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      Israeli Jets Pummel Hezbollah Targets in Southern Lebanon

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      Sirens sounded in northern Israel, warning of incoming fire from Hezbollah.Israel’s air force pounded targets in Lebanon as its soldiers clashed with Hezbollah militants in the southern part of the country, the military said on Sunday. Lebanon’s government said that at least 23 people had been killed over the past 24 hours.The Lebanese Red Cross said overnight that it was responding to a “major strike” in the southern city of Nabatieh, posting an image on social media that showed flames and rubble. Lebanon’s civil defense said on Sunday morning one person had been killed and four others wounded.The civil defense also said its teams had completed a search and rescue operation shortly before dawn after an attack a day earlier on the town of Al-Maaysra in the central Keserwan district. It said that 17 people — including two women and three children — had been killed and 12 others wounded. The Health Ministry listed a series of other attacks in which it said that at least six people had been killed and dozens of others injured since Saturday.On Sunday morning, the Israeli military said that its jets had hit around “200 Hezbollah targets deep in Lebanon and southern Lebanon” over the past day as part of its multipronged fight against the Iranian-backed militant group.Hezbollah started firing on northern Israel in solidarity with its ally Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks last year, setting off back-and-forth exchanges of fire that displaced communities on both sides of the border. Israel, which is also fighting in Gaza against Hamas, stepped up its bombardment in recent weeks before invading southern Lebanon with ground troops.The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion have killed at least 2,000 people and caused significant destruction and forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee their homes. Aid agencies have warned it is compounding a humanitarian crisis prompted by the war in Gaza.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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      Secret Documents Show Hamas Tried to Persuade Iran to Join Its Oct. 7 Attack

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      The Times reviewed the minutes of 10 meetings among Hamas’s top leaders. The records show the militant group avoided several escalations since 2021 to falsely imply it had been deterred — while seeking Iranian support for a major attack.For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.The documents, which represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas, also show extensive efforts to deceive Israel about its intentions as the group laid the groundwork for a bold assault and a regional conflagration that Mr. Sinwar hoped would cause Israel to “collapse.”The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the attack, on Oct. 7, 2023. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’s leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.The documents, which were verified by The Times, lay out the main strategies and assessments of the leadership group:Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack, which it code-named “the big project,” in the fall of 2022. But the group delayed executing the plan as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate.As they prepared arguments aimed at Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders said that Israel’s “internal situation” — an apparent reference to turmoil over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plans to overhaul the judiciary — was among the reasons they were “compelled to move toward a strategic battle.”In July 2023, Hamas dispatched a top official to Lebanon, where he met with a senior Iranian commander and requested help with striking sensitive sites at the start of the assault.The senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to prepare; the minutes do not say how detailed a plan was presented by Hamas to its allies.The documents also say that Hamas planned to discuss the attack in more detail at a subsequent meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, but do not clarify whether the discussion happened.Hamas felt assured of its allies’ general support, but concluded it might need to go ahead without their full involvement — in part to stop Israel from deploying an advanced new air-defense system before the assault took place.The decision to attack was also influenced by Hamas’s desire to disrupt efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the entrenchment of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Israeli efforts to exert greater control over the Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, sacred in both Islam and Judaism and known to Jews as the Temple Mount.Hamas deliberately avoided major confrontations with Israel for two years from 2021, in order to maximize the surprise of the Oct. 7 attack. As the leaders saw it, they “must keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm.”Hamas leaders in Gaza said they briefed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political leader, on “the big project.” It was not previously known whether Mr. Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel in July, had been briefed on the attack before it happened.Prelude to WarThe documents provide greater context to one of the most pivotal moments in modern Middle Eastern history, showing it was both the culmination of a yearslong plan, as well as a move partly shaped by specific events after Mr. Netanyahu returned to power in Israel in late 2022.Yahya Sinwar in April 2023 in Gaza City. Documents show that he and other Hamas leaders wanted time to lull Israeli leaders into a false sense of security before attacking Israel. Samar Abu Elouf for The New York TimesWe 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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      U.S. Aims to Revive Failed U.N. Plan for Lebanon War

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      At the heart of the frantic diplomatic efforts to halt Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon is a decades-old United Nations resolution that was intended to demilitarize the area and protect Israel from cross-border attacks by Hezbollah.All parties agree that the measure, Security Council Resolution 1701, has been a complete failure. They also agree that reviving it may be the only way out of Israel’s widening war to its north.“The outcome that we want to see is the full implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701,” the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, told reporters on Monday, speaking of Israel’s continuing assault in Lebanon.Mr. Miller said that would mean the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the Israel-Lebanon border, and the deployment of U.N. and Lebanese army forces into the buffer zone in southern Lebanon that the resolution had sought to create.The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1701 in August 2006 as part of a cease-fire that ended Israel’s last war with Lebanon. The resolution called for “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of” Lebanon’s government and a U.N. peacekeeping force in the area known as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL.In recent days, the question of how to restore that resolution has consumed senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Amos Hochstein, a senior White House national security aide who has been working for months to broker an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah to restore calm along the Israel-Lebanon border. Mr. Blinken has also been working the phones with Arab officials to discuss Lebanon’s political future, in which U.S. officials hope the influence of Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, will be diminished.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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      The US won’t run for another term on UN human rights council. Israel is likely why | Kenneth Roth

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      Something unusual happened this week at the UN: the US government decided not to run for a second term on the human rights council. Taking a year off is mandatory after a country serves two three-year terms, but the Biden administration chose to bow out after a single term. That is extremely unusual. What happened?Various rationales are circulating, but one, in my view, looms large: Israel. Or more to the point, Joe Biden’s refusal to suspend or condition the massive US arms sales and military aid to Israel as its military bombs and starves the Palestinian civilians of Gaza.The election for the 47-member human rights council in Geneva is conducted by the 193-member UN general assembly in New York. The balloting would have provided a rare opportunity for the world’s governments to vote on US complicity in Israeli war crimes. The US could have lost. The Biden administration seems to have calculated that it was better to withdraw voluntarily than to face the prospect of such a shameful repudiation.To understand that rationale, one must understand the dynamics of the human rights council election. The council was created in 2006 to replace the old UN commission on human rights. The commission had become a collection of repressive governments that joined it, not to advance human rights but to undermine them. They routinely voted to protect themselves and their ilk.The new council introduced a device that was supposed to avoid that travesty – competitive elections. Rather than the backroom deals that had populated the old commission with the dictators and tyrants of the world, the UN’s five regional groups would each propose slates of candidates on which the full UN membership would vote. The idea was that highly abusive governments could be rejected.View image in fullscreenFor the first few years, it worked. Each year, Human Rights Watch and its allies would single out the most inappropriate candidate for the council, and each year they would either withdraw their candidacy (Syria, Iraq) or lose (Belarus, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka). Even Russia was defeated, in 2016, as its aircraft were bombing Syrian civilians in eastern Aleppo. It lost again in 2023 as it was pummeling Ukrainian civilians.It worked this year as well, when the general assembly for the second time rejected Saudi Arabia, given its murder of hundreds of Ethiopian migrants trying to enter from Yemen, its not-so-distant bombing of Yemeni civilians, its repression of dissidents including women’s rights activists and its brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi.But to avoid that embarrassment, the regional groups began gaming the system. Many started to propose the same number of candidates as openings, effectively depriving the General Assembly of a choice. That’s how the likes of Burundi, Eritrea and Sudan hold council seats. Sometimes there were still competitive slates – Saudi Arabia lost this year because there were six governments seeking five seats for the Asia-Pacific region – but uncompetitive slates have become the norm.Even the western group, despite its ostensible support for an effective council, usually offers uncompetitive slates. The explanation typically offered is that western governments don’t want to bother with the need to lobby the 193 members of the general assembly for support. But that left western governments in no position to press other regions to present competitive slates. The council suffered for their diplomatic laziness.This year, something seems to have gone wrong with this cozy if detrimental practice. In the election this week, the western group had three seats to fill. Iceland, Spain and Switzerland had all put their hats in the ring, and the United States was expected to seek renewal of its term that was coming to an end. Three years ago, when a similar possibility emerged of four western candidates for three positions, Washington persuaded Italy to withdraw, allowing it to run unopposed.But this year, by all appearances, none of the other three Western candidates were eager to abandon their quest. That could have reflected the possibility that Donald Trump would win the US presidential election next month. In 2018, he notoriously relinquished the US seat on the council to protest its criticism of Israel. Iceland, Spain and Switzerland must have wondered: why defer to the US candidacy if Trump may soon nullify?View image in fullscreenThe Biden administration could have run anyway. After all, why not let the nations of the world choose the best three of the four candidates, as was originally supposed to happen? Instead, it bowed out. Yes, maybe it was just being nice – to Iceland, which assumed its seat when Trump abandoned it; to Switzerland, the host of the council; but to Spain? The Spanish government is one of Europe’s most vocal defenders of Palestinian rights. And Washington is ordinarily not reluctant to throw its weight around on behalf of Israel.It is rare that the UN general assembly has the chance to vote on the US government’s conduct. A competitive vote for the UN human rights council would have provided such an opportunity. Given widespread outrage at Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and at Biden’s refusal to use the enormous leverage of US arms sales and military aid to stop it – that vote could easily have resulted in an overwhelming repudiation of the Biden administration. Rather than face the possibility of a humiliating reprimand, the US government withdrew its candidacy.These events show again how devastating Biden’s support for Israel has been for the cause of human rights. By virtue of its diplomatic and economic power, the US government can be an important force for human rights. Other than on Israel, its presence on the council has generally helped the defense of human rights.But US credibility, already compromised by Washington’s close alliances with the repressive likes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has been profoundly undermined by Biden’s aiding and abetting of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. With Biden seemingly constitutionally unable to change, the defense of human rights is taking a hit.That doesn’t mean an end to that defense. The human rights council functioned well despite Trump’s withdrawal. Without the baggage of Washington’s ideological animosity, Latin American democracies led a successful effort to condemn Venezuela. Tiny Iceland secured condemnation of the mass summary executions spawned by the “drug war” of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, whom Trump had embraced.But it is a sad state of affairs when, rather than join the frontline defense of human rights at a time of severe threat – in Russia, Ukraine, China, Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere – the Biden administration has gone sulking from Geneva back to Washington. It says it won’t run again for the council until 2028.

