Construction of EU-China transport corridor via Iran

The transport ministers and representatives of the member states of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the creation of a new transport corridor from China to Europe via Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Tashkent on Thursday.

The MoU was signed on the sidelines of the 12th meeting of ECO transport ministers which was held in the capital of Uzbekistan with the participation of Iran’s Deputy Transport Minister Shahriar Afandizadeh, IRIB reported.

The unification of tariffs on transportation procedures and border processes will be implemented within the framework of the mentioned MoU, according to which, a significant share of the transit volume from China to Europe can be carried out via Iran's east-west transit route.

At the meeting, the ECO transport ministers also exchanged views on strengthening transport communications in the ECO region.

The need to finance infrastructural projects in the ECO region with the participation of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), completing the missing rail and road links and strengthening the regional corridors including Islamabad-Tehran-Istanbul and Almaty-Tehran-Istanbul and also east-west corridors for connecting China to Europe as well as Caspian Sea routes were among the other issues discussed at the meeting.

Addressing the meeting, Afandizadeh expounded on the Iran Road transport initiative and emphasized that all countries in the region will be able to have safe and cheap access to other destinations via Iran using the initiative.

The 13th Meeting of Transport Ministers of the ECO will be held in Tehran in 2024.

 

Saudi Arabia launches fundraising campaign to aid Palestinians in Gaza

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman and Crown Prince and Prime Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman have issued directives to launch a fundraising campaign on the Sahem platform affiliated with the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief) to aid the brotherly Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

King Salman has donated SR30 million and Crown Prince donated SR20 million to the fundraising campaign.

In a press statement, Advisor to the Royal Court and Supervisor General of KSrelief Dr. Abdullah Al Rabeeah noted that this fundraising campaign is part of the historical role of the Kingdom in supporting the brotherly Palestinian people in various crises. The Saudi humanitarian and development support has never stopped reaching the Palestinian people, he added.

Al Rabeeah pointed out that the Kingdom is at the top donor countries in providing support to the Palestinian people, expressing gratitude and appreciation to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and the Crown Prince for their support to help the brotherly Palestinian people.

Donation to the campaign can be made via the Sahem platform through the following link https://sahem.ksrelief.org/Gaza, or through the Sahem mobile app via Apple Store and Google Play. Donors can also send their contributions directly to the campaign bank account (SA5580000504608018899998) at Al Rajhi Bank.

United States advances Israel aid bill

The package includes US$14.3 billion for Israel but was rejected by most House Democrats because it slashes IRS funds. Twelve Democrats joined nearly all Republicans to advance the Israel aid package, which passed the House in a 226-196 vote.

The package includes billions in military aid for Israel as it battles Hamas following the militant group's October 07 attack on Israel.

The bill's passage marks a victory for newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson, who rallied the GOP conference around the bill.

Johnson on Thursday said the US must support Israel in its war against Hamas, with Israel conducting military operations inside Gaza.

"It’s imperative that the US sends a message to the world that threats made against Israel and the Jewish people will be met with strong opposition," Johnson wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, after the vote.

The legislation is dead on arrival at the Senate, where Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to combine assistance to Israel and Ukraine in one package.

"What a joke," Schumer said of the House bill on the Senate floor. "The Senate will not be considering this deeply flawed proposal."

As part of an effort to offset spending, the House bill makes cuts to the IRS that were included in last year's Inflation Reduction Act — cuts that if enacted are widely expected to increase the US deficit.

The House bill also did not include any funding for humanitarian aid in Gaza.

President Biden has promised to veto the House bill should it reach his desk, saying in a statement, “It is bad for Israel, for the Middle East region, and for our own national security.”

Biden last month also asked for a US$106 billion emergency aid package to fund Israel, Ukraine, border security and allies in the Indo-Pacific and would like to see those combined in one legislative bill.

Johnson has tied Ukraine aid to border security and said they would be included in a separate piece of legislation.

 

Hezbollah, Israel exchange fire at Lebanese border

Lebanon's Hezbollah said on Thursday it mounted multiple strikes on Israeli army positions including its first using explosive drones, and Israel launched air strikes on southern Lebanon in a sharp escalation of violence.

The Israeli army said it responded to launches from Lebanon toward Israel with air strikes on Hezbollah targets, along with tank and artillery fire.

