Author: M Barbu

With Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza underway and Houthi rebels in Yemen firing missiles toward Israel, the risk of regional escalation by Iran’s various proxies has reached dangerous new heights.

A day before today’s planned speech by Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, the group claimed to have simultaneously attacked nineteen positions in Israel, representing the largest escalation of fighting along the Israeli-Lebanese border yet.

One hundred years after its founding, Türkiye is pivotal to regional and global affairs, but the Islamist-oriented policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are often at odds with Türkiye’s NATO allies.

Erdogan’s support for Hamas in the context of the ongoing Hamas-Israel war will expand existing fissures with Washington.

L’attaque dévastatrice du Hamas le 7 octobre a changé la donne au Moyen-Orient. Le dossier israélo-palestinien, relégué au second plan depuis au moins une dizaine d’années, est brutalement revenu au cœur de la géopolitique régionale.

Alors que la guerre en cours entre le Hamas et Israël enhardit les mandataires de l’Iran dans la région, tous les acteurs impliqués (étatiques ou non étatiques) manœuvrent dans un jeu de pouvoir très complexe qui peut conduire à une guerre régionale à part entière ; mais un tel scénario peut être évité par une fin négociée.

On the morning of October 31, 2023, in the village of ‘Arura (north of Ramallah), Israeli security forces demolished the home of Saleh al-Arouri, deputy chairman of Hamas’ political bureau and in charge of the Hamas terrorist activity in Judea and Samaria. Palestinians rioted during the activity, throwing rocks and IEDs at the forces, who responded with riot control measures. Al-Arouri has not lived in the house for the past 15 years. After the Israeli forces left, residents came carrying Hamas flags to express their solidarity and see the destroyed house up close (QudsN Twitter account, October 31, 2023).

Saleh Muhammad Suleiman al-Arouri is a senior Hamas operative based in Turkey. On August 20 2014, he told the participants of the fourth conference of the World Union of Islamic Sages (held in Turkey) that Hamas’ military-terrorist wing was behind the abduction and murder of the three Jewish youths in Gush Etzion (June 12, 2014). He read his speech, saying that he was speaking on behalf of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal (calling him the “head of this resistance”). He was apparently recorded without his knowledge and his speech was uploaded to YouTube and received much feedback.

On September 26, 2022, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, considered for many years one of the
senior scholars in Sunni Islam, died at 96.1 Qaradawi, born in Egypt, arrived in the early 1960s
from Egypt to Qatar, which became the center of his activity.

Overview

On October 31, 2023, the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a radical Islamist
organization based in Qatar, held a press conference to announce a fatwa entitled “The duty
of Islamic governments regarding [the necessity to respond to] the Zionist invasion of Gaza.”
It called on the regimes and armies of the Muslim countries for urgent military
intervention to save the residents of the Gaza Strip and provide material, religious,
political and legal assistance.

For [many Muslims], the Koran, every word of it, is the dictated word of Allah (God) as told by the Angel Jibril (Gabriel) to Allah’s prophet Muhammad….

Ten years ago, U.S. soldiers being deployed to the Middle East who flew to Qatar or Kuwait on the United Arab Emirates airline, before the UAE’s supreme leadership in spearheading the Abraham Accords, reported that on maps in flight brochures, a country named Israel did not exist. Many seem to be working now to make that a reality, not just on a map.

Iran has not only been threatening the US with attacks, it has attacked US assets in Syria and Iraq 83 times since Biden became president, and at least 24 times in the past two weeks. Iran also recently threatened again to annihilate Israel, and has reportedly begun ordering its elite militias based in Syria into southern Lebanon “to participate in attacks on Israel.”