Latest news with #BlackSeptember
Irish Times
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The origins of Israel's conflicts with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah
1948: The State of Israel is declared. British troops leave and fighting breaks out with Arab neighbours. Some 700,000 Palestinians, half the Arab population of British-ruled Palestine , flee or are driven from their homes. Arab troops intervene but lose some of the land the United Nations had assigned to Palestinians. Armistice pacts halt the fighting a year later, but there is no formal peace. 1956: Israel invades the Gaza Strip and Sinai in conjunction with the Suez Canal campaign launched by Britain and France against Egypt. Israel withdraws six months later. 1965: Palestinian guerrilla movement Fatah carries out its first military operation inside Israel. 1967: Israeli strikes against Egypt and Syria launch the Six-Day War. Israel has occupied the West Bank , Arab East Jerusalem, and Syria's Golan Heights ever since – and the Gaza Strip for some of that time. READ MORE An armed police officer reacts after Palestinian terrorist group Black September takes hostages at the quarters of the Israeli athletes in the Athletes' Village during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, September 6th, 1972. Photograph: Daily Express/Archive Photos/1972: Palestinian guerrillas kill 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympics. 1973: Egypt and Syria attack Israeli positions along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights, beginning the Yom Kippur War. Israel pushes both armies back within three weeks. 1979: Iran 's pro-western leader, Mohammed Reza Shah, who regarded Israel as an ally, is swept from power in an Islamic Revolution that installs a new Shiite regime opposed to Israel. Egypt and Israel sign the first peace accord between Israel and an Arab state. 1981: Israeli planes destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor site, thwarting Saddam Hussein 's bomb plans. 1982: Israel hands Sinai back to Egypt. As Israel invades Lebanon, Iran works with Shiite Muslims there to set up Hizbullah . 1983: Hizbullah uses suicide bombings to expel western and Israeli forces from Lebanon. Israel later withdraws from much of Lebanon. 1987: In December the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, breaks out in occupied territories. About 400 Israelis and 1,500 Palestinians are killed in the ensuing six years. US president Bill Clinton presides over a White House ceremony in 1993 to mark the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Photograph: AP Photo/Ron Edmonds 1993: Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Fatah founder Yasser Arafat shake hands on the Oslo Accords on limited Palestinian autonomy. 1994: Israel signs a peace treaty with Jordan. 1995: Jewish ultranationalist Yigal Amir assassinates Rabin. 2000: Talks on returning the Golan Heights to Syria collapse. Camp David peace summit with Arafat and Israeli premier Ehud Barak fails. The second Intifada begins. 2002: A disclosure that Iran has a secret programme to enrich uranium stirs concern that it is trying to build a nuclear bomb. 2003: The US, EU, UN and Russia make public a 'roadmap' to peace talks. 2004: Arafat dies. Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas takes over as president of the Palestinian Authority. 2005: Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas declare a ceasefire. Israel pulls its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip after 38 years of occupation. 2006: Islamist group Hamas , steadily rising in power, wins the Palestinian parliamentary election. Israel fights Hizbullah in a month-long war in Lebanon but is unable to crush the heavily armed group. 2007: Hamas forces rout Abbas loyalists in Gaza. Fatah loses all power in the strip. 2008: Hamas agrees on a ceasefire with Israel in June. By December, the truce is over. 2010: Stuxnet, a malicious computer virus widely believed to have been developed by the US and Israel, is used to attack a uranium enrichment facility at Iran's Natanz nuclear site. It is the first publicly known cyberattack on industrial machinery. 2012: Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan is killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran. 2018: Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu hails US president Donald Trump 's withdrawal of the US from Iran's nuclear deal with world powers after years of lobbying against the agreement. In May, Israel says it hit Iranian military infrastructure in Syria – where Tehran has been backing president Bashar al-Assad in the civil war – after Iranian forces there fired rockets at the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. 2021: Iran blames Israel for the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, viewed by western intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian programme to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran has long denied any such ambition. 2022: US president Joe Biden and Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid sign a joint pledge to deny Iran nuclear arms. 2024: A suspected Israeli air strike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus kills seven Revolutionary Guards officers, including two senior commanders. In October Iran fires more than 180 missiles at Israel in what it calls revenge for the killing of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, and the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Iran's capital. Israel retaliates with strikes on military sites in Iran. A satellite image shows damage at the Fordo enrichment facility in Iran after US strikes, June 22nd, 2025. Photograph: Maxar Technologies via The New York Times 2025: In June, Israel carries out strikes in Iran, aiming to disrupt the Islamic Republic's nuclear infrastructure, and targets scientists working on a nuclear bomb. On June 22nd, the US attacks three Iranian nuclear sites with missiles and 'bunker buster' bombs. The success or failure of this mission is disputed. Reuters
Khaleej Times
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
'Blood and Gold' launches in Dubai, confronts the hidden history of the Munich Olympics
A powerful new book titled Blood and Gold by acclaimed author Christie Sikora has been launched this week, reigniting global conversations around the 1972 Munich Olympics and the way modern history is shaped, remembered, and often, deliberately forgotten. The book is being distributed globally with the support of international literary houses and is now available in the Middle East. Unveiled in Dubai as part of its international rollout, Blood and Gold takes readers beyond the well-known headlines of the Munich tragedy to uncover a far more complex, human, and politically layered narrative. In a time where global attention remains fixed on conflict and displacement in the Middle East, the book lands with piercing relevance - raising questions about media framing, institutional failure, and the long-term consequences of unresolved history. Sikora's work revisits the 1972 Olympic Games, which were tragically marred when members of the Black September organisation infiltrated the Olympic Village, taking eleven Israeli athletes hostage. The event, televised and immortalised in a single, haunting image of a masked man on a balcony, has long stood as a symbol of political violence. But Blood and Gold shifts focus to explore the deeper forces that led to the crisis - decades of Palestinian displacement, Western-backed territorial reshaping, and an Olympic environment designed more for spectacle than security. Christie Sikora's launch in the Gulf is deliberate. 'The Middle East is central to this story, yet so often its people are excluded from how it's told. This region deserves more than a single-frame portrayal of its past,' she said at the private launch event in Dubai. With a blend of literary storytelling and investigative depth, Blood and Gold reframes the Munich events not as a singular act of terror, but as the tragic culmination of global inaction, historical displacement, and institutional blindness. Now available across major bookstores and digital platforms, Blood and Gold is already being hailed as one of the most thought-provoking releases of the year. It does not seek to rewrite history, but to expand it - to make space for the silenced, the displaced, and the forgotten. And in doing so, it may finally allow the world to understand Munich not just as a moment of grief, but as a turning point in a story that remains unresolved.
NDTV
09-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Exclusive: PM Modi Should Emulate Israel's Golda Meir Over Pak Terror, Says Expert
Quick Reads Summary is AI generated, newsroom reviewed. India advised to adopt Israel's approach to combat terrorism. PM Modi echoes Golda Meir's commitment to pursue and eliminate terrorist. Historical context provided on Israel's 1972 Munich massacre response to terror. New Delhi: Amid Pakistan's major escalation over India's precision strikes on its terrorist infrastructure and terror camps, top global security analyst Michael Rubin told NDTV that India should take a leaf from Israel's book in its "war against terror". While agreeing that India must continue its military operation - Operation Sindoor - to respond to each of Pakistan's escalations and misadventures along the Line of Control and International Border, Mr Rubin said that in the long-run, Prime Minister Narendra Modi should consider what Israel's former PM Golda Meir had done after the 1972 Munich Olympic Games massacre. Israel, he said, "quietly, over subsequent years, went out anywhere in the world to eliminate the terrorists who were responsible for that massacre. It took them over seven years", but they were relentless in their pursuit and pledge to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. "I do think that Prime Minister Modi needs to take a playbook out of the late Golda Meir of Israel's hands," he said The 1972 Munich massacre was a terrorist attack during