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A group of Australian trauma physicians was in Israel earlier this month for a special medical mission focused on ongoing learning and training, with the goal of improving trauma care in both countries.

The mission, organized by AUSiMED and the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, was headlined by Dr. Nir Samuel, head of the Pediatric Trauma Service and an emergency medicine specialist at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel; Prof. Mark Fitzgerald, director of trauma services at The Alfred Hospital in Australia and director of the country’s National Trauma Research Institute; and Dr. Dany Ben-Eli, a trauma consultant and emergency physician at The Alfred.

The delegation, which arrived on August 1, visited a strong representation of Israel’s leading hospitals and medical institutions, from Hadassah Ein Kerem and the Institute for Research in Military Medicine at Hebrew University to Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, Rambam Health Care Campus and Sheba Medical Center. Along the way, the Australian physicians learned from their Israeli counterparts while sharing their own knowledge and experience, according to Samuel.

“We built a program with ongoing mutual learning and training,” Samuel told The Jerusalem Post, highlighting not only what took place on the ground but also the dialogue that unfolded in departments such as Sheba’s MSR, where discussions focused on full-scale simulations. One possibility discussed was bringing a large team from Australia to Israel to share its expertise while gaining skills that could help advance medical simulation in Australia.

MSR-Azrieli, the Israel Center for Medical Simulation at Sheba, is a global leader in simulation-based medical education.

“It was very strong professionally, but on a personal level, as an Israeli physician, it was really heartwarming,” Samuel added. “To have one of the leading [trauma] teams in the world come to Israel and support us at a time like this, that’s far from the norm.”

Israel and Australia have long maintained close ties. Yet since October 7, 2023, headlines have often focused on rising antisemitism in Australia and disagreements between Australian and Israeli leaders, including the countries’ prime ministers. Missions like this one highlight another side of the relationship, built around professional cooperation and person-to-person connections.

Those kinds of opportunities will also be part of the conversation in November at the first-ever Jerusalem Post Australia Summit, scheduled to take place in Sydney on November 19.

The event, which includes a gala the night before and a private cocktail reception at its conclusion, will feature a two-hour business and innovation program held in collaboration with the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Leaders from companies, hospitals and startups will have an opportunity to meet and discuss potential collaboration and investment.

Samuel said his relationship with The Alfred began when he decided he wanted to build Schneider’s first pediatric trauma service dedicated specifically to children. In early 2022, he traveled to The Alfred on a scholarship to train. The hospital is Australia’s largest trauma center and ranks among the world’s leading trauma centers.

He trained there for about 18 months before returning to Israel in May 2023. At the time, Samuel could not have envisioned what would happen on October 7. Ultimately, however, the skills and connections he developed in Australia proved invaluable over the next few years.

Samuel explained that while Israel has one of the world’s leading medical systems, even the best medical systems must continue learning from their counterparts abroad if they want to remain at the forefront of their fields.

“You have to learn different approaches,” he told The Post. “Going to Australia, there was no treatment or a device or whatever I heard about for the first time, but it’s about how you apply things, about processes, about doing things differently. It’s not a low resource country going to learn from a high resource country. It’s really two mature systems interacting to the benefit of both.”

He said that in clinical leadership in Israel, doctors often train abroad and bring home new approaches and techniques.

“Collaboration is super crucial,” he said. “If Israel gets shunned and people don’t go to study, we’re going to be in a difficult position.”

But for Samuel, the mission carried significance beyond its professional benefits. Australian colleagues made the effort, physically, mentally and financially, to come to Israel, offer their support and train alongside Israeli physicians.

He called it “reassuring that there are still people like this in the world and it goes beyond the practical implications.”

During the mission, in addition to visiting medical facilities, the participants ate together, toured Jerusalem’s Old City and spent time getting to know one another. Those experiences, Samuel said, helped strengthen the personal relationships behind the professional collaboration.

Samuel said he now envisions the partnership developing along at least three tracks. The first is increased people-to-people exchanges, including short- and long-term fellowships in Australia and Israel for doctors from both countries. The second is binational research. The third is innovation, connecting Israeli and Australian startups within the medical ecosystem and finding opportunities for them to work together.

Companies and professionals interested in exploring similar Australia-Israel partnerships can take part in the Jerusalem Post Australia Summit in November. For more information, visit the conference website at www.jpost.com/Australia2026. 

Partnership opportunities are also available through the conference organizers. Please email conferencep@jpost.com. 

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Ukraine could strike Russia with domestically produced ballistic missiles within the next few months, the country’s former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov told CBS on Sunday.

Fedorov, who was recently ousted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Ukraine could be able to launch the missiles within three to six months’ time

“We need to defeat Russia in every technological cycle, and we have to make decisions 24/7,” he told CBS.

Fedorov has often been credited with being the architect of Ukraine’s current war strategy. While he noted that it would be difficult to predict exactly when Ukrainian ballistic missiles would be deployed, he emphasized that Ukraine has “no choice but to do it.”

In June, Ukrainian defense company Fire Point began testing a ballistic model, which would allow Kyiv to respond to Moscow’s attacks. Fire Point has also said that it aims to begin launching interceptor missiles, but they will likely not be available until 2027. 

While it is on the uptick, Ukraine struggles to intercept Russian ballistic missiles because of its mass interceptor shortage.

Zelensky: If the US sells us 10% of Patriot missiles, ‘we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles’

On Sunday evening, the Ukrainian Air Force was unable to intercept any of the ballistic missiles that Russia fired at the country.

As such, Ukraine has mainly relied on long-range drones and cruise missiles to attack Russia.

Zelensky has been publicly pleading with the US and Europe for more interceptor missiles. In an interview with CNN, he said he has only about 10% of the interceptor missiles he needs.

If the US “sells us 5%, we will go through the winter and save people’s lives. If they can sell us 10%, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles. I have 1%,” he said.

After Trump walked back his public commitment to give Ukraine the Patriot missile interceptors, representatives from Lockheed Martin, which produces the Patriots, went to Kyiv to start discussions. But even if Ukraine does get the license, it would take at least a year, if not more, to produce them.

Ukraine has notably been receiving even fewer Patriot missiles than before due to the US interceptor shortage that stemmed from the war with Iran.

“I hope that I will get it,” Zelensky told CNN, regarding the interceptors.

“I don’t have 5% now, and I don’t have such an acceptance. And this is for me a big challenge, one of the biggest I have had from the very beginning of this war.”

In response, a White House official told CNN that the Pentagon “is currently exploring several potential pathways for future defense industrial cooperation with Ukraine.

“These discussions are in the exploratory phase; no specific industrial cooperation initiatives have been decided upon or guaranteed at this stage,” the official added.

“We must prioritize protecting these exquisite systems and expanding overall production of critical weapons systems for the US warfighter and for our partners and allies.”

Zelensky also told CNN that he would not concede any territory in Ukraine’s Donbas region, which Russia has repeatedly sought to control.

“Russia begins to speak about this war, and they speak about territory,” he said.

“The key question is why he will not come again with 1 or 2 additional million soldiers after a big pause. Why will he not come again to occupy us?”

He then signaled that he agreed with some assessments that Putin could try to expand the war in Ukraine to take on NATO.

“He doesn’t know how to end this war without big occupation or big victory for his society,” he said.

“It’s more simple to find some smaller country … for him, it will not be important if this country is in NATO or not in NATO. He wants quick victory, 100% sure that he will win, occupy or destroy or control.”

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Three drones were intercepted over Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq, on Friday.

The Kurdistan Region has been targeted by more than 1,000 drones and missiles launched by Iran and Iranian-backed proxies since February. Iraq has vowed that it will rein in Iranian-backed militias in Baghdad; however, the continued attacks illustrate that Baghdad has not been able to stop all the attacks.

The drone attack on Friday was intercepted by “US-led Global Coalition forces,” Rudaw media in Erbil said. “In the early hours of this morning, Friday … between 2:17 a.m. and 2:25 a.m. [local time], Coalition forces intercepted and shot down three bomb-laden drones in the skies over Erbil,” the Erbil-based Directorate General of Counter Terrorism said in a statement. “Fortunately, there were no casualties,” the statement added.

The report noted that Iran had also targeted an area in the Alana valley with missiles and drones last week. The attacks targeted the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran and Komala, which are two Kurdish Iranian opposition groups.

“According to Rudaw tracking, the Kurdistan Region has recorded more than 950 drone and missile attacks launched by Iran and allied armed groups in Iraq since the outbreak of the six-week war in late February, killing 32 people and wounding 154 others as of early August,” Rudaw noted.

After the latest attack on Friday, an Iranian-backed militia denied responsibility for the attack. Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS), which is one of the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and is also sanctioned as a terrorist group by the US, denied it had attacked Erbil. It claimed there was a “partial agreement” to stop attacks.

Along with groups such as Kataib Hezbollah, the KSS group is one of the major Iranian-backed threats in Iraq. These groups are also part of the Iraq paramilitary group called the Popular Mobilization Forces. As such, they operate as both illegal militias and also as a semi-official government force.

Kadhim al-Fartousi, spokesperson for the KSS group, told Rudaw that the attack “was not carried out by our groups…there is currently a partial agreement that no operations or attacks should be carried out, and that responding to Saudi Arabia’s attacks should also be delayed.”

Erbil backs Baghdad plan to bring militias’ weapons under state control

The Kurdistan Region has very good intelligence regarding which militias have targeted the region over the last year. It appears that Erbil is trying to work with Baghdad on a pragmatic solution that won’t require confronting the militias directly. Baghdad was to disarm the militias or move their arms to be completely controlled by the government. Erbil supports this. So does the US, Saudi Arabia and others.

Kurdistan Regional President Nechirvan Barzani said in an interview with Iraq’s privately owned Al Sharqiya TV that the region has been targeted by 1,000 attacks using drones and missiles. “According to Rudaw tracking, the attacks have killed 32 people and injured nearly 150 others,” Rudaw noted.

To understand the complexity of the situation, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) said their 52nd Brigade would be deployed in Amirli district in eastern Saladin province. This means that while the government reins in the militias, the PMF is still active throughout Iraq.

Iraq seeks to bring armed groups under state authority despite PMF ties

“The handover is part of a reorganization of security sectors and responsibilities aimed at enhancing field integration and coordination between the forces,” a statement from the PMF said, according to Rudaw. “The development comes as the Iraqi government is seeking to place all armed forces and weapons under state authority.”

“The PMF is a constitutional and legal institution and a major title and foundation for the movement of forces,” Iraqi officials say. It remains to be seen how the Iraqis will rein in the militias so long as they also function within the PMF as official brigades.

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A 1,300-year-old industrial and commercial complex was uncovered during excavations over the past few months in the Winter Stadium parking lot in Ramat Gan, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced on Sunday morning.

The excavations, which took place ahead of the construction of a large bus terminal by Netivei Ayalon at the site, revealed ancient streets, pottery kilns and several industrial buildings.

According to the IAA, the earliest parts of the site date to the seventh or eighth century CE, during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, and the later sections date to the Fatimid period.

While nearby communities at the time were home to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans, the excavations did not uncover any artifacts with a clear indication of a certain religious or ethnic group.

However, IAA researchers have proposed two main theories about what the site served as: either a major trade and industrial station or part of a currently undiscovered nearby settlement.

Site abandoned twice 

The site is estimated to have been operational for about 150 years before being abandoned for reasons researchers do not yet know, but it was later resettled in the 10th century CE.

Residents built buildings and production facilities there, and installed numerous tabuns (clay baking ovens). 

In the late 11th century CE, before the Crusader conquest, the site was abandoned once again and was never resettled.

In addition to the ruins, archaeologists unearthed dozens of pottery vessels and intact oil lamps, along with numerous bronze tableware, cosmetic implements, iron pickaxe heads, a sickle, numerous nails, dozens of coins, and a large quantity of fragments of local and imported pottery and glass vessels. 

The discoveries provide vivid insight into the period’s culture, trade, and economy.

Discovery ‘exceeds all expectations’

While ancient buildings and artifacts have previously been discovered in the area, the recent discovery has “exceeded all expectations,” said IAA Excavation Directors Dr. Yoav Arbel and Lior Rauchberger.

“The excavation uncovered an organized, planned complex featuring straight, intersecting streets,” they said. “Lining these streets were a series of rooms that served as shops or warehouses, plastered industrial facilities, pottery kilns and more.”

“Clearly, its main phase was planned in advance in detail by engineers and was built with the knowledge of the regional authorities, and perhaps even on their initiative and with their funding.”

“Its location was also likely not coincidental,” explained Arbel Rauchberger. “The site was situated near the main road that connected Jaffa, Ramla, then the district capital, and Jerusalem.”

The excavation directors noted that the complex may have stood on a secondary road branching off the main one, adding that the area also offers “fertile agricultural land and available water sources.”

Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu stated that the discovery once again demonstrates Israel’s “historical and archaeological wealth,” where “windows onto distant periods of the past may open anywhere.”

The IAA will hold an open day to view the finds on Wednesday, August 19. Afterward, they will be covered to preserve them, and the IAA will weigh the possibility of displaying them to the public again in the future. 

Registration for the IAA’s open day can be found here. 

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Several Palestinians were arrested by the IDF after attempting to attack Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron, Ynet reported on Sunday.

The report cited an IDF spokesperson, who said the military arrived on the scene following an altercation between Palestinians and Israeli settlers who were throwing stones at each other.

Upon their arrival, a group of Palestinians surrounded the IDF soldiers and attempted to attack them, with the soldiers responding by firing shots at two of the attackers and arresting several others, according to Ynet.

The IDF noted that an investigation into the incident will be conducted, including whether or not there was an attempt to steal a weapon from one of the soldiers, Ynet added.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said that it treated ten Palestinians injured in the incident, including two severely, according to a separate report by Ynet earlier on Sunday.

According to Ynet, the organization said it arrived on the scene to treat the injured Palestinians after receiving reports of an attack by Israeli settlers, noting that gunshots were heard in the area.

Palestinians attack shepherd, shots fired at Israeli settlement

The Hebron incident came following several attacks against Israelis in the West Bank over the weekend, according to United Hatzalah, citing the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council Spokesperson.

In an attack on Saturday, a shepherd was attacked by a group of around 30 masked Palestinians, with the attackers rioting and setting up several roadblocks in the area.

Earlier on Saturday, a bullet was found near a synagogue inside the Psagot settlement after residents heard gunshots.

The Binyamin Regional Council said such attacks are becoming more common despite rarely receiving public attention.

“The prominence of extreme events while ignoring ongoing Arab terrorism creates a partial picture of the security reality in Benjamin, Judea and Samaria,” said the council.

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Hengli Group, a Chinese company that employs over 300,000 people and earns over $100 billion per year, is a primary importer of Iranian crude oil, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing industry analysts, shipping brokers, and the US Treasury.

Hengli is one of the largest companies in a network of “teapot” refineries in China that purchase sanctioned oil, according to the officials cited by WSJ.

Since 2023, Hengli has received at least five million barrels of Iranian oil from multiple ships sanctioned by the United States, the US Treasury and shipping brokers claimed.

In response, the Treasury sanctioned Hengli’s refinery business earlier this year, although China’s Commerce Ministry instructed companies not to comply, and China‘s Foreign Ministry described the sanctions as “illegal and unreasonable unilateral sanctions.”

Iran evades US oil sanctions via ‘shadow fleet’

Iran has been evading US sanctions and the blockade using a system of ship-to-ship transfers in which sanctioned ships laden with Iranian oil offload their cargo onto another ship in the water before it is sent to China, the WSJ reported in May.

The ships receiving the oil are often part of Iran’s “shadow fleet,” a fleet of old, rusting tankers that obscure their owners and may switch their flags to those of countries with little shipping oversight to conceal their identities. Ships will often turn off their tracking device and may paint over identity numbers. 

Danya Saperstein contributed to this report.

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A Syrian Airlines flight from Moscow arrived at Damascus International Airport on Sunday, August 16, the first civilian flight from Moscow since the fall of the Assad regime. This “marks the resumption of the carrier’s air services between Syria and Russia,” Syrian state media SANA said.

This is important and comes after Russia and Syria agreed to a deal that will lead to Syria returning to control two bases in northwestern Syria that had been run by the Russians.

A week ago, the Associated Press noted that “Russian forces in Syria will give up control of two strategic bases on the Mediterranean coast, which will be used as joint Russia-Syrian training centers under a new agreement between the two countries, Syria’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday.”

Russia backed the Assad regime. Moscow was a key strategic ally of Syria for decades, going back to the Cold War.

When the Assad regime faced a rebellion in 2012 in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Russians came to support Assad. In 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria, sending aircraft and forces. As such, Russia’s backing of Assad became a symbol of the former regime’s brutality. It appears Russia used its intervention in Syria to test the international system and attempt to increase its clout.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia was therefore distracted from what was happening in Syria. Moscow assumed the Assad regime was secure after the regime made major gains in 2019. However, in November 2024, the Syrian rebels in Idlib launched a rapid offensive that led to the collapse of the regime. It was not clear how the new government in Damascus would get along with Russia. Some assumed that the new government would want to eject the Russians.

However, the new leadership in Syria has sought to find a path forward with Russia that doesn’t lead to antagonism. This has led Syrian officials and leaders to travel to Moscow.

The new agreement is clearly the fruit of this outreach and engagement. Syria has sought to have positive ties with most countries in the world. Most countries have embraced the new government of Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Final agreement on joint bases has yet to be reached

It remains unclear how the bases will be handled. AP reports that “under the new agreement between Damascus and Moscow, Syria will take control of the Hmeimem air base and the commercial berth at Tartus port as part of its civil administration. The military facilities at both sites will become “joint training” centers, the Foreign Ministry said.”

Meanwhile, SANA added details on the new flights. “Omar Hosari, director general of Syria’s Civil Aviation Authority, told SANA that the resumption of the route was part of broader efforts to rebuild Syrian Airlines’ regional and international presence,” SANA added.

“We are working to reconnect Syria with the world, launch more direct routes and provide wider travel options for citizens,” Hosari said. Syria’s strategy is to expand its airline network. Syria has received new flights from many countries over the last year. This has helped Syria reconnect with the region and Europe.

Syria continues to rebuild its international network

SANA added that “Hosari said Syrian Airlines is expected to resume services to several regional and international destinations in the coming period.” This means that the “expansion will also include new European destinations, which will be announced gradually as the airline continues to rebuild its international network.”

What matters now is that Syria and Russia are able to work together, and this will impact the region and also likely aid Syria’s need for support at the UN. Russia is a member of the UN Security Council. Syria has been working to end sanctions that were put on the former regime.

For Israel, this matters because some voices in Jerusalem see Syria as an enemy under its new government. Israel is one of the only countries in the world not to do outreach to the new government and seek to turn over a new leaf with Syria.

During the Assad regime, Israel sought to de-conflict with Russia in Syria and also maintain ties with Moscow regarding the situation in Syria. As Syria is now also working with Moscow, it is not clear how Israel will view this policy move.

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The Knesset asked the High Court of Justice on Sunday to allow five frozen budget transfers to proceed, arguing that Speaker Amir Ohana acted within his authority when he approved a Finance Committee meeting during the election recess.

The court is due to hear the petition on Tuesday, with hundreds of millions of shekels in disputed allocations still on hold. The case could also determine how far the Knesset speaker may go in authorizing parliamentary business after the usual coalition-opposition mechanism for approving recess meetings has rejected it.

Justice Alex Stein temporarily halted nearly all the transfers on August 5, citing apparent problems with the way the committee had been convened. He allowed one allocation concerning civilian emergency expenses to proceed and referred the case to a three-justice panel.

The temporary order did not determine whether the meeting or the transfers were unlawful. It will remain in place unless the court lifts or changes it.

The Hiddush religious-freedom organization and Democrats MK Naama Lazimi filed the petition. They argue that the August 4 meeting breached special restrictions governing the Knesset during the election recess and allowed the coalition to approve politically sensitive spending less than three months before the October 27 election.

The Knesset’s central response is that its rules provide two separate ways to convene committees during a recess.

Under the ordinary route, meetings require approval from a Coordination Committee representing both the coalition and opposition. A separate provision allows the speaker to authorize additional meetings in “special cases” at the request of the government, the committee chairman, or one-third of its members.

Knesset: House Committee decision cannot cancel speaker’s authority

The Knesset argued that the second route remains available even when the Coordination Committee has refused approval. It said a decision adopted by the House Committee for the election recess could not cancel authority expressly granted to the speaker.

The dispute began after the Knesset entered its election recess on July 18. The recess is due to continue until the next Knesset is sworn in following the October election.

The House Committee had approved rules allowing the Finance Committee to hold one meeting concerning budget transfers during the first two weeks of the recess. Meetings generally required four days’ notice, although the speaker could shorten that period in urgent and exceptional circumstances.

The Finance Committee held the permitted meeting on July 29. According to the Knesset’s response, 33 budget requests had been published before the meeting. The committee considered 23 by the time the sitting ended at 7:30 p.m. and approved 22.

Finance Committee chairman MK Hanoch Milwidsky subsequently sought another meeting to consider 13 requests that had not been addressed, along with three requests for reconsideration.

Government ministries were asked to explain which transfers were urgent. The government ultimately prioritized six, and the Knesset’s legal advisers concluded that those six could be discussed because of their stated importance and urgency.

The Coordination Committee did not approve another meeting after opposition coordinator MK Merav Ben-Ari objected. Milwidsky then asked Ohana to authorize it through the separate “special cases” provision.

Ohana accepted the legal advisers’ position that the six transfers justified another meeting. He also shortened the required notice period from four days to three, despite the Knesset legal adviser’s position that no reason had been given for departing from the four-day rule.

All requests approved by Finance Committee despite objections

The Finance Committee convened on August 4 and approved all six requests. Opposition lawmakers argued at the meeting that it had been unlawfully called and that some of the spending was inconsistent with the restraint expected during an election campaign.

The allocations covered a broad range of spending and internal budget changes. The Knesset said the ministries had identified needs including defense expenditure, preparations for the school year, salaries, payments to suppliers, summer education programs, and preventing the shutdown of the rabbinical courts’ computer systems.

The requests also included coalition funds for religious and haredi education and programs connected to the National Missions Ministry. One Education Ministry request included approximately NIS 268 million in coalition allocations. Other requests included NIS 125 million for the National Missions Ministry and about NIS 78 million for the Religious Services Ministry.

The Knesset said all six requests had completed the government approval process, including review by government legal advisers, before reaching the committee. It argued that claims concerning improper government spending should be directed principally at the government, rather than used to invalidate the parliamentary meeting.

It also said approval by the Finance Committee only makes funding available and does not independently authorize a government program or permit unlawful expenditure.

The Knesset further argued that the present government is not formally a caretaker government because it has not resigned, lost a no-confidence vote, or been replaced following an election. Restrictions developed by the court for caretaker governments therefore cannot simply be applied to the Knesset’s internal work, it said.

Ohana’s use of the provision was not unprecedented, according to the response. The Knesset said the speaker authorized three Finance Committee meetings during the 2022 election recess after the Coordination Committee declined to approve them. Some of those meetings also concerned coalition funds.

The Knesset concluded that courts intervene only rarely in the internal management of parliamentary proceedings and that no defect in this case justified overturning the committee’s decisions.

It asked the court to dismiss the petition and lift the order. The petitioners will argue on Tuesday that the August meeting bypassed safeguards intended to prevent the governing coalition from using public funds without sufficient opposition oversight during an election campaign.

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The UK’s Department of Education (DfE) is assessing information regarding four Muslim independent schools after the Charity Commission opened a statutory inquiry into the Al-Khair Foundation, the organization that runs the schools.

As reported by the The Jerusalem Post on August 9, the UK Charity Commission is investigating the prominent Muslim-registered charity Al-Khair Foundation following reports of alleged Hamas connections.

Al-Khair was set up to advance religion, promote education, support social welfare, build religious harmony, and offer relief to victims of disasters.

However, the Commission said it received a complaint alleging the charity and its partners had connections to Hamas and had also funded Hamas.

The regulator immediately started examining the serious concerns raised and gathered more information to inform its assessment. The Commission has now escalated its engagement to a statutory inquiry.

Al-Khair employee charged with conspiring to provide material support to Hamas

This follows the arrest of Mohammad Yousef Hasna, an individual employed by Al-Khair Foundation, in the UK last week. Hasna was extradited to the US and charged with conspiring to provide material support to Hamas.

This prompted UK Lawyers for Israel (UKFLI) to send a report to the DfE’s Counter-Extremism Division on 10 July 2026, detailing Al-Khair’s links to the Hamas terrorist group and raising concerns about safeguarding, extremism, and compliance with the Prevent duty at schools operated by the charity.

The Post viewed correspondence between UKFLI and the DfE regarding the Al Khair Foundation. DfE said it is “continuing to work with other government departments and agencies to assess all the information that has been provided to us and determine next steps”

The four schools run by Al Khair Foundation are Al-Khair Preparatory School in Croydon; Al-Khair Preparatory School in Oldbury, Birmingham; and Al-Khair Secondary Schools for Boys and Girls in Croydon.  Over 550 children attend the four schools. The annual school fees are £5468 for the Croydon schools and £3600 for the Birmingham school.

UKLFI’s letter to the DfE warned that the schools could be exposed to safeguarding and Prevent-related risks arising from Al-Khair’s employment of individuals allegedly linked to proscribed terrorist organizations. UKLFI’s investigation found that at least two people employed by Al-Khair Foundation had been identified as Hamas operatives, while another employee had significant links with Hamas figures.  

UK schools required to assess risk of pupils being drawn into extremism

Schools are subject to the statutory Prevent duty, requiring them to assess the risk of pupils being drawn into terrorism, challenge extremist narratives and manage potentially harmful external influences. UKLFI said the evidence it had gathered justified examination of whether those safeguards were operating effectively at the Al-Khair schools.

A UKLFI spokesperson said, “The allegations concerning Al-Khair Foundation are extremely serious in themselves, but they become still more concerning when an organization facing such allegations is also responsible for the education and safeguarding of children.”

“UKLFI alerted the Department to these concerns because schools must have robust procedures to protect pupils from extremist influence and from being drawn into support for terrorism. We hope the Department will now examine carefully the governance of all four schools, their relationships with the Foundation and its personnel, and whether their safeguarding and Prevent obligations have been properly discharged.

“The Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry and the separate criminal allegations now being pursued by the US authorities underline why these concerns required urgent investigation.”

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This article was written in collaboration with Nefesh B’Nefesh

Seven families from the Persian Jewish community of Great Neck, New York, arrived at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport last Tuesday, exhausted from their journey but excited for their lives as new immigrants to Israel.

“We’re running on fumes, but exhilarated,” Jordan, one of the new olim (immigrants) and a father of six girls, told The Jerusalem Post at the airport, adding that there were “too many emotions to process properly” but that he felt as though he was “flying.”

The families, which included some 26 children, made aliyah (immigration to Israel) with the help of Nefesh B’Nefesh, the non-profit organization that facilitates immigration to Israel from the United States and Canada, in partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and Jewish National Fund-USA.

“The decision of these seven families to make aliyah together and choose Israel as their home is both visionary and deeply meaningful,” said Naftali Derovan, Head of the Aliyah Guidance Division at Nefesh B’Nefesh. “They remind us that while Aliyah is often a deeply personal decision, it can also be a communal one. In this case, these families are bringing the strength and spirit of their close-knit community with them to Israel. We are excited to continue providing them with the professional support and resources they need to integrate successfully, build their lives here, and truly feel at home in Israel.” 

After arriving, the new olim received their official Israeli ID cards before eventually being shuttled to their new homes in the central city of Ra’anana.

Ra’anana mayor says city is proud to absorb new immigrants

“We warmly welcome the new families joining our community and are deeply moved by this inspiring step, which embodies Zionism and faith,” said the Mayor of Ra’anana, Chaim Broyde. “Ra’anana is proud to be one of Israel’s leading cities in the absorption of new immigrants, serving as a home to olim from dozens of countries and bringing together diverse communities.”

“We embrace the new olim and are committed to providing them and their children with the support they need to integrate, thrive, and feel at home in Ra’anana,” he added. “I wish the families a smooth transition into their new lives, and assure them that we will be there to support them every step of the way.”

Before leaving the airport, though, as they passed through customs and entered the Terminal 3 arrivals hall, the new olim were greeted by a jubilant crowd of mostly teenagers who sang and cheered as they welcomed them to Israel.

Among those were a group of girls who had done Sherut Leumi (national service) in Great Neck, alongside the very members of the Persian community who made aliyah.

Amid the scramble to make sure everything was in order after entering the arrivals hall, the new olim told the Post that the American-Persian Jewish community was “hearing the call to come back” to Israel.

“We’re expecting many more in the next year, and b’ezrat Hashem (with God’s help), this is going to be something for many years to come. You’re going to see a lot of the Persian communities coming back,” Jordan said.

Adam, another of the olim and a father of five, said that the community members had gotten together and “decided it’s time to come home.”

“Each family wanted to do it for a long time, and suddenly we came together and said, ‘It’s so hard to come alone. You feel lonely. You feel like you miss people. Why not do it together?’ Seven families are here together today, back home. It’s a dream come true.”

Adam added that he also expected many more from the Persian Jewish community to make aliyah from the US, saying that the movement to come to Israel was “on fire.”

Persian-Jewish aliyah group hopes to entice other community members

Jen, another member of the group, said that they hoped that, because they came as a group, it would help entice other community members and make their moves easier.

That community back in New York, she said, was elated for those who had made the move to Israel.

“Over the course of the past few weeks, every Shabbos we were being celebrated,” she said. “They’re honoring us in shul (synagogue), and they had a whole group of people who came and met us by the coach bus yesterday and sent us off.”

Talia, another woman in the group and a mother of three, said the decision to move to Israel was made in part because, despite “an amazing life in New York,” they are “thinking about our kids and the future of Jewish life.”

“We believe that the future of ‘Am Yisrael’ (the Jewish people) is in Israel, and we have this opportunity to do it all together,” she said.

This article was written in collaboration with Nefesh B’Nefesh

This post was originally published on here. 

Israelis Mali and Liel Yahalomi were tracked down in Buenos Aires, Argentina, partly because of their AI search history, N12 News reported on Saturday.

According to the report, the mother and daughter tried to cover their tracks by deleting the search history, but authorities recovered and traced enough information to locate them.

After consulting AI on how to buy a mobile device without showing identification, the Israelis bought a cell phone in the Czech Republic, left for Germany, and then traveled on to Argentina, N12 reported.

According to N12, the two further asked AI for advice on how to delete specific mobile apps to prevent location tracking, as well as which South American countries have no extradition agreement with Israel.

Mali, Liel Yahalomi found after international search effort

The two Israelis were initially reported missing in Vienna, Austria, about a week ago, with Israeli and Austrian authorities working together to search for them.

They were found on an intercity bus in Buenos Aires early Saturday morning, according to a report by the Jewish news agency in Argentina, AJN.

Israel Police released a video after the two were located, showing its police representative in South America, Walter Alejandro Kogan, approaching Mali and Liel on the bus.

“Hi Mali, hi Liel. I’m Walter, the police representative in South America, okay? From the Israel Police Intelligence Division,” said Kogan. “I want to ask you a few questions. We were very worried about you, okay? “I’m going to get everyone off the bus, and then we’ll talk, okay?”

According to KAN News, the two women planned to change their identities and start new lives, with Mali telling Kogan that she wanted a fresh start.

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Jewish men were permitted to bring prayer books onto the Temple Mount on Sunday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir confirmed to The Jerusalem Post, after right-wing journalist Arnon Segal shared a photo of Jewish men praying and reading from prayer books, claiming the photo was taken from the Temple Mount.

“Still no blanket permit, but an initial experiment aimed at ensuring the Middle East doesn’t lose its mind over this,” Segal claimed in his post. “History.”

The minister had no further comment for the Post, which also reached out to the Israel Police for comment.

