A majority of Israelis oppose the permanent annexation of parts of the Gaza Strip, a move that the government has reportedly begun mulling amid the logjam in efforts to secure a hostage release and ceasefire deal with Hamas, a poll conducted for The Times of Israel found.
 
Among respondents to the poll, 53.2 percent rejected annexing parts of the Strip, while 38.9% support annexation and 7.9% had no opinion.
 
The survey also found that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would win the most seats were elections held today, but it with its allied factions would fall far short of securing a majority coalition.
 
In the wake of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and throughout the war in Gaza, leaders on the far right have called for Israel to annex the territory and reestablish settlements there. Israel evacuated its settlements and troops from the enclave under the 2005 disengagement program.

Wednesday’s survey found that if elections were held today, Likud would win the most seats, at 26, followed by former premier Naftali Bennett’s party — currently going by the placeholder name Naftali Bennett 2026 — which would secure 24 seats.
 
(...)
 
Altogether, the current coalition, including the ultra-Orthodox parties that recently left the government in protest, would win only 49 seats, far short of a 61-seat majority. The opposition parties, not counting the Arab factions, would fall just short, at 60.

Israeli Military Intelligence Goes Back to Basics With Focus on Spies, Not Tech
 
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country’s military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam.

The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse.
 
(...)
 
The agency had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of Hamas ideology and its concrete plans, said a military intelligence officer, laying out the changes and speaking under standard military anonymity.
 
While the service was aware of Hamas’ scheme to capture military bases and civilian communities near Gaza, even watching militants rehearse in plain sight, the assessment was that they were fantasizing. Analysts concluded that the Iran-backed Islamist group was content in its role as ruler, pacified by foreign donations and well-paid work for some Gazans in Israel.
 
The failure to meet the enemy on its own terms is one that Israel’s security apparatus is determined never to repeat.
 
“If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,” said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center, “they’d understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.”
 
The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls “a deep cultural shift” in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture “that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.”
 
Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East.
 
(...)
 
The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don’t speak Arabic, and Israel’s two million Arab citizens aren’t required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than two percent of the population.
 
As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help.
 
It’s also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit’s work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — Ipcha Mistabra — or “the reverse may be reasonable.”
 
(...)
 
More broadly, the service is moving away from technology and towards a deeper reliance on human intelligence — such as planting undercover agents in the field and building up the interrogations unit. This breaks with a shift over the past decade towards working with data from satellite imagery and drones, and goes hand-in-hand with another change that was made after Oct. 7. While the country’s borders used to be monitored by sensor-equipped fences and barriers, the military is now deploying more boots on the ground.
 
These new approaches will not only require more people, said Ofer Guterman, a former officer in military intelligence currently at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, but people who are “more alert to different arenas.” Prior to the Hamas attack, he said, “there was a national perception that the big threats were behind us, except an Iranian nuclear weapon.” Now that that has been proven false, he believes that Israel needs “to rebuild our intelligence culture.”
 
(...)

@BernieSanders

Netanyahu is a disgusting liar.

Children are starving to death.

The United States cannot continue to supply his racist government with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that is used to kill innocent people.

Emily Schrader (Hebrew: אמילי שריידר; born 20 April 1991) is an Israeli-American journalist, author, and social activist. She is a news anchor at ILTV News[1][2] and a co-host of The Quad on JNS.[3][4]
Early life
 
Schrader was born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has a mixed Christian and Jewish background,[5] and identifies as Jewish.[6][7]
 
Schrader studied at the University of Southern California, majoring in political science, and obtained her master's degree at Tel Aviv University in political communications.[5] Schrader made Aliyah to Israel in 2015.[8]
 
Schrader is a journalist, pro-Israel activist and Zionist.[9][2][10] She has been a Jerusalem Post columnist[11] and a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.[12] She was digital director of the pro-Israel lobbying organization, StandWithUs.[13]

Schrader was named by Algemeiner as one of the 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life in 2022,[22] and in 2023 as one of the 18 "women to watch" by Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization.[23]

Today, U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA) issued the following statement on his intentions to vote “YES” on two joint resolutions of disapproval amid mass starvation in Gaza.

“It is wrong to starve children and other innocent civilians to death. Yet, whether through gross incompetence, woeful indifference, or some combination thereof, that is exactly what is happening right now in Gaza under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. It is a moral atrocity that cannot abide the conscience of those who believe in human dignity, freedom, and human thriving. That is why I will vote to support the Joint Resolution of Disapproval put before the Senate tonight.

“I’ve made clear I support the state of Israel and its right to defend itself. Today, I urge the state of Israel, the United States, and the world to move as quickly as possible to get the people of Gaza the same nourishment and care that we would want for our own children.

“I pray for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages home to their families, and look forward to resuming the work of securing peace and safety for all those in the region.”

L’armée israélienne a tiré sur au moins 57 enfants palestiniens à la tête ou à la poitrine, révèle une enquête de la BBC

Au moins 57 enfants palestiniens ont été frappés par l’armée israélienne d’une balle dans la tête ou dans la poitrine depuis le début de la guerre à Gaza en octobre 2023. C’est ce qui ressort vendredi d’une enquête menée par la chaîne britannique BBC. Israël affirme que les autorités enquêtent sur deux affaires.

Au cours des derniers mois, la BBC a enquêté sur 168 cas d’enfants touchés par des tirs dans la bande de Gaza. Dans 95 de ces cas, les journalistes ont découvert que l’enfant avait été touché à la tête ou à la poitrine.
 
Sur la base de témoignages oculaires, la BBC a finalement pu conclure que 57 d’entre eux avaient été visés par l’armée israélienne (IDF) et deux par des Palestiniens. Les autres cas n’ont pas pu être vérifiés, car Israël n’autorise pas les journalistes à entrer dans la région. Au moins 90 des 168 enfants sont déjà décédés des suites de leurs blessures par balle.

« Laissez-nous faire notre travail », insiste le patron de l’UNRWA, au sujet de l’aide humanitaire
« L’ONU (…) était en mesure de faire entrer entre 500 et 600 camions par jour lors du cessez-le-feu » en début d’année, rompu le 18 mars par Israël, a rappelé vendredi le patron de l’UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini.

Cette aide atteignait alors « l’ensemble de la population de Gaza en toute sécurité et dignité » et sans « aucune diversion », a-t-il insisté, jugeant qu’« aucune alternative à la réponse coordonnée par l’ONU (…) n’a donné de résultats similaires ».

« Revenons à ce qui fonctionne et laissez-nous faire notre travail. C’est ce dont les habitants de Gaza ont besoin aujourd’hui plus que jamais, avec un cessez-le-feu durable », a conclu le patron de l’UNRWA.

L’ONU dispose de près de 6 000 camions chargés de vivres, actuellement bloqués à l’extérieur de Gaza, et prêts à entrer dans le territoire palestinien affamé, a fait savoir Philippe Lazzarini. Les largages aériens « coûtent au moins 100 fois plus cher que les camions » qui « transportent deux fois plus d’aide que les avions ». « S’il existe une volonté politique pour permettre des largages aériens – extrêmement coûteux, insuffisants et inefficaces – il devrait y avoir une volonté politique similaire pour ouvrir les passages routiers. »

“In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement. That staff member has rejoined the Agency.  
 
“In nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff members’ involvement and the OIOS investigation of them is now closed.  
 
“For the remaining nine cases, the evidence – if authenticated and corroborated – could indicate that the UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the attacks of 7 October.