Israel Update: Emily, Romi and Doron are Home (day 472)
Hostages Held in Gaza: 94; IDF Soldiers Lost: 840
Romi Gonen, 24, from Kfar Vradim, Emily Damari, 28, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, both from Kfar Aza, were released Sunday afternoon after 471 days in Hamas captivity and arrived at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv on Sunday evening. YNet reports that the three women were reunited with their mothers at a specialized reception center in southern Israel before being flown by military helicopters to the hospital for medical evaluations.
Additionally, the body of Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, who was killed and captured by Hamas in 2014, was recovered in a clandestine operation this weekend and his body was returned to Israel by the IDF.
It was revealed that Damari and Gonen were held together during captivity. The three hostages were handed "gift bags" by Hamas upon their release, containing "souvenirs" of their time in captivity, including a photo of Gaza.
[WATCH] The moment the three hostages passed through Hamas to the Red Cross
[WATCH] The moment Emily, Romi and Doron are transferred from the Red Cross to members of the IDF
[WATCH] Former hostage Emily Damari is reunited with her family.
[WATCH: Disturbing Propaganda] Times of Israel military reporter, Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian posts: Hamas releases a propaganda video showing the release of hostages Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher from captivity in the Gaza Strip earlier today. The video shows Hamas operatives giving the hostages "gift bags" before they were freed. The bags reportedly included photos of them in captivity and a "certificate." The footage shows Hamas taking the hostages to a meeting point at a central square in Gaza City, where hundreds of Palestinians gathered. The three women were then handed over to the Red Cross.
Hostages (3 living hostages return, 1 body recovered)
There are now currently 91 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 94 hostages in total)
The Times of Israel reports: In a recent clandestine operation in the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops recovered the body of soldier Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, who was killed and captured by Hamas in 2014, the Israel Defense Forces announced on Sunday morning. The operation was carried out in the northern Gaza Strip over the past day and was completed overnight between Saturday and Sunday.
Link to the full story here: Body of soldier Oron Shaul, killed and captured by Hamas in 2014, recovered from Gaza
There are now 30 remaining hostages on the list for release during the first stage of the ceasefire. The women and children will be released first, followed by men over the age of 50. The release of those kidnapped by Hamas will be spread out over 42 days, six weeks, with at least three hostages being released each week.
Two civilian woman: Shiri Silberman Bibas and Arbel Yehud
Shiri’s children, Ariel (4 years old when taken hostage) and Kfir (9 months old) are also on the list and are the only remaining children in Gaza. It is assumed that they are not alive, but this has not been confirmed.
Five female IDF soldiers: Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Daniela Gilboa, and Naama Levy
Men over 50: Ohad Ben-Ami, Itzhak Elgarat, Yair Horn, Tsahi Idan, Ofer Kalderon, Oded Lifshitz, Shlomo Mansur, Gadi Moses, Eli Sharabi, Keith Siegel, Ohad Yahalomi.
7 hostages are Americans: Meet the Seven American Hostages Still Held By Hamas
On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
147 hostages in total have been released or rescued
The bodies of 40 hostages have been recovered, including 3 mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
8 hostages have been rescued by troops alive
Of the 91 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
At least 34 confirmed bodies are currently being held in Gaza
28-46 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity.
Thus, at most, 45-63 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
Hamas is also holding 2 Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015 (civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who have been held in Gaza for a decade), as well as the body of 1 IDF soldiers who was killed in 2014 (Lt. Hadar Goldin’s body remains held in the Gaza Strip)
Casualties
1,843 Israelis have been killed including 840 IDF soldiers since October 7th (no change since Wednesday)
The South: 405 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed (no change Wednesday)
The North: 131 Israelis (84 IDF soldiers) have been killed during the war in Northern Israel (no change since Wednesday)
Additional Information (according to the IDF):
2,569 (+8 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 495 (no change since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
5,644 (+24 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 837 (+2 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
The Gaza Casualty Count:
According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 46,707 (+142 since Wednesday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 109,660 (no reported change since Wednesday) have been injured during the war.
[MUST READ] Report: Questionable Counting: Analysing the Death Toll from the Hamas-Run Ministry of Health in Gaza by Andrew Fox with The Henry Jackson Society
On October 7th, Ohad Hemo with Channel 12 Israel News – the country’s largest news network, a leading expert on Palestinian and Arab affairs, mentioned an estimate from Hamas: around 80% of those killed in Gaza are members of the organization and their families.”
Read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled "Gaza Health Ministry." The analysis found that "9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data" and that "an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates."
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes official details on every civilian and IDF casualty.
X Post
IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. (R) Peter Lerner writes: I was asked several times today about the optics of Hamas’ obvious strength. Here’s the real optics: A few hundred people crammed together to make it look like endless masses. Today the images from the ground were orchestrated by Hamas, they wanted to project power, everything thing they show is manipulation.
Watch
Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Gaza Ceasefire: Implications for Israel, Hamas, and U.S. Policy
Antisemitism
The Tik-Tok Bill is About Antisemitism Too by Eric Fingerhut with Times of Israel
The TikTok bill was developed and passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support in both houses of Congress and signed by President Biden. Its supporters saw the documented harm that the deliberately biased content developed and disseminated by entities closely associated with the Chinese government is doing to the national security of the United States. Congress and the president reasonably determined that a foreign adversary should not be permitted to sway the content of an app that has such a pervasive presence in the lives of Americans.
The Jewish Federations of North America, of which I am the president and CEO, actively supported the passage of the TikTok bill. When I was asked why an organization dedicated to the safety, security and flourishing of the Jewish communities across America would get involved in this legislation, my answer was simple. The number one concern of Jewish communities across America today is the rise of antisemitism.
TikTok’s contribution to this problem is particularly egregious. One study found that people who use TikTok for 30 minutes or more daily are significantly more likely to hold antisemitic or anti-Israel views than comparable users of Instagram and X. Another study found that in just one-year, antisemitic comments on TikTok rose 912%.
Worse, evidence was clearly available – most prominently provided by a former TikTok employee who tried to address the problem internally – that TikTok’s bias is deliberate, not some technical issue caused by the number of posts on one topic or another.
On TikTok, evidence of suffering by Jews was blocked, while unproven and clearly false narratives of suffering claimed to be caused by Jews were given supercharged status by the relevant algorithms. While a majority of American voters support Israel, TikTok’s algorithm gave videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags 15 times more views than videos with pro-Israel hashtags. All of this is why we wrote to each member of Congress to say clearly that a vote for the TikTok bill was a vote against antisemitism.
We do not support or seek censorship of any kind, but we have every reason to hope that a different ownership of this important information source – one not controlled by a dictatorship that has shown hostility to America, to Israel and to Jews – would be more accountable to its users and the marketplace of free information and ideas.
The Hypocrisy of Pro-Palestinian Activists by Ilya Shapiro and Noam Josse in City Journal
The post-October 7 conflict on U.S. campuses has been framed as a battle between free speech and hate speech. Anti-Israel protesters claim that universities are stifling their right to expression, while many Jewish and other pro-Israel students respond that “pro-Palestinian” activism has led to violence, intimidation, and a general disruption of educational programs—and they note as well that before October 7, universities had often censored politically incorrect speech.
This framing is mistaken. “Pro-Palestine” advocates are not consistent proponents of free and open debate. Instead, they want to express crude and often menacing sentiments, as Columbia University’s example shows. Columbia students last April insisted that “Zionists” weren’t welcome on campus, even as they denounced other groups’ attempts to air alternative views.
In March, when Columbia Law School’s Center for Israeli Studies invited a panel of Israeli legal scholars to speak, CLSP sent a long SpeakerWatch decrying Israel’s alleged crimes and disparaging each member of the panel, describing one as “enabling violence against Palestinians.” Instead of suggesting that its followers attend and express their views, CLSP denounced the Center for Israeli Studies for merely hosting the event.
One approach to restoring free expression and discouraging menacing forms of protest was outlined in a report from Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism. The delegation called on the university to enforce “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech. (Under which you can, say, legitimately protest in a public square but not in the middle of the street; you can be louder in a park at noon than in a residential neighborhood at midnight.) Its recommendations, however, have been effectively ignored.
In any case, policy alone cannot change this dynamic. Students need to feel free to speak. That requires a culture shift, which must begin with law school deans and other university officials, as one of us (Shapiro) describes in his new book Lawless. These administrators are capable of inculcating among the student body almost any value—public service, entrepreneurship, social justice, whatever. Why not free and respectful speech?
Students should abandon institutions not committed to civic dialogue. Instead, they should consider options in states like Florida, Arizona, and Ohio, which have opened civic centers and institutes at their flagship public universities that teach a wide range of thought and hire academics who dissent from progressive orthodoxy.
Global Anti-Semitism’s Leading Lady by Seth Mandel in Commentary
Outgoing anti-Semitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt has done much for the Jewish community over her long career as an educator and writer in the battle against Holocaust denial. Now she has done one more service: revealing that even among the top brass of the United Nations, Francesca Albanese is properly regarded as a blight on humanity.
Lipstadt, according to Jewish Insider, objected to Albanese’s ostentatious Jew-baiting directly to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres twice; twice, Guterres responded: “She’s a horrible person.”
Though the candor is appreciated, Albanese—the UN special envoy to the Palestinian territories—is in fact so very much more than that. She is a figure of rare menace and depravity. She is “Globalize the Intifada” in human form, a sort of wandering dybbuk serving as a vessel for the unrested spirits of 20th century genocidal anti-Semitism.
Although Albanese’s UN appointment comes without a salary, the “world body” for whom she speaks is funded disproportionately by America.
Still, she’s been at this a while. There’s her 2014 rant to the BBC that “the Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system and you will be remembered to have been on the big brother’s side of this Orwellian nightmare caused once again by Israel’s greed,” similar to her insistence that America is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” There’s her vocal, in-person support for Hamas as recent as 2022; her full-throated call for everyone to “stand with” disgraced anti-Zionist professor David Miller; her assertion that “many Jewish people worldwide,” specifically those who support Israel, “live a lie”; her belief that only a “few” Israelis are non-genocidal.
When called upon for her “expertise” and to speak with the imprimatur of the United Nations, she rattles off Israeli crimes such as, in one breath: “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.”
UNRWA’s existence has been at the center of debate in recent weeks. Over the past 15 months of war since Oct. 7, 2023, UNRWA employees’ complicity has been revealed to be staggering. Some were recorded on video taking part in the Hamas murder spree, others were found to have held hostages, UNRWA facilities doubled as Hamas communications command spaces or weapons depots or entrances to Hamas’s underground terror-tunnel network. The UN refused to take sufficient action to clean out the rot, so in October the Israeli Knesset passed legislation greatly limiting UNRWA’s legal approval to work in Gaza and the West Bank.
UNRWA exists solely to cater to the Palestinians despite the existence of a wider UN refugee agency. This is to keep the Palestinians stateless and under a different definition of “refugee”—one that simply has no basis in law and serves solely to perpetuate the conflict.
Albanese may appear to be a ridiculous character, but she has colonized the institutional power and reach of the UN to disfigure international law in the pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish state.
Our New Government Must Stand Definitively Against Antisemitism by Mark Goldfeder in Newsweek
As it relates to the executive branch, law enforcement often depends on prosecutorial discretion, and for the last four years there has been little appetite to counter the rise in anti-Jewish hate. The incoming administration has already signaled their plan to reverse this trend in a number of important ways.
