标签： Asia

A bombshell months-long investigative probe from Israel’s Channel 12 News has laid bare a 12-year state policy orchestrated under successive Israeli prime ministers, most prominently Benjamin Netanyahu, that actively pressured Qatar to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in untraceable cash into the blockaded Gaza Strip, even as top Israeli security officials repeatedly flagged that the inflow was directly bolstering Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in the enclave. The policy, which remained largely concealed even from mid-ranking officials within Israel’s own security apparatus, traces its origins back to a clandestine 2011 Paris summit hosted by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy. At that closed-door meeting, Netanyahu sat across from Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who first extended an offer to mediate the release of Israeli captive soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas since 2006, alongside a pledge to deliver critical construction materials to Gaza to repair damage from prior Israeli military campaigns. Though Shalit was ultimately freed later that same year via Egyptian mediation, the quiet diplomatic opening between Jerusalem and Doha quickly evolved into a formalized, unwritten arrangement that would define Gaza’s economic trajectory for more than a decade. By 2012, Israel had granted Qatari diplomatic envoys unrestricted access to the Gaza Strip, and Doha committed to disbursing $400 million in reconstruction and humanitarian aid to the territory. In the aftermath of the devastating 2014 Gaza war, the partnership was formally institutionalized: Qatar rolled out a $1 billion recovery package, and Israeli authorities gave full, top-level sign-off for Qatari operatives to smuggle duffel bags stuffed with millions of dollars in US banknotes directly into the enclave, bypassing the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority entirely. The central figure overseeing these cash runs was Mohammed al-Emadi, Qatar’s long-serving special envoy to Gaza, who cultivated close personal ties with senior Israeli military, intelligence, and national security officials over his years of operating under the policy. Initially, the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, opened a formal inquiry into Emadi’s unusual cross-border cash shipments, only to shut the investigation down abruptly after confirming the transfers had explicit, direct authorization from Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. Internal Israeli security assessments, shared repeatedly with Netanyahu’s office over the years, warned that a significant share of the Qatari cash was being diverted by Hamas to fund military infrastructure, militant recruitment, and operational preparedness, rather than being spent exclusively on civilian humanitarian needs. Despite these persistent, well-documented warnings, Netanyahu repeatedly rejected alternative proposals from military leadership that would have rerouted the Qatari aid through the Palestinian Authority and distributed it in local Israeli shekels, insisting instead that funds be delivered in hard US dollars directly to Hamas-linked representatives inside Gaza. When Qatar attempted to step away from the funding arrangement in 2020, Netanyahu dispatched then-Mossad director Yossi Cohen on a regional diplomatic mission to find replacement funders: Cohen first held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and then-Abu Dhabi ruler Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, both of whom declined to take over Doha’s role. Cohen was subsequently sent to Doha to lobby Qatari leadership to reverse their decision, a request the Gulf state ultimately granted, extending the cash transfer program through to 2023. The Channel 12 investigation also uncovered evidence that al-Emadi distributed high-value gifts worth tens of thousands of Israeli shekels to dozens of senior Israeli officials across the military, Mossad, and National Security Council during the course of the program, including current Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson Effie Defrin, who received gifts from the Qatari envoy in 2022 while serving in a prior senior role within the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. The report confirms that Netanyahu’s successor Naftali Bennett also upheld the controversial funding policy, ignoring identical security warnings about Hamas’s growing military strength. Most damningly, the investigation reveals that just seven days before the October 7, 2023, cross-border attacks by Hamas that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and saw 250 civilians and soldiers taken hostage, Netanyahu issued a formal instruction to Mossad leadership to negotiate an additional round of Qatari funding for Gaza. The explosive findings have sparked widespread public backlash across Israel, with critics arguing the years-long policy of propping up Hamas’s finances directly enabled the deadliest militant incursion in the country’s 75-year history.