הבוקר בהר הבית: יהודים מתפללים עם סידורים. עדיין לא היתר גורף אבל ניסוי ראשוני במטרה לוודא שהמזרח התיכון לא יוצא מדעתו בגלל זה. היסטוריה pic.twitter.com/MduyD0YKmm

— ארנון סגל (@arnonsegal1) August 16, 2026

Temple Mount status quo for Jewish prayer shifting

Under the longstanding status quo, Jews and Christians are permitted to visit the Temple Mount but are generally prohibited from praying there, while Muslims are permitted to worship. 

In January, Israel Police began relaxing some restrictions on Jewish prayer at the site, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). Jewish visitors may now enter with a single printed prayer page prepared in advance, although prayer books remain prohibited.

Danielle Greyman-Kennard and Keshet Neev contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

On Friday, Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges and admitted to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024.

But Mangione’s trial is far from over. He still faces state charges in New York for second-degree murder and other weapons-related charges.

On Friday, Mangione acknowledged that his guilty plea could result in two lifetime prison sentences. If he is charged with second-degree murder and weapons and forgery charges in his state trial, he could have, at maximum, an additional life sentence added to his charges.

Mangione will be sentenced on December 18. Until then, his defense and prosecutors will jockey over his state charges.

Within the hour of his plea deal, Mangione’s lawyers formally requested that the state case be dropped, as it could arguably amount to double jeopardy.

What is Double Jeopardy, and how does it apply to Luigi Mangione?

Double Jeopardy is a clause in the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment that says individuals cannot be sentenced multiple times for the same offense.

Mangione’s lawyers, led by Karen Friedman Agnifilo, argue that the state and federal authorities worked together to maximize his chance of conviction.

“New York law does not permit a person to be prosecuted and punished twice for the exact same crime under a statute that covers successive prosecutions; it’s also known as the double jeopardy law,” Agnifilo said.  

Notably, because Mangione faces both federal and state charges, both sovereign entities get their shot at prosecuting him. However, Agnifilo and her team argue that federal and state prosecutors did not work separately, which could violate Mangione’s due process rights under the Constitution.

“There is no dispute that the state and federal prosecutors each charged the identical murder,” they wrote.

“Despite this being a single, isolated event, Mr. Mangione has been unfairly treated since the outset in every way and has successfully fought off terrorism charges and the death penalty, while also fighting at the same time two simultaneous prosecutions in two jurisdictions that are trying to punish him twice for the exact conduct,” Agnifilo told reporters after the plea was entered.

“Today’s guilty plea triggers the [double jeopardy] statute, and we just filed our motion in state court explaining why the state charges must be dismissed under New York’s double jeopardy protections.”

However, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said it had been working to convict Mangione for years, signaling that it would fight the defense’s double jeopardy argument. 

“Since December 2024, the Manhattan D.A.’s Office has been tirelessly preparing to pursue a trial conviction in New York State Supreme Court for the alleged cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson,” a spokesperson Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said in a statement.

“We are encouraged that Mr. Thompson’s family received a measure of accountability today. While federal sentencing is pending, we are prepared to litigate the defense motions. The Manhattan D.A.’s Office remains committed to seeking justice for Mr. Thompson and his family.”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office could potentially keep the state charges against Mangione going if prosecutors successfully argue that the state’s case seeks to address a different kind of harm than the federal case.

Additionally, if the prosecution succeeds in its argument that the cases are meant to address different levels of harm, then Mangione’s admission on Friday would be admissible in state court.

Manhattan’s lead Federal Prosecutor, James McDonald, noted on Friday that his office was free to seek the maximum penalty for Mangione.

“While the defendant pled guilty, our office does not have a plea agreement with him,” McDonald said.

“There are no accommodations or concessions, and we are free to seek the maximum penalty under the law.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Ahead of the Likud primaries, four serving ministers and four MKs from the party had asked to join Otzma Yehudit, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on Sunday in an interview with 103FM.

“They see Otzma’s polls, they saw how strong we are, and they wanted to join,” Ben-Gvir elaborated.

However, he sounded far more reserved regarding an MK who went in the opposite direction.

“Almog Cohen is in Likud. I did him a favor by not expelling him,” he said. “He is the one who would have taken a mandate from one party to another. Almog is a good MK, and I wish him success.”

Ben-Gvir said that during negotiations to unite his slate with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party, he insisted that Cohen be placed in a realistic position on the list.

“Smotrich didn’t want someone without a kippah, and I said: ‘It will not happen,’ my parents don’t wear kippahs. The negotiations almost blew up over it. After I fought so hard for Almog, to take my mandate and transfer it to Likud? That’s not how you behave.”

Ben-Gvir records videos supporting Likud primary candidates

Walla reported Sunday morning that Ben-Gvir had recently recorded a series of videos expressing support for and recommending ministers and MKs running in the Likud primaries.

Ben-Gvir’s list of “recommended candidates” includes ministers and MKs Eli Cohen, May Golan, Ofir Katz, Amir Ohana, Idit Silman, Shlomo Karhi, Tally Gotliv, Nissim Vaturi, Sasson Guetta, and Osher Shekalim.

In the videos recorded ahead of the primaries, Ben-Gvir expresses support for the candidates and urges Likud members to vote for them.

The move is relatively unusual, since Ben-Gvir is not a Likud member but heads a separate party, Otzma Yehudit, which also competes for votes on the Right. Now, days before the vote, he is choosing to identify the people within Likud whom he would like to see strengthened.

This post was originally published on here. 

Two toddlers were rushed on Sunday to the Galilee Medical Center’s emergency room after consuming chocolate containing hallucinogenic mushrooms during a family vacation.

The children, aged five-and-a-half and six-and-a-half, have been placed under close observation in the hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit (ICU).

While both were physically stable when they arrived at the emergency room, they had been experiencing neurological symptoms, Galilee Medical Center said in a statement.

The mushrooms are believed to be of the Psilocybe/Panaeolus family, according to the National Poison Control Center, which can cause hallucinations, increased blood pressure, and, in severe cases, seizures and heart damage.

Parents must stay vigilant, seek medical help if necessary

“The children came to us in a state of confusion, with dilated pupils and active hallucinations,” said Dr. Sally Makhom, a physician at the Galilee Medical Center’s Children’s Emergency Department. “We immediately stabilized them and, in coordination with the National Poison [Control] Center, began treatment and monitoring.”

“Due to the volatile nature of this type of poisoning, they were transferred for continued supervision in the pediatric intensive care unit.”

Galilee Medical Center Deputy Director Dr. Zvi Sheleg added that the incident is “a serious and life-threatening incident that has ended so far without critical injury thanks to the vigilance of the parents and the rapid treatment of our medical teams.”

“We call on the public to exercise maximum responsibility, to keep dangerous substances out of reach of toddlers and children, and to seek immediate medical attention if poisoning is suspected.”

This post was originally published on here. 

At a barbecue on a Netanya rooftop earlier this month, MK Yoav Segalovitz, a politician of whom most people outside Israel have never heard, told the members of the leading opposition party Yesh Atid that he would not be running with them in the upcoming October election.

It’s a decision that could reshape Israel’s political landscape and determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lose the October 27 election. 

Segalovitz, 67, who formerly headed the Israel Police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, is planning to join Ra’am, an Arab party that was the kingmaker in the 2021 elections, pollster Yousef Makladeh told Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing his conversation with Segalovitz prior to leaving the party. He added that the move had been under discussion for months. 

In an official statement last week, Ra’am’s chairman Mansour Abbas and Segalovitz said they had met and held a “cordial and positive” discussion about the possibility of Segalovitz joining Ra’am’s slate in the upcoming Knesset elections. The two agreed to continue direct talks in an effort to advance the matter. 

If that indeed happens, it would send a seismic shock through the Israeli political system on two fronts: He would be the first member in decades of a Zionist party to join an Arab-led party, and that party would be in a position to join other opposition groups to pry control of the next Israeli government away from Netanyahu.

The willingness of Ra’am, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, and Naftali Bennett’s New Right party to join a coalition in 2021 led by Bennett and Lapid provided the needed seats to push Netanyahu out of power after 12 consecutive years as prime minister. The first coalition in Israeli history to take office with the support of an Arab party was unprecedented – and viewed by many as a historic breakthrough in Jewish-Arab political cooperation.

The question in 2026 is: Could it happen again?

Israeli polls have consistently shown that neither Netanyahu’s coalition nor the bloc led by his chief rival, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, is on track to secure the 61 seats needed to form a government. The opposition’s Jewish parties have consistently polled at approximately 58 to 60 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc trails with roughly 50.

That deadlock has thrust Ra’am, led by MK Mansour Abbas, back into the spotlight. Most recent polls give the party between five and seven seats, potentially making it the kingmaker once again. 

Founded in 1996, Ra’am, whose name is an Arabic acronym meaning United Arab List, had until recently been a religious Arab party with roots in the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement. It had been part of the traditional bloc of Arab parties in the Knesset until Abbas split away, as part of his strategy to shift the party’s focus from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to practical achievements for Israel’s Arab society.

Makladeh, who has conducted surveys for Channel 13 and political parties across Israel’s political spectrum, describes Ra’am as “the missing piece of the puzzle” that could lift the opposition bloc “to 62 or 63 seats.”

In 2021, however, there was a shedding of some of the longstanding reluctance to consider an Arab party in the coalition, for those who saw the political necessity of doing so in order to remove Netanyahu from office. Netanyahu himself had reportedly spoken with Abbas about some form of a political partnership. This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, particularly this early in the election cycle when it is unclear if it will be absolutely necessary to do so. 

Political commentator Nadav Perry, host of one of Israel’s most influential political podcasts, says that the party’s ties to conservative Muslim religious leadership, together with the rapid collapse of the 2021 government and the trauma of October 7, 2023, had effectively pushed the idea of Ra’am joining another coalition with Jewish parties back to “square one.”

The addition of Segalovitz to Ra’am could change that by making the party more palatable to the Israeli public and could expand its voting base. 

Ameer Bisharat, the former director-general of the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads, added that Arab Israelis are “hungry for change.”

“Change can come through political power, and Abbas understands that very well. He is trying to create that political power,” Bisharat said

JTA reached out to both Ra’am and Segalovitz for comment. Segalovitz’s spokesperson declined to comment, while Ra’am did not respond to a request for comment. 

Segalovitz drops Arab crime rate during tenure in Bennett-Lapid government

Segalovitz has been a member of the Lapid-led Yesh Atid party, a centrist bloc that emphasizes secular rights and opposition to draft exemptions for haredi (ultra-Orthodox) yeshiva students, since 2016. He later served as Deputy Minister of Internal Security in the Bennett-Lapid government. In that role, Segalovitz was the public face of the government’s efforts to combat violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities. During his tenure, the number of murders in Arab communities declined sharply before rising dramatically again after the government fell.

Bisharat, who worked with Segalovitz and now advises the public policy department at the Accord Institute on Arab voting patterns, said the Bennett-Lapid government was “successful” for Arab society. It helped build trust between the government and Arab citizens, and it presided over a decline in violent crime in the Arab communities in Israel. 

Under Segalovitz’s leadership, a special plan was developed to combat crime in Arab communities, focusing on the main drivers of crime, improving case clearance rates, and strengthening cooperation among the various authorities, which was not continued under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In Segalovitz’s only full year in government, the number of Arab citizens killed in crimes fell from 126 to 116, according to data from the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that tracks violence and crime in Arab communities. The figure surged to 244 the following year, after he was replaced.

“Segalovitz was the point person in the previous government on crime in the Arab community,” said Perry, the political commentator. “He worked on it, and he delivered results. That made him a very popular figure on the Arab street. Not because he was pro-Palestinian, not because he was against the IDF, but because he reduced crime among Arab citizens.”

Former Yesh Atid MK Inbar Bezek, who served alongside Segalovitz in both the party and the coalition that relied on Ra’am, told JTA, “I saw with my own eyes that Yoav is an extremely respected and well-liked figure throughout Arab society, especially among local government leaders.”

Segalovitz’s possible move is far more than symbolic.

Bezek believes Segalovitz could both increase Arab voter turnout and attract Jewish left-wing voters to Ra’am. “I truly think he’s someone who brings voters to the ballot box,” she said. But she emphasized that the addition of Jewish voters would not change the overall balance between the opposing blocs, because those voters would otherwise support the Democrats, the most left-wing Zionist party.

That assessment appears to be supported by a recent Channel 13 poll, which was conducted in part by Makladeh. The survey found that Ra’am would rise to seven seats if Segalovitz joined the party, compared with five seats in most recent polls. Makladeh said six of those seats would come from Arab voters, while one would come from Jewish voters. 

The move’s real significance, argued Perry, lies not in winning additional votes before Election Day but in what happens afterward. He says that bringing Segalovitz into the party is intended “to create renewed legitimacy for Ra’am’s participation in a governing coalition.”

“I don’t think this would dramatically reshape the electoral map,” Perry said. “But it could dramatically reshape the question of legitimacy. It could complete Mansour Abbas’ metamorphosis from the leader of a non-Zionist Islamist party into the leader of a Jewish-Arab party that puts the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens first, while setting aside issues related to the Palestinian national struggle.”

Eisenkot does not rule out partnership with Abbas

Perry’s comments come as leaders of the opposition bloc send mixed and sometimes contradictory signals about whether they would govern with Ra’am.

Eisenkot has said he “doesn’t rule out” a coalition partnership with Abbas. Another strong contender for the premiership, Bennett, whose Together (Beyachad) party is polling second within the opposing bloc, said in February that “after October 7, there is no mandate in Israel for a government that relies on Arab parties.” Bennett recently declined to answer directly when asked whether he would rely on Abbas to form a government. Speculation is high, however, that he would agree to sit with Ra’am, given his past record of including the party in the coalition after running a campaign in which he promised not to do so.  

Opposition Leader Lapid joined forces in this election cycle with Bennett after his own party struggled in the polls, and the two now run together in the same bloc. Lapid has also ruled out forming a government that relies on Arab parties – a notable position given that Lapid was the architect of the move to bring Ra’am into the coalition in 2021. Another opposition leader, Avigdor Liberman, who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, sat with Ra’am in the 2021-2022 government. Last week, however, he said that “Ra’am cannot be a coalition partner.”

Segalovitz’s membership in Ra’am could soften that resistance.

“It will be very difficult to delegitimize a party whose number two is a Zionist and a former Israel Police major general,” Makladeh said. He believes that Segalovitz’s addition could effectively “legitimize” Ra’am’s votes in the eyes of the Israeli public, making it easier for opposition leaders to cooperate with the party after the election.

The hesitation among opposition leaders also reflects Netanyahu’s campaign strategy, which identifies the bloc’s dependence on Arab support as its main political vulnerability.

In a video posted this month on X/Twitter, Netanyahu juxtaposed his political rivals with Abbas under the slogan, “It’s them or us.” 

Far-right minister calls Segalovitz’s potential move a ‘conspiracy’

Segalovitz’s potential move has also drawn backlash from the right. Far-right National Security Minister Ben Gvir called his departure from Yesh Atid “a joint conspiracy by the left to pave the way for a future government with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Coalition lawmaker Tally Gotliv of the Likud called Segalovitz Abbas’ “pet Jew” and warned that his move could lead to “the imposition of Sharia law on Israel.”  

Perry said, “Almost the only political asset Netanyahu has left to take into the election is negative campaigning, because it’s very difficult to build a positive campaign around the last term.” He argued that Netanyahu has relatively few lines of attack against Eisenkot beyond the possibility that he could form a government with Arab parties. “That’s basically the Likud’s one-trick pony in 2026,” Perry added. “And it’s a message that has political effectiveness.”

This is why the addition of Segalovitz, who comes from the Israeli center and not the far left, is significant, Perry explained. The political commentator added: “If Ra’am enters the realm of legitimacy – because it is no longer Ra’am, it is no longer Islamist, and it is no longer only Abbas but Abbas and Segalovitz – then that could create a more realistic possibility of removing Netanyahu after the election.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Hamas and Hezbollah have begun coordinating their increased activity with Iranian assistance in recent weeks, the IDF has assessed, as the military has identified increased friction between Israeli forces and terrorists on both the northern and southern fronts. 

The IDF has expressed that the coordination is likely an effort to rebuild its axis of evil that would increase pressure on Israel.

According to a military source, a ‘battle of wits’ is taking place around the Ali Taher ridge between the Northern Command and Hezbollah. 

The terrorist organization is trying to determine where IDF troops are positioned, and when it detects movement, it attempts to attack in a “gray area,” as it did early Saturday morning with a fiber-optic drone. Three soldiers from the IDF’s Yahalom special engineering unit, operating under the Commando Brigade combat team, were wounded as a result.

Hezbollah attempts to resupply operatives trapped underground

At the same time, according to reports, Hezbollah is attempting to resupply its operatives who are trapped in underground infrastructure. The IDF, meanwhile, is trying to locate Hezbollah infrastructure and terrorists on the Ali Taher ridge and destroy them.

“Whoever comes out of the underground and surrenders will be taken for questioning in Israel, and whoever remains underground will either die, or we will kill him,” a senior military source said. 

The Northern Command is also conducting a complex intelligence effort to locate all hidden supply routes and drone activity intended to resupply Hezbollah operatives in the area.

“We are blocking access to the area where they are located. They will not be able to hold out forever,” a senior military source familiar with the details said.

According to reports, the operatives have been emerging from underground to search for food.

“What happened on Saturday was that they exposed us with a drone. Whoever is more determined will win. A lot of patience is needed,” the source added.

In response, the IDF struck in the Nabatieh area and within territory under the IDF’s operational control. Beirut and senior officials from the Shi’ite organization who are hiding there have remained off-limits due to a US demand.

IDF tank drives over explosive device in Gaza Strip

Meanwhile, an IDF tank drove over an explosive device in the southern Gaza Strip. According to IDF assessments, the device was planted recently.

Although the Southern Command views the incident as an escalation in the friction along the Yellow Line, the political leadership did not authorize a broad strike in the heart of Gaza City, again due to sensitivities with the White House, which is demanding an immediate halt to strikes in Gaza City and targeted killings, except in cases involving the removal of an immediate threat.

This post was originally published on here. 

The 11th International Arab Book Fair, which opened in Istanbul on Saturday, has also become a platform for activity by the Islamist axis and for Qatari-Turkish cooperation surrounding the Palestinian issue.

During the event, the secretary general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a Muslim Brotherhood organization operating from Qatar, called for aid to be transferred to the Gaza Strip by all possible means.

The fair, which will run through August 23, is being held this year under the theme “The Story Continues,” with more than 300 publishing houses from over 30 countries taking part. Qatar is among the countries active at the event, with its Culture Ministry setting up a booth featuring numerous titles.

Dr. Yasin Aktay, a former adviser to the Turkish president, described the event’s aim of strengthening the Islamist axis, saying that “the theme of this event extends across the story of a united nation, in the hope that the fair will help strengthen ties between people in the Islamic world across a variety of platforms.”

The Islamist axis is known for using events of this kind to spread messages rejecting Israel’s existence and encouraging Palestinian terrorism. At the international book fair held in Doha last May, books by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar were sold, and giant posters were displayed at the venue. Books praising the conduct of terrorists in Israeli prisons were also sold at the fair, along with books denying the Holocaust. None of this prevented the US Embassy in Doha from sponsoring the event.

Istanbul book fair demonstrates ties to Hamas

At the event in Istanbul, Qatari-Turkish cooperation was also demonstrated on Saturday in connection with Hamas. Sheikh Dr. Ali al Qaradaghi, secretary general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, called during the fair for the issue of the Palestinian people to remain at the forefront and for aid to be transferred to the Gaza Strip by all possible means.

The union operates from Qatar and, according to the source material, is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas itself belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, and according to the claim presented in the material, the organization’s call for financial support is intended to assist Hamas.

Dr. Ariel Admoni of Ariel University and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security said that this cooperation demonstrates the Qatari-Turkish use of soft cultural tools to continue providing financial and moral support for Palestinian terrorism in ways that do not damage the international legitimacy enjoyed by Qatar and Turkey.

This post was originally published on here. 

A 19-year-old east Jerusalem resident was arrested on Friday on suspicion of allegedly committing indecent acts against two 12-year-old girls.

During police activity along the Tel Aviv coastline on Friday, a report was received regarding a suspicious man who allegedly entered the water, approached two 12-year-old girls, and touched their bodies indecently.

Nearby police officers spotted the suspect and arrested him. A check of his details found that he was a 19-year-old resident of east Jerusalem.

The suspect was taken for questioning at the police station and was subsequently detained. On Saturday night, he was brought before the court, which extended his detention until Monday.

Wave of men arrested on suspicion of indecent acts

Last month, two men were arrested in Tel Aviv on suspicion of committing indecent acts against three women at three different locations in the city. A Palestinian man from Huwara in his 30s was suspected of touching the buttocks of two women at Park HaMesila and the nearby Teder club.

In addition, a Haifa resident in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of entering a women’s restroom stall at Frishman Beach, where he allegedly committed an indecent act against a woman.

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump on Friday vowed to hit Iran hard economically, a day after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Washington would impose measures on Tehran that have “never been seen” as soon as next week.

The United States, ‌the United Nations and the European Union have applied sanctions, implemented trade embargoes and frozen assets since the late 1970s over Iran’s nuclear program, human rights violations and support for militant groups.

Since the Iran war began in February, Washington has levied additional maritime, energy and financial sanctions and started a naval blockade.

Data from the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) shows the agency has imposed sanctions on more than 1,000 people, vessels and aircraft since Trump began his second term.

Recent measures have targeted Iran’s shadow oil fleet; shipping insurers; entities and people enabling Iran’s acquisition of weapons; and digital exchanges, freezing an estimated $500 billion in Iran-linked cryptocurrency.

Experts say the Trump administration can also try these options: 

 Sanctions on Chinese ‘Teapot’ refineries

Chinese independent refineries known as “teapots” account for a quarter of Chinese refinery capacity. They operate with narrow and sometimes negative profit margins.

China buys more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, according to 2025 data from analytics firm Kpler. Independent refiners absorb much of this trade, exposing them to so-called secondary measures that penalize entities helping a primary sanctions target.

Past US sanctions have deterred larger independent refiners from buying Iranian oil. But the independent refineries are somewhat immune since they have little exposure to the US financial system, sanctions experts say.

 Sanctions on Chinese banks

OFAC has imposed secondary sanctions on smaller China- and Hong Kong-based entities accused of processing billions of dollars in Iranian oil and helping to fund weapons procurement.

Treasury has warned two larger Chinese banks they could face secondary sanctions if Iranian funds were found moving through their systems, but has stopped short of designating them.

Hitting those two banks, which US officials have not publicly identified, or imposing other sanctions could have a chilling effect on bigger financial institutions, sanctions experts said, although they warned it could also trigger retaliatory actions by Beijing.

Trump administration officials have sought to play down tensions between Washington and Beijing ahead of an expected meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping later this year. They worry that China could curtail exports of critical minerals that are essential to advanced technology production at a time when the US and Western allies are still trying to develop their own supplies.

 ‘Whack-a-mole’

The United States could continue targeting Iranian individuals and entities, as well as others in China and the Gulf, that are helping Tehran evade sanctions to collect revenues for its war effort.

Treasury recently issued sanctions against firms that are springing up to facilitate Iran’s trading of oil revenue for imports. But such measures amount to a “whack-a-mole” approach that has not altered Iran’s behavior, said Brett Erickson, managing principal of Obsidian Risk Advisors, noting that Tehran simply creates new entities to replace them.

Miad Maleki, a sanctions expert with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Bessent was likely signaling a sharpened enforcement push against oil shippers, purchasers and currency exchangers who help Iran pay for its imports.

Further aviation sanctions were also possible, aimed at degrading Iran’s ability to move trade now that the US has blockaded shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, he added.

Land blockade

Some US and Israeli officials have floated the prospect of a land blockade, which would require assistance from Iran’s neighbors: Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The Trump administration has varying degrees of closeness with all those countries except Afghanistan, but that border is mountainous and extremely difficult to patrol anyway.

Trump may have leverage over Pakistan, which recently sought a $10 billion currency swap line from Treasury, and Turkey, which is seeking to rejoin the US F-35 warplane program.

A land blockade could increase pressure on the Iranian people by halting their imports of food, energy, and textiles, but experts say such a move would be difficult to execute and might not result in protests or internal pressure.

 Secondary tariffs 

Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on goods from countries that do business with Iran, although the Supreme Court struck down the legal basis for such taxes.

The Senate passed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill last week that included new Iran sanctions and would give Trump new tariff powers that he could potentially use against countries that aid Iran’s commerce and weapons procurement.

That legislation must still pass the US House of Representatives, which could prove challenging given widespread concerns among Democrats and some Republicans about the tariff measures.

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political situation is further complicating the American calculus. 

His current coalition is far from the 61 seats needed to form a government. From his perspective, preventing the opposing camp from securing a majority could also be enough: If no one succeeds in forming a government, he will remain in office as caretaker prime minister until another election. That possibility is particularly troubling to Washington because it could mean additional months in which Trump’s regional agenda is forced to wait for Israeli politics.

Trump also has personal political leverage over Netanyahu. So far, he has refrained from giving him the public election endorsement the prime minister had hoped for. 

When they met at the White House about two weeks ago, Trump even asked him directly about his standing in the polls. Netanyahu hesitated, and one of his advisers quickly told the president that he was “winning.” 

The data tell a different story. On four separate occasions in recent weeks, Trump was asked whether he supported Netanyahu, and each time he avoided offering an explicit endorsement.

Trump holding onto potential aid to Netanyahu before election

That reluctance carries additional significance because of the history between the two men. Trump has already demonstrated that he is willing to throw his full weight into an Israeli election campaign: Days before the April 2019 election, he recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a move he later boasted had helped Netanyahu. This time, at least for now, he is keeping that card in his hand.

The Israeli opposition also understands the value of that card. Figures close to Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Yair Lapid have in recent months conveyed messages to Trump’s associates through acquaintances, donors, and political allies, asking him to remain neutral in the election. That activity demonstrates the extent to which Trump’s position has become a factor in the Israeli election campaign even before he has decided whether to intervene.

The personal relationship between the two men has not been severed. Senior American officials describe Trump as fond of Netanyahu but increasingly frustrated by his decisions. Trump was also recently quoted as saying in private conversations that Netanyahu is “his own worst enemy.” 

At the same time, support in Israel for some of Trump’s policies has weakened following the agreement with Iran and the restrictions the administration imposed on Israel’s freedom of action in Iran, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. Trump also faces a political constraint of his own: Intervening too aggressively in Israel’s election could damage his standing among an Israeli public that once gave him almost automatic support.

US, Israel policies diverge

Lebanon is not the only arena where this gap is being tested. In Gaza, the White House wants to advance its Board of Peace plan; in Syria, Washington is investing in President Ahmed al-Sharaa, even as harsh statements against him are being voiced in Israel; and over Iran, the question remains whether the crisis will end in an agreement or another round of confrontation. Jared Kushner, Nickolay Mladenov, and Tony Blair are arriving in the region this week to advance the Gaza initiative. For them, it is expected to be the first issue on the agenda in their talks with Netanyahu. Israeli action in any one of these arenas could complicate an American initiative in another.

There is currently no basis for assessing that Trump is about to become an adversary of Israel or Netanyahu. 

The risk for the prime minister is that an American president convinced that the time for deals has arrived will begin assigning Jerusalem an increasingly large share of the responsibility for delaying them. Trump still holds other cards that Netanyahu may need as the election approaches, from a public endorsement to another move involving President Isaac Herzog on the issue of a pardon. For now, he is not playing them. As the election draws closer, Netanyahu’s room to maneuver in the face of American demands is also narrowing.

This post was originally published on here. 

There are more than 800 mother’s milk banks around the world – about half in developed countries – that collect the nourishing liquid from breastfeeding mothers to give to premature babies whose mothers can’t nurse them.

None of those had the insight of pediatricians at the Israel National Council for Pediatrics and Child Health about the unique circumstances of breastfeeding women who were murdered, abducted to Gaza, traumatized, or wounded by Hamas terrorists – or recruited by the IDF to fight – on October 7, 2023.

The invasion of southern Israel by Hamas led to the massacre of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians – including women and children –the kidnapping of more than 250 hostages into the Gaza Strip, and threats to thousands of families. At the very onset of the Hamas massacre, the optimal continuation of breastfeeding was challenged by many cases of maternal death or disability, or by emergency deployment for active duty of lactating mothers playing critical roles in the army or the air force.

The nonprofit National Human Milk Bank of Magen David Adom is located in Ramle’s MDA Blood Bank. Its professionals were asked to supply breast milk from over 400 women donors to 46 healthy babies whose mothers were not with them.

Some 200 new donors join post-October 7

In addition to the veteran donors, around 200 new donors joined, according to Prof. Francis Mimouni, a veteran pediatrician at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center and, for the last 15 years, chairman of the national council, who worked with Dr. Sharron Bransburg-Zabary, director of MDA’s human milk bank. 

“Because of the war, we have tripled its activity, and in addition to providing the routine milk, there was an emergent need for safe mother’s milk to nourish babies who have been orphaned, whose mothers have been abducted or injured, or for babies whose mothers were recruited to the IDF, said Bransburg-Zabary, a certified lactation consultant who helped found, and who leads, the facility to provide safe, screened donor breast milk to premature, sick, and vulnerable infants.

“We worked around the clock and recruited many new donors to collect about a liter per day for each baby and to continue providing the infants and the premature babies with the safest milk that stands up to the highest supervision levels and passes all the tests and procedures needed for their health.”

Bransburg-Zabary explained that when infants or premature babies are fed exclusively with breast milk, a unique environment of microorganisms, such as beneficial bacteria, is created in their tissues. This environment is part of their immune protection and helps prevent allergies.

“If the biological mother is unable to nourish her infant with her own milk, supervised portions of breast milk from the Human Milk Bank are the recommended feeding option endorsed by health authorities worldwide and by the Health Ministry. Breast milk is defined as a ‘lifesaving treatment’ for infants in need.”

The journal Military Medicine quickly accepted and published the unique study titled “Human milk bank in a war zone: A report of the 2023-2025 war in the Middle East” by Mimouni, Bransburg-Zabary, Dr. Deena Rachel Zimmerman, Prof. Eilat Shinar (who runs the blood bank), and others.

Healthy babies needed donated breast milk 

Mimouni told The Jerusalem Post in an interview that “we realized on Oct. 8 that there were babies who needed mother’s milk, even though these were not the usual ones that qualified. It was provided in normal times to premature, low-birth-weight babies to prevent infections like necrotizing enterocolitis.

“Our aim was not to save lives; the babies were all healthy, and at last resort, they could have been given infant formula. But it takes time for many infants to get used to formula after being nursed by their mothers. Some refused. They obviously had to drink from a baby bottle, which involves a very different technique of sucking with the tongue and mouth; but also having to get used to formula makes it harder.”

“Some families to whom we offered the donated milk asked how they could be sure it was sterile and suited to the baby,” Mimouni recalled. “We knew there would be anxieties, but weeks later, we did surveys of families who were involved in this unique experience. Many potential donors came forward after we published requests to apply.

“The project’s success was caused by motivation; what caused success was motivation; giving of your own milk, giving part of yourself while nursing your own baby is the height of unconditional love.”

In normal times, donors who had been given sterile bags brought their milk to a specific place, but with missiles falling and danger in the streets, MDA motorcycles took the bags every day and brought them to the Ramle milk bank.

MDA was chosen to run the milk bank in 2018 because “they’re used to dealing with emergencies,” explained Mimouni. There is no other place in the world where a national mother’s milk bank is run by a blood bank.”

When he was made chairman of the national council, he wanted to know what challenges there were and how to advise the ministry. “My idea was that there would be a mother’s milk bank.” He asked the then ministry director-general, Prof. Ronni Gamzu, to allocate NIS 1 million to start it, and he did. “So many people gave of their time.” 

