Did Netanyahu just ask Trump for another war — and get it?
By Trita Parsi – Responsible Statecraft – December 30, 2025
During a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump said that he will allow Israel to attack Iran once again to strike its ballistic missiles.
But what exactly does that mean? Will the U.S. be involved in the actual strikes? Will it “limit” its involvement to shooting down Iran’s retaliatory missiles?
If the former, Trump is not just “allowing” Israel to strike; the U.S. will actually be at war with Iran. This would be a betrayal of his promise to his base to keep America out of wars (he has, of course, violated that already).
Moreover, unlike the nuclear program, which incorporates a small number of known facilities, the missile program is spread throughout the country in a large number of hidden facilities, many of them probably unknown to the U.S./Israel.
Thus, Trump will likely not be able to frame this as mere “military action” rather than war. Nor will he likely be able to negotiate with Tehran a limited Iranian response since the missiles are Iran’s last line of defense — the last leg of its deterrence.
Tehran has gone to great lengths to avoid a military confrontation with Washington, but just because it has shown restraint in the past does not mean that it can afford to do so in this scenario. Indeed, given that Iran will be totally exposed without its missiles, it will likely reckon that it has no choice but to strike directly at U.S. targets.
Even if Trump opts to “only” support Israel defensively in yet another Israeli choice of war — which is the position Biden took — it nevertheless incentivizes Israel to restart war, as the U.S. is lessening the cost for Israel to do so.
The cost to the United States is great even in this scenario. Washington depleted 25% of its THAAD interceptors in the course of 12 days this past summer — for Israel’s war of choice, in a region four American Presidents have declared no longer is vital to U.S. national security.
As I wrote last week, every time Trump caves to Netanyahu and agrees to another war, it only prompts Israel to come back to Trump after a few months with another war plan for Americans to give their blood and tax dollars to.
This will go on endlessly until Trump decides to end it.
Trita Parsi is an Iranian-born Swedish writer and activist, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and founder and former president of the National Iranian American Council
Trump Says Hamas Will Be Given a ‘Short Period of Time’ to Disarm
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | December 30, 2025
President Donald Trump said that Hamas will be given a short period of time to disarm, threatening to be “hell to pay” if the Palestinian group refuses.
During a Press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump was asked about demilitarizing Hamas. “They will be given a very short period of time to disarm. If they don’t disarm, as they agreed to do, there will be hell to pay,” he said. If Hamas does not disarm, “it will be horrible for them, horrible. It’s going to be really, really bad for them.”
Trump suggested that Hamas would be disarmed by Middle Eastern countries, rather than the US or Israel, which are willing to commit forces to demilitarize Gaza.
However, Hamas did not agree to disarm under the October agreement. At the time, a US official told Fox News that the Israel and Hamas ceasefire agreement was negotiated at “lightning speed” and did not address several key issues. Two outstanding questions are what group will secure Gaza and whether Hamas will disarm.
Hamas has maintained that it will only disarm if it is in the process of creating an independent Palestinian state.
Since the signing of the truce earlier this year, Tel Aviv has taken several steps to block the creation of a Palestinian state, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeated his long-standing position against the two-state solution.
Is Israel About to Return to Genocide? Three Scenarios for What Comes Next
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | December 30, 2025
With Tel Aviv openly rejecting withdrawal and insisting on disarmament, the “ceasefire” risks sliding into either renewed mass killing or a slow-motion attempt to impose control and displacement.
Debate rages on over what Phase Two of the Gaza Ceasefire will look like, as US President Donald Trump demands the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance. Meanwhile, Gaza refuses to hand over its weapons. Most analyses are, however, missing the mark when it comes to reading Tel Aviv’s calculations.
The so-called Gaza Ceasefire has proven itself to be little more than an extended pause in the mass slaughter of civilians. While it is still described as a ceasefire, there were three major changes to the predicament on the ground that took hold during “Phase One,” as the war continued to rage on.
The first major change, perhaps the most notable, was that the Israelis committed to no longer killing an average of around 100 civilians on a daily basis. The second was that more aid entered Gaza, although nowhere near the amount required or agreed to. The third was a mutual prisoner exchange.
Assessing the strength and direction of the ceasefire in its first phase is important to reading what the second phase may have in store, if it is even reached.
To the Israelis, the benefits of the partial implementation of Phase One were numerous. To begin with, the least consequential element, they relieved themselves of the burden of releasing their captives. This was important for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in that he managed to clear the topic of returning the captives, especially as he heads into a new election cycle.
Then we have the other benefits for the Israelis. Gaza exited the international headlines, as daily killings appeared too low to even register as a major issue in the biased Western press. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers were able to continue doing the exact same work inside Gaza that has constituted the majority of its military operations throughout the genocide: building demolition work.
These demolition missions, for which a privatized Israeli workforce has been employed to operate alongside the occupation army’s engineering units, have constituted the vast majority of the military’s efforts on the ground. Face-to-face combat on the ground has never been a notable feature of the Israeli genocide; they simply refused to actually fight the Palestinian resistance groups.
One thing that troubled the Israelis was that this demolition work, which sometimes included destroying entrances to tunnels, came with a high risk of running into armed ambushes. The Palestinian fighters would prepare traps and set up ambush operations for their forces, especially when Israel would invade or reinvade any new area they had not retained a permanent presence in.
Phase One of the Gaza Ceasefire agreement, therefore, guaranteed that soldiers were not going to be subjected to the same dangers as before, as the Palestinian resistance groups would halt all operations against the invading army.
It is important that this reality is established when analyzing Israel’s decision-making, because what is being done to Gaza is a genocide, not a conventional war. Israel’s intent is to wipe out Gaza, ensuring that it becomes totally uninhabitable, with the intention of mass expulsion in mind. This is also why they rarely targeted the armed wings of the Palestinian factions, focusing on maximum damage to the civilian population instead.
Any other way of framing this issue is misleading and whitewashes what the Israeli regime has committed since October 7, 2023. It also robs any analyst of his or her ability to assess Israel’s calculations critically.
With this in mind, consider that the Israelis have now had over two months where their armed forces have still been working, but have had a break from any fighting or the fear of being ambushed. Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other equipment were also being repaired, as the decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington designed new plans for their fronts against Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.
They also needed fewer soldiers for security reasons, as a so-called Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) took over in monitoring the situation and helping shape the realities imposed on the ground. Every country involved in the CMCC was therefore made complicit in the genocide.
This phase came with the additional benefit for the Israelis that they now had the space to experiment with new approaches, conjure up more conspiracies, and seek to find a way to ensure the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip occurs. As Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has explicitly stated, his army has no intention of withdrawing from the besieged coastal territory.
Phase Two and What It Will Show Us
If we establish the fact that the Israelis are adamant on achieving ethnic cleansing, that their military operations have always sought to achieve this goal, and that they are continuing to conspire to achieve this, then we have arrived at the starting point from which to assess the implementation of a so-called Phase Two.
During the first phase, the groundwork was laid for a new set of conspiracies against the people of Gaza. The population was subjected to countless pressures, which the criminal CMCC oversaw, including the deprivation of sustainable living conditions, with only a handful of its nongovernmental organizations even raising issues about it.
Despite the best efforts of the Hamas-affiliated government security forces to restore order, they were dealing with an impossible situation. Over a million people live in tents that are unstable or susceptible to dire weather conditions, a lack of adequate medical supplies, sanitary supplies, and many food items are even restricted. Amid this, most people don’t have jobs, few have adequate salaries coming in, and even for those in a better economic standing, they remain traumatized and unable to return to their homes. Inevitably, this leads to social issues that no regular security force can fully repel.
Meanwhile, the Israelis expand the so-called Yellow Line, behind which they were supposed to remain, instead using this line to execute anyone who comes within a few hundred meters of it, thus deterring them from returning to their own homes or land, where they could possibly plant small crops. Behind this ever-expanding occupying line, the Israeli military and private contractors destroy more and more infrastructure. All of this is monitored by the US-Israeli-led CMCC.
