US Loses Trust in Israel Over Iran

The White House’s distrust of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has grown increasingly in recent weeks as Tel Aviv carries out multiple wars across the region, according to a report published Tuesday.

Washington’s wear in trust comes as Israel prepares its response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack last week. Tehran said it carried out the strikes in retaliation for the July assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and the killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last month.

Four US officials told the Axios news website that Washington is not opposed to Israel carrying out its reprisal but wants it to measure its attack according to Anadolu.

“Our trust of the Israelis is very low right now, and for a good reason,” one of the officials said.

Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, told his Israeli counterpart Ron Dermer last week that the US expects “clarity and transparency” from Israel as it plans its response, in part because any Israeli attack has implications for the security of US forces and interests in the region.

Skeptical

Sullivan signaled during the call that if the Biden administration is not informed beforehand, it would not automatically step in to thwart another ballistic missile attack from Iran, Axios said. Dermer reportedly said Israel wants to keep the US in the loop, but the officials are skeptical that is the case.

The US had been left in the dark about Israel’s assassination of Haniyeh, which took place just days after Netanyahu assured Biden that he would work to advance a Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal, as well as the strike that killed the Hezbollah leader and a series of explosions that targeted the militia’s communication devices.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was reportedly livid when he was informed of the strike that killed Nasrallah within minutes of the time when the jets dropped dozens of bombs on Beirut’s southern suburbs. He was irked by the fact that the notification time was not sufficient to adequately increase the security of US forces in the region.

Officials said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Austin that he was instructed by Netanyahu not to give Washington an advance warning.

Gallant’s visit to the Pentagon, which was to take place Wednesday, was called off at the last minute, according to the Pentagon. It did not give a reason, but Israeli media reported that Netanyahu is barring his defense minister from flying to Washington until Biden calls him directly.

Netanyahu’s further decision to walk away from a US-backed 21-day cease-fire proposal in Lebanon further eroded US trust, as has Israel’s decision to order all civilians in northern Gaza to flee south as it prepares a new offensive on the region.

US officials have said they are concerned that the directive is setting the stage for a potential siege and that Palestinian civilians would not be allowed to return.

“They tell us what we want to hear — the problem is lack of trust,” a US official told Axios as reported by the Turkish news agency.

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An Eye For an Eye

CROSSFIREARABIA – Israelis will not rest if the Palestinians don’t get their independent homeland and statehood to live free just as was the case before 1948 when Israel was forcibly created.

This present Israeli war on Gaza has shown that clearly.

While the Israeli war machine may have destroyed, nay, obliterated the whole of the enclave, the strip continues to be filled with resistance fighters who move above and below grounds with their weapons fighting their enemies.

Israel, its leaders, politicians and military, long propped up by American weapons have long known that but they continue to destroy rather than own up to Palestinian aspirations and the fact that the incessant conflict will not end otherwise.

In this war, slaughter, genocide – going into its second year now and shows no signs of stopping but on the contrary moving northwards to Lebanon – there developed a sense of equilibrium and proportionality although on a much smaller scale judging from the vast different of the protagonists.

Israel used massive bombs on civilians and sent them into a whirl of displacements, while Hamas continually fired rockets and missiles on the settlements and military bases surrounding Gaza and further beyond.

The immediate effect of that was the mass evacuation of the Israeli population from all these settlements, in effect as soon as the Israeli big guns started to ‘hammer’ the cities, town, villages and hamlets of northern Gaza soon after 7 October, 2023.

Displacement

Today, the Jewish settlements, more likely big towns and cities with high tech infrastructure stand empty; their populations have long been moved to hotels and guest houses by the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, for their safety.

They still wait their return but there is no end in sight as to when will this happen. The late Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, just before he was killed by Israel, said the occupation entity will not rest in peace, neither will the Jews return to their homes, until the bombs on Gaza stop.

Hezbollah had taken up the fight with Israel soon after 7 October as a support to Gaza through rocketing its northern parts with missiles. This process also set off a mass drove of Israelis to leave their homes, like their counterparts in the south, to be housed in a hotel accommodation away from the bombs and raging fires.

As the war genocide on Gaza continued in the following months, the return of these settler Israelis to their homes continued to be foggy, unknown. Many of these settlements and conurbations like Kiryat Shmona and Maalot today stand empty like ghost towns.

In Gaza around 2 million people out of a population of 2.2 million were forced into internal displacement, continually moving between areas from the north of Gaza to its southern border.

Likewise, the number of Israelis that were displaced was, initially estimated at 400,000 people with an extra 60,000 forced to leave when Hezbollah increased their missiles on the north after June 2024.

While they have been living in hotel accommodation many Israelis have been trying to get out of the country over the past months with the figures ranging from 500,000 up to a million.

Further to that about a quarter of Israelis polled by the Kan official channel, say they are truly thinking of leaving the country and 14 percent of them are supporters of Likud and the extremist rightwing parties. Indeed, soon after 7 October, the Ben Gurion Airport became filled with travelers as Hamas rockets started to land on Tel Aviv.

The airport is filled again today with travelers because of incoming missiles from Hezbollah from the north and the occasional ballistic missiles coming all the way from Yemen by the Houthis and/or the fright Israelis got from the recent incoming 200 missiles they saw in their skies from Iran.

There is no doubt that ordinary Israelis are under a lot of strain with sirens going off and on, all the time signaling for them, to go into the underground shelters. Video clips see them running asunder to the shelters, and who wouldn’t be scarred?

After all, the people of Gaza and now Lebanon are experiencing it all the time. For them however, there are no sirens, no warnings of 2000-pound bombs being dropped on their heads with no questions asked; their slaughter appear to be “manageable” foe western states who sell weapons to Israel.

The war can stop anytime. Hostages, around 110 from the original 250, can be returned anytime if there is a ceasefire but the Israeli prime minister is stuck on bringing them home by force, or so he says.

 Meanwhile Israelis are literally running. One videoclip in a Tel Aviv mall show people moving hastily to ahead, no doubt, to the underground shelters as the sirens blast all over.

Thus, there is a military equation that is being played out here: ‘You bomb us we will bomb you’. The Israeli army must realize that this is what is happening, and the stakes of the war game just keep getting higher and higher with Israel headed by Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, being lead to the abyss.  

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Israel Army Deploys For Lebanese Invasion

The Israeli army deployed a fourth division, Tuesday, for its ongoing ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

A military statement said the army’s 146th Reserve Division began ground operations in the western sector of southern Lebanon according to Anadolu.

Three other divisions – the 98th, 36th, and 91st – are already operating in the central and eastern sectors of southern Lebanon.

Israel has mounted massive airstrikes across Lebanon against what it claims Hezbollah targets since 23 September, killing more than 1,250 people, injuring 3,618 others, and displacing more than 1.2 million people.

The aerial campaign was an escalation in a year-long cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 42,000 people, mostly women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.

Despite international warnings that the Middle East region was on the brink of a regional war amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, Tel Aviv expanded the conflict by launching on Oct. 1 a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

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Is an Israel-Iran War Coming?

By Dr Khairi Janbek

In the late 1990s, the grandiose talk of a new order for the Middle East emerged which turned out to be nothing more than a euphemism for Disney Land Arab countries, poverty and conflict-stricken regional reality, with a mixture bordering on more than buffer zones.

Now we have a less ambitious notion and that is a new balance of power in the Middle East, another euphemism for Israel calling the shots and all its neighbors being called on to abide.

But how does this new notion translate in practical terms? Well basically, to all concerned and less concerned waking up every morning asking the question: Will Israel strike Iran or will it not? 

Of course, this is a horrific question if indeed Israel does hit Iran as it carries with it many important existential perils for the whole region and beyond.

One believes whatever is on Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind to achieve advantageous results must be carried out before the date of the US elections this November because no matter what he has been told by the US prospective candidates, at the end of the day, a sitting president doesn’t act like a president-elect.

Now what would a direct confrontation and open warfare between Israel and Iran entail? Well primarily, direct confrontation takes precedence over war by proxies, which means Israel will have to go directly into destroying the military capabilities of Iran in a hugely destructive war.

This would ultimately open the possibilities for its own destruction which means dragging the US and western powers into the conflict, no matter how reluctantly they maybe to defend it, and/or basically go into a slippery-slope open warfare reaching Syria and Iraq and Iran and whatever is on its plate regarding Gaza and Lebanon.

The current wisdom dictates a large scale war does not seem to be likely on the agenda, but that does not exclude a cycle of tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Iran.  Clearly Israel knows that for the economy of the west which is seriously preoccupied with prices and inflation, to target the Iranian oil facilities is a red line.

Moreover, to target the Iranian nuclear facilities would open the door for Tehran to retaliate against the Israeli nuclear facilities which will have dire consequences for the whole region and the world.

Therefore, if Israel is seriously thinking of dealing a blow to Iran, it will either resort to targeting personalities from the hierarchy of the country, and/or will be a just a face saving act with superfluous consequences.

Dr Khairi Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris and the above opinion is that of the author and doesn’t reflect crossfirearabia.com.

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Hamas Strikes Tel Aviv With Five Missiles

CROSSFIREARABIA – The Izz Al Din Al Qassam Brigade, the Hamas military wing, stated, Monday morning, they have struck Tel Aviv and its sorrounding areas with five missiles.

The news is trending on the social media with bloggers making fun of the Iron Dome for failing yet again, to intercept these missiles.

The rockets were fired from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. This is a city that has been bombed by air and tanks many times by the Israeli air force and army over the past 12 months.

Israeli media sources stated sirens sounded Monday morning in central Israel after a barrage of missiles was launched from Gaza. It added the sirens sounded in the cities such as Holon, Rishon Lezion, the Gedera’s industrial zone, Kfar Chabad, Bat Yam sorrounding Te Aviv.

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