On April 12, 1984, four Palestinian militants hijacked an Israeli bus of line 300 with 35 passengers, most of them Jewish settlers, in the Gaza Strip. In the rescue operation, one soldier and two of the four hijackers died. The other two hijackers were captured alive and were executed shortly after by agents of the Shin Bet secret services.

It can be said in many ways, but the meaning is the same: Benjamin Netanyahu is the one steering the ship of the war. Even many Republicans in the US, who are far from being anti-Zionist, understand this. The excellent Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Washington correspondent, who often speaks by phone with Donald Trump, put it this way: with each passing day, Trump identifies more and more with Netanyahu.

This March he will turn 54 and has already served as Prime Minister of Israel once, albeit only for the brief period from June 2021 to June 2022. Before entering politics, he had time to become a successful businessman in the United States, where he amassed a considerable fortune. Born in Haifa to American immigrants, he is currently the leading candidate to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu in the upcoming elections. Polls published these days indicate that Naftali Bennett is the preferred opposition candidate among Israelis. While he doesn't reach Netanyahu's level of popularity, his standing surpasses that of Yair Lapid and Gadi Eisenkot. His conciliatory nature contrasts sharply with that of Netanyahu, 76, who has a distinctly divisive personality. One of the latest polls gives Bennett's opposition blog 56 seats and Netanyahu's bloc 52, in a Knesset where a majority is 61 seats. The key, therefore, would lie with the Arab parties, which could confirm Bennett's victory. It's a realistic hypothesis, though not guaranteed.

Israeli authorities claim that "any regime that comes to power in Iran will be better than the current one." This has been the root cause of the war, into which Israel has drawn the United States. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged on Monday that Israel would have attacked Iran regardless, and that this determined Washington's involvement. According to Rubio, the Americans knew that Israel would attack the Persian country and that this would provoke a response from Tehran not only against Israel, but also against US bases in the region. This motivated Washington's participation, not the threat of the Iranian nuclear program. The United States has been arming Israel for many years. Therefore, Washington could have prevented the war by stopping Tel Aviv from using its weapons in the conflict. In the end, the Americans agreed to jump on the Benjamin Netanyahu bandwagon and participate in the attacks. There is no doubt that President Donald Trump, for whatever reason, is fully aligned with Netanyahu.

The war against Iran only has four days left.But some media outlets have already started talking about its end. However, the interests of the United States and those of Israel do not always coincide. Therefore, the strategies for exiting the conflict may differ for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week, veteran journalist Ehud Yaari said that no Israeli should be fooled: neither the United States nor Iran wants a war. The same can be said of the Sunni Gulf states, many of which have repeatedly expressed their support for a negotiated solution rather than weapons, as has ultimately been the case. Israel, on the other hand, has been pressing the issue until President Donald Trump gave the final order. Benjamin Netanyahu persisted until the very last moment. Now he wants to use the war to create a new situation throughout the region, a situation that would entail regime change in Tehran, with the demise of the Islamic Republic that Khomeini founded in 1979.

The Jeffrey Epstein case It is not limited solely to the sex scandal involving underage girls, which seems to be the most publicized.But it has also been interpreted as large-scale espionage. Some Western and Hebrew media outlets have echoed this aspect and link the Jewish-American financier, who apparently committed suicide in prison in 2019, to the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. According to this theory, Epstein was gathering compromising information on public figures and influential people in the United States and Europe to pressure them in accordance with Israel's interests. The comments to this effect are so numerous, and perhaps so convincing, that this February Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly denied them.

Almost four months after the ceasefireThe landscape of the Gaza Strip remains one of almost complete destruction from north to south and east to west. Despite daily promises of reconstruction, the reality on the ground is quite different, and so far no one has lifted a finger to provide stable housing for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have lost everything.

It's interesting to follow the Iran crisis through Israeli media. The war recent incident that directly involved both countries last June It did not resolve the total confrontation between Zionism and Shiism, which has lasted for decades. And now, the coincidence with the crisis in Venezuela adds some additional interest to what is happening.

