British tourist to be deported from Israel
A British tourist is facing deportation from Israel after allegedly entering a closed military area and threatening security forces, Israeli authorities say.
Janet Adyeri, 35, who was named by Israeli media, was detained in the Southern Hebron Hills area in the occupied West Bank on Monday.
After being questioned she was found to have posted anti-Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sentiments on social media and to belong to an organisation calling for the boycott of Israel, police said.
Israel's immigration authority said Adyeri would be kept in a detention centre, and is expected to be deported within the next 24 hours.
According to Israeli police, Adyeri "violated public order by refusing to identify herself to the forces and threatening a settlement security coordinator".
Following an investigation at the Central Unit of Judea and Samaria, Ayderi was brought before a judge, police said.
Adyeri's lawyer Riham Nasra said her client was not interrogated about her social media posts or making threats.
She told Israeli media she was only "questioned regarding her entry into a closed military zone, and that's it."
Nasra said added Adyeri only refused to identify herself when asked by a plainclothes soldier.
She presented identification to uniformed soldiers later on.
According to Israeli media, Nasra disputes Adyeri was brought before a judge, as police claimed.
She was taken straight to a hearing at the Population and Immigration Authority in Ramle, where her deportation was decided upon, Nasra said.
The BBC has contacted the UK Foreign Office for comment.
After the incident, Israel's national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said anyone "who acts against the State of Israel will find an aggressive police presence. The games are over," in a post on X.
Last month, two Labour MPs were denied entry to Israel while on a trip to the occupied West Bank.
Israel's population and immigration authority said this was because they intended to "spread hate speech".
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Atlantic
41 minutes ago
- Atlantic
How to Assess the Damage of the Iran Strikes
In August 1941, the British government received a very unwelcome piece of analysis from an economist named David Miles Bensusan-Butt. A careful analysis of photographs suggested that the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command was having trouble hitting targets in Germany and France; in fact, only one in three pilots that claimed to have attacked the targets seemed to have dropped its bombs within five miles of them. The Butt report is a landmark in the history of 'bomb damage assessment,' or, as we now call it, 'battle damage assessment.' This recondite term has come back into public usage because of the dispute over the effectiveness of the June 22 American bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities. President Donald Trump said that American bombs had 'obliterated' the Iranian nuclear program. A leaked preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency on June 24 said that the damage was minimal. Whom to believe? Have the advocates of bombing again overpromised and underdelivered? Some history is in order here, informed by a bit of personal experience. From 1991 to 1993 I ran the U.S. Air Force's study of the first Gulf War. In doing so I learned that BDA rests on three considerations: the munition used, including its accuracy; the aircraft delivering it; and the type of damage or effect created. Of these, precision is the most important. World War II saw the first use of guided bombs in combat. In September 1943, the Germans used radio-controlled glide bombs to sink the Italian battleship Roma as it sailed off to surrender to the Allies. Americans developed similar systems with some successes, though none so dramatic. In the years after the war, precision-guided weapons slowly came to predominate in modern arsenals. The United States used no fewer than 24,000 laser-guided bombs during the Vietnam War, and some 17,000 of them during the 1991 Gulf War. These weapons have improved considerably, and in the 35 years since, 'routine precision,' as some have called it, has enormously improved the ability of airplanes to hit hard, buried targets. Specially designed ordnance has also seen tremendous advances. In World War II, the British developed the six-ton Tallboy bomb to use against special targets, including the concrete submarine pens of occupied France in which German U-boats hid. The Tallboys cracked some of the concrete but did not destroy any, in part because these were 'dumb bombs' lacking precision guidance, and in part because the art of hardening warheads was in its infancy. In the first Gulf War, the United States hastily developed a deep-penetrating, bunker-busting bomb, the GBU-28, which weighed 5,000 pounds, but only two were used, to uncertain effect. In the years since, however, the U.S. and Israeli air forces, among others, have acquired hardened warheads for 2,000-pound bombs such as the BLU-109 that can hit deeply buried targets—which is why, for example, the Israelis were able to kill a lot of Hezbollah's