Many events that have occurred in the past few weeks point to our frightening reality. When it comes to freedom of expression about events between Israel and Palestine, we are on perilous ground.

It is clear that public opinion has shifted in a more supportive direction for the Palestinian people, especially among the American nation – young people and people of color, and so far, this fact has been recorded mainly in polling data. But with the past six weeks of Israel's brutal assault on Gaza, there has been an outpouring of statements supporting Palestinian rights and opposing Israel's relentless war against the Palestinian people.

It was expected that support for the Palestinian people would be countered by pro-Israel groups. But the ferocity of the pro-Israel counterattacks was alarming. A major American Jewish organization that claims to defend civil rights has called on universities to ban Students for Justice in Palestine (a pro-Palestinian university student activist organization in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand), describing it as anti-Semitic. In an unusual move, the US government called for an investigation into whether the students could be charged with “providing material support to terrorism.” While some students were not careful in their choice of words to express their support for the Palestinians, there was nothing to support the serious charge of “terrorism.” Some universities have responded by banning Students for Justice in Palestine, along with Jewish Voice for Peace, a national organization of progressive American Jewish youth who support Palestinian rights. Despite its Jewish membership, this organization has also been described as anti-Semitic by the same defenders of Israel.

About a week ago, the head of the Democratic Party in a Midwestern state sent a press release condemning officials of the Young Democrats (the largest youth-led political party organization) in a university building in the state. The statement ended with a text that pro-Israel groups insisted on... It is a controversial statement, because instead of saying, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they wrote, “Let every Palestinian be free, from the river to the sea.”

Despite the students' efforts, the state party chair accused them of using anti-Semitic language, making Jewish students feel unsafe on campus, and supporting genocide against the Jewish people, and called on them to resign from their elected positions in the Democratic caucus. To justify this harsh response, the president cited the definition of the original phrase, provided by a pro-Israel group.

Last week, the Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland (CASA), a respected community organization in Maryland that advocates for and provides services to immigrants, issued a statement in support of the Palestinian people. The association condemned what Hamas did on October 7, and also condemned the Israeli bombing campaign that claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinian men and women. The Casa statement said that as people of color, they identify with the struggle for justice and freedom because “the Palestinian struggle reflects our victory.”

CASA's solidarity was met with a letter from a group of lawmakers and elected officials in Maryland demanding that the association rescind its statement, describing it as "anti-Semitic." As state legislators who decide the state budget, they more explicitly stated: “This may be a good time to re-evaluate the state’s mechanism for providing financial aid and support to our immigrant community.” Because thousands of immigrant women and men depend on CASA for important services and advocacy, they felt compelled to apologize and rescind the statement. Lawmakers have not yet backed down from their threat to stop funding the association.

Finally, an editorial published in the New York Daily News last week called for the re-establishment of the notorious Jewish Defense League, a move that raises concern and anger. Instead, it passed without comment from elected officials concerned about the spread of hate. The author of the article, a prominent New York philanthropist, praised the founder of the Jewish Defense League, Meir Kahane, and extolled the virtues of the League, claiming that it represents strong Jews and is a firm response to dealings aimed at their safety. The writer ignored the facts that the League had for decades been on the FBI's terrorist list, was a major perpetrator of terrorist violence during the 1970s and 1980s, and was banned in Israel as a racist group that produced the likes of the person who massacred Muslim worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, and the person who Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. That a major American newspaper published such an article without comment indicates how serious the situation is.

On the 54th day of the war waged by the occupation against Gaza, the Israeli government received a list of the names of the sixth batch of Israeli detainees who will be released tonight as part of prisoner and detainee exchange deals with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and other factions of the Palestinian resistance.

Efforts in Israel to extend the truce

The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation said that there are efforts in Israel to extend the ceasefire after the end of the additional two days of the truce.

It is noteworthy that the Palestinian and Israeli sides have reached an agreement to extend the humanitarian truce in the Gaza Strip for two additional days, under the same previous conditions, namely a ceasefire and the entry of humanitarian aid.

This comes within the framework of the mediation of the State of Qatar, and in partnership with the Arab Republic of Egypt and the United States of America.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China and Brazil should seek to achieve a new consensus in the United Nations Security Council, push for a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, as well as the release of prisoners, and return to the two-state solution as the basic solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 

Wang, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, made the comments during talks with his Brazilian counterpart Mauro Vieira.

For his part, Vieira said that the Brazilian side agrees with China's position, noting that the temporary ceasefire must be extended first, and peaceful coexistence between Palestine and Israel must ultimately be achieved through the two-state solution.

He stressed that Brazil is ready to work closely with China to demand that the Security Council take new measures, and to speak with a clear, unanimous voice.

“A long-term ceasefire in Gaza requires concessions that are difficult to accept,” the Wall Street Journal reported, citing Egyptian and Qatari officials.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Egyptian and Qatari officials as saying: “The main mediators in the prisoner and hostage exchange process between Israel and Hamas are pushing both sides to prolong the ceasefire in Gaza beyond the current two-day extension, and to begin talks on a permanent truce that would end the war.” entirely".

The officials told the newspaper, "A long-term ceasefire will likely require Israel and Hamas to make concessions that are difficult to accept, such as exchanging Israeli soldiers for thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons."

The officials told the Wall Street Journal that “this will require Israel to curb its attack on southern Gaza with the aim of seizing the Strip and killing Hamas’ senior leadership,” but the officials explained that “the current temporary truce is working to build the kind of confidence necessary to move forward.”

Today, Tuesday, Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said: “We are working to strengthen the Qatari mediation role to reach a truce and then a permanent ceasefire.”

In a sign of the seriousness of the talks, CIA Director William Burns arrived in Qatar on Tuesday, a US official and a person familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

He is scheduled to attend the talks, in which David Barnea, head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and senior officials from Qatar, which has close ties to the political leadership of Hamas, are also expected to participate, according to the newspaper.

Discussions are initially focused on extending the ceasefire for another three days in exchange for 10 hostages each day.

The truce between Hamas and the Israeli government continues for the fifth day in a row after extending it for two days under the same conditions, while awaiting the release of a new batch of hostages and prisoners.

Earlier, the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the Hamas movement released 69 Israeli prisoners, while Israel released 150 Palestinian women and children, during the first four days of the truce agreement that the two parties reached with Qatari-Egyptian-American mediation, and which entered into force on Friday morning. past.

Source: Sama News

The official Israeli Broadcasting Corporation said on Tuesday that Qatar is witnessing discussions to conclude a new agreement for a “long-term truce” that includes the release of all detainees in Gaza, including soldiers, and Tel Aviv’s release of Palestinian prisoners “convicted” of killing Israelis.

This came in conjunction with talk in the Hebrew media about discussions in Doha between the heads of the Israeli Mossad, Dadi Barnea, the CIA, William Burns, the Egyptian intelligence, Abbas Kamel, and the Qatari Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, while no official comment was issued on this matter. 

The corporation said: “There is talk about discussions in Qatar, where the head of the Mossad is located, and on the table is a new agreement for a longer truce.” It explained that the agreement being discussed includes “the release of all abductees in Gaza, including men and soldiers.”

It continued: "In return, Israel extensively releases Palestinian security prisoners, including those convicted of killing Israelis."

According to the Commission, the Hamas movement expressed its approval of the broad outlines of the new agreement, but said it wanted a “complete ceasefire,” which Israel has rejected until now, while the movement has not officially commented on the matter.

The head of the Mossad informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the details of the new agreement being discussed in Doha, according to the same source.

In this context, the Hebrew Walla website said that the talks taking place in the Qatari capital, Doha, on Tuesday, with the participation of the Qatari Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman, the Director of the CIA, William Burns, and the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, The head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, Abbas Kamel, aims to extend the current truce for up to 9 days, in exchange for the release of 50 additional hostages.

