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Category: War

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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Israeli attacks unite Lebanese

Israeli attacks unite Lebanese

The Observer reports: In hospitals around Lebanon, ­hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded. “Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely ­performed these days. One of our senior ­ophthalmologists was saying…

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Israel’s attack on Hezbollah’s communications network is not the victory it claims

Israel’s attack on Hezbollah’s communications network is not the victory it claims

Ori Goldberg writes: Israel has not claimed responsibility for the rolling “pager attack” in Lebanon. Israeli social discourse, however, is not even debating the issue. It is clear that “we did it” (exclamation point optional). What is it that we actually did? One can surmise that Israeli intelligence established a company that produced pagers and walkie-talkies and managed to pique Hezbollah’s interest in these devices. Hezbollah prides itself on its low-tech approach to communications, assuming that this makes its network…

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Volodymyr Zelensky has a plan for Ukraine’s victory

Volodymyr Zelensky has a plan for Ukraine’s victory

Joshua Yaffa writes: Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in central Kyiv. On a recent afternoon, as I sat inside, waiting for Zelensky, I heard his voice—a syrupy baritone, speckled with gravel—before he entered, dressed in his signature military-adjacent style: black T-shirt, olive-drab pants, brown boots. He…

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Zelenskyy has a gamechanging plan to win peace. For it to work, Biden must back it – and fast

Zelenskyy has a gamechanging plan to win peace. For it to work, Biden must back it – and fast

Timothy Garton Ash writes: Earlier this week, I started a 3,000km, two-day journey back from the other end of Europe, where I witnessed Ukrainian resilience against Russian terror in the besieged city of Kharkiv. A university lecturer told me that from a 12th storey balcony in a north-eastern suburb she had actually seen the flashes of missiles taking off from launchpads just across the frontier, in the Russian city of Belgorod. An S-300 missile can reach Kharkiv from Belgorod in…

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A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

Meron Rapoport reports: The date is October, November, or December 2024, or maybe early 2025. The Israeli military has just launched a new operation throughout northern Gaza — “Operation Order and Clean-up,” we’ll call it. The army orders the temporary evacuation of all Palestinian residents north of the Netzarim Corridor “for their personal safety,” explaining that “the IDF is expected to take significant action in Gaza City in the coming days, and wants to avoid harming civilians.” The order is…

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With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

The New York Times reports: After nearly a year of war, fear marks everyday life for Palestinians in Gaza. There is fear of the Israeli warplanes that tear through the skies and carry out deadly airstrikes. There is fear of famine with only a trickle of aid coming in. There is fear of being displaced, yet again, by Israeli evacuation orders. And now, there is increasing fear of being forgotten. International attention has been diverted, first by deadly Israeli military…

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A broader Israel-Lebanon war now seems inevitable

A broader Israel-Lebanon war now seems inevitable

Ishaan Tharoor writes: On Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the war against Hezbollah had entered a “new phase” and that Israel would be concentrating more of its efforts against the group. “The center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north,” Gallant told Israeli Air Force personnel at an air base. By the next day, dozens of Israeli airstrikes hit alleged Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, the group’s leader Hasan Nasrallah…

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Uncommitted movement: Trump remains biggest threat, not Democrats

Uncommitted movement: Trump remains biggest threat, not Democrats

Middle East Eye reports: A group of Michigan-based Democratic voters who launched a historic nationwide primary ballot initiative to enact policy change on Gaza now say their best bet is to continue working through party channels. However, that’s not to say that White House officials or Democratic Party staff have heeded their calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, an arms embargo on Israel, and a lifting of the 17-year-old blockade on the Gaza Strip. In a virtual press conference…

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