Tag: perpetual war

Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza, says IDF

Israeli ground forces are getting closer to “the complete evacuation” of northern Gaza and residents will not be allowed to return home, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said, in what appears to be the first official acknowledgment from Israel it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area.

In a media briefing on Tuesday night, the IDF Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that since troops had been forced to enter some areas twice, such as Jabaliya camp, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.

He added that humanitarian aid would be allowed to “regularly” enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left”.

International humanitarian law experts have said that such actions would amount to the war crimes of forcible transfer and the use of food as a weapon.

On Thursday, an IDF spokesperson said Brig Gen Cohen’s comments had been taken out of context during a discussion about Jabaliya, and did not “reflect the IDF’s objectives and values.” The spokesperson also said that the briefing had been on background, and the brigadier general should not have been quoted in Hebrew media reports that emerged.

The Israeli army and government have repeatedly denied trying to force the remaining population of northern Gaza to flee to the relative safety of the south during a month-long renewed offensive and tightened siege. Residents still clinging on in the north have said the new operation has created the worst conditions of the war to date. Israel said the push is necessary to combat regrouped Hamas cells.

Rights groups and aid agencies have alleged that despite the denials, Israel appears to be carrying out a version of the so-called “generals’ plan”, which proposes giving civilians a deadline to leave and then treating anyone who remains as a combatant.

It is unclear how many people remain in northern Gaza; last month, the UN estimated there were about 400,000 civilians unable or unwilling to follow Israeli evacuation orders. On Wednesday social media footage showed waves of several dozen displaced people carrying children and rucksacks and walking south through flattened areas of Gaza City.

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NATO knows Ukraine is losing – Foreign Policy

NATO is fully aware that Ukraine is slowly losing its conflict with Russia, with an especially difficult winter predicted to worsen the situation, the influential US publication Foreign Policy has reported.

Amid increasing infrastructure damage and pressure on Kiev’s key resources, Western officials are warning that a victory for Moscow would solidify its influence in Europe, the magazine claims in an article, published on Wednesday. 

Foreign Policy sources believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of uncertainty in Washington. Michael Bociurkiw – a lobbyist at NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct – speaking from Ukraine, stated that the Kremlin sees a leadership “vacuum” during this period and is “testing for soft tissue” in the West. 

The strategy has reportedly been effective, he says, as missile strikes across Ukrainian cities have increased the possibility of winter power and heating shortages. 

Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian ports, according to officials, have also hurt Kiev’s logistics. 

The report indicates that Ukraine’s losses are reshaping the strategic outlook in the US and Western Europe. It highlights that a Russian victory would be a major setback for Washington and NATO. Western experts argue that Russia retaining its new territories could lead to a strengthened military presence near NATO’s borders, potentially igniting further conflict. 

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Report Details Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Beit Lahia, Northern Gaza

A report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published on Wednesday detailed the situation in Beit Lahia, a city in northern Gaza near the Israeli border where Israeli forces are implementing an ethnic cleansing campaign.

At the beginning of October, Israel ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in northern Gaza to head south. Many ignored the order since there was nowhere safe to go, and the Israeli military focused its renewed assault on the north on Beith Lahia and neighboring Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, where it imposed a full siege to starve out civilians.

The Israeli military has said it forcibly expelled 55,000 Palestinians from the Jabalia refugee camp, and it has no intention of allowing them back. According to Haaretz, only a few thousand civilians remain in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.

“There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes,” IDF spokesman Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told reporters on Tuesday.

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Trump ‘could be assassinated like JFK if he tries to end Putin’s war in Ukraine’, Kremlin official warns

A top Kremlin official has warned a ‘tired’ Donald Trump could face a JFK-style assassination if he ‘really tries’ to end Vladimir Putin‘s war against Ukraine should he emerge victorious from today’s US presidential election.

The chilling warning came on Sunday from close Putin crony Dmitry Medvedev, formerly Russian president and his country’s longest-serving prime minister, now deputy head of the Kremlin’s security council.

He also branded US Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ‘stupid’ and ‘controllable’ who – as president – would be ‘afraid of everyone around her’.

‘For Russia, the elections will not change anything, since the candidates’ positions fully reflect the bipartisan consensus on the need for our country to be defeated [in the war].

‘Kamala is stupid, inexperienced, controllable and will be afraid of everyone around her. A synod of the most important ministers and assistants will rule, plus indirectly the Obama family.’

Trump may face the same fate as John F Kennedy in 1963, predicted Medvedev, who was Russian president from 2008 to 2012.

‘A tired Trump, issuing platitudes like ”I’ll offer a deal” and ”I have a great relationship with…” will also be forced to follow all the system’s rules.

‘He won’t be able to stop the war. Not in a day, not in three days, not in three months.

‘And if he really tries, he could become the new JFK.’

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Game Of Chess: US Prepares Next Move With More B-52s, Warships To Middle East 

It’s been a week since Israeli fighter jets pounded high-value Iranian military sites and assets with missiles and bombs. Iran has since delayed a retaliatory strike on Israel as the US presidential election is just days away, and now the US appears to be bolstering defense capabilities in the Middle East as regional war risks remain elevated. 

Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News on Friday that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered several B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft, refueling aircraft, and Navy destroyers to the Middle East. 

In a statement to Reuters, Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder said additional military assets will begin arriving in the region in the coming months. 

“Should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every measure necessary to defend our people,” Ryder said. 

The strategic positioning—think of it as a game of chess—of additional US military assets in the region in the very near term may only suggest broadening war risks after the US election cycle ends. In other words, the Pentagon may finally get serious about Iranian-backed Houthis, other Iranian proxies, and even Tehran, which have sparked chaos in critical maritime chokepoints.

Ryder said Austin’s latest order shows the “US capability to deploy worldwide on short notice to meet evolving national security threats.” 

One week ago, the US signaled defense guarantees to the Saudis – in the event Tehran or its proxies attempt to weaponize crude oil by targeting the Kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery (the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the world) with drone swarms or hypersonic missiles. 

Austin revealed last month that B-2 stealth bombers targeted underground Houthi weapons storage facilities – indeed, a message to Tehran.

“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Austin said at the time, adding, “The employment of US Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrates US global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere.”

On Saturday morning, Iran’s supreme leader threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” … 

Meanwhile, the geopolitical risk premium in Brent crude oil has all but evaporated. 

But will that all change after the US presidential election?

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If ever a war could easily have been avoided, the war in Ukraine is that war. 

Address to the U.N. Security Council, Oct. 31, 2024

Thank you, Madam President, and thank you for giving me this opportunity to address this distinguished body.

If ever a war could easily have been avoided, the war in Ukraine is that war. If ever a war was needlessly provoked, the war in Ukraine is that war.

The war in Ukraine came about as a result of the Western powers’ single-minded insistence on scooping up every single country on the European continent into NATO, and on expanding the borders of NATO right up to the borders of the Russian Federation.

The war in Ukraine came about because the Western powers for more than three decades continued to dismiss the innumerable pleas of successive Soviet and Russian leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, that there could be no security for anyone on the continent unless the West and Russia agree on a common framework for peace that guarantees the freedom and security of all.

How do we know that this? Because former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told us as much. In September 2023, Stoltenberg went before the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and explained very succinctly that the war in Ukraine could have been avoided had NATO not insisted on moving its military infrastructure up to Russia’s borders.  President Putin, he explained, had

“actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement….He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO….We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.”

What Stoltenberg was referring to here were the two draft proposals for a new security architecture for Europe that Russia had issued on Dec. 17, 2021. The proposals—one addressed to NATO, one addressed to the United States—recalled the framework of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 in which the mutually antagonistic parties of the Cold War agreed to recognize one another’s security concerns and pledged not to enhance their own security at the expense of that of their purported adversaries. 

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U.S. omnipresent in all major EU defense and strategic projects

And suddenly, the mainstream media seems to have woken up and finally realized that the European Commission, headed by Ursula von der Leyen, when it refers to the European “values”, is actually talking about the values it benevolently attributes to European billionaire families. The Guardian says that its “investigation” has revealed that 17 billionaires, listed by Forbes, are listed as the final beneficiaries of projects worth 3.3 billion euros.

It’s a mystery why it’s taken so long for The Guardian to see a reality that has been repeated uninterruptedly for dozens of years. A reality that is unfolding at the same time as homelessness, the housing, health and education crisis, war and social instability are on the increase. But even more inexplicable is the confinement of this “investigation” to the agricultural sector and projects linked to the Policy for European Agriculture. After all, while it’s bad, given that small farmers are going through an unprecedented crisis, we’re still talking about money to produce food. However, there are far more damaging and obvious cases to which, as we shall see, The Guardian and the mainstream media turn a blind eye.

