This weekend, Israel’s war in Gaza turned six months old. It’s already left at least 33,000 people dead in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel continues to mourn not only for the 1,200 people estimated killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, but also for the 250-plus soldiers killed in Gaza since the war began. There are signs of an inflection point. On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said that its 98th commando division, which consists of special ground forces, had “concluded its mission” in southern Gaza and would leave the enclave “to recuperate and prepare for future operations.” Only one brigade would remain in southern Gaza, the IDF said, stationed upon a corridor that divides northern and southern Gaza. Concurrent with this troop drawdown, Israel has moved to open additional access points to northern Gaza that would allow more aid to flow in — in theory at least, bypassing the logistical blocks that had led to most aid ending up stuck near border crossings in southern Gaza. Israel has said it is working to increase the number of aid trucks that enter Gaza, with the IDF announcing that 468 aid trucks were “inspected and transferred to Gaza” on Tuesday — the largest single-day total since the start of the war, it said. Looming over these moves are cease-fire talks in Cairo, where Egyptian officials have spoken positively about the potential for a deal that could see some of the more than 100 remaining hostages kept by Hamas in Gaza freed in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Monday that negotiations were at a “critical point,” while Hamas said it would “review the proposals.” The shift comes amid international pressure on Israel. The country is facing its worst international backlash in decades, exacerbated by the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in an Israeli strike on April 1. The Biden administration has repeatedly called for a cease-fire and said Israel should allow more aid into Gaza to avert famine, while opposing the idea of an offensive on the southern city of Rafah, which Israel says is Hamas’s last major stronghold. President Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that he could lose U.S. support for the war unless he changes course. Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Biden suggested that Israel had not yet met the standard he called for. “We’ll see what he does in terms of meeting the commitments that he made to me,” Biden said of Netanyahu. U.S. officials are pointing to the changes in Israeli policy as a sign they are getting results. During a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers that American pressure on Israel is working. “It clearly had an effect. We have seen changes in behavior, and we have seen more humanitarian assistance being pushed into Gaza,” Austin said. “Hopefully that trend will continue.” But the strongest leverage on Israel has not been used yet. Western nations like the United States and Germany face calls to halt or limit arms sales to Israel. The two countries supplied roughly 99 percent of all arms imported to Israel from 2019 to 2023, according to an analysis published in March by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Some smaller nations have already moved to block arms exports to Israel. Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces significant domestic pressure to reach a deal that could free the remaining hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7. With no clarity on how many are dead or alive, families have faced an anguishing wait and resent their own leader as well as the captors. One Israeli familiar with the negotiations told The Post this week that Netanyahu “really does need to make a significant achievement with a deal.” The outcome of this window of change is not clear. The most important factors in the conflict remain as unresolved as ever. Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have said that destroying Hamas remains their ultimate objective, with an offensive on Rafah, a city now crowded with displaced civilians, still being planned, despite strong objections from the United States and other allies. Hamas is still operating in Gaza, where its most important leaders are in hiding, with the group pushing back on U.S. cease-fire proposals. They continue to call for a full end to the war, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. There is little evidence of a retreat. “With this pain and blood, we create hopes, a future and freedom for our people, our cause and our nation,” Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, said Wednesday in Qatar after reports that three of his sons and at least two grandchildren were killed in an Israeli strike on a car west of Gaza City. In Gaza, Palestinians now able to return home after the withdrawal of Israeli forces are finding themselves in limbo, with their old homes damaged beyond return, their new refuge unsafe. “I couldn’t recognize the place,” one Palestinian humanitarian worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters, told The Post in a phone interview Monday. “Even the streets are no longer there.” Israel remains in its own form of abeyance too, with the looming Rafah offensive hanging over it along with the lives of the remaining hostages. Analysts fear it is entering a counterinsurgency that will fail to resolve its fundamental problems in Gaza. Even while proclaiming a partial victory Wednesday, Israeli war cabinet minister and Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz seemed to admit so. “The war with Hamas will take time,” Gantz said, according to Israeli media. “Youth in middle school will one day fight in the Gaza Strip, as in Judea and Samaria, and against Lebanon.” |
| Displaced Palestinians offer Eid al-Fitr prayers in a displaced-persons camp in Rafah, Gaza. (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images) |
Palestinians visit the graves of loved one at the start of the Eid al-Fitr. (AFP via Getty Images) |
Palestinians hold Eid prayers by the ruins of al-Farouk mosque, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters) |
Palestinians in Gaza marked a somber Eid al-Fitr, the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. Eid celebrations, which is a time for charity and fellowship, and brings together families sharing food and sweets, were overshadowed around the world by the ongoing conflict. People prayed alongside the rubble of a mosque in the southern city of Rafah and vendors serving sweets such as lokma — syrup-soaked, deep-fried dough balls — in central Deir al-Balah. Mahmoud Alhamaydeh described this year’s celebration as “heartbreaking.” “Last Eid, I was surrounded by my children, looking at them with joy,” he told Reuters. “But today, I am injured, unable to move or go anywhere.” Hanaa Alsatry, a grandmother, spoke to Reuters while visiting a graveyard. “Eid today is a large wound, pain, farewell, torture,” she said. “May God give us patience on our loss.” |
