Note from the editor of Three Sages:
The following account was written and submitted to the Three Sages for publication by a Jewish American writer who converted to Christianity but wishes to remain anonymous. Part of his account is his …
The post A Personal Testimony: The Light of Jesus Amid Talmudic Darkness appeared first on Global Research.
The contract for the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine is just days away from expiring, but several European countries, including Hungary, Austria and Slovakia, seek to extend critical supplies. This agreement is necessary for Central Europe since there are …
The post Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Italy Fear Losing Russian Gas via Ukraine Following Expiry of Agreement with Kiev Regime appeared first on Global Research.
According to this Nouvel Observateur (1998) interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA’s intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 entry of Soviet troops.
To label this as The Soviet Afghan War is a misnomer. Confirmed by Brzezinski, It …
The post “Yes. The CIA entered Afghanistan Before the Russians”. Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared first on Global Research.
It seems Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. Nevertheless, we must try to make sense of what has already happened in order get a handle on what should happen and what needs to happen if humanity is to …
The post Jail Time for Questioning COVID Crimes in Alberta? appeared first on Global Research.
“Trump will not stand for having U.S. Navy ships attacked every day by the Houthis using Iranian missiles,” says former Trump official.
By World Israel News Staff
Incoming president Donald Trump will step up American military efforts against the Houthis to curb attacks on U.S. military assets, Israel, and international shipping, according to several analysts.
Since the outbreak of the October 7th war, the Houthis have paralyzed a vital shipping lane near Yemen and launched hundreds of explosive drones and ballistic missiles at Israel.
Under outgoing President Joe Biden, U.S. campaigns aiming to deter the Houthis have failed.
But once Trump takes office, experts say, the Houthis may be forced to stop their attacks.
“President Trump likely will add the Houthis back on the [State Department’s] Foreign Terrorists Organizations list, after President Joe Biden’s wrongheaded decision to remove them, as one of his first acts of president in 2021,” Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Jerusalem Post.
Re-classifying the Houthis as terrorists will allow for harsher sanctions on the group, helping cripple them economically.
It’s also likely that Trump will show a zero-tolerance policy for Houthi attacks on American military assets, which have occurred numerous times during Biden’s tenure.
“Trump will not stand for having U.S. Navy ships attacked every day by the Houthis using Iranian missiles,” Elliott Abrams, who served as the U.S. Special Representative for Iran from 2020 to 2021, told the Post.
“He will hit the Houthis harder, and he will threaten Iran that if a missile [that] Iran supplied kills an American, Iran will get hit directly.”
Trump will probably organize a coalition to stymie the terrorists’ activities, including regional powers like Saudi Arabia, who have a longstanding conflict with the Houthis.
Gulf countries, with the exception of Bahrain, have so far been reticent to join an anti-Houthi coalition because the “U.S. government refuses to give us protection and means to intercept missiles and UAVs if attacked by the Houthis,” Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Post.
“They have been attacking US warships for months on end, not to mention firing ballistic missiles at Israel,” Schanzer added.
“We should expect Trump to reverse the Biden policy, which has been to tolerate the group’s terror activities. I would expect a much tougher policy after January 20.”
The post Trump won’t tolerate Houthi attacks, will ‘threaten’ Iran – report appeared first on World Israel News.
Palestinian Authority ratchets up sanctions against Qatar-based network, shutting down broadcasts across all of Judea and Samaria after accusing Al Jazeera of backing rogue terror groups.
By World Israel News Staff
The Palestinian Authority has shutdown broadcasts of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network across the entirety of autonomous PA areas in Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian Authority announced Wednesday night.
According to a report by WAFA, a Palestinian Authority mouthpiece, the decision was made by a joint ministerial committee which brought together representatives of the Culture Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Telecommunications Ministry.
The move prohibits Al Jazeera television broadcasts across Judea and Samaria, and also bars Al Jazeera journalists and other staff from working on the network’s behalf in areas under the PA’s jurisdiction.
Ramallah accused the Qatari network of “repeated violations” of PA regulations with the broadcasting of “inciteful content” and “misinformation.”
