CrossFireArarbia

Trump: ‘This is a Great Day’

CrossFireArabia
October 4, 2025

The White House broadcast a recorded clip of US President Donald Trump commenting on the statement by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) agreeing to a proposal to cease the war on the Gaza Strip.

Trump said: “This is a great day, and we’ll see how things play out, and I very much look forward to the return of the hostages to their families.”

Trump added: “I want to thank the countries that helped with the Gaza issue, such as Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and others. I thank the great countries that helped with Gaza, and we received a tremendous amount of support.”

Trump emphasized that “everyone was united in their desire to end the war and see peace in the Middle East, and we are very close to achieving that.”

Jo24

Features

Thirty Minutes in a Gaza Hospital

CrossFireArabia
October 4, 2025

By Daniel Johnson

3 October 2025 Peace and Security

UN aid teams on Friday highlighted the disturbing situation in Gaza’s makeshift hospitals, where premature babies cry for scant oxygen and medics attempt to save child survivors targeted by airstrikes in their tents and quadcopter victims reportedly shot while fetching bread.

Speaking from the war-shattered enclave amid the ongoing Israeli military push to take full control of Gaza City, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder described one short visit to a hospital where youngsters were either suffering or dying everywhere he looked.

As we’re talking to the surgeon there, she dies on the bed in front of us

One victim at Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, was six-year-old Aya, injured by an airstrike. “I’m really noticing not just the wound, but the attention that the bobs in her hair, the care that a parent’s given before the airstrike,” he said. “As we’re talking to the surgeon there, she dies on the bed in front of us. That’s 30 minutes in a hospital.”

No space to move

At the same hospital, Mr. Elder reported seeing three children “all shot by quadcopters” – an attack drone with four propellers.

“It’s a war zone, children … bleeding out on the floor” with others wounded by shooting, shrapnel or burns.

The UNICEF spokesperson underscored reports that 1,000 infants have been killed in the last two years in Gaza since Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel triggered the war. “We have no idea how many more have died from preventable illnesses,” he continued.

With only around 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals still open and partially functional after almost two years of war, they are often “absolutely packed” with people needing help, Mr. Elder stressed.

Rescued, terrified

“I turn around and there’s a little girl, Sham, who has just been pulled from the rubble; so, she’s covered in that dust and smoke with that terrified expression on her face, being held by an aunt or an uncle… Now Sham didn’t have any broken bones nor internal injury, [she] was not told though, that her mother and her sister were both killed in that attack.”

Turning to Gaza City, the veteran UN aid worker stressed that many thousands of people remain there unable to leave, amid continuing Israeli evacuation orders airstrikes that have left children “shuddering” and gazing skywards “to track the fire” from helicopters and quadcopters.

“You’ve got shoeless children who push grandparents around the rubble, amputee children are struggling through the dust, mothers are carrying exhausted children – literally their skin is bleeding because of the severity of rashes,” Mr. Elder continued, before warning about “continued indiscriminate attacks in densely populated civilian areas despite official statements”.

Another aid worker killed

On Thursday, the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) confirmed the killing in Gaza of its fourteenth medical worker, occupational therapist Omar Hayek, in an attack that also injured four of his colleagues in Deir Al-Balah.

Until 13 September he had worked at an MSF clinic in Gaza City before finally evacuating amid “relentless attacks and forced displacement from Israeli forces”, the NGO maintained.

“People are scared and rightly so…“If you ask me now, can we do our work? I say no, of course we cannot do our work in the north,” said Dr Rik Peeperkorn, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The level of violence in Gaza is such that nowhere is safe, including field hospitals, which offer no protection from stray bullets, said Christian Cardon from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“We had several occasions of people being injured, brought to the hospital and while they were being treated, were wounded again because of stray bullets coming in the hospital,” he said, noting another such incident on Thursday according to UN News.

Uncategorized

Hamas Agrees to Trump’s Plan

CrossFireArabia
October 4, 2025

Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said Friday that the Palestine resistance group had agreed to US President Donald Trump’s plan on a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “in principle,” endorsing its main outlines, while stressing that implementation would require negotiations.

Abu Marzouk emphasized in an interview with Qatar’s Al Jazeera network that the group “would hand over its weapons to a future Palestinian state,” and the fate of Palestinians is a “national matter that Hamas alone cannot decide.”

“We agreed to the US plan in its main outlines, as a principle,” he said.

Abu Marzouk noted that the plan’s implementation “requires detailed negotiations through mediators.”

He pointed out that Hamas “will enter negotiations over all issues related to the movement and its weapons.”

“For example, all the details concerning the peacekeeping force require understandings and clarification.”

Abu Marzouk explained that Hamas “will hand over weapons to the coming Palestinian state, and whoever governs Gaza will hold the weapons.”

He said that “shaping the future of the Palestinian people is a national issue that Hamas alone cannot decide,” calling on Washington to “look positively at the future of the Palestinian people.”

Abu Marzouk noted that “there was a national agreement to hand over Gaza’s administration to independents whose reference is the Palestinian Authority.”

He affirmed that Hamas is “a national liberation movement, and that the definition of terrorism in the plan cannot be applied to it.”

Earlier, Hamas announced that it approved the release of all Israeli captives, the delivery of deceased bodies and the handover of Gaza’s administration to an independent Palestinian body in its response to Trump’s ceasefire plan for Gaza.

The Palestinian group said in a statement on Telegram that “other issues raised in President Trump’s proposal concerning the future of the Gaza Strip and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are tied to a unified national position based on relevant international laws and resolutions.”

A Palestinian source told Anadolu that Hamas delivered its response to Trump’s plan to mediators and requested clarifications on some clauses.

Hamas indicated that it had conducted “in-depth consultations within its leadership institutions and broad consultations with Palestinian forces and factions, as well as with mediators and friends, to reach a responsible position in dealing with US President Donald Trump’s plan.”

It affirmed its readiness to “immediately” enter, through mediators, into negotiations to discuss the details of the plan.

Israel estimates that 48 Israeli captives are in Gaza, including 20 alive, while around 11,100 Palestinians are held in its prisons, suffering from torture, starvation, and medical neglect, with many killed as a result, according to Palestinian and Israeli media and rights reports.

Earlier Friday, Trump gave Hamas until 6 pm Washington time (2200GMT) on Sunday to approve his plan regarding the Gaza Strip.

The White House issued a detailed plan on Sept. 29, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, followed by a comprehensive program for reconstruction and a reorganization of the enclave’s political and security situation.

The plan seeks to turn Gaza into a weapons-free zone, with a transitional governance mechanism overseen directly by Trump through a new international body tasked with monitoring implementation.

It includes the release of all Israeli captives held by Hamas within 72 hours of approval, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails according to Anadolu.

The plan stipulates halting hostilities, disarming the Palestinian resistance and Israel’s gradual withdrawal from Gaza, to be governed by a technocratic authority under the supervision of an international body led by the US president.

Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza, home to nearly 2.4 million people, for nearly 18 years. It tightened the siege in March when it closed border crossings and blocked food and medicine deliveries, pushing the enclave into famine.

Since October 2023, Israeli bombardment has killed nearly 66,300 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The UN and rights groups have repeatedly warned that the enclave is being rendered uninhabitable, with starvation and disease spreading rapidly amid widespread displacement.

Opinion

Netanyahu and The Crippled Horse

CrossFireArabia
September 30, 2025

By Rashad Abu Dawood

Gideon’s chariots are sinking in the Gaza quagmire. Israel is increasingly isolated, becoming a pariah state in the world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a slap in the face, or rather spat at, as the Israeli media described it, in his speech at the United Nations, where he spoke to walls as most of the delegations left when they saw him take the podium.

He lied and lied and tried to distort the facts of his crimes in Gaza, but the world no longer believes him.

Where is Netanyahu taking the region, the world, and even Israel itself to? His path has no end but death and destruction. This man no longer cares about international law, United Nations, or humanity. Nor, of course, does he care about the truth he tries to conceal with lies that no longer convince most Israelis or the countries and peoples of the world.

He reads from the Torah and impersonates Prophet Moses, Joshua bin Nun, and the kings of Israel, whose kingdoms once reigned but all perished. This was not because of the lack of character of their leaders or their lack of faith, but because their people disobeyed them and angered God. Didn’t they say to Moses: “Go, you and your Lord, and fight. Here we are sitting!”

Netanyahu misrepresents biblical terms. “Blotting out the memory of Amalek” refers to the Canaanite inhabitants of Palestine, and is a call for the Israeli army to act in Gaza exactly as Joshua did in Jericho: Genocide in the name of divine promise. “Iron swords” refer to the conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines during the time of David and Saul, when the Hebrews were forbidden from manufacturing iron weapons as a symbol of sovereignty.

As for the term “Gideon’s Chariots,” which the Netanyahu government has acknowledged as a failure – first its first phase and now second – remains a goal however to wipe out Gaza City including its people and structure. Gideon is the biblical judge who led his people during a moment of moral decline and widespread idolatry, when his enemies, Midian and Amalek, joined forces to destroy the crops. Despite the apprehension, Gideon continued his work in secret, believing in salvation from the Amalekites, and ultimately their kingdom was destroyed and wiped out.

After using most of the biblical terms to cover up his recklessness, failure, and corruption before the Israelis, Netanyahu began searching in history for something to distract them from their reality. He found the experience of “Sparta,” demanding they rely on themselves, manufacture weapons, and isolate themselves from the international community as a solution to the isolation he and his ally US president Donald Trump admitted Israel was experiencing.

As Israeli writer Ben Caspit put it in his Maariv article: “This man has completely lost his inhibitions, his balance, and his connection to reality. That he continues to command our Titanic is a danger to lives. Israel must not become Sparta or North Korea. This is not fate. Israel could have been a leading, beloved, accepted, and renowned country, a beacon of technology, intelligence, leadership, and economics in the Middle East as well, had it not been led by the unruly group of savages that this man brought upon us. How do I know all this? From the fact that we were, not long ago.

But one problem: Sparta has became extinct, lost, and disappeared. It no longer exists today (a small village bearing that name was rebuilt in modern times). What survived was Athens, the same Athens that Netanyahu is trying with all his might to destroy.

By the way, it was the Nazis who embraced Sparta, its culture, and its myths, orally, in writing, and in practice. And here, too, we know how things ended.

Netanyahu is the child who killed his parents, and then later asked for a reduced sentence because he was an orphan!

This column by Rashad Abu Dawood was originally written in Arabic for Addustour newspaper

News

Houthis Strike Israel With ‘Palestine 2’ Missile

CrossFireArabia
September 29, 2025

The Yemeni Armed Forces announced the “carrying out of a qualitative military operation targeting several sensitive locations in the occupied Yafa area, using a hypersonic ballistic missile, Palestine 2, with multiple warheads.”

The Yemeni forces said in a statement, Monday, “the operation successfully achieved its objectives and caused millions of herds of usurping Zionists to flee to shelters.”

It added: “We carried out a qualitative military operation with two drones that targeted two vital targets of the Israeli enemy in the Umm al-Rashrash area in southern occupied Palestine. The operation successfully achieved its objectives, thanks be to God.”

It emphasized that “the only option for our Arab and Islamic nation in the face of this enemy, which is attacking Arab and Islamic countries and committing massacres and genocide against our brothers in Gaza, is to confront, stand firm, and provide all necessary support to the oppressed Palestinian people and their honorable and noble resistance.”

It continued: “We will continue to fulfill our religious, moral, and humanitarian duties until the aggression against Gaza stops and the siege is lifted.”

The Houthis in Yemen assert that they are bombing the occupying state of Israel “in support of the Palestinians in Gaza,” and will continue bombing as long as Tel Aviv continues its war of genocide with American support according to Jo24.

Since October 7, 2023, the occupying forces, with direct support from the United States and Western countries, have continued to wage a devastating war in Gaza, which has so far resulted in the martyrdom and injury of approximately 234,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.