Media Watch:  Arab world is watching Israel like never before says Arab journalist.

Explaining this phenomenon is veteran Arab journalist and author Nazir Majli, widely known for his extensive career as a political correspondent covering Israel and the Middle East for the London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat. He has served as the publication’s Israel bureau chief, offering analysis and breaking news across both Arabic and international media. Reported in Ynet, Majli questions how Irael seems impervious to the negative impact many of its actions are having on Arabs in the region who were growing to the idea – once an anathema – of closer ties with Israel following the Abraham Accords. He characterizes Israel by its conduct as “a subcontractor for Hamas,” for the self-inflicted harm damage it is causing.
Let Majli explain – it is well worth a read.

David E. Kaplan
Editor, Lay of the Land

ARAB WORLD WATCHING ISRAELI MEDIA LIKE NEVER BEFORE, BUT ISRAEL IS FAILING TO UNDERSTAND WHY

By Nazir Majli

No country draws the attention of the Arab world more than Israel. Perhaps it began as “know your enemy,” but it did not remain only that. Many Arabs wanted knowledge and answers. For years, they learned about Israel mainly from hostile Arab sources, mobilized media, propaganda and incitement. Many believed that distorted picture until they encountered another truth.

Israel’s achievements in science, technology, security, high-tech and the economy raised more questions and increased the demand for reliable information.

When that demand became real hunger, Arab media faced a major challenge. Major newspapers such as Asharq Al-Awsat and Al-Hayat began employing Arab citizens of Israel as correspondents in the early 1990s. Al Jazeera later joined, followed by Al Arabiya. Today, there is no influential Arab channel or newspaper without a correspondent in Israel. Even Hezbollah-linked Al Mayadeen has commissioned reports from Arab Israeli journalists.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli voice has reached the Arab nation live and from the source. Netanyahu’s speeches and those of his ministers have been broadcast live with simultaneous Arabic translation and later quoted in news bulletins. Studio discussions were repeatedly interrupted for statements by Israeli leaders.

Even as Israeli planes bombed universities, schools, mosques and churches, even as thousands of women and children were killed and homes were destroyed in Gaza and in West Bank refugee camps, the voice and image of IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari appeared on screens in Palestinian and Arab homes. Every appearance was broadcast and translated reliably for Arab audiences.

At the same time, while Israel practiced military and self-censorship over IDF operations in Gaza and later Lebanon, and while broadcasters, reporters and commentators in Israeli studios often concealed the harsh consequences, Arab media made sure to carry the other voice — the Israeli one.

It was openness against opacity. Veteran Arab journalists remembered the 1960s, when Israel projected great self-confidence and often told the truth, while Arab media concealed it.

After 50 years of deeper and more authentic Arab familiarity with Israel, there is no longer one united Arab hostility toward Israel. There is an internal Arab conflict over Israel. The Abraham Accords were one of the clearest expressions of that change.

Hamas, inspired by Iran, attacked Israel in an effort to destroy that process. Israel’s harsh, unconventional and destructive response turned it, in effect, into a subcontractor for Hamas, helping it advance that goal and damaging the new Arab current that wanted normalization with Israel.

What had been seen as Israeli wisdom suffered a severe blow after Oct. 7.

The questions I now hear from Arab colleagues, influencers and policy figures have become much harder. Covering Israel for the Arab world has become more difficult. Israeli policy is seen as a gamble with everything on the table. Even those who hate Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah cannot digest Israel’s conduct throughout the war. Many believe this policy is helping the extremist axis.

Even friends of President Donald Trump, who strongly supports the Israeli government, do not understand how Netanyahu has placed everything in his hands.

They ask me:

 “Don’t you think about the day after? Is there no responsible body analyzing reality, examining scenarios and drawing professional conclusions about the future? How is policy made in Israel? What are the considerations? How do Israelis understand the value of good neighbors? Even if there are military achievements, why not use them for a diplomatic horizon? The first rule of wars is to end them with political achievements. Is Israel waiting for Trump to do that work, too?”

A wealthy, educated woman from Gaza, now a refugee in Egypt and known for opposing Hamas, asked me in despair: “Don’t Israelis have children? Don’t they think about their future? Do you know that my grandson talks about revenge?”

A Syrian intellectual living in Canada, who celebrated the fall of the Assad family’s regime, canceled his plan to return to Syria with his family because of the uncertainty there.

“What do the Israelis want from Syria already?” he asked. “A country without an army, extending a hand for peace and ready to cooperate against terrorism — why is it met with such hostility from Israel?”

A senior Egyptian diplomat I met in Tel Aviv told me: “You know how much I hate Iran. But Israel has been exposed. For me, it is the second Iran in the region. What it did in Gaza conveys weakness more than strength. The arrogance of its leaders and the talk of turning Israel into the most powerful force in the region and the world express a sick internal weakness.”

A senior official in Abu Dhabi, once an enthusiastic supporter of the Abraham Accords, spoke of deep shock.

“What Hamas did was not only carry out a cursed, murderous attack,” he said. “It also pulled Israelis out of judgment and strategic thinking, dragging them into sacrificing future generations to a dark future.”

He recalled Netanyahu’s 2015 comment at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, when he was asked whether Israel would forever live by the sword and answered, “Yes.”

