Israel’s failure in the information war

By Andrew Fox

On 26th February 2025, tens of thousands of Israelis lined the roads for the funeral procession of Shiri Bibas and her sons, Ariel and Kfir. Orange balloons, the colour of the boys’ hair, marked the route. Men dressed as Batman, Ariel’s favourite superhero, saluted as the coffins passed. Ariel had been four when he was abducted; Kfir was nine months old. Through family photographs and a desperate campaign to bring them home, strangers worldwide came to know these two little boys, who were brutally killed by Hamas in Gaza.

Israel’s government should have understood why their story reached people who would never read an IDF briefing. The families had kept their children recognisable through months of arguing about a war in which they had no say. Doing so deserved sustained government support from the start. Leaving so much of it to people already enduring the unimaginable was a failure of both compassion and, if we are being brutally cold about it, strategy.

Psychologists call the tendency to respond more readily to a named person than to anonymous suffering the ‘identifiable victim effect’. In a 2007 study, Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic compared an appeal about deprivation across Africa with one about Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Among participants who received no prior explanation of the effect, those reading about Rokia donated an average of $2.83, compared with $1.17 from those given the statistics.

That said, for balance, later research has been less conclusive: a 2016 meta-analysis found a small average effect, and a subsequent replication using hypothetical donations failed to reproduce it. We cannot turn a charitable-giving experiment into a measure of how many people changed their minds about Gaza. It does, however, give us a useful starting point for understanding why an individual’s suffering can command attention that casualty figures struggle to hold.

There is much less uncertainty about Yahya Sinwar’s calculation. In June 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported on messages in which he treated Palestinian civilian deaths as an advantage in the war. Citing the losses suffered in other conflicts, he called them “necessary sacrifices”. More deaths meant more pressure on Israel. Sinwar believed he could outlast the Israeli offensive whilst the people of Gaza paid for it. The suffering itself needed no invention. In November 2023, footage of Khaled Nabhan kissing his dead granddaughter, Reem, travelled around the world. She was three. In CNN’s account, he remembered the game in which she pulled his beard, and he pulled her pigtails; he spoke about the fruit the children had wanted and the tangerines he had managed to find. Anyone with a child or grandchild could recognise the affection in those small exchanges, and something of the agony of losing them. This is the key to the information war: making the suffering of innocents feel personal to those observing the physical war from abroad.

The opportunity for Hamas arose when that grief provided the sole explanation for the war. The viewer saw a dead child and the consequences of an Israeli strike, with all context stripped away. The men who had launched the massacre on 7th October and who continued to hold hostages could disappear from the account. Whenever sympathy for Palestinians became pressure on Israel to stop fighting, without equivalent pressure on Hamas to release their captives and surrender power, their strategy benefited. Foreign audiences did not have to like Hamas for this to work.

They used Israeli suffering with the same ruthlessness. On 16th October 2023, Hamas released footage of Mia Schem, wounded and captive. Her mother, Keren, recognised her daughter’s fear and believed she could see Mia repeating what her captors had told her to say. Hamas had abducted her; now they controlled what her family could see of her. A Palestinian family’s bereavement could be used to generate pressure against the offensive, whilst an Israeli family’s desperation could be used to press for a deal on Hamas’s terms. Their control over the hostages gave them a way to prolong that desperation.

The bitter irony is that Israel had their own human stories from the first morning, and yet was unwilling, and many will argue, rightly so, to use those stories as an information war opportunity. Shani Louk was a 22-year-old German-Israeli tattoo artist who went to Nova to dance. Much of the world first encountered her through the footage of her body in a pickup truck, subjected to the humiliation her killers chose for her. Her family’s memorial website shows her drawings and offers her tattoo designs for others to use. There is work there which she made before anyone knew her name, and which people can still choose to carry on their skin. Her family have given strangers a way to know her beyond the manner of her death.

The families of the observers at Nahal Oz have done something similar. Roni Eshel was 19 and loved Taylor Swift. Her parents planted fruit trees in her memorial park because she loved them. Her father, Eyal, has also spoken about the warnings she gave before the attack and the army’s failure to listen. Remembering Roni properly means making room for all of this. Her youth and enthusiasms belong alongside the responsibility she carried at the border, and her father’s anger at the people who were supposed to protect her.

