Gebran Bassil, a Christian member of parliament and former minister gestures as he speaks during an interview with Reuters in Sin-el-fil, Lebanon, Oct. 13, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

Iran-backed Hezbollah needs to focus on domestic issues in Lebanon and not the wider region, senior Lebanese Maronite politician Gebran Bassil said on Tuesday, adding that he was against the head of the army running for the presidency.

A year of fighting between the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah and Israel, which culminated in a tentative ceasefire brokered by the United States and France in November, saw more than 4,000 killed, thousands displaced, and the powerful Shi’ite group considerably weakened militarily with many of its leaders dead.

“It’s a process whereby Hezbollah accepts that they are part of the Lebanese state and are not parallel to the state,” Bassil, a Maronite Christian, who is one of Lebanon‘s most influential politicians, told Reuters in an interview in Paris.

“We don’t want their end. We want them to be partners in the Lebanese nation, equal to us in abiding by the rules and preserving the sovereignty of Lebanon. We agree with them on defending Lebanon and supporting the Palestinian cause, but politically and diplomatically, not militarily.”

Bassil, who said the group should distance itself from the Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance,” is head of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Christian party founded by former President Michel Aoun, his father-in-law, that has been aligned with Hezbollah.

He was sanctioned by the United States in 2020 for alleged corruption and material support to Hezbollah. He denies the accusations.

He was in Paris meeting French officials. He declined to say whether he met Donald Trump’s regional envoy and fellow Maronite Massad Boulos, who accompanied the US president-elect to France last weekend.

Since the truce, Paris has increased efforts to discuss with the myriad key actors in Lebanon over how to break a political impasse after two years without a president or permanent government.

The presidential post is reserved for Christians, but part of the standoff reflects rivalries among the community as well as crucial political and religious balances in the country.

Authorities finally announced that the parliament would meet on Jan. 9 to elect a new president.

Bassil, who has enough lawmakers to block a Maronite candidate, said he was against the candidacy of Joseph Aoun, the head of the army, who diplomats say both the United States and France consider as a serious candidate.

He said Aoun’s appointment would be against the constitution and that he did not have consensus among all the Lebanese factions.

“We are against him because we don’t see him as being fit for the presidency,” Bassil said. “We need candidates who can bring the Lebanese together,” he said declining to name one.

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Israeli soldiers operate in a location given as southern Syria, in this screengrab from a video obtained by Reuters on Dec. 9, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

JNS.org — The Israel Defense Forces has conducted 300 strikes in Syria since Sunday’s ouster of Bashar Assad, Israeli media reported on Tuesday, marking the heaviest air campaign in the country since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Israel’s Ynet news outlet cited Western intelligence sources late Monday night as confirming the figure, saying that the aerial assault is mainly targeting air force bases, including entire squadrons of fighter jets.

It is believed that the Syrian Air Force could be destroyed in its entirety “within a few days,” Ynet noted, which would substantially reduce the threat posed to the Jewish state by the incoming Syrian government.

The last time Israel destroyed an entire air force was in 1967, when the Egyptian Air Force was wiped out in the first hours of the Six-Day War.

Local security sources told Reuters on Monday that the Israeli Air Force had attacked at least three army bases that housed dozens of helicopters and jets in the largest wave of strikes on the Syrian Air Force since Assad was toppled.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based war monitor with links to the Syrian opposition, was cited by AFPas confirming that Israel carried out more than 100 strikes on Monday, including on a suspected chemical weapons production site. The IDF did not immediately comment on the strikes.

Early on Tuesday morning, AFP and Al Jazeera reported loud blasts in Damascus, with the latter outlet attributing the explosions to Israel.

On Sunday, Syrian President Bashar Assad fled Damascus as a coalition of rebel groups stormed the capital, ending his family’s five-decade rule.

“The tyrant Bashar Assad has been overthrown,” a rebel spokesperson declared in a statement carried on state television on Sunday morning.

On Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar confirmed that the IAF had struck sites used to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles in an attempt to prevent them from falling into hostile hands.

“We attacked strategic weapons systems, like for example remaining chemical weapons, or long-range missiles and rockets, in order that they will not fall in the hands of extremists,” Sa’ar told the Associated Press.

“The only interest we have is the security of Israel and its citizens,” he reiterated in his remarks to the wire agency. The top diplomat did not provide details about when or where the airstrikes were conducted.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier on Monday morning that he had ordered the continued destruction by the IDF of strategic weapons that were previously held by the Syrian regime and Iranian-backed militias, to prevent their falling into the hands of terrorist groups.

Among the arms taken out by the IDF were “surface-to-air missiles, air defense systems, surface-to-surface missiles, cruise missiles, long-range rockets, and coast-to-sea missiles,” the Defense Ministry stated.

Katz has also ordered the military to set up a secure area free of strategic weapons and terror infrastructure inside Syrian territory, beyond the buffer zone on the Israel-Syria border. The 210th “Bashan” Division began proactive operations on Sunday to ensure “the protection of the residents of the Golan Heights in light of the internal events in Syria,” the IDF said.

Katz said he had also instructed the military to establish full control over the once-demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan, which was established under the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem that ended the Yom Kippur War.

According to Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen outlet, which is closely affiliated with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror organization, IDF tanks have reached positions 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the town of Qatana, which is located some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the outskirts of Damascus.

