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How Montreal’s Jewish community helped create a new Uygher translation of Viktor Frankl’s famous Holocaust memoir
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Viktor Frankl famously penned in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most impactful literary works of the 20th century, “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
It was but one of many stirring passages that Kayum Masimov took in hand—and mind—when first reading Frankl’s book in Russian five years ago. A friend had recommended that Masimov, the Canadian representative to the World Uyghur Congress and a project coordinator for the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, read Frankl’s chronicle as a concentration camp prisoner, which has been translated into more than 50 languages and sold more than 60 million copies since first being published in 1946.
His reaction was immediate. “It’s a direct parallel to what I have experienced interviewing so many Uyghurs, especially those who came from concentration camps,” he told The CJN at the launch of a Uyghur translation of Frankl’s classic at the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM). The book debuted on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, marking the day in 1948 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“What struck me personally was when I read that this has happened before us. It’s a must-read for our community, especially now. I hate doing parallels and comparisons with other tragedies, but I cannot but think and observe these commonalities between our communities.”
Frankl’s survival story has helped generations worldwide cope with suffering, said Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom’s Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, who added that many Jews today acknowledge that “nobody was there for us when this was happening to us, so how can we be silent when this is happening to anyone else?”
Since China invaded East Turkistan in 1949, more than a year before entering Tibet, the region was prone to violence and repression through forced displacement, slave labour, civil rights erasure, rape, incarceration and much more. China has intensified its efforts since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, says Masimov.
“Over the last 10 or so years, it became intolerable—all-out war against the community. And not only Uyghurs, but all native people living in the region, including Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tartars, predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslims.”
According to rights groups, some 7 million people have been subjected to so-called re-education in China. With some 2,000 Uyghurs in Canada, a community established over the last 20-plus years, Masimov says “not a single Uyghur Canadian family has not been affected by this. And I thought this book will be a good thing because our community is so deeply traumatized, and this will be a good starting point to initiate conversations.
“The fact that I’m here with you, at the Holocaust Museum itself, and talking about it, is a part of the trauma healing for myself, sharing my pain.”
While China declares the number of Uyghurs at 12 million, the Uyghur rights groups put the real population at about 20 million, with about 100,000 in the global diaspora. Canada’s community is among the smallest. (The largest diaspora is in Turkey, estimated between 50,000-80,000 refugees.) “We are the canary in the coal mine in Canada,” says Masimov, who himself has been subject to harassment, intimidation and even death threats as far back as 2007 as a result of his advocacy.
He’s lost track of many members of his own family for several years. “There are people who have heard nothing from 40 family members for a decade,” he says. “My story is not unique at all. We all live with this, every day.” He says post-traumatic stress disorder and intergenerational trauma are evident among Canada’s Uyghur community.
Having acted as interpreter to many ex-concentration camp detainees during Canadian parliamentary hearings, Masimov spoke of hearing accounts of widespread rape and torture, “all this unimaginable cruelty. And the big question looming over my shoulders and that I heard many times from survivors: Why God allows this? What did we do wrong?”
When transmitting the human rights legacy of the Holocaust, MHM president Jacques Saada says, “It is precisely moments like tonight that help accomplish this crucial responsibility. This launch highlights the tragic yet resilient connection between Jewish and Uyghur communities and the importance of allyship in confronting genocide today.”
The project took over a year to complete, spurred on by Masimov and activists Marc Grushcow and Phil Kretzmar, who secured the publication rights and a translator who is anonymously credited on the book for fear of reprisals against their vulnerable family in China.
Frankl, a psychiatrist, originally penned his prescription for survival in German, and its new Uyghur versions are written in both Latin and Arabic script, with a possible Cyrillic edition coming, Masimov said in discussion with Rabbi Grushcow.
Free electronic versions are available for download online for anyone wishing to read, share or help raise awareness of the Uyghurs’ plight. “It’s not about selling anything,” says the rabbi’s father, Marc Grushcow. “It’s about rachmones” (compassion).
“China became a victim of its own success,” Masimov said. “It was so successful in suppressing us and other communities that it came to the point that even outsiders began wondering what is happening and posing questions.”
Rabbi Grushcow says the book’s profound takeaway is not just about surviving oppression, “but about maintaining human dignity, meaning, about psychological autonomy in the face of systematic attempts to destroy those fundamental capacities of any human being.”
Rights groups believe at least one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been incarcerated in Chinese internment camps.
“This is the largest incarceration or detention of any ethnic group in the world since the Holocaust,” says Masimov, who also spoke of organ harvesting, nuclear explosions resulting in high cancer rates, environmental degradation and a mass inflow of Chinese migrants, boosting the presence of ethnic Chinese in the region from five percent to surpassing 40 percent today. He also listed the widespread use of slave labour in the production of clothing, solar panels, food and other products found globally.
In February 2021, Canada’s parliament acknowledged the genocide and, in 2023, it launched an initiative to resettle 10,000 Uyghur refugees from third-party states, the first of whom arrived in Canada this week.
Asked what would happen if the world continues to do “almost nothing,” Masimov shared a sobering prognostic: “Within 20 to 30 years, we are facing the extinction of a 25-million-strong ethnic group.”
He says there is no long-term solution for China to keep its existence “as it is, as a political system. The first victims of the Chinese Communist Party are Chinese people themselves, right? It will come to the point that they will decide that it will be done. It’s not sustainable in the long term. I am optimistic on that… But the question is, will our community—along with others like Tibetans, Mongols—survive that? Because at the current rate, it is quite possible that within 20-30, years we will be gone as a group, which is a loss not only to us, but to Chinese civilization and the world.”
The Montreal Holocaust Museum has worked closely with Canada’s Uyghur community over the last few years to discuss pedagogical matters, says MHM head of communications Sarah Fogg. “We’ve done some beautiful bridge-building. We were there to show them what’s possible, how we handle exhibitions and artifacts.” Executive director Daniel Amarsays such collaborationis part of the mission “to strengthen links with other communities who suffered genocide (such as the Rwandan and Cambodian communities).”
Fogg says that part of the mission remains a challenge. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that people are not aware of this type of work that we do, as our core mission is still to educate anyone and everyone about the Holocaust and its legacy and teach about the dangers coming from unchecked antisemitism and unchecked hate.”
What stunned Marc Grushcow “was the parallel of the Jews of the 1930s in Germany into the war and the Uyghurs in China. Starting with the exclusion from society, family separation and forced assimilation. Uyghurs are subject to incarceration and forced labour, documented rape, forced sterilization of women, and it’s all part of China’s stated policy to erase Uyghurs through assimilation.”
Rabbi Grushcow recalled that the Jewish community must do “as much as we need to, to help each other, especially these days. We turn inward, of course, but there is also part of our tradition that says, ‘Remember the stranger, because you were a stranger.’ That we should not just look out for ourselves, but others.”
The situation of the Uyghurs is a grossly under-reported atrocity, she said, “and ‘genocide’ gets thrown around so much in terms of Israel and Palestine, wrongly. But in this case the markers of genocide and what is being done in China is so clear and how China has managed to keep this out of the headlines.”
On Oct. 10, 2023, she recalls, Canada’s Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project came out with a strong condemnation of the terrorist attacks on Israel, adding, “Anything we do with other communities, sometimes it’s strategic: we stand for you, you stand for us… That’s all well and good, but sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.”
Kasimov lauded the support of Canada’s Jewish community in his community’s plight and efforts. “Unfortunately, this has not been matched by our co-religionists,” noting that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas declared his support for China’s policies last year, “and said China’s re-education camps and everything they are doing are just.”
