Iran may have orchestrated the attacks on Israeli embassies in Stockholm and Copenhagen this week, according to Swedish intelligence agency SÄPO.

Danish police arrested three Swedish nationals on Wednesday after two blasts, likely caused by hand grenades, close to the Israeli diplomatic mission in Copenhagen.

“No one has been injured, and we are carrying out initial investigations at the scene,” Danish police had posted to X. “A possible connection to the Israeli embassy, ​​located in the area, is being investigated.”

On Tuesday, the Israeli mission in Stockholm was targeted by gunfire.

“All employees are safe, and none of them were injured,” the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem confirmed.

Fredrik Hallstrom, head of operations at SÄPO, the Swedish Security Service, said that “there are some things that could point in that direction” of Iranian involvement.

In May, the agency confirmed that Tehran was recruiting members of Swedish criminal gangs to commit “acts of violence” against Israeli targets.

Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported on Wednesday that the two embassy attacks had been ordered by the Swedish criminal network Foxtrot at the behest of Iran.

A firearm and an empty shell casing were found outside the embassy, according to Swedish TV4's "Nyheterna" news program.

The incident was reported some 30 minutes before Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at the Jewish state in its second-ever direct attack; the first one was back in April.

Ahead of the assault, Foreign Minister Israel Katz summoned an emergency meeting with all Israeli ambassadors on “how to act with heads of state in the various capitals in view of the recent attacks.”

Iran is behind a series of terrorist attacks carried out by criminal gangs targeting Israeli embassies in Europe, including Sweden, over recent months, the Mossad intelligence agency revealed earlier this year.

An Israeli Air Force fighter jet conducted a rare strike in Tulkarem in northwestern Samaria on Thursday night, targeting top Hamas terrorist Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi.

The Palestinian Authority reported at least 18 fatalities in the strike, with a local security source telling Agence France-Presse it was the deadliest in Judea and Samaria since the Second Intifada.

Ayyth Radwan, the head of Islamic Jihad's Tulkarem branch, was also reportedly killed.

Oufi was planning a terrorist attack “in the immediate time frame,” according to the Israel Defense Forces, and directed the thwarted car bombing last month near Ateret in the Binyamin region of Samaria.

There were no casualties in the incident, which Israel Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, called a “great miracle.”

The IDF said Oufi was involved in smuggling weapons to terrorists who perpetrated several recent attacks against Israelis, including some that resulted in injuries to civilians.

He also “worked to establish terrorist networks on behalf of Hamas and assisted terror operatives in the area to carry out significant shooting and explosive attacks,” added the military.

An Israeli Air Force strike in Beirut targeted an underground bunker where Hashem Safieddine and other top Hezbollah terrorists were meeting, The New York Times reports, citing three Israeli officials.

The fate of Safieddine, a maternal cousin of slain terror master Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council and a leading candidate to replace Nasrallah, is not yet clear.

Around midnight on Thursday, a series of huge explosions rocked Beirut's Dahiyeh district, a known Hezbollah stronghold, creating shockwaves that rattled buildings at least 15 miles away, according to the Times.

It was one of the heaviest Israeli bombardments in the Lebanese capital since Hezbollah opened fire on the Jewish state a day after Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre in the northwestern Negev.

Safieddine has been declared a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States.

On Sept. 27, the IAF dropped at least a dozen 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs in the strike that killed Nasrallah. Two unnamed Israeli defense officials told the Times that more than 80 bombs were dropped over the span of several minutes during the strike, but did not confirm the type of munitions used.

The IDF revealed on Sunday that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps deputy commander Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan and Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s highest-ranking military commander, were among at least 20 terrorists “of various ranks” slain in the strike.

"We have settled accounts with someone who was responsible for the murders of countless Israelis and many nationals of other countries, including hundreds of Americans and dozens of French,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Nasrallah's targeted killing.

“Nasrallah was not just another terrorist, he was the terrorist,” said Netanyahu. “He was the axis of the axes, the main engine of Iran’s axis of evil. He and his people were the architects of the plan to destroy Israel.”

The Hezbollah leader’s elimination was “a necessary condition in achieving the objectives we have set: Returning the residents of the north safely to their homes and changing the balance of power in the region for years,” said Netanyahu. “As long as Nasrallah was alive, he would have quickly rebuilt the capabilities we took from Hezbollah. Therefore, I gave the directive—and Nasrallah is no longer with us.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stressed that while Nasrallah’s death was “a very important step, it is not the final one.

"We will employ all the capabilities at our disposal, and if someone on the other side did not understand what those capabilities entail, we mean all capabilities," Gallant said.

An Israel Defense Forces strike in the Gaza Strip on Thursday killed Aziz Salha, who gained global notoriety for a video of him lynching two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah's twin city of el-Bireh on Oct. 12, 2000.

The images of Salha standing at a window in the Palestinian Authority's el-Bireh police station, waving his blood-soaked hands in front of a Palestinian mob during the early days of the Second Intifada, became etched into the collective Israeli psyche, and for many remains a direct consequence of the Oslo Accords.

IDF Cpl. (res.) Vadim Norzhic, 33, a truckdriver from Or Akiva who had made aliyah from Irkutsk 10 years earlier, and Sgt. First Class (res.) Yosef Avrahami, 38, a toy salesman from Petach Tikvah, were pulled from their vehicle and beaten and stabbed to death, and then mutilated, after accidentally entering the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah, located in the Judaean Mountains some 10 km. north of Jerusalem.

Salha, 43, was arrested a year later but was among the 1,027 Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli jails as part of the 2011 deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in Gaza.

Salha was targeted in an airstrike in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, the military said.

"In recent years he was involved in directing terrorist activity in Judea and Samaria and continued to engage in terrorist activity even in these past days," the IDF said.

After a decade of slavery, a Yazidi woman ISIS terrorists kidnapped in Iraq and trafficked to a terrorist in the Gaza Strip was rescued in an operation spearheaded by the Israel Defense Forces.

Fawzi Amin Sido, taken captive in 2014 at the age of 11, was freed this week and returned to her family in Iraq.

The Palestinian terrorist who had been holding her was recently killed, allowing her to flee and eventually be rescued, the IDF said.

“The young girl was extracted from the Gaza Strip in recent days in a secret operation through the Kerem Shalom Crossing. After entering Israel, she was taken to Jordan via the Allenby Crossing and then on to her family in Iraq,” the army said.

The operation was led by the Israeli military with the participation of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and "other members of the international community."

The incident proves the “connection between Hamas and the Islamic State and [is] further evidence of the crimes against humanity carried out by the terror group in Gaza,” the IDF said.

"The IDF will continue to act at all times to destroy the infrastructure of the terrorist organization Hamas-ISIS, and to return the abductees," it continued.

An Israeli Air Force strike three months ago killed Hamas's de facto prime minister in the Gaza Strip, the military confirmed on Thursday.

Rawhi Mushtaha was targeted in Gaza along with senior terrorists Sameh al-Siraj and Sami Odeh, who both held security portfolios in Hamas's "political" bureau, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Air Force fighter jets struck the terrorists while they were hiding in a tunnel in northern Gaza that “served as a Hamas command and control center and enabled senior operatives to remain inside for extended periods of time," added the military.

The IDF described Mushtaha as Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar’s “right-hand man and one of his closest associates." He is believed to have been one of a handful of key architects of Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 people in southern Israel.

Mushtaha shared a prison cell with Sinwar before both were released, along with 1,025 additional Palestinian terrorists, as part of the 2011 deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in Gaza.

The IDF "will continue to pursue all the terrorists who took part in the Oct. 7 [attacks] and will act to harm anyone who threatens the citizens of the State of Israel," the military said.

In August, the IDF confirmed that the head of Hamas’s terror army, Mohammed Deif, was killed in an operation in the Khan Yunis area of southern Gaza on July 13.

Deif and Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of the terrorist group’s Khan Yunis Brigade, were targeted in a building above ground close to the al-Mawasi humanitarian zone.

Deif, 58, was the second in command in Gaza after Sinwar, and headed Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. He was also responsible for planning several bus-bombing attacks in the 1990s and 2000s.

