As we know from prophecy, at some point the Middle East issues will boil down to the fate of Jerusalem, which will be the center of the world's attention:
12 A prophecy: The word of the Lord concerning Israel.
The Lord, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth,and who forms the human spirit within a person, declares: 2 “I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling. Judah will be besieged as well as Jerusalem. 3 On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves. 4 On that day I will strike every horse with panic and its rider with madness,” declares the Lord. “I will keep a watchful eye over Judah, but I will blind all the horses of the nations. 5 Then the clans of Judah will say in their hearts, ‘The people of Jerusalem are strong, because the Lord Almighty is their God.’
(Zechariah 12)
An estimated 5,000 Palestinian protesters held demonstrations and clashed with Israeli security forces at some 30 locations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Friday after midday prayers, in a show of anger over US President Donald Trump’s declared recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The Israeli army said it was braced for more protests on Saturday, and it stepped up the deployment of troops at West Bank settlements to try to thwart any attempted terror attacks. It said the 5,000 demonstrators on Friday marked a lower number than anticipated, but expected protests to continue for several more days, Hadashot news reported on Friday night.
Palestinian officials said two demonstrators were killed at the Gaza border fence. One was killed in the afternoon, while another who suffered serious injuries died of his wounds hours later.
The Israeli army said it fired on two “inciters” at the fence. It said there was six points along the fence where protesters gathered and burned tires. The Red Cross in Gaza reported that 15 people were injured by tear gas and rubber bullets.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian demonstrators threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and set fire to tires and rolled them at Israeli security forces, who generally retaliated with less-lethal riot dispersal equipment, like tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets, and in some cases with live fire.
Palestinian protesters also burned pictures and effigies of Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israeli and American flags.
Unusually, Palestinian Authority security forces allowed demonstrators to carry Hamas flags, Israel Radio reported. It said some Palestinians branded the protests the start of a new intifada uprising.
Palestinian officials reported over 200 people injured in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the vast majority of them lightly, from tear gas inhalation. Seven were hit by live bullets, and 45 by rubber bullets, the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said.
The Israel Defense Forces said it knew of at least 10 injured Palestinians in the West Bank.
Two Palestinian protesters were shot by Israeli troops during a violent demonstration at the Gaza border, the army said. Local media reported that one of them was critically wounded.
No soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces or Border Police were reported injured.
Israeli officials said six Palestinians were arrested during the protests.
Among the estimated 30 demonstrations in the West Bank, the largest took place in Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Al-Arroub, Tulkarem, Qalandiya, and Bayt Ummar, the army said. Smaller demonstrations were also reported in Ramallah, Nablus, Hawara and Nabi Saleh.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not meet with US Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the West Bank this month, a senior Palestinian official said Saturday as protests continued due to the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Abbas’ diplomatic adviser, Majdi Khaldi, said Saturday that Abbas won’t meet Pence “because the US has crossed red lines” on Jerusalem.
Abbas had viewed close ties with Washington as strategically important because of the US role as Mideast broker. The snub of Pence signaled a sharp deterioration in relations.
The White House warned on Thursday that cancelling the meeting planned for later this month in the West Bank would be “counterproductive”, but Abbas has been under heavy domestic pressure to shun Pence who is due to visit the region in the next few weeks.
Jibril Rajoub, a senior member of Abbas’s Fatah party, told AFP the same day that Pence was “not welcome in Palestine.”
Demonstrations continued Saturday as Palestinians called for a further “Day of Rage” to protest Trump’s decision.
In Gaza, where four people have been killed — two Hamas gunmen killed in an airstrike on one of the terror group’s camps, and two who were shot during Friday’s protests — hundreds of Palestinians were protesting near the border fence with Israel and at the funerals for the dead.
Large crowds of worshippers across the Muslim world staged anti-U.S. marches Friday, some stomping on posters of Donald Trump or burning American flags in the largest outpouring of anger yet at the U.S. president’s recognition of bitterly contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In the holy city itself, prayers at Islam’s third-holiest site dispersed largely without incident, but Palestinians clashed with Israeli troops in several dozen West Bank hotspots and on the border with the Gaza Strip.
Israeli warplanes struck Hamas military targets in the Gaza Strip Friday in response to a rocket fired from the zone that Israel’s military said was intercepted by its Iron Dome missile-defense system.
