Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 29-30/2023
Iran's Destructive, Expansionist, Fundamentalist and Jihadist Schemes, and the Spread of its Armed Proxies Threaten Moderate Arab Countries and their Societies./Elias Bejjani/October 29/2023
Jihadist Hamas does not serve the Palestinian cause, and its victory will be a victory for ISIS, fundamentalism, and for the Vicious Iranian mullahs’ Schemes/Elias Bejjani/October 26/2023
Israel Carries out Raids at Targets Deep inside Lebanon
Hezbollah says it downs Israeli drone in south Lebanon
Hamas, Jamaa Islamiya fire rockets from Lebanon as Hezbollah-Israel clashes continue
Mikati meets Emir of Qatar on first leg of Arab tour
Qatari emir, Lebanon's PM address Palestinian developments
Israel shells south as Hezbollah targets border military post
Hezbollah's Sheikh Nabil Kaouk: US sends threats but misses the mark
Kuwaiti Embassy in Beirut advises its nationals to depart Lebanon
Cyprus braces for migrant Influx amid Lebanon war fears
Currency stability amid regional tension: Dollar holds at LBP 89,000, Israeli Shekel declines
'Beirut,' a Palestinian child succumbs in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza Strip
French Defense Minister to visit Lebanon on Wednesday
Geagea elected as Lebanese Forces Party Chief, Adwan Vice-President
"Islamic Resistance": We targeted an Israeli infantry force in the Al-Malikiyah site and its surroundings, causing confirmed casualties
"Islamic Resistance": We targeted an Israeli drone in the East Khiam area with a surface-to-air missile
Two wounded after an enemy drone targeted motorcycles in Mays al-Jabal
Islamic Resistance: Our Mujahideen targeted Miskaf General’s site & destroyed part of its equipment
Sharia Council member mourns three persons who were killed while heading to central Beirut to partake in a sit-in in support of Gaza
Tenenti on yesterday's attack: We strongly urge all parties involved in the conflict to immediately cease
Missiles launched towards occupied Palestinian territories, enemy responds with artillery shelling
Bou Habib discusses with his Dutch counterpart developments in South Lebanon: Peace & stability in the entire region begin with the implementation of...
Education Minister extends school closure decision in southern border areas on Monday
Fayyad from Cairo: Syrian displacement places heavy burden on Lebanon's infrastructure, international community required to provide appropriate...
RSF Says Killing of Reuters Journalist in Lebanon a Targeted Strike

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 29-30/2023
Pope calls for Israel-Hamas ceasefire, hostages’ release
Syrian Opposition Members On Syrian Regime Hypocrisy: It Massacred Palestinians In Syria, But Weeps Crocodile Tears Over Palestinians In Gaza
Gaza receives largest aid shipment so far as deaths top 8,000 and Israel widens military offensive
Crowd storms Russian airport to protest flight from Israel
Israel Shows Images of Tanks in Gaza as War on Hamas Deepens
US Says Israel Must Protect Civilians in Gaza, Stop Jewish Settler Violence
Britain, France Stress Need to Get Aid into Gaza
"We reiterate - it's impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives."
Israel’s Netanyahu Says Wasn’t Warned of Planned Hamas Attack
Israeli Settlers Launch Annual Olive War by Killing Palestinian Farmer
Gazans at ‘Breaking Point’ as Aid Centers Looted, UN Agency Says
Iran says Gaza attack 'may force everyone' to act, as Saudi minister to hold talks with
Israel has been too soft on Hamas
Thousands break into aid warehouses in Gaza as deaths top 8,000 and Israel widens ground offensive
IDF bombs near Al-Quds Hospital as officials refute claims it harbored Hamas
Israeli settler shoots and kills Palestinian harvester as violence surges in the West Bank
Israel’s Netanyahu Says Wasn’t Warned of Planned Hamas Attack
UN Chief Warns Gaza Growing More Desperate 'by the Hour'
WHO Concerned by Report of Israeli Evacuation Warning to Gaza Al-Quds Hospital
Head of PLO meets with German ambassador as Turkey responds to Israel 'slander'
Israel seems to have replaced Gaza invasion with small incursions
Israeli army says 'increased' troop numbers inside Gaza
Israel says its war can both destroy Hamas and rescue captives. Their families are less certain
Retired general ‘can only hope’ Iran, proxies don’t escalate Middle East conflict
Impeding relief aid to Gaza may be a crime under ICC jurisdiction -ICC prosecutor
How Israel built and army to defend itself from Iran and its proxies

Titles For The Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 29-30/2023
Gaza and Two Big Lies ... Hamas, like Hezbollah launched battles whose consequences they failed to anticipate and brought hell upon their people./Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Netanyahu’s Deal With Putin Goes Wrong ...Is Ukraine the winner?/Vladislav Davidzon/The Tablet/October 29/2023
Biden’s Three Nos..Biden’s visit puts Israel in mortal danger/Gadi Taub/The Tablet/October 29/2023
Hamas Killed My Wokeness/Alex Olshonsky/The Tablet/October 29/2023
'Just Blind Hate': The Persecution of Christians, September 2023/Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/October 29, 2023
Hamas and the Ruse that May be its Last/Amir Taheri/Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
How the West allowed Iran to unleash horror across the Middle East/Daniel Johnson/The Telegraph/October 29, 2023
Former Israel PM Ehud Barak: ‘The Palestinian Authority needs to take over Gaza after the war’/James Rothwell/The Telegraph/Sun, October 29, 2023
Palestinian suffering since Hamas attack extends beyond Gaza/Daoud Kuttab/Arab News/October 29/2023


Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on October 29-30/2023
Iran's Destructive, Expansionist, Fundamentalist and Jihadist Schemes, and the Spread of its Armed Proxies Threaten Moderate Arab Countries and their Societies.
Elias Bejjani/October 29/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/123688/123688/
In the turbulent landscape of the Middle East, a sinister and destructive force has stealthily crept into the region, posing a severe threat to the very fabric of Arab moderation and stability. Iran, with its sponsorship of various Jihadist terrorist groups and proxy entities, has skillfully woven a web of influence that now stretches across several Arab nations, and its strategy bears serious implications for the entire region.
The Iranian Global Jihadist Agenda
Iran's nefarious influence in the region hinges on its persistent promotion of its Shiites' Jihadist expansionism and ideology of a satanic agenda. Through its sponsorship of extremist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and various militia factions, Iran actively fuels radicalism and terrorism. These Jihadist organizations, driven by an extremist ideology, undermine the stability of Arab nations, pushing them farther away from the path of moderation.
The Occupation of Lebanon
One of the most glaring examples of Iran's predatory agenda is its occupation of Lebanon through its terrorist and criminal proxy, Hezbollah that was once camouflaged as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation, has now exposed its deeply rooted affiliation to the Iranian scheme of expansionism and Jihadist  destructive strategy. Hezbollah, the most powerful Iranian terrorist and Jihadist proxy, has openly and boldly evolved into a well-armed and highly destabilizing force, acting as Iran's long arm in the region. Hezbollah's actions have plunged Lebanon into political turmoil, eroding its sovereignty, and sowing discord among its diverse communities. It is worth mentioning that, Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by several countries and international bodies, including the United States, Canada, the European Union, Israel, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Arab League, among others. It is considered a Shiite militant group based in Lebanon with close ties to Iran.
Iranian Schemes of Terrorism
Iran's involvement in orchestrating acts of terrorism across the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Yemen is well understated by analysts and reputable thinking tanks' entities. From supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Popular Mobilization Militias in Iraq,  to militarily supporting the Syrian dictator, Al-Assad regime, Iran has consistently employed terror as a means to achieve its geopolitical goals. This reckless approach only deepens the chaos and insecurity plaguing the region.
The Gaza Strip and Iran's Role
The ongoing war in the Gaza Strip serves as another distressing chapter in Iran's Jihadist-expansionism playbook. While the Palestinian issue is a legitimate and crucial concern for many in the Arab world, Iran's support for its proxy, the Jihadist Hamas, has exacerbated the conflict. Iran's provision of weaponry and financial support to Hamas fuels the flames of war, putting civilian lives at risk and exacerbating the suffering of the people of Gaza.
The Urgent Need for Resistance
To counter Iran's destructive strategy and the proliferation of its evil Jihadist ideologies, Arab nations must unite and strengthen their resolve. Cooperation is essential in facing the multifaceted threat that Iran represents, that not only endangers the Arab countries' stability. In this regard, initiatives should be taken to counter extremist narratives, promote moderation, and dismantle the support networks that prop up these Jihadist entities.
Conclusion:
Iran's destructive strategy, fueled by a Jihadist agenda and a web of proxy entities, has plunged the Middle East into a state of turmoil and instability. The Arab world must stand together to combat this threat, preserve their cultural heritage, and uphold the values of moderation, tolerance, and peace that have been at the core of their rich history. Only through unity and a resolute commitment to these principles can they hope to emerge from the shadow of Iran's destructive influence and secure a brighter, more stable future for their nations.

Jihadist Hamas does not serve the Palestinian cause, and its victory will be a victory for ISIS, fundamentalism, and for the Vicious Iranian mullahs’ Schemes
Elias Bejjani/October 26/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/123570/123570/
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “Hamas actions” do not represent the Palestinian people… and the PLO is the only legitimate representative.”
When trying to understand the political dilemma in the Middle East, it is imperative to deeply focus on the dangers and threats posed by terrorist, jihadist, and ideologically driven organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Houthies, and all the Muslim Brotherhood Islamic Jihadit’s offspring.
These groups represent a serious and significant threat to peace, security, and stability, not only in the Middle East, but also in all countries worldwide.
It is crucial to keep in mind that Hamas is a jihadist organization with ideological ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Turkey’s Erdogan and the Qatar Emirate etc.
If left unchecked and the Jihadists emerge victorious in Gaza’s ongoing war since the seventh of this month, there will be catastrophic consequences and dangers for various regional and international affairs, including a serious threat to moderate Arab and Gulf states’ regimes.
Hamas, and as the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abass stated on October 15/2023: “Its actions” do not represent the Palestinian people… and the PLO is the only legitimate representative”.
Hamas’s success in the Gaza war will undermine regional security and stability, ignite destructive populist hysteria, and trigger a wave of military coups that may target several Arab countries.
Hamas’s success will pose a significant threat to moderate Arab regimes and have highly negative consequences for strengthening the influence and presence of extremists in the region, and increasing their popularity among the youth.
Such a new imposed status could force many Arab and Islamic governments to abandon their moderate principles, in a bid to maintain domestic stability and avoid popular pressure.
Meanwhile, many political Islamic leaders may view Hamas’s success as an opportunity to achieve their jihadist, religious, and ideological goals, and could drive them to endorse and lead violent acts and angry popular protests that marginalize and threaten national identities, and also undermine peace and stability.
With the possibility of escalating tensions and disruptions in some Arab countries, military coups may occur, as the military Generals in these countries may see themselves responsible for maintaining stability and restoring order, which would impact democracy, freedoms, and a return to an era of regimes ruled by their military. In conclusion, the jihadist success of Hamas, or any other jihadist terrorist organization poses a serious threat to security, stability, and peace in the region. At the same time, the repercussions of Hamas’s success on the fate of moderate Arab regimes, the spread of hysterical and impulsive uprisings among the people, and the likelihood of military coups cannot be ignored. Addressing these fundamental challenges posed by Hamas, Hezbollah, and their patron, the Iranian regime, requires immediate and serious cooperation from all moderate Arab countries, their societies, intellectuals, and moderate leaders to coordinate openly with the free Western world in a bid to combat terrorism and promote stability in the region. Such world-wide endeavors MUST also involve plans to diminishing Iran’s influence and ending its proxies, especially Hezbollah, in addition to openly and courageously supporting moderate and democratic forces.

Israel Carries out Raids at Targets Deep inside Lebanon
Beirut: Nazir Rida/Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
The escalation of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah has entered a new stage in south Lebanon after Israel’s announcement on Saturday that it had stopped a surface-to-air missile fired from Lebanon at one of its drones. Israeli warplanes carried out three raids deep inside Lebanon in the Jabal Safi area, an area situated far from the border, while an Israeli air defense missile exploded over villages in the east of the southern city of Tyre. Hezbollah has incorporated new air defense systems into its ongoing battle with Israel which is a new development after 20 days of clashes and mutual bombardment.
The Israeli army and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon have exchanged fire on a daily basis since the start of the Gaza conflict three weeks ago. Israel's military said on Saturday it had "thwarted a surface-to-air missile that was fired from Lebanon" towards an Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It said the military had responded by "striking the origin of the missile's fire" killing 47 Hezbollah members. Hezbollah did not make any statement on the matter. An Israeli unmanned drone carried out three airstrikes targeting the American Hill area and an open location in the Jabal Safi in Iqlim al-Tuffah region, in parallel with Israeli surveillance drones flying over the region at medium altitude since Saturday morning. It is the first time that Israel carried out raids in said area. For the last 21 days, Israeli shelling has been confined to a maximum range of seven kilometers inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah says it downs Israeli drone in south Lebanon
BEIRUT (Reuters)/October 29, 2023
-Lebanon's Hezbollah said on Sunday it shot down an Israeli drone over southern Lebanon with a surface-to-air missile, the first time it has announced such an incident, as clashes on the Lebanese border escalate. The drone was hit near Khiam, about 5 km (3 miles) from the border with Israel, and was seen falling in Israeli territory, Hezbollah added. Two security sources in Lebanon said it was the first time Hezbollah had announced downing an Israeli drone."They have insinuated they have this capability but it is the first time they declare they have this kind of capability to shoot down a drone," Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center said. The Israeli Defence Ministry was not immediately available for comment. Earlier on Sunday, the United Nations' Lebanon peacekeeping force UNIFIL said that one of its members was injured after shells hit its base near the village of Houla on the Lebanese-Israeli border on Saturday. The Israeli army and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon have been exchanging fire on a daily basis since the start of the Gaza conflict three weeks ago. Some 46 Hezbollah fighters have been killed and 43 injured in the borderlands so far, the group said, adding it had conducted 84 attacks at 42 points along the border since the start of the clashes. Israel's military says at least seven of its soldiers have been killed so far. UNIFIL said on Saturday that its headquarters near the Lebanese coastal town of Naqoura was also damaged by a shell that landed inside the base. "UNIFIL expresses serious concern over these two attacks on our troops who are tirelessly working 24/7 to restore stability in southern Lebanon and de-escalate this perilous situation, " the force wrote on social media platform X.

Israel Carries out Raids at Targets Deep inside Lebanon
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Sunday that the killing of Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah in Lebanon on Oct. 13 was the result of a targeted strike from the direction of the Israeli border. "According to the ballistic analysis carried out by RSF, the shots came from the east of where the journalists were standing; from the direction of the Israeli border," RSF said. "Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting." The Israeli military has said it does not deliberately target journalists and that it is investigating the Oct. 13 incident. Reuters has asked the Israel Defense Forces for comment on the RSF report.

Hamas, Jamaa Islamiya fire rockets from Lebanon as Hezbollah-Israel clashes continue
Naharnet/October 29, 2023
The Lebanon branch of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades on Sunday announced firing 16 rockets from Lebanon at Nahariya in northern Israel in response to “the occupation’s crimes against our people in Gaza.”The military wing of Lebanon’s Jamaa Islamiya, which calls itself al-Fajer Forces, meanwhile claimed responsibility for another rocket attack on Israel’s Kiryat Shmona, saying the projectiles targeted the Israeli army’s posts around and inside the Israeli settlement. “Our rocket salvos will continue and increase whenever the Zionist enemy insists and goes far in its aggression against our people in south Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. We also stress that we are capable of expanding our responses to deter it from its aggression,” Jamaa Islamiya’s military wing warned. Both Hamas and Jamaa Islamiya are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood global network. Media reports said a building in Kiryat Shmona was directly hit with a rocket, with online footage showing the building in flames. According to some reports, the building was being used by Israeli troops, knowing that Kiryat Shmona had been recently evacuated of its residents by Israel's authorities. Hezbollah meanwhile announced shooting down an Israeli drone with a surface-to-air missile. The drone was flying over an area east of Lebanon’s Khiyam and was seen crashing inside Israel, Hezbollah added. In other statements, Hezbollah said it attacked three Israeli military posts on the border with guided missiles and the “appropriate weapons.”Israel retaliated by bombarding several Lebanese border areas with artillery shells, drones and warplanes. Three drone strikes were also reported on three houses in Mays al-Jabal, Maroun al-Ras and Adaisseh while a drone strike on a motorcycle in Mays al-Jabal wounded two people. The Israeli army confirmed carrying out three airstrikes against a cell and two individual militants.

Mikati meets Emir of Qatar on first leg of Arab tour
Naharnet/October 29, 2023
Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati met Sunday in Doha with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani. The talks tackled the developments in Palestine and the region and the bilateral ties between Lebanon and Qatar, Lebanon's National News Agency said. Mikati later held a meeting with his Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdurrahman bin Jassem Al-Thani. Mikati had recently announced that he would visit several Arab countries to strengthen Lebanon's position, back the calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and spare the region all-out chaos.

Qatari emir, Lebanon's PM address Palestinian developments
LBCI/October 29, 2023
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar, received in his office at the Amiri Diwan Lebanon's Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and the accompanying delegation. The latest developments in the Palestinian territories and the region were discussed, and bilateral relations between Lebanon and Qatar and ways to enhance and develop them were addressed. The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, also attended the meeting.

Israel shells south as Hezbollah targets border military post
Naharnet/October 29, 2023
Hezbollah on Sunday morning targeted the Misgav Am Israeli military post on Lebanon's border with the appropriate weapons, Hezbollah's al-Manar TV said. The Israeli army responded by opening fire on an area in the south of Lebanon's border town of Adaisseh. Israeli forces also fired around 10 shells at the heights of the border town of Kfarshouba and flares at the forests of the border town of Halta. Israeli incendiary shells had earlier in the morning targeted the forests around the border towns of Naqoura and Alma al-Shaab. Overnight, Israeli forces fired incendiary shells along the Blue Line as well as flares over south Lebanon's western and eastern sectors. A Nepalese UNIFIL officer of the rank of captain meanwhile sustained injuries to the abdomen and arm when two Israeli shells landed on a UNIFIL post in Lebanon's Houla, al-Manar said overnight.

Hezbollah's Sheikh Nabil Kaouk: US sends threats but misses the mark
LBCI/October 29, 2023
Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, a member of Hezbollah's Central Council, confirmed that the United States has sent threatening messages and deployed aircraft carriers and fleets in an attempt to intimidate Hezbollah, stating, "But they misaddressed it."During the celebratory event organized by Hezbollah in the town of Babliyeh, he viewed the construction of Israeli refugee camps as evidence of the collapse of Israeli military superiority theories. He considered that the US intervention meant that Israel was unable to protect itself. He said, "One of the most significant results of this battle is that the path of normalization has collapsed, and the path of economic, security, military, and political relations between the 'normalization world' and the entity has reached a dead end."He emphasized that the resistance will continue its operations to thwart the Israeli plan in Gaza because this failure is "protection for us, for Lebanon, and the region, just as it is protection for Gaza."

Kuwaiti Embassy in Beirut advises its nationals to depart Lebanon
LBCI/October 29, 2023
The Kuwaiti Embassy in Beirut called on Kuwaiti citizens to leave Lebanon due to the current security crisis in the region. In a statement, the embassy stated that this decision comes "based on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement issued on October 17, 2023, urging all Kuwaiti citizens who intend to visit the Lebanese Republic to postpone their travel during this period, and also appealing to Kuwaiti citizens currently in Lebanon to voluntarily return if there is no urgent need for their presence, given the current regional circumstances." It also urged all citizens currently present in Lebanon to contact the embassy and register their information on the embassy's phone at 0096171171441. In the past weeks, several embassies have also called their nationals to leave the country as the conflict in Gaza and Southern Lebanon intensifies.

Cyprus braces for migrant Influx amid Lebanon war fears
Agence France Presse/October 29, 2023
Cyprus has received an influx of 458 Syrian migrants from Lebanon in one week and is bracing for more as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to spread, officials said on Sunday. Authorities said 194 Syrians arrived late on Saturday aboard four boats from Lebanon and were taken to the Pournara reception center outside Nicosia. Interior minister Constantinos Ioannou warned that the east Mediterranean island's ability to handle large numbers of migrants was limited. He said the possible involvement of Lebanon in Israel's war and the generally worsening situation had weakened Beirut's efforts to monitor its territorial waters and prevent illegal departures. The first boat that arrived on Saturday held 110 people, and the second a further 52. Both had been heading for the southeastern coastal resort of Ayia Napa. Later, two more vessels were intercepted with a combined 32 people on board and taken to the southern port of Larnaca. Interior ministry official Loizos Hadjivasiliou said the Pournara center was now full, and an emergency plan had been activated to handle an increase in migrant arrivals because of the Israel-Hamas war. The European Union member has also asked Brussels for emergency assistance. "Additional tents have been requested in case our capabilities are exceeded," he told the semi-government Cyprus News Agency. On Tuesday, officials said "hundreds of Syrian refugees" in Lebanon were preparing to make the sea journey to Cyprus. A week ago, 264 Syrian migrants arrived on three boats from Lebanon, a relatively short journey across the Mediterranean. Cyprus has seen a surge of mainly Syrians arriving by boat from both Syria and Lebanon, which are less than 170 kilometers (105 miles) from the island. The government says it has reduced arrivals of irregular migrants by 50 percent since last year. Interior ministry figures show 11,961 asylum applications between March and August 2022, and that the number dropped to 5,866 in the same period this year. Cyprus argues that it is a "frontline country" on the Mediterranean migrant route, with asylum-seekers comprising an EU high of 6 percent of the 915,000 population in the republic -– a record figure across the bloc. According to the United Nations refugee agency, there are 26,995 asylum seekers in Cyprus whose applications are pending.

Currency stability amid regional tension: Dollar holds at LBP 89,000, Israeli Shekel declines
LBCI/October 29, 2023
Stability continues in the exchange rate of the US dollar at LBP 89,000 per one dollar, despite the tension in the region and Lebanon, precisely due to the ongoing military operations since the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Shekel recorded a decline, reaching 4.6 shekels per dollar, and the Syrian pound which reached 16,000 pounds per dollar on the black market. The reason for this can be attributed to the measures taken by Acting Banque du Liban (BDL) Governor Wassim Mansouri, in cooperation with the government and the Ministry of Finance, especially with regards to not injecting more pounds into the market, allowing speculation on the Lebanese lira. It is worth noting that contractors and suppliers had hurried to request their dues in Lebanese lira from state institutions and banks when the war broke out to exchange them for dollars. However, the Acting Governor made contacts that prevented the payment of these amounts.Sources revealed that Mansouri has also taken measures that reduced the cash mass, meaning the volume of Lebanese lira in circulation between citizens, institutions, and banks, from around 62 trillion Lebanese lira to 58 trillion Lebanese lira, thereby imposing further restrictions on speculators. The exchange rate of the US dollar against the Lebanese lira remained unaffected. Central bank sources emphasized that the Central Bank is capable of continuing its monetary stability policy at the moment. However, this does not mean the economic situation is at its best. Expectations indicate a decline in economic activity by approximately 50 percent, especially in the tourism sector, and this could harm the salaries and benefits received by workers in this sector and other private sectors.