First, they have committed to enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under Title VI, institutions that take federal funds have an obligation to protect their Jewish students, and all students, from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. During his first term Trump issued Executive Order 13899 on Combatting Antisemitism, which, among other things, incorporated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into Title VI. Because Jewish identity is so multifaceted (incorporating aspects of race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin), without a standard definition for authorities to reference when analyzing the intent behind illegal discriminatory actions, it is too easy for antisemites to hide behind this ambiguity and commit unlawful acts against Jews with impunity. The executive order solved that problem by requiring the relevant authorities to simply consider, as contextual rebuttable evidence, the gold-standard definition of antisemitism when assessing the motivation behind already unlawful behavior, if there is an allegation that the target was chosen because of an aspect of their Jewish identity.
Second, the administration has signaled that they will enforce the various laws against providing support for terrorism. Among them, the federal Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) criminalizes knowingly providing resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations the way that some pro-Hamas groups are doing, and the Immigration and Nationality Act allows for the deportation of individuals unlawfully importing terrorism and anarchy. At the same time, the IRS already has authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of organizations funneling donations to terrorist entities because the activities of a Section 501(c)(3) organization must not be "illegal, contrary to a clearly defined and established public policy, or in conflict with express statutory restrictions."
Third, the federal government must enforce laws requiring the disclosure of foreign funding in educational institutions.
…recent studies reveal widespread noncompliance, with billions of dollars in unreported funds flowing into U.S. campuses from authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Research also found a troubling correlation between the receipt of these funds and the erosion of free speech norms, alongside a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents.
Fourth, the federal government must dismantle the networks of organized antisemitic perpetrators. Much of the recent unrest stems from radical organizations preying on the impressionable and uninformed, and those groups that have been working in concert to commit unlawful acts should be held fully accountable.
An excellent model for the new Congress to follow is the Define to Defeat Act, which was introduced in the House by outgoing Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-NY). That bill simply extends the AAA to include other federal anti-discrimination laws under the exact same framework, and it should benefit from the exact same wide bipartisan support: It is hard to imagine, for example, lawmakers supportive of Jewish people being properly protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (which deals with higher education), but not, for example, under the employment provisions in Title VII of that very same law.
A whole of government approach is not only correct and efficient but also strategically advantageous. It would allow for both congressional and litigation discovery mechanisms to uncover and dismantle the funding networks that sustain and propagate terror-supporting movements.
Link: Our New Government Must Stand Definitively Against Antisemitism | Opinion
Israel/Middle East Related Articles
Matti Friedman: Israel’s Prisoner’s Dilemma in The Free Press
The mainstream Israeli position is that the government must make every reasonable effort to save the lives of captives, whether that means military operations if possible, or freeing jailed terrorists in exchange for hostages if necessary. Opponents of the deal, even if they’re tortured by the suffering of their fellow citizens in brutal conditions in tunnels under Gaza, see the deal as a form of surrender that rewards the tactic of hostage-taking and invites future attacks, saving people in the present while sacrificing people in the future. In my experience, most people actually hold parts of both positions, but when forced to choose, they tend to choose the first.
For external observers trying to understand the current debate here in Israel, the key is to realize that this is an argument that didn’t start with the current deal—or even with the current war. It’s impossible to understand the debate of 2025 without going back 40 years, to 1985. The debate is less about the details of this deal than about a basic question forced on us by the tactics of our enemies, namely: Does our willingness to assume grave risk to save individuals constitute an Israeli strength or weakness?
Prisoner swaps were a feature of all of the wars Israel fought against Arab armies in its first decades, but these tended to be standard prisoner-of-war swaps conducted along lines familiar to any army: soldiers for soldiers, once the fighting was done.
Facing the hostage dilemma in 1985, some figures in government had to publicly, and embarrassingly, reverse earlier positions. Seven years before, for example, Yitzhak Rabin, had criticized a deal to free one Israeli soldier for 76 prisoners: By releasing terrorists guilty of killing Israelis, he raged, the government had “crossed the red line.” But at the time of that statement, Rabin was in the political opposition. When the Jibril deal came up for a vote in 1985, he was in power, and he said yes. One of the prisoners released was Ahmed Yassin, who later became the spiritual leader of Hamas.
