At 10:15, she invoked Gaza and said “if borders can be changed by force, if sovereignty can be set aside when inconvenient, or upheld only when politics allows, then no Member State can sleep peacefully anymore.” She repeated Gaza alongside Ukraine as she closed her remarks at 17:00.
Israel is a UN member state. Gaza is not. Palestine is not. Yet the UN increasingly discusses this war as though those roles were reversed.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the government of Gaza alongside thousands of Gazans invaded Israel. Thousands of terrorists attacked communities and military installations, killed roughly 1,200 people and abducted 251 into Gaza.
Members of Hamas tear down fence and invade Israel on October 7, 2023
If Baerbock wanted an example of a member state’s border being violated by force, she had one.
Instead, the UN performs a remarkable double inversion. It starts the clock after October 7, making the war appear to begin with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Then it treats Gaza as the territory whose sovereignty and borders are paramount, while the actual member state that was invaded becomes the accused.
Territorial integrity cannot be a foundational principle when Russia enters Ukraine and an inconvenient technicality when Gazans invade Israel. A rule whose application depends upon who is doing the invading is not a principle. It is politics dressed up as international law.
The organization created to protect member states has demonstrated that when Israel, a member state, is invaded and its civilians raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, by some evil orchestration and institutional design, the terrorist enclave from which the attack emerged can be turned into the aggrieved party.
The UN has not merely failed its own basic test. It has exposed the fine print in its supposedly universal principles: borders are inviolable, sovereignty is sacred, and member states must be protected – unless the member state is Israel.
Hamas terrorist in Israeli kibbutz on October 7, 2023
Hamas has been a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997, when the list was first developed. On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attackers invaded Israel, deliberately murdered civilians and kidnapped over 250 people.
It was designated terrorists committing terrorism.
Yet “terrorist” became a troublesome word for mainstream media and alt-left politicians.
The Associated Press advises journalists to describe specific acts and generally attribute the terms terrorism and terrorist to people or organizations, rather than independently apply them. Amnesty International has gone further, explaining that it generally avoids the terms because they lack an agreed legal definition and carry strong political and emotional connotations.
That restraint evaporates around “genocide.”
Genocide is the more demanding accusation. Death, destruction and even war crimes do not establish it. The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Israel emphatically denies that intent, maintaining that it went to war to defeat Hamas – the terrorists which had committed mass terrorism – and recover its hostages, not destroy Palestinian Arabs.
Amnesty nevertheless declares that Israel is committing genocide. The same organization that will not call Hamas a terrorist organization after its deliberate slaughter and kidnapping of civilians has no hesitation resolving the vastly more difficult question of Israeli intent.
Progressive politicians follow the same linguistic path. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was accusing Israel of genocide within weeks of October 7 and later called Benjamin Netanyahu a “genocidal maniac.” Zohran Mamdani repeatedly describes the October 7 massacre as a “horrific war crime” rather than a terrorist act, while calling Israel’s war “genocide” and Netanyahu the “architect of a horrific genocide.”
The burden of proof has been turned upside down.
Calling October 7 terrorism requires looking simply at what Hamas did: a designated terrorist organization deliberately murdered and kidnapped civilians for political and ideological purposes. It is plainly terrorism.
Calling Israel’s war genocide requires establishing why Israel fought it: that its actual intent was to destroy Palestinian Arabs as a people rather than defeat Hamas in a defensive war.
Yet the first conclusion is treated as dangerously judgmental while the second is repeated as established fact.
Mehdi Hasan offered an almost grotesque demonstration this week while attacking a New York Times essay by Gazan Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib urging Palestinians to resist Hamas. Hasan called people sharing the essay “pro-genocide people,” Israel “the genocidaire,” the essay “a pro genocide piece” and the war “this current genocide.”
Hasan suffers a genocide stutter.
He cannot bring himself to say clearly and unambiguously that Hamas is a terrorist group and committed a heinous terrorist act, but cannot get the word “genocide” out of his mouth as he tries to hypnotize viewers into believing the unbelievable about Israel.
And the accusation does not remain attached to Israel’s government. Once genocide becomes the premise, anyone defending Israel can become pro-genocide. Even a Palestinian Arab arguing that his own people must resist Hamas can produce a pro-genocide piece for the obsessive compulsive stutterer.
That is how a defamatory vocabulary spreads.
Genocide is among the gravest accusations that can be made against a people or state. Repeating it as established fact without establishing the specific intent the crime requires does more than distort a war. It tells millions of people that Israel is deliberately destroying Palestinian Arabs and that those who defend Israel are defending that destruction.
That is an incendiary allegation in a world where Jews and Israelis are already threatened and attacked over Gaza.
Meanwhile, terrorist is handled delicately when describing the organization that deliberately slaughtered civilians on October 7 in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
The asymmetry is morally grotesque. Hasan, Tlaib, Mamdani are trafficking in the asymmetry of whataboutery as a heinous veneer to protect antisemitic terrorists, plain and simple.
Everyone knows why October 7, 2023 changed Israel. But an obscure Ottoman law makes another date worth watching: October 7, 2026.
In 1858, the Ottoman Empire enacted a land code under which three consecutive years without cultivationcould have consequences for rights to certain agricultural land.
Now, three years after October 7, that old rule may suddenly matter.
The Three-Year Rule
Much of the agricultural land of the Ottoman Empire was classified as miri. The sovereign retained ultimate title (“state land”) while individuals could acquire valuable rights of possession and use, known as tasarruf.
Active use of the land mattered.
Article 68 of the Ottoman Land Code addressed agricultural land left uncultivated for three consecutive years without a valid excuse. The original Ottoman mechanism was more complicated than “three years and the government automatically owns your land,” involving tapu, the status of the holder and opportunities to recover the right.
But the underlying principle was clear: continued cultivation could matter to continued land rights.
Ottoman term
Meaning
Relevance
Miri
State land carrying individual possession/use rights
Much agricultural land
Tasarruf
Right of possession and use
The individual’s valuable land right
Mahlul
Lapsed/reverted possessory right
Potential consequence of qualifying non-cultivation
Tapu
Land registration/title system
Documentary evidence of rights
This is not merely an Ottoman historical curiosity. It passed on to the British, Jordanians and then Israel with few modifications.
In 2020, Israel’s Supreme Court addressed the rule directly in HCJ 5426/17, Barakat v. Head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank (Nov. 29, 2020). The Court held that under the Jordanian land law still applicable in the territory, an unregisteredtasarruf right acquired through cultivation could be extinguished if the land was left uncultivated for three consecutive years, causing the land to revert to the government under Article 68’s mahlul doctrine. By contrast, a tasarruf right that had been formally registered generally was not lost merely because the land subsequently lay fallow.
So the three-year rule remains relevant to unregistered land in Judea and Samaria today.
Goats owned by Bedouins graze in Judea and Samaria (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Then Came October 7
After the October 7 massacre by Gazans, security conditions dramatically changed access to agricultural land across the region. OCHA reported that more than 96,000 dunams of olive-cultivated land went unharvested during the 2023 season following access restrictions and violence. By the 2025 olive harvest, OCHA was reporting that farmers from multiple villages had been completely denied access for the third consecutive year to certain olive groves.
That creates the question: How much unregistered agricultural land has actually gone uncultivated since October 7, 2023?
The Eye in the Sky
There is something unusual about these particular three years.
Israel has had extraordinary security reasons since October 7 to maintain extensive aerial surveillance of Judea and Samaria.
At the same time, the Civil Administration already uses sophisticated geographical information in determining land status. Its Surveying Unit maintains cadastral and mapping information, while its Supervision Unit operates a team whose stated function is examining land through survey procedures “aimed at locating state land in the area, for declaration as such.”
The Civil Administration therefore potentially possesses an extraordinarily detailed record of whether cultivation occurred.
Request For Access
Consider two claimants whose land appears uncultivated in aerial photographs for three years. One produces repeated applications showing: I wanted to cultivate my land. Israel prevented me from reaching it. The other has no comparable record.
Those are materially different factual cases based on the background discussed above.
OCHA reports that Palestinian liaison authorities submit farmers’ access requests to Israeli authorities and tracks approvals, denials and pending requests in particular areas. Those applications coupled with the aerial documentation, may move the land into a different legal category.
Meanwhile, Israel Is Looking for State Land
This is where the 1858 law meets 2026.
The Civil Administration openly maintains a Survey Lands team charged with examining whether land can be declared government property. Its newly published procedures show that potential survey areas are placed on a priority list requiring approval by the head of the Civil Administration and the Defense Minister or an authorized representative.
The State Comptroller describes the same team’s purpose as locating and marking land in Judea and Samaria that can be declared government property.
And Israel has dramatically accelerated state-land declarations.
In February 2026, the Israeli government approved the resumption of systematic land-registration proceedings in Area C, allocating approximately NIS 244 million to the effort—the first such broad registration initiative since Israel suspended the previous settlement-of-title process after 1967.
Peace Now calculates that approximately 27,119 dunams had been declared state land under the current government by June 2026, nearly as much as it says had been declared during the entire period since the Oslo Accords. A Palestinian Authority commission consequently calculates that approximately 29,335 dunams have been included in state-land declarations since October 7, 2023.
And we haven’t yet reached the anniversary when many West Bank Arabs encountered more restrictions on movement due to the war their Gazan brothers waged on Israel.
October 7, 2026
That is what makes the third anniversary different.
Consider the ramifications of Ottoman law to this point in time:
1858: Ottoman law makes three years of non-cultivation legally significant for certain land rights.
2020: Israel’s Supreme Court confirms that the Article 68 mahlul doctrine remains relevant to unregistered tasarruf rights in Judea and Samaria.
2023: October 7 is followed by enormous disruption of access to agricultural land.
2023–2026: Israel accumulates an extraordinary photographic record of what is happening on the ground.
2024–2026: state-land declarations accelerate.
2026: Israel funds a major new land-registration initiative.
October 7, 2026: three years have elapsed for when many West Bank Arabs accessed land they had used previously.
Nothing automatically changes ownership at midnight of 10/7. Many questions remain.
How much affected land is actually unregistered miri land? Was it legally “uncultivated”? What constitutes a sufficient excuse? What happens when Israeli security restrictions themselves prevented cultivation? And what evidence exists showing that individual claimants continued asserting their rights?
Those questions will have to be answered parcel by parcel.
But after October 7, something will exist that did not exist before: three complete post-massacre years of evidence.
October 7, 2023 changed the security map of the Middle East. October 7, 2026 may begin changing the actual map of Judea and Samaria as well.
In Greek mythology, the Hydra was almost impossible to kill.
It had many heads. Cut one off and more grew in its place. Heracles eventually understood that killing the monster required more than endlessly chopping at whichever head was attacking him. Each severed neck had to be cauterized so it could not regenerate.
Heracles battling the Lernean Hydra
For nearly three years, Israel has been told that Hamas is a Hydra. Kill its leaders. Destroy its tunnels. Eliminate its fighters. It won’t matter. Hamas—or something worse—will simply grow back.
Queen Rania of Jordan articulated the underlying argument shortly after the October 7 massacre, that Israel’s actions against Hamas:
“create a new generation of resistance that is fiercer and more violent” – Queen Rania of Jordan
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor was more explicit, predicting that “Hamas 2.0 will rise” from the destruction.
They identified a real danger. But regeneration is not immortality.
Hamas is more than leaders, tunnels, rockets and gunmen. It is a political and military organization built around an ideology. Destroy the organization while preserving everything capable of regenerating it and another head may indeed grow.
The question is whether everything capable of regenerating it must also be allowed to survive.
Nearly three years of Palestinian polling shows the problem.
As detailed recently in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, Palestinian Arabs have dramatically lowered their expectations after three years of war. Support for Hamas and armed struggle has fallen sharply from the extraordinary levels recorded after October 7. But losing faith in Hamas’s ability to win is not the same thing as rejecting Hamas.
In the August 2026 PCPSR poll, 72% opposed Hamas disarming before a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% envisioned it remaining both armed and political and another 36% solely political. In all, 89% envisioned Hamas surviving in some form.
That is the Hydra problem.
And Hamas is only one head.
