Israel's "Leviathan" - its grand strategy that seeks to squeeze out Turkey, and become the sole regional superpower in the Middle East. Learn more below 👇🏼

The Guardian interviewed @cherutLmoledet, a young Israeli girl and aspiring social media influencer, outside a rally for Itamar Ben-Gvir. His Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) party is projected to gain seats in Tuesday's elections, with strong support among younger voters. Her openly and unabashed genocidal statements and rhetoric towards Palestinians and Arabs across the Middle East speaks to the normalisation of such extremism in Israeli society. They are now effectively "saying the quiet part aloud".

The former director of the CIA, John Brennan, said that the US never supported Ahmed al-Sharaa's Al-Nusra Front. Nusra, which later turned into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was instead supported by locals in Syria, according to the former spymaster. Brennan was director of the CIA under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017.

In an interview with Breitbart, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that "if Iran didn't exist" then there would be no problems in the Middle East. He further added that even if the Palestinian issue continued to be a problem, it would be much easier to solve without Iran around. Rubio's comments neglect to mention that Israel, in the past few years alone, has bombed Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran itself, and even attempted as assassination in Doha, Qatar.

An elderly Yemeni man cries as he recounts how the Houthis have been killing and wounding people in his neighbourhood, sparing no one, not even women, children, the elderly, palm trees or even livestock.

As the Iran-linked Shia Houthi militia continues to besiege and bomb the Yemeni city of Taiz, some of its residents have spoken about the double standard of the group who criticises Israel for its genocide in Gaza while themselves committing similar atrocities against civilians in Yemen.

A spokesman for Qatar's foreign ministry has criticised Iran for its threats to cut deep sea communications cables, saying that those most harmed by their actions will be "the peoples of the region, including the Iranian people". The Qatari official added that Iran must stop its attacks on maritime navigation and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Joining Al Jazeera English earlier this morning, @TalAbdulrazaq dismissed as "overblown" the Egyptian role in the Saudi-Yemeni war against the Houthis, and said that the war could very well be decided by Saudi's "pain tolerance". If Riyadh showed patience in the face of Houthi attacks on their civilian infrastructure, he argued, it could progressively ramp up the pressure on the Houthis by destroying their oil and petroleum reserves, continuing to support Yemeni forces, and ensuring the success of the Ma'rib axis in threatening a recapture of the capital Sana'a.

American news television broadcast show, 60 Minutes, documented Israeli military officers assisting illegal Jewish settlers to remove Palestinians from their own land.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged to a rally of Israeli Druze that he had ordered the IDF to destroy the defence ministry in Damascus, Syria, and that he further threatened President Ahmed al-Sharaa in a "short and sharp" phone call to get him to call off the Suwayda attack in July 2025. There has been no confirmation that such a telephone call ever took place, and the Syrian government has firmly denied that it had ordered any "massacres" of Druze, stating that it prefers national unity on the basis of consensus and shared ownership of Syria's future.

With reports that Syrian authorities have captured Mihrac Ural AKA Ali Kayali, the Alevi Turkish militia commander who fought on behalf of Assad and perpetrated numerous atrocities, here is a clip detailing some of the Butcher of Baniyas's involvement in the Syrian revolution.

Speaking soon after a suspected Houthi and Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militia attack on Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia during US President Trump's first term in 2019, Kuwaiti politician @nasser_duwailah predicted that the Gulf would have its oil production and storage facilities attacked if they didn't find a way to move past the crisis without resorting to military force. Duwaila accused Trump of dishonesty and a lack of courage, and said that he was like a "suitcase salesman" trying to hawk goods on the street rather than a reliable ally and world leader. In 2026, the US and Israel launched a war on Iran that the Gulf Arab monarchies opposed. Nevertheless, Iran's primary targets in the region were not Israeli or American forces, but Gulf Arab countries, their refineries, oil facilities and LNG sites.

In a 2023 podcast with war journalist @AbdussamedDgl1, @TalAbdulrazaq explained how mut'ah marriage - or temporary marriage in Shia theology - was used extensively by Iranian-backed Shia groups to justify sex trafficking of Sunni women in Iraq and Syria.

Speaking to the press before leaving the White House for a rally in Alaska today, US President Donald Trump said that the Iran-backed Houthi group in Yemen was "behaving very badly" and that he might ask Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to deploy Turkey to Yemen, adding, "I have a lot of respect for the President of Turkey. President Erdogan I think would do as I ask."

Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum, held in the Polish city between 12-13 October 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that it was very noticeable that many toxic Russian-sponsored bots on social media were suddenly silenced after Kyiv struck Russian data centres. Zelenskyy suggested that many online toxic bots were being sanctioned by the Kremlin, and that Ukrainian attacks hampered their social influence activities. This strategy is not unusual, as countries like Israel, China, Iran, the UAE and other Gulf countries also use bot farms to spam content on social media sites to force a narrative their way.

Syrians in the northeastern city of Hasakeh flooded the streets waving the internationally recognised Syrian flag and told SDF remnants that their US-sponsored PKK symbols would now be dismantled. Syrians became increasingly fed up with minority ethnonationalist radical leftist Kurdish rule. Now that NE Syria is back under centralised control, the people have had enough of the symbols of the fallen SDF and have taken matters into their own hands.

Jewish-American pundit Eli Lake (@elilake), appearing on The Comedy Cellar alongside Noam Dworman, Coleman Hughes and others, tries to justify Israeli officials using genocidal statements when describing their war in Gaza. He further tries to cast doubt on the case spearheaded by South Africa in the International Court of Justice, describing allegations of genocide against Israel as "phony".

The Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, northern Syria, has officially reopened after extensive restoration work following large parts of the mosque's destruction due to repeated attacks from the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian-backed Shia militia allies.

The WJ's @TalAbdulrazaq says that Middle East observers need to calibrate their expectations of the Saudi-backed Yemeni republican campaign to dislodge the Houthis. This war will be attritional, not a blitzkrieg. Read more: talabdulrazaq.substack.com/p…

American economist Jeffrey Sachs accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of using Hamas and Hezbollah as an "excuse" to continue Israel's land grabs in Palestine and in neighbouring Arab countries. He also says that Netanyahu was influencing the US Congress by trying to sell them the idea of going to war with seven Arab and Muslim countries in five years, including overthrowing Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, which the US ultimately did in 2003.

Turkish freestyle wrestler Cemal Yiğit Purcu refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent at the Balkan Wrestling Championship in Zagreb, Croatia. Purcu then proceeded to make short work of his opponent by winning with a technical superiority score of 10-0 via repeated gut wrenches. After the match, the referee ordered him to shake the Israeli's hand, to which Purcu pointedly ignored him again leaving the referee looking bewildered as the Turkish wrestler walked off the mats.