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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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Yiddish startup brings together literature, listening parties and language circles in London
In one of the world’s earliest Yiddish comics, created by Samuel Zagat in 1912, Gimpel the Matchmaker strides ahead while glancing backwards over his shoulder. He’s moving steadily forward, but at the same time, he keeps one eye on the past.
It’s a fitting logo for Jargon, a London-based Yiddish culture organization that was founded last year, dedicated to exploring the past, present and future of the Jewish diaspora. Jargon draws on London’s rich Yiddish history – as well as the overlapping but distinct diaspora communities that have shaped the city for centuries – to imagine a future for Yiddish culture.
Historians Aleph Ross and M. Syd Rosen founded Jargon last year out of a “craving for more Jewish spaces that were platforming things that were about diaspora, that were about Yiddish, and also about more marginal, either esoteric or radical or counter-cultural Jewish characters,” Rosen told me in an interview. He said they had both long felt that these aspects of Jewish culture were “a major part of our sense of what Jewish history was in Britain,” but didn’t receive the attention they deserved in existing Jewish spaces.
Ross and Rosen began learning Yiddish together around five years ago, when Ross realized that she needed to understand Yiddish for a research project on her own great-great-grandfather, the London Yiddish writer Morris Myer. Still, the organizers see Yiddish as one of many aspects of “leaning into those threads of Jewish cultural identity that we felt have maybe gotten lost through processes of assimilation.”
The duo originally imagined Jargon as a bookshop selling Yiddish-language books alongside other Jewish literature, as well as hosting occasional events. In the year since they launched, that original vision has grown into a busy cultural program with pop-up events across London. Jargon hosts a regular shmueskrayz, or Yiddish-language conversation circle, modeled on the Berlin-based Shmues un Vayn group. At the same time, the group aims to “provide points of entry to [Yiddish] culture for different kinds of people,” including those who don’t speak Yiddish at all. With that audience in mind, Ross and Rosen also run a Yiddish-in-translation book club at a library.
“It’s explicitly about bringing attention to these works that are really cult or famous, or infamous, but [that], actually, very few people have read,” Rosen said. At book club meetings, Ross or Rosen sometimes reads a passage of the book out loud in Yiddish to give attendees a taste of the original.
For Jargon’s monthly pop-up events, the organizers often choose topics that touch on multiple different areas of interest – not just Yiddish language and culture. A recent event about the post-war Romani British poet Mark Hyatt, whose boyfriend was the Anglo-American Jewish poet Harry Fainlight, drew readers of both writers’ work as well as people broadly interested in Roma, Jewish, or queer poetry.
Rosen explains that Jargon seeks out this “slightly jumbled alternative read that we’re trying to put on our events, where they’re explicitly not the most obvious way of presenting a cultural product, and as a result they attract quite a weird and varied audience.”
Jargon’s location in London’s East End helps with that goal. Though Jargon is “semi-nomadic,” with events taking place around London, the group’s home base is at House of Annetta, a community space on Brick Lane, in the Shoreditch neighborhood of East London. Historically a center of Jewish immigrants, the neighborhood later became home to a large South Asian community and is now increasingly gentrified.
Being surrounded by multiple diaspora communities creates an opportunity to “think about the connections between these different stories,” Ross told me. In events like the Mark Hyatt talk, Jargon puts Jewish experiences in conversation with the stories of other minority groups in Britain – something the organization plans to do more explicitly in future programming.
At the same time, the area’s Jewish roots make it a fitting home for a Yiddish revival. “It’s so symbolic for people to feel like they can hear Yiddish in the East End again, even if they themselves never heard it,” Rosen said. “It’s got a heymish quality that people have a lot of fondness for.” That said, “we don’t want [the symbolism of the Yiddish language] to be the end point. We want it to be an entry point.”
During a fundraiser and listening party for the album Lider mit Palestine, a collection of new Yiddish songs protesting the war in Gaza, many audience members were encountering Yiddish music for the first time. Providing an accessible entry point to the language through music, the organizers said, made it possible to “advertis[e] Yiddish culture, but in a way that could actually appeal to people that didn’t even know such a thing existed as well.”
