Shiri Bibas Update

• Kibbutz Nir Oz said early Saturday morning that resident Shiri Bibas was murdered while held captive in Gaza, after Hamas handed over her body overnight and it was brought to Israel for identification.
• According to assessments by Dr. Chen Kugel, director of the Abu Kabir National Institute of Forensic Medicine, issued after the body had been identified, Shiri was “brutally” murdered along with her two boys, Ariel, 4, and baby Kfir, nine months, in November 2023. The confirmation of Shiri’s death means that three generations of her family were murdered by terrorists — her parents Yossi and Margit Silberman were killed at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, during the attack.
• Dr. Kugel confirmed on Saturday that there was no evidence that Bibas died in an explosion, refuting Hamas’s claims that she and her sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
• Of course the Associated Press distorts the truth of how the Bibas family was killed:

Hostage Update

• The Times of Israel reports: Hostages Tal Shoham, Omer Shem Tov, Omer Wenkert, Eliya Cohen, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed were released from Hamas captivity and returned to Israel on Saturday, in the largest single day of releases since the current hostage-ceasefire deal took effect. They are believed to be the final living hostages scheduled for release in the current first phase of the deal, with only four more hostages, all believed to be dead, set for release on Thursday.
• Shoham, Shem Tov, Wenkert and Cohen were all taken captive on October 7, 2023 during the Hamas-led attacks and massacres, and had been held as hostages in Gaza for over 500 days.
• Mengistu and al-Sayed both entered Gaza on their own accord in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and had been held captive by terror groups in Gaza for around a decade each.

According to the Times of Israel: Hamas releases photos showing the handover of hostage Hisham al-Sayed to the Red Cross in Gaza City earlier. The terror group did not hold a ceremony for his release, unlike all previous hostages freed in the ceasefire deal thus far, including the bodies of slain captives. Al-Sayed, a Bedouin Israeli from the village of Hura in the Negev desert, entered the Strip on his own near the Erez Crossing in April 2015. According to his family, he suffers from mental illness.

Before and after photos of three of the released hostages. The bottom images need no words to describe what these three men went through for 505 days.

[WARNING: EMOTIONAL FOOTAGE] In their latest propaganda video from today’s hostage “ceremony” in Gaza, these sick, sadistic, subhuman people took two Jewish hostages, Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, to watch today’s hostage parade and filmed them begging for their lives. Both hostages were not part of today’s release and were not set free. Hamas is pure evil.

According to Israeli media, this was the first sign of life from Evyatar David that has been made public since he was abducted on October 7, 2023, and the first sign of life from Gilboa-Dalal since June 2024.

Tal Shoham reunited with his family after 505 days as a hostage in Gaza

Eliya Cohen is reunited with his fiancé Ziv Bud, whom he didn’t know survived the Nova attack on October 7th, 2023. She did not know until a few weeks ago that he was even alive. Eliya was starved in captivity, and he says that two weeks ago the terrorists started force-feeding him and he gained 7 kg.

Hostages were chained, starved, kept in pitch black; some return almost unresponsive by the Times of Israel

• …they were chained in the dark, starved, and psychologically abused in Gaza, they and their family members said upon their return.
• Avera and Hisham came home Saturday bearing evident psychological scars from their captivity, and were described by relatives as largely unresponsive upon their return.
• …Shem Tov was initially held in apartments and later in tunnels, and that he was required to dress as a Muslim woman when moved around by his captors. He was once lowered into a tunnel in a small bucket, the network reported. At first, his hands were bound. He was cursed and spat at, it said.
• Eliya Cohen was held alone for some of his captivity, but spent much of it alongside Or Levy and Eli Sharabi, both of whom were recently released, and Alon Ohel, who is still being held
• They were chained not only by their feet but also by their hands, which caused open cuts, and they were physically abused by their captors.
• For months on end, they were not allowed to walk and couldn’t stand. Their captors starved them, and ate their meals in front of them, the report said.
• Tal Shoham, who was hardly exposed to media during his captivity, was not aware until his release that his wife Adi and their children Yahel, 3, and Naveh, 8 — were also taken hostage, but released on November 25, 2023, during the previous weeklong truce.
• Link: Hostages were chained, starved, kept in pitch black; some return almost unresponsive

Current Hostage Status

• There are now currently 62 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 63 hostages remaining in total)
• 29 hostages have been released so far in the first phase of the agreement
• 4 are now remaining on the list for release during the first stage of the ceasefire (pictures below) and are assumed to be dead. Only Shlomo Mansour has been officially declared deceased.

  

• 5 hostages are Americans: Meet the Five American Hostages Still Held By Hamas: Edan Alexander is assumed to be alive, Itay Chen is assumed to have been killed on 10/7, and Gadi Haggai, Judi Weinstein Haggai, and Omer Neutra have been confirmed to have been killed.
• 24 hostages will remain in captivity after Phase I and have not been declared dead.
  • 4 are soldiers
  • 7 are residents of the Gaza border communities
  • 11 were abducted from the Nova music festival
  • 2 are foreign workers: Bipin Joshi from Nepal and Pinta Nattapong from Thailand
• Link: These are the hostages to be released (and left behind) in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal’s first phase – Jewish Telegraphic Agency

• On October 7^th, a total of 251 Israelis were taken hostage.
  • During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
  • 189 hostages in total have been released or rescued
    • The bodies of 40 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
  • 8 hostages have been heroically rescued by troops alive
• Of the 63 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 35 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
  • Thus, at most, 28 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
  • Hamas is now holding the body of 1 IDF soldier who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)

Casualties (no change)

1,850 Israelis have been killed including 846 IDF soldiers since October 7th (no change since Wednesday)

• The South: 407 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed (no change since Wednesday)
• The North: 132 Israelis (84 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (no change since Wednesday)
• The West Bank: 63 Israelis (27 IDF and Israeli security forces)
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,581 (+1 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 497 (no change since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
  • 5,721 (+7 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 851 (+3 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.

• The Gaza Casualty Count:
  • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 61,709 total deaths have been reported, with a civilian/combatant ratio: 1:1.
  • [MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
  • 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.”
  • 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.

Antisemitism

The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline: how an ultra-leftist network hijacked some of the biggest non-political subreddits to censor its ideological enemies — and distribute terrorist propaganda by Ashley Rindsberg with Pirate Wires