Walla also revealed that the discussions in Doha discussed the possibility of drafting a new agreement under which all other hostages held by Hamas, including soldiers, would be released without revealing more details.

The website added that Israel is ready to agree to extend the truce according to the terms of the current agreement, to reach nine days, in exchange for Hamas releasing 10 hostages for every additional day.

Source: Sama News

The Chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Mike Warner, said that “Israel” has lost the sympathy of people, not in the region, but on a global level.

Waner pointed out in an interview with MSNBC that Israel is facing a major challenge, after it invited more than a million Palestinians to flee from north to south of the Gaza Strip, in light of what is happening now.

He said that it must pay money to the Palestinian Authority, in order to continue the security services it provides, and avoid chaos, as he described it.

He pointed out that he was worried that security personnel in the Palestinian Authority would lose their work and open a new front.

Source: Sama News

Between Benjamin Netanyahu’s shouting that ending the Hamas movement and uprooting its roots in the Gaza Strip is an irreversible goal, and between him being forced to negotiate with members of its political leadership, even through Qatar’s mediation, regarding the hostage issue, Israel has opened the gates of hell of genocide and forced displacement against the defenseless people of Gaza. Now that Israeli anger has subsided somewhat, after mothers, children, and grandmothers returned from being detained by the Qassam Brigades in the tunnels, it may be permissible to ask whether Netanyahu’s fault has been healed, or whether the next round of rounds, if the truce suddenly collapses, will be more devastating to him. Who remain of the mothers, children, and grandmothers of Gaza, hostages of a war in which none of them had a hand in igniting its flames, and no one among them was asked for an opinion about it before it exploded?

However, the most important thing is to pose the question to the distinguished gentlemen, the Chairman and members of the Political Bureau of the Hamas movement, whether there is a new perception beginning to take shape in their minds regarding their movement’s approach at various levels, which differs from their visions of the reality before the explosion of the seventh of last month. Logically, it can be assumed that this is possible. The movement's leadership had previously taken a similar measure. This happened six years ago, specifically on May 1, 2017, when Khaled Meshaal, who was then head of the Political Bureau, announced in a press conference in Doha a “new policy principles document,” which included for the first time the movement’s readiness to accept the principle of the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of June 4, 1967. In other words, acceptance of the peace path with Israel that began with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

It is true that the aforementioned document included an affirmation of Hamas’ refusal to recognize the State of Israel, or the peace process based on the Oslo Accords, but it is also true that this refusal falls within the political framework. The movement's leadership knows that accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River means accepting an existing reality represented by the existence of a state called Israel. In addition to this, something is no less important, which is that this “new policy principles document” includes Hamas’s retreat from the approach of considering the conflict against Israel based on a religious basis. Each of the two matters seemed, at the time, new, and at the same time important, and foreshadowed more than one possibility, the first, and even the most important, of ending the Palestinian division and directing Palestinian dealings with Israel based on a unified front that includes all Palestinian factions.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that that hope was an illusion. No reconciliation with the Fatah movement took place, despite the signing of more than one reconciliation agreement, and no reform of the situation of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah was taken seriously. Now all Palestinians, not just the faction leaders, stand at a decisive crossroads. However, the Hamas leadership in particular faces choices that will determine the future of the movement. The most important of these options is its return to the Palestinian embrace that embraces all the factions, that is, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The second is for it to reconsider its regional alliances, and be open to its Arab-Sunni affiliation, which is the basis on which it can trust, and nothing else. Thirdly, reflect carefully on the fact that the all-or-nothing logic has proven futile, and the person paying the heaviest price is the continuation of the people of Palestine, who have continued to pay the heaviest price with their blood, and with the future of their children, since the rejection of the United Nations resolution taken seventy-six years ago. This day (11-29-1947), which established the right of the Palestinians to a state on part of their land. Isn't it time to put the interests of the Palestinian people before the interests of all organizations? indeed.

By Nazir Majli

Amid talk of expanding the truces in the Gaza Strip and increasing prisoner exchange deals between Israel and Hamas, what can be described as “voices of reason” began to grow noticeably louder in Tel Aviv, demanding an end to the warlike rhetoric, and the search for opportunities to end the conflict between the two peoples, and give the mediators room in Washington and the Arab capitals to transform the disaster that the region is experiencing into hope, as usually happens when leaders who are concerned for the interests of their people and the future of emerging generations shine.

These voices are raised by a group of former political and military leaders and opinion writers who are disturbed by extremist rhetoric that is based on revenge and vengeance, and insists on setting goals that its owners know are unattainable, such as “annihilating Hamas,” completely occupying the Gaza Strip, and deporting its people.

Among these leaders, on Tuesday, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, who served as Minister of Defense in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Chief of Staff of the Army, and who is considered the holder of the largest number of military decorations in the history of the Israeli army, emerged. He said that the members of his generation were among those who fought many wars. They knew the meaning of bloodshed, and they saw that there were limits to power. He added, in an article published in the newspaper “Haaretz”, on Tuesday: “In addition to that apparent steel logic, which makes good people think that our security is linked to Israel’s complete and permanent control over the Gaza Strip, this thinking will lead them to the need to control Lebanon, and after that, Syria.” And perhaps throughout the region. The conclusion is that a government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu will lead to significant damage to Israel's strategic position, and to a war that has no endpoint.

This is great harm. Netanyahu must end his role before the consequences of his weakness become irreparable. In the current circumstances, we need a broad national unity government without Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich. Only this government, which will act responsibly and resolutely, free from extraneous and distorting considerations, can guide Israel towards ending the war victoriously.

Barak wrote: “After two months of war, we are approaching the decisive point. The Israeli army has clear achievements in the northern Gaza Strip, but Hamas is far from disintegrating in the south, and it maintains capabilities in the north as well. Completing the goal of destroying the military and authoritarian capabilities of Hamas is very necessary, but this will require many months and perhaps more. The practical clock and the political clock are not synchronized. International legitimacy for action is rapidly running out, and tension even vis-à-vis the United States is building up in closed rooms and could explode. Releasing the kidnapped people is not more important than destroying Hamas, but it is more urgent, and must be given the highest priority. Netanyahu's failure to lead the war lies in the exclusion of the realization that in the situation before us, victory cannot be achieved without a clear position on the next day. Netanyahu is still bound by an unholy alliance with Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the arsonists who are also trying to ignite the West Bank, and they provide him with protection from demands for his immediate removal. But basically, they are exploiting his dependence on them in order to impose the vision of resuming Israel’s full control and assuming responsibility for the Gaza Strip. This process most likely means drowning in the Gaza quagmire, conflict and losses for years, a crisis with the American administration, and jeopardizing relations with Egypt and Jordan, the Abrahamic Agreement, and the opportunity for normalization with Saudi Arabia.

Nahum Barnea, chief commentator in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, writes, “Instead of coming out every day with loud statements about liquidating Hamas, it is better to lower the tone. This not only confuses the mind of the Israeli public, but also of the Americans, Egyptians, and Qataris, whom we need to mediate in the deals of the kidnapped people. Credibility is a vital element in negotiations. (Hamas) wanted a ceasefire, so it works for it, but a ceasefire also works for the Israeli army. It allows it to address the flaws and shortcomings that were exposed in the first three weeks of the ground campaign. And, no less important, it allows us to explore issues that have been with us since October 7. Above all, in the matter of the next day. What reality in Gaza is Israel seeking after the situation stabilizes? Can the government, in its current structure, reach the necessary decisions on this issue? “It is very doubtful that it can.”

Under the title: “Enough with the warlike statements,” Dror Yemini wrote in “Yedioth Ahronoth,” saying: “Hamas must be eliminated, uprooted, annihilated. Those who will remain alive from among the men of (Hamas) must stand before the formula A talk on the Nuremberg trials; Because Hamas's ideology is a Nazi ideology in every sense of the word. However, in order to continue the fight, Israel needs international support. It needs the support of tens of millions of people who do not know the situation.

We also need the support of millions in the Arab and Islamic worlds who are not enthusiastic about the Muslim Brotherhood. We need the support of Congress. This is precisely why Israel must break the stalemate and change the rules of the game.

Instead of showy statements about “continuing the war with all force” and “ending the ceasefire,” there is a need to say exactly that Israel does not want the war to continue. Israel proposes a ceasefire. Provided, of course, that the Gaza Strip is demilitarized, all the kidnapped persons are returned, and Hamas activists leave the Gaza Strip. And also on one condition of all – say, stripping the sector, we already know what the response will be. This is exactly what will give Israel strategic superiority in international public opinion. And of course, more time to continue the fight.

Under the title: “There will be no victory, we will not destroy (Hamas), a political initiative is required,” Professor Tom Mahjar writes in the newspaper “Haaretz”: “Perhaps, in an apparently optimistic scenario, Israel will defeat (Hamas) within a few months and its authority will collapse. But in this new reality, the responsibility for continuing control over the Gaza Strip and its residents will fall on Israel. There is doubt whether this strong shock will bring security, and perhaps even perpetuate a permanent situation of fighting and losses, known to us from the Gaza Strip before the separation process and from southern Lebanon. Therefore, it is time to admit that we will not have victory, no matter how many brutal blows we inflict on the Strip and its poor residents. The painful truth is that Hamas, and in its wake Hezbollah, have dragged Israel into a war that began with their offensive initiative and our terrible failure. Military operations will not succeed in changing the political situation in which we find ourselves. So what to do? First, we must work to establish a ceasefire and make a comprehensive deal to release all the kidnapped people, and hold those responsible for the failure accountable as soon as possible. After that, we must commit to establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in exchange for a long-term ceasefire, approximately 15 years, and work to implement this commitment. This offer will be supported by Arabs, the moderate Arab world and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas will have no choice but to join this initiative, as Hamas leaders previously proposed a similar plan. “The time has come for an Israeli political initiative that stems from the realization that the Palestinian people will not disappear, and the way to live here in safety is through recognition of their rights and legitimate demands for independence.”

Source: Alsharq Al -Awsat

Today, the G7 Foreign Ministers called for extending the truce in Gaza to increase aid and facilitate the immediate and unconditional release of all detainees.

In a statement, they stressed the need to facilitate the departure of all foreign nationals from the Gaza Strip.

They also affirmed their commitment to working with all partners in the Middle East region to prevent the escalation of the conflict, and to establish a Palestinian state based on the two-state solution.

On the other hand, the statement called on the Yemeni Houthi group to "immediately stop attacks on civilians and threats to international shipping lanes and commercial ships."

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Tuesday that stopping the war in exchange for the release of all detainees in Gaza is a “plan to eliminate Israel,” while Ben Gvir threatened to dissolve the Israeli government if the war in the Gaza Strip stopped.

On Tuesday, the Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, threatened to dissolve the Israeli government if an agreement was reached that would lead to an end to the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, while the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, considered that stopping the war in exchange for the release of all detainees in Gaza is a “plan to eliminate” Israel."

This came in light of reports of discussions to conclude a new agreement for a “long-term truce” that includes the release of all detainees in Gaza, including soldiers, and the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners “convicted of killing Israelis.”

In a very brief post, on his account on the “X” platform, coinciding with talk about a possible new agreement for a long-term humanitarian truce in the Gaza Strip, Ben Gvir said: “Ceasing the war equals dissolving the government.”

Earlier Tuesday, Smotrich said that stopping the war in exchange for the release of all detainees in Gaza is a “plan to eliminate Israel,” in a blog post on the “X” platform, in response to the Arab affairs commentator on Israeli Army Radio, Jackie Hoji.

“A proposal will soon be put forward to the Israeli government and society: the release of all hostages, including soldiers, in exchange for an end to the war,” Hoji wrote; “(This) is not on the agenda, not even as a proposal,” Smotrich responded.

The Finance Minister claimed that “there is no discussion on this issue at all,” and added, “This is a plan to eliminate the State of Israel.” He continued, "We will continue until absolute victory and the elimination of Hamas."

In another tweet, Smotrich responded to a post by the political correspondent in the newspaper "Israel Hayom", Sherit Avitan Cohen, in which he said: "(Release) thousands of terrorists in exchange for captured soldiers; (in addition to) a ceasefire or extension of the truce indefinitely."

It added, "Also, the reconstruction of Gaza under Qatari sponsorship; Egypt and Hamas are plotting a deal from hell for Israel." It continued, “Who will stop it?” Smotrich responded by saying, “This will not happen.”

Source: Arab48

On Tuesday evening, the Israeli occupation authorities released 30 prisoners, including 15 women and 15 children, from the “Ofer” military prison, located on citizens’ lands in the town of Beitunia, west of Ramallah, and from the “Al-Maskobiyya” prison in occupied Jerusalem, as part of the fifth batch of “Exchange deal.”

The Prisoners' and Ex-Prisoners' Affairs Authority and the Prisoners' Club announced in a joint statement the list of names of the fifth batch of male and female child prisoners who were released today, within the terms of the "humanitarian truce" agreement, and it includes 15 women and 15 children.

Rescue and ambulance crews and volunteers in the Gaza Strip recovered 160 dead bodies from under the rubble and from the streets and roads, during the past 24 hours, which brings the number of dead since the start of the Israeli aggression on the 7th of last October to more than 15,000, including more than 6,150. children and more than 4 thousand women.

Local sources in the Gaza Strip reported that rescue crews have so far relied on manual and primitive methods to retrieve the bodies of the dead, in light of the lack of machinery and equipment to remove the rubble.

Incomplete data indicate that about 6,500 missing persons are still under the rubble, or their fate is still unknown, including more than 4,700 children and women.

Since the start of the temporary humanitarian truce, last Friday morning, rescue and ambulance crews and citizens have been trying to recover as many bodies as possible, with whatever capabilities they have.

The last five days revealed the horror of the humanitarian catastrophe that befell the Gaza Strip, as 300,000 housing units were damaged as a result of Israeli bombing, from the air, land and sea, including 50,000 housing units that were completely demolished by the occupation.

Despite the “truce,” the occupation prevented citizens displaced to the south of the Gaza Strip from returning to their cities and towns in the north, and the occupation forces stationed on Salah al-Din Street fired bullets at citizens who tried to reach the north to inspect their homes and search for their missing family members, which led to the death of three people. citizens and injuring others.

This evening, Tuesday, the Al-Qassam Brigades released 10 Israeli hostages, as part of the fifth batch in the prisoner exchange deal that included the temporary truce agreement in the besieged Gaza Strip. The resistance factions also released two Thais who were detained in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army confirmed that it received the hostages from the International Red Cross.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed earlier that its teams “succeeded in facilitating the release and transfer of 12 hostages held in Gaza,” which was confirmed by the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli army, in two separate statements. Netanyahu's office explained that the hostages who were released included a minor girl and 9 women, in addition to two Thais.

The spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Minister, Majed Al-Ansari, had explained that the Israelis released from Gaza were “a minor girl and 9 women, one of whom holds Austrian citizenship, 2 from Argentina, in addition to a Filipino citizen,” in exchange for 15 female prisoners, and 15 children and boys from the movement’s cubs held captive in prisons. Occupation.

What is noteworthy about today’s handover operation is the participation of the “Jerusalem Brigades”, the military wing of the “Islamic Jihad” movement, in the handover process, which indicates that some of the hostages who were handed over in the fifth batch were being held by the “Jerusalem Brigades” in the Gaza Strip since the seventh operation. Since last October.

A few hours before the end of the basic truce, Monday, Qatar and the United States announced an agreement to extend it for two additional days, until seven o’clock on Thursday morning, while the Qatari capital, Doha, is witnessing, in the meantime, persistent attempts to extend the truce beyond next Thursday.

On Tuesday evening, Israeli occupation forces arrested a child near the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah.

Local sources reported that the occupation forces arrested the child, Lara Yasser Fouad Zubaidi (16 years old), while she was passing through a flying military checkpoint between the town of Sinjil and the neighboring village of Jaljalia.

In this context, the same sources added that the occupation forces stormed the village of Qibya, west of Ramallah, and set up a military checkpoint between it and the neighboring village of Budrus, without any arrests being reported.

It added that confrontations broke out between citizens and the occupation forces after they stormed Jabal al-Tawil in the city of Al-Bireh, but no casualties were reported.

On Tuesday evening, settlers, protected by Israeli occupation army, attacked Bedouins from a community west of Al-Malihat on Al-Ma'rajat Road, northwest of the city of Jericho, and stole their sheep.

The supervisor of the Al-Baidar Organization for Defending Bedouin Rights, Hassan Mlihat, said that a number of settlers forcefully stormed the homes of citizens in the community, and severely beat the citizens, Muhammad Suleiman Kaabna and Jibril Mlihat. They also looted a number of sheep heads belonging to his brother Jamal Mlihat, and the sheep of Muhammad Kaabna.

He added that the settlers, accompanied by the occupation forces, are still raiding Bedouin homes in the community until now, and are intimidating its residents.

An Israeli source reported, on Tuesday, that Hamas handed over Israeli hostages to the International Committee of the Red Cross, on the fifth day of the truce.

According to information provided by the Red Cross, “10 kidnapped Israeli women, in addition to two civilians of foreign identity, are on their way to Israel.”

The handover comes within the framework of the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas since the October 7 attack, after reaching a truce, brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar. According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, 30 Palestinian detainees are also expected to be released on Tuesday, in the fifth operation. An exchange between Israel and Hamas, including 15 women and 15 minors.

The truce between Israel and Hamas was supposed to end on Monday night, but it was agreed to extend it for two additional days, ending on Wednesday night.

It is also likely that the truce will be extended for an additional two days, ending on Friday night, according to what a Sky News Arabia correspondent quoted an informed Israeli source on Tuesday.

The temporary truce stipulates a ceasefire between the two parties, the exchange of Palestinian prisoners and hostages held by Hamas, and allowing more humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

Israel has repeatedly confirmed that fighting will resume after the end of the truce with Hamas, even if it is extended for temporary periods.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that his current counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, is causing "serious damage to Israel's strategic position" and is leading a war that has no end in the Gaza Strip.

Barak warned against plunging Israel into years-long conflicts and crises with American administrations, amid risks that threaten Israel's relations with the Arab countries with which it has concluded normalization agreements.

In an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Tuesday, Barak considered that Israel is approaching a decisive crossroads in its war that it has been waging against Gaza since last October 7.

He said that Israeli forces have made significant gains in northern Gaza, but the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is far from collapsing in the southern Gaza Strip and also maintains some capabilities in the north.

Although he stressed that completing the task of dismantling Hamas's military and administrative capabilities is "critically important," he stressed that the matter will require months or more.

He criticized the lack of harmony between the political vision and military decisions, which increases the pressure on Israel as the war extends, and said that Netanyahu bears responsibility for this imbalance.

He considered that Netanyahu failed to lead the war because of his denial that victory could not be achieved without a clear plan for the next day (after the elimination of Hamas).

An unholy alliance

The former prime minister criticized Netanyahu's association with an "unholy alliance" with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, "who are obsessed with starting fires in the West Bank, and who are protecting him from falling at the present time."

But they are basically exploiting it to impose their ideology that Gaza should return to full Israeli control and responsibility.”

He said that these positions lead to the belief that Israel's security depends on full and permanent Israeli control over the Gaza Strip, "and, by the same logic, to believe that we need to control Lebanon, and after that Syria, and perhaps the entire region."

He considered that the success of this vision would involve Israel in the “Gaza quagmire” and lead to a conflict that would last for years and crises with the American administrations, amid tangible risks to Israel’s relations with Egypt and Jordan and to the Abraham Accords and normalization plans with Saudi Arabia.

Barak stressed that Netanyahu's government "is causing serious harm to Israel's strategic position and is leading a war that has no end," calling for an end to Netanyahu's presidency "before the consequences of his shortcomings become irreparable."

The former prime minister concluded that what is needed in the current circumstances is "an expanded national unity government without Netanyahu, and without Smotrich and Ben Gvir."

Source: Haaretz

Today, Tuesday, Israeli forces seized 1,500 dunums of land from the villages of Husan, Wadi Fukin, and Al-Jabaa, in the Bethlehem Governorate, for settlement purposes.

The director of the Office of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission in Bethlehem, Hassan Barijiyah, reported that the occupation forces had seized, according to a military decision bearing the number RJ5-465-3-8, 1,500 dunams of the lands of Husan, Wadi Fukin, and Al-Jab’a, in favor of constructing a settlement road.

Brijiyeh pointed out that this road will have disastrous effects in terms of stealing and destroying more citizens’ lands, creating setbacks to the settlement road, its negative effects on the Palestinian environment in general, and the clear impact on the western countryside of Bethlehem Governorate.

The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 marked the beginning of a series of unexpected events, and it is too early to determine how the attack may shape the future course of the struggle to liberate Palestine.

The massive destruction inflicted on the Gaza Strip and the horrific loss of civilian lives is a painful blow to the Palestinians, reminiscent of the Nakba of 1948. But at the same time the illusion that the Palestinian issue can be put aside while Israeli apartheid continues is shattered. The question of Palestine has returned to the top of the global agenda with a growing awareness of the necessity of addressing it, even if what happened on October 7 has polarized the discussion around it.

This is what Tariq Al Baconi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Palestinian Policy Network and an expert at the International Crisis Group, wrote in a lengthy analysis published by the American magazine Foreign Policy, in which he talked about the strategic shift made by the Hamas movement on October 7, and how it ended the Israeli plans to eliminate and overcome the Palestinian cause.

Hamas changes the balance in Gaza

Al-Baconi says that after 2007, Hamas's presence in the occupied territories was limited to the Gaza Strip, where the movement was effectively contained through the use of a tight siege that led to the mass imprisonment of Gaza's Palestinians, who number 2.3 million people. In this containment process, Hamas remained stuck in what I called “violent equilibrium,” where military force emerged as a means to negotiate concessions between Hamas and Israel.

Hamas uses missiles and other tactics to force Israel to ease restrictions on the blockade, while Israel responds with overwhelming force to build deterrence and ensure “calm” in the areas surrounding the Gaza Strip. Through this violence, both entities worked within a framework through which Hamas could maintain its role as a ruling authority in Gaza, even in light of the siege that legitimizes the daily structural violence perpetrated by the occupation authorities against the Palestinians.

Starting in 2018, Hamas began experimenting with different means to change this balance, one of which was through its decision to allow popular protests against Israeli hegemony. The Great March of Return in 2018 was one of the most comprehensive examples of Palestinian popular mobilization.

The protest emerged as a civil society-led effort, and was ultimately supported and managed by a committee comprising Gaza's various political factions, including Hamas. As a ruling authority, Hamas provided much of the infrastructure necessary for mobilization, such as buses to transport young men, and this was a stark departure from the methods Hamas had traditionally used to challenge the siege.

Another shift in the balance occurred a few years later, in 2021, when Hamas used its military arsenal to respond to Israeli aggression in Jerusalem. In the period before Hamas launched the rockets, Israel was actively working to evict families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers to take their homes. This led to widespread mobilization of Palestinians throughout the land of historic Palestine. The State of Israel responded by using force and mass arrests against the protests, which were peaceful, and included prayers around Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel's efforts to disrupt the protests and advance its colonization of East Jerusalem prompted Hamas to respond with rocket fire.

Hamas' demands go beyond lifting the siege to a force that defends the Palestinians

These examples demonstrate Hamas's efforts to continue the offensive and expand its resistance, to include demands that go beyond lifting the siege. Such a positioning implied a goal of acting as a military force to defend the Palestinians against Israeli colonial violence outside the Gaza Strip, and the basis of these tactics was a clear strategic shift on the part of the movement, to move from submission to containment to a more clear challenge to Israeli hegemony, thus upending the balance that had become Well established over 16 years.

This shift is consistent with Hamas's historical development as a movement that has relied on armed and unarmed resistance, in ebbs and flows, to challenge the Israeli occupation and press for the core demands of the Palestinian struggle, including the right of return, which was central to the 2018 protests. (Hamas's history is full of examples in which I read the political context surrounding it, and at the leadership level of the movement, I changed the strategic direction of the organization, with clear instructions to the military wing to either escalate or calm down.

Al-Baconi says the recent shift to all-out violence is also consistent with the movement's understanding of the role of armed resistance as a negotiating tactic, a tactic the movement has historically relied on to force Israel to make concessions.

The October 7 attack is the next logical step for Hamas

The October 7 attack can be seen as the next logical step for a movement seeking to contain this attack. Some analysts described Hamas' move as "suicidal," given Israel's reaction, or irresponsible, given the number of deaths among Palestinians it led to. Whether any of these descriptions are accurate or not, depends on an analysis of the options available to Hamas, and on how the dust settles. Yet there is no doubt that the attack itself marked a decisive break and, in retrospect, clearly the culmination of all the changes the movement was experimenting with.

The strategic shift necessitated a move from the limited use of missile launches to negotiate with Israel to a comprehensive military attack, specifically aimed at disrupting its containment and the Israeli assumption that it was capable of maintaining the apartheid regime with impunity.

There is no doubt that the October 7 attack exceeded Hamas' expectations, and that Israel initially succeeded in mobilizing Israeli and international public opinion in a way that Hamas may not have fully anticipated. Any major military operation carried out by Hamas with any degree of success - targeting military bases near the fence area between Gaza and Israel and securing a large number of Israeli fighters as prisoners - would similarly shatter the siege model, and provoke an equally devastating Israeli response.

Yet the scale of the deaths prompted a ferocious Israeli response in Gaza, made possible by the carte blanche given to the Israeli government by most Western leaders. Some genocide scholars have argued that the Israeli campaign amounts to ethnic cleansing and intent to commit genocide.

It is unrealistic to argue whether these responses would have occurred if civilians had not been killed or abducted. In both cases, the military attack launched by Hamas and the subsequent acts of mass violence irreversibly shaped the nature of the response against the Palestinians in Gaza, Al-Baconi says.

Hamas had no other options

From a purely strategic military perspective, the only option before the attack, other than using the force available to Hamas, was to remain restricted within the framework of the siege, while Israeli settlers expanded rampant violence in the West Bank and theft of land, and Israeli political leaders changed the status quo around Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Israel obtained Reward with US visa waiver programs and regional normalization agreements to do whatever it wants.

In this climate, the options available to Hamas were to acquiesce to the persistent assumption that the Palestinians had effectively been defeated, and to remain confined and suffocated within their various Bantustans, non-contiguous parcels of territory resembling the “homelands” of apartheid-era South Africa of the same name. Many disenfranchised blacks were relocated to urban areas and ruled by supposedly independent local client regimes, while a white supremacist government continued to exercise military control.

The choice, as Hamas saw it, was between slow death - as many in Gaza say - and fundamentally disrupting the entire equation. Certainly, tightening the noose on Hamas, and the Palestinians more broadly, is in a position where only a strong military attack of this form emerges as a preferred option for the movement. Even before containing Hamas, and specifically since the second intifada, there were many opportunities for diplomatic and political engagement with it.

Between 2005 and 2007, Hamas de facto aligned itself with a political program that, if properly exploited, might lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and the dismantling of the occupation. This is the position put forward by the movement as part of its election victory in 2006 and its subsequent entry into the Palestinian Authority. This position was later formalized in 2017 in the movement's revised charter, which called for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, without providing formal recognition of the State of Israel.

America and the West have missed all diplomatic opportunities to deal with Hamas

The Israeli and American refusal to engage in any of the political concessions the movement has made since then, while Israel has consistently been given a free pass to continue its violent occupation and ongoing colonization of Palestinian territories, has undermined any confidence Hamas may have had regarding the international community’s interest in Palestine, or holding Israel accountable or enabling the Palestinians to establish their state on part of historic Palestine.

Much has been written about missed opportunities in engaging with Hamas diplomatically. The events that followed the movement's democratic elections in 2006 were based on a refusal to deal with Hamas's political program, as Israel and the American government preferred to pursue regime change and deal with Hamas militarily, and chose to limit their involvement in the Palestinian file with Israel.

Since then, Israel has portrayed the movement as a terrorist organization, a paradox that has enabled the state to justify the collective punishment inherent in the blockade of the Gaza Strip. This was clearly the strategy chosen by successive governments under Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke publicly about the benefits to Israel of pursuing a “policy of separation” between the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a means of undermining the prospects for establishing a Palestinian state.

In the absence of any real diplomatic prospects for Hamas, its options were either slow strangulation as the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip, while Israel became cozy with Arab regimes that had all but abandoned the Palestinian cause, or a decisive blow that could fundamentally disrupt the assumption that the Palestinians were defeated and subjugated. And that Israel is able to maintain its apartheid system at no cost.

Hamas acted strategically

Al-Baconi says that Hamas choosing the latter option indicates that it is acting strategically, and remains committed to the belief that it is playing a long-term game. By this logic, even if the military wing of Hamas is completely destroyed or expelled, the movement has already achieved a victory in exposing the weakness and fragility of the Israeli army, which can be exploited in the future by a reconstituted Hamas, or by another military formation in the future on an equal footing and committed to armed resistance as a means of liberation. In other words, disruption itself becomes a field for the emergence of alternative possibilities.

This belief in the long game means that no matter what happens in the short and medium term, and even with the horrific loss of civilian lives in Gaza, Hamas has not only disrupted the structure of its containment, but the idea that Palestinians cannot fight, and are isolated in Bantustans and forgetting them without incurring any cost to the Israelis. This obstruction is of great importance to Israel, and with the support of its Western allies, it believes that the only way to survive this strike is to completely eliminate Hamas.

Israel fails to eliminate Hamas

Israel will fail - and is already failing - in achieving this goal, and regardless of how the battles against Hamas in Gaza unfold now, the movement can already claim to have emerged victorious in the long run, because it has been irretrievably destroyed the false sense of security that Israelis have had since 1948, despite all attempts to present Israel as an invincible and impenetrable state in the region.

But even in the direct battle underway in Gaza now, Israel's chances of victory are slim. As in any asymmetric conflict, guerrilla fighters do not have to lose to emerge victorious, while a strong state will lose if it does not achieve its overall goals.

The goal of eliminating Hamas as a movement is as vague as it is unachievable, for one thing: the movement is much larger than its military wing. It is a movement with a broad and deep-rooted social infrastructure, connected to many Palestinians who do not belong to the movement's political or military programs.

At its core, Hamas is an Islamist movement with roots in regional branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, connected to healthcare infrastructure, educational facilities and charities. If, by eliminating Hamas, Western and Israeli leaders call for the killing of any Palestinian who embraces any form of Islamic ideology, then this is nothing less than a call for the annihilation of the Palestinian people, and we must understand the matter this way.

