One of the iconic pictures of the hostages being released from Hamas is that of 17-year-old Mia Leimberg, 17, who was seen leaving captivity on Tuesday while carrying her dog. This was when the world – including the Leimberg family itself – found out that the pet was also kidnapped on October 7, together with its owner, her mother and other family members.
Before the release, Mia Leimberg’s father Moshe Leimberg had been actively looking for the family’s Shih Tzu named Bella as he wanted the beloved animal to be there for his wife and daughter’s return. “I want Bella to wait for Mia and Gabriela when they get home,” he explained in a Facebook post urging the community to help him find the dog that he believed was missing after Hamas’s attack on Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.
On October 7, Mia Leimberg, together with her mother Gabriela Leimberg, 59, who live in Jerusalem, visited her aunt Clara Merman, 63, in Nir Yitzhak. On the day of the attack, the three women as well as Clara Merman’s partner Luis Har and her brother, Fernando Merman were kidnapped by Hamas.
Clara Merman, Mia and Gabriela Leimberg were released on the fifth day of ceasefire on Tuesday. Luis Har and Fernando Merman remain in the Gaza Strip. In a stunning video clip released by Hamas, Mia can be seen marching out of the vehicle Hamas had driven her into the exchange with the Red Cross with both arms wrapped around that fluffy little dog. In the video a terrorist can be seen pointing at the dog in surprise, and Mia, all curly hair and brazen, seems to determinedly tell him — the dog is mine, back off.
Mia was captured on Oct. 7th while still in her pajamas. After the gunfire and explosions started, little Bella was incredibly frightened, and Mia, trying to assuage her fears, held her tight. When the Hamas militants broke into their safe room, they saw a young girl in her pajamas, holding what appeared to be a doll of a dog. They didn’t think much of it, and took the five captives with them into Gaza.
When the kidnappers first saw that doll move a few hours later, and realized it was an actual animal, a fight erupted, but Mia, an “only child who knows exactly what she wants and gets exactly what she wants,” as her cousins affectionately described her, won out.
“It was not easy to keep her,” her aunt said. Mia made sure to clean up quickly after Bella in the bathroom, kept her close, and shared whatever scraps of food she got with the pup. She told her homeroom teacher that Bella didn’t bark there at all.
Yet caring for Bella helped the Leimbergs survive captivity. “The most important thing was that they were together. When a person is with their best friend, the dog, the most loyal, the most beloved, it gives them strength,” her cousin said.
The popular British Sunday Times magazine dedicated its front page today to Hamas' assaults on women, including shocking testimonies of rape and other brutality and cruelty perpetrated against young women, female soldiers, and others.
In the article, under the headline 'I saw Hamas rape women before killing them' some of the survivors of the massacre describe the acts of sexual assault against women before murdering them.
Yoni Saadon, one of the witnesses, recounts in the Times:“I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her. She was screaming, ‘Stop it — already I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing, just kill me!’ When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head. I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ‘I’m sorry’."
“I kept thinking it could have been one of my daughters, or my sister — I had bought her a ticket but last minute she couldn’t come.”
"I hid in the bushes and saw that they had caught a young woman near a car and she was fighting back, not allowing them to... They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he says.
The article also quotes Shelly Harush, the police officer appointed to investigate sexual violence and crimes against women by Hamas.
"It’s clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people. We gathered thousands of declarations, photos, and videos. As a Jewish mother, my soul and spirit cannot take this."
Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, a voluntary religious organisation that collects the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they can be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition, adds his testimony to the article.
“We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim,” he said. “No one saw more than us. “It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could — to kill, to burn alive, to rape … it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.”
Among volunteers in an all-female team to prepare female corpses for burial was Shari, 60, an architect who lives in Jerusalem. Shari commented in the article on how some of the victims arrived:
"Their faces were in anguish and often their fingers clenched as they died. We saw women whose pelvises were broken. Legs broken. There were women who had been shot in … there seems no doubt what happened to them.”
Pro-Palestinian groups such as those who spread hate at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting this week, have been lavishly funded by the Rockefeller family’s main charitable arm.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has links to two groups the Israeli government designated “terrorist organizations,” a review of public records by The Post shows.
Founded in 1940, the famous clan’s $1.3 billion fund — where Justin, Wyatt and David Rockefeller Jr. sit on the board of trustees — has shelled out more than $2.6 million since 2018 directly or indirectly to at least six anti-Israel organizations, several of which openly celebrated Hamas’ Oct 7 terrorist attack on the Jewish state.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, whose logo was affixed to an ad promoting Wednesday’s rally, is a “fiscally sponsored project” of the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice.
In August 2022, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave the Alliance $100,000.
Israel designated Samidoun a terrorist organization in February 2021 and Germany banned it last month.
Samidoun, founded in 2011, condemned the United Kingdom in 2021 for classifying Hamas a terrorist organization, and cheered the Oct 7 terrorist incursion:
The Iranian regime has executed more than 127 people, including women and children, since the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, human rights groups said on Saturday, according to The Guardian.
Data collected by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and the Norway-based organization Hengaw, which have been cross-referenced by the Observer, there has been an alarming rise in executions since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas.
A third group, Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), confirmed that there has been a significant increase in executions since the October 7 attacks, stating that on Wednesday last week, the regime executed seven people within a 24-hour period.
Human rights activists and the families of those put to death have accused the regime of using the world’s preoccupation with the war in Gaza as a cover to exact revenge on dissidents and put people to death without due judicial process.
Those who have been put to death in the last two months include a child, 17-year-old Hamidreza Azari, whose death was labeled “deplorable” by the UN last week, according to The Guardian.
Iran has also executed 22-year-old Milad Zohrevand, the eighth protester linked to the Women, Life, Freedom movement to face the death penalty for participating in the nationwide anti-regime protests that erupted across Iran last year following the death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman who died while in police custody after allegedly being arrested for breaching Iran’s strict dress code.
In October, the UN condemned the Iranian regime for carrying out executions at an “alarming rate”. It said, according to its data, at least 419 people were put to death between January and July this year, which constitutes a 30% increase compared with the same time period in 2022.
This past April, rights groups said that Iran hanged 75 percent more people in 2022 than the previous year.
There has long been a concern over the number of executions in Iran, which activists say disproportionately target members of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, notably Kurds in the northwest, Arabs in the southwest and Baluch in the southeast.
In a Motzai Shabbos speech, a reporter from Channel 11 asked why some of the budget was allocated to Chareidi schools.
The Prime Minister responded that a Chareidi teacher is not half a teacher, nor is a Chareidi child a half of a child. These teachers receive a pittance of a salary of $1500 a month and they live in the south.
They are our brothers and sisters. Now is not the time to attack others. He then discussed the Zaka organization and how they cried when they say a family burned alive together.
The editorial claimed "In less than 2 months, the National Security Ministry has approved more than 25,000 firearms purchase requests, as well as 145,000 before the massacre, not including firearms already in possession of security forces."
"Ben-Gvir is taking advantage of the vacuum to create so-called 'emergency squads' which are walking about armed without any supervision, and arming the public as well."
The editorial ends with criticism of the appointment of Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister, and for giving him the powers he has: "The danger in giving this portfolio to a convicted criminal is no longer speculative, it is real. The writing is on the wall in blood."
The editorial comes on the heels of a Knesset deliberation in which members of Knesset complained that Ben-Gvir's staff had distributed firearms and licenses without permission.
During the meeting, it was revealed that the state ombudsman had forbidden Ben-Gvir's staff from dealing with firearms licensing requests.
The National Security Ministry's legal advisor commented during the deliberations: "Girl doing national service were given authority as firearms officials for half a year. Knesset employees who helped to check documents were not."
MKs are demanding to cancel the licenses that were issued and open a criminal investigation against the minister and his staff for the malicious misuse of their public office.
