The Big Story
Iran warned late Monday that the “coming hours” could see a “preemptive action by the resistance front”—Iran’s regional empire of Islamist militias—against Israel. “Leaders of the resistance will not allow the Zionist regime to take any action in Gaza,” said Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in a statement on Iranian state TV, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue his own threat to Iran and its allies on Tuesday morning: “Do not test us in the north,” referring to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group in control of Lebanon. The United States, meanwhile, is warning Israel not to escalate against Hezbollah and other Iranian assets, even as it deploys its own forces in the region. The deployment of U.S. forces is ostensibly an effort to deter any additional attacks on Israel but, according to multiple analysts, is really meant to stop Israel from hitting Iran and its proxies and potentially scuttling the new Iran deal that has been a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
The problem is that the conflict is inherently regional. U.S. pronouncements to the contrary aside, Hamas is not an independent actor, but a small and strategically insignificant bit player in the larger “resistance front” that is funded, armed, and directed by Tehran. For Israel to regain the strategic initiative against Iran, it would need to be able to strike back not merely against Hamas—which Tehran is happy to see bombed into smithereens amid cries of Israeli “genocide”—but against Iran’s most prized regional asset, Hezbollah, and against Iran itself. This, in turn, is precisely the option that the United States is committed to foreclosing. Indeed, Iran knows that its threats to escalate throughout the region in response to Israeli “war crimes” will be leveraged by Washington to further constrain the Israeli campaign in Gaza so as not to provoke Iran. If Israel’s message to Iran is “Don’t test us,” then Iran’s message to America is “If you don’t want that regional war, you’d better put your dog on a leash.”
In the meantime, as Tablet’s Levant analyst Tony Badran explains to The Scroll:
Hezbollah is achieving two goals. First, tactically, to add to the hesitation and delays of the ground offensive by keeping the specter of the second front hanging over the IDF. Second, it is reestablishing, under U.S. protection, pre-2006 rules of engagement which it had sought to reinstate ever since that war. That is, the ability to activate the Lebanon front on a low burner without incurring massive destruction in Israeli retaliation, limiting it instead to tit-for-tat skirmishes, to Hezbollah’s advantage. If this holds, it will be an important win for them. Implicit in Bibi’s warning [to the Iranians] is that he is currently accepting the current level of Hezbollah escalation in the north—that the Americans have announced they accept, and that Israel should accept, too.
Read more here: https://nypost.com/2023/10/17/iran-warns-preemptive-action-against-israel-expected-in-coming-hours-by-resistance-front/
The Rest
→BREAKING: Shortly before The Scroll was published on Tuesday, NBC news reported that a senior Hamas official claimed the group was willing to release all of its civilian hostages in return for an immediate cease-fire from Israel. More details to follow in tomorrow’s Scroll.
→A self-proclaimed member of the Islamic State killed two people and wounded a third in a shooting spree outside of a soccer game in Brussels on Monday night. Witnesses described the gunman, a 45-year-old Tunisian man identified by Belgian authorities as “Abdesalam L.,” shouting “Allahu Akbar” as he opened fire into a crowd of fans gathered for a match between Sweden and Belgium, killing two Swedish fans before leading police on a 12-hour manhunt that ended when police shot and killed him Tuesday morning. Shortly after the shooting, the gunman posted a video to social media in which he proclaimed his allegiance to the Islamic State and said the attack was “revenge for Muslims.” Belgian authorities said that a foreign government previously warned them that the man, who had been denied asylum in 2019, had been “radicalized and intended to travel abroad to fight in a holy war,” but “Belgian authorities were not able to establish this, so he was never listed as dangerous.”
