A Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet flies vertically over a beach during an airshow in Torre del Mar, southern Spain, July 31, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Jon Nazca

Turkey’s deal to buy 20 Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets from Britain for 8 billion pounds ($10.7 billion) also includes a comprehensive weapons package, including MBDA Meteor air-to-air missiles and Brimstone ground attack missiles, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

NATO allies Turkey and Britain signed the deal at a ceremony in Ankara on Monday, in a move aimed at deepening bilateral ties and bolstering Turkish air defenses. Ankara has said it was also seeking 24 more jets, albeit lightly used, from Qatar and Oman.

Some analysts called the deal expensive, although details have not yet been disclosed officially by either party.

“The deal includes a comprehensive weapons package, including the MBDA Meteor beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile, advanced short-range air-to-air missile and Brimstone ground-attack missile,” the person told Reuters.

The deal comes as Turkey, which is enjoying its warmest ties with the West in years, seeks to take advantage of the advanced warplanes to make up ground with regional rivals such as Israel, which has unleashed strikes across the Middle East this year targeting Iran-backed terrorists.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government have said Turkey would receive the first of the batch of 20 Typhoons in 2030, and that the deal, for which talks began in 2023, included an option to buy more.

Israeli military personnel operate on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border, on the day the Israeli military said it had resumed enforcing the Gaza ceasefire agreement after a series of strikes across the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

The Israeli military said on Wednesday it conducted a “targeted” strike in the area of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip targeting an infrastructure site where weapons were stored.

The military said earlier on Wednesday that it had resumed enforcing the Gaza ceasefire agreement and would respond firmly to “any violation” after a series of strikes across the enclave that it said was in response to Hamas violations.

Residents in Gaza City said they heard an explosion in northern Gaza and saw a column of smoke.

Israel had launched airstrikes in Gaza late on Tuesday, saying it acted after an attack by Palestinian terrorists killed one soldier, in the latest challenge to the already fragile ceasefire. Both Hamas and Israel have traded blame for violations of the deal.

AIRSTRIKES TARGETED HAMAS COMMANDER, ISRAEL SAYS

In a separate statement, the military said it had targeted dozens of Hamas terrorists across the enclave on Tuesday, as well as weapons depots and tunnels belonging to the Islamist group. It named five militants, including a Hamas commander, who it said took part in an attack on an Israeli kibbutz during the Oct. 7, 2023, assault that triggered the war.

The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said that 46 children and 20 women were among the 104 people killed in Israeli airstrikes since Tuesday. Analysts have long cast doubt on the reliability of such figures, which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants and have been shown in studies to be riddled with inaccuracies.

Despite the bombardments, US President Donald Trump said the US-backed ceasefire was not at risk.

“As I understand it, they took out an Israeli soldier,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “So, the Israelis hit back, and they should hit back. When that happens, they should hit back,” he added.

“Nothing is going to jeopardize” the ceasefire, Trump said. “You have to understand Hamas is a very small part of peace in the Middle East, and they have to behave.”

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said on Wednesday that the attack on the Israeli soldier and the subsequent Israeli airstrikes had been “very disappointing and frustrating for us.”

Qatar, along with Egypt and the US, has been leading efforts to broker peace in Gaza.

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, al-Thani said Hamas terrorists had been clear they were prepared to give up governance of the enclave, which they have run since 2007. Qatar was pushing them to acknowledge they need to disarm, he said.

An Israeli military official said Hamas had violated the ceasefire by carrying out an attack against Israeli forces who were stationed within the so-called “yellow line”, the deployment line agreed upon in the ceasefire.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attack on Israeli forces in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and said in a statement that it remained committed to the ceasefire deal, which went into effect on Oct. 10.

ACCORD INVOLVES RETURN OF HOSTAGE REMAINS

Under the accord, Hamas released all living hostages in return for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and wartime detainees, while Israel pulled back its troops and halted its offensive.

Hamas also agreed to hand over the remains of all dead hostages yet to be recovered, but has said that it will take time to locate and retrieve all of the bodies. Israel says the terrorist group can access the remains of most of the hostages.

The issue has become one of the main sticking points in the ceasefire, which Trump says he is watching closely.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said human remains handed over on Monday night belonged to an Israeli killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, whose body was recovered by Israeli forces in the early weeks of fighting.

The Israeli military said that Hamas had planted the remains at an excavation site before calling in a Red Cross team and pretending it had found a missing hostage, to create a “false impression of efforts to locate bodies.”

A 14-minute video published by the military showed three men placing a white bag at an excavation site and then covering it with earth and rocks.

Reuters was able to independently confirm the location of the video, but was unable to verify the date of the video or Israel’s account of what the video showed.

Hamas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Show Your Jewish Pride” rally at George Washington University G Street Park on May 2, 2024. Photo: Dion J. Pierre

The recent decision by the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice v. MIT has been widely mischaracterized as a judicial declaration that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” It was not that.

