Weekly roundup of world briefs

Maccabi World Union unveils memorial to victims of Oct. 7

By Rolene Marks

(JNS) — Maccabi World Union unveiled a memorial to the 1,200 victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre at the Kfar Maccabiah hotel and sports club complex in Ramat Gan on Wednesday.

Since the onset of Israel’s war against Hamas, MWU has been active in helping tens of thousands of residents from the south who evacuated their towns and kibbutzim on the border with Gaza.

MWU turned Kfar Maccabiah into a small village to accommodate evacuees from Sderot, a city on the Gaza border, and the surrounding area. MWU has ensured that evacuees have housing, schooling for children, playgrounds and a host of other amenities including counseling and help for victims of trauma and PTSD.

Maccabi World Union unveiled the memorial to the 1,200 men, women and children whom Gaza terrorists brutally murdered on Oct. 7. The event was closed to the public and attended by President Isaac Herzog along with Amir Peled, chairman, and Michael Segal, president, of MWU. The memorial is now open to the public for viewing.

Gov’t approves plan to rehabilitate Gaza-border towns

(JNS) — Israel’s Cabinet on Sunday approved the outline for a strategic multi-year plan to rehabilitate and develop the Gaza Strip-adjacent “Tekuma” region and its population.

The plan constitutes a broad budgetary framework for five years (2024-2028) of up to 18 billion shekels ($4.9 billion) intended to lead to the rehabilitation of the region.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “In the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip at the start of the war, we established the Tekuma Authority.” (Tekuma means “revival” in Hebrew.)

“We provided a massive budget to rebuild the communities and to ensure that nobody will be left behind,” he added.

The outline, formulated in cooperation with the local authorities and communities, is designed to lead to the renewal and development of the region with significant demographic growth.

The framework will make the region “a prosperous and attractive focus and magnet for economic resilience, quality education, investments, and advanced and innovative agriculture,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

With the framework’s approval, the Tekuma Authority will now produce a detailed multi-year, long-term roof plan to be published within 100 days.

Netanyahu said that Israel will ensure that the cities, rural communities and various councils “will flourish and prosper for generations and surpass what was.”

“We are committed to investing in education, employment, social services, assistance for evacuees, agriculture, businesses and every field,” he said.

“I would like to commend all those who are engaged in this important work, which we will submit to the government today. The wheat is being sown in the kibbutzim in the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip—and it will grow,” the prime minister said.

Israel Air Force strikes Damascus

(JNS) — Israel Air Force fighter jets struck several targets in and around Damascus on Sunday night, causing some material damage.

“Nearly at 23:05 p.m. on Sunday, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting some points in the vicinity of Damascus,” the state-run SANA news agency reported, citing a military source.

On Friday, four people were reportedly killed by an alleged Israeli drone strike on a vehicle in Syria near the shared border.

Iranian-backed Hezbollah said three of its operatives were killed, including Hassan Ali Dakdouk, the son of Ali Mussa Dakdouk, who oversees the terrorist group’s operations in southern Syria.

Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported that the elder Dakdouk previously trained Iranian-supported militias in Iraq to target American forces. U.S. troops detained him in 2007 but he was later released.

Israel Air Force fighter jets attacked targets south of Damascus in response to rocket fire launched from Syria on Thursday.

The Sham FM radio station, which supports the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, said that explosions were heard in the “southwestern Damascus countryside” as well as in the area of Quneitra, near the border with the Jewish state.

Earlier on Thursday, air-raid sirens warned of incoming rockets in the Israeli part of the Golan Heights. Army Radio reported that several own projectiles hit an open area in the Druze town of Buq’ata.

Last week, Israeli airstrikes near Damascus killed two Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.

Israel has struck hundreds of targets in Syria in recent years as part of an effort to prevent Iranian military entrenchment in the country. However, Jerusalem rarely acknowledges these incidents.

Spielberg to document Hamas massacre survivors’ stories

By Pesach Benson

(JNS) — The Shoah Foundation of the University of Southern California, founded by Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg, has begun collecting the testimonies of Israeli survivors of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.