Read more here: https://news.sky.com/story/brussels-shooting-what-we-know-about-suspected-terror-attack-before-belgium-v-sweden-match-12986005
→Israel announced that it had killed one of Hamas’ top commanders in a Tuesday-evening air strike, as the IDF hit more than 200 targets in Gaza in its most intensive bombardment since the war began. Israel also struck targets in Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s rocket and anti-tank fire and cross-border incursions, killing five operatives from the Iran-backed militia on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Israel’s much-anticipated ground invasion of Gaza appeared to be on hold, with an IDF spokesman saying at a Tuesday press conference that Israel has not committed to a full-blown invasion of the strip. Shortly before The Scroll published, reports emerged of an explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, killing hundreds. The Gaza Health Ministry blamed the explosion on Israeli airstrike, while the IDF claimed the explosion was triggered by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
→U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday, after the United States and Israel announced a deal Tuesday morning that would allow humanitarian aid to be delivered to civilians in Gaza over Israeli objections that such aid could be used to support Hamas’ war effort. The visit marks the latest step in Washington’s diplomatic push to contain the fallout from Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. The U.S. military announced on Tuesday that it was preparing to deploy 2,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East. “We don’t want to see this conflict escalate and widen,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told CNN. “There are no plans or intentions to put U.S. boots on the ground in combat in Israel.”
Read more here: https://www.jns.org/as-biden-turns-against-israel-netanyahu-must-stand-strong/
→Iran helped plan Hamas’ attacks at a meeting in Beirut, except the U.S. government says it didn’t. U.S. intelligence doesn’t keep tabs on Hamas, according to U.S. sources—except Hamas’ leaders are allowed to live in Qatar, the site of a major American military base, so they’ll be easier for the United States to keep tabs on. Egypt says it warned Israel, but not the United States, of an impending attack from Gaza, even though it’s the United States, not Israel, that pays Egypt tens of billions of dollars per year for access to intelligence. Hamas paragliders trained in Lebanon, where the United States pays the salaries of the armed forces and the U.S. ambassador is a noted paragliding enthusiast, yet the United States says it missed any signs that the terror group was planning something. If you believe all that, then The Scroll has some NFTs to sell you.
For everyone else, Tablet’s Lee Smith brings some clarity:
The continuing proliferation of conflicting and contradictory stories leaked by U.S. intelligence services regarding what they knew—and, more importantly, didn’t know—about the planning for Hamas’ assault on Israel, is more than just a D.C. bureaucratic comedy act. Taken together, the profusion of leaks suggests there are people in offices and agencies across the Beltway who are worried they’ll be blamed for missing signals and human intelligence outlining plans for the largest one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-administration-tries-hide-knew-impending-massacre-leaving-iran-untouched-hamas-lee-smith
→Stat of the Day: $2,807,000
That’s the amount the Palestinian Authority will pay to the families of the Hamas militants killed during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to the Israeli NGO Palestinian Media Watch. Under the PA’s “pay for slay” welfare programs, Palestinians killed while fighting Israelis are classified as “martyrs,” entitling their families to a onetime $1,511 grant and a monthly stipend of $353 for life—even in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which is still claimed by the PA. The PA budget for these payments is in turn heavily subsidized by hundreds of millions of dollars of European and U.S. aid. On Oct. 11, a federal judge in Texas ordered discovery in a lawsuit alleging that the Biden administration’s payments to the PA violated the Taylor Force Act, a federal law passed in 2018 that prohibits the United States from funding the PA until it ends its support for terrorism. “Recent production of records,” wrote Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk in the discovery order, “shows that the Government knew its economic support fund (ESF) funding in the West Bank and Gaza was benefiting Palestinian terrorists.”
Read more here: https://www.jns.org/pa-to-immediately-reward-families-of-oct-7-terrorists-with-nearly-3m/
→Israeli authorities have closed more than 100 Hamas-linked accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and seized millions of dollars’ worth of coins since Oct. 7, according to a report in the Financial Times, in an effort to take down online terror financing. Cryptocurrency, which is more anonymous and less regulated than traditional finance, has been linked to Hamas in the past. In 2019, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit against Binance alleging that company executives had received information “regarding Hamas transactions,” and Reuters reported earlier this year that Israel had seized 189 Binance accounts since December 2021, most of them owned by three Palestinian firms, for suspected connections to Islamist terror financing.
Read more here: https://www.ft.com/content/e03a370b-777f-46c2-8576-d1cee731efe2
→Quote of the Day: “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”
That’s King Abdullah II of Jordan, speaking at a press conference following a Tuesday meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin. As international pressure mounts on Israel regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza, U.S. allies Egypt and Jordan have steadfastly refused to open their borders to Palestinian refugees, citing fears that this would be a prelude to Israeli “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs from the Gaza Strip. Are other concerns at play? Perhaps. Abdullah’s grandfather, Abdullah I, was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist in 1951. His father, Hussein I, then fought a civil war against Jordan-based fighters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization during 1970’s “Black September,” surviving multiple assassination attempts in the process. Jordan is one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in the world, receiving $1.2 billion in 2022. Biden will visit Amman on Wednesday, where he will meet with Jordanian, Egyptian, and Palestinian leaders.
→In case you missed it, here’s a conversation from last night between Scroll editor and U.S. Army veteran Jacob Siegel, Tablet columnist Lee Smith, and U.S. Army Special Forces veteran and Washington-state congressional candidate Joe Kent on “Israel’s War and America First” and where the U.S. national interest lies in the current fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Watch it here:
TODAY IN TABLET:
Pray for Madness, by Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
Looking to God for answers in horrible times isn’t a rational thing to do. That may be why it’s so valuable.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
We Stand With Israel
A letter of support from the National Black Empowerment Council
By Darius Jones
Dear Israeli and Jewish friends,
In these unprecedented times, we, at NBEC, want to express our unwavering solidarity with you. We understand the pain and fear that comes from these barbarous acts of violence and hate. We stand in unity with you in the strongest condemnation possible of the evil actions of Hamas. Just as you have fought with Black leaders for justice and equality, we will stand with you to see that Jewish people the world over live in peace and security.
We mourn the innocent lives lost and have the mettle necessary to be with you and the Israeli people for as long as it takes to eradicate the threat of Hamas. Let us continue to work together towards a world where all people can thrive without the threat of extremist violence and hatred.
We stand ready to support and advocate for a peaceful future for Israel and the Jewish people.
With heartfelt sympathy and solidarity,
Darius Jones & the National Black Empowerment Council
The statement above has been signed by the following African American elected officials, in and closely associated with NBEC, who have publicly affirmed their support of Israel. The list is being continuously updated.
Rep. Nikema Williams - US Congress, 5th Dist., Atlanta (GA)
Rep. Shontel Brown - US Congress (OH)
Rep. Byron Donalds - US Congress, Dist. 19, Naples area (FL)
Rep. Joanna McClinton - Speaker of the House, Dist. 191, Delaware area (PA)
Rep. Jordan Harris - Dist. 186, Philadelphia (PA)
Mayor Steve Reed - Montgomery (AL)
Mayor Andre Dickens - Atlanta (GA)
Mayor Frank Scott - Little Rock (AR)
Mayor Quinton Lucas - Kansas City (MO)
Mayor Justin Bibb - Cleveland (OH)
Mayor Randall Woodfin- Birmingham (AL)
Mr. Aaron Ford, Esq. - Attorney General, State of Nevada
Mr. Damon Brown, Esq. - Deputy Attorney General, State of California
Senator Royce Duplesis, Esq.- Dist. 5, New Orleans (LA)
Senator Shevrin Jones - Dist. 34, Miami-Dade County (FL)
Senator Raumesh Akbari - Dist. 29, VC of Education Committee, State of Tennessee
Ms. Amanda Septimo - Assembly Dist. 84, the Bronx, State of New York
Mr. Brian Cunningham - Assembly Dist. 43, Flatbush/Crown Heights, State of New York
Ms. Angela Alsobrooks - CEO of Prince George's County (MD)
Ms. Melissa Conyears-Ervin - Treasurer of Chicago (IL)
Mr. Wesley Bell, Esq. - County Attorney, St. Louis (IL)
Mr. Nick Mosby - President City Council, Baltimore (MD)