'Old Donald' has managed to make Iran launching missiles at Israel all about himself.“Look at the World today—Look at the missiles flying right now in the Middle East, look at what’s happening with Russia/Ukraine, look at Inflation destroying the World,” 'Old Donald' wrote in one post. “NONE OF THIS HAPPENED WHILE I WAS PRESIDENT!”
In another post, 'Old Donald' decried the conflict as “TOTALLY PREVENTABLE.”
“IT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED,” 'Old Donald' said. “IF I WERE PRESIDENT, IT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED!”
Celebrations in Gaza after Hamas says it accepts ceasefire deal
Tensions quickly flared at American universities after the 7 October attack by Hamas that led to the deaths of around 1,200 people in Israel, and to a retaliatory assault that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians.Students are demanding that their schools, many with massive endowments, financially divest from Israel. Divestment means to sell or otherwise drop financial ties.
Student activists say that companies doing business in or with the nation of Israel are complicit in its ongoing war on Gaza - and so are the colleges that invest in those companies.
Israel yet to comment
The Hamas statement supports similar assertions from the White House. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Monday that negotiators are “getting close to the end” on the release of hostages held by Hamas – but he declined to elaborate on the details of a potential deal.
If this Gaza war was like all the others, a ceasefire would probably have been in force by now.The dead would be buried and Israel would be arguing with the United Nations about how much cement could come into Gaza for rebuilding.
But this war is not like that. It is not just because of the enormity of the killing, first by Hamas on 7 October, mostly of Israeli civilians, followed by Israel's "mighty vengeance" as its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it, which has mostly killed Palestinian civilians.
This war is different to the others because it comes at a time when the fault lines that divide the Middle East are rumbling. For at least two decades, the most serious rift in the region's fractured geopolitical landscape has been between the friends and allies of Iran, and the friends and allies of the United States.
Not only is Mr Netanyahu against independence for the Palestinians. His survival as prime minister depends on support from Jewish extremists who believe the entire territory between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean was given to the Jewish people by God and should all be inside Israel's borders.
It won't happen under the current leaderships of both Palestinians and Israelis.
Leaderships change, eventually. If this terrible war in Gaza doesn't force the Israelis, Palestinians and their powerful friends to try again to make peace, then the only future is more war.
There have been five wars in the last 15 years between Israel and Hamas. How do we end the current one and prevent a sixth from happening, sooner or later? How do we balance our desire to stop the fighting with the need to address the roots of the conflict? For 75 years, diplomats, well-intentioned Israelis and Palestinians and government leaders around the world have struggled to bring peace to this region. In that time an Egyptian president and an Israeli prime minister were assassinated by extremists for their efforts to end the violence.And on and on it goes.
This is a humanitarian catastrophe that risks igniting a wider regional conflagration. We all want it to end as soon as possible. To make progress, however, we must grapple with the complexity of this situation that too many people on both sides want to wave away.
Hamas leaders say they waged their Oct. 7 attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause was slipping away, and that only violence could revive it.It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”
About 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.Palestinians called the exodus and eradication of much of their society inside Israel the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, and it remains the traumatic event at the heart of their modern history.
Arabs who remained in Israel as citizens were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.
What happened to the Muslim community in the United States after Sept. 11 — the surveillance, the targeting, the fear — was intimately tied to many Americans’ belief in the righteousness of what our government was doing abroad. As the United States invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq, both wars that wrought devastating civilian casualties and paved the way for political chaos, the public perception of Muslims in America plummeted to new lows. Within a year of the Iraq invasion, a Pew poll found that a larger number of Americans believed Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. By 2014, Muslims ranked lowest in another Pew poll of how the American public views different religious groups.The first Friday after Oct. 7, the first holy day for Muslims and Jews since the attacks, New York City and the rest of the country seemed to be on high alert, bracing itself because a former Hamas leader in Qatar had called for protests across Arab nations in support of the Palestinians, a call which was mislabeled as a day of jihad. I decided to visit the Islamic Center at N.Y.U., expecting a tense and nervous congregation. Instead, an imam finished his speech, and the women around me lined up to pray. As we knelt together, all I could hear was sobs.
We've been here before, but we don't have to be here again.
If Hamas's war aims are indeed to derail the Israeli-Saudi peace treaty and to destroy all chance for normalization and peace, it is winning this war by a knockout. And Israel is helping Hamas, largely because Netanyahu's government seems to be conducting this war without clear political goals of its own.If no other country is willing to accept and protect Palestinian civilians, then once the Red Cross has been given access to the Israeli hostages held by Hamas and has ascertained their conditions, Israel could invite the Red Cross and the other international humanitarian groups to establish temporary havens for displaced Gazan civilians on the Israeli side of the border. These havens would accommodate women, children and hospital evacuees from the Gaza Strip while the fighting against Hamas lasts, and at the end of the fighting, the displaced Gazans would return to the Gaza Strip.
Taking such a step would fulfill Israel's moral duty to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians and would simultaneously aid the Israel Defense Forces in prosecuting the war against Hamas terrorists by reducing the number of civilians caught in the combat zone.
Do such initiatives have any chance of realization? I do not know. But I do know that war is the continuation of politics by other means, that Hamas's political aim is to destroy any chance for peace and normalization, and that Israel's aim should be to preserve the chance for peace. We must win this war, instead of helping Hamas achieve its aim.
U.S. Capitol Police arrested around 300 people who were protesting inside the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building to demand that Congress pass a cease-fire resolution in the Israel-Gaza war amid an intensifying humanitarian crisis.
There's no place for us to go: Gaza hospital director on evacuation orderGazans bombarded by Israel have no No hope and no escape
Intensive Care Unit 'bed numbers were expanded, but have already been filled. The wounded who need an ICU bed now have no place to be admitted,' the ministry said.
Why might Hamas want to draw the Israel Defense Forces into a bloody ground battle? Hamas is the uncontested power in Gaza, though elections have not been held since 2006. The Palestinian Authority; its main political party, Fatah; the business community; civil society; and family clan leaders cannot effectively challenge Hamas, which has become only stronger after each successive conflict with Israel. Despite an Israeli blockade and round-the-clock surveillance, Hamas has apparently been able to build and buy more rockets, steadily improve their range and accuracy, provide offensive combat training for its fighters and develop an intelligence network sophisticated and far-reaching enough to launch a simultaneous assault on 22 Israeli locations. Hamas surely believes it can defeat the Israelis on its home turf in a war of attrition.
Defense officials have ordered a 'complete siege' of Gaza after militants broke through its border wall into southern Israel on Saturday and killed at least 1,200 people, many of them civilians - the deadliest day in Israeli history.'No power, no food, no gas,' Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. 'We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.' Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, orchestrated the ambush over the weekend, when militants took more than 100 hostages to Gaza.
Under the EU’s newly enacted Digital Services Act, Meta is responsible for monitoring and removing illegal content like terrorist content or illegal hate speech. The company also has to detail its protocols for doing so. Failure to comply with the European regulations around illegal content could result in fines worth 6% of a company’s annual revenue.
'The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it. Israel's blanket denial of food, water, and other necessities to Gaza is a serious violation of international law and will do nothing but harm innocent civilians,' Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement Wednesday.
'Such intimidation is counterproductive to the education that needs to take place on our campus at this difficult time,' it continues.
A "significant number" of Israeli civilians and soldiers are being held hostage by Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military says.
Jewish parents in the suburbs of Boston, Washington and elsewhere protested after their school leaders put out statements that sought a measure of neutrality. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D., Mass), appearing at a vigil in Boston, was booed when he called for 'de-escalation of the current violence.'And at Stanford University, faculty protested after university leaders wrote to students about 'the devastating crisis in Israel and Palestine' without calling out Hamas as the aggressor. After a series of anti-Israel and antisemitic messages and incidents spread across campus, Stanford's president and provost sent a lengthy letter describing some of them and referring to 'horrifying new details about the Hamas attack in Israel last weekend, which involved intolerable atrocities including murder of civilians and kidnapping.'
It was obvious that Hamas, and later the Islamic Jihad, were keen on capturing as many Israelis – both soldiers, and settlers – as possible.Doing so, means creating a new line of defense, that would limit the Israeli military response, and would, eventually force Israel to negotiate.
But what the Palestinian Resistance wants from Netanyahu is too high a price for the embattled prime minister to pay.
Freeing all prisoners; respecting the sanctity of Palestinian holy sites in Jerusalem, ending the siege on Gaza and more.
Or, else.
Not only has the Resistance anticipated all scenarios, including the land incursion, but an invasion of Gaza would surely lead to thousands of Israeli deaths; let alone, the harvesting of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
Moreover, the Israeli soldier has proven incapable of fighting a ground battle. Hamas has shown that in recent days, as Hezbollah in Lebanon demonstrated the same fact as well, in 2000 and, again in 2006.
But even if we assume that Israel will be able to carry out such an invasion, what will it do once Gaza is conquered?
'Guys, we have red alert,' the voice warned. 'Red alert.'The Tribe of Nova trance music festival, near Kibbutz Reim, was one of the first targets for Hamas militants as they launched their unprecedented attack on Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning, overrunning the concert area, shooting into the crowd and grabbing as many hostages as they could. Festivalgoers described how the gunmen blocked roads, ambushed escaping cars and scoured the area looking for people to kidnap.
