As NATO convenes in Washington, it faces internal tensions and Trump’s potential return as U.S. president. But it is the alliance’s approach to Russia that will determine the future of transatlantic security.
NATO has a few worries as its leaders meet on July 9-11 in Washington for a summit marking the alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary.
Quelques rappels
De 1952 à 2002
Membre de l’OTAN depuis 1952, candidate à l’entrée dans les BRICS aujourd’hui, sanctionnée par son «allié» américain en vertu des sanctions «Caatsa» pour l’achat de S-400 Russes et pour sa non-participation aux sanctions contre la Russie et l’Iran, ouvertement présentée comme un ennemi lors d’un exercice de l’OTAN en 2017, la question se pose, légitimement, de savoir pourquoi la Turquie reste dans l’OTAN ?
Hamas is waiting for a response from Israel on its ceasefire proposal, two officials from the Palestinian group said on Sunday, five days after it accepted a key part of a U.S. plan aimed at ending the nine-month war in Gaza.
“We have left our response with the mediators and are waiting to hear the occupation’s response,” one of the two Hamas officials told Reuters, asking not to be named.
The three-phase plan was put forward at the end of May by U.S. President Joe Biden and is being mediated by Qatar and Egypt. It aims to end the war and free around 120 Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.
Another Palestinian official, with knowledge of the ongoing ceasefire deliberations, said Israel was in talks with the Qataris.
“They have discussed with them Hamas’ response and they promised to give them Israel’s response within days,” the official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters on Sunday.
Israel’s government made no immediate comment on the timing of its deliberations.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, has dropped a key demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before signing an agreement. Instead, it said it would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout the six-week first phase, a Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
A Palestinian official close to the peace efforts has said the proposal could lead to a framework agreement if embraced by Israel and would end the war.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns will travel to Qatar next week for negotiations, a source familiar with the matter said.
The conflict, triggered by an Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas fighters, has claimed the lives of more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.
Hamas killed 1,200 people and took around 250 hostages in the worst assault in Israel’s history, according to official Israeli figures.
FIFTEEN KILLED IN GAZA STRIKES
Protesters took to the streets across Israel on Sunday to pressure the government to reach an accord to bring back Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza.
They blocked rush hour traffic at major intersections across the country, picketed politicians houses and briefly set fire to tires on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway before police cleared the way.
Meanwhile, fighting continued to rage across Gaza, which has been largely reduced to rubble in the conflict.
Palestinian health officials said at least 15 people were killed in separate Israeli military strikes across the enclave on Sunday.
An Israeli air strike on a house in the town of Zawayda, in central Gaza, killed at least six people and wounded several others, while six others were killed in an air strike on a house in western Gaza, the health officials said.
Tanks deepened their raids in central and northern areas of Rafah on the southern border with Egypt. Health officials there said they had recovered three bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the eastern part of the city.
The Israeli military said on Sunday its forces have killed 30 Palestinian gunmen in Rafah during close combat and air strikes.
In Shejaia, an eastern suburb of Gaza City, the military said its forces killed several Palestinian gunmen, and located weapons and explosives.
The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said fighters attacked Israeli forces in several locations across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs.
As Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine reminds European countries about the importance of manpower, many are once again weighing the promise and perils of compulsory military service.
Introduction
Russia is preparing a bill to ban the “childfree ideology,” Deputy Minister of Justice Vsevolod Vukolov said , calling the conscious refusal to have children “extremistically oriented.” In his latest May decree defining Russia’s “national development goals,” Vladimir Putin ordered an increase in birth rates. The average number of children per woman should increase from the current 1.41 to 1.6 by 2030 and to 1.8 by 2036. The problem with the total fertility rate is not unique to Russia: by 2050, the TFR will be sufficient to reproduce the population in only 49 countries. There is not a single country in the world where the birth rate has not decreased in 2021 compared to 1950. And decrees cannot help here. As modern research shows, even radical government regulation measures, such as bans on contraception and abortions, are not capable of reversing this trend.
“The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds.
The smooth and quick transfer of power in UK speak volume on the great democratic tradition in that country. Election results came out during the day and by the afternoon outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation. By the time, he stepped out, Labour leader Keir Starmer was appointed the Prime Minister by the King and within minutes he addresses the nation at the historic entrance of No 10-downing street. The Prime minister paid tribute to his predecessor Rishi Sunak and acknowledged his contribution to Britain. With-in hours, the Prime Minister announced his cabinet and the transfer of power was completed without any pomp and show. Britain, that way, is a great example unlike United States where the new President takes oath nearly two months after the results are out in November in a great pomp and show though both the forms of governments are based on majoritarianism and revolve around the white power elite of these countries.
[I]t clearly looks as if the Biden administration just wants to please its terrorist-sponsoring adversaries, Iran and Qatar, by allowing their prized client, Hamas, to win the war.
Regrettably, Iran does not seem to be guided by the same humanitarian, ethical, or “natural law principles” embraced by Israel and the West.
The Nordic Resistance Movement has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization. Other groups should follow, but probably won’t.
Editor’s Note: The Biden administration’s recent designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement is a step in the right direction for fighting far-right terrorism. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies’s Jason Blazakis, however, argues that the United States has a very long way to go and outlines the many challenges the United States faces when trying to treat racist and anti-government groups with the same seriousness that it has jihadist terrorists.
As host of the key transit routes and operations Tehran uses to support Lebanese Hezbollah, Syria is a key battlefield in the burgeoning regional conflagration.
Israel has intensified its strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah-linked targets in Syria since the October 7 Hamas attack.
Syria has not joined other Iran-led Axis of Resistance partners in attacking Israel directly because of the weakness of the Assad regime as well as political differences with Hamas.