Connect with us

RSS

Israel Says Hezbollah Using UN Troops in Lebanon as Human Shields as UNIFIL Refuses to Leave Combat Zones

UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL) vehicles drive in Marjayoun, near the border with Israel, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon, Oct. 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karamallah Daher

United Nations peacekeepers will stay in all positions in Lebanon despite Israeli warnings that Hezbollah is weaponizing their presence in the Iran-backed terrorist organization’s war against the Jewish state.

“The decision was made that UNIFIL [the UN Interim Force in Lebanon] would currently stay in all its positions in spite of the calls that were made by the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] to vacate the positions that are in the vicinity of the Blue Line,” UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix said on Monday.

Lacroix’s announcement came after Italy, Britain, France, and Germany earlier in the day condemned what they described as Israeli attacks on the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, calling them violations of international humanitarian law and demanding an immediate halt.

In a joint statement, the nations emphasized the “essential stabilizing role” of UNIFIL in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah wields significant influence and has been fighting Israeli forces, and urged Israel to guarantee the peacekeepers’ safety.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forcefully rejected accusations that Israel deliberately attacked UNIFIL personnel as “completely false.”

“It’s exactly the opposite. Israel repeatedly asks UNIFIL to get out of harm’s way. It repeatedly asked them to temporarily leave the combat zone, which is right next to Israel’s border with Lebanon,” he said.

UNIFIL appeared to rebuff Netanyahu’s calls to evacuate with Lacroix’s latest statement. However, the Israeli premier hasn’t been the only one warning of how Hezbollah was using the UN presence in Lebanon to its advantage.

Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — said that Hezbollah was using UNIFIL troops as human shields.

“UNIFIL troops are deemed non-combatants like the rest of the Lebanese population, and not an enemy. Every commander in the IDF knows this,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner.

Israel’s one mistake, she said, was agreeing in the aftermath of the 2006 Second Lebanon War to the deployment of 10,000 UNIFIL troops in southern Lebanon.

“It’s outrageous that UNIFIL is not enabling us to do what it was supposed to do in the past 18 years,” she said. “They are risking their lives for nothing. I hope they’ll come to their senses and withdraw, as requested.”

Israel has asked that the peacekeepers retreat five kilometers, or 3.1, miles north of the border, to stay out of the line of fire.

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon on Sunday echoed similar sentiments.

“Hezbollah terrorists are using UNIFIL outposts as hiding places and as places of ambushes. The UN’s insistence on keeping the UNIFIL soldiers in the line of fire is incomprehensible,” said Danon.

The Lebanese terrorist group has launched more than 10,000 rockets into Israel since Oct. 8 of last year, a day after Hamas’s attack in Israel’s south, including more than 1,000 UAVs, one of which killed four Israelis on Sunday and wounded 70 more.

“For 18 years, UNIFIL personnel ignored the Hezbollah bases along the border and did not report any UN Resolution 1701 violations, which states that only the Lebanese army is allowed to operate in the area,” Danon said.

A UNIFIL report released on Monday about IDF incursions in the area raised concerns for Zehavi, who questioned the group’s effectiveness even as a monitoring entity. The report notably omitted any mention of the munitions and tunnels uncovered by the IDF just meters from UNIFIL posts.

“In almost every home that is in open areas, and under every tree, the IDF finds munitions,” she said. “It is clear that UNIFIL knew what was happening.”

Zehavi said that much of the problems arose when examining UN Resolution 1701, adopted in 2006 after the Second Lebanon War, which mandated a buffer zone free of armed groups and to prevent the area from being used for hostile activities. She questioned the division of responsibility in two seemingly contradictory articles of the resolution between UNIFIL and the Lebanese army in securing the area between Israel’s border and the Litani River.

“Who’s to ensure that this area is not used for all these purposes by a terrorist organization? Is it UNIFIL or the Lebanese army?” Zehavi asked, adding that at this point, “it doesn’t really matter.”

“Neither of them implemented the mandate, and from day one, Hezbollah deceived the whole world and continued rebuilding its terrorist activity in southern Lebanon,” she explained.

In the future, UNIFIL’s mandate should be limited to serving as mediator and capped at 1,000 personnel, Zehavi said. But she also called for another coalition to enter southern Lebanon, one that would be “willing to clash with Hezbollah.”

The key issue, Zehavi said, is that it’s impossible to fully implement UN Resolution 1701 as long as Hezbollah is not seen as an “illegitimate entity” within Lebanon. She argued that while Hezbollah operates both as a political party in Lebanon’s Parliament and government and as a massive social movement, the terrorist group essentially functions as a “state within a state,” with parallel civilian infrastructures that provide services to the population, thereby securing widespread support.

Despite the IDF’s successes in targeting Hezbollah’s munitions and rocket depots, Alma estimates that Hezbollah still retains around 50,000 mortars with ranges of up to 10 kilometers. Additionally, there are about 25,000 Grads and other mid-range rockets capable of reaching distances between 30 to 80 kilometers. For longer ranges of 80 to 200 kilometers, Hezbollah is believed to have around 2,000 rockets. However, Zehavi acknowledged that there are no current estimates for how many long-range missiles Hezbollah may still have in its arsenal.

Zehavi outlined four types of tunnels built by Hezbollah, each serving a specific function. The first type, border crossing tunnels, are meant to infiltrate Israel, with a recently discovered tunnel extending just a few dozen meters from Lebanon into the Israeli community of Zarit. Its opening shaft was discovered only dozens of meters away from a UNIFIL watchtower.

The second type is tactical tunnels, which link homes and strategic points in southern Lebanon. These tunnels were originally designed to facilitate Hezbollah’s invasion plans and defend against IDF incursions. Hezbollah’s plan to invade Israel — which included abductions — was “copy-pasted” by Hamas, she said.

In practice, since Hezbollah shelved plans for an invasion, the terrorist group has mainly used those tunnels to avoid direct combat, instead attacking from a distance with anti-tank missiles and mortars.

The third type, known as strategic tunnels, form a vast network stretching hundreds of kilometers, and are supported by Iran and North Korea. These tunnels are used to transport launchers and military personnel across Lebanon, from Beirut to the south and from the Lebanese-Syrian border.

Lastly, explosive tunnels are specifically designed to target IDF forces, with the intent of causing significant damage as Israeli units advance.

Beyond the fighting in Lebanon, Zehavi also described Iran’s recent massive missile attack on Israel as a declaration of war and called on Israel and its allies to attack Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi held a secret meeting on Sunday night at the headquarters of the Military Intelligence Directorate near Tel Aviv to discuss the country’s planned retaliation against Iran, according to Ynet.

The last such secret meeting reportedly occurred right before the Israeli airstrike last month that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The post Israel Says Hezbollah Using UN Troops in Lebanon as Human Shields as UNIFIL Refuses to Leave Combat Zones first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Post Views: 233
Related Topics:
Continue Reading

RSS

Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

Post Views: 19
Continue Reading

RSS

Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

Post Views: 0
Continue Reading

RSS

IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Post Views: 20
Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News