Tag: israel

Israel Wants ‘Aerial Corridor’ Over Syria to Strike Iran

Tel Aviv’s primary objective in discussions with Damascus is to establish an aerial corridor over Syria so Israel can restart its war against Iran. 

Axios reports that Israel presented the Syrian government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, with a maximalist agreement that would establish a no-fly zone over Syria. Additionally, Tel Aviv wants a large swath of Syria, from the Israeli border to Damascus, to become a demilitarized zone. 

An Israeli source told the outlet that an essential part of the agreement will be maintaining the ability to use Syrian airspace to attack Iran. “A central principle of the Israeli proposal is maintaining an aerial corridor to Iran via Syria, which would allow for potential future Israeli strikes in Iran,” they said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started an unprovoked war with Iran in June. Tel Aviv targeted leadership in Tehran, nuclear facilities, and scientists. President Donald Trump joined the war by striking three Iranian nuclear sites that Israel lacked the military capability to destroy. 

Israeli forces currently occupy southern Syria. Israel promised to withdraw its troops from Syria if Damascus accepted the agreement. On Wednesday, Sharaa said a deal with Israel was possible “in the coming days.”

Tel Aviv made a similar agreement with Hezbollah, where Israeli soldiers were scheduled to withdraw from South Lebanon after Hezbollah moved its forces out of the region. However, after the Hezbollah withdrawal, Tel Aviv maintained its occupation. Israel is now demanding that Hezbollah entirely disarm. 

The Israeli invasion of Syria began after President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by al-Sharaa last year. Al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is the founder of al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate. President Donald Trump has met with Sharaa and lifted some sanctions on Syria in a push to get Damascus to make a deal with Tel Aviv.

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Trump Is Preparing a $6 Billion Arms Package for Israel

The White House informed Congress that it is preparing a massive arms sale to Israel, including attack helicopters and military vehicles. The weapons will be paid for with US military aid. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the total value of the weapons deal is $6 billion. The sale is $3.8 billion for 30 AH-64 Apache helicopters and $1.9 billion deal for 3,250 infantry assault vehicles. 

Washington will pay for the arms with foreign military financing. The US provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in military aid annually. Washington boosted assistance to Tel Aviv following the October 7 Hamas attack. In the first year of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, the US sent Israel nearly $18 billion in aid. The weapons will begin arriving in Israel in two to three years. 

The report of the package follows Israel’s attempt to assassinate Hamas leadership in Qatar. The strikes angered Doha, a major non-NATO US ally. Qatar has also committed to investing $1 trillion in the US economy and gifted Trump a luxury aircraft. 

Additionally, the assassination attempt prevented Trump from initiating talks to end the war in Gaza and free the Israeli hostages. The strike occurred as the Hamas leadership was meeting to discuss a proposal sent by Trump. Qatar said the attempted assassination ended any chances of reaching a hostage agreement. 

The White House has pushed Congressional leadership to endorse the sale even after the Israeli strike in Qatar. 

Israel is in the process of ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza. The onslaught has primarily been conducted by Israel using American weapons. A large number of civilians have been killed by Israeli forces. Additionally, an Israeli siege of Gaza has created a famine, and hundreds of Palestinians have starved to death.

Since taking office, Trump has approved multiple arms sales to Israel, including a sale of $3 billion in bombs.

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‘TRUTH IS OUT’: Smotrich says Israel is working with U.S. as Gaza becomes a ‘real estate bonanza’

Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister and top “settler,” said at a conference that Gaza “is becoming a real estate bonanza” and there are already discussions in place with the U.S. about “how to divide the percentages of the land in Gaza.”

“The demolition phase is always the first phase of urban renewal,” he said, according to Haaretz. “We did that, now we need to start building.”

He said, “This plan was built by the most professional people there are. We are checking how this becomes a real estate bonanza—I’m not joking—and pays for itself.”

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Explosive-Laden Robots Pour Into Gaza City: ‘More Devastating Than Airstrikes’

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Wednesday, “We have poured a lot of money into this war. We have to see how we are dividing up the land in percentages” amid the ongoing Gaza military operation. Importantly, he further described “the demolition” of Gaza City as “the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.”

But how does Israel’s military plan to do this? First, as we’ve detailed before, the IDF is utilizing airstrikes involving powerful missiles hitting the bases of high-rise buildings in order to collapse them in their own footprint. But for other buildings and structures in tightly-packed urban areas, there’s increased reliance on explosive-laden robots, or something that might look straight out of Terminator 2 and Skynet.

Walla news outlet says “unprecedented” number of explosive-laden, remote-controlled vehicles are being prepared to invade Gaza City alongside the ground infantry troops.

The Israeli military commonly refers to them as “suicide APCs” – and they are capable of being driven deep into urban environments before causing huge explosions.

They’ve been able to cause ‘mega-blasts’ so powerful that in some instances they can be heard as far away as central Israel. Palestinians have described “earth-shaking” explosions, with one eyewitness recently telling Middle East Eye that “they are far more devastating than air strikes.”

Gaza’s Government Media Office has said over one hundred of these explosive robots have been used in about the past month alone. Hundreds of residential units and small business buildings have been destroyed.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor details the following on how large the explosives can get:

Each of these robots is loaded with highly explosive materials, sometimes weighing up to seven tonnes, and is directed to detonate in Jabalia al-Balad and Jabalia al-Nazla north of Gaza City; the Zeitoun, al-Sabra, al-Shuja’iyya, and al-Tuffah neighbourhoods south and east of Gaza City; as well as the al-Saftawi and Abu Iskandar areas northwest of Gaza City.

The unprecedented pace of destruction of residential neighborhoods in Gaza City using explosive-laden robots indicates Israel’s determination to wipe the city off the map. At the current rate, the rest of the city could be destroyed within two months, a timeline that may shorten further given the Israeli army’s massive firepower and the absence of any pressure to halt its crimes against Palestinians.

Often it is outdated M113 armored personnel carriers that are turned into autonomous vehicles and strapped with the large explosives. The fact that they are modified personnel carriers means that they can carry a very large payload.

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Discussions Before Iran War Indicate Nuclear Weapons Issue Was Less Pressing Than Netanyahu Claimed

Private discussions between Israeli officials before launching the war against Iran in June indicate that Tehran’s development of nuclear weapons was not an immediate concern. At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran’s nuclear program was an immediate threat. 

“We are at a historic moment with a crucial decision. If we don’t stop [them], within a few years, they will get tens of thousands of kilograms of [nuclear] explosives,” the Prime Minister said at a top-secret meeting the day before launching the war. “Iran has already enriched fissile material at a level that is enough for eight to nine bombs, and they are working on the weaponization.” 

According to The Times of Israel, one unnamed senior military official said the attack would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon in “the long term” and the war would “improve Israel’s strategic balance.”

Publicly, Netanyahu gave far more alarming warnings about Tehran’s breakout time to build a nuclear weapon. He said, “Iran’s nuclear teams were racing to build nuclear warheads. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad claimed Iran could assemble a nuclear weapon within 15 days. 

The private discussions also reveal that Israeli officials believed that they would not be able to destroy Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and were depending on Trump entering the conflict. “The basic assumption is that at the end of the operation, Iran will still possess enriched material,” one official said.

Tel Aviv needed the US to destroy the Fordo nuclear facility. One senior official admitted, “Fordo will be destroyed only if the US attacks it.” Setergetic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer was confident that Trump would decide to bomb Fordo and provide Israel with assistance in shooting down Iranian missiles. 

The conversations additionally reveal that Tel Aviv was trying to overthrow the Iranian government, not just destroy its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. 

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Israel unveils Light Shield – a world-first laser that can shoot down enemy missiles and drones… with each blast costing just $2 instead of Iron Dome’s $70k rockets

Israel have unveiled the world’s first laser-based interception system that can shoot down enemy missiles and drones for just $2 per blast.

The £413million Light Shield – also known as Iron Beam – fires beams of light with between 100kW and 150kW of energy at targets several kilometres away with pinpoint accuracy.

Now, after completing development and passing its final tests, the state-of-the-art weapon, which ‘never runs out of ammo’, has officially been declared operational.

After being in development for over a decade, the cutting edge weapon will be delivered to the military by the end of this year.

Taking to X to share the game-changing achievement, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett posted a clip of the Light Shield in action, blasting enemy drones out of the sky.

‘For the first time ever, our new Light Shield laser defence system successfully shut down dozens of enemy UAVs, using only a beam of light,’ he said.

Describing how the technology works, Bennett explained that the moment an incoming threat, such as a rocket, drone, or UAV, is detected, a high energy laser locks on and destroys it in mid-air within around two seconds.

‘When a missile is coming in, hundreds of micro lasers are fired at once towards that missile, and then a very clever algorithm identifies which one of them hit the target and then tells all the other laser beams to redirect and then the full laser power hits that exact point.

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New owner of CBS coordinated with former Israeli military chief to counter the country’s critics, according to leaked emails

A widely noted dataset of purportedly leaked emails from former Israeli minister of defense Benjamin Gantz appears to show that David Ellison, the new head of media conglomerate Paramount, was coordinating with the recently retired commander-in-chief of the Israeli military on a nascent campaign to sabotage critics of the Israeli military’s activities in Palestine.

The previously unreported emails appear to show David Ellison being recruited in December 2015 as a core American supporter of a nascent Israeli government effort which Gantz labeled the “Counter-BDS Initiative.” The original concept of the program, according to leaked emails and PowerPoint presentations, was to raise $1 million each from twelve prominent Jewish philanthropists in order to fund “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” and to contract the controversial private intelligence firm Black Cube to spy on and disrupt activists.

David and his father, Larry Ellison – the centi-billionaire founder of the enterprise database company Oracle – have come under increased scrutiny as a result of their joint financing of an $8 billion merger between Paramount and David’s own media company, Skydance. The purchase took place alongside Paramount agreeing to pay $16 million to President Trump over editorial choices regarding an interview with former Vice President Harris. Focus further increased on Wednesday, when Larry Ellison was reported to have overtaken his business partner Elon Musk as the world’s richest man.

Larry Ellison’s ties to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent opponent of Gantz, are well known. According to reporting in Haaretz in 2021, the Oracle founder went as far as offering Mr. Netanyahu a seat on his company’s board.

The New York Times further reported on Wednesday that David Ellison is considering appointing the former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss as co-president or editor-in-chief of the CBS News division of Paramount. The possible role comes alongside Ellison’s widely reported consideration of a roughly $100 million acquisition of Weiss’s ‘anti-woke’ media outlet, The Free Press, which prominently criticized CBS for its handling of a contentious interview conducted by its anchor Tony Dokoupil with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on September 30. “The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” editorialized The Free Press, in response to Coates having criticized the Israeli military’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.

Paramount has also received criticism for its recent appointment of Kenneth R. Weinstein, a former head of both the conservative think tank Hudson Institute and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as the conglomerate’s new ombudsman for CBS News.

The previously unreported emails between David Ellison and former Israeli military chief Benjamin Gantz are part of an archive originally released by the hacktivist group ‘Handala’, which is widely believed to be associated with Iranian intelligence, with the U.S.-based nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets serving as the primary intermediary for journalists. A related repository of leaked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, also published by Handala, led to recent reporting on Barak and the convicted child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein discussing potential investments in the now-defunct data analytics firm Fifth Dimension, which Gantz chaired from 2015 to 2018.

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Top US firm ends contract with Israel to whitewash Gaza war crimes

US public affairs giant SKDK has ended a $600,000 contract with the Israeli government that “promoted Israel’s perspective” about the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, according to POLITICO.

“SKDK stopped this work on Aug. 31 and has begun the process of de-registering,” a spokesperson for SKDK told the DC-based magazine, declining to comment on the reasons why the contract was cut short early, saying only that the work “had run its course.”

According to POLITICO, the contract between Tel Aviv and SKDK was expected to run until March 2026.

The announcement followed a report by Sludge on 15 September that said the firm was involved in a bot program to boost pro-Israel content online. 

“The contract, worth $600,000 from April 2025 through March 2026, also tasks SKDK with coaching Israeli civil society spokespeople for on-camera appearances, testing the effectiveness of social media influencers, and arranging tailored outreach to journalists at outlets including BBC, CNN, Fox, and the Associated Press to secure favorable coverage,” the Sludge report details.

However, SKDK and its parent company, Stagwell, denied this, insisting their work was limited to media relations. “Our work focused solely on media relations and nothing else,” the SKDK spokesperson told POLITICO.

An investigation by MintPress News in July revealed that Israel has spent millions of dollars per day on an expansive advertising campaign across YouTube, aimed at shifting European public opinion in support of its genocide and its unprovoked war against Iran.

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Backlash over Stagwell’s Israel work puts PR ethics in the spotlight

Stagwell, the US-based holding group that owns agencies including agencies Assembly, 72andSunny, Allison+Partners and Anomaly has come under scrutiny following reports of a major research and messaging program conducted for the Israeli government.

According to leaked documents first reported by Drop Site news website, the project involved research across more than 13,000 people and tested campaign messages designed to improve perceptions of Israel internationally. The recommendations included emotional storytelling, messaging around terrorism, and connecting Islamic radicalism to the conflict.

The presentation also recommended the “notion of radical Jihadism” being “universally effective” for conservative audiences. It said connecting radical Jihadism to a desire to dominate other religions was effective as communications means. The report also said that Mark Penn, chairman and chief executive of Stagwell, has long-standing links to Israel.

In a statement to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, the holding group confirmed a small team had worked on the project, but stressed that each agency in the network operates with autonomy and that its portfolio spans clients “across the political and issue spectrum.” Still, the revelations have prompted strong reaction across the PR and advertising industry.

Strategy consultant Zoe Scaman called on talent within Stagwell-owned agencies to “walk away,” with her LinkedIn post attracting almost 1,000 likes and more than 140 reposts. A follow up post also read:

This industry has a problem with selective blindness.

“We’re brilliant at seeing every nuance of consumer behaviour, every shift in cultural sentiment, every emerging trend. But somehow we develop convenient myopia when it comes to examining our own moral architecture.”

Other agency leaders also voiced criticism, highlighting growing concerns about the role of communications firms in politically charged work.

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The End Game for Gaza

I’ve taught military history “from Plato to NATO,” as we used to joke, but my expertise focused on technology and warfare. Along with “revolutions” and “transformations” in weaponry, I probably spent too much time focusing on “decisive battles” and “great captains” in history. When you look at the course of military history, most deaths from war didn’t come in battle. They came from hunger and disease, from famine and pestilence. Sometimes, mass starvation and pandemics were unintentional byproducts of chaos and societal disruption caused by war, and sometimes starvation and disease were intentional weapons and products of war.

You might call this apocalyptic war, from the Bible and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which included famine and pestilence among the death riders.

An apocalyptic fate seemingly awaits Palestinians in Gaza. I’ve written about Gaza as a genocide, the mass bombing by Israel, the mass killing, with the apparent goal of forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, but I haven’t given enough thought to the use of mass starvation and diseases as weapons in this genocide.

A reader, Dan White, brought this lesson home to me, and I’d like to quote his message to me at length:

I can’t think of a better word than the etiology of starvation. It hasn’t been adequately addressed by the snoozemedia. Starvation death rates have a funny shaped curve. During the first stages of starvation – can’t give any figures on a time period for this or any other part of the process/curve, due to there being varying levels of food deprivation – there are few deaths, generally (but not always) those persons with compromised health/preexisting health problems that make them more susceptible to death than others in the population. After some (varying length) period of starvation, people start to die in larger numbers, and then all of a sudden, everyone is dying, and then everyone is dead. This period of death is fairly short compared to the period of starvation. Again, due to varying levels of starvation and varying levels of preexisting health and varying levels of surplus consumable body tissue in the starved group, this period has no fixed length, but it happens all of a sudden, and it doesn’t take long for everyone to die once it starts – couple of weeks seems common.

The starving residents of Gaza haven’t reached the mass-death stage of starvation, but it could well start happening tomorrow. I can’t say because I don’t know the food reserves preexisting, the food delivery figures since the ‘war’ started, and nobody in the news biz has bothered to look for them, either. There really should have been some government or multi-state agency who has looked for them and published them, but nobody has.

When the mass-death stage hits, people in Gaza will be dying by the tens of thousands a week. Stopping the mass-death by all of a sudden providing food isn’t going to work very well, on account of logistical delivery problems and the medical problems of alleviating starvation at this advanced stage – folks’ digestive tracts may well not work well enough even if they get food. That will be the real genocide, and I’d bet money it happens, and bet more money that this is the real objective of Israel’s ‘war’ in Gaza. The notion of Israel’s war objective is displacement of Gazans is an absurdity – you want someone to leave, well they have to be able to walk, right? And they have to have a place to go. Israel is counting on the rest of the world to all of a sudden do a mass-evacuation of Gazans combined with a mass feeding and mass medical intervention all at the same time in order to prevent this mass death of Gazans from occurring? NFW – Israel’s leaders have accepted mass killing as an official state policy, and have commenced doing it, and do it as we speak. And Israeli hasbara [propaganda] will blame us for it, and a whole lot of whored-out American and European politicians, as well as Israel-worshiping American Jews, will go along with it.

What Dan White posits here is horrifying – and increasingly likely. Of course, as people are weakened through starvation, they become more susceptible to various diseases associated with famine and unsanitary conditions.

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