Hostage Update
Freed Israeli hostage speaks for the first time about his 505 days of surviving Hamas hell by journalist Efrat Lachter
"I went out and raised my hands," he said. "A man with murder in his eyes led me onto the road and to a vehicle. I saw about 40 heavily armed terrorists. Some of them were filming me on their phones. I was in shock — there was an entire battalion of Hamas terrorists inside our kibbutz, bodies of people I knew who were murdered on the ground, and they are laughing, unafraid."
He was then paraded through the streets in what he described as a "victory march." "They were shouting, ‘Soldier! Pig! Zionist!’ A mob gathered around, boys with wooden clubs trying to hit me. But I just waved and smiled. I didn’t show fear. ‘You’ve captured me, but you won’t see terror in my eyes.’"
The Hamas terrorists tortured them daily, hitting them, denying them food while eating in front of them. The hostages were allowed only about 300 calories a day — Shoham's weight dropped from 174 pounds to 110 pounds when he was released — and speaking was forbidden.
By June 2024, Tal, Guy and Evyatar were moved by an ambulance that Hamas used for discreetly transporting hostages, to an underground tunnel, where there already was another captive, Omer Wenkert.
They were given just 300 milliliters of water a day — a little more than 10 ounces. They could use it to either drink or wash their hands. Rice was all they had to eat. Months passed. They were beaten, monitored by cameras, randomly deprived of food and sleep. The guards were Hamas tunnel diggers — digging every day, even as war raged above. "Hamas never stopped digging tunnels," Tal Says. "Not for a single day."
Link: Former Israeli hostage breaks silence after 505 days in Hamas captivity
There are now currently 58 hostages taken on 10/7 currently in captivity in Gaza (there are 59 hostages remaining in total)
38 hostages were released in the first phase of the 2025 cease fire agreement (including 5 Thai nationals)
24 hostages will remain in captivity after Phase I and have not been declared dead.
5 hostages are Americans: Meet the Five American Hostages Still Held By Hamas: Edan Alexander is assumed to be alive, Itay Chen is assumed to have been killed on 10/7, and Gadi Haggai, Judi Weinstein Haggai, and Omer Neutra have been confirmed to have been killed.
4 are soldiers
7 are residents of the Gaza border communities
11 were abducted from the Nova music festival
2 are foreign workers: Bipin Joshi from Nepal and Pinta Nattapong from Thailand
On October 7th, a total of 251 Israelis were taken hostage.
During the ceasefire deal in November of 2023, 112 hostages were released.
193 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 heroically rescued by troops alive
Of the 59 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
31 hostages have been confirmed dead and are currently being held in Gaza
Thus, at most, 28 living hostages could still be in Gaza.
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)
Watch
When your family is taken hostage on Ask Haviv Anything by Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur
Today's episode of Ask Haviv Anything is a special one. Many of my subscribers asked about the hostages, about the activism of their families, about their shattering experiences on October 7 and how they have worked to piece their lives back together since.
I can't think of a better way to tackle these questions than by posing them to our good friend Shaked Haran, who lost three family members on October 7 and saw seven taken hostage, including her sister, her mother, three-year-old niece Yahel and eight-year-old nephew Naveh.
Last month, the last family member still held by Hamas, Tal Shoham, was finally released, closing a long and painful chapter in the life of this extraordinary family.
We talk about that day, about searching desperately for your family after a massacre, about finding the strength amid the pain and fear to launch a globe-spanning fight to rescue your loved ones, about Israel's social fractures and what holds us together, about a morally confused world and an enemy territory that could still, she insists, flourish if it manages to come out from under the shadow of the murderers of her family.
Listen and Watch: October 8th Documentary
[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: Why did Hollywood ghost a movie about antisemitism? - with Wendy Sachs & Lorenzo Vidino
Over the last 17 months, we have watched in shock as Ivy League campuses became hotbeds of support for terrorists and their ideology. A powerful new documentary that the Academy Awards refused to consider illuminates how - and more importantly why - college campuses became a pivotal front in the war against Israel.