'Beirut,' a Palestinian child succumbs in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza Strip
LBCI/October 29, 2023
A Palestinian child named "Beirut" has passed away as a result of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. In the past few days, many activists started sharing the story of "Beirut," a Palestinian child named after the Lebanese capital, as she was born on August 4, 2020, the day when the Beirut Port explosion erupted. Even though the actual Lebanese capital still stands despite the many crises and the ongoing regional tensions, Beirut and other Palestinian children are facing the repercussions of war, losing their sense of routine and rightful protection. The conflict has killed more than 3,000 children in under three weeks, stated Jason Lee, Save the Children's Country Director in the occupied Palestinian territory. Accordingly, the children of Gaza are not only going through very harsh circumstances, with the loss of their loved ones, homes, and schools, facing hunger and water scarcity, but they are losing their childhood innocence and paying the price of war both mentally and physically.

French Defense Minister to visit Lebanon on Wednesday
NNA/October 29, 2023
The office of the French Minister of Defense and Armed Forces, Sebastien Lecornu, announced today that next Wednesday he will begin meetings in Lebanon with officials, led by Prime Minister Najib Mikati, and will also visit a base for the United Nations peacekeeping forces in the South. Lecornu's office told Agence France-Presse in a statement, which his spokesman later confirmed to Reuters, that the minister seeks to reaffirm "France's commitment to Lebanon's stability." On Thursday, Lecorno will visit the UNIFIL peacekeeping forces.

Geagea elected as Lebanese Forces Party Chief, Adwan Vice-President
NNA/October 29, 2023
The long election day in Maarab to select members of the executive body of the Lebanese Forces party ended on Sunday, with the participation of 18,321 out of 31,000 voting members (58.9%).
Lebanese Forces Secretary-General, Emile Moukarzel, announced the final results, which came out as follows:
Party Head: Samir Geagea
Party Vice President: George Adwan
For the Lebanese Diaspora won Joseph Gebaili
For Beirut district won Daniel Spiro
For Mount Lebanon district won Eddie Abi Lamaa, Maya Zaghrini and Tony Karam
For North Lebanon district won Antoine Zahra, Wehbi Qatisha and Elie Keyrouz
For the Bekaa Valley won Bashir Matar and Michel Tannouri
For the South district won Asaad Saeed.

"Islamic Resistance": We targeted an Israeli infantry force in the Al-Malikiyah site and its surroundings, causing confirmed casualties
NNA/October 29, 2023
The "Islamic Resistance" issued a statement this evening, in which it indicated that "at 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, October 29, 2023, and after careful follow-up and monitoring, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance discovered an Israeli infantry force in the Al-Malikiyah site and its surroundings, which they immediately targeted with appropriate weapons, inflicting confirmed casualties among its members."

"Islamic Resistance": We targeted an Israeli drone in the East Khiam area with a surface-to-air missile
NNA/October 29, 2023
The “Islamic Resistance” issued a statement this evening, indicating that “at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 29, 2023, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance targeted an Israeli drone in the East Khiam area with a surface-to-air missile and hit it directly, where it was seen by naked eye falling into the occupied Palestinian territory."

Two wounded after an enemy drone targeted motorcycles in Mays al-Jabal
NNA/October 29, 2023
Two people were injured as a result of an enemy dtrone's targeting of motorcycles in the southern town of Mays al-Jabal, NNA correspondent reported this evening.

Islamic Resistance: Our Mujahideen targeted Miskaf General’s site & destroyed part of its equipment
NNA/October 29, 2023
The "Islamic Resistance" issued a statement on Sunday, saying: "The Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance, at 10:00 a.m. today, targeted the Miskaf General site with appropriate weapons and destroyed part of its artistic and technical equipment."

Sharia Council member mourns three persons who were killed while heading to central Beirut to partake in a sit-in in support of Gaza
NNA/October 29, 2023
Member of the Supreme Islamic Sharia Council, Kifah Al-Kassar, paid tribute today to “the souls of the martyrs in support of Gaza, Palestine and Al-Aqsa, Ahmed Hussein Qara, Mustafa Ali Hassan and Ali Jalal Al-Zakhouri, who died this morning in a car accident while they were heading from Dinniyeh to central Beirut to participate in a sit-in in support of Gaza.”"We condole ourselves and our people in Dinniyeh and the entire Islamic nation with these heroes who sacrificed their lives for Gaza and for the Palestinian cause, and we consider them to be martyrs, God willing," Al-Kassar said.
He asked the Lord Almighty to grant their families comfort and solace to endure their loss and wished the wounded a speedy recovery.

Tenenti on yesterday's attack: We strongly urge all parties involved in the conflict to immediately cease
NNA/October 29, 2023
In an issued statement today by UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti, he indicated that "at around 10 pm, two mortar shells hit a UNIFIL base in the vicinity of the village of Houla, resulting in the injury of one peacekeeper who was promptly evacuated for medical treatment. The peacekeeper sustained minor injuries, he was immediately evacuated to the hospital at UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura and he is currently in stable condition." The statement added, "Yesterday, UNIFIL compounds have been hit twice: in the afternoon with a shell hitting our Headquarters in Naqoura, and yesterday evening in the vicinity of Houla, resulting in the injury of one peacekeeper. UNIFIL expresses serious concern over these two attacks on our troops who are tirelessly working 24/7 to restore stability in southern Lebanon and de-escalate this perilous situation.""We strongly urge all parties involved in the conflict to immediately cease fire. Attacking UN peacekeepers is a crime, a violation of international law and must be condemned. Investigations have been launched into both incidents," Tenenti's statement concluded.

Missiles launched towards occupied Palestinian territories, enemy responds with artillery shelling
NNA/October 29, 2023
Heavy missiles were launched a short while ago towards the occupied Palestinian territories, and the enemy responded with artillery, NNA correspondent reported.
NNA - Caretaker Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, Abdallah Bou Habib, received today a phone call from the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Hanke Bruins, during which they deliberated over the latest developments in southern Lebanon and the Israeli verbal and military escalation. Bou Habib stressed, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “the need to pressure Israel to stop its provocations and threats issued by government and military officials to destroy Lebanon and return it to Stone Age, which may inflame the conflict and increase the risks of it turning into a regional confrontation that threatens peace and security in southern Lebanon and the entire region.”"This is in contrast to the statements issued by Lebanese officials that emphasize Lebanon’s lack of desire for war or seeking it," Bou Habib maintained. He also conveyed to his Dutch counterpart his “deep concern about the recent escalation in Gaza and the necessity of stopping the war, and for Israel to respect international humanitarian law.” Both ministers agreed that "peace and stability in the region as a whole begin with the implementation of the two-state solution by establishing a Palestinian state that grants the Palestinian people sovereignty and preserves their dignity."

Bou Habib discusses with his Dutch counterpart developments in South Lebanon: Peace & stability in the entire region begin with the implementation of...
NNA/October 29, 2023 
Caretaker Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants, Abdallah Bou Habib, received today a phone call from the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Hanke Bruins, during which they deliberated over the latest developments in southern Lebanon and the Israeli verbal and military escalation. Bou Habib stressed, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “the need to pressure Israel to stop its provocations and threats issued by government and military officials to destroy Lebanon and return it to Stone Age, which may inflame the conflict and increase the risks of it turning into a regional confrontation that threatens peace and security in southern Lebanon and the entire region.”"This is in contrast to the statements issued by Lebanese officials that emphasize Lebanon’s lack of desire for war or seeking it," Bou Habib maintained. He also conveyed to his Dutch counterpart his “deep concern about the recent escalation in Gaza and the necessity of stopping the war, and for Israel to respect international humanitarian law.” Both ministers agreed that "peace and stability in the region as a whole begin with the implementation of the two-state solution by establishing a Palestinian state that grants the Palestinian people sovereignty and preserves their dignity."

Education Minister extends school closure decision in southern border areas on Monday
NNA/October 29, 2023
Caretaker Education Minister Abbas Al-Halabi announced today the continued implementation of the closure decision of public and private schools, institutes, and vocational schools located in the southern border areas, on Monday, October 30, 2023.
"As for schools adjacent to the international border areas, the decision to close them will be left to the different school principals, while the remaining schools located in various Lebanese regions will continue to operate normally," Al-Halabi indicated.
Meanwhile, the Minister stressed the right of every student to enroll in the public school close to his new place of residence, as well as the right of educational staff who were displaced to other areas to enroll in the existing schools where they moved, provided that the educational districts are informed of these changes. Al-Halabi called on citizens to follow the Education Ministry’s statements, indicating that this decision remains in effect until further notice.

Fayyad from Cairo: Syrian displacement places heavy burden on Lebanon's infrastructure, international community required to provide appropriate...
NNA/October 29, 2023
Caretaker Minister of Energy and Water, Dr. Walid Fayyad, said in an interview with the Arab media on the sidelines of the “Cairo Water Week Conference” currently held under the auspices of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi: “This conference develops remarkably each year, going beyond the scope of the Republic of Egypt to reach the entire region and the Arab countries concerned with it as well as all other countries of the world, where participation is wide and diverse and from various international organizations...”
He deemed such wide participation as a good sign that benefits the Arab countries and provides an opportunity to exchange experiences in the water sector, where each country, through its historical practices, has a number of achievements that can be built upon for other countries to benefit as well.
“In Egypt, for example, the issue of recycling water and using water for irrigation and the reliable techniques and methodologies that this requires can be beneficial to Lebanon, as we can follow similar techniques in agricultural irrigation and elsewhere,” Fayyad said.
He continued to note that the conference was also “an occasion to reiterate our emphasis on the need for commitment by foreign donor countries and other participants from international organizations concerned with financing investment projects in water, and the essential role they must play in the countries most affected by climate change, a change they have contributed to over the past hundred years...Therefore, it is their duty to support the funds concerned with treatment in the water sector for the sake of sustainability, whether in Egypt, in the sisterly Arab countries, or in Lebanon.”
Fayyad explained that what greatly exacerbates the situation in Lebanon is the issue of Syrian displacement that places a heavy burden on the country’s infrastructure. “Hence, the international community is required to assist in an appropriate manner and to the extent of this burden, with investments in the water sector, such as projects concerned with preserving surface water, e.g. dams that have stopped as a result of the economic crisis and the cessation of funding from the World Bank and others in order to ensure their completion,” Fayyad asserted.
Finally, the Energy Minister disclosed that there was hesitation in attending the conference in wake of the prevailing circumstances in occupied Palestine...However, he considered that such participation is viewed as part of the steadfastness of Arab countries and their standing in support of their brothers in Palestine and Gaza who are being subjected to the most horrific massacres by the Zionist enemy. “These massacres are condemned and contradict all international laws and norms and the Charter of Human Rights and the main principles of all international agreements that must secure for the Palestinians their state, their sovereignty, and capital,” Fayyad underscored. “Consequently, what is happening is unjustified and is a described crime, and what is also unjustified is the silence at the level of some Western and Arab countries,” Fayyad continued to stress regretfully, highlighting the necessity of moving much more effectively in support of our Palestinian brothers.

RSF Says Killing of Reuters Journalist in Lebanon a Targeted Strike
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Sunday that the killing of Reuters visuals journalist Issam Abdallah in Lebanon on Oct. 13 was the result of a targeted strike from the direction of the Israeli border. "According to the ballistic analysis carried out by RSF, the shots came from the east of where the journalists were standing; from the direction of the Israeli border," RSF said. "Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting." The Israeli military has said it does not deliberately target journalists and that it is investigating the Oct. 13 incident. Reuters has asked the Israel Defense Forces for comment on the RSF report.

Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on October 29-30/2023
Pope calls for Israel-Hamas ceasefire, hostages’ release
LBCI/October 29, 2023
Pope Francis called on Sunday for a halt to the fighting between Israel and Hamas Movement. He once again appealed for the release of hostages held by the Palestinian militant group in Gaza.

Syrian Opposition Members On Syrian Regime Hypocrisy: It Massacred Palestinians In Syria, But Weeps Crocodile Tears Over Palestinians In Gaza
MEMRI/October 29, 2023
Syria, Palestine | Special Dispatch No. 10914
The condemnation of Israel and its war on Hamas by the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria has been ridiculed by members of the Syrian opposition, who argued that the Syrian regime – which killed thousands of Syrian-Palestinians, including women and children, imprisoned hundreds, and displaced hundreds of thousands – has no right to weep for the bitter fate of Palestinians in Gaza.
According to opposition members, since the war in Syria began in 2011, the Assad regime has attacked dozens of hospitals and hundreds of schools, and is even now attacking civil infrastructure in northwestern Syria. Therefore, they contend, its show of concern for Palestinians in Gaza is hypocritical, and any Palestinian hope for assistance from it will be in vain. Further, some oppositionists even called for supporting Israel rather than Syria if a war should erupt between them.
This report includes the statements made by members of the Syrian opposition against the Syrian regime on X (formerly Twitter), in the context of the war in Gaza.
Syrian Oppositionists: Assad Has The Audacity To Condemn Harm To Palestinians – After He Himself Murdered Palestinian Children And Bombed Dozens Of Hospitals In Syria
Several Syrian opposition members pointed out the hypocrisy of the Syrian regime, which does not hesitate to condemn what is being done to the Palestinians in Gaza despite having harmed Palestinians just as much.
Syrian media activist Radwan Al-Qassem posted a photo on his X account showing a sign from a demonstration against the Syrian regime in the country's southern Al-Suwayda Governorate. It read: "Clean your teeth of the flesh of Palestinian children [you murdered] in [the Palestinian refugee camps] Al-Zaatar[1] and Al-Yarmouk[2] before you pretend to cry for Gaza." He added: "To the regime gangs and their loyalists, there is no difference between those who kill Muslims in Gaza and those who kill Muslims in Syria."[3]
Similarly, Syrian activist Marea Othman wrote on X: "They murdered Palestinian children in the Al-Yarmouk [refugee camp] in Rif Damascus – and now are pretending they weep for those in Gaza. This is the nature of the Syrian regime, and its bullies who trade in [the Palestinian cause]."[4]
Mouaz Moustafa, director of the U.S.-based Syrian Emergency Task Force which is headquartered in the U.S., responded to the Syrian president's condemnation of the October 17 explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza as "one of the most terrible massacres against humanity in the modern age.” He wrote on X: "... Assad, the guy [whose forces] targeted dozens of hospitals and a hundred schools before breakfast, condemns the explosion of a hospital. This animal, who murdered babies in Idlib in the past days, and the past decade, has the audacity to speak."[5]
Opposition Activists: Assad, Who Murdered Palestinians In Syria, Will Not Help Them In Gaza
Many voices on social media argued that no help for Gaza should be expected from the Syrian regime that had murdered many Syrians and Palestinians in Syria. For example, Syrian opposition activist Zain Al-Abidin, from Deir Al-Zour Govsernorate, who covers Eastern Syria, wrote on X: "The Bashar [Al-Assad] regime has turned 280,000 Palestinian-Syrians into displaced persons and made another 120,000 into refugees; [he has caused] the deaths of 3,207 Palestinians, including 352 children, 312 women, and 497 men who were tortured to death; and he has imprisoned some 1,800 Palestinians, among them more than 100 women, in the regime prisons. Someone who slaughters and expels the Palestinians in Syria will not help them in Gaza."[6]
Al-Abidin's tweet
Syrian activist and journalist Omar Madaniah wrote on X: "Bashar Al-Assad, who threw the Palestinians into the pit in Al-Tadamoun [neighborhood] in Damascus,[7] will not save them in Palestine."[8]
Madaniah's tweet
Maher Sharaf Al-Din, a Syrian writer and poet affiliated with the Syrian opposition, raised the issue of military attacks by the Syrian regime and its allies carried out only against Syrians, not against Israel. He wrote on X: "The motto of the resistance: Bomb Idlib with barrel [bombs], and bomb Israel with words."[9]
Syrian Opposition Social Media Account: Stand With Israel If There Is An Israel-Syria War
Against the backdrop of a possible war between Israel and Syria, the Syrian Akad Al-Jabal account on social media has called for standing with Israel. It wrote on X, addressing "our Syrian people in the Golan" as follows: "If war approaches you from the Syrian side, take up arms and fight alongside the Israeli army in order to protect your lives – because they [the Syrian regime forces] will kill you... Do not believe the slogans, since it is clear to you what is happening in Syria. It is better to live in hell than for the Syrian regime to rule over you."[10]
Another post on X from the Akad Al-Jabal account stated: "With regard to Palestine's war with Israel, I will wish Arab Palestine victory with all my heart – but if there is an Israeli war with the Syrian regime, I will absolutely take Israel's side."[11]
Tweet from the Akad Al-Jabal account
[1] In August 1976, during the Lebanese Civil War, Christian militias backed by Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad carried out a massacre in the Tel Al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut.
[2] A camp in Damascus which was controlled by rebel forces for several years during the Syrian Civil War, during which several hundred of its residents were killed.
[3] Twitter.com/RadwanAlqasem, October 20, 2023.
[4] Twitter.com/Marea_Elshame, October 20, 2023.
[5] Twitter.com/SoccerMouaz, October 18, 2023.
[6] Twitter.com/DeirEzzore, October 19, 2023.
[7] In 2013, the Syrian regime carried out a massacre in the Al-Tadamoun neighborhood in Damascus, which included also massacring Palestinians and throwing their bodies into a pit.
[8] Twitter.com/Omar_Madaniah, October 18, 2023.
[9] Twitter.com/mahersharafeddi, October 8, 2023.
[10] Twitter.com/ElegancMad, October 11, 2023.
[11] Twitter.com/ElegancMad, October 11, 2023.

Gaza receives largest aid shipment so far as deaths top 8,000 and Israel widens military offensive
AP/October 29, 2023
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Nearly three dozen trucks entered Gaza on Sunday in the largest aid convoy since the war between Israel and Hamas began, but humanitarian workers said the assistance still fell desperately short of needs after thousands of people broke into warehouses to take flour and basic hygiene products. The Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll among Palestinians passed 8,000, mostly women and minors, as Israeli tanks and infantry pursued what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “second stage” in the war ignited by Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 incursion. The toll is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during the initial attack.
Communications were restored to most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people Sunday after an Israeli bombardment described by residents as the most intense of the war knocked out phone and Internet services late Friday. Israel has allowed only a trickle of aid to enter. On Sunday, 33 trucks of aid entered the only border crossing from Egypt, a spokesperson at the Rafah crossing, Wael Abo Omar, told The Associated Press. After visiting the Rafah crossing, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court called the suffering of civilians “profound” and said he had not been able to enter Gaza. “These are the most tragic of days,” said Karim Khan, whose court has been investigating the actions of Israeli and Palestinian authorities since 2014. Khan called on Israel to respect international law but stopped short of accusing it of war crimes. He called Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack a serious violation of international humanitarian law. “The burden rests with those who aim the gun, missile or rocket in question,” he said.
The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck over 450 militant targets over the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centers and anti-tank missile launching positions. Huge plumes of smoke rose over Gaza City. Military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said dozens of militants were killed.
Hagari also blamed Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yehiya Sinwar, for bringing destruction upon his people with the Oct. 7 attack. “We will chase him until we get him,” he said. The Hamas military wing said its militants clashed with Israeli troops who entered the northwest Gaza Strip with small arms and anti-tank missiles. Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel. The aid warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza,” said Thomas White, Gaza director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. “People are scared, frustrated and desperate.” UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel, which has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments. Israel says Hamas would use it for military purposes.One warehouse held 80 tons of food, the UN World Food Program said. It emphasized that at least 40 of its trucks need to cross into Gaza daily just to meet growing food needs. President Joe Biden in a call with Netanyahu on Sunday “underscored the need to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza,” the US said.
Israeli authorities said they would soon allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.
But the head of civil affairs of COGAT, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, provided no details on how much aid would be available. Elad Goren also said Israel has opened two water lines in southern Gaza within the past week. The AP could not independently verify that either line was functioning. Meanwhile, crowded hospitals in Gaza came under growing threat. Residents living near Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, said Israeli airstrikes overnight hit near the complex where tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital but has not provided much evidence. Hamas denies the allegations. “Reaching the hospital has become increasingly difficult,” Mahmoud Al-Sawah, who is sheltering in the hospital, said by phone. “It seems they want to cut off the area.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said nearby Israeli airstrikes damaged parts of another Gaza City hospital after it received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate. Some windows were blown out, and rooms were covered in debris. The rescue service said airstrikes have hit as close as 50 meters (yards) from the Al-Quds Hospital where 14,000 people are sheltering.
Israel ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators. “Under no circumstances, hospitals should be bombed,” the director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Robert Mardini, told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Israel says most Gaza residents have heeded its orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones.
An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an AP journalist at the scene.
The military escalation has increased domestic pressure on Israel’s government to secure the release of some 230 hostages seized by Hamas fighters during the Oct. 7 attack. Hamas says it is ready to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Desperate family members met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange. Israel has dismissed the Hamas offer. “If Hamas does not feel military pressure, nothing will move forward,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told families of the hostages Sunday. The Israeli military has stopped short of calling its gradually expanding ground operations inside Gaza an all-out invasion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle in dense residential areas.Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger.
More than 1.4 million people across Gaza have fled their homes.
The territory’s sole power plant shut down shortly after the war began. Hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment, and UNRWA is trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running. As water ran short, some Gazans bathed in the sea.
About 20,000 people were sheltering at Nasser Hospital, emergency director Dr. Mohammed Qandeel said. “I brought my kids to sleep here,” said one displaced resident who gave her name only as Umm Ahmad. “I used to be afraid of my kids playing in the sand. Now their hands are dirty with the blood on the floor.”The fighting has raised concerns that the violence could spread across the region. Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have engaged in daily skirmishes along Israel’s northern border. Hagari said Israel on Sunday struck three militant cells that fired from Lebanon into Israel and killed militants who were trying to enter. Hamas said its forces in Lebanon fired 16 missiles at the Israeli city of Nahariya. Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, said it also fired missiles at several sites.