Asked if there was a very memorable case of a mother who needed milk donations for her baby, he recalled a woman Israel Air Force helicopter pilot who decided to halt her maternity leave to go on active duty and fly her Apache.

If another country asked him tomorrow how to prepare for war or a major disaster, his advice would be how to continue to collect contributions from lactating mothers and not to allow a mother’s milk bank to close down in an emergency.

“Some traumatized mothers who survived were unable to breastfeed because of stress, so they decided to give formula or to accept donations for their babies. We asked about the possibility of developing guilt feelings because they couldn’t feed them by themselves, but this wasn’t an issue,” said the council chairman.

“At enrollment, half of families expressed a high or moderate degree of anxiety. In contrast, after the infant received the donated milk, less than 25% still expressed anxiety. More than 80% attested that the donation helped them in handling the consequences of the war and contributed to their child’s health, while more than 90% felt that the donation contributed to their own well-being,” the authors wrote. “In settings of maternal loss or incapacity during war, donor human milk can be effectively provided by human milk.”

“They said they felt ‘the whole country supported me,’ so we saw the donor milk become a symbol of solidarity. So much good came out of it,” Mimouni added.

The donor milk undergoes many tests and has to meet very tough criteria for it to be given to other babies. The mothers are not self-selected. Those who apply have to list any medications they are taking, and the milk that is accepted is pasteurized. The area where the milk is handled at the bank is replete with yellow light to kill any bacteria or viruses in the air. 

Asked whether the war since October 7 taught him something about medicine that he didn’t know before, Mimouni said that it clearly showed that medical workers don’t constantly think about their incomes. They came to work in hospitals and health funds, hotels where evacuees were sent. These included Israeli Arab doctors and nurses who asked if they were needed to help.”

The journal study isn’t really about the war, which was the circumstance. The published paper is about how an existing public health system adapts under extreme conditions.

In other words, the authors were asking: “What happens when a service designed for premature babies suddenly becomes part of national emergency response?”

The National Human Milk Bank in Ramle can be contacted by email at milkbank@mda.org.il; by WhatsApp at 052-634-4101; and by phone at 073-263-0200. 

This post was originally published on here. 

An F-18 fighter on a NATO air policing mission shot down a drone that illegally breached Romanian national airspace, the fourth unmanned aircraft shot down over the country this year, Romania’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

A spokesperson for NATO’s military headquarters, US Army Colonel Martin O’Donnell, said the alliance is constantly on watch and prepared to defend itself from any threat. 

“Additional details regarding Sunday’s incident remain under investigation, but the drone appears to be Russian,” he said.

NATO member Romania shares a 614 km. land border with Ukraine and has reported repeated breaches of its airspace by Russian drones over the past four years, as well as mines floating in the Black Sea across key trade and energy routes.

Romania’s defense ministry did not specify the origin of the drone, saying it was detected by radar as it entered the country from neighboring Moldova, 24 km. north of the southeastern Romanian city of Galati.

The F-18 jet, part of a Spanish NATO contingent deployed in Romania, “made radar contact with the target and received permission to engage”, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the drone was shot down safely at 5:01 a.m. (0201 GMT).

The ministry said that fragments from the destroyed drone appeared to have fallen in an uninhabited area between two villages.

Last night, airforce pilots monitoring our airspace successfully shot down another drone that entered Romanian airspace without approval.

The Romanian Ministry of Defence informed that at 04:44, the target was detected entering national airspace, 24 km north of Galați, at which…

— Toiu Oana (@oana_toiu) August 16, 2026

Russia reportedly sends drones to Romania to breach NATO airspace

In July, Romanian F-16 fighter jet pilots shot down three Russian drones breaching national airspace for the first time after dozens of such incursions since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In May, a Russian drone crashed into an apartment block in Galati during an overnight attack on neighboring Ukraine, injuring two people.

This post was originally published on here. 

Traffic congestion is only increasing, and unless there is a massive switch to public transport in the coming years, the situation will only become worse.

But in the past few years, Netivei Israel – the National Transport Infrastructure Company – has deployed some 170 AI-based adaptive traffic lights in an attempt to analyze demand and adapt in real time to the situation on the roads. Globes reports on the effectiveness of these traffic lights.

Netivei Israel’s sample comprises 25 junctions presenting different scenarios. The average time saving at those junctions over the course of the day was 25 seconds per vehicle. At Furedeis junction, traversed by some 80,000 vehicles daily, the total daily time saving was estimated at 771 hours. At the junction at the entrance to Kiryat Tivon, the time saving was measured at up to 56 seconds on average per vehicle, or a total of 679 hours per day.

Netivei Israel estimated the contribution to the economy and found that deployment at 100 junctions could benefit the economy by over NIS 500 million a year.

Regular traffic lights generally operate according to a timing program set in advance on the basis of periodic traffic counts. But the situation on the roads changes all the time. Demand rises and falls, the direction of traffic congestion switches, and sometimes unexpected events occur.

Algorithms adapt traffic light timing to real-life situations

An adaptive traffic light works differently. Cameras installed at the junction identify vehicles and analyze demand and the length of queues up to 100 meters from the junction. The algorithm adapts the timing of the traffic light in real time to the situation on the ground.

The system was developed over the past few years by ITC (Intelligent Traffic Control) in collaboration with the operations and maintenance division, the traffic management department, and the engineering R&D department, at Netivei Israel.

“Our aspiration is that within five years all 750 junctions for which Netivei Israel is responsible will be adaptive,” says Eitan Silberstein, head of the technologies unit in the traffic management department at Netivei Israel.

“On average, a driver uses three main roads on the way to work, with five to ten junctions on each,” Silberstein adds. “We estimate that an average saving of ten minutes on each journey will amount to two working weeks over the course of a year. The aim is not just to turn more traffic lights into smart traffic lights. If I save 30 seconds at a junction, but delay a driver at the next junction, I haven’t done anything. The real leap forward will be when the entire route is adaptive.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The IDF has needed to cancel and postpone the arrest of Palestinians suspected of terrorism as forces are diverted to deal with rising settler extremism in the West Bank, Army Radio reported on Sunday morning. 

According to Army Radio, the arrests come at the request of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), to which the IDF has responded that it is “unable” to arrest all of the wanted suspects.

“The IDF acts in accordance with the assessment of the situation and changing operational considerations, and accordingly prioritizes and allocates its forces to the various missions,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Army Radio in response.

On Friday, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that he had instructed the IDF to prepare a plan to transfer all civilian enforcement authority for Israeli communities and residents in the West Bank to the Israel Police, as part of a broader effort to redefine the military’s role in the territory.

According to Katz, the proposed plan would shift responsibility for civilian law enforcement and public order involving the Israeli population in the West Bank from the IDF to the police.

“The IDF’s role is to fight Palestinian terrorism and focus on defending the borders and the communities against threats,” Katz said in a statement.
 
“All responsibility for enforcing civilian matters and maintaining law and order will be transferred to the police,” he added.

A senior police official condemned Katz’s decision, telling N12 that the defense minister had “better learn how things work. He’s getting very confused. Let him do his homework.”

Settler violence reaches peak with Kusra incident

Both Army Radio’s report and Katz’s statement follow a sharp increase in recent months in settler violence against Palestinians, the most recent of which is the incident in Kusra. 

On Wednesday, dozens of settler extremists clashed with the IDF near Kusra after the military evacuated an outpost that was set up in the area.

The entire area had been declared a closed military zone on Tuesday, following reports of settler extremists entering and taking control of Palestinian homes in the Kusra and Jalud areas of the West Bank.

IDF sends Golani Brigade, Haruv Reconnaissance Unit to Kusra

On Thursday morning, the military announced it was sending the 51st Battalion of the IDF’s Golani Brigade to Kusra to take over operations in the West Bank.

However, according to Army Radio’s report, after deciding that a permanent military presence in Kusra is needed, the battalion is slated to be relieved by the Haruv Reconnaissance Unit, which will arrive in the Palestinian village on Sunday.

Government officials and settler leaders denounced the incident last week. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told Reshet Bet that while he admires the settlers building outposts, “there are some among them who really need to be stopped.”

Yisrael Gantz, the head of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council and chairman of the Yesha Council, described the Kusra incident as “improper and unacceptable.”

Corrine Baum and Shir Perets contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel Police on Sunday requested the public’s help in locating a 16-year-old from Acre who has been missing since late July, after being granted permission by the family to publicize details of the case.

Karim Abdel Kader was last seen on July 20 after leaving his school in I’billin, located in northern Israel near Shefar’am.

Kader has black hair, dark skin, and was last seen wearing a black shirt and matching pants. Police stated that he does not have a phone on him.

Police have asked anyone with information on his whereabouts to either report it to the police hotline (100) or to the Acre Police Station over the phone at 04-987-6808.

The announcement of Kader’s disappearance comes days after a separate missing persons case that gripped Israel was solved.

Police locate Mali, Liel Yahalomi 

On Friday, police announced that Israeli mother Mali Yahalomi and her daughter, Liel, had been found alive on an intercity bus in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The two left Israel for Prague, continued to Vienna, apparently traveled through Frankfurt, before eventually reaching Buenos Aires. They had been reported missing nearly a week ago after failing to check in with family members after a Shabbos spent in Vienna.

Authorities are continuing to investigate the circumstances of the trip, including why the two women traveled from Europe to Argentina and did not make contact while police were trying to locate them.

Police suspect the two recorded videos for their family in Vienna but sent them after leaving the country, creating the impression they were still there, Ynet reported. The investigation also reportedly found that their travel was connected to personal financial circumstances.

Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara asked the High Court of Justice to stop the government from appointing new leaders to the Police Investigations Department before the October 27 election, arguing that Justice Minister Yariv Levin has too much influence over who will be chosen.

The court has not yet ruled on the request. It is considering several petitions against a law passed in June that removes PID from the State Attorney’s Office and places it more directly under the Justice Ministry.

At issue are two long-term appointments: the director of the restructured department, who will serve for six years, and a new senior official who will resolve disputes over investigations of police officers and serve for three years.

Baharav-Miara argued that making those appointments shortly before an election would allow the current government to shape the leadership of one of Israel’s most sensitive law-enforcement bodies for years to come.

She also warned that perceived political control over PID could deter police officers, investigators, and prosecutors, particularly during an election period in which the police are responsible for maintaining public order and protecting demonstrations.

PID investigates suspected criminal offenses committed by police officers. Its independence is therefore intended to ensure that officers can be investigated without political interference or pressure from the police itself.

Levin has ‘significant influence’ over voting committee

Under the new law, a five-member committee will select the two senior officials. Baharav-Miara argued that Levin or his office had significant influence over three of its members.

The Justice Ministry director-general, or a representative, chairs the committee. Baharav-Miara’s filing described Director-General Itamar Donenfeld as holding a position of trust under Levin. Levin appointed a second member, a criminal-defense lawyer, after consulting with the national public defender.

The attorney-general’s filing revealed that Donenfeld was also closely involved in the selection of a third member, who was formally appointed by the Civil Service commissioner.

According to the filing, Donenfeld sent the commissioner the name of a single candidate, along with the candidate’s résumé and a legal opinion finding no impediment to the appointment. The commissioner interviewed the candidate and decided to appoint them.

Baharav-Miara did not claim that the commissioner failed to make his own decision. She argued, however, that Donenfeld’s decision to put forward only one name gave Levin’s office significant influence over a third seat on the committee.

That would be particularly consequential because the committee may operate with only three members. It will also have the power to dismiss the officials it appoints.

The committee has also not yet been fully established. An application process for the position of PID director was opened on June 25, but its deadline was extended three times, most recently to Sunday (August 16). No equivalent process has been opened for the second position.

Permanent appointments should be avoided during elections

Baharav-Miara argued that there is no urgent need to complete either appointment before the election. The existing PID continues to operate under an acting director and no position has been left functionally vacant.

Baharav-Miara argued, citing High Court precedent, that permanent appointments should generally be avoided during an election period when there is no urgent need and a temporary arrangement is available.

The attorney-general acknowledged that the coming election is taking place on its scheduled date, unlike many previous cases in which courts considered appointments after an early election had been called. She nevertheless argued that the same concerns over political considerations and binding the next government apply.

The filing said that, according to the Justice Ministry’s legal adviser, Levin had not yet formulated his position on whether to advance the appointments before the election. It added that his request for separate legal representation had been approved on July 14.

The Knesset approved the PID law in June by 43 votes to 39. It establishes PID as a separate body within the Justice Ministry and transfers powers currently held by the attorney-general and State Attorney’s Office to the department’s new leadership.

Levin and Likud MK Moshe Saada, who sponsored the law, have said the separation will address conflicts of interest and make investigations of police officers more independent and professional.

Baharav-Miara and the petitioners challenging the law argue that it would have the opposite effect by giving political officials influence over the body responsible for investigating the police.

The High Court must now decide whether to freeze the appointments while it considers the broader petitions against the law.

This post was originally published on here. 

An Iranian military official said on Sunday that Qatar should allow an Iranian team to enter the country to investigate the fate of pilots whom Tehran says were captured by Qatari forces, Iranian media reported.

Qatar denies holding any Iranian pilots. Doha said on Saturday that its search and rescue teams had found the remains of one pilot after Iranian aircraft violated Qatari airspace in March and failed to respond to attempts to contact them.

Qatar said it had contacted Iran to coordinate the handover of the remains and had invited Tehran to review details of its search and rescue operations, but had received no response.

Mohammad Baqerzadeh, commander of the Committee for the Search for Missing Persons of Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff, said an Iranian Air Force expert and fact-finding team had been waiting for months to enter Qatar, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Baqerzadeh accused Qatari officials of repeatedly delaying the investigation and preventing the pilots’ return to Iran. He called for the International Committee of the Red Cross to urgently follow up on the case.

Iran accuses Kuwait of witholding information about four Iranians held in Kuwait

Baqerzadeh also said Kuwait was similarly withholding information about the fate of four Iranians held in Kuwait.

In May, Iran said the four were affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards and had been on a maritime patrol before entering Kuwaiti territorial waters because of a navigation disruption. Kuwait has said the four were suspected of planning hostile actions against the country.

This post was originally published on here. 

Jason Arday, a former University of Cambridge professor at the center of a plagiarism scandal, died at 41 on Friday.

Arday resigned on August 5 after a former Cambridge researcher accused him of plagiarism in his PhD thesis. He denied the allegation but acknowledged making mistakes. He was the university’s youngest ever black professor.

He was found unresponsive by the ambulance service at a property in Battersea, south London.

“Sadly, a 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin have been informed and are being supported by officers,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit,” the police said.

The University of Cambridge announced an investigation earlier this week into the circumstances of Arday’s appointment to the Faculty of Education in 2022 and his time there since.

Arday’s personal life, childhood struggles investigated in plagiarism controversy

A high-profile professor who appeared frequently in the media, Arday faced accusations this year that parts of his 2015 PhD thesis were plagiarized, which he denied.

The allegations expanded to include apparent inconsistencies in Arday’s other academic work, and questions over his claims about his career, personal life, and medical conditions.

Arday’s accounts of his childhood struggles with autism and his sporting achievements – including a claim to have run 30 marathons in 35 days – have also been challenged.

“We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news. Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arday’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time,” Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice said in a statement.

Britain’s education secretary, Lucy Powell, said she was saddened to hear the news of Arday’s death.

His family said they were in shock.

“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone,” the family said in a statement provided by Arday’s publisher, Simon & Schuster UK.

“We won’t comment further at this point beyond asking the press to leave us alone now, and to stop the campaign of harassment which has been waged against Jason and his family for too long.”

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham called on Saturday for reflection following Arday’s death.

“It’s a tragedy on so many levels, but particularly… for everybody who knew Jason, his family obviously, his friends,” Burnham told broadcasters.

“It’s not a moment for any rushing to judgment. It’s a moment for reflection, I would say, reflecting on how things came to this.”

Critics blame ‘unthinking culture warriors’ for failing to check Arday’s credentials

The case has fueled debate over the university’s handling of the allegations. Some critics have argued it was so keen to hire a black academic that it failed to check Arday’s credentials sufficiently and did not respond appropriately when the plagiarism claims emerged.

“The unthinking culture warriors who have supported (Arday) unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for black academics and dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire,” Paul Gilroy, a University of London sociology professor, was quoted as saying by the Guardian newspaper on August 8.

Initial accusations against Arday were made by self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, the Guardian reported. Cofnas has previously expressed the belief that in a meritocracy there would be “close to zero” black professors at Harvard University.

The Guardian also reported that, following the allegations of plagiarism, Cambridge stated that it had passed the complaints to Liverpool John Moores, where Arday had completed his PhD, which had not found evidence of plagiarism.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge professor and supporter of Arday, said Arday had spoken to him hours before his death about his distress over media coverage and criticism on social media.

“He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny, including ridicule, discrediting absolutely every detail of his life,” Baron-Cohen told BBC Radio on Saturday. “And he wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation, and he felt he couldn’t go on.”

Arday, as a vulnerable person since childhood, deserved safeguarding and support, he said, adding that investigations into the case should assign accountability “at lots of levels.”

Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

A 35-year-old Israeli tourist was arrested in Crete on Saturday on suspicion of causing a wildfire after lighting a barbecue at a rented vacation villa despite being explicitly warned against doing so.

He is expected to be brought before a judge in Rethymno on Sunday for a hearing on extending his detention.

According to Greek media reports, the fire broke out at 7:11 p.m. on Friday near the village of Sellia, close to the resort town of Plakias, in the municipality of Agios Vasileios in southern Rethymno.

Findings from the Greek Fire Service’s arson investigation unit reportedly indicated that the fire began in the yard of the vacation villa where a group of Israeli tourists was staying. They are suspected of lighting a barbecue despite strong winds and serious fire warnings.

According to the reports, the villa owner warned the guests when they arrived that, due to the high fire risk, using a barbecue was completely prohibited in the area. He said he also provided the instructions in writing.

Despite the warning, the guests allegedly lit the grill. Sparks carried by the wind ignited dry vegetation, and the fire quickly spread into the surrounding open area.

More than 60 firefighters were dispatched to the scene, along with three special wildfire units, dozens of vehicles, firefighting helicopters, water tankers, and volunteers.

Greece’s national 112 emergency system sent alerts to residents and ordered the precautionary evacuation of the communities of Fotinari and Souda. Firefighters brought the blaze under control after about four hours.

Some 45,000 dunams burned in the area about two weeks ago

The incident comes amid a particularly severe wildfire season in Greece.

About two weeks ago, one of the summer’s most serious fires raged in the Rethymno area. According to data from the National Observatory of Athens, about 45,000 dunams burned within just two days south of Rethymno.

Authorities evacuated more than 8,000 residents and tourists from their homes and hotels. A total of 224 firefighters, 53 fire engines, 11 special units, and firefighting planes and helicopters fought the flames.

Two firefighters were killed during the firefighting operations. At the time, winds in the area reached speeds of up to 88 kilometers per hour, with local gusts exceeding 100 kilometers per hour, making aerial firefighting operations extremely difficult.

Following the wave of wildfires, Greek authorities have adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward violations of fire prevention regulations. On days when a high fire risk is declared, lighting barbecues, burning cut vegetation, or carrying out any activity that could create sparks is completely prohibited.

Those who violate the regulations may face heavy fines and criminal proceedings.

This post was originally published on here. 

Kasem Noubani, a 24-year-old man from the Chicago area, was sentenced about a week ago to 600 days in prison after pleading guilty to a hate crime for his role in the assault of an IDF reservist and another Jewish student on the campus of DePaul University in Chicago.

The attack, which was premeditated, left one of the victims with a brain injury and his friend with a broken wrist that required surgery.

Noubani was arrested only about a year and a half after the attack during a traffic stop in Arkansas. He was subsequently extradited to Illinois and prosecuted. On August 4, he pleaded guilty and was sent to the Cook County Jail.

The incident occurred in broad daylight on November 6, 2024, outside DePaul University’s student center. Max Long, an IDF reservist who came to study at the university after serving in Israel, set up an information booth with his friend, Michael Kaminsky. Long was wearing a sweatshirt that read, “Stop Antisemitism,” and the two held a sign inviting students: “Come talk about Israel with an IDF soldier.”

According to the indictment, Noubani and his accomplice, Adam Arkan, arrived at the scene wearing masks after planning the attack in advance. Arkan began speaking with Long and Kaminsky to distract them, while Noubani approached from behind, attacked Long, and repeatedly struck him in the head and body. Long was knocked to the ground and lost consciousness. Kaminsky, who tried to help his friend, was also attacked and suffered a broken wrist.

Long suffers memory loss months after antisemitic attack

Long suffered a hematoma, a severe concussion, and a brain injury. A cystic finding was later discovered in the area between his brain and spinal cord. Even months after the attack, he continued to suffer from memory loss and required regular medical monitoring. Kaminsky underwent surgery because of his broken wrist.

After the attack, Arkan fled the scene in his father’s car. Noubani was recorded throwing the sweatshirt and ski mask he had been wearing into a trash can. Investigators collected the clothing, and laboratory testing found that the DNA on the items matched Noubani’s. Arkan also identified him during questioning as the person who attacked Long from behind.

Arkan, who was 20 when the charges were filed, is a student at Triton College, not DePaul University. According to the indictment, security cameras recorded him arriving in the campus area about an hour before the attack, before he put on the ski mask, and his father identified him in the footage.

Arkan sentenced to probation, community service

Although Arkan was initially charged with serious offenses, including hate crimes and aggravated battery, he pleaded guilty under a deal to only two misdemeanor battery charges. Last November, he was sentenced to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service. The sentence drew criticism from Jewish organizations in Chicago, which argued that it did not reflect the severity of the violence directed against Jews.

Noubani, by contrast, had already had a previous encounter with the justice system. Months before the attack, he participated in a pro-Palestinian protest held around the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 2024. He was among the protesters who breached a fence in the security perimeter and pleaded guilty to trespassing.

Alongside the criminal proceedings, Long and Kaminsky filed a civil lawsuit against DePaul University. They claim that a university security officer stood about three meters away from them during the attack and did not intervene, while another guard briefly detained one of the attackers but allowed him to leave.

The two accuse the university of negligence and of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students on campus, and are seeking at least $50,000 in damages. The university asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed, arguing that it had no obligation to protect them from the attackers. According to the latest public update, however, the case has not yet been decided.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Health Ministry declared that a patient held in isolation tested negative for Ebola on Friday. 

The patient was admitted to Soroka Medical Center after returning from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) days earlier and developing a fever. 

The Health Ministry urged the public to avoid travel to the DRC and said anyone returning from the DRC or Uganda, where the Ebola outbreak has spread, should self-isolate and call the Health Ministry hotline at *5400 if symptoms appear within 21 days of return.  

The Health Ministry emphasized that currently there have been no confirmed cases of Ebola in Israel. 

The current Ebola outbreak in the DRC is caused by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, which does not have an approved cure or vaccine and is currently on track to be the largest outbreak in history, surpassing that of 2014-2016, in which 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths were recorded across ​Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization.

Less than three months after the outbreak was declared, over 4,381 cases were confirmed and deaths had reached 2,011. 

In 2014, it took a little over 12 months to reach the same number of deaths. 

Ebola is not an airborne illness and can only be transmitted through direct contact with a sick person with symptoms or with blood, body fluids, or secretions. 

The Health Ministry stated that it is continuing to monitor the situation and is conducting systemic preparations to ensure optimal preparedness of the health system for any possible scenario.

Reuters contributed to this report. 

This post was originally published on here. 

A dozen people were killed and at least 10 injured after a Polish bus overturned at night on a motorway in eastern Hungary, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar said on Sunday morning in a Facebook post.

The bus ran into a ditch and tipped over early on Sunday near the town of Mezokeresztes in eastern Hungary, police said, adding that the bus was heading towards the city of Nyíregyháza on the motorway when the accident happened.

State news agency MTI said there were 57 passengers and two drivers on the bus. 

“A Polish-registered bus traveling on the M3 motorway towards Nyíregyháza… veered off the straight stretch of road into a ditch and overturned. Preliminary information suggests the driver likely fell asleep,” police said on their website.

Twelve people lost their lives, and several others were injured in the accident, police said, adding that they were taking the bus driver into custody.

The injured have been taken to hospital. 

This post was originally published on here. 

Justice Minister Yariv Levin has declared that if the Likud wins the Knesset elections, he will ask to continue in his post so that he can finally implement his judicial reform policy. 

What needs reform even more is the size of the government. Admittedly, every party in a government coalition should be entitled to one minister, but regardless of the size of the party whose leader is the prime minister, no party, other than the ruling party, should have more than one minister in the government. The ruling party can have an extra minister in addition to the prime minister.

In delegating ministerial portfolios, the prime minister should forget about jobs for the boys and appoint the most suitable people from those who received the most votes in the primaries held by their respective political parties.

There were 12 ministers in the first government of Israel. The present government started with 30 ministers but now has 24. It’s not the largest government. There were two governments with 36 ministers. Naftali Bennett led Benjamin Netanyahu the other.

For political convenience, new portfolios are created, and some old portfolios are canceled or renamed.

In addition to the prime minister, ministries in the present government include: agriculture and food security; aliyah and integration; communications; construction and housing; culture and sports; defense; economy and industry; education; energy and infrastructure; environmental protection; finance; foreign affairs; health; heritage; innovation, science, and technology; interior; justice; national security; Negev, Galilee, and national resilience; religious services; social equality and the advancement of the status of women; tourism: transportation and road safety; and welfare and social affairs. In addition, numerous national authorities and other national bodies are engaged in formulating and determining policy.

By contrast, portfolios in Israel’s first government included agriculture, rationing and supply; education and culture; foreign affairs; finance, trade and industry; health; immigration and internal affairs; justice; labor and social security; police; religions and war victims; transportation; and welfare.

Issues further arise with the handling of these core ministries, such as education.

To the early governments of Israel, education was of primary importance after defense and diplomacy. In fact, a law on compulsory education was passed during the period of the first government.

But interest in education appears to be waning as teachers are made to work harder for less money and fewer vacation days.

There is almost always friction between official representatives of teachers’ unions and the Education Ministry, with threats and fears that some schools will not open at the beginning of September. This year is no different, but the situation is exacerbated by reports that teaching is no longer a desirable profession, and that there has been a sharp drop in the number of people opting for a career in education.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch has been quoted as saying that he loves the ministry and hopes to continue as minister if Likud wins the Knesset election.

But Kisch is not popular with teachers or their unions. If his wish comes true, more teachers will leave the profession. There is already an acute shortage of teachers. If their ranks continue to be depleted, what hope is there for Israel’s future?

Needed: An Israeli ministry for civil rights

In addition, though top-heavy with ministerial portfolios, some of which could either be merged or eliminated, Israel’s government desperately needs a ministry or authority for national priorities and the implementation of civil rights.

Israel’s founding fathers, namely the signatories to the Declaration of Independence, though coming from vastly different ideologies, agreed that “the State of Israel will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all citizens, irrespective of religion, race or sex. It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture. It will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions…..”

There’s a missing word – “residents.” It’s a known fact that certain residents of Israel who wish to become citizens have had their applications denied year after year. Some who are non-Jewish, but were married to Israeli Jews and have Israeli-born children, were deported after divorce or widowhood.

Some Arabs whose families have lived in this country for generations are also denied citizenship and most of the civil rights that go with it.

How can we ever make peace with the Palestinians while continuing to discriminate against Arabs in our midst?

Some of the Arabs living in Israel are married to Arabs living in Gaza. Before October 7, the Gazan spouse used to come to Israel every few weeks for two or three days. This is no longer permitted, and families rely on social media platforms to stay connected. If the Gazan spouse had been coming to Israel for years and never violated any Israeli laws, is it not a violation of the civil rights of the partner living in Israel to keep the two of them apart?

When Soviet authorities imprisoned Natan Sharansky and kept him apart from his wife Avital for 12 years until they were reunited with the help of US president Ronald Reagan, US diplomacy, and a prisoner exchange, the mobilization of world Jewry for the whole period in which Sharansky was incarcerated kept the issue burning.

Gazan spouses barred from Israel don’t have that kind of support, though their plight is occasionally mentioned in left-wing publications and on social media.

Of course they cannot be compared with Sharansky, who was a dissident dedicated to exposing Soviet tyranny and facilitating the emigration of Soviet Jews. But the bottom line in both cases is the break-up of family.

Family break-ups among Israeli families have also occurred because the husband, a reservist, spent too long away from home while serving in the army and was not adequately compensated for the loss of income.

There has to be a ministry other than social welfare that concerns itself with humane and human rights issues.

This post was originally published on here. 

Hurricane Lala approached Hawaii with strong winds and heavy rain on Saturday, leaving more than 40,000 utility customers without power across the state as the National Hurricane Center warned of “life-threatening” conditions.

The poweroutage.com website showed 42,889 customers without power as of 2:14 p.m. HST in Hawaii, including 31,792 on the Big Island and 7,203 in Maui County, which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai and Molokai. 

An advisory from the hurricane center at 2 p.m. HST predicted 10 to 20 inches (25.4 to 51 cm) of rain on the Big Island, and possibly up to 25 inches there, as well as 8 to 12 inches in eastern Maui and 4 to 6 inches in western Maui.

“This rainfall will produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, especially in areas of steep terrain,” the center said.

Hawaiian Electric warned customers to expect “possible extended outages, potentially overnight,” as the storm system made its way westward across Hawaii. On the Hamakua Coast on the Big Island, utility crews were assessing a 42-mile (67.6 km) span of transmission lines after fallen trees knocked down multiple poles and structures, Hawaiian Electric spokesperson Darren Pai told TV station Hawaii News Now.

Earlier in the day, the US National Hurricane Center said Lala’s maximum sustained winds reached 75 mph (120 km/h), making it a Category 1 hurricane.

Winds of over 100 mph measured

The Maunakea Weather Center, on the Big Island’s tallest peak, recorded wind gusts of more than 100 mph throughout the early afternoon, although winds would have been slower closer to sea level.

The Hawaii Department of Transportation said it was closing Hilo International Airport and would close Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole at 2 p.m. HST. The department also closed the Hawaii Island, Maui County, and Kaua‘i commercial ports.

This post was originally published on here. 

An Ethiopian Israeli should be able to become the prime minister, the president, or the chief rabbi of Israel. 

An Ethiopian Israeli should also be capable of leading a major Zionist or Jewish institution, and should appear on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, or Sky News.

Or even with Piers Morgan when discussing and debating Iran, Gaza, diplomacy, antisemitism, Jewish identity, and Israel’s future.

But until Israeli leaders, international Jewish organizations, and major media institutions begin treating Ethiopian Jews as potential leaders rather than permanent subjects of somebody else’s conversation, their language of diversity and inclusion will remain incomplete.

For decades, Ethiopian Israelis have been presented primarily through three narratives: immigration, discrimination, and poverty. Those stories matter. But they are not our entire story.

Where are the Ethiopian Israelis discussing national security, Jewish law, Africa, diplomacy, and Israel’s relationship with the United States? 

Where are the Ethiopian Israeli candidates being prepared for cabinet ministries, senior diplomacy, major Jewish institutions, or national religious leadership?

International media organizations debate Israel every day, yet Ethiopian Israeli intellectual voices remain remarkably rare.

Israel also bears responsibility. Do not appoint an Ethiopian Israeli simply because an institution needs a Black face in a photograph. 

And do not select an insufficiently prepared representative, watch that person struggle internationally, and then quietly conclude that Ethiopian Israelis cannot perform at the highest level. 

Find the qualified people. We already exist.

Qualified Ethiopian Israelis

Today I present two leaders among many: Rabbi Reuven Wabashat and Fentay Maharat-Alamu. And, with humility, I include myself not as someone claiming entitlement to office, but as another example of a generation asking for the opportunity to serve.

Rabbi Reuven Wabashat represents a remarkable bridge between the ancient religious tradition of Ethiopian Jewry and contemporary Israeli rabbinical scholarship.

Born in Anbobar, Gondar, Ethiopia, he is a descendant of generations of Ethiopian Jewish spiritual leadership. His grandfather, Qes Wabashat Aytegb, and great-grandfather, Qes Aytegb Tamenu, were respected Ethiopian Jewish leaders.

He immigrated to Israel as a child in 1972, before the great Ethiopian aliyah operations. He later served as an IDF officer, became a rabbinical judge and halachic scholar, and authored works of Jewish law and biblical interpretation.

I know Rabbi Wabashat personally – as my rabbi and mentor.

So I ask a question Israel should confront seriously: Why should a scholar of his caliber be viewed principally as a rabbi for Ethiopians? 

Why shouldn’t Ethiopian-Israeli Torah scholars compete for municipal chief rabbi positions – and eventually Israel’s highest rabbinical offices?

THEN THERE is Fentay Maharat-Alamu.

Her life challenges almost every stereotype about Ethiopian Israelis. Born in Gondar, Ethiopia, in 1984, Fentay was still a baby when her family undertook the perilous journey through Sudan toward Israel. 

In the desert, the family ran out of water and came dangerously close to death. 

During that ordeal, she suffered an injury near her eye. She arrived in Israel carrying a scar before she was old enough to understand what a scar meant. But the scar did not define the limits of her life.

Before entering Israel’s Foreign Service, Fentay accumulated roughly 15 years of professional and management experience in the private sector, including years at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. 

She later represented Israel diplomatically on several continents, including assignments in Chile, Ethiopia, and the Netherlands. Consider that transformation.

A one-year-old Jewish baby carried through the Sudanese desert grew up to represent the sovereign Jewish state internationally. That is not merely an Ethiopian story. That is a Zionist story.

Now Fentay is opening another chapter through literature and lectures. Her forthcoming novel, The Scarred Stone, received support from the Israeli center for Libraries even before publication. 

The book turns the lens backward toward Beta Israel life in Ethiopia, particularly the lives, courage, and memories of its women.

Who were Ethiopian Jews before the world called us immigrants? 

Before Sudan. Before rescue operations. Before absorption centers. 

There were families, villages, traditions, religious scholars, mothers and fathers who dreamed of Jerusalem. We did not enter Jewish history when Ethiopian Jews landed at Ben-Gurion Airport. We were already living Jewish history.

Fentay’s forthcoming book therefore deserves an audience beyond the Ethiopian community. It offers readers an opportunity to encounter Ethiopian Jews not merely through rescue and suffering, but through family, faith, womanhood, memory, and belonging.

MY OWN path is different. I came through education, law enforcement, public service, journalism, and Jewish advocacy. 

I studied educational leadership and conflict resolution, spent many years in American public service, and have written and spoken about Israel, Ethiopian Jewry, Jewish unity, moral diplomacy, equality, and world peace.

I mention this quietly because this article should not become my campaign biography. My point is, there are many of us.

Our community contains rabbis and diplomats, educators and officers, writers, entrepreneurs, academics, and public servants.

The tragedy is not that Ethiopian Israel has failed to produce leadership. It is that institutions and the stereotypical system too often fail to recognize it.

Political parties should recruit Ethiopian Israelis for meaningful parliamentary careers and prepare them for cabinet responsibility.

Religious institutions should cultivate Ethiopian Torah scholars for leadership of the entire Israeli public, not merely Ethiopian congregations.

The Foreign Ministry, universities, Jewish Federations, and international Zionist and antisemitism organizations should identify Ethiopian Israeli leaders and strategists capable of reaching their highest ranks. 

International media must change as well. 

We Ethiopian Israelis exist. Please call us to discuss Israel.

Can an Ethiopian Israeli become president of Israel? Why not? 

Can an Ethiopian Israeli become chief rabbi? Why not? 

Can an Ethiopian Israeli someday become prime minister of the Jewish state? Why not?

I’m not saying that Ethiopian Israeli leadership should replace anyone else, because leadership should be determined by knowledge, character, preparation, service, and vision. 

Rabbi Reuven Wabashat represents one expression of that leadership. Fentay Maharat-Alamu represents another – from the dangers of Sudan to Israeli business, diplomacy, literature, and public service. 

I humbly hope to contribute my own small part alongside them. 

And we must start looking at those who are already contributing.

This post was originally published on here. 

The family of  Haymanot Kasau, who has been missing for more than 900 days, has renewed their push for a more extensive search into her disappearance following the discovery of Mali and Liel Yahalomi in Argentina only about a week after they disappeared in Vienna and following an extensive search operation by the Israel Police in Israel and abroad.

Haymanot’s family is demanding that the same capabilities and resources used in the search for Mali and Liel also be employed in the investigation into her disappearance, and is calling for the case to be transferred to the Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency).

A statement from the campaign headquarters seeking Haymanot’s return home said that “With the mother and daughter having been found and Israel Police succeeding in solving the investigation, its helplessness in investigating Haymanot’s abduction stands out even more, and therefore the family is demanding that the investigation be transferred to the Shin Bet.”

Haymanot’s parents, Benchi and Tesfaye Kasau, also responded to the discovery of the two women, saying that alongside their joy that the case ended safely, they could not help but compare the efforts invested in that search with the handling of their daughter’s case.

“After Shabbat ended, we received the happy news that Mali and Liel Yahalomi had been found safe and well. Once again, a happy ending, except it is not our happy ending. Our Haymanot has not been with us for 902 days. 902 days have passed since our little daughter was abducted.”

The parents added, “Haymanot was 9 years old; she did not choose to disappear, she did not choose not to come home, and despite this, not everything possible has been done to find her. Israel Police, under the direction of Inspector-General Danny Levy, used all of its capabilities to find Mali and Liel, but what have they done for our Haymanot? Lahav 433 has investigated half the world to find them, and they still don’t meet with us or update us properly.

“We are once again asking Israel Police to transfer the investigation into Haymanot‘s abduction to the Shin Bet, and that Police Commissioner Inspector-General Danny Levy and Lahav 433 head Commissioner Meni Binyamin, who have failed to find any lead in the investigation, transfer the case to the Shin Bet because our girl is still not here.”

In an appeal to the public, the parents said, “And to the dear people of Israel, whose citizens continue to show us the light amid all the darkness, and we understand that many of them, like us, have expressed their anger over the discrimination in the handling of the investigation into Haymanot’s abduction, thank you. Thank you very much, and please, stay with us; help us make our cry heard because, unfortunately, no one listens to us.”

Mother, daughter found in Argentina after planning disappearance 

Mali and Liel Yahalomi captivated the country over the past week as the mystery surrounding their disappearance from the streets of Vienna unfolded. On Friday night, Israel Police announced that the two had been located on a bus in Argentina, safe and well. Police questioned them and released them after they said they had left of their own free will. Police clarified that they had no suspicion of criminal activity and had not opened an investigation.

Details revealed after they were found indicated that the two had planned their disappearance in advance, but had not taken into account law enforcement authorities’ ability to trace digital footprints and piece together information collected in different countries.

“Israel Police, in cooperation with all security agencies and relevant authorities in Israel and abroad, operated in recent days in an extensive and focused effort to locate the missing women,” the police stated.

“At the direction of Police Commissioner Inspector-General Danny Levy, the police, led by Lahav 433 and the Intelligence Division, operated command centers in Israel and abroad around the clock. According to the police, all necessary means and resources were allocated to the searches, hundreds of investigative actions were carried out, and cooperation took place with Europol and other police organizations around the world.”

A police source told Maariv, “From the outset, we said that there apparently was no criminal incident or terrorist incident here, and that the mother and daughter had most likely left the room of their own free will. Representatives of the police Intelligence Division managed to track them down, and they were surprised when we reached them. After a brief questioning, and once we understood that there was no criminal or other motive, they were released. There is no suspicion that they committed an offense.”

Haymanot Kasau’s family marks 900 days since disappearance 

Haymanot Kasau disappeared from an absorption center in Safed more than 900 days ago and has not been found since. Her family says police still have no leads in the case and has long demanded Shin Bet involvement.

Just this week, on Wednesday, family members, members of the campaign to bring Haymanot home, and activists demonstrated near Shin Bet offices in Tel Aviv, calling on Shin Bet chief David Zini to make the agency’s intelligence capabilities available to the investigation.

During the protest, Haymanot’s father, Tesfaye Kasau, read a personal letter he had written to Zini in Amharic, after which its contents were also read in Hebrew. “Tomorrow we will mark 900 days that our daughter has not been home, and my heart is struggling to bear the pain, the worry, and the helplessness,” the father wrote.

The family argues that the investigation should also be transferred to the Shin Bet in light of the agency’s involvement in other areas, including the fight against organized crime and weapons trafficking in Arab society and the search for the child Yuval Kogan. They say the agency’s resources and intelligence capabilities should also be made available in the effort to locate Haymanot.

In his letter, the father also raised a painful allegation regarding the way the case has been handled. “I am doing everything in my power to stop myself from thinking that it has to do with color, but it is very difficult not to think about how things would have looked different if we looked different. If she were blonde, would her life matter more? If she were not a new immigrant, Ethiopian, would you already be helping us? Prove to us that this is not the case.”

This post was originally published on here. 

For nearly 50 years, the world has dealt with Iran under a straightforward premise: the sole source of danger is the theocracy installed by the 1979 revolution.

Western policies have split between containing the regime, changing its conduct, eroding its capabilities, or waiting for internal collapse. The record of these tactics, though, raises a tougher question.

Why does the Iranian threat return each time Tehran’s foes believe they have contained it?

The breeding grounds enabling centralized power 

For decades, the world may have fixated on who governs Iran while ignoring the framework that lets central authorities rebuild their power project whenever conditions change.

The core issue is about more than the nuclear program, ballistic missile stockpile, and proxy networks. These are assets that can be disabled or partly destroyed.

They spring, however, from a large state with a huge population, energy reserves, a scientific and industrial foundation, geographic reach, and military institutions honed across decades.

Lost facilities, leaders, and munitions cannot wipe out technical know-how or erase recovery capacity. A single tool may break, but the underlying machine still can build a replacement.

History shows international dealings with Iran have targeted what can be destroyed; capabilities can be degraded. But such tactics leave unanswered the more fundamental question of how to stop a large, centralized state with people, resources and expertise from rebuilding losses once conditions ease.

So, the issue moves from disarmament to state structure, from who governs Iran to how power sources inside the country are administered.

One episode lays bare this disconnect. The July 2015 nuclear deal capped portions of Iran’s nuclear work. It left Tehran’s view of its regional standing intact. Missile work and proxy operations also proceeded without pause.

The January 2020 killing of Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani jolted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, although influence networks resumed activity once roles were reassigned.

Strikes on Iranian military sites have proved able to inflict damage and disrupt operations, but they cannot ensure permanent disablement.

Containment thus amounts to little more than managing repeated rounds of buildup, strike and rearmament.

Viewed this way, regime change in Iran offers at best a partial fix if presented as a final answer to the problem. The ruling system provides the country’s power project with its ideology, while the centralized state furnishes its resources and wealth.

Replacing the regime while leaving power administration untouched may soften rhetoric but offers no assurance of a different course. A more pragmatic, economy-focused government could emerge.

Geography, national interests and latent capabilities, however, survive leadership turnover. Long-held regional ambitions would likely resurface, framed in nationalist rather than revolutionary terms.

That said, casting the Iranian state as inherently hostile misreads reality. Most countries adjust conduct when their institutions, military doctrine, and balance between rulers and ruled evolve. 

The objective is something other than indefinite weakening of Iran. It is blocking the convergence of unchecked central power, expansionist ideology, and exclusive control over military decisions.

Chaotic breakup of the Iranian state carries its own severe risks. Internal diversity, widespread weapons, and Iran’s strategic position could turn collapse into civil conflict, foreign meddling, and massive disruption of energy flows and shipping lanes.

Break the ‘buildup, strike, resurgence’ pattern

The most durable course therefore starts inside Iran, on the premise that Iranians alone hold the right to choose their governing system and its structure.

Broad decentralization or federalism, and possibly confederal arrangements if adopted through national consent and constitutional agreement, can curb the center’s monopoly on wealth and decisions, give regions greater say over resources and fiscal matters, and write institutional limits into the use of national capacities for foreign ventures.

Forcing such models from outside, by contrast, would let authorities cast themselves as defenders of national unity and turn reform into a pretext for harsher repression.

Decentralization hardly guarantees Iran will turn automatically into a peaceful country. Constitutional arrangements by themselves cannot dispel national ambitions or remove foreign frictions. Their worth lies in raising the price of decision monopolization, spreading oversight of resources, and making long-term foreign ventures far harder to pursue without broad consent and accountability.

Such rules constrain impulsive action while still falling short of an ironclad promise of responsible behavior.

No global requirement exists for a permanent Iranian adversary to justify alliances and defense budgets. Removing the regime with no plan for what follows promises an even more dangerous crisis.

What is required instead is ending the threat’s ability to regenerate, through four parallel steps: capping offensive capabilities, advancing institutional reform that disperses power inside Iran, upholding regional deterrence to block coercion, and pursuing diplomacy that links economic and political integration to revised conduct.

The world has repeatedly slowed Iran’s power project. It has never eliminated the country’s ability to rebuild it. The ruling system may fall one day, but its collapse would leave intact the building blocks of Iranian strength.

If a framework survives that lets central authorities marshal people, resources and expertise behind foreign ventures, any win will amount to a temporary pause between rounds.

A credible resolution comes when Iran’s strength changes from a source of fear for neighbors into a force bounded by institutions and directed by societal interests. Only then does the root problem resolve itself. The danger will not have sustained another setback – it will have lost the conditions that kept reviving it.

The writer is a UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate.

This post was originally published on here. 

Around 5,000 people have been evacuated after a magnitude-7.7 earthquake smashed an area in eastern Indonesia, killing at least 51, blocking roads and causing landslides, authorities said on Sunday.

Thirty-six people were seriously injured in the Saturday morning quake in East Nusa Tenggara province, while 77 had minor injuries, Deputy Health Minister Benjamin Paulus Octavianus told a televised meeting.

The quake, followed by some 341 aftershocks, is the Southeast Asian nation’s worst in years. Hundreds died after a 2022 earthquake in West Java.

More than 3,300 people in the Sikka region self-evacuated or were stranded in a sports arena, said the disaster mitigation agency BNPB.

Some Sikka residents were stranded outside collapsed homes under a makeshift tent made out of tarp, while some people received treatment in a tent outside a hospital in the port town of Maumere.

“Almost all of Sikka’s residents didn’t dare stay indoors, so they slept on a porch or a tent outside,” Simon Subandi, deputy regent of Sikka, told news channel KompasTV.

More than 3,500 military and police officers have been deployed to the region, Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya said in a statement.

Over 1,000 homes damaged, people trapped under rubble

Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said rescuers were able to access parts of Maumere that had been blocked by landslides. Most of those missing were trapped under rubble, and more than 1,300 homes were damaged, BNPB said.

Twenty petrol stations were out of service due to power outages, state energy firm Pertamina said.

The East Nusa Tenggara government is considering declaring an emergency for the province, BNPB said, which would allow authorities to mobilize resources and funding.

The area of the quake was hit in 1992 by a magnitude-7.5 earthquake that caused extensive destruction, Indonesia’s geophysics agency said.

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 290 million people, straddles the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” a seismically active zone where tectonic plates meet and trigger frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

This post was originally published on here. 

Hurricane Lala approached Hawaii with strong winds and heavy rain on Saturday, leaving more than 40,000 utility customers without power across the state as the National Hurricane Center warned of “life-threatening” conditions.

The poweroutage.com website showed 42,889 customers without power as of 2:14 p.m. in Hawaii, including 31,792 on the Big Island and 7,203 in Maui County, which includes the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai.

An advisory from the hurricane center at 2 p.m. predicted 10 to 20 inches of rain on the Big Island, and possibly up to 25 inches there, as well as 8 to 12 inches in eastern Maui and 4 to 6 inches in western Maui.

“This rainfall will produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, especially in areas of steep terrain,” the center said.

Hawaiian Electric warned customers to expect “possible extended outages, potentially overnight,” as the storm system made its way westward across Hawaii. On the Hamakua Coast on the Big Island, utility crews were assessing a 42-mile span of transmission lines after fallen trees knocked down multiple poles and structures, Hawaiian Electric spokesperson Darren Pai told TV station Hawaii News Now.

Hurricane Lala winds reach Category 1 levels

Earlier in the day, the US National Hurricane Center said Lala’s maximum sustained winds reached 75 mph, making it a Category 1 hurricane.

The Maunakea Weather Center, on the Big Island’s tallest peak, recorded wind gusts of more than 100 mph throughout the early afternoon, although winds would have been slower closer to sea level.

The Hawaii Department of Transportation said it was closing Hilo International Airport and would close Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole at 2 p.m. The department also closed the Hawaii Island, Maui County, and Kaua‘i commercial ports.

This post was originally published on here. 

Recently, I got into a debate online with someone who demanded to know why, after all these years, there is still no Palestinian state.

The question was clearly meant as an indictment of Israel.

But as the exchange went on, it became clear to me that the person knew almost nothing about the history of the conflict. There were plenty of accusations but very little knowledge of the facts, a phenomenon we see all too often nowadays.

So let’s set the record straight.

Before asking why there is no Palestinian state today, it is worth recalling a basic historical fact: there has never been a Palestinian state in all of history.

The land was ruled, over the centuries, by Romans, Byzantines, Arab and Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British. But there was never an independent Palestinian Arab country with its own government, army, currency, or capital.

Even the name itself is revealing. The word “Palestine” appears precisely zero times in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, and the Koran. Indeed, it was only after crushing the Bar-Kochba revolt in the second century CE that the Romans. Under Emperor Hadrian, Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina. The change was intended to sever the Jewish connection to the land and erase the memory of Jewish sovereignty.

The many failed chances for a Palestinian state

In the modern era, Palestinian Arab statehood was repeatedly put within reach and repeatedly rejected.

The pattern began early. In 1937, a British royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended partitioning Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Arab leaders rejected the proposal, while the Zionist leadership accepted partition in principle, while objecting to key boundaries and details.

A decade later, in 1947, the United Nations proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.

The Jewish leadership said yes, and the Arab leadership said no.

Instead of accepting the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state, the Arab world went to war in 1948 to prevent the creation of a Jewish one.

And even after that war, there was another prolonged opportunity.

From 1948 to 1967, Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria, while Egypt controlled Gaza. Israel had no presence in either territory. Yet no Palestinian state was created during those 19 years.

The PLO, founded in 1964, underscored what the real priority was. It did not even focus its claims on Judea and Samaria and Gaza. Its original charter demanded the whole of Israel.

That same rejectionist approach was evident after Israel’s 1967 Six Day War victory, when the Arab League responded at Khartoum with the famous “Three Noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel.

The 1993 Oslo Accords: A wasted opportunity

Then came Oslo in September 1993, when Israel decided to test a different path.

Israel recognized the PLO, withdrew from Palestinian population centers, and helped establish the Palestinian Authority, expecting negotiations to lead to a permanent settlement.

That process eventually led to Camp David, where, in July 2000, prime minister Ehud Barak met with Yasser Arafat under US president Bill Clinton’s auspices. Barak accepted the idea of Palestinian statehood and offered far-reaching territorial concessions, including in Jerusalem.

Arafat rejected the deal, and the summit ended without an agreement.

But the effort did not end there. Later that year, in December 2000, Clinton proposed parameters envisioning a Palestinian state in Gaza and nearly all of Judea and Samaria, territorial swaps, and a capital in east Jerusalem.

Arafat did not accept those terms either.

In the years since, Clinton has been remarkably blunt about what happened. Speaking at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024, he recalled telling young Americans that Arafat had “walked away from a Palestinian state, with a capital in east Jerusalem, 96% of Judea and Samaria, 4% of Israel to make up for the 4%” that Israel would retain.

Then Clinton drove the point home: “You walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities and you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there.”

Those are the words of the American president who spent years trying to broker peace.

And what followed the collapse of that effort was not another Palestinian diplomatic initiative, but the Second Intifada. Israeli buses, restaurants, and cafés were attacked by Palestinian terrorists.

Still, Israel tried again.

In 2005, the Jewish state withdrew its soldiers and expelled its civilians from the Gaza Strip, uprooting every Jewish community and ending its permanent military presence inside the Strip.

Gaza now had the chance to become a test of what Israeli withdrawal could produce. Instead, Hamas seized control and turned it into a terrorist fortress. Rockets were fired at Israeli towns. Terror tunnels were dug under the border.

Three years later, Israel returned to the negotiating table once more.

In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert pursued another far-reaching agreement with PA President Mahmoud Abbas. According to former US president George W. Bush, the plan would have given the Palestinians the “vast majority” of Judea and Samaria, while Israel retained certain settlement blocs. It also envisaged shared sovereignty in Jerusalem and a tunnel linking Judea and Samaria and Gaza.

Bush later wrote in his memoir, Decision Points, that both leaders had privately accepted the details of the plan, but Abbas ultimately backtracked and refused to endorse it publicly.

And the problem is not confined to the negotiating table.

Abbas has spent nearly two decades as president without new elections, while the PA under his leadership continues paying stipends to terrorists and their families and educating children in a culture of rejection and “martyrdom.”

Then came Oct. 7, 2023.

Israel had left Gaza 18 years earlier. There were no Israeli towns or villages there and no Israeli military government running daily life. Yet Gaza became the launching pad for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Thousands of Palestinian terrorists poured across the border, murdering, raping, burning, and kidnapping Israelis.

We left Gaza and got rockets, dismantled Jewish communities and got terror tunnels, and withdrew every Israeli soldier and civilian and ultimately got Oct. 7.

And now there are voices once again telling Israel to repeat the experiment of retreat in Judea and Samaria, which would endanger Jerusalem, the Coastal Plain and Ben-Gurion Airport.

No Israeli in his right mind can or should agree to that.

After all, if Israel were really the main reason there is no Palestinian state, then the periods when Israel was absent should have produced one – from 1948 to 1967 in Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and in the years following Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. They did not.

A Palestinian state under present conditions would be a gamble with millions of Israeli lives. Territory surrendered by Israel was used to prepare and launch the Oct. 7 massacre. Why assume land surrendered in Judea and Samaria would produce a different result?

So the next time someone asks why there is no Palestinian state, turn the question around.

Ask them: Why did the Arab leadership reject partition in 1947? Why did Arafat walk away when Clinton was offering him a state with its capital in east Jerusalem and 96% of Judea and Samaria?

Why did Abbas fail to endorse the far-reaching agreement described by Bush in 2008?

Why was Gaza turned into a base for terror after Israel withdrew?

And after Oct. 7, why should Israel be expected to ignore every lesson of the past and take the same risk again?

The bottom line is that there is no “Palestine” because for generations the Palestinian leadership has preferred the struggle against Israel to the compromises required for statehood.

Palestinians cannot repeatedly pass up opportunities, embrace or tolerate violence instead, and then insist that someone else is solely responsible for the consequences.

Clinton understood that, Bush saw it, too, and Israelis certainly understand it now.

Simply put: the facts have not changed. Only the willingness to face them has.

The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This post was originally published on here. 

Hopes of finding survivors of the earthquake that struck western Colombia five days ago were dwindling on Saturday, as more bodies were pulled from buildings that collapsed due to the 7.4-magnitude quake that left hundreds dead or missing.

The earthquake struck just after 7:30 a.m. in San Jose del Palmar, toppling apartment buildings and damaging schools, churches, hospitals and homes from the Pacific port of Buenaventura to Colombia’s coffee-growing region and major western cities.

Around 290 people have died, with 140 more missing and nearly 4,000 more injured, according to official estimates late on Saturday. More than two-thirds of the deaths were concentrated in the cities of Cali and Pereira.

“We have only one site where there are signs of life,” Cali fire captain Alberto Hernandez told Reuters. “At the other locations, we are unfortunately in the phase of recovering bodies.”

With over 2 million inhabitants, Cali is Colombia’s third-biggest city. Rescue workers continued through the morning to sift through mountains of shattered concrete, bricks and metal to find those who remain unaccounted for, while others were cleaning their neighborhoods armed with brooms and shovels.

Hernandez said they would likely finish recovering bodies by Sunday, after which they will begin using heavy equipment to clear the debris.

“Even though the 72-hour mark has passed, we’re going to keep working relentlessly and without rest, as if those 70 people (still missing) were still alive,” Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder told a press conference. “Miracles do happen.”

Hundreds sleep outdoors

However, hopes have dwindled after the deaths of people who had become national symbols.

Daniela Largo, 32, died in hospital after surviving 36 hours under the rubble, and 24-year-old Juan Felipe Giraldo was found dead after an intense operation at a collapsed hotel.

Giraldo, whose father spent days by the collapsed building waiting for news, had been set to get married on Sunday. He leaves behind a 2-year-old son.

Thousands of people gathered in the cities of Medellin and Bogota to donate food, clothing and medicine to distribution centers in areas devastated by the quake.

In the city of Pereira, deep in Colombia’s coffee-growing region, hundreds of people spent the night on mats or in tents at a makeshift shelter in a park, where coordinators said there was a lack of blankets, tents, hygiene products and food.

A report by the disaster management unit found that thousands of homes were destroyed by Monday’s quake, leaving hundreds sleeping outdoors in shelters and waiting to find out whether damaged apartments are at risk of collapsing.

Colombia has recorded 269 aftershocks since the quake, piling on dangers for rescue workers and volunteers still sifting through the unstable rubble.

Request for tariff relief

The disaster became the first major challenge for President Abelardo De La Espriella, a political newcomer who took office a week ago and will now oversee relief efforts and reconstruction in the wake of one of Colombia’s worst natural disasters.

De La Espriella has faced some criticism over his handling of the initial hours, particularly for not accepting offers of rescue teams from certain countries. Authorities later received some response teams from Israel and the United States.

The recent election victory of the right-wing president, who campaigned on a platform of tougher austerity and security measures, marks a rapprochement with Washington, which has floated joint strikes on armed groups operating in the country.

De La Espriella said on Saturday he spoke with President Donald Trump in a 10-minute phone call, during which Trump expressed his condolences, and he requested the US temporarily suspend tariffs on Colombian goods to help business owners.

The US Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Today, more than ever, the alliance between Colombia and the United States is essential for the reconstruction of our beloved nation,” De La Espriella said on X/Twitter.

This post was originally published on here. 

Twelve suspects were arrested on Saturday on suspicion of involvement in a brawl that broke out at the Yamit 2000 water park in Holon.

Two security guards were lightly injured during the incident, according to medical officials.

Around 3:00 PM, a report was received at the police dispatch regarding a fight at the facility. Officers from the Holon police station and forces from the Tel Aviv District deployed to the scene, gained control of the incident, and arrested 12 suspects, residents of southern Israel.

All suspects were taken to the Holon police station for questioning.

Following the incident, the complex was closed to visitors. Police stated that the background to the incident is criminal.

״כיסאות עפו מעל ילדים״: קטטה קשה לפני זמן קצר בימית אלפיים: על פי עדויות האירוע החל לאחר שהעובדים במקום ביקשו להנמיך מוזיקה, ומשם זה התפתח לאירוע אלים של זריקת כיסאות וחפצים. אישה כותבת לנו: ״לא משנה על מה הריב איך הם לא חושבים על אחרים שנפגעים מזה? כיסאות עפו מעל ילדים, היה פה… pic.twitter.com/xJceG7cTmi

— daniel amram – דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) August 15, 2026

One of a series of similarly violent incidents throughout the country

The incident at Yamit 2000 joins a series of violent events documented in recent years at pools and recreational facilities across the country.

This past May, a mass brawl broke out at a pool in Arad, during which chairs were thrown, and three suspects were arrested.

In August of last year, an argument between a young man and a lifeguard at a pool party in Eilat escalated into a mass brawl, and six of those involved were detained for questioning.

Holon itself recorded a similar incident in recent years: in July 2023, a fight broke out between two women at the “Breeza” pool in the city, in front of bathers and children. Police were called to the scene, separated the two, and detained them for questioning.

This post was originally published on here. 

There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Thus posited Mark Twain, who attributed the origin of that scathing observation to 19th-century Jewish British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The saying suggests that attempting to encapsulate some event or other in pure numerical terms belies the facts-on-the-ground truth. 

Which brings us all too neatly, and chillingly, to what, for many of us, is the most potent and emotive statistic of all – six million – the approximate number of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe, in North Africa, in some Arab countries, and in the Far East, during the Holocaust.

That is a staggering figure, no matter how many times it is rolled out at official events, in literature, and on the silver screen. But the danger of succumbing to tropes is that we can so easily forget or unwittingly circumnavigate the inescapable fact that these were six million individual lives that were viciously decimated and cut short, and after the victims were subjected to all manner of unspeakable horrors.

As such, accounts of the lives of individual Jews in Europe during the Holocaust – including those who survived against seemingly impossible odds – are all the more precious and invaluable to perpetuating the memories of the victims and keeping the lessons to be learned from that ignominious chapter of human history uppermost in our minds. 

That counts doubly for the testimonies of the survivors, eyewitnesses to Nazi bestiality, who somehow endured indescribable physical and emotional suffering for years. Incredibly, they mostly picked themselves up after the war ended and managed to carve a new life for themselves, albeit bearing indelible scars that impacted them and their offspring.

Lord knows, we’ve had some grim times across this still-young country’s history, but how can one possibly imagine enduring the constant terror and deprivation that went with uncertain life in the ghettos of Poland, Belarus, and elsewhere? 

How can you grasp the courage, determination, and sheer willpower it took to live through two or three or more years hiding from the Nazis in forests, as members of partisan groups or completely isolated from other Jews, trying desperately to keep body and soul together by any means available?

Surviving the long, ineffable inferno of the Holocaust

Lazar Engles and Ruth Leimenzon Engles went through the long, ineffable inferno and managed not only to physically survive the Holocaust; they succeeded in rehabilitating their lives – to a greater or lesser degree – and started a family. This was after both had lost almost every member of their own close relatives, including their partners and, in Lazar’s case, children. 

That, and so much more, is succinctly, emotively, and unequivocally conveyed in the first person in the memoirs written by both Engles and Leimenzon Engles and published by Yad Vashem. 

The former is called Our Partisan Kingdom, exegetically subtitled From the Vilna Ghetto to the Bielski Family Camp. Ruth’s is called Written in a Barn: The Diary of a Young Woman from Vilna. 

Both tomes were lovingly and painstakingly translated from Yiddish into English by their son David Engles, who recently completed his first fourscore years on terra firma. 

He moved to the United States from a DP camp in Italy with his parents as a small child. He eventually made aliyah and set up a house in Netanya together with his wife Eva, also the offspring of Holocaust survivors. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all live in Israel.

Our Partisan Kingdom is a simply incredible tale of survival, from a string of ghettos – including Vilna, Woronow, and Lida – until Lazar somehow managed to escape, initially from the Vilna ghetto, with the help of an officer in the German army, ultimately making it to the forests of Western Belorussia, then part of Poland.

There, he joined a group of partisans led by Tuvia Bielski and three of Bielski’s 11 siblings, who set up a well-oiled camp complete with a hospital, school, and other facilities. The group’s principal military activity was aimed at saving Jews rather than attacking Nazi units per se. 

Many of the group’s members made it through the war alive

Amazingly, many members of the group survived the war, including Bielski and Lazar, who served as the camp cook. 

The first-person narrative makes for gripping reading. And its immediacy and potency are accentuated by the fact that Engles junior not only translated the text into English, but also pulled out all the stops in tracking down all the sources of historical data he could possibly find and even, at times, amended his father’s writing to steer the compelling tale into more accurate factual waters. 

Not that the odd veracity faux pas, such as misremembering an address in one of the ghettos, would have made Our Partisan Kingdom any less engrossing or moving, but David’s devotion to the commemorative personal task in hand adds cogency and value to the literary end product.

If the tale behind Our Partisan Kingdom is incredible, Written in a Barn, it simply beggars belief. While the former is the result of Engles’ senior’s recollections, which he registered soon after the end of World War II, Leimenzon Engles recorded her experiences and jotted down her emotions while she was in the throes of the grueling passage of time, as she hid in a haystack in a barn on a farm belonging to a Polish Christian family. 

