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Israel's dangerous expansionism is now the clear and present danger

Israel's dangerous expansionism is now the clear and present danger

That much was evident again during a speech in February when Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told how he had asked the country's military commanders what the main lesson was from the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
'They said we will no longer allow radical organisations to exist near [[Israel]]'s borders, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, or near the settlements. And that is now our policy,' Katz's speech went on to recount the military chiefs as saying.
But the truth of the matter is that this has always been Israel's policy, and at the heart of such a military doctrine lies the belief that territorial depth offers lasting security. Or, to put this another way, security through expansionism has forever been a core tenet of the Israeli military playbook. That said, rarely has the country and its government been as determinedly expansionist as it is today.
Writing recently in the Financial Times (FT), the Saudi author and commentator Ali Shihabi described Israel's current pursuit of more territory as one 'cloaked in the language of security and religious entitlement'. By 'entitlement' Shihabi is, of course, referring to the biblical idea of a 'Greater Israel' that many of the religious zealots and right-wingers that comprise prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu's coalition government envisage in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and beyond.
Whether Netanyahu himself is fully aligned with his cabinet over ambitions for a 'Greater Israel' remains open to conjecture, but what's in no doubt is that Israel is now pushing back its borders like never before.
In Gaza this past week, reports of an intensification in the demolition of buildings underscores what many observers see as Israel's long-term plan to move the Palestinian population out and fully control Gaza's post-war space. In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Israel's illegal settlement expansion and annexing of territory goes on apace. Further afield, the past week also saw Israel doubling down militarily on both Syria and Lebanon.
In Syria, Israel continues to take territorial advantage of the country's political fragility in the wake of the overthrow of Bashar al- Assad's regime.
(Image: The Washington Post via Getty Images)
FAR BEYOND THE LINE
FOR months, the Israeli military have been assimilating the Druze residents of the Golan Heights, venturing territorially far beyond the line where their predecessors stopped during the conquest of this mountainous plateau Israel has occupied since 1967.
Since the ousting of Assad last December, Israel has struck Syria hundreds of times, and invaded and occupied about 155 square miles of its territory.
Last Wednesday, Israel launched air strikes on Syria's capital, Damascus. It also hit Syrian government forces in the south in an operation it says was aimed at protecting the Druze minority group caught up in clashes with Bedouin tribes in Syria's southern province of Sweida close to the Israeli border.
But Netanyahu's claim that Israel is simply giving the Druze – one million of whom are are spread across the region including in Israel – a helping hand simply doesn't wash with many Middle East analysts.'It's pure opportunism,' Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador and consul general in New York, told Al Jazeera.
'Of course, it's nice to pretend that we're helping our friends the Druze in the same way as we never helped our other friends, the Kurds,' he said, referring to another regional ethnic group.
Pinkas is not alone in his assessment that Israel doesn't want to see a unified Syria with a strong central government controlled by Ahmed al-Sharaa's fledgling presidency. Like other observers, Pinkas maintains that Netanyahu would far rather see 'a weak central government dealing with areas controlled by the Kurds (in the north) and the Druze and Bedouin in the south.'
'Basically, if Syria remains un-unified, Israel can do what it wants in its south,' he added, underlining yet again the perceived importance of territorial depth offering lasting security.
Few doubt the sectarian violence that has gripped Syria's Sweida province these past days has underscored the country's fragility and presented al-Shaara with his most significant crisis yet. For his part, Netanyahu reiterated that Israel will continue to use military means to enforce its two red lines in Syria – the demilitarisation of the area south of Damascus, near Israel's border, and the protection of the country's Druze minority there.
The most extremist members of Netanyahu's government, meanwhile, continue to make clear that Israel's intention is to go much further. Only a few months ago, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that Israel would not stop fighting until Syria was partitioned and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from Gaza into third countries.
'With God's help and the valour of your comrades-in-arms who continue to fight even now, we will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled, Hezbollah is severely beaten, Iran is stripped of its nuclear threat, Gaza is cleansed of Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries,' Smotrich declared during a pre-Memorial Day speech in the West Bank.Divide the country?
DIVIDE THE COUNTRY
ACCORDING to the Times of [[Israel]], Smotrich's comment about dividing Syria came just days after a US Republican congressman Marlin Stutzman told the newspaper that al-Sharaa had expressed 'openness' to normalising relations with Jerusalem and cautioned against efforts to divide the country.
'The first (concern) – which I felt was most important to him – was that Israel may have a plan to divide up the nation of Syria into… multiple parts. That was something that he was very opposed to,' Stutzman recalled.
The plan again, according to the Times of Israel, appeared to be a reference to the lobbying Israel has reportedly been doing in Washington for the US to buck al-Sharaa's fledgling government in favour of establishing a decentralised series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarised.Going by last week's flare-up between Israel and Syria, that issue of partitioning Syria and creating a demilitarised southern area appears to be still on the cards as far as Netanyahu is concerned.
This weekend, relations took a slightly more positive turn, however, after hostilities between the two sides were quelled on Friday by the announcement of a ceasefire.
