Press TV – October 27, 2026
Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has called for the formation of a non-aggression security pact involving six Persian Gulf states plus Iran and Iraq, slamming US attempts to demonize the Islamic Republic as a threat.
Speaking at Girton College, Cambridge, on Monday, Albusaidi stressed that Washington has promoted for almost half a century the false image of Tehran as a threat to the Persian Gulf states, holding back West Asia’s ability to solve its own problems.
The Omani foreign minister, speaking to break the deadlock over the region’s future, stressed that the US would no longer be the region’s primary security provider.
“Issues such as the Strait of Hormuz have become impossible to resolve because external powers continue to define the terms of engagement, while regional powers are unable to take collective responsibility for making their own security arrangements and reach a consensus on them,” Albusaidi noted.
Iran has so far refused to ease its restrictions on transit through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, saying the key international energy waterway will be fully reopened once the US permanently ends its aggression and lifts its maritime blockade and sanctions against Iran.
Iranian authorities have also indicated that the country would not back down from its conditions and would respond decisively to any new act of aggression against its territory.
“What holds us back is that issues which ought to be handled at a regional level by the states of the [Persian] Gulf themselves, are made more complex, more intractable and sometimes simply impossible to resolve because the region’s security arrangements are insufficiently developed,” Albusaidi further stressed.
“And they are insufficiently developed because they have relied for too long on the involvement of external powers,” he added.
Oman’s top diplomat noted that the Islamic Republic “had been systematically excluded from playing any meaningful role in the security arrangements of the region.
Albusaidi also stressed that such exclusion had led to “profoundly negative consequences, not just for Iran, but for the region as a whole”, including the imposition of priorities on the region by external powers such as “the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the [Persian] Gulf.”
According to the Omani foreign minister, the most “damaging” of the priorities imposed on the Persian Gulf region from the outside has been the requirement that the Islamic Republic be excluded.
“Not just excluded. Worse. Positioned as the threat against which regional security had to be organized,” Albusaidi stressed, speaking on the day high-level defense and intelligence officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia gathered in Tehran in an attempt to prevent a renewed act of aggression by the US against Iran.
Iran and Oman, both coastal states bordering the strategic waterway, engaged in intensive negotiations for months over arrangements for safe shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran and Oman finally reached a temporary agreement on how shipping traffic should be managed in the strait, but the plan is on hold as Iran keeps the waterway closed due to US acts of aggression and violations.
Roughly one-fifth of global oil demand passes through the Strait of Hormuz, making the waterway one of the world’s most strategically important maritime chokepoints.
Oman’s foreign minister, without mentioning by name, also challenged US President Donald Trump’s case for a further war of aggression against Iran by saying that he believed the previous round of Oman-mediated negotiations between the US and Iran in February were “making significant progress, and that an agreement was within reach. We still stand by that judgment today.”
The US and the Israeli regime waged their first war of aggression against Iran, which lasted 12 days, in June 2025. Their second aggression began on February 28, 2026, and came to a halt in early April after 40 days.
Iran has been defending itself by targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf states with missile strikes and drone attacks.
Of 38 competing parties, only 11 were expected to clear the 3.25% threshold for parliamentary representation, according to the report.
RELATED: UN Commission Accuses Israel of War Crimes and Genocide in West Bank and Gaza
The latest surveys from the three main television channels, published three days before the election, gave the coalition led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot 52 to 56 seats and Netanyahu’s bloc 50, both short of the 61 needed for a majority, according to those polls. Arab parties were projected to win 14 to 16 seats, and only one poll gave 4 seats to the new pro-opposition Reservists-Economic Bloc.
Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud, relied on ultra-Orthodox Jewish formations and ultranationalists. Meanwhile Eisenkot’s bloc, led by the right-wing Yashar! party, included the right-wing Beyajad party of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Israel Beitenu of right-winger Avigdor Liberman, and The Democrats of Yair Golán.
U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly endorsed Netanyahu via Truth Social.
הנשיא טראמפ קורא לכם להצביע מחל. אל תישארו בבית, הצביעו מחל ויחד נשלים את המשימה ונשמיד את האיום האיראני. 🇮🇱 pic.twitter.com/6jQRjz8UVr
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 26, 2026
About 20% of Israel’s 10.3 million people are Arab Israelis, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship descended from those who did not flee or were expelled after the war preceding the state’s creation. Unlike Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, they can vote and make up 17% of the electorate, though past elections showed support for boycotts.
Researcher Marzouq Halabi told The New Arab that “people instinctively recognise that these elections serve as a cover for an absolute war, which Israel has framed as a religious one aimed at deciding the Question of Palestine through violence and subjugation, with all that this implies. As such, people will turn out collectively to the ballot boxes. They are not asking about party platforms; rather, they are asking how the fascist right can be repelled and its agendas obstructed.”
Reports from the Israeli media outlet Haaretz point out that Netanyahu’s Likud party has spent millions of shekels recruiting and paying workers to monitor polling stations in Arab communities, record voters, and report developments to party headquarters in real time.
A total of 12,018 polling stations opened across Israel and in illegal West Bank settlements for 7,332,000 eligible voters, the Israeli Central Elections Commission reported.
Because Israelis abroad cannot vote remotely, the U.S. NGO AID Coalition, which leads the Fly&Vote initiative, estimated at least 67,000 had returned to vote, mostly from Europe and the United States.
Netanyahu was set to vote at 11:00 local time in West Jerusalem’s Katamón neighborhood, while main challenger Gazi Eizenkot planned to vote about three hours later in Herzliya, their parties announced.
The Hebron municipality updated the number to 3,189 displaced people from an earlier count of 3,170, affecting some 488 families mainly from the Deir Bahha and Al Jalda neighborhoods, according to municipal data. The operation was launched after the two soldiers were killed near a checkpoint last Friday and has left hundreds of residents trapped in their homes while mass arrests reached at least 70 Palestinians.
RELATED: UN Commission Accuses Israel of War Crimes and Genocide in West Bank and Gaza
More than 200 children under two and of early age and about 250 people over 60 were among those affected. With a local state of emergency declared, a crisis group of authorities and citizens set up shelters and temporary accommodation with support from local families.
The offensive included a campaign of mass destruction of homes and the demolition of entire blocks and residential buildings by the Zionist Army, which justified the actions by saying it had destroyed infrastructure built in violation of the law, according to the report. Local sources and agencies such as Wafa denounced that the offensive formed part of a strategy of indiscriminate punishment against urban residents, according to the report.
The forced displacement of Palestinians by the Israeli military in the occupied west bank city of Hebron continues, as a city-wide siege remains in place. It's also triggered a humanitarian crisis, with the municipality scrambling to provide food and shelter pic.twitter.com/Z0sunIfbFz
— TRT World (@trtworld) October 26, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended continuing the operations and said the Army was preparing for a scale unprecedented since the 1967 Six-Day War. Reports from media such as Ynet revealed disagreements between Netanyahu and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, who advocated ending the operation because of limited tactical results and the discovery of a small number of weapons.
The United Nations and Palestinian factions such as Hamas strongly condemned the siege.
UN Human Rights Chief @volker_turk calls for an end to #Israel’s aggressive operation in the #WestBank city of #Hebron, which forcibly displaced nearly 2,000 Palestinians, demolished homes and commercial property, and deprived residents of the ability to move freely.
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) October 26, 2026
"Collective… pic.twitter.com/sfi6tJNMzy
© Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
By Arman Shariati | Press TV | October 26, 2026
Israeli regime’s airspace – the airspace over the occupied territories – is widely regarded as among the most heavily defended in the world.
Yet the scale of its protection cannot be explained by Israeli military technology alone. Russia, China and even the United States do not benefit from an equivalent network of allied support dedicated to intercepting threats before they reach their territory.
Israel’s own defenses are indeed formidable. Arrow 3 is designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere, while Arrow 2 targets ballistic missile threats within it. David’s Sling is built to counter medium-range threats, and Iron Dome intercepts rockets and other short-range projectiles.
These systems are backed by fighter jets and an extensive radar network, creating multiple layers of protection against incoming attacks.
But Israel’s air defense shield extends well beyond its own arsenal. From October 2023 through Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone operations in 2024, 2025 and 2026, a group of allied states has played an active role in protecting the regime.
They have provided interceptors, radar capabilities, fighter aircraft, military bases and personnel, helping the Tel Aviv regime detect, track and counter incoming threats.
What emerges is not simply a domestic air-defense network, but a wider umbrella sustained by the resources and involvement of powerful allies – from the US to Europe to Arab countries.
This ironclad commitment of regional and extra-regional countries to Israel’s protection has come at a considerable cost.
The price goes well beyond dollars and shekels. It includes depleted weapons stockpiles that could take years to replenish, damaged radars and military bases, soldiers killed or wounded, and governments facing domestic political backlash for a costly partnership that much of their own public fiercely opposes and protests against.
The burden, however, is not shared equally. The United States has shouldered the largest financial and military inventory costs. The Persian Gulf monarchies and Jordan have faced intense operational demands and direct security risks. European states have incurred more limited but still significant costs, particularly in munitions and the political fallout from a war that has driven up energy prices and compounded the cost-of-living pressures facing their populations.
The Israeli bill
The Israeli regime’s direct costs are the easiest to track because they fall on its own treasury. In April 2024, after Iran launched a large number of drones and missiles at the occupied territories, Brig. Gen. Reem Aminoach, an economic adviser to a former Israeli military chief of staff, estimated in an interview with Ynet that defending against the attack that night had cost 4-5 billion shekels, or roughly $1.1–$1.35 billion at the exchange rate at the time.
Haaretz later put the total cost of defending against the same retaliatory attack at around $1.5 billion. That was just one night. Many more retaliatory strikes have hit the occupied territories since then.
The cost structure follows a clear logic. Iran uses inexpensive drones and mass-produced missiles, while Israel relies on some of the world’s most expensive interceptors to defend against them.
This disparity lies at the heart of the war’s financial burden. Israel’s broader budget picture adds another dimension. Sustained, high-intensity defensive operations have forced the regime to spend far more than it did previously.
With a net budget of about 60 billion shekels in 2023, the Israeli military could not sustain repeated nights of interceptions without substantial increases in funding and continued US support.
Israel has been able to sustain this costly imbalance largely because of extensive financial backing from American taxpayers. Much of its interceptor production is funded or co-developed through US programs, and the Arrow missile defense system is produced with American participation.
US Congress has also repeatedly approved emergency supplemental funding for Israeli missile defense. These ties mean that Israel’s financial burden and America’s are deeply interconnected and difficult to separate, which explains the public anger in the US.
The American inventory crisis
No country has spent more on Israel’s defense than the United States, and no factor is more consequential than the state of its interceptor stockpiles. Washington may be willing to spend the tens of billions of dollars required to protect their genocidal ally, but willingness alone cannot resolve the US military’s primary challenge: replenishing its dwindling missile interceptors.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank, has published some of the most widely cited public estimates of US missile interceptor inventories.
Its analysis, updated following the 40-day war against Iran, found that American Patriot and THAAD inventories had declined dramatically.
According to CSIS estimates, the US inventory of Patriot interceptors fell from approximately 2,330 before the war began on February 27, 2026, to between 759 and 827 by July 27, 2026, marking a decline of roughly two-thirds.
The THAAD inventory also dropped sharply, falling from an estimated 452 interceptors before the war to between 239 and 257 by July 27, representing a decline of approximately 43 to 47 percent.
Many military experts believe CSIS’s estimates are overly optimistic. Some, for instance, argue that the United States may have fired as many as 290 of its roughly 360 THAAD interceptors during the early phase of the war. That would amount to more than 80 percent of its pre-war stockpile.
Whatever the exact figures, Washington’s decision to prioritize Israel’s defense has left the US military dangerously underprepared and more vulnerable to another round of war if it breaks out.
The cost of replenishing stockpiles
The US Army’s FY2027 figures put the unit cost of a PAC-3 MSE interceptor at roughly $5 million and that of a THAAD interceptor at nearly $12 million.
Based on these figures, replacing the Patriot and THAAD interceptors expended would cost an estimated $10 billion. The Congressional Budget Office has offered a higher estimate, putting the cost of replacing the depleted interceptors at approximately $13.1 billion.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in recent remarks noted that the US spent about $11 billion on missile defense for Israel over three years. In a post on X, quoting a tweet of a former Obama administration official, he said US forces had fired 609 interceptors in defense of the Israeli regime between October 2023 and June 2026, including SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, Patriot, and THAAD missiles.
The naval picture
The US Navy’s missile interceptor inventories are also under severe strain. The SM-3 and SM-6 are among the principal naval weapons used to counter ballistic missiles and other high-speed threats.
Public estimates vary widely, with some reports placing combined naval inventories in the low hundreds. A figure of 150–200 for the two interceptor types combined is plausible as a rough order of magnitude, but no precise public count is available.
The broader concern is that naval interceptors are expensive and slow to manufacture, while the Navy must preserve sufficient stocks to address other potential threats, including those posed by China and Russia. Every interceptor expended in the defense of Israel is therefore one fewer available for other contingencies until it can be replaced.
Not all US and allied defenses against Iran relied on ground-based or naval interceptors. Fighter jets also engaged Iranian drones using air-to-air missiles, including the AIM-9X and AIM-120. The AIM-9X reportedly costs several hundred thousand dollars per missile, while the AIM-120 AMRAAM costs more than $1 million.
Using such expensive weapons to destroy drones that cost only thousands of dollars compounds the economic imbalance, even when the immediate tactical objective is achieved.
The trade-off
By the final phase of the 40-day imposed war, following the initial ceasefire, it had become clear that US commanders were holding back dedicated SM-3 and THAAD interceptors rather than expending them to protect American bases in Jordan and elsewhere.
Footage of nighttime defensive missile launches appeared to show almost exclusively Patriot interceptors, with only one exception. The implication was stark: stocks had dwindled to the point where US commanders could no longer afford to use these missiles freely.
The apparent logic was to preserve the remaining interceptors for a larger war, prioritizing the future defense of Israel over the immediate protection of American service members.
That decision carried its own cost. Aircraft on the ground were hit, and US personnel were killed in some of the retaliatory attacks. This matters because it illustrates the full price of managing depleted stockpiles. A shortage of interceptors weakened the US military’s defensive capacity across multiple theaters, leaving American personnel exposed to attacks that more robust defenses might have helped repel – all in the effort to protect the Israeli regime.
Cost, however, is only part of the problem. Production capacity is the more consequential constraint in a prolonged campaign.
Patriot and THAAD interceptors are manufactured in limited quantities, and expanding output takes time.
CSIS estimates that restoring Patriot and THAAD inventories to their pre-war levels will take at least three years. Interceptors ordered in fiscal year 2027 are not expected to arrive until 2029, leaving a prolonged gap between expenditure and replenishment.
The China and Asia-Pacific dimension
The most serious long-term cost to the United States may emerge far from the West Asia region. As US interceptor stocks are depleted in the region, the Pacific is left more exposed.
The Indo-Pacific is where Washington faces its most formidable strategic competitor. Taiwan’s defense depends in part on US air and missile defenses, while Pentagon war plans for a potential war with China assume that American forces can withstand and respond to large-scale missile attacks.
If SM-3, SM-6, and Patriot inventories fall to a fraction of their previous levels, the margin for absorbing such an attack narrows considerably. A few hundred interceptors would be insufficient to sustain even several days of high-intensity combat in East Asia.
The extent to which US military capabilities in the South China Sea and across East Asia have been weakened cannot yet be quantified.
Nevertheless, the underlying concern is widely recognized among defense analysts: a shortage of interceptors in one theater affects the military’s ability to respond in every theater, and the Pacific is particularly difficult to reinforce quickly.
Persian Gulf states and early-warning network
The Persian Gulf monarchies and Jordan contributed to Israel’s defense in a different but equally consequential way.
Their role was not primarily to supply interceptors, but to provide sensors, airspace access, military bases, and the political authorization needed to put these assets to use.
Missile defense depends on early warning. A THAAD battery cannot intercept a missile it has not detected, and detection depends on radars capable of identifying and tracking threats at sufficient range and speed. The AN/TPY-2 radar used by THAAD is a large, transportable system. The US Missile Defense Agency’s 2025 budget puts the cost of each unit at approximately half a billion dollars.
In March 2026, during the first days of the 40-day imposed war of aggression, the American THAAD radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan was struck and destroyed. Imagery showed craters around the site, suggesting that multiple strikes may have been involved.
Buildings housing similar radar systems were also hit at two locations in the United Arab Emirates. Another THAAD radar, at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, was destroyed as well.
Iran also targeted and struck the AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar in Qatar, which was used to track Iranian missile launches.
Taken together, these incidents point to a broader pattern of Iranian retaliatory attacks on US-aligned early-warning radars and THAAD sites across the region.
This interpretation is consistent with the available satellite imagery, which indicates that the campaign extended beyond individual military installations to the sensor network underpinning regional missile defense that has been at the service of the US and the Israeli regime.
Such radars are expensive and exceptionally difficult to replace. Their value lies not only in the hardware itself, but also in their integration with interceptor batteries and the data links connecting them to other sensors.
Destroying a single radar can compromise an entire interceptor network’s ability to detect and track threats approaching from a particular direction. Replacing these systems can take months or even years, and rebuilding them does not necessarily restore the coverage they previously provided.
Radar losses therefore carry a strategic cost as well as a financial one. Once a radar is destroyed, the states that depend on it must decide whether to rebuild it at an exposed location, relocate it, or accept a gap in their defensive coverage.
By providing Israel and the United States with tracking data on Iranian projectiles, Arab monarchies exposed themselves to Iranian retaliation and risked becoming direct targets in a war they had helped shape.
These losses also raised questions about Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability as the wider regional confrontation extended to other fronts.
Yemen is a prominent example. Damage to radar and air defense assets across the Persian Gulf may have further complicated Saudi Arabia’s position in its prolonged war against Yemen.
Although the Ansarullah-led Yemeni military possesses independent capabilities, and Saudi Arabia’s difficulties in Yemen stem from numerous military, political, and strategic factors, the decision to contribute to Israel’s defense added another layer of risk for the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Their involvement exposed critical military infrastructure to retaliation and potentially weakened their ability to respond to threats beyond the immediate confrontation with Iran.
Jordan’s exposed position
Jordan’s case is perhaps the most striking because of its small military and fragile economy. The country hosts US occupation forces, including a THAAD battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, and lies along the flight paths of missiles and drones traveling between Iran and the Israeli-occupied territories.
During Iran’s 2024 retaliatory strikes, Jordan’s air force was reported to have intercepted many of Iranian drones and missiles crossing its airspace. The Jordanian government defended these actions as necessary to protect its territory and citizens – a lame justification.
For a country with limited military resources, however, the cost was significant: every interceptor fired and every fighter jet scrambled placed additional demands on an already constrained defense budget.
The political cost was even greater. Jordan has a large population of Palestinian origin, and public opinion is strongly sympathetic to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as well as the Axis of Resistance.
Jordan’s decision to intercept Iranian projectiles launched in retaliation for Israeli strikes proved controversial domestically, with Jordanians slamming their government for helping protect the Israeli regime.
Jordan made this choice despite facing its own concerns about Israel’s regional ambitions. Members of Israel’s ruling regime have openly advocated annexing the occupied West Bank, while some have promoted proposals that would displace Palestinians into Jordan.
This context makes Amman’s involvement in regional missile defense particularly sensitive. The country faces the dual risk of Iranian retaliation against US military assets on its soil and growing domestic anger over its role in protecting Israel.
Jordan’s economic vulnerabilities compound these pressures. Public debt, energy costs, and the burden of hosting refugees already strain its finances. Against this backdrop, even a relatively modest additional military expenditure can have significant consequences.
Jordan’s experience illustrates how participation in regional missile defense can impose not only military and financial costs, but also serious domestic political risks.
Europe’s price
European states paid in a different currency. Most did not expend large numbers of interceptors against Iranian drones, but their involvement carried costs across three main areas: munitions, military operations, and the economic shock of the war imposed on Iran.
France deployed air assets to the region to intercept drones and missiles over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. Some reports suggested that French stocks of air-to-air missiles, including the MICA, came under strain.
Such shortages would be significant, given France’s other military commitments. Its air force and weapons inventories are already stretched across support for Ukraine, operations in the Sahel, and the maintenance of its own strategic deterrent. Each additional deployment reduces the resources available for other missions.
Britain used its bases in Cyprus, including RAF Akrotiri, as well as its military presence in the Persian Gulf, to support operations against Iran. Reports indicated that RAF aircraft intercepted drones and missiles. The British armed forces are considerably smaller than they were at the height of the country’s military power, and sustained operations of this kind consume substantial flying hours, spare parts, and personnel capacity.
Europe’s greatest burden, however, has been economic and political. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the collapse of Persian Gulf energy exports drove up oil, gas, and diesel prices.
Europe’s dependence on imported energy meant that the shock quickly fed into household bills, transport costs, and food prices. Many European governments were already grappling with public dissatisfaction over the cost of living before the 40-day war. The war intensified those pressures as is evident now with protests raging across European countries.
European governments that committed military resources to Israel’s defense and offensive operations now face a difficult question: will their own citizens view that commitment as a principled security measure or as complicity in policies that have contributed to worsening economic conditions?
There is no straightforward answer, but the issue has become part of Europe’s domestic political debate. The costs of defending Israel have reached far beyond the battlefield, affecting budgets, energy security, and public confidence in government policy.
Defending the indefensible
The costs of protecting Israel have been substantial, although they have fallen unevenly across the countries involved.
The United States has spent billions of dollars and depleted significant portions of its advanced interceptor stockpiles, with replenishment expected to take years. The Persian Gulf states and Jordan have suffered damage to radar and air defense assets while assuming additional security risks.
European countries have borne the costs of munitions and military operations, alongside an energy shock that has intensified public anger over the cost of living.
Yet the financial figures tell only part of the story. The more fundamental question is whether the policies driving these expenditures serve the interests of the governments and populations bearing the costs.
The costs are real and continue to mount: public expenditure, depleted interceptor stockpiles, damaged radars and military bases, and the heightened risk of retaliation against countries drawn into a war beyond their borders. Meanwhile, rising fuel, food, and housing costs have placed additional pressure on ordinary households, deepening public frustration with government decisions.
Israel’s regional military campaign has drawn its partners further into a confrontation whose consequences extend well beyond the immediate battlefield. For these governments, the challenge is no longer simply how to sustain their support for Israel, but how to justify its mounting costs to their own populations.
The question is how much more they are willing to spend, how much additional risk they are prepared to accept, and how long their citizens will continue to support a policy whose burdens are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
As the Left unites with Islamists to march against Israel, what it forgets is that Zionism was always a progressive movement – and the Irish forget that they originally identified with the Jews, says Andres Roth.
The post The Left Forgets That Zionism is a Progressive Movement appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Press TV – October 26, 2026
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei says a meeting in Tehran with senior officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia could lay the groundwork for a regional security framework based on the interests and decisions of countries in the region.
Speaking at a weekly press conference on Monday, Baghaei said Tehran would host Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Pakistan’s army chief and Turkey’s intelligence chief as part of an initiative to discuss regional security.
He stated that the initiative was proposed during Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir’s visit to Tehran and was welcomed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Responding to a question from IRNA about the purpose and format of the gathering, Baghaei said the participation of senior officials from the three countries reflected efforts to explore mechanisms for regional security.
“From our perspective, the fact that regional countries are seeking to establish, or at least consider, regional security mechanisms based on their own interests and concerns is a welcome development,” he said.
“This meeting could serve as a prelude to further steps toward shaping endogenous security, an issue we have insisted on for decades. We have consistently emphasized that regional security can only be ensured by relying on the will and security considerations of the countries of the region,” Baghaei added.
He noted that developments over the past two years, particularly the past eight months, had demonstrated the importance of cooperation among regional countries.
“Recent events have shown that sustainable and reliable security in our region can only be achieved through building trust and cooperation among regional countries,” the spokesman said.
Baghaei said the visiting officials would hold discussions with the Iranian president and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
As this is the first meeting of its kind, he said, a range of issues would be on the agenda, with regional security challenges expected to feature prominently.
“Such a meeting cannot be held without taking into account the consequences of the United States’ military aggression against Iran for the security of the entire region,” Baghaei said, describing the issue as another important subject that should be considered within the framework of regional security discussions.
Deputy Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Bagheri Kani said the three senior officials are scheduled to meet with SNSC Secretary Major General Mohsen Rezaei and participate in a joint session on Monday.
Regional countries must strengthen capabilities to counter Israel
Responding to reports of disagreements between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli army chief over a possible attack on Iran, Baghaei said such differences would have no impact on Iran’s defensive preparedness.
“Despite possible differences in tactics, this group is united in its aggression and expansionism,” he said, adding that the regime’s actions across the region showed it was pursuing a common course aimed at undermining regional security.
He stressed that regional countries must enhance their capabilities to confront the Israeli regime’s threats and destabilizing actions.
Iran unconcerned about who rules in Israeli regime
Commenting on the upcoming Knesset elections in the occupied territories, Baghaei dismissed the process as a genuine democratic election, describing it instead as competition among rival groups seeking to commit greater crimes.
“For us, it makes no difference who ultimately takes the helm of the Zionist regime,” he said, noting that its record had brought nothing to the region but violence and bloodshed.
Armed forces will firmly counter threats
Responding to reports about the deployment of drone bases near Iran, Baghaei said Iran’s relevant authorities were closely monitoring developments surrounding the country, including reports of drone bases near its borders and Ukrainian activities in Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
“Those responsible for monitoring these developments are following the situation carefully and will act whenever necessary to defend the country and repel hostile actions and threats,” he said.
He emphasized that Iran’s armed forces had firmly defended the country whenever threats or hostile activities targeted its territory and would continue to do so.
Europe part of the problem
Baghaei expressed doubt that European countries had genuinely changed their approach toward Iran, pointing out that their renewed emphasis on diplomacy could amount to a political gesture.
He slammed Europeans for contributing to the crisis by aligning with the United States over the so-called snapback mechanism and failing to condemn US-Israeli military aggression against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Baghaei said Tehran hoped the three European countries would assess regional developments more realistically and adopt an independent and constructive approach toward West Asian affairs.
Brazilian people resisted unfair pressure
Commenting on Brazil’s presidential election and the defeat of the right-wing camp aligned with US President Donald Trump, Baghaei said the outcome demonstrated the Brazilian people’s determination to make independent political choices.
“The people of Brazil showed that they would not submit to misleading narratives and unjustified pressure, and that they would choose what they consider to be in their country’s best interests,” he said.
corbettreport | October 23, 2026
This week on Sunday(?) Update: RFK Jr. spars with his arch-nemesis RFK Jr. on vaccines; Bibi unveils his latest map; and Seinfeld is a racist!
By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | October 25, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared a new military operation in the occupied West Bank to collectively punish the people of al-Khalil, all in the lead-up to the scheduled national elections early next week. Is the Premier playing with fire?
Following years of ever-escalating settler violence and the intensification of Israel’s military occupation across the occupied West Bank, two Palestinian men in their twenties – Hamouda and Firas al-Ja’ba – decided to carry out a resistance operation against an Israeli army guard post.
The two resistance fighters carried out their attack, injuring four Israeli soldiers and killing two, using pistols and a rifle near the Farsh al-Hawa checkpoint in al-Khalil. The Israeli army called in backup, leading to an armed clash in which both of the Palestinians were killed during a 20-minute clash.
From the CCTV footage of the clash, it appears as if the two Palestinians were not professionally trained and acted alone. No Palestinian movement claimed the attack, although it was widely praised. Israel was quick to blame Hamas and then launch a new military campaign targeting the entire city of al-Khalil.
There are a number of reasons that the attack, which, although the most significant carried out in the West Bank in over a year, is not exactly unusual, has been reacted to in the way we see today.
One reason for this enormous overreaction is that Netanyahu is looking for a boost in the polls. He evidently believes that by launching a brutal crackdown in the West Bank, his population will respond positively and he may win some more votes come Tuesday.
This is why the Israeli Prime Minister claimed that the planned campaign against al-Khalil will be an operation “unlike any seen since the Six-Day War”. He is trying to play on Israeli nationalism, referencing the June 1967 war, during which the Israelis occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Evidently, this is hyperbole, but it doesn’t mean that the campaign will not be brutal.
Another reason why the attack has been transformed into such a major issue is that it is massively embarrassing to both the Israeli army and Netanyahu personally. Although the two Palestinian fighters do not appear to have had any professional training and did not act on behalf of any resistance group, the Israeli media, military, and government are saying the opposite.
The Israelis are claiming that Hamas was involved; they are also spinning a hero story that by calling in backup they managed to thwart a much larger attack that was planned on Israeli settlers and that what happened was actually a success story of sorts.
This is because the truth exposes the unprofessionalism and cowardice of the Israeli occupation soldiers. Two untrained individuals managed to kill a Staff Sergeant and a Sergeant, injured four others, while all the female soldiers on scene hid from the attackers. In addition to this, it took 20 minutes for them to take care of the threat posed to their forces; they also needed to call in backup despite clearly outnumbering the two gunmen already. Accepting the reality would mean accepting that the army is pretty incompetent, and the Israeli public will believe any narrative that allows them to ignore this truth.
Another element of this is that if you tell the public that the Israeli army managed to thwart a major attack, it shows that under Netanyahu’s leadership, he has learned the lesson from October 7, 2023. The narrative being sold to Israelis is that now the army is acting pre-emptively; it is launching a major campaign to prevent another major attack like the one that happened on October 7. Israelis also simply enjoy watching Palestinians suffer.
However, by launching such a collective punishment campaign, there is a chance that the Israelis could end up getting burned, even if not immediately. West Bank Palestinians have been placed under tremendous pressure; by launching an intensive campaign of this nature, it could end up pushing some people over the edge.
Although the rhetoric surrounding the campaign suggests that the Israeli military is seeking to turn the largest populated city in the occupied West Bank into Gaza, this is unlikely to be what they will do. Instead, they will carry out raids, make life an inconvenience, even more than before, likely killing some innocent people while kidnapping random Palestinians while going through their neighborhoods.
The most intensity will be focused on a few specific neighborhoods that will get the worst treatment. But escalating too hard, too fast, could end up triggering a unifying event, especially due to the Israeli soldiers being psychotic and not even following their own rules. Ultimately, it is because of the checkpoints, killings, torture, and daily harassment that Palestinians carry out resistance attacks like the one we saw this Friday morning.
It is only a matter of time until the pressure being placed upon the people of the West Bank will explode. What makes this predicament starkly different from that of Gaza is that when the situation deteriorates, the Israelis have already entrenched themselves so deeply within that territory that they are extremely exposed.
Netanyahu loves to pledge his intentions to collapse the Palestinian Authority (PA) and annex the West Bank, but this is just posturing for gullible Israeli fanatics who don’t understand how everything works. If the PA does collapse and there is a push to annex the territory officially, then the settlements will be indefensible.
Just as the Israeli public truly believes that they have “the most moral army on earth”, they also believe that they are physically superior too. The former is about as accurate as the latter.
During the Gaza Genocide, the West Bank strategy has been to subdue the Palestinians through brute force and to collaborate with the PA in order to ensure there is no major uprising. It has, until now, worked. However, that strategy of constant torment and increasing pressure also “worked” until October 7, 2023.
People will not live under such horrendous conditions forever; it is only a matter of time before the situation there dramatically changes. Such a shift could occur over something relatively small. When you constantly play with fire, you get burnt.
If the West Bank’s population were to enter a sustained popular uprising, the Israeli military would struggle to subdue it. In the event that other fronts of its regional war were to open, this could be a major strategic catastrophe.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
Press TV – October 25, 2026
The speaker of the Yemeni House of Representatives has denounced the European Parliament’s push to blacklist the Ansarullah resistance movement, saying the step is rooted in hypocrisy and double standards.
In a statement on Saturday, Yahya Ali Ahmed al-Raee emphasized that the legislature’s stance on Yemen is nothing more than a political cover for the war crimes being perpetrated by Saudi Arabia and its forces against the Yemeni nation.
“The European Parliament’s latest resolution is a clear sign of double standards and hypocrisy. It is an attempt to distort the position of the Sana’a-based Yemeni government, and blatantly ignores its repeated guarantees and commitment to international maritime security,” he noted.
Raee stated that the European Parliament should have designated Israel as the source of terrorism, given the genocidal crimes it is committing in the Gaza Strip.
The senior Yemeni official noted that the legislative body of the European Union has turned a blind eye to the crimes of genocide, murder, siege, and starvation that the Yemeni people have been enduring for more than 12 years as a result of vicious Saudi assaults and blockade.
He also called on the European Parliament to dispatch a parliamentary delegation to Yemen and document the firsthand crimes and aggression that Saudi Arabia is committing against the Yemeni people.
On Thursday, the European Parliament called on the Council of the European Union to designate Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement as a terrorist organization, including its political and military wings, leadership, and military and security apparatus.
In a resolution, the lawmakers also called for dismantling the group’s funding channels and freezing its funds, economic resources, and assets belonging to entities facilitating its activities.
