Hamas Watch

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The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it eliminated Hamas Commander Anas Muhammad Ibrahim Hamed, who infiltrated Israel and participated in the Oct. 7 Nova Music Festival Massacre.

Hamed was killed during a targeted Monday strike in Gaza, the IDF announced Tuesday.

“The IDF struck yesterday in the center of the Gaza Strip and eliminated Ans Muhammad Ibrahim Hamed, Nukhba commander in the Hamas terror organization, who raided the territory of the State of Israel and the Nova festival during the murderous massacre on October 7,” the IDF wrote in a Tuesday morning post on X.

The IDF called Hamed an “immediate threat to IDF forces operating in the Gaza Strip,” and said he was “eliminated in a precise airstrike.”

Blurb:

The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced Thursday that it has determined four sham charities are directly bankrolling Hamas’s military wing and enabling its operations.

According to the Treasury Department, Hamas is hiding its revenue-generating activities behind civilian organizations, under the guise of humanitarian work, to support the group’s terrorist activities.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent was quoted in a press release yesterday, saying,  “Hamas continues to finance its military wing by exploiting sham charities to support terrorist operations. The Treasury Department will not allow Hamas to misuse the charitable sector for its violent aims, and we will continue to target these networks wherever they operate.”

Four separate charities are accused of channeling cash to the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which are suspected of carrying out some of the group’s most heinous terrorist activities.

Blurb:

Israeli settlers vandalized a mosque in the Israeli-occupied West Bank early Monday, spray-painting offensive phrases and setting a fire, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Religious Affairs.

Worshippers arriving for the day’s first prayers found the damage and a smoldering fire that spewed black smoke across the entrance of the Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq Mosque in the town of Tell, near Nablus, and stained the ornate doorway.

“I was shocked when I opened the door,” said Munir Ramdan, who lives nearby. “The fire had been burning here in the area, the glass was broken here and the door was broken.”

Blurb:

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States will contribute $10 billion toward the Board of Peace.

Trump made his announcement during the board’s second official meeting, the first convening of the group in Washington, D.C.

“The United States is going to make a contribution of $10 billion to the Board of Peace,” said Trump. “We’ve had great support for that number and that number is a very small number when you look at that, compared to the cost of war. That’s two weeks of fighting.”

Blurb:

President Donald Trump is hosting the inaugural Board of Peace meeting on Thursday morning at 9 a.m.

The meeting will take place at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., before Trump heads to Rome, Georgia, for a speech on affordability.

The agenda for the meeting will include a discussion of how to move forward with peace in Gaza, as Israel and several Palestinian allies, including Egypt and Turkey, will be in attendance. Several of the U.S.’s typical allies, such as Canada, have not yet signed onto the organization.

Blurb:

The Israel Defence Forces have told CBC News that they dug 20 to 30 metres deep in a Gaza war cemetery where 22 Canadian soldiers are buried in order to destroy a Hamas tunnel.

An IDF officer who spoke to CBC News on background and who was involved in combat operations in the area said he was not able to give any assurance that Israeli forces had taken measures to preserve human remains.

News that the cemetery had been damaged during IDF combat operations was first reported in The Guardian on Feb. 4, but until now it was not clear whether the damage was just to surface structures such as headstones and walls or also included the remains of the dead. Bodies are normally buried at a depth of two to three metres.

Blurb:

The Vatican will not join President Donald Trump’s newly formed Board of Peace, its top diplomatic official said Tuesday, signaling reluctance from the Holy See to take part in the post-war initiative.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the Holy See “will not participate in the Board of Peace because of its particular nature, which is evidently not that of other States,” the Vatican’s official news outlet reported.

Blurb:

The Vatican has rejected an invitation to participate in President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which was recently formed to rebuild war-ravaged Gaza.

The Holy See’s top diplomatic official confirmed the rejection on Tuesday.

