It’s Sunday, February 8, and a broken clock has to be right at least once, right? According to Iran, their talks with the U.S. in Muscat on Friday concerned “only” the nuclear issue—despite the initial position that ballistic missiles, regional proxies and Iranian protesters would all be on the table.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled for a Wednesday visit to Washington to discuss the talks. After so many false readings, has the daylight between Israel and the United States finally materialized?

Well, let’s slow down.

So far, nothing combative has come out of Jerusalem. Then again, to date, Netanyahu has never publicly confronted Donald Trump. The worst he has done was issue a midnight statement against Trump’s Board of Peace for allowing a Palestinian flag in the technocratic council logo, and sent Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to “talk to the Americans.” The latter sounds innocuous, but it’s a snub—where the U.S. is concerned, Netanyahu is the foreign minister.

But past experience teaches us to be cautious. Every time there’s talk of a serious rift, it later turns out to be the opposite of what it appeared. The most prominent examples being Operation Rising Lion, the end of the war in Gaza, and several other episodes that were initially interpreted as confrontations and later revealed to be coordination.

I would suggest two alternative possibilities for the current perceived tension.

The first is that the Americans—like anyone with basic common sense—understand that asking Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to swallow four cups of poison may be too much, even for him. His predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, claimed to have drunk the “poison” of ending the Iran-Iraq War without total victory—and survived. But the chances that Khamenei can stomach the loss of the nuclear program, ballistic missiles, the dismantling of Hezbollah and Hamas, and ending the killing of demonstrators are low.

If that’s the case, an attack remains more likely than not. And when it happens, Netanyahu will say: Look, I helped bring this about by insisting on pushing the demands.

The second possibility is simpler.

Netanyahu was meant to attend a meeting of Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington next week. A photo of him sitting next to Qatar and Turkey in any context—especially when discussing their American-ordained future role in Gaza—is not one he wants circulating in an election year. Fake tension with the U.S. that precipitates an earlier visit may simply be Bibi’s way of taking a rain check.

The answer will have to wait for Wednesday, Netanyahu’s seventh Trump visit since the latter’s second inauguration.

Leonard Cohen singing for soldiers during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, with General—and future Prime Minister—Ariel Sharon on the left and Israeli musician Matti Caspi on the right.

This morning Israel lost one of it’s music legends, Matti Caspi. In Israel, Caspi was one of the defining voices of the 1970s, known for songs like “Lo Yadati SheTelchi Mimeni” (“I Didn’t Know You Would Leave Me”) and “Brit Olam” (“Covenant of Love”). For non-Israelis, he might have more significance as a little-known partner of the “poet of rock,” Leonard Cohen.

Many people will recognize the iconic photographs of Cohen visiting the Sinai Peninsula to entertain disheartened Israeli troops during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Less well known outside Israel is that Caspi was by his side on that journey. The song Leonard—going by his Hebrew name, Eliezer—wrote during the visit, “Lover Lover Lover,” was arranged with Caspi’s help.

During the visit, under the heading “Air Base,” eight lines appear in Cohen’s handwriting:

I went down to the desert

to help my brothers fight

I knew that they weren’t wrong

I knew that they weren’t right

but bones must stand up straight and walk

and blood must move around

and men go making ugly lines

across the holy ground

Cohen later had second thoughts about his involvement, crossing out the line “to help my brothers fight” and replacing it with “to watch the children fight.” Throughout that intense and emotionally charged journey, Caspi was by the poet’s side.

Caspi’s loss is a significant one in Israel’s musical history—and, to borrow Cohen’s words from Tower of Song: “I bid you farewell, farewell, farewell.”

For more on Leonard Cohen’s journey, check out Matti Friedman’s excellent book, Who by Fire: War, Atonement, and the Resurrection of Leonard Cohen.

In Israel, I’m often asked how I get to the TV studio so fast.

Many of you know I’m an Orthodox Jew, which means that from sundown on Friday until the stars come out on Saturday, I observe Shabbat: no electricity, no work, and definitely no driving. I don’t live at the studio—and yet every Saturday night I appear on Channel 12 just after Shabbat ends.

A few months ago at the JNS Global Summit in Jerusalem, I had the honor of interviewing someone I deeply admire, Fiamma Nirenstein, journalist, author, and former European foreign affairs leader in the Italian government. Her clarity about Israel’s turning point, rising global Jew-hating antisemitism, and the responsibility of the Jewish people is something the world urgently needs to hear.

The reopening of the Rafah border crossing linking the Gaza Strip with Egypt will ease travel restrictions on Palestinians seeking medical treatment abroad. At the same time, it has deepened Israeli concerns that the crossing will again allow Hamas, which remains in power in Gaza, to reactivate smuggling routes from Egypt.