“October 8” opens in theaters on Friday, March 14th, featuring a number of Call Me Back guests. The film is riveting, and revealing, examining the forces that enabled Islamist extremists to shape the minds of millions of well-meaning Americans.
We sat down with the filmmaker and one of the experts in her film, to discuss Hamas’s infiltration of academia, the entertainment industry, and other progressive spaces.
Watch the trailer here:
See if the film is playing near you: October 8 | Official Website
Antisemitism
Canary Mission, an organization that exposes antisemitism across North America, posted new details on the pro-Hamas Columbia “student” who is now facing deportation. Follow their amazing work here.
First they came for a disgraceful Holocaust comparison in the case of Mahmoud Khalil by Jeffrey Lax with the New York Post
Let’s be clear about Mahmoud Khalil: He’s a green card holder who has distributed propaganda from Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group, at Columbia University, where he has organized violent protests that fomented despicable antisemitism.
The federal Immigration and Nationality Act indisputably forbids aliens, including green card holders, from supporting or promoting a designated terrorist organization such as Hamas.
Doing so is grounds to revoke such an individual’s green card.
Under federal law, it is also clear that the secretary of state can deport such individuals for engaging in activities that have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) denounced Khalil’s arrest, he intoned, “Today it’s Mahmoud Khalil. Tomorrow, it’s me or you.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) similarly stated, “If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too.”
Both quotes deliberately recall the famous 1946 poem “First They Came…” by Martin Niemöller. In it, Niemöller bemoans the German people’s silence during the Nazis’ rise to power. He catalogs the incremental purging of various groups — Communists, socialists, Jews and others — in the march to the Holocaust.
Shame on Murphy, Ocasio-Cortez and the mainstream media for this craven display.
In a particularly disgusting maneuver, media outlets like PBS and the increasingly radicalized New York Times have enthusiastically cited two extreme-left “Jewish” groups who oppose Khalil’s deportation.
They know better. They just don’t care.
These groups, Jewish Voices for Peace and IFNotNow, are widely rejected by effectively all mainstream Jewish groups as being virulently anti-Israel and even antisemitic.
Mahmoud Khalil’s case is not a hard one. His complicity with Hamas rhetoric and his illegal behavior at Columbia make him a prime candidate for deportation, both morally and under the law. Most important of all, his deportation makes Americans safer.
Link: Mahmoud Khalil is not the victim — he was trying to stir up hate
The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS) Command Center analyzed a sample of posts from the last week discussing Khalil’s arrest revealing key insights into public perception of the case. The clear takeaway is that there are significantly more posts on social media calling for Khalil to be released: three posts calling for his release for every one post calling for his deportation. It is important to note we analyzed the more extreme voices on each side and did not account for people advocating for due process or other perspectives in the middle of the spectrum.
The Anti-Semitic Influencer Problem: Narratives against Jews have taken a different turn. By Christopher F. Rufo in City Journal
Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, terror campaign against Israel and created fertile ground for another propaganda war. In the United States, left-wing academics seized the moment to rally support for the “decolonization” of Israel, and in the digital realm, a new anti-Semitism has reared its head. Several influential online commentators—most notably, Kanye West, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate—have used the attention around October 7 to push conspiracy theories and, especially in West’s case, outright anti-Semitism, on podcasts and social media platforms, ostensibly from a “right-wing” perspective.
The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media “influencers” who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.
When Kanye West advertises a swastika t-shirt, it is not because he is signaling support for an organized neo-Nazi movement but because it symbolizes transgression and is bait for digital censorship, which would let him play the martyr.
Online, the narrative gets circulated through left-wing networks, which consider it useful for undermining support for Israel, and through right-wing networks, which find it helpful for building an audience.
American Jews rightly fear that this postmodern anti-Semitism will spill into the real world and result in violence, as it has done in Europe and with the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh.
