All News (Page 76)

Early summer in Israel’s northern Western Negev announces itself through watermelon fields. Long, low rows of deep green stretch across the flatlands where I live, reliable and unhurried as the heat itself. 

On a blazing July noon, I was standing a few kilometers from those fields, inside a different kind of green – the labs and corridors of SouthUp, watching a delegation of senior African diplomats move between start-ups whose founders, less than three years ago, had fled this very ground for their lives.

On July 29, 2026, a high-level strategic delegation from the Democratic Republic of the Congo arrived at SouthUp, the non-profit technology incubator rooted in the Shaar Hanegev region. Leading the delegation was Her Excellency Madame Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, DRC Foreign Minister. 

The visit was organized through the bridge-building of Ambassador Leo Vinovezky, Israel’s envoy to Angola, the DRC, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe – and I am grateful to the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry for entrusting a delegation of this caliber to our corner of the Negev. They could not have sent it to a more instructive place.

Vinovezky was quick to point out that the connection is anything but coincidental. The Foreign Ministry’s Economics Division has maintained a long-standing partnership with Israel’s kibbutz industry – a sector that has contributed to Israeli exports from the periphery for decades, long before “start-up nation” entered the vocabulary.

Bringing an African delegation to the Western Negev was, in that sense, a return to Israel’s diplomatic roots.

Shahar Belkin, one of the driving forces behind SouthUp, did not open with a pitch deck. He told Kayikwamba Wagner plainly what happened here. “We had 23 companies,” he said, “and 21 of them came back after we could reopen. Now we have 27.” 

A major new facility is already rising beside Sderot’s train station. They are calling it OfirTech – named after Ofir Lybshtein, the city’s former mayor, who was among the first victims announced on October 7. It will house 60 more companies.

None of that came from a government rescue package or an outside investor deciding the region was worth saving. It came from founders choosing to return to the same ground they had fled in the dark, and choosing to build something larger than what they had left behind.

Belkin put it in terms that cut through any polished pitch: “Although they’re called hi-tech, we seem to think they are spoiled kids playing with their computers. But they are the same spirit – second generation of the kibbutz founders.”

He was right. The founders who drained swamps and coaxed crops from sand were not driven by ideal conditions. Neither are the entrepreneurs here. In Israel, a start-up that fails is not a scandal – it is data, a credential rather than a disqualification. Vinovezky put it plainly: success rarely arrives before the fifth or 10th attempt.

Kayikwamba Wagner understood immediately why that distinction matters. “If you have to make it right the first time,” she said, “you are too afraid to take the risk of jumping into the water. You can get something good, but maybe nothing extraordinary. You get improvement – you don’t get breakthroughs.”

She said it over a lunch of hummus and falafel prepared for the delegation – a deliberately Israeli welcome, warm and unassuming. I found myself in a seat I will not forget: directly between Vinovezky and the minister herself.

This was not her first visit to Israel. She mentioned it was her third time in the country – but this time she had arrived as a minister, and the difference showed in how she listened. She was not here to absorb a tourism itinerary. She was taking notes.

That exchange, more than any product demonstration, captured why this visit felt significant. Two nations separated by thousands of kilometers found themselves describing the same problem: the gap between potential and delivery, and what it takes to close it.

Relations taking shape

The DRC sits on some of the most fertile land on earth. It has abundant water, a generous tropical climate, and the agricultural capacity to feed a significant portion of the African continent. Yet the country currently cultivates less than 1% of that potential, and the reason is brutally logistical.

Without post-harvest storage infrastructure, produce spoils before it reaches Kinshasa’s 12 million residents. In the absence of cold chain solutions, the country resorts to flying fresh food by air cargo – one of the most expensive supply chains imaginable. The problem is not the land. The problem is everything between the land and the plate.

Three start-ups inside SouthUp are working precisely on those gaps. Led by CEO Pninit Gilboa Tal, CTO Yossi Cohen, and CSO Dr. Yulimar Castro Molina, Biotization uses breakthrough 100% biological technology to protect crops from field to storage.

By combating systemic diseases, the company reduces post-harvest waste from over 30% to under 1%, extending shelf life and improving supply chain profitability. 

Fungit BioSolutions has isolated over 100 fungal strains from the high-salinity soils near the Dead Sea, organisms engineered by nature to survive extremes of heat, drought, and disease; reintroduced through standard drip irrigation, they give domestic crops the same resilience. 

A third company, BioTip, has built smart sensors and digital traceability tools that monitor perishable products in real time across the full cold chain, preventing spoilage before goods ever reach a shelf. None of these are theoretical. All three are operating commercially, and all three address, with surgical precision, the exact infrastructure gaps the minister described.

Before she left, Kayikwamba Wagner turned to Vinovezky with a candor that stopped the room: “This was really excellent, Ambassador. Congratulations. The program was just amazing.” 

Then: “Ambassador, I will come here for a whole week immersion. I don’t want to go. This is wonderful.” He smiled and told her a whole week would not be enough – but they would make it work.

What followed was the visit’s most consequential moment. Leaning toward Vinovezky, she said: “It’s giving me a lot of ideas for the president’s visit. We have to think about how we want to organize it.” She intended to call the president’s chief of staff that week to begin planning. 

SouthUp will deliver technical portfolios directly to Congolese investment and diplomatic agencies to establish commercial matching tracks. A presidential visit to the Western Negev – eagerly anticipated by both sides, and awaiting official confirmation – is already taking shape on the horizon.

What Israel has to offer Africa is not charity. It is a method: take the hardest conditions you have, and make them the source of your most useful ideas. The Western Negev has been doing exactly that for generations – and if all goes as both sides intend, the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will soon see it for himself.

The writer is the director of Innovation Diplomacy and Strategic Partnerships for Hamitba – The Western Negev Innovation Authority.

This post was originally published on here. 

Shin Bet Director David Zini warned Israel’s security cabinet that Hamas views the demilitarization agreement signed with the Board of Peace as a means of constraining Israel’s military freedom of action rather than advancing genuine disarmament, according to sources familiar with the discussion.

Speaking during a security cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Zini said Hamas believes it should have pursued the demilitarization agreement with the Board of Peace in order to “trap Israel” and prevent it from carrying out military operations in the coming months.

According to Zini, Hamas’s strategy is to stall the process while waiting to see what will happen in the next few months and also wait for political developments in Israel.

“They are dragging their feet,” he told ministers, according to the sources. “They are waiting for the elections, and then they will see what happens.”

The assessment was presented as ministers debated the proposed roadmap for Gaza’s demilitarization and post-war arrangements.

Cabinet ministers warn Netanyahu against 14-day preparatory period

According to two Israeli officials in the meeting, the was a consensus among cabinet ministers, who told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must avoid taking any steps that could be interpreted as entering the proposed 14-day “preparatory period for demilitarization” – a phase that would require Israel to halt targeted killings of Hamas terrorists.

The discussion also clarified Israel’s current position regarding the Board of Peace initiative.

According to the officials, Israel has neither signed nor formally approved the demilitarization roadmap with Hamas published by the Board of Peace.

In addition, a separate document concerning the deployment of a multinational force into Gaza was also left unsigned after Israeli officials raised numerous objections. Some of those reservations were outlined publicly this week in a joint letter by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlements and National Missions Minister Orit Strock.

As a result, Israel has not officially authorized the entry of the proposed multinational force into Gaza despite cabinet discussions on the issue, the sources said.

Framework falls far short of genuine disarmament, Strock said

Cabinet Minister Strock sharply criticized the proposed demilitarization framework in a conversation with the The Jerusalem Post, arguing that it falls far short of genuine disarmament.

“As long as the Board of Peace believes it is advancing toward the desired goal, it does not understand how much this agreement empties the concept of demilitarization of its real meaning,” she said, according to participants.

“The very fact that weapons remain in Gaza is not demilitarization. The Board of Peace defined the mission as ensuring there would be no weapons in Gaza. After October 7, it is clear that this must mean exactly that – no weapons. This is not about checking a box.”

Strock also warned against transferring Hamas’s weapons or security responsibilities to a future Palestinian police force.

“The goal is to ensure Hamas’s weapons are not simply transferred to a new Palestinian police force operating under Palestinian law,” she said. “When the Palestinian police was established in the West Bank, it operated under legislation that incentivizes the murder of Jews. Is this the legal framework under which the new police force is supposed to operate?”

She also referenced comments previously made by US President Donald Trump after meeting released Israeli hostages.

“Trump asked the hostages, ‘Nobody helped you?’ He was shocked that nobody did,” she said, arguing that the events of October 7 underscore the need for complete disarmament and removing all weapons from Gaza rather than partial security arrangements.

This post was originally published on here. 

Disclaimer: This story contains disturbing imagery, including references to sexual assault and violence.

Three police personnel and a duty officer allegedly raped a 26-year-old detainee at Iraq’s Al-Nahda Police Station in Diwaniyah province in late July, according to Arabic media reports and statements made by official ministries.

Investigations into the incident began after senior officials at the station realized that the surveillance cameras had been turned off.

Sundus Al-Mousawi, head of the Women and Children Committee on the Diwaniyah Provincial Council, told Independent Arabia that the young woman had been detained at the station in connection with a legal case under Article 248, which criminalizes actions involving deceit, alteration of evidence and the provision of false information during an investigation.

“On July 28, reports circulated on social media that a 26-year-old woman had been sexually assaulted by a captain, a police commissioner and two police officers. I immediately went to the office of the police commander, Major General Najah Al-Bayati, to ask about the details of the crime,” Mousawi said.

“We were told that one of the officers had called and informed them that the cameras at the station had been switched off. It was 4 a.m. when we went to the station to investigate. There, we questioned the female detainees, who told us that a girl had been taken out for two hours. After questioning, the captain and police officers confessed to the immoral crime that had taken place under the Iraqi flag and under the umbrella of the law.”

The victim was from ‘difficult social circumstances’

Mousawi described the young woman as a “thin, pale” orphan with four children who was the victim of difficult social circumstances.

Human rights researcher and activist Manar Al-Zubaidi told the site that “the woman has no income and needs psychological support.”

“Her dignity cannot be violated in a security institution that is supposed to protect her and represent the sovereignty of the state,” Zubaidi said.

Though the Interior Ministry published a statement saying that “the ministry will not tolerate any violation that harms human dignity or contravenes the law,” human rights activists and lawyers commenting on the case said there were limits to the number of women who would see justice, as social stigma and external pressure often force women into silence, allowing perpetrators to go free.

Mousawi has reportedly since demanded that a prison managed by female staff be established for female prisoners.

Rapists are often allowed to escape justice in Iraq, under Article 398 of the Iraqi Penal Code, which allows them to escape justice so long as they marry their victim. The maximum penalty for rape, without the marriage of the victim, can be life in prison depending on the circumstances surrounding the case.  

This post was originally published on here. 

A young victim of child marriage died earlier this week in Iran, 11 days after she set fire to herself in Piranshahr in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, according to reports by Iranian media and human rights groups.

Soma Moghaddi, 18, reportedly set herself on fire after years of abuse from her spouse, according to HRANA News Agency, the news agency of the Human Rights Activists in Iran. It is unclear how old she was at the time of her marriage.

The self-immolation left Moghaddi with burns on 90% of her body, and Iranian media reported that she was transferred from the Piranshahr City Medical Center to the Imam Khomeini Hospital in Urmia for treatment, but passed away despite efforts to save her.

Being married as a child ‘inflict[s] irreparable damage’

Multiple Iranian media sites, including khabarfoori and Rokna, have reported that there are rumors that Moghaddi’s husband may have been involved in the incident, though judiciary authorities have not commented on the case.

“The physical and psychological harms resulting from child marriage inflict irreparable damage on the lives of these children,” HRANA said in a statement. “These harms include pregnancies under the age of 18, maternal mortality, depression, suicide attempts, divorce, failure to complete education, and the perpetuation of the cycle of cultural and economic poverty.”

Under Article 1041 of the Iranian Civil Code, girls under 13 and boys under 15 can legally marry with the consent of a paternal legal guardian and court approval, with no absolute minimum age set for marriage.

This post was originally published on here. 

Dr. Kobi Barda, a historian specializing in American politics, warned on Friday that strains on US military stockpiles could leave Washington vulnerable if another major power, particularly China, were to enter a conflict.

“If I were an American today, I would be very worried if tomorrow morning China decided to enter the conflict,” Barda told 103FM. He added, “There may currently be weakness in the United States.”

Barda pointed to reported shortages in US military stockpiles and the amount of time that could be required to replenish key weapons systems.

“It is possible, it has been done in previous wars, when a large part of production was mobilized for the war effort. At least four years, according to the American media, is the time required to replenish the stockpiles of Tomahawk missiles and all the defensive missiles.”

“In principle, the feeling is that there is indeed some kind of shortage in the stockpiles, especially in light of the war, which is extremely intense in the Ukrainian arena, and this paints a fairly bleak picture of what is supposed to happen as the campaign continues at this time.”

Germany’s abundance of Chinese cars could drown local industry, Barda claims

He also cited Germany as an example of how economic dependence on foreign countries could complicate efforts to expand defense production, particularly as European manufacturers face increasing competition from China.

“An interesting story in Germany reflects the challenge posed by China, where Volkswagen is dealing with Chinese vehicles flooding its market. The company wanted to convert some of its production lines to manufacture heavy trucks intended to carry missiles, but the move was blocked because Qatar holds enough shares in the company, and it is blocking the merger with Israeli technology companies.”

“The question arises as to what it means to be dependent on an Arab country like Qatar, which decides what the factories will produce and what they will not, while the market is flooded with Chinese products.”

Barda also criticized Washington’s approach to Iran, arguing that the US appears determined to avoid further complications at least until after the midterm elections.

“It appears that there is a desire at any cost to try to get through the coming period, at least until after the midterm elections. In this context, there is no other way to put it except ’embarrassing,’ Iran is demanding to negotiate the division of highway robbery in the Strait of Hormuz with Oman alone, without a third party, and the Americans are willing to swallow it.”

This post was originally published on here. 

August 9, 2001, was a sultry summer day. A time for families and teens to take to the streets of Jerusalem to celebrate the weeks before returning to school; a time for meet-ups, for shopping, for stopping at local eateries for fun food and good conversation. 

It was the 20th of Av, after the mourning period of Tisha B’Av. The unsuspecting families and friends of 15 people did not yet know that their own mourning period was about to begin.

Israel was already in the throes of the Second Intifada, which followed on the heels of the First Intifada, which followed terror attacks in the wake of the signing of the Oslo Accords, which echoed the terror attacks of the 1970s, and earlier, going back many, many decades, long before Israel was declared a state.

But Israelis are irrepressible, and determined that life will go on.

So August 9 was the day that Malki Roth, 15, and her friend and next-door neighbor, Michal Raziel, 16, left their homes in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem and headed for town. After decorating the bedroom of a friend who was due to return later in the day from a family vacation in the US, the girls decided to stop off for a quick lunch at one of their favorite central Jerusalem places before heading to a pre-camp counselors gathering in another part of town. That’s how they came to be at the popular, bustling Sbarro pizzeria just before 2 p.m.

An inconspicuous young journalism student, a guitar case packed with explosives

Meanwhile, Ahlam Tamimi, a 21-year-old Jordanian journalism student who worked evenings as a news reader for an Arab TV station in Ramallah, left the city in the company of 22-year-old Izzedine Suheil el-Masri. Together they took a taxi to the Kalandiya checkpoint north of Jerusalem, where they got out and walked across into Israel. 

They looked like a modern 20-something couple, perhaps tourists. The guitar case slung across his shoulder attracted no interest from the Israeli security personnel manning the checkpoint. And no one guessed that the female was the first woman ever admitted to the ranks of Hamas terrorists. 

Another taxi brought them to east Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate from where they walked into the heart of Jerusalem, separating at the crowded crossroads of Jaffa Road and King George Avenue. 

At 2 p.m., Masri, standing next to Malki and Michal, activated the guitar case, which was packed with 10 kg. of explosives and a significant quantity of nails to enhance the skin-shredding effect. Malki Roth and Michal Raziel were among the dead. Tamimi later boasted that in scouting for a target-rich site in the capital, she was particularly alert to places that attracted children. 

Half of the dead were children. Five members of the Schijveschuurder family – both parents and three children – perished. 

In addition to Malki, two other American citizens were killed: Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, a young wife pregnant with her first child, herself an only child, died on that day. Chana Tova Chaya Nachenberg was severely injured. She was in a coma for almost 22 years and succumbed to her wounds on June 1, 2023. (This citizenship issue became important later.)

In the minutes after the horrific boom, Jerusalem’s cellular phone network collapsed under the pressure of calls. The Roths and many others frantically did what they could to find their children, contact hospitals, search for loved ones. 

The victims’ families eventually received the horrifying news. The Roths received theirs from their two older sons who had been brought to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute by a social worker. The victims were buried the next day; 15 pre-Shabbat funerals. And then the shiva period began.

Tamimi was tracked down and captured by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Israeli security forces, and in 2003, an Israeli court sentenced her to 16 consecutive terms of life imprisonment.

She confessed to all charges, smiling throughout the proceedings. The judges recommended she never be eligible for early parole or a pardon.

Arnold Roth wrote in 2021, as a guest columnist in Bari Weiss’s Substack:

“A video clip of her presenting that night’s news bulletin on Al-Istiqlal TV may be the only instance in the annals of television where an atrocity was reported by the perpetrator. Later, Tamimi spoke of how hard it was to suppress the jubilation that the deaths and injuries of Jews – especially Jewish children – aroused within her.”

A religious-Zionist family

Frimet (Moseson) and Arnold Roth made aliyah from Australia in 1988. Frimet, a native New Yorker, says, “Everything [in this case] revolves around the fact that I’m an American citizen and so was Malki.” 

She grew up in Queens and met Arnold when he was at Yeshiva University. “He had to go back to Australia shortly after we met because his father became ill. Phone calls were expensive in those days, so it was an aerogram courtship. We became engaged long distance, and we didn’t see each other again until two weeks before the wedding.” They got married in New York and immediately afterward moved to Australia, where they lived for the next 12 years. 

Arnold recalls, “On our very first date, she asked me what my plans were for aliyah.”

Arnold was a lawyer in Melbourne and planned to do the same in Israel. “I gave up practicing law after a few years in Jerusalem and shifted my professional focus to running technology companies.” Frimet qualified as an attorney but, with seven children, she says, “I was a stay-at-home mother.”

Malki, born in Israel, was child number four, the “filling in the sandwich,” a bright student, active in the Ezra youth movement, vivacious, a talented musician, and involved in volunteer work. The Roths’ youngest daughter, Haya, now 31, has severe disabilities. Frimet says, “She’s basically like a baby.” Haya lives at home. 

Frimet gives us a window into the world of who her middle child was.

“Malki was very, very devoted to her youngest sister, and she helped me immensely, even though she was just a child herself. She also loved her in a very, very unusual way. 

“She was drawn to helping other disabled people, children, and she would volunteer in all kinds of situations, probably because she had a disabled sister… One summer, she volunteered at the home of a young single mother in our neighborhood who had a very disabled child who subsequently passed away from his syndrome. Malki would go there every day and help the mother take care of the child.

“Nobody told her to do it. She just found out about her and did that. Also in school, there was a class for girls with special needs. The other kids their age didn’t really interact with them.

“But Malki, at break time, would always go over to them and spend time with them and talk to them. She was the only one who did that. That’s the kind of person she was. She was amazing. Very unique.” 

The Roths have a caregiver in the daytime hours to care for Haya, and Frimet says, “I take care of her right through the rest of the 24-hour cycle. So it’s very, very draining on me. She needs everything done for her, absolutely everything.”

To deal with their overwhelming pain, and to honor Malki and who she was, they created Keren Malki – the Malki Foundation – which has helped thousands of Israeli families with special-needs children, equipping them with medical equipment and therapies not provided by the healthcare system. 

Why was the public not warned of the suspected terror attack?

Frimet Roth tells The Magazine, “A few days after the Sbarro bombing, [then-justice minister] Meir Sheetrit appeared on a news program. I watched and wrote about it in at least one article. It still hurts me terribly. [Frimet published an op-ed on this in The Jerusalem Post on August 8, 2023.]

“He said that on the day of the bombing, in the hours preceding, the government was given intelligence information that a terrorist was on his way into the city and intending to commit a terror attack, a bombing. And they were hunting for him. He said, ‘We did not alert the public.’

“And apparently the hospitals were notified in advance to be prepared. But we, the general public, were kept in the dark.

“I would never have allowed Malki to leave if I had known what the police knew. In similar situations when intelligence was obtained about terrorists, they shut the city down. I think it was Haifa they shut down for some hours, the entire center of the city.

“They learned. But that day, not only didn’t they want to shut down the city, they didn’t want to warn us because there would be panic. It eats me up alive when I think back to what they did and what they failed to do. And he had no compunction about appearing and announcing this to us, telling us that this is what those in power did.

“I’m sure that nobody in their own families were walking the streets that day because they knew. 

“There are so many levels to this travesty, this outrageous conduct, right down to the fact that one of those involved in that decision had no hesitation in sharing it afterwards.”

Frimet’s memory is corroborated by two sources.  One, by an official briefing by justice minister Meir Sheetrit at the National Media Center, Jerusalem, on April 1, 2002, in which he said: “That same morning, we gave [PA head Yasser]Arafat information about a terrorist who we understood was ready to carry out an attack in the Jerusalem area – we did not know where and when the terrorist would strike, but we asked Arafat to stop him.”

In addition, then-Shas MK Nissim Ze’ev asked in the Knesset in 2004:

“In one sentence, I want to say and remind everyone: in the Sbarro restaurant, when [15] men, women, and children were murdered, the then-mayor of Jerusalem, [Ehud] Olmert, said: ‘I waited to hear the expected explosion, because there were ‘hot warnings’ [immediate security threats].”

“The public did not know there were hot warnings, and I didn’t understand then: If the mayor knows, and the police are searching for the terrorist, why doesn’t the public also have the right to search for the terrorist together with the police? So, it is possible there would be some panic among the public, but it is possible that terror attacks such as these could be prevented. Therefore, Mr. Speaker [of the Knesset], it is perhaps appropriate to rank warnings according to the real situation on the ground.” (The 168th Sitting of the Sixteenth Knesset, Wednesday, 28 Tishrei 5765, October 13, 2004)

I could not find a response, in Hebrew or English, from Olmert that contradicted what Nissim Ze’ev said, and the Magazine did not receive a response from him when I reached out to the Government Press Office. However, according to JTA, Olmert said at that time: “We tried to do everything to prevent it. Unfortunately, this time we were not successful.”

The Schalit deal

Shockingly, Tamimi was among the 1,027 convicted terrorists released by Israel in exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years. It was not the first time Israel had reneged on its proclaimed policy to never release terrorists “with blood on their hands.” That past decision – that had led to the courageous Entebbe rescue – was a distant memory. 

Ironically, the terrorists’ release was done under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu – the younger brother of the heroic commander Yonatan, who was killed in Entebbe – and a prime minister who, Roth noted in his column on Weiss’s platform, “made his international reputation by authoring a bestseller arguing that deals must never be done with terrorists.” 

Another terrorist released in the Schalit deal was Nizar Tamimi, who, together with his cousin Said, had perpetrated the murder and then the burning of the body of Chaim Mizrahi in 1993. It was only six weeks after the signing of the Oslo Accords (as Caroline Glick pointed out in her Post column in 2017). They were both sentenced by Israel to life in prison. Nizar, a cousin of Ahlam Tamimi, became her husband after his release. Said was released in 2013. 

In October 2020, Nizar was deported by Jordan to Qatar, which does not have an extradition treaty with the US. 

Many terrorists released through the years in deals with the devil returned to terror. Among those most monstrous terrorists released in the Schalit deal was Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the mega-atrocity of Oct. 7. 

Abdallah Barghouti was the bomb-maker who constructed the explosives for the Sbarro horror. He was sentenced by an Israeli court to 67 life sentences in 2004 for his role in this and other terror attacks. So far, Israel has resisted releasing him in the various deals made with terrorists. 

While Tamimi was serving her sentence in an Israeli prison, the Center for Near East Policy Research produced a 2007 film titled For the Sake of Allah, created by Shawn Bayer alongside Dr. Ronni Shaked, a fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute and a senior commentator for Yediot Aharonot. The film features an interview with Tamimi inside the prison, where she sits in front of attractive bookshelves. In the footage, she wears a calm half-smile and a white hijab – which she did not wear that Aug. 9 night while reading the news, and probably was not wearing that day that she walked through an Israeli roadblock.

The four-part video is eye-opening and bone-chilling. Tamimi describes (in Arabic, translated to English by Shaked) in minute detail how she got the call to implement the operation, meeting her collaborator, Izzedine el-Masri, in Ramallah. “We just acknowledged one another through eye contact, and from here we started the operation. On Jaffa Street, we started to talk. It was the first time I spoke with him. I interpreted it as his real desire to be a martyr and to meet Allah. 

“Izzedine el-Masri asked me just one question: ‘Are there religious Jews in the place where we are going to conduct the attack?’ I said yes, there are religious Jews there, and also other people. I had been to the area before; I knew there was a Jewish religious school near there. He asked how many religious Jews would be there.” 

Interviewer: “Why did he ask about religious Jews?” Tamimi: “Because the base of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a religious struggle. 

“When we came to the place, he looked at my eyes, and I told him, ‘There is no God other than the mighty Allah.’ He went on his way, and I went on my way. I felt sorry for him…. I had just walked with a man, and we had a conversation, and in another minute, he disappeared and ascended to the other world. My emotions and thoughts focused only on Izzedine el-Masri,” she says, still smiling, “and his strong personality, and his vision, and his action.” 

Interviewer: “Do you feel sorry?” 

Tamimi: “No, absolutely not. Why? For what?” 

Muhammad Douglas, who helped plan the bombing, was also arrested, and when asked how the people in his village reacted to the attack, he said to the camera, in English, “The people very, very happy [sic].” This is followed by scenes of elation in his village where children are waving candy as they rejoice. 

Douglas, sentenced to 15 life sentences, was also released in the Schalit deal, and was reportedly among the more than 40 terrorists who were deported to Syria, Qatar, or Turkey. According to several sources, Douglas ended up in Qatar. 

The film visits the restaurant of Masri’s parents in Jenin, and depicts how, after the bombing, the restaurant became a shrine with a life-sized mural of Masri on one wall, “a popular spot for young Palestinians to visit,” says the narrator.

Masri’s mother says in the film, “Praise Allah, praise Allah, that he was successful in his action. He went with a full conviction to do it. He spent all of his time in the mosque praying, and reading the Koran. He was interested in just religion.” 

Religion. For Tamimi and for Masri. 

It was never – is never – about territory.

Attempts to prevent her release

As the Schalit deal was being discussed, Frimet Roth wrote endless letters to the Pardons Board to not release Tamimi. Arnold says, “Frimet wrote letters every time, right through the 2000s, as every time there was a mention of a prisoner release, Tamimi would always be mentioned. To no avail.”

About Netanyahu, Arnold has little positive to say. “The Schalit deal was a catastrophe. That’s the exact word that Frimet and I both used in dozens of interviews in the week leading up to it. We had dozens of opportunities to speak with the foreign media in those frantic few days. But not the Israeli media; they had no interest in talking with us, or hearing about Tamimi and why she should never have been put on that list. If Netanyahu walked into the room now, I would walk out… 

“I’m fully aware of all the arguments that say he’s the greatest strategic leader we could possibly have, and that may even be true. But the bitterness of his double-talk about deals with the terrorists, the irreparable damage he did to my family… there’s nothing I care to hear from him.”

The letters that never arrived

Tamimi’s release, in addition to causing indescribable anguish to the Sbarro victims’ families, highlighted an additional issue, as she was released not to Yesha (Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza), but to Jordan, where she received a welcome afforded to heroes and celebrities. 

First, she was flown to Egypt, where she was met with great fanfare by Khaled Mashaal, who served as the second chairman of the Hamas political bureau at the time. (Today, he reportedly lives in Qatar.) When she arrived in Jordan, she received a hero’s welcome, including a reception in her honor at the Jordanian Law Courts building. In Jordan, she was given her own television program starting in March 2012 and running for nearly five years, beamed around the world to Arabic-speaking audiences literally everywhere. 

Throughout her Jordan years, which continue until today, Tamimi – harbored by Amman and kept safe from US prosecutors – has encouraged terror and admiration for those who do it. 
I am surely not the only one who, when confronted with the Tamimi story, wonders, “Where are the men from Munich when we need them?” (Referring to Operation Wrath of God, a covert operation directed by the Mossad to assassinate terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich massacre.)

When I expressed that thought to Arnold Roth, he replied, “With the Eichmann case and other precedents on people’s minds, I’m asked regularly why the Mossad don’t deal with Tamimi’s unjust freedom. But it’s the wrong question. Israel washed its hands of Tamimi the moment she walked free in the 2011 Schalit deal. They’re not interested in the smallest way. They set her free.

“There’s a political price to be paid by Netanyahu, who was the prime minister then and still is now, for doing the deal that led to the freedom of Sinwar and Tamimi and various other savages who went on to do terrible deeds and take lives. He has never communicated with us directly or otherwise, and in our quest for justice, we have zero expectations of him and of those in his circle.

“What we want is to see Tamimi in leg chains being bundled onto a flight from Jordan to the US. [More on that in Part Two of this series.] And, in my opinion, that is Netanyahu’s nightmare.” 

On July 15, 2013, the US Department of Justice filed a criminal complaint under seal against Tamimi in the US District Court for the District of Columbia charging her with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against US nationals outside the US, resulting in death. An arrest warrant was also issued under seal. The complaint, affidavit, and warrant were unsealed and made public on March 14, 2017, and at that time, the FBI simultaneously placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list. (More on this in Part Two.)

“Netanyahu freed her; he sold the deal to the Israeli public in 2011. I can’t imagine him being willing to pay in political capital terms today for the disasters of 2011 and where they brought us. 

“As it happens, Netanyahu was in Melbourne, the city where Malki was born, on the August 2001 day that Malki was murdered, in between his prime ministerships. I was told by friends that he was interviewed there by the Australian media. They asked whether he knew a Melbourne girl was among the dead. He evidently said to the reporters, ‘My heart goes out to the girl’s family,’ meaning us. ‘And when I return to Jerusalem, I will meet with them.’

“Relatives of his wife lived in our neighborhood, and so we were treated over the post-Sbarro years to the sight of Netanyahu turning up in our synagogue, usually on Erev Rosh Hashanah and Erev Pesach. His security people brushed past me. Not that we expected anything different, but he certainly never tried to meet with us. We didn’t hear a word from him then or ever. 

“Fast forward to the day in October 2011 that he announced the Schalit deal. In his TV message to the nation, I recall him using that same phrase – that his heart goes out to the families who suffered at the hands of the terrorists he was setting free. ‘And I shall write to all of them,’ he said. He seemed to mean it. 

“The Schalit deal went ahead, Tamimi was safely back in the arms and affections of the Jordanians, and Frimet and I noticed, unbelievably, that our letter from the PM hadn’t arrived. We checked with friends who had lost children and loved ones to the terrorists, and their letters had not arrived. We asked. You probably know the answer. 

“So, at that point, Frimet started phoning the Prime Minister’s Office.”

Frimet Roth: “And I asked them, ‘Can you tell me where our letter is? Where are the letters?’ A woman in that office told me: ‘Oh, they were sent.’ I said, ‘Well, we didn’t get ours, and nobody we know got theirs.’ In the background, another person, a male voice in English, was whispering: ‘Tell them hundreds of letters were sent. Tell her that.’” 

Arnold: “There were several more rounds of phone calls like this. At some point, I got through to the same woman. ‘You’re making this stuff up,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ve got so many letters to send that we can’t even take them to the post office. The post office is coming to collect them soon.’

“I recall myself saying that she needed to climb down from that tree,” says Arnold. “‘What you’re doing is appalling,’ I said. ‘You need to apologize, to drop the pretense. There were no letters. Why make up silly stories? Think about this and then get back to me with an apology.

“The rest you can guess,” he said to me. 

The Magazine reached out to Netanyahu for a response to Arnold Roth’s comments. At the time of this writing, the prime minister had not sent a reply.

Writer’s note: When editor Erica Schachne reached out more than a month ago, asking me to do a story on this topic, neither of us could have imagined the labyrinth of obfuscation, cowardice, and even mental cruelty, with only an occasional glimmer of hope and light, that Arnold and Frimet Roth encountered when dealing with powerful people in Israel, Jordan, and the United States. She has generously agreed that this be a three-part series.

Next week in Part Two – The American saga: As Tamimi was released to Jordan, which has an extradition treaty with the US, her future was now in the hands of America. 

Part Three will be about the involvement of American ambassadors to Israel, the American Jewish leadership’s response, and conclusions.

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. 

One of the United Torah Judaism spiritual leaders, Gerrer Admor Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, met Joel Landau, a millionaire member of the hasidic anti-Zionist group Satmar, Channel 13 reported on Thursday.

According to the report, the meeting between Alter and Landau focused on the issue of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft and possible solutions, with the anti-Zionist participants suggesting issuing complaints against Israel to foreign courts, including the International Court of Justice.

In footage released by Channel 13, another participant in the meeting, Emet LeYaakov chairman Israel Gafner, can be heard comparing Israel to North Korea, accusing the country of not allowing haredim to leave.

“Human dignity and freedom are not relevant when it comes to those who study Torah,” he accused.

חשיפה: האדמו”ר מגור נגד מדינת ישראל. תיעוד בלעדי שכמותו לא נראה מתוך ביתו של האדמו”ר – במפגש שלו עם המיליארדר האנטי ציוני מסאטמר, יואלי לנדא, נחשפת התוכנית למלחמה במדינת ישראל בהאג ובקונגרס: “האם מותר למסור את היהודים לגויים?” – הצצה להקצנה החרדית הדרמטית מתוך החדר הסגור. צפו: pic.twitter.com/9qvw4rZFAE

— יואלי ברים yoeli brim (@yoeli_brim) August 6, 2026

Gafner added that there was a group in the United States whom they were working with to collect reports of police brutality and pass them to US organizations, including to senators.

During their meeting, Landau reportedly offered to commit one million dollars to a fund protecting yeshiva students from prosecution while evading the IDF draft.

Landau has previously praised the Gerrer Rebbe, writing in a 2025 letter that he was “the only one who stood courageously and heroically to leave the government that threatens to draft the yeshiva students of Israel into their impure army.”

He also has harshly criticized other Israeli haredi rabbis, describing them in the same letter as people who “make compromises to defile the yeshiva students of Israel and send their sons to the Zionist Moloch.”

Knesset members condemn haredi extremism

Democrats MK Naama Lazimi reacted to the footage from Channel 13, saying in a post on X/Twitter that “Those who were looking for where the extremism lies – here you go, please.”

She added that it was “madness” for Israel to be funding this “total breakdown.”

MK Vladimir Beliak also reacted to the footage, saying “If you needed any further proof as to why the haredi parties are not legitimate coalition partners after the elections – in no scenario, under no circumstances. The haredi autonomy must be dismantled.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Saudi Arabia is less powerful than it may seem at first glance, former head of the National Security Council Prof. Jacob Nagel told 103FM in a Friday morning interview addressing the defense agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan.

“You have to understand that Saudi Arabia, despite all its wealth and weapons, is to a large extent a paper tiger. It has a great deal of weaponry and a great deal of money, but militarily, it cannot manage to ‘get through the day,'” Nagel said.

He added, “If we examine the war in which the Saudis tried to fight the Houthis, we see that they failed despite all the advanced capabilities at their disposal. They have a great many assets, but nothing is really liquid, and they have reached a situation in which, economically, they need help.”

“I don’t see the Turks sending their navy to attack the Houthis just because they attacked the Saudis. It simply does not fit my realistic view of the region,” he stressed.

Saudi Arabia looking for alternate alliances 

Nagel therefore believes Saudi Arabia is looking for alternatives.

“It understands that it is in serious trouble, both financially and in terms of security. Even before the latest wars, we saw them make a surprising move and sign an agreement with Iran, simply because they are afraid and feel exposed to the tangible Iranian threat, and to its militias across the Middle East.”

He added, “The Saudis’ problem is that they possess the most sophisticated equipment, aircraft, and intelligence, but they simply do not know how to use that power effectively on the ground. Therefore, all the talk about new alliances with Pakistan or Turkey should be taken with a very large grain of salt.”

At the same time, Nagel sought to explain the Saudi interest in the agreement.

“This is more of a diplomatic maneuver intended to put pressure on the American administration,” Prof. Nagel said. “The Saudis are disappointed with the conduct of the United States, especially in light of the shortages in missile and interceptor stockpiles that they identify in the West, and they are trying to signal that they will not remain alone in the campaign against the Shi’ite axis.”

Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani agreement accelerated due to regional developments

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a major joint defense agreement on Friday in the Saudi city of Jeddah. The move marks a significant escalation in efforts by the regional powers to strengthen security cooperation amid growing tensions and the ongoing war between the United States and Iran.

A source close to the Saudi government and military, speaking anonymously to AFP, said, “The agreement has been under discussion for a long time, but recent developments in the region accelerated the process.” Two additional regional sources with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the planned timetable to Reuters.

The closely watched summit brought together Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Erdogan departed Ankara on Friday morning for a brief working visit, accompanied by senior Turkish officials. Sharif and Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, arrived in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, where they were received at Jeddah airport by the deputy governor of the Mecca region.

A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry stressed that despite tensions in the Gulf, the visit has “significance that goes beyond the immediate crisis and short-term considerations.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset is no longer Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the opposition. For years, his rivals have mistaken national exhaustion with Netanyahu for public faith in them. They have changed leaders, renamed parties, assembled coalitions, and returned each time to the same message: I am not Netanyahu. That may be a protest slogan. It is not a governing philosophy, and it is nowhere near enough for the Israel that now exists.

This is not an argument for absolving Netanyahu. October 7 happened on his watch, and the conception that Hamas could be contained, deterred, and managed collapsed in blood. The military and intelligence establishment failed to understand Hamas, interpret the signs it possessed, and defend Israeli communities when the attack began.

No published inquiry has established that Netanyahu received a precise operational warning and simply ignored it. But political responsibility is larger than a document placed on a prime minister’s desk. Netanyahu presided over the doctrine that failed, and he must answer for it.

Accountability, however, is not amnesia. David Ben-Gurion declared the state. But the powerful, technological, globally consequential country the opposition now asks to inherit is, in no small part, Netanyahu’s modern Israel.
Israel is no longer a struggling young nation begging to enter the room.

It is a regional military power, a global technology center, an OECD economy, and a country that built open partnerships with Arab governments once considered unreachable. Netanyahu did not build that Israel alone. No leader could. Yet his economic reforms, strategic focus, campaign against Iran, and the Abraham Accords helped shape the Israel that his rivals now claim they can lead.

Replacing Netanyahu, therefore, requires more than persuading Israelis that they are tired of him. A successor must preserve what he helped build, repair what failed under him, and govern at a higher level.

Israel requires a leader who can maneuver locally and internationally

Winning votes inside Israel is only part of the job. Weapons, trade, diplomatic protection, normalization, and the IDF’s freedom of action are influenced beyond Israel’s borders. A prime minister must understand Washington, Arab capitals, global markets, hostile media, and people who do not think like Israelis. Israel is not searching for a competent mayor with a national title. It requires a statesman.

The founding generation understood this. Israel placed figures such as Golda Meir and Abba Eban before the world because they could translate Jewish sovereignty into the language of the people Israel needed to persuade.

Meir’s American upbringing and Eban’s Cambridge education were not ornaments. They were diplomatic weapons. They understood that an Israeli leader abroad never represents only himself. Every sentence, gesture, photograph, and interview tells the world whether the Jewish state is prepared, disciplined, and in command.

That is why Naftali Bennett’s ill-fitting suit at COP26 was not entirely trivial. Bad tailoring does not disqualify a prime minister. But when the suit becomes the story, the representative has failed to understand the stage. Israeli culture prizes informality and bluntness. The international arena can read the same qualities as provincialism. Stagecraft cannot replace statecraft, but for Israel, it is part of statecraft.

International fluency means nothing without strategic clarity. Too many politicians still repeat “two-state solution” as though the phrase survived October 7 untouched. It did not. A June 2026 INSS survey found that only 25% of Israelis supported a two-state solution.

I do not believe a broad Jewish Israeli coalition capable of replacing Netanyahu can be led by someone who still treats Palestinian statehood as the inevitable destination of Israeli policy. Such a candidate is telling the public that October 7 changed the body count but not the conception.

My position is unambiguous. I do not support the establishment of a Palestinian state, and I do not believe it is realistic under present or foreseeable conditions. Palestinians should not be denied dignity, prosperity, civil government, or a future. But sovereignty is not a humanitarian program. It carries armies, borders, treaties, weapons, international standing, and the ability to invite hostile powers into strategically dominant territory.

Israel removed every Jewish community and its permanent military presence from Gaza in 2005. Hamas turned the territory into a terror fortress and ultimately launched the deadliest attack in Israel’s history. Repeating that experiment from land overlooking Jerusalem, the coastal plain, and Ben-Gurion Airport is national recklessness dressed in diplomatic language.

The claimed Palestinian right of return makes the old formula even more dishonest. The world proposes a Palestinian state beside Israel while preserving a Palestinian national claim inside Israel. That is not two states for two peoples. It is one Palestinian state immediately, followed by a permanent campaign to dismantle the Jewish state demographically. There can be no peace until mass return into sovereign Israel is rejected permanently and the fantasy of reversing Jewish sovereignty is defeated.

Why the two-state notion is dead

A credible alternative government must therefore move beyond the two-state paradigm, not merely beyond Netanyahu.

Palestinians can exercise extensive civil self-government, build local institutions, expand economic opportunity, and administer their communities. Arab governments can assume greater responsibility for investment, education, development, and deradicalization.

Israel must retain overriding security freedom and prevent another sovereign military platform from rising beside its capital, airport, and population centers. Policy must begin with the world that exists, not the world foreign ministries keep pretending exists.

The Abraham Accords showed what realism can accomplish. The governments that normalized with Israel have not all abandoned support for Palestinian statehood. But the accords destroyed the Palestinian veto over Israel’s regional acceptance.

Arab governments proved that they could pursue security, technology, commerce, and strategic cooperation with Israel without waiting for Ramallah’s permission.

Any alternative government worthy of the name should deepen that achievement, not drag Israel backward into formulas buried beneath the ruins of October 7.

This is the standard that Netanyahu’s challengers have not met. They must offer a security doctrine, an economic program, international fluency, cultural confidence, and the stature to represent a powerful Jewish state before allies and enemies alike.

They must correct Netanyahu’s failures without erasing his achievements.

Rejecting Netanyahu is not the same as understanding Israel, and replacing a prime minister is not the same as being qualified to lead the country he leaves behind.

Israelis deserve a contest between governing visions, not a choice between one man and a vacuum. Netanyahu will be replaced when someone proves capable of carrying Israel’s power at home and before the world, while protecting what he built and repairing what he broke. Until then, “not Netanyahu” is not the opposition’s strategy. It is Netanyahu’s insurance policy.

The writer is the founder and CEO of The Israel Innovation Fund, a regular Jerusalem Post opinion writer, and the author of the forthcoming book What Is Zionism? Why Never Again Is Not Enough.

This post was originally published on here. 

Israeli public discourse is caught between what the Left calls the “poison machine” and what the Right calls the “poison channels.” As elections approach and every party seeks to distinguish itself, the country’s social race to the bottom is likely to accelerate. A hot – and dangerous – summer lies ahead.

The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) examines relations among the different sectors of Israeli society through its Emotional Proximity Index, which measures Israelis’ attitudes toward 10 groups. The findings show that the two least-liked groups, to put it mildly, are Arabs and haredim (ultra-Orthodox), with the latter at the very bottom.

Beyond the grave social consequences, the nationwide emotional distance from both groups has political implications. 

Each is represented by sectoral parties that many other political actors effectively blacklist: so long as haredi parties defend broad exemption from military service, they are unacceptable partners for a centrist government; so long as Arab parties are not Zionist, they are consigned to the opposition in almost any conceivable coalition. 

The stark result is that broad swaths of the public deem roughly one-third of Israel’s citizens illegitimate partners in a future government.

This reality is not inevitable. The coming election campaign may offer an opportunity for some social repair through daring moves that cross sectoral lines. 

One emerging development suggests what may be possible: if Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz can agree on the latter leaving Yesh Atid and joining Ra’am, it would begin to challenge the current threatening image of the “Arab parties” as disloyal to the state and therefore untrustworthy. 

If Segalovitz, who is known for his commitment to fighting violent crime, were then appointed national security minister after being elected on a civic platform supported mainly by Arab voters, everyone would stand to gain. The message would be even more powerful if he served in a broad government that also included right-wing parties.

Many ultra-Orthodox Jews deeply dissatisfied with haredi leadership

A similar development could take shape in haredi society. Despite the community’s celebrated unity behind its “great Torah sages,” many haredim are deeply dissatisfied with its current predicament. 

Their leadership’s unrestrained rhetoric, its scandalous refusal to shoulder its fair share of the national defense burden, its resistance to employment and educational reform, and the poverty and isolation these policies perpetuate, do not reflect the free choice of thousands of haredim. 

Their numbers are difficult to estimate, but it is hardly far-fetched to say that they represent at least two Knesset seats worth of haredi voters.

An organized movement of haredim seeking integration – in employment and military service – already exists. Led by Rabbi David Leibel through the Achvat Torah network, it gives expression to an authentic haredi voice – one that understands that haredi society must respond to changing realities and connect with the broader public sphere. 

These haredim seek to realize the ideal of Torah im derech eretz (Torah combined with worldly engagement) without viewing this as either an imposition or a compromise. Conservative in outlook and lifestyle, they nevertheless understand that excessive conservatism breeds stagnation and that its consequences are already clearly visible in parts of haredi society.

Some haredim are plainly dissatisfied with their political representation. Although the community is growing rapidly – doubling every 20 years – its political representation has barely increased. Haredi votes are already drifting to mainstream parties, but only as individuals, quietly breaking ranks, so the message of civic partnership is lost. 

