Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 30-31.2024
Video & Text/After the attack on the Al-Tanaf Base, President Biden confronts a brazen challenge from Iran: either surrender and flatter the Mullahs or take punitive measures to bring down their terrorist and jihadist regime/Elias Bejjani/
Israel troops to 'go into action' soon at Lebanon border, Gallant says
Berri says held 'beneficial and promising' talks with Quintet envoys
Report: Johnson urges 5-nation group against unilateral moves
Quintet Ambassadors Coordinate on Lebanese Presidential Election
Two Hezbollah fighters killed in Israeli strikes on Syria
Israel-Hezbollah border clashes: Latest developments
Hezbollah denies report, says state in charge of border talks with Israel
Palestinians in Beirut protest UNRWA fund suspension
Kataeb Party condemns Hezbollah's grip on southern Lebanon, urges sovereign forces to unite
Lebanon's Central Council is set to convene in the next two days
Frangieh meets Bangladeshi ambassador
Jumblatt meets new US Ambassador
Lebanese Foreign Ministry Condemns Attack on "American Individuals" on the Jordanian Border: Violation of Jordan's Security and Sovereignty
"Oh, Shame on You, Najah!"/Emad Moussa/Nidaa Al-Watan
Hezbollah: Dilemma of Tough Choices/As'ad Beshara / Nidaa Al-Watan

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published  on January 30-31.2024
'I hold them responsible': Biden says he's made a decision on response to attack in Jordan
Iran Urges Diplomacy as US Weighs Response to Deadly Attack
Iraq's Kataib Hezbollah suspends attacks on US forces
Antony Blinken Says Conditions In The Middle East Most Dangerous Since 1973 War
Three US soldiers killed in Jordan attack named
Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say
UK will consider recognising Palestinian state to help end conflict – Cameron
Gaza war and truce talks: Latest developments
Israeli forces dressed as women and medics kill 3 Palestinians in West Bank hospital
Where do the parties stand on efforts to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages?
‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza
Aid groups slam suspension of funding for UN agency in Gaza
As Europe's armies brace for war, allies call on Canada and others to catch up
Ukraine's strikes on targets inside Russia hurt Putin's efforts to show the war isn't hitting home
Russia to Japan: Drop territorial claim if you want a peace treaty

Titles For The Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources  on January 30-31.2024
And Why Would Iran Change Its Behavior?/Nadim Koteich/Asharq Al-Awsat
The drone wars of Iran’s militias are becoming more deadly/Seth J. Frantzman/ The Jerusalem Post
Will Biden Dare to Recognize a Palestinian State/Sam Menassa/Asharq Al-Awsat
Where Is ‘America 2024…’ and Where Is it Going?/Eyad Abu Shakra/Asharq Al-Awsat/January
A Hundred Days after Gaza's October 7 (Part 3 of 4)/Culpable Ignorance and the Devil's Spreadsheet/Gwythian Prins/ Gatestone Institute
US should rethink its Middle East strategy/Osama Al-Sharif/Arab News

Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published  on January 30-31.2024
Video & Text/After the attack on the Al-Tanaf Base, President Biden confronts a brazen challenge from Iran: either surrender and flatter the Mullahs or take punitive measures to bring down their terrorist and jihadist regime.
Elias Bejjani/January 29, 2024
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/126497/126497/
As one reaps the whirlwind by sowing the wind, those who engage in flattery, surrender, and submission to the evil jihadist schemes of the Iranian terrorist, fundamentalist, and sectarian regime, a reality evident in both the current Biden administration and the preceding Obama administration, are bound to face inevitable consequences. These consequences include humiliation, disappointment, defeat, human losses, the tarnishing of the USA's esteemed reputation, the propagation of a culture of death, terrorism, hatred, rejection of others, wars, and deadly delusions of Iranian expansionism.
This grim reality is reflected in the actions of both Democratic Presidents Biden and Obama in dealing with the criminal, repressive, and expansionist Iranian Mullahs. Throughout their tenures, strategic miscalculations, mischievous decisions, and fatal stances unfolded:
1-The Iranian Mullahs were allowed to challenge the United States directly, leading to attacks on U.S. soldiers and bases in the Middle East.
2-Billions of dollars were funneled to the Mullahs, sanctions were lifted, and their violations were overlooked.
3-The Mullahs were given free rein to spread chaos in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza.
4-They occupied Iraq, controlled its government, and turned a blind eye to over 45 fundamentalist Shia jihadist terrorist organizations operating under the name of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which attacked U.S. bases without facing consequences.
5-In Syria, the Mullahs were allowed to sow corruption, chaos, displacement, ethnic and sectarian cleansing, and support criminal militias like Hezbollah.
6-Complete freedom was granted to finance the terrorist and jihadist Hamas movement, leading to an invasion of Israel and unprecedented humanitarian disasters for the Palestinians.
7-The Yemeni Houthis were removed from terrorism lists, allowing Iran to control them and turn them into a terrorist threat.
8-Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, was allowed to occupy Lebanon, dismantle its state, control its borders, and terrorize its people.
In summary, the Obama and Biden administrations endorsed the crimes, terrorism, fundamentalism, barbarism, expansionism schemes, and jihadism of the Iranian regime. They prevented international justice from holding Iran accountable for its actions, aiding in the expansion of Iranian influence to the point of targeting the U.S. Al-Tanaf base, resulting in the death and injury of American soldiers and civilians.
Today, America faces a choice: either strike the head of the Iranian snake within Iran itself and eliminate this cancerous jihadist and terrorist threat, or allow the Mullahs the freedom to exert military and sectarian control over the entire Middle East, transforming into a nuclear state that threatens not only the region but also global peace, stability, and security.
**The writer, Elias Bejjani, is a Lebanese expatriate activist.
Writer's email address: Phoenicia@hotmail.com
Link to the writer's website: http://www.eliasbejjaninews.com

Israel troops to 'go into action' soon at Lebanon border, Gallant says
Agence France Presse/January 30, 2024
Israeli troops will "very soon go into action" near the country's northern border with Lebanon, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, as tensions surge amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Gallant told troops near the border with the besieged Gaza Strip that others were being deployed to Israel's north. "They will very soon go into action... so the forces in the north are reinforced," Gallant said. "The forces close to you... are leaving the field and moving towards the north, and preparing for what comes next," he said. He added that reservists would be gradually released "to prepare and come ready" for future operations. Since the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7, the Lebanese-Israeli border has seen near-daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally. Hezbollah claimed responsibility Monday for at least 12 attacks on Israeli army positions near the border, using Iranian-made Falaq-1 and Burkan missiles. Later on Monday the Israeli army said it carried out air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. "The targets included Hezbollah's infrastructure and an observation post located in the southern Lebanese areas of Markaba, Taybeh, and Maroun al-Ras," the army said in a statement. The army also confirmed that several projectiles had been launched from Lebanon and said forces "responded by targeting the launch sites and other locations in Lebanon". Israel's army chief Herzi Halevi said earlier this month that the likelihood of war on the northern border has become "much higher". "I don't know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past," Halevi said. More than 200 people, most of them Hezbollah members, have been killed in south Lebanon by Israeli fire since October 7, according to an AFP tally. On the Israeli side of the border, nine soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to Israeli officials. Gallant said Monday that Gaza militants were running out of supplies and ammunition, but that the war against Hamas "will take months".

Berri says held 'beneficial and promising' talks with Quintet envoys
Naharnet/January 30, 2024
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri on Tuesday held a meeting in Ain el-Tineh with the ambassadors of the member states of the five-nation group for Lebanon, which comprises the U.S., France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. The one-hour meeting tackled “the latest developments, especially the presidential juncture,” the National News Agency said. “The stance was unified and the meeting was beneficial and promising,” Berri for his part said after the meeting. The ambassadors will also meet with a number of political forces in the coming hours. Informed sources told the PSP’s al-Anbaa news portal in remarks published Tuesday that the ambassadors’ new endeavor, which coincides with the Qatari envoy’s behind-the-scene meetings in Beirut, represents a new exploratory attempt aimed at seeking exits for the presidential crisis. “It will involve discussions and consultations on means to achieve a presidential breakthrough more than it will be a new initiative,” the sources said. “No candidates will be proposed during this period but there will rather be an exploration of opinions and reconciliation of viewpoints, based on the latest ambassadors’ meeting at the residence of Saudi Ambassador Walid Bukhari in Yarze,” the sources added. “The important proposal is related to the president election’s mechanism, in an attempt to benefit from the atmosphere that engulfed the session that extended the army chief’s term,” the sources went on to say.

Report: Johnson urges 5-nation group against unilateral moves
Naharnet/January 30, 2024
U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Lisa Johnson has stressed that no member state of the five-nation group for Lebanon should carry out any initiative or move without prior coordination with the other members of the group, in an apparent reference to Qatar, informed sources said. Johnson voiced her remarks during the latest meeting of the group’s ambassadors that was held at the residence of the Saudi envoy in Yarze, the sources told al-Joumhouria newspaper in remarks published Monday. “She suggested that no party claim to represent the five-nation group or speak on its behalf, in reference to the French side, whose envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian will visit Lebanon following the meeting of the five-nation group that is expected to be held in Riyadh,” the sources added.

Quintet Ambassadors Coordinate on Lebanese Presidential Election
LBCI/January 30, 2024
After discussing the Lebanese presidential dossier bilaterally among themselves and holding a general meeting last weekend at the residence of the Saudi ambassador to outline a unified vision regarding the Lebanese presidential elections, the ambassadors of the Quintet Committee begin their tour as a group from Ain el-Tineh. This is due to the pivotal role of the Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, in this dossier, especially regarding the call for presidential election sessions and preventing the violation of the legal quorum. The ambassadors, whose sources said they share the same opinion about the seriousness of the situation and the necessity of having a president in Baabda to cope with the situation, emphasize the need to completely separate the presidential file from the Gaza war and the events in the region. In brief words, several ambassadors expressed unity of stance. Berri described the meeting as promising and constructive, while Ain el-Tineh sources confirmed to LBCI that the position was unified in the meeting, and the atmosphere was positive. The meeting did not address the names of the presidential candidates, and the discussion was limited to the presidential matter only, without touching on the implementation of Resolution 1701 or the situation in the south, either directly or indirectly. According to the available data, the ambassadors, who indicated that their countries have no concern about any nominations for candidates but that it is the sole responsibility of the Lebanese people, will submit a comprehensive report to their foreign ministries.  They may hold a higher-level meeting of those tasked with examining the presidential file, with French envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian returning to Beirut for the fifth time before February 10 after obtaining a complete picture.

Two Hezbollah fighters killed in Israeli strikes on Syria
Agence France Presse/January 30, 2024
Israeli strikes in Syria on Monday killed eight people, including pro-Iran fighters, a war monitor said, in the latest such attack in the country against groups loyal to Tehran. "Three Israeli missiles targeted a base belonging to Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the Sayyida Zeinab district" south of Damascus, "killing at least eight people," Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP. Two of those killed were Syrian, including a security escort to an Iranian officer, as were two Hezbollah fighters, he said, without specifying if any civilians were killed.
The Syrian defense ministry also reported an "air attack" that it blamed on Israel, saying that strikes around 1:00 pm (1000 GMT) targeted multiple locations south of Damascus. It said in a statement on social media that "a number of Iranian advisers" were killed, before later revising it to remove any mention of the Iranian advisers. Iran's Tasnim news agency, meanwhile, reported that "the Zionist regime (Israel) targeted an Iranian advisory centre in the Sayyida Zeinab area". However, Hossein Akbari, Iran's ambassador to Syria, denied in a social media post that an advisory centre had been struck or that "any Iranian citizens or advisers (were) martyred" in the attack. Hezbollah announced late Monday that two of its fighters had died "on the road to Jerusalem", its phrase for members killed by Israeli strikes, without further details. A previous air strike in Sayyida Zeinab in late December, also blamed on Israel, killed a senior Iranian general. Quds Force commander Razi Moussavi was the highest-ranking Iranian general to be killed outside the country since a January 2020 U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed the elite force's chief Qasem Soleimani. And on January 20, a strike on Damascus's Mazzeh neighborhood targeting the Revolutionary Guards' Syria spy chief killed 13 people, the Observatory had said. The Guards confirmed five members were killed in that attack, which they blamed on regional arch-foe Israel. During more than a decade of civil war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes in the country, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces as well as Syrian army positions. But such attacks have intensified since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7. Israel rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs President Bashar al-Assad's government, to expand its presence there. Since 2011, Syria has endured a bloody conflict that has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions. Iran says it only deploys military advisers in Syria at the invitation of Damascus.

Israel-Hezbollah border clashes: Latest developments
Agence France Presse/January 30, 2024
Hezbollah targeted Tuesday a group of soldiers in the Hadb Yarin post as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israeli troops will "very soon go into action" near the country's northern border with Lebanon.Hezbollah also said it has targeted surveillance equipment near the border village al-Wazzani. The group had claimed responsibility Monday for at least 12 attacks on Israeli army positions near the border, using Iranian-made Falaq-1 and Burkan missiles while the Israeli army said it carried out air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. On Tuesday, Israeli artillery and warplanes bombed Aita al-Shaab, and the outskirts of Mays al-Jabal, al-Naqoura, Dhaira, Yarin, al-Jebbayn and Tayr Harfa. Since the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel on October 7, the Lebanese-Israeli border has seen near-daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah.
More than 200 people, most of them Hezbollah members, have been killed in south Lebanon by Israeli fire since October 7, according to an AFP tally. On the Israeli side of the border, nine soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to Israeli officials.

Hezbollah denies report, says state in charge of border talks with Israel
Naharnet /January 30, 2024
Hezbollah on Tuesday denied a media report about future border talks with Israel, stressing that such negotiations are the responsibility of the Lebanese state. “The Nidaa al-Watan newspaper today published a fabricated and insulting report about what it called the file of indirect negotiations over the land border between Lebanon and occupied Palestine,” Hezbollah said in a statement. “Indirect negotiations are exclusively in the hands of the Lebanese state and accordingly what was mentioned in the aforementioned report is totally baseless,” Hezbollah added. The newspaper had quoted diplomatic sources as saying that “the U.S. has been informed via the communication channels with Beirut that Hezbollah … has ended its authorization for Speaker Nabih Berri and caretaker PM Najib Mikati to negotiate over the border file on behalf of Hezbollah.”

Palestinians in Beirut protest UNRWA fund suspension
Associated Press/January 30, 2024
Dozens of Palestinians gathered Tuesday in front of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters in Beirut after several countries decided to suspend funding for the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency. A number of key donors -- including the United States, Germany and Japan -- had announced they are suspending funding to the agency over Israel's accusations that some of its staff were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack. The protesters held posters that show the Israeli bombardment on Gaza and demanded that countries resume funding of the agency. "Stopping funding for UNRWA threatens the future of Palestinian refugees," some posters read, while an elderly woman held a poster saying "UNRWA, my right until I return." They also demanded that staff who were fired in the Gaza Strip over allegations that they took part in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel be returned to their jobs. Aid groups condemned Tuesday the decision to suspend funding UNRWA, pointing to a "worsening humanitarian catastrophe" and "looming famine" in Gaza. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East was established to provide aid to the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding the country's creation. The Palestinians say the refugees and their descendants, who now number nearly 6 million across the Middle East, have the right to return to their homes. Israel has refused, because if the right of return were to be fully implemented it would result in a Palestinian majority inside its borders. The fate of the refugees and their descendants was among the thorniest issues in the peace process, which ground to a halt in 2009. UNRWA operates schools, health clinics, infrastructure projects and aid programs in refugee camps that now resemble dense urban neighborhoods in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. It has 13,000 employees in Gaza alone, the vast majority of them Palestinians. In Gaza, where some 85% of territory's 2.3 million people have fled their homes, over 1 million are sheltering in UNRWA schools and other facilities. Israel has long railed against the agency, accusing it of tolerating or even collaborating with Hamas and of perpetuating the 75-year-old Palestinian refugee crisis. The Israeli government has accused Hamas and other militant groups of siphoning off aid and using U.N. facilities for military purposes.
UNRWA denies those allegations and says it took swift action against the employees accused of taking part in the attack. The United States and eight other Western nations that together provided more than half of UNRWA's budget in 2022 nevertheless suspended their funding to the agency. The United States, which was the first country to suspend funding, is the biggest donor to UNRWA, providing it with $340 million in 2022. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland have also suspended aid. The nine countries together provided nearly 60% of UNRWA's budget in 2022. "Our humanitarian operation, on which 2 million people depend as a lifeline in Gaza, is collapsing," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini Lazzarini posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. He expressed shock that countries would suspend aid "based on alleged behavior of a few individuals and as the war continues, needs are deepening & famine looms."

Kataeb Party condemns Hezbollah's grip on southern Lebanon, urges sovereign forces to unite
LBCI/January 30, 2024
After reviewing the developments in Lebanon and the region, the political bureau of the Kataeb Party held its meeting chaired by the party's leader, MP Samy Gemayel.
It pointed out that "Hezbollah persists in solidifying its grip on the south and its people, using them as human shields and bargaining chips to implement the Iranian plan seeking to gain a decisive role in the region, from Lebanon to Syria, Iraq, and Yemen."
"For this reason, it has ignited the southern front despite Arab and Western warnings against continuing on this deadly path," it added. The political bureau called on the Quintet Committee, which seeks to protect Lebanon from war, to do its utmost to separate the presidential track from the regional negotiations so that efforts bear fruit in a fully qualified state. This state should have a president authorized solely to conduct negotiations, sign agreements, and speak on behalf of the Lebanese people. The political bureau held those insisting on "seizing" the presidential file and refusing to meet the opposition halfway fully responsible. It urged selecting a universally acceptable president capable of leading this stage. The party called on "sovereign forces, including parties, individuals, and institutions, to unite and collaborate to confront the status quo, regain the state and institutions, no matter how high the sacrifices." The political bureau rejected defamatory attacks on Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Mar Bechara Boutros al-Rahi and anyone raising their voice "against the domination over Lebanon and the Lebanese, especially the leader of the Kataeb Party." The political bureau considered that "the approved budget is just another proof of the state's material and visionary bankruptcy. It constitutes a new 'tax burden' on the shoulders of the Lebanese. In addition to being illegal, it came devoid of any reformative or strategic utility, aiming only to reach out for the citizen's livelihood to cover the gaps caused by a failed financial policy."

Lebanon's Central Council is set to convene in the next two days
LBCI/January 30, 2024
The Central Council is set to convene in the next two days to deliberate on the future of Circular 151, contemplating discontinuing the fixed exchange rate of LBP 15,000 per US dollar. Sources confirm to "Nidaa Al-Watan" newspaper that the budget was approved when the state revenues, obtained in dollars (from the port and airport, and such), were converted at this rate to be included as revenues in Lebanese lira, with increases approved at 60 times the original value in various budget items. Sources emphasized that the current market rate would apply to bank transactions and withdrawals, as the acting Banque du Liban (BDL) governor refuses to continue forced deductions from deposits (haircuts). They stated, "The ball is back in the government and parliament's court because banks will assert their stance, refusing to adopt the market rate for withdrawals and budgets."
The sources added, "Hence, there is an urgent need to pass legislation to regulate this, or else we will witness intense confrontations between depositors and banks, with the government and parliament bearing responsibility." The insiders explained to "Nidaa Al-Watan" that the DL would not issue a specific directive on the exchange rate. Still, it would consider a proposal to allow depositors to withdraw $150. They confirmed a divergence of opinions within the Central Council on this matter, with one faction encouraging the proposal while another deems the amount insufficient. The latter suggests a more prudent approach, maintaining the status quo on haircuts pending the enactment of legal measures to restructure banks and restore balance to the financial system.

Frangieh meets Bangladeshi ambassador
LBCI/January 30, 2024
Marada Movement leader Sleiman Frangieh received on Tuesday Bangladeshi Ambassador to Lebanon, Javed Tanveer Khan, at his residence in Bnachi. Discussions were held regarding the current developments on both the Lebanese and regional fronts.

Jumblatt meets new US Ambassador
NNA/January 30, 2024
Former Progressive Socialist Party leader, Walid Jumblatt, on Tuesday welcomed at his Clemenceau residence, United States Ambassador to Lebanon, Lisa Johnson.
Also present had been the head of the Progressive Socialist Party, MP Taymour Jumblatt, and MP Wael Abou Faour. Discussions during the meeting touched on the latest political developments.

Lebanese Foreign Ministry Condemns Attack on "American Individuals" on the Jordanian Border: Violation of Jordan's Security and Sovereignty
NNA/ِJanuary 30, 2024
(LCCC Translation)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in a statement, expressed its condemnation and regret for the recent attack on "American individuals present on the Jordanian border," resulting in the loss of several individuals and injuries. It also considers this incident a violation of the security and sovereignty of the brotherly Jordan, leading to dangerous escalation and tension in the region due to the continued Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip. The Ministry also expressed its solidarity with the brotherly Jordan and its support for the measures taken by the Jordanian authorities to preserve its security and stability.
The Ministry called on all influential parties to intensify efforts to achieve security and stability in the region and to halt the escalation and tension through an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories, as a gateway to a political solution based on the establishment of the Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, in accordance with relevant United Nations resolutions.

"Oh, Shame on You, Najah!"
Emad Moussa/Nidaa Al-Watan/ January 31, 2024
(LCCC Translation)
We've reached a time when former deputy Najah Wakim addresses the "X" readers to criticize the Maronite Patriarch for his remarks on illusory victories. Here's what the young man from Nasiriya wrote:
"Patriarch Rai said that the victories of the resistance are illusory. Honestly, if they were illusory, would you be upset? Certainly not. Shame on you, the one with the condescending attitude towards the achievements, sacrifices, and the blood of its fighters. Shame on you."
First: Let the malicious eighty-year-old deputy focus his hatred-filled glasses on his own shortcomings and put out his cigarette, which obscures his view of the lines, and reread what provoked his "sectarian" feelings in Patriarch Rai's sermon. The Patriarch said, "Not abandoning national and Arab issues, but based on my honesty with myself - I refuse to be a hostage, and my family members as well, human shields and a sacrificial lamb for failed Lebanese policies and the culture of death that has only brought illusory victories and humiliating defeats to our country. We hear them, and our hearts bleed."
This is what the Patriarch said, and the words are attributed to people from the border villages who visited him and conveyed their concerns and fears.
Second: Not all residents of the border villages support the choices of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon that go beyond international and local legitimacy. They do not support a war that occupies the enemy with our blood, and they do not share the professor's Najah's whims.
Third: The president of the People's Movement, lacking popular representation, should unleash his tweets on the "IX" platform and promote, as a secular figure, the recent divine victories. He should join as a "movement" supporting the Baathist cubs and the forces of dawn, aligning with "the party," instead of indulging in Don Quixote-style heroics.
Fourth: It is truly regrettable that brother Najah resorts, the youngest deputy of the 1972 council, to pettiness and a market language, fully engaging his political consciousness in a "dirty" defamation war waged by the electronic loyalists on anyone opposing the war, from the head of the Maronite Church and downwards.
Fifth: Assuming that the Maronite Patriarch literally adopted what was conveyed to him by his flock rejecting the "complements" of the Flood of Al-Aqsa, do we blame him for not sharing the fate of those adventurers who are risking what remains of the country, their "readings," "victories," and their Tehran-centric vision?
Sixth: As if the former fiery deputy from Beirut, the moody, neurotic, and half-lover of the Earth and three-quarters of the Arab world, is more enthusiastic and desiring to liberate Jerusalem than those with sanctity. Man, just as the road to Jerusalem did not pass through Jounieh, it will not pass by exposing the southerners to death or displacement!
Shame on you, brother Najah, for your rapid decline. Indeed, shame on you!

Hezbollah: Dilemma of Tough Choices
As'ad Beshara / Nidaa Al-Watan / January 31, 2024
(LCCC Translation)
In a lengthy session, a knowledgeable ambassador revealed Israeli plans ready to strike Hezbollah if the U.S. initiative fails to convince the party to comply with Resolution 1701 and move away from the Blue Line. The ambassador did not specify a timeframe for the confrontation but shared insights into the information his government received about the nature of the threat to Israel. Israel is expected to act without red lines to achieve the goal of relocating its settlers to northern settlements after the "Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa" forced their evacuation.
These details reflect the gravity of the current situation in the south. The U.S. initiative has not succeeded in dismantling the explosive situation due to Hezbollah's insistence on linking the ceasefire to the end of the war in Gaza. This seems difficult unless a ceasefire is implemented, which could last for weeks, followed by a resumption of war in other forms, including security measures. Faced with this reality, what will be Hezbollah's position, backed by Iran? Will it withdraw seven kilometers from the Blue Line? What are the potential consequences of this withdrawal on its long-term project? Can Hezbollah bear the consequences if it refuses to withdraw?
It is clear that Hezbollah is in a dilemma of tough choices. It has a window that, if opened, will lead to only partial loss – withdrawal that could be accompanied by American concessions regarding demarcation. In case of refusal, Hezbollah can anticipate a scenario well-known to it, understood by Iran, which has been determined since October 7 to maintain its strong position without exposing itself to what Hamas faced in Gaza. Iran does not want to lose its strong position but appears incapable of watching Hamas fight alone. The limited support war, which did not deter Israel, seemed to allow Tehran to save face in the short term. However, Israel has given a withdrawal deadline, refusing to negotiate any file before completing the withdrawal, while Hezbollah offers the Americans a postponed solution: readiness to discuss all issues after a Gaza ceasefire.
After Iran targeted the U.S. site on the Jordanian-Syrian border, Israel gained a new card in the escalation path. The Biden administration, pressured by domestic demands for a response in Iranian territory, finds itself in a dilemma. Israel is preparing in the south, and as the knowledgeable ambassador revealed, Israel will not settle for airstrikes in Lebanon; it is preparing to establish a buffer zone, even through a ground invasion, a final decision with no turning back.

Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published  on January 30-31.2024
'I hold them responsible': Biden says he's made a decision on response to attack in Jordan
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY/January 30, 2024
President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he had made a decision on how to respond to the recent attack at a military base in Jordan that killed three U.S. troops and wounded 25 others. Asked if he holds Iran responsible, Biden said: "I do hold them responsible in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people who did it."Biden spoke to reporters on the White House South Lawn before heading to Palm Beach, Florida, for a fundraiser. The president's remarks follow a vow he made on the day of the attack to take swift action to deal with the attacks. “We shall respond,” he said Sunday. Biden blamed the unmanned aerial drone attack on the troops stationed in northeast Jordan near the Syria border on “radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.” He vowed to “hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.”In his remarks on Tuesday, Biden did not reveal any specifics about what the response will look like. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday said he was not in the position today to confirm exactly which militant group was responsible for the attack. "We're still working through the analysis, but clearly the work has all the hallmarks of groups that are backed by the IRGC and, and in fact by Hezbollah as well," he said. The three American troops were the first to be killed by enemy fire in the Middle East since Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the war that has led to more than 26,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a statement, also vowed retaliation. Meanwhile some Republicans have blamed Biden, and others, responded calling for a military response of "targets of significance inside Iran." Those in favor of some sort of strike include Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of South Carolina, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Former President Donald Trump, the leading GOP presidential contender, blamed Biden for the attack on Truth Social."This brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender….," he wrote.

Iran Urges Diplomacy as US Weighs Response to Deadly Attack
Bloomberg/January 30, 2024
Iran urged the US to use diplomacy to ease tensions in the Middle East, as Tehran braces for a military response to a deadly attack on an American base over the weekend. The foreign minister of the Islamic Republic said “active” diplomacy is underway to find a political solution to the war in Gaza and the regional fallout, without elaborating. “The White House knows very well” that the way to end the war “and the current crisis in the region is political,” Hossein Amirabdollahian said in a post on X. The comments came as the US weighs how to retaliate against a deadly attack on a base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers and injured dozens. President Joe Biden blamed Tehran-backed militias in neighboring Syria and Iraq and said he’d respond “at a time and in a manner of our choosing.” Iran denied involvement in the strike, which was the first to kill Americans since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October. Many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have said the attack shows Biden’s been too soft on Iran. The US and Iran don’t have formal diplomatic ties but have exchanged messages about the crisis since October, sometimes through the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Both sides say they want to de-escalate the situation while blaming the other for inflaming it. The US says Iran’s support for regional militias is fueling tensions, while Tehran says Washington must put pressure on Israel to end its military offensive in Gaza. Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7 from Gaza, triggering the war and roiling the wider region. Since then, US bases in Iraq and Syria have come under regular fire from Iran-supported groups. Hezbollah, also backed by Iran, is exchanging fire with Israeli forces almost daily across the Israel-Lebanon border. Deadly Attack Near Syria Renews Focus on US Bases in Middle East
The Houthis, meanwhile, have caused mayhem in the shipping world with attacks on vessels around the southern Red Sea. They say they won’t back down until Israel pulls out of Gaza, despite the US and UK launching missiles on their positions in Yemen.
“This is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday. “I would argue that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973,” he said, referring to the year in which Israel fought the Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria. “We’ve made very, very clear from day one that we’re going to defend our people, we’re going to defend our personnel, we’re going to defend our interests,” he said. “At the same time, the president’s been very clear that we want to prevent broader escalation.”

Iraq's Kataib Hezbollah suspends attacks on US forces
Iran-aligned Iraqi armed group Kataib Hezbollah announced on Tuesday the suspension of all its military operations against U.S. troops in the region, in a decision aimed at preventing "embarrassment" of the Iraqi government, the group said. "As we announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation forces - in order to prevent embarrassment of the Iraqi government - we will continue to defend our people in Gaza in other ways," Kataib Hezbollah Secretary-General Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi said in a statement released by the group on Telegram. Three U.S. troops were killed in a drone attack near the Jordan-Syria border on Sunday that the Pentagon said bore the "footprints" of Kataib Hezbollah, though a final assessment had not yet been made. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on the group's statement, adding: "Actions speak louder than words."The U.S. has vowed to respond to the attack. Iran-aligned groups have been waging attacks against Israeli and U.S. targets from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, since their Palestinian ally Hamas and Israel went to war on Oct. 7. Kataib Hezbollah is the most powerful faction in the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of hardline Shi'ite armed factions that have claimed more than 150 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since the Gaza war began. The U.S. has responded with deadly strikes in Syria and Iraq in a cycle of escalating violence that Iraqi officials said threatened to undo progress towards stabilizing the country after decades of conflict. Kataib Hezbollah's decision followed days of intensive efforts by Iraq's prime minister to prevent a new escalation after the Jordan attack, his foreign affairs adviser Farhad Alaadin said. "Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani has been hard at work in the past few days, engaging with all relevant parties inside and outside Iraq," Alaadin said in an interview. "All sides need to support the efforts of the Prime Minister to prevent any possible escalation," he added. Founded in the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kataib Hezbollah is one of the elite Iraqi armed factions closest to Iran. Iran has denied involvement in the attacks by Iraqi groups, saying all members of Iran's "Axis of Resistance" plan and execute operations by themselves. Iraq's government is backed by parties and armed groups close to Iran, though not directly by the hardline groups that have been firing on U.S. forces, Western and Iraqi officials say. Baghdad has condemned the attacks while also saying regional escalation would continue as long as the Gaza war went on.

Antony Blinken Says Conditions In The Middle East Most Dangerous Since 1973 War
HuffPost/January 30, 2024
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday described the present situation in the Middle East as the most worrying it’s been since the 1973 war between Israel and a partnership between Egypt and Syria. In a press conference alongside NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Blinken said the U.S. will respond to the drone attack that killed three U.S. troops and injured over 40 U.S. service members but noted the Biden administration is intent on preventing “broader escalation” in the region amid Israel’s war in Gaza. “I think it’s very important to note that this is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” Blinken said. “I would argue that we have not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.”The short-lived war between Israel and Arab states, sparked by a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 6, 1973, killed 2,656 Israeli troops and injured more than 7,250 Israeli soldiers. It is estimated that as many as 15,000 Egyptians and 3,500 Syrians died but exact numbers are unknown, according to Reuters. It is known as the “Yom Kippur War” in Israel and the “October War” in Egypt and Syria.Meanwhile, the U.S. is investigating the deadly attack at a military base in Jordan that hosts about 350 U.S. troops. The enemy drone was allowed to pass because it was allegedly mistaken for a U.S. drone returning to the U.S. installation near Jordan’s border with Syria, U.S. officials cited by The Associated Press said.
Blinken offered no details on what a U.S. response would entail. “Obviously I’m not going to telegraph what we might do in this instance or get ahead of the president,” he said. “But I can again tell you that as the president said [Sunday], we will respond and that response could be multi-leveled, come in stages and be sustained over time.” Deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the U.S. is still working to assess who was behind the attack, but said a militia backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was likely involved. “Iran continues to arm and equip these groups to launch these attacks, and we will certainly hold them responsible,” Singh added.
During his press conference, Blinken also addressed the pause in U.S. funding for UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, following allegations that some its staff may have been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. Blinken said the accusations were “troubling,” calling on the agency to investigate and potentially hold people accountable if wrongdoing is found, noting the group is playing “an absolutely indispensable role in trying to make sure that men, women and children who so desperately need assistance in Gaza” receive it.
“No one has the the reach, the capacity, the structure to do what UNRWA has been doing,” Blinken said. “And from our perspective, it’s important, more than important, imperative that that that role continues. So that only underscores the importance of UNRWA tackling this as quickly, as effectively and as thoroughly as possible, and that’s what we’re looking for.”Meanwhile, the U.S. is taking part in talks hosted in Paris between Israel, Egypt and Qatar regarding a potential cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that would reportedly see a six-week pause in fighting in exchange for the release of hostages still held by Palestinian militants, according to The New York Times. “I can just tell you that there is again, strong, I would say alignment among the countries involved that this is a good and strong proposal and the work that was done over the weekend, including by CIA director Bill Burns, was important in helping to advance this,” Blinken said. Blinken did not directly answer a question on how Israeli senior officials taking part in a conference encouraging resettlement in Gaza coupled with a leaked recording of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticizing Qatar, which is helping mediate hostage talks with Hamas, could hurt the ongoing talks. The war in Gaza has killed over 26,000 Palestinians and injured more than 65,000, according to local officials. At least 220 Israeli troops have so far died in the conflict, Israeli officials say.

Three US soldiers killed in Jordan attack named
Fiona Nimoni - BBC News/Tue, January 30, 2024
The US government has released the names of three troops killed by an enemy drone attack in Jordan on Sunday. Sgt William Jerome Rivers, 46, Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, were killed when a drone hit their housing unit.
The US has blamed Iranian-backed groups and the Pentagon said it carried the "footprints" of Kataib Hezbollah. The Pentagon also reiterated the US does not want a war with Iran. "We don't seek war, but we will take action, and respond to attacks on our forces," said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh. CBS News, the BBC's US partner, said it was told by a US official that the drone used in the attack appeared to be Iranian-made. The official indicated it was a "type of Shahed drone," which is a one-way attack drone Iran has been providing to Russia. Iran has denied US and British accusations that it supported militant groups blamed for the strike. The Pentagon said the three soldiers killed on Sunday morning came from an army reserve unit based in Fort Moore, in the state of Georgia. Lt Gen Jody Daniels, Chief of Army Reserve and Commanding General US Army Reserve Command, paid tribute to the fallen soldiers. "On behalf of the Army Reserve, I share in the sorrow felt by their friends, family, and loved ones. Their service and sacrifice will not be forgotten, and we are committed to supporting those left behind in the wake of this tragedy", said Gen Daniels.
The drone attack took place in Rukban, north-eastern Jordan, near the Syrian border. The base was later named by US officials as Tower 22. More than 40 military personnel were injured when the unmanned aerial system hit the container housing unit they were in on Sunday morning. Features of an air defence system were turned off at Tower 22 at the time of the attack, US officials told CBS News, because the enemy drone arrived at the same time as a returning US drone. They added that troops at the air base were still in their sleeping quarters when the drone struck - with little to no warning. Iran has denied playing a part in supporting groups suspected of being responsible for the strike. Nasser Kanaani, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, said it was "not involved in the decision making of resistance groups" in how they chose to "defend Palestinians or their own countries".Iran's Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib said that regional armed groups aligned with Iran respond to "American aggressors" at their own discretion. US President Joe Biden said the US "will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing". The US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said he and Mr Biden would take "all necessary actions" following the attack on American forces. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said the attack was carried out by an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-backed militia and had the "footprints" of Iraq-based militant group Kataib Hezbollah.
What options does US have to respond to Jordan attack?
Death of US troops ratchets up pressure on Biden
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed it was behind the attack. The umbrella group emerged in late 2023 and is comprised of several Iran-affiliated militias operating in Iraq. It has claimed other attacks against US forces in recent weeks. In a statement, the group said it had targeted three US bases in Syria - identifying them as Shaddadi, Tanf and Rukban. However, Rukban is on the Jordanian side of the border with Syria. The group also said it targeted an Israeli oil facility in the Mediterranean. It is the first time that a strike has killed US troops in the region since the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel. There have been other attacks on US bases in the region, but before Sunday there were no fatalities, according to the US military. Officials said that US sites in Iraq and Syria had been attacked at least 165 times since 17 October. Last month, the US carried out airstrikes against Iran-affiliated groups after three US servicemembers were injured, one critically, in a drone attack on a base in northern Iraq. Earlier in January, one retaliatory US strike in Baghdad killed a militia leader accused of being behind attacks on US personnel. A map showing the number of attacks that have taken place on US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan

Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say
Abeer Salman, CNN/January 30, 2024
Israeli special forces, dressed as civilians and medical staff, infiltrated the Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday and killed three Palestinian men, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials. CCTV footage shared on social media appeared to show around a dozen commandos disguised as nurses, women in hijabs, and others, with one pushing a wheelchair and another carrying a baby car seat, as they stormed a hospital corridor carrying assault weapons. Hamas said the men were Jenin Brigades fighters, an umbrella group of armed Palestinian factions in the West Bank city. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they were terrorists linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and an Israeli government minister praised the operation. The disguised special forces “infiltrated the hospital individually, headed to the third floor, and assassinated the young men,” Palestinian state news agency WAFA reported, citing sources from inside the hospital. The IDF said it targeted Hamas fighter Mohammed Jalamneh who “had recently been involved in promoting significant terrorist activity and was hiding in the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin.” Two brothers were also killed in the raid, the IDF said: “Mohammed Al-Ghazawi from the Jenin Camp, a terrorist operative of the Jenin Battalions who was involved in numerous attacks including firing at IDF soldiers in the area, and Basel Al-Ghazawi from the Jenin Camp, Mohammed’s brother, an Islamic Jihad terrorist organization operative involved in terror activities in the area.”Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir shared the CCTV footage on social media and praised the raid. “I congratulate and strengthen the naval commando forces of the Israeli police on their impressive operation last night in cooperation with the IDF and the Shin Bet in the Jenin refugee camp, which led to the elimination of three terrorists,” Ben Gvir said alongside the video on X. Hamas’s military wing, the Al Qassam Brigades, claimed Jalamneh as a member and released a photo of him. It said he had been “martyred by the bullets of a special force from the occupation army that infiltrated Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin with his comrades Mohammed and Basil Ayman Al-Ghazawi,” calling them “fighting martyrs.”The Ibn Sina hospital said Basil Al-Ghazawi had been receiving treatment for injuries sustained in a rocket explosion inside the cemetery of Jenin in October, when he was killed by the special forces Tuesday morning. The hospital said the three men were sleeping at the time of the attack. There were no reports of other casualties in the raid. The Palestinian Ministry of Health condemned the attack and the targeting of a health center and called on the UN General Assembly and NGOs to provide the necessary protection for medical treatment centers and emergency crews. “This crime comes after dozens of crimes committed by the occupation forces against treatment centers and crews. International law provides general and special protection for civilian sites, including hospitals,” the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

UK will consider recognising Palestinian state to help end conflict – Cameron
PA Media: UK News/January 30, 2024
Britain will look at recognising a Palestinian state under diplomatic efforts to end the conflict with Israel, Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron has said. He told a reception in London on Monday evening that the move would help to make a two-state solution – currently stalled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed to it – an “irreversible” process. Lord Cameron discussed the need to give the “Palestinian people a political horizon” under efforts to end the Israeli-Hamas war as he addressed a reception for Arab ambassadors in Parliament. Meanwhile, the Tory peer will pledge that Britain will “do everything” it can to prevent the conflict from “spilling over borders” during a visit to the Middle East. Last week during a meeting in Jerusalem the Foreign Secretary pushed Mr Netanyahu over a two-state solution to bring about peace for both Israeli and Palestinian people. Mr Netanyahu has rebuffed efforts from allies, including the US, to win his for support the proposal, saying it would “endanger the state of Israel” as he criticised the “attempt to coerce us”. But Lord Cameron spelled out how the UK and allies could add to pressure by considering recognising a Palestinian state at the United Nations. “We should be starting to set out what a Palestinian state would look like – what it would comprise, how it would work,” he said. “As that happens, we, with allies, will look at the issue of recognising a Palestinian state, including at the United Nations.
“This could be one of the things that helps to make this process irreversible.”Palestinian ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot said it was a “significant” moment.
“It is the first time a UK Foreign Secretary considers recognising the State of Palestine, bilaterally and in the UN, as a contribution to a peaceful solution rather than an outcome,” the diplomat wrote on social media. “A UK recognition is both a Palestinian right and a British moral, political, legal, and historical responsibility. “If implemented, the Cameron Declaration would remove Israel’s veto power over Palestinian statehood, would boost efforts toward a two state outcome, and would begin correcting the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people by colonial Britain’s Balfour declaration.”
Lord Cameron will this week make his fourth visit to the Middle East since being appointed Foreign Secretary in November as he presses for a de-escalation of tensions. Starting in Oman, the senior Conservative peer is expected to call for stability amid Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and an immediate pause in the conflict in Gaza as he looks to work diplomatically to stop the Israel-Hamas war from escalating into a wider conflict. An attack by Iran-backed militia in Jordan over the weekend that killed three US troops and left dozens injured has stoked fresh fears of a western confrontation with Tehran.The UK, the US and other allies have looked to police the Red Sea after the Houthis, another Iran-backed rebel group, based in Yemen, began targeting commercial shipping on the vital global trade route in recent months. The US and the UK launched a second round of joint strikes against the rebels but it appears to have done little to deter the Houthi missiles. A British-linked oil tanker went up in flames after a strike claimed by the Yemen-based group on Friday, before a further attack on HMS Diamond, a Royal Navy destroyer stationed in the Red Sea, was repelled. Speaking before his return to the Middle East, Lord Cameron said: “The Houthis continue to attack ships in the Red Sea, risking lives, delaying vital aid getting to the Yemeni people and disrupting global trade. “And we cannot ignore the risk that the conflict in Gaza spreads, spilling over borders into other countries in the region. “We will do everything we can to make sure that does not happen – escalation and instability is in nobody’s interests.”

Gaza war and truce talks: Latest developments
Agence France Presse/January 30, 2024
Deadly fighting and bombardment rocked Gaza on Tuesday as international mediators pushed for a new ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Israel-Hamas war. Heavy Israeli strikes and urban combat across the besieged Gaza Strip killed 128 more people overnight, the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory said. The epicentre of fighting has been the southern city of Khan Yunis -- the hometown of Hamas's Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the October 7 attack -- where vast areas have been reduced to a muddy wasteland of bombed-out buildings.
Troops fighting in city blocks and tunnels have raided several military sites, Sinwar's office and "a significant rocket manufacturing facility", the Israeli military said. Army spokesman Daniel Hagari claimed troops in the city had "eliminated over 2,000 terrorists above and below ground". Israeli undercover troops in the occupied West Bank meanwhile killed three alleged members of a Hamas "terrorist cell" in a raid on a hospital. The agents -- some dressed as medical staff and carrying a wheelchair and baby carrier as props -- shot dead three men at Ibn Sina Hospital in the northern city of Jenin, according to officials and hospital CCTV footage released by the ministry. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa named the three men as Muhammad Jalamnah, Muhammad Ayman Ghazawi and Basel Ayman Ghazawi. The Israeli army charged that Jalamnah, allegedly "inspired" by the October 7 attack, had "planned to carry out a terror attack in the immediate future and used the hospital as a hiding place and therefore was neutralised". The Palestinian health ministry stressed that hospitals enjoy special protection under international law and urged the United Nations to help end Israel's "daily string of crimes... against our people and health centres".
'Dire need'
The Gaza war, now in its fourth month, has left much of besieged Gaza in ruins and sparked a spiralling humanitarian crisis for its 2.4 million people, many of whom face the threats of hunger and disease. Israel has charged that around a dozen staff of the main UN aid agency for Palestinians took part in the October 7 attack, leading key donor countries including the United States and Germany to suspend funding. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has pleaded for continued support to meet the "dire needs", will meet donors in New York on Tuesday, his office said, as investigations into Israel's claims continue. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged UNRWA to address the allegations, but also hailed its "absolutely indispensable role in trying to make sure that men, women and children who so desperately need assistance in Gaza actually get it".
Truce talks
In the latest efforts to broker a new truce, CIA chief William Burns met top Israeli, Egyptian and Qatari officials in Paris on Sunday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office called the talks "constructive" but pointed to "significant gaps which the parties will continue to discuss". Blinken expressed hope for a deal, telling reporters that "very important, productive work has been done. And there is some real hope going forward." Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose government helped broker a previous truce in November and who attended the talks, said "good progress" had been made. Sheikh Mohammed said the plan included a phased truce that would see women and children hostages released first, with aid also entering Gaza, and that an initial deal might lead to a permanent ceasefire. Hamas confirmed on Tuesday that it had received the proposal, saying on its Telegram account that it was "in the process of examining it and delivering its response". A senior Hamas official, Taher al-Nunu, said the Islamist group wanted a "complete and comprehensive ceasefire, not a temporary truce".
Regional tensions
The deadliest ever Gaza war was triggered by Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack that resulted in about reportedly 1,140 deaths in Israel. Militants also seized 250 hostages, of whom Israel says around 132 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 28 dead captives. Israel's relentless military offensive has killed at least 26,637 people in Gaza, most of them women and children. Fears have grown that Israel and its ally the United States could face a widening Middle East conflict after months of violence involving Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Those fears were heightened after Washington vowed to respond to a drone attack Sunday that killed three US troops in a remote outpost in Jordan near the Syrian and Iraqi borders. Tehran has denied any involvement in the attack. Washington said the Jordan attack "requires a response", but White House spokesman John Kirby also underlined that "we are not looking for a war with Iran". The Israeli-Lebanese border has seen almost daily exchanges of fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah militants, heightening fears of a wider conflict there. Israel has said it is ready for any attacks but does not seek a wider war in the north. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said late Monday that some units in Gaza were "moving up to the north and preparing for what's to come".

