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NYPD is investigating. It wasn’t known if the victim is Jewish.

(JNS)

An unknown man assaulted an unnamed woman at the 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue subway station in New York City for a reason he made unmistakably clear.

“You are Jewish,” he reportedly said to the 29-year-old after punching her in the face and then fleeing. The attack was reportedly unprovoked.

The New York City Police Department has released two images of the suspect showing a man with light-brown skin and a beard wearing a dark-green head covering. He also wore a black vest with a green shirt, and in one photo appeared holding his hands up in a surrender posture.

The woman was treated for minor injuries. NYPD’s hate-crimes unit is investigating the incident.

It has not yet been confirmed if the victim actually is Jewish.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza is a silent museum of human and physical destruction, whose tableau of carnage is testimony to the hours-long attack that gutted this once-serene place.

Etgar Lefkovits

(JNS)

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Southern Israel—The stench of death fills the air.  The signs of carnage and destruction are all around.

Ten days after Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip carried out the most lethal assault on Israel in the last half-century, two border-area Israeli communities remain the scene of the wanton horror that struck on Oct. 7, a Shabbat morning and on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, indelibly changing the face of the modern-day State of Israel forever.

The surprise attack led to the murders of at least 1,400 Israelis, wounding thousands and resulting in about 200 people being taken hostage and dragged into the Gaza Strip. It exhibited a colossal intelligence failure that many are comparing to the infamous Yom Kippur War in October 1973. Yet the attack on the crisp fall morning 10 days ago was entirely different in that it was directed primarily at civilians, who bore the brunt of a heretofore unimagined barbarity that remains on display in these borderline communities.

A tableau of carnage

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which means “Gaza village” in English, was previously a bucolic stretch of green in the southern desert with a school and a synagogue—home to about 1,000 residents. It is now a silent museum of destruction whose tableau of carnage is testimony to the hours-long attack that gutted this once-serene place.

An eerie silence filled the air on Tuesday, with residents now all gone, punctured only by the thunderous booms of explosions rocking the Gaza Strip.

Walking through the communal farm is a trial to the mind and eyes. There is a fallen paraglider and a bullet-filled half-demolished vehicle that the terrorists used in their attack, where they stopped right outside the kibbutz kindergarten. The doors of many of the stucco homes have been blown from their hinges by terrorists using rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles, while throughout the town torched cars are riddled with bullets, leading to an even worse path of destruction.

Doors and outer walls of what used to be a row of neatly kept homes of young couples are blasted wide open. Inside, complete and utter destruction: The blackened skeletal remains of the houses that were set afire, often to goad the residents out to be captured, are virtually all that remain. In others, mattresses and inner household walls spattered with blood. Everywhere is the omnipresent smell of death.

More horror to meet the eye: a baby’s stroller and children’s toys overturned in the courtyard; clothing strewn on the floor outside; plastic chairs turned upside down; burnt and blackened scooters, tractors and motorbikes laying as lifeless as the village itself minus the now-heavy military presence. In one house, all that remained was a picture of a smiling couple on the wall.

‘Nothing less than a genocide’

“I cannot express in words the scene of Jewish soldiers collecting the burnt bones of their own brothers and sisters,” said Col. Golan Vach, commander of the search-and-rescue team in a briefing to a group of foreign ambassadors and Israeli parliamentarians.

Vach, who has rescued people trapped around the world from earthquakes over the last two decades, including most recently 19 Turks after that country’s recent natural disaster, said he has never witnessed such barbarity in all his service. “In all my years, I have never witnessed such willful evil both to intentionally slaughter, massacre and humiliate,” he said. “It’s not a battlefield. It’s a massacre.”

He described young girls and boys shot in the head, girls raped—some concentrated in groups and burned.

In this kibbutz alone, about 70 people were killed in the hours-long onslaught, while others have been kidnapped to Gaza, according to tentative figures.

“When we say never again talking about the Holocaust, what we see here is nothing less than a genocide,” said Knesset member Sharren Haskel, who organized the cross-party visit of lawmakers, as well as the ambassadors from Chile and Paraguay; the deputy ambassador of Spain; and the Consul of the Czech Republic.

