New happenings

I go away for a few days (to London for my sister-in-law’s funeral) and everything changes: 1. The President of Iran dies in a helicopter crash, 2. the International Criminal Court (ICC) puts out arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant and 3. the IDF continues its operation to take Rafah. I had nothing to do with any of these developments, honestly!

1. At first the Iranian authorities said the helicopter carrying Raisi and Iran’s FM has a “hard landing,” but then they found the crash site in very bad weather in a mountainous region and admitted that President Raisi had died with his FM and others. Very few in the world regretted the death of “the butcher of Tehran.” I cannot believe that the US and the UN regretted the death and has a minute of silence. Now the question is how it will affect the continuity of the regime in Iran. The fact that many of Iran’s population celebrated his death does not bode well for the regime’s future. Of course there have been suggestions that the Mossad did it, but there is no evidence whatsoever of this.
2. The ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, a Muslim and hardly a neutral observer, is putting the Israeli leaders on a par with the leaders of Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization. But he does not have jurisdiction over Israel, which is not a member of the ICC, and they only deal with States but Hamas is not not a State, but the ICC pretends it is. Although he condemned them and insisted they release the hostages, that they won’t do. While he accused Hamas leaders of war crimes, he accused Israel’s leaders of “deliberately starving the Gaza population,” a specious argument, since Israel has been cooperating with food supplies all the time, even if it has not been sufficient for the needs. Israel is the only State in the world that is not allowed to defend itself against a brutal attack and is also considered illegitimate by many pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab observers, after being a recognized member of the UN for 76 years! You’d think by now, like most rational peoples, they would have come to terms with it, but after being defeated on numerous occasions, they still keep trying to bash their head against the proverbial brick wall. They never indicted President Bashar Al Assad of Syria, who murdered ca. 500,000 people, and they never indicted President Bush of the USA when the US invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 and fought Al Qaeda or went into Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State, where the civilian casualties were much higher. This is a biased indictment.
3. Israel bowed to the strong requests of President Biden and reduced the scope of its operation in Rafah, first taking the Rafah border crossing and then the Philadelphi corridor, to close off escape by the Hamas leadership. Now they have gradually gone from east Rafah westwards, slowly taking over the region. Although Biden said that he was concerned abut the ca. 1.4 million Palestinian refugees there and that Israel had not come out with a plan to remove then, that is exactly what Israel has done, and in short record time. As of now the IDF claims that nearly 1 million have moved westwards to camps that have been set up or already exist. There have been no reports of Palestinian casualties during the fighting in Rafah as there were previously in northern Gaza.