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Jerusalem Center for Security
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DAILY ALERT

Thursday,
October 8, 2026

In-Depth Issues:

Hizbullah Is Still Present inside Southern Lebanon Pilot Zones - Tzvi Jasper (Jerusalem Post)
Hizbullah operatives posing as civilians are present in several areas within the pilot zones in southern Lebanon, Israel's Channel 11 reported Wednesday.
"The Lebanese state is not doing what it is supposed to do, if wherever Israel leaves, Hizbullah enters," a Lebanese source said.
"This only shows how critical the issue of disarming Hizbullah is even before the Israeli withdrawal."
Israeli officials have repeatedly stated that the pilot program, in which Israeli troops would withdraw in order to allow the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to take over operations against Hizbullah, had failed.
Senior IDF officials assess that LAF chief Rodolphe Haykal continues to cooperate with Hizbullah and is ineffective in carrying out searches, locating terror infrastructure, and finding weapons.

Since Oct. 7, 31,500 Rockets, Missiles, and Drones Have Been Launched at Israel - Emanuel Fabian (Times of Israel)
The IDF on Wednesday published new data about its operations on all fronts during the past three years of multifront war.
The IDF carried out strikes on 100,000 targets, including 65,000 in Gaza, 28,000 in Lebanon and Syria, 4,500 in Iran, and 80 in Yemen.
The IDF killed over 24,000 combatants in Gaza and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Oct. 7 onslaught.
Since the beginning of the war, 31,500 rockets, missiles, and drones have been launched at Israel from multiple fronts, including 10,200 fired from Gaza - 5,000 on Oct. 7 alone. There were 20,000 from Lebanon, 50 from Syria, 90 from Yemen, and 1,200 from Iran.
These figures did not include thousands of rockets launched from Gaza that misfired and landed in the Strip, those launched by Hizbullah that landed short in Lebanon, and ballistic missiles launched by Iran that failed to reach Israel.

A Palestinian State Now Would Be Credited to the Oct. 7 Massacre - Sagiv Steinberg (Jerusalem Post)
On Aug. 3, Piers Morgan asked Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas's political bureau, whether Oct. 7 had been a strategic failure, given what it brought down on Gaza.
Before Oct. 7, Hamad said, there were only Security Council meetings and Arab statements that changed nothing on the ground. Now there are "strategic achievements," adding that Hamas had not changed.
At the end of the interview, he said the world "should reconsider the existence of Israel."
For Hamas, the Oct. 7 massacre was an investment. Call it the massacre dividend: the political return a terrorist organization extracts from its own atrocity once the world translates it into urgency to "solve the issue."
The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs has measured public opinion seven times over 30 months. Opposition to a Palestinian state has held steady at 64-68%, and at 75% among Jewish respondents.
Total support, including conditional support tied to recognition and demilitarization, has not exceeded 25%.
Concern about an Oct. 7-style attack from Judea and Samaria climbed from 62% in Feb. 2025 to 77% in Sept. 2026.
A Palestinian state established now would be credited to the massacre. Every economic measure against Israel tied to the demand for statehood is recorded by Hamas in Gaza as a return on their investment.
The writer is CEO and communications director of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.

When Criticism of Israel Goes Off the Rails - Bret Stephens (New York Times)
Zealous criticism of Israel goes off the rails when it somehow imagines, or pretends, that blame for the crises in the Holy Land falls on one side alone and that Israel's security challenges are either a product of its imagination or payback for its own policies.
Israel came into existence with its enemies avowing its extermination, and nearly eight decades later those intentions remain unchanged.
The experience of Israelis in this century is that every time they have vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security.
Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that so many Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct. 7 - horrors that many of the world's so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or flat-out deny.
Constant critics of Israel might try to remember that Israelis aren't simply hallucinating their own peril.

