via Jonathan Cook

It’s not just ‘unlikely’ that a Palestinian rocket hit the Gaza hospital. It’s impossible. The media know this, they just don’t dare say it

Let’s say it again: The BIGGEST fake news comes from the establishment media. When the stakes are high, it barely bothers to hide its role as mouthpiece for Western propaganda.

This is another Iraqi WMD moment. We are being gaslit. Believe your eyes and ears, and the laws of physics, not the lies being peddled by our leaders and media about last night’s missile strike on the Baptist hospital in Gaza:

1. No Palestinian group has a rocket that can hit a hospital, killing hundreds. What they have are glorified fireworks that can cause minor damage and the occasional death or two. If Hamas or Islamic Jihad could cause the kind of damage that happened last night, you would hear about it happening in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon too. You don’t, because they can’t.

2. Israel’s apologists (and there are lots of them) are sharing all sorts of videos unrelated to the hospital strike. But the video of the strike itself shows that an incredibly large and powerful weapon is used. Listen to the noise the missile makes just before the hit – that whooshing noise is caused by its phenomenal velocity as it cuts through the air. That is not the noise of a falling Palestinian rocket.

If you watch videos being shared of Palestinian rockets being fired, notice how slowly they travel. Almost at a snail’s pace. If they fail, they drop at free-fall speed, not the near-supersonic speed of the missile that hit the hospital. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the laws of physics.

1. Israel’s apologists are trying to further muddy the waters by suggesting that either a Palestinian rocket fell, or was intercepted, and the rocket or fragments of it hit a very large ammo dump in the hospital. Let’s just accept the racist premise that hundreds of families were quite happy to seek safety next to a huge stash of explosives in the middle of a relentless Israeli bombing campaign. Let’s also accept the fantastical idea that a falling glorified firework or fragment of it could penetrate the hospital’s strong walls and set off such an explosion. If all this was true, you would still see a series of secondary explosions as the arms were detonated by the initial explosion. You don’t because there is only one explosion – from an enormous missile.

2. It’s a desperate psyop, so Israel has now released a recording of two Hamas militants conveniently having a chat after the missile strike, discussing whether they or Islamic Jihad did it. This is the same Israel that did not detect months of planning by Hamas that was needed to organise its breakout 10 days ago. But Israel got lucky this time, it seems, and just happened to be listening in when Huey and Louie decided to self-incriminate.

Remember Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians. Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people, set in Gaza, called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.

Most of the people spreading these lies know they are lies, including the media, and most especially the Middle East and defence correspondents. At least a few, like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Jon Donnison, are trying cautiously to suggest it’s unlikely a Hamas rocket could cause damage on the scale seen at the Gaza hospital. But it’s not unlikely. It’s impossible, and they know it. They just don’t dare say it.

by James Tweedie via Sputnik

Israel has demanded military aid from the US for its war with the Hamas movement. Former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter pointed out that the Pentagon’s cupboard was bare and it was failing to meet recruiting targets.

The US cannot give Israel the arms it needs for a war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — or even maintain its own forces — says a military veteran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war on the Hamas movement that rules in the besieged Gaza Strip in the wake of the surprise attack by several allied militant groups on October 7.

The incursion and subsequent skirmishes — including with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas on Israel’s northern border — has left almost 300 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops dead with 200 more held captive in Gaza. around 1,000 Israeli civilians were also killed. That represents Israel’s worst losses since its 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon.

Tel Aviv has called up some 350,000 IDF reservists and has bombed Gaza for almost two weeks in preparation for a ground offensive, which Economy Minister Nir Barkat said had been given the “green light” on Thursday. But that invasion has yet to materialise.

Former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told Sputnikthe IDF simply “can’t go into Gaza.”

“If they go into Gaza, they will be slaughtered by Hamas who has deliberately set this trap,” Ritter stressed. “Hamas is waiting for them to come in. Hamas will kill them in large numbers.”

Along with the risk of heavy casualties in Gaza, Israel is wary of Hezbollah’s threat to launch a major attack from the north if the IDF goes in.

“Israel cannot beat Hezbollah,” Ritter argued. “There’s a real likelihood that if Hezbollah comes in with everything they have, they will seize northern Israel in its totality, all the way up to the Sea of Galilee. Syria will recapture the Golan Heights, and there isn’t anything Israel can do to stop it.”