In the next block of homes, the chilling scene of destruction continues. Vach explained that the decapitated remains of a soldier were found in front of one of the destroyed homes with his head missing, taken by the terrorists as a trophy back to Gaza.

Just ahead, looking out at northern Gaza, the gate that once protected residents had been blasted open.

It was in these very fields that Ofir Libstein, mayor of the nearby Sha’ar HaNegev community, had dreamed of creating a joint industrial area with his Palestinian neighbors, Haskel said. On Saturday morning, he was gunned down outside his home—his dream and visions of peaceful relations obliterated, like his very life.

‘Children without parents, parents without children’

Aviva Fold, a 70-year-old survivor from another local community, Netiv Ha’asara, recounted how her daughter-in-law stuffed her grandchildren in the closet of the sealed room and put a blanket over them, instructing them only to come out when they heard their names called. Her other son was afraid that he would choke his 3-year-old son as he cupped his mouth from crying.

“We are trying to deal in a Western mindset with a Middle Eastern environment,” said Eran Casher, a 46-year first responder from Netiv HaAsara. “It is not a territorial dispute,” Haskel notes, “but a clash of civilizations.”

“I am not fully aware why I am still alive,” said Jaim Jellin, 65 of the nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, a 10-minute drive from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, which lost an estimated 10% of its 1,000 residents.

A native of Argentina who moved to Israel in 1976, he briefed the dignitaries in Spanish. “I cannot describe what happened here: it is like the Shoah. “This is not [just] the Hamas we knew, this is ISIS.”

He said entire families were mowed down in the Oct. 7 terror spree.

“There are parents without children; children without parents,” he said.

A 6-month-old baby was shot in the head as his father held him and then he too was killed, Jelin said, while a geriatric in a wheelchair was gunned down.

A dental clinic, like the other buildings and homes, is now marked bomb-free and cleared of bodies by the IDF, as magazines of Kalashnikov weapons, and an overturned helmet lay on the ground outside. The kibbutz dining hall was a scene of carnage; the fate of 50 residents taken hostage is an account that is still to be told, he said.

On the front door of one completely gutted house at Kibbutz Kfar Aza there remains a picture of a flower and a root, along with the word “to grow.”

Image: Israeli soldiers stand guard in Kfar Aza in southern Israel after Hamas terrorists rampaged through the community on Oct. 7, murdering families and taking civilians hostage, Oct. 16 2023. Photo by Rina Castelnuovo.

Police in Jerusalem have been “operating in an increased format… to monitor and address publications on social media networks that incite terrorism and violence.”

(JNS)

The Hamas terrorist organization killed at least 1,400 Israelis and wounded more than 4,100 in a massive offensive launched from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, which included the firing of thousands of rockets at Israel and the infiltration of the Jewish state by terrorist forces.

The terrorists butchered men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled and infants—some were decapitated while others were raped or burned alive. At least 199 hostages, including children, were taken to Gaza, Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel confirmed on Monday.

The Jerusalem District Police has been “operating in an increased format, in cooperation with other security agencies, to monitor and address publications on social media networks that incite terrorism and violence,” warned the Israel Police on Monday.

Indictments will be filed “in the coming days,” added the statement.

Among other suspects, police officers arrested a 20-year-old female resident of Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood, Israel’s Walla news site reported. The suspect allegedly shared pictures of fallen IDF soldiers on social media and praised their Palestinian killers.

In another case, officers detained a cook who worked in a central Jerusalem restaurant. After losing his job due to his public support for Hamas terror, he reportedly threatened to carry out an attack on the diner.

Amid fighting on Israel’s southern and northern borders, as well as ongoing attempts to open a front in Judea and Samaria, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir last week said his ministry was preparing for possible Arab riots in mixed Jewish-Arab cities.

During a visit to the western Negev city of Sderot, one of the communities attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, Ben-Gvir announced that he ordered Israel Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai to make preparations for “a scenario of ‘Guardian of the Walls II,’ which I think is looming.”

Ben-Gvir’s remarks referred to the widespread Arab rioting in Israeli cities with large numbers of Arab and Jewish residents that took place during the IDF’s May 2021 aerial operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Over the weekend, suspected Hamas sympathizers burned down a bicycle shop in Tayibe, an Arab city in central Israel, after its owner donated 50 bicycles to survivors of Hamas’s terror assault on southern Israel.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Kol Yehudi news outlet shared footage of what it said showed Israeli Arabs from the central city of Umm al-Fahm conducting military exercises at a training camp in northern Israel.