Israeli forces dressed as women and medics kill 3 Palestinians in West Bank hospital
Associated Press/January 30, 2024
Israeli forces disguised as civilian women and medical workers stormed a hospital Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, killing three Palestinian militants in a dramatic raid that underscored how deadly violence has spilled into the territory from the war in Gaza.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire inside the wards of the Ibn Sina Hospital in the town of Jenin. The ministry condemned the raid and called on the international community to pressure Israel's military to halt such operations in hospitals. A hospital spokesperson said there was no exchange of fire, indicating that it was a targeted killing. The military said the militants were using the hospital as a hideout, without providing evidence. It alleged that one of those targeted in the raid had transferred weapons and ammunition to others for a planned attack, purportedly inspired by the Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that triggered the war in Gaza. Footage said to be security camera video from the hospital that circulated on social media showed about a dozen undercover forces, most of them armed, dressed as women with Muslim headscarves or hospital staff in scrubs or white doctor's coats. One in a surgical mask carried a rifle in one arm and a folded wheelchair in the other. The forces were seen patting down one man who kneeled against a wall, his arms raised. The Associated Press has not independently verified the footage, but it is in line with its reporting. Meanwhile, fighting continued in the Gaza Strip, even as talks inched forward on a cease-fire to pause the war, which began when hundreds of Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250 others. In response, Israel launched a blistering air, sea and ground offensive that killed more than 26,700 people in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The ministry count does not distinguish between fighters and noncombatants, but it says about two-thirds of the dead are women and minors.
The conflict has also leveled vast swaths of the tiny coastal enclave, displaced 85% of its population, and pushed a quarter of residents to starvation. That humanitarian crisis may soon be exacerbated, the U.N. has warned, after several countries froze funding to the main aid provider to Palestinians in Gaza following Israeli claims that a dozen of its workers participated in the Oct. 7 assault.
HOSPITALS TARGETED
Israel has come under heavy criticism for its raids on hospitals in Gaza, which have treated the tens of thousands of Palestinians wounded in the war as well as providing critical shelter for displaced people. Gaza's health care system, which was already feeble before the war, is on the verge of collapse, buckling under the scores of patients, the lack of fuel and medical necessities limited by Israeli restrictions and repeated interruptions from fighting in and near the facilities. Israel says militants use hospitals as cover, hiding out in them or launching operations from them. The military has found underground tunnels in the vicinity of hospitals, and says it has located weapons and vehicles used in the Oct. 7 attack on hospital grounds.
WEST BANK CRACKDOWN
Since Oct. 7, violence in the West Bank has also surged as Israel has cracked down on suspected militants, killing more than 380 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most were killed in confrontations with Israeli forces during arrest raids or violent protests. The Israeli military says it has arrested nearly 3,000 Palestinians in the West Bank over the past four months. The military said in Tuesday's hospital raid, forces killed Mohammed Jalamneh, 27, who it said was planning an imminent attack. The two other men killed, brothers Basel and Mohammed Ghazawi, were hiding inside the hospital and were involved in attacks, the military claimed. The military did not provide details on how the three were killed. Its statement said Jalamneh was armed with a pistol, but made no mention of an exchange of fire. Hamas claimed the three men as members, calling the operation "a cowardly assassination." Hospital spokesperson Tawfiq al-Shobaki said there was no exchange. He said the Israelis attacked doctors, nurses, and hospital security during the raid. "What happened is a precedent," he said. "There was never an assassination inside a hospital. There were arrests and assaults, but not an assassination." He said Basel Ghazawi had been a patient in the hospital since October with partial paralysis. The raid took place in Jenin, long a bastion of armed struggle against Israel and the frequent target of Israeli raids even before the war began. Israeli operations there and in an adjacent built-up refugee camp have left vast destruction. Israel captured the West Bank, along with the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but imposed a stifling blockade on the territory, along with Egypt, when Hamas came to power in a violent takeover in 2007. It maintains an open-ended occupation of the West Bank, where more than half a million Israelis now live in settlements. The Palestinians claim these territories as part of their future independent state, hopes for which have increasingly dimmed since the war began.
PROGRESS ON CEASE-FIRE TALKS ELUSIVE
Progress, meanwhile, appeared elusive on a new deal between Israel and Hamas that could lead to a pause in fighting and see the release of dozens of hostages still held in Gaza. On Tuesday, Hamas' supreme political leader Ismail Haniyeh said the group was studying the latest terms for a deal, but said the priority was the "full withdrawal" of Israeli forces from Gaza, something Israel opposes, and that any agreement should lead to a long-term cease-fire. He said Hamas' leadership had been invited to Cairo to continue talks. Israel had said that cease-fire talks held Sunday were constructive but that "significant gaps" remained in any potential agreement. The prime minister of Qatar — which has served as a key mediator along with Egypt and the United States — was more upbeat, saying American and Middle Eastern mediators had reached a framework proposal. Speaking at the Atlantic Council in Washington on Monday, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said the mediators had made "good progress."The Israeli military said it was fighting Palestinian militants in south, central and northern Gaza, which was pummeled in the first weeks of the war and where Israel has claimed to have largely dismantled Hamas. It said aircraft destroyed the rocket launcher that fired a barrage of rockets at central Israel on Monday, the first rockets targeting the populated area in weeks.

Where do the parties stand on efforts to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages?
Associated Press/January 30, 2024
U.S. and Mideast mediators appeared optimistic in recent days that they were closing in on a deal for a two-month cease-fire in Gaza and the release of over 100 hostages held by Hamas. But on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the militant group's two main demands — that Israel withdraw its forces from Gaza and release thousands of Palestinian prisoners — indicating that the gap between the two sides remains wide. The war began with Hamas' Oct. 7 assault into Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. Nearly half the hostages were released during a weeklong November cease-fire in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Israel's offensive has killed over 26,700 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza, whose count does not separate civilians from combatants. Some 85% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million have fled their homes and the U.N. says a quarter of the population is starving. It has also sent ripples across the region, with Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen attacking Israeli and U.S. targets in support of the Palestinians, drawing reprisals in a spiraling tit-for-tat that could set off a regional conflagration. Here's a look at where each of the parties stand on ending the conflict.
ISRAEL'S NETANYAHU SEEKS 'TOTAL VICTORY'
Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to continue the war until Israel destroys Hamas' military and governing capacity and returns all the hostages, two increasingly elusive goals that many Israelis fear are mutually exclusive. Speaking at a religious pre-military academy in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, he said “we will not withdraw the Israeli military from the Gaza Strip and we will not release thousands of terrorists.”That would seem to rule out any agreement with Hamas, but it could also be posturing aimed at strengthening Israel's hand in the ongoing indirect talks. Netanyahu is under mounting pressure from families of the hostages and the wider public to reach a deal with Hamas to bring the captives home. Many Israelis fear time is running out. At the same time, his governing coalition — dominated by ultranationalist hard-liners who oppose a deal — could fall apart if he is perceived as being too soft on Hamas. Israel's military has only successfully rescued one hostage, and Hamas says several have been killed in airstrikes or during failed rescue operations. In December, Israeli forces mistakenly killed three hostages who had escaped and were waving a white flag.
HAMAS WANTS THE WAR TO END
Hamas has refused to release more hostages until Israel ends its offensive and withdraws from Gaza. It wants a broader agreement that would include a long-term truce and reconstruction. The group's top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said Tuesday that its priority is the “full withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza. He said any agreement should also lead to reconstruction, the lifting of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade on the territory, and the release of “all our heroic prisoners.” Hamas is widely believed to be holding the hostages in heavily guarded tunnels deep underground, using them as human shields for its top leaders and bargaining chips for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. These include high-profile militants involved in attacks that killed Israeli civilians. If Hamas releases the hostages without ending the war, it would leave itself exposed to an even greater Israeli onslaught once any cease-fire expires. Failing to secure a major prisoner exchange would expose it to intense criticism from Palestinians after the unprecedented death and destruction in the tiny coastal enclave prompted by its Oct. 7 attack. On the other hand, if Hamas secures a long-term cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the release of thousands of prisoners, it would be seen as the war's victor, at least by its own supporters.
MEDIATORS SEEK MIDDLE GROUND
The United States, which has provided crucial military aid for the offensive, largely supports Israel's goals in the war. It wants all hostages released and assurances that Hamas can never again carry out an attack like the one on Oct. 7. But the Biden administration also has a strong interest in winding down a war that has caused regional instability and divided Democratic voters in an election year. Arab countries, including key mediators Egypt and Qatar, have been calling for a cease-fire since the earliest days of the war, fearing broader instability. The U.S. and Arab mediators appear to be seeking a middle ground in which hostages would be released in stages over a two-month period in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, more desperately needed humanitarian aid would be allowed into Gaza, and Israeli forces would partially withdraw. A two-month respite could buy time for negotiating a larger agreement to address the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. and Arab diplomats have spoken of a potential grand bargain in which Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel and join other Arab countries and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in helping to rebuild and govern Gaza, in return for a credible path to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But Netanyahu, whose government is opposed to Palestinian statehood, and Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, have ruled that out as well.

‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza
Sana Noor Haq and Rosa Rahimi, CNN/January 30, 2024
Hanadi Gamal Saed El Jamara, 38, says sleep is all that can distract her children from the aching hunger gnawing at their bellies. These days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza. She tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient. “They are weak now, they always have diarrhea, their faces are yellow,” El Jamara, whose family was displaced from northern Gaza, told CNN on January 9. “My 17-year-old daughter tells me she feels dizziness, my husband is not eating.”As Gaza spirals toward full-scale famine, displaced civilians and health workers told CNN they go hungry so their children can eat what little is available. If Palestinians find water, it is likely undrinkable. When relief trucks trickle into the strip, people clamber over each other to grab aid. Children living on the streets, after being forced from their homes by Israel’s bombardment, cry and fight over stale bread. Others reportedly walk for hours in the cold searching for food, risking exposure to Israeli strikes. Even before the war, two out of three people in Gaza relied on food support, Arif Husain, the chief economist at the World Food Programme (WFP), told CNN. Palestinians have lived through 17 years of partial blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. Israel’s bombardment and siege since October 7 has drastically diminished vital supplies in Gaza, leaving the entire population of some 2.2 million exposed to high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, according to the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification (IPC), which assesses global food insecurity and malnutrition. Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief chief, told CNN the “great majority” of 400,000 Gazans characterized by UN agencies as at risk of starving “are actually in famine.” UN human rights experts have warned “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people.” Over more than 100 days, Palestinians in Gaza have seen mass displacement, neighborhoods turned to ash and rubble, entire families erased by war, a surge in deadly disease and the medical system wrecked by bombardment. Now starvation and dehydration are major threats to their survival. “We are dying slowly,” reflected El Jamara, the mother in Rafah. “I think it’s even better to die from the bombs, at least we will be martyrs. But now we are dying out of hunger and thirst.”Israel’s strikes on Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attacks have killed at least 26,637 people and injured 65,387 others, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. The Israeli military launched its campaign after the militant group killed more than 1,200 people in unprecedented attacks on Israel and says it is targeting Hamas.
People in northern Gaza ‘eat grass’ to survive
Mohammed Hamouda, a physical therapist displaced to Rafah, remembers the day his colleague, Odeh Al-Haw, was killed trying to get water for his family. Al-Haw was queueing at a water station in Jabalya refugee camp, in northern Gaza, when he and dozens of others were struck by Israeli bombardment, Hamouda said. “Unfortunately, many relatives and friends are still in the northern Gaza Strip, suffering a lot,” Hamouda, a father-of-three, told CNN. “They eat grass and drink polluted water
Israel’s blockade and restrictions on aid deliveries mean stocks are desperately low, driving up prices and making food inaccessible to people across Gaza. Shortages are even worse in the northern parts of the strip, according to the UN, where Israel concentrated its military offensive in the early days of the war. Communication blackouts stifle efforts to report on starvation and dehydration in the region. “People butchered a donkey to eat its meat,” Hamouda says friends in Jabalya told him earlier this month as shortages worsened. In what could be a serious blow to humanitarian efforts, several Western countries have suspended funding to the main UN agency in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in recent days over explosive allegations by Israel that several of its staffers participated in the October 7 attacks. The UN fired several employees in the wake of the allegations. Jordan’s foreign minister urged those countries suspending funding to reconsider, saying UNRWA was a “lifeline” for more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and that the agency shouldn’t be “collectively punished” over allegations against a dozen of its 13,000 staff.
‘No clean water’
Gihan El Baz cradles a toddler on her knee while comforting her children and grandchildren, who she says wake each day “screaming” for food.
“In the shelters, there is not enough food, the sun sets on us, and we haven’t even had any lunch,” El Baz, who lives with 10 relatives inside a weather-worn tent in Rafah, told CNN. She nurses her husband, who she says fell and broke his arm while dizzy from exhaustion. “There are no drinks, no clean water, no clean bathrooms, the kid cries for a biscuit and we can’t even find any to give her.”Infant orphans Hoor (left) and Kanan (right) shelter inside a tent in a displacement camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 25. Palestinian caregivers say the stress of being unable to protect children from strikes is exacerbated by their inability to provide enough food. - Courtesy Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi
Infant orphans Hoor (left) and Kanan (right) shelter inside a tent in a displacement camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 25. Palestinian caregivers say the stress of being unable to protect children from strikes is exacerbated by their inability to provide enough food. - Courtesy Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi
Displaced parents in Rafah, where OCHA reported more than 1.3 million residents of Gaza have been forced to flee, say the stress of being unable to protect their children from bombardment is compounded by their inability to provide enough food. Limited access to electricity makes perishable goods impossible to refrigerate. Living conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary. “People are forced to cut down trees to get firewood for heating and preparing food. Smoke is everywhere and flies spread widely and transmit diseases,” said Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City who fled south with the 40 people under his care – most of whom are children and infants living with disabilities. Hamouda, the displaced health worker, used to feed his children – aged six, four and two – a mixture of fruits and vegetables, biscuits, fresh juices, meat and seafood. This year, he said, the family has barely eaten one meal a day, living on dried bread and canned meat or legumes.
“Children are being violent towards each other to get food and water,” said Hamouda, who works at Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital and volunteers at a nearby shelter. “I can’t stop my tears from falling when I talk about these things, because it’s very hurtful seeing your kids and other kids hungry.”
All 350,000 children under the age of five in Gaza are especially vulnerable to severe malnutrition, UNICEF reported last month.
Increased risk of dying
The “scale and speed” of potential famine in Gaza will consign child survivors to a lifetime of health risks, said Rebecca Inglis, an intensive care doctor in Britain who regularly visits Gaza to teach medical students.
The first 1,000 days of a child’s life are “absolutely critical” for physical growth and cognitive development, Inglis told CNN. Malnourished children have an 11-fold increased risk of dying compared to well-nourished children, she said. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies force the body into an “emergency shut-down state” where it loses the ability to make energy, put on weight, or maintain kidney and liver functions, she added. Malnourished children, especially those with severe acute malnutrition, are at greater risk of dying from illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia, according to the World Health Organization. Cases of diarrhea in children under age five have increased about 2,000% since October 7, UNICEF said. Hamouda said his own children have diarrhea, cold and flu symptoms. “The children’s bodies are dehydrated … their skin is dehydrated.”In times of severe stress, pregnant women are more likely to miscarry or give birth prematurely, health workers previously told CNN. Gaza is home to 50,000 pregnant women, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Babies who do survive in utero are more likely to be born underweight and are therefore at higher risk of dying, Inglis said. Starving and dehydrated mothers cannot provide enough breast milk for their babies.
Challenges to food distribution, blocked aid
Shadi Bleha, 20, is trying to feed a family of six. Twice a week, they receive two water bottles, three biscuits and “sometimes” two cans of food from UNRWA, he said.
“It is not enough to meet my family’s needs at all,” the student, who is sheltering in a tent in Rafah, told CNN. Palestinians in southern Gaza also told CNN that poorly regulated humanitarian distribution means some civilians get no aid at all, while those who do may sell for profit. In other cases, vendors purchase aid from merchants and trade at markets for inflated costs. Some people with cars travel further afield to get water, returning to displacement camps to resell water for hiked prices. Intensified strikes also raise prices. Three weeks ago, a 25-kilogram bag of flour cost $20 in Khan Younis, according to Al-Naizi, but after the IDF intensified attacks on the southern city, it became $34.
Others say they receive humanitarian parcels that have been opened, with items missing. Dates, olive oil and cooking oil found in aid packages are reportedly sold on the black market for more than double their value.
On January 21, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said 260 humanitarian trucks were “inspected and transferred to Gaza,” marking the highest number since the start of the war.
But aid agencies say it is not enough. The Israeli military in January only granted access to a quarter of aid missions planned by humanitarian agencies to Gaza, OCHA said on January 21. CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment on OCHA’s statistics.
The WFP has called for new aid entry routes, more trucks to pass through daily border checks, fewer impediments to the movement of humanitarian workers, and guarantees for their safety. On January 5, the agency reported six bakeries in Deir al-Balah and Rafah had restarted operations, but three remained out of use. “Bread is the most requested food item, particularly as many families lack the basic means for cooking,” it said. Meanwhile, Israel’s military offensive has razed at least 22% of Gaza’s agricultural land, according to OCHA. Livestock are starving and fresh produce is hard to come by. Displaced civilians queue for aid distributed by the World Food Programme in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 21, 2024. - Courtesy Mohammed Hamouda. Displaced civilians queue for aid distributed by the World Food Programme in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on January 21, 2024. - Courtesy Mohammed Hamouda
Juliette Touma, director of communications for UNRWA, said the needs of displaced civilians in Gaza outweigh the amount of aid allowed into the strip by authorities. “We simply don’t have enough, and we cannot keep up with the overwhelming needs of people on the ground,” she told CNN. “That makes the delivery of humanitarian assistance extremely challenging.”
Both UNRWA and WFP told CNN while they could not verify reports of individuals reselling aid for higher prices, it is entirely possible given the scale of desperation and hunger in Gaza. “It’s absolute chaos and people are absolutely desperate, people are absolutely hungry,” added Touma. “The clock is indeed ticking for famine.”
WFP told CNN that aid distributions are based on verified beneficiary lists and observed by food monitors, who “report back that the food is delivered to its intended recipients.”“Sometimes families make a personal decision to sell WFP food in exchange for other household items that they might need. To be clear, any food distributed by the WFP is not for sale,” the agency said in a statement. The war has also caused widescale loss of employment in Gaza, further draining residents’ purchasing power as prices rocket. Hamouda now spends $250 per week to buy food and supplies for his family – compared with $50 to $70 before the war. In an invoice seen by CNN, monthly supplies for orphans under Al-Naizi’s care were purchased from a procurement company for $6,814 – including $2,160 for infant formula alone. Before the war, the same quantity of formula would have cost $1,680.
“We live almost in a jungle where war, murder, the greed of merchants, the injustice of institutions in distributing aid, and the absence of government lead to this deadly chaos,” al-Naizi said. CNN’s Nourhan Mohamed, Christiane Amanpour, Eyad Kourdi, Celine Alkhaldi and Hira Humayun contributed reporting.

Aid groups slam suspension of funding for UN agency in Gaza
Agence France Presse/January 30, 2024
Aid groups condemned on Tuesday a decision by several countries to suspend funding for the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), pointing to a "worsening humanitarian catastrophe" and "looming famine" in Gaza. A number of key donors to UNRWA -- including the United States, Germany and Japan -- have announced they are suspending funding to the agency over Israel's accusations that some of its staff were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack. UNRWA has fired several employees since Israel's accusations and promised a thorough investigation into the claims, which were not specified.
The two dozen top charities, including Oxfam and Save the Children, stressed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was the main provider of aid to millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the wider Middle East. "The suspension of funding by donor states will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children," the NGOs said in a joint statement. "The population faces starvation, looming famine and an outbreak of disease under Israel's continued indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate deprivation of aid in Gaza." A total of 152 UNRWA staff had already been killed and 145 of the U.N. agency's facilities had been damaged by bombardment, according to the statement, issued in English by the Norwegian Refugee Council, on behalf of the aid groups.
"If the funding suspensions are not reversed, we may see a complete collapse of the already restricted humanitarian response in Gaza," they said.
Duty to Palestinians
The NGOs said more than a million displaced Palestinians were taking shelter in or around 154 UNRWA shelters, stressing that the agency has been working in "near impossible circumstances." "Countries must reverse these funding suspensions, uphold their duties towards the Palestinian people and scale up humanitarian assistance for civilians in dire need in Gaza and the region."On Friday, the UN's top court said Israel must prevent genocide in its war in Gaza and allow aid into the besieged Palestinian territory, but stopped short of calling for an end to the fighting. On Saturday, Israel said it would seek to stop UNRWA from operating in Gaza after the war. The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that the row over funding for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees was distracting from the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel resulted in about 1,140 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures. Militants also seized about 250 hostages. Israel's relentless military offensive since then has killed at least 26,751 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry in the densely populated Hamas-run territory.

As Europe's armies brace for war, allies call on Canada and others to catch up
CBC/January 30, 2024
In Estonia, they're talking about building more public bomb shelters and making them mandatory in all newly constructed homes. In neighbouring Latvia, the government is going through the second draft of mandatory military service legislation. Next door in Lithuania, there's talk of universal conscription.
"I understand that when we speak from the Baltic perspective, it might sound somewhat dramatic and shocking," Viktorija Cmilyte-Nielsen, the speaker of the Seimas, Lithuania's legislature, told CBC News Monday in Ottawa. "It is obvious that today, democracy itself, democratic countries, democracies all around the world are under pressure from Russia and its autocratic allies."Since the beginning of 2024, security warnings in Europe about Russia's future intentions have been landing fast and furious. And they've come in different forms and from different officials — many of whom are known best for their discretion and lack of hysteria. These warnings are being driven in part by Russia's stated plans to put defence and munitions production on a war footing — something western nations, and Canada in particular, have struggled to accomplish in their efforts to bolster Ukraine's defence against Russia's invasion. Many observers wonder whether the security warnings are even being heard by Ukraine's allies, especially Canada and the United States. Two weeks ago in Sweden, a political debate erupted after the country's two top defence officials warned that war could be on the horizon. Sweden's Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin and its military commander-in-chief Gen. Micael Byden said people should prepare mentally for the possibility — and begin stocking up on supplies.
A land war in Western Europe?
The head of the British Army, Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders, said in a recent speech that the United Kingdom should train a "citizen army" and be ready to fight a war on land in the future. Three parliamentary speakers from the Baltic nations of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are the latest to deliver fresh warnings about how prepared western nations are for the prospect of an even bigger conflict in Europe. They visited Ottawa on Monday and met with senior government officials before heading to Washington for more meetings. Daiga Mierina, the speaker of Latvia's legislature, said that because Baltic nations were occupied by the Soviet Union, they have a decidedly more visceral approach to the threat posed by the Kremlin and can "very clearly see what we can expect from Russia.
"We understand Russia differently."
The speaker of Estonia's legislature said building up public resilience in western nations starts with understanding that an information war is already underway. "This is really important in a moment because it's full-scale war and [that's what] underlies the online attacks in social media and elsewhere," said Lauri Hussar. Whether these warnings are registering in western countries is debatable. Opposition politicians in Sweden described the warning from the defence chief as alarmist. Former Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson told Swedish TV that while the world's security situation is serious, "it is not as if war is just outside the door."Since many defence experts say the professional Russian Army that started the war in Ukraine has been virtually destroyed, there's a kernel of truth to Andersson's argument. But Moscow has an ambitious rebuilding plan. Russia's military spending in 2024 will increase to 7.1 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) and will account for 35 per cent of total government spending, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. What's needed in the West, in addition to ramped-up production, is a shift in mindset, said Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO's Military Council. "I think a nation needs to understand that when it comes to a war, as we see in Ukraine, it is a whole-of-society event," Bauer said recently following a meeting of NATO chiefs of defence staff. Ukrainian women assemble military drones at the drone manufacturer Atlas Aerospace in the capital Riga, Latvia, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — three states on NATO’s eastern flank scarred by decades of Soviet-era occupation — have been among the top donors to Kyiv. Ukrainian women assemble military drones at the drone manufacturer Atlas Aerospace in the capital Riga, Latvia, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — three states on NATO’s eastern flank scarred by decades of Soviet-era occupation — have been among the top donors to Kyiv. Ukrainian women assemble military drones at the drone manufacturer Atlas Aerospace in the capital Riga, Latvia, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. The West, he said, has for decades been labouring under the belief that "the professional military ... would solve these security issues that we had in Afghanistan in Iraq." That approach isn't good enough any longer, he said. "You will need more people from society to sustain the military in terms of people," he said. "You need the industry to have enough ammunition to produce new tanks, new ships, new aircraft, new artillery pieces. All that is part of this discussion of a whole-of-society event.
"I think more people need to understand it's not just something of the armed forces and money. We need to be readier across the whole spectrum."When asked about the recent comments in Sweden during an interview with CBC News last week, Defence Minister Bill Blair said the rising alarm in Europe is totally understandable, given the proximity to the threat. He insisted Canadians understand that their way of life, and the rules under which western nations have operated for decades, are at stake. "We've always been a country that stood up [for] those rules and those principles and we're going to continue to do so," Blair said. But do Canadian leaders truly share that sense of urgency felt across much of Europe? Last fall, a House of Commons committee heard about a critical shortage of artillery ammunition, notably the NATO standard 155 millimetre shells. Unlike its allies, Canada has not signed an agreement with munition-makers to radically boost production.

Ukraine's strikes on targets inside Russia hurt Putin's efforts to show the war isn't hitting home
The Associated Press/Tue, January 30, 2024
The wail of air raid sirens is commonplace in Belgorod, a Russian border city whose residents are on edge following a Ukrainian missile attack on a New Year's holiday weekend that left dozens of people dead and injured. A spectacular explosion rocked a huge fuel export terminal on the Baltic Sea southwest of St. Petersburg this month from a Ukrainian drone, forcing the energy company Novatek to suspend operations for several days. Last week, an apparent drone attack in the Black Sea port of Tuapse in the southern Krasnodar region hit one of Russia's largest refineries and ignited a fire, while another big refinery in the Volga River city of Yaroslavl, north of Moscow came under attack early Monday, but officials said there was no damage. There also have been strikes on a gunpowder factory in the Tambov region and arms producers and military facilities in the Bryansk, Smolensk and Tula regions.
Attacks like these are dealing a heavy blow to President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to reassure Russians that life in the country is largely untouched by the nearly 2-year-old war. “Ukraine has increased its capacity to strike back against Russia,” Michael Kofman, a military expert with the Carnegie Endowment, said in a recent podcast. “You see increased Ukrainian attacks against Russian critical infrastructure, retaliatory attacks against cities like Belgorod and greater strikes against Russian military base in Crimea,” he said. As Putin ramps up his campaign ahead of the presidential election in March, he wants to maintain an air of normalcy. But the increasingly frequent Ukrainian attacks have raised the visibility of the war on Russian soil, and there are other signs the conflict is increasingly challenging the Kremlin's tight control of the political scene.
Thousands across Russia have signed petitions supporting the longshot presidential bid of liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, who has made ending the war his main campaign issue. Wives of some soldiers rounded up in a partial mobilization in 2022 have pushed for their discharge. And despite a tight ban on protests, hundreds rallied in Bashkortostan province, clashing with police to protest the jailing of a local activist.
Certainly the Dec. 30 strike on Belgorod marked a bloody escalation in the minds of many Russians. A barrage of missiles struck the city of 340,000, which is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the Ukrainian border, on a holiday weekend when people were out shopping, ice skating and watching New Year's festivities. Officials said 25 people were killed, including five children, and over 100 were injured.
Residents described seeing victims with horrific injuries and pools of blood staining the sidewalks. One resident told the RBC news outlet he saw a baby carriage hit by shrapnel, the bloodied parents lying next to it. A drug store clerk said injured pedestrians ran into his pharmacy, seeking help.
“I’m seeing requests on social networks from people who write: ‘We are scared, please help us get to a safe place!’” said regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that several hundred people were evacuated, including over 1,000 children heading to camps in neighboring regions.
Holiday and religious festivities were muted or canceled entirely. The shelling damaged nearly 600 apartments and scores of private homes, and shrapnel peppered over 500 cars. Bus stops are being reinforced with concrete blocks and sandbags. Residents say they flinch at any loud noise these days and are afraid to go outside. Schools in the city and near the border have switched to online classes until mid-February. It's not the first time Belgorod has been touched by the war, with drone strikes and other attacks early in the conflict. In April 2023, a bomb accidentally released by a Russian warplane exploded in a street, gouging a huge crater and injuring two people. On Jan. 24, the Defense Ministry said a military transport plane was shot down in the Belgorod region while carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war, killing all 74 people aboard. Although Russia has released what it called evidence that it said proved Ukrainian POWs were aboard, officials in Kyiv disputed it and instead blamed Moscow for trying to use the incident to hurt Ukrainian morale.
Putin said the Dec. 30 shelling of Belgorod left him “boiling with anger,” describing it as an act of desperation by Kyiv following the failure of Ukraine's counteroffensive.
“They want to show their people and their sponsors who give them money, weapons and ammunition that they can retaliate against Russia’s action,” he said. “They want to show that they can also do something, but instead of fulfilling military tasks, they use barbaric methods and strike peaceful settlements with indiscriminate weapons.”Throughout the war, the Kremlin claims Russia has hit only military targets in Ukraine — despite widespread evidence to the contrary and heavy civilian casualties in places like Kyiv, Mariupol and Kharkiv.
Ukrainian officials rarely comment on strikes inside Russia but they emphasize their right to use all means to counter Moscow's aggression.
At a news conference in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had launched over 6,500 missiles and 3,500 drones since the war began, most of them at civilian targets. In a New Year’s address to the nation, he vowed: “The one who brings hell to our land will one day see it from their own window.”Russian hawks have pointed to Belgorod as a turning point for the Kremlin to raise the stakes in the war. Alexander Dugin, a nationalist ideologue whose daughter was killed in a car bombing blamed on Ukraine in August 2022, argues that Russia should respond by escalating the fighting and declaring a broad mobilization.
“I would like to believe that Russia now will take off the white gloves and start fighting for real,” he wrote. “Should we abide by the rules at a time when a gateway to hell opens? Our task for 2024 is to restructure the state and society to put it on military footing and throw all our resources to achieve victory.”
Russian military bloggers note the challenges of spotting Ukrainian rocket launchers moving to positions under 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border, emphasizing the need for better surveillance. Many lamented Russia's withdrawal from the area in September 2022 amid Kyiv's swift counteroffensive, arguing that more Ukrainian territory should be captured to secure Belgorod and other border regions. With fighting largely frozen along the 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) front line during winter, the missile and drone attacks inside Russia have demonstrated Ukraine’s long-range strike capability that is stretching Moscow’s security assets. “Continued Ukrainian strikes in deep rear areas in Russia may thus increase pressure on Russia’s air defenses overall,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a recent analysis. If this is Kyiv’s plan, it’s similar to what Russia did a year ago by targeting Ukraine's power grid in the hope that repairs would take time. In the end, Ukraine managed to get enough spare parts and make quick fixes so that Moscow’s campaign failed. Now, it's Russia that needs to find a coping strategy.
Sergey Vakulenko, an energy analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said it could be challenging for Russian refineries to fix the damage quickly. While Ukraine's small drones can't cause major destruction, he said “they can damage not just pipelines, but also compressors, valves, control units, and other pieces of equipment that are tricky to replace because of sanctions.” “If we are seeing the beginning of a wave of attacks on western Russia’s oil refineries, the consequences will be serious,” Vakulenko said in a commentary.