Indeed, in a June 2023 statement, the PA stated China’s policy toward Muslims in Xinjiang has “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.” Abbas also characterized criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghurs as interference in internal affairs. That elicited a reminder from MHM president Jacques Saada, who noted, “Abbas also wrote a book in which he justified the Holocaust, so we are again sharing a common point here.”
That’s why collaboration with the city’s Holocaust museum and its “outward-looking element, sharing that legacy about education” is so important, says Rabbi Grushcow. “We have so much history that matters with what’s going on with the Uyghurs.”
Showing compassion and support is no zero-sum game, she agrees: “Morally, it’s incumbent on us to do the right thing. The fact that it’s Victor Frankl, it’s extraordinary that this Jewish human memoir found its way into the hearts of the Uyghur community.”
The post How Montreal’s Jewish community helped create a new Uygher translation of Viktor Frankl’s famous Holocaust memoir appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Peter Beinart Bends Truth in New York Times Essay Accusing American Jews of Idolatry
Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Israel has no right to exist, New York Times “contributing opinion writer” Peter Beinart writes in a new opinion article accusing “mainstream American Jewish life” of being idolatrous.
The article appears under a general-purpose headline: “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do.” Yet after a bit of throat-clearing and hypothetical speculation about Scotland, Britain, Iran, and China, Beinart gets down to making his case for eliminating Israel, or, as he delicately puts it, “rethinking the character of the state” by replacing Israel with something else.
The one country that Beinart is really determined to rethink just happens to be the only one with a Jewish majority. The URL or web address that the Times team gives the article also exposes the game, “https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/opinion/israel-state-jewish.html.”
This isn’t some sort of abstract political theory philosophy project — it’s an effort by Beinart, platformed by the New York Times, to wipe the Jewish state off the map. At this point, it’s predictable and tired. Beinart had already announced in the New York Times back in 2020, “I no longer believe in a Jewish state,” part of what earned him the status of the New York Times‘ most favorite Jew.
So what, if anything, is new in this latest Beinart screed? Beinart has a new book to publicize, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. It is issued by publisher Knopf, whose parent company, Bertelsmann AG, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and subsequently covered it up.
As is often the case with hatred of Israel, Beinart’s article is marred by factual errors. He claims that “roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian.” That’s simply false; Israel’s population is about 9.8 million, of which about 7.2 million, or 73 percent, are Jewish, according to Israel’s central bureau of statistics. Beinart’s math depends on defining people in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah and Jenin, or in Hamas-controlled Gaza, as being “under Israeli control,” which is not accurate.
Beinart also falsely claims, “Even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold Israeli citizenship — sometimes called ‘Israeli Arabs’ — lack legal equality.” Just because a group suffers from discrimination or has lower achievement doesn’t mean it lacks legal equality. Israel’s Declaration of Independence states, “It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.” Israel’s Supreme Court has enforced that promise of equality. Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and serve in the Parliament. An Israeli Arab politician, Mansour Abbas, even recently served as a minister in an Israeli government.
Beinart also complains that “this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life.” That’s not true. Yes, most mainstream American Jews — unlike Beinart and, apparently, his New York Times editors — care deeply about Israel and oppose the enemies that hope to eradicate it. Yet the comparison to idolatry is inaccurate. It’s also inconsistent with Beinart’s previous claims. Already in his 2012 book The Crisis of Zionism, or even before that in his 2010 article “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” Beinart was predicting that American Jews would abandon Israel as it became, he claimed, more illiberal and right wing and undemocratic. Now, more than a decade later, he’s accusing American Jews not of abandoning Israel but of worshiping it. At least with his reference to “mainstream Jewish life” Beinart is defining himself clearly outside that. Given that, one wonders why the New York Times has chosen to rely so heavily for analysis of American Jewry and Israel on such an extremist, fringe figure.
I offered a couple of theories last year, including that “some portion of the Times online readership — alienated graduate students and other young, college educated liberals, along with increasing numbers of non-Americans — are looking for someone to give them a pass to hate Israel, basically to excuse their antisemitism. Beinart serves that function.”
In that regard, a Times colleague of Beinart’s offers some useful analysis. In a 2012 review for Tablet of a Beinart book, Bret Stephens, then still at the Wall Street Journal, paraphrased Leon Wieseltier’s observation “that characterizing antisemitic acts as a response to something Jews did doesn’t explain antisemitism. It reproduces it.”
From Beinart’s latest New York Times piece: “When you deny people basic rights, you subject them to tremendous violence. And, sooner or later, that violence endangers everyone. In 1956, a 3-year-old named Ziyad al-Nakhalah saw Israeli soldiers murder his father in the Gazan city of Khan Younis. Almost 70 years later, he heads Hamas’s smaller but equally militant rival, Islamic Jihad … The failure to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza ultimately endangers Jews. In this war, Israel has already killed more than one hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza as it did in the massacre that took the life of Mr. al-Nakhalah’s father. How many 3-year-olds will still be seeking revenge seven decades from now?”
It’s amazing that Beinart blames “Israeli soldiers” for the “murder” of Ziyad al-Nakhalah’s father in 1956 in Khan Younis. In 1956, Egypt, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, controlled Gaza. A Jerusalem Post article describes it more accurately: “Nakhalah’s father, Rushdi, was killed during the joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. The Gaza Strip back then was under Egyptian control.”
The New York Times itself provides useful historical context: A dispatch from Gaza on Nov. 2, 1956 reported that “at the roadside weary Israeli soldiers sat beside their weapons waiting for vehicles to remove them to points in the Gaza Strip where diehard commandos were offering resistance … Talking through interpreters to correspondents, residents of the Strip in the outskirts of Gaza said life as stateless displaced persons under the Egyptian government in the last eight years had not been happy. Although they had been allowed to vote in Egyptian elections this year, they said they had had none of the rights that had been given Egyptians on the other side of the Suez Canal zone.”
Another Times dispatch from Gaza, on Nov. 6, 1956, reported, “Israeli army units were cleaning out the last pockets of fedayeen (commando) squads … All along the road were wrecked and burned out Egyptian military vehicles and mobile weapons … Israeli troops expressed surprise at the joyous welcome they had received from Palestinian Arabs who had spent eight years under Egyptian control. There was no fear shown by the people, who seemed thankful that the Israelis had taken over the territory.”
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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How the Auschwitz Commandant’s Infamous Home Has Been Turned Into a Center Against Antisemitism
British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots
It was the most jarring moment of last year’s Academy Awards: as Jonathan Glazer accepted the Oscar for “The Zone of Interest,” a harrowing film set in the shadow of Auschwitz, instead of using his speech to honor the victims of the Holocaust, he made a political statement that many saw as an astonishing trivialization of the very subject his film had purported to explore.
Rather than acknowledging the unfathomable suffering of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz in particular, and the dangers of pathological antisemitism in general, Glazer chose to equate the Holocaust with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, implicitly drawing a moral equivalence between Nazis and the Jewish state.
The setting made it all the more disturbing — delivered amidst the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, Glazer’s so-called virtue-signaling call for universal resistance to “dehumanization” felt less like a plea for moral clarity and more like a cynical weaponization of the Holocaust to delegitimize Jewish self-defense and undermine the fight against the malignant evil of antisemitism.
“The Zone of Interest” is a film about the chilling banality of evil, loosely based on the novel of the same name, centering on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they go about their daily lives in a picturesque home just beyond the camp’s walls.
The film’s unsettling premise lies in its depiction of the Höss family’s mundane existence — gardening, swimming, and dining — while the machinery of genocide operates just out of sight. It is a study in complicity, yet it deliberately omits the suffering of Jewish victims, leaving their fate largely unseen and unheard.
And yet, somehow, Glazer’s acceptance speech managed to be even more disturbing than this conscious erasure. Instead of honoring those who perished, he co-opted the memory of the Holocaust to push a political agenda against Israel, without once mentioning the horrific evil perpetrated against Jews — fellow Jews! — on Oct. 7, 2023. Not a word about the deliberate murder, torture, and rape of 1,200 Jews, whose only sin was being Jewish in the land of their heritage, Israel.
While Hollywood — even, sadly, some within Jewish Hollywood — may be lost in its own navel-gazing world of self-righteousness, many Jews and Gentiles across the United States and beyond have been utterly shocked by the alarming resurgence of antisemitism in the 16 months since the Oct. 7 massacre.
Enter Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, who founded the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in 2014. Recognizing the urgent need to push back against the normalization of Jew-hatred, he enlisted my good friend Elliott Broidy and fellow philanthropist Dr. Thomas Kaplan. Together they purchased Rudolf Höss’s former home in Oświęcim, just outside the Auschwitz compound, the very setting of “The Zone of Interest” — and created the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization (ARCHER) at House 88, whose goal is not just to remember the victims of the Holocaust but also to find the best ways to combat the spread of antisemitism and advocate for them.
Instead of allowing the Auschwitz commandant’s house to remain a grotesque relic of history, they are turning it into a global center dedicated to combating antisemitism and extremism, ensuring that the lessons of the past are neither distorted nor forgotten — by Hollywood directors or by anyone else.
This week, Elliott was in Poland for the 80th anniversary commemoration of Auschwitz’s liberation. As part of the events, Höss’s house at 88 Legionów Street was opened to visiting dignitaries for the first time since the Holocaust.
Just steps from the site where 1.1 million Jews, along with 20,000 Roma and tens of thousands of Polish and Russian political prisoners, were murdered, this house was once home to the man who orchestrated that industrial-scale slaughter: Rudolf Höss. But for nearly eight decades, the Polish family that occupied it since 1945 refused to let anyone inside, despite its profound historical significance.
And the macabre site is just the tip of the spear. A major fundraising campaign has been launched to support ARCHER at House 88’s mission to transform the Höss home into a global center for research, education, and advocacy against extremism and antisemitism. With comprehensive programming designed for college students and educational tools set to be used worldwide, the initiative aims to confront hate where it festers most.
This week, Ambassador Wallace emphasized the center’s crucial role as a global hub for combating hate, while former US Senator Norm Coleman called the project a direct and urgent challenge to antisemitism and extremism.
I spoke to Elliott while he was in Poland. “Rudolf Höss’s house stood untouched for decades, a silent witness to history’s darkest crimes,” he told me. “We refused to let it remain a relic of evil. House 88 will be transformed into a center for fighting antisemitism, extremism, and hate. The lesson of House 88 is so disturbing: a neighbor can be fanatically antisemitic, and the result is the death of millions of Jews — or 1,200 innocent Israelis on the border of Gaza.”
His words carry the weight of history and urgency. This project isn’t only about preserving the past — it’s about ensuring the world understands where unchecked hate leads, and giving future generations the tools to resist it.
One of ARCHER at House 88’s board members is another good friend of mine, George Schaeffer. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” he told me, “and I know how important it is for us to never forget what antisemitism can lead to. The more we know about the past — the horrors of the past — the more we can correct the future, and change the future.”
George’s commitment to this project is deeply personal. “What we are constructing next to Auschwitz is an important way of teaching what the real dangers are,” he added. “The commandant and his family lived next door to Auschwitz as if it was normal — we need to make sure that it’s never normal to allow antisemitism to flourish, especially if it is on our own doorstep.”
In synagogues across the Jewish world, we are currently reading the Torah portions that recall the slavery and persecution of the Jews in ancient Egypt. One of the primary directives of Jewish tradition is incorporating the Hebrew phrase Zecher Li’yetziat Mitzrayim — a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt — into our prayers and blessings. But this is not just an exercise in historical memory — it is a directive for vigilance.