The plan is rather overt in its goals, but still vague in its precise stages of implementation. Both US and Israeli officials have made it crystal clear that they seek reconstruction only inside the Israeli-controlled portion of the Gaza Strip, where five ISIS-linked death squads are being strengthened by Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The UN’s most shameful Resolution 2803, passed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in November, makes it apparent that the goal is to implement a “Board of Peace” (BoP) and International Stabilization Force (ISF). The BoP makes Donald Trump the de facto ruler of Gaza, and the ISF is set to be a multinational invasion force tasked with fighting the Palestinian resistance factions.
This Monday, the new spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades of Hamas, who has also taken on the alias Abu Obeida, announced a staunch opposition to disarmament, instead calling on the Israelis to disarm, as they are the ones responsible for committing a genocide. All the Palestinian factions, with the exception of the mainstream branch of Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), are united on this issue.
The PA is in favor of Donald Trump’s plan for him to rule the Gaza Strip and disarm the resistance by force, but it is irrelevant in terms of representing Palestinians. This authority only continues to exist because it is propped up by the Israelis, Americans, Saudis, and Europeans, and its popularity, beyond its base of employees, is in the single digits among the Palestinian people. It does not even represent the sentiments of the majority of Fatah supporters anymore.
All of this is to say that if any Phase Two is going to be implemented, neither side is going to be in agreement about it. Netanyahu’s government demands disarmament, while the Palestinian factions demand Gaza’s self-governance and will only disarm by handing over their weapons to a newly established Palestinian state. Hamas is clear that it would allow a technocratic administration to take over Gaza and is not demanding that it remain as the government of Gaza.
Considering that neither side can agree upon the basis on which a Phase Two can begin, keeping in mind that Israel and the US are the sides with military dominance, there are three ways that this will unfold:
The US and Israel will proceed with aggressively implementing their plan, as laid out in the shameful UNSC Resolution 2803. They will begin deploying a regime change force and attempt to implement a number of schemes to start a slow ethnic cleansing of the territory amid this.
Israel will restart its full-scale genocide.
The shaky ceasefire will continue, but remain in limbo. This will mean periodic spats of violence, as the Israelis and the US attempt to slowly and partially implement the ISF-BoP agenda. This will be a process during which the people of Gaza will be subjected to more pressure, but not enough to collapse the agreement altogether.
An Aggressive Phase Two?
The first means of implementing the next phase of the Gaza Ceasefire initiative would likely buckle under the immense pressures destined to befall it. If we look at the ISF alone, it is a recipe for total disaster.
Forcing the “International Stabilization Force” aggressively on the people of Gaza means that it will start going after Palestinian resistance factions. Two major issues will immediately pop up. The resistance will certainly kill some of these foreign soldiers, who will return to their home nations in body bags and cause domestic chaos. A heavy-handed approach here would also likely result in civilians being killed, another major debacle in its own right.
The Israelis are adamant that Türkiye, Qatar, and other Muslim-majority nations they take issue with cannot deploy their armed forces in Gaza. Whether they get their way or not, consider that this armed force would mean gathering a few hundred soldiers from one country, a few thousand from another, and so on.
If this kind of ISF was sent into Gaza aggressively, considering that so far there has been no agreement concerning how to implement this invasion initiative or which countries will participate, it will be thrust into a complex urban warfare environment. They all speak different languages, work off different military doctrines, are ill-prepared, likely ill-equipped for their tasks, and, according to reports, will only number in the tens of thousands.
Donald Trump recently boasted that the nations which, he says, are participating in his so-called “peace plan” will work to destroy Hamas if it refuses to disarm, even bragging that Israel would not be required to act and that foreign invading forces would do all the work for them.
In order to conduct a regime change operation of this nature, the ISF would have to be at least 250,000 men strong. Bear in mind that mobilizing a multinational invasion force of this kind would take many months, an enormous amount of funding, and the key feature would be that it actually fights, unlike the Israeli army, which refused to go after the Palestinian resistance factions on the ground.
If an ISF that numbers only in the tens of thousands is going to try and defeat the Palestinian resistance, it will suffer heavier casualties than the Israeli military did. Any Arab or Muslim-majority nation deploying forces could experience mass protests or rebellions against their role in the genocide. Without going into the fine details, it makes no sense and if it is tried, it will quickly fail. Even the Egyptians, who along with Israel will be the guarantors of the strategy, have been advocating for a force equivalent to Lebanon’s UNIFIL to enter Gaza, which is not what UNSC Resolution 2803 approved.
Israel Collapses the Ceasefire
The next way this can go is that Benjamin Netanyahu decides to collapse the ceasefire altogether. Some argue this wouldn’t happen because the US is committed to its “peace plan.” This is not a serious argument. Donald Trump has demonstrated that he will go along with whatever the Israelis choose. He isn’t a strong leader on this question and clearly possesses a level of knowledge about the region that you would expect of a public high school student who took history and didn’t really bother to listen.
There are only two circumstances under which the Israelis will collapse the ceasefire in its entirety. They no longer believe that any of the schemes they sought to implement under the so-called ceasefire will work, and there is some kind of political benefit to returning to all-out combat. The second reason is that they are scared that the Palestinian resistance may launch some kind of offensive while the Israeli army is also battling Hezbollah and Iran.
Collapsing the ceasefire demonstrates that the Israelis are without any direction and lack a coherent plan to actually end the fighting on the Gaza front. It means that they are simply reverting to all-out genocide, with the hope that eventually an opportunity arises which will allow a mass ethnic cleansing event, or a slow process of ethnic cleansing as they exterminate tens of thousands more civilians.
Stuck Between Phase One and Phase Two
Another option is for the Israelis and Americans to stall the collapse of the ceasefire. It would mean placing the situation in limbo, not allowing its total collapse, but undergoing a process of trial and error, whereby it slowly attempts to force elements of “Phase Two” into reality.
This is a very likely outcome, designed to keep the Gaza front closed while focusing more on Iran, Lebanon, and perhaps even Yemen. We could therefore expect to see the ISF deployed in a less meaningful capacity than is currently envisaged in Washington, disastrous plots implemented involving private military contractors and aid distribution, and attempts to ethnically cleanse the population slowly here and there. All of these schemes will fall flat on their faces, but not without inflicting suffering on the civilian population of Gaza.
In the meantime, the US-Israeli alliance will have Tehran in its sights. The thinking behind this would be to squeeze the civilian population of Gaza, while prioritizing Iran and Hezbollah as their major strategic threats.
Israel’s Failure Hedges against Iran and Hezbollah
The conspiracies of Washington and Tel Aviv against Gaza can be defeated, but this hinges upon Hezbollah and Iran for the most part. If Iran and Hezbollah manage to deal enormous blows to the Israelis, refusing to play their game of fighting short defensive conflicts, then Israel will be dragged into deep waters.
All that is required of Hezbollah and Iran is that they don’t stop firing, no matter the degree of carnage exacted against their people. If Hezbollah drags the Israeli military into Lebanese lands and refuses the calls for a ceasefire, instead forcing the Israelis into a war that it intends to fight for many months, and Iran does the same, the Israelis will be in a major crisis.
The details of such conflicts are a topic for different pieces and many outcomes could occur, yet it suffices to say that major moves from Lebanon and Iran could put the Israelis in a very weak position, one that even enables major action from Gaza also.
If Iran and Hezbollah are either defeated or taken out of the picture for an even longer period after agreeing to meaningless ceasefires, after short rounds of fighting, also suffering the assassinations of major figures, this is the most favorable outcome for Benjamin Netanyahu. Victories in these arenas will open the door to ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip, even if slowly rather than in a stampede into the Sinai Peninsula. This is, of course, assuming there are no other major fronts which suddenly open to preoccupy them.
As things stand, the Israelis are in a very weak position, having failed to defeat any of their enemies. The only exception is the fall of the previous Syrian regime, which was not directly fighting Israel, but was a major land bridge for the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. For now, Syria can be considered a victim of Israel, but poses no immediate threat.
Ultimately, Israel has fought for over two years and failed to defeat the Palestinian resistance, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Iran, or any of its other adversaries, even after dealing varying degrees of blows against each of them. Netanyahu’s long-sought-after “total victory” does not appear likely, yet he still continues to double down on attempting to achieve this goal. The primary reason for this is the refusal of the people of Gaza, and also Lebanon, to give up.
Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Israeli-UAE Aggression In Yemen Could Backfire Enormously
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle |December 26, 2025
Although the Yemeni Armed Forces have halted their ballistic missile and drone attacks against Israel, adhering to the Gaza ceasefire, officials in Tel Aviv are continuing to insist that their front against Sana’a is not over.
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) has been busy seizing territory from Saudi-backed forces and signalling an intent to declare southern Yemen’s independence. Far from simply domestic disputes between armed groups, these developments will have major regional implications.
On December 3, the STC seized Hadramout province from forces aligned with Saudi Arabia, followed by a takeover of al-Mahra province. The UAE-backed separatists even went a step further, with a number of officials declaring their intent to break away and declare southern Yemen an independent state.
For context here, the UAE and Saudi proxies in Yemen were operating a joint governing body out of southern Yemen’s port city of Aden. For years, the Saudi-led coalition had attempted to prop up deposed Yemeni President, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, with the backing of the US, UK, and Israel. Hadi was therefore referred to as the “internationally recognised” leader of the Yemeni State, when in reality he had no such power.
Despite the glaringly obvious fact that Ansarallah had set up and was operating a government in the nation’s capital, enjoying a lot of popular support, the United Nations continued to play along with the West’s demands to recognise Saudi’s puppet proxy regime. In 2022, Riyadh then created what is known as the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), which was endowed with the powers of the Presidency and serves as the “internationally recognised government”.
The head of the PLC is a man named Rashad al-Alimi, who is an unelected leader and is part of the eight-member body. As of May 2023, three of the eight seats in the PLC were handed to officials belonging to the UAE-backed STC, which recently ran Saudi-backed officials out of Aden.
The STC’s recent territorial gains have posed an active security threat to Saudi Arabia and Oman, deepening the ongoing feud between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. The UAE, for its part, also appears to have been sizing up an offensive campaign against Ansarallah at some stage, as it acts in coordination with the Israelis.
The recent developments in Yemen have triggered anxiety amongst Zionist analysts in Washington, as they see a UAE-Saudi conflict in Yemen between their proxies as detrimental to the fight against Ansarallah in Sana’a. In line with this way of thinking, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) recently published a Policy Analysis piece arguing that such a UAE-Saudi conflict should be avoided and instead both should focus on Ansarallah.
It is clear that the primary goal of the Israelis is to see their Emirati allies use the STC to try and seize the port city of Hodeidah, thus securing dominance over the Red Sea. This is important to Tel Aviv as it means weakening the Yemeni Armed Forces and preventing them from being able to effectively impose a blockade on their ships. Israel even pushed the Trump administration to launch a war in Yemen for over a month in an attempt to break the blockade in the Red Sea, which resulted in resounding failure.
The Zionist think-tank WINEP has warned that any conflict between Saudi proxies and Emirati proxies could open the door for Ansarallah’s forces to seize the oil-rich region of Marib, a major catastrophe for the Israelis and Americans. Yet, so far, no UAE-Saudi understandings appear to have come about to find any solution to their competition in Yemen.
Instead, the major agreement that was just brokered came between the Yemeni government in Sana’a and Saudi Arabia, the largest prisoner exchange deal since the beginning of the war. This meant agreeing upon the release of 1,700 Ansarallah detainees in exchange for 1,200 opposition prisoners.
Another important clarification is that the Ansarallah government is often labelled “the Houthis” in the Western media, and the Saudi proxy opposition is called the “Yemeni government”. This can sometimes get confusing, but it is important to point out that this propagandistic rhetoric is used to shape the conflict in a way that reflects Western bias, not the objective reality on the ground.
Some will try to argue that the Saudi proxy opposition is the “internationally recognised government” according to the United Nations, which is true, but again, this has little bearing on the reality on the ground. There simply aren’t enough powerful States or even smaller nations that are willing to bat for recognising the government in Sana’a, therefore the West and their Arab allies have managed to prevent any reflection of reality reaching the United Nations or even the international media.
At this phase, the UAE’s STC appears to be in control of the majority of opposition-held territory in Yemen, greatly undermining Saudi Arabia’s role. However, the STC is not exactly a movement with the popular support to sustain and operate a lasting, or stable, southern Yemeni State. The STC has faced countless protests against their rule, after failing to deliver even basic services to the people living under its control. Blatant corruption, combined with criminal activities and a lack of basic governing skills, has left people with very little. Even in the Hadramout and al-Mahra provinces, there is significant opposition that could lead to their swift overthrow.
Amidst this, if the STC decides to commit to offensives against the Yemeni Armed Forces of Ansarallah, the strategy to defeat the UAE-proxy forces is rather simple. Ansarallah will not only most likely batter these armed militants on the ground, but need only direct drone and missile fire towards the real headquarters of the STC, Dubai. If ballistic and cruise missiles, along with drones, flood Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Emirati plot will quickly collapse.
When it comes to Saudi Arabia, it is a much larger nation and has the capacity to endure a lot more than the much smaller Emirates, making Riyadh a more formidable foe than Abu Dhabi. If the STC proxy forces become the main opposition and Saudi Arabia can no longer maintain any significant foothold in Yemen, the recipe for Yemeni unification becomes much simpler.
A war between Ansarallah and the STC has a very easy solution: flooding the UAE with missiles and drones for a sustained period, which will force them to give up and depart from Yemen. If this happens, Riyadh will have no choice but to reach a broader agreement with Sana’a, effectively ending the war altogether.
In the eyes of the Israelis and the United States, this outcome would be a catastrophe. If Ansarallah, even under a power-sharing styled agreement, reigned supreme over all of Yemen and became its officially recognised leadership, it would significantly increase its power and pose an even greater threat to Israel. In Tel Aviv’s eyes, this would be Iran 2.0 in the Arab World, an Islamic government that is openly hostile to Israel and a staunch supporter of the Palestinian resistance.
No matter which way you slice it, the US and Israel have no answer for the predicament they face in Yemen. The only option is to try and keep the nation in perpetual war, tightening the sanctions and ensuring immense suffering amongst its civilian population, all to avoid the inevitable rise of an Ansarallah-controlled Yemeni State, equipped with a military arsenal that will continue to develop.
The Rebirth of ISIS, Israel and the Continuation of Syria’s Civil War
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | December 25, 2025
The chaotic predicament in which Syria now finds itself was, in many ways, predictable, yet this makes it nonetheless tragic. Despite the recent removal of the US’s crushing Caesar Act sanctions, the challenges ahead are so numerous as to render this a minor victory for the country.
In order to begin to understand what is happening inside Syria, we first have to begin to comprehend what happened following the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Although the moment that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus, and Ahmed al-Shara’a declared himself leader, was dubbed a liberation of the country, thus interpreted as the end to the nation’s civil war, what had really happened was the birth of a new chapter in the Syrian war.
On December 8, 2024, the Israeli air force saw its opportunity and hatched a long-planned strategy to destroy Syria’s strategic arsenal and occupy key portions of territory in the south of the nation. That day, however, much of the Arabic language world’s media completely ignored the historic event and refused to cover its ramifications.
Another key point was that, beyond Israel’s land grab, the country’s territory still remained divided, as the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) maintained its control over the northeast of the country. This movement believes that the territory it controls, with Washington’s backing, is called Rojava and is part of the land of Kurdistan.
Türkiye, to the north, views the Kurdish movement as a strategic threat and treats the SDF as an extension of other Kurdish organizations it deems terrorist groups. The majority of the people living inside SDF-controlled territory are Arabs, an issue that can also not be overlooked.
HTS Ascendant and the Collapse of the State
Then we have the HTS government that took over Damascus, which originally pledged to rule for all Syrians and not just the Sunni majority. However, HTS is a rebranding of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot. Understanding this fact is key, because HTS was the de facto government in the territory called Idlib, in northwestern Syria; although a secular leadership was on paper, supposed to be the ruling authority.
In 2018, when Bashar al-Assad’s forces halted their offensive and sent all the armed groups opposing them on “Green Buses” to the Idlib enclave, Ahmed al-Shara’a, who called himself Abu Mohammed al-Jolani at the time, had started to consolidate power. This led to HTS establishing its own prisons and undergoing a process whereby it managed to control various al-Qaeda-affiliated Salafist armed groups inside the territory.
When HTS took Damascus, it did so with a ragtag army composed of militants from dozens of armed groups from inside Idlib, including many former ISIS fighters and others from different groups that were given the options to join forces with HTS, lay down their weapons, or face fierce crackdowns.
The way these crackdowns on dissidents were carried out, along with corruption in the governance of Idlib, even led to protests inside the province against HTS. Many hardline militants had also accused al-Shara’a of providing the US with details on the whereabouts of former ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Keep in mind now that when HTS took over Damascus, they did so without a fight and the former regime simply collapsed in on itself. So here was HTS, now tasked with managing the majority of Syria and had to do so without any army, because the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) had been disbanded.
Many elements of the former government, intelligence, and military under Bashar al-Assad were told they had been granted amnesty, yet forces aligned with HTS, and in some cases those within it, decided to take the law into their own hands through brutal field executions.
This eventually led to a group of former SAA fighters in the coastal region taking up arms against the new HTS security forces, triggering a response from a broad range of sectarian groups and others who were seeking “revenge” in blood feuds. The result was the mass murder of Alawite civilians across the coast.
Israel, the Druze File, and Syria’s External Fronts
Earlier this year, Israel also took advantage of tensions between Syria’s Druze community and sectarian militants aligned with Damascus, backing Druze separatist militias. This had been a strategy that Tel Aviv attempted to implement all the way back in 2013, when Israel began backing some dozen opposition groups, including al-Qaeda- and ISIS-linked militants that were committing massacres against the Druze.
The Syrian Druze population is primarily situated in the Sweida province in southern Syria. Israel long sought to create a Druze rump state there, which would serve as a land bridge to the Euphrates and allow for the total Israeli domination of the south. The Israelis are also allied with the SDF, although not as overtly as the Americans are, meaning that if their strategy works, then they have secured their domination all the way through to the Iraqi border.
This Monday, tensions again flared up between the Syrian forces aligned with Damascus and HTS in eastern Aleppo, with both sides blaming each other for the violence. Periodically, tensions continue to escalate in Sweida, yet come short of the large-scale sectarian battles we saw earlier this year.
Meanwhile, US forces have now expanded their footprint throughout Syria and have taken over more military air bases, even working alongside Damascus as a partner in the “fight against ISIS,” or “Operation Inherent Resolve.”
On December 13, an attack that killed three US servicemembers was blamed on a lone-wolf ISIS fighter. In response, the US then declared it was launching a retaliatory bombing campaign across the country.
The narratives of both Washington and Damascus make little sense, regarding this being a lone-wolf ISIS attack. Instead, the evidence suggests that the attack was carried out by a member of the HTS security forces, but this is perhaps a story for another day.
Now we hear report after report about the rise of ISIS. And while it is certainly true that ISIS is on its way back, even if in a weaker state, the context is never mentioned.
Internal Fractures, ISIS, and an Unstable Future
Not only has the current Syrian administration managed to play right into Israel’s hands with the management of the situation in Sweida, set up a shadow governance model that is even more corrupt than the previous regime, while isolating all of Syria’s minority communities in one way or another, but it has also effectively turned many of its own allies against it.
There is no actual “Syrian Army” to be spoken of right now, at least there isn’t one that is professionally trained or big enough to handle any major war. Instead, the Syrian state will rely on its allies, like major tribes and a range of militant groups. However, as time goes on, more and more of HTS’s allies and even many who now fill the ranks of its own security forces are growing tired of the government’s antics.
A large component of their anger comes from issues concerning tight Syrian relations with the US, leading to the hunting down of Sunni militants across the country, but particularly in and around Idlib. As mentioned above, HTS had integrated many ISIS fighters and those belonging to other hardline Salafist Takfiri fighting groups, but many of these militants have never been willing to sacrifice their core beliefs for a secular state.
For years, the man they knew as Jolani had preached against the United States and Israel, yet, after taking power, he began cozying up with them and targeting Sunni militants alongside the US military. In addition to this, the large number of foreign fighters inside the country have not been granted citizenship and feel as if their futures are threatened.
In other words, the conditions are ripe for some kind of revolt, and Ahmed al-Shara’a is surrounded by countless threats. If ISIS were to begin gaining traction, there is a good chance many of these fighters, currently allying themselves with the Damascus government, will switch sides. In fact, this is something that has already been happening, although in small numbers and isolated cases.
What we see is a recipe for disaster, one which could explode in any direction, triggering a much larger chain of events in its wake. So far, it appears as if there are four primary threats to the stability of the HTS government. These are the Sweida front, the Israel front, the SDF front, and the potential for an internal insurgency.
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, recently gave an interview during which he commented that Ahmed al-Shara’a “does know that any pathway for stability in Syria, his pathway for survival, is that he has to be able to have peace with Israel.”
It is important to understand that the two most powerful influences on Damascus are Washington and Ankara, yet it is clear that the US has the edge and could quickly overthrow the HTS regime at any time of its choosing.
Türkiye now has enormous influence inside Syria, where it is competing with the Israelis and attempting to set red lines, yet has failed to impose any equations as of yet. Perhaps the only way that the Turkish state could deter the Israelis is through backing a resistance front in the south of the country, yet it is clear that the US will not allow such a scenario to develop.
Even if a rather weak resistance group, or collection of groups, were to be formed and pose little strategic threat to Israel, this could also end up presenting a challenge to the rule of HTS in the long run. This is because such a resistance organization would enjoy enormous popular support and likely encourage other armed actors inside the country to join forces, creating a Lebanon-style system, whereby the forces of the state are incapable of confronting the occupier, and instead a resistance group would handle security.
The United States and Israel would never permit something like this to evolve, likely moving to commit regime change before such a plot is even conceived.
This leaves Ahmed al-Shara’a in an impossible position. He has no confidence in him as a ruler from the country’s minorities, growing anguish amongst the majority Sunni population, and no real army to be spoken of. Instead of resisting the Israelis, as his men and population at large seek, he sends his officials to sit around the table with them, while Syria’s official social media pages publish images of Syria without including the occupied Golan Heights.
Since 1967, most of the Syrian Druze living in the occupied Golan Heights had refused to take Israeli citizenship. After the sectarian bloodshed that occurred earlier this year, these Syrian Druze began applying for Israeli citizenship en masse. This is the impact that the rulers in Damascus have had on their own people; they have pushed Syrians who resisted Israeli citizenship for decades to switch sides, playing right into Tel Aviv’s hands.
Meanwhile, little is being done to reassure the disillusioned militants who had fought alongside HTS and believed they were fighting for a liberation cause and/or Islamic Caliphate, only to realize that they fought for a regime that negotiates with Israel and bows to the White House. Therefore, it is no wonder that when a group like ISIS appeals to them through its propaganda, it manages to convince them to join the organization’s fight.
What’s more is that this outcome was barely difficult to predict; only days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, militants from Idlib were posting photos on Facebook of themselves holding up pictures of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the Umayyad Mosque, the most important mosque to Sunni Muslims in Syria.
Not only this, while ISIS networks on social media were, in the past, blocked almost instantly, they began popping up in the open on places like Facebook again. This begs the question as to why such obvious ISIS glorification and supporters were permitted to begin operating so openly online during this period.
When it comes to Takfiri Salafist doctrine, whether someone is affiliated with ISIS or al-Qaeda offshoots, they do not simply abandon this ideology overnight because of changing political circumstances.
Now, Takfiri militants idolize a man named Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, which is why these Salafi groups are often referred to as Wahhabis. Historically speaking, this ideology was the bedrock on which the Saudi family launched their offensives to conquer Arabia, declaring the Ottomans kafir (disbelievers) and justifying their alliance with Britain, against other Muslims, on this basis. Therefore, some may justify the actions of al-Shara’a on the basis of their doctrine, but only to a certain extent.
