Russian troops have fully liberated Maryinka, a key town in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on Monday. The town, which is located immediately to the west of the city of Donetsk and has been part of Russia since last year's referendums, has been a major Ukrainian stronghold for years.

The minister broke the news during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Today, assault units with the troop grouping South fully liberated the town of Maryinka to the southwest of Donetsk,” Shoigu stated.

The liberation of the town opens up new opportunities for Russian troops and further damages Ukraine’s military capabilities, the minister said. The town, which has been the scene of fighting for nearly a decade since the early stages of the conflict in then-Ukrainian Donbass, had been turned into a major stronghold by Kiev’s forces, Shoigu noted. An extensive network of underground tunnels and reinforced concrete bunkers was installed on almost every street, he added.

The Russian president congratulated all the troops involved “at different stages” in the struggle for Maryinka, stating that its liberation is an important milestone that will have a positive impact – pushing Ukrainian forces away from Donetsk, as well as providing Russian troops with wider operational freedom, Putin said.

The fighting over the DPR town intensified in recent months, with Russian forces gradually seizing control of key locations. The fighting left the town heavily damaged with no structure left intact, videos from Maryinka shared online show. 

Apart from serving as a stronghold for the Ukrainian military, Maryinka has also been one of the key staging points for attacks on Donetsk itself. The city has been subjected to indiscriminate missile and artillery shelling by Ukrainian forces on an almost daily basis during the conflict.

https://www.rt.com/russia/589666-key-donbass-stronghold/

SEE (!): https://www.rt.com/russia/589669-rt-inside-liberated-maryinka/

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My main argument about the Holocaust has always been “come on, this is cartoonish evil – people don’t act like that.”

However, insofar as Jews are “people,” they are proving wrong my assumption.

The Jews are behaving in a way that is cartoonishly evil. What’s more, while they claimed the German Nazis did all that stuff in secret, the Jews are making a huge public display of this evil.

I recently heard John Mearsheimer say that the Jews have no fear of being brought before a war crimes tribunal. He said that the language being used, calling the Arabs “subhuman animals,” could be used in such a trial, but there was no chance of that happening because America and/or the Jews control these tribunals. However, I’m not really so sure that’s correct.

I think the world is still processing that this is actually happening – that we’ve spent 3 months watching the Jews murder children. However, when it sets in what has happened, I think it is going to be very easy for the rest of the world to organize against the United States, which is ultimately responsible for this situation.

I think we could live to see Jews put on trial for this.

CNN:

Israeli soldiers raiding a hospital in northern Gaza desecrated the bodies of dead patients with bulldozers, let a military dog maul a man in a wheelchair, and shot multiple doctors even after vetting them for terror links, according to allegations by staff and patients.

The claims relate to an eight-day operation by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the Kamal Adwan Hospital last week, which the military alleges was being used as a command and control center by Hamas.

Every hospital is a Hamas base.

CNN spoke to two senior medical staff, another doctor and a patient at the hospital, who provided corroborating testimonies of what happened. CNN also reviewed video evidence for some of the claims.

They paint a disturbing picture of how the IDF carried out the operation, as doctors were interrogated for their connections to Hamas and staff struggled to treat patients trapped inside.

The IDF says that Hamas hides terrorist infrastructure in and around civilian institutions in Gaza, such as hospitals, and that targeting them is essential as it works to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip. But its operations are contentious, with humanitarian organizations saying that medical facilities in Gaza are rendered unable to provide basic services.

They’ve claimed this for years, but there’s never been any evidence.

It would make sense to claim this, however, if you wanted to murder civilians on a large scale, while claiming it is a legitimate military operation.

That said, I don’t think anyone even claims this is a legitimate military operation at this point. Even the people who support it just say they support mass-murdering Arab children.

Among the most serious allegations relating to the IDF’s operations at Kamal Adwan is that, as troops were leaving the hospital complex, they used bulldozers to dig up bodies that had recently been buried in makeshift graveyards in the hospital’s courtyard.

“The soldiers dug up the graves this morning and dragged the bodies with bulldozers, then crushed the bodies with the bulldozers,” said the hospital’s head of pediatric services, Hossam Abu Safiya, in a phone interview on Saturday. “I have never seen such a thing before.”

No one has ever seen anything like that before. This is exactly the sort of thing the Jews claimed the Nazis did, and everyone laughed because it was so ridiculous.

Now, it seems, we’re seeing that the Jews were able to make up these stories about the Nazis because it’s what they would have actually done to people. This is a sort of “a-ha” moment there, perhaps.

Videos and images he shared with CNN show decomposing human remains scattered across the hospital grounds.

The allegation was supported by the hospital’s head of nursing, Eid Sabbah, and another nurse, Asmaa Tanteesh.

“The bodies outside in the courtyard were plowed in front of our eyes,” Tanteesh told CNN. “All the while, we were shouting and screaming at them, but our screams fell on deaf ears.”

Satellite imagery taken on December 15 – right before the IDF withdrew from the hospital area – shows razed grounds outside the hospital complex.

READ MORE:

https://www.unz.com/aanglin/israel-raids-hospital-shoots-doctors-bulldozes-bodies-lets-dog-maul-wheelchair-bound-man/

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Netanyahu Outsmarted by ‘Wily’ Biden? No, Biden Is the One Being Played

BY ALASTAIR CROOKE

Biden may believe that his ‘long experience’ puts him on the ‘right side’ in judging events, but his experience is drawn from another era.

Biden smirked and responded, “I know”, when told by a guest that Netanyahu is drawing the U.S. into a civilisational conflict – and further that Netanyahu blames him (Biden), complaining that the White House wants to block Israel from getting at the root of the problem, by harping on about Gaza and the ‘day after’.

In practice, what Netanyahu is doing is simply mounting a classic flanking manoeuvre – attempting to circumvent Biden by pointing to the ‘broader conflict’ with Iran: ‘Why are you pestering me about Gaza when there’s a monumental conflict raging’,suggests Bibi in exasperation?

“This is not only ‘our war’ but in many ways your war… This is a battle against the Iranian axis… now threatening to close the maritime strait of Bab Al-Mandeb… It is the interest … of the entire civilized community”, Netanyahu has said – not very subtly.

Biden’s reaction is a smug smile, hinting that he thinks he can outplay Netanyahu (‘the fox’). This is Biden’s approach: He aims to disarm Netanyahu’s allegation of an obstructionist U.S. through a parade of top-level visits that reiterates his unstinting support Israel – and to pre-empt Bibi, through insisting that he (Biden) will take care of the non-Gaza issues (Hizbullah, Yemen etc.).

So, the U.S. is assembling a maritime force to confront AnsarAllah in Yemen; the Biden Admin will act to sanction violent settlers in the West Bank; it is warning Baghdad to rein-in the Hashad al Sha’abi; and his envoys in Beirut are trying to forge a ‘diplomatic agreement’ that will include the withdrawal of Hizbullah’s Radwan Forces to the other side of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and also deal with the unresolved border disputes between Israel and Lebanon.

Biden prides himself on being a hugely experienced foreign policy actor – and thinks himself too wily for Bibi’s tricks. But maybe, Netanyahu – for all his many faults – better understands the Region?

Biden clearly is being played. Even though he fails to recognize it.

Netanyahu knows that ‘no way’ will Hizbullah disarm, and withdraw to north of the Litani. He knows this, and thus can wait out Biden’s diplomatic failure, before saying that the approximately 70,000 Israeli citizens displaced from the northern towns in the wake of 7 October need to ”go home”, and that if the U.S. cannot remove Hizbullah from the border-fence, then Israel will do it.

Netanyahu is using Biden’s diplomatic Lebanese initiative to build European justification for an Israeli operation in a few weeks’ time to push Hizbullah away from the border with Israel. (An Israeli operation against Hizbullah has been in the works from the outset of the Gaza war).

Netanyahu knows too that control over settler violence in the West Bank lies not with him, but is in the hands of his partners: i.e., Ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Neither he, nor Biden can dictate to them – they have been quietly increasing the squeeze on West Bank Palestinians for months.

And finally, Netanyahu knows the Houthis: They will not be deterred by Biden’s maritime flotilla. They will, rather, relish drawing the West into a Red Sea quagmire.

Like it or not, Biden’s tactic of containing and pre-empting regional escalation through the U.S. itself becoming lead actor – in lieu of Israel – is clearly drawing the U.S. deeper into conflict. Does Biden believe that the Houthis will just quietly ‘roll-over’ because the Gerald Ford is anchored off Bab Al-Mandeb, or that Hizbullah will accept instruction from Amos Hochstein?

