The Israel Defense Forces killed two Hezbollah terrorists, including a member of the group's elite Radwan Force, in separate strikes across Southern Lebanon on Thursday morning.
In the space of an hour, the military killed Hassan Ahmad Sabra—a Radwan Force commander—near Nabatieh in southeastern Lebanon, and a second operative who was rebuilding infrastructure in the Naqoura area of southwestern Lebanon.
The Radwan Force is the Hezbollah unit tasked with infiltrating Israeli territory, seizing areas along the northern border and abducting hostages as part of the terrorist group's "Conquer the Galilee" plan.
The activities the terrorists were involved in "constitute a violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon," the IDF stated, referring to the ceasefire agreement reached in November between Jerusalem and Beirut.
"The IDF will continue to act forcefully to remove any threat to the State of Israel," the military added.
On Tuesday morning, the Israeli Air Force carried out a broad wave of strikes targeting the Radwan Force in eastern Lebanon's Beqaa Valley.
The targeted camps were "used by the Hezbollah terror group to train and prepare operatives for attacks against IDF forces and the State of Israel," the military said, adding, "As part of this training, the terrorists conduct shooting drills and exercises with various types of weapons."
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strikes sent "a clear message to the Hezbollah terror group, which is plotting to rebuild its capabilities to raid Israel through the Radwan Force—and also to the Lebanese government, which is responsible for upholding the agreement.
"Every terrorist will be targeted, and every threat to the residents of the State of Israel will be thwarted," he continued. "We will respond with maximum force to any attempt at rebuilding [Hezbollah]."
On Nov. 26, 2024, Jerusalem and Beirut signed a ceasefire deal aimed at ending more than a year of cross-border clashes between the IDF and Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed terror group began attacking the Jewish state in support of Hamas in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
Since the truce, the IDF has conducted frequent raids to stop Hezbollah from rebuilding terrorist infrastructure in Southern Lebanon and so violating the terms of the ceasefire deal.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem has rejected demands to disarm in accordance with the truce, warning last week that the terror group was "rebuilding, recovering and ready now" to take on the IDF.
Meanwhile, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun over the weekend ruled out the possibility of normalizing relations with Jerusalem, though he expressed a desire to end the longstanding conflict with Israel.
"Peace is the lack of a state of war, and this is what matters to us in Lebanon at the moment. As for the issue of normalization, it is not currently part of Lebanese foreign policy,” Aoun said.
Is Syria the new front in Israel’s multi-pronged war, and could a known terrorist become an unlikely strategic ally?
Senior JNS contributing editor Ruthie Blum and Mark Regev, former Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom—both former advisers at the Prime Minister’s Office—break down Israel’s rapidly evolving security landscape, where threats from the north and south exacerbate political instability at home.
As the Israel Defense Forces strike the brutal forces of the new Syrian leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Blum and Regev unpack what’s really behind Israel’s intervention to protect the embattled Druze community. Is this about Israel’s moral obligation, strategic deterrence or a long-term bet on future alliances?
In Gaza, civilian evacuations and intensified military operations continue as delicate hostage negotiations unfold in Qatar. Could a new deal be close? Or is Hamas once again stalling for time? The hosts scrutinize the risks and paradoxes facing Israeli decision-makers: How do you balance rescuing 50 remaining hostages with minimizing IDF casualties and eradicating Hamas once and for all?
Back in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces not only war on multiple fronts, but legal troubles and a brewing coalition collapse over Haredi military service. With a government on the brink and elections possibly around the corner, Blum and Regev ask: Can Netanyahu govern through crisis, or is the clock ticking?
See more at: @JNS_TV. And don’t forget to hit the subscribe button!
Send feedback or topic suggestions to: undiplomatic@jns.org
A coalition of countries announced a series of measures, including preventing weapons transfers to Israel, that it said will bring about an end to Jerusalem’s war against Hamas.
The Wednesday announcement came after a two-day “emergency summit” of the eight-nation Hague Group in Bogotá, Colombia. The Colombian and South African governments co-hosted the gathering.
The Hague Group was formed in January to bring the so-called global south together “to take ‘coordinated legal and diplomatic measures’ against Israel’s violations of international law.”
The group stated that all 30 states at the summit “unanimously agreed that the era of impunity must end, and that international law must be enforced without fear or favor through immediate domestic policies and legislation, along with a unified call for an immediate ceasefire.”
