Tag: perpetual war

Two More Israeli Soldiers Kill Themselves Amid Crisis Driven by Horrors of Genocide

Two more Israeli soldiers killed themselves over the past two days, bringing renewed scrutiny to what experts say is a worsening mental health emergency inside the Israel Defense Forces during 33 months of genocidal war on Gaza and enduring stigma around seeking treatment.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, two female IDF troops – a combat soldier and an intelligence officer – died by suicide this week. Israeli Military Police said they are investigating both deaths, which bring the number of active duty IDF troops who have killed themselves this year to at least 16. Haaretz said that at least nine former IDF soldiers have also committed suicide after completing their military service in 2026.

The latest deaths underscore what military officials, mental health professionals, and veterans have increasingly described as one of the most severe psychological crises the Israeli military has faced in decades.

Earlier this year, Haaretz reported that Israeli military suicides reached 21 in 2024 and 22 in 2025 – the highest annual totals in roughly 15 years. Israel’s oldest daily newspaper also found that the military had reduced the number of mental health officers available to soldiers despite unprecedented demand for psychological services.

The crisis has been exacerbated by repeated troop deployments since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack – itself the cause of tremendous trauma and some suicides by survivors – and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, which has been characterized by what prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague say are crimes against humanity and war crimes, and what a United Nations panel of experts said is a genocide.

More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza, some of them reportedly executed at close range.

IDF troops and Israeli and international medical workers have described the deliberate and indiscriminate shooting of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, some of whom were reportedly executed. Former Palestinian prisoners and Israeli troops and doctors have also reported torture and sexual abuse of detainees, and of civilians including children and even a toddler. Such carnage and abuse has taken a toll on the perpetrators as well as their victims.

A persistent stigma surrounding mental health treatment also discourages many soldiers from seeking the care they need. Some fear being viewed as weak or worry that treatment could adversely affect their military service or relationships, despite ongoing efforts to de-stigmatize the issue.

A senior IDF commander told the Israeli public broadcaster Kan last year that “most of the suicides resulted from the complex reality created by the war,” adding, “War has consequences.”

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that the IDF had recorded a nearly 40% increase in post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops since September 2023, with 60% of the 22,300 people being treated for war wounds experiencing PTSD. The news agency cited an Israeli parliamentary committee’s finding that 279 soldiers had attempted to kill themselves in the period from January 2024 to July 2025, and that IDF combat soldiers comprised 78% of all suicides in Israel in 2024.

Some observers – especially Palestine defenders – have little sympathy for IDF soldiers who kill themselves, pointing to the widespread crimes being committed in Gaza and throughout illegally occupied Palestine, including apartheid, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing.

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Section 219: More Than a Defense Provision – The Battle Over the Future of US-Israel Relations

Somewhere in the thousand-plus pages of America’s annual National Defense Authorization Act sits a provision that started out as Section 224 and later became Section 219 in the House version. On paper it looks straightforward: expand technological and defense cooperation between the United States and Israel. In practice it has turned into one of the more revealing fights in current U.S. politics. The reactions on both sides make clear that this is not really about joint research projects or sharing a few more technical papers. It has become a proxy for bigger arguments about how far American security commitments should go, what role Israel should play in Washington’s strategy, and where the Republican Party is headed on foreign policy.

The House kept the language when it passed its version of the bill. Representative Thomas Massie, a consistent America First voice, tried to strip it out. His effort never even made it to a full floor vote. That alone told you something: for now, the coalition that wants deeper strategic ties with Israel still has the numbers in the House.

What the section actually does is instruct the Defense Department to expand work with Israel in areas like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum technology, cybersecurity, electronic warfare, drones, and joint research programs. Supporters say this is common sense. Facing serious competition from China and Russia, they argue, the United States cannot afford to go it alone on the technologies that will shape the next generation of military power. Israel has real strengths in these fields. Formalizing and deepening cooperation, they insist, does not create new combat commitments. It simply builds on relationships that have existed for years.