These efforts by ordinary Israelis and their friends worldwide began early. The “Kidnapped” posters created by Nitzan Mintz, Dede Bandaid and Tal Huber put names and photographs on streets around the world within weeks of the massacre. Israeli officials spoke about the hostages too, including Kfir Bibas. The Israeli government failed to turn those scattered efforts into a coherent campaign, with the resources and continuity a prolonged information war required.

In October 2025, former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai wrote that Israel still lacked a unified public advocacy structure that brought government and civil society together. He was right. Two years into the war, this was an extraordinary indictment of the government’s priorities. I would go further than Shai’s criticism of the machinery. Explaining why the IDF had struck a tunnel was necessary, but the explanation also needed to reach people who had no understanding of what it meant to live within reach of Hamas or the way in which they weaponised the suffering of their own people. The victims’ families could make that danger comprehensible in ways a military briefing could not.

The Nova exhibition shows what was possible. It opened in Tel Aviv in December 2023 and reached London in May 2026, bringing belongings recovered from the festival together with testimony from survivors and bereaved relatives. A friend of mine went multiple times with a variety of people from different backgrounds, and they all came away with a different perspective on 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza. The organisers had been doing this work for years. Their achievement makes the Israeli government’s failure harder to excuse: people outside the state had already demonstrated how to give foreign audiences a sustained encounter with the lives destroyed on 7th October. Israel should have helped such work reach far beyond those already inclined to listen.

The audience is more hostile now. Pew’s June 2026 findings showed that 69% of British adults viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 61% a year earlier. Let us be real: anger at Israeli policy and the destruction in Gaza cannot simply be attributed to manipulation, and no poll tells us what a better Israeli campaign would have achieved. It does show how difficult it is to secure a hearing for Israel today.

Israel ceded the initiative while much of the world was forming its understanding of the war. Testimony can still change minds, but a family speaking now may first have to persuade an audience that their loss deserves a hearing at all. The opportunity to shape those first impressions has gone. Recovering ground will take more than belatedly discovering that the dead had names. The government should pay for translation and help willing families take their testimony abroad, without making support conditional on what they say. If ministers want the world to hear Roni Eshel’s story, they must accept that her father will also tell the world who ignored her warnings. They cannot ask for the authority of his grief and then edit out his accusation.

No bereaved family should have to owe the state a PR campaign. Those willing to speak deserve its support, with the freedom to say things ministers would rather the world did not hear. Israel’s government should have understood this when families were putting up posters and pleading for help. By the time people lined the roads with orange balloons, those families had spent months asking the world to care. They should never have had to shoulder so much of that work themselves.

About the writer:

A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Repeated visits reveal fresh insights, revelations and questions.

By Jonathan Feldstein

On the way to the Gaza border, my friend asked how many times I had been there since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and massacre.

I had to think about it.

I remember the first trip vividly. Several other trips were outstanding whether visiting soldiers and bringing supplies or preparing and providing food, one on one like the time with my friend Marziyeh (Marzi) Amirizadeh and seeing the devastation through the eyes of a woman who suffered the evil hatred of radical Islam growing up and living in Iran and identifying the evil we faced with the evil that she lived under for most of her life, or planning for and implementing our incredible Root & Branch program bringing Christian volunteers to harvest olives in Israel and along the Gaza border.

There were other trips with friends and donors, as well as relatives, media and more. In the car, I estimated that I had visited the Gaza border at least 30 times. In retrospect it’s probably more. Surely averaging once a month. Considering my travels, that’s a lot.

Some trips blur together. Some are memorable for different reasons. All are emotionally draining. Yesterday was no different. It had been a while since the last time.