Hezbollah sits to Israel’s north. The Houthis attack from Yemen. Palestinian Islamic Jihad fights alongside Hamas. Above them, the Islamic Republic of Iran spent decades financing, arming and connecting organizations surrounding Israel.
October 7 exposed not simply a Hamas problem, but an ecosystem.
That is why eliminating Hamas militarily cannot be the entire definition of victory. As FirstOneThrough argued in From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard, an organization cannot maintain an independent army committed to destroying another state while simultaneously being normalized as an ordinary participant in democratic politics.
And military defeat addresses only part of what allows another head to grow.
FirstOneThrough addressed another part in The Only Way The Conflict Can End: the Palestinian claim to a so-called “right of return” into Israel itself.
A Palestinian state alongside Israel cannot simultaneously mean millions of Palestinians receive a state of their own while millions more retain a claim to move into Israel. That is 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 of a state for Jews.
American policy once said this plainly.
The 2004 Democratic Party platform called for Palestinian refugees to settle in a Palestinian state “rather than in Israel.” The 2008 platform repeated the position before the language was omitted in 2012.
President George W. Bush made the same commitment directly to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 as Sharon prepared the Gaza disengagement. A realistic solution, Bush wrote, would involve establishing a Palestinian state and “the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”
The principle was straightforward: Palestinian statehood was supposed to resolve Palestinian statelessness, not provide another mechanism for eliminating the Jewish State.
Defeating the Hydra therefore requires ending not only Hamas’s ability to wage war, but the expectation that Israel is temporary.
History offers another model.
Nazi Germany did not fight alone, and victory did not consist of killing Hitler while leaving the Axis intact. Germany and its allies were defeated or surrendered.
Then came political defeat. The Nazi military and political apparatus was dismantled. The Nazi Party was outlawed. Its leaders were prosecuted. Germany was not invited to preserve a rebranded Nazi Party so its supporters could recover through elections what they had lost through war.
The Axis was defeated as a system.
The same principle should define the defeat of Hamas.
Hamas cannot be permitted to lose its army, change clothes and emerge as an internationally accepted political party. Global institutions and governments should treat Hamas as one organization, dismantle its financing and international infrastructure, and isolate organizations that materially finance or facilitate its terrorism.
Prohibition is only half the answer.
Muslim governments, religious leaders and international institutions should strengthen Muslim movements committed to peaceful coexistence, religious equality and acceptance of Jewish sovereignty. Muslim-majority countries that have made peace with Israel already demonstrate that Islam and permanent war against Jewish sovereignty are not synonymous. Isolate the jihadis in the Jihadi-Israel Conflict and empower the moderate Arab and Muslim countries.
Make the institutions of coexistence stronger while making the institutions of violent supremacy militarily, financially and politically untenable.
The Hydra has many heads.
Hamas is a head. Hezbollah is a head. The Houthis are a head. The Islamic Republic supplies the Hydra with blood. The ideology gives it reason to regenerate.
The Hamas 2.0 warning should therefore be taken seriously—but not accepted as prophecy.
The Hydra is difficult to kill. It is not immortal.
Eight Muslim countries issued a joint statement Sunday condemning Israel’s rejection of the latest roadmap for implementing President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. They are: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia.
They have no formal collective name. So call them the Muslim Eight — the M8.
Together, the M8 countries have roughly 817 million people and contain forty percent of the world’s Muslims. Indonesia and Pakistan alone are two of the world’s largest Muslim-majority countries.
The M8 was assembled by U.S. President Donald Trump with a specific purpose.
On September 23, 2025, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump convened the leaders and senior officials of these eight Arab and Muslim countries. The goal was to end the Gaza War and build a day-after framework. Trump needed Muslim and Arab countries with street-cred in Gaza to make that happen, as well as a history of operating functioning governments.
Egypt controlled the critical border with Gaza and, together with Qatar, was central to negotiations with Hamas. Jordan brought its relationship with Israel, the Palestinian Authority and sensitive holy sites in Jerusalem. Saudi Arabia brought money, Arab leadership and the enormous prize of possible normalization with Israel. The UAE brought capital, administrative expertise and an existing relationship with Israel. Turkey brought regional power and channels to Hamas. Pakistan and Indonesia brought two enormous Muslim populations and legitimacy extending well beyond the Arab world.
Trump assembled M8 to be directed at the problem in Gaza. Help end the war. Get the hostages released. Stabilize the ceasefire. Keep Hamas from returning to power. Reconstruct Gaza. Support a new Palestinian administration. Reform the Palestinian Authority. Create a workable security structure.
Six days after Trump’s meeting, the M8 jointly welcomed his Gaza peace proposal and committed themselves to working with the United States and the parties to implement it.
When Hamas responded to Trump’s proposal in October, the M8 responded together. When disputes developed over Rafah, the M8 responded together. When Trump established his Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, all eight announced together that they would join.
Trump had created a Muslim steering committee for Gaza. But soon, the M8 discovered it could steer other things.
By December, it was collectively defending UNRWA, even as Trump’s postwar architecture was establishing new institutions to govern, finance and rebuild Gaza.
In March 2026, the M8 jointly condemned Israeli restrictions at Al-Aqsa Mosque/ the Jewish Temple Mount. Later that month, it issued another statement about Muslim and Christian access to Jerusalem’s holy sites.
In April, it jointly declared that the entire 144-dunam Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound was exclusively a Muslim place of worship and backed the Jordanian Waqf’s authority there.
The M8 began issuing collective positions on Israeli settlements, Israeli sovereignty measures, “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria.
None of that was why Trump assembled the M8.
The Board of Peace was created around a specific Gaza program: maintain the ceasefire, demilitarize Gaza, establish transitional Palestinian governance, rebuild the territory, reform Palestinian institutions and create conditions for a different future.
Yet the M8 now speaks on subjects well outside of Gaza with the institutional weight it acquired by becoming Trump’s chosen Arab-Muslim partner. A coalition created to solve Gaza has become a platform to pressure Israel over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, UNRWA and Palestinian statehood.
Trump gave the M8 a mandate to help fix Gaza. The M8 is turning it into a mandate to lecture Israel.
The New York Times published a photo essay under the headline “Still Waiting for Peace in Gaza.” Its Palestinian Arab photojournalist documents the world around him: shattered buildings, displaced families, rubble and danger. The photographs powerfully show what war looks like from inside Gaza.
But what does peace look like?
For Israelis living a few miles away, peace means sleeping without rockets overhead. It means children not watching their parents gunned down before them. It means young adults attending a music festival without being hunted, families living on kibbutzim without gunmen entering their homes, and civilians never again being murdered or dragged across the border as hostages.
Those images are outside the Times’ frame. And their absence raises the central question: Are Gazans waiting for peace with Israel, or peace from Israel?
Palestinian Arab polling makes the distinction important. After October 7, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research repeatedly asked whether Hamas had been correct to launch its attack. In March 2024, 71 percent of Gazans said yes. Three months later, after enormous destruction inside Gaza, 57 percent still considered the decision correct. Support showed a desire to live with violence inside Gaza if it led to the destruction of Israel.
The pattern predates October 7. Palestinian polling over decades has repeatedly recorded substantial support for attacks against Israelis, including civilians. The question of peace therefore cannot be answered simply by photographing people who desperately want the war around them to end.
Peace is reciprocal. It requires imagining security for the people across the border as well as for oneself.
A revealing photo essay would turn its lens outward. Ask Gazans whether Jewish families should live safely in Sderot and Kfar Aza. Whether Israelis should be able to dance near Gaza without fear of armed Palestinian Arabs crossing the border. Whether rockets should stop permanently. Whether Hamas should disarm. Whether the future they envision includes Jews living securely beside them.
Those answers would tell us whether Gazans are waiting for an end to war or waiting for peace.
And this is where the New York Times itself enters the frame. This is the newspaper’s own photojournalist, presented under the Times’ own headline and editorial framing. By calling the desire for calm inside Gaza “waiting for peace,” the newspaper takes one side’s desire for relief from war and gives it the language of reconciliation between two parties. It portrays the Palestinian Arabs as desirous of coexistence when it is plainly not so.
That framing is particularly consequential when the war began with Hamas crossing into Israel on October 7 to murder and abduct civilians. When thousands of Arab civilians invaded Israel to rape women and abduct children and spit on their corpses as they arrived in Gaza. Removing Israel from a story about “peace” reduces peace to what happens to Gaza after the attack, rather than what Gazans want to happen to Israelis in the future.
The Times reinforces a distorted understanding of the conflict: Palestinian peace becomes the absence of Israeli violence against Palestinians, while the Palestinian attitude toward violence against Israelis disappears beyond the edge of the photograph.
A camera pointed only into Gaza can show us what Gazans want to stop seeing. Peace begins with asking what they want Israelis to stop seeing too.
Congress did not arrive at legislation protecting Hamas overnight. It arrived there one bill at a time.
For decades, debates over Israel revolved around diplomacy. Republicans and Democrats argued over settlements, negotiations, Jerusalem, and the contours of a future Palestinian state. Even lawmakers sharply critical of Israel generally framed their proposals around advancing a negotiated two-state solution. The disagreement was over how peace should be achieved, not whether Israel had the right to defend itself against terrorist organizations.
In 2020, as the Trump Administration unveiled its peace plan and Israel considered extending sovereignty to portions of the West Bank, progressive lawmakers introduced legislation preventing American assistance from supporting annexation. Whether one believed annexation was prudent or unwise, the objective remained fundamentally political. These bills sought to influence the outcome of negotiations and preserve the possibility of a future Palestinian state. The debate was about borders, diplomacy, and competing visions for peace.
That bill did not stand in isolation.
In 2019, Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) also introduced legislation prohibiting U.S. assistance from supporting the military detention of Palestinian minors. On its face, the proposal carried moral appeal. No civilized society wants children caught in war, and few slogans resonate more powerfully than protecting minors.
Yet the legislation missed the point. Israel’s military justice system does not prosecute minors because they are children. It prosecutes minors accused of security offenses, including violent rioting, firebomb attacks, shootings, stabbings, and participation in terrorist organizations. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have all recruited teenagers into violent activity for decades.
Arab minors caught on camera right before they stab Israelis
The debate was no longer centered on where Israel’s borders should ultimately lie. It was becoming a debate over whether Congress should restrict Israel’s ability to prosecute those participating in terrorism.
That evolution became unmistakable after October 7.
The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust might reasonably have been expected to produce overwhelming congressional support for dismantling Hamas. Instead, it accelerated an entirely different legislative movement.
Arabs in Gaza take the body of Israeli woman they had just killed into Gaza where the crowds pelted her body and spat on her
One proposal after another sought to block the military tools Israel argued were necessary to fight the war. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) repeatedly forced votes to halt major arms sales. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Representative Delia Ramirez (D-IL), and others introduced the Block the Bombs Act. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sought to impose additional legal restrictions before military assistance could proceed.
US Senator Chris Van Hollen attends a Senate subcommittee on the Justice Departments proposed 2027 budget, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 19, 2026.
Supporters presented these bills as humanitarian safeguards designed to protect civilians and uphold international law. Their practical effect, however, would have been to deny or delay weapons while Israel was engaged in combat against a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that had murdered, raped, tortured, kidnapped, and burned civilians alive.
Congress was no longer principally debating the contours of a future peace agreement. It was debating how much of Israel’s wartime capability should be withheld while the war itself was still being fought.
And it continued.
In July 2026, Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced an amendment eliminating the entire $3.3 billion annual Foreign Military Financing package for Israel. Previous proposals had sought to condition aid or block particular weapons systems. Massie’s proposal went much further. It would have ended America’s regular military assistance altogether.
The amendment failed by a wide margin. But 104 members of Congress voted for it, including 103 Democrats alongside the bill’s Republican author.
That vote tells a larger story than the amendment itself.
Over the course of a few years, the legislative progression moved from opposing territorial annexation, to restricting Israeli counterterrorism practices, to limiting the weapons available to fight Hamas, and finally to questioning whether the United States should continue military assistance at all. Each bill built upon the political space created by the one before it. What once occupied the outer edge of congressional debate gradually became part of mainstream legislative discussion.
