Tag: israel

Lebanon excluded from US‑Iran ceasefire deal because of Hezbollah, Trump says; Israel hits 100 targets

Israel carried out its most intense air campaign on Lebanon since the outbreak of the current conflict, striking more than 100 Hezbollah targets across Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon in roughly ten minutes, the Israeli military said. The assault came hours after the announcement of a temporary two‑week US–Iran ceasefire. Meanwhile, in a brief exchange with a PBS correspondent, US President Donald Trump confirmed that Lebanon was excluded from the truce because of Hezbollah.

Israel struck Hezbollah targets across Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon within about ten minutes, the Israeli military said. Earlier, Israel had also made clear that the truce did not extend to its operations against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Lebanon’s health ministry said the strikes killed dozens and wounded hundreds, with ambulances unable to keep up with the wounded and emergency responders tackling fires and collapsed vehicles across the country.

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Report: Trump Considers Pulling Troops Out of NATO Countries Deemed ‘Unhelpful’ to Iran War Effort

The Trump administration is considering a plan to “punish” NATO countries that the president has deemed “unhelpful” to the US-Israeli war effort against Iran, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The potential plan would involve withdrawing US troops from those NATO countries and placing them in the territory of other allies that the administration believes were helpful to the US-Israel war, far short of President Trump’s suggestion that he may leave NATO altogether.

The most notable NATO member opposing the US war with Iran was Spain, which took steps to block the use of its territory and airspace for any military activity related to the Middle East conflict.

Italy also blocked a US aircraft from landing at an airbase in Sicily before it headed to the Middle East, and officials from several NATO countries were very critical of the war, including in Germany. The largest opposition party in Germany, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), recently called for the removal of the tens of thousands of US troops stationed in German territory.

The Journal report said that Trump’s plan could involve closing a military base, either in Germany or Spain. It could also lead to the US placing more troops in countries closer to Russia, such as Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.

Trump was unhappy that no NATO allies heeded his call to help the US military open the Strait of Hormuz and was expected to discuss the situation with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Wednesday.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if the president would bring up the idea of the US leaving NATO and said, “It’s something the president has discussed, and I think it’s something the president will be discussing in a couple of hours with Secretary-General Rutte.”

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Israel Carpet Bombs Lebanon After Announcement of Iran Ceasefire

sraeli forces launched some of the most intense bombardments of Lebanon in recent years on Wednesday, striking Beirut and towns and cities across the country just hours after a ceasefire deal that reportedly includes Lebanon was announced.

The Israeli military announced on Wednesday that it targeted over 100 sites with strikes over just the course of 10 minutes in Lebanon. The UN also reported that it has recorded over 60 locations struck. The intensity of the strikes was unprecedented in recent times, one Al Jazeera reporter said, reminiscent of the scale of Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982 or Israel’s beeper attack in 2024.

Video of the strikes circulated online. One showed a massive fire in the wreckage of destroyed buildings in Beirut, sending plumes of dark smoke into the air. Another video purportedly taken in Beirut showed the top floors of a building completely destroyed and smoking, while the streets below were covered in flaming debris.

Another video from Tyre, in southern Lebanon, showed an Israeli strike hitting a building in the city center, with the explosion spreading horizontally across what appeared to be several city blocks and sending a plume into the air that shot higher than the hills in the background.

The death toll is unclear, but early reports have said that hundreds have been killed by the strikes.

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Iran Launches Missiles at Israel, U.S. Installation Amid Ceasefire Announcement

Just after the United States announced a ceasefire with the Iranian regime, that regime launched ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel. Another missile salvo reportedly targeted a U.S. base or diplomatic installation in Iraq, though that strike might have occurred just before the ceasefire. In any case, I think the Iranian regime achieved a new record for a shortest ceasefire ever, even outdoing its terror proxy Hamas, which is stunning.

Of course Donald Trump wants the war to end — who outside of crazed jihad-lovers in America would not rather have peace? — but the question is whether we can trust the Iranian regime. Trump did indicate the ceasefire was temporary, up to two weeks, likely as a test, and it seems the Iranian regime couldn’t wait to illustrate for the president just how temporary the ceasefire was to be. 

Fox News reported that an Iranian barrage bombarded Israel just after the ceasefire announcement. An Iranian media account called The Hormuz Letter claimed Iranian missiles were targeting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and a U.S. base in Baghdad as well, and that the missile launch occurred just after the ceasefire announcement. Just yesterday, Iranian missiles killed two generations of the same family in Haifa, Israel.

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Israel excludes Lebanon from ceasefire, oil prices dive as Iran signals Hormuz green light

US President Donald Trump has announced a two-week suspension of bombing of Iranian energy infrastructure, agreeing to a “double sided ceasefire” contingent on Tehran agreeing to the “complete” and “immediate” opening of the Strait of Hormuz. The news prompted oil prices to drop by around 13% and shares to rise in early trading in Asia.

Israel has refused to include Lebanon, which it is currently invading, in the ceasefire.

Trump said Iran’s 10-point proposal delivered via Pakistan offers a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” He warned, however, that he would order devastating new airstrikes if no final deal is reached by the new deadline.

Tehran said the move represents a “historic and crushing defeat” for the US, claiming Washington has been forced to accept Tehran’s 10‑point plan as the basis for talks.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has announced that negotiations with the US will begin on Friday, April 10, in Islamabad, allocating a two‑week period that may be extended by mutual agreement.

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The US and Israel Are Making Gaza-Style War The New Normal

One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.

Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.

What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.

The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union — and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.

It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to pretend to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.

What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.

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Israel bombs Tehran as Iranians taunt Trump

Israel has conducted yet another wave of strikes against infrastructure targets including an airport in Tehran, after striking at least two petrochemical facilities in Iran the day before.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the debris from a successful “interception and destruction” of at least seven ballistic missiles fell in the vicinity of its energy facilities, with the damage still being “assessed.”

Israeli forces attacked Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in the South Pars natural gas field and a petrochemical complex in the city of Marvdasht earlier on Monday – as US President Donald Trump has stepped up threats to strike Iran’s infrastructure if American and Israel-linked shipping is not allowed through the Strait of Hormuz by Wednesday.

“It is Trump who has about 20 hours to either surrender to Iran or see his allies return to the Stone Age. We will not back down!” Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, claimed.

Tehran has reportedly rejected a US ceasefire proposal, circulated by Egyptian, Pakistani, and Turkish mediators, instead offering a ten‑clause plan that calls for a permanent end to the war. The demands reportedly include an end to conflicts across the region, protocols to ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of sanctions, and provisions for reconstruction.

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IDF Issues Chilling Nationwide Warning to Iranian Civilians — “Stay Off Trains” Ahead of Suspected Rail Strikes

The situation inside Iran is rapidly escalating.

On Tuesday morning, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a rare and highly specific warning directly to Iranian civilians, urging them to avoid all train travel and railway infrastructure for roughly 12 hours.

According to reports, the warning was delivered in Farsi on social media and explicitly stated:

Urgent Warning to Users and Train Passengers in the Country of Iran.

Dear Citizens, for the sake of your security, we kindly request that from this moment until 21:00 Iran time, you refrain from using and traveling by train throughout Iran.

Your presence on trains and near railway lines endangers your life.

The directive remains in effect until approximately 9:00 PM local time in Iran.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Monday that Iran would face its heaviest round of US strikes ahead of Trump’s deadline for Iran to make a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face “complete demolition.”

He further revealed that the President had ordered “the largest volume of strikes since day one of this operation” before tomorrow’s deadline, where bombs will rain down “even more than today.”

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Middle East is ‘on fire’ – Kremlin

The US-Israeli war against Iran has set the Middle East “on fire,” reflecting Russia’s warning about the dangerous consequences of the move, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

On Sunday, US President Donald Trump escalated the tensions by issuing an expletive-laden demand to Tehran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained effectively shut since the conflict began on February 28.
“Open the f**king strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell,” he wrote on social media, threatening to demolish the Iranian power plants and bridges if it doesn’t happen by Tuesday. Tehran maintains that the key waterway is only closed for oil shipments by the US and its allies.

When asked by journalists about Trump’s rant on Monday, Peskov said that “we have seen those statements, but we prefer not to comment on them.”

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Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza

The American press does its best not to cover savage Israeli views of Palestinians, but a leading New York synagogue gave an honored platform to those views ten days ago. It hosted an Israeli advocate with connections in its government who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and said American Jews need to support that operation.  

Benjamin Anthony said that all “Palestinian Arabs” in Gaza pose such a threat to Israel that the international community should use “muscular diplomacy” with Egypt so as force the population out of Gaza into an “enclave” in the Sinai peninsula. 

“I believe the international community would very handily be able to create some sort of enclave for the…Gazans in the Sinai peninsula. And then we might have the breathing room to think about long-term solutions.” 

Though those two million Gazans would likely be displaced again, into African countries, said Anthony, the leader of an Israeli think tank called the MirYam Institute. 

“I think someone like [Egyptian president] Sisi would likely move the Gazans along from the Sinai peninsula in the event that he didn’t want to build a place for them there, and you would probably see them dispersed through the continent of Africa quite quickly.”

Anthony’s argument is widely shared by Israelis (according to a 2025 poll), and it only received mild push back from Eliot Cosgrove, a leading conservative rabbi in the U.S., who had brought Anthony, his first cousin, onto the synagogue dais.  

Cosgrove called the scheme “very intriguing,” but protested that Anthony was conflating “Hamas with the entire Gaza population.” And that by creating a refugee population with a “narrative”, Israel was practically and morally kicking the can down the road. Speaking “as a proud Zionist,” Cosgrove said the scheme is not in Israel’s interest.

Anthony insisted that no Gazans could be trusted because Gazan civilians cheered the atrocities against Israelis on October 7. Cosgrove folded his hand: “Well, I love you, and I disagree with you, but let’s move on.” 

Cosgrove ended the hour-long dialogue by thanking Anthony “for fighting the good fight” and “for representing our people.”

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