Iran launches hundreds of missiles towards Israel
13 June 2025 22:39
TEL AVIV (Reuters/dpa) Hundreds of ballistic missiles were launched from Iran towards Israel, marking the start of Tehran's response to intensive Israeli strikes, Iranian media reported.
In the same context, the Israeli military says it has detected Iranian missiles being launched towards Israel.
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Middle East Eye
11 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
The more Israel kills, the more the West portrays it as a victim
Early on Friday morning, Israel launched unprovoked air strikes deep inside Iranian territory, targeting sites near Isfahan and Tehran. Among those reportedly killed were scientists, senior government officials and civilians, including women and children. Yet, within hours, western leaders and media outlets cast Israel's aggression as "preemptive" self-defence. US officials claimed that Israel acted to thwart an "imminent" Iranian threat, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune insisted the strikes were necessary to counter "Iranian aggression" and protect Americans. Despite its ongoing belligerence across the region, the depiction of violent, predatory Israel as a victim of its victims has prevailed in the West since before the establishment of the settler-colonial state in 1948. The more lands and people Israel conquers and oppresses, the more insistently the West portrays it as the victim. This framing was no accident. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters In 1936, a few months after the eruption of the Great Palestinian Rebellion against Zionist settler-colonialism and British occupation, the Polish Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion (born Grun) explained how Zionists must present their conquest of Palestine: We are not Arabs, and others measure us by a different standard… Our instruments of war are different from those of the Arabs, and only our instruments can guarantee our victory. Our strength is in defence… and this strength will give us a political victory if England and the world know that we are defending ourselves rather than attacking. In 1948, and in line with this Zionist strategy, the dominant western narrative cast the Zionists, who massacred Palestinians and expelled them from their homeland, as poor victims merely defending themselves against the indigenous population whose lands they had conquered. It was, however, Israel's "defensive" conquest of the West Bank and Gaza - 58 years ago this month - that firmly entrenched its image as a besieged "victim" and laid the groundwork for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Today, even that genocide is presented in the West as a matter of self-defence. Israel, we are told, remains the victim of its victims - 200,000 of whom it has killed or injured in its latest war to "defend itself". Saintly victimhood The June 1967 War elevated Israel to the status of untouchable, saintly victimhood in the West. Its supporters multiplied, among western Christians and Jews alike, who viewed Arabs and Palestinians as the oppressors of Israel. Indeed, it was this climate of extreme anti-Arab hostility that marked a turning point in the politicisation of the late intellectual Edward Said, who witnessed it first-hand in the United States. Israel's territorial conquests were celebrated as acts of heroic self-defence - a deliberate inversion of victim and aggressor that continues to shape western perceptions. A review of the 1967 war's so-called achievements helps explain how Israel's image as a victim has endured, even as it carries out mass killings and forced displacement A review of the 1967 war's so-called achievements - and the planning that preceded them - helps explain how Israel's image as a victim has endured, even as it carries out mass killings and forced displacement. Between 1948 and 1967, Israel destroyed some 500 Palestinian villages, replacing them with Jewish colonies. This erasure was hailed in the West as a miracle: the building of a Jewish state after the Holocaust in spite of the hateful resistance of the indigenous Palestinians seeking to save their homeland. The historian Isaac Deutscher - often described as a critic of Zionism - called Israel's effacement of Palestine and the Palestinians "a marvel and a prodigy of history", akin to "the great heroic myths and legends" of antiquity. Moshe Dayan, Israel's military chief of staff, reflected on its mythical achievements in destroying Palestine in 1969: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books are no longer in existence. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either." Dayan's pride in Israel's theft of Palestinian land led him a year earlier to urge Israelis never to say "that's enough" when it came to acquiring territory: "You must not call a halt - heaven forbid - and say, 'that's all; up to here, up to Degania, to Muffalasim, to Nahal Oz!' For that is not all." Western complicity That the Zionists established their state on stolen Palestinian land was never a cause for criticism in the West. While glorifying Israel's legendary land thefts, western powers lamented its small territory and backed its colonial expansionist plans - already well underway. After all, if Israel was the victim, then it naturally required more territory to occupy. This view was recently echoed by US President Donald Trump, who in February defended planned Israeli annexation of the West Bank by claiming: "It's a small country… it's a small country in terms of land." Israel's attack on Iran: Why Netanyahu opted to roll the dice Read More » Israel's avarice for the land of others was made unmistakably clear before and after its 1956 invasion and first occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. After this conquest, the secular David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, waxed biblical, claiming that the invasion of Sinai "was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people". The successful invasion and occupation, he claimed, restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north". "Yotvat" - as the Israelis rushed to rename the Egyptian island of Tiran - "will once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel". Amid inter-imperial rivalry with France and Britain, the US insisted on Israeli withdrawal, prompting outrage from Ben-Gurion: "Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat… which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army." He also declared the Gaza Strip "an integral part of the nation". Invoking the biblical prophecy of Isaiah, he vowed: "No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai." Despite popular support for Israel in the West, the Israelis withdrew four months later under pressure from the UN, the US and the Soviet Union. Egypt welcomed the UN Emergency Force (Unef) to its side of the border, but Israel refused to receive Unef monitors. Expansionist strategy In 1954, Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon "proposed entering the demilitarised zones [on the Israeli-Syrian frontier], seizing the high ground across the Syrian border [that is part or all of the Golan Heights], and entering the Gaza Strip or seizing an Egyptian position near Eilat." Dayan also suggested that Israel conquer Egyptian territory at Ras al-Naqab in the south, or cut through Sinai, south of Rafah, to the Mediterranean. In May 1955, he even proposed that Israel annex Lebanon south of the Litani River. The Israelis also moved forward with plans to steal all the land in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) along the Syrian border near the Golan Heights. By 1967, they had taken over the entire area. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war In addition to these land seizures and occupations, Israel's territorial ambitions expanded steadily between 1948 and 1967. It repeatedly sought to provoke its Arab victims into responding to attacks, in order to create a pretext for invading coveted Arab lands, while continuing to frame itself as the victim of its victims. On 13 November 1966, the Israelis invaded the southern West Bank village of Samu, across the border inside Jordan, and blew up more than 125 houses, along with the village clinic and school. Jordanian soldiers responding to the attack were ambushed before reaching the village. The Israelis killed 15 soldiers and three civilians, and they wounded 54 others. In April 1967, the Israelis were threatening Syria, chipping away at more of the DMZ by sending in farmers, tractors and soldiers disguised as police. When the Syrians responded with mortar fire, the Israeli "victims" launched 70 fighter jets, bombed Damascus itself and killed 100 Syrians. Manufacturing pretext Israeli provocations incensed Arab public opinion. In May 1967, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser finally yielded to popular pressure from across the Arab world to remove Unef from Egypt - forces that Israel had never permitted on its side of the border - and to close the Straits of Tiran, at the mouth of the Red Sea, to Israeli shipping, which was lawful under international law as it fell within Egyptian territorial waters. Nasser sent two army divisions to Sinai to protect the border after Unef's departure and closed the straits, through which less than 5 percent of Israeli shipping passed. Israel, which had been provoking an Arab response and waiting for the right pretext to invade its victims and steal their lands, now had several. Destruction can be seen in Egypt's Suez city following Israeli air raids during the June 1967 War, in which Israel seized Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Sinai (AFP) On 5 June 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Within six days, it had occupied the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula all the way to the Suez Canal - for the second time in a decade - as well as the entire West Bank from Jordan and Syria's Golan Heights. Unlike the Arab world, which refers to the invasion as the "June 1967 War", the Israelis and their western imperial sponsors not only insist that Israel was the one "invaded", rather than the invader of its Arab neighbours, but also refer to its multiple invasions as the "Six-Day War" - likening Israel to God, who created a new world in six days and rested on the seventh. The West erupted in unbridled racist jubilation. The Daily Telegraph called the war "The Triumph of the Civilised", while the French daily Le Monde declared that Israel's conquest had "rid" Europe "of the guilt it incurred in the drama of the Second World War and, before that, in the persecutions, which from the Russian pogroms to the Dreyfus affair, accompanied the birth of Zionism. In the continent of Europe, the Jews were at last avenged - but alas, on the backs of the Arabs – for the tragic and stupid accusation: "they went like sheep to the slaughter". Erasing Palestine As they had done in 1948, the Israelis