Crowd storms Russian airport to protest flight from Israel
AP/October 29, 2023
MOSCOW: Hundreds of people on Sunday stormed into the main airport in Russia’s Dagestan region and onto the landing field to protest the arrival of an airliner from Tel Aviv, Israel, Russian news agencies and social media reported. Authorities closed the airport in Makhachkala, the capital of the predominantly Muslim region, and police converged on the facility. There were no immediate reports of injuries or arrests. Russian news reports said people in the crowd were shouting antisemitic slogans and tried to storm the airliner belonging to Russian carrier Red Wings. Video on social media showed some in the crowd on the landing field waving Palestinian flags, protesters attempting to overturn a police car and others checking the passports of passengers who had arrived in Makhachkala. In a statement released Sunday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israel “expects the Russian law enforcement authorities to protect the safety of all Israeli citizens and Jews wherever they may be and to act resolutely against the rioters and against the wild incitement directed against Jews and Israelis.” Netanyahu’s office added that the Israeli ambassador to Russia was working with Russia to keep Israelis and Jews safe. The Ministry of Internal Affairs for Russia’s North Caucasian Federal District, where Dagestan is located, stated that CCTV footage would be used to establish the identities of those who stormed the airport, and that those involved would be brought to justice. While voicing support for Gaza, the regional Dagestani government appealed to citizens to remain calm and not take part in such protests. “We urge residents of the republic to treat the current situation in the world with understanding. Federal authorities and international organizations are making every effort to bring about a cease-fire against Gaza civilians … we urge residents of the republic not to succumb to the provocations of destructive groups and not to create panic in society,” the Dagestani government wrote on Telegram. The Supreme Mufti of Dagestan, Sheikh Akhmad Afandi, called on residents to stop the unrest at the airport. “You are mistaken. This issue cannot be resolved in this way. We understand and perceive your indignation very painfully. ... We will solve this issue differently. Not with rallies, but appropriately. Maximum patience and calm for you,” he said in a video published to Telegram. Dagestan Gov. Sergei Melikov was more assertive in his criticism of the protesters, and promised consequences for anyone who took part in the storming of the airport. “The actions of those who gathered at the Makhachkala airport today are a gross violation of the law!... what happened at our airport is outrageous and should receive an appropriate assessment from law enforcement agencies! And this will definitely be done!” he wrote on Telegram. He called the protests a “knife in the backs of those who gave their lives for the security of the Motherland,” referring to the 1999 war in Dagestan and troops currently fighting in Ukraine. Russia’s civilian aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, later reported that the airfield had been cleared of unauthorized people, but that the airport would tentatively remain closed to incoming aircraft until Nov. 6.

Israel Shows Images of Tanks in Gaza as War on Hamas Deepens
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Israel signaled intent to encircle Gaza's main city on Sunday, publishing pictures of battle tanks on the Palestinian enclave's western coast 48 hours after ordering expanded ground incursions across its eastern border. Israel's self-declared "second phase" of a three-week war against Hamas militants had initially been kept from public view, with forces moving under darkness and a telecommunications blackout cutting off Palestinians. The phone and internet cuts appeared to be easing on Sunday, according to Gaza residents. But they have severely hampered rescue operations for casualties of Israeli barrages wreaking destruction, especially on northern Gaza City, site of Hamas's government and command centers. As well as the Israeli military's pictures of tanks, some pictures online appeared to show Israeli soldiers waving an Israeli flag deep inside Gaza. Reuters could not verify those images. Hamas said it was firing mortars against Israeli forces in north Gaza and had hit Israeli tanks with missiles, belittling reports of deep advances by its enemy. "Israel cut us off from the world in order to wipe us out, but we are hearing the sounds of explosions and we are proud the resistance fighters have stopped them at meters distance," said Shaban Ahmed, a public servant who stayed in Gaza City despite an Israeli warning to evacuate south. Ahmed said he only found out on Sunday that his cousin had died in an air strike two days previously due to the blackout. Israeli Defense Force (IDF) fighter jets struck over 450 Hamas targets, including operational command centers, look-out posts, and anti-tank missile launch posts, in the last 24 hours, the military said on Sunday. It said several gunmen emerged from a tunnel near Israel's border and were killed or wounded in a clash with troops. "We are gradually expanding the ground activity and the scope of our forces in the Gaza Strip," said IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari. Israel has tightened its blockade and bombarded Gaza since Hamas gunmen stormed across the border into Israel on Oct. 7, killing at least 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Medical authorities in the Gaza Strip, which has a population of 2.3 million people, said on Sunday 8,005 people - including 3,324 minors - had been killed.
Regional overspill?
Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas, a task that it described as necessitating protracted ground assaults in, around and under Gaza City, where the militants have an extensive subterranean bunker network. Western countries have generally backed what they say is Israel's right to self-defense. But there has been mounting international outcry over the toll from the bombing and calls for a "humanitarian pause" to allow aid to reach Gaza civilians. There are fears too of regional overspill to the Gaza war, including in Lebanon where the Israeli army and Iranian-backed Hezbollah group have been exchanging fire.
On Sunday, the United Nations' Lebanon peacekeeping force UNIFIL said one of its members was injured after shells hit the mission's base near Houla on the Lebanese-Israeli border the day before. Israel said there were several rocket or mortar launches from Lebanon at its territory, and that it was returning fire. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that Israel must use every means possible to distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas in Gaza. He also urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "rein in" violence against innocent people in the occupied West Bank. Pope Francis on Sunday called for a ceasefire and renewed his call for the release of all hostages. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed concern about getting aid into Gaza during a phone call on Sunday, Sunak's office said. With supplies of food, water and medicines running low and much of Gaza reduced to rubble, thousands of residents broke into warehouses and distribution centers of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), grabbing flour and other basics, the organization said on Sunday.
Israel will allow a dramatic increase in aid to Gaza in coming days and Palestinian civilians should head to a "humanitarian zone" in the south of the tiny territory, said Colonel Elad Goren of Cogat, the Israeli Defense Ministry agency that coordinates with the Palestinians. The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Sunday 10 Egyptian trucks carrying food and medicine had arrived in Gaza via the Rafah crossing, bringing the total number so far to 94, a small fraction of what is needed.
'God have mercy'
Displaced Palestinians staying in tents in Gaza’s Khan Younis described dire living conditions, with little access to food and water and having to queue hours for the toilet. "I wish God will have mercy on us and the war stops," said Rami Al-Erqan, a father cradling his daughter, one of his six children. "We reached a state where we wish to have died under the rubble just to find some rest. Our life is torture."Central Israel also came under heavy rocket fire on Sunday, with sirens sounding in several major cities. Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said on its Telegram account that it was "bombing Tel Aviv in response to the Zionist massacres against civilians". They later said their fighters had clashed with Israeli forces northwest of Gaza and had also set fire to two Israeli tanks. There was no immediate word from Israel on the claims. The conflict has prompted large demonstrations worldwide in support of the Palestinians. On Sunday several thousand people rallied in Beirut to show solidarity with Gaza. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had received warnings from Israeli authorities to immediately evacuate al-Quds hospital in the Gaza Strip, adding that raids conducted on Sunday had taken place just 50 meters from the facility. The Red Crescent says some 14,000 people have sought shelter at the hospital from Israeli air strikes. Israel has accused Hamas of locating command centers and other military infrastructure in Gaza hospitals, something the group denies. Palestinian officials said around 50,000 people had also taken shelter in the Gaza Shifa Hospital and said they were concerned about ongoing Israeli threats to the facility.

US Says Israel Must Protect Civilians in Gaza, Stop Jewish Settler Violence
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Israel has a responsibility to protect the lives of innocent people in Gaza, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday amid a growing outcry over Palestinian civilian deaths. With the death toll in the Gaza Strip in the thousands and climbing, US President Joe Biden's administration has been under increasing pressure to make clear that its steadfast support of Israel does not translate into a blanket endorsement of all that its ally is doing in the impoverished coastal enclave. In a round of television interviews, Sullivan said Washington was asking hard questions of Israel, including on issues surrounding humanitarian aid, distinguishing between terrorists and innocent civilians and on how Israel is thinking through its military operation. "What we believe is that every hour, every day of this military operation, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Israeli government should be taking every possible means available to them to distinguish between Hamas terrorists who are legitimate military targets and civilians who are not," Sullivan said on CNN. The US has been clear on that issue and Biden will reiterate the position in a call later on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sullivan said. Sullivan also said Netanyahu has a responsibility to "rein in" extremist Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "It is totally unacceptable to have extremist settler violence against innocent people in the West Bank," he said. The brutal surprise attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas inside Israel on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 people unleashed a wave of aerial bombardment from Israel and an incipient ground operation. The militants also took more than 200 hostages from Israel, who are believed to be in Gaza. Medical authorities in the Gaza Strip, which has a population of 2.3 million people, say 8,005 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's campaign to obliterate the Iran-backed militants. The Hamas militants who control Gaza have embedded themselves among the Palestinian population and in civilian infrastructure, making an operation against them extremely difficult, Sullivan noted. "That creates an added burden for Israel, but it does not lessen Israel's responsibility under international humanitarian law, to distinguish between terrorists and civilians, and to protect the lives of innocent people, and that is the overwhelming majority of the people in Gaza," Sullivan said. Israel has tightened its blockade and bombarded Gaza for three weeks. With supplies of food, water and medicines running low, thousands of Gaza residents broke into UN warehouses and distribution centers to get food. There has been a mounting international outcry over the toll from the bombing and growing calls for a "humanitarian pause" to allow aid to reach Gaza civilians. In an interview on CBS, Sullivan was asked if there was "daylight" between the US and the Netanyahu government. "We talk candidly, we talked directly, we share our views in an unvarnished way and we will continue to do that," Sullivan replied on "Face the Nation.""But sitting here in public, I will just say that the United States is going to make its principles and propositions absolutely clear, including the sanctity of innocent human life. And then we will continue to provide our advice to Israel in private."

Britain, France Stress Need to Get Aid into Gaza
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed their concern about getting aid into Gaza and the risks of the Israel-Hamas war spreading, Downing Street said after the leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.
Israeli forces have expanded their ground operations in Gaza while their fighter jets have struck hundreds more Hamas targets in what Israel called the second phase of a three-week-old war. Sunak and Macron have both visited Israel and neighboring countries since the deadly rampage by Hamas gunmen in Israel early this month that triggered the conflict. "The leaders stressed the importance of getting urgent humanitarian support into Gaza. They agreed to work together on efforts both to get crucial food, fuel, water and medicine to those who need it, and to get foreign nationals out," a spokesperson for Sunak said. "They expressed their shared concern at the risk of escalation in the wider region, in particular in the West Bank." According to a readout by Macron's office, the leaders also reaffirmed Israel's right to defend itself within the limits of international law and the importance of finding a way to release the hostages held by Hamas. Both leaders said the long stalled two-state solution, envisaging independent states for the Israelis and Palestinians, was the best way to create peace. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday that reports the Palestinian Red Crescent had received warnings from Israeli authorities to immediately evacuate al-Quds hospital in the Gaza Strip were "deeply concerning". "The Palestinian Red Crescent report of evacuation threats to Al-Quds hospital in Gaza is deeply concerning," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on social media platform X.

"We reiterate - it's impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives."
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday warned the situation in Hamas-ruled Gaza is declining rapidly as he repeated desperate appeals for a ceasefire to end the "nightmare" of bloodshed. "The situation in Gaza is growing more desperate by the hour. I regret that instead of a critically needed humanitarian pause, supported by the international community, Israel has intensified its military operations," Guterres said on a visit to Nepal's capital Kathmandu. "The number of civilians who have been killed and injured is totally unacceptable." Israel unleashed its massive retaliation after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border on October 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and seizing 230 hostages, according to Israeli officials. After weeks of heavy bombardment of Gaza, which the Palestinian health ministry said has claimed over 8,000 lives, the Israeli army said "stage two" of the war started with ground incursions since late Friday, reported AFP. Panic and fear have surged inside Gaza, where over one million people are displaced, and where communications went dark for days after Israel cut internet lines, although connectivity had gradually returned early Sunday.
"The world is witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe taking place before our eyes," Guterres added. "More than two million people, with nowhere safe to go, are being denied the essentials for life –- food, water, shelter and medical care –- while being subjected to relentless bombardment. I urge all those with responsibility to step back from the brink."
'Teachings of peace'
The UN's top diplomat arrived in Nepal on a four-day visit following talks in Qatar. "I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the unconditional release of all hostages and the delivery of sustained humanitarian relief at a scale that meets the needs of the people of Gaza, he said. "We must join forces to end this nightmare for the people of Gaza, Israel and all those affected around the world, including here in Nepal." Ten Nepali students were killed in Israel during the Hamas attack on October 7, and one Nepali citizen is missing. In Nepal, Guterres said he will visit rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas to "see for myself the terrible impact of the climate crisis". Nepal has lost nearly a third of its ice in the past three decades, he said, with glaciers melting at record rates. "The impact on communities is devastating," he said, ahead of a planned visit to the Everest and Annapurna region. Earth's average surface temperature has risen nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times but high-mountain regions around the world have warmed at twice that pace, climate scientists say. Guterres said he would also be due to visit Lumbini, Buddha's birthplace in southern Nepal to reflect on Buddha's “teachings of peace and non-violence, which are more relevant than ever in our deeply troubled world".

Israel’s Netanyahu Says Wasn’t Warned of Planned Hamas Attack
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday took a jab at his intelligence chiefs on the X platform, saying they never warned him Hamas was planning its wide-scale attack on Oct. 7, but later retracted his comments and issued an apology.
The remarks, posted on X at 1 a.m. on Sunday (around 2300 GMT on Saturday), caused a political uproar and a rift within the war cabinet of Netanyahu, who has drawn public ire for not taking responsibility over intelligence and operational failures relating to Hamas' rampage through southern Israel. While top officials - from the heads of the military and the Shin Bet domestic spy service to his finance minister - have all acknowledged their failures, Netanyahu has not. He has only said that there would be time to ask tough questions, including of himself, after the war. Israel's military spokesperson, asked about Netanyahu's comments during a daily briefing with reporters, declined to respond, saying: "We are now at war, focused on the war."Israeli officials have said events leading up to and including the handling of the Hamas attack itself would be investigated, but that the current focus was on the conflict.
Netanyahu's now-deleted post had said: "At no time and no stage was a warning given to Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding war intentions of Hamas. On the contrary, all security officials, including the head of army intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, estimated that Hamas was deterred and interested in an arrangement." In a second post on X about 10 hours later, Netanyahu wrote: "I was wrong," adding that his remarks "should not have been made and I apologize for that." "I give full backing to all the heads of the security branches," he said. Netanyahu's initial comments were quickly rebuked by current and past allies, including Benny Gantz, a former defense minister who is now in Netanyahu's war cabinet. Gantz said on X that Netanyahu should retract what he said and let the matter go. "When we are at war, leadership must show responsibility, decide to do the right things and bolster the forces in a way that they can carry out what we demand of them," Gantz said. The well-planned surprise Hamas attack was the deadliest for Israel in its 75-year history. Israel has since bombarded the Gaza Strip with devastating air strikes and begun ground operations with the aim of toppling the Iran-backed Islamist group and returning scores of captives abducted from Israel to Gaza. The retracted post "points to just one thing: he (Netanyahu) is not interested in security, he is not interested in hostages, only politics," said opposition lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman, once Netanyahu's defense minister, in a radio interview. Yossi Cohen, who headed the Mossad spy agency under previous Netanyahu governments, told Israel Radio: "You take responsibility from the beginning of your job, not from the middle."

Israeli Settlers Launch Annual Olive War by Killing Palestinian Farmer
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Israeli settlers in the West Bank are waging their annual war against the olive harvest season by killing Palestinian farmers on their land, attacking others, and sabotaging lands and crops. A Palestinian man was killed on Saturday by an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said. Bilal Abu Saleh, 40, was “shot in the chest by a settler” in the village of Sawiya near Nablus in the northern West Bank, a ministry statement said. Settlers are motivated by a profound thirst for vengeance, as made apparent in the messages they disseminated on the West Bank's streets the day before. In these messages, they issued threats to local residents, urging them to depart voluntarily for Jordan, underlining the dire consequences they would encounter if they chose otherwise. With the killing of Saleh, the number of Palestinians murdered by settlers in the West Bank has risen since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on Oct.7 to six. Saleh was killed just a day after settlers threatened the people of the West Bank with another “Nakba,” reminiscent of the events of 1948, involving killings and displacement. The olive picking season was supposed to start last week, but security developments forced most families to delay their plans. Palestinians eagerly anticipate the olive season, particularly as the West Bank produces some of the finest olive oils globally. Olive oil production in Palestinian territories ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 tons annually, with a portion being exported abroad. In Palestine, there are olive trees that have been standing for thousands of years since the Roman era. Settlers attacked Palestinian olive farmers in various areas of the West Bank, including the towns of Qusra, south of Nablus, Salfit in the northern West Bank, Hebron to the south, as well as Yatta near Hebron, Ramallah, and Tulkarm.

Gazans at ‘Breaking Point’ as Aid Centers Looted, UN Agency Says
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Thousands of Gaza residents broke into UN warehouses on Sunday, grabbing flour and other essential items in a sign they had reached "breaking point", the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) said. One of the warehouses, located in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, is where UNRWA stores supplies delivered by humanitarian convoys crossing into Gaza from Egypt. Footage from Khan Younis in southern Gaza showed men frantically carrying boxes and large bags out of a warehouse, hoisting them onto their shoulders or loading them onto their bicycles. "This is a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza," the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said in a statement. Speaking to Reuters from Amman in Jordan, Juliette Touma, UNRWA's director of communications, said the scenes at the warehouses and distribution centers showed people's despair. "This is an indication that people in Gaza have reached a breaking point," she said. "The levels of frustration and despair are really very high, and people are hitting rock bottom when it comes to their patience, their ability to take more." Aid supplies to Gaza have been choked since Israel began bombarding the densely populated Palestinian enclave in response to a deadly attack by its ruling militant group Hamas on Oct. 7. Touma said UNRWA had been forced to reduce the scale of its humanitarian operation in the densely populated enclave because it could not distribute fuel to some medical facilities. She said UNRWA had not received any additional supplies on Sunday. "Those supplies are very, very little and they don't correspond to the huge needs on the ground," she said. "We are asking for a standard and regular flow of humanitarian supplies, including fuel, and an increase in the number of trucks on these convoys."UNRWA has said its ability to help people in Gaza has been completely stretched by air strikes that have killed dozens of its staff and restricted the movement of supplies. "Fifty-nine colleagues at UNRWA were killed during the war," Touma said. "This is only the number that UNRWA was able to verify and confirm. Sadly, the number of colleagues who have been killed could be in fact higher. We have also reports of people who are stuck under the rubble." Even before the conflict, the organization had said its operations were being jeopardized due to a lack of funding. Established in 1949 following the first Arab-Israeli war, UNRWA provides public services including schools, healthcare and humanitarian aid in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Iran says Gaza attack 'may force everyone' to act, as Saudi minister to hold talks with
The Telegraph/October 29, 2023
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned that Israel’s attack on Gaza “may force everyone” to act, after ground troops and tanks entered the territory. “The crimes of the Zionist regime have crossed the red lines, and this may force everyone to take action,” Raisi said, in the latest of a series of threats about Iranian proxy forces in the region. “Washington asks us to not do anything, but they keep giving widespread support to Israel,” he added. It came as the Saudi deputy defence minister was reported to be travelling to Washington on Sunday for talks with senior Biden administration officials. It will be the first meeting since Mohammed bin Salman snubbed the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken by leaving him waiting overnight for a meeting in the aftermath of the attacks on Gaza. Saudi Arabia, which had been in US-brokered negotiations over a normalisation deal with Israel before the attacks, will probably want to use the meeting as a bid to stop the war from spilling over into regional conflict. On Saturday, Riyadh, one of the most staunch supporters of the Palestinian cause, condemned the widening attacks on Gaza. The Middle East has been sitting on the precipice of regional war since the latest Israeli-Hamas conflict broke out.
Iran’s most powerful proxy force, Hezbollah, has been exchanging tit-for-tat fire across the border since the war began, but has mostly kept its involvement contained. It is not clear what Hezbollah’s red lines are for entering the war, but as the conflict drags on, analysts believe they will step in if Hamas faces significant military depletion. “The US sent messages to the Axis of Resistance but received a clear response on the battlefield,” he said, using a term often used to refer to Iran and its allies like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and other Shiite forces in Iraq and Syria. Israel has expanded its ground invasion into Gaza, carrying out its heaviest bombardment of the three-week war under the cover of darkness after taking out Gaza’s telecommunications. The US’s “widespread” support for Israel has not only angered Iran, which backs Hamas, but much of the Arab world, including some of its closest regional allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month, then enjoy 1 year for just $9 with our US-exclusive offer.

Israel has been too soft on Hamas
Jake Wallis Simons/The Telegraph/October 29, 2023
Even before the blood was dry, many Palestinians were blaming the Jews. You made Hamas do it, they said. You made them behead your babies. As night follows day, Western progressives joined them by weaponising the language of social justice to squat on the moral high ground. Gaza was an “open-air prison”, they said. The real problem was not the savagery but the “occupation”. Excuse me, the “brutal occupation”. When the hell of war started, the narrative was complete. Sure, every nation has a right to self-defence, but not those brutal Israelis. Yet again, the Jews were the baby killers, even as they told Gazan civilians to flee and went back to cleaning the blood off the floor of their nurseries. So it falls to us to cut through the propaganda. Not only has Gaza not been “occupied” since 2005, but Israel has been too soft on Hamas. Only now is Jerusalem waking up to its naivety. That is the crucible of the disaster.
Almost two decades ago, in a moonshot for peace, Israel withdrew from the Strip, dragging Jews from their homes and handing their neighbours the keys. Gaza had been relatively prosperous. There were kibbutzim and businesses, as well as a glorious beach. The underground aquifer held enough water for all its inhabitants. There was a power station and the potential for much solar energy. There was an airport. After Israel pulled out, the Gulf states were falling over themselves to invest and Jerusalem was ready to help with agricultural technology. Tel Aviv, an economic powerhouse, lay 35 miles to the north; Gaza City could have become its twin. Jihadism put an end to that vision. From the earliest days of Palestinian nationalism, when the hardline Husseini clan vanquished the moderate Nashashibis in the 1920s and 30s, to Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection of Israel’s 2008 two-state offer that would have given him everything he wanted, extremist Palestinian leaders have ruined everything. After seizing control of Gaza in a coup, Hamas destroyed Israel’s infrastructure and ran the enclave with one goal: jihad. Jerusalem tightened the border, but in the belief that economic stability would calm the terror threat, it allowed thousands of Gazans into Israel daily to work. There is an assumption in the military that this was how Hamas gathered intelligence deployed on October 7. Some “open-air prison”. This is just the start of the tragedy. Hamas funnelled its resources into a “metro” of terror tunnels while neglecting its own population. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, turned its back on its Arab brothers. So although Jerusalem was no longer responsible for the Strip’s welfare, it sent in fuel and water, effectively enabling Hamas’s expansion.
Much has been said about Israel’s provision of water to Gaza. It has never been under any obligation to do this, but because Hamas refused to invest in tapping Gaza’s aquifer, Jerusalem stepped in for humanitarian reasons. Videos have emerged of Hamas proudly digging up donated water pipes to turn them into the rockets that are raining down on Israel as I write. Along the Gaza border, many of the Israeli kibbutzim are populated by peace activists. Yocheved Lifshitz, the 85-year-old hostage released last week, would volunteer to drive Gazan patients to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Shlomi Matias and his wife Deborah, who were slaughtered in their home while shielding their son, dedicated their lives to creating peace with the Palestinians through music. The charred bodies of five members of the Kutz family, who regularly flew kites for peace near the Gaza border, were found in the safe room of their house in Kfar Aza.
The cruelty and the irony is unbearable. But now Israel has awoken from its slumber. This explains Jerusalem’s final stated war aim: to cut all ties with Gaza. Israel is getting tough. It’s just a shame it didn’t do so 17 years ago.
*Jake Wallis Simons is editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of ‘Israelophobia’

Thousands break into aid warehouses in Gaza as deaths top 8,000 and Israel widens ground offensive
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP)/October 29, 2023
Thousands of people broke into aid warehouses in Gaza to take flour and basic hygiene products, a U.N. agency said Sunday, in a mark of growing desperation three weeks into the war between Israel and Gaza's militant Hamas rulers. In response to the crisis, nearly three dozen trucks carrying water, medicine and food entered Gaza from Egypt while Israeli tanks and infantry continued to push into the Palestinian territory as part of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “second stage” in the war, which was ignited by Hamas' brutal Oct. 7 incursion into Israel. The Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll among Palestinians has passed 8,000, mostly women and minors. It's a toll without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during the initial Hamas onslaught. Communications were restored to much of Gaza early Sunday after a bombardment described by residents as the most intense of the war knocked out most contact with the territory late Friday. The besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people were largely cut off from the world. Israel has allowed only a small trickle of aid to enter. On Sunday, 33 trucks of aid crossed the only border crossing from Egypt, a spokesperson at the Rafah crossing, Wael Abo Omar, told The Associated Press. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court visited the Rafah crossing Saturday and was briefed on the damage caused by Israeli airstrikes to the Palestinian side. Karin Khan said on social media that the court has “active investigations” into recent Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank and dating back to the 2014 war. He called the suffering of civilians in this war “profound.” The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck over 450 militant targets over the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centers and anti-tank missile launching positions. It said ground forces killed a number of Hamas militants as they exited one of their extensive network of Gaza tunnels near the Erez crossing, which had been the sole pedestrian passageway into Israel before it was destroyed in the fighting.
Military officials circulated footage showing tanks and troops operating in open areas and bulldozers clearing mountains of debris. The Hamas military wing said its militants clashed with Israeli troops who entered the northwest Gaza Strip with small arms and anti-tank missiles. The warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza," said Thomas White, Gaza director for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. "People are scared, frustrated and desperate.”
UNRWA provides basic services to hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. Spokesperson Juliette Touma said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel. It has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments after the start of the war, saying Hamas would use it for military purposes. One warehouse held 80 tons of food, the U.N. World Food Program said in a statement. It also said at least 40 of its trucks need to cross into Gaza daily to meet growing needs. Israeli authorities said Sunday that they would soon allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. Elad Goren, the head of civil affairs of COGAT, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, said Israel had established a “humanitarian zone” near the southern city of Khan Younis and recommended that Palestinians flee there. But he provided no details on the exact location or how much aid would be available. He also said Israel has opened two water lines in southern Gaza within the past week. The AP could not independently verify that either line was functioning. Meanwhile, residents living near Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest, said Israeli airstrikes overnight hit near the hospital complex and blocked many roads leading to it. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital but has not provided much evidence. Hamas denies the allegations.
Tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering in Shifa, which is also packed with wounded patients. “Reaching the hospital has become increasingly difficult,” Mahmoud al-Sawah, who is sheltering in the hospital, said over the phone. “It seems they want to cut off the area.” Another Gaza City resident, Abdallah Sayed, said the Israeli bombing was “the most violent and intense” since the war started. The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said Israeli airstrikes damaged parts of another crowded Gaza City hospital after it received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate. Some windows were blown out, and rooms were covered in debris. The Red Crescent service said airstrikes have hit as close as 50 meters (yards) from the Al-Quds Hospital where 14,000 people are sheltering.
Israel ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators. “Under no circumstances, hospitals should be bombed. Under no circumstance, a patient should die in a hospital bed. And it is very difficult to evacuate hospitals,” the director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Robert Mardini, told CBS’ “Face the Nation."Israel says most residents have heeded its orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones.
An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an AP journalist at the scene. The military escalation has increased domestic pressure on Israel's government to secure the release of some 230 hostages seized when Hamas fighters from Gaza breached Israel's defenses and stormed into nearby towns. Hamas says it is ready to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Desperate family members met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange. Israel has dismissed the Hamas offer.Netanyahu said Saturday that the expanding ground operation “will help us in this mission" to bring back all the hostages.
The Israeli military said it was gradually expanding its ground operations inside Gaza, while stopping short of calling it an all-out invasion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle in dense residential areas. When asked about Israel’s military escalation, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CNN: "I will let the Israeli Defense Forces characterize their operations and how it fits into their larger plan.” He stressed the imperative to protect civilians. Biden planned to speak with Netanyahu later Sunday, Sullivan told CNN.
Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel, with the constant sirens in southern Israel a reminder of the threat. Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger. An estimated 1,800 people remain trapped beneath the rubble, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which has said it bases its estimates on distress calls it received. More than 1.4 million people across Gaza have fled their homes. The territory's sole power plant shut down shortly after the start of the war. Hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment, and UNRWA is trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running. About 20,000 people were sheltering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, emergency director Dr. Mohammed Qandeel said. “I brought my kids to sleep here," said one displaced resident who gave her name only as Umm Ahmad. "I used to be afraid of my kids playing in the sand. Now their hands are dirty with the blood on the floor."

IDF bombs near Al-Quds Hospital as officials refute claims it harbored Hamas
Adam Schrader/United Press International/ October 29, 2023
Oct. 29 (UPI) -- The Israeli Defense Forces bombed near the Al-Quds Hospital in the West Bank on Sunday as some refuted Israel's claim the hospital was being used as a "military command center." "The Israeli army deliberately continues to launch rockets directly near Al-Quds hospital with the aim of forcing medical staff, displaced individuals and patients to evacuate the hospital," the Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a statement Sunday. It was not immediately clear if the hospital had been directly hit in the strike and how many civilians were killed in the bombing. The White House has not yet addressed the bombing. "This has caused significant damage to hospital departments and exposed residents and patients to suffocation," the Red Crescent Society said. The Red Crescent Society previously said Israel had ordered the hospital to evacuate so it could bomb the area. Palestinians men helping a girl in the aftermath of Israeli bombing on AL-mgary family houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI. Palestinians men helping a girl in the aftermath of Israeli bombing on AL-mgary family houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Photo by Ismael Mohamad/UPI. "Beneath the hospitals, schools, mosques, and homes in Gaza lies a horrific underworld of Hamas terrorism," the IDF said in a tweet in advance of the strike. "In order to dismantle Hamas, we must dismantle their underground tunnels."
But Bashar Murad, the director of the hospital, told Al-Jazeera that there's "no police presence in the hospital, no military presence, nothing at all.""Israel is targeting every single building around Al-Quds Hospital," Murad said. "Why is that? Nobody knows."Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who has worked at hospitals in Gaza for several years, said there is "no evidence" that the facilities were being used by the Hamas militia. "I know the Al-Quds Hospital from the time it was built. There is a new medical block in al Shifa Hospital under international surveillance. During all these years having worked in these hospitals, I have never ever seen any sign of any military or political command center," Gilbert said. "And if the Israelis ... cannot provide any evidence or any proof, how can we look at this as anything else but lies, intimidating and scaring people, and excuses to bomb the hospitals."

Israeli settler shoots and kills Palestinian harvester as violence surges in the West Bank
JERUSALEM (AP)/October 29, 2023
A Jewish settler shot dead a Palestinian man harvesting olives near the West Bank city of Nablus, the man’s uncle said Sunday. This brings the number of Palestinians reported killed by settlers to seven since Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel three weeks ago. Tayseer Mahmoud said his nephew, Bilal Saleh, was working in the grove in the village of Sawiya with his wife and their four children on Saturday when a group of settlers attacked them. Saleh, concerned about the safety of his children, tried to leave the area, but a settler shot him in the chest, Mahmoud said. Mahmoud said he didn't witness the confrontation but was close by and reached the scene within minutes of the shooting. Saleh died before he could be taken for medical care, he said. Settler leader Yossi Dagan said in a video posted on the social media p(platform Facebook Saturday that the shooter was accompanied by family members and fired in self-defense after they were “attacked with rocks by dozens of rioting Hamas supporters.”The deadly shooting took place amid a spike in settler violence since Hamas militants infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 Israelis and taking over 230 others hostage. The incursion touched off a war that has killed more than 7,700 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In addition to the killings, Palestinians in the West Bank have reported attacks on people and property, as well as denial of access to their land. The violence has gotten so intense that it has drawn condemnation from U.S. President Joe Biden. Attacks by extremist settlers, Biden said, amounted to “pouring gasoline” on fires already burning in the Middle East since the Hamas attack. The Israeli military said it received a report of a “violent confrontation” between Palestinians and Israeli civilians, and that a Palestinian was reported killed. Police have opened an investigation, it said. This year has been the deadliest in the West Bank since the second Palestinian uprising against Israel two decades ago. Since the outbreak of the war alone, more than 100 Palestinians, including civilians, have been killed, most during military arrest raids and violent protests in the West Bank.

Israel’s Netanyahu Says Wasn’t Warned of Planned Hamas Attack
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday took a jab at his intelligence chiefs on the X platform, saying they never warned him Hamas was planning its wide-scale attack on Oct. 7, but later retracted his comments and issued an apology. The remarks, posted on X at 1 a.m. on Sunday (around 2300 GMT on Saturday), caused a political uproar and a rift within the war cabinet of Netanyahu, who has drawn public ire for not taking responsibility over intelligence and operational failures relating to Hamas' rampage through southern Israel. While top officials - from the heads of the military and the Shin Bet domestic spy service to his finance minister - have all acknowledged their failures, Netanyahu has not. He has only said that there would be time to ask tough questions, including of himself, after the war. Israel's military spokesperson, asked about Netanyahu's comments during a daily briefing with reporters, declined to respond, saying: "We are now at war, focused on the war."Israeli officials have said events leading up to and including the handling of the Hamas attack itself would be investigated, but that the current focus was on the conflict. Netanyahu's now-deleted post had said: "At no time and no stage was a warning given to Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding war intentions of Hamas. On the contrary, all security officials, including the head of army intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, estimated that Hamas was deterred and interested in an arrangement." In a second post on X about 10 hours later, Netanyahu wrote: "I was wrong," adding that his remarks "should not have been made and I apologize for that.""I give full backing to all the heads of the security branches," he said. Netanyahu's initial comments were quickly rebuked by current and past allies, including Benny Gantz, a former defense minister who is now in Netanyahu's war cabinet. Gantz said on X that Netanyahu should retract what he said and let the matter go. "When we are at war, leadership must show responsibility, decide to do the right things and bolster the forces in a way that they can carry out what we demand of them," Gantz said. The well-planned surprise Hamas attack was the deadliest for Israel in its 75-year history. Israel has since bombarded the Gaza Strip with devastating air strikes and begun ground operations with the aim of toppling the Iran-backed Islamist group and returning scores of captives abducted from Israel to Gaza. The retracted post "points to just one thing: he (Netanyahu) is not interested in security, he is not interested in hostages, only politics," said opposition lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman, once Netanyahu's defense minister, in a radio interview. Yossi Cohen, who headed the Mossad spy agency under previous Netanyahu governments, told Israel Radio: "You take responsibility from the beginning of your job, not from the middle."

UN Chief Warns Gaza Growing More Desperate 'by the Hour'
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Sunday warned the situation in Hamas-ruled Gaza is declining rapidly as he repeated desperate appeals for a ceasefire to end the "nightmare" of bloodshed. "The situation in Gaza is growing more desperate by the hour. I regret that instead of a critically needed humanitarian pause, supported by the international community, Israel has intensified its military operations," Guterres said on a visit to Nepal's capital Kathmandu. "The number of civilians who have been killed and injured is totally unacceptable." Israel unleashed its massive retaliation after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border on October 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and seizing 230 hostages, according to Israeli officials. After weeks of heavy bombardment of Gaza, which the Palestinian health ministry said has claimed over 8,000 lives, the Israeli army said "stage two" of the war started with ground incursions since late Friday, reported AFP. Panic and fear have surged inside Gaza, where over one million people are displaced, and where communications went dark for days after Israel cut internet lines, although connectivity had gradually returned early Sunday. "The world is witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe taking place before our eyes," Guterres added. "More than two million people, with nowhere safe to go, are being denied the essentials for life –- food, water, shelter and medical care –- while being subjected to relentless bombardment. I urge all those with responsibility to step back from the brink."
'Teachings of peace'
The UN's top diplomat arrived in Nepal on a four-day visit following talks in Qatar. "I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the unconditional release of all hostages and the delivery of sustained humanitarian relief at a scale that meets the needs of the people of Gaza, he said. "We must join forces to end this nightmare for the people of Gaza, Israel and all those affected around the world, including here in Nepal." Ten Nepali students were killed in Israel during the Hamas attack on October 7, and one Nepali citizen is missing. In Nepal, Guterres said he will visit rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas to "see for myself the terrible impact of the climate crisis". Nepal has lost nearly a third of its ice in the past three decades, he said, with glaciers melting at record rates. "The impact on communities is devastating," he said, ahead of a planned visit to the Everest and Annapurna region. Earth's average surface temperature has risen nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times but high-mountain regions around the world have warmed at twice that pace, climate scientists say. Guterres said he would also be due to visit Lumbini, Buddha's birthplace in southern Nepal to reflect on Buddha's “teachings of peace and non-violence, which are more relevant than ever in our deeply troubled world".

WHO Concerned by Report of Israeli Evacuation Warning to Gaza Al-Quds Hospital
Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday that reports the Palestinian Red Crescent had received warnings from Israeli authorities to immediately evacuate al-Quds hospital in the Gaza Strip were "deeply concerning"."The Palestinian Red Crescent report of evacuation threats to Al-Quds hospital in Gaza is deeply concerning," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on social media platform X. "We reiterate - it's impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives."

Head of PLO meets with German ambassador as Turkey responds to Israel 'slander'
Oct. 29 (UPI)/October 29, 2023
The head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the internationally recognized government of the state of Palestine, met Sunday with German Ambassador Deike Potzel as Turkish diplomats responded to "slander" from Israel. Hussein Al-Sheikh, the director-general for the executive committee of the PLO, announced the diplomatic meeting in a statement on Twitter. "We stressed the need to stop the humanitarian catastrophe occurring in the Gaza Strip, and to find ways to calm down and immediately end the ongoing aggression against the Strip, and the urgent need to provide safe passages for humanitarian aid to its residents, and to secure corridors to rescue and treat the injured," Al-Sheikh said. "Her Excellency Potzel stressed the rejection of the killing of civilians on both sides, and her country's position in support of a political path that guarantees security, calm and stability in the region on the basis of the two-state solution in accordance with international legitimacy." Meanwhile, the Turkish Foreign Ministry responded to "slander" after Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen announced he is recalling diplomats from Ankara after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan chastised Israel for bombing of Gaza in its war against Hamas, a militant group he defended by saying it was "fighting to protect its land and citizens.""Given the grave statements coming from Turkey, I have ordered the return of diplomatic representatives there in order to conduct a reevaluation of the relations between Israel and Turkey," Cohen had said in a post on Twitter.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry retorted that it rejects "slander and unfounded allegations of some Israeli officials." Israel is a major ally of the United States, as is Turkey -- a longtime member of NATO. "The efforts of some Israeli officials, who cannot even tolerate the truth and facts being expressed, to change the agenda with distortions and slander in the hope of covering up the brutal massacre targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza will not yield results," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said Saturday. "The fact that these authorities, who commit a crime against humanity in front of the whole world but cannot even tolerate criticism and condemnation, target the United Nations, the U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and our president ... is a clear indication of their incompetence."Meanwhile, the government of Sweden -- which hopes to soon join NATO but has been met with resistance by Turkey - had suspended aid to Palestine after the October 7 attack by Hamas, which Israel considers to be a terrorist organization. However, Erdogan has reportedly sent Sweden's NATO accession bid to the Turkish parliament for ratification -- one of the final hurdles for the Nordic nation -- amid speculation he could be trying to temper his support for Palestine against the unconditional support of his Western allies for Israel.'

Israel seems to have replaced Gaza invasion with small incursions
Naharnet/October 29, 2023
Israel’s apparent decision to hold off on a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and instead conduct more limited ground incursions, at least initially, aligns with suggestions that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made to his Israeli counterparts in recent days, the New York Times quoted American officials as saying.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Saturday evening that Israeli forces had entered the Gaza Strip on Friday to begin “the second stage of the war,” though he did not describe the move as an invasion. Military officials said earlier on Saturday that Israeli troops had pushed into the northern part of the enclave and remained there on Saturday evening. So far, the incursions into Gaza by Israeli ground forces are smaller and more narrowly focused than what Israeli military officials initially described to Austin and other top U.S. military officials, American officials told the New York Times.
The Israelis improved and refined their plan after a concerted effort by Austin and other officials, a U.S. official said. However, Biden administration officials have insisted that the United States had not told Israel what to do and still supports a ground invasion.

Israeli army says 'increased' troop numbers inside Gaza
Agence France Presse/October 29, 2023
The Israeli army has raised the number of troops fighting inside the Gaza Strip, a spokesman said Sunday, as the military stepped up its war on Hamas in the tiny Palestinian territory. "Overnight we increased the entry of IDF forces into the (Gaza) Strip, and they joined the forces already fighting there," army spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised briefing. On Friday evening, Israeli armored forces and infantry began operating inside Gaza in what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called "a new phase" of the war on the territory's militants. Israeli forces had made several smaller-scale ground incursions inside Gaza before, but the current one has been their longest presence in the territory since violence erupted with a deadly Hamas assault on October 7. "We're gradually expanding the ground activities and the extent of our forces in the Gaza Strip," Hagari said.

Israel says its war can both destroy Hamas and rescue captives. Their families are less certain
Associated Press/October 29, 2023
The Israeli military has sought to assure the public it can achieve the two goals of its war on Hamas simultaneously — toppling the strip's militant rulers and rescuing some 230 captives taken from Israel. But as the army ramps up airstrikes and ground incursions on the blockaded enclave, laying waste to entire neighborhoods in preparation for a broader invasion, the anguished families of captives are growing increasingly worried those aims will collide — with devastating consequences. Annihilating Hamas would seem to require a ground operation of unprecedented intensity fraught with the risk of harming Israeli captives. Saving captives stuck inside Gaza would appear to require engagement with Hamas, the group that forever traumatized Israel when it sent fighters into its south where they reportedly killed hundreds and took dozens captive on Oct. 7, sparking this latest war between the bitter enemies. Over 7,700 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel's government has not described what a rescue mission could look like. In a televised address late Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged the agony of captives' families and promised their release was an "integral" part of Israel's war effort, on par with its goal of destroying Hamas.
Hamas political leaders are in negotiations with mediators Egypt and Qatar to secure the freedom of at least some trapped Israeli civilians. Four captives have have been released so far. Anxiety over Hamas' captives reached a fever pitch Saturday, as Israel intensified its air campaign and sent troops into Gaza with heavy firepower. Crowds protested outside Israel's Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, demanding that Netanyahu and other officials address the fate of their loved ones.
It worked. Netanyahu met with the families Saturday and vowed to "exercise and exhaust every possibility to bring them home." Defense Minister Yoav Gallant promised to meet them Sunday for what his office described as the first official meeting with them.
"We are not waiting any longer," said protester Malki Shem-Tov, whose 21-year-old son, Omer, is being held captive in Gaza. "We want all of them back with us today. We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children."
The plight of the captives has captured the Israelis' attention for the past three weeks. Israeli media are filled with stories about the captives and interviews with their families.
But all of the military's options carry enormous risks. A military invasion raises the prospect of intractable warfare in densely populated cities and subterranean tunnels that could suck young soldiers into a monthslong quagmire.
With the captives believed to be hidden in Hamas' sprawling tunnel network, heavy fighting raises the prospect of unmitigated chaos for soldiers and captives alike.
Late on Friday as the Israeli military struck Gaza by air, land and sea with a ferocity never seen before, families of captives were on edge, acutely aware of the dangers facing their loved ones. "It was a long and sleepless night," said Liat Bell Sommer, a spokesperson for the families who she said suffered from "absolute uncertainty regarding the fate of the captives held there, who were also subject to the heavy bombings."
The bombardment seemed to send a message to Hamas — if the group thought it could avoid a devastating ground invasion because of the captives in Gaza, it was wrong.
Balancing the families' interests with the military goal of destroying Hamas has presented a dilemma for Netanyahu, who is already under fire for his government's failure to prevent the worst attack in Israeli history and to swiftly come to people's aid that day.
Amos Yadlin, a retired general and former head of Israel's military intelligence, said the government's challenge was to satisfy the immense public pressure both to return the captives safely and wipe out Hamas. He insisted the two goals could be reconciled if the government finds the "right strategy."
"Both should be handled simultaneously and should support each other," Yadlin said, without elaborating. But many experts believe the best strategy to save captives remains diplomacy. Hamas on Saturday offered Israel an exchange — the release of all captives in Gaza for all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The plight of the prisoners is deeply emotional for Palestinians, who see the prisoners as freedom fighters. Israel has a long history of agreeing to lopsided prisoner swaps. In 2011, it freed over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for Gilad Schalit, a soldier who was kidnapped and dragged across the border into Gaza. Many of those prisoners, including Hamas' top leader in Gaza, Yehia Sinwar, had been convicted in the killings of Israelis. "If the enemy wants to end this case at once, we are ready for that," said Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas' armed wing. Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari was evasive. He said Hamas was engaged in the "cynical exploitation" of the anxieties gripping the Israeli public. But families who saw four women released to Israel last week following complex hostage diplomacy said they weren't convinced that the Israeli government had their best interests in mind. "They feel like they're left behind and no one is really caring about them," said Miki Haimovitz, a former lawmaker who spoke on behalf of the captive' families at Saturday's protest. "No one is explaining what's going on."

Retired general ‘can only hope’ Iran, proxies don’t escalate Middle East conflict
Miranda Nazzaro/The Hill/October 29, 2023
Retired U.S. Gen. Robert Abrams said “we can only hope” Iranian proxies and Iran-backed groups do not take the war between Israel and militant group Hamas to a “much higher level.”Asked on ABC News’s “This Week,” if the U.S. should be doing more about a potential escalation of the conflict, Abrams said, “We can only hope that Iran and its proxies don’t take this to a much higher level.”Abrams’s comments echo those of U.S. and world leaders who have expressed concerns over an escalation of conflict in the Middle East following militant group Hamas’s bloody massacre of Israel over three weeks ago that left over 1,400 Israelis dead in their homes, at a bus stop and at a music festival. Hamas has been backed by Iran in the past, though it is not immediately clear the exact role Iran or its proxies played in the Oct. 7 attack. Attacks on American forces have increased since Hamas’s surprise incursion on Oct. 7, fueling worries that Iran and its proxies could seek to widen the conflict and destabilize the region. Last week, U.S. fighter jets struck two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran and its proxies following attacks against U.S. troopers in the region. Defense officials told reporters President Biden ordered U.S. military forces to carry out “self-defense airstrikes” on a weapons storage facility and an ammunition storage area used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Defense Sectary Lloyd Austin said last week the strikes by F-16 fighter jets are in response to a series of ongoing and mostly unsuccessful attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by “Iranian-backed militia groups,” that began earlier this month. Abrams said the U.S. should “continue to escalate that sort of portion of this protection of protection of our troops.”“Because as the national security adviser [Jake Sullivan] just said, the military, the U.S military will take all the actions necessary to defend their troops,” Abrams said, in reference to Sullivan’s earlier comments on “This Week,” where he vowed continued U.S. response to any attacks on U.S. troops by Iranian-backed groups or Iran’s proxies. Israel has responded to Hamas with a bombardment of Gaza that ramped up over the weekend ahead of an expected ground incursion by Israeli forces. Over 8,000 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, the Gaza Health Ministry reported on Sunday. The U.S. has offered its “unwavering support,” of Israel, while U.S. officials have noted Israel’s reasonability to keep Palestinian civilians’ lives in mind while defending itself against Hamas.

Impeding relief aid to Gaza may be a crime under ICC jurisdiction -ICC prosecutor
CAIRO (Reuters)/October 29, 2023
Impeding relief supplies to Gaza's population may constitute a crime under the International Criminal Court's (ICC) jurisdiction, the court's top prosecutor told a news conference in Egypt on Sunday. Karim Khan also said Israel must make "discernable efforts, without further delay to make sure civilians receive basic foods, medicine". Aid supplies to Gaza have been minimal since Israel began bombarding the densely populated Palestinian enclave in response to a deadly attack by its ruling militant group Hamas on Oct. 7. Israeli officials have said that food, water and medicines have been coming in through the Egyptian border and that it expected the quantities to rise. United Nations officials have said the aid supplies are limited and do not correspond to the huge need on the ground. In an unannounced visit, the ICC prosecutor went to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza earlier in the day and posted a video statement from his location on X social media. Khan said he was not able to get into Gaza but hopes to visit the Gaza strip and Israel while he is in the region. The court has been investigating in the occupied Palestinian territories since 2021, looking into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity there from 2014 onwards. Israel, which is not a member of the ICC, has previously rejected the court's jurisdiction and does not formally engage with its investigations. Khan has previously said that the ICC has jurisdiction over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during both the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and in the territory of Gaza.

How Israel built and army to defend itself from Iran and its proxies
The Telegraph/October 29, 2023
Israel calls its longstanding regional struggle with Iran the mabam, or “war between the wars”, reflecting the feeling that it would one day escalate. Before the Hamas attacks, Israel and Iran already traded blows in the form of long-range strikes around once a week. But with Israeli troops on the ground in Gaza, there are now clear concerns that the “true” war will soon begin. Israel and Iran have spent years preparing their militaries for just such a conflict, but the distance between the two countries continues to pose practical challenges. The idea of Iran sending large forces through Iraq and Syria directly to join the fighting is currently far-fetched, with any attempt (even if logistically possible) likely facing annihilation from both Israel and the US. For now, Tehran therefore has three more practical ways to escalate. The first and most obvious way is through the so-called “axis of resistance” - proxy groups, supported by the Qods force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). These proxies vary from almost defunct cells in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain through to ones that are heavily armed and control a great deal of territory – the Houthis in Yemen, and Hizbollah in Lebanon (plus, of course, Hamas). Groups in Syria provide Hizbollah with support, and the country is a key supply line, which is one reason Israel keeps striking targets there. Iraq also forms a focus, although actions by groups there have mostly targeted US interests.
Took observers by surprise. So far, only two proxies have directly supported Hamas – the Houthis with drone and cruise missile attacks up the Red Sea, and Hizbollah engaging at a comparatively low level across the border with Israel. The Houthi use of drones was expected, but the revelation that the group had a significant number of longer-range cruise missiles took many observers by surprise.
As shown during a parade in Sanaa just a month ago, they also have increasingly capable ballistic missiles and Israel will rightly be wary of further attacks from this direction. Hizbollah, though, is the main threat. The group has built up a rocket arsenal believed to comprise up to 100,000 units – many times more than Hamas, and with much greater capability. With a claimed 25,000 regular fighters and another 25,000 reserves, it is over 50 per cent larger than the forces in Gaza, with significant Syrian combat experience. Hizbollah has therefore been Israel’s largest concern, in part explaining why the risk from Hamas was overlooked. The strong IDF deployment to the north has negated the threat of a surprise incursion, and a ground attack would be costly for Hizbollah. Instead its advantage lies in utilising rockets and actions along the border to draw Israel into the difficult and well-prepared defensive terrain of southern Lebanon.
Since the rockets cannot be solely stopped from the air, conflict with Hizbollah would require a sustained commitment from the IDF, on top of operations in Gaza. This two-front war is the best way for Iran to help Hamas. Washington is well aware of this and for Israel the growing US presence is a powerful bolster, designed in part to constrain any such escalation. The second option for Iran is to accelerate actions by the sophisticated covert global networks of the IRGC. The impacts of these cells are more subtle, but they already play a vital role in helping to drive anti-Israeli sentiment, and more violent actions against Israeli interests remain likely.
Within this realm also lies the threat of enhanced cyber operations against Israel and its interests, with Iran being one of the more competent global cyber threat actors. The final and most overt way for Iran to strike is through its long-range drone and rocket forces. The IRGC operates the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East. US Central Command estimates a stockpile of around 3,000 missiles. Around nine of 25 operational Iranian designs have the range to reach Israel, carrying warheads of 500-1,000 kg (these are widely regarded as being nuclear-capable, although Iran currently lacks warheads).
Some cruise missiles also now have the capability to be effective in direct attacks from Iranian territory. Range, capacity and accuracy of systems has been a major priority for Iran since 2015, although claims of hypersonic weapons capable of avoiding defences are likely over-hyped. Israel will counter ballistic missiles, including possible launches from Yemen, with the Arrow system but these are a much higher-order threat than the weapons from Gaza. Alongside or as a more deniable alternative to missile strikes, the Shahad 131 and 136 drones have proven highly cost-effective in Ukraine. In many ways, the best direct escalation option for Iran is perhaps to use the latest iterations of these systems to provide an enduring threat at low cost while maintaining deniability.
This is, ironically, similar to the way in which Israel has been striking back at Iran. Drones have targeted Iranian weapons programmes as well as regional proxies, underscoring the effectiveness of this tactic when conducting conflict at arm’s length.
Such operations will continue, but the Israeli Air Force, supported by submarine-launched cruise missiles, is the main arm of potential retaliation. Israel has a dedicated cell focused on identifying strike targets for the IAF, likely linked to weapons development, the nuclear programme, and potentially Iran’s leadership. This mission has been rehearsed with mounting intensity since May 2022, with recent exercises focusing on integrating the F-35 stealth fighter into long-range strike operations. Stealth helps with, but does not totally negate, the main challenge – the sheer range of the mission, which requires flying over neighbouring states and potentially refuelling twice.
Repeated strikes would be required
Maintaining surprise will be hard, and tankers represent a single point of failure for a long-range strike against Iran. Moreover, repeated strikes would be required to achieve any significant impact, since targets are widely dispersed and heavily protected. This would be a difficult and costly mission that would be embarked on only by necessity, particularly given that the IAF is already busy closer to home. Any attack on Iran would also highly likely rely on significant US support to be successful, precipitating wider destabilisation. Strikes against missile launches from Yemen are, however, more likely, and are well within Israel’s capabilities, serving as an indicator of intent as part of an escalation pathway. This all suggests an acceleration of previous trends between the two powers rather than a radical departure. For Iran, this is not yet an existential conflict, and continuing to act through proxies limits the chance of US engagement alongside Israel – something that could actually threaten the regime. For Israel, direct Iranian involvement would certainly be seen as an existential threat, and would elicit a hard – albeit costly – response. Israel, then, is similarly better placed in the short term to focus on regional threats, preparing for a two-front war closer to home while seeking to keep Iran at bay through more targeted operations and the growing US force presence. However, this only holds true as long as this conflict does not see an unexpected turn – which is perhaps more than we can expect, given the trend since October 7.
Justin Crump is a British Army veteran, author, and CEO of the strategic intelligence company Sibylline.

Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on October 28-29/2023
Gaza and Two Big Lies ... Hamas, like Hezbollah  launched battles whose consequences they failed to anticipate and brought hell upon their people.
Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/123708/123708/
With the Israeli orgy in Gaza, two facts have emerged. The first is that the human rights discourse of Western regimes is a lie. The other lie that has been exposed is that of the so-called resistance in our region. Western regimes would not stop talking about human rights.
The West translated this narrative even in the actions of athletes, commercial deals, and other domains. Now, when Gaza is crumbling under the weight of a brutal Israeli machine, which shows no mercy or concern for defenseless children and women who had no say in this war, the hypocrisy of international pretenses stands out.  On the night of the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, the first statement issued by the US administration was that there were no red lines for Israel. Meanwhile, the Russians said Israeli bombardment violated international law, as though their bombardment of Syria and Ukraine complied with international law!
Thus, both Western support of Israel and Russia’s opposition are riddled with lies and hypocrisy. International law is irrelevant to both. They merely seek to score points and achieve their objective. The first victims are so-called human rights and human life, which is more crucial than anything else.
As for our region, the big lie is that of resistance, which has been pushed by Iran and the militias affiliated with it and funded by it. The mission of these forces in Iran’s orbit is to destroy our homelands and "statehood" as a concept. Theirs is a sectarian project, and its first victims are minorities and the people of the region as a whole. The worst of those implicated in this plot have repeatedly been told this resistance lie and justify it by claiming that "no voice and be raised above the battle."
The Iranian Foreign Minister, who has been making threats since October 7, now says, after the ground invasion of Gaza, that Iran does not want to expand the scope of the conflict in the region, and that "the resistance forces in the region have their own considerations and they make their own decisions."
He says just a week after having claimed that "fingers are on the trigger" in the region, Houthis targeted Egypt with two drones, and skirmishes by Hezbollah sought to "save face," launching their attacks from Christian and Sunni areas in Lebanon so that the Israeli response would hit the party’s opponents!
Thus, the lesson to be learned in this region, today and every day, is that Iran and all of its militias are not concerned with our causes. Palestine is merely a pretext for promoting and facilitating their plot to undercut Arab states. We all have a duty to safeguard our countries and reject these militias.
We are obliged to pursue this approach regardless of the dire situation of the Arab states in question. When Qurans were hoisted on the tips of spears, in a declaration that sovereignty belongs solely to God, Ali bin Abi Talib (may God be pleased with him) replied that there must be a "righteous or immoral leader" — in other words, that a government is needed, be it virtuous or corrupt, to prevent society from spiraling into chaos and ruin.
When anyone asks how we can criticize Hamas now, as Israel ravages Gaza, we must remember the saying of Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan. "He was killed by those who led him astray." Hamas, time and time again, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, launched battles whose consequences they failed to anticipate and brought hell upon their people.  Therefore, we must safeguard the state-building project and reject Iran and its militias everywhere. We must also remind the West that they are the ones who affirmed that human rights is a lie, now in Gaza, and before that in Syria and Iraq.

Netanyahu’s Deal With Putin Goes Wrong ...Is Ukraine the winner?
Vladislav Davidzon/The Tablet/October 29/2023
The Hamas massacres in the Israeli south that killed more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and members of the Israeli Defense Forces on October 7 constituted the worst day of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. The terrorist incursion also had the effect of undermining multiple long-standing and delicate balancing acts of regional diplomacy, which rested upon logic, predicates and assumptions that turned out to be delusional. The efficacy and wisdom of the neutrality entente between Moscow and Jerusalem, formerly a pillar of regional security arrangements, suddenly looks a lot less rational or defensible than it did to Israeli leaders before the attack.
Israel’s steadfast commitment to a doctrine of nonintervention in the wars raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East was a key part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regional security policy. The original entente reflected the conflict-averse Netanyahu’s desire to keep the Israelis out of the cauldron of the Syrian civil war. Positioning the advancing Iranian forces and their proxies at a remove from Israel’s northern border was a corollary of the deal, which stipulated that the Iranians would be prevented from operating along the Golan Heights, with the Russians acting as a de facto arbitrer of who controlled the territory adjacent to Israel.
Crucially, Moscow allowed the Israeli air force to carry out air strikes against Iranian proxies that operated in Syria, where the IDF would routinely request that Russian missile and air defence systems in Syria be temporarily powered down. The arrangement allowed Israel to stay out of a war in which Tehran’s proxies rampaged across Arab lands, but that augmented the power of the ring of Iranian-backed enemies that surrounds Israel. That encirclement further cemented Jerusalem’s military alliance with the Sunni Arab bloc.
Netanyahu’s arrangement with the Russians allowed the Israeli leader to portray himself as a masterful geopolitical strategist over multiple election cycles. He had always considered his close personal relationship to Russian President Vladimir Putin to be both a political and national asset, grounded in a symbiosis of mutual respect and transactional necessity.
Yet the Netanyahu-Putin relationship had noticeably cooled over the last year-and-a-half before October 7, for numerous reasons. While Putin genuinely respects—and somewhat fears—Israel, he has continued to balance his relationship with Netanyahu against Moscow’s commitments and alliances within the Arab world as well as with other Muslim allies. Russia’s relationships in the Middle East with powers hostile to Israel represent a direct continuation of the regional position of the Soviet Union; many of the USSR’s regional terror assets were inherited either directly or indirectly by Iran.
Nevertheless, the Israeli-Russian neutrality pact has constrained Israel from engaging more closely with or arming the Ukrainians against the Russian invasion. In turn, Israel has paid a substantive diplomatic price with numerous allies because of its neutral stance since the start of Russia’s invasion. Many people around the world (including prominent Israelis like the the ex-refusnik leader and former Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky) have viewed that arrangement as placing Israel on the wrong side of a historical conflagration. The president of Ukraine has repeatedly and fruitlessly deployed his own Jewish background in order to shame Israel into ramping up military assistance.
Yet as the war against Ukraine, which is now well past its 600th day, turned into a disastrous quagmire for Moscow, Putin has turned to his Iranian allies for assistance. While Russia’s alliance with Iran is inherently transactional, it is of ever-growing importance, sanctions have made it difficult for Moscow to procure weapons systems, munitions, and microchips. The Russian-Iranian relationship therefore imposes both a new threat to Israel, and a form of commonality—and even solidarity—with Ukraine.
Ukraine and Israel are now both at war with Iran, either openly or by proxy forces that are being directly supplied, trained, and commanded by Tehran. This is a fact that Ukrainian military and diplomatic officials have tried to hammer home to their Israeli counterparts over the last 19 months of the Russian invasion. The Iranian-made Shahed suicide drones that Iran first provided to the Russians in the summer of 2022 have been critically important in the drone arms race between the Ukrainians and Russians. These drones have been responsible for the deaths of many Ukrainian civilians in Odessa, Kyiv, and other cities, as well as for the crippling of numerous Ukrainian armored vehicles. The Israeli military has observed the technical capacity of the Iranian drones in the Ukrainian battle zones with great interest. The Russian-Iranian alliance has already destroyed half of all Ukrainian electrical pylons and infrastructure hubs. As a result, Ukrainian athletes now routinely refuse to shake hands with their Iranian competitors while taking part in international sporting events.
In return for drones and other support, Tehran, which continues clamoring for Russian technical assistance with its nuclear program, was proffered a certain amount of Russian diplomatic support to go with Russian upgrades on their drones. Moscow is also reported to have allowed Iran to build a massive drone factory in Russia. A great deal of discreet cooperation also takes place on the level of bypassing Western sanctions—an art that Tehran has mastered over the past 40 years, and which Moscow is now learning.
Last year, Russia also promised to sell Tehran a fleet of modern Russian Su-35 attack fighter jets—a transaction that could have potentially realigned the dynamics of air power in the Middle East. However, that deal seems to have been halted or scuppered, and the reasons for the deal not taking place have never been publicly explained. Moscow skillfully manages to find a common language between antagonistic Arabs, Iranians, and Jews, dealing with each discreetly on their own terms.
Yet because Putin had always been seen as viewing Israeli security concerns with appropriate consideration, his waffling, cagey and diffident response to the Hamas attack took many by surprise. Three days after the assault, Putin proffered his first comments on the war between Israel and Gaza during a conversation with the prime minister of Iraq. He stated that “it was a clear example of the failure of U.S. policy in the Middle East, in that the Americans had not taken the core interests of the Palestinian people into account (that is working to create an independent Palestinian state).” The statement worked on numerous registers: placating Arab audiences, reassuring the Iranians, restating Russian diplomatic commitments, and snubbing the Americans for their lack of skill in executing their chosen policy in the region. In other words, a typical aperçu for the trolling strongman.
It also took the Russian president an entire week-and-a-half to call Netanyahu in order to offer his condolences. Putin reportedly did not even bother to condemn the Hamas assault during the phone call. Ukrainian President Zelensky, meanwhile, was one of the first heads of state to render a call, offering to visit Israel. When that gracious offer of solidarity was declined, Ukrainian media and commentators felt deeply insulted by the rebuff. Helpfully for Moscow, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has now been relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, sparking arguments within the U.S. Congress about which war to prioritize. Ukrainian elites have privately voiced concern about being isolated in the wake of the attack. Indeed, the Russians have taken the opportunity to embark on a substantial counteroffensive around Avdiivka. It is a counteroffensive which is going badly for them, but one which is also succeeding in attriting Ukrainian forces.
While the Russians will doubtless attempt to take full advantage of Hamas’ attack on Israel and have already benefited greatly from it, that is not a priori evidence of their having had a hand in planning or executing the massacre. The question of who did know about the incipient assault, which surely took months of training and several years of planning, as well as significant outside technical and logistical assistance, remains unanswered.
The technical prowess that would appear to be needed to take down the billion-dollar Israeli fence is necessarily either a Russian or Iranian contribution. If the American intelligence services had any early warning of what was about to transpire from active signals intelligence in Lebanon or elsewhere, it seems quite possible that the Russians may have also been offered advance notice by their Iranian allies. Moscow has also not backed Israel in the United Nations over the past weeks. After the Israelis destroyed the Damascus and Allepo airports last week, the Russians allowed Iranian military flights—presumably carrying supplies, arms and military advisers—to continue using a Russian military airfield in the north of the country. Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Tehran for talks with his Iranian counterpart.
For the past week and a half, some Ukrainian analysts have been attempting to demonstrate the existence of a direct link between the Russians and the Hamas attack. Proof of Russian involvement in the Hamas incursion would doubtless be a world historical event. Meanwhile, Ukrainians point to the Hamas attack as proof that Netanyahu and the Israelis badly miscalculated in their relationship with Putin, and must now change course.
“Netanyahu is guilty of expecting Putin to remain loyal to his deal with him,” the British Ukrainian analyst Taras Kuzio complained to me. “I have always thought that the official Israeli arguments for why Israel was not aiding Ukraine—that is to avoid angering Putin in Syria—were overplayed and I find it bizarre that Netanyahu did not view the emboldening of Iran by Russia as a potential security threat.
“If Iran is to achieve its objective of a nuclear bomb,” Kuzio continued, “that would be because of Russian support.”

Biden’s Three Nos..Biden’s visit puts Israel in mortal danger
Gadi Taub/The Tablet/October 29/2023
President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel elicited a collective sigh of relief. The show of friendship and the strong statements of support, peppered with some Yiddishisms, gave Israelis a feeling that the U.S. truly has their back. The dispatch of two American aircraft carriers to the region served to further reassure us. This is what the president intended. He staged his embrace of Israel to elicit exactly such a response—and not just from Israelis but from American Jews as well.
However, the closer you examine Biden’s hug, the more it appears like a full nelson. To be sure, there are positive aspects to the visit, but the cons decisively outweighed the pros. Biden came to Israel to preserve his—and President Barack Obama’s—disastrous policy of appeasing Iran. That policy has run roughshod over Israel’s most vital interests and will continue to do so if it isn’t abandoned soon. It’s just that now, preserving that policy requires giving Israel some limited help against Hamas while preventing it from securing what it needs most: a clear and decisive victory. Anything short of that will leave our blood in the water for the bigger sharks to smell.
When you look beyond Biden’s “I love Israel” rhetoric and examine his actions through a sober political lens, here’s what the details look like.
The first thing to note is that, from the get-go, the U.S. denied Iran’s fingerprints on the Hamas attack. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that there was no “direct” evidence of Iranian involvement. That statement is risible. The evidence is as plain as day. The Islamic Jihad in Gaza, which is an extension of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, took part in the attack. Then there are the Iranian weapons and tactics, borrowed directly from Iran’s Lebanese Shiite proxy, Hezbollah—to say nothing of the money from Tehran. Hamas’ leaders publicly credited Iran for supporting them. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published detailed reported articles about Iran’s direct involvement in the attack.
Sullivan’s demurral about Iran’s involvement was the first sign that the administration is out to save the key element of its misguided Middle East policy, which the administration often refers to opaquely as “regional integration” or “de-escalation.” In practice, these phrases are euphemisms for a policy of appeasement that has offered Iran unofficial sanctions relief, flooding it with cash, including, most recently, a $6 billion package, which, contrary to early reports, was not frozen after the atrocities of October 7.
U.S. appeasement has enabled and emboldened Iran’s proxies, who together planned the slaughter that the world has just witnessed in Israeli population centers around the Gaza Strip. According to the press in Israel, Israeli officials asked Biden to publicly acknowledge that Iran was complicit in the attack. The Americans flat-out refused. The reason behind this refusal is simple: Admitting that Iran is behind the atrocities means admitting that the policies of two Democratic administrations are an abject failure—that they have destabilized this volatile region, even before Iran can complete its nuclear military program.
The closer you examine Biden’s hug, the more it appears like a full nelson.
Then there is the question of Hezbollah. Far bigger and more lethal than Hamas, this Iranian proxy is now playing a direct role in the war. Biden tried to appease Hezbollah at Israel’s expense when he pressured Yair Lapid’s shaky coalition to accept a maritime border agreement that served Hezbollah’s interest (including giving it access to an underwater gas reservoir) by forcing concessions on Israel—supposedly in exchange for quiet. Now Israelis see what “quiet” looks like.
Israelis put much faith in the formidable naval force now projecting Washington’s power over the eastern Mediterranean. It is here, the press tells us, to deter Hezbollah from opening a second front on Israel’s northern border. This may well be true. Here is where U.S. and Israeli short-term interests converge. Israel prefers to fight its enemies one front at a time, so that it can deploy the full force of the IDF in each confrontation. The U.S., for its part, strongly prefers that the Gaza conflict remain localized and not mushroom into a full-blown regional war that would blow its “regional integration” policy.
However, this overlap in Israeli and American interests is local and temporary. The American assistance, we learned while Biden was visiting, came with a high price tag. Many in Israel had been arguing that the right move was to start the fighting first on the northern front, the source of the greatest direct threat to Israel’s existence. Biden reportedly demanded that Israel not make a major move against Hezbollah—and Prime Minister Netanyahu complied. Now, unless Hezbollah decides to preempt Israel, its power will remain intact, beneath an American umbrella of protection.
Giving up the option to attack Hezbollah first, and even the possibility of a credible threat to do so, can still make sense, providing that Israel received a guarantee of American protection. But now we know that we received no such guarantee from Biden. On the flight back from Israel, a reporter asked the president whether he told the Israelis that the U.S. would intervene against Hezbollah should it attack Israel with its arsenal of 200,000 rockets and missiles. The president responded very clearly: “Not true. I’ve never said it.”
Biden’s public declaration was no doubt music to the ears of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel lost freedom of maneuver against Hezbollah but gained very little deterrence in return.
This is also true of the Gaza front. Here too the administration will not give Israel the free hand it needs against the terrorists who crossed Israel’s border and slaughtered 1,400 of her citizens. On 60 Minutes before his visit, President Biden said that occupying Gaza would be a “big mistake.” But how can Israel secure the destruction of Hamas as an organization, as well as a military force, without at least a monthslong occupation of Gaza? No entity other than the Israeli Defense Forces, and especially not the Palestinian Authority, has the power and the willingness to keep Gaza demilitarized. If Hamas remains a viable political organization in any part of the Gaza Strip, no Israeli will go to live in the western Negev for fear of a repeat of the horrors that we witnessed on October 7. Biden’s demand that Israel avoid occupying the Gaza Strip seems like a recipe for helping Hamas avoid destruction, placing it, too, under a de facto American protective umbrella.
Still, Israel can take the Gaza Strip in stages—by occupying the northern part, and then working southward from there, gradually squeezing and degrading Hamas over time. But then came the president’s curt answer to a journalist last Friday night, as he was boarding a plane. “Should Israel delay its ground offensive until more hostages are taken out?” a journalist asked. “Yes,” the president said. If this is going to be his policy, then it amounts to a demand to hold back on even a temporary occupation of the north.
So how is Biden actually expecting Israel to strike back against the terrorists who engaged in the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust? Hanging over all of these demands is the remark Biden made in his first speech, calling on Israel to abide by “the laws of war.” What was the meaning of this advice? Israel not only abides by the internationally accepted rules of warfare, it employs stricter standards than any other army, including the United States. Biden’s admonition was an early warning that the threshold of civilian casualties that the U.S. will tolerate is much lower than it set for itself when it destroyed the Islamic State, killing over 30,000 people. Raqqa and the Old City of Mosul were virtually leveled to the ground. The media was generally silent. It will not be in the case of Israel, even less so after Biden’s remarks.
What President Biden’s strictures mean in practice is that the United States does not agree with Israel that Iran is part of this conflict; it does not wish Hezbollah to be destroyed or injured in Lebanon; and it does not agree that Hamas must be completely destroyed in Gaza. Let’s call Biden’s actual posture toward Israel “the three nos.”
Of Biden’s three nos, the most difficult to justify is the one that has the U.S. running interference for the Hamas terrorists who gleefully butchered innocent civilians, including women, children, and the elderly on a mass scale unseen in any Western country since World War II. Hamas didn’t just deliberately target these civilians; its terrorists recorded and often showcased on social media how they committed barbaric, Nazi-like crimes against humanity. Most of the copious filmed and photograph records that exist of these acts are simply too sickening for the Israeli government to show in public—dismembering children in front of their parents, burning people alive, beheading babies, and much else. But enough of them have been made public that no sane person in any Western country can doubt either the reality or the irredeemable evil of these actions or the evil of the people who committed them. Hamas then retreated behind the civilian population of Gaza, using them as human shields.
Hiding military personnel and materiel behind citizens is itself a war crime. And if the civilians get hurt, those who hide among them are responsible. These are the internationally accepted rules of war, which are widely understood by every military on earth, if not always by journalists. To allow otherwise would be to disastrously license terrorism and aggression.
Yet Biden’s remarks have indicated that Hamas will be rewarded for the war crime of hiding weapons and armed terrorists among civilians. Israel, according to the Biden administration, must refrain from bombing Hamas if it does so. It must also help to keep those civilians docile and pliant under Hamas’ iron fist. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel before Biden and he sat with the Israeli cabinet for many hours. According to reports of those meetings, he virtually conditioned American military assistance on Israel immediately granting Gaza so-called humanitarian aid.
Apart from a ground invasion, depriving Gaza of aid of any sort—water, electricity, medicine, food—was Israel’s most effective lever for the possible release of the over 200 hostages held by Hamas. When Biden arrived, he underscored Blinken’s demand to allow “humanitarian aid,” which has now begun to flow through the Rafah crossing from Egypt—apparently uninspected by the United Nations or any other authority.
The agreed-upon fiction is that none of the aid will benefit Hamas; it is strictly “humanitarian,” of course. But Hamas controls the Gaza side of the crossing. Ultimately, it will determine the final destination of all aid, regardless of what is written on the manifests for the trucks. The same is true of Biden’s pledge of a $100 million aid package for Gaza, which amounts to rewarding the terrorists for their atrocities, at the American taxpayer’s expense.
Taken together, Biden’s three nos add up to this: Biden has closed all possible paths Israel has for a decisive victory in this war. And the meaning of this closure, make no mistake, can be very grave for the very existence of the Jewish state. Hamas is the weakest of our enemies. If they can commit such atrocities against us and get away with it, our budding alliances with the Sunni states will certainly begin to fray, as they seek to shore up their own security. They will not count on a lame ally in this dangerous neighborhood. What is worse, the stronger, richer, and more formidable among our enemies will take note, and prepare for the opportune moment to strike. This may push Israel to extremes we do not even want to contemplate.
Joe Biden is not consciously hostile to Israel. That much seems true. But his administration obviously cannot bring itself to admit the reality that recent events have laid bare: that the U.S. appeasement of Iran that became the centerpiece of U.S. regional policy under Barack Obama has destabilized the whole region and unleashed a tide of extremism that, if not contained, may send the Middle East up in smoke. In the long run, containing extremism can only be achieved by drastically curbing Iran’s power, not by supporting it with billions of dollars and the prospect of a nuclear bomb.
Israel’s considerations must begin with its own existential interests. And those can probably not be safely delayed until the U.S. comes to its senses.
*Gadi Taub is an author, historian, and op-ed columnist. His Hebrew bestseller The Rise of Antidemocratic Liberalism: Israel, the United States, and the West is being translated into English.

Hamas Killed My Wokeness
Alex Olshonsky/The Tablet/October 29/2023
I’ve found a home on the progressive left for years—even after I noticed a common blind spot around Jewish issues. But the reaction to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians was the final straw.
In high school in the early 2000s, I assumed the role of Palestine in our semesterlong “Model U.N.” class. It was, in part, a feeble act of rebellion against spending weekends at a Conservative synagogue during my angstiest years.
Although my comprehension of the Middle East conflict was in its infancy, an innate sense of justice drove me to defend the Palestinian cause. To characterize my choice as merely “rebellion,” then, doesn’t capture the full picture. My mother, a New Yorker with fierce feminist beliefs, raised me with quintessentially progressive Jewish values. I was taught that we, as Jews, stand with the oppressed—because we were the oppressed. This sentiment was often reinforced by my grandparents who arrived in America penniless, the Nazis hounding at their heels.
I took my role seriously, making it my mission to call for an immediate halt to the bulldozing of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. I plunged into extensive research and armed myself with the knowledge to effectively champion a two-state solution—a belief I passionately held in high school and continue to endorse today.
Later, as a man in his 20s, it was only natural that I found myself firmly situated within the progressive left. I never once questioned my political home. Guided by my Jewish values, during the George Floyd tragedy and the racial reckoning that followed, I wholeheartedly embraced anti-racism initiatives. I read Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and I even took on the role of facilitating international dialogues on collective sense-making and healing. I strove to be a good “white ally.” Truly, I did.
Then came a flexion point: During a 2021 Bay Area psychotherapy training, in a “processing session” around race, a woman vulnerably shared her firsthand experience with a horrific act of antisemitic hatred. To my astonishment, the two facilitators, both white women, chastised her—yes, chastised—stressing the session’s emphasis on anti-Black racism. This episode unveiled a disconcerting bias in this community that routinely minimized antisemitism, to the point it was no longer considered “legitimate” racism. The young Jewish woman who’d shared was cowed into silence. From within my depths, I could hear my grandfather’s groan from eternity: This, still, here?
At that moment, it became clear to me that “wokeness,” or whatever term we may use to describe the new progressive social justice ideology, didn’t seem fully compatible with the perspective I had developed in a family that was very liberal because of our lineage of Holocaust survivors.
Since then, I’ve struggled to find my political footing while maintaining a commitment to the pursuit of truth and justice. I started noticing the sinister shadow of postmodern progressivism everywhere: a seeming insistence on “pluralism” that, in practice, often lacks genuine embodiment and quickly devolves into its own form of dogmatic and reductive tribalism.
I began to feel as though I had been baited into an a priori virtuous worldview that, in a twisted way, sows more division than it does healing; more concerned, as it is, with retribution than reconciliation. That my Judaism was utterly swept away (even shadow-demonized) in the context of this conversation only left me more disillusioned.
Any ideology that ‘justifies’ or minimizes the tragedy of civilian casualties is broken and perverse.
Yet my affiliation with progressivism persisted. Say what one will about the oversimplifications and occasional insincerities of the progressive left, I told myself, their hearts were in the right place.
Then, two weeks ago, Hamas grotesquely murdered 1,400 Israeli citizens, including 270 at a pro-peace music festival, a gathering my friends and I would have joyously attended if we were in the Holy Land. While these events were deeply disturbing to me, and all fellow members of the diaspora, what was even more shocking was the response from segments of the online left back home. These are progressive groups that, ostensibly, should cherish all human life and abhor all wanton violence.
Instead, many celebrated—yes, celebrated—these attacks as a form of “anti-colonialist resistance.” Memes circulated, like the now infamous Chicago #BLM paratrooper, that quite literally glorified an unimaginable slaughtering. Student groups at Harvard decried Israel as “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ attack; groups at the University of Virginia went a step further in saying that “colonized people can resist occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”; and groups at Tufts took the cake by praising Hamas’ ingenious creativity.
The straw that broke my proverbial “progressive” back occurred last Thursday, when students at a high school in the Bay Area, my home for the last 15 years, were seen chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They marched in the hallways of a public school ringing the jihadist rallying call that implicitly calls for the erasure of the State of Israel. And all those who live within it.
Do these high schoolers, who are the same age I was when I debated on behalf of Palestine in Model U.N., grasp the underlying antisemitic implications of their words? Or might they simply be aligning with a far-left mindset that unreservedly and reductively supports the “oppressed”?
Zooming out, it has become clear to me, and devoid of the Israeli-Palestinian context, there’s a dark reality: Our Western culture is riddled with ambient antisemitism. Screeds by such celebrities as Kanye West testify to the fact. As Israel is pulled into a conflict governed by jihadist game theory—where civilians are intentionally used as shields so that dead children can be broadcast as propaganda puppets on social media—antisemitism has and surely will continue to intensify around the world. In London, antisemitic hate crimes have already risen by 1,350%. Watch it grow, worldwide.
Yet, it’s the latter question—how so many hypereducated students have steadfastly embraced far-left ideology—that raises my greatest concern for our future. This should not have to be said, but if you find yourself mourning some civilian deaths while celebrating any others, there’s an objective problem with your worldview. And you. The notion that one can distill our world’s most complex, historically dynamic, and challenging conflict into simplistic binaries is so utterly absurd that it clearly exposes the shortcomings of “woke” ideology. Or any dogmatism, for that matter.
Outside of lacking vital historical context, I’ve been aghast to learn that this branch of the progressive left does not seem to understand why such horrors were committed upon Israeli citizens. Unfortunately, there is an explanation beyond “colonial resistance”—radical jihadism. Granted, not all forms of jihadism are based on terrorism, and all Muslims are, of course, not jihadists. But make no mistake: The ones who are responsible for these brutal acts of murder, rape, and mutilation are radical jihadists. Groups like Hamas are, quite literally, death cults that are not consequentially distinct from Nazism—the death cult that systematically annihilated my grandparents’ entire extended family. The cult that the Allied West had no confusion about needing to destroy. Hamas’ stated intention is the eradication, first, of Israeli Jews—then all Jews everywhere. That is a genocidal agenda. The IDF, with all its flaws, which are numerous and sometimes deadly, avoids civilian Palestinian deaths whenever and however possible. That is the opposite of a genocidal agenda.
I truly wish it were as simple as reducing this conflict to an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. I am waiting, with horror, as Israel prepares for a ground invasion that will claim thousands of thoroughly innocent lives. I do not want any Gazan children to be collateral damage. My Jewish values, along with what I’ve learned advocating for Palestinian statehood, continue to affirm my belief in the importance of upholding the rights of Palestinian civilians.
Any ideology that “justifies” or minimizes the tragedy of civilian casualties is broken and perverse. That is not to say that all such casualties are avoidable. Reform Jews of my generation are unified in a desire for a two-state solution that provides Palestinians with safety, dignity, and rights. Over the past two weeks, I have heard no American Jew wish violence upon Gazans; I’ve witnessed many American so-called progressives who wish violence upon Jews. In response to raped teenagers and headless babies, a common leftist online refrain has been: “What did you think decolonization looked like?”
That’s not progressivism. That’s bloodthirst.
*Alex Olshonsky, an independent writer living in Oakland, is the co-founder of an addiction nonprofit and a practitioner of somatic psychotherapy.

'Just Blind Hate': The Persecution of Christians, September 2023
Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/October 29, 2023
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/123716/123716/
[O]ne young seminarian, Brother Na'aman, 25, who was on the verge of completing his priesthood training, was burned alive. Police were contacted even before the attack, but came only after the terrorists had fled. — Morning Star News, September 8, 2023, Nigeria.
"They then proceeded to separate Christians from Muslims, apparently based on their names and ethnicity. They opened fire on the Christians, riddling them with bullets." — acninternational.org, September 21, 2023, Mozambique.
"Today, I have nothing. I saw my house and my place of worship burn in front of my eyes. I was helpless. I saw my [Muslim] neighbours betray us. We have never done them any harm; we always respected them. Then why?" — Open Doors UK, September 6, 2023, Pakistan.
On September 15, terrorists with ties to the Islamic State (ISIS) invaded a village in Mozambique where they slaughtered at least 11 Christians "in cold blood." The attack occurred in a village in the province of Cabo Delgado, which has been under assault by ISIS for years. Pictured: Burned and damaged huts in the village of Aldeia da Paz outside Macomia, Cabo Delgado on August 24, 2019. On August 1, 2019, the village was attacked by an Islamist group. (Photo by Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)
The following are among the murders and abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of September 2023.
The Muslim Slaughter of Christians
Nigeria: As the genocide there of Christians continues, a Sept. 1 report found that "Of the 5,500 Christians who were killed last year because of their faith, 90 percent"—or about 4,950—"were Nigerian."
On the night of Sept. 7, Muslims torched a Catholic seminary in Kaduna State. Although two priests managed to escape, one young seminarian, Brother Na'aman, 25, who was on the verge of completing his priesthood training, was burned alive. Police were contacted even before the attack, but came only after the terrorists had fled. "It is sad that killings and this type of evil against Christians are still going on in spite of our appeal and pleading to Nigerian government to take measures towards ending these attacks," said the Rev. John Hayab, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Kaduna State Chapter Hayab. In a statement he elaborated:
"What is disheartening about this particular attack is the ... Parish is located at the heart of Kamantan town...This causes us to wonder some more, 'Where is the hope, how much more terrible could the situation get?.... [W]e invite the Governor of Kaduna State... [to]ensure that those responsible for the Kamantan evil night are apprehended and made to face the law. Security is everyone's business; it is disappointing that this kind of unholy activity could be recorded at the heart of the... community, and the criminals will operate unchallenged."
Other murders of Christians in September 2023 include:
Sept. 10: On a Sunday, terrorists killed 10 Christians in the same area of Plateau State where 27 other Christians were killed in the previous month.
Sept. 10: Terrorists murdered a Christian couple, wounded several others, and abducted six people in Taraba State.
Sept. 13: Gunmen kidnapped a pastor and two other Christians in Jos East County.
Sept. 15: Muslim Fulani herdsmen killed 15 Christians and kidnapped 32 in southern Kaduna state.
Sept. 20: Fulani herdsmen raided a village in Nasarawa State, killing one Christian and wounding three others, including a pastor.
Sept. 19-27: Muslim terrorists slaughtered 16 Christians in a series of attacks throughout Kaduna State.
Sept 30: Twenty-five Christians, most of whom were members of a church choir, were abducted as they were on their way to attend a funeral.
Mozambique: On Friday, Sept. 15, terrorists with ties to the Islamic State invaded a village where they slaughtered at least 11 Christians "in cold blood." The attack occurred in a village in the province of Cabo Delgado, which has been under assault by the Islamic State for years.
"According to Friar Boaventura, terrorists arrived in Naquitengue in the early afternoon and summoned the entire population. They then proceeded to separate Christians from Muslims, apparently based on their names and ethnicity. They opened fire on the Christians, riddling them with bullets."
The Friar added that this was not the first time that Muslim terrorists separated Muslims from Christians before slaughtering the "infidels" (here).
Uganda: On Sept. 6, Muslims beat an evangelist to death for leading Muslims to Christ at an evangelistic event. When it was over, Philip Bere, 33, and his colleague, Mudenya Sirasi, began traveling home on a bicycle. Before long, according to Sirasi,
"We heard people talking from both sides of the road at a nearby bush saying, 'They are the ones who converted our members today – they are not supposed to live, but to be killed.' From nowhere, one man who was stationed in front of us grabbed our bicycle that we were riding on and hit Bere with a blunt object on his back."
As Bere fell, Sirasi leapt off the bike and ran and hid:
"I could see the attackers brutally injuring my friend. One of the attackers hit him with a big stone, and he bled to death."
Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches
Pakistan: A Sept. 6 report offers different stories of the "horror experienced" by Christians during the August 2023 rampage prompted by a false allegation of blasphemy, when Muslims rioted and destroyed two dozen churches, hundreds of Christian homes, and displaced some 1,600 Christians. Concerning what happened to her small church, Sara (last name withheld for security) said:
"Hundreds rushed to the church, and we watched in horror from our homes as they destroyed each part of the church. Some had mallets, sledgehammers, pickaxes and axes, and others had metal rods and wooden sticks. They piled up the Bibles and hymn books and set them on fire. They smashed the furniture and poured fuel over the small worship area.... We heard them running on the roof as our home was connected to the roof of the church.... We heard them running, and with each thump, we heard more people on the roof. We just prayed, 'Lord, keep us safe.' My daughter was crying, and my son stood at the doorway with a stick – just in case the protesters decided to break in.... In that moment of terror [when the mob had reached the family's front door, banging on it and shouting verbal abuse] we held onto each other and prayed, 'Dear God, You are our high tower and our fortress. Please save us.' The banging got worse. For over 20 minutes, a group of about 15 men tried but the door held, so they gave up and left with my son's motorbike which was parked in the alleyway.... [Afterwards] we wandered the streets and met with [Christian] neighbours who had left their homes to the mob. Everything was gone, even the dowries of daughters about to be married, worth a lifetime of saving."
Another man, Asad, told of what happened to a local church, as well as the torching of his home:
"They took anything [from the church] that could be sold and loaded it onto trucks. They then poured acid over the items. I saw them trample the crosses and Bibles. I saw them throw the Bibles out onto the street and jump on them. It looked like they had no sense at all – just blind hate. They poured fuel from their petrol bombs, lit the Bibles on fire, and watched them burn, only walking away when satisfied.... Today, I have nothing. I saw my house and my place of worship burn in front of my eyes. I was helpless. I saw my [Muslim] neighbours betray us. We have never done them any harm; we always respected them. Then why? Why did they become part of an agenda that was so anti-Christian? What about my daughter? What will become of her?"
Uganda: On Sunday, Sept. 3, police announced that they had foiled a bomb attack on a cathedral in Kampala. A Muslim "man accused of trying to detonate an explosive in a crowd of worshippers" was arrested. According to a police spokesman:
"We have carried out a controlled detonation of the improvised explosive device which was made of nails, a motorcycle battery, a charger and a telephone handset which was to be used in the attack."
According to the cathedral's pastor, Robert Kayanja,
"The lord has saved us from deaths. The terrorist was a few yards to the entrance of the church, but the security put up resistance and (he) was arrested before he can enter the church and detonate the bomb."
The report adds that in June, Islamic terrorists of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF),
"crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo and massacred 42 people, including 37 students, in a gruesome school attack. It was Uganda's worst attack since twin bombings in Kampala in 2010 killed 76 people in a strike claimed by the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab [Muslim terror] group."
Indonesia: On Aug. 29, a "machete-wielding Muslim threatened to kill members of a house church," when he and other Muslims broke into a rented house and broke up a private worship service. The attack started when a Muslim woman began hurling stones at the home's windows and smashing them, while shouting at the congregation to stop worshipping. According to the report:
"Later the woman's husband came to the house with a machete, accompanied by another man with a wooden club. Brandishing the machete, the Muslim shouted at the congregation that he was going to cut their throats into pieces and told them to stop worshiping."
The congregation eventually complied. One of the Christians went to report the matter to police and ask them to prosecute. He told them that "the assailants had committed criminal acts, including threats with sharp weapons, vandalism, use of sharp weapons and human rights violations." Police, however, dismissed his complaint, and said it was "just a misunderstanding" over "neighborhood ethics." The Christian complainant was then told to go home since he was obviously "suffering from mental disorders."
Egypt: On Sept. 5, a Muslim mob attacked a Coptic Christian man's property on the false assumption that he was building a church. The incident occurred in the village of al-Khiyari, in the Abu Qurqas center. The Muslims apparently confused two developments. Because the village has no church, a Coptic priest had been meeting with the Christians of al-Khiyari near the home of the Coptic man, Imad Wajih. In that same area, Christians had submitted a request for a permit to build a church, so they could hold proper worship services, as opposed to meeting with a traveling priest in random spots. In the meantime, Wajih began building a smaller private home on his property. Although it had nothing to do with the proposed church, local Muslims grew suspicious and whipped up one another, including on social media, where they complained that "the Copts are building a church without a permit!" So they attacked Wajih's property, committed arson, and stole building materials, including reinforced iron and concrete blocks.
This scenario has played out countless times in Egypt over the years: whenever there is even a rumor that a Coptic church is being built or repaired—local Muslim mobs attack Christians and riot. Authorities frequently respond by appeasing the rioters and permanently sealing up the "offending" churches on the charge that they represent a "security threat." Back in 2018, when several churches were shut down for the same reason, Gamil Ayed, a Coptic lawyer, voiced typical Christian sentiment:
"We haven't heard that a mosque was closed down, or that prayer was stopped in it because it was unlicensed. Is that justice? Where is the equality? Where is the religious freedom? Where is the law? Where are the state institutions?"
France: On Sunday, Sept. 17, a Muslim migrant stormed into the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice; there, a 46-year-old Senegalese man interrupted morning mass by shouting "Allah" and other, "incoherent," words. Police forcibly hospitalized the man.
Muslim Attacks on Christian Freedom:
(Jihad on Apostates, Blasphemers, and Evangelists)
Afghanistan: On Sept 3 and again on Sept. 13, according to a report,
"The Taliban raided the offices of a Swiss nonprofit group based in Afghanistan, detaining 18 workers – including one American – for allegedly preaching Christianity, the country's government said... They were transferred to an unknown location in Kabul.
The Swiss charity — which helps improve healthcare and education in the country — said it was 'unaware of the circumstances that led to these incidents and have not been advised of the reason for the detention of our staff members,' it said in a statement....
Taliban officials, however, said the detainees were taken into custody for 'propagating and promoting Christianity' in the largely Muslim country.
Government spokesperson Abdul Wahid Hamas said several women, including the American, were among those held, VOA News reported."
Pakistan: On Sept. 8, Muslims accused a Christian couple, Shaukat Masih, 33, and his wife Kiran, 28, parents of three, of committing "blasphemy," by tearing pages of a Koran and releasing them from the roof of their home in Lahore. The following day, police imprisoned the couple, even though they were not home when the floating scriptures were seen. Left with no family members to take care of them, the three children, aged 7, 9 and 13, were taken in by Nasir Jameel of advocacy group the Living Water Society. "The children are extremely upset," he said, "due to their parents' absence, and one can only hope and pray for their early release." According to Section 295-B of the Pakistani penal code:
"Whoever willfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy of the Koran or of an extract therefrom or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life."
Uganda: A Muslim man, according to a Sept. 28 report, "locked up his son and starved him for more than four months for accepting Christ." On Sept. 15, after rumor of this development reached a Christian evangelical team, they went and pleaded to enter the Muslim man's home to pray for his family. After initial refusals, the Muslim father granted them five minutes. According to the lead pastor:
"As we were praying, there was a very strong, bad smell in the house. Since we were many, we forcefully entered the inner room where the smell was coming from and found a teenage boy in a dilapidated state."
The 17-year-old boy appeared "in a starving condition with skin clinging to bones." Some of the Christians forcibly took the youth to a nearby hospital, while others stayed and tried to reason with the Muslim family. The father confessed that when his son returned home from boarding school, he and other relatives tied him up and denied him food because the boy had "become a Christian by making a public confession, which was disgrace to our family."
"The message reached us through his teachers at Ibun Baz secondary school in Iganga, where our son was schooling. His teacher called us over the phone and told us about him joining Christianity."
At the hospital, the emaciated boy was only able to utter a few words about his mistreatment. The pastor, however, learned that:
"The mother used to sneak in with only water, but when her son fell sick, she didn't bring him medicine but insulted him by calling him an infidel to the family religion, and that he should die."
Muslim Persecution of Christians in Egypt
Egypt: According to a Sept. 27 report titled: "The Disappearance of Christian Women in Egypt: A Crisis that Requires Urgent Attention":
"Not a week goes by without social media or Coptic sites reporting on the sudden disappearance of a Christian girl, and often the girl is a minor. Typically, rumors begin to reach her family about her conversion to Islam. This opens several questions about it being a crime that is lacking in transparency, about how security agencies deal with it and their desire to resolve the crisis or not. When a woman disappears, families usually receive messages, either from the disappeared girl herself or from other persons, about the girl's conversion to Islam. Most families confirm that they quickly become suspicious of an abduction rather than genuine intention to convert. This is usually the immediate feeling, given the absence of any prior indication of the disappeared woman's intention to convert. At times, calls, messages or even videos are circulated about a disappeared woman, which increases families' suspicion that she has come under threat."
The report offers several examples, including the following:
"On July 30, the family of 25-year-old Mariam Samir Fayez, from Al-Arish Governorate, announced her absence after heading to an inter-city bus station in Cairo on her way back home at 7:30 a.m. Mariam was working as a university teaching assistant, and preparing her master's thesis at the University of Al-Menofeya.
"Mariam's father said that his daughter told him in a telephone call that she was on her way home, but then the call was disrupted. He later went to the police station to report her disappearance, and then he received a call from a person telling him that his daughter had converted to Islam. As he hadn't seen any particular behavior to explain such a conversion, he suspected that his daughter was not well.
"Days later, Mariam appeared in a video wearing a hijab, along with a certain Mahmoud Dawood, who identified himself as a comparative religions researcher, and asserted that she was not kidnapped nor forced to convert to Islam, adding 'From now on, I would like to live in peace (..) no one should say that I was kidnapped, as in fact I left home (on July 29), convinced and determined.. I went to the Islamic Research Complex where I declared my conversion to be Muslim.'
"After the video went viral on social media, along with a scan of her conversion document, many social media users accused certain groups of seeking to Islamize Coptic girls, and of forcing Mariam to appear in that video. A few days later, she appeared in the St Mary Church, in Mostorod, along with her family. A photo showed the cross on her wrist, asserting that she was still Christian and never converted, as claimed in the video.
"The term kidnapping, which is frequently mentioned in connection with the incidents of disappearance of Coptic women, does not only refer to kidnapping in its known sense, but includes coercion, exploitation, and blackmail, as well as targeting, seduction, concealment, lurking, etc.; all of which are terms that fall under the broader expression, and are also used internationally."
A separate report from Sept. 17, "A Decade of Curricular Reform? Egypt's Schools Still Teach Division and Discrimination," offers an in-depth look on where the radicalization begins:
"[A]ll programs—regardless of the classes and grades—include some Quranic verses and hadiths, and students of different religions are made to study and memorize them and sit for exams using these lessons. Some of the textbooks have passages that conflict with the beliefs of non-Muslims. One such instance can be found in an Arabic language lesson for the third preparatory level, as this Quranic verse is taught: 'And who is better in speech than one who invites to Allah and does righteousness and says, Indeed, I am of the Muslims.'
"Meanwhile, the education program is devoid of any lesson, text, or mention of other faiths or religions, with a total omission of Egyptian Christian or Jewish historical figures, or major non-Muslim religious holidays. The same goes for Coptic history, despite the fact that the Coptic Church played a prominent role locally or abroad in facing the Roman and Byzantine empires at the time. There is also a complete disregard for non-monotheistic beliefs such as the Baha'is.
"Moreover, some courses deal with relations between Christians and Muslims from an Islamic perspective. One example is a short story in the Arabic language class for the third secondary level titled 'The Church was enlightened' about how Christians fast with Muslims to celebrate Ramadan, and how they are keen on extending their best wishes to their Muslim brothers on the advent of the holy month. The context of the story is based on the general premise of school textbooks that Islam and the tolerance of Muslims are the foundation of coexistence, which is shown by how Christians are welcoming of Islamic religious holidays. There is no mention, however, of Muslims wishing or participating with Christians in any of their religious rituals or social events. .... [Another] characteristic of the educational content is the emphasis that Islam is the only source of virtues and positive values in such a way that depicts other faiths as inciting wrongdoing, or at least not upholding the same values."
**Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West, Sword and Scimitar, Crucified Again, and The Al Qaeda Reader, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
About this Series
While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by extremists is growing. The report posits that such persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place irrespective of language, ethnicity, or location. It includes incidents that take place during, or are reported on, any given month.
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20105/persecution-of-christians-september

Hamas and the Ruse that May be its Last
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al-Awsat/October 29/2023
It is, perhaps, too early to have a full picture of what led to the recent Hamas attack on Israeli villages close to Gaza.
One thing, however, is certain: the attack came when and where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet least expected.
But why? One answer adopted by Netanyahu’s team is “a failure of intelligence services”.
However, that answer, even if it contains a grain of truth, could not divert attention from a bigger failure: the Israeli leaders’ inability to correctly analyze the intelligence at their disposal and, and having bought into what looks like a ruse by Hamas, to imagine a worst-case scenario.
It now seems probable that Hamas carefully prepared a scheme to lull the Israelis into slumber as far as a threat from Gaza was concerned.
Major-General Yahya Safavi who wears the lofty title of “Senior military Advisor” to ”Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei in Tehran, says Hamas planned the attack over two years with a view to divert Israeli attention from Gaza and make a surprise attack possible. He does not say whether Iranians were involved in the planning but drops hints that they knew about the plot.
“The most important element was surprise,” he says.
French writer Michel Gurfinkiel, an expert on Israeli affairs, develops the theme further in an essay in the weekly Valeurs Actuelles. According to him Hamas worked out a scheme to make Israelis focus on the West Bank and Lebanon as the two most immediate sources of threat while portraying Gaza as relatively calm. Iran may have helped sell that narrative in a number of ways.
On several occasions, Khamenei publicly called for “the need to re-energize the resistance” in the West Bank. On two occasions Jordanian police seized shipments of arms and money ostensibly sent from Iran via Iraq. Then a series of clashes in Jenin convinced the Israelis that a “new front” was taking shape in the West Bank. On the northern front, Iran moved some Hezbollah units from Syria back to Lebanon, a move that the daily Kayhan claimed was designed to confront threats by ISIS. For the first time since the 2006 ceasefire accord, serving officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appeared in southern Lebanon, ostensibly for friendly visits. To pretend that something was being prepared in Lebanon Major. General Esmail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force, made two visits to Beirut for what Tehran media presented as “consultations” with Hezbollah leaders.
Hamas played another trick by leaking information to Israeli informers about “special plans” by the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine to attack Israel with Iranian support. Islamic Jihad is the last of the non-Hamas Palestinian armed groups to have a meaningful presence in Gaza; eliminating it would leave Hamas as the sole master of the enclave.
Relations between Tehran and Hamas had soured when the Gazan group decided to support Muslim Brotherhood armed groups against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who was backed by the Islamic Republic in Iran. In 2015 Hamas and Quds mercenaries fought a nine-month war close to Damascus when, according to Tehran media, the Gazans tried to destroy the Zaynabiah Shiite shrine.
That chapter was closed in 2019, when Hamas sent a senior team to Tehran. But even then, Tehran didn’t quite trust Hamas, a fact that Hamas leaders used in their plan to hoodwink the Israelis.
In his visits to Tehran Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh refused to attend official Friday prayer ceremonies, a gesture seen as his insistence on emphasizing his sectarian position vis-a-vis Iranians. In contrast, Islamic Jihad leaders attended the ceremonies to provide the TV footage that Tehran wanted.
The Hamas ruse included other elements. It suggested a doubling of the number of Gazans given permits to work in Israel. Just before the latest attack some 25,000 Gazans used such permits. At the same time, Israel shortened the delays in transferring to Hamas custom duties collected from good entering the enclave. Reports that cannot be independently confirmed suggest that Hamas, again using a convoluted network of informers, provided “valuable intelligence” to Israel on Islamic Jihad and embryonic groups in the West Bank, reinforcing the narrative that Hamas was trying to build a new persona as an embryonic state rather than a guerrilla group. To reinforce the narrative that Hamas was looking to a long period of calm, its key leaders moved their families to Qatar where figures like Khalid Meshaal, still regarded as an icon by many Gazans, and Haniyeh have been living for years.
Those who planned the ruse benefited from another factor. Playing religious groups against secular opponents may have become part of the Israeli intelligence’s collective memory.
That stratagem was used in Lebanon with the emergence of armed Shiite groups to counter and eventually eliminate the PLO’s presence in the south. The fact that Hezbollah is ultimately controlled by Tehran is also seen as an advantage because Iran as a state has to be responsive to both conciliatory and hostile moves by an adversary whereas a non-state operator such as Fatah or numerous other Palestinian guerrilla groups that are now extinct would always be regarded as loose cannons.
In Gaza, too, Israel tolerated, some say encouraged, the creation of Hamas for the same reason. Portraying Israel’s enemies as religious fanatics wishing to impose their faith on all mankind plays better with the international public opinion that might sympathize with non-religious outfits simply demanding “self-determination.”Ruse or not, what is certain is that Israeli leaders were deceived into thinking that Gaza was calm and that future threats would come from the West Bank and Lebanon. This is why they reduced the force set up to cope with any threat from Gaza while they raised the number of troops in the West Bank and close to the Lebanese ceasefire line. In previous clashes with Hamas the question was “how to be”; now, however, it looks as if “to be or not to be” is the question. Thus, Hamas may become the latest victim of the law of unintended consequences.

How the West allowed Iran to unleash horror across the Middle East
Daniel Johnson/The Telegraph/October 29, 2023
A shadow looms over the pandemonium now engulfing the Holy Land. Behind the terrorist pogrom inflicted on Israel by Hamas lurks the most sinister of all the Middle Eastern despotisms: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Most security experts in Israel, Europe and the United States agree that the Iranians are primarily responsible for arming, funding and indoctrinating the pitiless Palestinian butchers who three weeks ago slaughtered, raped and abducted Israeli infants, mothers and grandmothers.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) know that Hamas could not have overpowered its troops, including tanks, guarding the Gaza perimeter without drone technology and other military expertise supplied by Iran and tested on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Israel, like Ukraine, is fighting on the front line of Western civilisation, in mortal danger from a new “axis of evil” — Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang.
This week it became clear that this axis now includes Hamas. In Moscow, two senior terrorists — including a member of its ruling politburo — met a confidante of Vladimir Putin, while Iran sent its deputy foreign minister to join this macabre cabal.
Israel described this cynical volte face by the Kremlin as “obscene”. But the realignment of Russian diplomacy to embrace Hamas is further proof of the growing role of Iran in Putin’s war of extermination against Ukraine.
How, then, could the West in general, and the United States in particular, have lowered our guard against Iran, the only state to be deeply and demonstrably involved in both these major conflicts?
And how did it come about that Israel — a tiny country roughly the size of Wales, though with three times the population — is paying the price for the failure of America and Europe to take the Iranian threat seriously?
Hamas puppet-masters
More than 1,400 Israeli citizens were murdered in the attack on October 7. It was carried out by Hamas, which is largely a subsidiary of Iran, although Qatar hosts some of its leaders. If the UK were to lose 10,000 people in a single terrorist attack, does anyone think that we would hesitate to hit back hard, not only at the terrorists but also at the puppet-masters pulling the strings?
Why, indeed, should Israel allow its response to Iranian aggression be restrained by an American President who is still vainly hoping to negotiate with a state that has consistently declared its genocidal intentions towards the Jewish people and its eternal enmity to the West?
At a high-level private briefing by a spokesman for the IDF this week, I asked about their assessment of the possibility that Iran might directly intervene in the conflict. He pointed to the fact that the US had moved two carrier battle groups into the region to act as a deterrent against Iran.
But the arrival of the mighty USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest warship, in the Eastern Mediterranean is primarily a defensive move. Since October 17 Iranian proxies across the region have fired missiles at US air bases in Iraq and Syria, wounding at least 20 American personnel.
On Thursday night the US launched retaliatory airstrikes in Syria against weapons and ammunition facilities of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Lloyd Austin, the US Defense Secretary, is clear that the IRGC is behind the attacks on US bases, designed to widen the war across the region.
Yet if the US, the most formidable military and naval power on earth, is so concerned about hostile Iranian intentions, why has Joe Biden been so eager to sign off prisoner swaps and to resurrect the moribund 2015 nuclear deal?
Even now, it is clear that the President is primarily concerned about negotiating the release of the estimated 220 hostages taken by Hamas, above all the ten US citizens still being held. Biden has made his support for Israel conditional on the indefinite postponement of the IDF ground offensive, at least until the safety of Americans is guaranteed.
Freed US nationals Emad Shargi (centre) greets a family member as he and four others, who were released in a prisoner swap deal between US and Iran
US national Emad Shargi (centre) is freed as part of a prisoner swap with Iran - Jonathan Ernst/AFP
So far, Netanyahu has gone along with Biden’s demand, but he knows that the Israeli war aim of destroying Hamas once and for all is non-negotiable. The contrast between the Israeli and the US approaches to the crisis is stark: Washington sees the conflict in transactional terms, but for Jerusalem it is existential.
Force and restrain
Hamas and their masters in Tehran know this, of course. They are now also making the impossible demand that Israel release more than 6,000 convicted terrorists. And all the time we must presume that they are going full steam ahead with developing nuclear capabilities, probably now with Putin’s help.
The Iranians are hoping to drive a diplomatic coach and horses between the Israeli war aim of victory and the US one of damage limitation, with the Europeans playing their accustomed role of useful idiots.
What the President, like most of his counterparts in the EU, has been disastrously slow to grasp is that enmity of the Iranian tyranny is implacable. The only language that will restrain Tehran is that of force — overwhelming force of the kind that only Washington (but not Brussels) can project.
To all intents and purposes, the Islamic Republic has been at war with the “Great Satan” (the US), the “Zionist entity” (Israel), Britain and our allies ever since its inception. Hundreds of billions in oil revenues and countless lives have been sacrificed since 1979 in the name of the Islamic Revolution.
What is actually satanic is the Islamist state ideology imposed on Iran by the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, and perpetuated by Ayatollah Khamenei, his equally bloodthirsty successor as Supreme Leader. When Khamenei leads chants of “Death to America”, as he often does, or uses the phrase “final solution” about Israel, he means the words literally.
This apocalyptic vision, saturated in anti-Semitism, not only mandates a permanent global war against Jews in order to hasten the final triumph of Islam, but encompasses the annihilation of the Judaeo-Christian West — no matter what the human cost. The Iranian regime and its proxy Hamas speak the language of Nazi-inspired genocide. The vocabulary of Hamas-influenced Palestinians in Gaza, who unthinkingly speak, not of “civilian casualties”, but of “martyrs”, derives from Iran. And now we are hearing this eliminationist lexicon on the streets of London, in the ritual chanting of “from the river to the sea”, implying that Israel must be wiped off the map.
Price of appeasement
The political theology of this conflict dictates that moral choice for Palestinians has nothing to do with actions, however sanguinary, but everything to do with identity. Under the dictatorship of relativism, who you are matters infinitely more than what you do.
Yet ever since the Obama administration this same diabolical regime has been appeased and courted by the US and the EU, handsomely rewarded for the release of hostages and brought in from the cold — all in the name of preventing the mullahs from getting their hands on nuclear weapons.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed in Vienna in 2015. The five permanent members of the UN, plus the European Union, agreed to lift many of the long-standing sanctions on Iran and unfreeze Iranian assets in return for restrictions on its nuclear programme.
In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the deal, but since 2020 the Biden administration has sought to patch up relations with Tehran. Last August, the US revealed that it had negotiated a new Iran deal, handing over $6bn in frozen Iranian oil assets in return for American hostages.
Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, insists that none of this cash has been spent yet, let alone diverted into the hands of Hamas from the humanitarian purposes agreed in the deal. Yet a Hamas spokesman boasted to the BBC that the terror attack on Israel had been financed by Iran.
Even if Blinken is correct, however, the handover gave a green light to the regime and the wider world: the West is open for business with Iran.
What makes the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran all the more cynical is the fact that since the 2015 deal the regime has stepped up both its internal repression and its menacing meddling abroad.
Most obviously, there has been a brutal response to the nationwide protests that erupted last September against the Islamic Republic’s state-sanctioned misogyny and its treatment of ethnic minorities.
These protests, which continued for an unprecedented 100 days in the face of a harsh crackdown, were prompted by the death of Mahsa Jaina Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, at the hands of the notorious “morality police”.
A woman holds a placard with a picture of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini during a protest against her death
Iran has stepped up its internal repression, including the brutal response to protests against Mahsa Amini’s death - Markus Schreiber/AP
As of last April, at least 19,200 protesters had been detained and 537 killed by police. Seven have so far been executed and up to 100 more are in danger of the death penalty. Meanwhile, the Iranian judiciary responded to the uprising by banning the removal of headscarves by women in public.
Shocking as this level of state violence undoubtedly is, it is hardly surprising. The Iranian president since 2021, Ebrahim Raisi, was a notorious prosecutor during the decade after the Islamic Revolution. As a member of the “death committee” in 1988, he was responsible for the execution of up to 30,000 political prisoners in the purge that accompanied the war against Iraq. Raisi established the Iranian practice of conducting mass public hangings from cranes.
It is certain that Raisi’s draconian domestic policies have the full support of the Supreme Leader and the clergy. The same is true of the regime’s sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorism across the Middle East and beyond.
Sponsorship of terrorism
One of the most destructive — hence for Tehran, successful — of these has been the civil war in Yemen. There the Houthi rebels, including thousands of child soldiers, have destabilised one of the poorest countries in the region.
A decade of war in its Yemeni back yard has forced Iran’s arch-rival Saudi Arabia onto the defensive. The human cost has been horrific, with a death toll of up to half a million, mostly caused by famine.
The Houthis are equipped with Iranian weaponry and during the present Gaza conflict, missiles from Yemen aimed at Israel have been intercepted.
Far more dangerous to Israel, however, is the threat from Hezbollah. This long-established terrorist organisation based in Lebanon has an arsenal of 150,000 missiles, enough to overwhelm even Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defensive shield.
Indeed, so serious is the threat from Hezbollah that Israel has taken the precaution of evacuating Kiryat Shmona, a border town of some 25,000 people. During the 2006 Lebanon War, the town was hit by more than a thousand Katyusha rockets.
Not far from Kiryat Shmona lies Kibbutz Amir, which has a special significance for me. In the summer of 1977 I worked there as a volunteer; it was my first introduction both to Israel and to the kibbutz as a way of life.
I thought of my time at Amir when I read about the massacres on October 7 at Kibbutzim Be’eri and Kfar Aza near the Gaza Strip. At these two village-sized communities, more than 230 men, women and children were murdered in a sadistic dance of death.
Kibbutzim are populated by idealistic families who support themselves by farming and light industries, eschewing materialism in order to realise the original Zionist vision, based on a utopian form of socialism.
The life of a kibbutznik wasn’t for me, but I came away with deep respect for the integrity of their humanitarian principles. Even those kibbutzniks who moved on and achieved global success, such as the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz, would often return to their kibbutz for peace and recuperation.
I recall how local Israeli Arabs, though not members of the kibbutz, would work there on terms of easy familiarity, equality and trust. This trust has now been undermined, perhaps fatally, by the revelation that Palestinian workers are believed to have given Hamas information about Kibbutz Be’eir that enabled the terrorists to carry out their pogrom. We do not yet know for sure whether such collaboration with Hamas was voluntary or under duress.
Both sides, but especially the Palestinians, will be the losers from this betrayal. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza work in Israel, not to mention two million Israeli Arabs who live there. Yet this destruction of mutual trust at the human level is all part of the Iranian master plan to undermine the Jewish state by isolating it from its neighbours.
Another aim of the Iranians in goading Hamas into the October 7 attack was to sabotage the Saudi-Israel rapprochement. The Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and several Gulf states, paved the way for a similar deal with Saudi Arabia.
Formal recognition of Israel by the Kingdom would have had huge symbolic significance: partly for obvious economic reasons, but also because Saudi monarchs see themselves as Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques and Protectors of the Two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.
Acceptance of the permanence of the Jewish state by the House of Saud would be tantamount to an official cessation of the jihad against Israel that has persisted since 1948. It is that permanent jihad that provides the raison d’être for terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah — but also for the Islamic Republic itself.
It is one of several major failures of Western diplomacy to have risked the holy grail of Middle Eastern diplomacy, a formal pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, for the chimera of a deal with Iran.
What makes the focus on appeasing Iran even more incomprehensible is the fact that throughout more than a decade of this humiliating process, Iran has consistently sought to subvert Western society from within and to pursue its opponents even in exile.
An example of this was the forced closure last February of the London-based Iranian dissident broadcaster Iran International TV. The Metropolitan Police advised the émigré TV station to leave its office in Chiswick, West London, because they could not guarantee the safety of staff.
Last March Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev was charged with terrorism offences after being arrested while allegedly making seven videos outside the broadcasters’ HQ. He pleaded not guilty. Iran International TV has now moved to the US.
Such threats are clearly increasing in frequency and gravity. In the past year or two, MI5 and counter-terrorism police have foiled at least 15 Iranian plots to kill or kidnap individuals in the UK.
A similar rise in state terrorism has been seen elsewhere in Europe and the US. Last January three alleged hit-men were charged with conspiracy to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian critic of the regime living in exile in Brooklyn.
The dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the radicalisation of Muslim communities across the Western world since Hamas launched its offensive on October 7 provide a perfect opportunity for the Iranians to step up terrorist activities here. The huge marches in London and other cities in support of the Palestinians are thinly disguised pro-Hamas demonstrations, with a strong Iranian presence.
In one well-publicised incident during a march through Whitehall earlier this month, an Iranian dissident encamped outside the Foreign Office was set upon by thugs, one of whom allegedly threatened to behead him. He was protected by police, but one “protester” was arrested and later charged with possession of a knife. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps is probably the world’s leading sponsor of terror, yet while it is officially proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the US, its leaders can still come and go legally in the UK. Despite criticism from both Tory and Labour MPs, the Government has dragged its feet on this issue. Meanwhile front organisations linked to the IRGC, such as the Islamic Students Association of Britain, operate with impunity.
Last August the Jewish Chronicle reported that a former Methodist chapel in Hammersmith had been used by IRGC commanders to spread Holocaust denial, anti-Semitic propaganda and calls for jihad in British universities.
The toxic ideas spread among thousands of students by at least eight IRGC commanders include the claim that “Jews created homosexuality”, along with apocalyptic visions of the “liberation” of Jerusalem, the removal of “all trace” of Israel and the destruction of the US Congress.
Victims and perpetrators
If anyone was in any doubt about the threat posed by Iranian propaganda in the current conflict, they need only study the language of Western aid agencies based in Gaza. In the past week alone, Action Aid has accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war”, while Oxfam also points the finger at Israel, claiming that “a staggering 2.2 million people are now in urgent need of food”.
The clear implication of such unsubstantiated accusations is that Israel is now guilty of genocide, whereas it is in fact Hamas that both preaches and practices genocide against Israel. Simultaneously, at the UN the Iranian Foreign Minister warned the US not to support “the genocide in Gaza”, or else “you won’t be spared from the fire of war”.
A narrative is being constructed before our eyes that is the inversion of the truth: Hamas-led Palestinians are the victims, not the perpetrators, of genocide. And the authors of this monstrous narrative are the Iranians.
Where do we go from here? Joe Biden and Antony Blinken need to be reminded that Israel is the aggrieved party, not the aggressor, in this situation. Just as after 9/11 the Americans did not rest until Osama bin Laden was killed and al-Qaeda dismantled, so the Israelis are now determined to destroy Hamas, as they are entitled to do under international law.
Having deployed US air power in the Middle East, Biden should use it to interdict Iranian airspace and to systematically degrade the IRGC. President Raisi and Supreme Leader Khamenei must be taught that they cannot instigate attacks against the US, let alone crimes against humanity in Israel, without paying a heavy price.
As for the inhabitants of Gaza: their only hope is to have the incubus of Hamas removed forever. Once that goal is accomplished, Israel should hand over the administration of Gaza to a joint commission, to include the Palestinian Authority and the Egyptians, brokered by the US and EU, but financed by Arab states. At home, in order to restore his credibility Biden must face down both pro-Palestinian Democrats and Republican isolationists. His best hope of preventing a Trump comeback, which would be fatal to American prestige, is to side unambiguously with Israel and Ukraine against Iran and Russia.
If Biden cannot bring himself to do this, he should make way for someone who can. Just as Ronald Reagan restored moral clarity to American politics after Jimmy Carter’s failure to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis, so today the United States is in dire need of moral and intellectual leadership.
Only one presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat, states: “I will always unapologetically stand with Israel.” That candidate is the former US Ambassador to the UN and Governor of South Carolina: Nikki Haley.
If anyone deserves to be a winner from this emergency, it is she.

Former Israel PM Ehud Barak: ‘The Palestinian Authority needs to take over Gaza after the war’
James Rothwell/The Telegraph/Sun, October 29, 2023
Ehud Barak is reminiscing about the day when a strange gaggle of British soldiers turned up at his childhood kibbutz in central Israel. It was 1945, Israel was just coming into existence and the territory was awash with allied troops celebrating the end of the Second World War – including Scots in kilts with bagpipes.
“A small military band came to our kibbutz; me and the kids were sitting listening to many pipes playing,” recalls Israel’s former Labour prime minister.
The sight was completely alien to Barak, at that time a bookish youngster who knew little beyond the intimate, communal life of his tiny kibbutz, Mishmar HaSharon. “It’s something I’d never seen before.”In the Israeli psyche, the kibbutz is more than just a home, especially for Ashkenazi Jews who before fleeing the Holocaust had worked in dreary office jobs in Europe. It offered an opportunity to reconnect with the soil and soul of their homeland after centuries of exile, in a new Israel. But nearly eight decades later, on October 7, dozens of Kibbutzim just like Barak’s own were attacked, with children and the elderly butchered as Hamas rampaged through southern Israel. It was the deadliest attack ever to hit the Jewish state, leaving 1,400 dead and plunging the stunned nation into a war which dwarfed each one that preceded it in scale and complexity.
“It shatters the very basic feeling of being safe in your home,” he says. “The kibbutz was even more safe within the community [of Israel], it’s different from the settlements along the border with the Gaza Strip – where they suffered for many years under mortar attacks and even real clashes with terrorists.”
While bandana-clad Hamas terrorists stormed through towns and villages on a Shabbat morning, Barak was 5,000 miles away in New York on a business trip. As the enormity of the attack sunk in, he booked the first plane ticket he could find back to Israel.
On the long, anxious flight home, horrific images came to mind of past atrocities that now mirrored what was happening in the one place in the world where Jews were meant to live in complete safety.
“It was the most severe blow to Israel since its establishment,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his office in Tel Aviv – ready to run for cover should any air raid sirens ring out during the interview. “You have to think of it in terms of Daesh or Al-Qaeda, or like the Nazis in World War Two in eastern Europe; these terrible pictures of the Einsatzgruppen [Nazi death squads] that slaughtered whole populations and especially Jews.”
Now 81, Barak is watching Israel’s biggest war from the sidelines, having served as special forces commander and the nation’s 10th prime minister from 1999 to 2001. He does so with a mixture of horror and contempt for the current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I don’t envy him, it’s not easy,” he says of Netanyahu’s current wartime leadership. “He’s started on a bad footing.” He stresses that Netanyahu was not solely responsible for the biggest security failure in Israel’s history, which caught the entire country off-guard. “All the heads of the armed forces, the head of intelligence, the secret service, our MI5, they all said we failed in our responsibility and failed to deliver.”
He notes with some scorn that Netanyahu has sought to heap the blame for the catastrophe anywhere but on himself. “Whoever knows him knows he will never do it himself. Don’t wait for him to admit responsibility for things,” he says.
“The real challenge [for Netanyahu] is that basically he lost any drop of trust in the people. Polls now show that 70 per cent of the population of Israel expects Netanyahu to resign. Half of them say immediately, others say after the war.”
Three weeks into the war, Israel is poised to launch a major ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, which risks opening a second front against Hezbollah, Iran’s lead proxy in southern Lebanon. In the meantime, the Israeli military has been bombarding the Gaza Strip with thousands of bombs which have killed more than 7,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza.
“Israel cannot afford [not to] set the bar high for what has to be done with Hamas. It’s not out of revenge, not because of boiling blood, but it will have grave consequences if we don’t find a way to, after such an event, to eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and hopefully remove it from power. “This unfortunately cannot be completed by the air or by diplomacy, or TV broadcasts; it demands, compels us, to deploy ground forces.”
The Hamas death toll figures are difficult to verify, but there is little doubt that the number of civilian deaths is already high. Barak insists that “we are committed to international law”. However, he goes on to warn that “when you act heavily even with the air force, gradually [international] support which at the start was universal will erode”. Utterly destroying Hamas in Gaza is the goal of Israel’s war, one that Barak strongly supports, but what happens afterwards to the Gaza Strip is far less clear. Barak, like an increasing number of ex-officials and leaders, has no desire for Israel to occupy or govern the Gaza Strip if it is completely cleared of Hamas forces, both political and military. He is instead hopeful that control of Gaza can be handed over to the Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah movement leader Mahmoud Abbas, once the war is over. Drawing on his own experience of dealing with Abbas, when he was defence minister of Israel in 2008, Barak is keen to argue that it can work. Fifteen years ago, he says, he considered destroying Hamas himself – “it would have been easier then than now, it would probably take six weeks then not three months”.
Hosni Mubarak, then president of Egypt, had warned Barak that he had no desire to rule Gaza himself if Hamas were removed. “He said, ‘no, you conquered it in ‘67, it’s now yours and I will never put my hands on it again’,” Barak recalls. He then turned to Abbas, who was still unhappy about the PA [Palestinian Authority] being kicked out of Gaza after losing elections and a subsequent civil war to Hamas.
“He basically said, ‘I cannot afford coming back to power in the Gaza Strip sitting on Israeli bayonets’. It was quite a logical answer but I didn’t like it.”
But today, Barak insists, the situation has changed, and the Palestinian Authority is in a somewhat better position to rule in Gaza, citing recent normalisation treaties between Arab countries and Israel which would lend regional support to Abbas.
“We have had another 15 years of stable peace with Egypt and Jordan – and until three weeks ago even the Saudi trilateral deal was in the air – so a multinational Arab force could be established with international backing to bring back the Palestinian Authority, and these forces could even stay with the PA for half a year to help them to establish rule,” he argues. “The Qataris and Saudis can finance it, major project developments in Gaza are needed in order to cement it under the control of the Palestinian Authority and give them a horizon of better days to come.”
That theory may, however, rankle some leaders in the West, who note with concern that the Palestinian Authority is deeply unpopular among Palestinians and is already struggling to maintain control of the occupied West Bank, where in the north other militant groups increasingly wield power.
Born in 1942, six years before the creation of Israel, Barak’s early life was spent absorbed in books and playing the piano – a far cry from his future roles as a deadly special forces operative, defence minister and prime minister.
The eldest of four sons, his mother was Polish and his father Lithuanian, both having left Europe for Israel where they founded their kibbutz after their own parents were murdered; Ehud’s maternal grandparents died in the Treblinka extermination camp.
The kibbutz itself, Mishmar HaSharon, was a close-knit, almost claustrophobic farming community in which “everything belonged to all, and nothing belongs to you”. It was also rugged, wild and lacking the basic comforts of running water and electricity, but this only added to the feeling that it was a place of remote calm amid the turmoil of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
That made the destruction of the kibbutzim on October 7 all the more terrible, Barak says: it struck a blow right at the heart of Zionism, “to the raison d’etre of Israel, which was to create the one place on earth where Jews can live safely”.
Neither of his parents thought that the young Ehud would rise high in the army, let alone become the commander of one of the most feared special forces units in the world: Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli counterpart of the British SAS. “I was a very introverted person reading books, not playing football – I played the piano, the only boy with girls playing the piano,” he recalls. “No one would predict I would become a kind of special forces guy. Probably my parents thought I would become a scientist.”
At the same time he had a deeply mischievous streak, one which may have endeared him to Sayeret Matkal’s own roguish recruiters. As a boy, he developed a fascination with locks, cutting them open like a surgeon to discover how they worked.
Before long, the future prime minister of Israel was springing open locks all over his kibbutz and helping himself to watermelons, chocolate and anything else that took his fancy. He was, he fondly remembers, the “king” of the kibbutz among the other children for that reason. But then he got caught, punished by community elders, and not long after that he joined the Israel Defense Forces [IDF].
Barak’s antics in the army, and later in the special forces, swiftly passed into Israeli legend. He once disguised himself as a woman, during a 1973 mission in Beirut, to kill members of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
He also played a key role in the Entebbe operation, the daring mission to free hostages from an Air France jet hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, as well as a similar rescue operation on Sabena Flight 571. Barak acknowledges that this current hostage crisis is made “more delicate” by the high number of civilians involved, including foreigners. “It’s a sensitive issue; it’s very high on our list of priorities but it sits together with the imperative to paralyse the military capabilities of Hamas.”
Under his command in Sayeret Matkal at that time was a young Netanyahu, who later became both a bitter political rival and uneasy coalition partner. And in the early 1990s Barak switched to politics, beating Netanyahu in the 1999 general election by a wide margin as the head of the Left-wing Labour party.
Today he has strong views on the subject of Netanyahu’s leadership record and failings as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, as he feels that his successor’s decision to dismiss the Arab world’s concern for the Palestinians is a major factor in this current crisis. “This whole event seems to deny Netanyahu’s claim of being able to make peace with the Arab world and still totally ignore the Palestinian issue,” Barak says. “I think all the partners for peace – Egypt, Jordan, the PA, even the Saudis, or the members of the Abraham Accords – if you need them the day after [the war] they need to believe that Israel will take into account some of the problems that w
He accuses Netanyahu of single-mindedly trashing the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, and in turn strengthening Hamas, throughout his career for short term political gain. “Netanyahu’s government now wants a policy that can be summed up in one sentence: Hamas is an asset and the PA is a liability rather than the opposite. It’s part of a wider vision with an objective of one state rather than two states,” he says.
This tactic, Barak feels, allowed Netanyahu to bat away any Western pressure for concrete peace talks: the PA could be dismissed as too weak, while Hamas was beyond the pale.
He criticises Netanyahu’s bid to reform the Israeli judiciary, something Barak prefers to describe as a “judicial coup d’état” and “castration” of the supreme court which is “tearing apart our society”.
Before the war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis had launched unprecedented daily protests against the reforms, while many reservists – including elite troops – had refused to turn up for duty as a sign of disgust at Netanyahu.
“I predicted in advance that Netanyahu would have to try at a certain point to destroy the democratic institutions of Israel, because these would block them [his allies] from implementing their vision of one state,” he says. “And one state inevitably means it will turn into a... non-democratic state.”
A two-state solution is “for sure” the only way forward, a goal of which Israel should “never lose sight,” Barak insists. He expresses regret that his own attempt at peace with Yasser Arafat, at the Camp David summit, failed – but places the blame squarely on Arafat, whom he suspected of not being serious about the negotiations.
We end on the gloomy topic of a potential breakout of the Third World War, taking into account the risk of Iran, the US and potentially even Russia getting involved in the conflict once Israel’s ground invasion begins.
Iran, which is rapidly nearing completion of a nuclear weapons programme, was of perennial concern to Israeli leaders long before this latest war began.
But here, Israel’s former leader also displays some guarded optimism. While Iran cannot be stopped from becoming a nuclear power, he says, he seriously doubts that global or nuclear conflict is on its agenda.
“I cannot see a way to block them from turning into a nuclear power when they choose to do it. I think the better way is to deal with it as a strategic challenge, as a part of the wider context of Russia, the Ukraine, and to contain it, to slow it down,” he says. “I don’t see an immediate full scale war with Iran; it doesn’t serve them. They’d have to risk a full war against a coalition which includes the United States, and that might be devastating for this regime.”
“This whole nuclear plan is not about dropping a bomb; they [the Iranian regime] are extremists but not crazy, they are rational people,” he adds. “They understand. It’s like North Korea, it would never plan to drop a bomb on South Korea, or Japan, because they understand that they might be blown back to the Stone Age – it’s to protect the longevity of this dynasty.”

Palestinian suffering since Hamas attack extends beyond Gaza
Daoud Kuttab/Arab News/October 29/2023
While the vast majority of worldwide attention has been focused on the Israeli war on Gaza, the situation in the West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem, as well as in Israel itself, has not been easy for Palestinians. The distance between Jerusalem and the Beit Hanoun (Erez) Crossing into Gaza is relatively short at 67 km and, by car, the journey does not take more than an hour. But the events since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation have brought the people of Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip even closer in terms of Palestinian feelings of solidarity and unity.
Having declared war against Hamas several weeks ago, Israel has also been cracking down on Palestinians in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, the policy of war has removed any restrictions on Israeli soldiers. More than 90 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, mainly in clashes with Israeli troops, whose rules of engagement have been even further loosened.
The Israeli military has carried out a string of raids against Palestinians in the West Bank — especially those in the northern cities of Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarem. This intensifying Israeli policy was also demonstrated at a widely broadcast event, in which Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that his ministry would procure 10,000 rifles for Jewish civilian security teams in the West Bank.
At the same time, Palestinians’ emotional and national rapprochement has had a major and difficult impact on the lives and work of Jerusalemites. The link between Gaza and Al-Aqsa has provided an opening for the occupier, and many Israelis, to brutalize and bully in an attempt to regain superiority following the Oct. 7 attack.
In particular, Jerusalemites who have been suffering since the signing of the Oslo Accords have been feeling like political orphans for some time. The Al-Aqsa tsunami made the bad situation in the city even more difficult on all fronts.
Having declared war against Hamas several weeks ago, Israel has also been cracking down on Palestinians in the West Bank.
The events in Gaza reveal the depth of Israel’s racism and arrogance and have brought back feelings of anger and disgust, which will increase cases of repression and these may turn into an explosion sooner or later. The occupier will say that he was surprised by the causes of the explosion, even though the main reason was the unnatural and unsustainable state of the occupation, which has no radical cure for freedom and independence.
Many Palestinian workers have refrained from going to work and some have received threats that they will be fired if their absence continues, with employers seeming not to care about their workers’ access difficulties or the restrictions they face. Some workers complained that their employers insisted on searching the contents of their private phones to confirm the absence of any signs of solidarity with their people. With the continuation of the aggression on Gaza and the absence of any form of ceasefire, many Jerusalemite workers have become confused about their situation as, due to their living conditions, many of them have been forced to go to work, even if they endure longer journeys to reach their workplace. Many of them have erased the contents of their phones so that they would not be fired.
The declaration of war has allowed Israel to take much harsher measures against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The new policy shifts have included much tighter internal controls through checkpoints within the West Bank, as well as more stringent checks and disruptions for Palestinians in the West Bank. This includes prolonged periods where the King Hussein Bridge, which connects the West Bank with Jordan, has been closed or limited in terms of the number of people allowed to travel in either direction. Travel permits, including for workers, have been canceled for hundreds of Palestinians, thus affecting not only workers and businesses, but also individuals seeking medical treatment both in Jerusalem and in Israel.
Palestinians living just beyond the wall have found themselves unable to travel to other parts of Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Palestinians living just beyond the wall have found themselves unable to travel, especially in their cars, to other parts of Jerusalem, with Israel applying a draconian regulation restricting Palestinians to the neighborhoods in which they are registered according to their Israeli-issued identification cards.
While travel by car has been restricted for anyone, including Jerusalemites, living beyond the wall, some have been able to bypass these restrictions by using dual-used checkpoints, such as the Hizma checkpoint in the north and the tunnel checkpoint near Bethlehem. Young Palestinians in and around Jerusalem’s Old City say they have been stopped by Israeli soldiers, with some confiscating their cellphones to determine if they contain any material that can be considered supportive of the Palestinian struggle in general and Hamas in particular. In Israel proper, similar bullying was reported by university students and employees, including at least one hospital worker, with some saying they were suspended or lost their jobs because they expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Adalah, a Haifa-based nongovernmental organization, said that at least 40 Palestinian citizens of Israel had been suspended from university in recent weeks.
The tense situation facing Palestinians, in Israel and the West Bank as well as Gaza, has caused a deep schism in the region that will have its effects for years to come. The distance between Gaza and Jerusalem has become both closer and further due to the events of Oct. 7.
• Daoud Kuttab is a former professor at Princeton University and the founder and former director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al-Quds University in Ramallah.
X: @daoudkuttab