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.”

Vivian Silver believed that there were partners for peace in Gaza and paid for it with her life. Silver was not a politician. Not a soldier. Not a “settler.” She was a lifelong peace activist who built her entire identity around Jewish-Arab coexistence.

She lived on Kibbutz Be’eri, just miles from Gaza, and devoted decades to helping Palestinians, especially the sick, the poor and the vulnerable.

The 74-year-old was a founding leader of “Women Wage Peace,” a movement that advocates dialogue, reconciliation and a two-state future.

She also volunteered with the group, “The Road to Recovery,” personally driving Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for lifesaving care—children with cancer, adults needing urgent surgery. For the most part, people she did not know but felt responsible for anyway. She had such a big heart.

Just days before Oct. 7, 2023, Silver hosted an international meeting of peace activists. Even as security warnings mounted, she refused to give up on the idea that empathy could overcome hatred.

On Oct. 7, that belief was incinerated. Terrorists from Gaza crossed the border into Israel, entered Kibbutz Be’eri and reached Silver’s home. Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans set her home on fire, and sadly, she Silver was murdered.

For weeks, her family believed that she had been kidnapped into Gaza. Only later did DNA analysis confirm the truth. She was not a hostage. She was killed where she lived.

Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, was on the phone with her as the attack unfolded. When he heard gunshots outside her window, he told her to hang up and stay quiet. They continued texting as terrorists moved through the house. From a closet, Silver wrote that they were inside. She knew exactly what was happening.

Her final message to him was chilling: “They’re inside the house. It’s time to stop joking and say goodbye.”

He replied that he loved her. She told him she loved him, too. Her last words were: “I feel you.”

That was the end of her amazing life. What followed was just as telling.

There has been no meaningful outcry from Gaza condemning her murder. No apology to her family. No public reckoning that one of the Palestinians’ most devoted allies—someone who spent decades helping Gazan civilians—was burned alive.

This is not about collective guilt. It is about collective silence.

Silver’s life and death expose a lie at the heart of the two-state fantasy as it is currently sold to the world. We are told that if Israelis show enough goodwill, enough restraint, enough empathy, enough “understanding,” then peace will follow. Silver did everything she was told peace required.

She dedicated her life to Palestinian welfare. She rejected hatred. She believed in coexistence until her final moments. It did not save her.

Which leads me to this point: A viable two-state solution requires more than merely borders and international conferences. It requires moral reciprocity, the basic recognition that those who extend their hand in peace should not be murdered in return.

Yet on Oct. 7, Gazan society did not rise up to protect people like Silver. It didn’t mourn her afterward; in fact, her murder was celebrated there. It didn’t demand accountability for her murder. Instead, silence.

You cannot build a state on grievance alone. You cannot demand empathy while excusing barbarism. And you cannot murder your most committed allies and expect the world to keep pretending that nothing has changed.

Silver believed in peace with her Arab neighbors until her last breath.

The question now is not whether Israelis should acknowledge the harsh reality that the Jewish state never has and likely never will have a partner for peace next door. The question is whether or not the “innocent civilians” of Gaza are capable of saying the name Vivian Silver—and recognizing what was done to her.

By the most conservative estimates, in the coming days the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (CSG) would be able to participate in an attack on Iran Which jibes with the threats President Trump made.

Threats which encouraged many thousands of Iranian civilians to willingly sacrifice their lives in protests as part of an effort to bring down the terrible Iranian regime.

When Mr. Trump thanked Iran for not publicly executing protestors cynics suggested that he was giving Iran a pass to continue torturing them to death off camera.

I hope and pray that next week we learn that the cynics were wrong.

That the confusing talk was just to put Iran off guard.

Prime Minister Netanyahu knows the truth.

If Netanyahu knows that President Trump is blinking, then he must assume Trump will blink on other matters relating to Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, etc..

And everything we do from this point forward must take this painful reality into account.