Hamas mudou completamente o mapa do Oriente Médio, impediu a causa palestina de cair no esquecimento e dificultou a normalização de relações entre Israel e os países muçulmanos.
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Em 7 de outubro de 2023 iniciou-se, a partir de Gaza, uma memorável operação militar, na qual aproximadamente 4 mil homens armados das unidades de elite dos vários movimentos da resistência palestina local (Jihad Islâmica Palestina, FPLP, FDLP, Comitês de Resistência Popular, etc., liderados pelo Hamas) lançaram-se como um copo transbordando sobre os assentamentos sionistas dos arredores.
A ação era, simultaneamente, resposta à intensificação das expropriações de famílias palestinas na Cisjordânia, à pressão crescente sobre a Mesquita Al-Aqsa e à política de apaziguamento dos países árabes, e visava através da captura de militares (ativos e reservas) israelenses forçar a entidade sionista a uma guerra de atrito que pudesse conduzir a um desgaste significativo de Israel, internamente e externamente, e a uma reproposição da questão do Estado Palestino.
Ao que tudo indica, uma das expectativas da liderança do Hamas era de que o Hezbollah e o Irã e, talvez, as organizações militares da Cisjordânia se engajariam, também, brevemente e de forma sustentada, no conflito com Israel. Por uma série de motivos – totalmente diferentes para cada um dos atores – isso não aconteceu, exceto no caso do Hezbollah, e de forma limitada até a invasão terrestre do Líbano e, no caso do Irã, também de forma limitada durante a Guerra dos 12 Dias.
O evento levou a transformações cataclísmicas no Oriente Médio que podemos já descrever e a um panorama que, talvez, seja desconcertante para muitos que previram um cenário de vitória total sionista.
Não é nossa pretensão fazer uma descrição minuciosa dos processos que foram iniciados a partir da Guerra de Gaza, de modo que apenas tentaremos resumir cada um dos cenários em seus principais eventos e panorama atual.
Quanto à Gaza em si, a sua população foi vítima de limpeza étnica. Os números de mortes, se somarmos todas as causas, talvez chegue a 200 mil, ou seja, 10% da população a Faixa de Gaza. Uma parte significativa da liderança do Hamas, por sua vez, foi assassinada durante a guerra. Israel, porém, foi derrotada no conflito, considerando que não conseguiu alcançar os seus objetivos de destruir o Hamas, ocupar permanentemente toda a Faixa de Gaza e deslocar a população palestina. Os danos materiais e sociais para Israel, por sua vez, foram imensos. 60 bilhões de dólares em perdas econômicas gerais, aumento das tensões sociais internas e destruição total – talvez irreversível – da imagem internacional de Israel. Ademais, incapaz de derrotar o Hamas, Israel foi obrigada a aceitar um acordo de paz imposto pelos EUA. Enquanto isso, o Hamas segue com aproximadamente 12 mil soldados ativos e mais 15 mil recrutas jovens em treinamento, de modo que em breve retornará a aproximadamente o mesmo nível de força que antes de 7 de outubro de 2023.
Na frente libanesa, o conflito levou ao deslocamento de mais de 1 milhão de libaneses de suas casas, ao assassinato de Hassan Nasrallah, líder do Hezbollah, e de alguns outros líderes do movimento, à desestabilização política do Líbano, e envolveu a invasão por terra do país por parte do Estado de Israel, que, porém, não conseguiu também alcançar seus objetivos de forçar o governo libanês a desarmar o Hezbollah. O Hezbollah, por sua vez, que foi degradado de forma significativa entre 2023 e 2024 por tentar operar como forças armadas regulares, retornou à guerra de insurgência e com o aumento no uso de drones e novas ferramentas tecnológicas, bloqueou o avanço de Israel em 2026.
Quanto à Síria, testemunhamos o colapso do governo de Bashar Al-Assad e a tomada do país pelas milícias terroristas ligadas à Al-Qaeda, ao ISIS e outros grupos extremistas, os quais levaram à presidência Ahmed Sharrah. Israel se aproveitou do momento para destruir a maior parte do hardware militar sírio e ocupar uma faixa de segurança no entorno das Colinas de Golã, estabelecendo uma tênue aliança com as tribos e milícias druzas da região. A Queda de Assad impôs dificuldade para a logística do Hezbollah, que contava com a Síria para o trânsito de equipamento vindo do Irã. Se Israel esperava ter passagem livre pela Síria, porém, a situação é tornada mais complexa pelo fato de que a região é disputada, enquanto área de influência, com a Turquia, de modo que as tensões entre ambos países segue aumentando.
Os cenários palestino, libanês e sírio permitiam dizer, no início de 2025, por exemplo, que Israel estaria avançando significativamente em seus objetivos delineados no Plano Oded Yinon de desestabilizar e fragmentar os países vizinhos para facilitar a construção da Grande Israel. Teríamos aqui, naquele momento, a derrocada da estratégia do Crescente Xiita e do projeto geopolítico de Qassem Soleimani. Quando acrescentamos os cenários iraquiano e iraniano, bem como o contexto geral do Oriente Médio, a situação muda significativamente.
Porque no espaço entre a Guerra dos 12 Dias e a Guerra do Irã vimos o colapso do poder regional dos EUA no Oriente Médio, a ascensão do Irã a principal pretendente à hegemonia regional e o recuo de Israel para uma posição mais defensiva e de retaguarda.
Sinais de que o projeto israelense era mais frágil do que parecia à primeira vista apareceram já no conflito com o Irã em 2025. Incapaz de derrotar o Irã, que fustigava as defesas e infraestruturas israelenses com enxames de drones e mísseis, Israel teve que apelar por ajuda aos EUA, que realizaram um ataque aéreo majoritariamente simbólico contra instalações nucleares vazias no Irã. Isso não passou despercebido.
A nova rodada de conflito em 2026, iniciando-se no final de fevereiro, apesar de iniciar com o assassinato do Aiatolá Ali Khamenei, levou à eliminação de boa parte das bases dos EUA no Oriente Médio, ao bloqueio do Estreito de Ormuz, à destruição das capacidades antiaéreas israelenses, à evacuação das tropas estadunidenses no Iraque e à destruição do mito da superioridade militar incontestável dos EUA.
De fato, a incapacidade dos EUA de alcançar seus objetivos políticos militarmente no Oriente Médio (após o fracasso da tentativa de revolução colorida de janeiro), mesmo usando 2 porta-aviões (1 dos quais pode ter sido seriamente danificado nas operações), sua incapacidade de proteger seus aliados árabes, a própria incapacidade dos aliados árabes de defenderem a si mesmos, o esgotamento parcial dos estoques de mísseis dos inimigos do Irã, e a capacidade iraniana de rapidamente repor sua liderança e de agir militarmente de forma descentralizada, bem como sua demonstração de que sua capacidade industrial-militar permanecia ativa, mudaram o mapa geopolítico no Oriente Médio.
Em alguma medida, hoje, é o Irã quem dá as cartas. A evacuação do Iraque pelos EUA reabre o país para a penetração da influência iraniana, o que põe em risco até mesmo o domínio da Síria por Ahmed Sharrah.
Para contornar o controle iraniano de Ormuz, os sauditas têm experimentado com usar o Mar Vermelho e rotas terrestres. Se esses esforços fossem bem-sucedidos, a importância de Ormuz diminuiria e, com isso, o poder de barganha do Irã. O problema é que, exatamente quando isso começou a acontecer, o Ansarullah iemenita entrou no tabuleiro, iniciando uma operação militar em larga escala para derrotar os rebeldes apoiados por Riad. A resposta saudita aos avanços houthis levou ao fechamento parcial do Estreito de Bab-el-Mandeb e a ataques não apenas contra as instalações da ARAMCO, mas até mesmo contra poços de petróleo sauditas.
Se retornamos ao panorama geopolítico israelense, enfim, o país se encontra ainda com um problema palestino em Gaza, o Hezbollah ativo no Líbano, sem poder avançar na Síria por causa da ameaça turca e com suas capacidades militares defensivas bastante reduzidas.
Longe da “Pax Judaica” e da “Grande Israel” estamos vendo o reposicionamento dos atores geopolíticos e o ator na posição mais vantajosa é, hoje, o Irã. As negociações recentes entre Israel e os países árabes sunitas não muda significativamente o cenário.
3 anos depois da Operação Dilúvio Al-Aqsa, portanto, não nos é possível dizer se os objetivos de Ismail Hanyeh e Yahya Sinwar foram alcançados, mas é impossível negar que a ousadia do Hamas mudou completamente o mapa do Oriente Médio, impediu a causa palestina de cair no esquecimento e dificultou a normalização de relações entre Israel e os países muçulmanos.
Sacrifice the inconvenient, never the project. “Pal-washing” in action.
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A familiar script
On 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Navanethem Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist, former judge at the International Criminal Court and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The citation speaks of a person who has paved the way for a more comprehensive global legal order. The Committee’s chair, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, added that the prize is a message to those who attack and undermine the international system and its institutions. The verdict is avowedly political, and it is on this level that it must be discussed.
The very same figure who, in 2011, is said to have ‘toppled’ Gaddafi, paving the way for the plundering of Libyan oil and the enslavement of African migrants, would now ‘topple’ Netanyahu, thereby paving the way for Israel’s rehabilitation. The underlying logic would be neither morality nor peace, but the agenda of George Soros’s Open Society: to sacrifice those who have become inconvenient, never the essence of the project itself. Some have dubbed it ‘pal-washing’. The fundamental question is a serious one, for it asks whether there is a pattern behind the prizes and jurisdictions of the liberal order.
It must be emphasised that the script is already familiar. Do you remember when Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, whilst launching war after war? Or do you recall figures in search of a cause such as Machado, Mohammadi, or the defenders of Ukrainian criminals? But let us proceed in order.
Act One: Libya
In February 2011, Pillay, the High Commissioner, called on the Human Rights Council to take vigorous action to stop the violence and hold those responsible to account; the Council condemned the violations and established a commission of inquiry. The next step fell to the Security Council: referral to the ICC via Resolution 1970, followed by Resolution 1973, approved with ten votes in favour and five abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India, Russia). No one claims that Pillay decided to go to war. What matters is the sequence of events: the language of human rights opened the door, that of the protection of civilians authorised the use of force, and the operation gradually shifted towards regime change. As early as April, Lavrov was accusing NATO of exceeding its mandate, and a French minister admitted that regime change would have required a new vote.
Then there are the costs. In 2017, the IOM documented auctions of sub-Saharan migrants in southern Libya, sold for sums ranging from 200 to 500 dollars. The link with the collapse of the state after 2011 is the most plausible interpretation, although the source documents the phenomenon rather than its cause. Libya and the migrants paid the price; the legal framework emerged, formally speaking, intact, even if the controversy over the mandate would later weigh on the vetoes of Moscow and Beijing in other matters.
Act Two: Bibi
On 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Pillay had left the Court in 2008, but chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry which, on 16 September 2025, concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This is where ‘pal-washing’ comes into play. International criminal law deals with individuals: a defendant, a charge, a period of time. If the case concludes with the fate of a leader, a narrative break occurs – the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a man – after which the state can present itself as restored. Libya offers an analogy: there, the case concluded with the fall of a man.
The limitations of the process work in favour of this interpretation. The Court has no police force and the execution of warrants depends on the States Parties; the Commission is not a court and does not speak on behalf of the entire UN; the Committee itself, according to AFP, has stated that it is up to a court to determine whether genocide has taken place. The award has no legal effect, as we know, but it lends legitimacy to a system that promises justice yet cannot guarantee it.
We must also bear in mind that we have already seen dynamics of this kind on numerous occasions within the globalist order that dominates the West. The Open Society Foundations presents itself as the world’s largest private funder of groups working for justice, democracy and human rights, active in over one hundred countries, and Pillay received the Stockholm Human Rights Award, the same prize that went to Soros and Neier in 2011. It certainly seems that the pattern of the Soros agenda is repeating itself once again – an agenda comprising foundations, NGOs, tribunals, commissions and bureaucracies that share a common lexicon and worldview: that of a liberal order to be perfected and never called into question. Those operating within that lexicon may denounce a government, a leader, or even a state, but they cannot challenge the underlying assumptions of the order that grants them legitimacy.
Some will object that Pillay’s Commission attributes responsibility to Israel as a state, not merely to its leaders, which contradicts the idea of a purely personalised operation. The second point concerns the reaction. Netanyahu accused the Committee of having lost its moral compass; the Israeli Foreign Ministry spoke of a grotesque exploitation of the prize; and Washington announced sanctions against the ICC just a few hours after the announcement. All true. But it would make sense and have value if the Western system were not rotten to its very core, if its legal system were functioning properly, but this is not the case, in any respect (and we have already seen sufficient evidence of this – let us not forget the Epstein case either).
If, over the next twelve months, Netanyahu’s political downfall is presented as the conclusion of the case, rather than as a stage in proceedings concerning the state, ‘Pal-washing’ will gain traction. If the proceedings continue beyond his person, and if the State Parties execute the warrants, perhaps it will lose ground. Given the current evidence, the argument is plausible and, until proven otherwise, this is yet another ‘Non-Peace’ Nobel Prize – one we cannot call ‘war’.
Palestine’s long-awaited legislative elections have once again been postponed. The polls that were scheduled for November 28, have been pushed for one year, according to reports, through an agreement between Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas.
According to the report, the postponement aims to give time to rebuild the Palestinian political system in a way that allows all components to take part.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Friday, October 9 that Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh informed France that the elections will be delayed possibly until September 2027, citing the deteriorating conditions throughout the occupied Palestinian territories as a reason.
On Saturday, October 10, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree, setting September 11, 2027 for simultaneous presidential and legislative elections.
The reactions of Palestinian factions varied. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad welcomed the decision due to immense infrastructural, logistical, and political hurdles in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, which make the voting process impossible.
However, the Democratic Reform Current led by Mohammed Dahlan criticized it as “a crime against democracy”, accusing the PA’s leadership of monopolizing national institutions.
The move came amid the continuation of Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza, and its refusal to proceed to phase two of the US-brokered ceasefire deal.
In tandem, the Israeli forces and illegal settlers have escalated their attacks on Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, mainly focusing on the central governorate of Ramallah and Al-Bireh in the last couple of weeks.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has designated Ramallah and Al-Bireh as a de facto administrative capital since its establishment in 1994, following the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Therefore, many believe that destabilizing the governorate reveals Israel’s plans to further sideline the PA and undermine its power in a bid to ultimately dismantle it.
In late September, media reports surfaced indicating the Israeli government’s intention to reopen a route in the governorate for settler traffic, dividing its northern and southern halves.
The two weeks that followed saw a spiral in settler violence and raids carried out by the Israeli forces across Ramallah and Al-Bireh.
Friday, October 9, saw a notable increase in Israeli assaults across different parts of the governorate, coinciding with the onset of the olive harvest season.
A video circulated from Yabrud village east of Ramallah, showing a group of Israeli colonists attacking a Palestinian man and his son in their car. The settlers stole the vehicle after the man and his son ran away to survive.
Simultaneously, dozens of settlers stormed the northern town of Surda, wandering in its streets in an attempt to terrorize its people. They also destroyed the memorial of Muhannad Al-Halabi, one of the town’s martyrs.
Escorted by Israeli soldiers, settlers attacked international activists, who were protecting Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest in the town of Deir Ibzi, west of Ramallah. They also verbally abused journalists on site and tried to prevent them from covering the offensive.
On Friday evening, the Israeli army stormed Al-Bireh city, firing live ammunition and stun grenades, according to local media outlets.
Over the weekend and through Monday, October 12, settler attacks as well as military raids carried out by Israeli forces continued to take place in different parts of the governorate. The colonists also released a new video encouraging each other to continue storming Ramallah, and even the neighborhood where the Palestinian President resides in Al-Bireh city:
“You too can reach a point close to the house of Mahmoud Abbas and Ramallah,” the caption on the video noted.
Doctors and healthcare workers gathered in parallel to the World Medical Association (WMA) General Assembly in Rotterdam on October 8-10, demanding the suspension of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) over its breaches of medical ethics throughout the Gaza genocide.
Activists held mobilizations warning against the IMA’s attempts to obscure attacks on Palestinian health workers and infrastructure. These actions included a petition demanding the organization’s suspension from the WMA signed by nearly 6,850 health professionals.
“The petition demands that the IMA is suspended by the WMA for its gross violations of medical ethics over decades, concerning Palestinian patients and healthcare services and the complicity of Israeli doctors in the starvation, torture and medical neglect of Palestinian prisoners,” the IMA Out! coalition stated.
The coalition also called upon medical associations to follow the example of the South African Medical Association, the British Medical Association, and the Turkish Medical Association in severing ties with the IMA.
