RSS
16 more hostages are freed as Netanyahu vows to resume war at truce’s end
(JTA) — Twelve more Israelis have been freed from Gaza, including several who had been separated from family members released in recent days, as the current truce deal appears to be reaching its conclusion.
The latest release includes two Russian-Israeli women whom Hamas released as a “gesture” to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in addition to the 10 Israelis the terror group was required to release under the terms of its truce deal with Israel. Hamas also released four Thai workers whose names were not immediately released.
The hostages freed on Wednesday do not include members of the Bibas family, parents Shiri and Yarden and brothers Kfir, 10 months, and Ariel, 4, who have become symbols of the crisis in a country riveted by the daily ritual of learning who is coming home and who remains captive or missing. Hamas said on Wednesday that Shiri and her sons had been killed in an airstrike. Israel said it was investigating the “cruel and inhumane” claim, which comes days after Hamas said it had handed the family to a different terror group and more than five days since the last Israeli airstrike. Hamas previously returned a hostage whom it had previously said was dead.
Hamas has offered to release more hostages over the next four days in exchange for an extension of the ceasefire. It is not clear whether Israel will accept the offer. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Wednesday to continue the war, and Israeli military leaders have reportedly signed off on plans for the conflict’s next phase.
Meanwhile, a far-right minister has threatened that his party will leave Netanyahu’s government if the war does not resume: National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s departure could but would not necessarily bring down the government.
Most of the latest freed hostages come from Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the hardest-hit communities during the Oct. 7 attack where more than 100 people were killed. The Israeli hostages freed Wednesday are:
Raya Rotem, 54. Her 13-year-old daughter Hila was released Saturday, two days after the pair was reportedly separated for the first time since they were taken captive. While in Gaza, Rotem was the caretaker of Emily Hand, 9, who was sleeping at her house on the night of the attack; Hand was released along with Hila.
Raz Ben Ami, 55. Her husband Ohad was also abducted.
Yarden Roman-Gat, 36. After initially escaping from Hamas terrorists with her husband and toddler, Roman-Gat reportedly handed her child to her husband because he could run faster. Her husband and child survived the attack and were not recaptured.
Liat Beinin, 49. Beinin is a U.S. citizen who works at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. Her husband Aviv Atzili remains in Gaza.
Moran Stella Yanai, 40. Yanai is a jewelry designer from Beersheba who was selling her work at the Nova music festival where an estimated 360 people were killed. She was seen on video being pulled by a Hamas terrorist from a ditch where she had hidden.
Liam Or, 18. His cousins Noam, 17, and Alma, 13, were released on Friday, and their father Dror remains a hostage; their mother Yonat was killed on Oct. 7.
Itai Regev, 18. Regev’s sister Maia, 21, was released on Saturday and rushed into surgery because of a wound to her leg. The siblings were captured at the Nova festival; their friend Omer Shem-Tov remains in Gaza.
Ofir Engel, 18. A resident of Jerusalem and a Dutch dual citizen, Engel was visiting his girlfriend on Kibbutz Be’eri the day of the attack; she survived, but her father, Yossi Sharabi, was taken captive and remains in Gaza.
Amit Shani, 16. Shani was taken with Engel and Sharabi, the only member of his family to be abducted.
Gali Tarshansky, 13. Tarshansky was captured after jumping from the window of her home’s safe room along with her father, who survived. Her brother Lior, 15, was killed.
Yelena Trupanov, 50, and Irene Tati, 77. The Russian-Israeli mother and daughter were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, along with Trupanov’s son Sasha and his girlfriend, Sapir Cohen; her husband Vitaly was murdered. Sasha Trupanov and Cohen remain hostages.
—
The post 16 more hostages are freed as Netanyahu vows to resume war at truce’s end appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login