Situational Update

• President-elect Trump has announced what I consider to be one of the most pro-Israel teams ever to serve in his upcoming administration.
  • Secretary of State: Senator Marco Rubio
  • Secretary of Defense: Fox News host and Army veteran Pete Hegseth
  • US Ambassador to the United Nations: Congresswoman Elise Stefanik
  • US Ambassador to Israel: former Governor Mike Huckabee
  • National Security Adviser: Congressman Michael Waltz
  • Special Envoy to the Middle East: Steve Witkoff
  • National Security Transition Advisor: Brian Hook
• Axios’s Barak Ravid reports: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has decided not to suspend military assistance to Israel after the Israeli government took some steps to improve the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the State Department said.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,776 Israelis have been killed including 788 IDF soldiers since October 7th (+8 since last Wednesday)

  

  • First Sergeant Ofir Eliyahu (20), First Sergeant Nave Yair Asulin (21); First Sergeant Orr Katz (20), and First Sergeant Gary Lalhruaikima Zolat (21) (pictured above) were killed in a building in Beit Lahiya, Gaza when it was hit by an anti-tank missile fired by Hamas
  • Sergeant Ariel Sosnov (20) died on Wednesday in a rocket attack on Avivim (below)

    

  • Master Sergeant (Res.) Guy Shabtay (39), who served as an Army rabbi, succumbed to his injuries two weeks after being wounded in combat in Lebanon (below)

    

  • Maj. (res.) Itamar Levin Fridman, 34 (below), was killed during operations in the northern Gaza Strip

    

• 374 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
• 111 Israelis (67 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (+4 since Wednesday)

  

  • Sivan Sade, an 18-year-old killed by a Hezbollah rocket attack in Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk on November 6, 2024 (above)

  

  • Ziv Belfer, 52, and Shimon Najm, 54, were killed when a rocket exploded in the building where they were working in the northern coastal city of Nahariya on Tuesday (above)
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,425 (+23 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 460 (+4 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
  • 5,331 (+49 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 779 (+3 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.

• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 43,665 (+274 since Wednesday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 103,706 (+1,359 since Wednesday) 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.
  • 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)

• There are currently 97 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza
• 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.

Watch

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a direct message to the Iranian people: “There’s one thing Khamenei’s regime fears more than Israel. It’s you — the people of Iran. Don’t lose hope״.

Eli Kowaz posts on X: On Veterans Day, Columbia students held a memorial for Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas who was the mastermind behind the October 7th massacre.

• Watch the video here

Rocket Alerts

Yesterday, there were 271 red alerts, and a total of 1,352 in the past week

• +852 rocket alerts since last Wednesday
• +185 UAV alerts since last Wednesday

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel

Two Posts of the Day

Rachel Gur posts: There is a time to cry and a time for joy. Kibbutz Beeri celebrates it first wedding since 7.10. The groom, Hagai, was raised in Beeri, both his parents were murdered by Hamas on 7.10. During the tumultuous year, the rebuilding, he met Edan. Now they are putting down new roots.

Nadav Eyal posts: The community of Kibbutz Nir Oz just made the following announcement in Hebrew (I translated). This is the kibbutz where one in every four members was either murdered or kidnapped by Hamas.

• “On October 7, the community of Nir Oz endured a pogrom and mass massacre, carried out with unimaginable cruelty – we were left alone to bravely fight for our lives. This abandonment and bravery have not ended since – 29 of our friends and loved ones are still held hostage by a ruthless enemy.
• Amid the incomprehensible pain we have endured and continue to endure, and while calling on the government to immediately bring back all the hostages as a basic and essential condition for our revival, it is clear to us that the true and only victory, alongside the return of our loved ones, is the rebuilding of Kibbutz Nir Oz – stronger, better, and larger.
• The members of Nir Oz have decided – Kibbutz Nir Oz will be reborn!
• In the rebuilding of Kibbutz Nir Oz, the resilience and capacity for renewal of the State of Israel will be tested. Therefore, the government must ensure the complete and optimal rebuilding of the kibbutz, showing generosity, broad-mindedness, and a sincere and genuine will to bring about the revival of Nir Oz.
• Alongside the rebuilding, we are duty-bound to preserve the memory and heritage, and to commemorate the stories of heroism in Kibbutz Nir Oz, to ensure the memory of the place and its people for generations to come. This work, steeped in blood, sorrow, but also in life and renewal, will be carried out in coordination with the entire community, with utmost sensitivity to the victims and survivors, and through broad consensus on how it will be accomplished.
• Alongside the courage shown by all the residents of Nir Oz during the massacre, there will be those who cannot and do not wish to return to live in Nir Oz in the shadow of trauma and the personal losses they have experienced. These people are part of our flesh and form an essential part of the community.
• We demand that the state provide solutions for those unable to return, concurrently and as an inseparable part of the process of rebuilding the kibbutz and the community.
• Our door will remain open for them to return to Nir Oz in the future, should they be able to do so. We are committed to the struggle for the release of our friends, alongside the duty to return home and start anew.
• “We are not weary of the road but path-makers.” Together, we will boldly forge a path to life, a path to prosperity, a path to hope.”

The Amsterdam Pogrom

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: POGROM IN AMSTERDAM – with Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Omer Bigger

• Last night in Amsterdam, dozens of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans suffered a pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam, following the soccer team’s match against Ajax. According to most accounts, this ambush was planned and coordinated in advance.
• And according to Israeli authorities, 10 Israelis were injured throughout the night, as mobs of antisemitic rioters ambushed, chased, and attacked the Israeli soccer fans. Dozens have been arrested, and the Israeli government dispatched planes to Amsterdam to return the Israeli  fans safely to Israel. The Amsterdam police was observed to be largely ineffective in attempting to protect the Israeli fans from the assailants.
• To unpack these disturbing events, and discuss the climate of antisemitism that has erupted in the Netherlands and across Europe, we are joined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Omer Bigger.

Network Contagion Research Institute published key findings from the Amsterdam Pogrom Brief: On Nov 6-7, tensions between Maccabi TA fans and pro-Palestine activists escalated, leading to mob violence in Amsterdam. Despite advance warnings, local authorities did not intervene. PGNL, led by organizers including a former UNRWA affiliate, explicitly coordinated the protests online in the hours and day before via social media and messaging apps An accurate warning issued by Israeli authorities assessed an “extremely high” level of risk.

Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’ by Seth Mandel in Commentary

• A popular meme in recent years on the nationalist right is the number 109. It is meant to signify the number of countries from which Jews have been expelled. (The number is wrong, but it is self-defeating to spend much time rebutting the statistic. It’s like trying to rebut the claim that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs—you simply can’t accept the anti-Semite’s premise if you are to engage with him.) Sometimes this is represented as “109 soon 110” or some formulation of that, suggesting that the U.S. or some other country will follow suit.
• Inflating the number of Jewish expulsions is not, as one might think at first glance, an attempt to garner sympathy for the Jew. It is meant to blame the victim: Jews wear out their welcome in every country in every part of the world, gee I wonder what the common denominator is here, etc.
• But its usefulness as revisionist history pales in comparison to its main, forward-looking purpose. Namely, to cause the instinctive reaction to any event of mass violence against Jews to be the assumption that they must have done something to deserve it.
• There’s an easy test to see whether the “Jewish soccer hooligans” blather is yet another “109 soon 110,” only this time from the left: Even if you were to grant the worst possible interpretation of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans’ behavior, would it mitigate the evil of the pogrom? Did random Jews deserve to be stabbed and run over because other Israeli soccer fans were rowdy? To even write out that question is to see how much of a lunatic you’d have to be to entertain it.
• Could it be that the Jews keep getting accused of the same thing and yet all of these accusations are false? Could it be, today’s anti-Semites on both left and right will ask, that the Jews keep getting kicked out of their “host” countries and yet it is always the host countries’ fault? In the past year there have been Jew hunts not just in Amsterdam but across Europe and even an occasional version in the U.S.; could it be, we are asked, that none of those Jew hunts were the Jews’ fault? And don’t get so defensive, these pundits and activists insist; they’re just asking questions.
• Link: Justifying the ‘Jew Hunt’

Did a former UNRWA teacher help organize the Amsterdam pogrom? by Ohad Merlin in The Jerusalem Post

• The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) published an exposé showcasing how, on November 6, local authorities decided to cancel a preplanned protest against the Maccabi Ajax FC football game scheduled for 19:00 on November 7. However, the organizers did not give up and posted an invite to a new protest, which cautioned attendees to arrive in small groups, conceal Keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, and openly specified “This is a direct clash with our enemy (IOF and Mossad). Even if we do not get our desired location, we will not give up”; warning those under 18 not to attend the protest and calling to “prepare ourselves to deal with grave violence.”
• NCRI’s exposé highlighted that one of the main planners of these protests is an organization innocently named “The Palestinian Community in the Netherlands” (Palestijnse Gemeenschap In Nederland – PGNL), a group which organizes protests and “actions” across the Netherlands, with active groups on instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
• Following Abu-Rashid’s arrest, PGNL is led nowadays by Ayman Nejmeh, who appeared in the NCRI exposé as an administrator at one of PGNL’s instant messaging app groups. Nejmeh is a Syrian-born activist who described himself on his Facebook profile as a former UNRWA teacher, and who spoke at a pro-UNRWA rally in February. However, at some point in the past couple of days, Nejmeh decided to delete his affiliation with UNRWA from his Facebook profile for unknown reasons. In any case, Nejmeh himself has posted pro-Hamas content in the past on his Facebook page as well, including a picture of an al-Qassam militant.
• Elad, a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan who was present at the match in Amsterdam and experienced the events firsthand, spoke to The Jerusalem Post safely at his home in central Israel. Elad emphasized in his testimony that the rioters’ modus operandi was similar to or at least inspired by that of Hamas during the October 7th massacre, including the live documentation of humiliation and violence, the in-depth planning, and the violence itself.
• “Luckily we decided to march back together as a large group, but there were others who split from us and found themselves facing terrible violence. Every few meters, another squad of terrorists arrived that threw grenades and came to confront us, but immediately ran away to side alleys as if to lure us to go after them into the alleys, where more terrorists were waiting to harm us.
• “Even upon arriving at the hotel – after traveling crammed in a makeshift bus for 150 fans, the terrorists continued to throw objects, riot, and attempt to hurt us without intervention from the police. Even after arriving at the hotels – dozens of terrorists were waiting, simply attacking fans as they came into their hotels, sometimes armed with knives and clubs.
• When reached for comment, a researcher at NCRI noted that “their identification of some of the organizations and individuals that played a role in organizing the Amsterdam attack was exclusively based on open sources and publicly available tools. In fact, the timing, location, and violent intent of the November 7th demonstration were all openly advertised on social media platforms hours and even days before.
• “This lapse underscores the importance of open-source intelligence and research techniques in today’s world. Had there existed a tighter nexus between social media threat monitoring and local law enforcement agencies’ readiness posture, the tragic events of last Thursday night could have been prevented or significantly mitigated,” said the researcher.
• “The fact that this attempted pogrom was organized by yet another self-described former UNRWA employee, who was funded by European taxpayers is yet another proof if one was needed after the attacks of October 7, that there is something profoundly rotten in UNRWA’s corporate culture.”
• Link: Did a former UNRWA teacher help organize the Amsterdam pogrom?

Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam by David de Bruijn in The Free Press

• As the Amsterdam Jewish community joined with local officials to commemorate the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht at the city’s Portuguese-Jewish synagogue—established by Jews who escaped the Inquisition—a pogrom was taking place outside. Following a soccer match between the Dutch club Ajax and the visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv, Jewish and Israeli fans of the visiting club were ambushed and beaten in the city’s streets and alleys.
• In video of other attacks last night, a victim is struck and lies injured on the ground, seemingly unconscious. A father can be seen fleeing with his son. A man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. In the recording, where he is forced to say “Free Palestine,” his assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew”—a classic slur in Dutch, where both diseases and the Jewish ethnicity are deployed as put-downs.
• Much about the origins of the attack are still unclear, but early reports suggest that it was carried out by youth gangs from the Dutch Moroccan and Dutch Turkish community, and was orchestrated in advance. Visiting Israelis report being ambushed by groups of 10 to 15 masked assailants in various alleys. Fleeing Israelis told Channel 12’s Elad Simchayoff that “Amsterdam police instructed [Israelis] not to go by taxis. Police officers told fans that taxi drivers in the city are helping organize the riots and assisting the gangs.”
• Before the local authorities meaningfully intervened by dispersing the rioters and arresting assailants, Israel announced it would send two planes and a rescue team to Amsterdam to extract trapped Israelis. (Israel ultimately recalled the mission.) “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again,” the Dutch king Willem-Alexander reportedly said to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in a phone call on Friday morning.
• The shame these events bring to Amsterdam—where 75 percent of Amsterdam’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, and which takes pride in being the city of Anne Frank who, despite her betrayal and murder, has been embraced by the city as an emblem of its liberal, postwar attitude of tolerance—should be lost on no one. 
• I grew up in The Hague, where real and abundant antisemitism, from epithets in the street to physical threats to the community’s safety, was part of our daily life. As a young boy, I vividly recall how The Hague’s football hooligans—viciously opposed to Ajax, Amsterdam’s “Jewish” team—walked the streets under a banner reading “We’re hunting for Jews.” (Indeed, for my entire life, football stadiums in my home country have been filled with lurid chants like “Hamas, Hamas, all the Jews on gas!” and “My dad was in the commandos, my mom was in the SS, we like to burn Jews, because Jews burn the best.”)
• In high school, second- or third-generation Moroccan kids would point and hiss “Psst, psst, that’s a Jew, that’s a Jew!” as they passed by on their bikes. 
• Violent, antisemitic assaults have become increasingly regular occurrences. In May, a student at the University of Amsterdam, a young man, was assaulted by a protester in a keffiyeh, struck in the head with a wooden plank. In August, a statue of Anne Frank was defaced—for the second time—with anti-Israel graffiti. Today, walking around with a kippah in the Netherlands is an act that requires bravery.
• Between 1977 and 2002, more than 700,000 immigrants and refugees from Islamic countries settled in the Netherlands, now making up about 5 percent of the Dutch population. For decades, issues surrounding the integration of these minorities have riled passions and dominated Dutch politics—first in the form of the assassinated populist leader Pim Fortuyn; then filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in broad daylight 20 years ago this month; and most recently Geert Wilders, who lives under permanent police protection.
• In other words, modern antisemitism in the Netherlands has, for the past several decades, been an affliction of the immigrant and secular communities, which few care to do anything about. In secular Dutch society, teachers find it increasingly difficult to teach the country’s recent history—its complicity in the Holocaust—in schools with large immigrant communities. (As the Algemeen Dagblad related as early as 2015, if a teacher says “Holocaust,” students reply, “That’s all bullshit” and “You are on the side of the Jews.”)
• Link: Last Night’s Pogrom in Amsterdam

