World roundup: October 17 2023

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Venezuela, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

October 17, 1437: The Battle of Tangier ends

October 17, 1973: OPEC imposes an oil embargo against countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War—Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The embargo immediately caused a spike in oil prices and contributed to shortages that led to gasoline rationing in the targeted countries. It notably did not cause any of the targeted countries to change policy.

INTERNATIONAL

New research from Norway’s Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO) says that planetary carbon dioxide emissions are on pace to increase by 1 percent over last year, which would make 2023 humanity’s highest emitting year on record. Congratulations to everyone involved. In order to mitigate the effects of climate change we should actually be reducing our annual emissions by somewhere on the order of 5 percent so, hey, maybe those congratulations aren’t in order after all.

One big problem here, according to the International Energy Agency, is that governments aren’t making the kinds of investments in modernizing their electrical grids that would be necessary to support shifting away from fossil fuels toward more renewable sources. Indeed, the development of renewable energy technologies is apparently proceeding much more rapidly than the development of the infrastructure that would allow those technologies to make a difference.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Somebody destroyed Gaza City’s al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital on Tuesday, killing at least 300 and perhaps 500 or more people according to various accounts from Gazan officials. The facility was filled not only with patients and medical personnel but also with people seeking shelter from the incessant Israeli bombardment of Gaza, people who must have assumed—mistakenly, as it turns out—that a hospital would not be targeted. The most obvious scenario that the Israelis struck the hospital as part of that bombardment. However, I should say here that the Israeli military is disavowing responsibility for this incident and is claiming instead that an errant or intercepted militant rocket destroyed the hospital. This is within the realm of possibility, though this scenario raises a lot of questions, for example whether an entire hospital could be leveled by a single rocket—particularly one that struck it accidentally after falling out of the sky.

It might also be worth noting that the Israeli military apparently struck this same facility a couple of days ago. And that this is not the only hospital the Israelis have attacked over the past 11 days. For full context, anyway.

Elsewhere, the Israeli military earlier in the day bombed a Gazan school, killing at least six people. If schools are legitimate targets it’s not that big a leap to attacking hospitals too. Then there were the 70 or so people killed overnight in Israeli airstrikes on residential areas of southern Gaza—which if you recall is where Israeli officials have been telling residents of northern Gaza to go. The bombing in that region has been so intense, and conditions so dire, that many of those who evacuated have reportedly decided to return to their homes in northern Gaza despite the previous evacuation warning. Those of you who want to go further back may recall that Israeli officials blamed Palestinian gunmen for the murder of reporter Shireen Abu Akleh last year, a claim that turned out to be…oh, let’s say “slightly mistaken.” I guess what I’m saying here is that the Israeli military hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt with respect to the hospital incident. But I digress.

Tuesday’s violence takes the cumulative death toll over 11 days of Israeli attacks well over 3000, with 10,000 or more believed wounded and hundreds feared dead and buried under rubble. Among Tuesday’s casualties was another senior Hamas leader, Ayman Nofal, killed in another Israeli bombardment of Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp that according to the AP caused “dozens of casualties.” All of this violence has somewhat obscured the critical issue of humanitarian relief, which had been getting a great deal of attention over the past couple of days. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell there’s nothing new to report on that front. Aid still remains stuck in Sinai as the Israeli government refuses to allow it to pass into Gaza via the Rafah checkpoint.

Looming in the background is the anticipated Israeli ground invasion, and more to the point when—or maybe it’s better to ask “if” at this point—it’s going to begin. Israeli officials have gone from giving northern Gazan residents 24 hours to evacuate south last Thursday night to advising them to move urgently but without a deadline to…well, nobody seems to know anymore. It seems unlikely that they’ll kick things off while Joe Biden is in the region, and that pushes things back at least a few more days. I’ve seen various theories to explain these continued delays, ranging from unfavorable weather to a lack of trust in Israeli ground forces to get the job done, but I think one way to interpret this is that Israeli officials just don’t know what to do. World reaction has quickly shifted from near total revulsion at those militant attacks on October 7 to unease (at least) about the carnage in Gaza, and if it turns out that Israeli fire was responsible for the hospital strike that’s only going to heighten that unease. Maybe that, along with shock over the security failures that enabled those initial attacks, has Israeli leaders second guessing themselves.

