Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered some 70,000 Jews in a clearing in the forest of Ponar (now Paneriai), not far from the Lithuanian city of Vilna. Using advanced technology to explore the mass graves, an ongoing project has discovered a tunnel, previously known only from the accounts of survivors, by which some Jewish prisoners managed to escape. Nicholas St. Fleur writes:

In 1943, when it became clear the Soviets were going to take over Lithuania, the Nazis began to cover up the evidence of the mass killings. They forced a group of 80 Jews to exhume the bodies, burn them, and bury the ashes. . . .

About half of the group spent 76 days digging a tunnel in their holding pit by hand and with spoons they found among the bodies. On April 15, 1944—the last night of Passover, when they knew the night would be darkest—[they] crawled through the two-foot-square tunnel entrance and through to the forest.

The noise alerted the guards, who pursued the prisoners with guns and dogs. Of the 80, twelve managed to escape; eleven of them survived the war and went on to tell their stories, according to the researchers.

The archaeologist Richard Freund and his team used the information from survivors’ accounts to search for the tunnel. Rather than excavate and disturb the remains, he and his team used two non-invasive tools—electrical-resistivity tomography and ground-penetrating radar.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”