Musk promotes unvetted accounts Information researchers said that the new outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas is an early test of how the revamped X conveys accurate data during a major crisis.The War Monitor account has argued with others over Israel and religion, posting a year ago that 'the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zionists' and telling a correspondent in June to 'go worship a jew lil bro.'
Information researchers said that the new conflict was an early test of how the revamped X conveys accurate data during a major crisis, and that the immediate impression was poor.
The Israeli government, quite reasonably frightened by Arab rhetoric and actions, has enforced conditions in Gaza as bad as any ghetto our people endured. This new horror is the entirely predictable result, and surely demonstrates that “security” that is enforced by an iron fist is not security. It takes two to tango. Can both Israeli and Palestinian leaders now finally listen to those of their two peoples who even now seek peace and reconciliation, and get past their mutually well-founded fear and anger to reach for something better? However hard that is to imagine, it is the only way forward out of this dire swamp.
But now we get to the really terrible part for Israel. Hamas was not only able to cross into Israel and attack Israeli communities and army bases, but it was also able to kidnap a number of Israelis — reportedly including some older people, children and at least one soldier — and take them back to Gaza. Associated Press photos “showed an abducted elderly Israeli woman being brought back into Gaza on a golf cart by Hamas gunmen and another woman squeezed between two fighters on a motorcycle,” A.P. reported. Pictures of Israeli bodies taken to Gaza and being dragged into the streets were circulating on the internet.
he Jewish state’s current leaders, she said, were welcoming violent racists and trying to dismantle democracy and pluralism. American Jewry’s liberal majority, she said, must fight back. “Two coalitions. Two versions of Judaism. Two visions for the Jewish people, in direct conflict,” she said, prompting applause and eventually a standing ovation — both rare sights in synagogue.
Perhaps most disgusting and divisive has been the spectacle of Republicans telling outright lies in order to claim that the Biden administration is directly “complicit” in the attack, as Senator Tim Scott has claimed. 'Old Donald' and others say that the Biden administration helped finance the attack with a recent deal in which $6bn in Iranian oil revenue was unfrozen in exchange for the release of five American hostages. But this money – not a cent of which has yet been spent – is controlled by Qatar and can only be used by Tehran to purchase humanitarian supplies. Meanwhile, it’s clear that this attack has been in the work for months – far before the deal was even struck.
What happened in Israel on Saturday should not have surprised anyone.Palestinian officials had repeatedly spoken of an explosion if there was no political progress on alleviating their people's suffering. Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, King Abdullah II of Jordan said, 'Without clarity on where the Palestinians' future lies, it will be impossible to converge on a political solution to this conflict. Five million Palestinians live under occupation - no civil rights; no freedom of mobility; no say in their lives.' And recently, Egyptian intelligence had reportedly warned Israel of a catastrophe unless there was political progress.
The late Israeli president Shimon Peres used to quote an Arabic proverb: Fil haraka baraka - there is a blessing in movement. Unfortunately, there has been no movement on the political front for years. The last public talks between Israelis and Palestinians ended in 2014, and at the time, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry put the blame on the Israelis for their suspension.
Since then, no talks have taken place, even while three U.S. presidents - Barack Obama, 'Old Donald' and Joe Biden - have invoked the empty mantra of a two-state solution.
After that weakening, that overstretch, Joe Biden's America now finds itself facing a more serious alignment of major-power foes than did our empire under Bush. Which makes it essential that we figure out how to pursue today's more defensive objectives - the independence of Ukraine, the support of Israel, the preservation of Taiwan - through means that are more conservative than the ones the Bush administration embraced 20 years ago. And it's crucial that we help our friends and allies, in their own moments of anguish and devastation, to make strategy more coolly than we did.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote Thursday on X. 'We cannot starve nearly a million children to death over the horrific actions of Hamas, whose disregard for Israeli, Palestinian, and human life overall could not be more clear. We must draw a line.
When The Times's Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was 'to restore honor to Israel,'
All these Islamist/jihadist movements - the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis - have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
I believe that such a move could turn Israel's humiliating tactical defeat at the hands of Hamas, which included unimaginable barbarism, into a long-term moral and military strategic crisis.
Black NYU Law Student Speaks Out After Job Offer Rescinded Following Pro-Palestine Letter
In their first interview with the media, Workman told The Intercept that their message was to shed light on Israel’s “75-year violent regime over Palestine” and advocate for basic human rights. They also admired the resilience of the people of Gaza, who continued to use their voice to garner global support.“What’s been driving me is the resilience of Palestinians in this moment,” Workman told to The Intercept. “The fact that they are still using their voice, that they are still standing strong, that they are still here, and that they are asking us to continue to speak out and show up for them through this and to not let this be their end.”