With Israeli Raids in the West Bank, ‘There’s No Such Thing as Sleeping at Night’

Mangled pipes poured sewer water into what remained of the road. On either side of the runoff were piles of broken pavement, churned up by bulldozers. The archway at the entrance to the neighborhood had been demolished; the gnarled hull of a black car sat nearby.

Almost all of the residents of Jenin, a more than 70-year-old refugee camp turned neighborhood in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had fled in recent weeks. Of the handful who remained, few dared venture out onto the street. They knew that at any moment the quiet could erupt in the paw-paw-paw of gunfire and the hissing hydraulics of bulldozers as Israeli security forces carried out a new raid.

Since the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, the Jenin refugee camp — long known as a bastion of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation — has been a focal point of what Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism operations in the West Bank and an extension of their war in Gaza.

Across the occupied territory, Israel has conducted near-nightly raids. In the Jenin camp, it has done so every few days, sometimes twice a day, and has arrested at least 158 people, according to the Israeli authorities. Palestinian officials say at least 330 residents have been arrested and 67 people killed, including an 8-year-old child.

It is the deadliest two-month stretch the camp has experienced in recent memory, described by residents as a relentless siege. The local armed resistance has been pummeled — for now, residents say.

“The new generation will come back stronger because of everything they are seeing now,” warned Salah Abu Shireen, 53, a shopkeeper in the camp. “The war, the killing, the invasion, the raids — it will all fuel even more resistance.”

Formally established in 1953, the Jenin refugee camp has been celebrated for decades by Palestinians as a symbol of resistance against Israeli rule. Nearly every resident here has had at least one relative jailed or killed, helping forge a sense of common destiny. Posters of slain fighters line the streets and children carry farewell notes, akin to wills, on their phones in case they are killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers.

Since it was first built, the camp has morphed from a smattering of temporary tents to a neighborhood of concrete apartment buildings squeezed into the heart of surrounding Jenin city. But in recent weeks, the raids have left the camp, an area of less than half a square mile, battered.

Electricity lines have been damaged, water tanks punctured and paved roads turned to little more than pebbles and dirt. The stench of sewage hangs thick in the air. Over the past two months, around 80 percent of the roughly 17,000 residents have temporarily moved to the surrounding city, local leaders say.

Today, the camp’s warren of roads and alleyways is mostly empty, save for the few children chasing one another in games of tag. Dangling from the concrete facades of buildings around them are small white cameras and loudspeakers — part of the ad hoc warning system residents set up to alert one another to incoming convoys of Israeli military vehicles.

When the electricity was cut and the sirens could not blare, people turned to Telegram channels on which spotters on the outskirts of the camp offered warnings, or relied on children who ran through the streets screaming: “The army is coming! The army is coming!”

Since the raids began, Fida Mataheen, 52, and her relatives have often stayed awake until dawn, anxiously checking for alerts. “There’s no such thing as sleeping at night in the camp these days,” she said. “We are always lying awake, waiting.”

Ms. Mataheen’s only comfort comes from when she hears fighters joking and laughing in the street outside, she said. Knowing they are relaxed is often enough to lull her to sleep. But if she hears them fall silent and the clacks of rifles being picked up, she knows something is amiss. Her relatives — who live in the apartments above hers — will then run down to her first-floor apartment, hoping for safety there.

Earlier this month, their apartments were raided twice in one week, she said. Couches were overturned, drawers pulled out and clothing strewed across the floor, photographs show. Her daughter-in-law returned home to find her toilet overflowing, she and two other relatives said.

Life in the camp had already become untenable, Ms. Mataheen said. Her daughters-in-law had to ask neighbors for clean water for cooking, and, when the electricity was cut, her sons had to take their phones to a nearby hospital to charge. Her 3-year-old grandson, Mahmoud, began wetting the bed. Her youngest grandson, age 1, could sleep only if cuddled in her arms.

“It was so full of life, so full of energy — now that’s gone,” Ms. Mataheen said, describing the camp. “It’s like they are seeking revenge for what happened on Oct. 7 — but we didn’t do that,” she said.

The family has now left for a house they rented in Jenin city. The few residents who remain in the camp are determined to preserve a semblance of normal life.

Standing in his falafel restaurant, one of the few businesses still open, Samir Jaber, 52, worked over a pan covered in an inch-thick layer of oil. Light streamed into the restaurant from a smattering of small punctures in the doors, scars from an explosion during a raid about a month ago, he said.

“Would you like some fish?” his neighbor joked, nodding toward the stream of sewer water running across the torn-up street outside.

“Only if you caught it yesterday,” Mr. Jaber replied.

“Yeah, it was like a river then,” the neighbor conceded.

After a raid that destroyed the road, Mr. Jaber began leaving the camp each night to sleep in the safety of an apartment in the city. But he returned to the restaurant each morning to serve the few customers still milling about the neighborhood. “This is our camp; this is our home,” he said. “They are trying to displace us, but we’re not leaving here.”

While Jenin experienced raids before the Hamas attack, residents described the recent incursions as more aggressive and more frequent than ever before. The cumulative effect of raid after raid has worn on people, they said. It has also chipped away at the organized armed resistance that residents viewed as their protector.

Earlier this month, a well-known leader, Muhammad Zubeidi, 26, was killed in a clash with Israeli security forces. The Israeli forces confirmed they had killed Mr. Zubeidi, whom they identified as “the Jenin Camp Commander” and an operative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed group based in Gaza.

News of his death reverberated across the camp like a death knell for this generation. Young people ran to the scene of the clash in disbelief, they said. There, they found a building turned to rubble and Mr. Zubeidi’s shoes splattered in blood.

The fighters “were a symbol for all of us in the camp; they were defending us, they were fighting for our future,” Walid Jaber, 18, said from a hospital bed after being shot in the leg during a raid. A pendant with a photograph of Mr. Zubeidi hung around his neck. “We will not forget them. We will all seek revenge for their blood.”

Days after Mr. Zubeidi’s death, his father, Jamal Zubeidi, 67, sat in their family’s home welcoming mourners who had come to offer condolences. The family was renowned in the camp, and posters memorializing cousins and sons and brothers who had died fighting Israeli forces covered the walls.

“What the Israelis are trying to do with all this destruction is create a state of despair and drive a wedge between the people in the camp and the resistance — so people blame the resistance fighters,” Mr. Zubeidi said. “What the Israelis don’t realize is that our biggest strength is our unity.”

Christina Goldbaum is the Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief for The Times.
Hiba Yazbek reports for The Times from Jerusalem, covering Israel and the occupied West Bank.

On April 2 Israeli forces began to enter Jenin, sparking a week of intense fighting.  Before the fighting began, Israel issued warnings for civilians to evacuate. Most residents fled, but more than a thousand, perhaps as many as four thousand, remained.Some didn’t hear the warnings, some stayed to fight.

As they entered Jenin...the muezzin kept calling, “Itbach al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews).  Hamas, PIJ, and Fatah fighters had all worked together to prepare for the IDF onslaught. Their leaders tried to anticipate Israel’s preferred route of entry and the points the IDF would try to hold. Their goal was simple: inflict casualties on the IDF. With this framework in mind the militants decided that booby-traps, ambushes, and snipers would be the best way to confront the enemy.

"Hanged bombs”—bombs dangling from trees and other high places—were particularly effective.


As the Israeli invasion became imminent.. Palestinian fighters put bombs “inside cupboards, under sinks, inside sofas.” Some of the bombs were as big as 250 pounds—ten times the size of a typical suicide bomber’s payload. PIJ’s leader Abdullah Ramadan Shalah explained that they knew the IDF would go to the homes of suspected PIJ fighters, “so they evacuated the houses and booby-trapped them. They booby-trapped the doors, the furnitures, the book shelves and other equipment."

In all, thousands of bombs were placed throughout the camp. During interrogation Palestinian prisoners] often revealed where they had buried explosives.  Helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flew constantly overhead to scout out the enemy, orient troops, and provide information and firepower to commanders.  As the information flowed in, snipers picked off Palestinian fighters. The IDF used mistaravim (Hebrew for “to become an Arab”) units, in which Israelis dressed and acted as locals to gather intelligence. When the Israelis took over an area, troops went from house to house to collect the names, phone numbers, and other information from every resident.

April 9, 2002, Palestinian fighters ambushed IDF reservists in Jenin’s narrow alleyways, opening fire from three different directions as young boys threw bombs. Palestinian sources claimed they lured the soldiers and trapped them: “We all stopped shooting and the women went out to tell the soldiers that we ran out of bullets and were leaving.”

The women then alerted the Palestinian fighters that the soldiers were now in the booby-trapped area. “When the [IDF] senior officers realized what had happened, they shouted through megaphones that they wanted an immediate cease-fire. We let them approach to retrieve the men and then opened fire.”

Thirteen died in the trap. In his account of the battle the platoon commander Ofer Segal recalled the bloody moment. The radio receiver screamed, “Six [the radio code name for commander of platoon six], this is eight, we are wounded. Come rescue us.”

Segal started running toward the alley, where heavy fire came from all directions. Entering the alley, it dawned on him how deadly the ambush was. Palestinian fighters shot at the troops from windows above, and getting the wounded out seemed impossible. Because the soldiers and militants were mixed, helicopters could not fire without shooting their own.  As Segal watched, one of the soldiers trying to evacuate a friend stepped on a tripwire. In the massive explosion that followed the soldier died and two of his friends fell wounded. Rescue proved futile. It later became clear that bombs and trigger wires were everywhere in the alley. “They are all dead, there are no wounded,” the radio receiver screamed.

The fighters in Jenin were led by Mona Hazam, a fighter known as Abu Jandal who had fought the IDF in Lebanon and had served in the Iraqi Army. Mahmud Tawalba, the head of PIJ in Jenin who was at the top of Israel’s terrorist list there, was a brave, charismatic, and demanding leader who had sent his own brother to commit a suicide attack in Haifa.

After the reservists were ambushed, the IDF began to use D-9 armored bulldozers, twenty-foot tall machines that flattened everything in their path.  Initially the IDF used the D-9s to smash holes in the walls of buildings, what the troops called “knock on the door,” so the squad could then take the buildings by deploying in an area that was relatively undefended and without having to traverse the dangerous and booby-trapped alleys of Jenin.

The bulldozers were also effective at exploding bombs, thus clearing a path so deploying soldiers could pass through without injury.  [An Israeli officer] described a scenario where the D-9 approached a house containing nine terrorists. Eight surrendered. Their commander did not. The D-9 knocked the house on him and killed him.  

The D-9 It enabled military forces to move freely and intimidate the fighters opposing them. “Either they come out or we keep rolling.” Tabaat Mardawi, an Islamic Jihad fighter, put this plainly: “There was nothing I could do against that bulldozer. What could I do? Either surrender or be buried in the rubble.” The PIJ commander Mahmud Tawalba died along with two other fighters when they tried to get close enough to a D-9 to place explosives directly on it; apparently the driver saw them coming and smashed a wall down on top of them.

One camp resident, Maher Muhammad Hassan Salim, claimed that soldiers threatened to shoot his family unless he went first through “mouse-holes,” entry points created between houses when soldiers went through walls rather than risking exposure in the streets. Another Jenin resident, ‘Amer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karim, told human rights officials, “The soldiers would have us walk in front of them, sometimes with them resting their rifles on our shoulders.” Kamal Tawalbi told Human Rights Watch that he and his fourteen-year-old son were in the line of fire for three hours. Segal explained that the IDF used to enter a house, concentrate all the inhabitants in one room, and then take one person to search the house. “We don’t touch anything, he does everything we ask him to.” As one U.S. general told me, “Israelis inculcate a degree of ruthlessness among their junior officers that we don’t.”

Such methods, though ruthless, protected IDF troops. ‘Afaf Disuqi, a fifty-two-year-old woman, died when soldiers had her open a booby-trapped door. One Palestinian militant explained why his group did not kill a large group of soldiers: “We would have had to kill the boys too. Their brother was with us and begged us not to. We had the chance to kill twenty-five soldiers, but we did not.” However, the IDF planner Yossi Kuperwasser claims that Israel used civilians in this way to minimize casualties on all sides, as Palestinian militants wouldn’t activate booby traps against their own people. It was “a dialogue with them in their language.”

Battle for Southern Gaza Could Take Months, Says Israeli Military

TEL AVIV—The Israeli military says it could take months to assert control over a key city in southern Gaza, as Hamas guerrilla tactics are causing casualties to mount among Israeli troops.

At least 16 Israeli soldiers were killed across Gaza over the past three days, as the military is now focusing on killing Hamas’s leaders and dismantling its extensive tunnel network.

On Saturday, four Israeli soldiers were killed by improvised explosive devices, and another four were killed by an antitank missile fired at their armored vehicle, according to Israel’s state-owned Army Radio and partially confirmed by the military. Five additional soldiers were killed in fighting across the Strip on Friday. Israel’s military confirmed on its website two more additional deaths on Saturday and another on Sunday.

The growing death toll has led to some internal criticism that Israel is endangering soldiers by scaling back its use of force in response to U.S. demands to limit civilian casualties. Israeli security officials and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deny any change to tactics because of American pressure.

But the growing casualties in the Israeli military highlight the difficulties in wiping out Hamas, which is splintering into a part-guerrilla army and launching attacks from populated areas.

Israeli military officials say they have been surprised by the extent of Hamas’s vast military network in southern Gaza and are finding more tunnels and weapons than they expected. A senior Israeli military officer commanding the battalion inside the city of Khan Younis said it could take months before they have control over the city the same way the Israeli military now controls northern Gaza.

“Their modus operandi now is to harass our soldiers and then go back into the tunnels,” said the officer. Hamas is keeping its attacks to cells of two to five fighters, the officer added.

The officer said Hamas is also attacking Israeli forces from civilian shelters, and using women and children to gather intelligence or move sensitive equipment around, such as weapons. Hamas is also storing weapons in hundreds or thousands of empty homes. This allows its fighters to move around freely, passing as civilians, and to retrieve the weapons at the last moment before mounting an attack.

Hamas is organized into battalion and brigade formations, but more than three months of air assault and two months of ground operations have broken the core of its command infrastructure. But Hamas is still able to mount effective guerrilla attacks.

“We’re speaking about half a guerrilla and half an army,” said Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer, referring to the current Hamas force.

Some in Israel believe the mounting Israeli soldier death toll in southern Gaza is due to a more limited use of destructive firepower, such as airstrikes, which would remove danger to advancing troops, such as booby-trapped buildings, but likely lead to more civilian deaths among Palestinians.

“It’s untenable that we are endangering our soldiers’ lives and sending them exposed into buildings before striking them,” said Nir Barkat, Israel’s minister of economy and industry, on Sunday. “Folding to outside pressure, even from our best friends, is a terrible mistake.”

Responding to the criticism, the Israeli military on Sunday said that ground troops in Gaza are fully covered by air support and ground-based firepower.

The senior Israeli officer commanding forces in Khan Younis said there is no change in policy. Israel has more boots on the ground in Khan Younis than they had in northern Gaza during the start of the ground operation, and so there are less widespread airstrikes to avoid harming Israeli troops, the officer added. Israel, he said, has four bridges operating in the heart of Khan Younis and an additional two forming a defensive perimeter around the Israeli positions and bolstering logistical support.

He also said the army sometimes decides to send troops into a building before destroying it because they believe they can gather intelligence.

At least 154 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ground invasion of Gaza began eight weeks ago, making a total of 487 Israeli military deaths since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. The death toll is the largest of any Israeli war since the country battled Palestinian militants in Lebanon in the early 1980s in what is now called the First Lebanon War.

Israel’s war against Hamas is shifting from the northern part of the enclave, where Israel says it has largely gained operational control, to Hamas’s stronghold in the south at Khan Younis. There, Israeli troops are focusing on hunting for Hamas’s tunnels and the group’s leaders, who are believed to be hiding inside the underground structures.

In Khan Younis, the Israeli military is using a recently established grid system to move civilians out of areas it plans to attack rather than demanding they evacuate all at once as it did in northern Gaza at the start of the war.

The Israeli officer said the system is working and that civilians are evacuating areas before Israel attacks. He said this has led to fewer civilian casualties, and the majority of casualties in Khan Younis are now militants, a reversal from northern Gaza, where Israeli officials admitted civilian casualties had greatly outnumbered militants.

The statements about lower civilian deaths in Khan Younis couldn’t be immediately verified.

Dr. Ashraf Al Qedra, spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, said 70% of the people killed everywhere in Gaza are women and children, and that complete families were killed in Khan Younis.

“If the army says the ones killed are militants, let them give us a single name,” he said.

On Sunday, the Gaza health authorities in the Hamas-run enclave said 166 people were killed there over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 20,424 since the start of the war. The numbers don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Many residents across the Gaza Strip are without electricity and face frequent telecommunications blackouts. In Khan Younis, some residents said they were able to follow the Israeli military instructions using limited internet access.

Israeli officials say they are readying to transition soon to the third phase of the war. In this phase, Israeli security analysts say, Israel will redeploy many of its troops along the border with Gaza and rely on targeted raids to finish off the goals of the war—destroying Hamas’s ability to attack Israel from Gaza and free hostages held by the group.

Such a redeployment would limit the number of troops vulnerable to Hamas’s guerrilla tactics but also reduce their ability to find and destroy the group’s critical tunnel network, raising questions about the timing of this move. Israel believes Hamas is holding its hostages inside the tunnels and that destroying the underground network is critical to eliminating the group’s ability to fight.

Bolstering the claim, the bodies of five Israeli hostages were recovered from a tunnel, the Israeli military said Sunday. The five were named by the military earlier this month.

If Israel withdraws its ground forces from Hamas strongholds, eliminating tunnels “won’t be difficult, it would be impossible,” said retired Israeli general and former National Security Council head Uzi Dayan. “Without full control over territory, above ground, we can’t control what happens below ground.”

As part of its transition to lower-intensity fighting while retaining security control over Gaza, Israel is weighing the creation of a slightly more than half-mile-wide buffer zone within the Strip, running along the length of its Israeli border, said Giora Eiland, a former general who also used to head Israel’s National Security Council.

“We will clean everything that exists in this security zone, including buildings, greenhouses, whatever, in order to create a possible better security situation for the day after,” Eiland said.

The Biden administration has said it opposes this idea because it would shrink the enclave’s territory.

In his opening remarks to Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu denied American pressure is determining Israel’s operational decisions, saying that the U.S. isn’t preventing Israel from taking military action in the region.

“Israel is a sovereign country. Our war decisions are based upon our operational considerations, and I won’t expand upon that,” said Netanyahu. “They are not determined by external pressures.”

Netanyahu’s comments follow a Wall Street Journal report on Saturday that said President Biden had convinced Netanyahu to refrain from a pre-emptive strike against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah during the early stages of the war.

Netanyahu has vowed to keep going until Israel achieves its war aims.

“The war is exacting a very heavy price, but we have no choice but to continue fighting,” he said.

Retired general Dayan said that Israel’s public, which initially gave unprecedented support to the campaign to eliminate Hamas, is growing weary of war losses. “The Israeli public also wants to see the end of this,” he said.

Israeli soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip found a large cache of weapons used by Hamas in a building where civilians were sheltering in the northern part of the enclave, including “explosive belts adapted for children,” dozens of mortars, hundreds of grenades, and intelligence documents, the Israel Defense Forces said on Sunday.

Soldiers of the 261st Brigade, the Bahad 1 officers’ school in wartime, made the discovery in a search of the building, which is located near a school, a mosque, and a health clinic.

Later Sunday, the IDF said troops of the 401st Armored Brigade and Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit battled Hamas gunmen and found a cache of weapons in a school serving as a shelter in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood.

The IDF said the forces raided the school after receiving intelligence of Hamas operatives in the area, killing many of them in the process, while dozens of others surrendered.

“After we evacuated the [civilian] population, we found in the complex many weapons, hidden between the civilians’ equipment,” said a Shayetet 13 deputy company commander in a video, showing assault rifles, grenades and other explosive devices found in the school.

The IDF said dozens of Hamas fighters who surrendered and were interrogated by officers of the Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 at the scene were taken to Israel for further questioning.

Also in northern Gaza, the IDF said earlier that troops of the Yiftah Brigade identified several terror operatives coming out of a building used by Hamas for observation, and called in an airstrike.

Meanwhile, the 460th Armored Brigade, operating in northern Gaza’s Jabaliya, directed airstrikes and artillery against seven Hamas operatives and four observation positions in the area, the IDF said.

In southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, where some of Hamas’s leadership is thought to be hiding, the IDF said troops of the Kfir Brigade raided a Hamas headquarters, locating weapons, including dozens of grenades and explosive devices.

The IDF says the Air Force, Navy, and ground forces struck some 200 targets in the Gaza Strip over the past day, as “fierce battles” continue across the enclave.

Over the weekend, 14 soldiers were killed as the military has deepened its offensive against Hamas, two and a half months into a war with the terror group following its murderous assault on October 7 in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people and saw 240, of all ages, taken hostage.

The deaths bring the number of troops killed since the start of the ground operation in late October to 153.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday by offering condolences to the families of the soldiers killed over the weekend.

“The war is taking a very heavy toll on us, but we have no choice but to continue fighting,” said the prime minister.

"Our forces have so far eliminated many thousands of terrorists, and we will continue with all our strength until the end, until victory, until we have achieved all our goals,” the premier declared.

Israel says its offensive is aimed at destroying Hamas’s infrastructure, and has vowed to eliminate the entire terror group, which rules the Strip. It says it is targeting all areas where Hamas operates, while seeking to minimize civilian casualties.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 20,000 people have been killed in the Strip during the war, an unverified figure that also does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

According to Israeli assessments, troops have killed some 8,000 terror operatives since the war began. Another 1,000 Hamas terrorists were killed in Israel on October 7, during the terror group’s onslaught.

Israel-Hamas war: IDF reveals how it found bodies of five Hamas hostages

The IDF on Sunday night disclosed the full background behind the finding of five bodies of hostages held by Hamas in a huge underground tunnel near Jabalya in northern Gaza.

Around two weeks ago, the IDF found two bodies. A few days later, it found three more nearby. At the time, the military announced finding only the first two.

The tunnel was vast, including a large elevator and large rooms, and split into side rooms, like command centers, medical stations, prayer rooms, and rooms for manufacturing weapons.

An IDF source has said that finding the bodies required a mix of preexisting intelligence along with intelligence collected in real time in the field, including through forensic methods.

The tunnel was so large, that although the bodies were all within one general area, they were all in different parts of it.

The five were Eden Zechariah and Ziv Dado, whose bodies were found on December 12, as well as Elia Toledano, Nik Beizer, and Ron Sherman.

Last Thursday, Hamas released a video of the other three hostages killed in Hamas captivity, whose bodies the IDF had recovered.

In the video, the three hostages – Toledano, Beizer, and Sherman, are seen holding up pieces of paper with their names and personal information. All three were kidnapped on October 7.

In a statement posted alongside the video, Hamas claimed that “they tried to keep them alive, but Netanyahu insisted on killing them.”

The video then adds visual effects of shots and animated blood. They are shown in captivity smiling and speaking to each other.

IDF concerned over endangering forces on field

The IDF said it delayed mentioning the other three bodies until troops in the area completed their operations. Until then, there was real concern that announcing more details would endanger the forces in the field, who eventually used 13 tons of explosives to blow up the whole tunnel, something that took more time.

