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With their country under fire, Israelis who can’t fight find other ways to help
MODIIN, Israel (JTA) — When Israel’s national emergency service, Magen David Adom, opened a mobile blood donation site in the central Israeli city of Modiin on Tuesday to address the needs of those injured by Hamas’ attacks, the plan was to run a nine-hour emergency blood drive.
But the site was so overwhelmed when over 650 volunteers showed up at the opening that within an hour staffers said they had reached their blood-collecting capacity for the day and urged donors to stop coming.
Not far away, at a shopping center in Maccabim, volunteers collecting supplies for soldiers including soap, shampoo, deodorant, canned tuna, energy bars, underwear, socks, toothbrushes, female hygiene products and toilet paper were bustling with urgency.
Community members dropped off items they’d brought from home or stores, teenagers sorted them, and volunteers loaded them onto trucks and delivered them to soldiers in southern Israel. After a busy Monday, organizers sent out word on Tuesday that volunteers should stop coming to work at the site because there were too many – though they still needed supplies.
Four days after Hamas launched a brutal attack against Israelis with the murders of hundreds of civilians, soldiers and police in areas near the Gaza Strip and heavy rocket bombardments aimed at southern and central Israel, most Israelis appear to be falling into one of two groups: those mobilizing to fight and those trying to support them and the victims.
“I can’t sit and work. I’m a person who feels I need to do something. I can’t watch from the sidelines,” said Assaf Tzur-El, a Modiin resident who collected over $1,000 from friends, work colleagues and members of his synagogue to buy supplies for soldiers. “In this case I’m not doing reserve duty; I can’t for health reasons. There’s not a lot I can do there, so I do what I can.”
His effort began Sunday at the behest of his daughter, Yael Tzur-El, 22, who kicked into gear after reading posts on social media about the soldiers’ needs. She got two local falafel places to donate 80 meals, filled the trunk of her father’s car with food, drinks and salty snacks, and drove to an army gathering point near Rehovot to distribute the food to soldiers waiting to go down south. They handed off the food to security at the gate and within minutes saw soldiers exiting in cars headed southward chomping down on the food they’d brought.
Hundreds of Israelis donate blood in Jerusalem, Oct. 9, 2023. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)
The Israeli volunteer efforts span the gamut.
Social workers are showing up at the Dead Sea hotels where evacuees of the Israeli kibbutzim and towns that were attacked are recovering. Residents of central Israel are opening up their homes to fellow citizens who have fled affected areas in the South and towns along Israel’s northern border, near Lebanon, that are now considered at risk of terrorist infiltration.
“I want to invite anyone who needs a place to be my guest,” Noga Brenner Samia, a resident of Telmond, a small town not far from Netanya, said in a video she shared on social media. “I know maybe it’s hard to come into a stranger’s home. But I want to say that none of us are strangers. Nobody today is a stranger. We all are friends; we just haven’t met yet. So whoever needs a place to stay, I have a quiet, pleasant house. I’ve got a lot of available rooms because the kids are in the army or national service.”
Israeli chef Eyal Shani prepared a complimentary lunch on Monday at his Tel Aviv restaurant HaSalon for residents of southern Israel who had been evacuated to a hotel in the city, and the restaurant also prepared hundreds of bagged meals to be sent to soldiers. “With much love and hope for better days,” read a note attached to each bag.
“We wanted to do good for the residents of the South,” said Netanel Rosenberg, a chef who works at the restaurant. “Families came, older people – about a hundred in all. It put a smile on their face.”
A group of Hasidic Orthodox Jews from the desert town of Arad, near Masada, surprised soldiers on a nearby military base with a delivery of dozens of pizza pies. Volunteers launched crowdsourced fundraising efforts for large orders of mobile phone batteries and chargers for soldiers stuck on the front lines. Parents with sons and daughters in the army fielded messages from their children about the need for outdoor mattresses, wearable flashlights and sleeping bag covers to keep their bedding dry from rain. A group calling itself Grilling for the IDF spent a day barbecuing and then delivering the food to soldiers.
“We literally just heard from the boys now that the food that we donated yesterday they got now and they’re so, so happy,” said Noa-Chen Anders, a 15-year old from Modiin who, along with her 14-year-old sister, Miya, organized a food delivery on Monday of six cars full of food to soldiers. “They just put it all on the table and many of them ate for the first time since Friday.”
The efforts are not limited to Israelis. American Jews, too, are mobilizing. Donors in Los Angeles organized a van full of bulletproof vests to be delivered to LAX so they could be loaded on an El Al plane and delivered to Israel. (The Israeli Defense Forces says the army has no shortage of protective equipment but that it takes time to get everything in place; however, soldiers on the ground are complaining of substandard or scanty equipment).
Over 300,000 Israeli reservists have been called up for duty so far.
Because of the logistics involved, they don’t all have beds to sleep in or enough satisfying meals or hygiene supplies. In an army where most soldiers go home every couple of weeks or so, most military bases are not equipped with laundry facilities. And many soldiers left home with little more than the clothes on their back on Saturday in their rush to answer the call of duty while Hamas’ attacks were in full force.
This is the need volunteers are trying to address — so much so, in fact, that supermarkets are running low on items in high demand by soldiers because donors are buying them up in large quantities.
Tzur-El said the biggest sacrifice he has made so far was standing in the supermarket checkout line at Rami Levy, a national discount chain, for over an hour and a half. He might have complained, but then he saw a friend in front of him with a cart and a half piled high with items because he had opened up his home to a family displaced by the war and needed more food.
“There are people doing far more than me,” he said.
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Iran, US Task Experts to Design Framework for a Nuclear Deal, Tehran Says
Atomic symbol and USA and Iranian flags are seen in this illustration taken, September 8, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
Iran and the United States agreed on Saturday to task experts to start drawing up a framework for a potential nuclear deal, Iran’s foreign minister said, after a second round of talks following President Donald Trump’s threat of military action.
At their second indirect meeting in a week, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi negotiated for almost four hours in Rome with Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, through an Omani official who shuttled messages between them.
Trump, who abandoned a 2015 nuclear pact between Tehran and world powers during his first term in 2018, has threatened to attack Iran unless it reaches a new deal swiftly that would prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.
Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, says it is willing to discuss limited curbs to its atomic work in return for lifting international sanctions.
Speaking on state TV after the talks, Araqchi described them as useful and conducted in a constructive atmosphere.
“We were able to make some progress on a number of principles and goals, and ultimately reached a better understanding,” he said.
“It was agreed that negotiations will continue and move into the next phase, in which expert-level meetings will begin on Wednesday in Oman. The experts will have the opportunity to start designing a framework for an agreement.”
The top negotiators would meet again in Oman next Saturday to “review the experts’ work and assess how closely it aligns with the principles of a potential agreement,” he added.
Echoing cautious comments last week from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, he added: “We cannot say for certain that we are optimistic. We are acting very cautiously. There is no reason either to be overly pessimistic.”
There was no immediate comment from the US side following the talks. Trump told reporters on Friday: “I’m for stopping Iran, very simply, from having a nuclear weapon. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. I want Iran to be great and prosperous and terrific.”
Washington’s ally Israel, which opposed the 2015 agreement with Iran that Trump abandoned in 2018, has not ruled out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming months, according to an Israeli official and two other people familiar with the matter.
Since 2019, Iran has breached and far surpassed the 2015 deal’s limits on its uranium enrichment, producing stocks far above what the West says is necessary for a civilian energy program.
A senior Iranian official, who described Iran’s negotiating position on condition of anonymity on Friday, listed its red lines as never agreeing to dismantle its uranium enriching centrifuges, halt enrichment altogether or reduce its enriched uranium stockpile below levels agreed in the 2015 deal.
