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When hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers on September 11, 2001, roughly 25,000 children were living or attending school nearby in lower Manhattan, and thousands more were in surrounding neighborhoods. Some were infants and toddlers, while others were still in the womb.

Even though they were exposed to the massive toxic cloud and settling dust containing pulverized concrete, glass fibers, asbestos, and other pollutants in the days and weeks after the towers fell, very few of these children were enrolled in the government-funded follow-up health studies of WTC survivors. Those were mainly for first responders and other adults.

As a result, there was no means of tracking chronic illnesses, including cancers, cardiovascular diseases and reproductive health outcomes, that may only now be emerging as those children reach their 30s and early 40s, scientists say.

Major questions remain about whether exposure to the toxins and the trauma on 9/11 and afterward increased their long-term health risks, according to scientists.

To address these gaps, Congress announced in 2022 that it would fund a study of these individuals to be conducted with US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention oversight.

CDC seeking applications to set up WTC Youth Research Coordinating Center

Last month, the CDC said it will be seeking applications from researchers to set up the World Trade Center Youth Research Coordinating Center and identify and track a Youth Research Cohort.

The agency has specified that study participants will have been 21 years old or younger, or in utero, and living below 14th Street in Manhattan or anywhere in Brooklyn on and after 9/11.

A cohort of similarly aged but unexposed individuals will be recruited for comparison.

It is not clear how many participants the CDC hopes to recruit, but an agency spokesperson said it expects to spend up to $50 million in total program funding. The estimated start date for the project is July 1, 2027, the spokesperson said.

Members of the public can sign up online for updates and register to be notified when enrollment opens to those who are qualified.

The CDC’s World Trade Center Health Program and the New York City Department of Health’s World Trade Center Health Registry both offered services for children in the early years after the attacks. But most affected youngsters sought care from their own pediatricians, whereas many adult survivors were uninsured and needed the programs’ services, recalled lung specialist Dr. Joan Reibman of NYU Langone Medical Center.

Data on childhood exposure have so far come only from small studies

In adult survivors and first responders, dozens of types of cancers and other health issues related to their exposure have been identified. But data on the effects of childhood exposure has so far come only from small studies.

Reibman, the founder of the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center, said gathering participants will require a great deal of community support.

“These people are spread across the United States right now. They’re all older. They may not necessarily want to go back to that period of time,” she said. “There’s going to have to be a lot of work with community groups to try to recruit them.”

Reibman and Dr. Leigh Wilson, the current medical director of the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center, both acknowledged that children in war zones today may face some of the same long-term consequences as the children of 9/11.

“I would love to prevent every and any adverse effect in these children,” Wilson said.

Studying the children of 9/11 may shed light on preventive and mitigating measures and resources that could be put in place, Wilson added.

“You have to identify and start studying all exposed populations immediately, whether they’re adults or children,” Reibman said, and “unfortunately we haven’t learned it from the World Trade Center disaster.”

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British lawmakers will make a fresh push on Friday to legalize assisted dying for terminally ill people, hoping a groundswell of public support will help drive through a change in the law six months after a previous effort failed.

Opinion polls have long shown that a majority of people in the UK back the legalization of assisted dying, and supporters hoped a parliamentary vote in 2025 in favor of it would pave the way for the country’s biggest social change in a generation.

But that bill failed in March in the unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords, after members ran out of time to debate hundreds of amendments proposed during that parliamentary session.

Lauren Edwards, a lawmaker in British Prime Minister Andy Burnham‘s Labour Party, is now bringing back the legislation to the House of Commons, the lower chamber, through a mechanism known as a Private Member’s Bill whereby an individual lawmaker selected in a ballot can try to pass a law independently of the government.

The government is neutral on the legislation, meaning politicians can vote according to their conscience rather than along party lines. In 2025, the legislation passed in the Commons by 314 votes to 291 against.

Under the proposed bill, mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with six months or fewer to live would be given the right to end their lives with medical help, after approval from a panel of professionals.

Concerns over how to protect vulnerable ill people from coercion derailed the last attempt to legalize assisted dying. Parliament had rejected a similar bill 10 years ago.

 ‘Progressuve reform’

Edwards said that if the law was finally passed it would represent “the most pressing, progressive reform” of this parliament.

“It is time to… give terminally ill people the choice to exercise some control over the manner of their deaths,” she wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

“We owe it to them, and to the vast majority of voters who support them, not to sit back and allow a minority of unelected peers to stand in their way.”

A poll published by Ipsos on Monday showed two in three Britons support the legalization of assisted dying in principle, though in some cases that backing hinges on additional funding being provided for palliative care.

Burnham has previously said the debate over legalizing assisted dying should wait until the country’s palliative and adult social care systems have been fixed. He has said he will not vote on Friday.

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During the Hebrew year 5786, which comes to a close over the weekend, Magen David Adom marked 96 years of life-saving work in both routine emergencies and times of war and crisis.

Over the past year, MDA personnel were dispatched to 1,911,412 incidents, using mobile intensive care units, ambulances, emergency motorcycles, and rapid response vehicles operating across Israel.

According to the organization’s data, an MDA emergency team was dispatched every 16.5 seconds on average.
MDA’s 101 Emergency Call Center received 2,020,218 calls during the year, answering a call about every 15.9 seconds, with an average response time of 2 seconds or less.

“During 5786, Magen David Adom continued to advance technologically and strengthen its capabilities with the support of generous donors from Israel and around the world”, said MDA Director General Eli Bin. “This was alongside providing some of the world’s highest-quality emergency medical services and collecting blood units for hospitals and the IDF during both routine times and the war.”

Bin added that nearly 40,000 MDA volunteers and employees worked tirelessly throughout the past year, “day and night, by air, sea, and land, on Shabbat and holidays, in summer and winter, with tremendous dedication, compassion, and professionalism, and above all, from the heart.”

“Magen David Adom teams continued working under fire and risking their lives, with heroism and courage, to save lives in the best possible way.”

“In 5787,” he concluded. “We will continue doing everything in our power and sparing no effort to protect the health of Israel’s citizens. Shana Tova!”

Approximately 39,200 volunteers, employees, national-service participants, and civil-service members serve in MDA, including approximately 16,500 teenage volunteers. An additional 18,000 Life Guardians (“Ne’emanei Haim”) volunteers are active within MDA. 

MDA volunteers contributed more than 6.3 million hours of service throughout the year, with an average age of 26.8. 

The oldest MDA volunteer is a 92-year-old resident of Ness Ziona, while the youngest is 14.

MDA operates 213 stations and dispatch points throughout Israel. Its vehicle array includes 275 rapid response vehicles, 117 ambulances and MICUs, 652 motorcycles, 17 all-terrain vehicles, 27 Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) vehicles, 42 trailers equipped with supplies for treating mass-casualty incidents, 17 Medical Supervisor vehicles, three Unimog vehicles, five intensive care buses, 10 ambulances equipped with lifts for people with disabilities, eight ambulances equipped with specialized stretchers for bariatric patients, three MICUs capable of treating two critically ill patients simultaneously, 104 ambulances, MICUs and command vehicles with ballistic protection, three electric MiaFour vehicles, two electric vehicles for sports facilities, one truck equipped for staff accommodation and overnight stays, two mobile dispatch points on trailers, and one mobile clinic trailer.

In addition, on the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret), MDA operates an intensive care sea ambulance vessel. In Eilat, an MDA sea ambulance boat operates off the coast. Together, both aquatic units were dispatched to 153 incidents during the year.

MDA’s unique mobile ECMO unit, operated in cooperation with Shamir Medical Center in Tzrifin, treated nine patients, five of whom were connected to a heart-lung machine as part of field resuscitation efforts.

In road accidents across Israel, MDA EMTs and paramedics provided medical treatment to 67,624 injured people. 

During the current swimming season, which began after Passover and will end after Sukkot, MDA teams have provided medical treatment to 229 adults and children rescued from the sea, swimming pools, and other bodies of water.

Approximately 500,000 men and women completed CPR and first-aid courses in over 17,000 courses held throughout Israel during the past year. 

Thousands received training through MDA’s free first-aid and emergency-responder courses held in bomb shelters and protected spaces as part of its public service during the Israel-Hamas War and Operations Rising Lion and Roaring Lion.
MDA’s Medical Division certified 401 new paramedics this year, including 117 national-service participants. 

A total of 970 MDA youth volunteers were trained to respond to mass-casualty incidents, 591 teenagers were certified as first-aid instructors, and 190 youth volunteers completed leadership and resilience training.

Lessons learned from October 7: Project Magen

As part of the lessons learned from the October 7 massacre, MDA’s Operations Division launched Project Magen, designed to prepare Israel’s civilian population for emergencies. 

Since the project’s launch, 17,804 civilians, including members of local security squads, municipal employees and inspectors, have been trained to provide initial medical care. Of these, 1,322 were trained this year. 

Project participants, including more than 1,000 doctors and paramedics, were equipped by MDA with medical supplies, enabling them to provide an initial medical response when necessary, for example, during incidents in which a community is cut off from access routes due to a natural disaster, war, terrorist infiltration or any other emergency.

A total of 18,727 pregnant women were evacuated to hospitals, including 1,399 women who gave birth with the assistance of MDA teams at home or en route to the hospital. 

MDA operates a project for on-call midwives, in which professional midwives are equipped with advanced, specialized medical equipment and dispatched alongside mobile intensive care units to assist women in labor. This year, 97 midwives from across Israel joined the project and helped MDA teams provide medical care in dozens of obstetric emergencies.

Nearly 300,000 blood units collected

This year, MDA Blood Services collected 281,917 blood units through thousands of blood drives held throughout Israel, including at MDA blood-donation centers, schools, workplaces and IDF bases. 

Women accounted for 36.1% of blood donors in 5786, while men accounted for 63.9%. The average age of a blood donor was 34, and 46,407 of this year’s blood donors were first-time donors. 

Of the blood units supplied by MDA Blood Services to security forces and hospitals, 9,541 were whole-blood units.

MDA Blood Services operates 24 blood-service vehicles and 14 mobile blood-donation units, including two blood-donation buses, each capable of collecting blood from five donors simultaneously. 

All donated blood was tested for blood type and infectious diseases at the MDA Blood Services laboratories in the protected building at MDA’s headquarters in Ramla, the first facility of its kind in the world. The blood was then supplied to hospitals throughout Israel and the IDF.

MDA’s National Human Milk Bank supplied approximately 5,700 liters of breast milk during the past year to premature babies in neonatal intensive care units, newborns in hospitals, and sick babies at home who require breast milk due to their medical condition. 

In special cases, approximately 40 liters of breast milk per month were supplied to orphans whose mothers had begun breastfeeding or intended to breastfeed but died after giving birth. 

During the past year, approximately 370 new milk donors joined the bank. All meet the strictest medical standards to ensure the safest possible milk for premature infants.

MDA’s Logistics Division provided for the organization’s medical and operational needs in the field throughout the year. A total of 2,443 Immediate Response Kits were prepared by logistics employees and volunteers and distributed to MDA EMTs, paramedics, and doctors, enabling them to save lives outside their regular working and volunteering hours. 

MDA’s Make-A-Wish Ambulance fulfilled 128 wishes.

MDA, in cooperation with Hatzalah Air and Brook Aviation, operates five helicopters equipped with advanced intensive-care equipment. These helicopters treated and evacuated 264 patients and injured people by air to hospitals across Israel.

Additionally, MDA operates a unique national command-and-control truck equipped with advanced technologies, as well as three regional command-and-communications vehicles. 

MDA teams participated in 485 exercises during the past year. These exercises involved 836 ambulances, 229 mobile intensive care units, motorcycles, MCI vehicles, ATVs, Unimog vehicles, command-and-control centers, Medical Supervisor vehicles, rapid-response vehicles, intensive-care buses, MDA helicopters, and other equipment.

During 5786, MDA placed 128 automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in 45 communities throughout Israel. 

Since launching its public AED placement project, MDA has installed 2,036 life-saving devices in hundreds of communities across the country. In addition, MDA has installed more than 600 AEDs in synagogues in Jerusalem and other cities.

This post was originally published on here. 

A landmark legal battle to determine whether Jewish women have a religious right to an abortion entered a critical new stage in Indiana.

The state Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Thursday in a case that began with a local Jewish group’s 2022 religious freedom challenge to Indiana’s near-total abortion ban. The state  is appealing a permanent blocking of the ban that a lower court imposed in March. 

The arguments, held in Indianapolis, explored a legal theory that the state’s abortion ban impedes Jews’ religious freedom because many interpretations of Jewish law prioritize the life of the mother over that of the fetus. 

The case, one of the recent major challenges based on Jewish law to an abortion ban, could carry significant ramifications for how the American legal system weighs Jewish religious rights against conservative Christian doctrine, which strongly opposes abortion.

Indiana was one of several states to pass severe abortion restrictions following the 2022 US Supreme Court ruling overturning its 1972 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the right to an abortion. Separately, Christian groups and businesses have prevailed in national religious freedom cases determining whether they can be compelled to pay for contraception that can be used to perform abortions, arguing doing so violates their religious views.

But Kenneth Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, argued before the court Thursday that it was the abortion bans that curtailed the free exercise of religion. “Under Jewish law, the human life does not begin until the first breath,” said Falk, who argued the case on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice, a group formed explicitly to challenge the state’s abortion law, as well as two anonymous plaintiffs. While liberal Jewish denominations are generally permissive of abortion, Orthodox scholars offer more mixed interpretations. 

In response to a question by Chief Justice Loretta Rush about what the state should do “further along in a pregnancy,” Falk said, “I don’t think anyone is going to be advocating for abortions of a viable fetus.”

‘Secular’ exceptions to the abortion ban

In his arguments, Falk compared the Jewish women’s standing to what he called “secular” exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of rape or incest. 

“What is the reason for allowing these secular exceptions, but not a religious exception?” Falk asked the justices. He also referred to permitted religious exceptions to healthcare laws in other cases, including vaccine mandates.

In March, a judge in the Marion County Superior Court ruled in favor of Hoosier Jews for Choice, permanently blocking the state’s near-total abortion ban in cases where it would “substantially burden their religious exercise.” 

That ruling prompted the appeal from the state now under consideration, as well as conservative backlash, with Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks calling for the judge’s impeachment. 

“Our nation’s long tradition of respect for religious exercise has never been understood to encompass a right to intentionally destroy human life, any more than a right to abusively punish children,” Indiana Solicitor General James Barta argued before the state Supreme Court on Thursday.

Barta otherwise largely sidestepped the Jewish group’s religious arguments in his own presentation. Instead he insisted that the plaintiffs did not have proper standing because they were not actively seeking abortions themselves, though one is hoping to get pregnant but worried about getting proper care if an abortion were required.

Their case, Barta insisted, was “purely hypothetical.” 

A similar argument briefly prevailed in Kentucky in 2024, when a judge threw out a religious freedom lawsuit brought by three Jewish mothers against that state’s abortion law. The plaintiffs, the judge said in that case, lacked standing because none of them were currently pregnant. One of the plaintiffs, who was considering a pregnancy via in vitro fertilization, was allowed to appeal the case, which resulted in a partial victory this May when a judge struck down part of Kentucky’s abortion ban — related to a definition of when human life begins — as unconstitutional.

Many mainstream and progressive-leaning Jewish organizations, including the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League and representatives of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, are supporting Hoosier Jews for Choice and have signed onto briefs on the group’s behalf in court. 

In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the NCJW noted that questioning from the justices Thursday “appeared to focus on more procedural matters,” rather than “the merits of the case.” Yet Darcy Hirsh, the group’s vice president of government relations and advocacy, said she was “hopeful” the court would rule in the Jewish groups’ favor. 

“No individual should be forced to abandon their religious beliefs in order to comply with a narrow, Christian belief of when life begins,” Hirsh said. 

A representative for the state of Indiana did not return a JTA request for comment following the oral arguments.

Jews on the other side of the debate

There are also Jews on the other side of the debate. The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, a legal advocacy group, has filed amicus briefs in support of the state.

“From a theological perspective, it’s hard to say what is the single Jewish teaching on abortion,” Josh Blackman, an attorney with the coalition and professor at the South Texas College of Law, told JTA following the oral arguments.

Blackman added that, of all major religions, Judaism has “the strongest basis for the right to terminate a pregnancy.” But, he said, Jewish groups should be mindful of advocating for a system “where Jews in Indiana can have an abortion but Catholics cannot.”  

“At a time when there’s growing hostility between people on the right and Jews, I”m not sure this is the best use of Jewish resources,” Blackman said. “This could actually backfire in significant ways.”

There is no timeline for when the state Supreme Court might issue a decision on the case.

This post was originally published on here. 

Several people have been killed and several others injured in a bus crash near the Alpine village of Susch in eastern Switzerland, police said on Thursday.

Emergency response teams were dispatched to the site of the accident involving a travel coach, police in the canton of Graubuenden said in a post on X.

“A hotline is available for relatives and consulates regarding the coach accident in Susch,” police added in an additional X post. “Please contact the operations center of the Graubuenden Cantonal Police at 081 256 56 56.”

All passengers are Dutch nationals

A spokeswoman for the General Dutch Association of Travel Companies (ANVR), acting as spokesperson for tour operator OAD, said that a serious accident had taken place involving an OAD bus and that 48 passengers were on board, all Dutch nationals.

Pictures from the scene published by Swiss newspaper Blick showed a bus on its side surrounded by helicopters and emergency response vehicles.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel’s two established haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), are two of many vying for citizens’ votes in the elections for the 26th Knesset, which will be held on October 27.