She spent 10 months incarcerated there, unable to even wash for weeks on end, petrified of being discovered by any of the motley groups of workers, soldiers, and others who passed by. Though her hosts provided her with sustenance, it was at times miserly and erratic. 

As David notes in My Mother’s Legacy, his foreword to Ruth’s book, it was “very important for my father to keep the memory of Vilna alive, and to do everything possible to not let the world forget the Holocaust.” Ruth, who died at the age of only 40, was clearly blessed with fortitude and emotional resilience, level-headedness, and inexhaustible resourcefulness. Her diary was not meant for public consumption and was basically a means for her to make it through each day and not go out of her mind. That adds to the intimacy of her words and draws the reader into the thick of her very personal odyssey.

Even as the son of a Holocaust survivor myself, albeit one – my mother – who escaped on a Kindertransport rather than going through the horror of a concentration camp, with all the emotional scarring spillage unwittingly and unavoidably handed down – it is hard for me to imagine how anyone got through the devastation and bestial cruelty the Nazis and their helpers unleashed on the Jews and other ethnic and social minorities. 

Reading Our Partisan Kingdom and Written in a Barn brings us a couple of steps closer to what actually happened, on a day-to-day personal corporeal level, thereby also helping to keep the memories of the victims and survivors – who, naturally, were also victims – alive, and hopefully to make us aware of the lessons to be learned.

Written in a Barn was reviewed in the Magazine by Andrea Samuels in August 2024. 

Our Partisan Kingdom – From the Vilna Ghetto to the Bielski Family Camp
By Lazar Engles
(Engelshtern)
Yad Vashem
199 pages; NIS 104

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel’s Navy has implemented sweeping structural changes since the October 7 massacre, rebuilding its coastal defense system into a multi-layered “Iron Wall” along the Gaza Strip’s coastline.

In-depth investigations of the October 7 massacre highlighted severe gaps and demanded fundamental changes. Against a creative, constantly adapting enemy that deploys divers, underwater craft, fast boats, drones, and seemingly innocent fishing vessels, rigid thinking risks another catastrophe.

Navy Commander Vice Admiral David Salama initiated a series of operational changes, which current Navy Commander Rear Admiral Eyal Harel accelerated, understanding that effective defense requires learning on the fly.

To systematically eliminate Hamas’s naval capabilities and prevent future amphibious, subnautical, or drone-based infiltrations into Israeli territory, they’ve deployed upgraded fast patrol boats, integrated drone surveillance and joint intelligence, and mandated a strict zero-tolerance engagement policy.

The threat of a sea-based raid – alongside the use of drones, motorized paragliders, and submersibles – remains a constant danger. Although the Navy operates aggressively to neutralize threats early, and Hamas’s motorized vessels have vanished from the area, field commanders refuse to rest on their laurels.

Commanders of the “Knights of the Gulf” company slowed the Shaldag Mark V patrol boat off Gaza’s port along the city’s coast. What was once a bustling, round-the-clock hub with hundreds of vessels that challenged and surprised the Navy on October 7 is now deserted.

“There are no motorized vessels left; look,” explained the senior officer aboard, with the ruins of the city visible in the background. From the moment we left port toward Gaza, almost every command given over the radio was about scanning the water for threats.

The memory of the October 7 massacre hangs heavily in the air. That Saturday morning, at 6:29 AM, red alert sirens sounded.

Under cover of rocket and mortar fire, elite Nukhba naval forces from Hamas’s military wing launched seven boats toward Israel. Dozens of beachgoers rushed to find shelter – some ran to public bomb shelters, others to beach restrooms.

With remarkable sharpness against heavy odds, Navy sailors managed to strike five boats and eliminate 20 terrorists, but the balance of force was complex. Two boats reached the shore carrying 18 heavily armed Nukhba fighters who proceeded to predetermined targets – meticulously planned right under the nose of Israeli intelligence and the wider IDF.

The minutes that followed marked the start of a massive systemic failure.

Deep-dive inquiries and subsequent changes

As a primary, prominent measure, the Navy, Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence joined forces to systematically degrade Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s maritime capabilities.

This offensive push recently received significant momentum with the appointment of Rear-Admiral A., former commander of Shayetet 13 (Naval Commandos), as head of the Intelligence Directorate’s Operations Division – an officer raised in the naval arena who fully understands maritime threats and the necessary intelligence-gathering envelope.

Ashdod Naval Base Commander Captain A. deepened the analysis and debriefs, restructuring the entire sector.

In cooperation with ground forces, they established multi-layered defensive rings across sea, air, and land to back each other up and ensure continuous surveillance and interception capabilities. As part of the upgraded defenses, forces were positioned to act as a clear, aggressive buffer against sudden threats.

“Look to your left now,” the senior officer said. “See those quad bikes speeding south? That’s a new unit created after October 7 to counter beach infiltrations – a backstop in case we fail to stop terrorists at sea or during their transition to land.”

Sailors from the “Knights of the Gulf” company call the new system an “Iron Wall.”

It relies on a tight integration of advanced technology and force concentration across a broad, heavily monitored border zone where access is completely restricted – a far cry from the past, when Hamas terrorists disguised as fishermen constantly challenged forces, and some commanders enforced overly cautious rules of engagement. Hamas exploited that crack in the wall to lull the IDF into a false sense of security.

The new Shaldag vessel continued south toward the Egyptian border, with Khan Younis soon visible in the distance. The sheer scale of destruction was striking even from the sea. As they operate, the crew constantly analyzes threats in all sectors, above and below ground, including divers who could launch under cover of bad weather.

“That’s why anyone approaching the shoreline with diving equipment sets off an immediate red flag. It was never like this before,” explained one officer from the squadron.

He added, “Everyone on this boat knows that the moment a diver emerges from the sea onto land, he’s heavy and slow to organize. It takes him about 40 seconds to get his bearings. In that window, we have to strike him with precision from the sea. We train on this repeatedly to stay sharp. One of the core changes to prevent that scenario is joint-service integration. A Zik drone operator sees what the Shaldag sees, along with ground observation and drones – and vice versa. Everyone sees everything.”

The engine roar of the Shaldag Mark V tells the full story.

It is longer than the older model, with upgraded, classified surveillance and firepower capabilities, along with extended sea endurance and range. “In short – a monster of a vessel that maneuvers rapidly to its target,” explained an officer.

Suddenly, bursts of gunfire echoed from the starboard side. “We identified a suspicious object. To rule out an IED meant to hit us or wash ashore in Israel, we simply shoot at it. It could just be a loose fishing trap floating up from the seabed… we take zero risks.”

According to the sailors, Hamas is attempting to rebuild its naval capabilities from the ruins, developing low-tech methods using basic rowboats and paddles.

“We expect them to try to challenge us in every way, including surprises,” explained a young officer, pointing to a drone taking off from the deck. “We have zero patience for provocations or boundary violations,” he clarified. “See this drone? It can broadcast announcements, drop munitions, or strike directly – the team is fully trained for every scenario.”

An additional concern stems from Hamas’s high motivation to smuggle weaponry from the Sinai into the Gaza Strip. Beyond acknowledging professional cooperation with the Egyptian military, officers declined to elaborate. The altitude gauge and radar on the Shaldag’s control room monitors soon warned of their proximity to the pier.

Reality check: infiltration at Kibbutz Zikim

This process illustrates precisely what Dr. Zvi Lanir warned about in his book Fundamental Surprise regarding the “illusion of repair” after a major crisis: the trap of dumping resources into fixing secondary systems – like upgrading naval gear and technology – instead of fundamentally questioning the high command’s underlying assumptions.

A real-world test of this mindset didn’t take long. Last Friday, the IDF got a stark reminder of just how fragile the coastal sector and overall security setup remain when an alarm tripped at Kibbutz Zikim near the beach.

At 11:35 PM on Friday – typically Southern Command’s lowest state of readiness, with some commanders off for the weekend – a sensor flagged a disturbance along fence section 30 near the farm area. A security guard rushed to the spot, saw no damage other than two jackals nearby, decided that explained it, and gave the all-clear.

A few minutes later, a second guard on a routine perimeter sweep found a clean square cut through the fence near the cowshed and supply yard. He alerted the kibbutz security chief, who immediately escalated to the highest threat level, declaring a full terrorist infiltration.

The kibbutz rapid-response team mobilized, and the Northern Brigade under Captain O. triggered full emergency protocols, calling in a Zik drone overhead. The debrief showed that a unit led by a deputy battalion commander arrived within minutes. Shortly after, an engineering reserve force pulled up in two Humvees alongside the battalion commander’s mobile command post, placing nearly 50 armed troops inside the kibbutz – a rapid response by any standard.

Responders quickly realized the fence was likely cut to steal valuable copper wiring, lowering fears of an attack. Still, residents stayed locked in their safe rooms as reinforcements arrived, including a tracker and containment units led by the deputy brigade commander. Air Force personnel coordinated directly with the kibbutz security chief to maintain real-time situational awareness.

At the same time, a senior Southern Command official noted that multiple drones swept the surrounding area to rule out any remaining threats. The sector intelligence commander redirected surveillance toward Zikim, running manual sweeps and checking the post-October 7 radar network. Within minutes, the data confirmed no landings from the sea or crossings at the nearby Shikma Stream.

The breach at Zikim Beach

The debrief established that within 40 minutes, 140 troops, police officers, and Border Police were on site, working out of a joint command post with local security officials. Brigade Commander Captain O. had ordered forces to treat the event as a hostile attack until proven otherwise.

Even so, within 28 minutes of the first alert, Southern Command knew with high confidence that this was a routine theft attempt – confirming no entry into the kibbutz, as no footprints crossed past the cut fence.

In the aftermath, questions emerged over why the kibbutz PA system wasn’t used to warn residents faster, and why a quick headcount wasn’t ordered immediately. A senior official close to the investigation countered that the response was based on a recent brigade drill simulating multi-point infiltrations in Sderot and Netiv HaAsara, executed alongside Israel Police.

Still, he acknowledged that inter-agency coordination must become even tighter and faster to seal operational gaps.

Field commanders recognize that they must operate on the assumption that the enemy retains hidden diving and asymmetric capabilities. They remain on high alert for the toughest scenario: adverse weather at the most unexpected hour – the ultimate test for the new multi-layered defense system.

This post was originally published on here. 

Marc David Baer is a professor of history at the London School of Economics. “For the past 10 years,” he wrote recently, “I have taught a seminar… titled ‘Muslim-Jewish Relations: History and Memory in the Middle East and Europe.’ Many of the students are young Jewish or Muslim men and women from London, who grew up among the other group and have a desire to learn more about them.” 

Given how few knew about the similarities between the two religions and the intimate rivalries and cooperation of the past, Baer would tell them that it was not right to depict relations between Jews and Muslims in a negative way, nor was it correct that the last century of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been representative of the past.

Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations grew out of his teaching work. His objective was to tell the true story of the relationship between Jews and Muslims from the seventh to the 21st century. The book covers 1,415 years – from around 610, when Muslims say that Mohammed began to preach, to today – in the Middle East and in Europe.

In this deeply researched work, Baer argues against two dominant myths: that the past history of the Jewish-Muslim relationship is a sort of interfaith utopia or that it is a story of perpetual enmity.

His goal is to recount what he describes as “the unknown, forgotten, or purposely buried story of the connected histories of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and Europe from their earliest relations in Arabia to relations in the Middle East and Europe today.”

What was needed, he writes, “is a retelling of their relations without myth and counter-myth.”   

The author asserts that over the centuries the same themes repeatedly emerge, such as Jewish-Muslim religious and secular symbiosis; the rise of elite Jews to positions of wealth and influence and their subsequent fall as Muslims perceived a violation of the dhimma protection pact; the triangular relation with Christians, which worsens Jewish-Muslim relations; and the political use of myth and counter-myth obscuring that history. 

Baer does not obscure the reality of the present position

Although Muslims and Jews have engaged one another, sometimes for better, sometimes not, for over 1,400 years, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict means that most discussions of Jewish-Muslim relations now focus on the worst aspects of the relationship.

Baer exemplifies the difficulty that, unfortunately, sometimes arises when attempting even-handedness. It can obscure the truth and foster new myths of its own.  

In discussing Hamas’s barbarous pogrom of October 7, 2023, Baer provides a detailed account of how they “beat, gang, raped, and murdered” more than 1,200 Israelis. “The victims,” he writes, “included babies, children, women, and the elderly,” and he refers to the over 250 hostages who were assaulted and abducted to the Gaza Strip.

When describing Israel’s response, he writes of bombing which, in the first month, he claims, “killed an estimated 10,000 Palestinians, perhaps half of whom were children.” After two years, he continues, “at least 67,000 had been killed, an estimated four-fifths of whom were civilians, although we do not know how many were Hamas fighters. Israeli forces targeted hospitals, convoys of ambulances, schools, and refugee camps.”

Extraordinarily, Baer makes no mention of the vast subterranean network of tunnels, larger than the London Underground, that Hamas had created beneath Gaza, nor that the entrances and exits to them were concealed within hospitals, schools, mosques, and private homes. 

He makes no acknowledgment of the reality that, to attack the Hamas enemy, the IDF had no alternative but to target the buildings in which the tunnel entrances and exits were situated and in which the Hamas fighters were embedded.

Nor does Baer address the fact that Hamas-run and UN-cited statistics count everyone under 18 as “children,” even though Hamas has recruited boys as young as 14 for military youth programs. 

Hamas-provided statistics on child deaths – which are widely cited by the United Nations and media – have been sharply criticized by independent analysts for likely inflation and for misclassifying both ages and combatant status.  

Baer does not engage with subsequent criticism of Hamas casualty lists, including analyses by independent researchers who argue that the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures have at times combined genuine war deaths with deaths from natural causes such as illness and old age, a problem partially acknowledged by Gaza officials in later “cleanup” revisions.

Baer gives substance to genocide accusations despite attempts to avoid bias

Thus, Baer, while striving to avoid bias, nevertheless gives substance to the accusations against Israel of genocide. 

Elsewhere in the volume, Baer’s account of events in the Gaza war – which have yet to be impartially assessed – could be used to bolster charges against Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

On a positive note, he points out that on the first anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom against the Gaza-area communities, the UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, then-archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and then-chair of the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) Qari Asim jointly condemned both “the brutal Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel” and the “devastating war in Gaza.” 

In line with his admirable purpose in producing this work, Baer quotes the three religious leaders’ declaration rejecting “those who seek to divide us. Anti-Jewish hate and anti-Muslim hate have no place in the UK today,” they asserted. “We must stand together against prejudice and hatred in all its forms.”  

In Children of Abraham, Baer rejects both the myth of an interfaith golden age and the view from the other end of the spectrum of relentless Muslim-Jewish violence and persecution. Jewish and Muslim relations, he maintains, “span the spectrum of human interaction from love and friendship to hate and violence.” 

Baer provides his readers with a full history of the complex Jewish-Muslim relationship from the moment that Islam emerged as a religion from its Judeo-Christian biblical origins. He ranges widely for his source material, and it is all recorded in the 69 pages of references appended to his text.  

The work as a whole is an invaluable guide toward understanding one of the key issues of modern times – the antagonism that has become embedded between the Jewish and the Muslim worlds.  

The French have a saying: “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner” (to understand all is to forgive all). Baer’s work may help many on that journey.

The reviewer is a former senior civil servant. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com

Children of Abraham: The 1,400-Year History of Jewish-Muslim Relations
By Marc David Baer
Basic Books
496 pages; $27 

This post was originally published on here. 

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump met in the Oval Office on July 28, Trump asked Netanyahu how he was doing in the polls ahead of the October 27 Knesset election, according to a Friday Axios report.

Netanyahu paused, the report noted. Then one of his advisers piped up: “Mr. President, he is winning,” the aide said, according to Axios, citing a US official familiar with the exchange.

At the time of the meeting, the coalition bloc had 49 predicted Knesset seats, according to a Maariv poll – 12 short of the 62 seats needed for a majority. A more recent poll conducted on Friday predicted 48 seats. 

Ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu hoped to secure Trump’s support for his reelection campaign ahead of the October 27 election, people familiar with the matter said.

For months before the meeting, Trump publicly stated that he had urged Netanyahu not to launch further strikes in Lebanon and that he wanted to see Israel withdraw from parts of Syria. On several occasions, he had suggested that Washington and Jerusalem do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on every regional issue.

The US president recently said that “Bibi is his own worst enemy,” according to Axios, citing two people who spoke with Trump about Netanyahu.

Netanyahu uses Likud’s first reserved slot for businessman who called Trump ‘piece of s***’

Likud announced on Monday that entrepreneur and businessman Oren Dobronsky, a co-founder of the tech company Hotbar who spent years working in Silicon Valley, would receive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first reserved slot on the party’s Knesset list ahead of the elections.

Shortly after the announcement of his reserved slot, it emerged that Dobronsky had previously attacked US President Donald Trump, calling him “a morally corrupt person” in a post on X/Twitter.

Dobronsky walks back statement following backlash over Trump comments

However, on Monday, Dobronsky walked back his statement. He wrote on Facebook that “President Trump is the greatest friend that Israel ever had in the Whitehouse [sic]. I posted in his favor countless times. On one occasion, not knowing all the facts, I lost my temper and posted something I regret. My apologies to President Trump, whom I admire deerly [sic].”

Dobronsky is well-known in the Israeli and American tech industries. He co-founded a company that developed a toolbar for Internet browsers and later completed a significant exit. He subsequently continued working as an entrepreneur and invested in start-ups.

Idan Kweller, Moshe Cohen, Keshet Neev, and James Genn contributed to this report.

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An IDF humanitarian delegation, the “Alliance of Brothers,” has begun operating in Colombia on Saturday after arriving in the country following a major earthquake in the region.

The 80-person delegation, led by the Home Front Command in cooperation with the Defense Ministry and Foreign Affairs Ministry, was sent after Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella requested assistance from Israel.

Currently, Colombia has requested rescue teams from only four countries: the US, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Israel.

They are working in coordination with local professionals and officials at multiple impacted sites, focusing on two major sites by assisting in locating and rescuing people trapped by rubble.

One such site is the city’s university hospital, which experienced considerable damage. Home Front Command engineers are conducting search and rescue operations while attempting to restore the damaged medical wing’s operation.

IDF Home Front Command forces operating at impact sites in Cali, Colombia, August 14, 2026. (credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)

Mapping efforts, building assessments, data management

Mapping efforts and building assessments have begun in order to establish plans and priorities for the ongoing response efforts.

The delegation is also assisting in establishing data management systems in order to manage situational assessments and decision-making to help navigate the complex process.

Colombian authorities confirmed Friday morning that around 400 people remain missing nearly four days after the quake, whose epicenter was in the vulnerable Chocó department on the country’s Pacific coast.

Hundreds have been killed in the earthquake and its resulting damage, and over 4,000 people have so far been documented to have injuries.

Ariella Roitman contributed to this report.

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The Upton Lovell Shaman, a Bronze Age metalworker long assumed to have been a male individual, has been shown to be female, according to new research presented at London’s Francis Crick Institute We Go Way Back exhibition.

The exhibit, which opened on July 16, showcases the results of an analysis of DNA extracted from the skeleton’s skull, teeth and toes revealed to have XX sex chromosomes, typical in those who present as female.

“It completely tears up previous assumptions,” Wiltshire Museum Director David Dawson told The Guardian. “It’s a fantastic revelation of the position of women in society.”

“We’re so used to the assumption of men do everything, men are the leaders, men are the metalworkers. Here we have smoking gun evidence of a female metalworker. And metalworking was the space science of its day.”

Further analysis of the bones showed that she had most likely been over 45-years-old when she had died, and bore evidence of arthritis in her right wrist, consistent with a lifelong use of metalworking tools.

The complete details of the research carried out at by Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Crick are slated to be published in a scientific journal “shortly,” Wiltshire Museum explained in a July statement.

“The field of ancient DNA has surged in technical capability over the last two decades, now giving us answers to questions that were previously inaccessible,” Pontus Skoglund, who is a senior group leader of the ancient genomics laboratory at the Crick, explained to The Guardian. “It feels really good to give this to archaeologists.”

Wiltshire Museum Curator Lisa Brown echoed the sentiment in the museum’s statement, adding that the “groundbreaking research, using cutting edge techniques, shows the importance of making museum collections available for scientific analysis.”

“We now have a whole new understanding of this burial, rewriting their story, breaking stereotypes, and putting women front and centre in our understanding of early Bronze Age society,” said Brown.

Shaman originally assumed to be male

The shaman’s remains, dating to approximately 4,000-years-ago, were originally excavated in 1803 by William Cunnington at a barrow at Upton Lovell, located less than 10 miles from Stonehenge.

At the time, Cunnington had assumed “from the largeness of the bones” that the burial “appeared to be a stout man,” according to the Wiltshire Museum. 

Alongside her remains, archaeologists discovered several other artifacts, including a battle axe, stone gold-working tools and a cloak decorated with perforated animal bones.

“It shows the depth of understanding of her craft,” Dawson told The Guardian. “The people she left behind wanted her to take her tool kit into the afterlife.”

Remains reexcavated in 2000

In 2000, the barrow was reexcavated by Dr. Colin Shell, a Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Gill Swanton, a Wiltshire archaeologist. The shaman’s remains were removed from burial by Shell. He was also the first to notice that the stone tools bore traces of gold.

New research presented in 2022 by researchers from the University of Leicester identified the purpose of the tools as cups made from fossil sponges meant to mix adhesives and battle-axes repurposed to hammer out and smooth gold.

“The ability to transform other objects by the delicate and skilled process of covering them with gold sheet may have been seen as a magical or ritual process, a secret method known only to a few people,” Susan Greaney, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science in a 2022 email. “This research shows how metalworking was closely related to magical, ritual and religious beliefs.”

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A 35-year-old Israeli man was found dead in his hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand, on Saturday, according to a report received at the ZAKA International Division hotline. 

The man was on vacation in Thailand when the died. 

The ZAKA team worked with Thailand-based Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Nehemia Wilhelm, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry in an effort to bring the body quickly back to Israel for burial. 

Young Israeli killed in traffic accident in western Thailand

Also on Saturday, reports emerged that a young Israeli man was killed in a traffic accident on Thursday in Kanchanaburi, a province in western Thailand. The man was riding a motorcycle when he collided with a pickup truck.

He was pronounced dead at the scene and taken to a local hospital for an autopsy. Local police opened an investigation into the incident. 

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While Israel is locked in a visible, kinetic battle with Hamas, an equally insidious struggle is unfolding in the corridors of Western power. 

The Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological architect of Hamas, is executing a “quiet march through the institutions” of Europe, aimed at hollowing out the foundations of democracy from within – an invisible strategy that seeks to transform Western civilization without firing a single shot.

In countries like Switzerland, usually seen as a quaint bastion of neutrality and calm, the Muslim Brotherhood does not seek a sudden uprising. Instead, it pursues a long-term strategy aimed at the fundamental transformation of Western society.

While Hamas provides the “armed resistance” that some European-based “experts” still refuse to condemn, its parent organization provides the intellectual and logistical foundation for a global theocratic objective.

The playbook of infiltration

According to European intelligence, Hamas’s ambitions are no longer confined to the Middle East.

As early as 2019, cells in Germany were instructed to establish weapons caches for large-scale attacks, targeting sites like the American military base in Ramstein and the Israeli embassy in Berlin.

However, the Brotherhood’s primary weapon in the West is not bombs, but tamkeen – the doctrine of “institutional entrenchment.”

This strategy was laid bare in 2001 when Swiss authorities raided the home of Youssef Nada, then the director of Al-Taqwa Bank in Lugano.

They discovered a 1982 document titled The Project, a 100-year plan to transform Western civilization from within by “sabotaging” its own institutions.

This “legalistic Islamism” operates within the framework of Western law to undermine its foundations.

A subsequent 1991 document, the Explanatory Memorandum, described the mission as a “grand jihad in destroying Western civilization,” to be carried out by the “unbelievers” themselves.

By hollowing out the timber of democracy from the inside, the Brotherhood waits for the building to collapse under its own weight.

The intellectual roots of hate

The Brotherhood’s claim to power is rooted in the fundamentalist interpretations of its founder, Hassan al-Banna, and its chief ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, who legitimized physical warfare as offensive jihad.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi later globalized this ideology. Through his Al Jazeera program reaching 60 million viewers, al-Qaradawi advocated the death penalty for homosexuality and the “rebellion” of wives. 

Most chillingly, he described Adolf Hitler as “divine punishment” for the Jews and made no secret of his ambition to “convert Europe to Islam.”

Despite these radical roots, the Brotherhood excels at appearing as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

Behind the facade of “moderate Islam” – a misnomer, at least according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said publicly that “The term ‘Moderate Islam’ is ugly and offensive; there is no moderate Islam; Islam is Islam” – is a “network of networks” that co-opts progressive terminology like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to shield itself from scrutiny.

Switzerland as a strategic hub

Ever since the arrival of Saïd Ramadan, al-Banna’s son-in-law, in 1961, Switzerland has served as a central refuge and logistical hub for the movement. 

Today, security experts consider Switzerland the second most important hub – after England – for the Brotherhood in Europe.

The movement is characterized by powerful dynastic clans: the Ramadans in Geneva, the Kermous in Neuchatel, and the Nada and Himmat families in Ticino and Zurich. 

These families operate an opaque web of organizations where members of one clan often sit on the boards of another. For example, the Kermous clan has founded over a dozen associations devoted to pro-Qatar lobbying.

The Brotherhood has also been successful in entrenching itself as a key interlocutor for Western governments and law enforcement. 

For example, Khaldoun Dia-Eddine, a lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, has served on the boards of organizations led by convicted Brotherhood leaders, and headed a branch of the IICO, an organization linked by several intelligence services to Hamas. 

Yet he remains a regular interlocutor for Swiss federal authorities, even training police officers.

The Qatari connection and the ‘Islamophobia’ weapon

This quiet siege is fueled by virtually unlimited resources. The Qatar Papers revealed that Doha has invested millions into Swiss projects, including the Islamic Museum and various foundations. 

This is part of a multi-billion-dollar global effort to create a favorable environment for Islamist currents.

To shield these activities, the Brotherhood employs marhaliyyah (adaptation by phases), adjusting its language to suit Western discourse. 

Any substantive criticism is systematically branded as “Islamophobia” – a rhetorical weapon used to stifle debate, secure funding, and create a cultural blindness where tactical restraint is mistaken for successful integration.

Meanwhile, Brotherhood-affiliated bodies in Europe not only play a key role in turning public opinion against Israel and promoting boycotts against the Jewish state, but they also often provide critical public, legal, and even financial support to Hamas.

Necessary self-defense

The Brotherhood does not think in quarters; it thinks in centuries. 

While nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have long recognized the threat and banned the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, the West remains largely paralyzed by naïveté.

Western governments and institutions must abandon this laissez-faire approach. 

Transparency in funding, a consistent ban on front organizations, and rigorous scrutiny of appointments in sensitive areas like the military and police are necessary acts of self-defense. 

A state that closes its eyes to the networks hollowing out its foundations ultimately loses the ability to protect its citizens.

Israel and its supporters must sound the alarm bell for the entire West. And Israel in particular must play a leading role in highlighting the threat for Western decision-makers and providing actionable intelligence to Western governments and security agencies.

The Muslim Brotherhood siege on the West may be invisible, but the consequences of ignoring it will be all too real.

The writer is a strategy and leadership consultant, chairman of Misgav Institute’s Center for Peace Through Strength, founding chairman of the KH Impact Fund, and author of 10 books including Strategy-In-Action and The Rabbi and the CEO. Follow him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasdzweifel/)

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Senator Jon Ossoff is easy to admire. He is handsome, articulate, disciplined, and telegenic – the kind of politician who makes supporters feel they are backing not just a candidate but a future. 

I understood that initial, superficial appeal. For a long time, many of us shared it. Not anymore.

In November 2024, 13 months after October 7, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, with Israel fighting on seven fronts at once – Ossoff joined Bernie Sanders and a handful of others to block some of the weapons Israel needed to defend itself, backing two of three resolutions to halt the transfer of military equipment. 

He said he wanted to send a “message to Israeli politicians.” 

But instead, he sent a message to his Jewish constituents: at the hour of maximum threat to the Jewish homeland, it was more important to “virtue signal” to the far-left than to ensure the defense of the only Jewish state on earth. 

Then, hypocritically and ironically, he posed with freed Israeli hostages, smoothing over the fact he had voted to deny Israel the arms its soldiers needed to fight the very captors who took them.

His own community was loud and clear in their response – not once, but twice. Nearly 50 Georgia Jewish organizations, representing the vast majority of its engaged members, signed a formal rebuke; 22 rabbis added their own. 

On the Senate floor, Ossoff called his commitment to Israel’s security “ironclad.” His community wrote back with the truth: it was not ironclad. It had rusted through. 

And this week, the publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times – who has spent years avoiding partisan fights – accused the senator, in an open letter reported by Jewish Insider, of “lying” about his support for Israel.

Criticizing this Israeli government is legitimate; Israelis do it every day, loudly. But there is a difference between criticizing a government and disarming a nation. 

You do not take the shield away from 10 million people because you are angry at the man holding it. 

So I would ask the senator plainly: On seven fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and the rest – how, exactly, would you have protected a child in Sderot? With a statement of concern? With a vote to cut off the weapons?

This is not partisan noise. Esther Panitch, the only Jewish member of the Georgia legislature and a Democrat, wrote at the time that she “cannot overstate how upset Georgia’s Jewish community – especially Democrats – is with our senators.”

Partial loyalty is not loyalty

Mark Mellman, the late founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, said the two (Georgia) senators “voted to endanger Israel by blocking aid to that country.” Ossoff’s own long-time Jewish donors wrote to Governor Kemp urging him to run. 

When your most loyal supporters shop for a challenger, the problem is not messaging.

Put Ossoff in a pro-Israel room, and he grows smooth: billions in aid; the arms he blocked, a sliver, less than 5%. He will say that he votes with Israel the overwhelming majority of the time, almost proud of the math.

But no one congratulates a spouse for being faithful 90% of the time.

Fidelity is not a batting average. It is a covenant; you keep it when it is hard, or you did not keep it at all. 

On the ordinary votes, the ones that cost him nothing, Ossoff was with us. On those that counted – when Israel was fighting for its survival and the world was watching to see who would flinch – he broke faith.

Partial loyalty is not loyalty. It is betrayal made respectable by arithmetic.

And notice where his voice goes missing. When Graham Platner, the Sanders-backed Maine Democrat, was exposed with a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, Ossoff, Georgia’s first Jewish senator, would not condemn the man. 

His office managed a single line about “Nazi symbols” in the abstract and left it there – no rebuke of Platner, no call for him to leave the race. He went quiet. Not a profile in courage.

The senator is reliably unreliable. 

He has told the digital news outlet Semafor that he is backing Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s new Democratic Senate nominee – a man who calls Israel’s war “genocide and apartheid,” and who, asked directly whether the Jewish state has a right to exist, would not say yes. 

Ossoff wants him in the US Senate.

Sen. Jon Ossoff cannot be trusted. When the only Jewish state was fighting for its life, he broke faith – and no scorecard, no invocation of his own heritage, can buy it back.

That is why, with more regret than anger, much of this community can no longer stand with him.

The writer is co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in Jewish education, thriving Jewish communities, Israel, and families in need.

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The IDF struck a Hezbollah headquarters in the Ansar area in southern Lebanon overnight Friday, after terrorists seriously wounded three IDF soldiers in an attack near the Ali al-Taher Ridge.

The Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement, “This morning, Hezbollah violated the ceasefire in Lebanon by attacking our soldiers in the security zone, which protects Israeli communities just across the border. The Hezbollah attack seriously injured three of our soldiers. The IDF responded by striking the Hezbollah terror headquarters that ordered the attack.”