When HTS began killing fellow Sunni Muslims, alongside the United States and cozying up to individuals responsible for the mass murder of their co-religionists, this started to become a major problem. It could no longer be branded an “alliance with the people of the book,” especially when fellow Salafists were kidnapped and killed by HTS government forces.
Some attention has recently been placed on the comments of the US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, who remarked that Syria should not be a democracy and instead a monarchy, even explicitly stating that this plan could include merging Syria with Lebanon. Such a system would certainly please many allies of al-Shara’a, and comments like these could be made in the interest of restoring faith in the leader.
Nonetheless, the current system is still operating on a knife-edge and is far from achieving a monarchy that rules the northern Sham region. In the distance, the Israelis are watching on and simply waiting for the next opportunity to achieve even more of their goals.
This is all because the war in Syria never truly ended; the only thing that changed is that Bashar al-Assad’s government fell, and perhaps if that had occurred during the first years of the war, there wouldn’t have been so many issues.
As is normally the case with human psychology, we seek to frame things in a favorable way to our worldview, meaning that we simply ignore evidence to the contrary. Yet, the case of Syria is really not all that dissimilar from the post-US-backed regime change realities currently existing in Libya, although there are key differences, of course.
So long as Syria remains without an effective resistance front against the Israelis, it will never recover and remain trapped. In Lebanon, it took years before such a resistance force truly took off in the south, and even then, it took decades to expel and then deter the Israelis. Syria is a much more complex picture, which makes predicting outcomes even more difficult.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Iran says no basis for inspection of bombed nuclear sites
Press TV – December 24, 2025
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says that political and psychological pressure over inspection of damaged nuclear facilities will have no effect, calling for clear procedures to be established for such occasions.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mohammad Eslami said there is currently no codified instruction for inspecting nuclear facilities that have been damaged by military attacks.
“Until this issue is clarified, political and psychological pressure and irrelevant follow-ups aimed at re-inspecting bombed facilities and completing the enemy’s operations are unacceptable and will not be responded to,” he said.
Back in June, during the US-Israeli aggression against Iran, the US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, in a clear violation of international law and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Eslami noted that Article 68 of the Safeguards Agreement refers only to natural accidents and damage, not military attacks or war.
“If the IAEA considers military attacks on safeguarded nuclear facilities acceptable, it must explicitly approve and declare that,” he said. “But if such attacks are illegal, they must be condemned, and the post-war procedures must be clearly defined.”
He added that until such conditions are formally defined by the agency, Iran will not accept demands for renewed inspections of damaged sites.
On Iran’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Eslami said no country in history has cooperated with the agency to the extent Iran has.
“The most extensive and intensive inspections ever conducted have been imposed on Iran’s nuclear industry, and there is not a single report indicating non-compliance or diversion from safeguards,” he said.
He characterized current pressure as politically motivated and aimed at harming and weakening the Iranian people, stressing that Iran’s nuclear activities remain entirely peaceful.
Referring to the UN Security Council meeting held on Tuesday, Eslami said the discussions no longer merely warranted regret but instead exposed the reality of long-standing US pressure on Iran’s nuclear industry.
He noted that Washington has openly stated in its national security strategy that it does not pursue its interests through international organizations and, instead, relies on “the law of the jungle and the use of force.”
Eslami described the report, statements, and references made during the Security Council session as “completely unprofessional and non-legal.”
He emphasized that UN Security Council Resolution 2231 has expired, and even if it were to be cited, its procedural requirements were not followed.
Claims that Iran’s alleged non-compliance with the JCPOA justifies the reinstatement of previous UN sanctions, he said, are “entirely rejected and unacceptable.”
He added that China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, have explicitly rejected these claims, stating that the push by the three European countries and the United States—backed by Israeli lobbying—has no legal standing and is not enforceable.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Eslami announced the launch of a nationwide multimedia festival titled “Nuclear Technology for Life,” organized jointly with Iran’s national broadcaster.
He said the initiative aims to counter misinformation and distorted narratives about Iran’s nuclear program by presenting multi-layered accounts through public and media participation.
US Weighs Port Restrictions on Spain Over Israel Arms Transit Ban
teleSUR | December 20, 2025
The United States is considering restrictive measures against Spanish-flagged vessels following Spain’s decision to block the transit of US military cargo bound for Israel through its territory, prompting a formal investigation by US maritime authorities.
In late September this year, the Spanish government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez prohibited the transit of US aircraft and ships carrying weapons, ammunition, or military equipment destined for Israel through the military bases of Rota, in Cádiz, and Morón de la Frontera, in Seville. The measure was adopted in protest against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.
The Joint Spanish–US Committee confirmed the decision, clarifying that the ban applies both to aircraft and vessels heading directly to Israel and to those bound for the country after intermediate stopovers.
Washington responded on Friday through the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), which said it is considering closing US ports to Spanish ships while it investigates Spain’s refusal to allow US cargo vessels carrying arms to Israel to dock at the port of Algeciras, in southern Spain.
In a statement, the FMC said it is examining options that include cargo limitations, denial of entry to vessels operating under the Spanish flag, or fines of up to $2.3 million per voyage for Spanish-flagged ships.
Spain has prohibited the transfer of US weapons to Israel through the military bases of Rota and Morón, facilities located on Spanish territory but used by the United States under bilateral defense agreements.
US authorities view Spain’s stance as a challenge. The FMC said it is gathering information on “the current policy of Spain of denying or rejecting port access to certain vessels carrying cargo to or from Israel,” which, according to the commission, may be creating “unfavorable general or special conditions for maritime transport in US foreign trade.” The FMC, which is independent of the US government, stressed the urgency of completing its investigation to determine what “corrective measures may be appropriate to address such conditions.”
According to sources from Spain’s Ministry of Defense cited by Europa Press in September, the Defense Cooperation Agreement governing military collaboration between the two countries will not be amended. As a result, US-operated military bases in Spain remain excluded from arms embargoes.
Under Article 32 of the agreement, the United States must obtain authorization from the Permanent Committee, which operates under Spain’s Ministry of Defense, for operations involving the loading or unloading of munitions and explosives, as well as their transport by land, sea, or air within Spanish territory. However, the United States is not required to disclose the final destination of such cargo when stopovers are involved.
Spain reaffirmed in September its decision to halt arms sales to Israel, a move that has been questioned by some reports. The country has also taken broader diplomatic steps critical of Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In late May 2024, Madrid formally recognized the State of Palestine and later joined South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of committing genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The Folly of Establishing a U.S. Military Base in Damascus
By José Niño | The Libertarian Institute | December 16, 2025
Recent reports indicate the United States is preparing to establish a military presence at an airbase in Damascus, allegedly to facilitate a security agreement between Syria and Israel. This development represents yet another misguided expansion of American military overreach in a region where Washington has already caused tremendous damage through decades of failed interventionist policies.
The United States currently operates approximately 750 to 877 military installations across roughly eighty countries worldwide. This staggering number represents about 70 to 85% of all foreign military bases globally. To put this in perspective, the next eighteen countries with foreign bases combined maintain only 370 installations total. Russia has just twenty-nine foreign bases, and China operates merely six. The American empire of bases already dwarfs every other nation combined, and the financial burden is crushing. Washington spends approximately $65 billion annually just to build and maintain these overseas installations, with total spending on foreign bases and personnel reaching over $94 billion per year.
These figures are not abstract accounting entries. They translate directly into American lives placed in volatile environments, as demonstrated by the recent insider attack in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, where a purported ISIS infiltrator embedded in local security forces turned his weapon on a joint U.S. Syrian patrol, killing two U.S. soldiers and one U.S. civilian during what was described as a routine field tour. The incident underscores how the sprawling U.S. basing network increasingly exposes American personnel to unpredictable and lethal blowback in unstable theaters far from home.
Syria itself already hosts between 1,500 and 2,000 American troops, primarily concentrated in the northeastern Hasakah province and at the Al Tanf base in the Syrian Desert. The Pentagon recently announced plans to reduce this presence to fewer than 1,000 personnel and consolidated operations from eight installations to just three. Yet now, despite this supposed drawdown, Washington reportedly plans to establish a new presence in Damascus itself, either at Mezzeh Air Base or Al Seen Military Airport. This contradictory expansion reveals the hollow nature of promises to reduce American military commitments abroad.
Since the fall of Bashar al Assad in December 2024, Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military and civilian infrastructure while occupying parts of southern Syria including Quneitra and Daraa. Israel has systematically violated the 1974 disengagement agreement and expanded control over buffer zones. These actions align disturbingly well with the Yinon Plan, a 1982 Israeli strategic document by Israeli foreign policy official Oded Yinon that envisions the dissolution of surrounding Arab states into smaller ethnic and religious entities. The plan explicitly calls for fragmenting Syria along its ethnic and religious lines to prevent a strong centralized government that could challenge Israeli interests.
A permanent American military presence in Damascus would effectively serve as a tripwire guaranteeing continued U.S. involvement in securing Israeli strategic objectives in the Levant. Rather than protecting American interests or enhancing national security, such a base would entrench Washington deeper into regional conflicts that have consistently proven disastrous for both American taxpayers and Middle Eastern populations.
The human cost of American intervention in Syria should give any policymaker pause. The Syrian Civil War has resulted in between 617,000 and 656,000 deaths, including civilians, rebels, and government forces. More than 7.4 million people remain internally displaced within Syria, while approximately 6.3 million Syrian refugees live abroad. This catastrophic toll stems partly from Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA covert program that ran from 2012 to 2017 to train and equip Syrian rebel forces.
Timber Sycamore represented a joint effort involving American intelligence services along with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The CIA ran secret training camps in Jordan and Turkey, providing rebels with small arms, ammunition, trucks, and eventually advanced weaponry like BGM 71 TOW anti-tank missiles. Saudi Arabia provided significant funding while the United States supplied training and logistical support.
The program proved to be counterproductive. Jordanian intelligence officers stole and sold millions of dollars worth of weapons intended for rebels on the black market. Even worse, U.S.-supplied weapons regularly fell into the hands of the al Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and ISIS itself. The program inadvertently strengthened the very extremists Washington was ostensibly fighting.
The failure of Timber Sycamore illustrates a fundamental problem with American interventionism in Syria. Washington has pursued regime change in Damascus in various forms for decades, yet these efforts have consistently backfired, creating power vacuums filled by jihadist groups and prolonging devastating conflicts. The current enthusiasm for establishing a military presence in Damascus suggests American policymakers have learned absolutely nothing from these failures.
The figure now leading Syria exemplifies the moral bankruptcy of this entire enterprise. Ahmed al Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al Julani, currently serves as president of Syria’s interim government. This represents a stunning rehabilitation for a man who founded al Nusra Front in 2012 as an al-Qaeda affiliate and later formed Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) by merging various rebel factions. Under the name Abu Mohammad al Julani, he was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the United States on July 24, 2013, with a $10 million bounty maintained on his head.
Al Sharaa’s terrorist designation stemmed from his leadership of al Nusra Front, which perpetrated numerous war crimes including suicide bombings, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing, and sectarian massacres against Christian, Alawite, Shia, and Druze minorities. He fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq, spent time imprisoned at Camp Bucca between 2006 and 2010, and was dispatched to Syria by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in 2011 with $50,000 to establish al Nusra. His close associates have faced accusations from the United States of overseeing torture, kidnappings, trafficking, ransom schemes, and displacing residents to seize property. The New York Times reported that his group was accused of initially operating under al-Qaeda’s umbrella.
Yet in November 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 2799, removing al Sharaa and Interior Minister Anas Khattab from the ISIL and al-Qaeda sanctions list. The U.S. Treasury Department followed suit, delisting him from the Specially Designated Global Terrorist registry. This reversal came after the State Department revoked HTS’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation in July 2025. Washington essentially decided that a former al-Qaeda commander who oversaw sectarian massacres was now a legitimate partner worthy of American military support. This absurd rehabilitation demonstrates how completely untethered American foreign policy has become from any coherent moral framework or strategic logic.
Critics rightly question whether al Sharaa has truly broken from his extremist roots or merely engaged in calculated political rebranding. The speed with which Washington embraced him as a legitimate leader suggests American policymakers care far more about advancing Israeli interests and maintaining regional influence than about genuine counterterrorism or protecting religious minorities.
The United States needs to pursue a fundamentally different approach to foreign policy. Rather than establishing yet another military base to advance Israeli strategic objectives in Syria, Washington should implement a comprehensive drawdown of overseas military commitments. The hundreds of foreign bases it maintains abroad represent an unsustainable burden that diverts resources from genuine national security priorities like border security and stability in the Western Hemisphere. American taxpayers deserve better than footing the bill for an empire that consistently fails to advance their interests while enriching defense contractors and serving foreign powers.
Syria offers a perfect case study in the futility of American interventionism. Decades of attempts at regime change through covert programs like Timber Sycamore and direct military presence have produced nothing but chaos, empowered jihadist groups, created millions of refugees, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The rehabilitation of a former al-Qaeda commander into Syria’s president illustrates how divorced American policy has become from any coherent strategy or values.
Rather than doubling down on failed policies, the United States should pursue strategic restraint, scale back its sprawling network of foreign bases, and allow regional powers to sort out their own affairs without American military involvement. That represents the path toward a more sustainable, affordable, and morally defensible foreign policy. The Damascus base proposal deserves to be rejected outright as yet another wasteful expansion of an already overextended military empire.
For Israel, The Terrorist Attack At Bondi Is An Opportunity To Push For War With Iran
The Dissident | December 14, 2025
Today, a horrific terrorist attack was committed against Jewish Australians who were celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, killing 16 people and sending 40 to the hospital.
But for Israel, the terrorist attack is an opportunity to manufacture consent for a war with Iran.
There is no evidence that Iran has anything to do with the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, and all evidence so far that has emerged shows that it almost certainly was not.
The Iranian foreign ministry condemned the attack, saying, “We condemn the violent attack in Sydney, Australia. Terror and killing of human beings, wherever committed, is rejected and condemned”, and evidence released so far suggests the attacker identified so far, Naveed Akram, was a follower of Wahhabi Salafist ideology, which is openly hostile to Shia Islam and Iran.
Despite the lack of evidence and evidence showing it was not Iran behind the attack, Israel is using the horrific terrorist attack to manufacture consent for war with Iran.
Israel Hayom, the mouthpiece of Israel lobbyist and pro-Iran war hawk Miriam Adelson, published an article quoting an anonymous “Israeli security official” who claimed -without evidence- that “there is no doubt that the direction and infrastructure for the attack originated in Tehran”.
The Israeli newspaper Times of Israel, reported that Australia is “investigating if Sydney attack was part of larger Iranian plot” at the behest of the Israeli Mossad.
Previously, Israel pressured Australia to repeat baseless claims from the Mossad that Iran was behind anti-Semitic attacks in Australia.
As veteran journalist Joe Lauria reported, in August “Australian intelligence said the Iranian government was behind the firebombing of a Jewish temple in Melbourne last year as well as other ‘anti-semitic’ attacks in the country”, “days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly humiliated Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a post on X for being ‘a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews’ after Albanese said Australia would follow several European nations and recognize the state of Palestine.”
As Lauria noted, “The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) did not provide any evidence to prove Iran’s involvement last December in the Adass synagogue attack, which caused millions of dollars of damage but injured no one. It simply said it was their assessment based on secret evidence that Iran was involved”.
Australia’s ABC News reported that, “The Israeli government is claiming credit for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and intelligence agencies publicising Iranian involvement in antisemitic attacks on Australian soil,” adding that “in a press briefing overnight, Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer effectively accused Australia of being shamed into acting”.
Mencer boasted that “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has made a very forthright intervention when it comes to Australia, a country in which we have a long history of friendly relations”, implying that Israel pressured the Australian government to repeat their baseless claim about Iran being behind the attacks.
ABC reported that the move came days after, “Netanyahu labelled Mr Albanese a ‘weak’ leader who had ‘betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews’” and “Israel announced it would tear up the visas of Australian diplomats working in the West Bank in protest against the Albanese government’s moves to recognise a Palestinian state”.
