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Israel’s ravaged kibbutzes have become museums of the macabre. Their former residents want to go home..

GAZA ENVELOPE, Israel (JTA) — For Ido Felus, returning to his home in Kfar Aza is not a choice but an imperative that has guided every decision he has made — including what to study in college — since Oct. 7.

“If we don’t come back, the terrorists will have won,” Felus, 24, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from outside his home, the corner house in a row of ravaged one-story structures in the devastated kibbutz. Before the attack, he planned to study psychology, but he is now pursuing a business degree, with one ambition only.

“I am making it my life’s mission to rehabilitate this place. It should also be Israel’s most important mission. This area should no longer be peripheral — it should be the center of everything. Israel’s high-tech scene should relocate here,” Felus said.

According to Felus, many of the kibbutz’s younger generation — especially those who are single — feel the same way. “Even those who at first said they can’t come back are now saying they can’t not come back,” he said.

Last week, as the 100-day mark since the attack neared, the first residents of Kfar Aza returned home. Ayelet Cohen and Shachar Shnurman, whose home was one of the few to remain intact during the onslaught, said they were tired of being refugees. Despite the noise of war happening over the border, the middle-aged couple said they were able to sleep much more soundly in the kibbutz.

“In Tel Aviv there is the noise from cars. Here it’s no different than it was in 2014 [during the war with Hamas]. The kibbutz is destroyed, but in terms of the noise, the echoes of the explosions from Gaza is the music we know,” Schnurman told the Israeli news website Ynet. “Some people tell us, good for you, but others say we’ve gone crazy. I can’t disagree with them.”

A month after the war broke out, destruction and rubble dominated the once-arcadian kibbutz. Two months later, the landscape remains starkly unchanged. A notable difference, however, is the volume of visitors, which has risen dramatically, turning the area into a museum of the macabre.

Celebrities and influencers including Jerry Seinfeld, Debra Messing, Montana Tucker, Scooter Braun, Michael Rapaport, Caroline D’Amore, Gregg Sulkin and Emily Austin have all headed to Israel to meet with hostage families and visit the sites of the Oct. 7 massacres. (Screenshots via Instagram, design by Jackie Hajdenberg)

For months, the visitors included volunteers with Zaka, the nonprofit that searching for and evacuating bodies and body parts as well as cleaning out burned vehicles, all according to the dictates of Jewish law. But after almost three months of daily work, Zaka said it has now finished its activities in the Gaza envelope, its spokesman, Moti Bukchin told JTA. Now, the organization is only being called to work in very specific cases, for example, if new rains reveal previously undiscovered body parts or blood.

Still, in every direction, groups of people can be seen milling around, wandering shell-shocked through the debris or listening to their guides — often former residents of the Kibbutz like Felus — recount the horrors they experienced on Oct. 7. Many of them are part of a growing cadre of solidarity mission participants from Jewish communities in the United States, sometimes including celebrities and social media influencers; the area remains a closed military zone, off-limits to civilian Israelis and under ongoing rocket fire from Gaza.

Samuel Hayek, the chairman of JNF-UK, was part of a tour of the decimated kibbutz led by Felus.

“There is only one word to describe what seeing this in real life is like: Devastating,” he said. “We will be there, as we have for years, to strengthen the periphery until their lives and their neighborhoods are restored.”

JNF-UK executive director Yonatan Galon told JTA that for the past decade, the organization has spent roughly $5 to $8 million annually on infrastructure, education, and welfare initiatives across southern Israeli communities. The group’s contributions span a wide range, including the development of leadership programs, parks, promenades, student villages and senior citizen centers in several Gaza border communities such as Nahal Oz, Kerem Shalom, Sderot and Nir Oz.

Six and a half miles away in Beeri, the largest and wealthiest of the Gaza border kibbutzim and in many ways the most brutally assaulted, the destruction immediately appears to be even more extreme in its scope than at Kfar Aza. With half of the houses destroyed beyond repair, the estimated cost of restoring Beeri is just under $80 million, according to estimates by the Tkuma, or Revival, Administration, the new body tasked with rehabilitating and developing the Gaza periphery. The government has allocated $4.8 billion to the administration to handle the affected communities’ short-, mid- and long-term needs.