Along the roads from Routes 34, 232, 25 and more, I noticed the increased number of memorials along the side of the road. From once piles of stones with flags and photographs these have been “developed” to permanent and thoughtful memorials. In America and other countries, you see similar respectful homage where people have died in car accidents. The roads here have been repaved and show no signs of what happened that day anymore. But I remember the countless points where one would drive and see large dark spots on the road with a slight bump as you drove over them, burn marks from the high temperature flames where cars were set on fire. Torched with people inside.

The roads no longer have the scars but the memorials along the side of the roads show the points where hundreds of people were shot and burned to death, their bodies and their cars littering the roads.

I looked at the piles of the shot up and burnt remains of the vehicles from that day. More than 1000 cars, many of which became death traps for their passengers. As we visited the site that also has been built up as a permanent memorial, first I noticed dozens of tour buses. Most were for Israelis for whom the site has become a pilgrimage. People wanting to see, understand, bear witness to the horrors of that day.

There are few tourists in Israel now so most of the guides and survivors telling stories of what happened that day were speaking Hebrew. What broke my heart, other than the memorial itself, was the prevalence of young people. It’s terrible that we must educate our children about this all and it’s part of the legacy we leave them. It’s not new but it is still sad. Many high school students. Some of whom got to practice their English in a spontaneous conversation with Marzi about her life and imprisonment in Iran. She connected the dots of the Islamic Republic and Hamas as the same evil. That we have the same enemy. That the Iranian people are not the regime that hijacked Iran 47 years ago and that the people support Israel.

Three years ago, they were early adolescence and three years from now they will all be serving in the army defending their country. I wondered if in 7 or 10 or 15 years, my own grandson’s will be part of this pilgrimage.

I saw a group of soldiers. Three years earlier they were the age of the high school students we encountered. They stood there with weapons over their shoulders, against the backdrop of piles of dozens of burnt remains of just some of the cars. Their weapons are used to defend us against the evil that perpetrated the crimes that we witnessed with the cars just as one reminder, listening to things they surely remember from three years ago when they were just students and Israel was at its most vulnerable.

At the site of the Nova Music Festival where some 25% of the 1200 people killed that day were slaughtered, the memorials have become uniform and standardized, albeit with personal touches from the loved ones of those who were killed and mutilated there that day. I always describe it as a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz. We spent nearly an hour there, but what’s really needed to understand the enormity and the scope of the loss is much more, even if you’ve been there multiple times before as I have.

In Sderot, we visited the powerful memorial at the site of the former police station in which all the police on duty that morning were killed and many others on the street. As hard as it is to think, amid the slaughter there was incredible heroism and it was a miracle that more people were not killed there that day. Of course, that’s no comfort for the survivors whose loved ones are no longer with us.

I told the story of the Suisa family, the young parents, Odaya and Dolev, who were trying to flee Sderot in their car and were caught in an ambush and murdered in front of their two young daughters, leaving them orphans. It must be noted that the person who sacrificed his life trying to save the family was a Bedouin Arab, Amer Odeh Abu Sabila. A construction worker who was in Sderot early that fateful Saturday morning, Amer heard Odaya screaming after Dolev had been killed and got into the driver’s seat to try and bring Odaya and her two young daughters to safety at the Sderot police station. Not knowing that the police station had already been overrun by the terrorists, both Abu Sabila and Odaya were murdered, while the two kids, Romi, 6, and Lia, 3, lay on the floor of the car unscathed. There is harrowing video footage from that day that shows the two young girls screaming for help as police officers arrived.

Amer Odeh Abu Sabila’s story is not unique as many Israeli Arabs were killed that day, including a police officer inside the police station, but is important to recount as it reveals the reality of life in Israel of Arabs who tragically died alongside their fellow Jewish citizens.

As the sun was setting, we made our way to one of the lookout points from which Gaza is visible. Despite international claims to the contrary, even with the naked eye one can see entire cities still standing. And even three years and a week after the inhuman Hamas attack and massacre, there was a jarring audible punctuation of the reality as we heard gunfire in the distance coming from inside Gaza, indicating that if these killers are not fought and pushed back, they will rise and try to attack us again and again.

The numbers alone do not sufficiently represent the enormity of the day. Each of the 1200 people, including Jewish and Arab Moslem and Druze Israelis, as well as many foreigners including Christians, is the loss of an entire universe for them and their loved ones. But there’s a national story as well, timeless in the sense that it’s an unfortunate part of the reality of Jewish history and the foreseeable future.

However many times I have gone to visit these sites, each time thinking that there’s nothing particularly new in doing so other than bringing people who have not yet witnessed it, I am sadly shocked at how there’s still so much to absorb and process and how such experiences are necessary.

About the writer:

Jonathan Feldstein ­­­­- President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Journal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

In a world of celebrities clamouring for fauxmanitarian shots for social media to shore up credentials, who speaks for Israeli children?

By Rolene Marks

On the train to Tel Aviv a few days ago, I watched a mother with her little girl travelling to their destination. The little girl, decked out in her princess dress and sneakers, armed with a backpack full of colouring books which she was busy with, happily chatted to her smiling mother and waved at the passing trains. I felt tears prickle behind my eyes. I looked at the innocent, pure child and the tears that threatened to spill out my eyes were indicative of an all too familiar emotion.

Why do people want to harm our children?

Why is the world silent when our children are harmed?

Ariel Bibas should have celebrated his 7^th birthday this year. His mother, Shiri, and father, Yarden would have made a beautiful party for him on Kibbutz Nir Oz. All the children would have come to celebrate. In our minds eye, we can see Ariel who loved Batman and his dog Tonto, celebrating with the joy he had lived with in his all-too short life. We can hear the infectious giggle of his baby brother, Kfir, with his broad grin and matching red hair. It was a dream we hoped for.

Ariel never got to celebrate his birthday. Instead, Ariel, along with his baby brother Kfir and their parents were kidnapped from their home on 7 October. Shiri the lioness and her flame haired cubs, were separated from Yarden. They were murdered in captivity, their remains returned in a grotesque spectacle of horror. Kfir and Ariel and many others whose lives and innocence were stolen that day.

There are the children like Avigail Idan, who was just three years old when she was taken hostage that day, or Emily Hand whose devastated father told CNN death would have almost been preferable to her kidnapping, knowing the monsters who took her.

There are the children who in the last three years have lost friends, parents, siblings, grandparents and loved ones to war. I think of Avigail’s siblings, Michael (9) and Amalia (6), who hid in a cupboard in the safe room of their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, their mother’s body on the floor in front of them, their father’s outside. They hid for hours, thinking their little sister had also been murdered.

I think of the countless children traumatized by missiles, loss, sirens and everything else that they have endured over the last 3 years.  I think of the children forced to flee their homes and all that was familiar in both the north and south of Israel, becoming internal refugees in their own country.

These are the children the world has forgotten.

If you are a celebrity/former royal worth your “humanitarian” credentials, one of the first things that you do, is ensure that you land your high-paying self on site of the nearest global tragedy – preferably a war zone. Bonus points if the war zone involves an ability to blame Israel. Going to the border with Gaza means hitting pay dirt – and you can wear your best Prada bucket hat and Jolie-esque like humanitarian outfit.

Of course, no visit to a war zone is complete without a camera crew to document your concern from every possible angle – especially the most flattering.

Earlier this year, former (are they still royal? Who can keep up?!) Royals, Harry and Meghan graced Jordan with their presence, courtesy of the World Health Organization. Suitably attired in this season’s Chanel pumps, Meghan managed to contort her face into looking concerned and emotional for the cameras. Whipping back the covers of a hospital bed, cameras captured a child who had lost a leg as a result of the war. Conveniently excluded from the messaging is that the particular NGO employed staff who posted pro-Hamas content. It felt so exploitive of the child’s private pain. Naturally they failed to pop over the border to visit with Israeli survivors of 7 October, former child hostages or the children of soldiers, given that Harry is patron of the Invictus Games which supports wounded veterans. Israel is a member of Invictus.

