The Agony of Waiting for a Ceasefire That Never Comes - When the war in Gaza started, my family fled to the Jabalia refugee camp. Then Israel started bombing the camp. - link
Can Seawalls Save Us From Rising Seas and Surging Storms? - Huge coastal barriers could protect the world’s cities. But they’ll have unexpected costs. - link
What Will It Take to Win Brooklyn’s First Majority-Asian District? - In a recently redrawn City Council district, two Chinese American candidates are both trying to claim the mantle of “public safety.” - link
The Line Between Gaza and America - Fragments of life and death from Palestinians inside the Strip and their relatives abroad, four weeks into Israel’s war. - link
Donald Trump’s Contentious Day on the Witness Stand - Appearing at his civil fraud trial, the former President made some potentially damaging admissions, even as he dismissed the case against him as a witch hunt. - link
From Vox
The dire medical crisis in Gaza, explained -
A wounded girl waits for treatment at al-Shifa hospital on November 5, 2023. | Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images
Multiple hospitals have closed due to airstrikes and lack of fuel. Others are struggling to stay open.
As Israel steps up its air raids and ground assault in its ongoing war against Hamas, the medical situation in Gaza is growing more and more dire, with the north’s major remaining hospitals warning they’ll soon run out of fuel and supplies. Once they do, a humanitarian crisis that’s already untenable is only expected to get worse.
“If the airstrikes continue, there’ll be these dual forces of bombing, all of the trauma injuries that come from that. And then just as the health system deteriorates … [an] inability to deal with infectious disease, people who need other types of care,” says Yara Asi, a professor of global health management at the University of Central Florida who has studied health care systems in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “It is a disaster from the top to the bottom.”
The need for quality medical care in Gaza has only deepened following weeks of devastating airstrikes by the Israeli government, which have killed more than 10,000 people and injured more than 25,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. These airstrikes are in response to a brutal attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, during which the Palestinian militant group killed 1,400 people and took roughly 240 people hostage.
As a result of the Israeli government’s airstrikes and full siege on Gaza, hospitals are not just running out of fuel, food, and water, they’re also suffering damage from ongoing bombardment. Solar panels keeping one of Gaza’s largest hospitals going have reportedly been destroyed in the fighting, while other hospitals have suffered extensive structural damage.
That means existing patients, including pregnant people, babies, and people with chronic illnesses, can’t get treatment and are more likely to die as a result. As a doctor in southern Gaza told the New York Times, “The hospital doors are open, but the care we are able to give — it is negligible.”
Additionally, hospitals have become refuges for displaced people, making facilities already full of the ill and wounded even more packed. Medical experts worry that infectious diseases — such as cholera — will increase as people in Gaza are exposed to contaminated water and forced to shelter in cramped, crowded spaces.
“We’re running out of words to describe the horrors unfolding in Gaza,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a news briefing on Thursday. “Hospitals crammed with the injured lying in corridors. Morgues overflowing. Doctors performing surgery without anesthesia. Thousands of people seeking shelter from the bombardment. Families crammed into overcrowded schools desperate for food and water. Toilets overflowing and the risk of disease outbreak spreading. And everywhere, fear, death, destruction, loss.”
Hospitals are suffering from supply shortages and airstrikes
Of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, 16 have already been shuttered, and a number of those that remain — particularly in the north, which has borne the brunt of Israel’s attacks — say they can last days more at best. Smaller practices are in dire shape as well, with about 70 percent of primary care clinics reportedly forced to shut their doors.
Due to both dwindling fuel and damage from airstrikes, Gaza’s only cancer hospital, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, ceased operations last week, according to Palestinian health officials. The Indonesian Hospital, a major provider of medical care in northern Gaza, also saw its main generator go out last week, severely limiting its ability to provide key services, including oxygen and ventilators. And on Friday, al-Shifa hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, said it was running so short on fuel that it only had enough energy to power the neonatal intensive care unit. The UN has been able to keep some services at hospitals in the south afloat by sharing its fuel reserves, but the organization hasn’t been able to get any fuel to the north, where all three of the aforementioned hospitals are.
Without fuel, these hospitals aren’t able to ensure that they can keep their power or life-saving machines on. Beyond these struggles, Gaza’s hospitals are also short key medical supplies including everything from gauze to IV bags to antiseptic. These shortages have forced physicians to ration their existing supplies, and to perform procedures — including surgeries — with little or no anesthesia.
“Even the most basic of supplies we’ve run out,” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon in Gaza, told Australia’s SBS News. “We’ve run out of dressings, we’ve run out of intravenous fluids, we’ve run out of blade sutures. Anything that we require is finished or in the last few boxes left in the department.”
MSF’s Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, talking about what hospitals in Gaza need:
Fuel for generators. Clean water. Blood.
When fuel runs out, every person on a ventilator, premature baby in an incubator will die.
As their supplies dwindle, hospitals are also becoming more crowded with an influx of patients as well as other civilians seeking shelter after they’ve been displaced from their homes. “There’s no space in the hospital,” Abu-Sittah added in his SBS News interview. “We have over 2,000 wounded patients in a hospital that had a bed capacity of around 600.”
“In terms of the patient load of hospitals, it’s indescribable,” says Tanya Haj-Hassan, a physician with Doctors Without Borders who is based in Jordan, but in regular communication with doctors in Gaza. “They’re having to resuscitate patients on the floor, to do surgical procedures on the floor because there’s no room anywhere else.”
Hospitals have been the targets of or near repeated airstrikes and bombings as well. According to the WHO and the Palestinian Health Ministry, there have been 218 attacks on health care-related facilities in the Palestinian territories, and at least 135 health care personnel are among the casualties of the overall Israeli offensive. That includes airstrikes that were near the al-Shifa hospital, the al-Quds hospital, and the Indonesian hospital, as well as a bombing that hit an ambulance convoy. Many hospitals have been told to evacuate due to bombings in the region, but physicians have said this is impossible and an effective death sentence for patients who rely on ventilators and life support.
“Moving a baby on life support would be hazardous in a high-income country. Doing so in Gaza would gravely endanger a child whose life has only just begun,” said Ghebreyesus.
At least 81 wounded people are expected to be able to evacuate to Egypt for further treatment, and both Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have offered to provide medical care for those in need. But not every evacuation attempt works: Friday, for instance, a convoy attempting to leave al-Shifa was hit by an Israeli bomb, killing at least 13 and injuring many more, including people taking shelter in the facility. Additionally, the number of patients who are evacuated pales in comparison to the degree of need and the scope of people who’ve been injured.
The Israeli government claimed it was targeting — and killed — Hamas combatants in the al-Shifa ambulance strike, and has often sought to justify some of its airstrikes on healthcare by claiming that Hamas has a presence. Al-Shifa hospital, for example, has been cited as the location of a Hamas command center by Israeli leaders, an accusation Hamas has denied.
The WHO has raised concerns that attacks on health facilities are a violation of international humanitarian law. As experts told Al Jazeera, attacks on hospitals are a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which state, “Directing an attack against a zone established to shelter the wounded, the sick and civilians from the effects of hostilities is prohibited.” There are exceptions if there’s evidence that medical facilities are being weaponized to harm an opposing force, however. But Israel’s claims aside, it’s not clear Hamas is weaponizing hospitals. Thursday, WHO officials said they had not independently verified whether the al-Shifa hospital was being used as a base by Hamas.
“We have no information about what may be happening elsewhere underneath these facilities, that’s not information we would have, that’s not information we could verify,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said on Thursday. “The difficulty here is separating the needs of 50,000 people at al-Shifa hospital, civilians, doctors, patients, and others.”
There’s immense fallout for patients and providers
The fallout for patients from these hospital closures and shortages has been enormous — and is poised to increase.
