Hostage Update

• On Thursday night, the bodies of Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Shlomo Mantzur, and Tsahi Idan were returned to Israel without a public ceremony. Yahalomi, Idan, and Elgarat were murdered while in captivity in Gaza, the PMO said, while Mantzur was killed on October 7, 2023, when his body was kidnapped and held in Gaza.
• The return of the four bodies marks the end of the first stage of the ceasefire deal reached in January, which saw 33 Israeli hostages returned to Israel, 25 of whom were alive and eight who were killed, as well as five Thai citizens, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many convicted terrorists serving hefty jail sentences, according to the Times of Israel.

• There are now currently 58 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 59 hostages remaining in total)
• 33 hostages have been released so far in the first phase of the agreement
• 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.
  • 193 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 59 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 31 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):
  • 2,582 (no change 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.
  • 5,724 (+2 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 851 (no change since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.

• The Gaza Casualty Count:
  • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 62,614 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.

Watch

Hamas supporting “students” occupied Millbank Hall at Barnard College on Wednesday, causing thousands of dollars in damage, physically assaulted Barnard security including sending an employee to the hospital, and caused classes to be canceled. The event has now gained national attention for the college’s failure to aggressively take action.

What happened next?

Barnard’s President sent the Chair of Barnard’s Classics Department, Kristina Milnor to meet with these people due to being the closest staff member to this sit-in. Rather than send security or police immediately and actually enforce their own rules, the University capitulated. By asking students to leave by a certain time, the University issued a statement saying they would face no disciplinary action. The students left, still masked. Watch and see for yourself:

Keep in mind that last Friday, Barnard expelled the students who disrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class in January.

Earth to Barnard College: Enough by Bret Stephens in the NYT

• At Barnard, the demonstrators demanded to see Leslie Grinage, a dean, who agreed to a meeting on the condition that students unmask themselves and show their IDs. They, too, refused. The college then gave protesters a 9:30 p.m. deadline to clear out. They ignored it for over an hour. Some then marched out the front door banging a drum. The police, who were present on the campus, did not arrest them. Others slipped out through a first-floor window.
• After more than a year of incessant disruption, intimidation and rule-breaking by pro-Palestinian protesters — not to mention lasting reputational damage these protests have done their schools — the only question Rosenbury, Grinage and other administrators need to answer is why the police weren’t called in to clear out the sit-in within minutes, and why the protesters didn’t spend the night in jail.
• Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any non-students at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.
• Kicking out the students involved in Wednesday’s sit-in would make the point refreshingly plain.
• Link: Conversations and insights about the moment

[WARNING: EMTIONAL TESTIMONY] Eli Sharabi was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7. His wife, Lianne, and his daughters, Noya and Yahel, were brutally murdered by Hamas. He only found out that they were all three killed when he was released. He was held captive for 491 days, most of the time in tunnels 50 meters underground, chained in shackles. Here is his testimony with Israel’s Channel 12.

Hamas releases another propaganda video of recently released and current hostages. Times of Israel military correspondent Mannie Fabian writes:

• The Hamas terror group has published a propaganda video showing hostage Iair Horn, who was released from captivity two weeks ago, saying goodbye to his brother Eitan, who is still being held in the Gaza Strip.
• The video shows Iair Horn, Eitan Horn, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and two more hostages whose identities are unknown as Hamas blurred their faces in the video, sitting in a room.
  • Sign of life for of Soldier Nimrod Cohen as his father recognized his son in the video via a tattoo on his arm. Hamas blurred the faces of the other hostages – except for Sagui Dekel Chen, who was also released. “It’s easy to identify Nimrod by his arm. He got the tattoo a few days before he was kidnapped,” Yehuda Cohen, Nimrod’s father, told Ynet. “It’s not difficult to identify him.”
• The five hostages are seen embracing, ahead of the release of two of them. Iair Horn and Dekel-Chen were released from captivity on February 15.

