RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/71-year-old-israeli-grandfather-recounts-his-horrific-experience-as-a-captive-of-hamas/

Luis Har is a 71-year-old Israeli grandfather who was taken from his home at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on October 7, 2023 by Hamas terrorists. He was finally freed from captivity in the Gazan city of Rafah in “a daring military operation” carried out by the IDF in February 2024. More on his story, which he recently told to the newspaper Maariv, can be found here: “Most Hamas terrorists were drugged, completely inhumane, rescued hostage says,” by Sherry Makover-Balikov, Jerusalem Post, January 28, 2025:

“The hostages today are suffering from prolonged hunger,” released hostage Luis Har said in an interview with Maariv.”Hamas takes all the aid,” he continued. “I was there; I know what delaying the deals means. Every day increases fear, danger, and suffering. We must not wait, and we must not delay because every passing day increases the concern that, in the end, there will be no one left to bring back.”Har, who was abducted on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, was later freed in a daring military operation in Rafah in February 2024. In his interview, he described the terrifying moments of his abduction, his prolonged captivity in the home of a Hamas operative in southern Gaza, and his eventual rescue and return to Israel….

Har said the captors’ treatment of the hostages varied. “There were some moments of humanity, but not the majority. Most of them were either drugged or completely inhumane.”

“The man of the house, for example, took care of us and made it a point to reassure us that we would be okay. He said, ‘If there’s peace between us, I’ll come to your kibbutz to eat pizza at your place.’ That doesn’t negate the brutality of him and the others, who constantly threatened and shouted. They thought our situation would end in two or three days, but suddenly it became long-term.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21377/hamas-plans-trump-gaza-plan

Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

Hamas does not want any US intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The terrorist group, together with Iran’s terror proxies, fear that this would disrupt their Jihad (holy war) against Israel.

For the Trump plan to succeed, the US must insist on the removal of Hamas from power and the disarming of all the terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

It will take several years to rebuild the Gaza Strip and make it habitable once again. The Trump administration will be gone by then. The biggest fear is that a future US administration will fail to block the return of terrorists to the rebuilt Gaza Strip.

If that happens, it will be a matter of time before the Gaza Strip once again becomes a large base for jihadists not only from Hamas, but other Islamist terror groups for whom Israel and the US are the Number 1 target.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has responded to US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by threatening to resort to violence against Americans.

In a statement, Hamas said that the Palestinians will “confront the plan with resistance and necessary force.”

This threat is directed not only against the US, but also against Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, many of whom would be happy to move to another place where they could live in security and peace. Hamas is basically saying that if the Trump administration dares to implement the relocation and reconstruction plan, the terrorist organization will unleash a wave of terrorism against Americans and Palestinians.

https://www.jns.org/terrorists-released-by-israel-leave-prison-as-millionaires/

Many terrorists released by Israel are millionaires, flush with cash from years of receiving monthly Palestinian Authority “pay for slay” stipends, an analysis by a Jerusalem-based watchdog group revealed on Wednesday.

Palestinian Media Watch posted a list of all 734 terrorists scheduled for release from Israeli prisons in the first phase of the hostages-for-ceasefire agreement with Hamas, together with their “salaries”—the dollar amounts each terrorist had received from the Palestinian Authority’s so-called Martyrs’ Fund while incarcerated.

In total, the terrorists received $141,837,087, or more than half a billion shekels. Of those, 316, or nearly half, received more than a million shekels. (Palestinian Media Watch created a program to crunch the numbers, inputting all the relevant P.A. criteria—crime, marital status, number of children, etc., to determine the size of their stipends.)

“It’s a tremendous force driving terror,” Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch’s founder and director, told JNS.

First, it signals to Palestinians that these terrorists weren’t working in a vacuum, but were acting in the name of the P.A.

Second, the wealth places the terrorists in an honored position in Palestinian society, in fact, “Palestinian terrorists are the most honored people in Palestinian society,” he said.

“When they’re introduced, and in interviews, even years after they were released from jail, they’re called Asra [“Prisoner”]. That’s their title. It’s like an ambassador. It’s actually similar to POW [prisoner of war]. They have a different word for criminal prisoners. For the P.A., they’re legitimate fighters, even if they killed women and children,” Marcus said.

https://www.jns.org/trumps-call-to-resettle-gazans-could-end-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

U.S. President Donald Trump, sitting alongside Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a geopolitical earthquake on Tuesday, doubling down on calls to resettle “1.7 or 1.8 million” Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip.

