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With Global Attention on Venezuela, Israel Intensifies Assault on Gaza, Lebanon
Israeli forces reported blew up a 5-year-old girl and wounded two other children a day after fatally shooting a 15-year-old boy in Gaza.
Jan 05, 2026
With the world captivated by and concerned over the Trump administration's weekend abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, continuing its devastating US-backed response to the Hamas-led October 2023 attack.
In Gaza, where Israel faces widespread accusations of genocide, an Israeli strike on Monday "hit a tent housing displaced people, killing a 5-year-old girl and her uncle and wounding two other children," the Associated Press reported, citing officials at Nasser Hospital. "Family members wept over the bodies as they were brought to the hospital."
The Israel Defense Forces used one of its common claims for when it kills civilians. According to the AP, the IDF said that it struck a Hamas militant who planned an imminent attack on Israeli troops in Gaza, the strike complied with the ceasefire agreement, and it was conducted in a targeted way to limit civilian harm.
The tent strike in the Muwasi area northwest of Khan Younis came a day after Israeli forces shot and killed at least three Palestinians in that city on Sunday. According to Reuters, "Medics reported that the dead included a 15‑year‑old boy, a fisherman killed outside areas still occupied by Israel in the enclave, and a third man who was shot and killed east of the city in areas under Israeli control."
Israel has killed at least 422 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 1,189 since reaching the ceasefire deal with Hamas three months ago. The overall death toll in the strip has climbed to at least 71,388, with another 171,269 people injured, according to local health officials. Global experts warn the true counts are likely far higher.
Meanwhile, according to Al Jazeera, journalists on the ground in the illegally occupied Palestinian territory observed that the IDF "has spent the past 24 hours expanding the so-called 'yellow line' in eastern Gaza," or the boundary behind which Israeli forces officially withdrew as part of the October deal.
Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud reported from Gaza City:
The ongoing Israeli attacks on the ground, the expansion of the "yellow line," are meant to eat up more of the territory across the eastern part, really shrinking the total area where people are sheltering.
Everyone is cramped here. The population here not just doubled but tripled in many of the neighborhoods, given the fact that none of these people is able to go back to their neighborhoods. We're talking about Zeitoun, Shujayea, as well as Tuffah.
It was not until the past few minutes that the sounds of hums, the drones buzzing, faded away, but it had been going on for the past night and all of yesterday. Ongoing explosions that could be heard clearly from here.
Mahmoud also reported that "there's nothing on the ground other than the headlines we've been reading over the past couple of days, the expectation now that within days the Rafah crossing is going to open and allow for movement in and out of Gaza. So far, we know the Israeli military is pushing for Rafah to be just a one-way exit."
Throughout the Israeli assault, far-right officials in Israel have ramped up calls to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population and recolonize the territory. There has also been a surge in violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers against Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank over the past two years, as well as renewed settlement-building efforts there.
Laila Al-Arian, an American journalist and executive producer for Al Jazeera's documentary series "Fault Lines," said on social media Sunday, "With eyes on Venezuela, Israel is bombing Gaza and escalating its assault on the West Bank."
In November 2024, nearly a year before the ceasefire agreement in Hamas, Israel struck a deal with the Lebanese political and paramilitary group Hezbollah—and, since then, as with Gaza, has repeatedly violated it.
Israel launched strikes on eastern and southern Lebanon on Monday after an IDF spokesperson said the military would target alleged Hezbollah sites in Kfar Hatta and Ain el-Tineh, and Hamas sites in Annan and al-Manara.
Al Jazeera reported that "Lebanon's Health Ministry said a drone strike on a car in the southern village of Braikeh earlier Monday wounded two people. The Israeli military said the strike targeted two Hezbollah members."
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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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