Israel delayed aid into Gaza and kept the enclave’s border shut on Tuesday, while re-emergent Hamas fighters demonstrated their grip by executing men in the street, darkening the outlook for US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.

Three Israeli officials said Israel had decided to restrict aid into the shattered Gaza Strip and delay plans to open the border crossing to Egypt at least through Wednesday, because Hamas had been too slow to turn over bodies of dead hostages. The militant group has said locating the bodies is difficult.

Meanwhile, Hamas has swiftly reclaimed the streets of Gaza’s urban areas, following the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops last week.

In a video circulated late on Monday, Hamas fighters dragged seven men with hands tied behind their backs into a Gaza City square, forced them to their knees and shot them from behind, as dozens of onlookers watched from nearby shopfronts.

A Hamas source confirmed that the video was filmed on Monday and that Hamas fighters participated in the executions. Reuters was able to confirm the location by visible geographic features.

DELAY IN HANDING OVER BODIES

Trump has given his blessing to Hamas to reassert some control of Gaza, at least temporarily. Israeli officials, who say any final settlement must permanently disarm Hamas, have so far refrained from commenting publicly on the reemergence of the group’s fighters.

On Monday the US president proclaimed the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” to Israel’s parliament, as Israel and Hamas were exchanging the last 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza for nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners.

But so far, Hamas has handed over only four coffins of dead hostages, leaving at least 23 presumed dead and one unaccounted for, still in Gaza.

Aid trucks have yet to be permitted to enter Gaza at the full anticipated rate of hundreds per day, and plans have yet to be implemented to open the crossing to Egypt to let some Gazans out, initially to evacuate the wounded for medical treatment.

HAMAS RETURN DEMONSTRATES HURDLES TO SETTLEMENT

The highly public return of Hamas to control of Gaza’s streets demonstrates the hurdles to progressing from the initial ceasefire – phase one of Trump’s plan – to a permanent settlement that would prevent a new eruption of fighting.

Gaza residents said Hamas fighters were increasingly visible on Tuesday, deploying along routes needed for aid deliveries.

Palestinian security sources said dozens of people had been killed in clashes between Hamas fighters and rivals in recent days.

Hamas accused Israel of violating the ceasefire. The Israeli military said it had fired on people who crossed truce lines and approached its forces after ignoring calls to turn back.

A summit co-hosted by Trump in Egypt on Monday ended with no public announcement of major progress towards establishing an international military force for Gaza, or a new governing body.

HAMAS ASSERTS CONTROL

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently maintained that the war cannot end until Hamas gives up its weapons and ceases to control Gaza, a demand that the fighters have rejected, torpedoing all previous peace efforts.

But Trump, having announced that the war is now over, said on Monday Hamas still had a temporary green light to keep order.

“They do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said.

Hamas sources told Reuters on Tuesday the group would tolerate no more violations of order in Gaza and would target collaborators, armed looters and drug dealers.

The group, though greatly weakened after two years of pummeling Israeli bombardment and ground incursions, has been gradually reasserting itself since the ceasefire took hold.

It has deployed hundreds of workers to start rubble clearing on key routes needed to access damaged or destroyed housing and to repair broken water pipes. Road clearance and security provision will also be needed for increased aid delivery.

AID AND HOSTAGES

The ceasefire has stopped two years of devastating warfare in Gaza triggered by the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas-led terrorists killed around 1,200 people and seized 251 hostages.

Swathes of Gaza are in ruins and the global hunger monitor said in August there was famine in the territory. Thousands of Gazans have been returning to homes since the ceasefire, many finding whole streets bombed into dust.

UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram said that while aid was getting into Gaza with tents, tarpaulin sheets, winter clothes, family hygiene kits and other critical items, she hoped for a significant increase later this week.

What caught Nim Shapira’s eye when videos of New Yorkers tearing down posters of Israeli hostages began circulating in October 2023 wasn’t just the stark affront. It was also the poles the posters had been attached to.

“I recognized every corner,” he said. “This was my neighborhood.”

The filmmaker had never before turned his craft to his identity as an Israeli living in New York. But Shapira immediately began gathering footage about the posters — and about those who felt compelled to put them up, and to tear them down.

His resulting documentary, “Torn,” was first released last year, when about 100 Israelis were still held hostage, out of roughly 250 taken on . Now, with all living hostages released and Hamas agreeing to free the bodies of 28 deceased hostages, too, Shapira — who is entering “Torn” into awards consideration — says its message remains deeply relevant.