“Do Israelis understand what that means?” the Abu Dhabi official asked. “What leader promises his people wars for life?”

The Arab world is watching Israel more closely than ever. But attention is not support. Israel’s words are translated, its leaders are heard and its military briefings are broadcast. Yet everything Israel says is now weighed against what Arab audiences see.

The question is whether Israel understands what it is showing them.”

People would far rather believe that pigs can fly and Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners than that Hamas-led terrorists randomly mass raped and slaughtered women, children and some men on October 7. Here’s why:

By Marika Sboros

(Courtesy of Daily Friend in SA where first published)

There are moments when language fails, when violence outstrips the vocabulary available to describe it. 

October 7, 2023, in southern Israel was one of those moments.

The unprecedented violence, mass rape and sexual savagery that the Hamas-led attack unleashed on that day was so deliberately, systematically calculated to destroy bodies and families that no existing legal framework had a word for it.

Until now.

A new, independent report released on May 12, 2026 is the most comprehensive documentation and analysis to date of that violence. It is the work of the Israel-based, internationally focused NGO, CCO7 (Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children).

Buried in it is a word the Commission’s investigators coined soon after October 7, for what they found in their early research: kinocide – from kin (family) and cide (the systematic nature of destruction).

World media have yet to embrace the word.

The Commission’s leader, Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israel Prize laureate and international law expert, developed the concept of the word with principal contributor, former Canadian justice minister Prof Irwin Cotler.

They did so after watching video after video of Hamas terrorists forcing parents and grandparents to watch their children and grandchildren be tortured, raped and murdered, and children to watch their parents and grandparents suffer the same fate.

Elkayam-Levy describes kinocide as:

 “The deliberate, systematic torture of families and the weaponisation of familial bonds in order to maximise suffering.”

While looking and analysing the videos, they started seeing the pattern – moments that made them “understand that we were seeing something that needs to be defined,” Elkayam-Levy says in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

These moments made her move after October 7 to secure evidence before denial could take hold.

“We saw silence and denial  .. very quick denial,” she told the Times of Israel. This made her “understand that we have to collect evidence as quickly as possible and establish an archive under stringent international standards.”

The Commission’s two-year investigation has done so. It has drawn on legal scholars, international jurists, researchers, archivists and trauma experts, conducted in collaboration with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Prof David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone has endorsed the report. So have Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak and Anila Ali, president of the American Muslim and Multi-Faith Women’s Empowerment Council.

Their endorsement alone should silence those who would dismiss this as a partisan document.

Investigators documented 13 recurring forms of sexual violence across the Nova music festival, kibbutzim, roadside shelters, military bases, abduction routes and hostage captivity in Gaza. These were rape, gang rape, sexual torture, forced nudity, genital mutilation, executions linked to assault, post-mortem abuse and assaults in front of family members.

Some examples: a male survivor of the Nova musical festival slaughter, identified only as D, reportedly passed a polygraph after describing his gang rape:

“They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll … They did whatever they wanted to me.”

A 17-year-old hostage called her mother from Gaza:

“Mum, they’re going to rape me.”

Two related minor children held hostage in Gaza were coerced into sexual acts against one another. Their captors stripped them, touched their genitalia and whipped them.

These are not isolated accounts. They are part of what the Commission documents over two years and 300 pages, in a report titled “Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled”: a “systematic, widespread and integral” use of sexual violence, designed, planned and organised to terrorise Israeli society as a whole.

The Commission’s legal conclusion is unequivocal – these are war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal acts under international law.

After reading the Commission’s report, Lord Zac Goldsmith, British peer and former Cabinet minister, took to X to ask questions that journalists globally haven’t asked

I include them in full, as a handy reference for journalists who might yet cover it:

• What kind of a depraved monster slices off a woman’s breast while she is being gang-raped, and throws it into the dust to be used as a plaything?
• What kind of a twisted pervert turns rape into necrophilia by shooting a woman in the head while he is still defiling her?
• What kind of ‘freedom fighters’ go into battle with a set of handy Arabic-to-Hebrew phrases, including ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’ and ‘spread your legs’?
• What self-respecting human being presses nails, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers and other household tools into a woman’s genitals?
• How hard do you have to rape someone, and with what, to shatter their pelvis?
• Who shoots a young girl in the face and then films her mutilated corpse on her brother’s mobile phone?

The answer is staring us all in the face: Hamas terrorists.

I call them terrorists while many in the media call them “militants”. Unlike “militant”, “terrorist” has a specific meaning – someone who deliberately targets civilians to create fear for political ends. It carries legal weight and moral condemnation.

The October 7 attack meets every legal and common-sense definition of terrorism. Hamas is formally designated a terrorist organisation by the US, the EU, the UK and Australia, among others.

When the Civil Commission’s report landed in newsrooms, many mainstream editors may well have reached for a familiar refrain not to publish: the report is “not new”.  

Technically, they are correct. The Civil Commission’s first detailed report was in November 2023.  And accounts of mass rape and sexual violence began circulating online in the wake of October 7.

Yet there is not wide acknowledgement of why the full extent of that violence has never found its way into public consciousness – and the media’s role in that.

It’s not because the story is not new. It is because a sustained, organised, sophisticated global propaganda campaign has, over more than two years, successfully seeded doubt, denial and deliberate distraction into the information ecosystem.

This may arguably persuade those in positions of power and influence to give credence to claims that accusations of mass rape and massacre of innocents have been “exaggerated” and that Israel “doctored” all the evidence to make October 7 look worse than it was.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese lends ongoing institutional cover to this line of thinking. She regularly underplays the extent of the violence of October 7 – when she acknowledges it at all. She has opined that reports of Hamas’s sexual violence “may have been exaggerated.”

What is new about the “Silenced No More” report is the scope, rigour and forensic depth of its documentation – two years of painstaking evidence-gathering producing the most comprehensive war crimes archive ever assembled on these events.

It is designed to be undeniable.

Yet the denialism goes on, as does the global propaganda campaign.

A column in The New York Times on 11 May by the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof is relevant in that regard. The irony of its headline, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians”, is probably lost on Kristof 

It mirrors the moral language condemning the silence around October 7 in the Civil Commission’s own report headline: Silenced No More”. It makes Kristof’s column look like a deliberate attempt to pre-empt precisely the rhetorical space the Civil Commission’s report deserves to occupy.

Kristof’s column is riddled with terminal weaknesses, not the least is its most sensational claim: that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners in its jails.

Kristof is careful not to make the claim himself. He leaves it to his sources.

The claim quickly went viral. It is not only unverified. It is old.

As Honest Reporting has noted, Euro-Med Monitor, Kristof’s chief source for his column, and a self-described “human rights” NGO, was pushing it in June 2024.

The claim is physiologically and biologically impossible. As veterinary experts could have told Kristof, if he’d bothered to ask

They could have told him that the canine sexual response is governed by species-specific pheromones that humans do not produce; that canine mounting behaviour is non-sexual; and that canine anatomy is incompatible with human anatomy for penetrative acts.

Veterinary scientists call the dog-rapist claim biologically implausible. It is also a fabrication of a fevered mind designed to overwhelm critical faculties before implausibility registers. In the context of the Middle East conflict, it helpfully contributes to demonising Israel and Jews.

It’s tempting to see that Kristof’s column as preparation for undermining the Civil Commission’s report that launched the next day.

The New York Times did run an extensive news report of the Civil Commission’s the next day, by its Jerusalem correspondent, Isabel Kershner.

Some analysts see that as giving due credence to the Commission’s report. Others have a more jaundiced view. Whether it constitutes balance, accountability or damage control remains to be seen.    

Euro-Med’s record alone should have disqualified it entirely as Kristof’s source.

The NGO spread the debunked claim that Israel harvested organs from Palestinian prisoners. Israel has designated its founder, Ramy Abdu, as a Hamas operative in Europe. Abdu publicly declared on X (formerly Twitter) that Israel has “an insatiable appetite for drinking the blood of Palestinian children.”

(The tweet has since been deleted or made inaccessible, but not before Honest Reporting took a screen shot of it.)

Abdu was just spreading a modern “blood libel”, the word given to the first one that was weaponised in 12th-century England to trigger massacres and expulsions of Jewish communities across medieval Europe for centuries. In its original “glory”, the blood libel claimed Jews kill Christian children and drink their blood for religious ritual.

That The New York Times allowed Kristof to present Euro-Med as a credible watchdog over Israeli prisons without flagging any of this context is a notable editorial failure.

Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur gives his views of Kristof’s column in a YouTube video on May 12. He says that Kristof was not tasked with revealing sexual crimes but “covering for them. And it worked.”

Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger was more blunt on X:

“Utter depravity from (Kristof) for parroting such cartoonishly evil Hamas propaganda that would make Goebbels blush.”

The paper has stolidly defended the column.

In South Africa, the largest news platform, News24 and EWN were practically alone in covering the Commission’s report.

Contrast that with the considerable space and attention South African media gave to every procedural twist in the ongoing, ill-judged genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel that South Africa launched following October 7.

Some even treated it as a matter of national pride. They also later falsely reported (many journalists still do) that the ICJ found “a plausible case of genocide” against Israel in its ruling in January 2024.

The ICJ did nothing of the sort.

Former ICJ president Judge Joan Donoghue explicitly corrected this publicly in a BBC interview in April 2024: the court “did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” The court did decide that the Palestinians had a “plausible right to be protected from genocide.”

Many Jewish legal and historical scholars consider the genocide claim to rival the original blood libel about Jews killing kids to drink their blood as the worst modern-day libel against Israel and Jews.

Many journalists still make the false claim about the ICJ’s ruling. Many South African media have yet to correct their record.

That’s not incidental. It is an editorial choice that amplifies allegations against Israel and suppresses documented evidence of atrocities against Israelis. It has a cost – paid by the women, children and men whose suffering is erased from public consciousness when false claims are not debunked.

Silence and denialism from journalists on the full extent of the Hamas-led mass rape and other sexual violence of October 7 is one thing; the ongoing silence from feminists globally is another.

Women’s rights organisations built on the principle of believing survivors have still not found their voices. The slogan “Believe Women” turned out to have a gross political limit:

“Believe Women, Except Jewish Women.”

UN Women took weeks to issue even a hedged statement. The UN’s own special rapporteur on sexual violence in conflict reportedly labelled survivor accounts “disinformation”.

When former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg took to the UN podium in December 2023, two months after October 7, to demand that the world acknowledge Hamas’s sexual violence, she was not addressing a hostile audience. She was addressing a silent one.