In other items:

• In what is very much a developing story, news of the hospital blast has sparked large, spontaneous protests all over the Middle East and North Africa. Demonstrations have been reported in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Libya, and Morocco, and I’m probably missing a few places in that list. I can’t say much more because these protests are going on as I write but there may be more details to be had tomorrow.

A massive protest late Tuesday outside the Israeli embassy in Amman, Jordan (Laith Al-jnaidi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

• Biden supporters are still insisting that his public indulgence of Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza is part of a strategy whereby in private he and his administration are leaning on Israeli officials to restrain their response and protect civilians. There’s no outward evidence that they’re doing this or, if they are, that it’s working. The death toll continues to rise and there’s still no humanitarian aid in the offing, for example. If the ground invasion never materializes then private US pressure could be part of the reason why. That’s a big “if,” though. And I think this analysis misses the fact that what the US president says and does publicly matters, even if he “doesn’t really mean it.”

• Of course, the “Biden is trying to deescalate in private” folks need to reckon with the administration’s public moves, such as its decision to put some 2000 US military personnel on alert for possible deployment to the Middle East in support of an Israeli ground operation. If the Biden administration doesn’t support that ground operation this is a strange way of showing it.

• According to The New York Times, US officials have employed the Qatari government as a go between to try to secure the release of the scores of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. There may be some feeling that a hostage release could be one path toward deescalation, but on the other hand the presence of those hostages in Gaza may be one factor causing Israeli leaders to hedge on the idea of sending in The Troops.

• According to Local Call, Israeli authorities are cracking down against media outlets and individuals critical of the war. Some of this has entailed professional consequences—students being suspended, people getting fired from their jobs—but increasingly things seem to be turning toward criminalizing dissent and focusing particularly on Arab Israelis. People who called the October 7 attacks “Israel’s 9/11” may have been correct in this regard, at least.

• Electronic Intifada has salvaged an interview that was apparently scrubbed from Israeli radio and in which a survivor of one of the October 7 attacks, specifically the Kibbutz Be’eri attack, claims that at least some of the hostages taken there were killed by Israeli security forces, not militants, after they arrived and apparently began shooting at everything. I hesitate to make too much of this except to note that the Israeli government is going to have a long and probably uncomfortable investigation ahead of it once this crisis has subsided.

LEBANON

Hezbollah announced on Tuesday that Israeli forces killed at least five of the group’s fighters in another exchange of cross-border fire. Hezbollah members fired anti-tank missiles into Israel that wounded three people and prompted retaliatory fire from the Israelis. Israeli authorities say their forces killed four militants allegedly attempting to enter Israel from Lebanon—it’s unclear whether those casualties are in addition to the five Hezbollah fighters.

JORDAN

Jordanian King Abdullah II was preparing to host Biden on Wednesday for a summit focused on Gaza and the broader state of the Israel-Palestine conflict. That meeting has now been canceled, I believe because of the hospital attack. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas were also supposed to attend—Abbas specifically seems to have pulled out of the summit over the hospital situation. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that events in Gaza are damaging US relationships elsewhere in the Middle East. Now the part of Biden’s trip that was supposed to demonstrate some consideration for those relationships has been canceled and so the unambiguous impression conveyed will be that Biden is cheering on the destruction in Gaza. That’s not a great look.

IRAN

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lambasted Israeli actions in Gaza in a speech on Tuesday that was reported by Iranian state media. I mention this because Khamenei’s comments were, at least on paper, substantially less inflammatory than some of the things his foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, has been saying in recent days. Khamenei did say that “we must react to what is happening in Gaza,” but compared to the FM’s invocation of a preemptive attack against Israel that’s positively pacifistic. Khamenei is of course the ultimate authority on Iranian foreign policy so his words are (probably) more relevant than Amir-Abdollahian’s.

