked drone attack against two major Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. The Trump administration did nothing. “That was an attack on Saudi Arabia, and that wasn’t an attack on us,” Donald Trump said. On Jan. 17, 2022, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi militia attacked the United Arab Emirates with missiles and drones, igniting a fire near the Abu Dhabi airport and setting off explosions in fuel trucks that killed three people. Again, no U.S. response.
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
We’re talking about the top Israeli researchers, scientists, techies, cyberspecialists and innovators who drive the start-up nation’s economy and defense industries. Today, a vast majority are highly motivated and support the Israeli government. But if Israel cannot maintain stable borders or shipping lanes, some of these 400,000 will emigrate.
“If a critical mass of them decide to leave, the consequences for Israel will be catastrophic,” Ben-David said. After all, “in 2017, 92 percent of all income tax revenue came from just 20 percent of adults” — with those 400,000 responsible for creating the wealth engines that generated that 92 percent.
If Iran gets away with this, its appetite for squeezing any rival with its landcraft carriers will only grow. Israel can put up a strong fight and is capable of striking deep in Iran. But ultimately, to break Iran’s tightening stranglehold, Israel needs allies from the United States and NATO and the moderate Arab states. And the United States, NATO and the moderate Arab states need Israel.
But such an alliance will not come together if Netanyahu sticks with his policy of undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — essentially driving Israel and its seven million Jews into indefinite control of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The pro-American forces in the region and Biden cannot and will not be party to that.
So I end where I began, only now I hope three things are totally clear.
1. The keystone for winning all three wars is a moderate, effective and legitimate Palestinian Authority that can replace Hamas in Gaza and be an active, credible partner for a two-state solution with Israel and thereby enable Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states to justify normalizing relations with the Jewish state and isolating Iran and its proxies.
2. The anti-keystones are Hamas and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, which refuses to do anything to rebuild, let alone expand, the Palestinian Authority’s role.
3. Israel and its U.S. backer cannot create a sustainable post-Hamas regional alliance or permanently stabilize Gaza while Netanyahu reigns as the prime minister of Israel.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
Emily Hand had to run from house to house, forced to move by Hamas as Israeli forces attacked Gaza, her father Thomas Hand told CNN.
“That’s terrifying. Being pulled, dragged, pushed … under gunfire probably,” he said on Tuesday.
It’s one of the details that his daughter is slowly sharing of what happened after she was kidnapped on October 7 and taken to Gaza, a place she now calls “the box.”
“She’s coming out slowly, little by little,” Hand said.
[The CNN report continues]
Emily, who turned 9 in captivity, was held with her friend Hila Rotem-Shoshani and Hila’s mother Raaya before the children were released last Saturday.
[The CNN report continues]
From death to captivity to hope
Emily had been at a sleepover at Hila’s house when Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Be’eri. Hand was trapped in his house for hours, unable to reach his daughter, as the community was ravaged – about 130 residents killed and others captured.
[The CNN report continues]
Eight weeks after he had last seen his daughter, Hand was informed Emily was on the list of the second batch of hostages to be released under the temporary truce between Israel and Hamas.
[The CNN report continues]
“All of a sudden the door opened up and she just ran. It was beautiful, just like I had imagined it, running together,” Thomas said. “I probably squeezed her too hard,” he added, giving his view of the now iconic video of the reunion where he greets his daughter with her nickname “Emush.”
[The CNN report concludes]
Thomas’s focus is now split. He must get Emily well. And he will do all he can to get Raya back home and all the other hostages too. And he hopes the support he felt while Emily was missing will stay strong.
“We have to get Raaya back for Hila, back for Emily, back for justice,” he said.
“Don’t go silent on us now,” he implored the world. “Bring them home, bring them home.”
Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?
[The New York Times Report continues]
Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967…
[The New York Times Report continues]
According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.
Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument… Israel itself must end.
Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.
[The New York Times Report continues]
On Oct. 8, demonstrators around the world chose to embrace that axis. Sometimes they did so unwittingly, believing there was no contradiction between being pro-Palestinian and supporting Israel’s right to exist, or not understanding the implications of the slogans they were chanting.
But just as often they have done so wittingly.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Such embraces have consequences.
[The New York Times Report continues]
…they put a growing fraction of the progressive left objectively on the side of some of the worst people on earth — and in radical contradiction with their professed values.
“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,”
[The New York Times Report continues]
“A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.
A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.
In the Holocaust, my parents survived far worse than the Palestinians, yet they never dreamed of harming children, women and the elderly.
Many people support the Palestinians’ right to a state. Many condemn the policies and attitudes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political allies who deny these rights and mistreat Palestinians. I do too. Many are moved by the suffering of Gazans since Israel began its war against Hamas. I am too.
But too many of these same people support Hamas and praise the terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre. They say that this horrendous rampage of crimes against humanity was the justified action of a people who have been oppressed for 75 years.
[The commentary in JNS continues]
Not content with these horrors, the Hamas terrorists sent messages to the families of the victims in order to torture them further. Hamas’s own videos showed them celebrating their evil acts by describing what they did, accompanied by joyful shouts and praises to God.
This is not war. This is murderous hatred. It is cynically bartering human lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, for publicity: The more horrors, the more deaths, the more publicity.
[The commentary in JNS continues]
My parents survived the Holocaust. Their parents were murdered; their brothers and sisters were murdered; they were stripped of all rights; they were tortured; they lost their homes and property; they were stateless and never returned to their home.
I have no idea what my paternal grandparents or murdered uncles looked like. No photos or memorabilia survived. I was awakened many times in my childhood by the sound of my father screaming as he suffered his latest nightmare. He was deaf in one ear from a beating administered via a rifle butt. My mother is missing several teeth from the day she was hit in the mouth with a hammer. There are many more such stories, each more awful than the next.
Many years ago, I went with my parents to visit their old towns. The Jewish cemetery of their ancestors no longer exists. It is a corn field in which one can find bits and pieces of headstones. There is no other proof that my ancestors were ever there. When we visited my father’s former home, two women emerged and sat out front, guarding what was now their home from us. We did not enter.
[The commentary in JNS concludes]
So, again, what prior treatment and/or oppression can justify what Hamas has done and its promises to do it again and again?
The New York schools chancellor promised disciplinary action but also called for understanding students’ viewpoint after hundreds at a Queens high school protested against a Jewish teacher.
New York City officials are investigating after hundreds of Queens high school students protested against a pro-Israel teacher, who was moved to another part of the building during the demonstration, the schools chancellor said Monday.
The recent episode at Hillcrest High School erupted after the teacher, who is Jewish, had changed a social media profile photo to an image of her holding up an “I Stand With Israel” sign, the chancellor, David C. Banks, said. On Nov. 20, as roughly 400 teenagers roamed the school in between class periods, the teacher was moved to a different floor, Mr. Banks said.
Mr. Banks said the teacher had been targeted for her backing of Israel and for “expressing her Jewish identity,” adding that it was “completely unacceptable.”
[The New York Times Report continues]
But on Monday, Mr. Banks said there had been “many rumors and misinformation” about what happened. The teacher “was never in direct danger” or barricaded into a room, he said, but was moved to a different floor of the building when the protest began.
“Violence, hate and disorder have no place in our schools,” Mr. Banks, who himself attended Hillcrest in the 1970s, said at a news conference.
[The New York Times Report continues]
The incident at Hillcrest was a stark example of just how fraught the fallout from the war has been for school communities across the nation.
At times, videos of students marching through campuses or banging on classroom doors have gone viral — setting off swift firestorms. In San Francisco, for example, students said their peers and administrators had their personal information published online after a short clip of teenagers shouting “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” during a school rally was viewed more than 17 million times on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
[The New York Times Report continues]
School officials said some of the students involved in the protest had received suspensions for their conduct, though the officials were barred from discussing individual cases.
[The New York Times Report continues]
In interviews, a half-dozen students, who asked that their names not be published, shared mixed feelings about what had taken place. Several were frustrated over how their school had been portrayed online. One called the episode unacceptable and said he worries for his safety if other incidents occur.
Most of the teenagers said they believed that while some of their peers sought to protest the teacher’s post and express support for Palestinians, many of their classmates participated because they wanted to have fun or were curious about the commotion.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Two teachers at the school, who spoke on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak publicly, said they believed their school mishandled its response to the initial incident.
Some Hillcrest students had openly discussed their plans in the lead-up to Nov. 20, the two teachers said. By the weekend beforehand, they said, the Jewish teacher had learned she could be a target and informed a union representative and the principal.
But those details were not shared with the full staff, the two teachers said, adding that they felt blindsided when chaos erupted. Both said they wished for more robust communication. And they questioned whether the protest could be have been better controlled with more preparation.
Muhammad Ghazali, the student government president for the school’s senior class, said at the news conference he was disappointed with how the events unfolded, adding that the “entire Hillcrest community was hurt and broken” because of how some students behaved.
“It didn’t turn out the way it should have been,” he said. “It was meant to be a peaceful protest from the very beginning. But some of these students lack maturity.”
A third group of Gaza Strip hostages, including a 4-year-old American girl whose parents were killed in the Hamas raids on Israel, was freed on Sunday, raising the prospect more captives could be set free and a fragile truce extended.
The 17 hostages released by Hamas, who were seized when the militants raided Israel on Oct. 7, included three Thai citizens, one Russian and the little girl Avigail Idan, a dual American-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped from a kibbutz. She marked her fourth birthday in captivity in Gaza on Friday.
[The New York Times report continues]
With both Israel and Hamas poised to resume fighting at a moment’s notice, a collapse of the agreement might have quickly led to a resumption of the hostilities that have already killed thousands of people.
[The New York Times report continues]
Instead, late Sunday, responding to an offer by Israel to add one day to the cease-fire for every 10 hostages released, Hamas said it, too, was interested in extending the agreement.
[The New York Times report continues]
Hamas and its allies seized an estimated 240 hostages when they attacked southern Israel last month, killing about 1,200 people, most of them civilians. In Israel’s responding air and ground attacks on Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, more than 13,000 people have been reported killed.
On Friday, after protracted negotiations involving Qatar and the United States, Israel and Hamas paused the fighting for four days to allow the hostages to be released and food and other supplies to enter devastated Gaza neighborhoods.
Under the initial terms of the deal, Israel and Hamas agreed to a truce to allow for the exchange of 50 hostages held by Hamas and 150 Palestinian women and youths in Israel jails.
Jewish groups and leaders were quick to denounce anti-Palestinian hate following the shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent inVermont over the weekend. [People4Peace joins in condemning the shooting.]
Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad — all age 20 — were walking near the University of Vermont in the city of Burlington when a gunman shot them, injuring the students and sending them to the hospital. All three students are alive — two were stable as of Sunday and one had sustained more serious injuries, according to police.
The victims — all of whom attend colleges in the northeast region of the US — were reportedly speaking in a mix of English and Arabic and two of them were also wearing black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh scarves at the time of the shooting. Both local and federal authorities are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.
[The report by The Aljemeiner continues]
The Jewish community wasted no time in condemning the shooting, as well as hatred directed against Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians.’
[The Aljemeiner reported responses including from:]
New England office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted on Sunday. “At a time of rising incidents of identity-based hate all too often targeting the Muslim and Jewish communities in increasingly violent ways, we join in the call to law enforcement to investigate this as a possible hate crime.”
Arizona State Rep. Alma Hernandez (D) posted to social media that Jews stand together against anti-Palestinian hate.
[The report by The Aljemeiner continues]
Jewish on Campus, an antisemitism watchdog that tracks anti-Jewish hatred on college campuses, tweeted, “We stand in solidarity with the victims and their families and hope for their quick recoveries.
[The report by The Aljemeiner continues]
Pro-Israel advocates, both Jewish and non-Jewish were also quick to condemn the shooting in Vermont.
“The United States should have zero tolerance for anti-Palestinian hate and violence. America belongs to all Americans, and the safety of each American is sacrosanct,” added Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a progressive lawmaker who has been a vocal supporter of Israel in the US Congress.
The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) released footage on Monday of two Hamas terrorists explaining to interrogators how they used an ambulance to kidnap Thai and Nepalese agricultural workers during the massacre of Oct. 7 and take them to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
The terrorists, Adham Hawwas and Ismail Hawwas, were both seen in security footage at Kibbutz Alumim, near the Gaza Strip, and inside Shifa Hospital.
Both were arrested in Gaza and taken to Israel for interrogation.
On Nov. 20, the Shin Bet released footage of Palestinians confirming to agency interrogators how terrorists hid inside hospitals and dressed as medical personnel.
The first indications of possible sexual violence came as early as Oct. 7, the day that thousands of Hamas and other fighters streamed into Israeli towns and began live-streaming bloodshed and torture.
Footage showed several women stripped of their clothing. One video showed a woman, her hands zip-tied behind her back, with blood on the crotch of her pants.
Later came testimony from witnessesand first responders. One witness described in graphic detail a gang rape at the Nova rave site near Re’im. An Israeli reserve combat paramedic told The Post that he found the bodies of teenage girls with signs of sexual assault.
Combatants from Gaza overran 22 Israeli communities, killed at least 1,200 and took 240 hostage in the surprise attack. But their greater goal, sexual trauma specialists say, was to introduce terror against women — and children and other unarmed civilians — as a means of spreading fear.
[The article continues]
The Israeli commission, established by Elkayam-Levy,is working to compile a comprehensive database of the assault that day, based on the testimonies of survivors, witnesses, medical examiners, first responders, police and militants themselves, many of whom participated first from behind the camera, as they recorded their actions, and later in front of the camera, as they were interrogated by Israeli security forces.
That’s in addition to the investigation by Israel’s police in coordination with the military and Shin Beit, the internal security service. The agencies have been building a case on charges of mass murder, rape, torture and bodily mutilation.
[The article continues]
“There was humiliation through rape on the morning of Oct. 7,” Israeli Police Chief Kobi Shabtai said.
“There was worse evidence that we were not able to show,” he said. “They cut limbs and genitals, they raped, they abused corpses. There were sadistic sexual acts.” It’s unclear whether authorities have accounts directly from rape survivors.
[The article continues]
“There is always underreporting in sexual violence,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, who runs the Association of Rape Crisis Centers, based in Tel Aviv. “But with war crimes we know there will be extreme underreporting.”
Under those conditions, first responders and morgue workers have become a key source of information.
Driving by mosques and synagogues, protected by police cars parked in front of their entrances over the past month, I was reminded that there is a mezuzah on the door frame of my home. A mezuzah is a small decorative case that holds a prayer and placing it on doorposts has been a proud Jewish tradition for thousands of years.
But now I was wondering if it was visible to anyone standing on my porch. I couldn’t believe that these thoughts crossed my mind.
Antisemitism has increasingly been on the rise over the past few years with the Anti-Defamation League recording an over 316 percent increase over the past year.
[The Op-ed continues]
It’s like an indolent cancer that erodes through our social norms, metastasizing into our consciousness, obliterating what unites us as human beings. It grows on misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. It feeds on the souls of the uneducated and the disenfranchised who shout out answers to questions and situations that conveniently fit into slogans and chants. But these are not benign words. Just the opposite — they accelerate malignant intentions to harm and kill
[The Op-ed concludes]
A war against terrorism and antisemitism is much like a war against cancer. It needs to be fully detected and removed. We always try to use scalpel precision to protect surrounding tissue, but sometimes, it can only be done with debulking and other extreme measures. People may suffer from some collateral injury and scarring, but many lives are eventually saved.
Mark Levin of Fox News conducted an interview with Bibi Netanyahu, addressing the issue of civilian casualties in warfare.
They discussed the unique emphasis the media places on Israel in this context, contrasting it with the lack of similar scrutiny on other military forces worldwide.
“This is the face of a “white colonizer” Except there’s nothing white about me.
My family has been living in the land of Israel for actual centuries, but that’s not convenient with that narrative.
I come from a long line of Jews who have been living on this land long before and after it was named Palestine by actual colonizers, the British and the Romans, to name a few.
During that time, my Jewish ancestors were also called Palestinian. A label that was given to all inhabitants of the region, regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Our shared identity under colonial rule with other inhabitants of the region is often overlooked, but it’s an important part of our history.
It shows that Zionism, our return to our ancestral homeland, which my family has never left, is an act of decolonization, and although we’ve coexisted and evolved alongside countless diasporas throughout the years…
Jews are not white. We may come from every possible combination of DNA on the human spectrum, but our Jewish lineage keeps us connected to one another and to the land of Israel.
So when you think of us, remember we come in all colors and we’ve been on this land long before modern political narratives started shaping and reshaping our history.”
Below find excerpts from this New York Daily News “Be My Guest” column by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a contributing editor to Religion News Service, where he writes “Martini Judaism: for those who want to be shaken and stirred.” His new book, “Tikkun Ha’Am: Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism,” will be published by Wicked Son in January 2024.
On Oct. 7, the Jewish people suffered our greatest losses in a single day since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Jews and others were murdered; babies killed and burnt; our women were raped and paraded naked through the streets of Gaza; more than 200 people, from a variety of countries, were taken hostage.
Where were you?
You were either silent, or you said there was wrong on both sides…
[Rabbi Salkin continues]
But, when Israel fought back, you went ballistic. You criticized Israel’s response. You ignored how Hamas operates — placing its operatives in schools and hospitals, deliberately using its people as human shields. You called for a ceasefire but not a release of the hostages. You did not demand that the Red Cross be permitted to visit those hostages. [emphasis added by People for Peace]
[Rabbi Salkin continues]
There has been an explosion of antisemitism in this country — masquerading as pro-Palestinian support. “From the river to the sea” is not a cry for a two state solution (which many Jewish organizations have supported). Rather, it is a call for genocide against the Jews of Israel. When crowds at Columbia University chanted “Long live intifada!” do you not realize that this means the spreading of violence against — not Israelis, which would be bad enough — but against Jews?
[Rabbi Salkin continues with many example of Jewish activism and heroism in support and defense of civil and human rights, and then concludes]
But, again, we need to ask the first question that anyone asked in the Bible, the question that God asked Adam in the Garden of Eden: “Where are you?”
A video produced by the initiative of the information headquarters of the Civil Defense – Brothers of Arms, with the cooperation of workers from the Israeli gaming industry, calls for the return of the abductees Or Vigil Ya’akov Menir Oz.
From the moment the campaign was distributed, through a connection to the gaming communities in Israel and around the world, the campaign video received wide exposure, with over a million views in less than 24 hours.
The video states, On October 7, Hamas invited Or Yaakov’s home and abducted him and his younger brother Yagil to Gaza. Or is 16. Ygail is 13. For them, this is no game.
The “gamers” created #FORDSTILLAFK and urge that viewers share the video.
In a striking revelation, the IDF has uncovered an extensive underground network beneath Gaza’s main medical facility, Al Shifa Hospital.
This subterranean maze, crafted by Hamas, showcases a series of sophisticated and well-furnished spaces — including bathrooms, air conditioning, electrical connections and kitchen, intricately woven beneath the hospital’s foundation.
The IDF’s footage, released on a Wednesday evening (November 21, 2023), pulls back the curtain on this hidden labyrinth.
The video highlights the expansive and well-equipped nature of the Hamas tunnels. It shows how the infrastructure below connects to the hospital’s own electricity and plumbing.
This discovery underlines the complexity and reach of such underground networks in conflict zones, particularly how they intertwine with civilian structures like major medical centers.
