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Miami Herald
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Israel Embassy Shooting Suspect Donated to Joe Biden, Records Indicate
Elias Rodriguez, the 30-year-old who police believe was responsible for the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy employees by a Jewish museum in Washington D.C., appears to have made a donation to President Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. On Wednesday evening Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, identified as Israeli embassy employees by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, were shot dead at the Washington D.C. Capital Jewish Museum. Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith identified the suspect as Rodriguez. She said he had been taking into custody at the museum after the shooting and chanted "free Palestine." An individual named Elias Rodriguez donated $500 to the 'Biden for President' campaign committee on March 11, 2020, according to a Federal Election Commission filing. The individual gave their address as 3132 N Kimball Ave., which is in Chicago's Avondale neighborhood. This is the same neighborhood that an 'Elias Rodriguez' lived in, according to his profile on the website of the HistoryMakers, a nonprofit that says it is committed to "preserving and making widely accessible the untold personal stories of both well-known and unsung African Americans." On Thursday morning the Rodriguez account on the HistoryMakers website was removed. According to a LinkedIn account, an individual named 'Elias Rodriguez' worked as a "Production and Logistics Coordinator & Oral History Researcher" at the HistoryMakers between March 2023 and July 2024. On the Federal Election Commission form Rodriguez said his employer was CouponCabin, where he worked as a senior content associate. This matches the Rodriguez LinkedIn account, which says they worked as a "Senior Content Associate & Training Coordinator" at CouponCabin between February 2019 and April 2022. Newsweek has not independently verified that the 'Elias Rodriguez' LinkedIn and HistoryMakers accounts belong to the same individual who carried out the Washington D.C. shooting, though there is a visual resemblance in the photographs of the suspect arrested and the profiles. CouponCabin is a Chicago founded company which provides online coupon codes to its users. Newsweek has contacted Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police, the Chicago Police Department, the AOIA and the HistoryMakers for comment on Thursday outside of regular office hours via telephone, email and online inquiry form. Speaking to WAGA-TV one eyewitness said they saw the suspect being arrested inside the museum after the shooting. They said: "The security guard happened to let this guy in. I guess they were thinking and he was covered in rain, he was clearly in trauma, he was in shock, and some of the people in the event brought him water, they sat him down. 'Are you O. K.? Were you shot? What happened?' He's like, 'Somebody call the cops.' "So about 10 minutes later when the cops actually came in he said, 'I did this,' he said, 'Sir I'm unarmed,' he put his hands up he grabbed a red kaffiyeh out of his pocket and started the free Palestine chants. You know, 'there's only one solution, intifada revolution' and he was being dragged out of the building as he was yelling 'free Palestine'." Related Articles The Right-Wing Culture War Scam Comes Full Circle | OpinionElias Rodriguez, DC Shooting Suspect Latest, Israel Blames 'Toxic Incitement': Live UpdatesIsraeli Embassy Couple 'About to Get Engaged' Killed in DC ShootingWho Is Elias Rodriguez? Suspect Named in Israeli Embassy Staff Killings 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
Daily News Egypt
21-05-2025
- Health
- Daily News Egypt
Israel escalates military campaign in Gaza amid deepening humanitarian catastrophe
The Israeli occupation army has intensified its operation in the Gaza Strip, launching heavy airstrikes on residential neighbourhoods in both the northern and southern regions, despite mounting international condemnation and renewed calls for a ceasefire. The latest wave of attacks comes as the blockaded territory plunges deeper into an escalating humanitarian disaster, with hospitals overwhelmed, medical supplies dwindling, and critical infrastructure nearing collapse. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 82 people were killed and 262 wounded in the past 24 hours. The total number of casualties since the resumption of Israeli operations on March 18 has now reached 3,509 fatalities. Since the start of the war on October 7, 2025, more than 53,655 people have been killed and over 120,000 injured. In the most recent escalation, Israeli airstrikes struck multiple areas of Jabalia in northern Gaza and Khan Younis in the south, reportedly flattening entire residential blocks, according to Palestinian media. The Israeli army's radio service confirmed that additional brigades had been deployed as part of an expanding ground offensive aimed at increasing territorial control. Despite Israeli statements claiming a temporary opening of border crossings to allow humanitarian aid into the enclave, the United Nations reported that no assistance had reached civilians. UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric called the delivery process 'lengthy, complex, and dangerous,' citing Israeli military requirements for aid workers to offload and reload shipments—delays that have severely hindered distribution and increased operational risk. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) accused Israel of manipulating humanitarian aid for strategic purposes. Pascale Coissart, the organization's emergency coordinator in Khan Younis, said the volume of aid permitted to enter was 'woefully insufficient,' characterizing the process as a deliberate strategy to deflect accusations of using starvation as a weapon of war. Meanwhile, Gaza's Government Media Office said Israel had blocked the entry of humanitarian supplies for a third consecutive day, despite previous assurances. The office warned that the closure of all border crossings for more than 80 days has driven Gaza into a 'catastrophic humanitarian situation,' marked by extreme shortages of food, fuel, and medicine. Diplomatic tensions continued to rise. On Tuesday, the United Kingdom summoned Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely and announced the suspension of free trade negotiations with Israel, citing what it described as the 'expansion of genocide' against Palestinians. Sweden also declared its intention to push for European Union sanctions against Israeli officials over ongoing human rights violations and a lack of accountability. In the United States, Israeli news outlet Walla reported that two senior White House officials said President Donald Trump is growing 'increasingly alarmed' by the images of suffering Palestinian children circulating in the media. According to the report, Trump has sent direct messages to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, urging him to 'end the war immediately.' Nonetheless, Netanyahu ordered part of Israel's negotiating team in Doha to return home on Tuesday, leaving only technical personnel in place. The move is widely seen as a sign of stalled diplomatic efforts as fighting intensifies on the ground. Inside Israel, far-right activists staged protests near the Karm Abou Salem crossing in an effort to block humanitarian aid shipments into Gaza. The extremist group 'Order 9' shared videos on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that 'starving Gaza residents is the only way' to pressure Hamas into releasing Israeli hostages. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) issued a statement accusing Israel of using starvation as a deliberate method of warfare, labelling the blockade and bombardment as a 'systematic act of genocide.' In a message posted to Telegram, Hamas accused Israel of deceiving the international community with claims of permitting aid while carrying out 'one of the worst atrocities of the modern era.' Hamas called for immediate international intervention to end the blockade and stop the war, warning that continued global silence amounts to 'complicity in the crime.'
Irish Times
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
In The Settlers, Louis Theroux does something we have rarely seen him do in 30 years of TV
One of the most powerful scenes in The Settlers, Louis Theroux's brilliant new documentary about the Israeli settler movement, comes in the final minutes of the film, which was broadcast earlier this week on BBC Two. Theroux and his small crew are at a festival at Evyatar, one of the numerous settlements in the Palestinian West Bank deemed illegal under international law. He is there to speak with one of the festival's speakers, Daniella Weiss, leader of the extreme right Nachala settler movement. Theroux has had a number of exchanges with Weiss up to this point and her ethno-nationalist vision for the country's future has already been made clear: she wants to remove any possibility for a Palestinian state and to establish a 'greater Israel' by 'settling' Gaza and the West Bank and driving the Palestinians from their land, by divine right and by any means necessary. Theroux and Weiss are standing on a hill overlooking the town of Beita, the site of recent violent confrontations between, on one side, its Palestinian citizens and, on the other, the settlers encroaching on their land and the Israeli military protecting them. He asks her whether she is aware of the level of suffering caused to Palestinians by 'rampaging' settlers and puts it to her that 'when a people is invaded, and put under a military occupation, and deprived of their rights, then anger is an appropriate response'. READ MORE She says there is no such thing as settler violence. To this patently absurd claim, Theroux points out that there is no shortage of filmed footage of same. He refers to a piece of footage shown earlier in The Settlers, filmed in the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point