National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir clashes with American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during government meeting to approve the agreement with Hamas.

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Yes, we won
Amit Segal
October 9, 2025

…Hamas no longer threatens Israelis, and if Israel resists the temptation to return to its old habits of restraint, it will not rise again. Iran has been dealt a severe blow, and its nuclear project crippled. Hezbollah, Israel’s most dangerous enemy since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt—is taking hits daily and no longer dares fire even a single mortar at the Jewish state. For the first time, there is real hope that children living near the Gaza border will grow up without sirens and rocket alerts every few weeks. There will be no new “round” with Gaza anytime soon, and if there is, it will take place under entirely different conditions. For the first time in two generations, the security of Israeli citizens matters more than the exact line of the international border—in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza, and even in the skies above Tehran. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA Ben Gvir to US envoys: Would you make a deal with Hitler?  The government convened on Thursday evening to approve the agreement with the Hamas terrorist organization. In an unusual development, American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner joined the meeting for approximately 30 minutes. During the session, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir delivered sharp criticism of the deal. “I’m sitting here looking at the list of terrorists being released – murderers of babies, rapists of women,” he said. “With all due respect, the United States would never release people like this.

NY SUN While Trump Sees ‘Peace in the Middle East,’ Israelis Eye Future Dangers In the end, “extreme Islam will not disappear,” the head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, Yossi Kuperwasser, tells the Sun. The threats to Israel include “the Iran-led axis,” including the Houthis, “the Muslim Brotherhood axis — Turkey, Syria, Qatar, and Palestinian terrorists — and a growing number of anti-Israel extremists in the West” that pose strategic challenges for the country.

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“October 8, 2023 was when the world changed for Jews, and when Jews began to change for the world”

VOICE OF ZION
The hostages are coming home!
Yonah E
October 9, 2025

…Today the Middle East wakes up redrawn — not with ink on paper, but with courage, deterrence, and divine wrath. The lesson is eternal: you touch a Jew, you pay a price. You burn a kibbutz, your city burns back. You hold our babies hostage — you will meet soldiers who move like thunder and carry the fury of 4,000 years. When I made Aliyah last year, I thought I knew what Zionism meant. I didn’t. I know it now. It’s standing on the soil of your ancestors while rockets fall, and still sending your kids to school. It’s burying friends and still raising the flag higher. It’s loving this land so much that fear becomes irrelevant. I walk through Efrat and see a people reborn in their own ashes — families who lost everything but refuse to bow. This is the new Jew. We are not the broken ghosts of 1938. We are not the frightened whispers of the Warsaw Ghetto. We are the descendants of Maccabees, armed with tanks and Torah, with faith and fire. READ MORE

MIDDLE EAST FORUM Gregg Roman: Israel’s Hostages Come Home, But At What Price? The arithmetic of this exchange should give everyone pause. Israel will release over 1,700 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences for the most heinous acts of terrorism. These aren’t stone-throwers or protesters. These are the architects of the Park Hotel Passover massacre, the planners of the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, the orchestrators of attacks that turned school buses into crime scenes. Each has blood on their hands and expertise in their heads. Hamas is trading 48 hostages—20 living and 28 dead—for 1,700 experienced operatives—a massive force multiplication that transforms tactical defeat into strategic victory. Every released prisoner returns to Gaza or the West Bank as a hero, a symbol of resistance, armed with years of additional training and burning with renewed purpose.

FUTURE OF JEWISH We are all October 8th Jews now If October 7th was the day that broke the Jewish world, October 8th was the day that remade us. The images emanating from southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — the burned bodies, the stolen children, the laughter of murderers — tore open something ancient and fragile in the Jewish soul. On October 8th, when the carnage was still fresh, we began to see with devastating clarity what we had long tried not to see: that the safety, belonging, and sympathy we once believed we had earned in the modern world were illusions. The spell was broken. October 8th was when the world changed for Jews, and when Jews began to change for the world. For decades, many of us Jews believed that the Holocaust had finally secured us a place among the civilized.

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Eli Sharabi was taken captive by Hamas, and released on Feb. 8. He is the author of “Hostage.”

WASHINGTON POST
What 491 days as a hostage taught me about Hamas
Eli Sharabi
October 6, 2025

On Oct. 7, 2023, terrorists broke into my home in Kibbutz Be’eri. My wife, Lianne, our daughters Noiya and Yahel and I hid in our safe room as the gunmen burned and murdered their way through the kibbutz. After they took me, I was seized, bound and dragged into Gaza. My first experience was not only with Hamas fighters but also with an ecstatic civilian mob — men, women, children — fighting to try to rip me limb from limb. The Hamas terrorists needed to push the mob back. I did not know my wife and daughters had already been murdered. The hope that they were alive carried me through 491 days of captivity, a hope that was only destroyed upon my release. READ MORE

COMMENTARY Seth Mandel: To Hell and Back “There is also a pragmatic reason for Israel’s commitment to redeeming captives. It is a source of legitimacy for the IDF. As a nation with full conscription, the basic deal Israelis make with their government is this: We give you our sons and daughters, and then you give them back. The common expression in Israel is that its soldiers are ‘everyone’s children.’ This is more than a mere sentimental point; it is a crucial source of military and social cohesion.”