Having leaders say one thing when in opposition, and another when in power, would become familiar to Israelis confronting the hostage dilemma in subsequent decades—and indeed this week. One outspoken critic of the Jibril deal, as it happens, was the young politician Benjamin Netanyahu. The future prime minister positioned himself as an expert on counterterrorism with books like A Place Among the Nations, from 1993, where he castigated the deal as a fatal blow to Israel’s efforts to forge an international front against terrorism. (The lone fatality of the heroic Entebbe raid that freed the hijacked hostages was Netanyahu’s brother Yoni, who led the rescue mission.) Netanyahu wrote that the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada, which began two years later, in 1987, was due in part to the irresponsible release of more than 1,000 prisoners by Israel’s leaders.
Just a year after the trauma of the Jibril deal, however, Israelis were presented with a tragedy that illustrated the opposite danger—that of failing to make a deal. In 1986 an air force navigator, Ron Arad, had to abandon his fighter jet after a technical malfunction over south Lebanon, and was captured by Lebanese Shia fighters. Arad was alive, and his captors named their price, but public opinion was still stinging from the previous year’s asymmetrical bargain. Attempts to win Arad’s release through military means failed, talks dragged on, and by 1988 the navigator had vanished, never to be found. To this day, the name Ron Arad is familiar to most Israelis, including millions who weren’t even born when he was taken prisoner. It’s one you hear frequently right now: Many Israelis say they fear that some of today’s hostages will become “Ron Arads,” the worst fate of all—people whose fates are never known.
Israelis face the current deal with hope that at least some of the familiar faces from the hostage posters will finally return to their families after 15 months of horror, and also with relief at a pause in the Gaza fighting, which seems to be sinking into a war of attrition, exhausting our military reserves and delivering high Israeli casualties with diminishing returns. But the regional war that began on October 7, 2023 isn’t over, and neither is the terrible dilemma that faces Israel every time hostages fall into enemy hands. Yahya Sinwar might be dead, but the tactic that freed him, and which will now free his comrades, lives on.
Failure for the State, Victory for the Society by former Ambassador Michael Oren
For us, the return of the first three hostages is a moment of deep relief for some and for others profound sorrow. Fear will mix with anger, frustration with regret. While Biden and Trump both claim credit, Israeli leaders—political and military—are trying to escape the blame.
Certainly, there is a need to assign blame. The minute that thousands of terrorists broke through our border on October 7, the hostage deal became inevitable. Israel could not at the same time gain total victory over Hamas and secure the hostages’ release. The minute it became clear that increased military pressure on the terrorists would not force them to free the hostages but to shoot them, the deal became inevitable. As long as it holds a single hostage, Hamas knows it will survive. As long as a single hostage remains in Gaza, Israel cannot fully live.
And yet, even when forced to decide between two massive evils, even when grappling with painfully conflicted emotions, Israelis can also claim victory. It is, in fact, the most basic and durable victory of all.
Who is willing to pick up a gun and fight for Belgium today? For Spain? We are a people who fought not only on one front but on seven, overcoming insurmountable obstacles to achieve one of history’s greatest military successes.
We are a people who stood in the face of a tsunami of hatred, accused of war crimes and genocide, yet never gave in to self-doubt. We know we are innocent of those charges, who we are, and what we are fighting for.
Most importantly, we are a society that never abandoned our fundamental value, which is love of life, the principle that all Israel is responsible for one another. What Hamas sees as a weakness is in reality our greatest strength. The terrorists can claim a tactical victory, but our victory is moral, deep, and long lasting.
The deal is not the result of our failure to destroy Hamas but of our refusal to do so at the expense of the hostages.