In addition, whereas the IDF had said that Zechariah was killed back on October 7 and merely her body was taken to Gaza, the IDF did not give a clear conclusion about the timing of the deaths of the other hostages. Rather, IDF sources said forensic probes into that issue are still continuing.

NYT:  With Israeli Raids in the West Bank, ‘There’s No Such Thing as Sleeping at Night’

Extreme Home Makeover, sponsored by the IDF--Jenin refugee camp


Jenin


Highpoints:  

Article:Click To View Spoiler

Description of 2002 Battle of Jenin from Daniel Byman's book, "A High Price, the Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism"Click To View Spoiler

Two soldiers killed in northern Gaza Strip, bringing ground op death toll to 156

The Israel Defense Forces announced the deaths of two soldiers on Monday morning, both of whom were killed in fighting in the northern Gaza Strip the previous day, bringing the number of troops killed since the start of the ground operation in late October to 156.

The two soldiers were identified as:

Master Sgt. (res.) Nitai Meisels, 30, of the 14th Armored Brigade, from Rehovot
Sgt. Rani Tamir, 20, of the Nahal Brigade’s 50th Battalion, from Ganei Am
The IDF had previously announced that a third soldier, Maj. (res.) Aryeh Rein, 39, of the 14th Reserve Armored Brigade’s 79th Battalion was killed by an anti-tank guided missile on Sunday in northern Gaza.

A second soldier of the 50th Battalion was seriously injured in the same battle in which Tamir was killed, the IDF said.

The Israeli Navy struck several Hamas cells spotted near ground forces in the Gaza Strip over the past day, the IDF said, releasing footage of Navy shelling along the coast.

According to the IDF, the Navy struck Hamas operatives hiding in buildings near ground troops, as well as positions where gunmen opened fire from and launched mortars at Israeli soldiers.

The Air Force, meanwhile, struck and killed an unnamed Hamas commander in the Khan Younis area, the IDF said, and added that several more operatives carrying a rocket were killed in a separate strike.

In northern Gaza, the 261st Brigade called in an airstrike on a building where several Hamas operatives were identified, the military said.

Overnight, Palestinians reported heavy Israeli bombardment and gunfire in Jabaliya, an area north of Gaza City that Israel has claimed to have gained control of.

The war began with the deadly Hamas onslaught on October 7, when thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing around 240 hostages.

In response, Israel launched an aerial campaign and subsequent ground invasion, vowing to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip and end its 16-year rule.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has claimed that since October 7, more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed. This number cannot be independently verified, however, and is believed to include around 8,000 Hamas or Hamas-affiliated operatives, as well as civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.

'Needless security risk': IDF approved Nova festival despite senior officer's alarm
Officers at the army's Gaza Division say that the Nova Festival, in which some 370 Israelis were killed on Oct 7 by Hamas, was irregularly approved. The concern didn't stem from a possible terrorist incursion, but of rocket and mortar fire on the area near the Gaza border fence

The Gaza Division's operations officer, Lt. Col. Sahar Fogel, opposed the Nova rave taking place on October 7 near the border with Gaza, arguing that it was a needless security risk.

Furthermore, his objection was seconded by other officers, both at the Gaza Division and at the Southern Command headquarters. But in a conversation with the IDF's operations division, he was instructed to approve the event.

In private conversations, some officers in the Gaza Division told of irregular conduct and pressure surrounding the approval of the party, which was held at the Re'im camping ground, and where 364 people were murdered, with some 40 others kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.

The first request to hold a mass event at the location was filed three months prior to that Saturday. But the original request referred to a party titled "Unity" on the night between Thursday, October 5 and Friday morning, October 6.

Senior officers in the Gaza Division, including Lt. Col. Fogel (tasked with approving and coordinating the Re'im event), expressed concern about holding a mass party west of Route 232, due to its proximity to the Gaza Strip.

The concern didn't stem from the possibility of a terrorist incursion, but of rocket and mortar fire on the area near the fence. But eventually these remained mere concerns, and the event was approved.

As part of the preparations, a special "polygon" (alert area) was established in the Iron Dome system, focused on the party area. However, it was clear to all that safe spaces could not be provided for so many participants in case of need, and so the concerns were not remedied.

The producer of the "Unity" party is a man named Rami Shmuel. Early in the week of the rave, he filed another request to the IDF (which is in charge of the area between Route 232 and the Gaza Strip border) to extend the permit by another day, and to remain in effect until October 7.

This request was actually filed on behalf of another group of producers which joined Shmuel, and which organized the Nova party.

This extension was opposed by Lt. Col. Fogel. He argued in real time that extending the event would lead to needless danger, which should be reduced. Fogel also noted that the IDF would struggle to secure the ongoing party throughout the weekend, as it was the holiday of Simchat Torah and many troops were on leave.

Fogel raised his reservations and warning to operations division officers at Southern Command, and also to other commanders at the Gaza Division, who seconded his position. With this wind in his sails, Fogel approached the IDF headquarters' operations division, which was also involved in the approval process.

But in a phone call held by Fogel with Col. Nimrod Cibolski, head of the operations department at the operations division, Fogel was instructed to approve the party's extension, so that after the Unity revelers left the Re'im camping ground on Friday morning, the Nova crowd would replace them, staying until the next day.

Two parties in one event, or what is known in colloquial Hebrew as a "combina." Sources at the Gaza Division insist that the operations division is the one to deliver the order to approve the party, although it is supposed to be only an advisory authority. Following this, Fogel dropped his opposition to the extension.

After this phone call, several Gaza Division officers consulted with the police and the IDF legal counsel. Eventually a decision was made to approve the extension on Tuesday that week. The permit was signed by Col. Chaim Cohen, commander of the northern regional brigade of the Gaza Division.

According to sources versed in the details, the operations division claimed that refusing the party producers' request might have run into legal difficulties. According to the sources, such a refusal can only be given by having the regional command general declaring the Re'im camping ground a closed military zone, and absent such a declaration, there is no way to stop the party.

As far as Haaretz has been able to ascertain, the operations division did not provide Fogel with answers about the difficulties in providing security for the rave on Friday and Saturday.

The Eshkol Regional Council, in whose jurisdiction the rave was held, also opposed the Nova party, claiming it would create a nuisance over the weekend, but ultimately relented following approval by the police and military. Left completely uninformed of the extension and second event was the Jewish National Fund, which owns the campground.

During the days preceding the massacre, the system had received warnings that Hamas would try to attack on Israeli soil. The information was based on several sources who noticed alarming preparations by Hamas personnel, as well as intelligence that raised the concern growing among various security figures.

Haaretz has not been able to verify whether Lt. Col. Fogel was aware of this intelligence, or whether his opposition to the event was related to it.

Then came October 7. Hours before the terror attack, the security establishment received signs and warnings leading to its decision to prepare – if only partially – for a terrorist incursion. But no IDF officer updated the thousands of revelers or the rave organizers of the fear of an attack, or demanded that they break up the party and leave the area.

The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said in response: "The IDF will conduct a detailed and in-depth investigation into the matter once the operational situation allows, and will make its findings public."

Hoping for Peace With Houthis, Saudis Keep Low Profile in Red Sea Conflict
Riyadh is seeking to avoid getting dragged back into a bloody clash with the Yemeni militia, which has sowed chaos by attacking shipping and firing missiles at Israel.

Dec. 25, 2023, 3:00 a.m. ET

After Iran-backed rebels took over the capital of Yemen in 2014, a 30-year-old Saudi prince named Mohammed bin Salman spearheaded a military intervention to rout them.

With American assistance and weapons, Saudi pilots embarked on a bombing campaign called Operation Decisive Storm inside Yemen, the mountainous nation on their southern border. Officials expected to swiftly defeat the rebels, a ragtag tribal militia known as the Houthis.

Instead, the prince’s forces spent years mired in a conflict that splintered into fighting between multiple armed groups, drained billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s coffers and helped plunge Yemen into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, hunger and unchecked disease.

Saudi Arabia and its main partner, the United Arab Emirates, eventually scaled back their military involvement — partly because of American pressure — and Saudi officials entered peace talks with the Houthis, who secured control of northern Yemen.

Now, the war in Gaza has thrust the Houthis — whose ideology is driven by hostility toward the United States and Israel and support for the Palestinian cause — into an unlikely global spotlight.

The militia is creating chaos in the Red Sea by lobbing missiles and drones toward Israel and at commercial ships, and the United States has marshaled an international maritime coalition to try to deter them and is weighing other measures to confront the group.

Saudi Arabia, however, would rather watch these latest developments from the sidelines, with the prospect of peace on its southern border a more appealing goal than joining an effort to stop attacks that the Houthis say are directed at Israel — a state the kingdom does not officially recognize and which is widely reviled by its people.

Crown Prince Mohammed is now the de facto Saudi ruler, and he is uninterested in getting dragged back into a conflict with the Houthis, according to Saudi and American officials.

“To have a stable region, you need economic development in the whole region,” Prince Mohammed said in a television interview in September — shortly before the war in Gaza began — when Saudi officials hosted a Houthi delegation in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. “You don’t need to see problems in Yemen.”

As the prince rushes to make progress on his sweeping plan to try to transform Saudi Arabia into a global business hub by 2030, he has been working to calm conflicts and tensions across the Middle East, including through a rapprochement with the kingdom’s regional rival, Iran.

Saudi officials and analysts say that the return of Houthi missiles soaring over Riyadh or striking southern Saudi towns — a relatively common occurrence at the height of the Yemen war — are the last thing the prince needs as he seeks to convince tourists and investors that the Islamic kingdom is open for business.

“Escalation is in nobody’s interest,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign minister, said in a television interview this month. “We are committed to ending the war in Yemen and we are committed to a permanent cease-fire that opens the door for a political process.”

Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The new Saudi strategy in Yemen — which leans away from direct military action and toward cultivating relationships with Yemeni factions — is driven by the reality that after eight years of war, the Houthis effectively won. As fighting has quieted down, the militia — which espouses a religious ideology inspired by a sub-sect of Shiite Islam — has settled into power in northern Yemen, where it has created an impoverished proto-state that it rules with an iron fist.

As they face the prospect of conflict with the United States with undisguised delight, the Houthis are drawing on their expanded military capabilities and an apparent fearlessness that was honed in their clashes with the Saudi-led coalition.

If the United States sends soldiers into Yemen, its troops will face a conflict worse than its drawn-out wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the militia’s leader, threatened in a televised speech on Wednesday. The Houthis are “not afraid” of battling the United States directly, and in fact would prefer that, he declared.

If the Houthis say they want war with America, they also appear to have seized on the Gaza conflict as a chance to further a central aim.

“Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews” is part of the group’s slogan, and the Houthis have portrayed their attacks on commercial ships as a righteous battle to force Israel to end its siege of Gaza.

The Houthis are also an important arm of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes armed groups across the Middle East — although Yemeni analysts and Saudi officials say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group rather than a purely Iranian proxy.

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. al-Houthi demanded that other Arab countries step aside and “let the Americans and Israelis enter a direct war with us.”

“If you want to dance on the bodies of victims, dance,” he said — a veiled reference to a string of recent concerts in Saudi Arabia, including a performance by Metallica. “But don’t participate with the Americans in a war against us.”

For the Houthis, such a war would be a “golden opportunity for them to fulfill their narrative, enable them to easily recruit and gain credibility from people,” said Shoqi Al-Maktary, a Yemeni senior adviser at Search for Common Ground, a Washington-based organization that works to resolve conflicts.

That is particularly true as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — launched in response to the deadly Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 — sparks grief and anger around the Middle East, aimed not only at Israel, but also the United States, its main ally.

Before the war in Gaza began, the Houthis were on the verge of signing an American- and Saudi-backed peace deal that would potentially entrench their position in power and allow the international community to declare the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen.