Twelve of the 30 pledged to implement half a dozen measures, including preventing the “provision or transfer” of weapons, military equipment and fuel and dual-use items to Israel.
Vessels thought to be carrying such products to Israel would be barred from transiting or docking at any participating country’s ports, and such vessels won’t be allowed to bear the flag of the 12 states.
Each participating state will also launch “an urgent review” of its public contracts to ensure they don’t support Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian territory.
States must also “comply with obligations to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law” through independent investigations and support “universal jurisdiction mandates,” which would put Israelis in the crosshairs of any state’s legal pursuits.
The 12 states are Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, South Africa, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Algeria, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, China, Djibouti, Honduras, Ireland, Lebanon, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Qatar, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela also joined the summit, as did the Palestinian Authority.
The group stated that more countries are expected to join the measures on Sept. 20, when the annual, high-level debate week for the United Nations General Assembly takes place. “Consultations with capitals across the world are now ongoing,” the group stated.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur whom Washington sanctioned this month for her long history of antisemitic comments, attended the summit. “The clock is now ticking for states, from Europe to the Arab world and beyond, to join them,” Albanese said of the 12 that adopted the new measures.
Many of the countries that attended the summit are critics of the West. Qatar and Turkey are U.S. allies.
A U.S. State Department spokesman told JNS earlier this week that Washington “strongly opposes efforts by so-called ‘multilateral blocs’ to weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas.”
The Hague Group “seeks to undermine the sovereignty of democratic nations by isolating and attempting to delegitimize Israel, transparently laying the groundwork for targeting the United States, our military and our allies,” the spokesman said.
The U.S. government “will aggressively defend our interests, our military and our allies, including Israel, from such coordinated legal and diplomatic warfare,” the spokesman told JNS. “We urge our friends to stand with us in this critical endeavor.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clarified Israel's two-pronged strategic goal in Syria on Thursday—ensuring southern Syria is demilitarized and protecting the Druze of that region.
Netanyahu defined southern Syria as an area running from the Golan Heights to Jabal al-Druze, a region encompassing nearly all of the Sweida governorate, recently the site of massacres perpetrated by regime-linked Syrian forces against the Druze community.
The Syrian regime violated both red lines, Netanyahu said. "It sent troops south of Damascus into an area that was supposed to remain demilitarized, and it began massacring Druze. That was something we could not accept under any circumstances.
"Therefore, I instructed the IDF to act—and to act with force. The Air Force struck both the murderous militias and the armored vehicles. I also added a target—to strike the Ministry of Defense in Damascus," he said.
The Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday attacked the entrance to the Syrian regime’s military headquarters in the Damascus area in response to atrocities against Druze civilians.
"As a result of this intensified action, a ceasefire was established, and the Syrian forces withdrew back to Damascus," the prime minister said. "This will continue to be our policy—we will not allow military forces to move south of Damascus, and we will not allow harm to come to the Druze in Jabal al-Druze."
Netanyahu said that the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, reached out to him, saying: "During the Holocaust, when they were slaughtering you, the Jews, you called for help—and no one came. Today, they are slaughtering us, the Druze, and we are calling for help from the State of Israel."
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said on Wednesday evening that Israel's military was “acting with determination" to prevent dangerous elements from establishing a presence near the border, to protect Israel's citizens, and to prevent harm to Syria's Druze.
Israeli Air Force fighters struck tanks, rocket launchers, combat equipment and pickups armed with heavy machine guns making their way to the as-Sweida area over the past 24 hours, the IDF announced on Wednesday.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that IDF strikes on Syrian regime forces near as-Sweida would intensify if threats to the Druze population persist.
“The Syrian regime must leave the Druze in Sweida alone and withdraw its forces,” he said. He emphasized that Israel would not abandon the Druze community and enforce its disarmament policy in the area.
The New York Times should consider adopting the Jerusalem cross as its new logo to represent its crusade against Israel and the Jewish people. With a steady stream of slanted reporting and a roster of columnists united by their hostility to Israel (with the lone exception of columnist Bret Stephens), the Times has transformed itself from a paper of record into a platform for moral inversion.
Here’s the journalistic trick for looking credible while advancing a political agenda: Choose sources that support your point of view. It is particularly effective when those sources are anonymous, making it impossible to know their agenda. Times reporters do this routinely, typically quoting U.S. State Department Arabists who they know share their anti-Israel views. Sometimes, they quote sympathetic “experts” to give their bias a veneer of authority.
The op-ed page is worse. It runs on the adage that “man bites dog” is news, which in this case translates into prioritizing Jewish critics of Israel. These “As a Jew” pieces—by academics or activists who use their identity to launder moral attacks—are a staple. A recent example: Brown University professor Omer Bartov, who accused Israel of “genocide” while virtually ignoring the massacre that triggered the war.
Bartov is supposed to be taken seriously because he teaches Holocaust and genocide studies. Because it has not been the site of encampments and public confrontations like Columbia, Brown’s tolerance of anti-Israel and antisemitic students and faculty has gone largely unnoticed. Bartov has been railing against the Israeli government for years and signed the antisemitic Elephant in the Room screed, making him an obvious choice for the op-ed page.
As with most media coverage of the Gaza war, logic is missing from his article. He did not mention the word terrorism even once. His only references to Oct. 7—the day Hamas butchered more than 1,200 Israelis, took 251 hostages, and hid behind civilians in mosques, schools and hospitals—were cursory. Remarkably, he declared within a month of the terrorist attacks that Israel had committed war crimes, as though Hamas’s atrocities demanded no meaningful accounting.
His core claim of genocide hinges on intent. But the quotes he offers from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not call for the destruction of a people; they call for the destruction of a terrorist army. Netanyahu said that Hamas would pay a “huge price,” that the Israel Defense Forces would turn Hamas-infested areas “into rubble” and urged “residents of Gaza” to evacuate. If anything, those are statements of intent to protect civilians, not to eliminate them.
Bartov fails to mention that it is the Hamas charter that calls for the genocide of the Jews. Had Hamas not committed a massacre on Oct. 7, not a single Palestinian civilian would have lost their life in Gaza.
Like other detractors, Bartov has inverted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was a reaction to the Nazi crimes against the Jews, to blame the victims. The convention defines genocide as an “intention to destroy, wholly or partially, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, per se.”
Israel has never had any interest in the destruction of the Palestinian people. How else can you explain the growth of the population of Palestinians from 1.3 million during the British Mandate to roughly 4.6 million in the disputed territories? And in Israel, the population of Israeli Arabs has grown from 156,000 in 1948 to more than 2 million today—one-fifth of the population.
Consider also that Israel saved the mastermind of Oct. 7, Yahya Sinwar, by performing brain surgery on him when he was in an Israeli prison. Ismail Haniyeh, another Hamas official responsible for the massacre, approved of his daughter, granddaughters, brother-in-law and mother-in-law receiving medical treatment in Israel.
If Israel were engaged in genocide, it has been a dismal failure.
That is also true of Gaza.
Astoundingly, Bartov mentions the hostages only once in the context of the Jan. 19 ceasefire. He blames Israel for breaking the truce, without saying it was a result of Hamas’s refusal to release more hostages. If Hamas had surrendered and released all the hostages it is holding at any point, no civilians would be in danger. It is the genocidaire who starts the war, not the victim, and who is responsible for the casualties.
Like much of the media, Bartov parrots Hamas casualty numbers, referring vaguely to “Gazan health authorities.” He absurdly implies that Israel has failed to kill a single terrorist. Israel estimates that more than 20,000 of the 54,000 claimed dead were militants. That would leave approximately 34,000 civilian casualties, tragic, but consistent with modern urban warfare, primarily when the enemy uses human shields.
Even if we accept the inflated numbers, the implied genocide falls apart under scrutiny. A 1% casualty rate, while horrible, hardly supports an allegation of systematic extermination. Compare this to real genocides: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of 25% of Cambodians, Stalin’s famine-engineered deaths in Ukraine or the Rwandan genocide, which claimed 800,000 lives in just 100 days.
Genocide is not committed by countries that warn civilians to evacuate, allow humanitarian aid through enemy lines, or treat enemy combatants and their families in their hospitals.
Furthermore, if Israelis wanted to eradicate the Palestinians, why did they agree to coexist beside a Palestinian entity on at least 10 separate occasions from 1937 to the present? Opportunities that the Palestinians consistently rejected.
Look at any Palestinian map or the logos of the political organizations, and you can see that it is the Palestinians who wish to erase the Jews’ presence. If given the chance, as both Hezbollah and Hamas officials have repeatedly said, the terrorists would commit the Oct. 7 massacres repeatedly, from north to south. And don’t be misled: The “moderates” in the West Bank that some would like to run postwar Gaza include Palestinian Arabs who cheered and participated in the massacre, and who share the same bloodthirsty objective.
The only force standing between the Jewish people and those who openly seek their destruction is the IDF. This fundamental truth is what Bartov, The New York Times and other detractors refuse to confront, opting instead for a willful inversion of moral responsibility and historical facts.
Exposing the distortions in columns like Bartov’s is part of the endless, Sisyphean task of challenging the Times’ relentless crusade against Israel—an effort made even more urgent by the platform’s reach and influence.
Is Israel’s judicial system endangering its national security?
Aylana Meisel, executive director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum, sits down with veteran investigative journalist Akiva Bigman to expose how unchecked judicial power has reshaped, and even weakened, Israel’s ability to defend itself.
Bigman, editor-in-chief of Mida and former chief investigative reporter at Channel 14, walks us through decades of legal overreach from the Rabin era to the Hamas-led massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Together, they explore how the Israeli Supreme Court has intervened in counterterror policy, dictated military engagement rules and restricted the Israel Defense Forces ability to defend the border against Hamas.
Key topics discussed:
- The 2018 Gaza border protests and how Supreme Court pressure altered IDF rules of engagement
- The collapse of Israel’s “defensive perimeter” and its connection to the Oct. 7
- Historical precedents, including the “neighbor procedure,” targeted killings and the siege of the Church of the Nativity
- The role of foreign-funded NGOs in influencing Israeli court cases
- The growing consensus that security issues should be off-limits to judicial activism
See more at: @JNS_TV. And don’t forget to hit the subscribe button!
The Israel Law & Liberty Forum is proud to partner with JNS to offer a platform for conservative and classical liberal legal thought from within Israel. Any opinions stated are those of the speaker and not meant to represent the positions of the forum or JNS. The forum is an organization that fosters thoughtful conversation and debate on key issues in Israeli law and democracy. The forum takes no official position regarding any specific policy issue, nor does it advance specific policies.
I have a confession. Until my attention was drawn to his Chronicles article, “Zionism Should Not Be a Conservative Sine Qua Non,” I had not heard of Paul Gottfried.
Forced to use Google, I discovered that Paul Edward Gottfried (born in 1941) is an American political philosopher, historian and writer, a former Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania’s Elizabethtown College (an institution of which I was not aware), editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative (a term I do not know) magazine Chronicles (which I do not read) and an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank. I didn’t know that he is considered part of the “alternative right” or that some consider the H.L. Mencken Club, which he founded, a white nationalist group. He insists that he is not to be considered “in the same camp with white nationalists” or associated with “pro-Nazi.”
He was born to a Jewish family that had fled Budapest, Hungary, after the violence there in 1934, and landed in the Bronx, N.Y., and then moved to Bridgeport, Conn. The year 1934 was when the Christian Social Party of Engelbert Dollfuss merged with other nationalist and conservative groups to establish an authoritarian regime based on conservative Roman Catholic and Italian Fascist principles. They then found themselves first involved in a semi-civil war against the Social Democrats’ Schutzbund, a workers’ militia, and, after the assassination of Dollfuss, the object of a Nazi-initiated coup a few months later.
I was surprised to learn that the 83-year-old had attended Yeshiva University, my alma mater, as an undergraduate, and later, Yale University for graduate studies. I found it interesting that the Mises Institute’s “foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sell-out and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.” A fellow traveler of National Conservatism, an idea incubator where Yoram Hazony is quite involved, and whose ideas, that “national identity and national states are essential for freedom and true self-government,” Gottfried approves.
However, at present, he is arguing in that recent Chronicles essay “against making Zionist nationalism a centerpiece of American conservatism.” I doubt that that is because anti-Zionism is now fairly fashionable. Or am I wrong?
Why would Gottfried adopt such a position? After all, Zionism is an authentic nationalism, perhaps the oldest national identity framework, going back some 3,000 years or more. Zionism is faithful to the Jewish people’s national essence of shared history, religion, rituals and customs, a unique language, and a rich heritage of cultural success and accomplishment.
