Israel at war: What happened on days 28-29?

Israeli forces will reach Hamas terror leader Yahya Sinwar and will kill him, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed on Saturday evening briefing on developments in Operation Swords of Iron.

Further, Gallant said that "by the end of the war, there will be no Hamas in Gaza. There will be no threat to Israeli civilians from the Strip."

Israel intensified its ground operation in Gaza over the weekend, successfully targeting and dismantling vital Hamas elements, including their critical infrastructure and personnel.

British foreign minister James Cleverly has urged Iran to use its influence with groups in the Middle East region to prevent an escalation of Israel's conflict with Hamas.

Britain's Foreign Office said Cleverly spoke to Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Friday, telling him "Iran bore responsibility" for the actions of groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, that it has supported for many years.

Cleverly also reiterated that Iranian-backed threats against people in the United Kingdom were unacceptable and must stop, a Foreign Office spokesperson said.

Britain has supported Israel's right to defend itself after an Oct. 7 attack by terrorist group Hamas that Israel said had killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and saw over 200 others kidnapped.

Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson, Lior Haiat, castigated the Honduran government for its decision to recall its ambassador in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Saturday.

"The Honduran government's decision to recall their ambassador for consultation ignores Israel's right to defend itself against the terrorist organization Hamas, which is worse than ISIS," Haiat wrote. "Hamas terrorists have killed more than 1,400 people and kidnapped 240 [others] including children, infants, women, and the elderly, and are using them as human shields. Israel is fighting against the Hamas terrorists until their complete elimination in the Gaza Strip. We expect the government of Honduras to condemn Hamas, support Israel's right to self-defense, and refrain from making decisions that lend support to Hamas terrorism."

החלטת ממשלת הונדורס לקרוא לשגרירם להתייעצות מתעלמת מזכותה של ישראל להגן על עצמה מול ארגון הטרור חמאס שהוא גרוע מדעאש.
מחבלי החמאס רצחו למעלה מ-1400 איש וחטפו 240 בהם ילדים, תינוקות, נשים וזקנים ומחזיקים בהם כבני ערובה.
ישראל נלחמת במחבלי החמאס עד לחיסול החמאס ברצועת עזה.
אנו… pic.twitter.com/Dja6MGhR7T

— Lior Haiat 🇮🇱 (@LiorHaiat) November 4, 2023

The IDF struck Hezbollah terror cells along with a Hezbollah observation post in Lebanon, the IDF said on Saturday.

The Israeli military said the strikes were in response to Hezbollah's recent attempt to fire from Lebanon into Israel.

An accompanying video appears to show the IDF strike.

An Israeli drone fired a missile at the Gaza house of Hamas' leader Ismail Haniyeh who is currently outside the enclave, Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa Radio reported on Saturday.

It was unclear whether any of his family members were at the house when it was struck.

Haniyeh, Hamas' political chief, has been outside the Gaza Strip since 2019, residing between Turkey and Qatar.

The IDF said that what they originally believed to be a suspicious target that approached the border of the State of Israel on Saturday morning was determined to be a false alarm. 

The IDF ground forces have been operating in Gaza for a week, eliminating Hamas terrorists and destroying the organization's strategic infrastructure.

During the past few days, soldiers from the Armored Corps and Intelligence, under the command of Division 460 in the northern Gaza Strip, operated in an area where numerous attempts were made to attack IDF forces through tunnel systems and Hamas military facilities, the IDF reported Saturday morning.

The IDF forces eliminated terrorists who were active in the area, exposed tunnel entrances used for terrorist purposes, and identified the organization's means of warfare.

IDF takes on 15 terrorists at once

In one of the recent battles on Friday, soldiers from the Armored Corps and Intelligence engaged with 15 terrorists in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. The soldiers eliminated several terrorists and targeted tanks destroyed three Hamas observation posts.

IDF soldiers operated in an area where numerous attempts were made to attack them through tunnel systems and military facilities. The forces eliminated the Hamas terrorists.

Read full story by @MaayanJaffe: https://t.co/uhZdzikzNU pic.twitter.com/P0XJ3xANVt

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) November 4, 2023

Forces fire missiles as terrorists exit tunnel

Additionally, during a focused operation in the southern Gaza Strip, Engineering and Reconnaissance forces under the command of the Gaza Division, carried out building mapping and neutralized explosive devices. 

Israeli Air Force's attacks in the Gaza Strip | Read more by @MaayanJaffe: https://t.co/uhZdzikzNU pic.twitter.com/tsYnNsUc1v

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) November 4, 2023

During the operation, the forces encountered a group of terrorists who emerged from a tunnel entrance. In response, the soldiers fired missiles towards the terrorists, eliminating them.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to visit Israel next week, amidst the ongoing war over the past few weeks, according to an initial N12 report on Friday. 

Various sources already in the first week of the war reported that the Ukrainian President expressed interest in visiting Israel, but was rejected on the matter.

According to the report, there are advanced talks regarding the visit. Once agreed upon, the visit of the Ukrainian president is expected to take place on Monday or Tuesday.

Zelensky's reaction to October 7 massacre

In a speech delivered by Zelensky before the UN assembly, two days after the murderous massacre carried out by Hamas in the south of the country, he said that "Hamas and Russia are the same evil, and the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine."

He has also made clear that "Israel's right to self-defense is unquestionable. All details surrounding this terrorist assault must be revealed so that the world knows and holds accountable everyone who supported and helped carry out the attack."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during a press conference with Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (not pictured) in front of the presidential palace in Kyiv, Ukraine, September 6, 2023. (credit: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard via REUTERS)

Relations between Israel and Ukraine have seen a few ups and downs since the Russian invasion at the end of February 2022. Zelensky has explicitly criticized Israel in the past for not providing sufficient military aid to the Ukrainians. 

Only a few weeks before the Hamas massacre, Zelensky met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a basement conference room at the United Nations, where the Ukrainian leader said that Ukraine "expects more" from Israel.

Ukraine has wanted to purchase Israeli defensive anti-missile systems.

Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.

The Portuguese president harshly criticized the Palestinian ambassador after he attacked Israel on Friday.

Portugal 🇵🇹 president roasts the Palestinian ambassador who complains about Israel's attacks:

“The Palestinian side started it. You can't blame Israel, you shouldn't have started it.”
pic.twitter.com/o3F4X7B6yk

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 3, 2023

"Radicalism creates an ambiance of radicalism, and this time the radicalism started from some Palestinians," President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told to the Palestinian ambassador. "That's not an excuse for [the] reaction, it was brutal," responded the ambassador.

"I know, I know you blame the Israelis, but this time someone from your side started it," said Rebelo de Sousa "The Palestinian side started it. You can't blame Israel, you shouldn't have started it."

Police officers guard 'The Cenotaph' on the day of a protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in London, Britain, October 28, 2023. (credit: REUTERS/Susannah Ireland)

Pro-Hamas demonstrations

"Meanwhile, thousands of protesters are expected to demonstrate in favor of Hamas on British Remembrance Day, and locals fear that this will disrupt the day that honors the war dead," Rebelo de Sousa said.

He also added: "I asked the Minister of the Interior to support the police in doing everything necessary to protect the sanctity of Memorial Day. The right to remember, in peace and honor, those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for those freedoms must be protected."

Amongst demonstrations by Pro-Palestine supporters in Britain, in the country, he expressed concern that the demonstrations would take place on British Remembrance Day, November 11.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the intention to demonstrate on this particular day a "provocative and disrespectful" act.

(JTA) — Up in Broome County, New York, beneath a simple marker in a family plot in Hale Eddy Cemetery, I believe the Rev. Dr. Franklin Hamlin Littell is turning in his grave.

Littell, the son of a Methodist minister who also became one, was a towering figure in the study of the Holocaust and genocide. In postwar West Germany, he spent almost a decade as chief Protestant religious adviser to the High Commission on Germany, assigned to denazification. In 1958 at Emory University in Atlanta, he initiated the first US graduate seminar on the Holocaust. Eighteen years later in Philadelphia, as chair of Temple University’s religion department, he started the world’s first doctoral program in Holocaust studies. And in 1998 at Stockton University in Pomona, New Jersey, he and his wife, Marcia Sachs Littell, established the first interdisciplinary master’s program in Holocaust and genocide studies.

My late mother, Halina Wind Preston, a Jewish educator who survived 14 months hiding from the Nazis in the sewers of Lviv, was a frequent attendee at an annual Holocaust scholars’ conference cofounded by Littell. I knew Littell, who died in 2009, and at his invitation in 2000 I traveled from Atlanta, where I was a senior editor at CNN.com, to speak on “Professional Ethics After Auschwitz” at the 30th conference in Philadelphia.