Saving Lives under Fire: Magen David Adom on Oct. 7 (Ynet News)
Magen David Adom - Israel's national emergency service - has launched a website offering testimony, locations and accounts of the emergency medical response that day, as well as stories of MDA employees and volunteers who were killed.
It documents how hundreds of teams worked to provide medical care inside communities under attack, at MDA stations, at road junctions and along roads as fighting continued.
See also Magen David Adom Heroes of Oct. 7 (Magen David Adom)

Video: Israelis Witness October 7 (Friends of the IDF)
This new English-language digital video library features over 12 hours of footage from 50 filmed testimonies from former hostages, IDF soldiers, and the families of massacre victims.

Israel's National Library Rushes to Archive Every Video from Oct. 7 - Lidor Sultan (Israel Hayom)
At the National Library in Jerusalem, archivists have spent three years preserving every video, photograph, and WhatsApp message from Oct. 7.
Library staff downloaded videos circulating on Telegram the moment they were distributed, out of fear they would be deleted, and they have kept even the most difficult ones without filtering them.
"We don't have that privilege," said Maya Gan Zvi, director of the library's Oct. 7 archive.
"On October 9, 2023, we launched the documentation project for the Oct. 7 attack at the National Library. We quickly understood that the library had the professional infrastructure and the developed capabilities to handle enormous volumes of material."
"We understood we had to start collecting everything created digitally, both what survivors and victims produced during those terrible days, and what the Hamas terrorists who invaded the country created."
Still, even years from now, some of the material will not be able to be fully exposed to the general public due to its difficult content.

How the Oct. 7 Crisis Rewired Israel's Defense Tech Ecosystem - Anna Ahronheim (Jerusalem Post)
Three years after the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7, Israel's defense tech ecosystem looks fundamentally different from what it was before the war. It is larger, faster, more integrated with the military, and more mission-driven.
Before the war, Israel was already a global center for defense innovation. Yet much of the start-up ecosystem remained oriented toward civilian markets, particularly cybersecurity.
Within weeks and months, reservists returning from Gaza and engineers working in tech companies began identifying problems they had encountered firsthand.
The result was a new generation of companies building counter-drone systems, autonomous platforms, artificial intelligence, battlefield communications, electronic warfare, robotics, intelligence, and logistics.
The Israeli defense tech ecosystem has grown from 160 companies before Oct. 7 to over 300 today. Private investment surged from $1 billion in 2025 to $3 billion in 2026.
AI and machine learning became central tools for anomaly detection, drone swarm prediction, real-time battlefield analytics, and automated threat classification.
Autonomous ground vehicles, robotic logistics, and battlefield medical systems advanced rapidly. Cyber defense also intensified.
Bureaucratic barriers fell, procurement processes were streamlined, and wartime urgency shortened development cycles dramatically. Technologies that once took years to test and certify were deployed within months.

First Iron Dome Interceptor Made Entirely in U.S. Delivered to Israel - Lilach Shoval (Times of Israel)
At the R2S manufacturing facility in Camden, Arkansas, Israel's Defense Ministry received the first Iron Dome Tamir interceptor manufactured and fully assembled in the U.S.
The new facility, established by Rafael and Raytheon, will also manufacture a U.S. version of the interceptor - SkyHunter - for the Marine Corps.

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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:

Satellite Images Reveal Renewed Activity at Iran Nuclear Site - David Albright
High-resolution satellite imagery from September and October 2026 shows significant renewed activity at Minzadayi, a nuclear weapons development compound northeast of Tehran attacked by Israel on March 3, 2026. This activity may be indicative of an effort by Iran to reestablish a nuclear weapons development capability.
The nuclear weapons work carried out there likely involved research and development on nuclear warheads. (Institute for Science and International Security)
Iran Transfers $200 Million to Hizbullah - Laila Bassam
Hizbullah has received $200 million from Iran to help Lebanese displaced by this year's war with Israel, sources said. One source said the group had not stopped paying its fighters and the family members of those killed in combat. Iran transferred $1 billion to the group in the first 10 months of 2025, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. (Reuters)

News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:

Israeli Defense Minister: IDF Preparing for Possibility of War with Palestinian Authority - Emanuel Fabian
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz briefed ministers at the weekly Cabinet meeting on the military's preparations in Judea and Samaria, telling them that the IDF has been ordered to be ready for a scenario of war with the Palestinian Authority. A "reference scenario" for the IDF "stipulates that preparations must be made for the possibility of an attack by jihadist elements against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, as a lesson from the events of Oct. 7."
Katz said the IDF "is preparing for a scenario in which the Palestinian Authority security forces and the Tanzim organization affiliated with it turn their guns against Israeli civilians and IDF troops. In such a case, war would be declared against the Palestinian Authority, and the IDF would launch a comprehensive offensive in accordance with a detailed plan formulated and approved by Prime Minister Netanyahu and by me, based on the principles outlined for the IDF."
Such a campaign against the PA "would be short and forceful and would include the use of ground and air forces and special means, the elimination and expulsion of senior officials, the destruction of weapons, and the large-scale evacuation of residents and destruction of terror infrastructure inside the cities and in all refugee camps...in accordance with the Gaza and Lebanon models....There will not be an intifada lasting years as there was in the past, but rather a short and forceful war with a clear decision and a change in the reality." (Times of Israel)
Armed Bedouin Groups with Ties to Terror Organizations Are Emerging in Israel's Negev - Moran Azulay
Israel Security Agency chief David Zini warned Monday during a Cabinet meeting of a serious security situation in the Negev. "There are areas in the Bedouin communities with military infrastructure and attempts to establish military-style battalions - a very troubling phenomenon." They exist a a short drive from Beersheba, Dimona and other Israeli communities and have "troubling ties" to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, in part because many of those involved marry women from Gaza and the West Bank.
Attorney Assaf Bar Yosef of the Southern District Prosecutor's Office said weapons "are coming into the country in enormous quantities.... Drones are being used to smuggle in extremely powerful weapons, including MAG machine guns." (Ynet News)
IDF Prepares Faster Response to Surprise Attacks - Yossi Yehoshua
Three years after Oct. 7, the IDF is implementing a long list of changes in its security doctrine, operational preparedness and force buildup. More troops, more reserves, greater depth, more intelligence, greater firepower, and more exercises in scenarios in which the enemy succeeds in achieving surprise. One of the central lessons being advanced by IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir is not only trying to prevent surprise, but being able to fight effectively even when surprise occurs.
In Gaza, the IDF has moved from a concept of border defense to one of shaping the area beyond it. Today, a significant part of the defensive concept is to hold territory beyond the border and prevent Hamas from reestablishing itself nearby.
In Lebanon, the lesson is to create depth. The IDF now operates on the assumption that it is wrong to wait for Radwan forces or Hizbullah fire capabilities to remain close to the border. A security zone of 10 km. has been created, alongside activity intended to push the threat farther away and deny Hizbullah the ability to reestablish itself there. In Syria, a deeper security zone has been established, extending up to 15 km.
Across all the fronts, the idea is: Do not wait for the enemy to reach the fence or the community. Instead, create a space in which the enemy can be identified, stopped and engaged before getting there. The new security doctrine will be tested at the moment when intelligence says one thing, the enemy does another, and the entire system has to understand that within minutes. (Ynet News)

Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:

October 7 - Three Years Later

This Is the Story of Death and Survival in Oct. 7's Yellow Dumpster - Sabrina Miller
Naama Gal, 25, was in the Nova festival parking area when the first gunmen arrived. People around her started screaming: "Run! Run! They are coming." Naama spent the next 20 minutes running from gunmen before being pushed by a fellow party-goer into the large yellow dumpster, which was already crowded with a dozen others. From within their refuge, they listened to the violence around them as dozens of people were executed.
Then a terrorist opened the door of the container holding a Kalashnikov. "He was smiling," says Naama. He shouted "Allahu Akbar," then shot her friend David Newman dead. Bullets were sprayed around the container, sinking into bodies. Yiftach Dan Twig, 27, was killed instantly, alongside eight other people. Others were wounded.
Naama was hit with four bullets: two in her left thigh, one in her right thigh and one in her shoulder. When the gunman left, she reached for her phone to call her mother. "I told her on the phone: I've been shot. I love you. I am not coming back home."
At midday, Yagil Rimoni and Rom Braslavski (who was later kidnapped by Hamas and held for more than two years) managed to reach the container. "I saw Yagil's face and I screamed to him: I'm alive, help." Under gunfire, she was driven to a hospital, where she woke up two days later.
The container now forms part of a memorial site in Re'im where the massacre happened. (Telegraph-UK)
Oct. 7 Hostage Mia Schem Describes Cruelty of Palestinian Women and Children - Natalie Lisbona
On the third anniversary of Oct. 7, former Hamas hostage Mia Schem, 24, has revealed the lasting physical and psychological scars of captivity. She survived being shot at point-blank range, her arm nearly came off, she almost bled to death, and at one stage was kept in a cage by her captors in a tunnel 60 meters underground. One arm is permanently damaged and shorter.
Schem spoke about what she witnessed among Palestinian civilians during her captivity. "Everyone - even the children. I saw it with my own eyes. They teach their children from the very beginning to hate, to become terrorists and to glorify death. If you kill Jewish people, your parents in Gaza are proud of you. You have brought pride to your family."
"I thought perhaps the women would be different. Woman to woman, I thought there might be a little humanity. But there was nothing. It was worse with the wife of the man who held me captive....She was jealous and so cruel. Sometimes she would give me food only once every two or three days. I would get one bottle of water, perhaps two, for the whole week. It was only enough to keep me alive."
Even the captor's children, who were "around 10, 11 and 14," could be cruel towards her. "They would tease me with food: 'Do you want food?' Then they would not give it to me. They treated me like an animal in a cage. They would talk about terrible things in front of me, not realizing I could understand some Arabic....What shocked me was how proud they were."
"I was kidnapped from my country and taken into Gaza. I know how they treated me there....People really don't know the reality. They don't know, and we don't have enough people who can explain to the world the truth about October 7, what happened in Israel, and to the Israeli and Jewish people."
"I know what it means to be Israeli and Jewish. In the Torah, we are taught, first of all, to be a good person, a good human being....What I experienced in Gaza was completely different. I saw people glorifying death. When a terrorist dies after carrying out an attack, his family can be proud of him." (Daily Mail-UK)
Oct. 7 Isn't Over - Dr. Fiamma Nirenstein
Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar's plan for Oct. 7, set out in his own handwriting, said: Go and destroy the Jews. In doing so, you will not win the war, but you will win history. You will destroy Israel. And this first conquest will precede the destruction of Jewish history and, with it, the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that it generated.
For "moral reasons," the Palestinians coldly decided to burn alive, dismember, rape and murder Jewish families in the Israeli kibbutzim bordering Gaza. For Hamas, Iran and many other actors now active throughout the world, humanitarianism itself becomes part of the execution. It is the intention that has driven antisemitism through the centuries: to cleanse the earth of Jews, and therefore today, first and foremost, of Israel.
Everywhere, Oct. 7 is celebrated as a festival of the genocide of the Jews - of the campaign to erase the Jews. Faced with every piece of nonsense, every criminal fantasy about Israel and the Jews, those who respect themselves have no choice but to look the enemy and the fool in the eye.
Antisemitism has endured through the centuries, but the Jews have endured, too. The difference today lies in the certainty that Israel knows how to win wars. The entire West can win with Israel, if it still wants to and still is able.
The writer, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, served as vice president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. (JNS)
