| DAILY ALERT |
Thursday, October 31, 2024 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
New satellite photographs suggest that the Israeli military's attack on Iran on Saturday struck an array of sensitive military sites, including the Shahroud Space Center in Semnan Province, a major missile production facility which belongs to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who has been tracking that site since 2017, said it was used to build solid-propellant rocket motors that can be used in space technology, but which are also commonly used for ballistic missiles. Hinz said he had "high confidence" that the Shahroud facility was used in the mass production of intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could be used to target Israel. Initial reports suggested that three of Iran's four factories for missile production had been hit. Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, said Tuesday that if Iran struck again, "We will once again know how to reach Iran, with capabilities that we did not even use this time, and strike very, very hard at both their capabilities and locations. This is not over. We are still in the midst of it." (New York Times) The future of the UN agency that provides services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East is in doubt after Israel passed two laws cutting ties with it. Israel claims that UNRWA has become a cover for terrorist activity by Hamas, the militant group responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks. Israel provided video evidence that UNRWA food rations were found in a bunker in Khan Yunis used by the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Israel has long maintained that some of the food and healthcare distributed by UNRWA in Gaza is taken by Hamas. Israel also believes that UNRWA's focus on Palestinians gives them a special status that is inherently hostile to Israel, a UN member. Israel says that while refugees from other conflicts assimilate into their host countries, with support from UN agencies like the High Commissioner for Refugees, the presence of UNRWA in countries such as Lebanon encourages Palestinians to believe that they should be allowed to return to Israel and undo the establishment of Israel, which took place in 1948. UNRWA's presence also enables host governments to deny Palestinians full rights. In Lebanon, for example, they are barred from many jobs and are unlikely to ever gain citizenship. "If the issue is providing humanitarian assistance, there are other UN agencies for this very purpose, such as the World Food Program, World Health Organization, UNICEF and others," said George Deek, an Israeli ambassador who is himself Arab. (The Times-UK) U.S. airstrikes hit several Islamic State camps in the Syrian desert on Monday, killing up to 35 of the group's operatives including multiple senior leaders, U.S. Central Command said Wednesday. ISIS claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria in the first half of 2024. (New York Times) The German Army has received its first Leopard battle tank equipped with Israel's Trophy active protection system. (Israel Defense) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
An Israeli farmer and four foreign workers were killed in a Hizbullah rocket barrage that struck an agricultural field near the border town of Metula on Thursday. (Ynet News) Mohammed Yasser Naim, 23, was killed by Hizbullah rocket fire on his home in the northern Israeli city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha on Tuesday. 13 others were wounded in the rocket fire, including three children. Muhamed Kher, an adviser to the deputy mayor of Ma'alot-Tarshiha, said this was the fourth time rockets have hit Ma'alot-Tarshiha. The city was established through the merger of the Arab town of Tarshiha and the Jewish town of Ma'alot. (Ha'aretz-Jerusalem Post) Eight Austrian UNIFIL soldiers in Lebanon sustained light injuries in a rocket strike on Camp Naqoura near the Israeli border, Austria's Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. The IDF said that Hizbullah was responsible for firing the rockets from the Hallousiyyeh El Faouqa area. UNIFIL confirmed that a rocket that hit its headquarters in Naqoura was fired from the north. (Jerusalem Post) Following an evacuation warning issued to residents of Baalbek, Ain Borday and Dours in eastern Lebanon, the IDF targeted Hizbullah assets in the Beqaa Valley on Wednesday. The IDF's Arabic spokesperson, Lt.-Col. Avichay Adraee, warned: "The IDF is taking strong action against Hizbullah interests in your towns and villages and does not wish to harm you....Proximity to Hizbullah operatives, its facilities, or weaponry may expose you to danger." The IDF reported Wednesday that Air Force fighter jets operating in the Nabatieh area eliminated Mostafa Ahmed Shhadi, the deputy commander of Hizbullah's Radwan Force. Shhadi was responsible for operations in Radwan during the Syrian conflict from 2012 to 2017 and managed the unit's combat plans in southern Lebanon, "particularly the plan to conquer the Galilee." The Air Force also intercepted three drones from Lebanon. (Ynet News) A draft ceasefire agreement crafted by the U.S. includes a mandate for Israel to enter Lebanese territory to thwart threats from Hizbullah or other organizations. The draft states that if Israel identifies threats to it deep in Lebanon, including weapons production and storage, or the movement of heavy weaponry, ballistic missiles or medium- and long-range missiles, it will be allowed to take military action if the government of Lebanon fails to remove the threat. In addition, the draft says, the Israel Air Force will be allowed to continue overflying Lebanese airspace to collect intelligence and monitor developments. (Ha'aretz) The Knesset on Tuesday approved a law prohibiting the establishment of diplomatic missions in Jerusalem that are not embassies. The law will not affect the status of already existing diplomatic missions in the Israeli capital. The law is seen as intended to prevent the establishment of consular offices serving Palestinians in the Israeli capital. (Times of Israel) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Hizbullah Hizbullah, the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, has for decades murdered Americans, destabilized Lebanon, and targeted innocent Jewish communities around the world. In April 1983, Hizbullah assaulted the U.S. Embassy in Beirut with a suicide truck bomb that slaughtered 63 people, including 17 Americans. In October of that year, Hizbullah bombed the U.S. and French Marine barracks in Beirut, murdering 240 U.S. and 58 French servicemembers. In April 1984, Hizbullah bombed a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain, killing 18 U.S. servicemembers and injuring 83. In 1992, a Hizbullah suicide bombing at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires killed 29 and injured 240. In 1994, Hizbullah struck the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, murdering 85 and injuring 300. In 2005, when Lebanon was on the verge of shaking off Syrian domination, Hizbullah assassinated the popular Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Hizbullah has shown that, in line with the ideology of the Iranian Revolution, their war is not only with the "Little Satan" of Israel but with the "Great Satan" of the U.S. American and Western objectives in this conflict must be to empower and support Israel to finish the job, comprehensively defeating and demilitarizing Hizbullah and transferring control of Lebanon back to the Lebanese people. Hizbullah is a violent hate group bent on war to the death with the West. Too many Americans and others have lost their lives to its crimes. Hizbullah must be defeated. The writer is a Palestinian peace advocate, political analyst, and human rights pioneer who founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996. (Newsweek) The Lebanese Armed Forces has for years fallen short of the West's aspirations for it to become the key to stabilizing the country. Despite $3 billion in U.S. funding since 2006, Lebanon's armed forces are ill-equipped to push aside Hizbullah. It has 70,000-80,000 active-duty soldiers, compared with up to 100,000 for Hizbullah. Lebanon's military was supposed to have disarmed Hizbullah with the help of a UN peacekeeping force, part of a 2006 UN agreement that ended an earlier war between Israel and Hizbullah. Instead, Hizbullah maintained a presence south of Lebanon's Litani River, an area it was supposed to vacate. (Wall Street Journal) UNRWA The Israeli parliament on Monday voted 92-10 to severe ties with UNRWA, with even opposition members of the Knesset supporting the bill. For years, it was known that UNRWA's employees teach the most deplorable anti-Semitic content and glorify terrorism in schools, radicalizing generations of Palestinians. This has played a major role in perpetuating the bloody conflict between the sides, and makes the possibility of a settlement a distant dream, by dehumanizing and demonizing Israelis and Jews. This long-standing and known problem of incitement to violence and hatred in textbooks has been acknowledged and criticized by American administrations and the EU, but has never been resolved. But it was the massacre of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war that has pushed the Knesset to sever ties with UNRWA. It is estimated that 10% of UNRWA's 30,000 employees have connections to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Some of them participated in the massacre of civilians and soldiers, raped and abducted Israelis, and have hidden Israeli hostages and the bodies of Israelis killed on Oct. 7. For years, UNRWA facilities provided shelters for Hamas's terror activities, including in schools and medical clinics. Even though it was known that UNRWA has been plagued by extremism, no real action has been taken by the UN or by donor states to bring meaningful reforms. The very existence of UNRWA has helped to perpetuate the Palestinians' refugee status, instead of helping Palestinians resettle, build a sustainable self-rule, and a functioning economy that would render the refugee agency obsolete. Israel recognizes the need for humanitarian assistance, but it wants this done through agencies that have not been compromised by ties to terrorism. The Oct. 7 massacre and the war have exposed the depth of UNRWA's involvement in terrorism and, as such, it should no longer have a mandate to exist. This is an opportunity to replace it with organizations that can provide relief without enabling terrorism and who could reform the educational system in ways that de-radicalize rather than incite. The writer is a former research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. (Spectator-UK) On the face of it, the Israeli Parliament's new legislation banning UNRWA from operating inside the country appears dangerous. The pro-Palestinian lobby is wallowing in outrage. But Israel had no choice. In July, the Israel Defense Forces shared with UNRWA a list of over 100 of the group's staff who are members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On this roster - among others - was Muhammad Abu Atiwi, the Hamas terrorist who led the Oct. 7 massacre at the Re'im Nova bomb shelter, at which 16 Israelis were murdered and 4 kidnapped. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarin admitted that he received the list but stressed that UNRWA does not have police or intelligence investigation capabilities - a pitiful cop-out. Israel has, until now, been forced into a position where it must work with its enemies who get to rape and burn and massacre them before running back home to shelter within the reputational safety of the UN brand. It's surreal. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said, "There is no alternative to UNRWA." Except, of course, there is. Many other UN agencies provide aid and assistance. What's stopping them from being called in? The legislation will take effect in 90 days. This gives the UN three months to find alternative arrangements, if only it is willing to do so. Israel should hold firm on the decision to ban UNRWA - but ensure that innocent Gazans do not suffer as a result. (Daily Mail-UK) While many have condemned the Israeli Knesset decision to block the activity of UNRWA in areas under Israeli control, what is most interesting about UNRWA is that it exists at all. It began its work in 1950 to provide relief and work programs for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had fled the fighting in British Mandate Palestine and areas that became part of the State of Israel in 1948. UNRWA was created to thwart the establishment of Israel. It took a significant portion of the Palestinian population under its wing as a kind of state in the making for Palestinians. UNRWA camps served as the foundation for the majority of Palestinian political and militant and terrorist activities. Many refugee camps became known as bases of various groups and gunmen, and the rejection of Israel's existence comes primarily from the UNRWA camps. This means that UNRWA was organized to destroy Israel and use the refugees as the main engine of this destruction. The concept of UNRWA is to keep Palestinians dependent, living in refugee camps generation after generation, while using its young men as foot soldiers to fight Israel. Winding down the camps and having the people live normal lives could have potentially resulted in peace. (Jerusalem Post) When Ditza Heiman, 84, was released from Hamas captivity, she revealed that she was held in Gaza for 53 days under the watchful eye of a teacher from the UN agency in Gaza, UNRWA. Israel said hundreds of UNRWA employees were moonlighting with one of Gaza's terrorist groups, the head of the UNRWA teachers union was also Hamas's top official in Lebanon, the agency shared facilities with Hamas command centers, and rockets were stored in UNRWA schools and the Hamas tunnels underneath them. Why on earth was UNRWA given free rein in Gaza for so long? An agency funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money does nothing but perpetuate the conflict. We are told that the vote by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) against UNRWA will deprive over 650,000 children of an education, but the "education" provided by UNRWA schools teaches children to venerate terrorists and to hate Jews. Actual refugees deserve help from refugee agencies. But that work isn't being done by UNRWA, which is why UNRWA should not be doing any work at all. (Commentary) Boycotting Israel More than 1,000 leading names in the literary world and entertainment industry - ranging from the music world's Sharon and Ozzie Osbourne to French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy - have hit back at an attempt by some writers in the industry to boycott Israeli-linked publishers, book festivals and publications. Prizewinning author Howard Jacobson said he was "staggered" that the signers of the original petition by the Palestine Festival of Literature and Fossil Free Books could dream that they had a right to silence other writers. Signers of the counter-letter include Mayim Bialik, Sir Simon Schama, Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, actors Debra Messing, Rebecca de Mornay, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and film and TV names such as Amy Sherman-Palladino and Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Pictures, together with Lee Child, Lionel Shriver, and Gene Simmons, the lead singer of the band, Kiss. Sebag-Montefiore said: "History is full of examples of self-righteous cadres of self-appointed judges who tried to enforce their version of purity by excluding people. Whatever one thinks of this tragic Middle Eastern war, who judges who is good, who bad? Once started, where would it stop? Who is pure enough?" (Jewish News-UK) The letter released by the nonprofit Creative Community For Peace, which campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel, states: "We continue to be shocked and disappointed to see members of the literary community harass and ostracize their colleagues because they don't share a one-sided narrative in response to the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust." "Israel is fighting existential wars against Hamas and Hizbullah, both U.S., UK, and EU-designated terrorist groups. The exclusion of anyone who doesn't unilaterally condemn Israel is an inversion of morality and an obfuscation of reality." History was "full of examples of self-righteous sects, movements and cults who have used short-lived moments of power to enforce their vision of purity, to persecute, exclude, boycott and intimidate those with whom they disagreed, who made lists of people with 'bad' views, who burned 'sinful' books (and sometimes 'sinful' people)." (Guardian-UK) Weekend Features On Sunday, a mob of so-called "anti-Zionists" assembled outside the JW3 Jewish community center in north London and started screaming abuse at Jews. Standing outside a Jewish community center and screaming abuse at Jews is about as classic an example of antisemitic abuse as one can imagine. Some of the Jews inside JW3, who were there for a conference sponsored by the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, included some who called for sanctions against Israel. They were good Jews and should have been left alone. So we are told by our betters, who get to decide which of us is a good Jew who should be allowed to roam free, and which of us doesn't deserve that privilege. Those foolish protestors! If only they had known before they started screaming at random passing Jews that the random passing Jew might in fact have been a good Jew. Perhaps they could have had a quick test ready for the random passing Jews to take, to see if they should be attacked or given free passage into JW3. The thing is, though, it's all fake. They'll give you a pass if you're a good Jew, for the moment. But look at the history of Judaism and the history of Jew-hate and the same pattern repeats every single time, without exception. At some point the distinction disappears because, in the end, a good Jew or a bad Jew is still a bloody Jew. At the demo, the mob weren't making the distinction between good and bad Jews because - why would they? They are, as always, all-purpose Jew haters. (Jewish Chronicle-UK) My tribe are the tens of thousands displaced from Israel's north and western Negev, areas that no UN resolution calls "occupied." They are the million in the Haifa area who are now under daily rocket attack from Hizbullah, which has no territorial dispute with Israel. They are the families slaughtered in their homes on Oct. 7. They are the soldiers, the sons and fathers who have died defending us. They should be your tribe too, whether you are Jewish or not. Because we're right. Determining the justice of conflicts by who has suffered more or who has more power and privilege is inane. Those in the West who reflexively condemn every Israeli operation that results in any civilian deaths as unacceptable are much less quick to offer alternatives. How should a country respond to deadly and destructive rocket attacks that have left whole cities uninhabitable? How should it respond to an invasion and mass slaughter? How should it respond to neighboring enemy nations repeatedly threatening its destruction, all while building up enormous arsenals? How can an army fighting a group operating in densely populated civilian areas possibly avoid civilian casualties, even if it takes great care to do so? What is the basis for the belief that the Israeli military has not done so? Every past military conflict between Israel and Hamas and Hizbullah has ended with a ceasefire. All of those ceasefires have been violated by Hamas and Hizbullah. Ceasefires that left these groups in place were part of the path leading to Oct. 7. So why would we believe that a ceasefire today would be anything but slow-acting suicide? Major Israeli gestures toward increasing Palestinian autonomy, including a total withdrawal from Gaza in 2006, have been met with disastrous consequences for Israelis. Evil exists and must sometimes be fought. Even in just wars, the innocent cannot always be spared. On some level, Western leaders must know that they are admonishing Israel to act in a way that they would never act themselves. The writer is a senior lecturer in English Literature at Bar-Ilan University. (Times of Israel) Observations: How America Benefits from Its Security Partnership with Israel - Bradley Bowman (Washington Times)
The writer, a former Black Hawk pilot and assistant professor at West Point, is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. |
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