Israel’s ‘Right To Rape’: Leaked Video Investigated and Labeled Blood Libel
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | October 31, 2025
Israelis are, again, furious about the infamous gang rape of a Palestinian hostage in Sde Teiman concentration camp, but not at the rapists themselves. Instead, they are demanding the prosecution of those responsible for leaking the video.
On July 29, 2024, ten Israeli soldiers from its Unit 100 were reported to have been involved in a brutal gang rape incident against a Palestinian hostage, who was being held without charge in the Sde Teiman detention facility. Outrage immediately erupted in Israeli society when the soldiers were subsequently detained by the relevant authorities, but not for the reasons most would expect.
Instead of an Israeli public outcry condemning the incident, thousands of Israeli protesters, accompanied by elected officials, broke into the military facilities, demonstrated outside the jail where the ten soldiers were being held and advocated for the right to rape Palestinian detainees.
Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir referred to the accused gang rapists as “heroes” and argued that any action is permissible against Palestinian detainees. Likud Party elected official, Hanoch Milwidsky, even passionately defended the rape of Palestinians with a stick, simply upon the accusation that they are Hamas fighters.
During a heated debate in the Israeli Knesset, MK Ahmad Tibi, from the Ta’al Party, asked, “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?” to which Milwidsky responded, “Yes! If he is a Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do to him!”
Meir Ben Shatrit, one of the released accused Israeli gang rapists, later stated on video that his arrest was a sham and proceeded to frame himself as receiving Israeli popular support. This soldier was later brought on Israeli broadcast media, where he was treated well, given softball interviews and defended his actions.
It was also not long before Israel’s Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, chimed in, asserting that “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”.
On Wednesday, Smotrich’s demands were finally fulfilled, as the Israeli military launched a criminal probe into the leaking of the video, which showed the gang-rape incident. The full video itself was officially broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 in August of 2024, despite a shorter clip having been verified by Al-Jazeera at an earlier date.
Meanwhile, five of the accused soldiers were set free, while the remaining five were charged with “aggravated abuse and serious bodily harm” and are not being charged with rape, despite the incident being documented on video and the controversy surrounding it being centered on the issue of rape.
Initially, only two of the detained soldiers were released, after which Israel’s Honenu legal aid organization stepped in to represent four of the remaining eight accused gang rapists. Honenu reportedly argued that their clients were acting in self-defense.
What makes this case even more disturbing is that this is the most high-profile case of rape against a Palestinian hostage, yet this incident is turning into a witch-hunt against those who were potentially involved in leaking evidence of the horrific assault.
Copious evidence has emerged over the past two years, supporting the notion of mass weaponized sexual violence against Palestinians, held with no charges, both in Israeli prisons and in detention facilities. Countless cases of gang rape, rape using dogs, metal poles, sticks, and other objects, in addition to sexual humiliation and assault, are not only ignored by the Western media, but there is no accountability for those responsible.
Now, the Israeli Military Prosecutor, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi has gone on leave, as investigators examine whether top legal officers and even the Prosecutor may have been involved in leaking the video of the gang-rape incident. A development applauded by Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, who referred to the video’s release as one of the biggest “blood libels” against the occupation army’s soldiers.
Despite there being UN and Human Rights reports, along with investigative pieces published by distinguished media outlets, in addition to video and photographic evidence, on top of countless individual and even lawyer testimonies, there is little in the way of an international outcry over the issue.
When this is compared to the coordinated campaign, which could not produce a single victim or reputable witness testimony, let alone photographic or video evidence, to argue that Hamas had carried out a coordinated mass rape campaign on October 7, 2023, it demonstrates the clear double standards of not only Western media but also its political elites and institutions.
There must be an immediate push for an international investigation into Israel’s weaponization of sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and children. This should be impartial and seek to find answers as to whether Israel’s leadership simply allowed it to happen, or whether they were directly implicated in ordering what can be reasonably assumed to be a premeditated mass rape campaign against Palestinians.
Not A Ceasefire: The International Community Takes Over the Gaza Genocide
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | November 1, 2025
Israel is not actually implementing the ceasefire; instead, it is taking a break from some of the more taxing combat missions in Gaza and toning down its bombing, something that it has done at different periods during the genocide.
Calling what is currently taking place in the Gaza Strip a ceasefire is, by definition, incorrect. Israel has not ceased fire; instead, it has continued its military operations while reducing the intensity of the fighting. Meanwhile, the so-called “International Community” is working on a conspiracy to step forward and take command of the genocide.
Since the ceasefire was said to have gone into effect, the Israelis have violated every commitment they had pledged to adhere to. Despite this, we are still being informed through the corporate media that the war is allegedly over.
In order to draw conclusions about what is currently underway, it is important to first establish the facts, which can lead to a thorough analysis of what is transpiring on the ground.
Ceasefire Violations Expose Israel’s True Agendas
Before addressing violations, it is integral to any analysis of Gaza’s current predicament to make mention of the so-called “Civil-Military Coordination Center” (CMCC) established shortly after the October 8 agreement was inked.
The CMCC is supposed to be the committee that monitors and helps to enforce the ceasefire agreement. Although it was initially said that setting up the CMCC would take at least 17 days, within the first 5 days of the ceasefire agreement, it was up and running.
Instantly, 14 countries and over 20 non-governmental organizations joined the CMCC, with others joining in later. Although it may appear to be a project with a positive goal, it has been a complete and total failure through and through.
On October 19, the Israelis killed 44 Palestinians after their own forces ran over an unexploded ordinance, which they subsequently blamed on Hamas. The Associated Press (AP) reported that day that Israel had not violated the ceasefire, but had posed a “test” to it.
To give the CMCC the benefit of the doubt, one could plausibly argue that behind closed doors, its member countries and NGOs may have exerted pressure on the Israelis following this event.
However, on October 28, the Israelis decided to mass murder 104 Palestinians in Gaza, around half of whom were women and children. For all intents and purposes, this day was a return to the scale of destruction that was present throughout the genocide.
In this instance, did any nation or NGO withdraw from the CMCC in protest? Was there a coordinated effort to impose consequences on the Israelis for their actions?
If one sought to give the benefit of the doubt even in this scenario, arguing perhaps that the CMCC may be playing the role of simply ensuring the ceasefire doesn’t totally collapse, this still makes no sense. This is because part of the ceasefire is the issues of reconstruction, aid entry, Israeli withdrawal, the cessation of military operations, and stopping the killing.
On every issue concerning the Palestinian civilian population, the CMCC has not only failed, but the committee itself has watched on and is fully aware of what is occurring on the ground. In addition to this, the CMCC multi-national hub is based in southern Israel and is therefore not on neutral grounds; it is there with Israeli permission and, no doubt, a level of supervision.
When it comes to the entrance of humanitarian aid into Gaza, an average of around 90 trucks were permitted entry by the Israelis in the first few weeks of the ceasefire. According to the agreement, Israel had pledged to allow for 400 trucks to enter per day for the first five days, agreeing to unlimited amounts of aid flowing through after this.
The minimum required to meet Gaza’s needs is 600 trucks per day. On this issue, there is no other conclusion that can be drawn other than to accuse the CMCC of complicity or that it is a failure. If it is a failure, then the natural follow-up question becomes: Why is the committee growing, and there are no solid measures being taken to hold Israel to account? Or, at the very least, why is nobody resigning from the role in protest?