“Muhammad Deif, the ‘Osama bin Laden of Gaza,’ was eliminated on 13.07.24. This is a significant milestone in the process of dismantling Hamas as a military and governing authority in Gaza, and in the achievement of the goals of this war,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at the time.

Also in July, the chairman of Hamas’s politburo, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an alleged Israeli operation in Tehran.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, persona non grata in the Jewish state on Wednesday morning, hours before Rosh Hashanah begins.

“Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel, as almost every country in the world has done, does not deserve to step foot on Israeli soil,” Katz stated. “This is a secretary-general, who has yet to denounce the massacre and sexual atrocities committed by Hamas murderers on Oct. 7, nor has he led any efforts to declare them a terrorist organization.”

“Israel will continue to defend its citizens and uphold its national dignity, with or without António Guterres,” added Katz, referring to the secretary-general as “a stain on the history of the United Nations.”

Hours after Katz’s announcement, Guterres continued to blame the Jewish state for recent escalations in the Middle East and for being attacked in Iran’s ballistic missile barrage on Tuesday.

Addressing an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday morning, Guterres chastised Israel for balking at last week’s proposal by the United States and France, which called for a three-week ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.

“Israel refused that proposal and stepped up its strikes, including bombing the Hezbollah headquarters where its leader was killed,” Guterres said.

The secretary-general said that he issued warnings last week about growing tensions along the Israel-Lebanon border, but a JNS search of his public statements and social media accounts suggests that Guterres has barely mentioned Hezbollah as the terror group has launched some 9,000 rockets at Israel since Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s massacre. When Guterres did mention Hezbollah, JNS found, it was in a statement that also blamed Israel.

Guterres shared Iran’s reasoning for its ballistic missile attack on Israel with attendees of the Wednesday meeting, which included Israeli, Lebanese, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian representatives. 

“It stated it was in response to the killings of Hassan Nasrallah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp commander Abbas Nilforoushan last week, as well as that of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July,” Guterres said. 

He clarified a statement he issued on Tuesday, for which he was widely criticized, stating: “I condemn the broadening of the Middle East conflict with escalation after escalation. This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.” At the Wednesday meeting, Guterres said that he condemned Iran’s attack.

Stéphane Dujarric, Guterres’s spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday afternoon that the United Nations regards Katz’s declaration “as a political statement by the foreign minister” that has no practical impact. Guterres can only come to Israel at the Jewish state’s invitation, which was unlikely anyway given the tension between the global body’s head and Israel.

“We continue our contacts with Israel at the operational level and other levels because we need to,” Dujarric said.

JNS asked Dujarric at the press conference about a lack of  clarity in multiple Guterres statements about Israel, including his condemnation initially of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, which he followed by a lengthy attempt to justify the attack.

Dujarric told JNS that Guterres was clear at Wednesday’s Security Council meeting when he condemned Iran’s attack. The secretary-general’s statement on Tuesday was “within the context of what everybody knew and what the news was,” Dujarric said.

‘Flag still flies’

Guterres stated during Wednesday’s meeting that Israel had requested that U.N. Interim Force In Lebanon peacekeeping troops relocate within Southern Lebanon, ostensibly for their safety as Israel carries out ground operations to further degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities.

Guterres said that the “U.N. flag still flies” in UNIFIL’s area of operation, suggesting that the troops won’t heed Israel’s request.

JNS sought further clarification from Dujarric, who said that Jerusalem requested “UNIFIL to leave several positions near the Blue Line,” but the decision was made “operationally and politically to stay.”

Dujarric added that the United Nations “will continue to stay while at the same time assessing our posture and the security of the peacekeepers, I would say, on an hourly basis.”

Guterres also told the Security Council on Wednesday that “I wonder what remains of the framework” on Security Council Resolution 1701, which was passed in 2006 and was supposed to lead to the disarmament of the Lebanese Armed Forces and folding of Hezbollah. It was also meant to reestablish Lebanese government sovereignty in Southern Lebanon.

Asked on Wednesday which party to the resolution—Israel or Lebanon—ought to enforce it, given that Lebanon has not done so in 18 years, Dujarric said that “diplomacy takes time.”