The Palestinian Authority emphasized that the ban is temporary, and that it will remain in effect “until the network addresses its legal status in accordance with Palestinian regulations.”
Last month, the PA barred Al Jazeera from reporting in parts of Samaria, including Shechem (Nablus), Jenin, Tubas, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, and Salfit.
The PA’s ruling Fatah party has decried Al Jazeera‘s coverage of ongoing civil unrest across Judea and Samaria, as well as internecine violence in the northern Samaria city of Jenin, where officers from the paramilitary Palestinian National Security Forces have clashed with a rogue terror group for nearly a month.
On December 5th, PNSF forces entered Jenin to challenge the Jenin Brigades, an alliance of terrorist groups, including Hamas, which has effectively ruled the city since 2022.
Since then, the PNSF has attempted to reassert PA control over the city, leading to multiple clashes with the Jenin Brigades.
During the PNSF’s Jenin operation, the Palestinian Authority has accused Al Jazeera of promoting the Jenin Brigades’ cause with biased reporting.
The post Al Jazeera broadcasts banned in Judea & Samaria appeared first on World Israel News.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, said in a video he’d joined ISIS prior to killing at least 15 and injuring 30 in his ramming and shooting attack before being killed by police.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The man who killed at least 15 people and injured 30 when ramming a pickup truck through New Year’s eve revelers in New Orleans and shooting them early Wednesday morning had declared prior to the attack that he had joined the ISIS terror organization.
In a video Shamsud-Din Jabbar uploaded to Facebook, he pledged allegiance to the extremist Muslim terror organization.
When President Joe Biden mourned the dead c he said that the FBI had reported to him that “mere hours before the attack,” Jabbar had posted videos “indicating that he was inspired by ISIS, especially a desire to kill.”
His brother, Abdur, told the New York Times (NYT) that Shamsud had converted to Islam when young and had been “a sweetheart really, a nice guy, a friend, really smart, caring.” His heinous actions came from “some type of radicalization, not religion,” he added.
Jabbar also posted that he was planning to kill his family. He had been twice divorced and had two daughters, aged 15 and 20. He also allegedly discussed his debts and failing business.
The 42-year-old Texas native had rented an Airbnb about a mile away from Bourbon Street, the site he picked for his attack, as well as the Ford pickup truck he used in the rampage.
The black ISIS flag was flying from the back of his truck as he went around a flimsy police barricade cordoning off the street festivities and drove it through a crowd.
After the police shot and killed him, they found a blue cooler rigged with explosives and nails in the truck, and bomb-making materials in the Airbnb.
The FBI is also looking for other suspects as they do not think Jabbar “was solely responsible,” the agency said in a Wednesday afternoon press conference. Their agents are “conducting a number of court-authorized search warrants in New Orleans and other states.”
A man was seen surrendering to law enforcement officials outside Jabbar’s run-down Houston home that same afternoon, although it is as yet unclear if he was linked to the terror attack.
Jabbar had served in the U.S. armed forces as an IT specialist for almost eight years, according to his service record. During his active duty, he was posted to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010. After five years in the reserves, he left in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.
He had received several ribbons and service medals during his time in the army.
Two Israelis were injured in the attack, one of them seriously, according to the Israeli foreign ministry.
Both the ministry and the Consulate General in Houston are in contact with the hospitals and the families of the injured.
The post New Orleans terrorist linked to ISIS, two Israelis among the wounded appeared first on World Israel News.
First as tragedy, then as farce, and finally as that final season of a mediocre sit-com when every possible trick, even if obviously ridiculous, is used to attract some interest from the audience. This is one way to describe the complete implosion of Syriza, a party that was once thought to be the big hope of the European left.
Syriza has suffered another split and is now a much smaller party. Stefanos Kasselakis, the successor to Alexis Tsipras as president of Syriza, was not only ousted from his position by a newly formed majority at the Central Committee, but also barred from taking part in the leadership election. After mobilizing his supporters to impose his candidacy on the party, including by organizing a mass protest outside of the venue where the party Congress took place between November 8 and 10, Kasselakis left the party along with some members of parliament and has gone on to found his own party, called Movement of Democracy, which has five members of parliament.