The Palestinian health ministry said at least 15 people were injured in Friday’s air strikes.
Earlier, a 30-year-old Gaza man was killed by Israeli gunfire, the first death of a protester since Trump’s dramatic midweek announcement. Two Palestinians were seriously wounded, health officials said.
Dozens of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were hit by live rounds or rubber-coated steel or inhaled tear gas, the officials said.
On Saturday Hamas blamed Israel for any escalation in violence, after two members of the terror group were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Hamas training camp in the Strip.
“Israel bears full responsibility for any results of the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip,” said Hamas spokesman Hazem Kassem. “Yesterday, the spark of the intfada was lit and it will continue to blaze until we achieve our aim,” he said, refering to widespread Palestinain protests against against US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Israel launched a series of air strikes after terror groups in Gaza fired several rockets into Israel. Some were intercepted by the Iron Dome system, but one landed in a residential area of the town of Sderot, without causing injuries.
In one of the IAF strikes on a Hamas base in Nusseirat, located in the central Gaza Strip, two Palestinians were killed. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza named the men as Mahmud al-Atal, 28 and Mohammed al-Safdi, 30.
It said that their bodies were only recovered several hours after the pre-dawn strike. The terror group later confirmed the dead men were members of it’s military wing.
The strike followed three rocket attacks Friday night from Gaza into southern Israel.
“Today… in response to the rockets fired at southern Israeli communities throughout yesterday, Israel air force aircraft targeted four facilities belonging to the Hamas terror organisation in the Gaza Strip,” an English-language army statement said on Saturday.
It said the targets were “two weapons manufacturing sites, a weapons warehouse, and a military compound.”
“In each target, several components were hit,” it added.
Israeli strikes on Hamas facilities on Friday night wounded 14 people, among them women and children, the Hamas medical services said.
Somewhere in the mountains of northern Yemen, the missile lifted off in a dense cloud of fire and smoke and began its arc over Saudi Arabia. After roaring north for some 600 miles, the Iranian-made Qiam-1 reached its target, the international airport just outside of Riyadh. The Saudis claimed they blew the missile out of the sky with a U.S.-supplied Patriot interceptor, but experts said the incoming missile exploded upon impact, narrowly missing the domestic airport terminal.
The November 4 attack, Middle East intelligence sources told Newsweek on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, was one of 87 such long-range missile strikes Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched against the Saudis in their nearly three-year war. The strikes—some 50 of which the Saudis tried to keep secret—not only threatened to derail Riyadh’s ambitious plan to transform its oil-based economy into one more attractive to foreign investors; they were also the latest sign that Iran and its proxies were thumping the kingdom in their fierce battle for dominance in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump said that challenging Iran’s growing power in the region was one of his top priorities, but the U.S. and its allies have yet to come up with a concrete plan, and analysts said victory in this contest hinged less on guns and warplanes than on which side could best exploit religious and ethnic schisms in the Middle East.
An image taken from a video distributed by Yemen's pro-Houthi Al-Masirah television station on November 5 shows the purported launch by Houthi forces of a ballistic missile aimed at Riyadh's King Khalid Airport.
Tehran exerts enormous influence on an expanse that stretches from Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea, over the Levantine steppe of Syria and Iraq and down to Yemen. That influence stemmed from Iran’s creation of powerful Shiite proxies in key countries in the region, which Tehran had been able to mobilize to its advantage—and to Saudi Arabia’s chagrin—especially since the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011.
Large crowds of worshipers across the Muslim world staged anti-US marches Friday, some stomping on posters of Donald Trump or burning American flags in the largest outpouring of anger yet at the US president’s recognition of bitterly contested Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In the holy city itself, prayers at the Temple Mount site dispersed largely without incident, but Palestinians clashed with Israeli troops in several dozen West Bank hotspots and on the border with the Gaza Strip.
The religious and political dispute over Jerusalem forms the emotional core of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The ancient city is home to major Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines and looms large in the competing national narratives of Israelis and Palestinians.
In a Wednesday address from the White House, Trump defied worldwide warnings and insisted that after repeated failures to achieve peace a new approach was long overdue, describing his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the seat of Israel’s government as merely based on reality.
The move was hailed by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by leaders across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Trump stressed that he was not specifying the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in the city, and called for no change in the status quo at the city’s holy sites.
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