As at Kfar Aza, Beeri is bustling, but not just with people on guided tours. Some young adults have moved in to tend to the kibbutz in their neighbors’ absence. Farmers have returned to plant wheat in the hope that the harvest will be ready by the time the kibbutz is rebuilt. Busloads of employees of Beeri’s famous printing press arrive every day for work from their hotel near the Dead Sea — a daily commute of three-and-a-half hours. According to Uri Jelin, whose grandfather was one of the kibbutz’s founders, their desire to return to work stems more from the need to cope with their pain than from a commitment to sustaining Beeri’s economy.

The remains of the destruction caused by Hamas terrorists when they infiltrated Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, as seen on Jan. 4, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

On Oct. 7, Ben Suchman, the CEO of the press, was on the phone with his mother when a terrorist entered her safe room. He heard the terrorist ask his mother to remove her ring, but it wouldn’t budge. The phone went silent. Days later, authorities handed the ring over to Suchman. His mother was dead.

Jelin pointed to a house that appears to have sustained no apparent damage. “You see this house? It looks innocent, yes? It is anything but. This is where the terrorists enjoyed themselves the most.” Jelin recounts what took place inside the house but asks that the details not be repeated, out of respect for the people who once lived there.

The intact house and close to 200 others like it are becoming a sticking point for plans to rebuild Beeri. Days earlier, officials from the fund for property tax compensation surveyed the houses and determined that many did not meet the criteria for demolition. But residents don’t want to move back into homes that were the sites of extreme violence, even if they are structurally sound.

“How can we talk about coming back when people are refusing to live in houses that their neighbors were murdered in?” said the kibbutz’s secretary, Gili Molcho. The plan, Molcho said, was to establish a request for proposals in the coming weeks for architects to design the village’s reconstruction in a way that helps mitigate the trauma.

Even in exile, the kibbutz makes all decisions as a collective. An offer to move into three new buildings in Jerusalem was turned down. Instead, members of the kibbutz voted to stay in their Dead Sea hotel until new dwellings would be ready in a temporary kibbutz adjacent to Hatzerim, close to Beersheba. Construction was already underway, and the kibbutz anticipated relocating there in six months, with plans to stay for at least an additional two years before returning to Beeri. But as Molcho was quick to point out, “the most certain thing we can say is that there is no certainty.”

An internal survey showed that virtually no Beeri residents — less than 1% — said they never wanted to return to Beeri, Molcho said. Twenty percent said they would return the minute they were given the green light while the rest said it would depend on various factors, the foremost being the security situation. Young families have expressed their refusal to return to an “Oct. 6” Beeri, he said, where “every week or two they launch a couple of missiles from Gaza and we have sirens and go into safe rooms.”

The older generation, along with the sandwich generation beneath them, will return under such conditions, having grown accustomed to them over nearly two decades. Those cohorts were pressing to move back to the areas of Beeri that remain intact as soon as possible, he said. But, he added, “no one got used to living with terrorist infiltrations,” which constituted a clear red line.

“I strongly believe that if there will be quiet over there [in Gaza] Beeri will return and thrive and be bigger and better than before,” Molcho said.

After his tour of Kfar Aza and Beeri, Hayek continued on to Carmei Gat, a new neighborhood in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Gat, where JNF-UK has donated 13 apartments to residents of Nir Oz who were imminently set to move in. Like Beeri, one of the priorities for Nir Oz, which endured some of the worst of the Hamas attack with a quarter of its community either murdered or kidnapped, was to remain together. Carmei Gat, offering 130 available apartments, was one of the few places that could accommodate this need.

Samuel Hayek, chairman of JNF-UK, stands in an apartment in a new neighborhood, Carmei Gat, that his organization has rented for displaced residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, January 2024. (Deborah Danan)

“I came to check that the safe rooms lock,” Hayek said, before touring a penthouse apartment. The apartments, initially earmarked for Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war with Russia, were repurposed for the victims of Oct. 7.

“Making this decision was a no-brainer. These people went through a holocaust. We need to do everything to help them,” he said.

The modern apartments had been furnished with thoughtful touches that even extended to milk in the fridge and pictures of bucolic kibbutz scenes, but they still resembled furniture-shop showrooms. They were a far cry from the homey bungalows of Nir Oz, which even in the residents’ absence still brim with character.

Days after Hayek’s visit, the residents of Nir Oz finally left their hotel in Eilat to move into the new apartments. A week after settling into his apartment, Jonathan Dekel-Chen has yet to acclimate to his new surroundings. “It was most definitely time for us to move on to a place where we could properly grieve, to the degree that we can grieve, because this is an ongoing saga,” Dekel-Chen, an American-born professor at the Hebrew University, told JTA.

Dekel-Chen’s son, Sagui, JNF-UK’s national project coordinator, is being held as a hostage in Gaza. Sagui’s wife, who just gave birth to the couple’s third child, is also living in a JNF-UK apartment. Sagui’s mother, Dekel-Chen’s ex-wife, was also injured and taken captive on Oct. 7, but managed to escape at the last moment.

“There are still weeks to go before we all really figure out again, individually and families, how we navigate this very new space with none of our actual property,” Dekel-Chen said.

Kibbutz Beeri as seen in January 2024, three months after it was the site of a Hamas massacre. (Deborah Danan)

He described the community’s adjustment to its new environment as an “out-of-body” experience.

“It’s foreign to everything we know. It’s foreign in terms of the landscape, it’s foreign in terms of living, you know, on multiple floors. We are used to living in nature and with the colors of nature, the feel of nature at our doorstep,” he said. “When I look out now, in my home, I’m on the fourth floor of a building, and all I can see are cars, asphalt, concrete and metal.”

Initially, the Nir Oz community had planned to stay in Carmei Gat for less than a year while a new community would be constructed for them, similar to the one being built for Beeri near Hatzerim. They had planned to relocate there for one to two years before contemplating a permanent move. But according to Dekel-Chen, that step was scrapped because none of the residents wanted to live in two temporary homes.

Right now, few members of the kibbutz are able to provide a definitive answer about making a permanent return to Nir Oz in the future. Most of those with younger children told JTA outright that they wouldn’t consider it. But where the community eventually ends up and whether it will be one place or several remains an open question, Dekel-Chen said. A tentative agreement had been drawn up with two or three kibbutzim that could accommodate large groups of Nir Oz members.

The mailboxes at Kibbutz Nir Oz are marked red for those who were murdered on Oct. 7, black for those taken hostage. (Deborah Danan)

Part of their eventual resettlement would rely on a negotiated deal with the Tkuma Administration, he said. The administration “thought everybody was going back to Nir Oz, but clearly that’s not going to happen. Young families and many of the older folks absolutely have no intention of ever going back there,” he said.

The contours of the administration’s ultimate efforts remain unknown. If the administration fails to support people who refused to move back to their original towns, it would be a “national outrage,” Dekel-Chen said.

For its part, the agency told JTA it would help those who did not wish to return to Nir Oz and likewise, in the meantime, if individuals decided to move out of Carmei Gat, it would continue to assist them with the financial and other aid they are currently receiving, including rent and furnishings. But the administration said it had no plans to build new settlements or expand existing ones for the Nir Oz community and maintained that based on conversations it had with residents, most wanted to eventually return.

Meanwhile, the approach to memorializing the massacres in each village has also become a point of debate, both within each community and outside. Tkuma said it was working with the Ministry of Heritage as well as local representatives from each village to find ways to honor the victims and preserve the memory of Oct. 7. Molcho envisioned transforming a small corner of the kibbutz into a commemoration area, but nothing more.

Uri Jelin stands atop wreckage at Kibbutz Beeri, founded by his grandfather, in January 2024. (Deborah Danan)

“Our goal is to restore this place for normal living as much as possible, and not turn it into a memorial site,” he said.

Felus had a different take, believing that the entire 100-yard strip of Kfar Aza known as the “younger generation” zone, where not a single house survived, should be cordoned off and  preserved in its current state of ruin as a historical testament for future generations. He said he understood the potential trauma that such a memorial might evoke for some — in part because it’s one he experiences all the time.

“All I do is remember. Every step I take in this kibbutz I think, this friend was murdered here, that one was taken hostage there,” he said. “There’s no getting away from it anyway.”


The post Israel’s ravaged kibbutzes have become museums of the macabre. Their former residents want to go home.. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram

Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect

Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.

CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.

Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.

Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.

In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.

In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.

Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.

“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”

Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey

US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner

The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.

According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””

Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.

The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”

This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”

“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said. 

Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine. 

“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued. 

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”

In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.

The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.

Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her

An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect

A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.

Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.

The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.

“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”

Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.

She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.

“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”

In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”

“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”

Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.

“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”

Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.

“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”

The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.

Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.

In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”

“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.

Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.

Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.

The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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