NDTV notes, "Iran launched more than 200 drones and missiles at Israel in an unprecedented attack late Saturday, the Israeli army announced, in a major escalation of the long-running covert war between the regional foes." ABC NEWS adds, "Two U.S. officials confirmed that U.S. forces shot down about 70 Iranian drones headed towards Israel. One official added that one of the U.S. Navy destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean was also able to bring down an undetermined number of Iranian ballistic missiles." The White House released a statement from US President Joe Biden proclaiming that " we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles."
At Chatham House, Haid Haid wrote yesterday:
The suspected Israeli attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus on 1 April marks an unprecedented escalation by Israel against Iran in Syria. The killing of Iran’s top soldier, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, among other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, is the clearest signal yet of Israel’s determination to shift the conflict’s rules of engagement – moving beyond simply preventing arms supplies to Hezbollah or pushing Iranian-backed groups away from its border, to directly eliminating Iranian leadership in Syria.
There is a real risk that Iranian-backed groups will intensify their targeting of US forces and Israel in response to this latest attack, leading to heightened escalations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and possibly Jordan. This, along with US President Biden’s promise of ‘ironclad’ support for Israel in the case of a reprisal attack, presents a major risk of even greater escalation.
[. . .]
While Iran deliberates on its response to the consulate attack, its Syrian affiliates have wasted no time in launching retaliatory actions. On 2 and 4 April, cruise missiles and Katyusha rockets were fired towards the occupied Golan Heights. Moreover, since the consulate attack, US forces intercepted two drones in Syria, suggesting that the lull in attacks against them since early February may have ended.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that the attack on the Iranian consulate ‘will be punished’, and that its response will be significant enough to deter Israel from repeating or escalating such attacks. This could mean attacks inside Israel or the targeting of its assets abroad.
Lyse Doucet (BBC NEWS) observes:
In the wars within wars of this grievous Gaza crisis, the most explosive of all is the searing official enmity between Israel and Iran.
It's now at its most perilous point.
And this region, and many capitals beyond, are watching and waiting with bated breath to see what Iran does next.
It's Tehran's move after the airstrike on its diplomatic compound in the heart of the Syrian capital, Damascus on 1 April, which killed senior commanders in its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Israel never admits carrying out such attacks, but everyone knows it was its doing.
And since the Israel-Gaza war erupted six months ago, Israel has ramped up its targeting of Iran, not just destroying arms supplies and infrastructure in Syria, but assassinating senior IRGC and Hezbollah commanders.
In other news, Garrett Hargan (BELFAST TELGRAPH) reports:
A fundraising gig for Gaza featuring local bands and speakers will take place in Derry next month.
Acts include D:Ream, punk rockers TOUTS, Lavengro, ROE, Reevah and Niall McNamee.
Guest speakers on the day are chairman of Palestine Aid and Middle East expert Saeb Shaath, comedian Tadgh Hickey, who has been a prominent voice campaigning against the ongoing onslaught in Gaza, and veteran socialist Eamonn McCann.
Billed as Derry’s “largest fundraising event”, it is being run by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Derry branch, in partnership with Jika Jika and takes place on Monday, May 5 at Unit 8 Warehouse in Pennyburn Industrial Estate.
Protests took place around the world today. Bar Peleg, Nir Hasson, Eden Solomon and Adi Hashmonai (HAARETZ) report Israelis protested throughout the country including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as the family members of hostages called out the Netanyahu government for failing the hostages and called for Netanyahu to step down. Rami Amichay (REUTERS) notes, "As concern mounts in Israel for the wellbeing of the 129 remaining hostages, who cannot be contacted, their families and friends have organised increasingly vocal demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightist government. They have dovetailed with activists who have long called for Netanyahu's ouster given his trial on graft charges - which he denies - and his attempts to overhaul the judiciary last year." THE NATIONAL quotes Tel Aviv protester Marva Erez stating, "Our country's near the abyss. We've already started to drive down and we must stop it. I'm here to gather the force to tell the people that they need to come out and they need to tell our government that it's time to stop."
In Ireland, RTE reports:
Around one hundred people are attending a protest in support of Gaza outside the US Embassy in Dublin.
The rally has been organised by Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine and Mothers Against Genocide.