The coalition itself is unusual. Rashida Tlaib approaches the issue through Palestinian nationalism. Bernie Sanders emphasizes humanitarian law and civilian casualties. Chris Van Hollen argues for greater legal oversight of military assistance. Thomas Massie opposes foreign aid as a matter of constitutional principle. They arrive from very different ideological traditions, yet increasingly find themselves casting the same vote.
For generations, support for Israel was one of Washington’s few enduring bipartisan constants. That consensus has not disappeared; overwhelming majorities in Congress still support the alliance. But the terms of the debate have unmistakably changed.
Six years ago, Congress debated how American policy might influence a two-state solution. Today, members openly introduce legislation that would limit—or eliminate altogether—the military support Israel says it needs to defeat jihadist organizations committed not to coexistence, but to its destruction.
That is the real story of the Jihadi Protection Bills. Not that any single measure became law. But that, one bill at a time, the center of the American political conversation migrated from shaping the peace process to constraining Israel’s ability to wage war against jihadist movements to its basic ability to protect itself in a deeply hostile region.
We know that every death is a tragedy. We all wish there wasn’t war. Yet wars happen.
There have been several attempts to portray the current Gazans war against Israel in various lights. Some people have used the civilian-to-death ratio in this war of roughly 2-to-1 as historically low compared to any urban combat in modern times, especially one in which the army hides underneath the homes and hospitals of the civilian population.
Here, we lay out the civilian death figures relative to other modern wars which had many civilian deaths.
Assuming:
73,356 reported total deaths in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to August 2, 2026
25,000 of those were Hamas or other militants (a rough figure supplied by the Israeli army in January 2026)
Average civilian mortality per month: 2.19% ÷ 34 = 0.055% per month.
That yields the following comparison:
Case
Estimated monthly percentage killed
Multiple of Gaza civilian rate (0.055%/month)
Gaza [2023-present]
0.055%
1×
Guatemala (Ixil) [1981-3]
0.10%
1.8×
Darfur [2003-5]
0.11%–0.17%
2.0-3.1x
Roma genocide [1939-45]
0.20%–0.69%
3.6–12.5×
Anfal (Kurds) [1987-8]
0.22%–0.44%
4–8×
Ustaše genocide [1941-5]
0.36%
6.5×
Cambodia [1975-9]
0.44%–0.59%
8–10.7×
Rohingya [2017-8]
at least 0.67%
12.1×
Holodomor [1932-3]
0.73%–1.04%
13.2–18.9×
Holocaust [1941-5]
1.32%
24×
Yazidi genocide [2014-7]
0.65%–2.5%
11.8–45.4×
Rwanda [1994]
13.8%–22%
250.9–400×
Srebrenica (monthly equivalent) [1995]
~80%
~1,454×
Monthly toll of civilian deaths in wars over last 100 years, as a percentage of the total population, in comparison to current Gazan war against Israel
Yazidis are a non-Muslim ethnic group in and around Iraq targeted for persecution and annihilation by ISIS. They continue to suffer persecution from Muslims in Turkey and Iraq.
“IS fighters invaded Yazidi villages and towns in Northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, rounding up men, women, and children. Yazidi men were ordered to convert to Islam; those who did not, and even some who did, were executed in mass graves. Yazidi women and girls were abducted and sold into sexual slavery, being forcibly “married” to jihadists and other individuals in Iraq, Syria, and other countries. Yazidi boys were also kidnapped by the Islamic State and sent to training camps, where they were indoctrinated into the group’s severe interpretation of Islam and trained to become soldiers. IS glorified its atrocities online in gruesome videos, propaganda magazines, and religious publications, emphasizing its commitment to eradicating Yazidi identity.” – Vicken Cheterian, “ISIS Genocide against the Yazidis and Mass Violence in the Middle East,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48, no. 4 (2019): 1-7, doi:10.1080/13530194.2019.1683718.
Measured against the last century’s ethnic group civilian deaths, the war in Gaza has produced a far smaller death toll than the wars that shaped recent history. Yet few conflicts of comparable scale have generated such an extraordinary level of international media attention, UN action, street protests, and campus activism.
