Militants fire rockets from Gaza, Israeli strikes
Hamas sent a heavy barrage of rockets deep into Israel on Thursday as Israel pounded Gaza with more airstrikes and called up 9,000 more reservists. (May 13)
Israel has rebuffed any discussions of a ceasefire and vowed to continue airstrikes, which have leveled buildings and killed dozens - including kids.
GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Palestinian militants fired more rockets into Israel's commercial heartland on Thursday as Israel kept up a punishing bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip and massed tanks and troops on the enclave's border. Four days of cross-border fighting showed no sign of abating, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the campaign "will take more time". Israeli officials said Gaza's ruling Hamas group must be dealt a strong deterring blow before any ceasefire.
Unrest in recent days has seen rockets fired from Gaza while Israeli forces have bombarded the territory with air strikes.
Palestinians in Gaza marked Eid sombrely on Thursday as Israeli air strikes pounded the besieged coastal enclave for the fourth day. As Muslims worldwide began celebrating Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival concluding the fasting month of Ramadan, Palestinian militants continued firing rockets deep into Israel – over 1,600 so far, according to the Israelis. For many families in Gaza there was none of the usual shopping for new clothes and few family feasts to celebrate Eid, normally a festive event on a par with Christmas. “There is no Eid today,” said Ahed Mortaja, a 52-year-old shopkeeper who was forgoing his customary early morning Eid trip to the mosque with his sons for prayers. “Ramadan ended this year but we are just staying home to watch the news, hoping to hear about a ceasefire,” he said. In the absence of air raid shelters, many families huddled in corridors, away from windows, which were left ajar to prevent shockwaves shattering the glass.
Israel has killed a string of senior Hamas military figures and pounded three multistory towers as it hammers the Gaza Strip with airstrikes. Meanwhile, militants in the territory fired barrages of rockets Wednesday. (May 12)
ANAS BABA/AFP via Getty ImagesHospitals in the Gaza Strip were suffocated long before the most recent round of bombardment by Israeli forces. But now, health-care officials are faced with the impossible task of tending to the mounting number of citizens wounded in relentless attacks on the strip.On top of the COVID-19 crisis that killed almost 1,000 and infected up to 100,000 residents of the enclave, health-care workers in Gaza are tasked with caring for the roughly 500 that have been injured in a barrage of airstrikes on the strip over the past few days.“The situation here is very difficult, I can’t describe the horror in words,” a worker for the Red Crescent in Gaza told Haaretz on Thursday.Israeli Strikes Have Razed 21 Media Outlets in Gaza This Week, Says Non-ProfitGaza’s healthcare system has long been plagued with shortages of medical supplies, doctors, and electricity, as well as a crumbling infrastructure. The pandemic was particularly hard on Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents, with researchers saying that infection rates are vastly underreported and that Israel’s siege of the enclave had exacerbated the COVID crisis even further.“Israel’s blockade has devastated the economy in Gaza,” one researcher from European University Institute in Florence told Al-Jazeera in February. “And this is having a major impact on the ability of people to comply with lockdown measures when doing so means losing their already limited sources of income.”Adding to the COVID crisis in Gaza is a lagging vaccination rate. Although Israel’s vaccine campaign was one of the most successful in the world, less than 1 percent of Palestinians have been fully vaccinated. Israeli officials have faced a barrage of criticism for failing to extend their vaccine efforts to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.The current violence sweeping the region, with Israeli airstrikes pummeling building after building—and the Hamas militant group firing hundreds of rockets back at Israel—has killed at least 83 Gazans, including 17 children. On the Israeli side, five civilians have died.Bibi Vows Hamas Will Pay ‘Very Heavy Price’ for Rocket FireAccording to local news outlets, Gaza doctors are reporting dire shortages in blood supplies and hospital beds.“There is no possibility of establishing coronavirus wards, there is full occupancy of hospital beds, and I’m afraid they’ll have to evacuate or release these patients to provide urgent treatment for the wounded,” a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights told Haaretz. “Treating the wounded will overburden the medical system, and the system for treating COVID-19 patients is also likely to reach the point of collapse.”The influx of patients doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Thursday that the enclave will see “many, many more targets” hit in the days to come. Meanwhile, Gaza’s hospitals continue to struggle with the now double burden of devastating pandemic and a seemingly endless stream of wounded citizens.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
Instagram has removed posts naming the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem after mistakenly associating it with a terrorist organisation, according to a leaked company message. Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in the message that “al-Aqsa” is often “included in the names of several restricted organisations”. No organisations were directly named in the internal memo, but Aqsa Martyrs Brigade has been classified as a terrorist body by the US State Department. Numerous other organisations including “al-Aqsa” in their name and have been sanctioned. It has added another point of tension during one of the worst spasms of communal violence Israel has seen in years - and comes as the Israeli military is drawing up plans to invade Gaza, while a fresh wave of riots led to 400 arrests overnight. “I want to apologise for the frustration these mistakes have caused,” a Facebook employee said, admitting that content had been removed accidentally, in a memo shared with the New York Times. The employee, who works on the issue of “dangerous organisations” said the company understands the “vital importance” of the mosque to Palestinians and Muslims.