In accordance with President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan for Gaza, Israel agreed to reopen the crossing on February 2. Israel captured the Gaza side of the crossing in May 2024 as part of an operation in Rafah to combat Hamas, shuttering its operation.

But while the border’s reopening indicates progress in the Gaza ceasefire, the fact that Hamas has not yet been disarmed, another key stipulation of Trump’s plan, looms large.

Past experience strongly suggests that Hamas will exploit the crossing to smuggle weapons, terror operatives, and dual-use products into Gaza to reconstitute after a costly war with Israel. Ensuring that safeguards are implemented to address security concerns at the crossing is paramount to its operational success and the stability of the ceasefire.

Rafah Crossing’s Multi-Layered Security Measures

All Palestinians entering or leaving Gaza must be vetted by both Egypt and Israel. Israeli security officers will monitor the exit of Gazans remotely, using facial recognition to ensure that individuals leaving the coastal enclave have been pre-approved.

Palestinian Authority officials and monitors from the European Union Border Assistance Mission will conduct security screenings on individuals exiting Gaza. Security checks on individuals entering Gaza, however, will include an IDF checkpoint. After passing the station, Palestinians will be allowed to move into Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza.

Concern Hamas Will Renew Border Smuggling Operations

Several Israeli politicians expressed anxiety over the reopening of the crossing, among them opposition leader Yair Lapid, who lamented the lack of a physical IDF presence at the border.

Before the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, Hamas utilized the Rafah Border Crossing to smuggle weapons and supplies into Gaza to bolster its forces. Tunnels built along the Egypt-Rafah border served as the primary mode of smuggling for consumer goods like cigarettes and clothing, but the IDF assessed that most weapons in Hamas’s arsenal were smuggled through the Rafah Crossing aboveground, while the passage was under Egyptian control before May 2024.

According to the IDF, Hamas undertook much of its smuggling efforts during the one-year term in office of Egypt’s Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated former president, Mohammad Morsi, from 2012 to 2013. Reuters reports from 2021 indicated that Hamas focused on smuggling “factory-grade” rockets from Egypt during this time.

However, Israel also assessed that smuggling continued in the years that followed Morsi’s ouster, before the IDF took control of the Rafah Crossing in May 2024. Hamas primarily used the Rafah region to store rockets, hoping to deter Israeli strikes by placing weapons caches near Egypt.

Gaza Executive Board Must Identify Criteria for Closure

The persistent security challenge in Rafah was visible on January 29, when the IDF confirmed that its troops had captured a “central commander in the East Rafah Battalion” after several terrorists emerged from tunnels beneath the city, indicating that Hamas remains an active threat in the area.

To mitigate security risks, the Gaza Executive Board, the subcommittee of the UN-endorsed Board of Peace initiative responsible for overseeing the Gaza ceasefire, should identify clear immediate-closure criteria for the crossing, and communicate these with all security partners at the Rafah Crossing.

These should include any attempt at smuggling weapons, terror operatives, or other dual-use contraband through the crossing, and any attempt by high-level Hamas commanders to flee Gaza. Likewise, humanitarian aid shipments should continue to be diverted to the Kerem Shalom Crossing, on Gaza’s southeastern border with Israel, where the IDF operates advanced security screening measures for shipments.

Aaron Goren is a research analyst and editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Aaron and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aaron on X @RealAaronGoren. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Edward Wong, who covers the State Department for the New York Times, has a news article in the Feb. 2 newspaper that says “the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”

That’s more or less standard Times language. It’s problematic in its own right, failing to disclose that the health ministry is part of the Hamas-controlled Gaza government, and using the term “combatants” instead of “Hamas terrorists.”

What really caught my eye, though, was the new language in the following paragraph. It says, “A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number.”

This is scraping the bottom, even by the Times’s own very low standards—relying on what an anonymous source supposedly told some other journalists. For verification, the online version of the Times article links not to anything written by “Israeli journalists” but rather a piece in the far-left British newspaper the Guardian by a former visiting scholar of Chinese literature at Peking University who “also worked in Cuba for a year,” Emma Graham-Harrison. That Guardian article relies largely on the far-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose own published articles on the topic say nothing about “a senior Israeli security official.” The Guardian also links to an article from the Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian, who mentions an anonymous “senior Israeli military official.”

Even the Times’s “senior security official” is a vague term and could apply to a variety of figures, including political rivals of the current Israeli prime minister and disgruntled former military officials who have been ousted.

Meanwhile, the official Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on Jan. 30 to debunk the false claim that the IDF has accepted the casualty figures. “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” Shoshani said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The Times didn’t share that denial with its readers.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a 30-year veteran of the British Army who frequently visited Gaza alongside IDF troops, described the claims as “[f]ake news.” He wrote on social media, “No, the IDF has not ‘accepted’ that Hamas figures are accurate.”

A former IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, also noted that the IDF has not accepted the Gaza Health Ministry death toll numbers. “[T]he most important number is actually the number of dead terrorists in relation to non-combatants,” Conricus said, emphasizing that the deaths of non-combatants were “far lower than any other war in urban terrain.”

Wong, the Times’s diplomatic correspondent, has been a consistent harsh critic of Israel, which is one thing to be on the Times Opinion pages, but another thing coming from a supposed straight news reporter. In June 2023 I described an article Wong wrote about then-secretary of state Antony Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia, when he characterized normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia as “a move that would be opposed by many Saudi citizens,” as “so egregiously slanted against Israel that it reads as if it were dictated by the Iranian information ministry.” In January 2025 I wrote about him under the headline “New York Times State Department Reporter Emerges as Foe of Israel,” noting his omission of important facts inconvenient to his preferred narrative.

The Times would have readers believe, simultaneously, that Gaza has been so devastated that it has no electricity, food, water, housing, and health care and also that the territory manages to maintain a health ministry that keeps a scrupulously accurate death count that’s somehow able reliably to distinguish Israel-caused deaths from those attributable to natural causes, to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile misfires, to improvised-explosive-device accidents, and to violent intimidation by Hamas. The “health ministry” is high-priority because it serves Hamas as a propaganda weapon against Israel and America. The second it stops serving that function, the armed Hamas terrorists in charge of Gaza would shut it down and reallocate its resources to other forms of warfare.

A Dec. 28, 2025, paper by Israeli major general (retired) Yaakov Amidror for the Jewish Institute for the National Security of America noted, “The Gaza Strip, which stretches over an area of 365 square kilometers, is home to a civilian population of between 1.5 and 2 million people who are the kin and community of Hamas operatives. Many of them cooperate with the terrorist organizations (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) both passively (for example, families hiding Israeli hostages in private homes) and actively (such as assisting in the transport of weapons using civilian vehicles).”

He went on, “To understand the complexity of combat in Gaza, it’s important to recall that in many cases there is simply no distinction between civilians and Hamas operatives. The same person can shift roles from one moment to the next — sometimes appearing as an ordinary civilian, sometimes emerging with a weapon kept at home. In practical terms, it is impossible to visually distinguish between civilians and combatants, and it is no surprise that the IDF often failed to do so. How exactly should one classify a Hamas company commander who eats lunch with his family and then steps into the next room to pick up a Kalashnikov? Or a civilian who walks out in civilian clothes, connects his personal cellphone to a nearby rocket battery, and fires it remotely from his bedroom?”

And Amidror concluded, “The number of civilians killed in Gaza was the IDF’s greatest vulnerability in the Strip, but it was unavoidable. None of those who lectured Israel about the high casualty count — nearly 70,000 according to Hamas, of whom likely 40 percent or more were actual combatants — offered any credible way to fight Hamas without harming civilians. In practice, demanding that Israel avoid harming civilians was equivalent to demanding that it not fight Hamas at all — a demand that is neither moral nor feasible from Israel’s perspective.”

The falsehood about Israel’s supposed embrace of the Hamas casualty numbers was embedded in a Times story whose headline is also misleading.

“Trump Officials Bypass Congress to Push Billions in Weapons Aid to Israel,” the headline says. Yet this aid is not bypassing Congress. Every effort Israel’s enemies in Congress have made to vote to end the arms to Israel has been defeated, and instead arms sales to Israel have been approved with overwhelming bipartisan support. If Congress thinks the Trump administration is spending money that it has not appropriated, it has plenty of potential steps it could take in reaction. If Congress wants, at Wong’s behest, to render American arms factory workers unemployed by refusing arms sales to Israel even as Israel faces potential retaliation from Iran, a regime whose murderousness against its own people makes the worst mistake Israel committed in Gaza look angelically pure by comparison, there is nothing to prevent Congress from taking that action.

The Times’s goal here seems less to provide an accurate portrayal of the reality, either in Gaza or on Capitol Hill, but rather to provide fodder to its paying readership of dedicated haters of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The New York Public Library recently announced “Unlimited On-Site Access to The New York Times Online” at all library locations, even without a library card or a login, meaning that individual readers don’t even have to pay money to the Times for the privilege of wading through this nonsense. It’s useful mainly for educational purposes: about the ways that news organizations can mislead readers by withholding facts and passing along, instead, thirdhand anonymously sourced smears.

Last weekend, multiple media outlets reported that unnamed sources within the IDF were inclined to accept Hamas’ casualty figures from Gaza. But who exactly were these sources? I repeatedly contacted the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit seeking a background briefing with someone involved. “That’s not our position,” I was told. They directed me instead to a statement by IDF Spokesperson to the Foreign Media Nadav Shoshani:

“The details published do not reflect the official data of the IDF. Any publication on this matter will be released formally and in an official manner.”

It wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t a rebuttal. It was, above all, an evasion.

Numerous researchers have cast doubt on the reliability of Hamas’ numbers of dead in Gaza. Yet, as we know, those challenges are a drop in the ocean compared to the number of institutions that have adopted Hamas’ Health Ministry reports without question. “Fine,” many have said. “Let’s assume Hamas is publishing accurate data.”

The State Department formally determined this month that the Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, the same year PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed he ended the “pay-to-slay” program, according to a nonpublic notice provided to Congress and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

Rather than ending these payments, the PA shifted to a new system that it hoped to hide from international donors at a time when the Ramallah-based government is jockeying for a role in postwar Gaza, the State Department disclosed for the first time. Israeli intelligence assessed that the PA funneled $144 million to terrorists and their families in 2024 and committed at least $214 million through 2025, while the State Department determined that the payments continued from March to August 2025 under a purportedly reformed welfare system.

“The old Palestinian system of compensation for Palestinian terrorists and the families of terrorists killed in the course of committing such acts of terrorism gradually transferred responsibility for compensation to the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment (PNEEI) under the guise of social welfare,” the State Department determined. “Despite changing the mechanism for doing so, the PA continued the payments to Palestinian terrorists and their families during the reporting period.”

The findings are likely to further erode the PA’s standing with the Trump administration as it works to implement phase 2 of the Gaza peace plan, which bars Abbas’s government from participating in postwar programs until it undergoes a series of reforms that include ending pay-to-slay. Though the PA has no formal role on paper, the head of the newly created National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, civil engineer Ali Shaath, has held senior roles in the PA, suggesting Abbas’s government could wield behind-the-scenes influence.

The Trump administration collected evidence that the PA used post offices, social media platforms, and encrypted messaging services like Telegram to alert aid recipients that cash was available under the newly branded pay-to-slay program, “indicating clearly that compensation in support of terrorism has continued,” according to the State Department notice.

Abbas drew international headlines in February 2025 when he ordered an end to the pay-to-slay program, saying that welfare will be provided to Palestinians based solely on need, rather than the number of years their relatives have been imprisoned in Israel for terrorism. But Abbas cast doubt on that decree just weeks later, when he promised the Fatah Revolutionary Council that “even if we only have one cent left, it will be for the prisoners and martyrs.”

While the new system implemented by a government agency Abbas controls was portrayed as a major welfare reform project, the State Department determined that it essentially functions in the same manner as the old system by rewarding terrorists and their families for violence

“A shift to a potential welfare system without ending specific payments and benefits for Palestinian terrorists and their families is not compliant with the provisions under the Taylor Force Act,” the State Department wrote, referring to a 2018 law that froze American aid to the PA until it ended pay-to-slay. “The PA continues to provide a system of compensation in support of terrorism through a new mechanism under a different name.”

The State Department additionally determined that the PA is still enacting laws that require terrorists and their families to be compensated every month. One of those statutes, known as Law No. 14, stipulates that the PA “has a duty to support terrorists while they are incarcerated in Israeli jails by paying them the equivalent of their most recent monthly salaries prior to imprisonment,” according to the notice.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli nonprofit group, reported on Monday that the PA doled out a fresh tranche of “terror stipends” to recipients living in Jordan. The watchdog group compiled firsthand accounts and bank notifications that show “the sums transferred were identical to those received previously, suggesting that the payment scale remains unchanged.”

The PA historically paid incarcerated terrorists on a sliding scale, with those serving longer prison terms receiving upwards of $3,000 a month. The Free Beacon reported in October that nearly $70 million went to the 250 Palestinian prisoners released that month as part of the ceasefire agreement with Israel.

“The payments now appear to be continuing in areas believed to be beyond direct donor oversight, including Jordan and Lebanon,” PMW wrote. “While the PA has clearly not yet determined how to do so in the PA areas without attracting international scrutiny, an official from Fatah, the PA’s ruling party, revealed earlier this month that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has indicated his intent to maintain payments to all recipients.”

Abbas’s 2025 vow to end the program was the outcome of intensive diplomacy by the Biden-Harris administration’s Palestinian Affairs representative Hady Amr, according to Axios, which reported that the two parties negotiated the agreement over a two-year period before announcing it in February of last year.

Evidence that pay-to-slay continues under a new name is likely to serve as a wake-up call for the Trump administration as it pressures the PA to eradicate extremism before assuming a role in postwar Gaza.

“Abbas and the Palestinians are more committed to terrorism than fulfilling their promises to President Trump, even while the administration is asking them to help rebuild and govern Gaza,” a Republican congressional staffer who works on Gaza issues told the Free Beacon. “They’re still paying terrorists, inciting violence, and refusing to disarm Hamas.”