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      Discovery of 6 Dead Hostages in Gaza Spurs Protest and Division in Israel

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      The Israeli military said Sunday that Hamas had killed the hostages before they were discovered by Israeli troops on Saturday.The Israeli military said on Sunday that six bodies found in a tunnel under the Gaza Strip belonged to hostages who had been killed by Hamas, setting off a wave of grief and anger in Israel and further cleaving the deep divisions among the public, and the country’s leaders, over the future course of the war.Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman, said the bodies had been recovered a day earlier in the labyrinths under the southern city of Rafah, about one kilometer from where a seventh hostage, Farhan al-Qadi, was found alive last week.“They were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists a short time before we reached them,” Admiral Hagari said. The Israeli Ministry of Health said in a statement on Sunday that the hostages were killed by “a number of short-range shots” and that they had died about “48-72 hours before their examination.”After the recovery of six hostages that the Israeli military said had been killed by Hamas, demonstrators filled the streets of Tel Aviv demanding that the government do more to bring the remaining hostages home.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesIn an initial statement, Hamas did not directly address the accusations but said responsibility for the deaths lay with Israel, which it blamed for the lack of an agreement to stop the fighting in Gaza. Hamas later asserted in a separate statement that the hostages were killed by the Israeli military’s bullets, without providing evidence.The recovery of the hostages’ bodies put into stark relief the competing priorities of Israel’s leaders: those intent on dismantling Hamas through the pursuit and killing of its fighters and officials, and those who want to reach a truce that would bring home the dozens of captives still believed to be still alive in the enclave.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israeli Protesters Demand a Deal for the Release of Hostages

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      Protesters flooded the streets of Israeli cities on Sunday in mass demonstrations demanding that the government immediately accept a deal for the release of hostages held in Gaza. The furious protests, some of the largest the country has seen over months of failed negotiations, came after the Israeli military announced that six of the hostages had recently been killed in Gaza.In Tel Aviv, protest organizers put the number of people in the hundreds of thousands. Hostage families and a crowd of supporters carried six prop coffins in a march through the city. They swarmed in front of the Israeli military headquarters and clashed with the police on a major highway.In Jerusalem, the Israeli police fired skunk water, a noxious crowd control weapon, and forcefully removed a crowd of hundreds who rallied at the city’s main entrance. In smaller cities too, including Rehovot, in central Israel, people blocked traffic and chanted, “We want them back living, not in coffins!”Israelis demonstrated outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office after the military recovered the bodies of six killed hostages from a tunnel underneath Rafah, Gaza.Ronen Zvulun/ReutersThe national uproar built on months of protests and increasingly aggressive actions by the families of many hostages, who have been attempting to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to accept a deal to little avail.The frustration of the families, who have accused Mr. Netanyahu of sacrificing their loved ones for his own political gain, appeared to reach a boiling point on Sunday after the Israeli military said it had recovered the bodies of six hostages killed in Gaza. The Israeli health ministry said they had been shot at close range sometime between Thursday and Friday morning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Three Israeli Police Officers Killed in the West Bank

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      Gunmen killed three Israeli police officers on Sunday morning as they drove through the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the latest episode in the spiral of violence in the territory that includes attacks by Palestinian and Israeli extremists, as well as ongoing raids by the Israeli military in Palestinian cities.The officers were shot and killed as they drove along a highway in the southern part of the West Bank, close to a major checkpoint where traffic is screened before entering Israel, according to statements from the Israeli police and Magen David Adom, the emergency medical service.One of the officers was the father of a police officer who was killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 raid on southern Israel that started the war in Gaza, according to the police.The episode followed two attacks on Friday night by Palestinian militants, one of whom attempted to detonate a car bomb at a busy intersection in the southern West Bank, according to the Israeli military. In the second attack, a Palestinian drove into a nearby Israeli settlement, prompting a car chase and a shootout that caused an explosion in the Palestinian’s car, the military said.The Israeli military raided three major cities in the northern West Bank last week, killing at least 22 people, according to the Palestinian health authorities. The military said the operation was aimed at quelling armed Palestinian groups, but critics warned that the death and destruction caused by the raids risked encouraging the same violence that they aimed to reduce.Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 after capturing it from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year. Israel has since built hundreds of settlements in the territory, which are considered illegal by most of the world. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis now live under military protection in the West Bank, interspersed among roughly three million Palestinians who generally want the territory to form the backbone of a future Palestinian state.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Says It Has Recovered More Bodies in Gaza

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      The Israeli military asked the public not to speculate, but many Israelis assumed the announcement referred to dead hostages. The news amplified calls for a cease-fire and hostage-release deal.The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had found a number of dead bodies during an operation in the Gaza Strip, asking the Israeli public to refrain from speculation about their identities.The announcement was widely interpreted in Israel, however, as confirmation that more Israeli hostages had died in captivity, and it quickly amplified calls for an immediate cease-fire in order to free the roughly 100 captives still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza.Roughly 250 people were captured by Hamas and its allies during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which started the war.The military said in a statement on Saturday that the recently found bodies had yet to be identified and brought to Israel. It did not give further details about how many bodies had been found or where they were discovered, and it would not officially confirm that they were hostages.Still, the news of the discovery accelerated an increasingly rancorous debate within Israeli society about whether Israel should soften its position during negotiations with Hamas for a cease-fire. Under the terms currently being negotiated, scores of hostages would be released from captivity in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians detained in Israel.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is holding out for a deal in which the country would be able to retain control of strategic parts of Gaza during the cease-fire and restart the war in the future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eliyahu Rips, Who Claimed to Find Secret Codes in the Torah, Dies at 75