proceeded to wipe Palestinian villages in the West Bank off the map, including Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu, expelling their 10,000 inhabitants. They went on to decimate the villages of Beit Marsam, Beit Awa, Hablah and Jiftlik, among others. In East Jerusalem, the Israelis descended on the Mughrabi Quarter, so named seven centuries earlier when Mughrabi volunteers from North Africa joined Saladin's war against the Crusading Franks. In Gaza, Israel expelled 75,000 Palestinians by the end of 1968 and barred another 50,000 from returning home The neighbourhood had been owned by an Islamic endowment for centuries. Thousands of residents were given only minutes to vacate their homes, which were immediately bulldozed to make way for the conquering Jewish masses to enter the Old City and celebrate their victory facing the Buraq Wall - the so-called "Western Wall". The first Israeli military governor of the occupied territories, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, who would later become Israel's sixth president, took credit for the destruction of the ancient, densely populated neighbourhood. In typical Israeli racist fashion, he described it as a "toilet" that they "decided to remove". This, it seems, is what "civilised" victims do when they triumph over their victims. Israeli jeeps drove through Bethlehem with loudspeakers threatening the population: "You have two hours to leave your homes and flee to Jericho or Amman. If you don't your houses will be shelled." Mass expulsion followed, with more than 200,000 Palestinians forced to cross the River Jordan to the East Bank. As in 1948, Israeli civilians and soldiers looted Palestinian property. In Gaza, Israeli forces expelled 75,000 Palestinians by December 1968 and barred another 50,000, who had been working, studying or travelling in Egypt or elsewhere during the 1967 war, from returning home. The UN recorded 323,000 Palestinians displaced from Gaza and the West Bank, 113,000 of whom were 1948 refugees now expelled a second time. Apparently, this, too, was consistent with "civilised" behaviour. 'Civilised victims' Israel expelled more than 100,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights, leaving just 15,000 in the territory at the end of the war. It demolished 100 Syrian towns and villages, transferring their lands to Jewish colonists. In the Sinai, where the population at the time was mostly Bedouin and farmers, 38,000 people became refugees. Israel killed more than 18,000 Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and Palestinians during the war, while losing fewer than 1,000 soldiers. During and after the war, the Israelis shot dead at least 1,000 Egyptian prisoners of war who had surrendered, forcing many to dig their own graves before being executed. The Israelis killed the captured Palestinians serving in the Egyptian army, selecting them specifically for execution. Israel continued to deport Palestinians by the hundreds as the occupation advanced. All of the above was, in the eyes of the West, further proof of what "civilised" victims do when they conquer the lands of those they deem uncivilised. Yet, despite its signature war crimes, crimes against humanity and unabashed anti-Arab racism and supremacist contempt, Israel's conquest was still portrayed as a righteous victory by Israeli "victims" over their Arab "oppressors". Colonial expansion While a pro-Israeli chorus in the West insisted that poor Israel was maintaining its brutal occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967 in order to barter them for peace from its warlike victims, in reality, it was proceeding with the business of colonisation. Israeli atrocities are nothing new. The only novelty is the scale Joseph Massad Read More » Let us take a quick inventory. By 1977, 10 years after the invasion, successive Israeli Labor governments had annexed East Jerusalem, built 30 Jewish settler-colonies in the West Bank alone and four in the Gaza Strip, with more under construction. Upwards of 50,000 Jewish colonists had already moved to colonies established in East Jerusalem, which came to be deliberately mischaracterised as "neighbourhoods". Labor governments also established the majority of the 18 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula before the Likud party came to power. In 1972, Labor expelled 10,000 Egyptians after confiscating their lands in 1969. Their homes, crops, mosques and schools were bulldozed to make way for six kibbutzim, nine rural Jewish settlements, and the Jewish colony of Yamit in occupied Sinai. The Sinai colonies were ultimately dismantled in 1982, following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. In occupied Syria, Israel established its first Jewish colony, Kibbutz Golan, in July 1967. While touring the Golan Heights immediately after the 1967 war, Israeli Labor Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, born Shkolnik, was overwhelmed with nostalgia for his birthplace, exclaiming joyously: "Just like in the Ukraine." The Israelis evicted some 5,000 Palestinian refugees from their homes in East Jerusalem's "Jewish Quarter", which was never exclusively Jewish and which, before 1948, was less than 20 percent Jewish-owned. At the time, Jewish property consisted of no more than three synagogues and their enclosures. After 1967, Israel returned Jewish property in East Jerusalem to its original owners while confiscating all Palestinian property in the same area In 1948, the quarter's 2,000 