Tag Archives: Hamas

Britain, Gaza, Government, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

A region in flames

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: One year on from the 7 October attacks, the region is slipping deeper into war. The conflict continues to destroy countless lives. The scenes from Gaza since that fateful day have haunted millions around the world and the crisis is being felt with increasing intensity in Lebanon and the West Bank

THE last twelve months has been a period of slaughter and destruction for the Middle East. Far from any awakening from this nightmare, the region is slipping deeper into war. Israel is planning a “significant and serious” retaliation against Iran for its missile attack. The cycle of retribution is spinning faster, with the conflagration feared growing closer. Once more, civilians are paying the price.

On 7 October 2023, more than 1,200 men, women, and children were killed at a family festival in Israel by Hamas fighters who had crossed from Gaza: the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, in the country built to guarantee their safety. Another 250 – the youngest nine months old – were taken hostage. Though around half were subsequently released, many have yet to return home. Others never will.

The ensuing Israeli onslaught on Gaza has killed almost 43,000 Palestinians; most were women and children, including hundreds of infants. The chilling abbreviation WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family – has become commonplace. The survivors are displaced, hungry, and desperate, and the humanitarian catastrophe grows as Israel pursues its war in the wasteland. The last year has also been the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Already 2,000 people are dead in Lebanon.

Israel was embraced with sympathy in the wake of the Hamas attacks. Its right to defend itself does not permit it to trample the laws of war. Ministers and politicians have openly expressed – in the words of prominent Israelis – “the discourse of annihilation, expulsion, and revenge”. That speaks of the impact of permanent occupation; this story did not begin twelve months ago. Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to remain prime minister, and the zealotry of his political partners, have prevailed over the lives of Israeli hostages as well as Palestinians.

Hezbollah’s leaders too lie dead. The fear of another 7 October is understandably strengthened when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praises “a legitimate act”. But Israel’s tactical success to date against Hamas and Hezbollah is not the same as a strategic triumph. Military victory is a mirage. Israeli citizens are under immediate threat from an expanded war and the destruction of other homes and families is no foundation for their long-term, sustainable security.

Israel is now increasingly isolated, not because outsiders did not register the horror of 7 October, but because they cannot ignore the grave suffering of Palestinians. Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stand accused of crimes against humanity at the international criminal court. The international court of justice has ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, calling for immediate withdrawal and reparations, and in January ordered it to ensure no genocidal acts are committed in Gaza. While the US continues to ship arms to an ally that ignores its warnings, others are recoiling.

The release of hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza – and now Lebanon too – become only more urgent as the months pass. Power-hungry men of hatred have pursued a war in which innocent men, women, and children across the region have died. Ending it requires diplomacy addressing not only the immediate crisis but long-term security needs, including a fair settlement for Palestinians.

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Britain, Government, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

Escalating tensions could induce a wider war

MIDDLE EAST

SOME are wondering whether the blizzard of missiles, rockets, and drones blasted from Lebanon into Israel in the early hours of yesterday may have been no more than a preliminary.

The shelling could have been much worse but for a series of earlier Israeli air strikes designed to pre-empt plans by Hezbollah to launch an even bigger wave of rockets.

The Israeli air force struck at thousands of rocket launchers and bunkers housing everything from antiquated Soviet Katyusha systems to modern Iranian missiles.

Many of the missiles fired from Lebanon can do serious damage if they hit a target, but as it happens they are mostly easy for the Israeli air defences to detect and destroy.

Nonetheless, this latest fusillade serves to further deplete Israel’s defensive capability – notably, the Iron Dome system – thereby improving Hezbollah’s chances of hitting major targets with more powerful missiles in the future.

The Islamist leadership is claiming to have damaged buildings deep inside Israel, as far south as the outskirts of Tel Aviv – hitting a military base, and a patrol boat further north.

We cannot be sure of this – Israel has prohibited the publishing of photographs of bomb damage, both on TV and via social media. This prevents Hezbollah making a damage assessment.

A state of emergency has also been declared.

Whatever the case, Hezbollah’s attack has been expected for weeks, as payback for Israel’s double assassination of one of its commanders and the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed in the Iranian capital Tehran in July. The revenge strike was delayed because of the Shi’ite holy festival of Arbaeen, when up to two million pilgrims travelled overland from Lebanon and Iran to Karbala in Iraq.

Now their journey is over, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – Hezbollah’s real masters – has warned the war will commence in earnest.

Israel says it is well prepared, but it’s pre-emptive strikes yesterday may not have been enough to deflect the onslaught. It’s estimated that Hezbollah has around 150,000 rockets in its secret cache of hidden arsenals. This escalation also seems certain to have put paid to American efforts at brokering a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Central to this is the release of the surviving hostages seized on October 7.

Both sides say they don’t want all-out war. But neither is willing to be the first to turn the other cheek and stop retaliation – so war is looming. If that does happen, it will be on a scale that dwarfs the unfathomable civilian cost of Israel’s heavy assault in Gaza over the past ten months.

Many observers to this conflict believe that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is relying on a constant state of conflict to keep him in power.

As long as there’s no ceasefire in Gaza, an uneasy truce will continue within Israeli politics. If the fighting stops, Netanyahu will be ousted by his rivals, and will face prosecution and perhaps prison on corruption charges.

America is pledged to support Israel in any war against Iran. The U.S. has already deployed vast naval forces, including three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, to seas around the Middle East.

With our military bases in Cyprus, a little over 100 miles from the nearest missile launchers in Lebanon, the UK would be drawn into the war, too. Expats and holidaymakers in Cyprus would also be in danger.

And within the last few days, Hamas announced that Israelis in Europe and elsewhere were now regarded as targets for attacks abroad.

Meanwhile, schools in northern Israel are closed and up to 100,000 Israelis have been evacuated from the border with Lebanon.

The threats to peace continue to loom beyond the Middle East. Fears are growing that the vortex of escalating violence could drag us and many others into the conflict.

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Britain, Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, United States

Iran vows revenge on Israel

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: The temperature in the Middle East is rising by the day. Israeli air strikes in Lebanon and in Tehran claimed the lives of a senior military commander from Hezbollah and that of the political leader of Hamas. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader has vowed to inflict “severe punishment” on Israel. An all-out regional war looks ever likely, but the power vacuum in Washington DC is hardly helping matters

THE escalation has started. Today, the world stands on the brink of major war. Israel has retaliated following rocket attacks launched from Lebanon that killed twelve children in the Golan Heights. First, an Israeli rocket attack killed a senior military commander from Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut. Then, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas, in a precision air strike on a Tehran apartment building.

These two surgical killings mark a major upsurge of Israel’s twin conflicts with its neighbours – Lebanon to the north, and the Palestinians to the south. They effectively end any chance of a negotiated ceasefire in Gaza.

Now Iran, which backs both armed groups, is seeking retribution and revenge. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, will regard Israel’s elimination of Haniyeh – on Iranian soil – as a deep humiliation that can be salved only with a confrontation that is bound to claim yet more Israeli lives.

Khamenei, who had met the Hamas leader only a few hours earlier, described Haniyeh as “a dear guest in our home” before adding: “We consider his revenge as our duty.”

The political leader of Hamas had flown to Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. In a region of the Middle East where “face” and reputation are valued so highly, the Iranian state knows it has little choice but to respond in kind.

The grim likelihood of war spreading across the Middle East and beyond has also increased thanks to the United States’ apparent lack of interest.

The White House seems disinclined to enforce the “pax Americana” that has protected the West and its interests for decades. As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, it is widely viewed that Mr Biden has become a lame duck who will doze through the final months of his presidency.

The second air strike – presumably masterminded by Israel’s intelligence service Mossad from Jerusalem – took place at 2am in Tehran.

But it was still the middle of the evening in Washington DC and there should have been plenty of time for the White House to react.

The fact that neither President Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris deigned to speak suggests that Washington is either asleep, on summer holiday, on autopilot, or unwilling to act in an election year, all of which are equally dangerous.  

What next? After the nine-month siege of Gaza, some will say that Hamas can no longer be capable of inflicting much more pain on Israel.

But, based in Lebanon to Israel’s north, Hezbollah was able to fight Israel to a stalemate as recently as 2006.

The group still has a large arsenal of Iranian supplied rockets and drones.

It appears likely that Iran, too, could launch cruise and ballistic missiles as well as kamikaze drones at Israel in a repeat of April’s Operation True Promise (a coordinated attack of more than 300 missiles: itself a retaliation for Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus).

It is Iran’s proxy forces throughout the rest of the Middle East that make international conflict so terrifyingly plausible.

The Houthi rebels in Yemen are stretching the West’s military resources in the Red Sea by launching drone attacks on commercial shipping and directly attacking vessels from the U.S. and Royal Navies.

The Houthis have also sworn to launch air strikes against Israel itself, a response to Jerusalem’s attacks on Houthi-held territory in Yemen.

Then there are Iran’s Shi’ite allies in Iraq and Syria, who have recent history of attacking the few remaining American air bases in the region.

For Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, perhaps he has concluded that Israel can cope with any escalation of the conflicts now threatening to engulf his nation.

In attempting to decapitate Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is repeating the tactic that saw America successfully neutralise al-Qaeda as a global threat – by hunting down and destroying its leaders.

But Israel, of all countries, should know that wars of attrition are not won by assassinations alone.

Israel killed Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Yassin, as long ago as 2004, yet the Hamas threat grew ever stronger.

The danger for Netanyahu and Israel is that the country could be dragged into a bigger, wider conflagration on many fronts. And if that happens, the ramifications become very hard to predict.

In terms of military resources, Israel – with American backing – seems well placed to survive that conflict.

While U.S. Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, has previously said America wants to cool the temperature in the Middle East, Washington has been resolute in its insistence that the U.S. military would come to Israel’s aid if it was attacked by Iran – as it did when Tehran launched its huge drone and missile strike in April.

However, it remains to be seen how many civilian deaths, and how much economic damage, the Israel public is prepared to endure before ousting Netanyahu and suing for peace.

A widening conflict would leave Britain in an invidious position.

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak ordered British jets based in Cyprus to shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel in a show of support for America and Israel. Sir Keir Starmer is likely to do the same.

Yet would Britain put boots on the ground if America and Israel called for military help? Surely that would make Britain, and British interests overseas, a target for Iran’s allies?

Where would our involvement leave British relations with our European neighbours – some of whom have been vociferous in their support for Palestinian civilians caught up in the Gaza conflict?

And how would it affect our relationship with NATO ally Turkey, which has been increasingly strident in its support for Hamas, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even threatening to send troops to Palestine to support Hamas.

Russia’s involvement in the conflict should be considered, too.

Moscow is a long-term ally of Iran, which has provided drones and missiles for its war in Ukraine and it has a major military presence in Syria, providing Russia’s only military base on the Mediterranean.

The Kremlin also remains a master of destabilising tactics, using social media outlets to spread rumours and deploying “useful idiots” in rival states to foment social unrest and division.

The temperature in the Middle East is rising by the day. The usual mechanisms for de-escalation and negotiation seem dangerously absent.

How, or where, will it end?

The power vacuum in Washington isn’t helping matters.

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