A new haredi party, a concrete initiative called The Haredi Public, is already taking shape, but would be unlikely to clear the electoral threshold and would naturally seek to join an existing party. The next Knesset could therefore include one or two haredi lawmakers elected on a mainstream slate and promoting an explicitly integrationist haredi agenda. 

On the surface, these would be small shifts – a handful of seats crossing the stark lines between identity groups that divide us. Their true value, however, lies in challenging the automatic labeling of the groups routinely cast as Israel’s ultimate outsiders – haredim and Arabs. If this promising trend continues, it could strengthen the common denominator of Israeli society: citizenship.

The writer is president of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute – and a professor (emeritus) of law at Bar-Ilan University.

This post was originally published on here. 

Palestinians managed to smuggle new ATVs into the Gaza Strip under the IDF’s nose before publicly displaying them in Deir al Balah and performing stunts with the vehicles, Walla reported Friday, citing military sources.

IDF officials said no authorization had been given for ATVs to be transferred into Gaza and that the suspected smuggling is now under investigation. 

Officials also determined unequivocally that the vehicles did not enter through the Kerem Shalom Crossing but instead passed through gates along the border fence supervised by the IDF and Military Police.

The incident comes amid recent criticism of the Military Police’s conduct in the Gaza Division, particularly at several gates along the Gaza border fence. 

Insufficient border checks

The criticism centers on claims that civilian contractors and military personnel entering and leaving through the gates are not being subjected to sufficiently thorough checks. There has also been criticism over a lack of enforcement against reckless driving along roads in the area.

“The Gaza Division needs to increase enforcement together with the Military Police,” a security source said.

“Soldiers are sitting in air-conditioned police vehicles instead of checking every vehicle entering and leaving Gaza. When they are asked what they are doing at the gate, they say they are supposed to prevent looting on the Palestinian side.”

This post was originally published on here. 

Fielding four aspiring prime ministers, the opposition’s leaders will have to crown Gadi Eisenkot as their joint candidate. Not because he is better equipped to govern, but because he is better equipped to win. 

Yes, polls are tricky, but the gap Eisenkot has opened, suggesting he is nearly twice as popular as Naftali Bennett, will become unambiguous if sustained for another month. 

Conceding this will not come easily for the other three. 

For B’Yachad candidate Naftali Bennett, Eisenkot is a political novice who has not a fraction of the experience he has earned as prime minister and, before that, as minister of defense, education, and economy. The same goes for Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman, who headed six odd ministries, including defense, where he was Eisenkot’s superior. 

As for Yair Golan of The Democrats, he brings no such political experience, but to him, Eisenkot is an equal, the fellow infantryman he succeeded as deputy chief of General Staff. 

Even so, all three must realize that Eisenkot brings what none of them has – a symbol of the agony this country has endured and of the hope that it craves. Having lost in Gaza a son and two nephews, Eisenkot personifies our suffering. And having risen to the IDF’s command as the son of immigrants from Morocco, he instills pride in many Likud-voters’ hearts. 

Bennett, Liberman, and Golan surely know all this. They must therefore think not how to defy Eisenkot’s electoral gravity, but how to join it. And the way to do this is to present with him a shadow cabinet, a team that will display collegiality, consensus, and drive. 

Britain’s shadow cabinet monitor ministers, prepare to replace them

IN BRITAIN, the shadow cabinet is a serious thing that sometimes makes headlines. In 1968, for instance, shadow secretary of defense Enoch Powell was fired after delivering a racist speech. And in 1931, Winston Churchill resigned as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer after the Tories decided to back the Labour government’s plan for self-rule in India. 

Monitoring and critiquing a particular minister’s work, the shadow minister enjoys a higher public profile. Should he or she replace the minister they shadow, they will not have to study from scratch their ministry’s resources and tasks. 

Despite its utility, Israel never had a shadow cabinet, other than one anecdotal attempt by Tommy Lapid in 2005, which fell apart several weeks after it was announced, when Lapid and his Shinui party were trounced in that year’s elections. 

That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea. It’s a good idea any day, but for today’s opposition it is vital, because to win, it must display collective harmony, pragmatism, and purpose. That is how swing voters will be convinced that the opposition means business and can lead this traumatized country to better times. 

Who, then, should be shadow minister of what?
 
THE SHADOW cabinet should only assign six senior ministries’ hopeful ministers. Trying to man the full list, besides being impractical, would imply that the many unnecessary ministries in the current government are necessary.

The shadow ministers’ portfolios should be defense, foreign, finance, education, justice, and internal security. The way these agencies are managed will largely shape our departure from the past three years’ catastrophes. 

Liberman’s experience, systemic thinking makes him ideal defense minister

Defense should go to Liberman. Having already served in that position, he knows the defense system well. Moreover, he will work well with Eisenkot, as the two already did last decade. 

Moreover, Liberman thinks systemically, a merit he displayed as defense minister, when he argued that the IDF must build from scratch a missile corps, with the kind of resources and independence that existing forces like artillery, engineering, or the armored corps have. 

As an idea, it may or may not be right, but raising it shows that as defense minister he will bring the kind of broad, long-range outlook that an Israeli defense minister must possess, and the current defense minister lacks. After nearly three years of continuous fighting, the defense system needs the kind of comprehensive rethinking that Liberman can inspire and oversee. 

Foreign affairs should go to Bennett. His awareness of Israel’s image crisis is deep, his understanding of the media is thorough, his English is impeccable, and he has what it takes to reboot the foreign service, which so sorely needs new resources, direction, and esprit de corps. 

Finance should go, for the first time in Israel’s history, to a woman. There are two choices, at least. One is economist Karen Turner, a former director-general of the Finance Ministry and the Transportation Ministry. Another is Orit Farkash-Hacohen, a lawyer who headed the Israel Public Utility Authority before turning to politics and serving, successively, as minister of science, tourism, and strategic affairs. Now running with Eisenkot, she may have an edge over Turner, who is running with Bennett and has never been a politician. 

The shadow education minister should be Yair Lapid. The revolution that our ossified school system begs may well be delivered by a man who, before turning to politics at age 50, was a successful cultural entrepreneur. He owes this ministry’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy nothing, and will think out of the box. 

The national security minister should be Golan. The man who would have headed the IDF, if not for his big mouth, is actually an able manager who can fight the anarchism – Arab, Bedouin, ultra-Orthodox, and ultra-nationalist – that Itamar Ben-Gvir tolerated and inspired. 

Lastly, the shadow justice minister should be Matan Kahana. A religious air force colonel who, as the previous government’s minister of religious affairs, rattled that system – he is a right-wing lawyer who can help deliver a constitution by broad consensus. 

Introducing such a team now will convince voters that the humble and inexperienced Eisenkot will head an experienced and purposeful team that will collectively fix what its predecessors broke, and heal what they wounded. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.

This post was originally published on here. 

Police and forensic scientists have drafted in extra staff to try to identify the bodies of 80 migrants found after last week’s mass rush into Spain’s Ceuta enclave, as desperate families wait for news of missing loved ones.

Most will be buried in Ceuta in the coming days, officials said.

For the vast majority who won’t be named before then, staff have taken fingerprints and DNA samples and will keep working to connect the bodies with names, and then with relatives.

The influx and associated fatalities overwhelmed Ceuta’s five-man forensic team, which dealt with just 76 deaths in the whole of last year. Eight extra staff have been drafted in from the mainland, and a bigger morgue has been set up at a former military hospital.

“We have faced such a number of victims that it has overwhelmed our operational capacities,” said team director Manuel Aparcero, who was called to certify the deaths of migrants as they were brought onto the beach on July 30.

As his team kept working a week on, families posted messages on social media, watched news reports and kept close to phones, hoping their relatives would finally get in touch.

Jamal Bahloul, 26, said his 22-year-old brother Mohamed, a construction worker, left his home in Tangier and was last in contact on July 30.

Relatives search for misssing family members in local morgues

“We have heard nothing more,” said Bahloul. “We don’t know whether he is in Ceuta or he died.”

Other relatives are gathering at the Moroccan side of the border to press officials for answers and visit local morgues.

Around 72,000 people illegally entered Ceuta from Morocco in a 24-hour period, according to Spanish estimates.

Autopsies revealed many of the 80 people whose bodies were brought ashore in Spain died from cardiopulmonary arrests – a common feature of drownings, pathologists said.

Just four have been identified through fingerprints already in Spanish databases or through DNA samples, and tests are being run to confirm the identities of another four, according to a statement from a local court issued late on Thursday.

Spanish police have shared the fingerprints of all those who died with the Moroccan authorities, and have opened an office by the border where relatives can file a missing persons report and supply DNA samples.

A total of 19 reports had been filed by Thursday, according to the court statement.

Efforts to identify the migrants are being conducted under a mass accidents protocol that is usually applied to traffic accidents or natural disasters primarily affecting Spaniards, such as the Adamuz rail disaster in January.

Charities have in the past criticized the government’s failure to apply the same measures to incidents involving migrants, such as the 2024 sinking of a migrant boat near the Canary Islands in which 57 people were believed to have died.

All the migrant bodies will be buried in Ceuta in the coming days unless a relative asks for a body already identified to be repatriated, Aparcero said. Bodies can also be later exhumed to be transferred abroad if authorized by a judge.

After the autopsies, forensics teams have been cleaning the bodies in accordance with the Muslim rites, Aparcero added. “We respect their ideology and religion.”

Spain hopes to transfer migrant minors to mainland 

Spain’s Youth Minister said on Friday that she hoped to start transferring migrant minors from Spain’s enclave of Ceuta to the mainland within weeks.

Sira Rego said 1,342 minors had been registered so far and more staff would be brought from the mainland to help the effort. “We are prioritizing girls, and boys and girls who are under 13,” she told reporters during a trip to Ceuta.

This post was originally published on here. 

Every year, Rabbi Aaron Peretz climbs into a Spanish Civil Guard patrol vehicle and spends several hours driving along the 12-kilometer steel fence separating the Spanish city of Melilla from Morocco.

To most people, the barrier is one of Europe’s best-known frontiers, built to prevent illegal migration into the European Union. Reinforced with cameras and anti-climb devices, it has become a symbol of Europe’s struggle to control its southern border.

For Peretz, however, the annual inspection has nothing to do with immigration.

“Few people know this,” he says with a smile after leaving Melilla’s kollel (institute for full-time Torah study), accompanied by several of his children. “The security fence also serves as the city’s eruv [halachic boundary allowing Jews to carry on Shabbat]. We don’t need to build one. Every year we simply check that the enclosure remains intact.”

It is a uniquely Melilla story: Infrastructure built for security has also become part of Jewish religious life.

Only days before our conversation, another fence – 400 kilometers away in the neighboring Spanish city of Ceuta – became the focus of international attention after tens of thousands of Moroccan nationals broke into Spanish territory in the largest border crisis Spain has faced in decades.

The images shocked Europe and prompted Madrid to deploy additional security forces. But for residents of Ceuta and Melilla, the events represented something deeper than another migration emergency. They revived long-standing fears about the vulnerability of Spain’s only two cities on the African continent.

Walking through Melilla’s compact center, it is easy to forget how strategically exposed it is. Catholic churches, mosques, a Hindu temple, and synagogues stand within a few streets of one another, reflecting more than a century of multicultural coexistence.

Melilla remains one of Spain’s most vibrant Jewish centers outside Madrid and Barcelona

Among them rises the elegant Or Zaruah Synagogue, completed in 1925 in the Neo-Mudéjar style by Enrique Nieto, one of Antoni Gaudí’s best-known disciples. It remains one of the architectural jewels of the city and an active center of Jewish life.

Melilla’s modern Jewish community flourished after the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859-1860, when Jews from northern Morocco settled in the expanding Spanish port. By World War II, the city was home to nearly 7,000 Jews and 26 synagogues – more than the combined number of churches and mosques at the time. Although today the community numbers around 1,000 people, it remains one of Spain’s most vibrant Jewish centers outside Madrid and Barcelona.

Its history is also linked to one of the most painful episodes of Moroccan Jewry.

According to the Mem Guimel Cultural Association, the Egoz – the clandestine vessel that carried Moroccan Jews toward Israel – departed first from Melilla before sailing to Al Hoceima to collect emigrants. The boat sank on the night of January 10-11, 1961, killing 44 people, including 43 Jews seeking to reach Israel. Today, Mem Guimel preserves their memory.

For much of the outside world, Ceuta and Melilla appear in the headlines only when dramatic images show migrants climbing fences or swimming around breakwaters.

Ceuta and Melilla remain integral parts of Spain and the EU despite Morocco’s sovereignty claims

In reality, they are integral parts of Spain and the European Union, even as Morocco continues to dispute their sovereignty. Melilla has belonged to Spain since 1497, while Ceuta’s ties date back to a few decades afterward. Madrid argues that both cities became Spanish centuries before modern Morocco gained independence in 1956.

For decades, thousands of Moroccan workers crossed the frontier every day, and cross-border trade sustained much of the local economy. That balance has gradually eroded as Morocco developed its own infrastructure and tightened commercial restrictions, leaving many residents convinced that Rabat has sought to increase pressure on Madrid.

That fragile balance was shattered last week.

Unlike previous attempts to storm the fences – usually involving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa – the overwhelming majority of those who entered Ceuta were Moroccan nationals. That single fact transformed the crisis.

For the Spanish government, it was primarily a migration emergency exploited by human trafficking networks. For many residents of Ceuta and Melilla, it looked like something very different.

“I don’t think this started on Thursday,” said IL, a young woman from Melilla whom we met near the border fence and who accused King Mohammed of promoting the invasion. Another local resident considered that “whoever organized this wanted to send a political message to Spain. Around here, very few people believe it simply happened on its own.”

Spain stops short of blaming Rabat despite Morocco’s apparent knowledge of Ceuta migration rush

Across both cities, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, business owners, and retired officials repeat the same suspicion: that such a massive movement of people could hardly have taken place without, at the very least, the knowledge of the Moroccan authorities.

The Spanish government has stopped short of directly accusing Rabat of orchestrating the events.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the mass crossing as “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” while Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska insisted that “Morocco poses no threat either to Ceuta or to the rest of Spain. It is an absolutely reliable partner, and our cooperation made it possible to reverse the situation within 24 hours.”

Those statements may reassure audiences in Madrid. On Spain’s African frontier, they inspire considerably less confidence.

Whether Morocco actively encouraged the crossing or simply failed to prevent it remains an open question. What is undeniable is that the crisis has fundamentally altered public perception. In Ceuta and Melilla, it is no longer viewed simply as another episode of irregular migration but increasingly as a geopolitical warning.

For many residents, that perception is shaped by history.

In November 1975, as Gen. Francisco Franco lay dying, Morocco launched the Green March, sending some 350,000 civilians into what was then Spanish Sahara. Spain, immersed in a delicate political transition, chose not to confront the marchers and withdrew within weeks.

Nearly half a century later, the memory remains vivid.

“If Morocco ever wanted to overwhelm Ceuta or Melilla, it wouldn’t need tanks,” said Manu Tapia, a retired resident of Melilla. “Last week showed that thousands of civilians could create a crisis without a single shot being fired. Remember the Green March!”

Whether that scenario is realistic is almost beside the point. The events demonstrated how quickly a migration crisis can become a political, diplomatic, and psychological one.

Spain’s membership in NATO and the European Union remains its ultimate security guarantee. Yet the first hours of the Ceuta crisis exposed the limits of responding to a mass civilian incursion. Local police and Civil Guard units were rapidly overwhelmed before military personnel arrived to reinforce surveillance and logistics. By then, the images had already spread around the world.