What the Israel-Hamas Ceasefire in Gaza Means for the Middle East by David Makovsky in US News
Chief among the concerns is that factions within Hamas may see the first phase as merely a temporary respite to regroup. This could lead Israelis to believe Hamas remains a serious, albeit diminished, threat on its borders, reducing the likelihood of extending the ceasefire.
With so many roadblocks, why the breakthrough now? President Joe Biden was accurate Wednesday in explaining the timing of the deal, stating that it happened in part due to “the extreme pressure that Hamas has been under and the changed regional equation after a ceasefire in Lebanon and weakening of Iran.” Over the last few months, due to sweeping Israeli military successes, Iran and its proxies have been effectively backed into a corner.
Specifically, over a year of fighting, Hamas has been weakened, its army deconstructed and its cadres of remaining guerilla fighters isolated on the battlefield.
That suggests that Netanyahu’s fear of Trump, alongside Hamas’ weakness, was important in driving the ceasefire. Yet apart from these factors, there might be something else very important at work: namely, how Israel could be thinking beyond Gaza at this very moment. Specifically, it makes sense that Netanyahu would want to start off on a good foot with the incoming Trump administration not just out of fear but, critically, because Jerusalem has its eyes on a much wider regional agenda that will require U.S. support to achieve.
Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia – the most influential Arab country – would mark the end of the Sunni Arab states’ conflict with Israel since its inception in 1948 and would cement a moderate anti-Iran alliance among America’s Mideast allies.
It is also important to note that Hamas’ strongest opportunity to regain influence lies in Israel’s lack of a clear postwar strategy for Gaza. That gap has been shaped by the politics of Netanyahu’s coalition, some of whom oppose any form of Palestinian governance in Gaza. But without allowing Palestinian pragmatists to run the territory, it leaves a vacuum of power that Hamas is only too happy to fill.
Link: What the Israel-Hamas Ceasefire in Gaza Means for the Middle East
What the Palestinian victory celebrations mean by Ariel Beery in The Times of Israel
Victory celebrations broke out across Gaza and the world as soon as the ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Gazan military groups was announced.
There is no doubt in my mind that there are many, many more women, men, and children who did not share in these celebrations. Who suffer from their government and Israel’s attacks on their armed forces equally. Whose feeling can be defined not by victory but by relief.
And yet we should at the moment focus instead on those voices representing the government of Gaza, those armed forces who survived the war and who have vowed to carry out many more October 7-style attacks. Because there is no way that they do not intend to carry out their threats. Because if history provides any guidance, they plan to do so before they hit middle age. Which is to say, soon.
Victims suffer casualties due to events they cannot control. Victims struggle to survive powers that act upon them without their permission. Victims do not celebrate victory. Victims mourn. They thank the heavens for their survival, and, often with the support of others, do their best to never become victims again.
There were actual victims in this war. The individuals terribly ravaged and murdered on October 7. Many and possibly most of the civilians wounded and killed on the battlefields of Gaza. They had not invited such violence upon themselves. They suffered because of the unwillingness of the government of Gaza to surrender, despite Israel’s clear military advantage. Because of the unwillingness or inability of the people of Gaza to replace their government as did the people of Syria.
The Genocidaires of Gaza achieved this level of global support by establishing themselves as victims, as objects in another’s story, as the meek of the earth needing saving. They did so because they captured the narrative by capturing the narrators. They did so by leveraging tens of billions of dollars of oil-profit-paid media, university chairs, campus organizing.
Now is not the time to defend Israel in the media, not the time to explain the Israeli position, not the time to justify the existence of the Jewish state. Now is the time to ensure the world recognize that victims do not celebrate victory. That the only way to protect innocent lives is to utterly defeat and replace the government in Gaza.
Regular sources include JINSA, FDD, IDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education Center, Yediot, Jerusalem Post, IDF Casualty Count, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Institute for the Study of War, Tablet Magazine, Mosaic Magazine, The Free Press, and the Times of Israel