Tag: israel

Biden, Harris Speak With Netanyahu To Discuss Attacking Iran

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday to discuss Israel’s plans to attack Iran in retaliation for the Iranian missile barrage fired at Israel last week.

Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to multiple Israeli escalations, including the assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Israeli officials told Axios that Israel’s retaliation would likely involve airstrikes on Iranian military sites coupled with covert operations similar to the Haniyeh assassination.

NBC News reported on Tuesday that the US was considering supporting Israel’s attack with direct airstrikes of its own, although US officials said intelligence support was more likely. The US has also committed to defending Israel from any Iranian response.

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Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children.

Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals.

Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

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Israel to Establish Jewish-Only Settlements in Northern Gaza as Annexation Moves Forward

Israel has set its sights on a potential annexation of northern Gaza, framing it as a “closed military zone.” This comes one year after the same area endured an all-out ground assault. Coupled with Israel’s newly established “buffer zone” and the occupation of two corridors in central and southern Gaza, the territory is being gradually eroded.

In late October 2023, Israel launched its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, concentrating primarily on the northern portion of the besieged enclave. At the same time, Israel issued demands for medical staff at all major hospitals to abandon their facilities.

It then released CGI imagery depicting a “Hamas headquarters” under al-Shifa Hospital, which was later debunked after the medical facility was bombed and invaded. It had also ordered some 1.1 million civilians to flee towards the South, where “safe zones” were said to be located. Today, Israel has again shifted its focus onto northern Gaza, ordering the civilian population to flee and signaling to the remaining staff of the Kamal Adwan, Indonesian and Al-Awda Hospitals that they should immediately evacuate or be subjected to consequences of another military assault.

Israel has now coupled its invasion of the Jabalia Refugee Camp with speculation that the government is moving forward with a plan reportedly considered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in secret meetings back in September. This plan, publicly supported by certain Israeli members of the Knesset and former military officials, involves seizing northern Gaza and declaring it a “closed military zone.”

According to Haaretz, Netanyahu’s administration is now preparing to enter the “next phase” of its war on Gaza, which could result in the de facto annexation of the area north of the Netzarim Corridor. This corridor, which has been occupied by the Israeli military, effectively splits the Gaza Strip in half. It played a crucial role in the breakdown of previous ceasefire talks, as Israel refused to agree to a permanent withdrawal from the area.

The possibility of allowing Jewish settlers to establish colonies in northern Gaza is also being discussed. Since January, the settler movement has held conferences promoting this topic, signaling growing support for the idea.

Additionally, on May 6, after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal, the Israeli military immediately invaded the Rafah Crossing in southern Gaza. The invasion continued until Israel’s forces occupied the entire Palestine-Egypt border area, known as the Philadelphia Corridor. This, along with the destruction of infrastructure and agricultural land on Gaza’s outskirts over the past year to create a new “buffer zone,” has effectively reduced Gaza into an even smaller enclave. Over 1.5 million people are now crammed into overcrowded, unsanitary tent cities.

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Israel looking at $66bn war bill as economic woes deepen

The total bill for Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon over several years will be some $66 billion, about 11 to 12 percent of Israel’s pre-war GDP, according to the Israeli Central Bank.

The number was revealed by Adam Tooze, a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University in New York, who has written extensively about financial crises.  

He stated in a 7 October interview with Foreign Policy that Israel is fighting a war of choice, which includes the goal of unleashing mass violence to make Gaza “unlivable” and “deal” with Hezbollah.

Israel “is in a deliberate way escalating the destruction in Gaza and the effort to deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon. So this is expensive,” Tooze observed.

Even with US aid, which Tooze estimates at roughly $14 billion to $15 billion per year, the cost of the war is a strain on the Israeli government and society, he added.

Separately, a report published by Brown University’s Costs of War project said the US has given Israel $17.9 billion in military aid in the past year, and spent at least $22.76 billion assisting Israel, the highest amount in the two countries’ histories.

Tooze noted further that as a result of the war, Israeli tourism has collapsed by 75 percent, and hundreds of thousands of workers have been taken out of the economy at times while serving as reservists in the army.

“This is obviously disruptive to Israel, with a population of 10 million. If you take that number out of the workforce, prime-age, working young people, this is going to hurt.”

Tooze says that the Israeli economy, in particular the construction sector, has further suffered after imposing a ban on some 80,000 to 150,000 migrant Palestinian workers from the West Bank.

Estimates of Israeli GDP growth have fallen from three or four percent to roughly zero in the near future. At the same time, it faces a large surge in government spending.

