Where to start this update? It just feels different today trying to process everything that has happened over these past few days. I have read so many articles of heartbreak and loss, of anger and frustration. To think that these 6 souls fought so hard for 330 days, only to be executed in the most barbaric way imaginable, is just impossible to wrap my head around and has brought a sense of helplessness over the entire situation. I thought what Daniel Gordis wrote this in his weekly post was worth sharing:

The history books, I think, will tell one day that something about Israel died this week. Regardless of how this existential war plays out (and when the Prime Minister said last night, once again, that the war is existential, he was essentially acknowledging that we might win—or we might not), something changed this week.

Some will say what we lost was the very last pretense that there’s anything we can do (or anything we will do) to get the hostages back—so what we lost, yet again, was the belief in our ability to defend ourselves.

I also thought that Dan Senor’s most recent podcast episode from Call Me Back truly captured the range of emotions many are feeling after hearing about this tragic news while also laying out the political realities facing Israeli leaders today.

• Link: The execution of six hostages – Call Me Back – with Haviv Rettig Gur & Wendy Singer

On the 6 Murdered Hostages

• The family of murdered hostage Eden Yerushalmi has authorized the release of a portion of the sick terror video that Hamas published earlier today. The Yerushalmi family released this statement: “Our Eden, we love you too and we miss you like crazy. You are forever in our hearts.”
  • Link to Video
• Rachel Goldberg Polin speaking at Hersh’s funeral. “Ok sweet boy go now on your journey… You’re finally finally finally finally free Hersh”

• [VIDEO] Jon Polin: “Maybe, just maybe, your death is the proverbial stone, the fuel, that will bring home the remaining 101 hostages.”
• The Hamas terror group indicated Monday that it murdered the six hostages whose bodies were recovered by the IDF from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah over the weekend to prevent Israeli troops from rescuing them. In a statement, the spokesman for the military wing of Hamas said that following Israel’s successful hostage rescue in Nuseirat in June, new protocols were given to terrorists guarding the abductees that they were to follow should Israeli troops approach. “We say to everyone clearly that after the Nuseirat incident, new instructions were issued to the mujahideen assigned to guard the prisoners regarding dealing with them if the occupation army approached their place of detention,” said Hudhaifa Kahlout, known by the nom de guerre Abu Obeida. Israel believes that the terror group has given standing orders to operatives who are holding hostages, to kill the captives if they think Israeli forces are nearing.
• Channel 12 has published a document found in a Gaza tunnel where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been located. The document contains guidelines for Hamas officials and operatives (credit: OliaOnX)
  • Increase the production of photos and video clips showing the hostages in order to create psychological pressure (on Israel)
  • Do everything to increase the psychological pressure on (Israeli Defense Minister Yoav) Gallant
  • Push the line of thinking that Netanyahu is responsible for everything that happens
  • Damage the Israeli narrative that the military ground operation aids the return of the hostages

    

Situational Update

• According to Marc Schulman: According to an independent analysis, approximately 280,000 people participated in Tel Aviv, making it one of the largest demonstrations to date. [Demonstrations also took place in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva tonight].
• AIPAC reports that IDF troops continue operating in Jenin, one of the major terror hotspots in the West Bank, in what is now the longest counterterrorism campaign in the area in over 20 years. Backed by Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have turned Jenin into a launching pad for terror attacks against Israel, including a recent surge of attempted car bombings in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
• Per the Times of Israel: Israeli negotiators told mediators in recent days that they still support a complete withdrawal of the IDF from the Philadelphi Corridor in the second phase of the hostage deal, despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments on Monday that Jerusalem must maintain a military presence there indefinitely, the Kan public broadcaster reports. Confirming a Haaretz report, an Arab diplomat tells The Times of Israel that hours before Netanyahu’s press conference, Mossad chief David Barnea flew urgently to Doha yesterday in order to inform Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Jerusalem’s position.
• The FDD reports that A Hamas terrorist who achieved notoriety when he was filmed casually swigging from a bottle of Coca-Cola after murdering an Israeli father during the October 7 atrocities has been eliminated, the IDF confirmed on September 3.
  • Personal note: I wrote about this particular moment after watching the collected footage from Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Oct. 7. As a father of two young children, this was truly the hardest for me.