It is calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for the US government to end its support for the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
In England? UK SOCIALIST WORKER reports:
Tens of thousands of pro-Palestine protesters again took over the streets of central London on Saturday—this time for a regional, city-wide demonstration.
Marchers were furious at the way the West continues to back Israel’s genocidal war. And many also expressed their loathing of Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
But they were buoyed by yet another big turnout for the march from Russell Square. The protest end point, Parliament Square, was completely packed for a final rally.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign said that over 80,000 people had joined the march.
[, , ,]
Seasoned activists and new marchers in London told Socialist Worker the movement must now be ready to fight against Israel’s expansion of the war across the Middle East.
Ayesha, who has been on three demonstrations since January, worries about the “potential of the war to widen” into a fight against Iran. But, she says, “the very vocal support for Palestine from the movement has educated lots more British people”.
David, an administration worker from Edinburgh, took up the same theme. He said that despite Biden’s calls for a ceasefire, he is “still committed to having Israel as a docking station and launch pad for US imperialism”.
He slammed Labour’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, arguing that it’s because “Labour is a political party within a capitalist system”. “The writing is on the wall. It’s not possible to describe Labour as a socialist party,” he said.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 190 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "The Gaza Health Ministry on Saturday said 33,686 Palestinians have been killed and 76,309 injured in Israel's military offensive there since October 7. The ministry said that 52 people were killed and 95 injured in the past 24 hours." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
Today's violence? MEMO notes, "Within 24 hours, the Israeli army on Saturday once again bombed a UN school housing displaced persons in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, Anadolu reports. Eyewitnesses told Anadolu that Israeli artillery bombed a school run by the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the New Camp area in Nuseirat, causing severe damage to the school." ALJAZEERA reports, "According to eyewitnesses on the ground in the north of Nuseirat refugee camp, Israeli drones have been opening fire against people. They also said Israel is demolishing houses and destroying agricultural land which could be a sign, according to experts, that Israel is expanding the corridor that it has recently established splitting the north and the south of the Strip."
Yesterday, another aid worker was killed. THE NATIONAL reports:
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said that a member of its West Bank and Gaza mission was killed on Friday in Jaffa, Israel.
The agency said it was working with the US embassy for "further details about this fatal incident and how it will be investigated".
The most infamous attack on aid workers occurred earlier this month when the Israeli government murdered seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen. Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT) notes a development in that story:
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commander who was a senior figure in the execution of the drone strike on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy that killed seven workers last week had previously signed a letter calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza to be restricted — at a time when Israel was already blocking the vast majority of aid at the border.
According to The Telegraph, IDF Colonel Nochi Mandel signed an open letter “calling for [Gaza] to be deprived of aid,” as the Telegraph wrote, and demanding a “siege” of Gaza City in January. Mandel, who The Telegraph identifies as a “religious nationalist” and a resident of a settlement in the occupied West Bank, was one of two IDF officers dismissed after the WCK strike as Israel faced pressure from international leaders over the killing of the workers, one of whom was a U.S. citizen.
The letter asked the Israeli War Cabinet and the IDF chief of staff to “do everything in your power” to block “humanitarian supplies and operations of hospitals inside Gaza City.”
“As far as we understand … it is permissible and legal according to the laws of armed conflict, to impose a siege on a certain area, on the condition that the citizens who are in it are allowed evacuation corridors,” the letter said, according to the Telegraph. The letter was written in Hebrew.
Mandel’s signing of the letter reinforces concerns that the IDF purposefully attacked the aid convoy. Humanitarian groups have been saying for months that the IDF has been attacking them intentionally, with numerous reports finding vast amounts of evidence that targeting aid is a goal of the IDF. The letter signing also potentially undercuts Israel’s narrative that the attack was done in error; notably, the findings of the IDF’s own probe into the strike are riddled with inconsistencies.
Israel described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1 as a “grave mistake”, a “tragic event” that “happens in war”.
Israel is, obviously, lying. This entire so-called war – actually genocide – in Gaza, has been based on a series of lies, some of which Israel continues to peddle.
For some, in the mainstream media, it took months to accept the obvious fact that Israel has been lying about the events that led to the war and the military objectives of its constant targeting of hospitals, schools, shelters and other civilian facilities.
