"[The deal] took months of very difficult negotiations."

"What happens next maters even more. Implementation and verification have to be real."

"Withdrawal must move in lockstep with decommissioning."

Nikolay Mladenov, Board of Peace high representative for Gaza

 

"[The movement -- Gaza -- was making] concessions for the sake of our people in the Gaza Strip."

"Israel will not intervene in the issue of disarmament. The National Committee [National Committee for Administration of Gaza (NCAG)] is the body that will undertake this task." 

Ghazi Hamad, member Hamas negotiating team 

 

"The only good news in recent days is the announcement by the U.S. president of an agreement for Hamas to relinquish their weapons and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres 

Palestinian Hamas terrorists keep guard on the day Hamas hands over deceased hostages, identified at the time by Palestinian militant groups as Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly October 7, 2023 attack, to the Red Cross, as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip February 20, 2025. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

 

Western news media have published the story that Gaza's terrorist-governing Hamas -- an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose radical Islamist program of enduring jihad by polished 'public relations' that appeal to the Western press, and liberal-minded Western governments have given them entre to Democratic-liberal countries failing to recognition the stealth infiltration-by-diplomacy and the threat it ultimately poses to their foundational cultures and values and systems of justice, also by extension give credence to Palestinian terrorism as a 'liberating' force from 'occupation' -- is prepared to surrender its arms. 

 

Hamas is the other face of the Muslim Brotherhood, the one dedicated to a different type of jihad, through violent force necessitated by the intent to produce mass murder.

 

That mass murder took place once again on a scale significant enough to persuade Israel that this time around there would be no negotiations with the terrorist entity for a break in hostilities. Each of those breaks between mass assaults on Jews in Israel had Israel breathe a sigh of relief in the belief that the fury of hate would be healed by the passage of time, while Hamas took those breaks as a traditional Islamist 'hudna', an opportunity to recruit, retrain, rearm, and return to the attack. 

 

That would be repeated time and again, between assaults-and-defence. The reality that the Hamas reason for existence is the elimination of Israel is one that human decency, where it exists, fails to fully grasp.

 

The Conversation

 

The Hamas charter is a pledge to eliminate Israel from its ancestral geographical heritage, as Judeans indigenous to only part of the land that the renewed state of Israel sits upon. In a fit of generosity, the UN General Assembly reached a consensus in 1947 to offer its Partition Plan, giving Jews the opportunity to establish their state on a tiny portion of its original territory -- and Palestinian Arabs a like opportunity on another portion of Judean heritage land, while Jordan occupied a major portion. While Israel reestablished its ancient presence in 1948, the Palestinians refused the offer. 

 

They have refused to recognize Israel's right of existence ever since. Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have never resulted in that recognition, nor in the Palestinians accepting concessions from Israel for an agreement that would satisfy the aspirations of both in enabling the establishment of a Palestinian state next door to Israel's. Palestinians have been taught over the decades closing in on 80 years that the entire region belongs to them and that Israel's reestablishment is that of a colonial enterprise. That Israel must be destroyed, leaving Palestinians to claim 'their' geographical entitlement 'from the river to the sea'.

 

When Ghazi Hamad, negotiating for Hamas, speaks of "concessions for the sake of our people in the Gaza Strip", it is meant to appeal to the gullibility of a Western audience, the very liberal-left Westerners who ascribe an empathetic motivation for Palestinian violence against Jews, as a victimized people -- a designation cultivated by Palestinians to gather empathy for their 'cause' -- fighting back against their oppressors. The oppressors being in reality Jews who fight back to ensure their existential security against neighbours dedicated to their extermination.  

 

Two Palestinian youth react to the news of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas from Khan Younis. Ramadan Abed/Reuters

 

Hamas doesn't care one whit for the well-being and safety of Palestinians in Gaza, proven time and again their use as living shields, the outcome of which is Palestinian civilians dying, directly caused by Hamas deadly provocations against Israel; the greater the number of dead, the more emphatic those numbers become in seeking the sympathy of the international community, attributing those deaths solely to Israeli intentionality, not Hamas contrivance.

 

Hamas has no intention of surrendering its weapons, precious to them as the instruments enabling them to carry out their charter obligations in destroying Israel. Hamas demands the complete withdrawal of all Israeli troops before it will agree to finalize the surrender of its weapons. Without those weapons there would be no Hamas, completely emasculated of actionable intent. In that portion of Gaza where Hamas maintains its monopoly of complete control, it has reestablished itself as the sole authority, having overcome the resistance of Hamas tribal groups that had attempted to dislodge it from its primacy.