blank range in the stomach as an IDF soldier gazes equably on. (He could just as well be referring, though, to the shooting earlier this month of a 60-year old unarmed Palestinian man by a settler in the West Bank village of al-Rakeez, one of a group who was claiming his farmland as their own.) Weiss's response is more revealing than anything Theroux might presumably have expected. She steps towards him and shoves him in the chest. It's a surprisingly powerful shove, too, for a 79-year old woman, and Theroux is forced backward, clearly thrown off balance in every sense of the term. She is obviously expecting him to push her back, but he – unsurprisingly, sensibly, and yet also a little provocatively – refuses to do so. (Even if BBC guidelines don't have anything specific to say about getting into literal shoving matches with interview subjects, I suspect the general drift is against it.) The point Weiss imagines herself to be proving here is that if he had shoved her back, the footage could easily have been edited to portray Theroux as committing an act of unprovoked violence against a defenceless older woman. This, she says, is exactly what is happening when we see, say, the footage from the West Bank last year, of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point-blank range in the stomach while an IDF soldier looks on. Theroux has, for decades now, been celebrated for his approach to interviews: he tends, famously, to draw on a particular brand of impassive charm, avoiding expressing strong disapproval of even his more reprehensible subjects, whom he typically allows to do the work of portraying themselves in a bad light. But in the moments after being shoved by Weiss, Theroux listens to her reiterate her tribalist refusal to give any thought to the suffering of Palestinians, because they are not her people. And he does something we have rarely seen him do, in nearly thirty years of making television. He says exactly what he thinks of her: 'It would be understandable to think of your own people, your own children, first,' he tells her. 'But to think about other people, and other children, not at all? That seems sociopathic.' She laughs, and it is a laugh empty of even the possibility of humour. 'I hoped you would push me back,' she says, with a strange and unsettling smile. [ Renewed onslaught on Gaza is all about Netanyahu's political survival Opens in new window ] Theroux has encountered such people with such views in his films over the years – Afrikaner separatists in post-Apartheid South Africa, American blood-and-soil white nationalists and so forth – but they have tended to be basically fringe propositions, holding no real power within the societies they wish to reshape in their image. The Israeli settler movement, on the other hand, has, for a very long time, shaped the lived reality of Palestinians in their own villages, towns and cities. The illegal military occupation of the West Bank, in place since 1967, functions as both protection of and a front for the likewise illegal settlements that take up more and more land, and make life more and more dangerous and difficult for Palestinians. The fact that the settlements are illegal is, for the settlers themselves as for the power structure that protects them, neither here nor there. One of the film's major subjects, for instance, is an affable, armed-to-the-teeth American who left Texas to be a settler in the occupied West Bank. His own connection to the land is infinitely deeper, he says, than that of the 'Arabs' – he refuses to use the word Palestinians, because he denies the existence of such a nation, or such a people – who happen to have inhabited it for mere generations. 'There's some things,' he tells Theroux, 'that transcend the whims of legislation.' Theroux's film makes clear, in many ways, how a mythic narrative of divine promise supersedes the law and human rights, and justifies violence and dispossession. For her part, Weiss clearly doesn't think in terms of legality or illegality either. Her movement, as she sees it, is about doing what the state itself would like to do but can't. 'We do for governments,' as she puts it, 'what they cannot do for themselves.' Netanyahu, she says, can't openly say he supports their plans to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. 'But he is happy about it.' As she says this, she is sitting across the table from Theroux, a map of the territory spread out before her, on which the West Bank is dotted with a dense constellation of pink stickers, denoting the settlements built there since 1967. The heavy historical symbolism of the scene is left unarticulated, but it's easy to imagine a caption to the image, in the form of Edward Said's line about the imperial use of cartography: 'In the history of colonial invasions, maps are always first drawn by the victors, since maps are instruments of conquest.' That scene at Weiss's kitchen table is a scene right out of the 19th century: a nightmarish glimpse of an era, and a worldview, that has somehow survived into our present.
