Tag: israel

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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Israel Is Conducting a Campaign to Ethnically Cleanse Southern Lebanon of Shia Residents

On March 28, George Saeed, 62, and his 24-year-old son Elie were driving back to their home in Debel, a Christian village in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. It was a route Saeed knew well. He ran a small laundromat beneath his house, where he washed uniforms for a Polish unit in the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the nearby village of Tiri. The trip from Tiri used to take a few minutes, but after the main road was bombed by the invading Israeli military he had begun taking a longer route through the neighboring village of Rmeich.

That afternoon, villagers saw George’s car pass through Rmeich and enter Debel, disappearing along the village’s steep, winding roads. When they were roughly 60 meters from their house, the crackle of gunfire rang out, followed by the blare of a stuck car horn.

Elie Louqa, Saeed’s nephew and the former mayor of Debel, was in Beirut when he got a call from his brother describing what had happened. He began contacting UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL), the Lebanese Army, and the Red Cross, asking them to reach the car. Both the Red Cross unit in Rmeich and the nearby UNIFIL contingent told Louqa they could not secure permission from their superiors to move.

After about 90 minutes, a group of young men from the village decided to go themselves. Carrying white blankets and mattresses to signal they were civilians, they reached the site of the attack and found the father and son dead inside their bullet-ridden car. They pulled the bodies out and carried them to the village cemetery for burial.

“You won’t find a man with cleaner hands. He was generous to a fault,” Louqa told Drop Site News. “Go and ask the people of our villages who George Saeed was.”

The killings were just one in a series of attacks on residents of several villages along the southern border who have chosen to remain in their homes despite repeated sweeping displacement orders by the Israeli military covering all of southern Lebanon.

Earlier this week, the Lebanese army announced its forces had withdrawn from southern border villages, leaving residents without even the semblance of protection. At least six Lebanese soldiers have been killed by Israel over the past month. The army said its troops had to “reposition” as they were being encircled and cut off from their supply lines but claimed it continued to “stand by residents” by “maintaining a group of military personnel” in the villages. What this meant in practice, according to residents, was that soldiers from the area could stay in their homes provided they did not wear army uniforms or carry arms.

“We don’t know why the army made this decision,” said Boutros al-Rai, a local farmer and civilian administrator. “For us, its presence made us feel protected.”

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Israel Halts All Arms Purchases From France, Citing Anti-Semitism

A dramatic rupture between Israel and France is sending shockwaves through Europe’s political and defense establishment, exposing what critics describe as the consequences of globalist leadership detached from strategic reality. The decision by Israel to halt all defense procurement from Paris marks not just a diplomatic dispute, but a deeper fracture in the Western alliance.

According to a report from POLITICO EUROPE, at the center of the move is Amir Baram, who ordered an immediate end to government-to-government defense purchases from France. The directive reflects what Israeli officials describe as a long-building loss of trust in French leadership.

“Israel will reduce all defense procurement from France to zero,” the Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed, signaling a decisive pivot away from Paris. Instead, Israel will prioritize domestic production and cooperation with “friendly” nations.

The message is clear: reliability now matters more than tradition. For Jerusalem, France no longer qualifies as a dependable partner. The breakdown did not happen overnight. Israeli officials point to a pattern of increasingly hostile actions by the government of Emmanuel Macron over the past two years. Among the most controversial incidents was France’s decision to block Israeli participation at major defense exhibitions. At the 2025 Paris Air Show, French authorities physically partitioned Israeli booths, restricting access to key systems.

Baram described the move in blunt terms, calling it “absolutely, bluntly anti-Semitic.” He accused Paris of using political justifications to shield its own industries from Israeli competition.
This was not an isolated case. Earlier attempts were made to exclude Israeli companies from events like Eurosatory, one of Europe’s largest defense exhibitions.

Although a French court overturned one such ban in 2024, the pattern of obstruction continued. Israeli officials saw it as evidence of deliberate economic and political discrimination.
The situation escalated further during the ongoing conflict with Iran. France blocked the transfer of military supplies to Israel by refusing to allow aircraft carrying munitions to cross its airspace.

For Israeli leadership, this crossed a red line. One official described it as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

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Israel Is Making Sure Trump Can’t Find an Off-Ramp in Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.

The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed – or so it then seemed – after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group’s spiritual leader and military strategist.

If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East” – a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

Netanyahu directed Trump’s gaze to Israel’s supposed “audacious feat” in Lebanon. The US president should have been looking elsewhere: to Israel’s colossal moral and strategic failure in Gaza.

There, Israel spent two years pummeling the tiny coastal enclave into dust, starving the population, and destroying all civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

Netanyahu publicly declared that Israel was “eradicating Hamas”, Gaza’s civilian government and its armed resistance movement that had refused for two decades to submit to Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the territory.

In truth, as pretty much every legal and human rights expert long ago concluded, what Israel was actually doing was committing genocide – and, in the process, tearing up the rules of war that had governed the period following the Second World War.

But two and a half years into Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Hamas is not only still standing, it is in charge of the ruins.

Israel may have shrunk by some 60 per cent the size of the concentration camp the people of Gaza are locked into, but Hamas is far from vanquished.

Rather, Israel is the one that has retreated to a safe zone, from which it is resuming a war of attrition on Gaza’s survivors.

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“Israeli Soldiers will Not Be Participating on the Ground.” – Israeli Official Says Israel Will Not Provide Ground Troops if US Forces Invade Iran

As President Trump deploys more troops to the Middle East and reportedly weighs a ground invasion of Iran, it’s being reported that Israel will not commit any ground troops to the potential mission. 

This comes as Trump threatens to escalate the war amid the deployment of thousands of additional troops and weighs his options to end the war or deploy boots on the ground. Trump has also given Iran until Monday, April 6, to stop blocking oil shipping in the Strait of Hormuz amid negotiations.

Trump said on Monday that he will escalate the war, targeting Iran’s energy and water infrastructure if they do not reach a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. On the deployment of ground troops, Trump told reporters the day prior, “I just have lots of alternatives,” also noting, “we have tremendous numbers of ships over there.”

Trump later suggested that he will withdraw troops from the Middle East and force Europe, Asia, and the Gulf nations to deal with Iran’s blockade on the Strait of Hormuz after they refused his calls for help. “The U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday, offering to supply oil from the United States if the countries cannot “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

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Israel retaliates against France

Israel’s Defense Ministry has announced retaliatory steps against France after US President Donald Trump openly criticized the European NATO member for refusing to allow access to its airspace for arms shipments being delivered to the Middle East.

Posting on Truth Social on Tuesday, Trump described the French decision as “very unhelpful” to the US-Israeli war on Iran, adding that Washington “will remember” the move. France’s restriction on facilitating weapons transfers to Israel came alongside a broader embargo on arms sales to West Jerusalem introduced more than a year ago.

Israeli Defense Ministry Director-General Amir Baram stated in a Channel 12interview on Tuesday that he and Defense Minister Israel Katz aim to curb reliance on foreign arms suppliers, especially from countries such as France that Israel does not view as “friendly.”

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