Las noticias con La Mont, 16 de octubre de 2023

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*U.S. Response to Israel-Hamas War Draws Fury in Middle East*

The staunch support for Israel has stoked accusations of American hypocrisy, with Arab critics fearing a wholesale massacre of Palestinians in response to the deadly Hamas attack on Israel.

President Biden’s trip to Israel on Wednesday has landed him in a region where grief and fury are mounting, not only toward Israel, but also toward the United States, which has declared unyielding support for its chief Middle East ally.

On Tuesday, widespread condemnation of Israel rippled across the Arab and Muslim world after a huge blast at a hospital in the Gaza Strip killed hundreds of Palestinians who had been seeking treatment or refuge. Palestinian authorities accused Israel of striking the hospital, while Israel blamed a Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad, for an errant rocket launch.

Regardless of whatever evidence emerges, few people in the wider Middle East are likely to believe Israel’s version, as protesters took to the streets in Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen and Oman to condemn the country.

Even before Tuesday’s disaster, many people across the region had come to see Israel’s war with Hamas — the Palestinian armed group that carried out a shocking attack on southern Israel last week, slaughtering roughly 1,400 people — as an American-backed massacre of Palestinian civilians in the blockaded territory of Gaza.

Israel has cut off water, medicine and electricity in the enclave and targeted Gaza with airstrikes, killing more than 3,500 Palestinians, according to Gazan authorities.

Many Arabs say the American government is not only indifferent to the agony of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but also complicit in it. American pledges of “ironclad” support for Israel — and no-strings-attached security assistance — have stoked those feelings as all signs point to Israel preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza.

“There is tremendous anger in the Arab world, even by those who do not support Hamas,” said Nabil Fahmy, a former foreign minister of Egypt. “They are giving Israel a green light,” he said of Western powers, “and as this gets increasingly bloody, the West will have blood on its hands.”

So intense is the anger that a refrain, “Death to America,” has found renewed resonance in the region, including during a protest on Friday in Bahrain, a close American ally.

“America has to do something and stop these heinous crimes against Palestinians,” said Ahmed al-Asmi, 36, an Omani who participated in a demonstration in the country’s capital, Muscat, on Wednesday.

Many Palestinians and other Arabs said in interviews that the rhetoric coming from senior Israeli and American officials has been dehumanizing and warmongering.

*For Hezbollah and Israel, the Stakes in Any Broader War Are High*

The fighting between Israel and Hamas has raised fears that the violence will spill into Lebanon as a wider conflict with Hezbollah. Such a war would be dangerous for all involved.

The sounds of battle echo on both sides of Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Sirens blare in Israeli towns, warning of incoming rockets fired by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group. Lebanese civilians have fled their villages, fearing Israeli shelling and the possibility of a new war.

Since Hamas launched its deadly attack in southern Israel, tensions have surged along Israel’s northern border, increasing fears of a new conflagration between Israel and Hamas’ Iranian-backed ally Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.

Such a war poses great risks to everyone involved, experts say. Israel, which appears poised to launch a ground invasion in Gaza, could struggle to fight on two fronts and defend itself against Hezbollah’s skilled guerrillas. Lebanon, already reeling from a deep economic crisis, could face intense Israeli airstrikes that destroy infrastructure and could kill large numbers of people.

The potential for international involvement raises the stakes even further. The United States has dispatched two aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean in support of Israel that could strike targets on land. And other groups in the so-called axis of resistance, the network of Iranian-backed forces across the Middle East, could be drawn into a new war.

“The calculations in great wars are not calculations about states,” Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former security chief, said in an interview on Monday. “This is a war of existence: Either Israel remains or this axis remains.”

Leaders on both sides of the divide have issued stark warnings, emphasizing the stakes.

On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told Hezbollah not to get involved. “I have a message for Iran and Hezbollah: Don’t test us in the north,” he told Israeli lawmakers. “Don’t repeat the same mistake, because today, the price you’ll pay will be much heavier.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, warned in an interview on Iranian state television late Monday that Iran’s allied regional militias could attack Israel if it continued its attacks on Gaza.

“Time is running out very fast,” he said. “If the war crimes against the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will open and this is inevitable.”

One motivation for the Biden administration’s bringing the aircraft carriers closer to Israel is to try to convince Hezbollah to stay out of the fighting to avoid any possible intervention by the United States.

Changes in the Middle East in recent years have made it more likely that violence in one place could ignite violence elsewhere. That’s because Iran has worked to knit anti-Israel forces in different countries into an increasingly tight web.

Armed groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that once largely fought separately now see themselves as being on the same team. Many of their commanders have received similar training from Iran or Hezbollah and their members share knowledge on how to increase the firepower of rockets and to surveil their enemies with drones.

*Facing Risky Options for Gaza Hostages, U.S. Turns to Longtime Mediator*

Hamas is believed to hold at least 199 people in Gaza, a dense territory descending into a chaotic crisis, where many officials believe a military rescue would be dangerous for soldiers and hostages alike.

In the dense warrens of Gaza, Hamas is believed to hold at least 199 people hostage, guarded by gunmen and booby traps, likely scattered and hidden from any would-be rescuers as Israel readies a ground invasion.

Israeli and U.S. commandos have pulled off extraordinary hostage rescues before. But the chaotic environment of Gaza, which is descending into a humanitarian crisis and the base where Hamas launched devastating attacks on Israel this month, has made such a mission unlikely because of the dangers to hostages and soldiers alike.

That has left desperate, complex diplomacy — led by the United States and Qatar, a tiny nation with extensive ties to militant groups — as the best option to save hostages in the eyes of many current and former officials.

In the talks so far, Qatar is acting as a mediator between Hamas and officials from the United States, which like Israel and the European Union considers Hamas a terrorist group. Adding even more complexity to the talks, people from more than 40 countries are among the hostages.

If Hamas thought taking hostages was a hedge against an Israeli invasion, the group might have misplayed its hand. Although Western and U.S. officials have urged restraint to limit the danger to hostages and Gazan civilians, Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas, amassing troops and tanks on the border and calling up about 360,000 reservists.

“To sacrifice hostages and soldiers seems to be the psychology today,” said Gershon Baskin, who negotiated the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit in 2011 after more than five years in captivity. “No one is thinking about the day after: What do you do with Gaza?”

