In first, Arrow downs Eilat-bound missile from ‘Red Sea’; Houthis claim UAV attack | The Times of Israel

Source: In first, Arrow downs Eilat-bound missile from ‘Red Sea’; Houthis claim UAV attack | The Times of Israel

Israeli fighter jets shoot down drones claimed by Iran-backed Yemen group as response to Hamas war; military says ‘no threat or risk to civilians’

By EMANUEL FABIAN Today, 2:02 pm

A trail of smoke, apparently from an Israeli air defense missile, is seen over the Eilat area in southern Israel, October 31, 2023. (Courtesy)

The Arrow air defense system intercepted a surface-to-surface missile launched from the “Red Sea area” at Israel, the military said Tuesday, in the first operational use of the long-range system during the war with Hamas.

The ballistic missile was believed to have been launched by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, aimed for the southernmost city of Eilat.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said that air force systems tracked the missile’s trajectory and intercepted it “at the most appropriate operational time and location.”

Photos showed a trail of smoke from the Arrow missile, as residents reported hearing a large blast.

The IDF also said fighter jets downed another two “hostile targets” — believed to be drones — that were flying in the Red Sea area during the morning.

“All the threats were intercepted outside the territory of the State of Israel. No intrusion into Israeli territory was detected,” the IDF added.

Yemenis, some holding the Palestinian flag, gather for prayers in the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital Sanaa on October 27, 2023 (MOHAMMED HUWAIS / AFP)

Iran-backed Houthis said Tuesday that they had launched drones toward Israel, triggering sirens in Eilat amid Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

“These drones belong to the state of Yemen,” said Abdelaziz bin Habtour, prime minister of the Houthi government, when asked about the launch toward Eilat.

The Houthis, who seized Yemen’s capital Sanaa in 2014 and control large swaths of the country, are “part of the axis of resistance” against Israel along with Hamas — which is also backed by Tehran — and are fighting with “words and drones,” he said.

It was the latest in a number of attacks thought to originate from Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, amid concerns that Israel’s war with Hamas, sparked by the terror group’s murderous assault on October 7, could spread to other fronts.

Suspected drone infiltration sirens sounded in Eilat on Tuesday morning, with the IDF initially saying it had identified an “aerial target” approaching Israeli territory. It later confirmed that fighter jets had intercepted two targets, believed to have been drones launched from Yemen.

Armed Houthi fighters attend the funeral procession of Houthi rebel fighters who were killed in fighting with forces of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, in Sanaa, Yemen, November 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

“There was no threat or risk to civilians,” the military said.

Tens of thousands of people displaced by the Hamas assault on southern Israel and Hezbollah attacks on the north are being temporarily housed in the southern resort city.

On Friday a fighter jet intercepted a target over the Red Sea — apparently a drone heading for Israel — shortly after an unmanned aerial vehicle slammed into the Egyptian town of Taba on the Red Sea, wounding six people. The IDF said the early-morning strike in Taba originated from “the Red Sea area,” in an apparent reference to Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Taba sits on the border with Israel and is some 10 kilometers (six miles) from Eilat.

This handout picture courtesy of the US Navy taken on October 19, 2023 shows the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) defeating a combination of Houthi missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles in the Red Sea (Aaron Lau / US NAVY / AFP)

The Egypt blasts came after the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen attempted to fire missiles at Israel via the Red Sea earlier this month. The Pentagon announced that a US Navy warship intercepted three missiles heading north that had been fired by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, and that they may have been aimed at Israel.

Houthi rebels have expressed support for the Palestinians and threatened Israel amid the Israel-Hamas war. The Iranian-backed group’s slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

Iran has warned repeatedly that Israel could face wider threats if it does not halt its war against Gazan terrorists, launched after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist rampage through southern Israel, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed, mainly civilians.

Agencies and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

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Opinion Survey Reveals Overwhelming Majority Rejecting Iran’s Regime

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202302036145

Saturday, 02/04/2023

Iran International Newsroom

Iran ProtestsPolitics

An opinion survey involving 158,000 people in Iran showed that more than 80 percent of respondents reject the Islamic Republic and prefer a democratic government.