The resolution strongly condemned retaliatory Yemeni missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, as well as attacks targeting energy infrastructure and commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
The Sana’a administration announced a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia on July 20, in retaliation for “an unjust and oppressive siege” on Yemen that has continued for almost 12 years.
The Yemeni military has reported multiple successful operations targeting ships associated with Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its allies enacted a blockade on Yemen and initiated a large-scale war on the Arab country, with support from the United States and various Western nations in terms of military, political, and logistical resources.
The war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemenis. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia has not succeeded in achieving its goal of restoring a puppet government that aligns with its interests.
Press TV – October 25, 2026
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf says a United Arab Emirates diplomat’s bid to become the next United Nations secretary-general aims to clear the diplomatic runway for Israel’s expansionist and aggressive ambitions under the so-called “Greater Israel” scheme.
Qalibaf made the remarks in a post on X on Sunday, saying UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh’s candidacy for the UN’s top job also aims to whitewash Israel’s “systematic genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
He added that defending the Gaza tragedy had become a résumé for the UAE’s decision to seek the UN post, drawing a comparison between the country’s pursuit of the position and a fox seeking a job guarding a henhouse.
“Defending the Gaza tragedy is the résumé; the fox is updating the LinkedIn profile to apply for the henhouse guard job,” the top Iranian parliamentarian wrote.
Qalibaf’s post came after Nusseibeh announced her candidacy for the post of United Nations secretary-general on Wednesday, becoming the first woman to seek to lead the world body in its 80-year history.
Nusseibeh, a former UAE ambassador to the UN for more than a decade, brings Palestinian roots and defense of her country’s historic relations with Israel to her candidacy.
She has also faced sharp criticism over the UAE’s alleged role in backing paramilitary fighters who have killed thousands in Sudan’s civil war. The UAE has denied the claims.
In a post on her X, Nusseibeh said she is entering the race because the UN needs to act more urgently, bring people together, and drive the work forward until it produces concrete results.
“That is how we rebuild trust in the United Nations and ensure it delivers meaningful change for the people it exists to serve,” she wrote.
More than 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, when the Israeli regime launched its genocidal war on the beseiged territory.
By Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | October 23, 2026
Israeli soldiers have looted and demolished the family home of Radwan Mortada, a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who directed the recent viral Al Jazeera 360 documentary “The Trap.” The film exposes the surreptitious network and planning behind Israel’s notorious pager attack, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens wounded and maimed, and has become one of the channel’s most-watched in recent history.
Israel’s destruction of Mortada family home on October 17 has drawn condemnation from at least one international press freedom group, the Committee to Protect Journalists. On October 21, the organization issued a statement declaring that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military’s demolition of journalist Radwan Mortada’s family home in southern Lebanon. Just three weeks earlier, Mortada released an Al Jazeera documentary on the Israeli 2024 pager attack. In the days leading up to the demolition, Israeli soldiers launched a sound bomb, a tank tore down the entrance, and soldiers looted personal belongings. CPJ fears this destruction is in retaliation for Mortada’s work, marking another dangerous violation of international law and disregard for the press.”
Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada's investigation into Israel’s pager attacks is one of Al Jazeera most-watched documentaries
Mortada tells The Grayzone's @wyattreed13 how he tracked key players in the attack and got a hold of an unexploded pager
Watch our full interview
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) October 14, 2026
Speaking to The Grayzone, Mortada recalled how he learned that Israel’s military forces destroyed the estate he and his family had painstakingly constructed over almost a decade.
Pillaged and burned
“The story began on Friday, when someone sent me a photo of an Israeli Merkava tank parked right next to my house. A few days earlier, Israeli soldiers had arrived in a pickup truck and looted the contents of the house. And they destroyed the entrance” to the building as well, Mortada recounted.
“It never crossed my mind that they would plant explosives inside and blow it up, especially since my house is not in the Israeli-occupied area, there are no military positions nearby, and it is not a combat zone.”
Nevertheless, “at around 4 am on Saturday, they blew it up. I woke up to phone calls from neighbors in the village telling me, ‘The Israelis have blown up your house.’” Cell phone photos and footage confirmed the distressing news, he says.
“My village, Aita al-Jabal, is not under Israeli occupation, and my house is not within the so-called yellow line,” Mortada explains. There were no clashes or military activities in the area, he notes, and no military facilities or positions anywhere nearby. It is, he says, “a purely residential area.”
“Most importantly, the house was not destroyed by an airstrike or during any military confrontation,” he continues. “Israeli soldiers physically entered the property, planted explosives inside the house, and deliberately blew it up.”
While Mortada acknowledges he has no “concrete evidence” that Israel destroyed his family home in retaliation for the success of his documentary, he tells The Grayzone, “I do have suspicions, mainly because of the way the house was destroyed.”
Unlike other houses in the area that were damaged by airstrikes or shelling, Mortada notes, his house was deliberately blown up with explosives planted inside it. Israeli soldiers had occupied the house for several days before looting it and destroying it, video reviewed by The Grayzone shows.
“What makes this particularly suspicious is that my house is not in an Israeli-occupied area, nor is it within the so-called yellow line,” he says. “It is nowhere near a frontline or an active combat zone.”
He lamented, “Israeli hatred and vindictiveness seem to know no bounds.”
Mortada’s home in Aita al-Jabal was located approximately 4 kilometers outside of the so-called “Yellow Line,” a supposed buffer zone Israel unilaterally declared in Lebanese territory which it claims to be clearing of Hezbollah. If Israel’s soldiers didn’t simply rob and demolish the estate out of spite, it could signal an expansion of the areas Israel is targeting.
The first sign of trouble came when Israeli occupation forces assaulted a caretaker who had been living at the house with his family, looking after the garden, Mortada noted. “Israeli soldiers launched a stun grenade at him to force him and his family to leave the property.”
The grenade “was essentially a warning to the caretaker to leave the property with his family. Around the same time, Israeli forces also targeted a water tanker that was delivering water to the house. These incidents made it clear that they wanted him and his family to leave,” he says.
It’s a familiar feeling for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who’ve been forced to flee the region. Meanwhile, senior Israeli officials have spent months openly boasting of their efforts to destroy every Lebanese home south of the Litani River, and compare the campaign favorably to their systematic annihilation of Gaza. “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza,” Israeli defense minister Israel Katz declared in March.
In August, Katz deemed his mass displacement project – dubbed “Operation Silver Plow” – a success, crowing that residents of 24 villages in southern Lebanon now “have nowhere to return to; everything there has been destroyed.”
Now, the boasts have grown even bolder. With blue-and-white flags continuing to appear throughout swathes of occupied southern Lebanon, Israel’s leaders have eagerly provided live commentary of the slow-motion genocide. As an adoring audience cheered inside Israel’s Channel 14 studios on October 17, 2026, Katz declared that the number of villages annihilated by his forces had grown to 60. “Every single village — we’re talking about 23,000 homes — is in ruins.”
For Mortada, Israel’s aggression speaks for itself. “I believe Israel is undoubtedly carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon,” he says. “The objective, in my view, is clear: to prevent the people of southern Lebanon from returning to their villages and their land.”
In the past, “Israel at least attempted to justify its actions by claiming that it was targeting Hezbollah fighters or military positions. Today, however, it has become utterly brazen. Israeli officials openly speak about displacing the population, while their forces systematically destroy homes, infrastructure, and even bulldoze roads.”
“This is not simply about military operations. I believe it is a deliberate attempt to make entire villages uninhabitable and force their residents off their land permanently.”
“Perhaps, ultimately, this is also part of a broader ambition to realize the ideological vision of a so-called ‘Greater Israel,’” Mortada adds.
‘More than a home’
Combined with his testimony, photos of the now-destroyed home give a small glimpse of the loss incurred by the Mortada family when occupying Israeli soldiers seized everything of value and carried out a controlled demolition of the building.
“This house was much more than a home to us. It was a place where three generations of our family’s memories came together.”
When Mortada’s father, Nizar, returned to Lebanon after two decades spent working in Libya, “his dream was to build a peaceful home where he and my mother could grow old together, surrounded by family and the land he had always loved.”
“He chose that particular spot for a very personal reason: There were several olive trees he had planted with his father, my grandfather, when he was just a little boy.”
With his golden years approaching, Mortada’s father expressed a desire to build his home beside those same trees. “For him, it was a way of returning to his childhood, his roots, and the memory of his own father,” he explains.
Mortada explained that the home also “carries the memory of my brother Ali,” who died in 2016 at age 29. Ali suffered medical malpractice after having contracted a bacterial infection during Beirut’s garbage crisis, a tragedy which Mortada says “reflected the corruption and failure of Lebanon’s political system.”
When Mortada family buried Ali in the village of Aita al-Jabal, the family resolved to build a home that would keep his memory alive, and bring them together in their time of grief. “Until then, my siblings, Jawad and Nada, and I had never felt such a deep connection to the village,” Mortada said. “Losing Ali changed that. We wanted to be close to him, and building the house became our way of keeping that connection alive.”
The family broke ground on the house in March 2016, shortly after his death.
Having “always loved traditional Lebanese architecture,” Mortada wanted the house to preserve as much as possible of the country’s rapidly-disappearing aesthetic traditions. “At a time when beautiful old houses were being demolished to make way for concrete buildings, we did the opposite,” he says. “We collected stones and architectural elements from ruined heritage homes and used them to create something beautiful again.”
The family spent nearly eight years working on it, carefully considering every detail.
“I approached the process as though I were painting a picture,” Mortada recalls. “It was a labor of love, and we poured so much of ourselves into it.”
His wife, Nahod, recalled her husband’s excitement in a social media post explaining the significance of the home that Israel demolished later that day: “When I told my husband that I was pregnant with my first child, he was silent for a few seconds. His pupils were shrinking, he seemed to be doing a precise calculation. “When you give birth, the house will be finished,” he said with an enthusiasm I had never heard before.”
“He meticulously attended to every detail, carefully selected the furniture, altered some of the rooms to suit his unborn child, and even built a chicken coop “so my children can experience village life.””
In addition to paying tribute to the memory of his brother, the lovingly-constructed house was also the culmination of a lifetime of hopes and dreams of the entire family, Radwan Mortada tells The Grayzone.
“For my father, the house represented the peaceful retirement he had worked so hard for. For my mother, it was a family home filled with love. And for my siblings and me, it was a place where we could feel close to Ali,” he says.
“That is what the Israeli soldiers destroyed. Not simply walls and furniture, but a home built around the memories of people we loved, including those who are no longer with us.”
Compounding the pain of the loss of the family home, Mortada says, is “the feeling of abandonment” by the country’s leaders, who were imposed on Lebanon’s populace by the United States and Saudi Arabia in an effort to force Beirut to normalize relations with Israel. He names Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as among those principally responsible for the impunity enjoyed by Israel as it bulldozes dozens of villages in the South.
“The Lebanese government has done virtually nothing to protect the people of southern Lebanon or provide meaningful support to those who have lost their homes. People feel they have been left entirely on their own. We have seen no serious action capable of stopping the destruction, nor an adequate diplomatic or legal response, even at the level of the UN Security Council.”
“I believe what is happening in southern Lebanon amounts to ethnic cleansing. Homes are being destroyed, villages are being emptied, and people are being prevented from returning to their land, while the international community remains largely silent.”
“We can rebuild a house. We have done it before, and I hope we will do it again. But how do you replace the years, the memories, and the love that went into creating it?”
“My father wanted to spend his final years beside the olive trees he planted with his father as a child. My siblings and I wanted to have a home near the grave of my brother, and I wanted my children, Faya and Azer, to grow up there, surrounded by our family’s memories. Is that too much to ask?”
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By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | October 23, 2026
Amidst widespread confusion about the Saudi-Yemen War, British journalist Sami Hamdi has weighed in on the debate. Unfortunately, his stance and analysis not only miss the mark, but are replete with factual errors, undemonstrable assumptions, and an incorrect timeline of how events transpired.
Until recently, the war in Yemen has long been ignored by the corporate media in the West. Despite the conflict being over a decade old, most references to it highlighted a humanitarian crisis and presented a narrative that a Saudi-Iranian proxy war was raging on. “The Houthis” have been labeled as terrorists, and many have found it rather difficult to understand what is truly going on inside the country.
Therefore, the goal of this article is to push back against Sami Hamdi’s portrayal of events inside the country and provide key context that will help a wider audience understand this issue in greater depth. It is not an attack on Hamdi himself, or an attempt to discredit him as a journalist; instead, it is a criticism of his narrative on this issue and a correction of false information he has presented.
The “Both Sides” Argument
Note: Sami Hamdi refuses to call Ansarallah by the actual adopted name of their movement and instead uses the label “Houthis”, which is considered derogatory and tribalistic by their supporters inside Yemen. To be clear, “the Houthis” is used interchangeably with Ansarallah.
The crux of Hamdi’s argument rests upon the narrative that both sides in the war are in the wrong, presenting his analysis as coming from a somewhat neutral stance. He also draws a moral equivalency between the ills of “the Houthis”, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In this regard, he has argued that “the Saudis and the Houthis agree that Yemenis should not have the right to choose their leader”, going a step further to even posit that “the Saudis and Houthis believe that Yemen should not belong to Yemenis”.
To begin with, Ansarallah are a Yemeni movement composed entirely of Yemenis, publicly arguing that their war effort is to return Yemen to its people. Therefore, the concept that they don’t believe that Yemen should belong to Yemenis themselves makes little sense. The argument he employs additionally tries to separate Ansarallah from the Yemeni people, framing the issue as if they are a kind of foreign occupier.
In order to justify this claim, Hamdi argues that “the Houthis” imposed themselves on the country and do not even represent any authentic will of the Yemeni people. This not only attempts to relegate the Houthi family themselves, but also the millions of followers of the Ansarallah movement and its supporters, which represent a large portion of the nation’s populace.
A moral equivalency argument also does not work here. Ansarallah is an indigenous Yemeni movement that runs a government out of the nation’s Capital City and rules over the majority of the nation’s population. Saudi Arabia is a foreign country that has imposed a blockade on Yemen’s people for over a decade. The land, naval, and aerial siege manufactured a man-made famine that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people, while collectively punishing over 26 million others and depriving them of basic necessities.
Despite warnings from the United Nations and footage streaming out of the country, clearly showing the impacts on civilians, with children being disproportionately impacted, the Saudis continued their blockade.
The lower estimates for how many Yemeni civilians have been killed by Saudi airstrikes are around 9,000, while the higher figures often presented by the Ansarallah-led government are closer to 20,000. These attacks have included strikes on mosques, hospitals, schools, funerals and weddings.
The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) would conduct routine massacres, such as bombing a packed school bus on August 9, 2018, killing 51 civilians, including at least 40 children. In October of 2016, a funeral was held for the father of Yemen’s Interior Minister, which drew a number of officials from the Ansarallah movement. The Saudi air force bombed the funeral before launching a double-tap strike that targeted the first responders – 155 were killed and 525 others were injured; the vast majority of whom were civilians.
Riyadh systematically destroyed Yemen’s energy and fuel infrastructure, in addition to its transportation sector. It bombed Yemeni airports at least 227 times, struck countless food storage facilities, and indiscriminately bombarded commercial and public facilities. Nothing was off limits. This was also a war of choice, not of necessity. It asserted itself over Yemen and its decision-making since 2011, in an attempt to dictate who would rule the country, still refusing to lift its blockade after more than a decade of suffering inside the country.
Ansarallah are, factually speaking, a Yemeni movement; Saudi Arabia is a foreign country. As for Iran’s support for them, the Iranians are not responsible for launching a direct attack, imposing a blockade, carrying out civilian massacres, or dictating the post-revolutionary process like Saudi Arabia. No political Party or armed group inside Yemen is without any foreign backers or support from abroad.
Factually Inaccurate Framing Of History
Hamdi sets the stage for his analysis of the Saudi-Yemen War by falsely claiming “the Houthis had just lost their sixth attempt to take over Yemen”. In his narrative, the Ansarallah movement is a rebel faction attempting to impose a tribalistic theocracy on the entire country through a series of wars. According to this logic, the only reason they were not able to achieve this in the past was because of their weakness and because they were blockaded in the northern Sa’ada Province by the Yemeni State.
The six conflicts, taking place between 2004 and 2010, were never in any way attempts to take over Yemen, the Ansarallah movement was not fighting with this as a justification for their armed action against the State, nor does any authoritative source argue this. Either Hamdi is mistaken and should retract this claim, or he is deliberately spreading false information to bolster his narrative.
The movement that calls itself Ansarallah today began forming in the 1990s and was led by a Zaydi Shia scholar, Hussein al-Houthi.
In 1992, members of the Houthi family in the northern Sa’ada Province founded Al-Shabab al-Mu’minoun (The Believing Youth) movement. Their goal was to revive the Zaydi sect of Shia Islam, which they believed was being slowly lost, compromised and directly threatened. To achieve their goals of reviving their religious teachings, they began starting summer schools and cultural clubs.
Hussein al-Houthi, the movement’s founding leader, would go on to participate in Yemeni politics in the mid-1990s, getting elected to parliament on behalf of the al-Haqq Party. He offered scathing critiques of State corruption and mismanagement, while condemning Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States. As a leader of the movement, his platform was built upon anti-imperialism and pan-Islamic unity, teaching that this strategy was the most effective means of defeating the US and Israel.
This kind of anti-imperialist rhetoric was initially tolerated by Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was himself of a Zaydi-Shia background. President Saleh had initially sided with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In retaliation for Saleh’s stance in support of the Iraqi President during the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia expelled around a million Yemeni workers and Yemen grew increasingly isolated.
Then came the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror’ in the early 2000s, when President Saleh decided to switch sides and back the United States, also growing closer to Saudi Arabia. Hussein al-Houthi was causing immense embarrassment to the nation’s dictator. The Believing Youth movement would chant anti-US and anti-Israel slogans in their mosques, while advocating against Washington’s wars in the Muslim World.
In 2004, President Saleh decided to launch a military raid, aimed at arresting Hussein al-Houthi, but it was resisted by members of the movement. The conflict ended with the killing of the Zaydi leader. Although Saleh believed this would be the end of the movement, they had transformed Hussein al-Houthi into a martyr, and his forces achieved the very opposite of crushing the movement. Not a single one of the battles between the rebels in Sa’ada and the Yemeni Army was about who would rule Yemen; they were localized and had nothing to do with an attempt to impose their rule over the entire country.
In fact, President Saleh made a number of requests that the United States intervene in order to help crush the rebels, attempting to argue that they were receiving support from Iran. The US assessed that there was no such evidence that they were being armed by the Iranians, therefore treating the issue as a local problem. Instead, the Americans discovered that the weapons being used against Saleh’s forces were primarily coming from his own army.
The Ansarallah movement never aimed to take over Yemen through these conflicts; it was simply not even on the cards for them to think further than the north at that point. There are no public statements from them that indicate that any of these wars were fought over a divine right of the Houthi family to rule Yemen; this notion is simply false.
“The Houthi” Takeover and the “Internationally Recognized Government”
When Hamdi was recently interviewed on ‘The Thinking Muslim’ program, he made a number of assertions about the Ansarallah takeover of Yemen’s Capital, Sana’a – misrepresenting the series of events that led to this outcome.
He begins the timeline with the overthrow of longtime Dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, then claims that the Yemenis “get together and decide to host a national dialogue”.
“So a national dialogue begins under the auspices of the United Nations. Everybody engages with it and the Qataris insist that the Houthis should also take part in it as well.” Hamdi continues:
“They come to an agreement that the country will be ruled through democratic elections; there will be an interim government; a southerner will be put as President (Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi) in order to ease the southern separatist tendencies. There will be an election where this President will run on his own, so he will have a democratic mandate; then there will be widespread elections, and Yemenis will choose who should rule over them.”
This timeline is totally incorrect. In 2011, the Yemeni people initiated an uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which ended when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) drafted an arrangement whereby the dictator would step down and make way for a new leadership in 2012.
The Yemeni national dialogue, as described by Hamdi, did not take place during this period. Instead, the Saudis and their GCC allies decided that the Yemeni Dictator’s Vice President would be installed in power as part of the agreement to allow for a transition of power. An election was held, in which then Vice President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi was the only candidate on the ballot. The election was widely rejected by a range of Yemeni political parties.
Then came the 2013-2014 National Dialogue Conference (NDC) period, which was brokered by the Saudis and their GCC allies. It was endorsed and supervised by the United Nations on the ground, but it was not a UN initiative as Hamdi’s framing suggests.
President Hadi would be granted a two-year mandate to rule as the interim President. This mandate was then extended by a year, which did not come about by any democratic consensus of the Yemeni people.
Although his timeline is incorrect, it is true that Ansarallah participated in the National Dialogue, yet he leaves out key details as to why they decided to take measures into their own hands. In March of 2013, the dialogue began. By November, a member of the Ansarallah delegation had already been assassinated. On January 21, 2014, another member of their delegation was also assassinated, prompting Ansarallah to withdraw from the process and take over the Capital, alongside allied forces. President Hadi then resigned, before escaping and rescinding his announcement.
Another claim that Sami Hamdi makes is that Ansarallah simply toppled the “Internationally Recognized Government” of Yemen in Sana’a, with the process occurring as follows:
“They literally walk into the city and say: ‘This national dialogue that you guys have, this idea Yemenis decide who should rule, is Haram (A sin), we do not accept it. Abdul Malik al-Houthi, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, is the only one entitled to rule in this country’.”
Simply put, this is utter nonsense. There are no such statements that exist to suggest that this was their reasoning; Ansarallah have never publicly argued this position and did not use this reasoning to justify their takeover of the Capital at the time.
He then goes on to offer another invention:
“The Americans, Obama, who is negotiating his nuclear deal with the Iranians, doesn’t want to provoke Tehran; he doesn’t react to the Houthis taking Sana’a; instead, John Kerry comes out and says these Houthis can be reliable allies against Al-Qaeda.”
No such statement exists from John Kerry, who was US Secretary of State in 2015 when Ansarallah took over. In fact, the US reaction was the very opposite of what Hamdi describes. The takeover happened in February, which triggered fierce US condemnation and statements in support of the exiled President Hadi.
Within a month, the Obama administration had already greenlit the Saudi war against Yemen, with the goal of regime change, providing weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition. Washington also decided to permit the inhumane blockade on Yemen, deploying its own naval armada to help enforce that blockade. In April of 2015, the U.S. also backed United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2216 that demanded Ansarallah withdraw from the territories they had captured. It wasn’t until 2016 that John Kerry would actually initiate his ‘Yemen Peace Plan’, which ultimately failed.
To address another of Hamdi’s points, he directly states that the US did not want to take a firm stance against the Houthis because it was negotiating its nuclear deal with Iran. This is also false; the American stance was not only anti-Ansarallah, but it also endorsed and supported Saudi military action. The Iran Nuclear Deal was signed in July of 2015; in April of that year, John Kerry said the following:
“There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran. There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in and we trace those flights and we know those… The United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized.”
There is no evidence to support the claim that the US didn’t act because it sought to appease Iran. The opposite is true; they openly threatened the Iranians and took a firm stance, including military action.
When it comes to what is referred to as the “internationally recognized government” of Yemen, between 2015 and 2022, this was the deposed President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who fled to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. He long outstayed his mandate, in an election designed by the GCC States and in which he was the only candidate.
Then in 2022, the Saudis decided to remove Hadi and establish a Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council (PLC). The PLC was formed in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, and all its leaders were both selected by the Saudis and live there too. It has no “democratic mandate,” and nobody even knows where the deposed leader Hadi is today. Not exactly a sovereign government.
“The Houthis” Alleged Tribalistic-Theological Belief in Running Yemen
Sami Hamdi elaborates on his point about Ansarallah not wanting Yemeni self-determination in a number of interviews, then going on to argue that “the Houthis” believe that their current leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi is divinely ordained to rule over Yemen. This argument demonstrates a lack of any depth or understanding of the dynamics inside the country, and fails to take into consideration the track record of the movement, which has never promoted such a platform.
The current leader of Ansarallah and his predecessor, who ran the Zaydi revivalist movement that laid the foundations for what exists today, never advocated that they are divinely ordained to run Yemen. There is no statement that indicates this is the movement’s platform or assertions by its leadership that they have such intentions. Neither Hussein al-Houthi nor the current leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, have mentioned the concept as a goal.
However, the argument about the divine right to rule as descendants of the Prophet Mohammed’s family is a real belief. Yemen’s northern tribes have also experienced rivalries because of this concept within Zaydi Shiism. Amongst the tribes, there are those who are considered Qahtani and those who are Adnani. Qahtanis are those tribes who descend from the local population of the country, while Adnanis are those who originate from the north (modern-day Saudi Arabia). The Houthis are Adnani.
One major hurdle that Ansarallah has had to tackle in ruling the country is tribalism, which they have managed to find great success in combating and have gone to great lengths to mend ties with historically opposing tribes. In fact, the Ansarallah movement has managed to dismantle some of the traditional tribal power structures – such as parts of the Hashid and Bakil confederations – to achieve peace amongst tribes.
In 2019, Ansarallah released a document entitled the “National Vision for the Modern Yemeni State,” in which they advocated a democratic approach. They also allow for a parliament and government, composed of multiple parties, to run the nation’s affairs out of the Capital City, Sana’a.
It is true that the Zaydi faith teaches that only descendants of the Ahlul Bayt (Prophet Mohammed’s family) have the right to rule; it is also true that Abdul Malik al-Houthi remains the Ansarallah leader. Yet, arguing that this is what the movement is openly advocating inside the country is off the mark. It removes potential for elements of growth and what the Ansarallah public platform actually is, in addition to ignoring facts on the ground from the overall equation.
Their public platform in Yemen is not sectarian; it is actually advocating pan-Islamic Unity, and it has even taken up the banner of endorsing a democratic system publicly, arguing that the nation cannot be run by foreign influences. Its government is in many ways more representative and certainly more democratic than the surrounding hereditary monarchies surrounding it.
It is important to note that it would be totally inaccurate to describe the Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a as fully democratic; that is not what is being argued. There are advisors from the Ansarallah movement who are present at each level of the government and advocating the overthrow of the system is evidently not tolerated. However, it is a nation under siege, one whose infrastructure has been crippled by over a decade of war and has no access to the outside world, beyond support and recognition provided by their allies in Tehran. Like Hamas in Gaza, they have never been given a chance to properly govern.
If the argument is that Ansarallah has no right to govern based upon their current predicament, then the leaderships in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across the region should also be considered non-States and illegitimate. The criteria here simply makes no sense, especially given that the people whom the Ansarallah movement rules over have not revolted against them. Bear in mind here that the population they currently govern has for long been roughly a 50-50 split between Sunni and Shia. With the takeover of Taiz City, the Shia will actually be a minority.
One of the main reasons why “the Houthis” is viewed as a derogatory term, as opposed to using Ansarallah to describe a much broader movement that does not just consist of one family, is that the term is deliberately designed to encourage tribalism and sectarianism. In addition to this, it is simply no longer an accurate term to call them “the Houthis” or describe them as “rebels” either.
Another assertion made by Hamdi is that “they (Ansarallah) have shifted dramatically to the Twelver Shia sect”. Not only is this claim baseless, but if it were to be true, then it would completely defeat his argument regarding their alleged belief in a divine right to rule. This is because Twelver Shias do not share the Zaydi belief that only descendants of the Prophet Mohammed have the exclusive right to rule.
Ansarallah are known to be adherents to the Jaroudi School of thought, which is widely regarded as the strictest Zaydi branch. While other Zaydi schools of thought were accused of shifting their positions in order to appease the Republicans in North Yemen – after the fall of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom in 1970 – this school of thought resisted. In fact, the reason why Ansarallah exists today is because of a movement to revive the Zaydi sect.
This is also a conspiracy theory often promoted by Saudi-backed opponents of Ansarallah, who find it difficult to make extreme religious rulings against Zaydi Shiism. This is because the Zaydi branch of Shiism is much closer to Sunni Islam than Twelver Shiism (the sect that currently runs Iran). By claiming that they are no longer even Zaydis, it makes discriminatory sectarian arguments appear more logical. Above all, it lays the foundation for the argument that “the Houthis” are a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and that they have no real agency beyond a greedy family desire to rule.
As a point of history, Hussein al-Houthi was vocally critical of the Twelver Shia doctrine and offered various critiques of the Islamic Republic. This clearly didn’t come out of a place of animosity toward Iran, but from theological disagreements, which is demonstrated through the public admiration of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its stances against both Zionism and US imperialism.
If Sami Hamdi were making the argument that it is his personal belief that Ansarallah are lying in their public platform, then that would be a different matter. Yet, that is not what he is out there arguing; he jumbles up the timeline of events, attaches positions to the Ansarallah movement that are not those that it advocates, while seemingly inventing things that simply never happened. At best, it is a complete misunderstanding of reality; at worst, it is a completely dishonest approach.
It appears from his narrative that Sami Hamdi shares the Muslim Brotherhood perspective on Yemen. The Party connected to the Muslim Brotherhood there is called al-Islah and it is aligned with Saudi Arabia. Its leadership is also based in Riyadh. In addition to this, the Party that once had enormous influence and a large youth base inside the country, especially in the Taiz area, has since lost much of its support. It has become a hollowed-out shell of the former Party it was and is now working as an agent of Saudi Arabia, while having previously sought to only align itself strategically with them.
From a pro-Muslim Brotherhood perspective, al-Islah has failed and Saudi Arabia is in large part responsible for this. If Sami Hamdi’s intentions are to argue this stance, then his position makes perfect sense here. Because there is no longer any hope for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over and it has lost its ability to operate independently of its Saudi backers.
Preempting Potential Death Toll Arguments
Unlike the statistics for victims of targeted Saudi airstrikes, there is no comprehensive breakdown of civilian casualties caused by all sides on the ground in Yemen; claims from rights groups that are partisan to either side have published a range of claims, none of which have been independently substantiated.
Independent inquiries conducted by United Nations experts and leading international Rights Groups accuse all sides on the ground of inflicting civilian casualties and a litany of human rights abuses. The most comprehensive investigation was a 41-page report published by the UN Human Rights Council that documented acts of violence between 2014 and 2018.
If we look strictly to the international Human Rights Groups and the United Nations, their conclusions appear to maintain that thousands of civilians have been killed by all sides throughout a large number of battles, and tens of thousands of others were injured. However, all agree that when it comes to the category of who committed the most direct civilian deaths, it is the Saudi-led coalition – and this is not including those who died as a result of the blockade.
As an example of the kinds of unreliable figures produced in order to influence public opinion and claim that Ansarallah are responsible for the most civilian deaths, take the example of ‘The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms’. Although presenting itself as if it is an independent rights group, it works in favor of the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC)’s narratives and publishes reports that exclusively list alleged crimes committed by “the Houthis” but provide no figures on crimes committed by the Saudi-backed forces.
It also refuses to disclose its funders publicly, claims to be based out of Sana’a in Yemen on its website – which it isn’t – and has praised Saudi Arabia as the “sole guardian of the international resolutions that stipulate the protection of civilians in Yemen”.
In every warzone on earth, especially when fighting takes place in urban areas, it is a guarantee that all sides will inevitably end up killing civilians. However, the war of choice, launched by Saudi Arabia and its allies, cannot automatically be compared to the moral standing of the various factions inside Yemen itself.
Riyadh is in a league of its own when it comes to civilian deaths in Yemen. Nearly 400,000 civilians are estimated to have died due to the war, with most of these deaths being attributed to the results of the Saudi-imposed blockade, which continues to be imposed on the country. It deliberately manufactured a famine. Due to the blockade, between April 2015 and October 2018 alone, 85,000 children under the age of 5 died due to starvation and preventable illnesses, according to Save the Children.
If we want to look at the Saudi-backed forces on the ground, they have openly accepted the help of Al-Qaeda against Ansarallah, a fact that even shocked BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi in 2016, when she was covering a battle taking place in the Taiz province.
The UAE was also exposed for having recruited a large number of former Al-Qaeda fighters into its own “counter-terrorism” and “security forces” that it backed inside Yemen; the Southern Transitional Council (STC) being the biggest faction it supported. The main officer core of the Southern Giants Brigades militia, which fights on the side of the Saudi-backed PLC, is composed of former Al-Qaeda and Daesh fighters.
It suffices to say that the moral equivalency argument doesn’t work; it rings a very similar tone to the arguments employed against Hamas in Gaza: “Israel did bad things but”. Interestingly, when we look at the corporate media coverage of the conflict in Yemen, there is more than one similarity to the reporting on Palestine. For example, we hear about claims from a “Houthi-run Yemeni Health Ministry”, just as we hear about a “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry”.
History also always begins whenever those the media favor start the clock, like when Riyadh’s King Khalid Airport was attacked with a ballistic missile, ignoring hundreds of strikes on Yemeni Airports. Or that Saudi Arabia began its attack on Yemen on March 26, 2015, by committing a civilian massacre at Sana’a International Airport, or that it broke the Yemen ceasefire by bombing that same airport earlier this July.
Conclusion
Intentions aside, Sami Hamdi’s argument works to achieve the same goal as those who argue that there is a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel. Through this lens, both are guilty and neither side should be considered different from the other; instead, the focus is diverted away from culpability. Both sides are bad; history can be twisted in any way we choose; therefore, there is no stance that can be taken on the issue.
Using his logic, it should not come into consideration that Israel is openly backing Saudi Arabia’s war effort, even providing it with direct targeting data. Meaning that US-manufactured fighter jets are being used by Saudi pilots who pull the trigger on targets chosen by the same Israeli military that chooses targets across Gaza.
In the case of Yemen, Hamdi’s obfuscation shrouds the issue in ambiguity, presenting the war as too complex for the average person to understand. “The Houthis” are an evil foreign Iranian proxy that believes in a Zaydi concept of a divine right to rule, while simultaneously being Twelver Shia’s (who don’t believe this).
Just as Israeli propagandists have historically sought to depict the Palestine issue as too complex to understand, only to inject misleading propaganda into their “both sides” arguments, the Yemen propaganda works upon the same premise. The timeline is always inaccurate, there are countless unsubstantiated claims, and then there is always an accusation that if you identify an aggressor, you don’t care about the blood of the innocents.
The Ansarallah-led Yemeni Armed Forces are the only Arab government that fought Israel in response to the Gaza genocide. They sacrificed ongoing negotiations that could have helped them achieve economic relief in 2023 by deciding to open fire on Israel and to impose a blockade on Israeli Ports. Various Palestinian resistance factions, their fighters and leadership, openly praised and thanked Ansarallah for what they did. Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab governments were either complicit in the Gaza genocide or simply watched on, only offering occasional condemnatory statements.
While Sami Hamdi argues about the Yemeni people, not specifically articulating which Yemenis or Parties he is talking about, there are actually two sides that are fighting in Yemen:
One is backed by Israel and the United States. The other is fighting against Israel and has directly engaged both in battle. It is Saudi Arabia versus Ansarallah in this war. If Riyadh were to win, that means that Israel and the United States would win. These are the broader implications of what is going on and would mean that no Arab government supporting Palestine would be left standing.
Arguing a critique of Ansarallah does not justify Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen with US-Israeli backing. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was not exactly an angel; he stood accused of killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. Just because the former Iraqi leader committed crimes did not justify the US invasion and toppling of his government.
The same argument that Sami Hamdi uses in Yemen was deployed to explain away the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is a regime change war argument. People are able to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein committed various crimes, but still opposed the foreign war and understood that it was waged against Iraq, not just the Iraqi Ba’ath Party. In the early 2000s, there were also people who claimed that those discussing Israel’s role in promoting regime change, and the broader regional repercussions, believed that “Iraqi blood is cheap”.
Whether someone decides to support the Ansarallah as a movement, believing they should be the rulers of Yemen when the foreign-imposed war is over, is another question entirely. This question is also for the Yemeni people to answer internally and should not be dictated by Saudi Arabia or any outside power.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
By David Miller | Tracking Power | October 23, 2026
What is it with anti-Zionist Jews claiming that Christians invented Zionism? The image above is from the beginning of a video by Zachary Foster where he makes the bold claim that “Zionism was a Christian idea”. He begins his story in the 1640s, saying “In the 1640s, you had this movement founded in England known as the Restorationist movement.”
His post got some pushback, which he describes here:
Many comments on this video go something like this:
“Another attempt to absolve them of their crimes”
“You are diminishing Jewish Zionism and its actions”
“hasbara propaganda”
He responds: “The 17th century Christian origins of Zionism have absolutely 0 political implications today. Doesn’t make Israel less genocidal. Doesn’t have an impact on the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu or Gallant. Doesn’t make Israel any less of an apartheid state. Doesn’t make Zionism any less racist or settler-colonialist. Doesn’t absolve Jewish institutions today of their complicit in apartheid and genocide. It’s just a curios [sic] point of history.”
It may be curious, but it’s also wrong. His argument echoes that of Ilan Pappé who, in his book Lobbying for Zionism, claimed the key figure in the invention of Zionism was Lord Shaftesbury in about 1839. Pappé was wrong about that, as I showed in my review of his book. Unfortunately, even though Foster manages to go back two hundred years further than Pappé, he is still incorrect.
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Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of significant moments in the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine from 1211 to 1890, the year in which Nathan Birnbaum coined the term Zionism in his journal Selbstemanzipation, seven years before the First Zionist Congress in 1897. As one can see from the list, the development of settlements in Safed and Hebron long predated the 1640s. So the idea that Jews got the idea from Christians after the 1640s is false. Let’s start with an event celebrated in Zionist historiography, some four centuries before the 1640s.
1211 – The “Aliyah of the 300 Rabbis” – A notable group of hundreds of European rabbis was predominantly French-Ashkenazi and Provençal, though some sources say there were also English participants: the 16th-century chronicler Solomon ibn Verga wrote that “the Rabbis of France and England” went to Jerusalem, “more than three hundred” of them. Historians call this wave the Aliyah of the Tosafists. The key figures in this group, such as Rabbi Samson of Sens, were the leading giants of northern French and Rhenish (German) Jewish scholarship. While others came from Provence (southern France), and the Spanish scholar Nahmanides (also known as Ramban) followed half a century later, arriving in Acre in the summer of 1267, the linguistic and cultural core of that 1211 wave was French-Ashkenazi.
They settled in Jerusalem, which had been recaptured by Saladin in 1187. The 300 were, thus, among the first Jews to live in Jerusalem for more than a century after they had been banished in 1099 by the Crusaders. It’s worth noting that these Ashkenazi settlers had no connection to the ancient Judeans who had existed in “Judea” more than a millennium before. What’s more, it is suggested by Israeli academic Paul Wexler that the Jewish population before the 300 Rabbis arrived was not the original biblical Judeans either. Wexler, emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, argues that most Jewish groups, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, including the Musta’arabim (Arab or Arabic-speaking Jews), are primarily the descendants of non-Jewish populations. We can note that the term Musta’arabim is preferable to, and older than, the propaganda term adopted by the Zionists to refer to supposedly “indigenous” Jews who spoke Arabic: the “Mizrahim”. The term came to prominence as a classification only after the creation of the Zionist colony and referred to “Eastern” or “Arab” Jews, though it included incoming settler colonists who spoke a variety of languages and were not all “Arab”, including Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, or Syria.
In the case of the Musta’arabim and other Arabic-speaking Jews, Wexler argues that they descend largely from Arab, Berber and other West Asian and North African converts to Judaism in the centuries up to about 1200 AD. Long before then, Hebrew had ceased to be a living language. The older view, which is still reflected in standard reference works, was that Aramaic began to supplant Hebrew as early as the 3rd or 4th century BC. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls overturned that view. After this the consensus became that Hebrew ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the third century AD, a few generations after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 AD, i.e. in the second century), in which the Judeans were defeated. Estimates differ, but it is generally agreed that Hebrew died out as a native tongue between the second and fourth centuries. Effectively then, on this account, the remaining “Judeans” were either killed or exiled and integrated into other populations.
Those Jews that later spoke Arabic were – says Wexler – converts who “relexified” Arabic with Hebrew words, as opposed to having switched from Hebrew to an Arabic form of the language. In his 1996 book, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, Wexler claims that Sephardic and North African/Middle Eastern Jewish communities are largely composed of converted Berbers and Arabs. He views the term Musta’arabi (”Arabised”) literally, suggesting an ethnic Arab substrate that took on a Jewish religious identity, rather than ethnically Judean populations taking on the Arabic language. So, by the time that Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews came to settle in the Levant and replace or overwhelm the “Arab Jews”, there had been very few or – most likely – no “Judeans” living in the territory for perhaps a millennium.
Phase 1: The Medieval Trickle (Pre-1492)
Long before the mass expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, individual Sephardic scholars, merchants, and pilgrims also made their way to Palestine.
1488 – The Arrival of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro – This famous Italian commentator on the Mishnah arrived in Jerusalem shortly before Passover 1488, and his letters home describe the Jewish communities he found. Safed already had a functioning Jewish community, numbering some 300 families in 1481, and in Bertinoro’s time, as an Ashkenazi writer recorded a generation later, “the prayers were said according to the rite of the Mustarabim”. Naturally Zionists see the Musta’arabi as the living link to the biblical Israelites or Judeans at the time of Jesus. But even that tenuous connection is disputed, as we have seen.
Phase 2: The Great Influx (1492–1516)
The definitive arrival of the Sephardim as the dominant cultural force was triggered directly by the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, followed by the expulsions and forced conversions in Portugal in 1496–97.
1492–1498 (The First Wave): Tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Many fled to North Africa, Italy or the Ottoman Empire; relatively few at first entered the territories of the Mamluk Sultanate, which controlled Palestine at the time and was “quite inhospitable” to them. Even so, Spanish refugees began arriving in Safed towards the end of Mamluk rule, and the town, with its cooler climate, became a magnet for these refugees.
Before 1492, the tiny existing population of Safed and Hebron consisted of Musta’arabi Jews (Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in West Asia and beyond for some centuries). Because the Iberian influx was so massive, the Sephardim culturally overwhelmed the existing Musta’arabi population and absorbed it into the Sephardic umbrella, something the small trickle of Ashkenazim could not have done. Within a generation, one observer noted, the Sephardim had “practically eliminated every other usage”. Even the genocidal Chabad cult agrees that the Arabic-speaking Jews were “overshadowed by and merged into” the Sephardim, effectively wiping out any claim that any of the Jews in the contemporary state of Israel are indigenous to the Levant.
So what did these Jews actually speak? Not Hebrew, which had long survived only as a liturgical and literary language, and not Aramaic, which had replaced it in Palestine but lasted only until the seventh century. After the Arab conquest the Jews of the region adopted Arabic, keeping only their religion and their alphabet: the Musta’arabim spoke Judeo-Arabic, their own Arabic written in Hebrew letters. Aramaic lived on only on the page, in the Talmud and in the Zohar, the classic text of Jewish mysticism, which was written in Aramaic long after anyone spoke it.
After 1492 that changed too. In the towns the Musta’arabim gradually adopted Judeo-Spanish along with the rest of Sephardic culture, though for some decades the Jews of the countryside remained Arabic speakers. Judeo-Spanish, also called Ladino or Judezmo, is at base Old Castilian written in Hebrew characters: the language of Toledo, not of Judea. (The claim that “Ladino” properly means only the language of Bible translations and prayers is one the Encyclopaedia Judaica finds “hardly tenable”.) Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazim, came later and in smaller numbers: at the start of the 18th century only a few hundred Ashkenazim lived in the whole country, and Menachem Mendel’s party of 1777 were, in Michael Freund’s words, “Yiddish-speaking immigrants”.
1516 (The Ottoman Conquest): The Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine from the Mamluks, and the Sephardi element in Safed increased further. Ottoman rule was far more welcoming, and Safed experienced a massive boom in the 16th century: Turkish tax records show some 48 European families there in 1525, and 143 Portuguese-Jewish and 324 Spanish-Jewish households by 1555. While overwhelmingly Sephardic, the town also drew Ashkenazi scholars, who arrived to collaborate, publish, and practise, and in time formed a community of their own.
1522 (The Report of Rabbi Moses Basola): Rabbi Moses Basola visited Safed and found 300 Jewish families, made up of Sephardim, Musta’arabim, and Jews from the Maghreb.
1524 (The Leadership of Rabbi Jacob Berab): By this year Rabbi Jacob Berab, an eminent Spanish exile born near Toledo, was living in Safed, at least for periods. He became its leading rabbi and in 1538 tried to renew rabbinical ordination, cementing Sephardic administrative and halakhic (legal) dominance over the city just as the first small groups of Ashkenazim began trickling in.
1520s–1530s (Initial Influx): Small groups of Ashkenazi Jews arrived and, alongside the existing Sephardic (Spanish-descent) Jews, emerged as a distinct group among the Jews of Safed, later with their own congregation.
1550s (Scholarly Prominence): Renowned figures, including Rabbi Moses Alshech (a biblical commentator born in Adrianople to a Sephardic family, who studied under Joseph Caro and later sat on Caro’s court in Safed), became cornerstones of Safed’s legal and spiritual institutions.
1570 (The Lurianic Kabbalah Revolution): Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the Ari), who was born in Jerusalem to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother, moved to Safed in 1569 or early 1570. Over a brief period before his death in 1572, his teachings revolutionised Jewish mysticism globally. He bridged both heritages and reshaped the liturgical customs of European Jewry: the Hasidic prayer rite, according to Chabad, follows his custom.
1577 (Printing in Safed): Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi and his son Isaac of Prague left Lublin in 1573 and, after three years in Constantinople, set up a Hebrew printing press in Safed, issuing three books between 1577 and 1580. This technology helped carry Safed’s spiritual texts – including the works of Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis alike – to the global diaspora: the rapid spread of mysticism from Safed has been attributed to Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire.
Early 1600s (Institutional Growth): At the beginning of the 17th century Safed had 21 synagogues, 18 schools and 300 rabbinical scholars, and its community was split into four congregations: Ashkenazim, Portuguese Jews, Provençal Jews, and Italians. One of the synagogues associated with Luria, still known as the Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue, belongs to the Ashkenazim.
1740s–1770s (The Decline and Shift): An epidemic (1747) and a devastating earthquake (1759), which killed 2,000 people, among them 190 Jews, severely crippled the town; by 1764 only 50 Sephardi families remained. However, the community was revitalised from 1777 with the arrival of Ashkenazi Hasidic pioneers led by Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk.
Unlike Safed’s rapid expansion, Hebron was a smaller, more tightly knit community. Its Jewish Quarter was structurally re-founded in 1540, by the traditional dating, when Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi settled in the town and bought the walled courtyard in which Hebron’s Jews lived, although he is recorded as dying around 1620. He led a group of Sephardic Jews there and founded the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, the town’s oldest.
1540s–1590s (The Sephardic Foundation): The community was tiny: the Ottoman tax registers recorded no more than 20 Jewish households. It was consolidated around a single walled courtyard and the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, while Spanish exiles increasingly shaped its spiritual leadership. Malkiel Ashkenazi served as Hebron’s first rabbi, and the community treated his legal decisions and customs as binding for generations. Late in the century, kabbalists from Safed, including Elijah de Vidas, moved to the town.
1600s (Kabbalah and Amsterdam Money): Lurianic kabbalah and asceticism shaped Hebron’s religious life, and the Prague-born kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, who led Jerusalem’s Ashkenazi community from 1621, recorded the customs of Hebron as laid down by Malkiel Ashkenazi. In 1659 the Amsterdam philanthropist Abraham Pereira established the yeshivah Hesed le-Avraham there, and distinguished rabbis lived in the town.
1700 – The Aliyah of Judah He-Hasid: A large group of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, reportedly some 1,300 of whom about 500 died en route, set out with Rabbi Judah He-Hasid for Jerusalem, intending to settle there. He arrived on 14 October 1700 and died a few days later; several hundred of his followers reached the city.
1720s–1740s (Ashkenazi Newcomers): Hebron’s Jewish population rose somewhat after the breakdown of Jerusalem’s Jewish settlement in 1721, and with the arrival of Abraham Gershon of Kutow, the Baal Shem Tov’s brother-in-law, who visited in 1748. He related that the single Jewish courtyard was so crowded that his family could not join him there.
1738 (The Avraham Avinu Restoration): As the shared community expanded, the Avraham Avinu synagogue was restored; it was enlarged again in 1864.
1740s–1760s (Socio-Economic Collaboration): Hebron had sent emissaries of its own since the middle of the 17th century, and its emissaries (shadarim) now toured Europe. Between 1753 and 1758, for example, Rabbi Hayyim Joseph David Azulai toured Italy, Germany, Holland, France and England as emissary of the Hebron yeshivah. These emissaries raised charitable funds (Halukkah) to sustain the poor back in Hebron.
1770s (Pre-Modern Transition): By the late 18th century, the foundational groundwork was complete. This set the stage for the early 19th century, when, according to Chabad, a group of Chabad Hasidim founded Hebron’s Ashkenazi community.
After the 1760s many further settlement ventures were undertaken.
1777 – Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk: Led, with Avraham of Kalisk and Yisrael of Polotsk, a group of about 300 people, only some of them Hasidim, to the Land of Israel, aiming to establish a religious community, which was a significant precursor to organised settlement.
1788 – The Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi): While he remained in Europe to lead the Chabad movement, he was a fierce supporter of those who moved. He established a permanent fundraising system to support the settlers, which eventually evolved into the Colel Chabad (est. 1788), the oldest continuously operating charity in occupied Palestine. He was the author of the Jewish supremacist “bible” of the genocidal Chabad cult, the Tanya.
1816 or the 1820s – The Mitteler Rebbe (Rabbi Dovber Schneuri) – Accounts differ on when the second leader of Chabad sent his followers to Hebron. The Jewish community of Hebron traces Chabad’s roots there to 1816–1823, when a wave of Hasidim moved from Safed at his behest, and Steve Rodan’s Times of Israel blog dates Chabad’s arrival to 1816, when Hasidim directed by Dovber Schneuri relocated from Safed. Chabad’s own historian, Shalom Dov Ber Levin, records instead that the families who came in 1816–17 settled in Safed, Tiberias and Jerusalem, and that the Mitteler Rebbe directed them to Hebron in 1821–23, the move taking place between 1821 and 1826. Chabad’s world headquarters dates its history in the city to 1823.
1838 – Moritz Steinschneider – In 1838, along with two lifelong friends, Albert Löwy and Abraham Benisch, he set up a secret society among students at Vienna, called Die Einheit, to encourage Jewish colonisation in Palestine. Some two decades later, in 1860, Steinschneider coined the term “antisemitic”, mistakenly imagining that the scholar he was referring to thought Ashkenazi Jews were Semites and that he was a Judeosceptic. In reality he was a Judeophile. His two friends went on to play significant roles in the founding of the Zionist movement. Benisch later became the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Together Benisch and Löwy founded and ran the Anglo-Jewish Association which bought them into contact with the largesse of the Rothschild family.
1839 – Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai published Darkhei No’am, a Hebrew grammar in whose introduction he called on Jews to prepare for redemption through devotion to Zion and material support for those already living in the Land of Israel. He developed these ideas in Shelom Yerushalayim (1840) and Minhat Yehuda (1843), arguing that the physical return of the Jews to Zion must precede the messianic redemption.
1840s – After the 1840 Damascus affair Alkalai’s writing grew more urgent, and a society he founded in Zemun for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel was active in several of Serbia’s Jewish communities.
1852 – Alkalai established the Society for the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in London during a tour of Western Europe. While the society was short-lived and disbanded shortly after its creation, it served as a platform for Alkalai to publish his pamphlet, Mevaser Tov (Harbinger of Good Tidings), which called for an organised Jewish association to promote the “regaining of their fatherland”.
1860 – Association for the Colonisation of Palestine (Kolonisations-Verein für Palästina) – Alkalai was an active member of this group, established by Chaim Lorje in Frankfurt an der Oder. He worked alongside Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer to promote agricultural settlement in Palestine.
1860 – Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885): A British philanthropist who visited the “Holy Land” seven times (as far back as 1827), backing agricultural settlement and building residential areas in Jerusalem, such as Mishkenot Sha’ananim in 1860.
1871 – Kol Israel Haverim: On a visit to the Land of Israel, Alkalai founded this society for the settlement of “Eretz Yisrael”. He gave it the same name as the Hebrew translation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in an attempt to create a local branch dedicated to settlement. He settled in Jerusalem himself in 1874.
All of this happened before the invention of the term “Zionism” by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. So, the next time you hear someone – Zionist or anti-Zionist – talk about the Christian origins of Zionism, feel free to disabuse them of this fanciful notion.
The Cradle | October 23, 2026
Cyprus hosted the leadership of the pro-Israel US lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in Nicosia on 21 October, pledging to deepen the island’s ties with Israel and the US.
Outgoing AIPAC president Bernard Kaminetsky and his successor, Yehuda Neuberger, led the delegation to the presidential palace for talks with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides.
The talks focused on accelerating the 3+1 Mechanism, a partnership binding Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and the US to coordinate on energy, security, and infrastructure.
AIPAC, in return, pledged to keep championing Cypriot interests in Washington.
Meanwhile, pro-Israel lobbies have been embedding themselves inside the Cypriot and Greek parliaments, with Israel Allies Foundation (IAF) launching caucuses in both legislatures to bring lawmakers into line with Israel’s regional agenda.
IAF president Josh Reinstein unveiled the Cypriot caucus on 14 October after meeting Christodoulides, explicitly pitting the initiative against Ankara by branding Turkiye a “common enemy” of Israel and Cyprus.
Cyprus’s main left-wing opposition party condemned the MPs for turning parliament into a lobby for Israel amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza, while in Greece, one left-wing party warned that it would turn parliament into a tool for whitewashing war crimes.
Israel’s deepening ties with Greece and Cyprus have developed over the past decade into a strategic alignment that combines energy cooperation, military coordination, and shared opposition to Turkish maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The US has encouraged the relationship through the 3+1 format, which brings Washington into the Israel–Greece–Cyprus trilateral partnership and frames it as a vehicle for regional stability, energy security, and cooperation among “like-minded” partners.
Through the arrangement, Israel gains a gateway to European markets through Greece and Cyprus, along with diplomatic backing in disputes over offshore gas fields.
Athens and Nicosia, in turn, receive Israeli military technology and a partner against Turkiye’s assertive stance on maritime zones, airspace, and the divided island of Cyprus.
Washington, meanwhile, sees the axis as part of a broader effort to anchor energy routes and security cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean while reducing reliance on rival powers, even as the US courts Ankara with offers of F-35 sales and sanctions relief.
Israeli hostility toward Ankara, and its efforts to curb Turkish power, stem from fear that Washington’s growing dependence on Turkiye will erode Israel’s regional dominance.
Despite the friction, Turkiye continued to serve as a conduit for Azerbaijani crude to Israel through the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Pipeline (BTC) and Ceyhan Port, even after cutting direct trade in May 2024 and throughout Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
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