For patients with chronic illnesses, hospitals are increasingly unable to provide the vital medication and care they need to survive. “If you don’t have electricity, you can’t give dialysis [to patients with kidney illnesses],” says Haj-Hassan. “If you cannot do those things, you will ultimately become very unwell and die. [If] you can’t get cancer therapy, you will also die.”
For people with acute conditions, like a heart attack or stroke, there are limited medical resources — both when it comes to staffing and supplies — to be as responsive to these needs as before. “For acute problems, there’s just no capacity to care for anything that’s not a war injury at this point,” says Haj-Hassan. Care International told CNN roughly 160 people are expected to give birth in Gaza each day over the next month. Those pregnant people — including those who need C-sections — are among those who may be unable to secure the care they need.
Data from Al Jazeera and the WHO also notes that there are 130 infants relying on incubators, 1,000 kidney dialysis patients, and 350,000 patients with noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease who have to bear these effects.
And for patients with traumatic injuries — including thousands who’ve been injured during the airstrikes — it has meant incomplete treatments and little pain management. “How can you care for patients [when a] large part of their body is burned if you don’t have pain relief? It is completely inhumane,” says Haj-Hassan.
On top of the existing patient needs, many experts worry about the spread of infectious disease as clean water supplies continue to run low and people continue to shelter in cramped spaces. Roughly 50,000 people were believed to be taking shelter in al-Shifa as of late October, while the UN said 670,000 people were packed into its shelters. Asi pointed to a cholera outbreak that occurred during the war in Yemen and said a similar scenario could take place in Gaza.
“[Water-borne illness] is one of the number one killers of children in Gaza even before this, and the potable water situation there has always been poor since the siege started in 2006,” she says.
Doctors, too, are completely overwhelmed by the degree of need they are seeing as well as having to make impossible decisions about who is able to receive care and use supplies. “What I’m hearing from speaking with them is just desperation that they can’t do anything,” says Asi. “The hospitals are to the point where they’re so full that when patients arrive, sometimes doctors have to choose between who we bring into the hospital, who may have a chance of survival, and who we can’t.”
“Doctors are distressed. They are calling us crying…by the horror they are seeing…This has to stop. We’re operating on children without anesthetics. We don’t have morphine for them.”
The WHO and Doctors Without Borders are calling for a ceasefire, the ability to provide humanitarian aid to hospitals, and security for health care providers in light of these conditions.
In her description of doctors’ experiences in Gaza, Haj-Hassan read a text message she received on Friday from a pediatric intensive care physician based there.
“Unfortunately, we are on our way to collapsing from the horror of the scenes we see despite our strength,” it reads. “And the world is watching as if we were in a movie theater showing a horror movie and the viewers are silent.”
A boneheaded state official may have just handed the NRA a big Supreme Court victory -
A guest looks at a rifle at the Palmetto State Armory booth during the National Rifle Association’s Annual Meetings & Exhibits at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on April 16, 2023. | Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Democrats need to be smarter while the GOP controls the Supreme Court.
Every now and then, the Supreme Court takes up a case involving a public official who acted so foolishly — without any regard for the ordinary norms governing law enforcement, or without any insight into how their actions could undermine some of the government’s most important work — that you wish the justices could each take turns smacking them upside the head.
National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which the Court announced that it would hear last Friday, is such a case. It involves two unrelated actions which former New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) Superintendent Maria Vullo took against the NRA, one of which successfully shut down an NRA program that recklessly endangered countless New Yorkers’ lives — and one of which recklessly endangered Vullo’s effort to shut down this potentially deadly program.
In 2017, DFS opened an investigation into “Carry Guard,” an NRA-endorsed insurance program that, according to the federal appeals court that heard the Vullo case, “provided liability defense coverage for criminal proceedings resulting from firearm use even where the insured acted with criminal intent.”