The court did not issue any sweeping statement about the nature of anti-Zionism. Rather, it affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a pro-Israel group, focusing narrowly on the legal threshold for harassment under Federal civil rights law (Title VI).

The First Circuit held that campus protests and anti-Zionist rhetoric, however offensive, are generally forms of political speech protected by the First Amendment. It concluded that the plaintiffs’ allegations failed to show “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” harassment or “deliberate indifference” by MIT — emphasizing that the university had taken steps to address the situation. In doing so, the court avoided the broader debate over when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism.

That legal restraint is understandable. But the case highlights an urgent cultural and moral failure: the persistent unwillingness of elites, including some in the Jewish world, to recognize and address anti-Zionism for what it is — the latest mutation of the world’s oldest hatred.

Anti-Zionism as the Heir to Older Hatreds

As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the foremost moral philosophers of our age — warned, “The greatest mutation of antisemitism in our time is the denial to the Jewish people alone the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” 

Antisemitism, Sacks wrote, never disappears; it mutates — from religion to race to nation.

Anti-Zionism borrows from each earlier form. From Christian antisemitism, it inherits the charge of Jewish moral corruption — the idea that Jews act with singular malice. From racial antisemitism, it takes the belief in a people collectively tainted and unfit to belong among others. From modern Henry Ford style antisemitism, it adapts the conspiracy that Jews secretly control governments and media — projected now onto Israel instead of individuals.

The same libels that once fueled pogroms — Jews poisoning wells, murdering children, or orchestrating global cabals — now reappear in “human rights” reports and social media threads. “Jews rule the world” has become “Israel controls Washington,” a trope embraced by overt Jew-haters like David Duke as “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government). The medieval libel that Jews “murder children for their blood” has become “Zionists murder children.”

The Globalization of an Obsession

The First Circuit’s failure to see how this ideological continuity operates in practice leaves Jewish citizens vulnerable in an environment where anti-Zionism functions as socially acceptable antisemitism.

Before 1948, antisemites were obsessed with Jews as a source of cosmic evil. Today’s anti-Zionists display the same fixation — only now it is directed at the one Jewish state. Israel, smaller than New Jersey and home to less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, faces opprobrium with an intensity no other nation faces. 

China can imprison a million Uyghurs without prompting global boycotts. Russia can annex Crimea and level Mariupol without igniting campus “divestment” campaigns. Yet Israel alone — the world’s only Jewish state — becomes the singular object of global condemnation. The United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined. That is not mere “criticism.” It is pathology.

A Movement Against the Majority of Jews

This obsession also targets most Jews themselves. Surveys consistently show that over 80% of Jews worldwide identify with Zionism — the belief that the Jewish people have the right to a national home in their ancestral land. Nearly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel.

To be anti-Zionist, therefore, is to oppose the national aspirations of most Jews and the existence of the state that is home to roughly half of them. The claim that anti-Zionism is merely “political” collapses under this reality. Imagine a movement dedicated to dismantling Italy while insisting it is not anti-Italian, or one demanding the abolition of Armenia while professing no hatred of Armenians. No other nation’s legitimacy is contested this way. Only the Jewish State — and by extension, the Jewish people — is told its existence is conditional. 

Old Tropes in New Garb

Haviv Rettig Gur, senior political analyst at The Times of Israel and a brilliant commentator on Jewish history and identity, has written that antisemitism “does not persist because it hates Jews; it persists because it needs Jews — as a canvas on which societies project their anxieties and hatreds.” Anti-Zionism performs precisely this role today. It allows movements and governments to define their virtue by condemning Israel, recasting Jews once again as the world’s moral scapegoat.

 The pre-1948 demand that Jews prove their loyalty and moral purity has been transferred to the Jewish state. Every Israeli act of self-defense becomes a test of Jewish worthiness. Every imperfection becomes proof of collective evil. It is no coincidence that antisemitic incidents spike worldwide whenever Israel is forced to defend itself. The emotional and rhetorical link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is direct, measurable, and undeniable.

The Need for Legal and Moral Clarity

Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute and author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018), writes that, “Zionism is the most audacious attempt in modern times to unite faith and peoplehood, memory and sovereignty.” To deny that attempt its legitimacy is to strip the Jewish story of coherence — to say Jews may exist only as victims, never as a nation capable of defending itself.

The US Supreme Court will likely have future opportunities to address cases like StandWithUs v. MIT. When it does, it should affirm that discrimination does not always come wearing a swastika or a white hood. Sometimes it arrives cloaked in the language of “social justice” or “anti-colonialism.” But its targets are the same, and its logic — denying Jews what it grants all others — is unchanged.

This challenge is not only legal but cultural. It demands that we gain the moral and intellectual clarity to recognize anti-Zionism for what it is: the latest mutation of an ancient hatred. 

If Jewish history teaches anything, it is that ideas matter — especially poisonous ones. The Supreme Court now has a chance to affirm that civil-rights protections apply to Jews too — even, and especially, when the hatred against them pretends to be virtue.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.