The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,715 Israelis have been killed including 740 IDF soldiers (+5 since Sunday) since October 7th

  

• 353 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
• 73 Israelis (43 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,345 (+10 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 449 (+2 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • 4,881 (+148 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 726 (+17 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 42,344 (+279 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 98,464 (+578 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
  • On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
    • The article goes on to say: “In an N12 article that came out this morning, Hemo also pointed out that since the elimination of key leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top echelon has gone underground and fled Iran and Lebanon, with some relocating to Turkey and Qatar – with the hope that Israel will not strike them there.
  • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
  • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages (no change from Sunday)

• There are currently 97 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza
  • On October 7, 2024, the IDF confirmed the death of Idan Shtivi, 28, who was killed at the Supernova rave near Kibbutz Re’im and his body was taken hostage to Gaza where he is still being held. According the Jerusalem Post: Shtivi arrived at the site of the Nova festival to take photos of his friends who were conducting workshops there.  When the attacks began, Shtivi helped two people escape before he was kidnapped.

• 7 hostages are Americans: Meet the Seven American Hostages Still Held By Hamas
• On October 7^th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
• During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
• 146 hostages in total have been released or rescued
  • The bodies of 37 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
• 8 hostages have been rescued by troops alive
• This leaves 101 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 30-50 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
  • Thus, at most, 50-70 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
• Hamas is also holding 2 Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of 2 IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.

Listen

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: One Year Since October 7th – with Tal Becker

• For the fifth installment of this special series, we sat down with Dr. Tal Becker, who serves as Vice President and Senior Faculty of the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Tal was the former Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is a veteran member of successive Israeli peace negotiation teams and, most recently, represented Israel before the International Court of Justice and played an instrumental role in negotiating and drafting the historic peace and normalization agreements (the “Abraham Accords”). Tal earned his doctorate from Columbia University in New York City, and is the recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including the Rabin Peace Prize, and the Guggenheim Prize for best international law book for his book “Terrorism and the State”.
• Link: One Year Since October 7th with Tal Becker

Watch

‘Hezbollah’s Hostages’: A Secret Tour of ‘Hezbollahland’

• The subject of our fifth episode is not a person. Instead, we take you on a tour of a place called Dahiyeh on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. Dahiyeh means suburb in Arabic, but it is also known as Hezbollahland. There, the terror group—a proxy of Iran—uses Dahiyeh as a nerve center to impose its policies on the Lebanese people and inflict terror on the region and beyond.
• When Hezbollah’s critics accuse the group of operating a “state within a state,” they are referring to Dahiyeh, one of the most terrifying suburbs in the world.
• In Dahiyeh, Hezbollah operates a spy service, a military command center, and a prison system. Hezbollah also runs a massive propaganda machine, known as the “Iranian Media City.” On dozens of channels across the region, it broadcasts a round-the-clock call to war from Hezbollah and Iran’s other proxies, such as Hamas and the Houthis.
• One year after the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, it will be no surprise to learn that beneath Hezbollahland is a city teeming with tunnels, missiles, and munitions.
• At the same time, Dahiyeh is a land of haves and have-nots, where the rich Hezbollah elite live alongside an impoverished Shiite majority who owe no loyalty to the terror group. This restive population, which protested Hezbollah rule in 2019, faces even worse conditions now as Israel intensifies its targeting of Hezbollah sites in Dahiyeh. At this moment, the resurgence of civil opposition against Hezbollah could play a fateful role in upending Iran’s domination in Arab lands.

Rocket Alerts

One Year of Rocket Alerts: Below is a dynamic graph from @LittleMoiz of all rocket alerts from 06:29 on October 7, 2023, until 23:58 on October 6, 2024.

• Rocket Launches: 13,200 from the Gaza Strip; 12,400 from Lebanon; 400 from Iran; 180 from Yemen; 60 from Syria.
• Alerts: 10,914 from the Gaza Strip; 12,049 from Lebanon; 4,384 from Iran; 415 from Yemen; 60 from Syria; 29 from Iraq
• Total alerts including false alarms: 29,177

The North

Source: Swords of Iron: an Overview | INSS

Humanitarian Aid

Source: Israel Humanitarian efforts – Swords of Iron

What We Are Reading

The Brewing War With Israel Is Boosting Iran’s Young Hard-Liners, by Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi in Foreign Affairs

• Although some kind of Iranian attack was inevitable, given how closely allied Hezbollah is to the Islamic Republic, Khamenei surprised many observers by taking one of the most extreme options. He could have used his network of proxies to launch an indirect attack against Israel or set off a wave of regional terrorism. Both are steps he has taken in the past. Instead, Khamenei chose to fire hundreds of projectiles at Israel’s second-largest city: one of the largest biggest ballistic missile attacks in history.
• But Khamenei took this dramatic step for a reason—one that’s internal to Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Khamenei’s influential, ideological armed force, has been riven by divisions between its older, conservative commanders and its younger, radical ranks. The former generally favor exercising some restraint when it comes to Israel, whereas the latter want to go directly after the Islamic Republic’s nemesis. Typically, the older elite have held more influence with the supreme leader. But as more and more IRGC commanders and partners have been killed, the younger generations have gained the upper hand. They have done so by questioning the competence of their elders but also by suggesting that some IRGC elites are actually Israeli assets, including Esmail Ghaani, the IRGC commander who controls Iran’s Quds force—which, in turn, controls Iran’s network of proxy militias. After Israel killed Nasrallah, Khamenei’s calculus appears to have been shaped by this younger cohort. It is part of why he launched the October 1 attack.
• The power of these young hard-liners is likely to grow in the years ahead. After successive intelligence failures, Khamenei can no longer rely on the old guard to run Iran. Even if he could, the IRGC’s radicals have time on their side. Khamenei is 85, and many of his top advisers are also elderly. The younger generations can wait for them to age out.
• The IRGC is the backbone of the Islamic Republic. Established in 1979 to protect the clergy and consolidate Iran’s new theocratic regime, the Revolutionary Guards have gained power over seemingly every facet of the country’s economic, security, cultural, social, and political spheres. Once a relatively simple militia, the group now controls more than 50 percent of the Iranian economy and has its eye on gaining power over more. It has entrenched itself across Iran’s state bureaucracy and absorbed key ministries, including the interior and foreign ministries. It boasts 180,000 members stationed across Iran and the region.
• During the first decade of the 2000s, the Ayatollah began working to make the IRGC a more explicitly ideological group. Khamenei increased the time the IRGC spent on what the organization calls “ideological and political training,” or lectures, seminars, religious preaching, and religious ceremonies promoting Khamenei’s hard-line Shiite doctrines. The effort was a success. IRGC members who joined during the first decade of the 2000s—the Revolutionary Guards’ third generation—proved very faithful to the Islamic Republic’s principles and rule. They had few qualms, for example, about suppressing mass protests against the regime in 2009.
• Khamenei, pleased by this loyalty, doubled down on making the IRGC ideologically pure. He dedicated additional time to political indoctrination, increasing such programming to 50 percent of all IRGC training. He reworked how new members were admitted. For most of its history, joining the IRGC was relatively easy for Iranians with a religious background. But starting in 2010, the organization replaced its open application process with one that was by invitation only, exclusively recruiting those who had been scouted and pre-approved. The most crucial criteria for receiving an invitation were religiosity and loyalty to the supreme leader.
• The result is the IRGC’s fourth [current] generation. It is even more radical than the third. Like their predecessors, these youngest members have been happy to suppress anti-regime protests, openly gunning down demonstrators in 2019, 2022, and 2023. But they have also been disproportionately eager to deploy to Syria, where they have fought to prop up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime under the notion that they are defending a holy Shiite shrines. Finally, and with Khamenei’s encouragement, they have gone after less ideologically pure elements of the wider Islamic Republic, including Hassan Rouhani, a former Iranian president.
• In 2019, Khamenei issued a manifesto proclaiming that the IRGC should be the model for all state institutions. Iran’s bureaucracy, Khamenei argued, ought to be “young and hezbollahi” (ideologically hard line). He tasked his son and likely successor, Mojtaba, with following through on this command. Both men aimed to consolidate Khamenei’s personal control over Iran and ensure a smooth transition of power after his death.
• After Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the country’s military began a series of strikes against the IRGC’s forces and those of its partners. Israel has targeted the IRGC officials and various Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. It has taken out Hezbollah’s senior leadership. It also struck an IRGC Quds Force command facility located in the annex of Iran’s consulate building in Damascus. These attacks have infuriated almost all of the IRGC’s members, young and old alike. But the younger generations have also been outraged by Iran’s response. These radicals felt betrayed when Tehran refused to strike Israel directly after the latter’s initial set of attacks. Even after the IRGC sent hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in April 2024, many younger officials were unhappy. Iran’s retaliation failed to deal real damage to its adversary, and IRGC radicals saw the response as largely symbolic.
• Some younger members of the IRGC believe Iran has restrained itself out of fear. But others believe that something more nefarious is holding the country back. After the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, and especially when Nasrallah was assassinated in Beirut, many radicals concluded that the IRGC’s oligarchy had been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence. According to this logic, some senior Revolutionary Guards officials are so invested in making money that they have been bought off by Israeli officials, offering them the coordinates of valuable targets and generally constraining Tehran’s response.
• Some analysts have expressed hope that, once Khamenei dies, Iran might correct course. But if anything, the supreme leader’s death will expedite this radicalization. Mojtaba has proved to be an even bigger supporter of the younger generations than his father was. Even if Khamenei’s son doesn’t succeed him, the supreme leader’s machinations have effectively ensured the mantle will pass to another younger, radical cleric.
• Link: The Brewing War With Israel Is Boosting Iran’s Young Hard-Liners

From Nasrallah to Khamenei: The power vacuum shaping the Middle East, by Saeid Golkar and Jason M. Brodsky in The Middle East Institute

• Iran’s decision to attack Israel for the second time this year by launching a salvo of nearly 200 ballistic missiles on Oct. 1 was likely driven by fears over the stability of Khamenei’s regime. Without such a response, the Islamic Republic’s survival might have been at risk. Iranian conservatives and those in the military establishment have become increasingly concerned over the loss of deterrence capability against Israel, which could result in difficulties in managing and recruiting for its Axis of Resistance. With Hamas weakened, Khamenei’s crown jewel Hezbollah severely degraded, and growing complaints among the Lebanese Shi’a community over Iran’s lack of protection, Tehran now faces one of its greatest security crises in decades.
• This can be seen in public reporting on how Khamenei has become increasingly worried about security. Reuters indicated that he suggested that Nasrallah, before his death, decamp to Iran for safe harbor out of fears over Israeli infiltration. Though given the elimination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) guesthouse in Tehran, the Islamic Republic is no longer the refuge it once was for its terrorist and criminal syndicates.
• Iranian hardliners have even subtly criticized Hezbollah for not having a succession plan in place following Nasrallah’s death. Nasrallah was so important to the regime that some commentators went so far as to speculate that he could be a potential successor to Khamenei himself given his centrality in the Islamic Republic’s grand strategy. His death has thus magnified Tehran’s own woes, providing an opportunity for Khamenei to introduce Mojtaba to the public.
• Mojtaba Khamenei’s public debut: Traditionally a behind-the-scenes figure, Mojtaba made his first public appearance in a video just last month. For decades, Mojtaba only on rare occasions was captured by official photographers, particularly during parades for Quds Day and the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. He would also appear occasionally at funerals and memorials for key figures in the regime’s political elite.
• Shortly after the demise of Nasrallah, Mojtaba was captured by Iranian media meeting in Tehran with Abdullah Safieddine, the brother of Hashem Safieddine, a potential successor as Hezbollah secretary-general who was reported killed by Israel on Oct. 8. Mojtaba was also separately photographed in a hospital visiting operatives from Hezbollah who were wounded in the exploding pager and radio attack by Israel, a visit he conducted with his brothers on behalf of his father. Then on Oct. 4, he appeared on live state television sitting in the audience with other members of the regime’s high command during his father’s Friday prayers sermon — the first such occasion since January 2020 where the supreme leader delivered personal remarks. Iranian media outlets like Tasnim News, which is affiliated with the IRGC, highlighted his presence there.
• It seems Ayatollah Khamenei may fear sharing Nasrallah’s destiny but has become more comfortable with the prospect of Mojtaba succeeding him as the next supreme leader when he passes away or is even killed. This may explain the uptick in Mojtaba’s public appearances in recent weeks. In the past, one of the main issues preventing Mojtaba from being chosen as the third supreme leader by the Assembly of Experts, a body consisting of 88 Shi’a jurists, was the concern over the appearance of nepotism. The concept of hereditary succession is not only contrary to the regime’s main doctrine (the Guardianship of the Jurist) but its elimination is one of the very reasons that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 occurred.
• Mojtaba has some qualifications to be named the next supreme leader: he is a radical cleric with an extensive political background but without the public exposure. He has managed Iran’s deep state, which consists of unelected bodies parallel to the state bureaucracy in the Office of the Supreme Leader, since the early 2000s. Additionally, he has been part of small but high-ranking decision-making committees for promoting and circulating the regime’s privileged class in both military and civilian organizations. Many in the current Islamic Republic nobility, including Hojatoleslam Mohammad Qomi, the head of the Islamic Development Organization, and Peyman Jebelli, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, are confidantes of Mojtaba. In fact, Mojtaba for many years has created and run a network of such lieutenants, which some have dubbed the “Habib Circle,” to develop his own patronage system like his father’s.
• Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has suggested that Iran should increase its military deterrence and potentially change its nuclear doctrine to allow for the production of nuclear weapons. This move could be an attempt to gain support from conservative factions within Tehran’s power structure after being sidelined from running for top positions. However, his chances of succeeding Khamenei are extremely unlikely because of how Khamenei has engineered the Assembly of Experts and his succession process.
• Contrary to analysis by some observers who portray Mojtaba as a nascent modernist or reformist akin to young Middle East leaders like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he is unlikely to pursue a reformist agenda. His isolated upbringing, strong ties to extremist factions, and history of involvement in harsh crackdowns on protesters suggest that he will likely maintain, if not intensify, his father’s repressive policies. This is exactly why Khamenei prefers him to his other three sons — he sees himself in Mojtaba, a radical militant Islamist deeply immersed in military and security affairs. In this regard, Mojtaba is like Kim Jong Un in North Korea, who succeeded his father and continues his legacy of extremist policies.
• Link: From Nasrallah to Khamenei: The power vacuum shaping the Middle East

How the Israel-Iran rope-a-dope ends by Ambassador Michael Oren in Times of Israel