Too Many Still Believe the Lies of Hamas - Andrew Roberts
As the Red Army closed in on Auschwitz, the Nazis blew up the crematoria to hide the atrocities they had committed. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas did the opposite. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered his fighters to film their killing and broadcast it to spread terror. With GoPro cameras strapped to their chests, they filmed themselves gleefully slaughtering, burning, and raping Israeli citizens, young and old, and uploaded the footage in real time.
In three decades writing about war, I have rarely encountered an atrocity documented in such detail. The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report which I chaired, and the evidence that underpins it, runs to more than 300 pages. Yet the same organization that broadcast its own atrocities in real time began denying the specifics within hours. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told the BBC that Hamas never targeted women and children, and called footage of terrified families Israel's invention.
These same men now lead Hamas's negotiations, and their assurances sit at the heart of the diplomatic process. A movement instructed to showcase mass murder, not conceal it, cannot expect its word to be trusted - least of all on disarmament. Disarmament cannot depend on assurances. It must be verified: inspectors must have access to every depot and tunnel, a timetable must be published, and each missed checkpoint must trigger consequences, not renewed negotiation.
Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 "again and again" until Israel is destroyed. Those are not the words of a movement reconciled to peace, but of one waiting for its next opportunity. Peace does not require trusting Hamas; it requires ensuring Hamas no longer has the means to break it.
The writer a member of the House of Lords, is a British historian. (Telegraph-UK)
How Oct. 7 Impacted America - Liel Leibovitz
Oct. 7, 2023, is the day when many Americans woke up and realized, to our absolute horror, that we were living in a very different country than the one we had imagined. Before Israelis could even bury their 1,200 dead or attempt to rescue 240 hostages, before the IDF launched its operation in Gaza, thousands of our fellow Americans took to the streets - not to mourn the victims, but to cheer for their executioners.
On college campuses, students gleefully waved the banners of Hamas and Hizbullah, terror groups with a long tradition of murdering Americans as well as Israelis. Daily life began to feel like that terrifying scene, early on in every zombie movie, when the folks who used to be friends and neighbors are suddenly infected by some brain-rotting virus that turns them all into ghouls.
In the three years since, as Americans of good will have tried to make sense of the torrent of Jew-hatred suddenly flowing all around us, we've had to grapple with the truth that there was nothing sudden or spontaneous about this explosion of hate. Our institutions of higher education indoctrinated America's next generation of leaders with rank bigotry, and the inflamed ideology of those classrooms had seeped into newsrooms, boardrooms and everywhere else in public life.
The second and more disturbing truth is that the real target of the hordes marching, posting, podcasting and protesting on behalf of "Palestine" was not Israel or Jews. Their real target was America. That's why the goons repeatedly seek to disrupt all-American occasions like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting ceremony; why they block roads, clog up airports and interrupt major-league baseball games.
The writer, editor at large for Tablet, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. (New York Post)
Talk about "Genocide" Should Start with Israel's Murdered Mothers and Children - Allison Pearson
When I heard that students were planning a pro-Palestinian march through London on the third anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I thought how grotesquely insensitive is it possible to be? What is wrong with people?
You want genocide? Young women at the Nova peace festival, half-naked, strung up from trees the better to defile them. Twin baby boys, their mother slaughtered in the kitchen, their father riddled with bullets; the orphaned babies used as bait for 14 hours, little Guy and Roi, 10 months old, left to scream so they would lure neighbors to rescue them and those brave souls were then picked off by the terrorists lying in wait. Killing parents in front of their sobbing children, then setting the house on fire so those children are burnt alive.
Here we are, three years on from one of the darkest days in history, and it's Jews - not Islamists - who are either fleeing the UK or living in fear. Their children attend heavily fortified schools and worship in high-security synagogues.
I am not Jewish, but I believe the Jews deserve and need a homeland. I hate their enemies because they are our enemies. So that makes me a Zionist. If you have any sense of what history teaches us, you should be a Zionist too. No more "Yes, buts." Today, Oct. 7, of all days, let us stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters. (Telegraph-UK)

