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Israelis on Edge as Iranian Threat to Attack Looms
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi addresses a Hamas solidarity rally in Tehran. Photo: Reuters/Sobhan Farajvan
Israelis nationwide are preparing for an imminent attack by Iran and wider escalation in the north with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon.
While much attention has been focused on the Israeli government’s actions to brace for a military strike, regular families are in many cases being forced to alter their plans due to fear of an attack.
Israeli youth movements, for example, are weighing the possibility of calling off their annual Passover trips. Many parents have already cancelled their trips for the upcoming Jewish holiday later this month as they continue to monitor the situation, according to some groups.
“All activities and trips in the Bnei Akiva movement take place according to the guidelines and with the approval of the Ministry of Education, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], and the security forces in the State of Israel,” said Bnei Akiva, one of the largest youth movements in Israel with more than 80,000 total campers.
“Over 30,000 campers will go on a Passover trip next week,” the group noted. “At the same time, we understand parents who are more worried these days, and because of this we have decided that this year the Passover trip will take place only one day without overnight accommodation.”
The Hebrew Scouts, the largest youth movement in Israel with over 100,000 kids, is also taking precautions and ready to change plans if needed.
“Tens of thousands of campers and guides of the Scout movement have signed up for the trips in the coming weeks. Since we learned of the situation that has arisen, the movement is acting responsibly as it has always acted in full coordination with all the relevant parties, including the IDF,” the group said. “The movement is prepared accordingly and will make all the necessary adjustments according to the instructions of the authorized parties.”
Youth movements in Israel are extraordinarily popular, with around 250,000 youth active across the country. Many have credited the skills learned in the movements to Israel’s excellence in areas such as military operations and hi-tech innovation.
The concern among Israeli parents and youth groups comes as Israel prepares for a potential attack from Iran, whose leaders routinely call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Top Iranian officials have been publicly threatening to attack Israel as revenge for an airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria last week that Iranian officials have attributed to Israel. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a US-designated terrorist organization, including two senior commanders. One of the commanders allegedly helped plan the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the incident. However, Israel has been bracing for a retaliatory strike amid a flurry of public threats from Iran to attack Israel.
The White House said this week that it considered the Iranian threats of reprisals to be legitimate. “We still deem the potential threat by Iran here to be real, to be viable,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
Due to the threat, the US Embassy in Israel announced it is restricting government employees and their families from personal travels outside the greater Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Be’er Sheva areas.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Iran could launch an attack on Israeli soil within the next 24 to 48 hours, quoting a US official who cited American intelligence reports.
Israeli officials have said they are prepared to respond to an attack — warning that such a response could target Iran directly.
“We are prepared to defend ourselves on the ground and in the air, in close cooperation with our partners, and we will know how to respond,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said after a meeting with the head of US Central Command, General Michael Kurilla.
On Wednesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote on X/Twitter that “if Iran attacks from its own territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”
Less than an hour later, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted what appeared to be a response to Katz. “When the Zionist regime attacks an Iranian consulate in Syria, it is as if it has attacked Iranian soil,” he wrote. “That malicious regime has made a wrong move. It should be punished, and it will be punished.”
Countries including India, France, Russia, and Poland have warned their citizens against travel to the region, which is already on edge over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which began with the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state. Iran provides Hamas with weapons, funding, and training.
Despite the expected attack, Israeli officials have not forbidden travel to the Galilee area in northern Israel, where an Iranian attack could reportedly take place.
“Currently, as far as the Home Front Command is concerned, there is no crowd restriction in the area of Tiberias and the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but there is no doubt that an aircraft or a missile that penetrates this space constitutes a threat to us and a big challenge,” Commander Yigal Ben Lulu of the Tiberias Police said on Friday morning. “In such a situation, you must lie down on the ground and put your hands on your head.”
The post Israelis on Edge as Iranian Threat to Attack Looms first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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