Military targets among civilians don't justify attacks in Gaza
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Al Jazeera
18 minutes ago
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Trump says he wants all Middle Eastern countries to have formal Israel ties
Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has called on all countries in the Middle East to forge formal relations with Israel despite the ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza, citing the US attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities in June. Trump's call on Thursday comes amid a growing international push to recognise a Palestinian state. 'Now that the nuclear arsenal being 'created' by Iran has been totally OBLITERATED, it is very important to me that all Middle Eastern Countries join the Abraham Accords,' the US president wrote. 'This will insure [sic] PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Thank you for your attention to this matter!' Trump's administration has not presented evidence that Iran was weaponising its nuclear programme or building a nuclear arsenal, as the president has claimed. During his first term in 2020, Trump secured a series of deals, known as the Abraham Accords, to establish official diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But US efforts to expand the agreements – with focus on Saudi Arabia – over the past years have failed. The kingdom's top officials have repeatedly stressed that Riyadh is committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which conditions recognising Israel on establishing a Palestinian state. The war on Gaza, which Riyadh has decried as a genocide, further complicated the push to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But Trump appeared to link Arab-Israeli relations to the Iranian nuclear programme and the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, which saw the US military strike Iran's nuclear sites. Arab countries had condemned Israel's attacks on Iran in June, which killed top military officials and nuclear scientists as well as hundreds of civilians. When he visited the Gulf region in May, Trump appeared to de-emphasise Arab-Israeli normalisation. He said it is his 'dream' for Saudi Arabia to establish official ties with Israel, but he wants the kingdom to do it on its 'own time'. While the so-called Abraham Accords fostered trade and security ties between the countries involved, they failed to end or mitigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel has continued to build and expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, and it has destroyed most of Gaza, killing more than 61,000 people as it imposes a starvation crisis on the territory. It's not clear what sparked Trump's renewed call for Arab-Israeli normalisation. But his statement coincides with an Arab-backed international push to recognise the state of Palestine, which Washington has rejected. Earlier this week, Trump suggested that he would not block Israel's plan to expand its ground military operations to all of Gaza – a move that could compound the suffering of Palestinians who have been repeatedly displaced throughout the war. 'That's going to be pretty much up to Israel,' the US president said when asked about the Israeli plan. Washington provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid annually, assistance that significantly increased following the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Netanyahu says Israel intends to take control of Gaza in interview
In an interview with Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel intends to take control of the entire Strip, but does not want to govern it. His comments came on Thursday shortly before Israel's cabinet meets to consider his proposal to take over the Strip. 'We intend to [take over] in order to ensure our security, remove Hamas [from] there, enable the population to be free of Gaza and to pass it to civilian governance that is not Hamas and not anyone advocating the destruction of Israel,' he said. He said in the interview that Israel does wants a security perimeter, and that they want to hand it over to the armed forces to govern Gaza. 'We don't want to keep it. We want to have a security perimeter. We don't want to govern it. We don't want to be there as a governing body.' More to come.
Al Jazeera
2 hours ago
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Why are Israelis ‘not at all troubled' by starvation in Gaza?
Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand that their government reach a deal to release two Israeli captives held in Gaza who have been shown as starving in Hamas footage. The video showed that captives have been as badly affected by the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza in March as the rest of the population trapped there. So far, at least 197 people have starved to death in Gaza, 96 of them children and global outrage about the famine Israel is imposing on Gaza has mounted. However, a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) found more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents were 'not at all troubled' by the reports of Palestinians starving and suffering in Gaza. Front pages of international newspapers previously accused of backing Israel's war on Gaza have carried images showing the massive human cost of Israel's actions. Yet, in the past 24 hours, gangs of far-right Israeli agitators have blocked aid trucks from reaching a starving Gaza, in apparent defiance of global anger. Formerly stalwart allies, such as Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have condemned Israel and its actions in Gaza, committing to recognising Palestinian statehood if some kind of resolution is not reached. I guess Israeli settlers are stopping and destroying aid meant for starving Palestinians, so that Israel-first politicians in the West can accuse Hamas of stealing the aid… — Trita Parsi (@tparsi) August 6, 2025 Domestically, two of Israel's leading NGOs – B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel – have labelled Israel's war on Gaza a genocide, and protests against the war have grown. A week earlier, hundreds of demonstrators led by wounded soldiers and the families of some of the captives marched on the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, demanding that the war on Gaza be continued. A wilfully blind media Widespread awareness of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and their government's role in inflicting it, has yet to dawn upon the bulk of Israeli society, Orly Noy, journalist and editor of the Israeli Hebrew-language magazine Local Call, told Al Jazeera. This is particularly the case because Gaza's suffering has not been featured in mainstream media. 'I avoid Israeli TV,' Noy told Al Jazeera. 'However, I was round at my mother's yesterday, and they were covering the story of the video of the two captives. 'So, for once, starvation and famine in Gaza was finally on Israeli news,' she said, adding that, instead of denying that starvation existed in Gaza, the wider Israeli public was being told that the only two people starving there were the captives in the Hamas film. For months now, the mainstream media narrative in Israel has been that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is 'a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign'. This perception runs deeper than the framing by Israel's nationalistic television channels, political analyst and former government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera. 'It comes from decades of self-justification and dehumanisation,' Levy said. 'Most Israelis would be uncomfortable setting out some kind of moral critique of the country, but still have the feeling that something has gone very seriously wrong. There's a kind of cognitive dissonance at play that helps them make sense of it.' Then there is the language used by politicians, the media and, ultimately, the public to discuss the war, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said. 'They've corrupted language. Instead of 'concentration camps', they say 'humanitarian city'. Instead of talking about 'killing', they say 'elimination'. Every military operation has a biblical name, which we now use to measure time. 'We don't say 'such and such a thing' happened in June. We say, 'during Operation Whatever'. It helps people make sense of everything. The jargon's become a new type of speech. It's become Orwell's 1984,' he said, referring to the dystopian novel in which language is dictated by the state. Changing tides However, while most Israelis have continued to see Gaza's starvation through the lens of its media and politicians, there are signs that, at its fringes, the mood is beginning to shift, observers say. 'This isn't going to hold up,' Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta'al party, said. 'More and more, people are beginning to understand that there is real hunger in Gaza, and if Israel is making such a big deal of sending food now, then how can it not have been responsible for the hunger before?' Meanwhile, activists such as Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian group Standing Together say resistance to the war is growing across all parts of Israeli society – albeit for often widely differing reasons. 'We don't care why people are protesting the war. We don't care if it's because you don't want to do another tour with the army, or you don't want your children to go to Gaza and kill people. If you're against the war, you're welcome,' he said. However, despite the killing of more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – and thousands more lost under the rubble and presumed dead – much of Israeli society has yet to accept that the suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza is real. 'From my perspective, we've reached the point where the Israeli state and society has lost whatever moral claims they had as a result of the Holocaust,' Shenhav-Shahrabani said. 'They've spent whatever symbolic capital that was associated with it.'
