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
Max Blumenthal: Charlie Kirk Update – Middle East Plan Just BLEW UP
Dialogue Works | October 29, 2025
Ex-Mossad chief, behind ICJ blackmail campaign, brags Israel has installed a global sabotage network
MEMO | October 30, 2025
In a shocking admission, former Mossad director Yossi Cohen has openly boasted that Israel has deployed a global sabotage and espionage network which uses “booby-trapped and spy-manipulated equipment”. The method, denounced as terrorism by ex-CIA chief Leon Panetta, was used to target Hezbollah and now, according to Cohen, is embedded in “all the countries you can imagine.”
In a video that’s now circulating on social media, Cohen is seen speaking on The Brink podcast hosted by Jake Wallis Simons, editor of The Jewish Chronicle. The former Mossad director, who led a blackmail campaign against ICJ judges, detailed the covert programme Israel has planted across the globe. He claimed personal credit for inventing the “pager method” during his tenure at Mossad’s Special Operations division between 2002 and 2004.
“You know how many treated equipment we have in these countries? Not only booby-trapped, but spy-manipulated… in all countries you can imagine,” Cohen told Simons, describing what appears to be a far-reaching system of compromised commercial hardware used to gather intelligence or, in some cases, cause physical harm.
The technique, Cohen said, originated with the weaponisation of communications equipment used by Hezbollah fighters, specifically pagers rigged to function as remote surveillance tools or explosive devices. “If adversaries are purchasing equipment, Israel should intervene by embedding itself into their supply chain and exploiting it,” he explained, adding that the concept was refined and scaled globally after being tested during the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
The former intelligence chief further admitted that Israel’s sabotage apparatus had not been fully applied to Gaza, calling this a “critical shortfall” in the lead-up to the Hamas-led offensive on 7 October 2023. “Not Gaza. Not enough,” he said, arguing that Mossad had repeatedly warned of this vulnerability, only to be ignored by Shin Bet and the IDF.
While Cohen’s remarks appear to confirm longstanding suspicions by governments and cybersecurity analysts that Israeli firms and agencies have used technology as a Trojan horse, the interview also raises troubling questions about accountability, legality and the potential scale of the operations.
Critics have long warned that Israeli surveillance and weapons technology—often marketed through private firms with close ties to Mossad and Unit 8200—poses a threat to international security. Cohen’s boast now appears to offer direct confirmation that such concerns are well-founded.
Last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that “anyone with a cell phone owns a ‘piece of Israel’”. His remarks were widely viewed as an admission about Israel’s global sabotage and spy network.
The powerful who stand with Israel
Israel was able to carry out its live-streamed genocide in Gaza because powerful Western allies supplied it with diplomatic cover and weapons
By Vijay Prashad | people’s dispatch | October 28, 2025
On October 26, Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure”. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly,” she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches”. Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about ten to twelve percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.
“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield,” said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organization at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere”. As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb – creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.
Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to thirteen atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on August 6, 1945. This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defense systems, no air force, and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical. But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.
The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries. A new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: a collective crime (October 20, 2025), makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way – including through diplomatic support – are utterly complicit in the genocide.
In other words, the obligation to abide by the UN Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime”.
The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999). On August 6, 2025, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how UK military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassified revealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?
In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri: “There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time… We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here…because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you”. The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the UK is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.
The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the Special Rapporteur’s report is damning enough:
Since October 2023, the US has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to US weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorized hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The US has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with US surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent UN report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump – at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.
IOF infiltrate Lebanese town of Blida, murder civilian in his sleep
Al Mayadeen | October 30, 2025
Israeli occupation forces infiltrated the town of Blida in southern Lebanon at dawn, killing a municipality worker in his sleep.
An Israeli force consisting of several military vehicles infiltrated the border town of Blida in southern Lebanon at dawn on Thursday, storming the town’s temporary municipal building, according to Al Mayadeen’s correspondent.
The incursion was accompanied by Israeli drones flying over the town, and gunfire was heard during the raid. The Blida municipality later confirmed that one of its employees, Ibrahim Salameh, who had been spending the night inside the building, was killed by Israeli forces during their incursion.
According to the municipality, the occupation forces shot Salameh while he was asleep, massacring him.
Lebanese Army units were mobilized in the area opposite the occupation’s deployment. Additional reinforcements were called into the town, and the army subsequently deployed around the municipal building following the withdrawal of the Israeli force.
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent reported that the occupation forces withdrew from the building after approximately two hours. Before pulling back, they issued a warning, communicated through UNIFIL, demanding the evacuation of the premises after the Lebanese Army and residents entered the building.
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent confirmed that UNIFIL forces did not enter the town during or after the incident.
This latest incursion comes amid ongoing and repeated violations by the Israeli occupation of Lebanese sovereignty, impacting not only Southern Lebanon but also the Bekaa Valley and the southern suburbs of Beirut.
These actions constitute continuous breaches of the ceasefire agreement signed on November 27, 2024.
The UAE’s War on Muslims: From Sudan to the Gaza Genocide
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | October 30, 2025
While the United Arab Emirates advertises itself as both a peacemaker and opponent of so-called “Islamic radicalism”, it is currently involved in genocide in both Gaza and Sudan. Connecting these dots is key to understanding the overarching goals of the regime.
The United Arab Emirates has created its image in the world as an innovator, a builder, and a peacemaker, a carefully calibrated illusion as artificial as the buildings that mesmerize onlookers in Dubai. But behind the architecture and lavish outer shell is a rotten core that continues to aid in the erosion of the surrounding region.
While claiming to oppose “radical Islam” and paying talentless influencers to attack groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, they foster extremist ideologies and back ISIS-linked militant groups to carry out their regional ambitions.
For all of the critiques that can be offered of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and of Qatar, they are nothing like the orientalist depictions of them that are spread far and wide through Emirati propaganda.
The reason why the UAE attacks the ideology belonging to groups that are either linked to or part of the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with their religious motivations and everything to do with the Emirati opposition to their political agenda.
For them, they fear any politically engaged Islamic movement that is capable of successfully leading a country and organizing democratic institutions, because they are a dictatorship fully beholden to their Western handlers, including Israel.
The reason why the Islamic element of such movements threatens them the most is that it is popular and the religion that the majority of the region adheres to in some shape or form.
If any Islamic anti-imperialist movement proves successful and leads a democratic process, then this could threaten their rule. So, they seek to undermine, infiltrate, and destroy these movements wherever they rear their heads, including inside the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was an outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Its origins begin in the 1970s and the formation of the social/civil-society movement known as the Mujamma al-Islamiyya in the Gaza Strip, at the time colloquially referred to as the Muslim Brotherhood, as it represented Palestine’s wing of the movement.