“All of them are well known to the authorities, but Gaza-Hamas was also known to the authorities,” Kol Yehudi journalist Elchanan Groner wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “The problem is the concept. These guys are the enemy.”

Image: Israeli police officers clash with Arab rioters in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al-Amud, Oct. 13, 2023. Photo by Jamal Awad/Flash90.

IDF Spokesman repeats calls for Gazans to evacuate southward, and dismisses reports that Israel bombed a convoy of Gaza evacuees as “fake news.”

Yaakov Lappin

(JNS)

As Israel’s security cabinet and the Israel Defense Forces finalize plans on Sunday ahead of the expected Israeli ground offensive into the Gaza Strip, it is becoming clear that Israel’s objective will be to eliminate all Hamas military and political infrastructure in the Strip, from bottom to top.

The IDF has called for residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City to evacuate south, crossing the Wadi Gaza river, to avoid their use as human shields by Hamas’s terrorist army, which is commanded by Mohammed Deif and which has some 30,000 operatives.

Since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007 via a violent coup, it has built, trained and armed a terrorist army and guerilla force, and has entrenched it in high-rise buildings, subterranean bunkers and tunnels, in the midst of Gaza’s civilian population.

As a result, fighting is likely to take place in and around multi-story residential buildings converted by Hamas into military targets, doubling as command posts, lookouts and firing positions for the terror group.

The IDF can be expected to send in armored vehicles, infantry, combat engineering, artillery and special forces, backed by close air support and firepower support from the navy as well.

The mission will be to seek out and destroy all Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets, including senior operatives hiding out in bunkers and combat tunnels, thousands of kilometers of which crisscross Gaza. Repressing rocket fire on the Israeli home front by systematically destroying rocket launchers as the maneuver progresses will also be a key mission.

The forces can expect to come up against terrorists appearing from tunnels and buildings, firing shoulder-fired missiles, sniper rifles, mortar shells and other weaponry that has been mass produced in Gaza with Iranian funding or smuggled into the Strip with Iranian assistance.

The IDF has been training for years for this type of urban warfare, based on the concept of the 360-degree threat, in which enemies can appear from any direction, including from above and below.

In 2018, Maj. Guy Madar, a former Givati deputy battalion commander and a key planner of a war exercise held that year to simulate just such an offensive, told JNS, “When they [the IDF] enter the combat arena, they could have [enemies] under their feet. And they need to look up [too]. The enemy is not naïve. It wants to try its own surprises against us.”

He added, “Those who will win are those who act with cunning and creativity. It will be those who know how to think differently.”

Fighting at night, with armored vehicles, in closed combat areas with a stress on tall buildings and tunnels, and giving smaller units at the platoon and company level independence and flexibility to destroy their assigned targets, will be key to this offensive.

Such smaller units will likely prove to be the decisive factor in achieving victory, and the more they are decentralized in their freedom to act, the faster they can adapt to the asymmetric and brutal enemy at hand.

Platoon commanders are expected to be the ones experiencing utmost friction with Hamas’s terror army.

The IDF will also likely be counting on the Trophy active protection system, installed its Merkava 4 tanks, to provide support for the armor, and on its combat network to detect and share new enemy targets in seconds, enabling rapid fire on those targets.

Field commanders at the company level will have quadcopters and drones at their disposal for gathering their own aerial intelligence and building their own picture of the battle space, rather than fully depending on the air force to do this.

Meanwhile, speaking on Sunday, IDF International Spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht repeated calls for Gazans to evacuate southward, describing reports that Israel bombed a convoy of Gaza evacuees as fake news.

“We showed some aerial pictures of them [Hamas] blocking the convoys, and they’re trying to do everything to block it,” he said.

“We’ve opened a new corridor,” he added.

The Israeli Air Force has continued large-scale strikes against senior operatives and terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, with the assistance of the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), and has killed the commander of Hamas’s “Nukhba” forces in southern Khan Younis, who was responsible for the Kibbutz Nirim massacre, the IDF announced on Sunday.

“The IDF also struck over 100 military targets located in Zaytun, Khan Younis, and west Jabaliya. These strikes impacted the capabilities of the Hamas terrorist organization, by targeting its operational command centers, military compounds, dozens of launchers, anti-tank missile launch posts and observation posts. Furthermore, operational command centers belonging to the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization were struck,” the IDF added.

Hecht said the IDF is still reinforcing the Gaza barrier and border areas.

He noted that in the north, speaking shortly after a Hezbollah cross-border anti-tank missile killed an Israeli and wounded several others, “There is a certain threshold that people in the region know what it means,” referring to the danger of war breaking out with Hezbollah.

The United States has meanwhile deployed a second carrier battle group, the USS Gerald R. Ford, which will join the USS Eisenhower carrier strike group already off the Israeli coast, days after a U.S. cargo plane landed at Nevatim Air Force Base in the South with munitions supplies for the IDF.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi has maintained regular contact with U.S. CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurrilla.

By Sunday afternoon, the IDF confirmed that over 1,300 people were murdered on Oct. 7 during Hamas’s cross-border attack, 126 IDF soldiers were killed and 126 hostages were being held in the Gaza Strip, including young children and the elderly. Over 6,000 rockets were fired at Israel since Oct. 7.

Image: Israeli soldiers at a staging area near the Gaza border, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo by Erik Marmor/Flash90.

It is time for the international community to wake up and realize that Iran and its Palestinian proxy terrorists are as determined as ever to wipe Israel—and America—off the map.

Khaled Abu Toameh

(JNS)

Hamas’s Oct. 7 war on Israel did not surprise those who have been following the actions of Iran and its regime-backed Islamist terror group since it was founded in late 1987.

Since then, Hamas, with Iran’s help—Hamas does not have a productive economy in Gaza—has carried out countless terrorist attacks, killing and wounding thousands of Jews by suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings and car-rammings, as well by firing tens of thousands of rockets into Israel, a country the size of New Jersey (roughly 8,500 square miles).

In 2002, Hamas committed one of its deadliest massacres during the Jewish holiday of Passover in the Israeli city of Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered and 140 wounded when a Hamas terrorist, disguised as a woman, detonated a suitcase filled with powerful explosives in the dining room of a hotel where Jews were celebrating the holiday. Most of the victims were senior citizens (70 and over). The oldest victim was 90 and the youngest, 20.

Over the past three decades, Hamas officials never concealed their group’s ambition to destroy Israel through jihad (holy war). Hardly a day has passed without another Hamas statement concerning the need to “liberate all Palestine” (meaning destroy Israel).

Days before the latest Hamas attack on Israel, the terrorist group called on all Arabs and Muslims to “continue the legitimate struggle in all forms” until Israel is defeated and expelled from “our historical land.”

The statements by Hamas officials and leaders over the past three decades were not empty threats. They were backed by literally thousands of terrorist attacks against Israel. Sadly, many in the international community chose to look the other way as Hamas continued its threats and terrorist attacks.

The indifference has reached the point where some Western media outlets and officials continue to label Hamas terrorists as “militants.” The Oct. 7 carnage, during which Jewish women, children and the elderly were brutally murdered, shows that there is effectively no difference between Hamas and Islamic State.

The Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel used the very tactics employed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq: Burning people alive, raping women, beheading civilians and abducting women (including an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor on a wheelchair) and children.

Why, then, are Hamas terrorists labeled “militants” while ISIS members are called “terrorists”?

It is because of the identity of the victim. When the victim is a Jew, then the perpetrator is a “militant.” When the victim is a non-Jew, the Muslim extremist is called what he really is: a terrorist.

Attempts by some Westerners to whitewash Hamas and portray it as a small group of fighters challenging Israel, one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East, have continued despite the atrocities committed by the group over the past 35 years. Bizarrely, the attempts have continued even while Hamas leaders themselves were stressing that their group has not changed and remains committed to slaughtering Jews and eliminating Israel.

In 2017, Western media outlets published stories arguing that Hamas has recognized Israel’s right to exist by accepting the “two-state solution.” The only problem is, it wasn’t true.

The argument was based on a political program announced by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a press conference in Doha, Qatar.