Three security sources, one in Syria and two in the region, confirmed the report, telling Reuters on Tuesday that IDF soldiers had reached Qatana.

An IDF spokesperson denied the reports later on Tuesday, telling Reuters that Israeli ground forces “have not left the buffer zone.”

Jerusalem reportedly informed the United States that its activities in Syria constitute “temporary and tactical operations” to protect civilians in its north. A US government source signaled Washingtons approval for the move in a conversation with Israel’s Kan News broadcaster, saying that “no nation can tolerate terror groups on its doorstep.”

“Since the Syrian army abandoned its positions in and around the Israeli-Syrian buffer zone, Israel has declared that Syria’s enforcement of the 1974 ceasefire agreement has collapsed. Israel has taken temporary measures to stabilize the buffer zone and prevent an invasion of Israeli territory,” the American source told the Israeli public broadcaster.

“We hope that, in the future, we will see the area return to stability,” added the source.

Two sources familiar with the details of the conversations told Kan News that Jerusalem had informed the Biden administration of its intention to take control of the Syrian part of Mount Hermon and the buffer zones. Washington has not expressed public opposition to the moves.

The post IDF Hit More Than 300 Syrian Regime Targets in Two Days, ‘Effectively Wiping Out Air Force’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

This year, the one year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacre fell on the Jewish High Holidays, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. What did this signify? Do we need to seek a meaning in this peculiar, sorrowful, tragic lunar coincidence? Ten days of awe, ten days of repentance.

One of the ongoing themes of the Days of Awe is the concept that God inscribes our names into the Book of Life, writing down who will live and who will die, who will have a good life and who will have a bad one, for the next year. These books are written on Rosh Hashanah, and sealed on Yom Kippur. But during these days of awe, we can alter G-d’s decree.

If we look back at the year Israel experienced between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2024, we see a small, ultra-modern, democratic nation surrounded by hostile states that openly threaten Israel and America.

On October 7, 2023, the Jewish nation endured one of its darkest hours since the Holocaust. Despite the world’s tepid sympathy, including what I regard as inadequate support from the United States, and widespread condemnation of Israel’s response to the attack, Israel has remained defiant in the face of relentless pressure from anti-Zionist and hypocritical forces. These forces include the farcical United Nations, with its cowardly, blatantly antisemitic chief; the International Court of injustice; and prominent figures from around the world, including many American politicians of Jewish descent, all of whom have sought to undermine Israel’s right to exist.

Still, against all odds, Israel has dismantled Hamas and severely weakened Hezbollah, and although it has not finished Hamas off in its entirety, it has nevertheless greatly diminished its militaristic might. Israel has also taken the fight to Iran, and the collapse of the Assad government in Syria shows much Israel has accomplished, and Iran and its proxies have lost, since the Hamas pogrom in October 2023.

Now, like at no other time in its history, Israel needs true, strong, and honest allies who trust Israel and don’t try to restrain it out of calculating and cynical self-interest. Had America or the United Kingdom ever found themselves in a situation of a true existential threat, no other country or political body on earth would have been able to push them toward the self-restraint they continue to demand of Israel.

Israel again and again tells the world that we Jews matter — despite our small numbers and despite what has happened to us, and despite what has been happening to us for the past two millennia.

We are a sovereign nation, and we, and only we, shall determine our fate. Never again shall we be enslaved; our fate will never be in the hands of other people and other nations. Our nation shall never depend on the mercy of other people. As Jews, we will not allow ourselves to be taken away, humiliated, or abused — because now we have a country of our own that will protect us from our enemies.

The fate of the Jewish people has always been the extreme balancing act between survival and extermination, and in between those two extremes, we Jews have managed to make lives for ourselves. Our identity is rooted in life, in how we value it, how we fight for it, and whom we trust with it. Unlike so many of those who seek to destroy us, we are not a cult of death, but a nation of life.  We search and find meaning in everything life throws at us, even suffering and tragedy.

Our eyes are still filled with tears, our hearts are heavy with unbearable pain, and our minds are clouded with sadness over the loss of the lives so brutally taken from us since October 7, 2023, and the hostages and their bodies that are still captive in Gaza. And, despite all this, we — the Jewish nation, headed by the state of Israel — have demonstrated to the world that we will not give up and that we have not forgotten how to fight back. Our unwavering goal remains to protect our Jewish homeland, our Jewish freedom, and the voice of Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

We Jews stand here today to announce to the world that we are here to stay, whether in Israel or here in this messy antisemitic world, called the Diaspora.

I think this notion for us Jews today transcends religion. There are those among us who are religious, and those who are not. There are those who believe in G-d, and there are those who don’t. Some people are angry with him and argue with him about the injustice and cruelty that has befallen the Jewish nation and enveloped this world with unbearable sadness. But maybe by coming together,  and showing up for Israel, maybe G-d has looked down upon us and and inscribed us in the “good” book, because we are saying “yes” to a nation that chooses life over death — not only for its own people, but for everyone who chooses the glorious lightness of freedom over the despairing abyss of tyranny.

Anya Gillinson is an immigration lawyer and author of the new memoir Dreaming in Russian. She lives in New York City. More at www.anyagillinson.com. 

The post Reflections on the Jewish People Since Oct. 7: The Will to Never Give Up, and Protect Their Homeland first appeared on Algemeiner.com.