Newsroom

We Gazans are risking our lives to rid ourselves of Hamas’s oppression. This may be our only chance.

Rare demonstrations against Hamas, which has long repressed dissent, came amid widespread despair after Israel resumed the war in Gaza following a two-month ceasefire.

“Tonight, we returned to fighting in Gaza.” That’s what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said after Israel launched air strikes in the early hours of Tuesday, effectively breaking a two-month cease-fire.

Hamas represents an “existential risk to the very existence of the Palestinian people” a leading Gazan-American writer and advocate for co-existence with Israel has warned.

The United States has rejected a $53 billion Arab reconstruction plan for Gaza set out as an alternative to President Donald Trump's proposal to take over the strip and remove its Palestinian inhabitants to create a "Gaza Riviera".

The highly anticipated Egypt-drafted plan endorsed by Arab powers as a counterproposal to President Donald Trump's calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip outlines a new pathway to peace, reconstruction and eventual Palestinian statehood that excludes Hamas from power.

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As Israel mourns the return of four hostage bodies, pressure mounts ahead of negotiations for the next stage of the deal. Meanwhile, Donald Trump lays out his vision for Gaza in a bizarre, AI-generated video. At the same time, new IDF investigations into October 7th reveal years of misreading Hamas, leaving southern Israel dangerously exposed.

The US president’s video depicting a future Gaza under American authority was widely shared on Arabic and Hebrew social media, with many Palestinian users criticizing it.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has reportedly expressed readiness to cede control of the Gaza Strip and hand it over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Now comes the even harder part. On Wednesday, negotiators from Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of the remaining hostages taken by the terrorist group during its October 7, 2023 attack.

Fifteen months on, thousands lie dead and many more are injured. While Gaza has been reduced to rubble, Hamas still exerts control, hostages remain captive, and a ceasefire is hanging by a thread. Wars are a messy business, yet both sides claim to have won this one.

This past weekend, as Hamas paraded a trio of emaciated Israeli hostages who were about to be freed following more than a year of captivity in the Gaza Strip, the militant group seized the chance to direct a personal gibe at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Both Israelis and Palestinians are wondering whether Trump’s extreme pronouncements are a bluff, a shock tactic or a serious proposal.

In the hours leading up to President Donald Trump’s prime-time press conference Tuesday, his team knew what was coming. He had been discussing an idea for months — a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip — with advisers, some of whom saw it as a negotiating ploy to give Israeli leaders more leverage over Hamas as they try to turn a fragile cease-fire into a lasting peace.

A small U.S. security firm is hiring nearly 100 U.S. special forces veterans to help run a checkpoint in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas truce, according to a company spokesperson and a recruitment email seen by Reuters, introducing armed American contractors into the heart of one of the world's most violent conflict zones.

A ceasefire has finally been agreed between Israel and Hamas.

Cuomo, NewsNation

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The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, expected to begin its first phase Sunday, has brought relief to the international community but questions about whether the truce will hold — an issue that President-elect Trump will have to oversee when he takes office next week.

The deal could halt some 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas that has leveled vast tracts of Gaza.

I am eager for the war in Gaza to end and for the hostages to be released. Yet, I am concerned that the ceasefire deal agreed upon this week by Israel and Hamas is inevitably going to allow Hamas to retalia...

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has emerged as a voice of unique clarity in the zero-sum debate over Israel-Palestine.

Despite losing 32 members of his family in this war, Ahmed has become one of the most vocal Palestinian critics of Hamas in the West, bringing a rare nuance and undisputed humanity to debate that has been so lacking online and off. Jewish News isn’t in the business of bringing speakers to the UK, but this time it felt too important not to.

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An outspoken critic of Hamas has told a London audience that while he did not claim to speak on behalf of all Palestinians, he was confident thousands of Gazans were similarly critical, adding — “I see the seeds of transformation on social media”.

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I joined the Debate on France 24 (@F24Debate) to discuss the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel and its implications for Gaza, the region, "resistance" movements, the incoming Trump Administration, and impact on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Yahya Sinwar was an uncompromising extremist, a violent ideologue who once told an Israeli interrogator that even 100,000 dead Palestinian civilians would not be too many if it meant meeting his long-standing political goal of eliminating the state of Israel.

Biden administration officials are celebrating the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at the hands of Israel Defense Forces as a triumph of justice over evil, but also as a key opportunity to settle the war in Gaza by relaunching negotiations aimed at securing a cease-fire and the release of the remaining hostages in the enclave.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza, joins us one year after the Israel-Hamas war began.

"I saw how [Hamas] manipulated the social fabric of society."

Alkhatib adds: "Even with the brain washing, there are Palestinians who want something else, want a different way.

The “pro-Palestine” movement’s response to the October 7 massacre by Hamas was marked by strategic missteps and a lack of empathy for Israeli victims.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has emerged as a voice of unique clarity in the zero-sum debate over Israel-Palestine.

The group has abused hostages and Palestinians in its efforts to maintain control of Gaza and wage an insurgent war.

As protests continue to sweep across the nation, leading to more than 2,000 arrests, reporter Lilia Luciano explores how the language used in campus demonstrations is fueling strife and complicating the dynamics of these movements.

