middle east eye

May 16, 2024 – 11:25 pm

Live Updates
Middle East Eye, May 16 2024

Evening recap

  • On Thursday, South Africa presented a new submission at the International Court of Justice calling on the court to halt Israel’s military offensive on Rafah, as well as to order Israel to fully and immediately withdraw from the Gaza Strip. You can read more about Thursday’s trial here.
  • Also on Thursday, the Arab League called for a UN peacekeeping force in the occupied Palestinian territories. The move marked the first time Arab states have officially endorsed an internationalisation of the Israel-Palestine conflict since Israel’s war on Gaza erupted. Read more about that news here.
  • Meanwhile, inside Gaza famine and hunger continues to loom over the Palestinian population, with aid trucks continue to pile up on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, which Israel seized last week during its offensive on the area.
  • The US House of Representatives passed a bill that would force Biden to send additional weapons to Israel, despite the Biden administration already pushing through an additional $1b in aid to the country.
  • A new report from the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights says that Egypt’s military has in recent days been deploying additional reinforcements near the Rafah crossing with Gaza. Read the full story here.
  • Spain denied a request from an Israel-bound ship carrying arms to dock at the southeastern port of Cartagena.
  • Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is submitting a plan to the cabinet that would end Israel’s free trade agreement with Turkey. The move is in reaction to Erdogan’s decision to halt exports to Israel.
  • Israel’s COGAT announced a confirmation of the US military’s statement that the long-anticipated and much-criticised floating pier it was building off the coast of Gaza has been connected.
  • Fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups was tense in northern Gaza on Thursday. Palestinian groups claimed to have targeted an Israeli artillery site, a command headquarters, several tanks, and an observation site.

US Congress votes to force more weapons shipments to Israel

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force Biden to send additional weapons to Israel. The Israel Security Assistance Support Act was approved 224 to 187, largely along party lines. Sixteen Democrats joined most Republicans in voting yes, and three Republicans joined most Democrats in opposing the measure. The bill serves as a rebuke to Biden for halting a single shipment of arms to Israel. Israel will still get billions of dollars of US weaponry from the Biden administration, with Biden most recently pushing forward a package of more than $1b worth of weapons aid for Israel.

Egyptian military reinforcements arrive near Rafah crossing: Report

A new report from the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights says that Egypt’s military has in recent days been deploying additional reinforcements near the Rafah crossing with Gaza. The rights group published photos and videos showing tanks and armoured vehicles in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. SFHR further reported, citing eyewitnesses, that around 15 armoured vehicles passed through the town of Sheikh Zuweid, which is located about 15km from Rafah. Eyewitnesses told the organisation that it was the largest mobilisation of Egyptian troops towards the Rafah crossing since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October. Read more: Egypt deploys military convoys to Gaza border as tensions with Israel flare.

Spain refuses request to allow Israel-bound ship carrying arms to dock

Spain has denied a request from an Israel-bound ship carrying arms to dock at the southeastern port of Cartagena. Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares confirmed the news on Thursday, saying the refusal was consistent with Spain’s policy to ban the exports of all arms to Israel since the war on Gaza began. Albares told reporters:

We have detected this ship, we have refused to allow it to dock, and I can tell you that this will be a consistent policy with any ship carrying Israeli arms and arms cargo that wants to dock in Spanish ports.

Israel to abolish free trade deal with Turkey, says finance minister

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the country would end its free trade agreement with Turkey, after Erdogan moved to halt exports to Israel in protest against the war on Gaza. Smotrich also said the plan, which will be proposed to the cabinet for approval, would also impose a 100% tariff on other imports from Turkey.

In Gaza’s Jabalia, fighting intensifies

In the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups claimed a series of new attacks on Israeli troops. So far, the groups have claimed to have targeted an Israeli artillery site, a command headquarters, several tanks, and an observation site.

State Dept says humanitarian situation in Gaza still deteriorating

The US State Dept said the humanitarian situation in Gaza is continuing to deteriorate and urged Israel to do more to allow sustained humanitarian access to the Strip. State Dept deputy spox Vedant Patel said Washington remained concerned that the flow of fuel into Gaza via Rafah crossing has “come to a complete halt.”

PureGym CEO’s pro-Israel stance leads to calls for boycott

Calls to boycott the popular chain PureGym have gained traction on social media after the company’s CEO appeared to support continued UK arms exports to Israel. Speaking on the BBC’s Question Time programme, Humphrey Cobbold said: “We should support, in general, the Israeli government in being able to defend themselves,” seven months into Israel’s devastating military offensive on Gaza. Discussing the question, “should we be selling arms to Israel,” Cobbold said that the UK “sends very little” in terms of weaponry to Israel, before adding that he was “deeply concerned” about what is happening in the war-battered enclave. Social media users were quick to call for PureGym members to cancel their subscriptions, with many posting screenshots of their cancellation reason online, citing Cobbold’s remarks. Read more: PureGym faces boycott calls after CEO’s perceived pro-Israel remarks.

Israel confirms US floating pier ‘successfully connected’ to Gaza

COGAT announced a confirmation of the US military’s statement that the long-anticipated and much-criticised floating pier it was building off the coast of Gaza has been connected.It said:

In the upcoming days, trucks will begin entering.

Aid trucks continue piling up on Egypt’s side of Rafah crossing

The Sinai Foundation for Human Rights has obtained video footage showing that trucks filled with humanitarian aid have been accumulating in Egypt near the Rafah crossing with Gaza. Earlier this month, Israeli forces launched an offensive on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, and seized the crossing, which put a halt to the aid that was entering the enclave.

South Africa urges ICJ to halt Israel’s ‘genocidal’ Rafah offensive

In its new submission to the International Court of Justice, South Africa called for an end to Israel’s “genocidal” war in Gaza and for its attack on the southern city of Rafah to be halted. South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands Vusimuzi Madonsela said that Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza has “just reached a new and horrific stage.” Madonsela told the ICJ:

South Africa had hoped, when we last appeared before this court, to halt this genocidal process to preserve Palestine and its people.

Read more: South Africa urges ICJ to halt Israel’s ‘genocidal’ Rafah offensive.

South Africa asks World Court to order Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza

South Africa is asking the International Court of Justice to order Israel to cease its military operations in Gaza and to “totally and unconditionally” withdraw from the entirety of the enclave.

Gaza media office: more than 100 academics killed by Israeli forces

Gaza’s media office has published a list of more than 100 academics, university professors and researchers who have been killed by Israeli aggression since its war on Gaza began on Oct 7. The office said in a statement:

In addition, the occupation completely destroyed more than 103 universities and schools, in addition to partially destroying 311 universities and schools. We call on all universities and educational sectors in all countries of the world to condemn this crime.

Houthis: targeting of ships bound for Israel not limited to the Red Sea

Yemen’s Houthis will target any ships bound for Israeli ports that they can reach, even in areas beyond the Red Sea, the group’s leader Abd’ul-Malik al-Houthi said in a televised speech on Thursday.

Constant shelling pummels Jabalia, with many wounded

Al Jazeera is reporting that fighting is “raging” in Jabalia refugee camp, with residential neighbourhoods being pounded by “constant shelling” over the last few hours. The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said in a statement that it had attacked four Israeli army Merkava tanks in the camp. It added that the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Palestinian Jihad, had attacked an additional tank, killing and wounding Israeli soldiers.

Far-right Netherlands coalition plans to move embassy to Jerusalem

Emerging far-right Netherlands coalition is planning to move the embassy of the Netherlands to Jerusalem. In a draft coalition agreement, the partners said they would investigate “the appropriate time in which the move of the embassy to Jerusalem can occur.” A provisional agreement to form a right-wing government was reached yesterday, following the November elections in which the pro-Israel far-right Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders received the highest share of the vote.

South Africa at ICJ: Israel has defied the court in its offensive on Rafah

South African delegate Professor Max du Plessis told the ICJ that instead of complying with the orders it issued in January, Israel has defied the court by “trapping, besieging and bombarding overcrowded Rafah.” He added that Israel’s current offensive on the city is the “deadliest phase of this ongoing genocide.” He said that the court’s initial orders were made because the right of existence of the Palestinian population in Gaza is currently at risk of irreparable prejudice, the only effective way of preserving this right is through prevention. South Africa is seeking these new measures before it’s too late for prevention to be possible he said, cCiting the UN’s declaration that “no one in Gaza is safe.”

South Africa says ICJ orders did not protect Palestinians against genocide

South Africa’s second representative, Professor Vaughan Lowe, told the ICJ that the provisional measures already issued to Israel by the court were “not effective” in protecting Palestinians against genocide, and asked the court to “reassert its own authority and the authority of international law.” He said:

The current Israeli offensive on Rafah is the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian people. It was Rafah that brought South Africa to the court, but it is all Palestinians, as a national ethnic and racial group, who need the protection from genocide that the court can order.

South Africa tells ICJ genocide in Gaza is ‘ongoing’

Vusi Madonsela, South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, said in his opening remarks at the International Court of Justice hearing that the genocide in Gaza is “ongoing.” He added that South Africa’s fourth submission to the court was triggered not only by the offensive in Rafah but by an intensification of the Israeli assault across Gaza in the last few days.

Three Palestinians killed in Israeli raids in West Bank

Three Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids across the occupied West Bank on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry and Palestinian officials. The victims were Ayman Ahmad Mubarak, 26, Husam Imad Da’bas, 22, and Mohammed Yusif Nasrallah, 27. During the same raids, 11 branches of the same money exhange company were searched by Israeli forces and reportedly lost around 4 million shekels in the raids, or over $1m, according to Al Jazeera. Israeli forces also confiscated computers and safes, along with everything inside them.

Israeli defence minister says Rafah campaign ‘wearing down’ Hamas

Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said the offensive on Rafah “will intensify” as extra troops are sent to join the ground operation. He said in a statement:

This operation will continue as additional forces will enter. Several tunnels in the area have been destroyed by our troops and additional tunnels will be destroyed soon. This activity will intensify. Hamas is not an organization that can reorganize. It does not have reserve troops. It has no supply stocks, and no ability to treat the terrorists that we target. The result is that we are wearing Hamas down.

Two killed in Israeli strike on southern Lebanon

Two people were killed in an Israeli air strike that targetted their vehicle near the southern Lebanese town of Seddiqine, Lebanon’s An-Nahar news site is reporting. The news agency also reported that two others were killed in a raid in the area.

Palestinian President appeals to Arab countries for funds

Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has called for financial support from Arab countries, saying that the government has not received the funds it expected from international and regional partners. Abbas said at an Arab League summit on Thursday:

It has now become critical to activate the Arab safety net, to boost the resilience of our people, and to enable the government to carry out its duties.

Four people including pregnant woman killed in Israeli Strike on Jabalia

Four Palestinians, including a pregnant woman, have been killed in an Israeli strike on a home in the al-Faluja area of Jabalia, WAFA is reporting.

Israeli strike targets family home in Khan Younis, killing five

At least five people have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a family home in Khan Younis, Al Jazeera Arabic is reporting. Palestinians are fleeing to Khan Younis, among other areas, following evacuation orders from Rafah.

Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem visits Gaza City

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem visited Gaza City, his church said, where he delivered a “message of hope, solidarity and support” to the people in the war-torn Palestinian enclave. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said that Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa “entered Gaza and reached the parish of the Holy Family for a pastoral visit.” The archbishop presided over a mass and paid a courtesy visit to another parish, and the Patriarchate said he “met the suffering population to encourage them and to deliver a message of hope, solidarity, and support.” The visit was the vist stage of a humanitarian mission to deliver aid which includes food and medical assistance to people in Gaza. Over 3% of Gaza’s tiny Christian population of 1k have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, and 80% of their homes have been destoryed.

Arab League will call for ‘UN peacekeeping force’ in Palestinian territories, reports say

The Arab League is set to call for a UN peacekeeping force to be deployed in occupied Palestinian territories until a two-state solution with Israel is achieved, according to media reports. According to BBC Arabic and Saudi-funded Asharq Al-Awsat, the call will be made in the final statement of the Arab League summit being held in Bahrain on Thursday. The regional body will highlight the need to establish a timeline for a political process that leads to a Palestinian state. It will also urge full recognition of Palestine by the UNSC on the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. The call will come as the issue of “post-war governance” in Gaza, which assumes Hamas will no longer exist as a capable governing and military force, continues to be raised by international and Israeli officials. Read more: Arab League will call for ‘UN peacekeeping force’ in Palestinian territories, reports say.

Reported drone strike on vehicle in south Lebanon

Lebanese media reports that a drone has targeted a vehicle on the road between the towns of Ramiyeh and Qana in south Lebanon. Ambulances are currently heading to the scene.

Israeli anti-Zionist academic Ilan Pappe interrogated by US intelligence on Gaza views

Prominent Israeli academic Ilan Pappe said he was interrogated by the FBI after arriving in the US on Monday. Arriving at Detroit airport, the academic known for his stridently anti-Zionist views and research said he was subjected to two hours of questioning. Amongst the questions, he was asked whether he was a Hamas supporter and whether he regarded the Israeli assault on Gaza as a “genocide.” Pappe wrote on Facebook:

The two-man team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world! They had long phone conversation with someone, and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter.

Read more: Israeli anti-Zionist academic Ilan Pappe interrogated by US intelligence on Gaza views.

Gaza death toll rises to 35,272

Gaza’s health ministry said that 39 people were killed in Israeli attacks on the enclave in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 35,272 Palestinians killed since 7 October. Additionally, 72,205 people were wounded since the start of the war.

Over $1m seized in Israeli raids on West Bank exchange shops

Al Jazeera reports that 11 branches of the same money exchange company were raided by Israeli forces in the West Bank last night, as Israel accuses the company of dealing with “terrorist groups.” The company reportedly lost around ₪4m in the raids, or over $1m. Israeli forces also confiscated computers and safes, along with everything inside them. Similar Israeli raids took place in December, when they raided the branches of several exchange companies, amounting to a loss of around $0.3m.

New Dutch coalition promises to consider moving Israel embassy to Jerusalem

Political parties of the Netherlands’s new right-wing coalition have agreed to look into the “appropriate time” in which they will move their country’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. the draft agreement, which Dutch media report was finalised on Wednesday night, follows November’s Dutch general elections, which saw the far-right, pro-Israel Party for Freedom receive the highest share of votes. The party now has 37 of the Dutch lower house’s 150 seats. Geert Wilders, the head of the party, is known for his anti-Islam stances and was found guilty of inciting discrimination against Moroccans against Muslims in 2016.

Hezbollah says it fired 60 rockets at Israeli army bases in occupied Golan Heights

Hezbollah said it fired 60 Katyusha rockets on three Israeli military bases in the Golan Heights on Thursday morning. The group says the attack was a retaliation for Israel’s series of overnight strikes near Baalbek in Lebanon’s north-east.

Over 15k children killed in Gaza war: Palestinian Red Crescent

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society has reported that over 15k children have by killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza since the start of the current war on Oct 7. Over 35k Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since that date.

Arab League leaders head to Bahrain for Gaza-focused summit

Arab League leaders are meeting in Bahrain on Tuesday for a summit focusing on Israel’s war on Gaza. This marks for the first time the bloc is meeting since the extraordinary summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in November, which also involved the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. At that meeting, members condemned Israel’s “barbaric” actions in Gaza but did not approve of any punitive economic and political steps against Israel. The AFP reports that this could change at today’s meeting.

US military says Gaza pier project completed, aid to start flowing in soon

The US military has finished building a floating pier in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials saying they are ready to begin ferrying aid to the besieged Palestinian enclave. The pier’s completion comes two months after Biden ordered it, and follows Israel’s seizure and closure of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, stripping millions of Palestinians from much needed aid. While the pier is supposed to support aid deliveries, it is not expected to replace the cheaper and more efficient land deliveries that are now largely blocked off. Though it is a US-mandated project, US officials insist that their troops will not set foot in Gaza.

Israel sends additional brigade to Rafah as five soldiers killed in Jabalia friendly fire

The Israeli army announced it is sending an additional brigade to Rafah, southern Gaza, as the government is expected to approve a widening of operations in the city that once housed over a million displaced Palestinians. At least 0.6m Palestinians have already fled the southern city to other areas in the south and centre of the Gaza Strip since Israel intensified its military operations last week. Israel’s military also said that five Israeli soldiers were killed and at least seven were injured by an Israeli tank in what seemed to be a friendly fire incident in northern Gaza. Baalbek, north-eastern Lebanon, was hit by an intense series of Israeli strikes in what seems to be the strongest attack on the area since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Additionally, three Palestinians were shot and killed by Israeli forces during a raid on Tulkarm in the West Bank, WAFA reports. Israeli forces reportedly stormed several money exchange shops in the city, vandalised and stole from some of them, and arrested at least one of the shop owners. Read more: Israel sends additional brigade to Rafah as five soldiers killed in Jabalia friendly-fire.

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south front

May 16, 2024 – 2:49 pm

Israel Pays Heavy Price For War On Gaza
South Front, May 16 2024

Israel is paying a heavy price for its decision to continue the war on the Gaza Strip, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 35k Palestinians. In the first week of March, the IOF launched ground operations in the southern Gaza area of Rafah, where more than 1.4m Palestinians have been taking shelter. It later doubled down by resuming operations in two areas in the northern part of the Strip, the al-Zaitoun neighborhood in Gaza City and the Jabaliya refugee camp.

