All News (Page 25)

Former secretary of state Antony Blinken outright denied on Wednesday that he told Qatar to wait to broker a deal between Hamas and Israel, as was attributed to him in a Tuesday Haaretz article.

“For the record, this is false. Complete fiction,” he wrote in a post on X/Twitter with a screenshot of his quote. 

For the record, this is false. Complete fiction. https://t.co/dnQSLClKGt

— Antony Blinken (@ABlinken) September 9, 2026

Haaretz reported on Tuesday that UAE President Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel days before the October 7 massacre. 

Since then, Netanyahu has denied the report and has threatened to sue the left-leaning Israeli daily. 

‘Haaretz’ claims Blinken told Qatar to wait on deal between Israel, Hamas

Later in the report, Haaretz claimed that Blinken spoke with Qatari Emir Sheik Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani on the evening of October 7. The Qatari emir reportedly told Blinken that he had offered to negotiate a quick deal. 

“There are hundreds of hostages in Gaza, and among them, in my estimation, dozens of civilians. They need to be released now. I offered the Israelis to mediate a quick deal for their release, but they are not interested,” said the emir.

The article says Blinken responded, “Let’s wait,” and added, “I will speak with Netanyahu personally.”

The former secretary of state also reportedly told the Qatari emir he would travel to Israel within three days of the conversation.

“Right now, the situation is complex,” Blinken said, as quoted by Haaretz. “Israel is still under attack, and there’s no one to talk to. We will wait three days.”

Notably, the UAE did warn senior US and Israeli officials that Israeli actions and rhetoric were “putting regional stability at risk” in the period leading up to the October 7 massacre.

Also on Wednesday, two sources familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post that the Biden administration was unaware of any specific warning from the UAE before October 7 that Hamas was planning a major terror attack. 

Amichai Stein and Shir Perets contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he will grant a $5,000 dividend to all American citizens if the Republican Party wins both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

Trump said he would do so because of the US’s “tremendous strength and success economically,” noting that the dividend would apply to all US adults.

.@POTUS announces the TRUMP DIVIDEND: If Republicans win both the House and the Senate, because of our tremendous economic success, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States for $5,000 pic.twitter.com/s4orJJGx9d

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 10, 2026

He further noted that the dividend “must be spent in the United States of America,” saying he doesn’t want it spent in “Canada or Germany.” 

The US president made his comments while speaking at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, where he also said that he is considering renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.”

“I should get something out of it,” he said. “I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

Multiple American military aircraft suffered damage in strikes overnight on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, CBS reporter Jennifer Jacobs said on Wednesday on X/twitter.

One A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog, was struck and left with a missing wing, while roughly eight F-15s sustained light damage and were placed back into service, she added.

News: Multiple American military aircraft suffered damage in strikes overnight on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, sources told @JimLaPorta and me. One A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog, was struck and left with a missing wing. Roughly eight F-15s sustained light damage…

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 10, 2026

This is a developing story. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Five major Jewish organizations launched a “Jewish Students’ Bill of Rights” on Wednesday, calling on schools across North America to adopt new standards for combating antisemitism and protecting Jewish students.

The initiative was released by Jewish Federations of North America, the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and StandWithUs as students return to school following years of elevated antisemitism.

It calls on schools and districts to take six steps, including training educators to recognize antisemitism, establishing clear systems for reporting incidents, and ensuring that teaching about Jews, the Holocaust, antisemitism, and Israel is accurate.

The document also calls on schools to protect students who express their Jewish identity or connection to Israel and to ensure that teachers present disputed political issues in a balanced manner rather than using classrooms to promote a particular political position.

The initiative comes as antisemitic incidents in US K-12 schools have remained stubbornly high even while the overall number of incidents declined.

The ADL’s 2025 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 825 incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools, compared with 860 the previous year. Overall, the ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2025, down 33% from 9,354 in 2024.

According to the ADL, many incidents in schools involved peer-to-peer behavior, including antisemitic harassment, bullying and students drawing or displaying swastikas.

‘No child should have to choose’

“No child should have to choose between their education and their identity,” Jewish Federations of North America President and CEO Eric Fingerhut said.

“We are asking them to give Jewish students the same seriousness and the same protection that every other student in that building already receives,” he said. “The Jewish Students’ Bill of Rights is a crucial roadmap of how to do that.”

The six-point plan calls for administrators and staff to be trained to recognize contemporary forms of antisemitism and for schools to maintain transparent procedures for reporting and responding to incidents.

Schools should also ensure that material about Jewish culture, Jewish history, the Holocaust, antisemitism and Israel is accurate and representative, according to the document.

The groups called on schools to excuse absences for Jewish religious observances and avoid scheduling major school activities on widely observed Jewish holidays.

Another provision focuses on students’ ability to express their Jewish identity without being bullied or pressured to distance themselves from Israel.

The document also calls for educators to present contested subjects in a balanced manner.

“When a school does not know how to identify or respond to antisemitism, the lesson for every Jewish student in that building is that they do not belong,” ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said.

“These six standards will set the textbook for what to do,” he added.

Jewish students facing pressure

AJC CEO Ted Deutch said schools should provide an environment in which students can participate without fear of harassment or exclusion.

“This Bill of Rights outlines common-sense principles that will help ensure that Jewish students, like all students, are able to safely, fully, and proudly participate in school life,” Deutch said.

Conference of Presidents CEO William Daroff said the beginning of the school year had become a source of anxiety for some Jewish students following incidents of harassment and bullying.

“For too many Jewish students, recent years have brought something very different: harassment, bullying, and anxiety in the classroom,” he said.

StandWithUs co-founder and CEO Roz Rothstein said Jewish children were too often placed in the position of having to explain Judaism, Israel, and antisemitism to their classmates and teachers.

“Far too many Jewish students carry the weight of educating others and defending their community against bias and bigotry in K-12 schools,” Rothstein said.

“It is time for the adults in the room, educators and administrators, to meet this moment with courage and moral clarity.”

This post was originally published on here. 

For a few hours on Monday, it looked as though Israeli junior Dan Brand was about to write the same comeback story he had produced one day earlier at the US Open.

Instead, his second-round singles match became a heartbreaking lesson in just how quickly the fortunes of a young tennis player can change, and how much support can mean when they do.

Facing fellow 17-year-old American Andy Johnson, the tournament’s No. 10 seed and the world’s No. 12 junior, Brand again dropped the opening set before fighting his way back. But this time, just as he appeared to have seized control, severe cramping throughout his body brought his singles run to an abrupt end.

Brand lost the first set 6-2 in 28 minutes, going down 2-0 before beginning to find his rhythm in the second. He raised the intensity of his play, became more aggressive and began dictating the pace, winning four consecutive games to take a 4-2 lead before closing out the set 6-3.

It was almost a carbon copy of Sunday’s first-round match, when Brand had also quickly dropped the opening set before battling back to win the next two.

With the momentum and a partisan crowd firmly on his side, Brand appeared poised to mount another comeback.

But Johnson held serve to open the third set and then broke Brand for a 2-0 lead. With Brand trailing 2-0 and facing a 40-30 deficit, he suddenly clutched his right elbow and went to his corner to towel off. He returned to serve underhanded, lost the final point of the game and fell behind 3-0.

Brand then called for a three-minute medical timeout. A trainer evaluated him, had him lie down on the court, and appeared to treat his calf.

Brand would later explain that he was experiencing cramping throughout his body rather than dealing with an injury. He said he had experienced similar cramping before.

When he returned, he managed only two points over the next three games, serving some points underhanded, as Johnson closed out the decisive third set 6-0.

Jewish fans rally around Israeli junior

Yet even as the singles match slipped away, the support around Brand only grew louder.

The enthusiastic, heavily pro-Brand crowd was visibly disappointed and concerned for the young Israeli. Many remained afterward, waiting to take even more photographs and collect more autographs than they had following Sunday’s match.

A number of spectators were visibly Jewish, wearing yarmulkes and skirts. Some had read about Brand in the Jerusalem Post, while others had simply heard his name and “Israel” announced on the tournament schedule and made their way to Court 6 for the fourth match of the day.

Eli Shaer of Great Neck, Long Island, was there with his two children, nieces and nephews, and was among those cheering Brand on.

“He is incredible,” Shaer said after Brand’s second-set comeback. “He is very strong offensively, and he shows Jewish pride.”

Shaer was also struck by the size of the crowd for a junior match.

“It is over 50% full, and they are all here for Dan,” he said.

Martin Friedman of Staten Island, New York, attended with three friends, drawn to the match by a sense of Jewish pride.

“From far away, you smell family on the side court,” Friedman said. “You want to support our nation and our brethren, we are one big happy family.”

Brand faces one of world’s top juniors

Brand was facing a formidable opponent. Johnson, ranked No. 12 in the world among juniors, has already competed as a professional and made history in February when he became the youngest player to win an ITF World Tennis Tour men’s singles title since Carlos Alcaraz did so in July 2019. Johnson won the M15 Sunrise, Florida tournament at 16 years and 176 days.

The statistics reflected a competitive match despite the difficult ending. Both players reached serves of 119 mph, with Johnson averaging 94 mph and Brand 91 mph. Neither player recorded an ace. Brand finished with 39 unforced errors to Johnson’s 20.

For Brand, however, there was little time to dwell on the loss.

Brand rebounds with US Open doubles victory

After resting and rehydrating, he returned to the court Tuesday for the doubles competition, teaming with 18-year-old Austrian Thilo Behrman, the world’s No. 6 junior in both singles and doubles. The pair entered the tournament as the No. 5 seed and faced Connor Doig of the Republic of South Africa and Dimitar Kisimov of Bulgaria in the opening round.

This time, Brand walked away with a victory.

Brand and Behrman defeated Doig and Kisimov 6-3, 6-3 in just over an hour, advancing to the round of 16.

Watching from the coach’s box was Robert Raguz, who has been coaching Brand and a cohort of promising international juniors as part of the Grand Slam Player Development program. Raguz has been impressed by the Israeli’s ability to read and adjust to his opponents.

“He is very good at adapting to find his opponent’s weakness, and he has a high tennis IQ,” Raguz said.

The coach believes Brand’s next steps are to develop greater intensity and find more opportunities to train against high-level practice partners who can push him.

For Brand, the doubles victory offered an immediate opportunity to put Monday’s disappointment behind him – while continuing to enjoy an experience he clearly does not want to end.

“The experience here is amazing, the atmosphere is crazy, there are a lot of people, I like it!” Brand said.

He has particularly enjoyed seeing Jewish and Israeli fans filling the stands and cheering him on.

And with Behrman, Brand believes he has found a doubles partner with whom he can continue building something special.

“We are a good team together and hope to continue tomorrow,” Brand said.

The next challenge will come against Yannik Alvarez of Puerto Rico and Ryan Cozad of the United States in the round of 16.

After a painful singles exit, Brand has already shown that he is ready to get back on the court and keep playing.

This post was originally published on here. 

Argentina’s government announced on Monday that it will file a criminal complaint against Navitas Petroleum, an Israeli oil company, for operating in the Falklands.

The announcement came from Argentine President Javier Milei’s office and included complaints against several petroleum companies operating in the area.

According to the announcement, Navitas has been operating under the license of the United Kingdom’s “illegitimate government,” with the complaint aiming to “protect natural resources and safeguard the sovereignty of the Argentine Republic over the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and the corresponding maritime and insular spaces, as they are an integral part of the national territory.”

The status of the Falkland Islands is disputed between Argentina and the UK, with both claiming sovereignty over the territory.

The complaint follows a January report by N12 News that Argentina reportedly delayed moving its embassy to Jerusalem because of bilateral tensions over Navitas’s plans to drill oil from a field near the Falkland Islands.

Argentina: Navitas’s plan to drill ‘unilateral and illegitimate’

The Argentine Foreign Ministry said in December that Navitas, along with partner British company Rockhopper Exploration, had not obtained the proper permits and that their plans were “unilateral and illegitimate.”

The ministry warned of “potentially irreversible future consequences” if the plan proceeds, with both companies banned from drilling in Argentina for drilling without a permit.

Argentine sources told N12 at the time that they considered the plan to be “the theft of a natural resource that belongs to them.”

Mathilda Heller contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

British members of a Somaliland-Israel friendship movement criticized the UK government’s policies toward Israel and said they had urged their community not to vote for the governing party, according to a statement sent to The Jerusalem Post.

The statement, issued under the name of the Somaliland-Israel Friendship & Abrahamic Movement’s UK branch, said its British members wished to “make our position clear.”

“We strongly criticize the current policies of this UK government towards Israel,” the statement read. “These policies do not represent the will of the British people living in the UK.”

The group described Israel and the United Kingdom as “inseparable brothers,” citing a relationship built on history, shared values, democracy, and efforts to promote peace and stability in the Middle East.

The statement further accused the current UK government of abandoning the relationship and adopting what it called an “outdated, double-standard policy.”

“Therefore, we as British-Somalilanders have suggested to our community not to vote for this party that is currently in power, because it has opposed Israel and betrayed the true friendship between our two nations,” the statement said.

“We stand with Israel. Yesterday, today, and forever,” it added.

The statement was signed by Eng. Ahmed Abdillahi Dirie.

UK-Israel relations strained over settlement sanctions

The statement comes amid heightened tensions between Israel and the United Kingdom following new British measures targeting Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced on Tuesday an import ban on goods from what Britain considers illegal settlements in the West Bank, as well as sanctions targeting certain individuals and businesses providing services connected to settlement expansion.

Miliband said during his announcement that he was “unwavering in [his] support for the state of Israel,” while maintaining his support for a Palestinian state.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the measures in parliament on Wednesday, calling the decision an example of British “leadership on the world stage.”

Miliband also defended the sanctions on Wednesday, saying he was “proud” of the decision because “it was the right thing to do.”

Israel responds to UK measures

In response to the British measures, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced that Israel would close the UK’s consulate in east Jerusalem and expel British representatives from the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Kiryat Gat.

Israel’s countermeasures also included ending British training of Palestinian Authority security forces in Ramallah and banning 12 British elected representatives and other British nationals from entering Israel.

Sa’ar said that Israel had “nothing against the British people” and maintained that Israel had many friends in Britain while sharply criticizing the policies of the current British government.