Born and raised in Gaza and now living in the U.S., Middle East analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has lost 31 family members since Oct 7, in multiple airstrikes throughout the Gaza Strip. Alkhatib is angry and grieving. But he’s also challenging the narrow narratives on college campuses and in the streets and taking heat for fact-checking Hamas—which was voted in years ago by less than half of today’s Gaza population—as he vows to work with all sides in forging a new path forward.

The Realign For Palestine project is an intrepid initiative spearheaded by Ahmed Al-Khatib and moderated by the incisive Merissa Khurma.

In what is being dubbed “the flood of life” movement, tens of thousands of Palestinians throughout Gaza have been demonstrating against Hamas’s regime.

As anti-Hamas protests sprung up across Gaza, it became clear how wrong many narratives about Palestinians have been

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Rigid maximalist demands won’t deliver the future Palestinians desperately need.

As rare mass demonstrations erupt in northern Gaza denouncing Hamas, Jewish and pro-Israel communities grapple with what the protests mean

US President Donald Trump’s proposed “takeover” of the Gaza Strip has generated headlines but not meaningful solutions for the intractable problems facing the coastal enclave.

Two days ago, the president of the United States declared his intention to assume long-term ownership of the Gaza Strip, turn the coastal enclave into a real-estate-development heaven, and permanently remove its Palestinian inhabitants to other countries. The administration has already walked this proposal back, but not before touting the president’s “out of the box” thinking—a phrase that suggests ignorance of where, exactly, the box is.

Since the October 7 attack and the horrendous discourse that the massacre has unleashed, it has been difficult for many in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities to remain hopeful about the prospect of peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. An avalanche of hateful rhetoric, coupled with intense protests, has seemingly ignored the plight of hostages still in Hamas’s captivity, and a host of academic and media-based justifications for violence as a form of “resistance” have caused many to give up hope.

On the evening of Feb. 4, U.S. President Donald Trump shocked the world—including many lawmakers in his own party—by announcing that the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out,” he said.

The end of the fighting between Hamas and Israel in Gaza is a good initial step to reversing 15 months of unprecedented horror that was unleashed by the terror group’s Oct. 7 attack against Israeli communities near Gaza.

As President Donald Trump hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington today, Trump must push Netanyahu to create a political horizon for Palestinians in Gaza.

Predictably, the Oscar award for the documentary film “No Other Land” generated reactions among the classic fault lines of the Israel and Palestine conflict. Some believed it was a courageous work that highlighted the value of non-violent activism and cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis to challenge unjust forms of a military occupation regime that continuously pushes Palestinians out of lands they have lived on for generations and seeks to erase their connection to that land permanently.

I was born in Gaza Strip in the late 1990s, one of six children. At the time, the Palestinian Authority was the ruling party. My father, like most people in Gaza, was sick of the PA's corruption and was waiting for any alternative. Hamas promised "change and reform" and they won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006. One year later, I awoke to the sound of gunfire. Hamas gunmen were fighting Fatah, and they ended up killing of more than 600 Palestinians. It became clear very quickly that Hamas was not the "change and reform" that we hoped for.

Protests are spreading across the United States at college campuses, where university students are gathering in the name of Palestinian rights and occupying campus spaces with tents. Sadly, not everyone who purports to support Palestinians is truly interested in safeguarding our rights.

Ever since Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel and Israel's response in Gaza, there have been mass calls for a ceasefire coming from the Left, who have been pressuring President Biden to force Israel to give up its military operation to eradicate Hamas. On the flip side, Israel and its supporters have insisted that they must complete the mission and put an end to the terrorist regime.

Since the start of the current war between Israel and Hamas, Hamas has committed countless atrocities against its own people in Gaza. This was true even before the war. Yet somehow, despite the fact that Hamas has effectively kidnapped the Gaza strip and all its inhabitants and routinely terrorizes them, these crimes are never reported by Arabic media or western media, nor by global human rights organizations, all of which tend to portray Hamas as a legitimate resistance group who are trying to "liberate" the Palestinians.

Two peoples with past traumas and an intertwined fate: Why coexistence, justice and peace are the only way forward. Without warning, an Israeli air strike destroyed the five-story house in central Gaza City where I grew up last Friday. Almost 30 immediate and extended family members were inside.

When I was 18, I attended a rally in support of Gaza in San Francisco during one of the wars between Israel and Hamas. I was soon identified by a news reporter as someone from Gaza whose entire family is still there, who asked me what I thought of rockets being fired at Israeli towns and cities.

At around 5 A.M. on Thursday, Dec. 14, I received a WhatsApp message that I was hoping desperately never to receive. My mother informed me that a deadly Israeli airstrike had hit her family's home in Rafah, the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, which was supposed to be a safe area, in Rafah's "Brazil" neighborhood, a few hundred feet from the borders with Egypt.

Although I’ve lost many relatives, I still believe Palestinians and Israelis can embrace a different path.

I’m worried about the suffering of civilians right now—and the lack of a plan for a better future.

Over the last two decades, Western activists have only made things worse for my people.

I grew up in Gaza. Now I’m trying to expose Hamas as a disaster for the Palestinian people.

As America eulogizes Jimmy Carter, it is essential to reflect on a key component of his legacy that enabled him to succeed as a peacemaker in the Middle East: radical pragmatism rooted in humanity.