Israel Update: Day 611 - Bodies of 3 Hostages Recovered
Hostages Held in Gaza: 55 (-3); IDF Soldiers Lost: 866 (+4)
A long but important Sunday update.
Hostage Update (3 bodies recovered)
Gadi Haggai and Judi Weinstein Haggai
The Times of Israel reports: The IDF and Shin Bet security agency recovered the bodies of slain hostages Gadi Haggai, 72, and Judi Weinstein Haggai, 70 from the southern Gaza Strip in an operation overnight
The two, a married couple who held US citizenship, were murdered during their morning walk near Kibbutz Nir Oz during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, and their deaths were confirmed by the military in December of that year.
Judi, a dedicated teacher for children with special needs, and Gad, a talented musician and chef, were cherished members of Kibbutz Nir Oz.
They had been held by the Mujahideen Brigades, a relatively small terror group in the Strip that was also responsible for the abduction and murder of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir.
The overnight operation in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis was enabled by intelligence obtained during a Shin Bet interrogation of a Palestinian terror operative who was detained in Gaza
Nattapong “Nick” Pinta
The body of slain hostage Nattapong Pinta, who Hamas-led terrorists abducted on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet operation in the southern Gaza Strip
Pinta, a Thai national, was kidnapped alive by terrorists of the Mujahideen Brigades — a relatively small terror group in the Strip and somewhat allied with Hamas — from the Gaza border community of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where he worked as a farmhand.
The IDF said it believed that the terror group murdered Pinta in captivity during the first months of the war.
Pinta was among three hostages whom Israel had grave concerns for their lives, though had not until now officially declared Pinta dead.
Known as ‘Nick’ on his Facebook page, Pinta was working in the avocado fields of Kibbutz Nir Oz, saving up to pay off a debt and help his wife open a coffee shop. He left his wife and young son in Thailand, a year and a half before the onslaught, to work on the avocado and pomegranate farm.
Pinta was among 31 Thai nationals working in agriculture abducted by terrorists on October 7.
There are now currently 54 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 55 hostages remaining in total)
Of the 55 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
32 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
Thus, at most, 23 living hostages could still be in Gaza. It has been reported that only 20 are actually alive.
Hamas is now holding the body of 1 IDF soldier who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)
20 hostages remain in captivity and have not been declared dead.
2 hostages are Americans: Meet the Two American Hostages Still Held By Hamas:
Itay Chen died on October 7 defending civilians living in an agricultural area near the Gaza borde
Omer Neutra was killed when his team drove two miles to the border, where Hamas militants ambushed his tank with rocket-propelled grenades.
On October 7th, a total of 251 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
38 hostages were released in the first phase of the 2025 cease fire agreement (including 5 Thai nationals)
197 hostages in total have been released or rescued
The bodies of 42 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
8 hostages have been heroically rescued by troops alive
Casualties (+4)
According to the Times of Israel: Four Israeli soldiers were killed and five were wounded by an explosion in a building in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis on Friday morning. According to an initial IDF probe, the soldiers entered the building to clear it of possible terror infrastructure, including tunnels. The building was booby-trapped and the explosion caused the structure to collapse on the soldiers, killing the soldiers and wounding the others, including one seriously.
Sgt. Maj. (res.) Chen Gross, 33
Staff Sgt. Yoav Raver, 19
Israeli journalist Amit Segal said Yoav played for the Israeli youth basketball team. He chose to fight in Gaza even though he could have taken an exemption due to his sporting talents.
Sergeant First Class Tom Rotstein, 23
Sergeant Uri Yhonatan Cohen, 20
What the Death of Four IDF Soldiers Reveals About Hamas’s Pre-Destruction of Gaza by Seth Mandel in Commentary
With the large amount of cameras and remote triggers Hamas and other Gazan forces have left behind, sometimes standing around and waiting for backup or for a flyover of some sort really isn’t in the cards. Yet a prospective tunnel can’t be left unmolested either; just a week ago, IDF soldiers found a tunnel hundreds of meters long and with several exits.
…the terror tunnels aren’t hypothetical future threats; they are still active war zones whose presence puts every single soldier and civilian in the vicinity in grave danger.
This also helps explain the level of physical destruction in Gaza. Rather than being indicative of some sort of pyromania on the part of the IDF, which is what the media would like you to believe, these structures must be destroyed. They cannot be lived in. They aren’t inhabitable—or even safe for people to live and work near. They are boobytrapped, rigged with explosives, and contain entrances (or exits) to tunnels from which a cell of armed terrorists will eventually emerge into daylight.