However, if the goal is to destroy the movement's military infrastructure, this goal is likely to fail in one key way: the disintegration of Hamas' military wing will pave the way for the emergence of other forms of organized resistance, both within Hamas's ideological uniform and otherwise, that adhere to the same ideals using armed force against Israel.

Resistance is continuous feasibility

History has already taught us a lot. Hamas emerged in 1987 on the embers of the historic concession made by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the PLO shifted toward conceding the partition of Palestine by recognizing the State of Israel and rejecting the use of armed resistance in pursuit of establishing a Palestinian state. This transformation coincided with the establishment of Hamas as a party adhering to the same principles as the Palestine Liberation Organization before it, couched in an Islamic ideology rather than the secular nationalist ideology that dominated the 1960s and 1970s.

There is an ongoing series of Palestinian political demands dating back to 1948 and before. Whether Hamas is able to remain in its current form or not, it is just a red excuse. Palestinian resistance against Israeli apartheid, armed and unarmed, will continue as long as the system of racism and domination continues.

In essence, this is a system that provides more rights to Jews than Palestinians throughout the land of historic Palestine, divides Palestinians into different legal categories, and fragments them geographically in order to maintain an overall system of domination. At the same time, it prevents the internationally recognized right to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

The Israeli apartheid model is committed to Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea – a recently criticized phrase that the Israeli right has long used without apology – while the Palestinians remain a dominant people living within the borders of that state, governed in the occupied territories, through illegitimate authorities that are inherently cooperative with the State of Israel.

The October 7th attack was inevitable

To reverse this dynamic, and to back away from Israel's belief that by containing it, Hamas could be pacified as happened with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the movement took a calculated risk with its operation, given that it realistically expected that its military infrastructure would be damaged.

But in the absence of any willingness on the part of the international community to engage with the Palestinians outside such armed tactics, and given Israel's continuing and increasingly violent colonization, this shift toward an expanded military operation by Hamas was ultimately inevitable.

There is another reason that supports Hamas's calculations, which is its ambivalence towards governance, and Hamas was constrained by its role as the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip. When the party ran for elections in 2006, there was a significant degree of organizational conflict over assuming a governing role or even participating in the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas leaders made clear that rather than accepting restrictions on governance under occupation, as Fatah had done through the Oslo Accords, the movement was intent on using its electoral victory to revolutionize the Palestinian political establishment. It emphasized its ability to do so by pointing out that Israel, through its response to the Second Intifada, had destroyed the Palestinian political body, and rendered the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords obsolete.

Hamas spoke of the need to build a resistance society, a resistance economy, and a resistance ideology, through the body of the Palestinian Authority itself, and to use this body as a springboard to the Palestine Liberation Organization, where it could lead, alongside others, to develop a vision for the liberation of Palestine, and to represent all Palestinians outside the occupied territories. 

Al-Baconi says that Hamas victory in the elections, as I claim in my book “Containing Hamas,” was intended to be revolutionary in the direction of the status quo, not to accept it. With no real prospects for establishing a state, Hamas realized that focusing on governance and administration meant beautifying the Bantustan within the Israeli apartheid regime, that there would be no real possibility of liberation or sovereignty, and that the only way forward was to improve the quality of life while remaining subject to occupation. This is indeed the model of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it could have been a more extreme version of that in the Gaza Strip.

A revolution within Hamas

With the successful Western-backed coup against Hamas, which began shortly after Hamas won the elections and culminated in a war between Hamas and Fatah in 2007, it seemed for a time as if the movement's rule in Gaza had succeeded in pacifying it to the point that it was seizing power. The long period of containment suggests that the movement may have become captive to its electoral success, restricted by its responsibilities in governance, or in other words, quiet. The violent attack of October 7 clearly demonstrated that the movement was using precisely this time to revolutionize the political body, as it had always intended to do.

All this does not mean that Hamas's strategic transformation will be considered successful in the long term. The violent disruption of the status quo by Hamas may have provided Israel with the opportunity to carry out another Nakba, which could lead to a regional conflagration or a blow to the Palestinians that would take a generation to recover from.

What is certain, however, is that there is no going back to the way it was before, and yet this is precisely what Israeli, American and other Western leaders and diplomats are preparing for. The discussion had already shifted to the next day, even as a ceasefire had not been formalized.

All indications point to a US-Israeli decision to try to replicate in the Gaza Strip the successful model - from their point of view - of cooperative Palestinian governance that exists in the West Bank. Instead of engaging in a process whereby Palestinians have the opportunity to choose leaders who represent them and can govern them, Israel and the United States are rebooting an old approach of choosing obedient leaders who can do their bidding and subjugate Palestinians under Israeli control.

This is being done under the slogan of unifying the Palestinian territories, as both parties erase their complicity in facilitating this division until now. The goal of both is not reunification, but rather the pursuit of submissive rule: creating a governance structure in which a leadership governed by compliance with civilian needs, within an overall structure of Israeli military dominance.

Such a goal must deal with the historical reality that Gaza is experiencing as a stronghold of resistance to Israeli apartheid, given that the majority of Gaza’s population are refugees seeking to return to their homes, in what is now known as “Israel.” Facilitating the installation of the authority chosen by Israel and the United States requires nothing less than the destruction of Gaza and the killing of its residents, a policy that is now unfolding.

Hamas has dealt a fatal blow to the Israeli imagination

Apart from the ethical and legal implications there are practical implications. It is difficult to imagine any Palestinian leader or governance structure taking charge of the Gaza Strip after it is destroyed by Israel, as they would be seen as having been sent there on the backs of Israeli tanks. Such leaders will enjoy less legitimacy than the Palestinian Authority enjoys in the West Bank today, which is difficult to imagine.

Such an approach may buy some time, and may lead to something resembling the status quo and a degree of stability, but if any lesson is to be drawn from October 7, it is that this will not be permanent or sustainable, and no ruling entity will be able to ensure security for any Israeli, as long as apartheid exists, any Palestinian government installed in Gaza will rightly be viewed as illegitimate and traitor.

Whatever the “day after” plans are, they will fail, unless they come with Israel held accountable and the apartheid regime dismantled, and it will be clear to all Palestinians that this is just another Bantustan solution, cloaked in humanitarian cover or a renewed commitment to a two-state solution.

In this sense, Hamas has dealt a fatal blow to Israel's fantasy of being able to continue its occupation and siege indefinitely. However, it is not clear whether Israeli political leaders, along with retaliatory violence, have been able to heed this lesson, but grassroots organizers and Hamas' allies and other political and military formations did so.

Whatever comes next and whatever the “Hamas legacy” is written, it is clear that the movement is the one that exploded the illusion that Israel and its allies had held onto for a very long time.

Source: Arabic Post

The war between Israel and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza gave Russia a golden opportunity to sow the seeds of division among its Western enemies. This is an opportunity that the Kremlin's media machine would never have missed, as the American magazine Politico says.

Since the outbreak of war on October 7, Facebook accounts linked to the Kremlin have boosted their output by almost 400%, and the Middle East crisis now dominates the posts of Russian diplomats, state-backed outlets and Putin’s supporters in the West.

Russia benefits from the war in Gaza by weakening the West

According to Politico, rumors spread by digital propagandists in Moscow now include claims that Hamas is using NATO weapons to attack Israel and that British trainers have trained Hamas attackers. The deep-rooted conflict represents a double opportunity for Putin.

It allows Russia to foment division in the West through activity on social networks aimed at separating those who support Israel from those who support Palestine. Real-world violence has escalated over the past seven weeks, and anti-war protests have spread, with millions of people marching from London to Washington.

In addition, the Russian attack on social networks in the Middle East draws public attention away from its war in Ukraine. “It is good for Russia to divert attention away from Ukraine, because the more Western public opinion focuses on Israel and Hamas, the less it cares about the fact that "Congress is about to stop funding the war effort in Ukraine. Shining the spotlight elsewhere will allow attention to be diverted from Ukraine."

