[NYPOST] The head of a radical activist group who urged anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University to channel the deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 is a career agitator who spent "years" in the socialist haven of Cuba, The Post can reveal.
Manolo De Los Santos, the 35-year-old leader of the Midtown-based nonprofit The People’s Forum (TPF), came to The Bronx from his native Dominican Republic at age 5 and has made a career of spurring protests on the streets of New York City.
He first traveled to Cuba in 2006 and was there as recently as March to demand an end to the US blockade against the socialist state which has been in place since 1962.
As TPF’s executive director and de facto mouthpiece — a role he’s held since 2018, according to his Facebook — the writer, organizer and public speaker is as known for his zealous support of left-wing causes as he is for his repugnant public statements.
De Los Santos, who declined to speak to The Post when approached outside his Hell’s Kitchen home Monday, has in the last year alone hailed Hamas ...not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... ’ Oct. 7 terror attack as "heroic," called for Israel to be "erased from history" and eagerly welcomed the impending "defeat" of the "US empire."
He has been a longtime advocate for Cuba, which he first visited as a teenager with a progressive religious group called Pastors for Peace and which he was later based out of for "many years."
[GEO.TV] Two terrorists linked to Indian premier intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), were caught during a targeted operation by the police and spy agencies in Karachi, Korangi Superintendent of Police (SSP) Hasan Sardar said on Monday.
The joint operation by Korangi police and intelligence agencies foiled a major terrorist plan targeting the metropolis, he added.
The SSP said two hand grenades, a 9mm pistol and ammunition had been seized from the arrested terrorists.
Sardar further said that the nabbed terrorist had been involved in the recce of a target pointed out by foreign elements. He said that the terrorists used to send the images and information gathered during the recce abroad and received millions of rupees from foreign bank accounts for that.
Indian infiltration inside Pakistani territory for intelligence and terrorist purposes is not something known as a number of incidents of extra-territorial activities by RAW and arrest of its agents have been reported in the past.
Earlier this year, Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Syrus Qazi exposed the “sophisticated and sinister” Indian campaign of extra-territorial and extra-judicial killings.
Pakistan has "credible evidence" for Indian agents' link to the killings of two of its citizens on Pakistani soil, Qazi had revealed in January.
These claims were provided further credence by British daily newspaper, The Guardian, through a report that revealed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Indian government “ordered killings” on Pakistan’s soil.
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05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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The United States is studying Hamas's response to a ceasefire proposal and will discuss it with allies in the Middle East in the coming hours, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Monday.
"I can confirm that Hamas has issued a response. We are reviewing that response now and discussing it with our partners in the region," Miller said on Monday afternoon, confirming that a response was received in the last hour or 90 minutes and that discussions would take place in the coming hours.
CIA director Bill Burns is in the region "working on this in real time," Miller said.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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In response to Israel's recent strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a US official has stated that these actions do not constitute a major military operation.
While expressing concern, the United States is specifically focused on preventing a large-scale offensive in densely populated areas of Rafah. According to the official, it appears that the Israeli forces are not currently engaged in such an operation.
The situation is being closely monitored by the international community as tensions persist in the region.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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[GEO.TV] Israeli forces last night carried out air and ground raids in Rafah killing at least 12 people, while the occupational army’s tanks have moved closer to Rafah’s border crossing with Egypt, Al-Jazeera reported quoting Associated Press as saying.
On the other hand, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said the fighter group had accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal presented by mediators of Qatar and Egypt.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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[JPost] The Prime Minister's Office said earlier on Monday night that the War Cabinet had agreed to continue with Israel's planned Rafah operation.
The IDF Spokesperson said on Monday night that the military conducted precise, targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in Eastern Rafah.
The Prime Minister's Office said earlier on Monday night that the War Cabinet had agreed to continue with Israel's planned Rafah operation.
"The War Cabinet unanimously decided that Israel continues the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to promote the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war," the statement read.
The PMO also noted that in parallel and despite the fact that the "proposal is far from Israel's necessary requirements, Israel will send a delegation of mediators to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement under conditions acceptable to Israel."
This comes despite Hamas's earlier agreement with the Qatari and Egyptian ceasefire proposal.
'Deal doesn't exist'
A former Senior Israeli security source told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the proposed "deal" Hamas said they agreed upon doesn't actually exist.
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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[JPost] Nobody wants cockroach infestations
Israel has reportedly begun launching airstrikes and evacuated some 100,000 of the over one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah.
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05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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[IsraelTimes] Gazans celebrate in streets; families of hostages plead for deal; US studying response; war cabinet says negotiators will meet mediators, but orders IDF to push ahead with Rafah op.
In other words, Hamas continues playing negotiation games while waiting for somebody to force Israel to surrender.
Hamas on Monday evening claimed to accept what it said was an Egyptian and Qatari ceasefire and hostage release proposal, but Israeli officials said the Hamas terms did not meet Israel’s essential requirements.
"After Hamas agreed to the mediators’ proposal for a ceasefire, the ball is now in the court of Israeli occupation, whether it will agree to the ceasefire agreement or obstruct it," a senior Hamas official told AFP, soon after the office of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh had announced its acceptance.
But after receiving the Hamas response, Israeli officials said the terms Hamas claimed to have accepted did not match those that Israel had approved.
Later Monday, the Prime Minister’s Office said the war cabinet had decided unanimously to push ahead with an IDF operation in Rafah "in order to apply military pressure on Hamas, with the goal of making progress on freeing the hostages and the other war aims."
The statement said Hamas’s latest offer was "far from [meeting] Israel’s essential requirements." At the same time, the statement said, Israel would send working-level teams to hold talks with the mediators in order "to exhaust the possibility of achieving an agreement on terms that are acceptable to Israel."
War cabinet minister Benny Gantz, a political rival of Prime Minister Benamin Netanyahu, also said the ceasefire proposal Hamas accepted "is inconsistent with the dialogue [Israel] held with the mediators to this point and has significant gaps [from Israel’s demands]."
Israel’s negotiators were "continuing their work at every moment" and "will leave no stone unturned," Gantz promised. "Every decision will be brought before the war cabinet. There will be no political considerations" in the decision-making, he added (emphasis in original).
The Hamas announcement set off celebrations among Palestinians in Gaza.
In Tel Aviv, families of some hostages and other protesters blocked traffic on the Ayalon Highway, banging drums, blowing on bullhorns and lighting fires, urging the government to accept a deal for the return of their loves ones. Some protesters held a banner referring to Monday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, reading "Never Again?" There were also protests in and around Jerusalem’s Paris Square, and elsewhere in the country, urging the government to seal the deal.
Meanwhile, the IDF announced that troops were striking and operating against Hamas sites "in a targeted manner" in eastern Rafah.
The announcement came after Palestinian media reported a series of strikes in the area, where the IDF earlier called for civilians to evacuate.
Israel officials quoted by Channel 12 said Israel’s negotiating team could tell that "this is not the same proposal" for a deal that Israel and Egypt had agreed upon 10 days ago, and that served as the basis for the indirect negotiations since then.
"All kinds of clauses" have been inserted, the TV report said.
These new clauses, among other issues, relate to the cardinal questions of if, how, and when the war would end, and what kind of guarantees were being offered to that effect. The report noted that Hamas had been toughening its demands in recent days, and demanding that the war end during the first, 40-day phase of the deal, rather than in the second or third phases.
Israel, for its part, has repeatedly rejected ending the war as part of a hostage deal at all, instead insisting that it will resume fighting once the deal is implemented, in accordance with its twin war goals: returning the hostages and destroying Hamas’s military and governance capacities.
An Israeli official told Reuters that the Hamas announcement appeared to be "a ruse intended to make Israel look like the side refusing a deal," following days of the US saying the ball was in Hamas’s court.
The official said that the proposal Hamas has accepted was a "softened" version of the Egyptian proposal, which includes "far-reaching" conclusions that Israel cannot accept.
Why is Egypt putting forward a proposal Israel already rejected?
But an official briefed on the talks, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the offer Hamas accepted was effectively the same as one agreed at the end of April by Israel.
And a US official familiar with truce negotiations told Reuters that Netanyahu and the war cabinet "have not appeared to approach the latest phase of negotiations in good faith."
A THREE-PHASE AGREEMENT
Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, told Al Jazeera that the proposal that the terror group has agreed to is a three-phased agreement, and that each stage will be 42 days long.
"On the first day of the first phase of the agreement, there is a clear commitment to temporarily stop military operations," he said.
The second phase provides for the announcement of "a permanent cessation of military and hostile operations," he added.
He further said that Egypt is a guarantor of the deal and will not allow the war to return. He also said that the mediators informed Hamas that President Biden is committed to ensuring the implementation of the agreement.
According to a Haaretz report, Hamas sources claim to have received assurances from the US and Qatar, as well as Egypt, that Israel will not resume the war after the three-stage deal is implemented.
What about before?
The war erupted after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, when thousands of terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and seized 252 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
In response to the onslaught, Israel launched a wide-scale offensive aiming to eliminate the terror group’s military and governance capabilities in Gaza and free the hostages, 128 of whom remain in captivity.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to unverifiable figures from Hamas health officials that do not distinguish between gunmen and civilians. Israel says it has killed 13,000 Hamas gunmen in Gaza as well as 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. Some 270 IDF soldiers have been killed in the fighting in Gaza.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that Washington had received Hamas’s response to the latest truce proposal and was reviewing it and discussing it with the Qatari and Egyptian mediators. CIA director Bill Burns is in the region "working on this in real time," Miller added. Miller said a deal was "absolutely achievable."
"We want to get these hostages out, we want to get a ceasefire in place for six weeks, we want to increase humanitarian assistance," White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said, adding that reaching an agreement would be the "absolute best outcome".
The Three Wants. Sounds like something Communist China would come up with. And who, in this case, is we?
The Hamas announcement came directly after Netanyahu spoke with US President Joe Biden on the phone, with a considerable part of the call devoted to the efforts to reach a truce-for-hostages deal.
Leaders around the Arab world were quick to respond to the Iran-backed terror group’s announcement, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas calling on the international community to pressure Israel to commit to a ceasefire in Gaza, according to Palestinian official news agency WAFA.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said he was closely following positive developments in the negotiations to reach a "comprehensive truce" in Gaza, and called on all parties to exert more effort to reach a deal.
Both Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that they had spoken to Qatar-based Haniyeh on the phone on Monday regarding the deal.
The Iranian foreign minister said on social media platform X that Haniyeh had assured him, "We are sincere in our intentions," while Erdogan posted, "During the call, in which I stated that I found it positive for Hamas to take such a decision with Turkey’s suggestion, we emphasized that Israel must take a step for a lasting ceasefire too."
On the streets of Gaza, crowds of Palestinians could be seen cheering and firing guns in the air after Hamas claimed to have accepted the ceasefire proposal from mediators Egypt and Qatar. People could be seen crying tears of happiness, chanting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") and shooting in the air in celebration of the news, according to an AFP correspondent.
Brilliant, guys. All those bullets that missed your neighbours coming back down will still be unavailable to shoot Israeli soldiers in the days to come.
Netanyahu has for months vowed that Israeli troops would carry out an operation to root out the final Hamas strongholds in the southern Gaza city of Rafah regardless of a hostage release deal, with the IDF starting to issue evacuation orders to Palestinian civilians in the area on Monday.
The terror group, meanwhile, has rejected repeated Israeli truce offers during months of negotiations, with US officials repeatedly saying that the ball was in Hamas’s court when it came to accepting a deal.
Throughout the months of negotiations to secure a deal, media reports have repeatedly suggested potential breakthroughs, but talks have always ultimately broken down, in part due to Hamas’s demand for a permanent ceasefire and Israel’s refusal to end the war without moving to eliminate the group’s remaining fighters in Rafah.
[NYPOST] Israel has begun its military operation into Rafah after rejecting Hamas ...the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,... ’ cease-fire claim as a deception.
"The IDF is currently conducting targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in eastern Rafah in southern Gazoo
Islamic Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response. In October of 2023 Gazooks belonging to Hamas invaded Israel, killed over a thousand people, raped a bunch of women. Then they bitched and moaned about genocide when their butts handed to them in the entirely justified retaliation. ," the Israel Defense Forces said Monday night local time.
The world’s eyes are now on the southern city in the Gaza Strip, where more than 1 million Paleostinians have taken refuge while fleeing war elsewhere in the territory.
President Biden has repeatedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go ahead with the Rafah offensive unless the IDF could secure the safety of the civilians, with the president repeating himself during a call earlier Monday.
"The president was consistent again this morning that we don’t support ground operations in Rafah," White House national security front man John Kirby told news hounds prior to the advancement.
The announcement came shortly after Israel’s war cabinet unanimously voted to proceed with the attack on Hamas’ final stronghold in an effort to apply military pressure on the terror group, "with the goal of making progress on freeing the hostages and the other war aims," Netanyahu’s office said.
The prime minister also slammed Hamas’ latest truce officer as "far from Israel’s obligatory demands."
Following Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh ...became Prime Minister of Gaza after the legislative elections of 2006 which Hamas won. President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from office on 14 June 2007 at the height of the Fatah-Hamas festivities, but Haniyeh did not acknowledge the decree and continues as the PM of Gazoo while Abbas maintains a separate PM in the West Bank... ’s announcement that the terror group had accepted a cease-fire deal, Israeli officials told multiple outlets that the deal presented to the terror group was a "softened" version of what was really on the table and is not being taken seriously by Jerusalem.
One official told Rooters that the announcement was a clear ruse by the terror group to create backlash against Israel for refusing a deal, and officials told KANN TV that the announcement of a cease-fire agreement was a "Hamas deception."
Despite criticizing Hamas’ move, Netanyahu’s office said Israel is still sending a negotiation team to Cairo "to exhaust the possibility of achieving an agreement on terms that are acceptable to Israel."
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the US does not support an intensified military operation in Rafah and believes negotiations in Cairo are the best way to reach a cease-fire.
"We continue to believe that a hostage deal is in the best interests of the Israeli people," Miller said. "It’s in the best interest of the Paleostinian people and it would bring increased movement of humanitarian assistance and so we’re going to continue to work to try to reach one."
Hamas’ announcement triggered celebrations across Gaza, where Paleostinians cheered and chanted "Allahu Akbar" in the streets.
Israel has repeatedly rejected any cease-fire deal that calls for an end to the war, with Netanyahu saying that the conflict will only end once Hamas has been eradicated and Gaza proves to no longer be a threat to the Jewish State.
Thousands of Paleostinians are fleeing parts of Rafah after Israel issued warnings it was planning to start military action.
Prior to the Israeli military’s attack on Hamas position in Gaza, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned that a battle in southern Gaza’s most populous city would quickly become a humanitarian nightmare.
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05/07/2024 00:00 ||
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Who's in the News
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Govt of Sudan
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Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
...the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