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      His work provided the basis for the worldwide best seller “The Bible Code,” but he later rejected the book as unscientific.It sounds like a headline ripped from a supermarket tabloid: In 1994, three Israeli researchers claimed to have found a secret code embedded in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.But this wasn’t junk science. The paper in which they revealed their findings appeared in an esteemed, peer-reviewed journal. And the academic reputations of the three authors — Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witztum — were unimpeachable, especially that of Dr. Rips.A math prodigy born to Holocaust survivors in Latvia, he had received his doctorate from, and spent his career at, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he became known for his work in a field called geometric group theory.He had also become convinced that statistical tools and newer, more powerful computers that were becoming available in the 1980s could be used to identify hidden meaning within the Bible, and he teamed up with his two partners to discover them. Their biggest finding was the names of 32 Jewish scholars in the text, along with their birth or death dates; several of the scholars had lived thousands of years after Genesis was written.Their results, reported in the journal Statistical Science, set off a tempest in the worlds of biblical scholarship and statistical analysis. In 1997, Michael Drosnin, a journalist, used the team’s tools to write “The Bible Code,” a global best seller that claimed to find not just rabbis’ birthdays but also predictions about world events, including the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, all embedded in the Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament. (Mr. Drosnin died in 2020.)The book put Dr. Rips in an international spotlight. Magazine and newspaper profiles proliferated; with his Gandalfian white beard and wide-brimmed hat, he seemed to embody the intersection of science and Jewish mysticism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gaza Debate Reopens Divisions Between Left-Wing Workers and Union Leaders

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      Last week’s Democratic National Convention surfaced differences over the war in Gaza that could widen fissures between labor activists and union officials.When members of the Chicago Teachers Union showed up to march at the Democratic National Convention last week, many expressed two distinct frustrations.The first was over the war in Gaza, which they blamed for chewing up billions of dollars in aid to Israel that they said could be better spent on students, in addition to a staggering loss of life. The second was disappointment with their parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, which they felt should go further in pressuring the Biden administration to rein in Israel’s military campaign.“I was disappointed in the resolution on Israel and Palestine because it didn’t call for an end to armed shipments,” said Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher who attended the protest, alluding to a statement that the parent union endorsed at its convention in July.Since last fall, many rank-and-file union members have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led militants killed more than 1,000 people and took about 250 hostages. The leaders of many national unions have appeared more cautious, at times emphasizing the precipitating role of Hamas.“We were very careful about what a moral stance was and also what the implications of every word we wrote was,” the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said of the resolution her union recently adopted.In some ways, this divide reflects tensions over Israel and Gaza that exist within many institutions — like academia, the media and government.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jenin, a Target of Israeli Raids, Is a Symbol of Rebellion for Palestinians

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      Jenin, a focal point of Israel’s wide-ranging raid into the West Bank on Wednesday, is a potent symbol of rebellion and militancy for Palestinians after decades of fighting against occupying powers.That history dates back to British rule of Palestine during what was known as the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, and through the 1948 Arab-Israeli war surrounding the creation of the modern Israel and triggered the flight or expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.But Jenin’s resonance today, both for Palestinians and Israelis, largely stems from the second intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation in the early 2000s.Israelis remember Jenin, which sits in the rolling hillsides of the northern West Bank, as a source of dozens of suicide bombers sent into Israel at that time.Palestinians remember a 10-day battle, known as the Battle of Jenin, in 2002 between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces. Israel killed 52 people, of which up to half may have been civilians, according to the United Nations in a report on the event. The fighting killed 23 Israeli soldiers.Yasir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, dubbed the camp “Jeningrad,” a reference to the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Major Israeli-Palestinian Clashes in the West Bank: A Timeline

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      Since Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, more than 580 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, according to the United Nations, as Israel has ramped up military raids there and violence by extremist Jewish settlers has increased.Many Palestinians have died in Jenin or its refugee camp, long strongholds of the armed groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad; in Tulkarm, a West Bank city near the Israeli border; and in the nearby Nur Shams neighborhood. On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had begun a raid focusing on Jenin and Tulkarm, and that nine people it described as militants had been killed.Here are some of the notable recent Israeli military operations in the territory:July 3-5, 2023: Israel launched its largest military operation in years against armed groups in the West Bank, a raid meant to curb attacks by armed Palestinians on Israelis. Israel carried out deadly airstrikes, which had not happened there in about two decades.Twelve Palestinians were killed during the operation, which involved about 1,000 Israeli soldiers. Militant groups claimed at least nine of them as members. One Israeli soldier was also killed, possibly mistakenly by a fellow soldier. Thousands of people fled their homes and Israel detained and interrogated many others. Here are pictures of the raid.Oct. 19, 2023: At least 13 Palestinians and one Israeli officer were killed in clashes, less than two weeks after the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel. At least five of the 13 Palestinians were children.The worst clashes were in Nur Shams. Israel’s military said that it was “thwarting terrorist infrastructure and confiscating weapons” in the operation — and that Palestinians had fought back, shooting and throwing improvised bombs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More