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Israel’s Operation in Rafah Must Proceed
An UNRWA aid truck at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
The IDF is operating in the Gaza Strip to implement the directives of the political echelon. The objectives the cabinet defined for the army at a meeting on October 16, 2023, are: toppling the Hamas regime and destroying its military and governmental capabilities, removing the terrorist threat from the Gaza Strip, creating conditions for the return of the hostages, and defending the borders of the state and its citizens while removing the security threat from Gaza, and leaving the IDF full freedom of action without restrictions on the use of force. The IDF is succeeding in systematically dismantling Hamas, although the fighting in Gaza is fierce and exacting painful costs. After more than four months of war, the IDF has taken control of the northern Gaza Strip and has full operational freedom of action in the area. The forces operate in a variety of ways to continue cleansing Hamas infrastructure — above and below ground. Progress has also been made in Khan Yunis, where the IDF is eliminating terrorists and destroying their infrastructure.
Hamas is deeply embedded in the population of the Gaza Strip. Not only do Hamas terrorists receive support and assistance from the population, some of the “civilian” population has intensified resistance and taken up arms against IDF forces. The event of Simchat Torah when a barbaric mob joined the Nukhba terrorists in carrying out the massacre in Gaza border communities, was not exceptional. In fact, this is a “popular” war with the participation of civilians. The Gaza Strip has seen the emergence of a generation whose sole goal is to kill and exterminate Jews. In the face of this resistance, the IDF is succeeding in advancing methodically and systematically.
Recently, questions have been raised as to whether Israel needs to extend operations to Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. The prime minister has already said on several occasions that this war will not end until the IDF operates in Rafah and takes over the Philadelphi Corridor. An operation in this arena is of great importance for several reasons. First, it is Hamas’ last organized stronghold in the Gaza Strip, and the elimination of Hamas’ military capabilities will not be achieved without the destruction of the battalions stationed there. Second, Israel must remove Hamas’ governmental capabilities in this area. Third, in order to free hostages, it is essential to reach the areas where they are held.
As we saw in the operation to rescue Fernando Simon Merman and Luis Hare, some of the hostages are being held in the Rafah area. Moreover, we need to realize that Israeli communities in areas opposite Rafah will not return to their homes if operational Hamas battalions are on the other side of the border. Finally, the border between Gaza and Egypt — the Philadelphi Corridor — still operates as a conduit for the entry of weapons into the Strip through a network of tunnels. The IDF will have to eliminate this smuggling route.
With the IDF’s advance in Khan Yunis, a chorus of countries began to announce their opposition to an IDF operation in Rafah, in most cases due to their concern for the large population of displaced persons in the Rafah area. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Feb. 12, 2024, that, “the Israelis have a commitment, an obligation to make sure that they can provide for the safety of innocent Palestinian people that are there [in Rafah].” He added that the US doesn’t “want to see any forced relocation of people out of Gaza … we support and continue to support an extended humanitarian pause.”
It should be remembered that as far as the United States is concerned, the operation in Rafah could interfere with the process it is trying to advance, the essence of which is the cessation of hostilities and agreement (or coercion on Israel) to bring the Palestinian Authority into the Gaza Strip, and thus enable the advancement of normalization with Saudi Arabia. It wants to do all this in a timetable that could give President Biden an achievement to present to the American electorate ahead of the presidential elections in November. Needless to say, this American desire does not correspond at all with the reality in the region and with the Israeli public’s position on the Palestinian Authority.
United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Cameron said (Feb. 10, 2024) that the UK was “deeply concerned” about the possibility of military action in Rafah. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also said he was “deeply concerned about the loss of civilian life in Gaza and the potentially devastating humanitarian impact of a military incursion into Rafah.” French President Emmanuel Macron went further when he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about France’s “firm opposition to an Israeli offensive in Rafah, which could only lead to a humanitarian disaster of a new magnitude, as to any forced displacement of populations.” According to reports, Macron added that Israeli military action “would constitute violations of the international humanitarian law and would pose an additional risk of regional escalation.”
It should be noted that the number of non-combatant casualties in the Gaza Strip is among the lowest in the world when compared to all the wars in urban areas in the past hundred years. Even if we believe the reports of the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, the ratio of civilian casualties is 1.3 non-combatants for each Hamas terrorist killed. This contrasts with a ratio of 5-7 non-combatants for every dead combatant in other urban battles where a large civilian population was present. The non-combatant casualty ratio in Gaza is particularly low because the IDF developed combat methods that have enabled it to dismantle Hamas while preserving the lives of civilians in the Gaza Strip in a way that no country has succeeded in doing (or did not even try or never wanted to succeed in doing so in the first place) in urban warfare in recent decades.
Egypt, for its part on the other hand, opposes the operation because it fears that the border will be breached and many Palestinians will flock into the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian media even went so far as to claim that relations with Israel could be damaged if this happened. Egypt should be reminded of its laxity in preventing the strengthening of Hamas in the Gaza Strip due to the passage of weapons into Gaza through the Rafah crossing or through the tunnel network under the Philadelphi Corridor.
There has also been criticism of the IDF for not operating simultaneously in both the southern and northern Gaza Strip — but it is indeed easy to criticize those who actually do the work. The IDF, which has been severely curtailed in recent decades, found itself going to war with a very small order of battle given the challenges faced in Gaza. It was also necessary to direct some of the forces to Judea and Samaria and to defend the northern front. The IDF has thus been forced to manage the army’s resources, including reserves, in a way that will enable it to conduct a prolonged campaign. As a result, it also had to prioritize operations within the Gaza campaign itself.
The operation in Rafah is necessary and inevitable. So too is cutting off Hamas’ smuggling route along the Philadelphi Corridor. The IDF will have to create for itself complete operational freedom of action for decades to come in Gaza in order to eliminate any possibility of a rebuilding of terrorist capabilities there. There will also have to be a long process of de-Hamasification. Operating in Rafah and other terrorist centers in Gaza is an essential component in achieving the goals of the war, and as we have learned from the long months of fighting, the IDF will be able to carry out this operation successfully while maintaining the norms of international humanitarian law.
Gabi Siboni was director of the military and strategic affairs program, and the cyber research program, of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) from 2006-2020, where he founded academic journals on these matters. He serves as a senior consultant to the IDF and other Israeli security organizations and the security industry. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in engineering from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Ben-Gurion University. A version of this article was originally published by The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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