Israel launches deadly Gaza strikes, says ready for new truce talks

NABEK, Syria: In a centuries-old monastery on a rocky hill north of Damascus, friends of missing Italian priest Paolo Dall’Oglio carry on his legacy, hopeful Bashar Assad’s ouster might help reveal the Jesuit’s fate.
“We want to know if Father Paolo is alive or dead, who imprisoned him, and what was his fate,” said Father Jihad Youssef who heads Deir Mar Musa Al-Habashi, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Damascus.
For years, Dall’Oglio lived in Deir Mar Musa — the monastery of St. Moses the Ethiopian — which dates to around the 6th century. He is credited with helping restore the place of worship.
A fierce critic of Assad, whose 2011 repression of anti-government protests sparked war, he was exiled the following year for meeting with opposition members, returning secretly to opposition-controlled areas in 2013.
He disappeared that summer while heading to the Raqqa headquarters of a group that would later become known as the Daesh, to plead for the release of kidnapped activists.
Conflicting reports emerged on Dall’Oglio’s whereabouts, including that he was kidnapped by the extremists, killed or handed to the Syrian government.
Daesh’s territorial defeat in Syria in 2019 brought no new information.
Tens of thousands of people have been detained or gone missing in Syria during more than a decade of conflict, many disappearing into Assad’s jails.
His December overthrow has enabled his friends at the monastery to openly discuss suspicions Dall’Oglio might have been “imprisoned by the regime,” Youssef said.
“We waited to see a sign of him... in Saydnaya prison or Palestine Branch,” Youssef said, referring to notorious detention facilities from which detainees were released after Assad’s toppling.
“We were told a lot of things, including that he was seen in the Adra prison in 2019,” Youssef said, referring to another facility outside Damascus, “but nothing reliable.”

Dall’Oglio, born in 1954, hosted interfaith seminars at Deir Mar Musa where Syria’s Christian minority and Muslims used to pray side by side, turning the monastery into a symbol of coexistence.
Youssef said it became a bridge for dialogue between Syrians in a country that “the former regime divided into sects who feared each other.”
Some 30,000 people visited in 2010, but the war and Dall’Oglio’s disappearance scared them away for more than a decade.
The monastery reopened for visitors in 2022.
“I didn’t know Father Paolo,” said Shatha Al-Barrah, 28, who came to Deir Mar Musa seeking solace and reflection.
But “I know he reflects this monastery, which opens its heart to all people from all faiths,” said the interpreter as she climbed the 300 steps leading to the building, built on the ruins of a Roman tower and partly carved into the rock.
Julian Zakka said Dall’Oglio was one of the reasons he joined the Jesuit order.
“Father Paolo used to work against associating Islam with extremists,” said the 28-year-old, “and to emphasize that coexistence is possible.”

After Islamist-led rebels ended half a century of one-family rule, the new authorities have sought to reassure minorities that they will be protected.
Assad had presented himself as a protector of minorities in multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Syria, but largely concentrated power in the hands of the Alawite community to whom his family belonged.
This month, Jesuits in Syria emphasized the need for healing, noting in a statement that fear had “shackled” the community for years.
Youssef said that while “the regime presented itself as protecting us, in fact it was using us as protection.”
He expressed optimism that “at last, the load has been lifted from our chests and we can breathe” after decades of “political death,” adding that he hoped the new authorities would be inclusive.
For now, Youssef is intent on spreading Dall’Oglio’s message.
“We will return to organizing activities like he loved to do,” Youssef said, including a march in Homs province, home to Alawites, Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
“The regime caused deep wounds between the Islamic sects” in Homs, he said.
“Father Paolo wanted to organize a large procession there — to pray at the mass graves, to be a bridge between people — to let them listen to each other’s pain, grieve and cry together, and stand hand in hand.”
 

JERUSALEM: An elderly Israeli man taken hostage by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, has been declared dead, a statement from his kibbutz said on Tuesday.
“With heavy hearts, we, the members of the kibbutz, received the news this morning about the murder of our dear friend, Shlomo Mansour, 86 years old, who was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Kissufim during the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023,” the community said of the Iraqi-born Israeli.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday that the “decision to confirm his death was based on intelligence gathered in recent months.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a post on X that Mansour had been “murdered in captivity” by Hamas on October 7.
One of the founders of Kibbutz Kissufim, Mansour was kidnapped from a henhouse during Hamas’s attack on southern Israel.
His wife Mazal Mansour, with whom he lived for 60 years, managed to escape the attack. The couple have five children and 12 grandchildren.
The Israeli hostage forum said in a statement that Mansour, born in Baghdad, was a survivor of the Farhud pogrom — a 1941 attack on Iraq’s Jewish community — and immigrated to Israel with his family at 13.
“This is one of the most difficult days in the history of our kibbutz,” the community of Kissufim said in a statement.
“Shlomo was much more than a community member to us — he was a father, grandfather, a true friend and the beating heart of Kissufim.”
“Our hearts are broken that we couldn’t bring him back to us alive.”
The kibbutz called on the Israeli government and world leaders “to continue acting with determination to bring back all the hostages, both the living and the dead, and not to allow painful stories like Shlomo’s to repeat themselves.”
In a statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he and his wife, Sara, “share in the family’s deep mourning.”
“We will not rest and will not be silent until he is returned to a burial in Israel. We will continue to act with determination and without pause until we return all of our hostages — both the living and the fallen,” he said.
A fragile ceasefire reached last month between Hamas and Israel appeared strained on Tuesday, a day after Hamas threatened to postpone the release of Israeli hostages scheduled for Saturday.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump warned that “all hell” would break loose if every Israeli hostage is not released from Gaza within the coming days, a threat Hamas said “further complicates matters.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by the Hamas attack, the deadliest in Israel’s history, which resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 35 that Israeli officials say are dead.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the war has killed at least 48,208 people in the territory, figures which the UN considers reliable.