[New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman explores daily interactions between Israeli Jews and Israelis in this Thanksgiving Day 2023 commentary:]
I confess that as a longtime observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I aggressively avoid both the “From the river to the sea” activists on the pro-Palestinian left and the similarly partisan zealots on the “Greater Israel” Zionist right — not just because I find their exclusivist visions for the future abhorrent but also because the reporter in me finds them so blind to the complexities of the present.
They aren’t thinking about the Jewish mother in Jerusalem who told me in one breath how she just got a gun license to protect her kids from Hamas, and in the next about how much she trusted her kids’ Palestinian Arab teacher, who rushed her children to the school bomb shelter during a recent Hamas air raid. They aren’t thinking about Alaa Amara, the Israeli Arab shop owner from Taibe, who donated 50 bicycles to Jewish kids who survived the Hamas attack on their border communities on Oct. 7, only to see his shop torched, apparently by hard-line nationalist Israeli Arab youth, a few days later, only to see a crowdfunding campaign in Hebrew and English raise more than $200,000 to help him rebuild that same shop just a few days after that.
Over the last half-century, I have seen Palestinians and Israelis do terrible things to one another. But this episode that began with the barbaric Hamas attack on Israelis, including women, little kids and soldiers in communities alongside Gaza, and the Israeli retaliation against Hamas fighters embedded in Gaza that has also killed, wounded and displaced so many thousands of Palestinian civilians — from newborns to the elderly — is surely the worst since the 1947 U.N. partition days.
[Friedman’s column continues]
To that end, I devoted a lot of time on my trip to Israel and the West Bank this month observing and probing the actual day-to-day interactions among Israeli Arabs and Jews. These are always complex, sometimes surprising, occasionally depressing — and, more often than you might expect, uplifting — experiences. Because they reveal enough seeds of coexistence scattered around that one can still dream the impossible dream — that we might one day have a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
[Friedman’s column continues]
[Mansour] Abbas is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel who happens to be a devout Muslim and a member of Israel’s parliament, where he leads the important United Arab List party. Abbas’s voice is even more vital now because he did not respond to the Hamas terrorism with silence. Abbas understands that while it’s right to be outraged at the pain Israel is inflicting on Gaza’s civilians, reserving all of your outrage for Gaza’s pain creates suspicion among Jews in Israel and worldwide, who notice when not a word is uttered about the Hamas atrocities that triggered this war.
The first thing Abbas said to me about the Hamas onslaught was this: “No one can accept what happened on that day. And we cannot condemn it and say ‘but’ — that word ‘but’ has become immoral.” (Recent polls show overwhelming Israeli Arab condemnation of the Hamas attack.)
[Friedman’s column continues]
Well, it turns out that some Israeli Bedouins who lived near or worked in the border communities ravaged by Hamas helped to rescue Israeli Jews there. Some Bedouins got abducted by Hamas along with Jews, while others were murdered by Hamas because the terrorist group treated anyone who lived or worked in Israeli kibbutzim and spoke Hebrew as “Jews” — deserving to be killed.
[Friedman’s column continues]
And all along, both Jewish and Bedouin victims of Hamas were treated together in Israeli hospitals, where nearly half of all the new incoming doctors are now Israeli Arabs or Druze, as are some 24 percent of the nurses and roughly 50 percent of the pharmacists.
[Friedman’s column continues]
..this Israel-Hamas war, whenever it ends, has been so traumatic for everyone already that it will trigger the biggest debate about what the relations and boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians should be since the U.N. partition plan in 1947. I am sure of it — because anything less will mean permanent war.
I can already tell you that there will be a lot of destructive voices in that discussion: Palestinian and Arab Hamas apologists, who are already denying or playing down Hamas’s atrocities; Jewish supremacist settlers, eager not only to expand in the West Bank but also, insanely, to Gaza, and who show no apparent concern for the devastating suffering of Palestinian civilians killed in Israel’s retaliation there; Benjamin Netanyahu, who will sell Israel’s future down the river to stay in office and out of jail; and Hamas’s useful idiots in the West, particularly on campuses, where students denounce all of Israel as a colonial enterprise while chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
(Please spare me the explanation that this is really a call for coexistence: I was in Beirut in the 1970s when this chant was popular, and I can assure you it was not a call for two states for two peoples. If you have a mantra that needs 15 minutes to explain, you need a new mantra.) [Emphasis added by People4Peace]
[Friedman’s column continues]
His [Mansour Abbas] party [the United Arab List], broadly speaking, comes from the same Muslim Brotherhood wing of Palestinian politics as Hamas — only where Hamas worships violence and exclusion, Abbas advocates nonviolence and inclusion…. [Abbas said] Hamas’s actions do “not represent our Arab society, nor our Palestinian people, nor our Palestinian nation.”
[Friedman’s column continues]
In our interview, Abbas told me that we need “a new political rhetoric” and not to get drawn back into the old games. “This ‘river to the sea’ talk is not helpful,” he said. “They are making a mistake. If you want to help Palestinians, then talk about a two-state solution and peace and security for all the people.”
[Friedman’s column continues]
I finished my recent journey with two takeaways. The first is that this Gaza war is still far from over. Israel believes there will be no peace in or from Gaza as long as Hamas is in power there.
But the other is that just as the darkness of the Yom Kippur War produced the dawn of the Camp David treaty, and just as the viciousness of the first intifada and the Israeli pushback led to the Oslo Accords, out of the horrors of Oct. 7 will one day come another attempt to build two states for these two indigenous peoples.
Elon Musk rightly got called out for comments promoting antisemitism in a Nov. 15 post to his X platform formerly known as twitter.
So his comments two days (Nov. 17) later, –“At risk of stating the obvious, anyone advocating the genocide of *any* group will be suspended from this platform — are welcome, IF, indeed, the social media site follows through.
Musk also posted “‘decolonization,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.”
People4Peace and many, many others will be watching.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League which Musk previously WRONGLY criticized, stated. “This is an important and welcome move by Elon Musk. Greenblatt added, “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”
That said People4Peace expects the owner of a site where words and images and themes posted by some get amplified by others recognizes the dangers when he amplifies hateful, vile content.
Greenblatt makes it plain: “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories.”
If Jewish tradition, gleaning something new, even while studying anew the same content, is frequently possible. One hope an otherwise rather successful entrepreneur learned something…..
Read more in the November 20, 2023 JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)
As reported in a page one November 22, 2023 New York Times article,
” After more than six weeks of war, the Israeli government and Hamas announced Wednesday morning that they would uphold a brief cease-fire in Gaza to allow for the release of 50 hostages Hamas captured during its assault last month on Israel.
“The decision, first announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in a WhatsApp message, includes a pause of at least four days in the fighting in Gaza. If it holds, it would be the longest halt in hostilities since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks prompted Israel to begin its bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza.
“The Israeli government is committed to the return of all abductees home,” the government said. It added: “Tonight, the government approved the outline for the first stage of achieving this goal, according to which at least 50 abductees — women and children — will be released for four days, during which there will be a lull in the fighting. The release of every 10 additional abductees will result in an additional day of respite.”
Read the entire November 22, 2023 New York Times report.
People4Peace prays this leads to the return of all those seized as hostages.
PEOPLE4PEACE COUNTERS MISINFORMATION, BIASES IN WAKE OF HAMAS TERROR ATTACKS
Diverse Professionals Join Forces to Highlight the Threat of Hamas Terrorists to Both the Jewish and Palestinian People and Reaffirm Israel’s Right to Exist and Defend Itself.
NEW YORK / LOS ANGELES, Nov. 21, 2023 – Professionals from law, media, education, science, government relations, psychology and communications unite in People4Peace to tell the stories of real people in the wake of Iran-backed terrorist organization Hamas’ horrific attacks on Israeli civilians and ongoing cross-border assaults. The coalition uses traditional media, digital channels and social platforms to also emphasize Hamas’ stated goal — the genocide of the Jewish people, which violates international law — on the one hand and the values that guide American foreign policy since World War II on the other.
On October 7, thousands of Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,400 people. Children and infants were burned and beheaded in their beds, women were raped and their bodies desecrated, civilians — including the elderly and the disabled — were tortured and maimed, and 220 victims from more than 40 countries were abducted to Gaza as hostages.
Since then, the fighting has intensified and the misinformation and latent anti-semitism in this country and around the world has only grown, making the need for an organization such as People4Peace more vital.
“Even as Hamas still holds 220 hostages, fires unguided missiles at Israeli cities and perpetuates a wider war, some Americans seem to have forgotten Israel’s right to exist and defend itself against terror,” said Peter Samuelson, founder of People4Peace. “Hamas has time and again rejected peace with Israel, instead using Palestinian civilians as human shields — a war crime. Hamas is the greatest threat to Palestinian self-determination and the Palestinian right to live in dignity and peaceful coexistence with its neighbor. Israel cannot negotiate with the murderers of its children. There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated.”
Hamas has fired more than 10,000 unguided rockets into Israel since its October 7 terrorist attack. At least 550 Hamas missiles fell short in Gaza, many killing Palestinian civilians.
“Across social and traditional media, rampant lies and misinformation have skewed the public narrative, especially among young Americans,” said philanthropist, entrepreneur, and P4P Steering Committee member Mary Hagy. “Hamas presents a clear and present danger to the U.S., Israel, and the world.”
People4Peace informs broad audiences about the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s response. People4Peace volunteers from media, law, education, science, psychology, government and public relations are based in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Haifa. Learn more at www.people4peace.net.
Steering Committee: Peter Samuelson, Fred Klein, Corey Bearak, Mary Hagy, David Oralevich, Jonathan Taylor, David K. Haspel, Drew Westen, Joel Weinberger, Avidor Rabinovich, Bruce Lee, Deborah Heiser, Zafra Lerman, Jake Smith, Marco Ciapelli, Samantha Stone, Adam H. Brill, Shari Goldstein, Steve Posen, Shelley Simpson.
Sheryl Sandberg penned an Op-ed for CNN that highlights the most heinous violence of the Hamas terrorists against women and children. It accompanies a CNN video that details some of the vicious sexual violence. Read excerpts of the Op-ed below:
Rape should never be used as an act of war.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists committed unspeakable atrocities that we must speak about — and speak about loudly. Numerous witnesses have testified that sexual violence was widespread on that day, according to reports by Israeli investigators. An eyewitness has recounted the horror of watching a fellow concert-goer being gang-raped, then murdered. Rescue workers have reported recovering lifeless bodies, naked with their legs spread.
[Lean In Founder and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s CNN Commentary continues]
US leaders on both sides of the aisle, especially women, have taken a strong stand against the use of rape as a tactic of war. In 1995, then first lady and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton traveled to China, and in her famous “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” speech, insisted that “it is a violation of human rights … when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.” In 2008, addressing the use of sexual violence in armed conflict, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that “rape is a crime that can never be condoned.” The world agreed.
Not loudly condemning the rapes of October 7 — or any rapes — is a massive step backward for the women — and men — of the world.
[Sandberg continues her CNN Op-ed]
No matter what you believe should happen in the Middle East — I personally support a two-state solution where a Palestinian state and Israel co-exist so that both their populations can enjoy peace and security — we can surely unite against these atrocities. We can each “be a witness” and together call out this unacceptable horror and unimaginable suffering.
[Lean In Founder and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s CNN Commentary concludes]
We must denounce these rapes in every conversation, at every rally, and on signs held on every street corner. We must forget our conflicting politics and remember our common humanity.
Read the entire op-ed by Meta/ Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, the founder of Lean In (https://leanin.org) and view the CNN video detailing the sexual violence
Read this report of first hand knowledge that Hamas terrorists used Shifa hospital as a based form which it planned and carried out its vicious act of terror, slaughter, seizure of innocents and rape.
A British doctor who used to work at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical center, under which the IDF says Hamas operates a major command and control base, has confirmed that there were areas of the hospital where he could not go, or else he would be shot.
In a recent interview with the English-language channel of French broadcaster France24, the doctor, who declined to give his name for fear of endangering his colleagues in Gaza, said he had worked at Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank for three months, three years ago.
“When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot,” he was quoted as saying.
[The interview with the doctor continues]
The physician also reported to the journalist that if hospital staff were 10% frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes, they were 90% frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.
Hospitals have special protection under international humanitarian law for an important reason – their purpose is to save lives, and IHL’s purpose is to reduce unnecessary suffering as much as possible in the context of the horror of war. Unfortunately, Hamas has long sought to exploit the specially protected status of hospitals under international humanitarian law and to use them to shield their activities from counterattack by Israel.
Hamas has a long history of using civilian areas such as homes, hospitals, and schools to carry out its terror operations. Hamas stores weapons in residential areas and even schools and hospitals, firing rockets from densely populated zones, operating command centers in civilian areas like hospitals, and sometimes using civilian clothing to blend in.
Hamas has also used ambulances to evacuate fighters and operatives as well as transport food, IEDs, and weapons. Such practices make it challenging for the Israeli military to take action against legitimate military targets without risking civilian casualties.
Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as a terror base
Located in Gaza City, Al-Shifa Hospital, which means “healing” in Arabic, was built by the British in 1946 when they governed what was then the Mandate of Palestine. Later, when Israel gained control of the Gaza Strip from Egypt following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel, with American support, worked on a large-scale renovation to enlarge and modernize Al-Shifa in the 1980s, including the installation of a subterranean concrete floor. The hospital is the largest in the Gaza Strip today, the sprawling complex has over 1,500 beds and 4,000 employees.
Two actresses, one an Academy Award-winning veteran and the other a relative newcomer, have been dropped by Hollywood companies after comments they separately made about the Israel-Hamas war drew criticism.
Susan Sarandon, a five-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner (for best actress, in 1995’s “Dead Man Walking”), was dropped by United Talent Agency after making comments at a pro-Palestinian rally last week. An agency spokesman, Richard Siklos, confirmed Tuesday that the agency no longer represented Sarandon but declined to elaborate.
[The New York Times Report continues]
“We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” Spyglass said in a statement on Tuesday.
[The New York Times Report continues]
United Talent dropped Sarandon after she made remarks at a rally in New York City last week. “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence,” she said at the rally, where she called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, according to a video published by The New York Post.
[The New York Times Report continues].
Sarandon said at the rally that being critical of Israel should not be considered antisemitic. “There’s a terrible thing that’s happened where antisemitism has been confused with speaking up against Israel,” Sarandon said. “I am against antisemitism. I am against Islamophobia.”
There has been a sharp rise in antisemitic crimes in New York City since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, according to the Police Department. On Oct. 7, Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking about 240 people hostage, according to the Israeli government. More than 11,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,600 children, have been killed since the Israeli counteroffensive began, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
[The New York Times Report continues]
Hollywood has been riven in recent weeks by the Israel-Hamas war. Some Jewish writers were angered that their union did not quickly issue a statement condemning Hamas. A prominent agent at Creative Artists Agency, Maha Dakhil, posted messages to social media accusing Israel of “genocide” and then removed them. She issued an apology and resigned from an internal leadership position at the company. One of her prominent clients, the screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin, dropped her as his agent, saying in a statement, “Maha isn’t an antisemite, she’s just wrong.”
Update: On December 5, 2024 Page Six (New York Post) reported independent production company PTO Films ceased their consideration Sarandon for a short film due to her recent anti-Jewish and Anti-israel rants.
“Remember,” the former secretary of state said, “there was a cease-fire on Oct. 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery.”
Those three words — “that Hamas broke” — aren’t trivial. They give the lie to the “Cease-Fire Now” mirage, or imposture, that has become a rallying cry at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. They are at the heart of what the war is about, and the key to how it can end. And they are the bright dividing line between those who would allow Hamas to get away with murder, and those who would refuse.
[The Op-ed continues]
The Israeli government and Hamas agreed on Wednesday morning to a four-day cease-fire in which Hamas would free 50 of the hostages. But Hamas did that only because it’s under intense military pressure. It could get a real and lasting cease-fire for the people of Gaza — and probably safe passage out of the territory for many of its members — in exchange for releasing all the hostages, surrendering its arms and renouncing its rule in favor of some other Arab power.
That Hamas has done none of these things isn’t shocking: It’s a terrorist death cult. What’s shocking is that people in the Cease-Fire Now crowd don’t appear to have much interest in making any demands of Hamas equivalent to those they make of Israel.
[The Op-ed continues]
For Israelis, what “Cease-Fire Now” means is “Surrender Now.” No wonder they decline to heed the call.
[The Op-ed concludes]
Instead of Cease-Fire Now, we need Hamas’s Defeat Now. Only on that basis does a lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike have any chance to follow.
[Below find an excerpt of Mosab’s talk at the UN found accompanying YouTube video of his presentation]
Today, I can speak on the authority of a Palestinian child someone who grew up in that culture Hamas first crime against children in the Palestinian societies…it’s the religious ideological indoctrination that I had to go through with one intention in mind to annihilate the state of Israel this is Hamas primary goal. In this truth there is no confusion I speak as firsthand witness on Hamas and their intention my father is one of the founders of Hamas movement I was there when Hamas was born I was before Hamas was born.
[Mosab continues]
Don’t be mistaken and take my words very carefully Hamas is committing a crime against this generation and the next generations to come so blaming Israel is not going to solve the problem.
[Mosab continues]
“We are talking about a big problem it’s beyond Israel and here is the danger and with this I will conclude the danger if Israel fail their war in Gaza which is a brutal war because if it was open war. Israel would annihilate Hamas in no time matter of hours, let’s say days Hamas is finished but since Hamas strategy. It’s a strategic thing of Hamas to take human shields. This is this crime cannot be forgiven. None of us should forgive this crime gambling with children’s blood for political gain; it doesn’t get worse than this so Israel now got stained by blood. This is what Hamas wanted to happen from day one. They wanted to sacrifice the thousands of children so Israel can take the blame digging tunnels and bunkers under hospitals and schools. [They] launch missiles and a Hamas misfires. How many people killed at a hospital and they went so fast to blame Israel and the rest of the world listen to them and listen to their propaganda nobody’s concerned to check what is true and what is false.
[Mosab continues]
“If Hamas is not defeated in Gaza it will inspire many groups around the globe they will see that few thousands of savages can black blackmail the International Community, the superpowers and bring democracies to their knees. Many of them are watching now and satisfied to see the state of confusion and fear and anxiety this is the time to get united because if Israel fails in Gaza all of us we will be next”
TEL AVIV — The first clues came from the bodies of slain militants: maps, drawings, notes, and the weapons and gear they carried.
***
In Beeri, a kibbutz town overrun by Hamas on Oct. 7, one dead fighter had a notebook with hand-scrawled Quranic verses and orders that read, simply, “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.” Others were equipped with gas canisters, handcuffs and thermobaric grenades designed to instantly turn houses into infernos
***
The evidence….reveals an intention by Hamas planners to strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response.
***
Hamas militants staged a mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians in at least 22 Israeli villages, towns and military outposts.
***
Some militants carried enough food, ammunition and equipment to last several days, officials said, and bore instructions to continue deeper into Israel if the first wave of attacks succeeded, potentially striking larger Israeli cities.
***
One unit carried reconnaissance information and maps suggesting an intention to continue the assault up to the border of the West Bank.
***
Since 2020, the European Union and other international donors have contributed to dozens of new projects, from schools and youth sports facilities to roads and sewage treatment plants.
***
In quiet support of Gaza’s economic development, Israel agreed to grant work permits to up to 20,000 Gazan laborers. Meanwhile, it allowed Qatar to deliver $30 million monthly in development funds.
***
…most brutal attacks occurred in Beeri, where militants cut open the belly of a pregnant woman and dragged her fetus onto the ground. In other towns, survivors told of parents being murdered in front of their children and children murdered in front of their parents. Other survivors described witnessing sexual assaults, including rape.
Read the entire Nov. 12, 2023 article in the Washington Post
On Tuesday, November 14, 2023, Jewish people throughout the United States gathered for the country’s largest pro-Israel rally to ensure the world does not forget the hostages and to stand up against antisemitism.
Nearly 300,000 people gathered at the National Mall in Washington, DC, to stand with Israel.
The massive crowd of peaceful protesters included thousands of Birthright Israel alums who traveled from their college campuses or who took the day off work to show their support. Birthright Israel Foundation donors were also in attendance and joined their local Jewish federations for the march.
Watch this video to hear from young marchers who visited Israel through Birthright.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, that the White House condemns “this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms.”
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Bates wrote.
***
Musk’s endorsement of the post comes against a backdrop of rising antisemitism in the United States after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Bates said the White House will “continue to condemn antisemitism at every turn.”
(Read the full Nov. 17, 2023 article at Politico.)
Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount and Sony have joined other major X advertisers in choosing not to advertise on the social media platform. Earlier Friday, Lionsgate Entertainment Corp. announced it was pausing all of its advertising on the Elon Musk-owned X, effective immediately, citing Elon Musk’s “recent antisemitic tweets.” The decision comes just one day after IBM suspended ads on the social media platform, with Apple also reportedly suspending X , effective immediately, citing Elon Musk’s “recent antisemitic tweets.” The decision comes just one day after IBM suspended ads on the social media platform, with Apple also reportedly suspending X advertising Friday, according to Axios.
[The pressure from advertisers just might be having an impact as further in the article, it reports:]
While Musk has been under fire, he received a public statement of support from a surprising place: Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. Musk had threatened to sue the organization just two months ago, blaming them at the time for a prior advertising drop.
Greenblatt quoted Musk stating earlier Friday that terms such as “decolonization” and “from the river to the sea” “imply genocide,” are against the platform’s terms of service and will result in suspension.
“This is an important and welcome move by @elonmusk,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”
(Read more in the Nov. 17, 2023 The Wrap; there find further stories from Axios and Media Matters)
Alarmed by the Israel-Hamas war and a rising tide of hate directed at Jews, prominent entertainment industry creatives and executives have formed a nonprofit organization devoted to combatting antisemitism.
The Entertainment Alliance to Fight Antisemitism has come together in the past few weeks following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel and the shocking rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. Nearly 2,000 members of the creative community have signed a pledge that condemns discrimination and affirms Israel’s right to exist.
[The article continues]
The EAFA was born out of the same alarm that spurred the Anti Defamation League in September to establish its Media and Entertainment Institute with the goal of engaging industry insiders on the persistence of antisemitic and hateful tropes in pop culture.
[Read the full text of the EAFA pledge:]
We, the undersigned writers, directors, actors, producers, musicians, songwriters, crew, representatives, executives, and other entertainment industry professionals are alarmed by the growing wave of antisemitism that is spreading around the world, across our nation, through our college campuses, and in our industry.
We recognize that Jews have a right to live and learn and work without fear of violence and harassment. We recognize the right of Israel to exist. Just as we have bonded together to fight other forms of hatred and bigotry, we stand united in our pledge to fight antisemitism wherever it appears. We have seen what happens when unbridled Jew-hatred goes unchecked. We pledge to not let that happen on our watch.
[Learn more and read the full Nov. 17, 2023 article at Variety.]
A Hamas command center that the Israeli military says is under Al-Rantisi children’s hospital offers a chilling glimpse into what Gaza will continue to look like if the growing global calls for a ceasefire are heeded.
Inside hidden rooms, Hamas reportedly stored rocket-propelled grenades, an explosive vest and even a motorcycle believed to be used to kidnap Israelis on October 7, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Diapers and baby bottles found there suggest Hamas imprisoned its youngest hostages at the site, the IDF says.
Hamas also has a command node under Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, says a US official with knowledge of American intelligence.
The secret tunnels and command center that Israeli forces point to are part of an elaborate terror infrastructure that Hamas has spent 15 years constructing in the heart of Gaza. If that infrastructure is not fully destroyed, Hamas, which remains intent on destroying Israel, will retain the means to continue attacking Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians.
Accepting a ceasefire now will cost many more lives in the long run.
Read more in this Nov. 17, 2023 CNN op-ed by Aviva Klompas, former director of speechwriting at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations and co-founder of Boundless Israel, a nonprofit organization that partners with community leaders in the United States to support Israel education and combat hatred of Jews. It includes a video where Israel shows CNN an underground tunnel between a school and hospital in Gaza.
The Department of Education has launched investigations into seven schools, including Cornell University, Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, after receiving complaints about alleged incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The investigations include five antisemitism cases and two Islamophobia cases.
They are the first investigations of this kind by the Department of Education since the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
The schools were informed about the investigations within the last 24 hours. They include one K-12 school, the Maize Unified School District in Kansas, and six colleges: Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Cornell University in New York, Columbia University in New York, Wellesley College in Massachusetts, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told CNN on Friday that he anticipates more investigations are coming.
A list of K-12 schools and colleges under investigation for possible discrimination based on shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics is now posted on the Department of Education’s website and will be updated weekly.
[The article concludes:]
“Hate has no place in our schools, period. When students are targeted because they are—or are perceived to be—Jewish, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, or any other ethnicity or shared ancestry, schools must act to ensure safe and inclusive educational environments where everyone is free to learn,” Cardona said in a statement Thursday.
More than a dozen Jewish TikTok creators and celebrities confronted TikTok executives and other employees in a private meeting on Wednesday night, urging them to do more to address a surge of antisemitism and harassment on the popular video service.
The meeting, held on a video call for about 90 minutes and joined by more than 30 people in all, included the actors Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing and Amy Schumer. It was led by Adam Presser, TikTok’s head of operations, and Seth Melnick, its global head of user operations. The executives said they wanted to know more about what the creators were experiencing to improve the app, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
The celebrities and creators described, sometimes with fiery rhetoric, how TikTok’s tools did not prevent a flood of comments like “Hitler was right” or “I hope you end up like Anne Frank” under videos posted by them and other Jewish users.
“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis,” Mr. Cohen, who does not appear to have an official TikTok account, said early in the call. He criticized violent imagery and disinformation on the platform, telling Mr. Presser, “Shame on you,” and claiming that TikTok could “flip a switch” to fix antisemitism on its platform.
[The article continues:]
TikTok arranged the Wednesday meeting with the creators in response to an open letter they sent last week criticizing the company. [View the letter and signatories.]
[Read the entire Nov. 16, 2023 article at the New York Times.]
#FreeGazaFromHamas #standwithisrael #fyp
The absurdity in justifying the victim at all costs. Even if it means more victims on all sides
Take a stand, share this, the world should know the truth 🙏
#rejectfake #standwithisrael #hamasisisis #TikvaInternational #FreeGazaFromHamas #foryo #fyp
View this video posted to YouTube by Tikva International.
Taking a position against the killing of civilians — such as Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack and the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza — is relatively easy. It gets harder when considering support for or opposition to the overall prosecution of the war, including the growing calls for a cease-fire. And when the aperture is widened from the particulars of the current violence to the history of the broader conflict, the divergence of opinions becomes even more stark and complicated.
A few weeks ago, I interviewed several pro-Palestinian activists and scholars in America. Almost all of them described themselves as anti-Zionist, but in our conversations, all of them also condemned antisemitism. This week, I turned to Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League — whom I spoke to soon after he appeared at Tuesday’s March for Israel that drew tens of thousands of people to the National Mall — who sees anti-Zionism, by definition, as antisemitism. He told me, “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” He believes that claiming to be anti-Zionist but not antisemitic is like someone saying in 1963 that “I’m against the civil rights movement, but I’m also against racism.”
{The op-ed continues]
When I told Greenblatt that none of my interviewees gave a direct “yes” to the right-to-exist question, he said that was “almost indescribably offensive” because he connects any hesitation on the question to historical antisemitism and a denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
[Op-ed by Northwestern student & AJC Campus Global Board VP Lily Cohen]
As I scroll through Instagram, I am repeatedly told that Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel were justified by the “undeniable right to resist.” Worse than the sentiment itself is where it’s coming from – the same people who sit behind me in lecture halls, who were in my dance company or who I might see at a campus party.
The proximity of the vitriol has engulfed me in panic for the past month.
Many Jewish students have grown numb in recent years to the demonization of Israel on our campuses and in our social media feeds. But seeing students I engage with every day applaud the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered more than 1,400 people in Israel is sickening.
As I watched in horror the news from Israel on Oct. 7, I assumed that because the violent attack on innocent civilians felt so obviously wrong to my family, my Jewish friends and me, everybody else I knew would agree. Needless to say, I was caught off guard when classmates began declaring the attacks a victory for Palestinian “resistance.”
College campuses should be incubators of critical thinking and intellectual discourse. Yet, conversations have become increasingly stifled and cancel culture lauded, sometimes even by professors themselves.
And the events of the past two weeks suggest that the situation will only get worse unless something drastically changes.
[The Op-ed by Northwestern student & AJC Campus Global Board VP Lily Cohen continues:]
Last year, I wrote an article for the campus newspaper declaring my pride in my Jewish identity and my love for Israel, and calling out antisemitism on campus. In response, pro-Palestinian activists turned 42 copies of my article into a banner hung in front of the library and painted atop it “From the River to the Sea” – a phrase widely interpreted as a call for the erasure of the state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
[The Op-ed by Northwestern student & AJC Campus Global Board VP Lily Cohen concludes:]
My hope is that university leaders will realize they need to reset the dynamic on campus. As the threat of a protracted war looms, now is the time to put in the hard work to build academic environments that value truth and reject hatred.
Read the full Op-ed by Northwestern student & AJC Campus Global Board VP Lily Cohen in the Nov. 9, 2023 USA Today]
[Newsweek Op-ed by Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee.]
Amid a global wave of antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and violence, more than 290,000 people from across the United States came together on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. to make clear that Americans stand with Israel and the Jewish community. The March for Israel made clear that we are united against terrorism, against antisemitism, and in our dedication to bring home every hostage being held by Hamas.
Now it’s time to match those voices with action.
We have no time to lose; antisemitic incidents have more than tripled year-over-year in the United States since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, and no region was spared.
New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish community outside of Israel, experienced more than three times the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes this year than in October 2022. Jewish students at Ohio State University were attacked and the school’s Hillel was vandalized. Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Jewish Israel supporter died from injuries sustained when a protester at a Los Angeles-area rally in support of Palestinians became violent and attacked him. At a pro-Palestinian march in Washington, D.C., we saw a protester carrying a sign equating the Star of David with a Nazi swastika and nearby, at George Washington University we saw projections of “glory to our martyrs” on a university library. This is blatant Jew-hatred.
Antisemitism is an intergenerational, coast-to-coast, left to right phenomenon. Fighting it requires comprehensive buy-in from every facet of society.
It must involve government officials at the federal, state, and local levels. It must involve our university presidents and professors, educators, students, and civil society organizations. And given the skyrocketing increase in antisemitic incidents, this work must begin immediately.
Here are ten ways we should capitalize on the momentum generated by the March for Israel to strike a major blow against antisemitism.
[An excerpt of the ten points to combat antisemitism in Ted Deutsch’s Op-ed follows:]
1. A good starting point is to fully implement the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which takes a comprehensive, whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach.
2. Some of the most vicious antisemitic incidents of late have taken place at high schools and on college campuses.
3. An understanding of Judaism and American Jewry must be integrated into school and higher education curricula and training materials.
4. For their part, students should encourage universities to address their safety, speak out about antisemitic incidents, and educate themselves about Israel
5. We all must call on elected officials to condemn Hamas’s brutal terror attack, provide Israel the support necessary to defend its citizens and win its war against Hamas terrorists, and demand the release of all hostages.
6. Elected officials, for their part, must unequivocally condemn antisemitic incidents wherever and whenever they occur.
7. Local elected officials can appoint local Jewish community liaisons so that their constituents feel cared for and secure.
8. Tech and social media companies need to take prompt and effective action to counter the surge in online hate and content celebrating Hamas and its terror attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
9. As many American Jews feel alone or ostracized, government and educational institutions should lift up Jewish-American heritage and the considerable contributions of Jews to American life and our nation’s history.
10. Lastly, hate does not exist in a vacuum. Interfaith dialogue and inter-community work can help build a more secure America for all.
[Ted Deutsch concludes his Op-ed:]
Fighting antisemitism takes all of us, and there is no time to waste.
[Read the entire Nov. 15, 2023 Op-ed by AJC CEO Ted Deutsch in Newsweek]
When the historian Deborah Lipstadt defeated a libel suit brought against her in a British court by the Holocaust denier David Irving in April 2000, it was almost possible to imagine that antisemitism might someday become a thing of the past, at least in much of the West.
[ The New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens continues]
Today, Lipstadt is the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, and her battle against Irving (the subject of the 2016 film “Denial”) seems almost quaint. “I never imagined antisemitism would get this bad,” she told me when I spoke with her by phone on Monday evening. “Something about this is different from anything I have ever personally seen.”
[ The New York Times op-ed by Bret Stephens continues]
Lipstadt made short work of those claims. If Israel ought to be abolished because it is guilty of displacing native inhabitants, then the same should go for the United States or Australia, among many other countries. If Israel is racist, then how is it that more than half of Israeli Jews have non-Ashkenazi roots, because their ancestors came from places like Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia? If Israel is an apartheid state, why are Israeli Arabs in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court, attending Israeli universities, staffing Israeli hospitals?
Then there is the double standard that’s so often applied to Jews. On college campuses, she noted, “when other groups say, ‘We are a victim,’ the default position is to believe them. When Jews say it, the default position is to question, to challenge, to say, ‘You caused it’ or ‘You don’t have a right to that’ or ‘What you say happened to you is not really an example of bigotry.’”
Why is so much of today’s antisemitism coming from well-educated people, the sort who would never be caught dead uttering other racist remarks? Lipstadt recalled that of the four Einsatzgruppen — the German death squads entrusted with the mass murder of Jews in World War II — three were led by officers with doctoral degrees. “You can be a Ph.D. and an S.O.B. at the same time,” she said.
[Read the entire Op-ed Bret Stephens at the New York Times.]
From the New York Times Op-ed by David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator:
The absence of military resolve in the face of brutal and aggressive war is perhaps the most dangerous. There is no worse way to undermine the world order than to allow aggressors to prevail. We don’t need to refer to the familiar history of Europe in the 1930s to remind us of the extraordinary danger of unchecked military aggression. We’ve seen the result, for example, of Vladimir Putin’s military policy. From Chechnya to Georgia to Ukraine to Syria and now to Ukraine again, it’s clear that he fights without the slightest regard for the U.N. Charter or the laws of war, and it’s clear that he’ll fight until he’s stopped.
Similarly, as noted above,while Hamas wants a cease-fire (which is in its direct military interest) it has also vowed not to stop its long war against Israel. If it survives as a meaningful military force, it will almost definitely attack again. It disregards every single international legal rule or norm.
[The Op-ed continues]
When Hamas attacked Israel, it violated rules against aggressive war. When it intentionally slaughtered civilians and then hid among civilians after the attack, it violated the most basic principles of the law of armed conflict. As a result, Israel has a right under international law to defeat Hamas, and while it is also bound by the laws of armed conflict (which credible observers already claim Israel has violated), Hamas bears the legal responsibility for the civilian deaths that result from its own violations of the laws of war.
The overwhelming weight of domestic, international and diplomatic protests against Israel turns this system upside down. They place political pressure against Israel’s military resolve and — crucially — diminish the chances of legal accountability for the Hamas leaders and commanders who planned and executed a grossly illegal and brutal attack.
These protests also play directly into Hamas’s illegal military strategy. The entire reason for embedding in a civilian population is to make it impossible for others to respond to terrorist attacks without endangering or killing civilians, and an armed force that is almost certainly unable to prevail in direct combat with the I.D.F. utterly depends on outside forces demanding that Israel stop its attacks.
[The Op-ed continues]
If the goal, however, is to end civilian suffering, the best course of action is for Hamas to release its hostages and for its military forces to lay down their arms. That is the solution that is by far more in line with the entire postwar legal structure designed to end or limit armed conflict, and that should be the primary object of international pressure.
[The Op-ed concludes]
I do know that placing more pressure on Israel than Hamas to end the conflict and save civilian lives is exactly backward. The international system depends on opposing the aggressor and punishing crimes. Protests that aim their demands more at Israel than Hamas impede justice, erode the international order and undermine the quest for a real and lasting peace.
Read the entire Nov. 16, 2023 Op-ed by Columnist David French, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator, at The New York Times]
A British doctor who used to work at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical center, under which the IDF says Hamas operates a major command and control base, has confirmed that there were areas of the hospital where he could not go, or else he would be shot.
In a recent interview with the English-language channel of French broadcaster France24, the doctor, who declined to give his name for fear of endangering his colleagues in Gaza, said he had worked at Shifa and other hospitals in Gaza and the West Bank for three months, three years ago.
“When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot,” he was quoted as saying.
People stand outside the emergency ward of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on November 10, 2023, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. (Khader Al Zanoun/AFP)
[The Times of Israel article reported by Gianluca Pacchiani continues]
The physician also reported to the journalist that if hospital staff were 10% frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes, they were 90% frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.
Separately, a journalist from Italy who spoke to The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity recounted that in 2009, right after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Hamas, he visited Gaza’s hospitals looking to interview wounded members of Fatah — the rival Palestinian faction that Hamas violently ousted from the coastal enclave in 2007.
“Eventually, I realized that they were all at home — Fatah members were too afraid to stay in the hospital, even if they were wounded,” the journalist said.
“Shifa is a very large compound. I got lost inside it, and at some point I ended up on an underground floor, and I found myself in front of two armed Hamas men in military attire, who told me to get out.”
“I got the impression they were guarding a security door that gave access to their underground infrastructure. Several Palestinian sources I spoke with later on confirmed that Hamas’s command and control center was located under Shifa Hospital and that [Hamas leader] Ismail Haniyeh had been hiding there throughout the duration of Operation Cast Lead.”
[The Times of Israel article reported by Gianluca Pacchiani continues]
Shifa Hospital is believed to be one of the nerve centers of Hamas’s underground terror infrastructure. The IDF has been operating around and in the medical center for more than a week, uncovering what it has said is evidence of Hamas’s use of the site for terrorist activities.
What is antisemitism, and how has it changed over the centuries?
In recent months and years we have seen the return and rise of antisemitism across Europe and around the world. But how has antisemitism mutated over time? And why does its return today present a danger not just for Jews, but for all who care about our common humanity?
“Every year at school in Israel we used to get a lecture from a Holocaust survivor,” said Tomer Peretz. “I was always getting bored listening to him like, ‘OK, OK, we got it, OK. So, they killed you guys. Let’s move on …
“‘It’s one of those things that happened and will never happen again.’”
But after Hamas fighters raided Israeli farms and villages, killing and butchering more than 1,400 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostages on October 7, Peretz agreed to tape his own testimony so that others would not just move on.