TIMES OF ISRAEL Dead hostages’ families worry about condition in which they will be returned, if at all Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 48 hostages, including 47 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of the two others, Israeli officials have said. Among the bodies held by Hamas is an IDF soldier, Hadar Goldin, killed in Gaza in 2014.

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“The Jewish state has taken on many U.S. enemies since Oct. 7, 2023, even as the left turned against it”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
America’s Debt to Israel
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh
October 6, 2025

Two years after Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, the U.S. should be grateful to Israel. The Jewish state has defanged a range of militant actors who despise the U.S. and have killed Americans. Yet the Gaza war, with its substantial civilian casualties, has turned much of the Democratic Party against Israel and fractured European-Israeli relations. Israel’s enemies on the left depict the Jewish state as an illegitimate pro-Trump “apartheid” state, and the war has also stirred anti-Israel sentiments in corners of the American right…But Israel’s fight against Hamas has proved different from the Six-Day War. Hamas, Israel’s savviest enemy, borrowed a page from the playbook of past guerrilla forces. By shielding themselves with civilians, the terrorists have been able to use innocents’ deaths to mobilize the international community against the Jewish state. Democracies are particularly vulnerable to this cruel tactic.  READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA US sends 200 troops to Israel to monitor Gaza ceasefire The US is deploying 200 troops to Israel to monitor Gaza ceasefire and aid flow, as part of Trump’s peace plan. Troops will coordinate with allies and IDF, but won’t enter Gaza.

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“Thousands of Christian pilgrims have arrived for the Feast of Tabernacles, showing no hesitation in supporting Israel during these trying times”

JPOST
Israel’s Christian friends have no qualms about standing by the Jewish people
Editorial Board
October 8, 2025

The country has entered Sukkot on tenterhooks as we await word on whether the plan to end the Gaza war and return our hostages unveiled by US President Donald Trump last week will bear fruit. Thankfully, we have friends from abroad who are boosting the spirits of the country and embracing its citizens during these trying times, and reminding us that Sukkot is a joyous time for the Jewish people. We’re talking about the thousands of Christian pilgrims who have arrived this week for the holiday, which they know as the Feast of Tabernacles. With incoming tourism hit sharply over the last two years of the Gaza war (and with the COVID pandemic before that), any sign of visitors and support for Israel should be welcomed. READ MORE

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“The information diet fed to Arab audiences often includes selective voices: anti-Israel Jewish intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or Western-based Arab commentators with limited regional expertise, such as the late Edward Said”

FDD
Two Years of Arab and Muslim Failure
Hussain Abdul-Hussain
October 7, 2025

…What Palestinians needed, before and after October 7, was an honest discussion about their options. The failure to establish a Palestinian state is not due to Israeli control over territory but stems from Palestinian inability to form a representative, reliable government that speaks for all of them and delivers on its commitments without shifting goals to suit populist narratives, as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has done since 1993. Friends of Palestinians – particularly in the Arab and Muslim world – have failed them. Instead of fostering pragmatic discussions about costs, consequences and governance, many have indulged in emotional rhetoric and populism, focusing on vilifying Israel’s response to October 7 while ignoring the barbaric actions that triggered the response and the Arab and Palestinian failure to force a Hamas surrender that would have ended the war on October 8. READ MORE

CAMERA David Litman: The Extraordinary Dishonesty of CNN’s “Gaza Famine” Coverage CNN’s October 2 feature on an alleged “famine” in Gaza (“How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized” by Sana Noor Haq, Rachel Wilson, Soph Warnes, Lou Robinson, and Henrik Pettersson, with contributions from Ibrahim DahmanKareem Khadder, and Eyad Kourdi) offers a case study in what happens when journalists let their storylines lead the facts instead of the other way around. The article’s central premise—that famine has taken hold in Gaza and that Israel is solely to blame—collapses upon examination of CNN’s own reporting.