The Somaliland-Israel relationship has also expanded in recent months. Somaliland opened its embassy in Jerusalem in June during President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi’s first official visit to Israel following the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Somaliland last year.

This post was originally published on here. 

A new initiative to combat antisemitism was launched on Wednesday by Israeli United Nations Ambassador Danny Danon ahead of the upcoming UN secretary-general election.

“The words ‘Never Again’ were not meant to be a slogan,” said Danon. “They were meant to be a commitment. Words, declarations, and statements are not enough to fight the rising antisemitism on the streets, in synagogues, in universities, and even here at the United Nations.”

The move, which comes as antisemitism rises around the world, aims to explore ways to turn statements and condemnations into coordinated international action.

The initiative involved the identification of emerging antisemitic threats, as well as the development of tools and policies to combat the threats. Participating countries will coordinate diplomatic efforts to achieve these goals.

“It is time for action,” Danon declared. “We thank the countries who have already committed to joining us on this important mission. This mission is not the responsibility of Israel and the Jewish people alone. It is the responsibility of the entire international community.”

Danon pushes for prioritization of fight against antisemitism

Danon called for the prioritization of the fight against antisemitism when the international body chooses its next secretary-general, further requesting that more countries join the initiative.

US Ambassador to the UN Jeff Bartos also spoke at the initiative’s announcement event, saying the world is “facing a global pandemic of antisemitism.”

“That is irrefutable,” he emphasized. “Here at the United Nations, special rapporteurs who represent this organization are staining its reputation, its dignity, and discrediting the important work of other UN workers”.

Also speaking at the event, EU Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism Katharina von Schnurbein described the fact that many Jews feel the need to hide their identities as Jews as “fully unacceptable.”

“There can be no excuse for antisemitism,” she said. “It cannot be tolerated anytime or any place.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Palestinian officials in Ramallah described Britain’s decision to ban dealings with Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a “significant political achievement,” particularly in light of growing incidents of violence by settlers against Palestinians recently. 

They emphasized that the move represents an important step toward protecting the two-state solution and is widely regarded as a setback for far-right policies and “radical elements within the Israeli government.” 

A senior Fatah official hailed Britain’s move as “an excellent and outstanding step,” calling it “a victory for those working for peace and for the two-state solution.” 

The official pointed out that the UK, as a major world power and the country behind the Balfour Declaration, is now sending a strong message by taking this position. “This shows Britain’s understanding of international relations and its support for Palestinian statehood,” he told The Jerusalem Post. 

“The decision tells Israel that it cannot expect to enjoy security or normal ties with other countries while it continues settlement expansion and aggressive actions and policies against Palestinians,” he said.

‘World rejects Israeli settlement policies’

He added that the move gives Palestinians hope, demonstrating that the “world rejects Israeli settlement policies and stands with Palestinians’ rights.”

Another Palestinian Authority official told the Post that “It affirms that the world cannot accept the continued Israeli occupation and settlement activity, which violate international law.” 

Other Palestinians added that “this is a meaningful action to protect the two-state solution,” noting they are pleased with any initiative that restricts settlement activities. 

A former official from the PA foreign affairs ministry told the Post that Palestinians have urged other countries to follow Britain’s example.

A statement issued by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the PA “appreciates the determination of these countries to impose restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and to support the adoption of similar measures at the European level.” 

The statement considered it an “important practical step,” and called on the entire international community to expedite the translation of these positions into binding measures, including imposing sanctions on extremist settlers and those supporting them.”

It also called to “immediately halt settlement activities, cancel the E1 plan, and refrain from all measures aimed at annexing Palestinian land or displacing its residents.”

Chairman of the Palestinian National Council Rawhi Fattouh welcomed the French and British decisions to ban products from Israeli settlements, describing them as “important political and legal measures that strengthen the international stance rejecting annexation and the seizure of land by force.” 

He stated that confronting settlement activity is not merely a political choice but an ‘international responsibility’. He said that protecting the two-state solution begins with halting settlement expansion, holding accountable those who undermine it, and isolating the “apartheid government.”

Fattouh emphasized that international positions must go beyond political condemnation to include binding legal, diplomatic, and economic measures, such as a comprehensive ban on settlement products entering markets, ending all commercial or investment dealings with settlements, and restricting entities and companies that finance or support settlement activity.

He also called on European countries and Canada to adopt a clear international framework to isolate settlements, cut off funding sources, and end any form of political or economic protection that enables their continuation.

This post was originally published on here. 

Several areas in Sirik, southern Iran, were hit by projectiles on Wednesday, Iranian state media reported.

Further details regarding the strikes, including the extent of the damage or potential casualties, were not immediately available.

This is a developing story. 

This post was originally published on here. 

It’s your kid’s birthday party. There are snacks, cake, and games. The children are playing, the music is on, and you’re just waiting for the professional entertainment to show up.

A car outside skids to a stop. The driver gets out, walks up the stairs, and rings the doorbell. It’s Noa Kirel. She’s holding a samurai sword covered in blood, her white tank top is stained in red, and her face is smeared with crimson gore.

This is the 2026 Israeli version of the drunk clown scene from the cult comedy classic Uncle Buck.

In that 1989 film, Buck confronts Puter the Clown, a hungover, sleazy character who shows up to entertain eight-year-old Macaulay Culkin’s birthday party (remember the size of his birthday breakfast pancakes?!).

The clown stumbles around, stinking of alcohol, and has a mouth on him saltier than a sailor. (How I was able to watch this as a kid is shocking, but more on that later.)

The contrast between Uncle Buck and the clown in that scene is stark. Buck himself is no saint – or “Mother Cabrini,” as the clown snidely puts it. Throughout the film, Buck drinks, smokes, swears, and lives a messy adult life.

But Buck never chose to be around kids. He’s an uncle thrust into a temporary babysitting role, fully aware that his lifestyle doesn’t belong in a child’s world.

The clown, on the other hand, who built a career marketing joy to little kids, arrives fresh off an all-night bachelorette party, reeking of alcohol and offering adult jokes to a backyard full of eight-year-olds. He thinks he can bring his adult baggage straight into their safe space and hide behind a red nose.

Noa Kirel and the limits of parental controls

Watching the fallout from Kirel’s gruesome new music video for “Love Song,” it is clear the Israeli entertainment industry has just given us our own version of that clown.

I remember watching Uncle Buck for the first time at a friend’s house, in a home far stricter than the norm. I must have been under 10. The movie definitely wasn’t appropriate for us – that clown scene alone proves it – but we watched it anyway. There were fewer filters back then, and a lot of adult culture leaked through the cracks.

Today, we are told that digital guardrails are stronger. We have Internet filters and parental controls. But in the big picture, tech solutions cannot fix a cultural failure. They do nothing to stop the bleeding.

The digital filter is our safe room. Inside, we’re safe, but it doesn’t stop the dangerous environment from existing outside. The moment the child steps outside, they’ll encounter it. It’s on the playground, it’s in the rumors, it’s on everyone’s minds.

A filter might block a graphic video, but it cannot stop an entire childhood culture from being permanently altered. And after three years of war, more blood and gore from Kirel is the last thing our children need.

When adult art collides with a young audience

For years, Israeli parents have participated in a bizarre cultural compromise. We pretend our biggest pop stars can exist in two parallel universes. By day, they are the wholesome, candy-coated royalty of Festigal; by night, they release hyper-violent music videos dripping in cinematic blood.

We have looked the other way for a long time, but “Love Song” is the straw that broke the camel’s back. There is a vast difference between an artist being standardly “provocative” and an artist releasing a hyper-violent, Tarantino-esque bloodbath dripping in stabbings and gore.

Writing in The Jerusalem Post, music critic Dudi Patimer called parents’ outrage “exaggerated.” He argued that because horror movies are available at the click of a button, parents should simply accept Kirel’s dark artistic evolution. He noted that she is a 25-year-old independent creator and “has earned the right to evolve.”

To be fair, Kirel has never claimed to be a pure children’s entertainer. She isn’t Yuval Hamevulbal or Michal Haktana. We don’t expect her to sing songs about alphabet blocks or wear bright overalls.

But she has spent over a decade intentionally cultivating a massive, profitable audience of impressionable school-aged children. She cannot build an entire empire, brand, and fortune on the backs of families who buy her Festigal merchandise, only to retroactively pretend she is just a detached, avant-garde adult artist who owes them nothing.

Like the drunk clown, she explicitly chose a path that invites children into her tent; she doesn’t get to act shocked when parents expect her to keep the space safe.

If Kirel has grown up, move her to the adults’ table

If she has grown up, as Patimer said, then sit her at the adults’ table permanently.

If a performer wants to create art that requires an 18+ trigger warning, that is their creative right. But you don’t get to bring adult themes into the elementary school ecosystem and expect parents to keep paying for the tickets.

If the clown shows up to the party looking like this, it’s time to pull an Uncle Buck: Block the door and draw your fist back.

The writer is the editor of the Arts & Entertainment page.

This post was originally published on here. 

The 42nd Haifa International Film Festival, which will run from September 26 to October 3, has unveiled the highlights of its international program.

It features much-anticipated new films by leading directors, including Danny Boyle, Nanni Moretti, François Ozon, Lukas Dhont, Olivier Assayas, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Andrey Zvyagintsev.

The festival’s main international competition, Carmel, will open with Boyle’s Ink, which opened this year’s Venice Film Festival.

The film tells the story of legendary Sun editor Larry Lamb and publisher Rupert Murdoch as they transformed the struggling British tabloid in the late 1960s.

The film comes to Haifa directly from the Venice competition

The festival will close with Moretti’s It Will Happen Tonight, based on a story by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo and starring Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca. The film comes to Haifa directly from the Venice competition.

Among the major international prize winners screening at Haifa are Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes; Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden; Dhont’s World War I drama Coward; and Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, winner of the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.

Other highlights include Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Assayas’s political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin, and Kore-eda’s family drama Sheep in the Box.

The festival will welcome several international filmmakers. These include Romanian director Tudor Giurgiu, who will present 3 Days in September, which includes a 65-minute sequence shot in a single take.

Alberto Sciamma will attend with Cielo, a magical-realist road movie set in Bolivia’s Altiplano.

Boaz Dvir will present his documentary To Kill a Nazi, about French Jew Michel Cojot’s pursuit of Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie and his connection to Operation Entebbe.

German filmmaker Hille Norden will attend with the coming-of-age drama Easy Girl. Muriel d’Ansembourg will present Truly Naked, a drama about a teenager reassessing his understanding of sexuality and intimacy.

Documentaries, animation, culinary cinema, and more

The Haifa Classics program will feature a Barbra Streisand tribute with Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly!, A Star Is Born, and Yentl, as well as a retrospective of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima.

The Haifa Docs program will feature Broken English, a portrait of Marianne Faithfull, incorporating interviews, archival footage, and performances by musicians, including Nick Cave and Courtney Love, as well as The Match, about the legendary 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England.

Other sections will include documentaries, animation, culinary cinema, and the Haifa Wild Nights genre program, featuring Asian action and films from Cannes’ Midnight screenings.

For more details, go to the festival website at www.haifaff.co.il/

This post was originally published on here. 

For nearly three years, Israel and Jewish communities around the world have been living in a near-constant state of emergency.

In Israel, our attention has been consumed by the Israel-Hamas War, the hostages, and the evolving threats posed by Iran and its proxies.

The philanthropic response has been extraordinary. Faced with urgent and immediate needs, donors and institutions did what they have always done at their best: they responded with speed, generosity, and resolve. They supported emergency relief, trauma care, rehabilitation, and countless other efforts that became indispensable overnight.

That work is far from over.

But prolonged emergencies carry a risk. They narrow our field of vision. When every day presents another urgent challenge, it becomes difficult to think beyond the next one. Emergency response becomes not only our priority, but our mindset.

The future, however, cannot wait for the crisis to end.

Alongside the responsibility to respond to today’s needs, we must also ask a different question: What are we building?

What investments will shape Israel not next month, but 20 years from now? What are the foundational assets that will determine the resilience, prosperity, and character of Israeli society? And what are the building blocks that will strengthen not only Israel, but the future of the Jewish people?

Jewish history offers a remarkably consistent answer.

Time and again, following periods of destruction and upheaval, our communities invested in education. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish leadership rebuilt around centers of learning. Following expulsions, persecution, and pogroms, communities established schools and academies alongside homes and synagogues. They understood that rebuilding a society begins with rebuilding its people.

That lesson has not changed. Only its context has.

In the 21st century, education cannot be separated from research, deep science, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The breakthroughs that define Israel’s future, whether in medicine, artificial intelligence, food security, cybersecurity, or climate resilience, will not emerge spontaneously. They will emerge from people whose talent has been cultivated over years of education, research, and discovery.

Countries ultimately compete on the quality of their human capital. For Israel, perhaps more than for any other nation, that has always been our greatest strategic advantage.

Israel among the world’s leading innovation economies

And that advantage is measurable. Israel consistently ranks among the world’s leading innovation economies, with exceptionally high levels of investment in research and development and a remarkable concentration of entrepreneurship, venture capital, and collaboration between universities and industry. Hi-tech has become a central engine of the Israeli economy and a major source of its exports.

These achievements did not emerge from natural resources, a vast domestic market, or a large population. They are the return on decades of investment in human capital: in universities, researchers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Universities are part of the national infrastructure. But this infrastructure cannot be taken for granted. Israel is entering a period in which enormous public resources will necessarily be devoted to defense, reconstruction, and the social consequences of war. Those obligations are unavoidable. Yet they also create a long-term risk: that the institutions responsible for Israel’s future strength will be asked to do more precisely when public resources are stretched most thin.

Israel’s universities have never depended on government alone. Their ability to conduct ambitious research, attract and retain exceptional faculty, build world-class laboratories, support students, and compete with the best institutions internationally depends on a broader partnership, one in which philanthropy plays an essential role.

Their impact also extends beyond Israel’s borders: international academic collaborations connect Israeli researchers and students with colleagues around the world, building lasting relationships and ensuring that Israel is known not only through the headlines, but through its ideas, discoveries, and contributions to global knowledge.

Our universities cultivate the scientists who will make the next breakthrough, the physicians who will transform healthcare, the entrepreneurs who will build new industries, the jurists who will strengthen public institutions, and the educators who will prepare the generation that follows, and the citizens who will sustain Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state.

Universities are among the few places where rigorous inquiry, respect for evidence, open debate, and civic responsibility are cultivated together, values that are essential to the resilience of any liberal democracy.

If we want to see the leaders who will shape Israel in the decades ahead, we need only look to today’s classrooms and laboratories.

At the Hebrew University, those future leaders already reflect the remarkable diversity of Israeli society. Religious and secular Jews, Arab students from east Jerusalem, haredim (ultra-Orthodox), new immigrants, and students from every part of the country study alongside one another. They do not arrive with the same experiences or perspectives, but they share an intellectual environment that challenges assumptions, rewards curiosity, and prepares them to lead in a society whose complexity is one of its defining characteristics.

That, too, is part of investing in human capital.

For more than a century, the Hebrew University has demonstrated what sustained investment in people can achieve. Founded before the State of Israel itself, it has helped shape the country’s intellectual foundations, produced 10 Nobel laureates, pioneered discoveries that have transformed fields from agriculture to medicine to computer science, and educated generations of leaders in government, academia, business, law, and technology.

Philanthropy has always been about more than meeting immediate needs. At its best, it invests where the returns are measured not in months, but in generations.

Today’s emergencies remain painfully real, and they deserve our continued attention and support. But we should resist allowing the urgency of the present to crowd out the responsibility to invest in the future.

The crisis may continue for some time.

Israel’s intellectual and innovative edge took generations to build. We cannot afford to let our educational excellence erode while we wait for the crises to subside.

Our investment in Israel’s future, and in the future of the Jewish people, cannot wait that long.

The writer is Vice President for Advancement and External Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He previously served as the university’s Vice President and Director General, and held senior leadership positions at Intel in Israel and the United States.

This post was originally published on here. 

WASHINGTON — Former strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer firmly denied on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed before the October 7 attack, dismissing reports of such a conversation as “fiction.”

“Did a conversation take place? No,” Dermer said at the MEAD Conference in Washington.

Dermer, one of Netanyahu’s closest confidants and a central figure in Israel’s relations with the US and the Gulf states, said he would have known had such a call taken place.

“If there had been a conversation, I would have been part of it, because one of the tasks assigned to me was to expand the Abraham Accords and strengthen the partnership with the United Arab Emirates,” he said.

Dermer said he was either briefed on or participated directly in all conversations between Netanyahu and bin Zayed.

“I was either privy to the details or was on the line during the conversation itself, and this conversation did not take place,” he said.

Dermer denies that the call ever occurred

Dermer stressed that he was not merely disputing what was allegedly said during the call, but denying that the call itself ever occurred.

“It is not even a question of the content of the conversation,” he said. “I don’t believe there was a conversation at all. And certainly, that content was not discussed.”

Dermer said he did not know where the story originated, noting that both Israel and the UAE had rejected it.

“I think the Emiratis have made clear that it did not happen. We have made clear that it did not happen,” he said. “So it is simply fiction—a made-up story.”

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump attributed the win of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a state election to immigration rules and regulations that he cast as “horrible.”

The AfD, bolstered by public angst over the scale of mass immigration, surged into first place on Sunday in the election in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time a far-right party has come within reach of power at the state level since World War Two.

Trump has long accused various European countries, including Germany, of losing control of their borders, following a large influx of migrants and asylum seekers, especially from the Middle East and Afghanistan, over the past decade.

“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night. They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday.

pic.twitter.com/x7BetKv1oQ

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 8, 2026

The AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund, who hopes to become the new premier of Saxony-Anhalt after Sunday’s election, has promised “deportations (of illegal immigrants) from the first minute” in an echo of Trump’s own policies.

The AfD has been classified as right-wing extremist by the local office of Germany’s domestic intelligence service. In its election program in Saxony-Anhalt, it advocated for “remigration” policies to speed up deportations of rejected asylum seekers and foreign criminals and incentivize people to leave voluntarily.

It also wants the children of refugees to be taught in segregated classes.

Merz says AfD immigration policies tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz accused the AfD on Wednesday of advocating anti-migration policies that were tantamount to “ethnic cleansing” during an address to the German parliament after his party’s bruising defeat to the AfD.

In an email to Reuters, the AfD said Merz was deliberately mischaracterizing its position to demonize the party, and said its policies were legal.

Merz is trying to regain the initiative after Sunday’s election loss and his own record-low approval ratings put his position and his government’s reform program in question. He has brushed off suggestions that he might resign.

“If what is being advocated here, namely ‘remigration’, were to become reality, it would be nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin color,” Merz said, in answer to an earlier speech by AfD co-leader Alice Weidel.

The AfD’s victory also represents one of the biggest setbacks for Merz’s conservatives since they returned to power at the national level in Germany more than a year ago.

Merz spokesperson declines to comment on Trump post

When asked about the Saxony-Anhalt election on Wednesday, Merz’s chief spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, declined to comment directly on Trump’s social media post.

But he added that Merz has indicated in the past that interventions or comments from abroad on domestic German politics, particularly elections, are “out of the question” for the chancellor.

At the same regular press conference, Kornelius said the government had postponed a planned phone call between Merz and Trump on the upcoming 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the US.

“The German side postponed this call today. A new date has not yet been set,” he said, declining to give a reason for the postponement.

The US and Germany have traditionally been close allies, but their relationship has been put to the test since Trump’s return to office.

Kornelius said Germany remains ready to stand up for the values that define and unite the two countries. “These are freedom, democracy and respect,” he said.

This post was originally published on here. 

The UN nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation board of governors has passed a resolution reporting Iran to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years for breaching its non-proliferation obligations, diplomats said on Wednesday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution follows a previous one passed on June 12 last year – the day before Israel started bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, soon followed by the United States – that found Iran in “non-compliance” with those obligations. Reporting the breach to the council required another resolution.

While the Security Council is unlikely to take concrete action against Iran since its allies Russia and China are permanent, veto-wielding members, the move is an escalation in a diplomatic standoff between Iran and Western powers.

Iran warned on Monday it would retaliate if the resolution passed, but Iran’s mission to the IAEA did not mention retaliation in its initial reaction.

Iran says US is ‘delusional’

“Once again, a political resolution on Iran is nonconsensually adopted by the #IAEA BoG (Board of Governors),” it said on X/Twitter, referring to the fact that the resolution was voted on rather than adopted without any country objecting.

Once again, a political resolution on Iran is nonconsensually adopted by the #IAEA BoG. It follows a telling trend and facilitates further erosion and ultimate collapse of the proliferation regime as a whole.
The current situation is created solely because of the criminal acts of… pic.twitter.com/MubfUTrzqt

— Iran Mission UN Vienna (@PMIRAN_Vienna) September 9, 2026

“The current situation is created solely because of the criminal acts of aggression by the US and Israeli regime. The delusional objective of the US to force the great Iranian nation into ‘surrender’ and to plunder its oil will never happen,” it added.

The resolution text, proposed by the US, Britain, France and Germany, passed with 23 votes in favor, three against and eight abstentions, said diplomats at the closed-door meeting, adding that those that opposed it were Russia, China and Niger.

“(The board) requests the (IAEA) Director General to report this resolution and the previously adopted resolutions … to all Members of the Agency and to the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the IAEA Statute,” the text read.

While the finding of non-compliance predates the war between the United States and Iran and concerns Tehran’s failure to explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites that the agency spent years investigating, there is now another standoff over IAEA access to the sites bombed by Israel and the US

Lack of access a ‘serious proliferation concern’

Iran has not let IAEA inspectors return to its bombed sites, including the three uranium-enrichment plants at the heart of its nuclear program that were destroyed or badly damaged in the military strikes.

Tehran has also not accounted for its stock of enriched uranium, some of which was enriched to up to 60% purity, a short step from the roughly 90% of weapons-grade.

“The Agency’s lack of information about these facilities and associated nuclear material and our inability to conduct verification activities at these facilities is a matter of serious proliferation concern,” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told his agency’s board on Monday.

“The situation needs to be rectified with the utmost urgency,” he added.

The IAEA estimates Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to up to 60% before the US-Israeli attacks. That is enough, if enriched further, for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick. How much has survived is unclear, although the IAEA has said it believes more than 200 kg remains at one site.

Wednesday’s resolution specifically mentioned two previous ones: the June 12, 2025 text finding Iran in non-compliance and the most recent one, from June of this year, telling Iran to declare its remaining enriched uranium stocks and let inspectors verify them.

This post was originally published on here. 

On Sept. 10, 2001, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that New York’s Central Synagogue was reopening.

The Reform synagogue had been closed for three years after a devastating 1998 fire. Hundreds of workers had helped restore the landmark building, at a cost of about $40 million. A brief JTA item noted that the synagogue had been rebuilt, and its congregants were coming home. 

It’s the kind of story that meant one thing at the time it was written, and came to mean something else just one day later. When Rabbi Peter Rubinstein delivered his Rosh Hashanah sermon on Sept. 17, he sought to balance the immense joy of reclaiming the rebuilt sanctuary with the collective trauma and grief gripping New York City. 

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, are often called a historic inflection point, dividing the world into a neat and fateful before and after. A look back at what JTA reported in the days before Sept. 11, and the preoccupations of American Jews ahead of that bright, sunny day in September, suggests what has changed in the 25 years since – and, depressingly, what hasn’t. 

I was on a New Jersey Transit bus to my job at the Forward when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I made it to our offices on 33rd Street. It was a Tuesday, which meant we were getting the weekly paper ready for the printer and most of the news decisions had been made. The devastation unfolding a few miles away meant whatever we thought newsworthy on Monday – and for the foreseeable future – was beside the point. 

In September 2001, Israel was in the midst of a terrorist surge

I don’t remember what the week’s top stories would have been, but I can tell you what we and other Jewish news outlets thought was important in the ‘before times.’ 

In September 2001, Israel was in the midst of the second intifada. Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli reprisals were daily news. On Sept. 4, JTA reported that Israeli schoolchildren were returning to classes under specific warnings of potential attacks; four car bombs had exploded in Jerusalem in a 12-hour period. 

American Jews were also confronting a hostile international campaign against Israel at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which ran from Aug. 31 to Sept. 7. Israel and the United States withdrew their delegations after the conference became dominated by attacks on Israel.

The JTA report called it “a viciously anti-Israel, anti-Jewish circus.” It wasn’t the first time that post-colonial politics had manifested as antisemitism, but the ferocity of the invective at Durban marked what the historian James Loeffler recently called “a turning point in the evolution of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”  

You could glimpse another stage of that evolution in a Sept. 4 article about college campuses. JTA reported that pro-Palestinian student activists hoped to launch a national campaign urging universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel, explicitly comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa.

Jewish leaders thought the campaign, which came to be known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, was unlikely to catch on. “The divestment movement about South Africa was a uniting thing on campus, whereas anti-Israel activity on campus is divisive,” one Jewish leader said in a prediction I presume he regrets. 

In New York, three mayoral candidates, all Jews – Alan Hevesi, Mark Green and Michael Bloomberg – joined Elie Wiesel and Jewish leaders in criticizing Durban, just a week before the city’s Sept. 11 primary. 

And there was an argument over what American Jews should say about Israel. Organizers were preparing a huge Sept. 23 solidarity rally near the United Nations, but they deliberately chose a broad, almost bland slogan: “Standing together with the people of Israel.”

”If they had been more specific – asking for a return to the Oslo peace process or increased US intervention in Israeli-Palestinian relations, for example – part of the coalition of sponsoring organizations might have bolted,” according to a JTA analysis. 

Despite the discord and ongoing violence in Israel, some were still talking peace. Noa Ben Artzi, the then 24-year-old granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, was touring American Jewish communities saying that Israelis had lost touch with the slain prime minister’s conviction that peace required dealing with enemies who were also neighbors. 

A Jewish-Arab educational institute in Israel, Givat Haviva, had just won a UNESCO peace prize.  

Elsewhere, there were sightings of Jewish resilience, especially in Europe. Prague’s Jubilee Synagogue hosted its first Jewish wedding in more than 30 years, a small but powerful sign that Jewish life in the city was recovering from the Holocaust and Communist rule. 

Synagogues in England and seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe were receiving preservation grants. In Kosovo, Jews, Muslims and Catholics had worked together to rebuild a mosque damaged in the war that ended two years earlier – a “ray of light,” as one Jewish participant put it, amid the conflict in Israel and the ugliness at Durban.

And, because Jewish life can be silly, there was a story about a giant Rosh Hashanah greeting card. The 6,400-square-foot card, weighing 1,000 pounds, was unveiled at yet another pro-Israel event. Guinness World Records declined to recognize it because of the way it had been assembled.

There is a detail in the greeting card story that, like the rebuilding of Central Synagogue, would carry unanticipated meaning in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. One of the speakers at the demonstration was “a teenage survivor of the June 1 disco bombing in Israel,” a reference to an attack carried out by a Palestinian suicide bomber at the Dolphinarium discotheque on the beachfront in Tel Aviv. Twenty-one Israelis, including 16 teenagers, were murdered. 

At the time, the attack was largely denounced on the right and the left. Even Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat publicly condemned the bombing and called for an immediate cease-fire in the clashes between the IDF and Palestinian militants.

9/11: The War on Terror’s Pearl Harbor

A quarter century later, we look back on the Sept. 11 attacks by radical Islamists as the Pearl Harbor in the War on Terror. Despite the conspiracy theories that tried to pin the attacks on Israelis and Jews, the dominant narrative at the time was that Israel and the United States were engaged in battle against a common enemy.

The suicide bombings in Israel brought a measure of sympathy for its people. Even as the “peace process” foundered, there was guarded optimism that hawkish Ariel Sharon could perhaps be the prime minister who could finish what Rabin, another former warrior, had begun. Four years later, Sharon would indeed evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza. 

But Sept. 11 was only one of the 21st century’s inflection points. Oct. 7, 2023, saw another devastating, surprise terrorist attack that deeply traumatized the target nation and sparked massive military responses. And yet there were as many differences as there were similarities.

Few Americans can appreciate the social trauma of Oct. 7 within Israel, where every Jewish citizen seemed to know a victim or mourning family, and where the sheer body count, in a country of 10 million, was the equivalent of 13 Sept. 11’s. 

It was a different world, too, that witnessed Oct. 7. The ethos of Durban had gone mainstream on the left, and the vilification of Israel had become a progressive shibboleth. Israel was being led not just by a right-wing government, but a coalition that included arch-nationalists intent on closing off any possibility of reconciliation with the Palestinians.

A generation of young people, now in college and grad school, weren’t even alive at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and had no memory of any Israeli leader other than Benjamin Netanyahu. And 25 years after Sept. 11, the mayor of New York is himself an anti-Zionist. 

And the American Jewish community?  In the years between Sept. 11 and Oct. 7, synagogues and Jewish institutions were compelled to hire armed guards and staged “active shooter” drills. White nationalists carried out violent antisemitic attacks at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and at a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas. 

A weird coalition of the far right and progressive left has reduced “Zionist” to a slur. A Lebanese-born man inspired by Hezbollah drove an explosive-packed pickup truck into the entrance of a Michigan synagogue. Last month, an intruder interrupted Friday night services at Central Synagogue, screaming obscenities and striking a congregant.

On campus, the debates that JTA treated as a new and uncertain phenomenon in September 2001 would become as commonplace as rush week and homecoming.

There are still stories of Jewish resilience and rebuilding. There are still solidarity rallies for Israel. But the paroxysms of anti-Israel invective and the political stasis in Israel have taken their toll. Families hesitate to bring up Israel at their gatherings, worried that a youngster may announce her anti-Zionism or an elder his belief that “there are no innocents” in Gaza. 

The Jews reading JTA in the days before Sept. 11 didn’t know that their concerns were about to be reordered. They didn’t know which events would become footnotes and which would become the main story lines in American Jewish life.

They certainly didn’t know that a synagogue reopening in Midtown Manhattan, as inspiring as it was and is, would soon acquire the eerie glow of a false dawn.

This post was originally published on here. 

The fifth season of Fauda has just been released on Netflix around the world, after it was shown in Israel on Yes, and it ends in a cemetery at the funeral of one of the main characters, who was killed trying to take revenge on Hamas terrorists.

It’s a fitting end to a season, and perhaps to an entire series, that was about the real, day-to-day cost of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

It also underscores that despite the fast-paced, suspenseful action sequences in every episode, the real reason we kept watching was that we came to care about the characters, both Jews and Arabs.

More than any previous season, however, the fifth season is told from the point of view of the core members of the counterterrorism unit we have been following all these years: Doron (Lior Raz), Eli (Ya’akov Zada-Daniel), Steve (Doron Ben-David), and Gabi “Captain” Ayoub (Itzik Cohen), and not from Arab characters.

Perhaps it couldn’t be any other way, because, as has been widely reported, Fauda creators Raz and Avi Issacharoff, and the series writers, had season five written.

It was ready to shoot, but they scrapped their scripts following the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, which was far more deadly than anything they had imagined.

For those who want to watch the latest season without knowing more about it, stop reading here, because some spoilers follow.

The word “Fauda” means chaos in Arabic, and the new season starts out with a title showcasing a different Arabic word, “tha’r,” which, we’re told, means “Blood Revenge, restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.”

After that, it opens two years after October 7, with Salem (Byan Anteer), a Bedouin tracker who works with the unit, praying at the grave of his son, Yusef, who was killed in the massacre, and promising revenge for his death.

He goes to see Eli, who is living quietly in a nearby settlement, grieving the death of his wife, Hagit (Dafi Shoshana-Alpern), who was the widow of another unit member, Avichay (Boaz Konforty), and his two stepchildren on October 7.

Salem says he has received some new information: a video from inside Eli and Hagit’s house that shows who killed Eli’s family and Yusef, who was at their kibbutz to build a gazebo and took refuge in their safe room.

The killer fled and started a new life in Marseille.

At first, Eli does not want to hear about it. But Salem insists that they must take “tha’r,” saying, “If we don’t do this, that day will haunt us for the rest of our lives.”

Eli does not need much coaxing, and soon they are on the way to France to find this murderer, Maher (Amjad Bader), who is hiding in plain sight. Not long after, Steve and Doron join them.

Much of the season is their pursuit of this killer and his associates, who are planning a new attack in Israel, and they meet Maher’s widow, Anne (Melanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds), a Frenchwoman who has embraced the Palestinian cause.

Eli and Doron fall back on their usual MO, going undercover, and end up with Anne in a terror training camp in Syria.

Flashbacks to October 7, 2023

BUT A LITTLE after the midpoint of the season come episodes seven and eight, which are a flashback to October 7.

Both on Yes in Israel and on Netflix, they were released with a disclaimer warning viewers that they contain graphic violence and, in a most unusual step, informing audiences that they can skip them and still follow the last three episodes of the 11-episode season.

These episodes, particularly episode eight, are extremely disturbing, although the truth is that they show nothing that will be new to any Israeli who watched the news regularly three years ago.

They are constructed and filmed to resemble news clips, dashcam videos, and especially the videos that the terrorists themselves filmed and broadcast to the world.

Doron and Steve are just the kind of men who would take off as soon as they heard of the attack to fight the terrorists, and they do.

Eli is called out of the kibbutz in the middle of the night to keep watch on the border, but nothing happens until the missiles start being fired at 6:29 a.m., and by the time he realizes that no one is more vulnerable than the civilians on the kibbutzim, it is too late for him to make it back to save his family.

Doron and Steve also try their hardest to get to Hagit and the children, and on the way fight terrorists along the roads and at the Nova Festival.

As they see how many terrorists have invaded the area, and how few soldiers and police officers are fighting them, who are no match for them, Doron says, “Everything’s falling apart.”

These scenes bring back all the horror and chaos of that day, and unlike virtually every other episode of the series when the commandos fight like superheroes, you know there isn’t very much they can do, and it’s sobering.

They have never been more needed, but they have never felt more disillusioned or helpless. Yes, they save a few people, but there are many more who die in front of them.

The rest of the season takes us back to the terrorists and their new plot, but, like Eli, many of us will find our minds are stuck on that kibbutz, trying and failing to make sense of the deaths of his family.

The funeral in the last scene brings back Idan Amedi, previously a Fauda regular, who sat out the rest of the season because he needed time to recover from the injuries he suffered fighting in Gaza.

His presence, and the fact that the season was dedicated to Matan Meir, a crew member who was killed fighting in Gaza in November 2023, remind us that this war touched all of our lives.

For Doron, Steve, and especially Eli, at the end there is little comfort in the revenge, only chaos, loss, and a sense of abandonment, a feeling so many have experienced over the past three years.

The season is one of Fauda’s best, and it’s hard to know how people around the world will respond, but one thing is certain: millions will watch it. Fauda’s creators have said this is the final season, and it’s hard to imagine how they could follow this up.

New documentary for Israeli music lovers

ISRAELI MUSIC lovers will want to watch the new documentary The Sixteenth Sheep: The Reunion, which premieres on Hot 8 and Yes Docu on the evening of September 10 and is available on Yes VOD, Hot VOD, and Next TV.

Directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ran Tal, the movie tells the behind-the-scenes story of the reunion of the Sixteenth Sheep group – David Broza, Gidi Gov, Yehudit Ravitz, and Yoni Rechter, each of them among the greatest Israeli musicians of all time on their own, but together, a true supergroup.

They came together to perform songs by Yehonatan Geffen, which were set to music by Rechter and, in one case, Broza, and released in the late 70s on The Sixteenth Sheep album.

There are few Israelis of any age who cannot sing at least a couple of these songs, and the reunion tour of the artists over the last few years was wildly popular and provided magical moments during the war.

Several new documentaries about the September 11 attacks

NOW THAT it has been 25 years since the 9/11 Al-Qaeda terror attacks on the US, there are several new documentaries out.

Windows on the World: 9/11’s Forgotten Story, on Hot VOD and Next TV, examines the tragedy through the staff and guests of the restaurant that was on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower.

Everyone present when the plane hit was killed, and their stories have not been told in detail before.

Netflix features a new documentary, Turning Point: Generation 9/11, that looks at people who were young children at the time of the attacks.

The first part of the movie focuses on young people whose parents were killed in the attacks and is very moving. The second part of the film focuses on US policy in the wake of the attacks, and it makes points we have heard many times before.

While the US made many mistakes, to suggest, as many interviewees in this documentary do, that the response to 9/11 in America, such as heightened airport security, is somehow evidence of the US becoming a police state, rather than rational safeguards after the murder of nearly 3,000 people, defies common sense.

A documentary about how entertainers and athletes helped New Yorkers recover from the attacks, 9/11-United We Stand, 25 Years Later, now streaming on Disney+, is a far more enjoyable look at the resilience of New Yorkers.

Two feature films about 9/11 are available on Apple TV+: Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, with Nicolas Cage as a Port Authority cop trapped in the rubble, and Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which is a documentary-style look at that doomed flight in real time, from the point of view of the passengers, crew, and air-traffic controllers.

This post was originally published on here. 

“From an economic standpoint, it’s not as bad as it sounds,” former economic attaché to the UK, Shmuel Ben-Tovim, said in a Wednesday interview with 103FM about the sanctions announced by 12 European countries against the West Bank.

“There have already been all kinds of crises in our relations. Perhaps the most prominent was in 2010 during the Mavi Marmara crisis, which caused relations to sour. After that, things eventually returned to normal,” said Ben-Tovim at the beginning of the interview.

“At a rough estimate, products originating directly from settlements account for maybe tens of millions of dollars. I’d also point out that yesterday’s announcement requires legislation. That process could take several months, and who knows where things will stand by then?”

Ben-Tovim went on to endorse Jerusalem’s retaliatory measures, including closing the British Consulate in Jerusalem and expelling officials from the Kiryat Gat headquarters.

Israel has economic leverage against the UK

“Beyond the diplomatic steps Israel took yesterday – which I think were spot on – Israel also has economic leverage. Trade between Israel and the UK is roughly balanced.”

“Britain relies on us for a wide range of goods,” he added, “including in the defense sector. I think the political hit they took was immediate, whereas our economic hit will take longer to materialize. Shutting down the Jerusalem consulate is a very serious step. We’ll have to see how this plays out.”

Ben-Tovim’s comments come after British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband announced an import ban on goods from “illegal” settlements in the West Bank, as well as sanctions against specific individuals and businesses providing services such as construction, instruction, financing, or real estate for settlement expansion.

Mathilda Heller contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Demonstrators and community activists gathered outside the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) headquarters in downtown Manhattan for a rally organized by the EndJewHatred movement and the Lawfare Project on Tuesday.

The rally, titled “Unite Against Terror,” took place at the corner of Essex Street and Straus Square near the DSA offices. The gathering was held three days before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, focusing community opposition against the DSA and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

New York City experiences a marked rise in antisemitic incidents

The rally unfolded against the backdrop of a marked rise in anti-Jewish incidents in the city, with recent New York Police Department data showing that hate crimes targeting the Jewish community continue to drive local offense statistics.

Critics and community leaders have increasingly blamed Mamdani for fueling these tensions, pointing to his rhetoric regarding Israel.

Protesters stood with victims and families of 9/11 and directed a message to city leadership that terror has no place on local streets, while speakers addressed the growing crowd.

Cheri Sparacio and Mike Weinstein, relatives of people killed on September 11, 2001, took the stage to voice sharp opposition to Mamdani’s planned appearance at the upcoming 25th-anniversary ceremony.

Sparacio said to the crowd, “How can this man be at my husband’s memorial? How can I stand there with him at my husband’s memorial?”

Weinstein echoed those sentiments, highlighting his deep multi-generational roots in New York and saying, “Make no mistake about it, all [those who] died and their families were impacted by the attacks by al-Qaeda, violent Sunni Islamic terrorists, and jihadists.” Weinstein further criticized city leadership: “Some of the leadership of the DSA are aligned with terrorist ideology,” adding that attacks on Jews and New York had risen substantially since the mayor took office.

Ori Solow, cofounder of the political campaign and advocacy network, Stop Mamdani, addressed the crowd during the evening event, saying, “New York will never surrender to radical extremism.” Fellow co-founder Ezra Greenspan similarly said, “New York will not stand by quietly.”

Renee Collymore, head of the Black Jewish Coalition in Brooklyn, spoke at the rally, urging solidarity and action. She said, “Do not let them scare you,” emphasizing, “We must put our support together, the Jews and the Black folks; we got to work together. This is the only way we’re going to stop the DSA.”

President of the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council Anila Ali also spoke at the event, addressing the crowd about ideological threats: “Understanding the radical ideology that Mayor Mamdani believes in… it’s the same ideology that attacked America on 9/11; 3,000 of our innocent people were murdered by the Al-Qaeda ideology.”

Ali further warned, “that ideology has seeped into all our institutions, the Democratic Party, the DSA, the universities, the colleges, and also our schools.”

NYC activist Jacqueline Toboroff took the stage to criticize local political organizing, saying, “DSA runs close to 100 events in New York City per month. What the hell are the Republicans doing about this?”

Toboroff further condemned campus activism: “They used our school campuses from CUNY, NYU, and Columbia as campaign headquarters, get-out-the-vote operations, recruitment centers. And if you’re wondering why these campuses in America resemble Hamas outposts, it’s because DSA is there.”

She added, “This is how Zohran Mamdani secured the June primary. He was installed by who? By the people that DSA activated on those campuses.”

Activist and speaker Shabbos Kestenbaum addressed the crowd, pointing out the ideological alignments of local officials and condemning terrorism. He said, “Don’t take it from me, just listen to their own words; they’re individuals like Zohran Mamdani, who praise, who praise the Holy Land Five, a convicted terror front, who were convicted in a federal court for providing millions of dollars to terrorist organizations.”

Kestenbaum further suggested, “If you don’t like America, one of the great things about our country is we are blessed with a multitude of airports. You should visit one of them and leave.”

Rally participants held American flags and placards that featured messages such as “USA Not DSA,” “Unite Against Extremism,” “Remove Mamdani,” and “Stop Zohran Mamdani.”

Throughout the demonstration, the crowd joined in loud chants, repeatedly shouting slogans like “Stay away, Mamdani!” Activist and singer Ghazal Mizrahi sang the American national anthem.

