‘I Was Saved by a Miracle.’ A Survivor Recounts the Horror of the Hamas Attack on Israel’s Supernova Festival

Arbel Ashkenazy attended the Supernova festival on Friday night, a desert rave that coincided with the start of the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which celebrates the fall harvest and commemorates the Old Testament story of the Jewish people wandering in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt. The festival featured Brazilian psy trance music and focused on free love, spirit, and environmental preservation.

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But in the early hours of Saturday morning, Hamas militants paraglided into the outdoor festival and began shooting indiscriminately at partygoers. At the same time, Hamas also launched thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel and sent fighters to other border towns in the south of the country. Hamas says that they have taken over 100 Israeli hostages so far. Over 700 hundred Israelis were killed, with the death toll soaring over 1,200 on both sides on Monday.

The Supernova festival had one of the highest concentrations of casualties. More than 260 bodies have been found from the festival so far.

Below is Arbel’s account of the events that unfolded at the festival.

Read More: Pres. Isaac Herzog: Israel Needs Support

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We arrived at the party Friday night, and at around 6 in the morning on Saturday they stopped the music and sirens started to sound. We heard the sound of rockets over our heads in huge numbers. During this time we weren’t that stressed, we just stayed put at the party and lied down on the floor. Slowly, slowly we started to see many people leave and head to their cars despite the fact that we were supposed to stay.

During this time, I started looking for my friend Eden. Even though we didn’t arrive at the party together, she is my best friend so I immediately started to look for her. Me and my friend found her and we left and started heading for the direction of the cars at around 7 a.m. At this point, we were getting more stressed but we still didn’t totally understand exactly what was happening. There also wasn’t any reporting on it in the news or internet yet. 

We started to leave the party and get into vehicles, but because everyone was leaving at the same time—there were 3,000 people at the party—there was a crazy amount of traffic in the street. We ended up making a left turn and we immediately saw all these cars with shattered windows from the gunshots. We heard a lot of people screaming that they needed an ambulance. We didn’t know what to do so we stayed in our vehicles.

By that time, I had lost contact with my friend Eden, because she was in a different car and hid there when the gunshots started. Then, we heard somebody screaming, “get out of the cars,” so we left the cars, and just started running. There was an area with an empty field since it was a nature party. It was very bare with no trees or anything and we started to run toward it. At that same time, we also started to hear gunshots from every direction and voices shouting Allahu Akbar. While we were running in that open field, we could see in the distance some of the Hamas people. They were wearing all black with black masks and had these huge guns.

For some time, we hid in these bushes before we started to run further east. But as we started running east, we saw other people from the party running toward us and they told us, run to the other side because there are terrorists on this side. They had just circled all around us from every direction. We kept running when suddenly I saw a person—an angel—that had a big white van. He picked up a bunch of people into the van and me and my friend climbed onto the van.

It was a miracle that even though he was driving in this open field, and there were gunshots all over the place, we were able to get to a police station in the city of Netivot at around 10:30 a.m. We stayed there until the evening until things calmed down, if you can even say “calmed down,” because it didn’t really calm down. In our area, they captured some of the perpetrators. 

I heard that my friend Eden, who had hidden in the car during the gunshots, was on the phone the entire time with her mother for four hours straight. At some point she made it to the bushes as well, but then suddenly, four hours into the phone call, they heard her say on the phone, “they caught me.” You can hear for a moment in the recording the voices of the Hamas people and then the phone disconnects. We have been looking for her but have not heard from her since. 

The hardest part is to see all the bodies of young kids our age with blood laid out on the floor. We were in an environment of pure chaos. I was saved by a miracle and was left in peace, but many of my friends including my best friend Eden are still there and I just want everyone to return safely and in peace. I just want this horrible story to end because it doesn’t feel real. It’s not normal, in any country, any place, nobody should have to go through something like this. It didn’t make any sense. We ran like crazy people in the middle of an open field while they were shooting at us, there was no place to run, no place to hide. I’m grateful to be alive but I just want Eden back.

source https://time.com/6321984/escaping-hamas-supernova-festival-diary/

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Run for President as an Independent, Drop Democratic Primary Bid

(PHILADELPHIA) — Longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday he will run for president as an independent and drop his Democratic primary bid, adding a wrinkle to a 2024 race heading toward a likely rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Kennedy, a member of one of the most famous Democratic families in politics, was running a long-shot primary bid and has better favorability ratings among Republicans than Democrats. It’s unclear whether GOP support would translate to a general election when Kennedy would also be running against Trump. Allies of both Biden and Trump have at times questioned whether Kennedy would be a spoiler against their candidate.

