CrossFireArarbia

Chessboard Middle East

Dr Khairi Janbek
September 9, 2025

By Dr Khairi Janbek

When the British conquered the territory, they didn’t exactly know where to draw the borders of Palestine. British Prime Minister Lloyd George conferred with his French counterpart Clemenceau and suggested that the borders of Palestine be defined on biblical basis; in accordance with its ancient boundaries from “Dan to Beersheba”.

But what about the sparsely populated territory east of the River Jordan? Although in 1915 the British promised the territory to the Sharif of Mecca in the McMahon correspondence, in the early years of the British control, it remained part of Palestine, and not until 1922 did the British separate it from the rest of Palestine and named Emir Abdullah of the Hashemite dynasty as the ruler of the new country Transjordan.

Even when the borders of Palestine became clear to the British, the borders of the future Jewish National home remained open to dispute. Lord Balfour’s letter, spoke vaguely of the establishment ‘ in Palestine of a National home for the Jewish people’ he did not refer to the whole of Palestine or any specific part of it.

Among the Zionists, the borders of Palestine were just as blurred. The ideal borders, as mapped by the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Negotiations, included south Lebanon (Northern Galilee) and a stretch of land east of the River Jordan as far as the line of the Hijaz Railway.

Chaim Weizmann continued to believe that the land east of the River Jordan should be part of the Jewish National Home. Thus reiterated in his Congress speech in 1921: “The questions of borders will be answered when Cis-Jordan will be so full of Jews that we will have to expand to Transjordan.”

The right-wing Israeli revisionists continued to claim until the 1950s, the whole of Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River.

However, there was a brief glimmer of hope that an Arab-Jewish understanding might in fact be possible when Emir Faisal, later King of Iraq, and Chaim Weizemann signed an agreement in 1919, recognizing the right of the Jews to immigrate to Israel, but reality on the ground created a different set factors, when Faisal’s condition of far reaching Arab independence in the region was not fulfilled, he declared the agreement no longer valid, in any case, the agreement did not include representatives of the Palestinian Arabs.

Also in the post-World War I, another claim on Palestine was made in March 1920, when the General National Syrian Congress, declared that Palestine was nothing but the southern part of the Greater Syria State.

Dr Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris, France

News

London, Censorship and Banksy!

CrossFireArabia
September 8, 2025

A new artwork by Banksy appeared on the walls of London’s Royal Courts of Justice on Monday. It showed a judge using a gavel to beat a defenseless protester. Within hours, guards covered it up, proving Banksy’s point.

Banksy confirmed the piece was his by posting a photo on Instagram. The image quickly went viral. But at the court itself, workers and guards rushed to block the public from seeing it.

Security guards stood in front of the wall as soon as the painting appeared. Witnesses said they tried to stop people from taking photos. Later, staff arrived with materials to cover it.

The image was believed to reference the state’s response to pro-Palestine demonstrations. Police detained nearly 900 people during Saturday’s protest against the banning of the peaceful activist group Palestine Action.

Defend Our Juries, a group opposing the crackdown, linked the artwork to growing anger over censorship and arrests. A spokesperson said:

“When the law is used as a tool to crush civil liberties, it does not extinguish dissent – it strengthens it. As Banksy’s artwork shows, the state can try to strip away our civil liberties, but we are too many in number and our resolve to stand against injustice cannot be beaten.”

The protester in Banksy’s work is shown lying on the ground, holding a white placard. A red smear on the placard looks like blood. In Banksy’s Instagram post, a lawyer and a cyclist pass by the scene without noticing.

The HM Courts and Tribunals Service justified the cover-up. They said the court is a listed building. Officials are “obliged to maintain its original character.”

But critics argue that the decision was not about heritage. They say it was a political act meant to silence a powerful message.

Banksy is no stranger to political art. The anonymous artist has painted on the Israeli apartheid wall in the occupied West Bank. His works often target injustice, war, and state violence.

In May, he posted an image from Marseille of a stenciled lighthouse alongside the words: “I want to be what you saw in me.” The work was immediately vandalized.

News

Israel’s Bloody Day Revisited

CrossFireArabia
September 8, 2025

The occupation state witnessed a deadly wave of operations on Monday. Armed Palestinians, resistance fighters in Gaza, and drones from Yemen all struck Israel within hours. By the end of the day, at least 10 Israelis were killed, dozens were wounded, and the occupation state was left shaken.

Jerusalem Shooting

The bloodiest scene unfolded at a central bus station in an Israeli colonial settlement in occupied Jerusalem. Two Palestinians opened fire inside a crowded bus near Ramot settlement and in the area surrounding it.

Israeli police confirmed that six Israelis were killed and 15 others were wounded. Six remain in critical condition. Witnesses said panic spread among settlers as gunfire echoed.

Israeli Channel 12 reported that the two young men came from a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

The police said an Israeli soldier and a settler shot and killed the two young men. Still, their operation had already left deep marks inside one of the most fortified areas of the city.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza, skipped his corruption trial in Tel Aviv because of the operation. He arrived at the scene later, joined by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

The occupation forces immediately closed all entrances and exits of the occupied Palestinian capital city. A heavy security cordon surrounded Jerusalem. The police also searched for explosives after finding a suspicious object near the site of the operation.

Hours later, Israeli forces raided the homes of the executors. They kidnapped the father and brother of one of them. The Shin Bet intelligence agency also detained a young man from Jerusalem, accusing him of helping the gunmen reach the city.

Israeli ministers competed to call for harsh retaliation. Energy Minister Eli Cohen demanded the expulsion of families of Palestinians who carry out resistance operations. Defense Minister Yisrael Katz vowed to crush resistance in West Bank refugee camps just as the army has done in Jenin.

Israeli media reported that among the dead was a rabbi from the illegal settlement of Ramot.

The operation near Ramot settlement carries symbolic weight. Ramot is one of the largest settlements in occupied Jerusalem. Built after the 1967 war, it sits on confiscated lands belonging to Palestinian villages including Beit Iksa, Beit Hanina, and Nabi Samwil.

Over 50,000 settlers live there today. It forms part of the northern settlement belt that cuts Palestinian towns off from Jerusalem. The international community views it as illegal under international law. Yet Israel keeps expanding it, ignoring repeated condemnations.

Gaza Front: A Tank Destroyed in Jabalia

While Jerusalem reeled, resistance in Gaza dealt another blow. In the early hours of Monday, Palestinian fighters ambushed an Israeli tank in Jabalia, north of Gaza City.

According to Israeli military radio, four soldiers were killed. Local sources said fighters detonated an explosive device under the tank, then opened fire on its crew. Flames engulfed the vehicle, leaving no survivors.

The operation came as the Israeli army continued its massive destruction campaign in Gaza. Troops bombarded neighborhoods in Gaza City, demolishing residential towers and forcing families into displacement.

Hamas’ military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, said the ambush was part of its “Moses’ Rod” operations. Over recent days, it has targeted tanks, armored carriers, and groups of soldiers in several areas, including Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood and Jabalia camp.

Islamic Jihad’s armed wing, Saraya al-Quds, also announced rocket fire on the settlement of Netivot. It said the strike came in direct response to “massacres against civilians in Gaza.”

Yemen Joins the Battlefield

The confrontation widened further south. Israeli media confirmed that drones launched from Yemen penetrated Israeli airspace.

The army said it intercepted several drones. Yet one crashed near Ramon Airport in the Negev. Alarms also sounded in Dimona, where Israel hides its nuclear reactor.

The previous day, a drone from Yemen hit Ramon Airport, damaging a passenger terminal. Yemen, declared that its attacks would continue until Israel stops its war on Gaza. They also vowed revenge for Israel’s assassination of their Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahwi in Sana’a last month according to the Quds News Network.

News

Netanyahu Boasts His Army Destroyed 50 Towers in 48 Hrs

CrossFireArabia
September 8, 2025

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted Monday that his army destroyed 50 high-rise residential buildings in Gaza City in two days, vowing further demolitions and forced displacement.

“In the past two days, 50 of these towers have fallen. The air force brought them down,” Netanyahu said in a video statement.

“Now all of this is just an introduction, just a prelude, to the main intense operation — a ground maneuver of our forces, who are now organizing and gathering in Gaza City.”

It is Israel — a state that knows nothing but the making of death and destruction. pic.twitter.com/oBnAwDZbLl
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) September 5, 2025

Netanyahu pledged to proceed with forced displacement plans. “This is just the prelude to the main powerful operation, so I tell Gaza residents: you have been warned, get out of there,” according to Anadolu.

The Palestinian resistance group Hamas denounced Netanyahu’s boasting as “one of the ugliest forms of sadism and criminality” in full view of the world.

On Friday, the Israeli army began to bomb multi-story buildings sheltering hundreds of displaced civilians in Gaza City, as Tel Aviv pressed ahead with a plan to occupy the entire city.

Israel has killed more than 64,500 Palestinians in a brutal offensive in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave and pushed the entire population into famine.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

Features

Voices From Gaza: 700 Days of ‘Hell’

CrossFireArabia
September 6, 2025

The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.

All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.

“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.

“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”

After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food, no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.

What about the handicapped

‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.

“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”

He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know.

We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.

Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare.

Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.

We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”

The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.

We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.”

Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.

Blood on the streets

“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.

It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.

In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.

Sullen future

“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.

Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.

But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.