Antisemitism

Has the BBC committed a criminal offence? by Jake Wallis Simmons

• Every media organisation operating in Gaza via proxy knows that permissions, information and access are granted by the jihadi group. Indeed, a captured spokesman called Tarek Abu Shaluf told Israeli authorities that this gives them leverage over the international media; report what we want or we’ll put you on a blacklist and your coverage will come to a swift end.
• Therefore, when the prospect of splashing £40,000 of license-fee payers’ cash on creating a documentary in Gaza by paying people on the ground to gather the footage and directing them “remotely”, it should have been quite obvious that there was a significant danger that Hamas would be involved.
• You’ve seen the headlines. All three of the children involved in narrating the documentary had links to Hamas, including a charismatic little boy called Zakaria, 11, who was later found pictured wearing a jihadi headband and clutching an automatic weapon as he was embraced by a hooded terrorist.
• The main star of the programme, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, 14, was revealed by the researcher David Collier to be the son of a Hamas government minister, while the father of another child in the documentary had served in the Hamas police and been imprisoned in Israel for terrorism offences.
• After shamefully standing by the programme and trying to weather the storm, the BBC has finally capitulated and is conducting an investigation. But it seems safe to assume that the eagerness of staff to produce a documentary on the innocent suffering souls of Gaza, who are ground under the Zionist jackboot, might have had something to do with it.
• The executives at our national broadcaster will surely be aware that under the Terrorism Act 2000, it is a criminal offence to provide “material support, such as the provision of money” to a proscribed terrorist organisation. Like, say, Hamas.
• UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has asked counter-terrorism police to urgently investigate whether any payments were made by the film production company to anybody connected to the terror group.
• If it turns out that this did indeed occur, the BBC may find itself facing scrutiny of a different sort, one that brings with it the threat of imprisonment.
• Link: Has the BBC committed a criminal offence?

Behind the lens of all those terror images: Like the German Nazis before them, Hamas uses video documentation to exert their power and spread their propaganda. By Jacki Karsh with Jewish National Syndicate (JNS)

• Jewish hostages (living or now dead) have been marched through the streets of Gaza and handed over to the Red Cross. Some hostages were forced to push through throngs of jeering Gazan mobs.
• Perhaps your eyes were fixated on the hollow stares and faltering steps of the hostages. Or maybe you were watching terrorists in their pressed military uniforms, brandishing weapons like actors in a “Rambo” movie.
• My focus? The Hamas cameramen.
• For years, we have seen their handiwork. Hamas’s videography consisted of propaganda films with slickly produced montages of rocket launches and ambushes of Israel Defense Forces soldiers. But we had never seen the videographers themselves.
• And yet, there they were, clad in balaclavas and equipped with multiple thousands of dollars worth of equipment front and center in broad daylight at every hostage release “ceremony.” They moved through the hostage procession, mostly in pairs, capturing every minute of this live event with the ease and manner of professionals on a reality television set.
• They wanted us to see their cameramen. They wanted the world to witness the spectacle—not just of the suffering of the hostages but of the production of their release.
• These are skilled professionals wielding high-end 4K cameras mounted on gimbals. They stabilized their cameras and glided their arms to dramatically capture movement, different angles and complex shots amidst a crowd. Their final videos—edited with visual effects, rotating Al-Qassam graphic bugs in the corner, and overlaid with music and temporal dilation slowing video for intensity—are true productions. Barbaric content creators.
• We saw more of this handiwork with the release of a video Palestinian Islamic Jihad produced of hostage Alexander (“Sasha”) Troufanov before his release. He was forced to participate in a video featuring him on the Gaza beach, running among the rocks and fishing. As if his almost 500-day captivity was a walk on the beach.
• If this feels disturbingly familiar, it’s because we have seen it before. The Nazis, too, wielded the power of the camera. They filmed Jews in concentration camps, documenting their suffering as a tool of control.
• Death was a spectacle to be immortalized in film. Murder was filmed, categorized and stored as if it were something to be proud of. Like Hamas, German Nazis turned terror into content.
• To film a victim is to assert power over them. You capture not just a victim’s suffering but his or her submission as well. The Nazis knew this when they forced Jews to smile in staged videos before sending them to the gas chambers. Hamas knows it when they film hostage videos or parade Jews through the streets.
• Hamas may believe it’s controlling the narrative but watching those videographers—smoothly panning across scenes of abject horror, framing each shot with a filmmaker’s keen eye—evokes visceral disgust.
• Link: Behind the lens of all those terror images