What We Are Reading

Public Enemy: Unmasking the Qatar Connections, by Aaron Bandler in Jewish Journal

• “The name Yahya means the one who lives. They thought of him as dead but he lives. Like his namesake, Yahya bin Zakariya, he will live on and they will be gone.”
• These were the words of Sheika Moza Bint Nasser eulogizing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas mastermind behind the Oct. 7 massacre, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Moza, the mother of current Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and chair of the Qatar Foundation, is emblematic of the double game played by Qatar, using Western outreach to cover up its nefarious activities.
• “Qatar has been funding Hamas,” Middle East historian Asaf Romirowsky, who heads Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the Associate for the Study of the Middle East and North Africa, told the Journal. According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Qatari regime has funneled nearly $2 billion to the Hamas government in Gaza since 2007, and “pledged $360 million of annual support to the enclave in January 2021, in part to subsidize government salaries. About a third of Qatari support is in the form of fuel that Hamas authorities sell for cash.”
• “Doha has been harboring Hamas leadership, including Khaled Mashaal… while at the same time they’re buying institutions, including K-12 institutions, to normalize this narrative within American society,” added Romirowsky.
• While Qatar has portrayed itself as an ally to the West, acting, for example, as a go-between in negotiations to free the hostages held by Hamas, Qatari money has flown into American schools and universities to indoctrinate American students.
• Jewish Insider (JI) also noted that Moza said during a speech in 2023 that “artificial intelligence [is] used to fabricate stories, falsify facts, and block publications, photos, and videos that include atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation forces against the people of Gaza and the West Bank,” which JI characterized as an apparent claim that AI has been used to fabricate “Hamas atrocities against Israelis.”
• Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told the Journal that though Moza does not have a formal role in the current Qatari government structure, she is the matriarch of the royal family “and is heavily involved in the dispersing of funds to the various causes and alliances that Qatar supports” and has “immense clout within Qatar…The decision to  eulogize and lionize the architect of the 10/7 slaughter is to me not surprising but should be very clarifying to Qatar’s partners and allies.”
• “This goes to a larger issue [of] foreign money that has gone into American institutions with the idea of buying the politics, buying the role, and if you buy a chair or department, you also buy the complete and total narrative of how these topics are being taught in Western institutions,” Romirowsky said. “And that’s where they have been able to sanitize Hamas or Brotherhood kind of Islamist education in Western institutions.” He added that for Qatar, such spending is “a drop in a bucket and universities don’t like to say no to money, because universities kind of operate like a hedge fund.”
• According to Gerard Filitti, Senior Counsel at The Lawfare Project, “It is not illegal for Qatari money to be flowing to US campuses; the burden is on the recipients of this funding to comply with various laws…The law that has been most widely reported on is Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which requires colleges to report to the Department of Education any gifts received from, as well as contracts with, any foreign source, that are valued at $250,000 or more,” Filitti said in a statement to the Journal. “The Department under the Trump Administration opened investigations into multiple universities, and concluded in October 2020 that they had failed to disclose nearly $6.5 billion of foreign gifts and contracts. Under the Biden Administration, the Department has not prioritized similar investigations, despite the concerns raised by this significant amount of dark money.”
• National Review reported in 2020 that the Department of Education released a report finding that “a number of universities had not appropriately reported funding received from entities in China, Qatar, and Russia” and that several universities were being investigated over the matter; in 2022, The Washington Examiner reported that “the inquiries seem to be in a lengthy limbo” and the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the department was planning on ending the investigations. And in 2024, former U.S. Attorney and Prague Security Studies Institute Senior Fellow Paul Moore wrote at RealClearEducation that the department decommissioned an “interactive data table for analyzing foreign funding disclosures” that was part of an “online portal for reporting foreign source gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more per calendar year.” The department’s explanation for the removal of the table: a “contract change.”
• In February, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Qatar has “doled out more than $243 million on lobbying efforts in the United States since 2015, with more than $16 million spent in 2023 alone.” The Free Beacon quoted both Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) as saying that he is putting in efforts to get investigations launched and legislation on the floor to address the matter.
• More recently, Al Jazeera provided an exclusive broadcast to Hamas commander Mohammed Deif on the morning of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel. “It was, in fact, a Qatari declaration of war in the very first hours of the conflict – given the fact that it was Qatar who developed Hamas’s capabilities over a decade,” the MEMRI report stated. “Later, Qatar offered its services as a mediator between Israel and Hamas. This is the common Qatari playbook. It proved effective in Afghanistan in 2021: Qatar supported the Taliban for years, all the way until the day of the removal of the secular regime of President Ashraf Ghani, with 13 U.S. soldiers killed. It then offered its services as mediator between the U.S and the Taliban to evacuate the remaining Americans to Qatar, and since then it has been operating on the political level to provide legitimacy in the West to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.”
• And yet, in April the Biden administration criticized the Israeli government for taking efforts to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller saying at the time: “We support the independent free press anywhere in the world, and much of what we know about what has happened in Gaza is because of reporters who are there doing their jobs, including reporters from Al Jazeera.” This is what prompted MEMRI to republish their February report in May.
• Link: Public Enemy: Unmasking the Qatar Connections

