WarSclerotic

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps launched on Saturday a drill near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for nearly a third of all oil traded by sea.

Television showed amphibious forces landing on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf during the exercises, in which naval vessels, helicopters, drones, rocket launchers and commando units also took part.

The annual war game dubbed “The Great Prophet” came a day after the USS John C. Stennis, a U.S. aircraft carrier, sailed into the Persian Gulf. The carrier was shadowed by Revolutionary Guards speedboats. An Iranian drone flying near the carrier, presumably in order to film U.S. troops.

Iranian speedboats also fired rockets in the area of the carrier, but a U.S. Navy spokeswoman said they were pointed away from U.S. vessels. “We believe it was part of their [Iran’s] naval exercise,” Lt. Chloe Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet, said.

Tehran feels increasingly under pressure after President Donald Trump in November renewed sanctions that the U.S. had lifted under a 2015 nuclear deal. The U.S. pulled out of the deal in May.

“Hopefully, with these exercises, our enemies will realize more than ever how devastating our response would be to any move by them,” IRGC chief Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said.

In an apparent comment on the arrival of the Stennis, Jafari told state television: “They’ve come, pretending to ensure the Persian Gulf states’ security. … But it is Iran which has to provide security for the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf and our friends and brotherly countries on its southern coast.”

Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians, including a teenager, in the Gaza Strip during the latest of weekly protests organized by Hamas along the border with Israel on Friday, Palestinian health officials said.

The protests, dubbed by organizers the “March of Return” demonstrations, have been staged regularly every Friday since late March. Following a spike in violence last month, a cease-fire agreement has prompted Palestinian demonstrators to scale back the violence at the weekly demonstrations, largely keeping away from the border.

Some 8,000 Palestinians gathered near the border fence on Friday, the Israeli military said. Most kept their distance while some burned tires and tried to throw an explosive device into Israel, though it did not land across the border, the military said.

A military spokeswoman said the troops responded with “riot dispersal means” and fired in accordance with Israeli protocol.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said 16-year-old Mohammad Jahjouh was fatally shot in the neck while 25 others, including a local journalist, were wounded by Israeli gunfire.

It later said two men, aged 28 and 40, died of injuries sustained at the protests in two separate locations along the security fence earlier in the day.

Following the clashes, Hamas and the smaller armed factions active in Gaza issued a joint announcement Saturday, declaring that “the Palestinian factions plan to meet to devise a joint plan on how to retaliate for the crimes of the Zionist occupation against the March of Return protesters.”

The IDF is taking the Palestinian factions’ threat of a “harsh response” seriously but has not deployed additional forces in the area at this time. The military has, however, raised its alert level and shored up defenses along the border.

Meanwhile, a delegation of senior Hamas officials headed by Mahmoud al-Zahar visited Tehran over the weekend. On Saturday, al-Zahar met with Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani and thanked him for Iran’s support of the Palestinians in Gaza and for helping thwart earlier this month a U.S. attempt to secure a U.N. condemnation of Hamas rockets attacks against Israel.

The Hamas delegation also extended an official invitation to Larijani to visit the Gaza Strip.

Islamic Jihad leader Ziad Nakhala also visited Tehran this weekend and met with senior Iranian government officials, thanking them for their support for the residents of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Hamas’ public relations department reported that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was slated to visit Russia this coming weekend at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went on the attack against Israel once again over the weekend, this time claiming Israel murders innocent people in cold blood.

In a speech to the Turkey Youth Foundation in Istanbul, Saturday, Erdogan affirmed his county’s support for the Palestinians before saying that “the Jews in Israel kick men, but also women and children, when they’re on the ground.”

He said that “as Muslims, we deal with people directly, and if there are people who are brave enough to provoke us, we will teach them a lesson.”

Erdogan also told the audience, “Don’t be like the Jews.”

A number of Turkish journalists tweeted that some in the crowd called out for Erdogan to bring about the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem. Erdogan replied, “Soon, God willing.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the Turkish leader on Twitter, Saturday night, saying, “Erdogan – the occupier of northern Cyprus, whose army massacres women and children in Kurdish villages, inside and outside Turkey – should not preach to Israel.”