Minister Ben-Gvir defended the policy Thursday during a press conference at the scene of a deadly shooting attack in Jerusalem: "We have a strong army and police, but they can't be everywhere. We have seen repeatedly that armed civilians can save lives."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israel that it lacks “credit” to conduct the kind of military campaign necessary to defeat Hamas, saying that the Biden administration would not tolerate large-scale bombing over months in southern Gaza.
Blinken’s remarks were leaked to the Israeli press. The Times of Israel quoted a transcript of his meeting with Israel’s war cabinet:
Blinken: You can’t operate in southern Gaza in the way you did in the north. There are two million Palestinians there. You need to evacuate fewer people from their homes, be more accurate in the attacks, not hit UN facilities, and ensure that there are enough protected areas [for civilians]. And if not? Then not to attack where there is a civilian population. What is your system of operation?
IDF Chief Herzi Halevi: We follow a number of principles — proportionality, distinction, and the laws of war. There were instances where we attacked on the basis of those principles, and instances where we decided not to attack, because we waited for a better opportunity.
Children taken hostage by Hamas were “marked” by their captors with burns from searing-hot motorcycle exhaust pipes, family of recently released child hostages have revealed.
“They told us stories about what they went through inside Gaza. The stories are horrible,” said Yaniv Yaakov, the uncle of 12-year-old Yagil and 16-year-old Or, two boys freed this week as part of Israel’s ceasefire deal with Hamas.
“Each child that was taken by Hamas was taken on a motorbike and they took every child, took his leg and put it on the exhaust of that motorbike, so they have a burn so they will be marked if they run, if they escape, so they can find them,” Yaakov said during an interview, according to the Times of Israel.
His nephews and other children held captive by the terrorists were also frequently moved from place to place, and drugged to keep them complacent.
“They were treated so bad, but at least they are with us,” he said.
Yagil and Or’s account was just one of many emerging from relatives of children taken hostage by Hamas during their bloody October 7 attack on Israel. Of the more than 200 hostages, about 40 are believed to be children. At least 32 kids have been released so far.
The youngest, 10-month-old Kfir Bibas, died in Hamas captivity along with his mother and 4-year-old brother. The terror group claimed they were killed by Israeli shelling.
Twelve-year-old Eitan Yahalomi was beaten by a mob of Gazan citizens when he was first carried across the border from Israel, his aunt Deborah Cohen said, according to Reuters.
Later, the terrorists forced him to watch graphic footage of their massacres in Israel, Cohen said.
“Every time a child cried there, they threatened them with a weapon to make them be quiet. Once they got to Gaza, all the civilians, everyone was hitting them,” she said in an interview with French outlet BFM TV.
“We’re talking about a child 12 years old,” she added.
Emily Hand, a 9-year-old who spent her captivity dodging between houses in Gaza with her captors to avoid shelling, has only spoken in whispers since her return after they conditioned her not to make noise.
“I had to put my ear close to her mouth to hear. In captivity, she was told not to make any noise. You can see the terror in her eyes,” her father, Thomas Hand, told CNN after her recent release.
Another girl held with Emily, 13-year-old Hila Rotem Shoshani, is also speaking only in a hushed voice, according to her family.
Many children reported being kept underground in Hamas’ elaborate tunnel system throughout the duration of their captivity, where they subsisted on desperately small rations of rice and pita bread.
The ceasefire deal started on November 24 after Hamas agreed to release 50 hostages in return for a four-day truce and the release of 150 prisoners.
Hamas was given the option to extend the ceasefire another day for every 10 additional hostages released.
Over 100 hostages have since been released as the truce is scheduled to lift at 7 a.m. local time Friday, unless another deal can be reached.
The IDF has announced the renewal of fighting in Gaza, after the Hamas terror organization violated the terms of the operational pause.
An IDF spokesperson said that IAF aircraft are attacking Hamas targets in Gaza. A diplomatic source said, "We are renewing the fighting with all our might. There are no negotiations for the release of hostages."
At the same time, the IDF's Home Front Command updated the guidelines for the Israeli public, and in most cities in central Israel, schools will be open only in locations where a protected space is accessible within the required amount of time.