Shas was founded in 1984 as a Sephardi haredi party, emerging in part from complaints of discrimination against Sephardi Jews within the established Ashkenazi haredi political establishment. Arye Deri leads the party, with Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef serving as its spiritual leader.

United Torah Judaism was formed in 1992 as a joint list of the two main Ashkenazi haredi political factions: the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah. The alliance has periodically been strained by ideological and political disputes between the two factions, but they have continued to run together. UTJ is led by newly appointed chairperson Yaakov Asher and is advised by a council of Torah Sages from each faction.

Both parties sit on the right of Israel’s political map and have been key partners of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition bloc. In the 25th Knesset, Shas won 11 seats and UTJ seven. Current polling has them at roughly seven and eight seats respectively.

Neither party has committed to sitting only with Netanyahu, and Shas’s spiritual leader has also said he could be open to a government led by prime ministerial candidate Gadi Eisenkot, challenging the assumption that a Shas vote automatically means a vote for a Netanyahu-led coalition.

The parties made numerous demands throughout the current government’s term, threatening to halt coalition voting when contentious haredi-backed bills were not advanced quickly enough.

The parties also both resigned from the government in 2025 following the fallout in negotiations when developing a bill to enforce conscription to the IDF.

Where Shas and UTJ stand on the major issues

Both Shas and UTJ have been sharply criticized for their position regarding haredi conscription to the IDF amid the IDF’s severe manpower crisis.

In June, Deri visited imprisoned haredi draft evaders and said his party stood behind them. Then-UTJ leader Yitzhak Goldknopf also visited the prisoners.

Deri has been a fierce critic of Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and the decisions made by the High Court ordering the state to take concrete steps to revoke key financial benefits from draft evaders and to move toward criminal enforcement against them.

Both haredi parties pushed for legislation, recently passed by the Knesset, to enshrine Torah study as a fundamental value in Israel’s Basic Laws. Critics argued that the bill would encourage draft evasion, while the haredi parties presented it as protecting the religious value of full-time Torah study.

On Gaza, Shas has broadly supported the objective of dismantling Hamas and demilitarizing Gaza, while opposing indefinite Israeli control of the Strip.

UTJ has not developed a similarly detailed independent position on Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, with the party’s political focus largely remaining domestic.

The issue of separating religion and state is another defining area of haredi politics, as both Shas and UTJ seek to preserve an Orthodox Jewish character for the country and maintain the authority of religious institutions, particularly the Chief Rabbinate.

They have firmly opposed expanding alternatives to religious law, including civil marriage, and support maintaining the existing system in which marriages are conducted through the Rabbinate.

The haredi draft is part of this broader religious debate. Both parties claim that full-time Torah study is a central religious value that should receive legal protection, while their opponents argue that this creates unequal civic obligations between haredi men and Israelis who serve in the IDF.

Both parties have historically opposed expanding public transportation and other state-supported activity on Shabbat. UTJ has also opposed infrastructure and construction work on Shabbat.

On the issue of conversion to Judaism, the parties favor keeping the authority to do so within the Orthodox religious establishment, rejecting Reform conversions, along with other frameworks.

The haredi parties also sponsored recently passed legislation that repealed the 2021 kashrut reform, blocking private bodies from issuing official kashrut certificates and returning control over certification to the Chief Rabbinate and authorized public rabbis.

The parties also oppose changes that would expand non-Orthodox forms of worship at the Western Wall.

Regarding the topic of the contentious judicial reform, both parties have tied their support to efforts to protect haredi draft arrangements and religious institutions from court intervention.

Shas and UTJ have supported reducing the High Court’s authority to overturn legislation or government decisions, particularly when the court has intervened in haredi-related matters.

Neither party has made defense spending a defining campaign demand, as their emphasis has been on protecting haredi budgets and institutions while negotiating over the broader state budget.

Shas has called for assistance to lower-income families and for reducing measures it considers harmful to poorer households.

UTJ has placed greater emphasis on housing, including increasing the supply of housing available to haredi families and ensuring greater representation for haredim in planning and housing institutions.

Their greatest economic influence, however, comes through the state budget. Shas and UTJ have consistently fought to preserve or increase funding for haredi schools, yeshivot, families, and daycare.

In June, the two parties halted their support for coalition legislation after a bill expanding daycare subsidies was removed from the Knesset agenda. Critics argued the bill would encourage state subsidies for parents of draft evaders.

The parties have also been criticized for demanding state funding for haredi educational institutions that do not teach core curriculum studies.

What a vote for Shas or UTJ is likely to produce

A vote for Shas or United Torah Judaism is first and foremost a vote to strengthen the haredi political bloc.

For decades, voting for the parties has generally meant strengthening Netanyahu’s ability to build a coalition. Netanyahu has relied on Shas and UTJ as key coalition partners, and the government’s final legislative push before the election was heavily shaped by efforts to satisfy their demands.

A vote for either party is therefore likely to produce pressure for legal protection for haredi men who do not serve in the IDF, support continued state funding for haredi education and religious institutions, expanded support for haredi families and daycare, stronger Orthodox control over religious affairs, and reduced judicial intervention in haredi-related legislation.

Both parties have demonstrated that they are willing to use their Knesset votes as leverage. Their joint refusal to support coalition legislation over the daycare bill, their resignations from the government, and their threats over legislation concerning Torah study showed they are willing to prioritize their demands even at the risk of destabilizing the government.

The result is that a vote for Shas or UTJ could grant haredi leadership bargaining power over the next government.

Meanwhile, a new ultra-Orthodox party, Hardei Public, has entered the election race campaigning for a different model, in which most haredi men would serve in the military or national service.

If Netanyahu can assemble a majority with his traditional allies, Shas and UTJ, their support would likely help form a right-wing government, similar to the current one.

Alternatively, if the anti-Netanyahu camp can assemble a government and Shas is willing to cross the traditional bloc divide, the haredi parties could potentially become coalition bargaining partners on the other side.

Keshet Neev contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

The four major parties in the opposition bloc seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the October elections signed surplus vote-sharing agreements on Thursday, with the stated aim of increasing the number of seats won by the bloc and strengthening it.

It was announced that two agreements were signed: one between Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar and Yair Golan’s The Democrats, and the other between Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu.

As part of the agreement, the two parties pool their surplus votes after the initial allocation of Knesset seats following the elections. If the combined surplus is enough to secure an additional seat, one party can receive it, potentially strengthening the bloc to which the parties belong.

The deal is only relevant if both parties pass the electoral threshold. All four parties in the opposition bloc have been polling far over the required threshold.

Eisenkot’s Yashar party has led in recent polling with about 25 seats, surpassing Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party.

When announcing the agreement, Yashar stated that, in recent weeks, Eisenkot had been working in various ways “to optimally organize the camp for change and hope.”

“The camp’s consolidation around four parties has, to our satisfaction, created the ability for the parties to sign surplus-vote agreements with one another, drawing a lesson from previous election campaigns,” the party stated.

“We welcome the fact that in the upcoming elections, every ballot cast by Israelis seeking change and the replacement of the government responsible for the October 7 failure will go to one of the parties in the camp for change, thereby preventing the loss of votes,” it added.

Yashar voiced its support for agreement between B’Yachad and Yisrael Beytenu

Yashar also stated that it welcomed the surplus-vote agreement between B’Yachad and Yisrael Beytenu.

“We are determined to continue working in every possible way to achieve victory, fulfill the will of the people, and establish a Zionist, statesmanlike government that will replace the government of October 7,” the Yashar party added.

In Netanyahu’s coalition bloc, various parties are reportedly expected to sign surplus vote agreements as well.

Among the parties reportedly expected to do so are the two haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties – Shas and United Torah Judaism – along with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit.

The opposition bloc agreements were announced Thursday after Tuesday’s deadline for parties to submit their finalized Knesset slates, ruling out further mergers ahead of the elections.

The four major opposition parties ultimately chose to run separately rather than form further alliances.

Surplus vote agreements common in Israel

Surplus vote agreements are commonly used in Israeli elections to ensure that votes left over after seats are allocated do not go to waste, increasing the chances of the parties securing an additional Knesset seat.

The surplus vote agreement system typically favors larger lists, which generally have a greater chance of winning an additional seat based on combined surplus votes.

For example, in the 2020 election, Likud and Yamina signed one such agreement and secured an additional seat, which went to Likud.

This post was originally published on here. 

Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire, is an American businessman, longtime advocate for Israel, and former US ambassador to Austria under President Ronald Reagan. For decades, one mission has remained at the center of his philanthropy: strengthening Jewish identity, education, and community life around the world.

In 1987, Lauder established the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation to help rebuild Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe after decades of communist rule. Today, the foundation supports 37 Jewish schools, summer camps, and community centers across 10 countries, from Austria and Hungary to Poland and Ukraine. He later founded the Lauder Business School in Vienna, a secular university that respects the Jewish calendar and holds no classes on major Jewish holidays.

Lauder has never confined himself to quiet philanthropy. Over the years, he has repeatedly used his public standing to speak out on controversial political and social issues. He pressed Bernie Ecclestone to step down as Formula One chief, advocated for Israel’s admission to NATO, and has criticized governments he believes have failed to confront antisemitism.

Now 82, and having served as president of the World Jewish Congress since 2007, Lauder announced in 2026 that he will not seek another term when his current mandate ends in 2029. Increasingly, his attention is turning to a larger question: who will lead the Jewish world next, and what must be done now to secure its future.

In one of his first extended interviews in years, Lauder urged a younger generation of Jewish philanthropists to make education their priority. “Put money into schools,” he said. “That is your future.” At the same time, he sharply criticized wealthy donors sitting on billions while, in his words, “doing bubkes.”

That criticism reflects a broader argument Lauder has been making: the Jewish world is not investing its resources where they can have the greatest long-term impact.

Speaking in Geneva in May 2026 to mark the 90th anniversary of the World Jewish Congress, Lauder warned that Jewish communities were facing “another dark hour.” He pointed to more than $600 million spent by US Jewish organizations since October 7 on advertising and media campaigns against antisemitism – an investment he argued had done little to stem the rising tide of hatred.

Lauder has called to further investments in Jewish education

Instead, Lauder has called for far greater investment in long-term Jewish education. As evidence of what such an investment can achieve, he points to the more than 50,000 graduates of the schools and educational institutions he has founded and supported across Eastern Europe.

But for Lauder, education is only one part of the battle.

At The Jerusalem Post Conference in June, he warned that “Israel is losing the information war.” He called for the creation of a dedicated government agency to counter misinformation and antisemitism, led by an experienced professional from the worlds of communications, journalism, or public relations rather than by a political appointee.

At the same time, Lauder continues to use his position to demand accountability from political leaders. In May, amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in New York, he condemned what he described as “a disgraceful failure of leadership,” warning that antisemitism was no longer something that could be ignored – it was, he said, “exploding in plain sight.”

After nearly four decades of investing in Jewish institutions, Lauder’s message today is increasingly focused on the future. The struggle to secure Jewish life, he argues, will not be won through advertising campaigns, headlines, or responses to individual crises alone. It will depend on sustained investment in the next generation – in education, Jewish identity, and the leaders who will carry that responsibility forward for decades to come.

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After two years away from political life, former prime minister Naftali Bennett has returned to the political arena and emerged as a leading candidate in the upcoming elections.

Bennett, who chairs the B’Yachad party, is one of the leading figures in the opposition bloc seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and return to the premiership.

In a consequential move, the B’Yachad party merged with Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party in April, with Bennett at the lead.

The two politicians have underscored the importance of uniting the political camps in the first elections to take place after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks.

Bennett had led a short-lived government after becoming prime minister in June 2021, entering a rotation government with Lapid. His government was the first in Israel’s history to include an Arab party, Ra’am, in the coalition – a highly controversial move.

He has since taken a firm stance against including any Arab faction in a future coalition, acknowledging that he had broken a promise to voters in the past, and saying that after October 7, such a partnership with Arab parties was no longer a viable option.

Since returning to politics, Bennett has shifted from his previous campaigns, taking a more liberal position while maintaining a strong right-wing stance on security.

He aims to bring forward his plan to “repair Israel” in the next government. During his time away from the political scene, he consulted experts to prepare a comprehensive plan for the country’s future.

The plan includes the establishment of a written constitution, raising competition in the market to lower the cost of living, improving transportation, reducing crime rates, and investing in AI to advance the country’s technology and defense.

Bennett has drawn a red line at forming a coalition with haredi parties

Additionally, Bennett has drawn a red line to forming a coalition with the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, and called for reversing contentious haredi-backed legislation passed by the outgoing government.

He has also taken a hard-line stance toward haredi conscription to the IDF, as his party’s platform seeks to cut all state funding for anyone evading military service.

The former prime minister’s position also differs from that of other opposition party leaders, such as Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot, who has proposed allowing draft exemptions for up to 30% of haredim. In contrast, Bennett has called for no exemptions at all.

He has also developed a plan to reform Israel’s education system, proposing that a government led by him would cut state funding to haredi educational institutions that do not teach core curriculum studies

Instead, all students would be required to spend 60% of their studies on a core curriculum that includes Hebrew, English, mathematics, civics, Torah studies, and Zionist heritage. Individual communities and schools would determine the remaining 40% of studies.

The B’Yachad party leader has also said that one of his first priorities in the next government would be establishing a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding Hamas’s October 7 massacres in Israel.

As elections near, Bennett has taken an optimistic approach to repairing the country.

“I’m optimistic about Israel’s future because there’s a simple formula. I call it the ‘Bennett formula,’” he told The Jerusalem Post in a recent interview. “All we need to do is change the leadership.”

Following the merger with Lapid, B’Yachad began losing ground in the polls, while Eisenkot’s Yashar party gained momentum. Polling has shown Eisenkot overtaking Likud, making him Netanyahu’s leading challenger, with Bennett trailing both.

However, Bennett has made comebacks before in the past.

In 2019, it seemed that Bennett’s political career was over when his New Right Party failed to cross the electoral threshold in the elections. But two years later, he emerged as prime minister.

Now, as Israel heads toward another election, Bennett is back in the race, aiming to bring about change and influence in the next government, and potentially pull off his biggest comeback yet.

No. 3: Gadi Eisenkot >>

<< No. 5: Ronald Lauder

The 50 Most Influential Jews 2026 Full List

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Yashar Party leader and former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot has emerged over the past 12 months as the leading opposition candidate seeking to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the October 27 election.

Eisenkot stepped into politics at a crucial juncture. Entering the Knesset for the first time in 2022 as MK Benny Gantz’s second-in-command in the National Unity Party, he was thrust into a unity government in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacres, and the wars that followed.

The war in Gaza became extremely personal for Eisenkot, when, just two months into the fighting, he lost his son Gal. That same week, he lost a nephew; then, a year later, another nephew was killed.

Eisenkot said that the loss of his youngest son pushed him to take action to better the country, and in September 2025, he launched Yashar, months after leaving Netanyahu’s emergency coalition.

Over the past year, Eisenkot focused on how to bring the most votes to the opposition bloc as he laid the groundwork for a prime ministerial run.

Eisenkot has presented himself as a unique candidate, offering an image of a more reserved personality in comparison to the outgoing, loud personas who have led Israeli politics.

After October 7 and the loss of his son, the former IDF chief stepped out of the shadows of the political arena to offer his vision for moving the country forward. He called on Netanyahu to take responsibility, arguing that the time had come to remove those who were in power at the time of the massacre.

Following his party’s launch, Eisenkot has built a centrist platform focused on “repairing, healing, and hope for Israeli society,” seeking to guide the country toward a “straight” and honest path – as his party name suggests.

Eisenkot vows to establish state commission of inquiry into October 7 failures

Eisenkot has vowed to establish a state commission of inquiry to investigate the government’s failures on October 7. While he insists on equal service for all, his stance is less forceful than the positions of other opposition party leaders, calling for a “realistic plan” to draft haredim (ultra-Orthodox) into the IDF.

Rejecting advances from fellow opposition party leaders to serve as their second-in-command, Eisenkot noted in a March interview: “I believe in myself, I know the kind of leadership that I bring, and I see myself as a very strong candidate.”

Over the past few months, support for Eisenkot has surged in the polls, as he leapfrogs over both former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Netanyahu’s Likud party. In light of these surveys, he has been positioning himself as the main candidate to lead a post-October 27 government.

Garnering praise across the political spectrum, Eisenkot has indicated his willingness to sit in a government not only with the opposition bloc, but also with parties that are part of Netanyahu’s current coalition; this is in contrast to other opposition parties, which are maintaining a stronger hardline stance on the government’s post-election make-up.

Comparisons have been made between Eisenkot and Gantz, his former political partner, another former military chief once seen as one of Netanyahu’s strongest rivals, who has since lost public support. Time will soon tell if Eisenkot can overcome the hurdle that kept Gantz from becoming prime minister.

Should he do so, Eisenkot will make history as Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister. He would also have a chance to lead Israel into a post-Netanyahu reality, confronting the many challenges facing the country “straight” on, and with a fresh outlook.

No. 2: Benjamin Netanyahu >>

<< No. 4: Naftali Bennett

The 50 Most Influential Jews 2026 Full List

This post was originally published on here. 

On September 28, the third day of Sukkot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will mark 19 years as Israel’s prime minister.

By any measure, that is an astounding figure. It means that over Israel’s 78 and a half years of existence, Netanyahu has been prime minister for 24.2% of that time. In other words, he has occupied the Prime Minister’s Office for nearly one in every four days since independence, and for almost two out of every three days since he first took office in 1996.