Iran

Iran Bet on Waiting Out the Midterms. It Misread the Calendar and Donald Trump - Dr. James Jay Carafano
How will the midterms impact America's effort to tame the regime in Iran? Likely, not much. President Trump has demonstrated too much success in his war against the regime for any Congress, controlled by any party, to demand that he hand victory back. The president's opposition in Congress will find it strategically and politically impossible to let Iran become again the dangerous, destabilizing power of just a year ago.
Now, with Trump demonstrating a willingness to run this game as long as it takes and with demonstrable success in hand, the Iranians must know they can't outlast America in a war of attrition where all the attrition is on Iran's side.
The writer is a national security expert and a 25-year U.S. Army veteran. (1945)
Iran Faces Severe Challenges to Rebuild Missile and Drone Production - Jim Lamson
Israeli and U.S. attacks in 2024, 2025, and 2026 cumulatively caused severe damage to Iran's missile and drone industry as well as its larger defense research-industrial base. In the short term, Iran can conceivably assemble new ballistic missiles and drones from its prewar stockpiles of finished components. In the longer term, Iran will need to rebuild its severely damaged missile and drone industries.
Israeli and U.S. attacks targeted both the production and supply chains. According to my assessment, the strikes targeted 40 ballistic missile industry sites, 20 cruise missile industry sites, and 20 drone industry sites - plus dozens of other defense research-industrial sites that support production. They focused on critical bottlenecks, including sites important to guidance and control, propulsion, warheads, airframes, launchers, and final assembly. Additionally, they struck industrial facilities producing strategic materials such as carbon fiber, steel, and aluminum.
The strikes severely impacted production lines and also degraded Iran's ability to develop new and improved missiles and drones. The facilities, technologies, and processes involved in rebuilding Iran's industries and supply chains to produce ballistic missiles have a footprint that is harder to hide and to move underground. The manufacture and testing of liquid rocket engines and solid rocket motors provide an important example.
Iran faces significant challenges to rebuilding. Iran will continue to face Western trade controls, sanctions, and interdictions designed to hinder procurement, alongside a reported Israeli covert campaign targeting its efforts to acquire technologies to restore damaged production lines. It may also confront a renewed Israeli "campaign between wars," including sabotage. Iran will also need to avoid foreign detection and identification of new facilities. Moreover, Iran's rebuilding efforts face the prospect of renewed Israeli or U.S. military attacks.
The writer, a former CIA analyst, is a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. (War On The Rocks)

Israeli Security

After Oct. 7, Israel Rewrote the Rules of the Middle East - Erfan Fard
The most consequential results of Oct. 7 may be the transformation of Israel's national-security doctrine and the gradual destruction of the regional architecture the Islamic Republic of Iran spent decades constructing around the Jewish state. Oct. 7 exposed the catastrophic cost of deterrence without destruction, containment without elimination, and intelligence superiority without the political willingness to act upon it.
Israel can no longer afford to manage existential threats on its borders. It must dismantle the military and terrorist infrastructure that produces them. That shift is changing the balance of power across the Middle East.
Israel learned on Oct. 7 that a terrorist organization cannot safely be treated as a containable security problem simply because it appears deterred today. An adversary permitted to retain its command structure, weapons, tunnels, financing and external patron may require only an opportunity to convert latent capability into strategic surprise.
The emerging Israeli doctrine has consequently moved from periodic containment toward systematic degradation of the threat network. U.S.-Israeli cooperation in the 12-day and 40-day wars changed the equation by demonstrating that the architecture Tehran constructed outside its borders cannot necessarily protect the regime at its center.
Oct. 7 was intended to demonstrate the power of the terrorist architecture surrounding Israel. Instead, it triggered the campaign that began dismantling that architecture. (RealClearWorld)

