Tag: israel

Likud ministers urge Netanyahu to annex West Bank by the end of the month

Senior lawmakers and ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party launched a push on Wednesday urging the premier to annex the West Bank before the end of the Knesset’s summer session on July 27, claiming that he must ride the “historic achievements” of the war against Iran.

In a letter signed by 15 Likud ministers currently in government as well as Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, the lawmakers wrote that “after the State of Israel’s historic achievements in the face of Iran’s axis of evil and its sympathizers, the task must be completed and the existential threat from within must be eliminated, to prevent another massacre in the heart of the country.”

The politicians added that “the strategic partnership, backing and support of the US and President Donald Trump have made it a propitious time to move forward with it now, and ensure Israel’s security for generations.”

Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 during the Six Day War, but has never formally annexed it. Israel began moving toward annexation in 2020 as part of a wider so-called peace plan released by Trump during his previous term, but ultimately dropped the idea in exchange for normalization with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Wednesday’s letter was met with praise from the far-right Religious Zionism party chair, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a minister within the Defense Ministry for matters related to the West Bank. He said that as soon as the prime minister “gives the order,” he will be ready to implement Israeli sovereignty over the territory “immediately.”

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New Bill Would Give Israel Access to B-2s, Massive Bombs to Strike Iran

A new bipartisan bill in Congress would give Israel access to US weaponry to conduct strikes on Iran’s nuclear facility, similar to the one ordered by President Donald Trump last month. 

The Bunker Buster Act was introduced by Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY). “Iran, the leading state sponsor of terror, and one of America’s top enemies, can never have a nuclear weapon. That’s why I strongly supported our military actions earlier this month,” a statement from Gottheimer said. “Iran has killed scores of Americans, including our service members, and repeatedly attacked our key democratic ally, Israel. Israel must be able to defend herself against Iran, and ensure that Iran cannot rebuild its nuclear capabilities.”

Gottenheimer introduced similar bills in previous Congress sessions. If passed, it would give Israel access to American B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs that are currently only used by the US. 

On June 22, Trump deployed B-2s and the massive bombs to strike nuclear facilities in Iran. 

While the legislation would require Iran to be working on a nuclear weapon before having access to American arms, politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv have long asserted that Tehran was building a nuclear weapon without evidence. 

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Report Estimates US Used $1.25 Billion Worth of THAAD Interceptors To Defend Israel From Iranian Missiles

A report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimates that the US used 93 interceptors from its THAAD missile defense system to defend Israel from Iranian missiles during the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran.

At $13 million per interceptor, that means the US launched an estimated $1.25 billion worth of THAAD munitions during the war. The Israeli military also used its Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors, which are jointly produced with the US. The Haaretz report said that the total cost of the Arrow and THAAD interceptors used was about $1.5 billion.

Haaretz reached its figures using open-source videos that showed 84 interceptors being launched from Israel during eight Iranian missile salvos. Extrapolating from there, the paper estimated that the US and Israel launched an estimated 195 interceptors, including the 93 THAADs, 80 Arrow 3s, and 22 Arrow 2s.

A report from Military Watch Magazine came up with similar numbers, estimating the US used 60 to 80 THAAD interceptors during the war, accounting for 15% to 20% of its global THAAD arsenal. The Biden administration first sent a THAAD system to Israel and about 100 troops to operate it in October 2024, ahead of an Israeli attack on Iran.

In April of this year, reports said the US sent a second THAAD battery to Israel, which would mean that the US has two of its seven THAAD missile defense systems stationed in Israel.

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Assessing the Effect of the U.S. Strikes on Iran

There has been much commentary about the U.S. airstrike last weekend against three key nuclear sites deep inside Iran: Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The attack—President Donald Trump’s boldest use of military force to date—was designed to stunt if not destroy Iran’s nuclear program and bring Iran back to the nuclear negotiating table in a much weaker position. As the dust settles over the American missile and bomb craters, questions continue to swirl about the effectiveness of the U.S. strikes and their impact on the region more broadly.

Operation Midnight Hammer was designed to destroy and degrade the key bottleneck in Iran’s nuclear program: its enrichment capacity, including its most advanced and large-scale centrifuge cascades. The lion’s share of Iran’s operational IR-6 centrifuges were believed to be housed in the three facilities struck by the United States last weekend. Iran’s near nine-hundred pound stockpile of 60 percent enriched Uranium, which can fit in the equivalence of the trunks of ten cars, remains unaccounted for. But this stockpile will be of little use for any Iranian nuclear weapons program in the near term if their enrichment capabilities were wiped out.

The battle damage assessment remains murky. Though Trump has repeatedly claimed the country’s nuclear program is “completely and totally obliterated,” comprehensive assessments of the damage take time. Neither the United States nor Israel has released a final assessment on the strikes’ consequences for the nuclear program. It’s still early days. Earlier this week, a preliminary classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, estimated that the program had been delayed, albeit no more than six months. The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi said that the centrifuges at Fordow are “no longer operational” and that there was “no escaping significant physical damage.” U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan “Razin” Caine also emphasized that the United States had every reason to believe the strike was successful, while adding that the defense department had been preparing to destroy Fordow for more than a decade.

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Gaza’s Hunger Games

Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end.

I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.

Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.

It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.

“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

The report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise.

It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.

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What Means ‘Winning’?

At one level, Iran plainly “won.” Trump had wanted to be regaled with a reality-TV style, splendid “Victory.” Sunday’s attack on the three nuclear sites indeed was loudly proclaimed by Trump and Hegseth as such – having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, they claimed. “Destroyed it completely,” they insist.

Only … it didn’t: The strike caused superficial surface damage, perhaps. And seemingly was co-ordinated in advance with Iran via intermediaries to be a “once and done” affair. This is a habitual Trump pattern (advance co-ordination). It was the mode in Syria, Yemen and even with Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani – all intended to give Trump a quick media “victory.”

The so-called “ceasefire” that rapidly followed the US strikes – albeit not without some hiccoughs – was a hastily assembled “cessation of hostilities” (and no ceasefire – as no terms were agreed). It was a “stop-gap.” What this means is that the negotiating impasse between Iran and Witkoff remains unresolved.

The Supreme Leader has forcefully laid down Iran’s position: “No surrender”; Enrichment proceeds; and the US should quit the region and keep its nose out of Iranian affairs.

So, on the positive side of cost-benefit analysis, Iran likely has enough centrifuges and 450 kg of highly enriched uranium – and nobody (except Iran) now knows where the stash is hidden. Iran will resume processing. A second plus for Iran is that the IAEA and its Director-General Grossi have been so egregiously subversive of Iranian sovereignty that the Agency most likely will be expelled from Iran. The Agency failed in its basic responsibility to safeguard sites at which enriched uranium was present.

The US and European intelligence services thus will lose their “eyes” on the ground – as well as forego the IAEA’s Artificial Intelligence data collection (on which Israel’s identification of targets likely was heavily dependent).

On the cost side, militarily, Iran of course suffered physical damage, but retains its missile potency. The US-Israeli narrative of Iranian skies as “open wide” to Israeli aircraft is yet another deception contrived to support the “winning narrative”:

As Simplicius notes: “There remains not a single shred of proof that Israeli (or American, for that matter) planes ever significantly overflew Iran at any time. Claims of “total air superiority” have no grounds. [Footage] up until the final day shows Israel continued relying on their heavy UCAVs [large surveillance and strike drone aircraft] to strike Iranian ground targets.”

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How Israel’s ‘Operation Salted Fish’ Turned Gaza Into a Killing Field

An investigation conducted by the Israeli outlet Haaretz has uncovered that Israeli soldiers have received orders to shoot unarmed, starving Palestinians near food aid distribution centers in Gaza, even in the absence of any threat. Soldiers characterised these locations as a “killing field.” Soldiers who spoke with Haaretz indicated that the directives to fire were explicit: “shoot to deter individuals from approaching aid centres both before and after their opening”. One soldier referred to the strategy as “Operation Salted Fish”—the name of the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light,” where Palestinians are effectively killed while awaiting UN food trucks. Accounts from soldiers disclosed that the IDF employed machine guns, tanks, grenade launchers, and mortars against crowds. (Archived report)

Soldiers have reported the presence of private security contractors near aid sites tasked with demolishing homes, suggesting that individuals were killed to facilitate destruction. The aid at the various distribution centres in the Strip is managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and operated by Israel with assistance from U.S. evangelical allies closely associated with Trump and Netanyahu. The checkpoints are open for only one hour each day. The report indicates that the IDF is actively suppressing evidence, including footage from aid centers, whilst utilising GHF as a front to maintain the facade of humanitarian assistance. The IDF has turned Gaza into a “Killing Field”, said the report—a term already used by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres during a press briefing on April 8, 2025.

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Trump Rolls Over for a New War

It is generally believed that American voters elected Donald Trump president at least in part due to their embracing his lies that he was a peacemaker who would not involve the United States in the pointless wars that have proliferated since 9/11. Trump’s predecessor the hapless Genocide Joe Biden had entangled the US deep in a conflict involving nuclear armed Russia and had also armed, funded and politically protected war criminal Israel in its openly declared objective to eliminate the Palestinians. Neither conflict could be justified based on actual American interests. So Trump looked like a better bet than a witless giggler like Kamala Harris, though voters would have benefited from looking at the Trump record during his first term in office where he was little more than Israel’s mouthpiece after being heavily bribed during his campaign by Nevada casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Trump and his ambassador in Israel David Friedman endorsed the oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza and also illegally approved moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump also allowed Israel to annex part of the Syrian Golan Heights and ordered the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regarded as a major enemy by Israel, killing the man when he was in Baghdad Iraq for peace talks. Trump, like his successor Joe Biden, never said “no” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Be that as it may, the past five months have demonstrated that searching for an honest man (or woman) in Washington would require Diogenes and his lamp, with little hope of coming up with someone who was not alternately a bad joke, an incompetent, or a screaming psychopath. The last several weeks illustrate just how bad things are, though the real fear must be that they can actually get worse if Trump joins Israel when it ignores the current ceasefire and attacks Iran once again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump will no doubt have to construct a new big lie to explain their belligerency as it is now clear that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

