© Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said, as tensions flare between the US and Iran.
The person did not say what the two men discussed during the meeting, first reported by Axios. The Pentagon declined to comment. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hegseth said in a social media post that he had visited US service members in the Central Command area of responsibility, which covers the Middle East, northeast Africa and parts of Asia.
Israel’s Army Radio reported his meeting with Netanyahu took place at an air force base in Israel’s southern desert.
Hegseth’s visit comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East war as tensions flare between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and as Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis intensify their attacks on Saudi Arabia.
It also came a day after US President Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu in next week’s parliamentary election in Israel, the country’s first ballot since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel.
US and Israeli forces launched joint strikes against Iran in late February, setting off the wider Middle East war. Netanyahu told Israeli media this month that he’s not seeking to attack Iran before the October 27 Israeli election. Trump has said he will not attack Iran before US midterm elections in November.
Israel said on Monday it would resume allowing commercial goods shipments into Gaza after a days-long halt over a tax dispute involving Hamas and merchants, restoring a key route for food and other essentials to the aid-dependent enclave.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency overseeing humanitarian affairs in Gaza, said it made the decision after merchants reported that Hamas authorities had withdrawn demands for payments of 10,000 shekels ($3,225) per truck.
“The resumption of coordination is being carried out in accordance with Israel’s commitment to the humanitarian provisions of the ceasefire agreement,” it said.
COGAT said the merchants’ accounts had not been independently verified and shipments would resume gradually, with priority given to essential goods ahead of winter.
Oversight would be tightened to ensure payments are made and received only through documented bank transfers, with any merchant found to have paid Hamas facing exclusion from the system.
Hamas said the 10,000-shekel fee was a voluntary contribution by better-off Gazans to a national fund supporting people in need in the war-ravaged territory.
Most Gazans remain dependent on aid after three years of war, repeated displacement and severe restrictions on aid deliveries. While last year’s US-brokered ceasefire halted the heaviest fighting, it has not ended Israeli attacks.
Local health officials said on Monday that at least five Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in separate Israeli strikes in Gaza City and Khan Younis. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.
Israel says Hamas has continued to rearm and carry out attacks in violation of the ceasefire, while Hamas accuses Israel of undermining the agreement.
Gaza health officials say about 1,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the October 2025 ceasefire, while Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed by militants in Gaza over the same period.
The UN World Food Programme has said funding shortages are forcing major cuts to its aid programme in Gaza, leaving about 500,000 people without monthly food support in a territory where two-thirds of the population struggle to get enough to eat.
The WFP said it was reducing the number of recipients of its monthly assistance to 1.1 million people from 1.6 million.
In addition, food rations have been halved, cash assistance has been cut for 75,000 families, and the number of daily hot meals for those unable to cook has fallen to 150,000 from 250,000, with some families in hard-to-reach areas now receiving a hot meal only every other day.
The WFP said about 1.4 million people, or two-thirds of Gaza’s population, face crisis levels of food insecurity or worse, including roughly 200,000 people in emergency conditions.
Last year’s US-brokered Gaza ceasefire calls for the eventual reconstruction of the territory. But little progress has been made towards implementing a deal to end the conflict that includes terms for Hamas to disarm and Israel to withdraw its troops.
“It’s a year into the agreement of this ceasefire. Well, life is still brutal here. There is no proper shelter.. There is no basic services. There is no safety, no security,” acting Executive Director of the World Food Program WFP Carl Skau told Reuters in Gaza.
“These cuts are happening just as we are facing the fourth winter. You know, I’ve been through the winters here, absolutely brutal,” he added.
The WFP said it urgently needs $450 million over the next six months to maintain critical operations in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“We tell the world now is this is not the time to look away. This is the time to step up to sustain this support, to protect the progress that has been made, but also to push for early recovery,” said Skau.
Capitalism, fascism, wars, the Epstein class, endemic poverty and suffering – it’s a death cult in a theater near you.
Join us on Telegram, X, and VK.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
It’s hard to know whether to break the TV set or throw up when listening to the European governments rushing to condemn the air strike by Yemeni forces on Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid international airport.
The blast from a ballistic missile that slammed into the airport at the weekend, October 12, killed at least 13 civilians and injured scores of other travellers. Horrific video footage shows the moment the missile explosion ripped through a terminal lounge.
European leaders immediately in a coordinated fashion trotted out condemnations of Yemeni “terrorism” and vowed solidarity and support for Saudi Arabia. U.S. President Donald Trump called it “a terrible thing.” (As if bombing schoolchildren is not quite a terrible thing.)
Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and Spain all issued strident denunciations of the Yemeni attack.
The strike on the Saudi capital came after the Ansar Allah-led Yemen Armed Forces had given ample warning to the Saudis that their airports would be targeted and for civilians to avoid the areas. The airports were kept open for business as usual. The Yemenis have said that the attack on Riyadh and other Saudi airports are retaliation for weeks of multiple air strikes by the Saudis on Yemeni civilian centers.