US president Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv on Wednesday to pledge unqualified support to Israel — while endorsing Netanyahu’s claim that it was a stray Islamic Jihad rocket that killed 471 Palestinian refugees at the al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza, not an Israeli bomb or missile.

Israel has asked Washington for large quantities of military equipment and munitions, including tens of thousands of 155mm-calibre artillery shells previously earmarked for Ukraine, and as many missiles for its Iron Dome air defense system — used to intercept rockets launched from Gaza — as the US could supply.

“Israel has exhausted its Iron Dome. They sent an emergency request to the United States for all of the Iron Dome ammunition we had,” Ritter noted. But while “Israel’s hoping to get several thousand rounds, maybe 10,000 rounds,” all the US could offer was “360-some odd. That’s all we have.”

“Hamas will exhaust that in one night, firing two salvos of 150 rockets each. That’s it,” he warned. “And Hezbollah’s sitting on a stockpile of tens of thousands. And if they fire these… and Israel has nothing to knock them down, that means Hamas will eviscerate Israel will destroy Israel’s leadership capacity, industrial capacity, military capacity.”

Ritter said Israel’s leaders had “backed themselves into a corner” by vowing to destroy Hamas, a goal they have failed to achieve several times in the past.

“They’ve let their rhetoric get the better of them,” he said, noting that even Biden had told Netanyahu to “calm down.”

“Behind the scenes he was actively telling the Israelis the hard truth: that America isn’t going to step in and fight Israel’s battles for it, that if Israel goes into Gaza, one of the consequences will be Hezbollah’s intervention,” Ritter said.

“America is not putting boots on the ground or dropping bombs on Hezbollah because we don’t want a wider war with Iran,” he added. We have thousands of troops positioned throughout the Persian Gulf whose lives would be put at risk if Iran joined this fight. We don’t want that. It’s not our fight.”

The former US Marine dismissed Biden’s deployment of two aircraft carrier strike groups along with a Marine Corps amphibious assault ship with F-35 fighters and 2,000 troops to the eastern Mediterranean in a warning to other nations not to intervene as the US “flexing its muscles.”

“If you reflect on the reality that’s all we have. There’s nothing else to send Israel,” Ritter said. “And what we’ve deployed is not enough to handle the threat that can be posed by Hezbollah in Lebanon or by Iran if it chooses to intervene.”

He noted that, like its arms industry, the US military was increasingly hollowed out as young people lose interest in fighting — and losing — overseas wars.

“60,000 I think was the target to recruit for this year, and we were short 6000. That means that the army is missing 6000 soldiers, that it has billets for. If you don’t have soldiers to fill that billet, then you have to shrink your military further,” Ritter explained.

“In order to meet this new two-war concept that Biden and Congress are talking about, we’re going to have to increase the size of our conventional military. That means they will have to increase it by about 100,000 -150,000,” he pointed out. “We can’t meet the current recruiting requirements because nobody wants to fight.”

Israel would like to solve the problem without tanks in Gaza, but it seems a ground operation is inevitable

Yuri Podolyaka, journalist

▪️The first phase of the conflict in the Middle East has passed; it turned out to be a failure for Israel. Now they cannot solve their problems: senseless bombing is a sign of weakness.

▪️If the Israeli army enters Gaza, it will suffer colossal losses that will be impossible to explain to Israeli citizens. And it would be preferable for them to solve the problem without bringing tanks into Gaza.

▪️But now the Palestinians consider the situation a win-win for themselves. Without a serious military defeat, they will not negotiate surrender; but Netanyahu can only be saved politically by the surrender of Palestine. A stalemate? – We need to somehow start a land war. And losing the war will be a death sentence not only for Netanyahu, but perhaps for all of Israel, because it is holding on to this narrow strip of land until everyone understands that Israel is strong, with the United States behind it.

▪️As soon as Turkey understands that Israel has weakened so much that the problem of creating the Ottoman Empire in the south can be solved, this process will be turned on, and then Israel’s days will be numbered. Israel has already suffered reputational losses, and if the situation remains this way, the war will continue when the Palestinian side gains strength.

▪️If Israel cannot defeat Gaza militarily, it will continue to lose the war. The next phase will be even more terrible for Israel. Every country understands this and they are withdrawing their citizens from neighboring countries.

