The story of the Bibas children from October 7, 2023 until now has been horrific on every level, at every turn.
First, the four year-old and nine month old were ripped from their homes by the military of the ruling political-terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, along with the children’s terrified mother. They were abducted to the terrorist enclave of Gaza, murdered by Palestinian Arabs weeks later.
Their bodies were then held by the Palestinian Arabs without burial for over a year. They were not returned to Israel for proper, respectful burial.
Instead, they were held for ransom. The small Jewish corpses were ultimately paraded on stage before a crowd of hundreds of cheering Gazans – alongside their children – with a Gazan woman who was not their mother despite Hamas assurances, to be shipped to Israel.
The tiny innocent children were exchanged for dozens of Palestinian Arab terrorists convicted of murder, per Hamas demands. These released terrorists are alive and ready, willing and capable of slaughtering Jews once more.
The media falsely portrays this as a “prisoner exchange,” as though the two sides were swapping living adult prisoners of war. A blasphemy.
Every level of the story is a horror. Yet, there is only so much that Israel can do on its own to change the deep “deformity” in Gazan culture.
But it must try to dissuade at least some of the depraved actions.
Israel should commit to never holding onto any corpses of any Palestinian, whether soldiers, terrorists or anyone else UNLESS Palestinian Arabs are holding dead Israelis. As soon as Palestinians take a dead Israeli, every Palestinian killed should be retained by Israel. A future exchange will only have a single swap: all corpses for all corpses. It removes any bargaining power of killing people and holding the dead.
The Bibas story is pure torture. The Bibas Rule of only corpses for corpses might alleviate some death and pain in the years to come.
The United States passed the Taylor Force Act in March 2018 which prohibits the U.S. from giving funds to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues its “Martyrs’ Payments” to terrorists who killed and injured Americans or Israelis. The PA flatly refused to stop the payments for years, with PA President Mahmoud Abbas saying that he would prioritize giving terrorists and their families money even if he had only one penny left.
In the aftermath of Palestinians’ loss against Israel in the war Gazans started on October 7, 2023, Palestinians are desperate for money. Still, US President Donald Trump is halting the generous flow of money and support to various Palestinian groups and is making it very difficult for the PA’s other sponsors like Iran and Qatar to continue to fund the decimated Palestinian Arabs as long as they support terror.
Rather than halt the extremely popular pay-to-slay program, Abbas announced on February 10 that he will transfer the responsibility of terrorist-tribute from his Ministry of Social Development to a separate agency, the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment. Abbas thinks that this slight of hand to a foundation whose trustees are appointed by him, the PA president, will somehow confuse the United States to turn on the money spigot.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
The unpopular PA president is caught between Palestinian Arabs who seek the destruction of Israel and murder of Israelis, and the United States which accounts for a majority of Palestinian aid, now headed by an administration which will not countenance genocidal jihad, especially on its dime. Abbas prays that this farcical shell game will confuse US President Donald Trump as if he were former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Palestinians are starting to get the message that they must stop supporting terror. The issue is that the masses would rather live in rubble with “dignity” than coexist with the Jewish State.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Over the 2025 Martin Luther King holiday weekend, three Israeli women who had been held in captivity for 471 days by Palestinian Arab terrorists, were released in exchange for 90 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. As the Red Cross came to collect the three women, armed Hamas soldiers climbed atop the Red Cross vehicles to incite the Gazan mobs who had converged on the scene.
Mobs in Gaza surround Red Cross trucks carrying Israeli women
The parade of masked terrorists led The New York Times to comment that Hamas was still “standing”, albeit weakened and isolated, as the “dominant Palestinian power in Gaza.”
The official Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, was not as generous the Times. It mocked the members of Hamas who wore civilian clothes during fifteen months of war hiding amongst women and children, who suddenly donned military uniforms once Israel signed onto a ceasefire:
“When shame ends, only insolence remains. For 15 months of harsh war, Hamas did not dare to show even one of its operatives in military uniforms (!!), but when the ceasefire agreement stipulated that the cannons be silenced, Hamas brought out its operatives in military uniforms – not only for display purposes, but also to fabricate a victory narrative!”
“Victory?” Israel has never been stronger relative to all the countries in the Middle East. Hamas is only powerful relative to the decimated Palestinians.
If the “last man standing” is only relative to YOUR OWN SIDE, then your military foe was never really the opponent. The actions were performance art, a spectacle of battered women and children wavering being sadism and masochism, aired for an antisemitic audience whom Hamas hoped would actually do the fighting against the Jews.