The refusal to join the international effort signals hesitation from the Catholic Church’s leadership toward the post-war initiative.

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the Holy See “will not participate in the Board of Peace because of its particular nature, which is evidently not that of other States,” according to the Vatican’s official news outlet.

Blurb:

U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that members of his newly created Board of Peace have pledged $5 billion toward rebuilding war-ravaged Gaza and will commit thousands of personnel to international stabilization and police forces for the territory.

The pledges will be formally announced when board members gather in Washington on Thursday for their first meeting, he said.

“The Board of Peace will prove to be the most consequential International Body in History, and it is my honor to serve as its Chairman,” Trump said in a social media posting announcing the pledges.

Blurb:

MEITAR, Israel: Hundreds of tearful mourners packed a stadium in southern Israel on Wednesday (Jan 28) for the funeral of Ran Gvili, the last Gaza hostage whose burial marks the end of a painful national saga triggered by Hamas’s 2023 attack.

Israeli forces on Monday brought home the remains of Gvili, who was killed in action and whose body Palestinian militants took into Gaza during their Oct 7 attack, which triggered a devastating two-year war.

A large banner bearing the portrait of Gvili hung in a stadium in the town of Meitar, the 24-year-old police officer’s hometown and where he will be laid to rest.

Blurb:

Israel military on Sunday recovered the remains of the last hostage held in Gaza Ran Gvili and repatriated to Israel for burial.”Following the identification process conducted by the National Forensic Centre, in cooperation with the Israeli police and the military rabbinate, representatives of the (Israeli military) informed the family of hostage Ran Gvili... that their loved one had been formally identified and repatriated for burial,” IDF said in a statement.”With this, all hostages have been returned from the Gaza Strip to the State of Israel”, it added.

Blurb:

 

For the past twenty years, For more than twenty years, my colleagues and I have argued for what the world actually needs, not a malevolent,failed United Nations, but a union of headed by the US wth shared values and moral clarity.

From its inception, the United Nations was structurally destined to fail. It has failed the tortured, the oppressed, and the poor on a scale that is impossible to quantify. Graft and corruption are not anomalies at the UN; they are endemic to the institution itself. As Norm Coleman once put it, the UN functions as a “jobs program for many countries,” where nations that contribute little or nothing wield outsized influence over global affairs.

The bureaucracy alone is damning: thousands of mandates and precious little to show for them.

Blurb:

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Thursday (Jan 15) announced the formation of a Gaza “board of peace,” a key phase two element of a US-backed plan to end the war in the Palestinian territory.

“It is my Great Honor to announce that THE BOARD OF PEACE has been formed,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, adding that the members of the body will be announced “shortly”.

“I can say with certainty that it is the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place,” Trump said.

A United Nations initiate designed to give administrative flesh to President Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan is feared to become its replacement. What started as a board of invested actors to help manage the transition in Gaza from Hamas to something else is now taking on a global scope as mission creep has taken hold at an ecumenical scale. Trump said of the board that it would “get a lot of work done that the UN should have done.”

Maya Ungar, a UN analyst, is sounding the alarm, claiming, “If member states, if countries do decide to sign up – and not just to sign up, but to really institutionalise and move along with this Board of Peace process – it is going to become a parallel or competing structure to the UN Security Council, which is an institution that has already been facing immense legitimacy as well as financial concerns over the past few years.”

Blurb:

The Board of Peace was initially given a limited mandate by the UN Security Council last November, endorsed strictly as a mechanism to support the peace process in Gaza.

But recent developments suggest the project is rapidly expanding beyond that scope. Its draft charter reportedly makes no mention of Gaza at all.

Instead, the body is described as an organisation designed to “secure peace” in regions threatened by conflict – a remit strikingly similar to that of the UN Security Council.

Maya Ungar, a UN analyst at the Intern

Blurb:

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accepted an invitation to join US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.

A statement from his office said Netanyahu would become a member of the board “which is to be comprised of world leaders”.

The board was originally thought to be aimed at helping end the two-year war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and oversee reconstruction. But its proposed charter does not mention the Palestinian territory and appears to be designed to supplant functions of the UN.

Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have also agreed to join, as have Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Turkey and Vietnam.

Blurb:

Rights groups say the demolition order, which will affect 100 Palestinian homes, is an attempt to ‘cage in’ Palestinians.

The Israeli military will demolish 25 residential buildings in the occupied West Bank’s Nur Shams refugee camp this week, according to local authorities.

Abdallah Kamil, the governor of the Tulkarem governorate where Nur Shams is located, told the AFP news agency on Monday that he was informed of the planned demolition by the Israeli Defence Ministry body COGAT.

Blurb:

Children and families in Gaza scooped muddy water from their tents Tuesday, trying to protect the few belongings that remain after two years of war.

Winter’s heavy rains have left displaced Palestinians splashing in water that reaches their ankles, and blaming both Israel and Hamas for the misery that remains despite a cease-fire.

“All tents were destroyed,” said Assmaa Fayad in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, whose shelter was damaged in Tuesday’s latest downpour.

“Where is Hamas? Where are the people to see this rain and how our children are drowning?”

A Hamas spokesperson, Hazem Qassem, lashed out in a message on Telegram: “All the world’s efforts to alleviate the disaster have failed because of the Israeli siege.”

Blurb:

The United Nations adopted the United States’s proposal on Monday to begin implementing the next phase of President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza.

Trump’s 20-point plan to achieve lasting stability in the region, which had been beset by hostilities between Hamas and Israel, gained international legitimacy after the 15-member council voted 13-0 in favor of a resolution endorsing the plan’s proposal for a temporary new government in Gaza.

Russia and China abstained from the vote, which supported the establishment of the “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump as a transitional government, and the creation of a temporary “International Stabilization Force” in Gaza.

Blurb:

“He wants to be part of the Abraham Accords,” Trump said.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) signaled renewed willingness to join the Abraham Accords during a meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. He emphasized that any normalization with Israel must include a “path to a two-state solution” between Gaza and Israel.

The meeting, MBS’s first White House visit in more than seven years, was marked by an elaborate welcoming ceremony on the South Lawn to spotlight the administration’s partnership with the kingdom and showcase the rapport between the two leaders. They discussed security cooperation, defense sales, nuclear agreements, and hundreds of billions of dollars in Saudi investment in the US economy.

Blurb:

The world has been shocked and horrified by stories of how Hamas tortured and murdered Israeli hostages. But Hamas also viciously maltreats and even kills its own people who dare to stand up to it, including Moumen al-Natour, a Palestinian anti-Hamas activist.

The UK Daily Mail says that al-Natour has endured endless harassment and persecution from Hamas, from “being lashed with a whip, stripped of his clothes, or made to squat for 24 gruelling hours in a tiny underground cell, the 30-year-old lawyer has paid the price time and time again for his resistance to the authoritarian government.”

Describing one round of abuse at Hamas’s hands, al-Natour told the UK outlet, “They insulted me with obscene language and threatened to bring my father, mother, brothers and sisters to the prison to torture them. Once, someone even told me they could rape my mother and sisters in front of me.”

Blurb:

Hamas took Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American hero, captive on Oct. 7, 2023, and murdered him while in captivity. Israel finally recovered his body along with the bodies of two other brave Israelis after more than two years in Hamas’ hands.

Sharren Haskel, the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, posted the news about the three dead hostages’ heartbreaking homecoming in a tribute where she praised their courage and individual talents.

Neutra’s family said in a statement that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency obtained, “With heavy hearts and a deep sense of relief — we share the news that, Captain Omer Neutra …has finally been returned for burial in the land of Israel.” Neutra’s parents spoke at the Republican National Convention last year to rally support for releasing the Israeli hostages before they knew that their precious son had been murdered in captivity.