There’s a dangerous mystery about missing ‘Suicide Drones’
The U.N.-Brokered Gaza Border Crossing: How Much Help Should I Need? A World Leaders’ View of Israel’s Challenge
All eyes were on the crossing between Egypt and Gaza to see if a deal to deliver aid could hold, as more than two million Palestinians faced shortages of food, water and medicine.
The UN Secretary-General called for aid to be allowed into Gaza as soon as possible, after he arrived at the Egyptian side of the border crossing.
Gaza has been under total blockade by Israel since the days after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which 1,400 people were killed, according to Israeli officials.
In the past two weeks, the U.N.-operated shelters in the Gaza Strip have been damaged and thousands of buildings destroyed by Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes. Israeli military officials say the strikes are targeted at Hamas militants and infrastructure.
Israel has suffered a horrifying terrorist attack and deserves the world’s sympathy and support, but it should not get a blank check to slaughter civilians or to deprive them of food, water and medicine. Bravo to Biden for trying to negotiate some humanitarian access to Gaza, but the challenge will be not just getting aid into Gaza but also distributing it to where it’s needed.
There are 20 trucks representing a U.N.-brokered deal that world leaders urged along with President Biden who visited Israel last week. Israel’s fear that Hamas could use the trucks to smuggle in weapons was one of the reasons why aid was delayed.
Early on Saturday morning, the U.S. State Department alerted American citizens in Gaza of the border’s opening but warned that anyone attempting to cross should expect “a potentially chaotic and disorderly environment on both sides of the crossing.”
As Israel urged people in the north of Gaza to evacuate, Abuzayda and her husband and son moved south towards Rafah.
The Be’eri village in southern Israel is still surviving the horrific attacks that set off a war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip
On Thursday night a window shattered as her son slept nearby, she said. “I pulled him immediately, and I hugged him. He was freaking out. He doesn’t know what’s going on, she said. We are not safe here.
Palestinians and Israeli forces clashed at a refugee camp in the West Bank close to the border with Israel.
The United Nations said that an Israeli airstrike and a firefight with Palestinians followed a search and arrest operation inside the camp. Palestinian health officials reported 11 deaths from the counterterrorism operations, but the Israel Defence Force said a number of terrorists were killed. Israeli media report the death of one Israeli policeman.
In total, at least 80 people in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of the war earlier this month, according to Palestinian officials.
BE’ERI – To walk the streets of the small village of Be’eri in southern Israel nowadays is to relive the horrors from the single deadliest attack on civilians in Israel’s 75-year history.
The streets of this once close-knit community are now lined with partially destroyed homes. Some were blown open, others burned. Inside one are blood-splattered walls. In another, two childrens’ rooms are filled with books, binders, stuffed animals and paint supplies. The mattresses lay in white bed frames and are stained with blood.
On the road leading into this kibbutz, a backhoe scoops up the bodies of Hamas militants who stormed this community of just over 1000 people about three miles from the border with Gaza.
The Israeli military has led journalists through the village in recent days to give a peek at what occurred when Hamas sneaked into Israel undetected and killed at least 1400 people and took 200 hostages.
Many residents of the towns hid inside safe rooms waiting for Israeli forces to rescue them. For hours no one came. When it was finally over and they emerged, the scene was unlike anything they’d ever seen before.
More than a week since the Hamas attack, which set off a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza where the group is based, survivors are still waiting to identify bodies and plan funerals
Alom told NPR that they’re still trying to figure out how they’re going to deal with the number of funerals. We don’t know where to bury them because they’re not safe.
“I just don’t know how to deal with it,” he said “For more than four or five hours we were slaughtered and no one came to help us. I don’t know whose fault it is but I just know we’ve been slaughtered.”
Why is Israel so upset with Hamas? The Palestinian Enclave: Why does Israel care? Why Israelis need to rethink Israel’s response
Their anger is not yet aimed so much at the government for its intelligence failure or Israeli forces for their delayed rescues, but toward the Palestinian enclave.
Miles away from the border with Gaza, sitting in a Jerusalem cafe, 27-year-old Noy Katsman said they wants the war to stop. They know Alom has pain, but they use it differently.
Hayim was found dead in the village of Holit, which is about a mile from Gaza. Hayim, one of 30 Americans killed in the attack on Hamas, hid in the closet.
Hayim was a peace activist in the past. He wrote his doctorate on the dangers of the right wing in Israel and was critical of the government for encouraging illegal Israeli settlements and uplifting extreme anti-Arab voices.
That’s why Katsman believes their brother, despite his tragic killing, “would say we should never kill innocent people” and would encourage Israelis to re-think the long-term repercussions of retaliation.
I’ve flown into beautiful, sun-washed Tel Aviv, where the graffiti reads “Destroy Hamas.” The Hamas terrorism and kidnappings have shattered Israelis, the determination to dismantle Hamas explains, whatever the cost. The anxiety in Tel Aviv seems to be less than it’s perceived, while the situation in Gaza seems much worse.
They said you need a basic understanding of how people feel. “If we kill a thousand people then these people will hate us more and grow up and kill more people, that is not an understanding of people.”
They said Israelis care only about pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel. This is a distraction. People die. People die from both sides.”
The crisis in the Middle East is a test of our humanity, wondering how we should respond to a provocation for which there is no good remedy. The West is not doing well in this test.
I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. Almost half of the people of Gaza are children and they don’t lose their right to life because of their views. There are more than two million people who are being held in a siege and punished.
I am concerned that President Biden has placed a hierarchy of human life in official American policy, and that the United States speaks a good deal about principles. He expressed outrage at the killings of Jews by Hamas, but was unsure how to treat people in Gaza. And it’s not always evident whether he is standing four-square with Israel as a country or with its failed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime obstacle to peace.
What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? The idea that we will help pay for people to clean up the blood caused by our weapons would make sense, but is the idea that we will use our weapons to do so?
It’s important that the ones with particular medical conditions are released more than others. “There is no way easily to provide the medical help they need in Gaza today,” he added. “We asked for it. But today we are far from it, very far.”
Biden called for America to stand behind Israel and Ukraine, which he said were attacked by forces that wanted to destroy them. Fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.
I don’t think Americans would say it was Putin who started it. Russian children should have been given somewhere else to be born.
The Israeli Children’s Lives, the Red Cross, and the Gazan Red Cross: Who should we send out to Gaza if we can’t drop our hatred?
I think it’s a reflection of a moral and practical mistake. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.
The best answer to this test is to try even in the face of provocation to cling to our values. That means that despite our biases, we try to uphold all lives as having equal value. If your ethics see some children as invaluable and others as disposable, that’s not moral clarity but moral myopia. We must not kill Gazan children in order to protect Israeli children.
Red Cross officials said they were asking Hamas leaders to offer “proof of life,” such as a message, phone call or video that would prove each person believed to be held captive is alive. The Red Cross is also asking Hamas to allow in medicine and to immediately release the hostages with urgent health needs, like Rut.
The organization’s regional director for the Near and Middle East, Fabrizi Carboni, said in an interview this past week that there are people who shouldn’t be there.
“These supplies are a lifeline for severely injured people or those battling chronic illnesses, who have endured a harrowing two weeks of limited access to care and severe shortages of medicines and medical supplies,” the WHO said in a statement.
The aid workers said that there was food, mattresses, and blankets in the delivery. Aid groups say fuel is needed to power hospitals and desal plants for water, but no fuel arrived.
The UN reported that there is a severe shortage of humanitarian supplies in Gaza, and aid groups warned that the 20 truckloads wouldn’t be enough.
“They are the difference between life and death for so many people in Gaza,” Antonio Guterres said during a visit to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing. “And to see them stuck here makes me be very clear: What we need is to make them move, to make them move to the other side of this wall.”
