John Riley: Welcome to The Middle East Report, your connection to truth for reporting on Israel and the Middle East. Each week, we connect you to the people, places, and the land of Israel, and we bring you the truth of what’s actually happening in the land of Israel, because there is so much deception happening right now in the news media regarding Israel and what’s happening there in that land and in the Middle East in general. So we want to keep you informed and bring you the truth, because the deceptive media out there doesn’t want you to know the truth. But we do that for you every single weekend here on American Family Radio.
John Riley: We’re going to talk about a lot of different things here on this edition of The Middle East Report. We’re going to talk about what’s going on in our country with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the lies that they are spewing out, it seems like, every single day. We’re going to talk about the war that is really ongoing in Israel, especially in Gaza, between Israel and Hamas, and so much more.
John Riley: I’ve got a special guest with me whom I just met. He’s from Israel. He lives in Israel with his family. Doron Keidar is an international speaker. He shares powerful insights defending the State of Israel. He’s been doing that for decades, and he’s also someone who is serving and has served in the IDF, especially in the special forces of the IDF. We’re going to talk about that and a whole lot more. Doron, thank you for joining us here on The Middle East Report. It’s an absolute honor, sir.
John Riley: Doron, before we get into a lot of the different issues that I want to talk about today—you living in Israel and having your pulse on what’s happening there in that land—tell us a little bit about you. I know you have served in the IDF for a long time. You actually served in the special forces, and I don’t know if you’re serving still, but tell us about your service to the country.
Doron Keidar: My service actually started back in 2003, when many Americans were going off to Iraq. They had the hazmat training and whatever. So, ironically, I had a similar experience, just in Israel, because we were under the gun from Iraq. I actually had to have a gas mask on my hip every day throughout boot camp. So we had this special year of boot camp, so to speak, where the whole nation was under the threat of chemical warfare and on DEFCON 1. That’s how I started my service back in 2003.
Doron Keidar: It’s been over 20 years of military service, mainly in combat units. I started in Southern Command, and today I have been serving, since 2017, in the Israeli special-forces mobility units, which were the game changer, if you like, during wartime. They were not in existence during the Second Lebanon War back in 2006. So, thanks to us standing up these units, we are like the secret sauce of this military—how would you say it?—maintaining the military momentum in this war and basically keeping this fight going in a very effective way for our war fighters on the very front lines against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the seven fronts that we’ve actually been defending ourselves against.
Doron Keidar: My team specifically has had five deployments, close to 500 days of fighting—four in Gaza and one in Lebanon. So we’ve definitely had our hands full in the past few months.
John Riley: Yes, you have. And in the last couple of years, with the wars and the attacks from so many different countries on the land of Israel, I would imagine that you, like so many others, were at least alerted and called up to duty when October 7, 2023, happened. So were you called up when the Gaza war began?
Doron Keidar: On the morning of October 7, I woke up, like many Israelis, to the sirens and the rocket attacks. I put my family in the bomb shelter and basically briefed them that Daddy was going to have to go to war. So they were left defenseless at home, knowing that their only defender was now leaving under the gun of a rocket attack all over the nation. That is all we knew at the time.
Doron Keidar: I had to basically gun it to my base and show up with my team, not knowing the full picture and getting debriefed on the highway as I was driving—let’s just say breaking the speed limit, to say the least—and trying to read texts and information that were being fed to us simultaneously.
Doron Keidar: Actually, I thought it was an information war—that Iran was basically using bots and fake information—because we kept seeing these terrorists on what I think you call the doorbell camera. That footage of terrorists trying to get into a home was being circulated on social media because the people who were being attacked were filming it and trying to share it with their friends and family, saying, “I’m under attack. This is happening.” So we thought it was a false-information war, if that makes sense. We thought, “This is AI. This can’t be real.”
Doron Keidar: Then, of course, we showed up on base and started to get a better picture of what was happening: that we were actually under attack and people were being killed. We obviously didn’t know the full scope, but we knew people were being killed, people were being butchered, and we needed to engage with the terrorists on the fly amid the chaos of everything.
John Riley: For those who don’t know, this wasn’t a Bondi-style attack like in Australia. We’re talking about 7,000 terrorists invading Israel. This wasn’t just a terror attack. This wasn’t a 9/11. This was 7,000 terrorists crossing into Israel, murdering and killing, and then taking more than 250—251—hostages into Gaza. The aftermath included more than 1,200 people killed. It was a slaughter that happened on October 7, 2023.
John Riley: Doron, I don’t think a lot of people realize how massive the tunnel structure is there in Gaza, and I don’t think the average person listening right now to The Middle East Report understands how invasive this philosophy was there—this demonic philosophy in Gaza to kill Jews. It wasn’t just Hamas. It was built into the fabric and society of the citizens there in Gaza, and I think people just don’t understand that. You hear about Israel going after these Hamas terrorists. Well, these Hamas terrorists would use schools, hospitals, and all of these things to do their business.
