She’s taken from Gaza by Hamas fighters, but now Israel wants Israel to fight back: A touching tribute to a mother and her children
Although they disagree on how Israel should fight Hamas, the two people were waiting on the same thing – news from Israel that they’re in talks for the release of loved ones. The radio version of this story was edited by Adam Bearne and Jan Johnson and produced by David West. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.
She would take sick Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. So apart from being a wonderful mother and grandmother, that was her essence,” he added.
“Since she retired, she was very much involved in an organization called Women Wage Peace. Since 2015, she also volunteered with an organization called The Road to Recovery,” noted Zeigen.
“I think a situation needs to be resolved if she is being held there,” he said. “And I trust that the militant organizations in Gaza won’t hurt her. Her status as an old woman and the ethics of her religion.
Amidst the raw pain he was feeling, Shnaider didn’t have much room to think about similarly innocent people in Gaza being caught up in Israel’s bombing campaign in response.
It took me almost two days to wake up. To know that it’s not a dream. It’s not a nightmare. Shnaider said it’s something that really happened.
Source: He watched his family get taken by Hamas fighters. Now he wants Israel to fight back
The Islamic Resistance Movement in a Village: Israel’s Case Against the Second Intifada and the War Between the Sun and the Sun
He was searching for pictures and videos from the village, when he found a video of Bibes and her two children.
When he heard that Hamas fighters had crossed into Israel from Gaza, he tried to reach Bibes and her husband, Yarden Bibes, who live near the border in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Hamas has fought several wars with Israel in the last decade and a half. In May of 2021, the last major war, hundreds of people were dead in Gaza, and 13 people were dead in Israel.
The group was founded in 1987, during the first Intifada, when widespread protests against Israel’s occupation took place.
The Islamic Resistance movement is also known as Hamas and is the Arabic acronym for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s.
The group has vowed to annihilate Israel and has been responsible for many suicide bombings and other deadly attacks on civilians and Israeli soldiers.
Hamas’ current leaders are Yehia Sinwar, in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh, in exile. The leadership of the group was realigned with Iran and its allies. Many of the group’s leaders relocated to Lebanon.
In recent years, Israel has made peace deals with Arab countries without having to make concessions in its conflict with the Palestinians. The U.S. has recently been trying to broker a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a bitter rival of Hamas’ Iranian backers.
The Israeli “Resistance Camp” Against Hamas in the Middle East, as Confirmed Monday by Israeli Security Expert Neomi Neumann
Its leaders say hundreds of its 40,000 fighters took part in the assault. Israel says the group has about 30,000 fighters and an arsenal of rockets, including some with a range of about 250 kilometers (155 miles), and unmanned drones.
Iran has been ruled by Shia fundamentalists since the 1979 revolution. According to the associate professor at Northeastern University, Hezbollah was created to help export the Iranian revolution and project Iranian power in the region.
Abrahms, an expert on terrorism in the region, said Iran’s influence over both Hamas and Hezbollah varies, and that the Sunni organizations operate with more autonomy than Hezbollah does.
“I don’t think [Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan] Nasrallah would authorize a major attack against Israel without approval of Iranian leaders,” he said Monday. He said that the attack from Gaza on Saturday might have been different because Hamas waited for Iranian authorization.
Israeli intelligence analysts call the relationship among Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran “the resistance camp.” Neomi Neumann, a former head of research for the Israeli Security Agency, said that they share the same goal of creating a Muslim-run land in the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.
Neumann is visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Hezbollah has a far larger fighting force and is more well-equipped than Hamas.
Iran and Hezbollah have realized since 2021 that Hamas is a better player than they thought. Hamas is necessary in order to weaken Israel.”
They realized this, Neumann said Monday, after Hamas sought to unify disparate groups of Palestinians amid clashes with Israel in 2021, among them Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and Arab Israelis, which constitute about 20% of Israel’s population.
Over 900 Israelis were killed by Hamas attack and rocket fire in the worst day in Israeli history, claims the Israeli military.
Joint Israeli-Israeli and Palestinian-Islamic-Jihad attacks in the Sunday morning clashes in the Northern Hemisphere
IRNA said Raisi had made phone calls to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad after the attacks on Israel began.
