The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose decision to attack Israel more than a year ago set off the ever-widening war tearing up the Middle East, could be the key to ending the bloodshed. Now that Israel has decapitated Hamas in Gaza, the thinking goes, it might be …
Read More »Despite Israeli Bombs and Assassinations, Hezbollah Keeps Fighting
Israeli bombs have blown up its munitions stores and killed thousands of its fighters, including many seasoned commanders. And yet, Hezbollah keeps fighting. Since Israel invaded southern Lebanon nearly three weeks ago, its forces have confronted a flexible enemy that uses the environment to launch complex and sometimes deadly operations. …
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 »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 »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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