At least one driver is shot each day in Gaza by looters forcibly stopping aid trucks to pull off whatever they can to make a profit in the middle of the devastated war zone

NEW YORK POST
Humanitarian aid stacks up at Gaza border as relief organizations won’t deliver out of fear of Hamas, violent looters
Caitlin Doornbos
December 26, 2024

Thousands of pallets of humanitarian aid stacked at the Gaza border — from sacks of flour to blankets and canned food — are awaiting delivery by relief organizations that are unwilling to send supply trucks likely to be looted by Hamas terrorists and other street criminals. The aid, coming in on trucks from Jordan, Egypt and the West Bank, has already been inspected by the Israel Defense Forces before entering Gaza, where the international community and humanitarian organizations are in charge of delivering the assistance to Palestinians. But the path from the Israel-Gaza border to where the aid is needed in the central and north is long — and repeatedly targeted by violent thieves. READ MORE

COMMENTARY Seth Mandel: The Truth About That Famine Report This week, a group of USAID-funded famine researchers went rogue, knowingly publishing false statistics in a politicized attempt to sway U.S. foreign policy and calling into question its ability to conduct independent research. Employees with the Famine Early Warning Systems compiled a report warning that northern Gaza would soon sink into famine. USAID, in reviewing the report, noted that FEWS’s numbers were wildly inflated and demonstrably false, rendering the conclusions unreliable.

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Carter: The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough

NATIONAL REVIEW
Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President
Philip Klein
December 29, 2024

After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him…Carter’s friendship with Arafat was part of a pattern in which he would chastise Israel in the most extreme terms while ignoring or minimizing the actions of terrorists and dictators whose enemies happened to be Israel. On a Middle East trip in 1990, he visited Syria to meet with Hafez al-Assad and had nothing to say about the brutal dictator’s violations of human rights, but then he went to Israel and blasted its human rights record as it was trying to form a government. READ MORE

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“Israeli authorities have indicated that Prime Minister Netanyahu will not attend the ceremony to avoid potential arrest”

JPOST
Holocaust Memorial Mission to Poland canceled due to threats of arrest of Israeli PM
January 1, 2024

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) announced on Monday the cancellation of its Holocaust Memorial Mission of a group of leading academics and policymakers to Poland, which was set to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The decision comes in response to the Polish government’s announcement that it could arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he attended the January 27 commemoration event at the concentration camp, citing the flawed and contentious International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant. READ MORE

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“In a truly astounding statistic, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all Jewish”

COMMENTARY
The Jewish Vote in 2024: Trump did better. But not much better
Jay P. Lefkowitz
January 2025

…Even after Hamas’s murder of approximately 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the Democratic Party has continued to distance itself from Israel. A study by the Brookings Institute found that notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, President Biden’s strong statements in support of Israel at the start of the war, 44 percent of Democrats running for Congress in 2024 did not even mention Israel in their campaign materials. Seven percent of Democratic candidates even declared that Israel is committing genocide and/or that the United States must stop supporting Israel in the war. READ MORE

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He told police he chose AIPAC as his target because of its “political influence” and location, saying he was frustrated with the “status quo”

THE HILL
FBI says it thwarted apparent plot against AIPAC
Julia Shapero
January 1, 2025

The FBI thwarted an apparent plot to harm employees at a Florida office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), according to court documents filed Monday. Law enforcement arrested Forrest Kendall Pemberton after he allegedly traveled to Plantation, Fla., in search of AIPAC’s office with several firearms, including an AR-15 rifle. Pemberton told police he went to the site, a former AIPAC office, to “scout” out the location before returning with the firearms, according to an affidavit signed by FBI special agent Taylor Nicklin. He was intercepted in a ride-share vehicle carrying the guns on Dec. 25, the first night of Hanukkah. READ MORE

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Except for Israel: “There’s never been a war in the history of war … where any nation has been asked, ‘But what’s your civilian-to-combat ratio?’ Because that’s just not how the law of war works”

JNS
The Gray Lady’s latest anti-Israel hit job
Ruthie Blum
December 30, 2024

It’s hard to imagine The New York Times stooping any lower than usual in its coverage of Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. Yet the Gray Lady seems to have managed to outdo itself on this score once again. Its latest hit job took the form of a lengthy news feature on Thursday, titled “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians.” The article, marked by as many bylines as anonymous sources, attempted to lull readers with a neat trick: using the Israel Defense Forces’ self-imposed “purity of arms” doctrine, a stricter code of ethics than that of any other military in history, to highlight the Jewish state’s allegedly unacceptable behavior on the battlefield. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL Public support for conscripting ultra-Orthodox has surged throughout war Public support for doing away with sweeping army exemptions for military-age ultra-Orthodox men has risen sharply over the past year, according to a survey published Tuesday by the Israel Democracy Institute. Support for drafting eligible Haredim either en masse or incrementally, complete with economic penalties for those who do not comply, stood at 84.5 percent, compared to 67% in January 2024, the survey showed. Only 9% of the Israeli public supported exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory military service.