The Numbers

Casualties

• 1,664 Israelis dead including 706 IDF soldiers (341 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza: no since Sunday)
• Additional Information (according to the IDF):
  • 2,268 (+5 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 427 (+2 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • 4,422 (+21 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 658 (+4 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
• According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,819 (+217 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 94,921 (+1,006 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
  • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
  • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”
• The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.

Hostages (no change since Sunday)

• There are currently 97-101 hostages currently in captivity in Gaza
• 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 an estimated 97-101 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
  • 31 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
  • Thus, at most, 74 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.

What We Are Reading

Among the Mourners of Zion and Jerusalem: Here in Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s neighborhood, the bewildering events of the past year were reduced to one human face. Matti Friedman writes from Jerusalem in The Free Press

• Last September I had dinner with Hersh Goldberg-Polin at his home in Jerusalem, which isn’t far from mine. His parents are friends, Chicago natives who came years ago and stayed.
• The last version of Hersh that I remember, from that family dinner, was a wry traveler making us laugh with a deadpan account of working on a falafel truck at an electronic music festival in Italy. My teenagers were an admiring audience for his adventures. He, and we, were looking forward to his next one.
• One morning a few weeks later Hersh disappeared, leaving only two text messages to his mother, Rachel: “I love you.” And: “I’m sorry.” It was October 7, 2023.
• With him were five other hostages who somehow survived eleven months of captivity only to be murdered in the tunnels where they were held
• Here in Israel, we’ve had to learn a lot since this war began. We learned that we’d be forced to navigate the most fraught moment in our history with a government that is the most extreme and least competent ever to lead this country—a dangerous lack of faith that erupted after today’s news in the form of many tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, furious at the failure to get our people home. We’ve learned that we’re nearly encircled by Iranian proxies. We’ve learned that the terrorist organization that seized Hersh—Hamas—in fact operates openly in the territory of two American allies, Turkey and Qatar. We’ve learned that Egypt, which has a border with Gaza and a peace agreement with Israel, has been allowing in the weapons that Hamas uses against us.
• We’ve learned that Hamas is not universally shunned as a terror group, but actually enjoys broad support, including in the West, including among some of the most educated citizens. We’ve seen that much of the Western press is capable of turning a story about a war launched by Muslim fundamentalists into a story about the injustice of the Israeli response, and indeed about the injustice of our country’s existence. Some reports on these murdered civilians said they merely “had died,” or “were found dead,” and the tenor of coverage seemed notably less outraged than it was at the assassination in July of the leader of Hamas.
• Hersh was an American citizen, born in California—and in California and elsewhere, we learned that other Americans would tear down his poster and those with the faces of other Israeli hostages. We’ve seen the support of the American administration wane as the war wears on, including an explicit demand by the White House to stay out of the southern Gaza city of Rafah—the city where Hersh and the five other hostages were just found by our soldiers, but too late.
• This morning it felt like an invisible blanket had settled on the streets. It’s the first day of class, always a happy occasion. But outside the local elementary school, many of the other parents I saw had red eyes and couldn’t speak. Around here, even little kids know Hersh, and the grown-ups had just been trying to explain why nothing anyone did was enough to bring him back.
• Link: Among the Mourners of Zion and Jerusalem

Dark Tunnels and Moral Beacons: The names of the six murdered Israeli hostages—and the evil ideology of their executioners—should be seared into the minds of all who wish to live in civilization. By Bari Weiss in the Free Press

