56-year-old Ilan Weisz, a father of three, was possibly held hostage for nearly three months, as authorities did not discover his body for an extended period of time.
A four-day humanitarian ceasefire has been agreed upon by Israel and Hamas, as confirmed by both parties and the mediator Qatar as well. The Palestinians agreed to the release of 50 Israeli hostages, mostly women and children, while Israel agreed to set free 150 Palestinian prisoners. However, PM Netanyahu of Israel insists his country is still at war.
One of the star players of the Israeli national team brought with him the boot of a kidnapped football player, which he showed reporters at the press conference in Felcsút.
Katalin Novák met with her Israeli counterpart, President Isaac Herzog, to show her moral support to the recently attacked Israel, as well as for the Hungarian community living in Israel. She also called for the immediate release of hostages, some of whom are of Hungarian ancestry, taken by the Islamist terror group Hamas.
Israel had to postpone their last two European Championship qualifiers last month due to the Hamas attacks. Now, as Israel is not yet safe enough to host football games for their national team, they found their temporary home at the Pancho Arena in Felcsút, Hungary. This is not the first time Hungary provides a temporary home turf for a foreign football team.
Wizz Air has cancelled all flights to Israel until 15 November but is continuously reviewing the situation. The airline is in constant contact with Israeli, Hungarian, and international authorities, monitoring the events in Israel.
On 7 October, the terrorist group Hamas commenced the largest and bloodiest attack against Israel since the Yom Kippur War. In many ways, the aggression echoes not only the 1973 war, but also the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US as well.
In a recent op-ed published on NewsMax, CASEPAC Executive Director Bryan Leib expressed his conviction that support for Israel and the Jewish people ‘starts at the top,’ reminding that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tweeted his condemnation of the brutal attack by Hamas as soon as news of it broke. Orbán also stood up for Israel’s right to self-defence, he noted, stressing that all of this is refreshing, especially when he sees antisemitism growing in America, and thousands of Americans taking to the streets to support Hamas.
Airlines are systematically cancelling or suspending their flights to Israel since the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas launched a comprehensive attack on the Jewish state on Saturday morning, resulting in hundreds of casualties. This resulted in significant drops in the companies’ share prices.
Minister Szijjártó expressed Hungary’s deep concern over the Israel terrorist attacks and their potential consequences, which could easily lead to one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history. He believes that this tragedy occurred at the worst possible time, as the process of normalizing the situation had just begun, and significant steps had been taken towards peace, which now could be jeopardized and rendered null.
‘The first thing we can wish for Israel in the current situation is that it should regain control over the entire territory of the state of Israel and establish the security guarantees needed to prevent similar bestial attacks from happening in the future,’ Gulyás said.
‘All things being equal, the roots to the actual deadly conflict are profound, as already mentioned. Yet it does not help the cause of peace to keep doing business with Iran, just as the United States has done under the Obama administration and is still doing under the present one.’
The situation in Israel remains ‘extremely worrying’, with some areas practically in a state of war, Minister Szijjártó said, according to a statement by the Foreign Ministry. The Hungarian government’s top priority in such a case of emergency is to ensure the safety of Hungarians, he added.
‘In the Britain that is now, just like in every other Western country that has accepted indiscriminate mass immigration from countries with Islamic values, it has become normal to celebrate murder, rape, and terrorism, so long as Israeli Jews are the ones being terrorized.’
‘These recent bloody events—and the videos of Arab crowds celebrating them, not just in Gaza, but in Europe too—show perfectly what a significant part of the Muslim Arab world thinks about the issue. The problem is not that Israel is ‘running the world’s largest concentration camp’ in Gaza (a distasteful and debatable claim in the first place, but let’s not go into that now). This conflict existed before the majority of people alive today were born.’
Meanwhile, PM Orbán of Hungary offered his moral support for Israel, writing ‘our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Israel in these dark hours’.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.