*Why a Gaza Invasion and ‘Once and for All’ Thinking Are Wrong for Israel*

When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” he said. “The citizens are relying on us to defeat Hamas and remove the threat from Gaza once and for all.”

That caught my ear because, over the years, I’ve learned that four of the most dangerous words in the Middle East are “once and for all.”

All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.

And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.

And so let me say loudly and clearly what I have been saying quietly in my past few columns: I am with President Biden when he told “60 Minutes” that it would be a “big mistake” for Israel “to occupy Gaza again.”

I believe that such a move could turn Israel’s humiliating tactical defeat at the hands of Hamas, which included unimaginable barbarism, into a long-term moral and military strategic crisis. It’s one that could entrap Israel in Gaza, draw the U.S. into another Middle East war and undermine three of America’s most important foreign policy interests right now: helping Ukraine wrestle free of Russia to join the West, containing China and shaping a pro-American bloc that includes Egypt, Israel, moderate Arab countries and Saudi Arabia, which could counterbalance Iran and fight the global threat of radical Islam.

If Israel goes into Gaza now, it will blow up the Abraham Accords, further destabilize two of America’s most important allies (Egypt and Jordan) and make normalization with Saudi Arabia impossible — huge strategic setbacks. It will also enable Hamas to really fire up the West Bank and get a shepherd’s war going there between Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Altogether, it will play directly into Iran’s strategy of sucking Israel into imperial overstretch and in that way weakening the Jewish democracy from within.

Iran’s No. 1 strategic objective with Israel has always been to ensure that Israel remains enmeshed in the West Bank, gets drawn into reoccupying southern Lebanon and, in Iran’s most fevered dreams, reoccupies Gaza. Such an Israel would be so morally, economically and militarily enfeebled, it could never threaten Iran’s nuclear program and hegemonic ambitions.

What should Israel do to ensure that an attack like the one launched by Hamas never happens again? I don’t know right now. I just know that whatever the answer is, it’s not mobilizing 360,000 traumatized Israeli reservists to launch into an urban war in one of the most densely populated places in the world. This will crush the Israeli economy and its international standing.

All these dilemmas must push Biden to sharpen his stance on the crisis.

Biden must realize that Benjamin Netanyahu is unfit to manage this war as a rational player. After such a colossal defeat, the most powerful and unifying thing Netanyahu could have done was call new Israeli elections in six or nine months — and announce that he would not be running; he is ending his career in politics, and therefore Israelis can trust that whatever decisions he makes about Gaza and Hamas now will have only the Israeli national interest in mind; he will not have in mind his own interest in staying out of jail on corruption charges, which requires his holding on to the right-wing crazies in his government (who actually fantasize about Israel reoccupying Gaza and rebuilding the Israeli settlements there) by chasing some big, short-term military victory that he can take to the Israeli electorate as a compensation for the debacle that just happened.

As one of Israel’s best military writers, Amos Harel of Haaretz, wrote on Friday: “There is an unusual combination of people at the top in Israel. On one hand, there is an unfit prime minister, a nearly Shakespearean figure who is facing the personal danger of an ignominious conclusion to an arguably brilliant career. Facing him are a military brass who are smitten and consumed with guilt feelings (and if only Netanyahu would bother displaying a smidgen of that). That’s not a perfect recipe for considered decision making.”

If Israel were to announce today that it has decided for now to forgo an invasion of Gaza and will look for more surgical means to eliminate or capture Hamas’s leadership while trying to engineer a trade for the more than 150 Israeli and other hostages whom Hamas is holding, it would not only avoid further traumatizing its own society, as well as Palestinian civilians in Gaza; it would also give Israel and its allies time to think through how to build — with Palestinians — a legitimate alternative to Hamas.

Such a move would earn Israel a lot of support globally and enable the world to see Hamas for what it is: the ISIS of the Palestinian territories.

“In today’s world, whatever happens on the battlefield can be overturned in the information realm, so the battle of the story matters as much as the battle on the ground,” said John Arquilla, a retired professor of strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School. “If Israel overreacts in Gaza, it will drain out whatever residual good feelings toward Israel exist, and that is Hamas’s big bet. Israel has built so much, enjoys so much and contributes so much to the world and has so much more to contribute. To risk all that in an act of revenge or rage that will not fundamentally alter its strategic dilemmas is exceptionally unwise.”

But, as I said, if Israel still decides it must enter Gaza to capture and kill Hamas’s leadership, it must only do so if it has in place a legitimate Palestinian leadership to replace Hamas — so Israel is not left governing there forever. If that happens, every day that the sun doesn’t shine in Gaza, the water doesn’t flow, the electricity doesn’t operate and hunger or disease becomes widespread will be the fault of every Israeli and even every Jew in the world. Is Israel ready for that burden?

While Biden is right to support Israel, he must get clear answers from Netanyahu now, before it’s too late: Once Israel topples Hamas, who will govern Gaza? If Israel intends to govern Gaza, will it pay for the rebuilding of the infrastructure that it is destroying? And if not, who will? How long does Israel intend to allow the humanitarian crisis to unfold in southern Gaza? Does Israel plan to build settlements in Gaza? Does Israel respect Gaza’s borders? Does it have a plan to help rebuild the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank?

The West Bank Palestinian Authority, under President Mahmoud Abbas, is weak, corrupt and increasingly illegitimate; it can’t manage the West Bank, let alone Gaza — which is how Netanyahu wanted it, so he could always say he did not have any partner for peace.

But this is not all on Netanyahu. Believe it or not, folks, Palestinians have agency, too, and the corruption that the Palestinian Authority has tolerated, and the fact that Abbas banished the most effective leader it ever had, the former prime minister Salam Fayyad, is also a huge factor — something every friend of the Palestinians should be saying loudly, not just blaming Israel.

But all that said, Israel has to completely rethink how it relates to the Palestinians in the West Bank — and therefore the whole settler movement as well — if it wants to replace Hamas in Gaza. If the settler movement continues to set the terms of what is permissible in Israeli politics, another disaster is looming in the West Bank.

My bottom line? Just ask this question: If Israel announced today that it was forgoing, for now, a full-blown invasion of Gaza, who would be happy, and who would be relieved, and who would be upset? Iran would be totally frustrated, Hezbollah would be disappointed, Hamas would feel devastated — its whole war plan came to naught — and Vladimir Putin would be crushed, because Israel would not be burning up ammunition and weapons the U.S. needs to be sending to Ukraine. The settlers in the West Bank would be enraged.

Meanwhile, the parents of every Israeli soldier and every Israeli held hostage would be relieved, every Palestinian in Gaza caught in the crossfire would be relieved, and every friend and ally Israel has in the world — starting with one Joseph R. Biden — would be relieved. I rest my case.

*Possible Paths to Israeli-Palestinian Peace*

Mr. Beinart expresses outrage at the savagery of Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. At the same time, he outrageously proposes that what set the stage for the horrific displays of Hamas savagery was the failure of the international community over the years to support Palestinian nonviolent resistance, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

This conveniently whitewashes the fact that many supporters of B.D.S. and other forms of Palestinian resistance reject Israel’s very legitimacy and recognition of the Jewish right to nationhood. These activists see resistance as a means toward Israel’s complete elimination, and call for a refusal to engage with Israel — all of which provide the backdrop to the bloody massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7.

What is needed now is a true commitment to nonviolence, one that speaks to viable peace, a recognition of Israel’s right to exist and ultimately two peoples living side by side with security.

Peter Beinart’s essay is an exemplary reflection of the appeals for compassion for the Palestinians that are coming from all sides, now that Israel is going after Hamas.

Therefore it would be good to remind ourselves of what those who actually care about the Palestinians, and aren’t just progressive poseurs, could do to help them in practical ways.

First, they should put pressure on Arab states to allow the descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to assimilate and be granted citizenship in their countries. Second, they should exert whatever influence they have on the Palestinian Authority finally to begin negotiating seriously to accept part of Palestine as an independent state and to live in peace with Israel. It may well be too late after the recent catastrophe, but better to try late than never.

What happened just over a week ago clarifies who in fact cares about the well-being of the Palestinian people and who just uses the pose of compassion to denigrate Israel.

Peter Beinart presents a false dichotomy of Palestinian options for pursuing a state of their own — political pressure or terrorism — arguing that failing to gain traction in the former has led to the latter.

But there’s another avenue the Palestinians can try: accepting the legitimacy of the Jewish state and renouncing violence, two things the Palestinian leadership has failed to do time and time again during peace negotiations over the decades.

Israelis want peace more than anything, and the recent events are a horrid reminder of its necessity, but they will never pursue it with a literal or political gun to their heads.

Noam Safier
Teaneck, N.J.

To the Editor:

Re “The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plans for Gaza,” by Rashid Khalidi (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Oct. 15):

In Professor Khalidi’s telling, the Palestinians are always blameless victims without agency over their own behavior. He ignores the Palestinians’ 100 years of rejecting, often violently, offers of compromise and statehood from the international community and Israel.

*I Saw What Happened to America’s Postwar Plans for Iraq. Here’s How Israel Should Plan for Gaza.*

I headed postwar Iraq planning for the U.S. State Department in 2002 and 2003. Once the White House decided in 2002 to remove Saddam Hussein by force, I cautioned my superiors that there needed to be serious planning for what would follow. The study I led — the Future of Iraq Project, only some of which is now public — gave U.S. leaders an understanding of what postwar Iraq would need.

But before we could put plans into effect, we were thrown out of the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at Vice President Dick Cheney’s orders in a dispute over what to do in Iraq. As a result, many of the American civilians who went there had little experience and even less knowledge of what Iraq needed to recover from decades of brutal and corrupt rule under Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party. The result contributed to the tragedy for Iraq, the United States and the entire Middle East.

What we’re seeing now in Israel and Gaza gives me the same grave concern so many of us felt 20 years ago: a lot of talk about military plans and the devastation of war and not enough about what will need to come after. I have not written publicly before about the lessons the United States should have learned from what happened to postwar plans for Iraq. With the humility of hard-won experience, I would like to offer those lessons as advice to whoever assumes this role in Israel today: the official in charge of developing a plan for a post-Hamas Gaza.

Your job will be hard, but it’s not hopeless. Reject the cynics’ advice that Israel’s job begins and ends when it defeats Hamas militarily and destroys its ability to harm Israelis again. If you fail to try to build something better in Hamas’s place or try in a halfhearted way, Israel will gain only a few years’ respite. Destruction is easy, but building is hard. That does not mean it is impossible.

The self-defeating mind-set that took hold in the United States not long after Iraq’s occupation was that the decision to invade Iraq was an original sin — something so wrong that it could never have come out better than it did. That mentality is damaging because it cuts off any serious effort to understand what went wrong and why.

The label of “forever wars” that has been firmly attached to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fails to acknowledge that poor planning and scant resources will always fail to secure postwar peace. It astounds me that anyone could be surprised by this. But the lessons of postwar Germany and Japan that led to their prosperous democracies today, including well-resourced physical and political reconstruction and the time to succeed, were utterly misunderstood and misapplied by Washington in 2003 and 2004. Israel has faced its own forever war since 1948. Poor planning and scant resources are also your enemy.

Just as Iraqis rightly told us before the 2003 invasion that Iraq is not Afghanistan, Gaza is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. Factors unique to Gaza, such as decades of Hamas’s anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda and Israel’s treatment of Gazan civilians since 1967, will make both physical and political rebuilding especially challenging to Israel and even more challenging than southern Lebanon was to Israel from 1985 to 2000. The deep-seated hatred that many Gazans have for Israel today has no parallel to what U.S. forces faced entering Kabul or Baghdad. Anything Israel touches in a post-Hamas polity in Gaza risks becoming toxic; you must plan for this. Your plans need to understand what Gaza needs and to recognize that the government of Israel may not be the best means to deliver that.

Plan for the length of time you will need to bring about the fundamental changes that will break the cycle of violence Israel and Gaza have inflicted on each other over the past 50-plus years — not the time politicians think you will need. One reason the State Department’s best postwar plan for Iraq, which has still never been made public, was rejected by the White House was that Pentagon officials argued that a three-year timeline was too long. Decision makers opted for the siren song of one year or less and vastly inadequate physical or political reconstruction money, without regard for the reality that fast and cheap was doomed to fail. Instead, the United States expended more in blood and treasure from 2003 to 2011 and ended up strategically worse off than if a better postwar plan had been given the resources and time needed upfront. A repeat of Israel’s 15-year occupation of southern Lebanon is neither realistic nor desirable, but neither is the more recent pattern of quick ground incursions followed by withdrawals, or what’s called mowing the grass.

Finally, remember that military victory is an asset whose power decreases over time. If and when Israel succeeds in defeating Hamas, use that limited time wisely. What you decide to prioritize may be all you get done, so it has to lay the groundwork for constructive steps, not chaos, to follow. Recovery from disastrous decisions at the outset — like the U.S. decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to fire tens of thousands more Baath Party members than necessary from their government jobs, thus largely creating the Sunni insurgency — is almost impossible.

So what should you prioritize at the outset? Consider these six points, however difficult some may seem before a ground war even starts:

1. End Hamas’s culture of economic corruption in Gaza. Corruption is at the heart of what Hamas uses to keep the Gazan people in line. This needs to end. You may have a chance to put in place once-in-a-generation root-and-branch reforms in public integrity in government contracting, civil service hiring and business practices in Gaza.

2. Listen to what Gaza’s residents want. Ordinary Gazans must have a say in their future.

3. Change the educational curriculum. This has been Hamas’s basis for ensuring enduring hatred of Israel. But don’t listen to the equally poisonous voices in Israel that would overplay your hand and undermine lasting educational reforms that would work for Gaza. There are many experts today in the Middle East and outside it who have constructive ideas for an educational curriculum that is true to Palestinian history and in the best interests of lasting coexistence.

4. Find a path for Gazans to write a constitution that will lead toward a more democratic state that can live in peace side by side with Israel. Israel needs to demonstrate that it is committed to a two-state solution. This is one way to do that.

5. Show Gazans that Israel is prepared to help Gaza rebuild economically. This close to Oct. 7, Israelis cannot readily conceive of committing to a Marshall Plan for Gaza. But Israel needs to think through what conditions would make this the right thing to do.

6. Border security for Gaza that Israel can live with — not a siege — is vital. The U.S. failure to plan for security along the Iran-Iraq border was one of the most egregious flaws in the entire U.S. postwar plan. Iran poured money, explosives and operatives into Iraq, undermining any hope for a more stable Iraqi government. It is obvious that the measures Israel has had in place since 2007 have not prevented Iran from funding, arming and helping train Hamas. Israel needs now to do better. Even when Israeli ground forces ultimately pull back from Gaza and Gazans start to provide their own police force, Israel will want to ensure for at least three decades, as unobtrusively as possible, that neither Iran nor anyone else has the ability to smuggle into Gaza the means of waging war. At the Department of Homeland Security, I helped draft this kind of plan for Israeli-Palestinian border security that could be retrieved from storage and updated — and be made real.

As David Fromkin wrote in “A Peace to End All Peace,” it took Europe well over a thousand years to settle the fall of the Roman Empire. No one should be surprised that it is taking the Middle East more than a hundred years to settle the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

To the Israeli official looking back at history and ahead at what needs to get done: If Israel’s government does seek, as the prime minister’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) put it, “the destruction of the military and governing capabilities of Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” you must start today to lay the groundwork for a more durable peace. It will be hard, but it is not impossible.

“We have no choice,” Golda Meir said to an American TV audience in September 1973. “We do everything that is really impossible — and we remain alive.”

+ Morena reitera: obtendrán el “carro completo”; el buen resultado de gobierno, la mejor motivación para el elector; cancelar o no la presa, lo determinará un análisis técnico; el negocio de los uniformes escolares; promueven candidatos a la alcaldía; Luis Fuentes inaugura el HISAR 2023

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

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*LAS NOTICIAS CON LA MONT* 📰

📃 *Premio Internacional Periodismo Y Periodismo Migrante*📃 

La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Martes 3 de Octubre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:

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*Fearing Escalation, Biden Seeks to Deter Iran and Hezbollah*

The administration has grown increasingly anxious that Israel’s enemies may seek to widen the war with Hamas and has both sent diplomatic messages and deployed military assets to prevent it.

The Biden administration has grown increasingly anxious in recent days that Israel’s enemies may seek to widen the war with Hamas by opening new fronts, a move that could compel the United States to enter the conflict directly with air and naval forces to defend its closest ally in the region.

The administration has sought to use diplomatic and military avenues to head off any expansion. The Pentagon dispatched a second aircraft carrier to the region over the weekend along with additional land-based warplanes, even as Washington sent back-channel messages to Iran through intermediaries in Qatar, Oman and China warning against escalation.

Fears of a second front deepened on Sunday as intense clashes broke out along Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia that controls southern Lebanon, fired missiles into Israel, and Israel responded with artillery fire and airstrikes. A full-fledged attack on the north could overwhelm Israel, as most of its forces are focused on a potential ground invasion of Gaza, in the south.

“We can’t rule out that Iran would choose to get directly engaged some way,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We have to prepare for every possible contingency. That’s exactly what the president has done. That is part of what has motivated the president’s movement of these assets, to send that clear message of deterrence to make clear that this war should not escalate.”

Some experts warned that such a scenario remains frighteningly possible because Israel’s vulnerability was exposed by Hamas’s surprise attack that killed more than 1,300 people, including at least 29 Americans. Hezbollah poses a markedly more serious threat to Israel than Hamas because of its vast arsenal of precision-guided missiles and thousands of experienced and well-trained fighters. Iran and Hezbollah may decide this is a moment of maximum opportunity to take on a wounded Israel, which is focused on recovering 150 hostages and destroying Hamas as a viable organization in Gaza.

Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and Middle East special envoy, put the odds of a wider war at 50-50. “The potential for it to spread not only to Lebanon but beyond Lebanon is very high,” he said in an interview. “That’s why you see the administration so actively engaged in trying to fend them off, which they normally wouldn’t have to do if there hadn’t been such a big blow to Israel’s deterrence.”

An Iranian close to the government said that no decision had been made about whether to open a new front against Israel but added that a meeting was to be held on Sunday night in a Hezbollah command center in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, to deliberate.

After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Iran’s proxy militias throughout the region were placed on high alert, as was Tehran’s own military, according to two people familiar with Iran’s military calculations.

Iran itself does not plan to attack Israel if it is not attacked, the people said, but the leaders of the so-called resistance axis supported by Tehran have been discussing whether Hezbollah should enter the war. The final decision, they added, may depend on what happens if Israel’s ground forces enter Gaza as expected.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, has been on a diplomatic tour around the region to Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Qatar, countries aligned with or friendly to Iran, according to Iran’s state media. He openly displayed Iran’s support for Hamas by meeting with its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, in Doha, Qatar. He also met with Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut.

After Mr. Amir Abdollahian’s three-hour meeting with Mr. Haniyeh, a Hamas representative, Khalil al-Hayya, said the two had agreed to create “a wider front against Israel” and discussed how to prevent Israel’s anticipated assault on Gaza, according to IRNA, Iran’s state news agency.

In his public statements over the past week, Mr. Biden has repeatedly made clear that he stands solidly with Israel and has sought to send a clear message to Iran through military deployments. He ordered the Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, to the eastern Mediterranean along with its escort group last week. Then on Saturday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier to join it.

The Air Force is similarly rushing more warplanes to the region, doubling the number of F-16, A-10 and F-15 squadrons on the ground. Combined with the four squadrons of F/A-18 jets aboard each of the two carriers, the United States will have an aerial armada of more than 100 attack planes, according to military officials.

The Pentagon has also sent a small team of Special Operations forces to Israel to assist with intelligence and planning to help locate and rescue the hostages held by Hamas, who are believed to include some Americans.

Israel has historically resisted foreign ground troops participating in operations on its territory, and White House officials have said they are not contemplating any action on the ground by American forces. But if Hezbollah opens a major assault, the United States could come to Israel’s aid by using naval and air units to bombard the militia in Lebanon.

“Moving the two carriers into the region sends a very strong signal,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, the retired commander of the U.S. Central Command, said on “Face the Nation.” “There is ample historical evidence that Iran respects the flow of combat forces into the theater. It does affect their decision calculus. And as Iran’s decision calculus is affected, so is Lebanese Hezbollah’s calculus affected.”

Still, an Iranian close to the government said the U.S. diplomatic messages sent through intermediaries indicated that the United States had no intention to get into a war with Iran and that the warships were meant for moral support of Israel. That may suggest a difference in interpretation. American officials said they do not want war with Iran but were explicitly sending the military forces to deter Tehran with the option of using them if provoked.

Analysts wondered if the message had truly gotten through. They said the fact that Mr. Biden felt compelled to send a second carrier group suggested that the deployment of the first one did not produce the kind of response from Iran that Washington had expected or wanted.

*Voices From Gaza*

As hundreds of thousands flee south from northern Gaza, we hear from two people caught in the chaos.

*Why Israel Is Acting This Way*

With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.

And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.

That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.

And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.

In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”

So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.

The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.

Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.

Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.

The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.

This Israel-Hamas war is part of an evolving escalation of craziness that has been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and more dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper and more lethal.

Like Biden, I stand 100 percent with Israel against Hamas, because Israel is an ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas and Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That math is quite simple for me.

But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their boldness.

If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.

“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter, and reported by The Forward. “We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”

Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent. But what to do?

Finally, though, just as I stand today with Israel’s new unity government in its fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will stand after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against those who tried to abduct Israel’s soul.

*An Israeli Doctor, Off to War: ‘We Have Nothing Against the People of Gaza’*

Hamas viciously slaughtered Israeli men, women and children in their homes, but we have nothing against the people of Gaza, who are brutally oppressed by a terrorist organization.

Like many other Israelis, I received a call telling me to immediately report for duty after the attack. All reservists know this call, which comes without any notice and could instantly change your life.

A decade ago, during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, I served as a military doctor. The same day that the United Nations announced a cease-fire, I found myself in the twilight near the Gaza border in a field that burst into flames. My brigade’s medical armored personnel carrier had been hit by a rocket. Five soldiers, most of them medics, died while fiercely defending our sovereignty.

The latest escalation in the region brings us to the verge of another military ground operation. It seems that our enemies mistakenly decided to take advantage of the rift in Israeli society.

But those who seek our destruction will find us united against any adversary. They should listen to Joe Biden’s story about his meeting as a young senator with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, in the 1970s.

Before we turned a surprise attack by all our neighbors in the Yom Kippur War into a victory, she revealed to him our “secret weapon”: “We have no place else to go.”

Tomer Saad
Kiryat Ono, Israel
The writer, an internist, is a reservist officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

“We’re Teaching Music in Schools All Wrong,” by Sammy Miller (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 28), got so many things right! We need to instill musical joy in children from birth as parents and teachers by modeling passion for making and listening to music together.

During Covid, we witnessed people turning to music as an antidote to isolation, singing from the rooftops and jamming on neighborhood stoops. Parents curated playlists to bring emotional order to a child’s day.

As a lifelong early childhood music teacher, I know that music is an incredibly powerful tool for self-understanding, self-care and community building.

When we guide very young children to experience the deep emotion of music — before they even have words — we nurture lifelong passion that yields a temperamental disposition to learn an instrument.

Children who eat, sleep and breathe music for fun, especially in early childhood, will run toward any opportunity to be part of a social music scene, even if it means squeaking away at the clarinet for endless hours alone practicing in the basement.

Let’s give our infants and toddlers a rich diet of ​listening to and making music — to ready our next generation of avid concertgoers and incredible performers.

Renee Bock
Bronx
The writer is the early childhood director at the Riverdale Y.M.-Y.W.H.A.

To the Editor:

How heartening to see such humane, sensible suggestions for addressing music lesson attrition! Within the instrumental lesson parameters, these are excellent ideas. Taking this further, suppose we could actually broaden those parameters?

Twenty years ago I began to experiment with a child-centered music lesson. The idea was to help each learner discover their particular musical inclination — whatever that might be — and keep the learning attached to that inclination.

For some, the entry point was songwriting. For others it was improvisation or figuring out tunes by ear. One little fellow was obsessed with composers and music history: a pint-size musicologist!

Each student learned skills and concepts as needed to support their passion. Extraordinary transformations occurred. Children who had failed miserably in their previous lessons became competent, joyful music makers. Parents often reported that lessons had become the high point of their children’s week — sometimes of their lives.

This is not to suggest that we replace the standard instrumental lesson! We need both models: one designed for instrument mastery, the other as a personalized alternative for those who could benefit.

Kudos to the author for opening the door to new possibilities.

Meryl Danziger
New York

To the Editor:

I am grateful for Sammy Miller’s guest essay.

As a music educator, I too have advocated a more inclusive pedagogical approach, moving beyond the narrow, misguided emphasis on literacy in staff notation, which too often displaces the ways that humans have engaged with music throughout history: with our bodies, and with a sense of belonging.

But Mr. Miller skirts a critical issue: Too many students lack access to any music instruction, especially in early childhood. Disconcertingly, my research reveals that these disparities are linked to the geography of race and social class.

In New York City, elementary-age students deprived of music are disproportionately concentrated in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn, in schools where parent associations cannot afford “supplemental” arts programming.

By all means, we should focus on the joys of listening to and learning music together, improvising on an instrument, making beats, composing songs, etc. First, though, we need to make sure everyone has access to music education.

*He Called the Pope a ‘Filthy Leftist.’ Now He Wants to Be President.*

Javier Milei is leading the race to be Argentina’s next president. But he is dogged by his past broadsides against a fellow countryman: Pope Francis.

Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian leading the polls in Argentina’s presidential election this month, has made a lot of contentious statements in recent years: Humans did not cause climate change; people should be able to sell their organs; his nation’s currency “is not even good as manure.”

But, to many Argentines, he has done something far worse: attacked the pope.

In 2020, Mr. Milei, a self-identifying Catholic, called Pope Francis an “imbecile” and “the representative of the Evil One on earth” because he defends “social justice.” Last year, Mr. Milei said the pope “always stands on the side of evil” because he supports taxes.

And last month, in an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Mr. Milei said the pope “has an affinity for murderous communists” and is violating the Ten Commandments.

Those are bold words for a man trying to become president in Argentina, where nearly two out of three people identify as Catholic, where the state is officially Catholic and where the Argentine pope is, to many, a national hero.

But Mr. Milei — a Rolling Stones cover band singer turned libertarian economist turned television pundit turned politician — is not your average presidential candidate.

He has run with little party structure around him. He has vowed to decimate the government he is vying to lead. He promises deep cuts to social services. He wants to discard his nation’s currency.

And instead of campaigning with a spouse and children, Mr. Milei has an immediate family that consists of his sister (who runs his campaign), his girlfriend (who gets paid to impersonate a political archrival) and his five Mastiff dogs (which are clones of his previous dog).

The approach may be unorthodox, but it is working.

In August, Mr. Milei won open primaries with 30 percent of the vote, ahead of candidates from the center-left party running the country and the establishment conservative party.

*Why Israel Is Acting This Way*

With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.

And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.

That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.

And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.

In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”

So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.

The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.

Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.

Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.

The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.

So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”

Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.

Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.

Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”

Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.

This Israel-Hamas war is part of an evolving escalation of craziness that has been underway in this neighborhood but getting more and more dangerous every year as weapons get bigger, cheaper and more lethal.

Like Biden, I stand 100 percent with Israel against Hamas, because Israel is an ally that shares many values with America, while Hamas and Iran are opposed to what America stands for. That math is quite simple for me.

But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their boldness.

If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.

“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a video published on X, formerly known as Twitter, and reported by The Forward. “We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”

Israel has suffered a staggering blow and is now forced into a morally impossible war to outcrazy Hamas and deter Iran and Hezbollah at the same time. I weep for the terrible deaths that now await so many good Israelis and Palestinians. And I also worry deeply about the Israeli war plan. It is one thing to deter Hezbollah and deter Hamas. It is quite another to replace Hamas and leave behind something more stable and decent. But what to do?

Finally, though, just as I stand today with Israel’s new unity government in its fight against Hamas to save Israel’s body, I will stand after this war with Israel’s democracy defenders against those who tried to abduct Israel’s soul.

1. Política exterior 1: Joe Biden nuevamente conversó telefónicamente con Benjamin Netanyahu, primer ministro de Israel, para reiterarle el apoyo 
de EUA y actualizarle sobre el envío de equipo militar. Comentaron sobre la coordinación entre EUA, Israel, Jordania, Egipto y la ONU en torno a 
los esfuerzos para asegurar que los civiles afectados por la guerra con Hamas tengan acceso a agua, alimentos y medicamentos. Biden confirmó 
su “apoyo a todos los esfuerzos para proteger a la población civil.” También habló con Mahmood Abbas, presidente de la Autoridad Palestina. En 
la llamada, condenó el ataque terrorista de Hamas y señaló que no representa el derecho del pueblo palestino a la autodeterminación. Abbas 
comentó sobre sus esfuerzos para hacer llegar ayuda humanitaria a la población palestina, en particular en Gaza. En entrevista con 60 Minutes
de CBS News, Biden dijo que la ocupación de Gaza por parte de Israel sería un grave error. De acuerdo con CNN, AP, Politico y Bloomberg, la Casa 
Blanca evalúa la posibilidad de que Biden lleve a cabo próximamente una visita a Israel en atención a una invitación de Netanyahu. 
2. Política exterior 2: después de visitar Israel, Antony Blinken continuó con su gira por el Medio Oriente con actividades en Jordania (en donde se 
reunió con el presidente de la Autoridad Palestina), Bahréin, Qatar, los Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Arabia Saudita (2 veces) y Egipto. Hoy se 
encuentra nuevamente en Israel. Antes de partir de El Cairo, en breves declaraciones, Blinken dijo que los objetivos de sus contactos con líderes 
árabes eran cuatro: transmitir la unidad de EUA con Israel, prevenir que el conflicto se extienda a otras partes de la región, trabajar para la 
liberación de los rehenes y atender la crisis humanitaria en Gaza para evitar que los civiles sufran como consecuencia de las atrocidades de Hamas.
3. Congreso: la bancada republicana de la Cámara de Representantes eligió a Jim Jordan (Ohio) como su nueva propuesta para la presidencia de 
dicha instancia. Durante el fin de semana Jordan se acercó con sus colegas para tratar de asegurar al menos 217 votos en una bancada de 221 
miembros para obtener la mayoría. Hoy los congresistas republicanos se reunirán para abordar el tema con la expectativa de poder presentar 
mañana al Pleno la candidatura. El resultado es incierto pues Jordan es de orientación conservadora y hay representantes republicanos del ala 
moderada opuestos a su elección. Algunos lo rechazan por su cercanía a Donald Trump, y en particular, su conocimiento de los preparativos de 
la insurrección en el Capitolio el 6 de enero de 2021. Sobre el tema, notas de AP, Reuters, CNN y Mother Jones. 
4. Temas bilaterales: EUA es el país invitado de honor a la 51 edición del Festival Internacional Cervantino (FIC) que comenzó el viernes 13. En su 
mensaje, el embajador Ken Salazar resaltó que la invitación “refleja la cooperación y el diálogo histórico” y “realza el bicentenario” del 
establecimiento de las relaciones diplomáticas entre ambos países. Para apoyar la participación de EUA en el FIC, su gobierno destinó $1 millón 
de dólares; para programa, ver Cervantino – Embajada y consulados de Estados Unidos en México (usembassy.gov).

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

Sent from my iPod

*LAS NOTICIAS CON LA MONT* 📰

📃 *Premio Internacional Periodismo Y Periodismo Migrante*📃 

La Información Directa a tu Celular 📲 de HOY *Viernes 13 de Octubre 2023* *En El Plano Nacional e Internacional*:

*Ahora también ya estamos en la redes y síguenos a través de nuestros siguientes medios:*

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*Colaboración Especial En:* http://MexicoTodayUSA.com

*Hamas Attack on Israel Brings New Scrutiny of Group’s Ties to Iran*

Officials from Iran and Hezbollah helped plan the attack, people familiar with the operation said, but the U.S. and its allies have not found evidence directly linking Tehran.

Last weekend’s attack on Israel by Hamas has brought renewed scrutiny of the armed Palestinian group’s longstanding relationship with Iran, and questions about whether the Gaza-based group could have pulled off such a sophisticated and devastating operation on its own.

Iran has a long history of training and arming proxy militia groups in the region, from Gaza to Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. It supports Hamas militarily and has helped it design and produce a domestic missile and rocket system to match the capabilities and material available in Gaza — an impoverished, densely populated coastal strip that has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt for the past 16 years.

And over the past year, there have been signs that Iran and its proxies were preparing to take a more aggressive approach toward Israel.

Gen. Esmail Ghaani, who is in charge of supervising Iran’s network of proxy militias as head of the country’s paramilitary Quds Force, repeatedly traveled to Lebanon for covert sessions with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shiite Lebanese militia that Iran also supports.

Some people familiar with the operation said that a tight circle of leaders from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas helped plan the attack starting over a year ago, trained militants and had advanced knowledge of it. That account is based on interviews with three Iranians affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, one Iranian connected to senior leadership and a Syrian affiliated with Hezbollah.

Other people say they believe Iran had some involvement but it was not as deep. “The implementation was all Hamas, but we do not deny Iran’s help and support,” said Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has publicly denied the country played a role, even as he and other Iranian leaders praised the carnage. “We kiss the foreheads and arms of the resourceful and intelligent designers,” Mr. Khamenei said this week in his first televised speech since the attack. But he added: “Those who say that the recent saga is the work of non-Palestinians have miscalculated.”

The United States, Israel and key regional allies have said they have not found evidence in early intelligence gathering that Iran directly helped plan the attack. The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by it, according to several American officials, including people who would typically be aware of operations involving the Quds Forces.

*Airstrikes Intensify in Gaza, and More*

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*New York Is Starting to Act Like a Southern Border State*

For far too long, too many Americans considered the border to be someone else’s problem — someone in Texas, maybe, or Arizona or California. People who didn’t live near the border might have condemned harsh tactics used there or offered their communities as sanctuaries for those who managed to slip across it. But for the most part, the challenges of the border remained at the border. Out of sight, out of mind.

That changed this year with the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Northern cities, which is forcing even the most big-hearted places to grapple with what happens when too many migrants and asylum seekers show up on their doorstep overnight, a problem border communities know all too well. Chicago has housed migrants in abandoned schools, police stations and airports, sparking protests and at least one lawsuit. Portland, Maine, briefly commandeered a convention center. Massachusetts is putting up more than 6,000 families in emergency shelters and hotels, at an estimated cost of $45 million per month. About half are migrants.

Now a major reassessment is underway of what these cities can reasonably be expected to provide to people who have just crossed the border in search of safety and a better life and whether efforts to house and support them will encourage more to come. In a recent survey by Siena College Research Institute, 82 percent of New Yorkers called the arrival of so many migrants a “serious problem,” with 58 percent saying it’s time to slow the flow. New York is starting to think — and act — like a Southern border state now.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas must be pleased. This is exactly what he hoped for when he started sending busloads of migrants into so-called sanctuary cities in the North last year. “Bringing the border to Biden,” is what he called it. I’m no fan of Mr. Abbott. But his tactic is working.

Nowhere is this more apparent than New York City, where the emergency housing social safety net is being stretched to the breaking point. More than 10,000 migrants arrive in the city each month, about half of whom are being housed in shelters or hotels. Mayor Eric Adams has said that the $5 billion price tag of caring for migrants this year may force cuts to social services on which the neediest New Yorkers depend, including meals for older adults.

It’s gotten so dire that Mr. Adams — who campaigned on a pledge to keep the sanctuary policy in place — just wrapped up a whirlwind trip to Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, where he begged people not to come. New York is full, he told people in Puebla, Mexico. “There’s no more room.” I doubt migrants will listen. Why would they? New York City is spending $383 per family per night to house homeless new arrivals, thanks to a consent decree from a state court that requires the city to provide shelter to those who need it.

People who apply for asylum in New York are more likely to get it than those who apply in other places. New York immigration judges deny only 26 percent of asylum cases, compared with 92 percent in Houston and 86 percent in Miami, according to TRAC, an information clearinghouse at Syracuse University. And migrants who make it to New York are less likely to be deported. Since 2014, sanctuary city and state laws have limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It’s clear that the city’s well-earned reputation for welcoming immigrants has played a role in making New York the top destination. Nevertheless, Mr. Adams blames that “madman” — Mr. Abbott — for the crisis, even though only about 13,100 of the roughly 140,000 migrants who arrived over the past year were sent on buses chartered by Texas. (Mr. Abbott shot back on Fox News that New York and other liberal cities are to blame for the migrant crisis by offering sanctuary and “letting everybody live for free.”)

