The question now is: Can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel be pressured to declare victory and end the war in Gaza? Netanyahu now can take the best kind of offramp. He can savor the killing of Yahya Sinwar — a terrorist with so much Israeli and Palestinian blood on …
Read More »Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive
The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose decision to attack Israel more than a year ago set off the ever-widening war tearing up the Middle East, could be the key to ending the bloodshed. Now that Israel has decapitated Hamas in Gaza, the thinking goes, it might be …
Read More »Sinwar’s Final Moments: On the Run, Hurt, Alone, but Still Defiant
At the end, the fearsome militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war seemed barely a threat. In video captured by an Israeli drone, a man sat alone, badly wounded and caked in dust amid the ruins of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a kaffiyeh and …
Read More »Sinwar’s Death Highlights Israel’s Long Quest for Deterrence
A quarter-century before Israel was founded, the Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country. A Jewish state, he wrote in 1923, would succeed only by projecting enough strength to force its enemies to accept it as a permanent reality. …
Read More »Opinion | Yahya Sinwar’s Death Is a Tricky Opportunity
Reading the news that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s pitiless leader, had been killed on Wednesday by Israeli forces in southern Gaza, I had the same sense of elation so many people felt when Osama bin Laden was killed. To take satisfaction in the violent end of another human being, even an …
Read More »How Israel’s Army Uses Palestinians as Human Shields in Gaza
After Israeli soldiers found Mohammed Shubeir hiding with his family in early March, they detained him for roughly 10 days before releasing him without charge, he said. During that time, Mr. Shubeir said, the soldiers used him as a human shield. Mr. Shubeir, then 17, said he was forced to …
Read More »Survivors of Gaza Hospital Blaze Say They Are Living a ‘Recurring Nightmare’
This was not the first time that displaced Gazans camping on the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital awoke to Israeli strikes on the place where they were trying to find safety. But Monday’s strike overshadowed any they had survived before: flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony …
Read More »Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack
For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history. Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York …
Read More »Israeli Strikes on Northern Gaza Kill at Least 20, Aid Workers Say
The humanitarian crisis in the northern Gaza Strip deepened on Saturday as an Israeli bombardment killed at least 20 people, trapped thousands more and prompted one of the area’s last functioning hospitals to issue desperate pleas for assistance. Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Saturday hit the Jabaliya area of northern …
Read More »In Battered Lebanon, a Lone Gas Station Is a Lifeline in the East
The gas station is nestled on the side of the road, a lone hive of liveliness in an otherwise deserted stretch of eastern Lebanon. By 9 a.m., a steady stream of cars is already pulling up to its pump, and the station’s owner, Ali Jawad, waves them in one by …
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