Doron Keidar: Yes, you’re right. Again, I’ve been in the military for many years, but as a reservist; it’s not my career. My career has been in executive protection. I’ve done security for some of the wealthiest people in the world. American governors have come and visited. I’m not going to give names, but the point is that my expertise is threat assessment, understanding terrorism, counterterrorism, and so on.
Doron Keidar: I did not understand the level of brainwashing and outright control of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas death cult. We learned when we went into Gaza that all of the Gazans, as we saw it, were brainwashed. They were all supporting and taking part in terrorist activities. They weren’t necessarily all trained terrorists. They weren’t all terrorists, but they were support elements for the terrorists.
Doron Keidar: So, in the home where your daughter sleeps in her bedroom, there could be a tunnel leading down into the terrorist tunnel system. And, like you said, people aren’t saying how vast that is. To give you a picture, we’re talking about more than 500 miles of tunnel systems—a multilayered underground world, basically—where you can drive trucks for supplies. Not all the tunnels are that large, but some are large enough to drive supply trucks inside. That is how these terrorists basically had an underground city from which they could conduct this war against the military.
Doron Keidar: The civilians were the ones digging it, bringing in supplies, and letting their homes be used for camouflage and entry points to the tunnels, along with mosques, hospitals, schools, and United Nations facilities. In fact, in the beginning of the war—I don’t know what it is today—but just a few months into the war, we discovered that 2,000 United Nations employees were Hamas terrorists.
Doron Keidar: Everybody keeps talking about the press, saying, “You guys keep killing the press, and you’re so terrible.” I’m telling you: all—not some, all—of the press you hear reporting from Gaza are, in my view, confirmed Hamas terrorists. We have the famous doctor who was recently exposed as being one of the top generals within Hamas. He was shown to the world as this humanitarian doctor who cares about life, and people asked how the IDF could do anything wrong to him. But then, of course, we showed pictures of him with the top leadership of Hamas in military uniform to confirm, no, he’s a terrorist.
Doron Keidar: So it’s all intertwined. This death cult has permeated all of the society of Gaza. What we saw was that every other house was a weapons cache; every other house was a tunnel entry point or another means of getting into the tunnels. There was propaganda in every home—not just for Hamas. There are a lot of other terrorist groups, but Hamas was the dominant one. If it wasn’t Hamas flags and paraphernalia, it was material from other terror groups. To our shock and dismay, that’s what we learned as war fighters. Even those who should have had their finger on the pulse and known better were surprised.
John Riley: Your heart, Doron, is to combat the lies that are out there about Israel and the Jewish people. One of the things you constantly hear from college campuses and other places around the world is, “Israel committed genocide in Gaza.” Let’s break that down for our listeners. Just look at that for a moment and tell me what you see.
Doron Keidar: The Gaza genocide claim—“All Eyes on Rafah” and so on—you’ve all seen it. Here’s the sad truth, and I say sad because the world has been condemning us and condemning me, a man who has a family of four children and has been fighting to defend my children. Like I said, I left my children defenseless. Had the terrorists gotten into my house, they would have murdered, raped, tortured, or mutilated my wife, my children, and the rest of my extended family who were in the bomb shelter that day. That was my reality. That’s what I went to fight against and defend against, yet I was demonized and portrayed by the world as a baby killer.
Doron Keidar: Here’s something very interesting for people who make this claim. I want you to think logically for a second. Have you ever tried, in a civilian population, to specifically target women and children? Do you know how difficult that would be? Let’s say that’s what I wanted to do. Do you understand how difficult that would be in a civilian population where you have older people, younger people, grandmothers, young children, middle-aged people, young couples—all age groups and every kind of family makeup? For my bullets to somehow magically hit only women and children is an insane insinuation.
Doron Keidar: Have you ever been in a combat zone in your life? Ask yourself that question. I have. Combat is chaotic. You’re fighting for your life. It is not an easy place where you can stop, pause, think, and say, “Let me systematically do X, Y, and Z.” We’re not the Nazis, taking innocent people, carting them onto trains, and trucking them to their deaths. No, these are people fighting guerrilla warfare. They are booby-trapping every square inch of Gaza, trying to kill me and my men, and they have successfully done so. More than 900 of our soldiers were killed during this war.
Doron Keidar: Why would Israel pay that heavy price if all we wanted to do was drop bombs and annihilate people because we were supposedly trying to commit genocide? Ask yourself those questions. With that said, let’s look at the statistics and the truth, so to speak, of land warfare.
Doron Keidar: If you ask any American war fighter who served in the GWOT—the global war on terror since 9/11—what they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, they will tell you they followed the laws of warfare, the Geneva Conventions, and so on. Israel follows the same code, and we exceed it. We have our own code of conduct, informed by rabbinic guidance, and even though we have secular soldiers, we allow religious rabbis to say, “You need to go further to save life. You need to take another step and actually risk your own life to defend the lives of innocent civilians in the enemy combatant area where you’re fighting.” We extend it even further.
Doron Keidar: I’ve interviewed people like Andrew Fox and John Spencer. They will tell you, based on Western tactics, that we use special technology to pinpoint, in real time, where civilians are, where the military is, and how people are moving, in order to mitigate civilian casualties.
Doron Keidar: I’ve been saying for more than a year that civilian casualties are actually very low according to lawful land warfare. We have roughly under 20 percent civilian casualties, meaning more than 80 percent of the people killed in Gaza in this conflict were terrorists. That has now been confirmed by Hamas themselves; they’ve openly said this just recently. I’ve been saying it for months while everybody has been saying, “You’re committing genocide.” That would be a terrible genocide when more than 80 percent of the people who died in Gaza were armed combatants, as we understand it.
Doron Keidar: I would add that the other, let’s say less than 20 percent, were probably combat supporters. Remember, all of Gaza, unfortunately, supports Hamas even today, two years into this war and with Gaza being destroyed by bombs. They are so brainwashed that they are willing to pay the price, even to their utter destruction, to keep going. They won’t lay down their arms.
Doron Keidar: So if people want to stop dying in Gaza, simply put: put down your arms. Stop firing rockets into Israel. Stop trying to kill innocent Israelis, and the war is over. It’s that simple. The claim that Israel is committing genocide is, in my view, debunked. It didn’t happen. It’s not happening. You need to be a truth teller, know what’s going on, and make sure you’re consuming the right news.
John Riley: Another lie you’re combating right now comes, and I hate to say it, from the Christian right or the Christian conservative right. We have people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and many others who are lying about Israel. Recently, Tucker said that Israel persecutes Christians, which is laughable. Israel is the only place where Christianity has grown. It hasn’t grown in Jordan, where he was when he said that, or in Iraq or other Muslim countries. Christianity is not growing, or is nonexistent, in those countries. Tell us about combating that lie within Christian conservative movements. It’s sad.
Doron Keidar: Yes, this is unfortunately something we have seen rise since the war started. First of all, ask yourself: Why is there this new movement to condemn and combat Israel? How is it that before October 7, Israel was an okay country? You were either indifferent, pro-Israel, or anti-Israel. But why is it that after October 7—after the worst tragedy against the Jewish people, and what I consider an actual attempted genocide by the terrorists—this movement rose?
Doron Keidar: If it weren’t for me, my men, and the men and women of the IDF stopping them, it would have continued. And it would have affected every Jew and non-Jew, because another thing people don’t recognize is that the State of Israel has a mixed population of other indigenous groups as well, such as Druze and Bedouin Muslims. All of them were targeted. All of them were killed on October 7. The terrorists didn’t care if you were Muslim. They didn’t care if you were from the Philippines, working in the fields or learning agriculture. An African was murdered horribly, and so on. People were being murdered regardless of whether they were Jewish.
Doron Keidar: When it comes to Christian persecution in the Middle East, it is rampant. I am among those actively fighting to stop the persecution of the church in the Middle East. I’m working proactively with NGOs. In Israel, I am also helping support the indigenous Christian population so they can get better representation in our government.
Doron Keidar: Just a few weeks ago, we met with His Excellency Ambassador Mike Huckabee at the embassy in Jerusalem to fight for this cause and to help him, as an American voice and authority in Israel, weigh in with U.S. pressure on our government to help recognize Christians in Israel. I can tell you it’s a number-one issue for him, and it is for many of us in Israel. If that’s the case, it contradicts the claim that they’re being persecuted when you have Israelis fighting for them.
Doron Keidar: And, by the way, they have a voice because it’s a democracy. They can vote and get representation. The gentleman we’re fighting for diplomatically to be represented in the Knesset is named Ihab. He is now running for the Israeli Knesset to be another Christian voice in parliament and strengthen their voice.
Doron Keidar: Where there is persecution, it is under Palestinian Authority control. Those are the people Tucker interviewed. He interviewed Munther Isaac, the head of the Bethlehem Bible College, who has the Christ at the Checkpoint conferences to demonize Israel and create a bigger rift and division among Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians. That is counterproductive. It isn’t trying to bring reconciliation or understanding. It’s demonizing Israel, even though Israel has no authority in the Palestinian Authority areas. So why interview people there who are being persecuted, and by whom? By Muslims. That’s what you’re hearing and whom he is platforming.
Doron Keidar: This other woman, this “Monopolist” lady, is also, in my view, a KGB plant. We know this. Do your homework, guys. The KGB has platformed her and taught her how to use manipulation and misinformation. All of this feeds into Islamic dawah. Dawah is a tactic of silent jihad, which very few people in the West talk about, but it is the most effective.
Doron Keidar: That’s why, if you go to any library here in America and ask for Palestinian books about Palestine, you will find picture books. I found an example in Florida that talks about the history of Palestine, which I consider fictitious, because Arabs do not have a “P” sound in their phonetic language. They can’t say “P,” so it becomes “Falestine,” if anything. Isn’t it ironic that the Palestinian cause is supposedly for Palestinian Arab people, yet they can’t even pronounce “Palestine”? Let that sink in.
Doron Keidar: This is how great the deception is surrounding the cause we’re fighting over, the “from the river to the sea” slogan, and protests in America, because people like Tucker and Candace are stirring things up fictitiously. It’s like talking about Disneyland. It’s fairy tales. It’s not real.
