The editor who created the “Overlooked” obituary series at The New York Times talks about the upcoming book compilation.
Day: November 11, 2023
The Kremlin aims to exploit Hamas’ attack on Israel to divert Western support and attention away from Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported in its daily assessment on Oct. 7.
Following Hamas’ large-scale attacks on Israeli territory on Oct. 7, Russian voices amplified messages blaming Western countries for neglecting conflicts in the Middle East in favor of supporting Ukraine.
In a statement posted on the social media platform X, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev claimed that the U.S. and Western allies should have been focused on “Palestinian-Israeli settlement” rather than providing Ukraine with military aid.
As part of these information operations, pro-Russian military bloggers have also largely focused on the Hamas attacks in Israel, actively promoting Kremlin narratives.
According to ISW, Russian narratives surrounding the Hamas attacks are aimed at influencing Western audiences. Their objectives include driving a wedge in military support for Ukraine and attempting to demoralize Ukrainian society by claiming Ukraine will lose support from Western allies.
Earlier this week, Russia launched its single deadliest attack against Ukrainian civilians this year, killing 52 people and earning international condemnation.
Read also: ‘Every family affected’: Devastated village copes with aftermath of Russian strike on funeral
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A soldier stands guard next to a wall of a prison in Olenivka, in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces, eastern Ukraine, July 29, 2022. A Russian news agency is reporting that the country is preparing to send a battalion of Ukrainian prisoners of war to the front lines in their homeland to fight on Moscow’s side in the war. The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the report or if the POWs were coerced. (AP)
Russia is sending Ukrainian prisoners of war to the front lines of their homeland to fight on Moscow’s side in the war, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
The news agency said Tuesday the soldiers swore allegiance to Russia when they joined the battalion, which entered service last month.
The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the report or videos released by the news agency, or whether the POWs were coerced into their actions. Both Ukrainian military and human rights officials as well as the Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the AP.
Experts say such actions would be an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions relating to the treatment of POWs, which forbids them from being exposed to combat or from working in unhealthy or dangerous conditions — coerced or not.
“Russian authorities might claim they are recruiting them on a voluntary basis but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where a prisoner of war’s decision could be taken truly voluntarily, given the situation of coercive custody,” said Yulia Gorbunova, senior researcher on Ukraine at Human Rights Watch.
Nick Reynolds, research fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London, added that “the entire scenario is laced with the potential for coercion.”
A prisoner of war, he said, does not have “a huge amount of agency” and is in a “very difficult situation.”
Video from RIA Novosti showed the Ukrainians swearing allegiance to Russia, holding rifles and dressed in military fatigues to fight in a battalion named for medieval nobleman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, seen as a national hero in Russia for bringing parts of Ukraine under Moscow’s control in the 15th century.
The Institute for the Study of War in Washington said there have been previous reports of Ukrainian POWs being asked to “volunteer” for the battalion. They were housed in the Olenivka prison, which was blown up in July 2022. Russia said Ukraine destroyed the prison in the country’s east with a rocket, but Kyiv blamed the blast on Moscow to cover up what it alleged was abuse and killings of the POWs.
Russia also has used inmates from its own prisons to fight in Ukraine in exchange for a commuted sentence if they survive.
It is also trying to bolster its forces with a “conscription campaign in occupied Ukraine,” said the ISW’s Karolina Hird.
By mobilizing Ukrainian POWs, deploying Russian convicts and conscripting Ukrainians who live in occupied regions, Russia is increasing its combat force “without having to risk the social implications of conducting a general mobilization,” Hird said.
Earlier this year, Russian media reported about 70 Ukrainian POWs joined the battalion.
RIA Novosti reported the Ukrainians will operate as part of another unit in eastern Ukraine, and the unit’s website said it has about 7,000 fighters.
Given the location of the unit, Hird said she expected the Ukrainian POWs would be deployed to the front lines in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Reynolds said the fighters were not deployed as part of a conventional Russian military unit but were one of a number of irregular formations that don’t adhere to “normal force structure.”
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TEL AVIV — Israeli officials are becoming guardedly optimistic that a hostage deal with Hamas can be reached, but any agreement is likely to be interim and limited.
A deal is likely to involve just a few dozen captive Israeli children and elderly, among them some dual nationals, including Americans, according to two Israeli officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic of hostages.
The formalizing of humanitarian pauses in northern Gaza has helped progress the talks via the Qataris and Egyptians, the two officials acknowledged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week agreed to put in place four-hour daily humanitarian pauses in its bombings in Gaza after almost two weeks of pressure from the Biden administration.
But the two officials cautioned that there are still several outstanding issues that could easily derail a deal, including the Hamas militants withholding a complete list of the hostages being held in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas military leadership is also demanding a cease-fire, or a longer humanitarian pause of as much as a week, the Israeli officials said.