In the future, Ross and Rosen want to expand Jargon’s Yiddish-language book offerings. Since many Yiddish books are out of print, they try to find Yiddish literature secondhand or through donations and resell it on a pay-what-you-can basis. As well as broadening access to well-known Yiddish writers, they aim to introduce readers to more obscure works, offering a starting point for a deeper encounter with Yiddish culture. The goal, as Rosen put it, is for Jargon to be “the sort of environment where people say to themselves: ‘You know what, I’m going to read Isaac Bashevis Singer. Oh, and who’s this author that I never heard of next to him?’”
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How an Amish Mennonite school in Arkansas went viral with a song by an Orthodox Jew
Last month, Jewish social media was buzzing over a video of a choir singing the popular 2018 song “Tatty, My King,” composed by Dovid Edell, a former student of an Orthodox high school for boys in Waterbury, Conn. Normally, another rendition of a popular Jewish song wouldn’t cause such a stir, but the singers in this case weren’t the typical yeshiva grads of the Maccabeats; they were a co-ed a cappella choir of Amish Mennonite students from the tiny Calvary Bible School in Calico Rock, Arkansas.
Jewish viewers mostly expressed delight — “the Youtube algorithm is probably going crazy right now — frum people watching Calvary bible school,” one commenter put it, topping it off with a typed happy face — with only the occasional disgruntled remark about kol isha, the religious prohibition against men hearing women sing.
Curious about this rather unlikely collaboration, I called up Gabriel Jantzi, a self-described “amateur” musician who directed the choir, to ask about his introduction to Edell’s tune, how the project unfolded, and the choir’s surprising moment of minor fame in the Orthodox world.
Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
I’m 41 years old. I went to university for medicine, but I also really liked music. So I studied music, but I didn’t even minor in it, and I ended up as a veterinarian. [In the ensuing years] I have directed church choirs, and I directed my university choir for a year, and so that has been part of my life for the last 25 years. But it’s not like I have a master’s degree in choral composition or conducting.
I am a full-time farm and country vet in Ontario, Canada, and that’s what I do. This is a slow season in January and February, so it’s very convenient to take off time and do something that I really care about. So I’m also a pastor in a local conservative Mennonite church. I take great pleasure and derive a lot of energy out of working with young people who are interested in following God.
What’s your relationship to the Calvary Bible School?
I was a student there 20 years ago. Probably since its inception in the 70s, it’s been a destination for Beachy Amish Mennonite youth between the ages of 18 and 20 who want to dedicate time to study how to live a life that’s pleasing to God.
There are a lot of different names for all the different stripes of Mennonite. I grew up in the Amish Mennonite tradition. I got married, I moved a little bit. I ended up in a tiny bit different stripe. But at least in our communities, it’s not a big issue for me to go back to that tradition and say, here I am, what can I bring and what can I offer? So technically I’m not exactly the same stripe as the school, but I grew up in that stripe, if that makes sense.
I think the concept of moving a little bit along denominational lines, or even to sort of different expressions of one’s faith, would be quite familiar to many Jews.
I think that there are striking similarities between our communities here.
I think a lot of people understand who the Amish are and they understand who Mennonites are, but can you explain what an “Amish Mennonite” is? I know these boundaries can be fluid.
The Beachy Amish Mennonites care about traditions; we’re not throwing them out just because we want to move forward in a certain progressive way. Yet we are much more open to technology than what we call the Old Order Amish or Old Order Mennonite groups. When we use the term “Old Order,” we’re referring specifically to those groups that have said, “We’re going to welcome technology up until the 1800s or the early 1900s, and we’re going to maintain the horse and buggy style of life and so on.” [But Amish Mennonites] said, “No, we’re not actually against technology, we’re just hesitant to adopt everything new without testing it.” We care about probably many of the same traditional values that [Old Order groups] would, such as community and our church. And also just like they do, we put a great emphasis on our religion being a very practical religion. So it’s lived out in such a way that you can look at us and say, oh, they must have some reasons behind living a certain way.
How did you first come across this song, and what made you want to arrange it?