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Letters to The Editor — April 26, 2025
Now, action All the steps taken by India in its anger to punish Pakistan could turn out to be double-edged swords. India cannot take back the areas under the occupation of Pakistan (PoK) without unleashing a war which could end up with catastrophic consequences given that both nations possess nuclear weapons. 'Annulling' the Indus Waters Treaty unilaterally is legally complex and might have significant risks for India's international standing and also ensuring regional stability. Completely stopping the natural flow of rivers into Pakistan is also not immediately feasible. India must also not forget that China too is waiting to use water as a weapon. Therefore, what is required at the moment is not to over react. India needs to take steps, patiently and diplomatically, to isolate Pakistan from its staunch supporters and to dent its influence in the Muslim world. Coimbatore What happened in Pahalgam will scar Kashmir for years to come. Precious lives have been lost, families shattered, and a region already fatigued by decades of suffering has been left in shock once again. The Pahalgam carnage was a deliberate attempt to instil fear, fuel division, and weaponise religion. R. Sivakumar, Chennai It is good to see that all political parties have risen as one and expressed their support to whatever measures the Centre is going to take. Any response should not be too hasty, as it could cost the country goodwill. There needs to be a well-drafted plan based on sound intelligence. S.V. Venkatakrishnan, Bengaluru India's strong line — that 'India will identify, trace and punish every terrorist involved in this dastardly assault' — has obviously shaken Pakistan. India's neighbour must note that the bond between India and Kashmir cannot be broken. Steps must be taken to isolate radical and violent elements in Kashmir. Mani Nataraajan, Chennai India should not be satisfied with the initial steps taken after the Pahalgam attack but should systematically expose Pakistan's terror network globally. India should leverage new allies such as Saudi Arabia to further isolate Pakistan, and pressure China not to obstruct the listing of and sanctions on Pakistani-backed terrorists. If China changes its stance, it will be a major setback for Pakistan's terror networks. The unprecedented public anger after the Pahalgam attack is severely damaging Pakistan's narrative. Now is the time for India to vigorously expose Islamabad's support for terrorism globally and also campaign to uproot all the structures that fuel terrorism. Mohammad Asad, Mumbai The crux of the problem is identifying and locating the perpetrators of crime at Pahalgam. Without local support and a recce, the attack could not have been executed. Therefore, the starting point is zeroing in on local handlers. Once they are identified, the rest of the investigation falls in place. Last but not the least: utmost restraint from both sides is the need of the hour lest it become another Palestine issue. A.V. Narayanan, Chennai
Washington Post
21-02-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Live Briefing: Israel ramps up operations in West Bank after bus explosions
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to conduct 'an intensive operation' in the occupied West Bank after three empty buses in central Israel exploded in what officials said was a suspected terrorist attack. No one was injured in the attack, which involved a total of five explosives, three of which detonated on buses in parking lots in the city of Bat Yam, a suburb of Tel Aviv, according to police and local officials. Explosives were also discovered and neutralized in a parking lot in Holon, a nearby city. 'The bus event tonight should be treated like a mega attack. We must not look at the outcome, but at the intent,' said Benny Gantz, a centrist Israeli politician and former defense minister. After the blasts, Hamas's military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said that 'the revenge for our martyrs will not be forgotten as long as the occupier remains on our land.' The statement was attributed to the West Bank-based Tulkarm Battalion. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had ordered Israeli troops to intensify counterterrorism operations in the West Bank. The Israel Defense Forces said it had deployed three additional battalions to the area. Israel last month launched a major West Bank operation that has killed at least 25 people in the Jenin area and displaced thousands of civilians, according to the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli military and the United Nations. Hamas released four bodies Thursday that it said were hostages, including the remains of a mother and her two young children, members of the Bibas family, whose story came to symbolize the brutality of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. However, while an Israeli forensic analysis overnight identified the bodies of the two children, Ariel and Kfir, the Israel Defense Forces said the third body received is not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas. 'No match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body,' the IDF said in a statement. 'This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organization,' the IDF said. The fourth body was that of hostage Oded Lifshitz, whose family confirmed that his remains had been identified. Earlier Thursday, in Israel, the exchange was marked with somber gatherings. Onlookers and senior Israeli officials alike described the national mood as one of deep anguish. The deaths of Shiri Bibas and her sons — Ariel, who was 4 years old, and Kfir, who was 8½ months old at the time of the abduction — had been suspected for months. JENIN, West Bank — The Palestinian Authority recently took a high-stakes gamble in this restive city, launching a major military operation aimed at clipping the wings of militant groups that had grown in influence and audacity. If the operation succeeded, Palestinian security forces would demonstrate they could maintain order not only in the parts of the West Bank they nominally control but also, if given the chance, perhaps in Gaza as well. The role of the Palestinian Authority in governing Gaza is very much a live question as foreign powers and Arab states now debate the future of the war-torn enclave. But the six-week campaign in Jenin, which lost momentum after Israeli forces intervened last month, ultimately came up badly short and exposed some of the challenges the authority would face in securing Gaza. While the security forces arrested dozens of Iranian-backed fighters, high-profile militants remain at large. The clashes highlighted how poorly equipped the Palestinian Authority security forces are compared with the groups they are seeking to subdue. The campaign also underlined questions about how far Palestinians would go to fight fellow Palestinians and whether the authority could maintain its popular legitimacy if it did so. Moreover, the events in Jenin revealed how Israel's actions, which include its own withering attacks on targets in the city, undermine the ability of the Palestinian Authority to exert its control.