In contrast, the relatively small economy of the West Bank, with a GDP of as little as $18 billion, has plunged roughly 20 to 25 percent.

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White House Ignored Warning from Pentagon, State Dept that Israel Was Creating a Catastrophe in Gaza

Recently released emails from Reuters show that officials in the White House ignored warnings from their counterparts at the Defense and State Department warning that Israel was committing war crimes and creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Reuters reviewed emails from the Departments of Defense and State from last October, showing that high-ranking officials warned about supporting Israel as it committed war crimes in Gaza.

“As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House, the outlet reported. “The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel.”

The warning came from Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in an Oct. 13 email sent to senior White House aides. She explained an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone.”  

Stroul and other officials were pushing the White House to take a more sympathetic position on the suffering of Palestinians and ask Israel to give Gazans more time to comply with Tel Aviv’s evacuation orders. 

While the Biden administration claims that it did pressure Israel early in the onslaught and that did make a difference, Reuters reports that the White House had little impact on Tel Aviv’s military operations. 

“But Washington was slow to address the suffering of Palestinians, said three senior U.S. officials involved in the decision-making process,” the article explains. “And while the ground invasion was ultimately delayed by about 10 days, the three officials attributed the pause more to operational preparations by the Israeli military than U.S. pressure.”

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American Neocons Get Their Iran War as Congress Sleeps

Over the weekend, the Commander of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Michael Kurilla, arrived in Israel to “coordinate” with the Israeli military and plan a military strike against Iran. Think about that for a moment: one of the highest-ranking officers in the US military is planning a war in a foreign country against another foreign country which will be fueled by American weapons, American intelligence, and American tax dollars.

Did that foreign country – Iran – attack the United States or threaten Americans? No, it did not. What did Iran do to warrant a CENTCOM commander bringing the weight of the US military into play to plan a war – possibly WWIII? It retaliated against Israeli airstrikes including the assignation of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

It was the Israeli missile attack on Tehran – an unprecedented event – that set off this chain of escalation, but few would know if from media coverage. This war fever between Israel and Iran not only has nothing to do with us, but our increasing involvement actually hurts our national interests in the region.

After a deadly and futile three-year proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the last thing we need is another war in the Middle East, especially against Iran. But make no mistake, war is what we are getting. This Administration has even offered to “compensate” Israel with even more weapons and diplomatic support if they hit targets of the US choosing and avoid others in Iran.

Imagine if China sent military officials to Iran to pay Tehran to make sure some US targets were struck and others avoided. Would we consider it Iran’s war against us, or China’s war against us? Both?

Has Congress declared war on Iran or even authorized the war? No. Has this Administration explained to us why Americans suffering after the catastrophic Hurricane Helene are on their own because we need to spend billions on a war that is none of our business? No. The neocons have wanted this war for decades and for them it’s always America last.

This war will make us less free, less safe, and much poorer. There will be no benefits at all, only downside.

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UK psychological warfare unit collaborated with Israeli army

Britain secretly advised the Israeli military on psychological warfare techniques, Declassified has found.

Leaked documents reveal how the British army’s 77th brigade discussed strategy and tactics with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

The 77th brigade uses psychological operations and social media to help fight wars “in the information age”.

It specialises in “non-lethal forms of psychological warfare” such as cyber-attacks, propaganda activities, and counter-insurgency operations online.

Israel’s own information operations have involved using fabricated videos and fake social media accounts to defend the bombing of Gaza.

Two exchanges with the IDF took place at the 77th brigade’s barracks in Hermitage, Berkshire, between 2018-19.

Leaked documents about the encounters originate from a hack of the IDF by a group called “Anonymous for Justice”. The dataset was subsequently published by Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Although some of the documents reference “secret” matters, there is strong public interest in reporting on their contents.

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Why Israel Can’t Win

“Israel” is quite proficient at killing people. In less than a year they have killed 40,000 civilians in Gaza, and last week killed 2,000 more in Lebanon. Unofficial estimates of the real death toll in Gaza, as opposed to the officially recovered, counted, and identified bodies, exceed 200,000.

As they slaughter vast numbers of women and children under the flimsiest excuses, the Zionists also kill the political and diplomatic leaders with whom wiser leaders would be negotiating. They apparently have not considered that for each civilian they kill, dozens of furious survivors and onlookers become long-term anti-Zionist combatants-in-waiting. And they don’t seem to realize that martyring political and diplomatic leaders gives fighters added incentive to up their game, and leaves them no option but to do so. That’s why, in the wake of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s attempted invasion of Lebanon has been shockingly (to the Zionists) unsuccessful.