These buildings were already, for all intents and purposes, destroyed by Hamas.
The fate of these buildings was sealed by Hamas long ago. Sometimes they can be demolished safely, and sometimes they cause the deaths of Israeli soldiers. There is no third option.
Less than a year ago, reports out of Rafah were that 14,000 buildings were boobytrapped and that nearly 100,000 in all of Gaza were rigged. The walls of houses often have sniper holes neatly placed in them, making every building that isn’t rigged with explosives a possible Hamas fortification.
Link: What the Death of Four IDF Soldiers Reveals About Hamas’s Pre-Destruction of Gaza
1,884 Israelis have been killed including 866 IDF soldiers and police since October 7th
The South: 424 IDF soldiers (+4 since Wednesday) during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed. The toll includes three police officers (two of which were killed in a hostage rescue mission) and two Defense Ministry civilian contractors.
The North: 132 Israelis (84 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel
The West Bank: 63 Israelis (27 IDF and Israeli security forces)
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
5,937 (+9 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 885 (+1 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
2,700 (+8 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 520 (+1 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
The Gaza Casualty Count: According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 54,607 total deaths have been reported, with a civilian/combatant ratio: 1:1.
[MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
Read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March of 2024: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.
Humanitarian Aid
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed almost 9 million meals to date across multiple distribution sites.
However, on Saturday, the GHF says it suspended operations due to "direct threats against GHF operations" by Hamas
FDD’s Joe Truzman writes: From the outset, Hamas and its affiliates have sought to disrupt GHF’s work. As long as GHF continues to succeed in delivering aid to Gazans, escalation by Hamas is highly likely.
[WATCH] Inside the Massacre that Never Happened with the Center for Peace Communications and The Free Press
This week, Western media rushed to repeat the shocking accusation that Israeli troops opened fire on innocent Palestinians at an aid station in Gaza. But according to Gazans on the ground, it was Hamas—not the IDF—that was behind this deadly attack.
On Sunday, dozens of Palestinians were shot at here, with masked gunmen opening fire on the people waiting to collect aid, according to the released footage and subsequent reports.
The Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, and scores of other Western media initially reported that Israeli troops were the ones who had opened fire, and that the site of the massacre was the southern city of Rafah.
In partnership with the CPC, The Free Press sent a reporter to Gaza to speak with locals about what really happened on June 1, and get their take on the new aid mechanism that may spell the end of Hamas’s reign in the Gaza Strip.
Amid allegations of the IDF killing aid seekers in Gaza, the army released a phone call with a Gazan eyewitness refuting these claims, accusing Hamas instead – 'This isn't the first time... they want aid to come through the UN and int'l organizations so they can steal it'. The Gazan flat out says that Hamas shot the people trying to get to the Gazan Humanitarian Fund's distribution center in an effort to scuttle the initiative.
There's a way to aid Gaza. I know, my foundation just helped deliver 7 million meals... without incident by Johnnie Moore, Chairman of the GHF, in Fox News
It’s time to be honest about humanitarian assistance in Gaza. The incumbent system is morally bankrupt. Grift is not a bug—it is a feature.
The decades-long cycle of empty statements, inflated budgets, and institutionalized failure has created a self-sustaining machine that feeds off misery, undermines peace, and instinctively demonizes America and Israel.
The current system fuels fate.
Just days ago, the world should have celebrated the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's week of success. Over 7 million meals were delivered free to Gazans -- no trucks seized, no aid diverted, no violence at distribution sites.
Instead of celebrating GHF, the international press swallowed a Hamas disinformation campaign wholesale.
Hamas falsely claimed 31 Gazans died at our distribution site. Global media printed headlines treating Hamas' claims as fact.
When GHF's denials were questioned but Hamas' statements were believed, GHF released CCTV proving the truth.
Yet fabricated headlines still deceive online, even fooling U.N. Secretary General Guterres, who spread them the next morning (and has yet to correct his mistake).
Guterres’ statement came just hours after someone incited by this fake news set Jewish Americans on fire at a Colorado hostage vigil.
What the media should be doing is joining us in telling the truth about the systemic failure for years in Gaza and the United Nations should be working with us to fix the system.
The current systems, built to serve the Palestinian people, have not just been ineffective—they have been actively complicit in perpetuating suffering.
From UNRWA to the Human Rights Council, bigotry has been wrapped in bureaucracy, funded by American and European tax dollars, and aimed squarely at helping terrorists wage a never-ending war with Israel.
The silence is deafening, but actually, it’s worse. They keep spreading with no scrutiny the profane lies of Hamas.
The fact is that there were Palestinians harmed last week, but not by GHF. They were harmed by Hamas when they tried to break into warehouses where Hamas had been hoarding piles and piles of humanitarian aid meant for Gazans.
We’re told by beneficiaries that Hamas was selling aid or using it for coercive purposes.
One beneficiary asked our aid workers five times if our aid was truly free.
Yet, this behavior is excused, explained away, or flat-out ignored while organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are attacked constantly for trying to feed Gazans with no strings attached.
What GHF is guilty of is exposing the whole charade for what it is.
Unfortunately, instead of just focusing on feeding Gazans, GHF humanitarians must fight a profane information war naively parroted by those who should know better.
Our vision is that failure will no longer be rewarded. Instead, we demand results with Silicon Valley precision.
The good-hearted taxpayers of rich countries should no longer be content to line the pockets of institutional elites with cushy jobs propping up failing systems.
If even a sliver of hope is delivered through a model based on transparency, accountability, and realism, the entire cottage industry of perpetual process collapses.
But, no longer can we let the weaponization of humanitarian aid, or its mismanagement, prolong this and other conflicts.
There can be no peace process without peace, and there is no humanitarian aid without human dignity.
There’s also no time for nostalgia over broken systems.
It is time to stop rewarding failure and start building the future. Not in Geneva or New York, but in Ashkelon, Khan Younis, and Ramallah—where outcomes matter more than press releases.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation isn’t perfect. But it is honest.
And for those who have grown rich, powerful, and respected by keeping Palestinians poor, hopeless, and angry—that’s the real threat. We say: good. Let them be afraid.
To those in the humanitarian community who truly care and have witnessed press and U.N. attacks on our relief efforts: we choose the high road.
You're good people who, like Gazans, recognize authentic work.
Situational Update
FDD’s Joe Truzman reports: IDF and Shin Bet Eliminate the head of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement aka Mujahideen Brigades: In a joint operation, the IDF and Shin Bet killed Asaad Abu Sharia, the head of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement terrorist organization in Gaza.
Abu Sharia was a key figure in the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz and was directly involved in the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli and foreign hostages, including Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, Gadi Hagai and Judy Lynn Weinstein, and Thai national Natpong Pinta.
As leader of the group, he also recruited operatives in the West Bank and within Israel to carry out terror attacks. Under his command, the organization played a major role in assaults on IDF forces during the ongoing war in Gaza.
Israel/Middle East Related Articles
Who Profits from Gaza’s Desperation? by Eli Lake with The Free Press
On Sunday the world awoke to news of another alleged massacre in Gaza.
“Gaza Ministry Says Israel Kills More Than 30 Aid Seekers, Israel Denies,” blared the headline from Reuters. The Washington Post chimed in with “More Than 30 Killed by Gunfire Near U.S. Aid Site in Gaza.” The headline in The Guardian read: “Palestinians Gunned Down While Trying to Reach Food Aid Site in Gaza, Hospital Says.”
The issue? It’s not even clear if the massacre happened, let alone if Israel was involved.
“These reports were FALSE,” U.S. ambassador Mike Huckabee said in a statement Monday. “Drone video and first-hand accounts clearly showed that there were no injuries, no fatalities, no shooting, no chaos.”
Let’s start with the fact that while some accounts—such as those published by The Washington Post and New York Times have quoted named witnesses describing shooting at an aid site, nearly every account of the massacre attributes Israel’s killings to “local health officials.” And who might they be?
Are these the same health officials affiliated with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health that initially blamed the October 17, 2023, bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on the Israel Defense Forces?
It turned out the explosion at Al-Ahli was most likely due to a Palestinian militia’s misfired handheld munition.
The Al-Ahli lie had terrible consequences. A mob in Al-Ḥāmmah, Tunisia, razed a centuries-old synagogue in revenge for the bombing falsely attributed to Israel.
Then there is the stifling environment of Hamas-controlled Gaza that prevents the full truth from coming to light, something with which any journalist must contend.
Given that nearly all journalistic organizations in Gaza rely on local stringers for on-the-ground facts, these accounts must also be taken with healthy grains of salt.
Add to this the fact that the Gaza Ministry of Health does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths.