Jayne Zirkle, director of communications for EndJewHatred said in a statement to The Jerusalem Post, “Last night, EndJewHatred presented a rally to remember the lives lost on 9/11, but remembering alone is not enough. We must also confront the ideas and movements that contribute to extremism.

“The rally specifically raised awareness about the Democratic Socialists of America and what we believe are fundamental differences between aspects of its platform and the principles that have long shaped the American way of life, including our constitution, individual freedom, and the rule of law.

“This was a call to recognize the warning signs, reject extremism, and protect our communities from forces that can threaten the fabric of our country from within. EndJewHatred brought together an interfaith coalition of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who stood together to remember 9/11 and affirm that Americans of different faiths can unite in defense of a free society,” Zirkle said.

The DSA did not respond to the Post’s request for comment by the time of publishing.

This post was originally published on here. 

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett can “fix Israel after the chaos of October 7,” retired IDF general and counterterrorism expert Major-General (res.) Noam Tibon told The Jerusalem Post, as he spoke on his security priorities as a candidate on Bennett’s B’Yachad slate.

Tibon’s comments came at B’Yachad’s Knesset slate unveiling in Tel Aviv on Sunday, before the deadline for parties to submit their final candidate lists.

He received the sixth spot on Bennett’s slate, and with recent polls projecting B’Yachad to win around 15 seats, Tibon is well-positioned to enter the next Knesset.

‘I think we have the best team’

The B’Yachad party was formed from an alliance between Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid Party. It is one of the leading parties in the opposition bloc seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the October elections.

“I think we have the best team. And it’s a team of professionals. And Naftali Bennett is coming with experience,” Tibon told the Post.

Regarding Bennett and his leadership, Tibon spoke of the past government, saying he believed Bennett “was a great prime minister.”

“ He made some mistakes,” Tibon said, but added that he believed Bennett had learned from them.

“I believe that we can fix Israel after the chaos of October 7. We have a plan, you know. We’re going to touch everything,” Tibon said.

Tibon is considered a top expert in the field

Tibon served in the IDF for 35 years in senior command positions, specializing in combat operations and counterterrorism. He has since been considered a top expert in the field.

During the October 7 massacre, Tibon drove to Kibbutz Nahal Oz and rescued residents from the kibbutz, including members of his own family.

Regarding improving Israel’s security after October 7, Tibon said that his first priority for the country was to “bring security back to the people in the North [and] to the people in the South.”

Further, he said that it was required to “bring a new doctrine to Israeli security.”

“We need to win the war against Hamas, against Hezbollah, to disarm them, which didn’t happen yet.”

In order to defeat the country’s enemies, Tibon said that Israel required “a much bigger army.”

“We need to recruit the ultra-Orthodox. And everyone who will not serve will not get a shekel from the state of Israel,” he added.

“We’re going to recruit the Orthodox. We’re going to fix the economy.”

Tibon also said that B’Yachad would work “to fix education in Israel.”

“We’re going to change the whole balance in Israel. And we’re going to shut down the poison machine,” Tibon said.

This post was originally published on here. 

Sheba Medical Center held an appreciation ceremony for Turpaz Industries CEO and controlling shareholder Karen Cohen Khazon and her family following their donation of company shares worth approximately NIS 70 million to three major Israeli hospitals.

The donation, announced in July 2025, consisted of 1% of Turpaz Industries shares from the personal holdings of Cohen Khazon and her husband, Shay Khazon. It was designated for medical initiatives at Sheba Medical Center, Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Hospital and Soroka Medical Center.

During the ceremony, Sheba inaugurated its Institute for Obstetric and Gynecologic Imaging in memory of Cohen Khazon’s late parents, Nediva (Gisèle) and Moshe (Musa) Cohen.

The event, held at Sheba’s Institute for Gynecological and Obstetric Ultrasound, included formal remarks and a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, director-general of Sheba Medical Center, was among those who attended.

The Sheba ceremony followed similar events held in recent months at Soroka and Beilinson to recognize the donation.

Cohen Khazon dedicated the contribution to her parents, saying they had instilled in her the values of generosity, humility and civic responsibility.

Donation to support cardiac care, Soroka recovery

At Beilinson, the donation was designated for the development of the hospital’s Cardiology Center in the Hope Tower, headed by Prof. Ran Kornowski, and the expansion of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, led by Prof. Katia Orvin.

The funding is intended to increase treatment capacity, improve infrastructure and support the introduction of advanced technologies for cardiac patients.

Cohen Khazon and her husband also visited Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where they met hospital director Prof. Shlomi Kodesh.

Their visit came following extensive damage sustained by Soroka during Operation Rising Lion.

The portion of the donation allocated to Soroka is intended to help restore and upgrade damaged infrastructure, reinforce critical departments and purchase equipment for the hospital’s emergency and trauma units.

When the donation was announced, Cohen Khazon said she viewed the contribution as a way of translating business success into a broader contribution to Israeli society.

“I dedicate this donation to the memory of my beloved parents: Nediva (Gisèle), who raised and educated generations of children with special needs, and Moshe (Musa) Cohen, one of the founders of Israel’s electrical industry, who also made a significant contribution to the industry worldwide,” she said.

Generosity, humility and civic responsibility

“They instilled in me the values of generosity, humility and civic responsibility. As the CEO of a company that operates internationally yet remains deeply rooted in Israeli society, I felt that this was the right time to translate business success into a positive social impact.”

Turpaz Industries operates in the flavor, fragrance and specialty ingredients industries. The company markets products to more than 4,900 customers in over 100 countries and operates manufacturing facilities, research and development centers, laboratories and sales offices around the world.

The company employs more than 1,100 people and has completed 28 acquisitions since 2017 as part of its international expansion strategy.

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he expects the war with Iran to end “immediately after” the US midterm elections, arguing that Tehran is attempting to influence the vote in hopes of facing a weaker Congress.

Speaking to reporters before departing for Dallas, Trump was asked about the continued conflict with Iran and the sharp rise in oil prices.

“I think the war will end immediately after the election,” Trump said. “I think the war will end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer.”

Trump then accused Iran of attempting to influence the November vote: “They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon,” he said. “All they want is a nuclear weapon, and if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble.”

Trump’s remarks came as oil prices climbed above $100 a barrel amid renewed US-Iran military action. He acknowledged that Americans are paying higher prices but again framed the conflict around preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 

.@POTUS: “I think the war will end immediately after the election… They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we could get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon.” https://t.co/MV7GDA8e4q pic.twitter.com/fOuJfUpohm

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 9, 2026

“All you have to do is say, ‘Will you let Iran have a nuclear weapon?’ And the answer is no,” Trump said. He claimed Iran’s economy was in severe distress, citing high inflation, a weakened currency and difficulties paying its military.

“We control the strait and lots of other things,” he added.

Trump predicts reduction in oil, gas prices

Trump predicted that energy prices would begin falling after the midterms. “Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward,” he said. “They’re going to be tumbling down, and we’ll get them down. I think for gasoline, we’ll get them below $2 a gallon.”

He cautioned, however, that the decline would not come before the vote. “But not until after the midterms,” Trump said. “I think it’s going to take a little bit longer than the midterm.”

Asked about the latest US attacks on Iranian assets, Trump said Washington was responsible for the strikes and signaled that more could follow. “The attacks are made by us,” Trump said. “We’ve knocked out nine of their ships. I would say that the attacks are caused by us. Yeah, and you’re going to see a lot more.”

He later said the United States had “taken out about nine of their tankers.” Trump was also asked whether a nuclear agreement with Tehran remained possible after Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly suggested such a deal might no longer be on the table.

“I’m doing much more than a nuclear deal,” Trump replied. “There’s a lot more than nuclear. We’re going to have nuclear. That’s 99.9, but there’s going to be a lot of other things on the table that wouldn’t have been on the table three months ago.”

Trump responds to UK’s West Bank sanctions

Trump also addressed for the first time the sanctions announced by Britain, France and Canada targeting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The measures have prompted a sharp response from Israel, including a demand that Britain close its East Jerusalem consulate within 30 days. 

Asked for his reaction and whether he opposed the measures, Trump said he had only just learned of them. “Well, I’ve just seen it, and I’ll be speaking to Israel,” Trump said. “I’ll be speaking to them, and I’ll find out what their thinking is. I understand, you know, I understand exactly what’s going on, but I want to find out why all of a sudden that has happened.”

The comments were more cautious than those of US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who has publicly condemned the sanctions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had also previously declined to directly endorse or condemn the British move, while saying Washington did not want to see “anything destabilizing” in the West Bank. 

This post was originally published on here. 

The first flight of a United Airlines passenger plane from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport (TLV) landed in Israel on Wednesday.

The plane, a Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner, took off to fly the return route back to Newark later on Wednesday.

The airline has not operated the route since before Operation Roaring Lion in February. Several airlines canceled their operations to the Middle East, including Israel, due to the then-regular Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks across the region.

Currently, it is operating two round trips between its main hub in Newark and Tel Aviv every day, with a third slated to be added from November, The Jerusalem Post learned.

Airline to resume direct flights between Tel Aviv, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco

Meanwhile, the airline has also planned to resume direct flights from Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), and Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD) from October. Additionally, United is slated to resume flights from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) starting in March 2027, the Post previously reported.

The San Francisco flights, in particular, will boast the “highest frequency of business class seats between the two cities of any airline,” United claimed in August.

Delta also resumes flights, raising competition on the Israel-US route

Delta Air Lines also returned to Israel on Monday, landing at Ben-Gurion over 40 minutes ahead of schedule, the airline said at the time.

Delta’s Airbus A330-900neo left New York’s JFK Airport on Sunday, making it the first flight the airline operated since before Operation Roaring Lion.

Aaron Glick contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday, during an event marking 25 years since the September 11 attacks, that two firefighters carried him to safety near the World Trade Center shortly after the attack because of fears that a nearby building was about to collapse.

“I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys,” he said.  “And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself,’ but they were amazing.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he went with a construction crew to the site of the attack to allegedly aid in rescue efforts, though people who took part in the rescue and recovery efforts have questioned that claim.

“I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened,” he said. “The United States Steel building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.”

Trump claims to have been rescued during 9/11 attacks

However, The New York Times reported that no evidence supported the president’s account or confirmed the existence of the two firefighters he said rescued him from the area.

This is not the first time Trump’s account of his activities in New York following the attacks has raised questions.

On Tuesday, he repeated the claim that he took a crew with him and added that two firefighters rescued him.

Before the speech on Tuesday, he repeated the claims to Fox News, alleging that he and the crew “worked long and hard,” he said, adding that “it was just so terrible and so hopeless. It was so hopeless, such a terrible thing.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The United Nations’ August 2024 investigation into 19 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff members accused of taking part in the October 7 attacks on Israel contained “major deficiencies,” the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a report newly authorized for public release.

The UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) found that the evidence it received from Israel against nine of the UNRWA staff members was insufficient to substantiate the allegations against them, while in one case, it claimed that no evidence had been obtained. As a result, the UN body determined that there was sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations against only nine of the staffers.

After reviewing the full UN investigation, USAID OIG found “major deficiencies,” which it said validated the need for independent oversight.

OIOS, for example, claimed that it had been “unable to independently authenticate” evidence presented to it by Jerusalem.

However, USAID OIG noted that the physical evidence provided should have been considered “collected enemy materials,” as it had been obtained by Hamas, and that it was therefore “unreasonable” to expect anyone to independently authenticate the materials. Additionally, USAID OIG noted that OIOS had no reason to suspect that the materials provided were not genuine.

USAID OIG says there is no reason to doubt authenticity of evidence

Though OIOS complained that it had only been provided copies of the evidence because the originals remained in Israel’s custody, USAID OIG again stressed that there was no reason to doubt their authenticity.

Additionally, the report detailed the limited scope of OIOS’s investigation, which was restricted to “claims of the possible involvement of the… UNRWA staff members in the armed attacks of 7 October 2023 in southern Israel,” and did not examine whether current or former staff members were members of Hamas.

This came despite an UNRWA directive forbidding staff from “participating in the activities of or being a member of any militant or armed group or entity,” which could have allowed investigators to expand the scope of their inquiry.

Another key failure by OIOS, identified by USAID OIG, was describing the methodology behind its review of “information and communications technology” data.

OIOS concluded, without what USAID OIG deemed proper substantiation, that there was “no significant activity or items of interest in the various email archives” of the accused.

OIOS was also said to have failed to indicate in its report whether it had conducted any review of information available outside the email archives or of the material provided by the State of Israel.

UNRWA employees terminated in January 2024 – after Israel provided UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini with a list of employees suspected of being involved in the invasion – may go on to work for other organizations, some of which receive US taxpayer funding, the office warned, due to the way their terminations were characterized.

UNRWA terminated the 12 staffers’ employment “to protect the agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance,” which, USAID OIG said, meant the chance of them joining other aid groups was “very high.” Therefore, the office explained, Operation Stop the Carousel was launched to stop the circulation of terrorists in humanitarian circles.

USAID OIG refers over a dozen people to State Dep’t for debarment

As a result of its own independent investigation into UNRWA, the USAID OIG referred 17 of the 19 individuals from the OIOS report to the State Department for debarment.

USAID OIG accused OIOS of initially withholding the unredacted version of its investigation, leaving the oversight body able to review only a redacted version that it considered “useless” for its investigation. The oversight body was therefore forced to rely on independent information until it finally obtained a copy of the unredacted investigation.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and sent to The Jerusalem Post by Grassley’s office, expressed concerns on August 27 about the UN’s unwillingness to cooperate with the USAID OIG’s investigation, “as well as vetting failures by the UN to ensure taxpayer dollars do not fall into the hands of Hamas or other terrorist organizations.”

The exemption from vetting processes granted to UN staff, unlike NGOs and contractors, has meant that the US and other partners have relied on the UN to conduct its own vetting, thus creating vulnerabilities, he added.

Based on those concerns, Grassley asked Rubio to confirm how the State Department has vetted UN employees funded by American taxpayers; the status of disbarment investigations launched against over 100 UNRWA employees alleged to be members of Hamas, an affiliated group, or to have participated in the October 7 massacre; how many UNRWA employees have so far been confirmed as members of Hamas or an affiliated group; and whether the US will deny funding to UN organizations that fail to properly vet their staff.

Grassley also sent a second letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, which was also received by the Post, seeking an explanation as to why the scope of the OIOS investigation did not include identifying current and former Hamas members within its ranks.