Civil unrest between Jews and Arabs in Israel dealt a strong blow on Thursday to efforts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main political rival Yair Lapid to form a new government and unseat the Israeli leader. Naftali Bennett, head of the ultranationalist Yamina party and a kingmaker after an inconclusive March 23 parliamentary election, said he was abandoning coalition talks with Lapid, the opposition leader, preferring a wider unity government. Lapid, who heads the centrist Yesh Atid party, has three weeks left in a 28-day mandate from Israel's president to try to form a governing coalition.
As tit-for-tat bombing by Israel's military and Palestinian militants in Gaza takes a mounting toll, violence is also flaring up in Israeli cities in a way that's new, and worrying.
Violence between Jews and Arabs in Israel comes amid clashes between Israel and Hamas, which have destroyed buildings and killed dozens.
The Army wants payloads that keep Gray Eagle unmanned aircraft systems relevant to the future fight.
The Air Force is thinking about what it's future fighter fleet will look like, and it looks like it doesn't include the F-22.
Iran's foreign minister said Wednesday that his country is ready for closer ties with regional rival Saudi Arabia, adding that he hoped recent talks between the two sides would lead to greater stability in the region. Mohammad Javad Zarif was speaking in Damascus after a meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad. Baghdad recently confirmed it hosted Iraq-mediated talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia last month.
The U.S. and NATO military withdrawal may still be in its early phases, but the finger-pointing over who will be to blame for losing Afghanistan has already begun.
Israel's president warned of a civil war between the country's Arabs and Jews on Wednesday as fury and fear over shelling exchanges with Palestinian militants in Gaza ignited violence in Israel's streets. Appeals by religious and political leaders for calm, and police reinforcements and mass-arrests, appeared to do little to stem riots in several ethnically mixed towns. The strife was touched off by sometimes violent pro-Palestinian protests by members of the Arab minority incensed at an Israeli air barrage launched on Gaza on Monday after Islamist Hamas-led militants fired salvoes of rockets across the border.
Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis wants the U.S. government to make blockchain a priority.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations called on the U.N. Security Council to condemn the latest attacks from Gaza and support Israel's right to defend itself. More than 70 people have died in the recent violence in the region. CBS News Radio correspondent Robert Berger joins CBSN's Tanya Rivero from Jerusalem with the latest.