Opponents see a different trajectory. They worry the language is less about discrete projects and more about gradually knitting the two countries’ defense industries and military structures closer together. Once those ties become denser, they argue, American decision-makers may find their options more constrained when the next Middle East crisis arrives. Massie’s objection sits squarely in this camp. He believes the United States should stop creating new mechanisms that pull it deeper into security obligations connected to Israel

The fight is not really about one paragraph in a defense bill. It reflects deeper shifts already underway. The war in Gaza, the scale of civilian deaths, and the protests that spread across American campuses have made traditional support for Israel less automatic, especially among younger people. Inside the Republican Party a visible split has opened. Traditional conservatives still treat a wide network of allies as essential to American leadership. The America First wing wants fewer overseas commitments, fewer expensive wars, and more focus on problems at home.

So Section 219 is not just about Israel. It is about how America defines its own interests. Should Washington keep deepening alliances as the price of remaining the dominant global power, or should it start redirecting more energy and money toward rebuilding at home and competing economically with China?

The fact that opponents could not remove the section shows the old consensus still has real weight in Congress. But the intensity of the pushback shows that consensus is no longer automatic. What used to be a quiet assumption has become one of the sharper dividing lines in American foreign-policy debates.

Nothing is final yet. The bill still has to move through the Senate. If the two chambers produce different texts, a conference committee will have to work out the differences. House passage was a clear win for the provision’s backers, but the ultimate language depends on what happens next.

What is already obvious is that Section 219 has stopped being just another clause in a giant spending bill. It has become a rough test of the direction American foreign policy is likely to take. Will the United States continue leaning on ever-closer strategic partnerships, or will it gradually pull back toward a more limited, domestically focused approach?

For decades the relationship rested on a familiar mix of shared values, intelligence cooperation, technological overlap, and common adversaries. That foundation has not vanished. Israel remains a capable partner in missile defense, cyber operations, and advanced research. Supporters of the section keep returning to these practical advantages and argue that tighter cooperation is a logical response to a more competitive world.

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The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won’t Stop Israel’s Genocide

The words ‘killed’, ‘injured’, ‘maimed’, and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: “13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded.” Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.

It is this “and so on” that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel’s daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Santa Monica Beach’; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to UN and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.

What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel’s barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.

Yet the outcome remains unchanged: the death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.

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Russia Pounds Ukrainian Cities Overnight — Eight Dead, Dozens Wounded As Missiles And Drones Strike Residential Areas

Russia launched another overnight barrage of missiles and drones against Ukrainian cities Thursday, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens of others, according to Ukrainian officials. The strikes hit residential areas across multiple regions, continuing Moscow’s pattern of sustained pressure on civilian infrastructure as ground fighting grinds on in the east.

In a notable Ukrainian counterpunch, the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces struck a Russian Buk-M3 air defense system in occupied Snizhne — roughly 98 kilometers from the front line — and hit a drone storage and launch site in occupied Donetsk City. The Buk-M3 is one of Russia’s more capable medium-range air defense systems; its destruction, if confirmed, degrades Russia’s ability to intercept Ukrainian drone swarms over occupied territory.

Ukraine also struck a Russian oil refinery and a Wildberries logistics facility in Volgograd, deep inside Russian territory. The Volgograd strike is part of Ukraine’s sustained campaign against Russian economic and industrial targets — a strategy aimed at raising the domestic cost of the war for Russian civilians and disrupting supply chains that feed the front.

On the ground, Russian forces have reportedly completed their seizure of Hulyaipole, a town in Zaporizhzhia Oblast that has been contested for months.

The broader diplomatic picture remains frozen. Zelensky met with Trump in Washington earlier this week, with discussions focused on strengthening Ukrainian air defenses. No breakthrough on a ceasefire framework was reported. Putin, for his part, has been publicly projecting confidence about battlefield awareness as Moscow continues to take territory in Donbass which the Ukrainian military cannot stop.