Anabaptists have a strong tradition of a cappella music, men and women singing together without the aid of instruments. We care very much about that: Every time we get together for a worship service, that’s how we sing.
We came across an a cappella cover of this song by Benny Friedman on Spotify and that really resonated with us. Not me personally, but some of these kids [in the choir] would actually be from a congregation that’s set limitations that you’re not even supposed to listen to instrumental music, so they could listen to this song.
And so they brought it to me last year at the Bible school and said, “Do you know this song?” And I said, “No, I’ve never heard of it.” I listened to it a bunch more and I realized why they liked it. It talks about some very universal questions that any kid who’s grown up in a tradition with God will have: Where are you? I’m told I need to come talk to you, but I don’t really want to. And as my relationship with God matures, it kind of develops into this realization that actually He’s been covering my back all this time and I never realized, so I really do want to stay on God’s team. Whether you’re an Orthodox Jew or you’re a conservative Mennonite, either way, as your relationship with God matures, those words really resonate and that progression really comes through in the song. So I thought, and my wife thought as well, that I should lead this song next year for these kids.
I have often taken music and arranged it to fit an a cappella group, and for some reason I just was not filled with any profound inspiration on how to do that for this song. So I asked a friend of mine named Wendell Glick [to arrange it.] He is a professional musician, he’s got a PhD in composition, he does this for a living. He’s also from [an Anabaptist] background, and led this choir for seven years before I did. So he knows this choir, which means he knows how to write music that stretches them just the right amount so that they do a good job of it. I really want to praise him for that.
He did a great job.
It worked for us. We’re only together for two and a half weeks, and we’re not professional musicians. Also, this choir is mandatory. That means 60% of the kids want to be there, 20% are OK with it, and 20% don’t like singing and they still have to be there. Actually, you can see [in the video recording] some of them are really feeling it and others are zoned out. And that’s OK!
For the first week [of practicing], we didn’t really like it. We’ve been very tainted by mainstream Christianity’s Protestant music that came in the 1850s, [whereas] this song has just a touch of minor key. It comes from a different culture, not quite what our mental ear hears. It took us a bit of time to get into it, but by the second week this was without a doubt the favorite song of my repertoire. Then at our local or in-house concerts, the audience just absolutely loved it. And when I say that, it’s not like we got a standing ovation; to us the highest compliment is when somebody says, “It made me worship God.” And those are the compliments we began hearing.
Did you ever have any interactions with Dovid Edell, who wrote the song?
Yes, I did. When I take a song, I make sure it’s licensed for use. I understand [Edell] had to get permission or talk with some rabbis to see whether it would be appropriate. And so he talked to the rabbis and then he called me up and I spoke to him about who wanted to sing it and I explained that the youth are all Christian. He was very nice about it and he said, “Just let them know that this was my conversation with God. It’s a personal song.” And I said, “That’s the basis on which it resonates with us as well.” He was gracious and let us use it.
Then when I was actually working with the students, I also communicated back to Dovid because he said, basically, “I have a few messages I want you to directly convey to the students.” Which made it very personal. Gen-Z loves to have some personal connection, right? When they perform a song, they love to have some personal connection to the composer. And that just made it for them. That was amazing.
Did you get any negative reactions?
I’m assuming — and I say this with respect because we also understand some of the traditions from the Torah — that some people found it offensive, that it’s a mix. Forgive me if I’m mispronouncing it, but I had never come across the kol isha idea so I was a bit sheepish that I walked into something without doing my research very well.
One of the things I care about is that people worry about pronunciation when they sing another language. One of my negatives is I did not ask Dovid how to pronounce “tatty.” I just kind of ran with it. In the future, I would probably be a little more careful about asking the original composer whether he wanted a certain emphasis and a pronunciation of certain words.
Did you realize how popular the video had become in the Orthodox world?
The lovely thing is the conductor is not mentioned in that video and you just see his back. So fortunately, from my viewpoint, very few people know who I am. If there’s any publicity here, I’m glad that the school gets it, because the school is blatantly about the glory of God. And to use a phrase that Dovid would have said, he just wants to spread light. So I want that to be the focus.
