Vincent Wang

עם ישראל חי

[lindi 🇮🇱✡️ @Lyndagee49]

Brilliant letter! From 10 years ago! H/T to Jayne Wynick

British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, warned Israel that if it sent troops into Gaza to confront Hamas, it risked loosing the sympathy of the international community.

A Jewish woman in Britain, Mindy Wiesenberger, sent the following letter to Mr. Hague, in response. The letter has been published in many newspapers, including the Times of Israel.

Dear Mr. Hague

You have stated that if Israel tries to defend its population through a ground offensive in Gaza 'it risks losing the sympathy of the international community.'

Let me tell you something about the sympathy of the international community Mr. Hague.

My father was liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945, having lost his entire family but gaining the sympathy of the international community at the time.

After 6 million Jews had been annihilated at the hands of the Nazi regime, the international community had plenty of sympathy for the Jewish people. There is always plenty of sympathy for victims.

Israel doesn't need the sympathy of the international community. What it needs is to defend its citizens.

When as a tiny country it gained its independence in 1948 it had to absorb 800,000 Jews who were thrown out of Arab lands in the Middle East, and it did so without fuss and with dignity giving them shelter and a place of security in which their children could grow up to become productive citizens. When Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria tried to destroy Israel in 1948 and again in 1967 they took in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, but did they give them dignity or
shelter? No, they left them to rot in refugee camps in order to maintain
a symbol of grievance against Israel and use them as a political tool against the Jewish state.

What has arisen in those camps is a complicated situation, but it is what has led to Gaza today.

So don't lecture Israel on international sympathy Mr. Hague. Not when Israel has just sent in 120 trucks loaded with food into Gaza to feed the Palestinian people there, because their own leadership is more interested in using its population as human shields, launching rockets against Israel from within major civilian centers.

Don't lecture Israel on international sympathy Mr. Hague. Not when Israel targets, with as much military precision as it can, only terrorists and their bases, trying its utmost to prevent civilian casualties.

Don't lecture Israel on international sympathy Mr. Hague. Not when the Palestinian media deliberately uses images of victims of the Syrian civil war and presents them as casualties in Gaza to gain international sympathy.

Go read your history books Mr. Hague, go see that since the beginning of the twentieth century all the Arabs wanted to do was destroy Israel.

Go look at the country of Israel now since the Jews have established a state there.

Go read what advances in science, medicine, biotechnology,
agriculture and high tech Israel has developed, and dedicated that
knowledge to making the world a better place for humanity. Can you
imagine any other country that after 60 years of continuously being under attack could have achieved so much.

So Mr. Hague don't lecture Israel on international sympathy. Israel will do whatever it takes to defend itself from outright attack on its citizens, whether it be from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or any other country or terrorist group that attacks it.

And if it loses the sympathy of the international community so be it.

We don't need the international community's sympathy. We don't need another 6 million victims.

[Dr. Adi Schwartz @Adi_Schwartz]

The debate on Gaza’s future is built on a fundamental mistake: prioritizing reconstruction over the nature of the society it creates. Rebuilding infrastructure while leaving the ideas and institutions that fueled war intact simply sets the clock for the next conflict. Reconstruction is never neutral - it either builds peace or powers war.
Deradicalization can't wait. Access to rebuilding must be the primary leverage for political change.
The rule is simple: no reconstruction without political change.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

And now I’m here in Trafalgar Square in London on this gorgeous Monday morning. For nearly two hundred years, this square has been open, but because of the recent mental health condition that affects Muslims, causing them to shout Allahu Akbar before driving their vehicles into crowds of innocent people to kill them, we have to have these barriers. Here and on every bridge in London. Every single public place. Because solving the mental health condition would be very difficult so this is how we have to live now. Remember though boys and girls: diversity is our strength.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

Jews are the only people in the world who still speak, read, write, and pray in the same language their ancestors used 3,000 years ago in the exact same land.

[Ted S @ClearReason]

Israel has Muslim soldiers, judges and legislators.

Most of its neighbors barely have Jews.

Guess which society gets called apartheid.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

“Last year alone, Muslims kiIIled 500,000 Christians in only Nigeria. Why are they only talking about Palestine?"

He is 100% correct.

[Stephen Pollard @stephenpollard]

Here's my @Telegraph column, 'Restore Britain’s talk of Gaza ‘genocide’ is as ridiculous as the Left’s'

https://t.co/lyUjowBFtZ

The accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is the gravest accusation that can be made against any nation – and also, as Howard Jacobson has pointed out, the most sadistic that can be made against Israel in particular, because it deliberately shifts the Jews from historical victims of genocide to being perpetrators.

