The United States urged Israel on Friday to ensure more humanitarian aid gets into Gaza and to do more to protect Palestinian civilians, as Israel’s prime minister said there would be no cease-fire in the nearly month-old war until Hamas releases hostages.
The leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group stoked fears that the conflict could widen by promising more attacks along the Lebanon border.
Israeli troops tightened their encirclement of Gaza City, the focus of their campaign to crush the enclave’s ruling Hamas militants, who launched a brutal attack on Israeli communities that started the war.
But ever since that Oct. 7 assault, there have been concerns the conflict could ignite fighting on other fronts, and Israel and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah have repeatedly traded fire along the Lebanon border.
In his first public speech since the war began, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said his group had “entered the battle” with the past weeks’ unprecedented cross-border fighting. “We will not be limited to this,” he said, suggesting escalation was possible. Still, Nasrallah stopped short of announcing that Hezbollah is fully engaging in the war.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on his third trip to Israel since the war began, reiterated U.S. support for Israel in the war, saying it has the right to defend itself. But he said a “humanitarian pause” was needed to boost aid deliveries to Palestinian civilians amid growing alarm over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
After meeting Blinken, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “refuses a temporary cease-fire that doesn’t include a return of our hostages,” referring to some 240 people Hamas abducted during its attack. He said Israel was pressing ahead with its military offensive with “all of its power.”
Blinken said there had to be a substantial and immediate increase in humanitarian aid to Gaza, where “we need to do more to protect Palestinian civilians.” Without that, “there are no partners for peace,” he said, adding that it was critical to restore the path toward a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, attacked Israeli military positions in northern Israel with drones, mortar fire and suicide drones on Thursday. The Israeli military said it retaliated with warplanes and helicopter gunships, and spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said civilians were wounded in the Hezbollah attacks.
“We are in a high state of readiness in the north, in a very high state of alert, to respond to any event today and in coming days,” he said.
Blinken said the U.S., which has deployed aircraft carriers and other forces in the eastern Mediterranean, was committed to ensuring that no “second or third front” opens in the conflict, referring to Hezbollah.
In his speech, Nasrallah said his militia is not deterred by U.S. warnings, saying: “Your fleets in the Mediterranean … will not scare us.”
A war with Hezbollah would be devastating for both Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, with an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, some believed to be precision-guided weapons capable of striking deep inside Israel.
Israel has promised to unleash vast destruction in Lebanon if all-out war erupts, accusing Hezbollah of hiding its military installation in the midst of residential areas. The two enemies fought an inconclusive monthlong war in 2006. Renewed fighting could also risk drawing Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, into the conflict.
More than 9,200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza so far, mostly women and minors, and more and than 23,000 people have been wounded, the Gaza Health Ministry said, without providing a breakdown between civilians and fighters.
More than 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during Hamas’ initial attack, when some 240 people were also taken hostage. Some 5,400 have also been injured.
Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operation. Since the start of the war, seven Israeli soldiers and a civilian have been killed in different incidents along Israel’s border with Lebanon.
As American officials have before, Blinken pledged unwavering support for Israel and its right to defend itself.
“We stand strongly for the proposition that Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself, and to make sure that October 7 should never happen again,” said Blinken, who also plans to visit Amman, Jordan. It follows President Joe Biden’s suggestion for a humanitarian “pause” in the fighting. The aim would be to let in aid for Palestinians and let out more Palestinians who hold foreign passports and wounded.
Around 800 people left Gaza over the past two days — the first time people departed the besieged territory other than four hostages released by Hamas and another rescued by Israeli forces.
Blinken first held talks with Netanyahu behind closed doors before starting wider discussions with the leader and his War Cabinet and meeting with President Isaac Herzog.
More than 3,700 Palestinian children have been killed in 25 days of fighting, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Bombardment has driven more than half the territory’s 2.3 million people from their homes. Food, water and fuel are running low under Israel’s siege, and overwhelmed hospitals warn they are on the verge of collapse.
Israel has allowed more than 260 trucks carrying food and medicine into Gaza, but aid workers say it’s not nearly enough. Israeli authorities have refused to allow fuel in, saying Hamas is hoarding fuel for military use and would steal new supplies.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. was not advocating for a general cease-fire but a “temporary, localized” pause.
Israel has not openly responded to Biden’s suggestion. But Netanyahu, who has previously ruled out a cease-fire, said Thursday: “We are advancing. … Nothing will stop us.” He vowed to destroy Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip.
Israel and the U.S. seem to have no clear plan for what would come next if Hamas rule in Gaza is brought down — a key question on Blinken’s agenda during the visit, according to the State Department.
Meanwhile, military officials said Israeli forces have now completely encircled Gaza City, a densely packed cluster of neighborhoods that Israel says is the center of Hamas military infrastructure and includes a vast network of underground tunnels, bunkers and command centers.
Israeli forces are “fighting in a built-up, dense, complex area,” said the military’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevy.
Hagari, the military spokesperson, said Israeli forces were in “face to face” battles with militants, calling in airstrikes and shelling when needed. He said they were inflicting heavy losses on Hamas fighters and destroying their infrastructure with engineering equipment.
Hamas’ military wing said early Friday that its fighters battled Israeli troops in several areas in Gaza and claimed they killed four soldiers on the northern edge of the city of Beit Lahiya. It also claimed to have destroyed several tanks with locally made anti-tank rockets.
Neither the reports from Israel nor Hamas could be independently verified.
Casualties on both sides were expected to rise as Israeli troops advance toward the dense residential neighborhoods of Gaza City. Israel has warned residents to immediately evacuate the Shati refugee camp, which borders Gaza City’s center.
But hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain in the path of fighting in northern Gaza, despite Israel’s repeated calls for them to flee. Many have crowded into U.N. facilities, hoping for safety.
Still, four U.N. schools-turned-shelter in northern Gaza and Bureij were hit in recent days, killing 24 people, according to Philippe Lazzarini, general-secretary of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA.
In the occupied West Bank overnight, Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians in different places and arrested many more, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian health officials.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The Woke culture infecting our society today is the direct offspring of the Liberal Democrat party and the radical left. Woke has permeated our government institutions, Universities, and corporate America, Mainly because of the radical left that have become professors in higher learning, brainwashing students to believe it’s okay to mass-murder, rape, and torture innocent people in Israel and attack the Jews in America.
Although many Democrats try to separate themselves from the Wokesters, they are directly responsible for this Diversity-Equity-Inclusion that plants the seed for division and the balkanization of our country.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
When a tragedy happens, there are inevitably a rush of “how to talk to your children…” articles about how to break down what happened into manageable, kid-appropriate language.
Jews right now are facing a different issue: how not to talk to your kids about what happened on October 7th when it’s all you want to talk about.
How do we move on with life, yell at the kids to put on their shoes or do their homework, while also hugging them too often in our despair for the people whose lives cannot move on.
We are consumed by it. Jews around the world, who don’t know each other, are all posting the same thing. We haven’t slept since that Saturday. We see each other and our eyes are wide saucers, dark circles, full of pain. We refresh the news and absorb new, horrifying, details.
How do we protect our children from our despair and rage but also our fear?
We consider where we can no longer send our Jewish children to college, which countries we can no longer visit. We pass around the familiar stories of Jewish-owned businesses targeted, Jews shouted at, Jews chased, Jews beaten. We parse which friends are suddenly not. We think about which of our neighbors would happily load us on the train.
Pro-Hamas protesters at Harvard surround Jewish student and shout “Shame” “Shame” “Shame” pic.twitter.com/wy4n64KcQ8
My own children are blessedly too young for most of it. They know something bad happened and they know Israel is at war. The eldest, at 13, knows there was an attack in southern Israel where many died, knows hostages were taken but not much else.
I don’t want her to know about the rapes, the details I can’t unknow about the way children who look just like her were killed. In a few years she will be going to music festivals. I don’t want her to live a life of fear, worried that someone is coming to kill her. I don’t want her to know what monsters live on the earth with us and what they are capable of doing.
Our sons are 10 and 7. The eldest boy is a history buff. He knows about historical atrocities. He’s read about torture. But he’s still a baby who calls for me when he’s sick, reaches for me when he’s hurt. I don’t want him knowing that kids were stolen while screaming for their mama, that their parents could not save them. I don’t want him to hear that parents were killed in front of their children and children in front of their parents. And that’s before the truly gruesome particulars. I don’t want him to also not be able to sleep at night thinking of beheaded, burned, baked babies. I want him to believe it when I say I will always protect them, that no one is getting by me. I want to believe it too.
The youngest is too young for any of it. Israel is a faraway land he doesn’t know. He knows he has family there but still can’t quite put together who is related to who. His grandmother’s twin, her husband, her children and grandchildren, we go over the connections to him. He doesn’t know Israel is a safe haven for Jews around the world who are just like him. I’ll tell him, someday, about the hatred and the violence, but when I look at his sweet, innocent face, I think “not yet.”
Not telling them anything is no cure either. Recently a Jewish acquaintance wrote a long piece about how Israel just doesn’t matter to him. I knew before he noted it that his family had been in America since the turn of the last century. Those are always the Jews shrugging their shoulders. They did not experience the Holocaust and they also did not know pogroms in Russia, mass graves in Ukraine, murder and expulsion from Arab states. They have lived ensconced in a safety and security that has simply never been the norm for Jews. So sure, who needs Israel, pass the lox.
🚨 Breaking: Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad says they will repeat October 7-like massacres until Israel is annihilated.
I will have failed as a parent if that is my child. It’s my life goal to not raise my children to feel so blindly privileged. It was the luckiest twist of fate that they were born Jews in America and I will not let them forget that.
I want to tell them the truth, that we’re mostly alone in this world, that most people will not stand up for you. That will include their fellow Jews who had spoken up for others, posted all the right things, but when they see their own comrades are against them, they will quiet and shrink from view until they nearly disappear. Do not count on these Jews. Remember that there are always Jews who imagine they will be killed last. They won’t be. It’s a lesson they never seem to learn.
But if you do life right, there will be people who do reach out to you in bad times like these and offer support. They will pray for you, offer you safety should you need it, say the words to defend you and feel your fear.
I don’t say all this. I tell them for the 5th time to get their cleats on and to put their plate in the sink. I try not to show the darkness I’m feeling. They’ll know it all someday. It can wait.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post and writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. She has also written for Time, USA Today, The Observer, Heat Street, Federalist, Daily Beast and other publications. She is the co-author of the new book, “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” Follow her on Twitter @Karol.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took aim at President Joe Biden’s sudden push for a pause to Israel’s military action in Gaza, calling it “obscene.” Cruz was reacting to Biden’s response to a heckler on Wednesday in Minneapolis. A self-proclaimed rabbi interrupted Biden’s speech at a fundraiser and demanded that Biden push Israel for a cease-fire, in response to which Biden said, “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.”
The White House later clarified that Biden meant hostages, not prisoners.
“Obscene,” Cruz posted to X. “Biden poured hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hamas, which then massacred 1,400 Israelis and dozens of Americans. Now he’s pressuring Israel to stand down so Hamas can regroup. He’s even pressuring Israel to send more fuel to the Gaza Strip, which Hamas will seize and use to attack Israel.”
Cruz’s assertion about fuel came amid Israel Defense Forces releasing audio Wednesday of a conversation it says is proof that Hamas is taking gas from hospitals in Gaza.
On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will “urge” Israel on Friday to pause military operations in order for aid to get into Gaza and hostages to get out. The Biden administration is going to great lengths to define a “pause” as vastly different than “cease-fire,” but both involve Israel putting a halt to its military operation — something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to do until Hamas is eliminated.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby tried to peddle those semantics last week, but then said multiple pauses over more than one day might be required for aid.
“If that’s what it requires, then we absolutely will try to get such pause or pauses in place.”
Lior Haiat, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said last Friday, “Israel is opposed to a humanitarian pause or cease-fire at this time.”
Three weeks after Hamas brutally murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and two dozen Americans during a sneak attack, Southern Poverty Law Center President and CEO Margaret Huang published a 779-word statement lamenting “all acts of hate violence” in the Israel-Hamas war. A few days later, the activist group that made a brand out of tarnishing organizations with Christian missions or conservative ties covertly edited the statement to modify language that insinuated Israel intentionally attacked children in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. In her statement posted on Oct. 28, Huang acknowledged that “Hamas led an unconscionable attack against Israeli civilians, killing more than 1,000 people and kidnapping hundreds,” but couched the SPLC’s response by condemning Israel’s retaliation against the terrorists.
“The tragedy has only continued as Palestinian civilians in Gaza — many of whom are children — have been killed by airstrikes and cut off from food, clean water, medical care and life-saving supplies,” Huang wrote. “It is a humanitarian crisis of unspeakable proportions that has already left thousands dead. Our hearts are with all those who are suffering.”
An earlier version of Huang’s words, Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil reported, suggested that children in Gaza were “targeted” by Israel.
Instead, Huang reiterated that “we reject any attempt to prejudice or persecute communities pushed to the margins.”
The leftist organization claims to “monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States,” including many of which it says are “far right” antisemitic organizations.
Huang, however, hardly mentioned the rising antisemitism Jews all around the world faced after Hamas’ attack. Instead, she joined her concern about “a dramatic increase in the targeting of Jewish” communities with her worries that “Muslim communities” are also suffering.
The SPLC statement also claimed to “denounce all acts of terrorism.” Still, it invoked language such as “ongoing systemic injustice,” which pro-Hamas demonstrators and Palestine activists have used for years to scrutinize Israel, to describe the ongoing Middle East conflict. SPLC previously refused to tell The Federalist whether it had plans to designate the left-wing organizations like Black Lives Matter and Democratic Socialists of America that responded positively to Hamas’ massacre in Israel as “hate groups.”
It was also minimized by the fact that the SPLC Union flatly accused Israel of genocide last week, in a statement which went publicly unpunished or condemned by the SPLC, and a lead attorney for the organization allegedly participated in the pro-Palestine takeover on Capitol Hill.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Architects of Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran giveaway deserve plenty of blame for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, including the one that murdered 1,400 Jews — over 30 Americans. At this point in history, they should have nothing to do with our Israel policy.
And yet, welcome our new ambassador to the Jewish State, Jack Lew.
Sen. Ben Cardin, the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations, ludicrously claimed during Lew’s confirmation hearing that the former Treasury Secretary was “eminently qualified to serve in this post. He has extensive experience.”
Lew’s only experience in foreign policy is championing pro-Iran policies. During the Iran deal debate, Lew predicted the giveaway “will make our country safer, it will make our allies safer, and it will make the world safer.” Not once, in his Washington Institute speech praising Obama’s foreign policy, incidentally, did Lew mention the word “Israel.” What the deal — and subsequent support for Iran — did was reward the Revolutionary Guard for murdering around 600 Americans in Iraq and incentivize that regime to take more American hostages.
Our allies certainly aren’t any safer. Israel not only has to deal with Iran-funded Hamas but also the Iran-funded Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iran-funded Houthis in Yemen and Iran-funded Islamic terror groups still operating within Judea and Samaria.
The Obama administration, which refused to show any solidarity with the Green Revolutionaries, rarely had a bad word to say about Iran. Not so Israel. Because of his Jewish background, Lew was recruited by the administration to publicly rebuke duly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being critical of the deal. It was “beyond the pale,” said Lew in 2015, the man now being sent to pressure that same man into letting Hamas off the hook.
Then again, it should not be forgotten that Lew went above and beyond for Iran. As Treasury Secretary, he oversaw the $400 million “pallets of cash” transfer to the mullahs (we later learned it was much worse.) For over 37 years, through five administrations, both Democrat and Republican, the United States’ position was that those funds were not “Iran’s money.” Yet, rather than handing the funds to the families of American terror victims who were still owed $53 billion in court decisions against the terror state, Lew sent it to Ali Khamenei.
It got worse. After telling Congress that the mullahs wouldn’t be granted access to the American financial system, Lew secretly helped Iranians convert nearly $6 billion into dollars and then euros. (Apparently, Iran likes their blood money in $6 billion cuts.)
There was no stipulation in the Iran deal compelling the United States to license the exchange of mullah blood money in American banks. But, as usual, Lew lied. “Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” he said in 2016, without explaining how the transaction was legal. Iran, of course, hadn’t upheld its end of the deal. Nor was it in the “spirit” of the deal to covertly circumvent sanctions that were intentionally left standing. Though to be fair, Lew does know a thing or two about shady banking.
In 2006, Lew had parlayed his Clinton-era administration experience into a job heading up a Citigroup hedge fund that bet against the housing market. And still, somehow, under Lew, the fund lost nearly all its value. More than 50,000 employees at Citigroup were fired. For all his good work, however, Lew was cut a $940,000 bonus check right after Washington gave his company a $301 billion federal guarantee taxpayer-funded bailout and right before he became Budget Director for Obama.
Now, “Lew will have to take up Washington’s call to protect civilians in Gaza amid the widening human suffering,” according to CNN. Indeed, the myth that Israel isn’t engaged in a proportional response and hasn’t gone out of its way to warn Arab civilians to get out of the way is a kind of blood libel Democrats like to engage in to placate its pro-Hamas wing. Lew will likely incentivize Hamas to use more civilians as shields, as he did Iran, since it is obviously an effective tactic.
Virtually every instinct of the contemporary Democrat about this conflict has been disastrously wrong. And few of them have been more wrong than Lew.
The Israeli military reported additional casualties inside the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war enters its 26th day. Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7. More than 9,900 people have been killed in the war on both sides since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.
Israel has entered its fourth week of war against Hamas after the terrorist group infiltrated the country on October 7, firing thousands of rockets at residential areas and butchering civilians
As many as 9,900 people have been killed in the war on both sides, including at least 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers and 35 Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims 8,525 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 111 in the West Bank. At least 10 Americans are feared to be among the 240 people held captive by Hamas
Israel has greatly expanded its ground operations in Gaza over the weekend, marking a new stage in the conflict
The first foreign passport holders were permitted to leave Gaza and enter Egypt through the Rafah crossing, although American citizens are still struggling to leave the warzone
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Hamas terrorist gives graphic details about shooting children to Israeli authorities
A Hamas terrorist told an Israel Securities Authority (ISA) official he and another man shot and killed crying children who were inside a safe room, until the sounds could no longer be heard, while acknowledging he entered the house simply to kill.
In a video posted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, the Hamas terrorist is seen wearing prison garb while sitting in a chair with an Israeli flag behind him.
The unnamed man tells the ISA official, who cannot be seen in the video, that he and other members of Hamas entered a house through the window. While checking the house, he told the official, they heard sounds of young children in the safe room and shot at the safe room.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Doron Spielman appeared on “America Reports” to discuss recent Israeli strikes against Hamas, as the war between the two militaries continues.
Host Sandra Smith asked Spielman about a recent attack that killed a Hamas commander in the Jabalia refugee camp, but also several civilians in the process.
“This was a pinpointed strike against the Hamas commander that has been controlling and commanding the anti-tank warfare unit in the Gaza Strip, which they’ve been employing both in the Gaza Strip, towards our tanks, towards people, towards our soldiers,” Spielman explained. “In fact, one of those did result in some of the deaths that we experienced. He was a senior commander and he is confirmed dead, along with a number of other terrorists that were with him.”
The official also explained that Hamas terrorists have been fleeing into civilian areas amid the fighting.
“They are fleeing, I can tell you, into underground bunkers,” Spielman said. “We see them inside of medical clinics, inside of schools. They go in, you open the doors, you can’t find anybody. You walk a few feet in, you pull up a hatch and they’re underneath the ground.”
“They are so embedded within the civilian structures,” he added.
Israel-Hamas war: 5 American aid workers leave Gaza for Egypt
Foreign passport holders board a bus after arriving in the Egyptian part of the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip on November 1, 2023. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Fox News has learned that 5 Americans are part of the civilian group that left Gaza for Egypt on Tuesday.
The evacuation was conducted with the help of the Special Operations Association of America, which worked with the U.S. State Department.
The Americans were all aid workers, part of a group of around 30. The other 25 workers had different nationalities.
The civilians departed through the Rafah crossing after a deal was struck between Egyptian and Palestinian authorities, amid Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant says Hamas has two options: ‘Die or surrender’
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speak during a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 25, 2023. (Photo by Elad Malka (IMoD)/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant released a statement on civilian losses in Gaza amid the Israeli military’s war against Hamas terrorists.
The statement was released as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continues airstriking the Jabalia refugee camp for the second day in a row, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.
“The IDF is advancing on the way to defeating Hamas,” the official said. “War has a heavy price, I share in the sorrow of the families who lost their loved ones in the hard battles in Gaza City.”
In the press release, Gallant also referenced Israel’s determination to secure victory over Hamas.
“We are determined to win. The enemy has only two options: die or surrender unconditionally – there is no third option,” the statement read. “The arena of the war is wider, we are on the attack in the Gaza Strip area, but we are defending in the north and are prepared in additional fronts.”
“We are at the forefront of the free world against a world of darkness and all evil,” Gallant concluded. “We must win.”
Fox News Digital’s Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
Hamas official vows to attack Israelis ‘again and again’ until Israel is destroyed
Hamas Spokesman Ghazi Hamad speaks on May 23, 2021 in Gaza City, Gaza. (Photo by Laurent Van der Stockt/Getty Images)
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said in an interview that Hamas will repeat terrorist attacks against Israel “again and again” until the Jewish nation is destroyed.
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Hamad argued. “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”
The official argued that Hamas was willing to repeat the attacks until they achieved victory, calling Palestine “a nation of martyrs.”
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” he explained. “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
“We are the victims of the occupation. Period,” Hamad added. “Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”
Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip after winning elections in 2006, a year after Israeli occupation of Gaza ended.
Palestinian official says Gaza’s only cancer hospital is inoperable, faces fuel shortage
This picture taken on April 22, 2021 shows a general view of nurses and patients at the COVID-19 coronavirus intensive care unit , at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza City. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
The only hospital in the Gaza Strip that treats cancer patients has reportedly gone out of service Wednesday after running out of fuel.
The development surrounding the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital now means 16 out of the 35 hospitals in Gaza are not operating, Reuters is reporting, citing Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila.
“The lives of 70 cancer patients inside the hospital are seriously threatened,” she was quoted by the news agency as saying. “The number of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip is about 2,000 living in catastrophic health conditions as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Strip and the displacement of a large number.”
The Israeli government has maintained a blockade over Gaza in response to terrorist attacks from Hamas fighters, who have launched around 8,000 rockets since the war began.
Jordan recalls ambassador from Israel in protest of war in Gaza
Seen on a large screen the King of Jordan Abdullah II attends the International Peace Summit hosted by the Egyptian president in the New Administrative Capital (NAC), about 45 kilometres east of Cairo, on October 21, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (Photo by KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Jordan recalled its ambassador from Israel in protest of the “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Jordan’s deputy prime minister, Ayman al-Safadi, who is also the foreign minister, said the return of the ambassadors is linked to Israel “stopping its war on Gaza … and the humanitarian catastrophe it is causing.”
Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994, the second Arab country after Egypt to do so.
King Abdullah II of Jordan has called for peace between Gaza and Israel but said Israeli-Palestinian relations could never be stable without a “two-state solution.”
Such a proposal includes Palestinian people getting their own land and country, which Israel opposes.
“There will be no security, no peace, no stability without just and total peace that comes through a two-state solution,” King Abdullah II told the Jordanian parliament earlier this month, calling for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The King of Jordan has also mobilized medical and humanitarian aid teams to the blockaded Gaza Strip through Egypt.
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Democrats could be split for a ‘generation’ as left tears ‘itself apart over Israel’
The Democratic Party is divided over pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions in a major split that may tear the party apart for a “generation,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. (Getty Images // Fox News Digital)
The Democratic Party is divided over pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions in a major split that may tear the party apart for a “generation,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
Some of the biggest names in progressive and leftist politics are expressing concerns that the Democratic Party is no longer unified as politicians and commentators continue to battle it out in the public square over Israel. The article, headlined “The Left Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Israel,” was published on Tuesday.
“It has been an incredibly clarifying and terrifying moment at the same time for many progressive Jews,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told the WSJ’s Molly Ball. “They’re calling me, tweeting, messaging, expressing shock and sadness that the people they marched with, the causes they marched for, have abandoned them in their hour of need.”
Others were disappointed that the Democratic Party was not doing enough for pro-Palestinian factions.
“If you are Arab-American, Muslim-American or Palestinian, you feel like you don’t matter, you feel invisible,” said Waleed Shahid, former spokesman for the Justice Democrats. “If you are advocating at all that Palestinian and Israeli lives should be treated equally, there’s a feeling that the party doesn’t care about you at all.”
Shahid also pointed to flagging poll numbers for President Biden among “young and minority voters,” according to the story. A recent Gallup poll found that Biden’s “job approval rating among Democrats has tumbled 11 percentage points in the past month to 75%, the worst reading of his presidency from his own party. This drop has pushed his overall approval rating down four points to 37%, matching his personal low.”
“It shouldn’t be that hard to condemn the murder of innocent women and children and seniors, yet many have either said nothing or equivocated,” said Maryland state delegate and congressional candidate Joe Vogel. “We have a serious problem in our party right now.”
Fox News Digital’s Jeffrey Clark contributed to this update.
Biden says American citizens will leave Gaza through Rafah border crossing
RAFAH, GAZA – NOVEMBER 01: Ambulances carrying Palestinians, injured in ongoing Israeli attacks, arrive Rafah border crossing on November 01, 2023 in Gaza. Injured Palestinians are to receive medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
President Biden on Wednesday said the United States secured safe passage for wounded Palestinians and for foreign nationals to exit Gaza.
“We expect American citizens to exit today, and we expect to see more depart over the coming days,” Biden wrote in a post on X.
He added, “We won’t let up working to get Americans out of Gaza.”
Egypt, Israel and Hamas earlier came to an agreement allowing limited evacuations out of Gaza and into Egypt through the Rafah crossing after Qatar mediated talks.
The deal allows for foreign passport holders and some critically injured Gaza residents to evacuate, though no timeline has been set for how long the crossing will remain open, a source briefed on the deal told Reuters.
Dozens of foreign passport holders reportedly could be seen entering the crossing Wednesday morning in evidence of the deal.
The negotiations came as the Israeli military has been carrying out the second stage of its war against Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces have greatly expanded ground operations in Gaza, clearing Hamas terrorists out of their fortified positions and tunnels.
Military officials have warned that the campaign will be a long and difficult affair. So far, at least 16 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the fighting.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this update.
Cornell University junior Patrick Dai was arrested on a federal complaint Tuesday for allegedly calling for the deaths of Jewish people online and threatening to shoot up an on-campus dining hall.
The 21-year-old engineering student hails from Pittsford, New York, about 80 miles northwest of the Ithaca campus.
His mother told the New York Post that Dai suffers from “severe depression” and was on the brink of suicide before his arrest.
In a string of disturbing posts on a Greek life message board that was not affiliated with the school, Dai allegedly threatened to “shoot up 104 West,” a campus dining hall that serves kosher food, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York.
The cafeteria is next door to the Cornell Jewish Center, which provides housing for Jewish students.
“In another post, Dai allegedly threatened to ‘stab’ and ‘slit the throat’ of any Jewish males he sees on campus, to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish females, and to behead any Jewish babies,” the press release says. “In that same post, Dai threatened to ‘bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.’”
The deranged threats come in the midst of heightened hostilities and a spike in antisemitism on college campuses across the U.S. spurred by the Israel-Hamas War.
Fox News Digital’s Rebecca Rosenberg contributed to this update.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., accused a pro-Israel political action committee (PAC) of being an “extremist organization” that “destabilizes” American democracy.
The leader of the progressive “Squad” attacked the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Tuesday night amid Israel’s war with the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
Ocasio-Cortez — who accused Israel of committing “war crimes” last month — accused the pro-Israel PAC of being “racist” and “bigoted” toward lawmakers of color.
Ocasio-Cortez also accused AIPAC of being an “extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy.”
“AIPAC endorsed scores of Jan 6th insurrectionists,” the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) congresswoman said. “They are no friend to American democracy.”
“They are one of the more racist and bigoted PACs in Congress as well, who disproportionately target members of color,” she continued.
“They are an extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy,” she wrote.
AIPAC responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s post, blasting the democratic socialist congresswoman over her peddling “of the same tired lies [and] spin.”
“[Ocasio-Cortez] and the Squad summed up: People who disagree with us are racist,” AIPAC posted on Wednesday. “AIPAC stands with pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans of all races, genders, and backgrounds who support the US-Israel alliance.”
“And we oppose those who don’t, like you,” the group added.
Fox News Digital’s Houston Keene contributed to this report.
A Florida doctor is offering a helping hand in Israel after his family’s vacation to the Holy Land took a turn for the worst during Hamas’ surprise attacks on Oct. 7.
“It’s been a very chaotic period of time,” Dr. Cory Harow, medical director of the emergency department of West Boca Medical Center, told “FOX & Friends First” on Wednesday.
“This is not something that you plan for. We had a phenomenal family vacation. We were touring, visiting with friends, extended family, and it was all fantastic being together until air raid sirens woke us up October 7th. We padded out into the hallway of our hotel, and the images that we saw on the televisions were just chilling.”
Harow, a dual American and Israeli citizen, joined the IDF while attending Tel Aviv University.
He currently serves in a unit that specializes in battlefield triage, assessing, treating and stabilizing battlefield injuries.
“We’ve been training every year. We meet for one week a year to maintain a high state of readiness. And then we were mobilized on October 7th when the hostilities began in an attempt to save as many battlefield lives as possible,” he explained.
After Hamas terrorists launched their surprise attacks last month, his phone rang, and he confirmed he was in the country and ready for emergency mobilization.
While his family flew back home to the U.S. the next day, he stayed behind to work with first responders to help treat wounded IDF soldiers.
Fox News Digital’s Taylor Penley contributed to this update.
Yale Daily News (YDN) , the independent student newspaper and oldest college daily in the country, retracted editor’s notes that targeted a pair of recent pro-Israel columns after a huge backlash. The editor’s notes took issue with statements in both pieces that “Hamas raped women,” calling them “unsubstantiated claims.”
An Oct. 12 column by Yale student Sahar Tarak titled, “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?” was hit with an editor’s note without Tarak’s initial knowledge, reading, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
Another column published on Oct. 13, titled “Stop justifying terrorism,” similarly accused the terror group of raping women during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and also had an editor’s note added.
“The News was wrong to publish the corrections,” the newspaper later wrote on Tuesday. “By the time of the first correction on Oct. 25, there had been widely reported coverage from outlets such as Reuters publicly verifying that Hamas raped and beheaded Israelis.”
There have been multiple reports that Hamas terrorists committed rape during their rampage. Israel released footage of one captured attacker who said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl, according to The Times of Israel. NBC News reported on “signs of rape” in videos of the attack presented to journalists last week. Military forensic teams in Israel also said they found signs of torture and rape among the victims, according to Reuters.
Additionally, Shani Louk, a German-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped by Hamas and paraded unconscious on the back of a truck, as seen in footage of the Oct. 7 massacre, was discovered dead and beheaded, according to Israeli government officials.
The Yale newspaper wrote that it “failed to ensure that the columnists’ statements were properly cited and attributed” during its editing process because “[a]t the time of the columns’ initial publication, those specific forms of violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack were not independently confirmed by the cited source.”
Fox News Digital’s Jeffrey Clark contributed to this update.
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed three more casualties in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, bringing the total number of soldiers killed in the second phase of the war to 15.
Israel earlier reported that 10 soldiers were killed when hit by an anti-tank guided missile while operating in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7.
Military officials have warned that the war will be long and difficult, potentially spanning months or longer.
The IDF began expanded ground operations this week and ground troops are now tasked with clearing out a complex network of Hamas tunnels and other fortified strongholds. IDF says it has attacked 11,000 targets in Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.
More than 320 soldiers have been killed since the start of the war, many in the initial Oct. 7 attack.
Fox News’ Thomas Ferraro contributed to this update.
A sophomore Yale student whose pro-Israel column published in the Yale Daily News was edited without her knowledge spoke out on Tuesday.
An Oct. 12 column by Sahar Tarak titled, “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?” was hit with an editor’s note on Oct. 25, reading, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
Tartak wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Free Beacon this week about how the Yale Daily News, the university’s independent student newspaper, edited a section referring to Hamas’ atrocities in their terrorist attack against Israel.
Tartak said she found out about the edits over the weekend. “The Yale Daily News editor in chief told me that at the time my piece was published—five days after Hamas carried out a pogrom reminiscent of the bloodiest 19th-century atrocities—’there was swirling unsubstantiation [sic] of the rape and beheading claims,'” she wrote, while pointing to several sources substantiating the allegations.
She also reported that another column by a friend, titled “Stop justifying terrorism,” was updated by the Yale Daily News without the author’s knowledge to include a similar editor’s note that read, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims of rape.”
But Tartak said, “Yale Daily News editors are not such sticklers when it comes to lobbing accusations at the Jewish state,” in reference to other anti-Israel op-eds they published.
She warned about “history repeating itself” and how the attitudes of Yale students on campus reverberate into the greater media ecosystem when they graduate.
“I wish I could write off my classmates’ foibles as youthful stupidity, but I see professional journalists making the same mistakes. It’s not an accident: The Yale Daily News is their breeding ground, and in a few years, the editors who wrote and approved that correction will go on to careers in the mainstream press, which is chock-full of Yale Daily News editors and reporters. Take the New York Times, where the author of the flagship daily newsletter, the paper’s diplomatic and Supreme Court correspondents, and the host of the paper’s hit podcast The Daily are all Yale Daily News alumni,” she wrote.
“This pipeline is full of sewage, and it shows. The Yale Daily News is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial, where brutalizing Jews does not need to be justified. It’s just denied outright,” Tartak concluded.
Fox News Digital’s Hanna Panreck and Alexa Moutevelis contributed to this update.
Heads of Israeli universities sent a letter to colleagues around the world expressing concern about rampant antisemitism on some college campuses after the bloody Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.
The Association of University Heads in Israel also criticized the failure of academic leaders to clamp down on antisemitism on their campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“It’s unsettling to note that many college campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments, largely fueled by a naïve and biased understanding of the conflict,” the letter said, according to the Associated Press.
“Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of academic freedom, but it should not be manipulated to legitimize hate speech or to justify violence.”
At campuses across the U.S., anti-Israel protesters have organized massive demonstrations since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. The surge in incidents has been paired with antisemitic rhetoric and violence against Jews, leaving many students feeling unsafe and fearful of attending class.
Fox News Digital’s Madeline Coggins and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Cornell Jewish students described still feeling “terrified” after threats from a self-identified “Hamas fighter” led to the arrest of a suspect from the student body in interviews with Fox News Digital.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced it had a suspect – 21-year-old Patrick Dai –, who is a junior at Cornell, in custody for allegedly posting about threatening to “stab” and “slit the throat” of Jewish males, to “rape” Jewish women and throw them off a cliff and to behead any Jewish babies, according to its press release. Court documents show numerous posts allegedly made by Dai, where he allegedly used usernames like “Hamas fighter,” “jew evil” and “glorious Hamas”
“It’s both scary and sad that a member of our own campus community could be so hateful… To see that a student believes and was willing to make comments such as these shows that Jew-hatred can be anywhere and everywhere, even among our fellow students,” said Cornell student Netanel Shapira. He added it was “scary to think that people around you, especially… at an Ivy League school people take pride in… being well-educated and knowing the facts of what’s going on, and [are] believing in that… Just no words.”
Another student, Amanda Silberstein, criticized the university’s professors for peddling what she believed was propaganda against Israel in response to the arrest. She said it was “terrifying to be on campus right now.”
“Upon discovering that the suspect was, in fact, a fellow student at Cornell, rather than an anonymous individual unaffiliated with the university, the situation took on a heightened sense of reality,” said Amanda Silberstein.
“It’s a stark acknowledgment that harmful ideologies and antisemitic rhetoric persist and spread. This includes the propagation of untruths, the denial of atrocities, the tolerance of hate speech under the guise of free speech, the repetition of propaganda by some professors, and the falsehood that anti-Zionism is anything other than a form of hatred against the Jewish community,” she continued.
Cornell did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Silberstein’s opinion of the “propaganda.”
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Grossman contributed to this update.
On October 7, Hamas launched a multi-pronged terror attack on multiple Israeli army bases, civilian communities and a music festival. The Hamas paragliders who murdered teens and young adults at the music festival have been touted by some as a symbol of the attack, such as the Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter, which posted a graphic of a paraglider with the Palestinian flag that read “I Stand With Palestine.”
After asking about the prospect of revoking visas from foreign students calling for the destruction of Israel and Jewish people, Hawley read one such social media post and asked for Mayorkas’ opinion on the rhetoric.
“What about people who say things like, on October the seventh, ‘F Israel’ — I’m cleaning up the language here — ‘F Israel, the government and its military, are you ready for your downfall?’ People who say things like, ‘F Israel and any Jew who supports Israel. May your conscience haunt your dreams until your last breath. Palestine will be free one day. F apartheid Israel,’ This is pretty extreme rhetoric, don’t you think?”
After Mayorkas argued there is a distinction between “espousing or endorsing terrorist ideology and speech that is odious,” Hawley followed with some key details.
“This person works for you,” he said, noting the DHS worker in question is “an employee of the Department of Homeland Security who posted these comments on October the seventh.”
He went on, “That’s not all she posted,” noting the department employee also posted a “fake graphic” depicting a “Hamas paraglider” armed with a machine gun and flying into Israel.
Hawley noted that this employee posted it with the celebratory caption, “Free PALESTINE.”
Hawley addressed Mayorkas and asked if this “asylum and immigration officer who is posting these, frankly, pro-genocidal slogans and images on the day that Israelis are being slaughtered in their beds” is “typical of people who work for the DHS.”
Mayorkas initially denounced the premise of the question, “Your question to suggest that that is emblematic of the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security is despicable.”
“I’m sorry, this person works for the Department of Homeland Security, have you fired her?” Hawley replied.
Fox News Digital’s Alexander Hall contributed to this update.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said most U.S. companies likely do not want to hire someone who proverbially links arms with a terrorist organization, telling FOX News that those who demonstrate with signs and chants in favor of Hamas should be publicly identified.
Haley said that as a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she knows that most member nations believe Hamas is a terrorist organization, and that she believes the intergovernmental organization is a farce – and that the ideologically corrupt viewpoints expressed are similar to the reason why she wanted America to split from the World Health Organization during COVID.
“I expected this from the UN, you expect all kinds of ridiculous things at the UN. I fought this battle every day for two years. What I don’t expect is to see what’s happening in our cities and what’s happening on our college campuses, because these protests that we’re seeing,” she told “Hannity.”
“Are you telling me that these professors, these college students, they are supporting a terrorist organization?”
She noted Hamas has murdered at least 33 Americans and taken at least 20 hostage while members of the Palestinian-governing party have chanted “Death to America, and the like.
Haley asked whether the Americans who are demonstrating in favor of Hamas or in agreement with Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians therefore also want America to be destroyed.
“If they do, every one of them is dangerous to our country… because that’s what Hamas preaches, is ‘death to America’. So when they get up there, and they hold those signs, or they get upset on why people won’t hire them: it’s because companies don’t want to hire someone who wants to destroy our country,” Haley said.
“That’s why I think every name needs to be … published. Every face needs to be published. And we need to call this out for the hate that it is.”
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
Israeli mom recounts last call from terrified daughter as group vows to find Hamas hostages
“Mommy, I think I’m going to die,” Romi Gonen, 23, said while shot and bleeding in the back seat of a car during the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Her fate is unknown. Gonen is possibly among the 243 people believed held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. (Courtesy of Bring Them Home Now)
Meirav Gonen listened in real-time terror as her daughter, bleeding in the back seat of a car and fearing death, described by phone the surprise attack by Hamas on a music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
“Mommy, I’m shot. Mommy, I think I’m going to die,” said daughter Romi to her mother during the militant incursion into Israel, as the elder Gonen relayed to Fox News Digital on Tuesday from Tel Aviv.
“I heard her crying very quietly. I heard the shooting all around them,” said the anguished mother.
Gonen does not know the fate of the middle of her five children. But Romi’s best friend, Gaya Halifa, was killed — apparently in the same vehicle.
If Romi Gonen survived, she’s likely one of about 243 people — citizens from up to 20 different countries, including the United States — believed to be kidnapped and held hostage by terrorists in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Bring Them Home Now, a grassroots humanitarian movement with international volunteers, is determined to find every one of them.
“We demand the safe return of all citizens who have been taken hostage by the terrorist group Hamas,” the group says on its website, story.bringthemhomenow.net.
“We will not rest until every hostage is released and returns home safely,” the group says.
Fox News Digital’s Kerry J. Byrne contributed to this update.
Iran’s leader says countries should ‘block the flow of oil and food’ to Israel
TEHRAN, IRAN – OCTOBER 25: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran on October 25, 2023. (Photo by Iranian Leader Press Office / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is calling on countries Wednesday to block the flow of food and oil to Israel over its military action against Hamas inside the Gaza Strip.
Khamenei’s remarks to students in Tehran come after he praised the Palestinian terrorist group for launching its Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel.
“What the Islamic governments should insist is an immediate halt to the crimes [the Israelis] are committing in Gaza. The bombardments should immediately stop,” Khamenei was quoted by state media as saying, according to The Associated Press. “They should block the flow of oil and food to the Zionist regime. Islamic governments shouldn’t have economic cooperation with the Zionist regime.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on Iran’s Arab-majority neighbors in mid-October to impose an oil embargo on Israel and for nations within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to expel all Israeli ambassadors.
However, OPEC, the organization of largely Arab nations that overseas oil production in the Middle East, has no plans to impose such an embargo, Reuters reported at the time.
“We are not a political organization,” one OPEC source told Reuters.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Massachusetts family stranded in Gaza speaks out about situation on the ground
The Massachusetts family stranded in Gaza amid the ongoing war between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists said they continue to struggle to access drinking water, fuel and other resources and are hoping for safety as they await updates from the U.S. government about a possible exit plan.
Abood Okal, Wafa Abuzayda and their 1-year-old son, Yousef, were visiting family in Gaza when Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel on Oct. 7. The family has been in the region since late September, and had intended to return home to Medway, Massachusetts, on Oct. 13 before the violence delayed their plans.
In an audio recording obtained by Fox News Digital, Okal explained that the family ran out of drinking water on Sunday and that a nearby desalination station had run out of fuel needed to power generators. He said they have been roaming the main roads and streets in Rafah City, where they are staying in a single-family home with 40 other people including his sister Haneen and her three kids, in search of trucks or carriages carrying tanks of 1,000 or 2,000 liters of drinking water. Haneen and her children are also Americans.
“We stood in line, I think it was for maybe about two hours, to fill one gallon. They tried to limit the portions, so ours was a gallon. And we’re hoping that would last us for the rest of the day today and for most of tomorrow until we could find another place to get drinking water from,” Okal said in the recording created on Monday.
Israel’s military announced Wednesday that more than 11,000 terrorist targets have now been hit inside the Gaza Strip, while the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot down a surface-to-air missile fired from Lebanon at one of its drones.
The Israeli air force said in a series of posts that “During the fighting yesterday, IDF fighters identified many terrorists of the terrorist organization Hamas who had barricaded themselves in a multi-story building in the Jabalia area in the northern Gaza Strip.”
“The building is located near a school, a medical center and government offices. The fighters directed air forces that attacked the terrorists,” it added.
The Israeli air force said as military activity in the Gaza Strip continues “since the beginning of the fighting, the IDF has attacked more than 11,000 targets of the terrorist organizations.”
“In addition, IDF forces identified a vehicle carrying anti-tank missiles as it drove towards the forces operating in the Gaza Strip. Following this, the ground forces directed an aircraft that fired at the vehicle. A hit has been detected,” it also said.
Farther north, the IDF shot down a “surface-to-air missile” fired from Lebanon at an IDF remotely-piloted aircraft, according to the Israeli air force.
“In response, Air Force aircraft attacked the source of the fire from which the missile was launched as well as the squad that carried out the launch,” it said.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this update.
Bolivia cuts diplomatic ties with Israel while Chile and Colombia recall their ambassadors
Israeli security forces inspect the damage at a residential building after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashdod, southern Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2023. (AP Photo/Ilan Assayag)
Left-wing governments in several South American countries have taken actions against Israel this week, criticizing the reported number of Palestinian deaths in the ongoing war with Hamas.
Bolivia cut diplomatic relations with Israel on Tuesday, accusing the Jewish state of “crimes against humanity.” Meanwhile, Chile and Columbia recalled their ambassadors to Israel and criticized the country’s military offensive against Hamas terrorists.
Bolivian officials cited the number of Palestinian casualties in Gaza that have resulted from the latest Israel-Hamas war, but made no mention of the Hamas attack on Israel at the start of the conflict.
“Bolivia decided to break diplomatic relations with the state of Israel in repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive taking place in the Gaza Strip,” Freddy Mamani, Bolivia’s deputy foreign minister, said at a news conference.
Chile recalled its ambassador “in the face of the unacceptable violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip,” the South American country’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Neither country mentioned the Oct. 7 attack perpetrated against Israel by Hamas, in which 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, were butchered by terrorists.
Columbian President Gustavo Petro also said he was recalling his country’s ambassador to Israel.
The Hamas-led Gaza health ministry claims more than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations since the start of the war. Gaza authorities do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists in their reports, which cannot be independently verified.
Massie clashes with pro-Israel group over opposition to $14B aid package
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 20: U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a closed-door House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on October 20, 2023 in Washington, DC. The House Republican caucus is searching for a new Speaker of the House candidate after Rep. Jim Jordan failed on three separate attempts to achieve a majority of votes in the House of Representatives. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, responded to criticism from a pro-Israel group after he announced he would vote against a $14.3 billion aid package for Israel.
The aid package for Israel, which is backed by most House Republicans, includes allocating $1.2 billion for the development of the Iron Beam defense system and $4 billion for the country’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems.
“If Congress sends $14.5 billion to Israel, on average we’ll be taking about $100 from every working person in the United States,” Massie wrote Monday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “This will be extracted through inflation and taxes. I’m against it.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee pointed out that the congressman voted last week with nine progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, against a resolution defending Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas.
Massie responded to the post on Tuesday by saying the AIPAC was “intentionally misrepresenting” his intent in voting against the resolution. The congressman has condemned Hamas’ terror attack against Israel, but said last week he opposed the resolution because it calls for sanctions and “asserts the necessity of foreign aid commitments which I have voted against.”
“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first. I won’t be voting for their $14+ billion shakedown of American taxpayers either,” he wrote on Tuesday. “Let them know what you think by replying to their post. They are intentionally misrepresenting my intent and the resolution I voted against.”
The group replied, “The U.S. is stronger when Israel is secure. No misrepresentation, your vote says it all: NO to standing with Israel, NO to condemning Hamas, NO to helping Israel win this war.”
A drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria was thwarted on Wednesday, according to a report.
Two drones targeting Syria’s al-Tanf region were disabled or destroyed by the base defense system, an Iraqi government source told Reuters.
The thwarted attack comes as U.S. and Coalition Forces at Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) installations in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 27 times between Oct. 17-31.
Of these attacks, 16 happened in Iraq and 11 took place in Syria. They included a mix of one-way attack drones and rockets.
Most of these attacks were successfully disrupted by military forces and most failed to reach their targets, thanks to robust defenses. One U.S. contractor died as a result of cardiac arrest, when warned of an attack. Several other injuries were reported.
Defense officials have said Iranian-forces are believed to have backed the attacks.
Senior U.S. officials, including President Biden, Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have discouraged Iran from getting involved. They have also vowed retaliation if U.S. forces are intentionally targeted but have not specified which actions they would take.
The U.S. has deployed carrier group and other forces in the Mediterranean Sea and sent an additional 300 more troops on Wednesday.
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard and Liz Friden contributed to this update.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis took issue with President Biden’s tact of sending detachments of U.S. troops to the Middle East amid the Hamas invasion of Israel, saying the numbers of troops are too small to be effective but large enough to be a target of America’s enemies.
While Vice President Kamala Harris recently said the administration has “absolutely no intention” to deploy troops to fight in Israel or Gaza, several hundred have been deployed elsewhere and about 2,000 were reportedly told to prepare for potential deployment earlier this month.
The Pentagon has said there have been 27 attacks against American troops in the Mideast in October.
DeSantis, who is running for president, told FOX News on Tuesday that the U.S. taken ineffective actions against Iran – the suspected sponsor of Hamas terror – in that the response to attacks on U.S. servicemembers has been “abysmal.”
“I look at all these attacks that are going against US positions in the Middle East, and it seems like Biden has people there that are effectively sitting ducks,” he said on “Your World.”
“They’re there in probably too small a number to really do a whole lot. But they’re in sufficient numbers where they’re an inviting target.”
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
An Israeli woman who was taken hostage by Hamas recently told Israeli outlet Ynet that her fellow captives are still alive.
Kibbutz Nir Oz resident Nurit Cooper, 79, was released last week after being kidnapped on October 7. According to an English translation of the Ynet piece, she is “slowly recovering” from the traumatic experience. Cooper’s husband is still in custody of Hamas.
“The abductees are alive,” Cooper is quoted as saying. “Everything must be done to bring them back. I want all the families to be as happy as my family is.”
Cooper’s son told the outlet that her recovery is “not easy at all.”
“She remembers details, but doesn’t always share,” he explained. “She prefers to focus on the future. Father is still kidnapped and she worries about him very much. They were kidnapped together and held together in the same underground room, along with five other kibbutz members.”
“Father must have realized that mother and Yochaved were released,” he added. “The event is very traumatic for her, because the kidnapping was very violent.”
Foreign passport holders were seen entering the Rafah Crossing from Gaza to Egypt Wednesday morning.
These individuals are the first travelers to enter the crossing since the war between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists began on Oct. 7.
This, after Qatar mediated an agreement between Egypt, Hamas and Israel in coordination with the U.S. to open the Rafah Crossing on Wednesday. The agreement allows foreign passport holders and some critically injured civilians out of Gaza.
It is unclear how long the crossing will remain open.
More than 9,700 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, leading to retaliatory action from Israeli forces. Thousands more have been wounded, and many others have been taken hostage by Hamas and raped, tortured and murdered.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
The Ivy League student who allegedly made threats of a mass shooting and antisemitic violence at Cornell University has been criminally charged.
Court documents show that 21-year-old Patrick Dai, a junior at Cornell has been federally charged in connection with the threats following an investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“It is concerning, of course, that the threats came from within the campus. It must be particularly frightening for students to think that someone they sat in class with or socialized with could make such threats,” said William A. Jacobson, a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School. “I hope that there will be a full and transparent investigation of his connections, if any, to any groups or others who may have known of the threats.”
Fox News Digital’s Stepheny Price contributed to this update.
Nearly three dozen U.S. citizens were killed when Hamas terrorists executed a sneak attack on Israel on Oct. 7, according to the U.S. State Department.
“At this time, we can confirm the deaths of 35 U.S. citizens who were killed in the October 7 attacks,” the spokesperson said, adding that an additional U.S. citizen died as a result of continued violence after the attacks.
As far as the number of Americans who have died in Gaza, the State Department spokesperson said they are not aware of any, but information about U.S. fatalities in Gaza is “extremely limited” because of the situation.
“We extend our deepest condolences to the victims and to the families of all those affected,” the spokesperson said on behalf of the department.
Of the 35 U.S. citizens the State Department said have died, 26 have been confirmed.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard and Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
The Israeli military reported additional casualties inside the Gaza Strip, the day after it said its first two soldiers were killed during its ground invasion against Hamas Tuesday morning, the first such casualties in Gaza since Israel began its ground operations there.
According to Fox News’ Trey Yingst, who is in Israel, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were hit by an anti-tank guided missile while operating in the northern part of the strip, leaving at least 10 dead.
Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7.
Military officials have warned that the war will be long and difficult, potentially spanning months or longer.
The IDF began expanded ground operations this week and ground troops are now tasked with clearing out a complex network of Hamas tunnels and other fortified strongholds. IDF says it has attacked 11,000 targets in Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.
“Combined forces of the IDF attacked many terrorist targets throughout the Gaza Strip during the night, including operational headquarters and squads of Hamas terrorists,” a translated statement from the IDF Wednesday read.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard and Trey Yingst contributed to this report.
U.S. intelligence agencies virtually disregarded Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in the years following the 9-11 attacks, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead, the focus was on leaders of al-Qaida and the Islamic State, according to U.S. officials.
Mainstream media reports in the past several weeks have asked how Israeli and U.S. intelligence failed to discover what Hamas had planned for Oct. 7, when the group’s terrorists attacked Israel. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, and more than 200 others were taken to Gaza as hostages. AP reported that the death toll among Palestinians has exceeded 8,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Current and former U.S. officials said intelligence agencies had a handful of analysts tracking events in the Gaza Strip before the attacks, but the U.S. ceded the responsibility for monitoring Hamas to Israel, the Journal reported Wednesday.
“In terms of intelligence failures, which really do lie mostly on Israel, I think we should also share some blame for missing this event,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA operations officer with extensive counterterrorism experience, told the Journal. “Ceding the target to the Israelis now looks to have had consequences.”
Israel’s intelligence services have relied on human intelligence, eavesdropping, and other technical means throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
“It is almost inconceivable how they missed this,” Polymeropoulos told NBC News.
“True intelligence failures result not simply from a lack of information but also an inability to understand it,” Ignatius wrote. “Israelis knew the malevolent hatred that animated Hamas and its backers in Iran. What they didn’t appreciate was the creativity and competence of their adversaries. This was a level of organized malice that was, literally, unthinkable.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a comment Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, blamed the security failures on the country’s defense and intelligence services. However, he soon deleted the post and apologized. Members of Netanyahu’s Likud party have said Israel needs to focus on defeating Hamas before analyzing what went wrong.
Neither Hamas nor Gaza were mentioned in the U.S. director of national intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment, which was issued in February.
Jonathan Schanzer, who tracked Hamas as a U.S. Treasury terrorism finance analyst, now is at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He said the Oct. 7 attacks should prompt a review of U.S. policy toward Iran-backed proxy groups.
“There should be one. If there isn’t, it’s foreign policy malpractice,” Schanzer told the Journal.
The House Republican Conference has drafted a bill that would provide military aid to Israel funded by redistributed funds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
On Oct. 19, President Joe Biden delivered a speech from the Oval Office calling on Americans to support his administration’s proposed legislation that sends $100 billion of military aid to both Ukraine in its war against Russia and Israel in its conflict against Hamas, with some money being appropriated for border security and immigration processing. Amid widespread opposition among Republicans regarding aid to Ukraine, the House Republican Conference unveiled a bill that would allocate $14.3 billion for military aid only to Israel, offsetting the cost with repurposed funds from a portion of the $80 billion to the IRS enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. (RELATED: ‘The Worst Thing For Israel’: House Republicans Quickly Dismiss Biden’s Latest Aid Package For Israel And Ukraine)
The bill, known as the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, calls for the spending of money to procure weapons, ammunition and missiles, according to its text. It also allocates $1.2 billion to support Israel’s efforts to develop a laser-based missile defense system against rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza, known as the “Iron Dome” program, which is also a priority that the administration’s proposed legislation would fund.
The bill was reportedly introduced by Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas’ 12th District, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, according to the New York Post. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and J.D. Vance of Ohio.
The bill would also allocate $100 million to increase security for U.S. diplomatic missions in Israel and the surrounding region that have faced threats following the United States’ declaration of support for Israel after the attacks. It would further allocate $5o million to evacuate U.S. citizens from the country during hostilities.
The demand for a single bill regarding Israel, aid to which enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, has been a refrain of Republican members of Congress since Biden announced his package. However, the reduction of funds from the IRS, which has been a target of House Republicans during the 118th Congress, is likely to be opposed by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The White House and the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There’s a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency: A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle.
War in Ukraine? “Joe Biden Marshals U.S. Allies Against Russia” (Newsweek).
Obscene gas prices? “Biden’s frustration with soaring prices” (Washington Post).
War in Israel? “Why this Israel-Gaza conflict is so complicated for Biden” (CNN).
Folks! He’s frustrated, folks. It’s complicated for Biden, folks.
The New York Times’ David French offered up that same spa treatment for the president this week under the headline “Joe Biden knows what he’s doing.” In the piece, French implored his readers to “consider” all it is that Biden “confronts”: a war in Ukraine, another one in the Middle East, plus the ever-present threat from China. “And keep in mind,” he said, “Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact.”
Folks! Keep it in mind, folks. Biden is trying, folks. He’s managing lots of complicated problems, folks. It’s frustrating to the president, too, folks.
Honestly, I felt the same way under President Trump when he was confronted by two hot wars, record inflation, and impossible energy prices. He did the best he could to manage the challenges he faced — the struggles he endured.
Wait, that’s not right. There were neither wars nor inflation during Trump’s term. The U.S. was energy independent, and gas was cheap precisely because he flooded the market with oil for the taking. My mistake!
Actually, now that I think about it, I recall that despite a remarkable period of global calm and even a historic peace deal reached between Israel and the Arab world, the Trump era was marked by nonstop hysterics from the media about our supposedly shaken allies and emboldened foes. (i.e., Trump demanded that Western Europe live up to his part of the NATO bargain and made it known that the U.S. cannot solve all of the world’s problems, especially when large parts of the world don’t see them as such.)
But back to Biden. He’s not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him. He and his party actively created them. Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.
Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border. The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine’s membership. Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden’s team gifted Iran, the Jewish state’s greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies. We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn’t be. The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare (“childcare” and “living assistance”). And let’s not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).
Biden isn’t a knight of the kingdom off to slay a dragon. He’s a dunce screwing up everything. He doesn’t get to turn the economy and international stability into ruins and then get credit for saying he takes it all very seriously.
He’s not “struggling” or “managing,” and it’s not “complicated.” Biden is the struggle. He is the thing to manage. He is the complication.
Shani Louk, a German-Israeli woman who was thought to have been kidnapped by Hamas during the attack on a music festival on Oct. 7, was killed at some point during that attack and possibly beheaded, according to Israel’s president.
Louk, 22, came to international attention after she was seen being paraded half-naked and apparently unconscious in the back of a pickup truck in Gaza after Hamas attacked a music festival in Re’im on Oct. 7. Louk was initially believed to be kidnapped, but Israeli officials recently informed her family that human remains were matched to her DNA.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the German newspaper Bild that Louk’s “skull was found,” and added, “This means that these barbaric, sadistic animals simply chopped off her head as they attacked, tortured and killed Israelis.” Though Israeli officials have not publicly revealed Louk’s cause of death or confirmed many details, some reports state that she was shot in the head and that her head was later found but not the rest of her body.
German and Israeli mediareport that the Israeli Defense Forces and Zika, an organization of volunteer emergency responders, informed Louk’s family that a bone from the base of her skull had been located and matched to her DNA and that medical experts determined a person could not live without this bone, and therefore there is no possibility that Louk is still alive.
“For me, this news is terrible,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters while on an official trip to Africa. “This shows all the barbarism that lies behind Hamas.”
Democrats appear to be sticking by Joe Biden as their only presidential candidate for 2024 and don’t seem interested in any debates involving Robert F Kennedy or Dean Phillips of Minnesota. How’s that for upholding democracy? Shouldn’t voters have the ability to hear the opposition in order to make an informed choice within their own party?
There’s a lot of rigorous debating going on within the Republican Party that more closely resembles what democracy actually looks like, as opposed to the Democrats running their party like a communist politburo out of the former Soviet Union or Communist China. Democrats always seem to be in lockstep with each other, especially when it comes to policies that hurt Americans and their constitutional freedoms at large.
Israel is totally surrounded by the Muslim world and is constantly threatened with genocidal rhetoric, along with rockets being constantly fired on their innocent citizens every day from Gaza. The threat is instigated primarily by the Islamic Republic of Iran, a well-funded state sponsoring terrorism across the globe with the help of their branches, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Sadly, whenever Israel acts to defend their population against this barbarism surrounding them, the left in America and much of the world defend Hamas and these bloody acts of Terrorism. Many of the LGBTQ-XYZ groups are also protesting against Israel and defending the Hamas attacks against innocent civilians without any understanding that they themselves would be killed for being gay, lesbian, or trans in Gaza or in much of the Muslim world.
The United States is not trying to dictate limits for Israel, the White House said on Friday, as the Israelis expanded their military operation in Gaza against Hamas militants. The fresh military onslaught by Israel comes as the United States scrambles to arrange a humanitarian pause for deliveries of fuel and relief aid to Gaza civilians. How the expanded ground operation will impact efforts toward a pause was unclear.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, at a news briefing, would not comment on the Israeli expanded ground operation. But he said Washington supported Israel’s right to defend itself after Hamas militants killed 1,400 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7. “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel,” he said. He said the United States continued to discuss with Israel the aims of its operation, the need to protect civilians in Gaza, the effort to gain the safe return of Israeli hostages and the need to consider what comes after ground operations in Gaza.
“Since the very beginning, we have had and will continue to have conversations with them about the manner in which they’re doing this. And we have not been shy about expressing our concerns over civilian casualties, collateral damage, and the approach that they might choose to take. That’s what friends can do, and we’re friends,” he said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken contendsthat Hamas would gain no “greater” victory “than allowing its brutality to send us down a path of terrorism and nihilism. We must not let it.”
You can hear echoes of Barack Obama’s insufferable moral equivalencies imbued in that statement.
The contention is a not-so-subtle warning to Israel, who will almost surely enter Gaza and try to dismantle the Hamas terror state — which has been indirectly and directly funded not only by Iran, the European Union, and the United Nations but also by the Obama and Biden administrations.
The insinuation, of course, is that Israel needs to temper its inclination to engage in “terrorism and nihilism.” It is a blood libel.
It is not “terrorism” to seek justice for the pregnant woman who had her baby cut from her body or the elderly couple who was burned alive. And eliminating those who committed Nazi-like atrocities against your citizens is no more nihilistic than tracking down Eichmann or demanding Emperor Hirohito unconditionally surrender.
Yet, only days after the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden was already lecturing Benjamin Netanyahu on how “democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” The insinuation, again, is that there is something nefarious about winning a war against those who massacre your citizens.
Israel doesn’t target civilians, as Blinken, busy placating the progressives who now infest Washington and academia, knows well. Many Israeli soldiers have died because the nation avoids civilian casualties – even as Hamas diligently places their weapons and themselves behind women and children.
Then again, the idea Hamas’s greatest victory would be Israelis exacting revenge is itself the kind of self-satisfying gibberish that might impress a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival or readers of Tom Friedman columns.
Hamas’ greatest victory is killing and terrorizing as many Jews as possible. We know this because Islamists tell us this all the time. Why is this confusing? “There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad” are the words literally written into the group’s charter. And Hamas is quite popular in both Gaza and the West Bank. Islamic fundamentalism is popular.
“Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, is Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people,” Joe Biden said the other day. This is the “religion of peace” canard, begun by George W. Bush and widely promulgated by Obama all over again.
When our former president declared that the “future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” he wasn’t joking. Every time Islamists committed acts of terror, the Obama administration would turn the conversation towards “Islamophobia,” a neologism that conflates tolerance of individuals and groups (Muslims) with tolerance of a belief system (Islam). This rhetoric is not only meant to cloud reality but to chill speech and create immunity for the many progressive “anti-Zionists” on the left.
The modern Democrats have taken up this dishonest framing with gusto. When a reporter asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week if the president was concerned about rising anti-Semitism — you know, because of the Jew-hating protests that have broken out across the country — she responded by saying there were no “credible threats” and then pivoted the claims that “Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks.”
She did this twice. Not only is it a gross deflection, but it is also a lie. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews represent over 50 percent of all religion-related hate crimes, while hate crimes against Muslims are under 10 percent.
But Obama’s most corrosive legacy is foreign policy. Democrats have become obsessed with turning Iran into a regional counterweight to Israel while also restarting a “peace process” that would surely create a Muslim Brotherhood-led terror state on Israel’s borders.
Before Israel could even identify all the bodies of their citizens, Biden was already yammering on about the “dignity” and “self-determination” in places where “self-determination” manifested in the creation of a Jihadist terror state.
Donald Trump nixed this strategy, punishing Iran and circumventing Hamas/PLO in peace negotiations with Gulf states. That success was shattered when the Obama retreads entered the White House again and began opening up billions to Iran and sending Hamas and Fatah hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Biden administration is teeming with Obama-era Iran and Muslim Brotherhood fans. Not only did someone like Rob Malley — rehired by Biden after leading Obama’s giveaway — surround himself with real-life Iranian assets, but he’d met at least twice with Hamas, once with Obama’s blessing.
“This administration is different from the previous administration,” Hamas’s deputy foreign minister and New York Times columnist, Ahmed Yussuf, said at the time. “We believe Hamas’s message is reaching its destination.”
Definitely.
Even now, despite overwhelming evidence of its involvement in the killing of not only 1,300 Jews, 30 of them Americans, the administration does everything it can to deny Iran provided logistical and financial help that killed 30 Americans.
Like Obama, Biden offers just enough lip service about Israel’s right to defend itself to placate Jewish donors and voters. Every action of the president – even his supposed morale-lifting trip to the country–is meant to inhibit Israel from winning. Democrats are open to helping Israel defend itself but unopened to the prospect of destroying those who seek its end.
Let me amend that. There are plenty of Democrats who want Israel destroyed and more every day.
When Obama finally deigned to wade in on the killing of Jews and Americans, he offered his usual perfunctory throat-clearing about Israel’s right to exist before hitting the “but.” The “but” can be summed up as so: the more Jews die, the more Jews have a responsibility to placate the Islamic world and give their enemies a state.
And apparently, in many ways, the Biden administration concurs.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday spoke out against retaliatory attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. He also said he was redoubling his commitment to working on a two-state solution to end the decades-long Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Biden said the attacks by “extremist settlers” amounted to “pouring gasoline” on the already burning fires in the Middle East since the Hamas attack.
“It has to stop. They have to be held accountable. It has to stop now,” Biden said at the start of a news conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was being honored with a state visit to Washington.
Settler violence against Palestinians has intensified since the Hamas attack, and Palestinians have been killed by settlers, according to Palestinian authorities. Rights groups say settlers have torched cars and attacked several small Bedouin communities, forcing them to evacuate to other areas.
The West Bank Protection Consortium, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations and donor countries, including the European Union, says hundreds of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced in the West Bank due to settler violence since Oct. 7. That’s in addition to over 1,100 displaced since 2022.
Deadly violence has been surging in the West Bank as the Israeli military pursues Palestinian militants in the aftermath of the Hamas attack from Gaza.
The violence threatens to open another front in the 2-week-old war, and puts pressure on the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank and is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, in large part because it cooperates with Israel on security matters.
Biden again condemned the brutality of the Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and said that he was convinced that Hamas was driven in part by a desire undo U.S.-led efforts to normalize Israeli relations with some of its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.
The president also said that after the Israel-Hamas conflict comes to an end, Israeli, Palestinians and their partners must work toward a two-state solution.
“Two State solution”. That is NOT a solution. The land the so-called Palestinians occupy was given them by Great Britton after Saudi Arabia kicked them out of the country. It is not their land. Naver have been their land, and God will demonstrate soon whose land it really belongs to.
“Israelis and Palestinians equally deserve to live side by side in safety, dignity and peace,” Biden said, adding, “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.”
The Hamas-run Health Ministry says more than 6,500 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in retaliatory strikes. Biden said that it was critical for Israel to move carefully in its response to minimize civilian deaths.
“Israel should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war,” Biden said.
Biden also that he has not directly sought assurances from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel will hold off on an expected ground invasion into Gaza before hostages can be released.
“What I have indicated to him is that if that’s possible, to get these folks out safely, that’s what he should do. It’s their decision,” Biden said at news conference at the White House. “But I did not demand it. I pointed out to him, if it’s real, it should be done.” About 10 Americans remain unaccounted for amid the Israel-Hamas war, according to the White House.
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Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
President Joe Biden conducts a joint press conference Wednesday outside the White House with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Joe Biden voiced support Wednesday for Israel’s defense and warned against believing Palestinian estimates of casualties as the Jewish state continues to pound the Gaza Strip in retaliation for terrorist attacks committed by Hamas, which governs Gaza. During a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Rose Garden of the White House, Biden also talked briefly about newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., China’s aggression against the Philippines, climate change, and the Russia-Ukraine war.
A PBS reporter asked Biden about Johnson, saying that after the 2020 election, the Louisiana congressman objected to certifying Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. On the House floor Wednesday, Democrats also attacked Johnson as an election denier.
