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'What a Coincidence': Netanyahu Corruption Trial Adjourned as Israel Bombs Syria
"Last month it was Iran, now Syria! All thanks to free U.S. military supplies," said one observer.
Jul 16, 2025
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's testimony in his criminal corruption trial was cut short Wednesday as Israeli airstrikes pounded Damascus, the Syrian capital, despite considerable efforts by that country's rulers to appease Israel.
Al Jazeera reported Israeli strikes targeted the Syrian Defense Ministry headquarters and the vicinity of the Syrian Presidential Palace, killing at least one person and wounding 18 others in a dramatic escalation that followed Israel's threat to intervene in clashes between government forces and Druze militants in and around the southern city of Suwayda. There are approximately 700,000 Druze—an Abrahamic religion descended from a branch of Shia Islam—in Syria, 250,000 in Lebanon, and 145,000 in Israel.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on the social media site X that "warnings in Damascus have ended—now painful blows will come."
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) "will continue to operate forcefully in Suwayda to destroy the forces that attacked the Druze until their complete withdrawal," Katz added.
Huge explosions were seen in Damascus as Israel bombed Syria’s defence ministry during a live Al Jazeera broadcast nearby.
[image or embed]
— aljazeera.com (@aljazeera.com) July 16, 2025 at 5:53 AM
The Syrian Interior Ministry subsequently announced a cease-fire agreement for Suwayda. Druze religious leader Sheikh Yousef Jarbou confirmed the deal "to completely halt all military operations in Suwayda by all parties" and "to fully integrate Suwayda into the Syrian state."
Syria is the third country bombed by Israel within the past 24 hours. IDF airstrikes targeting the resistance group Hezbollah, including one on a camp housing Syrian refugees, killed 12 people in eastern Lebanon Tuesday amid the ongoing 21-month annihilation of Gaza that has left more than 211,000 Palestinians dead, injured, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The attacks also follow last month's unprovoked Israeli and U.S. bombing of Iran, including the country's civilian nuclear facilities.
The timing of Wednesday's strikes raised eyebrows, especially given Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa's painstaking efforts to avoid conflict with Israel. These include not retaliating for the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes in Syria since last year, cutting off arms supply lines to Hezbollah, and expressing a willingness to hammer out a peace deal with Israel—with which Damascus has technically been at war since 1948.
The conciliatory stance of al-Sharaa—who in 2012 created the al-Qaeda-backed al-Nusra Front to fight and ultimately overthrow the dynastic regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—prompted the Trump administration to lift long-nstanding sanctions on Damascus. The U.S. administration also removed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of al-Nusra Front formerly led by al-Sharaa, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.
As was the case with Israel's June bombing of Iran and alleged stonewalling of an agreement to end the Gaza war and secure the return of Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas, numerous observers accused Netanyahu of bombing yet another country in a bid to stay in power by forestalling a reckoning in his three cases of alleged criminal bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. If fully convicted, the prime minister faces up to 10 years behind bars.
"Israel could end the Gaza war, sit and talk with Syria and Saudi Arabia, and even manage its issues with Turkey through direct channels it already has," Middle East Eye Turkey bureau chief Ragıp Soylu wrote on X. "But Netanyahu chooses to distract its public from the corruption trial by keeping Israel in perpetual war with its neighbors."
Others accused Netanyahu of ordering the attack on Syria in a bid to keep Shas, the far-right ultra-Orthodox Jewish political party, from leaving his government.
"It didn't work. Shas is leaving anyway," Israeli-American academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim noted on X. "No one believes him and he is willing to kill people everywhere to get his way."
Netanyahu—who in addition to his domestic criminal trial is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—denies any corruption.
In language that echoes his own description of efforts to hold him accountable in the United States, U.S. President Donald Trump has called the cases against Netanyahu a "witch hunt" and called for their dismissal. In an unusual show of support, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee attended Wednesday's session of Netanyahu's trial in Tel Aviv District Court.
"This whole trial is wrong," Huckabee asserted, according to Axios.
Netanyahu stands accused of accepting more than $200,000 in gifts from wealthy businessmen, and of a quid pro quo in which he provided a telecom titan hundreds of millions of dollars worth of regulatory relief in exchange for favorable coverage.
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The US and Israel’s War on Iran and the Lie of ‘Peace Through Strength’
It may be strength, but it is the antithesis of peace. Unless peace means butchered children, shredded international treaties, destroyed TV news buildings, and mass famine.
Jun 23, 2025
Israel’s plan after October 7, 2023 was to take out Hamas and Hezbollah, crush Palestinians through genocide and starvation, and conduct repeated crackdowns in the West Bank. Once these goals were met and Iran’s “forward defense” was neutralized, the next in line was to go after the one country in the Middle East whose government actively (albeit mostly rhetorically) opposes U.S.-Israeli control of the region.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially claimed that Israel launched war on Iran to take out its nuclear industry, which was supposedly on the verge of building nuclear weapons, a false claim he has parroted for over 30 years. However, now as before, U.S. intelligence and international experts have said that Iran is three years away from making a bomb.
Yet after the U.S. entered the fray and attacked three underground facilities in Iran on June 21, Israel has expanded its goal to not only destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities but also to eliminate its military capability, including its ballistic missile arsenal. Apparently, when Israel attacked Iran unprovoked earlier in June, Iran should not have retaliated but rather accepted what the new rising hegemon had in store.
Throughout Iran’s modern history, it has never started a war, unlike Israel, the U.S. and Arab countries, such as Egypt and Iraq.
Netanyahu thanked U.S. President Donald Trump, the so-called anti-interventionist (wasn’t that W.’s stance in the 2000 campaign, too?) for doing Israel’s dirty work and invoked the Reagan “peace through strength” adage.
Yet, beside Israel’s keeping the non-Jewish population under its control without any rights, partially in an outdoor prison and partially on land that can be confiscated by settlers at any minute, before Israel conducted more targeted strikes in October 2024, there was peace (though uneasy) between the two countries. The only related semi-proxy conflicts between the two were in 2006, when Hezbollah fought Israel, and after October 7. In each case, although largely armed by Iran, Hezbollah made its decisions according to its own interests; in 2006, Hezbollah fought Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon after killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two to gain the release of Lebanese prisoners and, more recently, against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Throughout Iran’s modern history, it has never started a war, unlike Israel, the U.S., and Arab countries, such as Egypt and Iraq. While Iran may have fiery, anti-imperialist rhetoric that, under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, verged on the antisemitic, and an unorthodox defensive strategy of arming non-state actors, such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, it is a rational state actor concerned with its own regime survival that does not seek international conflict. Even when Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in July 2024 or in response to other unprovoked Israeli attacks in April and October 2024, Iran offered only minimal responses to avoid escalation.
The “peace” that Netanyahu claims he wants through strength existed between the countries before Israel’s attacks in 2024. Rather than deescalating and solving its problems with all of its neighbors in one fell swoop by ending the Gaza genocide and offering the Palestinians a shred of rights, Israel chose more illegal violence. Knowing that the most spineless and most beholden U.S. government—to the anti-peace, pro-Israel Evangelical and Zionist lobbies—would back it, Israel determined the time was right to pursue its advantage to the utmost. It would pursue greater control of the Middle East during the U.S. imperial pullback. This would allow it to create Greater Israel, by expanding its borders permanently into Syria and Lebanon, and complete the second Nakba by dispossessing remaining Palestinians from their homeland. Israel’s strategy of regional hegemony looks closer to the 13th-century invasions of much of Eurasia by the Mongols than a nation-state doing “forces of civilization” a favor.
It may be strength, but it is the antithesis of peace. Unless peace means butchered children, shredded international treaties, destroyed TV news buildings, and mass famine.
Yet whatever the genocidal leader and his U.S. wannabe dictator lackey say, it may increase their popularity at home. Unfortunately, both Israel and the U.S. have a martial culture that creates heroes out of those who perpetrate out-group mass violence. Each country has been fed “patriotic” versions of their history in which their nations could do no wrong in the past, nor, hence, in the present. And most politicians, even many Democrats, follow, wagging their tails.
Although, of course, now the tail has wagged the dog.
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100 Palestinians Killed in Weekend of Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza
Victims include 22 members of one family massacred in their Gaza City home.
Apr 27, 2025
Israel Defense Forces bombing killed at least 100 Palestinians including numerous women and children in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, while the IDF also renewed airstrikes on Lebanon as cease-fire talks between senior Hamas and Egyptian officials wrapped up in Cairo without any breakthrough.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Sunday that Israeli strikes killed at least 51 Palestinians over the previous 24 hours. Among the victims were eight people, including three women and two children, killed in an IDF bombing of a tent in Khan Younis; a man and four children slain in another strike on a tent in Deir al-Balah; and at least six people who died when a coffee shop near the Bureij refugee camp was hit.
The ministry said Saturday that at least 49 Palestinians were killed during the preceding 24 hours, including 22 members of the al-Khour family who were sheltering in their Gaza City home when it was bombed.
The IDF said the strike targeted a Hamas militant. Israel's military relaxed rules of engagement after the October 7, 2023 attack to allow an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.
Saed al-Khour, who is grieving the loss of his family, refuted Israel's claim, telling The Associated Press that "there is no one from the resistance" among the victims.
"We have been pulling out the remains of children, women, and elderly people," al-Khour added.
Israel's U.S.-backed 569-day assault on Gaza has left at least 183,800 Palestinians dead, injured, or missing. Nearly all of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened amid a "complete siege" that is cited in an International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are also fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for the pair last year.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces unleashed a wave of bombing attacks in Lebanon in what critics called a blatant violation of a November cease-fire agreement with the resistance group Hezbollah. The IDF bombed targets in southern Lebanon and in suburbs of the capital city of Beirut.
The IDF, which said it warned residents ahead of the Beirut airstrike, claimed it attacked "an infrastructure where precision missiles" were being stored by Hezbollah, without providing any supporting evidence.
Israel says it will continue its assault and siege on Gaza until Hamas releases the two dozen Israeli and other hostages it has imprisoned since October 2023. Hamas counters that it will only free the hostages in an exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, a complete withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza, and a new cease-fire agreement. Israel unilaterally broke a January cease-fire last month.
A senior Hamas delegation left Cairo late Saturday following days of talks regarding a possible deal for a multi-year truce and the release of all remaining hostages. The head of Israel's Mossad spy agency was also in Qatar earlier this week for separate cease-fire talks. Qatari mediators said they believed there has been "some progress" in both sides' willingness to reach an agreement.
United Nations agencies and international humanitarian groups—many of which have accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war—have warned in recent days of the imminent risk of renewed famine in Gaza as food stocks run out.
"Children in Gaza are starving," the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
said on social media Sunday. "The government of Israel continues to block the entry of food and other basics. [This is a] man-made and politically motivated starvation."
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