As a result of MPs following Kasselakis or simply leaving Syriza, Pasok has now replaced Syriza as the main party of opposition in the Greek Parliament. At the same time, the party is plummeting in the polls. Syriza — which in the meantime elected a new leader, Sokratis Famellos — is currently polling at around 6-7 percent. To make things even more complex, it seemed that within the current “base” of Syriza, significantly reduced because of the party crisis, there was a current in favor of Kasselakis, a man with no background within the Left who was, despite his populist rhetoric, unsuccessful in increasing the popularity of Syriza.
This crisis marks the political end of the road for Syriza. They have lost almost all their political capital and become a much smaller party, tormented by internal strife. Already Pasok, the socialist party, is faring much better than Syriza at the polls, having secured second place, albeit at a significant distance from the ruling New Democracy party.
How has a party that almost a decade ago won an election come so close to political irrelevance? Looking at the trajectory of Syriza can explain how this outcome became possible. Syriza was catapulted to a central position on the Greek political scene not because it had a broad base within Greek society — it was a relatively small party — but because of the acute social and political crisis which arose in 2012. The “memoranda” imposed by the infamous “troika,” made up of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank — the three parties responsible for managing bailouts to Greece as well as Cyprus, Ireland, and Portugal — led to harsh austerity measures that caused an economic and social crisis within Greece.
It was at this moment, when political and electoral relations of representation were collapsing at an accelerated pace, that Syriza managed to fill the void by suggesting that the only alternative to the economic violence dictated by the troika was to form a “government of the Left.”
This moment came in 2015 when Syriza won the election. However, despite obtaining significant electoral support, Syriza remained a party with a large electoral following but little organizational presence. It never enjoyed the linkages to the working class, the lower middle class, the trade union movements, and local government that Pasok had. For most of its electorate, Syriza represented a vote, not an “organic” social and political coalition. Moreover, Syriza never really elaborated a strategy for confronting the EU. In particular, the persistent attachment to the “European road” meant that it never had any plan for an exit from the Eurozone. This had to do with the fact that, despite the party’s often radical rhetoric, its dominant political line was a reformist one with strong elements of “left Europeanism.”
Consequently, when the EU used the Eurozone to pressure the Greek government, Syriza, unwilling to entertain a break with Europe, could only capitulate, even after getting majority support to reject the memorandum in a 2015 referendum.
Syriza did, however, manage to win its second election in 2015, despite its capitulation and the fact that the left wing of the party exited and formed a new party named Popular Unity. However, the fact that Syriza treated the “no” vote of the referendum as a “yes” and negotiated a third memorandum only led to a deeper trauma within the social classes and groups that helped Syriza reach power. For many, Syriza’s actions undermined faith that the party — and Tsipras personally — was capable of standing firmly behind its political promises and commitments.
In power, Syriza implemented a fully neoliberal program of austerity and privatization. In certain aspects it proved to be more successful than its predecessors in making sure that the demands of the troika were duly satisfied. While Syriza did try to maintain the appearance of caring for the poorest sections of society, its program did nothing to alleviate poverty or strengthen the hand of the working class. This created a strong sense of disillusionment and disappointment among the Greek electorate. Syriza would lose the 2019 election and bring New Democracy back to power.
The period from 2019 to 2023 was marked by the inability of Syriza to mount a serious opposition to New Democracy, despite the many problems with the latter’s policies, including the fact that Greece had one of the worst mortality rates during the pandemic. Syriza’s strategy during that period was what could be described as a “ripe fruit” strategy, according to which the discontent with the government policy would lead, by itself, to Syriza’s return to power.