The Israeli escalation was not without a price however. On May 10, four soldiers from the Nahal Brigade’s 931st Battalion were killed after being hit by explosive devices which were planted by fighters from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the al-Zaitoun neighborhood. On the same day, another soldier from the Nahal Brigade’s 931st Battalion was killed in the al-Zaitoun neighborhood during a gun battle with fighters from Hamas. On May 14, a soldier from the 7th Armored Brigade was killed while taking part in the operation in Rafah. And on May 15, a Defense Ministry contractor succumbed to wounds he sustained as a result of a mortar attack that targeted an IOF gathering in southern Gaza two days earlier. Also on May 15, five soldiers from the Paratroopers Brigade’s 202nd Battalion were killed in a friendly-fire incident when an Israeli main battle tank operating in the Jabaliya refugee camp fired two shells at a building where they were gathered.

In addition to these human losses, both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad released videos showing dozens of IDF vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers and bulldozers, being hit with rocket-propelled grenades and explosive devices in Rafah, al-Zaitoun and Jabaliya. Israel’s losses were not limited to Gaza as Hezbollah escalated attacks from Lebanon in response to the war on the Strip. On May 11, the group attacked an Iron Dome air defense system deployed at a base near the settlement of Beit Hillel with three suicide drones. On May 13, more drones were launched by the group at the barracks in the same base. And on May 14, Hezbollah attacked a small surveillance aerostat and its control room at the Adamit site with guided missiles, killing an Israeli. On May 15, Israel’s state-of-the-art Sky Dew radar early warning aerostat was damaged in a drone attack by the group on its home base near the settlement of Ilaniya.

In addition, Israel faced six attacks with suicide drones and cruise missiles by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq between May 11 and 15. Overall, the cost Israel is paying for the war on Gaza is increasing every day. The country is also facing more international pressure. Meanwhile, the war is yet to achieve any of its goals.

Hezbollah Attacks Israeli Site With Suicide Drone Armed With Rockets, Wounds Three
South Front, May 16 2024

Hezbollah attacked on May 16 a border site of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) using a new type of armed suicide drones. In a statement, the group said that the drone fired two S-5 rockets at a vehicle surrounded by troops in Metula then went on to impact another target within the site. Hebrew media reported that three troops were wounded, with one of them in a life-threatening condition. Hezbollah didn’t share any details on the new drone, but the S-5 unguided air-to-ground rockets used in the attack are known to have been developed in the Soviet Union. Rockets of this type have a range of three to 4 km and are armed with a warhead weighing a little less or more than 1 kg, depending on the version.

The attack on Metula was not the first by Hezbollah during the day. In the early morning, the group said in a statement that it had launched more than 60 “Katyusha” rockets at the headquarters of the 210th Golan Division in the settlement of Nafah, the air defense barracks in the settlement of Kiela and the Northern Regions’ artillery barracks in the settlement of Yoav in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The IOF confirmed that at least 40 rockets were launched from Lebanon in two barrages at the Golan Heights, but didn’t report any losses.

In addition, Hezbollah said in four separate statements that its fighters destroyed surveillance equipment of the IDF in the border sites of Jal al-Alam, Ramia and Adathir as well as in the Zarait barracks. The attacks were carried out in response to recent Israeli strikes on the northeastern Lebanese district of Balbaak, Hezbollah noted in its statements. In response to these attacks, the IOF launched another wave of strikes against targets of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Fighter jets struck a Hezbollah rocket launching position, the IDF said in a statement, addin that a building where Hezbollah fighters were gathered in the town of Ayta al-Shaab and another building in the town of Halta were also struck. Moreover, Lebanese media reported the death of two people in an Israeli drone strike that targeted a vehicle on a road between the towns of Seddiqine and Rmadiyeh.

Since the outbreak of the Israeli war on Gaza last October, Hezbollah and its allies began launching near-daily attacks against the IDF in support of Hamas and other Palestinian armed factions in the Strip. So far, the border clashes have resulted in ten civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of at least 14 IDF soldiers and reservists. On the Lebanese side, more than 400 people have been killed, including 281 fighters of Hezbollah and at least 70 civilians.

Five Israeli Soldiers Killed In Gaza As Palestinian Fighters Intensify Attacks
South Front, May 16 2024

The IOF announced on May 16 that five soldiers were killed and at least seven others were wounded while operating in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern part of the Gaza Strip a day earlier. The soldiers were all serving in the Paratroopers Brigade’s 202nd Battalion. The IOF said that a friendly-fire incident was behind their death. According to an initial military probe, a tank operating alongside the paratroopers in Jabaliya fired two shells at a building where they were gathered in the evening. The tank forces had arrived at the area in the morning hours, and several hours later, the paratroopers reached the area and established a post in the building. Later in the evening, another group of paratroopers reached the area and notified two of the tanks there that they were entering the building. The tank forces had later identified a gun barrel from one of the windows of the building and believed it was enemy forces, leading them to fire two shells. The IOF’s claims are highly questioned as the Izz’ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, reported on May 15 exactly 12 Israeli casualties after a “complex” attack by its fighters in Jabalia’s Block 4 area. The group said its fighters targeted a tank, a bulldozer and a house occupied by Israel troops using RPGs and explosive devices during the attack. Video footage showing a part of the attack was also released.

Other videos released by the group and the allied al-Quds Brigade, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on May 15 and 16 showed more Israeli losses in Jabaliya, the al-Zaitoun neighborhood in nearby Gaza City and the area of Rafah in the southern part of the Strip.








Also on May 15, an Israeli Defense Ministry contractor who was wounded in a mortar attack in southern Gaza two days earlier succumbed to his wounds. In addition to the slain contractor, the mortar attack left eight soldiers wounded, including two seriously and another contractor lightly hurt. The latest casualties brought the toll of Israeli troops killed since the start of ground operations in Gaza to 278. More than 1,500 others have been wounded in the Strip so far, including dozens in the last few days. On the Palestinian side, the Israeli war has so far claimed the lives of 35,233 people and left more than 79,141 others wounded, according to the latest update by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Most of the victims were women and children. Despite killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroying much of Gaza, Israel has not yet achieved any of the goals it set for the war.

Israel’s State-Of-The-Art Missile Defense Blimp Damaged In Hezbollah Drone Attack
South Front, May 16 2024

Israel’s state-of-the-art Sky Dew high altitude missile defense aerostat was damaged on May 15 as a result of a drone attack by Hezbollah. The group announced in a statement that it targeted a base near the settlement of Ilaniya, which houses the aerostat, with a number of suicide drones, describing the attack as “limited”. The IOF base is located near Golani Junction, some 35 km away from the Lebanon border. The attack was carried out in support of the Palestinian people and resistance in the Gaza Strip as well as in response to recent Israeli assassinations in southern Lebanon, the group said, likely referring to an early morning drone strike near the city of Tyre that killed one of its military commanders. On May 16, the IOF acknowledged the attack. It said that Hezbollah launched two suicide drones at the sensitive base near Ilaniya. One of the drones was shot down, but the other hit the base, according to the military, which said that damage was being assessed. Photos posted to social media later showed the Sky Dew aerostat partly deflated on its launch pad, apparently as a result of damage caused by the attack.

Sky Dew, also known as the High Availability Aerostat System, was developed in a joint venture between the Israeli Missile Defense Organization and the US Missile Defense Agency over the last few years. The system design is based on an aerostat air platform developed by the American company TCOM. The aerostat is not yet operational and has seen significant setbacks with its deployment. However, the IOF deployed it earlier this year after components ordered from the US arrived. The drone attack on the aerostat marked Hezbollah’s deepest strike in Israel since the group began launching attacks from Lebanon in support of Hamast and other Palestinian armed factions after the outbreak of the war in Gaza last October. In response to the attack, the IDF carried out strikes overnight in the northeastern Lebanese district of Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold some 100 kilometers from the Israeli border. The strike targeted a Hezbollah weapons manufacturing plant, used to build guided munitions and drones, according to the military. Lebanese media described the Israeli strike as the largest in the Baalbek region amid the war. No casualties were reported, however.


The clashes on the Lebanese-Israeli border have so far resulted in ten civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of at least 14 IDF soldiers and reservists. On the Lebanese side, more than 400 people have been killed, including 281 fighters of Hezbollah and at least 70 civilians.

Pashinyan’s Fantasies About EU/NATO Membership Won’t End Well For Armenia
Drago Bosnic, South Front, May 16 2024

Armenia is one of the oldest continually existing countries (and civilizations) in the world. Spanning millennia and starting with the ancient Kingdom of Urartu nearly 3,000 years ago, the now small nation has been limited to the South Caucasus region, particularly after the Turks committed the Armenian Genocide, one of the worst in known history, killing up to 1.5 million Armenians (in addition to well over a million native Greeks and Assyrians). In such a long span of its undoubtedly magnificent history, Armenia most likely never had a worse “leader” than Nikol Pashinyan. A man who has been promoting closer ties with Turkey instead of Russia since the 1990s pushed his way into power through the so-called “anticorruption” agenda. Pashinyan argued that the supposedly “pro-Russian” (actually patriotic) government that was in power until 2018 was allegedly “corrupt” and that he would “make things better.”

Well, he certainly changed things since 2018. In just two years of his power, Pashinyan lost most of Artsakh (better known as Nagorno-Karabakh), the complete fall of which was prevented only by Russia’s intervention. For approximately three years, Moscow’s peacekeepers were the only thing standing between the Azeri military and the remaining population of native Armenians. And yet, instead of building closer ties with Russia in order to ensure that whatever was left of Artsakh survives, Pashinyan focused on building phantom “alliances” with the political West, particularly after the latter escalated its crawling aggression against Moscow. The Kremlin was left with a rather difficult choice, either help its historical ally which was (slowly but surely) turning into anything but, or leave Yerevan to its own devices so as not to risk derailing the strategically important rapprochement with Ankara and Baku.

Unfortunately for the Armenian people, things have only gotten considerably worse in recent months. Pashinyan, a Sorosite who came to power by insisting that the government prior to 2018 was allegedly “corrupt” and “autocratic,” turned out to be truly corrupt, while his rule is effectively a dictatorship. His brutal crackdown on protesters is unprecedented, never seen under any of the previous Armenian governments. Any opposition to Pashinyan’s dictatorial rule is being quashed, including through the suppression of free press, one of the principles of “democracy” that he was so insistent on back in 2018, when press freedom actually existed. Pashinyan, once a journalist, is now sending his henchmen to arrest other journalists who oppose his suicidal policies. And yet, no matter how bad his internal schemes are, his foreign policy is far worse. Namely, Pashinyan keeps distancing himself from Russia.

According to his assessment, Yerevan is “ready to join the European Union as early as 2024.” Pashinyan actually said so at this year’s Copenhagen “Democracy” Summit. Such a statement is not only ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about the EU’s current state, but also because of the simple fact that the troubled bloc has long been exposed as a mere geopolitical pendant of NATO. Even the most naively optimistic spectator would laugh at the idea of Armenia joining the EU in 2030, let alone 2024. To put that into perspective, the neighboring Georgia has been trying to join the troubled bloc for over 20 years. In that time, its suicidal pro-Western government managed to lose around 20% of its territory and turn Russia into an enemy, destroying their centuries-old historical alliance. It seems Pashinyan is pushing Yerevan in the exact same direction. Worse yet, he plans to ally himself with Moscow’s other enemies.

Namely, Armenia will appoint a military attaché to the UK for the first time. This inexplicable move comes at a time when the latter is essentially looking to start a war with Russia. This is even worse than trying to establish closer ties with the EU, as London has no capacity to help Yerevan in any way, be it economic or military assistance. Its only motivation is to hurt Moscow’s interests in the region. However, the Kremlin is not exactly jeopardized by this, while Armenia is the one paying the price of its government’s suicidal tilt towards the political West. Earlier, the Speaker of the Armenian Parliament Alen Simonyan stated that the country is “ready to take a course towards European integration” and that “this will provide it with the greatest security.” However, in around half a decade of Pashinyan in power, Armenia’s security situation has never been this bad, perhaps even worse than during the Armenian Genocide.

Namely, the country is in serious danger of being overrun by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The opposition sees it, which is why protests have been raging for months. According to Garegin Miskaryan, Director of the Democratic Platform Foundation, the country’s geopolitical choice is the central point of contention between the Pashinyan regime and the opposition, as the former chose to focus on the political West without calculating the risks. Miskaryan believes that, in the context of a changing world order and tensions in the region, turning away from Russia is an adventure that could result in disastrous consequences. His concerns are also shared by the Armenian Apostolic Church. Namely, the Head of the northeastern Tavush diocese, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, demanded Pashinyan’s resignation, supported by everyone at a last week’s rally that involved thousands of people gathered in the center of Yerevan.

Nikol Pashinyan, we give you an hour to resign. I am ready to meet within this hour and discuss all the conditions for resignation. You no longer have any power in Armenia… They destroyed the entire security system, from the first day of their rule they turned the Church into a target, struck a blow at the pillars of our identity, denied the fact of the Armenian Genocide, destroyed the educational system, lost Artsakh. But most importantly, for the current authorities, in foreign relations, there is nothing to be said anywhere, not at any negotiating table.

It should be noted that Archbishop Galstanyan certainly didn’t do this on his own, as the Catholicos (Church leader) of All Armenians Karekin II gave his blessing for the procession that the Archbishop has been leading since May 4. It started precisely in his Tavush region, when Galstanyan announced protests in Yerevan (starting from May 9) against Pashinyan’s border delimitation agreement with Azerbaijan. The heads of all other dioceses of the Armenian Apostolic Church joined the protest, starting processions from their respective regions of Armenia. The Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the governing body of the Church, stated:

We consider processes carried out under the pretext of border demarcation in the Tavush region of Armenia to be extremely dangerous without comprehensive and guaranteed solutions.

However, Pashinyan outright rejected the Armenian Church’s appeals.

UK Escalates Its Inexplicable Desire To Start WW3 And Get Wiped Off The Map
Drago Bosnic, South Front, May 16 2024

The history of Russophobia goes back centuries in many Western countries. The perpetual fear and hatred for the Eurasian giant pushed Europe into a bloodbath several times in the last two centuries, resulting in dozens of millions of dead and the “old continent” virtually razed to the ground. Unfortunately, the political West learned nothing, despite the fact that its attempts to destroy Russia failed every single time. And yet, Moscow still tried to establish (and maintain) good relations after centuries of such futile attacks. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), there’s still no shortage of Russophobia in the political West, whether it’s the previously latent one or the much more blatant hatred unashamedly demonstrated in recent years. In most countries dominated by the US this has become the “new normal” ever since the special military operation started.

However, of all Washington DC’s allies, vassals and satellite states, there’s one that makes even the endemically Russophobic countries such as Poland or the Baltic states seem somewhat “moderate” – the UK. Namely, London’s pathological Russophobia is quite difficult to explain with the rather simplified logic of “thalassocracy vs. tellurocracy” competition. There has to be something more to it. Because the UK is quite literally jeopardizing its own existence by escalating its mindless hatred for Moscow. The Kremlin is certainly aware of this, which is why it has been considering the option of cutting even the most basic diplomatic ties with Downing Street. And who could possibly blame Russia given the fact that the UK is doing everything in its power to destroy whatever’s left of their relationship? London has simply crossed all red lines.

However, things are getting worse, as nothing seems to be enough for the British warmongering leadership. After Boris Johnson made sure that the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict continues, resulting in over half a million Ukrainian deaths, the UK kept sending not only ever more advanced and longer-range weapons to the Kiev regime, but even the pointless depleted uranium munitions that British tanks didn’t even get the chance to use (partly because London insisted on keeping these tanks away from the frontlines). Still, to make things worse, back in May last year, the mainstream propaganda machine reported that British special forces, specifically SAS (Special Air Service), SRR (Special Reconnaissance Regiment) and SBS (Special Boat Service), are directly involved in the fighting. And yet, by February this year, it turned out that this was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Namely, at the time, the Times essentially praised the British military’s contribution to the destruction of Russian naval assets. According to the report, the UK’s General Staff, headed by Admiral Tony Radakin, directly took part in planning and executing attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Radakin also seems to have been involved in other covert operations in Ukraine, all aimed at diminishing Russian capabilities. Worse yet, it seems that other NATO assets have also been involved, presumably various ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) platforms, meaning that London certainly wasn’t alone in this “noble endeavor.” In other words, this isn’t a simple arming of the neo-Nazi junta forces, but a direct participation in hostilities. For all intents and purposes, it’s tantamount to a declaration of war. And yet, once again, this certainly isn’t where things end.

Namely, the Head of the US SOCOM, General Bryan Fenton, revealed details about the deeper involvement of British special forces in Ukraine. According to Fenton, the Pentagon has been “learning about the ongoing war mostly through the eyes of our UK special operations partners who had been testing new approaches to modern warfare in the theater”. Among other things, he noted that these units were “observing and advising on the use of drones” and “the way a ship in the Black Sea navigates.” According to military sources, their tasks are to track the movement of Russian troops and provide accurate targeting data, as well as effectively guide NATO long-range weapons. This was also confirmed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who recently admitted that British and French soldiers have been directly helping the Kiev regime forces fire long-range missiles at Russian targets.

And yet, while even France seems to be backing off after its ambassador was relayed some very clear messages about the possible consequences, the UK is refusing to deescalate. Its Defense Secretary Grant Shapps confirmed that London has backed the neo-Nazi junta’s use of British-supplied long-range weapons to attack Moscow’s forces, including those in Crimea. For some inexplicable reason, the UK believes that Russia will leave such unashamedly hostile actions unanswered. Responsibility and patience may be the bedrock of Russian foreign policy, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the Eurasian giant will follow these principles even when it becomes ultimately self-defeating to do so. When Paris decided to escalate its involvement, including nuclear threats, the Kremlin promptly explained how many minutes such a conflict would last.