The calls go beyond any concept of “total victory” that Netanyahu has verbalized and possibly even considered at any point during the current war with Hamas in Gaza. A little more than a week ago, the questions on the table were whether Israel could ever return all of its hostages and who would rule Palestinians living in Gaza on the “day after” the war.

Trump—in the way only he could do—has stated what should have been patently obvious to a normal observer but unspeakable for any world leader: Gaza is completely uninhabitable, and its residents will need to be resettled elsewhere.

If Trump’s suggestions come to pass, it will not only represent a “total victory” beyond even Netanyahu’s wildest imagination but represent the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Migrating nearly 2 million people out of the Gaza Strip will permanently alter the demographic reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, removing any parity of numbers between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

If successful, calls for Israel to permanently cede land for the creation of a Palestinian state within the Jewish biblical homeland will end, and Israel will finally win the conflict. Jews would then be the overwhelming majority and Palestinians a smaller ethnic minority, removing once and for all the phony claims that Israel is an apartheid state.

Trump even hinted that America may support full Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (commonly known in the international community as the “West Bank”). “We’re discussing that … and people do like the idea. We haven’t taken a position on it yet, but we’ll be making one probably on that very specific topic over the next four weeks.”

If America recognizes Israeli sovereignty in the provinces of Judea and Samaria, then it will permanently slam the door on the failed Oslo Accords and the two-state paradigm that the Palestinians never wanted in the first place.

The president, who worked extremely well with Israel’s prime minister during the 45th administration, has previously succeeded in breaking paradigms in the region with the brokering of the historic Abraham Accords agreements in the fall of 2020.

In his remarks in the Oval Office, Trump stated tersely that he will “never win a Nobel Prize” for his groundbreaking role in brokering the unthinkable agreements.

He is now bringing his unconventional thinking back to the region just days into a new term and looking for an end to the conflict that began when Hamas penetrated Israel’s border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 men, women and children in the south, and kidnapping to Gaza more than 250 others in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Trump acknowledged that many “want to deny that Oct. 7 took place, just as many want to deny the Holocaust took place.”

‘Israel fought back bravely’

In the press briefing after the meeting between the two leaders, Trump called the Oct. 7 assault “an all-out attack on the very existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland.” Then he went on to praise Israel’s response to Oct. 7.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-says-u-s-will-own-gaza/

We are living at a truly momentous time in history. Donald Trump illustrated that yet again on Tuesday evening during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “You have to learn from history,” Trump declared and proceeded to upend the political order that has prevailed in the Middle East for decades. It is a multiply failed order and new approaches are very, very long overdue, but no one has dared to question it and suggest new solutions. Until now.

The most momentous announcement of this most momentous of press conferences was Trump’s declaration that Hamas would not be permitted to regain control of Gaza and that, in fact, the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip… we will own it.” He also reiterated his insistence that 1.7 million Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, explaining several times that this was necessary because the failed policies of the past should not and must not be applied yet again.

Hamas, Trump said, had ruled Gaza for years and offered no options for the Palestinian people beyond bloodshed and death. He sketched out a vision of a restored Gaza that would be an international area, populated not just by Palestinian Arabs but by people from all over the world who would be able to enjoy its renaissance as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

When asked if this meant that he was rejecting the possibility of a “two-state solution,” Trump said that he wasn’t addressing that at all, but merely saying that the old policies of the past had failed and that new solutions needed to be tried. He and Netanyahu also both expressed confidence that Saudi Arabia would soon normalize relations with Israel, which would have a seismic effect upon the Muslim Middle East, as it has shown unremitting hostility to Israel ever since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/03/how-western-governments-are-funding-the-persecution-of-jews/

The British government helped to fund the persecution of a British Jew. That’s the takeaway from Emily Damari’s revelation that she was held in an UNRWA facility for some of the hellish time she spent in Hamas captivity. Keir Starmer’s Labour government pumps millions of pounds into UNRWA. Money that will be used, in part, for the upkeep of UNRWA’s buildings. Buildings like the one in which Ms Damari was held by the neo-fascist militia of Hamas. It may have been indirect, it may have been unwitting, but British government money, our money, went to an organisation whose facilities were used to tyrannise a British Jew. And we need to talk about that.

