World Briefing: October 18, 2024
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, was killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza on Wednesday, the Israeli military said Thursday. After his death, Sinwar’s body was brought to Israel and identified using DNA testing and the comparison of dental records, according to numerous Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Though Israeli officials had believed Sinwar was hiding in Hamas’s network of tunnels, Sinwar was killed above ground, alongside two other Hamas operatives, in a firefight near the southern city of Rafah. The Israeli military found him by chance, Israeli officials said. In a speech Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza. This is the beginning of the day after Hamas.” - Washington Post
Of the shock killing of Yahya Sinwar by Israely, forces, Middle East expert Rami Khouri told the BBC: “It’s a setback but it’s not a decisive one..these types of assassinations have only made the institutions grown bigger & stronger. The western world is delusionally exaggerating what this means”
Former president Donald Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for allowing the war in Ukraine to start, even though Russia was the aggressor, during an interview with a podcaster that was published Thursday. Trump called Zelensky “one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever seen” and marveled at how much aid Ukraine has received from the United States. “Who else got that kind of money in history?” Trump said in the interview with podcaster Patrick Bet-David. “There’s never been. And that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. That war’s a loser.” Moments later, Trump criticized President Joe Biden, as he has often done, for his handling of the conflict, claiming he “instigated that war.” - WP
A brand new fire station in Germany, which was destroyed in a fire, causing millions of euros in damage and destroyed equipment did not have a fire alarm system. The fire broke out early Wednesday morning at the Stadtallendorf fire station in Hesse and destroyed, among other things, the equipment hall and almost a dozen emergency vehicles, German news agency dpa reported. Initial estimates put the damage at between 20 million and 24 million euros ($21 million to $26 million). No one was injured. Local officials told dpa that no fire alarm system was installed in the building because experts had considered it not necessary — much to the astonishment of many observers now that the station has burned down. The fire broke out on an emergency vehicle belonging to the fire department, which contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection - AP
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells a French newspaper that Israeli forces had found “state-of-the-art” Russian weapons in searches of Hezbollah bases in south Lebanon. Netanyahu highlights to Le Figaro newspaper, in an interview released today, that under a 2006 UN Security Council resolution only the Lebanese army was allowed to have weapons south of the country’s key Litani River. “However, in this area, Hezbollah has dug hundreds of tunnels and caches, where we have just found a quantity of state-of-the-art Russian weapons,” the French article quotes Netanyahu as saying. - Times of Israel
Moldovan authorities say they have exposed a network of more than 100 people trained in Russia and the Balkans to provoke post-election unrest in the southeastern European country and have arrested several suspects. Pro-Western President Maia Sandu is running for a second term on October 20 in an election that takes place simultaneously with a referendum to decide whether Moldovans want their impoverished country of 2.5 million people to pursue integration into the European Union. Moldovan police chief Viorel Cernauteanu told a news conference in Chisinau on October 17 that the network was financed by Russia-friendly fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor, who is wanted in Moldova for his involvement in the theft of some $1 billion from the impoverished ex-Soviet republic's banking system about a decade ago. Cernauteanu said four people were arrested and placed in pretrial custody for 30 days following extensive searches by police and Moldova's Intelligence and Security Service (SIS). - RFE/RL
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions. Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.” But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine. In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America. - AP