The humanitarian consequences were equally severe. Over 100 people drowned attempting to reach Spanish territory, while thousands spent nights sleeping in parks, beaches, and public spaces before many were gradually returned to Morocco. Others, particularly unaccompanied minors, entered lengthy legal procedures that make repatriation far more difficult.

The crisis has also reignited Spain’s domestic political debate, with opposition parties accusing Sánchez’s government of weakening border deterrence, while the government insists it acted within European law and preserved essential cooperation with Rabat.

Morocco has largely sidestepped the question of who organized – or allowed – the mass crossing into Ceuta. Officials have avoided directly addressing the allegations, suggesting instead that mafias trafficking with humans and social media helped fuel the events.

For many people in Spain’s African cities, that explanation has done little to dispel the uncertainty.

The greatest misconception about Ceuta and Melilla is that they are defined solely by the fence. They are not.

They are places where Europe and Africa meet not only geographically but culturally and spiritually. Church bells, the call to prayer, and Jewish services have coexisted here for generations. Spanish, Tamazight (a local Arabic dialect), and some Hebrew can all be heard in the same neighborhoods, reflecting a diversity rarely found elsewhere in Europe.

That coexistence has survived wars, diplomatic crises, economic downturns, and repeated migration emergencies. It remains one of the defining characteristics of both cities.

Jewish life in Melilla goes on

Although much smaller than they once were, the Jewish communities continue to occupy a distinctive place in that mosaic. Synagogues remain active, Melilla’s Jewish school continues educating new generations, and community organizations preserve a heritage that stretches back more than 150 years.

Life, despite everything, goes on.

Which brings the story back to Rabbi Aaron Peretz.

Sometime next year, he will once again climb into a Civil Guard vehicle to inspect Melilla’s eruv, just as he has done every year. The same steel fence that dominates headlines across Europe will once again be examined not as a political frontier but as the religious boundary that allows the city’s Jewish community to observe Shabbat.

For visitors, it is a striking paradox, but for Melilla’s Jews, it is simply part of everyday life.

Yet that same barrier has come to symbolize something far greater than a security installation. It embodies the complex reality of two Spanish cities that stand at the intersection of continents, religions, and competing national narratives.

Whether this summer’s unprecedented mass crossing proves to be an isolated episode or the beginning of a new phase in relations between Spain and Morocco remains impossible to know.

What is already clear is that it has altered the psychological landscape of Spain’s southern frontier and reopened questions about the future of Europe’s southern border.

This post was originally published on here. 

My first thought was: “What was that?” My second was: “It’s too early to tell.”

The images, however, were striking and unforgettable. Last weekend, some 80,000 people – mainly young men – swarmed across the border from Morocco into the Spanish town of Ceuta. Using a word like “swarmed” has probably already marked me in certain circles, and I should issue a trigger warning now that, at the risk of being accused of dehumanizing, I might describe the incident as an “invasion” or “incursion.”

I’m aware that these border-breachers are human beings – the vast majority of them being exploited. Scores lost their lives – and for what? That’s another question: Just who was behind the mass cross-border flow of thousands, and why did it take place?

Then there’s the tricky problem of what to call them – migrants, infiltrators, asylum-seekers, aliens, potential members of jihadist sleeper cells? Take your pick.

Some of the answers depend on where you are on the socio-political map, and others on where you are reading this on the global map.

The pictures of the barefoot adolescents emerging onto the beaches or climbing up rock cliffs and over fences have entered public awareness, like the Syrian refugees trekking across Europe after Angela Merkel opened Germany to migrants in 2015, or the devastating image of the lifeless body of toddler Aylan Kurdi on a Turkish beach after his family tried to cross the waters to Greece.

Whatever they came to do, it wasn’t to have a picnic in the picturesque small town or cash in on Spain’s success in last month’s FIFA World Cup. It was a challenge to Spain’s sovereignty, European conceptions, and the greater global diplomatic order. Someone was testing the waters, less than 20 km. from mainland Europe. And it wasn’t the first time.

Ceuta shows how mass migration can be mobilized and weaponized

Although most of the infiltrators returned – or were returned – to Morocco a few hours after kissing the Spanish enclave’s shore, they left a mark more enduring than their footprints on the sand. Residents of the small town were scared and scarred. And it wasn’t just the citizens in Ceuta who looked on in fear.

Ceuta’s residents physically locked their homes and stores; Europeans and Brits mentally locked down too. The need for tighter border controls was seen in every youth gleefully posting his personal Spanish conquest on social media.

Open borders combined with closed eyes are vulnerable to abuse. The incident tested the EU’s tolerance of migrants. And maybe that was the point: to see how far they could go figuratively and literally. A new term popped up in discussions: “Migration by mobilization.”

This mass crossing was not the work of small smuggling networks, but the result of the digital platforms used to get out the message, “The border is open,” and spread the news that Spanish courts had recently ruled that migrants who managed to reach Ceuta by sea would not be immediately turned back. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who had previously said Spain would regularize the status of some 1 million refugees in the country, fumed at this assault on Spanish sovereignty (and challenge to his already troubled government).

While last weekend’s incident might not change the global diplomatic map on its own, the precedent, and more importantly the response, will be watched everywhere from the US, Southeast Asia, and Europe. It has been suggested that countries that control migration routes – including Morocco and Turkey – might use the incident to leverage greater diplomatic influence. 

Some countries, including Russia and Belarus, might be encouraged to further “weaponize” migrants, using them as pawns to threaten neighboring states, as happened when Belarus apparently permitted an influx of mainly North African and Middle Eastern refugees along the borders with Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia in 2021.

Morocco, an Abraham Accords ally with Israel, is a relatively stable country under the rule of King Mohammed VI. Feeding conspiracy theories, there has been increased tension between both Israel and Sanchez’s Spain (mainly over Gaza), and Morocco and Spain (chiefly over Western Sahara and the status of Ceuta and the neighboring Spanish enclave, Melilla). Spain’s antagonism toward Donald Trump has increased, while Morocco’s relationship with him has grown closer. (Just this week, the Moroccan highway to Western Sahara was renamed after the US president.)

Undoubtedly, the scenes of the mass crashing of a border carry different connotations for Israelis post-October 7, 2023, when thousands of terrorists, followed by waves of “ordinary civilians,” invaded southern Israel, murdering 1,200, abducting 251, raping, pillaging, and burning homes to the ground.

Spiked chief political writer Brendan O’Neill noted the instant hypocrisy and anti-Israel conspiracies. “The speed with which anti-Zionist cranks latched on to the Ceuta crisis was extraordinary,” he wrote. “No sooner had 60,000 men from Morocco swam and kicked their way into the Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa than both the woke Left and crank Right had spied the hidden hand of the Jewish state… Shorter version: the Jews did it.

“It really is a mania. The Combat Antisemitism Movement found that within the first 72 hours of Ceuta’s storming, more than 100 million people on social media had been exposed to the idea that it was a ‘Jewish plot’…

“It is our own governments’ suicidal abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty that has caused the migrant crisis, not the hand-rubbing plotting of the Jews of the Holy Land. Like their forebears in the pitchfork Middle Ages, anti-Zionists prefer to live in a house of lies than to confront the truth of their world, and themselves.”

Israel also had mass border breachings before October 7, 2023 – notably one when Palestinians swarmed into the Golan Heights from Syria in May 2011, hailing it as a return to a homeland while conveniently ignoring the fact that the Golan Heights has never had a “Palestinian” presence. There were also intrusive rallies along the Lebanon border.

These incidents already raised the issue of social media creating such “spontaneous” events and who is legally responsible for any harm caused. It’s a strange world when the speed of security incidents depends on the quality of Wi-Fi, and the response needs to take place in the virtual world as well as on the ground.

There is undoubtedly poverty in Morocco; there’s also poverty in New York, London, and throughout the Western world. And these were not “climate migrants,” as some suggested; the weather in Ceuta is the same as just over the border. There is no part of the world that can – or should – accept the bulk of another part’s population. 

Ceuta turns mass migration into a global security concern

The answer is developing the techniques and technologies to combat the difficulties, and here, to the dismay of boycotters, Israel is a leading light in every sphere, including agriculture, water, and foodtech.

Europe was definitely spooked. Even though Ceuta and Melilla aren’t included in the Schengen Area that guarantees border crossing from one European member state to another, it was clear that the youths weren’t intending on finding work and living normative lives in sleepy Ceuta.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni immediately suspended the Schengen agreement with Spain on security grounds, and convened a meeting of European interior ministers to discuss the situation. The migrant crisis, already on the agenda in several national elections, will continue to polarize politicians and voters.

The Ceuta incident is largely being treated as part of the migrant crisis rather than a terrorist threat. Maybe that’s because it’s more convenient for European governments to continue to relate to a humanitarian crisis, real or otherwise, than to acknowledge the threat of global jihad, even after frequent painful reminders in the form of lethal attacks, including last month’s car-ramming by a suspected Islamic State member at the Berlin Gay Pride parade. Not only migrants deserve human rights; so do the citizens of the receiving countries.

The events last weekend demonstrate just how quickly borders can be breached by overwhelming numbers. Israel doesn’t need the reminder; it will be forever haunted by October 7. That’s why it is making an effort to maintain buffer zones on the northern and southern borders.

Mass migration is morphing from being a mainly humanitarian issue into being a global security concern. It wasn’t just a border that was breached in Ceuta; a red line was also crossed

This post was originally published on here. 

In the Jewish yearly cycle, the Torah portion Re’eh is generally read at the beginning of Elul – the month of mercy and forgiveness. This month is a time for introspection and accounting for the year that has passed, as well as a time to set goals and objectives for the coming year.

The understanding that we need to pause from time to time and examine our actions is sharpened by reading the opening verses of the parasha: “See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God… and the curse, if you do not heed the commandments of the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 11:26-28).

In these words, the Torah distills all of life’s struggles and temptations into one simple principle: making the right choice. In the language of the thinkers, this is known as the “point of choice.”

The Torah similarly summarizes the theme of repentance, in the passage read around the time of Rosh Hashanah:

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day… I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

What is truth? How does on choose?

What is the truth? What constitutes a proper life? And how does one choose correctly? These are weighty questions with which humanity has grappled for many years. The temptations and desires of the world, painted in dazzling colors, do not make the right choice any easier. They can even distort clarity of thought, drawing a person into them without realizing that they are choosing curse and death.

Every person has areas they have already conquered – places where the likelihood of stumbling is virtually nonexistent. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, in his essay on free choice (Michtav Me’Eliyahu, vol. I), notes that for most people who observe the Torah and its commandments, there is no temptation to desecrate Shabbat or to eat something that is clearly not kosher. 

Even those who observe Jewish tradition have areas of choice that they have already conquered, while their struggles lie elsewhere, each person according to their own level and circumstances.

A person has an obligation to identify where their own “point of choice” lies – the place where the weight of their personal struggle is greatest – and to choose correctly. One must be courageous enough to examine, through the lens of truth, whether one’s actions belong to life or to death.

The writings of the early sages offer a simple explanation for human behavior that leads people to make mistaken choices: the assumption that the choice has already been made for them. A person who does not believe may reason that their choices have no real significance, since once their life comes to an end, their role is over and their actions have no lasting impact. 

Even a person who considers themselves a believer may feel that their fate has already been predetermined and that the path they are walking cannot be changed. This mistaken way of thinking removes responsibility from the individual and causes them to miss the greatest human gift with which humanity has been endowed – the ability to choose.

Maimonides wrote about this error: “If God had decreed that a person would be righteous or wicked, or if there were something in a person’s very nature that compelled them toward a particular belief or action, as fools imagine, how could He have commanded us through the prophets, ‘Do this’ and ‘Do not do this’?… What place would there be for the entire Torah?… 

Everything is done according to God’s will, yet our actions are entrusted to us

“Know that everything is done according to His will, and yet our actions are entrusted to us. Just as the Creator desired that fire and wind rise upward, and water and earth descend downward, so too He desired that human beings have free will, with all their actions entrusted to them, without anyone forcing or compelling them. 

“Rather, a person acts according to their own understanding and the knowledge that God has given them. Therefore, they are judged according to their actions…” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 5:4).

A human being is created in the image of God and has been granted immense power to influence the world through their actions. What happens in their life, to a significant extent, is shaped by their choices. The power of choice granted to a person is so great that one can even choose against the truth.

As we approach the end of a year in which we have made many choices – some better and some less so – we must recognize that the coming year will depend, to a great extent, on the choices we make.

God has given us the framework of observing the commandments and a path for how to live, but He has left it to us to decide what our Shabbat table will look like. How we approach prayer is our choice. What kind of education we give our children and what values we embrace in our homes are our choices.

Perhaps along the way we will sometimes resort to the convenient excuse that everything has already been chosen for us. But anyone who truly desires life will take the power of choice into their own hands – and choose a life of genuine eternal meaning.

The writer is rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites.

This post was originally published on here. 

We live in a post-prophetic age. We trust reason, observation, and empirical evidence. Claims of supernatural knowledge are instinctively met with skepticism.

The biblical world was fundamentally different. God communicated directly with humanity through prophecy. Prophets offered divine guidance on national questions – war, leadership, and the moral direction of society – but often on personal decisions as well.

Thousands of prophets carried heavenly messages; only 48 prophets were recorded in Scripture because their words held enduring significance for future generations.

False prophets

An age of prophecy should have been an age of clarity. If God spoke directly to humanity, the path forward ought to have been unmistakable.

Yet parashat Re’eh reveals that prophecy created its own challenge. The very existence of prophecy made counterfeit prophecy possible. Alongside authentic prophets stood false prophets who also claimed to speak in God’s name.

The Torah therefore warns against individuals whose signs appear genuine and whose words are deeply persuasive.

The final generations of the First Temple were especially vulnerable to this danger. As the nation descended into moral and religious decline, too many false prophets assured the people that they could continue their corrupt behavior while remaining immune to conquest and exile.

Those who proclaimed God’s authentic message, such as Jeremiah, were imprisoned and persecuted, while the comforting voices of the false prophets found a more receptive audience.

Parashat Re’eh issues an explicit warning against these false prophets, instructing us not merely to ignore them but to prosecute them and, when warranted, even impose the death penalty.

The Torah is not speaking about deranged individuals making bizarre predictions or wandering about with delusions of grandeur. Such figures are easily dismissed. The Torah would not need to warn us about them.

Instead, it addresses a far more unsettling scenario. The false prophet has already established genuine prophetic credentials. He has accurately predicted future events and demonstrated access to supernatural knowledge through signs or wonders. His earlier prophecies earned him credibility.

Faced with someone who has repeatedly spoken the truth, people’s natural impulse is to trust everything he says. If he has demonstrated access to divine knowledge, shouldn’t his authority be absolute?

The Torah insists otherwise. The moment a prophet instructs the Jewish people to violate the Torah, he has contradicted the direct word of God revealed at Sinai. Whatever credibility he accumulated through earlier prophecies immediately collapses. His signs may have been genuine, but his present message is false because it conflicts with the foundational words at Sinai.

Beyond its legal ruling, this passage also teaches a broader lesson about how we process truth. A person may possess genuine insight and may speak profound truths. Yet possessing part of the truth does not make everything he says true.

It takes courage to reject someone who has demonstrated extraordinary gifts. It is intimidating to stand up to a figure who appears to possess supernatural knowledge. Yet the Torah demands precisely that. No matter how persuasive a person may be, and no matter how impressive his credentials, no one may elevate a partial truth above the eternal truth revealed at Sinai.

Partial truths

In that light, the saga and tragedy of the false prophet extends far beyond the specific laws governing false prophecy. It illuminates an enduring challenge of religious and moral life.

The greatest threats to truth rarely begin with outright falsehoods. More often, they begin with something that is genuinely true.