 

An Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza at this juncture would ultimately reward Hamas for its October 7 mass slaughter of Israeli civilians, with the assistance of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and ordinary Palestinian civilians for their ravaging of southern Israel kibbutsim, the mass rapes of Israeli girls and women at the Noma Music Festival for Peace, and the hostage-taking of Jewish children, the elderly and infirm, entire families, women and men of the Israeli military and foreign farm workers.  

 

The October 7 War    International Affairs

 

  

Until Justice is Done

"The report presents the truth as it is -- shocking painful, but vital and necessary." 

"On behalf of all those who were harmed, we are committed to continuing to fight until their cry is heard everywhere and until justice is done." 

"There was an expectation that women around the world would understand and support us, like in other conflicts. The feeling of their backs turned on us was painful."

"As Israeli women, we need to scream for those who cannot anymore and bring them justice."

Israeli First Lady Michal Herzog

 

"We say this [that sexual violence in conflict is systematic rather than random] in a clear voice: sexual violence in conflict is a weapon. It is not random, it is not directed only at the individual and it is not done without direction from above."

"It is time for the international community to treat this phenomenon as such."

Professor Ruth Helperin-Kadri 

The authors of the Dinah Project's report on sexual violence on and since October 7 are pictured with First Lady Michal Herzog (center) at the President's Residence, Jerusalem, July 8, 2025. (Itzik Biran)

 

On Tuesday a legal report was presented to the wife of Israel's president.  That ground-breaking report presents as the first comprehensive framework to enable the prosecution of Hamas and other Palestinian  terrorists for their systematic pre-planned use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, as seen by the agonized savagery on display during the October 7, 2023 invasion by Palestinian terrorists into southern Israel, where thousands of terrorists led by the Hamas ruling group committed mass rape, sadistic torture and massive bloodshed, taking the lives of 1,200 Israeli children, women, the elderly and foreign farm workers, along with a smaller number of Israeli soldiers.

 

The report in its 84 pages -- written by professor Ruth Halperin-Kadri, retired district judge Nava Ben-Or, and Col. (res) Attorney Sharon Zaggi Pinhas, former chief military prosecutor of the Israel Defense Forces -- is the most extensive legal and factual documentation at this point, of sexual crimes committed during the assault on Israeli border communities adjacent Gaza. The report is part of "The Dina Project", analyzing dozens of sources, establishing clear patterns of systematic sexual violence.

 

Outlined are clear and consistent patterns of sexual violence committed by Palestinian terrorists both at murder scenes and upon Israeli hostages in captivity. Gang rape, public humiliation, forced nudity genital abuse and direct shooting of intimate body parts -- all are documented. Accounts from abductees describing repeated sexual assaults, threats of 'forced marriage', and attempts to erase sexual identity are accounted for, including violent sexual attacks perpetrated on men.  

 

Memorials at the Nova music festival site in May 2024.  Leo Correa / AP

 

 Investigators discovered recurring descriptions of half-naked female bodies some of whom had been tied up to buildings and trees. Reports from personnel identifying casualties from military bases were also included. The unequivocal conclusion of the authors was that Hamas made use of sexual violence representing an integral portion of an overall plan of terror, collective humiliation and dehumanization of Israeli society. During interrogations, several Palestinian terrorist captured by Israel, admitted having raped and sexually abused women.

 

Testimony from Ilana Gritzewsky who survived 55 days of captivity in Gaza was included in the presentation. She spoke of her experience of sexual abuse: "On October 7, I was in my house, in Kibbutz Nir Oz, with my partner, Matan (Zangauker). And suddenly -- noise. Explosions, Screams. Then a door was broken open. We were kidnapped." 

 

Security forces at the Nova music festival site in Kibbutz Re'im, Israel, on Oct. 12, 2023.  Leon Neal / Getty Images file 

"When I woke up, I was half-naked. Surrounded by terrorists. They beat me, touched me. I didn't know what happened to my body in those lost minutes. But my soul already knew: nothing would be the same."

"I was released after 55 days. But I'm not really free. Because true freedom only exists when no one has to go through what I went through."

"Almost two years later, there are those who still ask if this really happened. I’m here to tell you that it did and it’s still going on."

"My Matan is still there. I don’t know what they’re doing to him, but I know what they did to me. I wake up every morning with the fear that he is experiencing what I did."

Ilana Geritzewsky  

"Sexual crimes during war are — forgive me — a ‘perfect crime."

"[Amid the chaos of war], perpetrators can rely on the silence of their victims, either because they murder them, which was the case for most of the victims who were assaulted on October 7, or for the survivors. There is so much trauma and shame unique to the crime that they often won’t talk about it."

IDF Col.(ret) Attorney Sharon Zagi-Pinhas