Hadeel Al-Shalchi
speaker
31 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Dec
Hadeel Al-Shalchi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Consider This from NPR · Why did Israel restart the war? One answer: Bezalel Smotrich. · 28 Mar 2025
podcast
The only parties that would agree to form a government with Netanyahu were the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionists, including Smotrich's party. Netanyahu formed a coalition with them, giving them more power than they had ever had before. The prime minister appointed Smotrich as finance minister and to the Ministry of Defense. Jewish extremism scholar Persico.
After the October 2023 attacks on Israel, Netanyahu called on Smotrich to be part of his war cabinet. The finance minister reached for his faith.
he told a group of religious students last year in a video posted online. Smotrich is reported to regularly consult with a group of rabbis known as the Five. Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira is one of them. He has opposed a hostage deal. There is joy that hostages will return. But despite that joy, this is a very bad deal for Israel, Shapira said in an online lecture.
Persico says Smotrich's faithful devotion is evident every time he threatens to collapse Netanyahu's coalition if the war doesn't continue in Gaza, where he ultimately wants to see Jewish settlements rebuilt.
Smotrich has leveraged this power to further settler ambitions in the West Bank. Just days after Israel paused the war in January and agreed to a deal with Hamas for the release of hostages, Netanyahu ordered the escalation of incursions in the West Bank, causing massive destruction in urban refugee camps and displacing thousands of Palestinians. Israel says it's to weed out Palestinian militants.
Smotrich was sidelined under President Biden's administration for his anti-Palestinian rhetoric. And in Israel, polls show that he would not survive another election. Only 11% of the Israeli population voted for Smotrich's party in the last elections in 2022. This month, Smotrich was invited to Washington, D.C. to meet with his counterpart in President Trump's administration.
Smolchich rarely gives interviews to U.S. Western media. This month, he gave his first press conference since his trip to the U.S., and I posed a question to him. I have two questions. Do you know anything about plans for the annexation of the West Bank? Smolchich objects to the word annexation.
Annexation implies taking something that isn't yours, the minister says. Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the West Bank, belongs to us. Trump told reporters his administration would announce its position on West Bank annexation by early March. That date has passed.
I reply, Is Trump the man who will make it happen for you? Will he support you to make it happen? We believe this is the right thing to do, he says. We're engaged in discussions and dialogue. So while Smotrich firmly believes he has God's mandate to take over the West Bank, the question is whether he also has Trump's blessing.
The U.S. State Department says the diplomatic delegation discussed, quote, transition principles with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which makes up the interim Syrian government. It said they also discussed the importance of fighting against ISIS. HTS has roots in al-Qaeda and some factions that made up the rebel forces which toppled former President Bashar al-Assad had ties to ISIS.
HTS is a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. No additional information was given on what it would take for the U.S. to drop that designation. The State Department also said the delegation sought more information about the whereabouts of missing American journalist Austin Tice. Hadil Al-Shalchi, NPR News, Damascus.
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