Now, France is nearly 2.5 times bigger than the UK, meaning that it would be far easier for Russia to simply wipe it off the map. And Moscow certainly has a plethora of ways to achieve this. A single Russian IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) could easily destroy up to half a dozen major cities in the UK, which amounts to most of its urban areas. Instead of focusing on its rapidly growing domestic issues, including the fact that its military is falling apart (even jeopardizing its strategic capabilities), London keeps fantasizing about defeating Russia, a global military superpower that not even the US can match in many respects. Although the Kremlin is still trying its best not to push the world into the abyss by reciprocating NATO aggression, it may soon be left with no other choice. It’s yet to be seen how Moscow will react, but the UK will pay the price of its belligerence.

By niqnaq | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

the cradle

May 16, 2024 – 2:03 pm

In urgent ICJ hearing, South Africa blasts Israel’s ‘explicit genocidal intent’
The Cradle, May 16 2024

The International Court of Justice held hearings on May 16 on South Africa’s request for additional emergency measures over Israel’s ongoing operation in Rafah. South Africa’s new appeal calls for an urgent halt to Israeli attacks on Rafah, which is sheltering hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Pretoria presented its argument to the court on Thursday, and Israel is scheduled to present its own the following day. As the hearing began, ICJ President Judge Nawaf Salam presented the details of the South African case and the provisional measures it has requested.  Vusi Madonsela, South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, delivered the opening statement of his country’s delegation, thanking the court for scheduling the hearing for the “earliest possible date” in light of the “urgency of the situation” in Rafah.

South Africa filed the application last week, on May 10. Legal experts say the urgency with which the court date was set indicates that the ICJ is taking the matter seriously. Madonsela added that South Africa has returned to the ICJ to “do what it can to stop the genocide” that has almost “knocked Gaza off the map, shocked the conscience of humanity.” Madonsela added that since the ICJ ruling in January, which ordered the Israeli military to prevent any genocidal acts in Gaza, Israel has “willfully breached the binding orders of the court” and escalated attacks against Palestinian civilians. The severity of the situation demands “urgent and speedy proceedings to preserve the rights of the Palestinian people, a commitment that South Africa takes seriously.” South Africa’s second representative at the ICJ, Vaughan Lowe, said that since South Africa’s latest request:

It has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part of the end game in which Gaza is utterly destroyed. This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian people. It was Rafah that brought South Africa to the court, but it is all Palestinians as a national ethnic and racial group who need the protection from genocide that the court can order.

Lowe also rejected Israel’s claims of acting in self-defense. “The prohibition on genocide is absolute,” he said, adding that a state’s self-defense does not extend to the territory it occupies and does not give that state a right to “unlimited violence.” Another representative of the delegation, John Dugard, said:

World leaders repeatedly warned that an assault on Rafah would cause forced and arbitrary evacuation of the already displaced Palestinians to even less hospitable parts of Gaza without adequate food, water, shelter and hospitals would have disastrous consequences. Israel has not heeded this warning.

Prior to the Israeli operation in Rafah, over a million Palestinians, most of whom displaced from other areas of Gaza, were residing in the city before Israel’s attack on May 7 forced hundreds of thousands to flee upwards towards the coastal area of Al-Mawasi. Dozens of people have since been killed, including children, as a result of the bombing of the southernmost city. Max Du Plessis of the South African delegation said the attack in Rafah shows clear “genocidal intent.” South Africa made an urgent request in February for the court to consider whether Israel’s decision to launch an operation in Rafah “requires that the court uses its power to prevent further imminent breach of the rights of Palestinians in Gaza.”

The country had filed its case at the end of December, declaring that Israel was breaching obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in their military campaign in Gaza. On Jan 26, the ICJ ordered that Israel take steps to prevent acts of genocide by its military in Gaza and punish incitements to genocide. The court, however, stopped short of ordering a ceasefire. South Africa had been aiming for an ICJ order of an emergency halt to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Any decision of the sort would need backing from the UNSC.

US spy balloon crashes in northeast Syria
The Cradle, May 16 2024

A sizable surveillance aerostat owned by the US military crashed on 15 May near the town of Rmelan in Syria’s northeastern Al-Hasakah province. Footage on social media showed the aerostat descending from the sky and, subsequently, its debris on the ground close to Rmelan, which was also near a US base. Allegedly, US fighter jets were seen flying over the vicinity during the event.

The US maintains several illegal bases in Syria, including the one in Rmelan, primarily in the northeastern provinces of Al-Hasakah and Deir Ezzor, as well as Al-Tanf in the southeast, purportedly to combat ISIS remnants. Several local sources said the spy balloon crashed due to a technical malfunction, while others indicate that unidentified culprits shot down the aerostat. The Pentagon has yet to comment.

The US initially introduced aerostats to its Syrian bases years ago, although they were considerably smaller than the one that crashed near Rmelan. The significant size of this aerostat indicates it likely carried sophisticated surveillance equipment, potentially including aerial radar systems. The day prior, the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah carried out multiple operations against Israel, including the downing of an Israeli surveillance balloon in the south of Lebanon and the demolition of the launching base and the control equipment utilized for its operation.

Egypt dismisses Israeli scheme for reopening of Rafah crossing: Report
The Cradle, May 16 2024

Egyptian officials have shot down an Israeli proposal to coordinate the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Gaza and to “manage its future operation,” according to Egyptian sources who spoke with Reuters. Shin Bet officials reportedly presented the plan to Cairo on May 15, which included “a mechanism for how to manage the crossing after an Israeli withdrawal.” The Israeli delegation traveled to the neighboring nation “mainly to discuss matters around Rafah, given recent developments,” according to an official in Tel Aviv cited by the British news outlet. Israeli spokesman David Mencer on Wednesday claimed Egypt rejected an Israeli request to open Rafah to Gazan civilians who wish to flee. These comments were followed by Netanyahu accusing Cairo of holding the people of Gaza “hostage” by not working with Israel. Netanyahu said just one week after the Israeli military violently took control of the Rafah crossing:

I mean, that’s not our problem. We’re not holding up the opening of Rafah. I hope Egypt considers what I’m saying now. Nobody should hold the Palestinian population hostage in any way, and I’m not holding them hostage.

In response, Cairo denounced what it described as “desperate attempts” to shift blame for the blockage of aid. Israel’s takeover of the Rafah crossing is a breach of the Philadelphi Accord, which was added to the Israel–Egypt peace treaty in 2005 after the evacuation of Israeli settlements in Gaza. Before Tel Aviv took over the crossing, Cairo warned publicly that any such move was a red line that would put the peace treaty at risk. Western media reported this week that Tel Aviv has amassed enough troops near Rafah to launch a wide-scale invasion of the besieged city, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee for their lives. As the crisis worsens, Egypt has announced it would formally join South Africa’s case accusing Israel of violating the UN Genocide Convention in Gaza at the ICJ.

Jabalia camp Gaza’s ‘main battle zone’ as fierce clashes rock northern city
The Cradle, May 16 2024

The Palestinian resistance confronted Israeli troops in fierce battles in north Gaza’s city of Jabalia on May 16. Hamas’ military wing said in a statement on Thursday:

Qassam Mujahideen attacked the rear lines of forces invading east of the city of Jabalia, and blew up two D9 bulldozers with a Tandum shell and an explosive device.

Earlier, it said it targeted and destroyed an Israeli Merkava tank east of Jabalia with an explosive device, killing and wounding its crew. The Qassam Brigades also “destroyed a Zionist troop carrier with an Al-Yassin 105 shell, leaving its crew dead and wounded in the Block 2 area of ​​Jabalia Camp, north of the Gaza Strip.” Other groups, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Quds Brigades, are also engaged in the fighting. As clashes between the army and resistance rage across Jabalia, Israel has stepped up its indiscriminate bombardment of the city. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported:

In the last couple of hours, we have recorded a clear surge in bombardment, not only on residential buildings, but also on the camp’s central market. The place is very densely populated.

Al Jazeera added that an Israeli drone strike targeted a kindergarten in the Jabalia camp, injuring at least five Palestinians. Israeli forces also targeted an ambulance and injured a number of medics. Jabalia camp is now the “main battle zone,” Abu Azzoum said. Citing Israeli soldiers, Haaretz reported on May 14 that troops currently fighting in Jabalia are frustrated to be back in northern Gaza, where resistance fighters remain entrenched several months after Tel Aviv claimed it “dismantled” Hamas. The soldiers also say they are having to adapt to the changing tactics of resistance fighters, who have increasingly been rigging buildings with explosives and detonating them with Israeli troops inside.

Traditional tactics, including RPG attacks on tanks and vehicles, sniping operations, and mortar attacks on troop concentrations, continue to be deployed. The Qassam Brigades have released several videos over the past few days showcasing their operations against troops in Jabalia.

The Palestinian resistance is also confronting Israeli forces in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. Israeli forces seized the Rafah border crossing to Egypt on May 7 and began pushing into the city under the cover of heavy and indiscriminate bombardment. Hundreds of thousands have been forcibly displaced by the operation, which has also severely hindered efforts to bring aid into Gaza. The Qassam Brigades “targeted a Zionist Merkava tank with an Al-Yassin 105 shell, south of Al-Mashrou’ Junction, east of the city of Rafah,” the group said on Wednesday afternoon.

US troops finish installation of floating pier in Gaza
The Cradle, May 16 2024

The US army announced on 16 May that it installed the temporary humanitarian pier on the shore of Gaza, as part of the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) initiative to bring aid into the strip. CENTCOM said in a statement:

Today at approximately 7:40 a.m. (Gaza time) United States Central Command personnel supporting the humanitarian mission to deliver additional humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in need anchored a temporary pier to the beach in Gaza. As part of this effort, no US troops entered Gaza. Trucks carrying humanitarian assistance are expected to begin moving ashore in the coming days. The United Nations will receive the aid and coordinate its distribution into Gaza. 

JLOTS is made up of two parts, a floating pier where aid shipments will be offloaded, and a causeway for transferring the aid to the distribution point in Gaza. The UK said on May 15 that its first aid shipment, which includes thousands of temporary shelters, is on the way from Cyprus to the strip. London said:

The aid will be distributed within Gaza as soon as feasible. Tthe initial goal is for 90 aid trucks to enter the strip on a daily basis.

According to the Pentagon, US aid is already on board a ship docked at the Israeli port of Ashdod. A Pentagon spokesman announced last week that construction of the pier and causeway were near complete, but that weather conditions made their installation unsafe. Officials confirmed to CNN at the time that even once operational, weather conditions could continue to pose safety risks while aid is being delivered via the pier. They also expressed security concerns over the timing of the pier operation, which coincides with Israel’s operation in Rafah and relentless, indiscriminate bombardment of the city.

The planned staging ground for the pier operation has been hit by the resistance’s mortars and rockets several times in past weeks. Pentagon spox Maj-Gen Patrick Ryder said this week that security and “force protection” will be of “paramount concern” during aid delivery operations, but that the Dept of Defense is “confident that we’ll have the security in place that we need.” Others are less optimistic. Former CIA military analyst and counter-terrorism officer Michael DiMino told Responsible Statecraft on 15 May:

Hamas is already reconstituting cells in the north and elsewhere in Gaza. There are intelligence gaps on the ground that could allow for a surprise attack. As the pier prepares to begin operations, maintaining security both around the pier itself and at the point where aid is transferred to civilians ashore remains a top concern.

In late April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted that it was “possible” that the US forces operating the pier could be attacked. Austin also said troops would have the ability and authority to open fire into the besieged enclave “to protect themselves.”

USAID whistleblowers accuse Biden of ‘direct complicity’ in Gaza famine
The Cradle, May 16 2024

Current and former officials from USAID and the State Dept say the White House has ignored months of internal warnings about the spread of famine in the besieged Gaza Strip, according to an in-depth investigation by the Independent. A USAID employee told the British daily:

I believe the US to be complicit in creating the conditions for famine. Not only has our response been woefully inadequate, but we’re actively responsible in large part for it.

Internal documents reviewed by the Independent show that staffers have repeatedly warned USAID administrator Samantha Power and other senior leaders about the intensifying crisis in Gaza “often to no avail.” A USAID staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity is quoted as saying:

What was surprising to me, and deeply disappointing, was the fact that we were hearing nothing about imminent famine in Gaza.

According to the investigation, at least 19 internal dissent memos have been sent since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza by USAID staff, with one of the most recent ones chastising the White House for its “failure to uphold international humanitarian principles and to adhere to its mandate to save lives.” In an internal dissent cable leaked to HuffPost in early April, officials warned that “the threshold to support a famine determination has likely already been crossed” and that the level of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza was “unprecedented in modern history.” A 15-year homeland security official told Responsible Statecraft earlier this week:

Having worked in the administration during the Afghan withdrawal and also the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so many efforts were spearheaded and led, and normal procedures were bypassed given the urgent humanitarian situation. Here, however, it has been a totally different ballgame. There are systemic issues with how we issue Palestinian cases. Any kind of initiative to expedite help for Palestinians has been blocked or quelled or slowed down dramatically in a way that I’ve never seen before. As the months dragged on, it became evident that the dissent channels that the State Dept likes to tout are about placating staff more than actually listening to those with deep regional and policy expertise and making changes.

Furthermore, the USAID whistleblowers who spoke with the Independent described Washington’s public proclamations of doing all it can to stop the spread of hunger as “very disingenuous.” The US officials say:

I don’t believe that the POTUS, Israel’s most important ally and benefactor, has so little leverage that he can’t force them to take meaningful steps to really allow in the amount of aid that is necessary to save lives. It feels like there was no real effort to force Israel’s hands in terms of ensuring greater access to humanitarian assistance.

Jan Egeland, the Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian organization with dozens of aid workers operating in Gaza, told the British daily that there is a “double standard” from the White House when it comes to Israel. Egeland says:

The administration could have (pressed Israel to cease its aid restrictions) through the application of Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits assistance to countries restricting US-funded humanitarian assistance; it could have done so through the withholding of arms shipments; it could have done so by supporting resolutions at the UN calling on Israel to stop restricting humanitarian assistance. Instead, its diplomatic impotence has been astounding.

Dozens of Palestinians, most of them children, have died from starvation as hundreds of thousands are living under conditions of “full-blown famine” in the north of the enclave. Despite the critical situation, the Israeli army has routinely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Moreover, mobs of Israeli settlers regularly attack the small trickle of aid deliveries headed for the strip, destroying the food and attacking truck drivers. On May 16, the World Food Programme announced that it ran out of stock in southern Rafah and had suspended food aid distributions there since May 11. As conditions worse, US CENTCOM announced on Thursday it had anchored a floating pier off the coast of Gaza that will allegedly allow for limited aid deliveries. Speaking to the Independent, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former high-ranking USAID official, described Washington’s plan as a “major policy failure.” Hhe said:

When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets in Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.

Israeli army wipes out five of its own in latest ‘friendly fire’ incident
The Cradle, May 16 2024

The Israeli army said on 16 May that five of its soldiers were killed in north Gaza’s Jabalia the day before in an incident of friendly fire. The soldiers were all members of the Paratroopers Brigade’s 202nd Battalion. According to the army investigation, an Israeli tank fired two shells at the building where they were stationed. After seeing a gun barrel in one of the windows and mistaking the soldiers for resistance fighters, the tank opened fire, the probe said. The incident is currently being investigated further.

Dozens of friendly fire incidents have been reported since the start of the Israeli ground war in the Gaza Strip in late October. Experts have said Tel Aviv has one of the highest friendly-fire ratios in recent military history. Wednesday’s incident came as Israeli troops take heavy losses in northern Gaza, particularly Jabalia. Israeli forces are now back in the north of Gaza, months after the army said it had been cleared of resistance fighters. Haaretz reported on May 14:

The IDF failed to fully assess the scale of Hamas’ military infrastructure in Gaza.

Soldiers cited in the report say they are having to adapt to new tactics by resistance fighters, who are increasingly rigging buildings with explosives and detonating them with Israeli troops inside.

Israeli troops withdrew from north Gaza’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood on Wednesday after a week of fierce battles. Last week, Tel Aviv confirmed the killing of five Israeli soldiers in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood. According to an army probe, they were killed by explosives detonated by resistance fighters. Intense fighting continues to rage across Jabalia. Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, said in a statement on May 16 May

We destroyed a Zionist troop carrier with an Al-Yassin 105 shell, leaving its crew dead and wounded in the Block 2 area of ​​Jabalia Camp, north of the Gaza Strip.

Other groups, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement’s Quds Brigades, are also deeply involved in the fighting and have been showcasing their operations on their media pages.

‘Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands’: Former US official
The Cradle, May 16 2024

A Jewish American official in the US government publicly resigned on 15 May in protest of President Joe Biden’s support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The letter from former special assistant to the chief of staff in the interior department, Lily Greenberg Call, reads:

I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In her letter, she accuses Joe Biden of using Jewish people to justify US support for the mass killing of Palestinians and says the US president “has the blood of innocent people on his hands.” Call asserts that Washington has long enabled “Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation,” highlighting that Biden has the power to end the suffering of civilians in Gaza. She said:

The President has the power to call for a lasting cease-fire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The US has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable.

In an interview with AP on Thursday, Call pointed to comments made by Biden at a Hannukah event where he said, “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe,” and at an event at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the Oct 7 Palestinian resistance operation was driven by an “ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people.” Call noted that her ancestors were killed by “state-sponsored violence.” She said:

He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong.

Her resignation coincided with the 76th anniversary of the Nakba. Call is at least the fifth mid- or senior-level government staffer to resign in protest of the White House’s military and diplomatic support of the genocide in Gaza and is the second political appointee to do so after an education department official of Palestinian heritage resigned in January. Earlier this week, US army officer Harrison Mann resigned from the DIA, citing his nation’s “unconditional” support for Israel, which he said enabled “the killing and starvation of innocent Palestinians.” In February, US airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in protest to the official US position outside of Israel’s embassy in Washington. Bushnell said in a live stream before the act:

I will no longer be complicit in genocide.