President Trump hedged on providing Ukraine licenses to manufacture Patriot interceptor missiles in Ukraine.

Sources close to the situation tell CDM that Trump is looking for a way to exit the war and bring it to a close.

The overnight strikes underscore the unchanged strategic reality: Russia continues to use long-range strikes to destroy military infrastructure, while Ukrainian forces pursue a parallel strategy of hitting Russian military assets and economic infrastructure wherever they can reach. Neither side is close to a negotiated end.

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Russian Missile Strikes NATO Soil In Poland As Moscow Launches Widest Ukraine Assault Yet

In the early hours of Thursday, July 30th, something happened that NATO’s bureaucrats in Brussels are desperately hoping you will not dwell on: a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crossed the Polish border during Moscow’s massive overnight assault on Ukraine and detonated in a field near Targowisko in eastern Poland, roughly 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian frontier. The explosion left a crater reported by multiple outlets to be approximately ten meters wide — 33 feet of scorched earth sitting inside sovereign NATO territory. Polish authorities confirmed they are investigating after the crater was discovered on Polish soil, and Warsaw scrambled fighter jets to secure its airspace alongside allied aircraft, according to Reuters.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha stated directly that the Russian Kh-101 cruise missile “violated NATO airspace” and crossed into Poland, per Ukrainian officials cited by Ukrainian news outlet UNN. The BBC confirmed that Ukraine’s foreign ministry said the missile had “crossed into Poland” as part of the broader attack, “violating NATO airspace.” Poland confirmed the crater but as of publication was still formally investigating its origin — the careful diplomatic hedging of a government that knows exactly what happened and also knows that saying so plainly drags NATO to the edge of its Article 5 cliff.

The Russian barrage that spawned the Polish incident was itself one of the most extensive strikes of the entire war. According to NBC News and Reuters reporting as of the morning of July 30th, Russian air strikes killed at least 13 to 14 people across Ukraine on Thursday, including one person in Kyiv, with attacks stretching as far west as Lviv — a city not known for frontline exposure and just 70 kilometers from the Polish border.

The timing is not incidental. Russia launched this particular assault on the same day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both at the White House for back-to-back meetings with President Trump — meetings organized, in part, around the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham and the continuing Iran war. Moscow clearly chose this moment deliberately, striking at maximum diplomatic noise to test whether Washington’s attention was elsewhere.

What makes the Polish crater especially significant is what it reveals about the state of NATO’s collective nerve. Article 5 of the NATO treaty — the alliance’s foundational mutual defense clause — states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. A Russian missile detonating on Polish territory is, by any plain reading of that clause, exactly the kind of event Article 5 was written for. And yet NATO’s response, as of this writing, has been to carefully avoid saying so. Alliance officials have called for “investigations.” Warsaw has called for “verification.” Brussels has issued statements urging “calm.” The hedging is deliberate and revealing: NATO is not ready to invoke Article 5 over a single missile crater, and everyone — including Moscow — knows it.

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The Dark Side of Washington – Money Before Country

I cannot express how dirty things have gotten in DC over the years. The Biden/Hunter Ukraine scam was blocked from investigation when Ukraine is known as the MOST corrupt nation-state in the world.

Ukraine remains the most corrupt government in the world, and they are selling the Ukrainian people for personal wealth and greed with ZERO remorse for their nation or their people. Ukrainian politicians topped all other countries for corruption. Even in the Pandora Papers, 38 Ukrainian politicians have to hide cash offshore – the largest number of corrupt politicians in any other country. Zelenskyy’s office tried to justify his use of offshore companies for himself as protecting him against pro-Russian forces, following leaked revelations in the Pandora Papers.

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China To Arm Iran With Hundreds Of MANPADS Despite Trump Warnings: Report

President Trump has repeatedly said that China’s President Xi Jinping has directly assured him that Beijing will not supply Iran with weaponry or military support.

But this week these ‘assurances’ have been called into question by an Reuters investigation. “Iran is expected to receive within weeks a first shipment out of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air-defense missile launchers, three sources familiar with the deal told ​Reuters, as it rebuilds its defenses amid war with the United States,” the fresh report says.

“The purchase, valued at $60-70 million, is one of Tehran’s largest-known efforts to strengthen its short-range air ‌defences since the outbreak of its war with the U.S. and Israel, which exposed gaps in Iran’s ability to protect military sites and strategic infrastructure,” it adds.

The fresh report cites three anonymous sources and did not receive comment from the Iranian side. Some of the assertions of the Reuters report are surprisingly specific, such as in the following:

The contract covers the purchase of between 300 and 400 man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), including Chinese-made QW-12 and FN-16 missiles, the sources said.

The deal was signed with Zhongqing Baoshang International Investment, a Hong Kong-based company that the sources said was acting as an intermediary between the Iranian ​side and the Chinese supplier.

The reporting even explores options being considered for delivery of the weapons, at a moment Iran is urgently seeking to replenish its air defense supplies after months of grinding tit-for-tat conflict with the US military.

“Two Western intelligence sources and an Iranian official said Tehran had also explored the use of overland routes to move Chinese military supplies and dual-use components ⁠more discreetly and ​reduce the risk of disruption,” Reuters continues.

MANPADS could prove especially dangerous for US helicopters and other low flying aircraft, and for Iran can serve as layer of short-range protection.

The opening days of Operation Epic Fury saw much of Iran’s anti-air units get taken out, especially across the Western part of the country, giving US-Israeli jets air superiority. However, at times the Iranians have claimed to shoot down some aircraft, and since then the US has seemed to operate from further afar.

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Rearmament: UK Govt Pushes For New Generation of Explosives Factories to Fix Post-Cold War Deindustrialisation

The British government is seeking to build “at least six new munitions and energetics factories” after the Ukraine War experience showed how fast ammunition is used in a near-peer conflict, and how long it takes to make more when the industrial base no longer exists.

The Ministry of Defence has announced a funding package to support 22 unnamed companies to underwrite their costs in building “at least six” new factories to produce what the industry calls energetics, which might better be known as explosives, propellants, and pyrotechnics. The selected businesses will receive up to £300,000 each to “develop proposals for the creation of new factories producing energetic materials used in munitions”, and the winners in the competition will receive contracts “worth up to £5 million each” to get the ground broken on building the new facilities.

According to the government’s statement, the project is intended to move — at least by Whitehall standards — at a very brisk pace. The proposals are due to be made by the end of the summer, and construction of new munitions factories should begin before the end of 2026. The rush to build is part of a century-long story of corporate amnesia in which London has repeatedly destroyed its own armaments factories to save money in peacetime, only to be surprised, yet again, when war returns.

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Is the Department of War Covering Up the True Extent of US Casualties?

Last Wednesday all the signs were pointing to a desperate action by the Trump administration to launch a ground operation inside Iran ostensibly to seize enriched nuclear material from an Iranian nuclear research facility. The report from the Wall Street Journal noted that US special ops forces were once again being deployed to the region to carry out a raid on a Hardened Deeply Buried Target (aka HDBT). But it also revealed something both disturbing and alarming: the deployment of 150 medics. According to the WSJ:

The U.S. is surging forces, medics and weaponry to the Middle East to give President Trump more muscular military options as he considers expanding the conflict against Iran, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the past week, special-operations forces have deployed to the region from their U.S. bases, according to flight-tracking data and U.S. officials. Squadrons of jet fighters have been staged across the Middle East, and bomber aircraft at bases in the U.S. and U.K. are on high alert to ramp up operations, according to one of the officials.

Additionally, more than 150 medics have arrived at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany in recent days, another official said. The hospital is the primary location for treating troops injured in combat in the Middle East.

Twenty years ago I participated in the scripting and execution of a Special Ops exercise that simulated the targeting of an underground nuclear target in the Middle East. The actual location of the field exercise was in the desert of Nevada, northeast of Las Vegas. At the conclusion of that exercise there was a Hot Wash, i.e., a review of lessons learned from that exercise. What was the primary lesson learned? Don’t do it. Too dangerous because the mission would likely to result in significant casualties and expose the soldiers to unhealthy levels of radiation.