On Saturday, October 10, 81 health workers simultaneously removed their scrubs and hung them in a line facing the WMA assembly. Each was marked with the name of a Palestinian healthcare worker currently held in illegal Israeli detention.
“These scrubs should not be empty,” said general practitioner Mejrem Ahmetaj from Artsen voor Gaza (Doctors for Gaza) in the Netherlands. “Our colleagues belong with their patients, not in Israeli prisons.”
The campaign to suspend the IMA over its breaches of medical ethics has been developing for months. In June this year, a report in The Lancet reported that a petition launched by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) to hold the IMA accountable collected over 1,100 signatures. Working together with other organizations and networks, including chapters of Healthcare Workers For Palestine and Teva boycott groups, the initiative was able to expand.
Since October 2023, at least 1,700 Palestinian health workers have been killed, and many more remain imprisoned in horrifying conditions in Israeli detention centers. Among them is Kamal Adwan Hospital Director Hussam Abu Safiya, whose mistreatment and imprisonment have caused international outcry.
These crimes have been extensively documented by UN experts and human rights associations, yet the IMA – which represents over 90% of Israeli physicians – took no action. Instead, some of its leading figures backed unfounded claims that Gaza’s hospitals are used for military purposes.
“The IMA has said and done nothing about these war crimes against health workers, patients and hospitals,” said Jonathan Fluxman from IMA Out!.
Ahmetaj added that the IMA is not a bystander. “It defends these attacks and blocks international condemnation while Palestinian healthcare is being destroyed,” the physician said. “That is not medical neutrality. That is complicity.”
The protest coincided with a legal action initiated by the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF). On October 7, the foundation announced it had called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the involvement of the IMA, the Israeli Ministry of Health, Ministry of Defense, and medical professionals “in the death, torture, and ill treatment of Palestinian detainees held at the Sde Teiman detention facility since October 7, 2023.”
The legal submission addressed the participation of Israeli medics in crimes perpetrated at Sde Teiman’s field hospital. There, health workers and detainees documented abuses spurring from directives issued by the Israeli Ministry of Health in December 2023.
According to the Hind Rajab Foundation, the Ministry of Health guidance instructed medical staff to treat prisoners while blindfolded and handcuffed and required them to sign medical documentation using only their professional titles. It also directed them to restrict transfers to civilian hospitals and authorized forced medical treatment without protections.
“By November 2025, at least 29 detainees had died at Sde Teiman as a result of physical violence, medical neglect, or both,” the organization wrote. The IMA did not initiate any disciplinary proceedings against members involved in these practices – and even used international journals as platforms to obscure them.
“The evidence shows that medical participation in torture and abuse at Sde Teiman was structural,” Natacha Bracq of the Hind Rajab Foundation said. “The Israeli Ministry of Health built the field hospital, dictated the terms of medical treatment; doctors served under Military Police authority rather than the Medical Corps; and a professional association provided ethical cover.”
“Israeli physicians abandoned their neutrality when they agreed to treat patients in chains and erase what was done to them,” Dyab Abou Jahjah from the same organization added. “The WMA must answer why an association that provided institutional cover for torture is still welcome at its table.”
People’s Health Dispatch is a monthly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.
By Kevin Barrett | October 12, 2026
On October 7, 2026, a front-page New York Times headline vaunted “Trump’s Retreat.” It wasn’t referring to Mar-a-Lago or Epstein Island.
The full headline, complete with subhead, reads:
“Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back. A war that was intended to demonstrate the reach of American power has now done the opposite. It is a lesson in unintended consequences.”
The “war that was intended to demonstration the reach of American power” was, of course, Trump’s ill-fated attack on Iran that began last February 28. But by publishing the story on October 7, the three-year anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the Times insinuated, intentionally or not, a causal link between Hamas’s heroic 2023 concentration-camp breakout and the collapse of the American empire following Trump’s losing war on Iran.
What the Times did not come right out and say, of course, is that the US has bled itself dry fighting losing wars for Israel, and that the October 7, 2023 provocation set off Israel’s long-planned US war on the last of the “seven countries in five years” that 9/11 was designed to “take out.”
About a month after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Gen. Wesley Clark got word that the whole purpose of 9/11 was the destruction of Israel’s region enemies:
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Thanks to resistance from the people of the region, and from realists in the US national security sector, Clark’s “seven countries in five years” turned out be be “seven countries in twenty-five years.” And the seventh, Iran, is not being “taken out.” Instead, it is Iran that is “taking out” the US empire.
But it was the Palestinian Resistance, specifically its Al-Aqsa Flood concentration camp breakout, that gave Iran the opportunity to show what it could do. Absent Al-Aqsa Flood, we would be living in a very different world:
* “Normalization” with the abnormal Zionist entity would have continued apace, and the Palestinian cause marginalized.
* US military bases would have continued to permeate and surround the Middle East.
* US naval forces would have continued to swarm unimpeded through the Strait of Hormuz and all over the Persian Gulf.
* The illusion that the US could protect and control Middle Eastern energy supplies would have been maintained.
* Propped up by its Middle Eastern footprint, the US empire’s military juggernaut would have continued to intimidate the world, leading to a gradual drawdown of US political and economic power over the next few decades, rather than the rapid collapse taking place right now.
Robert Kagan, dean of the neocons, has pointed out that without Trump-n’-Yahu’s idiotic attack on Iran last February 28, the US would have continued to successfully deter Iran from taking advantage of its geography and establishing control of the Persian Gulf. That deterrence did not depend on America’s power to defeat Iran and/or keep the Strait open. America had no such power, as we are seeing now. Instead, deterrence worked by creating uncertainty in the minds of Iran’s leaders about what might happen if they aggressively moved to seize control of the Strait. It worked by convincing them that seizing the Strait might cost them their lives. Most importantly, it worked by virtue of the fact that Iran’s leaders, unlike American and Israeli ones, are morally upright and unwilling to engage in acts of aggression.
