“We are facing an inflection point in history.” On Thursday evening, US President Joe Biden spoke to Americans from the Oval Office—in only the second such address of his presidency—to tie together the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine as part of a larger struggle for democracy and freedom. Biden made the case that US leadership
On October 13, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—an impartial, neutral humanitarian organization key to the origin story of the Geneva Conventions—issued a rare and exceptional public statement reminding parties to the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict of their obligations under international humanitarian law. After first condemning Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, ICRC stated that “[t]he
ABU DHABI—My route out of Israel in the days after Hamas’s terrorist attack drew the country into war took me from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Abu Dhabi, where I had the opportunity last week to speak with senior government officials about the unfolding war. (In the interest of disclosure: The Emirati government is a
In the aftermath of Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel, the Israeli government appears set for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip with the goal of completely destroying the terrorist organization. Meanwhile, the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza has set off a dire humanitarian crisis, with more than a million Gazans displaced as
The size, scale, and brutality of Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel suggests that the group’s aim was to fundamentally change the strategic dynamic with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and probably in the larger region, as well. Hamas may have believed Israel was weakened, distracted, and divided by its internal political turmoil over the