So, it was only logical for Israel to lie about killing the six internationals, and their Palestinian driver, of the World Central Kitchen (WCK). Notwithstanding an event as atrocious as this, it is implausible for Israel to start telling the truth now.
Luckily, few seem to believe Israel’s version regarding WCK, or its continued massacres elsewhere in Gaza. Israel “cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza,” the US-based NGO said in a statement on April 5.
At THE NEW YORKER, Keith Gessen has an interesting article entitled "Is This Israel's Forever War?" from which we'll note this section on former US State Dept worker Annelle Sheline:
Sheline had been in government for just six months when the Hamas attacks took place. The killings shocked and dismayed her. With colleagues, she discussed what Israel’s response would likely be. She was encouraged that President Biden had warned Benjamin Netanyahu not to repeat America’s post-9/11 mistakes.
She did not have to wait long to see that Netanyahu had not listened. In the first week of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron, its Air Force dropped more bombs on Gaza than had been dropped by the U.S. in the most high-intensity month of the campaign against ISIS, back in 2017. Civilians were being killed at an astonishing pace—more than three hundred Gaza residents died a day in the first month of the war, many of them children. In mid-October, a State Department official, Josh Paul, resigned. He had worked in the bureau that oversaw weapons transfers to Israel. In the past, he said, citing the example of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the attention paid to how weapons would be used had been “microscopic.” In this case, however, “there was none of that. It was, ‘Open doors. Go.’ ”
Sheline was impressed by Paul’s resignation, but she had no intention of following suit. For one thing, she was far more junior. For another, she had just arrived in government after a long period of trying to do so. She and her husband had a mortgage and a toddler—a little girl.
Sheline has trouble pinpointing the moment she changed her mind. During the next several months, she watched the State Department work on negotiations for a substantial ceasefire, which never seemed to come to fruition. She watched U.S. planes airdrop food packages into Gaza, Berlin Airlift-style, while its ally Israel endlessly inspected trucks that could have delivered far more food at the crossings into Gaza. She watched the Administration leak, over and over, that the President was very frustrated with Netanyahu. “It’s, like, Well, clearly he’s not,” Sheline said, “because he has a lot of power here.” If Biden were genuinely frustrated, she thought, he could demand that the ceasefire happen and that civilians be granted more access to humanitarian aid. “They’re building this stupid pier instead of just insisting on the trucks getting across the border,” she told me last month.
“Often, inside the State Department, there’s this belief in the process,” Sheline continued. “You know, ‘It’s a slow process. You have to just go through the steps.’ But, really, from what I’ve observed, the only thing that seems to be causing any shift is public pressure. I had done what I could. I had tried to do what small things are available for someone in my position on the inside.” In mid-February, citing the Israeli campaign in Gaza, she told her superiors that she was going to leave, though only after she finished a yearlong commitment to the job, and completed her work on the bureau’s annual human-rights reports. Once that was done, she shut down her personal Web site and wrote an editorial for CNN. “Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities,” she wrote, “I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.”
The experience was still very raw when we spoke over Zoom a few days later. “I know that I won’t ever probably get to work for the government again, which in D.C. may be tricky,” she said. “It’s hard to even say what a professional impact this may end up having. But, you know, I think about my daughter. I assume that she will learn about this in school. And I just want to be able to let her know that I did what I could on the inside. But then it became clear that that just wasn’t having any impact.”
While I write these posts -- on the weekend, I'm generally writing and not dictating -- I'm bouncing from screen to screen. I use one browser to write and to read e-mails and another to pull up news articles. Zach's e-mailed the public account (common_ills@yahoo.com) noting that he was reading a brief Gaza post that went up at about fifty minutes ago. It's this post Zach. I was writing the Iraq one and this one at the same time and hit "Publish" on this one when I meant to post Iraq (I had finished that one). When I realized my error, I reverted this post back to draft form and published "Iraq."
Every now and then, on a Saturday, I'll be running late and post with a note that it's still in progress and I'll keep adding to it. I could have done that tonight but I had already done the Iraq post (and it was complete except for one story I'll try to note in a snapshot this coming week).
If you read it while it was briefly up, the BELFAST TELEGRAPH story was the first thing noted and I skipped around from there. I usually write in patches and then move stuff around.
The following sites updated:
