In Gaza, the Biden admin has simultaneously played the role of arsonist and the firefighter. Last October, the US sent aircraft-carriers and nuclear submarines in support of Israel and provided military assistance to the tune of billions of dollars, including bombs, missiles and aircraft, to slaughter hapless Palestinians.

But at the same time, the Democratic administration built a shoddy pier to let humanitarian aid flow, and persuaded Netanyahu to let the Biden admin at least create optics of being a neutral arbiter while it is the main enabler of Zionists’ genocide of unarmed Palestinians.

As far as Israel’s merciless carpet bombing of Gaza is concerned, this isn’t even a war but downright genocide of Palestinians, because a war is between two comparable armies, whereas in the Gaza Holocaust, a regional power backed by the world’s most powerful military force is committing ethnic cleansing of hapless Palestinians.

Incidentally, the death toll of the savage slaughter is grossly understated by mainstream media for ulterior motives. 38,000 is just the number of dead bodies counted by aid workers, whereas the exact death toll is well above 100,000, as most dead bodies are still buried beneath the rubble of Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah and would take months, if not years, to recover after the rubble is cleared. A Lancet study recently estimated the Gaza death toll could exceed 186,000.

Besides the Biden admin’s reluctance to start another devastating Middle East war in the election year, another reason the American deep state is also hesitant to greenlight Israel’s ground invasion of Hezbollah’s bastion southern Lebanon is that all the military resources of the Pentagon are currently being consumed by the protracted proxy war in east Ukraine.

Moreover, the Biden admin is also concerned that mounting a military offensive against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon might provoke Iran to mount retaliatory missile and drone strikes on critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, such as the Abqaiq oil installation attack in September 2019, thus disrupting global energy supply in the election year and eliminating the Democrats chances of winning the elections.

However, Israel’s opportunistic policymakers are yearning to draw Iran into Gaza War, thus creating a pretext for the expansion of the war in southern Lebanon in order to cash the opportunity to dismantle the Iran-Hezbollah nexus once and for all, posing a security threat to Israel’s northern borders.

Even though by mainstream media’s own accounts the Shiite leadership of Iran and Hezbollah weren’t even aware of Sunni Palestinian liberation movement Hamas’ October 7 assault. It’s worth pointing out that Hamas’ main patrons are private donors in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Egypt, not Iran, as frequently alleged by the mainstream disinformation campaign. In fact, Hamas as a political movement is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

It has been the longstanding geostrategic objective of IDF to dismantle the Iran-Hezbollah nexus for which the Obama admin fought Syria’s decade-long proxy war since 2011. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of IRGC’s Quds Force, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

But with the help of Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients, including Israel.

Notwithstanding, while craven Arab petro-sheikhs, under the thumb of duplicitous American masters enabling the Zionist regime’s atrocious genocide of unarmed Palestinians, were squabbling over when would be the opportune moment to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic and trade ties, the Iran-led resistance axis, comprising Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, has claimed stellar victories in the battlefield against Israel.

As far as Israel’s airstrike at Iran’s consulate in Damascus on April 1 is concerned, killing two top commanders of the IRGC, it is the declared state policy of the Zionist regime of medieval assassins to use deception and subterfuge in order to eliminate formidable adversaries if it lacks the courage to cross swords with them in the battlefield.

It’s worth noting that a tip-off from Mossad led to the cowardly assassination of Iran’s celebrated warrior Haj Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, after Haj Soleimani gave the Zionist regime and its American patrons a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.

Nonetheless, after the consulate airstrike, Iran retaliated by mounting the first-ever direct airstrike on Israel with over 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles on April 13. The airstrike was codenamed Operation True Promise, or Vada-e-Sadiq in Persian.

In response, Israel vowed to avenge the direct Iranian airstrike on its territory. Immediately afterwards, on April 19, Israeli F-15s reportedly launched Blue Sparrow ballistic target missiles at Isfahan’s military sites from Iraq’s airspace that destroyed the radar system of S-300 air defense battery at a military airport in Isfahan.

But the retaliatory strike failed to assuage the murderous frenzy of Israel’s military hawks who vowed to teach Iran a memorable lesson for punching above its weight. On the fateful day of May 19, Iran’s charismatic and eloquent President Ebrahim Raisi was due to inaugurate a hydroelectric dam in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, alongside Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

After the inauguration of the dam, President Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian boarded a helicopter that was part of a convoy of three helicopters that departed for Tabriz. But the helicopter “mysteriously crashed” in the mountainous region of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, killing all eight people onboard.

Image source

Despite repeated provocations, Iran displayed maximum restraint, held free and fair elections after the death of President Raisi in which a moderate and reformist medical doctor of mixed Azeri and Kurdish origins Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian was elected president, which speaks volumes about inclusive nature of Iran’s democratic political system in sharp contrast with autocratic Arab kingdoms.

On July 31, Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh attended the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hours later, he was reported killed in an “Israeli strike” along with his bodyguard in Tehran. Simultaneously, Israel claimed it had killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and that its intelligence had confirmed that another top Hamas leader Mohammed Deif was also killed in a July 13 Israeli strike in Khan Younis, Gaza.

Although a few news outlets reported Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in an improvised explosive device (IED) attack, it’s nearly impossible. Because the Hamas leader was a state guest and his residence in Tehran was in the high security zone.

The most plausible scenario is that Israel deployed the same modus operandi for killing Ismail Haniyeh that it had previously used for destroying the radar system of S-300 air defense battery at a military airport in Isfahan on April 19. Israeli F-15 aircraft launched a missile at the Hamas leader’s residence in Tehran from Iraq’s airspace.

Today, the mouthpiece of US security establishment NY Times published a dubious report that Haniyeh was killed by a bomb Israel planted at state guest house in Tehran two months ago.

Clearly, this is a vain attempt by establishment media to absolve Israel from violating international law by mounting a missile strike on a sovereign state and diverting the blame instead on its regional proxies, specifically Mujahideen-e-Khalq, for allegedly planting the bomb.

But there are several major lacunas in the preposterous report. Firstly, Hamas chief was on Mossad’s kill list since October, therefore all political and military leaders of the organization are immensely cautious about their security and they never use the same accommodation or mode of transport in their visits abroad.

Secondly, Hamas has already officially acknowledged that Haniyeh was martyred in a missile strike on a secure building regularly combed with bomb detectors in which he was staying in for the duration of the visit and about which only a handful people knew. For obvious reasons, the statement of Hamas officials carries far more weight than malicious disinformation peddled by prejudiced Zionist news outlet owned by Jewish Sulzberger family.

The significance of Ismail Haniyeh in the Palestinian liberation movement can be gauged from the gracious gesture that his funeral prayers were led by Iran’s reclusive supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei who rarely ventures out in public.

Iranians attend the funeral procession of assassinated Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. [Majid Asgaripour/WANA via Reuters]

Ismail Haniyeh wasn’t even a military leader. He was a gifted politician and a skilled statesman who vociferously championed the Palestine cause throughout his life. For his lifelong mission, he paid the agonizing price of sacrificing three sons, many members of his extended family and eventually his own life. Being a pacifist political leader, Haniyeh was one of the most vocal proponents of ceasefire and peace in the region. The ten-month-long conflict in Gaza is only going to escalate after his treacherous assassination, which is the likely goal of the blood-thirsty Zionist regime.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

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