We read the comments, and I think I’d have two words to describe our reaction: First is delight, and second, we’re honored. We blatantly are Christians, not Jews, so we come at this and say this is a part of our maturity process to learn more about God’s son. But that being said, the song itself doesn’t speak whatsoever about the Messiah, it only talks about the relationship with God. And to us, it 110% resonated, just like it did for your community, so we are grateful that we could participate.
We care a lot about this school, but we understand it’s very arcane. All of 83 students were there this past term. Not many people know about it. So it was quite a thing that another community is interested in what we’re doing. But we also acknowledge that the song that we are singing is from that community. So yeah, it was kind of a good circle.
Did you have much familiarity with Jews and Judaism before this? Have you learned more about it through this experience?
Yes, we would have some familiarity. I hope I’m not coming across as cocky, but because we study Judaism, I think we actually have a bit more familiarity with Judaism than I think from what I read in the comments than they’d ever have with us. There are a lot of comments that were like, “Where did you get this song?” Well, guys, you put it on Spotify! But if you assume we’re all Old Order Amish that drive horse and buggy and don’t have Internet, then I can understand those questions. So I think we have some knowledge, although I had no idea about things like kol isha. Also, it was a surprise to all of us how much our performance of your song resonated with your community. I’m still not sure why.
I can think of two possibilities. One is that it’s just a very beautiful rendition, so it’s hard to imagine not being moved by it. But I also think Jews are often happily surprised to see a group of non-Jews embrace or respect a piece of Jewish culture, particularly Orthodox culture. A lot of the time, people anticipate negativity.
Well, that’s very nice of you to say. Those words really make me feel fuzzy and warm inside. We have great respect for your culture. We think God brought the Messiah through your people. I realize that differs from the understanding of many people who wrote comments, but we have profound appreciation and love for your people.
We understand that we are the white Christians and Christians have had thousands and thousands of years of fighting with the Jews. So I know it’s hard to say, “Well, we’re not like that.” But I think I can speak for all Anabaptists and say we would strongly differentiate ourselves and say no, one of our fundamental professions or distinctions is this idea of love for all man. In fact, we won’t even go to war because we love people. Again, it comes back to we are honored that you let us use it. We were tickled pink and I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other songs that I think could be used.
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Hezbollah enters Iran war, firing on Israel’s north, as US officials say more fighting is to come
(JTA) — Hezbollah fired on Israel for the first time since a 2024 ceasefire on Sunday, opening a new front in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran that began on Saturday.
Israel hammered Hezbollah positions in Lebanon overnight and said it had killed the group’s head of intelligence, Hussein Makled. Israeli officials said they expected further salvos from the Iranian proxy to the north.
The escalation comes as new missile attacks from Iran caused fresh damage and injuries in Beersheba and as the scope of the damage from the first two days of the war have come into focus. That includes sweeping damage in central Tel Aviv, where one woman was killed; a direct strike on a shelter in Beit Shemesh that killed nine, including three teen siblings; and strikes in Jerusalem that both injured Arab Israelis and sent shrapnel close to the holy sites of the Western Wall and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Both Israeli and U.S. officials say they expect operations to last for some time, with President Donald Trump suggesting a four-week timeline even as he indicated that Iranian officials had indicated a willingness to return to the negotiating table. Iran’s top security official, whom Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had identified as a leader in the case of his assassination, denied Trump’s characterization.
Military officials including War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday morning that they could not offer a timeline or details about the operations but said they were happy with the operations so far, which are designed to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and topple its Islamic Republic regime. Asked about the significance of the fact that Israel killed Khamenei, Hegseth responded, “I think Israel did a great job in the conduct of that operation.”
A fourth U.S. service member who was wounded over the weekend died on Monday, while multiple U.S. planes were shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait; their passengers survived.
The incident in Kuwait comes as Iran continues to fire on Arab states in the region, in a new escalation of regional conflict. An Iranian drone also crashed into a British base in Cyprus, causing Prime Minister Keir Starmer to agree to a U.S. request to use British bases to support efforts to destroy Iranian weapons. German Chancellor Frederich Merz is visiting Trump on Monday and may also agree to play a role in supporting the U.S.-Israeli operations.
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