The PBS reporter asked: “If you win reelection in 2024, are you concerned that Speaker Johnson would again attempt to overturn the election?”
Biden responded, “No.”
“Just like I wasn’t worried that the last guy would overturn the election,” Biden added, referring to his predecessor, President Donald Trump. “He had about 60 lawsuits. Every time, they lost. I understand the Constitution.”
During his opening remarks at the press conference, Biden asserted that Israel has the right and responsibility to defend itself after Hamas’ surprise attack Oct. 7 on Israel, massacring 1,400 and taking about 200 others hostage. The same PBS reporter told the president that the “Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed over 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children.”
But Biden appeared skeptical of those numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry.
“What that says to me is that I have no notion the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people were killed,” Biden said. “I’m sure innocents have been killed … but I think we should be incredibly careful. I think the Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure they are going after the folks that are propagating this war against Israel. It is against their interest when that doesn’t happen. But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are giving.”
A reporter from the Australian press shouted, “Are they lying?”
What an incredibly stupid question. Gee. Do you think this reporter has an agenda?
On Monday, Chinese ships blocked and collided with two Filipino vessels in the South China Sea. The United States has a mutual defense agreement with the Philippines going back to a 1951 treaty.
“Just this past week, the PRC vessels acted dangerously and unlawfully as our Philippine friends conducted a routine resupply mission within their own inclusive economic zone in the South China Sea,” Biden said of China’s actions.
“I want to be clear. I want to be very clear. The United States’ defense commitment to the Philippines is ironclad. The United States’ defense commitment to the Philippines is ironclad,” Biden said, repeating himself. “Any attack on a Filipino aircraft, vessels, or armed forces will invoke our mutual defense treaty with the Philippines.”
Biden has been having a lot of problems with his dogs biting people at the White House. It seems as though Iran has a couple of dogs that are even more ferocious, but it seems as though they’re well-trained. Their names are Hezbollah and Hamas.
It appears these dogs, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been well fed by Iran with money paid to them by the US… Biden and the US gave Iran $6 billion or more and paid Hamas $6 million, not to mention the $58 billion Iran made from oil production unleashed by Biden’s policies. President Trump had put restrictions on Iran’s selling of oil that Biden canceled as soon as he came into office.
Bottom line, you could say for sure that it was Obama and Biden who funded the terror and genocidal attack on Israel on October 7th due to their weak and ignorant Middle East policies in a desperate attempt to secure a nuclear deal with Iran and their appeasement of evil dictatorships.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
At least 33 Americans killed in Israel-Hamas war, secretary of state tells UN
Israeli forces have escalated their bombardment of the Gaza Strip as the war with Hamas enters its 18th day. The war is now the deadliest war in Gaza for both sides. The Hamas-run Health Ministry claims at least 5,087 Palestinians have been killed and 15,270 wounded. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed since the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas, in which 222 people including foreigners were taken captive into Gaza. Four people have been released so far.
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American troops attacked repeatedly in Middle East as war between Israel and Hamas continues
The Pentagon is seen from a flight taking off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on November 29, 2022 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
U.S. officials announced on Tuesday that American troops in the Middle East have been attacked 14 times in the last week.
The attacks were carried out with rockets and one-way drones. U.S. Department of Defense spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder explained that, between October 17 and 24, American troops in Iraq were attacked 10 times.
During the same time frame, U.S. troops in Syria were attacked three times.
At a Monday briefing, a senior defense official said that they expected to see a “significant escalation” of attacks against American troops due to the war.
“I think it’s fair to say when you see this uptick in activity in attacks by many of these groups, there’s Iranian fingerprints all over it,” the defense official explained.
Two U.S. defense officials confirmed later on Tuesday that Iran proxy forces fired a rocket at Iraq’s Ain al-Asad air base, which houses American troops.
No injuries or damages or reported from the rocket, which was intercepted.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner and Liz Friden contributed to this report.
Israel-Hamas war: IDF stops Hamas terrorists’ attempt to invade by sea
Israel continues to deploy soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles near the Gaza border in Sderot, Israel on October 24, 2023.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported early Wednesday morning that Hamas terrorists attempted to invade Israel by sea on Tuesday.
“Hamas terrorists attempting to infiltrate Israeli territory by sea were identified by naval forces in southern Israel earlier today,” the IDF explained in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The terrorists were thwarted and the tunnel was struck, in addition to a weapons warehouse used by the terrorists in Gaza,” the post added.
The IDF previously released footage of a naval squad stopping Hamas fighters from reaching Israel’s coastline on October 7, when the terrorist attacks began.
The soldiers took down Hamas speedboats, which ignited, and shot the terrorists who were swimming away.
Hundreds of pro-Israel demonstrators gathered in Boston Common on Monday evening amid the war between Hamas and Israel.
Many of the protestors objected to the New York Times’ coverage of an airstrike at a Gaza hospital on October 17. The report claimed that hundreds were killed by an Israeli airstrike, based off of information from Hamas officials.
Israeli and American intelligence later found that Israel was not responsible for the incident. A rocket fired by Iran-backed terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad misfired and crashed.
A protestor named Lia, who hails from Israel, told Fox News that the article made Jews less safe.
“It’s anywhere from adults to kids in schools who later take this false information and use it to attack innocent Israelis just because they read some fake article,” she said. “People are being harassed and abused because of it.”
Another Israeli named Tamir said that the reports endangers Jews across the world.
“I can feel people being hostile towards us,” he said.
Fox News Digital’s Kassy Dillon contributed to this report.
Israel-Hamas war: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cracking down on pro-Hamas sentiment on campuses
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during the 2023 First in the Nation Leadership Summit on October 13, 2023 in Nashua, New Hampshire. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is working with the chancellor of the Sunshine State’s university system to crack down on pro-Hamas sentiment at universities.
Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, recently wrote a letter to Florida state universities condemning the terrorist attacks against Israel, which began on October 7.
“During a holy Jewish holiday, the recognized terrorist organization, Hamas, launched an unprovoked attack on Israel – among those killed were babies, women, and elderly,” Rodrigues wrote. “To date, approximately 1,400 Israelis have been killed, including 31 American citizens. Governor DeSantis, our State University System and the Florida College System have condemned these attacks.”
The letter added that it would be a “felony under Florida law to knowingly provide material support … to a designated foreign terrorist organization.” Rodrigues referenced that at least two universities in the Florida system had students tied to National Students for Justice in Palestine, which called the Hamas attacks “the resistance.”
“Based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism, in consultation with Governor DeSantis, the student chapters must be deactivated,” the letter said. “These two student chapters may form another organization that complies with Florida state statutes and university policies.”
“The two institutions should grant these two chapters a waiver for the fall deadlines, should reapplication take place,” Rodrigues added.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
Israel-Hamas war: Biden speaks with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia about conflict
U.S. President Joe Biden arrives at a ceremony for recipients of the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology and Innovation in the East Room of the White House on October 24, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
President Biden discussed the Israel-Hamas war over the phone with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday, as the leaders agreed to try to prevent the escalation of the conflict.
“The two leaders agreed on pursuing broader diplomatic efforts to maintain stability across the region and prevent the conflict from expanding,” a statement from the White House read. “They welcomed the delivery of humanitarian assistance from Egypt into Gaza and recognized that much more is needed for civilians to have sustained access to food, water, and medical assistance.”
The statement also acknowledged the $100 million donation to support humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is headquartered in Saudi Arabia.
Biden and the Crown Prince also advocated for the immediate release of hostages that were taken by Hamas into Gaza.
“They also affirmed the importance of working towards a sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians as soon as the crisis subsides, building on the work that was already underway between Saudi Arabia and the United States over recent months,” the statement added. “They agreed to remain in close coordination directly and through their teams over the coming period.”
Several Hamas terrorists attempted to infiltrate Israel from the Gaza Strip by sea and were killed by Israeli Navy forces, the IDF said.
At least six Hamas terrorists were killed when Israeli fighter jets responded to a diver squad attempted to enter Israel by Zekim beach, sources tell Fox News.
Israeli forces have struck more than 400 terrorist targets in the past 24 hours, the military said Tuesday.
As part of its “wide-scale operation” to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities, the IDF said the targets struck include: Hamas gunmen setting up to fire rockets in Israel’s direction, an operational tunnel shaft allowing Israel to be infiltrated through the sea, and Hamas command centers and staging armaments in Mosques.
The focus continues to be on eliminating Hamas operatives and “weapons storage sites, underground terrorist tunnels, command centers, observation posts and more,” the IDF said in its daily recap.
The force also said it will continue operating with the safety of innocent civilians in mind.
Fox News’ Elizabeth Pritchett and Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this update.
People gather outside United Nations headquarters to demand the release of hostages taken by Hamas held in Gaza and to show support to some of their family members on Oct. 24, 2023, in New York City. (Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
With one exception, nothing about Oct. 7 surprised me.
The one exception was Israel’s unpreparedness. That also surprised nearly every Israeli. My guess is that a combination of Iranian technology and Israeli complacency and incompetence led to the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Nothing else surprised me. Not the butchery; not the sadism; not the Jew-hatred; not the theology that made the slaughter possible; not the support, even glee, in Gaza and among an untold number of Muslims around the world; not the reactions in our universities; and not the support of the Left (not of liberals).
The Middle East Dispute
Since the 1970s, when I was a graduate student at the Middle East Institute of Columbia’s School of International Affairs, I knew what the Middle East conflict was about: Muslim rejection of a Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world. To the best of my recollection, my professors—most of them fluent in Arabic and all experts on the Middle East—had it wrong. Being secular themselves and usually having a sympathetic view of the Arab world, they believed and taught that the issue was about land.
They were wrong. It was always about Muslim rejection of a Jewish state in their midst and a religious desire to destroy it.
In 2014, I presented a video for PragerU titled “The Middle East Problem.” It explains the Middle East problem in five minutes.
This is how It begins:
“When I did my graduate studies at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University … semester after semester, we studied the Middle East conflict as if it was the most complex conflict in the world when, in fact, it is probably the easiest conflict in the world to explain. It may be the hardest to solve, but it is the easiest to explain.
“In a nutshell, it’s this: One side wants the other side dead.”
Fifty years ago, I knew it. Muslims know it. Israel’s Jews know it. And now, unless you are a leftist, you know it.
I ended the video with another truism:
“Finally, think about these two questions: If, tomorrow, Israel laid down its arms and announced, ‘We will fight no more,’ what would happen? And if the Arab countries around Israel laid down their arms and announced, ‘We will fight no more,’ what would happen?
“In the first case, there would be an immediate destruction of the state of Israel and the mass murder of its Jewish population. In the second case, there would be peace the next day.”
As of Oct. 7, you know that too.
Why Jews Are Hated
There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably 2,000 years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”
Note that the sentence does not say “to persecute us” or “to enslave us,” but “to annihilate us.”
The question is why?
I wrote an entire book—“Why the Jews?”—40 years ago explaining antisemitism. But I can sum it up in a few sentences: Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it—because they believed it and/or because it is true.
The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments.
Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it—compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.
So, when I read about the horrors inflicted by Hamas on young Jews, old Jews, and Jewish babies, I was horrified, but not at all surprised. That is what the most evil of any generation do to Jews. And that is why non-Jews who dismiss Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah as the Jews’ problem are fools. Tens of millions of non-Jews were killed because most people dismissed Hitler and the Nazis as the Jews’ problem.
In fact, aside from increased loathing of Hamas and its Muslim and left-wing supporters, the only effect the events of Oct. 7 had on me was to reinforce my faith in the chosenness of the Jews.
Image via US Military Patriot / YouTube (screenshot)
The United States Navy shot down three cruise missiles and a set of drones stemming from a faction in Yemen who launched them over the Red Sea. These weapons could have “potentially” been heading towards Israeli targets.
The USS Carney took down the missiles and drones after they were launched from the Arabian Peninsula, the Pentagon stated in a press conference briefing.
“The crew of the guided-missile destroyer USS Carney, operating in the northern Red Sea earlier today, shot down three land attack cruise missiles and several drones that were launched by Houthi forces in Yemen,” Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said.
“We cannot say for certain what these missiles and drones were targeting, but they were launched from Yemen heading north along the Red Sea, potentially toward targets in Israel,” he added.
According to the Epoch Times, Ryder declined to acknowledge who authorized the missiles or whether the government knew if the missiles were targeting Israeli or American forces.
Ryder boasted about U.S. defenses and said it was a typical move for forces in the region.
“This action was a demonstration of the integrated air and missile-defense architecture that we have built in the Middle East and that we are prepared to utilize whenever necessary to protect our partners and our interests in this important region.”
“Our defensive response is one that we would have taken for any similar threat in the region,” Ryder added. “The decision was made that it posed a potential threat based on its flight profile, and so the decision was made to take it down.”
BREAKING: Brigadier Gen. Patrick Ryder confirms the shoot down of 3 missiles launched by Houthi terrorists by the USS Carney. pic.twitter.com/dNgDi1mF1a
The missiles were reportedly fired by the Houthis, a Yemeni group that has been historically backed by Hezbollah and Iran, according to Brookings.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Houthis allegedly adopted the slogan “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.”
The USS Carney, an American Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, uses the Aegis missile defense system developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, YouTube channel US Military Patriot described. The system is used in combination with standard missile interceptors to track and destroy ballistic missiles.
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A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll determined that 2 out of 3 U.S. voters want Congress to quickly elect a new speaker of the House to prevent a government shutdown and provide aid to Israel and Ukraine. According to the survey, 67.1% of voters want a new speaker elected “as soon as possible” to ensure immediate funding needs are met, with 24.7% saying they didn’t care. Another 8.2% said they were undecided on the issue. According to Suffolk University, the poll was conducted with 1,000 registered voters in the United States from Oct. 17-20 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
“We got to have a speaker, [but] I don’t think we’re going to have anybody soon,” George Ramge, 72, of San Diego, a building contractor and political independent told USA Today in the survey. “There’s a lot of Hollywood politicians out there getting their time on TV, and I don’t think they’re really serving the people’s purpose.”
Maryland Democrat Carl Hickey, 85, agreed with Ramge.
“They need to be functioning, and that’s the only way they’re going to function,” the retired Methodist minister said in the report.
Despite political differences, large majorities favored a quick resolution to the speaker dilemma with 86% of Democrats, 57% of Republicans and 59% of independents saying they want a speaker elected quickly.
“How often do you see Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree on anything in D.C.?” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk’s Political Research Center. “Look at every demographic: gender, geography, age, race, education level, income, political philosophy, even those who trust CNN vs. Fox News. They are all speaking the same seven words in unison: ‘Elect a speaker and do your job.’ “
Former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was voted out of the seat earlier this month 216-210 with all Democrats joining eight Republicans to oust him. Potential successors House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, could not gather the 217-vote majority required to win the position during several rounds of balloting, the report said.
The poll also found 61% of voters want Congress to reach a deal and not cause the government to shut down after a Nov. 17 deadline.
“I mean, don’t we live in a bipartisan world?” said Desiree Whitney, 64, of Boerne, Texas, an independent who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. “Why should it stop, you know, at our government, or does it begin there? I mean, it’s all about negotiations.”
The U.S. response to Hamas’ Nazi-like massacre of Israelis, Americans, and anyone else in its murderous path has been, almost without exception, robust. But U.S. officials are largely missing the larger picture and risking being drawn into an escalation — on the enemy’s terms.
Hamas and Hezbollah are the symptoms; Iran is the disease.
But President Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation on Oct. 19 danced around the core issue of Iran’s financing, training, and encouragement of violent, brutal forces across the region and beyond, as well as its nuclear missile program. Thus, the gathering might of the U.S. Navy off the coast of Israel in the form of two aircraft carrier strike groups and a Marine Expeditionary Unit betrays unimaginative, linear thinking.
If used, American firepower would augment Israel’s own considerable military force. In theory, this threat helps to deter Hezbollah from unleashing its arsenal of 100,000 missiles on Israel, many of them sophisticated.
But, like Hamas, Hezbollah is expert at digging. They hide their missile launchers in an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — all guarded by an air defense network that is likely to get lucky enough times to raise the specter of captured American pilots.
If the incremental addition of American airpower is helpful to the pending effort to destroy Hamas while deterring a wider conflict, that role can more than adequately be filled by the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy should instead be concentrating 2,000 miles to the east in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. There, the U.S. Navy would be playing to its unambiguous strength, enforcing sanctions against Iran by controlling the sea lines of communication that Iran depends on to generate the cash for its empire of terror.
Unfortunately, this would require a Biden administration that was both imaginative and strategic — and not in the thrall of a recently revealed Iranian influence operation that managed to place several advisors friendly to the Iranian mullahs in key national security positions since the Obama administration. Chief among these, Robert Malley, a longtime friend of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and an architect of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, a deal that focused exclusively on Iran’s nuclear program, rewarding the mullahs with cash and sanctions relief while greenlighting their missile program and global support for terror.
Iran’s Nuclear Program
Instead, Biden’s systematic appeasement of Iran, a continuation of the Obama-era policy that weirdly sought to use Iran as a counter to perceived Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian problem, has resumed. Up until the gruesome events of Oct. 7, Biden’s national security team was willfully blind to Iran’s bloody history of sponsoring terror and its determined drive to produce nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.
As a result, U.N. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear, missile, and drone program — never well enforced by Biden — expired on Oct. 18 with the U.S. announcing its own unilateral set of sanctions. The U.S. continues to pretend these efforts are somehow slowing Iran’s drive to push its nuclear program to completion, while Russian use of Iranian combat drones in Ukraine reveals the prior sanctions regime as inadequate to the task.
Reagan-Era Lessons
The U.S. never fully grappled with the Iranian theocracy after the shah was toppled in 1979. During the Cold War, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would come to Iran’s aid and that the military cost of defeating the regime would be too high. Instead, the U.S. was content to see Iran tied down in a bloody stalemate against Iraq after the latter invaded in 1980.
As the war started to threaten oil exports out of the Gulf, America responded by providing a U.S. Navy escort to six Kuwaiti-owned super tankers in July 1987. After an escorting U.S. Navy ship struck a mine on April 14, 1988, the Reagan administration responded only four days later with Operation Praying Mantis. It was the Navy’s largest combat action since World War II, sinking an Iranian guided missile frigate, crippling a second, sinking four other boats, and destroying two militarized oil platforms at the cost of one helicopter with two crew lost.
The operation was thoroughly wargamed a year before, when it was determined that an unambiguously aggressive response to Iran would likely prevent the conflict from escalating. In other words, a disproportionate response would rob Iran of the ability to control the timing and mode of escalation, reducing U.S. casualties and preserving the peace.
Applying Force
This lesson from the Reagan era opens up a final consideration. Rather than following through on the foolish precedent of incentivizing hostage-taking via negotiation and cash payments, America should ditch the carrots and pick up the stick.
Imagine the transformative discussion over the current hostage crisis — and the forestalling of future hostage-taking by Iran and its proxies — if the U.S. were to announce that every hostage taken is worth $1 billion (or $1.171 billion if we wish to account for Bidenflation). That amount would be deducted from seized Iranian assets or taken from oil tankers filled with Iranian oil. The proceeds would compensate hostages and their families, with the remainder used to replenish the Pentagon’s waning stocks of armaments.
This is exactly the kind of naval power application the U.S. Navy was built for. Unfortunately, the radical cadres infesting the Biden administration’s national security staff would never allow such an idea to reach the desk of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief.
A lead attorney for the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was apparently present at the pro-Palestine demonstrations on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. According to Townhall contributor John Hasson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., allegedly took a photo of a protester’s phone, which displayed a group chat titled “Global Intifada.” “Intifada” is an Arabic term used for “uprising” or “rebellion.”
Among the protester names captured on the phone is Katrina Bleckley, who shares the same name as a pro-Palestine attorney at the SPLC. The SPLC denied Bleckley’s employment but would not respond to follow-up inquiries about whether Bleckley had ever worked for the group. On Thursday, Bleckley’s LinkedIn profile still listed SPLC as her current employer, but as of Friday morning, her profile appears to be deactivated.
During today’s Capitol protests, @mtgreenee allegedly took a picture of a protestor’s phone
The group chat, named “Global Intifada” features the name Katrina Bleckley
Maybe a coincidence, but a Pro-Palestine lead attorney at the SPLC shares the same name pic.twitter.com/cFsnR4Thk3
A profile for a “Katrina Bleckley” on X, previously known as Twitter, is now private. The online bio identifies her as an “abolitionist” and “migrant liberator” next to the hashtag “#FreePalestine.” The person in that profile picture appears to be the same person as on the LinkedIn account.
On Wednesday, more than 300 people were arrested after pro-Palestinian protesters took over the Rotunda in the Cannon House office building to demand a ceasefire between Israel and the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas. Demonstrators tore down pro-Israel signs and called on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to stand down while Hamas keeps Israeli men, women, and children as hostages. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., stood outside the Capitol with demonstrators, regurgitating terrorist propaganda that Israel launched an attack on a hospital in Gaza that killed more than 500 civilians. The false claim, contradicted by audio and visual evidence from Israeli intelligence, was similarly picked up by American outlets. On the contrary, evidence shows the blast occurred in a parking lot, came from a Hamas rocket that misfired, and killed “dozens,” not hundreds.
The SPLC has a history of engaging in far-left extremist activism. Last week, the SPLC, which targets churches and organizations with conservative ties as “hate groups,” refused to say whether Hamas sympathizers would similarly be placed on the SPLC’s famous list of more than 1,200 “hate groups.”
While a lead attorney for the SPLC was seemingly present at Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the group previously provided research and testimony for the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 to prosecute pro-Trump demonstrators.
“Over the past few months, our SPLC analysts have met with Jan. 6 Select Committee staff and submitted nearly 40 pages of written testimony and research to document the involvement of extremists in the planning and preparation for the insurrection,” Michael Lieberman, senior policy counsel on hate and extremism at the SPLC, told Politico last summer. “Our work has helped to document coordination between Trump, his allies and two extremist groups we’ve tracked for years.”
Yet in March, another lawyer for the SPLC named Thomas Webb Jurgens was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism amid protests against police in Georgia.
“An employee at the SPLC was arrested while acting — and identifying — as a legal observer on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG),” the SPLC said in a statement at the time. “The employee is an experienced legal observer, and their arrest is no evidence of any crime, but of heavy-handed law enforcement intervention against protestors.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Corrupt corporate media outlets like The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to justify their role in disseminating terrorist talking points to the world without scrutiny.
NYT acknowledges that it was one of the “many Western news organizations” that regurgitated the unsubstantiated lie (sourced directly from the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip) that Israel killed hundreds by bombing a Gaza hospital.
Even though there was plenty of evidence absolving the Jewish state of the alleged war crime, the publication made no effort to issue retractions, print corrections, or even apologize for its role in the American press’s collective amplification of the propaganda.
Instead, NYT blames its feckless participation in the rumor mill — that incited violence against European and American embassies across the globe — on “fast-moving events” and “the difficulty of covering the war.”
