Starmer’s Palestine Crackdown Just Blew Up In His Face

Belfast Homes Burned. Britain Could Be Next

Right, so this is Belfast, this is where the far right is attacking homes, looking for black and brown people, homes getting torched, cars getting burned out, families looking at the remains of homes they had nothing to do with losing. A pogrom triggered off the back of a serious attack, a knife attack, with the suspect having been charged and remanded in custody, all now being weaponised by this bunch of absolute lunatics as an excuse to go after anyone who looks the same in their fevered minds. They don’t care about the facts being settled, they don’t care if kids are scared by bricks going through windows, they don’t give a stuff about evidence, or courts, or charges or due process, they don’t care about a conviction, all these rancid creatures care about is using a horrific incident as licence to commit atrocity in the name of keeping their area safe. A burning building, a burning bus, safe is it? At least that is what these knuckle-dragging racists will claim. They don’t care about facts, they don’t care about the family affected, they just want another suspect, just coming from the same background will do. In point of fact, they don’t even actually care if they get it right.

IDF Get Shown Up Hilariously - And It Took Just One Man!

Right, so Israel built itself a buffer zone in Lebanon to tell the north that the danger had been pushed away, and then the Israeli army had to announce that one armed man crossed from Lebanon near Ramim Ridge and breached the border. That's the event with the military varnish scraped off. One man. Israel called him a terrorist, public reporting says it was unclear whether he was even affiliated with Hezbollah, though there are reports he was dressed in a Hezbollah gear so caveats there and the same reporting says this was the first crossing of its kind from Lebanon in this round of fighting. The IDF border gets beaten by one man and that’s the real embarrassment here isn't it? [CLIP] Israel built a security line, sold it as protection, occupied ground in southern Lebanon to make it real, and the thing now sitting in front of it is one armed man getting through the very line that existed to keep exactly that image off Israeli screens. Regional reporting has also alleged that Israeli military media treated the incident as an operational failure, which is something of an understatement if one guy can breach your perimeter – imagine what two could do? And that nearby northern communities were told to stay indoors while the searches went on, lockdowns as that footage there made clear. The Israel Defence Forces, or Israeli Occupation Forces if you prefer, many do, the name doesn’t matter to me, it’s the most amoral army in the world and in my view that’s all they deserve to be called, has spent months trying to turn southern Lebanon into a controlled space, the Gazafication of Lebanon and Israel's government calls that control security, because they always call it that don’t they? Anything but occupation, especially when that occupation is being sold to their own population as protection rather than to the people living under it as force. Taken a knock now though hasn’t it? Israel's deranged Defence Minister Israel Katz has spoken of retaining a security zone in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is removed as a threat, but given Israel were already there before, firing on Lebanon through a ceasefire and all whilst Hezbollah spent more than a year giving their government a chance to fix this, it’s a hard pill for any observer to swallow that that is remotely true. Hezbollah sits at the centre of a very simple sales pitch to northern Israeli communities: the army goes forward, the danger moves back, and you can breathe again. That's the bargain Netanyahu's government has been offering. Benjamin Netanyahu gets to present force inside Lebanon as a shield for the north, Katz gets to dress the occupation up as a security necessity, and the Israeli military gets to play line manager here. But the trouble with building your politics around a line, though, is that the line becomes a test. Every breach after that belongs to the people who swore the line was enough and when just one man showed he was capable of doing just that, it hits that much harder.