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“Over the past decade or so, the warnings about smartphones have reached a fever pitch. Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma”revealed just how badly social media algorithms warp our brains, changing our behavior and beliefs”

FREE PRESS
How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against
Smartphones in Schools

Olivia Reingold
December 30, 2024

…Part of the book’s power is its simplicity. Haidt spells out four “foundational rules” to inspire a “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” They are: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones at school, and more unsupervised play and independence for kids. Haidt has consistently repeated these talking points at talks around the country and on his Instagram page, where he has 341,000 followers. Even so, Haidt told me he is “astounded” by how quickly the movement has spread throughout America, even rippling across the pond to the UK. “The only other example of social change I’ve seen that has moved this quickly is the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he told me. When I asked him why it took so long, he called it a “collective action problem,” in which the general public resents the status quo, but individuals are too scared to challenge it. READ MORE

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“The new rulers of Syria have been sending out messages demanding that Israel return to the ceasefire line, and the US and other countries have also begun to exert pressure on the Netanyahu cabinet to retreat”

JEWISH PRESS
Israel Establishing Extensive Military and Civilian Control in Southern Syria
David Israel
December 26, 2024

Israel is establishing extensive military and civilian control in southern Syria, the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported Wednesday. According to the report, the IDF has taken control of the buffer zone in southern Syria, including cities, towns, and strategic hills, and reached the suburbs of Daraa and taken control of the Yarmouk Basin and the freshwater sources in the area. Since the fall of the Assad regime, Al-Akhbar noted, Israeli forces have entered deep into Syrian territory and taken control of large areas along the buffer zone, more than 20 kilometers deep in some areas, including taking control of the strategic Mount Hermon peak. This is while UN peacekeeping forces are absent from the scene, and the new government in Damascus is distancing itself from what is happening in the south, claiming that the country cannot bear more wars. READ MORE

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“Israel has roared back to crush Hamas and defang Hezbollah, leaving the Assad regime in Syria to crumble and all their masters in Iran to fret, without air defenses, over Bibi’s next move”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Inside Story of Israel’s Comeback Victory
Elliot Kaufman
December 21, 2024

…“Hezbollah doesn’t want to continue the fight right now,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Neither do the Iranians. “They were dumbfounded when we took out their critical air defenses” after their second missile attack on Israel, he says. Israel also damaged Iran’s ballistic-missile production, “which means they now have to calculate how much ammo they have, because it’ll take them several years to resuscitate it—assuming we don’t hit it again.” Each attack had a multiplier effect. “We knocked down Hezbollah, which was supposed to protect Iran. And Iran didn’t protect Hezbollah either. And neither of them protected [Syria’s Bashar al] Assad. So, we just split that whole axis right down the middle.” READ MORE

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Former agents from Israel’s Mossad detail how they built and sold explosive pagers to Hezbollah terrorists

JPOST
60 Minutes confirms that walkie-talkie sabotage of Hezbollah was initiated over a decade ago
Yonah Jeremy Bob
December 24, 2024

A 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday evening confirmed many of the details behind the beeper and walkie-talkie sabotage attack against Hezbollah: the operation began over a decade ago, with the Mossad initially weaponizing walkie-talkies sold to the Iranian-backed proxy terrorist group. The beeper and walkie-talkie attack sent Hezbollah reeling and was credited for giving Israel an extra opening for a bombing campaign that brought the Lebanese terrorist group to its knees…Several top Israeli sources believe that if the walkie-talkie program had been used in October 2023, it could actually have killed around 15,000 Hezbollah terrorists, dwarfing even the impressive results that came after a year of fighting. READ MORE

CBS 60 Minutes Former agents from Israel’s Mossad detail how they built and sold explosive pagers to Hezbollah terrorists On Sept. 17, after Israel and the terrorist organization Hezbollah had been in an escalating war for nearly a year, the Israeli spy agency Mossad launched one of the most daring and sophisticated deceptions in the history of counter-intelligence: the pager plot, a modern take on the Trojan horse. Mossad created a bomb in a pocket – and tricked Hezbollah fighters into unwittingly wearing these devices on their bodies. Click here to view the episode

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