As such, his influence on Israel and on the Jewish people has been extraordinary. Whatever one thinks of him, whether one belongs to the camp that loves or loathes him, no other Israeli politician has shaped the country’s political era so thoroughly for so long.

But all political streaks eventually end, and this one is in particular danger as Israel heads to elections in a little over a month, with Netanyahu’s chances of forming another coalition seemingly receding. At 76, if he fails this time, the possibility of yet another comeback – like those he engineered in 2009 and 2022– appears far-fetched.

Nevertheless, his survival in Israel’s unstable and cutthroat political environment is extraordinary. Even more remarkable is that, despite having been prime minister on October 7 – the deadliest day in Israel’s history – he will serve out the full length of his current term.

Even before October 7, in the summer of 2023, when tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands demonstrated against him and his government each Saturday night, this feat seemed unlikely. Yet here we are.

Netanyahu, moreover, has become more than Israel’s prime minister for many. Abroad, for instance, he has become Israel’s symbol and the lightning rod for much of the hatred directed against the Jewish state.

Criticism of Netanyahu is legitimate, both inside Israel and abroad. But the increasingly common claim – “We don’t hate Israel, only Netanyahu” – is as spurious as it is disingenuous and cannot be taken seriously when accompanied by efforts to isolate Israel, sanction it, boycott its institutions, or deny it the means of defending itself.

Netanyahu has become a convenient fig leaf: attack the country, but insist the target is only the prime minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu has become almost synonymous with Israel

But that, too, is a measure of his influence. Few leaders become so closely identified with their countries as Netanyahu has with Israel, making it more politically acceptable for detractors to direct at him the hatred they harbor toward the country as a whole.

That identification has carried into Jewish communities abroad as well, where debates over Israel increasingly become debates over Netanyahu. Supporters view him as the leader who resisted international pressure and strengthened Israel; critics blame him for deepening divisions, damaging its standing, and triggering antisemitism against them.

Either way, Netanyahu has shaped Israeli politics and come to define the way Israel is discussed, defended, and criticized around the world.

The prime minister’s legacy will remain bitterly contested. But influence is not measured by popularity or universal acclaim. It is measured by impact – and by that standard, no contemporary Jewish figure has left a greater mark.

No. 1: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump >>

<< No. 3: Gadi Eisenkot

The 50 Most Influential Jews 2026 Full List

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On the night before the hostages came home, special US envoy Steve Witkoff stood in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square plaza, where for two years Israelis had been calling for the captives’ release. As Witkoff read the names of the people who had made the deal possible, the crowd cheered the US president and the Arab mediators. Then Witkoff reached the name of Israel’s prime minister, and the booing went on so long that he had to stop and wait for it to die out.

Jared Kushner spoke next. He thanked Witkoff and the US president. He did not mention Benjamin Netanyahu at all.

Eleven months later, Tal Meir, an anchor on TV’s Channel 14, the right-wing channel loyal to the prime minister, told viewers that peace envoys Kushner and Witkoff had become confused about who they were. That they are part of this people. That Israel is their real home, and that Israelis are guarding it for their grandchildren. Then she called them losers, and the program went to the break.

The distance between those two events is why Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, sit at the top of this year’s list. It is also a story about Israeli memory, which can retrieve what a minor politician said during a coalition fight in 1996, yet cannot reliably recall who was instrumental in bringing the hostages home last autumn.

We have not forgotten, exactly. We have moved on, which we do faster than anyone, on the way to the next crisis. A man can be applauded in the square on a Saturday night and be cast as a traitor by Passover, and nobody will feel they have changed their mind.

Kushner, 45, did not want the Special Envoy for Peace job.

He had served his term during the first Trump administration, built a private-equity firm in Florida and a life around it, and, people close to him say, decided that he was finished with the Middle East. In private, he describes the work the way people describe an illness: intense on the mind, intense on the body, a burden you carry. Business, he has told associates, is about dreaming about the future. This is about untangling other people’s old problems. It is not fun.

What changed his mind was the same thing that changed everyone’s. He and Ivanka were at a wedding in Colorado on October 7, 2023; he has said publicly that he sat up through the night watching and weeping what had been transpiring that day, and that he has not been the same since. The antisemitism that followed began with Gaza, he has argued behind closed doors, and cannot recede until Gaza is resolved, because whatever Israel does lands on every Jew everywhere.

Then the president asked him to get operational. In that family, one does not decline.

Two things about Kushner need holding at once, and Israelis tend to hold only the first. He is a Jew who cares about his people; he has written at length about his grandmother Rae, who escaped the Novogrudok ghetto through a tunnel. He is also, in exactly equal measure, an American. He works for the president of the United States, and when American and Israeli interests diverge, he is not free to pretend otherwise. Israelis who expect him to think like one of them are asking for something impossible.

The record is not in dispute, however inconvenient. The last 20 living hostages came home in October 2025. Over the following months, with no intelligence and no obvious pathway, the bodies came back too; the last, in January 2026, was police officer Ran Gvili. For the first time since 2014, there was no Israeli hostage in Gaza, breathing or otherwise. Twenty living, 28 dead: an outcome that, as Kushner points out in private, almost no one in Jerusalem thought possible – the prime minister included.

In August, Kushner flew to Cairo, at his own expense, and sat across a table from the men who had ordered the October 7 Hamas-led attacks, pressing them to give up their weapons. His logic, as he has laid it out to those around him, is cold and simple. Hamas still holds one hostage, and it is called Gaza. Leave it as it was, and nothing stops them from taking one more. So he sits with them.

He flew back to Florida and learned that the Jewish homeland had decided he was a traitor.

The night at Hostage Square, by Kushner’s own account to associates, was not a celebration for him; there was no trust between the sides, and the possibility of miscalculation was enormous. He and Witkoff went to the Western Wall that evening. He prayed for peace and for the strength to save lives, which is either a photo opportunity or a Jew doing the only thing available at that hour, depending on what you had decided about Kushner before he arrived.

Witkoff is the heart. He is the one who tells a crowd that the hostage families touched him like nothing in his life has, and means it, and cries. Kushner is the brain. He speaks last, says less, and leaves having arranged the next room. People who have worked with them say Witkoff makes people want to say “yes,” and Kushner works out what “yes” actually means. Kushner has told associates that Witkoff is one of the finest people he knows.

Before they spoke at Hostage Square, the two envoys met the families of the hostages at a hotel. The mood in the room varied. Some could not believe that what they had wanted for two years was about to happen. Others knew that they would be receiving the bodies of their loved ones. And some families did not yet know whether their child would be coming back at all.

Ivanka stood on the podium at Hostage Square too, telling the families that she was in awe of their strength and conviction, in spite of their suffering. Dignitaries say such things. It means something else from a woman who chose this people rather than inheriting them.

Two days later, addressing the Knesset, her father interrupted his own speech to thank someone who loves Israel so much that she converted, adding, to laughter, that he hadn’t known he would say that. Raised Presbyterian on the Upper East Side, Ivanka converted under Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun before her 2009 wedding, took the name Yael, and has raised three children in an observant home. She kept Shabbat throughout the four years she served in Trump’s first administration, when it was noticed; and four years in Florida, when it was not.

Ivanka is the only convert on The Jerusalem Post’s Top 50 list

She is the only person on this list who became a Jew by choice.

Then, at the David Kempinski hotel on the Tel Aviv seafront, nine released hostages came to see Kushner and Witkoff: Omri Miran, the twins Gali and Ziv Berman, Yosef-Chaim Ohana, Matan Angrest, Bar Kupershtein, Segev Kalfon, Nimrod Cohen, and Eitan Horn. They sat together, and as the hostages talked about their captivity, there was a great deal of hugging and crying. Before it ended, the nine asked the US special envoys not to stop their efforts to release the remaining hostages until the 15 still held in Gaza came out too.

People who have heard Kushner describe that afternoon say he does not hedge – it was one of the most emotional and beautiful things he has been a part of.

The months after were less photogenic. The special envoys had promised to bring all the hostages back. When they made that promise, nobody knew where all the bodies were. Only the promise, made to people who could not bear to be told twice that it hadn’t worked out. It took until this past January.

The gratitude expired at roughly the same time.

That month, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir attacked what he called the naivety of Witkoff and Kushner. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich pressed for military rule in Gaza. Neither mentioned the hostages, which had become an awkward subject, the way a debt becomes awkward.

Then came Iran. In June, Washington signed a memorandum with Tehran that ended the fighting and reopened the Strait of Hormuz but deferred what Netanyahu had demanded be settled first: the uranium enrichment, the missiles, the proxies. In Israel, disagreement became excommunication.

Yaakov Bardugo, a Channel 14 anchor close to the prime minister, said the two envoys had chosen the economic world over the existential one; Israelis, he noted, are the ones who live here. Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member turned broadcaster, accused them of operating under Qatari influence.

Meir’s version was the purest, and it had nothing to do with uranium enrichment. She said Kushner had forgotten whose side he was on. Having established he was family, she cast him out of it.

Sources told CNN that Netanyahu privately blames Kushner and Witkoff for steering the president toward ending the war, while the TV commentators closest to the prime minister do the shouting. The man who was booed at Hostage Square now directs the fire at the man who was cheered there.

Asked in private whether the hostility hurts, people who have put the question to Kushner say he reaches for a line that is affectionate, and distancing, and true: Jews are complicated people.

Then, they say, Kushner explains the rupture without hearing how it sounds. Israelis, in his account, cannot see what he sees. Israel has become insular; few of its people can travel in the Arab and Muslim world, and it pairs a real lack of understanding of its neighbors with great confidence about what is possible. 

Visions of peace in the Middle East

He can see a region that wants this: a warmer peace with Egypt, a real opening with Saudi Arabia, and something even with Syria and Lebanon. And then the admission underneath it all, offered almost in passing: they haven’t fully communicated it.

A man whose method is persuasion has moved four Arab governments and a terror organization and cannot move an Israeli taxi driver. He is convinced he is right, cannot explain why, and has concluded the problem is everyone else’s field of vision. That, more than Iran, is why they turned on him.

None of which makes Kushner right. He may be wrong about Gaza, and if the Israelis’ warning that this ends badly is proved correct, this page will not age well.

Skepticism is the correct Israeli posture, and Kushner does not dispute it. Behind closed doors he calls the enterprise a one-in-a-zillion shot and cannot blame anyone for refusing to believe in it. What he asks for is narrower: some latitude, and some credit for why he keeps getting on the plane. 

He wants, people close to him say, an Israel that his children and grandchildren can live in securely, and that is not a global pariah. His blessing, he has told people, is his family. When his children ask what it is all for, he tells them about Hillel, asked to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot: What is hateful to you, do not do to another; the rest is commentary. The rest of it he is doing for theirs.

There is a clock on it, and in private Kushner is open and honest about that: Israel has this president for two more years and cannot rely on being protected forever. The language of the new Middle East, he keeps telling Jerusalem, is economic: the Emiratis and the Saudis arrive in Washington with a hundred businessmen and sign deals. Israel arrives with a threat assessment.

The day after the agreement was signed, before a single hostage had come home, Kushner told the prime minister and the heads of Israel’s security services that they were going to fix Gaza. According to people familiar with the meeting, the people in the room looked at him as if he were mad. If you don’t believe it’s possible, he told them, you will fail; if you do, you at least have a chance. Then he reached for a quip by David Ben-Gurion: In this country, to be a realist you have to believe in miracles.

We put Jared Kushner first because influence is not approval, and because a list published on the eve of a new year ought to record what happened in the old one, including the parts we have begun to forget.

Shana Tova. Try to remember it past the holidays.

Amichai Stein contributed to this column.

<< No. 2: Benjamin Netanyahu

The 50 Most Influential Jews 2026 Full List

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The IDF has destroyed Hezbollah’s underground infrastructure on the Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon, completing the establishment of Israel’s security zone there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a joint statement on Thursday.

IDF soldiers completed the dismantling of underground routes in the Ali al-Taher ridge area after recently establishing operational control over the ridge, both above and below ground, the military said.

تفجير جزء من علي الطاهر تبعه هزّة أرضية💔 pic.twitter.com/F9idkf1p91

— Sireena (@sireenAAAAAAA) September 10, 2026

Later on Thursday, Army Radio cited Lebanese reports as saying that the country registered a magnitude 4.1 earthquake following the detonation.

The underground terrorist infrastructure extended for more than two kilometers. Troops found dozens of Iranian-made rockets, missiles, and UAVs inside, along with machine guns, dozens of anti-tank missiles, and hundreds of mines and explosive devices.

The IDF said that a central command complex belonging to Hezbollah’s Badr Unit was located within the underground infrastructure. The complex contained command centers, weapons storage rooms, and living quarters that enabled Hezbollah terrorists to manage combat operations and remain underground for extended periods.

Netanyahu, Katz say tunnels constituted strategic terrorist network

Netanyahu and Katz said the infrastructure was a strategic terrorist network built over the course of two decades with Iranian funding and planning.

According to their statement, the terrorist infrastructure and command center on the ridge were intended to serve as a base for an operation to conquer the Galilee and provided observation and fire control over Metulla and Kiryat Shmona.

Its destruction completes the IDF’s achievement of operational control over the Ali al-Taher ridge, both above and below ground, according to the statement.

IDF troops are preparing to defend the area and prevent Hezbollah from returning, Netanyahu and Katz said.

The IDF will remain in the security zone, continue destroying terrorist infrastructure, and thwart any attempt by Hezbollah to reestablish itself in the area or rebuild its capabilities, they added.

This post was originally published on here. 

In the 25 years since al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked passenger jets and flew them into New York’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, the group founded by Osama bin Laden has spawned affiliates and inspired attacks around the world.

While it has suffered setbacks, notably bin Laden’s killing in 2011 by US forces and the emergence of Islamic State as a rival, experts say al-Qaeda still serves as a source of support and inspiration for terrorists in many regions, particularly in Africa.

What is al-Qaeda?

Al-Qaeda emerged as a transnational jihadist network in the late 1980s under the leadership of bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born militant who had helped recruit and funnel support to Arab volunteers fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan after 1979 and fought there himself.

Al-Qaeda became a magnet for terrorists who aspired to establish hardline Islamist rule and who shared common hostility to the United States, Israel, and US-allied governments in the region.

Bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and expelled from Sudan in 1996, taking sanctuary in Afghanistan.

He began organizing attacks on US interests long before arriving in Afghanistan. The first recognized by the United States was a 1992 al-Qaeda bombing of two hotels in Yemen intended to kill Somalia-bound US troops who had already left or were staying elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, he supported training camps and established an elite brigade of foreign fighters.

In 1996, he declared jihad against US forces he described as occupying Saudi Arabia.

This was followed in 1998 by the announcement of a “World Islamic Front” for jihad against “Jews and Crusaders,” and a declaration that it was a duty for Muslims to kill Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military.

Later that year, al-Qaeda truck bombings against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 hijackers, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia. They hijacked four jets, the fourth of which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers stormed the cockpit. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.

What happened to al-Qaeda’s leaders after 9/11?

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, toppling the Taliban and driving al-Qaeda from its base of operations.

Anti-Taliban forces overran al-Qaeda’s base in the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, but bin Laden evaded capture for a decade, periodically releasing messages until US special forces killed him in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

The self-professed mastermind of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was captured in Pakistan in 2003. In 2007, Mohammed said he planned the attack “from A to Z,” according to a transcript of a military hearing released by the Pentagon.

A judge recently ordered Mohammed, who is held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and three co-defendants to stand trial before a military tribunal in June 2028, following two decades of legal deadlock.

Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahri, was killed by a US drone strike in Kabul in 2022.

Egyptian militant Seif al-Adel is believed to be al-Qaeda’s de facto leader today.

How did al-Qaeda’s influence spread after 9/11?

While al-Qaeda’s leaders scattered, terrorists linked to al-Qaeda or inspired by its ideology carried out numerous attacks.

The deadliest included a 2002 attack on a nightclub district in Bali that killed 202 people, bombings that killed more than 190 people on trains in Madrid in 2004, and suicide bombings that killed 52 people on London underground trains and a bus in 2005.

Al-Qaeda affiliates sprang up in the Middle East and beyond. One of the most powerful was in Iraq, where al-Qaeda fought US-led forces following the 2003 invasion.

A branch emerged in North Africa in 2007 and another in the Arabian Peninsula in 2009. After 2011, al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front became a force in Syria’s civil war.

In Africa, al-Qaeda affiliates include Al Shabaab in Somalia and Jama’at Nusrat al‑Islam wal‑Muslimin (JNIM) in the Sahel region. al-Qaeda also has ties to Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, which is waging an insurgency against Islamabad.

Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at the RUSI think-tank in London, said that while al-Qaeda suffered losses and dislocation after the invasion of Afghanistan, its profile rose and it expanded massively in the years that followed. Its influence peaked around 2013 before its Iraqi branch broke away to form Islamic State, he said.

How was al-Qaeda affected by the rise of ISIS?

Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi split from al-Qaeda and declared a “caliphate” across large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014, sparking conflict with the Nusra Front.

Though Islamic State was eventually beaten out of its territory in Syria and Iraq, in a reversal for jihadism, its rivalry with al-Qaeda continues, particularly in West Africa, where affiliates of the two groups regularly clash as they compete for territory and influence.

Another blow came in 2016 when the Nusra Front broke away. Its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, then known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, went on to topple Bashar al-Assad in 2024. He became Syrian president and made Damascus a Western ally.

Where is al-Qaeda most active today?

Somalia and West Africa’s Sahel region are the main theaters in Africa where al-Qaeda-aligned groups are expanding their influence and governing across swathes of territory.

