Month: October 2023

Senior Hamas official Ali Baraka said in an October 8, 2023 interview that aired on Russia Today TV that Hamas had been secretly planning the invasion of southern Israel for two years, even as it was making it seem like it was busy governing the Gaza Strip. He explained that this is the reason Hamas did not join the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in its previous round of fighting against Israel. He said that Hamas notified its allies in other Palestinian factions, in Hizbullah, in Iran, in Turkey, and in Russia only after the invasion started, and he stated that any prisoner exchange deal should involve Hamas prisoners held in the United States. Later in the interview, Baraka said that Hamas has a license from Russia to locally produce bullets for Kalashnikovs, that Russia sympathizes with Hamas, and that it is pleased with the war because it is easing American pressure on it with regard to the war in Ukraine.

Key points

• After 12 years of civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has consolidated its power and defeated credible threats to its rule. The anti-Assad armed opposition, which once controlled half of Syria, is relegated to the northwestern province of Idlib.
• While the Biden administration recognizes that Assad will likely remain in office, U.S. policy remains punitive, maintaining comprehensive sanctions on Syria until Assad negotiates political reforms with his opponents and agrees to free and fair elections.
• This policy will not produce the desired results. Assad is firmly entrenched, benefits from the help of security partners in Iran and Russia, who prefer that he stays in power, and remains highly unlikely to comply with U.S. demands. The status quo amounts to collective punishment of the Syrian population.
• Approximately 900 U.S. troops remain in eastern Syria, allegedly to train and advise the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces against ISIS. But ISIS lost its territorial caliphate more than four years ago. The risk of keeping U.S. forces there in perpetuity which includes sporadic attacks on U.S. positions and escalation risks with various actors, outweighs any rewards.
• Neither the sanctions nor the occupation of eastern Syria serves U.S. security interests. The former does no good, and the latter risks embroiling the United States in a mission without an end date.
• The United States should withdraw its remaining forces and offload what is left of the counter-ISIS mission to local actors. The United States should also reduce if not end its failing sanctions regime.

When, on October 7, the terrorist group Hamas launched a barbaric attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 Israeli men, women and children (and wounding thousands more), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, instead of his usual inflammatory anti-Israel rants, uncharacteristically advised restraint to both sides.

Türkiye “neutralised” 162 PKK/YPG terrorists in northern Iraq and Syria in operations carried out since Oct.1, the date of a foiled terrorist attack in the capital Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

“A total of 194 targets were destroyed. As a result of our operations, 162 terrorists were neutralised,” Erdogan said on Monday after a Cabinet meeting in the capital Ankara.

During the past 24 hours, Israeli security forces carried out massive activity in the Gaza Strip
on land, in the air and at sea; several hundred targets were attacked from the air. The forces
continued searching for and clashing with terrorists who still remained in Israel. In the
meantime, Gaza continued firing rockets at Israel’s south and center. According to an initial
report, in the afternoon several rockets were fired at the north of the country from Lebanese
territory.

On October 10, 2023, Hamas issued a statement[1] designating the upcoming Friday, October 13, 2023, as a day of general mobilization for the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operations. In the statement, it urged Palestinians in the West Bank and within Israel to participate in large-scale rallies and confront Israeli soldiers at every opportunity.

For more than a decade, Israel has clashed with Hamas in Gaza, with cycles of violence defined by periods of intense fighting followed by relative lulls. This brief summarizes a report focusing on a five-year period of this conflict — from the end of Operation Cast Lead in 2009 to the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

On a Shabbat morning and a religious holiday, on October 7, Hamas operatives invaded Israel and carried out a Hamas Einsatzgruppen attack.[1] This war should not to be compared to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel was surprised by invading armies of Arab states. Hamas’s operatives cannot also not be compared to Islamic State terrorists.

MSF calls on all parties to the conflict to ensure the safety of civilians and medical facilities.

Early Saturday morning, October 7, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a major attack on various sites in Israel, including civilian gatherings and villages, firing rockets on multiple cities and taking scores of hostages. The Israeli government declared war on Hamas and began a massive counteroffensive in Gaza, launching a barrage of air strikes.

The US-brokered talks were making progress; that’s probably why Iran gave Hamas the green light.

This column was supposed to be about the momentum and promise of the US-brokered Saudi-Israel peace initiative, including how the kingdom went big by making Israeli-Palestinian peace part of the deal.