The foundation is best known for its work documenting the stories of more than 56,000 Holocaust survivors since its founding in 1994.

“I never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime,” Spielberg said in an announcement issued by the foundation on Friday.

“Both initiatives—recording interviews with survivors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing collection of Holocaust testimony—seek to fulfill our promise to survivors: that their stories would be recorded and shared in the effort to preserve history and to work toward a world without antisemitism or hate of any kind. We must remain united and steadfast in these efforts,” said Spielberg.

The foundation has already posted on its site videos of 68 Oct. 7 survivors sharing their stories. Videos range in length from nine minutes to just over one hour. Many of the videos were in Hebrew with English subtitles.

At least 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s attacks on Israeli communities near the Gaza border on Oct. 7. Hamas currently holds 135 men, women and children captive in Gaza. Some people remain unaccounted for as Israeli authorities continue to identify bodies and search for human remains.

Israel says UN ‘must do better’ in delivering Gaza aid

(JNS) — The United Nations needs to do more to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, Israel said on Monday, posting to X a picture of dozens of trucks waiting on the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing.

“We have expanded our capabilities to conduct inspections for the aid delivered into Gaza. Kerem Shalom [Crossing] is to be opened, so the amount of inspections will double. But the aid keeps waiting at the entrance of Rafah,” the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories unit wrote on the social media platform.

Israel announced last week that it will open the Kerem Shalom Crossing to inspect humanitarian aid trucks in the coming days. However, the trucks must still enter Gaza via the Rafah crossing from Sinai.

The Kerem Shalom Crossing, located at the junction of the Gaza Strip–Israel border and the Gaza–Egypt border, has been closed since the start of the war on Oct. 7, which followed a bloody mass assault on southern Israel by Hamas terrorists.

This move is meant to facilitate an increase in aid trucks entering the Strip. Israel currently inspects the trucks at the smaller Nitzana Crossing with Egypt before they make their way to Rafah.

The Biden administration is pressuring Israel to reopen Kerem Shalom fully but Jerusalem is rebuffing the requests, Politico reported.

“We have been engaged with Israel to enable a surge of humanitarian assistance through multiple mechanisms and options, including Kerem Shalom,” a U.S. official said.

1,300-plus terror attacks in Judea and Samaria since Oct. 7

(JNS) — Palestinian terrorists in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley have escalated their campaign against Israeli civilians and security forces in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in the northwestern Negev, data published by Channel 14 News on Monday shows.

In the nine weeks since Hamas launched its cross-border attack from the Gaza Strip, the broadcaster counted 1,388 attacks in the disputed territories, including 569 cases of rock-throwing, 287 attacks with explosives, 143 Molotov cocktail assaults and 70 terrorist shootings.

Three Israelis—a civilian, a soldier and a Border Police officer—have been murdered in Judea and Samaria since Oct. 7.

In addition, at least 52 Israelis sustained injuries, according to Channel 14. The report said 16 people were wounded by rock-throwing, 10 sustained gunshot wounds, eight were violently attacked by Palestinians, and two were injured in a car-ramming attack.

At least 15 members of the security forces were wounded during counterterrorism raids in Judea and Samaria, while one Israeli was moderately injured as he neutralized a Palestinian terrorist.

In the first six months of 2023, Rescuers Without Borders (Hatzalah Judea and Samaria) recorded a total of 3,640 acts of terrorism throughout all of Israel. Palestinian terrorists killed 28 people and wounded 362 others between Jan. 1 and July 1, 2023, the emergency service said.

According to a recent survey, 83 percent of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.

Freed hostage says three women told her they were sexually abused

(JNS) — An Israeli woman who was released from Gaza on Nov. 26 after 51 days in Hamas captivity says that three hostages told her that they were sexually abused.

“We heard three stories from a first-hand source and another story that was told to us. Things that happened a few weeks after the stay in Gaza [began]. They are physically injured. With the way they sexually assaulted them and desecrated their bodies—they don’t know how they will cope,” Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, told Kan Bet in an interview that aired on Monday.

“If they had released them earlier it would have spared them. We also saw a guy who was beaten,” she added.

