The Family That Never Came Home. Plus. . .

It’s Thursday, February 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: A constitutional scholar on whether Trump is breaking the law. Why we’re all obsessed with JFK conspiracies. Scottish police arrest a protester for being too close to an abortion clinic. And more.

But first: Hamas returns the bodies of children they murdered.

Around 10 a.m. local time, Hamas handed over the bodies of four Israeli hostages who died in captivity.

Oded Lifshitz, 84, was a retired journalist and activist who advocated coexistence with Palestinians. He was kidnapped from the kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. So was Shiri Bibas, then 32, and her children Kfir and Ariel, who were nine months and four years old respectively.

You might remember the image of Shiri clutching the two redheaded children—terror in her eyes—as they were abducted. It looked like it was taken in Poland in the early 1940s.

“Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence,” Commentary magazine’s Seth Mandel writes in our pages.

Read “The Meaning of Kfir Bibas.”

This morning, hundreds of Palestinians gathered in the winter cold to watch Hamas militants put the coffins of these four Israelis on a stage in Khan Younis. Nearby, a poster showed a man standing next to coffins wrapped in Israeli flags. It stated: “The Return of the War=The Return of your Prisoners in Coffins.”

Meanwhile in Israel, television channels weren’t broadcasting the ceremony.

“Perhaps the oddest aspect of the grief in Israel on Thursday is that the fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir has largely been understood since late 2023,” writes Matti Friedman, our Jerusalem correspondent. “Hamas announced early in the war that the three were dead, killed by an Israeli airstrike,” yet the Israelis seemed unable to accept it.

It was as if their deaths “too unbearable to believe—and so simply wouldn’t be believed until we had no other choice.”

Read “The Family That Never Came Home.”

Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the children’s father, was released alive earlier this month after 484 days in captivity. On that day, Bari sat down with Matti to talk about the war, why returning the hostages is so fundamentally important to the future of Israel, the rise of anti-Jewish hate—and how to be American, Jewish, and Zionist at the same time.

You can listen to their conversation here:

On the first anniversary of October 7, Honestly’s executive producer Candace Mittel Kahn wrote a profoundly moving piece about her “decision to bring a new Jewish child into the world,” which she described as “an act of necessity.” At the time, she was five months pregnant. Last week, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

Read: “Bearing Jewish Children After October 7.”

Is It Time for a European Military?

Yesterday on Truth Social, Trump launched into a tirade against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, seemingly blaming him for the country’s war with Russia, plus calling him a “dictator” and worse—“a modestly successful comedian.” Then: He went after Europe.

“The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us—We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

Today in the The Free Press, French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy says Trump has made it clear that Europe can no longer rely on the United States. It’s time, he writes, for a European army.

Read “Bernard-Henri Lévy: Europe Must Unite or Die.”

Normies Always Win

On Monday, our editor in chief Bari Weiss addressed the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London. She implored conservatives to learn from the center-left’s disastrous capitulation to the far left. The far right, she argued, is no less illiberal, and the center-right cannot risk ignoring them. “Time is like luck. You run out of it faster than you think you will.”

I couldn’t agree more. As a former campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders, I tried to warn the left their politics were getting increasingly freakish—niche, identitarian, and completely out of step with the working class. In the great laboratory of the internet, the Frankenstein-left created a monster. On November 5, 2024, normie villagers grabbed their torches and chased it out of town.

In a new column for The Free Press, I argue that the right’s increasing cultural dominance will inevitably result in something similar. High on their own supply after Trump’s win, and their parasocial pal Elon Musk’s ascent to the highest levels of government, the online right is getting extreme. Its positions will, in due course, horrify normal Americans—including many Trump voters—setting the stage for an inevitable pendulum swing back to the middle, or even beyond.

Read my piece, “The Online Right Is Building a Monster.”

Is the Trump Admin Breaking the Law?

Since his inauguration, Trump has used blunt executive power to implement his agenda. He’s issued one executive order after another and allowed Elon Musk’s DOGE—an advisory board with a novel and somewhat unclear legal status—to exercise seemingly unilateral power over the country’s federal agencies.