The conflict has spilled far beyond the battlefield. Around the world, Israelis and Jewish communities have increasingly become targets of hostility, harassment, and violence tied to the war. Whatever one’s views of the prosecution of the war, the global reaction has extended well beyond criticism of a government and the borders of Israel unlike every other conflict, raising profound questions about why this war has become so singular in international political and cultural life.
The numbers remind us that history matters. A world that loses its sense of proportion does not become more moral but selective, narrow and biased.
Fair enough. But where is the equivalent sentence for the Palestinian claim?
What evidence was presented that the warehouse contained only medical supplies? Who independently verified it was not also being used by Hamas? The reporting does not say.
Reuters and CNN took the Palestinian Authority version of events as plain facts but left a question outstanding about the Israeli account. The reader is left with one side making a factual assertion, while the other appears to be offering an unsupported excuse.
Journalists should demand evidence from Israel. They should also demand it from Palestinian authorities. If neither side has independently substantiated its account, then neither claim should receive a presumption of truth.
In war, the burden of proof should not belong to only one side. Journalism earns trust when it applies the same evidentiary standard to everyone.
Al Jazeera is the global media company funded by Qatar, governed through a board appointed by the Qatari state and used to project Qatari influence around the world. Its digital arm, AJ+, was built in 2013 specifically for younger Americans who consume news through social media rather than television. By the late 2010s, it had become one of Facebook’s largest news-video publishers, generating billions of views and millions of followers while focusing heavily on race, social justice and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a peculiar cocktail of a socialist-jihadi alliance at that time, which is now mainstreamed.
AJ+ has a long history of peddling Hamas propaganda
In September 2020, the Trump Justice Department concluded that AJ+ was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and ordered it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Registration would not have restricted its journalism, but simply would have required public disclosure of its relationship with Qatar and periodic reporting similar to that required of other foreign state-backed media organizations like those from Turkey (TRT), China (CGTN) and Russia (RT).
AJ+ refused to register. Republican lawmakers including Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Todd Young pressed DOJ to enforce its own determination.
Then, in May 2022, the Biden Justice Department withdrew the order after reviewing additional information submitted by AJ+. What changed has never been publicly explained. DOJ has not identified the decisive new facts, released its legal analysis or explained why AJ+ was treated differently from other foreign state-funded broadcasters.
“AJ+’s reporting ‘supports an inference’ that its broadcasts are ‘designed to influence the opinions and perspectives of its U.S. audience as directed by the foreign principals and for their principal benefit.’…
Given Al Jazeera’s and TikTok’s public prominence in the U.S., mounting evidence of their use to advance foreign agendas, and the Biden Administration’s own national security concerns with the two companies, the Committee is puzzled that the Department appears to have either ceased or paused enforcement of FARA registration requirements for the companies without explanation.” – February 8, 2024 letter from the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
The timing naturally raises questions.
Only months earlier, the United States had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Qatar had become indispensable to Washington—hosting negotiations with the Taliban, assisting the evacuation from Kabul and serving as one of America’s principal diplomatic intermediaries in the region.
There is no public evidence that the FARA reversal was connected to Qatar’s diplomatic role but it is reasonable to ask whether a government relying heavily on Doha’s cooperation became less interested in forcing Qatar’s flagship media network to register as a foreign agent.
The same question now confronts the second Trump administration. Although Trump’s first Justice Department initiated the FARA action, his current administration has not publicly reopened the case. That may simply reflect DOJ’s legal judgment or competing priorities. It may also reflect Qatar’s continuing importance as a partner in addressing Iran, Gaza and other regional crises.
A final question – closer to home – may be the most consequential. During this same period, antisemitism reached levels not seen in decades while anti-Israel activism surged across American campuses and social media, principally from young people. And AJ+ was one of the most influential foreign state-funded digital news brands reaching young Americans, peddling such hatred over this time.
The unanswered question is whether Washington accepted greater Qatari influence inside the United States – including directly and indirectly promoting antisemitism – in exchange for Qatar’s assistance abroad.
Whether making Al Jazeera and AJ+ register under FARA would suddenly change these trends is unknown. But it is also unknown and curious why the government stopped asking the Qatari media powerhouse to do so.
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