That is why those who use it are either ignorant or malign – or, as in the case of Charlie Downes, campaign director and co-founder of far-Right party Restore Britain, both. Downes has a long history of using anti-semitic tropes (not least in his latest suggestion that “the Jews” have “bought” Nigel Farage). As Jacobson has put it: “There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide, as though those making it feel they have their man at last.”

Hitler first wrote about the “big lie” in Mein Kampf – the idea that ordinary people are more likely to fall for a huge, outrageous lie than a small, subtle one. The genocide lie is a typical example of this. Examine each of its constituent parts and the accusation falls apart. But that is rarely done – instead, the big genocide lie is repeated ad nauseam by those who seek to destroy Israel until it becomes almost an accepted fact by those who have never heard the detailed facts that disprove it.

Take the accusation that Israel has been starving the population of Gaza, largely based on the August 2025 report of the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) of Famine Review Committee (FRC). There was no local data so the IPC used an estimate.

But a new report using the most recent figures provided by Unicef, WHO, and the World Bank (based off acute malnutrition by weight for height for children under five years old) shows that in the UK the figure is 0.4 per cent, in Germany 0.5 per cent, in Egypt 3.3 per cent and Iran 4.3 per cent. In Gaza, according to Unicef, the figure is between 0.2 per cent and 0.8 per cent.

If that seems counter-intuitive it is because the central argument that Israel was starving Gazans is false. According to the coordinator of government activities in the territories (Cogat), the body which oversees civilian and humanitarian coordination in the West Bank and Gaza, 1.01m tonnes entered Gaza between October 7, 2023 and January 17, 2025 against an estimated need of 825,000 tonnes. Between the October 2025 ceasefire and June 7, 2026, 1.78m tonnes entered Gaza against a need of 643,000. It did not all reach those who needed it, not least because Hamas took much of it, but the idea that there was a starvation policy by Israel falls apart on the figures.

Similarly the assertion that over 70 per cent of those who have died are women and children has no basis in fact. The Gaza health ministry’s own figures last month had 71,444 identified fatalities in total. The UN’s own Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – hardly sympathetic to Israel – held that 45.2 per cent of the dead were woman and children. The casualty figures are skewed heavily towards men of fighting age.

Before the war, adult men made up 25 per cent of the population. With adult men making up over 50 per cent of those killed, the idea that Israel simply killed for the sake of killing also falls apart, not least as many of those men killed will have been combatants. (And, for good measure, the claim of hundreds of thousands lying dead in the rubble as made by the Lancet has never once been verified – and will not be. For one thing, there has been a significant financial incentive to Gazans to report missing family members).

The notion that Israel targeted hospitals for the sake of it has also been destroyed. It is now well documented that Hamas used al-Shifa hospital as a command centre and to store weapons and hostages.

As for the labelling of genocide by academics – the ‘finding’ by the International Association of Genocide Scholars was made in a vote in which only 28 per cent of members voted, and it turns out that anyone can join on payment of a fee. It is a worthless finding.

And so is the supposed finding by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of ‘plausible genocide’, often cited by those claiming genocide. It is worthless because the ICJ has never made such a finding, as former ICJ President Joan Donoghue told the BBC. Rather, it found that Palestinians in Gaza have a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention and thus South Africa had the right to present its claim. The ICJ made no finding on the issue of whether there has been a genocide.

All of this is without even considering the notion of intent, and genocide requires state intent. Gaza has experienced a terrible tragedy and appalling killing, but that is a consequence of war – and the Gaza War was brought about by Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023. Had there been no massacre there would have been no war.

But once Israel was engaged in the conflict, it had to deal with the reality built by Hamas, of a network of tunnels, houses and tower blocks used to conceal weapons and fighters, hospitals used as command centres and a civilian population deliberately excluded from protection by their Hamas government.

Indeed, Israel has gone out of its way to protect Gazans, alerting residents to military action where possible.

Far from being accused of genocide, Israel should be praised for the extreme humanitarian care it has taken in its existential fight against terrorists out to destroy it.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 WOW. This brave Christian migrant from Iran walked up and WENT BERSERK on the proposed Islamic Center in McKinney, TX — straight to the council's face

The whole building ERUPTED after his dire warning:

"I'm a Sharia law survivor from Iran."

"I'm TELLING YOU, this is a BAD idea and you're going to REGRET not listening to people like us who lived under Sharia law!"

"I'm here to tell you this is a DANGEROUS ideology you're allowing in your country. Every country that is Islamic now, it used to be a Christian country and we were soft Christians."