leadership in its supposedly secure bunkers. The aircraft that deliver bombs can affect the explosives' accuracy. Bombs that home in on the reflection of a laser, for example, could become 'stupid' if a cloud passes between plane and the target, or if the laser otherwise loses its lock on the target. Bombs relying on GPS coordinates can in theory be jammed. Airplanes being shot at are usually less effective bomb droppers than those that are not, because evasive maneuvers can prevent accurate delivery. The really complicated question is that of effects. Vietnam-era guided bombs, for example, could and did drop bridges in North Vietnam. In many cases, however, Vietnamese engineers countered by building 'underwater bridges' that allowed trucks to drive across a river while axle-deep in water. The effect was inconvenience, not interdiction. Conversely, in the first Gulf War, the U.S. and its allies spent a month pounding Iraqi forces dug in along the Kuwait border, chiefly with dumb bombs delivered by 'smart aircraft' such as the F-16. In theory, the accuracy of the bombing computer on the airplane would allow it to deliver unguided ordnance with accuracy comparable to that of a laser-guided bomb. In practice, ground fire and delivery from high altitudes often caused pilots to miss. When teams began looking at Iraqi tanks in the area overrun by U.S. forces, they found that many of the tanks were, in fact, undamaged. But that was only half of the story. Iraqi tank crews were so sufficiently terrified of American air power that they stayed some distance away from their tanks, and tanks immobilized and unmaintained for a month, or bounced around by near-misses, do not work terribly well. The functional and indirect effects of the bombing, in other words, were much greater than the disappointing physical effects. Many of the critiques of bombing neglect the importance of this phenomenon. The pounding of German cities and industry during World War II, for example, did not bring war production to a halt until the last months, but the indirect and functional effects were enormous. The diversion of German resources into air-defense and revenge weapons, and the destruction of the Luftwaffe's fighter force over the Third Reich, played a very great role in paving the way to Allied victory. At a microlevel, BDA can be perplexing. In 1991, for example, a bomb hole in an Iraqi hardened-aircraft shelter told analysts only so much. Did the bomb go through the multiple layers of concrete and rock fill, or did it 'J-hook'back upward and possibly fail to explode? Was there something in the shelter when it hit, and what damage did it do? Did the Iraqis perhaps move airplanes into penetrated shelters on the theory that lightning would not strike twice? All hard (though not entirely impossible) to judge without being on the ground. To the present moment: BDA takes a long time, so the leaked DIA memo of June 24 was based on preliminary and incomplete data. The study I headed was still working on BDA a year after the war ended. Results may be quicker now, but all kinds of information need to be integrated—imagery analysis, intercepted communications, measurement and signature intelligence (e.g., subsidence of earth above a collapsed structure), and of course human intelligence, among others. Any expert (and any journalist who bothered to consult one) would know that two days was a radically inadequate time frame in which to form a considered judgment. The DIA report was, from a practical point of view, worthless. An educated guess, however, would suggest that in fact the U.S. military's judgment that the Iranian nuclear problem had suffered severe damage was correct. The American bombing was the culmination of a 12-day campaign launched by the Israelis, which hit many nuclear facilities and assassinated at least 14 nuclear scientists. The real issue is not the single American strike so much as the cumulative effect against the entire nuclear ecosystem, including machining, testing, and design facilities. The platforms delivering the munitions in the American attack had ideal conditions in which to operate—there was no Iranian air force to come up and attack the B-2s that they may not even have detected, nor was there ground fire to speak of. The planes were the most sophisticated platforms of the most sophisticated air force in the world. The bombs themselves, particularly the 14 GBU-57s, were gigantic—at 15 tons more than double the size of Tallboys—with exquisite guidance and hardened penetrating warheads. The targets were all fully understood from more than a decade of close scrutiny by Israeli and American intelligence, and probably that of other Western countries as well. In the absence of full information, cumulative expert judgment also deserves some consideration—and external experts such as David Albright, the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, have concluded that the damage was indeed massive and lasting. Israeli analysts, in and out of government, appear to agree. They are more likely to know, and more likely to be cautious in declaring success about what is, after all, an existential threat to their country. For that matter, the