Mondoweiss – April 24, 2025
Rafah no longer exists. This is part of Israel’s plan to permanently occupy Gaza.
Israel has completely wiped out Rafah, turning a fifth of Gaza's territory into a giant buffer zone. This is part of Israel's plan to permanently remain in Gaza and facilitate the ethnic cleansing of its people.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj
Over the past month, the Israeli army has been methodically emptying Rafah of its residents and leveling what remains of its buildings. The city of Rafah and its surrounding towns are now virtually gone, with most residents having evacuated north to Khan Younis and the Mawasi coastline under artillery fire and the approaching sound of tanks and bulldozers.
Rafah has also been the site of several documented massacres, including the first responders massacre in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in late March, when the Israeli army opened fire on and executed 15 paramedics and rescue workers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the Gaza Civil Defense.
Rafah is the Gaza Strip’s southernmost governorate, located along the border with Egypt. Before the war, it housed about 200,000 residents, and its territory made up about a fifth of Gaza’s land. It no longer exists.
The Israeli demolition and displacement operations started in Rafah well before the short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect in mid-January. During the ceasefire period, Israeli forces prevented residents of several border areas from returning, such as Yibna refugee camp, al-Awda, al-Shabura, and Bir Canada. After the ceasefire broke down in mid-March, the Israeli army flattened them all.
The objective of the all-out assault on Rafah is now clear: to turn all of Rafah into a flattened buffer zone with a permanent Israeli military presence.
The objective of the all-out assault on Rafah is now clear: to turn all of Rafah into a flattened buffer zone with a permanent Israeli military presence. According to aﾠHaaretzﾠreport, this would “effectively turn Gaza into an enclave within Israeli-controlled territory, cutting it off from the Egyptian border.”
Images and reports coming out of Rafah show a city completely wiped out, with residents confirming that it is no longer fit for human habitation.
A buffer zone and a corridor
Khaled al-Dahaliz, 36, carried his belongings on a cart and fled Rafah towards al-Mawasi, west of Rafah, several weeks into the Israeli army’s renewed bombing campaign. He tried to hold out for a time, moving between different locations within Rafah, but could no longer withstand the indiscriminate shelling and bombing, he said in recorded testimony obtained for Mondoweiss.
“We left Rafah for the last time. We don’t think we will be able to return; nothing remains of it,” he said. “Even the tents we set up to survive in Rafah were targeted by the Israeli army.”
“Wherever you go, you won’t find homes or people — only the destruction of camps,” al-Dahaliz explained. “It’s so that no one knows where their home used to be.”
In areas adjacent to the Philadelphi Corridor, the strip of land running along the Gaza-Egypt border from which Israel was supposed to withdraw by the end of the first phase of the ceasefire, everything has been bulldozed and cleared, Rafah residents confirm. Areas such as Yibna refugee camp, the Saudi neighborhood, and Tal al-Sultan are now a military no-man’s-land barred to civilians: Israel’s new buffer zone.
In addition, over the past several weeks, the Israeli military finished establishing what it calls the Morag Corridor, which now separates Rafah City from the adjacent city of Khan Younis just north of it. Netanyahu had announced in early April that the Israeli army would begin its construction, which was completed on April 12.
This means that additional neighborhoods were destroyed to secure the Morag Corridor, just as homes were wiped out during the construction of the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors before the war.
“Rafah City is now surrounded by corridors constructed by the Israeli army on all sides,” Ahmad al-Dabash, 36, told Mondoweiss. He noted that the continuous sound of explosions could be heard from as far as Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat in central Gaza when the Morag Corridor was being constructed.
“The goal of the bombings is to shake the ground beneath the houses, so that if there is a tunnel, it collapses on the heads of those inside,” al-Dabash said, detailing what he and other residents saw as they fled Rafah. “After the houses are blown up, it looks like they were turned inside-out, and the bombs left these wide craters that swallowed the houses.”
“The al-Kharba roundabout and the Awni and Masbah areas north of Rafah were all in good condition. Now, the residents of Deir al-Balah hear the sound of explosions there, and the residents of Khan Younis see the smoke constantly rising from them as a result of the daily bombing,” al-Dabash said.
“The Israeli occupation wants to make life impossible in the Gaza Strip, and that is exactly what it has done. These are clear goals: the occupation will not let us live in peace and will continue to try to expel us from our land.”
Ahmad al-Dabash
The Morag Corridor runs through Gaza from east to west, parallel to the Netzarim and Philadelphi corridors. It is named after a now-defunct Israeli settlement that had existed between Rafah and Khan Younis before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
“They returned to the areas they were in before 2005. Their military positions and settlements were in the same areas. They know those areas well and occupied them again,” al-Dabash explained.
The massive route is hundreds of meters wide and runs through land that has since been bulldozed, costing thousands of families their homes and ensuring they will never return. According to residents, the route starts from the Baraksat area of Rafah, where the first responders’ massacre took place, and runs through the Shakoush area near al-Mawasi, west of Rafah, and toward the Kerem Shalom crossing in the far east of the city.
Residents believe that Israel’s actions on the ground demonstrate a clear intent to maintain a prolonged occupation of Gaza. The establishment of military routes and installations, its failure to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor during the ceasefire, and its blowing up of the deal all indicate that Israel had been planning on this endgame from the start, residents told Mondoweiss.
“The Israeli occupation wants to make life impossible in the Gaza Strip, and that is exactly what it has done,” al-Dabash said. “These are clear goals: the occupation will not let us live in peace and will continue to try to expel us from our land.”
Tareq S. Hajjaj is a journalist and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter at @Tareqshajjaj.
Countercurrent – April 25, 2025
Disguised as ‘voluntary migration’, Israel’s forced displacement campaign unfolds in Gaza amid deafening international silence
by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Palestinian Territory – The Israeli project in the Gaza Strip has reached its most revealing and dangerous stage yet. Israel is no longer concealing its intention to forcibly displace Palestinians from their homeland—it now announces this plan more openly than ever before, through official rhetoric at the highest levels. Through actions on the ground and institutional measures designed to reframe the crime as “voluntary migration”, Israel has attempted to implement its displacement campaign by exploiting the international community’s near-total silence, which has enabled the continuation of the crime and Israeli impunity despite the unprecedented nature of humanity’s first live streamed genocide.
Israel is now attempting to carry out the final phase of its crime, and its original goal: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine, specifically from the Gaza Strip. For a year and a half, Israel has carried out acts of genocide, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of people, erasing entire cities, dismantling the Strip’s infrastructure, and systematically displacing its population within the enclave. These actions aim to eliminate the Palestinian people as a community and as a collective presence.
The current plans for forced displacement are a direct extension of Israel’s long-standing settler-colonial project, aimed at erasing Palestinian existence and seizing land. What distinguishes this stage is its unprecedented scale and brutality—Israel is targeting over two million people who have endured a full-scale genocide and have been stripped of even the most basic human rights, under coercive, inhumane conditions that make living any sort of a normal life impossible. Israel’s deliberate objective is to pressure Palestinians into leaving by making it their only means of survival.
Having succeeded in revealing the weak principles of international law, such as protections for civilians based on their perceived racial superiority or lack thereof, Israel is now reshaping the narrative once again. Armed with overwhelming force and emboldened by the international community’s abandonment of legal and moral responsibilities, Israel seeks to portray the mass expulsion of Palestinians as “voluntary migration”. This is a blatant attempt to rebrand ethnic cleansing and forced displacement using dishonest language—like “humanitarian considerations” and “individual choice”—and is a direct contradiction of legal facts and the reality on the ground.
Euro-Med Monitor emphasises that forced displacement is a standalone crime under international law. It involves the removal of individuals from areas where they legally reside, using force, threats, or other forms of coercion, without valid legal justification. Coercion, in the context of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, goes beyond military force. It includes the creation of unbearable conditions that render remaining in one’s home practically impossible or life-threatening. A coercive environment includes fear of violence, persecution, arrest, intimidation, starvation, or other forms of hardship that strip individuals of free will and force them to flee.
“Israel has already committed the crime of forced displacement against Gaza’s population,” stated Lima Bustami, Director of Euro-Med Monitor’s Legal Department, “having driven them into internal displacement without legal grounds and in conditions that violate international legal exceptions, which only permit evacuation temporarily and under imperative military necessity, while ensuring safe areas with minimum standards of human dignity. None of these standards have been met. In fact, Israel has used this widespread and repeated pattern of displacement as a tool of genocide—aimed at destroying and subjecting the population to deadly living conditions.”
