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Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood
(New York Jewish Week) — In his campaign to unseat the Bronx’s pro-Israel congressman, Ritchie Torres, political organizer Jose Vega has referred to the New York City borough as “Gaza West.”
In both Gaza and the Bronx, he’s said, young people’s lives are “being destroyed.” And in a recent video, Vega identified what he sees as the root of the Bronx’s problem: the concentration of power in Riverdale, the neighborhood where much of the district’s Jewish population resides.
“Rich people like to live in areas where they can buy the politicians easily — like Ritchie Torres, who is bought and controlled by Zionist influencers and millionaires, who all live in Riverdale,” Vega said in a recent video.
The video included photos of Torres meeting with Jewish leaders, with motion graphics highlighting the outline of a kippah on Torres’ head. It has drawn condemnation from Jewish leaders, who accused Vega of using antisemitic tropes.
“Just because you use the word Zionist instead of Jew doesn’t make it any less antisemitic,” said Eric Dinowitz, Riverdale’s Jewish City Council member. “Especially in your video when you have little traces around yarmulkes. Like, it is very clearly an anti-Jewish sentiment that is driving his argument.”
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of the Modern Orthodox day school SAR Academy, called the video “ugly, ugly, old-fashioned antisemitism.”
The video has served as a particularly contentious chapter in a Democratic primary race for Torres’ seat, which has often revolved around the incumbent’s support for Israel — and which could be a test of how strongly a Democratic primary campaign centered around Israel resonates with voters.
Torres represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the Bronx and is one of the poorest districts in the country. And in a moment when many progressives are hoping to take on moderate pro-Israel Democrats, he has made himself an obvious target.
A former City Council member who joined Congress in 2021, Torres is a vocal pro-Israel advocate who’s said he always has been and “always will be” a Zionist and has called himself “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and been enthusiastically embraced by pro-Israel Jews in his district and across the city. In December, children from local Jewish schools serenaded him as he received the Shamash Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, in a ceremony held at SAR.
Pro-Palestinian activists as well as some local constituents, meanwhile, have taken aim at Torres’ support for Israel, claiming he’s more focused on foreign policy than his own Bronx district. The Jewish and anti-Zionist podcaster Adam Friedland tore into Torres during an interview last year that went viral.
Torres’ spokesperson has said in statements that the congressman is focused on issues such as housing, affordability and standing up to Donald Trump.
“Voters across the Bronx, no matter their religion, race, or background, trust Ritchie Torres to be their voice in Washington because he is a lifelong resident who delivers real results,” said Torres’ spokesperson, Benny Stanislawski, in a statement. “He remains focused on the issues that matter most to his community, from public housing to affordability, while forcefully pushing back against the harmful attacks coming from the Trump administration, whether they be ICE’s abuses or repeated cuts to the social safety net.”
Stanislawski continued, “Efforts to divide the Bronx and pit communities against one another will fail, because this borough knows who is fighting for them and who is simply desperately chasing relevance.”
But with a primary coming up in June, some of his challengers — and many of New York City’s progressive voters, who recently elected an anti-Zionist mayor in Zohran Mamdani — are hoping that Torres’ support for Israel will work against him. It is the first time Torres has faced a primary challenge since taking office.
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The three-term congressman’s challengers include Michael Blake, the former State Assembly member who recently ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign; Vega, a 26-year-old political organizer from the LaRouche movement, which has been described as conspiracy-driven and “cultlike”; Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender and Democratic Socialists of America organizer; and TikTok musician Jon LaTona.
Andre Easton, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running as an independent in November’s general election.
The only challenger with a record of supporting Israel, State Assembly member Amanda Septimo, suspended her campaign soon after launching it, citing a recent lupus diagnosis.
Blake, who lost the primary against Torres for the same district in 2020, has made Torres’ donations from AIPAC his focal point.
A former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Blake said in a phone interview that Democrats, and “especially a true progressive Democrat should be opposed” to positions that AIPAC espouses, such as that the United States should provide military aid to Israel.
Blake kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a launch video slamming Torres for taking donations from AIPAC.