Russian geopolitical game

The American magazine says that the attack launched by the Kremlin online reflects the geopolitical game that Putin has been playing since the attacks of October 7.

His government hosted Hamas leaders in Moscow at the end of October, apparently as part of his effort to play a mediating role on the release of Israeli hostages. Russia and Hamas have a common ally in Iran, and Putin himself has warned that Israeli military action in Gaza may escalate outside the region.

The Kremlin was quick to turn the war between Israel and Hamas into a weapon to serve its propaganda purposes.

In the seven weeks since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood broke out on October 7, Russian Facebook accounts posted 44,000 times compared to just 14,000 posts in the seven weeks before the conflict began, according to data collected by the Coalition for Guaranteeing Democracy.

In all, Russian-backed social networking activity on Facebook was shared nearly 400,000 times in total, a four-fold increase compared to posts published before the conflict.

The most shared keywords now include many conflict-related terms such as “Hamas” and “Middle East,” whereas before the war Russian state media and diplomatic accounts focused almost exclusively on Ukraine or Putin’s role in the world.

The nearly 400% increase in posts from accounts linked to the Russian government represents a drop in the ocean when compared to the millions of Facebook posts about the conflict in the Middle East from regular social media users during the same time period.

But many Kremlin-backed accounts — especially those from sanctioned media outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik — have outsized digital reach. Together, these companies boast millions of followers in Europe, Latin America and Africa, although the European Union has imposed sanctions on their broadcasting and social networking operations.

Has Russia succeeded in “riding the wave”?

“They are using everything they can to spread anti-Western messages, riding the news wave because they are competing for the same goal,” says Jacob Kalinski, deputy director of the European Center of Excellence for Combating Hybrid Threats, a joint NATO-EU organization that tracks state-backed influence campaigns audiences that consume powerful media sources.”

Such digital propaganda may have real-world effects. Some in the West are openly asking: How long can governments support Ukraine in its costly war against Russia at a time of economic uncertainty?

In France, for example, the Foreign Ministry accused a Russian-affiliated network of social bots of amplifying anti-Semitic images on buildings around Paris. French officials blamed Russia for "creating tensions" between supporters of Israel and those who support Palestine. But the Russian embassy in Paris denied any relationship between Moscow and secret digital activity.

The goal of the covert campaign was to raise tensions in the real world — both in France and across Western Europe — over which side governments supported, according to two senior European officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. “What happens online doesn't stay online anymore,” one official said.

Source: Arabic Post

The Israeli newspaper “Maariv” said, Tuesday, November 28, 2023, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected all the proposals presented to him during the past few years to assassinate the head of the Hamas resistance movement, Yahya Sinwar, and the newspaper spoke about what it considered a big intelligence failure. 

The newspaper reported that the last three heads of the Internal Security Service (Shin Bet) presented to Netanyahu 6 different operations to assassinate Sinwar, noting that the proposals were not preliminary decisions, but rather “they were real operational plans that could be implemented immediately.”

The newspaper notes that Sinwar did not live underground most of the time, but rather was moving with an open agenda, and did not move between secret apartments and hideouts as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has done since 2006.

The plans were detailed, and included different “forms” with different degrees of intensity, and one of the plans included “eliminating all major leaders in Hamas, not just Sinwar,” according to Maariv.

Former Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen previously said, during an interview with the Meet the Press program, that his agency proposed carrying out an “offensive” operation against all Hamas leaders in Gaza, and he also stated that his successors in the position proposed the same thing at the political level.

The Shin Bet viewed Hamas as an organization whose leadership should be overthrown, based on the great danger posed by its agenda, but Netanyahu rejected all of these operational opportunities.

Reports also revealed that Hamas increased the size of its elite forces by 100% over the past year, that is, it doubled the number of commando forces allocated to the invasion of Israel, which happened within one year. Israel was aware of this step, and of the significant increase in elite numbers, but this did not result in taking the necessary steps.

The Israeli newspaper says, “The more time passes, the more the extent of the intelligence and operational failure that preceded Israel’s collapse on October 7, 2023 (the day the Al-Aqsa Flood operation began) becomes clearer.”

The newspaper added that examples of this “are evident in Sinwar’s speech, which himself spoke about a plan to attack Israel like the flood of Al-Aqsa, as well as the large Hamas exercises in May 2023, which witnessed training on the plan implemented on the ground in October, publicly in front of Israel's eyes.

The newspaper adds: "Not to mention the disturbing reports from observers, including the 8200th officer who tracked what was happening and sent a series of emails in September, carrying major warnings to her superiors."

Source: Arabic Post

A source close to the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip confirmed, on Tuesday, the exchange of lists containing the names of ten hostages held by the Palestinian movement in exchange for 30 Palestinian detainees on the fifth day of the truce with Israel.

The truce between Israel and Hamas was extended on Tuesday to allow the release of more Israeli hostages and Palestinian detainees and the delivery of aid to the Gaza Strip, where the humanitarian situation remains “catastrophic.”

Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majid Al-Ansari said in a press conference today that Doha is focusing on extending the ceasefire beyond tomorrow, based on the movement’s ability to continue releasing 10 hostages per day.

He added that Qatar cannot verify the number of hostages remaining after the twenty that Hamas will release today and tomorrow, which are two days added to the truce that was initially scheduled to last 4 days.

Hamas said it was seeking to reach a new truce agreement with Israel under which the movement would release hostages other than the women and children it has already released so far, according to Reuters.

Statements in this regard issued late yesterday by Khalil al-Hayya, leader of the Hamas movement, coincided with Israel expanding the list of female Palestinian detainees that it could release in exchange for the release of hostages, which represents another indication that amending the terms of the truce is being considered.

Al-Hayya said: “We hope that the occupation will comply within the next two days because we are explicitly seeking to enter into a new deal other than women and children, so that we can exchange other categories that we have.”

He added that there is an effort “to go towards an additional period to complete the exchange process with the people we have available to whom we can exchange at this stage.”

Yesterday, the truce, which was initially agreed to last 4 days, was extended for two additional days.

Under the agreement reached with Qatari and Egyptian mediation last week, Hamas released 50 Israeli women and children who were detained in Gaza, in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons, with the option of doubling these numbers if the truce is extended for 5 days.

Israel published in advance the names of 300 detained Palestinian women and male minors for possible release.

Officials said that late yesterday, the Israeli government added the names of 50 female detainees to that list.

Israeli government spokesmen have not yet responded when asked about an explanation for the new number, which is not divisible by 3, which may mean that work is underway to prepare a new exchange formula.

Hamas captured about 240 people during its attack on southern Israel on October 7. Among the hostages still being held in the Gaza Strip are fathers, husbands, women and children, whom the movement released in recent days.

Source: Alsharq Alawsat

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres renewed his call for a permanent truce in the Gaza Strip and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.

In a statement issued today, Tuesday, ahead of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Guterres said that the Palestinians are suffering from “one of the darkest chapters in their history,” reiterating his condemnation of “Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7.”

However, he stressed that this “cannot justify collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” calling for “a long-term humanitarian ceasefire, unrestricted access to life-saving aid, the release of all hostages, the protection of civilians, and an end to violations of international humanitarian law.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this evening that the leader of the Hamas movement in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, met with some Israeli prisoners in the Gaza Strip in person.

The newspaper added that Sinwar spoke to the Israeli prisoners inside the tunnels in Hebrew and told them, "You are in a safe place."

The Hebrew Channel 12 commented on the incident as “the most wonderful story in the war so far... Sinwar again.”

Channel correspondent Amit Sehgal said, “We have heard many unbelievable stories, but this is the most amazing of all. When I heard it, my jaw dropped.”

According to the channel: “One of the liberated Israeli female prisoners, who returned to her family in the last days from the Gaza Strip, narrated an incident that occurred in the first days of captivity, that is, the first days of the war, where she and the other Israeli prisoners were detained in a tunnel when they felt that something was happening and then the door was opened.”