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Read More: Column: The Conspirituality of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Biden’s allies so far have dismissed Kennedy’s primary campaign as unserious. Asked for comment on his potential independent run, a Democratic National Committee spokesman responded with an eye roll emoji.

Awaiting Kennedy’s remarks Monday, hundreds of supporters gathered at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, an apt location for the launch. Campaign signs teased a potential new slogan: “Declare your independence.”

Among Kennedy’s fans in the crowd were several voters who said they don’t identify as Democratic or Republican and view Kennedy as a truth teller and a breath of fresh air.

“He tells it how it is,” said Julia Hill, a 23-year-old student from New Jersey. “He doesn’t sound like a politician.”

Other supporters, such as Brent Snyder, a disabled veteran from south Philadelphia, said they had voted for Trump in the past but were looking for a change.

“The last couple years I’ve been noticing the Republican Party’s been going a way I didn’t like,” Snyder said. “Not that I agree with everything that’s happening to Trump, but I think right now he has more baggage than his country needs. The division right now is just terrible. We need someone to bring both sides together to make us work.”

Monday’s announcement comes less than a week after the progressive activist Cornel West abandoned his Green Party bid in favor of an independent White House run. Meanwhile, the centrist group No Labels is actively securing ballot access for a yet-to-be-named candidate.

Kennedy has spent weeks accusing the DNC of “rigging” the party’s primary against him and threatening that he might need to consider alternatives.

Read More: Column: Two Visions of Bobby Kennedy Jr.

In campaign emails and videos, he blasted the DNC’s decision not to host debates between Biden and other candidates and railed against the committee’s plan to give South Carolina rather than Iowa or New Hampshire the leadoff spot on the primary calendar this election cycle.

“If they jam me, I’m going to look at every option,” he said in September at a New Hampshire barbecue held by Republican former Sen. Scott Brown.

Far-right and anti-vaccine influencers close to Kennedy also have sent strong signals on social media suggesting he should or will leave the Democratic Party. Last month, Joseph Mercola, an influential anti-vaccine doctor who is allied with Kennedy, ran a poll on X, formerly known as Twitter, asking if Kennedy should quit the party.

While Kennedy has long identified as a Democrat and frequently invokes his late father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle President John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail, he has built close relationships with far-right figures in recent years. He appeared on a channel run by the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and headlined a stop on the ReAwaken America Tour, the Christian nationalist road show put together by Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Read More: Inside the Very Online Campaign of RFK Jr.

Polls show far more Republicans than Democrats have a favorable opinion of Kennedy. He also has gained support from some far-right conservatives for his fringe views, including his vocal distrust of COVID-19 vaccines, which studies have shown are safe and effective against severe disease and death.

Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.

—Associated Press writers Michelle Smith and Will Weissert contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/6321987/robert-f-kennedy-independent-2024/

Flag Football Could Become an Olympic Sport in 2028

First, Taylor Swift. Next, the Olympics.

The NFL’s ongoing push for worldwide exposure got another boost Monday when organizers for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics delivered a proposal to put flag football on the program when the Summer Games return to the United States for the first time in 32 years.

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The International Olympic Committee will vote on the proposal at meetings in Mumbai, India, that begin later this week. Also on the L.A. proposal were baseball and softball, which have been bouncing on and off the program for decades; lacrosse; squash; and cricket—a fitting contrast to flag football in that it is virtually unknown in the United States but immensely popular over wide swaths of the globe.

L.A. chairman Casey Wasserman said the new sports are “relevant, innovative and community-based, played in backyards, schoolyards, community centers, stadiums and parks across the U.S. and the globe.”

Though participation numbers have been declining, there is no bigger spectator sport in the U.S. than football. Bringing its less-violent cousin into the Olympics would mark a huge victory for the NFL, which has been staging games in Europe for more than a decade now and is always looking for ways to grow both its participation and its audience. One of this season’s biggest stories has been pop megastar Swift’s trips to two Chiefs games to watch her friend, tight end Travis Kelce.