During this period, Syriza made no real assessment or self-critique of its period in government between 2015 and 2019, and did not stop to ask what political program and strategy could point to an alternative. The New Democracy government took advantage of state spending during the pandemic to solidify its social base and thus ended up with a very clear victory in the 2023 election and remained in power. Syriza, meanwhile, lost a significant proportion of its vote. In 2023, it won just 17.83 percent of the vote, down from 31.53 percent in 2019. The year since has been characterized by political and organizational crisis.
It was in the midst of this crisis that Tsipras, the party’s undisputed leader up to that point, decided to resign and call for new leadership elections, which is when Kasselakis entered the race. He came from the business world, had a background in shipping in the United States, and had no relation to the Left. In fact, at some point, he was a registered as a Republican.
Kasselakis had no real program and promoted himself entirely through social media. But he was also young, photogenic, and used populist rhetoric freely. By the time of the leadership election, Syriza’s base, which had lost any real sense of political orientation, was more willing to elect a complete unknown like Kasselakis.
After Kasselakis’s victory in the leadership election, an important segment of Syriza opted to leave, forming New Left, a party which, despite the impressive number of ex-ministers within its ranks, struggles to pass at opinion polls the 3 percent threshold for parliamentary representation (and failed to elect a European member of parliament in the 2024 European elections). Tsipras remained mostly silent on the internal situation. Instead of engaging in Syriza politics, the former leader went on to found his own political foundation and make public interventions on general political questions without being involved in party politics. This has led observers to speculate on whether he is contemplating a comeback.
In power, Kasselakis preferred simplistic populist rhetoric over substance. As a manager of the party, he promoted people friendly to him to positions of power within the party apparatus. He has also undermined the party’s media by not taking measures to secure their financing. This has led to almost continuous strike action from Syriza media employees, many of whom fear for their job security. At the European elections in May 2024, Syriza fared poorly and won just 14.92 percent of the vote, an outcome that led members to complain about Kasselakis’s leadership and his lack of strategy or political substance.
In response to Kasselakis’s shortcomings, a majority opposed to his leadership formed inside the Central Committee. It not only ousted Kasselakis as party president but also forbade him from participating in the leadership election. He reacted to this by threatening Syriza with legal action, causing a crisis that reached a high point at the party congress.
After the split with Kasselakis, Syriza proceeded with the process of electing a new leader. The race was mainly between Famellos, who was for some time the leader of the parliamentary group under Kasselakis (before being replace by Nikos Pappas) and Pavlos Polakis, an MP popular with segments of the party base for his hard-nosed rhetoric. In the end, Famellos was elected, gaining almost 50 percent, with Polakis conceding in the name of unity. Currently, Syriza attempts to present an image of unity but it is a much smaller party.
The sources of this crisis lie, I think, in the events of the summer of 2015, which culminated in the referendum on the troika’s memoranda and the subsequent acceptance of the terms of the troika. In the aftermath of these events, an irreparable rupture emerged between Syriza and important segments of Greek society, a rupture that was never dealt with because of the absence of any serious self-critique and explanation, as well as any strategic vision other than a repetition of some variety of contemporary “center-left” politics. Syriza never actually elaborated a radical strategy or position and never went beyond the limits of a post-Eurocommunist reformism — an outlook that left it incapable of conceiving of a serious alternative to New Democracy.
The party’s refusal to entertain any break with Europe meant that, even while Greece was suffering at the hands of the Eurozone, Tsipras was incapable of advancing a critique of the cause of the crisis. The experience of governance and the decision to turn more toward a social democratic, “center-left” positioning only made things worse, while the inability to have real grounding in movements and local government meant that Syriza’s relationship with the working class and other subaltern social strata never developed. In fact, it became even more fragile, culminating in these social groups eventually abandoning Syriza. Syriza’s decline has also shifted the political balance of forces to the right. Three far-right parties passed the 3 percent threshold during last year’s European elections and sent their representatives to the European Parliament.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this experience. Simply saying that the entire sequence of events was from the beginning determined to end in defeat is to massively underestimate the political potential unleashed in the first half of the 2010s in Greece. The Eurozone crisis, and the mass opposition to the troika, genuinely did point toward a path for the Left to win power and use it in the interests of the popular classes. But absent a strategy to either confront or break with the Eurozone, supported by movement mobilization, there was no left path for Greece that would not have culminated in spectacular failures and political tragedies.
Thirteen years ago at this time, New York City was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I taught at Bard College. There was plenty of snow up there, but around Bard, people know how to deal with big snowstorms. The streets were clear, the stores open, and it was a quiet New Year’s weekend grading term papers and otherwise tending to business.
A fresh fall of snow is a wonderful thing. For the first few hours, the snow is pure and fresh; then the people (and the dogs) come out.
Gradually, the snow is trodden down, plowed into icy heaps, and begins to turn various unsightly colors as the soot from passing cars and various other substances defile it. After a few days, it is an ugly, unsightly mess, and one longs to see it cleared away.
New years can be like that, too. They start out clean and pure, and we make resolutions to keep them that way. Then, over time, the old habits creep back, and before long we will be needing a fresh start once again. That’s not a bad metaphor for human history. Think of South Sudan, newly independent after decades of war with northern Sudan. It was going to be a new beginning, a bright new world. But it wasn’t long before new wars broke out as bitterness, jealousy, and tribal rivalries poisoned the life of the new polity.
Think of the Arab Spring. Or think of the Internet—so bright and shiny with the promise of a more peaceful and democratic world not long ago, and now increasingly a venue for espionage, hacking, the worst kinds of sexual exploitation, and cyberwar. Human nature doesn’t change when it goes online, and all the problems of the “real” world are popping up in cyberspace.
God has a problem. It’s us. We keep messing things up.
Over the past few days, we’ve been delving into the meaning of Christmas; it’s led us into a discussion of the Christian concept of God. There are many qualities that can be used to describe the Deity; Muslims often speak of the “99 names of God,” and it’s an instructive and beautiful list on which any monotheist can profitably meditate.
But at the end of the day, for Christians, the heart of the matter is this: God is love. Love doesn’t just describe God’s relationship to the creation; it describes God’s essence—His inner life and being. This, as we have seen, is the origin of the Christian idea of the Trinity: love is so intrinsic to the divine nature that we cannot conceive of His unity as solitude.
From a Christian perspective, God’s act of creation is an expression of love. God made the world because He wants an abundance of beings and sensibilities to love, to be with, to share life with, and to make happy.
That is where we come in. We have no way of knowing whether there is life on other planets, much less what, if anything, it thinks and whether it has religious aspirations. But among those life forms we know anything about, people have a particular place in God’s plan.
The Bible tells us that God loves animals and even plants. He knows when any sparrow falls, and it is His care that provides the beasts of the field with their nourishment. As the Psalmist says, “The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of all things living” (Psalm 145:15-16). God clothes the lilies of the field, Jesus says, more gloriously than King Solomon in all his robes (Matthew 6:28-29).
But people have a special place in the Creator’s heart. Made in God’s image and given both personality and intelligence, we were created because God wanted beings with whom He could share the kind of love that animals and plants can’t give. Strange as it may seem, the Maker and Ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company and has made Himself vulnerable to us; we can please God and we can hurt Him by the ways we treat Him, treat ourselves, and treat one another.
All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem.
On the one hand, God finds us irresistibly lovable, beautiful, and, where God’s love is concerned, needy. How could we not be? Beings made by love out of love are inescapably drawn to the perfect love from which they come. No matter how grizzled and grumpy we become with the passing years, or how pimpled and snarky we turn in our adolescence, God looks at us with the kind of tender solicitude and hopeful anxiety with which we look at small children.
Yet at the same time, like many angelic-looking children, we can be a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, sexual tyranny and exploitation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester.
Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods, and among friends. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings—and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs.
Christians talk about this situation under the heading of “original sin,” saying that our species has been a dysfunctional family since the dawn of time, and that each of us repeats and adds to that cycle of abuse and betrayal in our own way, even as we suffer from the damage done by those who came before. Other religions object to the kind of metaphysical structure that Christians give to the concept, but virtually everyone intuitively gets this picture of a human race somehow at war with itself and fundamentally out of whack.