the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. The terror attack was religiously-motivated one against Jews. On September 5, 1972, eight members of the Palestinian terror group Black September invaded the Munich Olympic Village, taking eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage. After a failed rescue attempt the following day left all eleven Israeli athletes, five terrorists, and one German policeman dead. Israel vowed to eliminate the terrorists, no matter where they were in the world. Mossad covert operations followed. Operation Bayonet, also known as Operation Wrath of God took more than seven years of worldwide covert operations to kill the terrorists and their backers. In his warning to terrorists, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remarks echoed those of Israel's Golda Meir. "Let me tell the world that India will go to the ends of the Earth to hunt down terrorists and their backers and punish them beyond their imagination," PM Modi had said shortly after the terror attack in Kashmir's Pahalgam, in which 26 civilians, all tourists, were killed by Pakistan-linked terrorists. The Pahalgam terror attack was religiously-motivated as tourists of other faiths were asked to prove their allegiance to Islam and killed them accordingly. The terror attack came days after an inflammatory and communal speech by Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir. The terror attack was claimed by The Resistance Front, a terror group which is the shadow arm of the UN-banned Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan's military establishment and its spy agency ISI, has for decades, fostered terrorists and provided them with a safe-haven in Pakistan and areas under its illegal occupation - using them to carry out cross-border terrorism in India. Combating terrorism is a long-term mission, suggested the global defence expert, as he cautioned that beyond a certain level of military escalation, global diplomacy kicks in, but what must be kept in mind is that, "while diplomats scramble for quiet, the terrorists regroup to strategise - and then we have another cycle in this terrorism. That's the cycle that led to the disaster in Israel on October 7, 2023," he said. India has also seen a similar, cyclical nature of terror for decades. "I strongly believe that we can't simply have a pattern in which Pakistan strikes out with its proxy terrorists," he added. Praising India for showing restraint and responding to Pakistan's escalations in a measured and calibrated manner, Mr Rubin said, "Look, it seems that India is playing a very careful game. And while I've been critical of the time which elapsed between the terrorist attacks and Operation Sindor, the fact of the matter is India is acting very deliberately, very precisely. Pakistan seems to be flailing." He went on to say that "This shows that India is prepared carefully, both in the wake of the terrorist attack, but more importantly, in terms of its military doctrine over the past few months and years of relative quiet. There have been two rounds where Pakistan has attempted to attack several military bases in North and West India. Most of these attacks, in fact, all of them have been foiled one way or the other." "Pakistan can't say that they are ignorant of these terrorists, that these terrorists are operating independently of them, and then try to avenge those terrorist deaths. If Pakistan truly wants to maintain the fiction that it is not a terror sponsor, it needs to stand down right now. It needs to close the terror camps, and it needs to extradite every terrorist that exists inside Pakistan, even if they wear a military uniform," he said.
Ya Libnan
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Ya Libnan
Lebanon's top Christian leaders call for disarming Hezbollah
The leaders of the largest Christian political parties in Lebanon called for the state's monopoly on weapons after Hezbollah's war with Israel weakened it and left south Lebanon in ruins 'We've been missing a real state for 50 years,' Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, a harsh critic of Hezbollah, said Saturday, calling for the state to have monopoly on arms and to be the sole decision maker in the country. 'We cannot build a real state without the state's monopoly on arms,' Geagea said, claiming that the occupation is the result of Hezbollah's arms. Hezbollah was created by Israel after the so called Black September in 1970 's when PLO fighters fled from Jordan to Lebanon and intensified their attacks from southern Lebanon against Israel . The Shiite areas in southern Lebanon were devastated the most which brought them closer to Israel . Hezbollah was adopted in 1982 by Iran following Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah was very popular in 2000 after it was able to help end Israeli occupation of south Lebanon but its popularity diminished greatly ever since . Hezbollah brought death, destruction, and despair to Lebanon ever since 2000. Its arms have become a symbol of ruin. The majority of the