The channel quoted the Israeli prisoner released in an exchange deal: “A bearded man stands at the door and speaks to them in excellent Hebrew without an accent. His name is: Yahya Al-Sinwar.”

She added: “The man who personally ordered the events of October 7 wants to know the condition of the Israeli prisoners, so he looks at them in the tunnel and says to them in Hebrew: “Welcome, I am Yahya Sinwar, and you are here safe and nothing will happen to you.”

She pointed out that the security officials supervising the investigation into the case of those released had verified the veracity of the story.

The Israeli army announced that its artillery fired more than 100,000 shells during the days of the war, more than 90,000 of which were in the Gaza Strip.

This is what an Israeli army spokesman said: “During the fighting, the artillery missile unit fired more than 200 guided missiles at dozens of targets.

A spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, Margaret Harris, said on Tuesday that a greater number of Gazans are at risk of dying from diseases than from bombing, if the health system in the Strip is not supported to return to normal quickly.

“Ultimately, we will see more people dying from disease than from bombing if we cannot rebuild this health system,” spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.

She described the collapse witnessed by Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza as a "tragedy" and expressed her concern about the detention of some of its medical staff by Israeli forces.

The spokeswoman said that the international organization is "very concerned" about the hospital employees detained in Gaza, and their neutrality as medical personnel must be respected.

On November 14, the Israeli army stormed Al-Shifa Hospital - the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip - after besieging it for several days and bombing its facilities, including electricity generators and operating rooms.

The occupation army then kidnapped the hospital director, Muhammad Abu Salamiya, and 5 medical personnel while transporting wounded people from the health facility. The World Health Organization was accused of involvement in their kidnapping, but it denied having any information about their fate.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza then announced the suspension of coordination with the World Health Organization in evacuating patients and medical personnel from hospitals in the Strip after the Israeli army detained its health employees, including the director of Al-Shifa Hospital.

The fate of Al-Shifa Hospital was similar to the fate of most hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip, which were completely or partially out of service as a result of the Israeli siege and bombing on them.

Before entering into a temporary humanitarian truce last Friday, the Israeli army launched a devastating war on Gaza since October 7, leaving more than 15,000 martyrs, including more than 10,000 children and women, while about 7,000 people are still missing. The number of infected people exceeded 36 thousand.

Health organizations have warned of the spread of infectious diseases and epidemics in Gaza as a result of the decomposition of the bodies remaining under the rubble, as well as the complete cutting off of water to the Strip since the start of the Israeli aggression.

This Tuesday afternoon, a child from the village of Tayasir, east of Tubas, died as a result of his injuries sustained by Israeli soldiers this morning.

Medical sources at the Turkish Tubas Governmental Hospital said that the child Amr Ahmed Jamil Wahdan (14 years old) was dead as a result of being shot in the chest by live bullets in the village of Tayasir, east of Tubas.

Wahdan was injured by live bullets in the village, in addition to three other young men during the occupation forces’ storming of the city of Tubas earlier today.

Health Minister Mai Al-Kaila said that 470 wounded people from the Gaza Strip have been received so far in Egyptian hospitals.

During her inspection of the wounded in Egyptian hospitals, Minister Alkaila expressed her hope that coordination would be made for the discharge of more wounded in the coming days.

She pointed out that 35,000 wounded people from the Gaza Strip are in need of treatment, praising the Egyptian efforts, especially the Ministry of Health, which is constantly contacted, and which has harnessed its capabilities to receive them.

She touched on the devastated health system in the Gaza Strip due to the aggression, saying: There are 26 hospitals out of 35 that were out of service as a result of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.

The Minister of Health explained that the death toll has so far reached 16,000 dead, 35,000 wounded, and 6,000 missing, stressing that the Gaza Strip needs a lot of humanitarian relief and medical aid.

She stressed the need to bring aid into the Gaza Strip, which suffers from a severe scarcity of nutrition and rations, and a lack of medicines and medical supplies.

The Washington Post published an article in which its author praised US President Joe Biden’s announcement of his desire to revive a Palestinian government that brings together the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under a “unified administrative structure.”

The author of the article - Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab - described the announcement as a "noble goal" that deserves to be rewarded by the American president. However, he did not hide his skepticism, seeking excuse for the Palestinians to wonder whether Biden was really serious when he made that statement.

If he is really serious, there is one step he can take now to achieve that desire, which is to recognize Palestine as a member state of the United Nations.

The writer - who previously worked as a professor of journalism at Princeton University in the United States - recalled that in 2012, the United Nations General Assembly granted the status of a non-member observer state to Palestine. 139 countries have recognized Palestine as a state within the borders of June 4, 1967.

He added that the United States and most European countries repeatedly called for adopting a two-state solution, but they refused to recognize the Palestinian state, and the Biden administration even refused to recognize the status of Palestine as a state under occupation.

Recognizing Palestine as a full-fledged state will have - in the opinion of the author of the article - many positive effects, and will show that Biden is truly serious about his declared goal of a two-state solution.

This would undermine the positions of the "extremists" on both sides, as the Palestinians among them refuse to recognize Israel, while the Israeli extremists from the far right "want to annex all Palestinian lands west of the Jordan River."

The book believes that the Palestinians are in dire need of a revived political structure, as President Biden says, a structure that is supposed to be based on the will of the Palestinian people, which is manifested in free elections. However, holding such elections - according to the Washington Post article - is almost impossible unless voters are sure that it will bring them closer to liberation from the occupation and endless violence.

In parallel with the United States’ recognition of the Palestinian state, Biden and the current Palestinian leaders must acknowledge the mistakes they made regarding holding elections that would lead to the selection of a new Palestinian leadership “to negotiate with Israel,” in the words of the Palestinian journalist, who criticized President Mahmoud Abbas for his hesitation “for fear of "Competition" comes from a new generation of "younger and more popular" figures, such as the detained leader Marwan Barghouti.

Biden's recognition of Palestine - if achieved - would give the Palestinians hope for liberation, and strengthen the ceasefire by drawing a clear political road map, according to the article.

Then, such recognition - as the author of the article believes - would help Biden domestically restore his credibility among American youth, progressives, and Arab and Muslim Americans in the Democratic Party, who are deeply disappointed by his policy towards Israel.

The writer concludes with the necessity of abandoning the tried-and-true “fragmented” solutions in any serious attempt to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, considering that this is the only path to finding an effective way out of the current crisis, and it is “an opportunity that should not be missed.”

Israelis who were recently liberated from captivity by the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip said that Israeli bombing was sometimes close to them, which sometimes prompted Hamas guards to evacuate their positions and leave the Israelis in a room alone, according to the Arab World News Agency ».

The Israeli Broadcasting Corporation quoted testimonies of Israelis detained in Gaza who said that food and drink were scarce, even for the guards themselves.

The authority added: “The testimony of one of the abductees who was released sheds light on the harsh conditions in which they were being held by Hamas, the little food they were receiving and whose supplies had deteriorated in recent days.”

The authority quotes one of the detainees as talking about “bad health conditions, a long stay underground, and constant terror.”

Family members of one of the detainees said that Hamas members were dividing the bread into small pieces in order to distribute it to the detainees to ensure that it was enough for everyone.

In the past four days, Hamas released dozens of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, as part of a truce between Israel and the Hamas movement, which was extended today (Tuesday) for an additional two days, to allow the release of more Israeli hostages and Palestinian detainees and the delivery of aid to the Gaza Strip, where the humanitarian situation still “catastrophic.”

Under the agreement reached with Qatari and Egyptian mediation last week, Hamas released 50 Israeli women and children who were detained in Gaza, in exchange for the release of 150 Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons, with the option of doubling these numbers if the truce is extended for five days.