The Israeli military said it struck targets linked to Yemen’s Houthis in Sanaa on Thursday, a day after the internationally designated terrorist group claimed a drone attack on a hotel in Israel‘s Red Sea resort of Eilat.

The Houthi-run health ministry said two people were killed and 48 wounded in the attack, which it said hit civilian and service facilities. Civil defense teams were still working at the scene.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the Houthi general staff’s control headquarters, security and intelligence compounds, and military camps were among the targets attacked by its air force.

“We have now delivered a powerful strike on numerous terror targets of the Houthi terror organization in Sanaa“, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X.

The strikes are the latest in more than a year of attacks and counterstrikes between Iran-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen and Israel, part of a spillover from the war in Gaza.

The strikes targeted the Dhahban power station and several residential neighborhoods, the Houthi-run Al Masirah TV reported.

The strikes came as a pre-recorded speech by Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi was being aired.

On Wednesday, at least 20 people were injured after a drone launched from Yemen hit a hotel in Israel‘s Red Sea resort city of Eilat, the Israeli ambulance service said.

Israel in August carried out a strike that killed the prime minister of the Houthis’ administration and several other ministers, the first such attack to kill senior officials of the Islamist group.

Paul Adams, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent, chose to mark the occasion of the UK’s recognition of the nonexistent “State of Palestine” by authoring a 2,000 word article where he portrays a convicted mass murderer to be its best candidate for president.

Here’s the problem: Adams doesn’t just misrepresent who convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti really is, but he also fails to explain why Hamas demands Barghouti’s freedom.

In “Recognising Palestinian statehood opens another question – who would lead it?” Adams writes, “[Barghouti] has always denied the charges but has been in an Israeli prison since 2002.”

Barghouti was arrested and indicted as the mastermind of the murder of a Greece-born priest named Georgios Tsibouktzakis (Father Germanos), as well as a string of other murders.

Barghouti had the opportunity to contest the charges and prove his innocence. But he refused to deny culpability and declared that the “Zionist” court had no right to prosecute him.

That makes sense, since — in Barghouti’s view — murdering Jews is the proper thing to do.

On May 20, 2004, Barghouti was convicted of the murders of Father Germanos and four other innocent people. He is serving five consecutive sentences of life imprisonment. Nowhere in his article does Adams state that Barghouti was convicted. Instead, Adams hides the truth and writes just that Barghouti was “arrested and charged.”

For many years, various journalists and others have been puffing up Barghouti, saying that he’s the only figure in the Palestinian Arab world who is popular enough to serve as head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the president of “Palestine.”

Well, if that’s true, what does that tell us about Palestinian Arab society right now, given that their most popular consensus candidate is a convicted mass murderer?

Adams writes: “Despite being a senior member of Fatah, which has long been in conflict with Hamas, [Barghouti’s] name is thought to feature prominently on the list of political prisoners Hamas wants freed in return for Israeli hostages held in Gaza. But Israel has not given any indication of a willingness to release him.”

One of the things that may be motivating Hamas to work for Barghouti as a replacement for current PA leader Mahmoud Abbas is the assumption that Western politicians believe Barghouti to be someone they will be able to collaborate with.

Another rationale for why Hamas wants Barghouti out of Israeli prison is that Hamas fully knows that if he were to become president of a future Palestinian state, he would be a Hamas supporter — and Hamas could one day reclaim power, whether with bullets or ballots.

Hamas believes, and with good reason, that its terrorists will be able to quickly wrest power from the PA’s Palestinian Security Services, or whatever successor organization takes its place, based on the fact that it was able to overpower Fatah in Gaza in 2007 and effectively eliminate it as a force there.

Hamas has only grown in its effectiveness and resourcefulness over the last 18 years, as October 7th proved.

Finally, Hamas can assume that its own goals and Barghouti’s are more closely aligned than not. Both want to see an end to the existence of an Israeli state. This basic agreement abates any differences, if they exist at all, over religion, culture, economics, and political systems.

Even if he were to oppose Hamas, Barghouti will not have the power or strength to defeat them. Hamas’ control of a large swath of land alongside Israel guarantees what Hamas has already pledged: never ending war.

Any agreements that a Barghouti government would make with Israel would be broken by Hamas when it would take power. Europe’s gamble that Barghouti can stop Hamas is a dangerous fantasy.

What would Israel look like today if it had been nine miles wide on October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked?

Every map of a “two-state solution” requires an Israeli withdrawal to the nine-mile-wide borders of 1949-1967. The reason those lines are inevitable is that PA cities such as Tulkarm and Qalqilya are nine miles from the Mediterranean — and Barghouti is not going to give up those cities.

Nine-mile-wide borders mean that Israel’s strategic mid-section would be virtually indefensible. Israel’s major cities and Ben Gurion Airport would be within easy rocket range of Hamas terrorists stationed on the “Palestine” side of the border. If Israel’s soldiers chased those terrorists across the border, Israel would become the target of severe international condemnation. The United Nations would almost surely threaten sanctions, as would the European Union. And who would prevent “Palestine” from importing Iranian missiles or “volunteer” soldiers from Yemen?

The West needs to recognize this reality and accept the fact that the world has changed. A “two-state solution” as envisioned in the past, means a situation in which Israel will be threatened with an October 7 every single day. That is something no reasonable government can accept, least of all Israel.

Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI,  (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.

When Benedict Cumberbatch stood on stage at the “Together For Palestine” event at Wembley Arena and solemnly recited lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, On This Land There Are Reasons to Live, many in the audience swooned, seeing it as an act of courage and humanism.

It wasn’t.

It was a performance — one that captures the moral blindness of much of the Western left (and extreme right) on this conflict. What Cumberbatch delivered wasn’t an ode to peace. It was the sanitization of a man who spent decades denying Jewish history, justifying violence, and romanticizing Jewish erasure.

And it was chillingly familiar.

In the 1930s, celebrated artists gave cultural cover to the Nazi Party. Richard Strauss led the Reichsmusikkammer as Jewish musicians were purged; and Leni Riefenstahl’s films, like Triumph of the Will, dazzled critics even as they glorified Hitler. Their art wrapped hate in beauty, and gave genocide’s ideology a veneer of sophistication.

That’s what Cumberbatch just did for Darwish — cloaking eliminationist ideology in lyrical packaging.

Romanticizing Erasure

The lines Cumberbatch recited are widely shared as “uplifting”:

We have on this land what makes life worth living…
This land is called Palestine, and it will remain forever Palestine.

But in context, this isn’t love of a homeland. It’s a rejectionist claim that all the land “will forever be Palestine,” with no acknowledgment of Jewish history, presence, or right to sovereignty.

There was never an independent “State of Palestine.” Before the modern Arab-Israeli conflict, “this land” was ruled by ancient Israelite and Jewish commonwealths and kingdoms, and then by a series of foreign empires: the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Islamic Caliphates, Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire.

Jews have lived in Israel continuously for over 3,000 years — and even after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, Jews remained the plurality until the Arab-Islamic conquests. It was only after crushing the Bar Kochba revolt that the Romans even tried to erase Jewish identity by renaming Judea “Syria-Palestina.”

Erasing that history — as Darwish does here — isn’t universalism. It’s denialism.

Airbrushing Antisemitism

Darwish was not a wistful humanist. He was a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and for decades, he was one of its chief propagandists. His most infamous poem, Passers Between the Passing Words (1988), didn’t just reject Israeli policy — it rejected Jewish existence in the land:

Leave our land…
Get out of our blood. Get out of our memories.
Get out of us.

This wasn’t metaphor. Even at the time, Shimon Peres decried it as “a call for the destruction of Israel.” It portrayed Jews as alien “passers” to be purged from the land, from memory, and even from Palestinian “blood.”

And it wasn’t a one-off. In A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (1967), Darwish depicted Israelis as soulless invaders “who come to our land to kill, and do not see the human in the human they kill.”

In Identity Card (1964), he accused Jews of having “stolen the orchards of my ancestors.” These aren’t just anti-Zionist statements. They are antisemitic – portraying Jews as greed-driven thieves, denying Jews any rootedness, humanity, or right to be in their ancestral homeland (and ignoring that before the Arabs rejected the partition plan in 1947 and launched a war to destroy Israel, every piece of land owned by Jews in “this land” had been legally purchased — mostly from Arabs and Turks).

Yet none of this seemed to trouble Cumberbatch. He simply delivered Darwish’s lines, framed as transcendent and beautiful, with the eliminationism and antisemitism airbrushed away.

The Western Left’s Moral Blinders

Much of today’s Western left has adopted a posture that treats complexity as colonialism and erasure as justice. They wrap themselves in keffiyehs, quote an antisemite like Darwish, and proclaim themselves defenders of the oppressed — all while ignoring that the ideology they romanticize rejects the Jewish people’s right to exist at all in their ancestral homeland.

They ignore that this same ideology — embodied by Hamas — led to the mindset that carried out the October 7 massacre, burned children alive, raped women, and kidnapped babies. They ignore that Hamas still openly declares its goal is to annihilate the world’s only Jewish state.

And they ignore that Darwish’s words helped cultivate generations of Palestinian Arabs to believe peace will come only once the Jews are gone.

This moral blindness lets them recast eliminationism as “liberation” — to celebrate a poet who told Jews to “get out of our blood” as if he were a harmless dreamer. It lets them cosplay righteousness while reinforcing the very ideology that perpetuates this conflict and keeps Israelis and Palestinians trapped in war.

Performance, Not Principle

If Cumberbatch truly wanted to recite poetry for peace, he could have chosen voices from Israeli and Palestinian coexistence activists — people who have lost loved ones, yet still work for reconciliation. Instead, he chose a man who dehumanized Jews as monsters and demanded they erase themselves from the land, from history, and even from memory.

That is not art in service of peace. It is art in service of erasure. And it is the perfect metaphor for the Western left’s approach to this conflict: a comforting performance that airbrushes antisemitism, denies Jewish history, and excuses the very ideology that makes peace impossible.

Unless, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch truly wants Mahmoud Darwish’s “vision of peace” to prevail — a “peace” in which Israel and the Jewish people are erased from “this land.” And given what Hamas did during the hours it briefly controlled a sliver of Israel on October 7, we sadly already know exactly what that “erasure” would look like.

Because when art makes erasure seem beautiful, it helps pave the road to atrocity.

Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.