Free Republic

TEL AVIV, Israel—Israeli women and children have in recent weeks begun speaking publicly about what they experienced during nearly two months in Hamas captivity late last year. In primetime Hebrew TV interviews, the released hostages have confirmed that ordinary Gazans were deeply complicit in every stage of the hostage scheme. Unarmed teens helped to abduct Jews from their homes on Oct. 7, while Gazan women and children held some of the Israelis captive. In other cases, Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals. When the Israelis encountered Gazans on the streets,...

Israel is considering launching a major military operation against Hezbollah after months of harassment and threats from the terror group, alarming some U.S. officials. Hezbollah has threatened Israel on its northern border from Lebanon for months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel from the Gaza Strip on October 7, murdering roughly 1,200 people and taking hostage hundreds more. Warnings from Israel that it intends to put a stop to Hezbollah’s threats have alarmed the Biden administration, which fears a growing Middle East conflict, according to The Washington Post. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has warned in recent days that Israel’s patience...

We are told – weekly, daily, even hourly – we must have a ceasefire in Israel. The press, the academics, the politicians of the world, the United Nations, all scream at Israel to stop shooting, stop fighting, give the Hamas terrorists a chance to recover, to regroup, to rebuild their terror network. They don’t say it in those words, of course, but that would be the result. Israel has finally had to place Gaza under siege, maybe years and years too late. Israel is finally committed to wipe out one of their worst, most vicious, most malevolent enemies, the bloodthirsty...

WARNING: This story contains graphic details Decades before Yahya Sinwar became the political leader of Hamas in Gaza, Israeli journalist and author Ehud Yaari sat down with him over hummus in an Israeli prison in the Negev desert. He describes Sinwar, who conversed in fluent Hebrew, as a curious but cunning Islamist, bent upon the destruction of the state of Israel. "He is not somebody who's thinking about negotiations, a two-state solution — that's not Sinwar," said Yaari, who interviewed Sinwar in prison four times between 1993 and 2001. "He was very clear that the state of Israel should be...

As we watch the news from half a world away, we suffer the usual dearth of information where sensitive negotiations are concerned: We want to know which of the hostages is finally being set free, almost 7 months past October 7, and we want to know what kind of criminals Israel has to release in order to win their freedom. Euphemisms play a role in this coverage, as we need to read between the lines, and remember the cultural differences between the rose-colored-glasses view of the world that we Americans often adopt in foreign policy, and the reality of a...

Roni Krivoi, 25, managed to escape from terrorists who held him hostage in the Gaza Strip, but ordinary Gazans returned him to his captors, his aunt said on Monday. The revelation, which followed Hamas's release of Krivoi on Sunday along with 13 other Israeli hostages, was the latest evidence that ordinary Palestinians have enabled Hamas's terrorism against Israel during and since the Oct. 7 attack. Krivoi was working as a sound technician at the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 when Gazan terrorists stormed the event as part of a rampage through southern Israel in which they...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with commanders and troops in the Gaza Strip amid the truce with Hamas, the first time he has been in the enclave since the war began. In a video statement, Netanyahu set out three goals for the war and said "we will continue until the end, until victory."

Most of us have never served in the military, let alone been personally involved in a war. While this has almost always been true in America, it’s truer now than ever, as our military has shrunken to a fraction of its traditional size, and as the end of the draft has resulted in generations of families with few or any servicemen at all. So there are truths that the general population used to know, almost instinctively, that are now unknown and untaught. Even if one didn’t serve in the military oneself – as I regrettably admit I did not –...

Hamas is feared to be using fuel intended to help the humanitarian effort in Gaza to power its underground tunnel network. The Israel Defence Forces have published aerial imagery supposedly showing Hamas storage tanks containing 'more than 500,000 litres of fuel'. Military experts are concerned that the terror group has begun exploiting the crisis response to Israeli airstrikes by seizing critical fuel supplies. The labyrinthine system of tunnels snaking below the Gaza Strip, thought to stretch for hundreds of miles, is thought to be Hamas's key defence against an Israeli ground invasion. The tactic relies on constant fuel supplies. Yesterday...