Hamas Must Be Defeated, Not Legitimized, by Khaled Abu Toameh in Gatestone Institute

• Hamas should not be permitted to play any role in the Gaza Strip after the war. This would allow the terror group to rearm and regroup and prepare for another October 7-style attack on Israel.
• By negotiating with Hamas about the future of the Gaza Strip, Abbas is legitimizing the Iran-backed terror group and sending a message to the Palestinians and the rest of the world that he sees no problem with dealing with murderers and terrorists who committed the most horrific crimes… As we have seen most recently in the Chinese Communist Party, Iran and Afghanistan, negotiating with terrorists and their equivalents simply does not work.
• Ever since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, thousands of Palestinians have been killed in wars they initiated with Israel. With the help of Europe, Qatar and Iran, Hamas transformed the Gaza Strip, home to two million Palestinians, into one of the largest bases for Islamist terrorism in the Middle East.
• The assumption that Hamas would voluntarily give up its control of the Gaza Strip because of any unity agreement with Abbas is just laughable.
• The Biden administration chose to turn a blind eye to Abbas’s efforts to legitimize Hamas. The US offered it a lifeline. A terror group committed to the elimination of Israel should have no role in any Palestinian government — not in the West Bank and certainly not in the Gaza Strip. Such a group should be completely destroyed militarily and politically, and not invited to join any Palestinian government.
• As long as Iran’s regime remains in place, torturing both its own people and others… regrettably there will be no peace. That is the only way to secure a truly peaceful future, not only for Israelis but for Palestinians and the Free World.
• Last week, representatives of the PA’s ruling Fatah faction (headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas) and Hamas held talks in the Egyptian capital of Cairo to discuss establishing a joint administration to rule the Gaza Strip. An Egyptian source confirmed that the Fatah-Hamas discussions aim at to create a committee to manage the affairs of the Gaza Strip, in addition to pursuing efforts to reach a ceasefire there.
• Tayseer Nasrallah, a senior Fatah official who participated in the talks with Hamas, expressed “optimism” that the talks with Hamas would lead to the formation of a committee for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. The talks, he said, “aim to unify visions regarding the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip” in the aftermath of the current Israel-Hamas war, which erupted after the October 7 attack that resulted in the murder of 1,200 Israelis and the injury of thousands. During the attack, many Israelis were beheaded, raped, tortured, and burned alive. In addition, more than 240 others were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 101 – alive and dead – remain in captivity.
• Hamas, for its part, said: “We held a meeting with our brothers in the Fatah faction, and the atmosphere of the meeting was positive and frank.” The terrorist group added that the two sides discussed “the formation of a body to follow up on the affairs and needs of the Gaza Strip,” and noted that the meetings with Fatah will continue.
• Moreover, Abbas should be urging Hamas to relinquish control over the Gaza Strip instead of begging it to agree to the formation of a joint Fatah-Hamas committee to manage the affairs of the coastal enclave.
• Abbas’s efforts to reach a deal with Hamas will only embolden and reconstitute the terror group and incentivize it to pursue its Jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel. These efforts send a message to Hamas that, despite the crimes it committed against Israelis on October 7 and the Nakba (catastrophe) it brought on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it can still play a key role in Gaza after the war. Since 2007, Hamas has demonstrated that it does not care about the well-being of the Palestinians living under its rule. The only thing Hamas cares about is remaining in power and continuing the fight against Israel to satisfy its patrons in Iran.
• The Biden administration chose to turn a blind eye to Abbas’s efforts to legitimize Hamas. The US offered it a lifeline. A terror group committed to the elimination of Israel should have no role in any Palestinian government — not in the West Bank and certainly not in the Gaza Strip. Such a group should be completely destroyed militarily and politically, and not invited to join any Palestinian government.
• Link: Hamas Must Be Defeated, Not Legitimized

IDF shifts tactics in Gaza offensive, causing higher Hamas casualties with fewer munitions by Yoav Zitun with Y-Net News

• Israeli forces have entered the second month of their prolonged operation in Jabaliya, in the northern third of the Gaza Strip, effectively placing the area under siege, the IDF confirmed Tuesday.
• These casualties add to the roughly 1,000 Hamas terrorists killed since the operation began over a month and a half ago, according to figures from the 162nd Division leading the offensive. The IDF estimates that 500-600 terrorists remain entrenched within the core of Jabaliya’s refugee camp or in nearby towns such as Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, with some blending into the civilian population still present in the area.
• Meanwhile, of the approximately 70,000 Palestinians originally in the Jabaliya region, the IDF has managed to evacuate around 55,000 southward, mostly to Gaza City. The army continues to apply heavy pressure on those remaining, urging them to move south.
• Despite most residents having been evacuated, Israeli forces continue to face numerous challenges in their prolonged operation in Jabaliya, with explosive traps posing the greatest threat. Since the beginning of the raid, IDF forces have discovered over 200 booby-trapped buildings in the area. In two incidents, explosives were triggered inside homes, killing six soldiers—two from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked Battalion and four from the elite Ghost Unit.
• For the past several months, the Ghost Unit has been operating in Gaza as part of the 162nd Division’s special forces. Established in 2019 to develop and implement advanced combat techniques and technologies for IDF ground forces, the unit suffered the loss of its commander, Lt. Col. Roy Levy, who was killed in battle at Kibbutz Re’im on October 7.
• In a recent operation, the unit identified and eliminated a group of terrorists attempting to ambush Givati forces. “Instead of firing missiles from a Hermes 450 drone, we’ve killed dozens of terrorists using Iron Ball, a drone that drops simple fragmentation grenades on terrorists and tunnel shafts,” said Lt. Col. Y., commander of the Ghost Unit.
• In addition to its impressive offensive capabilities, the Ghost Unit has also been developing methods to avoid triggering explosives, including identifying tripwires that activate traps. The terrorists, it was found, have been using simple pressure plates made of blinds with foam strips. “We’re taking extra precautions before soldiers enter for searches, even converting old armored personnel carriers (APCs) for various autonomous uses without soldiers inside,” officials added.
• As the operation continues with no clear end in sight, commanders in the field are unsure how long they will need to remain in Jabaliya. “In previous operations, we didn’t reach Hamas’ core areas here, but that’s what we’re doing now,” they explained. “Hamas has surrounded these areas with large rings of booby traps, and in recent days, civilians have been killed by these devices. According to testimonies from hundreds of detainees, Hamas terrorists have also executed civilians who attempted to flee the city.”
• Link: IDF shifts tactics in Gaza offensive, causing higher Hamas casualties with fewer munitions

‘Bring Them Home’? No,‘Let Them Go’, by Luke Moon and Phillip Dolitsky in WSJ

• Moses’ call to Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus to “let my people go” wasn’t a request for negotiation but a demand for freedom. Adapting his words today would help reject the notion that compromise is needed to free innocent people. “Bring them home” places the responsibility for securing the hostages’ release on Israel, as if Hamas has nothing to do with their captivity.
• “Let them go,” however, makes clear that Hamas is responsible for the hell these captives have endured for more than a year. The terrorist group started this war and holds the power to end it. The revised command is also directed at Hamas’s enablers, such as Iran and Qatar, who share responsibility for these crimes.
• This isn’t a time for bargaining. Our organization held a rally at the Washington Monument commemorating one year since the Oct. 7 massacre. Our speakers, including Sen. JD Vance, were moved by and voiced support for this shift in language. We are grateful for the vice president-elect’s moral clarity.
• Barbarians stole the captives and should release them immediately and unconditionally. “Let them go,” because the hostages’ lives are sacred, because the freedom of the innocent is nonnegotiable, and because it is right. Like Pharaoh, Hamas can’t escape the weight of this demand forever.
• Link: ‘Bring Them Home’? No,‘Let Them Go’

Antisemitism

[MUST READ] Instagram the Intifada: Mapping the Social Network of Students for Justice in Palestine by Mason Goad with the National Association of Scholars

• Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). SJP has defaced monuments, occupied buildings, set up camps, clashed with police, called for an “Intifada” (i.e., armed rebellion), and continues to do so. SJP also remains openly supportive of Hamas, a terrorist group, and questions about SJP’s organization, leadership, affiliations, and funding abound but have largely gone unanswered.
• SJP’s leadership, membership, and bed fellows have enjoyed hiding behind relative anonymity—masking their faces, organizational structure, and allied groups—as they’ve caused chaos on college campuses these last several months.
• We sought to answer the first three of those questions—in regard to organization, leadership, and affiliations—by mapping out the Students for Justice in Palestine’s social network on Instagram, but unlike Students for Justice in Palestine and the creators of the aforementioned Mapping Project, we are not hiding behind anonymity. We are not calling for violence, the destruction of property, or the destruction of the United States and her government. Our efforts are intended to assist law enforcement and other investigative entities / interested parties (such as researchers like ourselves, or members of the public), who are rightfully concerned with SJP’s actions and rhetoric. We simply want to understand the organization of SJP, to identify SJP’s true leadership, and to determine the groups that SJP is most closely associated with and influenced by.
• To accomplish this, we sampled 100 colleges and universities across the United States, as well as five geographic regions, and constructed a dataset of the “following” lists (as opposed to the “followers” lists) of 111 public accounts on Instagram that claim to be SJP chapters. Data collection and analysis took place from June to October of 2024
• Sure enough, the account that appeared most often across all lists was @nationalsjp, the National Students for Justice in Palestine coalition. The Columbia University SJP chapter placed third, with Harvard and Boston University chapters placing seventh and eighth, respectively. Excluding the trends of SJP chapters following each other—a trend that appears to reveal the relative importance of individual SJP chapters in the eyes of SJP’s (inter-)national leadership and membership—the data also reveals several journalists and various organizations that SJP appears to hold in high regard, as each account was followed by at least 20 of the 111 SJP chapters.

• The local accounts (such as SJP Chapter affiliates and leaders, sympathetic faculty and staff, and innocents who have no further connection with SJP) are often clustered around the edges of the network web, as these are the accounts followed by only one SJP Chapter, most often their local SJP Chapter. The graphic below zooms in on the network of @wvufriendsofpalestine (the West Virginia University SJP Chapter), which is the southernmost cluster in the visual above—the cluster sitting just above this paragraph.

• It has been just over a year since the October 7th attacks in Israel occurred, and Students for Justice in Palestine has celebrated the anniversary of the slaughter. The SJP Chapter at Swarthmore College posted a link on Instagram, with the caption: “Happy October 7th everyone! In honor of this glorious day and all our martyred revolutionaries, donate here.” Brown University suspended its SJP chapter due to the “severity of alleged threatening, intimidating and harassing actions,” and many other universities have done the same. A similar student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CAUD), openly praised Hamas and called for additional violence, prompting Senator Joni Earnst (R-IA) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the CAUD’s activities and affiliations.
• The SJP camps may have been cleared out, and the intensity of their protests may have waned, but this organization’s presence on campuses and the threat it presents has gone nowhere. There is still much left in the data to be explored, too much to do on our own. With the creation and release of this original dataset, we hope to offer other researchers and law enforcement officials an extensive list of leads for further inquiry into the organization and leadership of Students for Justice in Palestine, its ties to other organizations, and persons of interest.
• Link: Instagram the Intifada by Mason Goad

Contextualized and Decontextualized: Israel’s Fight for Truth by Michael Oren with Clarity with Michael Oren

• “So many people don’t understand the context in which this October 7 assault happened, “ actor Susan Sarandon told a pro-Palestinian rally that same week. “They don’t understand the history of what has been happening to the Palestinian people for 75 years.”
• Earlier, in October, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded the Security Council that, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
• Obama, Sarandon, and Guterres were making the same point. When confronting a case in which 1,200 Jews are butchered, beheaded, burnt, raped, and dragged into torturous captivity, one must first understand the context. Such atrocities can never be ascribed to sheer Jew-hatred. On the contrary, at some less than subliminal level, these Jews brought it on themselves. Their murderers must have been motivated by something far more complicated than evil, and therefore cannot be unequivocally guilty.
• The contextualization of the Gaza war and the antisemitism it fueled soon spread to Lebanon. On June 19, more than six months after Hezbollah first opened fire at northern Israel, the New York Times finally declared, “Israel and Hezbollah Play a Risky Tit-for-Tat, Leaving Region on Edge.” Both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal employed the same term, describing the “tit-for-tat fighting on the Lebanese border.”  The reality, of course, was that Israel was defending itself from the 8,000 Hezbollah drones and rockets that destroyed thousands of houses and displaced 100,000 Israelis. There was no tit-for-tat—no more than America’s entry into World War II was a tit-for-tat for Pearl Harbor. Somehow, once again, the Jews are complicit in their own murder.
• If once our problem was moral and historical relativism, it is now the prevalence of its absence. If once the horrors Hamas inflicted on Jews were juxtaposed with the Palestinian suffering caused by Israel and the Holocaust was linked to other mass killings in Eastern Europe and the caste system in India, the comparisons are regularly being jettisoned.  Once the victims of contextualization, Israel and the Jewish people, are today targeted by its opposite—decontextualization.
• Take, for example, the Washington Post op-ed, published on October 22, by columnist Shadi Hamad. In “A wake-up call for Kamala Harris from Muslim and Arab Americans,” Hamad assails the government’s failure to stop the “devastation of Gaza” and to prevent Israel from invading Lebanon. “The complicity of Biden and Harris in two wars that have deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure has become hard to deny,” he writes. Nowhere in the piece is the slightest mention of the barbarous attacks that triggered these wars—the names “Hamas” and “Hezbollah” nowhere appear. Nowhere does Hamad consider the possibility that the Iran-backed terrorists Israel battles also pose a tangible threat to the American freedoms Hamad, himself, enjoys.
• Israel simply kills Arabs for fun, the columnist suggests, with the Biden Administration its enabler. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon, once contextualized as the product of clashing Israeli and Palestinian rights and the cycle of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, are now presented as gratuitous acts of Zionist aggression. Such a distortion, published without correction on the pages of a major American newspaper, it is intellectually dishonest and arguably anti-Semitic.
• Further examples abound. Interviewing about the Lebanon war on CNN International on October 4, I protested a previous report that focused exclusively on the damage and suffering that Israel was inflicting on Lebanon. “To listen to CNN, you’d think Israel just wakes up and continues attacking Lebanon over and over again,” I began. “Not once did you mention the hundreds of rockets that have been fired by Hezbollah onto northern Israel. My family are in bomb shelters tonight and that’s not mentioned anywhere…There were drone attacks from Iraq all sponsored by Iran.” I literally pounded the table. “You’ve got to give a context.”
• Once again, there was no Hezbollah, no rockets or drones, or 100,000 Israeli refugees, just unadulterated Jewish savagery.
• Subtler but no less decontextualized are frontpage New York Times reports (October 18 and 30) on the destruction of hundreds of buildings by the IDF in southern Lebanon. While Hezbollah’s “cross-border attacks” are scarcely mentioned in passing, immense detail is devoted to the demolition of villages which Israel “says” served as Hezbollah strongholds. Before and after photos of the seemingly peaceful hamlets, together with videos of soldiers exulting after an explosion, reenforce the message of an Israel driven solely by vindictiveness.
• Formerly contextualized and now increasingly decontextualized, Israel’s struggle for survival must nevertheless continue. Our public diplomacy must relentlessly place the blame for this war on the terrorists who launched it and who bear the responsibility for both side’s suffering. We must always emphasize the malign Iranian hand behind all the violence sweeping the Middle East and that even now threatens the West. Ultimately, though, the only contexts that count are our own—of people, state, and Jewish history. Fight within them, honestly and fiercely, and Israel will prevail.
• Link: Contextualized and Decontextualized: Israel’s Fight for Truth

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, FDD, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, and the Times of Israel