• It’s by now a truism that digital propaganda will play a central role in wars of the 21st century. What’s less understood is the extent to which this is already happening. Amid the din about TikTok’s ties to Beijing, little attention is paid to terror groups funded by Iran and Qatar that are linked to extraordinarily effective propaganda networks that span every major social media and information platform.
• Since October 7, an online network has emerged that directs content sourced from US-designated Islamist terror organizations — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement — across Reddit, Discord, X, TikTok, Instagram, Quora and Wikipedia. The network works with an awareness that its manipulation eventually flows downstream and gets baked into universal platforms like Google search and ChatGPT.
• The central locus of the network is a 270,000-member subreddit called r/Palestine.
• On the Discord — whose new members must undergo an ideological purity test consisting of questions about their views on Israel, Zionism and October 7 — a “Reddit task force” channel coordinates posting to Reddit, identifying “comments sections that need more pro Palestinian commentary,” mass upvoting of anti-Israel posts, and downvoting of pro-Israel posts (a practice known as “vote brigading”). The Discord has separate task forces for Quora, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Wikipedia.
• But it’s with a cluster of million-member-strong subreddits infiltrated and now controlled by the network that have nothing to do with the Mideast — or even politics generally — that the r/Palestine network is particularly effective, and which illustrates an extraordinary degree of unambiguous astroturfing meant to convince unsuspecting users that there’s a widespread anti-Israel, anti-Western, Marxist movement online. These include, but aren’t limited to: r/Documentaries (20 million members), r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million), r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million), r/Fauxmoi (4.3 million), and r/iamatotalpieceofshit (2.1 million).
• The network leverages command-and-control mechanisms, radicalizing messaging and decentralized tactics by exploiting the openness and freedom afforded by these platforms, as well as vulnerabilities in the platforms’ trust and safety operation, which have largely been outsourced to the user-base itself (rather than trained moderators).
• But they also use Reddit and Wikipedia’s unique status in relation to search engines and LLMs to spread the propaganda orders of magnitude further.
• The backbone of the r/Palestine network is a group of moderators who control dozens of overlapping subreddits, with r/Palestine as the central hub.
• The moderator network is key, since Reddit mods hold sweeping authority over their communities, with the ability to remove posts, ban users, dictate discussion rules, and control visibility through pinned posts and automated filters. They can shape narratives by approving or suppressing content, restricting participation with account age and karma requirements, and even preemptively censoring topics using Automoderator.
• Good propaganda has varying objectives and standards. In some cases, it’s to sow just enough doubt to create a wedge. In other cases, the aim is to cajole or convince, or intimidate opposition into silence. What’s unique to r/Palestine is that it’s likely the first major propaganda effort that brings to bear the full range of digital platforms and capabilities, from messaging apps like Telegram to the forum modality of Reddit, the group discussion of Discord, and amplification of ancillary networks like X and Quora.
• The truth is that the network is doing what propaganda is designed to do — influence masses of people without them knowing. Its success in camouflaging the network is evidenced by the fact that Reddit continues to deny this is an issue.
• It’s a symbiotic approach that hijacks the democratic dynamics embedded in spaces where speech and expression are open and free — all performed in service of radical ideologies that seek nothing more than totalitarian control of how we think and what we think about.
• Link: The Terrorist Propaganda to Reddit Pipeline

NYT coverage of war creates ‘imbalanced’ sympathy for Palestinian side, study finds by Mathilda Heller with the Jerusalem Post

• The New York Times’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has generated “sympathy for the Palestinian people” while at the same time “diminishing Hamas’s responsibility for their situation and the continuation of the war,” according to a recently published study by Yale professor, Edieal Pinker.
• Pinker’s analysis indicated a “dominant narrative” that revolved around the number of Palestinians killed as a result of Israel’s military response to the October 7 Hamas attack rather than the losses on the Israeli side.
• The study revealed that, in the articles studied, the word “Israel” was mentioned three times more frequently than “Hamas.”

• Of the 1,561 articles in the sample, there were only 105 (7%) in which the number of times the word “Hamas” appeared was greater than or equal to the number of times the word “Israel” appeared.
• In total, the word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times vs 8,499 for “Hamas” across all articles in the analysis.
• …while personal stories of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering are generally featured on two out of every three days, “it is common to go a week at a time without a single mention of IDF deaths even when such deaths were frequent.”
• Pinker argued that the “net result of these imbalances and others is to create a depiction of events that is imbalanced toward creating sympathy for the Palestinian side, places most of the agency in the hands of Israel, is often at odds with actual events, and fails to give readers an understanding of how Israelis are experiencing the war.”
• According to the paper itself, it is the world’s most subscribed to digital media organization. As such, the paper holds significant sway over both US and worldwide public opinion, and therefore has the capacity to influence views on topics such as the Israel-Hamas war.
• A now well-known September report into the BBC’s coverage, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, found a “deeply worrying pattern of bias against Israel” and that Israel was associated with genocide 14 times more than Hamas.
• This led to the Asserson study’s conclusion that the BBC breached its editorial guidelines for news coverage more than 1,500 times since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War.
• The research also showed that BBC recognized Hamas as a terrorist organization just 409 out of 12,459 times, totaling 3.2%, over the four-month period.
• Link: NYT coverage of Israel-Hamas war is imbalanced
• Link to Full Report: An Analysis of the New York Times Coverage of the War Between Israel and Hamas

Israel/Middle East Related Articles

Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home by Matti Friedman with The Free Press

• Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.
• Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months.
• For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.
• No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.
• But Hamas has produced false information about other hostages as a form of psychological warfare, including a report that Daniella Gilboa was killed in an Israeli airstrike. (She was just released alive.) And while Israeli intelligence was able to ascertain the death of other hostages in captivity, there was no confirmation about the fate of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir.
• And so Israelis retained hope that the Bibas family would somehow come back alive. The reluctance to accept the worst was less about logic than about their deaths simply being too unbearable to believe—and so simply wouldn’t be believed until we had no other choice. That moment arrived on Thursday morning.
• After the war began on October 7, 2023, the Israeli government stated that its goals were the elimination of the Hamas threat and the return of all the hostages. Today, as armed terrorists held a macabre ceremony with the coffins of four Israelis who were kidnapped alive, it was impossible to argue that either goal had been achieved.
• Link: Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home

[HIGHLY RECCOMEND] Their Time Is Up by Liel Leibovitz in Tablet Magazine

• Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors.
• We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year.
• 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished.
• 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel.
• Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. Liri Albag, for example, the brave IDF soldier who was released in January, was enslaved by one such family, which did not allow her to shower for 37 days and refused to let her eat any of the food she was forced to cook for her captors.
• If we didn’t understand all of this before, we ought to now that we are burying two dead children. And the lesson we must learn is simple. It comes down to one word: enough.
• Enough with the sophistry about international laws and human rights. The crucibles in which these ideas were forged, raging with the fires of century-old conflicts, have now cooled down and crumbled. To pretend as if we must now take seriously a torrent of treaties long after the framework guaranteeing their efficacy—if such a framework ever existed in earnest—is sheer lunacy. We’ve seen the United Nations. We’ve seen the International Court of Justice. We’ve seen the Red Cross.
• Enough also with the insufferable ululations about Jewish morality and its arc which somehow always bends towards having mercy on the monsters who devour our children.
• President Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza of its inhabitants is, if we’re honest, more merciful than any Gazan deserves, offering the savages who heard Kfir Bibas sob without showing a shred of basic human decency the one thing that precious baby will never have—a chance of a good and peaceful life elsewhere. Nevertheless, we must embrace this proposal, because at its heart is the one true and inescapable sentiment: Israelis can no longer be expected to live in proximity to those who desire nothing more than their death.
• Negotiating with some other Palestinian group won’t do: The PLO, the PFLP, et al are merely a different shade of murderous. Nor is there much value to the fantasy that the same patient reeducation that cleansed so many Germans of the Nazi inflammation might work in Gaza, too.
• We can, and must, insist that their hands be nowhere near our necks.
• Now, American support is manifest. Now, an American president possessing uncommon moral clarity and candor is advocating for the opening of the gates of hell. And rather than live up to a year of tough talk, Israel equivocates, looking weak, wounded, and confused.
• You win wars and secure the peace by making your enemy realize that they had lost, and in the Middle East, as anyone who has ever consulted a history book could tell you, that means only one thing: seizing land.
• Israel, then, must annex Judea and Samaria right now, if only to appear as certain of its right to its ancestral homeland as, say, Senator Tom Cotton. It must enthusiastically advocate for Trump’s plan, or some other arrangement that leaves Gaza empty of Gazans. It must take one long look at Kfir Bibas’ coffin and realize precisely what happens when evil is met with too many clever arguments and not enough swift deeds.
• Link: Their Time Is Up

Trump has handed Bibi free rein on Gaza – he now needs to figure out a strategy by Seth J. Frantzman with The Jewish Chronicle