ASIA

INDONESIA

The Indonesian Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that the minimum age for Indonesian presidential and vice presidential candidates should not be lowered from 40 to 35…except if the candidate in question happens to have already been elected to office at a regional level. Which—hey, what a coincidence this is—means that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s son, Surakarta Mayor Gibran Rakabuming Raka, will be able to run in next year’s presidential election even though he’s just 36. It seems that perennial candidate Prabowo Subianto, currently serving as Indonesia’s defense minister, is thinking about making Gibran his running mate to try to capture some of that Jokowi magic that was too much for him to overcome in the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections.

CHINA

The Biden administration on Tuesday tightened its export controls to block high tech AI chips from getting to China. The new rules expand on the types of chips that cannot be shipped to China and also bar their export to other countries, including Iran and Russia, where there are substantial risks that they’ll be re-exported on to China. They also add two Chinese chip manufacturers to the existing US sanctions list. The administration continues to characterize these restrictions as national security measures rather than purely economic ones.

AFRICA

NIGER

Niger’s ruling junta said on Tuesday that its military killed at least 31 “terrorists” in a clash in the Tillabéri region that took place overnight Sunday into Monday. At least six Nigerien soldiers were also killed.

UGANDA

Ugandan authorities believe that Allied Democratic Forces fighters were responsible for killing two tourists and a local guide in the Queen Elizabeth National Park on Tuesday. One of the tourists was British and the other South African. The ADF began as a Ugandan rebel alliance in the 1990s, and while it largely shifted operations to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo a few years later it still carries out occasional attacks in its original home.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

The lower house of the Russian Duma, the Federal Assembly, voted unanimously on Tuesday to initiate the process of revoking ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Russian President Vladimir Putin floated this idea earlier this month so this comes as no surprise. There’s no indication that Putin is planning to conduct any nuclear tests in the near future but he does want to put Russia on the same footing as the United States, which never ratified the treaty in the first place.

UKRAINE

The Ukrainian military carried out overnight attacks against Russian airfields in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts using, for the first time, the US-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). This is a long range munition used in concert with the rocket launch platforms the US has previously supplied to Ukraine. The Biden administration only recently relented to Ukrainian requests and began shipping the weapon, after holding out for several months over concerns that they could be used to attack targets inside Russia. The ATACMS has a maximum range of some 300 kilometers, but the ones the US is sending to Ukraine are reportedly capped at around 100 miles or 160 kilometers. The strikes did reportedly cause some damage to Russian aircraft (possibly a significant amount of damage) but I have not heard anything regarding casualties.

Elsewhere, amid reports that the Russian assault on Avdiivka has been flagging in recent days, there are indications that Russian commanders are moving additional resources to that city. Apparently it remains an active target for them.

BELGIUM

Belgian police have shot and killed the man who allegedly gunned down two Swedish nationals in Brussels late Monday. The suspect in this case apparently declared allegiance to Islamic State in a video, just like the suspect in last Friday’s knife attack in northern France. That latter attacker also apparently mentioned the war in Gaza, but these incidents taken together seem to suggest that IS-inspired “lone wolf” violence is now back on the proverbial menu in Europe. The fact that the Belgian shooter specifically targeted Swedes also suggests a connection to the multiple Quran burnings that took place in that country earlier this year.

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

Representatives of the Venezuelan government and its political opposition met in Barbados on Tuesday to, as expected, sign a deal promising a “free and fair” election next year. Under this agreement, opposition politicians who have been banned from running for public office may be able to get those bans repealed, though there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism for accomplishing that as yet and the government and opposition parties seem to have conflicting interpretations on this point. The parties also agreed in principle to undertake efforts to update Venezuelan voter rolls and to ensure that all candidates have media access. There is a bigger deal in place here that will see the US relax Venezuelan oil sanctions in exchange for electoral reforms, but that will likely depend on how Tuesday’s deal is implemented.