Palestinian Arabs

Why Does the PA Fund Terrorists Instead of Building Hospitals? - Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch
For the past 20 years, the Palestinian Authority, in complete breach of the Oslo Accords, has built a massive terror army. The number of members of the PA Security Forces (PASF) has ballooned to five times the agreed size.
According to PA budget reports, from 2008 through 2025, the PA spent over $20 billion on salaries and social benefits for PASF members. Had the PA complied with its commitments, it could have saved $16 billion in salaries.
To this day, the PA does not have a modern and professional hospital, and still sends thousands of Palestinians every year to receive medical treatment in Israel. The additional money paid to cover the salaries of the PA's army could have been used to build hospitals and improve the health care of Palestinians.
In the same way that Hamas spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the Gazan terror tunnels instead of developing the "Gazan Riviera," the PA in Judea and Samaria has spent over $16 billion building a terror army, rather than providing for the basic needs of the Palestinians.
The writer, former director of the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria, is director of the Palestinian Authority Accountability Initiative at the Jerusalem Center. (Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs)
See also The New Palestinian Terror Army: Planning the Next Oct. 7 Massacre - Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch (Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs)

Antisemitism

Celebrating Hamas on Oct. 7 - Editorial
After his perfunctory mention of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, used Oct. 7, 2026, as another opportunity to libel Israel. He unleashed a stream of propaganda, much longer, about Israel's "ongoing genocide," "so-called ceasefire," "apartheid" and "war crimes" - with Hamas disappearing from the picture.
He passes off the Hamas-supplied Gaza casualty figure as if all the dead were civilians, not bothering to mention that at least 25,000 were combatants. To do so would be to admit that Israel waged a war, not a genocide, with a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio well within historical precedents for difficult urban warfare. For the same reason, he also has to omit that Hamas fought from hospitals, schools and mosques, posed as journalists, and built an unprecedented military tunnel system under Gaza's cities.
It betrays a particular ugliness to smear Israel to mark Oct. 7, the day Hamas started the war by deliberately massacring Jews. It killed nearly 1,200 of all ages in scenes reminiscent of Nazi death squads. Israel fought back after Oct. 7 to lift existential threats. But the antisemitism unleashed again three years ago is still with us. Defeating it remains the West's duty. (Wall Street Journal)

Observations:

Britain's Fastest-Growing Party Has an Anti-Jewish Problem - Tony Blair (Free Press)

The Green Party of England and Wales crossed a dangerous line, one that it is unacceptable to cross. It passed a resolution which effectively denounced the State of Israel's right to exist. The party passed a motion entitled "Zionism Is Racism," which commits the party to a single Palestinian state covering all of historic Palestine - which is to say, to a world in which Israel, the state which contains the largest population of Jews on Earth, does not exist. Since at least 2/3 of British Jews call themselves Zionists, the party has, in effect, branded the majority of the country's Jews racists.
Today, the Green Party is a significant force in British politics. It has moved itself, and many of its supporters and sympathizers, from condemnation of Israel's conduct in the Gaza war to a full-on denial of the State of Israel's right to exist.
Zionism was never a movement started in support of Jewish supremacy. It started because Jewish people found that the original preferred strategy of assimilation was impossible. Throughout the centuries, Jews in Europe and elsewhere were subject to persecution. Sometimes treated less badly than at other times, but never treated equally. So in the late 19th century, the movement began for a Jewish homeland. The terrors of the Holocaust gave it unstoppable force. But it was never, and has never been, incompatible with self-determination for the Palestinians.
Those of us working, through the Board of Peace, to ensure that the bloodshed of Oct. 7 is never repeated, and that Gaza has a different and better future, understand very well the legitimate global concern about Gaza.
We have a plan - the only viable plan on offer - whose framework is designed to create a new Gaza in which Israel's security is protected and the Palestinians in Gaza have the chance of a different and better future. We know that only by freeing Gaza from the control of Hamas, so long as it remains committed to the destruction of Israel by violence, can the Palestinians of Gaza have a chance at freedom.
When misguided or malevolently guided activists in Western countries campaign for Zionism to be delegitimized, they harm the Palestinian cause. Palestinians know Israel will continue to exist. They know that if there were a one-state solution how unlikely it would be that such a state would be Palestinian.
This vote - overt anti-Jewish discrimination from what is now a mainstream British party - is a warning sign. It reveals something rotten. It is the duty of all of us to put it right.

The writer served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and is executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

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