The simple answer is that Jews provide a convenient scapegoat…The Internet rewards scandal, shock, and virality, and conspiracy theories enjoy burgeoning market demand. Candace Owens has never been more popular, turning each outrage and accusation into new views, followers, subscribers, and revenues.
This problem has no easy answer—certainly not digital censorship or criminalization of speech. The better approach involves patience: push back on anti-Semitic narratives and build an establishment capable of both garnering attention and enforcing boundaries of decency. Anti-Semitic ideologies might be lucrative in the digital economy, but they are poison in the political realm. The Right should reject them and their merchants, just as it rejected Sharpton a generation ago.
How to Save Jewish Babies: Why are we giving the world a spectacle of powerlessness when we have never had more power? By Tal Fortgang in Tablet
Through centuries of Jewish powerlessness, our prayers for our children reflected the lingering hope that God would safeguard the remnant of Israel. Our comfort was God alone. We had no reason to think our fellow humans would care for our helpless little ones, much less defend them with force. And when powerlessness led to attempts to annihilate our people, we asked: Where was God?
Hamas returned Kfir and Ariel to Israel for burial after holding their mutilated corpses for over a year. Their coffins were sealed, labeled with the wrong names and a “date of arrest,” stuffed full of terrorist propaganda. Thousands of Gazans, including children dancing on the stage where Hamas proclaimed its triumph, flocked to the scene to celebrate. A poster blamed Israel for killing the boys and warned that any further Israeli military action would bring more living hostages to the same fate.
For many Jews, myself included, the depravity of that day has crystallized an important message. We know what Hamas is. We know the NGOs, politicians, and activists who try to create a moral equivalency between those who strangle babies and those who try to kill terrorists hiding behind human shields. We’ve always known who they were. They relish in tormenting us. It’s what they live for. But what’s maddening is that, in 2025, we are letting them torment us.
Some of us still cling to the old mindset of powerlessness, declaring credulously how we were now supposed to be full members of an enlightened world, expressing shock at how every leader of every nation and every NGO disavowed hatred of the Jews and dutifully swore “Never Again” only to go silent when Kfir and Ariel were taken from their mother and murdered.
But we are asking different questions now. Why are we giving the world a spectacle of Jewish helplessness? Why are we allowing this parade of Jewish suffering and inviting contempt against us in the process?
When Jewish babies were kidnapped, the then-president of the United States planned a pier to bring aid to their captors. Kfir and Ariel were suffering unspeakably beneath Gaza, and the then-vice president said Israel could not move heaven and earth to get them back—she had looked at the maps, and it just wasn’t worth it. The Joe Biden administration and its USAID Director Samantha Power sent $2.1 billion in “emergency” supplies to Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza, openly funding our enemy’s war of extermination against us under the pretense of “evenhandedness.”
We do not need anyone’s mercy. We are no longer powerless and need not pray over our children as if we were. We are free to fight our wars and win. We are free to be powerful. Our babies should sleep soundly at night because their “community” will use that power to defend them by any means necessary—if we can find the courage.
We will no longer be tormented, and we will take proactive steps to ensure that. We cannot worry about what the world will say.
Wikipedia Roiled With Internal Strife Over Page Edits About the Middle East: Shadow edit campaigns and political disputes have created headaches for overwhelmed editors and administrators. By Margi Murphy with Bloomberg
At least 14 editors have been barred from working on pages related to the topic, Jewish organizations are claiming bias, and the conflict has reached the top levels of Wikipedia as the site’s two founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, are at odds over whether to unmask the anonymous editors involved in the turmoil.
In January, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee found that fake online accounts used for deception, known as sock pockets, among the pages relating to Palestine and Israel are “an ongoing issue” which was “causing significant disruption.”
For about six months last year, Wikipedia published two, radically different accounts of a deadly battle at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, though only one of them appeared in a Google search for the camp’s name.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and a close confidante to President Donald Trump, in December labeled the site “Wokepedia” in response to a report that alleged 40 “Pro-Hamas” Wikipedia editors were working together to “delegitimize Israel” and urged his followers to stop donating.