Therefore, the success and popularity of Hamas, as part of what is viewed by the Emiratis as a wider body of Islamic political movements, is interpreted as a threat to its rule in the region.
As a means of dismantling the prospects of Democratic oriented Islamic political leaderships, the UAE has engaged in military confrontations and intense propaganda campaigns. On the propaganda front, they are joined by other Gulf leaderships who have their own agendas, also and not only fund direct anti-Hamas or anti-Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, but also fuel religious division.
One of the most powerful means of divisive propaganda is directly targeting Muslims themselves, in particular the Sunni Muslim majority of the region. While they certainly push sectarian rhetoric against the Shia too, they seek to pacify the Sunni population, deter them from engaging in anti-imperialist and anti-occupation struggles, or redirect their anger at fellow Muslims.
They do this through pushing divisions between mainstream Sunni schools of thought and employing their Madkhali propagandists to deter action against the so-called Muslim rulers. Without going too deep into the Madkhalis, as with each group of Muslims, there is always nuance; they are a group of Salafist Muslims who adhere to the dictates of their rulers and sometimes will even justify actions taken by those rulers that are prohibited in Islam.
The primary goal here is to fund and fuel division across the Muslim world, channeling hatred and creating debates around any issue that can distract from what Israel, the United States, and their allies are doing to the region. Another major tactic employed here is to Takfir (declare a disbeliever) or undermine any Muslim group that sides with the likes of Iran, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, or any other Shia groups.
Again, none of this opposition has anything to do with any substance that may be behind said arguments they make; these are well-funded propaganda campaigns designed for political purposes to undermine resistance to imperialism, occupation, and genocide. This is where we can begin looking at Gaza and then Sudan.
The UAE professes to oppose so-called “Islamic radicalism”, yet it now stands accused of providing support to the ISIS-linked gangs operating in the Israeli-occupied portion of the Gaza Strip. Not only has the UAE been accused of directly coordinating with these militia groups – composed of hardline Salafists who have links to ISIS and al-Qaeda, drug traffickers and murderers – but there is even evidence of these death squad members driving around in vehicles with registered UAE license plates.
In opposition to Hamas, the UAE is more than happy to back Israeli proxy collaborator groups that contain ISIS and Al-Qaeda minded elements within them.
Going back to the sorts of divisive propaganda that is encouraged by the Emiratis, a leading member of the Israel-backed so-called “Popular Forces” militia in Gaza, Ghassan Duhine, has openly cited ISIS Fatwas declaring Hamas apostates as a justification for killing them. ISIS officially declared war on Hamas back in 2018.
Meanwhile, the UAE has long been backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, the group currently accused of committing genocide, and which has re-entered the headlines after it captured Al-Fasher and other areas in North Darfur, resulting in the murder of around 527 people, including civilians who were butchered while sheltering in refugee camps.
RSF leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), has long collaborated with the Emiratis, and it was even previously pointed out that his official Facebook page was controlled out of the UAE.
Without getting into all of the complexities of the Sudanese civil war, Hemedti is a warlord who has long maintained power over the majority of Sudan’s Gold Mines, slaughtering anyone who dares to get in his way.
His forces have also been accused by the UN and prominent rights groups of committing widespread mass sexual violence, including horrific forms of rape.
Hemedti was additionally supplied with battle-changing technologies through his Israeli Mossad contacts, and despite there being documented rights violations on both the Sudanese Army and RSF sides of the war, there is no doubt that Hemedti’s forces have the most blood on their hands and carry out the most horrific crimes seen in the conflict.
The UAE is not just one of many actors involved in Sudan; it is the primary supporter of the RSF. According to a scoop published by The Guardian this Tuesday, British weapons sold to the United Arab Emirates were even discovered to have been used by the RSF to carry out its genocide.
Despite the United States declaring the horrors in Sudan as a genocide, during the Biden administration, no action has been taken against the UAE for its role in fueling the war. Similarly, the UAE has been involved in countless crimes committed throughout the Horn of Africa and in North Africa too, backing a whole range of extremist militant groups who stand accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians.
Although it is also hidden from the Western corporate media, the UAE even used members of the Sudanese RSF to fight on its behalf as proxy forces against Ansarallah in Yemen, where they were accused of playing a role in what many declared a genocide. Keep in mind that nearly 400,000 people in Yemen were killed due to the inhuman blockade and war of aggression, led by both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
The Emiratis push propaganda about the Sudanese Military being “Islamists”, accusing them of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood and then linking them to all sorts of other organizations. Ansarallah in Yemen is also branded as “Islamists”, but in their case are accused of being “Iranian proxies”. In essence, this line of propaganda is the typical Israeli-style Hasbara argument for committing egregious war crimes.
Throughout the Gaza genocide, the UAE was one of the only nations that continued its routine flights to Ben Gurion airport and transported materials to aid the Israelis. The Emiratis also turned Dubai into an Israeli safe haven, where soldiers implicated in genocide can go to party, engage in activities like consuming narcotics or hiring escorts, and live in luxury.
The UAE did not lift a finger to force the Israelis to let aid into Gaza, as they blocked all humanitarian aid trucks entering for around three months earlier this year, but will then point to the trickles of aid that they do supply as proof they are helping the people. In their defense, they argue that they were key in achieving a ceasefire, for which there is no evidence, just like there was no evidence that they stopped West Bank annexation when normalized ties with Israel.
Viewing the Emiratis as operating on their own whims, blaming them solely for the actions they commit, is incorrect. These are rulers installed by the West, who work for the West and are simply used as pawns to do the bidding of their masters. If any of their leaders stand up to the crimes that the UAE is inflicting, they will be assassinated and replaced with other members of the ruling bloodline who choose to play ball. They are hostages, posing as rulers and playing their part in the dismantlement of the surrounding region.
Constructing chaos: Tel Aviv’s hand in Syria’s sectarian slaughter
The Cradle | October 29, 2025
On 7 March, Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,500 Alawite civilians, including many elderly, women, and children, in 58 separate locations on the Syrian coast.
Though the killings were executed by sectarian forces loyal to Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani), a former Al-Qaeda commander, the path to the massacre was paved by a covert Israeli strategy aimed at inciting an Alawite uprising.
Israel’s plan hinged on pushing Alawites into the “trap” of launching an armed rebellion, with false promises of external support, only to give Sharaa’s forces the pretext to carry out the mass slaughter of Alawite civilians in “response.”
Israel’s goal was consistent with its long-standing aim, articulated in the infamous Yinon Plan: to dismantle Syria and reshape it into “weak, decentralized ethnic regions,” following former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
Netanyahu goes to Washington
After 14 years of sustained support from the US, Israel, and regional allies, the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – formerly the Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front – seized control of Damascus in December 2024. Its leader, Julani, rebranded as Ahmad al-Sharaa, swiftly assumed the presidency.
On the very day of this power shift, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for Assad’s fall and began a mass bombing campaign to destroy what was left of the country’s military capabilities.
However, toppling Syria’s government and destroying its army was not the end of Israel’s plan for Syria.
On 9 January, Netanyahu’s cabinet met to discuss organizing an international conference to “divide Syria into cantons,” Israeli news outlet i24 News reported.
“Any proposal deemed Israeli will be viewed unfavorably in Syria, which necessitates an international conference to advance the matter,” the outlet noted.
In other words, to be successful, Israel’s project to divide Syria needed to originate, or seem to originate, from Syrians themselves.
Less than a month later, on 2 February, Netanyahu visited Washington to present a “white paper” regarding Syria to US officials.
After Netanyahu’s visit, Reuters reported that “Israel is lobbying the United States to keep Syria weak and decentralized, including by letting Russia keep its military bases there to counter Turkey’s influence.”
The Times of Israel later commented that Israel was lobbying the “US to buck Sharaa’s fledgling government in favor of establishing a decentralized series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarized.”
Reports later leaked into political circles about a meeting two days later, on 4 February, between US officials and a representative of the most influential Druze religious leader in Syria, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, in Washington, DC.
Al-Jumhuriya reported that according to Syrian and American sources with direct knowledge of the meetings, discussions revolved around “a plan for an armed rebellion against the government of Ahmad al-Sharaa.”
The rebellion would reportedly include Hijri’s Druze forces from Suwayda, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from northeast Syria, and Alawite groups from the Syrian coast, but with “Israeli support.”
When asked about the meeting, Hijri’s representative confirmed to Al-Jumhuriya that it had taken place but stated that the proposal for a rebellion had not come from the Druze.
“The proposal originated from a state, not from any Syrian faction,” Hijri’s representative clarified, in a likely reference to Israel.
Inventing the insurgency: Meqdad Fatiha
Just two days later, on 6 February, an Alawite resistance group, the “Coastal Shield Brigade,” was allegedly formed.
A video announcing the group’s establishment claimed its fighters would respond to sectarian massacres carried out by HTS-led security forces against Alawites since December, including in the village of Fahel, where 15 former officers in the Syrian army were killed, and the village of Arzeh, where 15 people were killed as well, including a child and an elderly woman.
In both villages, former officers in Assad’s army had given up their weapons and completed a reconciliation process with the new authorities in Damascus, but were nevertheless murdered in their homes by militants linked to Syria’s new extremist-led security forces.
The Coastal Shield Brigades was allegedly led by Meqdad Fatiha, a former member of the 25th Special Forces and the Republican Guard of the Assad government.
Activists on social media circulated the video, which allegedly showed Fatiha declaring the establishment of the brigade from a base in the Latakia Mountains.
However, there was no evidence that the group was real. Fatiha’s face was covered by a black balaclava in the video, making it impossible to verify whether he was really the person speaking. This was odd, given that his appearance was already known from his Facebook profile.
The theatrics pointed to an intelligence fabrication – likely Israeli – designed to present the illusion of an organic Alawite insurgency.
A meeting in Najaf?
Just five days later, the narrative of an organized Alawite insurgency was reinforced by reports in Turkiye Gazetesi, an Islamist-leaning pro-government newspaper in Turkiye.
The report claimed that Iranian generals and former commanders in the Syrian army under Assad had met in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq to plan a major uprising against Sharaa in Syria.
The scheme reportedly involved Druze factions, the Kurdish-led SDF, Alawite insurgents on the coast, Lebanese Hezbollah, and, improbably, ISIS.
Large amounts of weapons were allegedly being sent by land from Iraq and by sea from Lebanon to the Syrian coast, the report added.
“Some surprising events were expected to occur in Syria in the near future,” the Iranian generals allegedly in attendance said.
While “surprising events” did occur one month later with the massacre of Alawites on 7 March, the reports of the Najaf meeting are likely fabricated.
It is unlikely that a Turkish newspaper would have access to a detailed account of a secret meeting taking place between top Iranian generals and former Syrian officers.
It is also unlikely, and even ridiculous, that Iran and Hezbollah would be coordinating with their long-time enemy, ISIS, or with the US-backed SDF.
Kurdish-Syrian commentator Samir Matini amplified the narrative through widely viewed livestreams, pushing the idea of “surprising events” to come. The aim: to pin Israel’s plan on Iran and Hezbollah and create a smokescreen of chaos.
Sectarian killings fuel resistance
Amid the propaganda claiming a foreign-backed Alawite insurgency was being organized, Julani’s security forces stepped up attacks against Alawite civilians in the coastal region.
Syrian journalist Ammar Dayoub reported in Al-Araby al-Jadeed that Alawites were often targeted solely based on their religious identity, rather than because they were “remnants of the regime.”
Dayoub observed that “these violations have targeted people who opposed the previous regime, and young people who were only children in that period, as well as academics and women.”
In response to the sectarian killings, Alawites began to defend themselves.
One key event occurred on 8 January, when armed men linked to the Damascus government killed three Alawite farmers in the village of Ain al-Sharqiyah in the coastal region of Jableh. The men were working their lands across from the Brigade 107 base when they were killed.
In response, a local man named Bassam Hossam al-Din gathered a group of local men, arming them with light weapons. They attacked members of Julani’s internal security forces, known as General Security, killing one and abducting seven more, before barricading themselves in an Alawite religious shrine.
The General Security launched a campaign against them, swiftly killing Hossam al-Din and his group.
A former intelligence officer of the Assad government, speaking with The Cradle, says these killings motivated him and others to fight back:
“All this fueled enormous resentment in the area, which grew worse day by day. After Bassam Hossam al-Din’s death, some people here – including former government military personnel and civilians – began to gather.”
Crucially, they were “encouraged by reports and promises [of help] they received from outside.”
They were told they would receive support, including by sea, from the US-led international coalition, in coordination with the Druze in Suwayda and Kurds in northeastern Syria.
“They were given hope of escaping this miserable situation,” the former intelligence officer tells The Cradle.
In the following weeks, Alawites continued to clash with Syrian security forces in an effort to defend themselves from raids and arrests.
In late February, Alawite insurgents attacked a police station in Assad’s hometown of Qardaha, located in the mountains overlooking the coastal town of Latakia.
According to Qardaha residents and activists who spoke to Reuters, “the incident began when members of security forces tried to enter a house without permission, sparking opposition from residents.”
“One person was killed by gunfire, with locals accusing the security forces of the shooting,” Reuters added, further suggesting that local Alawite men were acting in self-defense.
What happened in Datour?
The simmering conflict escalated further on 4 March. Reuters reported that, according to Syrian state media, two members of the Defense Ministry had been killed in the Datour neighborhood in Latakia city by “groups of Assad militia remnants,” and that security forces had mounted a campaign to arrest them.
One Datour resident told Reuters there had been heavy gunfire in the early hours and that security forces in numerous vehicles had surrounded the neighborhood.
A security source speaking with the news agency blamed the violence on a “proliferation of arms” among former security and army personnel who had refused to enter into reconciliation agreements with the new authorities.
The source said that local Alawite leaders had, in some cases, cooperated with security forces to hand over former personnel suspected of committing crimes during the period of Assad’s rule in hopes of staving off “crack downs and potential civil unrest.”
Testimonies from residents of Datour collected by Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) indicated that security forces carried out random arrests in Datour and indiscriminately fired at civilian homes, resulting in several deaths, including that of a child.
The campaign was “marked by sectarian rhetoric and intense hate speech directed against the Alawite sect,” STJ added.
A source from Datour speaking with The Cradle reveals that Julani’s government used a prominent local Alawite family to create the proliferation of weapons needed to justify a crackdown.
The Aslan family had previously been close to Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and commander of the army’s elite 4th Division, but quickly established good relations with the new government after it came to power in December.
It became common to see General Security members from Idlib spending time at the Aslan-owned businesses on Thawra Street at the entrance to Datour.
When residents complained to the General Security about criminal activity by the Aslan family, such as stealing money and confiscating homes, the General Security took no action against the family.
The source speaking with The Cradle says that on 4 and 5 March, members of the Aslan family distributed weapons to Alawite men in the neighborhood, encouraging them to take up arms against the General Security.
This was, of course, strange given the close relationship between the Aslans and the General Security, as well as because such a rebellion had little chance of success.
“Why would the Aslan family distribute weapons to fellow Alawites in Datour while knowing a rebellion would fail?” the source asks.
What happened in Daliyah?
On 6 March, a major clash erupted in the Alawite villages of Daliyah and Beit Ana, which lie adjacent to one another in the mountains of the Jableh countryside.
Sources from Daliyah speaking with The Cradle confirm that a large General Security convoy entered the village that morning to arrest a local man, Ali Ahmad, who had written posts against the Julani government on Facebook.
General Security members took Ahmad from his work at the local mini bus station and executed him at the entrance of the village.
The General Security members then entered the nearby house of a retired army officer, Taha Saad, in the adjacent village of Beit Ana, killing his two adult sons.
In response to the killings, local men from the village gathered light weapons and attacked the General Security members. After the General Security called for reinforcements, a convoy of 20 vehicles arrived to assist the government forces in the fight.
The sources in Daliyah speaking with The Cradle state that around 20 members of the General Security and 17 men from the village were killed in the gun battle.
As the clashes continued, Damascus sent helicopters to drop bombs on Daliyah and Beit Ana until a Russian plane forced the helicopters to withdraw.
Julani’s army escalated further by firing artillery at multiple Alawite villages in the mountain areas from the military academy in Rumaylah on the coast, near Jableh city.
A source from Jableh speaking to The Cradle says that the bombings made Alawites “go crazy,” especially because Daliyah is home to an important Alawite religious shrine.
The massacre and its beneficiaries
When the Russian plane appeared over Daliyah and Beit Ana, “People thought that this was ‘the moment,’ so they rose up on that basis,” stated the former intelligence officer speaking with The Cradle.
Alawite insurgents attacked General Security and army positions in various areas across the coast, including Brigade 107 near Ayn al-Sharqiyah, where Bassam Hossam al-Din’s group abducted the General Security members before being killed in January.
“There was no Meqdad Fatiha or anyone else from outside, no Iranians or any others. It was purely a popular force rising up against this situation,” the former intelligence officer explains.
However, they were emboldened by promises of outside help from the US-led coalition, the Druze, and the Kurds.
The clashes at the Brigade 107 base lasted all night, but the Alawite insurgents paused the attack early the next morning, on 7 March, thinking that coalition forces would come to their aid and bomb the brigade.
“They waited two hours, but no strikes came, no support arrived. Their morale collapsed, they realized it was all lies, just a trap,” the source goes on to say.
After the fighting stopped, disillusionment spread, and the Alawite insurgents attacking the base withdrew and returned to their villages.
Al Jazeera’s role
As the fighting still raged on 6 March, Al Jazeera repeated the false reports from Turkish media claiming Alawite insurgents were receiving massive external support from Iran, Hezbollah, the Kurdish SDF, and even Assad.
The news outlet’s propaganda gave Damascus the pretext to mobilize not only formal members of military units from the Ministry of Defense, but also many informal armed factions who responded to calls from mosques to fight “jihad” against Alawites.
On the morning of 7 March, convoys of military vehicles filled with tens of thousands of Sharaa’s extremist fighters began arriving at the coast.
Because the Alawite insurgency was weak and disorganized, with no help from abroad, it was not able to provide any protection to Alawite civilians as the massacres unfolded.
Facing no resistance, Julani’s forces began systematically slaughtering any Alawite men they could find, as well as many women and children, in cities, towns, and villages across the coast, including in Jableh, Al-Mukhtariyah, Snobar, Al-Shir, and the neighborhoods of Al-Qusour in Baniyas and Datour in Latakia.
The massive scope and systematic nature of the massacres, involving such large numbers of armed men in so many locations, suggests pre-planning by Julani and his Defense Minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra – a former commander-in-chief of the HTS military wing.
A media creation
The mobilization of Julani’s forces was also aided on 6 March by new videos appearing online claiming to show Meqdad Fatiha and members of the Coastal Shield Brigade vowing to fight against the new government.
In one video, the man claiming to be Fatiha was masked (this time dressed like a character from the popular video game, Mortal Kombat, and standing against a blank background), making it impossible to know who he was and whether he was in the mountains of Latakia or in a television studio in Tel Aviv or Doha.
In a separate video, Fatiha was masked and dressed just like an ISIS militant beheading Christians on video in Libya in 2015, leading to speculation the video was fake and had been created using artificial intelligence (AI).
Another video was later released in which Fatiha appeared without a mask, saying that previous videos of him were indeed real, and not created using AI. However, the new video also appeared fake, his face, shoulders, and eyes moving in an unnatural way as he spoke.
During multiple visits to the Syrian coast, The Cradle was not able to find any Alawites who expressed support for Fatiha or believed his group was real.
The source from Daliyah states that, “No one here supports Meqdad Fatiha. We all believe he works for Julani. The Coastal Shield Brigade is fabricated.”
A former Alawite officer in Assad’s army from the Syrian coast tells The Cradle, “We only see videos of Meqdad Fatiha online. We believe he is just a media creation.”
After showing The Cradle his rotting teeth, the former officer remarks, “Do you think we are getting help from Iran or Hezbollah? I don’t even have money to fix my teeth.”
An Alawite woman whose husband and two grown sons were murdered on 7 March suggests to The Cradle that Fatiha is a fictitious person, only existing on Facebook and created by the authorities to justify the massacres.
“Who is he? Julani created him. It’s a lie,” she explains.
General Security fatalities
The mobilization of Sharaa’s extremist forces from across the country was also aided by claims that Alawite insurgents had killed 236 members of the General Security in attacks on 6 April.
Some General Security members were certainly killed, but Syrian authorities never provided any evidence for this large number, suggesting it was vastly inflated to heighten sectarian anger. When Reuters requested the names or an updated tally, Syrian officials refused to provide them.
In one case, the pro-HTS “Euphrates Shield” Telegram channel published a photo collage allegedly showing General Security members killed by “regime remnants” during the fighting.
However, one of the fighters shown in the photos quickly posted a story on his Instagram with a “laugh out loud” emoji to show he was still alive, the Syrian Democratic Observatory showed.
Israeli ambitions
On 10 March, before the victims of the massacres had been buried, i24 News published a letter claiming to be written by Alawite leaders, asking Netanyahu to send his military to protect them.
“If you come to the Syrian coast, which is predominantly Alawite, you will be greeted with songs and flowers,” the letter stated.
It also called on Israel to unite against the “Islamic tide led by Turkiye,” while asking for help in separating from “this extremist state.”
When Israel secretly “greenlit” Julani’s massacre of Druze in Suwayda in July, the goal of dividing Syria was further advanced. Many Druze are aware of the covert relationship between Damascus and Tel Aviv, but, fearing extermination, feel they have little choice but to call on Israel for protection and to establish an autonomous region in south Syria.
Three weeks after the massacres of Alawites in March, an Israeli general quietly admitted that sectarian violence in Syria benefits Tel Aviv.
“This thing where everyone is fighting everyone, and there’s an agreement with the Kurds one day, and a massacre of the Alawites the second day, and a threat to the Druze on the third day, and Israeli strikes in the south. All this chaos is, to some extent, actually good for Israel,” stated Tamir Hayman while speaking with Israeli Army Radio.
“Wish all sides good luck (but) do it quietly. Don’t talk about it,” the general added.
A New Low: Western Media Promotes ISIS-Linked Gangsters In Gaza
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | October 29, 2025
Al-Natour is the embodiment of the archetypal Palestinian collaborator. A man who portrays himself as a victim uses his own experience as a Palestinian to whitewash Israeli genocide.
On October 27, the Washington Post published an article entitled “The ceasefire created two Gazas. One will consume the other.” The author argues that “My Gaza is ready for peace” and that “Hamas is trying to destroy it”, promoting the fictitious Israeli narrative that a utopian Gaza is being made possible inside the portion of the enclave where the occupation forces remain, behind the so-called “Yellow Line”.
The article works to promote the Israeli scheme in Gaza, which has been openly endorsed by US officials, and argues in favor of only allowing reconstruction in the territory operated by Israel, alongside four primary ISIS-linked militias.
Evidently, the article makes no mention of the Israeli armed and controlled Palestinian death squads – composed of convicted drug traffickers, rapists, murderers, ISIS-linked Salafists and aid looters.
The piece is purportedly written by one Moumen al-Natour, which makes even more sense out of why there is no mention of the ISIS-linked death squads, because he himself is an armed member of one such death squad.
Al-Natour is the embodiment of the archetypal Palestinian collaborator. A man who portrays himself as a victim uses his own experience as a Palestinian to whitewash Israeli genocide and lies about every detail to turn himself into a “peace activist” opposed to armed resistance, while simultaneously partaking in activities designed to further the extermination of his own people.
Take, for example, the following excerpt from the ISIS-linked death squad collaborator’s alleged opinion piece:
“My Gaza, where I wish to live, exists between Israel and the yellow line. There, the war is over and change buzzes in the air. People have access to food, medicine and electricity. And other signs of normality are beginning to return, such as some children going back to school. This is the Gaza that is waiting with anticipation to work with a new civil administration and an international protection force that will keep the peace as Israel withdraws. Few there speak of Hamas with any warmth or positivity. For once they no longer have to.”
The territory spoken of here is the area of Gaza where Israel and four ISIS-linked collaborator gangs operate; the only civilians there are the families of the death squads. Any other Palestinians attempting to reach their homes inside this area are bombed or gunned down by Israeli forces.
This territory, on the other side of Israel’s “Yellow Line,” is supposed to be 53% of Gaza, yet in reality is anywhere between 54-58% of the territory, due to Israel violating the ceasefire agreement and operating deeper than agreed upon inside the supposed withdrawal zone.
In addition to this, Israel continues its daily demolition operations against the remaining Palestinian civilian infrastructure inside the territory, again in violation of the ceasefire agreement. The proof of this has been openly published by Israeli soldiers who post videos of their demolition work on social media.
As for access to food, medicine, and electricity, these are provided to the collaborator gangs by Israel and are something they have not lacked during the war. While the people of Gaza were being starved for three months straight earlier this year, al-Natour’s militia friends were living lives of relative luxury.
Not only were al-Natour’s collaborator gang not starved, the so-called “Popular Forces” that he is part of, led by ISIS-linked convicted drug trafficker Yasser Abu Shabab, were living off of the supplies they stole from humanitarian aid trucks and looted from Gaza’s civilian population.
That is what these militant organizations began receiving Israeli backing to do – before being repurposed, armed and given direct combat missions by the IDF and Shin Bet – to rob humanitarian aid trucks and help enforce Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza. All of these collaborator gangs were tasked with involvement in such activities, and many of their militants continue to loot.
Meanwhile, in the Western corporate media and its allied Arab publications, al-Natour and his ilk are portrayed as the peace activists opposed to Hamas tyranny. For al-Natour’s part, he was one of the founders of the “We Want To Live” movement, which claimed its mission was to improve living conditions inside the besieged coastal enclave, described by UN experts as “unlivable” back in 2020.
As an activist, he was accused of working on behalf of Israel and spreading a message critical of Hamas, leading to his arrest. Whether he was a collaborator back then is under dispute, yet, during the genocide, he and his anti-Hamas message were picked up by a media outlet called Jasoor News.
This media outlet’s editor-in-chief is a Washington based journalist, named Hadeel Oueis, who routinely shares anti-Hamas content, including from the Center for Peace Communications (CPC). Oueis also expresses support for the current Syrian leadership of Ahmed al-Shara’a.
The CPC has received considerable donations from the Adelson Family Foundation of Israel’s richest billionaire and top Trump campaign donor, Miriam Adelson. For Jasoor News’ part, it is explicitly anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah, anti-Ansarallah, while publishing pieces in favor of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Western Media Support For ISIS-linked Groups
The recent propaganda opinion piece published by the Washington Post comes as little surprise, as it was the first Western publication to publish an interview with ISIS-linked militia leader Yasser Abu Shabab in November of 2024, when Israel began to give the aid looting gang a facelift and begin promoting them as a “grassroots” anti-Hamas resistance force.
In that WP piece, Abu Shabab claims victim status and that he looted aid out of necessity, expressing that “Hamas has left us with nothing”, despite his gang of collaborators clearly being the only group of Gazans who actually did have something during the genocide. Abu Shabab was used to do Israel’s bidding, blocking the flow of aid to civilians and lived under the protection of the Israeli military while doing so.
Back in July, the Wall Street Journal then published an opinion piece entitled “Gazans are finished with Hamas”, which it claimed was written by Yasser Abu Shabab himself. This was despite the fact that local sources in Gaza attest to Abu Shabab not only being unable to write in English, but also being illiterate and incapable of writing such a piece in Arabic too.
According to anonymous sources belonging to Palestinian journalist Muhammad Shehada, the latest Washington Post piece was published as explicit Israeli propaganda. “Journalists told me a pro-Israeli PR firm in DC is the one that pushed for this propaganda article to be published,” he wrote on X [formerly Twitter], adding that “my sources said there’s a chance the firm is the one that even wrote the op-ed”.
All of this works as part of an Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at legitimizing the agenda to create two separate systems of rule in Gaza, through spreading lies about Hamas and egregiously exaggerating the brutality of its Security Force crackdown on collaborators.
Israel is currently violating the Gaza ceasefire, not only through its daily bombings and sniping of civilians, but also through its refusal to allow sufficient aid to reach the civilian population. The Israelis had committed to allowing 400 aid trucks into Gaza for the first five days of the ceasefire before an unlimited amount afterward, later committing to permit 600 a day to enter, yet have allowed in a daily average of less than 90.
The idea, endorsed by the United States, is to deploy an international invasion force in the Gaza Strip, which will work alongside the ISIS-linked death squads to disarm Hamas. Once the Israelis withhold construction materials and equipment from entering the populated areas of the territory, where Hamas remains in power, they will then offer the civilian population a choice between entering their version of Gaza under occupation, or remaining where they are to starve and rot.
Hamas, along with all the other Palestinian factions, has agreed to hand Gaza over to an interim administration of technocratic governance, but will not disarm until the creation of a Palestinian State. Israel will not allow for this and instead uses its collaborators to fight for its own agenda, depending on its propaganda that is being prominently spread by its Palestinian media allies as a means of justifying this approach.
Inside Gaza, these ISIS-linked gangsters have no popular support. In fact, the vast preponderance of the population supports the Security Forces campaign to stamp out these groups. Despite the propagandists and militia members claiming that they are fighting a tyrannical regime that is killing its own people, the population of Gaza do not believe this narrative and hence will not support such a scheme.
The current round of propaganda against Hamas mirrors the regime change rhetoric used to overthrow countless governments in the region, beginning with Iraq. For example, during the campaign to justify the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Western governments and Washington-based think-tanks paid Iraqi “experts” and “peace activists” to justify the invasion of their own country.
Every time, the regime change script is the same. Except in this case, it is unlikely to succeed due to the grievances of Gazans with Hamas not matching those of their regional neighbors. This, however, will not stop the constant chorus of lies, exaggerations, and distortions from Washington and Tel Aviv’s “peace activists” who turn out to be armed members of ISIS-linked gangs and “Palestinian analysts” who just so happen to work for Zionist think-tanks.
These individuals speak with the language of “peace”, “reconciliation,” and “forgiving Israel”, but are ultimately soulless propagandists who weaponize their identity to serve an agenda aimed at destroying their own people. They value nothing more than status, power, and financial gain.
In the pro-genocide Western corporate media, these voices will continue to be elevated and their claims will never be fact-checked, because these outlets function as stenographers for the US and Israeli governments.
Francesca Albanese names over 60 states complicit in Gaza genocide
The Cradle | October 29, 2025
The UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, told the General Assembly on 28 October that 63 countries, including key western and Arab states, have fueled or were complicit in “Israel’s genocidal machinery” in Gaza.
Speaking remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, Albanese presented her 24-page report, ‘Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime,’ which she said documents how states armed, financed, and politically protected Tel Aviv as Gaza’s population was “bombed, starved, and erased” for over two years.
Her findings place the US at the center of Israel’s war economy, accounting for two-thirds of its weapons imports and providing diplomatic cover through seven UN Security Council vetoes.
The report cited Germany, Britain, and a number of other European powers for continuing arms transfers “even as evidence of genocide mounted,” and condemned the EU for sanctioning Russia over the war in Ukraine while remaining Israel’s top trading partner.
Albanese accused global powers of having “harmed, founded, and shielded Israel’s militarized apartheid,” allowing its settler-colonial project “to metastasize into genocide – the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine.”
She said the genocide was enabled through “diplomatic protection in international fora meant to preserve peace,” military cooperation that “fed the genocidal machinery,” and the “unchallenged weaponization of aid.”
The report also identified complicity among Arab states, including the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and Morocco, which normalized ties with Tel Aviv.
Egypt, she noted, maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing,” tightening the siege on Gaza’s last humanitarian route.
Albanese warned that the international system now stands “on a knife-edge between the collapse of the rule of law and hope for renewal,” urging states to suspend all military and trade agreements with Tel Aviv and build “a living framework of rights and dignity, not for the few, but for the many.”
Her presentation provoked an outburst from Israel’s envoy Danny Danon, who called her a “wicked witch.”
Frascnesca fired back, saying, “If the worst thing you can accuse me of is witchcraft, I’ll take it. But if I had the power to make spells, I would use it to stop your crimes once and for all and to ensure those responsible end up behind bars.”
Human rights experts described the report as the UN’s most damning indictment yet of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Albanese had previously been sanctioned by the US in July, after releasing a report that exposed western corporations profiting from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The 27-page report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ named over 60 companies, including Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Palantir, and Hyundai, for aiding and profiting from Israel’s settlements and military operations, and called for their prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC).
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Albanese of waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel,” announcing the sanctions as part of Washington’s effort to counter what he called “lawfare.”
The move drew sharp condemnation from UN officials and rights groups, who warned that it threatened global accountability mechanisms.
Israel moves to seize Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem: Report
MEMO | October 29, 2025
The Israeli government has taken new measures to assert its control over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem and evict Palestinian residents, an Israeli organization said Wednesday, Anadolu reports.
In a report titled “Strangling Sheikh Jarrah: New Tools for Israeli Control and Palestinian Displacement,” the Ir Amim organization said the Israeli government has entered a “new and dangerous phase” in its efforts to dominate one of East Jerusalem’s most symbolic neighborhoods.
“Israel is now using unprecedented legal, planning, and administrative tools to achieve the same goal: displacing Palestinian residents and consolidating the settlement presence at the heart of the neighborhood,” it said.
Among these measures, the report cited “large-scale urban renewal projects, including some 2,000 housing units for illegal Israeli settlers, entirely excluding Palestinian residents.”
It also noted “land registration efforts in certain plots, allowing government bodies and settlers to register them in their names, as well as confiscation and reallocation of public spaces for Jewish religious institutions and national-religious projects.”
Ir Amim called these mechanisms a “coordinated strategy to turn Sheikh Jarrah from a vibrant Palestinian neighborhood into a fragmented area dominated by Israeli settlements.”
Israeli researcher Aviv Tatarsky of Ir Amim said the government measures are part of Tel Aviv’s efforts to assert its control over the neighborhood.
“What we are witnessing in Sheikh Jarrah represents a new stage in Israel’s efforts to cement control over East Jerusalem,” he said.
“After years of failed attempts by settler groups to evict residents, Israel itself now leads the effort using new legal, administrative, and planning tools to solidify Israeli presence and push Palestinians to leave.
“What is happening in Sheikh Jarrah is not limited to one neighborhood; it reflects a government-wide policy to reshape the entire city.”
Government-backed settler organizations are seeking to evict hundreds of Palestinians from homes they have lived in since the 1950s. The settlers claim the land belonged to Jews before 1948, which Palestinian residents deny.
In recent years, illegal settlers have seized homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and continue to pursue additional properties to establish settlements.
Palestinians insist that East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state, while Israel maintains that the entire city is its capital.
The Sheikh Jarrah measures form part of a broader wave of Israeli escalation in the occupied West Bank, where 1,062 Palestinians have been killed, around 10,000 injured, and over 20,000 others detained, including 1,600 children, over the past two years.
In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israeli strikes violated Gaza ceasefire, Resistance will respond: Hamas
Al Mayadeen | October 29, 2025
Hamas affirmed that the Resistance will not allow the Israeli enemy to impose new realities under fire, warning that recent attacks represent a grave breach of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
In an official statement on Wednesday, the movement stressed that the ongoing Israeli escalation in the Gaza Strip clearly reveals an intention to sabotage the ceasefire agreement signed in Sharm el-Sheikh under the auspices of US President Donald Trump.
Hamas held the occupation fully responsible for the dangerous escalation and its consequences, warning that continued aggression threatens to collapse the fragile ceasefire. The movement added that the Resistance factions in Gaza remain unified and fully committed to the terms of the agreement, while vowing not to allow “Israel” to shift the status quo through military force.
“The world must realize that the blood of our children and women is not cheap,” the statement read, emphasizing the resistance’s readiness to respond to violations.
Hamas denies involvement in Rafah incident
Hamas also confirmed it had no connection to the shooting incident in Rafah, southern Gaza, reiterating its commitment to the ceasefire and accusing the occupation of fabricating pretexts to justify continued aggression.
The movement described the Israeli army’s bombing of civilian areas in Gaza as a flagrant violation of the agreement, warning that the occupation’s actions could lead to an uncontrollable escalation.
Hamas strongly criticized the US administration’s ongoing support for the occupation, describing it as an active partnership in the bloodshed of the Palestinian people. The statement condemned Washington’s silence and complicity, saying it directly encourages the continuation of attacks on Gaza.
As the situation on the ground deteriorates, Hamas warned that the ceasefire agreement, brokered under President Donald Trump, is at serious risk of collapse. The Resistance movement reaffirmed that while it remains committed to the agreement, it will not remain passive in the face of continued aggression and violations.
This comes after the Israeli occupation carried out a series of attacks against the Gaza Strip, violating the ceasefire agreement and killing at least 100 Palestinians.
Kyiv wants land, not people: former US State Department adviser warns
By Uriel Araujo | October 29, 2025
James Carden, former US State Department Russia Policy Adviser has faced criticism in certain circles over his otherwise underreported comments during a recent interview to Australian Sky News — especially for mentioning some hard truths about the ethnopolitics of Ukraine.
In that interview, Mr. Carden noted that, like HIMARS or F-16s, Tomahawks won’t be a gamechanger, and argued that Putin’s proposal — EU but not NATO membership — was a fair enough bargain. When the host replied that, in this case, that would involve land concessions as part of a land-for-peace deal, the former State Department Adviser argued that the land Kyiv would be ceding is a land that: “they themselves have been attacking since 2014. The Ukrainians are being a bit disingenuous here… They claim to want the land in the Donbass, Eastern Ukraine. But they don’t want the ethnic Russian citizens on that land. So they’ve been doing everything that they can to disenfranchise those people.”
These comments are not ill-informed or dishonest and they merit some attention. In fact, they are quite accurate.
For years, Kyiv’s policies have systematically sidelined a significant chunk of Ukraine’s population. According to the country’s last census in 2001 — the only one since independence in 1991 — “ethnic Russians” accounted for 17.3 percent of the populace, which is over 8 million people. The numbers don’t catch all the nuance here: Ukraine is, pure and simple, a deeply bilingual society, with Russian as the native language (in other surveys) for at least 29 percent nationwide, a percentage that gets far higher in the east and south.
It is true that a 2024 study by linguist Volodymyr Kulyk shows a decline in everyday Russian use in Ukraine since 2022, with streets renamed, statues of Russians taken down and “Russian literature taken off the shelves of bookshops”, as Lancaster University PhD researcher Oleksandra Osypenko puts it. While in 2012 only 44% Ukrainians primarily spoke Ukrainian and 34% Russian, by December 2022 Ukrainian had risen to 57.4% and Russian had fallen to 14.8%, with the remaining 27.8 percent reporting employing both. This means that 42.6% of Ukrainians (that is 14.8 plus 27.8) still use the Russian language routinely, even after three years of open war, with censored media, and all “pro-Russian” parties having been banned; and after at least 11 years of Ukrainization policies.
High rates of intermarriage blur the lines even further; and, from a social science perspective, many folks toggle between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” identities depending on the context, as I’ve noticed myself during fieldwork in 2019.
Yet, back in August 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Donbass residents who ‘feel russkiye [ethnic Russians]’ to move to Russia. At the time, I argued that this was one of the most russophobic statements from a high-ranking Ukrainian official since World War II; which is an ironic enough twist, considering the fact that in 2019 Zelensky (a Russian speaker himself) was widely described as a candidate courting the Russian and pro-Russian minority, and rode to power on promises to protect precisely these Russian-identifying folks in the east.
The 2014 ultranationalist Maidan revolution, backed by Washington (despite its far-right elements), has ushered in a surge of Ukrainian chauvinism that verges on negationism about the country’s pluri-ethnic realities. Language laws tell part of the tale. The 2017 education reform made Ukrainian the sole public-school language; by March 2023, Ukraine expanded media censorship and raised TV Ukrainian-language quotas to 90% by 2024, while banning non-Ukrainian languages in key areas.
Oleksiy Danilov, then secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, put it starkly in a 2023 interview: “The Russian language must completely disappear from our territory.” No wonder Ukrainian philosopher Sergei Datsyuk warned that such moves could spark an “internal civil war” worse than the external one, and even Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former adviser, echoed the alarm.
The truth is that such “internal civil war” kicked off nearly a decade ago in Donbass, as scholar Serhiy Kudelia frames it, under artillery barrages that turned it into Europe’s “forgotten war” until 2022. Kyiv has been bombing Russians (in Donbass) for a decade, while disenfranchising them.
This is no hyperbole: experts like Nicolai N. Petro, a US Fulbright scholar in Ukraine in 2013-2014 and ex-State Department specialist on the Soviet Union, have documented how Ukrainian policies erode civil rights for ethnic minorities, especially Russian speakers.
The Venice Commission, Europe’s go-to body for democratic standards, criticized Ukraine’s 2022 Law on National Minorities for restricting publishing, media, and education in minority languages, urging revisions to meet international standards. Despite this, Deputy PM Olga Stefanishyna dismissed it all by claiming: “there is no Russian minority in Ukraine.”
Moreover, for many, Ukraine’s history is inextricably tied to Russia’s; a 2021 survey, taken six months before the full-scale escalation, found over 40 percent of Ukrainians nationwide — and nearly two-thirds in the east and south — agreeing with Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”.
Yet Ukraine’s rigid unitary state, with its top-down nationalism, clashes hard against Russia’s matryoshka model of multinational autonomy — with 22 ethnic republics within the Russian Federation. Granting Donbass similar autonomy, for instance, could have eased tensions, but it would have demanded a constitutional overhaul.
In the broader post-Soviet mess, Ukraine’s woes look less unique. Frozen conflicts across the region — Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh — show how borders remain volatile. In this context, Crimea and Donbass have been hot topics for decades.
The hard truth is that if Kyiv won militarily (unlikely), more Donbass shelling and displacement would likely follow. Carden’s point stands: without addressing internal ethnopolitics, Ukraine cannot secure peace; for peace means embracing all its people, not just the land they stand on.
Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.
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‘Conspiracy Theory’ Now Fact: Greater Israel Has Arrived
By Kit Klarenberg | Mint Press News | January 28, 2025
Ever since Tel Aviv’s 1948 creation, much has been said and written about ‘Greater Israel’ – the notion Zionism’s ultimate end goal is the forcible annexation and ethnic cleansing of vast swaths of Arab and Muslim lands for Jewish settlement, based on Biblical claims this territory was promised to Jews by God. The mainstream media typically dismisses this concept as antisemitic conspiracy theory, or at most the fringe fantasy of a minuscule handful of extremist Israelis.
In reality … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Bombing Hitler’s Hometown
- German journalist threatened with homelessness as German court upholds EU sanctions in landmark free speech case
- US Tells Allies That Ukraine-Bound Arms Could be Sent to Middle East
- Organized terrorism: Iran condemns killing of its diplomats in Lebanon
- Why could Gaza enter the regional war?
- Hamas official rejects Mladenov Plan linking disarmament to Gaza reconstruction
- Two Primary Elections for the Soul of ‘America First’
- Japan Clings to US Vassalage Despite Energy Crunch Caused By Iran War
- US Seeks Control Over Global Energy Infrastructure – Kremlin
- US senators target Orban government for standing up to Zelensky
- If Americans Knew
- Researchers at Human Rights Watch Resign Over Blocked Report on Palestinian Refugee Return
- Jewish Groups Are Backing a War Americans Don’t Want
- Eric Fingerhut Thinks He’s the President of the Jews
- Top Jewish Philanthropists, Rabbis Urge Israeli President to Take Action Against ‘Jewish Extremists’
- Don’t Be Fooled. Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted to Control Southern Lebanon
- Israel’s widespread use of torture is a core element of its genocide against the Palestinian people
- In Israel’s War on Iran, Many Middle East US Bases Rendered “All But Uninhabitable”
- ‘Burn the lawn’: Israel pursues ‘Rafah model’ in southern Lebanon
- A genocide here, an amputation there
- Reports: Iran mobilizing 1M fighters, Israel-US run low on ammo, Israeli army faces shortage – Not a ceasefire Day 168
- No Tricks Zone
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
- Storing Green Energy To Last Germany 10 Days Would Require A 60-Million Tonne Battery
- New Studies: UK Sea Levels Were 4 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Destructive Green New Deal: German Energy And Metal Group Warns Of Drastic Crisis
- New Study Documents A 20-Year Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Decline – Driven By Internal Variability
- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
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