TTP has expanded its insurgency in northwestern Pakistan. It has received ideological guidance, training and support from al-Qaeda, according to a UN report published last month.

Pakistan says the TTP leadership and many of its fighters are based in Afghanistan, where the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after the US withdrew.

In February, another UN report said al-Qaeda “continued to enjoy the patronage of the de facto authorities” in Afghanistan, a reference to the Taliban government, and that its “appetite for external operations” remained “undiminished.”

Kabul denies that al-Qaeda operates in Afghanistan, or that it allows militant attacks on Pakistan from its territory.

Giustozzi said that while al-Qaeda was past its peak, “they’re still remarkably influential.”

It had evolved to be less dependent on specific individuals, relying instead on a cadre of low-profile operatives who are “much more difficult to target and identify,” he said.

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US President Donald Trump heckled the leaders of Iran at the first-ever Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, while promoting the idea of renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself. 

“The war will be over very shortly after the election,” Trump said in a 100-minute address. “They’re hanging out for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their nuclear bomb. But we’re not going to let that happen.” 

The president expressed confidence that Iran is “going to be quitting or dropping out” of the war “right after Election Day, because they want a deal desperately.”

“We’re winning it,” Trump said, referring to the war in Iran. “We control the Hormuz Strait.”

Trump has repeatedly predicted victory or an imminent end to the conflict with Iran. But six months later, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted amid competing US and Iranian efforts to control the vital waterway. 

On Wednesday, Iran said it attacked 10 ships near the strait after the US sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest exchange of attacks on shipping by the two sides since the war began. 

“I should get something out of this – the Trump Strait,” the president continued, repeating an idea he had proposed about a week ago. “I’ll have an announcement. We’ll call it the Trump Strait, and I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”

Trump: Iran ‘falling apart,’ probably not ‘too happy about anything’

Declaring that they’re probably not “too happy about anything,” Trump said that Iran “is falling apart” and described the country as “the bully of the Middle East.”

“They’re not the bully anymore,” the president continued. “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

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Iran has resumed producing ballistic missiles from existing components while working in underground facilities, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing officials from the United States and the Middle East.

The renewed production threatens to undo what the US and Israel have described as one of the significant achievements of the war, following heavy attacks on Iranian missile sites and industrial infrastructure during its initial phase, according to the report.

Despite the damage to those facilities, Iran has been assembling both liquid-propellant and solid-propellant ballistic missiles, some of the officials told the WSJ.

Liquid-propellant missiles must generally be fueled shortly before launch, while solid-propellant missiles can be stored in a launch-ready state, allowing them to be fired more rapidly.

Reported rebuild became major focus of Israeli operations

The reported rebuilding effort comes after Iran’s missile arsenal and production infrastructure became a major focus of Israeli operations.

Israel has previously carried out strikes on targets across Iran in response to Iranian missile attacks, while Tehran has continued to demonstrate its ability to launch ballistic missiles across the region.

Taken together, the developments underscore two continuing challenges facing Washington and its regional partners: efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s independent military infrastructure in Lebanon, and attempts to limit Iran’s ability to restore missile capabilities damaged during the war.

This post was originally published on here. 

There is an important calculation taking place in Washington about Israel, the Israeli elections, and President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Trump and the Board of Peace have apparently concluded that a public confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before Israelis vote could be counterproductive.

Netanyahu would immediately turn American pressure into an election campaign argument, telling Israelis that only he is strong enough to stand up to everyone – Europe, the Arabs, the international community, and even Trump.

There is logic in not giving Netanyahu that political gift. That calculation also helps explain why Washington is not now forcing full implementation of the Board of Peace’s 15-point Gaza roadmap, agreed on July 30 as the mechanism for implementing Trump’s broader peace plan.

The 15-point plan is extremely important. It provides for a phased process leading to the demilitarization of Hamas and other armed groups under the principle of “One Authority, One Weapon, One Law”; the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in stages; the transfer of civilian authority to the Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza; the deployment of an International Stabilization Force between Israeli forces and Palestinian-administered areas; new Palestinian police responsible for internal security; and large-scale reconstruction under Palestinian administration.

It also connects these arrangements to a political path toward Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

It is, in other words, not merely another ceasefire agreement. It is supposed to create an alternative both to Hamas rule and to permanent Israeli military control of Gaza.

The American calculation is that the final push to implement the plan should wait until Israelis elect their next government rather than allowing Netanyahu to make resistance to Trump a central issue in his campaign.

That may be politically wise. But there is a dangerous difference between postponing a confrontation with Netanyahu and allowing Netanyahu and his coalition partners to determine the reality that will exist when the election is over.

The most dangerous arena today is the West Bank.

Netanyahu’s political survival increasingly depends on the most extreme forces in his coalition. Their objective goes far beyond keeping Netanyahu in power. They want to destroy the possibility of Palestinian statehood by creating irreversible facts on the ground: expanding Israeli control, accelerating settlement, removing Palestinian communities from vulnerable areas, talking about plans for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and making territorial separation impossible.

The danger is that the West Bank becomes the place where the next regional fire is ignited. That is why US Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s visit on Saturday to Turmus Aiya was so important. Turmus Aiya has a large Palestinian-American population and has suffered repeated settler attacks. Huckabee, an ambassador strongly identified with support for Israel and the settlement movement, described violent settlers as terrorists and called for them to be prosecuted. That should not be a one-time intervention. It should point toward American policy between now and the Israeli election.

Trump does not need a public confrontation with Netanyahu. He needs to prevent Netanyahu and his extremist partners from creating irreversible facts before Israelis vote.

Trump should warn Netanyahu over the West Bank

The first step should be private and unmistakable red lines. Trump should tell Netanyahu directly that Washington will not accept an Israeli escalation deliberately designed to ignite the West Bank, the forced displacement of Palestinian communities, major steps toward annexation, or organized settler violence intended to provoke a Palestinian response.

These warnings do not need to be delivered at a press conference. In fact, they should not be. Netanyahu cannot campaign against pressure that Trump does not publicly dramatize. But he must know that the red lines are real.

Washington should simultaneously increase its presence on the ground. Huckabee and senior embassy officials should regularly visit Palestinian communities threatened by violence, particularly communities with American citizens.

The political framing should be simple and consistent: Terrorism is terrorism, whether committed by Palestinians or Jews. Allies are expected to enforce the law.

For now, the United States should concentrate consequences on perpetrators rather than on Israel as a country. Individuals who organize or carry out serious attacks should face visa restrictions and financial sanctions. Organizations financing systematic violence should face scrutiny and consequences.

At least until after the elections, the message must not become “Trump is punishing Israel.” It should be: America is acting against terrorists and those who finance them.

At the same time, delaying full implementation of the Gaza roadmap must not mean freezing it. That would be an enormous mistake. Every month in which nothing changes strengthens Hamas, weakens the Palestinian alternative, and convinces Palestinians and Arab governments that promises of new governance and reconstruction are meaningless.

The Board of Peace should therefore use the period before the election to prepare everything that does not require a public showdown with Netanyahu.

The Palestinian technocratic administration should be ready to govern. Palestinian police should be trained and equipped. The International Stabilization Force should be assembled and its deployment plans completed. Arrangements for crossings, humanitarian assistance, utilities, public services, reconstruction financing, weapons decommissioning, and the transfer of administrative authority should all be ready. Israeli withdrawal maps should already exist.

There should not be another six months of committees and negotiations after Israelis vote. The board should have a Day One, Day 30, Day 60, and Day 90 implementation plan ready before election day. Where limited implementation can begin earlier, it should.

The sequence is already inherent in Trump’s plan: Hamas begins to turn over its weapons to the agreed-upon body; Israeli forces withdraw from a defined area; the International Stabilization Force deploys; Palestinian police and civilian administration enter; reconstruction begins.

Trump’s plan specifically allows implementation to proceed in areas transferred from Israeli forces even if Hamas delays elsewhere.

Even one functioning area would demonstrate something enormously important: There is an alternative to permanent Israeli military control and to Hamas rule.

Trump should also create a regional firewall against escalation. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Turkey have different kinds of influence. Until the Israeli election, they should be coordinated around one immediate objective: Nobody lights another fire.

The purpose during this interim period is not to solve the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is to prevent anyone from destroying the possibility of solving it.

Trump himself should resist the temptation to fight publicly with Netanyahu. No insults. No public ultimatums. No daily argument about Israeli politics. Instead, Trump should keep talking about his objectives: ending wars, defeating terrorism, protecting Israel, preventing regional escalation, rebuilding Gaza, and creating a political future for Palestinians.

Netanyahu would like nothing more than to campaign as the Israeli leader who stood up to Trump. Trump should refuse to play the role Netanyahu has written for him.

The strategic principle is simple: Do not publicly pressure Netanyahu in a way that could help him win the election. But do not allow him to use the period before the election to destroy Trump’s peace plan.

The United States should not choose Israel’s next prime minister. Israelis must do that. But electoral neutrality does not mean strategic passivity. It does not require Washington to tolerate settler terrorism, Palestinian displacement, annexation, or an avoidable explosion in the West Bank.

Trump can postpone the final push until after the Israeli election. What he cannot afford to do is discover, the morning after Israelis vote, that the ground on which his peace plan was supposed to be built no longer exists.

The writer is the Middle East director of the International Communities Organization and the co-head of the Alliance for Two States.

This post was originally published on here. 

National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben-Gvir filed a NIS 100,000 defamation lawsuit against MK Gadi Eisenkot and his party on Thursday over remarks Eisenkot made on KAN News’s “How to Do Things” podcast.

Ben-Gvir filed the lawsuit through his attorney, Ze’ev Wolf, after Eisenkot attributed the dissemination of violent TikTok videos aimed at young people to Ben-Gvir.

According to the lawsuit, Eisenkot described videos containing messages such as “the only way is to kill” and “a good Arab is a dead Arab,” alongside messages encouraging the use of force and bullying.

Immediately after describing those messages, Eisenkot said: “This is the phenomenon called Itamar Ben-Gvir.”

Ben-Gvir insists he has never published or promoted videos with the statement ‘a good Arab is dead Arab’

Ben-Gvir stressed in the statement of claim that he had never published, promoted, or disseminated videos containing calls to kill or the statement “a good Arab is a dead Arab,” and argued that the allegation was entirely false.

Ben-Gvir is asking the court to order Eisenkot and his party to pay NIS 100,000 in damages without requiring proof of harm.

He is also seeking the removal of the relevant segment from all platforms controlled by the party and the publication of a clear correction to the remarks.

This post was originally published on here. 

Mayoral candidates and community members gathered for a debate on antisemitism and community safety, proceeding in the absence of Mayor Olivia Chow on Tuesday at a synagogue in Toronto.

The forum, hosted by the Jewish Lawyers of Canada, was organized to allow candidates to present their strategies for tackling antisemitism, protecting community institutions, and strengthening public safety in the city. The event’s location was not announced publicly because of security concerns, but it was provided to registered participants.

WATCH:

Mayoral candidate Brad Bradford says he would sit on the Toronto Police Service Board (TPSB), unlike incumbent Olivia Chow, who chose not to.

Bradford says, “It’s a dereliction of duty. It’s an abdication of her responsibility.”

Councillor Shelley Carroll, who chairs… pic.twitter.com/0vRSy7SNqI

— Caryma Sa’d – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) September 9, 2026

Mayor Chow opted out of the event; her campaign team told local outlets she would not take part in any debates before her re-election campaign officially launches. 

Journalist and podcaster Jesse Brown, the debate moderator, addressed the audience regarding the mayor’s absence and the surrounding communication. Brown noted that organizers were left without answers for weeks before being told last week that the event could not be attended because Chow’s campaign does not officially start until September 9. Brown added that when organizers offered to move the date to September 9 instead, they received no reply.

Chow’s primary challengers attended the event: Brad Bradford, a city councilor seeking to unseat the incumbent, and Chris Alexander, a former federal cabinet minister and diplomat pitching a fresh approach from outside municipal hall. 

Taking the stage, Bradford opened by addressing the mayor’s absence, stating, “I’m disappointed that the mayor wasn’t here tonight because… we’re not having a real conversation about antisemitism, about Jew-hatred, that’s festered like an infection in the city over the past three years.” Emphasizing that leadership requires direct engagement, he added, “And the mayor’s job is to be the mayor for everybody. And that means you’ve got to show up.”

Bradford contrasted this by committing to active leadership on public safety oversight, explaining, “the first thing I’m going to do… is I’m going to sit on the police board.” He noted that previous mayors served on the board, pointing out that “Olivia Chow chose not to.”

Bradford: ‘If the city is not safe, then the city is not free’

Bradford addressed the pervasive nature of the security crisis facing the community, noting that incidents have impacted schools, synagogues, and local businesses. “If your kids go to a faith-based school and it’s Jewish, well you’ve seen it shot up,” Bradford told the audience. He stressed that the alarming rise in hate incidents affects the entire city, concluding, “If the city is not safe, then the city is not free. And that is what I’m going to be laser-focused on, of course, correcting.”

Mayoral candidate Brad Bradford describes manifestations of antisemitism in Toronto, including schools and businesses being shot at and protests targeting residential neighbourhoods with high concentrations of Holocaust survivors.

Bradford says Toronto is now on the map as one… pic.twitter.com/PkrcfVFSZa

— Caryma Sa’d – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) September 9, 2026

Chris Alexander told the audience that having strong candidates with different kinds of experience working to end antisemitism and hate crimes was vital for the city.

When pressed on what separates him from Bradford, Alexander contrasted his municipal rival with his own federal cabinet and diplomatic experience, explaining, “The biggest difference is that I’m looking at these things with fresh eyes. I’m coming from outside of council… at the cabinet table in Ottawa, in diplomacy, managing complex issues like a very difficult international community, international military presence, Afghan government in Kabul, and the Department of Immigration.” 

Mayoral candidate Chris Alexander describes what sets him apart from his opponent Brad Bradford.

Both Alexander and Bradford differ from incumbent Olivia Chow in one notable respect: they participated in a debate on antisemitism, while Chow opted out.

📸 Sep 8, 2026#Toronto… pic.twitter.com/hUBFFV8B34

— Caryma Sa’d – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) September 9, 2026

Expanding on how his background equips him to handle local safety and community threats, Alexander emphasized his record of tackling global security challenges head-on. “I’ve actually been working on these issues of counter-terrorism, standing up to Iranian aggression, recognizing who their proxies are, and thinking about the pressures on Canada that come from places far from our borders for my entire career,” Alexander told the audience. 

He argued that municipal leaders must recognize how international threats intersect with local security, adding, “We are in a dangerous, a more dangerous world. It’s no longer a cliché or throwaway statement to say that. It’s literally true… And we are not responsible for foreign policy in City Hall, but what we do on issues like this will determine, will set the tone and determine the direction of Canada for years to come.” 

Emphasizing that the fight against hate is deeply personal, Alexander noted his lifelong ties to the local community and his family’s history in the area, stating, “I was born here, I grew up here, my parents have always lived here, I’ve always been close to the Jewish community.”

He framed the challenge as an existential priority for the city’s future, adding, “This is existential for me. Tackling this issue, being part of a Toronto that heals itself, that puts itself back on the right track… I’m bringing my expertise, I’m bringing my commitment, I’m bringing energy to this race.”

Toronto city councilor emphasizes broad stakes of the municipal election

Toronto City Councilor Mike Colle also addressed the audience during the event, emphasizing the broader stakes of the municipal election beyond everyday civic issues.

“This is a time like no other time in Toronto’s history,” Colle stated. “This is just not an election about property taxes, congestion, bike lanes.”

Councillor Mike Colle recalls commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Christie Pits riots in 2022, where he highlighted the danger of antisemitism in Toronto.

“And lo and behold, after October 7th… the world exploded. And it exploded right here.”

He then refers to the… pic.twitter.com/gQaMb1i9GM

— Caryma Sa’d – Lawyer + Political Satirist (@CarymaRules) September 9, 2026

Colle stressed that voters must look at the bigger picture regarding leadership and moral conviction, warning, “This is really a seminal time in Toronto’s history when the future of this city and the direction of this city will be decided, because the direction we’re going in right now, without leadership to deal with these problems and without moral persuasion, we are not going to combat this ongoing assault on the Jewish community.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The lightning Houthi advance down Yemen’s Red Sea coast this week came with direct guidance from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards seeking to open a new front in Iran’s war with the US, according to Yemeni government, Iranian, and regional sources.

By seizing the southwestern port city of Mocha, the Houthis have strengthened their chokehold on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway whose disruption further constricts global energy supplies after Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Six months into the wider regional conflict between the Houthis’ Iranian allies and the United States, the group now looks focused on consolidating that grip on the strait even as opposing government forces backed by Saudi Arabia focus on an offensive in the north.

Iran told the Houthis last week to escalate their attacks on Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, and promised more funding, weapons and senior officers to help them do so, two Iranian sources said.

While Iran describes the Houthis as an ally, it publicly denies giving them military direction, saying they are “not a proxy.”

How did the IRGC help the Houthis take over Yemen’s Mocha Port?

Several senior Revolutionary Guards commanders had already traveled to Yemen to oversee and command Houthi attacks directed against Saudi Arabia after weeks of discussions over military strategy, a regional diplomat briefed by Tehran said.

A third Iranian source, an official, said Iran had held several meetings with allies including the Houthis and that the move on Mocha was a Houthi rather than Iranian decision. However, it had helped Iran by putting upward pressure on oil prices and hurting the United States and Saudi Arabia, the official added.

