Tag: israel

Iran ‘Rapidly’ Beefs Up Air Defenses With Chinese Help After Israel Ceasefire

Iran has taken possession of Chinese surface-to-air missile batteries as Tehran rapidly moves to rebuild defensives destroyed by Israel during their recent 12-day conflict, sources have told Middle East Eye.

The deliveries of Chinese surface-to-air missile batteries occurred after a de-facto truce was struck between Iran and Israel on June 24, an Arab official familiar with the intelligence told MEE.

Another Arab official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence, said that the US’s Arab allies were aware of Tehran’s efforts to “back up and reinforce” its air defenses and that the White House had been informed of Iran’s progress. 

The officials did not say how many surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs, Iran had received from China since the end of the fighting. However, one of the Arab officials said that Iran was paying for the SAMs with oil shipments.

China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, and the US Energy Information Administration suggested in a report in May that nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports flow to Beijing.

For several years, China has imported record amounts of Iranian oil despite US sanctions, using countries such as Malaysia as a transshipment hub to mask the crude’s origin.

“The Iranians engage in creative ways of trading,” the second Arab official told MEE. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump likely heavily discussed Iran and its nuclear program when they meet on Monday. 

MEE reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. 

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How Israel’s Spy-built Apps Silently Fund Genocide While Infiltrating Your Device

The digital tools millions trust daily—photo editors, casual games, taxi hailers—hide a dark secret: They were crafted by Israeli spies turned tech moguls, funneling profits into apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As Israel wages war under the banner of Zionism, its militarized economy thrives on apps that mine your data, normalize surveillance, and bankroll atrocities. This bombshell investigation exposes the covert Israeli app empire, revealing how even the most innocent downloads fuel a regime built on occupation and bloodshed.

Key points:

    • Hidden owners: Major apps like Facetune, Moovit, and Waze were developed by ex-Israeli military intelligence operatives, laundering their spycraft into Silicon Valley fortunes.
    • Data harvesting risks: These apps often demand intrusive permissions, feeding personal images, locations, and identifiers into Israel’s surveillance-industrial complex.
    • Funding genocide: Companies like Playtika and Crazy Labs openly funnel billions in taxes to Israel’s war economy, with staff actively enlisted in Gaza massacres.
    • Global spyware threat: Behind the apps lies Israel’s Pegasus spyware, sold to dictatorships to crush dissent, murder journalists, and silence Palestinians.
    • Boycott urgency: The BDS movement urges users to purge these apps, breaking Israel’s stranglehold on tech and its economy of occupation.

From military intelligence to your smartphone

Israel’s Unit 8200—a surveillance unit comparable to the NSA—acts as a feeder program for the country’s tech elite. Graduates infiltrate app development, weaponizing civilian software to extract data and revenue. ZipoApps, founded entirely by Unit 8200 veterans, controls photo-editing tools like Collage Maker Photo Editor and Instasquare, boasting over 100 million downloads. Users on Reddit accuse Zipo of bait-and-switch privacy violations, turning open-source apps into paid spyware traps.

Similarly, Facetune, an AI photo editor with 50 million installs, was co-developed by Yaron Inger, who spent five years in Unit 8200. Apple Store reviews warn it’s a “scam,” demanding location tracking and device identifiers. Even ride-hailing apps like Gett and Waze were built by ex-spies, embedding Israel’s military ethos into everyday tech.

“These developers are digital conscripts,” explains a Tel Aviv-based tech whistleblower who requested anonymity. They don’t leave the battlefield—they just monetize it.

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Israel’s Army Still Taking On Mass Casualties After 640 Days Of War In Gaza

Over 630 days of war later and much of Hamas’ top command has been wiped out, and large swathes of the Gaza Strip obliterated. It’s been no secret that the Netanyahu government is pursuing the complete annihilation of Hamas, ensuring that it can never again return to rule, but the reality is that the Israeli army (IDF) is still taking on mass casualties.

This shows that the Hamas insurgency, using the Strip’s hundreds of miles of tunnels, is still fierce and ongoing. “Five Israeli soldiers were killed in combat in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army admitted on Tuesday, in one of the deadliest days for Israeli forces in the devastated Palestinian territory this year,” regional media reports.

The five soldiers “fell during combat in the northern Gaza Strip,” the IDF announced. In total 14 others were wounded. Included were two that were severely wounded and “evacuated to a hospital to receive medical treatment.” 

They came under attack near Beit Hanoun in the north of Gaza,when improvised explosive devices were detonated, after which Israeli soldiers who sought to rescue the wounded came under fire again. Thus it’s clear that either Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants set a trap and ambush for the soldiers.