Zionism has created a state where, now that the Likud/Herut ideology has been dominant for over four decades, conservative ideas have overcome Israel’s original dominating Marxist Socialist hegemony. Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, a new axis of states in contradistinction to the “open Europe” has been created that is solidly conservative. Zionism is the West’s current best bulwark against ascendant and triumphalist Islamism, an ideology that would wash away the heritage and traditions Gottfried champions.
Although he assigns his antagonism to a personal incident when, in 1987, having “offended high-placed Zionists,” he discovered that the dean of humanities at Catholic University of America was supposedly “warn[ed] against giving me a graduate professorship in political theory” having thought to be “not quite reliable in the matter of Israel.” This was when he acknowledged that he “strongly supported the Israeli right-wing” and was aligned with the editors of Commentary magazine. To this day, his mind is still boggled why he was not thought to be sufficiently pro-Israel.
The incident remains with him as it points to a “problem” inherent in the American conservative movement: it is “overly dependent on Zionist donors, like the Murdoch family and the widow of Sheldon Adelson.” Seemingly, that “problem” has “undoubtedly contributed to the bitter opposition against Israel coming from the outlying right, typified by the Ron Paul Institute, the Mises Institute, as well as some writers for Chronicles.”
Adopting an inverse Marxist interpretation, he is convinced that “professional and financial advantages that accrue to Zionist advocates … have everything to do, however, with making a career at The Wall Street Journal, becoming a Fox News celebrity or editor at National Review, and being allowed to hobnob with influential conservatives.”
He is sure “Zionist benefactors of the conservative movement throw their weight around” and that “to be a conservative in good standing, it seems that one must be an unqualified Israeli nationalist.” His proof is “please turn on Fox News for a few hours or read the WSJ editorial page.”
In short, while not being an opponent of Israel, he demands that “conservatives and others should have the right to criticize how the Israelis wage war without being denounced by Conservative Inc. as antisemites.” Nevertheless, a Zionist litmus test should not be imposed on members of conservatism. It is not proper and harmful. But why?
Well, Gottfried believes “Israeli forces in 1948 drove out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.” True, he notes, the Arabs did start that war, first having rejected a political compromise, and many of their later troubles could have been avoided. However, he doesn’t follow through with that paradigm of constant diplomatic rejectionism that has continued until this very day, not to mention the Arab engagement in terror as practiced since 1920, at the very least. That should indicate Israel is dealing with an unreasonable and irrational community that has consistently proven unreliable as regards Israel’s security needs, economic development and regional cooperation.
He has also “heard” a Zionist claim that “the Palestinians settled in Israel as latecomers, long after Jews had been there continuously since ancient times.” However, he knows an additional “complicated truth”: “those Jews who managed to stay in their homeland became Christians, and, later, Muslims, depending on the dominant power in the area.”
This from a professor, thinker, ideologue and public intellectual.
There were Jews in Roman Palestine, and the land’s “Christianization” did not alter its Jewish demography. The Jerusalem (“Palestinian”) Talmud’s editing ended by “the early fifth century.” There were Jews in seventh-century Byzantine Palestine, and they lived in many villages. Jews, as Jews, lived in the Land of Israel throughout the early Muslim period, as Moshe Gil writes. And on and on, including living as Jews during the Crusader period, the Second Arab-Muslim Conquest, the Mameluke Period and the Ottoman Period into the 19th century.
Gottfried sets up a strawman: “Israel was not an empty land waiting for European Jews to reclaim it … the idea that Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe during the late 19th century were the long-absent owners of Palestine. Am I supposed to believe that the Palestinians whom these Jews encountered were all recent squatters?” But the Arabs of what became the Palestine Mandate considered themselves until 1920 as Southern Syrians. Moreover, most of the privately owned land therein was not owned by Arab residents in the area.
He then takes a further step into the realm of historical ridiculousness in writing, “those Jews who arrived thousands of years later were different from the people whom the Romans drove out. They came from a different culture and part of the world, and … these Europeans did not have a moral right as ‘original settlers’ to dispossess the Palestinians.”