“Things have been going at a whipping pace for football,” said Bettina Cornwell, a sports business expert at the University of Oregon. “It’s a very smart idea to introduce a football-type game on a larger scale with more limelight that will perhaps persuade people that we can do something other than” stick to the violent game as it is currently played.

Flag football, in which “tackles” are made by pulling a flag off a belt worn by each player, would be a 5-on-5 affair played on a 50-yard field. There aren’t offensive and defensive linemen. At the World Games last year, the U.S. men won the gold medal while the women fell to Mexico in the final.

While flag football will feel familiar to the home fans, cricket will be a steep learning curve. Hugely popular in, among other places, India, Britain and Australia, which hosts the Summer Games in Brisbane in 2032, it is virtually unknown in the United States. A game called Twenty20—a shorter version of the original game—is proposed for the schedule in Los Angeles. Cricket was played once before at the Olympics—in Paris in 1900.

Not included in the L.A. program is breakdancing, which will be a one-and-done after its debut in Paris next year. Others not making the cut: motorsports, kickboxing and karate.

Unclear is whether other sports will have to trim the number of disciplines to help the IOC adhere to the limit it set of 10,500 athletes at a Summer Olympics. The addition of five team sports will inflate the number of participants.

How a new version of football will play five years from now in an already crowded 17-day sports schedule is anybody’s guess. The Olympics, like the NFL, have been working hard to entice a younger audience. In recent years, the IOC has added skateboarding, climbing and 3-on-3 basketball to its schedule. Flag football fits into that mold, said Cornwell, the Oregon professor.

“There are going to be hardcore NFL gridiron consumers who are not going to accept it,” she said. “But you have to recognize the fact that the danger of gridiron play is a talking point. It’s not popular. If there’s a play that could change things, this is it. Give them kudos for trying.”

source https://time.com/6321997/flag-football-olympic-sport-2028/

Israel’s President: Our Darkest Hour Casts a Shadow on the Entire World

Not since the Holocaust have more Jews been murdered on one day. The numbers of dead in the Simchat Torah Massacre are still rising as Israel’s soldiers and rescue services discover more and more families murdered in their homes.

Not since the Holocaust have we seen such images of innocent Jewish mothers and children, teenagers and old women loaded into trucks and taken away into captivity.

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Not since the vile crimes of ISIS, have we witnessed such barbarity. Indeed, this is what Hamas have done: imported, adopted, and replicated the savagery of ISIS. Whole families have been wiped out. Mothers and fathers, with babes in arms, murdered in cold blood. Young people at a party. Old people—even Holocaust survivors themselves. Massacred. Their bodies burned and abused. Along with dozens of Israelis taken away are other nationalities.

Many have labelled this Israel’s 9/11—a national catastrophe inflicted by bloodthirsty terrorists. Indeed, in terms of proportion for a nation of 9.3 million, the fatalities number more than seven times those of the Twin Towers.

So as President of Israel, what do I say to you, readers around the world? Do I tell you of some of the personal stories? Of the young couple Tamar and Yonatan, murdered in their home along with their 6-year-old twin daughters Shachar and Arbel, and 4-year-old son Omer? Do I tell you of the wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor in her 80s who was taken into captivity by Hamas terrorists? Do I tell you of the young women at a dance party rounded up by terrorists from Gaza to be murdered and their bodies violated?

I can tell you that from the depths, the light is clearest. From our darkest moments can arise Israel’s finest hour. Israel will remain united and strong. Israel will act firmly and with full force to defend its people and eliminate this threat. This is our solemn duty, and we will not rest day or night in the defense of our people.

However, the international community also has a duty to fulfill here. For too long, when Israel has faced incursions or rockets from Gaza, elements of the international community have called for restraint or sought to justify Hamas’s actions, swallowing their lies as they killed their own people and blamed Israel, while hiding rockets in hospitals, schools, and mosques.

The world can no longer turn a blind eye. Any justification or attempts to rationalize this terrible attack will only encourage them further.

It is important to remember that Israel has no presence in Gaza. For months the border has been ostensibly peaceful. Instead of seeking a brighter future, Hamas has brought havoc on its own people. Tens of thousands of Gazans would cross each day into Israel to work and support their families, working alongside peace-loving Israelis—many of whom I knew well, and sadly have been murdered in this onslaught.

Over the past days, I have spoken with leaders from around the world. I appreciate their support for Israel’s right to defend its people in the face of this abhorrent evil. I appreciate the outpouring of good will we have seen around the world with national landmarks and monuments illuminated with Israeli flags in solidarity with our people.