Amsterdam’s city centre was flooded with peaceful demonstrators on Sunday, as a massive grassroots mobilisation dubbed the “Red Line” protest drew more than 200,000 attendees, according to event co-organiser Amnesty Netherlands. Wearing coordinated red clothing to symbolise the moral threshold the Dutch government has been urged not to cross, the crowd marched through major thoroughfares chanting the rallying cry “Free, free Palestine!”, issuing a set of explicit, uncompromising demands to national leadership.
At the top of the protestors’ list is an immediate full ban on all Dutch arms exports to Israel, paired with sweeping, enforceable trade sanctions targeted at Israeli entities implicated in what demonstrators and human rights groups frame as an ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Campaigners are also calling on the Dutch state to formally and officially recognise Israeli military actions in Gaza as a genocide under international law, while publicly condemning the system of apartheid enforced by Israeli authorities across the occupied West Bank.
Among the attendees was 48-year-old Amsterdam resident Mike van Dongen, who shared his frustration with local and international press on the sidelines of the march. “What is unfolding for civilians in Gaza is unforgivably inhumane, and our government has so far refused to take any meaningful, brave action to stop it,” he told the Associated Press. “They are too afraid to stand up to pressure, even as the death toll climbs higher every week.”
Latest verified data from Palestinian health authorities puts the cumulative casualty count in Gaza at 74,643 confirmed fatalities, with an additional 175,962 people suffering life-altering injuries. Of the recorded deaths, roughly 22,000 are children, while thousands more civilians remain unaccounted for, trapped under the rubble of destroyed residential and public infrastructure. Even after the 11 October 2025 ceasefire agreement meant to de-escalate hostilities, 1,613 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 5,833 wounded, while Israel’s parallel military campaign in Lebanon has claimed more than 4,000 lives since it launched in March of this year.
The global legal context for the protestors’ demands has already shifted dramatically in recent months: the International Criminal Court has issued formal arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, charging both with war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from their actions in Gaza. In May, independent regional news outlet Middle East Eye reported that ICC prosecutors had filed a sealed application for a third arrest warrant, targeting Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich over separate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank.
The deep rift over the Gaza conflict has already upended Dutch domestic politics and longstanding bilateral relations with Israel. Last year, then-Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp resigned from his post after he failed to secure enough support from cabinet colleagues to push through harsher punitive measures against Israeli entities. The current minority Dutch coalition did implement a partial ban on goods imported from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank back in September, a move that prompted Israel to retaliate by revoking the official accreditation of all Dutch diplomatic staff stationed in the country.
Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who made a high-profile appearance at a previous iteration of the Red Line protest last year, opted not to attend Sunday’s mass demonstration, a choice that drew widespread criticism from activist groups. During his weekly scheduled press briefing last Friday, Jetten defended his administration’s existing track record on the Gaza crisis, pushing back against claims that his cabinet has been too passive. “Day in and day out, our government is taking every feasible step we can to ease the catastrophic humanitarian conditions facing Palestinian civilians,” Jetten stated, adding that his team is ramping up targeted political and diplomatic pressure on Israeli leadership to ensure it upholds all prior international agreements related to access and safety for Gaza’s population.