Inside Yemen, five military sources from the Saudi-backed and internationally recognized government said the Revolutionary Guards had directed the new Houthi campaign along the Red Sea coast, a flat, narrow plain known as the Tihama, starting with a blitz of rocket fire.

Citing communications intercepts and the accounts of captured Houthi prisoners, the Yemeni military sources said they believed the Iranian effort was being directed by Abdolreza Shahlaei, a top Revolutionary Guards commander.

Iranian sources could not immediately confirm that, though they had previously described Shahlaei, who is in the Guards’ specialist Quds Force unit, as having spent time in Yemen in recent years.

The Guards were still able to move weapons and personnel in and out of Yemen despite an aerial and maritime blockade of Houthi areas, the Iranian sources said without elaborating on how they did so.

“If we look at their offensive on the west coast, it’s not something prepared just last week or last month,” said Ahmed Nagi, a Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, describing the seizure of Mocha as a significant milestone in the war.

“The evolution of the Houthis was basically because of the new weapons they gained, either through the Iranians directly or through the different smuggling networks that they are counting on,” Nagi said, pointing specifically at their use of drones in the latest offensive.

As the Houthis began an advance towards Mocha last week, Yemen’s government requested more air support and other help from the Saudis, two more Yemeni officials said.

It was seeking a Saudi air campaign against Houthi targets in the Houthi heartland, including Sanaa and key strategic assets such as oil depots, they said.

However, the kingdom stuck to providing logistical, armament and intelligence support, with only limited air strikes focused on northern battlefronts in Jawf and Marib provinces, areas the government regarded as less important.

Saudis fear escalation with IRGC-backed Houthis as war with Iran rages on

The officials’ own assessment was that Riyadh was anxious to avoid a major escalation with the Houthis for fear of provoking heavier drone strikes on Saudi territory.

Saudi officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on Riyadh’s military focus on the northern front rather than the Red Sea coast and other big Houthi targets.

The overall military situation in Yemen is hard to gauge after a years-long pause in major warfare since a ceasefire was agreed in 2022. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have invested in forces they back there. But the pro-government coalition has suffered from internal splits.

Although previous rounds of warfare in the Tihama had produced sudden advances and retreats, it remains unclear if Saudi-backed forces can easily dislodge the Houthis this time, Nagi said.

“Maybe we can see some advances from the government if they get the necessary support from the Saudis. But that could be a bit difficult this time,” he said.

This post was originally published on here. 

My immediate curiosity was straightforward: How would Israeli Jews vote in a hypothetical 2026 US national election, and how would American Jews vote in Israel’s October 2026 Knesset election?

My principal conclusion is that Israeli Jews would vote considerably to the Right of Center in a US election, while American Jews would vote substantially to the Left of Center in an Israeli election. 

Israeli Jews voting in America would likely produce a strongly Right/Center leaning office holder, from the most conservative to the most liberal on the Right side of the spectrum. American Jews voting in Israel would likely produce a broadly Zionist, centrist, and Center-Left coalition.

Both communities would be heavily influenced by their different sociological environments, political cultures, and geographic circumstances. I recognize that neither Israeli Jews nor American Jews are monolithic entities, but multiple distinct communities. 

For the purpose of this exercise, I define the two populations principally by where they live, with the caveats noted below.

By and large, Israelis participate in a highly fluid political system. New parties emerge, disappear, and merge, and unforeseen events can substantially influence voter preferences. 

The American political party system is more stable, perhaps even fossilized, dominated by personalities and coalitions within two large parties rather than by parties temporarily rising, falling, disappearing, or bursting onto the scene. 

American Jews and Israeli Jews constantly have governmental institutions and political leaders pawing at each other for more power and control of budgetary allocations.

Voting Center and Center-Right in the US, Israeli views would be shaped by Israel’s political culture. 

Possessing a collective political identity, they aspire to live in a democracy that is tied to compulsory civic duties, inhabiting a sovereign Jewish state, obliged (with some exceptions) to mandatory military service, pay heavy national taxation, run their lives on a Jewish calendar, have 24/7 security concerns, and experience fierce, unending, and unyielding political debates, remain starkly polarized between ultra-Orthodox and a majority secular population. 

American Jews vigorously propound the separation of church and state and only voluntarily participate in politics. Both communities have common ancestral roots going back generations to European and Mediterranean regions.

When American Jews are placed in the Israeli political system, perhaps 65% to 70% of American Jewish voters would support parties opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, yet many of those votes would be centrist, security-minded, Zionist, and institutionally liberal rather than anti-Zionist. 

Orthodox American Jews would strongly support Likud, the Religious Zionist Party, and Shas or United Torah Judaism, while Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews would heavily favor Yashar, the Democrats, and centrist opposition parties.

The resulting government, with American Jews voting in Israel, might therefore resemble a coalition of Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, the Democrats, and Avigdor Liberman, perhaps totaling 85 to 90 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. It would be a broad Zionist coalition excluding both Netanyahu’s harder Right and the anti-Zionist Left. 

It is difficult to assume, however, that American Jews supporting a Center or Center-Left coalition in Israel could readily persuade a new Israeli government toward territorial compromise. 

Geopolitical realities in both populations matter: security concerns for someone living in Kfar Saba, Nir Oz, or Hanita generated enormous concern for those who live in Dallas, Denver, or Delray Beach.

Methodology

This exercise is meant to be instructive, not authoritative. We did not conduct an independent survey or apply rigorous statistical methods to original polling. We used survey and polling data assembled by others in Israel and the United States from June through August 15, 2026, then applied several questions to those findings. 

On August 18, using past Israeli polling data, we calculated the nine major issues motivating Israeli voters as they prepare for the October 27 Knesset election at our Center for Israel Education.

Naturally, no analysis conducted in August – or polling data collected before then – can incorporate subsequent events, statements, crises, or political developments that occur before October 27.

American and Israeli Jews share a religion and history, yet the two communities differ in significant ways thoroughly examined by many for decades, including Daniel Gordis in We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Jewish Book Council, 2019); Dov Waxman in Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton, 2016); and Eric Alterman in We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, 2022), and dozens of articles, surveys, and polls.

For purposes of this exercise, I divided Israeli and American Jews into five political categories: hard Right, Right, Center, Left, and hard Left/progressive. 

I also divided each community into four broad categories of religious practice: haredi (ultra-Orthodox), Modern Orthodox, centrist/conservative practicing Jewish, and secular/not practicing.

These categories require considerable caution. Some are imposed on the project and do not correspond precisely with categories used in individual surveys or polls. Political and religious categories also do not align exactly between Israeli and American Jews.

Political self-placement: Israeli Jews and American Jews

The broad conclusions are clear. Israeli Jews are roughly two-thirds Right, one-seventh Center and one-fifth Left. American Jews are roughly one-sixth Right/conservative, one-third Center/moderate and one-half Left/liberal.

Religious practice and identity

These categories are even more approximate than the political categories. “Conservative” Jewish religious practice, for example, has a very different meaning in American Judaism compared with the way religious traditionalism is described in Israel.

Israeli Jews are, proportionately, more religiously practicing than American Jews. Both populations have become more internally polarized, while Israeli Jewish society is moving increasingly toward the religious end of the spectrum. Many Israelis on all sides of either the political or religious spectrum hold multiple outlooks and preferences simultaneously.

My best hypothetical estimate is that a hypothetical Knesset elected solely according to American Jewish political preferences would produce a government dominated by Center and Center-Left parties, with support from elements of the Israeli Right that oppose territorial concessions but are neither driven by haredi or other Orthodox priorities nor committed to Netanyahu.

American Jews would bring a basket-full of liberal political instincts into an Israeli party system that prioritizes security, religion-state relations and coalition politics. 

Israel’s present contest includes Likud, Eisenkot’s Yashar, the Bennett/Lapid-centered opposition constellation, the Democrats, Yisrael Beytenu, the haredi parties, the parties to Likud’s nationalist Right, and potentially additional new parties.

If American Jews voted in Israeli elections and lived in Kfar Saba, Nir Oz, or Hanita, would their voting preferences change with their geographic setting, with news on the hour? What would it take for American and Israeli Jews to be less critical and more patient with the other?

There are 16 million Jews in the world, with seven-eighths of them living in the US and Israel. The last time there were 16 million Jews in the world was in 1939.

The writer is Emory emeritus university professor of Middle Eastern history, political science, and Israel studies, and heads the Center for Israel Education.

This post was originally published on here. 

Saima Wazed, the World Health Organization‘s Southeast Asia head and daughter of ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, resigned on Wednesday, according to her resignation letter seen by Reuters, following fraud investigations by the UN agency and Bangladeshi authorities.

Wazed’s case shows how the fallout from Hasina’s ouster following a deadly uprising against her around mid-2024 has spread to her family members, beyond her political allies. Many of Hasina’s allies face criminal charges, including for alleged corruption in Bangladesh, or live in self-imposed exile like Hasina.

In a statement to Reuters on Thursday, the WHO said a committee had recommended Wazed’s dismissal the day before her resignation. The UN health agency had placed Wazed, who took office as its Southeast Asia regional director in early 2024 for a five-year term, on unpaid administrative leave late last year. She was first sent on leave in July 2025 after Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission, under an interim government that replaced Hasina, filed charges against her in March that year alleging fraud and forgery.

The WHO accused Wazed of “committing financial fraud in relation to her travel to China” and of misrepresenting her academic credentials, according to a separate letter from her lawyers to the WHO on July 3, 2026, seen by Reuters. Wazed has denied the allegations.

The WHO also alleged she had illegally acquired a plot of land in Bangladesh, according to her resignation letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Wazed said she acquired the land before she joined the WHO and was entitled to it under a Bangladeshi law that covered the families of the country’s independence leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father.

Wazed says she was prevented from carrying out duties

“I was elected to the position of Regional Director in order to serve the countries in my region, which I had sincerely done,” Wazed said in her resignation letter to Tedros, sent late on Wednesday.

“Since you continue to prevent me from effectively carrying out my duties, I have lost all trust and confidence in your leadership of WHO,” she wrote. “Moreover, after nearly one year without any remuneration following your decision to place me on unpaid leave, my financial situation has become untenable. In these circumstances, I am choosing to step aside.”

Wazed declined to comment further.

The WHO said its regional committee and executive board would now consider her resignation. A spokesperson said by email the matter had been handled “with due regard for fairness and due process, while safeguarding the interests of the Organization and its ability to fulfil its mandate.”

Last month, it said Wazed was on leave but declined to comment further about her case to maintain confidentiality.

WHO to hold elections in January

Two sources said earlier the UN agency was planning to formally remove Wazed. One of them said the WHO would announce nominations for the role on October 12, vet applications in December and hold elections on January 24. On Thursday, the agency said Dr Nilesh Buddha would continue as officer-in-charge pending the appointment of a new regional head.

The sources declined to be named given the sensitivity of the matter.

Regional directors are among the world’s most influential health policy officials, with their duties including responses to outbreaks and emergencies and adapting WHO policies to local conditions. They are elected every five years by member states, which include Bangladesh and India in the Southeast Asia region.

In the July letter, Wazed, through her lawyers, denied any travel fraud, saying it was an administrative oversight by an assistant processing routine reimbursement requests and involved $901. On the credentials accusation, she said she holds an honorary doctorate for her work on autism in Bangladesh and had been clear with Tedros about this qualification.

This post was originally published on here. 

Switzerland’s Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) published the Josef Mengele file on Thursday. A digital version of the file, which is held in the Federal Archives in Bern, was uploaded to the government website for public access, although parts of it were redacted. The original document remains in the archives.

A statement from Bern said that after a historian requested access to the file, the intelligence service received many additional requests. In light of the “exceptionally high public interest,” the authorities decided not to limit access to individual reviews at the archives, but instead publish the file online. However, they emphasized that wherever protections applied to sources or the personal details of third parties, “there was no room for maneuver,” and the information was redacted.

According to the official statement, “as little as possible” was redacted: the names of current and former government employees connected to the service and its predecessors, protected information about sources, and personal details of private individuals. Public figures were not redacted. The service said the documents remained readable as a whole and that the course of events could be understood from them.

The file was originally compiled by the Federal Prosecutor’s Police Service, the predecessor of the intelligence service, and transferred to the archives in 2001. Under Swiss archival law, it was supposed to remain classified until the end of 2071. Requests for access were repeatedly rejected, with the latest denial coming in February 2026. A historian appealed the decision to the Federal Administrative Court.

During the proceedings, it emerged that the file had previously been reviewed by the Bergier Commission, which investigated Switzerland’s ties with Nazi Germany. Materials examined by the commission were subject to a government decision from December 7, 2001, instructing authorities to adopt a more liberal policy on access to documents. In May, the service announced that it would reconsider its refusal. On September 8, a new decision was issued, and on Thursday the file was uploaded online.

Mengele suspected of passing through Switzerland

Mengele, the SS doctor known as the “Angel of Death of Auschwitz,” was responsible for selections and medical experiments at the camp. After the war, he fled to South America and was never brought to trial. He died in Brazil in 1979.

At the center of interest in the Swiss file is a long-standing suspicion: that in 1961, after West Germany issued an arrest warrant against him, Mengele visited the Kloten area near Zurich Airport. His wife, Martha, rented an apartment in the area, and police monitored her. Historians hope the file will clarify what Swiss authorities knew at the time and whether the war criminal passed through the country without being arrested.

Even before the file was published online, historians sharply criticized the manner of its release. Instead of allowing access to the original documents, the intelligence service chose to publish a redacted digital version. Swiss newspapers reported that researchers described the move as “scandalous” and argued that it damaged Switzerland’s reputation.

Historian objects to continued classification of Mengele file

Historian Gérard Wettstein, who fought to open the file and raised public funds to finance his appeal, warned in recent months that heavy redactions would undermine the goal of transparency. After the publication, he said that keeping the file closed until 2071 “feeds conspiracy theories,” and that as long as parts remain classified, the public will continue to believe there is something to hide. According to reports in Switzerland, he is considering another appeal to demand access to the original documents.

The intelligence service itself acknowledged in its official statement that the file remains subject to a strict confidentiality period and that the case is now serving as a basis for a broader review of access policies for archival documents in general.

The Swiss disclosure comes after another dramatic release in December 2025. Argentine President Javier Milei ordered the publication of about 1,850 documents on Nazis who fled to South America after World War II. Among the files was a detailed dossier on Mengele.

The Argentine documents revealed that Mengele entered the country in 1949 using a fake passport under the name Helmut Gregor, but that by the mid-1950s Argentine authorities already knew his true identity. In 1956, he requested his original birth certificate from the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires and began using his real name. He lived in the Buenos Aires suburb of Carapachay, married his brother’s widow, and even partnered in a medical laboratory. In 1959, an Argentine judge rejected Germany’s extradition request, citing “political persecution.” He later fled to Paraguay and from there to Brazil.

This post was originally published on here. 

The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israeli politics are seeping into local US elections.

Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.

During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.

The city’s Democratic primary also previews a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel. 

Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.

Morales criticized Smiley for participation in CAM summit during campaign

During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, where Smiley serves in a leadership role. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders. 

The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”

It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.

This post was originally published on here. 

Nearly a year after the infamous Louvre heist shocked the world, a new series of museum thefts across Europe has raised concerns in the art and antiquities world about the rising phenomenon.

On Tuesday, four paintings were stolen from the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, and in mid-August, four paintings by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina were stolen from the Museo Regionale di Messina in the painter’s hometown.

Last month, the pan-European police body Europol said that art thieves in Europe are committing more violent robberies and specialist gangs have been replaced by ad hoc ​opportunists recruited through social media.

But the recent heists have not only been of priceless paintings, but of artifacts as well. 

Treasure of Villena

On August 27, thieves in Spain entered the Villena Museum (MUVI) and stole the majority of the Treasure of Villena, a collection of Bronze Age artifacts often described as one of the most significant prehistoric European finds.

The collection is made up of 66 artifacts of gold, silver, iron and amber. The gold artifacts including 11 bowls, three bottles and 28 bracelets.

It was originally discovered in 1963 by Spanish archaeologist José María Soler.

The theft happened “in a matter of minutes,” Villena Mayor Fulgencio Cerdán said during a press conference following the robbery.

He explained that the robbery took place around 5:20 a.m., with the thieves believed to have left the museum approximately four minutes later.

While most of the treasure had been taken, Cerdán noted that three silver vessels, a bracelet, some ornamentation of the bastón del reyezuelo, and the “Kingfisher staff.”

The stolen gold pieces are estimated to be worth €1.7 million, according to media reports.

Bronze Age treasure stolen in FOUR-MINUTE museum heist in Spain

Thieves stole most of the gold from Spain’s Treasure of Villena, a collection dating to around 1250 BC and considered one of Europe’s most important prehistoric hoard

The haul is valued at at least €1.7 million pic.twitter.com/OyhbUWeh7O

— RT Intl (@RT_on_X) August 27, 2026

“We are absolutely devastated,” Cerdán said. “I am shaking. The truth is that, for those of us from Villena, this destroys us. It is part of our heritage and part of our wealth and of what we feel proud of.”

Following the theft, MUVI stated in a social media post that it has temporarily closed its doors to the public, but will announce a reopening date as soon as possible. 

“The MUVI’s pieces and collections are not just heritage: they are shared memory, part of everyone’s history,” the museum wrote. “We have full confidence in the ongoing investigations and the professionalism of the State Security Forces.”

Queen Nazli’s diamond necklace

That same day, two unmasked men smashed a display case at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) and stolen a diamond necklace worth over $4 million.

It had been featured at the MAK as part of an exhibition titled “GLANZSTÜCKE: Van Cleef & Arpels High Jewelry × Masterpieces from the MAK Collection.”

