On December 20, a Palestinian waited in a wooded area near a Jewish village in northern Israel in the hope of encountering a victim. Soon enough he spotted Esther Horgan walking home from an evening jog and killed her by beating her with a rock. He later told the police that he did the deed to avenge the death of Kamal Abu Wa’er, a terrorist in Israeli custody. Itamar Marcus explains:

Kamal Abu Wa’er, who was serving six life sentences for involvement in the murder of at least four Israelis, recently died of cancer in prison. Already during Abu Wa’er illness, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and [its ruling] Fatah party launched an incitement campaign, with top officials falsely claiming that Israel was denying him proper treatment; once Abu Wa’er had died, they intensified the libel that his death was caused by “deliberate medical neglect.” Apparently believing this to be true, the terrorist, Mohammad Kabha, decided to kill an Israeli in revenge.

The Palestinian Authority does everything it can to demonize Israel and create hate among Palestinians. One way of doing so is by spreading libels, and one of those libels is that Israel treats imprisoned Palestinian terrorists inhumanely. For years, the PA has purported that Israel “tortures” terrorist prisoners, gives them experimental drugs rather than try to cure their illnesses, does Nazi-like experiments on them, intentionally infects them with diseases, deliberately neglects them medically, and refrains from treating severe diseases like cancer to cause their “slow death.”

It must be stressed that the International Red Cross regularly visits the Palestinian terrorist prisoners and has never accused Israel of treating sick terrorist prisoners improperly. In June 2020 a Red Cross official told PA TV “we visited more than 90 percent of those who are in these [20 different] prisons.”

Indeed, Israel more than once provided Abu Wa’er with medical treatment in its own hospitals. Yet among the many who repeated this libel was the PA prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, who praised Abu Wa’er as “a fighter and a pure-hearted son of Palestine.”

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.”