A newly released annual survey from the UK’s leading independent social research body, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), paints a stark picture of dramatic shifts in British public attitudes toward global geopolitical actors, driven by years of escalating violence across the Middle East and recent allied military actions. The long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, which NatCen has administered consistently since 1983, found that a staggering 78% of UK residents now view Israel as a major threat to world peace, a near-doubling of the 48% figure recorded back in 2005. This latest 2025 spring data was collected two and a half years after the outbreak of the deadly Israeli offensive in Gaza, in the immediate aftermath of joint Israeli and U.S. military strikes against Iran. This public sentiment shift has been building steadily: by autumn 2024, one year into the Gaza conflict, 73% of Britons already held the view that Israel posed a serious global peace risk. Complementary polling data from July 2025, commissioned by the Council for British-Arab Understanding and conducted by YouGov, reinforces this trend, showing that only 17% of the British public rejects allegations that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Extensive casualty figures corroborate the scale of the human toll in the region: official records confirm at least 74,643 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza, over 22,000 of whom are children, alongside 175,962 recorded injuries, with an additional 10,000 people still missing and presumed trapped dead under rubble. Even following the nominal ceasefire declared on October 11 the previous year, Israeli operations in Gaza have killed a further 1,613 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,833, while a separate Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon earlier in 2025 left more than 4,000 Lebanese people dead. The ripple effects of these Middle East conflicts have not remained confined to the region, but have directly impacted household finances across the UK. Prior to the outbreak of direct military conflict with Iran, economic analysts had projected that the Bank of England would cut its base interest rate in 2025. Instead, the central bank announced a rate hike from 3.75% to 4% last week, marking the first interest rate increase in over three years. The move has pushed up monthly mortgage repayments for millions of borrowers, raised costs for new home loan applications and renewals, and contributed to sustained price hikes for energy, food and other essential household goods, bringing the tangible cost of distant Middle East conflicts directly to British doorsteps. Public disillusionment extends far beyond Israel, with attitudes toward the United States – long considered the UK’s closest post-WWII strategic ally – also deteriorating at an unprecedented pace. The NatCen survey shows 74% of Britons now view the U.S. as a serious threat to world peace, a figure that has surged following high-profile public rifts between NATO allies over the status of Greenland, and the U.S. government’s February 2026 decision to join Israel in launching a bombing campaign against Iran. This represents a dramatic long-term shift: as recently as 1994, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, only 22% of the British public saw the U.S. as a global peace threat, a figure that rose to 47% in 2005, two years after the George W. Bush administration led the widely condemned illegal invasion of Iraq. The NatCen report explicitly notes that a clear majority of the British public viewing their traditional closest ally as a threat to global peace is an entirely unprecedented finding in the survey’s four-decade history. Public perceptions of other major global powers also reflect shifting geopolitical anxieties: 89% of UK residents regard Russia as a serious threat to world peace, 62% hold the same view of China, and 75% see Iran as a threat, a notable rise from the 67% figure recorded the previous spring. The NatCen analysis concludes that British society has undergone a profound psychological transformation, moving away from the post-Cold War mindset of a nation living in relative security, to a public that now accepts persistent, open-ended geopolitical competition as the permanent new strategic reality. This societal shift is unfolding against a backdrop of ongoing armed conflict in Europe, repeated Israeli military threats to destabilize the wider Middle East, intensifying systemic competition between Western nations and China, and an increasingly confrontational foreign policy posture from the United States.

Speaking at a public forum organized by leading Turkish foreign policy think-tank Orsam in Ankara on Monday, Turkish National Intelligence Organization head Ibrahim Kalin outlined Ankara’s official stance on long-running frictions with Israel, framing the upcoming formation of a new Israeli governing coalition as a critical litmus test to distinguish whether current rifts between the two regional powers stem from the broader policy of the Israeli state, or are exclusive to the hardline administration led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Kalin confirmed that Turkish diplomatic and intelligence circles are closely monitoring the ongoing government negotiation talks in Israel, which are being helmed by former Israeli military chief Gadi Eisenkot.

The top Turkish official issued a stark warning: if the Israeli state formally institutionalizes a policy that designates Turkey as a hostile or rival nation, the move would set both countries on an extremely perilous trajectory with far-reaching regional consequences. He emphasized that Ankara holds no unrelated bilateral grievances against Israel, and that the unresolved Palestinian question stands as the singular root cause of the decades-long deterioration in their once-close diplomatic ties. Kalin reminded attendees that Turkey was the first majority-Muslim nation in the world to formally recognize Israeli sovereignty, and to build full diplomatic, political and economic cooperative frameworks with the country, stressing that Ankara has never challenged Israel’s right to exist.

Turkey’s only non-negotiable demands, Kalin noted, are that Israel uphold fair treatment for Palestinian civilians, fully end its decades-long military occupation of Palestinian territories, and cease all unilateral annexation operations. Every prior breakdown in bilateral relations between the two nations, he argued, can be traced directly back to Israeli policies targeting Palestinian communities. Kalin underscored that neither Turkey’s national leadership nor its general public could reasonably be expected to remain silent or overlook the mass killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank in recent years.

Kalin further observed that a growing share of the Israeli public, particularly voters and political figures unaffiliated with Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, recognize that the country’s policy trajectory over the past two to three years has left it more diplomatically isolated on the global stage than at any prior point in its history. He described the current regional context as a dark period marked by widespread civilian casualties and alleged genocidal actions, framing the upcoming Israeli government formation as a pivotal crossroads.