An Israeli ground operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, but will this be a death sentence for Zelensky as well?

▪️Everyone is afraid that this phase is inevitable, and that Israel will suffer colossal losses. And that will be a death sentence for the Ukrainian armed forces, which, of course, will not receive serious support in the foreseeable future. All Western countries have already announced that their priority is clear: Israel.

▪️Some money will be allocated to Ukraine, but not what Kyiv is counting on, especially after the failed counter-offensive.

Ostashko!

“After we win this war… (we will make sure Ukraine wins…) Russia will pay the price…”

Amir Weitman, a member of Israel’s ruling Likud party, threatens Russia live on RT.

This is exactly what Russia tried very hard to avoid, but it was unable to do so. The “collective West” is the “collective Jewish West”. A war with the West will inevitably degenerate into a cataclysmic conflagration worldwide.

Western support for Israel has “poisoned efforts” to pull the countries of the “global South” to the side of Ukraine – The Financial Times writes about this with reference to officials and diplomats.

Dozens of Western officials told the publication that it “undid months of work to portray Moscow as a global pariah for violating international law,” and the West is now accused of hypocrisy because Israel is clearly also violating the rules of war.

“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we did with the Global South [on Ukraine] has been lost. Forget about the rules, forget about the world order. They will never listen to us again,” said a senior diplomat from a G7 country .

Many developing countries supported the Palestinians, viewing the situation through the prism of “self-determination and resistance to US global dominance.”

“What we said about Ukraine also applies to the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, we will lose all our authority. Brazilians, South Africans, Indonesians: why should they even believe what we say about human rights?” the diplomat added.

“It’s a godsend for Russia. I think what’s happening is damaging because Russia is using the crisis and saying, ‘Look, the global order that was built after World War II isn’t working for you,’ and appealing to 1 billion people in the Middle East or the Arab world,” said a senior EU official.

Former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says there is now a danger that the EU, G7 and NATO “will not be taken seriously”.

“There is a risk that at the next [UN] General Assembly vote on support for Ukraine we will see a big explosion in the number of abstentions,” says a senior Western diplomat.

The Global South shunned Ukraine a long time ago, but the West is seemingly living in some alternate reality…

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh: Israel gearing up to flatten Gaza, wants Egypt, Qatar to handle refugees

Once the civilian population of the Gaza Strip gets evicted, Israel intends to launch a full-scale bombing campaign that would result in the destruction of the city, if Hersh’s revelations are to be believed.

First, the Israeli Air Force would wipe out the “remaining structures in Gaza City.” Then, Israeli aircraft would start dropping US-made 5,000-pound bunker buster bombs in the “flattened areas” of the Gaza Strip in order to destroy Hamas’ underground facilities hidden deep beneath the enclave.

An Israeli insider told Hersh that the “current Israeli war planners” believe such munitions – “upgraded version of JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) with larger warheads” – would be able to penetrate up to 50 meters deep before exploding and “killing all within one-half mile.”

Meanwhile, a former European intelligence official told Hersh that Hamas’ tunnels are situated so deep underground they can withstand the attacks with JDAMs.

by Andrea Dergalin via Sputnik

A week after Hamas militants launched their brazen attack on Israeli soil, thus sparking the escalation of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s military appears poised to roll over the Gaza Strip, which they regard as Hamas’ stronghold.

In the days that followed Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Israeli forces kept pounding the Gaza Strip with airstrikes in preparation for a ground assault against the densely-populated Palestinian enclave.

Israeli authorities have also instructed the Gaza Strip’s civilian population via airdropped leaflets to effectively abandon their homes and evacuate south to the border crossing with Egypt.

While it remains to be seen whether Egypt would be willing to accommodate thousands of Palestinian refugees that might participate in this veritable exodus, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims, citing an Israeli insider, that Tel Aviv is trying to convince Qatar to “join with Egypt in funding a tent city for the million or more refugees awaiting across the border.”

According to Hersh, the Israeli insider told him that “it’s not a done deal” and that both Qatar and Egypt were warned that the Palestinian refugees would have to “go back to Gaza” in lieu of what the journalist described as a landing site.

“The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands,” Hersh surmised.