The pause was set to expire at 7:00a.m. Friday morning, but reports by the Wall Street Journal claimed that an agreement was reached on extending the ceasefire by a day. This report was not confirmed by Israel, and by Friday morning, Israel had not yet received a new list of hostages to be freed.
At 5:48a.m. Friday morning, sirens sounded in Israeli communities near the Gaza border. A few minutes later, the IDF announced that it had successfully intercepted a launch from Gaza.
An hour later, at 6:53a.m., sirens sounded in the Israeli community of Holit, located near the Gaza border.
Less than half an hour later, at 7:05a.m.. the IDF announced, "Hamas violated the operational pause, and in addition, fired toward Israeli territory."
"The IDF has resumed combat against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip."
The IDF also clarified: "Following the initial report regarding sirens sounded in Kibbutz Holit, a number of launches were identified from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory.
"The launches were not intercepted according to protocol.
"IDF fighter jets are currently striking Hamas terror targets in the Gaza Strip. Details to follow."
On Thursday, after several days of quiet, the IDF successfully intercepted a suspicious aerial target that crossed into Israel from Lebanon.
The IDF confirmed: "A short while ago, following the sirens that sounded in the areas of Dovev, Mattat, and Sasa in northern Israel, the IDF Aerial Defense Array successfully intercepted a suspicious aerial target that crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory."
The measure — titled the No Funds for Iranian Terrorism Act — passed 307-119 as Republicans sought to hold the Biden administration accountable for what they call their complicity in funding Iranian-backed terrorism in the Middle East.
“With such instability in the region, the last thing we need to do is to give access to $6 billion to be diverted to more Iranian-sponsored terrorism,” Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a debate.
U.S. officials have rebuffed this criticism, noting that not a single dollar has yet to be made available to Iran and insisting that when it is, it can only be used for humanitarian needs.
Republican critics like McCaul say that despite the money being restricted to aid, it is fungible, and could free up other funds for Tehran to provide support to Hamas like they believe it did before it attacked Israel in early October.
The U.S. and Iran reached the tentative agreement in August that eventually saw the release of five detained Americans in Tehran and an unknown number of Iranians imprisoned in the U.S. after billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets were transferred from banks in South Korea to Qatar. But days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, the U.S. and Qatar agreed that Iran would not be able to access the money in the meantime, with officials stopping short of a full refreezing of the funds.
Immediately after the blackest day in Israeli history, a consensus formed that we must wait until after the war to investigate how Hamas was able to invade the country, slaughter 1,200 innocents and get away with 240 hostages. There’s a lot to recommend this position.
We’re at war. Now is not the time for action, not recrimination and trials for failed generals, security chiefs and politicians. Good or bad, you go to war with the army and leaders you have. People have jobs to do, and our job is to let them do theirs.
While reasonable on its face, there is a problem with delaying a reckoning. At least in some cases, it seems clear that the people whose failures enabled the Hamas attack are not capable of bringing us victory.
Case in point: Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Directorate Chief Chief Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva. In the weeks since Oct. 7, more and more information has come out about why Hamas was able to pull it off. All of the information points to Haliva and his close subordinates.
The Field Observers unit at Nahal Oz base suffered the greatest losses there during Hamas’s assault. The unit, comprising female soldiers, is responsible for monitoring the footage from security cameras along the Gaza border around the clock and alerting forces on the ground and in the intelligence community to anything suspicious.
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US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) stated that Israel should "destroy every element of Hamas" when confronted by activists from the anti-Israel Code Pink organization who asked if he would support a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization.
"I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on," Rubio told the activists. "These people are vicious animals who did horrifying crimes, and I hope you guys post that."
When asked about the civilians who are killed during the battles between Israel and Hamas, Rubio replied that he blames Hamas for all civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip.
"Hamas should stop hiding behind civilians, putting civilians in the way. Hamas knew that this was gonna lead to this, so Hamas has to stop building their military installations underneath hospitals," he said. "I think it's horrifying, I think it's terrible, and I think Hamas is one hundred percent to blame."