“We want to see the gun silenced, and we want to see a return to diplomacy,” he said.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council that calls to “both sides” to stop escalating the conflict is “an absurd comparison between the one who causes destruction and the one who defends himself."

The conflict between Israel and Iran “is a struggle between a sovereign state fighting for its right to exist and a regime that desires nothing but the destruction of Israel,” Danon said.

‘Significant escalation’

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Washington’s U.N. ambassador, said in Wednesday’s Security Council meeting that Iran’s failure to kill Israelis on Tuesday “does not diminish the fact that this attack, intended to cause significant death and destruction, marked a significant escalation by Iran.”

“This is a moment for this council to speak out—with one voice—and condemn Iran for its unprovoked attack against another member state,” she said, “and equally important, to impose serious consequences on the IRGC for its actions.”

Thomas-Greenfield accused Iran of complicity in the Oct. 7 attacks by funding and training Hamas. She told the council that the United States warned Iran not to use the aftermath of the massacre to “risk propelling the region into a broader war.” 

Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, “flagrantly and repeatedly ignored this warning” by enabling its terror proxies to inflict further damage and chaos, Thomas-Greenfield said.

She also pushed back on the U.N. secretary-general’s explanation. “The IRGC was acting in solidarity with Hezbollah” after last Friday’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah,the Hezbollah secretary-general, she said.

“I can think of no starker example of state support of terrorism than launching ballistic missiles to avenge the death of a terrorist leader,” the U.S. envoy added.

Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador to the global body, blamed the United States for supporting Israel. “As a result, the flames of the all-consuming conflict are spreading wider, engulfing more of Israel’s neighbors in the region,” he said.

A harsh critic of the U.S.-Israel alliance, Nebenzia said that “there is a vast and dangerous illusion that Israel will be able to remain unscathed in this growing fire.”

From a keynote address delivered on Sept. 26 at the 18th Annual Jewish Law Symposium in Whippany, N.J.

Our topic tonight is “The Ethics of War and Peace.” A year ago, a program on this topic would have been an abstract philosophical discussion. Today, however, as the morality of Israel’s military actions are challenged at the United Nations and around the globe, our discussion is not hypothetical. The topic is concrete and real.

Israel is fighting a morally, ethical and just war. It is a war that Israel and the Jewish people did not want, did not seek and did not start. Similar to the battle undertaken by the Maccabees more than 2,000 years ago, Israel today is waging a war against those who seek to destroy our identity as Jews.

Make no mistake. This is not a war over territory. Yes, Israel must ensure that its borders are secure so that its citizens can safely return to their homes in the north and south of the country. But this is not a territorial dispute. For Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the sponsor of each of these terror organizations—the Iranian revolutionary regime—this is not a political dispute that can be resolved through land swaps or a two-state solution. Their goal, as spelled out in the Houthi slogan, is, “God is the Greatest. Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Iran and its terror proxies seek to eradicate Israel, the Jewish people and America.

It’s difficult to accept that there are people in this world consumed by irrational hate—and that it is not possible to eradicate that hate through negotiated political treaties. This is one of the lessons of antisemitism. It’s not possible to rationally negotiate it away. At its core, antisemitism is a continuously shifting baseless conspiracy theory that holds Jews responsible for society’s perceived misfortunes. No matter what the century, no matter the era, the Jews are always the scapegoat. As Douglas Murray said recently: “The Jews can never win. They’ve been hated for being rich and for being poor … for integrating and for not integrating … for being stateless … rootless cosmopolitans … [and now] for having a state.”

For the Nazis, who sought a pure Aryan race, the Jews were the ultimate race polluters. The Nazis certainly did not view the Jews as “white.” And yet, today, when many people see the world through the binary lens of the “oppressed” and “oppressors,” there are those who say that all Jews, including Jews of color, are white, colonizing oppressors.