The Israeli insider also admitted that his country essentially took a page from the US playbook with this plan for Palestinian refugee relocation, referring to the so-called Strategic Hamlet Program from the Vietnam War era.

Under the auspices of said program, authorized by John F. Kennedy’s administration, Vietnamese civilians living in contested areas were forcibly relocated to housing built in the South Vietnam-controlled areas.

“Their deserted lands were then declared to be Free Fire Zones where all who stayed could be targeted by American troops,” Hersh added, referring to the Vietnam War era program.

The plan for the relocation of Palestinian civilians would essentially ensure that “at least the people would not all be killed,” the Israeli insider said, claiming that Hamas wants to keep some civilians within the Gaza Strip to use them as “human shields.”

After the bunker busters do their job, Israeli infantry forces would move in to conduct mop-up operations.

One Israeli Defense Force veteran, however, told Hersh that “the Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” with the journalist clarifying that the Israeli leadership is concerned about their soldiers’ potential “disastrous lack of combat experience.”

The Israeli planners seem reluctant to immediately send IDF forces into the Gaza Strip to engage in urban combat with Hamas militants. That is why they seek to flatten the city before commencing ground operations there.

Meanwhile, a former European intelligence official expressed his skepticism about the Israeli plan, telling Hersh that “a city in rubble is just as dangerous as at any time” and that “the talk of JDAMS is the talk of people who don’t know what to do.”

The official argued that Hamas’ tunnels are situated so deep underground they can withstand the attacks with JDAMs.

“This was a carefully planned operation, and Hamas knew exactly what the Israeli reaction would be. Urban warfare is awful,” Hersh’s European source said.

Clare Daly rips Ursula von der Leyen apart in the EU Parliament

How dare Ursula von der Leyen  declare “Europe stands with Israel”?

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Global focus just shifted from Ukraine to Palestine. This new arena of confrontation will ignite further competition between the Atlanticist and Eurasian blocs. These fights are increasingly zero-sum ones; as in Ukraine, only one pole can emerge strengthened and victorious.

Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.

• First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.
• Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.

It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.

Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.

Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin.

Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.

There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing.

A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.

Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.

Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.

Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to nohigh-tech surveillanceaccess, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.

It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.

Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”

After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.

Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.

Which brings us to Iran.

Geopolitical plausible deniability

The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.

In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.

Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.

The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.

Elsewhere in the region,the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.

Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.

Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.

A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.

What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.

China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.

Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.

The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.

Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said that China will continue to stand on the side of international law, peace and justice, condemning all acts of violence against civilians in Israel’s war with Hamas. The unprecedented militant raid claimed over 1,300 lives and prompted Israel to declare war, with hundreds of Palestinians now dying in retaliatory strikes on Gaza every day.

“China condemns all acts that harm civilians and opposes any violation of international law,” China’s top diplomat said, as he met with the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in Beijing on Friday. Wang Yi said that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “rapidly deteriorating” and already “critical.”

However, China’s top diplomat insisted that the “root cause of this question lies in the long delay in realizing the dream of an independent State of Palestine and the failure to redress the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinian people.”

“Israel has the right to statehood, so does Palestine,” Wang Yi stated. “The Israelis have obtained the safeguards for survival, but who will care about the survival of the Palestinians? The Jewish nation is no longer homeless in the world, but when will the Palestinian nation return to its home?”

There is no shortage of injustices in the world, but the injustice to Palestine has dragged on for over half a century. The sufferings that plagued generations must not continue.

Beijing said that the top priority is to ”stop the fighting as soon as possible” to “prevent it from spreading endlessly,” and “make every effort to ensure the safety of civilians, open up a humanitarian rescue and assistance passage as quickly as possible.”

The international community, including the United Nations, should “play its due role in resolving” the crisis, while the sides of the conflict should “stay calm and exercise restraint, take an objective and just position, and work for de-escalation.”

The only answer to the decades-old conflict is the “two-state solution and an independent State of Palestine,” Wang Yi insisted, expressing hope that this way “Palestine and Israel could coexist in peace and how the Arabs and Jews could live in harmony.”

via Moon of Alabama

What is the reason for the ‘Al-Aqsa Deluge’, as Hamas had named its terror operation against the Zionists?

On October 8 Alastair Crooke, one of most experienced Middle East hands, wrote in AlMahadeen:

“Israel” has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of “Israel’s” future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi — a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.