Israel’s evidence-free claims are already being used by the Trump administration to manufacture consent for war with Iran.
The Jerusalem Post reported that, “A senior US official told Fox News that if the Islamic Republic ordered the attack, then the US would fully recognize Israel’s right to strike Iran in response.”
Israel’s weaponisation of the terrorist attack in Bondi is reminiscent of how Benjamin Netanyahu weaponised the 9/11 attacks to draw America into Middle Eastern wars for Israel.
After the 9/11 attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that they were “very good” for Israel, because they would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror”.
This, in effect, meant using 9/11 to draw the U.S. into endless regime change wars in the Middle East against countries that had no ties to Al Qaeda but were in the way of Israel’s geopolitical goals.
The top U.S. general, Wesley Clark, said that after 9/11, the U.S. came up with a plan to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”.
Years later, on Piers Morgan’s show, Wesley Clark said that the hit list of countries came from a study that was “paid for by the Israelis”, which “said that if you want to protect Israel, and you want Israel to succeed… you’ve got to get rid of the states that are surrounding” adding that, “this led to all that followed” (i.e. regime change wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.)
Yet again, Israel is weaponising a terrorist attack to manufacture consent for the final regime change war on their hit list.
The Deep State Targets Thomas Massie
By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | December 9, 2025
With the retirement next month of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the face of vociferous attacks from President Donald Trump, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is the only member of any of the three branches of our government who consistently and on principle opposes American empire—and who also opposes the taxes, debt, and interventions that come with it. In a little over a year, he may not be.
For the first time in his seven-term congressional career, Massie is being challenged by a formidable primary opponent. That opponent is Ed Gallrein, a former Navy Seal who during his thirty years of meritorious service earned four Bronze Stars and whose extended family of small business owners is a multi-generational staple of Kentucky’s 4th District. As the last line in Gallrein’s X bio has it, he is “Trump-endorsed to defeat Thomas Massie and Deliver America First for Kentucky”—and, given the popularity Trump still enjoys among Republican voters as well as Gallrein’s sterling military reputation, and despite Massie’s strong endurability, Gallrein may succeed in realizing his goal.
Whether Gallrein’s election would actually mean delivering America first is a very different question. Putting America first presumably means putting the soldiers sworn to protect Americans, those individuals with whom Gallrein so valorously served, first as well. But a closer examination of the agenda Gallrein is running on makes clear that, unlike Massie’s prudent America first constitutionalism, it does not accomplish that goal. Instead it is the latest iteration, this time under Donald Trump, of a long-running play where small networks of ideologues ensconced in Washington’s military-corporate complex use America’s armed forces to run imperial plays for profit and power. The people running this version—connected Zionists tied to Trump’s re-election bid and now to his White House—are using Gallrein’s military service, which one might think would end up aiding our men and women in uniform, as an excuse to do the opposite. They are funding a decorated veteran to act as a front for imperial plays that mis-serve our armed forces and the Americans they’re sworn to protect.
Understanding the conditions that allowed this operation to happen and their consequences means going back to the creation of the current armed forces at the hands of the military-corporate complex after 1945—and tracing its abuses and misuses at the hands of a small number of players whose inheritors are now backing Trump and targeting Massie.
Americans’ rightful and deep respect for the men and women of our armed forces obscures an essential fact about the organization they serve: in its current form, it was never intended to exist. From Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Dwight Eisenhower, people concerned for our liberties saw a large and expanding standing army and its support systems as inherent threats to our constitutional republic. These men were not unrealistic about the need for an armed forces—Jefferson founded West Point, and Eisenhower commanded D-Day—but they knew that an essentially defensive army equipped for a republic was very different than an aggressive army serving empire. In their view, this latter type of army would become a version of the British Army which Jefferson’s revolutionaries had fought against: an aggressive tool of imperial operators to use for power and profit.
With the start of the Cold War and the beginning of an arms race with the Soviet Union, Jefferson’s and Madison’s and Eisenhower’s fears came true, giving an enormous opportunity to a network that did not share them. Namely, old Northeastern WASPs and their allies who by 1945 had spent 150 years eschewing America’s constitutional politics in favor of building institutions and corporations in and around Washington DC. The Henry Cabot Lodges and the Brothers Harriman, the Rockefellers and the DuPonts and the Bushes, John Foster and Allen Dulles and John Jesus Angleton—these were the financial and corporate and military players who used the Cold War as an opportunity to make themselves into runners of American empire, for their own power and profit.
At their hands, the American Army became the British Army of a later age, with its own public-debt-fueled corporate outgrowths which purport to be serving our soldiers. In reality, as Dwight Eisenhower said publicly in his presidential farewell address of 1961, the new weapons-for-profit system made its minders into what Eisenhower called in his notes for the speech “merchants of death”: “flag and general officers retiring at an early age take positions in war based industrial complex shaping its decisions and guiding the direction of its tremendous thrust.” And these civilians running the weapons contractors were rotating not just through Pentagon and CIA consultancies and administrative agencies but through America’s new civilian intelligence service, the CIA. There, the profit motive—combined with a high level of ideological zeal—also distorted policy.
By 1961, Allen Dulles, John Jesus Angleton, and the lineup of other old-line WASPs running the CIA outside of meaningful oversight had put America into the Congo, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and the beginnings of Vietnam. After these came interventions in El Salvador, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Kuwait, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Palestine, and (again, this year) Iran. These were plays executed with input from McKinsey and Raytheon to Langley and the Pentagon via the Situation Room. They were increasingly run by new networks: once disproportionally WASP, these new networks were disproportionally made up of Jewish Zionists bent on using American empire to protect Israel. Among these were early operators like Henry Morgenthau and Theodore Kollek; and their later inheritors like Martin Peretz and William Kristol, Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen and Thomas Pritzker, people who in many ways shaped the policies of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden administrations. At their hands, accelerated military corporate cronyism has been the order of the day starting in 1993, when the Clinton administration, which assumed power thanks in part to Zionist backing, pressured the fifty major weapons contractors active during the Cold War to consolidate in the nominal name of cutting costs. The ensuing distortion of our military has occurred via multiple forms, which I reported on for the Libertarian Institute in July.
One distortion has been cost overruns on weapons systems, which contractors feel free to allow or even encourage since no competition exists for their product. This has also allowed errors in construction which diminishes the equipment that’s supposed to serve our troops. Then, as I have reported elsewhere, in response to the overruns came budget cuts and the “fix” of “sequestration,” which reduced these cost overruns by cutting expenditures on the troops, further under-equipping and overstretching personnel. Exacerbating the problem, as I have also reported, were Pentagon-and-contractor funded think tanks, which covered the problem with “social initiatives” via mental health, climate, and DEI, further distracting the Pentagon from the imperatives of readiness and training. All the while, interventions urged by the same financial-military-intelligence networks attenuating the capacity of our armed forces also overstretched them: in Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and (in an “advisory” capacity) Syria and Israel and Ukraine.
The result has not just been surging deficit spending that mortgages the future of Americans; nor backlash from affected populations to our imperial arrangements abroad. It has also, even more dramatically, been a spate of military embarrassments since 2018, most notably crashes of planes at the hands of overcommitted and demoralized troops and their commanders. These have racked up losses to the tune of nearly $500 million per crash and cost the lives of servicepeople. As I reported in January of this year, in an investigation of these crashes and their causes:
“For the Army, [the shrinking of budgets and personnel since the 2010s] meant “cut[ting] 40,000 active-duty soldiers, shrinking [the Armed Forces] to 450,000 by 2017.” For the Air Force, this meant a reduction of active-duty airmen from 333,370 to 310,000.”
“An Air Force report to Congress in 2018 said that, thanks to sequestration, the Air Force was ‘the smallest… it has ever been.’ Active-duty aircrew flying hours had been slashed from 17.7 to 13.2 hours per month. 31 squadrons, including 13 coded for combat, had stood down because of funding pressures. Plans had been announced to eliminate 500 planes, and, according to a Military.com report cited by The American Legion, the Air Force was ‘making do with ‘half-size squadrons.’’ The common refrain today is that hours in the air are even shorter—4.1 hours a month, by one estimate—and that efforts to replace real flying with “on-the-ground simulators” are dismal failures.”