The IDF later said that the three soldiers were wounded by an explosive drone launched by Hezbollah. They were evacuated to receive medical treatment at a hospital, and their families were notified.

Additionally, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and the PMO said in separate statements that civilians were also unintentionally killed in the strike.

The IDF said that its strike killed several Hezbollah terrorists – including Ali Samir Al-Haj Hassan, a battalion commander in

Hezbollah’s Radwan Force unit. However, the military noted that, at the time of the strike, Hassan’s family was with him inside the headquarters.

IDF, PMO says military was unaware of civilians present in Hezbollah HQ during strike

“It should be emphasized that the family members were not the target of the strike,” the IDF wrote in a statement. “The strike was specifically directed at Hassan, who was a lawful target under international law. The terrorist used his family as human shields, hiding alongside them inside the military headquarters.”

The PMO said that it had been unaware that Hezbollah put civilians in the Hezbollah military compound.

“Only later did the IDF learn that Hezbollah deliberately put civilians in that military compound. Hezbollah is willing to do anything, including using its own civilians as human shields, to falsely accuse Israel of deliberately targeting civilians, which the IDF clearly did not.”

At least 11 people were killed in the strikes, Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health said.

Lebanon’s Aoun, Nawaf say that IDF strikes violate US-backed ceasefire

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned “ongoing Israeli attacks” in southern Lebanon, which he said were in ‘violation of the Framework Agreement’ in a post from his office’s X/Twitter account on Saturday morning.

دان رئيس الجمهورية العماد جوزاف عون الاعتداءات الاسرائيلية المستمرة على مناطق الجنوب ولا سيما على منطقة النبطية ومحيطها، وخروقاتها المتكررة لاتفاق الإطار ولعمل مجموعة التنسيق العسكرية وللقوانين الدولية بحماية المدنيين ما ادى إلى استشهاد عائلة كاملة من بلدة أنصار.
واعتبر الرئيس…

— Lebanese Presidency (@LBpresidency) August 15, 2026

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam also responded to the IDF strikes, calling on Israel to “halt its military escalation” in Southern Lebanon in a post to X on Saturday.

“The responsibility for dealing with any military structures, if they exist on Lebanese territory, lies exclusively with the Lebanese state, through the Lebanese army and its legitimate institutions, and their existence does not grant Israel the right to violate Lebanese territory or endanger civilians,” Salam said.

إنّ التصعيد الإسرائيلي الذي تشهده منذ فجر اليوم مدينة النبطية وبلدة أنصار ودير الزهراني والقرى المجاورة، وما رافقه من غارات وقصف كثيف وترهيب للأهالي في منازلهم، امر بالغ الخطورة ويقوّض مساعي تثبيت الاستقرار في الجنوب.
إنّ شهداء الغارة الإسرائيلية على بلدة أنصار السبعة ليسوا «بنية…

— Nawaf Salam نواف سلام (@nawafsalam) August 15, 2026

“Israel must halt this escalation. For the security of our people and their right to life on their land are not subject to negotiation or bargaining,” he added.

In response to the attacks, Hezbollah said that IDF strikes in southern Lebanon would be “met accordingly.”

“This Israeli escalation, through the targeting of civilians and the expansion of the areas being targeted, reflects the desire and intention of the enemy’s criminal prime minister, Netanyahu, to escalate the war in order to bolster his domestic political standing, serve his electoral objectives, and appease the far Right,” the terror group wrote in a statement on Telegram.

“The Israeli enemy must understand clearly that its attacks, violations, and attempts to impose a new reality cannot continue and will be met accordingly, in defense of Lebanon, its people, its sovereignty, and its national dignity.”

In response to the IDF and PMO’s announcements that three soldiers were wounded, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called Hezbollah “pure evil.”

Iran’s proxies are pure evil. Hezbollah severely wounds @IDF soldiers knowing @Israel will respond. Hezbollah rounds up children to put in the military zone b/c they want them to be in harm’s way. @IsraeliPM affirms what US observes in Lebanon & in Gaza w/ Hamas. https://t.co/Eedhr8q5H8

— Ambassador Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) August 15, 2026

Ongoing push for trilateral framework agreement

Negotiations between Israel and Lebanon have remained in a state of flux since the trilateral framework, agreed upon by Israel, Lebanon, and the United States, was signed in June.

The agreement, which aims to encourage diplomatic relations between the two neighboring countries, remains uncertain as the IDF continues to maintain its presence in Southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah refuses to disarm.

Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.

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While the United States is celebrating its 250th anniversary of independence, the parents of a teenager with American citizenship, murdered 25 years ago in an atrocity whose perpetrator, Ahlam Tamimi, was released from prison in 2011 by the Israeli government in the Schalit deal, have since then been pleading with the US authorities to follow their own laws and legal decisions to bring the murderer to justice in an American court. 

“Justice,” a word repeated three times in America’s Declaration of Independence. The third time is regarding the Americans’ “British brethren” as having been “deaf to the voice of justice…” 

But have the tables turned? Is it the US that has become deaf to the voice of justice demanded by Frimet and Arnold Roth, the parents of Malka Chana – Malki – a justice they have been pursuing for 15 years? 

Their fervent dedication and resolve have been up against powerful people in Israel, Jordan, and the US. It is a story of obfuscation and pain, with only an occasional glimmer of hope and light. 

With Tamimi free and living the life of a celebrity in Jordan, as we wrote in Part I, the Roths took their case to Washington.

Arnold Roth: “Because Americans had been murdered at Sbarro, we hoped that a rarely invoked federal law, Section 2332a of Title 18 of the United States Code, might apply to get Tamimi back behind bars in the US.” 

The other American citizen murdered in Sbarro was Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, 31, a teacher originally from LA and living in Passaic, New Jersey. An only child, she had arrived in Israel with her husband for six weeks of graduate studies and was pregnant with their first child at the time of her death.

Chana Tova Chaya Nachenberg, of Modi’in, also an American, was 31 at the time of the attack. Severely wounded, she was in a coma for almost 22 years and succumbed to her wounds on June 1, 2023. Therefore, earlier letters and articles refer to only two American citizens who were murdered in the attack.

Section 2332a is a federal criminal statute titled “Use of weapons of mass destruction,” including “against a US national outside the United States.” The weapons can include “bombs, grenades, certain rockets, certain missiles, mines, similar devices… and if death results, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

“From our research,” said Roth, “we learned that Jordan and the US entered into an extradition treaty in 1995 and that it was active; fugitives had been extradited.”

In March 2012, news emerged from the Arab media that Tamimi was about to start hosting a TV show of her own. This was the trigger that got Roth to engage with the American authorities. A New York lawyer who had become a trusted adviser arranged for them (Roth and the lawyer) to travel together to Washington to meet with senior figures in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI. 

Roth: “We met behind closed doors. There was an emotional feel to the room. I urged them in the name of justice and decency to apply Section 2332a and get Tamimi brought to Washington for trial. I then screened a video that Frimet had recorded the night before on my cellphone. My sense was that they were touched.”

The meeting ran for about 90 minutes. By the end, Roth said, he received assurances that something was going to be done. “But we’re not going to be able to tell you anything,” he was told, “until we can tell you everything.”

Regarding her role, Frimet Roth added, “Traveling overseas is hard for me because I am the principal carer of our youngest child, who is now 31. She lives with us at home, and her profound disabilities mean I have to do everything for her 24/7. For me, travel is not an option.” 

The Jordan-US treaty, provided to the Magazine in its entirety (15 pages long), states, in simple language, that both countries must extradite individuals charged with or convicted of extraditable offenses, and any offense punishable by more than one year of imprisonment in both countries is extraditable. This includes serious crimes such as terrorism, crimes against heads of state, hijacking, and narcotics trafficking. 

The Roths heard nothing further from the DOJ for several years. In early 2016, Roth was invited to Congress to testify before Ron DeSantis’s House Oversight Committee on National Security. 

“What none of us in the chamber realized was that a criminal complaint had been issued against Tamimi in the District Court of the District of Columbia 15 months after our 2012 meeting with the DOJ leadership.” 

The fact that in 2013 the Department of Justice filed charges against Tamimi in federal court is confirmed by the DOJ Archives. 

But then, Arnold Roth said, “It promptly sealed them for the following four years.” 

Frimet confirmed, “Our request was honored, but years went by before we learned that.”

March 2017: The Tamimi criminal case is revealed

In March 2017, weeks into the first Trump presidency, the US government, Roth surmised, concluded that keeping the charges secret was no longer helping its efforts to obtain Tamimi’s custody. The Justice Department unsealed the charges. 

When making the charges public in a media presentation, acting assistant attorney-general Mary McCord described Tamimi as “an unrepentant terrorist,” and the FBI simultaneously placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list. 

How did the Roths learn about the unsealing of the charges?

Arnold: “Five years had passed since I brought my challenge to the Department of Justice, and they seemed ready and willing to take it on. But nothing had happened other than Tamimi’s weekly TV shows that were seen everywhere in the world. She was the embodiment of Islamist pride in jihad. 

“Then, in March 2017, there was a phone call from Washington. Frimet and I were asked to meet a delegation a few days later here in Jerusalem. No details, no headline, no sense of what was on the agenda.

“We arrive and see the family of the other murdered American woman, people with whom we had become friends. Everyone else in the room was from Washington – a delegation made up of seven or eight prosecutors and investigators. 

“We were somewhere between elated and puzzled by what we heard next. Elated because they said, ‘Three hours from now, there’s going to be a press conference, and we’re announcing that Tamimi has been charged. Sorry, we couldn’t tell you, but they [the charges] were issued four years ago.’ We learned she was being immediately named to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.

“Heading home, we began puzzling over things that were not said. For instance, they’re charging her and making her an FBI Most Wanted, but no reward was mentioned. Was that normal? At home, I checked the FBI website and saw that all the Most Wanted Terrorists had serious rewards attached to their names and mugshots. Not Tamimi. 

“They confirmed that Jordan has an active extradition treaty with the US, and we wondered why no actual extradition to Washington had come up, and we wondered why we aren’t hearing that she’s being extradited to Washington tomorrow afternoon on the 4:30 p.m. flight out of Amman?”

He continued, “Six days after the DOJ announcement of the Tamimi charges, we saw reports that Jordan’s highest court had handed down a ruling in a hearing we had not known about – a determination that Jordan’s treaty with the United States, made in 1995 between [US president Bill] Clinton and King Hussein, is invalid. That Tamimi cannot be extradited. End of case, and the decision is not appealable.

“What gradually became clear but [was] unreported by any news channel,” said Roth, “was that the so-called invalidity was a Jordanian failure. Jordanian law required the treaty to be ratified by the parliament, and it wasn’t. They had failed to do it.

“But the defect, if that’s what it was, could be cured by Jordan – only by Jordan. But Jordan didn’t fix it and will not fix it, because, as we came to understand, it’s not a defect; it’s a fig leaf, a small and shabby one. But it’s done the job for the past nine years. I’m not aware of anyone publicly calling Jordan to account for its sleight of hand.”

On the official site Congress.gov, the following appears: “The United States requested Tamimi’s extradition in 2017, but Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled that the extradition treaty was invalid.” 

In January 2018, the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Tamimi’s arrest or conviction. This also appears on Rewards for Justice, a US government site. Roth said the award was announced, “after a lot of frustrated pushing on our part.” 

In November 2019, the State Department said that “the United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.” More than two and a half years after Jordan said it was invalid? The wheels of justice spin slowly.

I asked Arnold Roth whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio or any of his predecessors had responded to his requests to press for Jordanian compliance with the treaty.

Roth: “For the next few years, no senior official from the State Department, in any administration, ever responded to us on any aspect of this.” 

A letter from King Hussein

Roth said, “The situation gets darker. It’s 2019, and in one of the very rare conversations I had with a junior desk officer in the State Department some weeks after the invalidity was announced, I learned that Jordan actually did ratify the treaty, and ‘we have the documents.’

“But getting a hold of that important document took months of filing applications under FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. And when that failed, we eventually sued the government in 2020.”

Among the documents delivered to the Roths’ lawyers in stages, starting in early 2021, was a letter that had been signed by the late King Hussein in 1995, addressing the US government (see graphic). 

I asked about the other documents. Roth explained, “Scores of documents, almost all massively redacted… all dealing with aspects of the treaty process.”

King Hussein’s letter blew the lid off Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruling invalidating the extradition treaty, a ruling that directly contradicts the clear intention of King Hussein, who had taken the treaty so seriously that he added this letter to it. 

Roth explained: “The letter was part of the process of each of the two countries certifying to the other that their own legal and constitutional treaty requirements had been met.”

Officially translated by the US State Department, it says, “With the help of God and His guidance, we, Hussein I, having reviewed the Extradition Traety [sic], signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, between the Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the Government of the United States of America, do hereby declare our agreement to and ratification of that Traety in whole and in part. We further pledge to carry out its provisions and abide by its Articles, and we, God willing, shall not allow its violation.” 

Thanks to the Roths’ FOIA submission and subsequent suing of the US government, this letter was made public.

“The Jordanian court that had declared the treaty void and unenforceable back in 2017 said nothing about any letter like this. Didn’t even hint at its existence,” Roth said. “But if we hoped revealing a formal 1995 letter from the revered King Hussein would change how Jordan’s 2017 violation of the treaty looked to the media, to Congress, to the Jordanians, we were disappointed.”

He said that starting just four months after Tamimi returned in 2011 to her homeland, Jordan, her TV show “began being beamed throughout the Arabic-speaking world via an Islamist satellite TV network, glorifying Islamist terrorism. It continued being produced and disseminated weekly from a studio in Jordan’s capital for the next four years.

“This is significant since Jordan has a notably unfree media. Nothing goes to air in Jordan unless it gets green-lighted by the Royal Hashemite Court.” 

Roth shared with the Magazine reports (verified online) from two organizations: Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House. According to them, journalism in Jordan is controlled and constrained by the government, so Tamimi couldn’t continue to disseminate her venom and promotion of terrorism without the approval of the Jordanian government – the same government that has a peace treaty with Israel.

Significantly, Abdullah II became the king of Jordan on February 7, 1999, the day his father, King Hussein, who had signed both the treaty and the additional treaty letter in 1995, died. Abdullah II would have been well aware of Tamimi’s broadcasts.

Abdullah II comes to America

The Roths, distraught, took their battle to the media. King Abdullah II was scheduled to meet then-president Joe Biden on July 18, 2021. 

In a column hosted on Bari Weiss’s Substack on July 2, 2021, Arnold wrote, “President Biden, we beg you: press [Abdullah II] to live up to Jordan’s promise by extraditing Ahlam Tamimi. Let her stand trial for murdering innocent Americans – one of them, my child.” 

In the same column, regarding the Most Wanted Terrorists list, he wrote: “The other fugitives on this list are, not surprisingly, all in hiding. But the investigators and prosecutors at the DOJ and the FBI know exactly where Tamimi lives.”

On July 18, 2021, the Roths published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal, which appeared on the same day Abdullah was hosted by Biden in the White House.

They wrote of Tamimi, “For five years in Jordan, she hosted a Hamas-produced terror-inciting television show called Breezes of the Free. She appeared frequently at public events and on Jordanian television. Students of the Arab world’s premier graduate school for journalists named her their ‘success model.’ Last month a prominent pan-Arab news site made her a weekly columnist.” 

Roth said there was no response from the Biden administration.

When asked if there had been any direct contact with the Trump administration, Roth said they had been in contact with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee since May 2025.

Huckabee told the Magazine, “My visit with the Roth family touched me in a profound way and personal way. They gave me a photo of Malki, and I have kept it framed in my office since that day, so there is not a day that goes by that I fail to think of the injustice to her and her precious family.

“One of my goals as ambassador is seeing justice done. Malki would be 40 years old this year.”

Roth said he and Frimet have stayed in touch with a small handful of US officials in the past year and hope this will lead to something concrete. He declined to be more specific.

Roth: “We lost our child, and so many other families experienced the same painful and horrifying thing, a quarter of a century ago. The woman who had the central role in this carnage is… a recognizable icon across the Arab and the Islamic worlds, and she’s smart and capable enough to use that celebrity to keep pushing a frightening message.

“I don’t care to protect the guilty or overlook the failures. As a cause that should have united people across political, religious, and national divisions, getting Tamimi to US justice has helped some of us understand that leadership is vastly overrated, and we have serious problems in our midst. I am among those who have seen the light.

“I can translate that into what I think it says about America’s political culture today. There are lessons to be internalized about how the fight to defeat terror is nowhere near as effective as we need it to be. 

“But for me,” he stressed, “the central message is a Jewish one. I think of our brothers and sisters in America’s Jewish communities who take pride in the values we cherish in common, and in our history of overcoming evil, as being the people who need to know this.”

“There are bright spots, of course,” Roth said, calling Huckabee’s “clear-eyed comments and gracious support” exemplary. In fact, in an X post on Sunday, Huckabee shared a link to the DOJ page offering up to $5 million for information assisting in Tamimi’s capture.

Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the US special envoy on antisemitism, also posted the link.

Did the US go after any other terrorists who took American lives in Israel?

Arnold: “Tamimi was the first case in which a US criminal provision was applied to a murder by terrorists outside the US. But not the only one.

“Another case, undertaken by the DOJ around the same time as the Tamimi one, concerns the murder of Kristine Luken, an American Christian tourist murdered in an especially barbaric way by Arabs in the forested hills outside Jerusalem. Her tour guide, my friend Tal Hartuv [who changed her name from Kay Wilson], was shockingly injured but survived.

“The difference between the two instances is that Kristine Luken’s killers were already serving time in an Israeli prison when those charges were issued, while Malki’s killer was already obscenely free. Other American criminal prosecutions of Arab terrorists may be underway now via the same law, but I don’t know about them.”

Were Kristine’s killers freed by Israel?

Arnold: “One of the two was, yes, in the October 2025 transaction in which thousands of Arab prisoners walked free so that Hamas would hand over the remaining hostages and hostage bodies from Gaza.

“Terrorists being freed in extortionate deals are always a catastrophe. Doing such deal is wrong. That it falls to the families of victims to fight for justice to be done is wronger still.” 

Dealing with the State Department

Arnold: “Pressing the US to act has been a strange experience.

“No one ever says we’re wrong to expect American justice to be done. No one speaks in Tamimi’s defense, obviously. No one says it’s wrong to press Jordan to live up to its treaty obligation. No one argues with us that this has all gone very badly since the Justice Department decided to get Tamimi into a Washington courthouse.

“But the reality – thwarted justice until today – speaks louder than those many words.

“Politics is politics, and people wielding power rarely own up to doing the wrong thing. So when I say fighting for justice has gotten us treated badly, and when I point out that the actions of those in government contradict the values they profess, pushback is inevitable. 

“‘What about those declarations we made?’ I imagine them saying. ‘Didn’t we call for justice? Didn’t we say we wouldn’t stop until it was achieved?’ 

“So, yes, when the US, which for us has usually meant the State Department, issued statements, these included some of the right words – but in total they have been empty, meaningless mantras.

“I don’t mean to sound partisan in the US political sense here. The shallow statements and the failure to act have been true of both Republicans and Democrats.” 

(It’s worth noting that Israel has its own multi-partisan issues. The 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, for example, under a Labor government, brought on an extreme increase in terror that persisted in both Labor and Likud majority governments. The Sbarro attack happened under Likud PM Ariel Sharon.)

Roth preferred not to name individuals, but when pressed, consented to talk in detail about one difficult interaction that lasted for months.

Roth: “Both by direct mail and via news platforms and social media, we have addressed ourselves to people at the level of president on down for years. This almost never produces a reaction, but in 2022 it did.

“A fax turned up in our home towards the end of 2022, addressed personally to us but passed along via the US Embassy in Jerusalem a month after the date it was faxed. 

“It was signed by Victoria J. Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs and a powerful figure in the State Department. But we were startled by how she was writing in the names of president Biden, secretary of state Antony Blinken, and national security advisor Jake Sullivan.”

The letter, which Roth shared with the Magazine, opened with condolences and then “Ahlam al-Tamimi must be held accountable for her role in the terrorist attack that claimed the life of your daughter and 14 others. The US government remains fully committed to bringing Tamimi to the United States to face federal terrorism-related charges in US courts. The US government is pursuing all viable options,” and so on. 

And then a clear statement of intent: Bringing Tamimi to US justice “is a foremost priority for the United States. We will stay in contact with you regarding our ongoing efforts to ensure Tamimi is held accountable for her despicable crimes.”

The message seemed clear and unambiguous. “Foremost priority” must have meant something. And while staying in touch was the opposite of what the Roths had experienced, here was a commitment that the three most important people in the saga – Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan – were going to keep on doing it. 

The Roths responded with a letter to Nuland; it got no reply. Then another. And eventually 11 letters, they say, all sent to Nuland in the five months after her fax. And not a single response, then or ever. Also, no one stayed in touch. Nuland left the State Department in March 2024, and the Roths knew to stop bothering her, Arnold said.

‘All men are created equal’ – unless you’re a Jew? 

The Taylor Force Act, which demands stopping economic aid to the Palestinian Authority until it ends payments to those who commit acts of terrorism and to the families of dead attackers, was signed into law in the US only in 2018. 

Taylor Force, a former US Army officer and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, during a school study-abroad trip, was stabbed and killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa in 2016. 

He was not the first American citizen killed by Palestinians terrorists in Israel, but he was a non-Jewish American.

In an article published on July 30, 2026, on the website of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, titled “Did the PA’s ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Policy Facilitate the October 7 Massacre?” Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch writes, regarding terrorists released in the Schalit deal, “Shortly after their release, the PA decided to allocate $5 million for a ‘Presidential gift as token of honor to prisoners… to all the released prisoners… both to those released to their homes and to those who were expelled.’”

According to Hirsch, in 2025, NIS 395,970,000 was awarded to imprisoned and released terrorists. 

According to Palestinian Media Watch, as reported in The Jerusalem Post on January 28, 2026, as of that date, Tamimi “has received around NIS 1,158,000 in pay-for-slay payments since she was first incarcerated.” 

Jordan has extradited or surrendered three terrorists to the United States in the past. None of those had been guilty of murdering Israeli Jews. 

Eyad Ismoil (aka Iyad Isama’il Al-Najim), a Jordanian citizen charged with being part of the plot to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, fled back to Jordan, was captured by Jordanian police in August 1995, and then extradited to the US. He was convicted in November 1997 and sentenced in April 1998 to 240 years’ imprisonment in a maximum-security penitentiary. According to a DOJ bulletin published on October 1, 1995, this was an official extradition.

Mohammad Zaki Amawi had both US and Jordanian citizenship. According to a US Court of Appeals document, “On February 19, 2006, FBI agents flew to Jordan and arrested Amawi.” He was flown to the US and convicted in 2008.

He was one of three men who stood trial in Ohio, sentenced to prison terms “for conspiring to commit terrorist acts against Americans overseas, including US military personnel in Iraq, and other terrorism-related violations.”

In Amawi’s case, the sentence given was “20 years of incarceration followed by life on supervised release.”

Nader Saadeh of Rutherford, New Jersey, who had dual US-Jordanian citizenship, was apprehended on arrival in Amman and jailed there for three months before authorities sent him to America in August 2015 to the FBI.

In 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, to be followed by a lifetime of supervised release, for conspiring to provide material support to ISIS.

Congressmen demanding justice

On April 30, 2020, Greg Steube, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, whose jobs in Congress included judiciary oversight and veterans’ affairs, sent a letter to Dina Kawar, ambassador of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, serving in Washington. 

The letter, more than two pages long, was signed by Steube and six other Republican congressmen.

Steube had been a captain in the US Army and an army judge advocate in the General’s Corps; he served in Iraq.

Three of the other six signees had also served in the US military. Especially notable was Brian Mast of Florida, who had been a combat engineer in the US Army, lost both legs while serving in Afghanistan, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Today, he is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

In the letter, Steube revisited the details of Tamimi’s atrocity and the outrageous fact that she is treated as a celebrity in Jordan and continues to use her exalted platforms to promote terror. 

And then he wrote: 

“US Federal charges were first brought against Tamimi in mid-2013. The US then delivered a formal extradition request under the treaty between our two countries that had been signed in Washington on March 28, 1995, and that entered into force on July 29, 1995. The Hashemite Kingdom refused. It continues to refuse to do so until today. This is a matter of grave and growing concern to the Congress and to all Americans. The American view concerning the treaty is that it is certainly valid. It continues to be listed in the US government’s authoritative Treaties in Force document.

“On March 14, 2017, Justice Department officials in Washington, DC, officially announced US Federal terrorism charges against Tamimi and added her the same day to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. There is a $5 million State Department reward for her capture and conviction.”

Steube, as far as is known, never received an official response to his letter. 

On April 14, 2022, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Steube: “To limit assistance to Jordan until the Government of Jordan recognizes the validity of the 1995 extradition treaty between the two countries, and for other purposes.” 

Apparently, it stayed in committee and never became law.

“Regarding the Steube initiative,” Roth said, “those efforts for a Tamimi extradition came to a screeching halt on a particular day in June 2022. Steube’s office broke off contact with us overnight and never took up the issue again. I don’t think he’s ever made a public comment about Tamimi or Jordan since then.”

The Magazine could not locate any further Steube involvement in the case, and he did not reply to our query submitted via his official website.

The EMET (Endowment for Middle East Truth) organization, reportedly behind the Steube effort, after recapping the fact that the US asked for Tamimi’s extradition and the Jordanian government refused, writes:

“The Jordanian government is the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid and receives $1.275 billion annually.

“In December of 2019, the US government passed Public Law 116-94, the most recent Appropriations Bill which states, in regard to foreign appropriations, ‘None of these funds, provided by this Act may be used to provide assistance to the central government of a country which has notified the Department of State of its refusal to extradite to the United States any individual indicted for a criminal offense for which the maximum penalty is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, or for killing a law enforcement officer.’”

What pressure did the US government bring to bear on Jordan to have Ismoil extradited? Why did FBI agents not fly to Jordan to pick up Tamimi, as they did with Amawi? If they pressured Jordan, why is that same pressure not being applied now?

EMET founder and president Sarah Stern wrote: “[A]s long as the United States turns a blind eye to the murderers of American citizens, we [the US] will be reinforcing their resolve against the United States.”

Arnold Roth said, “I understand people who see us as bitter and angry. But we’re constructive and optimistic even when facing hard developments. If we’re harsh, it’s because we see things around us that need to be condemned. And also changed. 

“There’s a wonderful charity that exists today in Malki’s memory – the Malki Foundation – that achieves small victories against tough realities. It’s there because we lost our sweet daughter. It won’t bring her back, but the good it achieves helps us stay focused on the good in our lives.”

He added contemplatively, “Several influential people from Israel’s think tanks have told me, more or less in patronizing words, over the years that there’s a fundamental fact we need to get into our heads. ‘The longest border Israel has is our eastern border with Jordan. All along that border, armed Jordanian forces stand on guard. And their guns? Those are pointed at their own people, and so we have peace. Can we get a better situation than that?’

“I try to point out that Jordan is near the top of the table of antisemitic sentiment, even by Middle East standards. And what has Jordan’s government done to address that? Has it fixed the schoolbooks with their hateful messaging about Israel? Have they prepared their people for a future of peaceful relations with Jews and Israelis?

“Right now, Israel is spending $1.5b. to create a much more fortified fence along the border with Jordan.”

“Is that because we have a peaceful border?

“And even if the answer is yes, should we be allowing them to turn Tamimi into an icon of hateful bigotry, an inspiration to more terror? Is there a case for exempting Jordan from accountability for holding on to a fugitive murderer of Americans? For trampling a cornerstone treaty with its far-and-away most important ally, the United States?

“That this woman remains a toxic celebrity is the dangerous outcome of a long line of bad decisions.”

At the time of this writing, there are no answers to Roth’s questions. 

Next week in Part Three: The involvement of US ambassadors to Israel, the American Jewish leadership’s response, and the additional tragedy that struck the Roth family when their son-in-law, Naftali Yonah Gordon, fell in battle in this current war.

The writer is an award-winning journalist and theater director and the co-founder and editor of WholeFamily.com. Her current theater project is Heroines! Songs & Soliloquies for the Soul with Raise Your Spirits Theatre, about heroic women of Oct. 7.

This post was originally published on here. 

As the Roman legions advanced on Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago, the city they were preparing to conquer was already at war with itself.

The Jews inside the walls were killing one another, and rival factions fought for control of the city as an imperial army approached from the outside. The struggle became so destructive that the defenders ended up weakening the society they were ostensibly trying to save.

“We weren’t taught this in Sunday school,” author Amotz Asa-El told the Magazine. “But it’s so vividly told by Flavius Josephus, and the details are so obvious, and no one disputes them.”

For Asa-El, that episode is more than one particularly tragic chapter in Jewish history. It is part of a pattern that runs through The Jewish March of Folly, his new, sweeping attempt to reconsider how Jews understand the political disasters that shaped their history, and what those disasters might teach an Israel once again wrestling with deep internal division.

The book takes its title and intellectual starting point from historian Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, in which political folly requires more than a decision that looks disastrous in hindsight. A credible alternative must have existed at the time and been rejected.

Asa-El applies that test to Jewish history and reaches a challenging conclusion. The familiar explanations for Jewish catastrophe, he argues, have allowed generations to devote too little attention to the choices made by Jewish political leaders themselves.

“There are generally two” conventional explanations, he said. The first is theological: calamity as divine punishment. The second is what he calls the Zionist “Sunday school narrative,” in which “bad things happened to the Jews because of the Gentiles.”

What happened before the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans came along? 

The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans unquestionably destroyed Jewish states, expelled populations, and devastated the country. Asa-El’s argument concerns what happened beforehand.

“We had political leaders in all of those events,” he said, “and I accuse them of having repeatedly, generation after generation, taken completely misguided policies with fateful results.”

At the heart of his case are 12 civil wars that he identifies across roughly 12 centuries of ancient Jewish history, beginning in the Book of Judges and ending around the Roman destruction of Judea. They are familiar individually to historians and readers of biblical history, he states, yet rarely assembled into a single political story.

Seen together, he believes they transform the way the period should be understood.

“I say that there is a recurring theme of civil war in ancient Jewish history,” he said. “During that span of roughly 12 centuries, I found 12 civil wars – in other words, an average of one civil war every three or four generations.”

That is also why The Jewish March of Folly is arranged thematically rather than as a conventional chronological history. Asa-El wanted to understand what repeatedly produced these conflicts, what political ideas lay beneath them, and what their cumulative consequences were.

Surprisingly, his trail leads back to Moses.

Asa-El sees in the Pentateuch the construction of an extraordinarily innovative political system: suspicious of concentrated authority, hostile to the divinity claimed by monarchs elsewhere in the ancient world, and built instead around a loose federation of tribes possessing considerable autonomy.

Moses, in Asa-El’s reading, was far ahead of later political thinkers in rejecting the assumption that a strong centralized monarchy was the natural basis of government. The ideal was noble, but its vulnerability was the power it left in tribal identity.

“He wanted a tribal confederation whereby every tribe actually had a form of tribal sovereignty,” Asa-El told the Magazine.

The danger becomes brutally visible in Judges, when the crime committed against the concubine at Gibeah leads the tribes of Israel into war against Benjamin and nearly to that tribe’s annihilation.

Asa-El opens the book by placing that story alongside the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. The comparison is deliberately unsettling. Both begin with horrific violence against a woman; their political consequences are radically different.

Genovese’s murder became a debate about communal responsibility and the alleged failure of bystanders to intervene. Gibeah becomes the spark for a civil war.

“It triggers civil war, and the civil war pits one tribe against all the rest of Israel,” Asa-El said. “It nearly results in the total annihilation and genocide of [the tribe of] Benjamin. According to the Bible’s own express description, it’s not my interpretation. It’s explicit.”

Another episode surprised even Asa-El while he was researching the book.