He also asked whether the UN and its agencies would commit to cooperating with USAID OIG investigations and what steps the UN has taken to ensure that American funds are not directed to Hamas or affiliated groups, as well as requesting all relevant information concerning employees accused of being members of terrorist groups.

OIOS declined to respond to the Post’s request for comment, instead referring the paper to Jonathan Fowler, UNRWA’s senior communications manager, who has not yet responded.

This post was originally published on here. 

Canadian pro-Israel organizations and advocacy groups condemned the federal government’s decision to ban the importation of goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The policy shift followed a joint statement issued on Tuesday by Prime Minister Mark Carney alongside international leaders confirming plans to introduce restrictions on trade with settlements. Joined by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, the prime minister, in a joint statement, said that “A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is critical for peace, stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.”

Following the announcement, HonestReporting Canada issued a statement on social media criticizing the government and calling on media outlets to scrutinize the rationale behind the measures. In a public statement released on Tuesday, the organization said, “HonestReporting Canada calls on the media to demand clarification from the Carney government on how its aggressively anti-Israel policies benefit Canadians.”

The statement further criticized the unilateral focus on Israel and said, “And now, rather than demanding concrete concessions from the Palestinian side, the Carney government is continuing down a reckless path of imposing punitive measures on Israel. This approach rewards Palestinian rejectionism, undermines the prospect of direct negotiations, and sends a troubling message that pressure will be directed at Israel regardless of Palestinian conduct.”

AGPI ISSUES LETTER OPPOSING CANADA’S TRADE RESTRICTIONS AGAINST ISRAEL

SEPTEMBER 8, 2026: The Abraham Global Peace Initiative (AGPI) has issued a formal letter to Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anita Anand, opposing her announcement that Canada will introduce restrictions… https://t.co/36eS0gluQ9 pic.twitter.com/EfLas5GkTi

— Avi Abraham Benlolo (@AviBenlolo) September 8, 2026

‘We strongly condemn the Government of Canada’s announcement’

The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) also issued a strong condemnation on Tuesday of the federal government’s announcement. Noah Shack, CEO of CIJA, said, “We strongly condemn the Government of Canada’s announcement of new sanctions on Israel.”

Shack further said, “Rather than pursue an independent foreign policy grounded in Canada’s strategic interests and its stated approach of not ‘lecturing countries from afar,’ the government has chosen to follow the United Kingdom’s lead, in a move reportedly driven by domestic political considerations to appease the most extreme elements of society.”

HonestReporting Canada strongly condemns the Canadian government’s decision to ban the importation of goods from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and is calling on the Canadian media to fulfill its solemn responsibility to scrutinize the government’s increasingly… pic.twitter.com/xZJzSIfuir

— HonestReporting Canada (@HonestRepCanada) September 8, 2026

The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) also issued a strong condemnation on Tuesday of the federal government’s announcement. Noah Shack, CEO of CIJA, stated, “We strongly condemn the Government of Canada’s announcement of new sanctions on Israel.”

Shack further criticized the administration’s motivations, stating, “Rather than pursue an independent foreign policy grounded in Canada’s strategic interests and its stated approach of not ‘lecturing countries from afar,’ the government has chosen to follow the United Kingdom’s lead, in a move reportedly driven by domestic political considerations to appease the most extreme elements of society.” 

CIJA STRONGLY CONDEMNS CANADA’S SANCTIONS ON ISRAEL

Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, issued the following statement:

“We strongly condemn the Government of Canada’s announcement of new sanctions on Israel.

“Rather than pursue an independent foreign…

— CIJA (@CIJAinfo) September 8, 2026

Shack added that “These sanctions fail to advance peace or security for Israelis and Palestinians. They interfere in Israel’s democratic election just weeks before Israelis vote, a warning voiced by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. They make diplomacy harder and do nothing to press the Palestinian Authority to fulfill the commitments it made to Prime Minister Carney, including to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.”

The Abraham Global Peace Initiative (AGPI) added its voice to the condemnation in an open letter addressed to Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand on Tuesday. Signed by Founder, Chairman and CEO Avi Abraham Benlolo, the letter criticized the move by stating, “This action closely mirrors the tactics and objectives of the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement by singling out the Jewish state for economic punishment and legitimizing campaigns intended to isolate the only Jewish state, not dissimilar to measures undertaken throughout history against the Jewish people.”

AGPI further stated that Canada formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism in 2019, noting that “IHRA identifies applying double standards to Israel, including requiring conduct not expected of any other democratic nation, as a contemporary manifestation of antisemitism,” and that the new trade measure is difficult to reconcile with that commitment.

The organization additionally emphasized that the timing requires restraint while Israel is in the midst of a democratic election campaign, warning that announcing restrictions now risks exerting external pressure and prejudging a government not yet formed, and concluding that “Trade restrictions will not advance peace. Punishing Israel while imposing no comparable consequences upon those who reject peace, glorify terrorism, or threaten Israel’s security rewards intransigence rather than dialogue.

This post was originally published on here. 

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar affirmed that Israel is not planning to expel any Palestinians from the Gaza Strip when asked if Slovenia would support efforts to move Gazans out of the territory, during a joint press conference with Slovenian Foreign Minister Tone Kajzer on Wednesday.

“First of all, we are not planning to expel or to deport anyone from the Gaza Strip,” Sa’ar emphasized, stating that his position is in line with international norms and laws.

He added that Israel would not force anyone to stay in Gaza and would not oppose Palestinians choosing to leave Gaza of their own volition if they are provided with an opportunity to do so.

“If someone wants to immigrate of their own will, and there is a country that is ready to accept them… we will not oppose that,” Sa’ar said.

Sa’ar was also asked for his response to a criminal complaint that was filed against him in Slovenia by the pro-Palestinian Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) on Monday, and accusations that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

He answered that HRF is “connected directly to terrorist organizations in Gaza” and rejected accusations of genocide. He added that those who participated in Hamas’s October 7 massacre and those who advocated for the destruction of the State of Israel are responsible for genocide.

“The objective is to eliminate the state of Israel,” Sa’ar added. “It is their public commitment to eliminate the Jewish state.”

Sa’ar, Kajzer sign Israel-Slovenia cooperation agreement

Sa’ar was present in Slovenia for the opening of the first Israeli embassy in the capital of Ljubljana and to meet with Kajzer.

During the joint press conference, Sa’ar and Kajzer signed a cooperation agreement to expand cooperation in the fields of education, science, business, and tourism.

“After 16 years, we are once again hosting the Israeli Foreign Minister in Slovenia. Today’s visit therefore has significant political and symbolic weight,” Kajzer said of Sa’ar’s visit. 

“After a long period of less intensive contacts, it is time to shift cooperation between Slovenia and Israel into a higher gear.”

As Israel faces increasing isolation and criticism on the global stage, Kajzer emphasized that Slovenia has chosen dialogue and cooperation with Israel over exclusion, telling reporters his government “believes that the progress of society is based on cooperation and opening up new horizons.”

This post was originally published on here. 

When British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband stood before the House of Commons on Tuesday to announce a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he lauded the decision as one intended to protect Palestinians and preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.

“I do not believe that the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets,” Miliband said. “So, I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.

“We will take action against specific companies and individuals who provide services such as construction, infrastructure, financing, or real estate for settlement expansion.”

What happens to Palestinians who make their living from boycotted businesses?

Yet amid Miliband’s declarations of settler “ethnic cleansing” and solidarity with Palestinians, which peppered his speech, there is a question to which he provided no answer: What happens to the Palestinians who make their living from the businesses the UK is seeking to hurt?

According to the latest quarterly labor force survey from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), approximately 17,600 West Bank Palestinians were employed in Israeli settlements during the second quarter of 2026.

Taking a look at the Palestinian economy, the same PCBS survey recorded West Bank unemployment at 27.9%, with approximately 284,000 people out of work.

In other words, the Palestinians employed in Israeli settlements play more than their part in the Palestinian economy at a time when over a quarter of West Bank Palestinians are unemployed. There are thousands of workers earning salaries, spending their currency inside the Palestinian economy, supporting families, and all of this within an economy which is already struggling to provide sufficient employment.

None of this resolves the argument over settlements, nor does Palestinian employment there provide an answer to the legal and political arguments surrounding them. But, if the purpose of an import ban is to reduce the revenues of businesses operating beyond the Green Line, it is reasonable to ask who will bear the consequences if that policy succeeds.

Businesses that lose customers eventually reduce production, investment, staffing, and in some cases, close altogether. The economic consequences of such actions do not distinguish between an Israeli owner and a Palestinian employee – something the UK government did not address in its grand announcement.

Israel also has precedent for how complicated such a situation can get

For years, SodaStream operated a large factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone, employing around 500 Palestinians alongside Israeli Jews and Arabs. The company became one of the most prominent targets of the international boycott movement, with the controversy reaching the mainstream in 2014 when actress Scarlett Johansson resigned as an Oxfam ambassador after the charity objected to her relationship with the Israeli company.

SodaStream subsequently closed its Mishor Adumim operation and moved to a new facility in the Negev, where it employs around 1,400 people, including Bedouins.

SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum has consistently rejected claims that the boycott campaign forced the company out of Mishor Adumim, saying the relocation had been planned for commercial reasons and as part of a broader consolidation of its production facilities. The boycott movement claimed the departure as a victory, but the company disputes this.

What is without dispute, however, is what happened to the Palestinian workforce there, which is a lesson in and of itself.

SodaStream tried to bring hundreds of its Palestinian employees to the new factory, but doing so required Israeli work permits. Only a fraction could continue working there and, by early 2016, just 74 Palestinian employees remained. When their permits expired, they too lost their jobs, although those workers were eventually allowed to return the following year.

Perhaps the UK considered the risk and sees it as a price worth paying

Israel’s permit policies did play an important role in the loss of those jobs, and it would be inaccurate to simply state that a boycott put hundreds of Palestinians out of work. But the episode demonstrates that Western policymakers should bear in mind that attempting to come down on Israeli businesses over the Green Line can affect the Palestinian economy as well as the Israeli economy.

Sometimes the jobs cross back over the Green Line and the workers cannot.

Perhaps the UK considered the risk and sees it as a price worth paying. Perhaps Palestinian workers themselves overwhelmingly agree. There are, undoubtedly, Palestinians who believe that economic pressure on the settlements is worth the potential personal cost as part of a wider political struggle.

Palestinian Ambassador to Britain Husam Zomlot welcomed Tuesday’s announcement as a “turning point” and called for further measures against Israel. Palestinian officials in Ramallah described Britain’s decision as a “significant political achievement.” Political points appear to have precedence over potential economic distress.

At the very least, Britain should acknowledge that economic pressure on Israel will have consequences beyond the people it intends to punish.

Before the UK (and by extension France, Canada, and the other countries supporting such action) congratulate themselves on refusing to buy products made in Judea and Samaria, they might consider finding out who actually makes them.

Britain says its new policy is intended to help Palestinians and punish Israel. But Palestinians will also pay a price.

This post was originally published on here. 

This weekend, on September 5 and 6, the second Jewish and Kurdish diaspora gathering met, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar sent a message. For his office, it was a small courtesy. For us it was not small at all, and it is worth explaining why a paragraph from Jerusalem lands so heavily on a people of 40 million.

Kurds are the largest unrecognized nation on earth. Not unrepresented, which is a lesser condition. Unrecognized. There is no seat, no flag at Turtle Bay, no ministry anywhere that receives our envoys as envoys. 

Compare us to almost any other stateless national claim and the asymmetry is immediate: Palestinians hold observer status at the United Nations and full diplomatic representation across most of the Western world, and their cause commands parliamentary time in capitals that could not locate Kurdistan on a map. 

I do not raise this to diminish anyone’s claim. I raise it because the same international system that found room for one has found none for a nation four times larger.

What that absence looks like on the ground is worth spelling out, because it is not abstract.

In Turkey, when Kurdish is spoken in parliament, whether by an elected member or by a citizen addressing a committee, the official record has entered it as speech “in an unknown language.” The state broadcaster runs a Kurdish channel, TRT Kurdî, funded by the same government whose parliamentary stenographers cannot name the language it broadcasts in. 

That is not repression at its most violent. It is repression at its most absurd, and the absurdity is the point: a century of policy has been built on the proposition that we are a clerical error.

The reach extends past Turkey’s borders. In Germany, Kurdish parents holding Turkish passports have found their children’s names constrained by what Turkish law permits, because German registry practice deferred to the naming rules of the applicant’s state of nationality. 

Turkish orthography excludes the letters Q, W, and X. Kurdish requires them. So a Kurdish family in Cologne discovers that Ankara has a say in what their daughter is called. Denial of identity does not stop at a frontier. It travels in the passport.

Against that background, consider what Jerusalem has just proved it is willing to do. In December 2025, Israel became the first state in the world to recognize Somaliland. Sa’ar flew there in January. Ambassadors were exchanged by the spring. 

Israel looked at a functioning, self-governing people that the international system had spent three decades pretending not to see, and decided that the pretense was not binding. Mogadishu objected. Israel proceeded anyway.

Kurds noticed.

Asking for advocacy

I am not asking for a declaration tomorrow, and I am not going to pretend we have earned one on our present performance. Israel represents its people. We cannot yet say the same. Our political factions have not produced a national congress or any body with standing to speak for the nation, and until they do, no partner has an address to write to. 

That failure is ours. I have said so in these pages before, and I will keep saying it, because a movement that will not name its own weakness has no business asking anyone to invest in its strength.

But the fracture is in Kurdish politics, not in Kurdish identity. Where our politicians have failed to build a representative body, our people have not failed to remain a people. And the place where that distinction can be turned into something usable is the diaspora.

This is familiar ground for Jewish readers. The State of Israel was conceived in exile, argued into existence in Basel and Vienna and London long before it was defended at home. Kurds are at the beginning of that road, second generation at most in the societies we now live in, where Jewish communities are measured in centuries. 

We are not equals in this. But we are in the same rooms, which is new, and the gatherings of the past two years are where it is happening.

So the practical proposal is narrow. The Jewish Diaspora is the most effective advocacy network any group of people has ever built, and Sa’ar has spent his term strengthening precisely those ties, most recently at the J50 Forum in Jerusalem five days before our own gathering met. 

That machinery, turned even partly toward the Kurdish question, would do more for our international standing in a decade than we have managed in a century of asking. Not charity. Advocacy for a cause that pays.

Because it does pay. The governments that guarantee Kurds never see daylight are, with striking consistency, the same governments organized around Israel’s disappearance. Relations with Ankara are at their lowest point in the history of the two states; Sa’ar himself described the Turkish foreign minister’s remarks this July as a call for genocide. 

Whatever deference to Turkish sensitivities once constrained Israeli policy toward Kurds, it is difficult to see what remains of it now.

Kurds have been misled and abandoned by Western partners often enough to be careful about who we thank. This is not one of those cases. Israel is doing the one thing we cannot do for ourselves: treating us as a nation in public, at cost, without asking permission. More is possible, and Somaliland is the proof that it is possible.

Israel has been bold before, and recently. Kurds will answer boldness.

The writer, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Central District Court in Lod sentenced a man on Wednesday to 13 years in prison for killing Palestinian mother Aysha Rabi in a rare conviction for Jewish-nationalist terror relating to a 2018 attack, concluding the trial stage of an unusually long and closely contested case.

The court also ordered the defendant to pay Rabi’s family NIS 258,000, the maximum compensation available under the law, and imposed an additional suspended prison term.

The defendant, whose identity remains barred from publication because he was a minor at the time, was 15 years and 10 months old when he carried out the attack.

On October 12, 2018, he positioned himself with two or three unidentified people on an embankment overlooking Route 60 near the West Bank settlement of Rehelim, the court found.

After identifying an approaching car by its Palestinian license plate, he threw a rock weighing approximately two kilograms through its windshield. The rock struck Rabi directly in the head as she sat beside her husband, Yacoub, and in front of their nine-year-old daughter.

Rabi, a resident of the Palestinian town of Bidya and a mother of nine, died from her injuries. The court found that the defendant acted from a nationalist motive, intending to harm the car’s occupants and disregarding the possibility that they could be killed.

In March, judges Michal Barak-Nevo and Michael Tamir found that the defendant had committed the offenses, while then-presiding judge Liora Brody voted to acquit him, contending the very high beyond any reasonable doubt had not been met.

Because the defendant was a minor at the time, the juvenile court first determined that he had committed the offenses without immediately entering a formal conviction. It formally convicted him on Wednesday as part of the sentencing decision.

He was convicted of manslaughter in circumstances amounting to an act of terrorism, aggravated stone-throwing at a vehicle and intentionally damaging a vehicle, with all three offenses classified as terrorism-related.

At the time of the indictment, the fact that the minor was accused not of murder, but only manslaughter, and that the filing of the indictment was delayed by several weeks indicated that the path to any kind of conviction might be difficult.

Honenu lawyer Adi Keidar told the Post at the time that even the DNA evidence could be attacked in court.

A spokesman for the right-wing legal aid group Honenu said that there was no other evidence connecting the minor to the incident, and that the DNA evidence was weak compared to standard DNA evidence, as it was found on a moving object – the rock – as opposed to on a stationary object, like a wall.

This meant, said Honenu, that the DNA could have come from a variety of sources, while the rock may have been moved.

In addition, the spokesman said the DNA was of a low resolution. In other words, while hi-resolution DNA evidence can flag a specific person, in this case the evidence could point to a number of people.

The majority of the court disagreed with these arguments, resting principally on the defendant’s DNA, which was found on the rock recovered from inside the family’s car, while also citing the rejection of his alibi, statements they found untruthful, contradictions in later accounts and his problematic conduct during questioning.

In August 2024, the Post learned that as part of the prosecutor’s case, extensive evidence had been presented to debunk the defense’s attack on the DNA evidence.

Further, The Jerusalem Post learned that the prosecution was able to use a May 2019 decision by the Lod District Court regarding various issues in the case as somewhat of a roadmap toward conviction.

Already in that decision, the court had ruled in the context of debates about how long to keep the minor in detention of some sort, that the prosecution’s chances of conviction were extremely high because of the DNA.

Despite the defense’s arguments, the prosecution has presented evidence that the chances of the minor-defendant just happening to have touched the rock randomly (versus using it as his killing weapon) are miniscule given that the only DNA on the rock is Rabi’s, her husband who touched the rock after it hit her, and the minor-defendant.

In May 2019, the court had called such a theory to try to acquit the defendant-minor “blatantly and grossly unreasonable.”

Moreover, the prosecution has taken aim at the defendant’s alibi.

According to the prosecution, the Post understands, the minor’s alibi was completely unreliable because he refused to open his mouth not only throughout the time of his arrest and being interrogated by the Shin Bet from December 30, 2018, but even from October 15, 2018 when he was interviewed only as a third party witness, and not yet as a suspect.

The fact that the defendant would not open his mouth even when he was not yet suspected of anything, the prosecution argued, drew much greater attention to his potential guilt and drew greater scrutiny to his alibi.

Put differently, when he was not worried about any criminal charges, what would he have to lose by telling law enforcement that he was in a different place from where he would have needed to be to perpetrate the crime?

Defendant continues to deny involvement in the attack

Further, the Post learned that the prosecution noted that the defendant only produced an alibi once he knew what the final narrative of the prosecution against him would be as the indictment was about to be filed.

The defendant continues to deny any involvement in the attack, although the sentencing summary said he expressed sorrow over Rabi’s death.

His family and the Honenu legal-aid organization said they would appeal both the conviction and sentence to the Supreme Court.

His lawyers, Ariel Atari and Adi Keidar, called the conviction wrongful and said Brody’s detailed dissent gave them a “high chance” of persuading the Supreme Court to overturn the majority ruling and acquit him.

The court said the defendant’s age was the central consideration in his favor. It also gave significant weight to the rehabilitation process he had undergone during the seven years since the attack, including treatment, his decision to live in a different environment and the positive impression he made on the probation service.

The judges nevertheless described the attack as cruel, stressing that Rabi was killed in front of her husband and young daughter and that the rock could also have killed the other occupants or caused the driver to lose control of the car.

They also found that its nationalist character made the offense more serious and that attacks of this kind risked increasing violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. 

Yacoub Rabi told the official responsible for preparing the family’s victim-impact report that justice, for him, would have meant his wife continuing to live with her family while the defendant pursued his own life and studied at university.

“No sum of money can compensate the Rabi family for the loss of her life,” the court said.

The Central District Attorney’s Office said, “The court sent a clear and unequivocal message today, reflecting the severity of the defendant’s actions and the grave and tragic outcome of the attack, which claimed Aysha Rabi’s life.” 

“This was an act of terrorism carried out for nationalist reasons against Rabi, a Palestinian woman traveling with her family.”

Prosecutors said that despite the defendant’s age at the time, the seriousness of the attack led them to seek a lengthy prison term, a position the court accepted.

“In our view, today’s sentence reflects the severity of – and the danger posed by – nationalist acts of terrorism of this kind,” the statement said.

This would not be the only such case of Jewish terrorists facing justice for violence against Palestinians, with the 2014 murderer of Palestinian minor Muhammad Abu Khadir, Yoseph Chaim Ben David, and the 2015 murderer of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family, Amiram Ben Uliel, both sentenced to life in jail in recent years.

In fact, one of the reasons that the Rabi case probably took longer is that the Shin Bet declined to use enhanced interrogation on the minor-defendant, after the agency’s use of such techniques on Ben Uliel almost led to a mistrial.

Elor Ben Azariah, Ben Deri, and other IDF soldiers have also been given prison time for killing Palestinians, but the conviction was still an unusual one, especially in the post-October 7 period.

This post was originally published on here. 

Following the British government’s decision to ban trade with Israeli settlements, Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli has instructed ministry officials to create a proposal for the Population and Immigration Authority regarding preventing representatives and activists of British organizations that work to promote a boycott against the State of Israel from entering the country.

Among the organizations whose representatives the ministry recommended be barred from entering are Islamic Relief Worldwide, Oxfam, Save the Children, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Palestine Action.

Chikli said that the organizations included in the proposal have for years conducted extensive anti-Israel activity in the international and British arenas, including promoting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and applying diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel.

Some organizations have alleged links to Muslim Brotherhood

Additionally, some of the organizations have purported links to entities associated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement and Islamist networks in Britain and Europe, as well as connections to other designated organizations such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Accordingly, Director-General of the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry Avi Cohen-Skali recommended to the Population and Immigration Authority that it prevent the entry of these groups into Israel.

Taken together, their activities, and particularly their efforts to promote measures against the State of Israel, warrant consideration of preventing their representatives and activists from entering Israel, Chikli added.

Following the coordinated announcement yesterday that Canada, the UK and 10 European countries including France are imposing trade bans and economic sanctions on Israel, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar imposed retaliatory measures.

These include shutting down the United Kingdom’s consulate in east Jerusalem, the expulsion of British representatives at the Kiryat Gat Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) and the termination of UK forces’ training of Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in Ramallah.

Furthermore, Sa’ar banned the entry of 12 British elected representatives and other British nationals: MPs Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Naz Shah, Diane Abbott, Hannah Spencer, Carla Denyer, Sian Berry, Ellie Chowns, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon and Adrian Ramsay, as well as Riverway to the Sea director Fahad Ansari.

This post was originally published on here. 

Palestinians are increasingly questioning the effectiveness of “armed resistance” in achieving their national ambitions, with only 13.3% now viewing violence as the most useful way to achieve those goals, according to a new poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) – founded in 1988 by Palestinian journalists and researchers – in cooperation with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

The survey, which collected responses from 1,200 Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between August 20 and 25, found that 15.7% of respondents in the West Bank and 9.7% in Gaza viewed “armed resistance” as the most effective way to achieve Palestinian national goals, a significant decline from 2023, when 37.1% of respondents said it was the most effective tool.

More than half of Palestinians (55.8%) now view the best approach to achieve their national goals to be peaceful negotiations, a significant increase from 2023, when only 28% said the same.

Demonstrating this shift in attitudes, the percentage of Palestinians who said they believed the October 7 attack served Palestinian national interests fell to 15.7% in August, down from 30.9% in September 2025 and 45% in September 2024.

A slight majority of Palestinians in the West Bank (50.1%) and a sizable number of Gazans (35.2%) said that Hamas’s invasions had hurt the national interests.

Support for a two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also grown compared to previous surveys. Nearly half of the respondents (47.9%) said they preferred two states over the alternatives, a significant jump from the 27.3% who answered the same in September 2023. Likewise, the percentage of those who would prefer to establish a single Palestinian state, removing Israel, declined to 18.6% from 24.7% in September 2023.

Only 28.8% of Palestinians in the West Bank expect the Palestinian Legislative Council elections to go ahead in November, while more than a third (35.5%) believe they will be postponed, and 22.4% expect the elections to be canceled altogether.

Most believe elections will happen at some point

Though most respondents appear to believe the elections will happen at some point, even if not on the date announced by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, fewer than half (46.8%) said the process would improve the situation for Palestinians. A nearly equal portion of respondents (46.4%) said the elections would either worsen the situation or have no impact.

Trust in political parties remains relatively low, appearing to explain Palestinians’ pessimistic view of the elections. Only 55% said that they trusted an existing organization, with major camps notably seeing a decline in support over the past four years.

The percentage of respondents in the West Bank and Gaza who trusted Hamas fell from the 12% recorded in the July 2022 survey to only 6.7% in August. Likewise, trust in Fatah has declined from 28.8% to 22.3%.

The support Hamas amassed following the October 7 attack has since sharply declined, with 18.7% of respondents in the West Bank saying they trusted the Islamist group in October 2023, compared with only 4.5% in the latest poll conducted in August 2026.

Though several experts have suggested that Abbas is under pressure to postpone the elections over fears that Hamas could win a majority of seats, the poll found that Fatah remains more popular than Hamas.

Some 27.5% of respondents said they would vote for Fatah, including 23.5% in the West Bank and 33.4% in Gaza, while only 7.6% said they would vote for Hamas, including 5.6% in the West Bank and 10.5% in the Strip.

Public trust in Abbas remains low

If the poll is representative of Palestinian attitudes, Fatah could expect to emerge victorious in the elections, yet trust in Abbas remains low, at only 6.9%.

In direct contradiction with data gathered by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, JMCC’s poll found that trust in Marwan Barghouti stands at only 6.3%. Barghouti is currently serving five consecutive life sentences plus 40 years after being convicted by an Israeli court on charges including five counts of murder and attempted murder during the Second Intifada. He has long been considered a favorite for the Palestinian presidency.

Barghouti and his family have maintained that he was not involved in planning the attacks for which he was convicted, while he has expressed support for a two-state solution.

However, questions remain over the direction in which the imprisoned Fatah leader could take the PA from behind bars.

There is also growing support for Mohammed Dahlan, a former Fatah leader based in the UAE who has held talks with Hamas in recent months, while pushing for a more unified Palestinian leadership that includes all factions. Trust in Dahlan stood at only 2.7% in 2023 but has risen to 5.8% as of August.

His growing support comes after he helped facilitate millions of dollars in UAE aid to Gaza, which likely contributed to his increased standing among Palestinians.

Though the issue of settler violence has become increasingly discussed by international media, respondents prioritized the issue of Israelis living in the West Bank well below ending the war in Gaza (50.1%), improving the Palestinian economy (16.9%), rebuilding Gaza (13.4%), and achieving national unity (8.9%).

Only 7% said that confronting settlement activity should be the number one priority for Palestinians.

Though not the number one priority for those polled, 70.6% said that residents of West Bank villages do not receive sufficient support from Palestinian society when they are exposed to settler violence, and 77.9% said the PA specifically does not provide adequate support.

The Palestinian economy has struggled in recent years. Israel has withheld PA clearance revenues in response to its continued pay-for-slay policy for Palestinians convicted of carrying out attacks against Israel, and some 100,000 Palestinian workers lost access to jobs in Israel following Hamas’s October 7 attack.

Combined with the regional insecurity that has severely affected tourism, financial pressures have forced the PA to make significant cuts to public services, with schools operating only three days a week and civil servants receiving only a fraction of their salaries.

The financial crisis has led 39.6% of those polled to believe that the PA will collapse. And 58.1% said they believed that Israel was deliberately maintaining a weakened version of the PA.