The second way that Biden is being outplayed is through him seeing the Israeli problem as ‘just Bibi’ – indulging in personal politics. Of course, it is true that the Israeli PM is moulding Israeli politics to his own survival needs; yet pause a moment to consider what President Herzog said on Tuesday during an interview facilitated by the Atlantic Council, a leading Washington-based think tank.

Herzog has long been viewed as distinctly ‘dovish’ and ‘Leftist’ by the Beltway foreign policy establishment – prior to the war – compared to Netanyahu.

In the interview, Herzog said: “We intend to take over the entire Gaza Strip and change the course of history”. He said that the current conflict is a clash of “a set of civilizational values” and he cast Hamas (in pure Manichaean terms) as a “force of evil”, adding that Israel would no longer tolerate Gaza being a “platform for Iran – driving everyone into the abyss of bloodshed and warfare”.

Not much daylight then between him and the PM then.

The convergence between Herzog and Bibi reflects, perhaps, a more substantive change taking place in Israel – a strategic shift that extends far beyond Biden’s personal obsession with Bibi:

Since 7 October, the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post report that 36% of Israelis have moved decidedly to the right on a number of political issues, including support for settlers in the West Bank, endorsements for far-right politicians, and even settlements again inside the Gaza Strip. And while public opinion of Netanyahu himself is faltering, his government is not expected to fall.

And even were that to occur, the more important point to grasp is that support for the policies upheld by Netanyahu’s radical Rightist government is growing, and rapidly.

Israel’s Right generally believes in Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, with many right-wing Israelis opposed to the principle of Palestinian state existing at allalongside Israel. This can be seen in many of the current government’s policies, which have worked toward expanding Israeli settlement of the West Bank and rendering Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.

On the opposite side of the spectrum sits Israel’s Left. The Jerusalem Post notes that the Left largely believe that Israel is ‘occupying’ the West Bank, and that an end to the conflict can only be achieved by ending the occupation and enabling a two-state solution. But no one is explicit on where that second state – a Palestinian state – would be situate. Legally it would be Gaza, the West Bank and part of Jerusalem. But who could enforce that? Who would expel settlers from the West Bank?

For many Israelis, the separation ‘apartheid’ Occupation state of the past 30 years wasthe workable ‘two-state solution’ – but its pillars (structural separation, military enforcement and deterrence) which had for many Israelis seemed to promise the ‘quiet’ that many hoped for – blew apart on 7 October.

“The trauma of what happened on Oct. 7 shifted Israeli society. It made them question the most basic tenets of whether they were safe in their homes”, said Israeli columnist, Tal Schneider:

“They are calling now for more — more military, more protection, more hard-line policies”.

“Many right-wing people,” Ariella Marsden writes in the Jerusalem Post, “and a minority of left-wingers, saw 7 Oct as proof that peace with the Palestinians is impossible”. Not surprisingly, thinking has turned to population removal which chimes with Netanyahu’s ‘new war of Independence’ theme.

In short, Biden may believe that his ‘long experience’ puts him on the ‘right side’ in judging events. His experience however, is drawn from another era. The political Israel he knew is over: It has reached the end of the road in respect to the old paradigm of its Palestinian modus vivendi. Demography no longer pushes towards ‘giving’ the Palestinians a state, but rather to a clearing of the land of all ‘hostile populations’.

Israelis are rummaging now for their new solution.

And just as Hamas’ resistance has pointed to new ways of conducting warfare, so Biden’s ‘long experience’ exemplified in the sending of 1960s era carriers and vessels to sit offshore, in an age of smart nimble, often untraceable drones and pinpoint missiles, points to something also passé.

The U.S. is directly engaged today in Yemen, Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq and Syria. And as the war widens, so the U.S. will be held at least partly responsible – You deliberately let Gaza break, and what’s broken, you own. What further gets broke, you own that too.

A destitute 2 million Gazans will be all refugees with no government to provide basic functions and services. Does Netanyahu get it? Of course. Do the vast majority of Israelis care? Nope. But the rest of the world does, and sees a dark stain spreading across the map, and leeching into the West.

And does the U.S. Red Sea flotilla; does the diplomatic effort in Lebanon; do the frantic calls to China to ask for help to rein-in Iran, and the efforts in Baghdad – will this suffice to bring an end to the Axis’ plan?

No – the Resistance must see the U.S. floundering and that Israel – suffused with anger – is positively inviting the next ascent up the escalatory ladder of diffused incremental wider conflict.

https://www.unz.com/article/netanyahu-outsmarted-by-wily-biden-no-biden-is-the-one-being-played/

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