Zelensky visited troops near front-line Pokrovsk, a key eastern city under Russian attack for months, to assess defense efforts and the battlefield situation.
Category: Full Text Articles – Audio Posts
Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
After breaking a two-month ceasefire, Israel launched an assault on Gaza on Tuesday, killing more than 400 people in pre-dawn strikes. The death toll continues to climb as airstrikes persist, and Israel pushes forward with a ground invasion. At least 200 children have been killed in recent attacks, according to UNICEF.
The assault — the deadliest in over a year — came after Donald Trump gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to break the ceasefire. Netanyahu has warned, “This is only the beginning.”
Author Pankaj Mishra argues Israel operates within a “culture of impunity,” emboldened by global far-right movements that admire Israel’s “brazen cruelty.”
This week on The Intercept Briefing, reporter Jonah Valdez speaks to Mishra about his latest book, “The World After Gaza,” which examines how the war on Gaza isn’t just another conflict — it’s a turning point reshaping global politics, exposing institutional failures, and forcing a reckoning over who sets the rules on the world stage.
“Some of the worst people in the world today are drawn to Israel,” Mishra says. “Not because they believe in Zionism, not because they are protective of Jewish population of Israel, but because Israel again represents to them — embodies this opportunity to take whatever you can and hold on to it using extreme violence if necessary.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The post Israel’s “Culture of Cruelty” Inspires the Far Right Worldwide, Says Pankaj Mishra appeared first on The Intercept.
JERUSALEM—When Israel’s defense minister on Friday threatened to take the Gaza Strip from Hamas piece by piece, he was not just sabre-rattling.
Rather, Israel Katz was describing a war plan that already appeared to be underway. Amid airstrikes across Gaza starting early Tuesday, Israeli ground forces on Wednesday retook much of the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza and on Thursday entered the cities of Beit Lahiya in the north of the strip and Khan Younis and Rafah in the south, according to military officials.
“If the Hamas terror organization continues to refuse to release the hostages, I have instructed the Israel Defense Forces to capture additional areas, evacuate the population, and expand the security zone around Gaza … through permanent control of the area by Israel,” Katz said in a statement. “The longer Hamas continues its refusal, the more and more land it will lose that will be added to Israel.”
Katz specified that Hamas must release all the remaining 59 hostages in Gaza, 24 of them presumed alive, as part of a temporary U.S.-backed ceasefire agreement. He added that Israel “will intensify the fighting” and expand the ground campaign in Gaza “until the hostages are released and Hamas is defeated” while also advancing President Donald Trump’s idea of a “voluntary transfer” of Gaza’s population abroad.
According to current and former Israeli officials, Katz’s threats are backed by a military plan to conquer Gaza that he and other government leaders first approved two weeks ago and gave the final go-ahead on Monday, ending a two-month ceasefire in the strip. As the Washington Free Beacon first reported, the plan calls for Israel to resume the war with airstrikes and quickly escalate to a ground invasion designed to isolate, starve, and kill Hamas terrorists.
Amir Avivi, a former Israeli brigadier general who has advised Israel’s government and the military during the war, said the “plan is built in stages where Israel is trying to pressure Hamas to release the hostages.”
“We might see two scenarios,” Avivi told the Free Beacon. “Either at a certain stage Hamas is willing to release the hostages, and we’ll see another ceasefire, or Hamas is not willing to negotiate and release the hostages, and this attack will escalate into a full-scale assault on Gaza, which will only end with Israel reaching the goals of the war.”
Current and former officials said that following any ceasefire, Israel would continue with the plan at least until Hamas surrenders.
Hezi Nehama, a former Israeli colonel and co-author of the influential General’s Plan for a staged siege of Gaza, predicted that barring a breakthrough in ongoing U.S.-led hostage-ceasefire talks with Hamas, Israel would launch “the big attack” on Gaza in a week or two, in which case mass conscription of reservists would start in the coming days. Nehama said Israeli leaders were considering deploying as many as six ground divisions to Gaza, far more than at any previous point in the war.
“They spoke about between five and six divisions,” he told the Free Beacon. “It depends on what happens on other fronts, like how Hezbollah reacts in Lebanon for example.”
Early on, Nehama said, troops would take over an area in southwestern Gaza and expand the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone to accommodate most of Gaza’s some 2 million noncombatants. Entrants would be carefully screened to keep out terrorists, and humanitarian aid would be provided in the area. Israel, which cut off humanitarian aid and electricity to Gaza earlier this month, would lay siege to the rest of the strip while hunting down Hamas terrorists and destroying their infrastructure.
“Hamas still doesn’t understand what’s waiting for them,” said Avivi. “They think we will do something similar to what we did before. They don’t get that it’s game over. They’re going to die—all of them—or surrender.”
The government has yet to make definitive plans for post-war Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will retain security control over Gaza indefinitely but will seek to hand over civil administration to local Palestinians not affiliated with terrorist groups. He has expressed hope that Hamas’s defeat will unlock new possibilities, including so-far uncooperative Gulf states’ support for rebuilding and governance of the strip.
Kobi Michael, a former senior Israeli government and military intelligence official, said Israel would likely end up recreating in Gaza a version of the governance structure of the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has limited autonomy.
“We will have to elaborate on the ‘mowing the grass’ model in both places, to improve it,” Michael, a researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, told the Free Beacon, using an Israeli term for long-term management of Palestinian terrorism. “This will be the model for the years to come.”
Israel’s leaders see Trump’s Gaza plan as a potential way to reduce the scale of the challenges in the strip, current and former Israeli officials said. The security cabinet, a government body in charge of urgent wartime decision making, earlier this month voted to form an agency within the Defense Ministry dedicated to the facilitation of Gazan emigration, the sources said. Katz has been in talks with Ofer Winter, a hawkish former brigadier general, about potentially heading the agency.
Amit Halevi, a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, said Katz last week promised to hold a full-government vote on the agency’s formation.
“This work needed to start yesterday. But I think we are finally going in the right direction,” Halevi told the Free Beacon. “For the first time in this war, I am optimistic.”
A spokesman for Katz told the Free Beacon that a cabinet vote on the Gazan emigration agency has not been scheduled. Winter declined to comment, as did spokesmen for the prime minister’s office, the defense ministry, and the Israeli military.
The post Israel Resumes War in Gaza With Plan To Conquer Entire Strip appeared first on .
After more than two weeks of fruitless negotiations for further hostage releases, Israel’s patience ran out. On Tuesday, the Israeli military bombarded Hamas leaders and positions in Gaza, and ground forces soon reentered the Hamas-ruled enclave.
Renewed fighting caused consternation for many. The remaining hostages’ friends and family fear for the safety of their loved ones. Israelis of all stripes want their countrymen free from the horrors described by some of the recently released captives. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political opponents accuse him of restarting the war to wriggle his way out of the most recent scandal to rock Israeli politics.
Focusing too narrowly on Gaza and Hamas, however, obscures the greater forces at play in the region. Jerusalem is acting like it is gearing up for the final confrontation with Iran, and it is taking Tehran’s pieces off the table in conjunction with the Trump administration.
Last week, a letter from President Trump reportedly reached Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. The message: Iran has two months to come to terms with Washington. As National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said this weekend, “Iran has been offered a way out of this.” It can either hand over its missile, uranium enrichment, and weaponization programs “in a way that is verifiable, or they can face a whole series of other consequences.”
So far, Iran is sticking with its usual tactic—defiance. After Trump announced the letter, Khamenei retorted, “They constantly say, ‘We won’t allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.’ If we had wanted to build nuclear weapons, the U.S. wouldn’t have been able to stop us.” Starting in December, Iran massively sped up its uranium enrichment program, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, by February, it had a stockpile of nearly weapons-grade uranium that could yield six bombs.
Iran can now get weapons-grade uranium at any time, and it is researching how to speed up the rest of its nuclear program. Toward the end of last year, the intelligence community assessed that the Iranians are working on shortcuts to shrink the time for making a bomb from about a year to only a few months.
The mullahs have crept right up to the edge of nuclear capability before, and previously they have traded parts of their program for diplomatic concessions, such as Obama’s misbegotten 2015 deal. Tehran has retained its enrichment program and its cadres of nuclear scientists so it can create new pawns to sacrifice as needed while moving toward its greater goals.
But over the past year, it has lost a lot of other pieces. Hezbollah, which had functioned as Iran’s strategic reserve in the region, is a shell of itself after Israel annihilated its leadership last fall. Syria used to be one of the Lebanese terrorist group’s primary supply routes, but the new regime in Damascus is clashing with it. Hezbollah rocketed Israel the day after Hamas began the war, but it is issuing only condemnations, not even threats, as the fighting resumes.
The Trump administration is pummeling another of Iran’s proxies, Yemen’s Houthis. The Houthis began attacking international shipping in the Red Sea in November 2023, and the Biden administration responded with only pinprick attacks. But last weekend, Trump began a much more damaging bombing campaign. The Houthis have been notoriously hard to dislodge, but if the U.S. military can pin them down and restrict their access to advanced weapons, they will be much weaker.
Hamas is one of the last Iran-backed groups that can seriously threaten Israel, and Netanyahu is hitting it again. This is controversial in Israel. Most of his countrymen seem to want to enact stage two of the ceasefire plan, which would trade all of the remaining hostages for a permanent end to fighting, and then finish off Hamas.
This is highly unrealistic. Hamas’s leaders are not very interested “martyring” themselves—in their view, that’s what Gaza’s children are for—and the remaining hostages are their best human shields. Returning the captives would remove the greatest obstacle to Israel finishing off the terrorists. They are not going to do that unless they believe that the only other choice is annihilation. That is the choice Bibi is offering them.
Bibi and Trump both prefer to intimidate with threats rather than risk war, which Carl von Clausewitz called “the province of chance.” But they are shrewd judges of power, and with Iran’s empire so weakened, Iran’s most advanced air defenses destroyed in an earlier Israeli air raid, and hard-earned Israeli expertise in tunnel fighting against Iran’s proxies, this is the best chance in decades to take out Iran’s bomb.
If Hamas and Iran are wise, they’ll take the deal.
The post Trump and Bibi Issue an Ultimatum. Iran and Hamas Should Heed It. appeared first on .
For those outside the Beltway, one might assume dating is a less political enterprise. Rather than meeting potential spouses at think tank happy hours, debate societies, or on the campaign trail—couples most commonly meet at school or work. The latest season of the popular Netflix dating show Love is Blind revealed that while love may be blind, it has never been more political.
This season, which took place in Minneapolis, ended with two couples separating over their conflicting views on LGBT issues, Black Lives Matter, the COVID-19 vaccine, and abortion. In a now viral clip, one contestant, Sarah, left her fiancé at the altar saying, “I love you so much but I’ve always wanted a partner to be on the same wavelength.” She, along with one of her costars, Virginia, said she was turned off by her potential spouse’s political views.
Each side of the internet took it as an opportunity to advance their own arguments. Conservatives criticized the women’s progressive positions and liberals praised their willingness to stand up for their beliefs. Despite the jarring imagery of a runaway bride, these moments were the most realistic in an otherwise idyllic and impractical show.
Following November’s election results, men were accused of a profound rightward shift; podcast-bro culture commentators were allegedly responsible for Kamala Harris’s loss. In reality, women are much more to blame for the gender gap, having moved further left while men have stayed relatively stable. Gallup polling from last year showed 40 percent of women ages 18-29 identified as very liberal or liberal compared with just 25 percent of men.
This gender gap is compounded by women and Democrats’ shared distaste for dating outside their party. The Hill cataloged this by interviewing women who had ended or failed to start relationships with those whom they disagreed with politically. Pew data from 2020 showed 71 percent of Democrats and just 47 percent of Republicans said they would be unwilling to date someone who voted for their opposing presidential candidate.
This has created a very real problem in the American dating scene, one where increasingly left-leaning women want to date left-leaning men who don’t exist in the same quantity. The more of a dealbreaker it is for them, the more uncoupled people there will be. This was a problem that played out on season eight of Love is Blind, which ended with only one couple getting married.
The show’s premise is a respectable one. Couples meet in “the pods” where they cannot see one another, getting the opportunity to know each other, and hopefully develop a “connection” without any knowledge of how the other looks. They are then able to meet in person if they decide to get engaged, and have a month from then on to prepare for their wedding day. In a culture of dating apps and The Bachelor, which are often superficial and transactional, this design certainly stands out. As I watched, however, I couldn’t help but think, “Would this really work for people with strong political or religious views?”
Religion was, of course, also a factor in these viral breakups.
Both men who were left at the altar, Ben and Devin, professed to be strong believers very early on in the season. Devin declined to continue pursuing a relationship with another contestant after she said she was bisexual. Later, he told Virginia that his family typically votes for conservatives, “because they are on the side of what their teachings are for their religion.” Ben, while consistently stressing he “hadn’t thought much about” politics, did continue to place his faith at the center of their discussions, even bringing Sarah to church.
Their female partners seemed to appreciate their faith—in the case of Virginia it was something she shared, but not the valence it took on when projected onto the guys’ behavior at the ballot box. Ben and Devin’s disproportional traditionalism tracks with national trends as well, where for the first time young men are more religious than young women.
There is also an increasingly strong relationship between religious and political affiliations in American life, with Protestants being 50 percent more likely to identify as Republicans than Democrats. Therefore, while women like Sarah and Virginia may like a man’s faith, conservative politics may come with the package.
This season of Love is Blind proved that while “strong connections” can form without lust, they struggle to stand up to the left-right divide. Though the average person cannot spend 40 days in an “experiment” looking for their spouse, they do face many of the same complicated questions as the contestants, making the show both surprisingly relatable and insightful—whether inside the Beltway or beyond.
The post Love Is Blind, but Not to the Ballot Box appeared first on .