"And we allowed these people to come in, bring their Sharia law into our countries and slowly k*ll us off left and right!"

"Let me make it very clear to you. Christianity is a personal relationship with God...Islam is Sharia law. Religion and state, which is not even compatible with the American thing and when these people will lie to you, to manipulate you."

"Because whenever Islam is little, they will lie to you and tell you they come in peace. This is level one!"

"Level two is what's happening in UK right now, where you have two-tier policing, where you have the blasphemy laws, Islamophobia, racism, all this nonsense that they talk about."

"Any time you criticize Islam, they will use the race card, but every country has this disgusting ideology inside their country, including my own country, Iran, Russia, Islamophobia is another made up bullsh*t because they don't want you to criticize their death cult!"

"If you question that disgusting book, they're get k*lled over it, just like my friends were apostates imprisoned or dead right now in Iran!"

HE NAILED IT!!!

[Laura✡️Marcus @MissLauraMarcus]

Regarding all this talk about how the triple lock is unaffordable and too much money is going to older people in Britain…
I’m 70 and only get the full state pension which is £965 every four weeks. So £1,045 every calendar month; £240 a week.
If I just stick to essentials, I can just about manage.
I’m aware the country can’t afford to keep paying me so much money. In years gone by, I’d be living in abject poverty. Why didn’t I have a private pension? Self employment. Erratic income. My fault for not being a higher earner? I got by. I never had enough for savings nor a pension scheme.
I’m aware of the issues but from where I sit, I just don’t care. Why should I? That’s what you have to ask. Why should those of us just barely getting by on the state pension care if it can’t be afforded? People don’t worry about the big picture when just about surviving is all they can think of.
I’m a baby boomer and my generation gets blamed for a lot. But I’m not aware of ever doing owt that created this situation. Not all baby boomers are rich. Not all did well. We’re a massive cohort. And there’s now naff all my generation can do to make the situation any better. Except die of course. So sorry for being healthy, fit and strong!
I’m immensely grateful for my £965 every four weeks. When you’ve been self employed and never knew when - or even if! - you’d get paid, getting regular money is for me still an incredible novelty.

[ראש ממשלת ישראל @IsraeliPM_heb]

ראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו בפתח ישיבת הממשלה:
"בוודאי שמתם לב לנקודה מעניינת - איראן תוקפת את כל המדינות באזור, אפילו מחוץ לאזור, אבל יש מדינה אחת שהיא לא תוקפת - את מדינת ישראל. עד כה היא לא תקפה, יכול להיות שתתקוף, אבל למה עברו שבועות ארוכים והיא לא תוקפת אותנו? משום שהיא יודעת איזה מכה עצימה אנחנו ננחית עליה אם היא תעשה את זה.

אני אומר את זה כי לאחרונה, ביומיים האחרונים, אנחנו מוצפים בגל שמועות על חולשה ישראלית ועל נסיגות ישראליות בכל החזיתות. הדבר הכי משעשע הוא שההתקפות הללו באות מאנשים שהטיפו לסגת מכל רצועת עזה, לא להיכנס בכלל ללבנון ולא להכות באיראן. אז אני מבקש לעבור אתכם בקצרה חזית חזית.

קודם כל איראן - אני מאוד מעריך את הנשיא טראמפ. הוא גדול ידידינו בבית הלבן. אני מאוד מעריך את השותפות ההיסטורית עם ארצות הברית נגד הניסיונות של איראן להתחמש בנשק גרעיני. ואני רוצה להדגיש שוב: עם הסכם או בלי הסכם, כל עוד אני ראש ממשלה לאיראן לא יהיה נשק גרעיני. כי הקיום של המדינה היקרה שלנו, המדינה של כולנו, הקיום של ישראל, אינו עומד למשא ומתן.

לגבי לבנון - גם בלבנון אנחנו שומעים כל מיני שמועות. אני רוצה להבהיר: בימים האחרונים ישראל פעלה בעוצמה בלבנון, חיסלה מחבלים, כולל ברכס עלי טאהר. אני לא יכול לפרט את זה. אנחנו בתוך פעילות חשובה מאוד. אנחנו עובדים בשום שכל ובתבונה. גם בנחישות וגם בתבונה עם צבא ההגנה לישראל ומחסלים איומים.

באשר לרצועת עזה - קודם כל אני רוצה להבהיר את הדבר העיקרי: כל עוד אני ראש ממשלה, לא תקום מדינה פלסטינית - לא בעזה ולא ביו"ש. לא ׳פת"חסטן׳ ולא ׳חמאסטן׳.