GUATEMALA

At least one person was killed and four more wounded late Monday during a protest in support of President-elect Bernardo Arévalo in the western Guatemalan town of Malacatán. It is unclear whether police were responsible for the shooting. Interior Minister David Barrientos, who oversees Guatemala’s national police force, resigned in the wake of the incident, though it does not appear that he resigned because of it. In a letter submitted to President Alejandro Giammattei, Barrientos mentioned the “complexity of the current situation that the country finds itself in,” which seemingly refers to his own unwillingness to order police to crack down violently against protesters even as other Guatemalan officials, chiefly Attorney-General María Consuelo Porras, are pressuring him to do just that. Porras called earlier in the day for Giammettei to fire Barrientos over the issue.

MEXICO

According to The Wall Street Journal, higher ups in Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel are advising their rank and file to get out of the fentanyl business:

The Sinaloa cartel, the leading exporter of fentanyl to the U.S., is prohibiting the production and trafficking of the illegal opioid in its territory after coming under increasing pressure from U.S. law enforcement, cartel members say. 

The order comes from the “Chapitos,” the group led by the four sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who transformed the Sinaloa cartel into a global empire managing the supply of narcotics, from Mexican heroin to Colombian cocaine and fentanyl made with precursors from Asia. 

The directive from the most powerful faction within the criminal group aims to evade pressure from U.S. law enforcement, operatives say, though some U.S. officials are skeptical that the ban will endure.

It remains to be seen whether this is a PR gambit to redirect US attention elsewhere or a genuine policy change. If it’s the latter, the cartel will presumably shift its fentanyl resources toward its other trafficking operations.

UNITED STATES

Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Paul Pillar questions the Biden administration’s public commitment to backing Israel’s war in Gaza no matter what:

The administration should think carefully about how U.S. interests differ from Israeli interests and objectives. Israel violently exacting revenge in this case is not a U.S. interest. Given that the foremost responsibility of a government is ensuring the safety and security of its own citizens, one of the important U.S. interests at stake concerns how some of those citizens may have become hostages in the Gaza Strip and will be greatly endangered by escalated Israeli military attacks.

In addition to Americans among the hostages Hamas seized, an estimated 500 to 600 other U.S. citizens — mostly Palestinian Americans — are in the Gaza Strip. They are hostages, too — trapped there after the Israeli shutdown of all movement in and out of the territory, and in serious danger of becoming casualties of Israeli air or ground operations. One of those Americans, a woman whose home is Salt Lake City and currently is stuck in Gaza with her family, said, “I feel like I’ve been abandoned by my country. We’re American citizens and we’re not being treated as American citizens.”

Another U.S. interest is preventing the current warfare to spread regionally. The more that the fighting involving Israelis and Gazans escalates, the greater is the danger of such spread, even though other actors in the region are not seeking a wider war. Those in the U.S. who habitually try to stir up conflict with Iran are using the current crisis to do more stirring. This is despite the fact that no evidence has emerged of any direct Iranian role in the Hamas attack — as attested to most convincingly by official Israeli spokespeople, given that the Israeli government usually is eager to implicate Iran in anything condemnable. Press reports citing sources within the U.S. government indicate that Iranian government officials were surprised by Hamas’s action.

The Biden administration nonetheless has foolishly picked this moment to draw Iran into the Gaza crisis in a way by reneging at least temporarily on its commitment, under a recent prisoner swap deal that freed five imprisoned Americans, to permit some frozen Iranian assets to be used for humanitarian purposes inside Iran. Accusations by opponents of the administration that this money had some connection, however indirect, with Hamas military operations are patently false, given that none of the money involved had yet been expensed. The administration’s move will further damage U.S. credibility regarding a willingness to make good on commitments, thereby making it more difficult for the U.S. to reach beneficial agreements with any other government, not just Iran.