“Everybody has to do it. It’s a must. I don’t see any other option. People need to know,” he told CNN.
He was giving his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, which for years has collected the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides in countries like Cambodia and Rwanda.
Peretz, a Jerusalem-born artist who now lives in Los Angeles, was in Israel the first week of October for a family wedding. As the horror unfolded that Saturday morning, he knew that he had to help. He volunteered with Zaka, an organization that collects human remains after terror attacks so they can be buried according to Jewish tradition.
Peretz was sent to collect the bodies at Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 120 lay dead.
“I was too coward to be on the side of the head. I didn’t want to see faces,” Peretz said of the gruesome process of bagging mutilated bodies and loading them into trucks. “And then my time to touch the body came. It was the first time.” He helped lift a woman’s body, pulling her up by the arm so someone else could slip a body bag underneath. Of a victim, he said: “She had no face … It looked like they, someone … didn’t want to leave a face.”
Sifting through some of the more than 50,000 Holocaust testimonies at the foundation, it’s easy to find eerie echoes, which Peretz once believed could never come again.
There were no babies. No beheaded babies. No burnt babies in the oven. The Israeli army decided to keep the worst of the images of Hamas massacring Israeli civilians out of its screening presented in Los Angeles on Wednesday — a compilation of video from victims’ cellphones, terrorists’ bodycams, kibbutz security cameras, city CCTV, first responder phones and intercepted conversations.
It was bad enough without them. You know without my saying so how horrible it was. Perhaps the nightmare of 1,400 people slaughtered on Oct. 7 has been digging a dark hole in your psyche, as it has mine.
The real-time images of “Bearing Witness” were very much the stuff of a horror movie — a woman in pink pajamas cowering under a desk, shot at close range. An attempted beheading of a corpse with a garden hoe. Two little boys on a kibbutz, roughly age eight or nine, who race into their safe room with their father, only to see a hand emerge from around a corner and lob a grenade inside. The father is killed. The boys were shown running out screaming, back into their home, captured from the distant vantage point of a security camera.
There was an ominous moment when a dozen women soldiers — out of uniform — gather in a corner of an unidentified room, talking in panicked tones, one of them recording on her phone. Far across the room, a Hamas terrorist appears with his machine gun. The video ends suddenly. We do not know what happened to the women.
Some of this footage has already been on social media — images of bodies littering the road near Sderot, video of young people stampeding across a desert plain as they flee the grounds of a music festival, audio of the plaintive cries of a first responder (“They’re dead, all dead”) as he discovers piles of young bodies.
And as the IDF representative at Wednesday’s screening mentioned, these images were drawn from fewer than 150 of the dead. We hear audio of a Hamas commander telling his fighters to send a corpse back to Gaza City so the crowd can do what it wants with it. You see bleeding hostages dumped like burlap sacks into the back of a pickup truck. You see many, many people burned into charred, unrecognizable remains.
What really stuck with me were some of the less obvious moments, like the jubilation of the Hamas terrorists, flashing broad smiles and stabbing the air with their guns after shooting civilians in their cars.
Pro-Palestinian students say that they are speaking up for an oppressed people, but critics say that their rhetoric is deeply offensive.
In the days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Max Strozenberg, a first-year student at Northwestern University, experienced a couple of jarring incidents.
Walking into his dorm, he was startled to see a poster calling Gaza a “modern-day concentration camp” pinned to a bulletin board next to Halloween ghosts and pumpkins.
At a pro-Palestinian rally, he heard students shouting, “Hey, Schill, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today,” an echo of a chant from the anti-Vietnam War movement, now directed at Northwestern’s president, Michael H. Schill, who is Jewish.
As Israel continues to defend itself against the terrorist group Hamas, a war of information is unfolding around the world. Major influencers on social media, as well as elected officials and mainstream media news and pundits, have amplified Hamas’ messages and presented those messages “pro-Palestinian.”
This mix of slogans and threats has infiltrated college campuses and even the halls of government.
Here are seven hateful and harmful slogans that Hamas and its supporters have unleashed, and many of those supporting Palestinians in America have spread.
“From the River to the Sea”
Here’s what it means: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” is the catch-all phrase symbolizing Palestinian control over the entire territory of Israel’s borders, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That means it is a call for erasing the State of Israel and the Jewish people who live there. It is also a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers to do the same.
There is of course nothing antisemitic about advocating for Palestinians to have their own state. AJC itself is an organization that believes in a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, praising Hamas or other entities who call for Israel’s destruction, or suggesting that the Jews alone do not have the right to self-determination, is antisemitic.
Here’s how it is being used: The hateful slogan has frequently appeared on protest signs nationwide during rallies in support of Palestinians, often used on social media by Palestinian supporters including government officials and members of Congress, and even on T-shirts for sale on Amazon. It has also become popular among far too common call-to-arms for anti-Israel activists on campuses across the country, including on the East Campus bridge at Duke University, on lecture slides at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual meeting, and scores of other academic spaces.
“Colonialist Enterprise”
By charging Israel with colonizing Palestinians, Hamas and its supporters are manipulating the cause of racial justice to advance their terrorist goals – all while hoping no one notices Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people for more than 3,000 years.
Hamas wants Americans and Europeans to think the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a racial one, in which Israelis are seen as European and white oppressors and colonizers and Palestinians are seen as people of color who are oppressed and colonized. But the conflict is not a racial one. It’s a conflict between two nationalities.
What it means: The term “settler colonialist” refers to a system of oppression in which a colonizing nation displaces and dispossesses a native or pre-existing population. It suggests the intention to replace or even eliminate an indigenous people.
Why it’s a false charge: When you are indigenous, it’s impossible to colonize yourself. And yet that’s what Hamas is contending about Israelis. The Jewish people have a 3,000-year connection to the land of Israel. The Roman Empire destroyed the Jewish state of Judea in 70 CE and expelled many of the Jews living there, but even in exile, the Jewish people always longed to return to their homeland. Still, Jews continued to live in the land of Israel. The Zionist movement of the late 19th century gave Jews outside of Israel the hope and ability to begin to return to live there.
Far from colonizers, Jews returning to their ancestral homeland fled persecution. This includes not only Jews from Europe, but also Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews) who make up over half of Israel’s population today. These Jewish communities fled or were expelled from Arab countries and Iran due to antisemitism and persecution in the mid-20th century.
The destruction of Israel and the emboldening of Hamas would make life unlivable for gay Palestinians
When I first heard the phrase “Queers for Palestine”, I assumed it was a joke, a meme dreamt up by some Right-wing wag on Reddit. There is surely no way actual gay people would cheer on a state infamous for its loathing of homosexuals.
For all their zaniness, surely not even purple-haired, post-gender activists would take to the streets, Pride flag in hand, to champion a country that would jail them, if they’re lucky, and bump them off if they’re not.
But it’s not a joke. These people are real. This is where wokeness has taken us – to a situation where the young of the West are throwing their lot in with a regime that would throw them from a top-floor given half a chance.
“Queers for Palestine” has become the source of much online mirth in recent weeks, following Hamas’s October 7 pogrom. And deservedly so. People have compared it to “Chickens for KFC”. I saw one comment on Instagram noting that if these people actually went to Palestine, especially Hamas-ruled Gaza, their pronouns would be “was / were”.
I feel tempted to say “it’s funny because it’s true”, but none of this is funny. Palestine has an atrocious record on LGBT rights. In 2021, the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles carried out a survey of 175 nations and their acceptance of gay and gender-non-conforming people.
Palestine was at number 130. Behind Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The “Queers for Palestine” would literally be better off in the notoriously homophobic petro-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia than in their favourite victim nation.
Gay people face staggering levels of persecution in both Gaza and the West Bank. Jail and sometimes even death awaits those who commit the “sin” of carnal knowledge with a member of the same sex.
In 2016, Hamas executed one of their own top dogs, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, reportedly for sleeping with a man. Last year, 25-year-old Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay man, was beheaded by thuggish homophobes in Hebron in the West Bank. Footage of this gruesome hate crime was uploaded to social media.
New effort to provide pro bono legal services to Jewish students facing antisemitism
Hillel International, ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP today announced the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line (CALL), a free legal protection helpline for students who have experienced antisemitism. With antisemitism on campus reaching all-time highs since Oct. 7, this new resource comes at a critical moment for the Jewish community.
Any student, family, faculty, or staff member can go to the CALL website or text “CALLhelp” to 51555 to report incidents of antisemitic discrimination, intimidation, harassment, vandalism, or violence that may necessitate legal action. Lawyers will assess reports of antisemitic discrimination and hate, conduct in-depth information-gathering interviews, and provide pro bono representation for victims who choose to move forward with specific cases. CALL will also provide referrals to social services, mental health counseling services, and other relevant support services in their area.
A legal team from ADL, the Brandeis Center, Hillel International, and Gibson Dunn will guide overall strategy and coordinate volunteer lawyers from other leading firms including Gibson Dunn and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP. CALL invites volunteer lawyers from other firms and companies, as well as other organizations, to join in this effort.
Private jets, cushy hotels how Hamas bosses live in luxury
They are living the Hamas high life.
While the people of Gaza live in poverty and have suffered under the horrors of Hamas, the terror group’s leaders apparently are living high on the hog.
Israeli officials say Hamas leaders are billionaires, amassing an overwhelming jackpot of terror money for themselves.
“It’s just really the numbers that are shocking, looking at the sheer amount of money that some of these terror chiefs have been able to sock away,” Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News.
“There is no accountability in these countries that support terrorism, that are effectively state sponsors of terrorism. They could care less whether the Hamas leaders are doing things that are unjust.”
Hamas bosses Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are worth an estimated $4 billion each, and political bureau leader Mousa Abu Marzouk is worth $3 billion.
“The longer they stay away from the Gaza Strip, the more they live in the lap of luxury,” Schanzer said.
The terror group is estimated to earn more than $1 billion a year from a global network that includes cryptocurrency, real estate, legitimate business and taxing and extorting Gaza residents. The U.S. Treasury department has slapped sanctions of dozens of Hamas honchos, but the vast number of shell companies and financial maneuvering has made Hamas one of the richest terrorist organizations in the world.
Photos show Hamas leader Mashaal playing table tennis, as well as squeezing in a workout on a treadmill in what appears to be a hotel gym.
Thousands have been killed in the Gaza Strip, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble, while doctors treat screaming children in darkened hospitals with no anesthesia. Across the Middle East, fear has spread over the possible outbreak of a broader regional war. But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’ leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation.
Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.
It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
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Since the shocking Hamas attack Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them.
“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told the Times.
Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar says the group’s aim is not to run Gaza but to shake the Middle East and put Palestinian issue back in focus; Tells New York Times expected Arab world to join fight
Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said the terror group launched its attack on Israel on Octoer 7, in order to change the entire equation in the Middle East. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm,” he told the New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday.
He said Palestinian leaders felt their cause was being shoved to the side and only drastic measures would revive it. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
Sinwar’s deputy said Hamas had wider goals than running Gaza. “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”
According to the New York Times, which has been conducting interviews with leaders of Hamas in recent weeks as well as with Israeli and Western officials, it appears that the October 7 attack was planned and executed by a small group of Hamas leaders in Gaza who did not share the information with the leadership abroad, or other regional allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Therefore, many outside Gaza were surprised by the scope of the attack and level of atrocities that had taken place and even the Gaza ruling terror group was surprised by the success of its assault and that the number of dead and abducted was higher than expected.
All war is hell. All war is killing and destruction, and historically civilians are inordinately the innocent victims of wars. Urban warfare is a unique type of hell not just for soldiers, who face assaults from a million windows or deep tunnels below them, but especially for civilians.
Noncombatants have accounted for 90% of casualties per international humanitarian experts in the modern wars that have occurred in populated urban areas such as Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa, even when a Western power like the United States is leading or supporting the campaign.
The destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict, rules distilled from a complicated patchwork of international treaties, court rulings and historic conventions. Scenes of devastation, like Israel’s strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza earlier this week, quickly spark accusations that Israel is engaging in war crimes, such as indiscriminately killing civilians and engaging in revenge attacks. But war crimes must be assessed on evidence and the standards of armed conflict, not a quick glimpse at the harrowing aftermath of an attack.
Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing and directly targeting civilians, as well continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques and schools.
On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza, particularly when the charges that the IDF is committing war crimes so often come too quickly for there to have been an examination of the factors that determine whether an attack, and the resulting civilian casualties, are lawful. The factors that need to be assessed are the major dimensions of the most commonly agreed to international humanitarian law principles: military necessity, proportionality, distinction, humanity and honor.
A senior Hamas leader has refused to acknowledge that his group killed civilians in Israel, claiming only conscripts were targeted.
Moussa Abu Marzouk told the BBC that “women, children and civilians were exempt” from Hamas’s attacks.
His claims are in stark contrast to the wealth of evidence of Hamas men shooting unarmed adults and children.
The proof includes video from Hamas body cameras and first-hand testimony given to international news networks.
Israel says more than 1,400 people were killed by Hamas in the 7 October attacks, most of them civilians.
Mr Marzouk, the group’s deputy political leader, who is subject to an asset freeze in the UK under counter-terrorism regulations, was interviewed on Saturday in the Gulf. He is the most senior member to speak to the BBC since the 7 October atrocities.
The BBC pressed Mr Marzouk on the war on Gaza, specifically on the scores of hostages being held inside the territory.
Anti-Semitism is a major pillar in the ideology of Hamas (acronym of Harakat al-muqawama al-Islamiyya – Islamic Resistance Movement), a Palestinian national-Islamic movement, which perceives and articulates its conflict with Israel in Manichean and absolutist religious terms. Like most other Islamic movements in the Middle East, Hamas regards the conflict with the latest and most fateful phase of the relentless onslaught waged by western imperialism and culture against Islam since the Crusades.
Hamas publications portray the Jews as instruments of the West or, alternatively, as the power that controls and manipulates the West in this war. Concurrently, it views the current struggle as the last link in the war, which the Jews have been waging against Islam since its essence. Consequently, Hamas emphasizes the emphasis on the “Islamic essence” of the Palestinian cause.”
As such, the struggle is portrayed as an unbridgeable dichotomy between two absolutes: a “war of religion and faith,” between Islam and Judaism and between Muslims and Jews, rather than one between Palestinians and Israelis or Zionists.
It is a historical, religious, cultural and existential conflict between the true religion, which supersedes all previous religions, i.e. Islam, and the abrogated superseded religion, Judaism. It is a war between good personified by the Muslims who represent the party of God (Hizballah) against “evil incarnated…. the party of Satan” (hizb al-shaytan) represented by the Jews.
Justifying the Self and Demonizing the Other
Every conflict involves justification of the Self and the demonization of rivals and enemies, or in Hamas’ case the Jews as the “enemies of God and of humanity.” Such an accusation, in the words of Bernard Lewis, applies to all enemies of Islam since, if according to the Quran the fighters for Islam are fighting in holy war “in the path of God” and for God, then their opponents are fighting against God and are, therefore, his enemies.2 However, such depiction is used more forcefully and more often against the Jews in view of their explicit castigation by the Quran.
Unlike the non-Islamist Palestinian groups, Hamas makes no distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and uses Zionists and Jews synonymously and interchangeably. Judaism is a “religion that stipulates racism and hostility towards others in its books and incites to usurp unjustly Palestine under the slogan of the Holy Land.” Zionism, according to this view, transforms these Jewish ideas into reality. Likewise, terrorism is an integral and inherent pillar of Judaism, which stems from the teaching of the Tora, and it finds its expression in Zionist massacres in Palestine.3
The portrayal of the Jews as powerful archenemies of Islam departs from traditional Islamic depictions of the Jews that are associated with cowardice, degradation and wretchedness. It has become a central element in Hamas’ ideology and an important theme in the writings of all Islamist movements in the Middle East as part of a broader need to explain the current crisis of the Muslim world. It is particularly difficult within this context to explain Jewish or Zionist success vis-a-vis the Muslims since, according to Islamic tradition, the Jews were destined to humiliation and subjugation to Muslims after they had rejected the message of the Prophet. It is one thing to be defeated by a super-power such as the U.S., and a completely different situation to be defeated and ruled by the Jews, who had been an inferior minority in the past under the Muslim empire, and who are a small minority in the modern Middle East. The only way to explain this cognitive dissonance is to magnify the power and evil of the Jews, and thereby help to explain Muslim weakness.
A Westchester public relations, advertising, marketing and media specialist has been proactive in organizing support for Israel from the business and entertainment communities. Adam Brill is senior director, communications and crisis management at Harrison Edwards in Armonk. He responded to what happened on Oct. 7 through joining in the creation of a new organization, People4Peace.
“This is the largest assault on the Jewish people since the holocaust,” Brill told the Business Journal. “We are a group of diverse professionals who came together after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s response. We are volunteers, we represent the media, we represent law, education, science, psychology, government and public relations. We’re based in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C, and Haifa. We are a group that includes Hollywood producers Peter Samuelson and Jonathan Prince, the former editor of Variety magazine Jonathan Taylor and others.”
Samuelson said, “Hamas has time and again rejected peace with Israel, instead using Palestinian civilians as human shields — a war crime. Hamas is the greatest threat to Palestinian self-determination and the Palestinian right to live in dignity and peaceful coexistence with its neighbor. Israel cannot negotiate with the murderers of its children. There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated.”
Brill said that the People4Peace website is operational (https://people4peace.net/). He said that he was asked to join in forming the organization to help get its message out across the nation that what Israel is doing is justified. He said that they want to see the Palestinians come to the table and work out a true peace in the region.
“Our coalition is going to use traditional media, digital channels, social platforms to emphasize what Hamas’ stated goal is, which is the genocide of the Jewish people. We have to take on this narrative. There is so much misinformation, so much disinformation. People are reinventing history. They’re creating all kinds of narratives that seek to put Israel as a colonizer.”
Brill pointed out that Hamas, which controls Gaza, does not celebrate human rights, equal rights, civil rights and gay rights.
“Israel is the only democracy there that promotes all of that, yet there are so many splinter groups here that are preaching ideas that there are all these rights there in Gaza and that the people are being unfairly controlled by Israel and, sadly, it’s just not accurate.”
As deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas continues, so too does a dire humanitarian crisis in the area.
At least 1,400 people have been killed in Israel and, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza, more than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza after Hamas launched unprecedented attacks on Israel October 7. Subsequent airstrikes have overwhelmed local hospitals and internally displaced an estimated one million people in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which suffered damage to one of its buildings in Gaza, is calling for the protection of aid workers, civilians, and critical infrastructure. Calling the situation “horrific,” Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is urging restraint after medical facilities have been destroyed in the fighting.
Read the full article and a list of vetted humanitarian organizations at CNN.
When two acquaintances in Atlanta sat down to find common ground on the Israel-Hamas war, they found themselves in a painful conversation about race, power and whose suffering is recognized.
Samara Minkin was already feeling rattled when she saw a Facebook post from one of her children’s former teachers seven days after Hamas killed or kidnapped more than 1,600 people in Israel.
“The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED,” Sanidia Oliver, 37, wrote. “I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die.”
Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
New research provides evidence that conspiracy beliefs, openness to authoritarianism, and a desire to disrupt the social order are key factors in predicting antisemitic attitudes. The findings, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, challenge common assumptions about the relationship between political ideologies and antisemitism.
While several attitudes related to right-wing extremism were linked to antisemitism, a facet of left-wing authoritarianism emerged as the strongest predictor overall.
Antisemitism has been a persistent issue throughout history, often associated with discrimination, hatred, and even violence against Jewish communities. Understanding the root causes and predictors of antisemitism is crucial for combating this problem. Previous research has hinted at potential connections between political ideologies and antisemitism, but the recent study aimed to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of specific ideological beliefs.
“I’ve been publishing research on antisemitism for five years now,” said lead author Daniel Allington, a reader at King’s College London. “I initially became interested in the topic in 2015 because of allegations about antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. I was a member of the Labour Party at that time, and my initial reaction was to dismiss the idea.”
“But when I began to look into it the following year, I quickly realised that there was a real problem: people with very obviously antisemitic attitudes were feeling inspired to support the party leadership. Before long, my research agenda was almost completely taken over with the effort to understand what was going on.”
At 6:30 a.m., October 7, Hamas, the Iran-backed terror group controlling Gaza, launched an unprovoked and vicious surprise attack on Israel.
Using rockets, paragliders, boats, motorcycles and other vehicles, and whatever other means they could, terrorists infiltrated Israel. More than 1,400 people have been killed, including 30 Americans, and that number will undoubtedly rise. Over 5,400 are critically wounded. Over 243 people, from all over the world, have been taken hostage in Gaza.
I write these lines from Jerusalem, after spending time with the families of some of the 240 people kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. The hostages now held in Gaza include Jewish Israelis, Muslim Israelis and foreign citizens of different ethnicities.
In all my years of public life, the meetings with these families were the most difficult and fraught I’ve ever held. I’ve also spoken with families of some of the more than 1,400 of my people who were killed that day, many of them murdered in their living rooms and kitchens or dancing at a music festival. When I returned from one kibbutz devastated in the attack, I had to wash the blood off my shoes.
Are these individuals independent journalists or are they associated with Hamas?
Around five dozen individuals, some associated with Hamas and collectively boasting more than 100 million social media followers, have been waging a propaganda campaign against Israel on various social media platforms since the start of the Swords of Iron war on October 7.
These influencers, who identify as independent journalists, are often seen sporting blue press vests and helmets. They have also reportedly found refuge in Al-Shifa hospital, which the IDF recently disclosed serves as a Hamas command and control center, providing them with access to electricity and the internet.
While these individuals may appear to be speaking independently, they effectively act as the mouthpiece for the terrorist organization. Furthermore, they frequently feature in interviews and are quoted in mainstream media, causing their lies to spread.
The Jerusalem Post has located some of these influencers through inside and open sources. It plans to reveal their identities in the coming weeks.
Videos and photos of the conflict are competing with misappropriated depictions of unrelated tragedies, a cycle that experts say diminishes the experiences of victims past and present.
In a video circulating online meant to convey the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas, a small boy wails, his face caked in dust. Clinging to the sandwich he was eating when an airstrike razed his family’s home, he sobs for his two teenage sisters lost amid the chaos, one of whom would later be confirmed dead.
“A little boy crying for his sisters in Gaza,” reads a post accompanying the video, which was widely shared in recent weeks on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Yet the boy’s cries actually rang out hundreds of miles away, in Syria, nearly a decade before Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza over the past three weeks.
Conversations on social media, news media coverage, events on college campuses, and general public discourse related to the Israel-Hamas war demonstrate a dire need for accurate information about Israel, Zionism, and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the war continues to evolve, staying well-informed about the historical context and ongoing developments is crucial for fostering more understanding and informed opinions.
The timeline below aims to address frequently asked questions about Israel’s history and to help dispel misinformation about the events leading up to this point.
Here is a timeline summarizing key events in both Israel’s history within the broader context of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
1897-1947: Pre-State Israel
1897: First Zionist Congress
The Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl and other leaders, advocated for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Widespread antisemitism and persecution of Jewish communities in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served as a major catalyst for the Zionist movement. Jews faced discrimination, violence, and pogroms, a violent organized riot or attack directed at Jews, in many parts of Europe, which fueled the desire for a safe and secure homeland. The First Zionist Congress was held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, where Herzl and other prominent figures in the Zionist movement discussed and debated their vision for the establishment of a Jewish state.
Why It Matters: The Zionist movement under Theodor Herzl was historically significant because it marked the birth of modern political Zionism. Herzl advocated for a Jewish homeland, organized the First Zionist Congress, and played a central role in shaping the intellectual and political foundations of the movement. His vision influenced Jewish identity and led to diplomatic efforts that eventually contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel. Herzl’s legacy as a visionary and advocate for Jewish self-determination remains a fundamental part of Israel’s history and ideology.
1917: The Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, expressing British support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Why It Matters: It was the first recognition by a major international power of Jewish national aspirations, which had a profound impact on international diplomacy, contributed to the end of Ottoman rule in the region, and shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by laying the groundwork for competing national claims in Palestine. It remains a pivotal historical document in the context of the region’s complex history and ongoing discussions about its future.
1920: The League of Nations Mandate
The League of Nations granted Britain the mandate to administer Palestine following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
Why It Matters: The mandate includes a commitment to implementing the Balfour Declaration and facilitating Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. The mandate led to nearly 30 years of British control over the region, ending in 1948.
1920: Creation of the Haganah
The Haganah was a Jewish paramilitary organization that played a significant role in the defense of Jewish communities in British Mandate Palestine.
Why It Matters: Initially formed to protect Jewish communities from local Arab attacks, the Haganah later evolved into one of the main military organizations in the Jewish community in the lead-up to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. After the establishment of the state, the Haganah became the foundation for the Israel Defense Forces.
1929: Hebron Massacre
The 1929 Hebron massacre was a violent event in the city of Hebron in British Mandate Palestine, occurring in August 1929. Arab residents attacked the Jewish community, resulting in the deaths of approximately 67 Jewish residents, including women and children, and injuries to many others.
Why It Matters: The violence had its roots in long-standing tensions between Jewish and Arab communities and had a profound impact on the relations between the two communities in Palestine. The massacre led to the end of Jewish presence in Hebron, one of the holiest cities in Judaism that dated back thousands of years. The Jewish community did not return till after the 1967 Six-Day War.
1930s: The Arab Revolt
The 1930s Arab revolt was a period of intense Arab resistance and rebellion against British colonial rule and Jewish immigration in the Mandate of Palestine. It occurred from 1936 to 1939 and was triggered by several factors, including Arab frustrations over land dispossession, Jewish immigration, and economic disparities.
Why It Matters: The revolt involved widespread strikes, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience by Arab residents in the region. In response, the British authorities imposed curfews, conducted military operations, and arrested numerous Palestinian activists.
1936: Peel Commission
This was a British investigative commission formed to examine the causes of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.
Why It Matters: It resulted in the first recommendation to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, offering one of the first official proposals for a two-state solution.
1939: White Paper
A British policy statement that limited Jewish immigration and land acquisition in Palestine.
Why It Matters: This had a significant impact by restricting the ability of Jews to escape the Holocaust and return to their ancestral homeland to establish a Jewish state. It also contributed to tensions between Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, furthering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Once a celebrated actress in Israel, Noa Tishby has emerged as a leading pro-Israel voice on U.S. TV, on social media and in print.
On a stage in Los Angeles last week, two Israeli-born women sat before a rapt audience, discussing their grief and anger in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists. More than 500 people had crowded into a synagogue auditorium to listen, and 400 more tuned in via Zoom.
“We’re actually seeing the horrors that our grandparents told us about,” Noa Tishby, Israel’s former special envoy for combating antisemitism, told them. “We’re seeing them manifesting in reality.”
Joining her was Gal Gadot, who starred in the blockbuster film “Wonder Woman,” among others. But in this perilous moment, it is Ms. Tishby, 48, who is drawing the attention of American Jews, television news shows and, most of all, social media.
Since coming to power in a violent coup in 2007 in Gaza, the Iranian-backed Hamas terror group has systematically exploited Palestinian civilians, using them to protect their terrorist infrastructure while stealing enormous quantities of resources to build their war machine.
From diverting economic resources to the endangerment of human lives, these activities not only perpetuate the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza – representing a crime against humanity – but also give Hamas operational advantages in its war against Israel where they win not only when they kill Israeli soldiers, but also when Israel inadvertently harms Palestinian civilians.
Here are seven ways Hamas exploits Gaza’s Palestinian civilians to further its genocidal aim to destroy Israel.
Hamas diverts critical civilian resources for its terrorism
Construction materials for terror tunnels: Hamas has a long history of diverting cement and steel intended for civilian reconstruction projects for the creation of a complex terror tunnel network known as “the Metro” that runs beneath Gaza.
Hamas’ tunnel network is believed to be the second largest in the world, behind North Korea, and is estimated to be around 500km (311 miles) with some 1,300 tunnels. They are equipped with rails, electricity, ventilation, communication lines, and even repurposed oxygen tanks initially sent as aid for Gazan hospitals.
Ambulances as transport vehicles: Hamas uses ambulances as part of its terror operations to shield its terrorists from Israeli forces. This use of ambulances not only denies civilians who are injured the use of the ambulances but puts at risk medical workers.
Everyday items for rockets: Hamas also has a history of transforming everyday items into weapons. Sewer pipes are pulled out of the ground to make rockets, and fiberglass intended to repair fishing boats is also diverted to the rocket industry. Even chemicals like castor oil and additives such as aluminum dust have been imported to produce rocket fuel, along with converting salt into a substance called AP (ammonium perchlorate for rocket fuel), using Iranian techniques.
Hamas steals Palestinian funds to build its terror operations
The Hamas leadership steals funds intended for Palestinian civilians to build a financial empire outside the Gaza Strip worth about $700 million that supports its terror operations.
Taxes to fund terrorism: In 2018 alone, Hamas made approximately half a billion dollars from taxes on goods such as gas and cigarettes coming into Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Instead of investing this substantial income in the welfare of Palestinian civilians, the funds go primarily to fund its terror operations, offering no vision for economic growth or improvement in living conditions.
Foreign money: Nor does Hamas invest any of the tens of millions of dollars it gets from Iran every year – estimated to be about $100 million a year and split among Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – in any civilian project, instead investing all of it towards its terror operations.
Prominent British tabloid leads with photographs of young hostages, says their abduction shows why Israel must defeat terror group
A leading UK tabloid newspaper, The Sun, featured on its front page Thursday the faces of the 32 children who were abducted from Israel and have been held hostage by Hamas since October 7, along with the banner: “Bring them home.”
“32 innocent children snatched by terrorists,” the paper declared in its main headline. “This is why Israel must fight evil of Hamas.”
The report was also placed on the homepage of The Sun’s website, which included a video showing scenes of some children being abducted by terrorists during the Hamas onslaught.
All 32 were taken when over 3,000 Hamas terrorists broke through the border from the Gaza Strip under the cover of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities. In a murderous rampage, the terrorists overran communities and killed 1,400 people, most of them civilians. Entire families were murdered, in some cases burned alive in their homes.
Some victims were raped and then executed, and some mutilated, amid other atrocities.
“Who kidnaps children? Where in the world is that the right thing to do?” Maayan Ziv, whose daughters Ella Elyakim, 8, and Dafna Elyakim, 15, were abducted, said to The Sun.
The breakthrough that allowed an initial group of foreign nationals, including US citizens, to depart Gaza on Wednesday came together after weeks of intensive, multi-party diplomatic efforts, sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN.
The agreement to allow foreign passport holders and a group of critically injured civilians to depart through the Rafah border crossing was reached on Tuesday, prior to the Israeli forces’ bombing of Gaza’s largest refugee camp.
Qatar, which coordinated with the United States, was the key broker of the deal between Israel, Egypt, and Hamas, according to sources familiar with the talks.
The development was hailed as a critical first step in getting thousands of foreign nationals out of the war-torn strip as Israel intensifies its military operations there. Though US officials have stressed that the situation remains fluid, they have expressed optimism that hundreds more will be able to depart in the coming days.
The negotiations were consistently described as immensely complicated, and the breakthrough came after “intense and urgent American diplomacy with our partners in the region,” President Joe Biden said Wednesday.
Negotiators had to contend with Hamas’ control of the Gaza strip, Israel’s blockade and bombing, as well as Egyptian security concerns.
Leading up to Wednesday, there had been a number of moments where US officials thought they would be able to get the Americans out, and the State Department had advised Americans to consider making their way toward the crossing. Those ultimately fell through, leading to frustration, fear, and confusion for the hundreds of US citizens trapped in Gaza.
US officials, led by Ambassador David Satterfield, engaged in on-the-ground diplomacy in both Israel and Egypt, but relied on partner countries to communicate with Hamas.
“We’re dealing with Israel, Egypt, and Hamas, and we’re not talking directly to Hamas, Egypt can send messages to Hamas, Qatar can send messages to Hamas. But you can imagine how difficult every little thing is, every bit of this is complicated,” a State Department spokesperson said last week.
After spotting a tent near a gas station in the Galilee, AJC Jerusalem Director Lt. Col. (Res.) Avital Leibovich stopped by and met an inspiring group of volunteers who are lifting up the spirits of IDF soldiers.
Go to AJC.org/AttackonIsrael for the latest resources and explainers about Hamas’ unprovoked attack on Israel.
Arrest follows warnings by officials to a congressional hearing on Tuesday about increased hate directed at Jewish students in the U.S. during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a Cornell University student for allegedly making online threats against Jewish students at the Ivy League school over the weekend. The arrest follows warnings by officials to a congressional hearing on Tuesday about increased hate directed at Jewish students in the U.S. during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza.
The U.S. government and advocacy groups have reported increased threats against Jews, Muslims and Arab Americans since fighting broke out in Gaza.
For those in the academic circle, the silence from university presidents on certain contentious topics is palpable. But why this silence, especially when it comes to touchy subjects like anti-Israel sentiments or pro-Hamas protests?
While many might point fingers at the First Amendment, there is an underlying reason many of us may be missing: the fear of provoking an irrational person into having an explosive response.
If there’s one thing that I have learned through my work, it’s the innate human tendency to steer clear of irrationality. Simply put, rational individuals are often fearful of provoking those who do not subscribe to reason.
Why? Because irrationality is unpredictable. It doesn’t follow the natural order of things, and when it manifests, it can spiral into wanton destruction and violence.
We’ve all seen it or experienced it, whether on a global scale or within the microcosm of our families. Think about it – how many times have you seen your family members tip-toeing around that one relative who’s known for their erratic, over the top behavior? The reason isn’t always because of a genuine concern for their well-being, but more so due to the fear of what their unchecked irrationality might unleash.
So, translating this to the university setting, it’s not difficult to see why presidents might hesitate to address or condemn certain behaviors or expressions. Their silence, in many ways, is a survival mechanism, a way to prevent campuses from detonating into chaos.
But here’s the pressing question: What can we do about it?
The death toll of the unprovoked attack on Israel by the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist group on Saturday continues to rise with over 1,400 Israelis killed. While the large-scale, brutal slaughter of Israeli civilians and military personnel have been devastating, Hamas terrorists also kidnapped at least 245 Israelis and other foreign nationals in the criminal assault.
Here is what is known about the people taken hostage on October 7, the history of Hamas’ hostage-taking, and how Israel has responded in the past.
How many hostages does Hamas have?
It is believed that at least 245 people are being held hostage by Hamas.
Babies, children, women, the elderly, and the disabled were among those taken hostage, according to IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus.
“These are numbers that were up until now unimaginable,” said Conricus. “This will shape the future of this war.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas was responsible for their care and well-being and Israel would “settle the score with anyone who harms them.”
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed terror group based in Gaza, claims that it is holding more than 30 Israeli hostages, the terror group’s leader Ziyad Nakaleh said. Hamas has also threatened to kill a civilian hostage every time Israel targets civilians in their homes in Gaza “without warning.”
On October 16, Hamas released its first video of a hostage, Israeli-French citizen Mia Schem. Mia was shown lying on a bed with her right arm being bandaged, while she pleaded to be returned to her family. Mia was captured by Hamas terrorists while attending the music festival where over 260 concertgoers were killed by terrorists.
On October 20, two Israeli-American hostages were released by Hamas, Judith, 59, and Natalie Raanan,17.
On October 23, two additional hostages were released, Nurit Cooper, 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, 85. Both were abducted from their homes in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Their husbands reportedly remain in Gaza.
On October 30, Ori Magdish, an Israeli soldier who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, was rescued by Israeli special forces on Monday. The soldier is in good health and met with her family, according to the IDF.
What is Israel and the U.S. Doing to Release the Hostages?
Hamas has demanded that Israel release some 6,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisoners in exchange for the release of all the hostages.
Israeli and American officials have been working closely with Qatar, a key intermediary with Hamas, to negotiate the release of the hostages. According to Axios, Mossad Director David Barnea visited Qatar and met with senior officials to discuss their efforts to secure the release. The Biden administration has also been in close contact with the Qatari government to secure the release of American hostages.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with the families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza. The Israeli leader promised to exhaust every option to bring them home.
On October 30, Hamas released a video of three hostages: Yelena Tropenov, Daniel Aloni, and Rimon Kirsht. In the video, Aloni called on Netanyahu to free them and release Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu’s office called the video “cruel Hamas-ISIS psychological warfare” and that the Israeli leader is “doing everything to bring all the hostages home.”
“Fill it up now, people are depending on us! They’re about to shoot us, they’re so anxious [to get fuel]. For the love of God.”
The IDF on Wednesday night released a recording of a conversation between a Hamas commander and a Gazan citizen revealing how the terrorist group takes fuel from hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
In the conversation, the commander of the West Jabaliya Brigade of Hamas speaks with the head of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza as well as another Gazan citizen.
Israel has the right to defend itself and deter further invasion, but foreign policy insiders, and now Sullivan and Biden, are increasingly discussing the thresholds for retaliation, particularly under the covenants of international law.
With the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre that left over 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals dead and more than 243 held hostage, there have been renewed attempts to rewrite history and assert that Jews are “foreign occupiers” with no ties to the land of Israel.
Among the lies being spread is an effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy by accusing it of being a settler-colonial state. Those spreading this lie argue that Jews have no historical connection to the land of Israel and that Zionists – those who support the right of Jewish self-determination and national homeland in the land of Israel – came to colonize the land, taking it from the Palestinians beginning in the late nineteenth century. However, this claim ignores the thousands of years of deep connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.
Here are five facts about the long history of the Jewish people’s ties to the land of Israel.
Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel.
While the Romans expelled the majority of Jews in 70 CE, the Jewish people have always been present in the land of Israel. A portion of the Jewish population remained in Israel throughout the years of Jewish exile while the rest settled around the world and became the Jewish diaspora. In particular, Jewish communities existed throughout much of this period in what is known as the Four Holy Cities: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed (Tzfat), and Tiberias. Jerusalem is the most sacred, known for the Western Wall. Hebron is associated with the Cave of the Patriarchs, the traditional burial site of several important Biblical figures. Safed became the center of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century. Tiberias is notable for the Jerusalem Talmud during the Byzantine Period.
Israel was under Jewish leadership for hundreds of years in antiquity.
