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Hezbollah Launched 25 Attacks From Near UNIFIL Posts Over Past Month
UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL) vehicles drive in Marjayoun, near the border with Israel, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon, Oct. 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher
JNS.org — Over the past month, the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah has fired 25 rockets and missiles at Israeli communities and forces from terrorist compounds embedded near United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) posts in southern Lebanon, the IDF said on Sunday night.
One of the attacks killed two Israeli soldiers.
The IDF accused the Iranian-backed terror army of “exploiting their proximity to UN forces.”
During a targeted ground raid in southern Lebanon, troops from the 146th Division located hundreds of weapons, including firearms, grenades and rocket launchers aimed at Israeli territory. These weapons were stored in compounds located from a few dozen meters up to a few hundred meters from UNIFIL posts situated near the Blue Line border.
“UNIFIL in southern Lebanon was deployed to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and prevent the presence of armed Hezbollah operatives south of the Litani River. However, both the State of Lebanon and the international community have failed to implement Resolution 1701, despite repeated requests to do so,” the IDF said.
“For years, Hezbollah has embedded itself in southern Lebanon in grave violation of UN Security Council resolutions. The organization has stockpiled large quantities of weapons aimed at Israeli civilians over the years and has deliberately built up its attack infrastructure near UNIFIL posts,” the military continued.
The IDF emphasized that its raids target only Hezbollah and not UNIFIL posts, forces or infrastructure, noting that on Sept. 30, before the start of ground operations in Lebanon, IDF representatives requested that UNIFIL move its personnel away from posts located within five kilometers of the Blue Line because this area would become an active combat zone.
However, the United Nations has refused to move its forces to safer areas, despite a plea from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday.
“I want to directly address the UN secretary-general from here: It is time for you to remove UNIFIL from Hezbollah’s strongholds and from the combat areas,” the premier said in a statement.
“The IDF has repeatedly requested this, only to be met with refusal, a refusal aimed solely at providing Hezbollah terrorists with a human shield. Your refusal to evacuate UNIFIL soldiers turns them into hostages of Hezbollah. This endangers both them and the lives of our soldiers,” he continued.
“We regret the harm caused to UNIFIL soldiers, and we are doing everything we can to prevent it. But the simplest and most obvious way to ensure their safety is to simply remove them from the danger zone. Mr. Secretary-General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately,” Netanyahu said.
“Unfortunately, some European leaders are applying pressure in the wrong place. Instead of criticizing Israel, they should direct their criticism at Hezbollah, which uses UNIFIL as a human shield, just as Hamas in Gaza uses UNRWA as a human shield. Unfortunately, in Gaza, UNRWA even collaborates with Hamas,” he added.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was defiant on Sunday, saying that any attacks on peacekeepers “may constitute a war crime.”
“UNIFIL peacekeepers remain in all positions and the UN flag continues to fly,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.
For its part, the Israeli army said that “the IDF maintains continuous communication with UNIFIL to avoid, as much as possible, any harm to UNIFIL personnel in the area and will continue to do so, despite the complexities of the UNIFIL’s presence inside the combat zone.”
Gallant: Hezbollah will not be allowed to return to border
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Sunday that Hezbollah will not be allowed to return to the Lebanese border area.
“The first line of villages contains Hezbollah military targets, where thousands of weapons and missiles are stored, and where there are hundreds of tunnels. These [military targets] will be destroyed, and even once IDF troops withdraw, we will not allow Hezbollah terrorists to return to these areas,” Gallant said during a visit to an observation post overlooking southern Lebanon.
Israeli soldiers entered southern Lebanon at the end of September, weeks after the Security Cabinet added the safe return of tens of thousands of internally displaced residents to their homes in the north to Israel’s official war goals.
Gallant conducted a tour and operational briefing with the commander of the IDF’s 91st Division and received an overview of the division’s activities, “with an emphasis on the progress made in ground operations aimed at locating and eliminating Hezbollah’s attack infrastructure in southern Lebanon,” according to his office.
“At this observation post we can see the entire first line of villages with Hezbollah infrastructure. These are military targets containing underground tunnels and weapon storages — our troops found hundreds of RPGs, munition and anti-tank missiles here. The IDF is currently destroying these means above and under the ground,” Gallant said.