Jewish inhabitants fled to the Zionist side when the Jordanian army saved East Jerusalem from Zionist plunder and occupation. Even before 1948, Muslims and Christians were in fact the majority of the inhabitants who lived in the 2-hectare "Jewish Quarter", and most of the Jews who lived there rented their property from them or from Christian and Muslim endowments. After the Israeli conquest, the quarter was substantially expanded to cover more than 16 hectares. The Jordanian Custodian of Absentee Property had preserved all Jewish holdings in the name of their original owners and never expropriated them. After 1967, the Israeli government returned Jewish property in East Jerusalem to its original Israeli Jewish owners, while confiscating all Palestinian property in the quarter. Meanwhile, Palestinian property in West Jerusalem, seized by Israel in 1948, was never returned to the Palestinians of East Jerusalem who now, under occupation, laid claim to it. Remaking Jerusalem On 29 June 1967, Israel placed occupied East Jerusalem under the expanded municipality of West Jerusalem. It dismissed and later deported the Palestinian-Jordanian mayor, dissolved the municipal council and Judaised the entire city administration. Immediately following the conquest, the area was declared "a site of antiquity", banning all construction. Israel closes Al-Aqsa Mosque to worshippers until further notice Read More » Israeli authorities launched archaeological excavations underground in a desperate search for the Jewish temple, leading to the destruction of numerous historic Palestinian buildings, including the 14th-century Fakhriyyah hospice and al-Tankiziyya school. In 1980, Israel officially annexed the city - a move declared "null and void" by a UN Security Council resolution. Excavations and drilling under and next to Muslim holy sites proceeded apace in search of the elusive First Temple, which has never been found - assuming it ever existed. Evictions of Palestinian Jerusalemites soon followed. Periodic curfews and collective punishment were imposed across the occupied territories. The Israelis also renamed the West Bank "Judea and Samaria" and altered the names of cities and streets to accord with their biblical fantasies. All this and much more preceded the current genocide, and drew either accolades or indifference from Israel's western supporters and funders. Enduring template It seems that support for Israel in the western mainstream increases in proportion to its cruelty towards its victims. The Nakba it perpetrated in 1948 and the apartheid system it imposed on those Palestinians it could not expel between 1948 and 1967 were hailed as epic achievements of "Jewish victims" over the people whose lands they had usurped and whose lives they have destroyed ever since. But if in the West today, it is deemed a moral crime to describe the Palestinian response to ongoing Israeli colonialism as resistance, the very same Ben-Gurion did not hesitate to call it just that in 1938. It was Israel's 'defensive' and near-divine capacity to annihilate its victims in 1967 that assured the West of its lofty civilisational prowess The Palestinian revolt, he explained, "is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews - that's why they fight". He continued: "Behind the terrorists is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice... we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside." This aside, it was Israel's "defensive" and near-divine capacity to annihilate its victims in 1967 that assured the West of its lofty civilisational prowess. That war became the enduring template for Israel's so-called "preemptive" campaigns, wars that expand its colonial reach while allowing it to pose as the righteous victim. It is no surprise, then, that Israel's western supporters have invoked this legacy not only after its latest strikes on Iran, but throughout its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its wider aggression in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In their view, Israel is not merely defending itself, but acting as a proxy for the West. Its current rampage is yet another striking demonstration of what western "victims" can and should do to their non-western victims. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sharjah 24
24 minutes ago
- Sharjah 24
Jordan, Syria, Lebanon reopen airspace as Israel, Iran trade fire
Diplomatic relations with Israel All three countries neighbor Israel, but only Jordan has formal diplomatic relations with it. Leadership changes in Syria Syria was long ruled by Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran. However, since his ouster in December, the country has been led by Islamist former rebels. The situation in Lebanon Lebanon hosts Hezbollah, a militant group that was significantly weakened in a war with Israel ending in late 2024. Since then, the Lebanese government has been working to implement a ceasefire, which requires Hezbollah to hand over its arsenal and withdraw from areas near the Israeli border. Jordan's airspace reopening "Jordan has reopened its airspace starting 7:30 am (0430 GMT)," announced Haitham Misto, chairman of the Jordanian Civil Aviation Regulatory Commission. Lebanon's airspace reopening Lebanon's Transport Minister Fayez Rassamni also announced the reopening of the country's airspace from 10:00 am (0700 GMT) Saturday. Syria's airspace update In Syria, the aviation authority confirmed the reopening of the country's airspace to civilian aircraft.
