The Israeli president stated that “to finish the tragedy in Gaza, which was imposed only by Hamas, one has to get the hostages back home.”

JNS Staff

(JNS)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, currently on a diplomatic visit to the Baltic states, met with Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs in Riga on Tuesday.

During joint press statements following their bilateral talks, Herzog issued an urgent appeal to the international community, urging nations not to engage in dialogue with the Hamas terrorist group until all hostages held in Gaza are released.

Emphasizing the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the plight of hostages, Herzog said, “In order to get to the day after, in order to finish the tragedy in Gaza, the terrible tragedy in Gaza, which was imposed only by Hamas, one has to get the hostages back home. Because we are dealing with a jihadist terror regime in Gaza, which we are trying to remove in order to release our hostages and make sure that our citizens on the border live in peace, we have to get the hostages back.”

Displaying images of recently publicized hostages, Herzog detailed their dire conditions and made a direct plea to the International Red Cross to deliver vital aid.

The pictures were of severely emaciated Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski. Hamas released the footage of David on Aug. 1. Palestinian Islamic Jihad released its video of Braslavski a day earlier.

Twenty captives are estimated to be alive. Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 251 people during the Hamas-led terrorist invasion and attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Herzog noted recent efforts by Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including the delivery of over 23,000 tons of aid in the past 10 days and increased airdrops. However, he emphasized that genuine progress hinges on the immediate release of hostages.

“I call upon the international community from here in Riga,” he stated, to present “a unanimous, tough position, including Europe, and saying to Hamas and its allies: we’re not talking to you until you release the hostages.”

Images: Israeli President Isaac Herzog holds up images of Israeli hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski as Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs looks on during their joint press conference in Riga, Latvia, on Aug. 5, 2025. Photo: Haim Zach/GPO.

Israeli security assessment details the IDF’s crippling blow to Hezbollah’s command as well as its rocket and tunnel capabilities in 2024 operation.

Yaakov Lappin

(JNS)

The Israel Defense Forces inflicted a devastating blow on Hezbollah during the September 2024 Operation Northern Arrows against the Iranian-backed terror organization in Lebanon, dismantling from 70 to 80 percent of its short-range rocket launchers, killing or wounding thousands of its operatives and rendering its elite Radwan commando force incapable of launching a large-scale invasion of the Galilee, according to Israeli security official.

The official shared a comprehensive recent assessment by the  IDF’s Northern Command, noting that the IDF has shifted to a new “forward defense” posture, operating from five outposts inside a southern Lebanese buffer zone.

The goal of this presence is to maintain “strategic superiority in the area,” he said. “The IDF operates from these outposts to strike remaining weapons and infrastructure near the border, prevent Hezbollah’s involvement in rebuilding the arena, restrict Hezbollah operatives’ freedom of movement and instill a sense of susceptibility and vulnerability within Hezbollah.”

As part of this effort, the official noted, the IDF has more than doubled its forces deployed along the Lebanese border.

According to the Israeli assessment, Hezbollah’s ability to threaten the Israeli home front has been severely degraded. The dismantling of the vast majority of its short-range rocket launchers has reduced its projectile fire capabilities to “small-scale volleys,” with the group experiencing difficulty in coordinating even these limited barrages.

The damage inflicted has significantly decreased the threat to the IDF’s own air defense systems and has curtailed Hezbollah’s ability to strike Israeli communities to “sporadic, isolated launches,” according to the assessment.

The terror group’s much-vaunted elite Radwan Force, which for years trained to invade northern Israel and seize communities under a plan known as the “Galilee invasion,” on which Hamas modeled its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on the western Negev, has been effectively neutralized as a major offensive threat.

The security official stated that the “Radwan Force is currently not fit for a large-scale offensive operation.” This is a result of a concerted Israeli campaign that dismantled all of the Radwan Force’s infrastructure, numbering in the hundreds of sites, along the entire frontline.

A key component of Israel’s strategy was the destruction of Hezbollah’s so-called “underground land” in southern Lebanon. The official detailed how the IDF located and dismantled approximately 1,500 underground infrastructure sites, including bunkers, command posts, and weapons depots. This effort dealt a “significant blow to Hezbollah, particularly affecting how operatives survive and weapons are stored in the area.”