“I have instructed the IDF at all levels to ensure the destruction of [attack infrastructure] and to ensure that terrorists may not return to these places. This is essential in order to ensure the safety of Israel’s northern communities.”
“The IDF’s actions are powerful and effective — we are operating in the entire area. We have destroyed [attack] infrastructure in Beirut, in the Bekaa [Valley] and across Lebanon, and now we are operating along the border. We will continue until operational requirements are achieved.”
Over 100 terrorists killed
The IDF said on Sunday night forces from its 146th Division have killed over 100 terrorists to date in targeted raids and ground operations in southern Lebanon.
Additionally, the division’s forces have located and destroyed dozens of tunnel shafts, terrorist infrastructure and over 50 rocket launchers and over 60 Hezbollah command posts.
Also, forces from the 205th Brigade uncovered terror infrastructure located in a tunnel around half a kilometer from the Israeli border. The tunnel contained equipment used by terrorists for prolonged stays, including electrical infrastructure, ventilation ducts and two rooms used for storing weapons and ammunition.
The tunnel itself was discovered several months ago and has now been destroyed.
Reports Beirut attacks halted ‘entirely false’
An Israeli official on Sunday night denied Hebrew media reports that Israel’’ political echelon had directed the IDF to pause airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Beirut in the past three days.
The reports are “entirely false,” the source told the Times of Israel, adding that “Israel maintains freedom of action all across Lebanon, depending on the location of the targets.”
Ynet had reported that US President Joe Biden asked Netanyahu to curb strikes in the Lebanese capital when the two spoke last week.
Hezbollah airs audio recording of Nasrallah
Hezbollah on Sunday aired an audio recording of Hassan Nasrallah, just over two weeks after an Israeli strike killed the leader of the terror group in the Dahiyah district south of Beirut.
“We count on you … to defend your people, your families, your nation, your values and your dignity, and to defend this holy and blessed land and this honorable people,” Nasrallah is heard saying in the recording.
Hezbollah said that the recording was made as he addressed the Iran-backed terror group’s fighters during a military maneuver.
Israeli strike kills Radwan missile unit commander
The IDF announced on Monday afternoon that the commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force’’ anti-tank missile unit was killed in an airstrike in the area of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon.
According to the Israeli military, Muhammad Kamel Naeem was responsible for planning and carrying out many terrorist attacks, including anti-tank missile attacks against Israeli civilians.
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At European Parliament, Urgent Call for Action on Women’s Rights a Year After Hamas Sexual Violence
The personal belongings of festival-goers are seen at the site of an attack on the Nova Festival by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Global silence and inaction in the face of gender-based violence by Hamas were condemned at the European Parliament this week, where a panel of experts warned that the denial and rationalization of the rape of Israeli women during the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack last year legitimized gender-based violence as a weapon of war and enabled other regimes, such as Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government, to continue their oppression of women.
“If the world continues to turn a blind eye, we embolden these regimes and open the door to more atrocities,” said Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), which hosted the event.
“Antisemitism, as history shows, begins with Jews but never ends there. Today, the forces attacking Jewish people are the same ones oppressing women across the Middle East,” Small said.
The event, co-hosted by MEP Fulvio Martusciello and ISGAP, highlighted the deteriorating state of women’s rights in the region since the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault on Israel, and came one year after the attack, in which women were subjected to widespread sexual violence, including rape, torture, and mutilation.
Numerous eyewitness accounts, video evidence, and investigations by the United Nations confirmed that these acts were committed systematically, targeting women as part of the broader assault. Victims were found naked or partially clothed, and survivors have since provided harrowing testimonies of the brutal attacks, most recently last week, on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre.
(L-R) MEP Fulvio Martusciello, Manel Mslalmi, and Dr. Charles Asher Small speaking at the EU Parliament in Brussels, Oct. 15, 2024. Photo: Courtesy of ISGAP
Dr. Small and other panelists, including Claude Moniquet and Prof. Firouzeh Nahavandi, explored how extremism and political instability have compounded the suffering of women, who are often targeted both for their gender and their identity.