באשר לדברים ספציפיים שעולים בחדשות לאחרונה, אני רוצה לדייק כאן: ישראל שוללת את מסמך 15 הנקודות.
שמעתי שאומרים: ׳לא אמרתם׳. אז הנה אני אומר עוד פעם: ישראל שוללת את מסמך 15 הנקודות. צה"ל לא יבצע נסיגה כלשהי עד פירוק החמאס מנשקו. וכשאני אומר פירוק החמאס מנשקו, זה אומר הנשק הכבד, הנשק הפחות כבד, כל הנשק. ואנחנו מדברים על פירוק אמיתי, לא פירוק פיקטיבי. עכשיו אנחנו מדברים עם האמריקאים על הנושא הזה. יש להם רעיונות, חלק מהם מקובלים עלינו וחלק לא מקובלים עלינו, ואנחנו יודעים לעמוד מול הדברים האלה. הוכחנו את זה בעבר ואנחנו מוכיחים את זה גם היום. בנוסף, צה"ל ימשיך לסכל את האיומים נגד כוחותינו ונגד אזרחינו.

הקיום של ישראל והביטחון של כל אזרחי ישראל אינו עומד למשא ומתן. אנחנו עומדים איתן על האינטרסים הללו. אנחנו עושים את זה לא במשרדי פרסום, אנחנו עושים את זה באמת בשטח. אנחנו הוכחנו את זה כל הזמן כשנכנסנו לרפיח, ולציר פילדלפי, כשנכנסנו ללבנון וחיסלנו שם את נסראללה ואת מאגר הרקטות, כשתקפנו את איראן פעמיים. בניגוד לכל אלה שמטיפים לנו, אנחנו עושים את מה שצריך לעשות למען ביטחון ישראל ואנחנו יכולים ויודעים לעמוד על שלנו גם מול הידידים הטובים ביותר שלנו כשצריך."

וידאו: רועי אברהם / לע״מ
סאונד: יחזקאל קנדיל / לע״מ

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

It’s actually quite insulting that, as a Jew, people immediately assume my issue with Hasan Piker, Mamdani, and El-Sayed must be about Judaism or Israel.

Their views on Israel are almost beside the point to me.

My issue with them is their hatred toward the values America and the West stand for, and toward the very idea of America as a beacon of freedom.

I don’t oppose them because I’m Jewish. I oppose them because I’m American.

And frankly, the fact that so many people think their main problem is their views on Israel and Jews is perhaps the most concerning part of all.

It’s burying your head in the sand. It reduces a much bigger problem to just a “Jewish issue” and allows the other 99% of their awful beliefs to escape scrutiny.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

Wow. I try not to get surprised by X. But “There’s no example in history of DDR working when one side insists on the other’s total surrender first.” Crazy.

Except Germany and Japan 1945. Ethiopia 1991. The Confederacy 1865. Multiple other examples of victory over the enemy.

The idea that total victory in war shouldn’t be the goal is the ahistorical part. Of course it should be and in Gaza that means exactly what the Trump 20-point plan states: complete disarmament and surrender of power in the Strip. Anything less just guarantees continued violence, instability, and suffering at the hands of Hamas in Gaza.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

Reform and Nigel Farage have finally made a response to our offer in the Daily Telegraph - I will go through their four conditions…

The Reform Chairman, Lee Anderson, has said Reform will not step aside in any constituencies. Reform should ‘always’ be on the ballot paper.

Meaning that Reform plan to run in every seat, even if there is an arrangement. This is not a constructive start.

I have been realistic. Clearly, the whole point of any arrangement would be not to divide the electoral force. That would mean certain Restore Britain candidates standing aside to ensure a sensible and pragmatic approach to our voting system.

If Reform are not willing to reciprocate in any constituencies, any at all, the offer I have made is entirely redundant.

They have also said we must endorse Farage to be Prime Minister, and allow the failed Conservative ministers to again be part of a future cabinet.

Contrary to reports, I have never said that Reform must dump anybody. That is not my place to do so. It is their party, it is entirely Reform’s choice who they run to be MPs or employ - it is putting these same ministers who failed Britain into a future cabinet which Restore Britain has helped to empower that I take issue with. Restore Britain will not be responsible for handing Nadhim Zahawi, Nadine Dorries and others some of the most powerful jobs in the country.

Farage and Reform have also said that Restore Britain must outright sack Charlie Downes - putting a young Christian man out of work, just as he is looking to build his life and start a family.

That is simply not how I operate.