US public opinion seems to be swinging in support of Palestinian rights, but it must go further to begin real change People in Washington DC protest Israeli attacks on Palestinians. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images The headlines speak mainly of “clashes”, “conflict”, and “casualties on both sides”. The politicians recite bromides about Israel’s “right to defend itself”– a right that Palestinians seemingly do not have. The US government calls for “all parties to deescalate”, with no acknowledgment that it is US funds – $3.8bn a year – that, in part, make Israel’s bombardment of Gaza possible. This is the familiar American routine when Israel goes to war. Yet before Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rockets came to dominate the news, what happened over the last week in Jerusalem was perhaps the most substantial Palestinian mass uprising in the city since 2017 – when Palestinian demonstrations led Israeli police to abandon their attempt to install metal detectors at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. Then, as now, it was an uprising centered in Jerusalem but about much more. And though US public attention has been diverted, the Jerusalem uprising is still ongoing. That is important not to forget. It was not a coincidence that the uprising began in Jerusalem. Occupied East Jerusalem exemplifies in miniature the Israeli government’s endeavor to secure “maximum territory, minimum Arabs”, as David Ben-Gurion saw the goals of the Zionist movement. Israel has pursued this goal in East Jerusalem – which it occupied in 1967 and formally annexed in 1980 – by making it nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain permits to build homes, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to displacement and their homes slated for demolition. East Jerusalemites, who are not citizens of Israel but legal residents, face stringent residency requirements that make their legal status precarious. The Israeli government has also empowered Jewish settlers to seize properties inside Palestinian neighborhoods such as Silwan, Abu Dis, a-Tur, and Sheikh Jarrah – part of an explicit strategy to “Judaize” the eastern part of the city. Israeli officials are increasingly bold about telegraphing these goals to the global public. “This is a Jewish country,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, British-born deputy mayor of Jerusalem, to the New York Times, “[o]f course there are laws that some people may consider as favoring Jews – it’s a Jewish state.” But if Israeli officials are open about the discriminatory logic at Zionism’s core, most US politicians continue to deny it. Indeed, that discriminatory logic is on full display especially in Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where Israeli settlers are trying to evict several Palestinian families from their houses. These eight families, who fled their original homes during the war of 1948, have lived in the neighborhood for more than half a century. Now, Israeli settler organizations – funded significantly by American Jewish donors – are claiming that because such homes were once owned by Jewish groups, the Palestinian families must be forced out. Yet no reciprocal right exists for Palestinians seeking restitution for properties they left behind during the Nakba, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes during the 1948 war. Under Israel’s Absentee Property Law, the property of Palestinian refugees is controlled by the Israeli state. The ongoing Israeli efforts to cleanse Jerusalem of a Palestinian presence, particularly in Sheikh Jarrah provided the spark for the latest uprising. But it was not only in Sheikh Jarrah where Palestinians have also resisted other Israeli efforts to excise them from the city landscape. After Israeli forces set up barricades at the Damascus Gate esplanade – a popular place for Palestinians to gather, especially during Ramadan, and a main point of access to Jerusalem’s Old City – successive nights of largely youth-led demonstrations eventually led the Israeli police to remove the metal gates (though not before Israeli police allowed far-right Jewish extremists to march through the streets of Jerusalem chanting, “Death to Arabs!”). Like in 2017, Palestinian access to the Al Aqsa Mosque has also been a focal point of the protests. Over the past week and a half, Israeli police have repeatedly stormed the Haram al-Sherif/Temple Mount complex, firing rubber-coated bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades at Muslim worshipers: videos on social media show Israeli forces shooting flashbangs and less-lethal rounds directly at people praying. Israeli police violence has injured several hundred people during these nightly raids, which have also taken place on some of the holiest nights of Ramadan. Elsewhere in East Jerusalem, Israeli police have soaked the streets and buildings with foul-smelling “Skunk” water, a chemical crowd dispersal tool. And under the tolerant eye of the Israeli police, Jewish settlers and far-right activists have attacked Palestinian protesters, going so far as to open fire on them with live ammunition. It was the repeated Israeli police incursions into the Al Aqsa Mosque, combined with rising settler violence in Sheikh Jarrah and other East Jerusalem neighborhoods, that prompted a response from Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders had already warned that they would respond to continued Israeli violence in Jerusalem with violence of their own. On Monday, Hamas’s armed wing issued an ultimatum: Israeli forces must leave the Al Aqsa Mosque and Sheikh Jarrah or face the consequences. Seemingly underestimating Hamas’s seriousness or military capacity, the Israeli government chose the latter. To be sure, there was no small degree of opportunism on the part of Hamas here. In early April, the Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas announced that the legislative elections planned for 22 May would be delayed indefinitely. With the factions of Abbas’s Fatah badly split, Hamas was likely to have a strong showing. By taking up the mantle of defending Al Aqsa, Hamas’s leadership may have sought a show of leadership that might have otherwise been achieved through electoral means. But the Jerusalem uprising was not Hamas’s doing. It was led by young east Jerusalemites, many of them born after the Oslo Accords were signed. And their demonstrations were successful. Before the skies darkened further, the Palestinian protests had not only led Israeli police to remove the barricades near the Damascus Gate; at the request of Israel’s attorney general, Israel’s high court postponed a hearing on the eviction of the families from Sheikh Jarrah, and Israeli police blocked the inflammatory, ultranationalist “March of Flags” from passing through Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem’s Old City. “The Jerusalem uprising had no Hamas or Fatah leadership,” tweeted Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah. “Both groups want to capitalize on it and gain some popularity, knowing that their actions will hurt those they claim to want to help most.” If there is any reason for hope, it is that public opinion in the US seems to be swinging, belatedly, in support of Palestinian rights. For the time being, such a position is hardly represented in the halls of US power. Only a handful of Democratic members of Congress have issued statements condemning Israel’s attempts to displace the Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah. But US politicians, and Democrats in particular, will not be able to ignore the calls to halt US military assistance to Israel forever. Of course, the US halting such support to Israel cannot alone end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the siege on Gaza. It is, however, a place to start. Joshua Leifer is Assistant Editor at Jewish Currents
(Bloomberg) -- Iron ore’s stunning surge won’t fade anytime soon because buyers remain nervous about being caught short as global demand accelerates amid lingering supply threats, according to a veteran commodities trader.The steelmaking material soared past $230 a ton Wednesday to a fresh record for Singapore futures, amid a broadening commodities boom. While steel demand and production are strengthening, many analysts argue market fundamentals alone don’t justify such high prices. That won’t halt further gains, according to Andrew Glass, Singapore-based founder of Avatar Commodities Ltd.“Logic dictates that these are ridiculous prices but fear will continue to keep the scramble going,” said Glass, a former head of ferrous trading at mining major Anglo American Plc, who has traded commodities since the 1990s. “There is fear of not being able to secure the logistics and the resources you need -- $220 is expensive, but it’s much more expensive if you have to shut down a mill because you can’t get material.”Industrial commodities and shipping costs are spiking as buyers hurry to secure raw materials with global industries from manufacturing to construction gearing up again as the pandemic fades. That adds to strong demand from China, where elevated steel margins are providing support for high iron ore prices. They could test $250 in the coming 12-18 months, according to Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.China’s steel and iron ore futures also jumped to record highs Wednesday. The nation’s steelmakers are ramping up production in defiance of government attempts to rein in output to control the industry’s carbon emissions, while robust profit margins are enabling mills to better accommodate surging input costs.Amazing MotivatorIron ore is “grossly overpriced at the moment, but fear is an amazing motivator and prices are a reflection of fear,” Glass said. “You’re seeing fear more broadly with gold prices up, the dollar down, there is a flight to safety, and there is a certain amount of fear feeding into commodities markets.”China relies on just two countries -- Brazil and Australia -- for 80% of its iron ore imports. Brazil is grappling with a deadly surge of the coronavirus, and there are global concerns about the Covid-19 variant that’s overwhelming India. Separately, China’s fraying ties with Australia have added another element of risk to the market.“From Brazil, those boats are 40 days away,” Glass said. “So any more problems in Brazil because of the virus, you better make sure you are well-covered. And if politics between Australia and China does get to the point of creating a problem with Australian supply, and there is a Brazil issue too, then security of supply becomes very, very important.”Iron ore in Singapore rose as much as 5.7% to reach a record $233.55 a ton and traded at $232.20 at 2:25 p.m. local time. Iron ore on China’s Dalian exchange and steel rebar in Shanghai also both advanced to fresh all-time highs.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
The U.S. special envoy for Central America met El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, during a visit to reiterate that Washington considers the recent removal of top judges and the attorney general to be unconstitutional. Ricardo Zuniga, the special envoy for Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, said he had a "cordial meeting" with Bukele on Tuesday after seeing senior congressional lawmakers. "Our point of view is that the decision of May 1 was not in accordance with the law, nor with the constitution, nor with the legal procedure of the constitution," Zuniga said in a news conference in San Salvador, the capital.