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Iran’s Acting FM Meets Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Leaders in Syria, Calls for Gaza Ceasefire
Iran’s acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani attends a press conference with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad in Damascus, Syria, June 4, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yamam al Shaar
Iran’s acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani on Tuesday met with leaders of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Syria, further underscoring the Iranian regime’s support for the terrorist groups as they fight Israeli forces in Gaza.
Bagheri Kani held meetings with key figures from the Palestinian terrorist factions at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, and PIJ have both long received extensive support from Iran, including funding, weapons, and training.
During his trip, Bagheri Kani also discussed Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad.
Bagheri Kani said at a joint press conference that he and Mekdad had discussed the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the delivery of humanitarian aid without conditions.
The Iranian diplomat then met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to Assad’s office, they discussed bilateral ties between the two allies and “developments in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
The meeting came one day after a general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful Iranian military force and a US-designated terrorist organization, was killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike near the Syrian city of Aleppo. In recent years, Israel has allegedly launched several strikes against Iranian targets in Syria in order to prevent Tehran from building another terrorist front against the Jewish state.
Tuesday’s meeting also came after Assad met Iran’s so-called “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran last week to offer condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. The late Iranian president died in a helicopter crash in northwestern Iran last month along with Bagheri Kani’s predecessor, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian.
The strong ties between Iran’s Islamist regime and Hamas were evident last month, when Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh delivered a eulogy for Raisi at a funeral in Iran. During his speech, Haniyeh thanked Raisi and Iran for their continued support of the “resistance factions in Gaza” and for creating, financing, and directing a “resistance axis” of Islamist, anti-Western militant organizations across the Middle East.
Before coming to Syria, Bagheri Kani traveled to Lebanon in his first trip abroad since becoming Iran’s acting top diplomat. In his day-long visit to Beirut, Bagheri Kani met top Lebanese officials as well as Hassan Nasrallah, the head Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon.
While Israel has been fighting Hamas to the south in Gaza, Hezbollah terrorists have been firing rockets daily at northern Israel, displacing tens of thousands of Israeli civilians.
Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel launched the war in Gaza. PIJ is a separate but allied terrorist organization in the Palestinian enclave that has also held Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7 onslaught.
Khamenei claimed on Monday that the massacre occurred “just when the region needed it.” He added that there was a plan by “the Americans, the Zionists, of their supporters and of some of the countries in the region to change the equation in the region” — an apparent reference to ongoing, US-brokered efforts to foster a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Many observers have claimed the Oct. 7 atrocities were meant to force Israel into a war and undermine the push for a historic Israel-Saudi normalization agreement.
The post Iran’s Acting FM Meets Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Leaders in Syria, Calls for Gaza Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
The post Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
The post Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30 first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
The post Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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