The familiar story of Samson presents the Israelite strongman battling the Philistines. Reading Judges closely, Asa-El became fascinated by Judah’s response. Samson belonged to Dan, whose territory stood between the coastal Philistines and the Judean highlands. Rather than help their fellow Israelites withstand Philistine pressure, the men of Judah handed Samson over to the enemy.

“They didn’t care about helping Dan cope with the daily harassment that he was evidently experiencing by the Philistines,” he said. When Samson fought back, “they took the Philistine side.”

Dan was ultimately displaced from its original territory and migrated north. Asa-El sees an extraordinary example of tribal self-interest overwhelming national solidarity: one Israelite group concerned primarily with keeping danger beyond its own border while another faced the consequences.

The greatest demographic catastrophe in this history came with the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel by Assyria and the disappearance of the Ten Tribes. Asa-El deliberately calls the event a “forgotten Holocaust,” while carefully distinguishing it from the unique ideology and methods of Nazi extermination. His use of the term is demographic.

The Nazi Holocaust murdered roughly one-third of the Jewish people. The Assyrian destruction, he argues, removed a far greater proportion of ancient Israel from history, leaving the much smaller Kingdom of Judah behind.

Even the phrase “Ten Lost Tribes,” he suggests, softened Jewish memory of what happened. “Lost” allowed generations to imagine intact Israelite peoples surviving somewhere beyond the known world, waiting to be rediscovered. Asa-El considers that romantic hope is historically implausible.

The deeper question is why catastrophes of this scale were remembered in ways that obscured political responsibility.

Asa-El does not believe the rabbis consciously gathered after the destruction and conspired to sanitize the national story. He sees something more psychologically understandable: trauma followed by denial.

“They couldn’t face up to the historical lessons,” he said, particularly the possibility that the Temple had been destroyed following “stupid political conduct and recklessness.”

The theological explanation offered an alternative: “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.”

“I dispute that,” Asa-El said. “It wasn’t because of our sins. It was because of our mistakes – and not our mistakes, but our leaders’ mistakes. Mistakes that we must not repeat.”

Nowhere is the existence of an alternative clearer for him than in the revolt against Rome.

Jewish Prince Agrippa II’s failed warning against confronting Rome

Before the rebellion, the Jewish Prince Agrippa II warned Jerusalem against confronting an empire whose military power vastly exceeded Judea’s. Asa-El describes Agrippa standing before Jerusalemites and methodically explaining the scale of Roman power, its armies, its navy, and the peoples it had already subdued as far away as Britain.

The warning failed.

“They were warned,” Asa-El said. “But these people were messianically fueled. Reality no longer interested them.”

The contemporary parallels in the Hebrew bestseller’s English edition are impossible to miss. The original Hebrew edition predated the judicial reform protests of 2023 and Oct. 7. By the time Asa-El returned to the material for English readers, the historical argument had acquired an immediacy he had never intended when he began writing.

He views the judicial overhaul as a particular example.

“The problem was that the broad task was constitutional. Constitutions, by definition, are meant to reflect the broad consensus and to foster it.”

Instead, he argues, the overhaul attempted to use a parliamentary majority to impose fundamental changes over the objections of a large minority.

“This was designed to do the exact opposite,” he said. “It was designed to impose the narrow majority on the broad minority.”

His criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes further back. Asa-El contrasts Netanyahu with earlier Israeli leaders whose overriding political project, however imperfectly achieved, involved creating common ground among disparate Jewish communities.

David Ben-Gurion spoke of mizug galuyot, the merging of exiles. Asa-El argues that Netanyahu, influenced in part by the political strategy of American consultant Arthur Finkelstein, recognized Israel’s divisions as something that could instead be politically exploited.

He points to Netanyahu’s famous 1990s appearance with Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, during which Netanyahu said the Left had “forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” as an early example of the deliberate use of a national cleavage for electoral gain.

“This was inflammatory,” Asa-El said. “That was generalizing and manipulative. This was the active search after a national cleavage in order to benefit from it.”

Oct. 7 gave Asa-El’s historical argument an even darker resonance.

The book identifies several occasions on which internal Jewish conflict was followed by foreign attack. After Solomon’s kingdom split into Israel and Judah, Egypt – until recently an ally of Solomon – invaded. When Rome approached Jerusalem, Jews were already fighting within the walls.

Asa-El does not reduce Oct. 7 to Israel’s domestic political crisis, nor absolve the enemy that carried out the attack, but his warning concerns what adversaries perceive when a society publicly tears itself apart.

The lesson also informs his view of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) refusal to serve in the IDF. He compares it less with ancient theological disputes than with the separatism of tribes that declined to participate in the wars of their fellow Israelites.

In the Song of Deborah, tribes are admonished for staying away while others fought.

“That was the haredi attitude,” Asa-El said: “This war is not ours.”

He considers claims about Torah study secondary to the underlying tribal instinct. “This is our tribe, and this is what we care about; the nation we don’t care about,” he said of the mentality he sees behind the refusal.

His warning extends to elements of Israel’s far Right, where he believes religious certainty can replace sober assessment of geopolitical power. Ancient texts, he argues, cannot simply serve as instruction manuals for the strategic realities of the modern international system.

Yet The Jewish March of Folly is ultimately more than an indictment. 

Israel’s history, Asa-El stresses, also supplies the counterexamples.

In 1967, with the country facing armies on several fronts, the Labor-led government and its political opponents, including Menachem Begin, formed a national unity government. In the economic emergency of the 1980s, Likud and Labor worked together as inflation approached catastrophic levels.

Later, Yitzhak Shamir chose to cooperate with Labor despite the parliamentary possibility of a narrower right-wing government, while Israel prepared for the enormous challenge of immigration from the collapsing Soviet Union.

The leaders did not cease disagreeing. Asa-El sees that as precisely the point. National unity did not require ideological uniformity.

“They only let their differences go that deep, but not any deeper,” he said. “So this nation does know how to unite, at least in its Israeli version. We need to revert to those precedents, to that kind of Israel, from today’s kind of Israel, and that is what this book is about.”

The argument includes Diaspora Jewry as well.

Asa-El is sharply critical of Israeli political leaders who treat millions of liberal American Jews as politically inconvenient or somehow less significant than Christian supporters of Israel. Political disagreement with Israeli governments, he argues, cannot become grounds for exclusion from the Jewish collective.

“There is no disowning of one Jew, of the rest, or of any number of other Jews,” he said.

Those Jews may want different borders for Israel, a different relationship with the Palestinians, or a different Israeli government. “But they’re openly Jewish, and they’re openly pro-Israel. How can you disown them?”

For Diaspora Jews who increasingly struggle to identify with the Israel they see, his advice is equally emphatic: “Struggle, don’t give up, we’ll change it.”

Asa-El was raised by Holocaust survivors from interwar Czechoslovakia. His father, deeply conscious of Jewish history, repeatedly warned him as a child about the danger of Jewish schism. Violent civil war was only its most extreme form; the divisions between hassidim and Lithuanians, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, rich and poor could also corrode a small nation from within.

“These are divisions that other nations can afford,” his father told him. “We can’t.”

“These were the kind of things I heard around Friday night table conversations,” Asa-El recalled.

The memory offers perhaps the clearest key to The Jewish March of Folly. Beneath its archaeology, biblical politics, Roman history, and modern Israeli argument lies a childhood lesson that Asa-El has spent a book attempting to prove.

This post was originally published on here. 

With elections looming, many Israelis are dooming and glooming. It’s not healthy for citizens in democracies to view every election as existential. The panic ignores Israel’s many economic, social, cultural, and generational successes. Those strengths heighten the contrast with a broken political system featuring toxic debates, barn-burning demagogues, and incompetent governance. It makes one wonder. Perhaps The Jerusalem Post’s thought-provoking, must-read commentator, with a wonderful sense of history, Amotz Asa-El, is right: Maybe Jews just aren’t good at politics.

Asa-El’s book, The Jewish March of Folly: The Dramatic Events, Fateful Results, and Unlearned Lessons of Ancient Israel’s Political Suicide, was a best-selling sensation when it was first published in Hebrew in 2019. Assessing the past, it warned of an inbred, intentional, Jewish disdain for politics – epitomized by often fratricidal tendencies, and legitimized by the prophets, then the rabbis.

The author’s motivation for writing the book summarizes his argument. Throughout decades of reporting on Israeli politics, he kept encountering “deaf ears, resolute voices, and narrow minds that collectively convinced me that my forebears’ anarchism, tribalism, factionalism, and fatalism are alive and well,” and still “threaten my people’s future.” 

The judicial reform explosion three years later, followed by the Hamas-led massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, intensified Asa-El’s despair. In 2019, Zionism’s successes had made his conclusion more hopeful than the title. An updated version is now available for English-speaking readers on Amazon. 

This is not a standard Jewish history – neither in its methodology nor its interpretation. Rather than tracking the story chronologically, Asa-El articulates a thesis, decrying Jews’ propensity for civil war and their aversion to shrewd nation-building politics. Rather than emphasizing what others have done to us, he mourns what we’ve done to ourselves.

The title salutes Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 classic The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, which chronicles smart statesmen making disastrous choices. Tuchman’s book analyzes four case studies. This book’s grandeur comes from Asa-El’s vast canvas: His story “lasted millennia, spanned much of the globe, and involved hundreds of protagonists,” from Moses to Albert Einstein.

The book begins with a rich rereading of the Bible you didn’t get in school. Asa-El highlights the “dozen forgotten civil wars that the Jewish people’s ancestors fought across some 12 centuries.” Their “overarching causes, their fateful results, and those results’ disastrous effect on the Jewish people’s future, to this day, are what this book is about.”

Asa-El’s book abandons conventional periodizing, goes conceptual

Rather than periodizing conventionally – dividing Jewish history into stages – Asa-El goes conceptual. He starts with “Nation,” charting the “Hebrew tragedy’s… national roadmap” – meaning the Israelites’ addiction to infighting – culminating in the Ten Lost Tribes catastrophe.

After that depressing play-by-play, part two analyzes the “anarchism” of the squabbling tribes and of the righteous but unrealistic prophets. 

Part three, “Space,” pivots on “The Jewish Big Bang” – the global dispersal after Rome destroyed the Second Temple, thanks to civil war.

In exile, “Israelite History” becomes “Jewish History.” By divorcing Jewish life from life in the Jewish homeland, Jews launched an unparalleled historical experiment. They tried proving “the possibility of a people’s national life after its political death” by sanctifying time, not just space. 

With most evicted from Israel, the religion evolves. The Jews develop skills for surviving abroad and bypassing politics rather than governing. This sets up Asa-El’s repudiation of Jewish fatalism in parts four and five, “Time” and “Psyche.” The assumption that their misery came from God and would only be cured by God kept the Jews weakened and oppressed.

Asa-El’s story culminates with another Jewish Big Bang, the atomic bomb. While the Nazis slaughtered six million powerless Jews, many homeless Jewish scientists helped America tap into mass destructive power. The centuries-long experiment in wandering and accommodating produced exceptionally talented people who shaped the modern world – but also broken people, too easily targeted in the world.

Yet Asa-El ends with a different Jewish Big Bang. Israel’s 1948 War of Independence vindicated Zionism, created the State of Israel, spawned the New Jew, and reset the trajectory of Jewish history. Emphasizing the 1948 game-changer would have reinforced his conclusion that Zionism saved the Jewish people from their fate as passive, apolitical, perennially squabbling, and defenseless victims – even as he fears Israel’s dysfunctional politics reverting to the destructive historical pattern.

He ultimately offers rays of hope amid dangerous thunderclouds. “Israel was undoing The Jewish March of Folly’s geography” of dispersion, defeatism, and despair. Inspiring anecdotes confirm that most Israelis realize “we are all in one boat.” They’re drowned out, however, by devastating examples of pettiness, partisanship, and polarization. They’ll unnerve readers even more because he so skillfully contextualizes them as a recurring, historical phenomenon.

Finally, despite the book’s excellence, its post-October 7 ending is too short, simplistic, and op-ed-like. So busy critiquing ultra-Orthodox “separatists,” anti-Palestinian “zealots,” and Bibi-worshipping “royalists,” Asa-El missed an opportunity to apply his historical lens to two enduring paradoxes. 

Pre-October 7 ‘conceptzia’ only half the story

True, the conceptzia (rigid assumptions) before October 7, preceded by the judicial reform crisis, and followed by a polarizing, bullying government, embodies Asa-El’s fears. But that’s only half the story.

Israel’s comeback, the society’s remarkable resilience, the restoration of the balance of terror – leaving our enemies fearing us more than we fear them – and Israelis’ rich Jewish and modern lives keep Israel in the World Happiness Index’s Top Ten. That vindicates Israel, Zionism, and Asa-El’s important argument for thoughtful power-playing and mature politics. 

At the same time, Asa-El should have analyzed the current tensions with American Jewry and within American Jewry through his clarifying lens. The American Jewish community is updating the debates about power and prophecy, about being ethical, and about fitting in, which he tracks so effectively. 

And the un-Jews, the anti-Zionists, and new Isaiahan Diasporists judging Davidic Israel so harshly, who increasingly repudiate Zionism, also resonate in the Jewish and Israelite history Asa-Al has illuminated brilliantly.

Although this final thought may sound critical, I can think of no higher praise. Whether or not Asa-El agrees with this alternative analysis – or others – he has done such a masterful job of creating and sharpening his historical lens that many now apply it easily. That confirms how clear, how resonant, and just how much of a must-read Jewish March of Folly is – in any language.

The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) in Jerusalem. He recently published, with David Suissa, 250 Reasons to Thank America, and with the JJPI, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership, the 250th Anniversary Edition. He is also a professor and Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University.

The Jewish March of Folly: The Dramatic Events, Fateful Results, and Unlearned Lessons of Ancient Israel’s Political Suicide

By Amotz Asa-El

Yedioth Books

511 pages; NIS 70

This post was originally published on here. 

About 150 haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protesters attempted to block a public bus from passing through Meron Junction on Saturday.

The weekly protest began several weeks ago in Safed and has since spread to Meron, with demonstrators seeking to prevent public buses from leaving the city before the end of Shabbat.

A group of about 70 Galilee residents affiliated with the Derech Hofshit (free road) movement gathered opposite the protesters and worked to prevent them from blocking traffic. Police forces also arrived at the junction.

Last month, dozens of haredi protesters blocked traffic on the main road near Safed’s central bus station, disrupting the flow of vehicles and shouting “Shabbos” at drivers. Police operated at the scene to disperse the demonstration.

The roadblock came just hours after an unprecedented, though limited, response from members of the city’s general public.

Earlier that morning, about 10 vehicle owners gathered at the market square and drove through the city in a convoy to protest the frequent road blockages.

Basimta cafe entrance glued shut, suspect seen on security camera

The protest in northern Israel follows an overnight incident in which a woman glued shut the entrance to Jerusalem’s Basimta Cafe, delaying its opening by 40 minutes, N12 News reported earlier on Saturday.

Security camera footage released by N12 showed the woman, wearing a white dress and a face mask, applying the glue to the cafe’s door before fleeing the scene. 

Basimta Cafe has been targeted weekly by haredi protesters due to its operations on Shabbat.

This post was originally published on here. 

For decades, a simple explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took hold across broad segments of Israel’s Left and Center: at its core, the conflict was territorial. Israel would give up land, the Palestinians would establish a state, and the conflict would gradually come to an end.

The Oslo Accords were built on this premise. Negotiations were conducted on its basis, and far-reaching proposals were offered to the Palestinians. But the events of recent years, above all the October 7 massacre, have shaken the assumption on which this entire approach rested for many Israelis.

The question they are asking today is far more difficult: What if the conflict is not only about where the border will be drawn, but also, and perhaps primarily, about the very legitimacy of a Jewish state existing in this region?

This does not mean that every Palestinian seeks Israel’s destruction, and a complex national conflict should certainly not be reduced to a sweeping generalization about an entire population. But it is no longer possible to ignore the enormous influence that Islamist religious ideology has gained in Palestinian society over recent decades.

Hamas makes no secret of its worldview. For Hamas, the struggle does not end at the 1967 lines, and the land is not merely territory subject to political negotiation. It is part of a much broader religious and historical vision.

This is something the West has struggled to understand. For years, it has tried to interpret the conflict through concepts familiar to it: borders, settlements, sovereignty, national rights, and self-determination.

All of these are indeed important components of the conflict. But they do not explain the intensity of the hatred, the glorification of martyrs, the celebration of armed struggle, or the fact that after Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Gaza did not become a laboratory for building a prosperous state. Instead, it gradually became a military stronghold for Hamas.

In this sense, Oct. 7 was a defining moment.

Israelis who believed that economic improvements, jobs in Israel, and eased civilian restrictions would reduce the motivation for confrontation discovered how dangerous it can be to assume that the other side operates according to the same logic.

The massacre was not directed at settlements in the heart of the West Bank. Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz are inside sovereign Israel. For the terrorists who entered those communities, that, too, was considered “occupation.”

This is the source of the awakening now taking place among parts of Israel’s Left and Center. It may be that the debate over dividing the land concealed a deeper question for years: Is the Palestinian national movement truly capable of accepting, and not merely as a tactical matter, the existence of a Jewish nation state?

Alongside the military campaign, another battle is being fought, one no less sophisticated: the war for global public opinion.

This is where Qatar enters the picture

For years, Doha has managed to build an extraordinary position for itself. It is an ally of the United States and hosts an important American military base, while having hosted Hamas leaders and provided enormous sums of money to the Gaza Strip at the same time. It also controls one of the most influential media organizations in the Arab world, Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera is not simply a television station. It is an international network with the ability to shape the global agenda and distribute images and narratives at extraordinary speed. In a world where a video lasting 30 seconds on TikTok or Instagram can have greater influence than a 1,000-word article, the first image people see and the first headline they read carry enormous weight.

This campaign is being conducted professionally. Images of destruction in Gaza are shown repeatedly, often separated from the context of fighting an armed organization operating from within a densely populated civilian environment.

The message is simple, emotional, and easy to absorb: Israel is the stronger side and therefore the aggressor. The Palestinians are the weaker side and therefore the victims.

Within such a framework, there is almost no room for more difficult questions. Who started the war? How did Hamas act with horrifying brutality, murdering, raping, and dismembering women and children? What responsibility rests with an evil regime that spent years investing vast resources in building its military capabilities?

This has been one of the greatest achievements of the Palestinian and Islamist campaign in the battle for public opinion: reducing history to a single image and transforming a complex conflict into a simple morality tale.

Israel, by contrast, often continues to conduct public diplomacy as though it were holding a news conference in the 1990s. By the time Israel releases an investigation, a map or evidence, the narrative has already reached millions of people.

In the age of social media, whoever reaches the public consciousness first gains an advantage that is extremely difficult to erase.

The struggle is not against Islam, nor is it against every Palestinian. It is against an ideology that denies Israel’s right to exist and sanctifies violence as a means of achieving that goal. Making this distinction is essential if Israel wants to persuade the world.

This awakening must lead to the abandonment of illusions.

A political settlement can exist only when both sides genuinely want to live alongside one another, not when one side views an agreement merely as another stage on the way to a different objective.

Before asking where the border should be drawn, a much more fundamental question must be asked: Is there a genuine willingness among Palestinians to accept the State of Israel as a permanent and legitimate reality?

The Oct. 7 massacre unfortunately provides a negative answer.

Therefore, the argument is not about territory. It is about the very existence of the State of Israel.

The author is CEO of Radios 100FM, an honorary consul and deputy dean of the consular diplomatic corps, president of the Israeli Radio Communications Association, and a former Israel Army Radio monitor and NBC television correspondent.

This post was originally published on here. 

Some 15 settlers entered the Palestinian village of Kusra in the West Bank again on Saturday, despite the fact that the IDF declared the area a closed military zone, Army Radio reported.

IDF troops arrived at the area where the Jewish extremists were gathered and read the closed military area order to the settlers, who then left the area, Army Radio reported later. 

Palestinian residents who remain in the area told KAN News that they still feel threatened by Jewish extremists in the area. 

“The army and the police are a few meters from here at a house under siege. You can see them in civilian clothes walking around and making their presence felt,” local resident Marmar Odeh told KAN.

“Before the army entered the homes, the settlers were moving around with pickup trucks, ATVs, sheep and goats, and now they have driven them away.”

Odeh told Reuters that he has been forced to erect metal fences around his home and bars on his windows to protect his family from attacks by militant settlers. Next to his home, the words ‘death to Arabs’ have been spray-painted in Hebrew on a wall.

Five months ago, Ouda said his nephew was shot and killed by a settler in an incident during which his brother was also injured.

He told KAN that his biggest concern is that if the IDF leaves the area, the settlers will ramp up their attacks on Palestinian homes in the area. 

“They are still in the area. They are hiding, coming out from all kinds of places,” Odeh said. “They want to expel us, they want to kill us.”

Human rights groups say extremist settlers are mounting a concerted effort to seize more land, further eating into territory where Palestinians aim to establish a state.

“They are very provocatively going and literally taking over houses,” said Ezra Brownstein, a researcher for Rabbis for Human Rights.

IDF to probe soldiers’ conduct, decisions in probe on Kusra

The IDF sent an additional battalion to the village for reinforcement earlier this week. A military spokesperson told The Jerusalem Post on Friday that the IDF will be conducting a probe into the incident.

The probe will cover why it took the IDF 48 hours to evacuate the illegal outpost set up by Jewish extremists, and why the military did not remove the outpost a second time after the settlers returned.

“This was a serious incident, and it will be investigated,” the representative said.

According to Channel 12, the IDF will also look into the manner in which the Palestinian families of the town were evacuated on Thursday after being instructed to leave.

Tensions in the village began on Tuesday but escalated on Wednesday, when the settlers got into physical altercations with IDF soldiers after security forces evacuated a settler outpost.

Footage seen by the Post showed extremists dismantling fences, blocking roads, and surrounding the area.

The Post reported on Thursday that though the IDF has sufficient power and forces to have removed the Jewish extremists in hours or less, there are some form of limits on the force troops used, and some of the IDF forces did not fully cooperate in the mission.

Additionally, a senior military official told Army Radio this week that the forces refrained from arresting the settlers because “they are released after a short time anyway, and the police do not detain those who violate the closed military area order.”

IDF sources told the Post that military forces may remain in the area for an extended period, but did not say how long.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israel Police located four-year-old Younes Abu Ghanem of Rahat after he went missing at Delilah Beach in Ashkelon on Saturday, N12 News reported.

Abu Ghanem, who was returned to his family in good condition, was last seen in the area of the beach approximately one hour before police issued a public appeal for assistance in locating him.

Police officers and volunteers conducted extensive searches in the area to locate the child.

Abu Ghanem marks the second young child to go missing in the Ashkelon area within a month, after four-year-old Yuval Kogan was found after he went missing from Hofit Beach.

Missing child found alive in July following overnight search

Kogan was found awake and in stable condition by horseback searchers following an overnight search, over 24 hours after he went missing. The search effort involved hundreds of police officers and civilian volunteers, with celebrations breaking out on the beach upon the announcement of his discovery.

“After many hours of frantic, nonstop searches for four-year-old Yuval Kogan, who was last seen yesterday afternoon, the missing person was located a short time ago on Nitzanim Beach, safe and sound,” said the Southern Region Missing Persons Unit.

Yanir Yagna, Rami Shani, and James Genn contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Five people were shot outside residence halls at Virginia State University early Saturday, leaving one person critically wounded and prompting a campus lockdown, Chesterfield County Police said.

Police responded to reports of a shooting at approximately 1:28 a.m. local time and found five people suffering from gunshot wounds outside the university’s residence halls.

All five victims were transported to area hospitals. One person was in critical condition, while the other four sustained injuries that were not considered life-threatening, according to police.

Authorities were investigating multiple suspects in connection with the shooting, according to reports. The identities of the victims and their connections to the university were not immediately clear.

The university initially ordered a lockdown as law enforcement responded to the shooting. The lockdown was later lifted, although a significant police presence remained on campus as the investigation continued.

Virginia State University shooting occurs ahead of new academic year

The shooting occurred near the university’s Quad Annexes in the area of Boisseau Street. Chesterfield County Police were leading the investigation, with university police and other law enforcement agencies assisting.

Virginia State University is a historically Black university founded in 1882 and located in Ettrick, Virginia, less than 25 miles south of Richmond. The shooting occurred shortly before the beginning of the new academic year.

This post was originally published on here. 

I’m an Australian lawyer who made aliyah just before October 7, had my third baby here, then quit my NGO job during the war with Iran to launch a babywear brand,” says Miriam Agranat, the 33-year-old daughter of an Israeli-born mother and Australian father.

She had long harbored the dream of making aliyah, having been raised in a strongly Zionist home, attending a Zionist school, and participating in the Bnei Akiva youth movement in Sydney. In high school, she and several 10th-grade girls spent a school term in Israel. “The trip had such a profound impact on me that adjusting back to life in Australia wasn’t easy,” she says.

Until the time was right, she earned a law degree at Macquarie University and landed a job at a large corporate law firm. She married her high school sweetheart, Ori, in 2016. When their first baby came along six years ago, she shifted into venture capital and found it much more fulfilling than corporate law. Still, not all the pieces were exactly in place.

“Life in Australia is beautiful and comfortable, but it was missing something,” she says. “My husband and I talked about wanting more for our children. So we decided to make the move to Israel once we had a three-year-old and a less-than-one-year-old.” 

On a pilot trip, they visited various communities and chose Modi’in because of its central location, not knowing where they’d be working. “It has turned out to be the best thing. It’s quite Anglo, with a mix of Americans, British, Australians, and South Africans, and we’ve been welcomed with open arms.” 

One of her two younger sisters had made aliyah a few years before, and her parents followed a year later, also settling in Modi’in. “We’re all on a high here. I’m so thankful we are here, especially with what’s happening in Australia now,” Agranat says. 

She recounts that when she tells people that they arrived in August 2023, “everyone says, ‘Oh my gosh, what bad timing!’ But it was one of the best decisions we ever made. We’ve created such incredible friends here; we’re in such a special community that became like family, and we landed very special jobs.”

Agranat discovers outlet for long-felt entrepreneurial desire

Her husband works for an energy company. She got a job in January 2024 as donor relations manager for Orr Shalom, a national organization for children and youth at risk. She loved her work there, but a year ago, after giving birth to her third child, she discovered an outlet for a long-felt entrepreneurial desire.

“I’d always had an itch to start my own business. When we made aliyah, it wasn’t the right time. The war started, and I was a new immigrant and didn’t know anything about anything here. So I opted to do something meaningful,” she explains. 

“Then, when I was on maternity leave, I didn’t find baby clothing here that I liked, and I felt that I needed to bring the standard I know from Australia. The itch to start my own business came back full force.”

She spent time during her maternity leave developing the idea and researching the basics of how to turn it into a business for the Israeli market. She chose the name Tiftaf (Hebrew for “droplets”) “because it’s catchy, playful, associated with Israeli childhood, and filled with Israeli soul.”

Agranat built Tiftaf as a one-woman operation, teaching herself every part of the process from scratch: design, textile patterns, manufacturing, importing, marketing, filling orders, and brand-building. Her father, a serial e-commerce entrepreneur, supported her with the technical side of the business.

The first product is an infant onesie made of a stretchy blend of organic cotton and bamboo. It features a two-way zipper for easy diaper changing, fold-over feet that become socks, and fold-over sleeves that become protective mittens. These premium features blend Australian standards with Israeli creativity.

“I’m releasing the onesies in very limited drops and collaborating with Israeli local artists. They’re doing extremely bold, colorful prints,” Agranat says. 

“For the next drop that’s currently live, I commissioned a Tel Aviv artist I met in Nahalat Binyamin. She painted two beautiful designs – a Tel Aviv landscape and a playground. Once that sells out, it will not come back, so it’s essentially a collectible,” she notes. “Tiftaf clothing is functional, beautiful, authentic, and unique.”

Despite launching the business during the war with Iran and the website in mid-May amid continuing geopolitical uncertainty, Agranat found the response “exceptional and mind-blowing. Within the first five minutes of going live, I had 40 people at checkout. After a week, I’d sold half my stock and realized I’m really filling in a gap.”

Social media influencers with tens of thousands of followers discovered the brand organically, including one who reached out after seeing Tiftaf shared in a local WhatsApp group and offered to help. 

“Others began following before I had even approached them, and later chose to share the product as well. I felt truly supported by a community who genuinely wanted to back a small, female-led business.”

The challenges of starting a new business amid a war

Much as Agranat enjoys realizing her entrepreneurial ambitions, it hasn’t been simple in these extraordinary times.

“Shipping the first drop in wartime was very touch-and-go. I paid a huge amount for air shipping and was on the phone with FedEx and customs officials every day. I was lucky that it came through in time. 

“The morning after the drop arrived, I had a photographer come to do a photo shoot, then we promoted it and went live. It was a fast and very stressful process. But it had a great response.”

Agranat says she believes that part of building a life in Israel is noticing where things can be better and feeling responsible enough to help improve them. She noted that she has taken to heart the phrase, “If not me, then who?” echoed in the words and diaries of fallen Israeli soldiers, including Capt. Daniel Perez.

“For me, it is not about focusing on what is different or difficult here,” she says. “It is about asking what I can contribute. If not me, then who? That idea really permeates me. We all have a responsibility, in whatever small way we can, to help build the country we want to live in.”

Miriam Di Veroli Agranat, 33

From Sydney to Modi’in, 2023

This post was originally published on here. 

The Israeli movie My One and Only, which just opened in theaters around the country, aims high as it attempts to combine Jewish mysticism and Torah study with the mysterious style of a director like David Lynch.

For some, that description will be enough to get them to order a ticket, and the more you are interested in Jewish holy books, the more you will get out of this film.

But for anyone who just wants to have fun at the movies, it’s a misfire.

That’s a shame because there are many well-acted, well-written scenes and an intriguing main plotline. It follows multiple stories, all of which, on some level, dramatize mystical concepts.

The central story is that of a young wife and mother, Shira (Talya Bartfeld Diskin, who gives a compelling performance), who turns to her rabbi’s wife, Miri (Navit Sitbon), with a complaint familiar to horror-movie viewers: Her husband, Noam (Nadav Antman Ron), is not her husband – he’s been replaced by an imposter who looks just like him.

 Is Shira’s husband possessed, or is she simply imagining it?

Her reasons for suspecting this switch are very prosaic, and will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been married: He seems indifferent; he came home from the store without buying what she asked him to; he doesn’t remember what he said about her blouse a few months ago.

It seems as if, in the tradition of the classic Rosemary’s Baby, the director is leaving us to decide whether her husband is possessed or whether Shira is just neurotic, a new mother who feels dismayed that her husband has lost interest in her.

But then there is another detail: his dominant hand seems to have switched. Miri tells her husband (Shimon Mimran) about it, and he is skeptical that anything is genuinely wrong, and quotes various Jewish texts to her.

Miri wants Shiri to see a famous psychiatrist (Zohar Strauss), who turns out to have become a mystic who performs exorcisms, while Shira resists the notion that she needs mental help.

Miri is in touch with another young woman, Gaia (Inbal Raz), who is about to get married and who, although she is secular, has just become interested in studying Jewish texts.

Gaia asks her fiancé, Idan (Yoel Rosenkier), why he decided that she was the one, as the couple sit with their families tasting the food at the venue where their wedding will be held. This leads to a reminiscence by one of the couple’s fathers about how he fell in love, but when he tells the story, his wife says that it’s all about the girlfriend he had before her, continuing the theme of doubles and replacement.

There is also a waitress, Heli (Ella Armony), at the wedding hall, who is caring for her senile mother who may or may not be possessed by some kind of spirit.

Suddenly, and this is where the movie lost me and never got me back, the two actresses playing Heli and Gaia switch roles.

A familiar cinematic device that works better in theory than practice

This is not an unprecedented device, but frankly, it always annoys me.

The master director Luis Buñuel did something similar in his 1977 film, That Obscure Object of Desire, where he had two very different actresses, one elegant and chilly, the other fiery and sensual, playing the same character at different times, and there, it worked well.