NYT’s original coverage of the so-called blast, which was the result of a misfired jihadist rocket that landed in a parking lot near the hospital, featured a photo of a destroyed building that had nothing to do with the hospital in question.
By Thursday, the feature image on the Times’ breaking news article pinning blame on Israel was replaced with a nondescript photo of a Middle Eastern man being transported into an intact medical facility on a gurney.
NYT further tried to absolve itself of accountability by noting that it sent out a news alert about a “misfired Palestinian rocket” once Israel’s internal investigations revealed it was not the perpetrator. That little news alert hours after NYT first blamed Israel did nothing, especially since dozensofcorporatemediaoutlets merely pivoted their coverage to indicate that Israel and terrorists were “trading blame” for the blast.
In a continued attempt to build its case, NYT quoted a former executive editor of The Associated Press, the same outlet that hired a terrorist sympathizer to be its Gaza correspondent and even shared office space with Hamas at one point. The AP veteran lamented that it’s not easy for media outlets to get “firsthand or verified accounts” of the war easily.
NYT used the ex-editor’s quote as a springboard to suggest that the Israel and Hamas war caused “vast amounts of misleading and false information online.”
The tone-deaf statement came mere sentences after the outlet feigned shock that, after dozens of headlines purported Israel was in the wrong, “much of the Arab world united in support of Palestinians.”
“It takes time to independently verify the claims from all sides,” NYT insisted, less than 24 hours after it failed to verify terrorists’ claims before publishing them as facts.
War propaganda is tough to sift through, but it takes deliberate stupidity to think that the word of the same guys who just raped and murdered 1,400 people and counting is worth splaying across breaking news banners and above-the-fold stories. Trusting the people who use women and children as human shields and stockpile weaponry and munitions near schools and hospitals was NYT’s first mistake, if you can call it that.
As Federalist Senior Editor David Harasanyi pointed out on Wednesday, the Times has a long track record of “spreading similar disinformation.”
“The paper’s editorial board and its op-ed pages are teeming with Hamas apologists — as are its news pages,” Harsanyi warned.
The NYT’s terrible track record is the product of unchecked corruption that plagues every corporate media outlet in the U.S.
Terrorists know outlets like NYT are corrupt. That is why they pitch their latest public relations campaigns to newsrooms with full confidence that their talking points will dominate front pages. A majority of Americans know the media is a corrupt threat to democracy because most outlets are run by partisans who want to divide the country.
The latest NYT article even proves that the media know they are corrupt. They simply aren’t sorry about it.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
On Oct. 18, the intrepid Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak outed a former Palestinian spokeswoman and open Hamas supporter as an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tasked with “vetting” immigrants and asylum seekers. He followed up to report Nejwa Ali is now on administrative leave — no word on whether that includes full pay and benefits.
UPDATE: DHS/USCIS says the former PLO spox has been placed on administrative leave from her job vetting immigrants.
PLUS NEW AUDIO: She reaffirmed her allegiance to Hamas THIS AFTERNOON, saying of hang-gliders: "I abso-fucking-lutely celebrate them, asshole, fuck you!" https://t.co/BJry1EisZepic.twitter.com/FPrQbjAPak
Of course, it’s a no-brainer that someone who supports terrorism should not be employed by any national security agency, let alone given the power to determine who enters the U.S. At the same time, suspending Ali while probably still paying her is just a symbol, while the underlying policy of ushering across our border people who hate America remains firm. It’s tokenism.
Just consider the fact that Ali’s fellow DHS employees donated 70 percent of their 2020 political contributions to Democrats. If she does end up out of this job, the odds are another person who hates America will replace her. Democrats as a party now openly state their hatred for America by constantly smearing it as “racist” and “oppressive.” Their immigration policies admit similarly-minded people, starting with the reality that anyone who enters this country illegally thereby demonstrates contempt for the United States and its people.
Ali’s own history is more proof. Rosiak writes that Ali “is from Dearborn, Michigan, a hotbed of unassimilated immigrants where thousands reportedly took to the streets in support of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.” Dearborn’s mayor immediately responded to Hamas’s barbaric attacks on unarmed women and children by blaming…Israel.
Dearborn is approximately half comprised of immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. Their immigration poses obvious national security concerns given the propensity of these groups to favor and excuse terrorism, as Mayor Abdullah Hammoud did. Not surprisingly, to anyone who knows politics, Dearborn is considered a “Democrat stronghold” in Michigan, a presidential election swing state.
Hamas is committed to eradicating Jews. It’s rational to suspect they would send members to the United States to perpetrate atrocities here. With immigration and asylum vetters like Ali, they wouldn’t even have to avoid getting caught crossing our open southern border, as millions of border crossers have since Joe Biden took office. They can turn themselves in, get released inside the United States, and stay indefinitely. Eventually, they can even get citizenship!
This isn’t speculation. Border authorities are aware terrorists have gained access to the United States, and an open border only makes their goals easier to achieve. Terrorists here have already formed sleeper cells, and not only against Jewish targets.
As Todd Bensman reported in 2020, “Iranian avengers, in the form of Quds Force-supported Hezbollah operatives of the clandestine ‘Unit 910,’ are stationed in cities across America, set to activate pending distant command on target lists they have painstakingly developed over time. Hezbollah operatives also are positioned throughout Latin America, where American officials and economic interests are ubiquitous.”
A September DHS report notes that, due to historic increases in illegal U.S. entrances during Biden’s presidency, U.S. officials have “encountered a growing number of individuals in the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), also known as the ‘watchlist.’” Obviously, those are the potential terrorists border officials encounter. Since Biden took office, they’ve watched an estimated 1.2 million enter they haven’t been able to apprehend. Exactly who was in that group, and what were their motives? We have no idea.
HOW ABOUT ALL THE “GOT AWAYS”??????? How many of them could be these Hamas plants determined to continue their quest for America’s destruction?
Of course, we also don’t know how many people U.S. officials haven’t detected who entered the United States across its completely unenforced border. Democrats’ open border is a national security disaster, and it’s far more dangerous than one open terrorist supporter vetting immigrants.
This same tokenism dynamic also applies to Biden himself. Getting rid of him, whether through internal Democrat struggle sessions or the publicly decaying man’s nearing natural death, will not solve America’s problems. It will be merely a symbol change instead of an underlying reality change if he’s replaced with someone who runs similar policies.
The policies that have led to our nation’s failure on multiple fronts are the problem, not the figureheads representing them. Our national security is in danger not through random accidents but because of failing to enforce our immigration laws and politicizing the U.S. military. Those are policy choices. So are engaging in noncritical foreign wars, trying to inflate away our bankrupt welfare state’s increasing piles of debt, and setting up moral hierarchies between Americans based on their skin color and sexual activities.
The policies are the problem, no matter who fronts them. Although it’s the right thing to do, merely getting rid of Ali and replacing her with another college-educated America-hater solves no underlying problems. Neither does getting rid of Biden and replacing him with another leftist like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom.
The underlying problem is the systemic America hatred that fuels people like Ali and Biden and places their ideology in positions of power. Their threat to us all begins to end with prioritizing America’s legitimate interests over the left’s nihilistic self-hatred.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Israeli airstrikes pounded locations across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, including parts of the south that Israel told Palestinians to take refuge, heightening fears among more than 2 million Palestinians trapped in the territory that nowhere was safe. Israel’s defense minister told ground troops to be ready to enter Gaza, though he didn’t say when the invasion will start.
With authorities still working out logistics for a delivery of aid into Gaza from Egypt, overwhelmed hospitals tried to stretch out ebbing medical supplies and fuel for diesel generators to keep the equipment running. Doctors in darkened wards stitched wounds by mobile phone light. A doctor at the largest hospital said staff were using vinegar from the corner store to treat infected wounds.
The Israeli military has relentlessly attacked Gaza in retaliation for a devastating Hamas rampage in southern Israel almost two weeks ago. Even after Israel told Palestinians to evacuate the north of Gaza and flee south, strikes extended across the territory and Palestinian militants continued firing rockets into Israel.
Meeting with Israeli infantry soldiers on the Gaza border Thursday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant urged the forces to “get organized, be ready” for an order to move in. Israel has massed tens of thousands of troops along the border.
“Whoever sees Gaza from afar now, will see it from the inside,” he said. “I promise you.”
Israel’s consent for Egypt to let in food, water and medicine provided the first possibility for an opening in its sealing off of the territory. Many among Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are down to one meal a day and drinking dirty water.
Israel did not list fuel as a permitted item, but a senior Egyptian security official said Egypt was negotiating for the entry of fuel for hospitals. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.
With the Egypt-Gaza border crossing in Rafah still closed, the already dire conditions at Gaza’s second-largest hospital deteriorated further, said Dr. Mohammed Qandeel of Nasser Hospital in the southern town of Khan Younis. Power was shut off in most departments to save it for intensive care and other vital functions, and staff members were using mobile phones for light.
At least 80 wounded civilians and 12 dead flooded into the hospital Thursday morning after witnesses said a strike hit a residential building in Khan Younis. Doctors had no choice but to leave two of the incoming to die because there were no ventilators left, Qandeel said.
“We can’t save more lives if this keeps happening, meaning more children … more women will die,” he said.
The Gaza Health Ministry pleaded with gas stations to give whatever fuel they had left to hospitals. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, gave some of its little remaining fuel stores to hospitals, according to spokesperson Juliette Touma.
The agency’s donation to Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, would “keep us going for another few hours,” hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia told The Associated Press.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,785 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, the majority of them women, children and older adults. Nearly 12,500 others were injured, and another 1,300 people were believed buried under the rubble, health authorities said.
Do I have to remind you not to believe anything coming out of Gaza? Remember, their religion says it is Allah’s will that they lie to infidels.
More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians slain during Hamas’ deadly incursion on Oct. 7. Roughly 200 others were abducted. The Israeli military said Thursday it had notified the families of 203 captives.
More than 1 million Palestinians, roughly half of Gaza’s population, have fled their homes in Gaza City and other places in the northern part of the territory since Israel told them to evacuate. Most have crowded into U.N.-run schools-turned-shelters or the homes of relatives.
The deal to get aid into Gaza through Rafah, the territory’s only connection to Egypt, remained fragile. Israel said the supplies could only go to civilians in southern Gaza and that it would “thwart” any diversions by Hamas. U.S. President Joe Biden said the deliveries “will end” if Hamas takes any aid.
Egypt must still repair the road across the border, which Israeli airstrikes cratered in a no-man’s land and on the Gaza side. No equipment had arrived to start the repair work as of Thursday afternoon, the Hamas spokesman for the crossing, Wael Abu Omar, said.
More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid were positioned at or near Rafah, according to Khalid Zayed, the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai.
U.S. officials said the first deliveries would likely take place Friday at the earliest, with an initial group of 20 trucks. The Egyptian security official also said the first trucks were expected to go in Friday.
Asked if foreigners and dual nationals seeking to leave would be let out of Gaza, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told Al-Arabiya TV: “As long as the crossing is operating normally and the (crossing) facility has been repaired.”
Israel had previously said it would let nothing into Gaza until Hamas freed the hostages taken from Israel. Relatives of some of the captives reacted with fury to the aid announcement.
“Children, infants, women, soldiers, men, and elderly, some with serious illnesses, wounded and shot, are held underground like animals,” the Hostage and Missing Families Forum said in a statement. But “the Israeli government pampers the murderers and kidnappers.”
The Israeli military reported Thursday that it killed a top Palestinian militant in Rafah and hit hundreds of targets across Gaza, including militant tunnel shafts, intelligence infrastructure and command centers. It said it also hit dozens of mortar-launching posts, most of them immediately after they were used to fire shells at Israel. Palestinians have launched barrages of rockets at Israel since the fighting began.
Israel has said it is attacking Hamas militants wherever they may be in Gaza. It has accused the group’s leaders and fighters of taking shelter among the civilian population, leaving Palestinians feeling in constant danger.
After Thursday’s strikes in Khan Younis, sirens wailed as emergency crews rushed to rescue survivors from the crushed apartment building. Many residents were believed trapped under twisted bed frames, broken furniture and cement chunks. A small, soot-covered child, dangling in the arms of a rescue worker, was taken out of a damaged building.
Gaza’s Hamas-led government said several bakeries in the territory were hit in the overnight strikes, making it even harder for residents to get food.
Violence was also escalating in the West Bank where Israel carried out a rare airstrike Thursday, targeting militants in the Nur Shams refugee camp. Israeli troops raided the camp the previous night and were still battling Palestinian fighters inside. Six Palestinians were killed in the camp, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, and the Israeli military said the strike killed militants. Ten Israeli officers were wounded when fighters threw explosives at the troops. More than 74 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the war started.
Hezbollah militants in Lebanon on Thursday said it fired missiles into northern Israel, hitting a kibbutz. The Israeli military said no one was injured and responded with shelling on border areas in Lebanon. Hamas militants also fired 30 rockets from southern Lebanese toward Israeli towns. Violence on the border comes amid fears the Hamas-Israel conflict could spread across the region.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A “disinformation” group is out with new reports flagging online information as “misinformation” for corporate tech giants known for censoring such info — even if the content is true.
VineSight, a Tel Aviv-based tech company with offices in New York, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to scan the internet for “toxic narratives” and “misinformation.” A thorough examination of the company’s recent reports, however, reveals so-called “toxic narratives” and “misinformation” are synonymous with conservative arguments and inconvenient truths.
The company’s report on clean energy, for example, highlights a post from a “bot-like” account as misinformation that reads, “China emits the most CO2.” The statement, however, is verifiably true. China is by far the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet and has been for almost two decades.
VineSight’s clean energy report also highlights statements from human accounts as misinformation including, “Climate advocates are hypocrites,” and “[electric vehicles] repeatedly catch on fire.” Climate advocates, however, are often hypocrites when they endlessly lecture about fossil fuels while flying to glitzy conferences courtesy of private air travel. And electric vehicles, including bikes and scooters, are seeing a rise in spontaneous combustion triggered by the malfunction of lithium-ion batteries.
On Facebook, allegedly misleading viral topics include a claim from conservative radio host Glenn Beck saying an “EV battery factory needs fossil fuels to run” and another from Breitbart that “Biden’s green policies benefit China.” But studies have shown that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts — in part because of the pollution-inducing production of lithium-ion batteries, a market China dominates. In other words, the more President Joe Biden subsidizes rich Americans buying electric vehicles, the more Beijing stands to profit.
Almost every energy-related statement VineSight flagged in its “misinformation” report is backed by either an outright truth or, at minimum, evidence to support the claim. For example, VineSight identified as misinformation a statement attributed to former President Donald Trump that went viral on TikTok: “The Green New Deal is the Destruction of Our Country.” The Green New Deal is a far-left proposal to radically reengineer the nation’s economy and power grid to prioritize climate change above all else. Residents in California are already suffering the effects of state officials implementing aspects of the Green New Deal on a local level; frequent blackouts and strict rules on water use are the new norm.
VineSight’s reports on climate change and voter fraud are not much different. Its climate change report this month flagged topics such as “climate change is a hoax” and “there is no climate crisis” as top examples of viral misinformation. Yet earlier this year, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist became the second Nobel laureate to sign a declaration with more than 1,600 other scientists that emphatically says, “There is no climate emergency.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” reads the declaration, organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
Another climate “topic” written off as disinformation by the misinformation group is, “China opens a new coal transportation network.” Yet here’s a headline from National Public Radio (NPR) in March: “China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.”
A VineSight press release in May celebrated the firm’s updated disinformation technology to “not only identify and alert organizations to disinformation attacks faster but also help mitigate, counter-message, takedown or label content before it damages a company’s reputation and business.”
“Today VineSight’s premier solution is used by major Fortune 500 brands including financial, manufacturing and pharmaceutical institutions, political campaigns, and other causes across the globe,” the company wrote.
The same press release highlights how “VineSight works with the terms of service of each social platform and where possible, get [sic] messages labeled or removed, to counteract any attacks or minimize virality.” In other words, by VineSight’s own admission, it shares its reports with major tech platforms to flag posts for censorship.
The company also admits its concerns about “disinformation” are related to election outcomes. “Disinformation is disrupting the legitimacy of the election process, threatening democracy, and allowing extremist views to become prevalent,” VineSight said in its May press release.
VineSight’s “tracking report” on voter fraud identified conservative themes on election integrity as “viral misinformation and toxic narratives.”
Here are a few The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted on X:
The topics also included “allowing illegal immigrants to vote is an insult to Americans,” and “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue.” The group also flagged the topic: “the 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024.”
Democrats did of course rig the 2020 election — a conspiracy they’ve admitted to — by way of exploiting Covid-19 to transform “Election Day” into election season with the radical expansion of mail-in voting, the least secure format to conduct elections. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also dumped some $350 million into the leftist nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, which funded and staffed local government election offices. These dollars flowed overwhelmingly to the blue areas of swing states, effectively making the operation a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
Then there was the collusion of Big Tech and the media, which openly suppressed blockbuster stories surrounding the corruption of the Democratic nominee and his involvement in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures. Hemingway wrote an entire 448-page book documenting the myriad ways Democrats rigged the 2020 contest.
As for the upcoming election, Trump, now the Republican front-runner in his third run for the White House, is faced with 91 felony indictments just over a year ahead of the next election. On Monday, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination was slapped with a gag order from an activist judge who effectively barred the former president from even campaigning against his top political opponent: the federal government. It bars Trump from publicly defending himself against attacks from potential witnesses, court personnel, or his federal prosecutors, including Special Counsel Jack Smith. According to VineSight, none of that constitutes election interference. Saying as much is amplifying “misinformation.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
After Hamas’ violent attacks on Israel last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar finally found someone she can condemn as a “terrorist”: Ohio Republican Jim Jordan. Omar chose this moment in world events to resurrect and post a quote from former House Speaker John Boehner describing Jordan as a “legislative terrorist” (a description Boehner apparently used to complain about Jordan’s ability to make “Boehner’s life miserable”).
Thankfully, others have stepped up to disavow the heinous behavior of Hamas. A San Francisco Board of Supervisors declaration condemned the “domestic terrorist organization” and blamed its sponsor states for putting “weapons in the hands of those who would harm and terrorize us.” Rep. Jamaal Bowman called for focusing “energy” on fighting “the Nazis” before “anything else.” The National School Boards Association wrote to the attorney general about the “immediate threat” posed by “actions of malice [and] violence,” urging a response to “terrorism and hate crimes.” Whoopi Goldberg of “The View” bravely denounced them as “terrorists.” Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage condemned the “terrorist” at the top.
Omar, to her credit, decried the “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes.”
Just kidding! None of these principled condemnations were directed at the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians last week. Issued over the past several years, they respectively referred to the National Rifle Association, Republicans in Congress, concerned parents at school board meetings, congressional Republicans (again), and Donald Trump. Omar’s “ethnic cleansing” comment was actually about Israel urging residents and others in Gaza to evacuate before incoming airstrikes against Hamas targets, while her “war crimes” remark slammed Israel for turning off electricity in Hamas-controlled territory.
Meanwhile, left-wing college students, their professors, and other congressional Democrats have found themselves unable to condemn the actual terrorists who killed, raped, and kidnapped unsuspecting Israelis and their families. Student groups and Marxist outfits like Black Lives Matter have aligned themselves with the terrorists, while others have reserved harsher words for the defending Israeli forces than for their attackers.
Why is it so hard to call a terrorist — a real one, who murders families in their homes and, yes, beheads babies — a terrorist? For a known antisemite like Omar, the answer is easy enough to discern.
For Marxists like BLM and their drones in college classrooms, it’s only slightly more complicated. Having been taught to see everything through the lens of oppressors and oppressed, they buy into the lies about Israeli “colonizers” and must therefore stand with the terrorists “freedom fighters.” Hamas, after all, is only doing to Israeli civilians what true Marxists think should be done to all “settlers.”
But there’s another hurdle to leftists admitting the terrorist acts committed by Hamas are, in fact, terrorism. To do so would invite comparison between those terrorists — of the raping, killing, and beheading variety — and the Republican “terrorists” that Democrats have assured us pose the greatest threat to the republic.
It looks pretty silly to call a potential speaker of the House of Representatives a “terrorist” when there’s so much real terrorism going on in the world. It looks equally silly to call Republicans “Nazis” while your own side cheers the deaths of hundreds of Jewish victims. No serious person could take a person like that seriously!
The Hamas attacks in Israel are inconvenient for the narrative that paints Republican congressmen, pro-life demonstrators, and concerned public school parents as terrorists who pray to Donald Trump at night, hide out in booby-trapped compounds in the Texas desert, and work to rain violent jihad on the sexually frustrated elementary school teachers exposed by Libs of TikTok. If there are terrorists actually dragging women’s battered bodies through the streets and taking toddlers hostage, Americans might realize that “terrorism” is a touch hysterical to describe voting for Trump or questioning the effectiveness of Covid lockdowns online. And then where would Democrats’ efforts to defend “democracy” be?
Anyone who honestly opposes “terrorism” should have no problem blasting Hamas’ crimes in the strongest possible terms. But to be honest about the term would also require not applying it to suburban soccer moms, Jim Jordan, and Trump-supporting grandmothers. (To be fair, some leftists do condemn Hamas’ terrorism as such. Draw your own conclusions, I guess, about what that means they think of you when they call you the same word.)
If I were given the choice of being stuck in a room with a Hamas jihadi or one of the Trump voters, parent protesters, or congressmen who have been described as “terrorists,” I’d take my chances with any of the latter three — or heck, all of them combined! I bet most of the people who casually slander American conservatives as “terrorists” would too.
Then again, when people tell you whose side, they’re on, you should probably believe them.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
It all happened rather quickly on Tuesday — a matter of minutes, not hours. There was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry immediately (and incredibly) claimed that some 500 people were killed and that the blast was caused by an Israeli missile, and every major media outlet took Hamas officials at their word and ran with that headline despite any corroborating evidence.
Before changing the headline (twice) The New York Times declared, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” The Wall Street Journal also called it a “strike,” without any evidence beyond the say-so of a terrorist regime that 10 days earlier had butchered more than 1,000 civilians, raping women and decapitating babies. Nearly every major news organization did something similar.
By nightfall in the Middle East, angry mobs assaulted the embassies and military bases of Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The streets of Baghdad, Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Doha, Tehran, Cairo, Rabat, and even some European cities like Berlin and Barcelona were filled with hordes of enraged Hamas sympathizers who believed (and now will always believe) that Israel struck the hospital. The fake news cycle even derailed President Biden’s trip to the region. Jordan abruptly canceled a planned summit with the United States, Egypt, and Palestinian leaders while Biden was en route. It also placed American lives in real danger.
By Wednesday morning, it was clear that nothing the media initially reported was true. Israel didn’t fire a missile at the hospital, and hundreds of people weren’t killed. Instead, it appears that a Palestinian rocket misfired and landed in the parking lot of the hospital complex. In the light of day, video footage of the site showed no impact crater consistent with an airstrike, and most of the nearby hospital buildings intact.