Hamas launched a war with genocidal intent and then hid underground with civilian hostages as well as disguised amongst civilians, only to emerge “standing” atop humanitarian trucks carrying a few female hostages.
After fifteen months of hiding, leaving women and children to bare the brunt of Israeli fire, the armed cowards of Hamas came out once the gunfire had been silenced to wave their arms as “victors” before thousands of Gazans who had watched their own lives being destroyed.
MLK once said “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” The measure of Hamas, the ruling power in Gaza is depraved, cruel and cowardly. That “support for Hamas remains the highest compared to all Palestinian factions” according to the most recent Palestinian poll, marks the Palestinian society as integrally complicit and wicked.
The signing of a ceasefire agreement in January 2025 must have been welcomed news for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past fifteen months, it has watched its various proxies in the region get decimated.
Hamas’s leadership was killed and a majority of its fighters killed, injured, or captured, while Gaza has been largely destroyed.
Hezbollah’s military was soundly defeated, its leader killed, and a new non-Hezbollah aligned Lebanese president was elected.
Syria’s Iranian-backed government was routed, and the country’s armaments were destroyed.
And Iran’s defensive capabilities were eliminated by Israeli attacks, after Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel which caused little damage.
Over the course of the Iranian Proxies – Israel War which started on October 7, 2023, Iran went from being a regional power to an impotent joke. The ceasefire was really a call for the “mercy rule” in which one party was so decisively decimating the counterparty that third parties jumped in to save the stubborn vanquished from complete annihilation.
And yet.
The delusion of unique heavenly blessings have deeply intoxicated and blinded radical Islamic jihadi rulers. The chief cleric of Iran, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei praised the resistance of the Palestinian people” and defeat of the “Zionist regime” upon the announcement of the ceasefire. He fashions himself “leader of the Islamic Revolution,” not just in Iran but around the world, to defeat infidels everywhere.
Much like Monty Python’s delusional defeated Black Knight in the film Holy Grail, the deranged leader cannot admit his utter defeat, and yells as the world passes by.
The lunatic had company.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards said “The end of the war and the imposition of a ceasefire… is a clear victory and a great victory for Palestine and a bigger defeat for the monstrous Zionist regime.”
Hamas’s Khalil al-Hayya said “The ceasefire agreement is the result of the legendary steadfastness of our great Palestinian people and our valiant resistance in the Gaza Strip over the course of more than 15 month. The agreement to halt the aggression on Gaza is an achievement for our people, our resistance, our nation, and the free people of the world. It marks a pivotal stage in the ongoing struggle against the enemy, paving the way toward achieving our people’s goals of liberation and return.”
The Palestine Chronicle tried to rewrite history that there were “Global celebrations” for the “Victory of the Resistance.”
In the United States, Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of Within Our Lifetime wrote on X that “Gaza has won, Palestine has won, resistance has won. Imperialism and Zionism has lost,” and then threatened the United States.
There is no negotiation possible with such lunacy. It is probable that the Iranian nuclear program must be destroyed with impunity rather than dismantled with discussions in the global community.
The sad truth is that radical jihadists who despise Jews are in the majority of the Middle East, as shown in repeated ADL polls. Coexistence will only be a reality under the “wings of democracy,” with jihadi groups and countries stripped of weaponry and capabilities to destroy religious pluralism.
The most famous Ugandan has long been Idi Amin (1928-2003) who served as president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He was known for his ‘reign of terror’ which systematically attacked minority groups including Christians, with over 100,000 people likely killed during his tenure.
A new Ugandan has emerged on the world stage, a 70-year old judge by the name Julia Sebutinde (1954-).
Julia Sebutinde, serving on the International Court of Justice
Sebutinde was the lone judge on the International Court of Justice who did not vote in favor of admonishing Israel regarding its war with the Palestinian terrorist-political party Hamas in several decisions, including on January 26, May 24 and July 19.
On May 24, she issued a lengthy dissenting opinion in which she argued that “I firmly believe that Israel has the right to defend itself against its enemies, including Hamas, and to continue efforts to rescue its missing hostages.” She believes that the ICJ overreached in essentially denying Israel such basic right, even as she agreed that Israel’s defensive actions need to be proportionate, adding “neither international law in general nor the Genocide Convention in particular deprive Israel of the right to take necessary and proportionate actions to defend its citizens and territory against such armed attacks on multiple fronts.”
The opinion was not appreciated by the government of Uganda which distanced itself from Sebutinde, stating her “ruling at the ICJ does not represent the Government of Uganda’s position on the situation in Palestine.” [Uganda recognizes Palestine as a country.]
Uganda took its sharp turn against Israel and sided up with jihadists early in Amin’s reign.
Uganda aligned with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in February 1972 declaring that their regimes would be based on Islam and stand against “Zionism and imperialism.” A few months later, Amin sent a telegram to the United Nations Secretary General applauding Palestinian Arab terrorists murdering Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. The telegram added that the locale was appropriate because “It happened because Hitler and all of the German people knew that the Israelis are not a people who work for humanity and because of that they burned them alive and killed them with gas on the soil of Germany.” He repeated the comments that Hitler was right to kill Jews the following year.
Amin continued to align with “the plight of the Palestinian people” by expelling all Israelis and shutting the Israeli embassy in Uganda in 1973. He declared that the Abayudya native Ugandan Jewish community was illegal and granted the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) permission to operate training facilities in Uganda.
That set the stage for Amin to allow Palestinian Arab terrorists to land a hijacked civilian airplane at its capital city airport of Entebbe in 1976. He watched as the Palestinian terrorists separated Jews and non-Jews, allowing the non-Jewish hostages to fly to France while the 94 Israelis and non-Israeli Jews plus 12 Air France crew remained hostages.
Julia Sebutinde was 22 years old when she watched her country platform Palestinian terrorists and hold 106 Jewish civilians as hostages. She must have marvelled at Israel’s ability to come to their rescue on July 4, 1976 in Operation Thunderbolt.
Roughly 48 years later in 2024, Sebutinde spoke of Israel’s right to fight for another group of 100-plus Israeli hostages held by Palestinian terrorists, this time, trapped in Gaza:
An Israeli operation in February 2024 resulted in the rescue of two hostages, and more recently, the bodies of three more hostages killed in captivity were recovered from Rafah. It is plausible that additional hostages in captivity remain in the area, which is why Israel has declared its intention to locate and return them, dead or alive, to their families. This is a right that the Court cannot deny Israel or the hostages.
The United States government stands with Israel’s right to self defense while a vocal minority of citizens ignore the hostages and call to “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada.” In Uganda, the situation is reversed, with a government hitched economically and politically to jihadi regimes, while a 70 year old judge declares the obvious, that Israel must be allowed to defend itself and bring back the hostages.
It is alarming to watch mainstream media excuse rampant antisemitism as stemming from the Gaza war. It’s not about Gaza; it’s about a global jihad to purge Jews from Jerusalem.
New York Times article arguing that “Israel’s asymmetric response to Oct 7” has brought out the antisemites who are also making “many Muslims in Europe… feel threatened,” diverting the narrative that the prime attackers against Jews are radical Muslims.
Hamas labeled its war against Israel the “Al Aqsa Flood,” meaning the launch of millions of Muslims into Jerusalem. As Hamas stated in starting the war, “the battle of the beginning of the Liberation of Al-Quds [Jerusalem], our land, our people and our prisoners held in the jails of the Zionist occupation…. Today, the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our lands, our holy city of Al-Quds, our Al-Aqsa mosque, and the release of our prisoners from the jails of the Zionist occupation.”
They were clear. The genocidal jihadists are waging a war to eradicate the Jewish State and to reclaim Jerusalem, as though we were in the Middle Ages fighting Crusades.
The slightly less genocidal Palestinian Authority headed by Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas has done his best to gather the Muslim world to join in the jihad. Its Wafa media site continues to claim that “fanatic Israeli settlers… broke into the compounds of al-Aqsa… and raided the holy Islamic Mosque” to inflame hatred against Jews around the world. [Note: the “storming” was regular Jews walking around the Jewish Temple Mount during regular visiting hours and never stepping foot into the al Aqsa mosque.]
Others have sought to recruit Christians to the jihad for Jerusalem, most infamously Jordanian King Abdullah II.
Abdullah spoke at the United Nations in September 2022. At 9:13 of the talk, the king took aim at Jews “Undermining Jerusalem’s legal and historical status quo triggers global tensions and deepens religious divides,” meaning Jews wanting to pray at Judaism’s holiest site on the Jewish Temple Mount.
He continued: “As custodians of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian holy sites, we are committed to protecting the historical and legal status quo and to their safety and future. And as a Muslim leader, let me say clearly, that we are committed to defending the rights, the precious heritage, and the historic identity of the Christian people of our region. Nowhere is that more important than in Jerusalem.Today, Christianity in the holy city is fire. The rights of churches in Jerusalem are threatened. This cannot continue. Christianity is vital to the past and present of our region and the holy land. It must remain an integral part of our future.”
For clarity, neither Christianity nor Islam are under threat in Jerusalem. The Jewish State has allowed full access for the two global faiths in the Jewish State. Further, the Jordanian king has no rights or control of Christian sites but only Islamic ones with the permission of Israel. This was a naked and dangerous call for the Christian world to join the Islamic one to combat Jews in Jerusalem.
And the Muslim world is enormous. At roughly 1.9 billion people, it is almost twice the entire population of North, Central and South America combined.
When agitators storm campuses or graffiti synagogues, they write “Free Palestine” because they are part of the global jihad against Jews everywhere to destroy the Jewish State. When university professors from Columbia and Cornell express their “joy” about the mass murder of Israelis, they believe they are seeing the beginning of the “liberation of Palestine.” They are not considering the casualties that will come upon Gaza.
When anti-Israel groups made a mapping project of Jewish institutions in Massachusetts they were zoning in on Zionists. When CAIR called out Jewish groups like Hillel as “enemies,” it was months before the October 7 attack.
The “martyrs” in Gaza are marketing fodder to enlist people in the global jihad. Like an advertisement, the product being sold is not the ad but the item itself, in this case, the annihilation and expulsion of Jews.
Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about foreign and domestic affairs from a liberal and Arab point of view, honed by his Harvard and American University in Cairo education, and years at the anti-Israel New York Times.
His antipathy for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish State is only matched by his ignorance.
New York Times opinion by Nicholas Kristof on October 20, 2024
Kristof wrote an opinion in the aftermath of Israel’s killing of Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the savage October 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel. He led with a call for the United States to pressure Netanyahu, and repeated the demand throughout his article.
Kristof said that Hamas will never surrender, so it’s up to the United States to apply significant pressure on Israel to declare victory against the unwavering foe. His ignorant view is not supported by polling data. Since the war started, Gazans have lowered their support for war to 36% from 51% right before October 7, 2023. Gazan support for negotiations has more than doubled from 19% in September 2023 to 40% in September 2024.
Similarly, Gazan support for the October 7 massacre dropped dramatically over the last six months from 71% to 39% as the war they initiated has become a dismal failure.
September 2024 PCPSR poll
Kristof continues with the lie that Israel’s defensive war is creating a new “generational threat” from young Gazans seeing the destruction all around them. Yet the opposite is true, that the United Nations educational system has created the “generational threat” of teaching Palestinian Arabs that their future is inside Israel, while Israel’s decisive defensive war is convincing Arabs that violence is not an answer.
Pressure needs to be applied to the UNITED NATIONS, not on Israel, to declare unambiguously that the future for the UNRWA wards lies in Gaza and the West Bank, not Israel; specifically, that there is no ‘right of return’ to homes where grandparents once lived inside Israel. Similar pressure needs to be made on the media to stop platforming lies, particularly from jaundiced woke jihadists.
ACTION ITEM
Write to Kristof’s assistant spencer.cohen@nytimes.com as well as letters@nytimes.com that Kristof’s views of Israel are disconnected from reality.
Palestinian Arabs believe that the pathway to gaining land is through violence, while Israel believes that land given to Palestinian Arabs becomes a launching pad for terrorism. The cause-and-effect is a bloody mirror: violence-for-land (Palestinians) and land-facilitates-violence (Israelis).
Palestinian Arabs have a “greater confidence in the efficacy of armed struggle” to achieve their goals of a Palestinian State, according to Palestinian polls. They point to the success in getting Israel to hand over Jericho, Bethlehem and major Arab cities because of the First Intifada, and abandoning Gaza because of the Second Intifada. This continued more recently in May 2021, when Hamas’s rocketfire caused Israel to halt the eviction of Arab squatters living in Jewish homes in the Sheikh Jarrah section of Jerusalem.
Many Israelis see handing over Gaza as an enormous mistake as it clearly demonstrated that Arab-controlled land becomes a terrorist safe haven. Rather than turning the beachfront land into a peaceful paradise, the Gazans spent years building a terrorist infrastructure from which to launch a genocidal war to destroy Israel. In the aftermath of Israel leaving Gaza in 2005, Palestinian Arabs voted the US-designated terrorist group Hamas to 58% of parliament with the most antisemitic and genocidal charter ever written.
Palestinians are looking for more land; some want all of Israel to be wiped out in favor of Palestine, while others want personal property inside of Israel. Only a minority seek a two-state future.
Israel is not only attempting to destroy Hamas and rescue its hostages; it is educating the jihadists that violence does not pay.
One of thousands of Gaza terrorists killing civilians inside of Israel
It may be working.
A recent September 2024 Palestinian poll found that “for the first time since October 7, 2023, simultaneously in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, findings show significant drop in the favorability of the October 7 attack and in the expectations that Hamas will win the current war, and a moderate drop in the level of support for Hamas; moreover, findings show a drop in the Gaza Strip in the preference for a continued Hamas control over that area in the day after the war and a rise in the preference for PA control…. . Findings show significant rise in support for the two-state solution in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Support for armed struggle declines and support for negotiations rise.”
Both Israelis and Palestinians believe that land and violence are tethered in the holy land. Perhaps the current war is slowly severing that connection and will enable a pathway towards coexistence.
They were shipped to concentration camps to be gassed and incinerated.
They were sent on death marches in the winter to freeze to death.
They were lined up and shot in the heads after digging ditches to receive their corpses.
Almost the entirety of European Jewry was killed. One-third of global Jewry was liquidated.
Holocaust Survivors tried to return to their towns and homes after the war, to be greeted by the locals who had stolen their goods and moved into their homes, who quickly executed the survivors of horrors.
Yet the Holocaust survivors who watched their families, friends and people get annihilated did not take up arms against the German people. They didn’t begin gassing the Austrians after the war. They didn’t invade Poland to burn Poles alive.
Why?
People have argued that Israel’s war to destroy Hamas is breeding another generation of terrorists because of the massive death toll of Palestinian civilians. The argument posits that when young Arabs see the horrible devastation brought upon their families and towns, they will become terrorists when they grow up and seek revenge.
Yet the people who actually experienced a genocide – Jews – never embarked on such a lust for blood and revenge.
Why?
Jews wanted to just live a regular life before the Holocaust and afterwards. Their goals did not change with time. They went from loving their neighbors and governments in Europe to hating them but did not seek revenge.
Palestinian Arabs have also stayed their course. Their goal was to destroy the Jewish State and its founding and remains so today. The wars have not altered their goals and the death of friends and family are simply viewed as setbacks to achieving their aims.
Wars do not create a new generation of terrorists. A culture that dehumanizes the “other” as evil begets a generation of terrorists set on killing the invading entity.
During the Holocaust, Nazis kept Jews calm in concentration camps, making them believe that they were in forced labor camps, not death mills. In recent decades, the United Nations has kept Palestinian Arabs in “refugee” camps, making them believe that the world was going to help them reclaim the towns and homes where grandparents once lived.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews inside their camps, while the UN raised generations to kill thousands of Jews just a short distance away.
ACTION ITEM
Contact the White House and your local representative that UNRWA is a weapon of war that must be closed. Pressure the United Nations and Saudi Arabia to state clearly that there is no “right of return” for Palestinian Arabs to move into Israel.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has many proxies surrounding Israel: Hamas which controls Gaza; Hezbollah which controls Lebanon; Syria; and farther away, the Houthis in Yemen.
Does it also have cells in the West Bank?
As Iran sent over 180 missiles into Israel on October 1, 2024, two Palestinian Arabs from Hebron shot and killed seven people in Tel Aviv and injured many others. The timing was minutes apart.
This was the first time that Palestinian Arabs shot up Tel Aviv streets during the year long war against Palestinian terrorists. Is it a coincidence that Palestinian Arabs decided to blast Tel Aviv just as Iranian missiles showered from above?
West Bank Arabs have been much more supportive of the October 7 attacks and commitment to destroying Israel than their counterparts in Gaza according to Palestinian polls. Israeli activity likely prevented a two-front war on October 7, which would have resulted in thousands of additional Israeli deaths in cities like Kfar Saba and Ra’anana which are very close to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
While the world is focused on the violent storm between Israel and Iran, Israel’s security will need to investigate how deeply Iran has integrated with the newer terrorist groups in the West Bank like Jenin Battalion, Lions’ Den and Tulkarm Brigades, to clamp down on yet another front of jihadi terrorism.
ACTION ITEM
Write White House and pro-Israel members of Congress like Ritchie Torres, Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer or your local representative to get the State Department to label the Jenin Battalion, Lion’s Den and the branches of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade as US designated foreign terrorist organizations.
First One Through 