• Evenings after coming home from work, my father taught me how to box. The only Jewish kid in a working-class neighborhood, I was being bullied by a slightly older antisemite who was very good with his fists. I wasn’t. So my father, a former amateur lightweight, dug up his old Everlast gloves and trained me always to lead with my left, again and again, distracting and exhausting my opponent to the point where he let his guard down. Then you deliver a roundhouse right – “the haymaker,” he called it – a knockout punch straight to the jaw.
• I’ve been thinking about my father’s lessons throughout this year of seemingly endless war and the decades of conflict before it. Israel’s enemies, it occurs to me, have been leading with their left. The limited war with Hezbollah in 2006 and then those with Hamas in 2008, 2012, and 2014 – all were designed to deplete us and wear away our international legitimacy. The onslaught of October 7 was a singularly agonizing jab, but still only a left. The right has yet to be landed. The knockout punch, the haymaker, is the Iranian nuclear weapon.
• Avoiding that blow required preemption. “Lunge first,” my father instructed me. “Strike fast with all your strength. Don’t let the other guy recover.” Israel, tragically, has yet to deliver that blow. Instead, we have focused on deflecting the enemy’s repeated lefts while the Iranian nuclear program enriches enough uranium for multiple bombs. Not even the recent revelation of Iran’s extensive role in the training and financing of Hamas’s October 7 attack altered Israel’s fixation on the lefts.
• Iran’s haymaker is coming, and the only question is whether Israel is prepared to deliver ours first. Can Israel, in classic boxing fashion, use Iran’s strategy against it? Will Israel emulate Muhammad Ali, the greatest pugilist of all time, in adopting the tactic of “rope-a-dope?”
• Though not taught to me by my father, “rope-a-dope” was known to all sports fans of my generation. Ali would simply put his gloves up, covering his face, and let his opponent pound them repeatedly to no effect. Finally, with the challenger utterly fatigued, Ali would inflict his lethal right. An eight-count would follow, concluding with a bell.
• Israel, too, could play rope-a-dope with Iran, parlaying its proxies’ attacks while wearing down the Ayatollahs’ resources. We could also lead them to believe that we’re concentrating solely on their left jabs and ignoring their impending right. We could lull them into a worn-out sense of security and then, unexpectedly, deliver the knock-out.
• My father’s lessons worked. When next accosted by the Jew-hating bully, I suggested that we fight like gentlemen and challenged him to a match. We each got a pair of the Everlasts and started to box. Hackneyed as it sounds, he never laid a glove on me. Rather, I let him tire and fluster himself blocking my lefts until I could exploit his unguarded face. The bell – had there been one – pealed my victory.
• Link: How the Israel-Iran rope-a-dope ends

This Is the House That Hezbollah Built by Yonah Jeremy Bob in Wall Street Journal

• Imagine a generation of children who grow up believing that it is normal to live among weapons of war. This is the monster that Hezbollah built across dozens of villages in southern Lebanon
• Israel’s military learned about taking apart terror infrastructure built into civilian surroundings from dismantling Hamas in Gaza. But the two fronts are very different. The mountainous terrain I rode through to the village in southern Lebanon was unlike the mostly flat desert of Gaza.
• That rocky topography makes it harder to destroy Hezbollah’s tunnels, which sometimes requires pouring in huge amounts of cement. The terrain hasn’t kept Israel from prevailing on the battlefield far more than it did in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. During my visit, I heard gunfire and explosions and saw Hezbollah rockets overhead.
• As Israel tears apart Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon, it is also wiping out the West’s view that this is an Israeli problem that can be solved by diplomacy alone. Since the invasion of southern Lebanon began on Sept. 30, the IDF has showered the West with evidence of weapons and materiel hidden in every third or fifth house. In some villages, Hezbollah commandeers every house.
• The West can no longer deny that Hezbollah is out of control and must be restrained, preferably by diplomacy but if necessary by force. Yet the West’s priority seems to be reaching a cease-fire so it can go on ignoring the dangers of these Middle Eastern actors.
• In an ideal world, cease-fire and diplomacy are the way to prevent long wars. Diplomacy has worked wonders for Israel with six Arab and Muslim countries, most importantly Egypt. But until Hezbollah halts its rocket fire and accepts terms that let Israel and its allies expel the group from southern Lebanon, diplomacy is fruitless.
• After Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and Hezbollah’s unprovoked firing of rockets into Israel starting the next day, Israel gave Hezbollah 11 months to agree to a cease-fire that would have left its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in power and most of the group’s 150,000 rockets still able to threaten the Jewish state.
• Nasrallah wasn’t interested. He liked his new role as a lead player in Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel. He wanted to be able to fire rockets on Israel whenever it might be advantageous to Tehran—or any time he wished to wade into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And look what happened to him.
• The West must realize that Hezbollah and Iran can’t be coaxed into joining the civilized world’s norms of nonviolence. But military force without diplomacy won’t end things either. Diplomacy backed by military force is the only way to achieve stability between Israel and Lebanon. This is even more true when it comes to the dangerous ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic. Tehran’s ballistic-missile attacks on Israel in April and October showed that Iran can kill thousands of people and destroy whole cities more than 1,000 miles away—a fate Israel averted only through excellent antimissile defense.
• Link: This Is the House That Hezbollah Built

UN peacekeeping troops failing Israel as Hezbollah creates terror tunnels right under their noses by Douglas Murray in New York Post

• The world’s eyes are once again focused on the south of Lebanon, as the Israel Defense Forces continues its war against Hezbollah. The IDF took me into Lebanon Saturday to see firsthand some of what it has already found. The timing was important because the Israelis this week got caught in a battle of more than words with the United Nations “peacekeeping force” in the area. Five UN force members have been wounded in recent days.
• The IDF has taken responsibility for several of these accidental cases, although two days ago, it was Hezbollah that hit a UN peacekeeper.
• Still, the fact is that ever since the 2006 war ended, the UN’s peacekeeping force has been not just useless but worse than useless. It was meant to be here to ensure that peace was kept on this tinderbox of a border. But for the past year, it has sat useless as Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets from southern Lebanon into Israel.
• On Sunday, I saw with my own eyes how this had happened. A short way inside Lebanon, the IDF showed me two Hezbollah tunnels — right near the Israeli border.
• These had been built in the hope of carrying out a Hamas-style Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And also to store and fire rockets into northern Israel.
• The ground in Lebanon is rocky — not sandy like Gaza — and these are serious, deep tunnels. But the tunnel shafts opened not much more than 100 meters away from a giant UN peacekeeping base and observation point.
• How is it possible that the kind of heavy digging needed to create these tunnels could have happened literally right under the noses of the UN? Were they not looking? Did they even care?

• The answer seems to be a very obvious “No.” They decided not to look. The international peacekeeping force has been a joke for years.
• After all, what Irish or Sri Lankan soldier is going to put their lives at risk to enforce a mere UN resolution? Or do anything to protect the state of Israel from Iran-backed terrorists?
• In a single square kilometer, they told me, they had found more than 100 tunnel shafts like these. All filled with ammunition, blood units and other medical gear bearing the label “Made in Iran.”
• This includes not just Hezbollah uniforms and vests, but all of the group’s other necessities. There are mines — including ones that are used to blow open walls.
• Now that we know that Hezbollah was planning an Oct. 7-style attack from the north, it is clear that this was one of their ways to break into Israel, just like their friends in Hamas broke in from the south.
• There are items — including medical kits — that show they were acquired in the last year from Iran. But there are other items that reveal that new weaponry has also arrived from Russia and North Korea.
• The Israeli military tells me that in this portion of Lebanon alone, it has already found more than 700 caches of weapons like this.
• It is testament to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Hezbollah has spent on building up its terror infrastructure, destroying the lives of the people of Lebanon as well as Israel. That includes $1 billion each year from the revolutionary government in Iran.
• The Hezbollah terrorists who recently left this camp left other things behind, too: pipe bombs, other explosives, many rounds of bullets.
• As I drive south from the border, rockets start to land again all over northern and central Israel — leaving some 67 people in the Jewish state wounded in Haifa.
• And the sound of Israel’s response rings out, too. The UN will now castigate Israel and America for not implementing a cease-fire in the region.
• Link: UN peacekeeping troops failing Israel as Hezbollah creates terror tunnels right under their noses

Captured documents reveal Hamas’s broader ambition to wreak havoc on Israel by Joby Warrick, Souad Mekhennet and Loveday Morris with Washington Post

• Years before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas’s leaders plotted a far deadlier wave of terrorist assaults against Israel — potentially including a Sept. 11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper — while they pressed Iran to assist in helping achieve their vision of annihilating the Jewish state, according to documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza.
• Electronic records and papers that Israeli officials say were recovered from Hamas command centers show advanced planning for attacks using trains, boats and even horse-drawn chariots — though several plans were ill-formed and highly impractical, terrorism experts said. The plans anticipate drawing in allied militant groups for a combined assault against Israel from the north, south and east.
• The trove of documents includes an annotated, illustrated presentation detailing possible options for an assault as well as letters from Hamas to Iran’s top leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters. It is unclear whether Iran knew of the planning document or responded to the letters, but Israeli officials view the requests as part of a larger effort by Hamas to draw its Iranian allies into the kind of direct confrontation with Israel that Tehran has traditionally sought to avoid.
• The 59 pages of letters and planning documents in Arabic obtained by The Washington Post represent a fraction of the thousands of records that Israel Defense Forces say they have seized since Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began Oct. 27.
• The decision to release the documents comes at a time when Israeli leaders are weighing a possible retaliatory strike after Iran launched more than 180 ballistic missiles against Israel on Oct. 1, in response to Israel’s Sept. 27 killing of Hasan Nasrallah, the Shiite cleric and leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group.
• “Hamas is so determined to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map that it managed to drag Iran into direct conflict — under conditions that Iran wasn’t prepared for,” said an Israeli security official who has reviewed the letters and planning documents. The official, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive documents seized by Israeli forces in Gaza.
• Iran’s mission to the United Nations, in response to questions from The Post, did not address specific allegations but accused Israel of spreading disinformation.
• “We regard the Israeli regime as a mendacious criminal, anti-human entity and place no credence in their illusions,” a spokesman for the mission said. “They have a long history of spreading falsehoods, fabricating already-counterfeit documents, and conducting deceptive psychological operations.”
• Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, declined to comment on the contents of the letters and records but said that Israel has a history of fabricating documents.
• But, in the months preceding the attack, Hamas envisioned going much further, a planning document suggests. A 36-page computer slide presentation created in late 2022 and discovered at a Hamas outpost in northern Gaza on Nov. 10 lays out options and scenarios for attacking Israel across multiple fronts, with targets ranging from military command centers to shopping malls.
• The Arabic document, titled, “Strategy to build an appropriate plan to Liberate Palestine,” contains dozens of maps, photographs and schematics depicting the movement of Hamas fighters against Israeli targets, and a possible sequence for attacks.
• “We present to you this vision, which talks about the appropriate strategy for liberation in the near future, God willing,” the presentation’s preamble states.
• Among the latter was a plan to destroy a Tel Aviv skyscraper. The document identifies as possible targets the Moshe Aviv Tower, a 70-story building that is Israel’s second tallest, as well as the Azrieli Center complex which comprises three skyscrapers, a large shopping mall, train station and cinema. The plan notes the nearby presence of the IDF headquarters building and suggests that the collapse of a nearby high-rise could crush the military facility as well.