Israel is currently rolling out a new process for distributing aid to Gazans that—if it is successful—will bypass Hamas completely.
This should be a shared goal for everyone but the terrorists.
Nonetheless, on Monday the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation announced that it had delivered nearly 6 million meals in its first week of operations.
If that trend continues, it’s a death sentence for Hamas.
Hamas would rather we die of hunger than let the American aid distribution system succeed.
Hamas wants to sabotage Israel’s plans to cut out the terrorist group from one of its remaining sources of control and leverage in Gaza: distribution of food and aid.
At a bare minimum it’s reasonable to conclude that Hamas is instigating confrontations with the IDF in order to provoke the shootings of hungry aid recipients. That’s a tragedy, but not a massacre.
“I believe Hamas has every interest in sabotaging the aid mechanism because they cannot control it or loot it to finance their existence.”
Even if Israel is to blame for the alleged shootings in Rafah, it would be a triumph for Hamas if these reported incidents scuttled the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s work.
If Israel and its allies—more than a year and a half into the war—have found a way to sever aid distribution from Hamas’s grip, there is a real chance that finally these fanatics will be driven from power by the very people they have misruled for nearly two decades. That is how to end the war.
“It has shown an immense potential for many who are desperate to access food without having to pay massively inflated prices for aid that is supposed to be free in the first place.”
“That’s not on Israel,” he said. “That is on Hamas, the international NGO community, and the United Nations.”
The US-Israel Gaza aid plan is working — which is why Hamas is spreading lies about it by John Spencer and Arsen Ostrovsky with The New York Post
This week, the world was fed another lie: that Israeli troops deliberately opened fire on Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza.
The usual chorus responded on cue — crying “massacre” and “war crime” — while much of the media once again acted as an amplifier for Hamas propaganda.
The reality couldn’t be more different.
Not only was there no massacre, but the Israel Defense Forces were actively securing a humanitarian corridor to enable deliveries by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-Israeli initiative designed to get aid directly to civilians.
And for the first time since Hamas started the war on Oct. 7, the terror group was losing control over the distribution of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
The GHF was created to bypass Hamas entirely — cutting it out of the aid supply chain it has long exploited as a tool of war.
Hamas has operated like a terrorist mafia: hijacking trucks, stockpiling supplies for its fighters and then inflating prices to fund its war effort, and violently punishing any Gazan who dares to take food outside its control.
Tens of thousands of Gazans received food safely and without incident — no Hamas middlemen, no inflated black market and no political strings.
This is the first serious, large-scale aid operation that undermines Hamas’ most powerful weapon: control over the people of Gaza.
And Hamas is panicking.
Why? Because food has long been part of its arsenal.
Hamas has used aid as leverage — diverting, distributing and denying it as a means to enforce loyalty and preserve power.
The GHF threatens to dismantle that system by delivering directly to civilians, bypassing the terror group that has used starvation as a strategy.
So Hamas has turned to a two-pronged response.
First, disruption on the ground: sending armed operatives to provoke chaos at aid sites, firing on civilians attempting to access food and deliberately manufacturing volatility.
Second, disinformation: flooding social media and compliant news outlets with false casualty counts, doctored images and fabricated narratives — all to paint Israel as the aggressor and itself as the victim.
This isn’t theory. It’s strategy. It’s textbook Hamas.
That’s not journalism — it’s complicity.
Yes, the suffering in Gaza is real.
But its cause is not Israel’s military operations or efforts to rescue the hostages Hamas still holds; it’s Hamas’ own strategy of exploitation and terror.
Meantime, the international community, led by UNRWA, had been the primary source of humanitarian assistance in Gaza and for years willfully turned a blind eye to Hamas’ exploitation of aid — failing to enforce meaningful oversight, even employing Hamas members (many who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks) as local staff and using its facilities to hoard aid for terror operations.
Now, UNRWA would seemingly rather see the GHF fail, and the people of Gaza actually starve, so it can continue using the Jewish state as its forever-scapegoat.
Humanitarian aid must never be a bargaining chip for terrorists.
But by insisting on a system that leaves aid in Hamas’ hands, much of the international community has allowed exactly that.
Hamas would rather starve its own people than lose control over them.
Those who truly care about the welfare of Palestinian civilians must support a system that bypasses Hamas altogether.
The GHF is delivering what countless international actors have failed to provide: direct, accountable, large-scale humanitarian assistance that does not empower a terrorist group.
