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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to visit Israel on Monday and the United Arab Emirates a day later to discuss the recent normalization deal between the two countries. The accord, which US President Donald Trump helped broker, firms up opposition against growing regional power Iran, which Washington, Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi consider the main threat to Middle East stability and security.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s senior adviser, Jared Kushner, will be making a separate, multi-nation visit to the region in the coming days to push for a broader Arab-Israeli rapprochement. Both trips are aimed at finalizing at least one, and potentially more, peace accords in the near future.
Meanwhile, the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, reportedly met with General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, deputy head of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, although Khartoum has denied the claim. The Sudanese military is reportedly interested in strengthening ties with Israel, in part so that Washington drops the North African country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. The UAE allegedly brokered the meeting.
The Path to Peace: Pompeo, Kushner to Visit Middle East (VIDEO)
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Senior members of the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip have reportedly gone into hiding over fears that Israel could re-implement a policy of targeted killings. Gaza-based organizations have warned against the move, saying that it would be met with a massive response, including the firing of thousands of missiles at Tel Aviv.
Israel has struck Hamas targets in Gaza on an almost daily basis since August 6 in retaliation for the renewed practice by Palestinian terrorists of flying incendiary balloons across the frontier. Concurrently, rockets have been regularly fired from the enclave into the Jewish state.
It comes as Israeli officials warned of an ecological disaster in the South as sewage from Gaza spilled across the border. Sources described the occurrence as a deliberate act by Hamas following Jerusalem’s decision to restrict fuel imports into Gaza due to the escalation in violence.
Meanwhile, as Egypt has been attempting to broker a truce deal between the sides, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday deemed it fit to host a large Hamas delegation. Ankara has become one of Hamas’ biggest international backers, leading Israel to increasingly view Erdogan’s government as a threat.
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Amid a months-long standoff, UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi will on Monday make his first trip to Tehran since assuming his post in a bid to pressure the Islamic Republic to grant inspectors access to two suspected atomic sites. The International Atomic Energy Agency in June passed a resolution calling on Iran to allow monitors into the locations, where evidence of prior undeclared nuclear activity was allegedly detected.
The visit comes amid a push by the US to re-impose UN sanctions on Iran within 30 days. The move is exposing deep divisions between Washington and other members of the Security Council, some of whom remain parties to the 2015 nuclear deal from which President Donald Trump withdrew 2.5 years ago.
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Israel’s cabinet did not hold its weekly meeting on Sunday due to a coalition crisis that has brought the government to the brink of collapse. If a state budget is not passed, or an extension is not agreed to, by the end of Monday, then parliament will automatically disband and Israel will hold its fourth election in less than two years.
Ostensibly, the dispute centers on whether a state budget should be approved for 2020 and 2021, as stipulated in the coalition deal and which is Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s preferred course of action; or one that covers only the rest of 2020, which Netanyahu’s Likud party has insisted on given the economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
Netanyahu and Gantz have had numerous bitter disputes, including, most recently, over the latter having essentially been left in the dark regarding the normalization deal with the United Arab Emirates.
According to reports, Gantz fears that unless a lengthier budget is passed, Netanyahu could try and bring down the coalition at a later date but before Gantz is slated to assume the premiership in November of next year.
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The coronavirus pandemic has boosted demand in the Arab sector to serve in the IDF, with the Israeli military’s “uniformed ambassadors” project recently recording a significant rise in enrollment. The initiative, which started two years ago, has taken off over the past six months in part because of the IDF Home Front Command’s success in managing the health crisis.
The program’s trainees are for the most part aged 29-50, with many of them hailing from communities in northern Israel as well as the Arab-majority “Triangle Area” and Bedouin locals in the Negev. The latest course lasted for several weeks and included classes with senior IDF officers that were meant to familiarize Arab residents with the army and its practices..
One of the graduates of the course, Rami Haj Yahya from Taybeh, said: “I will do everything to recruit more young people… because everything that happens to us in terms of violence shows that if we do not invest in the future of the next generation… we will have nowhere to go.”
Antisemitism Watch: A disturbing new trend has emerged among users of the popular app TikTok. In a series of controversial videos, teens pretend to be Holocaust victims in heaven, applying makeup in order to look as though they suffered in Nazi concentration camps. The users act out fictionalized scenarios of what occurred to them, which often include references to Auschwitz. According to Wired, TikTok does not believe that the videos violate its guidelines as they do not contain explicit hate speech.
@tiktok_us did these girls really cosplay a holocaust victim and narrative for a tik tok.. such a callous mockery of the genocide of millions of jews and other marginalized groups, i feel sick #Holocaust #tiktok #holocaustchallenge (more to follow) pic.twitter.com/ZeDeddkRQ8
— Patricia?????? (@Mowgli_Lincoln) August 18, 2020
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Gal Gadot will soon be hitting the big screen to reprise her iconic role as Wonder Woman, with a trailer for the upcoming film having been released on Saturday during the DC FanDome event. Scenes in the clip foreshadow an inevitable clash between the heroine and numerous villains, including Cheetah, a role played by Christen Wiig. The movie was supposed to be released last fall but was pushed back until this coming October due to the COVID-19 crisis.
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