Why do so many spy agencies take so much interest in Gaza?
By Motasem A Dalloul | MEMO | September 16, 2019
The Gaza Strip is a part of Palestine with more than two million Palestinians living in around 365 square kilometres. It has been occupied by Israel since 1967, which has imposed a near-total 13-year land, air and sea blockade. It is regarded as one of the most densely populated areas on earth.
The coastal enclave has been subject to many Israeli military offensives, with three major attacks during the past decade alone. It has no natural resources and “less than four per cent of fresh water is drinkable and the surrounding sea is polluted by sewage.” Tragic humanitarian statistics — unemployment at 52 per cent; poverty 53 per cent; water pollution 95 per cent; and daily power outage 75 per cent — convey a bleak picture. A United Nations report warned in 2018 that it could soon become unfit for humans to live in by 2020.
However, Gaza has a presence in many corridors of power around the world, in both the East and the West. Last week, a security source in Gaza told me that they had so far discovered agents for 25 regional and international intelligence agencies operating in the territory.
Furthermore, every official or partisan Israeli election list has the issue of Gaza at the top of the agenda in their current campaigns. What are they promising to do with the Gaza Strip?
According to Ron Ben-Yishai, the military correspondent of Yedioth Ahronoth, for example, the Likud Party is planning a large-scale military ground operation in Gaza to deter the Palestinians’ “military power”, after which, he claimed, Israel will call for the world to disarm the security forces there and reconstruct the infrastructure and economy. The Blue and White party, said Ben-Yishai, is promising potential voters that it will do more or less the same thing as Likud.
The veteran journalist pointed out that the head of Israel’s Jewish Home party, Avigdor Lieberman, is promising its voters to carry out a similarly “strong” military operation in Gaza to “completely” remove its government before rebuilding the enclave “from zero”. Again, the intention is to have a disarmed population on Israel’s doorstep. The Yamina alliance led by the former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, meanwhile, is promising to carry out a massive air strike in Gaza and carry out assassinations (“targeted killings”) of Palestinian leaders.
It is no secret that Egypt is a major player in the situation in Gaza. It plays a role in the Israeli and internationally-backed blockade, and has a special unit in almost every security agency tasked with dealing with the Gaza Strip. In practice, Egypt, is the only state beside Israel which has a land border with the Gaza Strip, but regards it as a security issue and is dealing with it as such. As far as the Palestinians can see, though, since the time of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s deep state gives priority to Israel’s interests in Cairo’s relationship with Gaza.
End Gaza Siege! – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
The UAE has imposed severe restrictions on Gaza since the victory of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in the 2006 elections. Hamas has been the de facto government in Gaza ever since. The government in Abu Dhabi has since deported or asked hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to leave the Emirates, and has been running active intelligence agencies in the Gaza Strip with the help of Palestinian MP Mohammed Dahlan who lives in the UAE with his family.
During the 2014 Israeli military offensive against Gaza, the security services discovered that an ostensibly medical aid convoy which entered the territory included intelligence staff instead of doctors and medical staff. To avoid clashes with the UAE, the Gaza security officials immediately deported the UAE nationals.
Jordan also has a hidden agenda in Gaza. A security source told me that a Jordanian MP who visited the territory during the 2014 Israeli offensive was discovered collecting and reporting intelligence on behalf of a certain country. He was immediately deported with the threat that he would be exposed to the media if he did not leave his hotel in the enclave at once.
Other known agents active in Gaza include those working on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Western powers, the US and Russia. Prior to 2008/9, an American citizen in her 20s entered Gaza posing as a journalist and claimed to me that she was a CIA agent. Israel, of course, has many Palestinian collaborators in the territory.
Why are the countries of the world paying so much attention to the sliver of land known as the Gaza Strip? Could it be because Gaza is the only place in the whole Arab world which is being ruled by the people who were chosen by democratic elections declared to be free and fair by international monitoring bodies, including the NGO run by former US President Jimmy Carter? Or is it because the Gaza Strip is a “superpower” that the whole world is afraid of? May be the latter is true precisely because of that electoral accountability.
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New Book
LONG LIVE NOVICHOK!
By John Helmer • Unz Review • January 14, 2025
Novichok is the notorious warfighting poison which has killed no one but fooled everyone.
At least that’s how British Government officials, their scientists, chemical warfighters, policemen, media reporters, and trailing after them all, their judges, intend the story to be told.
Theirs is the story of the assassination, ordered by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and attempted on March 4, 2018, by two military officers tracked and filmed to every location but not the murder scene; with a weapon not detected at the scene nor in the blood streams and bodily tissues of their murder targets.
The victims, Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal, have been made to disappear and are either incommunicado in prison or dead. The only direct testimony which has been recorded voluntarily in front of witnesses was given by Yulia Skripal, in hospital four days after the attack, when she identified the assassination attempt as having been carried out with poison spray by an attacker who was not Russian, just minutes before she and her father collapsed. She meant the poison was British; the assassin British.
The motive for the Novichok crime turns out to be hearsay by the British government against the Russian government.
In political and military terms, the Novichok poison story is propaganda between enemies at war. Judgement of what happened to the Skripals is a weapon of this war. And so it has turned out that there has been no court trial or test of the Novichok narrative, according to British law. Instead, there has been a proceeding which looked like a court trial but wasn’t; in which the Skripals were represented by police interrogators and by lawyers who said nothing; presided over by a judge who wasn’t.
In other words, a show trial in a time of war. … continue
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Gaza is known as the largest open air prison in the world & compared to the “Warsaw Ghetto in WWII all of which a shame on Israel which could not care less.
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The fact that all main Zionist Parties are threatening Gaza with yet more death and destruction is a frightening prospect for them and all peace-loving people. They have no military resources or defences to match the IDF. They have done little more than any impartial observer would expect to protest against two decades of cruel repression and inhuman deprivation of basic rights. These monstrous electioneering threats amount to state terrorism, dishonourable blot on the Rogue State’s already debased extremism. If carried out, the leaders should be indicted at the International Criminal Court and in every country that upholds the rule of law.
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Is Gaza sitting on top of a large oil reserve? When all the mentioned countries show up you must have something their hearts beat for.
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