A partial truth becomes destructive only when it is elevated into an absolute truth. Every distortion contains an element of truth, but that truth has been detached from its proper context and inflated beyond its rightful place. Partial truths remain partial. They become dangerous only when they are mistaken for the whole truth.

Modern false prophets

Though prophecy has ended, the temptation it exposed has not.

The past four centuries have been shaped by powerful ideologies that began with profound truths but outgrew their proper limits. Much of our cultural confusion stems from mistaking partial truths for complete ones.

After centuries of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and the suppression of political and religious freedom, the modern era sought a different political order. The Enlightenment championed individual liberty, while modern nationalism insisted that nations should govern themselves rather than be ruled by dynasties or empires.

These were genuine achievements. Yet, like every powerful truth, they became dangerous when elevated into absolutes. National identity is important, but when it eclipses every other loyalty, it becomes an absolutist ideology.

In the 20th century, the nation, and in other places the state itself, became an absolute. Fascist movements in Europe demanded unquestioning loyalty to the nation, while Communist regimes in the Soviet Union subordinated the individual to the state and the party. Both sacrificed personal liberty to all-encompassing ideologies and committed terrible crimes against their own citizens and against humanity.

The horrors of the Second World War produced an understandable reaction and, in some respects, an overreaction. Having witnessed the devastating consequences of states trampling the rights of their own citizens, much of the Western world shifted its emphasis to the individual.

Protecting individual rights, personal autonomy, and freedom of self-expression became the surest safeguard against the abuse of state power. Modern democracies also sought to guarantee civic, political, and economic equality, ensuring that every citizen enjoyed equal protection under the law.

These developments corrected real injustices, but here, too, a partial truth was elevated into a complete truth. Individual autonomy came to eclipse national, religious, and communal identity, while personal choice became the ultimate measure of meaning and morality.

The result has been a culture uncertain of its moral foundations. When every individual defines truth for himself, it becomes difficult to speak of objective moral principles. A society that hesitates to affirm any fixed truths gradually drifts toward moral relativism.

Closer to home

Closer to home, the Jewish world also sometimes mistakes partial truths for complete truths.

Tikkun olam is a central Jewish value. We are charged with improving the world, protecting the vulnerable, and striving for a more just society. Yet for some, tikkun olam has become the defining value of Judaism rather than one value alongside Torah study, prayer, mitzvot, and the Jewish people’s national calling to build a life of Torah in the Land of Israel.

Another example of a partial truth becoming the whole truth concerns Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. God wants the Jewish people to inhabit their homeland, and we rightly emphasize Jewish settlement there. Yet this, too, is one value within a broader religious vision. At times, religious parties have become identified almost exclusively with the settlement enterprise, while giving less attention to social welfare and moral responsibility toward the most vulnerable members of society.

A third example emerges from the war we are currently fighting.

Israel has been engaged in a just war of survival for nearly three years. Despite the fabricated accusations leveled against us, this remains a moral war, and the IDF has sought to uphold the highest moral standards under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Yet the justice of our cause can never become an excuse for acts of violence or abuse against innocent people. Recently, there has been an alarming rise in such incidents. However understandable the anger and frustration may be, such acts violate both the moral standards of the Torah and the values on which the State of Israel was founded.

The false prophet has not disappeared. He reappears whenever a partial truth is mistaken for the whole truth.

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. 

Over the past month, it almost felt as though Israel had turned a page. Headlines once dominated by fallen soldiers gave way to election campaigns, peace negotiations with Lebanon, and discussions of pilot zones designed to secure the northern border.

Wednesday was a painful reminder that the page has not yet been turned. Two IDF reservists were killed in a deadly explosion in southern Lebanon – the first Israeli combat deaths on the northern front in more than a month.

During IDF operations in Majdal Zoun, forces from Battalion 2855 entered a booby-trapped building where an explosive device detonated upon their entry, causing part of the structure to collapse and trap soldiers beneath the rubble.

Maj. (res.) Harel Birenstock, 34, and Master Sgt. (res.) Tamir Vaknin, 33, were killed in the incident, the military said on Thursday. Four others were seriously wounded.

The IDF immediately launched an investigation into the incident, while Defense Minister Israel Katz was said to have questioned the commanders’ decision to enter the explosives-laden building rather than destroy it from the outside, in line with his policy of avoiding unnecessary entry into suspected terrorist infrastructure.

The tragedy also highlighted the difficult balancing act Israel now faces.

The IDF’s response to what it called a blatant violation of the ceasefire terms was more controlled and restrained than some expected it to be. Reports from Israel and Lebanon suggested that the military initially sought a broader response to the incident but ultimately opted for a more restrained one, amid ongoing American efforts to keep negotiations with Lebanon on track.

Whether or not every detail of those reports proves accurate, the broader reality that must be reckoned with is that every escalation on the ground now carries immediate diplomatic consequences.

Israel-Lebanon talks in Rome focusing on LAF pilot zones

So what happens next, both in Rome and in the Middle East?

The talks in Rome have focused on expanding pilot zones under Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) control, establishing verification mechanisms and creating conditions that could eventually lead to a more stable northern border.

Those mechanisms are intended in part to reduce the need for Israeli troops to repeatedly enter areas in Lebanon from which Hezbollah could launch an attack – a goal that Wednesday’s tragedy underscored remains far from guaranteed. But every Hezbollah attack raises the same question: Can any agreement succeed while the terrorist organization remains armed and capable of carrying out deadly attacks?

The more violence escalates along the border, the more difficult it becomes not only to reach an agreement with Beirut but also to implement one.

Every Israeli casualty deepens public skepticism that Lebanon can fulfill its commitments, while every military escalation increases the risk of undermining the diplomatic process itself.

Concurrently, the Majdal Zoun incident should serve as a reminder to everyone sitting around the negotiating table in Rome – especially American and Lebanese officials – that lasting peace cannot be achieved as long as Hezbollah remains armed and able to pose a threat to IDF soldiers and northern Israeli citizens.

Israel is naturally skeptical of promises made by Beirut. Similar commitments to strengthen the authority of the LAF and curb Hezbollah’s military presence have been made before, with little to show for them.

Diplomacy must be given every opportunity to succeed

Yet Israel must also recognize that diplomacy deserves every reasonable opportunity to succeed. Hezbollah will keep attempting to emulate Hamas’s guerrilla tactics in Gaza, and every village can conceal a booby-trapped home, another tunnel, and another carefully prepared ambush. We owe it to the soldiers still operating in southern Lebanon to exhaust every diplomatic option available to avoid the next deadly incident.

In her eulogy at Harel Birenstock’s funeral on Thursday, his mother Yonat recalled a heartbreaking conversation with her son.

“You loved what you did and always said, ‘Mom, in the end everyone dies. So if I’m going to die, at least let it be like this.’ The truth is, you were right,” she said.

As admirable as his sense of duty was, no parent should have to hear their child accept the possibility of dying in combat as inevitable. If the talks in Rome are to mean anything, they must work toward no Israeli parent ever having to hear those words again.

This post was originally published on here. 

Seven people, including teachers and students, were killed and 23 others injured by a student who opened fire at a school in Thailand on Friday before killing himself, authorities said.

Thai national police spokesperson, Trairong Phiwphan, confirmed the casualties to Reuters, stating that seven were killed included the student shooter, who reportedly turned his weapon on himself after the attack.

The incident took place in the Bang Kruai district of Nonthaburi province north of Bangkok. Police identified the perpetrator as a student.

Police later reported that the student shooter also shot and killed grandparents at their home before opening fire at school.

Police said the shooter, who was 14 years old, fired at least 26 bullets, and was found with 34 additional ammunition rounds. The gun had belonged to his grandfather, police said.

One 18-year-old student told Reuters he initially thought there were firecrackers going off or someone banging an object.

“I didn’t think it was a gun at first,” he said, “There were many shots: bang bang bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again.”

In photos circulated by emergency workers, students streamed out of the Debsirin Nonthaburi School, on the northwestern outskirts of Bangkok, as ambulances operated.

In one photo, one person is seen lying down on a stretcher outside an ambulance, while another is attended to by a medic.

The shooting represents the worst mass killing in the Southeast Asian nation since 2022.

In the 2025 academic year, the school had an enrollment of around 3,100 students and 147 teachers, according to district authorities.

Second school shooting this year

It is the second school shooting in Thailand this year after a teacher died and a student was injured in the south of the country in February.

Emergency worker Kiatikhun Verapongpradith, 47, described arriving as the shooting was ongoing and his team treated students with injuries in the back, chest and arms. They found a male teacher lying dead on an upper floor of the school, and in another room they found a female teacher with wounds in her chest and arm.

“We gave CPR for about 30 minutes and rushed her to the hospital as we could not get her heart rate up, but we tried our best,” he said.

In the 2025 academic year, the school had an enrollment of around 3,100 students and 147 teachers, according to district authorities.

Deputy Education Minister Akkharanan Kannakittinan said in a statement he was coordinating to provide assistance.

History of shootings in Thailand

Gun ownership and gun violence are not uncommon in Thailand, which has seen a series of deadly shootings in the past six years, with children among the victims.

Thailand’s worst mass killing by a single perpetrator in its recent history took place in 2022, when a former policeman ran amok in a three-hour gun-and-knife attack in the northeast that killed 36 people, including 22 children stabbed as they slept at a daycare center.

A gunman killed five people, including security guards and a vendor at a Bangkok market in July 2025 before turning the gun on himself, while a teacher died in the southern city of Hat Yai in February this year when a shooter opened fire at a school where she worked.

In 2020, a soldier killed 29 people in a shooting rampage in Nakhon Ratchasima. And in 2023, a 14-year-old used a modified handgun to kill two people and wound five others at a luxury Bangkok shopping center.

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A Nukhba terrorist who participated in the October 7 Massacre was arrested on his way to the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Thursday after being caught driving a humanitarian aid truck, Israeli media reported on Friday.

According to N12, security forces stated that the terrorist had been collecting aid from the private sector, meaning that a private vendor had purchased the cargo he was transporting.

The terrorist was taken in for questioning by the Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency).

This is a developing story.

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Israel’s attacks against Syria are one of the greatest destabilizing factors for the country, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan claimed at a joint news conference with Syrian counterpart Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani on Thursday.

“Israel’s attacks targeting Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are among the greatest threats to the country’s stability,” he said, adding that Syria’s stability was a shared responsibility for all the countries in the region.

Fidan also condemned Israel’s attacks in Gaza, saying that they “have once again shown that Netanyahu does not want peace,” and in the West Bank, calling them “acts of terror.”

“Gazans will continue living in Gaza and building their future there,” he stated about alleged Israeli plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza. “”Netanyahu will not succeed in this policy.”

He also claimed that Israel was “dragging its feet” on transitioning to the second phase of the Gaza peace deal.

Sa’ar accuses Turkey of violating Syrian sovereignty

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar pushed back against Fidan’s statements on Israeli action in Syria, accusing Turkey of spending decades “violating the sovereignty of Syria while cynically lecturing others on international law.”

According to Sa’ar, Turkey occupies 5% of Syria and intends to use the space to undermine Israeli security, while Israel only holds “one-tenth of one percent of Syrian territory” in the form of a buffer zone to protect itself from terror attacks.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan accuses Israel of destabilizing Syria for taking the minimum measures necessary to protect Israeli citizens from attacks. These are the same Turkish leaders who have spent decades violating the sovereignty of Syria while cynically lecturing others on…

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) August 6, 2026

“Under President Erdoğan, Turkey has carried out extensive military campaigns against Kurdish forces across Syria and Iraq, repeatedly threatened neighboring states, maintained its occupation of 36 percent of Cyprus for more than half a century, and drawn widespread international criticism for its human rights record,” Sa’ar stated.

“What Minister Fidan wants is for Israel to stop protecting itself from threats to its security. This will not happen.”

This post was originally published on here. 

The distribution of Knesset seats remained unchanged this week, against the backdrop of uncertainty on the security, diplomatic, and political fronts, Friday’s Maariv poll revealed.

The poll, conducted by Lazar Research, headed by Dr. Menachem Lazar, in cooperation with Panel4ALL, showed that among the opposition parties, the Democrats have failed to return to double digits after losing two seats last week, falling to nine, below the level recorded before the party’s primaries.

Nevertheless, the overall picture remains unchanged. The coalition retains 49 seats, compared with 57 for the Zionist opposition parties, which could reach a 61-seat majority with the four seats held by the Zionist Home party, led by Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel.

The Arab parties remain at 10 seats, while the effect of the contacts between Mansour Abbas and Yoav Segalovitz has yet to be reflected in the polls. Balad, at 1.4%, and Blue and White, at 1.2%, also remain well below the electoral threshold.

The poll also found that most Israelis, 55%, oppose including Ra’am in a future coalition, even if Segalovitz is placed second on the party’s Knesset list. Twenty percent support the move, while 25% have no opinion.

Most Israelis, 54%, also oppose the published road map for an agreement in Gaza. Opposition rises to 72% among voters for coalition parties. Twenty-four percent support the plan, while 22% have no opinion.

The latest poll results mean that the Knesset composition would be as follows:

Yashar: 23

Likud: 22

B’Yachad: 15

Yisrael Beytenu: 10

Democrats: 9

Otzma Yehudit: 8

United Torah Judaism: 8

Shas: 7

Hadash-Ta’al: 5

Ra’am: 5

Religious Zionist Party: 4

Zionist Home: 4

Bennett, Eisenkot still beating Netanyahu in poll for prime minister suitability

This week’s poll also found that the gap between Naftali Bennett, with 43% support, and Benjamin Netanyahu, with 40%, on the question of suitability to serve as prime minister remained unchanged.

The gap in favor of Gadi Eisenkot over Netanyahu also remained unchanged, at 47% compared with 38%, respectively.

Netanyahu continues to lead Avigdor Liberman, with 42% compared with 38%, also showing no significant change from previous weeks.

The poll was conducted before Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein announced the establishment of a new party that will run in the Knesset elections.

The poll was conducted on July 5 and 6. A total of 3,514 people were invited to participate, and 502 respondents, or 14%, completed it. The respondents constituted a representative sample of Israel’s adult population aged 18 and over, including Jews and Arabs. The poll’s maximum sampling error was 4.4%.

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On the morning of October 7, Atara was home from the army.

It was Shabbat and Simchat Torah, and she was in the middle of her training to become an officer in the IDF Education and Youth Corps.

Hours after the Hamas attack, she was called back to her base. Over the weeks that followed, Atara was sent South to secure communities near the Gaza border, clear out military bases that had been overrun and ransacked by Hamas, and later, organize educational and support programs for evacuees living in hotels across Jerusalem.

Ilan was already in the South.

Just a few days earlier, he had completed a year-long course to become a military paramedic. This is a demanding position that combines advanced medical training with the responsibilities of a combat soldier. Military paramedics serve alongside infantry units and perform lifesaving surgical procedures under fire, often in the most difficult conditions imaginable.

Ilan and several friends from his course had decided to celebrate their graduation by spending the holiday at Kibbutz Sufa, which is located along the Gaza border. 

When Hamas invaded that morning, they found themselves locked inside a bomb shelter with local residents. They were rescued later that day, and within days, Ilan was attached to one of the elite IDF units sent into Gaza. 

He would spend the next two years in combat, treating wounded soldiers, accompanying troops into battle, and carrying a responsibility that few people his age should ever be asked to bear.

The October 7 generation builds a new future

Atara is my daughter. Ilan, as I write these words, is her fiancé. By Thursday night, they will – please God – have become husband and wife.

Over the past few months, and especially during the weeks leading up to their wedding, I have found myself watching them more closely. 