The intelligence chief also pointed to shifting global public sentiment, noting that international communities are no longer broadly accepting Israel’s longstanding official narrative justifying its actions against Palestinians. As tangible evidence of this global shift, he cited recent comments made by U.S. President Donald Trump during an interview with 60 Minutes, where he acknowledged that public and political support for Israel is declining across the United States, its closest longstanding ally. Kalin argued that Israel faces far greater long-term diplomatic and security risks than Turkey amid these shifting tides, and that the Israeli side bears full responsibility to conduct a full review of its current policy framework.

Kalin went on to acknowledge that bilateral frictions between Turkey and Israel have deepened considerably in recent years, noting that Israeli expansionist actions across Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria are actively fueling widespread instability across the entire Middle East region. He stated plainly that the Israeli government’s consistent land-grabbing agenda is an undisputed, well-documented fact, while reaffirming that Turkey has no intention of provoking conflict with Israel or designating it as an official enemy state. “It is they who need to change their policies,” Kalin concluded firmly.

On Sunday night, a convoy of far-right Israeli activists, who traveled to the mixed city of Lod from locations outside municipal boundaries, launched a targeted incursion into densely populated Palestinian residential districts, triggering violent confrontations with local residents. Eyewitnesses from the Palestinian citizen community of Israel reported that the unannounced late-night procession moved through narrow neighborhood streets, hurling rocks at private properties, verbally abusing local families, and chanting overtly racist slurs targeting Arab residents.

When local Palestinian residents mobilized to confront the advancing mob, physical clashes erupted that left multiple people with minor injuries. Khaled al-Zabarqa, head of Lod’s Popular Committee, confirmed that this latest attack marks the third consecutive far-right provocation in the city in the past 30 days, following two earlier similar incidents: one staged in the vicinity of the historic Al-Omari Mosque, and a second that unfolded in Lod’s central public market. Unlike the two prior events that involved local extremist actors, Sunday’s incursion saw the outside mob go so far as to attempt a forced entry into a private Palestinian family home, al-Zabarqa told Middle East Eye.

“These extremist groups are deliberately working to blow up communal tensions across Lod to serve narrow political agendas,” al-Zabarqa emphasized, before leveling explosive accusations of state complicity against Israeli law enforcement. “We submitted formal advance warnings to police about the planned provocations and explicitly flagged the risk of violent fallout, which means authorities carry full responsibility for the harm that unfolded. Police had full advance intelligence about Sunday’s march, but instead of intervening to stop it, they positioned themselves to shield the far-right participants, and later assisted the mob members in avoiding immediate legal consequences. The consistent failure of police and state institutions to safeguard Arab residents is not an oversight — it reflects a deliberate, systemic policy of neglect and bias.”

For their part, Israeli police released a carefully calibrated statement claiming that a large gathering of dozens of individuals had assembled in Lod, with subsets of the crowd violating public order and ignoring official dispersal orders. Authorities said they deployed officers to break up the unrest and detained 11 suspects, all of whom were released on Monday morning under conditional restrictive measures while formal investigations remain ongoing. Independent reporting from Israeli outlet Haaretz revealed that the march was actively promoted on social media by far-right figures closely aligned with Israel’s ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who framed the event as a “sovereignty march” meant to assert exclusive Israeli control over the mixed city. Ben Gvir, who has emerged as one of the most high-profile political figures spearheading anti-Arab incitement in the weeks following last month’s Israeli general election — where Palestinian citizens of Israel posted record voter turnout and secured unprecedented parliamentary representation — has publicly claimed the election results were “stolen” and demanded a new national vote. Several of Ben Gvir’s most prominent loyalists, including notoriously aggressive far-right activists Mordechai David and Ziv Baranes, were documented participating in Sunday’s violent procession.

Lod’s elected mayor Yair Revivo, no ally of local Arab political factions, issued a blistering public condemnation of the outside extremist incursion. “I am seething with unbridled rage,” Revivo stated in an official release. “A mob of outsiders descended on our city, lit the fuse of communal conflict, and then vanished, leaving local authorities and our diverse resident population to clean up the catastrophic aftermath.”

