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Israel

How ISIS And Iran Are Keeping Israel's Borders Quiet

Turns in the war in Syria, as well as shifting resources and alliances across the Muslim world, mean tensions are easing between Israel and both Hamas and Hezbollah.

All quiet on the Rafah crossing too
All quiet on the Rafah crossing too
Daniel Rubinstein

TEL AVIV — Things may become quieter on the Israeli border for some time to come, as the Syrian conflict has sapped and redirected the money, troops and attention of two of Israel's biggest nemeses.

The Islamist terror group Hezbollah has no intention or capacity to start a long-term armed conflict in Israel because the organization's first priority is to bolster President Bashar al-Assad's control over Syria.

For this, Hezbollah receives military and financial supplies from Iran. But Iranian stocks are running low because of the dramatic drop in oil prices and because of the other fronts Iran has in Yemen and at the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Hezbollah's other priority is the war with ISIS, which has sent affiliates to Lebanon and to other Islamic extremist groups that are fighting Assad.

Furthermore, broad changes in American and Western policies towards Assad's regime are changing the landscape. If it was obvious during the past few years that Americans were funding the rebels fighting to overthrow Assad, it's not so clear anymore.

This policy shift happened after the beheading executions by so-called Jihadi John of ISIS. Additionally, if the choice were between ISIS and Assad, there is little doubt most everybody would support Assad — and not just Russia, which has supported the Syrian leader from the beginning.

In other words, the deteriorating situation on the northern Israeli border is temporary. Opponents of Hezbollah in Lebanon, such as the Christian and Druze leaders, have already said they will not let the organization drag Lebanon into a war and financial catastrophe as it has in past years. The United States would probably try to block the Israeli government if it struck Hezbollah, Assad's biggest defenders, too hard.

It's quiet, even in Gaza

Gaza's border is also unlikely to become heated militarily, and for the same reasons: the loss of political and financial support for the Hamas regime. In the past, Hamas had a long list of supporters who gave the Islamic regime in Gaza money and weapons.

Among them were Syria, Iran, Egypt (then under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood) and until recently Qatar. All of these have almost completely cut off their support, and Hamas was left with only Turkey, which provides limited aid.

Gaza's restoration is taking time because the money isn't arriving, and bureaucratic blocks from Israel are making progress difficult. According to an Israeli organization, just 4% of the building materials that were supposed to enter Gaza in the last four months have indeed made it.

What also weighs heavily on Gaza's economy is the continuous rivalry between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas leadership in Gaza, since most of the 40,000 Hamas officials haven't received their salaries for the past 10 months. Hamas demands their payments from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who says he has no money because Israel has frozen tax payment transfers collected from Palestinians.

Like in the north, Hamas can't allow itself to reopen an armed conflict with Israel. It has neither money nor political support.

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Society

Big Brother For The People: India's CCTV Strategy For Cracking Down On Police Abuse

"There is nothing fashionable about installing so many cameras in and outside one’s house," says a lawyer from a Muslim community. And yet, doing this has helped members of the community prove unfair police action against them.

A woman is walking in the distance while a person holds a military-style gun close up

Survellance and tight security at the Lal Chowk area in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India on October 4, 2022

Sukanya Shantha

MUMBAI — When sleuths of the National Investigating Agency suddenly descended on human rights defender and school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s house on October 11, he knew exactly what he needed to do next.

He had been monitoring the three CCTVs that are installed on the front and the rear of his house — a chawl in Vikhroli, a densely populated area in suburban Mumbai. The cameras told him that a group of men and women — some dressed in Mumbai police’s uniform and a few in civil clothes — had converged outside his house. Some of them were armed and few others with batons were aggressively banging at the door asking him to immediately let them in.

This was not the first time that the police had landed at his place at 5 am.

When the policemen discovered the CCTV cameras outside his house, they began hitting it with their batons, destroying one of them mounted right over the door. This action was captured by the adjacent CCTV camera. Shaikh, holed up in his house with his wife and two children, kept pleading with the police to stop destroying his property and simply show them an official notice.

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