• Link: Captured documents reveal Hamas’s broader ambition to wreak havoc on Israel

Israel’s Paradox of Defeat by Aluf Benn with Foreign Affairs

• Last October 7, Hamas surprised Israel’s famed military and intelligence agencies. Both had known, for years, about the Palestinian armed group’s preparations to invade Israel and kill and kidnap its soldiers and citizens. But they failed to believe that it would dare or succeed to execute such an unprecedented operation. The Israeli military and intelligence services; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; and the wider Israeli public all believed that their country’s fortified southern border was so impenetrable, and the balance of power so favorable to Israel, that Hamas would never challenge the status quo.
• But Hamas did challenge it. In the days and weeks after it launched its devastating attack, a common refrain among Israelis was that “everything has changed.” And for a time, it appeared that everything had: the assault shattered Israelis’ fundamental self-confidence, upending long-held beliefs about the country’s security, politics, and societal norms. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces lost its prestige almost overnight as details emerged about how it had failed to prevent the attack and then arrived too late to save border communities, military outposts, and defenseless attendees at a music festival.
• Overcoming its initial shock, the IDF then fought back with a vengeance. Charged with dismantling Hamas’s military and governance capabilities, it reduced large swaths of Gaza to rubble, made nearly two million Gazans internal refugees, and killed more than 40,000 Palestinians—about a third of them Hamas militants, according to official Israeli assessments. The IDF effectively stopped Hamas’s rocket fire into Israel and dismantled much of its Gazan tunnel system; it says it has shattered the formerly well-organized terror group into scattered guerrilla teams.
• This calamitous stasis, coupled with Israel’s growing global isolation and increasingly gloomy economic outlook, contribute to a national sense of hopelessness and despair. In fact, paradoxically, important facets of Israeli politics and society have changed surprisingly little since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Citizens of border communities in the north and the south remain unable to return to their homes. Rather than uniting Jewish Israelis against a common external enemy, Israel’s now multifront fight against its external enemies has only widened preexisting social and political fissures between Netanyahu’s opponents and his supporters. Beating the expectations of his foes and his friends alike, Netanyahu continues to act as the center of gravity in Israeli politics. The right-wing coalition that keeps him in power has amped up its quest to crush the Palestinian statehood movement and “replace the Israeli elite,” a euphemism for demolishing Israel’s democratic and liberal institutions.
• By shrugging off responsibility and carefully maneuvering to maintain his political bloc, Netanyahu has staved off a potentially devastating inquiry into his policy of coexistence with Hamas, his dismissal of the military’s and the intelligence agencies’ repeated warnings about an impending attack on Israel, and his efforts to weaken the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s former peace partner. Fearing defeat at the ballot box—and seeking a way to postpone his ongoing corruption trial—Netanyahu has also managed to avoid an early election. A key component of his strategy has been to prolong the war in Gaza, extend it to Lebanon, and avoid a cease-fire deal with Hamas—even at the price of abandoning the remaining hostages in Gaza, who are being tortured, starved, and murdered in Gaza’s remaining tunnels.
• To safeguard himself, Netanyahu has ceded an extraordinary amount of authority to his far-right coalition buddies, who vocally oppose any hostage deal that would entail an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza or the release of Palestinian militants from Israeli prisons. This, too, represents a 180-degree change in the national attitude. Israelis have always prided themselves on their willingness to do everything to bring home hostages and prisoners of war, as epitomized by the 1976 IDF raid in Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane bound from Tel Aviv to Paris—a daring operation during which Netanyahu’s older brother, Yoni, sacrificed his life. Just five years ago, the prime minister flew to Moscow and personally negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin to release a young Israeli woman detained for drug trafficking. He has not done the same for the hostages taken on October 7.
• Now Israeli liberals are facing the combined pressures of rejection abroad by the progressive West and, at home, demonization and marginalization by Netanyahu’s base. Although conservative and religious Israeli Jews are also suffering from the devaluing shekel and rising inflation, they can find meaning in the struggle to prosecute the war. This is especially true for diehard West Bank settlers, who feel their opposition to the 2005 pullout from Gaza has been vindicated and sense an opportunity to raise their status within Israeli society, especially given their prominence in the army’s fighting forces.
• The other survival strategy is to dig in their heels and keep protesting against Netanyahu and his coalition while supporting the military struggle against Hamas and Hezbollah and calling for the remaining hostages’ release. In late August, the hostage crisis reached a horrible climax when Hamas executed six Israelis in a tunnel in Rafah. Agonized and angry that Netanyahu had not concluded a deal to save these six—and that he will not finalize negotiations to release the remaining hostages—hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets in the largest antigovernment protests since October 7.
• Israel’s tragedy is that its current government is leading the country in the opposite direction. Netanyahu’s lifelong mission has been to defeat the Palestinian national movement and avoid territorial or diplomatic compromise with it. His coalition’s stated goal is to create a Jewish state from the river to the sea, extending limited if necessary but preferably no political rights to non-Jewish subjects, even those who hold Israeli citizenship. The calamity is only exacerbated by the fact that Zionist opposition parties call for Netanyahu’s ouster but do not dare to raise the flag of peace and coexistence with the Palestinians, fearing to appear unpatriotic in wartime or to be smeared by right-wingers as traitors.
• Rather than looking at the deeper meaning of October 7—and realizing the unsustainability of the antebellum status quo, acknowledging the self-delusion involved in the effort to “manage” the Palestinian issue while riding the wave of economic growth, and appreciating the perilousness of pretending the Palestinians don’t exist—Israelis are being led to accept deeper institutionalized apartheid in the West Bank, permanent occupation in Gaza and perhaps south Lebanon, and growing autocracy and theocracy at home. Sadly, after a year of war, the long-term threats to Israel’s democracy and liberal values have only become graver.
• Link: Israel’s Paradox of Defeat

