Tag: israel

Middle East is ‘on fire’ – Kremlin

The US-Israeli war against Iran has set the Middle East “on fire,” reflecting Russia’s warning about the dangerous consequences of the move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

On Sunday, US President Donald Trump escalated the tensions by issuing an expletive-laden demand to Tehran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained effectively shut since the conflict began on February 28.
“Open the f**king strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell,” he wrote on social media, threatening to demolish the Iranian power plants and bridges if it doesn’t happen by Tuesday. Tehran maintains that the key waterway is only closed for oil shipments by the US and its allies.

When asked by journalists about Trump’s rant on Monday, Peskov said that “we have seen those statements, but we prefer not to comment on them.”

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Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza

The American press does its best not to cover savage Israeli views of Palestinians, but a leading New York synagogue gave an honored platform to those views ten days ago. It hosted an Israeli advocate with connections in its government who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and said American Jews need to support that operation.  

Benjamin Anthony said that all “Palestinian Arabs” in Gaza pose such a threat to Israel that the international community should use “muscular diplomacy” with Egypt so as force the population out of Gaza into an “enclave” in the Sinai peninsula. 

“I believe the international community would very handily be able to create some sort of enclave for the…Gazans in the Sinai peninsula. And then we might have the breathing room to think about long-term solutions.” 

Though those two million Gazans would likely be displaced again, into African countries, said Anthony, the leader of an Israeli think tank called the MirYam Institute. 

“I think someone like [Egyptian president] Sisi would likely move the Gazans along from the Sinai peninsula in the event that he didn’t want to build a place for them there, and you would probably see them dispersed through the continent of Africa quite quickly.”

Anthony’s argument is widely shared by Israelis (according to a 2025 poll), and it only received mild push back from Eliot Cosgrove, a leading conservative rabbi in the U.S., who had brought Anthony, his first cousin, onto the synagogue dais.  

Cosgrove called the scheme “very intriguing,” but protested that Anthony was conflating “Hamas with the entire Gaza population.” And that by creating a refugee population with a “narrative”, Israel was practically and morally kicking the can down the road. Speaking “as a proud Zionist,” Cosgrove said the scheme is not in Israel’s interest.

Anthony insisted that no Gazans could be trusted because Gazan civilians cheered the atrocities against Israelis on October 7. Cosgrove folded his hand: “Well, I love you, and I disagree with you, but let’s move on.” 

Cosgrove ended the hour-long dialogue by thanking Anthony “for fighting the good fight” and “for representing our people.”

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The Shift: The Democratic Party battle over AIPAC heats up

A Democratic National Committee member says she will introduce a resolution rejecting AIPAC spending at this month’s DNC meeting.

“At a time when Democratic voters might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict, this could be one step toward bringing those voters back into the party,” the committee member, Allison Minnerly, told The Intercept’s Matt Sledge.

“Given the recent primaries in Illinois, but also what we’ve seen across the country, I think it’s important that we specify that AIPAC as a growing force in our primaries needs to be specifically addressed when we talk about dark money,” she added.

If Minnerly’s name rings a bell, it might be because she introduced Resolution 18 last year. It called for a ceasefire in Gaza, suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, and recognition of Palestinian statehood. Her effort was ultimately watered down, then unceremoniously dismissed at the DNC’s summer meeting in Minnesota.

“The fight over Resolution 18 was more than a simple vote over a symbolic resolution. The story shows how the Israel lobby is doing all it can to prevent Democratic Party leadership from honoring the overwhelming will of party members. It also is a harbinger of fights to come, as support for Palestine only continues to grow in the party in reaction to Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” wrote Nadia Ahmad at Mondoweiss at the time.

The same is true this time around.

The new resolution is also symbolic, but it gets Democrats on the record regarding a lobbying group that has already become a hot-button issue among presidential hopefuls.

One such example is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is attempting to distance himself from past AIPAC connections based on the direction of the political winds.

“It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker declared after the group spent heavily in Illinois’s recent primaries. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”

A spokesperson for the Governor reiterated that Pritzker “withdrew his support” from the group after it “became a pro-Trump organization.”

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Israel is implementing its Gaza strategy in Lebanon: turning ‘buffer zones’ into permanent borders

While the US-Israeli war on Iran and its economic repercussions on the global economy continues to be at the center of global media attention, Israel is in the process of re-drawing the map of the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon. If successful, Israel’s plans could have regional and global repercussions. And yet, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon has barely made a blip on the Western media’s radar. 

Last week, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israeli forces will not leave the south of Lebanon after the end of the current war. Katz’s statements are in line with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said last weekend that he had instructed the Israeli army to expand its control in the south of Lebanon up to 10 kilometers, to create a “security buffer zone.” These statements come as the Israeli army has deployed four divisions to the Lebanese border, and continues to push into Lebanese territory.

Everything in the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon is repeated from previous invasions; Israeli orders to civilians to leave their villages in the south, the near 1 million Lebanese displaced, the bombing of infrastructure, especially bridges over the Litani river, and the fighting inside and around Lebanese villages. But there is something different this time; Israel’s destruction of infrastructure is not a mere war strategy. It is yet another announcement of Israel’s renewed doctrine: occupying new areas, often depopulating them by force, and permanently controlling them, basically expanding Israel’s de facto borders with “buffer zones.”

Although Israel has implemented elements of this strategy in the past, this time it is significantly different. First, because Israel is explicitly stating that it wants to permanently occupy new Arab territory, against the backdrop of official statements about ‘Greater Israel’ ambitions. Second, because it is happening without any significant international reaction. And lastly, because this new model that Israel is trying to replicate on a second front could have implications for the future of war and border drawing worldwide. 

This reality raises two critical questions: how did this model become an Israeli official policy? And what will this Israeli vision mean for the Middle East and the world, if realized?

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How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away. 

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control. 

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Drugs, sexual blackmail: shocking confession letter exposes Israel’s Red Crescent spy ring

A bombshell confession letter obtained by The Grayzone reveals Israeli intelligence recruited an asset in the Palestinian Red Crescent, who admitted using drugs and sexual blackmail to create a “network of informants” which could infiltrate and destroy resistance groups.

A leaked confession indicates the Red Crescent was infiltrated by Israeli intelligence, which exploited its collaborator network within the Occupied Palestinian Territories to engage in criminal activity including drug trafficking, shocking acts of sexual blackmail, and political executions. 

The document was obtained by The Grayzone, which verified its authenticity through two West Bank sources with knowledge of the case. Originally published by the State of Palestine Public Prosecution, the letter shines a light on the inner workings of Tel Aviv’s espionage network inside the West Bank, revealing how resistance groups are infiltrated and monitored, while common Palestinians are press-ganged into serving the apartheid state.

The confession traces the story of a longstanding Palestinian collaborator within the Red Crescent who was originally recruited by Israel in December 2004, following “security incidents” across the West Bank during the height of the Second Intifada.

At this time, the Palestinian visited an Israeli “field interrogation center” established near their home. Struggling financially as the primary breadwinner in a fatherless family, they were considered an ideal recruit by Israel’s intelligence services. The Grayzone has omitted the identities of the Palestinians named in the confession letter.

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This company used to make weapons for the Nazis. Now it will do the same for Israel

One of Germany’s biggest and most iconic car manufacturers, Volkswagen (VW) and one of Israel’s most well-known arms manufacturers, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, part of the global Rafael Group, are planning to collaborate. If the project is realized, VW will convert one of its German factories in the historic city of Osnabrueck from making automobiles to producing components of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

There are good reasons why this has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it reflects not only VW’s growing problems, but those of Germany’s vital automobile sector and the German economy as a whole. As the Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark “the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged,” trying to save itself by entering the “booming defense sector.”

These plunging profits are due to many factors: Chinese competition; Germany’s failure to keep up with cutting-edge technology, communication infrastructure, and business practices; American sabotage by tariff warfare and filching German companies via subsidies; and last but not least, the horrendous energy costs that the entire EU has inflicted on itself by going to war – by Ukrainian proxy and sanctions – against Russia.

The shift to making things for the military, meanwhile, is just a small part of Germany’s breathtakingly misguided response: Namely, a policy of going into massive public debt – under a so-called conservative – to finance a bizarre form of military Keynesianism that is based on illusions (no, Russia is not about to attack), produces self-reinforcing Russophobia (which makes a return to normality even harder), and won’t work as an economic boost, as even the usually government-aligned Spiegel has admitted.

In short, like a prism, the Osnabrueck plan bundles together many of Germany’s worst – and self-inflicted – problems, and the single silliest idea of how to tackle them.

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Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank

The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.

The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word a document originally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”

The FDD document was authored by Tzvi Kahn, the former assistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

A March 2, 2026 statement issued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analyst Stephen McIntyre noted Thursday.

While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.

Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.

A 2009 investigation by journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was most likely the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.

While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”

At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

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IDF threatens ‘elimination’ for Russian leaders who ‘wish Israel ill’

Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.

Israeli military spokeswoman Anna Ukolova has drawn outrage in Moscow after threatening that Russian authorities who “wish Israel ill” could be subject to “elimination,” while suggesting Israel could hack into Russian closed-circuit television cameras to identify and track targets.

Asked by a journalist with Russian radio broadcaster RBC whether Israel had access to Russian traffic cameras, Ukolova declined to answer directly but warned that “Khamenei’s elimination shows our capabilities are serious” and that “no one who wishes us harm will be left aside.”

She added, ominously, “I hope Moscow does not wish Israel ill right now – I’d like to believe that.”

In response to a post by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who wrote that the IDF spokeswoman threatened that “Russian authorities [will] be killed if they take [an] anti-Israel position,” Ukolova claimed Dugin was spreading “fake news.” But she declined to clarify how her remarks had been incorrectly interpreted.

Ukolova’s statements came just days after it was revealed that a large number of Russian CCTVs were potentially using BriefCam – an Israeli video analysis software that closely matches the description of a program the Netanyahu regime reportedly deployed to track Iranian movements outside the home of Iran’s Supreme Leader before they assassinated him during their February 28 sneak attack.

On March 12, Russian outlet Mash revealed that the Israeli software BriefCam “has been used in Russia by private providers since the 2010s.” Founded at Israel’s Hebrew University in 2007, BriefCam uses AI to let users “review hours of video in minutes” and “make [their] video searchable, actionable and quantifiable.” In 2024, BriefCam was absorbed by a Dutch subsidiary of the Canon Group named Milestone Systems, which publicly pledges to “amplify what organizations of any size can see, do and achieve with video.”

“Our patented VIDEO SYNOPSIS® technology condenses hours of surveillance into a short summary by overlaying multiple events—each tagged with its original timestamp—onto a single frame, letting you filter them by object type and attributes,” the company’s BriefCam page crows. An analysis by Al Jazeera revealed those attributes include “gender, age group, clothing, movement patterns and time spent in a given location.”

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US, Israel destroy Iran’s historic Pasteur Institute, highest bridge in West Asia

US-Israeli airstrikes hit major infrastructure across Iran on 2 April, including a medical institute more than 100 years old and a key bridge linking Tehran to the city of Karaj. 

The Iranian Health Ministry said Thursday that the Pasteur Institute of Iran, founded in 1920 in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute of Paris, was heavily damaged in the latest US-Israeli attacks on the country.

The institute specializes in combatting infectious diseases and outbreaks such as rabies, smallpox, and cholera. It is also a leading hub for the production of vaccines. 

An Iranian Health Ministry spokesman, Hossein Kermanpour, called the strike “a direct assault on international health security” and an attack on “a century-old pillar of global health.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei called the attack “heartbreaking, cruel, despicable, and utterly outrageous,” stressing it was “not merely another war crime, but a barbaric assault on basic human core values.” Over 300 health facilities have been damaged by US-Israeli strikes since the start of the war.

Washington and Tel Aviv also attacked on Thursday the B1 Bridge in Alborz – also known as the Ebrahim Raisi Bridge and recognized as the tallest bridge in the region.

It was developed with the involvement of the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, standing 136 meters high and stretching over a kilometer across the Karaj River valley.

It is now severely damaged, images have shown.

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