“The Oct. 7 attack was not just an assault on Israel but on the core values we claim to uphold — human rights, equality, and dignity,” Small said. He criticized the international community’s tepid response, noting, “The brutal murders and abductions of Israeli women by Hamas should have sparked global outrage, yet we faced silence, or worse, justifications disguised as resistance.”
The discussion also drew attention to the wider repression of women’s rights across the Middle East, with Qatar and Afghanistan cited as examples of regimes that suppress women’s freedoms while gaining international legitimacy. “Qatar funds radical movements while suppressing women’s rights,” Small noted, adding that the ongoing silence only emboldens such regimes.
“In Afghanistan, women can no longer speak publicly, let alone access education, and the world remains silent,” he said.
Manel Msalmi, president of the European Association for the Defense of Minorities, highlighted the “gendered nature of the violence” in the Oct. 7 attacks, stressing that women were specifically targeted for their gender with “unspeakable brutality designed to dehumanize and terrorize.” She urged the global community to respond with the urgency the atrocities demand.
“Whether in Iran, Afghanistan, or Gaza, women are systematically silenced, subjugated, and stripped of their most basic rights. It is disheartening that the international community has largely failed to respond with the urgency and outrage these atrocities demand,” Msalmi said.
“We cannot claim to stand for women’s rights, equality, or human dignity if we turn a blind eye to such barbarism,” she added.
The post At European Parliament, Urgent Call for Action on Women’s Rights a Year After Hamas Sexual Violence first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York Times Finds a Way to Israel-Bash Even When Recommending the Talmud
The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Is there no Jewish subject the New York Times can touch without somehow connecting it back to Israel-bashing?
The Sunday New York Times Magazine features a regular “letter of recommendation” column devoted usually to unreserved endorsements — baseball on the radio, Danish butter cookies. The latest one is about the Talmud. Actually, not quite about “the Talmud,” as the Times headline somewhat misleadingly puts it, but about the “Daily Dose of Talmud” emails published by My Jewish Learning, which are not bad, but which are something different from the full and complete text of Talmud itself, even in translation.
Anyone who expected the Times to treat the Talmud with the same unalloyed positivity and enthusiasm that it applies to cowboy boots, practicing the saxophone outdoors, or other “letter of recommendation” topics is in for a bit of a surprise, because the Times describes the Talmud as useful largely as medicine for the writer’s guilt about Israel’s “brutal” bombing campaign.
“In the days immediately following the attacks of Oct. 7, the Talmudic rabbis felt like a comforting reminder of Jewish resilience. But in the later weeks and months, as the horrors of Oct. 7 gave way to a brutal Israeli bombing campaign, my relationship to the Talmud began to curdle,” the Times article says. “I tried hard to disentangle Daf Yomi from the bombs, from my grief and anger at those who seemed to value retribution over the sanctity of human life and the pursuit of peace.”
The article goes on: “A year later, now, with much of Gaza in ruins and tens of thousands of people killed — tens of thousands of worlds destroyed — I’m still struggling with these questions. Most days, frankly, the only answer I have is to keep reading, to keep returning to the text no matter how angry or ashamed or grief-stricken I might be.”
I guess it’s somewhat reassuring that the Jewish Times writer feels personally connected enough to Israel to be “ashamed” by its actions, rather than entirely disconnected from it. And dealing by studying the Talmud, even a version of it mediated by emails, is better than protesting against Israel on campuses or in the streets.
Yet it takes a certain level of vanity and obtuseness for an American Jew, while Israeli soldiers are risking their lives in Gaza and Lebanon and while Israeli civilians are crowded in bomb shelters to protect against Iranian missile attacks, to be publicly handwringing in the New York Times about his feeling of being “ashamed” by “a brutal Israeli bombing campaign.” The idea that the campaign is about “retribution” rather than itself about the sanctity of life and the pursuit of peace is misleading and simpleminded.
The Times writer, Michael David Lukas, was last noticed in the New York Times back in 2018, publicly proclaiming himself a pork-eater, professing his “fondness for Bernie Sanders,” and denouncing Hanukkah as “an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.” At least it’s not just contemporary Israeli violence that bothers Lukas; he didn’t like it when the Maccabees defended Israel, either.