Russia to Japan: Drop territorial claim if you want a peace treaty
Reuters/January 30, 2024
Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev told Japan on Tuesday it would have to drop territorial claims to a group of Pacific islands if it wanted to conclude a peace treaty with Russia formally ending World War Two.The blunt remarks by Medvedev, a former president who is deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, over what Moscow calls the Kuril islands are likely to anger Japan which lays claim to four of the southernmost islands, which it calls the Northern Territories.Russia, the main successor state to the Soviet Union, and Japan have never signed a peace treaty formally ending their hostilities during World War Two, with the islands remaining the primary stumbling block. The islands are located off Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, and were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two. Diplomats on both sides once spoke of the possibility of reviving a Soviet-era draft agreement that envisaged returning two of the four islands to Japan as part of a peace deal. But Russia withdrew from peace treaty talks with Japan and froze joint economic projects related to the islands in 2022 because of Japanese sanctions over Russia's war in Ukraine and relations have soured further since. Medvedev said he was respondidipng to comments by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida who he said had spoken in favour of a peace treaty with Russia. "Nobody's against the peace treaty on the understanding that ... the 'territorial question' is closed once and for all in accordance with the constitution of Russia," Medvedev said on his official X account. In 2020, Russia's constitution was amended to bar handing over territory to a foreign power. Medvedev, who styles himself as one of the Kremlin's most hardline anti-Western hawks, said Japan would also have to accept that Russia would develop the Kuril islands and station new weapons there. "We don't give a damn about the 'feelings of the Japanese' concerning the so-called 'Northern Territories'. These are not disputed territories but Russia," said Medvedev. "And those samurai who feel especially sad can end their life in a traditional Japanese way, by committing seppuku (Japanese ritualistic suicide by disembowelment). If they dare, of course." Medvedev accused Japan of cosying up to the United States despite the fact that the U.S. military had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Russia said in December it regarded joint military exercises by Japan, the United States and Australia near Hokkaido to be a "potential security threat". It has complained about Japan - with U.S. help - expanding its military infrastructure and increasing arms purchases. Japan has periodically expressed unease about Russia beefing up its military infrastructure on the disputed island chain.

Latest English LCCC  analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published  on January 30-31.2024
And Why Would Iran Change Its Behavior?
Nadim Koteich/Asharq Al-Awsat/January 30/2024
Unless Washington radically changes its strategy for dealing with Iran, after the attack on an American base in Jordan, there is no reason to expect another Qasem Soleimani to be eliminated, and by extension, that the US will rebuild deterrence vis-a-vis the Mullah regime.
If there's one thing Iran understands more than the language of force, it is the language of weakness. Iran believes that President Joe Biden’s administration is weak, confused, and ready to make unimaginable concessions because it has two illusions: the first is pursuing political rationality is the best way to arrive at an understanding. The second is that it can buy its way out of escalation by bribing the Iranians, through a money-for-hostages policy and by easing oil sanctions, as it believes that this is the safest route to avoid getting bogged down in the mud of the Middle East.
Both illusions stem from a major structural flaw in the United States’ conception of Iran's objectives in the region and its strategy for achieving them.
It's no coincidence that the Iranian militias’ attacks on US bases have coincided with debates in the US about plans to withdraw from Syria and Iraq. This is Iran's declared objective, and nothing could please the Iranians more than hearing the Biden administration explicitly discuss such plans, or seeing something similar in the discourse of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump - although Trump's line of thinking and actions are more decisive towards Iran and its threats.
Indeed, it is clear that Tehran's strategy to use attacks on American forces by militias allied with it in Syria and Iraq, as well as the actions of the Houthis in the Red Sea, the specter of opening a Lebanese front, and intervention in the Gaza war, to ramp up the pressure on US interests in several sites, and push the US to withdraw from the Middle East, in order to entrench Iran’s regional hegemony.
In addition, it is no coincidence that the Iranian lobby in Washington - which consists of Iranian-American academics, researchers, and journalists, whose ties to the Iranian government have been exposed, with some even finding their way into the American government through the diplomat ousted from the Biden administration, Robert Malley - is loudly arguing that the escalation of Iranian militias will end if a ceasefire is reached in Gaza.
Pushing this line of thinking, which ties the actions of Tehran's militias to a ceasefire in Gaza, is an effort to hijack the ongoing political process - the joint American, Arab, and Gulf push to establish a ceasefire as part of a political settlement for Palestine and ensure Israel’s security, ending the perverse state of affairs reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's governments. On the other hand, Iran wants the ceasefire in Gaza to solidify Hamas' standing in Palestine and give credence to the idea of armed struggle across the region, as it sees that as a gateway to regional dominance.
Those in the US who are convinced that an understanding with Iran is possible overlook the fact that this would require Iran to discard the only cards it has to play. Indeed, Iran has none of the strengths that rivals in the region can depend on, be it economic power, the strength of the social model, prosperity, welfare, openness, or peace.
So, why would Iran abandon the pillar of its strength through dialogue and understanding?
1. What are Iran's alternatives to exploiting regional conflicts, like the situation in Gaza, or supporting attacks on American forces and threatening the interests of Washington and its allies in the Red Sea region?
2. What are the other tools for influencing the United States’ policy on Iran, its revolutionary ideology, and its worldview, that Iran has at its disposal and could encourage Iran to agree to abandon its current tools?
3. What other avenues could Iran take besides further escalating tensions on various fronts, to divert attention away from its nuclear program and weaken the international community’s resolve to address this issue?
4. What options for enhancing its regional or domestic standing does Iran have, other than constantly harassing the United States and showing that it can play with the big boys without Washington daring to hit it with a strong military response?
5. What tools does Iran have, even in the midst of negotiations with the US, to influence nuclear and non-nuclear diplomatic negotiations, besides blackmailing it with regional destabilization?
6. How else could Iran compel the US to withdraw its military forces from the Middle East, if not by using militias to increase the costs of its military presence in the region and creating domestic pressures for withdrawal?
7. What are Iran's other tools for ensuring that the regime has a seat at the table in which the region’s political and security issues are discussed, other than its network of militias and allied states, which allow it to showcase its power and safeguard its interests?
Iran's immediate and critical interests are intricately linked to what the United States calls Iran’s behavior. Thus, calling for a change in behavior is akin to demanding that Iran stop being Iran. Imposing such a change on any nation through dialogue and negotiation is not realistic.
Nazi Germany did not transform through dialogue and appeasement, nor did Japan turn its back on its military imperialist doctrine through political understanding and goodwill. Fascism wasn't defeated through a swing in public opinion. These regimes are acutely aware of their interests, and they do not hesitate to protect the pillars of their power. Washington's insistence on refusing to understand what Iran represents and what its behavior implies is the primary reason for the decline of US influence in the Middle East. Indeed, because of this insistence, the US finds itself facing adversaries who are not intimidated by it and allied with actors who do not trust it.

The drone wars of Iran’s militias are becoming more deadly
Seth J. Frantzman/ The Jerusalem Post/January 30, 2024
Iran is seeking to improve the capabilities of its drones. It has now had almost ten years to use them throughout the region.
Over the last decade, Iran has been increasingly exporting drones to its proxies throughout the Middle East. The drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are playing a gradually larger role in Iran’s policies and the attacks by its proxies.
Several years ago, the drone threat may not have been seen as a major issue. Today, it’s a different story and is taken much more seriously across the region. Even so, Iran continues to try to improve the precision and deadly effectiveness of its drones. The attack on US forces in Jordan, in which three servicemen were killed and dozens wounded, is merely one example.
The bigger picture is one in which Iran’s drones threaten Israel, the US, and many partner countries across thousands of miles of the front line. That means Iran’s proxies have become terrorist armies with drones, which gives them a larger area to threaten.
This is because drones, unlike rockets, can fly a more complex flight path and can be more precise. Hezbollah, for instance, has thousands of drones and has already used dozens against Israel in the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7.
Iranian-backed militias in Syria also have drones and have been using them since at least 2017. Iran has based its drones in Syria, primarily at the T-4 base near Palmyra. In 2018, for instance, an Iranian drone entered Israeli airspace and was shot down. It was carrying munitions destined for the West Bank.
Iran has also sought to target Israel with drones flown from Iran and Iraq. These threats increased over the last several years. During Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, for example, Iranian-backed groups in Iraq tried to target Israel with a drone. Iran also sent a “killer drone” team to an area near the Golan Heights in 2019. In January 2021, Iran supplied the Houthis in Yemen with the Shahed 136 drone, Newsweek reported. A year later, that same drone was being used by Russia against Ukraine.
Increased use of drones against US forces by Iranian proxies
Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have increasingly used drones against US forces and to target Kurdish dissidents. The drones are more effective for them than using 107-mm. and 122-mm. rockets. The drone threat has now increased again, and they were used to target US forces in Tanf, Syria, near the Jordanian border and in Jordan. Iraqi-based groups linked to Iran have claimed credit for the attacks. Iran has denied involvement. The drones used to attack US forces in Jordan and Syria were able to penetrate modern air-defense systems, according to Beirut-based Al Mayadeen news channel, which is pro-Iranian. It is difficult to confirm these claims. That pro-Iran media is making the claims, however, indicates they want them to be true.
That means Iran is seeking to improve its drones’ capabilities. It has now had almost 10 years to use them throughout the region.
Iranian-backed militias are increasingly turning to drones as their go-to weapon system. This can be seen from the Iranian-backed Houthis using them against ships, how Hezbollah uses drones, and their use in Iraq and Syria.
*Seth Frantzman is the author of Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machine, Artificial Intelligence and the Battle for the Future (Bombardier 2021) and an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Will Biden Dare to Recognize a Palestinian State
Sam Menassa/Asharq Al-Awsat/January 30/2024
Both Iran and Israel have managed, in record time, to mobilize the largest number of adversaries or lose the largest number of friends. Iran has Europe’s overt or covert sympathy, pushing the Europeans to adopt a position more aligned with their US ally because they have concluded that Iran has become a destabilizing force in the region. Indeed, Iran has gone as far as undermining European economic interests, as it is accused of being behind the Houthis’ actions in the Red Sea, in addition to other reckless actions by its allies in the region.
As for Israel, it has done more to alienate friends than its arch-enemy, dissipating the support it enjoyed after October 7th. At this point, almost the entire world has condemned the brutality of Israel’s retaliation to the "Al-Aqsa Flood'' attack. Israel has stubbornly rejected all initiatives and mediations, and it has insisted on perpetuating the violence with the declared aim of annihilating Hamas, and the hidden aims of displacing Palestinians, which do not end with the occupation of Gaza and could even include displacing the population of the West Bank.
Iran, Israel, and some factions are the parties to the Gaza war and the smaller ongoing conflicts in the region, from Lebanon to Syria, Iraq, and the Red Sea. The state of affairs has created a ticking time bomb that will eventually blow up in everyone's face. Although the United States and some Western countries share Israel's goal of containing and weakening Hamas, they oppose its right-wing government’s other war objectives. Instead, they seek, through initiatives and active diplomacy, to put an end to the war and reach a sustainable political settlement for the Israeli-Palestinian and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.
The primary belligerents, namely Israel, Iran, and other factions, are unanimous in their rejection of the short-term or permanent initiatives and settlements on offer, raising questions about whether they can obstruct them and for how long. This question is particularly pertinent given the fact that the Europeans, the United States, and Arab states - specifically the Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan, agree on the diplomatic objectives. These goals include a two-state solution, ensuring regional security, and the normalization of Arab-Israeli relations, which would ensure security for Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs.
We must acknowledge that these are broad objectives, and the details need to be hashed out. The first question to answer is what a two-state solution would look like and what regional security actually means. They must also determine how these goals should be achieved, the guarantees needed by the parties concerned, and the entity or entities that will back these guarantees. Other questions regarding the approach to managing the ongoing conflicts across the region between Israel and Iran's local allies must be resolved. What are the costs Iran will pay, or what will it receive, and how will these costs or rewards align with its concept of regional security? Moreover, Iran is very apprehensive about the prospect of a final, permanent settlement of the conflict and Arab-Israeli normalization facilitated by US guarantees. How would Iran respond to such a scenario? Would it be capable of preventing it?
Without delving into whether Iran wants to obstruct this process or not, the question of whether it has the capacity to disrupt a major settlement path remains, especially after it "shuffled the cards" in the region through the "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation and froze the US-sponsored peace process between the Arabs and Israel.
The dynamics of the region, the intertwined interests of its various actors, and the capabilities of the parties involved complicate these questions and make the answers pivotal to the future trajectory of the region, its stability, and its diplomatic relationships.
We should not underestimate the significance of the push to end the conflict, especially after everything that the Al-Aqsa Flood and the Gaza war have revealed to Israel, the Arab states, and the region. Indeed, recent developments have had serious implications for the security of the region, the interests of Western powers, and the balance of power in the region.
Iran alone can create obstacles and hurdles to such a settlement if it materializes, and it is not alone in this battle. Rather, it is spearheading this effort after consolidating its hold on strategically important and sensitive areas of the region. Iran's influence reaches the Red Sea, and it has effectively encircled Israel from the north through Lebanon and from the east through Syria. Its proxy militias are spread across Iraq, dominate Yemen, and control the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait; it also has capabilities across the globe and relationships with a variety of powers.
Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other members of the Resistance Axis are pushing in the opposite direction. They are patiently and methodically bolstering an alliance that could pose a direct challenge to the regional order established by the West that has shaped the Middle East for decades. The Iran-backed Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea show that they pose a threat to global trade and energy supplies, underlining the complexity and the multifaceted nature of the challenges to peace and security in the region.
Iran is not the only entity capable of putting a stick in the wheels. It is unclear how much longer will Israel remain governed by the hard right, which is vehemently opposed to any form of settlement and poses its own set of challenges. Any potential changes in Israel would likely encounter staunch opposition from the right, which could resort to violence and undemocratic methods.
Furthermore, the Palestinian issue remains on the margins. To change that, concerted Arab, American, and Israeli efforts. They must also wisely and carefully support a renewed Palestinian Authority committed to durable peace.
The role of Russia, which is keen on hindering US efforts in the region, and this will perhaps eventually be true for China, should not be overlooked either.
On the other hand, Western and Arab countries do not want the war in the Gaza Strip to escalate and set the region alight. However, rifts are deepening with time, and the pace of the "mini-wars" across the region is intensifying. Time is also not on the side of the Biden administration, which is set to face a fierce electoral contest, be it against Donald Trump, if he manages to secure the Republican nomination, or Nikki Haley. Biden needs a significant breakthrough that marks his presidency, as a Trump victory could upend everything, including the situation in the Middle East and the accomplishments of his administration.
Achieving a breakthrough will certainly be challenging, it can only be achieved by pressuring Israel. That pressure is unlikely to include a halt in military, financial, or diplomatic support, particularly at international fora at a time when it is isolated and has been ordered to prevent genocide by the International Court of Justice. Biden's viable only option might be to immediately recognize the Palestinian state, leaving Netanyahu's government to deal with a fait accompli. This scenario is not far-fetched, as the Biden administration has already paved the way for this through its explicit support for a two-state solution. The most notable statement in this regard was made by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Speaking about Arab-Israeli relations and their link to a political solution for the Palestinians: “We determined that the best approach was to work toward a package deal that involved normalization between Israel and key Arab states together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people... "It is President Biden's firm conviction that the best way to do that is two states with Israel's security guarantee."
Will Biden dare to translate Sullivan's words into action?

Where Is ‘America 2024…’ and Where Is it Going?
Eyad Abu Shakra/Asharq Al-Awsat/January 30/2024
Amid the influx of "political gifts" Israel is being granted by major Western countries on the anniversary of the Holocaust, and the sympathy shown for its leaders following the position of the International Court on the actions it has taken - and continues to take - in the Gaza Strip... political analysis has been focused on Israel. However, there have also been accelerating unfamiliar developments unfolding in the United States over the past two weeks.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ decision to pull out of the Republican Party primaries may have surprised some observers. DeSantis, whom many considered an "ideal candidate" to win the upcoming elections, decided that it would be best to cut his losses and leave the arena early on, although he came second to Donald Trump in the first primary election in Iowa.
The following qualities determined the strength and weakness of DeSantis’ candidacy, first against Trump in the primaries and then in the presidency against Joe Biden:
1- He was a candidate whose extreme conservatism is indisputable, vying for the nomination in a party where the influence of the extreme conservative right is growing strongly and rapidly.
2- He is among the young politicians expected to shape the future of the Republican Party after the "personalized" Trump era.
3- He was among the first politicians to recognize the significance of pushing back against immigration and asylum seekers. To this end, he unequivocally adopted "Trumpian policies," sometimes seemingly going further than the "founder", who sought a "separation wall" with Mexico.
4- He is the governor of the third most populous state in the United States, which is also the third largest "Latino state" (after California and Texas), and along with Texas, a major stronghold for the Republican Party.
However, it seems that at some point, DeSantis's qualities began worrying his "mentor." Trump went from seeing the man as a promising student to an arch-rival seeking to inherit his position too quickly. The truth is that Trump's apprehension about any serious candidate challenging him from the right is growing in parallel with the increasing doubts about his ability to carry on his electoral campaign until the next fall, given the "myriad" of legal issues and "mines" of political allegations he must overcome.
This reality becomes increasingly evident not only from Trump's stance towards DeSantis but also in his position towards the second competitor, Nikki Haley (the former Governor of South Carolina), who became his serious rival after the withdrawal of the Governor of Florida. Haley might stand to benefit if the problems of the former president accumulate and the provocations he instigates, or sometimes gets dragged into, increase.
In fact, following the Iowa caucus and then the New Hampshire primary, "sensible" voices within the party have urged Haley to remain in the race against Trump so that the party does not find itself without a plan if something unforeseen were to happen in the next few months.
In addition, the recent court ruling against Trump in the defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he was ordered to pay over $83 million, is not the first and may not be the last verdict that goes against him. Nevertheless, the former president continues to pursue his familiar tactic of "rousing" his supporters by accusing the current administration of targeting him and manipulating the judiciary to fight him.
Meanwhile, another potential "successor" of Trump’s has made use of the "virtues" of "agitation" and populist "rabble-rousing" tactics to assert himself, Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
Abbott, who governs a state that borders Mexico and has a long (political, cultural, and bloody) history with it, decided that Texas would curb immigration and asylum on the borders with its own forces, without referring to the federal government. The Supreme Court of the United States (despite its conservative majority), ruled last Monday, by a narrow margin (5 against 4), in favor of the federal government's right to remove the barbed wire installed on the border with Mexico.
However, Abbott, who is part of the extreme right in the Republican Party, decided to challenge the court's ruling and the government's policy. He has decried the federal government for being soft on immigration and added more barbed wires. He also encouraged his fellow right-wing Republican state governors to ignore Washington and order their National Guards to protect their borders. Six states did indeed follow the example of Texas, including Florida, which faces the Caribbean Sea, and Montana in the far north on the border with Canada.
Their mutiny brings the instigation of the 1861 American Civil War to mind. At the time, the state of South Carolina militarily rebelled against the federal government's anti-slavery policy and fired the first secessionist shot from Fort Sumter in Charleston.
At that time, as is the case today, the pretext was "state rights." The argument was that in a federal political system, the center (i.e., the central government) should not impose its will on the component parts (i.e., the states). As for the new challenge, it is the second in modern American history, after the storming of the Capitol, the seat of the federal legislative authority, by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021... following the refusal of the outgoing president to acknowledge his electoral defeat a few months earlier.
What do we see before us today?
The United States, the world's leading power, suffers from very serious structural problems. Foremost among them is the collapse of the "broad national consensus" on political principles. There are explicit disagreements over how to define democracy, political legitimacy, the independence of the judiciary, and the transfer of power, to say nothing of the trivialization and threat to public freedoms, including academic and media freedoms.
The collapse of a broad consensus in a pluralistic entity in which citizens have the right to bear arms, amid a climate of violent and exclusionary polarization carries the portents of major risks.

A Hundred Days after Gaza's October 7 (Part 3 of 4)/Culpable Ignorance and the Devil's Spreadsheet
Gwythian Prins/ Gatestone Institute/January 30, 2024
Sir William Shawcross's much delayed and now recent report on "Prevent" - the British Government anti-radicalisation programme - which has documented the failure of efforts at integration and the degree of risk residing within Muslim extremism has secured this disturbing knowledge its place on the public record.
In a climate of Israelophobia, where moral compasses go haywire, Hamas is not being held to account. Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. Under the guise of "human interest", the BBC repeatedly broadcasts prurient details of injuries to individual children in Gaza. Why? It is designed to shock and anger the listener and to demonize Israel; and it leaves those implications unspoken, hence deniable.
The former Director of BBC Television asks, "When do individual errors add up to something more? When do 'mistakes' become a clear pattern of institutional bias? These are questions the BBC must answer when it comes to its reporting of Israel's conflict with the terrorist group Hamas." He then lists nine other cases of gross error since 7/10 where the bias has been always the same, namely anti-Israel. "...Is the BBC just unlucky that this keeps happening? The answer is no."
Hamas has nowhere to hide under Geneva 4. Its crimes are war crimes of the highest order. The ICJ's interim ruling is vexatious and, while unable to make an objective finding, tarnishes that Court by implying that Israel might in the future commit "genocide" when there is neither evidence of intention nor a community which meets the criteria to be victims of genocide. The same day as its ruling, evidence arrived that UNRWA on which in part it had relied had itself now been discredited by evidence of its operatives' involvement in 7/10. This is the latest form of Holocaust denial.
It is a matter of moral and legal judgment about how a country with high moral standards wages war against a terrorist enemy that has none. The framework for such an assessment has not been satisfactorily spelled out.
Israel's entire ground force is part of an interactive all-arms cyber/air/sea/land concept of operations optimised for precision targeting to minimise collateral casualties, maximise the extinction of Hamas terrorists and ensure the effectiveness of its own force protection.
Hamas, conversely, has only a homicidal interest in its own Gaza civilian residents. Bluntly, for its purposes, the more that are killed the better because their deaths can then be blamed on the IDF and added to the undifferentiated butcher's bill in which Western media take figures issued by Hamas uncritically as being all civilian. Hamas repeatedly obstructed Gazans trying to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza, blocking the route -- even shooting them -- when, before the first phase of ground operations began, the IDF gave civilians notice to move.
The devil's spreadsheet therefore brings the ethical terms of engagement squarely front and centre. Israel did not bring war on 7th October. It has Just Cause, is fighting by just means, and has clear precedent.
So the relevant ethical compass is all too clear. It is Hamas and by extension its supporters wherever they are – on the world's streets, even in the BBC it seems – who carry all moral blame for the fate of Gaza and its people.
In the modern trope of woke "intersectionality", as victims of purported "white, Jewish colonialism", Arabs are licensed to do freely any depraved act; and by definition Jews can never be victims.
[F]ar from being an agent of indiscriminate warfare, the IDF is probably the most successfully discriminate modern army. Has the comparison with other modern armies been heard or discussed in BBC analyses? The genocide case was just an attempt to smear with loose language... and has no relevance to Israeli conduct, which will not stop attempts to claim that it has.
Since 7th October, the jihadist plus radical left alliance of Jew-haters in Great Britain directs phalanxes of ignorant British members of the "woke" movement, expressing support as the latest radical-chic virtue signal. Pictured: Anti-Israel protesters in London on January 13, 2024.
For ten days after 7th October 2023, the jihadist plus radical left alliance of Jew-haters in Great Britain was quiet. On the one hand, there are the truculently non-integrated Salafist Muslim immigrants centred on many mosques, including Hamas leaders who, incredibly, have been allowed to settle in Britain since 1997. The scale of this group has been long known to the intelligence services; but it is Sir William Shawcross's much delayed and now recent report on "Prevent" -- the British Government anti-radicalisation programme -- which has documented the failure of efforts at integration and the degree of risk residing within Muslim extremism. It has secured this disturbing knowledge its place on the public record.
Since 7th October, this jihadi leadership directs phalanxes of ignorant British members of the "woke" movement, expressing support as the latest radical-chic virtue signal. That this second part of the alliance is ignorant, is not difficult to deduce: random inquiry by journalists found people on the well-organised street-marches "for Gaza" who could identify neither the river nor the sea in their Israelophobic chanting, and who, indignantly and (one hopes) equally ignorantly, shouted ancient anti-Semitic blood libels.
Initially, this alliance had found it hard to find a way to blame the Hamas massacres of Israelis on the Israelis. They soon discovered a way and their normality returned. On 17th October, in the evening, Gaza's al-Ahli Hospital – actually its car-park -- was hit by some sort of weapon. Some people died, but not in the many hundreds initially claimed by al-Jazeera news agency. Nonetheless Israel could once more be blamed for killing women and children: especially children. In that subliminal echo from medieval times, this became the new blood libel. The London street-protesters had their green light.
Pretty quickly, all serious Western analysts confirmed the Israel Defence Force's telemetry analysis, pointing to an Islamic Jihad missile that fell short, as they frequently do, and that casualties were much lower than the initial claims. Yet all that was swept aside. The 'Arab street' exploded across the region. Arab states, that had been in the process of normalising relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords, fell silent; and, to its shame, the BBC played a central role.
In an instant, despite the IDF denial, later substantiated in evidence, one of the BBC's reporters, Jon Donnison, pronounced, "...it's hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes", thus conferring on the Arab claims the BBC's inherited but nowadays undeserved authority. Lies went around the world before, as the saying goes, the truth had got its boots on. From the very start, the BBC refused to describe Hamas as terrorists, despite the organization being widely proscribed as a terrorist organisation, and even now will not go beyond the circumlocutory formula: "which is proscribed by the British Government."
As UK Minister of State for Security Tom Tugendhat reproved the BBC's flagship radio news show, the "Today" programme, the BBC's rush to judgment was "not the BBC's finest hour" – and even then (if you listen to the interview) presenter Nick Robinson tried, rather pompously, to push back. Some moral clarity from the BBC would be welcome, not to mention journalistic competence, instead of misapplied moral equivalence and the endless dog whistle of "collective punishment" used obnoxiously to portray the victim of a genocidal attack as the perpetrator of one.
So too, in these days after the world turned upside-down, we need to recollect the currently active obligations of High Contracting Parties -- the state signatories to the conventions -- to pursue and punish Hamas, the proven genocidaires, within their sovereign jurisdictions under the 4th Geneva Convention. In a climate of Israelophobia, where moral compasses go haywire, Hamas is not being held to account. Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. Under the guise of "human interest", the BBC repeatedly broadcasts prurient details of injuries to individual children in Gaza. Why? It is designed to shock and anger the listener and to demonize Israel; and it leaves those implications unspoken, hence deniable.
The BBC's past reputation, especially heroic during the war against the Nazis, is one of supreme objectivity. Its reporting, therefore, is uniquely influential. Today, however, something seems to have gone seriously wrong.
In an extraordinary intervention, the former Director of BBC Television, Danny Cohen, asked:
"When do individual errors add up to something more? When do 'mistakes' become a clear pattern of institutional bias? These are questions the BBC must answer when it comes to its reporting of Israel's conflict with the terrorist group Hamas."
He then lists nine other cases of gross error since 7/10 where the bias has been always the same, namely anti-Israel.
"...Is the BBC just unlucky that this keeps happening? The answer is no. The sheer volume of these incidents instead tells us something highly significant about institutional bias at the corporation and its management's failure to get to grips with it."
In sum, the BBC's institutional bias is the most serious because of its unique world-wide influence. This makes it the most influential case of culpable ignorance, although it is by no means alone in this respect.
The al-Ahli Hospital episode was not unique. Two months later, on 16th December, His Eminence Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem instantly blamed IDF "snipers" for killing two Gazan Christian women, Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter, Samar, "in cold blood" at the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic Church in Gaza. The Cardinal furthermore stated unequivocally that no Hamas terrorists were present. This report was taken at face value -- more culpable ignorance -- and immediately retransmitted by Cardinal Vincent Nichol in London and by the Pope himself who described the alleged IDF shooting as "terrorism".
Once again, after investigation by the IDF, facts showed differently. Hamas guerrillas and "spotters" were present, using the Church precinct as a shield – thereby removing the legal protection of the protected site as explained in Article 19 of the 4th Geneva Convention of 12th August 1949 (Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War). Israeli troops had been attacked by Hamas with RPGs fired from the precinct. Positive identification of the terrorists had been made and they were all killed. The two women were not killed by Israeli gunfire. But even if they had been, it would not have been in breach of the laws of war. Hamas was in grave breach of Geneva 4 while the IDF has complied throughout. But, once more, moral equivalence was ascribed to Hamas the genocidaire and the IDF and this time, most ignobly by the Pope.
Therefore the Holy Family Church episode is not just a question of evidence and ignorance. It is deeper. It is a matter of moral and legal judgment about how a country with high moral standards wages war against a terrorist enemy that has none. The framework for such an assessment has not been satisfactorily spelled out.
The 7th October pogrom compelled the Israel Defence Force to embark on intensive, high-precision urban warfare against an enemy that as a matter of deliberate tactics and in flagrant breach of the laws of armed conflict hides among civilians and in tunnels underneath the civilian Arab population that it holds hostage and, specifically, in and under protected places such as hospitals, schools, religious sites as defined in Geneva 4, Article 18 and Annex 1.
Hamas's attacks of 7th October were in specific breach of Geneva 4 Article 27 (protecting women) and the perpetrators are in breach of the most serious of the "grave breaches" of Geneva 4 set out in Article 147, namely wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment and the taking of hostages. For this they stand liable to severe punishment. Nuremberg established long ago that following orders was no defence. So, Hamas members from leadership downwards are all miscreant with consequent obligations for all signatory states, if the laws of armed conflict are to mean anything, anymore. Hamas are enemies of all mankind: international outlaws.
Hamas has nowhere to hide under Geneva 4. Its crimes are war crimes of the highest order. Article 146 lays down those obligations of pursuit, trial and punishment incumbent on every High Contracting Party, singly or together, as follows:
"...Each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts. It may also, if it prefers, and in accordance with the provisions of its own legislation, hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party concerned, provided such High Contracting Party has made out a prima facie case...."
FIBUA (fighting in built-up areas) is the most difficult type of warfare and the IDF is probably the world's most meticulously trained and best equipped modern army for this sort of fighting. Technical military capabilities plus their modes of operation are not irrelevant details: they are material demonstration of intent. Israel's Merkava Mk IV tanks and huge Namer armoured personnel carriers, both field revolutionary automatic close-in protection from the "Trophy" system. They integrate with combat engineering units deploying Caterpillar D9 armoured bulldozers in novel combinations. In fact Israel's entire ground force is part of an interactive all-arms cyber/air/sea/land concept of operations optimised for precision targeting to minimise collateral casualties, maximise the extinction of Hamas terrorists and ensure the effectiveness of its own force protection. Technical military capabilities and their modes of operation demonstrate intent.
Hamas, conversely, has only a homicidal interest in Gaza civilian residents. Bluntly, for its purposes, the more that are killed, the better: their deaths can then be blamed on the IDF and added to the undifferentiated butcher's bill in which Western media take the figures issued by Hamas uncritically as being all civilian. Hamas repeatedly obstructed Gazans trying to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza, blocking the route -- even shooting them -- when, before the first phase of ground operations began, the IDF gave civilians notice to move.
In contrast, the IDF "kill ratio" of civilian collateral victims to terrorists since 7th October is reckoned by British military expertise to be more likely 2:1, which is less sparing that the 0.6:1 ratio in the May 2023 Operation Shield and Arrow -- a world record for precision -- but more sparing than was ever achieved by US or British forces in Iraq or Afghanistan (3:1 to 5:1) . 7:1 to 9:1 is the norm. David Miliband's International Rescue Committee calculated that 87% of casualties in modern wars are civilian.
Thus, in another perverse inversion, far from being an agent of indiscriminate warfare, the IDF is probably the most successfully discriminate modern army. Has the comparison with other modern armies been heard or discussed in BBC analyses? The genocide case was just an attempt to smear with loose language, imperilling the special status of genocide, the "crime of crimes" and has no relevance to Israeli conduct, which will not stop attempts to claim that it has.
There, is, however, an even worse episode of perverse inversion fresh before us.
In Part 1 of this series, I predicted that the South African attempt to tar Israel with the implication of genocide risked putting the ICJ in the dock rather than Israel if it did not throw out the case as being without merit; and so it has proved. The ICJ's interim ruling is vexatious. While unable to make an objective finding, the Court disgraced itself by implying that Israel might in the future commit "genocide" when there is neither evidence of intention, as was noted in Part 1, nor a community which meets the criteria to be victims of genocide. This second reason was implied in Part 2 and was stated by Melanie Phillips who deserves to be quoted in full. In terms of the Genocide Convention and within the logic of pan-Arabism:
[T]he Palestinians are not a discrete 'national, ethnical, racial or religious group' but — as many of their own leaders have acknowledged in the past — they are an indissoluble part of the broader Arab nation. They have no culture, language or religion that makes them distinct from that broader Arab nation; many if not most of their ancestors in the last century immigrated into Palestine from neighbouring states such as Egypt and Syria; their 'Palestinian' identity was forged in the 1960s purely as a weapon of war to destroy Israel and to appropriate Jewish history as their own. By this standard, they aren't covered by the Genocide Convention at all."
Matters then got even worse for the reputation of the ICJ. The very day that its ruling was pronounced, evidence arrived that UNRWA, on whose evidence in part it had relied, had itself now been discredited by verified Intelligence of its operatives' involvement in 7/10. Furthermore United Nations Watch has published documentation that not one of 3,000 UNRWA teachers on their Telegram chat group dissented from celebrating the pogrom. This, as Phillips writes, is the latest form of Holocaust denial. Little wonder than many major state funders of UNRWA, aghast, are withdrawing their support.
Tugendhat also reminded "Today" on 19th January that Hamas has exploited Gazans as forced labour to build its tunnels, using concrete and steel stolen in breach of Geneva 4 Art 23, Exception (a) from aid intended for relief of the non-combatant population.
Furthermore, he firmly instructed the interviewer Robinson on what "proportionality" means in such a war. It is not a "devil's spreadsheet" of body count for body count. It is proportionality in war aims. The complete neutralisation of an enemy is legally and ethically a proportionate objective when the enemy's aims are neither territory nor the welfare of civilians (Gazan in this case) but genocide, as the Hamas Charter states in black and white, trailing its Nazi-inspired pedigree.
The devil's spreadsheet therefore brings the ethical terms of engagement squarely front and centre. Israel did not bring war on 7th October. It has Just Cause, is fighting by just means, and has clear precedent.
As one of his case studies in his classic study, Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer relates the history during the American Civil War of the siege and burning of Atlanta, a crucial Confederate supply base and rail hub. The Union General William Tecumseh Sherman had ordered Confederate General John Bell Hood to evacuate the city, so that it could be burned.
Those were more literate days. Hood replied to Sherman's order:
"...the unprecedented measure you propose transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war."
Sherman was having none it and wrote back in careful but forceful terms:
"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it... those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war".
That is just cause. Yet, like the IDF, Sherman offered his enemy the chance to evacuate before he acted firmly the more quickly to end the war. That is right conduct. The IDF calls it "tohar haneshek" – purity of arms – and practices it, often sacrificing surprise, for example with the "knock on the roof" to warn occupants of buildings about to be targeted to vacate them, and at a cost to itself of endangering its own troops.
Sherman torched Atlanta on 15th November 1864, wrecked the Confederate rail system hub and then laid waste to Georgia in his "March to the Sea", a military undertaking which proved to be efficient in obtaining swift surrenders, thereby materially shortening the war.
Sherman, however, was no reveller in bloodshed or destruction. His purpose was in his letter to Hood. After the war he often said in lectures that "war is hell". So the relevant ethical compass is all too clear. It is Hamas and by extension its supporters wherever they are – on the world's streets, even in the BBC, it seems – who carry all moral blame for the fate of Gaza and its people.
To end the evil of an unjust war that Israel did not initiate as soon and as humanely as possible, the IDF is applying maximum focussed force, without interruption, for both operational and moral reasons, just as Sherman did. If there is a proven patron and co-ordinator of its proxies' actions, as in this instance Iran, then, by extension, to touch that state is also both legitimate and germane. Moreover, toppling the mullahs would be a blessing to the brave Iranians, especially the women protesting against restrictive veiling and being savagely flogged incarcerated or killed for so doing. It was noteworthy that at the march against anti-Semitism in London on 26th November there were many supporters of a secular Iran along with tens of thousands of other non-Jews.
At Nuremberg, SS Commander Otto Ohlendorf's penultimate throw of the dice was to invoke a tu quoque defence ("you too", discrediting an opponent's character rather than his argument), but pre-emptively: his 91,000 murders well preceded large-scale Allied bombing of German cities. When pressed to justify his actions in 1941 in ordering and overseeing the systematic murder of defenceless civilians and in particular of Jewish and Gypsy children, he first sought to place the actions of his death squads on a par with the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945:
"... I cannot imagine that those planes which systematically covered a city... square meter for square meter, with incendiaries and explosive bombs and again with phosphorous bombs ...in Dresden ...could possibly hope not to kill any civilian population, and no children".
That was his Dresden Defence.
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, in 1943. (Image source: German Federal Archive)
The analogous Hamas defence, which is often heard more by implication than directly and repeatedly by implication on the BBC, would be that the actions of 7th October were justified by children killed as unintended collateral victims in subsequent (or indeed any) IDF air strikes. In the modern trope of woke "intersectionality", as victims of purported "white, Jewish colonialism", Arabs are licensed to do freely any depraved act; and by definition Jews can never be victims.
The double helix hovers over law and ethics too.
Gwythian Prins is Research Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics and a past member of the British Chief of the Defence Staff's Strategy Advisory Panel.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20357/israel-gaza-culpable-ignorance

US should rethink its Middle East strategy
Osama Al-Sharif/Arab News/January 30, 2024
Sunday’s lethal drone attack on US forces stationed at a military post in northeastern Jordan was the most severe challenge to America’s military presence in the region since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked southern Israel. US forces in Syria and Iraq have been targeted at least 150 times since then by pro-Iranian militias based in Iraq. But three US soldiers were killed in the Jordan attack and as many as 30 injured. The drone is believed to have been launched from Iraq. The so-called Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella of several Shiite groups attached to the Popular Mobilization Units, claimed responsibility.
The target location is believed to be a vital center of military communications and surveillance that covers Syria, Iraq and Jordan. Pro-Iranian groups have said their post-Oct. 7 operations are in response to Israel’s war on Gaza. The same groups claim they have attacked targets in Israel itself, including Eilat in southern Israel.
At the same time, the Houthis in Yemen have managed to disrupt commercial maritime activity in the Red Sea by attacking US, British and Israeli ships and any vessels heading to Israeli ports. They have also launched many long-range missiles against southern Israel. They, too, claim they are supporting the people of Gaza against the Israeli onslaught. The US and Britain have carried out several aerial attacks against Houthi positions in response.
Sunday’s attack took the US by surprise. The fact that the strike took place on Jordanian territory is also essential. President Joe Biden and the Pentagon promised to retaliate, but Republican lawmakers and the right-wing media want him to strike Iran, which has denied any connection to the incident. Tehran said that resistance groups are the ones that have decided to respond to the US military presence in the region, not itself. The White House finds itself in an awkward position, needing to show deterrence while avoiding an open war with Iran and its proxies. The White House finds itself in an awkward position, needing to show deterrence while avoiding an open war
The US has retaliated in the past few weeks with strikes against forces at the Al-Asad and Irbil airbases in Iraq. The most serious was last month’s strike on a Kata’ib Hezbollah base in Baghdad, which killed at least one senior official and wounded 18, including civilians. The Iraqi government protested the US strike, calling it an “unacceptable attack on Iraqi sovereignty” that would “harm bilateral relations.” Since then, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani has requested that negotiations should begin to end the US military presence in Iraq.
Meanwhile, US media reports have stated that Washington is also considering pulling out of northeastern Syria. The main question is how the US will retaliate. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday that America is not looking to go to war with Iran, nor does it want to expand the regional conflict.
Sunday’s attack raises many challenges for the US. First, its military has been in this region for decades, toppling Saddam Hussein and triggering a sectarian war in Iraq, while incriminating itself in war crimes. After destroying Iraq, it allowed Iran to play a crucial role in the country’s politics, resulting in what we have today: multiple nonstate actors that are supported by Iran and are ideologically against the US presence, not only in Iraq but the region. Second, the US has launched wars or been involved in them from Afghanistan to Libya and from Yemen to Somalia and Syria, with one clear outcome: the creation of failed states. This has enabled proxy groups and nonstate actors and led to the death or displacement of millions of innocent civilians. Other than triggering wars, the US has had no clear regional strategic objective. It has alienated its traditional allies and created anti-US sentiments across the region.
Third, in this latest Israeli aggression on Gaza, the US has sided, as usual, with the aggressor without any consideration of how the people of the region will feel. They may not like Iran and its proxies, but opposition to Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza has created so much grassroots support for the so-called resistance front that it also puts pressure on America’s allies in the region, which have to answer to their citizens.
The US must stop viewing the region from an Israeli perspective if it wants to build genuine and lasting alliances
Still, the Middle East is changing and leaders are learning the lessons of the past. One immediate outcome of this is that leaders now affirm there will not be any regional stability so long as the Palestinian cause remains unresolved. This is the position of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Jordan and other Arab and regional players. This is a message that Washington has refused to understand. The neocons in the US Congress and right-wing media, who believe the US can club together an anti-Iran coalition, triggering another costly war in the region, are not only delusional but simply wrong. The leaders in the area have learned their lessons. “Never again” also means never repeating the mistakes of the past.
The Gaza war has been an eye-opener for millions of people around the world. The region’s leaders have also absorbed the lessons. The US Middle East policy has delivered chaos and radicalism since the 1990s. America’s blind bias in favor of Israel has turned it into an accessory to war crimes and now an allegation of enabling genocide.
The US must stop viewing the region from an Israeli perspective if it wants to build genuine and lasting alliances with countries in this part of the world. Today’s leaders are aware of their geopolitical options, opening up to Russia and China while also keeping links to the US. Suppose the US has an agenda for the region. In that case, it must consider what the vast majority of the people of this region want. A resolution to the Palestinian question in a just and viable way would be a significant step in the right direction.
A direct attack on Iran should not be on the cards for the US. An all-out regional war is something that helps Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objective of dragging everyone into a conflict that serves no one’s interests but his. Instead, the US should examine its national interests in a fast-changing region, in which leaders opt to resolve their differences through diplomacy.
America’s 30-year military engagement in the region has been toxic and disruptive. No one here wants to see another war flaring up. Instead, leaders want a durable and just resolution to the core of regional instability; something the Palestinians will accept so that other nonstate actors stop using them as an excuse to destabilize the region. Washington needs to rethink its Middle East strategy after Sunday’s attack.
**Osama Al-Sharif is a veteran journalist and political commentator based in Amman. X: @plato010Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view