According to Austrian state broadcaster ORT, the unmasked thieves bought tickets to the exhibit prior to the robbery and commited the theft during the museum’s opening hours.

Police added that the two then “fled with the piece of jewelry in an unknown direction.” 

Photographs and CCTV footage of the suspects have been shared by police, and has since been added to INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database. 

This necklace, stolen from an exhibit at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, has been added to INTERPOL’s Stolen Works of Art database by Austrian authorities.

The piece, adorned with 673 diamonds, once belonged to Queen Nazli of Egypt.https://t.co/Vu7vWW0AkC pic.twitter.com/hgZYl2MLkG

— INTERPOL (@INTERPOL_HQ) August 28, 2026

The museum noted in an August statement that it would not be sharing information regarding the investigation into the robbery.

Belonging once to Queen Nazli of Egypt (1913-1936), the second wife of King Fuad I, the necklace is adorned with 673 diamonds and weighs about 200 carats.

It, and a matching tiara, had been commissioned by Nazli for the wedding of her daughter Fawzia to, the at the time Iranian Crown Prince and later Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Demonstrators gathered outside Downing Street on Wednesday evening to protest the British government’s recent policy measures regarding Israel.

The rally, titled “Sanction Terror Not Judea and Samaria,” was organized by Stop the Hate UK, a Jewish-led direct action campaign group, to protest the UK government’s announcement of sanctions targeting Israeli settlements. 

At today’s Stop the Hate rally, @TiceRichard tells us that he asked @Ed_Miliband about the risk of sanctions emboldening antisemites on British streets. The Foreign Secretary replied that he was wrong to even ask the question.

Richard Tice reminds us that the actions of this… pic.twitter.com/1UNvQdYFmA

— Stop The Hate UK (@StopTheHate_UK) September 9, 2026

The rally drew activists who displayed banners and signs reading “Sanction Terror Not Judea and Samaria” and “Israel is an Ally not an Enemy.” Participants criticized the government following announcements of restrictions targeting Israeli settlements.

Stop the Hate UK founder and CEO Itai Galmudy addressed the demonstrators, focusing heavily on what he termed the double standards applied to the Jewish state. Galmudy questioned why the British government deploys sweeping regional trade bans and blanket economic measures against Israel while maintaining bilateral trade frameworks and economic agreements with other conflict-ridden countries.

Pointing to nations like Yemen, where large swaths of land are dominated by the Houthis, and southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah exerts immense pressure, Galmudy noted that Britain handles those regions with targeted responses rather than sweeping economic isolation.

“What makes those measures so deeply frustrating is the undeniable double standard. Where is the same sweeping economic approach when it comes to other conflict zones rife with terror?” Galmudy asked the crowd, asserting that this singles out Israel to a standard no other country faces and risks alienating key democratic allies.

Mark Birbeck, founder of the grassroots campaign Our Fight, a group challenging British antisemitism, took to the microphone to warn about the rising prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment, explaining that leaders often search for a moral framework to fill a void and that “the framework that they are reaching out for now is anti-Israel.”

Birbeck: Antisemitic ideology ‘made its way into parliament’

Birbeck stated that this ideology has “made its way into number ten and it’s made its way into parliament,” adding that “the technocrats have become dangerous because they are now the instigators and the propagators of the most dangerous idea in British politics now, that Israel is the source of the world’s problems, and that to be virtuous and to be good and to be moral, you need to be against Israel.”

Birbeck further emphasized the severity of the shift, telling the crowd, “this is a dark, dark time that’s coming and we need to rally our forces, we need to find those people who understand the seriousness of what we are facing, because this anti-Israel prejudice, this anti-Israel bigotry is now becoming an ideology.”

As ever. Iconic @joshxhowie https://t.co/Z1FGCBGO83 pic.twitter.com/FGEqyzlVrE

— Shelley Blond (@BlondShelley) September 9, 2026

Comedian Josh Howie also spoke at the demonstration, delivering a sharp critique of the government’s motives and policy decisions. He argued that the boycott of goods from Judea and Samaria would “achieve nothing,” noting that it fails to bring about peace, threatens thousands of Palestinian jobs, and pushes a two-state solution further away.

Howie contended that the policy served as a political crusade for votes rather than a moral stance, warning attendees, “This is no moral crusade for peace, this a crusade for votes from the far-left and Muslims.”

Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice also attended and addressed the crowd, sharply criticizing the Labour government over the policy shifts. Tice highlighted the immediate hostility faced on the streets during the gathering, pointing out that cyclists had just gone past and spat at the demonstrators.

Tice: Labour policy shifts a ‘grave mistake’

He argued that the government’s actions effectively embolden antisemites and damage key strategic relationships with allies like the US and Israel, describing the measures as a “grave mistake.” “I think the foreign secretary is playing purpose to this. He is making a grave mistake that has damaged international relations, that has frankly damaged the respect and trust that everybody in Israel feels about the United Kingdom,” Tice said.

Concluding his remarks, Tice said he hoped a general election would take place within the next three years, adding that it would be the moment when the UK prime minister and foreign secretary are punished for their grave and grievous judgments.

This post was originally published on here. 

Last Thursday, for the first time since 1979, a delegation of hassidic leaders came to the White House to meet the president of the United States.

They spent an hour with senior officials on the needs of their communities, then half an hour with US President Donald Trump himself. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio dropped in unannounced. 

The grand rabbis of Satmar, Bobov, and Vizhnitz came, along with a representative of Skver and the head of Beth Midrash Govoha, the great yeshiva of Lakewood, New Jersey. The community had come to Washington to talk about conditions of federal prisons, the future of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, and housing assistance for large families.

On that last point the vice president, who walked over after his press briefing, had some standing. Hassidim, he joked, are the only people with bigger families than his. Rabbi Teitelbaum led the delegation in the blessing for kings – the prayer Jews have said over emperors and presidents for centuries – and left the president a leather-bound copy.

Before the rabbis had even arrived, the meeting was being argued over online. Satmar teaches that a Jewish state must wait for the Messiah. Some of the president’s own supporters said men who believe that had no business standing next to him.

As antisemitism abounds, White House opens its door to Jews

The argument, however loud, missed the point. Most Americans cannot tell a Satmar hasid from a Bobov one. What they saw was simpler and far more important. A week before Rosh Hashanah, the most powerful man in the world sat with a room full of bearded men in long coats and black hats – visibly and unmistakably Jewish – and gave them his attention. 

We live in a moment when a young couple leaving a Jewish museum in Washington can be shot dead on the sidewalk and marchers for the hostages can be set on fire in Colorado. When the regime in Tehran chants death to America and death to Israel in the same breath, and antisemitism rises here and abroad. When synagogues have a budget for armed guards. When a man in a fur hat and long black coat thinks twice before walking home alone. Against all that, the door to the Oval Office opened. America and the world saw it open, and saw a president who cares.

At a briefing just before he joined the rabbis, the vice president said you can disagree with someone and still be friends, because the republic depends on people of different views being able to talk to one another. A plain idea, and an American one. 

Trump knows he must serve all Jewish communities

The fight over who belonged in that room is a family fight, and it is ours to have. No single White House meeting will settle it. A president who grasps that he serves the whole family, including the branch that argues with the rest, has understood something about this country.

Consider what the delegation came to discuss: prisons, housing, a hospital. Ordinary matters, brought by citizens to their government. For decades, Washington treated hassidic communities as a curiosity when it noticed them at all. On Thursday they were treated as constituents. That is the whole purpose of the White House Faith Office, and of the decision to seat the administration’s liaison to the Jewish community inside it for the first time. That liaison spent months arranging Thursday’s visit.

The record behind the picture is real. This president has treated antisemitism on college campuses as something to confront rather than manage. He has defended religious schools and the parents who choose them. He has made the safety of Jews a matter of federal policy. He won a larger share of the Jewish vote than any Republican since 1988, and hassidic precincts voted for him nearly as one. The rabbis in the Oval Office thanked him for all of it. So do I. And the vice president deserves his own thanks for walking in when he could have walked past.

One more thing happened on Thursday. The two Satmar rebbes are brothers who lead rival factions and have been estranged for two decades, since their father’s death in 2006. They shook hands and spoke face to face. One congratulated the other on a grandson’s engagement. The visit took more than a year to arrange, and it landed in the days before Rosh Hashanah, when Jews wish one another a happy, healthy and sweet new year and set about repairing what is broken between people. That two brothers reconciled in the room where world leaders meet and make their hardest decisions fits the season’s spirit. 

It also suggests a wish for the year ahead. Wherever we live, in Israel or America, however we vote, however we pray, we are one people. We can disagree, and we will, but we will still be able to wish each other a Shana tova.

The writer is the former chairman of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.

This post was originally published on here. 

A video clip of a speech by IDF Central Commander Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth, responsible for the West Bank area, was publicly distributed on Thursday, in which he walks a fine line between trying to unify Israel’s efforts against Palestinian terror and Jewish extremist violence through positive encouragement, with some needling of some of his co-law enforcement partners to step up their game.

On one hand, Bluth extolled the efforts and cooperation of the police, the Shin Bet, and the local Israeli councils for Judea and Samaria.

On the other hand, he warned in a roundabout way that only if all of these officials do their jobs properly will terror and violence be stopped on both sides of the conflict, whether Palestinian or Jewish.
  
The sanctions that England and around 10 other Western countries placed on Israel this week relate to a number of issues, some of them in the diplomatic arena and beyond the IDF’s arena.

But one of the issues which clearly pushed these countries – regardless of Israel’s criticism of the move itself – to take the actions they took related to Israel and the IDF’s own admission of failing to sufficiently rein in Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank.

Bluth himself has made numerous speeches in which he has requested or demanded stronger efforts from the police, the Shin Bet, and local officials, as well as from the security cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In this specific speech, Bluth said, “When there is strong cooperation between [law enforcement] organizations… not just generic cooperation, or based on [mere] interests, but good cooperation, like there is today between the Central Command, the Shin Bet, the Border Police, the general police, from top to bottom, positive interorganizational cooperation enables the thwarting of terror of all kinds, sovereignty, enforcement of the rule of law, and public order.”

But then he added, “This is when there is cooperation. But when things work in isolation or when people just try to deal with things on an ad hoc basis, this creates less effectiveness in the field. I praise the cooperation… and even when there is criticism, it is said only internally,” and not to the public.  

Bluth attempts to calm concerns of political Right while pushing for more action

With these mixed messages, Bluth seemed to be trying to assuage criticism from his political Right that he has cracked down on Jewish extremists and banged heads with Defense Minister Israel Katz, while also trying to urge the police, the Shin Bet, and local and national political officials to take the Jewish violence against Palestinians problem more seriously during a week when Israel is paying a high cost on the diplomatic field at least partially due to this problem.   

On July 19, Bluth even made a speech talking about the need to increase the use of restraining orders as a tool, and in a not-so-veiled way, complaining about the inability to use administrative detention against violent Jews, which Katz blocked in January 2025.

Whether responding to Bluth or to those supporting the Jewish extremists, Katz’s leak to Arutz 7 on July 21 that he would summon the IDF central commander for being too aggressive at a time when Jewish extremist violence is out of control puts the defense minister in a new category.

He also announced he would fire Bluth, but IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, who reminded Katz that firing top IDF officials was solely his decision.

IDF, Shin Bet declare Katz’s ending of Jewish administrative detention a failure

The results of Katz’s ending of Jewish administrative detention have been declared an unequivocal failure by the vast majority of IDF and Shin Bet officials since 2025, which is not only leading to harm against innocent Palestinians, a problem on its own, but is also undermining Israel’s fundamental standing in Europe and even among both US Democrat and Republican circles.

The Trump administration does not care that much about what happens in the West Bank, but has numerous times condemned Israel’s slow and limited efforts to restrain Jewish extremist violence, including from top pro-Israel figures like US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Israel Police’s 2025 statistical report has still not been published nine months after the end of the year, raising questions over the reason for the delay and its timing ahead of the elections, on Thursday.

Since the establishment of Israel, the police have published an annual “statistical report” detailing key data on police activity, including breakdowns and trend analyses across various areas.

Last year, for the first time since the establishment of Israel, the report covering 2024 data had not been published despite a significant amount of time having passed since the end of the year. Notably, after media pressure, the police eventually released the 2024 statistical report in May 2026, after a lengthy delay.

Now, it has emerged that the police are also delaying the publication of the 2025 report. Nine months after the end of the year, the document has yet to be released, an unusual delay for which the police have not provided a detailed explanation.

The report is considered a key source of information because it compiles not only crime data and breakdowns, but also detailed figures, graphs, trends and comparisons with previous years across a wide range of areas related to Israel Police activity. Its publication allows for a broader examination of police performance and changes over time.

What is in the Israel Police’s statistical report?

Previous reports have included data and analysis on calls from citizens to the 100 and 105 hotlines, the latter dealing with harm to minors online; public satisfaction with police services; road accident figures and breakdowns by type; the number of police volunteers; human resources; the police budget; recruitment and retirements; reported crime figures; the distribution of activity between national and local units; sexual offenses against minors; exposure offenses targeted by police, including drugs, weapons offenses and traffic violations; agricultural crime; international comparisons; police objectives; and staffing levels.

In recent years, the reports have also included data on fines issued for purchasing sexual services, including analysis of the characteristics of those fined. These figures underscore the report’s role as a central tool for examining police activity, priorities and long-term trends.

The police typically publish the statistical report several months after the end of each year and, in recent years, no later than August. The fact that the 2025 report has still not been released has raised questions, particularly amid ongoing public criticism of police conduct and calls for greater transparency.

The report is intended to provide the public, government officials, and lawmakers with a structured overview of police work, priorities, and developments across different fields.

This year, the timing of the report also carries political significance. Publishing the document before the elections could allow the public to assess police performance during the period leading up to the vote and could influence evaluations of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s tenure.

The police do occasionally publish data online, but these are raw figures that are difficult to interpret, analyze, or use to draw broader conclusions.

The year 2025 ended nine months ago. About two weeks ago, the police said that the report would be published “in the coming weeks.”

Israel Police later responded at the beginning of September that the report “is currently undergoing approval processes and is expected to be published during the coming weeks. Upon completion of the organizational approval process, the statistical report will be published for the public on the required platforms.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The confrontation with Britain over its intention to advance sanctions and trade restrictions related to settlements is also being reflected at the municipal level in Jerusalem: Deputy Mayor Aryeh King is demanding that the name of King George Street, one of the capital’s main thoroughfares, be removed and replaced with the name “Tabur Haaretz” (“Navel of the Land”).

King submitted the request Wednesday morning to Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, who also serves as chairman of the street naming committee. In his request, he directly linked the initiative to the worsening of British policy toward Israel. According to King, the measures being advanced by London against government policy and Israeli activity in parts of Jerusalem require reconsidering the commemoration of the British monarch in the capital’s public sphere.

The request comes a day after the British government announced its intention to advance a series of measures against settlements in the West Bank. At the center of the plan is a future ban on imports of goods and products manufactured in settlements, alongside new legislation that would grant British ministers the authority to impose targeted sanctions on organizations, companies, and individuals involved in financing, supporting, or building in settlements. The measures will not take effect immediately, as their implementation requires the completion of legal and regulatory procedures expected to take several months.

According to details released after the announcement, the planned import ban applies to physical goods from settlements and not to services. The sanctions mechanism targeting companies, organizations, and individuals is also not a blanket automatic ban, but rather the creation of authority that would allow the British government to impose sanctions on a case-by-case basis. Due to the legal and technical complexity, the measures are not expected to take effect before the Israeli elections, and likely only next year at the earliest. A possible change in Israeli policy during this period could affect the scope of the measures and their practical implementation.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband linked the move to settlement expansion and tenders for construction in E1, which Britain has described as a “red line.” London has stressed that the planned measures are directed at settlements and not at Israel within the Green Line, and that their purpose is to prevent further damage to the possibility of implementing a two-state solution in the future.

The British move has also received broader international backing. In a joint statement, 12 countries, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Britain, announced their intention to impose national restrictions, support European restrictions on trade with settlements, or actively consider such measures and additional steps. Britain, France, and Canada explicitly announced that they would advance national measures to ban trade in settlement products.

Against this backdrop, King is seeking to add a symbolic step directly related to Britain’s historic presence in Jerusalem. Instead of the name of King George, he is proposing the name “Tabur Haaretz,” taken from the Book of Ezekiel. According to him, the name reflects both Jerusalem’s status at the heart of the Land of Israel and the street’s location in the center of the capital.

The name King George has been associated with the street for more than 100 years. It was given in 1924 during the British Mandate period in honor of George V, king of Britain from 1910 to 1936. His reign included the British conquest of the Land of Israel from the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of British Mandate rule.

The fact that the name was established under British rule is part of the argument presented by King.

King George’s name removed from Haifa street, Beersheba park

In his request, he notes that neither an Israeli government nor a Jewish municipality after the establishment of the state decided to commemorate the king. He also points to changes made elsewhere in Israel: in Haifa, he says, a street bearing King George’s name was renamed King David Street, and in Beersheba his name was removed from a municipal park.

This is not the first time King has sought to use public space naming as a way of conveying a political message. In the past, he proposed name changes following disputes with France and with UNRWA.

The initiative comes as political figures call for retaliatory measures against the British announcement. The crisis between Jerusalem and London has intensified following Britain’s intention to advance the restrictions, even though they have not yet taken effect and the final details of their implementation are still being formulated.

King is now seeking to add a municipal move with declarative significance: removing one of the most prominent remnants of the British Mandate period from Jerusalem’s street names. For the proposal to be implemented, it will need to go through the municipal procedures required for changing street names.

Israel is advancing another retaliatory step against the British move targeting settlements: the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry recommended that the Population and Immigration Authority prevent the entry into Israel of employees and activists from 11 organizations operating in Britain, claiming they promote boycotts and sanctions against Israel. The list includes Oxfam, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Save the Children, as well as Palestine Action and Islamic Relief Worldwide, which are designated organizations in Israel.

The move was advanced under the direction of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli following the British government’s announcement of its intention to promote a ban on trade in products from settlements in Judea and Samaria. Ministry Director-General Avi Cohen Skali sent the recommendation to Amnon Shmueli, head of the Ben-Gurion Airport division at the Population and Immigration Authority, with a copy sent to the authority’s director-general Boaz Yosef.

The letter stated that the government and ministry view the British move with severity, and that against this backdrop, the activities of British organizations promoting “boycotts, sanctions, and economic and political measures against the State of Israel” should be examined. The ministry recommended preventing entry by activists belonging to organizations that it claims operate against Israel and harm its legitimacy.

The list compiled by the ministry is divided into three groups: organizations that, according to the document, received direct funding from the British government; organizations that received indirect funding; and organizations that are not funded by the British government.

The first group includes Oxfam, Islamic Relief Worldwide, War on Want UK, and Norwegian Refugee Council. The second includes Save the Children and Medical Aid for Palestinians, while the third includes Palestine Action, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, and Europe Trust.

The emphasis placed by the ministry on funding sources is not incidental. According to the document, several of the groups whose activists the ministry seeks to prevent from entering Israel previously received direct funding from the British government. The letter presents this alongside the organizations’ activities against Israeli policy and within campaigns calling for boycotts and sanctions.

Pro-Palestinian organizations support arms embargo, sanctions on Israel

The ministry details its claims against several organizations. Regarding Oxfam, it states that although the organization presents itself as humanitarian and does not define itself as supporting the global BDS movement, it promotes a ban on goods originating from settlements and calls for an arms embargo and sanctions against Israel. War on Want, according to the document, participates in campaigns against companies operating in Israel, including in the fields of arms sales and settlement trade, and defines Israel as an “apartheid state.”

Save the Children was also included on the list. The document claims that the organization supported an arms embargo on Israel, worked to include the IDF on the UN list of parties violating children’s rights in armed conflicts, and accused Israel of “genocide” and “deliberate starvation.” It also states that the organization’s request was rejected in January by the interministerial team for nongovernmental organizations, based on an alleged connection to Islamic Relief Worldwide.

Regarding Medical Aid for Palestinians, the ministry notes that the organization, which provides healthcare and medical assistance to Palestinians, runs a campaign calling for sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel. According to the letter, MAP called on Britain to suspend arms sales to Israel, including components for F-35 aircraft, and urged London to clarify that it would honor International Criminal Court arrest warrants.

Two organizations receive extensive attention in the letter due to their status. Islamic Relief Worldwide was declared a designated organization in Israel in 2014 based on information that it had funded Hamas. The letter also states that one of its founders, Issam al-Haddad, was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestine Action, a British organization focused on direct action against the Israeli defense industry, particularly Elbit Systems, was designated as a terrorist organization in Britain in 2025. Regarding both organizations, the letter uses broad language and recommends preventing any employee or activist from entering Israel.

The list also includes Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which the ministry defines as the largest delegitimization organization in Britain and one that openly promotes boycotts as part of the BDS movement; Friends of Al-Aqsa, which it claims plays a central role in promoting boycotts in Britain and whose senior figures participated in the Mavi Marmara flotilla; and Europe Trust, which the ministry describes as one of the main frameworks associated with Muslim Brotherhood activity in Europe.

The ministry also includes Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. According to the document, the organization has worked over the years with bodies and individuals that Israel claims are linked to designated organizations, including DCI-Palestine and Khalida Jarrar, who is associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The letter states that, regarding some of the organizations, the ministry claims there have been links over the years to entities associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist networks in Britain and Europe, as well as ties to designated organizations including Hamas and the Popular Front. Their activity promoting boycotts and sanctions, alongside the alleged links attributed to them in the document, forms the basis for the ministry’s recommendation to examine the entry of their representatives and activists into Israel.

This post was originally published on here. 

For one extraordinary moment on Thursday night, the giant screens at the Republican convention in Dallas did not show another minister in the Trump administration, a Republican member of Congress, or a party candidate. Instead, they showed John Fetterman, the sitting Democratic senator from Pennsylvania.

“Why am I here speaking with you today? Because, well, I am a common-sense Democrat,” Fetterman said in a prerecorded video. “I will always stand with America. I will always reject extremism, socialism, and this anti-American way of life.”

Fetterman appeared in the video with the Mon Valley Works steel plant in western Pennsylvania behind him and devoted most of his remarks to his Senate colleague, Republican Dave McCormick.

“Dave McCormick is the kind of senator who gets things done, and he will fight for Pennsylvania,” he said. “I am proud to call him my friend.”

He then pointed to the steel plant behind him and said, “Right over my shoulder is this iconic American steel plant. And this is exactly the kind of thing that we are going to work together on, and work with President Trump to fight for and protect the steel way of life, right here in the Steel Valley.”

Fetterman presents Republican Senator McCormick as ‘great friend’ 

Then came an introduction rarely heard from a Democratic senator on the stage of the opposing party’s convention.

“I have the opportunity to introduce this great American, a great senator. And yes, he is in a different party, but I am proud to call him a great friend of mine. So for everyone there in Dallas, I am here to introduce Dave McCormick.”

McCormick took the stage and responded with a gesture of his own.

“How great is John Fetterman?” he told the crowd, thanking him for his “friendship” and his “courage.”

Shortly afterward, a White House account shared the video with the caption, “Based John Fetterman.”

“Based” is internet slang used as praise, describing someone who is not particularly concerned about what others think of their views, or a position seen as bold and worthy of admiration because it breaks with convention. In this context, the meaning is roughly that Fetterman says what he thinks and is not afraid to go against the grain.

The episode was especially unusual because Fetterman is not a Republican who switched parties, nor has he announced any intention of doing so. In fact, he repeatedly emphasizes that he remains a Democrat.

He also was not appearing to support a Republican candidate currently running against a Democrat for a Senate seat. McCormick already serves as Pennsylvania’s second Republican senator.

Even so, the sight of a Democratic senator appearing at the Republican convention, while using some of the language the opposing party uses against the Left, made the moment especially striking. Political commentators in the US described it as an “extraordinary escalation” in the widening rift between Fetterman and his party.

His story was unusual long before the night in Dallas.

Fetterman, who stands more than two meters tall and for years was known for wearing hoodies and shorts, with an appearance almost as far removed as possible from the traditional image of a US senator, began his political career as mayor of Braddock, a small, struggling steel town in Pennsylvania.

He was later elected lieutenant governor of the state, and in 2022 ran for the Senate as a figure many associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Just days before the Democratic primary that year, Fetterman suffered a stroke. He won the primary and later the general election, although he was left with difficulties processing spoken language.

Another crisis came just months after he entered the Senate. In February 2023, he voluntarily admitted himself to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for treatment for clinical depression. He later spoke publicly about his mental health struggle and the importance of seeking treatment.

Fetterman comes out in staunch support of Israel after October 7

But the political shift that transformed him from a popular figure on the Left into a deeply controversial one within his party began largely after October 7.

Fetterman came out unequivocally in support of Israel in its war against Hamas, opposed pressure on Israel from parts of the Left, and repeatedly clashed with progressive activists. His support for Israel gradually became one of the clearest fault lines between him and parts of the Democratic Party.

In 2024, he also skipped the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though he said at the time that his decision had nothing to do with political disagreements or Israel.

He said his three children were on summer vacation and that he preferred to spend the four days with them. He said he had made the decision even before the presidential debate in June, which eventually led Joe Biden to withdraw from the race.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the gap between Fetterman and parts of his party has widened further.

He supported several Trump nominees for administration positions, voted alongside Republicans in the fight over the government shutdown, and opposed congressional efforts to end the war in Iran. After Trump’s 2024 election victory, Fetterman became the first Democratic senator to meet with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago.

Fetterman, however, continues to reject claims that he is on his way to becoming a Republican.

“I am not going to become a Republican, but I am going to be a Democrat who is going to have a conversation with anybody that is acting in good faith,” he said recently.

He also wrote that he would be a “terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with the Democrats.”

He has, however, identified one red line, a situation in which, in his words, the Democratic Party becomes an “anti-Israel party.”

Fetterman support drops sharply among Pennsylvania Democrats

The polling illustrates how dramatically his political standing has changed.

According to an August New York Times poll cited by AP, only about two in 10 registered Democrats in Pennsylvania had a favorable view of Fetterman, compared with 74% in 2024.

Among Republicans in the state, by contrast, 73% viewed him favorably. Senior Democratic officials and activists in Pennsylvania have also said they are not asking him to join them on the campaign trail ahead of the midterm elections.

At the same time, his relationship with McCormick has become especially close. The two appear together at events and have even established a joint political fundraising committee, an unusual step for two senators from rival parties.

That is why the appearance in Dallas amounted to far more than a one-minute video clip.

As the Republican Party held the first midterm election convention of its kind in an effort to energize its voter base ahead of November, it was a Democratic senator who arrived and used some of the same messages Republicans themselves are seeking to put at the center of the campaign, while continuing to insist that he remains in his party.

Fetterman did not announce that he was crossing party lines. Instead, he did something perhaps even harder to fit into Washington’s conventional political categories: He appeared at the opposing party’s convention, praised a Republican senator as his friend, pledged to work with Trump, and in the same breath reminded everyone, “Yes, I am a Democrat.”

This post was originally published on here. 

“NAZA,” a documentary by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that debuted at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, claimed that mass civilian deaths were routinely built into Israeli military targeting decisions in Gaza.

“NAZA” takes its title from an Israeli military term for expected “collateral casualties” and is built around testimony from intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the war, challenging official accounts.

There was “mass killing on an industrial scale,” one of the officers says in a series of anonymous interviews.

Israel says it has gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields in densely populated areas – a claim Hamas denies.

The film tells a different story.

“We show in our film a targeting system that is, by design, targeting people in civilian spaces, in their family homes,” Abraham told Reuters. “Sometimes it can be 500 NAZA … destroying entire villages or entire neighborhoods.”

Intelligence officers described an AI-assisted system that identified targets using data gathered from thousands of hacked mobile phones. They said the phrase “daddy’s home” picked up on a child’s phone would be enough to trigger an airstrike.

The officers also described the killing of civilians in Israeli-designated no-go zones, including near aid distribution centers. The location of the zones was not disclosed to residents, one officer said: “They have to learn with blood.”

The United Nations said last year that more than 400 Palestinians were killed while seeking aid. Israel acknowledged civilians had been harmed at distribution centers and said it had amended its rules of engagement.

Comparisons to the Holocaust

Several of the officers interviewed compare what they witnessed to historical patterns of dehumanization and discuss parallels with lessons drawn from the Holocaust.

“It’s a link that comes from the soldiers,” Abraham said.

“In a situation where so often you see how the memory of the Holocaust is used as a means to justify Israel’s actions in Gaza, it’s very important to draw a more universal conclusion.”

The IDF did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment about the documentary.

All the interviews are filmed on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night, with scenes of destruction from Gaza only shown briefly at the end. The directors said they wanted to highlight the contrast between daily life in Israel’s commercial capital and the devastation unfolding roughly 60 km (37 miles) away.

“We wanted to show how life in Tel Aviv goes on,” said Szor, who won an Oscar with Abraham last year for their documentary “No Other Land,” about Israeli demolitions in the West Bank.

She added that many Israelis feel no empathy for Palestinian civilians. “There is a big part of Israeli society who are saying out loud that there are no innocent people in Gaza.”

Many officers in the film came from elite units and do not fit the stereotype of ideological hardliners. “They sometimes describe themselves as left-wing,” she said. “And they perhaps are the people who are responsible for the most killing.”

Abraham doubted that Israel would bring anyone to justice for the civilian deaths without outside pressure.

“I hope there will be justice and accountability for the crimes. … It depends on holding people to account and on the political will of the United States and the EU,” he said.

“NAZA” is one of 21 films competing for Venice’s Golden Lion award, which will be presented on Saturday.

This post was originally published on here. 

A fire at a school in Congo‘s rebel-controlled city of Bukavu has killed at least 17 people, including some children, local and medical sources said on Thursday.

A witness at the scene told Reuters he had helped to load 17 bodies of deceased men and children into an ambulance.

A local health centre said it had received 10 bodies of people killed in the fire. Another hospital said it had admitted more than 50 students, 14 of whom died.

Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 rebels 

Bukavu has been controlled by Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 rebels since the group staged a lightning offensive in eastern Congo last year.

The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.

Corneille Nangaa, coordinator of the rebel alliance, told Reuters he didn’t have an exact figure yet but put the death toll at around 10.

This post was originally published on here. 

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been fighting a war unlike any in its history, across multiple fronts, often with methods the rest of the world is only beginning to absorb.

The record is formidable. Hezbollah has been decapitated and badly degraded as a fighting force. The infrastructure it spent years and enormous sums building for its own October 7-style assault on northern Israel has been shattered.

Hamas remains alive, but it is hardly kicking. The Houthis have discovered that distance does not necessarily provide immunity. Iran has suffered blows that punctured the aura it spent decades constructing.

Across these fronts, Israel has displayed tactical brilliance. Air power has been used with extraordinary precision and range. Israeli ground forces have adapted to dense urban warfare against an enemy embedded inside and beneath a civilian population.

The IDF has shown ingenuity, resilience, speed of learning, and an ability to move between conventional war, counterterrorism, and long-range strike. The world has noticed. And therein lies the danger.

There are two problems lurking beneath Israel’s success. The first is external. The West and much of the region are increasingly seeing Israel as a regional powerhouse. But Israel is not the regional powerhouse, and confusing those two things would be dangerous.

Israel remains a small country with limited strategic depth and enemies whose combined demographic and geographic weight dwarfs its own. Israeli success will not end regional hostility. It may intensify it. Every humiliation inflicted on Iran, Hezbollah, and the broader anti-Israel camp creates deterrence, but also wounded pride and incentives to study Israel more carefully. The target on Israel’s back is getting larger.

The second danger is internal, and perhaps more serious. Israel may begin believing its own hype. Much of what Israel has accomplished since October 7 was earned. The courage, improvisation, intelligence work, technological creativity, and operational skill are real. But not everything that went right was the product of Israeli brilliance.

The elephant in the room is October 7 itself. Yahya Sinwar launched the attack without Hezbollah and Iran entering the war simultaneously at full strength. What would October 7 have looked like if Hamas had attacked from Gaza while Hezbollah unleashed its prepared invasion from Lebanon and Iran coordinated the wider network at the same moment? No Israeli victory since then should make that question less frightening. It should make Israel humble.

This is where the history after 1967 becomes relevant. The Six Day War was one of the most spectacular military victories of the modern age. It was also psychologically dangerous. Israel had defeated surrounding Arab armies so decisively that military superiority began to harden into assumption. Assumption hardened into doctrine. Doctrine hardened into conceptzia (entrenched military mindset). It became that the Arabs could not threaten Israel on its own terms, and that Israel’s qualitative edge, warning time, intelligence, and established defenses would be sufficient.

Then came October 1973.

The Bar-Lev Line embodied part of that mindset. It offered a static defensive architecture along the Suez Canal that was politically reassuring and superficially formidable. Ariel Sharon argued for something different. He wanted depth, maneuverability, and the ability to move forces rapidly rather than fastening them to a rigid defensive line. When war came, the static line became a liability. Maneuver helped restore Israel’s advantage.

The larger lesson was not that fortifications are useless. It was that Israel’s greatest military strength has rarely been its ability to sit behind walls. It has been its ability to move, improvise, surprise, and seize the initiative. Israel now faces a similar doctrinal crossroads.

Turkey looms increasingly large. A Sunni security architecture is beginning to consolidate around states whose interests may increasingly diverge from Israel’s. Iran may be weakened, but weakened powers do not necessarily become passive. Hezbollah will rebuild if permitted. Hamas will mutate if it survives. The Houthis are learning. Every enemy Israel has fought is studying what worked, what failed, and where Israeli vulnerabilities remain. Warfare is an evolutionary animal. Nothing punishes complacency faster.

As Israel’s elections heat up, some of the political back-patting may capture votes but not reality. Israel cannot emerge from this war merely congratulating itself for having fought it well. It must ask what assumptions made October 7 possible in the first place. The greatest doctrinal failure was fortress logic.

Israel placed trust in military technology

Israel built walls, fences, sensors, cameras, barriers, and increasingly sophisticated defensive systems. Together, they encouraged a strategic psychology in which Israel allowed its enemies to gather along its perimeter while trusting technology, intelligence, and deterrence to keep danger on the other side. The enemies adapted. They used proxies, tunnels, militias, rockets, drones, political warfare, and gray zone tactics to compress Israel from every direction while keeping escalation below thresholds that would provoke decisive action. The answer moving forward cannot simply be a taller wall, more tanks next to it, and more planes looking over it.

Israel has to recover maneuver as a strategic principle, not merely a battlefield technique. It has to create strategic options that allow it to fight on the edges rather than waiting for threats to accumulate along its borders.

That means sea power.