The post Iran, US Task Experts to Design Framework for a Nuclear Deal, Tehran Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hamas Says Fate of US-Israeli Hostage Unknown After Guard Killed in Israel Strike
Varda Ben Baruch, the grandmother of Edan Alexander, 19, an Israeli army volunteer kidnapped by Hamas, attends a special Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony with families of other hostages, in Herzliya, Israel October 27, 2023 REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
Hamas said on Saturday the fate of an Israeli dual national soldier believed to be the last US citizen held alive in Gaza was unknown, after the body of one of the guards who had been holding him was found killed by an Israeli strike.
A month after Israel abandoned the ceasefire with the resumption of intensive strikes across the breadth of Gaza, Israel was intensifying its attacks.
President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff said in March that freeing Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old New Jersey native who was serving in the Israeli army when he was captured during the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks that precipitated the war, was a “top priority.” His release was at the center of talks held between Hamas leaders and US negotiator Adam Boehler last month.
Hamas had said on Tuesday that it had lost contact with the militants holding Alexander after their location was hit in an Israeli attack. On Saturday it said the body of one of the guards had been recovered.
“The fate of the prisoner and the rest of the captors remains unknown,” said Hamas armed wing Al-Qassam Brigades’ spokesperson Abu Ubaida.
“We are trying to protect all the hostages and preserve their lives … but their lives are in danger because of the criminal bombings by the enemy’s army,” Abu Ubaida said.
The Israeli military did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Hamas released 38 hostages under the ceasefire that began on January 19. Fifty-nine are still believed to be held in Gaza, fewer than half of them still alive.
Israel put Gaza under a total blockade in March and restarted its assault on March 18 after talks failed to extend the ceasefire. Hamas says it will free remaining hostages only under an agreement that permanently ends the war; Israel says it will agree only to a temporary pause.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it hit about 40 targets across the enclave over the past day. The military on Saturday announced that a 35-year-old soldier had died in combat in Gaza.
NETANYAHU STATEMENT
Late on Thursday Khalil Al-Hayya, Hamas’ Gaza chief, said the movement was willing to swap all remaining 59 hostages for Palestinians jailed in Israel in return for an end to the war and reconstruction of Gaza.
He dismissed an Israeli offer, which includes a demand that Hamas lay down its arms, as imposing “impossible conditions.”
Israel has not responded formally to Al-Hayya’s comments, but ministers have said repeatedly that Hamas must be disarmed completely and can play no role in the future governance of Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to give a statement later on Saturday.
Hamas on Saturday also released an undated and edited video of Israeli hostage Elkana Bohbot. Hamas has released several videos over the course of the war of hostages begging to be released. Israeli officials have dismissed past videos as propaganda.
After the video was released, Bohbot’s family said in a statement that they were “deeply shocked and devastated,” and expressed concern for his mental and physical condition.
“How much longer will he be expected to wait and ‘stay strong’?” the family asked, urging for all of the 59 hostages who are still held in Gaza to be brought home.
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Oman’s Sultan to Meet Putin in Moscow After Iran-US Talks
FILE PHOTO: Sultan Haitham bin Tariq al-Said gives a speech after being sworn in before the royal family council in Muscat, Oman January 11, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Sultan Al Hasani/File Photo
Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq al-Said is set to visit Moscow on Monday, days after the start of a round of Muscat-mediated nuclear talks between the US and Iran.
The sultan will hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.
Iran and the US started a new round of nuclear talks in Rome on Saturday to resolve their decades-long standoff over Tehran’s atomic aims, under the shadow of President Donald Trump’s threat to unleash military action if diplomacy fails.
Ahead of Saturday’s talks, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow. Following the meeting, Lavrov said Russia was “ready to assist, mediate and play any role that will be beneficial to Iran and the USA.”
Moscow has played a role in Iran’s nuclear negotiations in the past as a veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member and signatory to an earlier deal that Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018.
The sultan’s meetings in Moscow visit will focus on cooperation on regional and global issues, the Omani state news agency and the Kremlin said, without providing further detail.
The two leaders are also expected to discuss trade and economic ties, the Kremlin added.
The post Oman’s Sultan to Meet Putin in Moscow After Iran-US Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.