John Riley: I want to encourage you to connect with Doron Keidar. You can just Google his name. You’ll find him online and find his website. His first name is D-O-R-O-N, and his last name is K-E-I-D-A-R. Doron Keidar. Just Google that and find out more about what he’s doing to combat all of these lies.
John Riley: We’re talking about a lot of hard stuff right now, and I want to wrap this up by giving you the opportunity to speak to the many people listening right now who love the land of Israel, love the Jewish people, and love the Bible. The Bible is a Jewish book—the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. It’s all written by Jewish people. Jesus was a Jew. So talk to those people who are listening right now about what we can do. What is our call to action amid all the lies going on in our nation and literally around the world?
Doron Keidar: We just talked about a lot of heavy things and a lot of misinformation. It can feel overwhelming. You get online or go to work, and your friends keep hitting you with all this propaganda. You don’t know how to answer or how to stand for the truth because it’s overwhelming. That’s what dawah is supposed to do: overwhelm you with disinformation. That’s the silent jihad, which is also called the Red-Green Alliance—the communists and the Islamists collaborating together.
Doron Keidar: Then you have certain pundits who might play into that. We can suspect and speculate whether Candace, Tucker, and others are part of that. So it’s overwhelming. What do we do? The answer is really simple: Read your Bible. Don’t get into the information war. Don’t get drowned in that; get drowned in the Word of God.
Doron Keidar: I know there is this MAGA movement here—Make America Great Again. I believe the answer isn’t about making America great again; it’s about making God great again in your home and in what you can control. What you and I can control is our own minds. I can block what comes in and what goes out.
Doron Keidar: The best way, in my opinion, is for Bible-believing Christians to be just that: Bible-believing. To be Bible-believing means you should at least know what the Bible says. Read the Bible. Genesis to Revelation is my encouragement. Read it prayerfully and with trembling and fear before Almighty God, and let that bathe you with truth so that, when you hear all these lies, they deflect because you know the truth.
Doron Keidar: It’s just like somebody who works at a bank. They don’t deal with counterfeits all day long; they deal with the real thing so that, when the counterfeit comes, they can identify it. In the same way, bathe yourself in God’s truth—not my word or someone else’s word, but God’s Word. Then you will know people by their fruit, because it will be very evident.
Doron Keidar: As far as action you can take against people using disinformation, like Tucker and others, I’m not about defaming these people. The best way to combat their lies is through the declaration posted on my website. This is really for Christians who want to take a stand. It is called the Truth in Love Declaration. This declaration defends the name of Jesus against unrepentant Jew-hatred and false witness, which these individuals are, in my opinion.
Doron Keidar: The best way to combat them is not to fight and debate them, because there’s no point. They aren’t interested in debate; they’re interested in false information. But, as a Christian, you can be the Bonhoeffer of today and take a stand by signing this petition. Many Christian leaders have put their names to it. You can go through the website, see the link, and make a difference against the lies.
John Riley: Let me give you the direct link to that website. It is calling for biblical accountability for Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens: ChristianCallToTruth.org. Go to that website, sign the petition, and add your name, as so many other people have done. ChristianCallToTruth.org.
John Riley: Doron, thank you for your service to the country of Israel. Thank you for standing up to combat all of these lies against the Jewish people and the land of Israel. We need to do more of that. You are being inundated with deception and lies from the media and now all of these influencers, so you need our prayers. I ask everybody to pray for you and all of the Jewish people.
John Riley: Doron Keidar has been with us here on American Family Radio on The Middle East Report. I hope you’ll reach out to him and find out more about what he’s doing there in the land of Israel.
John Riley: As we wrap up this edition of The Middle East Report, I want to encourage you once again to be very, very careful about the social media, news, and information you consume regarding Israel and the Jewish people. There are so many lies and deceptions out there. You need to be plugged into the truth and, most importantly, plugged into God’s Word.
John Riley: If you want a list of solid news organizations you can trust—organizations that will give you news and information from a biblical perspective and information that is truthful—just email me and I’ll send you a list: [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.
John Riley: Thanks for listening to The Middle East Report. I’m John Riley. Get a podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts. We are on all the major podcast platforms, whichever one you use. Or, of course, you can go to AFR.net and download the podcast there.
John Riley: Welcome to The Middle East Report, your connection to truth for reporting on Israel and the Middle East. Each week, we connect you to the people, places, and the land of Israel, and we bring you the truth of what’s actually happening in the land of Israel, because there is so much deception happening right now in the news media regarding Israel and what’s happening there in that land and in the Middle East in general. So we want to keep you informed and bring you the truth, because the deceptive media out there doesn’t want you to know the truth. But we do that for you every single weekend here on American Family Radio.
John Riley: We’re going to talk about a lot of different things here on this edition of The Middle East Report. We’re going to talk about what’s going on in our country with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the lies that they are spewing out, it seems like, every single day. We’re going to talk about the war that is really ongoing in Israel, especially in Gaza, between Israel and Hamas, and so much more.
John Riley: I’ve got a special guest with me whom I just met. He’s from Israel. He lives in Israel with his family. Doron Keidar is an international speaker. He shares powerful insights defending the State of Israel. He’s been doing that for decades, and he’s also someone who is serving and has served in the IDF, especially in the special forces of the IDF. We’re going to talk about that and a whole lot more. Doron, thank you for joining us here on The Middle East Report. It’s an absolute honor, sir.
John Riley: Doron, before we get into a lot of the different issues that I want to talk about today—you living in Israel and having your pulse on what’s happening there in that land—tell us a little bit about you. I know you have served in the IDF for a long time. You actually served in the special forces, and I don’t know if you’re serving still, but tell us about your service to the country.
Doron Keidar: My service actually started back in 2003, when many Americans were going off to Iraq. They had the hazmat training and whatever. So, ironically, I had a similar experience, just in Israel, because we were under the gun from Iraq. I actually had to have a gas mask on my hip every day throughout boot camp. So we had this special year of boot camp, so to speak, where the whole nation was under the threat of chemical warfare and on DEFCON 1. That’s how I started my service back in 2003.
Doron Keidar: It’s been over 20 years of military service, mainly in combat units. I started in Southern Command, and today I have been serving, since 2017, in the Israeli special-forces mobility units, which were the game changer, if you like, during wartime. They were not in existence during the Second Lebanon War back in 2006. So, thanks to us standing up these units, we are like the secret sauce of this military—how would you say it?—maintaining the military momentum in this war and basically keeping this fight going in a very effective way for our war fighters on the very front lines against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the seven fronts that we’ve actually been defending ourselves against.
Doron Keidar: My team specifically has had five deployments, close to 500 days of fighting—four in Gaza and one in Lebanon. So we’ve definitely had our hands full in the past few months.
John Riley: Yes, you have. And in the last couple of years, with the wars and the attacks from so many different countries on the land of Israel, I would imagine that you, like so many others, were at least alerted and called up to duty when October 7, 2023, happened. So were you called up when the Gaza war began?
Doron Keidar: On the morning of October 7, I woke up, like many Israelis, to the sirens and the rocket attacks. I put my family in the bomb shelter and basically briefed them that Daddy was going to have to go to war. So they were left defenseless at home, knowing that their only defender was now leaving under the gun of a rocket attack all over the nation. That is all we knew at the time.
Doron Keidar: I had to basically gun it to my base and show up with my team, not knowing the full picture and getting debriefed on the highway as I was driving—let’s just say breaking the speed limit, to say the least—and trying to read texts and information that were being fed to us simultaneously.
Doron Keidar: Actually, I thought it was an information war—that Iran was basically using bots and fake information—because we kept seeing these terrorists on what I think you call the doorbell camera. That footage of terrorists trying to get into a home was being circulated on social media because the people who were being attacked were filming it and trying to share it with their friends and family, saying, “I’m under attack. This is happening.” So we thought it was a false-information war, if that makes sense. We thought, “This is AI. This can’t be real.”
Doron Keidar: Then, of course, we showed up on base and started to get a better picture of what was happening: that we were actually under attack and people were being killed. We obviously didn’t know the full scope, but we knew people were being killed, people were being butchered, and we needed to engage with the terrorists on the fly amid the chaos of everything.
John Riley: For those who don’t know, this wasn’t a Bondi-style attack like in Australia. We’re talking about 7,000 terrorists invading Israel. This wasn’t just a terror attack. This wasn’t a 9/11. This was 7,000 terrorists crossing into Israel, murdering and killing, and then taking more than 250—251—hostages into Gaza. The aftermath included more than 1,200 people killed. It was a slaughter that happened on October 7, 2023.
John Riley: Doron, I don’t think a lot of people realize how massive the tunnel structure is there in Gaza, and I don’t think the average person listening right now to The Middle East Report understands how invasive this philosophy was there—this demonic philosophy in Gaza to kill Jews. It wasn’t just Hamas. It was built into the fabric and society of the citizens there in Gaza, and I think people just don’t understand that. You hear about Israel going after these Hamas terrorists. Well, these Hamas terrorists would use schools, hospitals, and all of these things to do their business.
Doron Keidar: Yes, you’re right. Again, I’ve been in the military for many years, but as a reservist; it’s not my career. My career has been in executive protection. I’ve done security for some of the wealthiest people in the world. American governors have come and visited. I’m not going to give names, but the point is that my expertise is threat assessment, understanding terrorism, counterterrorism, and so on.
Doron Keidar: I did not understand the level of brainwashing and outright control of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas death cult. We learned when we went into Gaza that all of the Gazans, as we saw it, were brainwashed. They were all supporting and taking part in terrorist activities. They weren’t necessarily all trained terrorists. They weren’t all terrorists, but they were support elements for the terrorists.
Doron Keidar: So, in the home where your daughter sleeps in her bedroom, there could be a tunnel leading down into the terrorist tunnel system. And, like you said, people aren’t saying how vast that is. To give you a picture, we’re talking about more than 500 miles of tunnel systems—a multilayered underground world, basically—where you can drive trucks for supplies. Not all the tunnels are that large, but some are large enough to drive supply trucks inside. That is how these terrorists basically had an underground city from which they could conduct this war against the military.