But platitudes and sympathies must translate into tangible support. Over the next days and weeks, Israel will be doing all it can to secure its borders, to remove the threat posed by Hamas, and to return its captive civilians and soldiers. I am under no illusion that this will be a swift or easy process—but one thing is for sure, it will demand the support of the international community.

History will judge Hamas for its crimes against humanity, along with all those who fail to stand against them. I urge all the international community, those who have always stood by us, and those who have traditionally taken a different stance. Now is the time to speak out. Now is the time to take action in support of Israel by word and deed—at home and in the international institutions. To our Muslim neighbors and friends in the region who represent a different face of Islam—I say now is the time to show that we all share an inalienable and mutual respect for human life.

The days ahead are certainly shadowed with cloudy skies, as Israel embarks on a difficult and painful mission to secure its borders, to eliminate the threat to its people, and to return the hostages to their families. However, just like in the past, even in the face of the most difficult times, Israel will overcome, the Israeli spirit will overcome, and we will emerge stronger, more resilient, and above all, united.

source https://time.com/6321967/israel-president-isaac-herzog-hamas-attack/

The Frasier Revival Serves Up Wilted Salads and Expired Eggs

“Life’s callin’ again,” Kelsey Grammer croons in the updated version of “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” that plays over each episode’s closing credits in Paramount+’s Frasier revival. Life, in this case, must be short for television executives thirsty for a nostalgia-driven hit, because it’s hard to believe anyone else was clamoring for more of an 11-season sitcom that was itself a Cheers spin-off. When you figure in the absence of virtually every original cast member besides Grammer, as well as new leadership behind the scenes, writer-showrunners Chris Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and Joe Cristalli (Life in Pieces), the project starts to sound especially dire. And it is.

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Premiering Oct. 12, Frasier 2.0 picks up about two decades after its predecessor’s 2004 finale—an episode that found Seattle’s favorite pretentious radio shrink at a crossroads, as his widower father remarried, his brother and employee-turned-sister-in-law had a baby, and Frasier decided to forsake a job opportunity in San Francisco for a chance at love with Laura Linney’s Charlotte, who lived in Chicago. In the first few minutes of the revival we learn that he’s been there ever since, amassing fame and fortune as the Windy City’s favorite pretentious TV shrink. But now the show and the relationship are over. His parting words to the network: “Get off your knees, stop begging, I’m already out the door.” Charlotte, meanwhile, “told me the same thing.”

Now, in the wake of his dad Martin’s funeral (John Mahoney, who played the elder Crane, died in 2018), he’s in his former home city of Boston for what is supposed to be a quick visit. Apparently he no longer keeps in touch with anyone from Cheers, because the face that greets him at their airport is an unfamiliar one: Frasier’s best friend since his Oxford days, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst), making his first-ever appearance in Dr. Crane’s four decades of existence as a TV character. Though his real passion is alcohol, Alan is a psychology professor at Harvard, where Frasier’s high-strung nephew David (Anders Keith) happens to be an undergrad. Practically the moment he arrives, Alan’s ambitious department head Olivia (Toks Olagundoye) offers Frasier a faculty job. (The sound you hear is a nation’s worth of unemployed PhDs groaning.) Of course he takes it. If nothing else, the move promises to give him a chance to reconnect with his semi-estranged, 33-year-old son Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), a Harvard dropout turned Boston firefighter. (The word Harvard comes up often in this show.)

With this multigenerational ensemble, Harris and Cristall seem intent on replicating the dynamics of the canonical Frasier cast without actually bringing back Grammer’s old co-stars. (Peri Gilpin is slated to guest star at some point in the season as Frasier’s producer Roz, but she wasn’t in any of the five episodes sent for review.) Once again, there are the effete snobs and the salt-of-the-earth people who tolerate them. Freddy is the show’s answer to Martin, a retired cop. The actress he lives with, Jess Salgueiro’s Eve—a character whose backstory I’ve been asked to avoid discussing, not that it makes for an especially exciting reveal—is the Daphne-like ingénue. Olivia drives the status-conscious Harvard plots, like a Type A Roz, restoring the original show’s balance of family and workplace comedy. David, a delicate soul prone to fits of anxiety, and Alan, a sometimes rival who’s quick with bon mots, fill in for Niles.

But let’s be real. There’s no replacing Frasier and Niles’ frenemy (bronemy?) rapport, which fueled endless sibling-oneupmanship story arcs rendered gently hilarious by the narcissism of two very similar narcissists’ small differences. And there’s certainly no replacing David Hyde Pierce’s performance as Niles, whose feline mannerisms and puppy-dog panting after Jane Leeves’ Daphne made him the show’s breakout character. (In case you were wondering, the market for extremely specific Niles Crane tribute merch is booming.) Grammer disappears back into his signature role, but without his one true sparring partner, Frasier feels adrift.

It’s not that the supporting cast is a complete bust. Lyndhurst can be pretty funny as a glib, dissipated British academic of a certain age. Salgueiro adds some much-needed effervescence and charm to a relatively low-energy milieu. But the show strains to find reasons to throw these characters together in humorous situations. Harris and Cristall invent a third-space pub whose clientele appears to consist solely of firefighters and Harvard faculty; Eve is the bartender. For a college student living on campus, David—who comes across as a collection of neuroses more than a fleshed-out character—spends an alarming amount of time with his uncle and cousin. 

The writing, in other words, disappoints. Gone is the fizzy dialogue of Frasier’s heyday, replaced by dated “Baby Shark” gags and broad exchanges like the one in which Freddy notes that a new (spoiler-y) development in his life is “not exactly catnip for ladies” and David—who is, again, studying at America’s most prestigious institution of higher learning—marvels: “There’s catnip for ladies?” One early episode recycles a plot the original series did at least once, as Frasier, Alan, and Olivia all vie for two open membership slots at an exclusive faculty club. 

The tone feels off, too. It’s nice that the new episodes were filmed in front of a live audience, but their laughter, which reads as artificial in 2023, makes the revival feel too much like a kitschy throwback. Frasier’s quest to prove, after a couple of decades as an overeducated talk-show host, that he’s got more substance than, say, Dr. Phil makes for a decent premise. But his guilt over passing his daddy issues onto the next generation is more of a bummer than a light comedy can support. The show needs more jokes and less earnest emoting, at the very least. Still, I’m not convinced that any amount of tweaking would be enough to justify its existence. 

The new Frasier presumably exists to capitalize on the new audience that the NBC original, a ’90s Must See TV staple, has found on streaming platforms. In 2017, the critic Lili Loofbourow made the case that it was the ideal show to fall asleep watching; a few months later, The Ringer went so far as to dub the languorous Friday after Thanksgiving Frasier Day. And just last year, a roundtable of Atlantic writers pronounced Frasier the ultimate comfort show. The consensus is, essentially, that we still love Frasier because, in this age of struggle and strife, it feels uniquely luxurious to sink into a warm bath of Clinton-era rich-people problems. Who wouldn’t want to take a 22-minute virtual vacation to a time when conflicts between white-collar snobs and blue-collar populists ended in a shared chuckle rather than, I don’t know, an insurrection?

It’s impossible to recreate the same soothing atmosphere today, although Harris and Cristall do wisely avoid political hot topics. (Among other groan-worthy possibilities, this spares us from hearing Dr. Crane crack jokes about nonbinary pronouns, like every other nonplussed baby boomer in a multi-cam comedy since 2016.) Not even the return of Niles, Daphne, and the rest could have compensated for the loss of the show’s original context. Frasier—all 264 infinitely rewatchable episodes of it—will always be a comforting place to visit. But central to its appeal, which only increases with age, is our awareness that we could never live there in the present.

source https://time.com/6320681/frasier-reboot-review/

Biden’s Twin Crises: Possible U.S. Hostages, Risks of Wider War

Deploying substantial new air and naval forces to the Middle East, President Biden and his top aides are scrambling to deal with twin crises unleashed by the hot war between Israel and Hamas: the possibility that American hostages may have been taken into Gaza along with Israelis during the deadly weekend assaults, and the danger that the conflict could spread in the region, potentially drawing the U.S. closer to conflict.

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As Israeli Defense Forces continued to battle Hamas militants in Israeli towns, American officials worried violence could erupt in the West Bank and that Iran-backed forces in Syria and Lebanon may try to open additional fronts against Israel. The Biden administration is also trying to find out just how many Americans may have been taken hostage from a music festival and in other kidnappings during Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel. Biden spent the day at the White House on Sunday being briefed on the attack and the fallout, calling allies, and instructing the U.S. military to deploy more firepower to the eastern Mediterranean Sea near Israel.

In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday morning, Biden expressed “deep sympathy” for the killed, missing, and wounded in Israel and “pledged his full support” to Israel, according to a White House description of the phone call.

Biden told Netanyahu that he had directed the U.S. military to rush equipment and ammunition to Israel to assist the Israeli Defense Forces. The two leaders talked about the hostages taken by Hamas, which include families, elderly people, and young children, the White House said.

Biden Administration officials hope that the show of U.S. military force in the Mediterranean will help deter an escalation of fighting elsewhere on Israel’s borders, including in the occupied West Bank. “What we’re really focused on right now is trying to ensure,” said a senior administration official, “that this does not spread to the West Bank. We want to try to make sure this is contained in Gaza, as terrible as the situation in Gaza is.”

A day earlier, Biden had put enemies to Israel, including Iran, on notice. “Let me say this as clearly as I can: This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage. The world is watching,” Biden said, during televised remarks on Saturday.

The U.S. is doing more than watching. The U.S. military is sending ammunition and equipment to the Israeli Defense Forces, and Biden ordered a heavily armed carrier group to change course and move into the waters off the coast of Israel. The naval formation includes the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Normandy, as well as four U.S. Navy destroyers.

The U.S. is also adding aircraft to several fighter jet squadrons already based in the area, the Defense Department said Sunday. Additional fighter aircraft include Air Force F-35, F-15, and F-16 fighter jets as well as A-10 attack jets.

Moving the forces closer to Israel would speed up the response time if the U.S. decided it needed to strike targets in the region or, at some point, wanted to launch a rescue operation for any American hostages held in Gaza.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Sunday that the deployment of U.S. forces was in response to the Hamas attack on Israel and are designed to “bolster regional deterrence efforts” and underscore the U.S.’s “ironclad support for the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli people.”

In addition to military assistance rushing to the region, American officials are working to track down reports that Americans were killed or have been taken hostage in the Hamas attacks, including from a large trance music festival. “We have reports that several Americans may be among the dead. We are very actively working to verify those reports. Similarly, we’ve seen reports about, about hostages and there again, we’re very actively trying to verify them, and nail that down,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

U.S. intelligence officials are likely reviewing troves of intercepted electronic communications and other material to see what may have been missed in the run up to the attacks, said Michael Allen, a former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee and a former senior official on President George W. Bush’s national security council. “We look at our intelligence holdings to see if there is anything relevant to this, something we may have missed,” Allen said.

Asked if intelligence agencies failed to see the attack coming, Secretary of State Blinken said there would be time for Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies to see how they missed seeing the planning for the coordinated attacks from Gaza. “In terms of the intelligence, there will be plenty of time in days to come to look and see what anyone missed, what might, what we could have done better. Right now, the focus is on helping Israel, making sure that it has what it needs to deal with this attack,” Blinken said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The deadly attacks could have been partly motivated by an effort to disrupt the push to normalize relations between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states, Blinken said. “Certainly, that could have been part of the motivation. Look, who opposes normalization? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. So it wouldn’t be a surprise that part of the motivation may have been to disrupt efforts to bring Saudi Arabia and Israel together, along with other countries that may be interested in normalizing relations with Israel,” said Blinken.

U.S. diplomats have been concerned about escalating violence in the region. In the wake of the attacks from Gaza in Israel’s south, Hezbollah and Israel briefly exchanged fire along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. But officials haven’t seen a major escalation. Biden’s national security team also made a blitz of calls over the weekend to high level officials in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, as well as European countries and the Palestinian Authority to try to keep allies aligned.

In the past two days, Biden, Blinken and other senior U.S. officials have worked to press allies and countries in the region to stand up in defense of Israel in the face of the assault on Israel by Hamas.

But the outreach so far hasn’t delivered a full-throated condemnation of Hamas and the attacks from Arab states that U.S. diplomats wanted. After Blinken spoke with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah on Saturday evening, a statement from the minister stopped short of condemning Hamas, saying only that the Kingdom rejects the targeting of civilians.

source https://time.com/6321860/hamas-us-hostages-israel-biden-wider-war-iran/

A Surprise Attack Upends Israel and the Middle East

The obvious and intended point of reference for the shattering surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was the 1973 October War, the devastating invasion that Arab armies launched precisely 50 years earlier, plus a day. It was the last time Israelis awoke to a life-changing assault that its intelligence apparatus had not seen coming, and also the last time they found themselves, officially, in a “war.”

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Another analogue might be the Tet Offensive, the 1968 Viet Cong surprise attack that changed the course of the Vietnam War. Like the Hamas assault out of the Gaza Strip, it broke out on the morning of a holiday and seemingly everywhere at once; it demonstrated capacities unforeseen in a guerrilla force; it briefly overwhelmed a far superior military; and it produced images that challenged fundamental assumptions about a conflict that had ground on for years.

In Israel, the challenged assumption is that its conflict with the Palestinians can be “managed” rather than solved. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all but disavowed that assumption as he addressed the camera in the Kirya, the Defense Ministry high-rise in downtown Tel Aviv: the coming conflict meant the country was in “not an operation. Not a round. At war.” 

And like the October War and the Tet Offensive, the Hamas raid and its fallout are forcing reconsideration worldwide too, as political and military leaders from Washington to Beijing weigh the possible outcomes of the war. The attack stalls, and perhaps kills, a hoped for peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that depended on the presumed acquiescence of occupied Palestinians to the status quo. It calls into question America’s long-standing hope that it would be able to focus attention away from the Middle East, and it resets a competition between global powers in the region. Once again, the world is finding the near future of geopolitics depends heavily on Israel and the Palestinians.

Brief, lopsided battles with Gaza militants, usually fought by drone or fighter jet, had become so regular that Israeli officials had come to refer to them, in bemused tones, as a homeowner’s routine chores: “cutting the grass,” they would say. Mowing was the most starkly military component of “managing the conflict,” which has been the overarching approach for decades. The strategy assumes that there is no political solution to Jewish Israelis’ contest with the Palestinians, both of whom want the same land. The best that can be done is to contain them.

On the hills of the West Bank, which 3 million Palestinians share with some 500,000 Jewish settlers, much of that management is outsourced to a formidable internal security apparatus that answers to Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Also known as Abu Mazen, Abbas, now 87, wagered that subduing violent resistance (which, conveniently, also meant subduing Hamas, a rival to Abbas’ Fatah party) would produce negotiations that ended with a Palestinian state. That wager has not paid off.

There are no longer Jewish settlers among the 2.2 million Palestinians crowded into the Gaza Strip. They departed, with the Israeli military, in 2005. For most of the time since, the enclave has been ruled by Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, and sealed off by Israel. As on the West Bank, Israel controls Gaza’s power supply, telephone systems, and much of its economy, but it has proved harder to manage. Poverty is endemic, and the youthful population has no option to leave. Israeli security has relied heavily on the fences and walls that Hamas guerrillas tunneled under in 2014, and on the morning of Oct. 7 tore down and flew paragliders over. 

The scenes that ensued are seared into the souls of Israelis who already possess, along with the most powerful military in the region, a deep reservoir of trauma. In the chaotic morning hours of sabbath, everything was overwhelmed: the Israel Defense Force that forms the core of Israeli society, the Iron Dome missile batteries that ordinarily shield the civilian population, and the almost luxurious sense of security that led hundreds of young people to an overnight rave in the desert where the paragliders landed and opened fire. Some of the terrified young revelers ended up among the estimated 100 hostages, young and old, Israelis and foreign citizens, carried into Gaza as hostages.

Abduction, including of bodies, is a tried and true tactic of the asymmetrical warfare Israel faces, offering bargaining leverage from hit-and-run operations. Like the deaths of civilians, the kidnappings also guaranteed Israel sympathy, and wide latitude to respond; Netanyahu vowed to turn parts of Gaza “to rubble,” though how to do that with dozens of Israeli hostages in the line of fire?

As darkness fell on Oct. 7, Israeli forces were hauling tanks south and, in Gaza, Palestinians’ phones buzzed with texts from the IDF, warning them out of buildings that were about to be bombed. In an instant, Israeli society was no longer torn asunder by Netanyahu’s efforts to sideline the Supreme Court. But the feeling was far from familiar. Some, groping for a reference point, thought not of 1973 or 1968, but 2001. It felt like 9/11. In just moments, a great deal had changed. —With reporting by Solcyre Burga

source https://time.com/6321849/israel-attack/