The „Committee for the Evaluation of the Defense Establishment Budget and the Balance of Power“ is led by former National Security Council head Yaakov Nagel, and is often referred to in Hebrew media as the Nagel Commission or Nagel Committee.
The commission was established in 2023 before the outbreak of the war, to create recommendations for the defense ministry regarding the possible areas of conflict facing Israel in the years ahead.
The Nagel Committee issued a report on Monday detailing the defence budget and security strategy, where they raised concerns over Turkey’s aspirations and possible future tensions with Israel, according to Israeli media.
The committee said these tensions could escalate into conflict and highlighted the risk of Syrian factions aligning with Turkey and creating further threats to Israel‘s „security“.
(January 3. 2025)
Although the majority of high-ranking officials in the HTS-led administration refrain from making categorical claims about Israel, they constantly stress that Iran and Hezbollah, not Israel, are Syria’s main enemies.
(…)
Ayman Al-Asimi, a senior member of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) and former spokesperson for the Syrian opposition delegations during the Astana talks, made headlines with his remarks to BBC Arabic. He stated unequivocally that Syria’s only opponent is Iran.
(December 12, 2024)
In 2003, he went to Iraq to fight against American forces. After three years of war, he was captured by the U.S. military and spent over five years in prison, including a stint at the notorious Abu Ghraib torture center.
While in Iraq, Jolani fought with ISIS and was even a deputy to its founder. Immediately upon release in 2011, ISIS sent him to Syria with a rumored $1 billion to found the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda and participate in the armed protest movement against Assad that arose out of the Arab Spring.
Baerbock and her French counterpart Jean-Noel Barrot visited Syria in a sign of support for the transitional government, where they expressed willingness to help the war-torn country after Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled last month, making them the first European officials to do so.
Syria‘s new de facto ruler and leader of the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) received an EU delegation led by German Foreign Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot on Friday.
Syrian sources told Reuters that the foreign fighters appointed to the military include Uyghurs, a Jordanian, a Turk, and an Albanian. “This is a small token of recognition for the sacrifices Islamist jihadists gave to our struggle for freedom from Assad’s oppression,” an HTS source told the media outlet.
(…)
HTS is still designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization, but the Biden administration has celebrated its takeover of Syria. The US has also made clear it’s willing to work with the new government and its de facto leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who has been going by his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa.
(December 17, 2024)
Rosemary DiCarlo briefed the Security Council on developments surrounding the 2015 accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and implementation of Council resolution 2231 (2015) which endorsed it.
The JCPOA set out rigorous mechanisms for monitoring restrictions placed on Iran’s nuclear programme, while paving the way for lifting sanctions against the country.
It was signed between Iran and the Council’s five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – plus Germany and the European Union. The US withdrew in May 2018 under the Trump administration.
(December 17, 2024)
Saudi Arabia has the characteristics of a nuclear hedger: a state that lays the groundwork for the active pursuit of nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia has stated the conditions under which it would pursue nuclear weapons. It already possesses dual-capable delivery systems and seeks reactors to produce weapons-grade uranium. Its inability to enrich nuclear material alone prevents Saudi Arabia from gaining nuclear latency that it can rapidly convert into nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is best categorized as an insurance hedger that seeks to reduce the time needed to build a bomb. Regardless of the categorization of Saudi Arabia’s hedging, its interest in nuclear weapons has entered a new, acute stage.
The Pentagon said on Monday that the US has more troops deployed in Iraq than it has been disclosing, an admission that comes after it revealed there are significantly more US troops in Syria than the US has said.
May the sound of arms be silenced in war-torn Ukraine! May there be the boldness needed to open the door to negotiation and to gestures of dialogue and encounter, in order to achieve a just and lasting peace.
May the sound of arms be silenced in the Middle East! In contemplating the Crib of Bethlehem, I think of the Christian communities in Palestine and in Israel, particularly the dear community in Gaza, where the humanitarian situation is extremely grave. May there be a ceasefire, may the hostages be released and aid be given to the people worn out by hunger and by war. I express my closeness to the Christian community in Lebanon, especially in the south, and to that of Syria, at this most delicate time. May the doors of dialogue and peace be flung open throughout the region, devastated by conflict. Here I also think of the Libyan people and encourage them to seek solutions that enable national reconciliation.