So, à la Gottfried, a national people are only due to a culture and the part of the world that they come from? Of course, from where does he presume that European Jews originated, if not the Land of Israel in the first place? And what about the Jews from Middle Eastern, North African and Asian countries who also over the centuries repatriated back to the Land of Israel with a different cultural background, and yet the same religious practices, the same national language and shared customs, even if different in Sephardi communities rather than Ashkenazi ones?
In his last lashing out, Gottfried insists that “it’s time for the right to rid itself of its unseemly obsession with Israel loyalty tests. There is a difference between hating Israel and sounding like a cheering gallery on steroids.”
No one, professor, need “cheer.” One does have to be faithful to the historical record, to the truth of the history of the Jewish people as well as the great morality that is in supporting Israel and Zionism as it faces an implacable enemy—from the ranks of white nationalist antisemites to Islamist antisemites to Marxist antisemites, and all those in-between.
The Israeli Air Force on Thursday afternoon intercepted two rockets fired at the Jewish state by terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip.
Air-raid sirens sounded in the border villages of Kibbutz Mefalsim, Kibbutz Nir Am and Ibim, as well as in the nearby city of Sderot, sending tens and thousands of civilians running for shelter.
On Monday night, the IDF said that it had "most likely" intercepted two rockets fired by Palestinian terrorist groups from central Gaza.
Last week, a mortar shell fired from the Strip hit a structure in Kibbutz Nirim after the Israeli army failed to intercept it due to "human error."
The shell caused minor damage to the kibbutz's "Youth Neighborhood," which is undergoing reconstruction after 24 homes were completely destroyed during Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which five residents were murdered.
The latest rocket attack from Gaza comes as efforts are underway by mediators to reach a deal to release the remaining 50 hostages, living and dead, being held by Hamas and forge a ceasefire in the coastal enclave.
Israeli military operations across the coastal enclave have continued as part of "Operation Gideon's Chariots," a campaign with the stated goal of dismantling Hamas's last military capabilities, taking control of key areas in the Strip, and securing the release of the captives.
Paradiso, a feted concert hall in Amsterdam, announced on Wednesday it had offered a solo show to Bob Vylan, a British duo that recently highlighted the chant “Death to the IDF.”
The duo was originally scheduled to perform at the Paradiso with another band as part of a joint European tour that also included Germany, but the German venues cancelled the show because of the “Death to the IDF!” chants led by Bob Vylan at the Glastonbury festival last month, Paradiso wrote in a statement.
Two other Dutch venues—in Tilburg and Nijmegen—also invited Bob Vylan to perform there to allow them to hold a European tour, the De Telegraaf daily reported on Wednesday.
“Paradiso has now scheduled Bob Vylan for a standalone headline show in the Main Hall on Saturday, 13 September 2025,” said the management of the venue, which has hosted The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Nirvana, Lou Reed and U2.
“We are aware that a debate arose following their performance at Glastonbury, in which they strongly criticized the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza. Those words are not ours, but we recognize the right to be outraged by war and mass human suffering,” Paradiso added.
Earlier this week, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema accused critics of Bob Vylan of “intimidation” against Paradiso and equated them with people who seek to boycott Israelis, because people opposed to the concert had placed a banner vowing to “fight” against the duo’s
appearance there.
The banner read: “If Bobby plays that night, Amsterdam will stand and fight.”
Bob Vylan is the subject of a criminal investigation for their “Death to the IDF” chants, which they led thousands to repeat.
Paradiso is also hosting Kneecap, a British band whose singer, Liam O'Hanna, is standing trial in his native United Kingdom for displaying in public a flag of Hezbollah, which Britain considers a terrorist organization. Kneecap is scheduled to perform eight days ahead of Bob Vylan.
The U.S. State Department has revoked visas for Bob Vylan’s band. This was “in light of their hateful tirade at [the] Glastonbury [music festival], including leading the crowd in death chants,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said in a post on X. “Foreigners who glorify
violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” he added. Bob Vylan had a U.S. tour lined up in November.
Their former agency, United Talent Agency, removed their page from the agency’s website, the LBC radio station reported.
Glastonbury is the largest music festival in the United Kingdom, attracting some 200,000 revelers.
A British government spokesperson condemned the rhetoric used on stage by Bobby Vylan, which was aired on the BBC, as did the organizers of the Glastonbury festival. (The Bob Vylan punk duo consists of singer/guitarist Bobby Vylan and drummer Bobbie Vylan. They use stage names to hide their real names.)