Israeli warplanes strike a base belonging to the Palestinian group the PFLP-General Command inside of Lebanon near the border with Syria early Monday morning, according to Lebanese state media. The attack comes days after an Israeli drone crashed near Beirut.
A crackdown in Lebanon against unlicensed workers that set off a wave of protests in Palestinian refugee camps over the summer intensified this month when the first demonstrator was killed.
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Marion Kawas’ return to Lebanon came with disappointments, “In many areas, there is nothing left to recognize from 45 years ago, especially given the destruction that occurred during the years of the devastating civil war and the subsequent 1982 Israeli military invasion.”
John Gunther Dean, now 92, and a former American ambassador to five countries, has long maintained that Israel was behind his attempted assassination outside Beirut in 1980, which was attributed to a rightwing Lebanese group. A new book by an Israeli investigative journalist says that group was set up by Israeli security officials to sow chaos in Lebanon.
Israa M. Khater on her visit to the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon: “My nation has been reduced to human trash. We are simply meant to be sustained, contained, but never returned. So comes the international aid, a humanitarian initiative by no other than those who stripped us of everything we owned. It comes preconditioned on our admission of defeat, on our acceptance of what cannot be logically accepted. Can one be grateful to what amounts to nothing compared to what has been lost?”
Dangerous rumblings of war continue in the Mideast, the day after Israeli warplanes and surface-to-surface…
There are ominous signs that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi Crown Prince are pushing for a wider war in the Mideast. In a dangerous escalation, Israel last night attacked an Iranian military base near Syria’s capital, Damascus, using both warplanes and surface-to-surface missiles.
The Korean peninsula may not actually be the most dangerous place in the world. Take a 32-year-old Saudi prince, intoxicated by having more real power than possibly anyone else in the Kingdom’s history, add the opportunistic Benjamin Netanyahu, who is anxious to act decisively to ward off the growing political threat from the Israeli far right, mix in the volatile, ignorant Donald Trump — and you have the makings of a regional cataclysm.
Israel backed al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria in an effort to weaken Bashar al-Assad and Iran. The effort has failed and now Israel and Saudi Arabia are turning their attention to Lebanon where two mysterious events over the past week indicate that Hezbollah may be in Israel’s sights.