Al-Zabarqa warned that the worst unrest may still lie ahead. “Our on-the-ground assessment confirms this situation is on a direct trajectory toward far more severe escalation,” he cautioned. “Anti-Arab incitement across Israeli public life has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels since October 7, but this new pattern of organized, direct violent provocations targeting Palestinian neighborhoods is a dangerous new trend that has only emerged in the past two weeks.”

Lod, referred to by its longstanding Palestinian name Lydd, hosts a large, longstanding community of Palestinian citizens of Israel — descendants of the roughly 150,000 Palestinians who remained in their ancestral homeland after the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophic displacement event where Zionist militias expelled an estimated 750,000 Palestinian people to establish the State of Israel. The city was the epicenter of some of the deadliest intercommunal violence during the 2021 nationwide mass protests that swept mixed Jewish-Arab Israeli cities: on May 11 of that year, a far-right Israeli mob shot and killed 31-year-old local Palestinian resident Musa Hassouna, while coordinated extremist attacks targeted hundreds of Palestinian homes, businesses, and mosques across the city. In the three years since that 2021 unrest, Lod has remained a frequent flashpoint for far-right and settler groups to stage deliberate provocations, including unpermitted marches through Arab residential zones, mass displays of nationalist Israeli flags in majority-Palestinian areas, and coordinated chanting of anti-Arab racist slogans.

A cascade of reports from Iranian daily newspapers closely affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has laid out a public inventory of potential military targets across European nations, in the immediate aftermath of recent US strikes targeting Iran’s Qeshm Island last week. The wave of publications coincides with surging global speculation that the United States may be on the cusp of re-escalating full-scale military confrontation with Iran.
On Tuesday, leading Iranian daily Hamshahri splashed a detailed map of Europe across its front page, explicitly marking US military installations and bases hosted by the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Romania, Greece, Albania, and Portugal as the formal “target bank of the Iranian armed forces.” The paper framed Iran’s newly updated military posture as a doctrine of “confrontation without geographical limits,” a phrase first coined by Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, noting that under this expanded framework, all US support hubs, air and naval staging grounds, and associated logistical infrastructure across European territory now qualify as legitimate potential targets for Iranian retaliation.
Fellow conservative daily Kayhan, whose top editor is directly appointed by Iran’s supreme leadership, issued an accompanying stark warning: if the United States refuses to meet Iran’s preconditions for a negotiated peace settlement, “the geography of the battle will expand to the heart of Europe and the depth of overseas bases.” The publication further emphasized that Iran’s military doctrine targeting the US, Israel, and their allied nations has shifted to a far more direct, offensive orientation, singling out the United Kingdom as the European state that has played the “most key and prominent role” in ongoing hostilities against Iran.
Against this backdrop, a segment of senior Iranian officials has publicly framed the US Republican Party’s losses in recent midterm elections as a meaningful setback to former President Donald Trump’s long-documented hawkish foreign policy agenda. However, Iranian news platform Khabar Online pushed back against overly optimistic assumptions of imminent US de-escalation, drawing a direct parallel to the 2006 US midterm elections held during the height of the US-led occupation of Iraq. The publication noted that while the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress was widely expected to force a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, then-President George W. Bush instead used broad executive war powers to authorize a major “surge” that increased US troop levels on the ground, extending the conflict rather than ending it. Khabar Online concluded that historical precedent demonstrates a congressional majority opposed to war cannot unilaterally halt a presidential administration’s military campaign without unified political coordination and sufficient legislative backing to override a presidential veto.
Additional strategic context emerged from a recent interview with Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator who participated in the 1993 Oslo B talks, speaking to BBC Persian. Levy revealed that Israel’s February 28 launch of military strikes against Iran was rooted in a deliberate goal of fragmenting the Iranian state, replicating the destabilization campaigns previously implemented in Iraq and Syria. “Israel’s explicit objective was the collapse of the Iranian state, the creation of widespread chaos across the country, and the breakup of Iran into smaller entities – a playbook we already saw executed in Iraq and Syria,” Levy stated, adding that Israeli leadership never truly believed its public propaganda claiming the campaign would trigger spontaneous popular regime change in Iran. He further noted that early reports of Israeli forces funneling weapons to Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraq aligned with an initial plan to carve out a “liberated” enclave inside Iranian territory, to serve as a staging ground for operations against Iran’s central government. Levy also described Israel’s public embrace of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed Shah, as a purely temporary tactical move to advance its destabilization goals, rather than a serious commitment to installing him as Iran’s new leader, noting the Pahlavi family was viewed as nothing more than a disposable “tool for creating chaos.”
As military tensions remain at a fever pitch, diplomatic efforts to broker a permanent ceasefire between the US and Iran are quietly gaining traction, with growing speculation that China could emerge as a central broker. Recent high-level diplomatic contacts between Tehran, Beijing, and Muscat point to the emergence of a previously unreported parallel negotiation channel. Pro-reformist Iranian daily Shargh reported that Iranian senior security official Ali Bagheri Kani’s recent closed-door meetings in Beijing could mark the formal launch of this new China and Oman-led diplomatic track, framing the trip as part of Tehran’s ongoing consultations to evaluate new peace initiatives and leverage the influence of major global powers to prevent further catastrophic escalation. Conservative daily Jame Jam meanwhile framed Bagheri Kani’s visit as part of Iran’s broader push to align Moscow and Beijing with its regional policy priorities, alongside ongoing mediation efforts with third-party intermediaries including Qatar and Pakistan. The publication cautioned, however, that mere verbal statements of support from China and Russia will not be sufficient to end the ongoing conflict, noting that meaningful de-escalation will only be possible if these global powers take concrete, practical action to push back against longstanding US unilateral military interventions across the Middle East.