Wikipedia’s page on the Israel-Hamas war, for instance, has garnered more than 9.8 million views, and it continues to attract more than 21,000 on average per day.
Wikipedia is among the top 10 most visited websites in the world, according to several measures, an easy and free reference tool with the ability to shape or distort public opinion. It is often the first item to appear in a Google search, and it is used by ChatGPT to answer questions on various topics as well as training its underlying technology and other large language models.
But recent events in the region are challenging Wikipedia’s claims of independence. The blowback has been particularly acute among Jewish groups and media, where Wikipedia has come under increasing fire for alleged bias. One recent headline declared, “Wikipedia’s anti-Israel propaganda mocks objectivity and destroys its credibility,” and the World Jewish Congress last March published a report saying the English language version of Wikipedia contains “anti-Israel bias that perpetuates disinformation and promotes negative stereotypes.”
On Jan. 7, the Forward, an American-Jewish news organization, reported on an alleged Heritage Foundation plot to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors working on pages about the Middle East that were labeled anti-Semitic.
In a January 10 discussion on Wikipedia about the Heritage Foundation allegedly targeting users, Wales, the co-founder, expressed concern, describing the allegations as “extremely worrisome.”
However, Sanger, the other Wikipedia co-founder, who has frequently criticized the website for being too left-wing, backed the Heritage Foundation’s alleged targeting of editors on the social media platform X. “Admins and those with significant authority in the system should be as easily named and shamed as any ordinary journalist,” he wrote.
In the same month, 11 editors were banned from editing Palestine and Israel-related pages by ArbCom for reasons including “non- neutral editing,” “incivility” and coordination off Wikipedia to create teams who would approve edits. One was accused of sock-puppetry and banned indefinitely from Wikipedia. Of the editors, three were accused of taking a pro-Israel stance and seven, pro-Palestine positions.
Allegations of coordinated editing have been lodged against all sides in the Middle East disputes. In early 2024, three different editors involved in a previously unreported pro-Israel campaign were banned from Wikipedia following an investigation by ArbCom. Their coordination began shortly after Oct. 7, the investigation found, when an editor who had been kicked off the website began emailing others and directing them to amend pages related to war in Gaza, including articles pertaining crimes against Israel, the use of human shields and the 2001 Beit Rima raid in the West Bank.
Conversely, an initiative named Tech for Palestine allegedly began in the spring of 2024 coordinating editing of Wikipedia pages on its Discord server. The allegations were first reported by the Jewish Insider.
A Twitter account, “Zei Squirrel,” announced in April a plan to “coordinate action on countering Zionest propaganda lies with facts on Wikipedia.” A person claiming to be behind the account discussed the effort on Discord in May, saying they had established a mailing list to send updates about editing articles about Israel and Palestine. Participation in mailing lists like this is described as “covert canvassing” on Wikipedia and is forbidden.
The tensions between Wikipedia between editors were evident for months in entries on a June 8 event in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza strip. Until early this year, two different pages were posted.
The first accorded with the official Israeli military narrative, describing a “rescue” operation to save the hostages gave way to a firefight between Hamas militants and Israeli troops, resulting in around 100 civilian casualties. The second detailed a “massacre” that resulted in the deaths of at least 274 people, with nearly 700 more injured. This article was based on figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is overseen by Hamas.
A former employee at Wikipedia, who had knowledge of previous politically inflammatory debates, said it was unlikely anyone at the Wikimedia Trust would try to intervene to quell the tensions, owing to the organization’s long-held hands-off policies.
But the editors that spoke to Bloomberg suggested that the voluntary system is creaking at the seams. An ArbCom member complained in a post on the website in August that the group has “run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues” related to Palestine-Israel articles.
“PIA is a Gordian knot,” the arbitrator wrote, adding that their team “has run short of knot detanglers.”
