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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem on December 9, 2024 [MAYA ALLERUZZO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected leader of the right-wing Likud Party on Thursday, with the premier nominated as the party’s candidate in the upcoming legislative elections, Anadolu reports.
According to Israeli Channel 14, Netanyahu was re-elected unopposed during a meeting of the party’s Election and Oversight Committee in Tel Aviv.
Under the party’s bylaws, a candidate is automatically elected when only one nomination is submitted, without the need for a vote.
Israel’s upcoming elections are scheduled for Oct. 27, 2026.
Netanyahu has led multiple Israeli governments since first taking office in 1996.
Thursday’s decision signals Netanyahu’s intention to run again despite the ongoing corruption charges against him.
Israeli law does not require him to resign unless convicted by the Supreme Court.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Smoke billows from the area following Israeli attacks on the town of Tayr Dibba in the southern Lebanese province of Tyre, Lebanon, on November 6, 2025. [Houssam Shbaro – Anadolu Agency]
The Israeli army launched a series of airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Thursday evening, shortly after warning residents to evacuate, despite a ceasefire agreement in place since November 2024, Anadolu reports.
Israeli fighter jets struck a building in Tayr Debba in the Tyre district, and another in Al-Taybeh in the Marjayoun district. Airstrikes also targeted a building in Aita al-Jabal in Bint Jbeil, and another in Zoutar al-Sharqiya in Nabatieh, the Lebanese news agency NNA reported.
No information was yet available about casualties.
Footage obtained by Anadolu and shared on social media showed powerful explosions and rising flames, and smoke following the strikes in the three towns.
According to NNA, Israeli drones flew at very low altitude over the capital, Beirut, and its southern suburbs.
The attacks came after the Israeli army ordered Lebanese residents in the three towns to evacuate before the attacks.
The army claimed that the strikes aimed to thwart Hezbollah’s attempts to rebuild its capabilities in Aita al-Jabal, al-Taybeh, and Tayr Debba.
There was no comment from Hezbollah on the Israeli attacks.
Tensions have been mounting in southern Lebanon for weeks, with the Israeli army intensifying near-daily air raids inside Lebanese territory despite the ceasefire, under the pretext of targeting Hezbollah members and infrastructure.
Israeli Channel 12 reported on Thursday that Tel Aviv is preparing for another possible round of fighting with Hezbollah.
The Israeli army has killed more than 4,000 people and injured nearly 17,000 in its attacks on Lebanon, which began in October 2023 and turned into a full-scale offensive in September 2024.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
In an age of resurgent fascism, the left can fight back and win
Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the contest for the New York mayoralty is a historic moment. He has crushed Andrew Cuomo – but more importantly, the brand of politics that the Democratic Party establishment represents.
He now has the opportunity to ensure that it is the US left which assumes the leadership of the movement against Trumpism.
He has won over half the vote, defying the opinion polls, and he is the first mayoral candidate to win over a million votes since John Lindsay in 1969.
The socialist left – the authentic, real deal, unapologetic, loud and proud socialist left – will now take power in New York City, the biggest and important city in the United States. In age of darkness, one of the great centres of the Western world has elected a socialist who stands against capitalism, against racism, against genocide.
This is a historic moment – and the consequences will reverberate not just around the United States, but across the Western world and indeed beyond. There are so many lessons that we must now learn so that what is today triumphed in New York will tomorrow take power at national level across the West – and drive back the rising tide of fascism.
Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and US President Donald Trump. Photos via X
“We know the heart and intent of Trump is to help us fight insecurity,” states the spokesperson of Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, who has time and again demonstrated his loyalty to the West.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to go “guns-a-blazing” into Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, which he denigrated as a “disgraced country”. In a social media post on Saturday, November 1, he declared, “I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet.”
“Yes sir,” War Secretary Pete Hegseth replied to his post. “The Department of War is preparing for action.”
Why? Ostensibly to “wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities” against “our CHERISHED Christians”. For over two months, the US right wing has been peddling a conspiracy about a “genocide” against Christians in Nigeria.
Championing this false claim, Senator Ted Cruz has proposed the so-called “Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act” to use “powerful sanctions and other tools” against Nigerian officials he accuses of “ignoring and even facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist jihadists.”
Myth of Christian genocide
Facts, however, contradict this accusation. The majority of people killed by the Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province are Muslims, simply because they make up the majority in the northern region these Islamist insurgencies are ravaging. For the same demographic reasons, Muslims are also the majority victims of bandits who kill, loot, and kidnap in the northwest region, where the state is struggling to enforce the rule of law.
In the central region, Christian victims of violence are in the majority, not because of their religious identity but because of their occupation: farming. Amid intensifying competition over depleting land and water due to climate change, raids on farmlands by mobile herders, groups of whom are armed, are a serious problem in several African countries suffering desertification.
90% of these herders are Muslims, while in this region of Nigeria, farmers are predominantly Christian. But the violence is over resources, not faith. There is no evidence of a systematic and large-scale, religiously motivated targeting of Christians in Nigeria, where they are almost equal to Muslims in population.
“While Christians make up roughly 50% of the population, violence in which Christians have been specifically targeted in relation to their religious identity accounts for only 5% of reported civilian targeting events,” the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reported in mid-2022.
Trump’s own envoy for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, had pointed out at a summit last month in Italy to discuss counter-terrorism in West Africa that Boko Haram has killed more Muslims than Christians. Facts notwithstanding, “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” Trump insisted.
“Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter,” he claimed, announcing on Friday, October 31, his decision to designate Nigeria a “country of particular concern” for systematic violation of religious freedoms.
“The characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it recognize government efforts to safeguard freedom of religion and belief,” replied Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, a Muslim, married to a Christian Pastor.
A secular suffering
Under his secular regime, Christians, Muslims, and non-believers have all suffered alike, from hunger, unaffordability, unemployment, etc, as a consequence of his aggressive implementation of the IMF-World Bank prescribed reforms.
This crisis has enhanced the fertility of the ground for terror groups, bandits, and other criminal gangs to harvest more recruits, especially in the hinterlands and remote areas the state is struggling to police.
While struggling to restore security in these regions, Tinubu tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to lead the Nigerian military into a war with neighboring Niger at the behest of US ally France after its neocolonial puppet regime in Niger was ousted in mid-2023.
A year later, he unleashed his security forces on the domestic front to crush the “hunger protests” demanding a reversal of the IMF-World Bank prescribed liberalization, killing at least two dozen people. Another 1,200 protesters were arrested, many of whom were tortured in custody. Several, including minors, faced charges of treason.
Later in November, allegations of treason were leveled against Tinubu himself when the CIA objected to the release of the unredacted files of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) investigation into Tinubu in the early 1990s. Accused of laundering money for a major heroin racket in Chicago at the time, Tinubu entered into a plea bargain to avoid a trial, forfeiting USD 460,000 to US authorities.
Tinubu’s loyalty to the West, unrewarded
In response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the release of unredacted files of the investigation, “We oppose the full… release of the DEA’s Bola Tinubu heroin trafficking investigation records,” the DEA insisted. “While Nigerians have a right to be informed about what their government is up to, they do not have a right to know what their president is up to.”
Reminding that its activities are “carried out through clandestine means, and therefore they must remain secret,” the CIA objected to full release as it could “cause damage to US national security by indicating whether or not the CIA maintained any human intelligence sources related to Tinubu.”
“The CIA effectively confirmed that Nigeria’s sitting president is an active CIA asset,” remarked David Hundeyin, author of the documentary “Bola Ahmed Tinubu: From Drug Lord to Presidential Candidate.”
From his alleged contribution to US intelligence, his readiness to hurl Nigeria into war with a neighbor for France, his obedient implementation of IMF-World Bank diktats, and ruthless crushing of protests against it – Tinubu has time and again demonstrated his loyalty to the West.
But Trump is not placated. Ordering the Department of War to prepare for a military action, Trump doubled down on Sunday, adding that both airstrikes and boots on the ground were open options.
Groveling again
“Nigeria is US’s partner in the global fight against terrorism,” said Tinubu’s spokesperson, Daniel Bwala. “We know the heart and intent of Trump is to help us fight insecurity,” he groveled. “We do not see (Trump’s threat) in the literal sense… We know that Donald Trump has his own style of communication.” It was, he suggested, Trump’s way to “force a sit-down between the two leaders so they can iron out a common front to fight their insecurity”.
But he is confident that when Tinubu and Trump meet, “there will be better outcomes.” Will these “outcomes” from the suggested meeting include Tinubu’s walking back on his refusal to accept foreign nationals deported by the US? Will he throw open Nigeria’s vast critical mineral deposits for US extraction, which the establishment think tank, Brookings Institution, deems “a win-win policy”?
US nuclear test “Baker Shot” in 1946. Photo: US Dept of Defense
As a justification for his order to resume US nuclear tests, order to resume US nuclear tests, had claimed on Sunday that China, Russia, and Pakistan, among others, have been conducting secret nuclear tests.
China rejected accusations lodged by US President Donald Trump that it was conducting secret nuclear testing, asserting that China abides by its obligations to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and advised the US to adhere to the same.
Addressing a regular press conference on Monday, Mao Ning, spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserted that as “a responsible nuclear-weapon state, China is committed to peaceful development, follows a policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and a nuclear strategy that focuses on self-defense, and adheres to its nuclear testing moratorium.”
In an interview broadcasted on CBS News on Sunday, Trump had claimed that he ordered the immediate resumption of nuclear tests in the country because other countries are already conducting tests, which may compromise Washington’s superiority in terms of nuclear weapons.
In a surprising move on Thursday, before meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Trump asked the Pentagon, through his social media page, to resume nuclear tests immediately.
Trump accused Russia, China, and Pakistan, along with North Korea of conducting such nuclear tests without providing any evidence. He also claimed that it is difficult to know about these tests because of the “closed” nature of those societies.
“We are going to test, because they [China and Russia] test and others test,” Trump said during the CBS News interview.
Following China, several other countries have also rejected Trump’s accusation, denying they have conducted tests secretly.
Kremlin spokesperson Demitry Peskov was quoted by Reuters saying that the world came to know about nuclear testing only after Trump’s interview. Before “we didn’t know that anyone was testing,” Peskov said.
Pakistan said on Monday it will not be the first to resume nuclear weapons’ tests in South Asia.
Ning appealed to the US to abide by the moratorium on the nuclear tests and “take concrete actions to uphold the international nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime, as well as global strategic balance and stability.”
Fear of proliferation
Reacting to Trump’s call for the resumption of nuclear tests, Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said in a statement on Thursday that “any explosive nuclear weapons test by any state would be harmful and destabilizing for global non-proliferation efforts and for international peace and security.”
He appealed to world leaders to work together for a world free of nuclear weapons.
China, according to Ning, is “ready to work with all parties to jointly uphold the authority” of the CTBT and “safeguard the international nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime.”
Responding to Trump’s announcement of the resumption of nuclear tests, Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s security council, told the press on Friday that if the US resumes testing Russia will do the same.
The CTBT was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996. The treaty bans all kinds of nuclear tests for either civilian or military purposes.
It has been signed and ratified by over 178 countries in the world. However, a section of the nuclear powered nations, such as India, Pakistan, and Israel, have neither signed nor ratified the treaty.
Though both China and the US have signed the treaty neither of them have ratified it.
However, the moratorium on nuclear tests has lasted more than two decades now. Except for North Korea, no other nuclear power has conducted weapons’ tests since the 1990s.
According to Reuters, the last US nuclear test was conducted in 1992. After that a moratorium on such tests was announced by then-president George H. W. Bush. Russia and China conducted their last tests in 1990 and 1996 respectively. India and Pakistan conducted their last nuclear tests in 1998.