Renewed armed hostilities have roiled Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region since a newly formed rebel coalition launched territorial seizures in September 2025, marking a rapid unraveling of the fragile 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended a two-year civil war marked by widespread atrocities. While the federal Ethiopian government has largely contained frontline fighting and reclaimed the regional capital Mekelle without major resistance, October 2026 saw explosions rock the capital Addis Ababa, stoking public anxiety over the conflict spreading deep into state territory. Tigray’s long, turbulent history of bloodshed stretches back decades: the 2020-2022 civil war left hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and widespread verified accusations of war crimes and ethnic genocide targeting the Tigrayan ethnic group documented by independent human rights monitors. The current resurgence of fighting has sparked urgent international alarm that the localized insurgency could escalate into full-scale bilateral war between Ethiopia and its northern neighbor Eritrea, after Addis Ababa formally severed diplomatic relations with Asmara in October 2026, accusing Eritrea of deploying troops across the border to arm and support the rebel coalition. This potential new conflict arrives against a backdrop of already widespread instability across the broader Red Sea corridor, where active armed conflicts are ongoing in Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, threatening to entangle the entire Horn of Africa in a wider regional conflagration. The emerging bloc of competing patron states further complicates the crisis: the United Arab Emirates stands as a key military and economic ally of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration, while Eritrea has secured public and private backing from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the internationally recognized Sudanese government. This breakdown of peace follows years of unmet obligations under the 2022 AU-mediated Pretoria deal: critical clauses including full TPLF disarmament, safe return of 2 million displaced civilians, and restoration of regional administrative autonomy have never been implemented, paving the way for internal power struggles within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). In March 2025, hardline TPLF faction leader Debretsion Gebremichael ousted moderate regional administration head Getachew Reda, who fled to Addis Ababa to become a senior advisor to Prime Minister Abiy, his former wartime adversary. By January 2026, skirmishes between federal forces and TPLF fighters erupted in western Tigray, and the TPLF formally declared the Pretoria Agreement “effectively dead” by July of that year. In September 2026, the TPLF forged a historic alliance with longstanding former civil war rivals to launch the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Coalition for Survival, known locally as Tsimdo, with a public vow to overthrow Abiy’s administration, which the coalition accused of entrenching “war, genocide, mass slaughter and absolute poverty” as core features of its governance. The Tsimdo offensive quickly seized swathes of territory across Tigray, Afar, and Amhara regions before federal forces retook Mekelle, pushing rebel units back to the region’s rugged, mineral-rich rocky highlands. The sudden reversal of Eritrea’s wartime allegiances – from fighting alongside Abiy’s government against the TPLF during the 2020-2022 war to now backing the insurgents – traces directly to a bitter dispute over Red Sea maritime access. As the world’s largest landlocked country with a population of 140 million, Ethiopia lost all coastal access when Eritrea won independence in 1993 after 30 years of anti-Ethiopian insurgency that killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people. For years, Abiy has publicly framed unimpeded access to a Red Sea port as a non-negotiable national priority, a stance widely interpreted by Eritrea’s leadership as a veiled threat to seize the strategic Eritrean port of Assab, located just 70 kilometers from the shared border. The competing regional power interests driving the crisis extend far beyond bilateral Ethiopian-Eritrean tensions. The UAE has poured billions of dollars in investment across Ethiopia since Abiy took power in 2018, and deployed drone support to back federal forces during the 2020-2022 civil war, as both Abu Dhabi and Addis