The ancient history of the land of Israel includes many centuries during which the land was governed by the Jewish people. Beginning in approximately 1000 BCE, which was the beginning of the Iron Age, under King Saul, David, and Solomon, the entire land of Israel was under a unified Jewish kingdom. The Unified Kingdom, as it is known, was divided in approximately 931 BCE into the Kingdom of Israel (Northern Kingdom) with its capital in Samaria, and the Kingdom of Judah (Southern Kingdom) with its capital in Jerusalem. Both kingdoms remained under Jewish rule. The Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE and most of its inhabitants were exiled, but the Southern Kingdom remained under Jewish rule until 586 BCE when the Babylonian Empire conquered it, exiling many Jews.
The Jews returned from exile under the Persian Empire and regained control over the land with the Hasmonean dynasty in the 2nd century BCE. Judea, as it was then called, became a client state of Rome in 63 BCE, and the Herodian dynasty, a Jewish dynasty under the control of Rome took over. In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and exiled many of the Jewish inhabitants of Judea.
These kingdoms played crucial roles in shaping Jewish history, religious traditions, and cultural identity, with the city of Jerusalem and the two great Temples that once stood there holding special significance in biblical narratives and Jewish history.
Jerusalem is the holiest site in the Jewish faith.
Jerusalem has been the spiritual, religious, and national center of the Jewish people for thousands of years. Approximately 3,000 years ago, under the rulership of King David, Jerusalem became the capital of Israel. Jerusalem was the site of the two great Temples, the centers of Jewish worship for hundreds of years. The first Temple was built by King Solomon during the tenth century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, who laid siege to the city of Jerusalem, flattening the holy city and also forcibly exiled Judeans from the Kingdom of Judah.
The second Temple was built less than a century later, and destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans, who also destroyed the Jewish capital and forcibly exiled most of the Jewish inhabitants. The loss of the Temple had a profound impact on the Jewish faith.
Even after the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile of Jews from the land, Jerusalem remained central to Jewish life – and it is still central today. No matter where Jews pray, they always face the direction of Jerusalem. The Western Wall, the last remaining wall from the Second Temple structure, is the holiest site in the world for Jews. At Jewish weddings, the groom traditionally breaks a glass in memory of the destruction of the Temple. At the end of the Passover Seder, Jews recite “Next year in Jerusalem!”
While in exile Jews never stopped yearning to return to Israel.
Despite being scattered throughout the world during various points in history, the Jewish people maintained a strong connection to the land of Israel through religious practices, prayers, and an enduring hope of eventual return.
Diaspora Jews yearned to return to the Jewish homeland and the holy Jewish city of Jerusalem, both of which are mentioned multiple times in daily Jewish prayers.
Traditional Jewish religious thought stated that the Jews had been exiled from their homeland as a punishment from God. They could only return in Messianic times. This belief kept most Jews from thinking about a return to living in Israel.
But, in the nineteenth century, as European Jews suffered from growing antisemitism and violence against them, a new ideology was born – Zionism, a national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Zionists saw a return to the Jewish homeland as the path to Jewish redemption from thousands of years of oppression. Small groups of Zionist pioneers began returning to their ancient homeland in the late nineteenth century, joining the community of Jews who had never left.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 realized the long-held dream of a Jewish homeland, and it has since become the center of Jewish identity and culture for millions of Jews worldwide. Israel is seen as a place of refuge, a cultural renaissance, and a symbol of Jewish self-determination.
Israel plays a central role in the Bible.
The land of Israel is central to the Jewish faith and is mentioned throughout the Bible. In the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God promises the land of Israel to Abraham, the first Jew, and then reaffirms the promise to Abraham’s son Isaac and grandson Jacob. In fact, the name Israel is another name for Jacob.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery and oppression in Egypt with a promise to take them back to the land of Israel, the land of their forefathers. The books of Judges and Kings relate the stories of Jewish rulers over the land of Israel, and many accounts in these books have been proven historically accurate by archaeological finds and Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian sources.
Amy Schumer, Debra Messing, Julianna Margulies, Michael Douglas, Billy Crystal, Mayim Bialik, Chelsea Handler, Zooey Deschanel, Mandy Moore, Helen Mirren Join #ReleaseTheHostagesNow Campaign: A Call To Action
Celebrities And Influencers Around The Globe Are Taking To Social Media In A Coordinated Action To Demand The Immediate Release Of The Now 239+ Hostages Currently Held By Hamas
LOS ANGELES (October 30, 2023) —Today, a coalition of celebrities launched a campaign to highlight the now 239+ innocent civilians currently held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The campaign, #ReleaseTheHostagesNow, was organized in part by Creative Community For Peace (CCFP), an entertainment industry non-profit organization; Nina Tassler (television executive and former Chairwoman of CBS Entertainment); and Emilio Schenker (CEO, Sipur Studios), in full cooperation with the official Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
The viral campaign, which has already gained significant attention, hopes to leverage entertainment leaders’ social media audiences to galvanize international support for the hostages and their families, and ultimately to expedite their release from captivity.
Seeing what’s going on in so many campuses worldwide by both students and faculty regarding the massacre in Israel by Hamas terrorists really breaks my heart.
In the name of politically correct and post modernism, or mere stupidity, ignorance and well hidden antisemitism these “intellectuals” support terrorists who murder, rape, burn or kidnap civilians and not Israel who was attacked and now fights for its existence and its citizens right to live normally.
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, we are no strangers to treating victims of airstrikes over the years. The team all too often must rush into the emergency room, all hands on deck, ready to treat shrapnel wounds, burns and blood loss. In the early days of the current Israel-Hamas conflict, our hospital of only 80 beds was quickly overrun.
On Oct. 17, following the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, we were flooded with dozens of wounded and dying victims. By the next day, our patient roster had grown by nearly 120. We knew it would be another sleepless night, another in a string of far too many since the violence started 10 days earlier.
As many as three to four children had to share single beds, and many more were forced to settle for the floors. Some patients from the hospital explosion came in screaming in pain, but others were silent, in shock or beyond saving. With anesthesia, iodine, alcohol, blood and even gauze running low or entirely gone, we had a dwindling supply of tools to help ease the human suffering. The people who flocked to Kamal Adwan to sleep in our hallways or even the parking lot, believing it safer than their homes, were no doubt as frightened as we were.
Read about the experience of Dr. Abu Safyia, a pediatrician in Gaza, at The New York Times.
Elon Musk on Sunday admitted he felt global pressure to offer his Starlink internet service to Gaza after Israeli airstrikes knocked out almost all communications in the area, though it remains unclear how his plan to offer service to aid organizations in the area will work.
Musk first posted just the head-exploding emoji, and then after a user suggested he was “stuck between what the best thing to do is” after feeling pressure to provide support in the territory, Musk just responded “Yeah” with a frowning emoji.
The billionaire owner of X on Saturday said Starlink, part of his SpaceX company, will “support communication links with internationally recognized aid organizations” in Gaza.
The internet service requires terminals on the ground to communicate with SpaceX satellites to connect to the internet, and the Wall Street Journal reports there are unlikely to be any such terminals in Gaza because of an Israeli blockade erected earlier this month.
There has been no clarification as to how or when the terminals will be sent or set up in Gaza, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment Sunday.
The Czech Republic’s defense minister’s move to call to leave the UN came after a resolution called on Israel to leave Gaza without condemning Hamas.
One must not stand silent in the face of a second Holocaust, the Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová said as she called on her country to withdraw from the United Nations to protest its failure to condemn Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.
“The Holocaust is back, and we must not be silent again,” she said, in a statement she posted on X.
She spoke of her outrage one day after the UN General Assembly voted 120-14 for a ceasefire for the Gaza War, which focused primarily on the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The UNGA resolution which also had 45 abstentions, did not mention or clearly call for the release of the 230 hostages the terror group took captive on that day.
“I am ashamed of the UN. In my opinion – the Czech Republic has nothing to expect in an organization that supports terrorists and does not respect the basic right to self-defense. Let’s get out.”
“Exactly three weeks ago, Hamas murdered more than 1,400 Israelis, which is more victims per their population than the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda murdered on 9/11/2001 in the USA.
Thousands of Gaza residents broke into U.N. warehouses on Sunday, grabbing flour and other essential items in a sign they had reached “breaking point”, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said.
One of the warehouses, located in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, is where UNRWA stores supplies delivered by humanitarian convoys crossing into Gaza from Egypt.
Footage from Khan Younis in southern Gaza showed men frantically carrying boxes and large bags out of a warehouse, hoisting them onto their shoulders or loading them onto their bicycles.
“This is a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said in a statement.
Speaking to Reuters from Amman in Jordan, Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications, said the scenes at the warehouses and distribution centres showed people’s despair.
“This is an indication that people in Gaza have reached a breaking point,” she said. “The levels of frustration and despair are really very high, and people are hitting rock bottom when it comes to their patience, their ability to take more.”
As a raw divide over the war ripples through liberal America, a coalition of young voters and people of color is breaking with the president, raising new questions about his strength entering 2024.
The Democratic Party’s yearslong unity behind President Biden is beginning to erode over his steadfast support of Israel in its escalating war with the Palestinians, with a left-leaning coalition of young voters and people of color showing more discontent toward him than at any point since he was elected.
From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, in labor unions and liberal activist groups, and on college campuses and in high school cafeterias, a raw emotional divide over the conflict is convulsing liberal America.
While moderate Democrats and critics on the right have applauded Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel, he faces new resistance from an energized faction of his party that views the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that dominated American politics in the summer of 2020.
A look at the primary points and criticisms behind the UN resolutions on Israel and Gaza.
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted overwhelmingly to call for a “humanitarian truce” as the Israel-Hamas war grinds onwards, leading to the deaths of more than 1,400 Israelis and 7,000 Palestinians.
The non-binding resolution, passed on October 27, follows multiple failed attempts to pass similar language in the UN Security Council (UNSC), a body charged with issues of global peace.
The General Assembly – a larger branch of the UN that includes representatives from every member state – sent a strong signal with its landslide vote, with 120 countries voting in favour and 45 abstentions. Only 14 countries, including the US and Israel, opposed the resolution.
But efforts continue in the UNSC to craft language that can pass the 15-seat council, composed of five permanent members and 10 elected ones. Malta’s Ambassador Vanessa Frazier has said the council’s elected members plan to put together a new draft over the next few days.
The UNSC, one of the UN’s most powerful organs, can only adopt a resolution if at least nine of the 15 members vote in favour of it and no veto is used by one of the five permanent members. A shortage of favourable votes and a veto from the United States has kept UNSC resolutions from manifesting so far.
The full article and video can be found at Aljazeera.
Elon Musk said on Saturday that SpaceX’s Starlink will support communication links in Gaza with “internationally recognized aid organizations”, prompting Israel’s communication minister to say Israel would fight the move.
Elon Musk said on Saturday that SpaceX’s Starlink will support communication links in Gaza with “internationally recognized aid organizations”, prompting Israel’s communication minister to say Israel would fight the move.
Musk said in a post on social media platform X that it was not clear who has authority for ground links in Gaza, but we do know that “no terminal has requested a connection in that area”
A telephone and internet blackout isolated people in the Gaza Strip from the world and from each other on Saturday, with calls to loved ones, ambulances or colleagues elsewhere all but impossible as Israel widened its air and ground assault.
International humanitarian organizations said the blackout, which began late on Friday, was worsening an already desperate situation by impeding life-saving operations and preventing contact with their staff on the ground.
For 35 years, I’ve devoted my professional life to U.S. peacemaking policy and conflict resolution and planning — whether in the former Soviet Union, a reunified Germany or postwar Iraq.
But nothing has preoccupied me like finding a peaceful and lasting solution between Israel and the Palestinians.
There has been “significant progress” on negotiations to release hostages held by Hamas but there are issues still remaining, diplomatic sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN.
“Negotiations are going very well. We have a breakthrough,” the source said.
“There are issues still remaining, but talks are ongoing, and we remain hopeful,” the source added.
As supplies of virtually every basic human necessity dwindle in Gaza, one group in the besieged enclave remains well-stocked: Hamas.
Arab and Western officials say there is substance to Israeli claims of Hamas stockpiling supplies, including desperately needed food and fuel. Hamas, they say, has spent years building dozens of kilometers of tunnels under the strip where it has amassed stores of virtually everything needed for a drawn-out fight. It is a reality that Israel may soon find itself grappling with if it makes good on its threat to invade Gaza.
It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.
Peace in the israel-palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state.
Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.
View the full article and supplemental readings at The Atlantic.
Richard Trank asks, “How long will it take the WGA’s current leadership on both coasts to come to a consensus that its silence in the face of the wanton slaughter of Jewish men, women and children by a terrorist organization is wrong?”
“The Board of Directors has worked exhaustively to consider the great diversity of opinions among our members on this issue… the Board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach. For these reasons, we have decided not to comment publicly.”
After more than two weeks of silence, Writers Guild of America West president Meredith Stiehm finally issued a statement on behalf of the union’s board about the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. While the WGAW has never had problems making statements about controversial issues, for some reason this particular writers room could not come to a “consensus” on the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Fellow guilds like the DGA and SAG-AFTRA somehow were able to come to consensus to make clear statements on the issue of a terrorist organization reportedly decapitating babies, torturing and raping women, kidnapping elderly Holocaust survivors, parading and humiliating hostages and murdering some 1,400 people, including more than 260 young people enjoying a music festival during one of the most important Jewish religious holidays of the year. The major studios did not seem to have a problem coming to a consensus condemning this brutality. The Academy Museum canceled its annual gala on Oct. 14 because it didn’t feel such an event was appropriate after the Hamas attack. And several hundred of the top names in Hollywood managed to get together to sign a letter denouncing Hamas and demanding they allow all of the hostages in Gaza to be freed. But a group of writers who pride themselves at figuring out in a room how to tackle the most complicated plot points were unable to reach “consensus?” That strains credulity.
Sari Beth Rosenberg was teaching a high school history class in New York City recently when a student interrupted her with a question: “Are you Team Israel or Team Palestinian?”
Rosenberg had just started her lesson on the French and Indian War when the question came up.
As a public-school teacher for more than two decades, Rosenberg has talked with her students about many controversial topics, including gun violence, the Ukraine-Russia war and the January 6 insurrection.
But the current war between Israel and Hamas is by far the most divisive topic she’s had to address as an educator, she says.
Rosenberg, who is Jewish, feared that getting into a conversation on the complexities of the conflict could alienate some of her students with ties to the Middle East. So she tried to turn the question into a learning experience.
“I told them I’m ‘Team Humanity,’” she says. She told her students that she thought both the deadly Hamas terror attacks in Israel and Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza are horrific.
Then she asked them what they knew or thought about what’s happening.
“This one called for a different approach, one that aligns with the way I want my classroom to be, which is fair for everyone, where no one feels like there’s an agenda or bias,” she says. “Because I have kids who wear hijabs; I have Jewish students; I have kids who don’t know anything about it.”
A California teacher says the conflict has taken an emotional toll on her and her students
Rosenberg’s concern mirrors a struggle facing educators across the United States as they try to navigate conversations both in and out of the classroom about a polarizing international conflict.
Many Jewish people have called for stronger condemnation after Hamas militants attacked a music festival and raided Israeli towns near Gaza, killing and abducting civilians and igniting the region’s latest war. Other groups have taken to the streets in the US and elsewhere to protest decades of suffering by Palestinians in the crowded Gaza Strip.
Away from the protests, teachers in US schools – especially those with ties to the region – are quietly facing their own challenges.
A Palestinian sixth-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, says she’s struggled to answer her students’ questions in a way that gives them a clear picture of what’s happening in the region. She asked CNN not to use her name out of fear of backlash for discussing such a divisive issue.
Her students know about her Palestinian heritage and noticed that she’s appeared distracted since the war started, she says.
“They could see how badly it affected me. And every morning I’d come in, they’d ask, ‘Is there any good news, anything happening? Are they stopping this war?’”
This week a student asked her how tensions between Israelis and Palestinians started, so she offered some historical context. She also read aloud to her students from a children’s book, “Baba, What Does My Name Mean?” by Palestinian American author Rifk Ebeid, which details the journey of a young Palestinian refugee who turns to her father for answers about her cultural heritage.
The teacher says the past few weeks have been emotionally tough on her. It’s been especially disheartening to see statements from school districts denouncing Hamas’ attacks on Israel with no mention of the suffering of Palestinians, she says.
“What about us Palestinians? It’s like they don’t even see us … they don’t even see us as human,” she says. “It’s been super hard going to work and trying to put on a fake face and trying to get through my lessons, trying to get through my day. Last week I went home early. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Her teaching job that has been her passion for three years, she says, but the Israel-Hamas conflict has taken a toll.
“I’m not as enthusiastic as I used to be, which causes my students to not be as enthusiastic,” she says.
A teacher in Georgia says she’s asking students to discuss the war with their parents
CNN talked to four other teachers who also did not want to be named. They said they’ve avoided responding to questions about the war in class out of concern they may have students connected to both sides. They also fear students could record their comments and post them on social media, opening them to misinterpretation and threats.
One middle school teacher in an Atlanta suburb told CNN it’s been difficult to talk about the conflict with young kids. Some sixth-graders and seventh-graders have asked her what Hamas is and appeared confused when she explained it’s both a militant and political organization governing Gaza.
The teacher says she avoids talking about controversial subjects with her students and urges them to instead discuss the issues with their parents.
But she worries about the effect of the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war on her young students.
“They are asking if we’re headed for World War III,” she says. “Between the pandemic and the threats of war, I really feel for these young kids. It’s tough.”
View the full article and supplemental videos at CNN.
Oct. 7, 2023, will be remembered as a horrific day when many lives and families in Israel and across the globe were shattered by the barbaric actions of Hamas. More than 1,400 people were tortured and murdered and more than 200 were abducted into Gaza.
A belief that “Never Again” would be upheld to ensure that Jews would be safe from mass slaughter was destroyed. A yearning for understanding and compassion from friends, colleagues and academic and professional societies was unanswered.
It is their silence that still shatters our hearts.
As a daughter of a Holocaust survivor with family in Israel and as a doctor who has practiced in underserved communities, it is this silence that has rocked my core belief that we as a society will stand up for what is wrong and fight for what is right. Individuals and professional organizations that have traveled with me to Israel — especially in the late 1990s when we thought peace was within our grasp after the Oslo Accords — have remained silent, not denouncing the atrocities that have been inflicted on innocent civilians.
I’ve tried to understand why. Is it out of misguided moral equivalency in that Palestinians have also become the “collateral damage” in this war and showing empathy for those who were butchered by Hamas condones this? Is it due to closeted antisemitism or self-centered apathy? Is it related to the distrust or disdain for the Israeli government, and this cognitive dissonance is causing confusion and clouding moral compasses? Or is it just plain ignorance and believing the falsehoods and lies that the Israelis deserved this?
I don’t know the answers. But I do know that this silence is lethal — it always has been so.
As screenwriters, we know that words matter. We spend weeks, months, years agonizing over getting the story straight, the dialogue, message.
But we also write the silences. They are scripted in the whites of the page and they speak volumes. Every lack of response, every blind-eye turned, every coward who says nothing in the face of cruelty. We write it all. Silence as ignorance. Silence as indifference. Silence as inaction.
When it comes to taking a stand, the Writers Guild of America has always led by example. When employers sought to exploit our work, the Guild bravely spoke up. When the BLM movement took flight, the Guild rightfully spoke up. When the #MeToo reckoning came and Hollywood needed to change, again the Guild spoke up.