By niqnaq | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

strategic culture

May 16, 2024 – 10:05 am

In Slovakia, the lone gunman strikes again
Stephen Karganovic, Strategic Culture, May 16 2024

The “lone gunman,” that cartoonish figure that for the last several decades, at least since Nov 1963, has regularly framed most high-profile assassinations, has struck again, this time in disobedient Slovakia. He always pops up whenever his presence is required to warn misfits and discipline even team players who are inattentive to their tasks. The assassination attempt on the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico fits (no pun intended) that pattern. Fico’s political record going back for decades may have provoked a measure of distrust in globalist circles. However, his electoral victory and return to power in the fall of last year probably would have been treated as a manageable challenge had Fico been rotten enough to act as his colleagues routinely do, saying one thing before elections and doing the opposite afterwards. He has, instead, turned out to be a man true to his word, certainly quashing any rumours that he had ever been recruited as one of WEF’s Young Leaders.

At a critical juncture for the globalist string-pullers, when being a cooperative team player is considered de rigeur, he chose to go off the beaten path with other outcasts like Victor Orban and to champion old fashioned values, such as Slovakia’s national sovereignty. Fico however did not just insist on Slovakia’s sovereignty, which would have been bad enough, but also on other despised notions, equally discredited in present-day Europe: Statehood, Nationhood, Religion, and Family. It is his adherence to those values, once the cornerstone of the European civilisation before its cultural implosion, that made Fico a lone gunman target. But to these shortcomings several other, no less bothersome and also potentially life threatening faults, should be added. Over the last several months, as Project Ukraine was turning into a shipwreck, Fico defiantly refused to allow military aid for the Kiev regime, called for cancelling anti-Russia sanctions, and repeatedly expressed the prohibited notion that Ukraine will be defeated.

As if that were not enough, there is more. In a long-forgotten tragedy in 2006, a Slovak aeroplane mysteriously crashed whilst flying back from Kosovo. On board, in addition to Slovak peacekeepers, there was most interesting cargo. Slovakian specialists and forensic experts were involved in the exhumation of several mass graves in Kosovo where Serbian victims had been buried and they were bringing the evidence back home. It turned out that many of those victims exhibited thorax incisions which strongly suggested that they had been used as unwilling organ donors by Albanian traffickers. Readers  whose memory is still unimpaired will recall the controversy about human organ extraction and trafficking in Kosovo that raged at the time, culminating in the incriminating 2010 report on this topic submitted to the EU by Swiss investigator Dick Marty.

The Slovak team handed a set of the evidence it had unearthed to NATO, of which Slovakia had by then become a member. But just to make sure that their findings would not disappear in some NATO black hole, they took the precaution of carrying an extra set home with them. That evidence was on board the aeroplane that inexplicably crashed and it perished along with about 40 Slovak personnel whose mouths concerning their gruesome findings in Kosovo were thus forever sealed. As custom ordains in such situations, a hasty and superficial investigation was conducted by Slovak authorities, its conclusions were declared a state secret, and then sealed. Five years ago, the 2006 plane crash again was in the limelight as new evidence emerged that the event may not have been an accident after all because of an explosive device that was placed on board. The Slovak parliament opened an inquiry into the matter which Robert Fico wholeheartedly and publicly supported. In addition to his more recent gaffes, that also must have been a huge strike against him.

Predictably, responsibility for the shooting was instantly attributed to a lone individual who allegedly bore Fico a political grudge and decided to kill him. How that risible, Jack Ruby-type explanation will pan out, we may soon see as Slovakian authorities press their inquiry. But irrespective of what Slovakian investigators uncover and how much of it their NATO overlords allow them to publish, certain preliminary conclusions about this ghastly attempted murder may still be drawn. Based on the totality of past experience, these conclusions are bound to be ultimately corroborated and will most certainly withstand the test of time. The gangster hit on the Slovakian Prime Minister will have had its intended effect whether he survives or not. It was an intimidatory message sent loud and clear to all concerned not even to think of challenging the rules based order.

The nature and reach of the “rules” as pertaining to them was made starkly clear the other day in Slovakia. As the position of the collective West crumbles, all European leaders who might be thinking of flip-flopping or asserting their nations’ interests in preference to obediently following orders have been put on notice. If Robert Fico was vulnerable, so are they. And this applies not just to pathetic excuses for national leaders who are presently in office, but also to those aspiring to replace them. More widely, the attempted murder of Robert Fico sends a message to outstanding non-political public figures of many profiles, such as Archbishop Vigano, whose bold statements, coherent analyses, and compelling appeals to the public threaten to collapse the manufactured consensus.

Emir of Kuwait dissolves the National Assembly and takes aim at the Muslim Brotherhood
Steven Sahiounie, Strategic Culture, May 16, 2024

Dr Walid al-Tabtabai, a former Kuwaiti member of the National Assembly, and a man integrally involved in the fundraising of the Radical Islamic terrorists who invaded Syria and killed thousands of unarmed civilians, was arrested by Kuwaiti authorities on May 12 after he posted on Twitter, accusing unnamed countries of interfering in Kuwait’s internal affairs, calling this “unacceptable” and expressing hope that the National Assembly would be reinstated “with all its constitutional powers.” Experts suspect al-Tabtabai was referring to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who have both cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood in an effort to reform their countries into places of peace and prosperity. On Sunday, Kuwait’s public prosecution issued a statement saying it had ordered the arrest of one person and the detention of others, on the grounds that they had posted “expressions” on their Twitter accounts “containing attacks on the rights and authority” of Kuwait’s emir.

Al-Tabtabai obtained a PhD in Islamic studies from Al-Azhar University, and was an assistant professor at Kuwait University before being elected to the National Assembly in 1996. Kuwait is in a process of reform, and purging the National Assembly of Muslim Brotherhood influence and domination. Egypt and Tunisia both threw off their “Arab Spring” cloak of Muslim Brotherhood domination which had been imposed on them by Obama to benefit American and Israeli interests. During the US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change, Kuwaiti MPs as well as Salafi clerics were funding and exporting armed terrorists, whom they referred to as “jihadis.” The Kuwaiti ruling family did not publically support the funding of terrorists in Syria beginning in 2011, but instead turned a blind eye to the operation to overthrow the Damascus government, which was unsuccessful.

Kuwait had been a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system. The National Assembly consists of 50 elected members who represent different constituencies across the country. The Emir holds extensive powers, including the ability to dissolve the National Assembly, dismiss the Prime Minister, and issue decrees. The ruling Al-Sabah family has been in power for centuries, and this has led to criticism of limited political reforms. Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Mishal Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said on May 11 he would suspend the parliament for up to four years, declaring that he had made the move “to save the country.” The 83-year-old said on Friday:

Unfortunately, we have faced some unimaginable, unbearable difficulties and impediments. We were left with no option other than taking this hard decision to rescue the country and protect its higher national interests and resources of the nation. I will not allow that democracy will be exploited to destroy the state.

The leader of Kuwait was wrestling with the ever present gridlock in the National Assembly due to the overwhelming chaos produced by its’ members following the Muslim Brotherhood, which stands on the same political platform as ISIS, Al Qeada, and other such terrorist groups cut from the same cloth. Al-Tabtabai is a follower of Radical Islam, which is a political ideology, and is not a religion or a sect. He is one of the chief supporters of funding the terrorist groups in Syria. Kuwait, one of the few semi-democratic countries in the Middle East, and the parliament had only been in existence for one month, having been elected in Apr 2024, with opposition MPs gaining the majority of the seats. It had not even met yet before the Emir’s dissolution decree.

Al-Tabtabai has been convicted of numerous crimes in the past, but while serving in the National Assembly enjoyed immunity. In Dec 2019, the former Emir of Kuwait pardoned him of past crimes. Now, with a new leader on the throne since Dec 12 2023, al-Tabtabai has been arrested, and will face the full wrath of the law. His arrest is not just the downfall of one man, but is a collective punishment of all the Muslim Brotherhood followers in Kuwait in the National Assembly or clerics, who have prevented the Kuwaiti government from necessary reforms to promote the peace and prosperity of all citizens. Although Kuwait has among the largest oil reserves in the world, it lags far behind the dramatic pace of development as compared to its neighbors Saudi Arabia and UAE. According to Hussain Abd’ul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, all Arab countries that witnessed change between 2004 and 2011 saw Islamists climb the ladder of democratic election to take over government.

In Kuwait a hybrid system emerged that allowed for a free press and the democratic election of the National Assembly, but kept the last word for the Emir. Kuwait came close to being a constitutional monarchy. Every time Kuwait elected its representatives and formed a cabinet, the gridlock returned. With a population of a million or so, it was expected to compete with Dubai and Abu Dhabi in terms of growth and attraction. Yet, the democratic gridlock inhibited growth, and the once-shiny Kuwait City became shabby and backward compared with its oil-rich peers. One of the main problems of the Kuwaiti democracy was its Muslim Brotherhood, whose lawmakers undermined the government at every turn. Democracy had become synonymous with Islamist tyranny, where elections are held routinely, but the rule of law is always absent.

Since 2011, al-Tabtabai and other Kuwaitis were donating millions of dollars to fund the terrorists in Syria, who were not only targeting the government, but who were killing unarmed Syrian civilians in their homes and in the streets. The monies were flown from Kuwait to Turkey and Jordan, where the cash was distributed to the various terrorist groups. Because Kuwait has been a US ally for decades, it was compliant with a directive from the Obama Oval Office to support the US-NATO attack on Syria. The US, UK, France, Turkey and Jordan set up the “Friends of Syria” group which allowed for donations outside the official channels to supply funds and supplies to the terrorists. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were among the biggest supporters of the US-NATO project, which supported Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and Al Qaeda. In 2014, the Kuwaiti role involved not only creating military operation rooms and directing the course of certain battles, but also giving direct orders to commit massacres and then boasting about them.

Al-Tabtabai is known as the director of the siege and massacre of Nubl and al-Zahraa. He made sure that the aid collected in Kuwait reached the terrorists either in the form of cash to cover the fighters’ salaries, or in the form of arms shipments, by numerous personal visits to Syria. One of his visits to Idlib lasted four months during which he participated in planning some attacks on civilians. Today, Idlib is the last terrorist controlled area in Syria, and is commanded by Mohammed al-Julani, formerly of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Jibhat al-Nusra and currently the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The US, UK and the UN continue to supply Idlib with truckloads of humanitarian aid which first passes through the hands of Julani and his militia.

In Sep 2013, al-Tabtabai appeared in a video clip on Youtube during his participation in preparing and launching Grad missiles at Latakia, west of Idlib.  The terrorists thanked al-Tabtabai for his support during the siege imposed on the two towns of Nubl and al-Zahraa in the Aleppo countryside. Those villages were populated by civilians who were Shite Muslims. The massacre of men, women and children carried out over months of attacks by the al-Tabtabai supported terrorists were purely sectarian in nature, and had no military objective of bringing down the Syrian government. In Jun 2013, a massacre was committed in the village of Hatla in Deir al-Zour’s countryside in which 60 victims were killed. People were killed with Kuwaiti knives and purely for sectarian reasons. Just like Jabhat al-Nusra boasted at the time that it “cleansed Hatla of the Shia,” Kuwaiti Sheikh Shafi al-Ajami boasted of “slaughtering Shias with knives” amidst cheers and cries of “God is great.”

Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti media outlets celebrated the massacre each in its own way. When a journalist from Asia News Agency asked Ajami a few days later “if he feared that the Kuwaiti authorities might arrest him,” he replied: “This is an issue that concerns me and the Kuwaiti authorities,” who did not lift a finger. The Council of Supporters of Kuwait was behind the creation of the Damascus operations room in Sep 2013. It included Jaysh al-Islam, al-Furqan Brigades, al-Habib al-Mustafa Brigades, the Islamic Ahrar al-Sham Movement, the Companions Brigades and Battalions and the Army of the Muslims Brigade. One Salafi group in Kuwait, the Great Kuwait Campaign, had been so successful in raising money for terrorist groups that 12k terrorists were fully armed as a result of their pledges in 2013. The campaign was publicly launched in Jun 2013, at the same time as the Hatla massacre, and was titled: “Kuwait’s Major Campaign to Prepare 12k Invaders for Syria.” The campaign collected about $30m, and its main promoter was al-Tabtabai.

In Jun 2013, al-Tabtabai was working alongside a terrorist group in Aleppo that gathered and trained armed men to fight in Syria. Tabtabai spoke to al-Jazeera TV and said it was the final day of training for more than 3k armed men who have newly arrived in Aleppo. He said another 1k militants will be “graduated” in northwestern city of Idlib the following day. Al-Tabtabai said they had promised the Syria militants to train 12k terrorists to send to Syria. On Jan 28 2019 a Kuwaiti court sentenced al-Tabtabai to seven years in jail for failing to tell his wife he divorced her and continuing to have sexual relations with her. She only found out about the divorce when he refused to support his newborn daughter. Regardless of his pious Islamic reputation, he broke Islamic law by having relations with a woman outside of marriage, and forced his ex-wife to also commit a sin, unknowingly, for his pleasure. At the time, he was outside Kuwait and already facing a 42-month jail term handed down in July 2018 in another case for storming parliament and assaulting police.

Kuwait has been actively pursuing major developments and reforms to diversify its economy and revamp its infrastructure. Kuwait’s Vision 2035 has taken center stage, aiming to transform the nation into a regional powerhouse by diversifying its economy, reducing reliance on oil revenues, and increasing private sector participation. The government is actively working to attract foreign investment, foster innovation, and enhance the ease of doing business. Kuwait is steadfast in improving its infrastructure and enhancing connectivity to position itself as a business and tourism hub. Remarkable advancements have been made in renewable energy sources, with the country aiming to produce 15% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. In Syria, where the Kuwaitis helped to destroy the country and infrastructure, currently the people have only three hours of electricity per day.

Kuwait deeply values its cultural heritage and is investing in the revival and preservation of its historical sites and landmarks, such as the UNESCO World Heritage Site nominations for Failaka Island and the city of Al-Jahra. In Aleppo, Syria, according to the UN, the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, the Kuwaitis participated in the wholesale destruction of antiquities far surpassing anything that Kuwait has. Kuwait’s new initiatives aim to promote artists, galleries, museums and cultural centers to boost tourism. Before the Syrian war began in 2011, in which the Kuwaitis participated, Syria was voted as the safest tourist destination in the Mediterranean region by the French Association of Tourist Agents in their annual conference. Kuwait now wants to increase women’s participation in the workforce, while in Syria women have full rights the same as men in the civil code, and are doctors, lawyers, judges, and a past Speaker of the Syrian Parliament was a woman.

Why is Anglo-Saxon media so desperate over possible Western involvement in Zelensky’s assassination attempt?
Lucas Leiroz, Strategic Culture, May 15 2024

It has long seemed evident that Western powers want to remove Zelensky from power in Kiev. The Ukrainian president no longer seems to have enough political strength to continue leading the country in the current context of war. Being seen as a “beggar” by most Western public opinion, Zelensky is quickly “exhausting his political image,” according to the words of former US Sec State Victoria Nuland, as revealed in leaked Pentagon documents. The international pressure for Zelensky to call elections in 2024 appears to be a maneuver for the Ukrainian leader to be removed from office in a “democratic” and “fair” way. Only with a new president will it be possible to renew the pro-Ukrainian lobby in Western countries and revitalize popular support for NATO assistance. However, Zelensky appears to be reluctant to step down.

The Ukrainian president has carried out several purges since last year, dismissing or arresting some officials on suspicion of conspiracy. Furthermore, there is no expectation that elections will actually take place in Ukraine. With his popularity declining drastically, mainly due to draconian forced mobilization measures, Zelensky knows that he is unlikely to be re-elected, which is why he does not want to risk his position. Recently, the Ukrainian security service dismantled a plot to assassinate Zelensky. The suspects captured by the authorities were members of the president’s personal security team and spent months collecting information about Zelensky’s routine to facilitate the creation of an assassination plan. Apparently, conspirators planned to infiltrate military units and launch an artillery attack on government facilities, killing not only the president, but also some other high-level officials.

As expected, the Ukrainian government quickly accused the Russians of being behind the attack plot, even though there was no evidence of Russian intelligence participation in the plan. The accusation appears to have been an attempt to create a “false flag” situation, trying to attribute responsibility to the Russians for a crime committed by other agents. In my column for a Russian newspaper, I commented on the case and stated two obvious facts: there is no evidence of Russian participation and, considering the clear Western interest in removing Zelensky, it is very likely that NATO countries were behind the plot. This type of opinion was supposed to be common to any analyst paying attention to events in Ukraine, since Western leaders’ dissatisfaction with Zelensky is a publicly known fact. However, the Western media was shocked by my report and decided to react desperately.

On May 9, the American newspaper Daily Beast published an article accusing me of being a “mysterious fraudster” for commenting on the topic. According to the author, Shannon Vavra, an alleged Washington-based security expert, my opinion is wrong and invalid because it cites Russian sources. At the same time, she uses biased data from the US State Dept to defame pro-Russian activists in Brazil. Furthermore, she accuses me, without evidence, of inserting “Kremlin disinformation into Brazil’s political discourse.” Also, shamefully lying, Vavra claims that I did not respond to a contact request which never happened. I was never contacted by the Daily Beast to explain my positions, being the newspaper’s lies published in a unilateral and undemocratic manner. As if that weren’t enough, a few days later, the British newspaper Daily Mail published an article in which my name is mentioned as an alleged spreader of “inauthentic information” at the service of Moscow.