(December 19, 2024)
“They did not tell us how it would happen,” Bashar al-Mashadani, an RCA commander, told The Telegraph. “We were just told: ‘Everything is about to change. This is your moment. Either Assad will fall, or you will fall.’ But they did not say when or where, they just told us to be ready.”
In October, the US brought several other Sunni Muslim militias under the command of the RCA, swelling the force from 800 fighters to about 3,000. All of the fighters are armed by the US, and the US pays their salaries of $400 per month.
(December 18, 2024)
RCA fighters who captured the Russian-controlled Syrian air base on the outskirts of the town last week said they had been told to prepare for Assad’s possible fall in early November, nearly three weeks before the offensive began.
Until one month earlier, Capt Mashadani had been second-in-command of the Abu Khatab brigade. This small unit of 150 men was created by US Special Forces and trained by their British counterparts in Jordan until 2016, to hunt down Isis fighters near Deir ez-Zor, a city in eastern Syria.
Julani fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq against American soldiers during the Iraq War. He then founded al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, the al-Nusra Front. In recent years, he has attempted to soften his image by giving friendly interviews to Western journalists, often appearing in a suit and with a trimmed beard to obscure his jihadist ideology.
Leaf said of Julani after the meeting, who is also going by Ahmad al-Sharaa, “I heard him on his priorities, which are very much rooted in getting Syria on the road to economic recovery.”
“We’ve been hearing this for some time, some very pragmatic and moderate statements on various issues, from women’s rights to protection to equal rights for all communities,” she added. “It was a good first meeting. We will judge by deeds, not just by words.”
„Als Gegenleistung für ihre Unterstützung und ihr Geld, so sagte mir der Israeli, würden die Vereinigten Staaten der saudischen Führung ein erweitertes Verteidigungsabkommen anbieten, das Saudi-Arabien in ihren nuklearen Schutzschirm einbeziehen würde – für den Fall, dass der Iran, Israels letzter verbliebener Feind, in den Besitz einer Atombombe gelangen sollte. “
(…)
„Der Israeli sagte mir, dass das saudische Paket einen zusätzlichen Anreiz enthält: Die Saudis würden wegschauen, wenn die Israelis Bombenangriffe durchführen, einschließlich der Bombardierung militärischer Ziele im zerrissenen Syrien, und würden Israel Zugang zu einem Flugplatz innerhalb der saudischen Grenzen gewähren. Auf diese Weise könnten israelische Bomben, die zumeist von den Vereinigten Staaten geliefert werden, innerhalb von Minuten, nicht Stunden, auf wichtige iranische Ziele abgefeuert werden.“
(December 16, 2023)
Israeli leaders believed that Hamas was more interested in governing than fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would buy stability and peace.
Mr. Levy recalled briefing Mr. Netanyahu personally in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio.
In return for its support and money, the Israeli told me, the Saudi leadership would be offered an expanded defense treaty by the United States that would include Saudi Arabia in its nuclear umbrella—its zone of protection—in case Iran, Israel’s last standing enemy, were to acquire a nuclear bomb.
(…)
There is an added inducement in the Saudi package, the Israeli told me: the Saudis would look the other way as the Israelis conduct bombing raids, including bombing of military targets inside fractured Syria, and would give Israel access to an airfield within Saudi borders. This would bring Israeli bombs, most supplied by the United States, within minutes, and not hours, of key Iranian targets.
(December 18, 2024)
Israel and Saudi Arabia have reached a breakthrough in talks around normalising relations, Haaretz reported on Tuesday, adding that the normalisation could be related to an elusive ceasefire deal that would bring about an end to Israel‘s war on Gaza.
Sources familiar with the negotiations told Haaretz that rather than Israel agreeing to Saudi Arabia‘s demand for the recognition of a Palestinian state, the two sides agreed that Israel would give a vague commitment on a „path towards Palestinian statehood“.
The State Department said early Friday that three senior American diplomats had arrived in Damascus, the capital of Syria, to meet with leaders of the militias that have seized control of the country, and to look for signs of the journalist Austin Tice and other missing U.S. citizens.
After learning of the fluctuation in number of troops, Fox News’ Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin pressed Ryder about the correction to the number of troops and timing.
„This is more than double the number of troops that we’ve been told for quite some time. So, are we talking about this has been going on for months? For Years?“ Griffin asked. „Is this something that just happened this summer? We need a time frame.“
„Yeah, I think it would probably be fair to say at a minimum, months,“ Ryder said. „I’ll go back and look. But it’s…yeah, it’s been going on for a while.“
Since Assad’s downfall, the US, Turkey, and Israel have all been bombing Syria. On December 8, the day Assad fled, the US launched heavy airstrikes in Syria, saying it hit 75 ISIS-related targets.
US officials justify the strikes by saying they don’t want ISIS to reconstitute itself following the regime change. But on the other hand, the US has supported the HTS takeover even though the group is designated by the US as a terrorist organization and has a similar ideology to ISIS.
The US has also made clear it has no intention of withdrawing the approximately 900 troops that it has occupying eastern Syria.
Germany plans talks with representatives of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Damascus on Tuesday, the foreign ministry said, joining the United States and Britain in establishing contact with the group after it led the overthrow of Syria‘s Bashar al-Assad.
In a significant development, European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced that the bloc‘s top diplomat for Syria will head to Damascus on Monday to initiate contact with the new Syrian government.
„Using all the channels that we have available, and those are diplomatic and, of course, intelligence-led channels, we seek to deal with HTS where we have to.“
On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has had direct contact with HTS.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States was communicating directly with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the dominant rebel faction, despite its designation as a terrorist group.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed their willingness to engage with Syria‘s new leadership, following the ousting of Bashar al-Assad, under certain conditions, a statement from the German government revealed after a call between the two leaders.
The U.S. government would “recognize and fully support” a future Syrian government that results from an inclusive and transparent transition process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday, outlining a first set of principles regarding the Biden administration’s hopes to influence discussions over Syria’s future after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.
The United States army announced on Sunday that it carried out airstrikes against 75 Islamic State (ISIS) camps in Syria, to prevent the group from taking “advantage” of the recent kerfuffle in the country.
“The strikes against the ISIS leaders, operatives, and camps were conducted as part of the ongoing mission to disrupt, degrade, and defeat ISIS,” read a statement from the army’s Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees US troops in the Middle East.
President Biden: „After 13 years of civil war in Syria, more than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office, flee the country.“
As a result of the Saudi and Israeli positions, “Riyadh and Washington hope a more modest defense pact could be sealed before President Joe Biden leaves the White House in January,” according to the Saudi and western sources.
In a drive to get a wide-ranging mutual security treaty over the line earlier this year, Riyadh softened its position on Palestinian statehood, telling Washington that a public commitment from Israel to a two-state solution could be enough for the Gulf kingdom to normalise relations.
But with public anger in Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East at fever pitch over Israel‘s military actions in Gaza, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has again made recognition of Israel conditional on it taking concrete steps to create a Palestinian state, two Saudi and three Western sources said.
Der Bundestag hat das Mandat für den Einsatz deutscher Soldaten im Irak um weitere 15 Monate verlängert. Für die Fortsetzung stimmte eine deutliche Mehrheit von 539 der anwesenden Abgeordneten (Nein: 93, Enthaltung: 2), wie das Präsidium nach namentlicher Abstimmung verkündete.
In 2007, former Nato commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him: “We are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Clark added of the neoconservatives: “They wanted us to destabilise the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”
As I documented in my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washington’s post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war.
This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.
The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya.
Netanyahu has issued statements essentially calling for regime change in both Lebanon and Iran, while Israel’s boosters in the United States see in its expanding wars an opportunity to “remake” the political map of the Middle East.