Ababa seek to expand their influence across the Red Sea littoral. Their joint 2024 memorandum of understanding with breakaway Somaliland to access the Emirati-funded Berbera Port, in exchange for potential recognition of Somaliland’s de facto independence, sparked a major diplomatic backlash from Somalia, forcing Ethiopia to scale back plans to build a formal naval base at the facility. Tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan have also escalated sharply, after satellite imagery analysis from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab verified that Ethiopian military bases were being used to funnel supplies to the UAE-backed Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group widely accused of mass atrocities during Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Though Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi deny supporting the RSF, Sudan’s internationally recognized government has aligned itself with Eritrea to counter Ethiopia’s regional ambitions. Egypt, long locked in a decades-long water dispute with Ethiopia over the $5 billion Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile River – a megaproject Cairo views as an existential threat to its freshwater security – has also forged close military and diplomatic ties with Eritrea, after Abiy’s administration expelled Egyptian diplomats in late 2026 over unsubstantiated claims that Cairo was backing the TPLF insurgency. Saudi Arabia, the UAE’s primary regional geopolitical rival, has also deepened its economic and diplomatic engagement with Eritrea, aligned with its existing policy of backing the Sudanese national army against the UAE-supported RSF. At the geographic core of this unfolding crisis, Tigray spans approximately the same land area as Slovakia or the U.S. state of West Virginia, with a population of roughly 7.5 million people, 96% of whom identify as ethnic Tigrayan, and the vast majority speaking Tigrinya – the most widely spoken language across Eritrea, a cultural and linguistic tie that has shaped decades of shifting alliances between the two territories. The region’s highlands hold some of Ethiopia’s largest untapped gold and mineral deposits, and its population is overwhelmingly adherent to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, matching the dominant religious identity across most of Ethiopia. For nearly 27 years, the TPLF led the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition that governed the country from 1991 onward, after the rebel movement overthrew Ethiopia’s brutal military junta alongside Eritrean separatist fighters. While that administration oversaw a period of rapid economic growth and expanded public service access across the country, it faced widespread condemnation for suppressing political dissent, concentrating state power exclusively in the hands of a small Tigrayan elite, and rigging national elections to win every single parliamentary seat for consecutive election cycles. The TPLF-led government also fought a brutal two-year border war with newly independent Eritrea between 1998 and 2000 that killed tens of thousands of combatants on both sides, before Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 following mass cross-country anti-government protests. Abiy, an ethnic Oromo from Ethiopia’s largest demographic group, dissolved the TPLF-led ruling coalition to form his new Prosperity Party, a move the TPLF refused to join, and signed a historic peace deal with Eritrea that won him the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. That fragile peace collapsed in 2020, when the TPLF held unauthorised regional elections in defiance of Addis Ababa’s federal electoral schedule, triggering a full-scale federal military offensive after the government accused TPLF fighters of launching raids on federal military bases – a charge the TPLF has consistently denied. The subsequent 2020-2022 civil war saw the federal government impose a total blockade on all food, medicine, and humanitarian aid entering Tigray, triggering a manmade famine that independent monitors estimate killed at least 200,000 civilians. All parties to that conflict – Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean allied troops, Amhara regional militias, and TPLF fighters – were accused by human rights groups of systematic war crimes, including mass sexual violence and targeted civilian massacres, with total combined death toll estimates ranging from 160,000 to more than 600,000 people.

Delivering a widely discussed Friday night sermon framed around the outcomes of recent U.S. midterm elections, prominent American Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch issued a stark public assessment that the decades-long “Golden Age of American Jewry” — a period of unprecedented social acceptance, professional advancement for Jewish communities, and broad bipartisan U.S. support for Israel spanning the formative years of Baby Boomers, Gen X, and older millennials — has formally come to a close.

Hirsch laid significant blame for shifting public sentiment toward Israel on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which relies heavily on extreme far-right, religious-nationalist allies including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. He characterized the administration’s agenda as defined by “right-wing messianism and West Bank lawlessness,” pointing to rampant, unregulated settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and provocative acts targeting shared holy sites in East Jerusalem as key drivers of growing global and U.S. opposition to Israel. As a high-profile example, he cited a September public appearance by Netanyahu, who filmed himself walking through excavation tunnels under the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem ahead of Yom Kippur, making statements that anchored Israeli territorial claims to the area adjacent to the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, steps widely viewed as deliberately provocative to Muslim communities who revere the same compound as the home of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. That same weekend, Ben Gvir and groups of Israeli settlers entered the contested sacred compound to perform public Jewish religious rituals, acts that have long sparked regional tensions.

To back his framing of rampant West Bank unrest, Hirsch cited verified data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which documented more than 2,060 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property destruction across 300 West Bank communities between the start of 2026 and October 12 of that year. In just the final two weeks of that monitoring window, five Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces or settlers, 246 Palestinians sustained injuries, and 244 separate incidents of settler violence targeting homes, agricultural land, livestock, and civilian infrastructure were recorded. A separate October report from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry went further, concluding that Israeli military operations and sustained settler aggression constituted a coordinated, widespread systematic attack against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

Hirsch warned that these developments have eroded the once rock-solid bipartisan U.S. support for Israel, creating space for fringe anti-Zionist figures to gain mainstream political traction. He called out high-profile political influencer Hasan Piker for remarks stating he would vote for Hamas over Israel and comparing liberal Zionists to liberal Nazis, as well as a recent political ad that incorrectly blamed Israeli policy for driving up U.S. food prices. He specifically criticized two incoming members of Congress: House representative-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom he accused of attending a rally celebrating the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attack on Israel and refusing to condemn Hamas during her campaign, and Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, whose comment describing a violent attempted attack on a synagogue and preschool as a predictable outcome of “hurt people hurt people” Hirsch dismissed as deeply troubling. He noted that a growing cohort of incoming U.S. lawmakers are not merely critical of specific Israeli government policies, but ideologically opposed to the very existence of Israel, viewing the country as a global paragon of evil.

Crucially, Hirsch paired his sharp criticism of Netanyahu’s government with a forceful rejection of anti-Zionism, which he labeled a “hateful ideology of destruction — as illiberal and immoral as anything in modern public life.” He chided progressive political figures who fail to draw clear lines between legitimate criticism of Israeli state policy and anti-Zionist rhetoric that directly fuels rising antisemitism. He noted that while antisemitism has long existed in the U.S., it had previously been pushed out of mainstream public institutions and partisan political life, but has now become normalized across both the far right and far left of the U.S. political spectrum.

Hirsch framed the October 7, 2023, attacks as the symbolic final marker of the end of American Jewry’s golden era, a shift he said had been building for years beneath the surface. He described the recent U.S. midterm results as a broad repudiation of former President Donald Trump, driven by voter frustration over economic pressures, the ongoing Iran war, corruption allegations, trade tariffs, controversial immigration enforcement policies, and widespread personal dissatisfaction with Trump’s leadership. He cautioned that traditional American Jewish communal organizations can no longer rely on longstanding, predictable partisan political alliances to advance their interests, and called for a “searing reassessment” of long-held community strategies, urging leaders to pursue pragmatic, broad-based cross-community coalitions to navigate what he warned will be years of turbulence and rising antisemitic sentiment across the country.