The Daily Psyop

RIYADH: The leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, has been assassinated in Iran, officials in the country have said.

Iran’s state television made the announcement of the killing early on Wednesday, and was confirmed by Hamas.

A Revolutionary Guards statement said that Haniyeh and a security guard had been ambushed in their place of residence.

The Guards said what caused the incident was not yet known, but an investigation is underway.

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A US official told Reuters that the US carried out a strike in Iraq on Tuesday just hours after Israel bombed Beirut.

The official didn’t share details about the attack, but earlier, a drone strike was reported in the Iraqi province of Babylon that hit a base housing Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of mostly Shia militias that’s part of Iraq’s security forces.

A PMF official told AFP that the base was hit by four or five missiles. An Iraqi security source confirmed that four people were killed and said the death toll was expected to rise.

The US has a history of targeting the PMF as retaliation for rocket attacks on US bases in the region. The US’s latest bombing came a few days after rockets were fired toward the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq, which houses US troops. A US base in eastern Syria was also targeted in recent days.

From October 2023 until February, US bases in Iraq and Syria came under hundreds of rocket and drone attacks. Iraqi Shia militias, which include members of the PMF, began the attacks in response to US support for the Israeli onslaught in Gaza.

After three US troops were killed in an attack on Tower 22, a secretive base in Jordan on the Syrian border, Iran and the Iraqi government pressured the militias to stop, and there have only been a handful of attacks since February.

The Iraqi government strongly opposes unilateral US strikes on the PMF since the coalition is part of its military. US attacks on the PMF led to Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani calling for a US withdrawal.

The US and Iraq have entered talks about the future of the US military presence, but no concrete plans have been announced. Statements from the US suggest the plan is to leave troops in the country after formally ending the mission of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition. The lack of progress toward a withdrawal could be why rocket attacks on US bases started up again.

As the war enters its 867th day, these are the main developments.

Thousands of Palestinians returned to areas of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Tuesday after Israeli forces withdrew from the city and left it in ruins.

Israel launched a new assault on eastern Khan Younis on July 22, marking at least the third time the Israeli military invaded the city. Gaza’s civil defense agency said about 300 bodies have been found in the area since the Israeli attack started.

“Since the beginning of the Israeli ground invasion of the eastern part of Khan Yunis province, the civil defense and medical teams have recovered approximately 300 bodies of martyrs, many of them decomposed,” civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.

Rescue teams pulled 42 of the bodies out of Bani Suhaila, a town on the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis. According to Reuters, witnesses said Israeli forces destroyed a cemetery in the neighborhood, something the Israeli military has done throughout its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Back in January, CNN reported that Israel had damaged or destroyed 16 cemeteries in Gaza. The Israeli military brought a CNN journalist to one of the cemeteries after the investigation, claiming a Hamas tunnel ran under it, but they failed to show any evidence for the claim.

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The State Department on Tuesday refused to label Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian prisoners as a war crime.

Said Arikat, a reporter for Al Quds, asked State Department spokesman Vedant Patel about the Israeli soldiers who were detained for raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility. The Palestinian was transferred to a hospital with damage to his rectum that was so severe he could not walk.

The condition of the prisoner confirms some of the worst allegations about conditions in Sde Teiman. Both Israeli whistleblowers and former Palestinian prisoners have detailed torture and widespread abuse carried out by Israeli soldiers at the facility.

“Apparently rape and killing and torture and all this thing – it happens regularly in Israeli detention camps. Does that constitute a war crime to you?” Arikat asked Patel.

Patel replied, “So the reports of abuse are deeply concerning, and we have been clear and consistent with Israel and the IDF that they need to treat all detainees humanely and with dignity in accordance with humanitarian law.” He added that the US was going to let “due process” play out in the case against the Israeli soldiers.

Arikat followed up, asking, “Now, if proven to be true, that does constitute a war crime, doesn’t it?”

Patel said, “I am not a legal expert, Said. Certainly I imagine it would be inconsistent with Israeli law.”

In contrast, the US government was quick to label Russian actions in Ukraine as war crimes, and President Biden even declared as early as March 2022, less than one month into the invasion, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”

The arrest of the Israeli soldiers suspected of rape sparked protests involving far-right activists and members of the Israeli Knesset, and one member of the coalition government. Protesters stormed Sde Teiman and one other military base in defense of the Israeli soldiers.

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