“The silence on these war crimes is deafening,” Sandberg told the assembly. “Silence is complicity.”

She later added: “I never thought that politics could make any group or feminist leader turn a blind eye to just such clear documentation of sexual violence.”

Her contribution to breaking that silence was to produce a film, titled Screams Before Silence, to give voice to the silenced.

The Civil Commission’s report, which Elkayam-Levy, herself a feminist scholar of international law, built in direct response to that silence, is in part a rebuke to her own field.

The deafening silence still ongoing from feminists over the sexual violence of October 7 is troubling enough. Compounding it with an ironic veneer of respectability is Jewish voices among the loudest dismissing or minimising it.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the American antizionist organisation, blamed Israel for the attack on the day it happened. It has e cast doubt on the sexual violence documentation.

The Antidefamation League (ADL) has noted that JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield some in the anti-Israel movement from allegations of antisemitism and provide a veneer of legitimacy.” That veneer gives the denialism of October 7 sexual violence a halo it would not otherwise have.

In South Africa, the halo hangs over the quaintly named South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) and the non-profit Jewish Democratic Initiative (JDI) when it comes to Israel’s war against Hamas.

The implicit message is insidious: if Jews themselves say something didn’t happen or was exaggerated, how could doubting it be antisemitic or antizionist?

When people with professional credentials in women’s advocacy, or the perceived moral righteousness and authority of being Jewish, line up to cast doubt, the propaganda campaign need not argue its case. It simply points at them.

This is the ecosystem in which the Civil Commission’s report lands in 2026.

Of course, none of the above justifies ignoring credible accounts of abuse in Israeli detention facilities. Confirmed abuse allegations demand accountability, no matter the perpetrators or victims.

Rettig Gur is among Jews prepared to acknowledge the existence of documented cases of Palestinian prisoner abuse. These are “real”, he says, but “far smaller” than alleged and mostly not sexual. He identifies Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as responsible for treating prisoner welfare as a political liability rather than a legal obligation.

He also stresses that “the vast majority of (IDF) soldiers are honourable men (and women) who walked into fire so our families may live.”

Israel’s government has served notice that it will sue The New York Times for Kristof’s article. An announcement that it was addressing and investigating concerns about abuse of Palestinian prisoners would have been more helpful.

Rettig Gur posits the way forward: the failures of a minority must be fixed from within and must never be weaponised to erase what Hamas did.

The denialism goes on. As the Civil Commission’s CEO, Merav Israeli-Amarant, told Kershner in The New York Times, sexual crimes are “the easiest crimes to deny.” This is especially true of the October 7 attack “because most of the victims were murdered and are unable to testify.”

History has its own power.

It will not remember the perpetrators of kinocide kindly. It will be equally unkind to those who had all the evidence and chose to stay silent. 

About the Writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

Follow Marika Sboros on X:  @MarikaSboros
Subscribe on Substack: Marika Sboros 

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).

There are words here that will direct you to look away – DON’T! You need to read, process and bear witness.

By Rolene Marks

[Warning: Sensitive Content]

In 2024 I was invited with a small group of journalists and diplomats to view some of the evidence that was found on the terrorists on 7 October and what was subsequently discovered in the Gaza strip. Under close supervision and military intelligence headquarters, we viewed weapons, maps, books and material – and orders in specific detail to commit acts of appalling sexual violence, including instructions for the victims to remove their clothing.

This article will be extremely uncomfortable and difficult for many to read. I appeal to you to please persist – we must bear witness and be the voices of victims and survivors. 

Ushered into another room, phones prohibited, we were shown a 20-minute collation of footage from Hamas body-cam, first responders and desperate family members searching for their loved ones. This we were told, would be evidence submitted to the ICJ where South Africa had filed a case accusing Israel of genocide. The images are seared into my conscience – including that of a partially burnt woman, her legs splayed, dress pushed up and naked, intimate parts for the world to see. There was a slice across her one thigh. I recall another image that I see as clear as day. The body of a woman, on top of a pile of corpses, bleeding from her crotch where she had been shot with the deliberate intent to defile her femininity.

The evidence of what I saw is undeniable.

These are two specific examples of the horrific crimes of Sexual and Gender based Violence (SGBV) and crimes against humanity committed against Israeli men, women and children on 7 October 2023 and to hostages in captivity.

Despite irrefutable proof noted in reports by UN Women, the Dinah Project and one from the Association of Rape Crisis Centres, denial, downplaying and even justification of the atrocities still continue – including from feminist organisations. It would appear that the voices of victims matter – unless they are Israeli. What message does this send future victims of SGBV?

This week, the Civil Commission – an independent Israeli non-profit organisation led by human rights expert and 2024 Israel Prize laureate Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy – released their report. “Silenced no more” was meticulously documented and referenced for over two years and is a devastating collation of the crimes against humanity and SGBV committed on that day and to hostages in captivity.

The report is close to 300 pages long and contains documentation of at least 10,000 items including videos, photographs, forensic findings and the testimonies of 430 victims and survivors. Hamas proudly filmed and distributed evidence of their crimes. The hope is that not only will this be documented to fight back against denial – but could lead to further legal action against the perpetrators. Israel’s Knesset has approved the convening of a special tribunal to try the perpetrators of 7 October.