Trump Struck Iran… Then Panic Took Over

Right, so the tangerine toddler Donald Trump has managed the rather impressive feat of taking a helicopter incident near the Strait of Hormuz, using it as his excuse to hit Iran again, so much for claiming he wanted out of this mess, and then watching US-linked bases across Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan come under fire. Trump wanted a strong response, Trump ordered strikes on Iran, and Iran answered by pushing America's regional military network straight into the firing line. Bahrain and Kuwait reported air defences active, Jordan got pulled into the same story, and the immediate official line from those states was that attacks had been intercepted or repelled, with no immediate confirmed casualties or damage. So let's get the first thing straight before anything else, because the headline is not that Trump looked tough as he would love it be. The headline is that Trump's show of strength left US positions having to defend themselves, and that's a rather different story, isn't it? Now, the Apache helicopter story. I touched on this yesterday, it was unclear why it came down at the time, but now it's the route Trump took into this latest mess, so let's deal with it properly. A US Army Apache went down near Hormuz, the two crew members were rescued, and Trump has now said Iran had shot it down. That claim is the bit he used to justify what came next, but the incident itself was nowhere near a neat, closed, settled fact when the response was being sold to everyone. The crash was under investigation, the cause was not immediately reported and if Iran had shot it down, you’d think there would have been hell up a lot sooner. Reporting around it included the possibility of a collision with an Iranian drone, with intent not cleanly established in the way Trump needed it to be for his simple war-president pose now, emphasis on the simple. He played it down at first, because of course he did, saying the pilots were fine and treating the whole thing as something short of a catastrophe, he had the Strait under control according to him didn’t he? Perhaps it was decided it was too embarrassing to blame Iran at first, but then the machinery around him turned it into a reason for strikes. So what changed? Another phone call with his boss Netanyahu maybe? We don’t know. But it’s quite the journey, that, going from not a big deal to bombing Iran on the back of an incident nobody had actually settled. There's your first problem, and it sits squarely with the man who decided uncertainty was good enough for escalation.

Netanyahu Wanted Wider War; Houthis Shatter His Containment Plans

Right, so Israel hit Beirut, Iran answered having warned them against doing just that, and now the Houthis are back on the scene. The Yemeni Armed Forces have claimed missile strikes toward Jaffa and then declared Israeli maritime navigation in the Red Sea banned, with Israeli-linked movement treated as a military target. So not only is the Strait of Hormuz now shut, so is the Bab el Mandeb Strait it seems! [CLIP] That is the cost Netanyahu now has to carry, because the war he has been widening through Lebanon, Iran and Gaza has pulled Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, the Houthis back into the fight, and the price is ships. Israeli-linked ships. Red Sea movement. A route Israel needs to look boring, safe, insured, manageable and open. Yemen has now said that route is tied to the war, tied to Israeli action elsewhere, and no longer something Israel gets to treat as separate from the fire it keeps spreading. So the question is not whether the Houthis have issued another angry statement. The question is why ships are being targeted now, and why Netanyahu’s own escalation has handed Israel one more route it cannot simply assume will stay quiet.

Iran Hammers Israel; Netanyahu Gets Trapped At Gaza’s Aid Gate

Right, so Iran fired missiles at Israel after Israel struck Beirut, and COGAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry body that controls civilian coordination and access for Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory, said crossings into Gaza would be closed until further notice as a result, including Kerem Shalom and Rafah. So Netanyahu's government took a hit from Iran, and then, right on cue, took it out on Gaza, as Gaza's humanitarian lifeline gets squeezed at the crossing. For all the language around security measures, escalation management, ceasefire pressure and humanitarian reassurance aid still has to pass, in the end, through one very simple object, that being a closed gate. Netanyahu now carries the question of whether his response contained the crisis or dragged another live wire into it, and he comes out of it looking less like a man controlling escalation and more like a man reaching, again, for the one lever he can still pull whenever the bigger war starts getting away from him. COGAT sits under Israel's Defence Ministry and helps control how Gaza is managed from the outside, the crossings, the permits, the coordination, the practical routes through which people, goods and aid can move or be blocked. So when COGAT says crossings are closed, that is not background noise, it is Israel's control system saying out loud which part of Gaza's life support is being tightened. Kerem Shalom is one of the main cargo crossings used for aid and goods into Gaza. Rafah is the crossing tied to the Egypt-Gaza border, and in political terms it has become one of the words that means whether Gaza has any exit at all, any relief, any route that is not run through Israeli permission. Once those names turn up in the same sentence as "closed until further notice", the story has already moved well past the missile exchange and into who can Israel punch down on after getting their backsides handed to them and of course the answer is always those who can fight back the least.