David Meidan, a former Mossad intelligence officer, who served for a time as Benjamin Netanyahu’s coordinator on hostage issues, believes that “something is moving under the surface” regarding the hostages. The humanitarian pauses that Netanyahu has agreed to “might lead to some positive steps,” Meidan said in an exclusive interview with POLITICO.
More than a decade ago, Meidan negotiated the deal to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006, in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Meidan, who has been counseling the families of the Israeli hostages, has been consulted by U.S. diplomats and Netanyahu’s newly appointed hostage envoy, Gal Hirsch.
Meidan advised Hirsch and the Americans not to waste time juggling different channels of communication and to focus their efforts on identifying mediators able to reach the key decision-makers — namely the Hamas military leaders in Gaza. He said he told them that “the political leaders outside Gaza in Qatar are not so relevant.” They can serve just as go-betweens for messages to the Hamas military leaders, Meidan explained.
“When I led negotiations 12 years ago, I did not understand in the beginning exactly who the key players were. Finally, I understood that the key person at the time was Ahmed Jabari,” Meidan said.
Jabari in 2006 was commander of the military wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. He was killed subsequently in 2012 in a targeted Israeli airstrike. Now Meidan says Yehya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in the Gaza Strip and one of the founders of the organization’s military wing, is the key player — along with Mohammed Deif, who planned the October 7 terror attack on southern Israel, and Marwan Issa, who is the deputy chief of Hamas’ military wing. “It is those three,” he said.
“The Americans are deeply involved. I have the impression that on the American side there’s a very high level of engagement and it is coming straight from the top,” Meidan said. But the American role can only be limited, and Washington is not best placed to be a negotiator. “What it can do is pressure the Egyptians and Qataris and instill a sense of urgency,” he says. Last week, Mossad chief David Barnea and CIA Director William Burns were in Qatar to discuss ways to win the release of the hostages in Gaza with the Qatari prime minister, according to media reports.
Meidan said the negotiations this time round will be more difficult than what he encountered a dozen years ago. First, he was bartering for just one soldier, not for around 240 captives, mostly civilian; and he wasn’t negotiating against the backdrop of an all-out war.
And though he couldn’t sit opposite Jabari because of Israeli laws, he and the Hamas leader were in adjacent rooms in Cairo during the final stages with the Egyptians ferrying messages back and forth as they bargained. Meidan knew a deal was near when Jabari started to accept that it would be impossible for Israel to release some of the Palestinians that Hamas wanted freed. “That was when I knew he was turning pragmatic,” he said.
Egyptian generals were crucial in pulling off the Shalit deal, according to Meidan. He thinks they will be key again — including one general who led the Egyptian team in 2006.
“Now it is even more complex,” Meidan said. No one is in adjacent rooms, and it is much more laborious and time-consuming.
“What you have now is the Israelis and the Americans talking with the Qataris, who are then passing messages to the Hamas political leaders in Doha, who then communicate with Gaza. And you have Egyptians talking with Hamas leaders in Gaza. The Israelis draft proposals and the Americans tweak them. The Qataris and the Egyptians make suggestions. The final version is sent to Gaza via the Hamas leaders in Doha,” he added.
Hamas has different ways of communicating between the political and military leaders, including using cell phones, which are easily monitored. “Each round of bargaining takes two to three days” slowing the process and drawing out the bargaining, says Meidan. “It takes a lot of time but, alas, time is of the essence,” he said.
Meidan had wanted Israel to prioritize hostage negotiations much sooner — and before Israel started to pummel Gaza and launch military ground operations.
“Now we are in a different situation,” he said. He faults Netanyahu for dragging his feet. “I listened carefully to the statements of the Hamas leaders, and I got the impression they were taken aback at the international outrage after the terrible October 7 attack and were trying to argue that the worst of what happened wasn’t carried out by their fighters,” Meidan said.
Meidan said the best way to engineer a deal now is to use the humanitarian pauses to push a humanitarian line on Hamas and argue they should reciprocate by freeing captive babies, children, the elderly and the infirm. “But it is very difficult,” he said.
The families of the hostages are getting ever more impatient and desperate, he said. Most are holding off calling for a cease-fire, leaving it to the government to determine the best ways of getting their relatives back, Meidan said. Most are arguing that Netanyahu should release all and any Palestinians held in Israeli jails that Hamas wants freed.
But that could change soon. “They are going through a rollercoaster of emotions and can say different things from day to day — you have to remember there are many relatives involved and they don’t all agree,” Meidan said. But with each passing day, more are saying to me that there should be a cease-fire to save as many hostages as possible,” he said.
If the hostage families as a group begin to call for a cease-fire, it could shift domestic Israeli politics dramatically, presenting Netanyahu with a potentially explosive political moment, say opposition politicians. The war aims to wreck Hamas’ military capabilities, defang the organization to prevent any repetition of October 7 has enormous public backing, but if Israel is faced with a stark choice of choosing between the hostages and the military campaign, then Israelis will prioritize getting the captives released, say some opposition politicians.