Is Al Jazeera Providing Material Support to Hamas? By Toby Dershowitz and Eitan Fischberger in Real Clear World

• Senior Al Jazeera producer and investigative reporter Tamer Almisshal reportedly conceived and directed the vile “ceremony” for Hamas from his office in Qatar—planning every detail of the staging, including the backdrop displaying Hamas slogans glorifying the Oct 7 massacre. Almisshal may have played the same role for subsequent hostage release faux “ceremonies.”
• If true, this report raises concerns that Al Jazeera and the Government of Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera, have crossed the line from biased reporting to being a participant in the war against Israel, including by providing material support for Hamas, designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. If true, this would be a serious violation of U.S. law.
• Almisshal is also the producer and presenter of an Al Jazeera docuseries called “More Than Meets the Eye” (also known as “What is Hidden is Greater.”) In one recent episode, the show aired exclusive footage of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planning operations in Gaza, as well as “testimonies” from Hamas terrorists who took part in the Oct 7 massacre. Almisshal ended the episode by praising Hamas’ “historic blow” against Israel.
• The U.S. Department of Justice affirmed in September 2020 that “The Government of Qatar provides the entire funding for AJMN [Al Jazeera Media Network]” and that “despite assertions of editorial independence and freedom of expression, AJMN and its affiliates are controlled and funded by the Government of Qatar.”
• The problem is, Al Jazeera was founded by the Qatari government officials and operates, in effect, as an extension of its own policies using the channel as a tool of its soft power.
• Qatar consistently positions itself as a staunch ally of the United States. And yet its flagship state-run media outlet colludes with the very terrorist organization that murdered 40 American citizens on October 7 and which continues to hold captive six other Americans in Gaza.
• Link: Is Al Jazeera Providing Material Support to Hamas?

BBC removed references to ‘Jews’ and ‘jihad’ in Gaza documentary: Corporation accused of ‘whitewashing that keeps viewers ill-informed about nature of Hamas’ By Neil Johnston in The Telegraph

• The BBC has been accused of “whitewashing” the views of participants in its controversial Gaza documentary after repeatedly mistranslating references to “the Jews” and omitting praise of “jihad”.
• The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.
• An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews” was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting “Israeli forces”.
• The documentary was trailed as revealing “in gripping detail the lives of four young people living in Gaza”, and it was said it would present “an unflinching and vivid view of life in a war zone”.
• However, the broadcaster issued an apology and removed the film from iPlayer after it emerged that it had prominently featured the son of a Hamas minister.
• The BBC initially kept the documentary online with an added disclaimer at the start, arguing that it remained an “invaluable testament” to Palestinians’ experiences of the war. But it has since removed it from iPlayer while it conducts “further due diligence” with Hoyo Films, the production company.
• Around four minutes in, a Gazan woman among a convoy fleeing from part of the besieged strip is asked by the cameraman: “What’s going on?” She replies: “The Jews invaded our [area].” However, the BBC subtitles quote her as saying: “The Israeli army invaded our area.”

• Around a minute later, a woman is interviewed about the Oct 7 Hamas attacks and is quoted as saying that was the “first time we invaded Israel – it was always the other way round”. However, she actually says: “We were invading the Jews for the first time.”