The individual testimonies are absolutely devastating.

In the weeks and months following the atrocities, eye witnesses and forensic experts testified about what they witnessed. Forensic experts spoke about the condition of the bodies that were brought in for identification, saying how they were shot in their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted in their most intimate parts. Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. Heads were decapitated and pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.  A Nova survivor testified to a victim being shot in the head while her rapist continued his assault. The intention was clear – to destroy their beauty and femininity. Forensic pathologists spoke of an “obsession with sex organs”. First responders echoed the same sentiment and have addressed numerous NGO’s and global institutions sharing their testimonies to the defilement and horror they saw on the kibbutzim, road 232 and at the Nova festival grounds.

“I saw them raping her,” says Raz Cohen, who escaped the Nova Music Festival, “Then they murdered her. And then they raped her again.”

Eden Wessely, who came to Nova to rescue a friend, found and filmed a naked, burned body. “Her dress was pulled up, and she wasn’t wearing underwear, not because it burned, because there was no trace. . . . Her legs were spread. Her genitals were exposed.” Was it the same image I saw?

Former hostages have spoken about the abuse they suffered in captivity. Guy Gilboa-Dalal spoke about how he was touched on his private parts and how his captor “wanted to make a porn movie with him.” Arbel Yehud testified to daily abuse.

Keith Siegel, a 66-year-old grandfather who was taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza along with his wife Aviva, 65, testified that he was made to undress in front of a terrorist who then shaved his pubic hair and made comments about his penis.

Aviva Siegel spoke about how she was nearly executed after she comforted a young girl who was sexually assaulted in captivity. Siegel recalled telling young girls to take feminine products with them to the bathroom so that if their captors thought they were on their period, they would not abuse them.

A male says he was gang-raped at the Nova site, providing medical records and a detailed account:

“They laughed, they were really pleased, as if I was their sex doll.”

The Commission also identified thirteen recurring patterns of sexual and gender-based violence repeated across multiple sites. They include a damning list of crimes:

*    Rape, gang rape, and other forms of sexual assault.

*    Sexual torture, including intentional burning and mutilation.

*    Deliberate shooting in the head, face and genital area.

*  Killings and executions following or committed during abuse.

* Postmortem sexual abuse, humiliation, and the desecration   of bodies, including cutting off body parts.

*   Forced nudity and exposure including to family members.

*   Handcuffing, binding, and restraint of victims.

*   Public displaying and parading of women and children. One such example is the parading of the body of Shani Louk, whose partially undressed and twisted limbs were paraded on a truck in Gaza while men spat at her.

*    Abduction of mothers and children.

*     Sexual violence in the presence or near vicinity of family members including Kinocide – the deliberate targeting and destruction of families as a weapon of war or terror, recognized as a distinct form of violence against humanity.

*   Filming and digital dissemination by the perpetrators including the use of social media to document, glorify, and amplify the atrocities.

*    Threats of forced marriage.

*   Rape and other forms of sexual violence against boys and men.

President Herzog released a statement on social media platform X on behalf of his wife, Michal, who said:

 “We must continue to amplify around the world the voices of the victims of sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th and thereafter.”

 Mrs. Herzog commended the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes against Women and Children “for their dedicated research and tireless work, resulting in the publication of an important new report that once again gives voice to the victims.”

The victims and survivors of these most evil of crimes will no longer be silenced by those who deny, downplay and justify the atrocities committed by Hamas. Please do not look away. As unbearable as the testimonies are to read and hear, we must bear witness. We have a moral duty to be their voices. Silence is a second violation.

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).

How Obama misread the aims of Iran

By Neville Berman

In January 2009, the Democratic Party nominee, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States of America. It was a watershed moment in American history. America finally had a black President that seemed to fulfill the dreams of the Democratic Party and liberals.  The Norwegian Nobel Committee immediately bestowed on him the Nobel Peace Prize.

For his first foreign policy statement, Obama chose to speak at a university in Cairo. The choice of venue was a message in itself. Obama was greeted by rapturous applause by an overflowing audience of students. His speech revealed his positive view of Islam.

He started off by saying that he had come to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, and that they share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. He blamed the attacks of 9/11 on violent extremists who represented a small but potent minority of Muslims. He stated that “his father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims, but that he was a Christian, who as a boy had spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of Islam at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”

Below are some additional quotes from his speech that clearly demonstrated his thinking towards Islam:

• “Civilization’s debt to Islam that paved the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.”
• “Since America’s founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.”
• “Let there be no doubt Islam is a part of America.” 
• “America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”
• “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.”
•  “I will fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
• “Throughout history Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”  
• “America and Iran must work together in mutual respect.”
• “I will seek a world in which no nation has nuclear weapons.” 
• “America would support human rights everywhere.”
• “Islam is a nation of tolerance.”
• “There is one rule that is common to all religions and that is we do unto others what we want to do to ourselves.” “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
• “The Holy Koran tells us to be conscious of God and speak always the truth.”

Obama’s views of Islam as a tolerant and peaceful religion must have come as news to hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus around the world. The claim made by Obama that Islam is a peaceful religion is contradicted by centuries of Islamic subjugation and oppression. Obama was obsessed with promoting peace and refused to see the reality of the fact that millions of Muslims around the world cheered on September 11, 2001 when 2,977 people were killed by al-Qaeda on American soil. The attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, makes a total mockery of

“Do unto others what we want to do to ourselves.”

The truth is that subjugation and domination are part of the pillars of Islam. Obama never mentioned the Islamist division of the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-harb. The former is the land where Muslims have sovereignty and where Shariah law is the law of the land. The latter refers to land that still needs to be conquered and subjugated to Shariah law. He also never mentioned the Islamic religious call for jihad against infidels.

Let us now turn our attention to Iran. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any attempt to enrich uranium to weapons grade levels is a violation of this treaty. By 2013, the UN Security Council had passed 6 resolutions that imposed various levels of sanctions against Iran for refusing to comply with demands to end its nuclear enrichment program. The resolutions included the freezing of Iranian exports of oil and gas. This drastically reduced Iran’s foreign income. Iran was also banned from using the Swift system that dominates international banking and money transfers. Billions of dollars of Iranian money were frozen in Western banks. The sanctions were crippling Iran’s economy. By 2013, the value of the Iranian Rial was in freefall and the Iranian people were out in the streets demanding changes. Despite all the calls of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, Obama decided that it was time to negotiate a deal with Iran.  

In October 2013, representatives of the P5+1 (USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) held talks with Iran in Geneva. The main aim of the American negotiating team was to ensure that Iran would never be able to acquire nuclear weapons, and in return, sanctions on Iran would then be lifted. To lead the American team of negotiators, Obama appointed Under Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, who had previously negotiated the deal with North Korea that was supposed to end its nuclear program.

It was a total failure.

An interim agreement with Iran was reached in November 2013. It partially removed some of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations and encouraged Iran to continue with the negotiations. Negotiations continued for  twenty months. In 2015, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, took the lead in the negotiations. For 18 days in Vienna, he worked with the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javid Zarif, to finalize the deal. The final deal between Iran and the P5+1 delegates, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was officially reached on July 14, 2015. It was subsequently adopted on October 18, 2015.

The JCPOA deal achieved the exact opposite of what was originally intended. The sunset clause in the deal simply kicked the can down the road for when Iran could legally acquire nuclear weapons once the deal ends in October 2030. No restrictions or inspections were placed on Iran’s missile program. Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% without any limit as to the amount it could produce at this level. It was also agreed that if Iran enriched uranium above the agreed level, it needed to either destroy the uranium enriched beyond 3.67% level, or send it to another country for safekeeping. In effect the deal allows Iran to acquire the knowledge of how to enrich uranium to weapons grade level, and to then send it to another country for safekeeping. Russia would be the most likely country to receive the enriched uranium. The absurdity of Russia protecting the West by safekeeping weapons grade uranium produced by Iran was what was effectively agreed to. In addition, the deal allows Iran to produce unlimited intercontinental missiles that could threaten the world. After October 2030, these missiles could be legally armed with nuclear warheads.

Iran agreed that inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could take place at certain sites.  Surprise inspections required 48 hours’ notice. The agreement included a clause that if Iran did not abide by the agreement, Iran could be referred back to the Security Council to reimpose sanctions on Iran. This so-called “snapback sanctions” clause could be exercised at any time during the first 10 years of the agreement. China and Russia would not be permitted to vote if Iran was referred back to the Security Council to reimpose sanctions for non-compliance.  

Under the deal, sanctions on Iran were immediately lifted. Iran was given permission to export oil and gas and companies were given permission to invest in the Iranian oil and gas industry. Iran was allowed to rejoin the Swift Banking system. If this was not catastrophic enough, the deal immediately released frozen Iranian money plus interest on the money. Reports vary as to the actual amount released, but all agree that the sum was in the tens of billions of dollars. One report estimated that the final amount released was approximately $100 billion.  Obama ordered part of the money to be transferred in cash. The obvious intention of providing cash was to prevent American banking oversight of what the money would be used for. Iran immediately received all the benefits, while America received commitments by Iran to comply with the agreement in the future. It turned out that Iran had no intention to keep to its commitments.

In plain language, Iran lied.

Obama realized that the deal would never be approved by the Senate if it was presented as a treaty. What actually happened was that the negotiators signed the cover page of the agreement in Vienna, and then the parties to the deal, announced that they had agreed to it. There was no ceremony where the deal was signed. Obama was determined to bypass all the rules of approval needed in a treaty. What this meant was that any future American President could withdraw from the agreement. The Iranians were laughing all the way to the bank.    

With the windfall of money that Iran received, it immediately increased funding to its proxy terrorist organizations around the world, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran continued to claim that its nuclear program was only for peaceful purposes.  This was clearly a blatant lie. There is no peaceful use for uranium that is enriched to weapons grade levels. Its only use is to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran also denied access to certain sites by the IAEA inspectors.  Questions raised by the inspectors were either ignored or non-plausible answers were provided. The inspections would eventually become an absolute farce. In the final analysis, Obama did nothing to rid the world of nuclear weapons. What he did was to sanctify that the world’s leading terrorist state would legally be allowed to have a nuclear arsenal of unlimited magnitude once the sunset date was reached.

On May 8, 2018, President Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the JCPOA agreement. He called the agreement “a horrible one -sided deal that should have never, ever been made. ” He added that the deal would never bring peace.   

The present war in Iran can be traced back to President’s Obama’s naïve assumption that once Iran was treated with respect, it would become part of liberal based international order, and would live in peace with the world. Without any doubt, the JCPOA deal helped Iran out of a crisis, and empowered the Shiite mullahs of Iran to spread terrorism around the world. The deal provided Iran with frozen money as well as billions of dollars of future profits derived from the sale of Iranian oil on the world market. The money made it possible for Iran to finance its missile program, its nuclear program and to greatly increase funding to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The money transformed Iran into a threat to world peace.

Obama either misunderstood the Islamic goal of subjugating the world, or he had some ulterior motive to conclude a deal with Iran.  Whatever the case, Obama set in motion the events that led to the present war with Iran. Obama undoubtedly made the world into a much more dangerous place. The long arm of President Obama’s legacy is the present war with Iran.

About the writer:

Accountant Neville Berman had an illustrious sporting career in South Africa, being twice awarded the South African State Presidents Award for Sport and was a three times winner of the South African Maccabi Sportsman of the Year Award.  In 1978 he immigrated to the USA  to coach the United States men’s field hockey team, whereafter, in 1981 he immigrated to Israel where he practiced as an accountant and then for 20 years was the Admin Manager at the American International School in Even Yehuda, Israel.  He is married with two children and one granddaughter.

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).

A mass murder of Jews on a public beach did not “just happen” –  When lies reign, death ultimately follows.

By  Allan Joffe

Two months on from the Bondi attacks, a hard truth remains: antisemitism is nourished when untruths about Israel go unchallenged. Much of this misinformation spreads easily because many who consider themselves neutral remain uninformed out of complacency or the belief that the issue is simply too complex to engage with. Others fall into false moral equivalence that blurs the line between atrocity and response.

The level of misunderstanding is often astonishing. Joe Rogan recently guessed that there are “500 million Jews in the world.”

The real number is 15 million. 

In this environment, where algorithms deliver information designed to provoke rather than clarify, ignorance – to paraphrase Joseph Goebbels – is what allows a lie repeated often enough to become accepted as truth. In this sea of disinformation, some facts remain beyond dispute. These are not matters of interpretation or ideology, but facts that anyone engaging in this debate should understand. 

FACT 1: denying the Jewish connection to Zionism is antisemitic. 

For most Jews, Zionism is an expression of identity and faith. The Jewish people have long understood themselves as a nation with an enduring historical, cultural, and spiritual connection to the land of Israel. Nationally, Israel is to many Jews what Armenia is to Armenians or Greece to Greeks. Religiously, the longing for Zion is woven into Jewish prayers, holidays, and scripture much as Mecca anchors Islam and Rome anchors Catholicism. 

To insist that Judaism be defined without Zionism is an attempt to dictate to Jews how they understand their own faith and identity. No-one claims the right to redefine any other religion or identity in this way. 

Zionism is simply the belief that the Jewish people, like any other nation, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews isn’t progressive. It’s prejudice. 

FACT 2: 7 October wasn’t resistance. It was terrorism. 

Hamas terrorists carried printed orders explicitly instructing them to kill as many people as possible and to target schools and civilian communities. They raped women, burned families alive, and executed children. These weren’t acts of desperation or liberation, but war crimes. Those who justify or “contextualise” such crimes reveal moral bankruptcy. 

FACT 3: Israel didn’t occupy Gaza 

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew completely from Gaza in the hope that the territory would become a peaceful, self-governed Palestinian entity. It was a real opportunity for Palestinian self-rule, however Hamas used it to wage war on Israel. 

To limit the flow of weapons, Israel and Egypt jointly controlled Gaza’s borders – a policy often misrepresented as a “blockade”. The massacres of 7 October proved how ineffective that measure was. The claim that Gaza was “occupied” isn’t a legal or factual reality. 

FACT 4: the conflict isn’t about borders, it’s about Israel’s existence 

If the Palestinian cause was really about ending the “occupation” and achieving statehood, it would have been resolved decades ago. Palestinian leaders were offered independence repeatedly – in 1937; 1947; 1967; 2000; and 2008 – and rejected each proposal. 

At Camp David in 2000, under then United States President Bill Clinton, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairperson Yasser Arafat was offered a state comprising most of the West Bank and all of Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat walked away, and the Second Intifada followed. In 2008, Mahmoud Abbas rejected a similar offer. 

The record is clear: the conflict has never been about the size of Israel. It is rooted in an ideological refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. 

FACT 5: Hamas isn’t a resistance movement 

Hamas’s founding charter calls for the annihilation of Israel and the murder of Jews. Its leaders openly promise to repeat massacres like that of 7/10.”

This isn’t a movement of resistance, but a jihadist regime whose worldview is fundamentally opposed to liberal democratic values. Hamas enforces Sharia law; suppresses dissent; persecutes LGBTQ+ people; and strips women of basic rights. 

This ideology isn’t confined to Hamas. Repeated polls show broad public support for Hamas and for the 7 October atrocities in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian Authority continues its “pay-for-slay” policy, paying salaries to the families of terrorists, with higher payments for killing more Jews. Schools are named after “martyrs” who murdered Israeli civilians, and children are taught to idolise them. This isn’t a fringe phenomenon but an institutionalised worldview that is taught, celebrated, and rewarded. 

Author and philosopher Sam Harris captured the core asymmetry of the conflict, saying, “If the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down theirs, there would be genocide.” Israel is fighting a jihadist ideology that openly calls for genocide. 

FACT 6: the Palestinian refugee system keeps Palestinians stateless by design 

After World War II, refugee crises involving millions were resolved through resettlement. Twelve million Germans expelled from Eastern Europe; 14 million Hindus and Muslims displaced by the India-Pakistan partition; and three million Koreans separated by the Korean War were all resettled and rebuilt their lives. 

The Palestinian case is unique. In 1948, roughly 750 000 Palestinians became refugees and a comparable number of Jews were expelled from Arab states. Yet today, the number of Palestinian “refugees” exceeds five million, while the number of Jewish refugees is zero. This is because the United Nations via UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) applies a unique system used for no other refugee population: Palestinian refugee status is inherited indefinitely, even by those who hold full citizenship elsewhere. And unlike every other post-war refugee crisis, not one Palestinian refugee has ever been resettled under UNRWA’s mandate. Each generation is kept stateless by design. 

The absurdity is obvious. Omar Yaghi, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, was born in Jordan to Palestinian parents and left for the United States at age 15. Today, he holds American, Jordanian, and Saudi citizenship. Under UNRWA’s rules, he could still be classified as a Palestinian “refugee” if he had been registered with UNRWA before he emigrated and if so, his children could also inherit that status. 

This is an institutional system designed to keep the refugee issue alive indefinitely. It ensures that it is never resolved, and it leads directly to the next fallacy: the so-called “right of return”. 

FACT 7: the “right of return” is a demographic weapon 

The so-called “right of return” – the demand that more than five million Palestinians and their descendants be allowed to resettle inside Israel isn’t a humanitarian proposal but a demographic weapon. 

No other refugee population makes such a demand. The descendants of Germans expelled after World War II or of Hindus and Muslims displaced in 1947 don’t claim a “right” to return to homes their ancestors left generations ago. This demand exists only in the Palestinian case because it serves a political goal: to undo Israel’s existence through demographic means. 

If implemented, Israel would be transformed into a Palestinian majority entity. A solution that includes a “right of return” isn’t a peace plan. It’s a political impossibility. 

FACT 8: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East 

According to the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, Israel ranked 30th in the world, between the United States and Portugal. Australia ranked 14th; and South Africa, one of Israel’s harshest critics, 47th. The Palestinian Territories – ranked 115th – and every Middle Eastern state were classified as authoritarian. 

Israel stands as the region’s only democracy, with free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, and a free, critical press. 

Fact 9: the UN applies double standards to Israel 

No country has faced more condemnation by the UN than Israel – a level of scrutiny that reflects an institutional fixation while the UN has very little to say about countries such as Venezuela, Sudan, North Korea, and Iran. From 2015 to 2023, the General Assembly passed 154 resolutions censuring Israel, and only 71 against all other nations combined. At the Human Rights Council, Agenda Item 7 exists solely to debate Israel’s alleged violations, while no other state faces comparable treatment. 

This bias extends to the officials leading these supposedly neutral bodies. Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, has had her positions on Israel condemned by France,Germany, and the US as “disgraceful”, “scandalous”, and “antisemitic”, yet remained in her post. The UN’s “independent” inquiry into Israel is chaired by Navi Pillay, who took the position after publicly branding Israel an apartheid state. 

These patterns reveal a culture within the UN and its agencies that legitimises Israel’s detractors and fuels modern antisemitism. 

Fact 10: Israel is falsely portrayed as a settler-colonial state 

Israel and Zionism aren’t colonial projects. Jewish presence in the land stretches back thousands of years, and as academic Dr. Einat Wilf notes, one need not be Jewish or religious to recognise that few relationships between a people and a land are as deep and enduring. 

The return of Jews to their homeland bears no resemblance to colonialism in which a foreign power conquers territory to extract resources. From humble beginnings, Israel has built one of the world’s most open and diverse societies and has the 18th-highest GDP (gross domestic product) per capita in the world, between Belgium and Germany. 

The descendants of the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries after 1948 now comprise more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, meaning that the majority of Jewish Israelis are from the Middle East and not from Europe. 

Israel also has more than two million Arab citizens who enjoy full and equal legal rights. Arab representatives serve in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) and on the Supreme Court. The Arab population has grown from 156 000 in 1948 to more than two million today. This demographic reality is incompatible with claims of colonialism or apartheid. 

BEFORE YOU DECIDE WHAT THE TRUTH IS

The debate about Israel is, at its core, a debate about moral clarity. The loudest anti-Israel movements draw on a familiar convergence of ideas. Some of their leading figures openly support jihadist violence, presenting it as resistance. Others on the far left reframe the conflict through distorted theories of settler-colonialism and race. And on the far right, there are those who promote antisemitic conspiracies, minimise the Holocaust, or revive old-fashioned Jew-hatred. 

Before you decide where you stand, ask yourself whether these voices reflect your values. 

Bondi starkly demonstrated the cost of indulging such narratives. 

In the war for truth, ignorance isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice. 

*Feature picture: Bondi Beach Massacre. Left behind was more than people’s personal belongings but the end of a nation’s innocence.

About the writer:

A Chartered Accountant by training, Allan Joffe is a businessman based in Johannesburg. He is husband to Sandi, and father of their three children. 

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).