Orientul Mijlociu

US assistance to Gaza is going to provide emergency shelter, food relief, health care and mental health care.

US funding for Gaza won’t go to Hamas, vowed acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Joey Hood as he explained that the humanitarian assistance would flow to regional actors through transparent and legitimate channels.
The US will provide assistance to Gaza “through trusted, vetted, independent partners who distribute directly to the people in need, not through Hamas,” Hood said, when he spoke Tuesday at a panel discussion at the Wilson Center.
The international community has scrambled in the aftermath of the 11-day Gaza war in May, to find a way to prevent Hamas from confiscating civilian rehabilitation funds. Hood said such a mechanism would come on top of existing stiff regulations with regard to financial assistance for Palestinians.

Salvini said he would make the Italian and EU Parliaments understand the terrorist organization’s intentions in its war against Israel and its ambition to spread Islam around the world.

At a panel on the European reaction to Operation Guardian of the Walls this past Monday, Italian Senator Matteo Salvini announced that he would distribute the text of the Hamas Charter to his fellow members of the Italian and European Parliaments in order to raise awareness of the threat the pose.

On July 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined thousands of worshippers in the streets around the historic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul for a doubly symbolic moment. Surrounded by a swarm of politicians, soldiers, security forces and imams, the Turkish leader made his way into the giant, former Byzantine cathedral through doors once hammered open by conquering Ottoman soldiers in 1453. Inside, he read out the namaz, or Muslim prayer, formally turning the 1,500-year-old building back into a mosque.

This is the scenario the US has been concerned about for years. The pro-Iran attacks may spill over to Syria.

Iran’s media gave major headlines to claims of attacks on US forces in Syria on Sunday. The July 4 date was symbolic; it was US Independence Day. What could be a better day for Iran to claim it had struck a US base in Syria?

However, it turns out the rumors of the rocket attacks were likely false, and the US-led coalition denied any incident happened in Syria.

The Houthis think they can get legitimacy through negotiations, but haven’t given up on using drones and rockets.

Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have achieved many successes using drones and missiles in recent years. The US, Saudi Arabia and other countries have linked the Houthi drones and missiles to Iran over the past four years.

But the Houthi ambassador to Iran, Mohamed al-Dailami, who was appointed in 2019, gave an interview to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency this week. The Houthis had developed their own weapons and were not receiving drones from Iran, he said.

Erdoğan’s government claimed the cargo was humanitarian aid to Turkoman locals in Syria but then filed criminal charges against the editors Cumhuriyet, for being members of a “terrorist organization,” espionage and revealing state secrets…. The prosecution asked for life sentences for two Cumhuriyet editors.

Since then, Can Dündar, then-editor-in-chief, has been living in Germany in exile.

The world needs to know the horrendous dimensions of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, and of the gross Apartheid Israeli maltreatment of 5.2 million Occupied Palestinians and in particular of the 2 million inmates of the blockaded and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp. A numbers-based summary of these ongoing atrocities will strengthen global Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the intolerable obscenity of Apartheid Israel and its racist supporters.

A conversation with Professor Jytte Klausen about her new book, ‘Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History’, which charts the development of Al-Qaeda’s growth in the West.

In forensic and compelling detail, Professor Jytte Klausen shows how Islamist terrorism in Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement has adapted to Western repertoires of protest: agitating for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam.

Our colleague Odai Al Zoubi wrote the following on his Facebook page: “The real tragedy for the Syrians in Denmark is that not being expelled back to Syria means that they will remain imprisoned in Denmark, under the mercy of a fascist, ignorant and chauvinistic group of politicians. The Syrians in Denmark’s tragedy is not their expulsion to Syria; it is their lives in Denmark!”