Orientul Mijlociu

America Must Prevail on Its Ally to Step Back From the Brink

In the early morning of October 13, the Israeli military issued a warning to the 1.2 million Palestinians of northern Gaza: they must evacuate within 24 hours, in advance of a probable ground invasion. Such an Israeli assault would have the avowed goal of ending Hamas as an organization in retaliation for its shocking October 7 surprise attack into southern Israel, where it massacred over 1,000 Israeli citizens and seized over a hundred hostages.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that a ground operation is highly risky and complicated, but might have no other options.

Israel will never be the same after Oct. 7, 2023. The invasion of its territory and slaughter and abduction of its civilians has awakened Israel’s deepest existential fears. Scenes of armed men leading away women, children and the elderly have invariably evoked memories of the Holocaust even among third-generation Israelis who never experienced those horrors.

The Israel Defense Forces says it has killed a senior member of the Hamas terror group in an overnight airstrike in the Gaza Strip.

The strike, targeting a headquarters from which the terror group managed its aerial activity, kills Murad Abu Murad, the head of Hamas’s aerial array, according to the IDF.

An October 11, 2023 op-ed in the Iranian website Asr-e Iran called on regime officials, hinting at the ideological extremists among them, to rein in their feelings and not to speak out regarding Iran’s connection to the “Hamas-Israel conflict” for fear of harming Iranian national interests. The article recommended that they not deviate from the official line set out by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei the previous day, on October 10, according to which Iran is proud of the Palestinian resistance that carried out the attack on Israel and encourages it to continue, but that Iran was not involved in it.

Since Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on Saturday, neighbouring Egypt has been fast to assert its position as a non-violent peacemaker.

Cairo has urged both sides to de-escalate, with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi voicing the need for a fair two-state solution and prioritising domestic security by keeping the Sinai-Gaza border closed.

The southern sector: IDF activity continued on land, at sea and in the air. In the Israeli
villages surrounding Gaza and in the city of Ashkelon there were several clashes with terrorist
squads that remained in the area.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the longest and most violent ongoing modern conflicts. It involves multiple causes, and includes various actors, one of which is Hamas, perpetrators of the brutal attack on Israel that has initiated the war in Gaza.

It’s killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions. And its future lies in its past. We break it down.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced many millions of people and has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago.