May 5: Israel to Take Gaza
Houthis launch missiles at Ben Gurion; Arab arson suspect released on house arrest; Iranian nationals arrested by British counterterrorism
The Big Story
Israel approved plans today to occupy the Gaza Strip in its entirety in order to eradicate Hamas, two Israeli officials told the Associated Press.
The plan, approved early in the morning by cabinet ministers, calls for the IDF to stay in Gaza for an unspecified period of time, during which it would directly administer the territory, including taking charge of delivering and distributing food and other critical supplies to the civilian population. News of the plan, which is reportedly set to commence after U.S. President Donald J. Trump completes his forthcoming trip to the region, unleashed torrents of criticism from opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government—making clear what one Tablet contributor calls the “competing war aims” inside the government.
Some speculate that Israel’s announcement of expanded war aims may be intended to pressure Hamas into making concessions in cease-fire negotiations. But Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, representing the National Religious Party-Religious Zionism—which has long supported the taking of Gaza on political grounds—said Monday that Israel should not exit Gaza even if there is another hostage deal, according to The Times of Israel. “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip,” said Smotrich to Channel 12 journalist Amit Segal. “We are cleansing the strip, bringing back the hostages—and defeating Hamas.” Smotrich believes that the only way to bring back the hostages is to “subdue Hamas” entirely.
The Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the political body established by some of the families of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, accused the government Monday of “choosing territory over hostages.” At the Knesset on Monday, Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, voiced anger about the cabinet’s decision, going as far as to call for reservists to not show up to duty: “The cabinet decided to send heroic soldiers to an operation that will result in the murder of hostages in captivity, and the loss of soldiers,” she said.
The statement led to a rebuke from Knesset member and National Religious Party member Simcha Rothman, who instructed Zangauker to avoid calling for military refusal, enraging the mother of the hostage. “Don’t put words in my mouth!” responded Zangauker. “I said not to show up to reserves for moral and ethical reasons!” But refusal due to moral and ethical reasons is still refusal.
One could easily accuse Netanyahu’s opposition of again using the understandable frustration and pain of the hostages’ parents as shields in their long-game effort to topple the prime minister. Some of the statements made by members of Netanyahu’s opposition would seem to support this notion. Knesset member and chairman of The Democrats Party—the only Zionist party in that opposes the occupation of the West Bank—Yair Golan said on X Sunday night that the plan to occupy Gaza was not a measure to “protect the security of Israel” but a measure meant to “save Netanyahu and his government of extremists.”
Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party that formed in the late 1990s due to Lieberman’s disappointment in Netanyahu for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, accused Netanyahu of acting like the allies in World War II who knew about the Nazi death camps but made rescuing Jews a lower priority than military victory.
What these criticisms fail to acknowledge is that seizing Gaza and saving the hostages from captivity are not irreconcilable goals. On the contrary, the more leverage Israel has over Hamas, the more negotiating power it will have in getting the remaining hostages home. In an interview with national broadcaster Kan today, Culture Minister Miki Zohar of Netanyahu’s Likud Party acknowledged that the move to seize Gaza could potentially endanger hostages but insisted that a renewed offensive could force Hamas to the table in a serious way: “Hamas may soon realize that it has no choice but to return the hostages and exile itself from Gaza,” he said.
Zohar’s remarks underline another reality that some hostage families and opposition leaders prefer not to confront: namely, that Hamas has consistently refused to return the remaining hostages for anything short of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which would leave the terror organization in full control and able to launch future attacks—a situation that no sane Israeli leader can agree to. In other words, the suggestion that Netanyahu is not taking a deal with Hamas for political reasons assumes that there is indeed a deal on the table when, in fact, there is not.
One analyst argued to The Scroll that taking control of Gaza could push Bibi out of a reactive posture and help Israel consolidate its gains as a regional power. “To win wars in the Middle East, you have to take land,” he said. “You can’t leave Hamas in power for obvious reasons, and the only way to destroy them is with conventional forces inside of Gaza.”
Also, it may well be that Israel has done all it can to mitigate the suffering of the hostage families and their captive loved ones while continuing its war against a cruel foe who seems willing to see all of Gaza pulverized into dust before ceasing its attacks and releasing the remaining hostages. To date, Israel’s strategy of pressuring Hamas into returning captives by continuing to fight has saved the lives of a majority of the hostages—at the price of delaying a final battle while ceaselessly generating battlefield footage and images that have severely degraded the country’s image abroad. Now, the country’s ability to achieve the dual goals of necessary self-defense and rescuing captives may have reached its limit.
—Adam Lehrer
The Rest
→The Houthis launched two missiles that landed near the main terminal at the Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv Sunday, according to The New York Times. While no fatalities were reported, four people were mildly injured by the attack while two others were hurt attempting to flee the blast site, according to personnel from the Magen David Adom emergency service. The Israeli military said it made several efforts to intercept the strike, and that the occurrence was under review. President Trump wrote a post on social media claiming that Iran, which last week was in talks with the U.S. government about a new nuclear agreement that temporarily stalled, would be held accountable for the Houthi aggression. Prime Minister Netanyahu reposted Trump’s statement and added his own: “Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters.”
Iran denied supporting the Houthis’ strike in a Monday statement, saying that the rebel group took action independently in support of Gaza, which seems unlikely given that the group has been backed by Iran since the 1990s, according to International Affairs.
→The Jerusalem police released Riyad Abu Tir—a 63-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s Umm Tuba neighborhood who was detained last Wednesday on suspicion that he started the massive wildfires that spread throughout East Jerusalem last week—to house arrest over the weekend, according to The Times of Israel. When they detained him, police said they found a lighter and combustible materials on his person. Abu Tir’s lawyer argued that his client had gone to the area to smoke, adding that he also had a pipe and tobacco on him at the time of his arrest. Authorities wanted to detain him for five more days but were rejected by Jerusalem’s Magistrate Court. So far, Jerusalem’s fire officials have declined to attribute the fires to arson, claiming it was more likely the region’s unfavorable topography and conditions that caused the fires to spread.
→British counterterrorism authorities arrested eight men Saturday, seven of them Iranian nationals, in connection with two separate investigations, according to The New York Times. In one of those cases, four Iranians and a man whose nationality hasn’t been identified were detained for preparing a terrorist attack against an unnamed site, which The Telegraph reported “may have been a synagogue or another target linked to the Jewish community.” The other three Iranians were arrested as part of a separate counter-terror investigation, say the authorities. They added that the men were detained under the National Security Act 2023, which was introduced to tighten protections against hostile acts against Britain.
→Beijing has stopped publishing some of the data needed to gauge the strength of China’s economy, according to a Wall Street Journal article published over the weekend. The article states that data on Chinese land sale measures, foreign investment data, and unemployment indicators have all vanished in “recent years”; “even official soy sauce production reports are gone,” wrote the reporters. Chinese authorities haven’t explained why the data can’t be found anymore, but the reporters point out that China’s economy has faltered recently due to huge debt and crumbling real-estate value. Because of this and its trade war with the United States, Chinese officials have made concerted efforts to control the economic narrative. After a Chinese economist at state-owned SDIC Securities, Gao Shanwen, said at a conference in Washington that China’s economic growth “might be around 2%” and that “the past few years, we do not know the true number of China’s real growth figure,” Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered that Gao be “disciplined.” The vanishing data can be attributed, suggests the article, to China seeking to control the world’s view of its internal economy.
The graph below, from the National Bureau of Statistics, for example, demonstrates the plummeting value of Chinese national land sales.
To read the full article, click the link below:
→Virologist Steven J. Hatfill, who served in President Trump’s first administration and was known during the pandemic for his promotion of Ivermectin as an effective treatment of COVID-19, joined the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week, according to The Washington Post. As of today, Hatfill begins his second week as a special adviser in the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, an agency responsible for preparing for pandemics and other biological and chemical attacks. Hatfill was investigated by the Justice Department in the early 2000s as a “person of interest” in the 2001 anthrax letters attack but was formally exonerated in 2008 and offered a settlement of $4.6 million by the Justice Department. Hatfill has said that in his new role for the administration, he plans to research and discover new treatments and medications for COVID-19.
→“In times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm,” said President Trump on Truth Social last night. “That is why, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” Trump’s new directive to reopen the long-shuttered Alcatraz is part of his efforts to overhaul how and where federal prisoners and illegal immigrants are detained, according to the Associated Press. The prison was closed in 1963 due to its crumbling infrastructure and has been a tourist destination ever since. Its mythology as a prison has been accentuated by several films, such as Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz (1979)—based on the real historical attempt of three convicts to escape the San Francisco island prison in 1962—and Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996). The Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement today that it will comply with all presidential orders. California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said Trump’s directive is “not a serious one.”
→In a Sunday Truth Social post, President Trump announced a 100% tariff to be imposed on all films made outside the United States. Trump said he had authorized Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, to begin the process of taxing “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Hollywood executives declined to comment on the announcement, according to The New York Times. If you’re someone who agrees with filmmaker John Waters that “feel-bad French films with full-frontal nudity” objectively make up the best film subgenre, this may be the first tariff announcement that genuinely concerns you.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The left has manipulated the families of the hostages and refuses to understand that only the eradication of Hamas will result in the rescuing of the hostages You don’t win a war against a vicious snd subhuman enemy by engaging in hostage exchanges
The whole idea behind the Disengagement in 2005 was that if the Gazans were left with a state they would be forced to act as responsible state actors. Obviously, this is not what happened. So it makes sense to go back to status quo ante. With Gush Kativ and everything! Including settling the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors.