Tag: israel

Marco Rubio Calls New Israeli Bombing ‘a Misunderstanding,’ Calls for ‘De-Escalation’

As a wave of Israeli attacks on Syrian forces rocks the fragile crust of a Middle East peace, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is trying to stop a full-scale war from erupting.

After two days of Israeli attacks on Syrian forces, Rubio said he was hopeful the attacks would stop.

“It’s complicated, obviously. These are historic, longtime rivalries between different groups in the southwest of Syria — Bedouins, the Druze community — and it led to an unfortunate situation and a misunderstanding, it looks like, between the Israeli side and the Syrian side,” Rubio said in a video posted to X.

“So we’ve been engaged with them all morning long and all night long, with both sides, and we think we’re on our way towards a real de-escalation,” he said.

“And then hopefully get back on track in helping Syria build a country and arriving at a situation there in the Middle East that’s far more stable. So, in the next few hours, we hope to see some real progress to end what you’ve been seeing over the last couple hours,” he said.

Most of Syria is Muslim, but the Druze have their own faith. Last year, after a Muslim-controlled government took power, Druze communities expressed their fears that they could become targets of the new regime, which has said it seeks to respect all faiths, and sought to be annexed by Israel, which has its own Druze communities.

On Wednesday, as Rubio spoke in Washington, Syrian and Druze leaders said they had reached a cease-fire, according to NBC. That came after Israeli air strikes hit targets in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Announcement of the cease-fire drew skepticism from Druze leaders in Syria, according to the Times of Israel.

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Israel Engineers Mutant Plague—Puts Its Genes in mRNA Shot That Makes Human Cells Produce Virulence and Immune-Evasion ‘Black Death’ Proteins: Journal ‘Advanced Science’

In a deeply troubling development, Israeli military scientists have genetically modified one of the deadliest bioweapons known to man—Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes pneumonic plague—and then used its altered genetic material to engineer a new mRNA vaccine that programs human cells to manufacture plague proteins tied to virulence and immune system evasion.

This follows the U.S. military’s genetic engineering of plague DNA into E. coli using CRISPR—a move detailed in a peer-reviewed study just weeks before the World Health Organization added the plague-caused Black Death to its official pandemic watchlist, raising fresh concerns over bioweapons development.

Unlike the U.S., China, and Russia, Israel has never ratified the Biological Weapons Convention—meaning its military bioengineering of the plague bacterium and insertion of its virulence genes into an mRNA shot occurs outside the binding framework of international bioweapons law.

The United States provides Israel with approximately $3.8 billion in military aid annually under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that extends through 2028.

Nearly all current U.S. aid to Israel is for military purposes, delivered primarily as grants through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program.

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Israel and Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a key figure in the development of the Zionist movement, which led to the founding of Israel in 1948. After breaking from mainline Zionism, Jabotinsky, born in Odessa (Ukraine), established Revisionist Zionism, a more openly militant version.

What is Revisionist Zionism? Even fellow Zionists saw similarities with fascism. According to Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo, “Before the opportunistic alliance between Germany’s Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, and Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in 1936… a degree of affinity existed between Zionist and Fascist leaders in Rome.” Baroud and Rubeo went on:

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, of which Israel’s current Likud party and other right and far-right groups are the offspring, saw in Italy “a spiritual homeland.”

“All my views on nationalism, the state, and society were developed during those years under Italian influence,” Jabotinsky wrote in his autobiography, referring to his ideological formation years in Italy.

In return, Mussolini had expressly spoken in support of Zionism and of Jabotinsky in particular: “For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky,” Mussolini said… in November 1934.

Paradoxically, Jabotinsky was also known as a classical liberal supporter of the market economy and the equal rights of all, including members of minority communities. He seems to have had early misgivings about the use of violence, but apparently overcame them. Historian and journalist David Hirst writes that Jabotinsky “once told a colleague, ‘I can’t see much heroism and public good in shooting from the rear an Arab peasant on a donkey, carrying vegetables for sale in Tel Aviv.’ …By June 1939 he had come to the conclusion that ‘it was not only difficult to punish only the guilty ones, in most cases it was impossible.’” (David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East.)

According to the Jewish Virtual Library (JVL), Revisionist Zionism’s goal was “the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority in the entire territory of Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan [river]. Jabotinsky’s organization favored a powerful Zionist military component. The JVL described the program:

The Revisionist program soon became more elaborate, asking, in addition to the demand for Jewish military units for the introduction of a whole new system of policy in Palestine, defined as a “settlement regime” – a system of legislative and administrative measures (such as land reform, state protection of local industries, a favorable fiscal system, etc.) explicitly designed to foster Jewish mass immigration and settlement.

Jabotinsky also founded the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, known as Irgun, a paramilitary squad that committed terrorist acts in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine from 1931 to 1948. The Irgun became infamous for bombing Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in July 1946, where the British administration was headquartered, and conducting a massacre in the peaceful village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, a month before Israel declared its independence. The Deir Yassin massacre was one of the acts of Zionist militia violence that incited some 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948. This is known in Arabic as the Nakba (catastrophe). During this time, Irgun was led by Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in 1977. “Begin and his followers had shed few of the romantic, ultranationalist beliefs imparted by their spiritual godfather Vladimir Jabotinsky,” Hirst writes.

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“Snuff videos as a sales pitch”. Rafael boasts of human testing in Gaza death camps

Australia’s government awards rich contracts to Israeli drone maker Rafael, which skite to investors about killing Palestinians. Stephanie Tran reports.

Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has posted a video showing an unarmed man being stalked and killed by a drone in Gaza, using the footage to advertise the weapon responsible for his death.

The video, posted to the company’s official account on X, shows a Spike Firefly loitering munition drone as it hovers above a man walking alone through the rubble of a heavily bombed area. The drone silently tracks the man before detonating directly above him, killing him instantly. 

Meanwhile, a young Palestinian girl, Hala, was executed yesterday with a bullet to the the head fired by a quadcopter drone. It is even more grotesque that Israeli weapons manufacturers are crowing about their human testing labs – which are the killing fields of Gaza.

The Spike Firefly drone, first unveiled by Rafael in 2018, is a lightweight, soldier-deployed loitering munition designed for urban combat. Weighing just three kilograms, the drone is launched from a canister and can fly silently above a target for up to 15 minutes before striking with high precision.

The drone can be operated remotely with a tablet, and its camera feed allows operators to stalk targets in real time.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has increasingly relied on drones like the Firefly to kill civilians in Gaza since October 7, 2023, with quadcopters being deployed in densely populated residential areas and refugee camps. Their report documents multiple instances of drones being used to assassinate individuals in violation of international humanitarian law.

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Why new CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper is as wrong as the old one

If accounts of President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities this past month are to be believed, the president’s initial impulse to stay out of the Israel-Iran conflict failed to survive the prodding of hawkish advisers, chiefly U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Michael Kurilla.

With Kurilla, an Iran hawk and staunch ally of both the Israeli government and erstwhile national security adviser Mike Waltz, set to leave office this summer, advocates of a more restrained foreign policy may understandably feel like they are out of the woods.

They would be sorely mistaken.

CENTCOM’s incoming commander, Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, is Kurilla’s deputy, and he would become just the second Navy officer ever to command CENTCOM. Unanimously confirmed by voice vote in the Senate and championed by both Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his immediate predecessor, Cooper’s Senate confirmation testimony indicates more continuity than change.

For an administration that once talked a big game about realigning U.S. foreign policy in a more restrained direction, this selection implies the opposite: an indefinite commitment to U.S. primacy in the region in the name of counterterrorism and great power competition.

Forces in Iraq and Syria don’t make America safer

In his responses to written questions for his confirmation, Cooper argued that the United States should retain military forces in Iraq and Syria to “maintain the defeat of ISIS.” The primary reason for this, he argues, is that the U.S. presence denies the terrorist group safe haven from which to attack the U.S. homeland.

Yet, as the Trump administration itself acknowledged by reducing U.S. troop levels in Syria earlier this year, ISIS lacks the capacity to pose a serious threat to the U.S. homeland and other regional actors have an interest in suppressing ISIS. As Rose Kelanic at Defense Priorities writes, “While ISIS has morphed into an international ‘brand’ adopted by affiliates in far-off locales, notably ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), a group based in Afghanistan and Iraq that was responsible for attacks in Russia and Iran earlier in 2024, whatever original ISIS elements still exist in Syria appear incapable of conducting sophisticated, international terrorist attacks.”

Furthermore, the “safe haven” concept has serious flaws — namely, that it is incredibly difficult to mount sophisticated military operations across the globe in a dysfunctional environment, especially given sophisticated U.S. over-the-horizon intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities and the interest regional partners have in suppressing terrorism. This is precisely why Afghanistan did not become a safe haven for terrorism after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal.

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The ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report: A Reckoning Beyond Rhetoric

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares, pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

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IDF Soldiers Say Grenade-Drones Being Used On Civilians: ‘None Of Them Were Armed’

The Israel Defense Forces are routinely killing civilians in Gaza with commercial drones modified to drop grenades on them — often leaving the corpses to be eaten by dogs, according to interviews with seven soldiers and officers conducted by Israeli investigative journalists. The tactic is being used to deter civilians from venturing into areas declared off-limits by the IDF, with indifference to the fact that the individuals — some of them children — pose no threat. Compounding the amorality of the conduct, the soldiers say the off-limits areas aren’t marked on the ground.   

According to Israel’s +972 Magazine and Local Call, every Palestinian killed in this fashion was counted as a “terrorist” in the IDF’s official reporting. The soldiers say that’s utterly false. One soldier identified as “S” says that he coordinated dozens of drone attacks over the 100 days his unit was deployed in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and that the vast majority of the dead were unarmed civilians. The only two exceptions were a single executed Palestinian who merely had a knife, along with only one legitimate encounter with armed militants. 

By his recollection, the battalion killed a civilian in this fashion on a daily basis, even though it was obvious to him that the Palestinians posed no threat. “It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes — there’s no question. None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.”

Adding another layer of horror to the IDF-orchestrated hell that is Gaza, the corpses — which were upwards of a mile from their killers — were typically left to be eaten by dogs, says S.: 

“You could see it on the drone footage. I couldn’t bring myself to watch a dog eating a body, but others around me watched it. The dogs have learned to run toward areas where there’s shooting or explosions — they understand it probably means there’s a body there.”

Worse, S. said children have been deliberately targeted: 

“There was a boy who entered the [off-limits] zone. He didn’t do anything. [Other soldiers] claimed to have seen him standing and talking to people. That’s it — they dropped a grenade from a drone…In most cases, there was nothing you could tell yourself. There was no way to complete the sentence, ‘We killed them because ____.’”

“There were many incidents of dropping grenades from drones,” said H., a soldier who’d been deployed to central Gaza.  . “Were they aimed at armed militants? Definitely not. Once a commander defines an imaginary red line that no one is allowed to cross, anyone who does is marked for death,” even just for “walking in the street.” These new accounts are consistent with previous reporting that the IDF creates “kill zones” where soldiers shoot anyone moving inside the area, followed by the IDF boasting that another terrorist was killed. Where IDF soldiers’ ability to mow down civilians in kill zones was previously limited by the range of their rifles, drones now let them kill from several kilometers away.  

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Former Israeli Prime Minister Furiously Responds to Allegations That Jeffrey Epstein was Connected to Mossad – Megyn Kelly Then Pokes Holes in His Statement

A former high-ranking Israeli government official has broken his silence after prominent conservatives alleged that deceased p*dophile Jeffrey Epstein had ties to Israeli intelligence, but one prominent conservative isn’t buying what he’s saying.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, Tucker Carlson on Friday night named who he believes really funded Epstein’s crimes. He boldly said he believes foreign intelligence was behind the Epstein blackmail operation.

According to Carlson, the country responsible was the Jewish State.

“No one has ever gotten to the bottom of that because no one has ever tried. And moreover, it’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. Now, no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” Carlson said.

“There is nothing wrong with saying that,” Carlson continued. “There is nothing hateful about saying that. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about saying. There’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that.”

Someone who agrees with Carlson’s assessment is CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. Moreover, even prominent Israel defenders like former Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz conceded it was possible Israeli intelligence used the infamous child predator.

On Monday morning, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett reacted furiously to Carlson and others’ accusations on social media.

“The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false,” Bennett wrote. “Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.”

Bennett then slammed those making the accusation as ‘liars’ who are engaging in slander against his country.

“Epstein never worked for the Mossad,” he continued. “This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t.”

“They just make things up, say it with confidence, and these lies stick, because it’s Israel. There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it anymore.”

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‘Pink Floyd’ Frontman Roger Waters Could Face Up To 14 Years In Prison For Supporting Pro-Palestine Group Dubbed “Terrorist Organization” By UK Parliament

The Campaign Against Antisemitism is calling for “Pink Floyd” co-founder Roger Waters to be imprisoned after he posted a message earlier this month supporting the group Palestine Action, which was recently banned in the UK under anti-terrorism laws.

In Waters’ video, he claimed Palestine Action is a “nonviolent” and “great organization” comprised of people who are “absolutely not terrorists in any way.”

Waters, who is from Cambridge, England, showed a sign he made that read, “Parliament has been corrupted by agents of a genocidal foreign power. Stand up and be counted. It’s now!”

“This is the ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” he wrote on social media, saying in the video, “I declare my independence from the government of the UK, who’ve just designated Palestine Action a terrorist, proscribed terrorist organization.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism responded by calling for Waters to be jailed, writing, “Anyone expressing support for it contrary to section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 commits a criminal offence. We stand ready to privately prosecute offenders in instances where an offence has been made out and the authorities fail to act.”

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Netanyahu Says Israel Will Restart War in Gaza After Any Ceasefire

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that any ceasefire in Gaza will only be a temporary pause in the onslaught. Some believe that Tel Aviv has no plans to agree to any truce and is engaging in talks as a stalling tactic. 

Israel’s Channel 12 News reported that Netanyahu said to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, “After the pause, we will transfer the population in the Strip southward and impose a siege [on northern Gaza].”

The population transfer proposal calls for using a 60-day ceasefire to create a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza. Then Israel will force 600,000 Palestinians into the tent city, followed by the remainder of the population. From there, the Palestinians will be forced to leave Gaza for third countries. 

Many, including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have denounced the proposal as creating a concentration camp. 

One Middle East diplomat believes Tel Aviv has no desire to make a deal with Hamas. “He is making public statements that a deal is possible and imminent in order to keep the pressure off of him, but it’s starting to feel like a stalling tactic,” an Arab diplomat said. 

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