Emily Callahan, an American nurse with Doctors Without Borders, gives a harrowing description of what she witnessed in Gaza as she was attempting to get out of the area.
◾ Emotional and valiant appearance on American prime time TV giving a first hand account of the horrible conditions of death and starvation the Palestinian people are been subjected by the Israelis, but also of their incredible bravery and heroism, their endurance and love for their homeland and their people.
Western support for military action in Gaza will evaporate as public opinion turns against it, Ehud Barak told Politico
via RT
The Israeli military only has weeks to destroy Hamas before Western governments withdraw their support for the operation in Gaza, former prime minister Ehud Barak has said.
The Israeli military has but weeks to inflict damage on Hamas, before Western governments reduce support for the operation in Gaza, former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak believes.
“Listen to the public tone – and behind doors it is a little bit more explicit,” said the 81-year-old, who also served as defense minister and a general with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
“We are losing public opinion in Europe and in a week or two we’ll start to lose governments in Europe,” Barak told Politico, as reported on Tuesday. “And after another week the friction with the Americans will emerge to the surface.”
US officials have been advocating for “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza, but have not publicly threatened to withdraw Washington’s backing. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to stop hostilities. Barak believes Israel will have to “come to terms with the American demands within the next two or three weeks, probably less.”
“You can see the window is closing. It’s clear we are heading towards friction with the Americans about the offensive. America cannot dictate to Israel what to do. But we cannot ignore them,” he remarked.
However, the former general believes it would take the IDF months, or even a year, to push Hamas out of Gaza. Israel has made the obliteration of the Palestinian military group its primary objective after it caused hundreds of civilian deaths during an incursion a month ago.
The IDF has subjected Gaza to intensive bombardments as part of its strategy. Gaza officials reported that the death toll in the Palestinian enclave had surpassed 10,000 on Monday.
New evidence of changing attitudes in Europe emerged on Monday, when Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo blasted Israel’s military tactics.
“Bombing an entire refugee camp with the intention of taking out one terrorist, I don’t think you can say that is proportional,” De Croo said. “It is a bridge too far.”
Last week, the IDF hit several Palestinian refugee camps, including the large Jabalia settlement in northern Gaza, which Israel had declared an evacuation zone. Israeli military spokesman Richard Hecht described the civilian casualties from Israeli strikes as “the tragedy of war” when confronted by CNN host Wolf Blitzer last week.
Barak served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and represented his nation during the US-mediated 2000 Camp David Summit with Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Iraqi demonstrators watch a speech from Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on a screen as they hold flags of, Hezbollah during a pro-Palestinian rally in Basra, Iraq, Friday, Nov. 3, 2023. – Sputnik International, 1920, 05.11.202 © AP Photo / Nabil al-Jurani
by Ilya Tsukanov via Sputnik
From the first hours of the October 7 crisis, US officials have tried to goad Hezbollah into joining Hamas’ war against Israel to give neocons the pretext they need to bomb Iran. Political analyst Ajamu Baraka told Sputnik why Hezbollah has so far been able to resist the pressure, and why doing so is becoming more and more difficult with time.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah gave a fiery speech Friday condemning Israel for its war in Gaza and accusing the United States of bearing full responsibility for the crisis.
“America is entirely responsible for the ongoing war on Gaza and its people, and Israel is simply a tool of execution,” Nasrallah said in a speech in Beirut. The US “impedes a ceasefire and the end of the aggression,” he added.
Emphasizing that Hamas’ surprise October 7 incursion into Israel was the result of a “100 percent Palestinian decision,” Nasrallah warned that Tel Aviv would make the biggest mistake in its history if it attacked Lebanon, and said that Hezbollah is tying down a third of the Israeli military, even if back-and-forth attacks haven’t crossed the threshold into a full-scale war. “If Israel continues to hit our civilians, I say with constructive ambiguity: all options are on the table on the Lebanese front,” he said.
Nasrallah went on to dismiss the positioning of US warships in the region in what the Pentagon has characterized as a “signal” to Hezbollah and “other actors” not to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. “Threats against us are pointless. Your naval forces in the Mediterranean do not frighten us and have never frightened us. These ships you threaten us with, we have prepared a response to them,” Nasrallah said.
Separately on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv to speak with Israeli officials and give an update on the war.
“Days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, I came to Israel, followed soon thereafter by President Biden, to make clear that as long as the United States stands, Israel will never stand alone. Today, in my fourth visit to Israel since October 7, I reiterated that in all my discussions with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, the security cabinet. I reiterated and made clear our support for Israel’s right to defend itself, indeed, its obligation to defend itself,” Blinken said.