So I can imagine Littell’s revulsion if he knew that the word “genocide” was being misused against Israel by scholars and activists — including an Israeli historian who now directs the Stockton program he started.

As Israel retaliates in the wake of the bloody rampage of October 7 — in which Hamas killed 1,500 Israelis, including 260 people at a music festival and hundreds of civilians in nearby communities, and took more than 200 hostages — Raz Segal, the Israeli historian who directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Stockton University, has been attracting worldwide attention by blaming the victims.

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Stirp, as seen from Ashkelon on October 17 (credit: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS)

On October 18, at a vigil on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Segal called President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel “support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.” On October 13, Jewish Currents published “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” in which Segal wrote that “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed” and that “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza.”

Segal is far from a lone voice accusing Israel of genocide. At Penn, a student group that organized a rally October 16 said it “unequivocally stands with Palestine in the face of ongoing genocide committed by the Israeli government, which has been assisted by other Western allies like the United States.” On October 24 in Washington, D.C., students at George Washington University projected the message “Divestment from Zionist Genocide Now” onto a library facade.

And on Tuesday, Craig Mokhiber, director in the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, resigned, citing Israel for a “textbook case of genocide.”

Littell understood that “genocide” was coined in 1944 by a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to denote “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” Lemkin wrote that genocide is intended “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. ”

Historian Michael Berenbaum, distinguished professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, said that Israel has no greater ambition than to coexist with the Palestinians as peaceful neighbors and that Littell would be appalled at the suggestion that Israel was committing genocide in its attempts to root out the fighters and sever the leadership of a group that killed and kidnapped Israelis.

“I knew and worked with and deeply respected Franklin Littell for the last 40 years of his life,” Berenbaum, who was a visiting distinguished professor at Stockton under Littell, told me. “These statements would be anathema to his values.”

Richard Libowitz, coauthor with Marcia Sachs Littell and Dennis B. Klein of “The Genocidal Mind,” agreed that the Israeli incursion does not constitute genocide.

Israel “has never advocated nor sought the total annihilation of an Arab population, whether in Israel proper, the West Bank or Gaza,” said Libowitz, who received a Ph.D. in religion under Franklin Littell at Temple and is retired from the faculties of Temple and St. Joseph’s University.

Palestinian population has risen

Indeed, since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Palestinian population in what now includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza has risen from 1.4 million to 6.6 million, including 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Libowitz acknowledged the ferocity of the Israeli military strikes on Gaza in the wake of the October 7 attacks, as the Palestinian death toll as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry rose above 9,000.

“Civilian casualties in Gaza — especially the death of children — are tragic,” said Libowitz. “Hamas carried out the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust and the outrage should be understood. Israel intends to destroy Hamas, but Magen David Adom [the Israeli Red Cross] personnel treated wounded terrorists after their attack. Gazans were warned to flee the northern part of the strip. This is human tragedy, but it is not genocide.”

He added: “The stated aim of Hamas — to wipe Israel from the Earth — is certainly a genocidal intent.”

Polly Zavadivker, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, told me that Segal’s statements on genocide “threaten future attempts to identify, prevent, and prosecute that crime. It is equally damaging to the legitimacy of Holocaust and Genocide Studies as a field when such false claims are presented in the guise of scholarly expertise.”

Zavadivker, who teaches courses in antisemitism, the Holocaust, and comparative genocide, said that an accusation that Israel is committing genocide “renders the word meaningless.”

In 1973, after working on it for four years, Franklin Littell and 17 other Christian theologians released a 14-point statement on Israel. The statement, which appeared as an appendix in Littell’s book, seems strikingly relevant 50 years later.

“The charge is sometimes made that Israel is belligerently expansionistic as a result of its military triumphs in the Six-Day War,” it said in part. “Visitors to Israel, however, can easily discover that the overriding concern of the majority of Israelis is peace, not more territory. Israel’s anxiety about national defense reflects the age-old human yearning for security, the anxiety of a people whose history has been a saga of frightful persecution, climaxed by the Holocaust of six million men, women, and children.

“Against such a tormented background, is it surprising that the Jewish people should want to defend themselves?” they continued. “Criticism that would use the failure of Israel to live up to the highest moral standards as an excuse to deny its right to exist … would be a double standard, one not applied to any other nation on earth.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.