“These shortages of manpower and training had immediate effects that took time to tally… 2018, the year after the sequester was complete, saw a spate of plane crashes. In late 2020, Congress found that, in just six years since the sequester began, ‘‘mishaps’ in training flights or routine missions killed 198 service members and civilians, destroyed 157 aircraft, and cost taxpayers $9.41 billion.’ Two weeks alone in 2022 saw three crashes on routine training missions in Alabama and California, costing at least five lives and two injuries. The last few months of 2023 saw four crashes. On December 22, 2024, a navy jet was shot down by friendly fire, and another narrowly avoided being shot down by the same barrage, in the Mediterranean.”
A year ago, given the stakes Donald Trump himself articulated for his re-election (a run against the “deep state”), it seemed unthinkable that Trump would adopt military corporatist priorities wholesale almost immediately on assuming office. But, influenced in part by Zionist operators who swung to support his re-election campaign in the summer of 2024 after pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, he has done exactly that. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in July, Trump has forgone actually reforming aspects of the military corporate complex to aid our soldiers. Instead he has committed to a “Big Beautiful Bill” that inflates ICE’s budget but does not direct military funding away from corporate cronyism; a surface-level crusade against “wokeness” and “DEI”; a military parade; superficial demonstrations of force in Yemen and Iran and Venezuela; the militarization of law enforcement via ICE recruiting; and the placement of American troops in American cities. He claims to be standing above all for our troops—but in reality he is standing for the military corporate complex that mis-serves them, to the demonstrable detriment of our men and women in uniform.
The most recent example of Trump’s demonstrably detrimental effect on our troops comes from The Washington Post, in a story published December 4, 2025. The subject was a deployment to the Middle East for the benefit of Israel and its Saudi and Emirati allies against Yemen; a campaign prosecuted in the Biden administration and before with the encouragement of Zionists but decisively and unprecedentedly accelerated by Trump in his second term:
“The U.S. Navy on Thursday released its findings from four investigations scrutinizing the significant challenges encountered by one of its aircraft carrier groups over nine months in the Middle East, where several major accidents occurred as the ships battled Yemeni militants.”
“The Truman carrier group departed its home port in Norfolk in September 2024 — and by the time it returned in May, the carrier itself had collided with a merchant vessel; its cruiser had shot down one of its fighter jets, another warplane was lost when it slid overboard as the carrier performed an evasive maneuver to dodge an incoming missile; and a third jet was lost when an arresting cable failed as the pilot attempted to land.”
“In three of the four incidents, investigators determined, either poor training, improper procedures or crew fatigue played significant roles. And while no service members died, those incidents could have led to multiple fatalities, the Navy found.”
All of which raises with some immediacy the question of Ed Gallrein, who was selected to run against Massie after the congressman repeatedly voted, along Jeffersonian constitutionalist lines, against using taxpayer money and deficit spending to benefit Israel. Gallrein’s selector was Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager in 2024 and Trump’s pick to spearhead the anti-Massie campaign, who is working with at least $2 million from an anti-Massie PAC funded by the Jewish Zionist billionaires Paul Singer, John Paulson, and Miriam Adelson. These three operators owe their easy entrée into Washington in part to the military-intelligence Zionist operators linked to the money and power at the origins of the CIA and of the host systems for the merchants of death 80 years ago—just as the decisive momentum was building for the creation of Israel.
And the $2 million they have committed so far on behalf of Israel’s interests has had its effect. At a recent gathering of campaign donors, Massie informed the group that before this primary campaign his approval/disapproval rating in polls was 62-12 (adding together very approved, somewhat approved, etc.) But, he went on to say, after $2 million in negative ads spent in his district, it’s now 51-37. He said hthat he personally expects $20 million to be spent against him, but will feel comfortable in his odds if he raises $5 million.
Gallrein was endorsed preemptively by Trump, which is to say before he entered the race, and he is by any measure a shrewd choice for Trump and Trump’s Zionist allies to back. He is not just a decorated veteran with thirty years of valorous service, he is also a fifth generation farmer and the scion of a Kentucky family with deep roots in the 4th District. The Gallrein Family Farm, founded in 1929, became the largest dairy producer in the state; expanded aggressively into tobacco and vegetables and grain along with a subset of trucking; and has now expanded into “agritourism” with weddings and a farmers market, along with a store and lunch counter which sells the farm’s “produce and product lines.” According to his LinkedIn CV, Gallrein worked at the farm from 1962, when he was four, to 1982, when he was 24, rising to vice president; then in 1984 he joined the U.S. Army, where “he served for 30 years and became a Navy SEAL officer… rose to the rank of captain and served in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq.” Since retiring in 2014, Gallrein has experimented with careers: opening a farm and stables as well as two “leadership” and “startup” consultancy businesses, and running in the Republican primary for the District 7 state senate seat, going on to lose the race by 118 votes. He speaks, repeatedly, of his intention to bring the skills he learned during his military service to serve the 4th District.
Gallrein, having never served in office, has no voting record, and his policy platform amounts to loyalty to President Trump’s agenda, which now includes supporting interventions or operations abroad in Yemen, Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, and possibly Nigeria. In public statements this year, Gallrein has doubled down on interventionism, specifically defended our engagements in the Middle East, especially against Iran, as “leveraging” our “power” there and (echoing a favorite line from Trump-supporting media) “playing chess” against our enemies. He uses the authority of his service to help make the case—even to the extent of arguing that what may seem to be the Trump administration’s irresponsible ventures abroad and at home with authoritarian surveillance regimes like the Saudis and Emiratis via the ministrations of Israel are in fact necessary complements to our national security. (“Economic is the centerpiece of national power. [That concept is] called ‘Dime’ as we studied it in the War College.”)
What Gallrein doesn’t emphasize in his interviews is as telling as what he does. What he under-emphasizes is not just questions of taxes and debt and cost of living, which is not a surprise considering that he has said publicly that he “believes it’s his stance on foreign policy that put him on Trump’s radar.” What he under-emphasizes also relates to crucial questions when it comes to his nominal area of expertise, our military. He does not speak about meaningfully reforming our weapons contracting systems or their think tank outgrowths; or about the influence of money on the interventions we make in other sovereign nations. In other words, he does not speak about any actual structural problem in the military corporate complex that hurts the men and women with whom he once valorously served—or about any actual structural reform that would help them. And why would he? His financial and political backers are tied, directly, to those very structures—the military corporate systems and their financial supporters and their think tanks and advocacy groups and the state, Israel, that is their main priority and beneficiary and the beneficiary of our endless interventions.
Not just our sovereignty, but the safety of the people pledged to protect us, are under clear threat when they’re presided over by politicos like Gallrein run by networks, and operators, like these.
US rushes loitering drones built based on Iranian blueprint to West Asia
Press TV – December 3, 2025
The US has deployed “its first squadron” of one-way attack drones, developed following reverse-engineering of a much-sought-after and versatile Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle, to the West Asia region.
On Wednesday, US Central Command announced establishment of Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS) that will oversee the first of its kind operational deployment by the US military, various American outlets reported.
The aircraft in question was identified as the Iranian Shahed-136 long-range UAV.
The reports also cited CENTCOM as noting that Washington had additionally set up Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS) to oversee the drone’s so far unprecedented deployment.
Observers also pointed to the unique nature of the taskforce, saying its development signaled urgency in Washington’s approach towards the drones’ deployment.
“This new taskforce sets the conditions for using innovation as a deterrent,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander.
‘Cutting-edge drone capabilities’
“Equipping our skilled warfighters faster with cutting-edge drone capabilities showcases US military innovation and strength,” the official added.
According to one report, the system’s deployment was spurred in part by War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “drone dominance” initiative that was deployed to accelerate delivery of low-cost and effective drones to US forces.
The Islamic Republic deployed the aircraft during the Israeli regime’s and the US’s unprovoked and illegal war against its soil in June.