She added: “Although the legal elements of the crime are already fulfilled, Israel is further escalating it to a more lethal level against the Palestinian people—manifesting its settler-colonial vision of expulsion and replacement. Now it is attempting to market the second phase of forced displacement, i.e. beyond Gaza’s borders, as ‘voluntary migration’: a transparent deception that only a complicit international community—one that chooses silence over accountability—would accept.”
Today, the people of the Gaza Strip endure catastrophic conditions that are unprecedented in recent history. Israel has obliterated all forms of normal life; there is no electricity or infrastructure, and there are no homes, no essential services, no functioning healthcare or education systems, and no clean water services. Around 2.3 million Palestinians are confined to less than 34% of the Strip’s 365 square kilometres. Approximately 66% of the territory has been turned into so-called “buffer zones”, or areas that are completely off-limits to Palestinians and/or that have been forcibly depopulated through Israeli bombings and displacement orders.
Most of the population is now living in tattered tents amid the spread of famine, disease, and epidemics and an accumulation of waste—conditions symptomatic of the near-complete collapse of the humanitarian system. Israel continues to systematically block the entry of food, medicine, and fuel; destroy all remaining means of survival; and obstruct any efforts aimed at reconstruction or restoring even the minimum conditions for a healthy life.
These conditions in place are not the result of a natural disaster; rather, they have been deliberately engineered by Israel as a coercive tool to pressure the population into leaving the Gaza Strip. The absence of any genuine, voluntary alternative for Palestinians in the enclave renders this situation a textbook case of forcible transfer, as defined under international law and affirmed by relevant jurisprudence.
“While population transfers may be permitted in certain humanitarian contexts under international law, any such justification collapses if the humanitarian crisis is the direct consequence of unlawful acts committed by the same party enforcing the transfer,” according to Bustami. “It is impermissible to use forced displacement as a response to a disaster one has created—a principle clearly upheld by international tribunals, particularly the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”
Framing this imposed reality as a “voluntary” migration and an option not only constitutes a gross distortion of truth, but undermines the legal foundations of the international system, erodes the principle of accountability, and transforms impunity from a failure of justice into a deliberate mechanism for perpetuating grave crimes and entrenching the outcomes of such crimes.
Repeated public statements from the highest levels of Israel’s political and security leadership have escalated in intensity over the past year and a half, and expose a clear, coordinated intent to displace the population of the Gaza Strip. In a blatant bid to enforce a demographic transformation serving Israel’s colonial-settler agenda, senior Israeli officials—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—have publicly called for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Strip and for the settlement of Jewish Israelis in their place.
Netanyahu expressed full support in February 2025 for United States President Donald Trump’s plan to resettle Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip, describing it as “the only viable solution for enabling a different future” for the region. Likewise, Smotrich announced in March that the Israeli government would back the establishment of a new “migration authority” to coordinate what he termed a “massive logistical operation” to remove Palestinians from the Strip. Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, has openly advocated for the encouragement of “voluntary migration” coupled with calls to resettle Jewish Israelis in the territory.
The 23 March decision of the Israeli Security Cabinet to establish a dedicated directorate within the Ministry of Defence, to manage what it calls the “voluntary relocation” of the Gaza Strip’s residents to third countries, is evidence that this displacement is not a by-product of destruction or political rhetoric, but an official policy. This policy is being implemented through institutional mechanisms, directed from within Israel’s own security apparatus, with full operational powers, executive structures, and strategic goals.
Current Defence Minister Israel Katz’s statement on the new directorate confirmed that it would “prepare for and enable safe and controlled passage of Gaza residents for their voluntary departure to third countries, including securing movement, establishing movement routes, checking pedestrians at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip, as well as coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries”.
The true danger of establishing such a directorate lies not only in its institutionalisation of forced transfer, but in the new legal and political reality it seeks to impose. It rebrands displacement as an “optional” administrative service while stripping civilians of their ability to make free, informed decisions, therefore cloaking a war crime in a veneer of bureaucratic legitimacy.
Any departure from the Gaza Strip under current circumstances cannot be considered “voluntary”, but rather constitutes, in legal terms, forcible transfer, which is strictly prohibited under international law. All individuals compelled to leave the Strip retain their inalienable right to return to their land and property immediately and unconditionally. They also have the full right to seek compensation for all damages and losses incurred as a result of Israeli crimes and rights violations, including the destruction of homes and property, physical and psychological harm, the assault on human dignity, and the denial of livelihood and basic rights.
Under its obligations as an occupying power responsible for the protection of the civilian population, Israel is prohibited from forcibly transferring Palestinians and bears full legal responsibility to ensure their protection from this crime. The rules of international law, particularly customary international law and the Geneva Conventions, require all states not to recognise any situation arising from the crime of forcible transfer and to treat it as null and void. States are also obligated to withhold all material, political, and diplomatic support that would contribute to the entrenchment of such a situation.
International responsibility goes beyond mere non-recognition. It includes a legal duty for states to take urgent effective steps to halt the crime, hold perpetrators accountable, and provide redress to victims. This includes ensuring the safe, voluntary return of all displaced persons from the Gaza Strip, and providing full reparations for the harm and violations they have suffered. Any failure to act in this regard constitutes a direct breach of international law and complicity that could subject states to legal accountability.
The international community must move beyond deafening silence and abandon paltry rhetorical condemnations, which have come to represent the maximum response it dares to make in the face of the livestreamed genocide unfolding before its eyes. It must act swiftly and effectively to halt Israel’s ongoing project of mass displacement in the Gaza Strip and prevent it from becoming an entrenched reality. This action must be based on international legal norms, a commitment to justice and accountability, and an honest reckoning with the root structural cause of the crimes: Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967.
Endorsing or remaining silent about Israeli plans to forcibly transfer Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip not only exonerates Israel but rewards it for its illegal conduct by granting it gains secured through mass killing, destruction, blockade, and starvation. This is not just a series of war crimes or crimes against humanity—it embodies the legal definition of genocide, as established by the 1948 Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
All states, individually and collectively, must uphold their legal obligations and take all necessary measures to halt Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. This includes taking immediate, effective steps to protect Palestinian civilians and to prevent the implementation of the US-Israeli crime of forcible transfer that is openly threatening the Strip’s population.
The international community must impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for its systematic and grave violations of international law. This includes halting arms imports and exports; ending all forms of political, financial, and military support; freezing the financial assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; imposing travel bans; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that offer Israel economic advantages that sustain its capacity to commit further crimes.
States must also hold complicit governments accountable—chief among them the United States—for their role in enabling Israeli crimes through various forms of support, including military and intelligence cooperation, financial aid, and political or legal backing.
The ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place right now in the Gaza Strip would not be possible without Israel’s decades-long unlawful colonial presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is the root structural cause of the violence, oppression, and destruction in the besieged enclave. Any meaningful response to the escalating crisis in the Strip must begin with dismantling this colonial reality, recognising the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and securing their freedom and sovereignty over their national territory. As Israel and its allies must be compelled to abide by the law, international intervention is the only path to ending the genocide, halting all forms of individual and collective forcible transfer, dismantling the apartheid regime, and establishing a credible framework for justice, accountability, and the preservation of human dignity.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe
Global Research - April 24, 2025
Response to US-Israel Preemptive Attack :
Iran’s “Fattah-1” Hypersonic Missile Is Accurate, Lethal and Unstoppable
By Mike Whitney
In the event that the United States and Israel launch a preemptive attack on Iran, Iran is prepared to deliver a withering response that will destroy US military bases, oil production facilities, critical infrastructure, and command and control centres across the Middle East. In short, Iran has the ability to set the entire region ablaze at the flip-of-a-switch due entirely to its prodigious missile capability which surpasses that of either the United States or Israel. Check out this excerpt from an article at The National Interest titled Why Iran’s Fattah-1 Hypersonic Missile Is a Disaster for Israeli Security:
Two years ago, in June 2023, the Islamic Republic of Iran unveiled the Fattah-1, the country’s first hypersonic ballistic missile—at least according to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Fattah means “Conqueror” in Farsi.
The missile represents a significant milestone in Iran’s military ambitions, signaling its intent to project power—and highlights the radical, evolving nature of Iran’s missile threat. In many respects, this threat is even more of a concern to Western strategists than Iran’s threshold nuclear weapons capability. After all, even if Iran developed such weapons, it could not use them without inviting its own annihilation. But if Tehran had truly developed a hypersonic ballistic missile, everyone knows which nation it would be first to target….
Unlike traditional ballistic missiles that follow predictable parabolic trajectories, the Fattah-1 features a maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV), enabling it to adjust its course mid-flight, both within and outside Earth’s atmosphere. This maneuverability, facilitated by a solid-fuel propulsion system and a movable secondary nozzle, is central to Fattah-1’s ability to evade most advanced missile defense systems, such as the Israeli Arrow, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome—or even American systems like the Aegis and Patriot.