But here, when these two pretty ingenues swap places, it doesn’t seem to mean anything. I imagine we are supposed to think about how the course of anyone’s life could change in an instant, or how we might all have easily ended up with a different partner under certain circumstances. But neither actress is distinctive, and it just takes you out of the action and makes you think about the director’s logic.

There’s also a sequence where Shira goes to visit her grandmother (the always entertaining Shosha Goren), who tells her that her own husband was replaced years ago, after trauma he experienced in combat. The grandmother, who is not observant, believes he was taken by aliens, rather than an evil spirit.

It goes on like this, and the biggest suspense is whether the actresses will switch back. Along the way, there are some interesting scenes and ideas, which make it seem that there is a well-constructed movie struggling to get out of this muddled script.

Tauber made the movie with his wife, producer Eliya Tauber – with whom he has four children – over a period of 10 years, and that’s a nice story.

I have a feeling it would be more fun to watch an interview with them talking about the ideas behind the movie than it is to actually see their film.

This post was originally published on here. 

Tel Aviv never stops. The city is full of movement wherever you go, especially during the hot summer months when the streets can feel almost overwhelming. Cars, scooters, construction, people rushing between appointments, and the Mediterranean heat all contribute to the city’s particular rhythm.

As someone living in the city, I am often looking for somewhere a little quieter, somewhere that still feels connected to Tel Aviv without having to experience all of it at once.

The Norman, just off Rothschild Boulevard and adjacent to Nahalat Binyamin, provides that contrast.

The four-story hotel occupies two restored 1920s heritage buildings, with citrus gardens and Italian-style patios connecting them.

From the outside,  the architecture is relatively understated. Inside, the atmosphere changes. The interior combines the character of an older European residence with contemporary design, marble surfaces, dark wood, and a collection of Israeli art spread throughout the hotel.

Our room had tall windows, which brought in the afternoon light, while the combination of marble and dark wooden furniture gave the space a sense of calm.

Hotel library transforms into cocktail bar, Japanese dining spot at night

In the evening, the hotel’s library serves as a cocktail bar, leading into the on-site Dinings restaurant, which features a Japanese izakaya-style menu. The venue offers standard selections like tuna sashimi with yuzu, sake-steamed chicken, and yellowtail crispy rice with jalapeño aioli, and one of the non-traditional options is goose liver sushi.

It is worth noting for prospective guests that the hotel is not kosher, which limits its demographic. Furthermore, premium ingredients and a luxury setting mean menu prices are significantly higher than average Tel Aviv dining options, making it an unlikely choice for budget-conscious travelers.

After dinner, we moved out onto the balcony with our sake. Looking down, the contrast was hard to miss. Down on the streets, the city was still moving at its usual pace. Up above, everything felt considerably slower. It was a distinctly Tel Aviv moment, although one with a Japanese accent.

The following morning, we had breakfast in the courtyard. The area manages to maintain a connection with the city without exposing you completely to it.

Greenery and shade offer a welcome escape from the city outside

The sounds of the streets are still there, the buildings are still visible beyond the hotel, and the heat is impossible to forget, but the greenery and shade create a welcome separation.

After checking out, we left our luggage with the hotel and headed to the rooftop pool. The view up there puts the hotel back into its surroundings. Skyscrapers stand around the pool, while the Mediterranean appears on the horizon. The city and noise are everywhere, but from up there it seems considerably further away.

Ultimately, The Norman does not try to replace Tel Aviv, nor does it completely disconnect you from it. Instead, it offers a different way of experiencing the city, one where you can step outside into the heat and noise, then return to a quiet courtyard, a drink at the bar, dinner upstairs, or a few hours beside the pool.

While it comes at a very high price point, The Norman serves those looking to experience Tel Aviv without being consumed by its pace.

Sometimes experiencing Tel Aviv means going out and seeing everything it has to offer. Sometimes it means finding somewhere quiet enough to watch the city from a distance.

The writer was a guest of the hotel.

This post was originally published on here. 

Sunday, August 16, is 3 Elul. It is not only the yahrzeit of Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of Israel and the greatest spiritual architect of religious Zionism. It is also an invitation to travel. Not merely through his books, but through landscapes.

The winding country roads of Latvia and Lithuania, lined with silver birch forests and bordered by quiet rivers, still seem to whisper his story. The scent of wet earth after a summer shower, the rustling of flax fields in the wind, the silence of forgotten Jewish cemeteries, all preserve echoes of a man who believed that holiness was not hidden from the changing world but revealed through it.

To understand Rabbi Kook, opening his books Orot or Igrot HaRe’iyah is not enough. We must walk where he walked, breathe the same northern air, and stand before the remnants of the communities that shaped his soul. Several Israeli religious tour operators organize heritage journeys following Rabbi Kook’s footsteps. Their tours continue to attract Jewish travelers eager to discover not only the biography of a towering rabbinic figure but also the landscapes from which his revolutionary ideas emerged.

Griva

Nearly 160 years ago, a baby was born in the small town of Griva, today a neighborhood of Daugavpils in southeastern Latvia. His parents named him Abraham Isaac, but affectionately called him “Yatzki.”

When little Yatzki was only three, he attended the local cheder. There he invented a game: He lined up the children with their small satchels across their shoulders, as though preparing for a long expedition. Then he asked them to call out: “Where are we going?” And he would shout back: “To Eretz Israel!”

It was a child’s game, yet in hindsight it seems almost prophetic.

That game took place in the courtyard of the Kaddish Synagogue, which still stands today after careful restoration. Here, his parents used to pray, and the young prodigy astonished the community. At nine, he was already delivering sermons from its pulpit, and by 11 he had begun writing a commentary on the Song of Songs.

Visitors to the synagogue at Cietokšna 38 today will find commemorative plaques honoring Rabbi Kook on the synagogue’s exterior. Joining the Mincha prayer service inside these ancient walls is more than a religious experience. It feels like stepping into the opening chapter of a remarkable life.

At 15, Rabbi Kook continued his studies in the Panevežys Yeshiva. There, Rabbi Israel Meir Hacohen, known as the Chafetz Chaim, gathered a select group of exceptionally gifted students who were priests and assigned them to immerse themselves in Seder Kodashim, the Talmudic tractates devoted to the Temple service and sacrificial rites. His vision was that when the Messiah came and the Temple was rebuilt, the Jewish people would already have scholars thoroughly versed in its sacred service. Rabbi Kook was chosen to join this elite circle and devoted himself to mastering the laws governing the priests’ service in the Holy Temple.

The Chafetz Chaim later arranged his marriage to the daughter of Rabbi Eliyahu David Rabinowitz-Teomim (the Aderet), then the rabbi of Panevežys.

Žeimelis

After his marriage, Rabbi Kook became rabbi of Žeimelis, a quiet agricultural village in northern Lithuania.

The countryside has hardly changed. White stone cottages still line the roads. Orange brick farmhouses stand beside wooden barns. Vast flax fields shimmer beneath enormous skies, interrupted only by rows of trees tracing the edges of streams and small lakes. Now and then, herds of deer emerge from the forest and bound gracefully across the open fields.
Most of the town’s Jewish residents were farmers. For the first time, the brilliant scholar confronted the practical questions of daily agricultural life: The shemita (sabbatical) year restrictions, milking cows on Shabbat, and the countless legal dilemmas of families whose livelihood depended on the land.

These encounters profoundly shaped his halachic thinking. The famous heter mechirah, the temporary sale of agricultural land during the sabbatical year, grew from a deep understanding of hardworking farmers whose faith and survival depended equally on the fields before them. Not from abstract legal theory. For Rabbi Kook, Jewish law was never meant to remain confined within the walls of beit midrash. It had to walk through muddy fields, endure rain and drought, and accompany people where life actually unfolded.

His former home no longer survives, but its foundations are marked by white stones at Bauskes Street 7.

Across from his home, once stood the synagogue where Rabbi Kook studied the Jerusalem Talmud and wrote the first chapters of the book Itur Sofrim, a place that helped shape his intellectual and spiritual world. When I stood among the remaining stones, I found myself regretting that I had not brought a volume of Igrot HaRe’iyah. There seemed no more fitting place to read his words than the place where many of his earliest ideas first took shape.

Rabbi Kook lived seven years in Žeimelis, which also witnessed profound personal sorrow. His first wife died here at a young age. Her gravestone, discovered years ago lying abandoned on the ground, has since been restored. The small Jewish cemetery has become another stop for Jewish travelers.

Here he remarried. Here his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, was born, later becoming head of Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva and one of the foremost spiritual leaders of religious Zionism (and my rosh yeshiva).

Bauska (Boysk)

From rural Žeimelis, Rabbi Kook moved to Bauska in southern Latvia. It was an entirely different world. More than half the city’s residents were Jewish, yet not all observed Jewish law. Traditional scholars lived alongside merchants, intellectuals, Zionists, laborers, members of the Bund, and young Jews already drifting away from religious life.

Years earlier, Rabbi Kook had often traveled to Bauska to study with Rabbi Mordechai Eliasberg, one of the leading figures of the Hibbat Zion movement and an early founder of the Mizrachi movement.

When Rabbi Eliasberg passed away, the young Rabbi Kook delivered the eulogy. His words so deeply impressed the community that they immediately offered him the city’s rabbinate.
He declined.

Only five years later did he finally accept.

The Jews of Žeimelis loved him so dearly that they reportedly organized a wagon drivers’ strike in an attempt to prevent his departure. Eventually, Bauska sent its own drivers, and the young rabbi began the next chapter of his life.
The central square of Bauska still looks remarkably similar to photographs from Rabbi Kook’s era. Nearby stands a memorial built on the site of his synagogue. The synagogue itself was torched by the Nazis.

Today, at Rigas Street, at the corner of Pasta Street, low stone platforms outline its former walls within iron frames. Abstract sculptures stand at the corners. Where the holy ark once stood rises a striking menorah fashioned from stone and iron. At the location of the bimah rests a black monument, shaped like an open book, engraved with the history of Bauska’s vanished Jewish community.

Currently, there are no Jews in Bauska, but Jewish public buildings such as the school and the slaughterhouse remain and are worth visiting.

It was in Bauska that one of Rabbi Kook’s most influential ideas fully matured. Ten years he was living in Bauska. He encountered Jews who no longer observed Shabbat and mitzvot, yet he recognized their idealism, their devotion, and their love for the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. He refused to define them as enemies. To him, even the secular pioneers draining swamps and cultivating barren land were partners in redemption. Their language differed from his; their purpose did not.

Following the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, a rumor spread claiming that the Congress had resolved that “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.” (It was later revealed to be fake news, circulated by those whose position had been rejected in the vote).

In response, most rabbinic leaders chose to distance themselves from the Zionist movement. Rabbi Kook, however, challenged this approach and argued that there was a better alternative: a religious Zionism that united Jewish faith with Jewish nationhood rather than separating them. The estrangement of today’s haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community from compulsory service in the army has its roots in that historic moment, when many came to feel that Zionism was “not ours.”

At the age of 39, Rabbi Kook stood at a crossroads. He had to choose between serving as the spiritual supervisor (mashgiach) at the prestigious Telshe Yeshiva, or becoming the rabbi of Jaffa. He chose to make aliyah to Eretz Israel, and the rest is history.

Rabbi Kook’s contemporaries recognized his extraordinary stature. When derogatory remarks were spoken against him, the Chafetz Chaim reportedly declared that such words warranted the traditional act of rending one’s garments in grief. The Chazon Ish likewise refused to join those who opposed Jerusalem’s chief rabbi, saying simply: “Know that he is holy and pure.”

Returning with different eyes

Something changes after completing this journey. Returning to Rabbi Kook’s writings, one no longer encounters abstract ideas alone, but the landscapes that shaped them. Griva inspired his vision, Žeimelis taught agriculture, and Bauska deepened his understanding of sociology. From these quiet towns, he carried to Jaffa and Jerusalem a spiritual vision that sought to unite heaven and earth.

Today, most of the synagogues have disappeared, the rabbis’ homes are gone, and the communities that once flourished have faded into history. Yet among the birch forests, quiet rivers, and weathered stones, their spirit still lingers. Following Rabbi Kook’s footsteps across Latvia and Lithuania is more than a heritage tour. It is a journey to the birthplace of an idea: that faith and modernity, Torah and daily life, can enrich rather than oppose one another.

Perhaps that is Rabbi Kook’s greatest legacy. Not only the books he wrote, but the hope he carried. His footsteps remind us that every generation can rediscover its past, draw strength from it, and continue the journey toward a brighter future.

The author is the creator of the JewishTraveler blog.

This post was originally published on here. 

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf claimed he is in contact with Hezbollah terrorists despite Lebanese objections to his account, Saudi channel Al Arabiya reported on Saturday.

“I had a close friendship and relationship with every martyr of Lebanon, and I am still in contact with the (Hezbollah) fighters on the front lines in Lebanon,” said Ghalibaf.

According to the report, the rejection of Iranian interference in Lebanon has previously been stressed by Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, who told CNN in June that “this is not your country, it is our country, and it is our duty and your job not to interfere in our country.”

Ghalibaf’s comments come amid a tense period in negotiations between Iran and the United States. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian news outlet Shahrara News earlier on Saturday that Iran-US negotiations have not resumed despite the regime exchanging messages with mediating countries Qatar and Pakistan.

Ghalibaf, who is also Iran’s top negotiator, insisted that both Hezbollah and Lebanon were included in the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), Al Arabiya added.

IDF strikes Hezbollah terror targets in Lebanon

Meanwhile, the IDF continues to strike Hezbollah targets in Lebanon following ceasefire violations by the terrorist group, with the latest strike targeting the southern Lebanese village of Ansar overnight between Friday and Saturday.

Aoun condemned the “ongoing Israeli attacks” in a post from his office’s X/Twitter account on Saturday morning, calling them a “violation of the Framework Agreement.”

دان رئيس الجمهورية العماد جوزاف عون الاعتداءات الاسرائيلية المستمرة على مناطق الجنوب ولا سيما على منطقة النبطية ومحيطها، وخروقاتها المتكررة لاتفاق الإطار ولعمل مجموعة التنسيق العسكرية وللقوانين الدولية بحماية المدنيين ما ادى إلى استشهاد عائلة كاملة من بلدة أنصار.
واعتبر الرئيس…

— Lebanese Presidency (@LBpresidency) August 15, 2026

Hezbollah responded to the IDF strikes later on Saturday, saying they would be “met accordingly.”

Hezbollah chief: No progress in Israel-Lebanon framework agreement

According to Al Arabiya, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem said on Friday that the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire framework “has not achieved any progress,” describing the establishment of pilot zones for the framework in southern Lebanon as a “novelty that serves Israel’s goals.”

The report contrasted Qassem’s comments with those of Lebanese Information Minister Paul Morcos, who emphasized the country’s commitment to continued negotiations with Israel. 

Shoshana Baker and Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

The United Arab Emirates said on Saturday Iran had attacked an Abu Dhabi National Oil Company vessel while it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier, the Emirati state news agency WAM reported.

ADNOC said no injuries were reported and that the situation was under control, according to WAM.

The UAE foreign ministry called on Tehran to halt what it described as unprovoked attacks, end hostilities and fully reopen the waterway.

There was no immediate comment from Iran.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have previously threatened action against vessels transiting the strait if they are linked to Tehran’s adversaries or fail to comply with Iranian directives.

The attack was the third such incident involving ADNOC vessels in less than a week, and the UAE had also accused Iran of being behind the earlier incidents.

UAE vows to defend sovereignty, interests as Strait shipping remains disrupted

Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, said Abu Dhabi would defend its sovereignty and interests after repeated attacks on ADNOC vessels.

“We will safeguard our rights to freedom of navigation … while continuing the path of dialog and prioritizing diplomatic options,” Gargash said in a post on X.

Separately, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said earlier it had received a report of a bulk carrier being struck by an unknown projectile in the strait on Friday. It was not immediately clear whether the incident involved the same ADNOC vessel.

About a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through the narrow waterway between Oman and Iran before the conflict. Since the US-Israeli war with Iran broke out on ​February 28, shipping has ​been repeatedly disrupted, ⁠raising freight rates and creating security concerns.

ADNOC, Abu Dhabi’s state oil company, is one of the world’s largest energy producers and exports crude oil, natural gas and refined products worldwide.

This post was originally published on here. 

The Torah prohibits the unnecessary destruction of resources. This principle is known as bal tash’hit, the ban against needless waste.

Of course, what constitutes waste depends on context. Behavior that is wasteful in one era or circumstance may not be considered wasteful in another. In a modern world where, thank God, food is abundant, discarding leftover food may not carry the same implications that it did in generations marked by scarcity.

What is striking is the setting in which this prohibition appears. The Torah introduces bal tash’hit, the prohibition against waste, amid warfare, rather than in the more predictable setting of agriculture or everyday life.

Ancient wars were fought by laying siege to cities, requiring enormous quantities of timber. Wood was needed for military camps, battering rams, siege towers, and fuel. Recognizing these genuine military needs, the Torah permits the felling of non-fruit-bearing trees for such purposes, while protecting fruit trees from wanton destruction.

Why do we plant trees?

When outlining this prohibition, the Torah offers an iconic analogy: ki ha’adam etz hasadeh, “man is like the tree of the field.” Just as human life must be carefully protected, a tree that produces and sustains life cannot simply be felled for utilitarian purposes.

The comparison reflects the unusual connection human beings have always felt toward trees. More than almost any other part of nature, we identify with trees and sometimes even personify them.

The 19th-century naturalist W. H. Hudson observed nature through an almost spiritual lens. In his memoir Far Away and Long Ago, he recounts the story of a landowner who possessed a “reverential feeling for his old trees.” Before retiring for the night, “he would walk round to visit them, one by one,” resting his hand on the bark and whispering good night. Hudson writes that the man believed his trees possessed “intelligent souls” and appreciated his devotion. To him, trees were alive, individual, and deeply personal.

Unlike this landowner, we do not believe that nature is animate, and trees certainly do not possess human souls. Yet the prominence of trees throughout Tanach suggests that our attachment to them is more than sentimental.

Human history begins among the trees of the Garden of Eden. Abraham receives his angelic visitors beneath a tree, and Jonah becomes deeply attached to his kikayon tree. Again and again, trees appear in Tanach as part of the human landscape.

Even the anatomy of a tree invites comparison to the human form. A mature tree has a clearly defined structure: hidden roots supporting a central trunk which rises and spreads into an intricate network of branches. There is something almost “bodily” about this structure, with a stable core and limbs reaching outward in different directions.

Our Sages drew on this structure in Pirkei Avot, comparing a person whose wisdom exceeds his deeds to a tree with many branches but few roots, easily overturned by the wind. The comparison works because we so readily recognize human qualities reflected in trees.

More than almost any other feature of nature, trees really do seem alive. As Shakespeare wrote, there are “tongues in trees.” Each tree has its own shape and something resembling a distinct personality. An old oak conveys strength, a willow gentleness, a cypress dignity. Trees grow and mature; they age and become scarred, and each develops its own shape and character.

The comparison between a tree and a human being reminds us to guard against wasting human potential. A productive tree still has fruit to bear; a person still has talents, abilities, and contributions to offer. Wasting either means cutting short what could still have been produced.

The connection between trees and war

However, there is a particular reason why the Torah draws this analogy between human beings and trees, specifically in the context of war. The qualities represented by trees carry special importance during wartime. Preserving sensitivity toward trees can help counter some of the pressures that war creates.

Planting for Israel’s future

Trees teach us to think about the future. The Talmud in Ta’anit tells of a man planting a carob tree even though he will not live long enough to enjoy its fruit. When asked why he is planting for a future he will not see, he explains that he entered a world filled with trees planted by earlier generations and must do the same for those who will follow him.

Unlike crops that must be replanted each year, a tree planted today can continue producing fruit for decades. Trees naturally extend our vision beyond our own lives. We plant and nurture them, knowing that their fullest benefits may only be enjoyed by generations who had no part in planting them.

War demands that we extend our vision into the future. It is painful and exhausting, exacting enormous sacrifices at many levels. Without a clear vision of what we are fighting for, those sacrifices become much harder to sustain. A war without a larger purpose can easily become a succession of battles without hope.

During the past three years, we have endured an extraordinarily difficult war; the strain on our society has been enormous. The war has dragged on without a clear and decisive victory on the horizon.

We must keep reminding ourselves that our generation is struggling so that future generations will not face the violence and pogroms that we experienced on October 7. Sometimes a generation is called on to carry a burden whose benefits will be realized only by generations to come. We plant and nurture a tree today, knowing that others may sit beneath its branches and enjoy its fruit.

Every tree is different

Trees also possess remarkable individuality. No two mature trees are identical. Each develops its own shape and carries its own history. Trees are battered by storms, afflicted by disease, scarred by injury, and sometimes recover in ways that permanently alter their appearance. An old tree possesses something resembling a biography, with much of its history written into its trunk and branches.

War reduces individuals to numbers and statistics. Behind every person lies a world of relationships, dreams, achievements, and hopes. Every loss is the loss of an entire world. Every serious injury can radically alter a person’s life and the lives of those around them. Amid the scale and intensity of war, it is easy to lose sight of the individuality of each person and the unique story of every family.

The Torah’s concern for each individual tree reminds us to preserve that same sensitivity toward every individual human life.

Building, not destroying

Finally, trees remind us that humans are meant to be productive in this world. Trees are among nature’s great providers. They give us fruit, shade, shelter, fuel, and, through photosynthesis, the oxygen we breathe. Their presence sustains the environment around them.

War is fundamentally destructive. It destroys lives and what human beings have spent years building. Sometimes we are forced into war, but we should never develop a culture that celebrates war or destruction.

The comparison between people and trees reminds us of our deeper calling. We are meant to produce, build, and improve our world. War may sometimes be necessary, but destruction can never become our purpose. Man is meant to be a tree.

Planting again in Israel

From its earliest days, the Zionist movement viewed planting trees in Israel as an expression of confidence in our future. I remember collecting money as a child in the little blue Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund boxes to help plant forests in Israel.

Trees have repeatedly been destroyed by war, fires, and other causes, but we have always planted again as an expression of Jewish resilience and rebuilding. 

The writer is a rabbi and educator at Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush). Find his latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, at mtaraginbooks.com.

This post was originally published on here. 

Fauda finally announced its Netflix international release date is September 8, when you will be able to stream its fifth season with English subtitles.

But that’s almost a month away, and what will you watch till then? One option, obviously, is to re-watch the previous season, which introduced new characters and spanned several continents. But I would recommend going back even further and starting with the first season, so you can see how the characters and themes develop.

Another suggestion is to watch a different thriller series in the meantime. Legends, the new Netflix series about British customs agents cracking an international drug ring, is one of the best recent ones and shows how drug cartels operate around the world, as does Narcos, which is also on Netflix.

On Apple TV+, Slow Horses is a good option, even though it’s far more comic than Fauda, but it really does build suspense. It was recently announced that the sixth season of Slow Horses will be released on September 16.

If you are looking for something a little lighter, a series that fits that sweet spot between too dark and too dumb, then check out Parenthood, which has just become available on Hot VOD and Next TV, and will be shown on Hot 3 starting at the end of August. The series is also available on Netflix.

I have recommended this series in the past because it helped me get through the pandemic and the early days of the war.

Parenthood brings three generations of a complicated family to life

Unlike other essentially feel-good series that were a bit more grandiose or contrived, like This Is Us, Parenthood tells the story of a loving but complicated three-generation family in Berkeley, California. It was based on a darker, more cynical movie of the same name starring Steve Martin, but other than a few plotlines, it has little relation to the movie.

Usually, in a series like this, you tend to like one generation, but here, they are all equally engaging. The oldsters are Zeke (Craig T Nelson), a demanding Vietnam veteran with an unpredictable side, and Camille (Bonnie Bedelia, who has never been more charming), an aspiring painter who gave it all up to be a supermom to her four children.

The adult children are the main protagonists, and the series gets going when prodigal daughter Sarah (Lauren Graham of The Gilmore Girls) moves home, years after running off with a musician, bringing along her two teenagers, Amber (Mae Whitman of Good Girls) and Drew (Miles Heizer from People We Meet on Vacation).

The rebellious Sarah learned far too late that her parents were right about her ex and is trying to build a new life for herself, which is a struggle since bartending is her only marketable skill.

Her brother, Adam (Peter Krause of Six Feet Under), encouraged her to make the move back to the family home. An executive at a shoe company, he is the good son, and he is the one everyone comes to with their problems.

But he is dealing with a big problem of his own when his son Max (Max Burkholder, one of the standouts in a great cast) is diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.

Julia (Erika Christenson), a control-freak lawyer, and Crosby (Dax Shepard), an unreliable sound engineer who has to grow up in a hurry when a former flame returns, round out the Braverman second generation.

The supporting cast includes Michael B Jordan, who just won the Best Actor Oscar for Sinners; comic Ray Romano of the series Everybody Loves Raymond; and Xolo Mariduena, who starred in the Cobra Kai series.

Besides the likability of the entire cast, the series, created by Jason Katims, has several unusual aspects. One is that the writing is so much less predictable than on most television shows. Another is that the Asperger storyline, based on Katims’ own family, is just one story among many; it’s just part of life.

A third is the soundtrack, which features great indie and offbeat music, including a gospel version of Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love” and dozens of other songs that may well end up on your playlist.

Two of the characters eventually team up to open a recording studio, and many real musicians drift through the show, including CeeLo Green recording a Janis Joplin song and Glen Hansard, the Irish musician who passed away recently.

Monster explores the origins of evil in post-Cold War Germany

I’ve watched quite a few anime series, and the only one I’ve ever been moved to re-watch is Monster, available with English subtitles on Netflix. I was introduced to it by one of my sons, and it’s really unlike anything out there, both in the anime world and in general.

Based on a famous manga series by Naoki Urasawa, the series brings Urasawa’s drawings to life, and they are beautiful.

This isn’t the kind of anime where everyone has exaggerated round eyes, but rather a far more realistic style.

Monster opens with a quote about the beast from the Book of Revelation, and it tells an ambitious story that grapples with no less a topic than the origin of evil. Set in Germany mainly during the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, its hero is a brilliant young Japanese neurosurgeon named Kenzo Tenma, who has come to Europe to finish his training.

Tenma is ambitious but has a strong moral compass. When Johan, a child whose life he saved, turns up years later, Tenma learns to his horror that the young man is a psychopathic murderer. Even worse, Johan frames the surgeon for his crimes, and Tenma must go on the run, determined to save the world from this monstrous killer.

The series provides a kind of snapshot of Germany in that era. The path to Johan leads to an East German eugenics project in an orphanage, whose creators tried to twist children’s minds using a frightening fairy tale.

There are a little over 70 episodes of Monster,  and each runs about 20 minutes, so it will keep you busy for a while – and it’s hard to stop at just one. If you can watch the English version, you will get to hear Liam O’Brien as Tenma, which is considered to be one of the greatest performances in anime.

The bottom line is that Monster plays as if Alfred Hitchcock had come back to life and decided to direct an anime.

Shark Week may be over, but there’s still plenty to watch

Maybe you didn’t get your fill of shark content when Shark Week ran on the Discovery Channel, and Sharkfest was shown on National Geographic Wild. The good news is that there is still a lot of shark content out there, perfect to watch on mind-numbingly hot days.

Obviously, the great shark movie will always be Jaws, which is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+. People may not remember that there were multiple Jaws sequels that Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with. They are all beyond terrible, but the most unintentionally funny one is Jaws: The Revenge.

It is set mostly in the Bahamas and stars acclaimed actor Michael Caine, who has admitted he was having financial problems when he signed on to the role. Most of the Jaws sequels are available on Apple TV+, although Jaws fans will probably have more fun with the documentary, Jaws@50: The Definitive Inside Story, available on Disney+.

Disney+ is truly the king of shark content among the streamers, featuring over 20 shark documentaries, so there may be one you haven’t seen yet. You might enjoy the two newest documentaries, the Up Close series with the genial British researcher and filmmaker Bertie Gregory, Hammerhead Sharks: Up Close and Sharks: Up Close.

There’s also Sharkcano, a documentary that reveals that wherever there are active volcanoes, the nearby waters are filled with sharks. Could there be a connection, or was this documentary created mainly because the title sounds like Sharknado?

You’ll have to watch it to find out.

This post was originally published on here. 

At least 38 people were killed after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake, and a series of smaller earthquakes struck Indonesia on Saturday.

The initial quake struck Indonesia’s Flores region shortly before 5:00 a.m. local time and occurred at a depth of 35 km, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC).

Soon after 5:00 a.m., another earthquake with a magnitude of 5.5 and a depth of 10 km shook the same region. 

According to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), throughout the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, a series of smaller earthquakes ranging in magnitude from 4.9 to 5.3 continued to hit the area.

Shortly before 6:00 p.m. local time, another tremor with a magnitude of 6.4 struck Indonesia’s northern Sumatra. 

Indonesia mobilizes government agencies in response to earthquakes

According to Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Authority (BNPB), several government ministries and agencies have been mobilized in response to the seismic activity to assess damage and locate individuals trapped underneath rubble.

Gerak Cepat Pemerintah Pusat Membantu Penanganan Darurat Pascagempa M7.7 NTT

Pemerintah pusat melakukan rapat koordinasi untuk memastikan penanganan darurat gempa bumi M7.7 berjalan optimal. Sejumlah kementerian dan lembaga juga secara pararel telah bergerak menuju lokasi… pic.twitter.com/pr2Iem4986

— BNPB Indonesia (@BNPB_Indonesia) August 15, 2026

BNPB stated that the disaster response is prioritizing the evacuation and rescue of those who may be trapped and the treatment of the wounded. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

Three Iranian military pilots have been held in Qatar for the past six months after being captured by Qatari forces, Iran International reported on Saturday.

The report cited the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff’s committee for missing personnel commander Mohammad Bagherzadeh, who disclosed the information in a letter to International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, appealing for help securing the pilots’ release.

Iran says three military pilots whose Su-24 fighter jets went down during attacks in March were captured alive by Qatari forces and have been held in the country for about six months.

Mohammad Bagherzadeh, commander of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff’s committee for… pic.twitter.com/f8n7mYM6Nt

— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) August 15, 2026

According to the report, the pilots were taken into Qatari custody after their Russian-made Sukhoi Su-24 tactical bombers were struck in March during a mission against what Tehran described as “an enemy military base” in Qatar.

Qatari authorities did not immediately confirm the incident.

Bagherzadeh: No contact between pilots and their families, Iranian officials

Bagherzadeh noted in the letter that the pilots have not been permitted to speak to their families or Iranian officials while in Qatari captivity, according to Iran International.

The report identified the pilots as Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian, and Omran Behraveshian, and Iranian officials previously confirmed that an additional pilot, Majid Kazemi, was returned to Iran after a military operation against Qatar.

Reuters contributed to this report.

This post was originally published on here. 

A funnel cloud was seen in the Golan Heights on Saturday following thunderstorm and flash flood warnings issued earlier in the day by the Israel Meteorological Service, with gust forecasts in the Golan reaching as high as 42 kph.

Footage published by N12 News shows the funnel cloud seemingly touching the ground amongst the northern hills.

Notably, a funnel cloud usually develops from a supercell thunderstorm, and is often a visual precursor to tornadoes.

Further footage published by N12 showed heavy rainfall in the Jerusalem area, particularly near Ma’aleh Adumim.

The Israel Meteorological Service issued thunderstorm warnings for nearly the entire eastern side of the country, stretching from the Golan to the Negev Desert. The warning remains valid until 6:00 p.m.

The flash flood warning covered a smaller area, mainly around the Dead Sea region and the northeastern Negev, valid until 9:00 p.m.

Israel Meteorological Service warns against swimming activities along coast

An additional warning was issued later on Saturday for the coastal plain, advising against all swimming activities due to high waves of up to 120 cm and rising, valid until 10:00 p.m. 

The warnings add to existing heat-stress warnings across the country, valid throughout the day and evening.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here.