Meanwhile, tensions between Turkey and Greece were on the rise over the weekend following Istanbul’s repeated violation of Greek airspace over the Aegean Sea. The most recent violation occurred on Thursday, Turkish fighter jets flew over the Greek island of Kastellorizo minutes after an airplane carrying Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos flew past it.

Following the incident, Kammenos said that “if Turkey makes even the slightest move in the region, we will crush it.”

Chief of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff Evangelos Apostolakis warned the Turks not to carry out a military operation in Kastellorizo.

“If the Turks land on the island, we will destroy them. That is our red line,” he said.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot is sounding the all clear days after U.S. President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement that he plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, saying that while the move is “significant, let’s not make too much of it.”

On Wednesday, Trump announced that the Islamic State terrorist group had been defeated in Syria and that he planned to pull all U.S. forces from there, triggering panic among U.S. allies and eliciting criticism and resignations from his own staff as well as fellow Republicans.

Speaking at an event honoring the late IDF chief Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin Shahak in Herzliya Sunday, Eizenkot said that the IDF’s ability to operate deep within Syrian territory has not been compromised by the withdrawal of American forces.

“The IDF has been operating independently the entire time,” Eizenkot said. “The Americans are making this decision at a time when the cooperation between our respective militaries is at an all-time high.”

“The Russian presence in Syria has created a new reality, and it has profoundly influenced the way we operated our forces there,” Eizenkot continued. “Our planning allowed us to effectively defend Israel’s security interests. The Israeli contribution to the defeat of Islamic State is far greater than the public knows. They were on the border and they were hurt far more than the media reported. They were hurt by the Zionist arm far more than was made public.”

Touching on another enemy, Iran, Eizenkot noted that “the IDF’s main effort over the last four years has been to combat Iran’s aspirations to export its capabilities from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This was a threat that remained hidden from the public eye in Israel, but as a military, we invested enormous intelligence, aerial and covert resources into this endeavor. We succeeded in preventing Iran from realizing its vision as planned, but the desire and aspirations remain.”

Turning to another burning topic, the recently discovered Hezbollah attack tunnels jutting from Lebanon into Israel, Eizenkot remarked that “it isn’t difficult to imagine what would have happened had the incident with Hezbollah begun with hundreds of Hezbollah fighters infiltrating Israel in an underground tunnel. We identified this threat in advance and secretly prepared to neutralize it. In the coming future, we will complete this mission. We were successful in preventing the organization from acquiring the precision capabilities it had tried to gain as well as against its effort to establish a presence on the Golan front.”

He also spoke about the tensions on Israel’s southern border, saying that “there was a bitter debate on whether or not Israel should launch a large-scale operation in Gaza. Whether to prepare the military for a broad campaign and simultaneously prepare a separate operation to prevent Hamas achievements. Their aim has been to infiltrate [Israeli] communities and to abduct soldiers, and that has failed. We chose a reality of balance between cost and benefit. This reality came with victories, but it also came with a cost – particularly the way it affected Israel’s image, in the way that it was reflected in Israeli deterrence.”

“I ask myself what the right thing to do would have been, for Israel’s sake. Over the last decade, we have engaged in three wars. I keep hearing that Israel’s deterrence has collapsed, but the reality is far more complex. Deterrence isn’t built in a day and doesn’t collapse in a day. It’s a tricky term,” he said.

“The situation in Gaza is very difficult, in terms of infrastructure and the humanitarian reality,” he continued. “Electricity, water, employment, sewage – part of it is the basic reality in Gaza and part of it they do to themselves because they don’t want to agree to prisoner exchanges or to return soldiers’ bodies. I view bringing the Israeli soldiers to burial in Israel and returning our two [captive] civilians home as a top priority.”

“I’m not trying to tell you that the reality in the Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza border is excellent. Far from it. But with that, when I ask myself what happened there, I can say that over the last four years, not a single Israeli civilian has been killed. Three Israeli civilians were moderately wounded, and 20 mainly suffered from shock. Two soldiers were killed in combat and 16 were wounded, five of them seriously or moderately.”

“Meanwhile, they paid a very steep price. Instead of getting money from the Palestinian Authority, they are getting it from Qatar. That’s not protection.”