Israel Update 6.2.25

HOSTAGE RELEASE

 

American-Israeli Keith Siegel, 65; Yarden Bibas, 35; and French-Israeli Ofer Kalderon, 54, were released from Hamas captivity on Saturday after 484 days.Report here

 

Yarden Bibas, came home not knowing the fate of his wife and sons who are on the list of hostages being freed in this first phase, but who were not released in the first few days, when living children and women were supposed to have been prioritized. Earlier last week, the Israeli government was reported to have demanded information from Hamas on the status of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir; there has been no word of response from the terrorists.Report here

 

Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon said that in the first weeks they were kept in cages and beaten multiple times. Keith Siegel testified about severe food shortages and at his release he was severely malnourished. Some hostages were reportedly held for long periods in damp tunnels with little air.
The Thai hostages freed last week also reported harsh conditions. They were kept in two groups in different apartments in Gaza, in complete darkness. The women IDF soldiers released also said that they were starved and kept in darkness for many days.Report here

 

 Mandy Damari, mother of British-Israeli former hostage Emily Damari, told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday that “Hamas held Emily in UNRWA facilities and denied her access to medical treatment after shooting her twice.” Report here

 

Gadi Mozes, 80, in isolation, paced 7 kilometres a day in his two-square-metre room; female surveillance soldiers counted grains of rice to fairly divide the scant food they had between them; Report here

 

Hamas deliberately hunted down and executed Thai nationals. Report here

 

The reality of the hostages’ long road to recovery. Report here

 

Within two weeks after their release from captivity, the five female IDF soldiers who were held hostage by Hamas have asked to resume their IDF service. However, the IDF said it was still too early and that they need time to rest and recuperate. Report here

 

TERRORISTS RELEASED

 

72 Palestinian security prisoners were released on Saturday in exchange for the release of three Israeli hostages. 14 of the security prisoners were serving life sentences including a Fatah member involved in a bombing that killed 17 Israelis. 111 additional  prisoners, Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, were also released. Report here (paywall)

 

All 734 terrorists being released by Israel in exchange for Israeli hostages have been receiving monthly salaries from the Palestinian Authority since their arrests. In total, they have received at least $141,837,087. This article includes a list of all 734 terrorists and the amounts each one has received in $

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE ON 4 FEB .

 

Trump (extracts) “The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative….They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again.”…“I’m hopeful that this ceasefire could be the beginning of a larger and more enduring peace that will end the bloodshed and killing once and for all….And I have to stress, this is not for Israel, this is for everybody in the Middle East – Arabs, Muslims – this is for everybody….You can’t keep doing the same mistake over and over again….They’ve tried it for decades and decades. It’s not going to work. It didn’t work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history. You just can’t let it keep repeating itself.”

Full transcript here

And see Comment & Opinion articles below.

 

GAZA

 

Hamas has been using hostage release operations to rebuild its forces and map territory within Gaza according to Israeli sources.
The quantity of equipment still held by Hamas is also coming to light, with each round of hostage releases showing more arms, including machine guns, anti-tank missiles and drones.

Report here (paywall)

EASTERN FRONT

 

A Palestinian terrorist opened fire at a checkpoint in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, killing two Israeli soldiers and injuring eight others. The terrorist was eliminated.Report here

The IDF said Sunday that it has killed over 50 Palestinian terrorists in the northern West Bank since launching a major counterterrorism offensive nearly two weeks ago. More than 100 wanted Palestinians have been detained, 40 weapons were seized, and over 80 explosive devices were neutralized. 23 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp used by terror operatives were demolished. Hundreds of buildings in Jenin have been scanned, with troops locating bomb-making labs, caches of weapons, and commandcentres.Report here

 

COUNTER TERRORISM

Announced today: the Shin Bet and the IDF thwarted a plot by a terrorist cell that planned to carry out a suicide attack on a bus in Jerusalem. Report here

 

IRANIAN THREATS

 

Israel has complained to the U.S.-led committee overseeing the ceasefire in Lebanon that Iranian diplomats have been flying from Tehran to Beirut with suitcases stuffed with U.S. dollars to fund Hizbullah’s revival. Turkish citizens have also been used to ferry money from Istanbul to Beirut by air. Report here (paywall)

 

Iran is developing nuclear missiles with a range of 3,000 km. (which could hit Europe) based on designs handed to the Islamic regime by North Korea, according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran.Report here (paywall)

 

Footnote: On Feb. 4, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) restoring maximum pressure on the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The NSPM directs the Secretary of the Treasury to impose maximum economic pressure on the Government of Iran, including by sanctioning or imposing enforcement mechanisms on those acting in violation of existing sanctions.Fact Sheet here

 

HOLLAND

 

The Dutch House of Representatives passed a resolution last week by 70-67 to make funding for Palestinian NGOs depend on their recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The resolution also requires greater transparency from NGOs. Report here

 

FIGHTING WILDFIRES

 

As devastating wildfires raged across California, a special unit of Israeli soldiers at the IDF Home Front Command headquarters provided vital data analysis that proved instrumental in saving lives and protecting property. During American night-time hours, Israeli analysts conducted comprehensive data processing and prepared detailed operational assessments for the next day’s firefighting efforts. Report here

 

COMMENT & OPINION

 

HOSTAGE/CEASEFIRE DEAL

 

David Elmescany: This is no ordinary prisoner swap. Every hostage returned by Hamas is matched by the release of killers who spent years behind bars for proven crimes: bus bombings, stabbings in public squares. Terrorist groups now have a playbook. Simply kidnap civilians, film the brutality, and wait for democracies to trade terrorists for living bodies.Article here

 

Danny Cohen: The released Palestinian prisoners are not hostages – they are terrorists. The BBC and others paint a moral equivalence between those freed by Hamas & by Israel. There is none.Article here

 

GAZA: (Articles published prior to Trump’s Tuesday announcement)

 

 

Amb. Gilad Erdan: Hamas still has 20,000 fighters and dozens of miles of tunnels in Gaza. It is already working to rebuild its capabilities and train a new generation of terrorists. Rebuilding Gaza means rebuilding Hamas. Therefore, any reconstruction of Gaza under Hamas rule must be limited to the bare minimum.
Every mechanism established to monitor materials entering Gaza has failed in the past and will fail again in preventing Hamas from using them to restore its military capabilities. Israel and the U.S. must send a clear message to the Arab world: As long as Hamas controls Gaza, another war is only a matter of time and any investment in reconstruction will be wasted. Article here

 

Khaled Abu Toameh: The failure of the Palestinian Authority’s security operation against the Jenin gunmen shows why the PA cannot be trusted to assume control over the Gaza Strip, where thousands of Hamas and PIJ terrorists continue to operate, especially after the recent US-brokered ceasefire-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas…

There is only one viable way to address the Gaza Strip’s problems: discard Qatar as a supposedly honest broker (it is not), designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization (it is), disarm all the terrorist groups, and oust Hamas completely from power.Article here

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S GAZA PLAN

 

Lazar Berman: Trump’s Gaza plan won’t happen, but it could certainly shake up the region. Moving Gazans to Arab countries won’t work, but neither will ending the war leaving Hamas the strongest force in Gaza. New ideas are needed, and this might spark more viable solutions.Article here

 

David Horowitz: It could be… that for all the president’s repeated insistence on the necessity of his Gaza plan, what we saw on Tuesday was a characteristic Trumpian deliberate overreach gambit: the unveiling of a proposal so radical and so unpalatable that it shifts the various forces that are complicating his goals — from Hamas, to Egypt and Jordan, to the Saudis, even to Iran — and blasts open a viable path to weaken, marginalize and eliminate shared American and Israeli enemies, and jolt reluctant potential allies. Article here

 

Alex Winston: Trump’s record suggests that his goal isn’t to occupy Gaza – it’s to force neighbouring Arab nations to take a more active role in solving the crisis. His assumption? That the shock of such a radical proposal will jolt Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states into stepping up in ways they have so far refused to do. Trump may be forcing these countries to react – if only to reject his idea and propose an alternative.Article here

 

Seth J. Frantzman:  Many countries in the region have viewed Gaza as a hot potato, and they want nothing to do with it. This is one reason that Hamas has been allowed to rule Gaza since 2007. In retrospect, it’s obvious that Hamas should never have been allowed to rule Gaza, but many countries didn’t care enough to stop it.
Hamas took control and for almost 20 years has waged endless wars that have destroyed Gaza. In retrospect, the whole region should have stopped this hell from materializing. Hamas infiltrated every aspect of life in Gaza to exploit it for war. In addition, Hamas secured partnerships with UN organizations, media organizations, medical NGOs, and other entities in its takeover of Gaza.
Trump is proposing that all this will end now. It might be that Trump can secure a win here by shocking everyone into finally stepping forward with a solution. Trump’s goal by floating his ideas may be to get countries to agree to be stakeholders in peace in Gaza – rather than just rebuild it again and let Hamas run it and destroy it again.Article here

 

David Christopher Kaufman: A truly novel solution – the proposed relocation of Gazans to other parts of the Middle East, as now suggested by Donald Trump – was immediately dismissed as offensive and unworkable. But nothing even close to a forced “transfer” is on the table here.
As with so much in Trump-world, the trick is to take the president seriously, not literally. Focus on the essence of his messaging: that it’s time for the Arab world to take responsibility for looking after people they profess to care about.
The point here isn’t that Trump necessarily wants to force Gazans from Gaza. Instead, mechanisms must be devised to allow Gazans who want to leave to at least be given the option of doing so. No one should be forced to live under the rule of craven Islamist fundamentalists who starve their own citizens of basic resources and use them as human shields. We certainly would not expect this from people in the West – so why do we demand it of Gazans? Article here (paywall)

 

WSJ Editorial: President Trump’s idea that the U.S. might relocate two million Palestinians from Gaza and then rebuild the strip isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. But the idea does have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.
Note that Mr. Trump expressed admirable sympathy for the Palestinians and their plight. Gaza “has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it,” he said Tuesday. Who could disagree with that? He went on to say, “we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this.”
Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering? The famous “two-state solution,” with a Palestinian state next to Israel, won’t happen as long as Hamas still runs Gaza and could run the West Bank. The best the world can come up with is to let Gaza remain a hell-hole where Hamas will revive its reign of terror, and Palestinians who want something different will be tossed off buildings.  Editorial here (paywall)