Israel’s geography is normally discussed as a weakness. It is narrow, small, and deprived of strategic depth on land. But its maritime geography offers something different. Israel sits at a hemispheric intersection of the eastern Mediterranean, the approaches to the Red Sea, and routes connecting Europe, Asia, and the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the naval threat is growing, from missiles and drones to mines, submarines, and hostile control of maritime choke points. The sea can become part of Israel’s missing strategic depth.

That requires more than simply buying ships. Israel should build a maritime force around the warfare that is coming, not the fleets of the last century. Unmanned surface vessels, underwater drones, autonomous reconnaissance, mine warfare, counter-mine capabilities, long-endurance systems and mother ship concepts should sit alongside submarines, missile ships and naval aviation.

The arrival of the Dakar submarine is important. But the submarine should be part of a wider architecture in which manned and unmanned systems operate together across enormous distances.

Israel does not need to choose between air power and sea power. The challenge is to build another dimension around it. Air power gives Israel reach. Sea power can give it persistence. And maneuver gives both depth.

The lessons of this war should not be that Israel is the region’s strongest military. That would be the beginning of another conceptzia. The lesson should be almost the opposite. Israel fought extraordinarily well because it adapted faster than its enemies, recovered the initiative, and refused to remain inside the assumptions that had failed on October 7. It was also helped by enemy mistakes and contingencies that Israel cannot assume will repeat themselves.

The next enemy may coordinate better. The next technology may neutralize an advantage Israel currently considers permanent. So the strategic question is not how Israel preserves the military superiority it demonstrated in this war. It is how Israel prevents that superiority from becoming the mythology that blinds and invites the next one.

That means adapting doctrine to a simple truth: fortresses invite siege, while maneuver creates uncertainty. Israel learned after 1967 how quickly victory can harden into complacency, and in 1973 how brutally an adapting enemy can exploit it. For a small country that cannot afford major mistakes, initiative is not merely an operational advantage. It is Israel’s most important doctrinal asset, and complacency its mortal vice.

The writer is the co-founder of Jewish National Initiative.

This post was originally published on here. 

Sara Netanyahu demanded NIS 5 million from a defendant accused of setting a fire near the prime minister’s Jerusalem home, after he accused her of defamation for saying those responsible intended to kill her family.

Eyal Giler is one of four defendants charged over fires set during a September 3, 2025 protest calling for the release of the hostages. Prosecutors allege that the defendants planned fires at six locations near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood.

Five recycling bins were ultimately set alight. The fires allegedly damaged vegetation and other property, nearly destroyed a vehicle and endangered residents of a nearby building, who were evacuated.

Prosecutors described the plan in the indictment as creating a “ring of fire.” They did not, however, allege that the defendants intended to kill Netanyahu or members of his family.

That distinction is at the center of the dispute between Giler and Sara Netanyahu.

In an August 31 interview with Channel 14, Netanyahu described the incident as “a circle of fire around our house.”

“So everyone would perhaps choke and die,” she said. “The intention was really to kill.”

Giler demanded Netanyahu withdraw remarks, apologize

Giler subsequently sent Netanyahu a pre-suit warning demanding that she withdraw the remarks, apologize and pay him NIS 100,000. His lawyers threatened to file a defamation suit seeking at least NIS 1 million if she refused.

Netanyahu rejected those demands Thursday and issued a counter-demand through her attorney, Uriel Nizri.

Nizri denied that her remarks were defamatory and accused Giler of attempting to turn “the victim into the accuser.” He argued that Netanyahu had expressed her understanding of the incident and described the danger she felt to herself and her family.

Netanyahu would not apologize, withdraw her remarks or pay Giler “a single shekel,” Nizri said. He argued that Giler’s warning letter itself gave her grounds for a defamation claim and demanded NIS 5 million on her behalf.

Nizri said no lawsuit would be filed if Giler paid that amount. He also said Netanyahu intended to bring a civil claim based on the criminal proceedings if Giler is convicted.

Suspect charged with lighting recycling bin ablaze

Giler is specifically accused of pouring flammable liquid into a recycling bin, adding fuel-soaked material and setting it alight. The resulting fire allegedly damaged a stone wall and a canopy.

The indictment charges the defendants with offenses including arson, malicious damage to property, damage to a vehicle and obstruction of justice. 

The exchange is the third publicly reported legal dispute arising from Netanyahu’s Channel 14 interview. Democrats chairman Yair Golan and Amir Sadeh, a defendant in the separate flare-firing case, previously challenged other remarks made during the broadcast.

This post was originally published on here. 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced a hate crime indictment against 51-year-old Raul Morales on Tuesday, following an investigation into a pair of unprovoked daytime stabbings on the Upper West Side.

According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the attacks took place in broad daylight on July 23, near synagogues. Prosecutors stated that Morales first approached a 57-year-old man from behind, near West 84th Street and Central Park West, stabbing him in the back with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and other expressions.

Minutes later, near a second synagogue close to West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Morales allegedly attacked a 50-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah, stabbing him in the chest with a screwdriver.

Both victims survived the assaults after being rushed to the hospital, with the first victim requiring emergency surgery to remove a knife still lodged in his back. Responding police officers tracked Morales to his nearby apartment, where he eventually surrendered. Subsequent search warrants executed on his phone uncovered text messages containing explicit antisemitic sentiments, reinforcing the bias motivation behind the assaults.

“Raul Morales was allegedly motivated by antisemitism when he attacked two New Yorkers in broad daylight near two Upper West Side synagogues,” Bragg said in a statement.

“Since the initial arrest, my office has continued to thoroughly investigate this matter and has uncovered additional evidence alleging the defendant specifically harbors antisemitic views. This case is a prime example of how hate crimes make all of us less safe.”

“As alleged, Raul Morales violently assaulted two innocent New Yorkers for no other reason than his belief they were Jewish,” New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

Tisch: NYPD ‘responded quickly,’ will continue to fight ‘hate crimes of any kind’

“The members of the NYPD responded quickly, identified the suspect, and took him into custody that same afternoon. That is what the NYPD has done, and will continue to do, in response to antisemitic hate crimes and hate crimes of any kind,” she added.

Morales faces a multi-count indictment, including charges of attempted murder in the second degree as a hate crime; assault in the first degree as a hate crime; attempted assault in the first degree as a hate crime; and assault in the second degree as a hate crime.

This post was originally published on here. 

The security map exposes what diplomacy obscures: across much of it, European and Israeli interests align more closely than either does with Washington. Politically, Washington looks closer; geographically, militarily, and industrially, Europe does.

For generations, Europe and Israel anchored their security in the United States until alliance became dependence: Europe outsourced critical protection; Israel embedded American finance, supply, and technology in its force structure. 

The 2026 US National Defense Strategy codifies the divergence, leaving Europe to lead against threats Washington deems less severe for itself as US power concentrates on homeland defense and the Indo-Pacific. Washington is organizing for itself; Europe and Israel must do the same.

America can choose its theaters; Europe and Israel cannot. Geography fixes theirs: from the Arctic and Baltic through the Mediterranean and North Africa to the Levant, the Red Sea and the routes to Asia.

This geography forms one security system in which missiles and drones, maritime coercion, trade and cable disruption, energy and cyber vulnerability, Russian power, Iranian projection, and Turkish leverage transcend the nominal divide between European and Middle Eastern security. Sovereignty has one test: What stops when an external power says no?

Greenland and Cyprus expose the same flaw at opposite ends of this system. Denmark and Greenland rejected US demands to acquire Greenland, accelerating European military activity in the Arctic. 

In Cyprus, Turkey sits inside NATO and the Republic of Cyprus outside it; Turkish coercion against Greece, Cyprus, or Israel places the coercer inside NATO’s consensus mechanism.

That is the Veto Map: every foreign gate capable of halting a sovereign function.

A friendly veto remains a veto.

Europe depends on American protection; Israel on American permission through licenses, components, replenishment, and export approvals. Washington’s February 2026 arms transfer strategy codifies it: arms transfers advance US foreign policy; foreign demand expands US industrial capacity.

The 2016 memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel must not become the model for its successor. By tying US financing to US goods and services and phasing out Israel’s domestic procurement allowance by 2028, it subsidized capability while embedding donor control. 

Aid that dictates expenditure is donor industrial policy inside the recipient’s defense economy.

The MOU shaped the force structure and supply chains inherited by future Israeli governments, constraining industrial choice when Washington and Jerusalem diverge. Its expiry must unwind, not renew, that dependency. After 2028, the question is not what Washington offers but how much dependency Israel will buy with it.

Europe has the same deficit: defense spending cannot buy strategic autonomy while critical functions remain externally controlled. Spending measures resources; sovereignty measures control.

Permission Exposure measures how much sovereign capability depends on another state for production, modification, integration, replenishment, transfer, or operation. Sovereignty After Purchase asks who still decides after delivery.

Strategies and sovereignty 

Germany’s Arrow 3 and Finland’s David’s Sling capture the contradiction: Israeli systems underpin European security while American approval remains embedded in their export architecture. 

SAFE, the EU’s joint procurement instrument, curbs foreign dependence yet permits substantial external content and partner participation as Turkey seeks deeper access, risking Turkish vetoes in place of American ones.

A weapon that cannot be adapted, replenished, or transferred without foreign permission is possessed, not sovereign. Europe and Israel need substitutability, not autarky: irreplaceable components, sole sourcing, and inescapable licenses create leverage. Foreign content creates jurisdiction that can become a veto.

India exemplifies the alternative: deep partnership with Washington without making it indispensable to production, sustainment, or political choice.

Europe needs Israel’s wartime endurance independent of Washington and its combat-proven capabilities in missile defense, intelligence, unmanned systems, electronic warfare, and integration; Israel needs Europe’s industrial scale, aerospace and naval depth, strategic transport, space infrastructure, finance, and continental geography.

Israel has a direct security interest in a Europe able to defend itself without America and defy Washington when necessary, even when that means opposing Israel. 

Diplomatic convenience is not a strategic interest. A sovereign Europe gives Israel alternative suppliers, routes, industrial depth and a second Western power center, reducing the cost of an American refusal.

Europe faces three forms of exposure: Russian territorial aggression, Turkish obstruction inside NATO, and American indispensability embedded in permissions, supply chains, and infrastructure. Fragmentation gives Moscow time, Ankara leverage, and Washington jurisdiction over sovereign decisions. 

When interests diverge, and Washington preserves a dependency, veto, or Turkish lever that Europe or Israel must dismantle, deference becomes a security risk.

Article 42(7) of the Lisbon Treaty supplies Lisbon 2.0’s legal core: if an EU member suffers armed aggression on its territory, the others owe it aid and assistance by all means in their power. Turkey is not an EU member and cannot condition that obligation. 

Lisbon 2.0 operationalizes it through sovereign European capacity and parallel commitments with non-EU partners. NATO remains Europe’s principal military instrument against Russia, but no longer the monopoly through which European security is organized. When coercion comes from within, consensus becomes constraint.

Washington and Ankara exploit different asymmetries: Washington converts allied dependence into leverage; Turkey converts membership into leverage. Greenland showed that even an alliance does not preclude territorial pressure when American interests diverge. 

Ankara’s strategic arbitrage keeps it Western enough to preserve protection and access, yet revisionist enough to monetize its indispensability while easing Russian isolation and expanding Iran’s latitude. The Mecca pact institutionalizes that Double Bind, keeping Turkey inside NATO while adding a second defense framework with Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan. 

It is neither an Islamic NATO nor a mirror of Lisbon 2.0: Riyadh imported dependencies; Lisbon 2.0 is built to remove them.

In Athens, former Hellenic Army lieutenant colonel Savvas Kalenteridis draws the corresponding conclusion: Greece must organize around states with shared interests or threats, placing Cyprus and Israel at the core.

The architecture already exists in law, procurement, force structure, and geography; declaration lags reality. Israel, though outside the EU mutual assistance obligation, belongs inside Lisbon 2.0 because Europe’s southeastern security perimeter extends beyond the Union and rests on Israeli power and strategic position. 

Israel is not an adjunct but Lisbon 2.0’s principal non-EU military pillar on that flank.

From Greenland and the High North to Israel and the Red Sea, every European defense euro and every Israeli defense shekel must be measured by the veto point it removes.

The writer is founder and principal of Line of State, a strategic practice working with governments, institutions, and decision-makers on strategy, risk, access, and security decisions in high-stakes environments.

This post was originally published on here. 

Satellite imagery has picked up construction activity at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday.

According to Grossi, the IAEA has not yet inspected the fortified underground site, which sits just south of Tehran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment plant.

Grossi’s comments follow a CNN report earlier on Thursday, which published images allegedly showing the construction activity at the tunnel complex.

The report cited analysts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank, who said the activity at the site “has shifted from active excavation toward probably internal construction and continued exterior reinforcement.” 

The CSIS analysts note that, according ot the imagery, the site “is not yet capable of enrichment work, if that is the intended purpose.”

Trump threatens to bomb site as US develops new weapon for task

On Friday, US President Donald Trump threatened that he may soon order strikes against the site, with the US military currently developing a new bunker-buster munition that could potentially target more deeply buried facilities.

CNN reported that the US awarded a prototype contract for the new munition, which would succeed the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), in September 2025.

Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

This year, Rosh Hashanah begins on September 11, the day that America was forever changed by terror attacks in New York City and elsewhere.

Rosh Hashanah is a holiday of renewal, the beginning of an entirely new page in the Jewish people’s story. Yet this year, as the holiday coincides with one of the darkest moments in America’s history, Rosh Hashanah also offers us a rare opportunity to grapple not just with new starts, but also with trauma and resilience.

I have the privilege at Ohel, and often the heartbreak, of walking alongside individuals, families, and communities navigating the aftermath of trauma. Together with our dedicated colleagues, highly trained professionals specializing in trauma, we witnessed its immense toll after 9/11 and again after Hurricane Sandy. 

Then, entire neighborhoods rebuilt their homes as they struggled to rebuild their sense of stability and safety.

Nearly three years after the October 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel, survivors, hostages’ families, soldiers, and entire communities continue to carry psychological wounds that are invisible to others – while they carry on with their lives. 

Efrat Atun, CEO of Safeheart, even coined a new term: “the first and a half degree victim.” This type of victim refers to a boyfriend or girlfriend of those murdered on October 7.

These “first and a half” victims are not legally entitled to survivors’ mental health services, and so these individuals often must work harder to access resources to which they should be entitled.

Each tragedy is different. But the psychology of recovery is not.

Across each of these experiences, we recognize a similar pattern. Some of the questions people grapple with after disaster strikes are, “When will things return to normal?” “Can things return to normal?”

The truth is that there is no easy return to normal.

Following 9/11, Lower Manhattan was rebuilt. After Hurricane Sandy, floodwaters receded. In the wake of October 7, schools reopened. Businesses recovered. Lives moved forward. Yet so many did not return to being the same people they were before tragedy entered their lives. 

Trauma can change us in a variety of ways. Part of recovery is owning that reality and learning how to cope and live well within it.

Too often, we may believe that healing is a matter of time. We assume that if enough months or years pass, grief will fade and life will somehow become what it once was.

Dr. Edith Eger, a post-traumatic stress expert, Holocaust survivor, and renowned psychologist, reminded us in her National Jewish Book Award-winning memoir, The Choice: “Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with the time.”

Recovery is not passive. It is not waiting for pain to dissipate, hoping enough time will make us whole again. It is not pretending that life is what it once was. Recovery is the intentional work of building resilience, strengthening relationships, accepting support, finding meaning, and developing emotional tools to work within a reality we never would have chosen.

After a tragedy, we are mobilized to rebuild what we can see. We clear debris. We repair buildings. We restore power. We raise money. These efforts are essential, but they are only the beginning.

As we observe at Ohel, the more difficult reconstruction happens internally and emotionally. That work occurs in families learning to enjoy life again, in children slowly regaining a sense of security, in communities choosing connection over isolation. 

It manifests as the courage to ask for help and the willingness to offer it.

This important work enables us to help individuals in communities across the US, in Israel, and other countries through Ohel’s Zachter Family National Trauma Center and Kestenbaum Family International Children’s Services.

Insurance for our souls

Rosh Hashanah – and its placement this year on September 11 – challenges us to examine our lives and to think about how we can grow and prepare ourselves for the year ahead and the future. On Rosh Hashanah, we ask to be reinscribed in the Book of Life. 

At the same time, we acknowledge all the ways human beings can encounter disaster and mortality. In the holiday’s liturgy, we ask, “Who by water and who by fire; who by the sword… who by hunger and who by thirst; who by earthquake and who by pestilence,” and so on.

From the beginning of Jewish history, we have understood that tragedy can find us anywhere. We cannot know how much time we have or what we may encounter along the way. But while we cannot insure ourselves against tragedy, we can invest in our ability to meet what comes.

We insure our homes against fire. We insure our cars against accidents. We protect our businesses, savings, and possessions because we understand that life is unpredictable.

But what policy have we taken out on our souls?

A soul policy is not something we purchase after a disaster. It is built over time. It is found in the relationships we nurture before they are tested, the communities we strengthen before they are needed, the stigma we remove around mental health, the willingness to seek help without shame, and the resilience we cultivate through faith, purpose, compassion, and connection.

None of us can prevent the next tragedy. History has taught us that with painful consistency.

Twenty-five years after September 11, a tragedy that continues to shock us, we can embrace this truth: recovery is not about returning to the lives we once had. It is about having the tools, support, and the courage to build meaningful lives in the ones we have now.

This Rosh Hashanah, as we take stock of the year that has passed and prepare for the one ahead, one of the most valuable assets we can invest in is protecting and strengthening our soul, even our reincarnated one.

The writer is the CEO of Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services.

This post was originally published on here.