Hezbollah has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces across the Israeli-Lebanese border since the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel went to war on October 07, in the deadliest escalation at the frontier since a 2006 war.

Lebanon's National News Agency on Thursday said four people were killed near the southern village of Hula during Israeli shelling.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is due on Friday to deliver his first speech since the war began.

The group said in a statement its fighters launched 19 simultaneous strikes on Israeli army positions in Israel using guided missiles, artillery and other weapons.

Hezbollah said two drones packed with explosives struck an Israeli army command position in the disputed Shebaa Farms area at the border.

Israeli shelling struck the outskirts of Khiyam town some 6 km (3.75 miles) from the border, slightly injuring one civilian, the town's mayor, Ali Rashed, told Reuters. "His house caught fire and people are putting it out," he said by phone.

"The intensity of the shelling was higher than previous days. The shelling and the counter shelling were more than any previous level and included the whole area," he said.

Lebanon's National News Agency reported Israeli shells hit various areas of the south along the border.

Hezbollah's attack using explosive drones came a few days after the group said for the first time it had used a surface-to-air missile against an Israeli drone.

Israel has held the Shebaa Farms, a 15-square-mile (39-square-km) area of land, since the 1967 Middle East war. Both Syria and Lebanon claim the Shebaa Farms are Lebanese.

 

 

Secret US Base in Israel

According to a report, two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multi million dollar contract to build US troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named ‘Site 5’, the longstanding US base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel. 

On October 07, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.

The US Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a ‘life support facility’: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret US military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing. 

The US$35.8 million US troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 02 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512.

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather because the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept.

“In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Rare acknowledgment of the US military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the US government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.”

Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.” 

A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an American base, insisting that it was merely a living facility for US service members working at an Israeli base. 

The US military employs similar euphemistic language to characterize the new facility in Israel, which its procurement records describe as a life support area.

Such obfuscation is typical of US military sites the Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a “cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.

Site 512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.

The overwhelming focus on Iran continues to play out in the US government’s response to the Hamas attack. In an attempt to counter Iran — which aids both Hamas and Israel’s rival to the north, Hezbollah, a Lebanese political group with a robust military wing, both of which are considered terror groups by the US — the Pentagon has vastly expanded its presence in the Middle East.

Following the attack, the US doubled the number of fighter jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of Israel. 

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when US presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel.”

Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on Iran.”

While some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack, there have been indications from the US intelligence community that Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.

The history of the US–Israel relationship may be behind the failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas US military bases.

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when US presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept.

“The announcement of US military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for Israel.”

 

Iran: Khamenei urges Muslims to boycott Israel

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Muslim states to cease oil and food exports to Israel, demanding an end to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

"The bombings on Gaza must stop immediately ... the path of oil and food exports to the Zionist regime should be stopped," Khamenei told a group of students in Tehran.

Israel has vowed to wipe out Tehran-backed Hamas, which rules Gaza, in retaliation for an October 07 attack that killed 1,400 people and saw hundreds taken hostage.

Israel has launched an unprecedented bombardment of Gaza and imposed a siege of the enclave. Palestinian authorities say more than 8,000 people have been killed.

Iran's clerical rulers have warned Israel of an escalation if it failed to end aggressions against Palestinians, with authorities indicating Tehran-backed proxies in the Middle East were ready to act.

Backing the Palestinian cause has been a political pillar of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a way in which its Shi'ite Muslim theocracy has fashioned Iran as a leader in the Muslim world.

Khamenei, Iran's top authority, said the United States was complicit in Israel's "recent crimes against Palestinians".

"The Islamic world should not forget that in the crucial issue of Gaza, those standing against the oppressed Palestinian nation were the United States, France and Britain," Khamenei said to chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America".

Israel, which Tehran refuses to recognize, has long accused Iran's clerical rulers of stoking violence by supplying arms to Hamas. Tehran says it gives moral and financial support to the group, which controls the Gaza Strip.

"One of the shameless acts of the West is accusing Palestinian fighters of terrorism," Khamenei said.

Palestinians halt Israeli ground offensives

The al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas fired anti-tank missiles at Israeli forces on Tuesday, troops were trying to infiltrate south of Gaza city. 

A Hamas spokesman confirmed the presence of Israeli tanks in Salah ad-Deen highway, located in the middle of the Strip, which he pointed out the Palestinian resistance forces have prevented them from moving north toward Gaza city. 

Reports from inside Gaza have also said that attacks by the resistance fighters forced the occupation troops to withdraw from the Salah ad-Deen area, east of the Zeitoun neighborhood in central Gaza, following heavy clashes. 

Hamas also attacked two Israeli tanks and bulldozers in northwest Gaza with missiles.

The al-Qassam brigades added its fighters targeted Israeli forces with Al-Yassin 105 shells, and destroyed a Zionist vehicle east of Erez (located one kilometer north of the Gaza Strip), with an explosive device and two Al-Yassin 105 shells.

The Israeli military acknowledged that its troops were attacked by anti-tank missiles and machine gunfire. 

Reports from inside Gaza say the resistance engaged in heavy clashes with the occupation, east of the Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip, and thwarted the regime's incursion attempt.

The Palestinian resistance is said to have inflicted casualties on the occupation ranks after confronting regime troops at the Karam Abu Salem site east of Rafah near the border with Egypt. 

Elsewhere, the resistance engaged in clashes with the occupation forces during their attempt to storm eastern Bureij.

Reports point out that the Palestinian resistance launched surface-to-air missiles to confront Israeli aircraft, believed to be drones, in the eastern Gaza Strip.

Violent clashes have also taken place, according to verified reports from inside the coastal sliver, between the resistance fighters and the occupation forces east of the town of al-Qarara, which is located near the southern city of Khan Yunis.

The heavy clashes indicate two main points. 

One is that Palestinian resistance factions have heavily disrupted Israeli attempts to advance into urban areas of the Gaza Strip, restricting the regime's troops to the enclaves' borders and agricultural land, which it had bombed before. 

There are no military achievements so far, according to Hamas spokesman Hazem Qasim. 

This is contrary to Western reporters who are spreading unverified information while outside the Gaza Strip and relying mainly on Israeli military statements. 

The Israeli military has forbidden any reporters to accompany them into the battlefield. 

Experts say this is supposed to avoid reports being published of any ambushes and traps, and would essentially increase the anger of Israelis watching on intensely across the occupied territories and beyond.

Secondly, the fierce exchange of fire and airstrikes in the Southern Gaza Strip debunk the Israeli myth that it would have been safe for Palestinians to travel south. 

A series of Israeli raids have targeted residential areas east of Khan Yunis city in the southern Gaza Strip, as well as other areas in the south where the regime is bombing civilian sites and trying to conduct military operations by land. 

Actually, for the civilian population trapped in Gaza there is nowhere to run or to hide.  

The high level of Israeli bombings so far (from the air, sea and land) has not stopped Palestinian resistance forces in the Gaza Strip from launching retaliatory operations. 

Israeli media reported that air raid sirens sounded in many settlements, including Netiv Haasara, Kissufim, Erez, Ashkelon, Zikim, and Sderot as a result of Palestinian rocket barrages on Monday and Tuesday. 

These are mostly settlements north and northeast of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military claims to be attacking with more intensity. 

Air raid sirens sounded in the Red Sea settlement of Eilat with an Israeli military warning of an approaching aerial target. 

A statement warned of a possible hostile aircraft intrusion. The Israeli military said its systems identified an aerial target approaching Israeli (occupied Palestinian) territory.

Unconfirmed reports on Israeli radio have suggested that a drone was spotted over the Red Sea.

Hours later, Israeli media reported fresh explosions in Eilat with a flying object spotted. 

Eilat is a large southern Israeli settlement that has come under constant fire (during the current war on Gaza) by long-range missiles launched from the strip.

However, reports have emerged that the explosions may be the result of projectiles fired from Yemen in response to the regime's massacre of civilians in Gaza. 

Israeli media has reported that the first test of the land (operations) appears to have been disappointing, noting that the government is gambling with the lives of soldiers in Gaza.

This is while the al-Qassam brigade issued another brief statement on Tuesday afternoon stating that it was eliminating a Zionist force after it entered a building in Beit Hanoun, inside which our fighters were present and ambushed the force while targeting (another) bulldozer and a vehicle.