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drone attack
Israel Bombs Yemen Saturday in Escalation with Houthis
The attack came a day after the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Tel Aviv
Jul 20, 2024
Houthi-run media say Israeli air strikes Saturday targeted oil storage facilities in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah and that there are an unspecified number of fatalities and injuries.
The attack came a day after the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Tel Aviv that killed one person and struck just yards from a U.S. Embassy branch office.
Israel’s air strikes will not stop the Houthi's military operations in support of the Palestinian people, Houthi political bureau member Mohammed al-Bukhaiti said in a post on X, warning they will instead increase until the war in Gaza ends. “The Zionist entity will pay the price for targeting civilian facilities, and we will meet escalation with escalation,” al-Bukhaiti wrote.
Military and political analyst Elijah Magnier told Al Jazeera, “Is this going to change the course of action of a non-state actor that is motivated to support the people of Gaza? Certainly not,” Magnier said. “They’ve been given a perfect reason to increase the attacks. We have not seen the end of it – far from it,” he said.
In another post on X, the Houthis’ spokesman, Mohammed Abdulsalam, called the Israeli air strikes “a brutal Israeli aggression against Yemen that aims to deepen people’s suffering and to pressure Yemen to stop supporting Gaza.” Abdulsalam called the attack an Israeli “dream that will not come true. We affirm that this brutal aggression will only increase the determination of the Yemeni people and their valiant armed forces to be steadfast and to continue their support for Gaza. The Yemeni people are able to face all challenges for the sake of victory for oppressed Palestine and the people of Gaza, whose cause is the most just on earth.”
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'War Is Clearly Back on the Agenda': US Says Israel Was Behind the Drone Attack on Iran
"This latest act of sabotage conducted via a military attack inside Iran is a dangerous escalation and should be cause for concern for everyone who opposes war," said one campaigner.
Jan 30, 2023
Unnamed U.S. officials on Sunday confirmed suspicions that Israel was behind the weekend drone attack on a purported military facility in the Iranian city of Isfahan, heightening concerns that the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gearing up for a broader assault on Iran as international nuclear talks remain at a standstill.
The New York Times reported that the drone attack—which Iran says it mostly thwarted—was "the work of the Mossad, Israel's premier intelligence agency, according to senior intelligence officials who were familiar with the dialogue between Israel and the United States about the incident."
"American officials quickly sent out word on Sunday morning that the United States was not responsible for the attack," the Times noted. "One official confirmed that it had been conducted by Israel but did not have details about the target."
The Times added that the "facility that was struck on Saturday was in the middle of the city and did not appear to be nuclear-related."
The Wall Street Journal also reported Sunday that Israel carried out the attack, which was launched hours before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East for planned trips to Israel, Egypt, and the occupied West Bank.
Last week, CIA Director William Burns made an unannounced trip to Israel to discuss "Iran and other regional issues," according to the Journal.
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said in a statement that he is "deeply concerned by the gathering clouds of war in the Middle East."
"This latest act of sabotage conducted via a military attack inside Iran is a dangerous escalation and should be cause for concern for everyone who opposes war," said Abdi. "War will only further empower the most violent and repressive forces inside Iran at the expense of ordinary Iranians demanding freedom, and will embolden reactionary elements in Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S."
"It is vital that we call for all sides to exercise restraint and to prioritize non-military solutions to the tensions threatening the region."
Israel's latest attack inside Iran's borders came after negotiations aimed at bringing the U.S. back into the Iran nuclear accord—which former President Donald Trump violated in 2018—hit a wall. President Joe Biden told a rallygoer in November that the Iran deal "is dead, but we're not gonna announce it."
Israel's spy agency has made clear that a newly negotiated nuclear accord would not stop its attacks on Iran.
"Even if a nuclear deal is signed, it will not give Iran immunity from the Mossad operations," Mossad chief David Barnea said in September. "We won't take part in this charade and we don't close our eyes to the proven truth."