In other words, the presence of Fattah-1 should give both the Americans and Israelis pause as to agitating for preventative air strikes against suspected Iranian nuclear weapons development facilities. Why Iranﾒs Fattah-1 Hypersonic Missile Is a Disaster for Israeli Security, National Interest
.Repeat: The US and Israel’s most advanced missile defense systems, (the Israeli Arrow, David’s Sling, Iron Dome, Aegis and Patriot) are useless against Iran’s hypersonic missiles. In other words, the Fattah-1 is unstoppable.
Does Donald Trump know any of this?
No. Trump is surrounded by “yes-men” and neocons who only tell him what they want him to hear. He’s locked inside a foreign policy bubble in which all the occupants believe in the delusional myth of “American invincibility”. Trump thinks that obsolete carrier groups and B-2 Stealth bombers will win wars even when his adversaries have modernized and stocked their arsenals with state-of-the-art ballistic missile systems that can elude any of their outdated air-defense systems and put their payload directly on the target. Here’s more from the same article:
While U.S. B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers could likely clobber Iranian nuclear facilities from the air, the Iranians can threaten retaliation against a long list of targets in the region—exposed U.S. bases near Iranian territory, sensitive oil refineries in neighboring Saudi Arabia, U.S. aircraft carriers in the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and even distant Israel. The bounty of soft targets in the region is a profound threat against which there is little reliable defense….
Trump Moves ﾑNuclear Capableﾒ Bombers to Within Striking Distance of Iran
Iran’s possession of missiles like the Fattah-1 means that Iranian retaliation is a significant threat to the region. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem should not downplay this real threat to their safety and economic prosperity.
And, for all the naysayers saying that Iran’s previous rounds of “massive retaliation” against Israel within the past year have fallen flat, it’s important to understand the geopolitical context. Iran appears to have held back its most important weapons in those retaliatory strikes—and there is evidence to suggest that they pulled their punches following pressure from their primary military partner, Russia.
Why Has Iran Been Holding Back?
Although the Russian hold over Iran is strong, the fact of the matter is that previous Israeli strikes against Iranian targets have avoided the country’s suspected nuclear weapons development facilities. These facilities represent the equivalent of the Holy Grail for the Iranian Islamist regime.
If either the Israelis or Americans struck these facilities and destroyed them—or even degraded them—it is unlikely that even Russia’s hold on Iran would dissuade the enraged Islamists from striking back against U.S., Israeli, and Saudi targets in ways hitherto unimagined.
Therefore, the Iranian missile threat is real. It should be avoided, if at all possible. And while negotiations with Iran are unlikely to achieve much, air strikes are a strategic mirage. The uncertainty and instability they can unleash in an already chaotic region is not worth the risk. Why Iranﾒs Fattah-1 Hypersonic Missile Is a Disaster for Israeli Security, National Interest
What’s interesting about this article is that the author—who appears to be a strong backer of US and Israel—is offering a word of caution based on his objective analysis of Iran’s astonishing missile capability. He is not making a moral judgement about the impending war itself, just informing the presumed perpetrators that they will face stiff resistance and could lose. That’s right, the US could lose a war with Iran. (In fact, that very scenario has been ‘gamed out’ many times in the past and the outcome was always the same.) At the very least, an outbreak of hostilities with Iran will send oil prices skyrocketing, equities markets tumbling and the global economy into a death spiral.Trump hopes to minimize the damage by escalating quickly to tactical nuclear “bunker buster” weapons that (he thinks) will bring the conflict to a swift end. But that’s not going to happen. After all, Iran has been preparing for a war with the United States for nearly two decades and they are ready to go. Any attack on their nuclear facilities will put the dominoes in motion triggering wave after wave of ballistic missile attacks on soft and hard targets in Israel and across the Middle East.
Naturally, a number of analysts think that the Fattah-1’s abilities have been greatly exaggerated and are all a part of an Iranian propaganda campaign. Not surprisingly, these are the same people who want to drag the US into a war with Iran. It’s worth noting, however, that even the conservative Washington Post provided “satellite imagery from Planet Labs and expert assessments, that confirmed that at least 24 to 32 (Iranian Fattah) missiles struck or landed near Israeli targets, including 20 to 32 hits on Nevatim Airbase, three on Tel Nof Airbase, and two near Mossad headquarters. (The most protected sites in the world!) Damage was limited, but this indicates some missiles evaded interception.”