So what happened here? This was an info op, a deliberate campaign to alter the narrative of the Israel-Hamas war and inflame the Muslim world. Perhaps a billion people or more are now convinced beyond all doubt that Israel bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
We have seen this kind of op before, many times. In every case, it’s designed to serve the domestic interests of the progressive left. In this case, the purpose was to constrain Israel’s response to last weekend’s horrific Hamas attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. That, by the way, is the actual purpose of Biden’s trip to the Middle East, where he’ll be “asking tough questions as a friend of Israel,” according to the administration. Translation: Israel is to stand down now. The credible threat of unconstrained mob violence across the Middle East, directed at Western targets, will do much to advance this goal. Indeed it already has.
We saw a similar media info op in the Ukraine-Russia war last November when a missile struck a grain silo in Poland, killing two civilians. The missile strike was immediately blamed on Russia, stoking outrage across the West and bolstering calls for more military assistance to Ukraine. It wasn’t until last month that Polish experts finally confirmed that the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian.
The same thing routinely happens here in America. During the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, hysteria and outrage preceded the collection of facts or the verification of claims. In episode after episode that summer, we saw law enforcement officers, including black officers, use justified force in the line of duty — often amid chaotic and violent rioting. Such force was then instantly used as a pretext for more rioting. Then as now, it didn’t matter what the facts were, and no one cared or even noticed when they were corrected. The misreporting by then had served its purpose of providing cover for a fresh cycle of street violence and rioting.
It’s important to understand that these media info ops only happen on issues where the reporting biases serve the domestic political priorities of the left. From Ukraine to Gaza to the streets of American cities, the reporting bias works in the same direction and serves the same set of interests. The connections and affinity between BLM activists and the pro-Palestinian crowd in the U.S. should be fairly obvious by now, and we should understand these media ops in that light.
In this case, the stakes of such ops are rather high. Instead of mere outrage on social media, or even mere riots in the streets, corporate media misreporting about the hospital fueled violent mobs across the entire Middle East, and the Israel-Hamas conflict now appears to be on the brink of triggering a wider regional war.
For those on the right, it’s long past time to understand and admit what corporate media are and how they operate. These outlets are not interested in reporting the news of what actually happened, or in shedding light on real events, and certainly not in exposing the truth and informing the public. By repeating Hamas propaganda, they are effectively waging war against Israel, but they are doing so as part of a larger information war to advance their agenda in the United States.
And if you think there will be a reckoning or any accountability for the lies they spread and the damage they cause, think again. There never has been, and there won’t be this time either.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A coalition that represents more than 2,500 Orthodox Jewish rabbis condemned Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s decision to blame Israel for an explosion caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Pictured: Tlaib speaks at a press conference calling for the expansion of the Supreme Court on July 18, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Jemal Countess, Take Back the Court Action Fund/Getty Images)
The Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents 2,500 Orthodox Jewish rabbis in American public policy, condemned Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for rushing to blame Israel for the Wednesday bombing of a hospital in Gaza, despite increasing evidence that a misfired missile launched by the terror group Islamic Jihad caused the blast.
“Rep. Tlaib has repeatedly made it clear that she doesn’t value human rights, she merely hates Jews,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday.
“In this case, her devotion to an antisemitic lie is of a piece with blood libels spread by bigots of the past,” Menken added. “That a woman whose rhetoric recalls Nazi Germany is a member in good standing of the House Democratic Caucus should alarm every American, even given President Joe Biden’s strong moral stance.”
“Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that,” Tlaib posted on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday night.
She tagged Biden and directed her comments to him.
“@POTUS [President of the United States,] this is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire & help de-escalate,” Tlaib added. “Your war and destruction only approach has opened my eyes and many Palestinian Americans and Muslims Americans like me. We will remember where you stood.”
Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that. @POTUS this is what happens when you refuse to facilitate a ceasefire & help de-escalate.
Palestinian officials said an explosion at Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital killed 471 people Tuesday, Reuters reported. Hamas, the group the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization that runs the government of Gaza and the health ministry that reported the deaths, blamed Israel for the explosion. Yet Israel claims the explosion traces back to a misfired rocket sent by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iran-backed terrorist group that took part in the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Palestinian Islamic Jihad has denied involvement, saying it did not have any activity in or around Gaza City at the time.
“I’m telling you this is the first time that we see a missile like this falling, and so that’s why we are saying it belongs to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” one speaker says.
“It’s from us?” another asks.
“It looks like it,” the first speaker replies.
Hamas terrorists in their own voices:
Listen to the conversation between Hamas operatives as they discuss the failed Islamic Jihad rocket launch on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on October 17, 2023. pic.twitter.com/mz31MiePU3
The Israel Defense Forces shared footage around the area showing that the misfired rocket damaged a parking lot near the hospital, rather than the hospital itself.
A failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization hit the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City.
IAF footage from the area around the hospital before and after the failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization: pic.twitter.com/AvCAkQULAf
Pictures and video of the area on Wednesday confirmed that the explosion took place at a parking lot.
So let’s walk through it.
We now have video of the scene showing the explosion is from the parking lot and the buildings are in tact. There is no crater, no building demolished. This is inconsistent with the type of bomb many were suggesting yesterday. pic.twitter.com/HFKKxS8kvrpic.twitter.com/SpgG3Ktbiy
A member of the Israeli security forces stands close to a car hit by a rocket fired from Gaza, in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, on October 9, 2023. Stunned by the unprecedented assault on its territory, a grieving Israel has counted over 900 dead and launched a withering barrage of strikes on Gaza that have raised the death toll there to 560, according to Palestinian officials. | JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images
Israel’s government presented graphic images of dead children and civilians said to have been killed in last weekend’s attack by Hamas after reports emerged of claims that dozens of babies were killed and some beheaded by the terrorist group. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv on Thursday and was shown the photographs. He spoke about the images while talking with the press at a hotel in Jerusalem that evening.
“It’s simply depravity in the worst imaginable way,” Blinken told reporters. “Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million.”
“We did see photographs, videos, that the Israel Government shared with us. Some, I think, has actually already been seen in public media. Others were new to me and, I think, new to our team,” he explained.
“It’s hard to find the right words. It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see and, God forbid, experience. A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms.”
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office also released the graphic images shown to Blinken on social media.
“Horrifying photos of babies murdered and burned by the Hamas monsters,” reads a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It almost defies comprehension, and as I’ve been saying, to me, it, in the most immediate future, hearkens back to ISIS and some of the very things we saw when it was on its rampage that, thankfully, was stopped,” Blinken added.
“So, I think for any human being to see this, it’s really beyond almost anything that we can comprehend, digest. And I’d just add that when you see this, you try to imagine — maybe not try, you can’t help but imagine — yourself, your family, your loved ones, your friends, in that situation, in that predicament. And maybe the best word for it for me is overwhelming.”
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant addressed his counterparts at NATO’s Brussels headquarters, showing the images from the aftermath of the attack on Israel’s southern border communities with Gaza.
“Children were tied up and shot,” Gallant said in his address, according to Reuters. “Yes, I repeat, children, tied up and shot.”
The photographs were taken by the armed forces who found “mutilated bodies” in settlements attacked by Hamas last Saturday, The Times reported.
The Hamas attack on Israeli settlements along the border with Gaza began last Saturday, resulting in over 1,200 deaths and thousands of injuries. At least 150 people were also reported to have been taken hostage. The attack drew retaliatory airstrikes from Israel into Gaza, which the Palestinian authorities say has led to the loss of over 1,400 Palestinians and over 6,000 wounded.
Israeli survivors have shared their stories of how they were fortunate to survive attacks on their homes.
Before the photos were released, there was skepticism surrounding reports of children being massacred in the Israeli Kfar Aza settlement, with an on-the-ground reporter from i24News reporting that Israel’s military discovered the bodies of over 40 babies killed. Dozens of dead civilians were found in the village; some burned beyond recognition. Another kibbutz Kerem Shalom also reported the killing of children, with the Israel Defense Forces releasing photographs of a child’s bed covered in blood at the time, according to The Telegraph.
The Israel Air Force has been conducting bombing raids on Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, since the attack, and tens of thousands of troops are amassing along the border for a possible ground invasion. Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, admitted in a speech to troops Thursday that the Israel Defense Forces failed to protect its citizens and guard the border along the Gaza Strip.
“The IDF is responsible for the security of the country and its citizens, and on Saturday morning in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, we did not do it,” Halevi said, according to Jewish News Syndicate. “We will learn. We will investigate. But now is the time for war.”
Deputy Hamas chief, Saleh Al-Arouri, now claims that the plan was to target only military and “occupation” soldiers, according to remarks released by Hamas.
Israel’s military on Friday issued an evacuation order to over 1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza, instructing them to move to the southern part of the territory, The Associated Press reported.
“Civilians of Gaza City, evacuate south for your own safety and the safety of your families and distance yourself from Hamas terrorists who are using you as human shields,” a statement from Israel Defense Forces reads.
“In the following days, the IDF will continue to operate significantly in Gaza City and make extensive efforts to avoid harming civilians.”
The United Nations cautioned that such a mass exodus would be disastrous, the newswire said, adding, that Hamas dismissed the order as a tactic and urged residents to stay put. The evacuation directive, which also encompasses Gaza City, has incited widespread panic among civilians and aid workers.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said Washington is not placing any conditions on its security assistance to Israel.
Britain is sending two Royal Navy ships and other military assets to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of military support for Israel and to bolster surveillance and security in the region.
“We must be unequivocal in making sure the types of horrific scenes we have seen this week will not be repeated. Alongside our allies, the deployment of our world class military will support efforts to ensure regional stability and prevent further escalation,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in a statement.
“Our military and diplomatic teams across the region will also support international partners to re-establish security and ensure humanitarian aid reaches the thousands of innocent victims of this barbaric attack from Hamas terrorists.”
The White House has confirmed that 22 Americans have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel. At a press briefing Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that 17 Americans remained unaccounted for.
“We know that these numbers are likely to increase in the days ahead,” she said.
Biden administration officials including President Joe Biden warned over the weekend that Hamas’ attack on Israel has resulted in an increased threat of terrorism within U.S. borders. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned on Saturday that the “heightened environment” presented by the fighting in Israel and Gaza has caused “an increase in reported threats.”
“We’ve got to be on the lookout, especially for lone actors who may take inspiration from recent events to commit violence of their own,” Wray said during his address at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference. “I’d encourage you to stay vigilant because as the first line of defense protecting our communities, you’re often the first to see the signs that someone may be mobilizing to violence.”
Biden similarly confirmed during a “60 Minutes” sit-down that Americans are at greater risk of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil after the events of the last week and a half.
“Because of what we’re seeing in the Middle East, is the threat of terrorism in the United States increased?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked.
“Yes,” Biden replied. “I had a meeting this morning with the Homeland Security people, with the FBI, in the Situation Room for the better of part of an hour to discuss how we make sure that we prevent a lone wolf and or any coordinated effort to try to do what was done in synagogues before, do what was done to Jews in the street.”
Biden claimed that his administration is “making a major effort to make sure that doesn’t happen,” yet he has no concrete plans to cut off the biggest potential terrorist pipeline into the United States.
Hama’s “global day of rage” prompted terrorist attacks and anti-Israel demonstrations not just in France, China, Jordan, Iran, and Italy, but also in states like Washington and California. In addition to the Iranian spies who made their way into the Biden administration and the terrorist sleeper cells already embedded in U.S. cities, foreign incendiaries who wish ill on Americans can literally walk right into the U.S. via our compromised Southern border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sources confirmed to Fox News on Monday that two of the Iranians caught sneaking across the Southern border in the last month were pinned as “raising red flags that they could pose a significant security threat.” Their information was later located in the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The capture is not the least bit surprising to border officials who, since October 2022, arrested nearly 160 illegal border crossers whose information was found on the TSDB. The Department of Homeland Security even admitted last week that “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” via its open Southern border.
Yet, Biden has no plans to stymie the border crisis created by his commitment to undo Trump-era security policies. On the contrary, the Democrat has repeatedly reinforced that he does not care to stop the collapse of the Southern border.
When word spread that Biden, in a major reversal, sought to build part of the Trump border wall he had been “quietly”auctioning off, the Democrat regime scrambled to assure Americans that the administration did not care to secure the nation’s borders, especially with physical barriers.
I want to address today’s reporting relating to a border wall and be absolutely clear.
There is no new Administration policy with respect to border walls. My full statement ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ga1fEMqvN8
— Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (@SecMayorkas) October 5, 2023
Biden is not blind to the fact that nearly 7 million illegal border crossers have marched into the country detected by border officials, though likely not detained for long. Instead of addressing the border crisis that is clearly used as a pathway by potential terrorists to infiltrate the states, however, Biden is planning a trip to Israel to discuss its border issues.
If the Biden administration can waive more than two dozen laws to begrudgingly erect part of the border wall, it could easily reinstate other border security measures that would keep illegal border crossings down and free up Border Patrol to capture the several potential terrorists who inevitably make up part of the 1.5 million gotaways who made it into the U.S. under Biden.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Iran is warning of a possible “preemptive” strike against Israel soon. The warning, reported by Aljazeera, came as Israel prepared for a major ground offensive in Gaza.
Tensions have flared along the Lebanon-Israel border between the Hezbollah group and Israeli military, The Associated Press reported. While shelling has been limited to towns along the border, there have been fears Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups would escalate their actions to support Hamas should Israel begin a ground operation in Gaza.
“All possible options and scenarios are there for Hezbollah … Naturally, resistance leaders will not allow the Zionist regime to take any action in Gaza, and when it feels reassured about Gaza, move on to other resistance areas in the region,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on state TV late on Monday, referring to his meeting with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah the previous day.
“Therefore, any preemptive measure is imaginable in the coming hours,” he added.
According to the New York Post, he further said: “The resistance front is capable of waging a long-term war with the enemy [Israel] … in the coming hours, we can expect a preemptive action by the resistance front.”
The Post noted that Iran had applauded the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas, which had targeted innocent civilians.
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
Cities throughout the world experienced acts of alleged Islamist terrorism and anti-Israel demonstrations on Friday, following calls by the former chief of Hamas for the Islamic world to partake in a global “Day of Rage.”
For context, Hamas is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization that launched a horrific attack against Israel earlier this week, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,200 innocent civilians. Days after the initial attack, Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’ ex-chief (2004-2017) who resides in Qatar, called for worldwide demonstrations in support of Palestinians living in Gaza and Muslim-majority Middle Eastern countries to wage war against Israel. He also claimed the day represents a “moment for the application” of jihad.
“[We must] head to the squares and streets of the Arab and Islamic world on Friday,” Meshaal said. “To all scholars who teach jihad … to all who teach and learn, this is a moment for the application [of jihad].”
“The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors,” he added.
Several acts of violence and anti-Israel demonstrations have since been reported in cities across the world on Friday that appear to be in response to Meshaal’s call to action.
France
In Arras, a Chechnyan man was arrested by law enforcement after stabbing several adults at a local school. While no children were harmed, early reports indicate at least one adult was killed and two injured. According to France24, the suspect allegedly shouted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” in Arabic, at some point during the attack.
The suspect was also reportedly on a “state watchlist of known people to be a possible security risk,” according to Reuters.
China
An Israeli national who worked at the country’s Beijing-based embassy was reportedly stabbed on Friday. While the attacker’s nationality remains unknown, Chinese authorities claimed the suspect is a 53-year-old “foreign national” who has “operated a small retail business in Beijing.” According to embassy officials, the victim has been hospitalized and remains in stable condition.
A video circulating social media on Friday appears to show the suspect in question stabbing the victim before hobbling away.
Jordan
Jordanian police were forced to disperse pro-Palestinian demonstrators after the latter attempted “to reach a border zone with the Israeli-occupied West Bank.” According to Reuters, witnesses claimed, “Police fired tear gas to halt about 500 demonstrators who had reached a security checkpoint outside the capital Amman on a highway leading to a main border crossing.” The nation’s government had previously declared anti-Israel demonstrations near the area off-limits.
An unprecedented number of people filled the streets of the capital of Jordan
If King Abdullah II is in Raghadan (royal palace), then an attempt to evacuate members of the Hashemite dynasty from Amman using helicopters or American special forces cannot be ruled out.
According to the New York Post, video evidence from Iran shows thousands of the nation’s residents “taking to the streets … burning not only Israel’s flag but the American flag as well.” Demonstrators also reportedly chanted phrases such as “End of Israel” and “Down with USA.”
Other Middle Eastern Nations
In addition to Iran and Jordan, a bevy of other Middle Eastern nations also experienced pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrations on Friday. This list includes Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Oman, Qatar, and Yemen, according to Bloomberg News.
Washington State
Students at the University of Washington held a demonstration in support of Hamas on Friday, in which attendees reportedly chanted for the “one solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In praising Hamas, one attendee claimed the terrorist organization is “fighting for their people [and] fighting for their country back.”
“What America is promoting is that Israel is a victim. For what? For Hamas defending their people?” the girl said.
A Muslim woman at the @UW Palestine rally, in which protesters chanted for the “one solution,” says Hamas are heroes defending people. Hamas is an antisemitic Islamist terror group. The rally was promoted with a flyer featuring a Hamas paraglider. pic.twitter.com/mgdU4K9dB9
Students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) held an anti-Israel gathering, in which participants could be heard shouting “intifada, intifada,” a term often used by Arab demonstrators invoking the memory of past Palestinian uprisings in the Jewish state.
This is @UCLA where students are screaming "intifada, intifada” – a call to murder Israelis and Jews.
This article has been updated since publication to include additional anti-Israel demonstrations and actions.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
After the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews in Israel, among them beheaded infants and impaired elderly women burned alive, President Joe Biden delivered a righteous speech defending Israel and condemning the antisemitism of Hamas as “pure, unadulterated evil.” We should expect this kind of sentiment from any leader of a nation of civilized people after the single worst act of butchery against Jews since the Holocaust. And, earnestly, the moral clarity was nice to hear after listening to the degeneracy of Hamas allies and the fellow travelers that infest the American left these days.
Democrats who’ve spent years defending the likes of Rashida Tlaib or Ben Rhodes or BLM or CAIR or whomever else are now feigning surprise that Soviet-style “anti-Zionists” are in their midst. And these aren’t members of some fringe groups dressing up like a bunch of Nazis in front of Disney World. They’re celebrated and educated and deeply embedded in left-wing intellectual circles, in major universities, in bureaucracies, in Congress, in establishment publications, and in cable news channels.
Some on the center-left have spoken out. Most leaders have not. I’m not suggesting censoring anyone. But if you’re too much of a coward to denounce these people at this point, when will you?
So, anyway, Biden’s speech was nice. But what are Democrats going to do? It is likely that the United States is providing Israel with intelligence assistance. One hopes we’ll provide diplomatic cover rather than engage in the Obama-era machinations that treated the Jewish State as if it were barely an ally. All that is also appreciated.
When, however, will the administration rescind the $6 billion waiver it gave the Iranian mullahs, who have spent decades murdering and kidnapping American citizens, in addition to fueling war against our allies in the Middle East? There is no plausible way that Hamas could launch an attack of this scope without the logistical and monetary assistance of Iran. The Biden administration has allowed somewhere around $40 billion in waivers to flow to Iran over the past few years, not only six. Some of that was likely to keep world supplies up and prices domestically down (of course, we could drill here instead.) Sanctions exist to pressure regimes to engage in normal behavior. Will that change, or will Biden continue to employ pernicious Obama-style placation of the terror regime?
What is Biden going to do about Qatar — where Hamas leaders are welcome to celebrate the murder of Jews and Americans while sipping spring water in upscale hotel rooms in Doha? The Department of Justice has designated Hamas as a terror organization. Qatar is ostensibly an ally. There is no reason we should not be able to extradite the architects of violence against American citizens.
What is Joe Biden doing about the hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars that continue to flow to Palestinian governments every year in direct aid and through the United Nations? Will we fund groups that divert fungible assets to launch terror attacks and pay stipends to the families of those who murder Jewish civilians? Should we be funding regimes that work to instill and propel (generational) hate and violence?
Only months ago, Fatah was in talks to form a unity government with Hamas, the organization that executed 260 young people at a music festival. (Though, to be fair, Hamas could probably win a majority support from the Congressional Progressive Caucus or the Harvard student body, as well.) For over a decade, there haven’t been elections in the “West Bank” because Hamas, or similarly fanatical parties, would prevail. The only group that can make Fatah look moderate is Hamas. Does that sound like the type of place deserving of U.S. aid? Or moral support? Or a state?
The president has said all the right things. It’s appreciated. But his administration hasn’t done many of them. Not yet.
Hundreds of U.S. families are stranded in Israel without a safe way home after most major airlines canceled routes out of the country and U.S.-bound flights remain unavailable following Hamas’ vicious terrorist attack in the region.
Several thousand Americans traveled to Israel in late September to celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, which spans over several days and has become a popular time for Jewish families to visit the Holy Land. For many in Jerusalem, the holiday celebrations were interrupted by air raid sirens signaling incoming missiles in the region, forcing them to take refuge in designated bomb shelters in their hotels or apartments.
Orthodox Jews there had been off electronics, including their cell phones, and had not known the extent of the bloodshed in southern Israel until Sunday evening when the holiday concluded.That’s when they learned the harrowing details of Hamas’ massacre on Israeli civilians and were informed that their flights home had been canceled indefinitely.
They spent the next several hours scrambling for alternative flights to no avail. Many of them were forced to accept the dreaded reality: They were now stuck in a region bracing for war.
Israeli firefighters extinguish fire at a site struck by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip in Ashkelon, Israel, on Monday. (AP/Tsafrir Abayov)
“This whole ordeal has been unimaginably stressful,” Moshe K., a resident of New Jersey who was visiting Jerusalem with 10 family members, told Fox News Digital. “I’m embarrassed of how the State Department has done nothing thus far to get us home other than collecting tens of thousands of names of stranded Americans who can’t get a flight out.”
Moshe was scheduled to return home on October 9, two days after Hamas launched its brutal attack in southern Israel, murdering over 700 civilians. He said he fears his family will be stuck in Israel for several more days if the U.S. State Department doesn’t intervene.
When he’s not frantically searching for flights home, Moshe and his family, including his children, elderly parents and young grandchildren, have been spending the past three days in and out of bomb shelters in their rented Jerusalem condo as air raid sirens continue blaring across the country.
Moshe said he was told that Switzerland, Poland, Brazil and other European countries have sent charter planes to evacuate their citizens from the war-torn territory, but Americans have received no word from the consulate about an evacuation plan. U.S. families and individuals have been instructed to fill out an online form requesting help from the State Department, but most of them have not heard back.
“While I fully understand that the State Department also has to sadly deal with killed and captured Americans, they have sufficient manpower to assign people to handle that aspect as well as the evacuation plan. The fact that 80 hours later, absolutely no word has come out as to what that plan is or concrete steps being taken to evacuate thousands who are stranded, is absolutely appalling,” Moshe said.