Based on the WSJ report it appears that Trump was on the verge of ordering a real-world version of that exercise. However, this report surfaced on the 23rd of July. Two days later, Trump apparently rescinded the order for the ground op and halted the bombings of the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.

So far, so good. What most people glossed over was the report that 150 US combat medics were deployed to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. This was not an ordinary deployment, nor was it in anticipation of possible casualties from an impending military operation… These men and women were deployed to reinforce a badly stretched medical staff at Landstuhl that were trying to cope with dozens of badly wounded US military personnel that had survived the missile strikes on Muwafaq al-Salti airbase in Jordan and two army bases in Kuwait.

Based on the number of C-17 medical flights reported in open source that departed Jordan following the 17 July missile attack on Muwafaq al-Salti airbase and flew to Ramstein airbase in Germany, which is the entry port for the Landstuhl Medical Center, US casualties numbered over 100, perhaps higher. The large number of wounded may have been another factor contributing to President Trump’s decision to halt the bombing one week later.

While there are no direct talks between the US and Iran, Pakistan, along with Qatar, are working intensively as intermediaries in trying to resurrect the MoU. If the MoU is resuscitated it will be because the US met Iran’s demands that Israeli forces withdraw from Lebanon and that the US unfreeze Iranian assets up front, not at some point in the future. I am sure that Bibi Netanyahu will try to persuade Trump to reignite the war and pursue a more intensive bombing campaign as well as some kind of ground operation on Iranian territory.

For now, the bombs and missiles are not falling. I am skeptical that this current hiatus will hold… I sincerely hope that I am wrong. Once Senator Graham is buried on Wednesday, we may see Trump reverse course once again and renew the bombing campaign. Iran, for its part, is holding firm to its demands that the MoU be fully implemented, otherwise Iran is prepared to continue fighting and inflicting more damage on US assets and personnel.

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Israel’s violence engulfs occupied West Bank

Israel has intensified its assault on the occupied West Bank. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 1,111 Palestinians, at least 243 of them children, have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 65 of them since the beginning of 2026.

Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property has surged to record levels. OCHA documented more than 1,800 attacks in 2025 that resulted in casualties or property damage across about 280 communities in the West Bank—an average of five incidents a day, the highest daily rate since records began in 2006. Attacks are up more than 50 percent in the first six months of this year.

The latest clash was provoked by armed settlers on Friday night, in which two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrested dozens of people around the village of Tell near the West Bank city of Nablus. Troops carried out mass raids in Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarem and the southern West Bank, setting up checkpoints and closing gates across the West Bank. The IDF said it was bolstering its forces in the West Bank by five companies and cancelling weekend leave for troops.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu backed the settlers, pledging he would take “powerful action” in response, including demolishing the home of the family of one of the Palestinians involved and accelerating the approval of construction of more Israeli settlements in the area. In so doing, he acknowledged that settler violence, far from being the work of a “few bad apples” is nothing short of a state-backed policy in pursuit of ethnic cleansing.

Last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced plans for $400 million in funding for the construction of dozens of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government rushes to expand its control of land in the West Bank and drive out Palestinians before elections scheduled for October.

This comes amid an unprecedented surge in Israeli settlement activity. According to the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), the number of new settlement outposts—illegal even under Israeli law—has soared in recent years. The number has jumped from around eight a year between 2012 and 2022 to 32 in 2023, then 62 in 2024, reaching 86 in 2025.

Armed settlers, protected by the Israeli military, continued their pogroms over the weekend, rampaging through more than a dozen villages across the northern West Bank. Hundreds of Israelis hurled stones, set fire to homes, two mosques and several vehicles, wounded more than a dozen Palestinians. They sprayed graffiti claiming “revenge” over the killing of an Israeli, and setting up another four illegal outposts.

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