Earlier this month, Netanyahu—a longtime Iran hawk who has been making false predictions about Tehran's supposed nuclear bomb ambitions for years—vowed to "act powerfully and openly on the international level against the return to the nuclear agreement."
In the absence of a nuclear agreement, the Journal reported Sunday that the U.S. and Israel are looking for "new ways to contain" Iran, which condemned the Saturday attack as "cowardly."
Citing the Journal's story, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft tweeted Sunday that "unlike before, when U.S. officials stayed silent or only confirmed Israel's role in attacks on Iran days later, now U.S. officials immediately name Israel and appear to hint that it is part of a joint effort to 'contain' Iran."
"War is clearly back on the agenda," Parsi added.
Abdi of NIAC echoed that warning, arguing that "the Islamic Republic's brutal crackdown against the Iranian people, its assistance in Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, and its rapidly expanding nuclear program freed from the restraints of the JCPOA have pushed tensions to a boiling point."
"This, coupled with the rise of a hardline administration in Israel that appears determined to push the envelope militarily, an increasingly assertive Saudi royal family, and a U.S. that has been unable to turn the page on the Trump administration's destabilizing Middle East policies, makes for an exceedingly volatile cocktail," Abdi said. "For those of us who favor democracy, human rights, and peace, it is vital that we call for all sides to exercise restraint and to prioritize non-military solutions to the tensions threatening the region."
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New Report Highlights US Legacy of Lies on Civilian Drone Deaths
Rights group exposes contradictions between government statements on civilian casualties and independent reports showing much higher figures
Jun 30, 2016
In anticipation of an impending White House announcement on civilian deaths from drone strikes, the international human rights group Reprieve has released a report that finds that there is significant evidence the U.S. government is lying about the human toll of the aerial bombing campaign.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce as early as Friday that since 2009, U.S. military and CIA airstrikes have inadvertently killed only about 100 people in nations that are not officially recognized as battlefields, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. On the other hand, the numbers for active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan will not be included.
But according to Reprieve's report, Opaque Transparency (pdf), every previous statement made by the Obama administration on the civilian casualties from drone strikes has been misleading at best, with some being outright false.
That includes an on-record comment from CIA director John Brennan in June 2011 that "there hasn't been a single collateral death" in Pakistan for nearly a year and a claim from Obama in May 2013 that strikes are only carried out when there is "near certainty that the target is present" and "near certainty that noncombatants will not be injured or killed."
As Reprieve notes, internal CIA documents leaked in 2013 show that the agency itself recorded a civilian death just two months before Brennan's comments, while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and other independent investigators found that dozens of local elders were killed in a strike in March 2011. As of this February, only ten drone victims killed in Pakistan last year had been identified.
The Daily Beast separately noted earlier this month that the White House's expected estimate of 100 collateral deaths is approximately one-tenth of the real number, which most independent advocacy groups put at 1,000.
That could be because, as the Intercept revealed last year, the military posthumously labels its unidentified drone victims as "Enemies Killed in Action" unless they are proven otherwise.
The president's claims that strikes are not carried out unless there is "near certainty" that noncombatants will not be killed were similarly contradicted by other internal CIA memos that "show[ed] that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing despite the administration's guarantees," according to McClatchy.
Indeed, in 2015, a group of drone operators turned whistleblowers accused the administration of allowing the killings of "innocent civilians" while "lying publicly about the effectiveness of such a program."
The figures, published annually from now on, will not include details such as names and countries of origin. The administration is also not expected to explain how it defines its targets, Reprieve said, rendering Friday's announcement virtually meaningless.
"[I]t has to be asked what bare numbers will mean if they omit even basic details such as the names of those killed and the areas, even the countries, they live in," the report states. "[T]he numbers without the definitions to back up how the Administration is defining its targets is useless, especially given reports the Obama Administration has shifted the goalposts on what counts as a 'civilian' to such an extent that any estimate may be far removed from reality."
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