Roughly 500 Palestinian militants got specialized combat instruction at Iranian facilities as recently as September
In the weeks leading up to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, hundreds of the Palestinian Islamist militant group’s fighters received specialized combat training in Iran, according to people familiar with intelligence related to the assault.
Only a few convoys of trucks carrying humanitarian aid have been able to enter the besieged Gaza Strip since it was sealed after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. As supplies dwindle, the situation is becoming increasingly dire for Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people. Almost 1.5 million have had to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
Those who moved south under orders from the Israeli military are unable to leave the country through the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Gaza’s borders with Israel remain closed. The U.N. says its shelters are crowded at more than twice the capacity; up to 70 people are living in each school classroom. Hospitals are on the brink of collapse.
How is aid delivered and distributed in Gaza? Where is it coming from?
Long lines of trucks carrying humanitarian supplies have been waiting at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. Some of the aid is being flown from Kuwait to Egypt.
Aid that does reach the border has been delayed as it enters Gaza. This aerial view below show rows of trucks at the Egypt/Gaza Rafah border on Saturday as the first humanitarian aid eventually crosses. After the aid enters Gaza, it appears it’s transferred to flatbed trucks from within Gaza as delivery vehicles return to Egypt:
After crossing the border, some of the aid is taken by truck to a Khan Yunis storage facility in the southern Gaza Strip.
View the full article and infographics at USA Today.
The warning signs that Israel’s war with Hamas may become a wider Middle East conflagration are flashing ominously. America has sent a second carrier strike group led by the uss Eisenhower to the Persian Gulf. “There’s a likelihood of escalation,” said Antony Blinken, the American secretary of state, on October 22nd.
The chances of further attacks by Iranian proxies on American forces are growing, he continued: “We don’t want to see a second or third front develop.”
Fears are also growing in Lebanon that Israel could use America’s cover to launch a pre-emptive strike. Israel has evacuated its towns near the border with Lebanon and Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has cautioned that if Hizbullah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, enters the fighting, the consequences for Lebanon will be devastating. One reason Israel has delayed its offensive in Gaza may be to bolster its preparations for escalation on its northern front. Iran’s foreign minister has said the region is like a “powder keg”.
U.S. military aircraft have carried out strikes in eastern Syria against facilities associated with Iranian-backed militant groups believed to be responsible for more than a dozen rocket and drone attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria that injured 21 service members, the military said Thursday night.
“Today, at President Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces conducted self-defense strikes on two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a statement.
“These precision self-defense strikes are a response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militia groups that began on October 17,” he said.
As open war rages in the Middle East following the Palestinian organization Hamas’ recent attack on Israel, American sympathies are strongly on Israel’s side — and getting stronger.
Nearly half (48%) of U.S. adult citizens say they are more sympathetic toward the Israelis in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to just 10% who are more sympathetic toward the Palestinians. Almost a quarter (23%) sympathize with both sides.
These findings come from the latest Economist/YouGov survey of U.S. adult citizens, conducted October 14 – 17, 2023.
This sympathy for Israel has been trending upward. The 48% who sympathize with Israel is higher than the 42% who said the same in last week’s poll, in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. It’s also significantly above the 31% who backed Israel in March 2023.
Support for the Palestinians hasn’t fallen in this period. The 10% who sympathize more with the Palestinians now is similar to the 9% who felt that last week and the 13% who backed the Palestinians in March.
The footage bore testament to an ancient hatred. A handsome man in his 20s in a military uniform zips past me on a motorised scooter. A woman with a tattoo and piercings calmly sips a cortado in a coffee shop across from me. A young family bustles past. This is Israel in 2023.
I am on my way to a screening of “raw” footage of the 7 October massacres that Hamas committed against Israeli civilians. Atrocities that are being denied and dismissed across social media and in parts of legacy media internationally. “In 2023 we are still dealing with holocaust denial,” says my contact in the IDF media unit. “This event is an attempt to put that right.” This is also Israel in 2023.
Apologists for Hamas ignore the terrorist group’s role in terrorizing Palestinians, absconding with aid intended for civilians and using civilians as human shields, a war crime.
In demanding Israel “free Palestine,” these apologists ignore that Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza and has periodically attempted to trade land for peace with the Palestinians.
The refusal to differentiate between bloodthirsty terrorists and the Palestinian people does nothing to help the latter. If Palestinian supporters truly want to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians, blaming Israelis for their own massacre is as counterproductive as it is morally warped.
A ground invasion in Gaza could produce some of the fiercest street-to-street fighting since World War II.
Heavy fire from rooftops and booby-trapped apartments. Armor-piercing projectiles blowing up troop carriers. Fighters blending in with civilians, launching drone ambushes, or surging from tunnels full of enough ammunition, food and water to sustain a long war.
As the Israeli Army gathers tanks at the Gaza border for a threatened invasion aimed at crushing Hamas, experts are warning that the country’s troops could face some of the fiercest street-to-street combat since World War II in Gaza City and other densely packed areas.
Urban warfare studies and American officials offer dire comparisons to Iraq: Think of Falluja in 2004, the most intense battles that American troops had faced since Vietnam, or the nine-month fight to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul in 2016, which led to 10,000 civilian deaths. Then multiply the destructive toll, possibly exponentially.
Hamas has three to five times as many fighters — perhaps 40,000 in all — as the Islamic State had in Mosul. It can draw reserves from a young, restive population, and has international support from countries like Iran. Even on its own, Hamas’s leadership has had years to prepare for battle across Gaza, including in city streets, where the superiority of tanks and precise munitions can be stymied by guerrilla tactics.
“It’s going to be ugly,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Arnold, a U.S. Army strategist who has published studies on urban operations in the Middle East. “Cities are the devil’s playground — they make everything infinitely more difficult.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has vowed to “demolish Hamas.” Without sharply defining what that means, he pledged to remove the group from Gaza after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,400 people and led to the kidnapping of more than 200 others.
But Gaza, heavily urbanized, with Hamas deeply entrenched, is an especially complex battlefield. Concerned about the challenges ahead, the Biden administration has sent senior military officers to provide advice to the Israelis, based on their own experiences in Iraq, while pressing Israel to delay the invasion, to leave more time to negotiate the release of hostages taken by Hamas and to deliver more humanitarian aid. American officials worry that Israel lacks a plan with clear, achievable objectives that would prevent an enormous loss of life among Gaza’s more than two million Palestinian civilians.
“I’ve encouraged them to conduct their operations in accordance with the law of war,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said on Sunday.
With history as a guide, three factors would most likely shape a ground war in Gaza’s cities: the urban environment, the interaction between fighters and civilians, and political pressures.
There is an old saying that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, then you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain.
The idea, of course, is that liberalism is a game for the youth and that age brings security, stability and a natural resistance to change. The upshot, in American politics, is that while most voters might start on the center-left, with Democrats, they’ll end their political journey on the center-right, with Republicans. One party represents disruption and change; the other party represents a steady hand and the status quo.
Or at least that’s the story. The reality is a little more complicated. Not only does our narrative of political change over time exaggerate the degree of rightward drift among different people as they age, but there’s also good evidence that for the youngest generations of Americans, it is hardly happening at all.
Gal Gadot, Madonna, Natalie Portman, The Rock, And More Hollywood Stars Support Israel Amid Deadly Hamas Attacks
Hollywood stars are showing their support for Israel, after Hamas launched a surprise attack this past weekend, firing thousands of rockets from Gaza that have killed at least 900 people with more than 100 civilians kidnapped and held hostage.
The attack, which occurred early Saturday morning on Shabbat and coincided with the Jewish high holiday of Simchat Torah, is being called “Israel’s 9/11” and is the deadliest day in Israel in 50 years. Hamas’ attack included a massacre at a music festival where Israeli rescuers say they have found 260 bodies.
Not since the Holocaust have this many Jews been murdered in one single day. Nine American citizens are among the climbing death toll.
Over the weekend, President Joe Biden condemned the terrorist attack and supported Israel’s right to defend itself. “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel. Terrorism is never justified,” the president said in a statement. “My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.”
Israel ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza on Monday, cutting off all electricity, food and water to the area. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israel airstrikes, in response to the Hamas attack.
Now, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars are speaking up to lend their support to Israel. Gal Gadot, Madonna, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Natalie Portman, Andy Cohen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Debra Messing, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Kris Jenner, Mindy Kaling and Meghan McCain are among the celebrities who have taken to social media to stand alongside Israel.
Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have donated $1 million to help children in Israel and Gaza, sources tell Variety.
“I stand with Israel you should too,” Gadot posted. “The world cannot sit on the fence when these horrific acts of terror are happening!” The “Wonder Woman” star, who is Israeli, has been posting daily about Israel being under attack. She has been posting photos of the hostages taken by Hamas, in an effort to help bring them home.
On Sunday evening, U2 changed lyrics during a performance in Las Vegas to honor those murdered in Israel. “In the light of what’s happened in Israel and Gaza, a song about non-violence seems somewhat ridiculous, even laughable, but our prayers have always been for peace and for non-violence,” the band posted. “But our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed. So sing with us… and those beautiful kids at that music festival.”
Bruno Mars cancelled a show in Tel Aviv, Israel, that was planned for Saturday evening, after he had put on one show earlier in the week. The show cancellation was announced by concert organizer Live Nation. Bruno Mars has not made any statement regarding Hamas’ attack in Israel.
Natalie Portman, who is Jewish, posted: “My heart is shattered for the people of Israel. Children, women and the elderly have been murdered and abducted from their own homes. I am in horror at these barbaric acts and my heart is pounding with love and prayer for the families of all affected.”
The Rock — who with 392 million Instagram followers is the fifth most followed individual on the platform in the world — posted a statement to condemn Hamas terrorists, and support Jewish people. Johnson is the most influential public figure to release such a statement.
“I’m heartbroken, angry, and sickened by the brutal murders and kidnapping of Jewish people through the horrific acts of the Hamas terrorist group,” Johnson wrote. “The growing loss of innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives is heart wrenching as this war escalates to immense proportions.”
The New York Times on Monday published an editors’ note about its coverage of an explosion on Oct. 17 at a hospital in Gaza City. The initial report, which included a large headline across The Times’s website, led with claims by Hamas government officials that the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike.
According to the editors’ note, however, The Times’s initial accounts “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”
The note continued: “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”
There is a master narrative I don’t ever remember hearing that we need to tell in a concise, emotionally evocative way, using the story structure people recognize and that draws them in, and repeat it so many times that its truth becomes self-evident in most people’s minds:
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a tragic story, which began thousands of years ago: two peoples, with historical claims to the same land. No one can question that this was the land of the ancient Israelites. But they were pushed off thousands of years ago and began to reclaim it in the early 20th century. That put them at odds with people who were then living on that land.
So 75 years ago, the United Nations, led by Great Britain, which was at that time in control of Palestine believed even before the Holocaust that the Jewish people needed a homeland, and they settled on the best of the imperfect solutions they could devise: divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews didn’t like it, but they accepted it and began building the state of Israel in 1948. The Arabs didn’t like it, so they began waging 75 years of war. Hamas, whose charter explicitly States that its goal is the genocide of the Jewish people and to push the Jews of Israel into the Mediterranean sea, is just the latest version of that refusal. It is just another variant of the violent, radical perversion of Islam proclaimed by al-Qaeda, Isis, and Hezbollah, who even moderate Arab states recognize as terrorist organizations in their own countries.
Israel has made enormous mistakes, like putting settlements on land outside the original partition. But at least they accepted a partition, which, to this day, the Palestinians have not. When they had their first Democratic elections in 2006, they chose Hamas as their leaders, fully aware that Hamas vowed jihad until there was no Jewish state and called for the genocide of the Jewish people everywhere. Since that time, The Palestinians in Gaza have learned how brutal Hamas can be to its own people, just as it has been to Israeli citizens.
We are faced with a dilemma much like that faced by king Solomon. Both sides say they want peace. But as Hamas could not have made more clear, it prefers to cut the baby in half rather than to partition the land and make peace with Israel.
The last thing Israel wants from this war is to occupy Gaza. The only solution now, after Hamas has been eradicated, is for an International organization, most likely moderate Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, who the Palestinian people could trust, to step up to the plate and send peacekeepers To Gaza to rebuild the Palestinian economy, to protect against the resurgence of the same kind of jihadist terrorist groups from reemerging after Israel has eradicated Hamas and turned its tunnels of death into dust, and to convince the Palestinian people, after 75 years, that the time has come to turn their swords into ploughshares and to give their children life and hope.
Drew Westen, PhD
Professor, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry
The media is saturated with reports of the damage and death inflicted by the Israeli Defense Force on Gaza. Thousands are dying. Buildings, whole neighborhoods, are being destroyed. Food, water, electricity, and fuel are becoming increasingly scarce. It seems inevitable that Israel will soon launch a massive ground invasion. Thousands more Gazans will die as will Israeli soldiers. Many of the hostages Hamas and their allies are holding will probably also die. There are calls for a ceasefire to avoid this humanitarian catastrophe. The onus for all of this is on Israel. It is entirely up to them. Or so the narrative goes.
According to this narrative, Hamas has no say in this. They will continue to hide among and below their citizens, inflicting death and destruction on invading Israelis and inviting the same for themselves and their citizenry. It is a given. But is that their only choice? No. Hamas can end this and save these lives. They can sue for peace; they can surrender. They are surrounded by a superior force. They can inflict a great deal of damage but they cannot win. Killing Israelis is their goal. They will achieve that. But massive death and destruction will also be borne by the people they claim to champion. Is that also their goal? If not, Hamas can prove it. They can release all of the hostages and surrender. This would champion their cause by showing, through self-sacrifice, that they care for their fellow Gazans. They are willing to give themselves up to save them. They say they are willing to face death as martyrs; let’s see.
And it doesn’t even have to be that stark a choice for Hamas. They need not offer an unconditional surrender. They can offer a conditional surrender. This could take the following form. Through an intermediary or third party that both sides can work with, Hamas says it will give back all of the hostages. Clearly such channels exist as they have already given back four hostages. Further, they can offer to abandon their tunnels and let the Israeli troops in. Finally, the members of Hamas leave Gaza, alive. It can go even further. Negotiate a surrender wherein after Hamas leaves, a third party comes in and runs Gaza. The people can return to their homes but Hamas is gone. Israel destroys all rockets and tunnels and weapons and ammunition. After the people come back, a third party (the UN, Egypt, a multinational force) takes over. Israel has the right to inspect for weapons but this is subject to being overseen by that multinational force so that everything Israel does is above board. Moreover, Israel does not take over Gaza. Set a time period after which Gaza gains autonomy and even self-rule if it agrees to remain unarmed.
The Israelis are coming no matter what. In the end, after the bloodshed and destruction, the tunnels, rockets, and weapon caches will be destroyed. All Hamas gains by fighting is killing more Israelis at the cost of their own citizens who they claim to cherish. Here is what it really comes down to: Does Hamas believe that killing more Israelis is worth the lives of their innocent countrymen? Are the people of Gaza innocent civilians to them or just more hostages to be sacrificed on the altar of their cause? If Hamas were to make such a deal, they take away Israel’s reason for bombing and invading. The destruction of life and property ends. Israel gets what it says it wants. Hamas saves its citizens and becomes the self-sacrificing peace makers.
All Hamas has to do is sacrifice themselves to save its people. Will they? Are they worth more than the people they claim to be doing this for? If they don’t surrender, they are saying yes, their lives are worth more. We all know what will happen. We all know that Hamas will not even consider, let along offer such a solution. In fact, there is no solution other than the destruction of the Jewish state that they will countenance. So, they will insist on fighting a battle they instigated and which they will eventually lose where the main casualties are their own people.
This isn’t just about Israeli choices and intransigence; Hamas is consciously choosing death and destruction for its people.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Mr. President, thank you for convening this ministerial and for convening this council. And thank you very much, Special Coordinator Wennesland, Deputy Special Coordinator Hastings, for your important briefings.
Mr. Secretary-General, we’re grateful for your leadership in this incredibly challenging time, particularly in helping get humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.
And to the entire UN team – their incredible bravery, their dedication – all of those who continue to serve in some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable, we express our gratitude and our admiration.
I’m here today because the United States believes the United Nations – and this council in particular – has a crucial role to play in addressing this crisis. Indeed, we’ve put forward a resolution that sets out practical steps that we can take together toward that end.
The resolution builds on many elements of the text that Brazil put forward last week. It incorporates substantive feedback we received from fellow council members over recent days. It also draws heavily on the views that I heard firsthand from partners across the region after Hamas’s appalling attack on October 7 – views that the United States shares.
First, we all recognize the right, and indeed the imperative, of states to defend themselves against terrorism.
That’s why we must unequivocally condemn Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack against Israel – babies riddled with bullets; young people hunted down and gunned down with glee; people, young people beheaded; families burned alive in a final embrace; parents executed in front of their children; children executed in front of their parents; and so many taken hostage in Gaza.
We have to ask – indeed it must be asked – where is the outrage? Where is the revulsion? Where is the rejection? Where is the explicit condemnation of these horrors?
We are heartened by Friday’s release of the two American hostages, Judith Ranaan and her daughter Natalie Ranaan and by today’s release of two Israelis, Nurit Cooper and Yocheved Lifshitz, whose husbands remain in captivity.
But our relief is tempered by our overwhelming concern that 220 innocent people, including 30 children, remain captive by terrorists, threatened with torture and death. They were taken by Hamas in the savage massacre of October 7, where over 1,400 Israelis were slaughtered – women raped, families burned alive, and infants beheaded.
Thank you for your unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people, who have been terrorized by Hamas since the group’s founding over 35 years ago, and for the Palestinians, who have also been terrorized, oppressed, and victimized by Hamas for the last 17 years that the group has been governing Gaza.
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker made one of his first public appearances in New Jersey since returning from Israel Thursday morning. The senator was in the region for a summit in Jerusalem when the Israel-Hamas War broke out on Saturday.
Booker addressed the congregation at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills for a prayer service. Booker was in Israel when Hamas launched its attacks and was in and out of bomb shelters Saturday as the conflict escalated. Booker said he would continue to work with his colleagues in the Senate to continue supporting Israel’s security and ensuring stability in the region.
“We’re going to go to Washington this week to get supplemental funding, not just for Ukraine now, but also for Israel and Israel’s defense,” Booker said.
Since Hamas’ terror attacks in Israel on October 7th, we’ve seen bigots and extremists exploit the crisis to spread hate, disinformation, and extremism.
This is a moment of deep Jewish pain, mourning the lives taken and praying for the safe release of the hostages in Gaza – and this pain and fear is compounded by a horrific rise in antisemitism here in the United States and around the globe.
We also know that we are not the only ones being targeted in this moment. Our Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian American neighbors are facing bigotry, threats, and violence – including the despicable murder of a six-year-old child this weekend outside Chicago, by a man who reportedly espoused anti-Muslim hate.
Let us be unequivocally clear: The Jewish community rejects Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, antisemitism, and all forms of bigotry. Particularly as extremists continue to exploit this moment, we are reminded that all of our communities’ safety and futures are inextricably linked — and recommit ourselves to fighting hate in all its forms.
It’s been 17 days since Hamas launched its horrific attack against Israel, killing over 1,400 Israeli citizens, including defenseless women, children and the elderly. In the aftermath of such unspeakable brutality, the U.S. government and the American people have shared in the grief of families, prayed for the return of loved ones, and rightly declared solidarity with the Israeli people.