I must be very clear – there is absolutely nothing wrong – and it is very important and admirable to care about the children of Gaza. We all should. The human cost of war is devastating and as an Israeli, I don’t want to see my neighbours suffer. The hideous reality of war is that children, the most vulnerable, are killed and every single death is a tragedy where words just simply fail. I do have to wonder where these newly minted child advocates were when Hamas was forcing children to become soldiers, a clear violation of international convention on child soldiers, or when they were mercilessly used as labour to dig tunnels. I wonder where these paragons of virtue signaling were when children are taught to hate and kill Jews in their schools and at summer camps. It is not something that they can deny – it is more than evident in the public domain through textbooks, media and proud photos of young Gazans in camouflage being taught to leopard crawl through obstacles and fire weapons.

It is not alternative education – it is child abuse.

Where were the voices of the glitterati when Hamas leaders openly boasted about their human shield strategy, wanting as high as possible casualty rates among children? Silent.

We all should be concerned for the children of Gaza – they deserve a better future.

What is missing from global concern is Israeli children. There are also children in Israel who have suffered tremendously. Who speaks for them? There has been a very conspicuous silence and lack of concern for their trauma, safety and loss.

In the media-friendly performative activism of the many, an important voice has been drowned out. Erased. Ignored. Deliberately.

There has been no visit from Angelina Jolie, the paragon of humanitarian work with refugees, to the communities that were evacuated from both the south and the north of Israel following Hezbollah’s firing on communities close to the border with Lebanon. Israel had over 250,000 internal refugees, many of them children who had lost loved ones, their homes and their foundations – but Ange ‘forgot’ to visit them. She still hasn’t met with our profoundly traumatized children.

From upon their platforms at awards shows and on social media networks, the talented and sanctimonious have preached (while wearing their pins celebrating the lynching of two IDF officers) and signaled their virtue about the horrors of war – but said nothing when our children were sitting in captivity. I don’t recall anyone expressing their horror about the murder of Ariel and Kfir Bibas – and the grotesque parading of their coffins in front of a baying mob in Gaza that included children. Suffer the innocents. We will never forget how the morally deficient tore down the posters of kidnapped Israeli children in cities all over the world.

Many took to their social media in what I can only describe is a carefully orchestrated campaign (by who, we have yet to find out) to share the exact same graphic about the impending death of 14,000 Gazan children. In May 2025, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” show:

“There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them. I want to save as many as these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.”

Needless to say, it never happened.

Neither did the apologies from the entertainment industry who all suspiciously shared the same graphic at the same time. Strange, that. There was no apology for the parading of Palestinian children with congenital disease who were readily exploited to push the mass famine narrative – or expressed outrage for the condition that Israeli children starved, beaten and harmed in unspeakable fashions in captivity suffered. No apology for Eitan Yahalomi who was one of the many child captives whose experience was made public, “First, he was beaten, then they put him alone in a cell with bars and he was left alone for 16 days in the custody of armed men from Hamas,” said his mother, Bat-Sheva.

The signalers of virtue and naturally women’s rights were missing in action when the reports of sexual violence committed against children were made public in all of their devastating details. Me too – unless you are an Israeli child.

Nobody seemed too concerned when missiles rained down from Hezbollah on to the communities of the north of Israel. There was no mention of the 12 Druze children, murdered by a Hezbollah rocket as it slammed into them on a sunny Saturday afternoon as they played football (soccer). We thought one little boy was hiding or missing – but he took the impact of the missile and there was nothing left of him.

What about these angels?

From the pulpits of pomposity, the noble and sanctimonious have said nothing about the ballistic missiles and drones that rained terror over Israel, courtesy of the Islamic regime who unlike Israel, did not target military installations. They targeted civilian centres.

Israel’s children have endured the unthinkable these last three years. No toddler should have the words for “sirens”, “hostage” or “fallen” in their lexicon. Acknowledging their suffering does not negate the suffering of Gazan children. Instead, it should motivate all of us to fight for a better world for all of them – but when it comes to speaking up for our children, who else if not we?

Do not let them be forgotten.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Gazans describe the machinery of indoctrination and coercion and why it will endure while Hamas remains armed.

By Andrew Fox

For more than a generation, Hamas’s indoctrination of Gaza’s children has sat at the edge of public discussion. As far back as 2001, human rights organisations were already reporting that Hamas had recruited 15-year-olds, with 12 being the youngest recorded age.