The National
30 minutes ago
- The National
'We were negotiating': why Israel's attack caught Iran off guard
Less than a month ago in Tehran, senior Iranian diplomats engaged foreign journalists and analysts with a clear message: Iran sought dialogue, not confrontation. It wanted better relations with its Middle Eastern neighbours, they said, and, under the right conditions, with Western nations with which it had long been at odds. There was some optimism – albeit very cautious – about the prospects of reaching an agreement with the US for limitations on its nuclear programme in exchange for much-needed sanctions relief. Senior officials past and present stressed that Iran and its neighbours needed to look at what was possible, rather than be constantly on the look out for perils. 'One of my criticisms of my own country is that we have to depart from a threat-based perspective,' one former senior official said in a background briefing. 'We want an opportunity-based outlook, not a threat-based outlook.' In a glossy cobalt blue book of essays that accompanied the Tehran Dialogue Forum, a conference held by an Iranian Foreign Ministry-affiliated think tank, former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi argued that US President Donald Trump was hesitant to drag the US into more wars. Saber-rattling would keep Iran on its toes and strengthen Washington's negotiating position 'without actually unleashing a ruinous conflict', Mr Salehi wrote. Iranian officials attempted to emphasise diplomacy, knowing well that Israel favoured military options, and the US had threatened action should nuclear talks collapse. In the following weeks, Iranian officials and observers made clear that they believed Israel wanted to strike, and that any attack could not take place without US knowledge and backing. 'We will immediately respond to the Zionist regime's possible attack on the country's nuclear facilities,' Iran's Supreme National Security Council said in a statement last week, before the Israeli strikes began. Iranian officials and analysts did not expect an attack to happen while there were active plans for more negotiations. US and Iranian officials have been planning to meet for a sixth round of discussions in the Omani capital Muscat on Sunday. 'We were in a limited negotiation process and did not expect military [action],' a senior Iranian government foreign policy researcher told The National on Friday. 'In fact, the Israeli regime sabotaged the diplomacy entirely with military action.' Hassan Ahmadian, assistant professor of West Asian Studies at the University of Tehran, said that 'Israeli warmongering against Iran was obvious and so the attack was never ruled out at any point'. 'Yet many in Iran believed that now the US had chosen dialogue with Tehran, it wouldn't unleash the Israelis against it,' he told The National. That moment came quicker than expected, though. For many in Iran, diplomatic talks have not yet failed, although they were facing significant headwinds over differing stances in Tehran's rights to uranium enrichment. President Trump appeared to justify Israel's attacks, which he later said took place with Washington's knowledge, by noting that a 60-day deadline he had imposed for nuclear talks to succeed had ended on Thursday. The point is that we were in a diplomatic process and we expected the other side to respect this joint diplomatic effort. Iranian government foreign policy researcher Some observers argue that Iran miscalculated the time it had available for negotiations, and Israel's willingness to really go through with an attack. In Tehran, however, many believe Israel miscalculated too, encouraged by what they see as international inertia over its bombing campaigns in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. And because of the perception of US complicity, Washington is being held responsible as well. 'It's not about underestimating [Israel],' the government foreign policy researcher said. 'The point is that we were in a diplomatic process and we expected the other side to respect this joint diplomatic effort.' The US president was swayed from diplomacy to not saying no to military action, Iranian officials believe. Influence of, "Zionist lobbies" on the US government and "extremists" in US decision-making frameworks "should be considered the reason for this change in approach and finally, Israel carried out this attack," a second senior Iranian government official told The National. Israel's multipronged attack on Iran's nuclear and defence infrastructure has dramatically changed the playing field. As it pledged, Iran has responded, and there is room for further escalation if the exchange of strikes and counterstrikes continues. It has named its continuing strikes against Israel as 'Operation True Promise 3', linking it to previous operations of the same name on the country. Unlike past responses, which carefully balanced force with restraint to avoid spiraling escalation, such caution may now be less of a priority. ' Iran 's response cannot be similar to what happened in October or April 2024,' a regional source close to Iranian thinking and military circles, told The National. 'The proportionate retaliation must be strong enough to deter further Israeli aggression.' The escalation has endangered both the possibility of nuclear talks continuing and the likelihood of them succeeding, even if they resume. Iran's position on attending the negotiations scheduled for Sunday is unclear, its Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Saturday. The framework of thinking in Iran is shifting from diplomacy to war, observers believe. 'I suspect it's [Iran's] preferred diplomatic approach not to go ahead in parallel with the continuing military confrontation with Israel,' said Mr Ahmadian. 'And so, it's war now – diplomacy can only come afterwards.'