As I stated in an earlier post, Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence, and I fully support President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.
But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters. In particular, it matters — as President Biden has repeatedly emphasized — that Israel’s military strategy abides by international law, including those laws that seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations. Upholding these values is important for its own sake — because it is morally just and reflects our belief in the inherent value of every human life. Upholding these values is also vital for building alliances and shaping international opinion — all of which are critical for Israel’s long-term security.
This is an enormously difficult task. War is always tragic, and even the most carefully planned military operations often put civilians at risk. As President Biden noted during his recent visit to Israel, America itself has at times fallen short of our higher values when engaged in war, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government wasn’t interested in heeding the advice of even our allies when it came to the steps we took to protect ourselves against Al Qaeda. Now, after the systematic massacre of Israeli citizens, a massacre that evokes some of the darkest memories of persecution against the Jewish people, it’s understandable that many Israelis have demanded that their government do whatever it takes to root out Hamas and make sure such attacks never happen again. Moreover, Hamas’ military operations are deeply embedded within Gaza — and its leadership seems to intentionally hide among civilians, thereby endangering the very people they claim to represent.
The original post can be found on Barack Obama’s website.
Officials in Israel screened footage of the Hamas attack for the press: “What we shared with you, you should know it,” one official said.
This afternoon, at a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters’ body cams and mobile phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.
It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, “a very sad movie.” Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farmworkers.) “Give me a knife!” one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man’s throat, taking thwack after thwack.
Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?
The audience gasped. I heard someone heave a little at another scene, this one showing a father and his young sons, surprised in their pajamas. A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, “Why am I alive?” and “Daddy, Daddy.” One says, “I think we are going to die.” The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep, he raids their fridge. “Water, water,” he says. The spokesman was unable to say whether the children survived.
“We all want the same thing: Freedom for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace,” reads a letter signed by both talent and entertainment executives.
A long list of Hollywood stars and executives have signed a letter thanking President Joe Biden for his leadership amid the Israel–Hamas war, and asking to keep focus on the hostages in Gaza.
Gal Gadot, Amy Schumer, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Bradley Cooper, Madonna, Courteney Cox, Chris Rock, Bob Odenkirk, Debra Messing, Constance Wu, Justin Timberlake, Tyler Perry, Will Ferrell, Billy Crystal, Tiffany Haddish, Aubrey Plaza, Zack Snyder and Shawn Levy are just some of the celebrities who added their names to the document circulated by a group of Hollywood leaders who launched a website called No Hostage Left Behind. Those who are actively involved in the coalition include Gadot and Schumer.
When does criticizing Israel veer into antisemitic territory? In May 2021, as tensions heightened during the conflict between Israel and terrorist groups in Gaza, we saw two examples: beating Jews down in the streets and telling them to go back to Israel. Across the globe, protesters—some maliciously, some unwittingly—employed and spread antisemitic themes and tropes.
Fast forward to October 7, 2023, as thousands of Hamas terrorists funded by Iran and fueled by hatred for Jews attacked Israel with one goal: to indiscriminately butcher and kidnap as many Israelis as possible—women, the elderly, children, and babies. The numbers now stand at 1,400 murdered and over 200 held hostage in Gaza, their fate unknown.
As Israel rightfully responds to terrorism and defends its people, we must be prepared for rising antisemitism. We must anticipate false moral equivalencies. Double standards. Misinformation. Outright lies. We’re already seeing this from certain media outlets and prominent voices.
There’s a source that offers clear guardrails about what can constitute antisemitism: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism adopted by more than 1,000 entities, including more than 40 governments, the EU, the Organization of American States, recommended for use by the UN, used by the U.S. Departments of State and Education and embraced by the White House.
The Working Definition is a clear and compact description of antisemitism in its various forms, including where and how anti-Israel animus can become a form of antisemitism, separate and apart from criticism of Israel.
American Jewish Committee (AJC) created its signature tool: Translate Hate – a glossary of dozens of antisemitic terms – many dating back to medieval times, others either born or given new life in recent years – to shine a light on antisemitism that can hide in plain sight.
Here are seven antisemitic terms, tropes, and themes that pervaded anti-Israel protests during the last significant conflict between Hamas and Israel in May 2021, and new examples already seen since Hamas prompted its brutal, unprovoked war on Israel in October 2023. To be clear, these trends make life more dangerous for Jews in America and around the world. Today, as this dangerous rhetoric ramps up and as Jewish communities across the globe increase security, we must be prepared to recognize and respond to antisemitism no matter the source.
The Crown Prince has staked his name on a major economic transformation – a vision for the future of his own country, and of the Middle East, which would revamp the region and support political stability.
Such plans underpinned a recent resumption of relations between Riyadh and regional rival Iran, and even a foray, led by the US, into normalising ties with Israel.
Saudi Arabia had requested major military support from Washington and significant Israeli concessions to the Palestinians as part of any normalisation deal.
“For us, the Palestinian issue is very important. We need to solve that part,” the Crown Prince told Fox News during a rare interview last month.
For now, such diplomatic engagement has been suspended, but the threat of escalating conflict clearly does not serve Saudi Arabia’s stated interests, analysts said.
The last time Ruby Chen heard from his 19-year-old son Itay was a 6:40am message saying his military base was under rocket attack. His father was just waking up to news that Hamas militants had launched a surprise attack on Israel.
‘That was 12 days ago,’ the New York-born father-of-four told DailyMail.com. ‘That was the last time we had any communication with him.’
Itay, who holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, is among more than 200 Israelis believed to be held hostage in Gaza by Hamas terrorists or other extremist groups.
The crisis has triggered an extraordinary response among the Israeli population, uniquely equipped by decades of war to deploy skills learned in the security services or tech industries.
A campaign to keep the hostages’ plight in the headlines has drawn 1000 volunteers together, coordinating international protests and social medial campaigns from the glitzy offices of a law firm in a Tel Aviv high-rise tower block.
And across the city there are at least two efforts by tech experts to use the latest in geo-location technology and artificial intelligence to find clues from videos posted by Hamas that might aid a rescue mission.
Karine Nahon, an academic in information science, is one of the leaders of a team poring over video footage posted online by Hamas. They are using A.I. coupled with facial and voice recognition software to identify the missing and zero in on locations.
‘The government right now relies on the information that is coming from these rooms,’ Nahon told Reuters.
Some 1500 tech experts are working in a war room set up in Tel Aviv Expo Center.
On Monday 23 October, at the IDF Glilot military base in Herzliya, alongside at least 100 journalists, I was invited to a screening, exclusive to international media.
We were warned in advance that the materials we were going to see would be raw and unedited footage, including documentation of murder and other visually gruesome materials.
We were also informed that we would not be allowed to bring phones or any other recording devices into the screening auditorium. However, we were allowed to write about what we saw…
In an exclusive interview to us at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Major Ella Waweya, the deputy commander of the IDF’s Arabic-language spokespersons’ unit, addressed Admiral Daniel Hagari’s statement that Hamas does not represent Islam and that their 7 October atrocities go against the teachings of Islam. Major Waweya, an Arab Israeli and Muslim herself, said to us ‘What Hamas did is against Islam, against humanity, against everything a human being can think of. Hamas came to kill children, to kill women, and to kill the elderly. In which religion is that written? This is not in Islam. This is not humanity. This date, 7 October, must be engraved with all humanity in all history. This is not the war of Israel, this is the war of the whole world against Hamas-Isis’. Waweya added ‘Don’t forget 7 October’.
The YouTube video, posted on the official IDF channel, generated over 5.5 million views in less than 24 hours and contains disturbing and graphic footage that captures the horrifying scenes of Israelis being murdered and burnt – viewer discretion is advised
The IDF released on Wednesday extremely graphic footage of the massacre that took place in southern Israel on October 7 by Hamas terrorists.
The video, which the official Israel Defense Forces channel uploaded to YouTube, features more than 10 minutes of footage captured by local cameras, dashcams, and bodycams retrieved from Hamas terrorists.
WARNING: This video contains extremely graphic footage, viewer discretion is advised.
The full article and supplemental videos can be viewed at Ynet News.
After Hamas fired rockets and invaded southern Israel, killing some 1,400 hundred people and abducting more than 200, Israel’s response has been under intense scrutiny. Some commenters have deliberately spread falsehoods about Israel’s actions and intentions, and others have criticized them in ways that reflect a misunderstanding of Israel’s legal obligations as it works to eliminate the threat posed by a terrorist organization committed to its violent destruction.
Israel’s actions have been informed by the rules of International Humanitarian Law, or the law of armed conflict, which places obligations on parties to war whether they are states like Israel or non-state actors like the terror group Hamas. These rules are intended to limit the harm that civilians experience as a result of war to the greatest extent feasible while not impeding parties to war from pursuing legitimate objectives. In Israel’s case, those objectives include eliminating Hamas’ capacity so they can never again carry out atrocities like those seen on October 7.
Since October 7, Israel has taken and is continuously taking several important steps to prevent harm to Palestinian civilians. Hamas, on the other hand, has not only deliberately killed and kidnapped civilians in Israel, but has also deliberately put Palestinian civilians in harm’s way, making it extremely difficult for Israel to effectively protect innocent lives. Here’s what you need to know about International Humanitarian Law and who is violating it.
What is required by International Humanitarian Law?
International Humanitarian Law (IHL) refers to the rules that govern how nations (Israel), along with armed actors that aren’t governments (Hamas) conduct themselves in war. These rules are designed to protect civilians and prisoners of war, reduce war-related suffering, and restrict the means and methods of warfare that are allowed.
What principles govern International Humanitarian Law?
There are three key principles that inform the global rules of combat during wartime: Necessity, Distinction, and Proportionality.
Necessity allows parties to armed conflicts to take necessary measures that are not otherwise prohibited to carry out legitimate military actions. It also anticipates that collateral damage may occur as a result.
Distinction requires that all parties to conflicts distinguish between civilians and combatants. Attacks may only be directed against combatants. Attacks that deliberately target civilians are prohibited. To achieve this, IHL requires military structures to be built separately from civilian populations. It also requires fighting forces to wear military uniforms.
Proportionality requires that acts of self-defense and retaliation be proportionate to the overall threat from the aggressor. It bans attacks that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or excessive damage to civilian homes and structures that would go beyond the anticipated military advantage sought from the attack.
Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives.
For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.
This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.
The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.
But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.
A Hamas leader claims there is more to the fight than Palestinian freedom.
“The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors.” Only then, if everyone adopts his law, will there be peace.”
Mother shares heartbreaking messages from her children after their father was gunned down in front of them by Hamas terrorists who stormed his home during Israel attacks.
A mother has shared the heartbreaking messages she received from her children moments after their father was brutally murdered in front of them by Hamas terrorists.
Reut Karp took to Facebook on Sunday to reveal the final messages sent by her husband, Dvir, before he was killed in one of many surprise attacks launched by the terrorist group in Israel.
In the exchange, 46-year-old Dvir says: ‘There’s a big mess here’, before adding ‘There is a heavy shooting in the kibbutz’.
Concerned for the safety of her husband and children who were with their father, Reut replied: ‘Shooting? Inside the kibbutz?’
He said: ‘Yes. That’s how it sounds’.
Referring to her children, Reut then replies: ‘She wrote that she’s in a safe place. Orly is calming down Lia’.
But in a devastating turn of events, Reut’s daughter writes back: ‘Mom, it’s Daria… Dad has been murdered. Stav too. Help’.
Sharing the correspondence, Reut wrote on social media: ‘My last messages with my husband, the father of my children, Dvir Karp.
‘Dvir Karp RIP 1977 – 2023 Rest in peace’.
Hamas launched a surprise assault on Israel on Saturday, that has so far killed more than 700 Israelis and injured 1,200.
Meanwhile, more than 100 Israelis are being held captive, a senior Hamas official said yesterday.
View the full article and additional videos at DailyMail.
Investigations have unveiled that foreign funding significantly influences the American educational system.
Such funding introduces ideologies from abroad into our colleges including those from non-democratic regions with values contrary to Western principles.
The Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism in Policy — ISGAP — follow the money project has uncovered that Qatar emerges as the foremost foreign benefactor to U.S. universities.
Over recent years the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood has thus found its way into Academia.
Hamas, its Palestinian branch, a recognized terrorist organization by several countries including the United States responsible for the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust on October 7th, still holding over 100 hostages in captivity, has since been endorsed and even admired on many US college campuses.
As part of the so-called fight for justice for the Palestinians, the influx of foreign capital is directly linked to the rise of anti-Semitism on the American college campus.
Recent research exposed byISGAP found the staggering scale of Qatari funding to Cornell University with over $1.95 billion dollar donated directly to the University from 2001 to 2023.
This makes Qatar the largest direct foreign donor to the university.
The overwhelming and violent anti-semitic protests of the last few weeks across American universities has brought these issues to an urgent and imperative moment that we must reckon with.
On October 7, a series of brutal attacks on Israeli towns and the Nova Music Festival left a dark mark, characterized by horrific acts of sexual violence against women and girls, including rape, assault, and mutilation. These heinous acts extended to the treatment of Israeli captives in Gaza, with released hostages recounting experiences of sexual assault. Despite the gravity and severity of these atrocities, there has been a noticeable lack of attention from human rights groups and international organizations.
The Documentary: An In-Depth Investigation
In the 60-minute documentary film, “Screams Before Silence,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org, takes on the role of presenter to delve deep into these sexual atrocities. The film features interviews with a range of participants including eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, as well as medical and forensic experts who were on the ground during and after the attacks.
Lack of Scrutiny and Denial
The documentary highlights a disturbing trend among some sectors of the global community, including notable figures in politics, academia, and media, who have either minimized or outright denied the occurrence of these attacks. This denial and the general scarcity of scrutiny stand in stark contrast to the indisputable evidence presented by survivors and professionals involved in the aftermath of the events.
Purpose and Impact of the Documentary
“Screams Before Silence” aims to bring these ignored and denied narratives to the forefront, providing a platform for the voices of survivors of this sexual violence. By presenting firsthand accounts and expert analyses, the documentary seeks to challenge the prevailing narratives and encourage a more informed and empathetic understanding of the atrocities committed.
Broader Implications
The release of this documentary raises important questions about the role of human rights organizations and the international community in addressing and acknowledging acts of terror and sexual violence. It calls attention to the need for a unified and unequivocal response to such acts, regardless of the geopolitical or social complexities involved.
The film serves as a critical reminder of the human cost of conflict and the importance of holding perpetrators accountable while providing justice and recognition to the victims of such unfathomable acts.
A young woman danced and whirled like a dervish, another sat cross-legged, beating on a drum; around them, 28 dupes marched in a circle chanting every vacuous slogan. I set my iPhone on video to ask: “What does it feel like to be the useful idiots of Palestinian murderers and rapists?”
Then I rephrased it in my mind. Not Palestinian, but Hamas. After all, not all Palestinians agree with the Islamic killers. But these young Americans clearly do.
It was a mild little demonstration of students outside The New School on New York’s 5th Avenue and East 13th Street. Of course, they chanted from the river to the sea, and divest, and we will not stop, and blew horns and cursed Israel, while a bored NYPD officer made sure people could still walk by.
They’re not bad kids, I thought. They’ve found something to be passionate about, much like myself at their age, a young Brit marching barefoot to Aldermaston yelling Ban the Bomb, a useful idiot of Soviet agents whose own country was hell-bent on building up its nuclear arsenal.
[The Times of Israel Op-Ed continues]
Today, everywhere, Jews ask themselves the generational question: Where can we be safe? Where do they not hate us?
Many answer: But most don’t hate us. It’s just a vocal minority who conflate the actions of Israel with the Jewish people everywhere.
Really? So where are they? Where are the demonstrations against the killers and their useful idiots who preach hatred and fear? If they are the silent majority, is it not time to speak out, to voice their rejection of murder and rape?
So I swallowed hard and prepared to ask my question of how could they support murderers and rapists. I hesitated. How would they react? Would they really beat a slightly disheveled, elderly Jew. I didn’t want to sugarcoat my question, because it is the only question worth asking. Or would I chicken out?
I vacillated. What was the point? Would I change anybody’s mind? I was just a face in the crowd, watching and wondering. Should I speak up?
That took me back to 1938 in Vienna. I wondered, was there a face in the jeering crowd that wanted to speak up, to stop the spectacle, when Nazis forced my grandmother, and other Jews, to clean the street with a toothbrush? Later my mother collected her mother, shaken and disoriented, from the police station.
Nobody spoke up then. Would I speak up now? Would I ask the only honest and worthwhile question, my little way of standing up for my people? Would I endanger myself and my wife?
For what? A provocative and ultimately useless question? But if I don’t ask, who will? If I, a Jew, don’t speak up for the Jews, why should anyone else? Should I challenge the more numerous ignorant youth, emboldened by their false righteousness, or slink away, my tail between my legs.
In the Middle Ages it was known that Jews had tails and horns, and the proof that they were agents of satan was that when they were killed and their naked bodies displayed, their horns and tails had been magically conjured away.
In the end, I didn’t ask my question and continued on to dinner with friends on the Lower East Side, and I was ashamed.
Martin Fletcher served as NBC News Mideast correspondent and bureau chief in Tel Aviv for 28 years, winning almost every award in television journalism, including five Emmy’s. He has written seven books. Walking Israel won the National Jewish book Award in America for non fiction and Promised Land was a finalist in the fiction category. He is the only author to be honored in both categories.
We are asking all Americans to stand up to hate and not be silent. Millions of people saw our ad during the Super Bowl and we have one question: how will you stand up?
Video features Dr. Clarence B. Jones who wrote Dr. King’s I have A Dream Speech.
As 2023 drew to a close last week, South Africa decided to file a claim at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, preposterously accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza.
The crime of genocide, coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin to describe the systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis, is one of the most serious accusations that can be leveled in international law. Today, it has a very specific definition under Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948, meaning committing acts, including by killing, that are intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
[The Op-Ed from The Hill continues]
“Israel isn’t trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel isn’t trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So, if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”
This week, asked about South Africa’s claim against Israel, Kirby could was unequivocal, saying the U.S “find this submission meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”
Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, have been unequivocal and repeated in stating that the goal of the operation in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas, by destroying its military and governing capabilities.
If anyone is guilty of genocide here, it is the internationally recognized terrorist group Hamas. Not only does Hamas openly state that the destruction of Israel is its ultimate goal, as evidenced in its Charter, it acted out on those intentions on Oct. 7, when Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis, including raping, burning, mutilating and executing women and children.
That there have been civilian casualties in Gaza is tragic, but it is also the inevitable consequence of Hamas using its own people as human shields and embedding its military operations in schools, hospitals, kindergartens and homes. Notwithstanding this challenge, the IDF have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid casualties and abide by principles of international humanitarian law.
[The Op-Ed from The Hill continues]
In a Oct. 24 interview, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad gleefully stated that the terror group would repeat the Oct. 7 massacre “again and again” until Israel was “annihilated,” openly admitting the group’s genocidal intentions.
In response, then British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly commented, “How can there be peace when Hamas are committed to the eradication of Israel?”
Next week, the International Court of Justice is set to hold the first hearing into the case brought by South Africa. If the court wishes to maintain its credibility, respect for the rule of law and sacrosanct obligation in holding real perpetrators of genocide accountable, it will immediately dismiss these baseless and mendacious proceedings against Israel and direct its attention solely to the crimes of Hamas.
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