Blaming Hamas for the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and accusing the militia of “cynically and monstrously” using people as “human shields,” Blinken urged Israel to show restraint in its military operations to “minimize civilian deaths while still achieving its objectives of finding and finishing Hamas terrorists and their infrastructure of violence.”
“I think the Palestinian resistance and Hamas in particular are hoping that there will be a more aggressive response, a deeper penetration into or an attempt at least to address the presence of Israeli soldiers along the border and actually in parts of Lebanon,” international human rights activist, organizer and political analyst Ajamu Baraka told Sputnik, commenting on key points of Nasrallah’s address.
“I think there may be some dissatisfaction with that, but I think Hezbollah is very much concerned about the domestic situation in Lebanon and would like to avoid a deeper commitment since the situation that they are facing and the situation facing Lebanese citizens is so unstable right now,” the observer added, pointing to Lebanon’s years’ old political and economic crisis, which has threatened at points to explode into a new round of sectarian violence.
The Gaza crisis “is putting significant pressure on Hezbollah to become more aggressive, not just from Hamas, but from elements within Lebanese society and from elements across the so-called Middle East,” Baraka said.
“People are really outraged by what they see. Many people are concluding that with the diplomatic channels being blocked by the US – and the criticism that [Nasrallah] raised was in fact true, that when you have the US blocking any attempts to come to a ceasefire or to have a more effective humanitarian corridor, it’s quite clear that the US is fully implicated in the slaughter of Palestinians. So it’s putting tremendous pressure on everyone to act, and to act, at this point in a military fashion since the diplomatic and peaceful channels seem to have been preempted,” the observer emphasized.
Baraka expects to see “political blowback” against Washington across the world and inside the US itself, suggesting that America’s credibility has been heavily damaged through its stalwart support for Israel throughout the present crisis. “In terms of the rest of the real world, outside of the 10 percent that represents Europe and the US, it’s quite clear to everyone who the real perpetrators are in this conflict, and in most of the conflicts that have occurred since the end of World War II. It is in fact the US and the US empire, along with their vassals in Western Europe, first attempting to maintain their colonial possessions, and then secondly to consolidate and expand the power of Western imperialist capital through war, subversion, assassination, sanctions and all of the tools they have readily available to in fact do that,” he said.
Today, the observer noted, even inside the US itself public opinion is starting “to catch up with the rest of the world,” and “people are beginning to understand that they in fact live in a rogue state and that they are not the good guys, and they definitely are not innocent. That’s some of the points that were made by the leader of Hezbollah. Unfortunately, some of that sounds very, very accurate.”
The Gaza crisis may turn into an important “turning point” in the US’s justifications for empire, Baraka believes, since it robs Washington of a key tool previously used to justify attempts to set up a global “rules-based international order.” Today, he said, the US move to give a “green light to the slaughter” in Gaza robs the US of the ability to “frame their policies” in “positive humanitarian terms.
“It means that we have crossed a threshold, so that the US, in not being able to effectively use these ideological tools, will find it in their interest to just replicate what the Israelis are doing and engage in the most horrendous violent activity, and not caring about the response, if the response is not a response in which there’s a real exercise of power that can constrain them,” Baraka warned.
As for Blinken’s trip to Tel Aviv, Baraka suggested that the secretary was merely playing the role of running “PR interference to buy time so that the Israelis can continue with their military operation,” which the analyst stressed cannot succeed because the resistance is not Hamas, but the Palestinian people themselves.
EVERYONE MUST UNDERSTAND THE ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT (00:30) – anti-Zionist Rabbi Beck.
Beck explains Palestinians have full right of whole land and people must stop ignoring some parts of history just because it clashes with their narrative (01:08).
I’m a teacher. A child comes to me “teacher, he hit me!” No, please, look at everything that happened. What you did to him before that. You have to look at the whole situation – Rabbi on Hamas’s October 7 surprise attack.
[ . . . ] the overwhelming Russian support for the Palestinians in their fight for survival against Israel. No poll is allowed to measure and publish this support, and the emotional reaction the majority of Russians feels towards the operations of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the US military to destroy the population of Gaza. – John Helmer
“We should not, we have no right and we cannot allow ourselves to be carried away by emotions,” President Vladimir Putin announced on October 30.
“We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organising this lethal chaos and who benefits from it. In my opinion, it has already become clear to everyone, as the masterminds brazenly act in the open. These are the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites who are the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this.”
via @TheIslanderNews
In the gruesome theatre of war, Gaza’s soil is stained with the imprints of Israeli boots, each step echoing the chilling narrative of oppression. The ground assault, a testament to Israel’s insatiable appetite for dominance, unfolds amidst the cries of the innocent. A week into this ordeal, Israel boasts of encircling Gaza City, snuffing out the lives of ten Hamas commanders, yet the spirit of resistance thrives amidst the rubble.
As Israeli forces inch deeper into the heart of Gaza, the world witnesses a blatant exhibition of aggression, each advancement severing the lifelines of the innocent. The siege tightens around Gaza’s only cancer treatment facility (Al-Shifa), its closure a silent killer amidst the chaos. Yet, the ember of resistance burns fiercely as Hamas retaliates, displaying a show of defiance that reverberates across borders, challenging the IDF on every front.
The Israeli narrative of decimating Hamas’s military prowess crumbles as days roll by. Each day, rockets soar, defying the iron dome, an emblem of unwavering resilience against the IDF’s onslaught. The toll of innocent lives climbs, painting a grim picture of the price paid for a breath of deffered freedom. The world gazes upon the unfolding horror, yet the corridors of power echo with eerie silence, the condemnations lost in the void of political apathy.
The saga of Gaza is a stark reminder of humanity’s resilience in the face of overpowering adversity. Amidst the cacophony of warfare, whispers of hope for a ceasefire resonate, longing for a world where empathy triumphs over apathy. The unfolding tragedy in Gaza is not just a regional concern, but a global call to action. Amid the despair, the vision of a just peace flickers on the horizon, urging the global community to transcend divisive ideologies, and unite in fostering a climate where peace can flourish, heralding a new dawn of a ceasefire that could pave the path towards enduring peace.
Craig Mokhiber, director of human rights body, resigned a few days ago after accusing the US, UK and much of Europe as ‘wholly complicit in the horrific assault’:
– In this case, the intent by Israeli leaders has been so explicitly stated and publicly stated by the prime minister, by the president, by senior cabinet ministers, by military leaders… It’s on the public record. What I see unfolding on Gaza is Genocide.
Israel does not have the right to self-defense as an occupying power, this is confirmed by the conclusion of the International Court of Justice in 2004, said Vasily Nebenzya. At the same time, he emphasized that the Russian Federation recognizes Israel’s right to ensure its security.
Palestine previously stated that Israel does not have the right to self-defense. Almost all major players in the political world (USA, Italy, Spain, Britain, Canada, etc.) hold the opposite opinion, although many of them with the caveat that this right does not allow the Jewish state to kill civilians.
Israeli security forces today raided an anti-Zionist Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem ( Mea Shearim, there is such a place) to remove Palestinian flags.
‘Meanwhile Biden and his top aides discussed the possibility that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political days are numbered, writes Politico.
The topic of “Netanyahu’s short remaining political shelf life” has come up in recent White House meetings involving Biden, two senior administration officials said. This includes discussions that took place following Biden’s trip to Israel, where he met with Netanyahu.
Biden went so far as to invite Netanyahu to consider lessons he would share with his eventual successor, the two administration officials added.
Sergei Markov writes:
Malta. There was a big conference on Ukraine. Russian media unanimously write that Zelensky failed there. But that’s not true.
This is not a meeting, this is a process, this is a project. And he has several tasks that he performs.
1. Create a platform for permanent dialogue between the Collective West and the Global South on the Ukrainian crisis. In order to at some point use this platform in the interests of the Collective West, forcing the Global South to join this. 2. Institutionalize this platform. Make it essentially an organization.
3. Put the US plan, which they formally gave to Zelensky, at the center of the discussions, calling it “Zelensky’s peace plan.” Although this is not Zelensky’s plan, and not peace, but the surrender of Russia.
4. So far they have succeeded. The third big meeting took place. And there will be a 4th.
5. There were 15 countries in Copenhagen. In Jida there are already 43. In Malta there are already 66.
6. 5 working groups have been created in the areas of the “Zelensky plan” and discussions are taking place there. That is, it is already a permanent organization with its own structure.
7. All these discussions are strictly anti-Russian. For example, there is a safety group at Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. It seems like what is there to discuss? It is clear to everyone that the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant has one security threat – nuclear terrorism from Zelensky. But they are discussing, as you understand, something else – how to gradually transfer control over the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant to the Kyiv regime using cunning tricks.
8. The fact that China and Egypt did not participate is good. But these are temporary difficulties of the project. 9. Overall, this US effort is going well.
10. Trying to portray the enemy’s success as a failure is not the path to victory.
11. One of the goals of this format for the United States is, if the Russian army begins an offensive, to organize enormous pressure on Russia with the participation of these 66 countries, including the Global South, to demand that Russia stop the offensive and conclude “Minsk 3.”
12. We need to prepare for such a turn, and not convince ourselves that they are a failure. Unfortunately, they are not a failure.
13. Remember how we spent 8 years telling ourselves fairy tales that the Kiev regime was about to collapse? Collapsed? Don’t lie to yourself.