The International Rescue Mission (ICEM) in Gaza after the Sept. 7 attacks: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and Israeli Prime Minister Biden
Even as Israeli airstrikes and shelling hit the area around the border crossing, many families in besieged Gaza come to the crossing daily, hoping for news of its opening.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who arrived at the Egyptian side of the border crossing on Friday, called for aid to be allowed into Gaza as soon as possible.
Gaza has been under total blockade by Israel since the days after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which 1,400 people were killed, according to Israeli officials.
About a million Palestinians — roughly half of Gaza’s population — have fled their homes to seek shelter elsewhere inside Gaza. None of the people were able to leave the territory with the borders closed.
Israel has suffered a horrifying terrorist attack and deserves the world’s sympathy and support, but it should not get a blank check to slaughter civilians or to deprive them of food, water and medicine. Bravo to Biden for trying to negotiate some humanitarian access to Gaza, but the challenge will be not just getting aid into Gaza but also distributing it to where it’s needed.
The 20 trucks represent a U.N.-brokered deal urged along by world leaders, including President Biden, who visited Israel last week. Among the concerns delaying the aid were Israel’s fear that Hamas could intercept it or use the trucks to smuggle in weapons.
The hundreds of Americans who have been trapped in Gaza since the war began have been waiting for word on the border’s status.
Abuzayda and her husband and son moved south towards Rafah after Israel urged people in the northern part of Gaza to leave.
The aftermath of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Be’eri, Gaza: Witnesses to the horrors of a village in southern Israel
On Thursday night, a building nearby was struck, causing a window to shatter as her son was sleeping nearby, she said. “I pulled him immediately, and I hugged him. He was freaking out. He was looking at me — he doesn’t know what is going on,” she said. “We aren’t safe here.”
In the West Bank, tension grew overnight after a confrontation between Israeli forces and Palestinians at a refugee camp northeast of Tel Aviv.
The United Nations said Israeli police and Palestinians shot at each other after an airstrike in the camp. The Israeli Defense Forces said a number of terrorists were killed in counterterrorism operations, while Palestinian health officials reported at least 11 deaths. Israeli media report the death of one Israeli policeman.
In total, at least 80 people in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of the war earlier this month, according to Palestinian officials.
BE’ERI – To walk the streets of the small village of Be’eri in southern Israel nowadays is to relive the horrors from the single deadliest attack on civilians in Israel’s 75-year history.
The community used to be a close-knit one, but now has partially destroyed homes. Some were blown open, others burned. Inside one are blood-splattered walls. In another, there are two rooms with books, binders and stuffed animals. The white bed frames are stained with blood.
On the road leading into this kibbutz, a backhoe scoops up the bodies of Hamas militants who stormed this community of just over 1000 people about three miles from the border with Gaza.
When Hamas launched its attacks against Israel, it unleashed a flood of rockets as cover, while the militant group holed up in the Gaza strip. One particular clip released by Hamas, played on news stations the world over, provoked a particular bit of paranoia: video of balaclava-clad Hamas fighters standing in a desert landscape, launching a line of suicide drones.
Many residents of the towns hid inside safe rooms waiting for Israeli forces to rescue them. For hours no one came. The scene they saw when they emerged was unlike anything they’d seen before.
More than a week after the Hamas attack, survivors are still waiting to identify bodies and plan funerals.
“We’re just still trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with so many funerals,” Alom told NPR’s Morning Edition . We don’t know where to bury them because they’re not safe.
“We were slaughtered for four or five hours without anyone showing up to help us, I have no idea how to deal with that,” he said. I don’t know who is to blame. but I just know we’ve been slaughtered.”
The War on the Palestinian Enclave: Why Israelis Need to Stop Warping and Israelis Shouldn’t War the Israelis? Noy Katsman, the Israeli Ambassador to Gaza, Remembered
Their anger is not yet aimed so much at the government for its intelligence failure or Israeli forces for their delayed rescues, but toward the Palestinian enclave.
Miles away from the border with Gaza, sitting in a Jerusalem cafe, 27-year-old Noy Katsman said they wants the war to stop. They knows Alom’s pain but wields it differently.
Hayim died in the village of Holit about a mile from Gaza. Hayim was hiding in the closet when Hamas militants shot him and was one of 30 Americans killed in the attack.
Hayim was a peace activist in the past. He wrote his doctorate on the dangers of the right wing in Israel and was critical of the government for encouraging illegal Israeli settlements and uplifting extreme anti-Arab voices.
That’s why Katsman believes their brother, despite his tragic killing, “would say we should never kill innocent people” and would encourage Israelis to re-think the long-term repercussions of retaliation.
“My government, instead of saying, ‘Okay, we failed, maybe we need to do something else,’ they’re saying, ‘Oh, we need to kill more Palestinians. “We need to destroy Hamas now,” said Katsman. “It’s right-wing politicians who gain power from violence and hate, these are the people who gain from it. But we lose from it.”
“You need a basic understanding of how people feel,” they added. “And if after they kill us, a thousand people, we are going to kill three thousand of them, that’s not an understanding of people, because these people will grow up and hate us even more.”
“That’s the problem – Israelis only care if something is pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel,” they said. This question is hard to focus on. People are dead. People die from both sides.”
There is no solution to the crisis in the Middle East which asks how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy. We are not doing very well in this test.
The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin soon suggests that Palestinian children are lesser victims, devalued by their association with Hamas and its history of terrorism. Consider that more than 1,500 children in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and around one-third of Gaza homes have been destroyed or damaged in just two weeks — and this is merely the softening-up before what is expected to be a much bloodier ground invasion.
The United States speaks a good deal about principles, but I fear that President Biden has embedded a hierarchy of human life in official American policy. He expressed outrage at the massacres of Jews by Hamas, as he should have, but he has struggled to be equally clear about valuing Gazan lives. And it’s not always evident whether he is standing four-square with Israel as a country or with its failed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime obstacle to peace.
What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?
What do we have to tell the Gaza doctor who lost his wife and son in the bombing that he had to care for his daughter? He didn’t even have time to care for his niece or sister, for he had to deal with the bodies of his loved ones.
In his speech on Thursday, Biden called for America’s continued support of the two nations that were attacked. It was fair enough. If Ukraine responded to the atrocities of the Russians, they would bomb a Russian city, cut off water and electricity, and kill thousands of people.
I believe Americans would not say that Putin started it. Russian children should have chosen somewhere else to be born.
The International Committee of Red Cross (IRC) is urging the Hamas people to move out of the Gazan War and to go to the next door
I believe it reflects a moral and practical mistake. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.
The best answer to this test is to try even in the face of provocation to cling to our values. That means that despite our biases, we try to uphold all lives as having equal value. If you think some children are expendable, that is not moral clarity but moral myopia. We must not kill Gazan children in order to protect Israeli children.
The International Committee of Red Cross is trying to help. Within two days of the attack, Red Cross officials said, they had approached Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar.
“The starting point — and I have a hard time getting away from this — is that there are people who should never be there,” said Fabrizio Carboni, the organization’s regional director for the Near and Middle East, in an interview this past week.
“These supplies are a lifeline for severely injured people or those battling chronic illnesses, who have endured a harrowing two weeks of limited access to care and severe shortages of medicines and medical supplies,” the WHO said in a statement.
Aid workers at the Rafah border crossing say that the delivery included food, mattresses and blankets. Aid groups say hospitals and desalination plants need fuel to run because of a lack of water.
But aid groups have warned that 20 truckloads do not come close to addressing the humanitarian needs in Gaza, where the U.N. reports a severe shortage of potable water, food and medical supplies.
The difference between life and death for many people in Gaza is the result of them, according to the U.N. Secretary-General. “And to see them stuck here makes me be very clear: What we need is to make them move, to make them move to the other side of this wall.”
