Habib Siddiqui

  “I am convinced that Bibi understands…that by significantly weakening Hezbollah and Iran, he has helped set in motion the possibility for Lebanon and Syria to restore their sovereignty and unity.  I think he is ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal [from Lebanon] and finalize the border….” – Thomas Friedman, “How Trump Can Remake the Middle East,” New York Times, January 21, 2025, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most influential columnist, has comprehensively recorded his dreamscape for the Middle East.  It tells Donald Trump that “you have a chance to reshape this region in ways that could fundamentally enhance the peace and prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians and all the region’s people, as well as the national security interests of America.”  Friedman believes that Benjamin Netanyahu is “ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal and finalize the border” with Lebanon, and that the United States has an “enormous opportunity to truly end the civil war [in Lebanon...

  On the morning of January 19, Khalil Fahjan left his family’s small, damp tent in Deir al-Balah and quickly headed south to his family home in Rafah. The deadline for a “ceasefire” agreement to halt Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, at least temporarily, was supposed to go into effect at 8:30 a.m. that morning. He had not been to Rafah in more than seven months, since the Israeli military invaded the city, and he was desperate to go home. Fahjan, 25, was unaware that the Israeli military had delayed the implementation of the deal by nearly three hours, attacking and killing Palestinians in Khan Younis and northern Gaza in the interim. When he arrived in his neighborhood of Tal-al-Sultan, he struggled to comprehend the scene before him. “It was such utter devastation that I could see the sea from central Rafah, which is four kilometers away,” Fahjan told Drop Site News. “All the houses in my area were turned into piles of rubble. At first glance, I couldn’t identify my neighborh...

  In a special livestream on Tuesday, The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah talked about his ordeal in Switzerland this past weekend. You can watch the whole stream in the video above. Defying  international outrage , Abunimah was  detained without charge  on Saturday at the behest of Mario Fehr, a government official in charge of policing in the canton of Zurich. Fehr is an  ardent Zionist who attends  pro-Israel demonstrations. After two nights in jail, Abunimah was  deported from the country  on Monday. In the special livestream, Abunimah recounted what was effectively a kidnapping at the hands of undercover Swiss police, as well as his three days in an immigration jail. With no warning, Abunimah was grabbed by police en route to a speaking venue, where he was due to address local Palestine solidarity campaigners. “I thought I was being mugged,” Abunimah told us. At no point during his detention were any charges put to him a...

  A leading neoconservative for most of the last half century has released a comprehensive series of recommendations on   Middle East   policy for the new   Trump administration   nearly all of which are ideas that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party would happily embrace. The 16-page report, entitled “ Deals of the Century: Solving the Middle East ,” is published by the Vandenberg Coalition, which was founded and chaired by Elliott Abrams, who has held senior foreign policy posts in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan (except George H.W. Bush’s), including as Special Envoy for Venezuela and later for  Iran  during Trump’s first term. Created shortly after former President Biden took office,  the Coalition  has acted as a latter-day Project for the New American Century, a letterhead organization that acted as a hub and platform for pro-Likud neoconservatives, aggressive nationalists, and the Christian...

  A  study  came out in December that made me cry. Titled  Needs Study: Impact of War in Gaza on Children with Vulnerabilities and Families , it was conducted by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management (CTCCM) in Gaza. Written in a clinical style, nothing about the language should have impacted me in the way that it did. But the study’s findings were shocking. Here are some of the cold facts: 79 percent of the children in Gaza suffer from nightmares. 87 percent of them experience severe fear. 38 percent report bedwetting. 49 percent of caregivers said that their children believed that they would die in the war. 96 percent of the children in Gaza felt that death was imminent. Put simply, every single child in Gaza feels that they are going to die. Galal Yousif Goly, Sudan,  Untitled,  2024.  (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research) This article, my first of 2025, could have ended after that last line. What more needs to be said? B...