Israeli officials confirmed that 'due to the ongoing instability' they had agreed to allow Syrian forces limited access to the Sweida area over the next few days. But even with this ceasefire in place the situation remains incredibly volatile, and al-Sharaa could now in effect be forced to either cede ambitions to reassert state control over southern Syria, undermining his attempts to unify the country, or risk an even greater confrontation with Israel.
Israel's laying down of territorial markers in Syria is just the latest example of what some analysts says is a policy of pushing a dangerous expansionism in the region. With the Israeli air force bombing Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, as well as the Syrian capital Damascus from which its infantry troops are now stationed a mere 40 minutes away, never has Israel engaged in such prolonged conflict on so many battlefronts.
All this, too, before taking into consideration its recent onslaught on targets across Iran. With every day that passes Netanyahu, it seems, raises the stakes even further while increasingly disregarding the occasional overtures from Washington to rein in Israel's military actions as was the case in Syria last week.
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EXPANSION STRATEGY
TO get a fuller picture of the scale and intensity of Israel's expansionist strategy at the moment it's worth considering recent mapping compiled by the independent non-profit think tank the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
According to a recent analysis of its data, it shows that between October 7, 2023 – the date of the Hamas attack on Israel – and just before Israel attacked Iran on June 13, Israel has carried out nearly 35,000 recorded attacks across five countries: the occupied Palestinian territory, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.These attacks include air and drone strikes, shelling and missile attacks, remote explosives, and property destruction.
The majority of attacks have been on Palestinian territory with at least 18,235 recorded incidents, followed by Lebanon (15,520), Syria (616), Iran (58) and Yemen (39). Detailing ACLED's research, the broadcaster Al Jazeera noted that while the bulk of Israel's attacks have concentrated on nearby Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon, its military operations have also reached far beyond its immediate borders.Over the past six months, Israeli forces have launched more than 200 air, drone or artillery attacks across Syria, averaging an assault roughly every three to four days, according to ACLED.
In Gaza, meanwhile, reports last week confirmed that Israel has stepped up the demolition of buildings across Gaza with entire towns and suburbs levelled in the past few weeks.
Heavy machinery has played a central role in this destruction operated both by soldiers and civilians, reports indicate.Civilians operating heavy machinery in Gaza can earn as much as $9,000 per month, according to reports in the TheMarker, a Hebrew-language daily business newspaper.
According to newspaper, a trained heavy equipment operator can earn approximately 1,200 shekels (£270) per day, drawn from the 5,000 shekels (£1,118) the Israeli ministry of defence pays daily to the equipment's owner.'At first I did it for the money. Then for revenge. The work there is very hard and unpleasant,' one heavy equipment operator told TheMarker. 'The army doesn't operate smartly, it just wants to destroy as much as possible and doesn't care about anything.'
Gaza's demolitions, many of them buildings that have already been destroyed or damaged by Israel's military onslaught, is seen by observers as part of a longer post-war plan to control, contain, or disperse what remains of Gaza's civilian Palestinian population and prepare the way for the territory's use for settlement expansion and commercial use. In the occupied West Bank, meanwhile, Israel is applying many of the tactics used in its war on Gaza to seize and control territory there.
According to an analysis by the British research group Forensic Architecture, Israel has used building demolitions, armoured bulldozers, and air strikes to establish a permanent military presence in areas such as Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps.
Satellite imagery shows widespread destruction, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and roads reconfigured to facilitate troop movements and surveillance. The United Nations estimates that these operations have displaced at least 40,000 Palestinians.
As Israel's expansionist strategy intensifies, many regional observers say it is simply fuelling chaos and stoking up a future widening regional conflict.
Martin Gak is an Argentinian Jewish journalist based in Germany who is of the view that Israel's territorial ambitions are 'much bigger than the theological design of greater Israel'. In a recent interview, Gak drew parallels with the way Israel is now operating in the Middle East using tactics similar to those of Russia.
He said: 'If you look at Gaza, if you look at what happened in southern Lebanon, the images should be very reminiscent of Grozny in the second Chechen war… so I think that what we're seeing is a Russian playbook of complete destruction,' Gak told Turkish media.
ISRAEL'S GAIN?
OTHER regional observers like the Saudi commentator Shihabi recently posed the question in the FT as to what does Israel truly gain from this relentless push to expand its borders?
'The cost is staggering: deepening international isolation, increasing threats to the global Jewish community, psychological trauma within a constantly targeted Israeli society, and the further destabilisation of an already volatile region,' Shihabi concluded.
Like other Middle East watchers, Shihabi is firmly of the view that more territory is not the answer to Israel's security problems and that 'the future is being held hostage by zealots who value conquest over co-existence'.
While it might have been initially framed as an 'incursion' to eradicate Hamas and rescue the nearly 250 hostages seized on October 7, Israel's Gaza 'operation' has since moved into an entirely new and much wider military realm. It's one, too, for which it has been given virtual carte blanche by the US and Western countries to prosecute. Until that stops, Israel's dangerous expansionist ambitions will almost certainly continue to fuel an escalation in conflict across the Middle East.
The days of framing such a military strategy as being driven by 'existential need' have gone. Israel, as many rightfully argue, is the real regional threat now.
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Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns
Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns

North Wales Chronicle

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Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns

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Britain is working with Jordan to airdrop aid into Gaza and evacuate children needing medical assistance, with military planners deployed for further support. However, the head of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency has warned that such efforts are 'a distraction' that will fail to properly address deepening starvation in the strip, and could in some cases harm civilians. UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said: 'A manmade hunger can only be addressed by political will. 'Lift the siege, open the gates and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need.' On Sunday, Israel announced military pauses to enable the 'safe movement' of food and medicine to Gaza via designated UN convoys amid mounting international alarm at humanitarian conditions in the strip. Images emerging from Gaza in recent days of emaciated children have seen the country's government criticised for its conduct during the 21-month war. 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Later in the week he will chair a Cabinet meeting, with further updates on the UK's next steps expected in the coming days as Mr Lammy prepares to attend a UN conference on a two-state solution in New York. Speaking to broadcasters on Sunday, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury James Murray acknowledged that airdrops come with 'real limits and drawbacks' but that the situation was 'desperate and urgent.' 'Until the restrictions are lifted, until aid is able to get in at the scale and quantity that is needed, we need to be doing everything we possibly can to help,' he told Sky News' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips show. It comes after the Prime Minister held crisis talks with French and German counterparts on Saturday, during which Number 10 said they agreed 'it would be vital to ensure robust plans are in place to turn an urgently-needed ceasefire into lasting peace'. 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Mr Murray said on Sunday: 'As a Government, we're committed to the recognition of Palestine, but we need to work with international partners and we need to use that moment to galvanise change. 'It needs to be part of a pathway to peace.' He added: '140 countries have already recognised Palestine. 'The suffering is still continuing.' Sir Keir and Mr Trump, who is in South Ayrshire on a private visit to his Turnberry golf course, are expected to meet on Monday.

Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns
Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns

Glasgow Times

timean hour ago

  • Glasgow Times

Military pause not enough to ease Gaza suffering, Lammy warns

The Foreign Secretary welcomed the resumption of humanitarian corridors in the enclave but called for access to supplies to be 'urgently' widened over the coming hours and days. He said Israel's announcement that it would suspend fighting in three populated areas of Gaza for 10 hours a day and open secure routes for aid delivery to desperate Palestinians was 'essential but long overdue.' 'This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza,' the Foreign Secretary said in a statement on Sunday. 'We need a ceasefire that can end the war, for hostages to be released and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered. 'Whilst airdrops will help to alleviate the worst of the suffering, land routes serve as the only viable and sustainable means of providing aid into Gaza. 'These measures must be fully implemented and further barriers on aid removed. The world is watching.' Britain is working with Jordan to airdrop aid into Gaza and evacuate children needing medical assistance, with military planners deployed for further support. However, the head of the UN's Palestinian refugee agency has warned that such efforts are 'a distraction' that will fail to properly address deepening starvation in the strip, and could in some cases harm civilians. UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said: 'A manmade hunger can only be addressed by political will. 'Lift the siege, open the gates and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need.' On Sunday, Israel announced military pauses to enable the 'safe movement' of food and medicine to Gaza via designated UN convoys amid mounting international alarm at humanitarian conditions in the strip. Images emerging from Gaza in recent days of emaciated children have seen the country's government criticised for its conduct during the 21-month war. Food experts have warned for months of the risk of famine as Israel continued to restrict aid, which it says is because Hamas siphons off goods. Ceasefire talks between the two sides ground to a standstill this week after the US and Israel withdrew negotiating teams from Qatar, with White House special envoy Steve Witkoff accusing Hamas of a 'lack of desire' to reach an agreement. Sir Keir Starmer is expected to press Donald Trump on the revival of talks as he meets the US President during his visit to Scotland on Monday. The deal under discussion was expected to include a 60-day ceasefire, and aid supplies would be ramped up as conditions for a lasting truce were brokered. The US president is visiting his Turnberry golf course in Scotland (Robert Perry/PA) Sir Keir will raise Washington's work with partners in Qatar and Egypt during his talks with Mr Trump and seek to discuss what more can be done to urgently bring about a ceasefire, it is understood. Later in the week he will chair a Cabinet meeting, with further updates on the UK's next steps expected in the coming days as Mr Lammy prepares to attend a UN conference on a two-state solution in New York. Speaking to broadcasters on Sunday, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury James Murray acknowledged that airdrops come with 'real limits and drawbacks' but that the situation was 'desperate and urgent.' 'Until the restrictions are lifted, until aid is able to get in at the scale and quantity that is needed, we need to be doing everything we possibly can to help,' he told Sky News' Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips show. It comes after the Prime Minister held crisis talks with French and German counterparts on Saturday, during which Number 10 said they agreed 'it would be vital to ensure robust plans are in place to turn an urgently-needed ceasefire into lasting peace'. A Downing Street readout of the call made no mention of Palestinian statehood, which Sir Keir has faced calls to immediately recognise after French President Emmanuel Macron announced his country would do so in September. Sir Keir Starmer discuss the crisis with Donald Trump on Monday Some 221 MPs from Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SDLP and independents have signed a letter pressuring the Government to follow suit at a UN meeting next week. The majority of those who have signed, 131, are Labour MPs. #Gaza: airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient & can even kill starving is a distraction & screensmoke. A manmade hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates & guarantee safe movements… — Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) July 26, 2025 The Government says it is a question of 'when, not if' statehood is recognised but that its immediate focus should be on getting aid into the territory. Mr Murray said on Sunday: 'As a Government, we're committed to the recognition of Palestine, but we need to work with international partners and we need to use that moment to galvanise change. 'It needs to be part of a pathway to peace.' He added: '140 countries have already recognised Palestine. 'The suffering is still continuing.' Sir Keir and Mr Trump, who is in South Ayrshire on a private visit to his Turnberry golf course, are expected to meet on Monday.

Bowen: Israel's aid measures a gesture to allies horrified by Gaza starvation
Bowen: Israel's aid measures a gesture to allies horrified by Gaza starvation