Carry Guard offered to pay both the civil and criminal legal costs (up to $1 million for a civil case, and up to $150,000 for a criminal case) of its customers who shot another person, allegedly in self-defense. The NRA actively promoted this insurance to its members as a product that would give them peace of mind if they shot another human being. One pitch to the NRA’s members told them that “you should never be forced to choose between defending your life … and putting yourself and your family in financial ruin.”
For reasons that should be obvious, New York generally does not permit insurance contracts intended to “insure a person for that person’s intentional criminal acts,” and it certainly doesn’t permit the kind of insurance that may pay out if a beneficiary commits a violent crime with a deadly weapon. And so, not long after DFS opened its investigation into Carry Guard, three insurance companies that underwrote or administered Carry Guard or similar programs entered into a consent decree where they agreed to stop providing this kind of insurance.
All of this is well and good. Nothing in the Constitution prohibits New York from targeting insurers who sell a product that will encourage people to shoot other people. And nothing in the First Amendment prohibits New York from targeting illegal insurance that is backed by the NRA, even though the NRA also engages in First Amendment-protected advocacy.
But then Vullo did something incomprehensibly stupid.
In February 2018, the Parkland, Florida, school shooting happened — killing 17 high school students and school staff. After this shooting, DFS issued a “guidance,” signed by Vullo, which encouraged insurers to “continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks, that may arise from their dealings with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations.”
To be clear, this guidance did not explicitly threaten to take any action against insurers who continued to do lawful business with the NRA. But that does not change the fact that DFS, an agency whose responsibilities include law enforcement, and that had recently brought a $13 million enforcement action against insurance companies that did illegal business with the NRA, was now suggesting that those same companies might face consequences if they did other, legal business with the NRA.
This guidance, and similar post-Parkland communications between DFS and the insurance industry, do potentially violate the First Amendment. While the Constitution permits a government official to ask any company to stop doing business with the NRA, it does not typically permit the government to coerce private businesses into halting lawful business with an advocacy group. And DFS’s guidance, which was issued so soon after DFS opened its Carry Guard investigation, looks suspiciously like coercion.
The First Amendment places special burdens on law enforcement agencies
As a general rule, the government has a virtually unlimited right to express its own viewpoint, as do government officials. They may condemn the NRA. They may call for strict gun laws that the NRA opposes. They may say unkind things about the NRA to business leaders who may wish to do business with the NRA. And, if the NRA does something illegal, they may warn businesses against the legal risks of joining that illegal activity.
But, in Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Supreme Court recognized that “people do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” While the government may express whatever opinion it wants about any organization its leaders do not like, it may not use law enforcement officials to implicitly threaten someone with criminal charges unless that person abandons activity that is protected by the First Amendment.
Bantam Books involved the ominously named “Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth,” a government body that identified books and magazines it deemed “objectionable for sale, distribution or display to youths under 18 years of age.” It then sent notices to booksellers and distributors seeking their “cooperation” with the commission in removing such books — and reminding those sellers of the commission’s “duty to recommend to the Attorney General prosecution of purveyors of obscenity.”
According to one book distributor, he was often visited by a police officer shortly after receiving such a notice, and the officer asked the distributor what steps he had taken in response to the notice.
Bantam Books held that this level of pressure — a letter that explicitly mentioned the possibility of a prosecution, followed by a visit from an inquisitive police officer — crosses the line from permissible persuasion to impermissible coercion.
The facts of Vullo aren’t quite as egregious as those in Bantam Books. DFS’s guidance does not mention the possibility of any kind of enforcement action against an insurer who continues to work with the NRA. And there’s no indication that DFS sent an armed police officer to New York insurance companies to check in on whether they had, in fact, dropped their business with the NRA.
Even so, the guidance does raise serious First Amendment concerns. Imagine, for example, that a police officer arrested you for shoplifting — or some other crime that you legitimately did commit, and that a police officer legitimately may arrest you for committing. Then imagine that this same police officer shows up at your workplace a few months later and pressures you to end your relationship with another company. Would you feel free to refuse? Or would you think that this officer, who so recently placed you under arrest, was implicitly threatening to do so again?
That’s basically what happened in Vullo. DFS brought a completely legitimate enforcement action against three insurance companies, arising out of those companies’ decision to administer or underwrite an insurance product that no sensible government would allow to exist. Then, months later, the same agency sent a guidance to all New York insurers — including these same three companies — informing them that DFS “encourages regulated institutions to review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations, and to take prompt actions to managing these risks and promote public health and safety.”
It’s not hard to read that guidance as a coercive attempt to punish the NRA because New York’s government disagrees with the NRA’s political advocacy in favor of looser gun laws.
Law enforcement agencies should be exceedingly cautious before they opine on politics
The NRA has sought an extraordinary remedy in the Vullo case. According to the complaint it filed in the trial court that heard this case, the NRA wants a court order requiring DFS to “immediately cease and refrain from engaging in any conduct or activity which has the purpose or effect of interfering with, terminating, or diminishing any of the NRA’s contracts and/or business relationships with any organizations.”
Among other things, that could prevent New York from enforcing its law prohibiting insurers from selling products that encourage people to shoot other people.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court won’t impose such a catastrophic consequence on the people of New York because of a misstep byone of its former officials. But, by bringing herself and her agency into a political dispute about gun advocacy, Vullo gave this highly partisan Supreme Court an opportunity to insert itself into what should have been a routine insurance enforcement action.
Iran could determine how far the Israel-Hamas war spreads -
Supporters of Hezbollah wave flags as they watch a televised speech by its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 3, 2023. | Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP via Getty Images
Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups support Hamas but haven’t opened new fronts.
In his first public statement about Israel’s war with Hamas,Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday indicated that the Shia militant group — though supportive of Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack on Israel — wouldn’t be opening up another front in the war just yet.
Hezbollah, which the US and other countries have designated as a terror group, has engaged in cross-border firefights with Israel since the October 7 attack. That’s not particularly new; there is regularly low-level conflict across the so-called Blue Line, the line of demarcation between Lebanon and Israel, which UN peacekeepers have been deployed to monitor since 2006. But given its proximity to the conflict and Hezbollah’s close affiliation with Iran, it’s a possible front to expand the war.
Lebanon is not the only place at risk of spillover conflict; Iran-backed militias have been attacking US forces in Iraq and Syria, launching 27 attacks at US bases since October 17 after several months without any such attacks. And the Houthis, an Iran-backed Shia group which controls much of western and northwestern Yemen, have lobbed missiles and drones in Israel’s direction, though those have been intercepted by US warships in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as by Israeli missile defense systems. “The Iranians are happy to activate their proxy groups and let other people do the fighting and dying — and frankly a lot of the proxy groups are happy to do the fighting and dying,” Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox.
Iran, to varying degrees, funds and provides resources to each of these groups, as well as Hamas. “Iran’s relationship with other groups really fits onto a spectrum,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. “At one side of the spectrum you have Hezbollah, because Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah is really like two NATO allies.” Hezbollah has only Iran as a state backer, while Hamas and militant groups in Iraq and Syria have relationships with other nations.
Though Nasrallah and Iranian leadership have praised Hamas’s attack and threatened retaliation for Israel’s aggressive bombing and ground campaign in Gaza — whether through a proxy group or outright — a “red line” for doing so isn’t clear nearly a month into the war.
All of these groups give Iran options about where and how it wants to send messages to its adversaries — the US and Israel — while ostensibly giving the Islamic Republic a measure of plausible deniability. But this tactic is not without risk, especially without direct diplomatic channels between the adversaries.
The US, in addition to providing Israel with weapons and material support, has moved major military assets to the region — two carrier strike groups, and now a guided missile submarine carrying up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles. The move is meant as a further deterrent to Iran and its related groups in the region as Secretary of State Antony Blinken makes another trip to the Middle East, in part to try and contain the conflict to Gaza.
“To me, there are two ways this could expand: one is by calculation, and one is by miscalculation,” Alterman said. Iran likely would not want to attack Israel or the US decisively and directly, but an error or a step too far by Iran or any of its proxies could push the conflict outside the bounds of Gaza. “At a time of heightened alert … somebody’s missile could go awry, it may kill somebody. You could have commanders who are freelancing,” or working outside the directions of Iran or another proxy group, “anything can happen, and you can get yourself into a pretty rapid escalation pretty quickly.”
Hezbollah has fought Israel before — and it’s better equipped now
Though none of the proxy groups would act without Iran’s go-ahead, Hezbollah is in lock-step with Iran ideologically and tactically; Nasrallah and his group are not acting independently. But Lebanon has its own longstanding conflict with Israel, and Hezbollah plays a big role in that.
Israel has occupied the Shebaa Farms area, which was once part of southern Lebanon, since 1967, and invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, ultimately occupying part of the country south of the Litani River until 2000. Lebanon was in the midst of a brutal, sectarian civil war, and Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s in part to serve and represent the Shia population in the south, which wasbeing marginalized by the Lebanese Christian ruling minority as well as an influx of Sunni Muslim Palestinian refugees and resistance groups, upsetting Lebanon’s precarious political balance.
Over time, and with significant Iranian support, Hezbollah emerged as a potent political and militant force in southern Lebanon and on the national stage. Militarily, Hezbollah aimed to push the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) out of southern Lebanon. When Hezbollah in July 2006 fired rockets at Israeli positions and crossed the border to kill and kidnap IDF soldiers, Israel attacked Lebanon, setting off just over a month of war until a UN-mediated ceasefire took effect August 14.
Since that conflict, Hezbollah has grown its capabilities; Nasrallah claims his group has 100,000 fighters, thousands of whom have been honing their skills by supporting Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria over the past 12 years. Iran has also maintained its support, helping the group obtain a vast arsenal of rockets and artillery, including longer-range Iranian models with higher payloads. Hezbollah also now possesses the ability to retrofit older rockets and turn them into precision-guided missiles, according to Reuters. That means Hezbollah could fire deeper into Israel and target critical infrastructure.
Hezbollah is also a political actor, holding 62 seats as part of a coalition in Lebanon’s parliament. It lost a number of seats in the last round of elections and a war would be extremely unpopular in Lebanon, which is undergoing both a political and economic crisis; the country has been without a government for a year, and its currency, the lira, is at an all-time low value of 100,000 to the US dollar. US officials have met with the Lebanese caretaker government in an effort to try and prevent the conflict from spreading into Lebanon.
Hezbollah maintaining power in Lebanon also means Iran keeping power in the country — power which it aims to deploy when necessary. “Once Iran needs to use Hezbollah, they will, despite what happens to Lebanon,” Hanin Ghaddar, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Vox. And though it has a larger ground force than Hamas, “they would be running up against probably 100,000 fully alert, dug-in Israeli troops — and that is a suicidal mission,” James Jeffrey, former US special envoy to the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, told Vox. For now, Iran has likely calculated the threat of Hezbollah’s increased missile arsenal is enough to keep Israel from taking significant action in Lebanon.
Hamas officials have met with Hezbollah senior leaders in Lebanon — and likely encouraged them to do more to support Hamas or otherwise challenge Israel, Ghaddar said. But whether they do so will depend entirely on Iran, she added. “Hezbollah’s job today is to protect Iranian interests, not to support Hamas or the Palestinians.”
Though Hamas and Hezbollah do coordinate regarding attacks on Israel, Ghaddar said, “Hamas’s expectation was a lot more [support]” against Israel. “I think what happened is [Hamas] realized they are being thrown into the fire for Iran to establish certain political gains,” such as scuttling normalization processes between Israel and Arab states. “Hezbollah’s job is to protect these gains and help Iran use the Hezbollah threat to translate these gains into more political, economic gains. And Hamas really has been duped into this [conflict].”
More peripheral groups also present a risk
The US, meanwhile, has launched multiple airstrikes against proxy groups in Iraq and Syria since attacks on US installations resumed on October 17. But rather than real threats of a new front in the war, these and Houthi missiles launched toward Israel look more like a signal of Iran’s displeasure about Israel and the US’s military actions than they do a real threat of escalation — for now.
“There is a core network of Iranian-controlled groups in Iraq that run these front groups” which are carrying out rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, according to Phillip Smyth, an independent analyst who focuses on Hezbollah and jihadi groups in the region. Several core jihadi groups affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force, or IRGC, are directing a number of front groups in Iraq and Syria.
These groups have been launching rocket attacks since about 2020, after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a revered leader in the Iranian military. Some of the groups have been around much longer — since 2005 at least — and are trusted allies of the Iranian regime. They’re unlikely to deviate from Iran’s strategy and interests in the region. But other, smaller front groups aren’t necessarily quite so closely aligned, Smyth said, and can sometimes mistakenly go off-course or outright flout Iran’s orders.
Hamas official Osama Hamdan did meet with the leader of the front group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, according to the UAE outlet the National. Hamdan told Lebanese pro-Iran TV channel Al Mayadeen that Hamas is “looking forward to an important role to be played by Iraq for the Palestinian cause.”
But that meeting doesn’t signal that these front groups will do anything more than lob rockets at US military installations — unless Iran decides it serves their interest.
As for the Houthis, many factions of the group are intensely loyal to Iran, but they have their own interests, too — namely regaining control in Yemen. For 1,000 years, a Zaydi Shia imamate ruled Yemen, but it was overthrown in 1962 and Yemen’s Zaydi Muslims — including the Houthis — were stripped of their political power. The Houthi movement started in the 1990s, as a protest against increasing Saudi financial and religious power in northern Yemen. Iran and Hezbollah support the Houthis because they see the Houthis as part of a Shia revival and struggle against Sunni Islam.
Yemen has been in a brutal civil war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed central government, creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Though the Houthis have made gestures of solidarity with Hamas by launching rockets, they’re also unlikely to open up another front in the war simply because they have their own concerns, namely trying to negotiate a political settlement and officially end the conflict. There’s also the issue of serious, unrelenting poverty in Yemen and increased terrorist violence by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Iran, for its part, also has significant domestic problems that make it difficult to imagine they’d risk directconflict with the US and Israel; the government and the supreme leader are extremely unpopular, as evidenced by widespread protests over the past year. Surging poverty, unemployment, and inflation are further angering ordinary Iranians; open conflict isn’t likely to help the government’s problems.
Israel has thus far ignored those calls —from the US, its neighbors, and from its own citizens. So far in the conflict, IDF strikes have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and 12 Hamas leaders, according to the IDF.
Update, November 6, 10:50 am ET: This story, originally published November 4, has been updated to include the deployment of US military assets to the region.
From The Hindu: Sports
Pride’s Angel shines -
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From Jokes Subreddit
A Mormon and the Irishman are on a plane -
A Mormon was seated next to an Irishman on a flight from London to the US. After the plane was airborne, drink orders were taken. The Irishman asked for a whiskey, which was promptly brought and placed before him.
The flight attendant then asked the Mormon if he would like a drink. He replied in disgust, “I’d rather be savagely raped by a dozen whores than let liquor touch my lips.”
The Irishman then handed his drink back to the attendant and said, “Me, too, I didn’t know we had a choice.”
A redhead, a blonde and a brunette escape from jail.. -
A redhead, a blonde and a brunette escape from jail and hide in a barn. The police close in, so the three women each hide in a sack. The police search the barn, and to check each sack, a police officer kicks it as he walks past. The officer kicks the redhead’s sack, and the redhead says, “Meow!” The officer kicks the brunette’s sack, and the brunette says, “Woof, woof.” The officer kicks the blonde’s sack, and the blonde shouts, “Potatoes!”
