‘Horrific': Former Israeli hostage speaks to CNN about conditions in Hamas captivity
Keith Siegel, an Israeli-American citizen, was abducted by Hamas from his home in kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023 and released earlier this year as part of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal. In an interview with CNN's Jeremy Diamond, Siegel describes his captivity and his fears for the remaining hostages.
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The Hill
31 minutes ago
- The Hill
Rising: June 6, 2025
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The Hill
33 minutes ago
- The Hill
Why Trump stopped listening to Netanyahu
In his first term, President Trump was widely seen as a knee-jerk defender of Israel. Now, not so much. Whether and how far Washington splits from Jerusalem — especially on Iran's nuclear-weapons program — has enormous security implications for America, Israel and the wider Middle East. For Trump, personal relationships with foreign leaders equate to the relations between their countries. If he is friendly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then U.S.-Israel relations are good. And vice versa. Today, neither relationship is fully broken, but both are increasingly strained. Seeking the strongly pro-Israel evangelical Christian vote in 2016, Trump pledged to withdraw from President Barack Obama's Iran nuclear deal and generally provide Israel strong support. He kept that promise, exiting the agreement in 2018. Moreover, Trump moved America's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, merged the separate Palestinian liaison office into the bilateral U.S. mission, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and protected Israel at the U.N. Security Council. The transactional basis for these acts was clear. Having close personal relations with Netanyahu, or at least appearing to, buttressed this political imperative. How good those first-term relations really were invites debate, but a continuing rationale was Trump's desire for reelection in 2020 and, later, 2024. Keeping the pro-Israel vote was a top priority in both races. Even though tensions developed between Trump and Netanyahu, few surfaced publicly. In 2024, Trump held the evangelical vote while losing Jewish voters to Harris by a mere 34 points. Even many Harris voters believed Trump would safeguard Israel's interests. But now that electoral constraint is gone, since Trump has essentially admitted he cannot run again. Meanwhile, earlier irritants — such as Netanyahu garnering publicity for his role in the 2020 strike against Iran's Qassem Soleimani, swiftly congratulating Joe Biden for winning in 2020 and his general aptitude for getting more attention than Trump himself — caused personal relations to grow frostier. And all of this was very likely fed by Trump's recurring envy of Obama's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. So in just four months since the inauguration, Trump concluded a separate peace with Yemen's Houthi rebels, ending inconclusive U.S. efforts to clear the Red Sea maritime passage and leaving Israel in the lurch while Houthi missiles targeted Ben Gurion airport. The White House, without Israel, bargained with Hamas for release of Edan Alexander, their last living American hostage. Trump's first major overseas trip was to three Gulf Arab countries, but he skipped Israel, in direct contrast to his first term. While in Saudi Arabia, Trump lifted sanctions imposed on Syria's Assad dictatorship, clearly breaking with Israel, which retains grave doubts about the militant group that ousted Assad and now rules the country. The record is not entirely negative. Trump sanctioned the International Criminal Court for initiating investigations against Netanyahu and his former defense minister. He broadly, but not unreservedly, backs Israel's campaign against Hamas. But the greatest divergence has emerged over the existential threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program. On April 7, during Netanyahu's second post-inaugural visit to the Oval Office, no one seemed more stunned than he when Trump announced that Steve Witkoff would soon be negotiating with Iran. Trump had previously disclosed writing to Ayatollah Khamenei, expressing openness to negotiation but setting a two-month deadline, implying military force should talks fail. If the clock started from the date Iran received the letter, that two-month period has ended. If it began with the first Witkoff-Iran meeting (April 12 in Oman), the drop-dead date is imminent. Trump could extend the deadline, but that would simply extend Israel's peril. Reports that Witkoff has broached an 'interim' or 'framework' deal further exacerbate the dangers of Tehran tapping Washington along. Time is always on the proliferator's side. While discussions languish, Iran can even further disperse, conceal and harden its nuclear weapons assets. Trump acknowledges pressing Israel more than once not to strike Iran's nuclear program. Such public rebukes to a close ally facing mortal peril are themselves extraordinary, proving how hard Trump is trying to save Witkoff's endeavors. Little is known about the talks' substance, but reports show signs of inconsistency and uncertainty — indeed incompetence — over such critical issues as whether Iran would be permitted to enrich uranium to reactor-grade levels, the original sin of the Obama deal. To say Netanyahu is worried is more than an understatement. Trump's behavior is entirely consistent with greater personal distance from Netanyahu and a desire to be the central figure, rather than Netanyahu's Israel taking dispositive action against Tehran's threat. It may also reflect the isolationist voices within his administration, although not among Republicans generally, as 52 senators and 177 representatives have publicly urged Trump not to throw Iran a lifeline. Israel did not ask permission in 1981 before destroying Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor, or in 2007 before destroying Iran's reactor that was under construction in the Syrian desert. Trump is grievously mistaken if he thinks Netanyahu will 'chicken out,' standing idly by as Iran becomes a nuclear power. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019 and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. He held senior State Department posts from 1981 to 1983, from 1989 to 1993 and from 2001 to 2005.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Opinion - Progressives push anti-Israel activism, are surprised by antisemitic violence that follows
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is running for cover. After the horrific attack on Jews in Boulder, Colo., the Minnesota representative issued the kind of bland statement meant to deflect blame, posting this on X: 'I'm holding the victims and families in Boulder, Colorado in my heart. Violence against anyone is never acceptable. We must reject hatred and harm in all its forms.' As some noted, it took nearly 24 hours for Omar to issue even that statement, which notably failed to mention that the victims were Jews and the suspect is an Egyptian Muslim who attacked them while shouting 'Free Palestine.' A video has now surfaced in which the accused assailant ranted about his faith, saying 'Allahu Akbar.' After he firebombed a group of Jews, he told investigators he wanted to 'kill all Zionist people.' One of the victims, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, asked NBC News, 'What the hell is going on in our country?' It's a question everyone should be asking. Here's part of the answer: It is a very easy hop from college students intimidating Jewish students and chanting about Intifada and a Muslim man trying to murder Jews. It is similarly but a short leap from Omar, who applauded anti-Israel student protesters at Columbia University for being 'brave and patriotic,' voted against an antisemitism resolution in the U.S. House and suggested to aggrieved people acting out of anger that some Jewish students are just 'pro-genocide.' It is also easy to connect student demonstrations with terrorism. For the first time, a protester at Columbia University — an outsider arrested for hate crimes against Jews — has been linked to Hamas. He won't be the last. In recent months we have witnessed not only the hideous attempt to burn Jews alive in Boulder, but also the firebombing of Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's home and the cold-blooded murder of two young Jewish people at the Jewish Capital Museum in Washington. All three suspects expressed anti-Israel sentiments, with the alleged perpetrator of the latter killings shouting 'free, free Palestine' after he shot the victims 21 times. The Anti-Defamation League reports that 2024 saw a record number of antisemitic attacks, up 344 percent over the past five years. This is intolerable. Radicalized students at some of our top schools are part of the problem. Recently, MIT's graduation was marred by a student speaker, Megha Vemuri, who donned the politically symbolic keffiyeh and told the commencement audience, 'We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it.' She also accused MIT of complicity 'in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.' Writing in the Times of Israel, one alum panned the speech as a 'trite, TikTok-depth graduation speech on a tragic issue of devastating complexity'; she condemned the administration for not informing the audience of myriad programs funded by MIT that improves the lives and futures of Palestinians. MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, did not defend the university or refute Vemuri's incendiary language; instead, she stepped to the podium and said, 'At MIT, we believe in freedom of expression. But today is about the graduates.' Not, apparently, about the Jewish graduates. A Jew graduating with a Ph.D in cryptography posted on X: 'I finally got my PhD from @MIT, with my 5-year-old twins, my 2-year-old and my parents (children of Holocaust survivors) traveling halfway around the world just to be there. Instead, MIT's student commencement speaker decided it was appropriate to use the moment for hate-filled rhetoric against Israelis and Jews … too many in the crowd erupted with cheers and anger. My kids might not have understood every word, but they felt the fear and hostility. … How could @MIT let this happen? How, indeed. It is not only schools that are allowing anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred to spiral out of control; because the fever is being staunchly condemned by the Trump White House, the media has gone mushy. After the Boulder incident, USA Today ran a sob-sister piece about the offspring of the Egyptian man who tried to burn Jews alive with the headline: 'Boulder suspect's daughter dreamed of studying medicine. Now she faces deportation.' After receiving massive blowback, USA Today quietly revised the offensive piece. Increasingly, it is progressives like Omar who are responsible for surging antisemitism. Apologists claim that supporting Palestine and opposing Israel do not constitute antisemitism. Perhaps they would not in in isolation, but the protesters have taken pains to muddy the waters as much as possible. As the New York Times recently noted, 'the sprawling protest movement against the war in Gaza has scrambled efforts to distinguish opposition to the actions of the Israeli government, or even to the state of Israel itself, from hostility to Jews. Critics of the protesters have argued that slogans like 'globalize the Intifada' are thinly veiled calls for violence in any Jewish space.' A rabbi in Boulder was quoted by the Times writing, 'Jews in America have mostly felt the threats of antisemitism from the far right in the form of White Supremacy, yet now many of us have experienced hatred, bigotry and intolerance from progressives, those who many of us have considered friends and allies.' In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman writes, 'The American radical anti-Israel movement has built the intellectual scaffolding for—and in many cases all but invited—the violence now playing out in places like Boulder. When you call for 'Intifada,' you cannot feign surprise when someone takes that call literally. Whatever your legal right to speak, that is the outcome you invoked.' Lehman is correct: The Intifada is here and must be confronted. Our government must protect free speech criticizing Israel or supporting Palestine, but it must also deploy all resources to punish acts of violence — including on college campuses — before more people get hurt. If it were blacks or Asians under attack, we would not have to defend efforts to stave off hate crimes. Jews should be afforded the same protections. Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. 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