Next, we have the issue of reconstruction. According to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, they are backing a scheme whereby reconstruction will not take place in areas where Hamas is still based. In other words, they will implement an Israeli proposed scheme, as initially reported upon in Axios News, to use reconstruction funds to build only behind what is known as the ‘Yellow Line’.
The Yellow Line is the zone demarcating the areas controlled by Hamas and Israel. The Israelis were supposed to withdraw to this line and remain only in 53% of Gaza. Instead, they quickly violated this portion of the agreement and are operating hundreds of meters beyond this point, as verified by satellite imagery. Israel is in reality occupying up to 58% of the territory.
Inside the territory the Israelis occupy directly, they are continuing their daily demolition operations against the remaining Palestinian civilian infrastructure there. This is a flagrant violation of the ceasefire, which is evident through Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves destroying homes on social media. Again, where is the CMCC in all of this, let alone on the question of the daily killing of civilians and bombings?
Under Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, he seeks disarmament of the Palestinian factions. If you look at the rest of the nations involved in the so-called monitoring and enforcement effort, they all voted in favor of the New York Declaration’s proposal for a Two-State model and ceasefire. The UN General Assembly vote reflected an agreement on disarming and drowning out non-State actors.
So why then are the CMCC nations not sounding the alarm over Israel’s continued military backing for four separate ISIS-linked militia groups operating behind the Yellow Line? These forces cannot take over Gaza and are hated amongst the entire population, who were not only subjected to their indiscriminate violence, in addition to the looting of their homes, businesses, and hospitals.
These militias actively receive orders from the Israeli Shin Bet and army; they are also responsible for looting the majority of the aid trucks heading into Gaza since May of 2024, under Israeli protection and monitoring.
Nothing is being said about how to combat these gangs, composed of Salafist militants who are affiliated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda, along with bans on convicted murderers and drug dealers. On the part of Western media, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have even published op-eds, purported to have been written by the ISIS-linked militia members themselves.
Yet, when it comes to holding Hamas to account and achieving the portions of the agreement that benefit Israel, the CMCC is ready to play ball and take action. As a measure to ensure the ceasefire is being enforced, Egypt sent teams of specialists into Gaza to help search under the rubble for the bodies of dead Israeli captives. The US has also sent hundreds of troops as “advisors” and deployed reconnaissance drones over Gaza.
All of this alone demonstrates that only the Israeli side is being prioritized, while Palestinians are not only killed on a daily basis by direct fire, but through deprivation of essential medicine and goods, in addition to the refusal to allow the sick and injured to leave for treatment.
The ‘Ceasefire’ Agenda is Now Becoming Clear
What is currently happening is that Israel is being allowed to take a glorified pause from its full-scale military operations that it had previously committed itself to in Gaza. In an interview for Israel’s Hebrew-language Channel 14 News, the plot is discussed by Reserve Brigadier General Amir Avivi.
Avivi argues that behind what is labeled a “temporary calm”, there are many complex political and security moves being taken by both the Israeli and US governments. “Trump and Netanyahu are working simultaneously on the international force, in which there will be no Qataris or Turks, and also on regional peace agreements. Because everything is intertwined in this, everything is slower. It is being done step by step”, he stated.
Some of these schemes may be kept private from the public eye, yet enough of them have been exposed piece by piece, enabling us to be able to put together an educated analysis of what is really going on.
For example, the International Security Force (ISF), which the Trump administration has been advocating for, was exposed by Vice President JD Vance himself when he explicitly stated that they would be tasked with disarming Hamas.
The ISF plan is still incredibly vague in terms of how it would be actually implemented, yet it should be noted that projects like the failed American floating aid pier and the PMC-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundations (GHF) were rolled out without thorough planning, resulting in mass death and destruction.
What we do know about the ISF is that everything it does will have to receive approvals from the Israeli military and operate within its framework. So immediately, it is a pro-Israel force that is not impartial, and we know from what’s been reported upon that the US and Israel are adamant that the ISF will not act as a Gaza version of UNIFIL in southern Lebanon.
Israel is also clear that no Qatari or Turkish forces will be deployed as part of this ISF. A number of unnamed Arab nations have reportedly withdrawn their pledges to commit forces to the ISF, also reportedly leading to the US approaching more East Asian nations to replace them. The main concern is the lack of clear direction for the force, the precarious security situation, and that these soldiers will likely be forced to fight Hamas.
The ISF, in other words, is an international regime change force that is planned to be an invading army, tasked with carrying out Israel’s dirty work. Interestingly, however, the likes of Israeli Reserve Brigadier General Avivi believe that the scheme will not work and that instead the Israelis will be forced to return to attacking Hamas.
Avivi himself mentions that the pause is being used by the Israeli army to repair its tanks and that “the Chief of Staff has long asked the government for time to work on the tanks, on the tools. After two years of fighting, the tools are worn out. They want to refresh the forces, consolidate the defense line.”
With or without the ISF regime change force, the Israelis are still working on a range of different plans for the Gaza Strip. As mentioned above, Israel’s military operations behind the Yellow Line have not stopped, and this territory is being reinforced with security equipment and cement blocks to demarcate the zones.
What Tel Aviv is seeking is to create two separate Gazas. One, which will be under the de facto rule of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, and the other, which is under Israeli occupation and also the ISIS-linked militias it uses as proxies. So far, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the only known outside entity to have thrown its weight behind these ISIS-linked gangs; however, they were used to coordinate with the GHF mercenaries.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff appear to have given Israel’s Two-Gazas Solution the green light, making it clear that no reconstruction will happen except in the territory controlled by Israel and its ISIS-linked proxies.
The only problem that the Israelis face with this strategy is that all of Gaza’s civilian population are along the coast in the areas controlled by the Palestinian resistance, and they will not move willingly. The only civilians living in the Israeli-controlled territory are some family members of the aid looting militia collaborators.
Therefore, the Israeli military is proposing a range of solutions to cleanse the population and force them into this “new Gaza” zone. One of those proposals involves aid distribution, in particular the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was the privatized machine implicated in the mass murder of over 1,000 civilians, who were lured to the distribution sites and picked off by snipers for sport.
Israel’s idea is to continue restricting the aid from entering areas where Gaza’s civilian population lives. They may eventually shut off all aid, or slowly reduce it if their strategy begins working. On the other side of the Yellow Line will be aid distribution points run by the GHF, which the people will be forced to go to in order to simply survive. This project has not been fully mapped out as of now, but all the reports point to this being the case.
Another part of this displacement project, which has been openly discussed in the media, as mentioned above, is that Palestinians will be offered to live in areas where some reconstruction is happening, sites that will be concentration camps.
The alternatives will be for the civilian population of Gaza to stay in the areas controlled by Hamas and to starve, or continue living in tents with less than the bare necessities.
If we look back at different phases of the genocide, this plan mirrors aspects of a number of similar schemes, all of which failed. For example, the GHF was supposed to result in a herding of the civilian population into a gated concentration camp facility that was being constructed in Rafah, over which the ISIS-linked gangs would be its de facto rulers.
There was also the infamous “General’s Plan”, drafted by former Israeli General Giora Eiland. This scheme was the goal that the Israeli military set out to complete in late 2024 and up until the January 2025 ceasefire agreement, which they later broke. To summarise it, they sought to ethnically cleanse the entire civilian population from the north of Gaza, in an attempt to isolate Hamas inside the area and surround it.
Threats were made in late 2024 to some 400,000 civilians that if they did not flee, they would all be considered combatants and were going to be targeted as such. It failed and militarily made no sense either, yet this was openly the plan at the time.
If we look at the evidence, the Israelis are now using this period of time in order to regroup, perhaps also to re-direct military attention to Lebanon also, while also seeking to find solutions to eliminate the civilian population. As they understand that ethnic cleansing will not be allowed in the form of a stampede into Egypt, the strategy is to ultimately create a situation under which the population will languish and slowly be forced to flee.
The Implications
What has happened is that the Israelis are being granted international supervision under the guise of a ceasefire. They are retrieving all their captives, dead and alive, which will take political pressure off of them, while they receive a break and praise from leaderships around the world for “ending the war”.
However, the war isn’t over, and this is something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly stated in a public address, in Hebrew, at the start of the ceasefire agreement. The difference now is that the governments of dozens of Arab, Muslim Majority, and Western nations are directly implicated in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza.
As I wrote for the Palestine Chronicle, at the beginning of the ceasefire, Phase two of the agreement will not fully go into effect, as there are fundamental disagreements between the Israelis and Palestinian resistance on the question of disarmament and Palestinian self-determination. Instead, it is more likely that we will remain in limbo at a prolonged Phase Once pause, the length of which is impossible to accurately determine.
Israel is not actually implementing the ceasefire; instead, it is taking a break from some of the more taxing combat missions in Gaza and toning down its bombing, something that it has done at different periods during the genocide when there was no ceasefire in place. Its demolition operations were always the bulk of the Israeli military operations during the war, because their goal has never been to destroy Hamas; it has been about destroying Gaza and its people, hence it is called a genocide.
The genocide really has little to do with Hamas as a group. Because even if Hamas were to be defeated, another resistance force would pop up to replace it, and the cycle would start once again. The Israelis are genocidal lunatics, but they aren’t stupid; they know full well that their national project’s success necessitates the total elimination of not only the Palestinian people, but also their mere national identity.
A multi-national coalition is now directly aiding in that project to eradicate the Palestinian identity and its cause for national liberation. This was also what the Saudi-French “New York Declaration” that was voted upon at the United Nations was all about, which I have written about here too, as is the Trump-Netanyahu so-called “peace plan”.
If these nations that are endorsing and are directly involved in the implementation of the Trump plan were truly genuine about seeking a “Two-State solution”, as their votes cast at the United Nations General Assembly this September suggested, then why go along with this project that has stated its opposition to “Two-States” from the outset?
It’s very simple, it is because they want the Palestinian cause gone. This is what the New York Declaration was. This is what the Saudi-French initiative outlined. It wasn’t a proposal for a State of Palestine. Why? Because they explicitly asserted that the “State” they seek must be the only completely disarmed nation on earth, it should also not have control over its own textbooks and is not allowed to have its own independent political parties; all of them must be banned, and only the Western-approved and funded corrupt politicians they choose are allowed into office.
This was the “State” they proposed. It provided no solid answers or conclusions on the “final status issues”, certainly nothing to offer to the Palestinian diaspora, no reparations paid by Israel, and no consequences for Israel, other than it would have to give up its pledge to parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Now look at what these nations have signed up for: Trump’s plan that doesn’t even offer this, that seeks to offer less than his 2020 “Deal of the Century” that is pretty close in its details to this Saudi-French proposal.
So what now, you may ask? Well, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has set forth Israeli stooge Hussein al-Sheikh to be its next unelected quasi-dictator and is attempting to leech whatever it can off of the Trump plan, sucking up to Saudi Arabia and every Arab regime it can for more scraps so that it can run its corrupt administration whose only function is to serve Israeli security coordination.
Unfortunately, this PA has swallowed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), hollowing out what was once an influential organization that now occupies the role of the State of Palestine at the UN. The PA represents nobody but its employees, and despite the best attempts of all the Palestinian political parties, including factions within the ruling Fatah Party itself, they continue to insist upon division. So, on the political front, until this US-EU-funded entity dies, there is little chance of unity, meaning a comprehensive political solution is, for now, off the cards.
On the Israeli side, they are scheming to try and ethnically cleanse Gaza, and as has been mentioned are not implementing the ceasefire; they even gave Hamas an impossible-to-fulfill ultimatum regarding withdrawing fighters hiding in tunnels from behind the Yellow Line. It was proven that Hamas cannot communicate with most of them, many of whom don’t even know there is a ceasefire. So this is just one of many excuses for Israel to ramp up its death and destruction.
When the Israeli-US scheme for Gaza eventually fails, after inflicting all the suffering that it will on the civilian population, they will then have to go to Plan B, restarting the full-scale genocide once again.
The picture now really depends upon what happens on the other fronts of this ongoing regional war and whether the likes of Hezbollah and Iran can dramatically change the picture. As for the Arab masses, there is always some possibility they could rise, but after two years of genocide and them living their lives as if nothing is happening, not a whole lot should be expected from them.
As I have written to conclude most of my analysis pieces over the past two years, this war is regional and will be fought until one side is decisively defeated. Therefore, either the Israelis succeed at exterminating a segment of the Palestinian population, ethnically cleansing the others, and placing the rest in concentration camps, or Israel is crushed. There are no other options.
Unless the Israelis are strategically defeated, the US, European, Arab and Muslim Majority nations collaborating with it, will back it in its Greater Israel Project until the end. These governments are now more involved than they were before and play their role with the taxes paid to them by their own people, selling their populations the lie that they are working towards peace.
Washington’s ‘new Gaza’ project meets Gulf pushback
The Cradle | November 2, 2025
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pushing back against US President Donald Trump’s plan to construct roughly half a dozen residential regions on the eastern half of Gaza, which is currently under Israeli control, The Times of Israel reported on 2 November.
Citing two Arab diplomats familiar with the matter, The Times of Israel said that Trump and his real estate developer son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have proposed the plan to donors in the Gulf to build the “new Gaza” on the eastern side of the strip only, which is now under direct Israeli control.
Following the 11 October ceasefire agreement, Israeli forces withdrew to the east of a “Yellow Line” drawn up during the negotiations to divide Gaza into two parts. Hamas remains in control of the territory to the west of the line.
The partial withdrawal leaves Israeli forces in direct control of at least 53 percent of Gaza.
Trump’s plan to build residential areas in the Israeli-controlled east of Gaza reportedly envisions the Israeli army “gradually withdrawing to the other side of the Gaza border and leaving the Strip altogether,” The Times of Israel wrote.
However, such a withdrawal is conditioned on the establishment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) for postwar Gaza, and the disarmament of the Hamas.
“With those two conditions for continued Israeli withdrawal so difficult to meet, the US is not waiting to begin the reconstruction process,” The Times of Israel added.
The US wants the international force to deploy to the west of the Yellow Line, the area remaining under Hamas control.
Washington also wants its Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to pay for the force.
However, the diplomats stated that the wealthy Gulf states are pushing back on the plan, as are Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Turkiye, and Egypt, who are expected to provide troops.
These nations are reluctant to assist Washington without a clear UN mandate or agreement with Hamas to hand over its weapons, the two Arab diplomats said. They also want to first deploy their forces on the east of the line to replace Israeli troops.
This information aligns with a previous Israel Hayom report, which revealed that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE had warned the US administration that they would not take part in Gaza’s reconstruction unless Washington enforced the ceasefire terms on Hamas and ensured the group’s disarmament.
Israel is also backing four militias as part of a project to oust Hamas and create a “new Gaza,” according to a report released by Sky News on 25 October.
These armed groups – which throughout the war have been engaged in hostilities against Hamas on behalf of Israel – are currently operating along the Yellow Line of Washington’s ceasefire map, in Israeli-held territory.
Jared Kushner stated he wishes to begin building on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, in particular on the ruins of the destroyed city of Rafah in the south of the strip on the Egyptian border.
“The US proposal envisions as many as one million Palestinians — around half of Gaza’s population — moving to the residential areas on the Israel-held side of the Yellow Line,” The Times of Israel stated.
Kushner plans to complete the construction of these areas within two years, even if Israeli forces have not withdrawn by then, the two diplomats briefed on the plan stated. Both Arab diplomats concluded the timeline was “highly unrealistic.”
“Palestinians may not want to live under the rule of Hamas, but the idea that they’ll be willing to move to live under Israeli occupation and be under control of the party they also see as responsible for killing 70,000 of their brethren is fantastical,” one of the Arab diplomats said.
Additionally, there is no guarantee Palestinians would be allowed to return and live in the new housing developments. If Israeli forces remain in control of the area, Tel Aviv could decide to house Jewish Israeli settlers in the newly built neighborhoods instead, leaving Palestinians to languish in tents on the other side of the line.
One diplomat stated the Trump White House plans to sponsor a UN Security Council resolution to establish the international security force later this month, possibly before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits the White House for talks on the future of Gaza on 18 November.
Kushner and Vice President JD Vance previously stated the US and Israel are considering a plan to divide Gaza into separate zones, one controlled by Israel and one by Hamas, with reconstruction only taking place on the Israeli side until Hamas is disarmed and dissolved.
Vance and Kushner summarized the plan during a press conference in Israel on 22 October, explaining that no funds for reconstruction would go to areas that remain under Hamas’s control.
“There are considerations happening now in the area that the [Israeli army] controls, as long as that can be secured, to start the construction as a new Gaza in order to give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live,” Kushner said.
Kushner is seeking to “create an environment that would be safe for the billions of dollars in investment needed to rebuild,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) commented.
“White House officials said Kushner is the driving force behind the split-reconstruction plan, having devised it alongside special envoy Steve Witkoff,” the WSJ said.
The financial newspaper added that with time, Israel could take more territory in Gaza from Hamas, and try to replicate what it has done in the occupied West Bank, with Israel taking complete security control while “forcing Gazans into small, unconnected areas of control.”
“Gaza has represented the only patch of territorial contiguity for a Palestinian state,” explained Tahani Mustafa, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“A plan like this could end up creating what Palestinians feared.”
Most Intense Hurricanes
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 2, 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlantic_hurricane_records
Melissa is now ranked tie 3rd most intense Atlantic hurricane at 892mb. We can look at it in graph format:
The picture is stark – nearly all of the eleven most intense have occurred in recent years, including the two most intense, Gilbert in 1988 and Wilma in 2005. Does this mean then that global warming really is making hurricanes more intense?
WHOA THERE!!!
Take another look at that table.
Of the eleven on the list, seven were logged out at sea. Of the other four, we already know that the Melissa reading was not at landfall, but occurred several hours before at sea.
Dean’s minimum pressure was measured at landfall, but was observed by hurricane hunters. The other two, Labor Day and Camille, were the only two genuinely recorded at the surface on land.
When we separate readings at landfall and at sea, we get a different story:
It is not a coincidence that mid ocean hurricanes did not feature before 1980, because proper technology did not exist then to measure them, whether satellites or aircraft.
We know that hurricanes almost invariably weaken as they approach land, so comparing mid-ocean intensities with landfall ones is a meaningless exercise.
But it gets worse.
On the Wikipedia table of most intense hurricanes at landfall, all of the modern entries were taken by hurricane hunters – Dean, Dorian and Irma.
Nowadays hurricane hunters are able to stay inside hurricanes for hours on end, able to seek out the highest wind speeds and lowest pressures. In contrast, measuring hurricanes like Camille relied on land based thermometers, which were extremely unlikely to be at the exact spot where pressure was lowest.
Scientists at the US Hurricane Research Division have done sterling work with their attempts to reanalyse past hurricanes. But as good scientists, they have to be conservative in their findings. They only estimate pressures and windspeeds that they can sensibly justify. Believing that a hurricane was probably more intense is not enough if you don’t have the data to back it up.
Many hurricanes only hit small islands – Dorian and Irma for example. Hurricane hunters are invaluable in getting measurements in these situations where previously there may have been no reliable land-based data.
Hundreds of catastrophic hurricanes have hit the Caribbean over the years. Just because we don’t have accurate data on them does not make them less catastrophic.
Norbert Bolz: ‘The EU has become a monster’
Those who fight against Brussels ‘are not anti-Europeans, but good Europeans’
Weltwoche | October 19, 2025
The European Union has become a “monster” that is increasingly undermining freedom and democracy—this is the criticism leveled by media scholar Norbert Bolz in an opinion piece for the newspaper Die Welt. He argues that the EU is no longer a community of free states, but a centralized “machine that constantly produces regulations and prohibitions,” which follows a “script” reminiscent of Kafka and Orwell.
Bolz, a professor emeritus and one of Germany’s most prominent conservative intellectuals, sees the original idea of a peaceful and economically united Europe as having been perverted. What began with free trade and freedom of movement has been replaced by bureaucratization, a lack of transparency, and authoritarian tendencies. As a concrete example, he cites the Digital Services Act and the planned chat surveillance: “This is about the methods of a totalitarian surveillance state that reads private communications and thus destroys privacy and freedom of expression.”
At the center of his criticism is EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. For Bolz, she embodies the “cold German face of a failed Europe.” He finds it particularly outrageous that she refuses to disclose the text messages she exchanged with the Pfizer CEO during the coronavirus pandemic.
Furthermore, he states that the EU lacks democratic legitimacy. “There is no separation of powers and no democracy,” writes Bolz. He contends that Brussels serves as a lever to push through nationally unpopular measures—for example, in the name of climate protection and corporate social responsibility. This practice enables left-wing and green parties, in particular, to circumvent the political will of their own populations.
According to Bolz, those who rebel against this development are not anti-Europeans, but good Europeans.
Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for military attack on her own country
RT | November 2, 2025
The US military buildup off Venezuela’s coast could help bring about regime change, opposition figure Maria Corina Machado has said. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate this year signaled she would welcome US strikes on the country if they help remove President Nicolas Maduro.
Washington has accused Maduro of having ties to drug cartels, calling him a “narcoterrorist.” Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump deployed a naval armada to the western Caribbean, and since September, US forces have struck alleged drug-smuggling vessels off Venezuela’s coast.
Media reports say Washington is expanding its naval presence, with analysts suggesting that the mission could extend beyond counter-narcotics. Trump denied planning direct strikes inside Venezuela, but reportedly reviewed a list of potential targets.
Asked on Bloomberg’s ‘The Mishal Husain Show’ if she backs US military action, Machado said, “I believe the escalation that’s taking place is the only way to force Maduro to understand that it’s time to go.”
She claimed that Maduro “illegally” seized power in last year’s election, from which she was barred. Machado also claimed that opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won the election. Ousting Maduro, she said, would not be “regime change in the conventional way,” since he is “not the legitimate president” but “the head of a narcoterrorist structure.”
“This is not regime change, this is enforcing the will of the Venezuelan people,” she stressed.
Maduro has accused Machado of channeling US funds to “fascist” anti-government groups, calling her a front for Washington’s interference in Venezuelan affairs. Machado has had close contacts with the US government for decades. In 2005, then-President George W. Bush received her at the Oval Office.
Asked if US military force is the only way to remove Maduro, Machado said the threat alone could be sufficient: “It was absolutely indispensable to have a credible threat.” She added that the Venezuelan opposition is “ready to take over government,” backed by the military and police, claiming that “more than 80% of them are joining and will be part of this orderly transition as soon as it starts.”
Maduro has denied US drug-trafficking accusations, accusing Trump of “fabricating a new war.” Caracas called the US operations a violation of sovereignty and a coup attempt, reportedly seeking help from Russia, China, and Iran to strengthen its defenses.
Russia, which ratified a strategic partnership treaty with Venezuela on Monday, has condemned the US campaign.
“Stunning!” Apollo Moon Photos Too Good to be True?
Photographer-filmmaker Massimo Mazzucco takes on the New York Times
By Kevin Barrett | November 1, 2025
Jason Farago, who appears to be a Deep State propagandist and pro-UkroNazi culture warrior, just published a New York Times interactive photo-video piece headlined “How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth.” Farago celebrates the alleged artistic genius of the Apollo moon photos, viewing them as the climax of the overlapping artistic and scientific histories of moon explorations and representations.
Moon landing skeptic and professional photographer Massimo Mazzucco says that’s bullshit. Farago’s extravagant praise of the Apollo astronauts’ brilliant use of deep depth of field just means they knew how to crank the f-stop up to f16 or f32 (which I figured out about five seconds after buying the cheapest available Pentax when I was a journalism student back in 1976). His orgasmic effusions about the beautifully-rendered lunar surface texture sound like something an LSD tripper might say while staring hypnotically at the ground in some godforsaken stretch of barren desert. And his ranting about how many of the moon landing photos are so perfectly composed and executed that they look totally fake really takes the cake:
“The photographs were in fact so good—and the 70mm stock so detailed—that doubts set in on the blue sphere below. With their rich chiaroscuro and starless skies, Bean and Conrad’s photos looked uncannily like a Hollywood stage set.”
Uncannily indeed. Is Farago engaging in classic neocon doublespeak (surface layer for the ignorant rubes, esoteric layer for the cognoscenti)? Is he nudging and winking at the cognoscenti in a shared moment of dupers’ delight? Was this assignment handed out by the Deep State desk at the New York Times to blow smoke to cover for delays in the Artemis missions? Or is Mazzucco wrong in his claims that many moon landing photos are obviously fake, and that the most likely explanation of these and other anomalies is that the Apollo missions didn’t really put men on the moon circa 1969-1972?
Watch Mazzucco deconstruct bad New York Times propaganda, watch his film American Moon, and make up your own mind.
Excerpts from the Interview
Welcome to a special edition of False Flag Weekly News, the weekly news show that normally peels back the news headlines to reveal what’s crawling around underneath. Today we are going to be interrogating the perhaps most influential newspaper in the Western world, The New York Times, by way of a special art and science uh photo analysis that they did discussing the moon landing photos from the Apollo missions. And who better to talk back to the media on that subject than Massimo Mazzucco? He is the director of September 11th: The New Pearl Harbor, possibly the best and most comprehensive 9/11 documentary film, as well as American Moon, probably the best film about the moon landing. So, hey, congratulations on making the best conspiracy films in two genres.
Thank you. It’s not for me to say they’re the best. I can certainly say they’re the longest. Because September 11th: The New Pearl Harbor is five hours and the American Moon is three and a half.
Well, that’s what I meant by comprehensive. I was trying to be nice. (laughter)
Okay. Okay. Let me just clarify very quickly. There’s a reason for that. I don’t like to entertain people more than is needed, except that for both films, I use the technique where I first present the problems or the issues (with the official stories). Then I present the explanations or answers that the debunkers have for each of those issues. And then I present the debunking of the debunkers. So each argument, each issue, is presented from three times: The presentation (of holes in the official stories), what the debunkers say about it, and what I have to say about what they say.
There’s a term that David Ray Griffin coined first. It’s called debunking the debunkers. And that’s why I like to have it all in one film, all comprehensive, both questions and answers. And then people can make up their own mind, of course.
Yeah, it’s a great format. And honestly, I think they’re the best as well as the most comprehensive films, partly because of that format. And we’re going to follow that type of format here too, because we’re going to see what the New York Times says about these images. And then you get to say what you have to say about them. And unfortunately, we don’t have the New York Times here to answer you, so we’ll just have to leave it at that.
Let’s look at our slideshow. We’re going to do a close read on this New York Times photo exhibit. Here’s their opening shot. They’re really ecstatic about the artistic quality of the moon landing photos. And in a couple of places, they actually mention that it looks almost suspicious. These photos are almost too good to be true. What do you think, Max?
I don’t think they’re good at all. No, I have to tell you… maybe your audience doesn’t know. I have been a photographer for the first part of my life, let’s say between age 20 and 40.. And I was a professional, at the top level. I was working for magazines all over the world. I was using actually the same cameras and film and lighting that supposedly were used in the Apollo missions.
I’ll give you one quick anecdote so you understand the point of view of a professional. I learned my trade from a famous photographer, now deceased. He just passed away a few months ago. His name was Oliviero Toscani. He’s actually the guy who made the Benton campaign all over the world. He was very, very famous. I would put him in the top 10 in the world history of fashion photography. I was his assistant for about three years. Then we parted ways. I went on to have my own career.
Back in 2000, when I saw the lunar pictures for the first time—all of them, not just the few that were published before, but all of them that were put out by NASA on the internet—I looked at them and I could see all the defects that I would find myself when I tried to replicate sunlight in the studio. So I got very suspicious. I called Toscani and I said, “Oliviero, what did you think the first time you saw the Apollo moon pictures?” And his answer was, and I quote him:
“I always thought that had they given me the job, I would have done a much better job.”
Wow, better than Neil Armstrong! Because you’re going to see how the New York Times praises Neil Armstrong (as a photographer)…Okay, so they begin with this poetic passage: “The darkness we expected. What we had underestimated was the silence, the quiet of the vacuum, disturbed only by our breath and the radio in our ears.” So that’s supposedly these Air Force guys, these astronauts. You think that they hired a literary guy…
There’s a problem. These astronauts were wearing what is called the PLSS, the Portable Life Support System, which provides them with both a cooling system for the body—because you have over 100 degree Celsius temperature on the surface of the moon—and air for breathing.
So in the back of the PLSS, you have these pumps that are supposed to be both circulating water and pushing air through the system so that you can actually breathe. Except when you listen to their conversations, there’s absolutely no noise. There’s no noise whatsoever.
No wonder they underestimated the silence.
Yeah, exactly. Because you’re in a studio when nobody is making a sound. That’s why you hear all the silence. If you had those machines really on, you would hear probably a purring in the back of your ear. You would hear of these pumps working. Nothing of that is ever heard in their conversations.
In the opening picture, that light tells me that is a studio spotlight facing straight into the camera. It is not the sunlight. The sunlight acts differently. With the kind of lenses that they had, the kind of distortion that you would have inside the lens is much different than that. That, to me, tells me that that is a spotlight facing straight into the camera and making it look like the sun.
Another thing that you can tell is what is called the fall-off. You have a major amount of light coming through the center of the picture, straight in line with the sun. But off to the sides, if you look at the edge of the crater on the middle of the right of the picture, you can see that the more you go away to the right, the darker the ground gets. If this was the sun, you would have illumination that is equal all over the sand. In this case, you can tell that it is degrading towards darkness as you move to the right, and that is because that is the spotlight. It’s not the actual sun.
So here’s one where they say it’s a shockingly well-composed picture.
Yeah. I think they’re trying to influence the viewer by using all these words, shocking and beauty and all that. There’s absolutely nothing shocking in this picture.
“The lunar module’s eagle’s leg is near dead center. A bag of waste is perfectly jettisoned to one side.” So maybe they’re telling us it’s all a bag of waste. I don’t know.
How do you imperfectly jettison?
Ye ah I’ve jettisoned a lot of waste in my life but I can’t tell the perfect from the imperfect myself. But the New York Times, they’re critics. They know this stuff.
Yeah.
Do you see anything suspicious about this image?
I do but it would be a little too long to explain. Again there’s a fall off. But it’s very mild because they lowered the contrast. So I can tell that there is more light right below the LEM in the center left of the picture, it is brighter than on the far right. But it’s a very, very mild difference because the contrast is very low.So you can’t really tell here. Only a professional can tell.
The New York Times tells us: “During their camera training it became evident that Armstrong had a better eye than Buzz Aldrin…” Which meant he was the one taking most of the pictures for Apollo 11 in 1969…took more than 100 photographs. And the New York Times guy says: “I would happily claim, in fact, that Armstrong authored one of the last century’s signal works of American portraiture, his head-on view of Aldrin, legs contrapposto like a Greek statue in the southwest of the Sea of Tranquility.” Wow.
I would suggest we look at something else in this picture rather than read the caption. And the fact is that Aldrin, the person allegedly pictured in the photograph, is inside a little crater which is based maybe 10 centimeters lower than the average surface. And if you look at the way the photo is taken we can see the top of the helmet. Now remember the camera is allegedly sitting on Armstrong’s chest. So it should be at the same height, basically, as where the hand of Aldrin is, just a little higher. It would be impossible if I shot from my chest, even though the guy is in a little bit of a vacuum. It’s a small, it’s a little lower than the surface, but only like 10 centimeters. I cannot see the top of his head. So this picture is taken from a much higher viewing point than the actual chest of the photographer.
Could he have been on a little hill or something?
He could have except there was none. It’s all flat. They’re all basically on the same surface. If you look at other pictures of the situation it’s really all pretty much flat. And it’s one curious thing. You cannot prove that the pictures are fake. But again I can see now that the New York Times has used…a corrected set of pictures not the original ones. In the original ones, the original scans that were made from the original negatives, the contrast is much higher, and you can tell very, very easily that the guy allegedly being Aldrin is sitting in a spotlight. All around him, if you turn back the contrast to the way it was originally, before it was manipulated, you could tell that Aldrin is inside of a circle of more light, and that’s where the spotlight hits, as opposed to the background. The background, as soon as you lower… the contrast gets much darker than the ground he is standing on. And that should not be happening, if the source light were the sun.
I can’t believe the New York Times would be manipulating these pictures.
They’re not manipulating them themselves. They’re using a set of manipulated pictures that have been circulated by NASA, which are not original, but of course where the problems are less evident.
And here it says that’s our photographer reflected in Aldrin’s gold visor and one of the only still images of Armstrong on the moon. And so they zoom in and show the photographer reflected in the visor.
Yes. Well I mean that could be anybody of course. One wonders why would Armstrong, the first man on the moon, not have any pictures of himself? I mean you organize such a precise, such an accurate trip to the moon, where every detail is scheduled and laid down. They have papers with: “1005 turn around. 10010 breathe again.” I mean, everything is scheduled. And then they forget to take pictures of the first man on the moon. And we only have pictures of Aldrin. Could it possibly be that Armstrong, who did not want to be manipulated more than necessary, did deny them the right to say that that was him? Just remember, of the first man of the moon we have no pictures except one shot where you can actually see his face a little bit through the visor. And all the others it’s Aldrin. It’s very strange…they forget that you should schedule an actual photo up for the first man on the moon.It’s shocking. It goes together with the fact that they lost the original tape of the first moonwalk.
And of course their claim is that Armstrong was such a good photographer that he got to take all the pictures.
It doesn’t take a good photographer to take those pictures. They have the camera strapped on the chest.All they have to do is set the F-stop to focus the diaphragm, the lens opening the iris. And press click. They’re not even aiming, because they have the camera strapped to the chest. So all these shots that are well composed are actually a stroke of luck. Because you cannot see inside. You don’t have a viewer. You don’t have the viewfinder in that situation. So they’re really aiming by moving their shoulders. And guess what? All the pictures are so perfectly centered. Which is a little suspicious.
And here we see that Alan Bean and Pete Conrad of Apollo 12 are apparently even better photographers from the chest than Neil Armstrong is. These are even more “extraordinary.” And there were a total of 583 photos allegedly taken by Alan Bean and Pete Conrad of Apollo 12.
There’s absolutely nothing (extraordinary). What’s so incredible about this, is it is a set. All you need to do is sit there, focus and click. I mean there’s no artistry. The very idea that you’re looking for artistry…
Well, the horizon is horizontal.
The horizon is horizontal. And there are no hills in the distance, by the way. If you take what’s called the 360 panoramic of the whole, you turn around, you just stand there and turn around, click click click. And then they join them all together and you have a 360.
This landscape is like 200 yards not even in every direction. There’s no hills anywhere in the distance. Only after Apollo 15 did they realize that their sets were so skimpy that they had to add mountains in the distance. Apollos 11, 12 and 14 had a very very short horizon like this. I mean very short. And if you think that that object on the left was put there by a man, it means that the distance from here to there is maybe 20 yards. So you have another 20 yards and then what’s the end of the moon? There’s nothing else.
Yeah, that’s a pretty flat moon.
Look! The shadow of the LEM reaches almost the end of the moon. There’s no distance. I mean, think! You’re in a desert. You have to picture yourself in a desert with a LEM and imagine there’s nothing behind that little hill. There’s nothing. You can see nothing. It’s a joke. This is clearly a set. And besides, because of the use of the wide angle, this actually looks larger than it was in reality. In reality this set is no more than 10 meters by 10 meters, 30 feet by 30 maybe. That’s about it.
We’re told that they were “tasked with creating panoramas, 360-degree views that would establish when pieced together back home the context of their scientific research.” Then in the New York Times presentation it shows you the 360-degree panorama. Here’s the theme of the whole piece: “In one-sixth gravity, art and science did not seem so far apart.” They’re trying to tell us that the amazing artistry of these photos is some hybrid of art and science.
I really fail to see any artistry at all in these pictures. I’m sorry. I mean I know enough about good photography. Not only have I been a professional photographer for 25 years but I have enjoyed photography. I loved it. I know the great photographers, from Ansel Adams to Karsh. There’s a lot of history of photography that I can recognize. And I tell you what is an artistic picture. I see absolutely nothing artistic about these at all.
You’re not going to add Neil Armstrong to the list of great photographers…
Okay, here again the astronaut reflected in the visor, the little guy in the middle of the picture: On his right, our left, the terrain is much darker than on his left, our right. The sun is on the side. It should be equally illuminating both sides of his background. It is not. That means that is a spotlight that centers on him and it’s illuminating more the right-hand side from the way we see it than the left. That’s called an oopsie.
Interestingly, they chose this picture to tell us that it’s so good that it looks like a Hollywood stage set. This reminds me of Douglas Rushkoff’s Coercion, which describes mind control techniques that are common to operators from CIA interrogators to used car salesmen. And he describes how the key to mind control is to basically break down the subject’s sense of reality. And the way they do that is: the used car salesman takes you for a test drive. And at just the right point in the test drive he kind of turns to you while you’re driving the car and he says: “Is this the kind of car that you can see yourself driving?”And you try to see yourself driving the car that you actually are driving, and you have a sort of a brain fart. You have this space-out moment and lose contact with reality. And the car salesman then just takes over your world and orders you to drive back to the dealership. And he doesn’t ask you, do you want coffee? He just forces you to drink coffee, brings out the contract, and you walk out with the new car. And the CIA does a similar thing when they interrogate you. And so anyway, in this example, they’re inoculating you against the idea that this is a stage set by telling us it looks so good that it almost looks like it could be a stage set.
This is not the best picture of a footprint. But you can tell even from this picture—look how sharp and how… how sturdy, how solid are the little (rectangles of “moon sand”) that look like chocolate bars imprinted in the sand. Remember, there’s no atmosphere. Therefore there’s no humidity. Therefore that sand should be falling apart as soon as you remove your foot. How can you make it stick in such precise shapes without the humidity on earth?
Maybe they brought a little aerosol spray can and some gluey substance.
Exactly. You need humidity to get sand to stick like that. And there’s no humidity on the moon.
Why Lebanon doesn’t trust Israeli-American intentions — and why it shouldn’t
By Hussein Mousavi | Press TV | November 1, 2025
As Lebanon’s government, led by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, inches closer to implementing its multi-phase plan to disarm Hezbollah, one question continues to divide the country:
What if Hezbollah lays down its arms… and the Israeli regime still doesn’t change its behavior?
The plan – drafted under the supervision of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and backed by the US, France, and several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE – seeks to reassert the state’s monopoly on the use of force.
On paper, it sounds like a long-delayed step toward full “sovereignty.” That’s how the Lebanese premier and his allies – both inside and outside the country – try to present the issue.
Yet for many ordinary Lebanese, the proposal feels less like progress and more like exposure. And so, it raises a deeper fear.
Disarming the Hezbollah resistance movement, they fear, could strip Lebanon of its last line of deterrence, without changing anything about Israeli long-standing hostility.
Syrian precedent: Disarmament without security
Elsewhere in the region, Syria’s experience stands as a grim reminder. Even after the Jolani regime made public gestures toward normalization with the Israeli regime, the airstrikes on Syrian territory have never stopped. They continued unabated.
These attacks – justified by Israel as “preemptive” measures against so-called Iranian entrenchment (despite any evidence suggesting the same) have convinced many in Lebanon that military restraint does not necessarily guarantee security.
To many Lebanese, that says it all: even a weakened and cooperative neighbor hasn’t been spared unprovoked Israeli assault.
So, for the majority of Lebanese, the question resonates: If a disarmed, diplomatically compliant Syria was still bombed, why would a disarmed Lebanon be treated any differently?
That logic has sunk deep… even among communities once skeptical of the resistance. This isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about survival, sovereignty and dignity.
People genuinely fear that weakness, not resistance, invites aggression.
Social undercurrents: A shift in perception
Hezbollah’s argument for keeping its weapons has always been rooted in resistance to Israeli military occupation and the defense of Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity.
For years, that claim was losing traction—chipped away by the US, Israeli regime (Hasbara), and Persian Gulf-funded campaigns that painted the resistance movement as a destabilizing force.
But the chaos next door changed the mood.
The violence in Syria, especially the relentless massacres committed by Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Suweida, jolted many Lebanese back to a hard truth: in a region defined by uncertainty and terrorism, some form of deterrence is still necessary.
Even among Christians and Druze, there’s a quiet shift. What was once a divisive argument is slowly becoming a reluctant consensus:
“Lebanon without a deterrent is Lebanon exposed. And now, no one in Beirut really believes the skies will stay quiet after disarmament. Not anymore.”
Washington’s back-out: The missing guarantees
Lebanese skepticism was further reinforced by Washington itself. If anyone still hoped for international reassurance, Washington’s recent message was clear.
During his visit to Beirut, US envoy Tom Barrack openly admitted that Washington could not provide any binding guarantees that the Israeli occupation forces would refrain from future military action, even if Hezbollah were to be fully disarmed.
It was a rare moment of honesty, and a devastating one. For many Lebanese, it confirmed what Hezbollah has been saying for years: Without credible security guarantees, disarmament amounts to a strategic suicide.
Barrack’s inflammatory statement spread quickly across social media platforms and prime-time talk shows. It fueled the perception that Western powers are happy to demand disarmament but will not lift a finger to protect Lebanon afterward.
So, for now, Hezbollah’s deterrent remains the only shield people trust in a region where promises evaporate, and treaties rarely hold.
A state caught between principle and survival
That leaves the Lebanese government trapped in a painful paradox and facing an impossible balance.
Internationally, disarmament is pitched as a prerequisite for reconstruction after the 2024 Israeli aggression. Domestically, it looks more like a setup, an attempt to squeeze out concessions that Washington and Tel Aviv couldn’t win through war.
PM Salam insists the Lebanese Army can fill the security gap once Hezbollah disarms. But everyone knows the LAF is overstretched, underfunded, and struggling to retain personnel amid an economic meltdown.
Even LAF Commander “Rodolph Haykal” has quietly admitted the limits.
And with UNIFIL’s mandate due to expire in 2026, the southern buffer zone that once helped keep the peace is fading fast.
Given these realities, Hezbollah’s arsenal (long portrayed by Israeli, American, and certain Arab media as “the problem”) is tied to something deeper: the complete absence of trust in Israel’s intentions, and the lack of any reliable security guarantees from its allies.
Trust, deterrence, and the price of “peace”
Trust can’t be declared in a press release. It’s earned through behavior, consistency, and respect. For Lebanon, disarmament cannot be separated from reciprocity.
Unless the Israeli regime demonstrates, through verifiable actions, that it will respect Lebanese sovereignty – and unless those commitments are backed by enforceable international guarantees – any talk of disarmament will remain politically impossible and socially toxic.
A peace built on parity
Lebanon’s real dilemma isn’t whether disarmament is good in theory. It’s whether peace can exist without parity, and whether Western powers are willing to enforce that parity with real guarantees, not vague assurances.
Until that happens, every call for disarmament will collide with the realities of regional mistrust… and also with the same hard truth: You can’t convince its citizens to give up their shield when the sky above them still burns.
And that’s why, for many in Lebanon today, neither the government nor the resistance has any reason to trust the Israeli regime.
Hussein Mousavi is a Lebanese journalist and commentator
Burevestnik and Poseidon: Russia’s New Double Deterrent Against First Strike Aggression
Sputnik – 01.11.2025
President Putin has announced the back-to-back successful testing of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable unlimited range cruise missile, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable unmanned underwater vehicle. Sputnik asked a seasoned US Army vet and military analyst to comment on Russia’s new twin deterrence potential.
“The Burevestnik and the Poseidon are very interesting weapons… pretty much designed as defensive in nature,” retired US Army Lt. Col. Earl Rasmussen told Sputnik, characterizing the pair of nuclear doomsday scenario strategic systems as an effective new “counter strike type of capability.”
Touting the twin systems’ miniaturized nuclear engines as their key standout capability, Rasmussen noted that nuclear power essentially means unlimited range and loitering.
The weapons fundamentally enhance Russia’s nuclear deterrence, according to the observer. “There are some crazy generals out there that think they can win, do a preemptive strike and win a nuclear war, which is insane, essentially,” Rasmussen recalled, alluding to ideas like the Prompt Global Strike (PGS). Burevestnik and Poseidon are designed to nullify them.
With a system like the Poseidon, “you don’t have to strike anything. You could detonate it, probably flood and wipe out the entire British Isles or the entire east coast of the United States. So the impact could be quite devastating,” and far beyond the ‘acceptable loss’ calculations of any PGS-style planners.
“Like I said, I don’t look at Russia using them as a pure offensive-type weapon. I look at them as more of a defensive weapon and as a counterstrike type of capability. But it really, really enhances that capability to counter an adversary’s offensive actions against Russia,” Rasmussen summed up.
Kupyansk and Krasnoarmeysk Encirclements Make Ukraine’s Defeat ‘Too Big to Hide’
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 01.11.2025
Volodymyr Zelensky and his Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky are infamous for sacrificing Ukrainian lives to prolong fighting, Mikael Valtersson, former officer of the Swedish Armed Forces and Air Defense, tells Sputnik, commenting on the Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk) and Kupyansk encirclements.
“[Their] policy has left up to 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers in a very precarious position. They are left with two bad alternatives, either being eliminated defending hopeless positions or taking heavy losses during a very hard withdrawal. In both cases Ukraine will lose invaluable military units,” Valtersson notes.
There is a little, if any, chance that Zelensky could order a surrender, as “the worst thing that could happen from Kiev’s point of view would be thousands of retreating or surrendering Ukrainian soldiers,” according to the pundit.
Zelensky’s team has put on a brave face, insisting there are no encirclements, while barring foreign journalists from the area.
“Such journalists would only expose Kiev’s lies about the situation and crush Ukrainian credibility,” Valtersson says.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defeat is a thing too big to hide, the military expert notes, projecting that Russia’s advance in November and December would lead to Ukraine losing several cities.
“Large cities like the Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Konstantynivka urban area, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov might be up for grabs,” the pundit suggests. “The worst is yet to come for Ukraine in 2025. We are now witnessing the final fall of Krasnoarmeysk and Kupyansk.”
The Evolving Lens on SIDS: From Mystery to Focus on CDC’s Schedule
By Jefferey Jaxen | November 1, 2025
In America, infants are dying at a rate of around 1,300 to 4,500 per year depending on the reporting source. Lives ended suddenly, unexplained with the greater medical system appearing to be okay with it as evidenced by their lack of deeper investigation into the ‘syndrome.’
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) has long-haunted parents and pediatricians alike. Defined traditionally as the sudden death of an apparently healthy infant under one year old for unknown reasons – scientific and legal momentum may be moving towards public understanding.
For decades, it was viewed as an enigmatic “diagnosis of exclusion,” often chalked up to environmental factors like prone sleeping, overheating and in extreme cases blaming the parents for abuse.
Yet, as of 2025, this static portrait is fracturing. Emerging research, landmark court rulings, and legislative reforms reveal SIDS not as a singular black box, but a tapestry of metabolic, genetic, and iatrogenic vulnerabilities—chiefly, immature detoxification pathways and post-vaccination inflammatory cascades.
Florida’s House Bill 188, filed for the 2026 legislative session, exemplifies this paradigm shift legislatively. The bill amends state statutes to mandate comprehensive autopsies for Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUID) and Sudden Death in the Young (SDY), explicitly requiring microscopic toxicology, full immunization records from the past 90 days, and reporting to the CDC’s national SUID/SDY Case Registry.
No longer optional, these protocols aim to unmask hidden contributors, such as vaccine excipients or genetic polymorphisms, that prior “undetermined” classifications obscured.
And the best part, the bill comes with penalties for noncompliance—fines up to $5,000 and potential license revocation—underscore a growing impatience with incomplete probes. By integrating immunization data with federal surveillance, HB 188 positions SIDS investigations as proactive risk-factor hunts, potentially reclassifying dozens of annual cases from “unexplained” to preventably-framed within the context of the largely untested infant CDC vaccine schedule.
This rigor finds stark validation in the 2023 U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruling on Sims v. Secretary of Health and Human Services (No. 15-1526V), a rare vaccine court triumph that dismantled SIDS as a default for post-vaccination fatalities.
An eleven-week-old infant succumbed just eight hours after receiving five routine shots after a well baby visit. Autopsy revealed cerebral edema [brain swelling] and pulmonary congestion.
The Special Master Christian Moran ruled the vaccines triggered a “Table” encephalopathy via cytokine storms breaching the blood-brain barrier, leading to herniation and arrest. Expert witnesses retained by the Sims family skillfully displayed and achieved the “preponderant evidence” standard under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) against all odds that the Department of Justice attornies and their expert witnesses fought to deny justice.
HHS Secretary Kennedy said during a 2025 interivew with Tucker Carlson:
“The lawyers in the Department of Justice, the leaders of it were corrupt. They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice.”
The Sims family vaccine court award of $300,000 has ignited momentum and advocacy. As detailed in Wayne Rohde’s June 2025 Substack analysis, the case—amid fewer than 5% NVICP death-claim successes—challenges the “coincidental” narrative, urging deeper scrutiny of ~100 pending infant petitions. With the appeal deadline passing without action, we may be witnessing a precedent-proof vaccine link in such cases, eroding SIDS’s explanatory monopoly.
Scientifically, the puzzle pieces align with revelations on cytochrome P450 (CYP450) enzymes, the liver’s metabolic gatekeepers. A 2025 paper by Dr. Gary Goldman has highlighted infants’ CYP450 immaturity: at birth, activity hovers at 30-60% adult levels, with preterm babies hit hardest by “poor metabolizer” genetics (15-40% prevalence).
These enzymes process vaccine adjuvants like aluminum (up to 3,350 mcg in year one) and polysorbate 80. A vicious circle appears as inflammation from shots further suppresses the detoxification ability prolonging toxin exposure.
VAERS data clusters 75% of SIDS-like reports within a week post-vaccination, peaking at day two—echoing the Sims timeline. In serotonin-deficient brains (flagged in 70% SIDS autopsies). In a node to Florida’s SB 188, Dr. Goldman’s study warns current toxicology protocols ignore these developmental gaps, fostering misclassifications.
Together, these threads weave a bolder SIDS narrative: less “syndrome,” more sentinel for systemic oversights. HB 188’s mandates, the Sims precedent, and CYP450 insights demand holistic federal and state-level probes—genetic screening, excipient dosing tiers, and inflammation biomarkers. As Rohde posits, transparency could halve misattributions, saving lives while honoring the unexplained’s gravity. In 2025, SIDS evolves from fatalism to fixable, urging science and policy to catch up before another crib goes silent.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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