28 civilians were injured during clashes at the entrance to the town of Beita, south of Nablus

 

Wafa - At least 28 civilians were injured by tear gas inhalation, during clashes that erupted with the occupation forces, this evening, Tuesday, at the entrance to the town of Beita, south of Nablus.

The director of ambulance and emergency at the Palestinian Red Crescent in Nablus, Ahmed Jibril, told "Wafa" that the teams provided field treatment to 28 citizens, who suffocated with tear gas, during the confrontations with the young men who went out to confront the settlers' march, indicating that the confrontations are still continuing.

The citizens went out to the entrance to the town to confront the settlers' attacks on the town, and lit the rubber tires. The occupation forces suppressed the civilians by firing stun grenades and tear gas.

The official in charge of the settlement file in the northern West Bank, Ghassan Daghlas, said that the citizens went out to confront the marches called by the settler groups, this evening, under the title "Israel is in danger... We want the Jewishness of the state."

He added that clashes erupted at the entrance to the town of Beita between the occupation forces and the youths, amid heavy firing of tear gas and sound bombs.

He confirmed that settlers' marches started from the Za'tara military checkpoint towards the Hawara checkpoint, in addition to other gatherings at the crossroads between the governorates of Nablus, Qalqilya and Salfit.

Under cover of darkness the occupation demolishes the home of the Salihiya family in Jerusalem after the arrest of those present

Salhia family home before it was demolished

Jerusalem: The Israeli police raided, at dawn on Wednesday, the home of the Salhia family in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, and arrested those present, before demolishing the house.

Walid Tayeh, the family’s lawyer, said: “At three o’clock in the morning, large Israeli police forces stormed the Salhiya family’s house, beat some of the people there, and took them to a police station.”

He added: "About 20 people were arrested, including the owner of the house, Mahmoud Salhia, some family members and solidarity activists." He continued, "What happened is a barbaric act."

Lawyer Tayeh pointed out that the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem “demolished the house after evacuating it.”

Eyewitnesses indicated that the Israeli police used force to carry out the surprise arrest.

In turn, the Israeli police said: “In the last hours, the police helped the Jerusalem municipality implement an order to evacuate the land. The talk is about land that was confiscated by the municipality for the purpose of establishing educational institutions for the benefit of the neighborhood’s residents.”

And she added: "The day before yesterday (Monday), the evacuation of part of the land was carried out, and tonight the eviction continued, as people who had barricaded themselves in the building were evacuated illegally."

And she continued: “A part of them were arrested and referred for investigation on suspicion of violating a judicial order, violent fortification and disturbing public order,” according to the occupation police.

Salhiya had been holed up with a number of his family and friends, and Israeli and foreign leftist activists, since last Monday.

The area of ​​land owned by Salhia, on which his house was built, a nursery and a car showroom that were demolished on Monday, is about 6,000 square meters.

At that time, Salhia threatened to set himself, his family and his house on fire, if the Israeli police would evict him, which prevented the police from carrying out the eviction.

In a previous interview, Salhia said that his family has been in this house since 1948, after they were displaced during the Palestinian Nakba from the village of Ein Karem in West Jerusalem.(Anatolia)

In a repeat of the Saudi scenario, the Houthi attack on the UAE confirms the failure of Western air defense systems

The Houthi attacks against the UAE yesterday, Monday, are a relative turning point, as they were expected, but the real surprise is the failure of the UAE air defenses to intercept aircraft and missiles despite their diversity, in a repetition of the Saudi scenario.

The UAE was quick to announce that it was subjected to Houthi bombardment and provided a specific outcome of the recorded losses, with the death of three people and losses that it considered limited to industrial facilities. In this way, it is adopting a proactive media movement to withdraw the initiative from the Houthi media, and thus make the world address the losses according to the Emirati narrative. This pre-emptive technique, although it takes effect in the early hours, does not prevent the facts from emerging later, and in this case, the Associated Press published, on Tuesday, data highlighting the destruction of oil installations, while the real number of deaths is shrouded in mystery, while the Wall Street Journal spoke Journal of used quality weapons.

These attacks highlight a fact that is troubling the Gulf states as well as the United States, and it is a confirmation of the same concern since November 2017. The Houthis’ drones and winged missiles have succeeded in penetrating UAE defenses and hitting specific targets. This occurred at a time when the UAE possesses an advanced arsenal in its air defense consisting of French and American systems, and its operation is supervised by Emirati and foreign experts.

Perhaps the qualitative leap for these attacks that Abu Dhabi was subjected to is highlighted by the missiles targeting specific facilities such as the airport and the industrial area, and this means the accuracy of the targeting and not just the indiscriminate bombing towards a specific area. In addition to this, the missiles this time exceeded the medium to long range, given the distance between Yemen and the UAE.

The qualitative leap for these attacks that Abu Dhabi was subjected to stands out in the missiles targeting specific facilities such as the airport and the industrial area, and this means the accuracy of the targeting and not just the indiscriminate bombing towards a specific area.

Saudi Arabia was attacked with a ballistic missile in November 2017, and it was the first attack, then there were other attacks. And the New York Times revealed it in a report on December 4, 2017, in an article titled “Have the American Defense Systems Failed in Saudi Arabia?” There is great concern in the Pentagon because one of the most important US air defense weapons, the “Patriot system”, does not always succeed in intercepting the missiles that are considered semi-rudimentary launched by the Houthis, so what will be the case with the advanced Iranian missiles. And the Pentagon called for the need to draw lessons from this war.

The same scenario was repeated when Western defense systems, led by the United States, failed to protect Aramco's facilities in Saudi Arabia in September 2019. At that time, the American "NBC News" wrote that the American "Patriot 2" system failed to protect Saudi Arabia.

The UAE is aware of what happened to the Patriot system in Saudi Arabia, so time has accelerated to search for auxiliary systems, such as its recent consideration of buying the Israeli Iron Dome, or its signing weeks ago of a deal with South Korea to buy the MSAM anti-missile and anti-drone system, with a value exceeding 3.5 billion dollars.

The failure of Western defense systems to intercept Houthi missiles and drones, although they are not very effective compared to what Iran can possess, will undoubtedly push the Gulf states to re-think about adopting Chinese HQ 19 or Russian S-400 systems despite Washington’s opposition to acquiring countries Gulf for these weapons.

Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon control the Captagon trade in the region

Channel 4 on British television broadcast a report prepared by Lindsay Hilsum about the transformation of Syria and Lebanon into drug states.

She said that she visited a factory that uses machines to make chocolate in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, south of Lebanon, to produce "amphetamine", which is considered a drug in Britain. She said that the war in the two countries turned them into two countries for the production and export of drugs to the Gulf countries, where the pill is sold for ten dollars in Saudi Arabia to thousands of addicts, giving them ecstasy and destroying their health.

The producer, whose identity was not revealed, said that he is working in this field in order to survive and provide the basics, while senior officials in Lebanon and Syria are making billions of dollars from the Captagon trade . He said that the need is what drives him at a time when people are killing for a few dollars. "People work in prostitution, trade in drugs and hashish, kill and steal," he said. He said that crime exists in Lebanon because of corruption, and if there was no corruption, the crime would not exist.

 Helsom said that this factory is one of several existing factories in the Bekaa, whose residents have long cultivated and traded hashish, but this industry only needs a room, a machine, and chemicals that are imported legally. The Bekaa is controlled by Hezbollah, an ally of the Syrian regime, backed by Iran and part of the Lebanese government.

The journalist quoted Makram Rabah from the American University of Beirut as saying, “At the present time, Syria and Lebanon and all the countries under Iran’s control are technically drug states, which unfortunately is a fact that the Lebanese have not yet recognized and prevents recovery from economic collapse.”

Muhammad Jaafar, the head of a family in the Bekaa Valley, denies that his family has ties to drug dealers, but he admits that his armed men protect the borders, as some of his family members are linked to the trade. He said: "There are well-known merchants in the region, and they may be Zuaiter or Jaafar, and this is known in the media and abroad." He stressed that the crime had spread in Lebanon, but he blamed the prominent officials, the unjust policy, the criminal and corrupt system, and the criminal judiciary. She said that the symbol of the collapse of Lebanon and its elite is the explosion of Beirut a year and a half ago, which destroyed grain storage sheds, in which politicians allowed ammonium nitrate to be stored for six years.

Drugs became the country's main export. Last month, a shipment of oranges was intercepted and revealed to contain a shipment of Captagon pills worth $9 million. And oranges are not the only fruit through which drugs are smuggled. A shipment of pomegranates sent to Saudi Arabia was discovered containing Captagon pills, which called on Riyadh to prevent the import of all agricultural materials from Lebanon. Captagon is not manufactured in Lebanon, but rather in Syria, under Iranian influence, where it is smuggled by land to Saudi Arabia via Jordan and Turkey, and by sea via Qatar, the UAE and Libya, and small quantities are sent to Europe. In 2018, the Coast Guard stopped a Syrian-flagged ship, Noka, which was loaded with Captagon pills, on its way to the Libyan city of Benghazi. The ship came from the port of Latakia, the stronghold of Bashar al-Assad's regime. In 2020, the seized Captagon constituted one fifth of the illegal Captagon materials seized from Syria.

It is rare for Bashar al-Assad to appear on public occasions, but his tyrants are present everywhere. The army and the Fourth Division in particular, led by his brother Maher al-Assad, control the port of Latakia and the drug trade.

Today, Assad rules a devastated country in the image of an empty victory, with no allies other than Iran and Russia. And drugs are not the main source of income at a time when his people are suffering from economic conditions. But exporting it to the Gulf countries is an attempt by Assad to take revenge on these countries that supported the opposition against him at the beginning of the civil war in 2011. “Drugs became with the beginning of the civil war a means and a weapon used by the Syrian regime and Iran against Lebanon and the Gulf states, from By earning money from cheap drugs and their ability to smuggle them to the Gulf in order to obtain exorbitant money. That is why amphetamine and captagon have become synonymous with Hezbollah and the Assad regime.”

In 2020, 88 million drug pills, worth a billion dollars, were discovered in the Italian port of Salerno. The Italian police believed that the drugs were from ISIS and the jihadists who depend on drugs to finance their operations, but later discovered that the drugs came from the port of Latakia and under the protection of Hezbollah. In another incident, the Lebanese police discovered shipments that had been smuggled in coffee bags, as they were destined to pass through Jordan to Saudi Arabia. The journalist quoted Colonel Joseph Muslim of the Lebanese Internal Security as saying that the Captagon trade did not exist in Lebanon, but spread after the civil war in Syria. And traders discovered it was profitable and durable because the cannabis season was once a year.

Hilsom indicated that drug factories in the south are mobile to avoid Lebanese security, but that their supervisors and sponsors are a faction and part of the Lebanese government. Makram Rabah said that those who provide protection and control this trade are Hezbollah, Iran and its militias that provide protection and earn a lot of money from it.

On the streets of Beirut, people struggle to make ends meet amid a currency collapse and most people live in poverty. The lines between the illegal trade and the state are blurred. The Captagon trade is the result of war and corruption, and its consequences spread from the ruined port of Beirut to all parts of the Middle East.