Iran said it launched dozens of drones and ballistic missiles towards Israel on Saturday in a major attack following days of acute tension building up in the region and warnings from the US and elsewhere about a wider conflict erupting.
Air attack warning sirens began wailing over Jerusalem just before 2am local time on Sunday after the weapons were fired a few hours earlier from Iran with US and Jordanian military assisting Israel’s air defenses in intercepting the first incoming barrage.
With weapons believed to be still in the air en route to Israel, Iran’s mission to the United Nations posted on X: “Iran’s military action was in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus. The matter can be deemed concluded.”
However, it threatened more severe action in the face of further Israeli aggression and warned the US and Jordan specifically not to assist Israel.
Edit: here are links to the NYT and BBC live feeds.
Edit 2: updated summary and archive to reflect article changes.
What would you have done?
I personally wouldn’t have used mass murder and eviction to create an ethnostate aka Israel. Israel then has proceeded to annex more land against all treaties, blocks aid from entering Palestine and routinely murders Palestinian civilians. Are you saying Israel had no other options?
Yes, I agree it should not have been done, it is the UN’s original sin. But now it is there, survived lots of attacks from its beighbours, lots of jews were expelled from e.g. arab countries to shelter there, you just can’t go back.
I’m asking what you would do if 20% of a country next to you kept trying to kill you (hamas wouldn’t even be happy with Palestinian statehood, they just want Israel wiped off the map).
I’d “build a wall”, stop weapons going in and let them be until they calm down somehow…but that’s not what Israel did anyway…and hamas got over the fucking wall anyway, so here we are…back to 2007 again.
They didn’t just do that though, they funded Hamas, allowed them to recieve weapons, refuses to recognize any sort of Palestinian statehood, pursued policies that enabled the most extreme factions of Palestinian resistance and thwarts any attempt at lasting peace. There is a long-term plan in the works by Israeli forces to annex all of Palestine. Israeli officials from top to bottom have made it clear they want to eliminate Palestine as an idea.
What would you do if you were Palestinian?
Stop being an apartheid and have a truth and reconciliation process to correct the wrongs done to the Palestinians.
I stopped looking at this problem through the lens of morality, it just leads you into a paralyzing spiral of blame and righteousness, because you have millions of people who don’t even know their borders, their status, their rights, an israeli military that is not sure where their jurisdiction and authority ends, a divided capital (that in itself is a stupid diplomatic trap by design, who the hell thought that would ever work?). This was a political failure in the making born from the utopian lack of vision of the birth of the UN: a political trap for anyone that gets near it, which can also be weaponized into political ammo by outside forces.
Probably the only solution starts by disabling the first layer of the trap: a palestinian state with its own official borders (which is its own problem, because there is no contiguity…legacy of the stupid original bipartite design), some form of limited military, navigation rights, release Marwan Barghouti, etc …and then you pray that hamas does not win the elections and immediately declare jihad on Israel :/ , but at least then there will be some clarity about what to do in terms of what we want states to act like with each other.