Opponents say Trump is unconstitutionally abusing his authority. Is he? Time to ask a guy who actually has the word constitution in his job title. As lawsuits against the administration loom, Free Press deputy editor Charles Lane engages Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, on the big questions: Can Trump really end birthright citizenship? Are we in a constitutional crisis? Is the DOGE stuff even legal?

Find out here: “The Rule of Law After the Vibe Shift.”

K9 Hurricane with his handler, former Secret Service Special Operations officer Marshall Mirarchi, on October 4, 2019, in London, England. (Peter Summers via Getty Images)

• Police in Glasgow arrested a 74-year-old woman for standing within 200 meters of an abortion clinic holding a sign that read, “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.” She is the first person charged under a new law to ensure “safe access” to the clinics. According to a letter from the Scottish government to residents living within “exclusion zones,” even anti-abortion (and also, technically, pro-abortion) speech and actions within private homes can constitute an offense if they are “intentional or reckless” or can be “seen or heard” by others. There is no exception for prayer. For more on the UK’s abortion censorship zones, read Madeleine Kearns: “She Was Arrested for Praying in Her Head.”
  

• Emil Bove, Trump’s acting deputy attorney general who sought to have charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams dismissed, was interrogated in a Manhattan federal court yesterday. The judge peppered Bove, the second most powerful prosecutor at the Department of Justice, with questions about the DOJ’s motivation for potentially dismissing Adams’ federal corruption charges. Bove provided a simple explanation: The case against Adams impeded his ability to enact Trump’s policies in New York City. Read The Free Press Editors on Danielle Sassoon—the federal prosecutor who courageously resigned instead of obeying an order to drop the charges against Adams.
  

• Speculation is swirling that Kamala Harris will run for California governor to succeed Gavin Newsom, who is succumbing to term limits. Following Trump’s inauguration, the former vice president flew back to her home state and has since appeared at numerous public events. When asked if she was considering running, Harris—loquacious as always—didn’t exactly say no: “I am here and would be here regardless of the office I hold, because it is the right thing to do.” Meanwhile, she’s assembled a team of former advisers to help chart her political future.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered top brass at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8 percent per year from the defense budget for the next five years. There are exemptions—the Trump administration doesn’t want to see cuts to the southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons or missile defense, or the acquisition of submarines, one-way attack drones, and other munitions.

• On Tuesday, NASA said there’s a 3.1 percent chance a “city killer” asteroid will hit Earth in 2032—then yesterday, the agency lowered the chances to 1.5 percent. Just say you don’t know! Give me a heads-up in 2031 if the city the asteroid kills is going to be St. Louis. I’ve always wanted to see the arch!

• In more weird but true news: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told a local Fox News affiliate she’s investigating why she was allowed to go on a trip to Ghana days before wildfires swept her city, eventually killing 29 people. “We need to look at everything about the preparation . . . for the fires,” she said with a completely serious face. “It didn’t reach that level to me to say something terrible could happen and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”

• K9 Hurricane, the most decorated military dog in U.S. history, has died age 16. The Belgian Malinois became famous for taking down a White House intruder in 2014 while President Obama and his family were inside. Where’s his American Sniper?

In other news: The Trump administration says it’s pulling the plug on New York’s traffic-fighting congestion pricing plan, setting up a struggle with Governor Kathy Hochul and the MTA, who want to keep it. Two people are dead after two single-engine planes collided at an Arizona airport. The IRS announced it will lay off 6,700 employees, which reminds me: I need to do my taxes. And last but not least, is it possible Adam Sandler convinced Kanye West to stop being a Nazi? Nobel Peace Prize if true.

ICYMI: Breaking History: Why We Can’t Escape JFK Conspiracy Theories

On January 23, President Trump ordered the director of national intelligence to plan how to release all the files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald—if you’re gullible enough to believe that.

You got me: I’m a JFK conspiracy guy. But I’m far from alone. A majority of Americans don't believe that Oswald acted alone. In the latest episode of his podcast Breaking History, our columnist Eli Lake says there’s a reason for that—and it has a little something to do with Kevin Costner.

Listen to the podcast below, and subscribe to Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, if you’re short on time, you can read Eli’s great companion essay.