Free Republic

Whether the threat was abusive Hamas guards, hunger, illness or Israeli strikes, there were moments during Tal Shoham‘s 505 days of captivity at the hands of terrorists in Gaza when he didn’t think he’d be alive the next morning. There were “many times that I separated from life and… tried to accept death,” the 40-year-old Israeli, who also holds Austrian citizenship, told The Associated Press. “There are so many ways to die there.” Shoham was one of dozens of hostages released from Gaza in February as part of a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel that has since been broken....

One of the accused ran a restaurant in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Another one was a taxi driver. Inconspicuous, friendly – seemingly integrated. The discovery of a USB stick made the investigators sit up and take notice. What they found on it was highly explosive: coordinates, photos, clues to possible targets in Germany. Several locations were spied on: the Israeli embassy in Berlin, the US military airport in Ramstein and Tempelhofer Feld, one of Berlin’s most popular parks.

A State Department list of 898 approved government grants and contracts authorized by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) includes over $2.5 billion of authorized funding to organizations that have previously supported the charitable infrastructure of designated terrorist organizations. In March, the State Department provided a document to Congress listing some 5,341 awards terminated as part of the administration’s decimation of USAID, alongside 898 surviving grants. Surviving beneficiaries that have supported terrorist charitable infrastructure are set to receive, the Middle East Forum has found, a total of $2.5 billion across 103 awards [see Appendix], for projects that the USAID...

Fatima Hassouna, a war documentarian who had covered the conflict in Gaza on the ground for 18 months and the subject of a new documentary to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival next month, was killed along with seven members of her family in an Israeli strike this week. “If I die, I want a resounding death, I do not want me in urgent news, nor in a number with a group,” Hassouna wrote in a post on Instagram in August 2024. “I want a death that the world hears, an effect that remains for the extent of the...

Mohamed Adan Mohamed was arrested last week; a BCA agent said "there were strong indicators that Mohamed was preparing to conduct some sort of attack (Mass Casualty Event) in the next twenty-four hours." The Blue Earth County Attorney’s Office has filed felony charges against Mohamed Adan Mohamed after he allegedly stole $2,150 worth of firearm magazines and made a threatening, anti-American post on social media. According to the criminal complaint, Mohamed entered a Mankato store last week wearing a COVID mask, gloves, a green stalking cap, and a heavy winter coat. The 24-year-old reportedly began selecting high-priced items such as...

Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) says the Trump administration should drop nuclear negotiations with Iran and finish off the country's nuclear facilities with a military strike. "Waste that s—t," the Pennsylvania Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview on Wednesday. "You're never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities." Fetterman dismissed the foreign policy experts who warn that striking Iran would lead to the outbreak of...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke via phone on Tuesday with US President Donald Trump, the American leader said, declaring that the pair “are on the same side of every issue.” The call covered “numerous subjects including Trade, Iran, etc.,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, adding that the conversation went “very well.” Notably, Trump did not include Gaza or the 59 hostages being held there in his list of topics discussed amid the ongoing impasse in ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. However, according to a report in Axios, the pair did talk about efforts to reach...

Thomas L. Friedman, famous New York Times editorialist, does not much like Trump’s plan for Gaza. A skilled wordsmith, he dismisses it, writing, “How short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking.” However, the former is correct. This plan is creative, unique, and incisive, and kills several “boids” (as we say in Brooklyn) with one rock. For one thing, it will safeguard Israel. Under an American Riviera on the Mediterranean, there will be no more rockets launched in an eastward direction; no more leaping out of tunnels (a new tourist attraction!) to unleash suicide bombers. For another,...

Watch Yosef Haddad, an Israeli Christian Arab educate an entire Muslim Crowd at Oxford Union. Very fiery delivery over intense heckling, of a defense of Israel by a combat veteran of IDF. Transcript linked to video. Too long to detail in a summary, but well worth the listening.

When war once again came to Gaza in late 2023, Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona began documenting all aspects of life: death, displacement, destruction, children celebrating during Eid, relief as people were allowed to return to northern Gaza during a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas this year. Despite the challenges she faced, the 25-year-old was planning for the future: She was engaged to be married this summer and received news last Tuesday that a documentary about her life in Gaza during the war had been accepted to Acid Cannes, which runs alongside the Cannes Film Festival in France. A day later,...

The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the field's premier scholarly journal, has dedicated past issues to topics like the "various nuances through which water and design mix" and the "relationship between stories and architecture." Last year, the journal landed on a different topic for its fall 2025 issue: The "ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza." The journal's "call for papers"—a prompt for essay submissions—was littered with anti-Semitic rhetoric. It lauded "siege and prison breaks" as methods of "anti-colonial life- and land-protection" and justified Hamas's Oct. 7 attack as "the rupture of settler containment." The fall issue, the journal...

Ten years ago, when President Barack Obama and other leaders reached a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, Saudi Arabia was dismayed.Saudi officials called it a "weak deal" that had only emboldened the kingdom's regional rival, Iran. They cheered when President Trump withdrew from the agreement a few years later.Now, as a second Trump administration negotiates with Iran on a deal that might have very similar contours to the previous one, the view from Saudi Arabia looks quite different.The kingdom's Foreign Ministry issued a statement recently saying that it hoped the talks, mediated by neighboring Oman, would enhance...

Betar Worldwide @Betar_USA ‼️‼️‼️Hamas USA operative wearing mock suicide vest playing with wires in central Manhattan. Is this a test? Jews in great danger in NYC today!‼️‼️‼️

I think we don’t really realize what’s happening. When British PM Keir Starmer visited the White House, he rejected J.D. Vance’s claim that free speech is restricted in Britain. “We’ve had free speech for a very long time in the UK,” Starmer retorted, “and it will last for a very long time”. Unfortunately, Starmer’s Home Office seems not to have taken notice. Because it has just blocked a famous French writer from entering the UK to give a speech on the dangers of mass immigration, while in the courts British lawyers are trying to legalise Hamas. The writer is Renaud...

* * * This is beyond disgusting. A man who allies himself with and speaks for genocidal Jew haters, who has a clean, if not particularly comfortable venue, sufficient food, no forced labor, access to lawyers and libraries, a national publication anxious to publish his word, and multiple court hearings, and who, at worst, will be removed to a country sharing his values, claims that he is a victim of the new Nazis—America. Khalil, his ghost writers, and the Washington Post are so morally repugnant that anything I write is inadequate to make that point. The Democrat party is sick....

Pic too big. Click to see. GAZA — In a desperate attempt to return to family and friends they haven't seen in over a year and a half, American hostages being held by Hamas reportedly disguised themselves as MS-13 gang members so Democrats would fight to bring them home to the U.S. After being held captive since late 2023 with little sign of their elected officials being motivated to bring them home, sources said the Americans still in the custody of Hamas had devised a clever plan to cover themselves in MS-13 tattoos so congressional Democrats would advocate for them....

Aide: Clinton Unleashed bin Laden Chuck Noe Bill Clinton ignored repeated opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies and is responsible for the spread of terrorism, one of the ex-president’s own top aides charges. Mansoor Ijaz, who negotiated with Sudan on behalf of Clinton from 1996 to 1998, paints a portrait of a White House plagued by incompetence, focused on appearances rather than action, and heedless of profound threats to national security. Ijaz also claims Clinton passed on an opportunity to have Osama bin Laden arrested. Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, hoping to have terrorism sanctions ...

For the last few weeks, many foreign students living in the US have watched as a sequence of events has repeated itself on their social media feeds: plain-clothes agents appearing unannounced and hauling students off in unmarked cars to detention centres. The combination of targeted detentions and reports of wide-scale visa revocations have left campuses on edge, from the biggest public universities to elite Ivy League institutions. "I could be next," said one student visa-holder attending Georgetown University, who has written articles about Israel and the war in Gaza. Another student in Texas said he's afraid to leave his apartment,...

50 years ago today, on April 13 1975, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on a church in Beirut, killing 4 Christians. It was the start of the Lebanese Civil War It would destroy the Christian-majority country that had been one the best and safest countries in the Middle East ... A tragic reminder of how quickly violence can destroy a once-peaceful nation. Lebanon was truly a jewel of the Middle East before extremism tore it apart. We must learn from history to prevent these devastating sectarian conflicts from repeating. ... Same plan for America. ... Islam destroys everything it touches. ......

The Qatari minister quickly deleted the tweet once exposed by online bloggers, in hopes to erase his history of support for the terrorist organization. Qatari deputy prime minister and defense affairs minister Sa'oud bin Abd Al-Rahman Al Thani this week posted and quickly deleted a Twitter/X post in support of Hamas: “We Are all Hamas… Oh Al-Quds, revolt and commemorate Al-Qassam!”