Getting around downtown Chicago is a challenge at the best of times. Weekdays feature a constant flow of carefully and swiftly moving traffic; weekends all the more so. But it is a city of 2.5 million people, in a tri-state metro area of 9 million. Back in the days when Chicago was known as “The City that Works” – a generation ago, at least – the city fathers took great care to minimize any event that threatened to jeopardize that title. We had parades occasionally; we had demonstrations all the time. The Constitution guarantees American citizens’ right to such things....

On October 7, 2023, the Hamas terrorists did everything they could think of. And they had been planning it for years. Using everything from rifles to rockets, they murdered over a thousand that day, and injured thousands more. In addition, hundreds were kidnapped, taken back into the Gaza Strip as hostages. Since a few of these kidnap victims have been released, we are now learning more of Hamas’ intentions. We will never objectively, completely understand Hamas, because they are terrorists; their minds don’t work like the minds of decent people. But we must piece together what we know, in order...

A resident of Netiv Ha'Asara returns to visit the settlements of Otaf Harev, relives the moments of trauma, and finds it difficult to understand how we got to the current situation Yoni Kempinski, published: 4 Cheshvan 5784, 10.19.23, 7:23 "I didn't imagine the magnitude of the disaster. I couldn't believe the cruelty and magnitude of the disaster," she says and states that now "the entire perception of the IDF must be changed, enough to be humane. We were too humane towards them, we gave them a lot of money, a lot of money that was not controlled, nobody knew what...

Evidence suggests some of the weapons used by Hamas in a bloody attack on southern Israel earlier this month likely came from North Korea. While Pyongyang has repeatedly denied supplying the terrorist group with weapons, expert analysis along with a trove of evidence that includes video as well as munitions seized by Israel, suggests otherwise. At the heart of the controversy is the F-7 rocket-propelled grenade, a shoulder-fired weapon fighters typically use against armored vehicles. An image published by Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack features members of the terrorist organization wielding a rocket-propelled grenade with a distinctive red stripe...

There is a widespread belief that if Israel would only give back the territories it seized during the Six Day War in 1967, then peace would come to the Middle East. This is demonstrably false, especially in light of a popular chant heard around the world in recent days.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar warned Israel that "if the Strip is dragged into war, Israel will suffer. It won't evacuate just the towns bordering Gaza, but also Ashdod, Ashkelon, and even Tel Aviv." "Our fingers are still on the trigger, and they'll stay there in order to protect the Palestinian nation. Hamas will be a sword and shield for the Palestinian people." On Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority's Al-Quds newspaper reported that the various local factions - headed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad - ordered their members to cease using explosives along Gaza's border with Israel. The report also claimed that...

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably...

Senior members of Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah claimed that Hamas' surprise attack on Israel that killed at least 600 people was given the green light by Iranian security officials. Hamas plotted the air, land and sea invasions with help from officers of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps The official go-ahead for the attack was allegedly given at a Monday meeting in Beirut. Four other Iranian backed military groups were believed to be at the meeting, including members of Hamas and Hezbollah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken claims he has 'not yet seen evidence' that Iran was involved in the attack....

On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Live,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan said the Hamas attack on Israel that happened on the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the annual High Holy Day cycle, “is our 9/11” and “we said, since the Holocaust, where Jews were butchered and massacred, never again. And never again is today,” Erdan also argued that when Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas turned the Gaza Strip into “a war machine. We cannot allow this situation of Gaza as a war machine to continue. And we are committed,...

Israel’s opposition leader and contender for next prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and urged him to reconsider, in his most direct criticism yet of the war. Netanyahu said in an interview with USA Today that he thought Putin’s decision to go to war in Ukraine was “guided by his vision of reconstituting a great Russian realm,” adding, “I hope he’s having second thoughts about it.” “We all have sympathy to Ukraine, it’s not even a question, and I’m no different,” he said. Israel has sought not to antagonize Russia in the conflict,...

HERZLIYA, Israel, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Israel's defence minister accused Iran on Sunday of providing foreign militias with drone training at an airbase near the city of Isfahan, a month after Tehran came under global scrutiny over a suspected drone attack on an Israeli-managed tanker off Oman. In what his office described as a new disclosure, Defence Minister Benny Gantz said Iran was using Kashan airbase north of Isfahan to train "terror operatives from Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in flying Iranian-made UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)." Iran was also trying to "transfer know-how that would allow the manufacturing of UAVs...