I watched them with their friends at their engagement party, at the henna celebration, and at the other gatherings that accompany the joyful chaos of an Israeli wedding.

And as I watched them, I realized that I was not looking only at a young couple preparing to begin their life together. I was looking at a generation – the soldiers of October 7.

Most of their friends are now out of the regular army, although many continue to serve in the reserves. Some remain in the IDF as officers, some are still commanding soldiers, and some continue to fight. Almost all carry something with them from the war.

All Israelis know someone who the war has scarred. We all know veterans who can’t sleep at night because of the nightmares, the sudden memories, the images that remain seared into their minds and refuse to disappear. We know of the emotional price paid by those who fought in Gaza or arrived at the devastated communities along the border in the days after the massacre. 

These burdens are not immediately visible. They don’t look like a missing limb or a scar from shrapnel.

As the father of the bride, perhaps I am more emotional than usual. But that emotion has also pushed me to observe these young people more carefully: Atara and Ilan, of course, but their friends as well.

They have given so much to this country and ask for so little in return.

These young people want to study, travel, and begin careers. They want to rent apartments they can barely afford and eventually build homes of their own. They want to hang out with friends, dance at weddings, complain about their professors and jobs, and live ordinary lives.

Even getting married is not simple. Over the past week, as the possibility of another escalation with Iran appeared to rise and fall by the hour, wedding plans were once again accompanied by the familiar Israeli questions: Will flights be canceled? Will reserve units be called up? Will the celebration be able to proceed?

This is what it means to build a life in Israel. Even the happiest moments exist alongside the possibility of war.

Not long ago, many people worried that this generation would not know how to stand up when the country needed it.

They were dismissed as “The TikTok generation,” “The Instagram children,” “The kids raised on video games, iPhones, and instant gratification.”

They were accused of caring more about themselves than about the collective and of lacking the resilience and sense of national purpose that defined earlier generations.

The “TikTok generation” became Israel’s defenders

Then came October 7.

It was these young people who stood up.

They ran toward the Gaza border when others were paralyzed. They reported to bases without waiting to be called. They fought in Gaza and Lebanon. They evacuated civilians, treated the wounded, organized supplies, volunteered in hotels, buried friends, and then returned to their units.

For nearly three years, they have defended this country. And now, at the same time, they are beginning to build it.

They are getting married, going to university, launching businesses, beginning careers, and planning families. They are trying to reclaim the pieces of their lives that were interrupted on October 7, even as many continue to be called back into uniform.

They are not merely Israel’s future. They are the reason to believe that Israel has a future.

This summer marks another personal milestone for me: 25 years as a journalist and storyteller.

Twenty-five years of covering this crazy little country, with its nonstop news, chaotic politics, and endless wars. Journalism can make a person cynical, and Israeli journalism can do that on steroids.

Our politics often seem all-consuming. We debate the same questions endlessly: Bibi or no Bibi? Can Gadi Eisenkot lead the country? Should this party sit with that one? Should Arab parties be part of a coalition? Was the meeting in the Oval Office a success or a failure?

These questions matter, and policy also matters. The people who make decisions about war and peace, the economy, and the nature of the state have enormous influence over our lives.

But sometimes, in our obsession with politics, we miss the point.

When I watch Atara, Ilan, and their friends dance, celebrate, smile, and jump for joy, I am reminded that the story of Israel is larger than the politicians who temporarily occupy its offices.

Israel’s founding generation established a sovereign Jewish state, and later generations have fought to preserve it

Israel’s founding generation dared to do what people before them only dreamed of doing – they established a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel despite overwhelming odds, a massive military invasion, and enormous sacrifice.

The generations that followed fought to preserve it. They absorbed immigrants, built cities, established industries, developed universities, created one of the world’s most capable militaries, and transformed a small, vulnerable country into a center of technology, medicine, culture, and Jewish life.

Every generation has fought. But the responsibility was never only to fight. It was to fight and build simultaneously. The obligation is to pass on to the next generation a country that is safer, stronger, and better than the one we inherited.

We should worry about Israel’s future. The situation is precarious, and the threats are real. The country’s unity is fragile, our politics can be poisonous, and security can never be taken for granted. The last three years have taught us that catastrophe is possible in the snap of a finger.

But worry cannot be the only emotion that defines us.

We must also appreciate and cherish what is being built here. We need to look beyond the politics and cynicism and see the young people who have carried this country since October 7.

They are dedicated and committed. They understand responsibility and have been willing to pay an extraordinary price for the welfare of the collective. They are traumatized, but they are still capable of joy.

That might be the most remarkable thing of all.

After everything they have witnessed, they still choose to dance, to celebrate new beginnings, and to believe in building homes and families right here.

With young people like these, that future can be bright.

This post was originally published on here. 

US President Donald Trump has privately expressed frustration that information about shrinking US munitions stockpiles has become public, arguing that the disclosures make the United States appear weak as he threatens further military action to pressure Iran into reaching a deal, CNN reported, citing senior US officials.

Trump raised the issue during a cabinet meeting at Camp David last week, according to sources cited by the report, with the president focused on media coverage describing low US munitions stocks.

CNN also reported that Trump had known for months about possible shortages of key US missiles, with his anger instead centered on the timing of the disclosures and the increasingly public debate over the stockpiles while he sought to project US strength.

“The US has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after midnight on Thursday. “Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the US as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history.”

Trump nevertheless appeared to confirm that supplies of some weapons were limited. He threatened “long-term jail sentences” for anyone found responsible for releasing the information.

Speaking later in the Oval Office, Trump said certain munitions were in “tighter” supply, while maintaining that the United States had a “virtual unlimited supply” of less advanced weapons.

Trump targets officials responsible for disclosures

White House officials said Trump had not directed his anger at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In a separate Truth Social post on Thursday, the president said he was “extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing.”

“He has never blamed Pete. This is all about the leakers,” one official told CNN.

Trump also reportedly instructed the Justice Department to identify individuals inside the administration who disclosed the information, as he described those responsible as “treasonous.”

Long-range missile inventories depleted during Iran war

On Tuesday, several people familiar with the data regarding US missile stockpiles revealed that America had used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran.

The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The US has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

The degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported.

The long-range munitions, which cost more than $1 million each, are an important part of the military’s arsenal, allowing accurate strikes from a safe distance. US-supplied ATACMS have played a key role in the war in Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to attack targets inside Russia. The PrSM is a newer, more advanced generation that will replace the ATACMS, which have a shorter range.

The dramatic rundown in precision, long-range missiles means US President Donald Trump may have to rely more on riskier, piloted bombing missions if he relaunches large-scale attacks on Iran.

The sources declined to say how many of each munition the US had left.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Democratic Republic of Congo’s confirmed Ebola cases have risen above 4,000 for the first time in the current outbreak, government data showed.

The epidemic, the world’s second-largest, has been described as the fastest-spreading on record.

Experts believe infections started circulating months before the outbreak was declared on May 15 and that the true number of cases could be much higher than the official tally.

The Central African country’s public health institute said in its latest report that the total number of infections had reached 4,053, including 1,850 deaths.

Cases have been recorded in five provinces in the country: Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uele and Tshopo.

Researchers speculate Congo’s outbreak began earlier than previously thought

A report published in the journal Science last month concluded that Congo‘s outbreak had started in January, or even earlier, in Ituri. Researchers identified more than 500 suspected cases between mid-January and May 15.

Delayed detection, overwhelmed surveillance, military conflict, and a lack of vaccines and treatments for the species of the virus involved have allowed the disease to outrun containment efforts this time.

So far only West Africa’s 2014-16 outbreak has been bigger, with over 28,000 cases recorded across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

This post was originally published on here. 

“What did he say about us?”

That, the filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz told me, was the question Israelis kept asking him in 2023. He heard it everywhere he went with his camera, from the Right and from the Left, in almost the same words.

He would finish interviewing a protest leader and government supporters wanted to know what she had said about them.

He would finish with one of the government’s own and the protesters wanted to know how he had answered. Citizens of the same small country, often the same city, sometimes the same family, had stopped asking each other anything. They asked the Venezuelan.

I heard him tell that story on stage at the Peres Center in Jaffa on Tuesday, at the Israel premiere of Soul of a Nation, his documentary about the year Israel spent tearing itself apart before October 7.

My face went hot in the dark, and it stayed hot, because I could not pretend I was watching the past. Less than three months before the first election Israel has held since the massacre, we are talking about each other again, in exactly the voice this film preserves, as if the worst three years in our history taught us nothing.

Jakubowicz chronicles Israeli politics as an outsider

Jakubowicz is not an obvious chronicler of Israel’s soul, which may be why he managed it.

He is a Venezuelan-born Jewish director who made his name in Hollywood, with Robert De Niro in Hands of Stone and Jesse Eisenberg in Resistance. He grew up watching Venezuela, once among the most stable democracies in Latin America, argue itself into ruin, neighbor against neighbor, until there was nothing left to divide.

In early 2023, his mother, who lives in Tel Aviv, began talking to him about Israeli politics in a tone he recognized from home. That frightened him enough to get on a plane.

For readers who watched 2023 from a distance, here is what he found.

That January, Israel’s government, the most right-wing and religious in its history, introduced a package of laws to curb the power of the Supreme Court. Supporters called it an overdue correction of an unelected judiciary that had seized power no voter gave it. Opponents called it the dismantling of Israeli democracy.

Both sides believed it completely. For nine months, the country convulsed: hundreds of thousands in the streets every Saturday night, air force reservists announcing they would no longer volunteer to fly, generals, rabbis, and Nobel laureates enlisting on either side, families going silent at Shabbat tables. And while we screamed at each other, Hamas rehearsed.

Jakubowicz filmed through the end of September 2023. He flew out roughly a week before October 7, when Hamas crossed the fence and murdered some 1,200 people, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

That accident of timing is what makes this film unlike anything else made about Israel since. Every conversation in it happens on the far side of a line nobody on screen can see.

Reservists explain, 77 days before the massacre, why a divided Israel is a vulnerable Israel. They are not prophets; they are people talking on a Tuesday. The film never tells you October 7 is coming. You bring it into the theater with you, and it turns every casual sentence into testimony.

The world has had this film for a year and a half: a Miami premiere in January 2025, an audience award, the Jewish festival circuit, American theaters, streaming. Israel got nothing, until Jaffa.

When I asked Jakubowicz why, he told me: “Israel wasn’t ready for it,” in his reasoning, with the hostages still in Gaza, then the war with Iran. This was the first time in three years it was a good moment. Acknowledge that a foreign director kept our portrait from us for three years because he thought we couldn’t stand to look at it.

A film that refuses to pick a winner

What he built is a film that refuses to pick a winner. Former prime ministers from the Right and the Center: Naftali Bennett and Ehud Olmert; Simcha Rothman, the lawmaker who drafted the judicial overhaul; and Dorit Beinisch, the former Supreme Court president whose institution it targeted.

Two Nobel laureates from opposite camps, and it is one of them, the biochemist Aaron Ciechanover of the anti-overhaul camp, who turns out to be the comedian of the piece (They threw a “falafel party,” he said of the Israeli Right after the announcement of the Judicial Reform); the laughter around me in Jaffa was the laughter of people recognizing themselves.

I was reminded of two scenes.

The founder of one of the biggest women’s organizations in the protest movement, Moran Zer-Katzenstein, gives speeches that I disagree with almost word for word, but she does so with a clarity, heart and head working together that I do not recall hearing from anyone on Israeli television that year.

Additionally, Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Arab lawmaker (Arabs make up one-fifth of Israel’s population), acknowledges that Arab women in Israel have the same legal rights as Jewish women but claims they are paid significantly less.

Jakubowicz responds, “Where else in this region do Arab women hold those rights at all?” The scene is not won by anyone. The point is that. No Israeli channel would have shown a scene in which no one wins in 2023.

Jakubowicz also observes to Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the Gibraltar-born former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, that everywhere else on Earth, the political Right is coded white.

In Israel, the Right’s base is largely Sephardi, Middle Eastern, and Ethiopian; Jews from Morocco and Iraq and Addis Ababa. If you’ve been reading our politics through American categories, that single observation will change your perspective.

Then the film reaches for the Jewish calendar, and that moment is where it stopped being a documentary for me. Tisha B’Av is the summer fast on which Jews have mourned the destruction of both ancient temples for 2,000 years. In 2005, Israel carried out its withdrawal from Gaza on the eve of that fast, removing some 8,000 of its own citizens from their homes; the religious Right experienced it as a destruction.

In 2023, the Knesset passed the reasonableness law, the first and only major piece of the overhaul to become law, on the sixth of Av, three days short of the fast; the protest camp shared black graphics reading “Shisha B’Av,” the Sixth of Av.

I do not believe Heaven schedules our legislation. I believe something worse: Twenty years apart, each camp chose those days to do the thing the other camp experienced as ruin, and both were certain they were saving the country.

I supported major parts of the judicial reform. I still do. What I could not support was how it was pursued and how it was argued, and I said so less clearly than I should have.

In 2023, you knew what you would hear before you turned anything on: Israel’s three mainstream channels against, the pro-government channel in favor, the newspapers and websites sorted to match. Nowhere, including, if I am honest, in my own work, was there room for a sentence with two halves in it: I support this clause and oppose that one.

The reform was not the death of democracy, and democracy must still be treated as close to holy because it is what sheltered Jews wherever they found it, and because this state was declared Jewish and democratic, and the second word was never decoration.

Did I do enough to keep a space open where that sentence could live? Did I translate 2023 honestly for readers abroad, who were being sold either Israel’s funeral or Israel’s rescue, and nothing in between? No. A film made by an outsider should not have been the first place I heard my own country speaking in complete sentences.

My simple conclusion: Every Israeli should watch this film before October 27.

It will not tell you whom to vote for; scan the cast, and you will find only people you already agreed or argued with. It will let you hear what we sounded like the last time we were certain, and force you to admit that the sound of this campaign, on your channel, in your feed, maybe out of your own mouth, is the same sound.

Haven’t we learned? Three years, a massacre, a war on seven fronts, the hostages, the funerals, the hospital corridors, the endless reserve call-ups, and the argument we are having now, before this election, is recognizably the argument in this footage.

The last time we talked about each other instead of to each other, we were too absorbed to see what was assembling on the other side of the fence. We now know what that costs in a way no generation of Israelis has ever known. We cannot afford to learn it twice, and this time, nobody will be able to say we were not warned.

And if you are reading this outside Israel: Watch it for the opposite reason. You are handed a cartoon of this country, flattering or damning, and asked to defend or condemn it.

This film is the version with the arguing left in, which is the true version and the more persuasive one. Notice, while you watch, that the Israelis who explain this country most fluently to the world, Michael Oren and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, are both in this film, though almost never permitted to help govern it.

Why that is may be next week’s column.

This post was originally published on here. 

Three sites in the Ramat Gan area caught fire in what is suspected to be arson, Israel’s Fire and Rescue Authority announced on Friday morning.

Seven people were treated for smoke inhalation and evacuated for medical attention with light injuries.

The police have opened an investigation into the fires. At this stage, investigators do not have an initial indication of the identity of the arsonists or the motive.

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here. 

The contest to lead Israel’s opposition bloc is intensifying.

Former prime minister and leader of the B’Yachad party Naftali Bennett called out Yashar! chairman Gadi Eisenkot in an interview ultra-Orthodox (haredi) news outlet Kikar Hashabbat’s Yishai Cohen.

“His [Eisenkot’s] draft outline is an insane mistake,” Bennett said, adding that “[MK Moshe] Gafni and [MK Aryeh] Deri will once again run circles around the latest politician, and it will end with nothing.”

B’Yachad MK Ram Ben Barak also addressed Eisenkot’s rise during an interview with Anat Davidov and Nissim Mishal on 103FM, pointing to what he described as a key weakness that Eisenkot has yet to overcome.

“I think what Gadi Eisenkot is presenting, and he is also a friend of mine, is 180 degrees [away] from Netanyahu. The public is so fed up with what it is seeing that it wants the exact opposite. We have still not succeeded in convincing people that what matters now is experience.”

He added that “what Eisenkot lacks is experience in government work. This is not the military.”

“Bennett has that experience, and the Yesh Atid MKs have it. I am certain that we will rise in the polls and ultimately form the government as well,” he said. “I think that after seven years in politics, people understand that I am not leaving and that I am not constantly looking for where things are best for me and going there. Eisenkot and I speak, and he knows that this is not relevant.”

Bennett lacks strategical approach, says political adviser

Communications adviser and political strategist Ronen Tzur argued that Bennett’s approach toward Eisenkot reflected strategic uncertainty and an inconsistent campaign message.

“Bennett has found himself in a state of strategic helplessness during this campaign, which has also been reflected in his shifting attitude toward Eisenkot,” Tzur said. “At first he attacked him, then he embraced him, and now he has returned to attacking him.”

“It is evident that in the effort to crack the formula for gaining seats, Bennett is navigating without a map or stars, relying instead on gut feelings.”

Tzur said Bennett should have built a clear narrative around his candidacy and developed a focused campaign to support it, noting that “There are 90 days left until the election, and Bennett still has no strategy, no narrative, and his campaign is erratic.”

Tzur assessed that unless the trend changes, Bennett could come under intense political pressure “to withdraw unless he charts an escape route from the single-digit danger zone.”

Former minister Haim Ramon said the attacks by Bennett and Yair Lapid were unlikely to help them recover lost Knesset seats and could instead benefit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Their situation is hopeless. They have no ability to stop the erosion, which could very well end with a single-digit result,” Ramon said.

According to him, “Their attacks on Eisenkot are effectively serving Netanyahu. They may hurt Eisenkot, but they will not gain seats.”

Ramon argued that Eisenkot should present the parties in the opposition bloc with an unequivocal demand: that they commit to supporting the leader of the bloc’s largest party as their candidate for prime minister.

“Everyone in the bloc must commit that the leader of the largest party in the bloc will be prime minister,” he said. “Anyone who is unwilling to say that apparently wants to leave other options open, options that do not include Eisenkot.”

Ramon said those options could include a demand for a rotation agreement, particularly from Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman, or a future attempt to join the Likud if Netanyahu steps down.

“Therefore, anyone who wants to provide certainty for change should prefer voting for Eisenkot, as long as the others refrain from stating the obvious, that whoever leads the bloc should be prime minister.”

B’Yachad lost support in July poll

On Wednesday, Eisenkot responded to Bennett’s declaration that he would formally designate Qatar an enemy state.

Speaking at a press conference at Kibbutz Nir Oz, Eisenkot said, “I hear the discussion and fully accept the role Qatar plays against Israel, in Gaza and in international activity. Israel must examine and make decisions regarding its policy toward Qatar, in consultation with the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the National Security Council.

“I do not suggest that this be done as the result of a political gimmick, particularly by those who held influential positions as defense ministers and prime ministers and could have made decisions I say this as someone who is closely familiar with the issue from the cabinet,” Eisenjot said. “It should be adopted as a serious decision and not as some kind of election statement. Qatar plays a very negative role against Israel.”

The public confrontation comes amid a shift in the distribution of Knesset seats within the opposition bloc.

A Maariv poll published on July 27 found that B’Yachad was continuing to lose support. However, the encouraging development for the opposition was that its voters were not moving to parties on the other side of Israel’s political divide. Most remained within the bloc, shifting primarily to Eisenkot’s Yashar!.

In the month before B’Yachad was established, Bennett 2026 averaged 24 seats in Maariv polls, while Yesh Atid averaged seven seats and was experiencing a slow but steady decline. Together, the two parties held a combined 31 seats.

At the same time, Eisenkot was experiencing the opposite trend. In the month before Bennett and Lapid joined forces, Yashar! averaged 13 seats. Since then, it has grown almost continuously, reaching a record 23 seats in the latest poll, 10 more than before B’Yachad was established.

At first glance, the numbers suggest an almost perfect exchange, with the 10 seats lost by B’Yachad appearing in Yashar!’s total. In practice, however, the picture is more complicated.

Not all of the seats shifted directly from Bennett and Lapid to Eisenkot. Some voters moved to other parties within the opposition bloc, while B’Yachad also gained support from other sources.

Maariv political commentator Mati Tuchfeld wrote last month that Bennett’s political difficulties were also affecting his partnership with Lapid. According to Tuchfeld, the alliance that had been presented as a “historic agreement” was beginning to become a political liability.

According to the report, signs of unrest are beginning to emerge among Lapid’s associates and within Yesh Atid. Party lawmakers, many of whom see their political futures threatened by the union, understand that if the trend continues, some of them may not return to the next Knesset.

As the threat to their political careers becomes more tangible, Tuchfeld wrote, loyalty to the agreement is also beginning to erode.

According to Tuchfeld, the threat to the partnership is no longer merely a theoretical scenario raised by political commentators, but a genuine concern within Yesh Atid.

He assessed that unless Bennett succeeds in stabilizing the party and developing a clear and consistent message, he may discover that giving up the exclusive fight for the premiership has become a painful political reality, not only for him, but also for Lapid and members of his party.

Eisenkot wants opposition to unite similarly to how the right-wing forms, says Tuchfeld

In an interview with 103FM, Tuchfeld said a growing number of political figures now believe Eisenkot is the candidate most likely to lead the opposition camp.

“In the end, people see the situation and what is happening in the opposition camp,” he said. “They see the trend, and the working assumption among all the pollsters in the political system is that Eisenkot will lead the bloc. He is continuing to rise, while Bennett and Lapid are continuing to fall.”

However, Tuchfeld said Eisenkot’s rise in the polls was also accompanied by concern that his potential partners would not accept his leadership.

“You can see signs of Eisenkot’s pressure over the possibility that his colleagues will not accept the outcome,” he said.

Tuchfeld recalled Eisenkot’s statement that a party receiving eight or nine Knesset seats could not demand the premiership.

According to Tuchfeld, Eisenkot is seeking to establish a principle under which all the parties in the opposition bloc would unite behind its largest party and a single candidate for prime minister, similar to the structure of Israel’s right-wing bloc.

“On the right, [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir does not claim the crown, and Goldknopf does not claim it either, because they understand that Netanyahu leads the camp,” he explained.

“Eisenkot would like to create a situation in which it is clear that he leads the bloc and that everyone stands behind him. He is concerned that this has still not happened.”

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At a speed that surprised local broadcasters and political analysts, the Associated Press determined that former Rep. Cori Bush had lost Missouri’s congressional Democratic primary to incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell just an hour after polls closed. In the end, Bell achieved a landslide victory, racking up 59.2% to Bush’s 36.9%.

That’s four times greater than the margin two years ago. In that first face-off Bell topped Bush, then the district’s representative, by just 5.5 percentage points. The pro-Israel Bell’s overwhelming success Tuesday was especially striking due to negative shifts in public perceptions of AIPAC and the Jewish state, which also made for the biggest policy differences between two candidates with similar platforms.

Multiple factors determine the outcomes of political contests, which are always subject to geographic influences, personalities and various other complexities. But pro-Israel advocates who saw the Bell-Bush rematch as a referendum on AIPAC were relieved the lobby got passing marks on Tuesday. 

That success indicates that views on Israel even in deep-blue communities are not monolithic or always decisive, and shows the limits of a campaign run almost exclusively on this topic. Demography and the economy ultimately mattered more in St. Louis than a conflict thousands of miles away, according to political analysts.

“The sentiment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and AIPAC money — while it was a central campaign theme of Cori Bush, it wasn’t the top of mind issue for voters in the district,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist unaffiliated with either campaign, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

During Bell’s first contest with Bush, before he had a proven track record on Capitol Hill, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent $9 million to support his campaign (compared to $3 million this year), according to Federal Election Commission records. The vast majority of the sum targeted Bush, who has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.

Bush’s promise of revenge

When she lost that race two years ago, Bush promised revenge, threatening to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom.”

“I do believe that AIPAC and that money was Cori Bush’s whole campaign,” Payne said. “She focused on that and personal grievances versus talking about the issues. And Wesley Bell stuck to the cost of living and Cori Bush’s record in Congress.” 

Bell reiterated the importance of domestic issues in a statement published following his victory, noting that “St. Louis is up against a president that is coming after our healthcare, our due process, and the paychecks of working families.”

Bush, in contrast, said in her concession speech that she’s “not just coming for AIPAC,” but also for “the billionaires, the corporations, that think they’re people.”

On paper, Bell and Bush are quite similar. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, they are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson. Bush served two consecutive terms in Congress, until she lost her seat to Bell in 2024.

Their political platforms also shared many positions on immigration, reproductive choice and healthcare. But they diverged when it came to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign pledging to “stand for justice in Palestine” and Bell known for his pro-Israel stance.  

In response to Bush’s defeat, the pro-Israel lobby posted on X that Bush has long “demonized AIPAC’s members, attacked Israel and refused to condemn Hamas terrorism — and voters made sure she did not make it back to Congress.” 

For his part, Bell mentioned neither Israel nor AIPAC in his victory speech and referred to Jewish constituents only while rattling off a diverse list of St. Louis’s many cultures. Instead, he highlighted local concerns like gun violence and economic struggles. 

Of those many cultures, the Black community is one of the city’s largest. Payne pointed out that in most Democratic primaries to date that have involved Democratic Socialists of America candidates, including Bush, Black voters have opted for the more moderate opponent. 

“Older Black voters tend to be more religious in general,” he said. “They’re more of what we would generally consider establishment Democrats.”

He described Black women in particular as “the core of the Democratic Party,” noting that “they tend to be more moderate, and so these DSA candidates don’t typically earn their support.”

Theodore Johnson, a scholar of Black electoral politics, discussed this tendency in a Washington Post column on Wednesday and noted that the direction this population sways in primaries often depends on geography as much as on platform.  

“To the degree that democratic socialists appeal to Black voters, it is a function of regional politics and culture, dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, the chance to elect Black legislators at a time when many are exiting Congress, candidate charisma and character, and viability in the general election,” Johnson stated.  

Bell, for his part, earned the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose political action committee declared that “the St. Louis area is sending a fighter back to Washington.” And the congressman enjoyed across-the-board endorsements from the Democratic establishment, including from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, fellow Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, California Rep. Peter Aguilar and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

Bell also “ran a good campaign,” according to Payne, citing his prioritization of local concerns like affordability and Bush’s performance in Congress. 

Bush claims Bell, ‘doesn’t know how to fight for us’

In one of her campaign ads, Bush claimed that Bell, “doesn’t know how to fight for us.”

During her two terms in Congress, however, Bush missed more than 240 roll call votes, equivalent to nearly 11% of votes she could have placed, according to the GovTrack database. The median missed votes for Congress members at the time was 2.2%. Bell has missed 18 votes, or 2.8% of those he could have placed, the records showed.

Pro-Israel advocates saw an additional factor in Bell’s success.

Haile Soifer, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, which endorsed Bell, described his win in a statement as a “resounding 22-point victory.” She praised the hard work of volunteers who made thousands of phone calls and mobilized networks of voters to secure the win for Bell. 

“This work continues, as we engage voters in key districts and states in support of Democrats who share our values in the lead-up to the critically important midterms in November,” Soifer added. 

This post was originally published on here. 

A New Mexico state court ordered Meta on Thursday to pay $567 million and change how its platforms function for young users in the state after finding the company is to blame for harming children’s mental health.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe ruled the company had created a public nuisance in New Mexico, siding with the state’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat. Torrez had accused the social media company of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Biedscheid ordered the company to impose a range of youth-safety measures, including monthly limits on teens’ use of Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards for AI chatbots, and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports, under a $567 million decree that will remain in place for five years.

Meta said it will appeal the ruling and that it has been working to identify and remove harmful content from its platforms.

“We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” Meta said in a statement.

Case just one of many against Meta and other companies

The ruling came in the second phase of New Mexico’s lawsuit. A jury in March had found Meta violated the state’s consumer protection ​law by misrepresenting the safety of Facebook and Instagram for young users. It ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages.

Biedscheid heard three weeks of testimony during the second trial over the lawsuit, which did not involve a jury. It focused solely on whether Meta’s platforms created a “public nuisance” under New Mexico law.

The case is being closely watched as states, municipalities and school districts across the country ​pursue similar claims seeking to force changes at the industry level.

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Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg’s ruling to ban observers from announcing the identity of voters restores voters’ privacy and prevents the disclosure of sensitive information and political views, explained former deputy attorney-general Mike Blass in an interview with 103FM on Thursday.

“When the public appeals came up for discussion, several members of the public who wanted to ban the practice of reporting to the party who had already voted in order to encourage those who hadn’t yet, sought to prevent it,” Blass explained.

“A comprehensive hearing was held before [Justice] Sohlberg, with all the relevant parties, the Privacy Protection Authority, and the attorney-general. They all presented their legal positions to him.”

Blass said Sohlberg had carefully examined the relevant legislation.

“He conducted a thorough analysis of Israel’s privacy protection laws and election laws, and reached the conclusion that this constitutes an infringement of a person’s privacy, which I believe is legally difficult to dispute,” Blass said.

Blass described that the reporting process worked and how someone would know what to report.

Information being used for more than its intended purpose

“The voter enters the polling station and states their name, and the observer writes it down,” he said. “An infringement of privacy is defined, for example, as tracking a person in a manner that could harass them.”

He added that the information was being used for more than its intended purpose.

“In addition, it involves using information about a person’s private affairs, or providing that information to someone else, for a purpose other than the one for which it was given,” he said. “What did Justice Sohlberg say? A person arrives at a polling station to vote and provides their details, and then someone takes the details provided for the purpose of voting and uses them to encourage other voters.”

Blass said the ruling also addressed polling stations located in sensitive facilities, where reporting a voter’s presence could reveal additional personal information.

“The justice also explained that there are more sensitive polling locations, such as facilities for people with disabilities, shelters for abused women, or various hospitals, so you would be revealing additional information about that person,” he added. “He [Sohlberg] concluded that reporting that a voter has voted constitutes an infringement of that voter’s privacy.”

Blass also noted that information about who voted could, in some circumstances, reveal a person’s likely political views.

“Solberg referred to the fact that at polling stations, where most voters go to a particular party or bloc or when the number of voters is low, it is possible to draw approximate conclusions about the worldview of a particular voter and his political opinions. The person himself is being followed, and therefore certain people feel a violation of their privacy,” he said.

Ruling ‘restores respect’ to voters

Blass said he believed the ruling restored respect for voters’ right to privacy and clarified the limits of observers’ authority.

“There is a sense that there is no law or order, but when Justice Sohlberg examined and analyzed this issue, his legal analysis led to two conclusions: that there is an infringement of privacy, and that observers are a type of public employee for that day, and therefore have no authority to do what they are doing,” he noted.

Further, Blass recalled that he had previously taken part in the same practice, before Israel’s privacy laws and constitutional protections had changed.

“Decades ago, when I was young, I served as a party observer during elections and reported who had voted,” he said. “That was how we operated at the time, but Israel’s legal framework has since changed. I’m talking about a period when there was no Privacy Protection Law and the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty with a constitutional right to privacy.”

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