Abbie Fielding-Smith

Well done to the amazing @ramitanavai for not giving up on the story of Gaza medics

A minister announces a policy to invade a country & change its borders by force. Countries who care about law and peace need to respond. “Smotrich went on: “I say here definitively … in every room and in every discussion, too: The new Israeli border must be the Litani [River].”

The war aim is now re-opening a strait that would not have been closed were it not for the war itself.

Israel has now blown up the main coastal bridge into the city of Tyre, further cutting off south Lebanon from the rest of the country ahead of their ground offensive.

We will quite literally all pay the price

Publication day for Blood Will Flow! A five-year investigation into the second biggest terror attack of all time, after 9/11, the effort to cover it up, and the hidden truth of the global energy business. bonnierbooks.co.uk/books/ithaka/b…

Evacuation orders means things like people being unable to go for dialysis or other such routine life-maintaining treatments, or the collapse of fragile livelihoods they spent years to build and maintain. It's lethality in a humanitarian way you don't notice on a screen.

Does it have a civilian death ticker?

"Let's redo the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, but this time with explicitly sectarian overtones" is an unbelievably stupid idea, even by the standards of American Middle East policy Also: that it's being discussed is a reminder of how Lebanon (and particularly President Aoun) has wasted time over the past 18 months reuters.com/business/aeros…

The Damascus governorate banned yesterday all restaurants in the city from selling alcoholic drinks. It also banned all liquor stores, with the exception of those located in Christian majority areas (Bab Touma, Bab Sharki, Qassaa). Practically, this means that Syria's new leaders, similarly to leaders of most Muslim-majority countries, think they need to tell their Muslim citizens how they should behave, what they should drink or not, eat or not, and, eventually, how they should be dressed. But more seriously, the decision effectively segregates between Muslims and Christians. It implies that Christians should stay in their areas and Muslims in theirs. Even during the late Ottoman period, this type of segregation was starting to disappear.

Incredible there are no serious efforts to prevent this invasion.

This needs to trigger a significant preventative response.

Lebanon is in a real catch-22. Hizbollah is too weak to deter Israel, protect its community, force a negotiated settlement, or rethink its own tactics... Yet strong enough to deter the Lebanese army from taking over, while egging on Israel and inviting ever more escalation.

I escaped from Iran. But I keep reliving the horror economist.com/interactive/18… from The Economist

“But, as you see, it's a beautiful day, the Strait of Hormuz is open and people are having a wonderful time!”

Although the new war on Lebanon may look like a continuation of its forebear in 2024, it is in fact different in many ways.🧵

My best tip for anyone trying to get back into reading is to remember that you can read books to avoid other responsibilities in your life, and it can become a vice if you play your cards right.

I don’t think unconditional surrender is imminent.

“I never thought I’d say this, but if someone from within the regime becomes a real reformer, why not? In the end, we just want peace” ft.com/content/4e048e…

This investigation from @OCCRP, published a few weeks ago, uncovered how a person running two UK-registered crypto exchanges was actually a fake front linked to laundering for Iran's regime. One of the links in the investigation relied on facial matching a cat. Brilliant.