Jews are fighting both a military war on the ground in the Middle East and a war of words and ideas around the globe. The current military battle began with Hamas’s barbaric, unprovoked attack on Oct. 7, but the battle of ideas—that seeks to demonize Jewish identity and deny Jewish history—that battle has been waging on college campuses and beyond for decades. For years, Jewish students have been vilified and equated with evil. Einat Wilf, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, calls it the “placard strategy.” Imagine the sign, with its simple message: Star of David = Zionist = evil concept (apartheid, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, famine, genocide, etc). These concepts are not presented to discuss or even debate their accuracy. Is it apartheid? Or a genocide? No, the evil concepts are there for the equation, the idea is to equate Jews (as represented by the Star of David) and the “Zionists” with evil.

As president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, I have been speaking with students on campus on a nearly daily basis for years. And I can tell you that what is taking place at universities today, overwhelmingly, is not a good-faith political debate about Israel’s policies. When students are barred from the encampments, no one inquires to determine whether or not they support Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or a two-state solution before blocking their access to the university library or the dining hall. Instead, anti-Israel demonstrators see a student wearing a Magen David (Star of David) or a kippah or speaking Hebrew, and they conclude that the student must be a “Zionist”—a Jew who defines their identity as part of a people indigenous to the land of Israel. On college campuses today, if you believe the Jews are a people with a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and that, therefore, Israel has a right to exist, you are branded a Zionist and told you are not welcome. You are treated as a pariah and the equivalent of evil.

Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act requires universities that receive federal funds (which includes nearly all institutions of higher education in the United States) to protect students from harassment and discrimination that is so severe it denies the student an equal educational opportunity. Although Title VI does not include “religion” as a protected category, for the last 20 years, the statute has been interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education to cover Jews and members of other faith-based communities when they are targeted on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry and ethnicity rather than their religious practice. In other words, universities have a legal obligation to protect Jewish students when they are being bullied, shunned, marginalized, excluded or assaulted on the basis of their Jewish shared ancestry and ethnicity. If universities fail to meet their obligation, they risk losing their federal funding.

So what is the Jews’ shared ancestry and ethnicity?

Well, Jews are not only a faith, we are also a people. And what defines our peoplehood, what has kept us connected over millennia, is our shared ancestral history and heritage. What binds us together as Jews is our collective memory. We share the stories of our ancestors. At the Passover seder, for example, we tell the story of how our ancestors were liberated from slavery in Egypt. During Sukkot, we recall how our people wandered in the desert on the way to the Promised Land.

Our Jewish history is inextricably intertwined with the Land of Israel. It is impossible to separate the two.

Some 3,000 years ago, King David designated Jerusalem, also known as Zion, as the capital of Israel. His son, King Solomon, built the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Our holidays are linked to the agricultural cycle in Israel. For centuries, Jews have not only prayed facing Jerusalem, but they have also prayed to return there.

Those who recognize this history and understand that the Jews are a people indigenous to the land of Israel are Zionists. They appreciate that, as an indigenous people, Jews have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

I do not mean to suggest that all Jews are Zionists. Some Jews do not define their identity this way. By the same token, not all Jews are Sabbath observers. But the fact that some Jews do not observe Shabbat does not negate the fact that Shabbat observance is, for Jews who observe Shabbat, an integral part of what it means to them to be Jewish. So too, the fact that some Jews may claim to be “anti-Zionist” does not negate the fact that for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism—the recognition that the Jews are a people indigenous to the land of Israel—is an integral component of how they define their Jewish identity. That is why, according to a Pew study, eight in 10 Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.

Universities, thankfully, are beginning to understand this truth. Some schools like New York University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University, and the recommendation report prepared by Judge Jonathan Lippman for the City University of New York (CUNY) school system, have recently explicitly acknowledged that for many Jews, Zionism is a part of Jewish identity, and therefore, harassment and discrimination of “Zionists” violates university policy when the term is being used as a substitute for “Jew.”

