MAY GOD AVENGE HIS BLOOD: Besides the Bibas mom and babies, who deservedly have received a great deal of attention as their bodies returned to Israel today, the monsters in Gaza also murdered 83 year old Oded Lifshitz. Oded was a peace activist who devoted his retirement to driving children from Gaza to hospitals in Israel for medical treatment. My heart breaks for his daughter, who I met in Israel last July, and who had the strength to show my tour group the burnt-out husk of a home she grew up in, and from which her parents were kidnapped. They were kidnapped alive, and Oded was alive when his wife was released in November 2023. Hamas was well-aware by then of Oded’s biography, and at any time could have ordered the release of the elderly man who had helped so many Palestinians. To Hamas, though, he was just a Jew fit for slaughter. And at least some of the “civilians” in Gaza who were befriended and helped by peace activists like Oded provided intelligence information for Hamas’s 10/7 massacre. In Judaism, when someone dies we traditionally say “May his memory be a blessing.” But when someone is murdered by antisemites, we say, “May God avenge his blood.”