(January 5, 2024)
In 1988, the Central Intelligence Agency did discover that Riyadh bought SS-2 medium-range missiles from China but only after the deal was sealed. In 2003, when China exported DF-21 ballistic missiles to the Kingdom, the CIA again found out and was even allowed to verify the missiles were not nuclear-capable, but only after the missiles were delivered.
Several years later, when intelligence finally leaked out that China secretly built missile factories for the Saudis, the Trump administration was mum on whether there was an intelligence failure and allowed speculation that it had blessed the transaction. Then, in 2020, when US intelligence confirmed China was helping the Kingdom mill uranium domestically, it did so, again only after the mining and milling were well underway.
This track record of studied inadvertence, then, brings us to the next worry: MBS wants Washington to green-light the Kingdom enriching uranium…
(March 19, 2023)
In general, the Saudis wish to present themselves as Iran’s equals, and if Iran can enrich uranium, say the Saudis, then so can we. In addition, the Saudis want to keep all their nuclear options open, even if they are not intending to work on the development of nuclear weapons immediately.
This appendix complements the letter sent to President Joseph R. Biden, Vice President Kamala D. Harris, and others on October 2, 2024 by 99 American healthcare workers who have served in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
(…)
In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its compilations in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children.
As long as aid agencies and public health experts are denied entry to Gaza the true
numbers cannot be known. However, if these estimates are accurate they will approximately match the projected estimates of 85,750 total (direct and indirect) excess deaths in Gaza by August 2024 under the epidemics and military escalation scenarios published by a joint project from Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This is the population-adjusted equivalent of 13.3 million deaths and 26.6 million injuries in the United States.
Figure 1: Direct Deaths from Violence Reported in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank
(Oct. 7, 2023 – Oct. 1, 2024)
Israeli Fatalities in Israel 1,200
Israeli Fatalities in Gaza 34
Israeli Fatalities in West Bank 339
Palestinian Fatalities in Gaza 41,615
Palestinian Fatalities in West Bank 693
Palestinians Missing/Estimated Dead Underthe Rubble 10,000
Total > 53,887
(…)
Figure 2: Estimates of Indirect Deaths in Gaza (Oct. 7, 2023 – Sept. 30, 2024)15
Estimated Deaths from Starvation 62,413
Estimated Deaths from Lack of Access to Care for Chronic Diseases 5,000
Estimated Deaths from Infectious Diseases, Maternal/Neonatal Deaths, and Others ?
Total > 67,413
Figure 1: U.S. Military Aid to Israel from October 7, 2023 to September 2024 (in millions of dollars)
Foreign Military Financing $6,8009
Missile Defense $4,500
Missile Defense (Iron Beam) $1,200
Enhancing Artillery Production $1,000
Replenishing Arms Delivered to Israel from U.S. Stocks $4,400
TOTAL $17.9 billion
Our real enemies are in Washington and London and Tel Aviv. In Berlin and Paris and Canberra. In secretive government agencies in the state of Virginia, and in imperial propaganda institutions in New York and Hollywood.
I hate when people say “Bah the middle east has always been at war, it’s just how they are.” No you asshole, it’s been at war because of western interventionism and Israel.
Madame President, Excellencies,
The raging fires in the Middle East are fast becoming an inferno.
Exactly one week ago, I briefed the Security Council about the alarming situation in Lebanon.
Since then, things have gone from bad to much, much worse….
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday reiterated his urgent call for an end to violence and a diplomatic resolution in the Middle East shortly after Israel‘s foreign minister declared that the U.N. chief was barred from entering the country, a move that drew international condemnation.
„The raging fires in the Middle East are fast becoming an inferno,“ Guterres told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, denouncing Israel‘s „relentless airstrikes across Lebanon,“ devastation of the Gaza Strip, and obstruction of a cease-fire agreement that could pull the region back from the brink of all-out war.
The Israeli military on Tuesday called on residents in more than 20 areas of southern Lebanon to evacuate, hours after saying it launched ground raids across the border.