The IDF and Israeli media have described that the infantry troops were operating on foot when the blast happened. One detail which highlights the ongoing extreme difficulty of uprooting the Palestinian insurgency is that the area where the attack occurred was subject of Israeli aerial raids just prior:

The military said the area where the attack took place was targeted from the air ahead of the troops’ operations.

The Netzah Yehuda soldiers were operating under the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade as part of a fresh offensive with the 646th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade in Beit Hanoun, which began on Saturday, aimed at clearing the area of terror operatives who remain holed up there.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X in the wake of the large-scale casualties, “For the sake of the fighters, for the sake of their families, for the sake of the hostages, for the sake of the State of Israel: this war must be ended.”

Israeli society has remained fiercely divided over Netanyahu policy, with hostage victims’ family members outraged that efforts to negotiate a deal to release the remaining captives have completely stalled.

Meanwhile, there is some activity on this front, with Qatar’s foreign ministry on Tuesday saying that renewed indirect negotiations will “need time”. The White House has been supportive of peace efforts, but has sided with Israeli actions in Gaza time and again in its public rhetoric.

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Israel Defense Minister Unveils Plan For ‘Concentration Camp’ In Gaza

With Gaza ceasefire negotiations under way and President Trump raising hopes of a deal being reached by week’s end, Defense Minister Israel Katz on Monday revealed that the IDF will create what it calls a “humanitarian city” in the wasteland that is Rafah, and then forcibly concentrate Gaza’s entire population of nearly 2 million people inside it. 

Though the Israeli government and its advocates will likely to condemn already-widespread usage of the term “concentration camp” to describe this undertaking — likely claiming it’s somehow antisemitic given the parallels to Nazi Germany — it’s unambiguously applicable under the Merriam-Webster definition of the term: 

concentration camp (noun) a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard  

In the first phase, the IDF plans to round up 600,000 displaced Palestinians who are living in the coastal Mawasi area and move them to Rafah, a city in southernmost Gaza that borders Egypt and Israel. Eventually, every Gaza resident will be moved. After security screening, Palestinians will be ushered inside the camp, with IDF guards ensuring that none are able to leave, Katz said. 

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New footage exposes ragtag US mercenaries firing toward Gaza aid seekers

Following an AP investigation accusing a US mercenary firm of firing on desperate Gaza aid seekers, the company has released extensive new footage in an attempt at damage control. But the video only further implicates the scandal-plagued operation.

On July 2, the Associated Press released an exposé containing short videos which appeared to show American mercenaries associated with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) opening fire on aid-seekers in Gaza during an incident in southern Gaza this May. The footage was supplied by a former employee of UG Solutions, a firm charged with securing GHF distribution sites.

“I think you hit one,” one soldier of fortune says to another following a loud burst of gunfire.

“Hell yeah, boy!” another exclaims.

In an apparent attempt to control the damage from the AP investigation, UG Solutions has distributed a pair of videos comprising over seven minutes of footage to the press. 

The newly released footage offers an unprecedented glimpse of the disturbing interactions between the starving population of Gaza and well-armed, clearly unprepared Americans hired to provide security for GHF’s chaotic aid operations.

Filmed by one of its own employee, the recordings were seemingly distributed in an effort to show UG Solutions’ agents have not fired live bullets on unarmed crowds of Palestinians. According to a UG Solutions statement, the videos “not only clarify what happened, but provide critical context, which contradicts that [sic] AP’s reporting and shows that the accusations are unfounded.”

However, a closer examination by The Grayzone demonstrates that the video was anything but exculpatory. 

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US To Spend $1.5 Billion Building New Air Bases and Facilities for the Israeli Military

The US is poised to spend over $1 billion on building new air bases and various other types of military facilities, Haaretz reported on Tuesday, citing documents and presentations from the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The construction projects include building a facility to accommodate Israel’s new KC-46 refueling aircraft, a facility for CH-53 helicopters, new headquarters for the Israeli army’s Shayetet 13 naval commando unit, ammunition storage, and other projects.

Ongoing US construction projects inside Israel are valued at about $250 million, and the total for all of the projects being planned is $1.5 billion. All of the construction will be funded by US military aid.

Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid each year, but has received significantly more since October 7, 2023. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, from October 2023 to October 2024, the US approved at least $17.9 billion in new military aid for Israel to support the genocidal war in Gaza and other Israeli wars in the region.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Nominates Trump for Nobel Peace Prize, Presents Him with Letter of Nomination

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday during a dinner meeting with President Trump that he is nominating the President for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Netanyahu made his third appearance at the White House —the most of any foreign leader—on Monday to have dinner and meet with the President to discuss the situation in Gaza.

During their dinner, the Prime Minister presented President Trump with his letter to the Nobel Prize Committee, officially nominating Trump for the Peace Prize.

“He’s forging peace as we speak, in one country and one region after the other,” Netanyahu said.

WATCH:

Netanyahu: He forged the Abraham Accords. He’s forging peace as we speak, in one country and one region after the other. So, I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. It’s nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved, and you should get it.

Trump: Thank you very much. This, I didn’t know. Wow. Thank you very much. Coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful.

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Netanyahu Visits White House: Genocide Made Invisible

Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty. That pact and its horrific consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.

Recent news reporting that President Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing – not only with American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.

Last year began with a United Nations statement that “Gazans now make up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s continued bombardment and siege.” The UN quoted experts who said: “Currently every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”

In late February 2024, President Biden talked to journalists about prospects for a “ceasefire” (which did not take place) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before sauntering off. He spoke during a photo op at an ice cream parlor in Manhattan, while the UN was sounding an alarm that “very little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month.”

During the 16 months since then, variants of facile verbiage from top U.S. government officials have repeated endlessly, while normalizing genocide with a steep race to the ethical bottom, so that – in Orwellian terms, much like “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – genocide is not genocide.

Refusal to acknowledge the complicity and impunity is most of all maintained by avoidance and silence. The process makes a terrible truth inadmissible rather than admittable.

All the doublethink and newspeak must detour around the reality that the U.S.-supported Israeli siege of Gaza is genocide, which the international Genocide Convention defines as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – with such actions as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly meet that definition, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have unequivocally concluded with exhaustive reports.

But under the cloaks of the Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable should be invisible.

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Reuters Forced to Retract After Blaming GHF for Gaza Relocation Plan

The Reuters news agency was forced to issue a correction Monday after falsely attributing a plan for the relocation of Palestinians in Gaza to the Trump administration-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The article originally claimed in its headline: “Exclusive: US-backed aid group proposed ‘Human Transit Areas’ for Palestinians in Gaza.”

It claimed, further:

A controversial U.S.-backed aid group proposed building camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside – and possibly outside – Gaza to house the Palestinian population, according to a proposal reviewed by Reuters, outlining its vision of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza.”

The $2 billion plan, created sometime after February 11 for the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, was submitted to the Trump administration and recently discussed in the White House, according to a source familiar with the matter.

There was no basis or the story — the latest in a series of mainstream media efforts to smear the GHF, which is replacing the United Nations and undermining Hamas’s control over the delivery of aid in Gaza.

Reuters later published a corrected version, “Exclusive: Proposal outlines large-scale ‘Humanitarian Transit Areas’ for Palestinians in Gaza.”

At the end of the story, it added: “(This story has been corrected to remove ‘U.S.-backed aid group’ in the headline, and to reflect that while the document bears the name of the Global Humanitarian Foundation, it could not be determined who created or submitted it, in paragraphs 1 and 2).”

It could not even report the name of the group correctly in the correction.

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ISIS-Linked Palestinian Group Admits to Coordinating With Israel

A Palestinian group opposed to Hamas and tied to ISIS has received support from Israel, its leader now admits. 

Yasser Abu Shabab, head of the ISIS-linked Popular Forces, discussed coordinating with Tel Aviv in an interview with Makan, Israel’s Arabic-language public radio broadcaster. “We keep them [Israel] informed, but we carry out the military actions on our own,” he said. 

Abu Shabab did not directly state that the Popular Forces receive direct support from Israel. He explained that his organization is supported by a number of parties, and “There are things we can’t talk about publicly.”

Last month, the ties between Abu Shabab and Tel Aviv were exposed by Israeli opposition leader and former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. “The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with the Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister,” Liberman said. “To my knowledge, this did not go through approval by the cabinet.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later confirmed Liberman’s accusation, saying the policy saves the lives of Israeli soldiers. 

Abu Shabab and his gang have been backed by Israel against Hamas. He said in the interview, adding that he was seeking to eradicate Hamas’s “injustice” and “corruption.” “We will continue to fight, no matter the bloodshed,” Abu Shabab added. “Right now, Hamas is dying. They know their end is near.”

An IDF officer explained to Haaretz, “There are many groups that oppose Hamas – Abu Shabab went several steps further. They control territory that Hamas doesn’t enter, and the IDF encourages that.”

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