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Category: War

Qatar to pause Gaza ceasefire mediation, source says

Qatar to pause Gaza ceasefire mediation, source says

Reuters reports: Qatar will stop trying to mediate a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal until Hamas and Israel are willing to resume talks, an official briefed on the matter said, while also casting doubt on the continued presence of Hamas’ political office in Doha. The Gulf country has been working alongside the United States and Egypt on months of so-far fruitless talks between the warring sides in Gaza and its withdrawal from that process would further complicate efforts to…

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Jordan’s former foreign minister says two-state solution is over

Jordan’s former foreign minister says two-state solution is over

  Middle East Eye reports: Jordan’s former foreign minister has told Middle East Eye that Arab countries need to abandon the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. “Practically, that is not going to take place,” Marwan Muasher, who also served as Jordan’s deputy prime minister and opened the kingdom’s first embassy in Israel in 1995, said of the two-state solution in a video interview with Middle East Eye. The ex-diplomat, who is now vice president for studies at the Carnegie…

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North Korean troops heading to Ukraine are inexperienced, poorly trained and underfed

North Korean troops heading to Ukraine are inexperienced, poorly trained and underfed

Justin McCurry writes: Depending on whom you ask, they are the boost that Russian forces need to make a significant breakthrough in Ukraine, or they are simple cannon fodder, destined for repatriation in body bags. After weeks of speculation, Nato and the Pentagon have confirmed that around 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia, with most massing near Ukraine’s border in Kursk, where the Kremlin’s forces have struggled to repel a Ukrainian incursion. US officials believe the North Koreans could…

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Russia suspected of plotting to send incendiary devices on U.S.-bound planes

Russia suspected of plotting to send incendiary devices on U.S.-bound planes

The Guardian reports: An incendiary device hidden in a DHL package that caught fire in Germany in July was due to be sent by air to the UK as part of a suspected Russian sabotage plot that may also have been a dry run for a similar attack on the US and Canada. The device, reported to have been secreted in shipments of massage pillows and erotic gadgets, started a fire on the ground in Leipzig that was feared to…

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Ilan Pappé: The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism

Ilan Pappé: The birth of Israel and the death of Zionism

  Can Zionism survive the current war in Gaza? Israeli historian Ilan Pappé believes it can’t. In fact, he argues that the liberation of Palestine is an inevitability. Pappé is the author of 24 books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most recently published two books: ‘Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic’ and ‘A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’. This week on The Big Picture Podcast, we sit down with Ilan Pappé to talk about where…

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Kamala Harris is not our savior. But a Donald Trump win would be catastrophic

Kamala Harris is not our savior. But a Donald Trump win would be catastrophic

Teen Vogue‘s editor in chief, Versha Sharma, writes: Donald Trump cannot win this election. Full stop. Right now, we have the power to make sure that doesn’t happen. Not exercising that power only gives him more. And it will result in the loss of power for many of our communities. As the head of this publication, dedicated to young readers, I have been closely following younger generations’ collective disbelief at the Biden administration’s support of the Israeli government during its…

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‘Our job is to flatten Gaza. No one will stop us’

‘Our job is to flatten Gaza. No one will stop us’

Ryan Grim writes: Journalists Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip have managed to find and archive all the Instagram stories and daily posts shared by the soldiers of one key unit, Israel’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion. They’ve mapped out the structure of the unit and identified the individual soldiers and officers involved, along with their various roles in operations. They have tracked the activities of each company in the battalion, including what they were doing, when, and where, as the force…

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Exterminate, expel, resettle: Israel’s endgame in northern Gaza

Exterminate, expel, resettle: Israel’s endgame in northern Gaza

+972 Magazine reports: The “Generals’ Plan,” published in early September, has a very simple goal: to empty the northern Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population. The plan itself estimated that about 300,000 people were still living north of the Netzarim Corridor — the Israeli-occupied zone that bisects Gaza — although the UN put the number closer to 400,000. During the first phase of the plan, the Israeli army would inform all of those people that they have a week to evacuate to the south…

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‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the tragedy of Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh

‘I couldn’t cry over my children like everyone else’: the tragedy of Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh

Nesrine Malik writes: Wael al-Dahdouh was live on air when he realised something was wrong. It was 25 October 2023, about 5pm, and Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza was standing on the roof of the channel’s office building, speaking about the day’s airstrikes. “It’s going to be a bloody night,” said Dahdouh, his voice playing over live images of the skyline, as explosions flared on the horizon. Out of the corner of his eye, Dahdouh noticed his nephew Hamdan,…

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Trump would be worse for Palestinians

Trump would be worse for Palestinians

Nicholas Kristof writes: If Donald Trump is elected president on Tuesday, one factor may be anger at Biden administration policies in the Middle East. Some Arab Americans, including those in swing states like Michigan, are enraged at President Biden’s support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Their taxes are paying for weapons that may be killing their relatives. A poll found Arab American support for Kamala Harris is 18 percentage points below support for Biden in 2020. Many young…

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Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union…

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The doctor who saw children shot in the head in Gaza—and tried to tell the world

The doctor who saw children shot in the head in Gaza—and tried to tell the world

Sophie Hurwitz writes: Dr. Feroze Sidhwa has volunteered as a trauma surgeon in Ukraine, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. But when he went to Gaza in March and April of this year, it changed him. Sidhwa had never seen so much horror in his life. “There’s nothing like Gaza right now,” he said. “Almost 100 percent of Gaza’s population is homeless and displaced…does that sound like a place where people are going to survive?” With international journalists banned from Gaza…

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Israeli parliament votes to ban UNRWA from Israel within 90 days

Israeli parliament votes to ban UNRWA from Israel within 90 days

The Guardian reports: Israel’s parliament has voted to ban the UN relief and works agency (Unrwa) from the country within 90 days, in defiance of US and other international pressure to maintain the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to the country’s Palestinian population. In a 92-10 vote late on Monday, the Knesset banned the agency, which operates in Israel according to a 1967 treaty, from conducting “any activity” or providing any service inside Israel, including the areas of annexed East…

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Poll shows Israelis massively favor Trump over Harris in U.S. election

Poll shows Israelis massively favor Trump over Harris in U.S. election

The Times of Israel reports: A poll published by Channel 12 TV shows that Israelis massively favor Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris, in the upcoming US presidential elections. Asked who they prefer to be the next US president, 66 percent chose the former president, while only 17% say they want to see the US vice president win the election. A further 17% said they did not know. The channel noted that US President Joe Biden was briefly favored…

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Iran mocks Israel’s ‘weak’ attacks as hardliners call for reprisal

Iran mocks Israel’s ‘weak’ attacks as hardliners call for reprisal

Patrick Wintour writes: The Iranian government has belittled the scale and effectiveness of the Israeli attack on its military sites, but hardliners in the parliament insisted the strikes breached Iranian red lines and required a swift response, preferably at a time when Israel is already enmeshed in Lebanon and Gaza. The internal Iranian debate on how to respond to the long-awaited Israeli attack turns on whether to treat Israel’s breach of Iranian national sovereignty as too grave to be ignored,…

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Satellite images show major expansion at Russian site with secret bioweapons past

Satellite images show major expansion at Russian site with secret bioweapons past

The Washington Post reports: A few months after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, satellite imagery captured unusual activity at a restricted military research facility nestled among the birch forests northeast of Moscow. The Russian site, called Sergiev Posad-6, had been quiet for decades, but it had a notorious Cold War past: It had once been a major research center for biological weapons, with a history of experiments with the viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and hemorrhagic…

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