The video drew allegations of fanning the flames of antisemitism, in part because it featured Guy Christensen, an influencer who justified the killing of two Israeli embassy workers near the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last year. Blake has said including Christensen in the video was “a miss”; his campaign has since taken down the original video and reposted a new version that does not feature Christensen.
Skeptics pointed out that Blake himself had previously spoken at AIPAC events and attended a trip to Israel that it ran. But he has since spoken out against the organization and scrubbed posts from his social media profiles, while sharply criticizing Israel for committing a “genocide.”
Blake’s change of heart was convincing enough to earn him praise from Track AIPAC, the X account with more than 400,000 followers that works “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy” by documenting politicians’ campaign donation numbers from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.
“AIPAC’s Rep. Ritchie Torres has a serious, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid primary challenger in #NY15!” the account posted. “@MrMikeBlake is taking a courageous stand against Israel lobby corruption!”
Included in Blake’s launch video was a clip of Mamdani praising Blake; the two cross-endorsed each other toward the end of the mayoral Democratic primary, in which Blake finished eighth.
Mamdani, whose endorsement could boost a candidate’s profile among progressives, has not weighed in on the 15th district race — and until recently, Blake wasn’t the only candidate showcasing his relationship with the new mayor.
Septimo, who was elected to a second term in the State Assembly in 2024, told Politico that Mamdani, a former colleague in Albany, is “supportive of me and my efforts to deepen my work and the reach of my work.” During last year’s mayoral election, the New York Times wrote that Septimo was part of Mamdani’s inner circle and “brain trust.”
Unlike Blake — and unlike Mamdani himself — Septimo is a longtime supporter of Israel. She strongly opposed Mamdani’s failed “Not On Our Dime” legislation which was aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016, and visited again following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Septimo had said her campaign would focus on “centering people in the Bronx and what they’re facing on a daily basis,” rather than international issues. But she suspended her bid last week when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with lupus.
By keeping international issues in the background, Septimo had taken a starkly different approach from Blake’s anti-AIPAC campaign — a move that might be more resonant with voters in the district, according to a political strategist.
“I don’t know if this is a winning approach for Michael Blake,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang. “Ritchie Torres is a fairly well-liked incumbent in his district, and he has over $14 million in the bank.”
Yang added that it was affordability, and not Israel-Gaza politics, that fueled Mamdani’s rise.
Ross Barkan, a journalist and one-time State Senate candidate, said he doesn’t see Israel as being central to Bronx voters’ priorities in the way that it might be in more heavily Jewish districts, such as the 10th Congressional District race between Rep. Dan Goldman and Brad Lander.
“It’s just not a place where that many voters are emotionally tied to Israel,” Barkan said of the 15th district. “So whether you’re for Palestinian rights or for Israel, it might not resonate much either way.”
That characterization would be news to Jews living in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city where Israeli flags hang on front lawns and synagogues and Ha-Makolet: Shoshi’s Market carries a wide range of Israeli products. The neighborhood is home not only to SAR but to a nondenominational day school, Kinneret, whose founders in 1947 included the Zionist leader Golda Meir — and whose portrait hangs in the hallway.
According to a 2023 UJA-Federation of New York community study, there are 16,000 Jewish adults and 4,000 Jewish children living in Riverdale and the adjacent Kingsbridge neighborhood. Jews are a small minority across the Bronx, though, with an estimated population of 29,000 in the borough of 1.4 million, approximately half of whom live in the 15th district.
Torres was already popular in the district before Riverdale was added in 2022. But the neighborhood has a special bond with him.
“As Jews in this community, we obviously support Ritchie, and would love that the vote gets out for him,” said Michael Brown, a Jewish Riverdale resident, in an interview. “It’s not just his support for Jews, but he’s been good for his whole constituency.”
Brown said his daughter attends SAR, where Torres has been a frequent guest. “I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres told the entire student body during a December 2023 visit, a day after he was heckled for his Israel views on the Upper East Side.
“I actually gave him a report card last year because he spent so much time here,” joked Krauss, the principal. Krauss said he’s been to Israel with Torres twice, including a 2024 trip with a group of Bronx leaders during which they met with Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister.