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HBO Max’s ‘One Day in October’ revisits the massacre on its two-year anniversary

DAILY BEAST
This Chilling Drama Series About October 7 Will Leave You Shaken
Nick Schager
October 7, 2025

Time and distance often prove a benefit to understanding and processing unspeakable tragedies, especially when tackling them through a dramatic lens. Nonetheless, One Day in October uses immediacy to its moving advantage. An anthology about October 7 that’s debuting on HBO Max on the two-year anniversary of the attacks—and whose first four installments originally premiered in Israel last October 7—Oded Davidoff and Daniel Finkelman’s miniseries is a collection of dramatized true stories from that distressing day, affording intimate and urgent snapshots of the slaughter from a variety of divergent vantage points. Poignant and harrowing, it’s an act of memory, confrontation, and healing, as well as a challenge to the world to reckon with, and remember, an unfathomable atrocity. HBO Max provided press with two of One Day in October’s seven chapters, both of which exemplify the endeavor’s desire to look, closely and agonizingly, at an unspeakable nightmare. READ MORE. Click here to view One Day in October trailer

JEWISH JOURNAL ‘One Day in October’ and the Story That Hasn’t Ended The series interweaves the experiences of Israelis who lived October 7 in all its unimaginable horror. We saw the story of Omer Shem Tov, who spent 505 days in Hamas captivity — a reminder that while the series is titled One Day in October, that day has not ended. It continues for every hostage still held by Hamas and every Israeli praying for their return. We saw the story of parents who saved their infant daughter as Gazan civilians marauded through their home, setting it ablaze with the family inside. And we met an incredible young woman and warrior who helped save her kibbutz from being overrun by terrorists.

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“As reservists went to war with expired armor and broken helmets, the Friends of the IDF imploded in allegations of misconduct. But the real scandal was ideological, and rooted in a U.S.-Israel relationship that undermined Israel’s security from within”

TABLET MAG
Israel’s Forgotten Army
Jacob Siegel
October 4, 2025

“It was absolutely abysmal. I mean, it was shocking the equipment that we were given.” Eitan was 27 years old on Oct. 7 when he got the alert. (Soldiers who are identified by their first names only have had their names changed.)…The IDF’s problem was that its leaders had spent decades under the illusion that ground wars requiring mass mobilizations, which are the miluim’s raison d’être, were a thing of the past. In ideal circumstances, a reserve force will still operate at a level of funding and equipment below its active-duty counterparts. But in Israel, where the reserves were no longer seen as vital to the military’s offensive capabilities, the situation had moved past nonideal to dangerously unprepared. Eitan, serving in the reserve component of a special operations unit, should have had better gear than most. Yet, even for the elite commandos of miluim, the initial supply situation was dismal. READ MORE

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“A Palestinian boy saved by Israeli doctors & by the compassion of one of Israel’s biggest music stars עידן רייכל – Idan Raichel – through the incredible Save a Child’s Heart program – grew up to become a Hamas terrorist who murdered Jews”

JNS
Compassion is no match for indoctrination
Micha Danzig
October 5, 2025

Israeli world musician Idan Raichel recently revealed a story that should shake anyone still clinging to illusions about the war in the Gaza Strip. Seventeen years ago, through the extraordinary Save a Child’s Heart program, he helped save the life of a child from the Hamas-run coastal enclave. It was a story of humanity that transcended borders. But this year, Raichel learned that the child whose life he helped save grew up, joined Hamas and took part in murdering Jews.SFor many, the story is incomprehensible. How does a boy, given life by Israeli compassion, repay that gift by pledging allegiance to those who burn babies alive, rape women and kidnap Holocaust survivors? The answer is simple: Compassion is no match for indoctrination. READ MORE

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“After leaving, Weiss launched a successful Substack that grew into the Free Press, which was acquired by Paramount as part of the deal that put her in charge at CBS”

NATIONAL REVIEW
Good Luck to Bari Weiss at CBS
The Editors
October 8, 2025

The appointment of Bari Weiss to be editor in chief of CBS News has people freaking out — “like, literally freaking out,” per a staffer at the organization quoted by The Independent. “People are using words like depressing and doomsday,” said another. So what, exactly, is all the fuss about? Weiss gained national attention in 2020 when she resigned from the New York Times, which had become a hostile environment. She wrote as a disillusioned liberal rather than as a doctrinaire conservative, but that was enough to earn her the ire of colleagues in a newsroom that could not tolerate any deviation from progressive groupthink. READ MORE

NATIONAL REVIEW A Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia Is Fundamentally Unfunny — and Unfree  If an American stand-up comedian agrees to perform in the quasi-authoritarian country of Saudi Arabia for boatloads of money, is he selling out free speech? Sebastian Maniscalco, Pete Davidson, Andrew Schulz, Bill Burr, and Dave Chappelle are popular comics who are participating this week in the Riyadh Comedy Festival, a Saudi-sponsored event, for allegedly big checks.

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