BBC News

timean hour ago

  • BBC News

Bowen: Israel's aid measures a gesture to allies horrified by Gaza starvation

Israel has responded to sustained and growing international condemnation that it is responsible for starvation in Gaza by announcing a series of measures the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said would 'improve the humanitarian response.'It is allowing airdrops of aid, carrying out the first one itself during the night and allowing the United Arab Emirates air force to follow with another later on IDF also announced that it would allow a 'tactical pause in military activity' in some areas and set up 'designated humanitarian corridors… to refute the false claim on international starvation.'Hamas has condemned the moves as a "deception". Israel, it said, was "whitewashing its image before the world".Follow live updates Israel later carried out an airstrike during the 'tactical pause.' Reports from the scene say a mother called Wafaa Harara and her four children, Sara, Areej, Judy and Iyad were Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are already the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court last year, accused of joint criminal responsibility for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts". Netanyahu, Gallant and the Israeli state deny the Israel continues to insist it is not responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and does not impose restrictions on aid entering Gaza, those claims are not accepted by its close allies in Europe, or the United Nations and other agencies active in new measures might be a tacit admission by the Israelis that they need to do likely they are a gesture to allies who have issued strong statements blaming Israel for starvation in latest, on Friday 25 July, from Britain, France and Germany was stark."We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and urgently allow the UN and humanitarian NGOs to carry out their work in order to take action against starvation. Israel must uphold its obligations under international humanitarian law."Israel followed a total blockade of all aid into Gaza with restrictions on the approval of the contents and movement of aid convoys. With the Americans, it has also set up a new system of distributing aid through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) intended to replace the aid network run by the United Nations. Israel claims that Hamas stole aid from the UN system. The UN says it is still waiting for the Israelis to back their claims with UN and other agencies will not cooperate with the GHF system, which they say is inhumane and militarised. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been shot dead trying to reach the GHF's four sites, according to the UN. The GHF operates in zones controlled by the IDF and it deploys armed American security personnel at its sites.A retired US special forces colonel who worked for the GHF in Gaza told the BBC that he saw American colleagues and IDF soldiers opening fire on civilians. Both deny they have targeted Whittall, the head in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the UN's office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) has already condemned the methods used by the GHF. Israel told him his visa would not be renewed after he posted on social media a month ago that the GHF system had brought to Gaza "conditions created to kill… what we are seeing is carnage. It is weaponised hunger. It is forced displacement. It's a death sentence for people just trying to survive. It appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life".After Israel announced its new measures, Whittall told the BBC that "the humanitarian situation in Gaza has never been worse".He said for Israel's new measures to change matters for the better it would have to reduce the time it takes to allow trucks to transit the crossings into Gaza and improve the routes provided by the IDF for the convoys to would also need to provide "meaningful assurances that the people gathering to take food off the back of the trucks won't be shot by Israeli forces".Israel released grainy footage of a transport plane dropping pallets of aid into Gaza. Lines of parachutes billowed out the back of the aircraft in the dark of the night. The IDF said it had delivered seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar and tinned other wars I have seen aid being dropped, both from the aircraft themselves and close up on the ground as it dropping aid is an act of desperation. It can also look good on television, and spread a feel-good factor that something, at last, is being is a crude process, that will not on its own do much to end hunger in Gaza. Only a ceasefire and an unrestricted, long term aid operation can do that. Even big transport planes do not carry as much as a small convoy of Iraqi Kurdistan, after the 1991 Gulf War, the US, UK and others dropped aid from C-130 transport aircraft, mostly army rations, sleeping bags and surplus winter uniforms to tens of thousands trying to survive in the open in mud and snow high in the mountains on Iraq's border with Turkey. I flew with them and watched British and American airmen dropping aid from the rear cargo ramps of the planes several thousand feet above the people who needed was welcome enough. But when a few days later when I managed to reach the improvised camps in the mountains, I saw young men running into minefields to get aid that landed there. Some were killed and maimed in explosions. I saw families killed when heavy pallets dropped on their Mostar was besieged during the war in Bosnia in 1993, I saw pallets of American military 'meals ready to eat', dropped from high altitude, scattered all over the east side of the city that was being constantly shelled. Some aid pallets crashed through roofs that had somehow not been destroyed by artillery involved in relief operations regard dropping aid from the sky as a last resort. They use it when any other access is impossible. That's not the case in Gaza. A short drive north is Ashdod, Israel's modern container port. A few more hours away is the Jordanian border, which has been used regularly as a supply line for aid for was one of the world's most densely populated places before the war when the population of more than two million Palestinians had access to the entire strip. In British terms, the Gaza Strip is slightly smaller than the Isle of Wight. Compared to American cities, it's roughly the size of Philadelphia or Israel has forced most of Gaza's people into a tiny area on the southern coast, amounting to around 17% of Gaza's land. Most of them live in densely packed tents. It is not clear if there is even an open space for despatchers high in the sky to aim of aid dropped by parachute often land far from the people who need pallet will be fought over by desperate men trying to get food for their families, and by criminal elements who will want to sell it for profit.

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