Torres has consistently voted on pro-Israel positions in Congress, and in January 2024, he left the Congressional Progressive Caucus as his identification with Israel made him increasingly an outlier on the left.
Dinowitz, who represents Riverdale, Kingsbridge and a few adjacent Bronx neighborhoods, is the Chair of City Council’s Jewish Caucus, and left the Progressive Caucus in February 2023.
“With someone like Ritchie in Congress, a lot of us do feel safer, knowing that someone’s not going to shy away from their support of the Jewish community because it may be politically convenient at this time or that time,” Dinowitz said.
Thomas Gardner, the senior rabbi of the Reform synagogue Riverdale Temple, said everyone he’s spoken with has “been very positive about Ritchie Torres.”
Gardner said Torres told him that the most frequent complaint he hears walking around the district is that he supports Israel despite the war in Gaza. Gardner pointed to Torres’ criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu has done “irreparable damage” to Israel’s support among Democrats — as a sign of his alignment with a number of constituents.
“My personal feeling is that his statements were very much along the lines of what most of my congregants think,” Gardner said. “They’re very pro-Israel but they’re not pro-Netanyahu. They believe in Israel and hope that it is strong and exists. But they also hope that the Palestinians don’t suffer. Palestinians need better leadership. The Palestinians need peace.”
For many of Torres’ critics, simply being anti-Netanyahu falls short of the mark.
Jose Vega is taking a Michael Blake-like approach to capture those critics’ attention, having launched his campaign at a town hall called “The Bronx is ‘Gaza West’: Rebuilding Starts Here — and There.”
Vega is part of the LaRouche movement, which follows the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who reportedly said that only one and a half million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Ku Klux Klan was founded on behalf of B’nai Brith. Vega has made a point of centering Torres’ views on Israel, and even confronted him in a Bronx restaurant about them.
“You are responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Ukrainian children — you love funding war,” Vega declared in a video that he took of the confrontation.
Vega posted another video on X of a billboard in the Bronx that featured a photo of Torres and the message, “For every Palestinian child that’s murdered… your Congressman, Ritchie Torres, gains a profit. Let the Palestinian children live.”
Vega said the video was sent to him by a “Torres hater,” though JNS reported that the billboard’s message may have been AI-generated. (Torres called the message “lies and libels that are meant to incite political violence,” in a statement.)
A couple of weeks later, Vega appeared on a video podcast called the Jimmy Dore Show, and said with a smile that he “will not confirm or deny” whether he, in fact, took the video himself, though he did firmly state that “it’s not artificial intelligence, because I hate AI.”
Vega was endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC, a non-partisan group that has endorsed a range of candidates including Democrats, Libertarian independents and America First Republicans calling for mass deportations, on the basis of their anti-Israel views.
His recent remarks about Riverdale Zionists controlling Torres and the district, which came during an interview with anti-Israel influencer Erik Warsaw, drew strong reactions from Jewish leaders such as Krauss, who said he was “sickened,” and Dinowitz, who called the video “frightening.”
“I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide his antisemitism,” Dinowitz said.
There is no polling data yet for the race, and Vega, whose campaign has received about $101,000, is the only challenger to have reported receipts to the Federal Election Commission. Torres, meanwhile, has $14.3 million in cash on hand, rolled over from previous elections.
Dalourny Nemorin, a public defense attorney and DSA organizer, is running on domestic issues like housing, healthcare and immigrants’ rights, though she also criticized Torres for his AIPAC support in an interview with the Bronx Times.
His funding from AIPAC and pro-Israel views, she said in November, have led him to “deny the existence of genocide in Palestine, while we watch in real time as people starve to death.”
When asked by a Reddit user why her campaign site doesn’t emphasize her position on taking AIPAC money, Nemorin said she “wanted to highlight the issues Ritchie was ignoring and not further platform they [sic] people who keeps him preoccupied.”
Meanwhile, music TikToker Jon LaTona has said little about his candidacy. He has worn what appears to be a keffiyeh in unrelated videos, indicating an opposition to Torres’ pro-Israel stance, though the TikTok account for his campaign has been taken down.
The post Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood appeared first on The Forward.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”