Public argument about Gaza speaks constantly about civilians, often at a distance from the people enduring the war. This video records Gazans interviewed in recent weeks describing their own experiences of Hamas.

They speak of discovering that Hamas had lied to them. Their accounts describe children being recruited with money and false promises, under the shadow of armed coercion. In the system they portray, a child’s life is expendable.

Their testimony suggests a strong practical link between disarmament and deradicalisation. So long as Hamas retains armed control, the teachers and preachers who sustain its recruitment system can operate under the organisation’s protection. Any attempt to reform education will remain vulnerable while that machinery retains coercive force.

Disarming Hamas is a civilian necessity, though carrying it out is exceptionally difficult. Gaza’s children remain at risk while an armed organisation can indoctrinate and recruit them in service of its own survival. I have examined the practical obstacles to the Gaza ceasefire in depth, in an extensive three-part series (here).

Ahmad Fouad Alkhatib drew attention on X this week to an appalling video of a child being sent into harm’s way. Gabriel Epstein has collected material identifying apparent child soldiers through wartime images and eulogies released by armed groups or relatives. This phenomenon warrants far closer investigation than they have received from the world’s media.

Before the war, 50 per cent of Gaza’s population was under 18. Male fatalities disproportionately outnumber female fatalities in the 10–14 and 15–19 age groups, whereas the figures for children aged 0–4 and 5–9 show no comparable divergence. Evidence suggests that underage recruitment is a viable and increasingly likely explanation.

Please feel free to download and share this video, either here or on X. The full scale of this child abuse remains undiscussed. This makes the unanswered questions more urgent.

About the writer:

A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

An IDF investigation has produced no verdict and no new evidence of guilt. The online mob is exploiting the tragedy for clicks anyway.

By Andrew Fox

The IDF has opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of Hind Rajab and eight others. That is the entire development. No verdict is implied. The announcement identifies no suspect, nor does it specify an offence. Online carrion crows have turned Hind’s death into clickbait by stripping the news of its qualifications and selling an investigation as a verdict.

describes the alleged shelling of that ambulance and records that the girls and two paramedics were later found dead. It does not establish what happened during the intervening hours.

Mark Zlochin’s close reading exposes the misrepresentation. The formal finding concerns the initial fire at the car. The later events remain reports and allegations. His earlier analysis raised unresolved questions about the route and timeline and tested whether the telephone material and available lines of sight supported The IDF examination states that troops fired at the approaching family car on 29 January 2024. Five passengers were killed; Hind and her cousin Layan survived the encounter. Hours later, a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, whose movement had been coordinated, went to recover them. The announcement more than one source of fire. Those questions do not resolve the deaths, and today’s announcement provides no new evidence of criminal guilt.

There is one awkward point for Israel’s defenders. The IDF’s first account said no troops were in the area. Its subsequent examination now acknowledges that troops fired at the car. That correction cannot be wished away, and anyone who repeated the first version should amend their view. The acknowledgement revises the official account of the initial encounter. Hind and Layan, it now says, survived the initial fire, while the ambulance strike and their later deaths remain under investigation. Criminal responsibility remains unresolved.

The carrion feeders have ignored that distinction. They demanded an investigation. The moment one was announced, they called it an admission. Their trick relies on readers confusing suspicion with conviction. They use a dead child for emotional force and borrow legal vocabulary to manufacture authority. Nobody has been charged. No court has tested individual liability in the Hind case or in the separate Tel al-Sultan referral. There is no legal conclusion in either case. For these people, the case is not about truth or justice for Hind Rajab: it is about validating their preconceptions about Israel no matter what.

The IDF’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism compiles operational material for the Military Advocate General. Reasonable suspicion triggers a military police investigation; prosecutors then assess whether the evidence offers a reasonable prospect of conviction. A referral records suspicion but supplies no answer. The suspected offence may involve negligence in following procedure. The announcement does not say.