By attacking Iran, Netanyahu and his blackmailed pedo-slave Trump removed all of Iran’s incentives to remain deterred. First and most importantly, it handed Iran its right of self-defense on the proverbial silver platter. Seizing Hormuz suddenly became a defensive act, not an aggressive one.
By martyring many of Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Trump-n’-Yahu also removed the deterrent effect of Iran’s leaders fearing for their lives if they seized the Strait of Hormuz: “If they’re going to try to kill us even if we don’t take over the Strait, what have we got to lose?” Suddenly Iran’s perception of its best path to security radically shifted from “reason, moderation, and accommodation” to “hardline military moves aimed at transforming the regional security equation.”
Clearly, the February 28 attack on Iran was supremely irrational. Every serious analyst knew Iran would respond by seizing control of the Strait. That had been war-gamed thousands of times. And if the US lost hugely to Iran in 2003, according to the Millennium Challenge simulation, how was it going to win in 2026, after Iran had built up a powerful and impregnable drone and missile force?
How could a would-be global hegemon be so stupid? The answer, of course, is that Trump obeyed orders from Netanyahu to attack Iran. But that just passes the buck to Netanyahu. How could he be so stupid? After all, when the US is defeated and driven out of West Asia, Israel’s days will be numbered.
Netanyahu’s irrationality, like Trump’s, stems from narcissistic hubris. Both leaders are monstrously egotistical. Both see the world through the distorting prism of their own self-serving vanity.
Netanyahu’s personal project, for more than four decades, has been inciting the US to destroy Israel’s regional enemies. Often that incitement has taken the form of reckless acts of false flag terror, as FFWN co-host Wyatt Peterson observed in his recent article “Blood and Terror Flow Wherever Bibi Goes.”
Clearly Netanyahu, and his co-ethnic agents like Paul Wolfowitz, have been frustrated by the slow pace of the US march on Tehran, which should have been taken out “five years” after 9/11. Pushback from American realists, and presidents like Bush and especially Obama who listened to them, has been driving Bibi up the wall ever since 9/11, which Bibi famously said was “very good…for Israel” and should have incited a quick clean sweep of Israel’s regional enemies, most importantly the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Decades of frustration at Israel’s inability to unleash a huge regional war—as a cover for accelerating the genocide of Palestine, grabbing territory from neighboring countries, and destroying Iran—led to Netanyahu’s hubristic incitements of October 7, 2023 and February 28, 2026.
In October 2023 Netanyahu got the Hamas attack he wanted, slaughtered his own civilians to raise the body count, and charged madly into his long-desired regional Armageddon. But instead of paving the road to Greater Israel, it has set the stage for a world without Israel:
* Israel has failed to achieve all of its military objectives, including defeating Hamas, freeing hostages militarily, emptying Gaza, emptying the West bank, putting an end to Hezbollah, seizing and settling territory in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies including not just Hezbollah, but also AnsurAllah in Yemen and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.
* US withdrawal from the region leaves Israel naked, exposed to surrounding nations who view it as an illegitimate settler colony and recklessly expansionist threat, and who will seize every available opportunity to put an end to the genocidal Zionist experiment.
* Israel has been completely delegitimized on the world stage, as witnessed by the Nobel Committee’s decision to thumb their noses at Trump and give the prize to anti-genocide UN investigator Navi Pillay.
Netanyahu’s grotesquely irrational war, “a lesson in unintended consequences,” stems not just from Bibi’s individual psychopathy, but from the larger psychopathy of the hardline Zionist movement he leads. These people may or may not believe in Yahweh, their Bronze Age tribal god, but they certainly do believe that Yahweh gave them a real estate deed to everything between the Nile and Euphrates more than 2500 years ago, so they are going to try to steal all that land before somebody else does.
The drooling, demented Zionists aren’t thinking strategically. They’re emoting. They’re perpetually driven to hysterics by the thought that somebody somewhere might say something “antisemitic” (meaning critical of Jews or Zionism). They’re endlessly whining about real or imaginary ill-treatment from the goyim, who want them stuffed into gas chambers or driven into the sea, and who kicked them out of every country they’ve ever lived in for no reason at all.
So they feel they have a valid excuse to lie outrageously about Hamas supposedly roasting babies and raping Jewesses, and using such tall tales (along with all the other tall tales from the Torah to the Holocaust) as an excuse to hunt children for sport, train dogs to rape prisoners, and commit the world’s first-ever live streamed genocide.
It is that fundamental irrationality, the product of 2500 years of mental illness “from Yahweh to Zion,” that is driving the US empire to its destruction in West Asia. On the opposite side of the ledger, the sanity, decency, and heroism of the concentration camp prisoners who broke out of their death camp on October 7, 2023—and their brave backers in the Axis of Resistance—has brought down what used to be, just a few years ago, the world’s mightiest empire.
Sputnik – 12.10.2026
MOSCOW – Russia believes that the use of force by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon grossly violate international law, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
At a press conference with Lebanese Foreign Minister Youssef Raji, Lavrov said that they discussed Israel’s ongoing actions in Lebanon, adding that Moscow has reaffirmed its position in support of Lebanon’s sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity.
“Of course, we are committed to our assessments that the military actions of the IDF, the Israeli army, grossly violate the norms of international law and provoke an additional escalation of tensions in Lebanon,” Lavrov said.
This was part of a broader discussion of the situation in the Middle East, the Russian minister said.
“We certainly discussed the situation in the region and examined issues related to developments in the Gulf, in and around Syria, and, naturally, in Palestine, where Israel’s actions are a source of particular concern, as they create facts on the ground that directly contradict the UN resolution on the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Lavrov said.