 

Elliot Kaufman: Each major Palestinian leader has preferred his own generation to suffer rather than consent to live alongside a Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland.
This is the worst kind of nationalism, an eliminationist one that brings its people only misery. But Arab states have long indulged it. It relieved them of the burdens first of resettling Palestinians and then of starting and losing wars to annihilate Israel.
The world plays along. UNRWA was founded in 1949 to resettle the displaced from the defeated Arab invasion of Israel. The Arab and Soviet blocs made UNRWA into a permanent international commitment to the lost cause. Palestinians are radicalized in UNRWA schools and kept on the international dole rather than encouraged to build institutions of their own…Trump now proposes to do the job UNRWA never would.
The scandal isn’t that displaced Palestinians now could be “transferred” voluntarily out of Gaza; it’s that they have been forced to stay there. When Palestinians tried to flee the war, as is their human right, Egypt forcibly closed the border – with the support of the international community. Their incarceration by UNRWA and Egypt is the brutal status quo, strangely unchallenged until now. Article here (paywall)

 

Amb. Michael Oren: Perhaps most significantly, Trump is challenging what he sees as a long-standing Palestinian dependency on victimhood. Palestinians can stand amid Gaza’s ruins and declare victory to the Muslim world while portraying their suffering to the West, but Trump isn’t buying either narrative. Instead, he is offering them a chance to break free from this cycle. Article here

 

Einat Wilf: At the heart of President Trump’s proposal lies an oft-overlooked fact: Gaza is not inherently doomed to fail. Its problems are not geographical, economic, or even logistical in nature – they are entirely political.
The Gazans, and their sympathizers, have couched Gaza in terms of a hapless victim of circumstance for decades. Reality starkly differs. Gaza is a prime piece of real estate – a coastal strip abutting the Mediterranean, with fertile sands from the Egyptian Delta, proximal to ancient trade routes. The only problem Gaza has is the politics of destruction.
Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the leadership there used international aid to turn Gaza into a military fortress embedded with terror tunnels and missile launch sites against Israel. Billions of dollars cascaded into Gaza from the U.S., EU, and Qatar. Much of it was diverted to armaments and terror infrastructure.
If Gaza is to have a future, it has to start with a change of mind. The Palestinian notion of “return” – the idea that generations of Palestinians, including those born in Gaza, are refugees awaiting their rightful home in Israel – needs to be brought to a close. That ideological obsession underpinned the Oct. 7 attacks. Article here

 

Jake Wallis Simons: This morning I awoke to a WhatsApp message from my long-time friend in Gaza, whom I met during my time as a foreign correspondent: “Habibi, make Gaza great again 🙂 Gaza is uninhabitable, so this is a great idea,” referring to President Trump’s plan. When we spoke by phone, he told me from Gaza City, “We survived the war but we will die from the rubble. This is the best solution for the people. Would you want to wait two-to-five years just for the rubble to be removed so your house can be rebuilt?”
“Everybody I know, the people around me, feel the same as me. At least half-a-million will accept to leave, be happy to leave. We suffered for one-year-and-a-half. Also another ten years? Hamas has no support any more. Not like before. They destroyed us for nothing.” Article here (paywall)

 

Alex Traiman:The reason Gaza is in this situation is because of Hamas’s strategy to use its entire civilian infrastructure as its base of operations. Nearly every residential building, mosque, school and hospital was turned into a weapons storage depot or a tunnel entrance. The IDF destroyed every building used by Hamas for military purposes. The IDF accomplished this feat while moving nearly all of Gaza’s civilian population out of harm’s way. Article here

 

UNWRA

Brendan O’Neill: How Western Governments are funding the persecution of the Jews. We know UNRWRA has intimate links with Hamas, so why are we giving it money?Article here

 

 

HISTORICAL NOTE: The Roots of Nationalism and Territorial Claims of Palestinian Arabs.

Dr Harold Rhode:(Extracts)

Prior to 1948, practically the only people who referred to themselves as Palestinians were the Jews.
Modern Palestinian identity was largely invented in 1964 when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created.

In the 19th century, much of what is now the West Bank and Gaza was sparsely populated and underdeveloped.
The Ottoman Empire sought to repopulate and develop the region by bringing in Muslim migrants from Albania, Bosnia and the Caucasus.
In the 1840s, Egyptian forces occupied the region, prompting many Egyptians to settle there.

During the British Mandate period, as Jewish immigration increased, Arab workers from across the Jordan River streamed westward, drawn by employment opportunities and improved health care provided by the Jews. They did not perceive themselves as Palestinians.
The historical connections between the people of Gaza, the West Bank and British Mandate Palestine are shaped by centuries of migration.
They are not one people, but a hodge-podge of peoples with no prior connection to pre-1948 Palestine, who settled there during the past two centuries.

Article here