This flawed race, trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong, is what and who God is bound and determined to love; the question is, How can He do it?
From the Christian point of view, this is not a trivial problem. People aren’t just messy and incomplete. We are actively evil. We aren’t just victims of an unjust society and a tragic history; we make choices that perpetuate and even deepen injustice and add new dimensions to unfolding tragedies of our time.
God is so loving that He can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied. Yet at the same time, God is too just, too all-seeing to overlook what’s going on.
Think of a God’s-eye perspective on someone who beats and abuses a child. God sees the helpless victim and burns with anger; yet He also knows that the perpetrator was once an innocent victim. He felt all the fear and pain of the young child who has grown up to become an abuser, feels all the pain of the adult who has grown up twisted. Knowing the future, as God does, He perhaps can see a time ahead when today’s victim is tomorrow’s bully. He can see the fanatical Nazi as a child growing up in a culture wrenched out of shape by defeat, civil strife, and a ruinous inflation. He can see the Russianmafioso as the product of a society that suffered genocidal violence at the hands of both Soviet and Nazi oppressors. He sees the genocidaires of Rwanda and Darfur as victims in their own way of societies gone deeply wrong. Yet He also hears the cries of their victims.
It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners—those American whites, for example, who could have done something about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye—have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore.
God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up on the moral standard of true justice, and to leave people trapped in a cycle of evil and pain. Christians believe that God refused to choose between His love and His justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren’t, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.
Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to do for the human race what we could never have done for ourselves. The baby in the manger wasn’t just there to look cute and beam rays of benevolence to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve.
God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.
Jesus came to deal with the flaws, the weakness, and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God. He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way—we haven’t and don’t.
He came to show and live out God’s radical commitment to His creation. People aren’t just a hobby for God; the universe isn’t a diversion for Him. Infinite Love made us to share an infinite intimacy and will go to infinite lengths to restore that bond no matter how deeply or how horribly we have failed. That love is not blind; it knows what messes we make of our lives and how we wound and damage others. But even so, God is determined to be with us.
That is why there was a baby in the manger. That is why we celebrate this time of year. God knows exactly who we are, loves us anyway, and will do whatever it takes to make this relationship work.
Israeli intelligence pegged Hamas’ pre-war strength at roughly 25,000. Despite massive losses since October 7th, the terror group has nearly returned to its prior size.
By World Israel News Staff
The Hamas terror organization has replaced a significant portion of its forces lost in combat with Israel since October 7th, according to reports by Israeli media outlets Wednesday.
According to estimates by the Israeli military, the Gaza-based group had roughly 25,000 men under arms in the coastal enclave prior to the October 7th, 2023 invasion of southwestern Israel.
Since then, the IDF estimates that between 17,000 to 20,000 Gaza terrorists have been killed, the vast majority of them from Hamas.
In addition, thousands more have been taken out of action because of wounds suffered during the war, while thousands of others have been captured by Israel.
More than 4,300 Gazans are being held by Israel, many of them Hamas operatives.
Despite Hamas’ significant losses, however, the terror group has effectively replenished its ranks, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 12.
Together with the much smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, the two terror groups now have between 20,000 to 23,000 men under arms in the Gaza Strip, the report said.
A report published by The Jerusalem Post Wednesday night disputed Channel 12‘s figures, while confirming that Hamas has recruited thousands of new members.
According to the Post, Hamas’ military wing currently commands roughly 12,000 combatants.
The source cited by the Post also suggested that initial Israeli military estimates putting Hamas’ pre-war strength at 25,000 significantly underestimated the terror group’s size, suggesting that the figure was likely closer to 40,000.
However, the source emphasized that regardless of the number terrorists commanded by Hamas before the war or at present, there has been a notable decline in the quality of its forces, with large numbers of untrained teenagers filling Hamas’ ranks.
The post Report: Hamas has replaced nearly all its war losses with recruiting spree appeared first on World Israel News.
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