We spoke to Shapira on Monday in the hours after 20 hostages were released about what he learned about the poster wars and why his film is still essential viewing.

Sign up here to attend a virtual screening of “Torn” on Thursday at 7 p.m., followed by a conversation with Shapira and others involved in the poster wars in New York City.

JTA: Before Oct. 7, your work did not focus on your Israeli identity. Why did you feel you had to make this movie?

Shapira: I’ve always been vocal for peace. But then, Oct. 7 happened, and the people that were my friends stopped speaking to me because I’m Israeli. It’s like the old saying of: You are the people you’ve been waiting for. I just had to do it. I didn’t want to do this film, and I had to do it.

What did you learn about the people who were tearing down the posters? Were there moments where you felt like you understood what they were thinking?

That’s what I wanted to explore in the film. I don’t justify what they did, and I don’t respect it, but this is a documentary. It’s asking questions. It’s not a film funded by this organization or that organization, or this country, or that country. I’m asking for empathy, and if I’m asking for empathy, I should also have empathy for the other side, and I should also understand their motives.

I would say that the people that tore down the posters live on a spectrum. These were people from in their teens to people that are retired, every ethnicity, every background and every age group. And that’s what strikes me the most. There were so many people without skin in the game that joined this cause of taking down these posters.

Some people that tore down the posters did lose family members in Gaza because of Israeli airstrikes. Some people that tore down the posters — they didn’t read what was on the signs. They were told that this is Israeli propaganda funded by the government, and they thought that it needs to be removed. Some of them are college students that thought it was the cool thing to do. And some are antisemites.

So I don’t want to put a label on the entire group of people that turned out the posters, because there are different scenarios in which posters were torn. In any case, this was an attack on freedom of speech, and this was anti-American. And there are enough lampposts in New York to share their suffering as well.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing “Torn”?

Empathy is all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. I honestly don’t think that people can put themselves in other people’s shoes, because you can never know what another person is going through, but you can step outside of your own shoes for a quick moment. So that’s all I’m asking.

I’m asking for the people who put on the posters to think about these victims and hostages that did nothing wrong. And I’m also asking for understanding from, let’s say, my side, to understand that the number-one reason why people read down the posters is that the death toll in Gaza kept rising throughout this war.

What has been most surprising about the reception?

I was able to have a film screened in Ivy League universities from Columbia to Harvard to Stanford to NYU. I’m very proud of that. I’m very proud that some of the screenings had people from the encampments. I spoke with American Muslims. I spoke with people from Jordan and from Egypt. I also spoke with Chinese and Venezuelans — I spoke to everyone who came to the screenings. I think maybe the most surprising thing was that there was a Q&A that I couldn’t come to — people just stayed in the theater and talked until the usher told them to leave.

Now there are good reasons to remove hostage posters — all of the living hostages are home. Why is your movie still worth seeing?

For two reasons. First, the hostage families with their loved ones still in Gaza — they are asking for us to stay in the fight. They still need us.

These hostages that were murdered, first kidnapped and then murdered — they are not just Israeli. They are American, and they are also from Nepal, Thailand and Tanzania. They are Christian and Muslim and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews. People from all religions are captive right now because their only sin was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and their families deserve to bring them home for a proper burial.

But also, my film is not about Israel or Palestine. My film is about New York and America. I’m dying for the day that the film will not be irrelevant, but we are more tribal and polarized than ever. We exist in different echo chambers and different silos. The poster war did not just tear down the posters, but also tore down the social fabric of the city. We are the most diverse city on the planet, so if we can’t sit down and talk to one another, what are we doing here? We have the biggest Jewish population. We have a huge Muslim population. Antisemitism is at a record high; there’s also Islamophobia that is rising.

But these are not just problems for the Jews or the Muslims. This is a societal problem and the film mostly asks questions. It asks: Can multiple things be true at the same time? Why is empathy a limited resource, and can we have disagreements without dehumanizations? So yes, the film is still much more relevant than ever.

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The post With hostages home, the filmmaker behind ‘Torn’ says his documentary about NYC’s poster wars remains sadly relevant appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Most American Jews have taken a dim view of the Trump administration’s approach to fighting antisemitism, saying his policies are disingenuous and prone to exacerbate the problem rather than solve it.

But beyond rejecting the crackdown on universities, liberal Jews have lacked a singular blueprint for fighting antisemitism akin to what the conservative Heritage Foundation offered the Trump administration with Project Esther.

The Nexus Project is hoping to change that with Tuesday’s release of the Shofar Report, a 63-page document that combines policy recommendations with essays arguing that leaders interested in countering antisemitism should focus on strengthening democratic institutions.

Its authors hope that it will fill a vacuum for both politicians and individual Jewish Americans.

“People are really hungry for solutions,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “They’re frustrated by the false choice of either protecting democracy or countering antisemitism.”

Spitalnick’s organization has been one of the leading voices alongside Nexus in arguing that the Trump administration’s moves to deport student protesters and cancel grants to universities accused of antisemitism are endangering Jews by weakening American democracy.

The Shofar Report builds on these arguments with a set of nine key recommendations focused on funding educational initiatives and civil rights protection while avoiding limits on free speech by directing enforcement at “clear discrimination and harassment.”

It calls for providing universities with more resources to combat harassment toward Jews, teaching more about the Holocaust and expanding investments in programs that help people leave extremist movements.

John Ruskay, the former director of UJA-Federation of New York, said that the Shofar Report comes at a time when Jewish leaders have poured resources into fighting antisemitism often without much basis in data or a cohesive strategy and that it could help “those who want to go beyond sloganizing.”

It also serves as counter-programming to Project Esther, released by the Heritage Foundation shortly before last year’s presidential election with advice for how a future Trump administration should fight antisemitism. The document described a “Hamas Support Network” (composed of progressive nonprofits and foundations) threatening Jews that could be dismantled by the federal government.

Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of Nexus, said that the Shofar Report’s narrative is that there is no tension between protecting civil liberties and countering antisemitism. “People think that we need to fight antisemitism and then, as a separate matter, you need to fight the weaponization of antisemitism,” he said. “And we’re saying fighting the weaponization of antisemitism is a strategy for fighting antisemitism.”

Nexus, which expanded from an academic task force focused on defining antisemitism into a full-fledged advocacy organization in 2024, quickly gained influence with the Biden administration and among Democrats in Congress who were looking for advice on how to respond to increasingly illiberal policy recommendations around antisemitism put forth by both Republicans and legacy Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Democrat, has become a champion of Nexus’s approach, which focuses as much on concern for freedom of expression as on raising the alarm about antisemitism itself. He praised Tuesday’s report in a statement, saying it “highlights some of the most timely and acute challenges facing the Jewish community and American democracy today.”

The second half of the report, which was edited by Forward opinion columnist Emily Tamkin, features longer essays by academics seeking to contextualize the contemporary conversation around antisemitism for Jewish clergy and lay leaders trying to guide their communities.

The Shofar Report’s reliance on so many authors can muddle its message around the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism — arguably the central question in today’s debates.

Rabbi Seth Limmer, for example, kicks off the policy briefs by focusing on the protests that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, and dwells on other quandaries coming from progressives, like the absence of Jewish studies experts at the University of Chicago’s Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity.

But a few pages later, David Myers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a forceful defense of higher education. He writes that the threat to Jews at universities comes from “new attempts to silence protesters in the name of protecting Jews.”

The varied perspectives add weight to what Jacoby said was an attempt to create a document that could transcend traditional partisan lines, and Limmer said his hope is that readers understand the need for a holistic approach to the problem: “It is definitely time for a new conversation around antisemitism that removes this fictitious partisan divide that pretends like only some people are responsible for the problem.”

While the report offers a detailed diagnosis of what it refers to as “authoritarian shortcuts” — in one section Judith Lichtman, a civil rights attorney, assails “attacks on nonprofits under the guise of fighting terrorism” — many of its recommendations lack specificity. Lichtman, for instance, called for Congress to “address white supremacy in law enforcement,” but does not detail how lawmakers should do so.

Project Esther’s public report also included somewhat vague advice to the executive branch, though these were partially fleshed out in private donor presentations created by the Heritage Foundation that detailed the mechanics of pressuring universities and civil society groups.

Other recommendations in the Shofar Report include expanding media literacy programs to help students recognize conspiracy theories, incorporating Jewish content into school curriculum and supporting partnerships between Jews and other minority groups. Some of its more concrete policy advice — like fully funding the Education Department’s civil rights office, which is less than half the size it was at the start of 2025 and being further reduced during the government shutdown — seem almost certain to be nonstarters so long as President Donald Trump is in office.

Jacoby acknowledged that the Shofar Report is being released at a time when Democrats, who are more likely to be receptive to its perspective, are out of power and focused on responding to actions from the White House rather than driving their own policy agenda.

“This is a plan for the present, not for the future,” Jacoby said. “We’ll work on that next.”

The post Project Esther created a blueprint for Trump to fight antisemitism. The ‘Shofar Report’ is a liberal response. appeared first on The Forward.