Hamas has every reason to press for their fight with Israel to snowball into something bigger. Every peace deal struck validates Israel’s claims to legitimacy.
A group that has sworn to destroy the Jewish state cannot tolerate anything that might secure their position as legitimate in the world — especially in the eyes of the muslim world.
The Abraham Accords from the Trump years had set the region onto a path of peace. The Caliphate had been reduced to a bad memory and key players in militant Islam had a habit of dying ‘like a dog’ during the previous administration.
Along came Biden. Everything changed.
Palestine and Iran were flush with cash again. The Houthis were no longer classified as terrorists. Biden’s relationships with Israel and the Saudis soured considerably. The never-ending low-level cold conflict between Israel and her neighbors is now red-hot.
Gaza is a warzone. Terrorists based out of Lebanon threaten to drag them into a conflict with Israel. International shipping is being re-routed to avoid Iran’s very aggressive proxies playing pirate in the Red Sea.
That brings us up to speed to set up where we began the New Year, which has been quite busy in terms of people blowing up other people in the region.
We’ve got a couple of targeted strikes on key leaders connected to Hamas, a terrorist leader in Syria blown to bits, and a big explosion in Iran to look at.
First, Syria.
The leader of the Islamic State (IS) is dead following a US raid in northern Syria that also killed a senior deputy of the terror group, US officials say.
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi set off a blast killing himself and his family as special forces rounded on his hideout after a gunfight.
[…]
US officials did not name the IS deputy also killed, but provided dramatic details of the operation that had been months in the planning. –BBC
It’s always good to knock a militant jihadist of the game board. But, in a region where rival Islamist groups wrestle for control, it remains to be seen what will come of this in the long term.
The Hamas-related drone strikes…
…In Beiruit
Lebanon is lodging a formal complaint with the UN after a drone strike killed a jihadi terrorist in Beruit.
Lebanon has filed a complaint to the UN Security Council over Israel’s targeted killing of the senior Hamas figure Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut, calling it the “most dangerous phase” of Israeli attacks on the country.
The complaint, dated 4 January, said Israel used six missiles in the attack that killed al-Arouri and added that Israel used Lebanese airspace to bomb Syria.
Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said Lebanon would be “exposed” to more Israeli operations if his group did did not respond to the killing of al-Arouri, an attack which some analysts have described as an Israeli message to Hezbollah that its strongholds were vulnerable. — Guardian
That attack took out Saleh al-Arouri. Just last year, Americans were offering a $5M bounty for information on his whereabouts. He was deputy head of Hamas’s politburo and a founder of its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. The strike took place in a suburb that has been seen as a stronghold of Hezbollah, which explains the ‘message to Hezbollah that its strongholds were vulnerable’.
Lebanon’s national news agency said the drone struck a Hamas office. Two security sources said the strike had targeted a meeting between Hamas officials and Lebanon’s Sunni Islamist Jama’a Islamiya faction and left a total of four Palestinians and three Lebanese dead.
The strike marks the first targeted assassination of a Hamas official outside Palestinian Territories since the Palestinian group’s deadly assault on Israeli territory on Oct. 7.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC that Israel had not taken responsibility for this attack, but “whoever did it, it must be clear: That this was not an attack on the Lebanese state.”
“Whoever did this did a surgical strike against the Hamas leadership,” Regev said in the interview.
Arouri was deputy head of Hamas’s politburo and a founder of its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. —Reuters
…and in Gaza
The IDF announced the death of Mamdouh Lolo, a chief Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror leader taken out in an airstrike.
From that same story, we have an update about someone was killed in a strike some time ago:
Last month, IDF and Shin Bet announced that Subhi Ferwana, a terror financier in Gaza who transferred tens of millions of dollars to fund Hamas terror, was killed in an airstrike.
Ferwana and his brother used a currency exchange store in Gaza to launder money received from Iran and other major funders of terrorism.
The death of Ferwana in an airstrike in Rafah on Gaza’s southern border is likely to dramatically hurt Hamas’ long-term operations, since his funding efforts were essential for fueling the terrorist group.
According to a joint statement by Shin Bet and the IDF, “Ferwana was one of the few and prominent money exchangers who was able to transfer to the military wing of Hamas the amount of money needed for the fighting. — WorldIsraelNews
An update on that big explosion in Iran
Remember how Iran’s Veep blamed (you guessed it!) the ‘Zionist entity’ for the mass slaughter of Iranian civilians?
It turns out that Jihadis did NOT want to share credit for their handiwork with their hated foe, the Jews.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility Thursday for two suicide bombings targeting a commemoration for an Iranian general slain in a 2020 U.S. drone strike, the worst militant attack to strike Iran in decades as the wider Middle East remains on edge.
Experts who follow the group confirmed that the statement, circulated online among jihadists, came from the extremists, who likely hope to take advantage of the chaos gripping the region amid Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Wednesday’s attack in Kerman killed at least 84 people and wounded an additional 284. It targeted a ceremony honoring Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, held as an icon by supporters of the country’s theocracy and viewed by the U.S. military as a deadly foe who aided militants who killed American troops in Iraq. — AP
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