      Kenneth Roth was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022. He is now a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs More

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      Hurricanes, the Middle East, and Covid-19 tests to Putin – podcast

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      It’s less than a month before the US presidential election. Donald Trump is pushing conspiracy theories over the federal response to hurricanes battering several states, and denying he gave Covid-19 test machines to Vladimir Putin during the pandemic. Joe Biden is in talks with Benjamin Netanyahu over growing tension in the Middle East. Kamala Harris rattled through a media blitz, with some criticising her campaign strategy. And Melania Trump has written about being pro-abortion and pro-immigration in her new memoir.
      Jonathan Freedland and the veteran political strategist David Axelrod discuss what all of this means for the election

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Israel’s Security Cabinet to Meet to Discuss Response to Iran Attack

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      The cabinet was expected to authorize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, to initiate a retaliatory attack at their discretion, officials said.Israel’s security cabinet was set to convene on Thursday evening, officials said, to discuss Israel’s response to an Iranian barrage of some 200 ballistic missiles that sent nearly the entire country into reinforced shelters last week.Senior ministers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will discuss the overall plan for Israel’s retaliation, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the discussions.The cabinet was expected to authorize Mr. Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, to initiate the response at their discretion, the officials said.Iran’s attack in early October came in retaliation for Israel’s killing of top leaders in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — all proxy militias funded by Iran. One of them, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, was assassinated while staying in a state guesthouse in Tehran in July. The majority of the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. but a Palestinian was killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank when a fragment of an Iranian missile fell on him.International mediators and the Biden administration fear a massive Israeli strike could touch off a wider, direct escalation between Israel and Iran. The regional archnemeses’ decades-long shadow war escalated in direct action in April, when Iran launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israeli territory. Most were intercepted. More

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      Republicans threaten to punish colleges that allow pro-Palestinian protests