The IDF also located and eliminated all of Hezbollah’s offensive tunneling infrastructure, including one cross-border attack tunnel. The campaign has led to an adaptation of the IDF’s combat doctrine for underground warfare in the northern arena.

The human cost to Hezbollah has been substantial. According to the Israeli assessment, between 4,000 and 5,000 Hezbollah commanders and operatives were eliminated during the fighting, with an additional 9,000 removed from the group’s combat reserves.

The loss of senior commanders has left Hezbollah’s leadership with a “sense of vulnerability and unfamiliarity with the terrain and operational framework,” said the military official. The organization as a whole has suffered a “significant blow to its morale and operational continuity,” he added.

With the ceasefire in effect, the IDF has transitioned to a new strategy designed to enforce the terms of the agreement and prevent Hezbollah from recovering. The primary Israeli objectives are preventing the re-establishment of Hezbollah’s operational presence south of the Litani River and dismantling any remaining ability to manufacture or deploy weapons. To achieve this, the IDF is operating through two main efforts.

The first is a “forward defense” posture via five outposts established in a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon. These outposts are aimed at “maintaining strategic superiority in the area.” From these positions, the IDF strikes remaining weapons and infrastructure, prevents Hezbollah’s involvement in rebuilding the area, restricts the freedom of movement of its operatives, and instills a “sense of susceptibility and vulnerability within Hezbollah.”

The second effort involves enforcing the agreement with Lebanon by working with the established international mechanism in southern Lebanon, while continuing to conduct independent strikes and eliminations on terrorists and terror targets as needed.

This new security reality has allowed for the return of a majority of displaced northern Israeli civilians. Since the ceasefire began on November 27, 2024, some three-quarters of northern residents have returned to their homes. The IDF is also bolstering local security by establishing outposts within Israeli communities and expanding civilian defense squads.

In the Syrian arena, meanwhile, the fall of the Assad regime created a strategic opportunity for Israel to dismantle capabilities that belonged to the Iranian axis. The IDF acted to thwart and damage Iranian entrenchment in Syria, striking military targets in the Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo areas.

The campaign also targeted terrorist groups in southern Syria, intercepted weapons transfers on the Lebanon-Syria border, and significantly damaged the Syrian Air Force and its strategic weaponry. The official noted that during these operations, the IDF struck over 600 targets in Syria with more than 1,800 munitions.

This strategic advantage, the official stated, has been crucial in “cutting off the Shi’ite axis from Iran to Syria and Lebanon,” which, he said, will enable further restrictions on weapons smuggling to Hezbollah.

Image: Israel Defense Forces soldiers operate against the Hezbollah terrorist group in Southern Lebanon, Jan. 23, 2025. Credit: IDF.

The head of the GHF set the record straight about getting food to Gazans. But he didn’t scratch the surface of the anti-Israel slander.

Ruthie Blum

(JNS)

Let’s not kid ourselves. Israel’s heightened efforts to guarantee that humanitarian aid reaches the residents of Gaza without falling into the hands of Hamas aren’t going to put a dent in the “purposeful starvation” propaganda campaign.

We don’t have to look far for evidence that this is the case. Take Israel’s exposing of the false depiction of certain children in the Strip with congenital diseases as victims of the “Israel-imposed famine,” for instance.

Revealing the truth behind the viral photos and front-page fabrications hasn’t stopped mainstream media outlets, including Israeli ones, from perpetuating the lie. Nor has it prevented European leaders from finger-wagging at Israel.

On the contrary, the more that Israel presents the facts, the louder the cacophony grows. The same goes for the higher the number of compromises it makes with Hamas—in order to secure the release of at least some of the hostages—and the greater the amount of aid it provides to Gazans. Indeed, the blood libels lobbed at the Jewish state since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre nearly two years ago only increase with each passing Israeli concession.

The timing of the current Hamas-spurred media blitz isn’t accidental. It coincided with the ceasefire/hostage-release talks in Qatar. To be more precise, it began when the American and Israeli delegations had reached the end of their rope—with the terrorist group’s constant upping of its ante in the negotiations—and returned home.