The British newspaper The Guardian then claimed that Hamas, in its new program, had made “the biggest concessions” by agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The paper quoted a part of the program, that says:

“[Hamas] considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of June 4, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

Many in the international media, however, failed to report that the new program also states that:

“Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”

Other sections of the political program, falsely presented by some media outlets as a sign of Hamas’s purported moderation and pragmatism, actually reaffirmed the group’s original charter, published in 1988.

The 2017 program includes these statements:

• “The establishment of Israel is entirely illegal”
• “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity”
• “Resistance and Jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honor for all the sons and daughters or our people and our Ummah [Muslim community].”

The 1988 Hamas charter states that “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.” It quotes Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an offshoot) as saying: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

In its charter, Hamas makes it clear that it remains faithful to the words of the prophet Mohammed, who was quoted as saying:

“The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews [killing the Jews], when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O’ Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” (Article 7)

Article 13 of the charter emphasizes the importance of jihad:

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Hamas says in the charter that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day” (Article 11) and “the Jihad for the liberation of Palestinian is an individual duty of every Muslim” (Article 15).

Notably, the new Hamas program did not replace its 1988 charter. In fact, the program repeated Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel through jihad, but pointed out that since this goal cannot be achieved under the current circumstances, the group is ready to accept a temporary state on any land it obtains as a first stage toward the annihilation of Israel. Hamas, in short, is saying: We will take whatever you (Israel) give us now—starting with a Palestinian state—and we will use this to slaughter you.

Moreover, no senior Hamas official has ever gone on the record to announce the revocation of the charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state. On the contrary; Hamas representatives have gone to some lengths to let it be known that they have not abandoned their desire to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

Days after the political program was announced, Hamas’s envoy to Iran, Khaled al-Qaddoumi, asserted that there was no change in his group’s attitude toward Israel. The program, al-Qaddoumi said, does not include any recognition of the “Zionist entity,” adding:

“The Palestine that we believe in and want is every inch of the historical land of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea. Therefore, this [program] is an affirmation of the principles of Hamas, that it wants everything.”

Mahmoud al-Zahar, another Hamas leader, also emphasized that the new political program does not mean that his group has changed its position toward Israel:

“Most importantly, we did not recognize the Israeli entity. Our acceptance to establish a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders does not mean that we recognize the [Israeli] enemy or give up Palestine.”

Hamas did not carry out the Oct. 7 massacre because Jews were living in settlements in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. The Jews who were butchered on that day lived inside Israel, near the border with the Gaza Strip. Israel, it should be noted, withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip in 2005.

Hamas launched its attack on Israel because it does not see a difference between a Jew living in a West Bank settlement and a Jew living in a city inside Israel.

For Hamas and its followers, all Jews are “settlers” and “colonialists,” regardless of their geographical location. Hamas launched the attack as part of its effort to slaughter Jews and obliterate Israel.

To be fair, both the present Iranian regime and Hamas have made their intentions clear. Iran, since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, has vowed “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” Why would anyone think they do not mean it?

Hamas has boasted of its intention to commit atrocities against Jews. These two regimes have not changed and will never change. It is time for the international community to wake up and realize that Iran and its Palestinian proxy terrorists are as determined as ever to wipe Israel—and America—off the map.

Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashaal, Saleh al- Arouri and Khalil al-Hayya, living safely in five-star hotels in Qatar and Lebanon, actually invited reporters to document them during the special prayer they held to thank God for the massacre of Jews. These bogus leaders also evidently do not give a damn about the thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have lost their lives, homes and loved ones as a result of Hamas’s thirst for Jewish blood.

Those who continue to defend Iran and Hamas are complicit in their campaign of genocide against Jews. Such a defense is an outrage not only to the Jews, but also to the many Palestinians who are being used as human shields and cannon fodder to satisfy the bloodlust of Hamas leaders and allow them to maintain their residences in the five-star hotels of Qatar, Turkey and Lebanon. It is also an outrage to the millions of Iranians being held as virtual prisoners in their own country, while their leaders sit comfortable and untouched, watching everyone else pick each other off, while they collect billions of dollars from violating U.S. sanctions—as the Biden administration looked the other way—that enabled them to prosecute this war.

Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.

Image: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (right) embraces Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Source: Khamenei’s Twitter account, posted May 24, 2021.