Towards a Post-Hamas Future by John Aziz with Quillette

• I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I saw some photos uploaded by Jewish friends celebrating Sukkot, a holiday commemorating the biblical story of the Israelites’ 40-year journey through the desert after their exodus from enslavement in Egypt, led by Moses. The pictures showed the temporary outdoor structure called a sukkah that a friend had erected in his back garden. These structures, with roofs created from natural materials like branches or leaves, are built on Sukkot to represent the fragile dwellings the Israelites lived in during their journey. During the week-long festival, families and friends gather in these sukkahs to eat, socialise, and reflect on their religion, and their lives.
• At the time, I was just a Palestinian-British student who had gained a few Jewish friends by participating in small-scale peace groups. I wanted to learn about the other side’s narratives and history because I believed then—just as I believe now—that neither Palestinians nor Israelis are going anywhere, so we have to live in peace together, and that the process of peacemaking starts with being able to listen to each other and understand each other’s lives and troubles.
• I am just one person, but I wanted to do everything that I could to help build this process of mutual understanding and intercommunal cooperation. As I learned more about the long and interwoven history of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian-Arab-Islamic nationalism, I realised that it is important to take responsibility for trying to improve things and attempting to coexist peaceably, instead of casting all the blame on the other side.
• Peace is just the first step, of course. I dreamed of a Palestine that would be not only at peace, but a glimmering jewel of prosperity and economic development, like a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Palestine sits on a land bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa, which makes it a prime location for infrastructure and prosperity. Its population, in spite of the ongoing conflict, is highly educated. Being located next door to the Israeli high-tech hub should be an economic blessing in terms of trade, education, and development—not a curse.
• That was how I felt on 6 October. Then the next day, Hamas carried out an anti-Jewish pogrom in which over 1,200 Israelis were killed, some were raped, and over 200 were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where at least 100 remain in captivity to this day. My peaceful dream seemed to have been shattered into a trillion pieces on the floor like a glass ornament dropped from a skyscraper. Peace, it seemed, might now be delayed for decades or even generations. Hamas deliberately chose terror, throwing everybody—both Palestinian and Israeli—into chaos.
• Hamas intend to impose a theocracy in the land where Israel once existed, subjugating any remaining Jews, Christians, and Bedouins, along with the non-religious, their political opponents, and anyone else whom they don’t like. Theirs is simply a vision of ethnic cleansing, a neo-mediaeval fantasy in the vein of the early Islamic conquests. This vision of ethnic cleansing is why Hamas propagandists so frequently obsess over pictures of long queues in Tel Aviv airport—because they see victory as Israelis leaving Israel, or “going back to Europe,” as they like to imagine it.
• Never mind that a majority of Jewish Israelis are Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors came back to Israel from the Arab world, and not Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors came back to Israel from Europe or America. Never mind that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for thousands of years, even after Rome tried to enslave the conquered Judean population, and even after the 11th-century Islamic Caliph Al-Hakim tried to forcibly convert everyone to Islam.
• Hamas chose to try to settle the conflict with Israel on the battlefield. But Hamas has no recent military victories to boast of. They have lost thousands of fighters—Israel claims to have killed upwards of 10,000 of them—while their former leader, Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran and replaced by Yahya Sinwar. While the war may have started with an incursion into Israel, this incursion only lasted one day, and ever since then, Israel has been on the front foot. The war has overwhelmingly taken place inside Gaza, not inside Israel. Hamas can do little but lurk in their tunnels, trying to snipe off Israeli soldiers by stealth, while hoping that their allies Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran might be dragged into a regional war to heap pressure onto Israel. And while a regional conflict that could drag in global powers like Russia and China would be a wild card in these war games, it is likely that the outcome would still be disastrous for Hamas—and would heap further immense suffering onto the Palestinian civilian population. Taking all of this into account, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that 7 October—far from being a victory—was the beginning of the end for Hamas, and for many of its ideological allies.
• I am a Palestinian and I agree with the majority of Gazans that Hamas’s decision to launch the attacks of 7 October was incorrect, and I oppose their continued rule in Gaza, and anywhere else. I certainly endorse the idea of a two-state solution and self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis. However, this dream can only be achieved through a clear process of negotiation and agreement with Israel. Just as Israelis have a responsibility to work towards peace, Palestinians will also have to work to make peace a reality. This is what Hamas could have done, instead of planning and carrying out 7 October: sit down across the table from the Israelis as responsible adults and start negotiating.
• Link: Towards a Post-Hamas Future

[WARNING: GRAPHIC TESTIMONY] Isis sex slave kidnapped aged 11 is rescued a decade later thanks to TikTok video writes Christina Lamb in The Times

• When a young Yazidi woman in a pink hijab posted a TikTok video from Gaza last year, her face masked by a crying emoji, saying she was there “against my wish” and pleading for help, she had no idea that she would spark a military operation involving undercover agents and Israeli drones.
• Now an Israeli brigadier-general and a Moroccan-Canadian dealer in vintage cars dubbed “the Jewish Schindler” have detailed for the first time the dramatic rescue of the former sex slave Fawzia Amin Seydou, 21, from one of the world’s deadliest war zones earlier this month.
• Seydou’s escape involved a hasty flight to the border and a diplomatic wrangle to get her home to Iraq. But while it resulted in a tearful reunion with her mother, it has torn her away from her two young children, who remained behind.

  

• Seydou was just 11 when she was kidnapped by Islamic State fighters who stormed her home area of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014, killing men and abducting thousands of young women and girls.
• Taken to a slave market in Mosul, she was traded between different Isis fighters and repeatedly raped. After a year she was moved to the Syrian city of Raqqa where she was married off to her third captor, a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza who she says also belonged to Hamas.
• “He told me that I had to sleep with him,” she said in an interview with Kurdish TV channel Rudaw. “On the third day, he went to a pharmacy and bought a drug that numbs part of the body. He gave me the drug and I cried.”
• The following year she gave birth to a boy, then some time later a daughter.
• In late 2018 her captor was killed in fighting for the Islamic State, which was driven out of its last stronghold by Kurdish forces backed by a US-led coalition. Seydou was transferred to Al-Hawl, a grim camp for Isis wives in the desert of northeast Syria where as many as 100 Yazidi women still remain.
• Eventually, last September, she made the TikTok video asking someone to contact Nadia Murad, the Nobel peace prizewinning Yazidi activist. “HELP me,” she pleaded. “I’m really tired, it’s not just their men, their women and children also harass me … They might assault me, KILL me … it’s really overwhelming.”
• It was picked up by a Kurdish TV channel, which interviewed her. The story was seen by her mother who had long assumed her daughter was dead.
• As Israeli forces moved into Gaza in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas, her family made contact with Steve Maman, a Moroccan-born Canadian businessman who makes his money from selling vintage cars to collectors. Known as “the Jewish Schindler”, he had rescued 140 Yazidi women and girls from Isis captivity.
• “Rescuing Fawzia was the hardest, most complex of any rescue,” he said, “like a Holocaust-era kind of thing. The geopolitical situation really complicated things.”
• After exploring ways to smuggle her out of Gaza, Maman began to lobby the Iraqi government with whom he has good relations through his previous rescue missions as well as Israeli, American and Jordanian officials. He spoke in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and persuaded the Iraqi consulate in Jordan to issue a “laissez-passer” travel document in absentia, using a photo of Seydou taken from one of their Skype conversations. This in itself was a remarkable step given that Israel and Iraq have no diplomatic relations.
• But as the months went by, Seydou was getting more and more desperate. “You’d think countries might put aside their differences to help a young girl taken at 11 and who’s hurting. But the beautiful thing is that in the end, they did,” said Maman.
• In September a senior Israel Defence Forces (IDF) officer, Brigadier-General Elad Goren was appointed to a new post of “head of humanitarian-civil efforts in Gaza”.
• “When I learned about Fawzia’s case I was shocked,” he told The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview. “Initially I couldn’t believe it was a real story. If we had an opportunity to help and try to give her a better future, we should do it.”
• The brigadier’s team made contact with her and studied three options for extracting her. The first, getting her to make her own way to the Kerem Shalom crossing, was, he said, “fraught with danger and risked losing contact with her”.
• Early on Tuesday, October 1, Fawzia was told to be ready in six hours. As the vehicle collected her, Goren monitored the whole process from a control room. “We sent drones overhead to escort the car from the air and directed its route to make sure they bypassed roads where Hamas and criminals were operating.”
• It took about 90 minutes for her to be brought to the crossing where his team and an ambulance were waiting.
• “It was a major operation but it didn’t matter how many resources we invested as we have a Hebrew saying, ‘If we save one life, it’s as if we save the whole world’,” said Goren. “I’m happy she’s safe and if there are other such cases in Gaza I encourage them to contact us.”
• That’s not all. Seydou had been forced to leave behind her two young children in Gaza, something she says she now bitterly regrets.
• “But they are Hamas children. There’s no way they would have let her take them … Nor would the Yazidis have accepted her with them.”
• Link: Isis sex slave kidnapped aged 11 is rescued a decade later thanks to TikTok video

Antisemitism

• According to the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS): In the last 12 months, online conversations related to Jews, Israel, and antisemitism have skyrocketed—mentions of these topics are up over 500% since October 7, 2023 compared to the 12 months prior. Conversations around these topics surged from a weekly average of under one million mentions before the attacks to a weekly average of four million afterward. During this time the most used phrase on social media has been “Gaza Strip” followed by “Free Palestine” and “war crimes.”

• The FCAS Command Center also analyzed online conversations across different age cohorts, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z. This large dataset revealed significant generational differences, particularly in how younger Americans talk about antisemitism and the conflict. For example, the two most commonly-used phrases by Gen Z are “from the river to the sea” and “f*ck Israel,” whereas the two commonly used phrases by Baby Boomers are “Hamas terrorists” and “attack on Israel.” In addition, there are generational differences in the amount of conversation over time. The graph below shows the daily number of mentions made by accounts in the Baby Boomer cohort and the Gen Z cohort between October 7 and November 17.

• During the day of 10/7, the Command Center also tracked conversations using the solemn occasion to spread hate and celebrate the October 7 attack. The phrase “happy October 7th” began trending on social media on October 6 and through October 7. There were over 20,000 posts with that phrase and similar language, often accompanied by imagery linked to the events of that day. Some of the accounts sharing these sentiments have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Sources: JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, and the Times of Israel