Goldstein-Almog and her children Tal, 9, Gal, 11, and Agam, 17, were kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza during the Oct. 7 massacre. Chen’s husband, Nadav, 48, and their daughter Yam, 20, were murdered on that day.

Israel is investigating many accounts of rapes and sexual abuse that occurred during the Oct. 7 assault on the northwestern Negev, when thousands of heavily armed Hamas gunmen stormed the border, killing 1,200 people, wounding more than 5,000 others and taking approximately 240 hostages back to Gaza.

At least 10 of the hostages released during the temporary ceasefire were sexually assaulted or abused, a doctor who treated some of the 110 persons released from captivity told the Associated Press.

Many students who chant ‘From the river to the sea’ don’t know which river, sea

(JNS) — Some may wonder what students understand when they chant the antisemitic slogan “From the river to the sea.” Ron Hassner, a professor of political science and Israel studies chair at the University of California, Berkeley, decided to find out.

Hassner, also editor-in-chief of the journal Security Studies, hired a polling firm to survey 250 U.S. students “from a variety of backgrounds,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8 percent) and others to a lesser extent (53.2 percent).”

It turned out that just 47 percent of those who supported the slogan knew which river and which sea it referenced. Some thought it was the Nile or Euphrates, both of which are rivers, or the Dead Sea, Atlantic and Caribbean, which are not rivers.

Students supporting the slogan showed greater ignorance about other facts about the region and its history. Fewer than 25 percent knew who PLO leader Yasser Arafat was, with 10 percent saying he was Israel’s first prime minister. A quarter thought the Oslo Peace Accords weren’t signed.

“There’s no shame in being ignorant unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions,” Hassner wrote.

After the students were confronted with their misunderstandings, 67.8 percent of them changed their minds and rejected “From the river to the sea,” Hassner added.

“These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography,” he added. “Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.”

Strong US-Israel relations ‘good for the entire world,’ House Speaker Mike Johnson says at ZOA event

(JNS) — Speaking at the 2023 Zionist Organization of America Justice Louis D. Brandeis Dinner, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told attendees that Israel and the United States “are bound together by our shared values and our deep, religious convictions.”

“It’s the Judeo-Christian foundation that builds America,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why our nation and Israel have been able to enjoy such harmony and friendship over the years.”

At the Dec. 3 event, Johnson received the ZOA’s Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award.

“A strong U.S.-Israel relationship is good for the entire world,” he said. “It’s something that we must maintain.”

“Today, we are we are heartbroken. We are shocked that our Jewish friends are facing an unprecedented level of attacks and persecution,” he said. “Not since the World War II era have we seen what we’re seeing now.”

Johnson spoke of a screening he arranged for congressmen on both sides of the aisle of the raw footage of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

“You could have heard a pin drop in that auditorium,” he said. “The only sound that you could hear was our colleagues mourning what they were seeing. Sobbing, crying and many had to get up and walk out of the theater, and I have to confess to you that I was one of them. I could not sit through the horror that we were viewing.”

IAF destroys Jabalia launch site firing rockets at Sderot

By Joshua Marks

(JNS) — The Israeli Air Force overnight Monday destroyed a launch site in Jabalia from which rockets were being fired toward the western Negev city of Sderot, one of several launch sites attacked over the past 24 hours across the Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces also raided a Hamas compound overnight, where they located 250 rockets, shells and rocket-propelled grenades, as well as other weapons and military equipment. Troops also struck a weapon production factory where they located hundreds of grenades, rockets, and M72 LAW rockets (light anti-tank weapons).

In addition, Israeli naval forces struck a terrorist cell that was firing at ground troops in the Gaza Strip.

Sirens sounded in communities close to the Gaza border on Tuesday morning. 

Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 11,500 rockets at Israel since Hamas launched a war against the Jewish state on Oct. 7. On that day, thousands of rockets were launched into Israel while masses of heavily armed gunmen stormed across the border, murdering 1,200 people, wounding over 5,000 others and taking 240 hostages back to Gaza.

At least 107 soldiers have been killed in action in Gaza since the start of the IDF ground operation on Oct. 27; 434 Israeli soldiers have died since the war began.