“Oct 7 2023”

Israel will not engage in a full-scale military offensive in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. Instead, it will continue its limited operation in the last Hamas bastion, with the blessing of the Biden administration, according to Washington Post analyst David Ignatius.

In an opinion piece published on Monday citing sources familiar with the matter, the newspaper’s senior commentator wrote that the framework for eventually ending the Gaza war became more clear after a just-wrapped trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel by U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, the U.S. National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.

It was with unexpected interest that I read Elizabeth Spiers’s “guest essay” for the New York Times over the weekend, titled “Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots,” and not just because it was akin to a brief visitation from the tattered ghost of cocaine-addled early 2000s New York City online scenester “journalism.” (She was the founding editor of Gawker, although she left when it was still just a catty, petty upstart devoted to vandalizing the pieties of the New York publishing scene rather than the worst den of sleaze to ever exist.) Now she lectures to journalism students at a prestigious school — a very apropos post-career sinecure — and is here to tell us that she knows these kids, she has met these kids in her classes, and people like me are simply just getting these kids all wrong.

There are 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza. We already know, thanks to the relentless investigations conducted by Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, that some of those UNRWA members joined Hamas operatives on October 7, taking part in the atrocities inflicted that day, joining in the fun of rape, torture, and murder of Israeli men, women, and children. Other UNRWA members in Gaza have subsequently expressed support for Hamas’ actions. UNRWA schools still use textbooks full of antisemitic passages. UNRWA’s European and American donors have repeatedly demanded that such material be excised from the schoolbooks; UNRWA solemnly promises that it will comply, and then never does, and the farce continues. UNRWA never objects when Hamas hides its rocket launchers and weapons in UNRWA schools and other facilities. Some Palestinians working for UNRWA may be afraid to raise that issue with the agency, but many more approve of aiding and abetting the terror group. Unlike Palestinians, the Europeans who head UNRWA need not fear reprisals from Hamas if they were to demand that it remove its weapons and fighters from UNRWA schools. They have chosen not to do so; worse still, some of them have denied that Hamas hides weapons in those schools, when everyone in Gaza knows the truth.

From 2009 until 2021, Israel succeeded at preventing the International Criminal Court from opening a full war crimes probe against it, holding it at bay with a preliminary review of jurisdictional issues.

From June 2021 until October 2023, Israel also held ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan at bay, who barely talked about Israel and the Palestinians for his first two-and-a-half years, and absent the current war, many believe that Khan would have given Jerusalem a pass both on the 2014 Gaza conflict, and maybe even on the settlement enterprise.

Everything changed in less than a month.

The Université du Québec à Montréal says it has informed pro-Palestinian protesters who erected an encampment on campus it will need to “take actions” if the protest continues to impede access to some of its buildings.

In a statement issued Saturday, the university said its priority is ensuring all of its students’ safety, including those taking part in the encampment, as well as maintaining free movement on campus and access to its pavilions.

The International Criminal Court Chief is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, its Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday.

“Today.. we’ve applied for warrants to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC in relation to three individuals that are Hamas members,” Khan said.