Hamas’s intransigence was given a boost by the likes of The New York Times, the United Nations, and, of course, French President Emmanuel Macron, who announced his country’s unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state as a reward for Hamas atrocities.

It’s not surprising that none of those professing grave concern for the plight of hungry Palestinians bothers to mention the massive amounts of aid stolen by Hamas or the truckloads of food decaying at the border, due to the refusal by the United Nations to distribute it.

What these bleeding hearts do instead is criticize, rather than praise, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Naturally.

After all, the reason that GHF aid is reaching the non-combatants is that, together with the Israel Defense Forces, it has managed to separate them from the terrorists trying to sabotage the endeavor and kill anyone who gets in their way.

GHF chairman Johnnie Moore articulated the above in an interview on Monday evening with Channel 14’s Maggie Tabibi.

“There is profound hunger in Gaza; that’s why we’re there,” he began. “We’ve delivered—soon surpassing—100 million meals of food directly to the people of Gaza. And they needed that food.”

But instead of support, the foundation has been met with hostility from the very organizations that profess to care about Gazans.

“The United Nations has been a participant in a series of propaganda and disinformation campaigns that, in effect, made them a press secretary for Hamas,” he said. “It’s basically put them on the Hamas side of the negotiating table.”

He then called out the United Nations for its hypocrisy.

“How can you have 1,000 trucks of food sitting inside the Gaza Strip that you refuse to deliver, while simultaneously using every available means—communications, P.R., political allies—to promote the claim that there isn’t enough food?”

He recounted that he’d written an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with a proposition: “If the United Nations wasn’t going to deliver the food into the Gaza Strip, then we would just do it for them. I actually asked one of the State Department officials to have a lawyer study that.”

He continued: “We’ve got a lot of people who say that they’re humanitarians, sitting in suits and ties in Geneva and New York City. But they’re not humanitarians at all. They’re politicians serving a different agenda.”

Asked whether his mission was too big for the GHF to handle, Moore replied, “From the very beginning, we were clear that we couldn’t do this alone; we needed to work with other organizations. We do not exist to replace the aid system in the Gaza Strip.”

But he scoffed at the suggestion that the GHF has failed.

“Of course [not]! How could you say that delivering 100 million meals of food directly to the people of Gaza—thousands of truckloads, not a single one intercepted or diverted—is a failure?”

He pointed out that “90% of the World Food Programme’s convoys didn’t make it to their final destination. None of our food has been diverted by Hamas. We have served at least 800,000 people in Gaza. That’s a conservative number—it may be closer to a million.”

He added, “We have, in just a few short weeks, over the course of two wars, provided life-saving food to half of the people in the Gaza Strip.” And that’s while “operating in an active war zone in the most complex environment in the world.”

He proceeded to blast the United Nations for deliberate obstruction.

“The leaders of the United Nations used all their political power around the world to make sure it was impossible for us to expand,” he said, stressing that “it wasn’t Israel preventing our growth; it was the intentional policy of the United Nations.”

He also underscored the disingenuousness of the world body, which shouts about the suffering of the Palestinians, yet blocks those who can actually help them.

“It’s corruption,” he stated unequivocally.

Summing up the core difference between GHF and the rest of the so-called aid community, he said: “These existing agencies—they don’t even try to solve the problem. What we’ve proven is that it’s possible to deliver millions and millions of meals of food without it being diverted. ‘Diverted’ is a fancy legal term; it just means ‘stolen’. Hamas steals the aid and uses it for nefarious purposes.”

While he declined to comment on Israeli policy, he didn’t hold back on the bigger picture. “We’ve shined a very, very bright light on a very, very broken humanitarian system,” he said.

He was right.

But he only scratched the surface of the underlying illness at the root of the slanderous stories in which Israel is the ultimate villain. It’s the world’s oldest hatred that’s enjoying a horrifying revival.

Image: Gazans receive humanitarian aid in 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

During the last week in June, stickers and/or graffiti depicting antisemitic phrases were placed on a mailbox, stop sign and emergency bell.

(JNS)

The Chicago Police Department issued a community alert on Monday regarding a string of antisemitic, “hate crime-related” damages to property over one week at the end of June.

Between June 23 and June 30, “unknown offender(s)” placed stickers and tagged locations with graffiti depicting antisemitic phrases, with damaged property including a mailbox, a stop sign and an emergency bell.

All incidents occurred in the Hyde Park neighborhood, which has a substantial Jewish presence.

JNS contacted the police department for incident reports.

Recent statistics released by the city of Chicago showed that antisemitic hate crimes “surged” by 58% in 2024, and account for 37.6% of all reported hate crimes in the city.

“This is part of a national increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes but is especially troubling given that Jewish residents represent just 3% of Chicago’s population,” according to the office of Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Image: Police car lights. Credit: Franz P. Sauerteig/Pixabay.

Katharina von Schnurbein was merely saying “that today’s antisemitism often wears the mask of anti-Zionism,’’ the European Jewish Association maintains.

Yossi Lempkowicz

(European Jewish Press via JNS)

European Jewish organizations expressed support for Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, who has been the target of a campaign criticizing her for pointing out that much of hatred directed at Israel because of the war in Gaza is directed at Jews and is fueling antisemitism.

The campaign also “accuses” her of having lobbied against E.U. sanctions on Israel.

Some 26 MEPs, mainly from left-wing groups, have called for her to resign, in a letter sent to the European Commission, according to EUObserver.

In a statement on Friday, the European Jewish Association, an organization representing more than 600 Jewish communities across the continent, said it “stands firmly with her.

“Of course, Israel, like any democracy, is not above criticism. Like any other country, it makes mistakes. But unlike any other country, criticism of Israel is far too often laced with tropes, slurs and conspiracies that are unmistakably antisemitic. No other state is singled out with such obsessive hatred—and no other people are held collectively responsible for it,” the EJA said.

“When Coordinator von Schnurbein warned about this toxic double standard, she was doing her job. She was defending Jewish life in Europe. And she was naming what so many refuse to admit: that today’s antisemitism often wears the mask of anti-Zionism,” the statement adds.

“The campaign to discredit her is not about accountability. It is about silencing those who dare to name the connection between Jewish identity and the Jewish state—and the way that connection is weaponized against Jews in Europe and beyond,” its says.

The EJA urged the European Commission “to reject these political attacks and to reaffirm Katharina von Schnurbein’s mandate.

“For nearly a decade, she has worked tirelessly to protect our communities, to fight hate in all its forms, and to build a Europe where Jews can live openly and proudly,” the EJA said.

The European Jewish Congress called for continued support for von Schnurbein’s work and rejected “any attempt to discredit her or weaken the fight against antisemitism in Europe.”

The demands for resignation are “unfounded, disgraceful and based on false accusations and a misleading narrative,” the EJC said

“They cause great harm to European Jewish communities by undermining one of their staunchest allies. For nearly 10 years, Katharina von Schnurbein has been a tireless champion of Jewish life in Europe, standing with our communities during some of the most difficult moments—from the rise in antisemitism and terrorist attacks to increasing social polarization,” the EJC said.

Asked by European Jewish Press for a reaction about this campaign against von Schnurbein, a spokesperson of the European Commission said Friday: “We have no comment whatsoever on unverified leaks from a meeting,” in a reference to a conference in Israel where von Schnurbein participated with E.U. ambassadors in her official capacity, in line with the E.U. strategy on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life adopted by the European Commission in 2021.

As for accusations that she lobbied against E.U. sanctions on Israel, the spokesperson referred to what E.U. foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas said on Tuesday following a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council, where E.U. foreign ministers shelved a decision on anti-Israel measures.

Referring to the “common understanding” reached by the E.U. and Israel for the expansion of the humanitarian aid into Gaza, Kallas said that we “see positive signs but Israel needs to take more concrete steps to improve the humanitarian situation on the ground.

“The European Union will keep a close watch on how Israel implements this common understanding and the pledges,” the E.U.’s top diplomat added.

Regarding the letter from MEPs calling for von Schnurbein’s resignation, the European Commission spokesperson said that “we will reply in due course.”

Originally published by the European Jewish Press.

Image: Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Union’s coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life. Source: EU Justice and Consumers/YouTube.