• Towards the end of the documentary, a Palestinian woman holds her phone as she shows the camera crew footage of Sinwar being killed. In the subtitles, she is quoted as saying that “his face was covered and his weapon was ready, prepared for battle”, but a translation reveals she says that he was “ready for jihad”.
• “It is this whitewashing that keeps viewers ill-informed about the nature of Hamas, and promotes sympathy for their deadly ideology. This documentary signifies the institutional failure behind the BBC’s reporting of the Israel-Hamas conflict.”
• “There is nothing impartial about giving credibility to the claims of terrorists. Providing a platform for terrorists’ propaganda, downplaying their crimes and continuing to refuse to call them terrorists is the BBC putting its thumb on the scale.
• Link: BBC removed references to ‘Jews’ and ‘jihad’ in Gaza documentary

Israel/Middle East Related Articles

A Decimated Hamas Prepares for a New Fight With Israel by Summer Said, Rory Jones, and Benoit Faucon in the WSJ

• Hamas is regrouping its military forces for a potential return to fighting with Israel in Gaza
• The militant group’s armed wing has appointed new commanders and begun mapping out where to position fighters in the event of a return to war, according to Arab officials who talk with Hamas. The U.S.-designated terrorist group also has started repairing its underground tunnel network and has passed out leaflets to inexperienced new fighters on how to use weapons to mount a guerrilla war against Israel
• Hamas militants have repurposed unexploded ordnance into improvised explosive devices and scanned properties for listening devices left behind by the Israeli military to monitor their movement, the Arab officials said. The militant group has assigned fighters to monitor Gaza for spies and has tasked another unit with monitoring potential infiltration by Israeli forces, the officials said.
• Israel’s military is aware that Hamas is regrouping and acknowledges its enemy has recruited thousands of new militants over the course of the war. But Israeli officials stress that Hamas’s military, despite recent public displays of force during hostage handovers, has been significantly weakened by the war.
• Hamas officials said they agree that the group will have to give up overtly ruling Gaza if the enclave is to be rebuilt with cash from foreign donors. But hard-liners within the group also want to remain as an armed force that can exert influence behind the scenes and potentially return to fighting Israel
• The group is also asserting administrative control over civilian matters. Hamas’s police forces are now securing the delivery by humanitarian organizations of aid, which has poured into Gaza during the current cease-fire. Israel accuses Hamas of redirecting food and other supplies to its members to boost support and recruit new fighters.
• Link: A Decimated Hamas Prepares for a New Fight With Israel

The Life and Death of the Oldest Hostage in Gaza: Shlomo Mantzur fled Iraq as a child. He tried to never look back. Then came October 7, 2023. By Matti Freidman with The Free Press

• Mantzur—a diminutive carpenter, a father of five and grandfather of 12, a man whose only extravagance was a spectacular moustache—expected to end his life at the kibbutz in southern Israel where he fixed cupboards and clocks and tended his garden in the heat.
• Shlomo Mantzur was seized from his home at Kibbutz Kissufim, on the Gaza border, on the morning of October 7, 2023, as thousands of Palestinian gunmen attacked communities across southern Israel. The images of him that proliferated on Israeli streets afterward, in the form of hostage posters, depict a man with welcoming eyes and a grin. His personality seems unmistakable.
• Mantzur was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1938. On the rare occasions when he spoke about the country of his birth, his daughters remembered, the stories tended to have happy endings. He grew up in Baghdad at a time when the population of the Iraqi capital was about one-third Jewish—a fact nearly impossible to imagine now.
• When Mantzur was 13, his family fled Iraq for the new Jewish state, part of the mass exodus and expulsion of the early 1950s. (All told, about 800,000 Jews left their homes in the Islamic world, most of them becoming Israelis.) At 16, he found a home at the tiny frontier kibbutz called Kissufim, a cluster of huts on the border of the Gaza Strip. He married Mazal, whose family came from Aleppo, Syria, where the ancient Jewish community had been gutted by looting and arson committed by Syrian Muslims on November 30, 1947, the day after the United Nations’ vote to partition Palestine. He worked at the eyeglasses factory owned by the kibbutz, fixed any of his neighbors’ appliances that needed fixing, and never left.
• The kibbutzim near the Gaza border have always been associated with Israel’s political left and the desire for peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs—a point that has been made often since October 7, 2023 both by admirers of residents’ idealism and by critics mocking their naivete.
• I first saw Shlomo Mantzur’s lively face when someone put up a poster at a bus stop near my home in Jerusalem soon after the war began. I read about his story. What was he thinking, I wondered, wherever he was, about the life of a Jew in the Islamic Middle East? Did he see the two events that defined his life—the Muslim assaults on Jews in 1941 and 2023—as the same event? What had changed for a Jew in this region, and what had not? What did he think about the way both attacks were justified as a response to something his people were doing, or as a reaction to colonialism? Is the state of Israel a break with Jewish history among Muslims, or part of a continuum? I actually thought that I might, one day, have a chance to ask him these questions.
• On February 11, amid the new hostage releases, Israel Defense Forces representatives contacted Mantzur’s family with new information. The precise nature of this information, and its source, have not been made public. But what they learned was that Mantzur was killed on the first day of the war, October 7, 2023, or immediately thereafter. He was not a hostage, so he wouldn’t be released. All his family can wait for is a body.
• When Shlomo Mantzur came here as a child, a decade after the mass murder he witnessed in Iraq, the state of Israel gave him a new life in a country where his people were the majority, where he would be protected by a Jewish army and freed from the nightmares of the past. He had a full and happy life. But eight decades after he ran on his 3-year-old legs up to the roof in Baghdad to escape the killers, they came for him again, and he was alone again.
• Link: The Life and Death of the Oldest Hostage in Gaza

Palestinians Have Dehumanized Themselves by Uri Kurlianchik in The National Review

• In the decades since the lofty dreams of Oslo, we’ve seen Jews torn to pieces with bare hands because they accidentally strayed into Ramallah in 2000. We saw Jews massacred in discothèques as in the Dolphinarium attack of 2001, slaughtered while celebrating Passover at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002, and on buses, as in the Beersheba suicide bombings of 2004. We saw a murderer who smashed a baby’s head in 1979 becoming an international hero after his release in 2008. We saw little girls butchered in their beds in Itamar in 2011.
• People were mutilated, castrated, crippled — not as collateral damage, but meticulously, with sadistic precision, by an enemy who preferred to go after defenseless civilians, and who seemed to revel in atrocity, as if atrocity was an end in and of itself.
• The change didn’t occur at once. But as time went on, we discovered that pity is a resource, and it’s finite.
• Some Israelis started arguing that perhaps the Palestinians weren’t going to be the most reliable peace partners after all.
• Then October 7 came, the ultimate exhibition of atrocities, the ultimate barbarity, its vivid details recorded and spread so ubiquitously that there was no chance to miss it. Shocked and hurt, the Jews who still had pity in their hearts learned that few had pity for them — from the celebrations in Gaza, to poll after poll showing the operation was overwhelmingly supported by the broader Palestinian population, to the moral decrepitude of the international community.
• The message was simple: “No matter what happens to you, you deserve no pity. Your very existence is a crime. Everything done to you is justified. Even to civilians, even to babies.”
• This was the final straw. This was the moment the last shred of compassion for the enemy evaporated for most Israelis and our hearts became hard; hearts of survival, hearts of war.
• Will Israelis’ pity for the Palestinians ever return, or have we finally transformed into a new kind of nation? I don’t know.
• What I do know is that when you treat people with pitiless barbarity for decades, don’t expect them to be compassionate toward you forever. And when your society celebrates the murder of an infant, you have dehumanized yourselves.
• Link: Palestinians Have Dehumanized Themselves

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