The Netherlands-based Gamaan institute conducted the survey from December 21-31, which also included a sample of 42,000 respondents in the diaspora, revealed very similar attitudes between those in the country and abroad.

“In response to the question “Islamic Republic: Yes or No?” 81% of respondents inside the country responded “No” to the Islamic Republic, 15% responded “Yes,” and 4% were not sure. Of the Iranian respondents abroad, 99% responded “No,” opting against the Islamic Republic,” GAMAAN reported.

In a follow-up question for those who answered “No”, the survey asked about their preferred democratic and secular alternative political system. Of those, 28% inside Iran and 32% outside Iran would prefer a presidential republic, 12% inside Iran and 29% outside Iran would prefer a parliamentary republic, and 22% inside Iran and 25% outside Iran would prefer a constitutional monarchy.

In a press release shared with Iran International, GAMAAN explained that “This survey was conducted online using a specialized and secure platform.” Given the inaccessible nature of the country, Gamaan used a special online tool to reach respondents in Iran through diverse channels, to eliminate chance of selective targeting and include as much of a representative sample as possible.

But GAMAAN does explain that it “uses digital tools and different methods to extract the (real) opinions of Iranians about (sensitive) social and political topics. The rationale for GAMAAN’s innovative approach is the fact that conventional survey methods cannot yield valid results in the existing Iranian context.” It also ran reliability comparisons with available data and other surveys.

Regarding the antigovernment protests since mid-September, 80% of those inside the country support the movement; 67% believe the protests will succeed, while 14% think they will not succeed. Around 15% of the population inside the country oppose the protests. Respondents outside the country overwhelmingly support the protests; of these, 90% think they will succeed, and only 9% think they will not succeed.

Responses to multiple questions confirm a general view shared by many observers that the clerical regime in Iran enjoys a 10-15 percent support in the country.

While 60 percent of respondents inside Iran describe themselves as proponents of regime change as a pre-condition for any meaningful change, only 6 percent support gradual reforms and 11 percent support the principles of the Islamic Republic.

Another result that confirms reporting by Iran International and others was the lack of support for Iran’s football (soccer) team in the 2022 World Cup. About half of the respondents in Iran and abroad “state that they feel happy that the soccer team of the Islamic Republic of Iran lost against the United States’ team. In contrast, 23% of those in the country and 8% of those outside report having felt sad about the game’s outcome.”

Iran’s protests

The survey revealed that 85 percent of respondents in Iran who support the protests agree with the formation of a so-called solidarity council, or opposition council comprising prominent activists of various political orientation to assume the leading role in the campaign against the Islamic Republic. Nearly 60 percent expect the council to form a transition council and a provisional government. Respondents name around 20 prominent figures in Iran and abroad as candidates for this council.

Prince Reza Pahlavi, Ali Daei, Ali Karimi, Hamed Esmaeilion, Hossein Ronaghi, Nazanin Boniadi, Fatemeh Sepehri, Masih Alinejad, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Toomaj Salehi, Narges Mohammadi, Molavi Abdolhamid, Golshifteh Farahani are the top candidates picked by respondents.

Remarkably, 73 percent inside the country believe that Western countries should defend the protestors’ rights by seriously pressuring Tehran. Of the Iranian respondents outside the country, 96% support this view. In contrast, around 19% of respondents inside the country think that Western powers should not intervene, as the protests are an internal matter.

Also, “a majority of 70% agree with Western governments proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, expelling the ambassadors of the Islamic Republic, allowing international foreign intervention to protect protestors, sanctioning officials who played a role in suppressing the protests, and seizing Iran’s property and assets to cut the government’s access to them,” Gamaan says.

Note: In the original version of this article, a mistaken statement was published saying that the methodology of the survey was not fully clear. After further investigation paragraph 5 was amended.

Israeli Official: Hamas Raped ‘Women, Grandmothers, Children’ So Violently ‘They Broke Victims’ Pelvis’

By Ryan Saavedra
•
Oct 21, 2023 DailyWire.com

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, GAZA STRIP – OCTOBER 18: Masked Palestinian Hamas militants attend the funeral of Tariq Abu Hussein, senior Gaza field commander of the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the radical Hamas movement October 18, 2003 at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Medics state that Israeli forces killed Abu Hussein, another Islamic militant and a female bystander in fighting at the Palestinian refugee camp.
Abid Katib / Getty Images
New details have begun to emerge about the barbaric evils that innocent Israeli citizens were forced to experience at the hands of savage Palestinian Islamic terrorists with Hamas during their unprecedented terror attack two weeks ago.

A woman named Shari, who did not want to give her last name because she wanted to protect her family, works in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Rabbinate corps and it is her job to clean the victim’s bodies as best as possible to prepare them for burial.

“We wash the bodies and prepare them for burial. We try to bring them dignity in death,” she told the Daily Mail. “I heard stories about Auschwitz as a child growing up in New Jersey. But what I have seen here with my own eyes is worse than the Holocaust.”

“What these barbarians did to these people is beyond words,” said Shari, who is from New Jersey and moved to Israel 20 years ago. “There is evidence of mass rape so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children.”

She said that she never expected to see some of the horrifying scenes that she was exposed to as a result of the Islamic terrorism.

“People whose heads have been cut off. Women standing in their night dresses woken up and shot. Faces blasted off. Heads smashed and their brains spilling out,” she said. “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.”

“Women and children burned to charcoal. Bodies murdered with their hands tied behind their backs,” she continued. “My mother and my grandmother are Holocaust survivors. They were the only members of the family to come out of Auschwitz alive after they were taken from their homes in Czechoslovakia. All of her brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts were murdered there.”

The Hamas terrorists were barbaric to begin with, but many of them also reportedly took a drug called Captagon, an amphetamine produced in southern Europe and the Middle East that has helped fuel terrorism. It is commonly referred to as the “ISIS drug.” Small bags of cocaine were also found in vehicles that the terrorists used to drive from Gaza to Israel.

Colonel Rabbi Haim Weisberg said that what Israeli forces have discovered in the aftermath of the attacks was “evidence of torture and savagery.”

“We have babies with their heads cut off. Bodies without hands, without legs, without genitals,” he added.

Kibbutz massacre survivor describes attack by Hamas gunmen – BBC News

https://go.shr.lc/3M2xgEK

Iran’s nuclear program must be destroyed – Alan Dershowitz

Listen in as an IDF Spokesperson provides a situational update as the war against Hamas continues.

Attack on Israel – Day Four- My Perspective

Source: Attack on Israel – Day Four- My Perspective

https://josephwouk.locals.com/post/4701144/attack-on-israel-day-four-my-perspective

Shapiro: ‘The Worst Day For Jews Since The Holocaust’

These are terrorists who have no actual military agenda. Their only agenda is to murder as many Jews as possible…”

By  Tim Pearce

•

Oct 9, 2023   DailyWire.com

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Amir Levy/Getty Images

Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro said on his show Monday that over the weekend the world witnessed the “worst day for Jews since the Holocaust” – conducted by a group whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish people.

“Understand, this is the worst disaster for the Jews since the Holocaust,” he said. “It is worse than the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That was a military operation designed at eviscerating Israel, but at least it was a territorial military attempting to take on another territorial military. These are terrorists who have no actual military agenda. Their only agenda is to murder as many Jews as possible because anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, because the destruction of the state of Israel is coincident with the murder of as many Jews as possible, with more Jewish blood spilled.”

The bestselling author and podcast host warned his viewers at the start of the show that he was going to “sear” into their memories graphic, uncensored images of the atrocities committed by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas – underscoring that it is necessary to look evil in the face if we are to confront it fully.

“Today, I’m going to let evil show you its face. Do not turn away. Look,” said Shapiro. “This weekend, this was the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust. Do not turn away. Look. Look it in the face.”

Shocking images and video footage shows Hamas terrorists torturing the living and mutilating the dead. The graphic footage shows families, couples, the elderly, and children indiscriminately murdered by the militants, while some are led away as terrified captives. Dozens of women and children are believed to be held by Hamas in Gaza.

All of it, said Shapiro, is the wages of decades of accommodation toward anti-Semites and terrorists, enabled by arguments of “moral equivalence.”

“This is what moral equivalence brings,” said Shapiro. “The rape of women, the kidnapping of children, the murder of hundreds of innocents, including for families. Look, for decades we’ve been told that if you look evil in its face, that was somehow unsophisticated. Let’s pretend the evil way was an act of intellectual virtue. That to cater to evil, to concede to evil was the pathway toward a better, more peaceful world. It was a damned lie.”

Shapiro refuted claims by anti-Israel activists about the supposed Jewish “suppression” of the Gaza Strip.

The strip, which contains about 2 million Palestinian Arabs, “has been under the complete and utter control of Hamas since 2007,” Shapiro pointed out. “Israel has no presence in the Gaza Strip. It does not control what goes on inside the Gaza Strip. It doesn’t allow weapons to flow inside the Gaza Strip, but it has been providing free electricity and water to the Gaza Strip for literally decades.”

Shapiro then went on to detail the coordinated attack on Israel by the Palestinian militants and their deliberate targeting of civilians.

At 6:35 a.m., the militants began firing as part of a “distraction technique,” he said. “It’s a highly sophisticated operation planned and greenlit apparently by the Iranian government. The Iranian government on a geopolitical level is terrified that Israel is about to make peace with Saudi Arabia and that peace is going to break out across the region, providing a regional counterbalance to the worst terror state in modern history, the Iranian terror state, which has spread its tentacles of evil across Iraq, across Syria, across Lebanon, into Yemen, into the Gaza Strip.”

“At about 7:40 a.m., the Hamas terrorists began blowing up parts of the border fence,” he continued. “This border fence was supposed to be technologically sophisticated with the so-called touch fence, which means that if there were ladders that were stacked on the fence, then they would go off and then it would be alerted. But apparently there was a simultaneous attack, a cyber-attack on the border fence, which meant that it was not functioning properly. Apparently, about 80 places in the wall were breached. They rushed through.”

The Hamas terrorists then targeted Jewish military bases before going on murderous rampages in civilian areas.

“They proceeded to blow up and murder a bunch of Jews in these IDF bases, and then they proceeded into Israeli border towns and then went house to house, murdering people in their homes, kidnaping children, raping and kidnaping women, murdering them house to house,” said Shapiro. “These people are shooting women. They’re shooting babies. This is what they do.”

Navy to deploy warships near Israel amid Hamas attack

Source: Navy to deploy warships near Israel amid Hamas attack

By

Ryan King

Published Oct. 8, 2023, 5:03 p.m. ET

The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier was deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea as Israel continued its offensive against Hamas, US defense officials said Sunday.

Accompanying the aircraft carrier will be a strike group of warships as well as Air Force F-35, F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons, according to The Pentagon.

“My thoughts continue to be with the people of Israel and the many families who have lost loved ones as a result of the abhorrent terrorist attack by Hamas,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.

Maneuvering the warships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea will better position the US to reinforce Israel and potentially defend Americans.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged Sunday that Americans may be among those killed, injured, and taken hostage.

3

The USS Gerald R. Ford is one of the world’s largest aircraft carriers.

AP

Some politicians — such as Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) — have floated the possibility of dispatching special forces to recover any potential American hostages.

Austin pledged to keep up US assistance to Israel as it grapples with violence erupting within its borders.

“In addition, the United States government will be rapidly providing the Israel Defense Forces with additional equipment and resources, including munitions,” Austin continued. “The first security assistance will begin moving today and arriving in the coming days.”

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Lloyd Austin reiterated the US’ support for Israel as it battles against Hamas.

AFP via Getty Images

Waships in the strike group accompanying the USS Gerald R. Ford include: the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116), USS Ramage (DDG 61), USS Carney (DDG 64), and USS Roosevelt (DDG 80), as well as the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60), per the Pentagon.

As of Sunday afternoon, the death toll stood at least 700 dead and 2,100 missing on the Israeli side, according to health officials.

On the Palestinian side, over 313 Palestinians are reported dead and 1,990 reported missing, including 20 killed and 121 injured children, per the Health Ministry.

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A fighter jet lands on the US aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford.

NTB/AFP via Getty Images

Biden has fielded multiple phone calls with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and affirmed US support for the Jewish State.

Israel declared war on Hamas — its first declared war since 1973 —and vowed to emerge victorious.