The article in the UK media is particularly focused on defaming Russian human rights activist Mira Terada, a friend of mine who, together with me, is a co-founder of the BRICS Journalists’ Association, an independent press organization that, among other activities, recently organized an expedition to the Russian-Ukrainian border. On that occasion, as already reported, I had the opportunity to inform Brazilian and international audience about the Kiev regime’s criminal bombings against Russian civilians in Belgorod. Apparently, telling the truth about the conflict is a cause for concern for the Western media, which reacts with defamation, lies and hate speech against authentic journalists. Given so many desperate reactions from the Western media, the question remains: Why are Western newspapers so desperate to “refute” my claims that the West wants to kill Zelensky? Are Western agents, through their biased media, trying to disguise the evidence of their own plans?

Recently, we have become used to public, open terror actions by the Kiev regime and its supporters. For example, the neo-Nazi government even maintains a public kill-list to threaten its supposed “enemies.” Western intelligence agencies, in addition to NATO itself, frequently leak people’s data to be included on the infamous “Myrotvorets” website. However, if the “enemy” this time is the Ukrainian president himself, the West’s actions will certainly not be so explicit. NATO cannot put Zelensky in Myrotvorets. If the West wants to kill the Ukrainian leader, it will have to act surreptitiously, using the intelligence apparatus and financing infiltration and sabotage projects. More importantly, they will have to disguise any flaws in their plans and prevent the conspiracy from being discovered. The fear that the Western media is showing by reacting to my thoughts perhaps indicates that they are already working to hide the mistakes.

Just how confused is US foreign policy right now?
Martin Jay, Strategic Culture, May 14 2024

Arafat was right. He knew at the Camp David Summit of 2000 that if he signed the deal offered to him as a new Palestinian state, 92% of Gaza and 100% of West Bank, that in a matter of only hours the Israelis would have cheated him and invaded, given that the most controversial point of the deal was that they would both have to be demilitarized. Today the case to distrust America and Israel is even stronger. Our parents who witnessed the Camp David Summit and before that the Oslo Accords of 1993, both Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at creating a two-state solution within Israel for the Palestinians, would not believe what we are witnessing now, since the massacre of Oct 7.

Israel has been not only allowed but goaded into what is clearly becoming obviously a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and western media are asking us to believe that there is reason to this madness which lets Israel bomb innocent civilians while sending food aid. Israel successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of around half a million Gazans to move to Rafah which was supposed to be a ‘safe zone’ only to take the genocide to the next level and murder them en masse while they are there, all under the eyes of the so-called international community which witnesses the failure of international law which should have prevented the IDF from even making it to the border crossing itself with Egypt, incidentally part of the Camp David agreement in the 70s.

Is Biden really running the US? The only inkling which might indicate that he is, would be the incoherent decisions and actions by him and his administration, not to mention the State Dept which concluded in a report recently that probably Israel was breaking international law by almost certainly using US weapons to bomb Gazans in Rafah. But the report seemed to be a self-lancing boil. While it pointed the finger, it also pardoned Israel for its war crimes, thus encouraging the government to continue, led by Netanyahu who, in the late 90s when he became prime minister in Israel delivered an award-winning performance for Clinton whereby he and his government showed it was committed to the ethos of Oslo and Camp David accords. In reality it was a bluff as he cheated even a naïve US president leaving the Palestinians to exercise their only tool they had in the coming years: terrorism.

Biden, when he is lucid, is less naïve about the game of cat and mouse which Netanyahu is playing and winning. The move by him to temporarily block arms deliveries to the IDF is of course a bluff as he knows very well that for at least a couple of months Israel has enough stocks. The truth of the ruse is that the US itself is very low indeed on ammo and that Biden is actually giving the manufacturers some time to replenish their own stocks while he attempts to beguile a gullible US public that he actually cares about Palestinian lives. The reality is that he has no real problem with them being mowed down like rats in a pen. He simply can’t state that though so pretends to be disturbed about the genocide which, according to the Palestinian health authority has reached 37k deaths. Nothing compared to the Holocaust of WW2, right?

Jews around the world, even Zionists fret over whether the world will forget their own massacre which left 6 million exterminated. But how can we when the IDF remind us each day in Gaza and Rafah what a real Holocaust looks like in modern times? Only this time it has the blessing of the US and the kangaroo court it created at the end of WW2 aimed, ironically, at preventing other Holocausts from happening. Now the Palestinians will be wiped off the face of Gaza as Israel’s elites and those who control them want to seize Gaza’s offshore gas. And still Netanyahu keeps lying to the world as does the President in office as to the true nature of the war. UNGA voting to allow Palestine to have its own state? It’ll never get past UNSC’s final vote, not while Biden is president. But Trump? Now there’s a thought. (You must be joking – RB)

By niqnaq | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

wsws

May 16, 2024 – 9:34 am

Biden pledges $1b in additional military aid, as new report accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza
Jordan Shilton, WSWS, May 16 2024

The Biden administration intends to dispatch more than $1b of military equipment to Israel so that it can continue the genocide against the Palestinians. The military package will include $700m for tank ammunition, $500m in tactical vehicles and $60m for mortar shells. Its unveiling coincided with UN figures showing that 0.6m people, or more than a quarter of Gaza’s total population, have fled Rafah since Israel’s ground operation began on May 6. The UN noted that 150k people have fled Gaza’s southernmost city in the past 48 hours. Evacuation orders have also been issued by Israel for around 100k residents in northern Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza City on Wednesday in an attack on a group of people trying to use a public internet connection. In the city’s Sabra neighbourhood, an UNRWA hospital was the target of an air strike, killing at least 10 displaced people. Most of those fleeing Rafah have fled many times before in the past seven months. They lack not only access to food, water and medical treatment, but also almost all civil infrastructure to support human life. The UN Development Programme estimates that 270 kilotons of solid waste have accumulated in temporary dumps throughout Gaza because the means to dispose of it have been destroyed by Israel’s onslaught. The UN wrote in its May 15 flash update:

Rising temperatures are exacerbating the impact solid waste accumulation is having on people, such as generating insects and attracting wild animals, which is particularly severe at IDP sites. UNDP warns: “If the issue of solid waste, including medical waste, is not adequately addressed and resolved, it will exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … and severely impact public health, particularly with limited access to healthcare services.

According to OXFAM, the “lethal cocktail” of overcrowding, waste and sewage accumulation, malnutrition and heat is creating ideal conditions for the spread of infectious diseases like cholera. Amid this human misery, the Biden administration’s military package would aim to replenish the weaponry used by Israel since its onslaught began and could take years to complete, according to the WSJ. The Biden administration has been by far Israel’s largest supplier of high-powered bombs, which have been used to flatten entire neighbourhoods, and other military equipment. As part of a supplemental military spending package adopted late last month, Washington set aside some $26b to support Israel’s military. In comments made last week as the long-planned onslaught on Rafah began, NSC spokesman Adm (Retd) John Kirby insisted that every dollar would be spent.

The uninterrupted flow of weaponry from the US to Israel underscores Washington’s responsibility for the Gaza genocide. As the official death toll since Oct 7 rises to over 35.2k Palestinians, with well over 40k dead when those unaccounted for under the rubble are taken into account, the vast majority being women and children, Washington’s response is to double down on its support for the far-right Zionist regime and accelerate the shipment of arms. There is only one place suitable for the individuals responsible for such inhuman decisions: the defendants bench of a war crimes tribunal. This was underscored in a report released by the University Network for Human Rights Wednesday accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Network consists of leading law schools at universities in the United States and South Africa, including Yale, Cornell, Boston University and the University of Pretoria. The report declares in its executive summary:

We conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since Oct 7 2023 violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.

The report notes that the total number of Palestinians killed or wounded between Oct 7 and May 1 (34,568 and 77,765 respectively) accounts for more than 5% of Gaza’s population. 2% of children in Gaza have either been killed or injured. Israel killed more children during the first four months of its bloody onslaught than all of the child deaths in all of the world’s conflicts over the past four years. The report continues:

Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza have been motivated by the requisite genocidal intent, as evidenced in this report by the statements of Israeli leaders, the character of the State and its military forces’ conduct against and relating to Palestinians in Gaza, and the direct nexus between them. As this report details,13 officials at all levels of Israeli government, up to and including the Prime Minister, have made remarks that not only express blatant and unequivocal dehumanization and cruelty against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere, but also explicitly reflect intentions to destroy and exterminate Palestinians as such. The patterns of conduct of Israeli military forces in Gaza further reinforce the finding of Israel’s genocidal intent.

The report explains that its findings will strengthen the cases at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide and in US federal court against the Biden administration. The authors write:

Israel’s violations of the international legal prohibition of genocide amount to grave breaches of peremptory norms of international law that must cease immediately. These violations also give rise to obligations by all other States: to refrain from recognizing Israel’s breaches as legal or taking any actions that may constitute complicity in these breaches; and to take positive steps to suppress, prevent, and punish the commission by Israel of further genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

These appeals have fallen and will continue to fall on deaf ears. US imperialism and its allies in Canada and Europe are up to their necks in the blood of Gaza’s Palestinians. The only steps these governments take to suppress, prevent and punish are against the opponents of the genocide, who face the full force of the repressive state apparatus as police tear down protest camps and carry out mass arrests, amid a vicious smear campaign slandering them as “antisemites.” Over 3k anti-genocide protesters have been detained in the US over recent weeks, while in Germany opponents of the Israeli regime’s crimes have been barred from entering the country and speaking at public events. The Palestine Congress in Berlin, where eye-witness accounts of the devastation in Gaza were to be heard, and encampments outside the Bundestag and at the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, were violently dispersed in state-orchestrated police raids. The University Network for Human Rights’ report was released on May 15, which Palestinians commemorate each year as Nakba Day. The expulsion of 0.7m Palestinians from their homes in a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing that led to the founding of Israel on May 14 1948, with the backing of the imperialist powers, was one of the 20th century’s great crimes. It is a measure of the barbarism of Israel and its imperialist backers in Gaza that the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, could state in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Western powers’ enabling of the Gaza genocide is “even worse” than the role they played in 1948. Pappe said:

At the time in 1948, there was no television. People did not have smartphones, and it was relatively easy to cover up the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, and to claim that it didn’t exist. It is impossible to say now that people cannot know what is going on when it appears on our screens. So I think the level of denial today is far more sinister, far more outraging…

Remarking that massacres were used by the Zionists in 1948 to force Palestinians out of areas claimed for an Israeli state, he added:

What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza.

Professors come to the defense of New Orleans students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza
Emma Arceneaux, May 16 2024

The police state crackdown against students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza has resulted in nearly 3k arrests across the US. Following the violent breakup of the student encampment at Columbia University in New York on Apr 18, tent encampments have sprung up across the US and internationally, including in Germany, Argentina, Japan, Tunisia, the UK and other countries. These have been violently dispersed by coalitions of university, city, state and federal authorities. In the US, the assault has been politically and logistically directed by the Democratic Biden administration. In New Orleans, a Palestine solidarity encampment led by students from Tulane and Loyola Universities was broken up by a group of state, city and university police in the early morning hours on May 1, about 30 hours after it was set up. Approximately 100 Louisiana State Police armed in riot gear and gas masks surrounded the encampment, located on the lawn in front of Tulane’s Gibson Hall on St Charles Avenue. Multiple students were injured after being shoved and assaulted with batons. Students report that police fired rubber bullets at the ground near their feet. Fourteen people were arrested, including two Tulane and five Loyola students.

Six protesters were arrested earlier on Apr 29, when police attacked students as they were initially setting up tents. New Orleans Police mounted on horseback were filmed tearing down tents and ripping umbrellas out of protesters hands. The student encampment followed the police assault on an off-campus encampment on Apr 28 at Jackson Square in the French Quarter. In addition to the legal charges faced by protesters, which include battery, resisting arrest and trespassing, students face significant disciplinary action from the university administrations. At least seven Tulane students have been suspended due to their participation in the protest, including Silas Gillet, a Jewish sophomore. Gillet reported to Al Jazeera that he was evicted from student housing and that his and other students’ scholarships are in jeopardy as a result of their suspensions. Additionally, the Tulane administration has suspended the campus chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society for its role in organizing the protest, on the bogus grounds that the group violated regulations by holding an “unregistered event” and that they engaged in “antisemitic chanting, disruptive noise, and shoving police.”

The lie that opposition to Israel’s genocide is “antisemitic,” used by politicians, the media and university leaders to justify the suppression of protests, has been repeatedly refuted by the participation of many Jewish students and activists in the protest against Israel. On Friday, members of Jewish Voice for Peace in New Orleans delivered a letter to the Tulane administration, signed by 250 people, demanding the university reinstate all suspended students, issue a correction on unsubstantiated claims of antisemitism among protesters, and vow to divest from Israel. The violent crackdown against antiwar opposition, led by the Democratic Party and Biden administration in coordination with the far-right Republican Party, is producing broad opposition throughout the public, including among university faculty, some of whom have themselves been the victim of violent police assaults. In an important display of solidarity with the democratic rights of their students, faculty from both Tulane and Loyola have issued principled public statements denouncing their respective university administrations. In a video posted to social media, over a dozen Tulane professors condemned the university administration’s response to the peaceful student protest and denied the administration’s lie that the protesters were violent and antisemitic.

The video statement reads as follows:

I am a professor at Tulane University. I was present at the Pro-Palestinian protest on Tulane’s campus. I observed Tulane students engaging in peaceful and nonviolent demonstrations. Tulane’s administration is currently seeking to punish staff, students and faculty, who attended the encampment or have merely expressed private support for students to administrators. We demand Tulane stop criminalizing peaceful student protests. Lift student and staff suspensions and drop all criminal charges against members of our community. We condemn the violent and disproportionate use of TUPD, NOPD and Louisiana State Police. We condemn the administration for placing at least four members of staff on administrative leave and threatening employees with termination for simply attending peaceful protests. We defend our students’ right to free speech and political self-expression and stand in solidarity with them as their professors.

In addition to the video statement, nearly 300 faculty at Tulane have signed an Open Letter to President Fitts denouncing the crackdown on the student protests. The letter states that faculty hold a “range broad range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, we share a commitment to listening to our students’ concerns no matter their political views. This encompasses the right to freely express their perspectives on government and university policies.” It denounces the arrest and suspension of students and calls for the university to reverse the suspensions and discontinue its “efforts to intimidate students and employees” with threatening retaliation for protesting. Faculty from Loyola University have also published a letter in the student newspaper, the Maroon, urging the administration not to file conduct charges against the arrested students. They wrote:

We can all come together to use our amplified voices to denounce the excessive force used by police against our unarmed students participating in civil disobedience, a tradition that has played such an important role in this nation’s tortured history. Furthermore, we cannot sit by silently in light of the administration’s singular focus on the legal issue of trespassing as justification for their subsequent direct threats to weaponize the student code of conduct against our students. Trespassing is not a simple legal concept that we can unilaterally condemn. After all, Loyola often (rightly) celebrates great ‘trespassers’ in US history as heroes. For example, all of the students who participated in sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement were trespassers on private property.

The statements of support from faculty, who themselves are faced with intimidation and threats of retaliation from the universities, are important and welcome, and their calls for the universities to drop suspensions of students and reinstate the SDS chapter must be taken up broadly. But the interconnected fight against the genocide and the fight to defend democratic rights cannot remain centered on the campuses. The escalating repression against the student protests must be understood within the context of the expanding global war led by US and NATO imperialism, which includes the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine against Russia, and the military buildup against China. As Andy Thompson, a member of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, explained in his speech to the annual May Day rally hosted by the WSWS, students must unite with the working class to stop the genocide and world war.

Students and young people cannot stop the genocide or imperialism alone, and through appeals to their campus administrations to divest from the US and Israeli war machines. The fight against imperialist war and the genocide in Gaza can only be advanced through the mobilization of the international working class, the principal revolutionary force in society, which has the power to stop all weapons production and shipments. The explosion of militarism abroad is incompatible with the right to free speech at home. The aim of this state campaign is to abolish free speech, not only on the campuses but in all areas of social and political life, in the US and internationally.

Dutch students and faculty members protest against the genocide in Gaza
Daniel Woreck, WSWS, May 15 2024

As part of the worldwide movement of workers and students against the genocide in Gaza and police brutality, both students and faculty members of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) staged their fourth demonstration on Monday May 13. Students were carried signs saying “All Eyes on Rafah“ and “No Genocide on Our Dime.” At the time of this writing, other prominent universities throughout the Netherlands, such as Groningen, Nijmegen, Eindhoven and Maastricht are occupied and thousands of students are participating in simultaneous protests and setting up anti-genocide encampments. As the gathering at Roeterseiland Campus attracted many thousands of participants, the UvA administration reported trespassing and destruction and thus justified the intervention of the Mobile Unit (ME) or the Dutch riot police in the university building, brutally beating and arresting students. Previously, on May 6, inside the UvA demonstrators constructed blockades utilising desks and railings to obstruct access from the canal side. The Dutch police employed a bulldozer to dismantle the blockades and detained 169 people. Following the police crackdown, protesters gathered around UvA on May 8 involving further police violence and the arrest of 36 protestors. On May 9, a subsequent and spontaneous demonstration was coordinated, once more at the Roeterseiland university campus of the University of Amsterdam. Thousands of demonstrators proceeded to march through the city.

Representatives of the Amsterdam Student Encampment have rejected the accusations of the university administration and the government that the protesters of have caused considerable damage, amounting to around €1.5m in the past week alone. Video footage circulated by a smear campaign led by state media depict black-clad individuals smashing screens, defacing walls and breaking windows. The Amsterdam Student Encampment insists that it does not know who these individuals are, implicating state provocation and instigation. Hand in hand with stepped up measures of state repression, the Dutch political establishment has rallied on social media to intimidate the protests. The caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte (VVD) has called the protests “unacceptable disruptions” and stated:

The events at and around the UvA in the last few days clearly cross boundaries. Demonstrating is always allowed. But using violence against the police and causing destruction is never allowed. Stop that!

Minister of justice and security Ferdinand Grapperhaus (CDA) warned:

There will be no tolerance for violence and destruction in any form. The rule of law must be upheld.

Party leaders such as Jetten (D66) and Timmermans (GroenLinks-PvdA) also call on demonstrators “to stop destruction and violence.” Far-right leader Geert Wilders who yesterday announced a government deal between his Party for Freedom, Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the New Social Contract party and the Farmer Citizen Movement, denounced the students as “scum” and “antisemitic.” These statements have been widely used in state media outlets to legitimize the heavy-handed police response and to intimidate the protesters. Furthermore, the unanimous support for the crackdown exposes the right-wing character of the Dutch ruling elite and the police as an instrument of class rule.

Like in other parts of Europe and the US, the protesters in Dutch cities are demanding an end to the US and EU-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an immediate ceasefire and an end to European arms deliveries to Israel. Additionally, the students and staff members of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and Amsterdam University College (AUC) demand that their institutions sever all connections with Israeli corporations, institutions, and private military entities. The University of Amsterdam, like many other universities in the Netherlands, has been hesitant to openly acknowledge its affiliations with the Israeli military and its arms industry by playing a sizable role in conducting advanced research and development programs for weapons systems used by the Israeli military.

The WSWS conducted the following interviews at Monday’s protest with students and university staff and distributed the statement “Mobilize the working class in defense of protesters against the Gaza genocide!” Roza, a student at the UvA, highlighted the hypocrisy of the ruling class regarding the NATO proxy war against Russia and the genocide in Gaza:

Even though I am not Palestinian, I went through some discrimination, and just seeing the reactions of the media, the governments and the politicians to the Russian invasion of Ukraine compared to the Israeli genocide, that can be followed literally live, it is shocking to me and shows the hypocrisy of the ‘western world.’ I think it is important to speak up and not to be silent; being silent means also being complicit. This is not a war; it’s ethnic cleansing; it’s a colonizing project. It needs to end. There’s so much going on in the world, not only in Palestine. There are so many conflicts, and it’s just eye-opening.

Alongside students and staff members, many residents of Amsterdam took part in the protest. One of them was Amanda, who noted:

The world is waking up in a new way now. There is complicity in all of our institutions across the world. It is beautiful to see people out in the streets, seeing what Palestinians have been screaming their entire lives for the world to see. We just need it to happen as fast as possible because children are dying; people are dying every day in Gaza, so the urgency has never been greater. A global movement is growing every day. This is a US-sponsored genocide. The Netherlands is complicit just as many other countries are, like the UK and France. This US and Israel-led genocide with a coalition of forces, including the Netherlands, and that complicity goes into every institution.

JF Engelberg from the Department of Media Studies, who also delivered a speech at the protest on behalf of the university staff, insisted that he joined the protest as a Jewish anti-Zionist member of staff at the UvA to cut across the official narrative to portray protesters as antisemites:

I have been deeply inspired by the passion and the moral clarity shown by our students in their call for the university to disclose, boycott, and divest. These urgent calls have been met, however, with repression, intimidation, defamation, and violence, as the university administration (CvB) refuses to negotiate in good faith, spreads lies about its own students, and then recruits the police to violently repress dissent. We will not stand for the erosion of democratic freedoms at the institution in which we teach and learn. Indeed, teaching and learning cannot take place without the democratic freedoms we hold dear. I stand beside you in the struggle for a liberated Palestine in which all can live freely under conditions of radical equality from the river to the sea.

The attacks on the protests against genocide in the Netherlands and internationally show the continuity between imperialist foreign and domestic policy, attacking core democratic rights and legitimising mass murder. The Dutch ruling class on its part is terrified the student protests could be a catalyst in arousing the Dutch working class. Students in the Netherlands and worldwide have taken a courageous stand, but none of the issues they have raised can be resolved on the university grounds. Rather their actions anticipate an even more powerful movement in the Dutch and international working class. The working class, the most powerful social force on earth, which creates all wealth through its labor, must leverage that power to force an end to genocide, austerity and war.

Stella Assange: “Julian is just one decision away from being extradited”
Laura Tiernan, WSWS, May 15 2024

At a press conference in London Wednesday, supporters of imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange warned that a High Court ruling on Monday could see him extradited to the US “within 24 hours.” Stella Assange told a Foreign Press Association (FPA) briefing that if Britain’s High Court ruled against her husband next week, “there will be no further avenues for appeal in the UK.” She was joined by WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, Reporters Without Borders campaign director Rebecca Vincent and lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who appeared via videolink from Australia. Stella reminded journalists that Assange has been “in one form of detention or another” since Dec 2010, when he was placed under house arrest just seven days after WikiLeaks started publishing leaked US diplomatic cables. Since British police seized him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he has spent five years without charge “in the UK’s most notorious prison.”

Assange is the victim of a political and judicial witch-hunt led by the US and Britain, in retribution for WikiLeaks’ courageous journalism exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain’s High Court will hear a final appeal from Assange on the narrowest grounds: whether to accept worthless US “assurances” that a man they tried to assassinate will receive First Amendment protections if he is extradited. Arguments have been submitted to the High Court by US government lawyers and by Assange’s legal team. Both sides will argue their case on Monday morning, with a decision likely later that day. Stella explained:

The timing is uncertain, but we know that in other national security extradition cases, the person has been extradited within 24 hours of a decision.

Hrafnsson told the assembled media:

It is abundantly clear that the process in the courts in the UK are corrupt. The case is rigged against Julian. I know these are harsh words, and words that we usually have for courts in non-European countries, non-Western countries, but I’ve come to the opinion that that is absolutely the case. This is institutional corruption on a judicial level. Julian Assange is a political prisoner. It’s abundantly clear.

He appealed to the assembled journalists:

I hope that you can look into the details of the case where the evidence is basically screaming at you.

He pointed by way of example to paragraph 210 of the High Court’s most recent ruling, responding to arguments by Assange’s lawyers that “you cannot extradite an individual to a country whose secret service has drawn up plots to kidnap or assassinate them.” Hrafnsson explained:

I’m referring to the CIA plot to kidnap or assassinate Julian in 2017, at the time when Mike Pompeo was director of the agency.

He described the High Court’s response as “something out of Alice in Wonderland,” paraphrasing its argument that even if it were credible that the CIA plotted to kidnap or kill Assange, “his extradition through a lawful process meant the need to kidnap or assassinate him falls away, thereby it is not an argument for an appeal. Can you believe this? This is something you read in papers in the Royal Court of Justice. It’s unbelievable. The judicial process is rigged.” Rebecca Vincent told the media:

If Assange is prosecuted under the Espionage Act, the precedent is set for the same sort of case to be applied to any publisher, any journalist, any source. Any media organization that works with leaked classified information could find themselves in the same situation at Julian Assange. Our hope for justice here in the UK is not completely diminished. At each stage that space for hope shrinks, but a small glimmer of hope is still there, and that is what we’re hoping for on Monday.

Jennifer Robinson told journalists:

The Australian government has put their support behind Julian Assange. We are working closely with our Prime Minister and our Attorney General and the Australian government to try to seek a resolution of this case and we continue to demand that Julian be released, the case be brought to an end, and he be brought home to Australia. There is bipartisan political support for Julian Assange here in Australia and just recently we had a parliamentary resolution go through our parliament with two-thirds of the parliament’s support calling on the UK and the US to drop this case and to allow Julian to return home to Australia.

There is overwhelming support among millions of Australians for Assange’s release, but Robinson’s portrayal of the Labor government as championing Assange’s freedom is a political cover-up. Successive Labor and Liberal-National governments have backed the US vendetta against the WikiLeaks editor. Shamefully, Robinson made no mention of Labor’s escalating war against whistleblowers and journalists, including the vicious five-year prison sentence handed down this week against former Australian Army lawyer and whistleblower David McBride who exposed war crimes in Afghanistan. In the Q&A which followed, journalists asked whether the British or US election outcomes would have any bearing on Assange’s case. Stella replied that her husband’s case was “all politics” and said that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had “not acted in good faith” toward Assange since his arrest in 2010:

There is correspondence from the CPS evidencing that they were colluding… to keep him in a legal limbo and to keep him in in some form of detention and from being able to defend himself and be free.

The head of the CPS during that time was Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Rebecca Vincent said:

We don’t know how the US elections will play into this case either. I agree with Stella and Kristinn’s assessment that this is a political case, we’ve talked about this quite a lot. We don’t know what will happen in the event of a return of Trump whose DoJ] brought this case in the first place. President Biden has the chance still to be the president who put an end to this, who acted in the interest of press freedom and journalism, rather than enabling this very dangerous prosecution that will tarnish the reputation forever of the country of the First Amendment.

No faith can be placed in the war mongers in Washington or London. Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Tory, are at one in their backing of genocide in Gaza and military confrontation against Russia. Imperialist war abroad is being accompanied by a crackdown on democratic rights, with the mass arrest of student protesters across the US and a frontal assault in Britain on the right to protest and free speech. The fight for Assange’s freedom must be taken up by the working class internationally as part of the fight against war and dictatorship produced by capitalism. Toward the end of the FPA’s press briefing Vincent reported that journalists who are not based in the UK are being barred from remote audio access to Monday’s High Court hearing. A journalist reported she had been told to pay for remote access. The WSWS has received notice that our reporter must pay £303 and submit an “Application Notice (Pursuant to the Extradition Act 2003)”. Such is the level of political censorship and secrecy surrounding the final stages of extra-judicial proceedings against Assange in the UK.

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May 15, 2024 – 11:30 pm

Live Updates
Middle East Eye, May 15 2024

Demonstrators raise painted hands at House hearing in DC

A group of demonstrators joined today’s House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on “Antisemitism on College Campuses,” on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. During the meeting, the protestors raised their hands, which were painted in red, in solidarity with Palestinians killed in Gaza.

Israeli settlers attack truck driver because they believed he was delivering aid to Gaza

Two commercial trucks with Palestinian drivers were mistaken for an aid delivery convoy by Israeli settlers near the Giv’at Assaf settlement in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. The settlers reportedly stopped the trucks, emptied their contents and burned the tires. The settlers also threw a stone that hit one of the drivers in the head, Haaretz reported.

“I know the Nakba never ended,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib stated Wednesday

Rashida Tlaib virtually addressed a Nakba remembrance ceremony held by the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Combatants For Peace on Wednesday, saying:

I know the Nakba never ended. The Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of war. Israeli forces have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians: over 13k children. Nearly 100k Palestinians have been injured and 1.7 million displaced. Palestinians are human beings, and we also have dreams of truly being free. We are mothers, daughters, and granddaughters. We are justice seekers … My prayer on this Nakba Remembrance Day is that the Palestinian people will one day live in a free Palestine.

Hezbollah launches drone attack at military base in Tiberias

Hezbollah has confirmed that it has launched a drone attack at a military base west of the Israeli city Tiberias. The attack comes two days after Hezbollah field commander Hussein Mekki was killed in an Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon. Today’s attack marks the deepest attack into Israeli territory since Hezbollah began exchanging fire with Israel in parallel to the war on Gaza, Reuters reported.

On Nakba Day, first Jewish-American Biden appointee resigns over Gaza war

Lily Greenberg Call announced her resignation from the Biden administration on Wednesday over the ongoing US support for Israel’s war on Gaza, becoming the first Jewish-American political official to resign in protest against the war. Greenberg Call, who was serving as special assistant to the chief of staff at the interior ministry, sent a letter of resignation to Secretary of Interior Debra Haaland on Wednesday afternoon. In her letter, which was shared with Middle East Eye, Greenberg Call said:

I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration amidst President Biden’s disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. What I have learned from my Jewish tradition is that every life is precious. That we are obligated to stand up for those facing violence and oppression, and to question authority in the face of injustice.

Read more: On Nakba Day, first Jewish-American Biden appointee resigns over Gaza war.

Israeli opposition leader Lapid says government is ‘non-functional’

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said on Wednesday that as long as the current government is in power, Israel will not be able to win its war against Hamas. Lapid tweeted:

The government has lost control. Soldiers are killed every day in Gaza and they fight among themselves on television. The cabinet is disassembled and non-functional. Ministers protest in front of cabinet meetings. One cabinet sends humanitarian aid convoys and the other burns them. Relations with the US are collapsing, the middle class is collapsing, they have lost the north. You can’t go on like this. We will not win with this government.

Lapid’s comments come as Netanyahu, the minister of defence and other government officials publicly sparred over the Gaza war plan.

Right-wing Israeli government officials demand Gallant’s removal

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has called on Netanyahu to fire Gallant after he publicly criticised Netanyahu’s post-war plan for military rule in Gaza. He tweeted:

From Gallant’s point of view, it makes no difference whether Gaza is controlled by IDF soldiers or whether Hamas murderers control it.

MKs from Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party have joined criticism of Gallant’s comments.

Israeli war cabinet member says Gallant is right to criticise post-war plan for Gaza

Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz voiced support on Wednesday for Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s critique of the government’s plan for “open-ended” Israeli military rule over the the besieged Strip. Gantz said in a video statement:

Gallant spoke the truth. The responsibility of leadership is to do the right thing for the country, at any price.

Netanyahu’s latest comments raised a post-war scenario for Gaza consisting of Israeli-led security control over Gaza, after achieving its “war goal” of dismantling Hamas’s government in Gaza. Gallant on Wednesday openly challenged Netanyahu over his plans and told reporters that he had pushed for a Palestinian administration for the past months but received “no response” from within government.

Israeli settlers attack houses in villages near Hebron and Nablus in West Bank

Israeli settlers have vandalised a house and threatened its owner in Masafer Yatta near Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank, WAFA reported. Settlers from the Esh Kodesh settlement reportedly also attacked a house in the village of Qusra near Nablus while under the protection of Israeli soldiers.

Israel’s defence minister says he opposes open-ended military rule

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called on Netanyahu’s government on Wednesday to present a clear plan for post-war governance in the Gaza Strip, saying he would not support open-ended Israeli military rule over the Palestinian territory. Gallant told reporters that for the past seven months, he had promoted a plan for a new Palestinian administration not linked to Hamas to govern the territory, but received “no response” from various Israeli cabinet forums. Gallant was quoted as saying:

A dangerous trend is developing that advances the idea of Israeli military and civilian governance in Gaza. This is a negative and dangerous option for the State of Israel strategically, militarily, and from a security standpoint. Military rule in Gaza would become the main security and military effort of the State of Israel over the coming years, at the expense of other arenas. The price paid would be bloodshed and victims, as well as a heavy economic price.

His comments came hours after Netanyahu released a video statement where he said discussions concerning the “day after” were meaningless until Hamas was defeated. In response to Gallant’s comments, Netanyahu said that Hamas’s elimination had to be pursued “without excuses” to pave a path to an alternative government in Gaza. Read more: Israel’s defence minister says he opposes open-ended military rule.

Israeli historian says West’s position today on Gaza is ‘worse’ than during Nakba

Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, said in an interview with Al Jazeera:

The level of denial by western nations regarding Palestine is more sinister and far more outrageous than during the Nakba. At that time, in 1948, there was no television. People did not have smartphones, and it was relatively easy to cover up the ethnic cleansing and to claim that it didn’t exist. It is impossible to say now that people cannot know what is going on when it appears on our screens.

Over 300 authors sign letter urging Baillie Gifford divest from Israel-linked companies

A letter signed by 360 authors has urged asset manager Baillie Gifford, which sponsors a number of literary festivals to divest from companies linked to Israel. The letter, released to mark Nakba Day, the event that saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 by Zionist militias, also called on the company to divest from fossil fuels. It read:

Many of the undersigned book workers have already withdrawn from participation in Baillie Gifford-funded festivals in 2024, including Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival, keeping the commitment we made in our author statement last year. Others commit to continue to raise our demands. Literary organisations can expect escalation, including the expansion of boycotts, increased author withdrawal of labour, and increased disruption until Baillie Gifford divests.

Among those signing the letter are comedian Frankie Boyle, authors Lola Olufemi and Sally Rooney and writer Naomi Klein.

Israel orders evacuation of two more northern Gaza neighbourhoods

The Israeli army has ordered the evacuation of a two more neighbourhoods in northern Gaza, claiming Palestinians are firing rockets from them into Israel. Israeli military spokesman for Arab media Avichai Adrai said the two neighbourhoods were al-Manshiya and Sheikh Zayyed neighbourhoods and said the army would “act forcefully against them.” He said in a statement:

For your safety, you must evacuate the area immediately to known shelters west of Gaza City.

Israeli forces battle Palestinian fighters in refugee camp on Nakba day

The Israeli military has continued to escalate its military operations across the Gaza Strip with fierce battles taking place in a Palestinian refugee camp on Nakba day. Air strikes on Wednesday morning hit a UN clinic in Gaza City and homes across northern and central districts, killing at least 20 people, including children, according to WAFA. Heavy artillery shelling in Rafah caused widespread destruction to residential homes and property. The Palestinian health ministry said that 60 Palestinians have been killed over the past 24 hours, raising the death toll since Oct 7 to 35,233. Last week, the Israeli military sent tanks and troops into Rafah, Jabalia refugee camp and the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza City. Read more: Israeli forces battle Palestinian fighters in refugee camp on Nakba day.

Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbs to 35,233

IOF have killed at least 35,233 Palestinians in Gaza since Oct 7, the Palestinian health ministry said on Wednesday. At least 79,141 others have been wounded in the enclave since the war began, the ministry added.

Israel to ‘significantly increase’ migrant workforce, says Netanyahu

Netanyahu said that the cabinet had decided to “significantly increase” the migrants workers quota in Israel. The country has faced a major labour shortage since its war on Gaza began, partly due to Palestinian workers being banned and Israeli reservists being called up to join military operations on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts. Israel is set to now allow the entry of over 300k foreign workers, or 3.3% of the population. The prime minister said it would cover shortages across the economy, including in construction, agriculture and nursing. He said:

This is an important decision for businesses, for our economy and also for our security.

Labour vote share in Muslim-majority areas ‘down by a third’ due to Gaza stance

The UK Labour party lost a third of its vote share in areas with a Muslim majority during recent local elections, likely driven by its stance on Israel’s war on Gaza, according to a new report. Based on analysis by Number Cruncher Politics, first reported by ITV News on Tuesday, the opposition party lost 33% in areas with mostly Muslim residents on May 2. British voters went to the polls earlier this month to elect local councillors, mayors and police and crime commissioners. While Labour saw gains across much of the country, there was a marked drop in support among Muslims, largely due to its failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza sooner. In local council wards with over 70% Muslim populations, Labour lost 39% of its vote share. In several of these areas, independent candidates stood against the mainstream parties, often campaigning solely on the issue of the Gaza war. Read more: Labour vote share in Muslim-majority areas ‘down by a third’ due to Gaza stance.

Bahrain signals willingness to join Arab multinational force in Gaza, US official says

Bahrain has signalled its willingness to be a member of an Arab multinational force that would administer security in Gaza once Israel ends its war on the embattled enclave, a US official familiar with the Biden administration’s plans for the region has told Middle East Eye. US officials have made several overtures in recent weeks to see if Bahrain would be a member of the force that will fill the security vacuum in Gaza until a Palestinian governing authority can be formed, the US official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Manama has said it wants to take a bigger role in post-war Gaza’s governance, pointing to its position as the fourth country to normalise ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the controversial Abraham Accords agreements, the official said. Bahrain’s willingness to entertain the idea suggests that Saudi Arabia is also open to an Arab peacekeeping force in Gaza, given Manama’s political, military and financial reliance on its larger neighbour. Read more: Bahrain signals willingness to join Arab multinational force in Gaza, US official says.

Ireland to recognise Palestine statehood before end of May: Foreign minister

Irish Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin said that his country will recognise the State of Palestine “before the end of the month.” He told the Newstalk radio station:

The specific date is still fluid because we’re still in discussions with some countries in respect of a joint recognition of a Palestinian state.

The leaders of Ireland, Malta, Slovakia and Spain had previously said in a joint statement in March that they were ready to recognise Palestinian statehood. Last week, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that Ireland, Slovenia and Spain were going to symbolically recognise the State of Palestine on May 21, with other states potentially following suit.

Israeli army: 60 rockets fired from Lebanon, no reported injuries

The IOF said that a barrage of around 60 rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanon on Wednesday, mostly targeting Mount Meron, where a sensitive air traffic control base is situated. The military said that while several rockets were intercepted, some caused “minor damage.” Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was a response to Israel’s killing of one of its members yesterday.

Israel’s Gallant reportedly orders Al Jazeera closure in West Bank

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has reportedly ordered army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting in the occupied West Bank. Quoting unnamed sources in the Israeli military, Israel’s Army Radio reported that the army was working to implement Gallant’s order against the Qatari broadcaster. According to the Times of Israel, it is not clear whether the order would apply to areas of the West Bank where Israeli settlers live, or if it would extend to Palestinian areas, where Al Jazeera is widely watched. It is also not clear if the order would mean the closure of Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah as well as a block on the network being watched across the West Bank. An Israeli milspox told the Times of Israel:

The IOF is working to implement the defence minister’s order.

Read more: Israel’s Gallant reportedly orders Al Jazeera closure in West Bank.

Rocket from Gaza hit empty home in Sderot: Israeli army

The Israeli army said that one of the two rockets fired from Gaza was not intercepted and hit an empty home in Sderot, southern Israel, causing damage. It had initially said that both rockets were intercepted. The Israeli military said the incident is “under review.”

Israel will ‘set its sights on Anatolia’ if not stopped in Gaza: Erdogan

Erdogan said that Israel would not stop at Gaza, Ramallah, and would go as far as Anatolia if it is not stopped. He said during his party’s group meeting on Wednesday:

Do not think that Israel will stop in Gaza, do not think that Ramallah will be safe and that fierce state will sooner or later set its sights on Anatolia with the delusion of the promised land if this terrorist state is not stopped. There are people who are disturbed when I compare Hamas to the National Forces. Why are you disturbed? Those who call Hamas a terrorist organisation today, believe me, even if it were a century ago, they would also call the National Forces a terrorist organisation.

Tens of families stuck in Jabalia as Israeli attacks continue

Reporters in northern Gaza say that tens of families are besieged by Israeli forces in Jabalia, as fighting with Palestinian factions continues. Heavy Israeli bombings are being reported from the area and ambulances are struggling to reach the injured.

EU urges Israel to end Rafah operation ‘immediately’, warns ties may be undermined

The EU urged Israel on Wednesday to end its military operation in Rafah “immediately,” warning that a failure to do so would strain relations with the bloc. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement in the bloc’s name:

Should Israel continue its military operation in Rafah, it would inevitably put a heavy strain on the EU’s relationship with Israel.

Hezbollah chief meets Hamas delegation in Lebanon

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met with a delegation of top Hamas figures headed by Khalil al-Hayya alongside Muhammad Nasr and Osama Hamdan in Lebanon. Hezbollah said the meeting consisted of “an extensive and in-depth assessment of the events and developments taking place in the Gaza Strip in particular and occupied Palestine in general and the various support fronts.” The men also discussed the development regarding ceasefire negotiations, international political positions as well as the student-led pro-Palestine protests across the globe.

Pro-Palestine students at University of Melbourne rename Arts West building ‘Mahmoud’s Hall’

Pro-Palestine student protesters at the University of Melbourne, Australia renamed the Arts West building to “Mahmoud’s Hall.” Mahmoud Alnaouq was a Palestinian man who was about to start pursue a Master’s Degree at the University of Melbourne, but was killed along with his family by an Israeli shelling in Gaza in October.

Australian senator breaks party ranks, accuses Israel of ‘genocide’

Australian Labor senator Fatima Payman broke ranks from her party to accuse Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza, and called on the prime minister and the Australian government to sanction Israel. Payman criticised Australian leaders for “performative gestures”, it was seems to be a veiled criticism of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. she said on Wednesday:

Instead of advocating for justice, I see our leaders performatively gesture defending the oppressor’s right to oppress, while gaslighting the global community about the rights of self defence. This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise. The lack of clarity, the moral confusion, the indecisiveness is eating at the heart of this nation.

Live Updates
Middle East Eye, May 15 2024

10 killed in Israeli shelling of UNRWA clinic in Gaza City

Al Jazeera reports that an Israeli strike on an UNRWA clinic in Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood killed at least 10 displaced Palestinians.

US to send $1b more in weapons, ammo to Israel despite Rafah tensions

The Biden administration told key US lawmakers it would send over $1bln in additional arms and ammunitions to Israel, three congressional aides told the AP. It was unclear, however, when the arms would be delivered. The major transfer of military aid, initially reported by the WSJ, comes a week after the White House paused a single transfer of 1.8k 2k-lb bombs and 1.7k 0.5k-lb bombs to Israel, citing concerns over the lives of civilians in Gaza. Biden had also said that we would stop sending offensive arms to Israel should it carry out a large-scale invasion of Rafah. The congressional aides said the package revealed on Tuesday includes about “$700m for tank ammunition, $500m in tactical vehicles and $60m in mortar rounds.” In Gaza, six people were killed in two separate Israeli attacks on apartments in Gaza City, including a mother and her child overnight, as Israeli forces continue to carry out strikes across the Palestinian enclave. The strikes come as the death toll from yesterday’s attack on a school and a home in Nuseirat, central Gaza killed rose to at least 40 people. Additionally, Palestine’s WAFA reported that the European Hospital in Khan Younis is now out of service as power generators ran out of fuel. Read more: US to send $1bln more in weapons, ammo to Israel despite Rafah tensions.

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south front

May 15, 2024 – 1:24 pm

Israeli Army Suffered More Losses At Hands Of Palestinian Fighters In Gaza
South Front, May 15 2024

The IOF suffered more human and material losses while attempting to advance in different parts of the Gaza Strip in the last few days. On May 15, the IOF said that a soldier from the 7th Armored Brigade’s 75th Battalion was killed while taking part in the ongoing ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah a day earlier. His death has brought the toll of Israeli troops killed since the start of ground operations in the Strip to 273. More than 1.5k others have also been wounded so far, including dozens since the start of the IDF operations in Rafah earlier this month. The Izz’al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas Movement which rules Gaza, released on May 13 and 14 two videos showing its fighters shelling IOF gatherings with mortars and blowing up Israeli main battle tanks and APCs using RPGs and explosive devices in Rafah.


On May 14 and 15, the group released three more videos of its fighters targeting IDF main battle tanks, APCs, bulldozers and troops with RPGs in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another video shared by the group showed a small quadcopter drone that was captured during the fighting in the area.




Al Jazeera also reported on Mar 15 that the IOF withdrew its forces from Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood in the northern part of the Strip following a six-day operation. The IOF said that the Nahal Brigade withdrew from the neighborhood to prepare for “additional offensive operations.” Nevertheless, it noted that reservists of the Carmeli Brigade continue to operate in Zeitoun, contradicting Al Jazeera report. On the Palestinian side, the Israeli war has so far claimed the lives of 35,173 people and left more than 79,061 others wounded, according to the latest update by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Most of the victims were women and children. In addition to the high number of casualties, the Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the Strip’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN. Despite expanding operations in Gaza, the IOF is still facing fierce resistance from Hamas and other Palestinian armed factions in Gaza and taking both human and material losses. On top of that, none of the goals of the Israeli war have been achieved yet.

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the cradle

May 15, 2024 – 11:23 am

Yemen targets US destroyer in latest Red Sea op
The Cradle, May 15 2024

The Yemeni Armed Forces announced on May 15 the targeting of two ships in the Red Sea, including a US destroyer warship. Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Yahya Saree announced in a televised statement on Wednesday:

The naval forces of the Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a military operation targeting the American destroyer ‘USS Mason’ in the Red Sea with a number of appropriate naval missiles. They achieved accurate hits on USS Mason.

USS Mason was in the Red Sea as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian, which aims to protect Israeli shipping from Yemen’s operations. US CENTCOM said on Monday that it had destroyed a drone and a missile launched by the Yemeni Armed Forces. The armed forces also confirmed the successful targeting of another ship in the Red Sea, identified as the ‘Destiny.’

Yemen explained that the Destiny was targeted because it violated the blockade on ships headed to Israeli ports. The statement explained that the ship was headed to the southernmost Israeli port of Eilat on Apr 20 by way of “deception and concealment claiming that it was heading to another port.” The armed forces stated that it had monitored the ship and warned the ship “not to enter the ports of Occupied Palestine.” Upon violation of these commands, the Destiny was banned from setting sail in the areas falling under the scope of the operations.

Saree reiterated that Yemen would not cease operations until the aggression against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip was stopped. Yemen recently announced that it will be expanding to the Mediterranean Sea as part of the fourth phase of its operations.

Palestinians commemorate 76th Nakba Day as half a million flee Rafah
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Nearly half a million Palestinian civilians have fled Gaza’s southern city of Rafah on 15 May as Israel’s threat to invade continues to loom overhead. The mass forced displacement of civilians continues as Palestinians mark the 76th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, which paved the way for the creation of the Israeli state when Zionist paramilitaries drove around 750k Palestinians out of their homes and villages, many seeking refuge in what would become the Gaza Strip and West Bank and sanctuary in surrounding Arab nations. Zionist militias attacked Palestinian villages in efforts to form a Jewish state, ethnically cleansing it from its indigenous inhabitants.

Nakba Day comes as battles rage on between the Palestinian resistance and Israeli forces. The UN estimates that roughly 450k Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from Rafah since 6 May, and nearly 100k from northern Gaza. In just a week’s time, effectively, a quarter of Gaza’s population of 2.4m has been displaced yet again. More than 45k Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel’s onslaught of violence against Gaza. At least 14.5k of those killed were children. Protests and actions commemorating the Nakba tragedy have sprung up across the globe in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Students in Melbourne took over a hall at the University of Melbourne, renaming it “Mahmoud’s Hall” in memory of Mahmoud al-Nouq, a prospective student who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October. Student Gemma O’Toole said:

We don’t want to be at a university that funds research for war. Students have always been on the right side of history and always been met with the sort of reaction we’re getting right now.

Students in the Philippines also held a protest, burning Israeli and US flags and calling for a ceasefire despite police disapproval and violence.

German tech workers have taken to Berlin streets in protest against the Amazon Web Services summit, demanding that the company pull out of Project Nimbus, a contract that provides the Israeli army with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. The project is speculated to have been used to provide public data for AI targeting systems like Lavender and compile a kill list for Israel.

Students at Tel Aviv University held protests, which the police refused to permit for the first time since the event was established 12 years ago. Anti-protesters could be heard shouting at the Tel Aviv University students, “Here is not Columbia,” where students set up encampments in solidarity with the Palestinians. Graduates even ripped up their diplomas in dissent against the university’s policies. Palestinians today have endured mass expulsion from their homes on a scale unseen since the Nakba. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, told Anadolu Agency it would be accurate to call what is happening in Gaza a “second Nakba, but even worse.”

Israeli war minister orders Al Jazeera shutdown in West Bank: Report
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has instructed Army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi to prevent Al Jazeera from airing in the occupied West Bank, coming after a ban on the network in Israel earlier this month. According to an Israeli Army Radio report citing unnamed Israeli military officials, the army is working to implement the order against the Qatari news outlet. The report adds that it remains unclear whether the directive would encompass regions of the West Bank occupied by Israeli settlers or if it would be extended to Palestinian regions, where Al Jazeera continues to wield considerable viewership. It is also unclear whether the order would close Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah or ban the network airing on television across the Palestinian territories. Al Jazeera has yet to comment on the situation.

Previously, Al Jazeera broadcasted live from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and a location near Gaza in northern Israel on a daily basis. However, it has now been compelled to generate all its content from Ramallah. On May 5, the Israeli government ratified a decision to close down Al Jazeera in Israel, shuttering its offices, seizing broadcasting equipment, disconnecting the channel from cable and satellite providers, and restricting access to its websites. Netanyahu, after the cabinet vote on the closure, asserted that Al Jazeera had “harmed Israel’s security and incited against soldiers,” characterizing the outlet as a “Hamas mouthpiece.” Video footage circulating online depicts undercover officers dismantling camera equipment in a hotel room, identified by a source from Al Jazeera as situated in East Jerusalem.

Last month, Netanyahu described the Doha-based outlet as a “terrorist channel” and reiterated that Tel Aviv would “act immediately” to shut down its activities under a proposed law. Israel has had several confrontations with the Qatari news agency over the years, including the killing of a journalist and a freelancer via an airstrike in Gaza and the intentional targeting and murder of Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022.

Hezbollah bombs Israeli bases with large rocket, missile barrage
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Hezbollah targeted Israel’s Meron air control base and Pranit barracks in the Galilee on May 15 with dozens of rockets and missiles in response to the assassination of one of its fighters the night before.

Hezbollah said:

In response to the assassination carried out by the Israeli enemy in the south, on Wednesday, May 15 2024, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance attacked the headquarters of the air control unit at the Meron base with dozens of Katyusha rockets, heavy rockets, and artillery shells, hitting its old and new equipment. Parts of them were completely disabled.

Hezbollah announced in a statement a short while earlier that it struck the headquarters of the Israeli army’s 91st division in the Pranit barracks with Burkan missiles. Tel Aviv said 60 rockets were fired from Lebanon, causing “minor damage” to the Meron base. A source told Sputnik that more than 100 rockets were fired at the Meron base and the Pranit barracks, adding that “smoke was seen rising” from the two sites. The resistance group announced the death of its fighter Hussein Ibrahim Makki on Wednesday. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike south of the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Tuesday evening. Hezbollah also targeted technical equipment and espionage devices at the radar site in the occupied Shebaa Farms region on Wednesday. The Lebanese resistance has attacked the Meron base numerous times in recent months. As a result, the annual Israeli pilgrimage event on Mount Meron, Lag Ba’omer, has been cancelled.

The assassination on Tuesday evening came after Hezbollah carried out several operations against Israel, including the downing of an Israeli surveillance balloon used against the resistance. Hezbollah has attacked Israeli military sites daily since Oct 8 in solidarity with Gaza and in support of the Palestinian resistance. It has vowed to continue doing so until the war in Gaza is brought to an end. Proposals for deescalation brought forth by Washington and Paris have continued to fail in pressuring Hezbollah to stop its operations. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on May 13:

The Lebanon front’s first and foremost goal is to contribute to pressuring Israel to stop the war in Gaza.

Hezbollah leader hosts Hamas officials to discuss joint resistance efforts
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah received a delegation from the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on May 15. The Hamas delegation, headed by Khalil al-Hayya, also included Muhammad Nasr and Osama Hamdan, who conducted in-depth and extensive discussions on the Gaza Strip, Palestine more broadly, and the regional support fronts. Hezbollah’s media release read:

The course of the recent negotiations and the outcome of international political positions and student movements in many parts of the world were also reviewed.

Unity between the branches of resistance in all freedom fighting, political, and public efforts were emphasized for achieving the goals set by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. During a recent speech by Nasrallah on Monday commemorating the death anniversary of Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badreddine, he emphasized Hezbollah’s commitment to fighting Israel until it ceases its war on Gaza. Nasrallah said:

The Lebanon front’s first and foremost goal is to contribute to pressuring Israel to stop the war in Gaza. The Americans and French have acknowledged this fact.

Addressing Israeli settlers, the Lebanese resistance leader said:

We say to the settlers in the north, if you want a solution, go to your government and tell them to stop the war on Gaza.

Hundreds of settlers have taken to the streets in protest of the situation in the north. According to Haaretz, some settlers have been saying that “the government has lost the north.” Nasrallah noted during his speech:

We estimate that the enemy has two options: returning to the mediators’ proposal, which means defeat, or remaining in a battle that will be prolonged for them. In both cases, the resistance will be victorious.

Hezbollah has continued shelling northern Israeli settlements as far as Acre in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, leading to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers. Recently, Hezbollah’s operations against Israel have intensified. This includes an attack on an Israeli spy balloon and operating base, announced with a video on the group’s official military media.

Israeli troops forced out of north Gaza’s Al-Zaytoun
The Cradle, May 15 2024

The Israeli army withdrew some of its forces from the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood in northern Gaza on 15 May following fierce battles with the Palestinian resistance. The troops withdrew after a week of operations there, Israel’s Broadcasting Authority reported. Citing army sources, it added that fighting is ongoing in three areas: Jabalia in the north, Rafah in the south, and the Netzarim axis near the center of the strip. An army spokesman said in a statement:

This morning the forces of the battle team of the Nahal Brigade have finished operating in the Al-Zaytoun area and are preparing for further offensive operations, the battle team of the 2nd Brigade continues to operate in the Al-Zaytoun area.

Hamas’ Qassam Brigades said on May 14 that they targeted Israeli troops in Al-Zaytoun with mortar fire. Last week, Tel Aviv confirmed the killing of five Israeli soldiers in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood. According to an army probe, they were killed by explosives detonated by resistance fighters. Fighting continued in the area in the days that followed. Those killed belonged to the 931st Battalion of the Nahal Brigade, which withdrew from the neighborhood on Wednesday morning. As part of efforts to clear north Gaza of Hamas fighters in February, Israeli forces launched an operation in Al-Zaytoun and took severe losses during battles with the resistance. The army withdrew from the neighborhood on Feb 29 under heavy fire. This latest withdrawal from the area comes as intense battles rage in northern Gaza, where Israeli army has returned months after claiming to have dismantled Hamas’ battalions. Fighting in north Gaza’s Jabalia area in particular has been a major thorn in the side of Israel’s military.

The Qassam Brigades announced in a statement on Wednesday afternoon that it carried out an operation that killed 12 Israeli soldiers in the Jabalia refugee camp. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Quds Brigades also said it engaged in fierce clashes in Jabalia on Wednesday, leaving several troops dead and wounded. Rockets continue to fire out of northern Gaza towards cities and towns in southern Israel, indicating that the resistance’s military capabilities are intact.

Resistance operations against Israeli troops in the southernmost city of Rafah have been ongoing since the army seized the city’s border crossing on May 7 and began pushing into the city. Qassam fighters sniped an Israeli soldier in Rafah on May 15. Wednesday’s battles coincided with Nakba Day, the anniversary of the killing, uprooting, and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

Israel will ‘set sights’ on Turkiye if Hamas defeated: Erdogan
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Erdogan warned on May 15 that Israel would “target” Turkiye if victorious against the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip. Erdogan said during a parliamentary group meeting in Ankara:

Israel will not stop in Gaza, and if not stopped, this rogue state will eventually target Anatolia with its delusions of a promised land. We will continue to stand by Hamas, which fights for the independence of its own land and which defends Anatolia. On Nakba, the Day of Catastrophe, we once again declare with all our being and resources that we stand by Palestine and the Palestinian cause. We will also ensure that the perpetrators of genocide face justice.

For the past several months, the Turkish president has harshly criticized Israeli authorities for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. However, his actions trailed far behind his words, as it took over six months for Ankara to end its highly lucrative trade ties with Israel. However, mere days after announcing a trade freeze, the Turkish government partially walked back its decision by issuing temporary approval for the supply of construction materials to Israel. Ankara has also refrained from obstructing the flow of oil from neighboring Azerbaijan to Israel.

For its part, Tel Aviv has been quietly returning diplomats to Turkiye in recent weeks after withdrawing them months ago over “security concerns.” Nevertheless, Turkish officials continue to send mixed signals, as earlier this week, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said his country decided to submit its declaration of official intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Fidan told reporters:

Israel systematically killing thousands of innocent Palestinians and rendering a whole residential area uninhabitable is a crime against humanity, attempted genocide, and the manifestation of genocide.

Israeli troops lament return to north Gaza months after ‘dismantling’ Hamas
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Israeli troops say they are facing significant difficulty in battles with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza’s northern city of Jabalia, an area that Tel Aviv said months ago was “cleared” of Hamas fighters. Haaretz reported on May 14:

Renewed operations in Jabalia and other parts of northern Gaza, like Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood, point to two lessons learned: that the IDF failed to fully assess the scale of Hamas’ military infrastructure in Gaza. When Israeli forces left the area, Hamas quickly reestablished itself in the vacuum created by the lack of a ‘day after’ strategy.

Tel Aviv claimed in early January that all of Hamas’ battalions were dismantled in northern Gaza, including Jabalia. Several Israeli army brigades are now back in the north, with the army’s 98th division operating in Jabalia after being diverted there instead of Rafah, according to Haaretz. The commander of the Israeli army’s 196th Battalion is cited as saying:

We are in a learning contest with Hamas. You can see they’ve changed tactics and are now focusing more on setting explosive devices in buildings.

The fighters of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades and other groups like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Quds Brigades have increasingly used the tactic of booby-trapping and detonating buildings with Israeli forces inside. Traditional tactics, including RPG attacks on tanks and vehicles, sniping operations, and mortar attacks on troop concentrations, continue to be deployed. The Qassam Brigades released several videos over the past few days showcasing their operations against troops in Jabalia.

The Haaretz report notes that despite wide-scale operations across Jabalia months earlier, the resistance’s military capabilities remain intact. On May 14, Israeli forces watched a barrage of rockets fly overhead, fired from nearby them in Jabalia northwards to Ashkelon. A commander of the 196th battalion says:

It’s frustrating to see this, seven and a half months after the war began.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli soldiers fighting in Jabalia have all used a single word to describe their presence in the city: “Sisyphean.” The word refers to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who the gods punished by forcing him to roll a giant boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he neared the top. Reservists are also increasingly frustrated, as they are being deployed to combat areas with no knowledge of when they could return. The Israeli outlet cites a reservist as saying, adding that some are not reporting for service:

We were told that, in principle, we’re coming for a month, but the bottom line is that we’re here with open-ended orders.

UAE, Egypt, Morocco consider joining ‘postwar force’ in Gaza: Report
The Cradle, May 15 2024

Authorities in the UAE, Egypt, and Morocco are considering joining a US-led initiative for a “peacekeeping force” in Gaza once the genocidal war comes to an end, according to western and Arab officials who spoke with the Financial Times. An unnamed western official told the British news outlet:

Three Arab states have had initial discussions, including Egypt, the UAE, and Morocco, but they would want the US to recognize a Palestinian state first.

Another setback the western initiative faces is that the interested Arab parties insist the postwar force “should be US-led.” Another official briefed on the discussions told FT:

We have been trying to build some momentum for a stability force, but the American policy is pretty firm that there will be no American troops on the ground, so it’s hard for them to make the argument that others should. There could be other ways to get there, and any effort has to be American-led.

In late March, Politico reported that US officials had launched “preliminary conversations” with Arab partners about options for “stabilizing post-war Gaza,” including a proposal for the Pentagon to help fund either a “multinational force or a Palestinian peacekeeping team.” A senior White House official told the DC-based outlet:

We are working with partners on various scenarios for interim governance and security structures in Gaza once the crisis recedes. We’ve had a number of conversations with both the Israelis and our partners about key elements for the day after in Gaza when the time is right.

The report coincided with leaks in Hebrew media that said Tel Aviv had been pushing for the establishment of an “international peacekeeping force to secure the Gaza Strip,” specifically naming the UAE, Egypt, and a “third country” that also normalized ties with Israel. When pressed by FT about the most recent information, a US State Dept spox confirmed:

We have held talks with partners in the region about post-conflict Gaza,. Many share a willingness to play a constructive role when conditions allow. There will be an ongoing need for many nations to step up to support Gaza’s governance, security, and humanitarian efforts. I’m not going to get ahead of those diplomatic discussions.

Another roadblock to Washington’s plan is the Israeli government, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Tel Aviv’s forces will maintain long-term security control of the strip. The western official who spoke with FT said:

Israel is refusing to talk to anybody about it; it’s in denial. And everyone else is talking past each other. The Arab states say the west has to recognize a Palestinian state, but very few of the major western states are really close to doing this.

Earlier this week, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan blasted Netanyahu for saying the Emiratis could assist a future post-war administration in the Gaza Strip. The top Emirati diplomat said via social media:

The UAE stresses that the Israeli prime minister does not have any legal capacity to take this step, and the UAE refuses to be drawn into any plan aimed at providing cover for the Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.

Egypt and Morocco have also pushed back against helping Israel maintain security control of Gaza.

US readies $1b in bombs for Israel days after ‘pausing’ arms transfer
The Cradle, May 15 2024

The Biden administration has informed Congress that it is planning a $1b weapons transfer to Israel, congressional sources told CBS on May 14.  Congress will have to approve the transfer, which was initially reported on by the WSJ. This is the first arms shipment to be announced by Washington since it paused a shipment of weapons to Israel over concerns with its plans in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. The weapons package includes $700m in tank ammunition, $500m in tactical vehicles, and $60m in mortar rounds. It remains unclear when the arms will be sent.

The news comes as Republican lawmakers have this week been planning to advance a bill to mandate the “prompt delivery” of offensive weapons to Israel. The White House said it would veto the bill, which has little chance of passing in the Democratically-controlled Senate. Democrats are divided on the issue, and around two dozen have sent a letter to Biden saying they were “deeply concerned about the message” sent by the recent pausing of the arms shipment to Israel. In response, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week:

We strongly, strongly oppose attempts to constrain the President’s ability to deploy US security assistance consistent with US foreign policy and national security objectives.

She added that Washington plans to send “every last cent” of the supplemental package signed into legislation by Biden last month. In March, Congress passed a $95b package of foreign aid that includes military assistance to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.

Israeli forces stormed and seized control of the Rafah border crossing on May 7. Dozens of civilians, including children, have been killed as jets continue to heavily bombard the besieged city. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been forcibly displaced, and the operation has severely disrupted efforts to send aid into the strip. Washington has repeatedly warned Israel over the months against carrying out a full-scale attack on the city, which shelters over a million besieged Palestinians in dire living conditions. Biden had said on 9 May his administration would not supply weapons for an expanded operation in Rafah. On Monday, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that Washington will continue to provide Israel with military assistance in line with the aid package but added that the bomb shipment was paused earlier this month because “we do not believe they should be dropped in densely populated cities.”

Israeli airstrikes have pounded densely populated city indiscriminately since the start of the operation. Artillery shelling caused widespread destruction to homes and property on 15 May, according to WAFA news agency. The UN warned this week that an expanded operation in Rafah would be “catastrophic.” In the past 24 hours, at least 82 Palestinians have been killed due to Israeli bombardment across Gaza.

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moon of alabama

May 15, 2024 – 11:18 am

Ukraine SitRep: An Army And Country At Their End
Moon of Alabama, May 15 2024

Stephen Byren writes, correctly, that the purpose of the Russian offensive towards Kharkiv is to disintegrate the Ukrainian army:

To my mind, Russia’s objective is to force Ukraine’s army to chase after invading Russian units. The idea is to cause heavy casualties on the Ukrainian side and, if all goes according to plan, either to split Ukraine’s army into two, or disintegrate it altogether. In such a manner the idea is not just to take territory but to destroy Ukraine’s ability to resist. There are many indicators that Russia is having success in the ongoing operation.

General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, (which includes foreign fighters and Nazis units,) agrees to that. He paints an bleak picture (archived):

Like most Ukrainian officials and military experts, General Budanov said he believes the Russian attacks in the northeast are intended to stretch Ukraine’s already thin reserves of soldiers and divert them from fighting elsewhere. That is exactly what is happening now, he acknowledged. He said the Ukrainian army was trying to redirect troops from other front line areas to shore up its defenses in the northeast, but that it had been difficult to find the personnel. “All of our forces are either here or in Chasiv Yar,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian stronghold about 120 miles farther south that Russian troops have assaulted in recent weeks. “I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”

The Ukrainian military has pulled out parts of various brigades that are engaged in the east and is moving them north towards the Kharkiv region. This will be a hodgepodge of partly filled battalions without a unified command and with nothing left to stuff any holes elsewhere. Budanov correctly fears that Russian can and will repeat this game in other places:

General Budanov said he expected the attacks in the Kharkiv region to last another three or four days, after which Russian forces are expected to make a hard push in the direction of Sumy, a city about 90 miles to the northwest of Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials have previously said that Russia had massed troops across the border from Sumy. Pavlo Velycho, a Ukrainian officer operating near the Russian border in the Sumy region, said that Russian shelling of the outskirts of Sumy had recently increased.

The Russian forces can easily progress because the money allocated for fortifications in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions was paid to fictitious companies without any trenches ever being build (machine translation):

Multi-million contracts for the construction of fortifications, for which they spent a total of 7 billion hryvnias there, were transferred by the Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars. … It so happened that the department of the Kharkiv OVA for defense purchases chose newly registered no-name firms and FOPs. Moreover, the owners of these firms do not resemble successful businessmen and businesswomen-they have dozens of court cases, from whiskey theft to domestic violence against their husband and mother, some of them are deprived of parental rights and have had enforcement proceedings for loans in banks. Another interesting detail: it seems that these beneficiaries do not even know that they are millionaires. After all, they continue to work in shifts in the fields and factories.

The US obviously fears that the Ukrainian army will not be able to hold its lines. Today Blinken arrived on an unannounced visit in Kiev to shore up moral, or probably to arrange for a change in Ukraine’s leadership:

Blinken, who arrived in Kyiv by train early on Tuesday morning, hopes to “send a strong signal of reassurance to the Ukrainians who are obviously in a very difficult moment,” said a US official who briefed reporters traveling with Blinken on condition of anonymity. “The Secretary’s mission here is really to talk about how our supplemental assistance is going to be executed in a fashion to help shore up their defenses (and) enable them to increasingly take back the initiative on the battlefield,” the official said. … Blinken will reassure Ukrainian officials including President Zelensky of enduring US support and deliver a speech focused on Ukraine’s future, the official said.

Blinken and Biden need the Ukrainian army to hold until the November election is over. It is unlikely that they can achieve that aim. Some pause on the battlefield would now be convenient but that requires to get rid of Zelensky. US media are emphasizing the $60b package passed by Congress for Ukraine. They neglect to explain that only $14.5b of that is actually going to Ukraine, half of it to keep the state solvent and the other half in form of weapons Ukraine might buy once they are build. The other money is designated to refill the US military stockpile. The real military help for Ukraine during the next months, in form of artillery and anti-air ammunition, will be minuscule.

There is nothing in there that can defend against the FAB glide bombs the Russian military is using in ever growing numbers to break up Ukrainian positions. The last three days have each seen Ukrainian losses at about 1,500 per day, double the usual count, with most of them occurring on the eastern front, not in the Kharkiv direction. Currently the replacement rate through Ukrainian mobilization is said to be only 25% of the losses that are actually occurring.

Everyone knows that the war is coming to an end. That there will be a victor, Russia, and a lot of losers. The US as well as the EU are now trying to find a face saving way to acknowledge that without admitting it. The easiest way will be to blame Ukraine, and especially its President Zelensky, for having not listened to western advice during some of the hotter phases of the war (Bakhmut etc). “We gave them a chance and they blew it,” will soon become the major tenor of official statements. But in reality there never was a chance for Ukraine to defeat or even to weaken Russia. All numbers, capacities and people, pointed against that. Despite that fact it was pushed to its death by western delusion. One hopes that its people, and others, will have learned from it.

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xymphora

May 15, 2024 – 10:04 am

Assassination politics

Canada got a dose of the Zionist astroturfing to its legislature:

It remains striking, absolutely amazing really, that we have the worst group of ‘leaders’ in generations, as well as all the scum billionaires pulling all the strings, and yet the only people in danger are the relatively good ones:

Given the absolute Jewish ownership of Musk, I thought it was odd he reinstated Nick Fuentes, only for Fuentes to immediately start attacking Hamas, making everything clear:

Note how common it is for the Genocide Jews to initiate contact, and then claim loudly that they are being assaulted, all while we can see what is happening on cameras (and we’re supposed to believe their ‘Holocaust’ tall tales!)!

This appears to be deliberate mischief to give the (((media))) something to use for distraction, while even half the numbers would still be a genocide:

I guess it doesn’t really matter how many died, as they all had it coming, for wanting not to be killed and have their land stolen:

Globalize the Intifada

An excellent example of how Tracey’s constant, mindless contrarianism makes him no more than a ‘gibbering doofus’:

Hamas is undeniably beating both the IOF and its American backers, on the battlefield and tactically/strategically. Some ‘freakish sideshow’!

500 miles:

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