“We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon, if I remember correctly, with the other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel,” he said. Spokespeople for Hamas did not return requests for comment.
“Hezbollah’s response from southern Lebanon is not opportunistic,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London.
The fighting around the northern Israeli border is at a much smaller scale than in southern Israel near Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave to Israel’s southwest. But the double-pronged attacks at both poles of Israel left many fearing a more widespread, regional escalation of violence.
Monday’s fighting follows rocket and drone attacks in the region on Sunday. The United Nations urged everyone to exercise restraint after Hezbollah and Israel fired across the border.
The Israeli military said that it had killed several fighters crossing the border. Hezbollah said it killed one of its fighters in Israel’s response. An armed group called the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed it had injured seven Israeli soldiers.
This week, militant groups in southern Lebanon escalated their attacks on neighboring northern Israel, prompting Israel to launch artillery and cross-border airstrikes.
Source: Fighting with Israel signals coordination between Hamas and Hezbollah, analysts say
Gaza’s Human-Right Defenders: The End of the Exclusion Game, the United Nations, and the Gaza Strip as a Future State
Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, denied that Iran was involved in the attack on Israel. He said in televised comments Tuesday that they kiss the hands of those who planned the attack on the regime.
Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials have accused Iran of providing training, money and other assistance to Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, who carried out an unprecedented, multifront assault on Israel on Saturday.
LONDON — Human rights groups call it “the world’s largest open-air prison.” The Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people, has come under heavy bombardment from Israel in recent days, after Hamas militants launched an unprecedented ground invasion and thousands of rockets into Israel from Gaza.
Israel has ordered a “complete” blockade of the already besieged area, saying that “no electricity, food or fuel” would be allowed into the enclave and raising alarm among some in the international community over what this might mean for the people of Gaza, who, with borders mostly closed, cannot leave.
During the Arab-Israeli war, Egypt captured Gaza. The territory was under the control of Egyptian authorities until 1967, when it was occupied by Israel. Palestinians claim these territories and see them as part of a future state.
1.7 million Palestinians are registered with UNRWA, a U.N. Palestinian relief agency, in Gaza.
The United Nations says more than 80% of Gazans live in poverty, with access to clean water and electricity at crisis levels even before the latest violence. UNRWA says clean water is unavailable for 95% of Gaza’s population. According to the bureau, the unemployment rate in the territory stood at 45% in the second quarter of this year.
During an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described conditions for children in the Gaza Strip as “hell on Earth.”
Gaza’s hospitals are regularly beset with shortages of equipment and medicine because of the blockade. Gaza’s health ministry director general told Mary Louise Kelly the area’s hospitals are already struggling with overcrowding following Israel’s offensive.
The following year, the Hamas movement came out ahead in Gaza elections. But after wrangling with the rival Fatah party, Hamas seized power by force in 2007. Gaza has not had elections in a while.
Israel carried out heavy bombardments across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as its military repeatedly hit the enclave following last weekend’s deadly incursion by Hamas militants in Israel.
The First Ship of U.S. Weapons Arrived in Israel: A Brief Address to the Jewish Simchat Torah Day of the First Yom Kippur War
The Biden administration said there are talks to create a safe corridor for civilians, echoing a call from the U.S. World Food Program to create emergency humanitarian corridors.
The first shipment of U.S. weapons arrived in Israel, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to Israel to deliver a message of solidarity and support, the State Department announced.
On Tuesday, In Washington, President Joe Biden called Hamas’ attack on Israel “pure unadulterated evil” and promised to “make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of itself.”
Fourteen Americans have died and more than twenty have not been found in Israel, according to Biden. In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said there are some Americans among dozens of those held hostage by Hamas but called it “a very small number of Americans that we know of.”
There’s also a larger number of Americans that are not accounted for. Now, some of them could turn up to be in the hostage pool. We don’t know. Kirby said they are trying to get as much information as they can.
The bloodshed began on the Jewish Simchat Torah holiday, and a day after the 50th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel came under attack by Arab countries.