“We coordinated with Hezbollah and with Iran and the Axis [of Resistance] before, during and after the battle at the highest level.” — Hamas representative Ahmed Abdulhadi, revealing Hamas coordination before and during the massacre, Newsweek, October 11, 2023.
Washington now sees Hamas the same way as Isis and could offer help killing senior leaders
The US will support Israeli plans for targeted assassinations of senior Hamas officials, a former CIA analyst specialising in the Middle East has told.
The October 7 Hamas cross-border assault on Israel will upend the geopolitics of the region and prompt a reconsideration of many of the assumptions underpinning U.S. and allied policy toward the Middle East.
Although Iran’s role in the attack is contested, its role as orchestrator of an “axis of resistance” will further alienate Tehran in the region, and could cause broader conflict if Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, fully enters the battle against Israel in what would be a second, deadlier phase of the conflict.
The attack demonstrates that U.S., Israeli, and Arab assumptions that the region was headed toward peace and security through normalization agreements and broader de-escalation have proven flawed.
U.S. leaders are likely to return their focus on the Middle East and counterterrorism that characterized U.S. global policy for a decade after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
As the war between Israel and Hamas stretches into its fifth consecutive day, Israel is attempting to keep the conflict contained to prevent further escalation that could bring Hezbollah or Iran into the fight.
Sending a carrier strike group to the Middle East serves as an unequivocal message that the U.S. is firmly behind Israel, yet the so-called “axis of resistance,” led by Iran, responded by issuing its own red lines and threatened to target U.S. interests with missiles and drones if Washington intervenes.
Bulent Kenes, a Turkish journalist who was editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Today’s Zaman, was arrested in October 2015 for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison for criticizing the president on Twitter. In 2016, an arrest warrant released by Erdogan regime for Kenes along with 46 other prominent journalists and writers, who were caught in a wave of repressions when Erdogan arrested about 100,000 people (including hundreds of journalists) ostensibly linked to the military that had been plotting a coup. Turkey and President Erdogan personally seek Kenes’ extradition from Sweden, where he has been living for the past 6,5 years. In a meeting with the Swedish prime minister, Erdogan presented giving up the journalist as a condition for Ankara’s ratification of Sweden’s NATO membership.
Palestinian Hamas has launched the largest war against Israel in decades, with hundreds already killed. For the first time, militants were able to take control and even hold several Israeli settlements for some time. Previously, only the armies of neighboring states could pose such a serious threat to Israel and only when they acted together. Now, the real war against the Jewish state has been launched not by regular troops from Syria or Egypt, but by militants from the Gaza Strip who have neither aviation nor armored vehicles. How did it happen that Hamas terrorists came to power in the Gaza Strip and the only social ladder for the residents was jihad, and why Israel ignored intelligence warnings about the possibility of a large-scale attack – journalist Yuri Matsarsky understood all this (he previously worked in the Gaza Strip, and now serves in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and his parents, on the contrary, fleeing the war, left Kharkov for Israel and now came under fire from Hamas).
Contrary to popular belief, Hamas is not just flip-flop hijackers with rusty Kalashnikovs and suicide bombers wrapped in cheap explosives. Hamas has been busy for many years with its scientific program, which included developing weapons of mass destruction and electronic intelligence. Iran is actively helping the program, but Gaza already has many of its own engineers, trained at the local university.
The world has looked on with shock and horror at the Jewish bombardment of innocent civilians in Palestine over the last few days. Apparently even Israel thinks their actions are indefensible, since on May 15th, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) destroyed a building housing the Associated Press (AP) and other media outlets in Gaza with the intention of stopping images of Palestinian suffering from reaching the rest of the world. Following the attack on the AP, Israel stepped up its bombing of civilian targets, killing dozens of Palestinians with airstrikes on populated streets.
Au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient, les réactions face à l’offensive du Hamas contre Israël varient en fonction des liens entretenus avec Tel-Aviv. Mais les autorités doivent aussi composer avec une opinion publique totalement acquise à la cause palestinienne.
How the Security Establishment Could Have Underestimated the Hamas Threat
Hamas’s devastating terrorist attack against Israel has unleashed the most violent and serious conflict the country has seen in half a century. Already, at least 1,000 Israelis (and 14 U.S. citizens) have been killed. It is an astronomical number for such a small country—equivalent to 30,000 Americans. About 2,900 more Israelis have been injured and an estimated 150 others, including toddlers, grandmothers, and foreign nationals, have been taken hostage. Meanwhile, at least 900 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, and another 4,500 have been injured.