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A View From the Ground: The Latest in Gaza, Lebanon — and Israeli Casualties
An Israeli tank maneuvers, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near the Israel-Gaza Border, in southern Israel, May 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Despite various statements by interested parties, the negotiations between Israel and Hamas are still stuck. Hamas continues to demand a total cessation of Israel’s military operations and withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, and the opening of Gaza for unimpeded and unchecked imports (i.e., the ability to import weapons to rebuild their forces) in return for a slow dribble of kidnappees totaling approximately 30 to 35 (including dead ones) of the 132 (including dead) kidnappees still in Palestinian hands.
In other words, Hamas demands the ability to rehabilitate its control over Gaza to be able to continue to attack Israel.
The Israeli government has so far refused to accept these terms. It is willing to exchange some imprisoned Palestinian terrorists (the exact numbers are not clear — before the war there were approximately 5,000 Palestinians in custody for terrorist activity and during the war many more have been captured — a few thousand in Judea and Samaria and a few thousand in Gaza) and accept a temporary ceasefire only. The issue of whether to accept or not has caused friction inside Israel, with some groups demanding the government accede to the terms. Currently the majority of Israelis, according to polls, still support the government’s position.
Fighting inside Gaza continues as described in previous reports: low-intensity guerrilla warfare. Hamas and other groups conduct small-scale raids or ambushes against Israeli units and Israeli forces reciprocate.
Despite incessant American and European and Egyptian demands that Israel not conduct its planned offensive into the Rafah area, Israel commenced this operation over the past week. Initially, leaflets were dropped recommending the population in the eastern area of Rafah move west and northwest. To aid the movement of the population, the IDF has provided thousands of tents (there are reports the IDF procured some 40,000 tents in all) and other provisions to be located in the area to which the population is being told to move. The movement directions were gradual; every couple of days an area further west was declared dangerous prior to the entrance of IDF units.
Then, after series of airstrikes on known locations of Hamas positions, an Israeli combined-arms division advanced several kilometers to the outskirts of the city of Rafah. According to reports on Palestinian social media, the attack is being conducted on separate axes: one near the border with Egypt, which has the Rafah terminal through which all official travel between Gaza and Egypt takes place; and the other some kilometers further north. Facing them is the Rafah brigade of Hamas, reinforced by other terrorist groups. There are probably at least 5,000 enemy combatants.
After a couple of days clearing the taken area (mopping up Hamas units that had not yet retreated, destroying above-ground and underground storage sites for weapons and other military equipment), the Israelis began dropping leaflets on the next section of ground. By May 14, there were reports that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had moved in the direction recommended by the IDF.
The general humanitarian effort continues. The Egyptians are refusing to send trucks through the Rafah terminal while it is in Israeli hands, but the other crossings are open, including a new one in northern Gaza. (Previously, provisions for northern Gaza were sent through the southern crossings from Israel and Egypt.) However, as the majority of trucks entered Gaza from Egypt, their refusal to allow the trucks to continue using the Rafah terminal has reduced the total flow considerably. Parachuting of supplies continues, and the Americans have completed preparations of a floating dock located near the Gaza coast. Israel has prepared a pier on the shore for the unloading of supplies just south of Gaza City.
The Egyptians have also threatened to reduce the level of diplomatic relations with Israel and to join the South African lawsuit at the International Criminal Court.
Lebanon:
The exchange of fire on the Israel-Lebanon border continues at a varying but fairly low intensity. Over the past few weeks, Israeli attacks have escalated in the choice of targets, which are no longer only near the border but also include Hezbollah installations in central and northern Lebanon. Hezbollah has responded by increasing the size of its rocket and exploding drone salvos into Israel.
Hezbollah has fired more than 4,500 rockets and exploding drones into Israel, as well as a few hundred guided anti-tank missiles (mostly Kornets, some the latest Russian version with ranges of up to 10 kilometers). Over the past month, Hezbollah stated that some of the rockets and exploding drones it fired were new models.
According to the Lebanese government, from October 7, 2023, through April 30, 2024, the IDF conducted approximately 4,010 strikes inside Lebanon using aircraft, artillery, tanks, and other weapons systems. The Israeli count is approximately 1,450 strikes. The discrepancy is probably due to what each side counts as a separate strike — i.e., the Israelis count as one strike the hitting of separate targets within the context of a one particular action, whereas the Lebanese count each individual target as a separate strike even if they occur more or less simultaneously.
Israeli casualties on the Lebanese border since October 7 are 18 soldiers (four more since my last report), and six civilians and several dozen wounded (including about a dozen more since my last report).
Hezbollah has admitted that so far, 299 of its personnel have been killed (another 26 since my last report). This figure does not include non-Shiite members of Hezbollah who probably add at least a couple of dozen more to the list.
Other Lebanese and Lebanese-based Palestinian organizations have also participated in the exchange and approximately 70 members of these have been killed too.
Total Lebanese military casualties are now two killed and half a dozen wounded.
Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, exploited the timing of Israel’s Independence Day to give a speech extolling the success of Hamas and Hezbollah in this war. He claimed that Israel has lost 1,500 soldiers and is hiding the true number (the actual number is 620). He added that polls in Israel show that 30% of its Jews have lost hope for Israel’s existence and that many are already emigrating. He claimed that the decision of many states to recognize the existence of a Palestinian state was one of the victories of the war, and that the many demonstrations calling Israel a genocidal state rather than one adhering to liberal democracy were the result of the successful prosecution of the war against Israel.
Nasrallah went on to say that Israel’s policy and strategy are at a dead end because it has failed to destroy and replace Hamas, and the Arab states that had reached accommodation with Israel are refusing to help it. Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel would not cease, he said, until Israel surrenders to Hamas’ demands in Gaza, and the Israeli refugees from the north will not be able to return to their homes until this happens.
Israeli casualties:
The total number of Israelis confirmed killed on and since October 7is now 1,559, with another approximately 15,000 wounded.
There are still 132 kidnapped Israelis and non-Israelis in Gaza. How many of them are alive and how many are dead is not known, though the current estimate is that at least 30 are dead and probably more. In negotiations with Hamas, Israel has demanded a list of those alive and those dead, but Hamas has refused to provide this information. Furthermore, Hamas claims not to know the whereabouts of more than a few dozen of the kidnappees. Some are said to be in the hands of other groups or even of “private” clans who joined the assault on Israel in the third wave of the Hamas attack on October 7.
In addition, 19 Israeli civilians have been killed in the Hamas rocket attacks and six by Hezbollah.
As of May 14, a total of 620 IDF soldiers have been killed on all fronts (16 more than my previous report).
Of the approximately 15,000 Israeli wounded, nearly 2,000 were wounded on October 7. Of the total, approximately 3,500 are civilians and approximately 11,500 are soldiers (career personnel, conscripts and reserves). The IDF has published that since the beginning of the war, 7,200 soldiers have been admitted to rehabilitation treatments. Approximately 3,000 more were wounded but released after initial treatment without needing extensive rehabilitation treatment.
Initially the number of Israelis who were forced to leave their homes in 64 villages and towns along the borders with Gaza and Lebanon reached approximately 250,000. The number of those returning to their homes has grown, mostly in the areas around Gaza. The current number of Israeli refugees is approximately 150,000.
Dr. Eado Hecht, a senior research fellow at the BESA Center, is a military analyst focusing mainly on the relationship between military theory, military doctrine, and military practice. He teaches courses on military theory and military history at Bar-Ilan University, Haifa University, and Reichman University and in a variety of courses in the Israel Defense Forces. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
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Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
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