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Category: War

Israel must end the war and start building a real democracy

Israel must end the war and start building a real democracy

Dahlia Scheindlin writes: Since the war in Gaza began, there have been proliferating signs that Israel’s institutions of state are under severe stress. Netanyahu has ignored repeated warnings from Israel’s attorney general that his government’s actions have violated the law; in response, government ministers have called for the attorney general’s dismissal. Israel’s legal system is in disarray. For over a year, the government held up dozens of judicial appointments, including on Israel’s Supreme Court; and in September, Netanyahu’s justice minister…

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Moody’s lowers Israel’s credit rating for 2nd time this year, amid Hezbollah escalation

Moody’s lowers Israel’s credit rating for 2nd time this year, amid Hezbollah escalation

The Times of Israel reports: US rating agency Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating for a second time this year on Friday, doing so this time by two notches, while citing the increased intensity of the fighting with Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group and the lack of an Israeli “exit strategy.” The prominent credit rating agency cut Israel’s score from A2 to Baa1, raising concerns that domestic political risks have increased alongside geopolitical ones “with material negative consequences for the country’s creditworthiness…

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Is Israel dragging the U.S. into a Mideast quagmire?

Is Israel dragging the U.S. into a Mideast quagmire?

  As long as the US extends “total impunity” to Israel, there’s no way to prevent further genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and further bloodshed in Lebanon, argues Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. One of the biggest factors preventing all-out war in the region is Iran’s desire to pursue its own interests and reconcile with the US, according to Iran expert Roxane Farmanfarmanian of Cambridge University. Join Friedman and Farmanfarmanian in their conversation with…

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Why Israelis do and don’t want war with Hezbollah

Why Israelis do and don’t want war with Hezbollah

Ori Goldberg writes: What is Israel doing in Lebanon? Before we delve into the byzantine brew that sustains Israel’s Lebanese “operation,” we must give the one answer we know to be true. Israel is killing Lebanese, nearly a thousand so far this month alone, in a combination of sabotage — the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies on Sept. 17 and 18 — and sustained, unchecked bombing. The indifference with which Israel kills, with explanations ranging from “they shouldn’t have had a…

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Report from Beirut: Israel is ‘targeting everyone’ in bombing campaign, killing 700+ in just days

Report from Beirut: Israel is ‘targeting everyone’ in bombing campaign, killing 700+ in just days

  We get an update from Lebanon, where the death toll from Israeli airstrikes has risen to over 700 since Monday, following a series of explosions involving pagers and walkie-talkies in Beirut and southern Lebanon last week. The Israeli military reiterated its troops were preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon if tensions continue to escalate. Multiple Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have appeared across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. As the Biden administration claims it’s working toward a ceasefire…

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Netanyahu’s UNGA speech ‘one of the lowest points of Israeli propaganda’ says former PM advisor

Netanyahu’s UNGA speech ‘one of the lowest points of Israeli propaganda’ says former PM advisor

  A large number of diplomats left the GA Hall once #Netanyahu came to the podium. The people you hear cheering the PM during the speech are in the gallery who he brought for that purpose. #UNGA79 #Walkout pic.twitter.com/bAgiOzztWA — Rami Ayari (@Raminho) September 27, 2024

Public mistrust of Gaza coverage is opening space for Russia-linked media on the left

Public mistrust of Gaza coverage is opening space for Russia-linked media on the left

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is not a friendly place for journalists. Since the onset of the uprising in 2011, the regime has issued few visas. In 2012, when the American journalist Marie Colvin and the French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik entered Syria unauthorized, they were targeted and killed. But in 2021, a Canadian podcaster was given unusual access to regime-controlled Syria, and among his various dispatches, one in particular stood out. Standing in front of the ruins of…

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U.S. gov’t agencies found Israel was blocking Gaza aid. Blinken ignored them to keep weapons flowing

U.S. gov’t agencies found Israel was blocking Gaza aid. Blinken ignored them to keep weapons flowing

  We speak with Brett Murphy, the ProPublica reporter behind a blockbuster exposé that revealed the Biden administration ignored warnings from its own experts about Israel blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza in order to keep supplying the country with weapons. USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded earlier this year that Israeli authorities routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine into the devastated Palestinian territory, where hunger, disease and displacement have wreaked…

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Biden administration divided over Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah

Biden administration divided over Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah

The Washington Post reports: The Biden administration is divided over Israel’s military escalation against Hezbollah with some senior officials viewing it as a reckless bombardment likely to produce more deadly cycles of violence and others seeing it as a potentially effective means of degrading the Lebanese militant group and forcing it to back down. Senior officials are publicly calling for de-escalation as the administration tries to find a diplomatic off-ramp to the metastasizing Middle East conflict. In the past two…

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Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

By Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments…

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Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Iran brokering talks to send advanced Russian missiles to Yemen’s Houthis, sources say

Reuters reports: Iran has brokered ongoing secret talks between Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels to transfer anti-ship missiles to the militant group, three Western and regional sources said, a development that highlights Tehran’s deepening ties to Moscow. Seven sources said that Russia has yet to decide to transfer the Yakhont missiles – also known as P-800 Oniks – which experts said would allow the militant group to more accurately strike commercial vessels in the Red Sea and increase the threat…

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Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war

The Guardian reports: At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens…

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Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Why is Netanyahu starting a cataclysmic new war?

Dimi Reider writes: For much of the last year, the prospect of an all-out war in the North was presented to Israelis as a pitfall to avoid. Israel, they were told, doesn’t want a second war – especially not one that could escalate to a regional one with Iran – and neither does Hezbollah. All in all, both parties would prefer a long-term accommodation or regularisation (hasdarah). Israel wants Hezbollah to stop firing and ideally move its forces further north,…

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Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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