It breaks Hamas’ monopoly over aid and strips it of one of its most dangerous tools — using food as a means of control.
That’s why Hamas is trying to sabotage this initiative.
Supporting the GHF means more than feeding the hungry. It means breaking Hamas’ grip on Gaza’s civilians. It means dismantling the group’s strategy of domination through deprivation.
And it means backing a bold US-Israeli initiative that delivers not only food — but hope.
Link: The US-Israel Gaza aid plan is working — which is why Hamas is spreading lies about it
Antisemitism
[MUST READ] How the Media Manufactured a ‘Genocide’ by Zach Goldberg with Tablet Magazine—A data-driven investigation into the way coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza surpasses actual genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and beyond
Concept creep describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.
The results were striking and unambiguous: Coverage linking Israel with genocide has surged far beyond every other agreed-upon historical case of genocide across all examined outlets.
This is not a minor anomaly. It marks a profound shift in how the concept of genocide is being applied in public discourse.
Genocide is going the way of racism and white supremacy, I observed on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn’t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of genocide in The New York Times (1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper’s earlier peak for white supremacy (1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for racism/racist(s) (7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.
It may also be unique in that the targeted group’s combatants have deliberately embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure and sought to increase civilian casualties for strategic and propaganda purposes.
And it could be the only genocide that might plausibly be halted on the spot—not by the genocider, but by the group claiming victimhood.
Yet doing so would mean relinquishing a central propaganda asset: the ability to frame Israel’s actions as a genocidal assault on a defenseless population, a framing that is in turn made possible only by concept creep.
The answers are highly troubling either way. If the new math of genocide is correct, then we have a press teaching a large public that warfare of any kind is always a hideous crime, even when waged in response to murderous attacks by genocidal maniacs and Nazis on defenseless civilians.
Israel’s open media environment, combined with its geographic proximity to Gaza and the steady stream of imagery and testimony emerging from the territory—often via NGOs and local sources, some affiliated with Hamas—enables consistent and detailed, if often false or misleading, reporting.
Far from inoculating Israel against baseless charges, this openness perversely amplifies them, making the country a uniquely visible and morally charged target.
The rapid escalation in the use of the term genocide is not the product of ignorance; rather, it is entirely purposeful, with mainstream reporters and essayists engaging in frequent linguistic and legalistic contortions to justify their usage of an inflammatory term in order to delegitimize the actions of one side in a conflict and legitimize the actions of the terrorist organization that started the Gaza war.
Reporters are willingly serving as the delivery mechanism for targeted information operations—a formerly novel role that U.S. media has adopted on ideological grounds in conflicts at home and abroad.
The job of the media is not to separate fact from fiction: Rather, it is to draw halos on the virtuous parties and then mobilize the public on their behalf and against their oppressors.
Digital engagement powerfully influences which frame dominates the global discourse, with consequences far beyond rhetoric: shaping historical memory and, most immediately, weaponizing the framing to enact policy targeting Israel, looking to destabilize its government and pressure it to concede to Hamas.
The unprecedented volume of atrocity rhetoric attached to Israel in mainstream outlets is not merely a mirror of preexisting outrage; it is a megaphone, broadcasting the idea that Jews are collectively and unambiguously guilty of the darkest of crimes.
It is unsurprising that assertions of collective guilt on the part of “Israelis” and “Zionists” bleed into even broader attitudes toward Jews, resulting most recently in two back-to-back deadly attacks, which took the lives of a young couple and torched an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.
We need our moral language to retain its clarity and gravity, not to mention its anchoring in legal and historical reality.
Once terms like genocide and ethnic cleansing become routine descriptors for controversial wars or asymmetric conflicts, they lose their power to name the world’s most unspeakable crimes.
That erosion weakens our ability to recognize and respond to real genocides when they occur—and distorts our understanding of those that already have, while diminishing the agency and true horror of genocidal actions.
Antisemitism and the Politics of the Chant by Cynthia Ozick in The Wall Street Journal
‘My German quality and my Jewish quality do not get in the way of each other, but do each other a lot of good. . . . I experience this strange and intimate duality in unity as something precious.’
To read these words now, knowing how such widespread sentiments were massively betrayed, is to succumb to pathos. But replace “German” with “American,” and they spring into living truth. Intimate, precious duality in unity has long been the premise and promise of America for its Jewish citizens.
Until Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the hellish massacre of peacenik families in Israeli communes and young people at a music festival, when this healthy confidence fell apart and turned into something close to panic.