In fact, the large corporations that own the mainstream media, social networks and financial resources, financing the electoral campaigns that follow one another within the framework of an absolutely fallacious democratic process, of which the upcoming elections in the U.S. are the latest paradigm, not only manage to get governments, which are always domesticated, to lower their taxes, but they also manage to obtain more tax breaks, tax exemptions and access to public funds for investment. A kind of “socialism of the rich”, in which the state socializes the costs and risks and privatizes the profits.

The European Investment Bank, in its latest “Investment Survey 2004”, shows how an important part of this transfer is taking place. Between the 1st quarter of 2020 and the 1st quarter of 2024, corporate investment only grew positively in one quarter (the 3rd quarter of 2023); in all the other quarters, there was only positive growth in the quarters in which investment by the state and households increased. Despite the hundreds of billions of euros that the EU allocates to private company projects, in the 1st quarter of 2024, corporate investment evolved negatively. In other words, the money we “invest” in these privileged beings is not leveraging investment, but rather accumulation.

And if you look at the accumulation side, you’ll find many of the answers, namely the way in which a foreign country sucks up many of the resources we produce. The war in Ukraine plays an absolutely fundamental role here, as a catalyst for the growth of public investment and the transfer of income to large corporations and, through them, to the richest families. That’s why the Western oligarchic elites feel a brutal desperation in the need to maintain the conflict in Ukraine. Even the U.S., as we see, will take their share, even in the case of the investment is supported by the EU.

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Erasing ‘Any Sign of Life,’ Israeli Demolition Teams Razing Entire Villages in Lebanon

As the death toll from Israel’s 13-month assault on Lebanon passed 3,000, satellite imagery analyses published by multiple media outlets in recent days revealed that nearly a quarter of all buildings in 25 municipalities in the southern part of the Mideastern country have been destroyed or damaged in a ferocious campaign that has left entire villages in ruins.

Satellite photos examined by The Washington Post, Reuters, and the Financial Times showed vast destruction caused by Israeli bombing and controlled demolitions of towns and villages, many of whose residents are among the more than 1.2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.

“There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old,” Meiss al-Jabal Mayor Abdulmonem Choukeir told Reuters. “Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes. Who knows what will still be standing at the end?”

Meiss al-Jabal native Fatima Ghoul told The Washington Post that “everything has been reduced to rubble” in the town of 8,000 inhabitants. Footage circulating on social media Monday showed large portions of the village, which has been inhabited for many hundreds of years, turned to dust in a simultaneous series of demolition explosions.

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Ukraine Announces First Direct Clashes With North Korean Troops

The US and South Korea now say many thousands of North Korean troops are on the front lines, potentially engaging Ukrainian forces, with most of them located in Russia’s Kursk oblast, which has been under Ukrainian troop presence since the August cross-border offensive.

“More than 10,000 North Korean soldiers are currently in Russia, and we assess that a significant portion of them are deployed to front-line areas, including Kursk,” spokesman for South Korea’s defense ministry, Jeon Ha-kyou, told a briefing.

The Pentagon has said the same with spokesman Pat Ryder having stated Monday, “All indications are that they will provide some type of combat or combat support capability.” He added: “We would fully expect that the Ukrainians would do what they need to do to defend themselves and their personnel.”

The US administration has continued to warn that these foreign troops are “legitimate military targets” if they are found inside Ukraine and enter the fight.

Kiev has taken the allegations a step further, saying that already there’s been an exchange of fire between Ukrainian and North Korean troops. But it reportedly happened inside Russia.

“Ukrainian officials said on Monday that their forces had fired at North Korean soldiers in combat for the first time since their deployment by Russia to its western Kursk region,” FT writes of the new development.

The publication is calling the alleged instance “the first direct intervention by a foreign army since Russia’s full-scale invasion” as well as constituting an expansion of “what was already the largest land war in Europe since the second world war.”

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s high-ranking ‘counter-disinformation’ official, announced on Telegram. Another top intelligence official said the same but did not provide or confirm any details of the alleged clash.

Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha has urged his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock on the “need for decisive action” in response to North Korea’s presence in the conflict.

“We urge Europe to realize that the DPRK troops are now carrying [out] an aggressive war in Europe against a sovereign European state,” Sybiha told a press conference.

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