According to data released by the UN, in the last two months Israel violated the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip more than 350 times, causing the deaths of more than 121 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians. This data gives a clear picture of the fragility of the ceasefire that President Donald Trump negotiated with Israel and Hamasand announced in October.

The newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat This week, an unbelievable report about Hamas was published. According to this Arab media outlet, the leadership of the Islamist organization is reviewing documentation regarding a transformation of the armed movement into a political force, including the laying down of arms. a complete renunciation of armed struggle

On the night of November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv. Three shots ended the life of the then Prime Minister of Israel. The assassination was committed by Yigal Amir, a young man with radical, religious, and nationalist ideologies, who wanted to break the inertia of the Oslo Accords signed two years earlier with the Palestinians. And it seems clear that Amir achieved his objective, as we can see thirty years later. This weekend, Rabin's son, Yuval, who lives completely removed from public life in a remote town in Central Europe as an anonymous citizen caring for his dogs, gave a lengthy television interview to review the past and analyze the present. Three decades later, Yuval still considers Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for his father's death. Let us remember that Netanyahu won the immediate 1996 elections, and that he has subsequently been the prime minister who has served the longest in officeMore than David Ben-Gurion. During his long career, Netanyahu has managed to crush any hope of an agreement with the Palestinians, and now he is pushing for a radical transformation of the state and its institutions.

What do they have in common? the Syrian AlawitesWhat about the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, and the Syrian and Lebanese Druze? All of them are ethnic or religious minorities in predominantly Sunni countries, with the exception of the complex case of Lebanon. But they also have something else in common: this week, delegates from these minorities met "to discuss the future" with Israeli representatives, and they did so publicly in Tel Aviv.

Yeah the agreement reached between Israel and HamaIt is respected, it will mean the end of two years of an unequal war, but it will also mark, according to Donald Trump, the beginning of a second phase of negotiations that are more complicated than those of the first phase. The most difficult issue on the table is the disarmament of the Palestinian militias in the Gaza Strip, starting with Hamas. The Islamist organization has already said it will only lay down its weapons if there is an agreement for the creation of a Palestinian state, involving all the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war, that is, the West Bank, with East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

During his Historic address to the Knesset plenum, US President Donald Trump asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is being tried for several corruption cases by a Jerusalem court. He said this in the presence of both, and it was not the first time he had let it slip, but he had already called for "Bibi's release" last JuneBut what potential impact might Trump's suggestion have in practice?

Israel's future remains dependent on the actions of the international community. It is clear that the Israelis do not want to withdraw from the Palestinian territories under any circumstances, and that the agreement on the Gaza Strip will not change the Jewish state's intentions, no matter how many regional negotiations Donald Trump pushes in the coming months or years. The problem with resolving the eternal crisis with the Palestinians is that today there is a clear and broad majority within the Israeli political class that agrees with Benjamin Netanyahu on this particular issue. Because in the opposition, there are parties as opposed to an agreement as the Prime Minister, who has reiterated this publicly this week.

Donald Trump has one fixation these past few days: he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.This summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the candidate, and the US President himself, without much modesty, has put himself forward for the award.

An agreement does not guarantee that the Gaza war will end. Of course, an agreement can be signed at any time, but this will not necessarily mean an immediate solution to the conflict, not even to the most basic problems of the ongoing war, if the systematic killing of thousands of civilians in the Gaza Strip can even be called a war.

Under no circumstances could Israel allow the flotilla to reach the Gaza Strip. The Israelis have never allowed this to happen and will certainly not allow it in the future. They had warned the flotilla: If you want to bring food and humanitarian aid, you can enter our ports, unload it and we will deliver it to Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to make momentous decisions in the coming days, following this week's spectacle at the UN General Assembly. That is, after a long list of countries around the world, including some of the most powerful, have officially recognized the Palestinian stateYes, a decision that comes too late for the Palestinians.