• The names of Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin should be seared into the minds of anyone who wishes to live in a civilized world. Instead, we read headlines in our most storied media outlets describing these six Israelis as having “died” in Gaza. We are told that those defending their murderous captors “have a point.”
• As students return to campus, and a number of them renew the anarchy that proved so many administrators morally and physically unprepared to defend their Jewish students, there will be those prepared to tear down the hostage posters once more. Those eager to erase the faces and the meaning of those innocents who still remain in Gaza. I think about Hersh’s face and all of their faces. I think about the foundational principle of our civilization, that every human life has dignity.
• It is this very principle that Hamas and its barbaric ilk are trying to turn on its head. Much as they turn the people of Gaza into sacrifices, denying them shelter as they fire missiles from schools, mosques and hospitals, secure in the belief that the country they attacked will be found guilty of the bloodshed.
• This is not only about Israel. Or about special sympathy for allies who share our values, though they are and they do. It is about the reality that those who burn Israeli flags burn them alongside American ones. 
• Hersh, and those executed beside him in the tunnels under Rafah, were killed by Iran. It’s a country, now in league with China and Russia, that calls for death to America in the same breath it calls for the destruction of Israel. It is a country that began its tyrannical rule in 1979 by taking Americans captive, and that, as I write this, is actively targeting Americans on American soil. That is what we face.
• Link: Dark Tunnels and Moral Beacons

The Hostage Murders and the New Threat by John Podhoretz in Commentary

• Imagine an Israel that was not told by its best friend in the world that offensive action in Gaza had become self-defeating, was not told that Israel should care more about feeding people in Gaza than about eliminating the threat to its 9 million citizens and pummelling Hamas until that evil group of thugs cried uncle and begged for way to negotiate to return the hostages.
• Hamas is the evil here. America is not responsible for the deaths of anyone in Gaza, and anyone who says otherwise is a moral idiot—just like those deranged people who seem determined to blame Bibi Netanyahu for not surrendering to Hamas, as though the hostage deals of the past, like the one that freed Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar in 2011, weren’t among the root causes of this horrible conflict.
• But we Americans are morally liable for our role in our backseat-driving in this war, for screaming at the Israelis at the wheel, unnerving them as they were trying to keep their eye on the road ahead.
• This is a dangerous moment. This monstrous act of villainy will not quiet the campuses as the anniversary of October 7 approaches. No, it will embolden the very monsters who have been psychologically torturing Jewish students—and assaulting them in some cases—over the past year. The stories we’ve read in the past two days about the report of Columbia University’s anti-Semitism task force chill the blood. “Hillel Go to Hell,” read a banner at a Baruch College demonstration this week, in case you were wondering if things were going to quiet down.
• The threats were real then and they are going to be even more real now, as those who support the destruction of the Jewish state and the crushing of the spirit and the freedom of American Jews make their moves over the next month.
• Link: The Hostage Murders and the New Threat

A letter of optimism to Israel by Shaun Maguire

**I have included a few snippets of Shaun’s note, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

• Things are tough right now. But on a longer time frame, I’ve never been more optimistic about Israel. It’s worth keeping a longer perspective in mind.
• When I first came to Israel almost 20 years ago, to be blunt, it felt like a third world country. It was closer to Mexico than Miami. If you go back further, say to the Six Day War in 1967, Israel relied on imports for approximately 80% of its military technologies. In 1967 Israel relied on the outside world for: weapons, water, energy and dollars. Even worse, Israel was the world leader in very few strategic technologies.
• If you fast forward to today, Israel is independent for both water and energy, exporting each to Jordan, for extreme strategic benefit. In terms of weapons, Israel is now only dependent for about 20% of its strategic technologies. Israel is the world’s #1 cyber power and #1 in missile interception, including with hypersonic defense.
• The world doesn’t appreciate how important and powerful cyber capabilities are. In modern warfare, every physical operation is preceded and assisted by cyber operations.
• This is power. Israel isn’t the dependent little island that it was 50 years ago.
• The only long-term risk in my opinion is a lack of unity inside the country.
• In my outsider opinion, the root of the protests is less about the present and more about the future.
• In order for Israel to prosper, the country needs to find a way to come together. Secular Jews have been sacrificing their lives in the nightmare that is Gaza. While Religious Jews have been fighting the long-term demographic battle, with Haredi women having about 6.7 children on average. Israel needs to find a way for more Haredi Jews to join the Army. This requires more compromise and empathy than most secular Jews have appreciated. But on the other hand, religious Jews need to help alleviate the fear that the way of life in Tel Aviv will change.
• There is no future where Israel looks like the past. But this doesn’t need to be a bad thing. By some miracle, Israel survived the last 75 years and is now one or at most two decades away from being completely self-reliant from an economic and military standpoint. The existential risk has shifted from outside the country, to coming from within.
• Link: A letter of optimism to Israel

Munders and Metzgers, salt of the earth by Saul Singer, co-author, with Dan Senor, of Start-Up Nation and The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World.

• On Wednesday and Thursday, we witnessed two funerals in the small pastoral cemetery of Kibbutz Nir Oz.
• The first was of Avraham Munder, who was kidnapped from his home in Nir Oz on October 7 with his wife, their daughter, Keren, and their only grandson, 9-year-old Ohad. Keren’s brother Roi, was murdered that day on the kibbutz. After the heartbreaking eulogies in front of two coffins waiting for burial, side by side, father and son, Avraham and Roi (Roi was being reburied), the coffins were simultaneously lowered into the ground and immediately covered with buckets of sandy dirt wielded by their family and the kibbutzniks who had known them for decades.
  • For five months, Munder survived in the tunnels in Gaza. A video of him alive was released by Hamas — as a form of psychological torture — in December. According to forensic evidence, his captors executed him and other hostages as they feared capture by advancing Israeli forces.
• The second funeral was that of Yoram Metzger, husband of Tami, also taken captive, father of three sons, grandfather to six grandchildren. At first, Yoram was held separately from Tami. The couple, both of whom spoke fluent Arabic, were eventually reunited in the tunnels of Gaza. In late November, the rest of Metzger’s family was released in the first and only hostage deal. Tami did not want to leave her husband but Metzger insisted, “You need to take care of the children.”
• These two men embodied the Israeli story. They lived through or fought in all of Israel’s wars. They were pillars of a flourishing kibbutz so close to Gaza that both funerals began with a macabre public service announcement: please turn off your phones and, if a siren goes off warning of missile attack, you have eight seconds to lie flat on the ground, in place, with your hands on your head.
• There is an unspoken tendency to think that the cutting off of the life of an 80-year-old is less of a tragedy than that of a younger person. At least they lived a long life.
• But the sweep of their lives, cutting across Israeli and Jewish history, also sharpens the bitterness of betrayal. These men personally fought for their country twice in wars in which Israel’s existence hung in the balance.
• Who prevented Israel’s destruction then? Who fought to unify Jerusalem? It was an entire generation of Munders and Metzgers. And as if that were not enough, these two men chose to raise their families a stone’s throw from a regime whose raison d’etre was to commit genocide against a neighboring state and rain destruction on its own people.
• “Salt of the earth” does not begin to express the joy, toil, and selfless sacrifice that Avraham Munder and Yoram Metzger brought to their families, communities, and the country they loved. It does express their end, in that treasured earth, far too soon.
• Link: Munders and Metzgers, salt of the earth

When Israel Buried Hersh Yesterday by Daniel Gordis on his blog, Israel from the Inside

• The history books, I think, will tell one day that something about Israel died this week. Regardless of how this existential war plays out (and when the Prime Minister said last night, once again, that the war is existential, he was essentially acknowledging that we might win—or we might not), something changed this week.
• Some will say what we lost was the very last pretense that there’s anything we can do (or anything we will do) to get the hostages back—so what we lost, yet again, was the belief in our ability to defend ourselves.
• Or, for some (but certainly not all), the belief that we have it within us to do the right thing and to get the remaining hostages home.
• Some will say that what we lost even the pretense that some (again, some, not all) of the leaders of this country even care that much.
• Some will say that it’s deeper than that. They will say that as long as the agony of his captivity endured, as long as Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin, along with their daughters, fought indefatigably for the return of their beloved son and brother, we were blessed (for the most horrifying reasons) to see the very best of what Israel can be. Dignified, passionate, determined. Zionism that is genuine (they moved here, after all). A profound Zionism that also has a place for acknowledging the pain of all the innocent victims—not just us. Deep religiosity animated not by hate, but by boundless love.
• Because of his extraordinary parents, who have touched more hearts and souls than any contemporary Jewish or Israeli religious figure one could possibly point to, Hersh came to symbolize those qualities for millions of people. With the news of his death, we were reminded how few are the voices in the Jewish world who reflect those values. So when he died, some hope we have for ourselves, some piece of our sense of who we can be when we are at our best, died as well.
• Link: When Israel buried Hersh yesterday

How Close Is Iran to the Bomb? By Jay Solomon in The Free Press

• Two separate documents—about a half dozen pages written in Farsi—obtained by The Free Press reveal how Iran’s parliament, or Majlis, is significantly expanding the funding and military pursuits of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Farsi language–based acronym, SPND. The pages of legislation, passed this summer, were downloaded from the parliament’s website, but are being detailed for the first time in the Western press.
• While the new Iranian legislation doesn’t specifically mention nuclear bomb development, it clearly states that SPND’s mandate is to produce advanced and nonconventional weapons with no civilian oversight. The legislation, which The Free Press translated, states that “this organization focuses on managing and acquiring innovative, emerging, groundbreaking, high-risk, and superior technologies in response to new and emerging threats.”
• The law essentially shields Iran’s defense department from any domestic oversight—while giving it a seemingly unlimited budget, though no specific numbers were given.
• SPND, according to U.S. and Israeli officials, is the successor to a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program, called the AMAD Plan, which Iran disbanded in 2003 after it was detected by Western intelligence agencies.
• Iran’s government officially claims that its nuclear program is for peaceful pursuits and cites a religious fatwa, or decree, publicly issued in 2003 by Ayatollah Khamenei banning the development of atomic weapons. But in recent months a number of current and former Iranian officials, including Ali Akbar Salehi, have publicly questioned the utility of this military doctrine, pointing in part to the threats posed by the U.S. and Israel, both of which have nuclear weapons (though Israel has never acknowledged its arsenal). This debate about the right to develop nuclear weapons is also taking place inside Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to people who have talked to senior IRGC officials in recent months.
• SPND’s operations are seen as central to any final Iranian decision to actually cross the weapons threshold. Its scientists, some of whom are tied to the original AMAD Plan, have been involved in developing triggering devices for a nuclear detonation, according to U.S., Israeli, and UN officials.
• The sense that Iran was secretly seeking the bomb has, at times, seemed like a Western myth or outright paranoia. But the simple passage of this new Iranian law could mark the end of this story of intrigue.
• Link: How Close Is Iran to the Bomb?

Israel Can Hit Iran’s Proxies Without Starting a War: After Gaza, a long-term strategy involves diplomacy with the Saudis and hybrid operations against Hezbollah and the Houthis. By James Stavridis in Bloomberg

• There are two essential elements of an effective long-term strategy for the Israelis: One is diplomatic and the other military.
• The best single strategic move is on the diplomatic side: Deepening Israel’s alignment with the Arab world.
  • Just before the appalling attacks of Oct. 7, it looked like the outline of a strategic deal among the US, Israel and the Saudis was taking shape. Hamas’ invasion, although long in the planning, was no doubt timed to upend those negotiations.
  • The reason this should be the central plank in a long-term Israeli strategy is that it consolidates resistance to Iran.
  • By capitalizing on friction between the Arab states and Iran, Israel can construct a far better barrier to Tehran’s belligerence. It would benefit from excellent shared intelligence, missile defenses and early-warning capabilities, as well as special-forces cooperation. Some of this has been happening informally and quietly for years, but moving it into the open makes sense both for Israel and the US.
• The second key element is military — and it is not, as some have argued, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon.
  • Hybrid warfare. This would entail a continued campaign of air strikes targeting Hezbollah leadership; special forces operations disabling Hezbollah’s offensive capabilities; cyberattacks against the terrorist group’s financial and logistical chains; interdiction of supply routes on land and at sea between Iran and Lebanon; and information warfare seeking to drive a wedge between Hezbollah and the ever-shaky government of Lebanon.
  • A similar approach against the Houthis is warranted. This would be closely coordinated with the US and NATO allies, who are irate at the massive constriction of the Suez Canal and Red Sea shipping routes.
• There is a middle path between a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo and an all-out regional war. The first essential component is diplomatic and consists of upgrading the Abraham Accords to an “Abraham Alliance” — creating a strategic triangle between the US, Israel and the Arab world. The second is a military campaign of hybrid techniques against Iranian proxies that falls short of actual war. Tehran won’t like it, but it’s unlikely to initiate a full-scale regional conflict on behalf of the Houthis and Hezbollah.
• Link: Israel Can Hit Iran’s Proxies Without Starting a War

Antisemitism

A stunning reversal on academic boycotts is all about Israel by Steven Lubet in The Hill

• There was a time when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) deserved its self-description as the “most prominent guardian of academic freedom” for faculty and students in the U.S. But not any longer.
• Last month, the organization rescinded its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, which it had previously recognized as aiming “directly at the free exchange of ideas,” in favor of a new policy declaring that such boycotts “can legitimately seek to protect and advance…academic freedom and fundamental rights.”
• The turnaround is a betrayal of academic values, which ideally comprise the “freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues” and “the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas,” without political restraints.
• Although the revised AAUP statement does not mention Israel or Palestine, it is obvious that it came about in the context of the siege of Gaza and the intensified efforts of the boycott, divest, sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
• The AAUP leadership has admitted as much, saying that “Academic boycotts, it seems, cannot be thought about apart from the polarizing geopolitics of Palestine and Israel.”
• A University of Michigan professor, for example, refused to write a reference for a student’s participation in a university-sponsored program in Israel. He explained that his adherence to the “academic boycott against Israel” precludes “writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there,” although he would gladly provide a reference for any other country.
• The editors of a scholarly journal at the University of Minnesota refused to consider a submission from an Israeli Ph.D. “due to the journal’s commitment to BDS guidelines” and the author’s “affiliation with Israeli academic institutions.”
• In Europe, Israeli authors’ articles are summarily “rejected by journals” and “reviewers refuse to review Israeli research projects or academic papers.” Some universities have imposed “bans on inviting Israelis to academic conferences.”
• The tragic irony of the new AAUP position is that it will surely be used to promote the boycott of Israeli universities, which happen to be the most liberal, peace-oriented, and integrated institutions in the country.
• Link: A stunning reversal on academic boycotts is all about Israel

University of Maryland Cancels Pro-Hamas Oct. 7 Rally by Dion J. Pierre with The Algemeiner

• The University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) has rescinded permission to hold a pro-Hamas rally on its campus on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last year which took the lives of 1,200 people and resulted in the largest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
• UMCP reportedly granted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been linked to jihadist terror groups, a permit to hold the demonstration in August, prompting an outcry from the campus Jewish community. Protesting what many perceived as a celebration of anti-Jewish violence, groups such as Maryland Hillel called on school officials to reverse course.
• On Sunday, the university announced it had cancelled the event, but it did not comment on SJP’s intent. Rather, UMCP president Darryll Pines wrote in a statement that the decision was precipitated by a “safety assessment,” which, he added, did not identify any threats to the campus.
• Despite stopping short of denouncing the SJP rally, the decision was commended by UMCP’s Jewish Student Union.
• Link: University of Maryland Cancels Pro-Hamas Oct. 7 Rally

University of Illinois reaches agreements to protect Jewish students, resolving antisemitism probe by Haley Cohen in the Jewish Insider

• The new school year is bringing fresh protections for Jewish students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, following the administration’s announcement on Tuesday that its nondiscrimination policy will now extend to harassment or discrimination based on Jewish students’ connections to Israel and Zionism.
• Under the agreement, announced on Tuesday, the University of Illinois declared that the protections offered by the university’s nondiscrimination policy extend to harassment or discrimination of Jewish students, including harassment or discrimination based on Jewish students’ connections to Israel and Zionism.
• Link: University of Illinois reaches agreements to protect Jewish students, resolving antisemitism probe

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