Doron Keidar: The civilians were the ones digging it, bringing in supplies, and letting their homes be used for camouflage and entry points to the tunnels, along with mosques, hospitals, schools, and United Nations facilities. In fact, in the beginning of the war—I don’t know what it is today—but just a few months into the war, we discovered that 2,000 United Nations employees were Hamas terrorists.
Doron Keidar: Everybody keeps talking about the press, saying, “You guys keep killing the press, and you’re so terrible.” I’m telling you: all—not some, all—of the press you hear reporting from Gaza are, in my view, confirmed Hamas terrorists. We have the famous doctor who was recently exposed as being one of the top generals within Hamas. He was shown to the world as this humanitarian doctor who cares about life, and people asked how the IDF could do anything wrong to him. But then, of course, we showed pictures of him with the top leadership of Hamas in military uniform to confirm, no, he’s a terrorist.
Doron Keidar: So it’s all intertwined. This death cult has permeated all of the society of Gaza. What we saw was that every other house was a weapons cache; every other house was a tunnel entry point or another means of getting into the tunnels. There was propaganda in every home—not just for Hamas. There are a lot of other terrorist groups, but Hamas was the dominant one. If it wasn’t Hamas flags and paraphernalia, it was material from other terror groups. To our shock and dismay, that’s what we learned as war fighters. Even those who should have had their finger on the pulse and known better were surprised.
John Riley: Your heart, Doron, is to combat the lies that are out there about Israel and the Jewish people. One of the things you constantly hear from college campuses and other places around the world is, “Israel committed genocide in Gaza.” Let’s break that down for our listeners. Just look at that for a moment and tell me what you see.
Doron Keidar: The Gaza genocide claim—“All Eyes on Rafah” and so on—you’ve all seen it. Here’s the sad truth, and I say sad because the world has been condemning us and condemning me, a man who has a family of four children and has been fighting to defend my children. Like I said, I left my children defenseless. Had the terrorists gotten into my house, they would have murdered, raped, tortured, or mutilated my wife, my children, and the rest of my extended family who were in the bomb shelter that day. That was my reality. That’s what I went to fight against and defend against, yet I was demonized and portrayed by the world as a baby killer.
Doron Keidar: Here’s something very interesting for people who make this claim. I want you to think logically for a second. Have you ever tried, in a civilian population, to specifically target women and children? Do you know how difficult that would be? Let’s say that’s what I wanted to do. Do you understand how difficult that would be in a civilian population where you have older people, younger people, grandmothers, young children, middle-aged people, young couples—all age groups and every kind of family makeup? For my bullets to somehow magically hit only women and children is an insane insinuation.
Doron Keidar: Have you ever been in a combat zone in your life? Ask yourself that question. I have. Combat is chaotic. You’re fighting for your life. It is not an easy place where you can stop, pause, think, and say, “Let me systematically do X, Y, and Z.” We’re not the Nazis, taking innocent people, carting them onto trains, and trucking them to their deaths. No, these are people fighting guerrilla warfare. They are booby-trapping every square inch of Gaza, trying to kill me and my men, and they have successfully done so. More than 900 of our soldiers were killed during this war.
Doron Keidar: Why would Israel pay that heavy price if all we wanted to do was drop bombs and annihilate people because we were supposedly trying to commit genocide? Ask yourself those questions. With that said, let’s look at the statistics and the truth, so to speak, of land warfare.
Doron Keidar: If you ask any American war fighter who served in the GWOT—the global war on terror since 9/11—what they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, they will tell you they followed the laws of warfare, the Geneva Conventions, and so on. Israel follows the same code, and we exceed it. We have our own code of conduct, informed by rabbinic guidance, and even though we have secular soldiers, we allow religious rabbis to say, “You need to go further to save life. You need to take another step and actually risk your own life to defend the lives of innocent civilians in the enemy combatant area where you’re fighting.” We extend it even further.
Doron Keidar: I’ve interviewed people like Andrew Fox and John Spencer. They will tell you, based on Western tactics, that we use special technology to pinpoint, in real time, where civilians are, where the military is, and how people are moving, in order to mitigate civilian casualties.
Doron Keidar: I’ve been saying for more than a year that civilian casualties are actually very low according to lawful land warfare. We have roughly under 20 percent civilian casualties, meaning more than 80 percent of the people killed in Gaza in this conflict were terrorists. That has now been confirmed by Hamas themselves; they’ve openly said this just recently. I’ve been saying it for months while everybody has been saying, “You’re committing genocide.” That would be a terrible genocide when more than 80 percent of the people who died in Gaza were armed combatants, as we understand it.
Doron Keidar: I would add that the other, let’s say less than 20 percent, were probably combat supporters. Remember, all of Gaza, unfortunately, supports Hamas even today, two years into this war and with Gaza being destroyed by bombs. They are so brainwashed that they are willing to pay the price, even to their utter destruction, to keep going. They won’t lay down their arms.
Doron Keidar: So if people want to stop dying in Gaza, simply put: put down your arms. Stop firing rockets into Israel. Stop trying to kill innocent Israelis, and the war is over. It’s that simple. The claim that Israel is committing genocide is, in my view, debunked. It didn’t happen. It’s not happening. You need to be a truth teller, know what’s going on, and make sure you’re consuming the right news.
John Riley: Another lie you’re combating right now comes, and I hate to say it, from the Christian right or the Christian conservative right. We have people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and many others who are lying about Israel. Recently, Tucker said that Israel persecutes Christians, which is laughable. Israel is the only place where Christianity has grown. It hasn’t grown in Jordan, where he was when he said that, or in Iraq or other Muslim countries. Christianity is not growing, or is nonexistent, in those countries. Tell us about combating that lie within Christian conservative movements. It’s sad.
Doron Keidar: Yes, this is unfortunately something we have seen rise since the war started. First of all, ask yourself: Why is there this new movement to condemn and combat Israel? How is it that before October 7, Israel was an okay country? You were either indifferent, pro-Israel, or anti-Israel. But why is it that after October 7—after the worst tragedy against the Jewish people, and what I consider an actual attempted genocide by the terrorists—this movement rose?
Doron Keidar: If it weren’t for me, my men, and the men and women of the IDF stopping them, it would have continued. And it would have affected every Jew and non-Jew, because another thing people don’t recognize is that the State of Israel has a mixed population of other indigenous groups as well, such as Druze and Bedouin Muslims. All of them were targeted. All of them were killed on October 7. The terrorists didn’t care if you were Muslim. They didn’t care if you were from the Philippines, working in the fields or learning agriculture. An African was murdered horribly, and so on. People were being murdered regardless of whether they were Jewish.
Doron Keidar: When it comes to Christian persecution in the Middle East, it is rampant. I am among those actively fighting to stop the persecution of the church in the Middle East. I’m working proactively with NGOs. In Israel, I am also helping support the indigenous Christian population so they can get better representation in our government.
Doron Keidar: Just a few weeks ago, we met with His Excellency Ambassador Mike Huckabee at the embassy in Jerusalem to fight for this cause and to help him, as an American voice and authority in Israel, weigh in with U.S. pressure on our government to help recognize Christians in Israel. I can tell you it’s a number-one issue for him, and it is for many of us in Israel. If that’s the case, it contradicts the claim that they’re being persecuted when you have Israelis fighting for them.
Doron Keidar: And, by the way, they have a voice because it’s a democracy. They can vote and get representation. The gentleman we’re fighting for diplomatically to be represented in the Knesset is named Ihab. He is now running for the Israeli Knesset to be another Christian voice in parliament and strengthen their voice.
Doron Keidar: Where there is persecution, it is under Palestinian Authority control. Those are the people Tucker interviewed. He interviewed Munther Isaac, the head of the Bethlehem Bible College, who has the Christ at the Checkpoint conferences to demonize Israel and create a bigger rift and division among Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians. That is counterproductive. It isn’t trying to bring reconciliation or understanding. It’s demonizing Israel, even though Israel has no authority in the Palestinian Authority areas. So why interview people there who are being persecuted, and by whom? By Muslims. That’s what you’re hearing and whom he is platforming.
Doron Keidar: This other woman, this “Monopolist” lady, is also, in my view, a KGB plant. We know this. Do your homework, guys. The KGB has platformed her and taught her how to use manipulation and misinformation. All of this feeds into Islamic dawah. Dawah is a tactic of silent jihad, which very few people in the West talk about, but it is the most effective.
Doron Keidar: That’s why, if you go to any library here in America and ask for Palestinian books about Palestine, you will find picture books. I found an example in Florida that talks about the history of Palestine, which I consider fictitious, because Arabs do not have a “P” sound in their phonetic language. They can’t say “P,” so it becomes “Falestine,” if anything. Isn’t it ironic that the Palestinian cause is supposedly for Palestinian Arab people, yet they can’t even pronounce “Palestine”? Let that sink in.
Doron Keidar: This is how great the deception is surrounding the cause we’re fighting over, the “from the river to the sea” slogan, and protests in America, because people like Tucker and Candace are stirring things up fictitiously. It’s like talking about Disneyland. It’s fairy tales. It’s not real.
John Riley: I want to encourage you to connect with Doron Keidar. You can just Google his name. You’ll find him online and find his website. His first name is D-O-R-O-N, and his last name is K-E-I-D-A-R. Doron Keidar. Just Google that and find out more about what he’s doing to combat all of these lies.
John Riley: We’re talking about a lot of hard stuff right now, and I want to wrap this up by giving you the opportunity to speak to the many people listening right now who love the land of Israel, love the Jewish people, and love the Bible. The Bible is a Jewish book—the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. It’s all written by Jewish people. Jesus was a Jew. So talk to those people who are listening right now about what we can do. What is our call to action amid all the lies going on in our nation and literally around the world?
Doron Keidar: We just talked about a lot of heavy things and a lot of misinformation. It can feel overwhelming. You get online or go to work, and your friends keep hitting you with all this propaganda. You don’t know how to answer or how to stand for the truth because it’s overwhelming. That’s what dawah is supposed to do: overwhelm you with disinformation. That’s the silent jihad, which is also called the Red-Green Alliance—the communists and the Islamists collaborating together.
Doron Keidar: Then you have certain pundits who might play into that. We can suspect and speculate whether Candace, Tucker, and others are part of that. So it’s overwhelming. What do we do? The answer is really simple: Read your Bible. Don’t get into the information war. Don’t get drowned in that; get drowned in the Word of God.
Doron Keidar: I know there is this MAGA movement here—Make America Great Again. I believe the answer isn’t about making America great again; it’s about making God great again in your home and in what you can control. What you and I can control is our own minds. I can block what comes in and what goes out.
Doron Keidar: The best way, in my opinion, is for Bible-believing Christians to be just that: Bible-believing. To be Bible-believing means you should at least know what the Bible says. Read the Bible. Genesis to Revelation is my encouragement. Read it prayerfully and with trembling and fear before Almighty God, and let that bathe you with truth so that, when you hear all these lies, they deflect because you know the truth.
Doron Keidar: It’s just like somebody who works at a bank. They don’t deal with counterfeits all day long; they deal with the real thing so that, when the counterfeit comes, they can identify it. In the same way, bathe yourself in God’s truth—not my word or someone else’s word, but God’s Word. Then you will know people by their fruit, because it will be very evident.
Doron Keidar: As far as action you can take against people using disinformation, like Tucker and others, I’m not about defaming these people. The best way to combat their lies is through the declaration posted on my website. This is really for Christians who want to take a stand. It is called the Truth in Love Declaration. This declaration defends the name of Jesus against unrepentant Jew-hatred and false witness, which these individuals are, in my opinion.
Doron Keidar: The best way to combat them is not to fight and debate them, because there’s no point. They aren’t interested in debate; they’re interested in false information. But, as a Christian, you can be the Bonhoeffer of today and take a stand by signing this petition. Many Christian leaders have put their names to it. You can go through the website, see the link, and make a difference against the lies.
John Riley: Let me give you the direct link to that website. It is calling for biblical accountability for Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens: ChristianCallToTruth.org. Go to that website, sign the petition, and add your name, as so many other people have done. ChristianCallToTruth.org.
John Riley: Doron, thank you for your service to the country of Israel. Thank you for standing up to combat all of these lies against the Jewish people and the land of Israel. We need to do more of that. You are being inundated with deception and lies from the media and now all of these influencers, so you need our prayers. I ask everybody to pray for you and all of the Jewish people.
John Riley: Doron Keidar has been with us here on American Family Radio on The Middle East Report. I hope you’ll reach out to him and find out more about what he’s doing there in the land of Israel.
John Riley: As we wrap up this edition of The Middle East Report, I want to encourage you once again to be very, very careful about the social media, news, and information you consume regarding Israel and the Jewish people. There are so many lies and deceptions out there. You need to be plugged into the truth and, most importantly, plugged into God’s Word.
John Riley: If you want a list of solid news organizations you can trust—organizations that will give you news and information from a biblical perspective and information that is truthful—just email me and I’ll send you a list: [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.
John Riley: Thanks for listening to The Middle East Report. I’m John Riley. Get a podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts. We are on all the major podcast platforms, whichever one you use. Or, of course, you can go to AFR.net and download the podcast there.
The Middle East Report
Interview with Doron Keidar | August 20, 2026
In this episode of The Middle East Report, John Riley speaks with Israeli special-forces reservist and international speaker Doron Keidar about his military service, his experience mobilizing on October 7, and what he encountered during the war in Gaza. They also discuss allegations against Israel, claims of Christian persecution, misinformation in the media, and how Bible-believing Christians can respond with truth, discernment, prayer, and action.
· 00:00 — Introduction and Today’s Topics
· 02:15 — Doron Keidar’s IDF Service
· 05:05 — Mobilized on October 7
· 08:55 — Inside Gaza’s Tunnel Network
· 12:15 — Responding to Genocide Allegations
· 17:05 — Claims of Christian Persecution in Israel
· 21:20 — Misinformation and the Christian Right
· 24:20 — A Biblical Call to Action
· 27:10 — Closing and Contact Information
The Middle East Report
Interview with Doron Keidar | August 20, 2026
In this episode of The Middle East Report, John Riley speaks with Israeli special-forces reservist and international speaker Doron Keidar about his military service, his experience mobilizing on October 7, and what he encountered during the war in Gaza. They also discuss allegations against Israel, claims of Christian persecution, misinformation in the media, and how Bible-believing Christians can respond with truth, discernment, prayer, and action.
· 00:00 — Introduction and Today’s Topics
· 02:15 — Doron Keidar’s IDF Service
· 05:05 — Mobilized on October 7
· 08:55 — Inside Gaza’s Tunnel Network
· 12:15 — Responding to Genocide Allegations
· 17:05 — Claims of Christian Persecution in Israel
· 21:20 — Misinformation and the Christian Right
· 24:20 — A Biblical Call to Action
· 27:10 — Closing and Contact Information
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