Even given the horrors being perpetrated by the United States as a bosom buddy ally of Israel, one is nevertheless particularly taken by the malapropisms and the verbal slurs and even threats of physical abuse increasingly being hurled about by the buffoon who pretends to be the president of the United States. Trump, pretending to negotiate with Iran, also saw fit to threaten to “eliminate” the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if Iran did not submit to unconditional surrender. He claimed to know the “secret location” where Ali Khamenei was hiding but “won’t kill him for now.” Trump also called out Representative Thomas Massie, one of the most principled men in Congress, on social media, calling him a “LOSER” after Massie posted a social media post criticizing the president for unconstitutionally bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night without a declaration of war. Worse still, Trump also engaged in screaming fits focused on two women journalists who questioned his claim that he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, demanding that CNN’s White House correspondent “Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out like a dog.”

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Iran Damaged 33,000 Structures in Israel

The damage assessment in Israel from Iran’s counterattack against Tel Aviv’s unprovoked aggression against Iran last month is coming in.

Despite strenuous efforts by Israeli authorities to suppress news from bomb sites — including arresting news crews — the extent of the destruction suffered by Israel is now being revealed.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Monday that the vaunted Israeli air defense system, headlined by the so-called Iron Dome, failed to prevent a significant inundation of Iranian ordnance.

Some single ballistic missiles landing on Israeli streets damaged a wide area of surrounding buildings purely from the vibrations of the impact, the newspaper reported.

“Throughout Israel, between the shock waves and the direct impact of the heavy Iranian missiles, the destruction spread out over hundreds of meters,” Haaretz said. “Thousands of houses and buildings have been damaged, some severely, with exterior and interior walls collapsing.” 

“The common denominator is the person uprooted from his or her home, who will feel the shock for years,” the paper said.  It further reported: 

“In Tel Aviv, 480 buildings have been damaged, many of them badly, at five separate sites. In Ramat Gan, it’s 237 buildings at three sites, about 10 badly. In another Tel Aviv suburb, Bat Yam, 78 buildings were damaged by one hit; 22 will have to be razed.

The Israel Tax Authority has received applications for financial assistance for nearly 33,000 damaged structures. Another 4,450 files have been opened for the loss of belongings and equipment, and another 4,119 for damaged vehicles”.

The Iranian attacks killed 29 Israeli civilians and, according to a Haaretz map, 96 buildings were severely damaged. 

By contrast, in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa, killing two Israelis and damaging 4,100 buildings, destroying 28. 

The Haaretz report deals only with civilian buildings. Iran also hit a number of Israeli military bases, including  Kirya and Camp Moshe Dayan in Tel Aviv; as well as the  BAZAN oil refinery in Haifa, causing significant damage; and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, destroying two buildings. 

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Mike Huckabee Suggests US B-2 Bombers Should ‘Visit Yemen’ After Houthis Fire Missile at Israel

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee suggested on Tuesday that US B-2 bombers should “visit Yemen” after Yemen’s Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, fired a missile at Israel, as the group has vowed to keep up attacks until Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza comes to an end.

“We thought we were done with missiles coming to Israel, but Houthis just lit one up over us in Israel,” Huckabee wrote on X. “Fortunately, Israel’s incredible interception system means we go to the shelter & wait until all clear. Maybe those B-2 bombers need to visit Yemen!”

The US conducted a heavy bombing campaign in Yemen from March 15 to May 6, which involved over 1,000 missile strikes and killed 258 civilians, and B-2 bombers were reportedly used in some of the strikes. Despite the US attacks, the Houthis were able to fire on US warships and launch missiles at Israel.

President Trump eventually agreed to a ceasefire with the Houthis, which he framed as a victory, but the US essentially gave up on trying to stop Yemeni attacks on Israel. President Biden also failed to deter the Houthis during a years-long bombing campaign from January 2024 to January 2025, which he launched in defense of Israeli shipping.

The Houthis also joined in on Iranian missile strikes during the 12-day US-Israeli war on Iran, saying it coordinated with Tehran in some of its attacks on Israel during that time. In response to Tuesday’s missile attack, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened that Israel would treat Yemen like Tehran, referring to Israel’s airstrikes on the Iranian capital city.

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