*The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left*

On Tuesday evening, I was drinking on the porch of my friend and neighbor Misha Shulman, the Israel-born rabbi of a progressive New York synagogue called the New Shul. All day, he’d been on the phone with congregants deeply distraught over the massacres and mass kidnappings in Israel. Of all the people he spoke to, he said, those most devastated were either people who had lost close friends or family, or young Jews “completely shattered by the response of their lefty friends in New York,” who were either justifying Hamas’s atrocities or celebrating them outright.

This sense of deep betrayal is not limited to New York. Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.

By now, you’ve probably seen examples. There was the giddy message put out by the national committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, which proclaimed, “Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air and sea.” New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a rally where speakers applauded the attacks, and the Connecticut D.S.A. enthused, “Yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anticolonial struggle.” The president of N.Y.U.’s student bar association wrote in its newsletter, “I will not condemn Palestinian resistance,” leading to the withdrawal of a job offer. Over the otherwise benign slogan “I stand with Palestine,” Black Lives Matter Chicago posted a photo of a figure in a paraglider like those Hamas used to descend on a desert rave and turn it into a killing field.

“I think what surprised me most was the indifference to human suffering,” said Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor at the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents and a member of the editorial board at the progressive publication Dissent.

“I’m trying to hold on, personally, to my commitments, my values, which now feel in conflict, in a way, with the political community that I lived alongside in the United States for basically my whole adult life,” he said. “It certainly has begun to feel like a breaking point.”

Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary. As I write this, Israel has imposed what the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, called a “complete siege” of Gaza’s two million people, about half of whom are under 18. “No electricity, no food, no water, no gas — it’s all closed,” said Gallant. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Such collective punishment is, like the mass killing of civilians in Israel, a war crime.

Hunger was already rampant in Gaza before this conflict broke out; today the World Food Program estimates that 63 percent of its population, living in one of the most densely populated places in the world, is “food insecure.” “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said in 2021.

If Gaza was already hell, we lack the language for what it’s about to become. Over the weekend, Ariel Kallner, a member of the Knesset from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for a new “nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians use to describe being driven from their homes at Israel’s creation in 1948. This time, Kallner said, the catastrophe befalling Palestinians would “overshadow” the last.

*Biden Administration Awards $7 Billion for 7 Hydrogen Hubs Across the U.S.*

Clean hydrogen could help fight climate change, but it barely exists today. Now the administration wants to build an entire industry from scratch.

The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to award up to $7 billion to create seven regional hubs around the country that will make and use hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel with the potential to power ships or factories without producing any planet-warming emissions.

Hydrogen is widely seen as a promising tool to fight climate change, as long as it can be produced without creating any greenhouse gases. When burned, hydrogen releases just water vapor. But very little of this so-called clean hydrogen is used today. By awarding the grants, the Biden administration is trying to stand up an entire industry from scratch.

Dozens of regions competed for the money, which will be awarded to proposed hydrogen projects on the Gulf Coast (Texas and Louisiana) and in the Mid-Atlantic (Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey), Appalachia (Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio), the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana and Michigan), the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota) and the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon and Montana). A proposed hub in California will also receive funding.

President Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm were expected to travel to the Port of Philadelphia on Friday to discuss the announcement.

“Clean hydrogen is one of our most versatile, sharpest tools to slash emissions,” Ms. Granholm wrote in June when she outlined the administration’s hydrogen strategy.

In theory, hydrogen could be used to help produce steel, cement, chemicals and fertilizer. It could also be used to power trucks, ships or airplanes or to produce electricity, all without emitting the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.

The challenge, however, is figuring out how to manufacture that hydrogen cleanly. Today, companies usually extract hydrogen from natural gas in a process that emits large amounts of carbon dioxide. But it is also possible to produce hydrogen without any emissions — by, for instance, using wind turbines or solar panels to power electrolyzers that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The catch is that making hydrogen this way is still two to three times as expensive as making it with natural gas.

To help jump-start a clean hydrogen economy, Congress approved $8 billion to create regional hydrogen hubs as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, lawmakers approved a hefty tax credit for companies that produce low-emissions hydrogen, in the hopes of driving down the cost of production.

Partly as a result of those laws, the Department of Energy estimates that the use of clean hydrogen could grow to 10 million tons per year by 2030, up from virtually nothing today.

The gusher of federal money also kicked off a furious competition among states. The Department of Energy initially received 79 proposals for hydrogen hubs from states across the country before selecting seven. The hubs typically consist of networks of businesses, labor groups, researchers and local governments that have pledged to work together to produce, transport and use clean hydrogen.

Each of the award winners plans to take a slightly different approach. The proposed hub in California, for instance, aims to produce hydrogen from renewable energy and use the fuel to power heavy-duty trucks and port operations in Long Beach, Los Angeles and Oakland.

By contrast, the Appalachian hub, which will span parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, is expected to continue to use natural gas to produce hydrogen, but companies will seek to capture carbon dioxide emissions from the process and bury it underground. That proposal was backed by Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.

Some environmentalists and researchers have criticized that method, known as “blue hydrogen,” and warned that it could still lead to high emissions if methane leaks from the process.

The Energy Department estimates that nearly two-thirds of the investments will eventually go toward hydrogen made by renewable electricity.

Not all of the $7 billion in funding will be spent at once. As a first step, the Energy Department will give awardees initial grants to create more detailed proposals for their hydrogen hubs. If the agency deems the projects viable, it will disburse more money over time — but that money is not guaranteed if any of the hubs prove unworkable.

*¡Buenos días, excelente fin de semana!*
🔹Ven en Banxico riesgo para la inflación por más gasto fiscal.
🔹Inflación en EU no cede: avanza 3.7% en septiembre.
🔹Silencio no implica inacción sobre fideicomisos: Piña.
🔹Presidente propone que los 15 mil mdp de fideicomisos sean para becas.
🔹Para sacar a 764 mexicanos de Israel harán ‘puente aéreo’.
🔹Hay 10 finalistas para encabezar la rectoría de UNAM; son 7 hombres y 3 mujeres.

🎯 Ya sea al interior O exterior de la UNAM, Raúl Contreras es reconocido por su empeño, capacidad, experiencia y sensibilidad para solucionar los problemas universitarios y tender alianzas estratégicas en favor de la comunidad y su preparación.
https://www.ejecentral.com.mx/para-alusiones-personales-unam-exige-respeto-y-raul-contreras-sabe-darselo/

*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*

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