Trump & Israel Panic; Iran Adds To Their Hormuz Leverage

Trump's Warmongering EXPLODES; Iran Return Strike A US NIGHTMARE

Trump thought he was sending Iran a message; The reply came back with a new return address courtesy of Kuwait. Right, so Iran has fired a missile at an American air base in Kuwait, and the worst part of that sentence, for Trump anyway, isn't the Iranian bit. It's the American bit. Because it's the United States military itself, through Central Command, the lot who run every American operation across the Middle East, that has come out and said Kuwait got hit, and called it an egregious ceasefire violation, very much forgetting they hit Bandar Abbas just the other day – that was the ceasefire violation or are they all getting as addled as the citrus skinned commander in chief they all follow? Well, a US official went further and said it was American forces in Kuwait that were the suspected target. So no, this isn't Tehran shouting into a microphone while Washington has a little chuckle. This is Washington itself confirming that the place where America parks its soldiers in the Gulf has just been hit, hours after Donald Trump's own forces went and struck inside Iran. And the man who's spent months telling everyone he's got Iran boxed in, that the pressure's working, that the deal's nearly done, has just watched one of his own base once again become the thing on the receiving end. And of course Iran, put a little bit of video out all about this, just to hammer the point home [CLIP] So leet me lay out who did what here, because the order matters, and Trump would much rather you didn't follow it too closely, he certainly doesn’t seem to. Late Wednesday night, Washington time, US Central Command says its forces shot down five Iranian one-way attack drones near the Strait of Hormuz.

Israel Went Hunting In Lebanon - Hezbollah Found The Commanders

Hezbollah's unstoppable drones have found a new target amongst the IDF - and it's causing some proper panic. Right, so the officer Israel handed one of its proudest armoured brigades is lying in a hospital in Haifa with a serious head wound, and the thing that put him there cost less than a second-hand motorbike. His name is Colonel Meir Biderman. He is forty-one, he commands the 401st Armoured Brigade, and on a Wednesday morning in southern Lebanon a Hezbollah drone struck him in the head. He was hit on the exact stretch of ground Benjamin Netanyahu keeps telling Israelis his army has under control. Not a missile. Not an ambush by some crack unit out of a film. A small flying machine, a bit of explosive, and a thread of glass that Israel's air defences cannot see, cannot jam and cannot stop. That is the weak spot, and it is a humiliating one. The most advanced air-defence shield in the region, walked straight past by a toy. Netanyahu sold this whole campaign as clean dominance: march into Lebanon, hunt Hezbollah down, make the north safe, come home the winner. It has reached the point where an army that bills itself as the most advanced in the world cannot keep its own brigade commanders alive on the ground it claims to own. Israel went into Lebanon as the hunter. Somewhere in those villages, the hunting quietly started going the other way.

Trump’s Gaza Peace Prize Fantasy Just Blew Up In His Face

The sham that is Trump's Board of Peace has come to a head with the announcement it's broke - so where did all the billions paid go? Right, so Donald Trump's grand Gaza peace machine has just been caught with nothing in the till. The official fund set up to rebuild Gaza, the one administered by the World Bank, endorsed by the United Nations, the one he stood up in January with all the fanfare of a man unveiling a new wing of a casino, that fund has taken in exactly zero dollars from donors. Not a slow start. Not a trickle. Zero. Four months in, with member states having pledged around seven billion dollars between them, Tony Blair involved as well as if it didn’t stink enough already and Trump personally promising another ten billion of American money on top, the public account that's meant to be holding all of it reads nil. And while that pot sits there empty, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister whose forces did the flattening in the first place, has stood up at a conference in a West Bank settlement and ordered his army to go and take seventy per cent of Gaza. So that's your peace deal, isn't it. An empty rebuilding fund, and a fresh order to seize more of the rubble it was supposed to rebuild. [CLIP] The audience there for the record was urging Netanyahu to push on from 60% to 100%. But this is the part Trump can't wave away, because it's where an embarrassing headline turns into something a lot dirtier.

TRUMP Just Made a HUGE Mistake with Iran!

Sheer lunacy from Trump as his Iran deal continues to implode, now threatening to bomb the mediators on camera! Right, so Trump did not threaten Iran last week. He threatened Oman. That is the tell. Not the bluster, not the sanctions announcement, not the press conference posturing, but the specific, deranged choice of target. When the man who spent months selling himself as the dealmaker who was going to force Tehran to its knees ends up pointing his finger at the Gulf state that has been quietly shuttling messages between Washington and the Iranians, something has gone badly wrong inside the deal, badly enough that he could not keep his fears off camera. So Oman, now apparently going from mediator to potential target according to the tangerine tyrant because there’s no pause in the middle apparently. Bit extreme isn’t it? Oman is a small, wealthy sultanate on the southeastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that shares a coastline with the Strait of Hormuz, and it has maintained a carefully neutral diplomatic position for decades that makes it useful to everyone and threatening to nobody, which you would think is exactly what you want from the country running your back channel when you are trying to close a deal. It has been the go-between for Iran and the United States for years, most notably during the talks that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. The JCPOA. In this round, following the US-Israeli military assault on Iran, Oman is at the centre of the mediation process again, the channel Washington needs functioning if any agreement is going to land. But of course as you’ve just seen, Trump was asked about reports of an Iran-Oman shipping framework being negotiated for the strait, and rather than deny it or wave it away, he said Oman would "behave" or the United States would "have to blow them up."

Israel's Secret Mosque Plan Just Leaked; But They Forgot About The Guards

Israel’s secret mosque theft plot has leaked, and the one thing they forgot could wreck the whole plan before it even starts. Right, so this past Eid al-Fitr, Israel did something it hadn't done since 1967. It shut Palestinians out of the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque altogether. Barricaded gates, the Old City sealed, worshippers down on prayer mats in the open road outside the walls because they couldn't reach the third-holiest site in Islam on one of the holiest mornings of their year. That was of course back in March. Middle East Eye reported it, Al Jazeera reported it, many other outlets reported it and the official reason given was the "security situation" during the US-Israeli war on Iran. Now hang onto that notion for a minute, because the story being sold now is that all of this is just access and management. It isn't. Sitting above the gates is a reported plan most of those worshippers have never heard of, and the people drawing it up would much rather you kept staring at the checkpoints to gain access than at what they've got on paper in the here and now.