I have always maintained that where credible evidence supports a war crime charge, it should be prosecuted. That remains my position. The World Central Kitchen case illustrates the distinction. Australia’s review by Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin found that the strike was not knowingly or deliberately directed against the charity. It recorded mistaken identification and failures to follow procedures. Binskin made no criminal finding. A catastrophic outcome can warrant criminal scrutiny without establishing deliberate murder.

I know of a British soldier in Afghanistan who shot dead a farmer carrying a broom. Having known the soldier well and having previously expressed doubts about his suitability for deployment, I am fairly certain that a murder was committed. His defence was that he genuinely believed the broom was a weapon and that his life was threatened. No charges followed. The incident is relevant here only as an example of how difficult it is to reconstruct a shooter’s state of mind after the event.

War crime allegations in Gaza, and more generally, are difficult to investigate because evidence is disturbed and witnesses can be inaccessible. There are no sterile crime scenes, few witness statements, and evidential chains of custody are extremely hard to maintain or prove. The criminal standard of proof does not bend to outrage.

The delay remains a fair ground for criticism. Peter Lerner accurately describes the timing problem:

Israel’s legal machinery moves at an investigative pace, while the information war moves in minutes or seconds. His call for earlier acknowledgement and carefully bounded updates might have reduced speculation. Seth Frantzman’s demand for accountability is fair, too. However, a bleaker counterpoint remains as an answer to both: Israel will be hammered whatever it does. The same people who treated silence as concealment now present the inquiry as a confession.

Researchers should update their positions and opinions when new facts emerge. That applies to Israel’s initial claim that no troops were present. The acknowledgement of IDF fire at the car must be noted. It provides no new evidence about who killed Hind or what happened around the ambulance, or what Hamas was doing at the time. This was a war zone, remember. The public record still contains no evidence establishing a provable crime.

Nine dead human beings have become raw material for clicks and political self-gratification. They have taken an investigation that establishes no guilt and sold it as a confession, using Hind Rajab’s death as a weapon before investigators have established how she died and at whose hand. Decent analysts change their position when the facts change. The ghouls simply distort the facts until they fit the verdict they wanted from the start. If credible evidence of a crime emerges, I will follow it and demand that it be prosecuted. Until then, the spectacle of people parading a dead child through the information war deserves nothing but utter contempt.

About the writer:

A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Israelis love to fantasize about eating humus in Damascus. However, fantasies turn into fiascoes when they collide with fiendish reality.

By Jonathan Feldstein

In the good old days, Arabs would just rant with wild unabashed rhetoric about destroying Israel outright and driving Israelis into the sea. They would threaten Israel openly, blockade shipping, eject UN “peacekeeping troops,” launch a variety of terrorist attacks, initiate global boycotts of Israel and the companies that do business with Israel, etc.  Today, while the chants of freeing “Palestine” “from the river to the sea” still mean driving Israel into the same sea and eliminating the Jewish state, their tactics have changed from outright hostility and threats to something even more nefarious but not new.

Israelis want peace. We are lured by the idea of peace. Each generation prays that it will be the last generation to serve in combat to defend ourselves from ongoing threats. Even after the Hamas attack and massacre of October 7, 2023, even though the reality vis-à-vis our Arab neighbors is clear, some still fantasize about peace and believe it is somehow achievable.

Israel has peace with Egypt and Jordan, and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco thanks to the Abraham Accords. While three years ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said peace with Israel has never been closer, the Saudis remain unwilling to pull the trigger so to speak.

Qatar who still threatens Israel, is an epicenter of radical Islam, and brainwashing the world as such through media and buying influence.

Turkey, while not Arab, has emerged as one of the major regional threats with its Islamist leader threatening to reconquer Jerusalem (and his fantasies about restoring the Ottoman Caliphate which was resoundingly defeated in WWI). Its influence in Syria has increased, bringing the threat of a land attack – though they also seek American F35s – closer than ever before. Turkey also openly supports and harbors Hamas terrorists, making no secret of its ill intent, despite being a member of NATO.

While no less alarming, Turkey’s tactics are old-school: overtly threatening, delegitimizing, and seeking alliances and weapons upon which it can realize its threats vis-à-vis Israel. Recently, reports were revealed marking a shift in the tactic but no less threatening to Israel’s existence.

While the countries involved have not yet been named, what has been revealed is that one or more Arab countries are being encouraged to make peace with Israel in order to normalize relations as if being part of the Abraham Accords, but to use this to “lull” Israelis to think that peace is real, and at the same time to build up their military preparedness to attack Israel. This is a new tactic in the past 100 years of the broader “Arab-Israel Conflict,” but it is indeed a tactic that is as old as Islam.

This week’s headlines could have come from headlines of the year 628 with Mohammed’s “Treaty of Hudaybiyha.”  What happened 1398 years ago was that Mohammed signed a truce with the stronger Quraysh tribe at Hudaibaiyah. Many of Mohammed’s followers found this humiliating. However, Mohammed had a bigger scheme planned.  As the Quraysh tribe lived through the intoxication of their “peace in our time” fantasy, the pause in fighting allowed Mohammed time to rearm and grow stronger. Two years later, he broke the treaty, attacked Mecca with a much larger force, and conquered it from the Quraysh tribe. Mecca was never the same, and Islam continued this path until today of using the model of the Treaty of Hudaibiyha to conquer other tribes, cultures, and countries.

What’s evident in this week’s headline is that as much as Israelis strive for peace agreements with our Arab and Muslim neighbors, what’s been proven time and again throughout history, is that we cannot trust them, we cannot let our guard down, and we must maintain our military and intelligence capabilities because every treaty has the potential of being Hudaibaiyah .

Countless ceasefires with Hamas and Hezbollah were not made from positions of strength or genuine desire for peace, or the well-being of their own communities. They are made from weakness in order to regroup, rearm, and return to war when the time is right. That’s what this week’s headline is about.

While Israel has peace with Egypt and Jordan in the form of signed treaties, it has been a cold peace. We have continued to see threats and military buildup, and the frequent undermining and delegitimizing of Israel, as well as publicly bashing Israel in many forums. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, rather than standing with Israel against the Islamists who also threaten them, these two nations at ‘peace’ with Israel, have only increased their rhetoric and threats against Israel.

In Lebanon, we see hopeful signs of some sort of agreement with our northern neighbor which has largely been plagued by war since 1975. However, Hezbollah’s tight grip on Lebanon’s fractured society,  continues to plague the nation and jeopardizes its future.

The Lebanese should want peace, and signing a piece of paper would be advantageous. However, as long as Hezbollah remains dominant and a threat to Israel as well as to Lebanon, Israel will never be able to truly trust a peace agreement with them either.

So, which Arab countries are involved in this attempt at a modern Treaty of Hudaibaiyah?

 I don’t know yet but have my guesses. In the bigger picture it almost doesn’t matter because it’s the simple reality of the threat of peace with any Arab or Islamic neighbor is the same. In 1979 we were intoxicated by the idea of peace with Egypt and indeed there have been many advantages of that. The same with making peace with Jordan in 1994, theoretically freeing up the risk of threats along our longest border. Some never trusted these from the outset, and recent rhetoric and threats may prove them right.

The Abraham Accords brought normalization with Arab countries that were never in open conflict with Israel, and with which Israel does not share a border. These have been fruitful in just a few years. But just because we’re paranoid about the long-term threats as a result of making peace does not mean we’re wrong about the potential for these threats. Time will tell.

Israelis fantasize about eating humus in Damascus. From the early years of the state. After the Arabs’ resounding loss in the 1967 Six-Day War, we believed that they would eventually come to understand that Israel is not going anywhere, and if it were a conflict about land, using the failed “land for peace” model which the rejected anyway, if we “gave back” land to the vanquished Arab states, they would become rational and make peace with us.

As we maintain the need for readiness for anything, and as has been revealed this week we cannot let our guard down, we also must continue to look in the rear-view mirror. As much as we want peace, Mohammed’s model then is our tragic and treacherous reality today. 

About the writer:

Jonathan Feldstein ­­­­- President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Journal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).