Israel Warns: Another Strike on Iran May Be Hours Away | MidEast & Beyond: [One hour, two minutes] Israel established a secret elite intelligence task force in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre to track down and kill or capture every terrorist involved in the attack — from senior commanders who orchestrated the assault to individual gunmen who crossed into southern Israel during the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israeli officials told the newspaper that targets are reportedly approved only after investigators obtain at least two independent pieces of evidence placing them at the scene of the attack or directly tying them to the assault. According to the report, Israeli intelligence personnel relied on a sweeping range of surveillance and intelligence tools to identify suspects, including facial recognition software run against videos uploaded by Hamas terrorists themselves, intercepted communications, cellphone location data, social media footage, and interrogations of Gazan detainees captured during the war. Inside Israel, the operation has drawn repeated comparisons to the country’s years-long campaign following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, when Israeli intelligence hunted down Palestinian terrorists involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. “It will take time, just as it did after Munich,” Mossad Director David Barnea said in 2024. “But our hands will reach them, wherever they are.” Michael Milstein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer specializing in Palestinian affairs, similarly argued the campaign reflected broader regional realities. ..."Unfortunately, this is the language of this neighborhood.” A Pashtun man from Afghanistan’s Kunar Province walked into a meeting with the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem this week and introduced himself as a son of Yusuf, son of Yaakov, of the nation of Bani Israel. His name is Yusufzai Afridi. He is from the tribe of Ephraim. And he just may be the beginning of the return of millions of Pashtun as the prophesied return of the lost tribes of Israel. The Pashtun, an Iranic ethnic group of 50 million Muslims living, refer to themselves as the “Bani Israel,” very similar phonetically to the Hebrew term for the “children of Israel,” Bnei Yisrael. They say their families have known this for 2,700 years. They never forgot and have retained a strong tradition, passed down for countless generations, that they are from the nation of Israel. And despite being forcibly converted to Islam 1,500 years ago, they have retained more than fifty traditions based on the Torah in a code that is called Pashtunwali. And they have even retained the Torah itself. The Pashtun are the largest tribal society on earth. There are over 65 million of them, some estimates put the number at 100 million, native to southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. They speak Pashto. They are Sunni Muslim. And they have a social and ethnic code called Pashtunwali that governs every dimension of their lives, a code that predates Islam by over a thousand years. The Pashtun tribal structure maps directly onto the twelve tribes of Israel. The Yusufzai believe they descend from Joseph (Yosef). The Lewani trace themselves to Levi. The Rebbani to Reuben (Reuven). The Afridi to Ephraim (Efraim). The Gaghai to Gad. The Benyamin to Benjamin. Pashtun men wear four-cornered fringed garments reminiscent of the Jewish tallit (prayer shawl). Many Pashtun light candles on Friday evening — Shabbat candles — at the onset of the day of rest. This practice is entirely absent from Islamic law and entirely absent from the Quran. Yet Afridi noted it as one of the core Pashtunwali traditions, one that has persisted for generations even as the surrounding Muslim world looked on in bewilderment. Pashtun circumcise male infants on the eighth day, exactly as Jewish law mandates, and unlike the surrounding Muslim populations, who do not observe the eighth-day timing. Many Pashtun maintain the prohibition against mixing milk and meat, a dietary law based on rabbinic interpretation of the Torah and with no basis in Islam. They refuse to eat crustaceans. They refuse to eat camel meat or drink camel milk, which are entirely permissible and popular among neighboring Muslim communities. Meir Halevi, the spokesperson for the Sanhedrin, added a detail that has received far too little attention: the Pashtun elders possess Torah scrolls, the same Torah scroll tradition preserved by Yemenite and Iraqi Jews, written on parchment (gvil) in the ancient style. “They have the Torah scroll that the Yemenite and Iraqi Jews have, not the Ashkenazi version, not in Hebrew script as we know it today, but the same scroll. The pronunciation is a bit different, but they have the same scroll that we have, exactly the same thing.” The Pashtun, Halevi said, are preserving “over 56 mitzvot from the Torah, 56, which is a lot. Although they did not preserve everything, they did preserve major, major mitzvot.” ...Pashtun do not intermarry with non-Pashtun.... And through every invasion, every occupation, every attempt to absorb or destroy them, the Pashtun did not scatter, did not assimilate, did not surrender Pashtunwali. The prophet Zechariah wrote that Ephraim would be like a mighty warrior, that their hearts would rejoice, that God would whistle for them and gather them, because He redeemed them. Yusufzai Afridi sat in Jerusalem. He stood on the Temple Mount. He is from the tribe of Ephraim. God is whistling. And Ephraim is listening. [Much more at the link.] Israeli police arrested 13 people Friday after they broke through security barriers and forced their way onto the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, attempting to perform the Biblically mandated grain offering to mark the festival of Shavuot. The arrests came hours before the holiday began at sundown, and initial reports misidentified the ritual items as preparation for an animal sacrifice. What the group actually carried onto the holy site were two loaves of bread. The suspects breached security and ran into the compound in an attempt to perform the ritual before being stopped by authorities, police said. No animals were present. According to the Ynet news site, the group brought loaves of chametz — leavened bread — made from freshly harvested wheat, the centerpiece of the Shavuot grain offering. Shavuot, meaning “Weeks,” marks the culmination of the 49-day Sefirat HaOmer — the counting of the Omer — that begins on the second night of Passover. It is both an agricultural festival celebrating the wheat harvest and the commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. ...It is the only occasion in the Temple service when leavened bread was offered on the altar. The 13 people arrested Friday were Jews trying to fulfill a biblical commandment at the place the Bible designates for it — and they were stopped by the government of the Jewish state. The Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, and it is in Israel’s capital city. Jewish rituals at the site are explicitly described in the Bible, and the Jews carried them out in the two temples for a total of more than 800 years. But for some inexplicable reason, after Israel conquered Judaism’s holiest site in the 1967 Six-Day War, control of the site was turned over to the Jordanian Muslim Waqf, and despite the law requiring Jews to have freedom of worship, the Israeli police remove any Jew who tries to exercise that right. That is the status quo that Israeli governments across the political spectrum have maintained for 58 years. The two loaves of bread never made it to the altar. The men who carried them are in police custody. And the Mount stands as it has stood — without a Temple, without a service, and without the Shtei HaLechem ascending before God on Shavuot. BREAKING NEWS: [30 minutes] 
Report: Israel Formed Secret Unit to Kill or Capture Every Oct. 7 Attacker:
Returning lost tribe of Ephraim: Sanhedrin meets Pashtun man from Afghanistan:
13 Arrested on Temple Mount as Jews Attempt to “Sacrifice” Shavuot Bread Offering: