Israel-Hamas war, Gaza genocide

[SvennoJ]

zeldaring said:

Regardless of the agenda how do you not think what they are doing is not helping Gaza is insane. They are disrupting world trade until there is a cease fire and making the war a bigger conflict which America doesn't want that puts huge pressure to end the war, and it's cost America billions.

Disrupting world trade has given the US and UK a new distraction tactic. Just look how the reporting on CNN has changed, the latest headlines

Houthis claim responsibility for attack on American ship and vow to respond to future strikes on Yemen

3 missiles launched toward Red Sea on Monday, with one striking US-owned vessel, maritime security group says

Houthi ballistic missile strikes US-owned and operated vessel, US military says

UK wants to de-escalate regional tensions amid recent attacks on Houthi rebels, prime minister says

Focusing on the US/UK led coalition to save world trade, as well as claiming it's out of self-defense, that same word Israel keeps using to save everyone from 'terrorists'. US now wants to declare the Houthis a terrorist organization as well.
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-says-yemens-houthis-are-terrorist-group-2024-01-12/

The problem is Western media doesn't give a crap about motives or reasons behind attacks. The Houthis will say they do it to disrupt trade with Israel as a form of sanctions against the Gaza genocide. However that's not mentioned in the western media. It already started with denial that the ships they attacked were affiliated with Israel, now it's not mentioned at all anymore, They fired on US ships, we need to defend ourselves!



For example CNN also doesn't report on the motives behind the GTA style attack in Raanana today

1 killed and at least 17 injured in twin attacks in central Israel. Here's the latest

At least one person — a woman in her 70s — has been killed, and 17 others injured after twin attacks in the central Israeli city of Raanana, according to statements released by the hospitals treating the victims of the attack. 

The Israeli police said two suspects in the two simultaneous terror attacks were residents of Hebron. Hebron is a city in the occupied West Bank. The police said they entered Israel illegally and are now in police custody. 

Hamas weighed in on the attacks, describing them as a "natural response to the occupation’s massacres and its continued aggression against our Palestinian people.”

That's it, suggesting a link between Hamas and the terrorists, well actually more than suggesting

Hamas praises deadly attacks in central Israel

Correction: An earlier version of this post reported Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks. The group praised the attacks but did not directly claim responsibility for them.



Aljazeera instead looks for reasons behind the attack

Relatives of Raanana attack suspect died in Israeli prisons

We are hearing reports from locals in the occupied West Bank that the suspects in the Raanana attack had cousins who died in Israeli prisons in the early 2000s. It’s hard to know what the details were, but in recent months, we’ve been seeing the numbers of those Palestinians declared dead by the Israeli authorities inside Israeli prisons increase.

Now, Israeli forces are likely to raid the village of the suspect. That’s what usually happens after these kinds of attacks. They arrest the relatives of those perpetrators for a long time, for what Palestinians call collective punishment.

And the cycle continues

Israeli forces kill 30 Palestinians in West Bank so far this year: UN

The death toll includes seven children, according to the UN agency OCHA. Three children were killed by Israeli forces on Sunday, including a 14-year-old Palestinian in Ein el-Sultan refugee camp in Jericho and two 17-year-old boys near the Beit El settlement in the al-Bireh area outside Ramallah.

Last year, Israeli forces killed 507 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the largest annual death toll since OCHA started recording casualties in 2005.

We're only 2 weeks into the new year...




And Hezbollah and Syria only makes it easier for Israel to allocate more money for the Gaza war.

Israel’s cabinet passes amended budget, adds $15bn for Gaza war

Israel’s cabinet has passed an amended 2024 state budget, adding 55 billion shekels ($15bn) of extra spending in light of the Gaza war, according to the Ministry of Finance. The measure passed after ministerial opposition to across-the-board budget cuts.

“This is the war budget, which also takes care of the needs of our reservists, their families, the self-employed and government ministries and the needs of the public,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said before the vote.

“We are increasing the health budget and adding a billion shekels [$270m] to it for mental health, an important need. There are increases to the education budget, the welfare budget, the internal security budget, but most importantly, the defence budget, which is simply essential for victory and for our future,” he added.

Netanyahu has been hammering on about the 80K displaced people in the North and wanting a safe zone between Israel and Lebanon

https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-on-lebanon-border-well-restore-security-preferably-without-a-widespread-campaign/


The problem is, it's bolstering Netanyahu's conviction that he's doing the right thing. They're all out to get us, we need to destroy Hamas completely. We're not dealing with a sane person here. It's the same with Putin, The more push back, the more fuel he has to declare everyone else against them so he can claim he's doing the right thing for Russia. Plus he needs the conflict to grow and go on so he can stay in power. War cabinet done, Netanyahu is out and back facing corruption charges next to having to face up to all the failures that made Oct 7 possible, as well as all that went wrong on Oct 7. Escalation is in Netanyahu's interest.

As always, more violence doesn't solve violence. Hezbollah isn't sending troop carriers to Gaza to defend towns against the IDF, nor sending weapons and equipment like the West does for the Ukraine. They're only helping Israel's war cabinet to stay in power.

And indeed the US doesn't want a bigger conflict, which is why they will not stop supporting Israel. Because Israel is still the cheaper option to keep Hezbollah and Syria deterred from escalating further than having to send their own troops there.

Although the US is now sending more troops to maintain the status quo

US to send 1,500 soldiers to Iraq, Syria amid regional standoff

The United States is sending 1,500 troops to Iraq and Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIL (ISIS), even as its regional standoff with Iran-aligned groups in those countries is rapidly heating up. A report by US outlet CBS News showed soldiers from the New Jersey Army National Guard being celebrated and honoured by New Jersey state Governor Phil Murphy before their deployment, which is reportedly their largest since 2008.

The soldiers will first head to Fort Bliss in Texas for training before going to the Middle East. This is happening while US-opposed forces in Iraq and Syria have targeted US bases at least 130 times since the start of the war in Gaza. The government of Syria considers US forces to be an “occupying” force, and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said last week that he wants a “quick” exit of US forces.

Iran just attacked a Mossad headquarters in Iraq

Iran going ‘a step further’ with Erbil attack (Capital of the Kurdistan region in Northern Iraq)

The attacks are separate, one is in Syria and the other is in Iraq. But the Iranians issued statements claiming responsibility for both of them.

As for the attack in Erbil, they’re saying they targeted a Mossad headquarters – Mossad is the Israeli intelligence service. The Iranians claim the Israelis are responsible for the killing of an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] general in Syria and also some other commanders of the regional “resistance axis”, as Iran describes its allies.

The context is very important here, given that there is already a war raging in the region. Iran has been trying as much as possible to distance itself from any kind of tension. This is the first time we have seen the Iranians going a step further, especially when they are claiming to have targeted a Mossad headquarters in Erbil. This isn’t the first time that the Iranians are claiming to have hit what they claim to be this specific headquarters – it also happened in 2022.

It is clear this is an escalation. Iran proxy forces in the region have been operating against Iran’s enemies. Those proxies would claim responsibility for the attacks, either in Iraq or in Syria or elsewhere in the region. But now, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is claiming responsibility for the attack.

This is all part of the spillover of the conflict in Gaza. Because these Iran-aligned armed groups, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, blame the United States for, as they say, standing as a major supporter of Israel’s war on Gaza. They are now demanding not only to stop supporting Israel [in] its war in Gaza but the removal of all foreign troops from Iraq including coalition and US troops.

Iran also claims attack on ISIL in Syria

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said that missile attacks had been launched against the “perpetrators of terrorist operations in the Islamic Republic. Particularly ISIL [ISIS]” in Syria, state media reported.

“The Guards identified and destroyed gathering places of their commanders and key elements with a series of ballistic missiles in response to the recent terrorist atrocities in Iran,” the statement said.

ISIL (ISIS) claimed responsibility for an attack in Iran’s southeastern city of Kerman earlier this month, which killed nearly 100 people.

 

It's a fucking mess and the whole region is escalating. However instead of going for the root of the problem, the genocide in Gaza stoking up tensions across the Middle East, the US and western media use the escalation as reasons to be there and for distraction theater. Turning it into a fight of us against them, stoking up Islamophobia to distract away from what's really been happening.

Sadly despite Hezbollah and the Houthis having good intentions towards the people of Gaza, Western media simply paints them as further scare mongering and supporters of terrorism.