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On October 7, 2023, a memorable military operation began from Gaza, in which approximately 4,000 armed men from the elite units of the various local Palestinian resistance movements (Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP, Popular Resistance Committees, etc., led by Hamas) poured like an overflowing glass over the Zionist settlements in the surrounding areas.
The action was simultaneously a response to the intensification of expropriations of Palestinian families in the West Bank, the growing pressure on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the appeasement policy of the Arab countries. It aimed, through the capture of Israeli military personnel (active and reservists), to force the Zionist entity into a war of attrition that could lead to significant exhaustion of Israel, internally and externally, and to a reassertion of the Palestinian State question.
Apparently, one of the expectations of the Hamas leadership was that Hezbollah and Iran, and perhaps the military organizations of the West Bank, would also engage, briefly and sustainably, in the conflict with Israel. For a series of reasons – entirely different for each of the actors – this did not happen, except in the case of Hezbollah, and only in a limited way until the ground invasion of Lebanon, and in the case of Iran, also in a limited way during the 12-Day War.
The event led to cataclysmic transformations in the Middle East that we can already describe, and to a panorama that may be disconcerting for many who predicted a scenario of total Zionist victory.
It is not our intention to provide a detailed description of the processes that were initiated by the Gaza War, so we will only attempt to summarize each of the scenarios in their main events and current panorama.
As for Gaza itself, its population was the victim of ethnic cleansing. The death toll, if we add all causes, may reach 200,000, that is, 10% of the population of the Gaza Strip. A significant part of the Hamas leadership, in turn, was assassinated during the war. Israel, however, was defeated in the conflict, considering that it failed to achieve its objectives of destroying Hamas, permanently occupying the entire Gaza Strip, and displacing the Palestinian population. The material and social damage to Israel, in turn, was immense. 60 billion dollars in general economic losses, increased internal social tensions, and total – perhaps irreversible – destruction of Israel’s international image. Furthermore, unable to defeat Hamas, Israel was forced to accept a peace agreement imposed by the US. Meanwhile, Hamas continues with approximately 12,000 active fighters and another 15,000 young recruits in training, so that it will soon return to approximately the same level of strength as before October 7, 2023.
On the Lebanese front, the conflict led to the displacement of more than 1 million Lebanese from their homes, the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, and some other leaders of the movement, the political destabilization of Lebanon, and involved the ground invasion of the country by the State of Israel, which, however, also failed to achieve its objectives of forcing the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah. Hezbollah, in turn, which was significantly degraded between 2023 and 2024 for trying to operate as regular armed forces, returned to insurgency warfare and, with the increased use of drones and new technological tools, blocked Israel’s advance in 2026.
As for Syria, we witnessed the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s government and the takeover of the country by terrorist militias linked to Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist groups, which led Ahmed Sharrah to the presidency. Israel took advantage of the moment to destroy most of Syria’s military hardware and occupy a security belt around the Golan Heights, establishing a tenuous alliance with the Druze tribes and militias of the region. The fall of Assad imposed difficulties on Hezbollah’s logistics, which relied on Syria for the transit of equipment coming from Iran. If Israel expected free passage through Syria, however, the situation is made more complex by the fact that the region is disputed, as an area of influence, with Turkey, so that tensions between both countries continue to increase.
The Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian scenarios allowed one to say, in early 2025, for example, that Israel would be advancing significantly in its objectives outlined in the Oded Yinon Plan of destabilizing and fragmenting neighboring countries to facilitate the construction of Greater Israel. We would have here, at that moment, the collapse of the Shiite Crescent strategy and of Qassem Soleimani’s geopolitical project. When we add the Iraqi and Iranian scenarios, as well as the general context of the Middle East, the situation changes significantly.
Because in the space between the 12-Day War and the Iran War, we saw the collapse of US regional power in the Middle East, the rise of Iran as the main contender for regional hegemony, and Israel’s retreat to a more defensive and rear-guard position.
Signs that the Israeli project was more fragile than it seemed at first glance appeared already in the conflict with Iran in 2025. Unable to defeat Iran, which was pounding Israeli defenses and infrastructure with swarms of drones and missiles, Israel had to appeal for help from the US, which carried out a largely symbolic airstrike against empty nuclear facilities in Iran. This did not go unnoticed.
The new round of conflict in 2026, beginning at the end of February, despite starting with the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led to the elimination of a good part of US bases in the Middle East, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the destruction of Israeli air defense capabilities, the evacuation of US troops in Iraq, and the destruction of the myth of the US’s incontestable military superiority.
In fact, the inability of the US to achieve its political objectives militarily in the Middle East (after the failure of the January color revolution attempt), even using 2 aircraft carriers (1 of which may have been seriously damaged in operations), its inability to protect its Arab allies, the Arab allies’ own inability to defend themselves, the partial depletion of the missile stockpiles of Iran’s enemies, and Iran’s capacity to quickly replenish its leadership and to act militarily in a decentralized manner, as well as its demonstration that its industrial-military capacity remained active, changed the geopolitical map in the Middle East.
To some extent, today, it is Iran that calls the shots. The evacuation of Iraq by the US reopens the country to the penetration of Iranian influence, which puts at risk even Ahmed Sharrah’s domination of Syria.
To circumvent Iranian control of Hormuz, the Saudis have been experimenting with using the Red Sea and land routes. If these efforts were successful, the importance of Hormuz would diminish and, with it, Iran’s bargaining power. The problem is that, exactly when this began to happen, the Yemeni Ansarullah entered the board, initiating a large-scale military operation to defeat the rebels supported by Riyadh. The Saudi response to the Houthi advances led to the partial closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and attacks not only against ARAMCO facilities, but even against Saudi oil wells.
If we return to the Israeli geopolitical panorama, finally, the country still finds itself with a Palestinian problem in Gaza, Hezbollah active in Lebanon, unable to advance in Syria because of the Turkish threat, and with its defensive military capabilities considerably reduced.
Far from the “Pax Judaica” and “Greater Israel,” we are seeing the repositioning of geopolitical actors, and the actor in the most advantageous position is, today, Iran. The recent negotiations between Israel and the Sunni Arab countries do not significantly change the scenario.
3 years after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, therefore, it is not possible for us to say whether the objectives of Ismail Hanyeh and Yahya Sinwar were achieved, but it is impossible to deny that Hamas’s boldness completely changed the map of the Middle East, prevented the Palestinian cause from falling into oblivion, and hindered the normalization of relations between Israel and Muslim countries.
A BBC Arabic reporter who wrongly described terrorists killed in Gaza as "journalists" has a history of glorifying the murder of Jewish people.
The post BBC Reporter’s History of Glorifying Murder of Jews appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Al Mayadeen | October 9, 2026
David Milstein, a senior advisor to US Ambassador to “Israel” Mike Huckabee, suppressed an embassy memo critical of the Israeli government’s decision to approve additional settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, The New York Times reported, citing three US officials who work with Milstein.
The officials told the Times that Milstein blocked the memo from being released before it could be shared with lawmakers in Washington. He also insisted on approving communications from the embassy section responsible for Palestinian affairs, according to multiple officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
The officials said they spoke to the newspaper because they were concerned that Milstein’s actions were undermining the normal work of the diplomatic mission, while those who interacted with him told the Times that he went to “unusual lengths” to portray “Israel” positively.
Milstein’s role at embassy comes under scrutiny
Milstein’s LinkedIn profile shows that he previously worked as an aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and as an advisor to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign, where he handled “Jewish and pro-Israel outreach.” He later served as a special assistant to former US Ambassador to “Israel” David Friedman during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Milstein also drew attention in September after sending wedding invitations requesting “monetary wedding gift[s]” in “U.S. dollars or Israeli shekels” alongside a QR code, according to screenshots reviewed by Politico’s Playbook.
Huckabee defended Milstein following the report, writing on social media, “If there is anyone I’ve worked with presently or over the past 50 years of my adult life which I’ve had absolute confidence in as one with impeccable integrity, it’s David Milstein.”
A source in the intelligence community told Politico, “[Milstein’s] a giant walking counterintelligence red flag … the fact that he is blatantly soliciting donations is absolutely jaw dropping.”
The Trump administration previously dropped sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on extremist Israeli settlers. Huckabee has also condemned settler violence in the West Bank, calling it an “act of terror.”
Huckabee has separately addressed growing dissatisfaction toward “Israel” in the United States, telling NewsNation that social media disinformation and foreign propaganda were responsible for much of the negative perception.
Three years after Israel launched its genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip, massacres and mass destruction continue to take place on a daily basis, despite the US-brokered ceasefire deal that was reached in October 2025.
The nominal truce was preceded by two other short ceasefire agreements. The first was reached in November 2023 and lasted for only one week, while the second was sealed in mid-January 2025 and collapsed two months later.
For three entire years, the world has borne witness to one of the most heinous genocides in modern history, which has resulted in the killing of at least 75,000 Palestinians, according to the latest official health reports, with women, children, and the elderly comprising 56.2% of the death toll. Meanwhile, 82% of Gaza’s structures have been destroyed.
Starvation and the total blockade of aid have also been used as weapons of war against the Palestinian population in the war-ravaged territory.
As soon as it was launched, the US-backed fierce Israeli military campaign expanded beyond Gaza to include other parts of West Asia, including the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria.
About 9,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, more than 1,136 in the West Bank, dozens in Yemen and scores of others in Syria.
The genocide in Gaza has been characterized by the systematic targeting of journalists and media workers, with the death toll reaching more than 260, according to Naser Abu Baker, President of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS).
Abu Baker told BreakThrough News that over the same period, 550 journalists were wounded, and over 200 were arrested.
“All of this underscores a systematic policy implemented by the Israeli occupation, which primarily aims to prevent the truth about the crimes committed in the Palestinian territories by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people from being documented and transmitted, especially in the Gaza Strip,” he emphasized.
The chief of PJS noted that the targeting of Palestinian journalists by the Israeli forces began over one decade before the October 7 attacks.
“PJS documented more than 9000 assaults on journalists in the occupied Palestinian territories between 2012 and 2023. More than 56 journalists were killed during that period, including three foreign journalists,” Abu Baker clarified.
Simultaneously with the events in Gaza, the Israel Prison Service escalated a brutal crackdown against the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement, intensifying a campaign that began in early 2023.
While around 5,200 Palestinian political prisoners were held in Israeli detention prior to October 7, 2023, the number jumped to 9,600 after the outbreak of the Israeli genocidal aggression on Gaza. Many of those prisoners have been placed under administrative detention without charge.
These latest figures only represent the prisoners whose whereabouts inside Israeli detention centers were documented by Palestinian prisoners groups. Thousands of additional Palestinians remain unaccounted for and are believed to have faced enforced disappearance amid the ongoing Israeli military operations in Gaza.
During the past three years, Palestinian prisoners have endured miserable detention conditions, including medical neglect, deprivation of adequate food and hygiene supplies, as well as physical and psychological torture.
This horrific situation culminated with the endorsement of an Israeli law mandating the execution of Palestinian prisoners by hanging.
On the third anniversary of October 7, Raed Abu al-Hummus, head of the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, delivered a message to international human rights organizations via BreakThrough News.
“I call on international human rights organizations to practice their stated objectives, to truthfully convey our message, and to form a parallel front to our heroic prisoners’ front inside the prisons, in an attempt to protect them from these violations, from this far-right monster seeking to slowly kill them,” Abu al-Hummus stated, referring to Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.
While some media outlets and political analysts suggest that Israel’s intensified atrocities in recent years represent the policy of the far-right wing solely, the Palestinian grassroots believe that they constitute the very core of the Zionist movement.
Palestinian political activist, freedom fighter and former prisoner in Israeli jails Omar Assaf argued that “the genocide does not reflect a policy of an individual or a current within the Israeli government. It rather reflects a general policy, because the Zionist movement as a whole was founded on the exclusion of the Palestinian people, expelling them, and looting their land.”
“Therefore, if this far-right government is practicing genocide, this does not mean that the next government will be a government of peace,” Assaf asserted.
Despite three years of unspeakable atrocities and over 78 years of military occupation amid the total silence and inaction of the international community, the Palestinian people remain steadfast and resilient in their homeland, refusing to leave or surrender.
An EU Parliament memorial for victims of the 7 October attack caused disarray and anger as well as grief in a divided European house.
It was crowned by a towering Israeli flag, alongside the EU’s.
The exhibit set up in Strasbourg’s parliament included maps showing Occupied Palestinian Territories as part of Israel and sold trinkets made from debris of Israeli missiles.
But it made no mention of the 74,200 people killed by Israel in Gaza in the past three years, after Palestinian militants Hamas killed some 1,200 Israelis in a surprise attack.
This situation struck a chord with the sole Palestinian in parliament, left-wing French MEP Rima Hassan, who tried to take down the Israeli flag in protest, and toppled over the EU one as well in an unwanted domino effect.
“My action was in no way directed at the victims of 7 October or their memory,” Hassan told EUobserver.
Instead, it targeted “this incessant and untenable double standard, for a Russian flag would never be permitted, and rightly so, within the [EU] institution’s premises”.
The memorial was organised by German centre-right MEP Hildegard Bentele, who chairs the parliament’s Israel delegations, alongside the Israeli embassy, and the The International Movement for Peace & Coexistence (IMPAC) group in Brussels, as well as others.
“During a conversation with a member of my team, the guest artist [at the EU Parliament memorial] claimed that Palestine ‘does not exist’,” Hassan added.
Her family were expelled from their birthplace by Israel in 1948 along with hundreds of thousands of others in what Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
But in the cacophony of narratives in the EU assembly, those who saw her anti-Israel flag protest as offensive or antisemitic had echoing voices.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
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Benjamin Netanyahu likes to translate Israel’s grief into American. At the United Nations last month, he took the dead of October 7 and multiplied them by the ratio of America’s population to Israel’s. The 1,200 Israelis killed that day, he said, were “equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered in less than 24 hours. That’s 16 times 9/11.”
Per-capita comparisons are a perfectly legitimate tool. A small country feels a massacre more than a large one, and Americans should understand what October 7 meant to Israelis. But a method is only honest if you’re willing to apply it to everyone. So let’s apply Netanyahu’s method to the people his army has been killing for three years.
Gaza had about 2.2 million people before the war. The United States has about 341 million, roughly 155 times as many. Take a conservative figure of 75,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, slightly above the Gaza Health Ministry’s latest count of more than 73,000. Multiply it by Netanyahu’s own logic, and you get about 11.6 million Americans.
Eleven point six million. That is roughly the population of Ohio. It is more than ten times the number of Americans killed in every war the United States has ever fought, from the Revolution to Afghanistan. It is about 15 times America’s deaths in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history.
Measured in the unit Netanyahu chose, it is about 3,900 September 11ths.
Run the numbers in Israel’s own terms and the result is the same. Seventy-five thousand dead in a population of 2.2 million is the equivalent of about 340,000 Israelis. Netanyahu built a speech, a war and a foreign policy on 1,200. Imagine what he would say about 340,000.
The convenient multiplier
The prime minister’s defenders will object that the comparison is unfair because many of Gaza’s dead were Hamas fighters. Fine. Subtract every combatant the Israeli military claims to have killed, and apply the multiplier to what remains. Even 50,000 dead becomes nearly 8 million Americans, about 2,600 9/11s. You can argue over every death in the ledger, and the result is still measured in millions.
Netanyahu’s arithmetic has problems even on its own terms. Forty thousand Americans divided by the 2,977 who died on September 11 comes to about 13.4 9/11s, not 16. When the rhetoric needs a bigger number, it seems, the calculator rounds up.
But the real problem isn’t the rounding. It’s the selectivity. Netanyahu’s multiplier is designed to work in one direction only. It enlarges Israeli dead into an American catastrophe so that American audiences will feel what Israelis felt. Applied to Palestinians, it produces numbers so large they would make any American audience ask what, exactly, it has been paying for. That is why he never applies it to them.
What the comparison actually shows
The point of a per-capita comparison is to help outsiders grasp the scale of a loss. Netanyahu wants Americans to imagine 40,000 of their countrymen murdered in a day, and to understand everything Israel has done since as the natural response. Very well. Ask Americans to imagine 11.6 million of their countrymen dead, in a territory sealed off from escape, and to call it self-defense.
No American president would describe 11.6 million American dead as a proportionate response to anything. No American would accept that the dead deserved it because some of them were armed. And no one who has run the numbers can accept the premise of Netanyahu’s arithmetic, which is that Israeli lives scale up and Palestinian lives do not.
The method is Netanyahu’s. So is the answer it produces: by his own measure, the catastrophe in Gaza is about 290 times larger than the one he asks the world to remember.
Original article: sonar21.com
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