Israel will keep destroying Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says in a video statement.
“We have achieved another huge victory over Hezbollah,” he claims. “We destroyed its great terror stronghold on the Beaufort ridge and the Ali Taher ridge.”
“Our policy is clear — we will continue to destroy terror infrastructure in the security zone in Lebanon,” Netanyahu pledges. “We will continue to remove any threat to Israel.”
Turning to Israel’s foes, Netanyahu repeats his threat that, “If you haven’t learned the lesson by now, and you decide to attack us again, you will absorb even heavier blows. There is more work to complete, and with God’s help we will complete it.”
The conflict in Yemen intensified on Sunday, as government forces launched attacks against Iran-backed Houthi rebels along the Red Sea and Houthis fired into neighboring Saudi Arabia, which supports Yemen’s government.
The Yemeni government vowed to send more forces to the Red Sea coast and one official conceded a “painful” defeat last week when Houthis captured the port city of Mokha and an island on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial shipping alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.
The escalation — especially Houthi attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and its shipping in the Red Sea — adds pressure on global oil supplies and prices, and that could give Iran leverage in its war with the United States.
As Yemen risks descending into another civil war, the United Nations estimated that more than 80,000 people in the impoverished country have been displaced by the fighting since the start of September.
One woman said a mortar shell fell nearby as she fled in the middle of the night from the town of Khawkha in Hodeida province along the Red Sea, shortly before it was captured by Houthis.
“I saw with my own eyes cars and buses burning, and bodies of children and women were lying on the road in a horrific scene,” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for her and her family’s safety.
Saudi authorities sounded sirens Sunday afternoon in the southern city of Abha and Khamis Mushait province, warning residents to take shelter from potential incoming fire. Both areas were repeatedly attacked by the Houthi in recent weeks.
The Houthis claimed to have used drones and missiles to target Saudi Arabia, including a military base just over the border with Yemen. Houthi military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree didn’t provide evidence or say when the attack occurred.
The Saudi civil defense overnight said a projectile fell in a different area near the border with Yemen along the Red Sea, injuring two people and damaging a mosque and several other buildings. The statement blamed the Houthis.
Saudi Arabia did not announce any new attacks targeting the Houthis.
The Houthis are targeting Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping as part of a recently declared blockade, but they have said they do not intend to threaten other countries’ commercial shipping.
The National Resistance, a government-allied force that had controlled coastal areas, said more than 500 government fighters were killed on the west coast over the past four weeks — its first comprehensive toll.
It also said more than 1,000 Houthis had been killed in Hodeida and Taiz provinces. A spokesman for the Houthis didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Yemen is home to over 40 million people who fear a return to the civil war that began more than a decade ago and killed 150,000, bringing many others to the brink of famine. Yemen’s internationally recognized government and Saudi Arabia have been battling the Houthis for 12 years. A ceasefire that began in 2022 had mostly halted the fighting.
Sultan al-Arada, a member of the ruling presidential leadership council, described the collapse of government forces in the port city of Mokha and elsewhere on Yemen’s west coast as “painful and regrettable.” He said in the televised interview aired late Saturday that forces “are currently regrouping and will return to the battle.”
On Sunday, Rashad al-Alimi, who leads the presidential council, sought to downplay the defeats as “incidental,” according to comments published by the country’s state-run SABA news agency. The government, he said, “will remain clear and fixed on the goal of retrieving (state) institutions and of reclaiming sovereignty over all national territories.”
On Sunday, the Yemeni military said it launched airstrikes on Houthi positions in Mokha, the coastal town of Dhubab and elsewhere in Taiz province. The rebels reported strikes by the Saudi-backed forces in Taiz province and artillery shelling in Saada province, a Houthi stronghold on Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia.
The advance puts Houthis closer to a major US base in Djibouti
The Houthis’ advance puts them just 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the U.S. military base in Djibouti, on the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. It’s the main U.S. base in Africa and one of several foreign military bases in Djibouti, including those of China, France and Japan.
The small Horn of Africa nation is already seeing the arrival of displaced Yemenis making the perilous water crossing. More than 2,000 Yemenis have reached Djibouti, the International Organization for Migration said Sunday.
Djibouti’s Economy and Finance Minister Ilyas M. Dawaleh, said on X that the country’s navy, coast guard and other specialized agencies were conducting rescue operations and providing emergency assistance.
So said the British Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, during an interview with the BBC the day after he announced a package of sanctions and other punitive measures against Israel, sending relations between London and Jerusalem into a nosedive.
Miliband, who is Jewish, made this admission when the BBC presenter Justin Webb asked him whether he would be attending synagogue over Rosh Hashanah, “as many British Jews will be, many of whom will feel less safe. … What do you say to them, to individuals. Are you going?”
When Miliband responded that he wasn’t, Webb countered: “Isn’t that then the point? That actually for a lot of British Jews, they really feel this; they have to have security duties at synagogues. They know that there have been violent attacks, and that is why when [UK Chief Rabbi] Ephraim Mirvis uses those words they mean an awful lot to them and perhaps, frankly, less to you.”
The chief rabbi’s words referred to by Webb were stark, issued after Miliband laid out his plans before the House of Commons. The measures marked “truly a dark day for British Jews,” Mirvis said. Webb, who is not Jewish, clearly understands that while Miliband may be “of” the Jewish community, he is not “in” it.
Had Miliband not highlighted his Jewish origins during his parliamentary speech, there would be no need to pass judgement on this exchange. In free and democratic societies, religious observance is a private matter. Whether you attend synagogue—or church, or mosque or temple—is, or should be, entirely up to you.
However, Miliband made sure to tell his parliamentary colleagues that he is a “proud British Jew, someone with the deepest gratitude to the State of Israel for giving a home to my grandmother after she lost her husband, my grandfather, and 60 other family members at the hands of the Nazis.” He is content to invoke his Judaism when it suits him for political purposes, but as Webb demonstrated, in a country that recorded nearly 2,000 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of this year alone, Miliband is sufficiently removed from the Jewish community to have little understanding or empathy with what its members are going through.
Mirvis was correct. Miliband’s announcement was indeed a “dark day” for British Jews and for Israel as well. For all the foreign secretary’s talk of his Jewish pride, his condemnation of the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, and his insistence that the existence of the State of Israel is not up for debate, the fact remains that his package targets Israel alone.
Goods produced by Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are being banned. Companies and individuals that provide financial or other services to these communities face sanctions. Critically—and stupidly, given the United Kingdom’s extensive use of both Israeli intelligence and Israeli weapons technology—Miliband has also said that license applications for arms exports will be rejected for as long as the “occupation” lasts.
No matter the degree to which he sugarcoats his words with assurances of his personal affection for Israel and reminders of his Jewish identity, Miliband’s message to Jerusalem is an unremittingly hostile one. It is a particularly acute example of a trend visible in other Western countries, including the United States: the insertion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, uniquely among all international conflicts, into domestic politics, powered by an extremely vocal and increasingly influential foreign-backed lobby that promotes the goals of Hamas using the slogan “Free Palestine.”
That the United Kingdom should be something of a pioneer in this regard is no surprise.
Britain has had a long and often tortuous relationship with both the land of Israel and the Jewish people since the days of the Plantagenet kings. For more than a century, it has, by turns, supported the Zionist movement only to then throw obstacles in its way.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which looked “with favor” on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in mandatory Palestine, was followed in 1939 by a White Paper that severely restricted Jewish immigration into the Land of Israel on the literal eve of the Shoah. In 1956, Israel was part of a tripartite alliance with France and the UK in the botched war against Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser; by 1973, when Israel was facing land invasions by Arab armies on all of its borders, the UK was declaring an arms embargo on the Jewish state, even preventing US aircraft engaged in resupplying the Israelis from using British bases in Cyprus.
A fair-weather friend who cannot be trusted is not much of a friend. And there is another layer to this as well: As the scholar Anthony Julius pointed out in his indispensable history of English antisemitism, Trials of the Diaspora, the early British engagement with Zionism coupled with its League of Nations mandate over Palestine meant that “anti-Zionist positions tainted by antisemitism” had been established in British political discourse by the end of World War I. “In the matter of antisemitic anti-Zionism, then, England arrived first,” wrote Julius, “even though the more proximate origin of contemporary global antisemitic anti-Zionism may be found in the Soviet polemics of the post-World War II period.”
For now, only the United States stands apart from the United Kingdom and other democratic allies determined to cajole, harass and compel Israel into agreeing to a Palestinian state on its borders. That will likely cause transatlantic tensions, much as it did in the past.
In April 1946, according to US State Department records of the meeting, then-British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, like Miliband a Labour Party politician, complained to US Secretary of State James Byrnesabout American Jews financially backing the efforts of the Yishuv to create an independent Jewish state. “During the course of his remarks, Mr. Bevin asserted that the Jews through their aggressive attitude were ‘poisoning relations between our two peoples,’” the record stated.
One wonders whether Ed Miliband may find himself articulating similar sentiments to American officials in the coming weeks and months. That will depend in part on how the United States reacts to the British sanctions on Israel. Weakening our key ally in the region absolutely runs counter to American interests and should be implacably opposed.
That is the message Washington should be delivering to London and all other capitals.