“Not a word about their ‘evacuation plan’, that at this point looks like it could take a week or so. They should be ashamed,” the worried father said on Monday.
Many other stranded Americans expressed a similar sentiment.
A resident of Clifton, N.J., who asked to be identified only as Rivkie, traveled to Israel with her family at eight months pregnant for the holidays. Her doctor cleared her for international travel because she was scheduled to return home before the start of her ninth month, but with no available return flights or assurances from the U.S. government, Rivkie fears she will be forced to remain in Israel and deliver her baby in a hospital already overwhelmed with wounded war victims.
“This has been so hard on my family, I’m pregnant and I’m slowly running out of days to fly home,” she said. “Why isn’t the U.S. government doing more to help us? European airlines are working to bring their citizens home.”
Rivkie said she’s worried how her young toddlers are processing the chaos, anxiety and deep sadness in the air.
“I’m worried about my kids. This has been traumatic. I took them outside today, and they asked if there will be another ‘boom boom’ soon. They cry every time we have to run into a shelter,” she added.
‘I’m worried about my kids. This has been traumatic. They cry every time we have to run into a shelter.”— Rivkie, Fox News Digital
Many Americans trapped in Israel have been glued to their phones and computers in the hopes of a return flight opening up. If anything does become available, they are booking several flights at a time only for them to be canceled hours later. Some Americans have managed to leave the country with flights headed to Europe and then booked a connecting flight to the U.S. from there.
Chana Rowe, a resident of Queens, N.Y., told Fox News Digital that she has been staying at a hotel in Jerusalem with her family since her flight to JFK this week was canceled. They have been advised not to leave the hotel unless necessary and have spent most of their days holed up in their rooms desperately searching for connecting European flights or private charters to bring them home.
“The past few days have been a nightmare, in so many ways,” Rowe said. “We’ve had to run into the shelter multiple times. It is scary to think that it could be several days before we can leave as the airlines continue to cancel most flights.”
“We are all changed forever. I can’t fathom going back to normal life.”— Chana Rowe, Fox News Digital
“My family and I will never forget this time. We are all traumatized to say the least. There are young children with us who cannot fully grasp what is going on but the devastation, horror and fear in the air is palpable. We are terrified to go outside but we don’t feel completely safe in the hotel either. We are not sure where it is safest,” she added.
Rowe said her family has received no support or communication from the U.S. consulate.
“The U.S. government has not provided any means of support for the Americans that are stuck here,” she told Fox.
For some Americans stranded in the region, there is a deep sense of guilt felt by those trying to leave while their relatives, many of them residents of Israel, stay behind to face the war. The conflicting feelings among the Jewish Americans there – a longing to remain in Israel to support the Jewish State, while fearing for their own safety – has been weighing heavily on them.
The Albrechts were supposed to travel home from Israel this week. As war has broken out since the Hamas terrorist attack, they have endured fear but also felt pride for Israeli tenacity.
“Seeing what Hamas is doing to our fellow Jews is absolutely horrific. Anyone who doesn’t view these actions as acts of pure evil and hatred is inhumane,” Rowe said. “We are all changed forever. I can’t fathom going back to normal life once we do return to New York. I can’t stop thinking about the lives that were taken, those kidnapped, the women and teenagers that were raped, held hostage, for being Jewish. The whole world should be supporting Israel and should be helping out in any way they could.”
“We’re scared, we don’t know what to expect every time we run into a bomb shelter,” she added, “and at the same time, we are filled with deep sadness and feel sick to our stomach for our brothers and sisters just a few hours away who were brutally murdered or are grieving the loss of loved ones.”
Shai Albrecht, a personal trainer and Instagram fitness influencer from Maryland, traveled to Israel for the holidays with her husband and three children, ages five, seven and nine with a scheduled return flight on Monday. Her flight with United Airlines was canceled indefinitely. Albrecht and her children have been using their unplanned time in Israel to support the IDF soldiers who’ve been deployed, buying meals and fundraising for them when they’re not rushing into a bomb shelter.
“We have now had to go into the shelters many times. We have heard about this as American Jews, but to experience it is completely different,” Albrecht said. “There is a fear and sense of insecurity all the time, even when the sirens were not going off. I never realized that I could be so nervous using the bathroom. I keep thinking, if the siren goes off now, will I be able to… grab my kids and get them all in the shelter in 30 seconds? My son seems most impacted, he constantly wants to check the Red Alert App and look outside for missiles,” she told Fox News Digital.
Like Rowe and others, Albrecht said she too has been grappling with conflicting feelings of guilt, fear and trepidation.
“This may be a war-torn country, but it is also my country as a Jew,” she told Fox. “But, I’m also scared. I simultaneously want to run home to my quiet farm in the U.S., but also stay and support my family – literally and figuratively, in Israel. I have a lot of deeply conflicting feelings of fear, guilt, and trepidation for what may come tomorrow.”
“I simultaneously want to run home to my quiet farm in the U.S., but also stay and support my family.”— Shai Albrecht, Fox News Digital
Albrecht said she trusts that the U.S. government will assist “if it gets to the point that our lives are in danger. Depending on how tonight and tomorrow are, I fear that this may get much worse,” she told Fox.
“Again, I am deeply conflicted, I know that I have the privilege to leave in a way my Israeli cousins do not, but also know that the kids school started today and they are missing their home, their friends, and their sense of normalcy. This has given us all a newfound sense of appreciation for the tenacity and dedication of Israelis,” she added.
Until they can return home, Albrecht said she and her family will do their “best to support the Israeli people and show our children that in times of national crisis each of us, no matter where we are located, must step up to help.”
A source familiar with the situation told Fox News that the State Department is working on arranging flights to bring stranded Americans home as soon as possible. The Department is “acutely aware of the currently limited capacity on commercial flights and the high demand from U.S. citizens wanting to depart,” a department spokesperson told Fox News.
“The State Department has teams communicating 24/7 with U.S. citizens and providing them assistance through phone calls, an online form, and the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program,” their statement reads. “Our goal is to assist U.S citizens who want to leave Israel with a safe means of doing so,” they said.
At this time, the State Department encouraged U.S. citizens to “take advantage” of commercial flights that involve transiting a third country if they are unable to book a direct flight to the United States.
“In order to meet high demand for flights, we are also exploring other contract options by air, land, and sea to nearby countries,” the department said, adding that they will continue to provide updates to U.S. citizens who have registered via their online form as information becomes available.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. ((Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images))
The statement comes a day after members of Congress urged Secretary of State Antony Blinken to do everything possible to evacuate Americans out of Israel. Included in the request to Blinken was a push to charter flights out of Israel, as airlines have canceled most flights out of Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“As the number of casualties continue to rise, our constituents who remain in Israel fear for their lives,” the letter to Blinken reads. “We ask that you consider charter flights and military options for evacuation, simultaneously. At this harrowing moment in Israel’s history, it is more important than ever that every American who is looking to return home has the opportunity to do so.”
Hamas-led forces poured over the Israel-Gaza border on Saturday while residents were sleeping, dragging people, including women and children into the streets, taking some hostage while beheading and brutally murdering others. More than 700 Israelis, including men, women, children and the elderly, were indiscriminately killed in one day — the largest terror attack in a single day in Israel’s history. Two days later, Israel’s military discovered many scenes of unspeakable bloodshed perpetrated by Hamas.
The Hamas attack shocked Israel and the global community and has sparked a war on the Palestinian terrorist organization. More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed, and 25 Americans have been confirmed dead, with others still missing.
The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem told Fox News Digital that U.S. citizens seeking to be in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Israel should visit the website cacms.state.gov/s/crisis-intake or call +1-833-890-9595 and +1-606-641-0131. Any notifications from the Embassy can be found at https://il.usembassy.gov/category/alert/.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media.
Yael Halon is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to yael.halon@fox.com.
Bipartisan members of the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday requesting more Iron Dome batteries for Israel. The letter was Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Sen. Rick Scott, R-S.C., Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Sen. Michael Rounds, R-S.D.
The letter read: “While we appreciate the Department of Defense has announced that it will rapidly provide Israel with equipment and munitions, and that discussions are underway to resupply Israel with Iron Dome interceptors, we also understand that Israel may urgently require additional missile defense capacity to protect its citizens and territory, including new Iron Dome batteries.
“As you know, the United States Army is currently in possession of two Iron Dome batteries that have not been deployed and have no operational use inside the United States where they are currently stored.”
The committee members said that transferring these two batteries to Israel, in addition to other “defensive assets,” would provide “tangible, life-saving, and sustained support” to prevent Israel from being “overwhelmed” by rocket and missile salvos from Hamas in Gaza.
“I’ve joined a bipartisan letter with [Sens. Rosen, Scott, and Rounds] to Secretary Austin requesting that the Department of Defense transfer two Iron Dome batteries to Israel, as well as additional unused military assets,” Gillibrand said in a social media post including the letter on Wednesday.
The Washington Examiner reported Thursday that the anti-missile system has been heavily used since the massive Hamas attack on Oct. 7 that has launched thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel and killed more than 1,000 Israelis and at least 22 Americans. Hamas forces have also kidnapped more than 100 Israelis and other civilians, possibly including Americans to be used as hostages, the report said.
In the letter, the Senators asked Austin to respond to the request by Friday.
Newser reported Wednesday that Israel currently has 10 Iron Dome batteries scattered throughout the country to take out incoming rockets and missiles. According to the report, the system uses radar to estimate an incoming missile’s speed and trajectory to fire an interceptor missile to destroy it in the sky. Each individual battery contains three or four launchers, each holding up to 20 interceptor missiles.
The report said that the massive amount of rockets launched at Israel could be designed to use up their current interceptor missile inventory, leaving them vulnerable for future attacks if the munitions are not replenished.
The U.S. reportedly already has a “quiet understanding” with Qatar to hold the $6 billion in sanctioned Iranian oil money. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats about this “quiet agreement” and the $6 billion “isn’t going anywhere anytime so on,” Punchbowl News first reported Thursday. Three sources confirmed the report to The Washington Post.
Iran’s Nournews had said Thursday that Tehran had full access to its funds that were transferred to Qatari banks last month under a prisoner swap deal with the U.S., despite some reports that Washington and Doha have agreed to stop Iran from tapping the $6 billion.
“There has been no change in Iran’s access to its foreign funds in Qatari banks, and the existing agreement remains in effect,” said the news website, affiliated with Iran’s top security body.
But that is now shelved under pressure from American lawmakers, according to the Post.
“It is perplexing why the Biden administration refuses to crack down on Iran and issue a formal decision to freeze the $6 billion ransom payment,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., wrote in a statement provided to Newsmax. “Instead, the administration is selectively leaking parts of their backdoor deal with Qatar to the media.
“We need to ensure the Biden administration will not release another dollar to Iran — even when the media attention on Israel dissipates. We must send the message that America does not reward terrorism or the arbitrary detention of our citizens abroad.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive in Qatar on Friday to discuss with its prime minister developments in the Israel-Hamas conflict, ways to de-escalate it and the protection of civilians, the Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson said.
“The senators in question and the U.S. government are all acutely aware that they can NOT renege on the agreement,” Iran sources told the Post in a statement.
“The money rightfully belongs to the people of Iran, earmarked for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to facilitate the acquisition of all essential and non-sanctioned requisites for the Iranians.”
The prisoner swap has already been completely, so refusing Iran’s money now will have a deleterious effect on the Biden administration’s hopes for diplomatic reset with Iran.
“If this step is taken, that status quo falls apart — and it will have a very detrimental effect on the internal discussions in Iran, within the regime,” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi told the Post. “If there is no prospect of a deal with the U.S., it will likely tilt Iran toward building a bomb — and that would be an extremely dangerous situation.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
The events of the past 120 hours have made it abundantly clear that Israel can no longer coexist alongside Hamas. The violence unleashed by Hamas against unarmed civilians, including women and children and the elderly — much of it filmed and livestreamed online — has shocked the world. On Tuesday, we learned that at a kibbutz near the Gaza border called Kfar Aza, Hamas terrorists slaughtered entire families, including at least 40 babies and small children, some of whom they beheaded.
The Western world has not seen this kind of barbarity in nearly 80 years, and most of us recoil from it in horror and incomprehension. Make no mistake: Kfar Aza will take its place in history alongside Auschwitz and Treblinka. The evil of Hamas is that kind of evil, perhaps not in scale but in kind. In some ways, it is worse because while the Nazis took care to hide what they were doing from the world, Hamas has broadcast its atrocities, boasted and reveled in them. All Hamas members are guilty and deserve swift execution.
Delivering justice to Hamas is now Israel’s grim task, and they will go about it as best they can. But another, perhaps more difficult, task is confronting the Western world at large. In the immediate wake of the Hamas atrocities, demonstrations were staged all over the Western world — in support of Hamas. Those who marched in the streets, who signed pro-Hamas student statements, who posted memes online praising Hamas are not, by and large, antisemitic neo-Nazis. They are left-wing zealots, BLM and LGBT activists, the woke grandchildren of radical Baby Boomer politics, brain-washed by “anticolonialism” propaganda, which they regurgitated before a watching world.
This should not surprise you. The people who cheer the beheading of babies are of course those who also cheer the slaughter of babies in the womb. They are, like Islam itself, post-Christian, and their morality, like the morality of Hamas, is decidedly pagan. That means they do not believe in universal human rights or inherent human dignity. They do not believe in the Christian doctrine of imago Dei and the moral imperatives that flow from it. They do not believe in objective morality or truth. They reject the Christian precepts that constitute the basis for Western civilization.
These are the barbarians who reside beyond the gates of the Christian West. They believe only in power, and they will do whatever they can to gain it. Once they have it, they will exercise it as they see fit, unconstrained by questions of right and wrong, or notions of justice and morality whose premises they reject. They will not have qualms about their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. Appeals to compassion and mercy will fall on deaf ears.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Romans 1:18-32
These are the same people, after all, who insist that “words are violence” and that debates and free speech and even jokes must be suppressed because of the “harm” they cause to vulnerable and marginalized people. If you say a man cannot become a woman, they want you to be fired, to be silenced, to lose everything. If you say we must not castrate and mutilate children in the name of gender ideology, they want your own kids to be taken from you. Confronted by the wholesale slaughter of women and children, the decapitation of babies by armed men, they respond with a shrug and a meme. They do not care about violence as such, they simply want to be the ones to wield it.
Do not think these people are just confused or ignorant. They are pagans, and like the Hamas terrorists whom they champion, they cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. If it is obvious that Israel and Hamas cannot coexist, it is equally obvious that these two worlds, the Christian and the pagan, also cannot coexist. We will become all one thing or all the other.
Under such circumstances, we need to recognize this struggle for what it is: a fundamentally religious struggle between two irreconcilable religious worldviews. For many centuries the Christian West was able to see this clearly. It’s why the Catholic Church worked tirelessly for centuries to stamp out paganism in northern Europe. It’s why the Spanish conquistadors, confronted by human sacrifice cults in the New World, toppled them and razed their temples. They understood that there could be no peace with such a regime. It had to be destroyed utterly.
So, the problem we confront today is old, and the solution is the same. But do we even have the ability, at this late hour, to recognize the problem and do what is necessary? Probably not. We are likely too far along in the process of dechristianization.
Just look at how we responded to 9/11. Many have been calling the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11, which is an apt comparison. But Israel should not make the mistake America and its leaders did. We did not recognize the 9/11 attacks as a religious act. In fact, we actively denied that the massacre was religiously motivated, and so we failed to respond on religious grounds. Remember the infamous words of then-President George W. Bush immediately after the massacre of 3,000 Americans. Surrounded by Islamic leaders who more or less shared the basic worldview of the al-Qaeda terrorists, he proclaimed that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and insisted there could be no connection between the killing and the religion the killers professed.
It was incredible to behold at the time. And what followed was equally incredible. We invaded Iraq on the premise that the Iraqis were just like us, or that we could make them like us. Absurdities followed. The State Department flew political scientists to Baghdad to devise an “Islamic” basis for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In Afghanistan, we went well beyond offering education to Afghan girls and women and instead spent decades and untold billions catechizing them into gender theory and queer studies. For years our leaders repeated ad nauseum the fatuous notion that deep down all people want to be free. Never did it occur to them that some people would rather have justice or power or revenge.
All of these things were indications that we had finally severed ties with our Christian past and stepped firmly, perhaps without realizing it, into the pagan future. We never grappled with the root causes of 9/11, never entertained the notion that a people’s relationship to God shaped everything and was therefore insurmountable. All such discussion was totally absent from the public square. We bought into the lie that all religions are the same, democracy and classical liberalism are fungible and can be imposed at will on any culture, and that religious differences are mostly matters of aesthetics.
What a monstrous lie — and a dangerous one, too, as we are learning every day now. The conflict unfolding in the Middle East is fundamentally religious in ways that are fairly obvious. What is less obvious, because we are a post-Christian people, is that the conflict unfolding in America is equally religious. Hamas and the pagans stand on one side; Christians and Jews stand on the other. Only one side is going to win.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
We’re hearing a lot about what President Biden said in Tuesday’s address on Hamas’s outrageous attack on Israel. What’s missing, though, is … well, what was missing. For while he was careful to denounce this brutal, inexcusable act of terrorism, Biden ignored the key role played by his own disastrous policies, and left Americans largely clueless as to how his administration would respond to this major test of U.S. leadership.
Let’s recap what we didn’t hear:
1. Ghosting on Iran
It is common knowledge that Biden was trying to buy the Iranians off with a massive payout for hostages. Add to this gaps in sanctions big enough for the biggest oil tankers to sail through, and virtual silence on Iran’s human-rights record, support for terrorism, and destabilizing activities in the region and Latin America.
Biden had hoped that Iran would keep a low profile, at least until after the 2024 elections. Tehran’s payback to the U.S. and Biden was not only to cheerlead as Hamas terrorists decapitated babies, but to likely assist in supporting and planning the terror campaign.
The president could not even bring himself to mention Iran in his speech on Tuesday. That’s a clear signal the administration is clueless what to do now that it’s been hit with irrefutable evidence that its Iran policy has utterly and completely failed.
2. Ignoring Russia
Russia has declared itself all in for Hamas, a marked shift in Moscow policy. Further, there are reports that Russian mercenaries may have assisted in training and preparing Hamas’s shock troops. And there are additional reports Russians smuggled captured arms to the Hamas and then spread a false-flag that these arms were sold by Ukrainians to Hamas on the black market.
Both Russia and Iran clearly believe that a spiraling war in the Middle East will overstretch and distract the United States. Meanwhile, Biden, who has never articulated a clear strategy for Ukraine, now gives us a “no plan” plan for dealing with a dual global crisis.
All we have from the White House is that Ukraine can expect a blank check for as long as it takes. For Israel, we get finger-wagging at Israel not to over-react. The signal this sends to both Moscow and Tehran is that Washington is just making this up as it goes along.
It’s Amateur Night writ large at a time when we need true professionals at work.
3. Gaslighting on the Border
Israel gets hammered with Pearl Harbor from Gaza with virtually no warning. Meanwhile, the U.S. has the most open border on earth. Millions of illegals have poured into the U.S. without even being observed by border agents, let alone vetted.
We know that this flood includes people from all over the world. We know it includes people on terrorist watchlists. We know this because in recent months we have culled unprecedented numbers of them at the border. The odds that they’re the only ones are less than zero. Yet in his speech Tuesday, the president had nothing to reassure Americans that he’s prepared to safeguard Americans from the next 9/11.
4. Antisemitism Gets a Pass
A long list of yahoos, from the “Squad” in Congress to BLM to radicals at Ivy League universities, have reacted to Hamas’s atrocities by attacking Israel. The president has a deep, insidious, and pernicious problem with antisemitism in his own party. Tuesday’s speech presented a perfect opportunity for him to call them out and declare it unacceptable. He didn’t take it.
The White House staff is probably proud that Biden could muster the energy, after hosting a BBQ, to deliver what was largely a boilerplate speech. But Americans looking for real leadership can’t help being disappointed by a president who appears to be going through the motions at a uniquely critical time.
The barbaric attack on Israeli civilians over the weekend by Hamas terrorists has left people wondering, as we often do after mass tragedies: How did no one see this coming? As a surprisingly sophisticated, coordinated surprise attack left nearly 1,000 people dead and countless more innocents wounded or kidnapped, anyone can recognize the massive intelligence failure without calling into question who is morally culpable for the invasion. Iran-backed militants attacked civilians from multiple points of entry, hang-gliding into a music festival and dragging the bodies of murdered women through the streets, all effectively livestreamed on the internet.
It wasn’t just an intel failure on Israel’s part — as a close ally with an intelligence presence all over the world, the United States also failed to foresee the attack. A senior U.S. military official admitted to NBC News that “We were not tracking this.” CIA counterterrorism veteran Marc Polymeropoulos told the outlet he was “stunned” that American intel agencies were caught off guard.
Intelligence operatives are fallible, yes. But instead of identifying the threat from Hamas terrorists, the Biden administration was busy sending money to their state sponsors in Iran and employing Iranian conspirators at the Pentagon.
There’s another task that’s been keeping America’s so-called “counterterrorism” apparatus busy lately, though. Instead of focusing their efforts on actual terrorists — those abroad and those doubtless infiltrating our porous southern border — the Biden administration has continued, and escalated, the trend of turning our post-9/11 surveillance state against Americans, smearing them as “terrorists” for their political beliefs.
Just last week, Newsweek reported that the FBI is targeting Trump supporters as “domestic terrorists” ahead of the 2024 election. The universal line from the Biden administration is that “domestic terrorism” and its aliases — all of which are used as code for political right-wingers — are the No. 1 threat to national security. The effort to make an example out of Trump supporters who demonstrated at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is only one of numerous instances in which Democrats within and beyond intelligence agencies are working to equate “domestic terrorism” with their political opponents.
Two years ago, Biden’s Education Department infamously planted a letter from the National School Boards Association to Attorney General Merrick Garland, urging him to target concerned parents who showed up at school board meetings to protest Democrats’ Covid policies and their racialist and sexually graphic curricula in public schools. The letter smeared those parents as domestic terror threats and urged the Department of Justice to wield counterterrorism laws against them, and Garland happily acted on the suggestion.
A few months later, the politicized Department of Justice announced a new “domestic terrorism unit” to deal with “an elevated threat from domestic violence extremists,” including “those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” (Who knew the Founding Fathers were domestic terrorists?)
Taking things, a step further, disgraced former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe claimed that targeting the “fringes of the right-wing movement” was insufficient to “catch this threat,” and instead called for federal suspicion of “mainstream” conservatives.
In June 2021, the Biden administration released a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” It proposed to “counter domestic terrorism by addressing underlying racism and bigotry” — and they weren’t talking about the racism that led Hamas militants to slaughter Israeli civilians this past weekend and has driven violence against Israel in the region for decades. A National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin issued the same year lumped “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud” and “responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases” in the same sentence as “domestic violent extremist ideologies.”