Nearly a quarter (23%) said they believed that it would be better if the PA were dissolved, while 69.4% said it was important that it remain in place.

This post was originally published on here. 

Eyal Giler, a defendant in the 2025 Jerusalem garbage bin fire case, has sent Sara Netanyahu a pre-suit warning demanding an apology and NIS 100,000 over remarks in which she said those responsible for the fires intended to kill her family.

The fires were set on September 3, 2025, during a protest calling for the release of the hostages. Prosecutors allege that Giler and three other defendants planned fires at six locations near the prime minister’s private residence in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. Ultimately, they set five garbage bins alight.

‘The intention was, really, to kill’

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.”

The letter, dated Tuesday, threatens a defamation suit of at least NIS 1 million if its demands are rejected. It is not a lawsuit, and no court has ruled that Netanyahu’s comments were defamatory.

Netanyahu did not name Giler in the quoted passage. His lawyers, Tali Ben-Simon and Yadin Dan Giladi, argue that viewers would have understood her remarks as referring to him because his name and photograph had previously been published in connection with the criminal case.

Letter demands that Sara Netanyahu withdraw the remarks

The letter demands that Netanyahu withdraw the remarks, publish an apology, and pay Giler NIS 100,000. His lawyers said they would seek at least NIS 1 million if she does not comply.

The indictment provides support for part of Netanyahu’s description, but not for her assertion about an intent to kill.

Prosecutors allege that Giler and three other defendants helped plan coordinated fires at six locations near the prime minister’s home during a September 3, 2025 protest calling for the release of the hostages. According to the indictment, the locations were selected to create what prosecutors themselves called a “ring of fire.”

Prosecutors say that the fires damaged vegetation and other property, nearly destroyed a vehicle, and endangered residents of a nearby building, who were evacuated.

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

These allegations have not been proven, however. Giler and the other defendants are presumed innocent while the criminal proceedings remain pending.

The indictment charges the defendants with offenses including arson, malicious damage to property, damage to a vehicle, and obstruction of justice. It does not charge Giler with attempted murder or allege that he planned to kill Netanyahu or members of her family.

However, the warning letter’s suggestion that prosecutors attributed no intention to cause harm is too broad. The indictment alleges that the defendants intended to damage public property and vegetation or endanger nearby residents, or acted while recognizing such an outcome as nearly certain.

The letter is the third publicly reported pre-suit warning arising from Netanyahu’s Channel 14 interview. Democrats chairman Yair Golan and Amir

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Syrian border on Wednesday, where he released a statement on his commitment to defending Israel from border incursions and the defeat of Iran.

“We will not allow any terror army to establish itself on our border…. We are committed to defeating the terror regime in Iran – and we will do it,” the prime minister said, overlooking Syria from the top of Mount Hermon.

“On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, we are at the summit of the Hermon, the crown of the Hermon. Damascus is here, Lebanon is there, the Syrian Golan Heights is over there, and we control the entire area from the crown of the Hermon to the Yarmouk, and from here to the Mediterranean Sea – absolute control the likes of which have never been seen before,” Netanyahu said. 

“We will not allow any terror army to establish itself on our border, and this is one of the monumental achievements we have secured in the War of Revival,” he added.

“From these peaks, there is still work to be done – the primary job is to defeat the terror regime in Iran. We are very close to it. We know that the entire axis will ultimately collapse,” he said, before  wishing a “Happy New Year to the citizens of Israel and to our heroic soldiers who are doing the work here.”

Netanyahu joined by Defense Minister Katz, military officials

Netanyahu was joined by Defense Minister Israel Katz and Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Tamir Yadai during his tour of the area, where he received an operational briefing from Northern Command Chief Maj.-Gen. Rafi Milo and 210th Division Commander Brig.-Gen. Yair Peli.

Katz spoke about tensions with Syria, saying, “We are sending a very strong and clear message to the President of Syria sitting 35 kilometers away down there in the palace in Damascus: We are here on Mount Hermon, we are in the security zone, and we are not moving from here – in order to defend against threats from any jihadist element on this side of the border and within Syria itself.”

Threats of Iran, regional proxies launching coordinated attack on Israel

These comments by the prime minister come shortly after assessments by the Israeli establishment came out, saying that Iran is reportedly preparing for a broad, coordinated attack against Israel on several simultaneous fronts in a scenario resembling an October 7-style assault.

According to the assessments, Iran is seeking to combine its forces with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the Houthis in Yemen, and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq in a single unified offensive.

Recent developments on the Syrian front

The IDF maintains a buffer zone with Syria, holding positions on Mount Hermon and the surrounding high ground, often launching patrols, searches, and raids into Syrian territory as defensive measures.

Last month, multiple incidents occured wherein the IDF struck Syrian territory.

Israel carried out strikes on the Abu al-Duhur military airfield in northwestern Syria, causing US Envoy to Iraq and Syria Tom Barrack to condemn the attacks as an unnecessary escalation that threatens regional stability.

“Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo,” the Prime Minister’s office rebutted.

Additionally, on August 22, the IDF killed a terrorist who was in the “final stages” of preparing an attack against Israeli soldiers, according to the military.

On Wednesday, at least 14 people were killed, and 11 were wounded in an explosion at a weapons depot near the Syrian city of Sarmada in Idlib, according to state television.

It is not yet clear what the cause of the explosion was.

Additionally, a Syrian civilian managed to reach the vicinity of an IDF post in the southern Golan Heights. Authorities detained him and transferred him for questioning. 

Anna Barsky, Shir Perets, and Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel can defeat Iran under a government led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party, though there is still “a lot of work to do in this field,” former Mossad and Shin Bet official Dvora Sharifian Bachar, a candidate on the party’s Knesset list, told The Jerusalem Post.

Bachar’s comments came at Yashar’s Knesset slate unveiling in Rosh Ha’ayin on Monday, a day before the deadline for parties to submit their final candidate lists.

She received the 14th spot on Eisenkot’s slate, and with recent polls projecting Yashar to win around 23 seats, Bachar is well positioned to enter the next Knesset.

“Iran was the focus of my 20-year career in the Mossad,” Bachar told the Post. “I think we have a lot of work to do in this field.”

She added that she believed Israel has the capability to “win against Iran” and “bring security back” by confronting the Islamic Republic as well as its regional proxies, including the Houthis and Hezbollah.

Smuggled out of Iran by Mossad, Bachar joined the intelligence service later in life

Bachar, 44, was born in Tehran several years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

At the age of seven, the Mossad covertly smuggled her and her family out of Iran and brought them to Israel. There, despite being raised in a conservative Jewish family, she enlisted in the IDF and became a commander, eventually rising to the rank of captain.

After completing her military service, Bachar began a 22-year career in security, first serving as a field operative in Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, before moving to the country’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.

Now on Eisenkot’s list, she believes her party is well positioned to triumph in the October elections and “make Israel great again.”

“With my colleagues, and of course with Gadi, at the head of the party, we have all the best chances to win this election,” she said.

Plans to focus on Iran, national security, and education

If elected, she added, beyond focusing on Iran and national security, she would also like to work on education.

“There is also education, which is something I love,” she said. “I’ve been working for five years now as a teacher. I teach Persian, as well as intelligence and defense, in high schools from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat.”

Following her career in Israel’s intelligence apparatus, Bachar founded the “Security and Intelligence: Iran Track,” an education program that works to prepare high school students for service in the IDF, particularly in intelligence and cyber units.

“I think that Israel’s real security is education,” she added.

Eisenkot’s Yashar party has led most recent polls and is part of the opposition bloc seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the October elections.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Arab League Council adopted a resolution on Monday affirming solidarity with Lebanon and rejecting Iranian foreign influence and Hezbollah’s continued military activities, according to an exclusive report published by L’Orient-Le Jour on Tuesday.

The council reportedly adopted the resolution based on a draft Beirut previously submitted, affirming its full support for Lebanese independence and sovereignty.

It also expressed collective support for Beirut’s decision to establish a state monopoly over weapons and security decisions, referencing the government’s March decision to require that all weapons be held exclusively by legitimate authorities and ban Hezbollah from military activity.

Notably, the council reportedly also rejected foreign interference, particularly from Iran, which has launched numerous attacks against Arab states in recent months and attempted to condition a memorandum of understanding with Washington on a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Member states will be mobilized to help Lebanon secure its territory

Calling on member states to mobilize necessary international support for the Lebanese army, L’Orient reported that efforts would be made to help Lebanon secure its territory from smuggling and terrorism.

Addressing the recent agreement with Israel, under which the IDF would withdraw from select Lebanese villages as part of a pilot program aimed at preventing Hezbollah from repositioning near the Israeli border, the council reportedly welcomed the diplomatic efforts and expressed hope that the recent moves would compel Israel to withdraw.

This post was originally published on here. 

Eight countries welcomed the decision by Britain to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and impose restrictions on some services, adding that they hoped the move would mobilize other countries to take similar action.

In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Indonesia, and Jordan also said they welcomed the joint statement by 12 countries on the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The ministers “reiterate their call for Israel to rescind all measures taken in connection with settlement activities and other measures aimed at altering the geographic and demographic character of the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the statement said.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Iranian-backed Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia this week. This is being seen as the first test of the new alliance that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan entered in August. The “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement” was intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression, according to reports in early August, when it was first announced.

Later, a meeting in Turkey sought to create formal institutions as part of the new security agreement. The three countries created a permanent secretariat that is supposed to be in Saudi Arabia. “The move gives institutional shape to an alliance built around collective deterrence and regional responsibility. A mechanism for other countries to join the group was already underway, officials said,” MBN media reported on September 3.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke about the importance of the new pact when he went to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Kyrgyzstan. He spoke about “collective deterrence.”

Now there are questions about whether Pakistan or Turkey will respond to the Houthi attacks. Both Pakistan and Turkey have been wary of any conflict with Iran. Saudi Arabia has in the past been very critical of Iran. Saudi Arabia also fought the Iran-backed Houthis since 2015. Riyadh appears now to hope that Yemen government troops can push back the Houthis and make gains. The Houthis are threatening Saudi Arabia increasingly over the last months.

Turkish MFA condemns attack in the strongest terms

Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did condemn the Houthi attack. The statement on September 8 said that Ankara condemned in the strongest terms the attacks by the Houthis against Saudi Arabia. Turkey said it reaffirmed support for Saudi Arabia. “These attacks undermine diplomatic efforts aimed at bringing the conflict in Yemen to an end through a lasting political solution.” Ankara called on the Houthis to cease their aggressive acts. This does not sound like Turkey joining Saudi Arabia in strikes on the group.

Turkey has military assets nearby because Ankara has been operating in Somalia. In fact, Turkey recently freed a crew of a ship from Somali pirates. “Turkish and Somali forces have freed the MV LUTUF after pirates hijacked the vessel off the coast of Somalia. The 10-day operation killed 14 alleged pirates and destroyed four boats used by the attackers,” DW reported in late August.

Pakistani PM condemns Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said “I condemn in the strongest terms, the cowardly attack by Houthis targeting civilian and energy facilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which have left many people injured.” He added that “Pakistan stands in unwavering solidarity with the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the brotherly people of Saudi Arabia.” He also noted that “such dastardly attacks threaten innocent lives as well as regional peace and security. We reaffirm our steadfast support for the Kingdom’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity, and pray for the swift recovery of all those injured.”

Turkey Today reported that “Pakistan is likely to carry out airstrikes against Houthi forces in Yemen at Saudi Arabia’s request, according to Pakistani sources. A source noted that the attacks may take place soon and will be made public shortly afterward.” The report noted that “one of the military priorities for the Pakistani attacks would be to clear the Houthis from Saadah along with other regions, according to one Pakistani source. However, a final decision on attacking Yemen’s Houthis has not been made.”

If the alliance is able to come together in more than just words on the Houthis this will show that the regional pact has teeth. This is something that other countries, such as India, Israel and Greece may be watching. This is because the pact has regional implications. The countries may want to expand the pact. However, if it is not able to deter the Houthis then the speeches about deterrence may have been empty. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Families of 9/11 victims hand-delivered a petition with over 100,000 signatures to City Hall on Tuesday to demand that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stay away from the upcoming 25th-anniversary commemoration at the World Trade Center site. The families held a press conference on the steps of City Hall.

The petition was launched on change.org on July 9 by 9/11 widower Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was murdered in the attacks. He began the petition out of concern over the mayor’s public positions, rhetoric, and associations.

Galante addressed the gathering on Tuesday, saying: “The main purpose is just that we don’t believe in what he believes in, and we really want to be left alone.”

He added, “This 25th anniversary is for our victims and us survivors to blend in and pray [on] that day for all the families, not have a circus around us.”

Monica Iken, whose husband Michael was murdered in the towers, also spoke at the podium, noting, “If the families really feel that we don’t want someone at our world-class memorial museum that’s sacred and hallowed, we feel that that person should respect our wishes.”

It’s about Mamdani’s policies, not religion

Iken further said, “It’s nothing against the mayor – it’s just against the fact that we feel he wasn’t even here. He was 10, he wasn’t in this country, and I think he should really respect us.”

Cheri Sparacio, whose husband Tom was killed in the South Tower, emphasized the core objections of the petition: “Our petition is not about Mayor Mamdani’s religion or where he came from; it is strictly about the policies that he has today.”

Elected officials and organizational leaders also joined the families at City Hall. City Council Member Joanne Areola criticized the administration’s recent actions, noting that the mayor “does not care about 9/11 or the tragedies that took place because he surrounds himself with people who believe that America deserved what it got.”

‘I am demanding that he not show his face at that sacred ground’

City Council Member Vicky Paladino took an even stronger stance: “I am not asking politely for the mayor not to come to that ceremony. I am asking, I am demanding that he not show his face at that sacred ground.”

The press conference followed remarks made by Mamdani to ABC News on Monday, during which he affirmed his intention to be present at the solemn observances. When speaking about his plans for the anniversary, Mamdani said he wanted this week to be a “focus on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror on September 11 – and a focus also on the first responders, everything they did for the city, and to the people who came together to try and help their fellow New Yorkers.”

The mayor added, “And so, in the days to come, my focus will be on attending events that memorialize that incredible courage, and I will be there on Friday at the memorial just as I was last year.”

This post was originally published on here.