(JTA) — Israelis seeking to visit the United States could soon be required to submit five years of social media history, according to draft regulations published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week.

The regulations would apply to tourists from 42 countries, all allies of the United States, that are enrolled in the government’s Visa Waiver Program that allows passport holders to visit for up to 90 days without a visa.

Israel was first designated into the Visa Waiver Program by DHS in September 2023. The same year, Israeli tourism to the United States reached 376,439, followed by 417,077 in 2024, according to Statista.

The proposed regulations come as the Trump administration seeks to tighten borders. In April, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it would scrutinize the social media accounts of people applying to immigrate and international students for “antisemitic activity.” But the regulations mark a shift toward examining the records of people who are trying to visit, not move to, the United States.

In response to a question from a reporter Wednesday about whether the new requirement would cause a “decline in tourism,” President Donald Trump demurred.

“No. We’re doing so well,” Trump said. “We just want people to come over here, and safe. We want safety. We want security. We want to make sure we’re not letting the wrong people come enter our country.”

The new regulations would overhaul the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, an online application that tourists included in the Visa Waiver Program have recently been required to submit before entering the country.

It was not immediately clear how tourists would submit their social media history under the proposed regulations, or even what such a request could constitute in an era when people maintain many social media accounts and post prolifically on them.

The DHS notice began a 60-day period for public comment on the regulations this week. A spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement that the notice was preliminary.

“Nothing has changed on this front for those coming to the United States. This is not a final rule, it is simply the first step in starting a discussion to have new policy options to keep the American people safe,” the statement read. “The Department is constantly looking at how we vet those coming into the country, especially after the terrorist attack in Washington DC against our National Guard right before Thanksgiving.”

The Nov. 26 shooting of two National Guard members by a suspect who is an Afghan national triggered several restrictions on immigration by the Trump administration. The suspect entered the country legally and has not been publicly alleged to have had a social media track record that might have elicited alarm.

The potential regulation comes as Israeli soldiers have faced scrutiny for their posts on social media during the war in Gaza, with some soldiers fleeing countries they have visited that are less friendly than the United States to Israel over the threat of potential war crime inquiries.

The post Israeli tourists could soon be required to show 5 years of social media history to enter the US appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Two months after they were taken hostage, and eight months before they would be murdered, the Israelis who would later be known as the “Beautiful Six” were herded into a new section of the Hamas tunnel where they had been held.

There, their captors took hours of video of the young adults as they lit a makeshift menorah, sang traditional Hanukkah songs and, after being prompted, offered holiday greetings to the camera.

“Where are the sufganiyot?” asked Eden Yerushalmi.

“We’re waiting for Roladin in the land [of Israel],” joked Hersh Goldberg-Polin, referring to one of the most prominent purveyors of Hanukkah donuts in Israel.

The other hostages — Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lubanov and Carmel Gat — sit with their fellow captives. Sarusi appears visibly distressed as he makes the blessing over the candles, and the cameraman captures wrenching comments as the six young adults sing the song “Maoz Tzur.”

Goldberg-Polin explains that there are six verses in the song, “one for each time they tried to kill us and failed.” Yerushalmi responds, “We need to add another verse.”

In another video, Lubanov is instructed to shave the heads of his fellow male hostages. While shaving Danino, he recalls the movie “The Pianist,” set during the Holocaust, and says he is like a barber in that setting.

“This situation is not that far from the Holocaust,” Danino replies, looking at a mirror that a third person, possibly from Hamas, is holding up.

Some of the footage appeared intended to fuel the kind of hostage videos that Hamas released intermittently during the war, but Hamas never put it out. Instead, the footage was recovered by the IDF about three months ago during a raid on a hospital in Khan Younis and was delivered to the families of the hostages about six weeks ago, according to YNet News. It was released publicly on Thursday.

The video adds to accounts that many of the hostages sought to maintain Jewish practices and traditions while in captivity, though it is the first to suggest that such practices might at times have been facilitated or coerced by their captors.

“Lighting Hanukkah candles in that dark place captures the essence of the Jewish spirit: light prevailing over darkness,” the hostages’ families said in a statement released by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

“Hamas filmed these videos as propaganda, but the humanity of the beautiful six shines through this footage. It is stronger than any terrorist organization. These videos bear witness to evil and failure. The entire world must see our loved ones in these moments, their unity, strength, and humanity even in the darkest times. They were taken alive, they survived in captivity, and they should have come home alive,” the statement continues. “Nothing will bring our loved ones back to life. Only bringing the truth to light, only genuine accountability at the national level, can bring justice and healing to all our hearts.”

We will never forgive and we will never forget how our hostages were treated by Hamas in Gaza.

Despite the horrific torture and humiliation, our brave and courageous hostages never lost hope, and even continued to light Hanukkah candles to bring light into a world of darkness. pic.twitter.com/wv3PSnbQZk

— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) December 11, 2025

The release of the footage has renewed grief over the murder of the hostages, which closely followed the collapse of ceasefire negotiations in July 2024. Some of the hostages, including Goldberg-Polin, who lost an arm on Oct. 7, had been on the list for release had a deal come together. Since then, Israeli officials have counted the hostages, whose bodies were retrieved soon after they were killed, among those rescued by the Israeli military.

“What heroes,” Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, told Channel 12, according to the Times of Israel. “Six young luminous people who did everything right and they stayed alive and they did their part, and for us to claim we brought them back, in bags, bags of children to their parents, please don’t count Hersh among the people you saved.”

News of their deaths triggered mass protests in Israel opposing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to reach a deal the month before. In September 2024, Netanyahu issued an apology to the hostages’ families.

The video comes as the body of the last remaining hostage in Gaza, Ran Gvili, has yet to be returned to Israel, two months after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that required the release of all of the remaining hostages. Twenty living hostages and 27 deceased hostages, most but not all killed on Oct. 7, have since been returned.

The video appeared to be taken months before the group of six were killed in Hamas captivity in Rafah on August 29, 2024, shortly after the collapse of ceasefire negotiations with Hamas that could have led to the release of some of them.

The post 6 hostages murdered in Gaza lit Hanukkah candles in captivity, newly released footage shows appeared first on The Forward.

People gather for the UTEP chapter of Turning Point USA’s event featuring Border Czar Tom Homan on Dec. 4, 2025, at the UGLC on the UTEP campus in El Paso, Texas. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

A strong majority of Republicans in the US support Israel and reject antisemitism, but “new,” more liberal entrants to the party are more likely to hold an animus toward the Jewish state and tolerate antisemitic hatred, according to a major new survey.

The Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, has released a new poll examining the evolving makeup of the Republican Party (GOP) and its current attitudes toward Israel and Jewish Americans.

The results show a GOP that still contains a strong, reliable core of pro-Israel voters, yet one that is increasingly fractured, with a growing minority expressing skepticism toward Israel or even openly hostile antisemitic views. 

According to the poll, the majority of Republicans, defined as registered GOP voters or those who, regardless of party affiliation, voted for Donald Trump in 2024, remain consistently conservative on foreign policy and firmly supportive of Israel. The Manhattan Institute divided this group into two groups: “Core Republicans,” defined as “longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier,” and “New Entrant Republicans,” defined as “recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.” The two blocs comprise about two-thirds and one-third of the GOP coalition, respectively.

Among the nearly 3,000 total respondents, 55 percent said that Israel is an “important and effective” US ally, while 23 percent said that Israel is “a country like any other” whose interests sometimes align with the US. An additional 12 percent agreed with a description of Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and a liability, indicating a heavy disdain for the Jewish state. 

“New Entrant Republicans” perceive Israel in a far harsher light than the general GOP base, according to the data. Among this cohort, 24 percent see Israel as a “liability” while just 39 percent still consider Israel an important ally of the US.

Notably, old guard and newer members of the Republican Party have split perspectives on Qatar, with 41 percent of new entrants viewing the Middle Eastern country favorably compared to 23 percent of “core” Republicans.

The survey also delivers a stark warning about a troubling minority within the GOP and across the broader electorate that holds openly antisemitic views. According to the results, 17 percent of current Republicans can be categorized as “anti-Jewish,” defined as those who “self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust denial or describe Israel as a colonial state” or “do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.”

The Manhattan Institute found that newer entrants are more likely to be anti-Jewish.

“Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans,” the survey states. “They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”

This group is also in general more politically liberal, according to the survey: “Given that many of these voters are younger and former Democrats, more progressive policy tendencies are unsurprising.”

Notably, the Manhattan Institute found slightly higher levels of anti-Jewish sentiment (20 percent) among Democrats.

Among newer Republicans, 38 percent believe that Jews are more loyal to a foreign country than the US, compared to 24 percent of more traditional Republicans.

The “new entrant bloc is more likely to express tolerance for racist or antisemitic speech, more likely to support political violence, more conspiratorial, and — on core policy questions — considerably more liberal than the party’s traditional base,” the Manhattan Institute writes. “These voters are drawn to Trump but are not reliably attached to the Republican Party.”

A key factor in the data is age, with the survey showing a major generational divide in which older GOP voters are much more supportive of Israel and less likely to express antisemitic views than their younger cohorts.

According to the data, 25 percent of GOP voters under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.

Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment. There are also substantial divisions among racial lines. Whopping amounts of black and Latino GOP voters, 66 percent and 77 percent, respectively, believe in Holocaust denialism. Thirty percent of white GOP voters deny or minimize the Holocaust, according to the Manhattan Institute.