Israelis Take to the Street to Mourn Slain Hostages

Happy Tuesday. Let’s get straight into the news.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Saturday discovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages—four men and two women, all between the ages of 23 and 40—in tunnels underneath the southern Gazan city of Rafah. Following an autopsy, the Israeli health ministry said that Hamas executed the hostages at point-blank range between 24 and 48 hours before the IDF found them. Among the murdered hostages was 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli dual citizen who lost his lower arm in the October 7 attacks from Hamas explosives before he was abducted and brought to Gaza. “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes,” President Joe Biden said in a written statement. “And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.” There are some 100 hostages still thought to be in Gaza, though it’s not clear how many remain alive. 
• Spurred to action by the IDF’s discovery of the six murdered hostages in Rafah, hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters took to the streets on Sunday and Monday, expressing frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the lack of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Hamas—though Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has shown little interest in actually reaching an agreement. An Israeli trade union, Histadrut, launched a labor strike in support of the ceasefire and hostage release protests, but an Israeli court in Tel Aviv on Monday ordered the strike to end, ruling that it was politically motivated—not driven by labor or workers’ complaints—and therefore was not legally allowed to continue. Netanyahu remained steadfast on Monday in his commitment to keeping Israeli troops in the Philadelphi Corridor—a strip of land on the Gaza-Egypt border and a key smuggling route for Hamas—thought to be a major sticking point in negotiations. 
• Meanwhile, Hamas claimed responsibility for a drive-by shooting along a highway in the southern West Bank on Sunday that killed three Israeli police officers, in addition to two separate car bomb attacks in the region—one that was safely neutralized by Israeli authorities, and another that left three IDF soldiers with non-serious injuries. The 31-year-old gunman in the drive-by shooting was killed by IDF soldiers shortly after his fatal attack on the police officers.
• Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack on Russian territory over the weekend, hitting a refinery and power station in what is believed to be one of the largest such attacks in Ukraine’s war with Russia to date. Kremlin officials claimed Russian air defenses downed 158 Ukrainian military drones across 15 regions, including nine over the Russian capital of Moscow, and said on Monday that Russia would be updating its nuclear weapons protocol that currently permits Russia to deploy nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an attack that threatens the government’s existence. While the precise changes are unclear, a senior Russian government official said the move was prompted by the alleged “escalation” of Western nations in the Russia-Ukraine war.
• Meanwhile, Russia launched missile strikes in several major Ukrainian cities on Monday morning that wounded dozens of civilians—including kids—on the first day of school for many Ukrainian children. Just days prior, a Russian missile assault on the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv killed seven people—including a 14-year-old girl—and injured dozens more, after guided bombs struck a residential building and a playground. 
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the Ukrainian Air Force’s top commander, Mykola Oleshchuk, on Friday, after a U.S.-made F-16 fighter jet—one of a handful so far delivered to Ukraine—was destroyed in a crash earlier last week, killing its pilot. Zelensky did not explain a reason for Oleshchuk’s dismissal, and it’s unclear whether the F-16 crash was a motivating factor, as Ukrainian authorities continue to investigate the cause of the incident.
• The far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won its first-ever regional state election in the central German state of Thuringia on Sunday and came in a close second place in the eastern German state of Saxony. AfD secured nearly one-third of the vote in state parliament elections in Thuringia, making it the largest party in the parliament, though it will likely be kept out of state government by the other parties who are unlikely to join it in a coalition. A far-left party founded earlier this year that shares parts of AfD’s anti-immigrant sentiment, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, came in third place in both Thuringia and Saxony.
• The United States Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed on Friday that U.S. forces killed 15 ISIS militants in western Iraq on Thursday in a joint mission with the Iraqi military. Several media outlets reported the operation left seven U.S. soldiers with non-serious injuries. “This operation targeted ISIS leaders to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ ability to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against Iraqi civilians, as well as U.S. citizens, allies, and partners throughout the region and beyond,” CENTCOM said. 
• The U.S. Justice Department confirmed on Monday it had seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s private jet, saying the plane’s purchase violated U.S.-imposed sanctions on Maduro. The confiscation—which reportedly took place while the jet was undergoing maintenance in the Dominican Republic—comes one month after the Biden administration recognized Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo González as the rightful winner of the nation’s presidential elections, and claimed Maduro “tampered with the results of that election, falsely claimed victory, and carried out wide-spread repression to maintain power.”
• Fifteen members of the Turkish Youth Union—a revolutionary, anti-American youth organization—were arrested in Turkey on Monday after they assaulted two U.S. service members posted aboard the USS Wasp, a naval vessel docked in the western Turkish city of Izmir after joint military exercises with Turkish warships. The U.S. Embassy in Turkey said that Turkish authorities assisted in suppressing the assault and added that the two military personnel “are now safe.”
• Seven people—including a 6-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl—were killed in Mississippi on Saturday after a commercial bus en route to Mexico experienced a tire failure, causing the vehicle to crash and flip. Some 37 other passengers were injured and hospitalized, and three agencies—the National Transportation Safety Board, Missippi’s Commercial Transportation Enforcement Division, and the state’s highway patrol—have opened separate investigations into the fatal incident. 

‘A National Trauma’

At the Democratic National Convention last month, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg took the stage in Chicago, their hometown, with pieces of masking tape stuck to their shirts. On the tape was the number 320: the number of days since their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a dual Israeli and American citizen, was taken hostage by Hamas. 

While the crowd at the convention chanted “Bring them home!”—a call for the release of the hostages remaining in Gaza after their abduction by members of Hamas and its allied terrorist groups on October 7, 2023—Hersh’s mother, Rachel, collapsed onto the podium in tears. 

Her son had been attending the Nova music festival in southern Israel when he was taken in Hamas’ brutal onslaught. A terrorist’s grenade blew off Hersh’s left hand and forearm—his dominant one—and he was last seen alive in a hostage video recorded by his Hamas captors in April. Before the DNC crowd, Rachel lovingly described her 23-year-old son as “obsessed” with music and music festivals and fascinated by maps, geography, and travel.

Since his abduction, “We live on another planet,” Rachel said at the DNC. She had stopped listening to music, doing crosswords, and wearing makeup when her son was taken, and was eating just one meal a day as she and her husband traveled the world to advocate for the release of Hersh and the other Hamas-held hostages. “Anyone who is a parent—or has had a parent—can try to imagine the anguish and misery that Jon and I and all the hostage families are enduring,” she said.

But now, only days after Rachel’s DNC speech, her son is dead. Hamas terrorists executed Hersh and five other hostages before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops reached their location in a tunnel under Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, on Saturday. 

The discovery of the six murdered hostages set off …

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Worth Your Time

• In The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas identified a major hurdle preventing local housing development projects: local government. “In America, we’ve delegated the power over how our land is used to the local level, and seeded the process with various veto points,” she wrote. “We’ve done this under the misguided assumption that decentralization will make the process more democratic. In reality, this system has resulted in stasis and sclerosis, empowering small numbers of unrepresentative people and organizations to determine what our towns and cities look like and preventing our democratically elected representatives from planning for the future. … NIMBYs win because land politics is insulated from democratic accountability. As a result, widespread dissatisfaction with the housing crisis struggles to translate into meaningful change.”
• As America’s “loneliness epidemic” continues to impact Americans nationwide and foster increased social tension, there could be a simple cure: “Make a new friend,” our old friend David French argued in the New York Times. “There is a class divide in the percentage of Americans who can rely on someone to give them a ride to the doctor, lend them a small amount of money in an emergency or offer a place to stay. Another way of putting this is that the Americans who are most vulnerable to losing the informal social safety net of friends and relatives may be the people who need it the most. … The thought that so many millions of our fellow citizens feel as if they don’t belong, as if they can’t call anyone for help or simply lack the pure joy of fellowship with close friends should grieve us all. It should change the way we behave. It should make us be more intentional about reaching out to people. And it should call us to action in our own neighborhoods and communities.”

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In the Zeitgeist

Brian Kelly, Louisiana State University’s head football coach, was understandably frustrated on Sunday after his 13th-ranked Tigers lost to the 23rd-ranked University of Southern California Trojans in their first (r)outing of the season—so frustrated, in fact, that he sent his water bottle flying off the table when he banged his fist on it. And that sucker had some real hang time. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team reported on Vice President Kamala Harris’ first interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee and Donald Trump’s recent shift on abortion policy, Nick pondered (🔒) what’s left for conservatives in the Trump-led GOP, Hannah Anderson argued in Dispatch Faith that the decision to have children should not derive from social or political strategies, and Kevin compared (🔒) the tribalistic nature of politics to the social dynamics of school. 
• On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on Harris’ first interview and the Christian underpinnings of the Western mind, Sarah talked to Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, on The Skiff (🔒), and Jamie interviewed former U.S. National Security Adviser and retired Gen. H.R. McMaster about his new book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.
• On the site over the weekend: Christopher J. Scalia celebrated the return of the British rock band Oasis, Jordan J. Ballor argued that public depictions of the Ten Commandments by government entities aren’t necessarily unconstitutional or ethically problematic, and Matthew Kuchem proposed that academic universities strengthen free speech protections to counter the rise of campus illiberalism. 
• On the site today: John reports on what a Stop the Steal 2.0 could look like and Chris provides a polling update as the presidential election enters the home stretch.