But the war we are fighting against those who deny Jewish identity and erase Jewish history is increasing in intensity. There is a narrative that is becoming entrenched in kindergarten to 12th-grade lesson plans and is being promoted on university campuses as scholarship. According to this narrative, everything that happened in the land that we call Israel, since creation, is Palestinian. It acknowledges that there were Jews, Christians and Muslims living in the land. But it defines those identities as only religious identities. According to this narrative, the ethnic and cultural identity of all those people throughout history was Palestinian. Those who promote this narrative claim to “know the difference” between “Jews” and “Zionists.” For them, “Jews” are the ones who define Judaism as only a religion. The “Zionists” by contrast, are the ones they accuse of trying to “Judaize” Palestinian history and heritage by calling it Jewish. According to this narrative, Jewish identity is completely erased and hijacked. Jewish history is renamed as Palestinian and Jewish peoplehood is denied.

That, however, is still not the end of the road. Those who seek to eradicate our Jewish identity have developed a term, they call it Anti-Palestinian Racism. According to the definition, the term applies to anyone who pushes back against the narrative I just described. So Jews who define themselves as members of a people indigenous to the Land of Israel or as Zionists are being accused of anti-Palestinian racism. Merely expressing pride in our Jewish ancestral heritage is now being defined as somehow erasing Palestinian history. This is the modern incarnation of the United Nation’s repugnant “Zionism is Racism” resolution which was revoked in 1991. And it is at the core of the war of words and ideas being waged on university campuses.

Social media has brought the military battlefield into our living rooms and onto the palm of our hand. In this way, the military battlefield has become a tool in the war of words and ideas. Our enemies frequently mischaracterize what takes place on the military battlefield, and weaponize it to dehumanize Israelis and Jews. We need to recognize this mischaracterization and manipulation and the threat that it poses to the Jewish people worldwide.

It’s incumbent upon us to push back forcefully against any narrative that dehumanizes Jews and seeks to erase and deny our Jewish identity, history and heritage and eradicate our homeland. Fighting these battles is moral, just and ethical. Just like the battle the Maccabees waged to preserve Jewish identity so many years ago.

I end on a note of hope. The silver lining evident today on campuses and beyond is that Jewish engagement in Hillel and Chabad is skyrocketing. On campus, Hillel directors and Chabad rabbis report that record numbers of students are participating in their programs. It is wonderful that Jews across the country are leaning in and learning more about their Jewish identity. Increased knowledge enables confident warriors. Never forget that the best antidote to bigotry and discrimination is self-confidence and pride.

Jews are the most resilient people in history. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said, “Jews are the people who not only survive but thrive in adversity.” We have an uncanny ability to find inner strength in our darkest moments. To quote Rabbi Sacks again, “Any civilization that can see the blessing within the curse, the fragment of light within the heart of darkness, has within it the capacity to endure.” We will endure, and we will thrive.

So, my prayer for the coming year is that we be blessed as a people to come through this difficult time a more united, better-educated, more empathetic, stronger, proud people who will continue to enrich and enhance our world, and serve as a light unto the nations.

Am Yisrael Chai. Shanah Tovah!

U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday that he opposes an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Speaking on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland ahead of a trip to states affected by Hurricane Helene, Biden said he was crafting a response with the G7 group of leading democracies.

“We’re working on a joint statement all of us agree on from Japan to France to Germany,” Biden said. “What we’re doing in that regard is we’re making it clear that there are things that have to be done.”

“It will be done before too long, probably by the time we land,” Biden said of the statement. “There’s going to be some sanctions imposed on Iran.”

Asked if he would support Israel striking Iran’s nuclear sites, Biden said he would not.

“The answer is ‘no,’” Biden said. “We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do, but all seven of us agree that they have a right to respond, but they should respond proportionately.” (The G7 is Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.)

Biden declined to say what advice he was giving to the Jewish state and indicated that he had yet to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Iran’s ballistic missile attack.

“We’ve been talking to Bibi’s people the whole time. It’s not necessary to talk to Bibi,” he said, referring to Netanyahu’s nickname.

“I’ll probably be talking to him relatively soon,” he added.

Biden spoke with the G7 leaders on Wednesday "to discuss Iran’s unacceptable attack against Israel and to coordinate on a response to this attack, including new sanctions," per a White House readout.

Biden and the G7 "unequivocally condemned Iran’s attack against Israel," the White House added. "President Biden expressed the United States’ full solidarity and support to Israel and its people and reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security."