Randomly murdering tens of thousands of civilians, or assassinating a handful of leaders, superficially looks like tactical success. Richie Allen seemed to think that Israel’s terrorist attack on non-combatants associated with Hezbollah via exploding pagers was an impressive achievement.* As I told him, just about anybody who really wants to randomly murder that number of people, or more, can do so if they so choose. The fact that Israeli leaders employed such an elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme to mass murder noncombatants—to counterproductive strategic effect—reveals the Israelis as psychopathic idiots and shameless war criminals, not geniuses.

The appearance of tactical success achieved by Israel’s pointless murders conceals a colossal strategic failure. The root of that failure is simple: Netanyahu has no idea what he is trying to achieve, other than keep the war going so he can stay in office and out of prison. His extremist coalition parters, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, do have a vision—“exterminate Amalek”—but since this is 2024, not the Bronze Age, that isn’t going to happen. Israel can kill a small fraction of today’s “Amalek” but for every Amalek they kill, ten or a hundred more will spring up. Long before Israel killed even 5% of its current Amalek enemies it would have transformed most of the world’s 8 billion non-Jews into a new, even more angry and determined Amalek.

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Words Kill: Why Israel Gets Away With Murder in Gaza and Lebanon

The official Israeli army version of why it has targeted civilian areas during the intense and deadly bombardment of September 20 in south Lebanon is that the Lebanese are hiding long-range missile launchers in their own homes.

This official explanation by the Israeli military was meant to justify the killing of 492 people and the wounding of 1,645 in a single day of Israeli strikes.

This ready-to-serve explanation shall accompany us throughout the Israeli war in Lebanon, however long it takes. Israeli media is now heavily citing these claims and, by extension, US and western media are following suit.

Keep this in mind as you reflect on earlier statements made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog on October 13 when he argued that there are no civilians in Gaza and “there is an entire nation out there that is responsible”.

Israel does this in every war it launches against any Palestinian or Arab nation. Instead of removing civilians and civilian infrastructures from its bank of targets, it immediately turns the civilian population into the main targets of its war.

A quick glance at the number of civilians killed in the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza should be enough to demonstrate that Israel targets ordinary people as a matter of course.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, children and women constitute the largest percentage of the war’s victims at 69 percent. If we factor in the number of adult males who have been killed – a number that includes doctors, medics, civil defense workers and numerous other categories – it will become obvious that the vast majority of all of Gaza’s victims are civilians.

Only Israeli media, and their allies in the west, continue to find justifications of why Palestinian civilians, and now Lebanese, are being killed in large numbers.

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October 7th in Retrospect, Why Hamas Attacked

A year has passed since Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7th. Dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas conducted an improbable attack that resulted in 1200 dead Israelis and over 250 hostages taken into Gaza. Israel also initiated the Hannibal Directive that day, killing some of their civilians to prevent them from being taken into Gaza. In the aftermath of the attack, political pundits and analysts ruminated on why Hamas attacked. From Hamas’ perspective, October 7th was a justified response to 75 years of Israeli oppression against the Palestinian people. Beyond that rationale, experts could not fully explain October 7th. However, in retrospect, other elements may have driven Hamas’ strategic calculus for the October 7th attacks.

One of the motivating factors behind Hamas’ October 7th attack was the group’s unpopularity amongst Palestinians in Gaza. According to James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute, roughly 20% of Palestinians in Gaza supported Hamas before Oct 7th. One of the most notable instances of public disobedience came in July 2023 when thousands of Palestinians took to the streets against the Islamist group over the economic and living conditions in Gaza caused by Israel’s brutal blockade. The demonstrations were violently broken up in what was considered a rare but powerful display of frustration against Hamas’ rule.

Taking these elements into consideration, Hamas sought to use October 7th as an attempt to reconfigure its image as an authoritarian militant group into a fighting force protecting Palestinians against Israeli aggression. Hamas believed that by framing October 7th as a revolutionary act of resistance against Israel, Palestinians would see them as protectors of their struggle and see Hamas in a favorable light.

Geopolitical considerations in the Middle East also contributed to the October 7th attack. Hamas ultimately felt the need to debunk the narrative that the Middle East could ignore the Palestinian struggle entirely. For example, Jordan and Egypt relinquished their political leverage when both nations made peace with Israel without conditioning the creation of a Palestinian state.

In the months before the Hamas attack, Saudi Arabia was on the brink of repeating this same pattern by normalizing relations with Israel. Washington and Riyadh were engaged in high-level discussions in which the Saudis sought a U.S. defense pact. The White House pushed the Kingdom to drop its demands that normalization with Tel Aviv be conditioned on a Palestinian state.

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