The video showed the hostage with his brother Yair, shortly before the latter was released. Netanyahu slammed Hamas for its “cruel propaganda.”

JNS Staff

(JNS)

The Hamas terrorist organization released on Saturday evening footage of Eitan Horn, an Israeli abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, Gazan invasion of the northwestern Negev and still held captive in the Strip.

The video was apparently filmed a short while before Eitan, now aged 38, was separated from his brother Yair, who was released from captivity on Feb. 15.

The brothers were shown in the footage holding each other and bursting in tears. Eitan Horn speaks to the camera, pleading with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sign an agreement on the second phase of the ceasefire, so he can be freed as well.

The Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement, “The terrorist organization Hamas released another cruel propaganda video this evening, in which our hostages are forced to serve as tools for psychological warfare.

“Israel will not be deterred by Hamas’s propaganda. We will continue to work relentlessly to bring all our hostages home and achieve all of Israel’s war objectives,” the statement concludes.

The Horn family, authorizing the publication of the video, said in a statement: “It breaks our heart to see Eitan in this difficult situation, saying goodbye to his brother Yair, who is being freed while Eitan remains held in Hamas’s hell for 512 days now.”

It continues, “You can see the despair and fear in Eitan’s eyes. Since Yair returned to us, he hasn’t stopped thinking about and working for Eitan, and all the other hostages he met in captivity who are still there. We demand from the decision-makers: Look Eitan in the eyes. Don’t end the agreement that has already brought dozens of hostages back to us. They are running out of time! Bring everyone home, now, in all at once.”

At least three other hostages are seen in captivity with Eitan and Yair Horn, two of whom have their faces blurred.

The third abductee whose face is visible, American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, was released on the same day that Yair was handed over to Israel, along with Alexander (“Sasha”) Troufanov, 29, a dual Russian-Israel citizen who had been held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist organization that operates in Gaza.

All three men were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist assault on the community, which was among the hardest hit. One in every four residents was killed or kidnapped.

Image: Eitan Horn, 38. Credit: Courtesy of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

A senior official from the terrorist group urged an escalation of “resistance in all its forms in Jerusalem.”

Shachar Kleiman

(Israel Hayom via JNS)

With Ramadan set to begin at sundown on Friday, Hamas is aiming to spark a wave of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, including on the Temple Mount.

On Thursday, Harun Nasser al-Din, the head of Hamas’s Jerusalem Office, who is currently abroad, declared that there must be “full confrontation against the occupation’s incursions, an uprising against its projects, and no surrender to attempts at Judaization and expulsion.”

Another senior Hamas official urged an escalation of “resistance in all its forms in Jerusalem,” a clear incitement to terrorist attacks.

Al-Din also referenced the demolition of illegally built structures in Jerusalem, accusing Israel of implementing “malicious plans for expulsion and Judaization projects.” He further emphasized that “all plans and schemes will be shattered by the escalation of the resistance in all its forms.”

Throughout the week, Hamas seized on Israeli police recommendations to limit the number of Muslim worshippers allowed on the Temple Mount during Ramadan, proposing a cap of 10,000 people at a time.

In response, the terrorist organization declared that restricting the number of worshippers constitutes “a dangerous escalation and precedent aimed at undermining freedom of worship at Al-Aqsa mosque.”

Hamas further warned Israel about “the consequences of implementing these recommendations,” stating that it would bear full responsibility for any resulting escalation.

At the same time, Hamas is not ruling out an extension of the first phase of the hostage deal and ceasefire in Gaza. If additional phases proceed, they will coincide with the volatile period of Ramadan, which has seen terrorist attacks in the past.

Overnight on Wednesday, 642 terrorists were released as part of the deal, including individuals who were freed from prison and sent to eastern Jerusalem. This marks the last hostage release of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, during which 33 captives were returned, including eight who were dead.

Hamas spokesman Abd al-Latif al-Qanoua told the Al-Araby channel on Thursday morning that “the organization is ready to extend the first phase of the hostage deal or merge the two phases according to red lines.”

He further claimed that the first phase of the agreement has been completed and the terrorist organization upheld all its commitments despite Israel’s “ongoing stalling.” Hamas has set several conditions for the second phase, including a “permanent” end to the war in Gaza and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip.

This is an edited version of a story originally published by Israel Hayom.

Image: Palestinians wave Hamas flags outside the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the last Friday of Ramadan, April 29, 2022. Photo by Jamal Awad/Flash90.

Finding a place is a thorny issue because each time Palestinians have moved elsewhere, they have caused trouble for their hosts.

A.J. Caschetta

(The Investigative Project on Terrorism via JNS)

When U.S. President Donald Trump proposed to relocate more than 1 million people from Gaza while the area is being rebuilt, many derided it as a combination of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. Others thought it too ridiculous to take seriously. But more people are coming around to his way of thinking. Journalist Liel Leibovitz now argues, “We must embrace this proposal, because at its heart is the one true and inescapable sentiment: Israelis can no longer be expected to live in proximity to those who desire nothing more than their death.”

Palestinians there who don’t want to fight Israelis and who have sought to leave the embattled strip of land are perhaps the world’s only genuine refugees not been permitted to leave a war zone, but where to send them and their bloodthirsty neighbors who live for the opportunity to kill is perhaps the biggest problem with the proposal. Those who protest the loudest about Trump’s alleged “ethnic cleansing” plan are more interested in exploiting Gaza residents for the purpose of destroying Israel than helping them. Don’t expect Spain, Norway or Ireland to welcome any of them.

And what about Muslim and Arab nations? Are they too racist or “Islamophobic” for endorsing the plan? The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, recently told an interviewer, “I don’t see an alternative to what’s being proposed.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Sadanand Dhume took up the topic in a recent column titled “If Indians and Pakistanis can relocate, why can’t Gazans?” Dhume noted that “many population transfers have taken place over the last century … Only in the Palestinian case has the refugee question festered endlessly.”

In a Jan. 26, press release, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called Trump’s proposal “dangerous nonsense,” invoking the ethnic cleansing trope. This is in stark contrast to the joy that CAIR executive director Nihad Awad expressed on Nov. 24, 2023, over the Oct. 7 attack which he likened to a jailbreak. Gaza is a “concentration camp,” and its people “decided to break the siege” and “throw … down the[ir] shackles,” he enthused.

Of course, the Gazans who carried out the Oct. 7 attack wanted out of Gaza. They wanted Israel. Now Awad wants them to stay in their “concentration camp” so that their resistance will continue.

Hamas supporters like Awad know that moving people out will make it more difficult for Hamas to survive. Without Palestinian children and Israeli hostages to use as human shields, Hamas doesn’t stand a chance of surviving the Israel Defense Forces’s efforts to eradicate it.

CAIR’s press release also claims that “the only way to achieve a just, lasting peace is to force the Israeli government to end its occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.” A peaceful Gaza that is not part of a Palestinian state contradicts the generational imperative for a “Palestine from the river to the sea” and makes the chances of a “two-state solution” more remote. CAIR would love to see Hamas rewarded for the barbaric rape-torture-infanticide pogrom on Oct. 7, 2023, with a sovereign state.

The main reason for opposing Trump’s plan is sheer logistics. Where would the Gazans go while Gaza is being rebuilt, and which ones would be permitted to return? This is the thorniest problem because each time Palestinians have moved to a new diaspora they have caused trouble for their hosts. Throughout the Arab and Muslim world, Palestinian options are limited by their past conduct. Few nations are interested in taking the residents of Gaza because Palestinians have worn out their welcome wherever they have gone.

Egypt and Jordan are the two most likely destinations for Gazans relocated, either temporarily or permanently, due to propinquity and racial homogeneity. Aside from their desire to destroy and annex Israel, Gazans are ethnically, linguistically and culturally indistinguishable from Egyptians and Jordanians. However, both nations have been down this road before.

Egypt annexed Gaza after the 1948 War of Independence and refused to allow Arabs (who had not yet begun calling themselves “Palestinians”) Egyptian citizenship. It has had an uneasy relationship with both the PLO and Hamas ever since. Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (whom Trump once called his “favorite dictator”) has, from time to time, flooded Hamas tunnels, killing untold numbers of Gazans, because he felt threatened by their militancy. Unless it is forced into a corner, Egypt is unlikely to accept large numbers of Palestinians ever.

Likewise, Jordan knows what admitting more than a million Palestinians will mean to Jordanian sovereignty.

After the 1948 war, Jordan (unlike Egypt and the other Arab nations that attacked the nascent Jewish State) admitted hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees. The 1954 Nationality Law granted Jordanian citizenship to “any person who, not being Jewish, possessed Palestinian nationality before 15 May 1948 and resides ordinarily in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan on the publication date of this law.”

After the Six-Day War, Israel expelled the PLO to Jordan along with some 200,000 more Palestinians. There, they began a civil war that only ended after some 70,000 Jordanians were killed and the PLO was again expelled, this time to Lebanon, where it promptly started a civil war.

In 1988, Jordanian citizenship was revoked from Palestinians. As Anis F. Kassim, a Jordanian lawyer put it, “more than 1.5 million Palestinians went to bed on 31 July 1988 as Jordanian citizens, and woke up on 1 August 1988 as stateless persons.”

The current king of Jordan, Abdullah II, seems unwilling to accept any Gazans beyond the 2,000 “cancer children” he told Trump he would admit for treatment.

What about other Arab nations? Kuwait will never accept Palestinians. Before the first Persian Gulf War, thousands of Palestinians lived in Kuwait, working jobs Kuwaitis didn’t want. But when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990, Palestinians were on his side, and Kuwaitis have never forgiven them. Any post-Gulf war Kuwaiti advocacy on their behalf is motivated by hatred of Israel not love of Palestinians.

How about Indonesia, the country with the greatest number of Muslims in the world? “Indonesia’s stance remains unequivocal: any attempts to displace or remove Gaza’s residents is entirely unacceptable,” said the country’s foreign affairs minister, according to the Jakarta Globe.

Morocco, a signatory to the Abraham Accords, has also been mentioned as a potential destination, but it clearly doesn’t want Palestinians within its borders. Besides, the United States already recognizes Morocco’s sovereignty over the western Sahara, so that carrot has been eaten.

The most interesting and unusual choices made public are Puntland and Somaliland, two autonomous regions within Somalia.

Puntland, which declared itself autonomous in 1998 and claimed in 2023 that it would function as an independent state, could benefit from a deal to accept Palestinians. Likewise, Somaliland declared itself independent from Somalia in 1992 and operates autonomously, even though no country has recognized its independence. Accepting Palestinians might pave the way for either Puntland’s or Somaliland’s recognition as a separate country, but it would also leave their fledgling states vulnerable to violence and susceptible to being taken over by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the PLO and all the rest. It seems unlikely that either putative nation would risk achieving its goals by accepting Palestinian refugees.

Thus, Palestinians are left to live with the consequences of their decisions. Their inability to destroy Israel and unwillingness to abandon their dream of victory has kept them stateless and condemned their children to a life of misery. As Commentary’s John Podhoretz put it: “Like the Japanese and Germans in and after World War II, they have to be broken before they can be put back together as a functioning polis.”

After eight decades of militancy and refusal to accept any deal for a state that does not eliminate the State of Israel, Palestinians find themselves unwelcome throughout the world.

 Image: U.S. President Donald Trump hosts an expanded bilateral meeting and working lunch with King Abdullah II of Jordan and his son, Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah, at the White House, Feb. 11, 2025. Credit: Daniel Torok/White House.