For Years, Israelis Trusted the Army to Defend and Inform Them. Now Many Feel Abandoned 

10 October 2023, Israel, Sa'ad: Israeli forces patrol areas along the Israeli-Gaza border as fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen continues. (dpa)
10 October 2023, Israel, Sa'ad: Israeli forces patrol areas along the Israeli-Gaza border as fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen continues. (dpa)
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For Years, Israelis Trusted the Army to Defend and Inform Them. Now Many Feel Abandoned 

10 October 2023, Israel, Sa'ad: Israeli forces patrol areas along the Israeli-Gaza border as fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen continues. (dpa)
10 October 2023, Israel, Sa'ad: Israeli forces patrol areas along the Israeli-Gaza border as fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen continues. (dpa)

It was, they thought, an ironclad social contract. Israeli citizens would serve in the military and live along enemy borders. In exchange, the army would defend them.

That contract was shattered Saturday when hundreds of Hamas fighters breached Israel’s defenses from the Gaza Strip, pouring in by air, land and sea on a rampage that would leave hundreds dead. The infiltration caught Israel’s storied high-tech army completely unaware and stunned a country that prides itself on military prowess.

Further shocking Israelis was how long it took the military to respond. As thousands in southern Israel suddenly found themselves besieged, their cries for help went unanswered for hours. Holed up inside homes and safe rooms as militants rampaged, they turned in desperation to social media, to journalists and to friends, beseeching the army to save them.

The weekend attacks and the military's response brought an unsettling new sense of vulnerability and abandonment. Thousands of families had no idea whether loved ones were alive or had been taken as captives to Gaza. At the height of the violence, there was no one to turn to for guidance or information. Contact centers were eventually set up, but the focus was on soliciting information from families rather than offering it.

Six members of Jonathan Silver's family are missing, and he approached authorities for help. At least three relatives are captive in Gaza, he said, and the others are assumed to be there, too. He saw video of a cousin and two children taken hostage from their kibbutz, Nir Oz.

But the family has received no information, Silver said.

"We tried to reach everybody – the homeland command, police, friends, acquaintances, people on the kibbutz," he said. And for hours, "there was no one to talk to."

He's particularly concerned for his aunt, who has Parkinson’s disease and needs her medication. He's frustrated, but he also said now is not the time to criticize too deeply.

"I have a lot of questions and a lot to say. The day of reckoning will come," he said, but "now I prefer to stand beside the army."

In Israel, military service is compulsory for most Jewish men and women. In the eyes of many citizens, it is the glue that keeps the country together in a region widely hostile to its presence, and it's recognized worldwide for its technological advances and intelligence-gathering capabilities.

That it could be taken so completely by surprise by an armed group is something Israelis are hard-pressed to fathom.

For Merav Leshem Gonen, a feeling of helplessness gripped her when her daughter called in a panic from a music festival that was attacked.

"Mommy, we were bombed. They shot at us. The car was shot, we cannot drive, everybody here is hurt," Gonen recounted her daughter saying.

"She was talking to me and said, ‘Mommy, help us, we don’t know what to do.’ And I’m saying, ’We love you, and it’s OK. We are trying to find a way to take you out of there. We are sending people,’" Gonen told a news conference outside Tel Aviv. "And I know I’m lying because we don’t have answers, and we didn’t have any answers. Nobody had."

Journalist Amir Tibon had good fortune that many others didn’t: While the army struggled to regroup, his 62-year-old father, a retired general, entered the breach. Noam Tibon headed from his home in Tel Aviv to Nahal Oz, a kibbutz where his son, his wife and their two young daughters were hunkering in a safe room. On the way, he connected with another retired general and a group of commandoes.

After firefights with gunmen along the way, the elder Tibon extricated his son and family. More than a dozen others at Nahal Oz did not survive.

"The terms of the contract between us and the state had always been clear: We protect the border, and the state protects us," Amir Tibon wrote in an article retelling the rescue for his newspaper, Haaretz.

"We fulfilled our share of the deal heroically. For all too many of our beloved friends and neighbors, on this black day of Saturday, October 7, the state of Israel did not fulfill its share."

Maayan Zin said she learned that her two daughters had been abducted when a relative sent her photos from a Telegram group appearing to show them sitting on mattresses in captivity. She's among dozens of distraught families who say there's been a lack of support from Israeli authorities about their loved ones held in Gaza.

"There is no information. No one has contacted me since yesterday. Not the army, not the government, not the police," she said.

At first, she couldn't believe what she saw in the images. "I thought it was Photoshopped," she said.

But videos she found online confirmed her worst fears. Dafna, 15, and Ella, 8, were shown weeping and terrified. Their father, her ex-husband, was seen being taken across the border into Gaza, his leg bleeding heavily.

"Just bring my daughters home," Zin pleaded. "Bring everybody home."



What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
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What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)

Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to jumpstart these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution.

Why did Trump write the letter? Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the US could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.

How did the first round go? Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under US President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Why does Iran’s nuclear program worry the West? Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Why are relations so bad between Iran and the US? Iran was once one of the US’s top allies in the Middle East under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The revolution followed, led by Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Middle East that persist today.