The formerly open doors of synagogues, schools, community centers, libraries, museums and auditoriums now have guards, entry codes or both.
With them we see streets, highways, bridges, public and private spaces, and most notoriously university campuses flooded with hundreds of marchers with bull horns, Hamas flags and commercially printed slogans on sticks.
That these phalanxes wear a uniform emblematic of the will to assert crushing force is not without precedent—the Roman helmet, the white hood, the ranting radio priest’s collar, the arm band with its swastika. And now the kaffiyeh.
Clearly a recognizable social movement, these bristling stalwarts rise as another menacing ism to add to the last century’s fascism and communism. Call it pro-Palestinianism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism. Or in plain English, Jew-hate.
Yet despite its historical longevity, and in contradiction to its increasing familiarity, this ritualized organism of disruption bursts into novelty.
Where so much is stale—the hijacking of human-rights vocabulary, crude denials of verifiable fact, schooling as propaganda—something new is in the air. Musical, catchy, rhythmic, rhyming, mesmerizing, a powerful beat frequently intensified by drums.
As he was led away in handcuffs, Elias Rodriguez, the alleged shooter of the two young Israeli Embassy aides at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, sang out almost mechanically, as if turned on by a key: “Free, free Palestine!”
The syllables sing themselves. So do “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada” and “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” And on and on.
Multiplied by a thousand throats, these rumbles and roars let out a crashing thunder, a delirium of dervishlike self-intoxication, rushing on in oceanic waves, undermining reason and drowning thought.
Here there is no history, no honest journalism, no honorable discourse, no argument, no analytic engagement. Not so much as a coherent sentence.
What we are hearing is the cruel zeal of an up-to-date hypnotic cultism: the politics of chant.
A new sound in the wind.
The Boulder Attack Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere by Bruce Hoffman with The Atlantic
Terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It depends on the oxygen of rhetoric for sustenance and encouragement.
Nearly two years after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the cumulative effect of calls to “Globalize the intifada” and “End Zionists” perhaps inevitably led to the horrific attack yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, where a man yelled “Free Palestine” as he threw an incendiary device at a Jewish gathering in support of the hostages.
The protester at Columbia University in 2024 holding a sign labeling Jewish demonstrators who were waving Israeli flags as Al-Qasam’s next targets was dismissed as being hyperbolic. So were the By Any Means Necessary banners carried at demonstrations and the red inverted triangles, similar to those Hamas uses to mark Israeli targets, spray-painted on university buildings, a national monument, and even the apartment building of a museum director.
When demonstrators wave the flags of terrorist organizations, wear headbands celebrating those same groups, and publicly commemorate the martyrdom of terrorist leaders such as Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, they’re not throwing the bomb, but their message can light the fuse.
In the past six weeks, that fuse has produced a succession of terrorist acts that have threatened the safety and security of America’s Jewish community.
Tragically, among the eight victims, who ranged in age from 52 to 88, the eldest was reportedly a Holocaust survivor.
Yet another example of an especially egregious act of violence was the shooting deaths last month of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim on the street outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. This was an execution.
Despite the sharp increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. recorded over the past decade by the Anti-Defamation League, American Jews also once believed that the violence against Jews in France, Britain, Germany, and other European countries couldn’t happen here.
But yesterday’s attack, coming on the heels of the firebombing of Shapiro’s residence and the D.C. murders, has proved otherwise.
As Ian Fleming, the former spy and novelist who created James Bond, reportedly observed, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Arguably the system was already blinking red after the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
But in today’s threat environment, the question for Jews everywhere is inevitably: How much security is enough?
And there will be challenges in what can be done to prevent such tragedies in the future.
After yesterday’s attack in Boulder, the answer, most likely, is yes.
Whatever upgrades and increases have been implemented in the past will necessitate reassessment, further modification, and enhancements.
More resources will need to be dedicated to ensure the protection of Jewish places of worship, clerics, and congregations.
Strengthened physical, personal, and digital security measures will likely follow—especially during religious holidays and festivals.
Ultimately, however, physical security alone will not protect American Jewry.
The prejudice and calumny directed against that community that have now become commonplace and have often been treated with indifference must change as well.
Violence against all faiths is rising.
To stop it, our society must take more seriously not just bomb throwing, but the messages that light the fuse.
Regular sources include JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, algemeimer, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, Commentary, The Free Press, The Jewish Institute for Strategy and Security, and the Times of Israel