Emily Damari is the young British-Israeli woman who was abducted from her home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz during the Hamas-led pogrom of 7 October 2023. She was held hostage for 471 days, finally being freed on 19 January as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. In a phone call with Starmer on Friday, she revealed that for some of the 15 months she spent in the captivity of that army of anti-Semites, she was held on premises belonging to UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). We don’t know how Starmer responded, but hopefully he said something like: ‘What?! The aid agency I just gave millions to?’

For that, almost unbelievably, is what happened. Three days before his chat with Ms Damari, three days before being informed that this citizen of the country he leads was held by racist terrorists in an UNRWA facility, Starmer’s government awarded an additional £17million for the Palestinian territories, much of it to UNRWA. Anneliese Dodds, Starmer’s minister for development, gushed about the ‘vital role’ UNRWA plays in Gaza and haughtily instructed Israel to back off and let it play that role. One of the roles it seems to have played, wittingly or otherwise, is the provision of facilities for Hamas, including for the purposes of criminally depriving a British Jew of her liberty. How ‘vital’ is that?

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of all this. British taxpayers helped to fortify buildings in which Hamas committed war crimes. British taxpayers helped to fund one of the dens of anti-Semitism in which our fellow citizen was held captive for the ‘crime’ of being a Jew in Israel. Where is the outrage? Where are the pained editorials in the liberal press? It is a testament to the moral indifference of Britain’s cultural elite that we can discover a British woman was held hostage in UNRWA facilities days after our government handed UNRWA yet more money and no one bats an eyelid.

If Starmer was shocked by Ms Damari’s revelation, he has no right to be. For everyone who has been paying attention knows that UNRWA has been thoroughly compromised by its intimate links with Hamas. Other hostages have likewise said they were held in UNRWA buildings. It’s possible some of these hostages were seized by UNRWA’s own employees during the orgy of barbarism that was the 7 October pogrom: at least nine UNRWA staff members are suspected of having taken part in that fascistic atrocity. ‘I’m inside, I’m inside with the Jews’, an UNRWA-employed teacher reportedly said as he invaded Israel on that day of bloodshed.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

The horrors of war, kidnapping, and confinement by barbarians is told by hostages returning to the warm embrace of Israel.  It evokes Psalm 71: “Deliver me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of evil and cruel men.”rsk

In contrast there have been many recent heartening and enheartening events and activities in Israel which are strengthening the nation and benefiting the world. Michael Ordman

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
On a clear day you can see Damascus. Israel’s internal risks may have deteriorated by the release of hundreds of terrorists, but at least its external geographic security situation has improved substantially.
https://www.jns.org/on-a-clear-day-you-see-damascus-a-rare-visit-to-mount-hermon/
 
Up close with the Arrow defense system. (TY Yanky) Serving 24-hour shifts in vault-like rooms across the country, 136th Battalion soldiers face the ballistic missile threat against Israel at all times. Ultimately, one person decides when to press the button to intercept a ballistic missile launched thousands of kilometers away.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sy3beemvjx
 
Full scholarships to former hostages. (TY Yanky & ToI) The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is offering full scholarships for a three-year academic degree (both Bachelor’s and Master’s programs) to all released hostages. It will also establish a fund to pay the fees, when they reach adulthood, of children held hostage by Hamas.
https://www.afhu.org/2025/01/27/hebrew-university-announces-scholarship-fund-for-released-hostages/
 
An ice bath works wonders. Biokineticist Nikia Blumenthal offers IDF combat soldiers a cold plunge to promote physical and emotional healing. She packs her car with a portable bath and 100kg (220 pounds) of ice and drives to IDF bases or army refreshment stations. (Disclosure – I attend Nikia’s Netanya stretch classes)
https://www.israel21c.org/an-icy-bath-can-work-wonders-for-soldiers-bodies-and-minds/
https://www.stretchchill.com/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Natural antibiotic is safe. (TY OurCrowd) Israel’s Omnix Medical (see here previously) has completed Phase 1 trials of its lead antimicrobial, nature-derived, peptide OMN6 on 80 patients to show its safety. It is now starting Phase 2 FDA-approved clinical trials to establish its efficacy, especially on superbugs.
https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/omnix-medical-approval-anti-infective-trial/
 
Life-support for US hospitals. (TY Atid-EDI) ART 100 cardiopulmonary bypass systems from Israel’s Inspira Technologies (see here previously) are to be deployed in hospitals on the US East Coast. The system takes over the functionality of the heart and/or lungs in critical care patients.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/inspira-technologies-prepares-its-first-life-support-systems-for-deployment-at-a-leading-us-hospital-302357407.html
 
Clowns relieve the ultimate pain. (TY Irene) This article features medical clowns alleviating both physical and mental suffering – for children and adults. (Aside, I went to see a friend in hospital recently who was visited by clowns while he was on a video call to his work office. “You’re at the circus!” his colleagues exclaimed.)
https://momentmag.com/israeli-medical-clowns/
 
Restoring the lives of wounded IDF soldiers. This article describes the life-saving work of the charity Belev Echad (see here previously).  It facilitates the recovery of wounded men and women of the IDF through physical, medical, legal, emotional and financial support. And sometimes it requires a miracle.
https://www.jns.org/wire/wounded-idf-soldiers-witness-miracles-thanks-to-us-israel-medical-partnership/
https://belevechad.nyc/   https://belev-echad.org/en/home/
 
Predicting the next accident. The AI accident prediction system (see here previously) built by the IDF for Israel’s United Hatzalah, really works. It sent a team to the Azrieli Mall in Ramat Gan just as someone began suffering a heart attack. With 14% of UH’s volunteers on IDF reserve duty, the system is literally a life-saver.
https://www.jns.org/how-life-saving-ai-tech-used-by-united-hatzalah-was-born-out-of-oct-7/
 
Does your DNA define you? Israel’s OMGene is developing an AI decision-support system based on personal genetic information. It links the genome to a database of health, psychological, and social characteristics, from thousands of individuals and generates recommendations e.g., on sleeping, relationships, hobbies, health etc.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-omgeneai-using-dna-and-ai-to-identify-our-strengths-1001499609
 
Are your proteins good? Researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute have developed IPHOMED – a method for mapping all the proteins in a person’s microbiome. Some act as natural antibiotics, killing good bacteria and possibly causing inflammatory bowel disease. Problem proteins in food can also be mapped.
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/we-know-what-you-ate-detailed-protein-maps-assess-intestinal-health   https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)01429-6
 
Targeting genetic diseases. Israel’s Averna Therapeutics (formerly Exsilio Therapeutics) is using gene editing to develop medicines to cure rare genetic diseases. Averna’s leadership includes Tal Zaks who was Chief Medical Officer at Covid-19 vaccine developer Moderna. Averna has already raised $82 million in funds.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-tal-zaks-israeli-startup-targets-rare-genetic-diseases-1001500636
 
Get a good night’s sleep. Prof. Giora Pillar, head of Sleep Clinics at Clalit Health Services in Haifa and the Western Galilee, gives plenty of advice to those who are losing sleep during these difficult times.
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/bjttx00ilkl
 
Hospital director saves heart patient on El Al flight. Prof. Yoram Weiss, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization, saved a man having a heart attack during an El Al flight to Miami. Weiss administered oxygen, provided medication, and had the flight diverted to Athens. The passengers applauded in appreciation.
https://www.ynetnews.com/travel/article/rkh3yhydkg
 
Surgeon returns to reconstruct faces. Dr Alan Billig performs facial reconstructive surgery at Hadassah in Jerusalem. He won the 2024 Best paper award for the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery journal. The ex-IDF medic graduated in New York, qualified in Israel, and practiced in Toronto. Now he’s back.
https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/article-834140 
 
9 startups to improve UK healthcare. The Dangoor Health-Tech Academy has selected nine Israeli health-tech startups for its program to advance the UK healthcare ecosystem. They are Impilio, Kai.AI, Shela Health, Predose, Thrive Together, Sensomedical Labs, Treat Me, Anydish, and Seegnal.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ry2dgxniye  https://sensomedical.com/home/
https://www.israel21c.org/9-israeli-startups-to-help-uk-improve-its-healthcare/
https://impilo.health/  https://www.shela.health/  https://www.predose-tech.com/
https://www.thrivetogether.health/  https://www.treatme.ltd/entreatme