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In Wild Escalation, Israel Assassinates Ismail Haniyeh In Iran
When an Israeli airstrike killed high-ranking Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in a Beirut suburb on Tuesday, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's political chief, was in Tehran celebrating the inauguration of new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.
Just hours later, Haniyeh was dead too.
In a stunning development with the potential to push the region back to the brink of all-out war, the IDF targeted Haniyeh in what initially looked like an airstrike while he was inside Iran. In a statement, Hamas said Han
The only question in my mind is what will the blowback be for Israel for all the prized scalps it is inflicting on the other side?
Meanwhile, polio and hepatitis A epidemics have broken out in Gaza and at least 170.000 Palestinians are now suffering from one disease or another, related to the conflict. That’s what, nearly 10% of the population?
When will this stop and why is it taking so long.
Because the world’s self-appointed policeman prefers to let it go on rather than risk the wrath of the supporters of this genocide
And we have this gem from the Qatari Prime Minister. Perhaps the driest rhetorical question ever posed.
From The NY Times:
The Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, appeared to accuse Israel of assassinating Haniyeh in a post on social media. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” wrote Al Thani, one of the main mediators in the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas.
SLAP ! Now we are even.
No we are not, SLAP ! Now we are !!!!
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.
I have a friend that lives in Erbil on the base and is a US contractor. He said the US killed 4 Kitab Hezbollah members in an airstrike in Baghdad last night. I haven’t read anything about this on the news, but he says it happened.
If this is true, it is strange that the US did a strike at the same time as Israel striking Tehran.
The risk they took blows my mind. They had to be 100% confident in their intelligence of where he was, then had to have faith that the missile would hit its target. The area was packed with other Middle Eastern leaders, dignitaries, diplomats… If the wrong person had been in the room with him, or if the missile missed its target by a bit, the consequences could have been profoundly catastrophic. The balls it takes to green-light this attack is positively breathtaking. I can’t imagine any sane leader taking such a risk–that the missile would go off course, that the wrong person would be hit, never mind that you’re killing someone you were negotiating with & while they’re in Tehran. I have to imagine the White House is borderline apoplectic.
Yessir. Biden was desperate to broker a cease fire in Gaza to cement his foreign policy legacy. This is Bibi’s way of getting even for Biden’s recent change from 40 years of strong support. Plus I am sure that Bibi would be delighted if it helps Trump get reelected.
My question to the intelligent group that subscribes to Heisenberg, and I genuinely appreciate that the comment section here is far more informed than any other I read, is ‘what is Israel supposed to do?’. They are surrounded by multiple terrorist organizations who have as their primary goal for existence the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews? Israel gets attacked constantly, and so they retaliate. They are peaceful when left alone. Have they attacked Egypt since the peace treaty in the 1970s? Hamas hides behind women and children. Israel has been pointing that out for decades. The pictures and videos are absolutely horrific, but hamas fights from hospitals and schools for that very reason. Israel was attacked, they are retaliating. We sit comfortably, thousands of miles away, judging what a country is doing in an existential struggle against terrorists. I’m ranting a bit now, but when Israel is left alone, it seems to me there’s peace in the region.
And what about forcing 750,000 people off their land and claiming that land as their own? And what about relegating 2 million people to an open-air prison (i.e., Gaza)? What about insisting on building an ethnonationalist, nuclear-armed security state on seized land and telling everybody in the vicinity that resistance is futile? What about all of that? What about the fact (and it’s a fact) that members of the Israeli right have as their primary goal the destruction of the Palestinian identity?
Let me put it to you as a question: If I come to your neighborhood, force you, your family and all of your friends off your property and out of your homes at gunpoint and confine you to a giant, blockaded, fenced-in ghetto, are you going to be amenable to that? And would you accept the (flagrantly ridiculous) notion that the barrier to peace in that situation isn’t me, it’s you, because you won’t submit to your fate as an inferior creed and race? And are you likely to accept, as an excuse for my actions, the idea that I’m one of “God’s chosen people,” while you, on the other hand, are a backwards savage? I hope not. I hope you wouldn’t accept any of that.
I’m not telling you that Hamas is good. They’re not. What I’m telling you, rather, is that everyone’s bad. Hamas is bad. Hezbollah’s bad. Israel’s bad. Iran’s bad. The US is bad. And on and on and on. Humans are bad. This planet would be vasty better off had we never developed the capacity to organize. We’re a blight on history. If there was a God, she would’ve destroyed us a long time ago, once and for all. If there’s any justice, some plague will come along and wipe us out, leaving the planet to heal, thrive and prosper in our absence.
Climate change doesn’t threaten the planet. It threaten’s the ability for humans to live on the planet. Maybe we shouldn’t try and do anything about it. As you say, the world would far better without us!
Hear, hear. My over-under is 2100. No more people then. I have the under. One of the first books I bought for my daughter (and still available) is called “The Wump World.” Can’t get there fast enough.
LOL, for a second in the middle of this comment, I thought I was reading Caitlin Johnstone’s blog by mistake. (Kidding, kidding.)
I do agree with you about all the players being bad, but my 2 cents, just for myself, is flat-out extinctionism takes a little far. I remain hopeful that there’s some alternative to that. I haven’t found it yet, but, I remain hopeful.
every piece of land on this planet was taken from someone at some point, why is it that only Israel should give it back? is Jordan returning palestinian land? Is anyone up in arms over Jordan having claimed that land? as for the prison comment, there’s a locked door on the Egypt side of gaza too, why aren’t people up in arms over that? the fact is that the Israelis tried dozens of times to make peace. arafat was offered a road map to a two state solution and he balked. Israel tries to make peace, and retaliates when attacked. you say everyone is bad, but suggest that there’s an equivalent ‘badness’ between all parties. the situation is more complicated than that. i understand your, and my own, disgust at seeing women and children dying because of decisions that politicians and terrorists make. what i don’t understand is why there isn’t similar disgust in similar situations. why don’t college kids stage nationwide protests when russia attacks ukraine? where are the russian students getting accosted on their way to class? why don’t they protest against chinese oppression of the uighurs, or against mexican drug lords’ destruction of an entire country?? part of my anger is that it’s only the jews that seem to generate outrage, and that a lot of that outrage to me is antisemitism, not politics.
The thing about this argument “what about other countries stealing land” is that it overlooks the fact that Zionist forces in Israel are stealing the land and committing genocide right now. Before our eyes and on social media. This is nothing to do with Jewishness, and to suggest that feels Machiavellian at this point. This is fascist ethno-religious supremacy backed by a lot of US tax dollars. This is the normalization of absolute horror. And to your protest point, I think if the US were funding Putin’s war and a Russian lobby had the political heft of AIPAC you’d be seeing those campus protests. The way the campus protests were brutalized by the police and right wing thugs was a disgrace. They were simply pointing out that any genocide is wrong. It’s not complicated and it’s not antisemitism. Up with people. All of them.
Pretty much sums up my long held summation of reality. Taken line by line, I have a really hard time understanding the falsity of this narrative. That really bothers me, say it’s not so because it it is so, then we are living the most incredibly, no truly bizarrely blatant raciest/ colonial reality imaginable where we punish a powerless colored population for the crimes of white Christians. We are exterminating one population to clear our conscience of another.is no way that this stands the test of time. I am such a simpleton and must be missing some nuanced linch pin that explains this madness.
I’m a hawk on Israel, but Netanyahu’s government is, and clearly has been, part of the security problem to Israel’s detriment. Even the Israeli military is warning that there is no “military-only” solution for Gaza. Israel has to work with others to establish a functioning administration in Gaza – or, take on the burden of filling that role itself. Netanyahu will not take those steps because he depends on support from extreme right-wing parties who are focused on taking over the West Bank and do not want a Gaza solution. He is focused on keeping himself in power and out of jail, not on protecting the Israeli nation and people.
Correct. And he also wittingly perpetuated Hamas’s rule in Gaza so as to ensure Israel could argue against a Palestinian state on the excuse that “half of them” are terrorists. Not enough people know that.
In purely tactical terms, Iran now finds itself between a rock and a hard place. If it responds to this week’s provocations with an attack on targets inside Israel, and depending on the scale of those attacks, Israel could use said attacks as justification for going after Iran’s nuclear assets. And as per our host, if Israel knows within a few feet where Hamas and Hezbollah leaders are at any given moment, they surely know where Iran’s nuclear assets are hidden/buried and have worked out a plan to get at them.
As is Israel. They do not have the military manpower and equipment capacity to fight both Hamas and Hezbollah at the same time over an extended period. I guess Netanyahu is assuming the US will back him up, no matter what. Not a bad bet heading into the US election I suppose.
We should be as concerned about our own growing tendency to build and hang onto power based on a religious creed and identity
We are being attacked from within with the take-over of the GOP by the “christian” right and the majority on the Supreme Court.
Don’t pretend these zealots are only in far away lands. Religion and power are a lethal combination