Hundreds of Yemeni civilians have been killed since Saudi Arabia broke a four-year truce with an air strike on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on July 13. Saudi warplanes, U.S.-supplied F-15s and European Typhoon jets, have been continously bombing homes across Yemen. This week, two days after the Riyadh strike, at least nine people including five children were killed in air raids on houses in Taiz city and in northern al Jawf province. Al Masirah TV footage showed a distraught father holding up a child’s shredded body amid rubble. There was no condemnation of that atrocity from any European leader.
As Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, former Irish Members of the European Parliament, point out in their podcast this week, the official European reaction is utter hypocrisy and a cynical distortion of the conflict on the Arabian Peninsula.
Britain and France in particular, along with the United States, have backed the Saudi aggression against Yemen beginning in 2015. Over seven years, that aggression killed up to 400,000 Yemenis through air strikes and a blockade on humanitarian needs.
The European Union remained largely silent for seven years. No protests were made to Washington, Paris or London. Ambassadors were not summoned, sanctions were not imposed.
The return to hostilities that began with Saudi air strikes on Sanaa in July have been enabled by U.S. and Britain supplying warplanes, military advisors and intelligence.
None of the European governments have bothered to condemn this recent U.S. and UK-backed slaughter.
So, it is nauseating when one hears British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband saying he is “appalled” by the strike on Riyadh airport. And other European leaders vowing “full solidarity with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul condemned Yemen’s “terrorist act.”
His French counterpart said France stood with Saudi Arabia “in defending its territory and infrastructue.” (No mention of what the Saudis have been doing for years to Yemen’s territory.)
Referring to the strike on Riyadh without any context, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni said: “Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are unacceptable and must cease.” (Yes, indeed, so why not tell that to the Saudis who are doing it deliberately on a massive scale with support from Washington and London?)
What is instructive here is not just the sickening hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy. It is the manifestation of a systematic corruption and criminal responsibility. This is not just one more example of a flawed European political class whose judgement is suspect. What is increasingly apparent is the totality of the corruption.
The same European supporters of Saudi monarchs waging a genocidal war on Yemen are also contemporaneously supporting the Israeli Zionist regime in its extermination of Palestinians. They are complicit in enabling the U.S. aggression against Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. They are sponsors of the NeoNazi regime in Kiev to keep fighting a proxy war against Russia despite more than one million Ukrainian military casualties and the risk of nuclear conflagration.
The death cult of Western capitalism is on full display in multiple theaters, exposing the organic evil at work. There is sense that all of Western imperialist history is now on display in one final orgy of barbarity.
In previous times, the death cult operated discreetly in seemingly disparate conflict scenarios. Wars on different continents seemed somehow unconnected. The Western media would in the past reliably cover up the crimes by distorting the motives and objectives with false narratives and (laughable) claims of noble purpose. The West was “defending democracy,” “fighting communism,” “protecting human rights,” or “waging war on terrorism,” or some other pretext that in isolation and with loads of media propaganda managed to fool a lot of people as somehow plausible.
What’s happening now, it seems, is a concatenation of wars that ultimately exposes the essential system that drives the violence, and its insatiable lust for human suffering.
It is impossible to work for such a vile system, the death cult of capitalism, without also being oblivious to its evil ways. To remain oblivious necessitates denial or lies. That deception might be tenable for occasional and seemingly disparate scenarios. But not when the system is exposed in its infernal entirety.
American and European wars in the past might have succeeded in being sold to the Western public as one-off wars and misadventures. We think of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Latin American, Africa, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more recently Libya.
In more recent years, as consciousness evolved, the public began discerning and decrying “endless wars”.
But now the world is witnessing a totalizing of the war machine that goes by the name of “Western democracy”.
What’s happening in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Yemen is not coincidence. It is the death cult on display and unable to hide itself. It manifests too in attacking and locking up Western citizens who condemn genocide or who simply call for peace.
Capitalism, fascism, wars, the Epstein class, endemic poverty and suffering – it’s a death cult in a theater near you.
The politicians, governments, media and pundits who promote it or serve it are seen for what they are.
By John REES
Join us on Telegram, X, and VK.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
Preparations for war with Russia and complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza have set off a struggle over jobs, wages and military production
War preparation is now a reality across Europe. Within a single September week, Poland issued fresh warnings, Germany ran drills and national alerts, military exercises were held across the Baltic, and Lithuania published plans to evacuate residents of Vilnius in the event of an attack.
The Finnish government is in full cry over the prospect of war, reminding its citizens yet again that they should be ready, in mind and in practice, for the disruption it would bring.
On 18 September, French President Emmanuel Macron gathered party leaders and presidential hopefuls at the Elysee Palace to hear the heads of France’s intelligence services describe what his office called the rapid deterioration of the international situation.