Mizrahi are mostly the original Middle Eastern Jews and often on the religious far right, Ashkenazi are mostly liberal European ones. The current Netanyahoo government is the first which includes far-right Mizrahi ministers.

Most Mizrahi follow the Sephardi religious rites. They want an religious state based on Jewish law. They are as radial as ISIS.

The high court of Israel has 14 Ashkenazi judges and one Mizrahi one. It is one of the reasons why the Netanyahoo government wants the parliament to be able to vote down high court judgements. There have been large, U.S. sponsored ‘regime change’ protests in Israel against that move. The leaders of the military and security services, mostly Ashkenazi, have also opposed the government move against the court.

I therefore think that it is quite possible that there was intelligence pointing to the Hamas attack, but that it was not revealed to let Netanyahoo fall into a trap. We have however no evidence that there were reasonably precise intelligence warnings, or that they were held up.

There are already demands for Netanyahoo to go. If only for his long term sponsoring of Hamas as a counterweight to the more secular Fatah Palestinians. Should he no longer be prime minister the courts will take up the three bribe cases against him which are currently pending. He would likely end up in jail.

Another reason for Hamas’ success was the fact that three of the four infantry battalions, with 800 soldiers each, that usually guard the Gaza strip, had been moved to the West Bank to protect right-wing Zionist settlers during a religious holiday. This allowed for Hamas’ easy breach of the fence.

Back to Alastair Crooke on the real motive of the Al-Aqsa flood:

Well, the Right in Netanyahu’s government has two long-standing commitments. One is to rebuild the (Jewish) Temple on ‘Temple Mount’ (Haram al-Shariff).Just to be clear, that would entail demolishing Al-Aqsa.

The second overriding commitment is to the founding of “Israel”, on the “Land of Israel”. And again, to be clear, this (in their view) would entail clearing Palestinians from the West Bank. Indeed, the settlers have been cleansing Palestinians from swaths of the West Bank over the past year (notably between Ramallah and Jericho).

On Thursday morning (two days preceding Al-Aqsa Flood), more than 800 settlers stormed the Mosque Compound, under the full protection of Israeli forces. The drumbeat of such provocations is rising.

This is nothing new. The First Intifada was triggered by (then) PM Sharon making a provocative visit into the mosque. I was a part of Senator George Mitchell’s Presidential Committee investigating that incident. Even then, it was clear that Sharon intended the visit to fuel the fire of religious nationalism. At that time, the Temple Mount Movement was a minnow; today it has ministers in Cabinet and in key security positions — and has promised its followers to build the ‘Third Temple’.

So, the threat to Al-Aqsa has been building for two decades, and today is reaching an apex. And yet US and Israeli intelligence didn’t see resistance coming, and nor did they see the settler violence building in the West Bank?

What happened on Saturday was widely expected and clearly extensively planned.

There is by the way no archaeologic evidence, none, that a Jewish ‘Temple’ ever existed in Jerusalem. If it did, it was most likely not on the hill of Al-Aqsa but one of the six other ones.

Al-Aqsa is holy to all Muslims, Shia and Sunni alike. Its destruction would inevitably lead to war. The West is clearly underestimating what forces calls like this one can rise:

Khalid Aljabri, MD د.خالد الجبري @JabriMD – 11:52 UTC · Oct 13, 2023Friday sermon from the Grand Mosque in Mecca prays for the “liberation of Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem.

This is significant for two reasons:
• Audience of 2 billion Muslims.
• Such sermons have been significantly censored under MBS. Today’s sermon was likely pre-approved.
Video

Israel has used White Phosphorus on the people in Gaza, another war crime. Israel has given all people in north Gaza, 1.1 million human beings, 24 hours to move to south Gaza. That is impossible and will not happen. It is an attempt of ethnic cleansing.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz – 10:52 UTC · Oct 13, 2023If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant open-air prison and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.

If Israel makes, as announced, a ground attack on Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon is likely to attack Israel. The U.S. has allegedly let Syria know (via France) that Damascus, and President Assad personally, would be attacked if that were to happen. This is a miscalculation. It is far from certain that Assad, or even Iran, has the means to hold Hizbullah back.

A U.S. attack on the government of Syria would bring Russia into the war. Iran would also respond which is exactly what some of the neocons want.

The war could easily escalate further from there.