• US President Donald Trump has conveyed a clear message to Israel. ‘You do whatever you want,’ he says he told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a shift from the messaging during the Biden administration and for Israel’s governing coalition this appears to be welcome news. However, the complete support that Israel is now getting from the White House will now require Israel to come up with a plan regarding Gaza.
• When Israel faced pushback from the Biden administration during the first year of the Gaza war, Jerusalem could often claim that its lack of a clear strategy in Gaza was due to challenges it faced in dealing with the White House on policy goals for Gaza.
• The ground is shifting in Gaza. As Hamas returns the hostages slowly it also uses this opportunity to return to rule over Gaza. The IDF has withdrawn from key areas, such as the Netzarim corridor that separates Gaza city from central Gaza.
• Unlike some wars of the past when armies would push slowly forward over a large front defeating an enemy, as the Allies did against the Nazis in the Second World War, in Gaza there was no moment where the IDF flew the Star of David over the Hamas equivalent of the Reichstag, even assuming such a thing exists. Instead Hamas returned and it is Hamas that has been putting up banners in Gaza claiming victory.
• Does Israel have the wherewithal to send tens of thousands of soldiers back into Gaza, whole divisions such as the 162^nd, to clear Hamas out again? In some places in Gaza Hamas has been cleared three times, and returned three times since October 2023.
• Israel may have laid down some goals in Gaza, but the goals require a clarity of vision that has been lacking.
• The Trump administration has put the ball in Israel’s court. Unlike in the first months of 2024 when the Biden administration warned Israel against going into Rafah and there was pressure on Israel to reduce combat operations to a minimum during Ramadan and then wait for the White House to deploy an ill-conceived temporary pier in Gaza, today Trump is telling Israel to do whatever it wants. The challenge for Israel now is to come up with a plan.
• Israel has prided itself on being a start-up nation and an island of democracy and freedom in a region that often has extremism and totalitarianism. However, a long conflict in Gaza without a vision is not in the interest of any modern democracy seeking to thrive.
• Removing Hamas requires a vision for the future so that it doesn’t become a source of endless disasters for Israel in the future.
• Link: Trump has handed Bibi free rein on Gaza – he now needs to figure out a strategy

Sixteen Months of Lies About Everything by Seth Mandel in Commentary

• Hamas lies about everything, and therefore Hamas has lied about everything. Hamas propaganda has shaped the world’s understanding of this conflict, and every syllable of it has been false.
• One is tempted to interject here that an intellectually honest person would have already come to this conclusion and therefore perhaps there are precious few minds left to be changed. But integrity compels us to say what is true anyway.
• The claim that the Bibases were killed in an IDF airstrike was believable enough—and therefore was widely believed. Even if that had been true, it wouldn’t have mitigated Hamas’s responsibility one iota. But since much of the world, from media to governments to activist organizations, was looking for any excuse to absolve Hamas and the Palestinians and to cast Israel’s counteroffensive as overly aggressive and counterproductive to boot, its underlying assumptions were accepted and repeated and shaped debate over the war even within Israel itself. And since Israel and the U.S. are democracies, public debate shapes war policy and outcomes as well.
• Hamas has stage managed the war to an unprecedented degree.
• …there are two kinds of Hamas statements: lies that have been exposed and lies that have yet to be exposed.
• Hamas managed to get pretty much every major newspaper and network to double the actual numbers of civilian casualties (there were about 25,000 all considered) and inflated the overall casualty figures. Not only was there no genocide in Gaza, there wasn’t even disproportionate collateral damage.
• Early on, Hamas blamed Israel for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza and claimed hundreds were killed. By the time it became clear that a Palestinian rocket was to blame, mob protests against Israel and the U.S. broke out across the world and President Biden’s meetings with Arab leaders were canceled.
• Those big lies spawned a thousand little lies. But the point is that reporting on the conflict, which led to weapons embargoes by allies against Israel, was based on lies every step of the way. If you got your news from the New York Times or the Washington Post or the BBC or any number of others, you followed an entirely different war—one that didn’t happen.
• Link: Sixteen Months of Lies About Everything

I want to recognize Ethan Karlovsky, a senior at Rice University here in Houston, who has helped me compile these updates since we started this effort after October 7th. Ethan has been a true champion and strong voice for the Jewish people on campus.

Regular sources include 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, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, The Free Press, and the Times of Israel