Lukas’s social media feed is full of retweets of non-Zionist and anti-Zionists writers and publications such as Peter Beinart and Jewish Currents and extreme anti-Israel activist groups such as If Not Now.
Leave it to the New York Times to let an article recommending the Talmud drift into an expression of vicarious shame for Israeli brutality. If I drafted such an article as an anti-New York Times parody, people would think it was over-the-top.
So often at the New York Times, in academia, or in mainstream book publishing, though, Israel-bashing is, for Jews, the required price of admission. Lukas, who not only writes for the Times but also teaches at San Francisco State University and is a book author, appears all too willing to perform the public role of American Jew ashamed of Israel. Maybe by the time he finishes the page-a-day cycle a few years from now he’ll wise up. Or maybe by then the Times editors will find some way to write about the Talmud without using it as a vehicle for more Israel-bashing.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
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Author Slams Amazon for Canceling Talk to Jewish Employees, Having Anti-Israel Rapper Macklemore Address Staffers
The Amazon logo is seen at the Young Entrepreneurs fair in Paris, France, Feb. 7, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Charles Platiau
Amazon has come under fire for a second time this week, and the most recent controversy involves a Jewish activist who accused the e-commerce giant of having a “big, giant Jewish problem” for allegedly canceling her talk to company employees but allowing anti-Israel rapper Macklemore to address staffers.
Best-selling author and renowned speaker Samantha Ettus revealed in an Instagram video on Tuesday that she was invited by Amazon a few months ago to speak to an unofficial group of Jewish employees at the company. However, her talk was eventually canceled because the human resources department at Amazon decided she was “too controversial,” said the Harvard graduate and former TED Talk speaker.
A few months later, Ettus explained, Amazon invited Macklemore to speak to employees, reportedly at an official seminar for Amazon employees who are suffering from addiction or in recovery, in honor of September being National Recovery Month.
The “Hind’s Hall” singer has publicly spoken about his alcohol and drug addiction, but has also publicly accused Israel numerous times of committing a “genocide” of Palestinians during the Jewish state’s ongoing war with Hamas terrorists, which began after last year’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. Hamas-led terrorists murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel and took over 250 hostages, including Amazon employee Alexander Trufanov, who remains in captivity. Amazon has so far not publicly commented on Trufanov’s kidnapping.
Macklemore accused Israel of “genocide” when he performed at a “Palestine Will Live Forever” benefit concert last month, which took place just weeks after his pre-taped, Zoom seminar for Amazon employees, according to the New York Post.
“Despite the Jewish people’s pleas that this is an antisemite, you can’t have him speak, the employees are up in arms, [Macklemore] is allowed to speak,” Ettus said in her Instagram video. “So Macklemore is not controversial but I am … Amazon, you have a huge Jewish problem. What are you going to do about it?”
An Amazon spokesperson responded to Ettus’s accusations on Wednesday in a statement to The Algemeiner.
“Many of these assertions lack important context, and it’s inaccurate and misleading to suggest we tolerate hostility in our workplace,” the spokesperson said. “We realize this has been a difficult time for many, and we remain focused on supporting all of our employees.”
Ettus shared the news the same week that Amazon executive Dr. Ruba Borno appeared in a promotional video for the company wearing a pendant in the shape of Israel that had a Palestinian flag imposed on top. Amazon has since deleted the video but not before the company faced backlash from social media users, who called the video “disappointing and insulting” to Jews, threatened to cancel their Prime subscriptions, and called for Borno’s firing.
Ettus has a Substack called “The Jewsletter” and launched a campaign called New Voices, in which non-Jewish and Jewish celebrities and influencers, including Cindy Crawford and Kevin Nealon, draw awareness to antisemitism. Ettus is also a producer of the upcoming documentary “Primal Fear: Jews Under Siege,” which is being filmed now.
She claimed in her Instagram video on Tuesday that Jewish employees at Amazon have been denied the right to form their own employee resource group, also known as an affinity group, even though the company has 13 such groups already, including ones representing Asians, women, military veterans, people with disabilities, Latinos, indigenous workers, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Amazon “refuses to officially acknowledge” Jews and allow them to create an affinity group for themselves because the company believes Jews are “a religion [and] not an ethnicity,” Ettus claimed.
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