There is shelling everywhere. “We are sleeping next to the crossing and we are scared more than if we were inside.” said a Swedish citizen who was at the border with his daughter. He said they had been staying there for days, hoping to escape as soon the doors opened.
Agriculture in the South: The challenge of the Trump re-election campaign, said R. Randy Schmidt, president of the Lone Rock dairy farm
In rural Lone Rock, Wis., where harvest season had meant yet another long workday on Thursday, Randy Schmidt, 60, a dairy farmer, said the president’s appeal for military aid was “going to be a hard sell in these parts.”
Mr. Schmidt owns the largest dairy farm in Richland County, a swing district that had voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1980, until 2020, when voters there went for former President Trump’s re-election.
Mr. Schmidt said that money comes hard here. This year has been a challenge for us on the farm. I think we support Israel, but I do not believe we can do that much.
The questions posed by the violence in the Middle East and Ukraine were not as moral as they could have been. The terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israelis, in particular, were triggering for her, she said.
“I understand that there has been a fight between the two for years and years,” said Ms. Lucas, 58. She stated that her heart broke because of the way that it was handled. It took me back to 9/11 and the fear I had about who was going to do it.
On Friday she went to Holy Hill, a basilica on a forested hillside, a country drive away from her community, Brookfield, to take in the fall colors with her son, Michael, 25, who was in town from Tampa, Fla. As African Americans, they felt uneasy about the president’s call to support Israel. They could not condone terrorist attacks, they said, but sympathized with Palestinians and what they see as the long discrimination they have endured.
“There are times when I sit in the middle, because I can see both sides of it,” Janet Lucas said. Is there another way that the US or any other nation could help the people of Syria come to some form of peace?
Hamas vs. the United States: Using U.S. Forces to Stop a Ground Warfare Invasion
A hostage rescue is not safe at the moment, since it is considered too risky and dangerous.
Some political leaders from Hamas think the worst atrocities of the group were committed by angry Gazans and other armed groups, rather than their own fighters. Yet videos released by Hamas fighters themselves depict the brutal killing of unarmed civilians.
The army is getting ready for an invasion of Gaza with tanks and armored personnel carriers. And even though Israel allowed a trickle of humanitarian aid — 20 trucks for two million people — into Gaza on Saturday, Israeli warplanes show no sign of relenting in a campaign that is intended to destroy Hamas but has also killed thousands of civilians.
The former head of the Shin Bet said that Israel may have agreed to allow aid into the Gaza Strip on Saturday after the release of hostages. He said Hamas’s motive might have been to inspire Israelis who have loved ones in captivity in Gaza to pressure their government to delay the impending ground invasion until more hostages are released.
The reasons why the Raanans were released are still unknown. Robert D’Amico, a former F.B.I. agent who worked on hostage cases overseas, said it may have been the fact that the two were healthy.
Another obvious reason the Raanans were chosen, Mr. D’Amico and others said, is that they are Americans — though there are up to 10 more Americans in captivity. Hamas might be trying to temper Israeli retaliation on Gaza by gaining some good will from the Biden administration. President Biden and his team have been advising the country on how it is bombing Gaza, but how much Israel actually listens to what they say is not known.
Like more than 20 non-state actors in conflict zones around the world, Hamas recognized that the drones could substantially upgrade its ability to wage war. Unlike its unguided missiles, which are designed to beat Israel’s air defenses simply by overwhelming them, drones are considerably harder to intercept. They fly low and don’t travel in a predictable, parabolic arch. As a number of countries have recently learned, thwarting an advancing drone—much less a number of them—is a tricky problem to solve.
The earliest versions of its Qassam rocket were rudimentary: lightweight and capable of traveling just a few miles. The missiles became larger, with larger warheads, in each successive generation.
Hamas vs. Israel: The Optimal Tests of the Persistent Israeli War on the Relative Right-Right Front
Israel has been trying to frustrate Hamas’ ability to extend its reach and develop offensive capabilities over the past two decades.