The shelling is all over. “We slept next to the crossing on Friday and are scared more now than if we had been here”, said the Swedish citizen, who was at the border with his daughter. He said they had been staying there for days, hoping to escape as soon the doors opened.
The Case for Warfare in the Middle East, Nicaragua, and the Future of the United States: A Dairy Farmer’s Perspective
Randy Schmidt, 60, a dairy farmer in Lone Rock, said the president’s appeal for military aid was going to be a difficult sell in these parts.
Mr. Schmidt owns the largest dairy farm in Richland County, a swing district that had voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1980, until 2020, when voters there went for former President Trump’s re-election.
Money comes hard here, Mr. Schmidt said. It was a tough year for farming for us. We support Israel but I can’t believe we can do that much.
In suburban Milwaukee, however, the questions posed by the violence in the Middle East and Ukraine were less economic than moral for Janet Lucas. The terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israelis, in particular, were triggering for her, she said.
Ms. Lucas said that there has been a fight between the two for a long time. “But the way that it was handled recently, my heart just broke of the devastation,” she said of the Hamas killings and kidnappings of Israeli families. “It took me back to 9/11 — the same feeling, the same fear of, you know, is it going to happen to us, or who’s next?”
She and her son Michael traveled from Florida to Holy Hill, a basilica in a forested hillside, for the fall colors on Friday. As African Americans, they said, they felt conflicted about the president’s call to side with Israel. They could not condone terrorist attacks, they said, but sympathized with Palestinians and what they see as the long discrimination they have endured.
Janet Lucas says she can see both sides of the issue when she sits in the middle. “And then I also think, is there another way, could the United States or any other country get involved to help them to come to some form of peace?”
Hamas and the Palestinians: Why Israel allowed a trickle of humanitarian aid and why Israel allowed them to flee Gaza on Oct. 7
At the moment, an armed hostage rescue is considered too risky and dangerous, leaving officials from various countries franticly continuing their negotiations.
Some Hamas political leaders are trying to distance themselves from the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7 and now contend that it was angry Gazans and members of other armed groups — not their own fighters — who kidnapped the civilians. The videos show the killing of civilians by Hamas fighters.
The Israeli army is ready to invasion Gaza with tanks and armored personnel carriers. And even though Israel allowed a trickle of humanitarian aid — 20 trucks for two million people — into Gaza on Saturday, Israeli warplanes show no sign of relenting in a campaign that is intended to destroy Hamas but has also killed thousands of civilians.
Yaakov Peri, a former head of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, said Israel may have agreed to let humanitarian aid enter Gaza on Saturday morning in light of the hostages’ release Friday night. He believes that the motivation of Hamas might have been to encourage Israelis who have loved ones in captivity in Gaza to try to delay the ground invasion until more hostages are released.
There are many questions as to why the Raanans were released from all the hostages. Robert D’Amico, a former F.B.I. agent who worked on hostage cases overseas, said it may have been the fact that the two were healthy.
Another obvious reason the Raanans were chosen, Mr. D’Amico and others said, is that they are Americans — though there are up to 10 more Americans in captivity. Hamas might be hoping that the Biden administration will allow them to calmIsraeli reprisals on Gaza. Although it is not clear how much Israel actually listens to what the Americans say, the president and his team have been helping Israel with its war on Gaza.
Hamas was like many other non state actors in conflict zones around the world that saw the potential of drones to wage war. drones are harder to intercept than unguided missiles because they are designed to beat Israel’s air defense by overwhelming them. They travel low and do not travel in a predictable arch. A number of countries recently learned that blocking an advance drone is difficult to solve.
The earliest versions of its Qassam rocket were rudimentary: lightweight and capable of traveling just a few miles. In each successive generation of the missile, however, they became bigger, capable of flying farther, and equipped with larger warheads.
Hamas vs. Israel: A Two-Dimensional Competitive War-Front in Anti-Israeli Distinction
Over the past two decades, Hamas and Israel have engaged in a race—Hamas, to develop its offensive capabilities and extend its reach; and Israel, to frustrate those efforts as much as possible.