A just society can only thrive and survive if persecution and hatred are identified, combated, and rooted out. We must never be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the danger has passed. Antisemitism may have begun more than three millennia ago in Egypt, but it has reared its ugly head in every era and every location since.
And now, as we face yet another alarming resurgence, ARCHER at House 88 stands as a powerful new initiative to ensure that this latest iteration of Jew-hatred is confronted and defeated — just as Pharaoh was in Egypt, just as Hitler and Höss were in their time, and just as every other vicious antisemite throughout history has ultimately been overcome.
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Three Israeli Hostages, Including Dual US and French Citizens, Set for Release in Gaza on Saturday
A view of a banner depicting Keith Siegel, who is a dual US citizen seized during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and taken hostage into Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, is seen with other images of hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, April 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
Hamas said on Friday it would free the father of the youngest hostages seized in its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and two others including a dual US citizen and a dual French citizen in the next exchange of Gaza hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Yarden Bibas, Keith Siegel, and Ofer Kalderon will be handed over on Saturday, said Abu Obeida, spokesperson for the armed wing of the Palestinian terrorist group, in a post on his Telegram channel.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office confirmed on Friday that Jerusalem has received the names of the three hostages who are set to be released from captivity in Gaza under the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
“A detailed response will be provided after reviewing the list and updating families,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Yarden Bibas is the father of baby Kfir, only nine months old when he was kidnapped, and Ariel, who was four at the time of the cross-border attack.
There was no word on the fate of Kfir and Ariel, or on their mother Shiri, who was taken at the same time. Hamas said in late 2023 that they had been killed by Israeli bombardment, in the early months of the Gaza war.
Video of their capture began circulating soon after they were seized. It showed a terrified Shiri clutching her small children in a blanket as they were bundled into captivity surrounded by terrorist assailants.
The father, Yarden, 34 at the time of the attack, was also abducted and a clip circulated showing him bleeding from a head injury suffered from hammer blows.
Israeli-American Keith Siegel, who was taken hostage with his wife Aviva, was seen in a video released by Hamas last year. His wife was released in the first hostage-for-prisoner exchange in November 2023.
Ofer Kalderon’s two children Erez and Sahar, abducted alongside him, were also freed in the first exchange. The joint French–Israeli national’s family said they were waiting with “immense joy mixed with paralyzing anguish” for his release.
On Thursday, Hamas freed three Israeli and five Thai hostages in Gaza while Israel freed 110 Palestinian prisoners after delaying the process in anger at the swarming crowds engulfing one of the hostage handover points.
Under the ceasefire deal that halted more than 15 months of fighting, 33 hostages held by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza are to be freed in the first six weeks of the truce in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom have been serving life sentences in Israel for terrorist activities.
Fifteen hostages, including the five Thai workers, and 400 prisoners have so far been exchanged, and Hamas has told Israel that eight of the 33 are now dead. Ninety Palestinian prisoners, including nine serving life sentences and 81 serving long-term sentences, are to be swapped for the three Israelis on Saturday, Hamas’s prisoner information office said.
Netanyahu has drawn criticism in Israel for not having sealed a hostage deal earlier in the war after the security failure that enabled Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists to burst across the border and storm nearby Israeli communities.
But there has also been opposition to the current deal, which some critics in Israel have said leaves the fate of most of the hostages in the balance and Hamas still standing as Gaza‘s dominant entity, despite months of warfare and the death of its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar.
The truce has enabled a surge in international humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians amid dire supply shortages.
Hamas-led terrorists started the war with their surprise invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Around 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 hostages were abducted in the attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Around half the hostages were released in November 2023 during the only previous truce, and others have been recovered dead or alive during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
More talks on the implementation of the second stage of the deal, due to begin by Feb. 4, are meant to open the way to the release of over 60 other hostages, including men of military age, and a full Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza.
If that succeeds, a formal end to the war could follow along with talks on the mammoth challenge of reconstructing Gaza.
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