Days after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Pentagon quietly dispatched several dozen commandos to Israel to help advise on hostage recovery efforts, U.S. officials said. Those troops from the Joint Special Operations Command were quickly joined by a group of intelligence officers, some working with the commandos …
Read More »Fighting Rages in Gaza and Lebanon, Despite Killing of Hamas Leader
Israeli forces pounded targets in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya on Saturday, killing at least 33 people and injuring dozens of others in the bombardment, a Palestinian emergency services group said. Israel has surrounded Jabaliya for a week as it seeks to root out Hamas fighters who it says …
Read More »Opinion | Yahya Sinwar’s Death Is a Tricky Opportunity
Reading the news that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s pitiless leader, had been killed on Wednesday by Israeli forces in southern Gaza, I had the same sense of elation so many people felt when Osama bin Laden was killed. To take satisfaction in the violent end of another human being, even an …
Read More »Sinwar’s Final Moments: On the Run, Hurt, Alone, but Still Defiant
At the end, the fearsome militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war seemed barely a threat. In video captured by an Israeli drone, a man sat alone, badly wounded and caked in dust amid the ruins of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a kaffiyeh and …
Read More »Sinwar’s Death Highlights Israel’s Long Quest for Deterrence
A quarter-century before Israel was founded, the Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country. A Jewish state, he wrote in 1923, would succeed only by projecting enough strength to force its enemies to accept it as a permanent reality. …
Read More »Columbia Bars Vocal Pro-Israel Professor From Campus
Columbia University has temporarily barred a vocal pro-Israel professor from campus, saying he repeatedly harassed and intimidated the school’s employees. Shai Davidai, an assistant professor in the business school, has been a polarizing presence on campus since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas led an attack on Israel that has turned …
Read More »Tent Camp in Gaza Engulfed by Flames After Israeli Strike
Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed Palestinians in a tent encampment on the grounds of a hospital and in a school turned shelter, according to residents and U.N. officials, as deadly fighting also raged between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Survivors of the strike at the hospital complex in …
Read More »Survivors of Gaza Hospital Blaze Say They Are Living a ‘Recurring Nightmare’
This was not the first time that displaced Gazans camping on the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital awoke to Israeli strikes on the place where they were trying to find safety. But Monday’s strike overshadowed any they had survived before: flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony …
Read More »Opinion | Polio Threatens Gaza Today. Tomorrow, It Could Be Cholera.
In August, health officials recorded the first case of polio in Gaza in more than 25 years, in an unvaccinated 10-month-old baby whose lower left leg became paralyzed by the virus. Sadness and frustration washed over me when I first heard the news. It is outrageous that polio — which …
Read More »Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack
For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history. Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York …
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