Avraham Mengistu, 28, an Israeli citizen, crossed into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on September 7, 2014. He has since been kidnapped by the Palestinian terror group, and they have refused to let him return home, Israeli officials said Thursday.
“No family of an American hostage has ever been prosecuted for paying a ransom for the return of their loved one,” Obama said. “The last thing we should ever do is to add to the family’s pain with threats like that.” During conversations with families of the hostages, Obama said, they expressed frustration with the government bureaucracy to bring their loved ones home.
Later this afternoon, Obama is expected to meet with some of the families of the slain hostages and announce his new policy that would allow families to privately pay ransoms to terrorists to recover their loved ones. According to Foreign Policy, only 24 of the 82 families that the administration contacted chose to participate in the hostage review.
The “trial” of Jason Rezaian – an American journalist brazenly held hostage by those trustworthy statesmen in Iran – has gotten under way, and it is exactly the kind of outrageous totalitarian farce you would expect.
Turkish authorities neutralized a woman who was reportedly armed with guns and hand grenades as she and a male accomplice attempted to attack the Istanbul Police Headquarters on Wednesday, Ankara officials have revealed.
In February 2013, jihadists dressed all in black stopped two unidentified men at a Syrian checkpoint and on examining their IDs discovered they were Christians. The militants handcuffed the two men, threw them into the back of a truck and drove them to an undisclosed location some eight hours away.
For the tenth time since taking him hostage, the Islamic State (ISIS) has paraded British journalist John Cantlie as the “host” of one of its propaganda videos, this time giving a guided tour of the contested Syrian city of Aleppo, which ISIS seeks to portray as functional and productive under its control.
Dutch authorities have released few details about the bizarre case of 19-year-old Tarik Zahzah’s attack on the main news studio of television station NOS on Thursday. To get the obvious question out of the way first, the police say there is no evidence that Zahzah, who is half-Egyptian, acted on behalf of organized terrorism.
The United States has reportedly aborted an effort to rescue a Jordanian pilot captured by the Islamic State near Raqqa, Syria– the proclaimed “capital” of the Islamic State.
The 6th edition of the Islamic State jihadist terror group’s Dabiq magazine features an interview with captured Jordanian pilot First Lieutenant Muadh Safi al-Kasasbeh.