Link: Wikipedia Struggles to Moderate Volunteer Editors on Gaza, Israel, Hamas
On March 2nd, Jewish Onliner exposed a Yale scholar who was also a member of the international Samidoun network which is a designated terrorist organization by the US Treasury Department for operating as a fundraising arm for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—also a designated terror group. A few days later…
Yale Suspends Scholar After A.I.-Powered News Site Accuses Her of Terrorist Link by Stephanie Saul in the NYT
Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar in international law, began a new job in 2023 as the deputy director of a project at Yale Law School.
As an activist who had championed pro-Palestinian causes in both published papers and public appearances, Dr. Doutaghi seemed to fit into the left-leaning mission of the Law and Political Economy Project, which promoted itself as working for “economic, racial and gender equality.”
Last week, though, she was abruptly barred from Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., and placed on administrative leave. She was told not to advertise her affiliation with the university, where she had also served as an associate research scholar.
Yale officials cited the reason as allegations that she was tied to entities subject to U.S. sanctions. It was an apparent reference to Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group placed on the U.S. sanctions list last year, after the Treasury Department designated it a “sham charity” raising money for a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The swift action against Dr. Doutaghi illustrates the tightrope American universities are walking as the Trump administration takes aim at higher education.
The Law and Political Economy Project appeared to embrace Dr. Doutaghi’s views, featuring her last year in a virtual event titled, “A Political Economy of Genocide and Imperialism.” The page describing the discussion has been scrubbed from the project website, but it referred to the “genocide in Palestine,” a characterization that some pro-Israel groups have called antisemitic.
But three days after the Jewish Onliner published its article, Dr. Doutaghi was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave…
Link: Yale Scholar Banned After A.I. News Site Accuses Her of Terrorist Link
Read the original report here from Jewish Onliner: Member of US-designated Terror Group is also Scholar at Yale University
Israel/Middle East Related Articles
Blame Hamas for Israel Halting Aid to Gaza by Arsen Ostrovsky and Mark Goldfeder in Newsweek
On March 2, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would halt the entry of all goods and supplies to Gaza. This decision came after Hamas rejected a framework proposed by U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff intended to continue the hostage-ceasefire talks—a framework Israel had already agreed to.
For the record, international law is very clear on this point: Israel is not obligated to provide aid that will be used by an enemy in a time of war, and anyone who argues differently is either illiterate or willfully ignorant.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt certainly were not expected to provide aid to Nazi Germany during WWII, yet there is a systematic double standard and misapplication of the law against the Jewish state.
To begin, those who ignorantly claim that all blockades are automatically a war crime, are simply wrong. Blockades, which are a lawful military tactic in the course of war, are regulated by international humanitarian law, but are not prohibited by it, as long as it is not used to intentionally starve the local civilian population.
Article 23 is very explicit in outlining that a High Contracting Party, such as Israel, shall allow the free passage of humanitarian supplies, but that is if, and only if, there are no serious reasons to believe these supplies are being diverted from their destination or used for military purposes.
There has been indisputable and overwhelming evidence that Hamas systematically steals the aid, and uses it to advance their military goals, including the ongoing captivity of hostages. Everyone from The New York Times to the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations has reported on this fact for years. And if that's not enough, even Hamas themselves has admitted it.
Israel has made well-documented and extensive efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, even though it does not have to (as it is not legally occupying Gaza), and even under the extraordinary challenge of Hamas's systematic theft and weaponization of such supplies since they initiated the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
There is apparently so much extra food, in fact, that Hamas can afford to have drones drop candy for the massive crowds that gathered to watch them parade innocent tortured Israeli civilian hostages and murdered Jewish babies in front of a jeering crowd before their release in a macabre celebration.
Any accusation therefore that Israel's objective here is to starve innocent civilians—rather than to compel the surrender of Hamas combatants—is not merely unfounded but a libelous distortion of truth.
In summary, Israel's actions in halting aid are entirely just and legitimate under international law. Those who seek a resumption of further aid into Gaza, would be well advised to direct their outrage and pressure toward Hamas (and their sponsor Qatar) to accept the Witkoff framework for the continuation of a temporary ceasefire during the Ramadan and Passover period, and to demand the immediate and unequivocal release of all the remaining hostages being held captive in Gaza.
Voluntary Refugee Resettlement: A Possible Solution to Clashing Visions for Gaza Reconstruction by Robert Satloff from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
When President Trump announced his provocative proposal to relocate Palestinians while Gaza is cleared of hazards and rebuilt, he put the fate of the war-torn territory’s nearly two million residents on the Middle East’s front burner for the first time in recent memory. Indeed, Arab leaders met in Cairo this week and endorsed a counterproposal to begin reconstruction without moving Palestinians outside the territory.
Both ideas have their faults—the Arab plan would keep Gazans in the Strip even if many of them want to leave (see below); Trump’s initial proposal seemed to envision forcing them out against their will, whether for the duration of the estimated decade-long reconstruction process or permanently. And neither idea offers clear answers on how to get from the current situation—an imperiled ceasefire on the verge of renewed warfare—to a post-conflict, Hamas-free Gaza that is ready for reconstruction.
Conventional wisdom long held that the refugee problem could only be resolved in the context of creating a Palestinian state. But statehood was already a distant prospect before Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel; today, even discussing a potential “pathway” toward statehood is a hotly contested issue. Waiting for diplomacy to catch up to the human reality in Gaza is not an acceptable reason to delay addressing the plight of local residents.
Highlighting the refugee factor may therefore provide a way to bridge the Arab and Trump proposals. After all, neither the White House nor Arab governments can realistically believe that there will be two multi-billion-dollar initiatives to redress issues in Gaza—one now, to repair damage from the latest war, and a second, off in the future, when the politics of the peace process are ripe for resolution of the refugee issue.
The last time the Palestinian refugee issue was discussed with any seriousness was twenty-five years ago, when Gaza had 600,000 fewer registered refugees.
That basic architecture would still work today. Given clear options, some Palestinians would choose to stay in Gaza and renounce their refugee status in exchange for the deed to a new home of their own. Others, with the promise of compensation, would no doubt jump at the chance to move—whether to the West Bank, an Arab or Muslim country, or elsewhere, depending on how wide the doors to asylum, permanent residency, and even citizenship swing open around the world.
The numbers are not nearly as daunting as one might think. For example, even if half of Gaza’s refugee population chose to relocate over a ten-year reconstruction period, that would average out to around 70,000 per year, which is a large figure compared to the world’s annual number of resettled asylum seekers (which has averaged nearly 100,000 over the past decade), but only a tiny percentage of the world’s estimated 281 million migrants. Gaza refugees would be somewhere in between—they would not quite be asylum seekers, since they would be leaving a post-conflict zone in an organized, well-supported matter, but they would not quite be migrants either, at least in the sense of solely seeking economic opportunity. More to the point, their plight has the entire world’s attention at the moment, so finding homes for 70,000 per year is not an insurmountable burden.
Arab states currently want it both ways: on one hand, they argue that Gazans have such a firm attachment to the land that few would ever leave voluntarily; on the other hand, they reject the very idea of voluntary relocation because they fear numerous Gazans would in fact take that option…
Ultimately, refocusing postwar plans for Gaza on the concept of voluntary refugee resettlement could result in 40 percent or more of the Strip’s total population leaving of their own accord. This approach may therefore hold the key to reconciling U.S. and Arab plans while dramatically improving the prospects for safe and expeditious reconstruction.
Link: Voluntary Refugee Resettlement: A Possible Solution to Clashing Visions for Gaza Reconstruction
Casualties (no change)
1,852 Israelis have been killed including 846 IDF soldiers since October 7th (no change since Wednesday)
The South: 407 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza have been killed
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):
2,583 (no change since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 498 (+1 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
5,736 (+5 since Wednesday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 852 (+1 since Wednesday) who have been severely injured.
The Gaza Casualty Count:
According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 62,614 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: 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.
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