Our intelligence apparatus expends resources on things like telling Big Tech companies which free-thinking Americans’ social media posts to censor, as we discovered via the “Twitter Files” and Missouri v. Biden. It’s actively researching how to most efficiently surveil what you say online. The FBI has been putting its resources to work targeting — and likely “infiltrating” — traditional Catholic congregations, and terrorizing peaceful pro-lifers like Mark Houck, a pastor who was dragged away in a surprise raid at his home in front of his family.
It’s not just domestic intel agencies being wielded against Americans; the CIA did its part to help Twitter censor speech, and even solicited signatures to help falsely smear damaging reporting about the Biden family as disinformation ahead of the 2020 election. (For some reason, none of those involved are being arrested for “conspiracy against voting rights.”)
Across the board, we’ve seen the people we elected, and countless bureaucrats we did not, weaponizing supposedly counterterror laws like the Patriot Act against Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment freedoms (at least).
Imagine if those resources were redirected away from targeting ordinary, law-abiding Americans for their political views and aimed at stopping actual terrorists who seek to harm us and our allies. Contrary to the pretense that surveilling Americans as walking national security threats is for our own protection, our world would be a lot safer.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
We can no more count on Biden to defend our border than to assist Israel. That means states and local communities must take their fates into their own hands.
“Such is the nature of Evil. Out there in the vast ignorance of the world it festers and spreads. A Shadow that grows in the dark. A sleepless malice as black as the oncoming wall of night. So, it ever was, so it always will be.”
These words from the movie adaptation of The Hobbit were quoted by my colleague Dr. David Wurmser, who is presently in Israel reporting as he can between rocket attacks and shelter-in-place orders.
Only Tolkien’s stories of the changeless sweeping malevolence of evil across the ages seem appropriate to encapsulate the tremendous paradigm shift represented by the horrific massacre perpetrated by Hamas over the weekend. The losses suffered, perhaps as many as 1,000 dead and many thousands more wounded, are of such a horrific scale in light of Israel’s small population that regardless of how the fight proceeds now, Israeli society is likely to be changed forever. The attack, in which as many as 1,000 Hamas jihadists crossed the Gaza border under the cover of a massive rocket barrage and drone attacks, seized control of towns in Southern Israel and went from door to door to rape, torture, and murder every Jew they could find, all on video, instantly evoked horrors known to most of us only from black and white newsreels in previous centuries.
As the perpetrators have openly admitted, the massacre was planned and prepared with the help of Iran, whose other terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and Houthi terrorists in Yemen, remain at the ready to expand the fight on Tehran’s orders.
A New Age, A Timeless Evil
The likely purpose of the attack from Iran’s perspective was to undermine peace efforts between Israel and Arab states, most especially Saudi Arabia. Not coincidentally, this has also been a major effort of the Biden Administration, which has sought to undermine the historic Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump by injecting the Palestinian issue into the center of the Arab-Israel conflict, even while pretending to seek an agreement.
The Biden Administration has released $6 billion dollars to Iran, currently stored at a bank in Hamas-friendly Qatar. It has provided funds to Gaza which they admitted would result in arming Hamas, and pillaged stockpiles of U.S. arms stored in Israel as part of a long-standing agreement, and sent them to Ukraine.
Like the conniving Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, the Biden administration, as the Obama administration before it, has at every turn counseled Israel to maximize restraint and complacency in the face of a growing peril, all while professing friendship.
Here at home, the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that consists of numerous Democrat politicians at the local, state, and federal level, hosted the largest Pro-Hamas rally thus far, in New York City replete with open calls in support of terrorist violence. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with close ties to Hamas, has called for a National Day of Resistance and a “Unity Intifada” in solidarity with the Hamas attack for Thursday, Oct. 12.
In the face of this reality, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley saying the attack represents “an attack on America,” or Qatar-friendly Sen. Lindsay Graham issuing threats against Iran is mere fecklessness and bravado. The truth is that as it is currently constituted, the U.S. government, especially the State Department and intelligence agencies, are unlikely to do anything but deliberately hamper Israel’s attempts to defend itself and seek ways to further bolster Iran and its proxies behind the scenes.
Americans should demand the American government keep out of meddling with Israel’s response and allow it to defend its citizens as it sees fit. Certainly, the U.S. should honor existing agreements and obligations (refilling drained stockpiles for instance) but over-the-top or performative action will likely only amount to interference.
The Invasion on Our Own Border
Meanwhile, we should tend urgently to our own border and security. Israel’s border with Gaza was one of the most heavily surveilled and monitored borders in the world. As events have shown, surveillance is not enough. U.S. border doves for years promised that a border can be protected by a mere “virtual fence” of cameras and sensors. The reality is that only real physical barriers, like walls, watched over by sufficient numbers of properly armed and trained men constitute a secure border. Anything else is theater. On the other side of that border are barbaric criminal cartels and narco-insurgents every bit as murderous as Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, Hezbollah has extensive ties with various drug cartels, which it has used to try and conduct attacks inside the United States. Hundreds of individuals already named on the terrorist watchlist have crossed into the country.
Israeli awareness of the situation in Gaza now being criticized as insufficient, is undoubtedly far superior to our own understanding of the threats on the other side of our own border.
The Biden administration continues to facilitate an invasion, consisting of as much as an entire infantry division a day, mostly of military aged males across the Southern border. They come from all over the world, including places rife with jihadist terrorists, and increasingly from hostile adversaries like China. Some, likely working with the cartels, cross the border wearing camouflage and carrying firearms.
Iran’s parliament is chanting “Death to Israel! Death to America!
This would not be happening under Trump! Joe Biden just gave them 6 Billion Dollars.
We can no more count on the Biden Administration to defend our border than to assist Israel. That means states and local communities must take their fates into their own hands.
In the wake of the attack from Gaza, Israel immediately loosened its otherwise quite strict gun laws to increase the number of prepared citizens able to defend themselves from terrorists. The reality is that no government force can respond quickly enough against such overwhelming violence to prevent tragedy. Americans should strongly oppose any efforts to restrain our own Second Amendment and take advantage of the ability to possess and train with firearms for their own defense whenever and wherever possible.
Bolster Law Enforcement
Local communities in Israel were quickly overwhelmed by the coordinated terrorist attack, and local police were not equal to the onslaught. It has been reported that over 30 Israeli police were trapped in a police station that came under siege by Hamas gunmen. Many fought bravely and lost their lives.
In America, both urban and rural areas are struggling to recruit, train, and outfit sufficient law enforcement officers following the left’s assault upon policing in 2020. Many local agencies are hundreds of officers below their required needs. Cities continue to attempt to replace armed law enforcement with mere social workers.
Americans everywhere should endeavor to support and bolster the morale of their local law enforcement, most especially their elected Sheriff. Encourage your community to provide the necessary funding to train, recruit, and equip the best possible local law enforcement, without relying upon fickle and restrictive federal grants. Law enforcement leaders should consider ways to augment smaller or struggling police forces with citizen auxiliaries, properly vetted and trained. States should look at ways to bolster their National Guard and State Defense Forces and prepare them for the kinds of violence we know are possible.
Things will get worse before they get better. The attack on Israel is an unmistakable sign that we have entered a dangerous and trying time. The forces of evil fester and spread, not just in the Middle East, but here at home.
First and foremost, we should, as Tolkien wrote, set ourselves to “uprooting evil in the fields that we know” and encourage our friends abroad to do the same.
Kyle Shideler is senior analyst for Homeland Security at the Center for Security Policy.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday said the United States “has Israel’s back” and will ensure that Israel can “defend itself” in light of the Hamas terrorist attack during the weekend. In a speech from the White House, Biden said American citizens were among those held by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas after its weekend attack on Israel that left hundreds dead. He said 14 U.S. citizens had been killed by the terrorists.
The White House later said the State Department had been in contact with the families of those Americans killed.
Biden also said the U.S. would surge additional equipment to Israel, including interceptor missiles for the Iron Dome system.
Biden said U.S. law enforcement agencies were taking steps to disrupt any domestic threat that may emerge after Hamas’ attack.
The FBI said earlier it was “closely monitoring unfolding events” but added it “does not have specific and credible intelligence indicating a threat to the United States stemming from the Hamas attacks in Israel.”
Earlier Tuesday, Biden said he discussed support for Israel in his call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday after meeting with U.S. national security teams “to direct next steps.”
“We connected with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss coordination to support Israel, deter hostile actors, and protect innocent people,” Biden said in a social media post before making public remarks on the situation in Israel.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke by phone with Netanyahu to discuss the situation on the ground.
Biden, in his previous public remarks and statements since Hamas launched its attacks, has repeatedly emphasized his shock over the breadth and brutality of the Hamas assault — a blitz by land, sea and air that surprised Israeli and U.S. intelligence and that has killed hundreds Israelis and left even more wounded.
Retaliatory strikes by Israel on the Gaza Strip have also left hundreds of dead and wounded Palestinians in the blockaded 141-square mile area, one the poorest patches of territory in the world. The death toll was expected to grow as Israel pummeled Gaza with airstrikes and sent tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing into U.N. shelters.
The White House on Monday confirmed that it has already begun delivering critically needed munitions and military equipment to Israel, and the Pentagon was reviewing its inventories to see what else can be sent quickly to boost its ally in the war against Hamas.
The U.S. Ford carrier strike group has arrived in the far Eastern Mediterranean, within range to provide a host of air support or long-range strike options for Israel if requested, but also to surge U.S. military presence there to prevent the war from spilling over into a more dangerous regional conflict, a U.S. official told The Associated Press.
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the arrival ahead of an announcement.
The Pentagon has said that the U.S. warplanes, destroyers and cruisers that sailed with the Ford will conduct maritime and air operations which could include intelligence collection, interdictions and long-range strikes.
Along with the Ford, the U.S. is sending the cruiser USS Normandy and destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt, and the U.S. is augmenting Air Force F-35, F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons in the region.
Biden on Monday in a joint statement with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak underscored the “legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people” and their decades-long push for sovereignty. But the leaders also sought to separate the Palestinians’ aspirations from the “appalling acts of terrorism” by Hamas.
Americans have had a gloomy outlook on Biden’s performance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Six in 10 Americans (61%) disapproved of how Biden was handling the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to an August poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About one-third (35%) of U.S. adults approved, which was slightly lower than Biden’s overall approval rating of 42% in the same poll.
Four in 10 Americans (44%) said the U.S. gives about the right amount of support to Israel in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say the U.S. should offer more support to Israel. Four in 10 Americans (42%) said the correct amount of support is given to the Palestinians. Democrats and Independents were more likely than Republicans to say the Palestinians should receive more support.
The current crisis seems certain to further test public sentiment about Biden’s Mideast foreign policy approach.
The Biden White House has pointed to its handling of the last conflict between Israel and Gaza in 2021 as playing a crucial part in limiting the length and loss of life in a war that stretched over 11 days and killed at least 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel.
During the 2021 conflict, Biden limited his public commentary while pressing Netanyahu in private to end the conflict. His behind-the-scenes effort played out even as some of the president’s fellow Democrats pressured him to speak out against the Israelis as the death toll climbed in Gaza and as tens of thousands of Palestinians were displaced by the aerial bombardment, White House officials said at the time.
But this conflict is unlikely to end so quickly. Domestic and international pressure could quickly mount on Biden to pressure Netanyahu to wind down operations to prevent the suffering of innocent Gazans.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
An Israeli Defense Force commander told journalists that soldiers founded babies beheaded in the wake of Hamas terrorists’ assault on Israel. The IDF showed journalists around Kfar Aza, a town near Gaza, on Oct. 10. Pictured: A view of a house left in ruins after an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz days earlier when dozens of civilians were killed near the border with Gaza. Oct. 10 in Kfar Aza, Israel. (Photo: Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Israeli soldiers report finding the bodies of babies, some of them decapitated, in the ruins of a town ravaged by Hamas terrorists in their surprise attack on Saturday. Israeli Defense Force soldiers took dozens of foreign journalists Tuesday to Kfar Aza, a town about 1.5 miles southeast of the Gaza border. Journalists surveyed the devastation, with explosions and artillery fire occurring in the background.
“It’s not a war,” Gen. Itai Veruv, head of the IDF’s Depth Command, told reporters. “It’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists kill them.”
“It’s not a war … it’s a massacre,” Veruv added.
'It's not a war, it's not a battle. It's a massacre'
Journalists are let into Kfar Aza for the first time, four days after the community came under the shock attack by Hamas terrorists
IDF Major General Itai Veruv describes the scene of brutal violence, where whole families… pic.twitter.com/HJzoMKj2Ta
Nicole Zedek, an i24 News reporter, said that an IDF commander told her they found the bodies of some 40 babies, some of whom had been beheaded.
i24NEWS Correspondent @Nicole_Zedek reports from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, a quarter-mile from the Gaza border, and recounts the atrocities that were committed in the small community which remains an active scene as soldiers clear booby traps and recover the bodies of dozens of victims pic.twitter.com/J4ZfWZQYHp
Earlier Tuesday, the IDF reported having regained control over the border with the Gaza Strip, roughly 72 hours after Hamas terrorists blew through sections of the barrier and launched the invasion early Saturday morning, The Times of Israel reported.
Hamas militants attacked Israel on the last day of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, as well as the Sabbath day of rest and the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The terrorists slaughtered over 900 Israelis, including about 250 at a music festival, and kidnapped more than 100.
“This morning, on Shabbat and a holiday, Hamas invaded Israeli territory and murdered innocent citizens, including children and the elderly,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday. “Hamas has started a brutal and evil war.”
“They didn’t go for military targets—they went for civilians, they went for grandmothers, children, babies,” Israeli Defense Forces’ international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said in a video message Sunday. “The numbers are unprecedented.”
“The style of attack is barbaric,” Hecht added. “In a way, this is our 9/11.”
He explained that the Hamas fighters attacked a party near the Gaza strip and kidnapped a grandmother. “Everybody, nearly, in Israel is affected by this.”
Hamas militants shot civilians at bus stops, on roads, and in their cars, photos show, according to Israeli experts who spoke to the Times of Israel. Videos reportedly show Israeli civilians, including women and children, getting abducted and taken to Gaza. Two videos raise concerns of sexual assault or rape.
Operational update with IDF International Spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht. https://t.co/9d9JeiUYFG
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu smiles as he enters an election night event for the Likud party on November 1, 2022, in Jerusalem, Israel. | Amir Levy/Getty Images
Benjamin Netanyahu has once again become prime minister of Israel in the country’s fifth election in less than for years. Yair Lapid conceded defeat on Thursday after nearly all the votes were counted, allowing the 73-year-old Netanyahu to claim victory in the election.
“The State of Israel comes before any political consideration,” Lapid said. “I wish Netanyahu success, for the sake of the people of Israel and the State of Israel.”
Netanyahu’s return to the executive office came as his Likud Party formed a political alliance with two other political parties known as Jewish Power and Religious Zionism.
Religious Zionism and its allies have weathered claims that they are extremists who will target the nation’s minority Arab community, and the LGBT community if they take power.
“We’re not going to hammer anyone,” said MK Orit Strock, a member of Religious Zionism, as quoted by the Times of Israel. “We will serve all citizens, including those who do not think like us and whose lifestyles are different.”
Strock did say that her party wants to “bring order to the public space,” apparently taking issue with lewd, vulgar and pornographic aspects of LGBT pride events.
“Regardless of pride, there shouldn’t be marches of people walking down the street naked or half naked,” she added. “The problem is with years-long efforts, not just here but around the world, to force things on the public.”
Before Thursday, multiple news outlets had predicted a victory for Netanyahu and the creation of a more right-leaning national government.
With 99% of the votes counted, the Jewish News Syndicate reported that the total number of seats for the coalition government had decreased from an expected 65 seats to 64. Nevertheless, the JNS added, Netanyahu only needed 61 seats to have a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
In 2019, Netanyahu became the first sitting prime minister in the history of the modern state of Israel to be indicted, with various charges, including breach of trust, bribery and fraud.
“This is a hard and sad day,” said Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit in a speech given before the Justice Ministry at the time, as reported by The Jerusalem Post. “I am bringing an indictment on public corruption against the prime minister in three cases. It is sad for me personally and for the country.”
For his part, Netanyahu denied the allegations, labeling the indictment “a political coup” and “a contaminated process,” in which he felt the investigators “were after me personally.”
In June 2021, Netanyahu lost his position as prime minister after 12 years in the role, being replaced by Naftali Bennett, who held on to power with a very slight majority in the Knesset.
The Canadian pharmaceutical company SaNOtize Research & Development Corp., (SaNOtize), and Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Limited (Glenmark), announced earlier this month the successful outcomes of a nasal spray in its Phase 3 clinical trials and now approved by India’s drug regulator as a treatment for adult patients with COVID-19 who have a risk of progression of the disease. TrialSite is the first to report on this.
“The study confirmed that SaNOtize’s Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) represents a safe and effective antiviral treatment that shortens the course of COVID-19, and could prevent the transmission of COVID-19,” according to their news release.
The SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) is designed to kill the Covid-19 virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and spreading to the lungs. It contained anti-microbial properties with a direct virucidal effect on Covid-19.
Read their news release published at Business Wire and below:
In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-arm study at 20 clinical sites across India that evaluated 306 patients, NONS reduced the SARS-CoV-2log viral load in COVID-19 patients by more than 94% within 24 hours of treatment, and by more than 99% in 48 hours as compared to saline control.
Treatment also demonstrated, in the high-risk group (n=218), a statistically significant greater proportion of patients who achieved a combination of clinical and virological cure, based on the World Health Organization (WHO) Progression Scale. Moreover, the median time to negative PCR, in this group, was 4 days in the treatment group compared with 8 days in the control. Test subjects included patients infected with different variants, likely including Delta and Omicron. There were no significant adverse health events recorded in the Phase 3 trial, or in over 500 subjects treated so far with NONS in clinical trials.
The reduction in log viral load corroborates the reduction of viral load in the UK Phase 2 trials (a reduction of 95% in 24 hours and 99% in 72 hours), conducted in March 2021 by Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Berkshire and Surrey Pathology Services, and published in the Journal of Infection in August 2021.
“These results definitively substantiate the safety and efficacy of NONS in the fight against COVID-19,” said Dr. Gilly Regev, SaNOtize Co-Founder and CEO. “We are thrilled to be able to provide COVID patients with an affordable product that has been shown to deliver a faster cure. And with the proven safety profile of NONS, we look forward to this becoming the first line of treatment and potentially defense for COVID infection worldwide.”
The SaNOtize treatment is designed to kill the virus in the upper airways, preventing it from incubating and spreading to the lungs. It is based on nitric oxide (NO), a natural nanomolecule produced by the human body with proven anti-microbial properties shown to have a direct effect on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The pharmacology, toxicity, and safety data for NO use in humans has been well-established for decades. The NO molecule released from NONS is identical to the one delivered in its gaseous form to treat persistent pulmonary hypertension, or Blue Baby Syndrome, in newborn babies.
With the receipt of manufacturing and marketing approval from India’s drug regulator, SaNOtize’s strategic partner, Glenmark, will launch NONS commercially in India under the brand name FabiSpray®. The approval is for the treatment of adult patients with COVID-19 who have a risk of progression of the disease, which includes either persons over the age of 45, non-vaccinated people and/or those with comorbidities. Glenmark entered into an exclusive long-term strategic partnership with SaNOtize in August 2021 to manufacture, market and distribute NONS for COVID-19 treatment in India and other Asian markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Nepal, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.
NONS has a marketing authorization as a Class I Medical Device in the EU. NONS is also approved and being sold in Israel, Thailand, Indonesia, and Bahrain, under the name enovid™ or VirX™.
“As viral load is an important determinant of disease severity and transmission of COVID-19 infection, demonstration of reduction in the viral load is expected to have significant clinical consequences from a patient and community perspective,” said Dr. Monika Tandon, Senior Vice President and Head – Clinical Development, Global Specialty/Branded Portfolio for Glenmark. “In the current scenario, with new emerging variants exhibiting high transmissibility, this novel product provides a useful option in the world’s fight against COVID-19.”
Glenmark will submit the clinical trial data for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in order to share its findings.
Patients in the Glenmark Phase 3 clinical trial in India self-administered a dose of 2 sprays per nostril, six times a day for a seven-day treatment period, along with standard supportive care.
The primary and secondary outcome measures demonstrated the efficacy and safety of the NONS treatment arm over the control arm, which was administered normal saline nasal spray as placebo in double-blind manner.
The trial also included a subgroup analysis for patients with a high risk of disease progression, including either non-vaccinated patients, patients in middle- and older-age groups, and/or patients with co-morbidities.
Reduction in log viral load in the NONS group was statistically significant and superior to the control group in the full population and high-risk population (p < 0.05). Similar results were seen in the un-vaccinated group. The primary endpoint was achieved and confirmed in all analyses.
Significantly higher proportion of patients became negative on the RT-PCR test in the NONS group as compared to the placebo group. The time to virological cure was four days in the NONS group and eight days in the placebo group (p < 0.05).
A significantly higher proportion of patients demonstrated a 2-point clinical status improvement on the WHO Progression Scale, the most clinically validated point system used in clinical trials, in the NONS group as compared to the placebo group in the high-risk group (p < 0.05).
Data suggests role of NONS in prevention of COVID-19, which is consistent with a faster viral reduction.
NONS was safe and well tolerated by all patients who were part of the clinical trial. There were no reports of moderate or severe or serious adverse events or death in the study. An independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) concluded that NONS was safe in COVID-19 patients.
“NONS destroys the virus, blocks entry into the nasal cavity and halts replication of the virus, which rapidly reduces viral load. This is important because viral load has been linked to infectivity, poor health outcomes and complications from Long COVID,” said Dr. Chris Miller, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of SaNOtize. “Amid evidence of waning efficacy for some vaccines and higher breakthrough rates, there is currently a lack of an antiviral therapy that is effective against COVID-19 and its variants that can be made widely and affordably available to the public. This is what makes NONS a critical weapon in ending the pandemic and preventing future outbreaks.”
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
An Israeli study found that the 4th COVID booster shot is ineffective in preventing the disease. This is horrible news for the Medical Industrial Complex.
To start, 274 healthcare workers at Sheba Medical Center received a 4th dose. Specifically, 154 received Pfizer, and 120 received Moderna. They were compared with a control group of nearly 6,000 healthcare workers that didn’t receive a booster. Prof. Gili Regev-Yochay, lead researcher commented, “We see an increase in antibodies, higher than after the third dose,” he stated. “However, we see many infected with Omicron who received the fourth dose”. T elaborate, around the same number of individuals that received 4 doses experienced as many breakthrough infections as those who received 3. That said, there are a few lessons to learn from this.
This may explain the crash in vaccine stocks Moderna and BioTech.
The hedge funds have finally realized there will be no fourth shot. And that mRNA technology, erm, still has a few issues to work out. (1 billion people aren’t gonna love hearing that, but too late now. Mistakes were made, stuff happens, amirite?)
Moderna and BioNTech are down 8-10% today, 60% since August. Oh, how I wish I could have shorted them.
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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