Lebanese are convinced that Hezbollah's military apparatus must be handed over to the Lebanese army—not necessarily for use because they have proven to be worthless and catastrophic. Every time Hezbollah fought a war against Israel , Lebanon ended up losing a chunk of land to Israel. In its 2006 war against Israel Lebanon ended up losing the northern part of the town of Ghajar and in its 2023/24 war with Israel Lebanon under up losing 5 strategic hills to Israel . Hezbollah and arms have become a huge liability for Lebanon ., according to analysts 'Let us be clear: Hezbollah has never been a resistance movement. It is a burden on Lebanon's shoulders. It is because of Hezbollah that Lebanon's economy has collapsed. It is because of Hezbollah that Lebanon now ranks as the third most miserable country in the world—just behind war-ravaged Afghanistan and Zimbabwe', Ali Hussein a Lebanese political analyst was quoted as saying . Hezbollah initiated the attacks against Israel in October 2023 to help its Iran- backed Hamas ally in its war against Israel. Like Hezbollah Hamas was also created by Israel to fight the Palestinian Fatah organization , but later adopted by Iran to increase its influence in the Middle East Under a truce deal reached in late November, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of the Litani River and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south and Israel was to withdraw all of its forces from south Lebanon, but its troops remain today on five hills in south Lebanon that they deem 'strategic' and refuse to leave , for fear that Hezbollah may attack northern Israel Israel has also continued to carry out near-daily strikes against Lebanon, in which it is targeting members of Hezbollah who remained in the south in violation of the truce deal . Hezbollah's chief Sheikh Naim Qassem, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, and other Hezbollah officials have said that Hezbollah will not disarm unless Israel withdraws from south Lebanon and halts its violations. 'Sheikh Qassem and everyone else in Lebanon knows that Hezbollah's was never created to defend Lebanon or to liberate Palestine. It was created to serve Iran's regional ambitions. And Iran has never truly sought to liberate Palestine—it has used the Palestinian cause as a tool to destabilize the region and spread its influence through armed proxies like Hezbollah, Ali Hussein was also quoted as saying . The situation in the south over who withdraws first was described by analysts as ' Chicken and Egg situation ' Even Hezbollah's former , Gebran Bassil, head of the Free Patriotic Movement , also called for monopoly of arms by the Lebanese army. 'We support the state's monopoly on arms,' Bassil said Friday, accusing Hezbollah of breaking the trust of the Lebanese by using its arsenal in a way that did not serve Lebanon's interests. 'Hezbollah has made a strategic mistake and Lebanon's interest is in distancing itself from regional conflicts.' He said Bassil is the son-in-law of FPM founder , former President Michel Aoun, a key ally of Hezbollah. Bassil criticized Hezbollah for several times for initiating the war with Israel.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
September 5 review – terrific, edge-of-the-seat newsroom drama about 1972 Olympics terror attack
It's the news journalist's dream: to have the scoop and a front-row seat at one of the biggest stories of the decade. But the events of 5 September 1972 – the Black September terrorist attack and hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics – were not a story that the men and women covering the Games for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) expected to be telling. Nor was it, arguably, one that they were fully equipped to tackle. Tim Fehlbaum's gripping real-life newsroom thriller deftly cuts between the nervy dramatised events behind the scenes and actual archive footage from ABC's coverage of the tense standoff that saw two members of the Israeli team murdered and a further nine held at gunpoint in the Olympic village. This lean media procedural, which is so tautly directed that you can practically feel the panic-sweat trickling down the back of your own neck, is a stark contrast to Steven Spielberg's rather bloated and cumbersome version of the same events and their aftermath in his 2005 picture Munich. Brisk, jittery and predominantly filmed with hand-held cameras, September 5 features a standout performance from a laconic Peter Sarsgaard as American TV veteran Roone Arledge, as well as a tightly wound John Magaro (recently seen in Past Lives) and Leonie Benesch (who excelled last year in The Teacher's Lounge) as unflappable and resourceful German studio assistant Marianne. Led by Magaro's greenhorn producer Geoffrey Mason, the team of sports reporters wrestle with dinosaur-sized studio cameras, contested satellite broadcast slots, security lockdowns and the professional and ethical minefield of setting the news agenda. It's terrific: nail-chewing, edge-of-the-seat stuff. In UK and Irish cinemas