Iranian foreign minister concedes that 'serious damage' was done. One has to set aside the sycophantic braggadocio of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who seems to believe that one unopposed bombing raid is a military achievement on par with D-Day, or the exuberant use of the word obliteration by the president. A cooler, admittedly provisional judgment is that with all their faults, however, the president and his secretary of defense are likely a lot closer to the mark about what happened when the bombs fell than many of their hasty, and not always well-informed, critics. *Photo-illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Source: Alberto Pizzoli / Sygma / Getty; MIKE NELSON / AFP / Getty; Greg Mathieson / Mai / Getty; Space Frontiers / Archive Photos / Hulton Archive / Getty; U.S. Department of Defense
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
At least 71 killed in Israel's attack on Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, Iranian judiciary says
DUBAI — At least 71 people were killed in Israel's attack on Tehran's Evin Prison, Iran's judiciary said Sunday about the notorious lockup where many political prisoners and dissidents have been held. Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir posted on the office's official Mizan News agency website that those killed on Monday included staff, soldiers, prisoners and members of visiting families. It was not possible to independently verify the claim. The Israeli bombardment, which came the day before the ceasefire with Iran took hold, hit several prison buildings and prompted concerns from rights groups about the safety of the inmates. It remains unclear why Israel targeted the prison, but it came on a day when the Defense Ministry said it was attacking 'regime targets and government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran.' The news of the prison attack was quickly overshadowed by an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Qatar later that day, which caused no casualties, and the announcement of the ceasefire. Jahangir did not break down the casualty figures but said the attack had hit the prison's infirmary, engineering building, judicial affairs and visitation hall, where visiting family members were killed and injured. On the day of the attack, the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran criticized Israel for striking the prison, seen as a symbol of the Iranian regime's repression of any opposition, saying it violated the principle of distinction between civilian and military targets. Over the 12 days before a ceasefire was declared, Israel claimed it killed about 30 Iranian commanders and 11 nuclear scientists, while hitting eight nuclear-related facilities and more than 720 military infrastructure sites. More than 1,000 people were killed, including at least 417 civilians, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activists group. In retaliation, Iran fired more than 550 ballistic missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted, but those that got through caused damage in many areas and killed 28 people. Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, said in a Saturday letter to United Nations officials that the international body should recognize Israel and the U.S. 'as the initiators of the act of aggression' against Iran and that their targeting of a sovereign country and its people should require 'compensation and reparation.' 'The Security Council should also hold the aggressors accountable and prevent the recurrence of such heinous and serious crimes to enable it to maintain international peace and security,' Araghchi said in the letter obtained by the Associated Press. 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Abdolrahim Mousavi, the chief of staff for the Iranian armed forces, said in a conversation with Saudi Arabia's defense minister that Iran is prepared if there were to be another surprise Israeli attack. 'We did not initiate the war, but we responded to the aggressor with all our might, and since we have complete doubts about the enemy's adherence to its commitments, including the ceasefire, we are prepared to give them a strong response if they repeat the aggression,' Mousavi said, according to Iranian state TV agency IRNA. Meanwhile, a lot remained unclear about the status of Iran's nuclear program, which incited the initial Israeli attack. President Trump claimed that the U.S. strikes 'obliterated' the program, though preliminary American intelligence reports are inconclusive. Iranians say Trump is exaggerating. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. atomic watchdog, told CBS' 'Face the Nation' in an interview that aired Sunday that Iran's capacities remain but it is impossible to know the timeline or access the full damage to the program unless inspectors are allowed in, which Iranian officials have suspended since the U.S. bombardment. 'It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage, first of all. And secondly, Iran has the capacities there, industrial and technological capacities. So if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.' Rising and Amiri write for the Associated Press.
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
President Donald Trump calls for a ceasefire deal on the war in Gaza as signs of progress emerge
TEL AVIV, Israel — U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday urged progress in ceasefire talks in the 20-month war in Gaza, as Israel and Hamas appeared to move closer to an agreement. Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was set to travel to Washington this week for talks on a ceasefire, an Israeli official said, and plans were being made for Netanyahu to travel there in the coming weeks, a sign there may be movement on a deal. Netanyahu was meeting with his security Cabinet on Sunday evening, the official said on condition of anonymity to discuss plans that hadn't been finalized. 'MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!' Trump wrote on social media early Sunday. Trump raised expectations Friday for a deal, saying there could be an agreement within the next week. Trump has repeatedly called for Israel and Hamas to end the war. An eight-week ceasefire was reached just as he took office earlier this year, but Israel resumed the war in March after trying to get Hamas to accept new terms on next steps. Some Palestinians greeted the possibility of a new truce with skepticism after watching the last ceasefire shattered. 'Since the beginning of the war, they have been promising us something like this: Release the hostages and we will stop the war,' said Abdel Hadi Al-Hour. 'They did not stop the war.' Trump also doubled down on his criticism of the legal proceedings against Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, calling it 'a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT.' In the post Saturday evening, Trump said the trial interfered with ceasefire talks, saying Netanyahu 'is right now in the process of negotiating a Deal with Hamas, which will include getting the Hostages back.' Last week, Trump called for the trial to be canceled. It was a dramatic interference by an ally in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state. It unnerved many in Israel, despite Trump's popularity there. The trial has repeatedly been postponed at Netanyahu's request, citing security and diplomatic developments. On Sunday, the court agreed to call off two more days of testimony by him scheduled this week. Talks between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly faltered over a major sticking point — whether the war should end as part of any ceasefire agreement. Hamas official Mahmoud Merdawi accused Netanyahu of stalling progress on a deal, saying on social media that the Israeli leader insists on a temporary agreement that would free just 10 of the hostages. About 50 hostages remain, with less than half believed to be alive. Netanyahu spokesperson Omer Dostri said that 'Hamas was the only obstacle to ending the war,' without addressing Merdawi's claim. During a visit Sunday to to Israel's internal security service, Shin Bet, Netanyahu said that the Israel-Iran war and subsequent ceasefire have opened many opportunities: 'First of all, to rescue the hostages. Of course, we will also have to solve the Gaza issue, to defeat Hamas, but I estimate that we will achieve both tasks.' Hamas says it is willing to free all the hostages in exchange for a full withdrawal of Israeli troops and an end to the war in Gaza. Israel rejects that offer, saying it will agree to end the war if Hamas surrenders, disarms and goes into exile, something that the group refuses. The war in Gaza began with the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which fighters killed 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostage. Gaza's Health Ministry on Sunday said that another 88 people have been killed by Israeli fire over the past 24 hours, raising the war's toll among Palestinians to 56,500. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, doesn't distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count, but says more than half of the dead are women and children. The war has displaced most of Gaza's population, often multiple times, obliterated much of the territory's urban landscape and left people overwhelmingly reliant on outside aid, which Israel has limited since the end of the latest ceasefire. Fewer than half of Gaza's hospitals are even partly functional, and more than 4,000 children need medical evacuation abroad, a new U.N. humanitarian assessment says. 'We are exhausted, we are tired. We hope to God that the war will end,' said one Palestinian, Mahmoud Wadi. The Israeli military ordered a mass evacuation of Palestinians in large swaths of northern Gaza, home to hundreds of thousands of people who had returned during the ceasefire earlier this year. Col. Avichay Adraee, a military spokesperson, posted the order on social media. It includes multiple neighborhoods in eastern and northern Gaza City, as well as the Jabaliya refugee camp. The military will expand its escalating attacks westward to the city's center, calling for people to move toward the Muwasi area in southern Gaza, Adraee said. An Israeli military offensive aims to move Palestinians to southern Gaza, so forces can more freely operate to combat fighters. Rights groups say their movement would amount to forcible displacement.
