Shalom all, 

For too long the world has viewed Israel’s security problems through a narrow optic that privileges short-term appearances, emotive snapshots, and diplomatic convenience. The last two weeks make that myopia painfully clear. While Israel grapples with subterranean militants, hostage locations, and a steadily rearming Hezbollah on its northern border, many governments – distracted, earnest, or politically constrained – press the Jewish state toward policies that risk leaving it exposed. Israel needs to be guided by clarity of purpose – not selective empathy.

Israel is the only country that needs to constantly explain its history, as if it was presenting a press briefing. This past week compressed tunnels and hostages, U.N. resolutions and border escalation, among other things, into one dense package of strategic urgency. Many governments tend to respond with sympathetic statements or peace-talk proposals, yet too often miss the live combat realities beneath the surface and expose how badly foreign governments misunderstand the nature of Israel’s war for survival.

This is not just a story of policy or optics – it is one of real geography, real tunnels, real hostages, and real weapon flows. It is one of widening cease-fire cracks. It deals with the heart-wrenching return and burial of Lt. Hadar Goldin, with U.S. and Russian drafts at the UN, with a proposed contiguous corridor from Gaza to Judea & Samaria and with Hezbollah re-arming on Israel’s northern border. Read together, these events form a single, integrated narrative.

Cease-fire cracks and the underground threat

The accepted “cease-fire” is widely seen abroad as a sign of progress. For Israel, however, it remains a dangerous pause. Israeli forces repeatedly disclosed tunnel shafts and Islamist operatives beneath and across the “yellow line” – the nominal Israeli-controlled edge of Gaza. These tunnels provide ingress, egress, munitions movement and surprise-attack pathways. More alarming: recent assessments place 100–200 Hamas militants in those tunnel networks beneath Israeli-held areas near Rafah and Khan Younis, who are refusing to surrender and continue to pose a lethal threat to troops and civilians alike. This is a tactical reality that diplomatic frameworks seldom address: underground warfare that only claims light in surface negotiations.

In line with this, during the week, Israeli security services thwarted imminent shootings and bombings south of Jerusalem – a stark demonstration that small terror cells remain an active threat despite the “pause” in the fighting. According to Israeli reports, Hamas holds strategic hostage intelligence – they “know the locations of all remaining hostages.” The upshot: any suggestion of “safe passage” for militants must be conditioned on verified recovery of the bodies of the hostages remaining in the control of Hamas, as well as disarmament. Without that, Israel deals with more pie-in-the-sky empty promises. 

The return of Lt. Hadar Goldin – grief, symbol, and leverage

This week saw the long-awaited homecoming of Lt. Hadar Goldin, who was killed in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge and held by Hamas for more thaan 4,000 days. His funeral in Kfar Saba drew thousands. However, multiple sources indicate Hamas delayed the transfer of his body as a tactical offering, being part of broader negotiations over militants and cease-fire lines. This exposes a deeper reality: that humanitarian acts can be weaponized into bargaining chips. Every diplomatic framework must recognize that dynamic. If it fails to do so, then humanitarian aid and the protection of civilians risk becoming tools of coercion. This can undermine genuine relief efforts, incentivize bad-faith actors to manipulate suffering for political gain, prolong conflicts, and erode the moral and legal foundations of humanitarian norms.

U.S. pressure, UN drafts and diplomatic myopia

Washington’s diplomatic push this week focused on stabilization frameworks for Gaza and a pathway to “Palestinian” self-determination – a fancy term intended to substitute for the call for the establishment of a “Palestinian” state. Its efforts were marked by the circulation of a U.S. draft resolution at the U.N. Security Council.  Russia responded with its own draft, centered on humanitarian access and a simplified cease-fire guarantee, while resisting governance mechanisms that might impose a transitional authority.

The crucial problem is that while both resolutions attempt to redefine governance in Gaza and Judea–Samaria, the U.S. draft goes significantly further by incorporating an eventual pathway to Palestinian statehood – yet it pointedly avoids making Israeli security requirements a binding prerequisite. This omission is not a technical oversight, but a structural flaw: it establishes political expectations without embedding the security architecture needed to sustain them. By advancing statehood language absent enforceable sequencing, the U.S. proposal risks legitimizing political concessions without demanding the demilitarization, counterterror guarantees, and territorial controls essential for Israel’s safety. In practical terms, it pressures Israel toward an outcome while declining to anchor that outcome in the very security conditions that any responsible framework must require.

Deviations from the Trump 20-Point Plan

President Trump’s 20-Point Plan laid out a specific order: deradicalize Gaza, verify disarmament, secure the territory before granting political recognition – and preserve critical Israeli-controlled areas like the Jordan Valley. The U.S. draft this week diverges: it embeds stabilization and political horizons into the Security Council language before full verification of disarmament. That deviation is not technical. It means political settlement becomes the lever for security, rather than security being the foundation for settlement. For Israel, that inversion is perilous. Washington is pushing diplomatic deliverables, instead of confronting the nature of the enemy.

Why geographic contiguity matters – the Gaza-Judea & Samaria corridor

Diplomatic language likes the word “contiguity.” It sounds innocuous, but Israeli reality calls it a red line. If Gaza is linked to Judea & Samaria, Israel faces a corridor that slices across its body, splitting north from south and placing major population centres at risk. The corridor could be:

• A land route under the control of so-called “Palestinians”.

• A surface road or tunnel system under international supervision.

• A territory swap carving out Israeli sovereign land.

Each model creates strategic vulnerabilities: hostile seams, transit routes open to infiltration, and attack vectors previously absent. Even a “peace corridor” under international supervision is not bullet-proof. Decades of peace-keeping experience show that rules of engagement lag behind militant ingenuity. For Israeli defence planners, geography is destiny – compromising borders without security verification is not compromise, it is capitulation.

Any physical route connecting gaza to Judea & Samaria, whether above ground, below ground, surface roads, sovereign passageways, or even controlled lanes, would:

Create a permanent security vulnerability – a hostile corridor running across its midsection;

Place Israeli cities at risk – the corrector would pass within minutes of major population centers;

Create a logistical nightmare – Israel’s north-south contiguity would be interrupted, forcing rerouted traffic, military mobilization challenges and emergency-response delays;

Enable Iranian movement across the territory – a corridor would not just be a right-of-way for so-called “Palestinians”, but would become a strategic asset for Iran and its proxies;

Undermine every Israeli defensive doctrine – the IDF’s rapid-deployment model depends on internal geographic freedom. A corridor would shatter that.

Part Two of this post will be forwarded tomorrow.

Have a great week.

Bless, be blessed and be a blessing.

Marvin