At least so far, the Houthi response to the Gaza war does not appear to have diminished Saudi Arabia’s appetite for a deal over Yemen, analysts said.

“The war in Gaza didn’t undermine the talks between the Houthis and the Saudis — on the contrary, it brought them together even closer,” said Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group.

In an interview with The New York Times Times in late September, Ali al-Qahoom, a member of the Ansar Allah Politburo, the political arm of the Houthis, said that negotiations with Saudi Arabia had been “full of seriousness and optimism.”

Mr. al-Qahoom said that they had discussed how to facilitate salary payments for public servants — who have gone uncompensated for years — and the potential reopening of airports and ports, steps that could ease the suffering of millions of Yemenis in desperate need of aid.

Children gather around pots of food as a veiled woman holds out a plate. Men look on in the background.
Food being distributed in August at a makeshift camp for internally displaced people in Sana. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis died during the years of war from violence, hunger and unchecked disease. Credit... Yahya Arhab/EPA, via Shutterstock
“Our views were pretty close,” Mr. al-Qahoom said. “What hinders reaching an agreement is the disavowal of obligations by Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Britain and America to address the destruction caused by eight years of war and other issues like reconstruction and reparations.”

That appeared to be a reference to monetary compensation that the Houthis expect to receive from Saudi Arabia as part of an incentive for any deal.

The Saudi government, analysts say, is likely to include some form of payment to get the deal done.

Amid these negotiations with the Houthis, Saudi Arabia has also continued to cultivate a warmer relationship with Iran, its longtime foe. President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran made his first visit to Riyadh in November.

This week, the United States announced a naval task force to address the threat posed by the Houthis in the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were not among its members; the only Arab nation to join was Bahrain, where the move sparked popular anger.

Saudi Arabia “is not interested in any Western efforts to protect Israel,” Sulaiman al-Oqeliy, a Saudi political commentator, wrote on the social media platform X. Many pundits in the Gulf have also expressed frustration with the U.S. in recent days, arguing that American policy toward the war in Yemen helped the Houthis thrive.

The United States respects that some countries might have “domestic reasons” for staying out of the task force, John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, told reporters.

American military planners have prepared preliminary Houthi targets in Yemen, should senior Biden administration officials order retaliatory strikes, two U.S. officials said. But military officials say the White House has shown no appetite for responding militarily to the Houthis and risking a wider regional war.

“Sometimes in the Middle East, you don’t have good decisions and bad decisions,” Prince Mohammed said in an interview in 2018, when asked about the war in Yemen. “Sometimes you have bad decisions and worse decisions.”

Senior Iran Revolutionary Guards officer slain in alleged Israeli strike on Damascus

A senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed Monday in an alleged Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Iranian media reported.

According to the semi-official Iranian Tasnim news agency, Brig. Gen. Razi Mousavi was killed in a strike in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab.

Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi vowed that Israel “will certainly pay for this crime.”

“Without a doubt, this action is another sign of frustration, helplessness, and incapacity of the usurping Zionist regime in the region,” Raisi said in a statement.

The Israel Defense Forces’ top spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, declined to comment on the reports during a press conference on Monday evening.

While Israel’s military does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country, over the last decade.

Mousavi was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Iran and Syria, and was believed by Israel to be heavily involved in Tehran’s efforts to supply weapons to terror proxies in the area, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Pro-government media outlets in Syria did not immediately report the strike, unlike other incidents in the past when Damascus has publicly blamed Israel for attacks.

It came as Israel has hit Hezbollah targets in Lebanon as a response to the Iran-backed terror group’s rocket fire at northern Israel that began in October when war erupted between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The Tasnim report said Mousavi was “one of the oldest advisers of IRGC in Syria” and close to former IRGC Quds force head, Qassem Soleimani, killed in a 2020 US drone strike in Iraq.

It said there was no information about other injuries in the attack.

Three munitions reportedly hit the compound where Mousavi was located.

In a statement carried by Iranian media, the IRGC confirmed Mousavi was killed near Damascus, and threatened revenge. The IRGC said that “the usurping and barbaric Zionist regime will pay for this crime.”

The al-Jadeed Lebanon outlet reported that Mousavi had lived in Syria for 30 years and had his own office inside the Syrian Defense Ministry.

At the beginning of the month, Iran said two IRCG officers were killed in an attack in the area of the Syrian capital, and blamed Israel.

The IRGCs said Mohammad Ali Atai Shoorcheh and Panah Taghizadeh were “martyred” while on an advisory mission to Syria, blaming the “Zionists” for their death.

Syria said Israeli airstrikes targeted multiple areas near Damascus on that occasion.

The IDF has carried out hundreds of strikes inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years, often targeting Hezbollah and other terror groups backed by Iran, but it rarely acknowledges or discusses the operations.

On October 7, Palestinian terror group Hamas led a massive terror attack from the Gaza Strip that killed over 1,200 people in Israel. Thousands of terrorists who burst through the border also abducted at least 240 who were taken as hostages in Gaza.

Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas, remove it from power in Gaza, and release the hostages.

After the war started, Hezbollah began carrying out attacks along the Lebanese border with Israel, firing at military positions, and communities as well as launching rockets at the north of the country. The attacks prompted Israel to evacuate tens of thousands of people from towns in the line of fire. Israel has hit back at Hezbollah with artillery fire and airstrikes in Lebanon.

Earlier Monday, Hezbollah again fired missiles and rockets at northern Israel.

Several IDF positions along the Lebanon border were targeted, as well as civilian homes in Misgav Am.

There were no reports of injuries in the attacks.

The IDF said its tanks shelled several Hezbollah sites in response to the rocket and missile fire.

Chief Supt. Avi Amar, 54: Hero officer’s final hug caught on film

Chief Superintendent Avi Amar, 54, from Otzem, a commander in the Israel Police Yoav Unit, was killed fighting Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.

His loved ones said that when the air raid sirens began early Saturday morning, Amar headed straight to the front lines, fighting first in Sderot, then Kibbutz Kfar Aza, before heading to Be’eri, where he was slain.

His family said he kept them updated throughout the day, until he stopped answering around 2 p.m. A week later, his body was located and he was confirmed dead. He was buried on October 15 in Moshav Noga in the south.

He is survived by his wife Pazit and six children, ranging in age from 22 to 7, as well as his parents, Chana and Yisrael, and 10 siblings. His family described him as a dedicated family man, who loved nature and the outdoors and particularly horseback riding.

The final photo taken of Amar on October 7 showed him kneeling and embracing a distraught IDF soldier overwhelmed by the sights of the Hamas onslaught in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.

“We don’t have any idea who took the photo, they just made sure it got to us,” Amar’s brother, Lior Amar, told Ynet. “The photo was taken about an hour before he was killed in Kibbutz Be’eri. The final photo of Avi encapsulates exactly who Avi was, a warrior who we lost.”

Chief Superintendent Avi Amar comforting a distraught IDF soldier near Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023, hours before he was killed. (Used in accordance with clause 27a of the copyright law)
Lior said that the photo shows “on the one hand, he is embracing and hugging strongly the IDF soldier who was experiencing shell shock, and on the other hand there is a lot of tenderness. I see in this photo my brother Avi who was full of heart, who provided a moment of calm to an IDF fighter, amid all the chaos and the gunfire of terrorists on that black Saturday.”

A police official, identified only as M., told Ynet that he witnessed the photo being taken: “In the middle of the fighting, a soldier came to us from inside Kfar Aza and started crying, and Avi immediately got down on the road, hugged him and told him: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get through this, I’m protecting you.'”

Another officer said that amidst the fighting that day when the officers were in desperate need of water, he entered an abandoned gas station, grabbed bottles of water and called the owner to ask him to charge him for six bottles: “This is what characterized Avi. He was determined to rescue officers and civilians and amid all of the horrors he did not give up and kept his cool and his humanity until he was killed.”

Amar’s son, Magen David Adom paramedic Itay Amar, also headed out to save lives on that Saturday morning. He told a local Ashdod news outlet that he continued to work all week while his father was considered missing to treat those wounded in the attack and the fighting: “I know that Dad would be proud of me for the lives I saved on that terrible Saturday, and I am the most proud of him in the world for those he saved.”

His daughter, Stav Amar, told Ynet that during the shiva mourning period, “so many police officers came and told stories of his bravery, of the kind of guy he was.” When they received that final photo, “We stopped breathing because we know that hug so well, we know how it feels… I’ve been in that hug dozens of times, you’re not afraid of anything in that hug.”

Stav said the family feels lucky that he “left us six siblings strong. That was his life’s work, to ensure we were united and loving and together, so we are together in the good times and together in the difficult times.”

She said there are “so many stories of his bravery and his fighting but I want people to know, that in addition to that tough facade, he was an incredible and sensitive and loving father, and the first to help, and the first to give advice, and I will miss his hug forever.”

U.S. strikes Iran-backed militias in Iraq after troops wounded in drone attack

U.S. strikes targeted three locations used by Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups for aerial drone activities, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

President Biden was immediately briefed on the attack on U.S. personnel, Watson said, adding that he directed the retaliatory strikes.

Iranian-backed militia groups are believed to have waged a spate of attacks on U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq and Syria, as anger in the Middle East grows over U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. More than 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began. The Washington Post last month reported that since Oct. 17, U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria had faced near-daily assaults from rocket fire and one-way drones.

A senior Kataib Hezbollah official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the group’s operations against U.S. forces in Iraq are partly because of the United States’ support for Israel in its war with Hamas, and also because it considers the U.S. presence in Iraq an “occupation.”

“Our operations will continue until the departure of the last American soldier,” the official said.

The Biden administration has carried out similar retaliatory strikes in Syria, including on an Iranian weapons facility and on sites associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in October and November.

The administration is aware that any overreaction to the attacks on U.S. personnel could inflame a broader regional war. “While we do not seek to escalate conflict in the region, we are committed and fully prepared to take further necessary measures to protect our people and our facilities,” Austin said in the statement Monday.

About 3,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq and Syria to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State extremist group. Iran has long backed militias in an effort to dislodge U.S. presence in the region.

“These strikes are intended to hold accountable those elements directly responsible for attacks on coalition forces in Iraq and Syria and degrade their ability to continue attacks,” Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, said in a statement Monday night.

According to the statement by Centcom, early assessments indicate that the airstrikes Monday probably killed a “number of Kataib Hezbollah militants.” The Shiite militant group was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 2009.

In a statement Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani condemned the drone attack and the U.S. response, which he said killed one Iraqi service member and injured 18 others, including civilians.

“This constitutes a clear hostile act. It runs counter to the pursuit of enduring mutual interests in establishing security and stability, and it opposes the declared intention of the American side to enhance relations with Iraq,” he said.

The earlier Centcom statement said there were “no indications that any civilian lives were affected.”

Israeli aircraft bombarded the southern Gaza Strip overnight in apparent preparation for expanding the military’s ground offensive, the military said Tuesday, even as continued fighting near Gaza City challenged the army’s claim that it was largely in control of the north of the Strip after 80 days of war.

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders vowing to continue fighting, despite growing international pressure to wind down the battle and calls at home for a deal to free hostages held in Gaza, the military appeared poised Tuesday for a newly intensified push into the central and southern parts of the Strip.

“This is a long, tough war. It has costs, heavy costs, but its justification is the highest that can be,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Knesset lawmakers Tuesday, hours after the army raised the death toll from the ground offensive to 158 soldiers. He vowed Israel would punish Hamas over its brutal October 7 attack, “whether it takes months or years.”

He also said Israel was fighting on “seven fronts” and had hit back on six of them.

The overnight airstrikes targeted over 100 Hamas sites in the southern Gaza Strip “as part of backing for forces maneuvering on the ground,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.

Residents of central Gaza on Tuesday described a night of shelling and airstrikes shaking the areas of Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij in central Gaza, areas crowded with people who fled from the north.

According to the military Tuesday, the air force targeted tunnel shafts, military sites, and other infrastructure used by terror operatives to attack Israeli forces during the overnight operations.

IDF forces operate in the Gaza Strip, in a handout photo released on December 26, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)
The army is thought to be moving its offensive toward Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, where many leaders of the Hamas terror group are thought to have fled. On Monday, Hamas’s leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar appeared defiant in his first message since the October 7 massacre, grossly inflating the terror group’s achievements in the war.

During strikes in the Khan Younis area, the IDF said the 7th Armored Brigade directed IAF aircraft to hit more than 10 Hamas operatives within just a few minutes.

In another incident in Khan Younis, the IDF said the Givati Brigade spotted a Hamas cell moving toward a building used by the terror group to store weapons. An airstrike was then called in against the building.

Two soldiers were killed in fighting in southern Gaza Monday, the army said, naming them as:

Staff Sgt. (res.) Elisha Yehonatan Lober, 24, of the 179th Reserve Armored Brigade’s 8104th Battalion, from Yitzhar.
Sgt. First Class (res.) Joseph Yosef Gitarts, 25, of the 179th Reserve Armored Brigade’s 7029th Battalion, from Tel Aviv.
Lober was killed during a gun battle with Hamas operatives, and Gitarts was killed by an anti-tank guided missile.

Fighting also persisted in northern Gaza, even as the IDF has indicated it has “operational control” over most of the area.

Overnight in Jabaliya, troops of the 261st Brigade battled a Hamas operative who attempted to place an explosive device near a tank, according to the IDF. Troops called in an airstrike against the operative, members of the cell behind the attack, as well as a building being used by the cell, the IDF said.

Meanwhile, Givati troops operating with the 401st Armored Brigade raided an Islamic Jihad compound in the Gaza City neighborhoods of Daraj and Tuffah, locating firearms, explosives, and intelligence documents, according to the IDF.

In the same area, Nahal Brigade soldiers raided homes where they had battled Hamas fighters, finding dozens of assault rifles, grenades, and RPGs in a children’s bedroom, the army said. It said the finds bolstered its contention that Hamas “hides weapons and terror activity under civilian cover.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, Netanyahu said the area would not see peace until Hamas was destroyed, Gaza was demilitarized and Palestinians were deradicalized, continuing to object to plans for a revamped Palestinian Authority to take over control of Gaza once the war ends.

Notably, the premier’s conditions did not include the release of the 129 hostages who were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 and are still being held by terrorists in the Gaza Strip, along with two captives and the remains of two soldiers held since 2014.

Israel launched its war against Hamas after the terror group led an unprecedented assault into southern Israel on October 7, Some 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, were massacred. Another approximately 240 people were kidnapped, including women, children and the elderly. A previous truce deal allowed for the release of over 100 women and children, but talks for a new deal have foundered.

Gallant warned the Knesset’s powerful Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee against allowing threats to fester along Israel’s borders, saying that the military was dealing with threats on six of seven fronts, in what was seen as an implied message to Iran.

“We are in a multi-front war. We are being attacked from seven fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Iraq, Yemen and Iran,” he said. “We have already responded and acted on six of those fronts.”

“Everyone who acts against us is a potential target,” he added. “Nobody has immunity.”

“Without meeting the goals of the war, we will find ourselves in a situation where the problem will not be those who live near Gaza or live in the north; the problem will be that people will not want to live in a place where we do not know how to protect them,” he also said.

The full-throated defense of Israel’s war goals came a day after families of hostages heckled the prime minister during a speech in the Knesset, as he argued that military pressure was the surest way to secure their release but required “time.”

“We don’t have time,” one relative called out in response from the Knesset gallery, after which the families chanted “Now! Now! Now!” demanding the immediate release of the hostages.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who had mostly cooled attacks on Netanyahu since the October massacres, also level criticism at the premier, telling Army Radio that he did not trust Netanyahu’s management of the war.

“If the October 7 attacks happened on my watch, I would have resigned that day,” Lapid said.

Netanyahu is also facing pressure from the US to quickly transition toward a less-intense form of fighting, with President Joe Biden’s administration joining international calls for the humanitarian crisis in the Strip to ease, even as Washington has continued to back Israel’s refusal to entertain a ceasefire with Hamas still in charge of Gaza.

The expanding fighting has pushed the population into a shrinking area, particularly the city of Deir al-Balah in the center and Rafah at the far south of Gaza, on the Egyptian border. More than a million people have squeezed into UN shelters, and many more displaced people are crowded into houses.

Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health authorities claim Israel’s bombing campaign and fighting on the ground have killed over 20,600 people in Gaza, though the figures cannot be verified and Hamas has been accused of inflating casualty figures in the past, and including those killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.

Hamas does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, though it claims that the dead include thousands of women and children.

The IDF says it has killed some 8,000 Hamas operatives in Gaza and another 1,000 terrorists during and immediately after the October 7 attacks.

Two attacks against a US naval vessel within the past four days prompted the cruise missile strikes against radar sites located in what the Americans say is Houthi-controlled territory.

An earlier attack on a UAE-leased high-speed transport vessel caused significant damage - so the threat from these land-based missiles - thought to be a variant of the Chinese C-802 - is real enough.

Quite why the Houthi rebels decided to attack the US ships now is unclear. The US of course, though troubled by several aspects of the Saudi-led air campaign against the Houthis, remains a close ally of Saudi Arabia.

The Obama administration clearly took the view that three missile attacks on shipping could not go unanswered. A direct strike against presumed Houthi positions marks the first direct US involvement in the conflict and many in Washington will hope that this will be its last.

Israel wants to focus on Hamas, but killing of Iranian commander risks northern escalation

Ever since the October 7 terror attack from the Gaza Strip, Iran has openly supported Hamas and other members of the regional radical axis, but has tried not to put itself in the line of fire from Israel and the United States. Israel's patience is presumably starting to wear out, due to the combination of intensified attacks by the Houthis in Yemen on maritime traffic in the Red Sea (alongside a direct Iranian attack on a ship with links to Israel in the Indian Ocean), and the continuing massive rocket and antitank fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Amid all this, a cyberattack that impaired the functioning of Iranian gas stations has been attributed to Israel. And that was joined Tuesday morning by an American airstrike on pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, in response to rocket fire on U.S. army bases in Iraq and Syria that wounded three American soldiers.

After the massacre in southern Israel, Iran and Hezbollah refrained from fully joining Hamas' war on Israel. Today, it's fairly clear that Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, wrongly hoped his patrons would follow his lead even though he surprised them with the attack. Nevertheless, Iran's contribution to the war is significant, and Israel evidently thinks it has crossed red lines.

This is a deviation from Israel's policy in the north before the war erupted. In general, Israel has been leery of directly confronting Iran and Hezbollah. Consequently, it refrained for years from attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, even though this enabled the organization to build facilities to manufacture precision weapons.

Now it seems that some of these restraints have been lifted. Senior Iranian officials, including the president and foreign minister, threatened Israel with a direct response to the assassination, and that response will presumably arrive. The question that remains unanswered is whether it will be a localized response – heavier fire on the north or an attempt to assassinate some prominent Israeli abroad – or whether we have entered another phase that brings us closer to an all-out war with Hezbollah, with Iran's backing.

Israel's stated policy is that it would be better to deal with Hamas and Gaza first and not get embroiled in a wider regional war right now. But developments on the ground create the danger of a downward spiral, and there's no guarantee it can be stopped.

On the southern front, attention has focused on the attacks on shipping near the Bab el-Mandab strait. But the Houthis' aggression doesn't end there. To date, they have launched around 50 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, though all were intercepted. According to foreign media reports, America, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have participated in the interception effort.

Israel is trying to maintain deterrence through repeated statements by the prime minister and defense minister that Beirut could end up looking like Gaza if Hezbollah escalates its attacks. In the short run, these threats may prove sufficient. But in the long run, if a diplomatic solution isn't found to remove Hezbollah's Radwan Force from the northern border, war may erupt.

PM's message vs. reality
Hamas rejected new compromise proposals this week for a prisoner exchange that would also gradually lead to the end of the war in Gaza. The proposals came from Qatar and, unusually, Egypt.

Hamas leaders both inside and outside Gaza are currently presenting a united front – the fighting must end, with a permanent cease-fire and a full Israeli withdrawal, before the release of the 129 Israeli hostages still in Gaza can even be discussed. These statements followed signs of tension between Hamas leaders in Gaza and those in Qatar, caused by Sinwar's suspicion that the organization's external leadership is seeking a new division of power, under Egypt's auspices, that might well push him to the sidelines.

The message Sinwar evidently seeks to convey is that the success of the surprise attack, his biggest achievement in the war, remains unchanged. Neither Israel's current pressure on his suspected hideout in Khan Yunis, the widespread death and destruction in Gaza nor the heavy losses among Hamas' military wing has altered his position.

He intends to hold out until Israel withdraws its troops from Gaza, either under international pressure or due to worsening domestic disagreements. At that point, Hamas would utilize its remaining assets – the hostages still in Gaza – as bargaining chips in lengthy negotiations aimed at securing the release of all the Palestinians jailed in Israel, thereby reinforcing Hamas' control of Gaza.

Moreover, Sinwar has heard Israel's leadership vowing to assassinate him sooner or later. Given that, it's hard to say he has any incentive to free all the hostages. He needs at least some of them as a potential insurance policy.

Nobody can confidently predict how things will develop. Even if Qatari or Saudi money pours into Gaza, it will take many years to fix the damage that has been done there. And the national scars the Palestinians bear are no less traumatic. More than half of Gazans have been forced out of their homes by the Israeli offensive, while the vast majority of homes and neighborhoods in northern Gaza are no longer fit for human habitation.

Will all this, coupled with the massive distress of Gaza's civilian population, enter into Sinwar's considerations? So far he has demonstrated utter indifference to it. Like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for all the differences between them, Sinwar is also promising his people utter determination until the final victory.

Israel is speaking in several different voices about what comes next. On one hand, Netanyahu says the war will continue until the end, rejects any postwar role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, and completely forgot to mention the hostages in an op-ed he published Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.

The army, on the other hand, is preparing to move to phase three of the war – demobilizing some of the reservists, redeploying within Gaza and switching to a modus operandi of brigade-level raids. This could happen in January.

And on the third hand, as the Walla internet news site reported on Tuesday, Netanyahu sent one of his closest associates, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, to Washington to discuss arrangements for the day after the war, including feelers about a "revitalized Palestinian Authority" that might have some involvement in Gaza's future government.

But first of all, the IDF seeks to increase its advantage in the war against Hamas, to do more damage and send a message to the enemy that it cannot survive the conflict. The difficulties the army faces are clear. It has four divisions deployed in Gaza (with a fifth protecting the border), operating in a crowded, partially destroyed urban environment.

Despite what has been achieved, thousands of tunnel openings have yet to be located and destroyed. And Hamas continues to carry out localized attacks from the tunnels to exploit the weak spots in Israel's deployment, which is largely static.

Six brigade-level combat groups are operating under Division 98 in Khan Yunis. That's an enormous number, far more than a division would normally control during combat. The focus of the activity in Khan Yunis is a kind of special operation aimed at killing senior Hamas officials and finding the hostages. But given the crowded terrain, from which most civilians haven't been evacuated (due to the lack of any real safe space), the IDF needs huge forces to secure its operations.

Two other major operations are taking place – one in the vicinity of Daraj Tuffah in northern Gaza, where Division 162 is assaulting the last Hamas battalion in the area that hasn't taken severe damage, and one in the refugee camps of central Gaza, where Division 36 has begun an offensive. The latter region hadn't been attacked at all until last week. At the same time, the IDF's deployment is gradually changing in other parts of northern Gaza.

But officers in Gaza have no illusions. In every region where one of Hamas' territorial battalions has been defeated, new Hamas activity has sprung up, albeit on a limited scale. Terrorists keep surfacing through the tunnels. There is also an influx of returning civilians, despite the dimensions of the destruction.

The battle against Hamas in Gaza is a long-term project, a war of attrition. And the Israeli public hasn't been given sufficient explanation of its complexity.

'That his death will not be in vain'
The fighting, in Gaza and on the Lebanese border continues to exact a heavy toll. On Monday afternoon, in the small cemetery of the moshavim Ganei Am and Yarkona in the Sharon region, Sgt. Rani Tamir, a member of the Nahal Brigade killed in combat in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday, was laid to rest. The commanders and soldiers of the 50th Battalion did not attend the funeral because they are still fighting in the Strip. The battalion's previous deputy commander, who was identified only as Maj. Daniel, related in his eulogy how, when he met with Rani and his comrades the evening before they entered Gaza, the young warrior had asked him questions about what the battalion could expect to encounter in combat.

While the broadcasters on Netanyahu's TV propaganda channel reiterated canards about the left not doing its part in the war, Rani's mother, Sharon, addressed any members of the media in attendance, asking them to pass on a message: "that they will not be ashamed to talk about peace when the fighting is over. That his death will not be in vain." She described a sensitive, funny boy who devoured life every second that he had. Her son, she related, to the tears and the sound of laughter of the many people at the funeral, had one request in the event of his death: that no one name a race after him – Rani always hated running, she said. If anything, he'd rather be commemorated with an afternoon nap.

One of the Kan public broadcaster's radio stations on Tuesday interviewed Ze'ev Epstein, brother of Sgt. 1st Class (res.) Joseph Gitarts of Tel Aviv, who was killed the previous day in a battle in the southern Gaza Strip. His younger brother, Epstein said, left his parents a farewell letter when he enlisted in the reserves after the October 7 massacre. He gave his brother and a friend links allowing them to access the letter. Gitarts was a mathematician and a computer expert who liked to go to sing-alongs with his brother. "I went all the way, I have no regrets," Gitarts wrote to his parents. "I could have not come here and hid. But that would have gone against everything I believe and value and who I consider myself to be. I would do the same thing if I could choose again."

Every day at the exit gates of the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, relatives of the hostages who are still being held in the Strip stand in a silent demonstration, demanding that the government accelerate the talks on a deal for their release. The vehicles exiting the base drive past them, and each time the expression on the faces of the relatives looks more desperate and sad than it did the day before.

Northern towns rocked by heaviest Hezbollah barrages since outbreak of war

Sirens sounded repeatedly in northern Israel on Wednesday as rockets fired from Lebanon pummeled the towns of Rosh Hanikra and the city of Kiryat Shmona in a major escalation of violence along the restive border, as Israel’s top general vowed that the country’s military was prepared to battle the Hezbollah terror group, even as heavy fighting persisted in Gaza.

No injuries were reported in the attacks, which reportedly marked the most intense volleys on northern Israel since the region was plunged into war on October 7. Israel responded to the attacks with airstrikes in southern Lebanon.

The uptick came after an alleged Israeli strike killed a Hezbollah member, as well as his brother and his brother’s wife, and with Iran vowing revenge for the killing of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer in Syria, which it has blamed on Israel.

At least 18 rockets were fired at coastal Rosh Hanikra at around 10 a.m. on Wednesday, in an attack that Hezbollah claimed was aimed at an Israeli Navy base in the area. At least six of the rockets were said to have been intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system, with several others falling in open areas.

Several hours later, a second barrage was fired at the city of Kiryat Shmona. Six of the rockets impacted inside the city, causing damage to residential buildings and infrastructure, while another four landed in open areas within the municipal boundary, officials said. An additional three rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome, with the remainder landing in open areas.

Authorities in Kiryat Shmona said that at least 16 rockets were fired at the city, although Hezbollah claimed to have launched 30 in total.

The city, normally home to over 20,000 people, has been largely evacuated in recent months, along with other towns near Israel’s border, due to near-daily rocket, missile and drone attacks launched by Hezbollah and allied groups.

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the rocket barrages, as well as for three explosive-laden drones that hit the Mount Dov area, where several IDF positions are located, saying that they had launched the attacks “in response to the enemy’s repeated crimes.”

Visiting Northern Command headquarters on Wednesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said that the military is “at a very high level of readiness” amid escalating Hezbollah attacks.

“Our first task is to return residents safely, and that will take time. Today we approved a variety of plans for the future, and we need to be ready for an offensive, if necessary,” he said in remarks provided by the IDF.

“The IDF and within it the Northern Command are at a very high level of readiness. So far, the campaign here has been managed correctly and meticulously, and this is how it should continue. We will not return the residents without security and a sense of security,” he added.

According to a security official speaking to Reuters news agency, Hezbollah fired more rockets and drones on Wednesday than it had on any other day since it the daily skirmishes began.

In response to the heavy fire from southern Lebanon, Israeli fighter jets struck the launch site of the drone attack, as well as other targets close to the border, the IDF said in a statement.

The near-daily clashes on Israel’s northern border began following Hamas’s deadly onslaught inside Israel on October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza through which Israel has vowed to eliminate the Palestinian terror group. Along with allied Palestinian factions along the Lebanon border, Hezbollah has said that it is carrying out attacks on Israel in a show of support for the people of Gaza.

Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Iraq and Syria have also attacked Israel and US troops in the region repeatedly since October 7, in what is widely seen as a bid to stretch military forces thin as Israel battles Hamas in Gaza.

Four civilians and nine soldiers have been killed in attacks on the northern border, which have included dozens of anti-tank missile attacks. There have also been several rocket attacks from Syria, without any injuries.

Hezbollah has named 129 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 16 Palestinian terror operatives, a Lebanese soldier and at least 19 civilians, three of whom were journalists, have been killed.

Lebanese citizens gather on the rubles of a house that was destroyed by an alleged Israeli airstrike Tuesday night, in Bint Jbeil, South Lebanon, Wednesday, December 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)
A strike on the southern city of Bint Jbeil late Tuesday night attributed to Israel killed three people, according to Lebanese media, two of them civilians.

According to the country’s state-run National News Agency, the bodies of Ibrahim Bazzi, his wife Shorouk Hammoud, and Ibrahim’s brother, Ali Bazzi, were pulled from the rubble of their destroyed home.

Another member of the family was reportedly wounded.

Ibrahim Bazzi was identified by one of his relatives as a Lebanese-Australian dual citizen. Although family members in the village alleged that Ali Bazzi was a civilian, Hezbollah put out a statement announcing his death as a “martyr on the road to Jerusalem,” as it typically does when one of its fighters is killed.

Ibrahim Bazzi was said to have lived in Sydney and was only in Lebanon to visit his wife Hammoud, who just recently received a travel visa for Australia and so was not yet living with her husband.

Asked about the incident, the Israeli military said one of its jets had struck a Hezbollah military site overnight in Lebanon. Australian media quoted a spokesperson for Australia’s foreign ministry as saying it was aware of the report and was seeking confirmation.

Bint Jbeil is a Hezbollah stronghold and large parts of it were destroyed during the 2006 war between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group.

The power behind the power: How Qatar helped the Houthis become a threat to Israel

The Yemeni Houthi militia shoots missiles at Israel and blocks international shipping routes on the Red Sea. Its members dance traditional Yemeni dances on the ships they seize, and they chant “Death to Israel, death to America.”

While the Houthis — who also go by the name “Ansar Allah,” or “Supporters of God” — have emerged as a fresh and mostly unexpected threat to Israel and global security since the start of the war in Gaza, the terror group had already posed a major threat to its Gulf neighbors before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict on October 7.

Today, the Houthis enjoy unprecedented popularity and support in the Middle East — despite being backed by Iran. Also overlooked is the damage they are causing to the economies of Egypt and Jordan due to the halt of maritime activity in the Red Sea, as well as their attacks against Saudis, Bahrainis, and Emiratis, and extrajudicial killings of Yemenis themselves.

Al-Jazeera and other Qatari media are playing a huge role in whitewashing the militant group, amplifying the Houthi commitment to the Palestinian cause and casting them as the Robin Hoods of the Middle East.

How did a relatively small minority that has had little success rebelling against the Yemeni government since the early 1990s become so effective and powerful?

It happened through a unique confluence of geopolitical circumstances, and regional backers –including the Qataris — have brought them from near-obscurity to the forefront of the global arena.

First, a look back
The Houthis stem from the Zaydi Shia minority rooted in a mountainous area of northern Yemen. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, they formed a theocratic kingdom that existed until 1962, when its leader died. His death emboldened voices that called for modernizing and joining the Arab nationalist movement.

A proxy battle followed between the nationalists, who were supported by Egypt, and the royalists, supported by Saudi Arabia, Britain, and Jordan, with the nationalists emerging victorious and the establishment of a Yemeni republic in 1968.

Things were far from calm. Then, in 1990, the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh — himself a Zaydi Shia — united the country following prolonged and bloody civil wars. But his fellow Zaydis weren’t long placated. They rebelled against him in the ’90s, and then again in the 2000s.

Experts believe that the Houthis — who have adopted the name of their leader Hussein al-Houthi — were largely radicalized by the 2003 US war in Iraq but escaped global attention at the time. Another possible catalyst for their radicalization lay with the rapid emergence of Salafist-jihadi groups in Yemen such as al-Qaeda, and later, ISIS. These terror organizations expanded their power significantly in Yemen during the 2000s and often attacked Shia areas in the north, likely triggering defensive radicalization.

At that time, the Saudis helped Saleh in his fight against the Houthis, but it was clear that the north was reaching a boiling point and the jihadi groups were also gaining prominence in other areas.

The situation spun out of control in 2011 after the Arab Spring, when millions of Yemenis marched against Saleh’s regime and demanded his resignation. The regime was shaken and weak, and it was the Houthi rebels’ cue to act. In 2014, the Houthis took control of some parts of southern Yemen as well as the capital, Sanaa.

Mighty regional backers – Iran and Qatar
A leaked confidential UN report states that the Houthis received weapons from Iran for the first time in 2009. After the Arab Spring, the alliance became closer and by 2015 a full-blown military conflict erupted in Yemen between the central government and the Houthis, with the Iranian weapons already pouring in. The Saudis led a 10-country coalition that backed the internationally recognized government, which was now exiled from its capital.

By 2017, Qatar, a country that originally joined the Saudi coalition against the Houthis, backed off and pulled its forces out of Yemen, mostly due to a rift with the Saudis and other Arab countries that eventually resulted in their blockade of Qatar and the severing of diplomatic relations between the countries.

Soon thereafter, the Saudi press revealed interesting details regarding the nature of relations between the Qataris and the Houthis. While previously it was common wisdom that Doha supported the Islah — an Islamist Sunni party that is ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood — now, according to Saudi sources, the Qataris were also supporting the Houthis.

A July 2019 article published in the Saudi daily Okaz titled “The Poisonous Qatari Money” accused the small emirate of “play[ing] a dual role in Yemen,” supporting the Houthi rebels in Sanaa and the Muslim Brotherhood to sow discord and spread chaos in Yemen, which is now suffering humanitarian consequences from the Houthi coup. Thousands of Yemenis have died in indiscriminate Houthi attacks on their homes and government hospitals, said the article.

“The Qatari weapons were not supplied to organized forces, but weapons of destruction designed to carry out specific operations to target and undermine the security stability of [Sanaa], which is a symbol of Yemen’s legitimacy, to mix the cards and make way for the Muslim Brotherhood to expand its influence,” it said.

In 2020, Yemeni Information Minister Moammar al-Eryani warned Qatar over its backing of the Houthis in a Twitter post, calling on Qatar and Al Jazeera, “whose position has become clear in identifying with the Iranian project in Yemen and its Houthi tool… to review its policies and distance itself from the swamp of Yemeni blood in which Iran’s mullahs are immersed, as history will not be merciful to anyone.”

Towards 2022, the Qataris were skillfully installing themselves as the mediators between the United States and their Houthi protegees in Yemen in a manner that closely resembles its situation vis-à-vis the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which was funded and supported by Qatar for many years.

However, there are still some in the region who are well aware of the Houthi alliance with Iran and Qatar. They point out the absurdity of the alliance between a militia that chants “Death to America” and Qatar — a country that hosts a massive American base on its territory and is considered to be one of the strongest American allies in the region.

But the current role of Qatar in the “Houthi phenomenon” is yet to be fully explored and analyzed — not only in the context of Yemen and the 2015 war with Saudi Arabia, but within the wider frame of its being a regional disruptor and serial supporter of the Middle East’s most violent and dangerous militias, parties, and terrorist organizations.

Israel should consider a Ground Invasion of Lebanon

No one is saying so out loud, but Israel and Lebanon have been at war since October 8, with Hezbollah once again dragging an unwilling Beirut into Iran's long battle against the Jewish state.

In July 2006, Hezbollah – without Beirut's approval – attacked Israel unprovoked and sparked the destructive Second Lebanon War. When the war ended, the UN Security Council responded by adopting Resolution 1701 which called for the banning of militias from the Israeli-Lebanese border region and end the lawlessness that gave Hezbollah free rein.

But Lebanon refuses to implement its terms. Hezbollah's unilateral and unauthorized entry into the Gaza-Israel war has highlighted the need to rectify Beirut's dereliction – leaving Israel as the likeliest party to do so, and with a legal right to enforce its terms.

The main responsibility of Resolution 1701's rests on Lebanon. But it's been shirking its responsibilities ever since it was passed, instead adopting an idiosyncratic interpretation of it that excludes Hezbollah from its ambit, effectively eviscerating 1701's spirit and its demands that Lebanon disarm all militias, exercise full and exclusive control over all its territory, and establish between the Blue Line the provisional border and the Litani River "an area free of armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL" — the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, peacekeepers authorized to prevent conflict across the Israeli-Lebanese border.

We see the Hezbollah aggression in the firing rockets and missiles at civilian homes and army units in northern Israel. The fighting has intensified in recently, leading to a growing death and injury toll on both sides.

These attacks have killed eight soldiers and four civilians, and wounded dozens more. Hezbollah has also facilitated rocket attacks and incursions by the Lebanese franchises of its Resistance Axis allies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from south Lebanon. On Thursday the Israeli army intercepted a drone attack near the northern city of Haifa.

It is increasingly hard to dismiss these attacks as "mere frontier incidents" or border skirmishes.

Cumulatively, they have come to resemble an "armed attack" justifying broad Israeli retaliation. In Lebanon reportedly over 120 Hezbollah members have been killed along with 17 civilians.

Tensions are especially high this week after Iran accused Israel of assassinating a top commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Sayyed Razi Mousavi. The head of the IRGC has vowed to avenge his death with the "eradication of the Zionist regime."

The fighting has highlighted the need to rectify Beirut's dereliction – leaving Israel as the likeliest party to do so, and with a legal right to enforce its terms. This could mean Israel will have no choice but to try to push Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River.

With Lebanon unwilling and unable to act, Israel must contend alone with the perpetually growing threat on its northern border from Hezbollah – as dedicated as Hamas to Israel's ultimate destruction and committing October 7-style atrocities, but with far better capabilities.

Lebanese non-performance stems in equal parts from intransigence and inability. Since 2006, Hezbollah has been too preoccupied -- with a domestic crisis in Lebanon, involvement in Syria's civil war since 2011, and now navigating Lebanon's ongoing economic collapse – to initiate war with Israel, dampening any Lebanese sense of urgency to act against the group.

Lebanon's passivity also stems from its makeup. The country is built and governed around "confessionalist" – or sectarian – system. This system is effectively feudalistic, devolving each sect's allotment of the share of power upon sub-sectarian representatives or parties.

Beirut only makes decisions by the consensus of these sub-sectarian groups, which are obliged to count Hezbollah as a critical political and social element because it retains massive popular support.

In a country of just over four million citizens, the group won 356,112 of votes in Lebanon's May 2022 legislative elections – the best gauge available, despite its imprecision – making it parliament's largest by 150,000 votes, though not by seats.
.
Beirut therefore can't ignore Hezbollah, which has guaranteed this by using its vast arsenal against political opponents, and would need the group's unlikely consent to disarm it. Lebanon would otherwise be inviting civil war – a dynamic making 1701's central operative clauses unworkable, and any diplomatic efforts to induce Beirut to implement them futile.

For Lebanon, the immense cost of doing so will always appear to outweigh any benefits. UNIFIL can't rectify the situation, despite its original mandate being repeatedly upgraded to allow full freedom of movement and authority to conduct unhindered and unannounced patrols in south Lebanon.

Since February 2011, Hezbollah has been threatening and training to "liberate the Galilee" – "Al-Aqsa Flood's" operational blueprint, imparted – along with preparation and training – to the Shiite organization's Palestinian partners.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah hinted to his organization's intention to commit their own series of October 7-style massacres against Israelis last month, to "to "win[..] incrementally," until the "battle [to destroy Israel…] reach[es] the phase of victory by fatal blow" – echoing Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas politburo member.

An Israeli ground invasion at least pushing Hezbollah north of the Litani River would neutralize this threat. It would also allow Israel to degrade the broader threat posed by Hezbollah's 40,000+ fighting force and diverse arsenal – an array of 150,000+ projectiles of various ranges, degrees of precision, and striking power, coupled with a domestic production capability.

It would further deprive the broader "Resistance Axis" of its arguably most critical front – decades in the making and increasingly interlinked with Iranian-controlled Syria – for attacking Israel now or in a future "big regional war." Finally, it would also irreparably dent Iran's regional expansionism and send a forceful message of deterrence to Tehran.

But such an Israeli undertaking would be highly costly and destructive for Israel. Reaching the Litani would require an invasion far deeper than the Second Lebanon War's minor incursions past the Blue Line. Hezbollah will also increase tenfold the daily number of rockets fired at Israel as compared to the 2006 conflict.

This price, coupled with American pressure against Israeli escalation against Hezbollah, are temporarily staying Israel's hand as Jerusalem indulges American and French efforts to peacefully obtain Hezbollah's relocation north of the Litani River.

If those efforts prove fruitless – as they likely will – Israel would have the right to launch a ground invasion in self-defense, moving beyond its ongoing tit-for-tat exchanges with Hezbollah, without committing a crime of aggression.

On November 3, Nasrallah himself declared Hezbollah's full "entry of the [Gaza-Israel] battle on October 8…when the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon began it operations."

Nasrallah reemphasized this the following week, stressing Hezbollah's escalating attacks had caused Israeli "soldier and civilian casualties," and that "this [northern] front will remain a[n open] pressure point."

Nasrallah has fallen silent since then, but Hezbollah's guns have not.

But as he said, "the battlefield will speak…not our words." Since Hezbollah fired its first unprovoked shots in October, it has claimed daily responsibility for launching over 1,000 projectiles into Israel.

Some 60,000 Israeli residents of the north who live within five kilometers of the Lebanon border have been evacuated from their homes since October 7. A group of them sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden saying the White House should give "its full support to the government of Israel to act with the necessary force" to protect Israel's north.

Certainly, the accumulated chain of Hezbollah recent attacks on Israel exceeds – in intensity, scope, and casualties – Hezbollah's July 12, 2006 incursion which triggered Israeli self-defense and sparked the Second Lebanon War.

Nasrallah has even recognized, considering the intensity of Hezbollah's attacks, that Israel's preoccupation with Gaza alone was sparing Hezbollah the full brunt of Israeli military retaliation.

The international community recognized the need to end Hezbollah's threat to Israel almost two decades ago.

But time is increasingly proving that silencing Hezbollah's guns, and ending its broader threat, will only be possible through direct Israeli military action broader than the IDF's current limited counterstrikes.

As ongoing diplomatic efforts and international mechanisms inevitably falter against Lebanon's impotence and intransigence and Hezbollah's lawlessness, Israel's justification to push Hezbollah beyond the Litani River and create a buffer zone down to the Blue Line increasingly appears to be the option proportional to the threat – if not the only option available.

David Daoud is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) focusing on Hezbollah, Israel, and Lebanon issues. He also holds a JD with a concentration on international law and the laws of armed conflict. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidADaoud

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
.
A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella

Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.

At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”

In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.

The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.

The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.

One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.

As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”

Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.

A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.

Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.

Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.

And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.

Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.

Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.

Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.

The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.

A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.

That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.

In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.

“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”

Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.

“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”

‘Screams without words’
Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.

She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.

She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.

About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.

“It was like an assembly point,” she said.

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.

Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.

Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.

“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”

That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”

Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.

Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.

“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”

Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.

A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.

One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.

Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.

The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.

Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.

Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”

A woman stands in a large metal container whose doors are open, showing wrapped bodies stacked on shelves, while a man with a gun stands looking in her direction.

Shari Mendes, an architect who was called up as a reserve soldier to help handle the bodies of female troops, in a container used to hold bodies before their removal to a morgue at the Shura military base in central Israel.
A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

The investigation
The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.

But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.

In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.

The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.

According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.

Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.

A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”

Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.

Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.

“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Yossi Landau, a volunteer with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he had not taken pictures of the bodies because it was not allowed. “In retrospect, I regret it,” he added.
The trauma from sexual assault can be so heavy that sometimes survivors do not speak about it for years, several rape counselors said.

“Many people are looking for the golden evidence, of a woman who will testify about what happened to her. But don’t look for that, don’t put this pressure on this woman,” said Orit Sulitzeanu, executive director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. “The corpses tell the story.”

The woman in the black dress
One of the last images of Ms. Abdush alive — captured by a security camera mounted on her front door — shows her leaving home with her husband, Nagi, at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 7 for the rave.

He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. She was dressed in a short black dress, a black shawl tied around her waist and combat boots. As she struts out, she takes a swig from a glass (her brother-in-law remembers it was Red Bull and vodka) and laughs.

You’ve got to live life like it’s your last moments. That was her motto, her sisters said.

At daybreak, hundreds of terrorists closed in on the party from several directions, blocking the highways leading out. The couple jumped into their Audi, dashing off a string of messages as they moved.

“We’re on the border,” Ms. Abdush wrote to her family. “We’re leaving.”

“Explosions.”

Her husband made his own calls to his family, leaving a final audio message for his brother, Nissim, at 7:44 a.m. “Take care of the kids,” he said. “I love you.”

Gunshots rang out, and the message stopped.

That night, Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site with three friends and found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car, about nine miles north of the site. She did not see the body of Mr. Abdush.

Eden Wessely, a car mechanic, drove to the rave site looking for a missing friend but instead found Ms. Abdush sprawled half naked on the road next to her burned car.

She saw other burned cars and other bodies, and shot videos of several — hoping that they would help people to identify missing relatives. When she posted the video of the woman in the black dress on her Instagram story, she was deluged with messages.

“Hi, based on your description of the woman in the black dress, did she have blonde hair?” one message read.

“Eden, the woman you described with the black dress, do you remember the color of her eyes?” another said.

Some members of the Abdush family saw that video and another version of it filmed by one of Ms. Wessely’s friends. They immediately suspected that the body was Ms. Abdush, and based on the way her body was found, they feared that she might have been raped.

But they kept alive a flicker of hope that somehow, it wasn’t true.

The videos caught the eye of Israeli officials as well — very quickly after Oct. 7 they began gathering evidence of atrocities. They included footage of Ms. Abdush’s body in a presentation made to foreign governments and media organizations, using Ms. Abdush as a representation of violence committed against women that day.

A week after her body was found, three government social workers appeared at the gate of the family’s home in Kiryat Ekron, a small town in central Israel. They broke the news that Ms. Abdush, 34, had been found dead.

But the only document the family received was a one-page form letter from Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, expressing his condolences and sending a hug. The body of Mr. Abdush, 35, was identified two days after his wife’s. It was badly burned and investigators determined who he was based on a DNA sample and his wedding ring.

The couple had been together since they were teenagers. To the family, it seems only yesterday that Mr. Abdush was heading off to work to fix water heaters, a bag of tools slung over his shoulder, and Ms. Abdush was cooking up mashed potatoes and schnitzel for their two sons, Eliav, 10, and Refael, 7.

The boys are now orphans. They were sleeping over at an aunt’s the night their parents were killed. Ms. Abdush’s mother and father have applied for permanent custody, and everyone is chipping in to help.

Night after night, Ms. Abdush’s mother, Eti Bracha, lies in bed with the boys until they drift off. A few weeks ago, she said she tried to quietly leave their bedroom when the younger boy stopped her.

“Grandma,” he said, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can ask anything.”

“Grandma, how did mom die?”

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, backed by Iran, massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, resulting in full-scale war in Gaza. Hezbollah, also backed by Iran, has launched more than 1,000 rockets at northern Israeli communities since then, risking regional conflagration. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen are attacking and hijacking ships in the Suez canal, threatening one of the world’s most vital waterways. Militias in Syria and Iraq, with support from Iran, are attacking U.S. bases and—as always—threatening moderate Arab nations.

Notice a pattern? The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror. Yet inexplicably, almost nobody is touching it. For the past 45 years, the regime has been the source of endless war, terror and suffering throughout the world. I’ve come to realize that enough is enough. The evil empire of Iran must be brought down.

As a young officer in Israel’s special forces, I spent a great deal of time fighting Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy. I studied its methods and vulnerabilities. I targeted its commanders and fighters. In 2006, as a reservist, I commanded a special search and destroy team in the second Lebanon War.

Only after that war, in which I lost my best friend, did I begin to realize our great folly. We were fighting the wrong battle, and that is exactly what Iran wants us to do.

In the late 1980s, Iran embarked on a simple yet brilliant strategy: Set up terrorist proxies across the Middle East. Fund them, train them and arm them. Let them do the dirty work of fighting and dying.

Iran executed this plan well. There is little direct war taking place between Iran and Israel. Instead, Iran constantly attacks Israel via its proxies in such places as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza and Yemen. Its brutal Quds unit exported terror around the globe. Iran’s terrorist proxies have waged war on every moderate element in the Middle East. They’ve attacked the Saudi oil company Aramco, the United Arab Emirates, the Kurds and Israel on many occasions. The most amazing part: Iran has largely gotten away with it.

There is a new cold war taking place in the Middle East. On one side, there is a corrupt, incompetent and hollow empire—the Islamic Republic of Iran—similar to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. On the other side, there is a thriving, free and strong democracy—Israel (and its allies)—reminiscent of the U.S. in the original Cold War.

When I became prime minister in June 2021, I decided to change this. I told my three security chiefs—the heads of the Israel Defense Forces, Mossad and Shin Bet—that my goal was to avoid, if reasonably possible, local clashes with Hezbollah and Hamas. Rather, Israel’s national-security resources must be focused on weakening our primary enemy—Iran.

There are many ways to weaken Iran: empower domestic opposition, ensure internet continuity during riots against the regime, strengthen its enemies, increase sanctions and economic pressures. But Israel can’t and shouldn’t do this alone. The U.S. should be leading the effort. This doesn’t require a full-scale war, just as the demise of the Soviet Union didn’t result from total war. Rather, the Soviet Union collapsed from internal rot coupled with external pressure applied by the U.S.

As prime minister, I made another decision regarding Iran. I directed Israel’s security forces to make Tehran pay for its decision to sponsor terror. Enough impunity. After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran.

It turns out that Iran’s tyrants are softer than one might expect. They gleefully send others to die for them. But when they’re hit at home, suddenly they become timid.

The U.S. and Israel must set the clear goal of bringing down Iran’s evil regime. Not only is this possible. It is vital for the safety and security of the Middle East—and the entire civilized world.

Mr. Bennett served as Israel’s prime minister, 2021-22.

Report details ultra-secret buildup to October 7, and isolation of Hamas in its wake

Hamas alerted the leader of fellow terror group Hezbollah just minutes before launching its October 7 assault, according to a report this week, detailing rifts between various Iran-backed groups and within Hamas in the wake of the unprecedented assault.

According to the report in French daily Le Figaro, members of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance, including Lebanese terror group Hezbollah and other alleged proxies around the Middle East, have offered only middling support for Hamas as it faces off against Israel, along with alleged evidence of souring ties between Hamas’s Gaza leadership and the group’s Qatar-based politburo.

The report, largely based on sources with ties to various terror groups, including one said to be close to Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, describes Hamas’s exhaustive preparations for the attacks and expected reprisal, from appointing dummy commanders to take the brunt of Israel’s response, to sending members on secret training missions, all while keeping the timing of the assault and other details from all but a handful of people, a decision that may have wound up leaving the group largely isolated.

The shock attack on the morning of October 7 came as a complete surprise to Israel, whose security apparatus had largely dismissed various indications of Hamas’s aims over previous months as empty boasting. Early that Saturday, a Jewish holiday, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists streamed out of Gaza into southern Israel, overrunning military positions and infiltrating over a dozen communities and towns, as well as an outdoor rave festival, under cover of heavy rocket fire on southern and central Israel.

Some 1,200 people were killed in the ensuing massacres, most of them civilians, often slaughtered in their homes, gunned down in fields or butchered on roads. The bloodletting included atrocities from rape to torture, mutilations and executions of bound captives.

Around 240 people — including young children and the elderly — were kidnapped and taken into Gaza to be used as bargaining chips; some 129 of them remain there, though some are thought to have since been killed. Another two Israelis and the remains of two soldiers have been captive since 2014.

As Israel struggled to mount a response, Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon was also scrambling to get a picture of what was happening, according to Le Figaro, citing a Lebanese source close to the terror group.

It was only some 30 minutes before the 6:30 a.m. rampage kicked off, that Saleh al-Arouri, a top Hamas official based in Lebanon, was told over the phone to give Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah a heads up on what was about to happen, the paper reports.

Hezbollah, which had been planning a similar assault on Israel, was not pleased, the report claimed. “The cards they had been holding for a future attack against Israel had been shown by the Palestinians: penetrating inside Israel, airborne [assaults], the element of surprise,” said the Lebanese source, noting a “well-known plan by Hezbollah’s elite al-Radwan to infiltrate the Galilee.”

While Hezbollah began firing at northern Israel the next day in support of Hamas’s mission, its attacks have largely been limited to anti-tank missile strikes, launching armed drones and sporadic rocket fire, mostly aimed at since-evacuated border towns. A source with fellow Iran-backed terror group Islamic Jihad also tells the paper that it has kept a lid on attacks against Israel.

Hezbollah’s heaviest attacks, such as Wednesday’s barrages on Kiryat Shmona and Rosh Hanikra, have generally come in retaliation for Israeli strikes on its members or positions in Lebanon or Syria.

Nine soldiers and four civilians in Israel have been killed in attacks from Lebanon since October 8, while Hezbollah has named 129 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes. The fighting has been heavy enough that Israeli leaders indicate they may soon launch a major military operation aimed at pushing the terror group away from the border, describing the situation in northern Israel as untenable.

Hamas, though, was apparently expecting beefier backing from Iran-backed groups.

According to the Hezbollah source, Arouri “oversold” Hamas’s leaders on the support they could expect from Hezbollah and others. Nasrallah, unable to commit backing, sent Arouri to Tehran, where he and Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh were told by Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that it would not be embarking on an “all-out war” against Israel, Le Figaro said, corroborating a November Reuters report on the meeting.

According to Reuters, Iran refused to help because it was not given prior warning about the assault.

The Le Figaro report described Sinwar as keeping his cards extremely close to his chest, hiding his plans from even many of Hamas’s heavies, including Osama Hamdan, a Beirut-based official who tells the paper he heard about the attack on the news.

A short clip from the day of the attack showed Haniyeh, Arouri and others giddily watching the attacks unfold on TV.

Former Hamas politburo head Khaled Meshal refused to tell Le Figaro if the political leadership had known about the attack ahead of time.

In the months leading up to the attack, according to the report, Sinwar largely stopped communicating with Hamas officials in Qatar and elsewhere, even making Moussa Abu Marzouk, another bigwig in Hamas’s politburo, wait to see him in person.

The report indicated that while the politburo was open to negotiating with Israel, Sinwar’s harder line has placed him at odds with his bosses.

Speaking to the paper, Meshal said “a long-term truce with Israel is certainly negotiable,” and recognition of Israel could be considered “when the time comes.”

Sinwar, on the other hand, has long carried a reputation as an uncompromising hawk dedicated to destroying Israel.

“He is a little dictator, insensitive to the death of Palestinian civilians” the paper quoted the Jordan-based source, described as a longtime associate of Sinwar, who has long known the terrorist and speaks to him regularly. He said the Gazan’s brusque personality had led to run-ins with the political leadership.

Others have rued the destruction brought upon Gaza in the wake of the attacks, with Hamas health authorities claiming over 20,000 people killed, numbers that cannot be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Israel says it has killed around 8,000 terrorists in Gaza.

“Hamas led to 100 catastrophes in Gaza,” Palestinian National Council member Osama al-Ali recently told Emirati television.

The shadow’s shadow
According to Le Figaro, while Sinwar kept his plans secret from much of Hamas’s leadership and allies, he did approach small Salafist groups for arms and training.

Other preparations included sending Hamas members and allies to drill for the assault in Syria and Lebanon, getting them out of Gaza under the guise of sending them to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage. Six weeks before the attack, he ordered commanders to freeze communications between each other, according to the report.

The Jordan-based source claimed that Sinwar went as far as appointing figurehead commanders of armed units in order to protect the actual commander. According to the report, Mohammed Deif, long-described as the head of the Izzeldine al-Qassam Brigades, is one such decoy.

Deif has largely lurked in the shadows. Pictures of him are so rare that a Channel 12 news report Wednesday night revealing a photo purporting to show him was enough to cause a major stir in Israel and raise hopes that troops in Gaza could be closing in on him.

He is also apparently useful as bait. Despite his elusiveness, Deif has been subjected to no less than seven Israeli assassination attempts, somehow crawling away each time, though missing an eye and possibly some limbs.

The source named Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya Sinwar’s younger brother, as the actual leader of Hamas’s armed wing.

The younger Sinwar has survived several assassination attempts himself, according to a report in the Telegraph. In 2014, he faked his death, and had not been seen since last month, when the Israel Defense Forces published video it found of the Sinwar brothers cruising through a massive tunnel in northern Gaza in a car.

Reports indicate that Israel believes Mohammed Sinwar is a top commander in Hamas’s armed wing and played a major role in planning the October 7 attacks. He is among the most wanted men in Gaza, and a leaflet reportedly distributed in the Strip offering rewards for information on Hamas’s leaders put the second highest price on his head, three times what it offered for Deif.

“Deif is not dead, he walks with canes, but his head still works well, he resolves internal problems in the armed branch,” the source was quoted saying. “He is a respected figure, but the one who moves the brigades is Mohammed, the brother, whom Yahya protects.”

The claims by the paper’s sources could not be independently verified, including the assertion that only three or four people knew the time and day when the attack would take place.

On Wednesday, Channel 12 news reported that the Shin Bet received a tip over the summer on Hamas’s attack plans, including when it would take place, seemingly contradicting the claim.

The Jordan-based source claimed that though he did not know when the attack would take place, he had heard about plans for it from Sinwar at least two years prior. Those plans were for an assault possibly even more devastating than what took place: a 5,000-man-strong siege on Ashkelon, the Israeli city Sinwar still claims as his hometown.