“Basically, if you ask me, the hostages have to come first, we should get them home,” Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party and leader of the opposition, told POLITICO. Although he said he thought in practical terms Israel won’t be faced with such a black-and-white dilemma. But if it is, “we will have our chance to kill whoever we need to kill afterwards. If we are faced with a choice, then we must go with the hostages because that is the basic contract the country has with the families,” he added.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agrees that there doesn’t have to be a clear-cut choice. “I am not sure it will come to an either-or. I don’t think that if Israel stops now, then we’ll get the hostages. And I don’t think that if we don’t stop, we will lose the hostages,” he said.
“When we negotiated the release of Gilad Shalit, we were still confronting Hamas and killing terrorists and they never harmed him because they understood he was an asset and a bargaining chip which they didn’t want to lose. They protect the assets,” he said. But he and other politicians acknowledge say that if the families of the hostages call en masse for a cease-fire, it will roil Israel’s domestic politics.
Javed Ali broke down the layers of Israel’s intelligence community and how the country’s agencies failed to stop the invasion of Israel by Hamas militants on October 7
An Israeli army tracked medical vehicle moves in a military convoy
A counter-terrorism expert has questioned how Israel, with its top-notch intelligence capabilities, missed the threat to its national security during the Hamas attack on October 7.
Javed Ali, a counterterrorism professor at the University of Michigan believes that the attack “took an enormous amount of deliberate and careful planning,”. He suggests that the complex structure of Israel’s intelligence services, which are as capable as the US’ FBI, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency but aren’t unified, might have led to crucial details being overlooked in the bureaucratic rush to share information between agencies.
“Israel has one of the most capable and sophisticated intelligence enterprises at the international level,” Prof Ali told The Conversation. He explained the structure of Israel’s intelligence community, mentioning the Shin Bet, similar to the FBI, which keeps an eye on terrorist threats within the country.
Then there’s the Mossad, like the CIA, that monitors threats from overseas. He also mentioned a military intelligence agency, likened to the Defense Intelligence Agency. These agencies work together to protect the state by gathering information in four main ways: human, signals, imagery and open-source intelligence.
An Israeli soldier walk in the grounds of Kibbutz Kfar Aza
(
AFP via Getty Images)
The first involves traditional spies, while the second includes texts and other forms of communication. Imagery refers to photos, taken by satellites or people on the ground with cameras. Open-source intelligence is public info like internet chat boards, Ali explained. Despite having the tech and resources to gather intelligence in all these ways, Israel doesn’t have an intelligence coordinator, who would oversee all these operations and ensure good communication and teamwork between the agencies.
Ali suggested that having one might have allowed the intelligence Israel had already gathered on Hamas movements to be shared between the agencies and passed up to the country’s top officials, who could then plan preventative measures. Ali, speaking about the Oct. 7 attack, said: “This took an enormous amount of deliberate and careful planning, and Hamas must have gone to great lengths to conceal the plotting from Israeli intelligence.”
He suggested that due to a lack of coordination between intelligence agencies, crucial information was not shared widely enough for action to be taken. The US. which shares intelligence with Israel, probably didn’t pass on any details about the looming attack. Ali believes this is because the US is likely concentrating its intelligence efforts on other global hotspots like Ukraine, China, and Russia, so it may have missed any signs.
Ali also hinted at possible Iranian involvement due to the “advanced features” of the attack. However, he pointed out that U.S. intelligence officials have dismissed such claims since the conflict started. Iran has now publicly declared its stance on the conflict, opposing Israel and the U.S., and threatening to step in if the horrific acts being committed by the latter in Gaza don’t stop immediately.
Israel’s response to Hamas militants has led to the tragic loss of over 12,000 innocent lives, many of them women and children. The state has been targeting refugee camps, hospitals and simple family homes filled with cowering civilians hoping the humble structures will provide them with protection from the onslaught. Many are calling Israel’s actions war crimes, and the United Nations has condemned many of the country’s actions.
* An AI tool was used to add an extra layer to the editing process for this story. You can report any errors to webhomepage@mirror.co.uk
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One of the women has Alzheimer’s, another was rushed to hospital in distress afterwards and a further two are widows of men executed by the regime in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.
“What threat do ill and elderly Baha’is pose to the Iranian government?” asked Simin Fahandej, the BIC’s representative to the United Nations. “Nothing but religious prejudice can explain such merciless actions.
“With almost every passing week, and with each new wave of arrests, the Iranian government gives us new proofs [sic] of its cruelty and its intentions to persecute Baha’is only for their beliefs, even in advanced age.”
Iran has released no information about the charges facing those arrested this week or where they are being held.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met on Saturday with Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi on the sidelines of the extraordinary joint Arab-Islamic summit, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.
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The meeting is the two leaders’ first since the two countries restored ties in March under a deal brokered by China.
The Crown Prince also separately met with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the report added.
The leaders had landed in Saudi Arabia to attend an emergency meeting of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss the escalating Israel-Gaza conflict.
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