This year, one of the recipients of the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement—the country’s highest civilian honor—was Rachel Heber, the director of an organization called Matnat Chaim. She founded Matnat Chaim in 2009 with her late husband Yeshayahu in 2009. Michele Chabin explains its mission:

Israel is in the bottom half of countries when it comes to organs harvested after death, the type used in most transplants globally. [But], for more than a decade, the number of Israelis who have donated kidneys while they are still alive and well has increased to the point that Israel is the worldwide leader in live donations per capita.

That’s in large part thanks to the Jerusalem-based nonprofit . . . Matnat Chaim, Hebrew for “gift of life,” which recruits and encourages individuals in good health to donate a kidney for purely altruistic reasons. Of the more than 1,450 live kidney donations Matnat Chaim has facilitated, more than 80 percent were altruistic—donated by individuals who had no connection to the recipient. According to the group’s records, it made at least half of the matches between recipients and live donors in Israel from 2015 to 2022.

Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber, whose life was saved by kidney from a live donor, died from COVID-19 in April 2020. [He] had said he was moved to recruit volunteer donors after watching other kidney patients die for lack of transplants.

About 90 percent of Matnat Chaim’s kidney donors belong to the Modern Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox streams of Judaism.

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.