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      Top Republicans are threatening to pull billions of dollars of federal funding from some of the most prestigious universities in the US, stripping them of official accreditation to punish them for allowing pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses.The Guardian has reviewed a video recording of a meeting in Washington last week between House majority leader Steve Scalise and the powerful pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). In it, Scalise outlined how he planned to unleash a massive attack against universities that fail to squash criticism of Israel.The offensive, which would be coordinated with the White House should Donald Trump win the presidential race in November, could even threaten the existence of universities, Scalise warned. He talked about revoking accreditation, the system by which higher education institutions are approved and to which the bulk of federal funds are tied.“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise said. “You’re not playing games any more, or else you’re not a school any more.”The Aipac meeting was held on 1 October, and was attended by Scalise and his fellow Republican congressman, Pat Fallon from Texas. The event was ostensibly billed as a discussion on the spread of antisemitism in the US since the start of the Gaza conflict on 7 October last year, when Hamas killed 1,200 people inside Israel and took 250 hostage.The attack sparked the Israeli offensive, which has destroyed much of the Palestinian territory and killed almost 42,000 people, according to local health authorities. The fall-out continues to roil campuses and cities throughout the US.Latest FBI figures show that the monthly rate of hate crimes against Jewish people in the US spiked in the aftermath of 7 October from 103 offenses in September 2023 to 389 in November. Anti-Muslim incidents have also surged.Despite the Aipac-Scalise meeting’s framing on antisemitism, most of the talk was about how to crush criticism of Israel’s military operation in Gaza. There was no attempt during the hour-long conversation to distinguish hatred of Jews from pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli government sentiments.Aipac is the most influential pro-Israel lobby group in the US. It has a $100m war chest to spend on the election this year, and is using that muscle to support political candidates that back the actions of the Israeli government and oppose those who are critical.This summer Aipac invested $23m in unseating in primary contests two core members of the progressive Democratic group the “squad”, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri. The pair had called for a ceasefire in Gaza and have highlighted the death toll of civilians there.Fallon praised Aipac for intervening in the races. “I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for firing Jamaal Bowman, and even more so, Miss Cori Bush. Great work,” he said.“That’s accountability, by the way,” Scalise added. He further commended Aipac for having “tentacles throughout the Republican and Democrat circles in 435 districts. You can see how people are voting – just put the pressure on those who are voting the wrong way.”Scalise reserved his most potent threats for universities that in his view have failed to quash anti-Israel protests. He told Aipac that a second Trump administration would wield federal purse strings to punish the schools.“We’re looking at federal money, the federal grants that go through the science committee, student loans. You have a lot of jurisdiction as president, with all of these different agencies that are involving billions of dollars, some cases a billion alone going to one school,” Scalise said.The congressman from Louisiana is the second highest-ranking Republican in the House. He has travelled to Israel several times on trips paid for by the American Israel Education Fund, a group created by Aipac.Scalise singled out Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, which have been rattled by the controversy over student protests around the Gaza war. Penn’s president Elizabeth Magill resigned last December and Harvard’s Claudine Gay a month later after they were accused of being evasive under Republican questioning about how they would respond to calls for the genocide of Jews.Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik stepped down in August after also facing criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protest encampments.In the Aipac meeting, Scalise scolded the former university chiefs for existing in a bubble in which Palestinians were painted as the real oppressed group. “You start siding with a terrorist organization, and you think that’s mainstream, because all your friends are in this little bubble, and I don’t know who you’re talking to – you’re sure not talking to normal people any more,” he said.The congressman went on to denigrate Jewish students who engage in pro-Palestinian protest, saying they “just feel guilty that they’re alive. I don’t know how you’re brought up to where you feel, ‘I’m a Jewish student, and I’m on the side with terrorists who want to kill me.’”Scalise said Republicans were determined to confront anti-Israel protests, which he called “disgusting” and “unacceptable in America”. “We’re bringing legislation to the floor to continue to confront it, to stand up against it, to show we support Israel,” he said.The Guardian invited Scalise, Fallon and Aipac to comment on the meeting and their discussion about punishing universities for pro-Palestinian campus protests, but they did not immediately respond.Part of the Republicans’ gameplan is to use House oversight powers to investigate colleges for alleged civil rights violations. Scalise told Aipac that any college deemed to have breached the law would have their accreditation revoked.“If you have a change in administration, President Trump has made it clear day one, if you’re a college that is violating the civil rights of your students, we’re taking away your accreditation. We have that ability,” he said.Under the current system, the bulk of federal money that flows to higher education institutions comes through student loans that are in turn dependent on formal approval of the school’s academic and other standards, known as accreditation. That approval is granted by 19 accrediting agencies, independent bodies that are in turn recognised by the US education secretary.Under a second Trump administration, the education department could decertify accrediting agencies that pursue liberal policies towards campus speech and favour agencies that follow a more draconian approach. Republicans could effectively punish universities by forcing the removal of their accreditation, with potentially dire consequences.“If accreditation becomes a political tool, then the concern is it will be used ideologically to punish particular views on campus, threatening free inquiry which is the bedrock of universities,” said Mark Criley of the American Association of University Professors.The plans being laid by top congressional Republicans chimes with Trump’s own vision of a second term. In his manifesto for a return to the White House, Agenda47, he says that “our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system”.He pledges that once back in the White House, “I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” He would then appoint new accreditors who would defend “the American tradition and western civilization” and remove “all Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”.“We are going to have real education in America,” Trump said.Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, has taken a similarly hard line, calling universities “the enemy” in a 2021 speech. He said he would “aggressively attack the universities in this country”.In May, Vance introduced to a bill to the US Senate which he titled The Encampments or Endowments Act. Were it passed, it would give universities an ultimatum: remove protest encampments from campus grounds within seven days, or lose all federal funding.David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the Republican vendetta against universities over pro-Palestinian protests was deeply disturbing. “That is viewpoint discrimination at its core. It’s an attack on academic freedom in its most basic form, and would raise serious constitutional concerns.” More

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      Trump marks 7 October anniversary and criticizes ‘weak’ Biden and Harris

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      Donald Trump marked the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas terrorist attacks, which he called “one of the darkest days in all of history”, with a commemoration for victims and hostages at his golf resort in Miami on Monday night, but swiftly turned the event into an attack on Kamala Harris.He also repeated a previous claim that the attack on Israel would never have happened if he was still in the White House.Blaming Harris and Joe Biden for the “weakness” he said gave Hamas the confidence to launch the attack, the Republican presidential nominee told a crowd of about 300 supporters, mostly from the Jewish community, that a wave of anti-Israel sentiment which he said was sweeping the US, and wider world, could be blamed on their administration.“Almost as shocking as 7 October itself is the outbreak of antisemitism that we have all seen in its wake,” he said.“The anti-Jewish hatred has returned … and within the ranks of the Democratic party in particular. The Republican party has not been infected by this horrible disease, and won’t be as long as I’m in charge.”The attacks, which left 1,200 people dead and an additional 250 taken hostage by Hamas, provided “a moment in horrible history”, he said.“It seemed as if the gates of hell had sprung open and unleashed their horrors unto the world. We never thought we’d see it … and a lot of that has to do with leadership of this country.”After claiming the attacks would not have taken place had he been elected to a second term, Trump said he would restore the closeness with Israel he insisted the US had lost, despite Biden and Harris both expressing support for the country’s right to defend itself.“If, and when, they say, when I’m president, the US will once again be stronger and closer [to Israel] than it ever was. But we have to win the election,” he said.“What is needed is more than ever unwavering American leadership. The dawn of new, more harmonious Middle East is finally within our reach. I will not allow the Jewish state to be threatened with destruction. I will not allow another Holocaust of the Jewish people. I will not allow a jihad to be waged on America or our allies, and I will support Israel’s right to win its war.”Trump’s fire and brimstone delivery was at odds with remarks earlier in the day from Harris, his Democratic opponent in November, who paid tribute to those who lost their lives, but also spoke of ensuring Israel had what it needed to defend itself.Biden expressed sorrow for suffering on all sides of the conflict in the Middle East, and in a statement condemned a “vicious surge in antisemitism in America” since the attacks.Trump’s address began more than two hours later than billed. He joked about a bumpy flight from New York, and his concern for Florida from Hurricane Milton, a category 5 storm predicted to slam into the state on Wednesday.His supporters, some wearing yarmulkes with the former president’s name embroidered on them, cheered as he took the stage of the ballroom at Trump National in Doral.He spoke against a backdrop of six American and Israeli flags, and images of the almost 1,200 victims, including 46 Americans, killed by Hamas one year ago. A succession of speakers and guests, including two Holocaust survivors, Jewish religious leaders and Republican politicians, lit remembrance candles as they took the stage.Along one wall, rows of candles sat in front of photographs of the dozens of people taken hostage. Each name was marked by the word “kidnapped” in capital letters.View image in fullscreenTrump has presented himself as Israel’s strongest, most outspoken defender, but has also drawn criticism for his previous comments. A year ago, in the days following the terrorist attack on the Nova music festival, he called Hezbollah, the Lebanese group closely allied to Hamas, “very smart”, and Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant “a jerk”.Speaking at an event in Florida last October, Trump said Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not prepared, and that Israel’s enemies were “smart, and, boy, are they vicious”.The White House condemned his comments as “dangerous and unhinged”.Trump also raised eyebrows last month when he claimed he was “the most popular person in Israel”, and bemoaned a lack of support from Jewish voters after polls showed him below 40% with them.Insisting he had been “the best president by far” for Israel, he said: “Based on what I did … I should be at 100%.” Trump did not repeat the boast on Monday.Some supporters in the audience in Miami were pleased to hear Trump speaking forcefully in defense of Israel.“Kamala Harris will stand for Hamas. She is no friend of Israel,” Ben Fisher, a Miami resident, said. “Donald Trump speaks the way a strong leader should. He knows if your country is attacked you cannot let that go, if it’s the attack on the festival or the missiles from Tehran.”Harris spoke earlier in the day at the vice-presidential residence, promising that if elected next month she would “always ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself”.Unlike Trump, she resisted the opportunity to make political remarks, focusing instead on victims by telling the story of two Americans who died, and naming each of the seven Americans taken by Hamas to Gaza, four of whom are still believed to be alive. More