But I want to be clear - if a sensible reciprocal arrangement can be found on our proposed policy platform, we would be willing to stand our Restore Britain candidates aside in certain seats in order to defeat the left-wing alliance. For any political party, that is a big step to make - country before party.

Reform have just outright rejected doing the same. If that position continues, then this whole exercise is futile.

A deal will mean give and take on both sides. I’ve been in business long enough to know that.

Our original offer was focused on policy, their response is about personality.

After all of the bad blood, if we focus on personality and ego, we will get nowhere. That much is obvious from the last seven days.

Our papers on economics, energy, deportations, policing and much more show exactly what can be delivered - properly considered policy must be central to everything.

The place to start this negotiation is on policy. Find common ground, sort out the clear differences, build on that and go from there.

Restore Britain remains open to good faith talks where both parties understand the brutal electoral reality we are facing.

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

August 9, 2001

Palestinian Ahlam Tamimi chose the target: a Sbarro restaurant packed with kids in the heart of Jerusalem.

She escorted the suicide bomber to the door and then walked away smiling. She is still smiling today as she lives free and celebrated in Jordan.

The Hamas bomber detonated a device packed with nails, screws, and bolts designed to kill and maim as many people as possible.

15 civilians were murdered on the spot. 8 were children.

Among the dead:

Two parents and three of their children.
A pregnant American woman.
15-year-old Malki Roth.

Among the 130 wounded:

Chana Nachenberg, a young mother left in a permanent vegetative state for 22 years before she finally died of her injuries.

15-year-old Miriam Shoshan, who had 60 nails driven into her body, a hole torn through her thigh, a ruptured spleen, and third-degree burns over 40% of her body.

When Tamimi later learned the real death toll was higher than she first thought she said it made her happy. When told how many children were killed, she smiled.

She received 16 life sentences in Israel.

In 2011, she was freed in the Gilad Shalit deal and went to Jordan, where she received a hero’s welcome.

Today she lives openly in Amman. She has hosted television programs, given interviews, and spoken with pride about the massacre. She has never expressed a single word of remorse. On the contrary, she is quite pleased with the number of Jews she helped murder.

The United States charged her with murdering American citizens. She is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. A $5 million reward is offered for her capture.

Jordan refuses to extradite her.
Successive American administrations have never forced the issue.

25 years later, the Palestinian woman who helped blow up a restaurant full of children lives free as a hero while the families of her victims are still waiting for justice.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

According to sharia, if a Muslim walks into a room and a non-Muslim is seated, the non-Muslim must stand-out of “respect,” and give his seat to the Muslim.

A dhimmi (a non-Muslim living under Islam) is to lower his gaze, never raise his voice, never walk ahead of a Muslim.

He could not build higher than a Muslim’s house, ride a horse in public, or repair his place of worship without permission.

Islam does not teach that all men are created equal. It teaches that Muslims are superior and that everyone else, Christians, Jews, atheists, Hindus, are second-class citizens at best, enemies of God at worst.

If you believe it was evil for white men to demand that black women give up their seats, then you must admit that Islam is evil too.

Don't let the Abduls and the Omars deceive you, sharia is completely the opposite of what he is trying to do here.

Banning Sharia is equal to liberating slaves.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

President Trump’s war aims are now reduced to reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before he launched his attacks on Iran.
He’s even indicated to White House aides he’s now not so interested in a deal curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
But at the weekend Iran set its highest yet price for reopening the Strait: billions in US reparations, the withdrawal of US troops from the Gulf region and, of course, the end of the US naval blockade.
Tehran thinks Trump’s position now so weak they don’t even have to offer him a face-saving off-ramp.

[Dr. Adi Schwartz @Adi_Schwartz]

I watched Nikolay @nmladenov's interview with Amit Segal this evening, and what stood out was his statement that Israelis and the residents of Gaza share the hope to "break the cycle of violence" and live in peace.
Well, I am sorry to repeat this once again, but that is simply not the case. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem, which is why the proposed solutions continue to fail. The problem is that there is one side (the Israelis) that indeed wishes to live in peace with its neighbors, and a second side (the Palestinians) that is unwilling to accept a Jewish state. Both sides do not share the same hope.
There is no "cycle of violence." There is a 150-year-old violent attempt to prevent or destroy Jewish independence. Until this fundamental truth is understood, we will not be able to move forward.

[Boy George @BoyGeorge]

I played this as @diplo was taking over the decks and scratched over it. I hope he recommends now he;'s my AI brother in arms. Also on Pay Him -Boy George

[Boy George @BoyGeorge]

Get it here! Play it loud!

We Will Dance Again https://t.co/CK38GWbj1A