Nato, meanwhile, talks ever more openly about Russian sabotage, cyber attacks, arson and drone attacks.
Many workers and citizens across the continent, though, are not convinced by the war fever.
Thousands of Airbus workers in Spain began strike action on 1 July after rejecting the company’s pay and conditions offer.
Representatives of the UGT and CGT unions said the stoppage had slowed military and commercial production and would make it harder for the company to meet its delivery target. Airbus’s eight sites in Spain produce military transport planes and parts for commercial aircraft and satellites.
As the Defence Matters website reported: “The industrial pressure is not confined to commercial aviation. Spain is central to Airbus Defence and Space, including military transport and satellite activity. European governments are asking manufacturers to increase output at the same time as companies compete for engineers, technicians and production workers.”
Supply lines are so tight that Airbus has had to hire giant Antonov An-124 heavy-lift aircraft to ferry parts from one plant to another just to keep production running.
Air Data News reported that the strike “threatens key military aircraft programmes”, noting that the Eurofighter plant near Madrid and the military transport aircraft site near Seville were both affected.
Spanish unions said about 90 percent of eligible workers took part in the stoppage on 25 August, part of an indefinite strike. The strikes were called after workers voted at plant-level assemblies to reject the company’s offer.
French unions briefed on the dispute said the three striking Spanish unions represent about 40 percent of Airbus Spain’s roughly 14,000 employees. Workers were seeking inflation-linked pay rises, the restoration of previous remote-working arrangements and sick-leave benefits.
After the intervention of Industry Minister Jordi Hereu and concessions from Airbus, the strikers paused the stoppage on 10 September, but not the movement. Two days later, around 8,000 workers from Airbus sites across Spain marched through Madrid to keep the pressure on.
On 1 October, 77 percent of those voting backed an improved offer providing for the restoration of lost purchasing power, inflation-linked pay rises and the protection of remote-working rights, a settlement that months of industrial action had forced out of the company.
The Airbus dispute shows the leverage workers hold in the very industries on which Europe’s rearmament depends.
Trains and the TUC
In Scotland, meanwhile, the rail union RMT, the drivers’ union Aslef and the white-collar TSSA have demanded that the Scottish government remove CAF, the Spanish manufacturer Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, from its shortlist of contractors to build ScotRail’s new fleet of suburban trains.
The company is included in the UN human rights database of businesses involved in Israeli settlements for its role in running the Jerusalem light rail and helping to extend it into territory illegally seized by Israel.
Aslef made clear that its members would refuse to drive CAF trains, a position echoed by TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust when she urged the Scottish government to “think again”.
Scottish Greens co-leader Gillian Mackay put the first minister on the spot, asking him directly: “So will the first minister agree that CAF should be blocked from this contract, and will he stand with the rail workers who have refused to drive trains produced by a company that they say profits from apartheid?”
In his response, the first minister confirmed that ScotRail was seeking advice on the contract.
For the second year running, delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) backed a motion opposing increases in arms spending.
This year’s motion passed with even more support than last year’s, which reversed the TUC’s previous backing, advocated by the GMB and Unite unions, for higher defence spending.
Speaking in favour of the motion, Alex Gordon, a former RMT president and national officer of the Stop the War Coalition, said: “This movement is about fighting for jobs, for public services, for investment in the industries of the future that our young people, that our young workers need.
“Those industries are not military industries. The skills of the workers in the military sector are vital skills, vital skills that need to be used in civilian production.”
Ports and classrooms
Dockworkers’ unions in at least six countries are planning an international day of action and strikes on 30 October to protest against the war on Gaza and demand an immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people.
This coordinated mobilisation follows a strike on 6 February this year that shut down cargo operations at more than 20 Mediterranean and European ports to halt arms shipments bound for Israel.
“No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarisation of ports and strategic infrastructure from [the] EU,” the unions said in their statement. “Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.”
The signatories include CGT FNPD in France, Enedep in Greece, LAB in the Basque Country, Liman-Is in Turkey, ODT in Morocco, and Orsa Porti and USB in Italy.
The next generation, at least in Germany, seems even less enthusiastic about the prospect of a new European war. More than 45,000 school students across the country walked out of class in late September to protest against plans for compulsory military service, after hundreds of young men were summoned for medical examinations.
The School Strike Against Conscription initiative said demonstrations took place in more than 100 cities after the German defence ministry began calling in 18-year-old men for medical screening. Service itself remains voluntary for now, but the screening is compulsory.
Students took to the streets demanding a halt to the forced checks, the repeal of the new military service law and an end to what they call a step-by-step return to the draft.
This is now the ground on which European politics is being fought. It is a contest between a political establishment obsessed with war and preparations for war, and millions of workers across the continent unwilling to pay for rearmament with their wages, jobs and living standards.
These are the opening shots in that battle.
Original article: middleeasteye.net
Login