A child stands amid Eid worshippers in Iraq. (Hussein Faleh/AFP via Getty Images) |
Muslims take part in Eid al-Fitr prayers in Jakarta. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images) |
| • Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wants the West’s extra, idle Patriot air defense batteries, each costing more than $1 billion. And he’s not asking nicely anymore. “Nice and quiet diplomacy didn’t work,” Kuleba told The Post in an interview this week. |
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba outside the Foreign Ministry building in Kyiv on Monday. (Oksana Parafeniuk for The Washington Post) |
• As Israel and Hamas try to hammer out a cease-fire deal, Israeli officials are seeking the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza. But they don’t actually know how many of them are alive. So far, Hamas has failed to provide Israeli negotiators with a list of the remaining hostages, raising fears that the group has lost track of them amid the war — or worse, that it might not want to reveal how many have been killed. • A new Scottish law that criminalizes the “stirring up of” hatred against some groups has triggered a debate far beyond its borders. The law makes it an imprisonable offense to incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, transgender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability. But conservative celebrities and politicians say the law threatens free speech. • China “clandestinely and deceptively” interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections, seeking to support candidates favorable to Beijing’s strategic interests, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said in a top-secret 2023 intelligence briefing. The activity was aimed at discouraging Canadians, particularly Chinese Canadians, from voting for the Conservative Party, which it viewed as having an anti-Beijing platform, it reported. Those claims are now at the center of a public inquiry happening in Ottawa. |
| By Maegan Vazquez and Mariana Alfaro | | |
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| By Amanda Ripley | The Washington Post | | |
By Graeme Wood | The Atlantic | | |
By Spencer Ackerman | The New York Times | | |
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| Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, shows Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi nuclear centrifuges during an April 2022 exhibition in Tehran. (Iranian Presidency/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) |
VIENNA — For the past 15 years, the most important clues about Iran’s nuclear program have lain deep underground, in a factory built inside a mountain on the edge of Iran’s Great Salt Desert. The facility, known as Fordow, is the heavily protected inner sanctum of Iran’s nuclear complex and a frequent destination for international inspectors whose visits are meant to ensure against any secret effort by Iran to make nuclear bombs. The inspectors’ latest trek, in February, yielded the usual matrices of readings and measurements, couched in the clinical language of a U.N. nuclear watchdog report. But within the document’s dry prose were indications of alarming change. In factory chambers that had ceased making enriched uranium under a 2015 nuclear accord, the inspectors now witnessed frenzied activity: newly installed equipment, producing enriched uranium at ever faster speeds, and an expansion underway that could soon double the plant’s output. More worryingly, Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of nuclear fuel — a kind of highly enriched uranium, just shy of weapons grade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving “deterrence,” suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a bomb if it chose. Fordow’s transformation mirrors changes seen elsewhere in the country as Iran blows past the guardrails of the Iran nuclear accord. Six years after the Trump administration’s controversial decision to withdraw from the pact, the restraints have fallen away, one by one, leaving Iran closer to nuclear weapons capability than at any time in the country’s history, according to confidential inspection reports and interviews with officials and experts who closely monitor Iran’s progress. While Iran says it has no plans to make nuclear weapons, it now has a supply of highly enriched uranium that could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks, current and former officials said. The making of a crude nuclear device could follow in as little as six months after a decision is made, while overcoming the challenges of building a nuclear warhead deliverable by a missile would take longer, perhaps two years or more, the officials said. Iran recently has sought to dilute some of its highly enriched uranium, signaling, in the view of U.S. officials, that it is seeking to avoid a conflict by self-imposing limits on its supply of near-weapons-grade fuel. But Fordow’s machines are making highly enriched uranium at a faster rate than ever before, and the country’s combined stocks of uranium fuel continue to increase, records show. The trend is unmistakable: From interviews with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials and current and former U.S. and European intelligence and security officials, the emerging view is one of Iran advancing slowly but confidently, accumulating the means for a future weapon while making no overt move to build one. The collapse of the deal, meanwhile, has sharply curtailed the IAEA’s ability to monitor or investigate Iran’s activity. A U.S. official with knowledge of internal IAEA discussions conceded that the nuclear watchdog is less capable now of detecting a nuclear breakout by Iran. Such an event could bring cascading consequences, from a Middle East arms race to a direct Israel-Iran conflict that could unleash a wider regional war, said the official. For now, the U.S. official said of Iran, “they are dancing right up to the edge.” – Joby Warrick Read more: Nuclear deal in tatters, Iran edges close to weapons capability |
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By Harry Stevens |
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Welcome to my geopolitics blog site. This is a Hawaii Island news site focusing on geopolitical news, analysis, information, and commentary. I will cite a variety of sources, ranging from all sides of the political spectrum.