So, some missiles were intercepted?
Not likely. As the author confirmed, US and Israeli air defense systems are incapable of shooting down Iran’s hypersonic missiles.
By the way, the damage was “limited” because Iran did not use their more destructive warheads. It was basically a ‘show of force’; a “shot fired over the bow” of impulsive aggressors who don’t grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe they’ll face if they blunder ahead with their misguided strategy. Of course, coverage of the Iranian attacks has largely been concealed from the public to ensure that Trump doesn’t get ‘cold feet’ and refuse to launch air strikes according to plan. In short, Israel has set a trap for Trump, and Trump appears to be walking straight into it. This is from a post at the Middle East Spectator:
Iran’s 2,000 kilometer range ‘Sepehr’ OTH Radar has finally become operational, satellite imagery seems to confirm
The radar array is one of Iran’s most advanced over-the-horizon radars, more than 1,5 kilometers in length. It can detect takeoffs of individual aircraft or ballistic missile launches at a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, including inside the entirety of Israel.
Only a handful of countries have mastered such advanced OTH radar technology, and the radar provides Iran with valuable early warning of an imminent attack. Middle East Spectator
So, Iran has developed advanced radar systems that can detect any enemy aircraft or ballistic missile that is launched from 2,000 kilometers away. Which means the Iranian military will have ample time to engage their defensive assets while ordering whatever first-wave ballistic missile strike they have in mind.
But that’s ‘just for starters’ because—as we know from the tit-for-tat air strikes (that took place) between Israel and Iran last year; these cutting-edge, multi-layered air defense systems—(that have been integrated with Russian S-200, S-300s, Chinese systems, and other unknown elements)—forced Israeli aircraft to turn around and retreat during their April 19 attack. As it happens, the Israelis “never got closer than 70 kms to Iran because they were locked onto by “an unknown air defense system” that spooked the Israelis prompting a hasty retreat. As a result, the Israeli pilots were forced to fire their long-range missiles at targets that were too far away to be effective. In short, Iran’s air defense system forced the Israelis to scrap their mission and return home after inflicting only minor damage to Iranian military sites. There is every reason to believe that a similar scenario will unfold if US fighters and high-altitude bombers are involved.
.Conclusion
- The Israeli air assault shows that Iranian air defense systems—which rank among the best in the world—can detect and counter stealth aircraft like the F-35
- Iran’s electronic warfare systems enhance its air defenses by disrupting enemy targeting or communication
- Iran’s advanced radar systems—that can detect any enemy aircraft or ballistic missile from 2,000 kilometers away—provide ample time for Iran’s military to engage their defensive assets and order counterstrikes.
- Iran’s Fattah-1 Hypersonic missile—which travels at a speed of Mach 13 (roughly 10,000 mph)—can evade any US or Israeli air defense system and deliver its warhead precisely on target
- Former Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter summed it up like this:
If we get into a war with Iran, we will not win … Iran has a significant ballistic missile force, with an extraordinary capability. It’s capable of targeting American naval vessels, sinking American aircraft carriers…War with Iran would be suicide and the US will lose.
A word to the wise is sufficient.
*
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
https://www.globalresearch.ca/iran-fattah-1-hypersonic-missile/5885212
Countercurrent – April 25, 2025
Fallibility, Dirty Wars and Pope Francis I
The very idea of infallibility sets one up for the mighty fall. But the Pope, temporal head of all Catholics, is one such character, the papacy one such institution, arrogantly paraded before religion, faith and principle, as an individual and office hovering between humankind and God. Unfortunately for the papal record, infallibility in any spiritual sense is no guard against spotty records and stains. It certainly does not erase what came before, though good efforts are often made to reinvent it. 
Pope Francis I, eulogised as the pontiff of the periphery and the oppressed, was not averse in his pre-papal iteration to courting the powerful and the authoritarian when a US-backed military dictatorship seized power in his native Argentina in 1976. That dictatorship, responsible for the forced disappearance of 30,000 people, came to be known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process). In 1978, on a visit to Buenos Aires to attend the football World Cup as dictator Jorge Videla’s guest, former US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was filled with praise for the murderous methods of the Proceso in its efforts to combat “terrorism”.
On their seizure of power, the junta were also keen to grease palms and cultivate ties with the Catholic Church. Archbishop Adolfo Tortolo obligated, urging Argentinians “to cooperate in a positive way with the new government.” Argentina’s bishops also issued a statement declaring that the security services could hardly act “with the chemical purity” expected of them in times of peace. Some freedom had to be shorn. Church figures who did not play along, such as Enrique Angelelli, the bishop of the Andean diocese of La Rioja, were murdered. In a 2012 interview, Videla expressed satisfaction at Church-state relations during his rule. “My relationship with the church was excellent. It was very cordial, frank and open.”
To say, for one thing, that Francis had that progressive rainbow in soul and practice is to ignore the same figure who encouraged Jesuit priests under his charge to focus on religion rather than matters of social deprivation. As Jose Mario Bergoglio, Provincial of the Jesuits, he removed teachers of the more progressive stripe and replaced them with steelier, austere types. He shunned the liberation theologians, clinging on to the 1969 Declaration of San Miguel that gave the cold shoulder to Marxism in favour of a rather vague theology of the masses. Paul Vallely writes that the late Francis “seemed unaware of any of the teachings of Vatican II. It was all St. Thomas Aquinas and the old Church Fathers. We didn’t study a single book by Gutiérrez, Boff or Paulo Freire”. (Those three figures were very much front and centre of liberation theology.)
The disavowal of priestly work in the slums of Buenos Aires as Provincial of the Jesuits had its consequences. Orlando Yorio, a Jesuit priest doing just such work, was conveyed in 1976 to the dark offices of the military junta by then Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s seeming refusal to back, endorse or acknowledge the labours that the military regime despised. The same fate befell Franz Jalics. In the first trial of the junta leadership in 1985, Yorio was convinced “that he himself [Bergoglio] gave over the list with our names to the Navy.” Jalics, however, stated in March 2013 that Bergoglio had never “denounced” either himself or Yorio. Both priests had been kidnapped for connections to a catechist who “later joined the guerillas.”
At the time of his election in 2013, the Vatican made a point of stating that, in the words of spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, there had “never been any credible, concrete accusation against him.”
In other instances during that most dirty of wars, Fr Bergoglio does not seem to acquit himself well. Estela de la Cuadra, who shared little in the way of enthusiasm for Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation to pontiff, suggests that he knew far more about what was taking place in the 1970s than what he subsequently testified to. In a trial in 2010, the then Cardinal was asked to attend a trial on the infamous “stolen babies” cases, a spectacularly unsavoury matter involving the handing over of infants from murdered mothers to military families. Unconvincingly, he claimed to only know of the practice once Argentina moved into the calmer, less murderous waters of democracy after 1983.
De la Cuadra is all rebuttal, claiming that her father had been advised by the then Fr Bergoglio to meet a bishop who might advise him on the fate of the disappearance of his pregnant daughter Elena. The bishop was, at best, callously helpful, informing him that “his granddaughter was ‘now with a good family’.”
The ventures to investigate and tease out Bergoglio’s legacy during the Proceso remain a matter of record. Investigations by scribblers in 1986 and 2003, carried out respectively by Emilio Mignone and Horacio Verbitsky, attest to that. (Verbitsky’s account is further spiced by allegations that he was himself on the junta’s payroll, working as ghost writer for Brigadier Omar Domingo Rubens Graffigna.)
Bergoglio’s disputed dance with the junta continues that extensive tradition perfected by the Catholic Church. A power, however ruthless in the secular realm, should still be accommodated by the spiritual leaders of the church if the adherents of said power are sympathetic followers of Rome. “Never in the years he headed the Catholic Church in Argentina did he acknowledge its complicity in the dictatorship, much less ask for forgiveness,” blazed Gabriel Pasquini, editor of El Puercoespín, in 2015.
The argument for the defence has tended to be framed along the lines of internal church politics, misunderstanding, and indignant claims of slander. There were Jesuits who took issue with him, for instance, for selling the Universidad del Salvador to the Iron Guard, a right wing order characterised by an unflappable ascetic. And when Bergoglio met with such bloodthirsty thugs as Videla and Emilio Massera, this was only to intercede on behalf of the detained clerics and others to seek their release. “He was very critical of the dictatorship,” asserts former Argentine judge and acquaintance, Alicia Oliveira. He really meant well. It is precisely in that meaning that questions have been and should be asked. To what extent should the powerful be pleased by the supposedly spiritual?
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
https://countercurrents.org/2025/04/fallibility-dirty-wars-and-pope-francis-i/
