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      US-Israeli soldier posted videos showing detonation of Gaza homes and mosque

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      An American-Israeli man deployed in Gaza with a combat engineering unit of Israel’s armed forces posted videos online that show indiscriminate fire at a destroyed building and the detonation of homes and a mosque.One video posted by the man, Bram Settenbrino, and filmed from the shooter’s viewpoint, shows dozens of rounds being fired into the ruins of a building. Another video shows what appears to be an armored vehicle’s fire-control system trained on a mosque before it is razed to the ground. Others depict the detonation of several homes as soldiers cheer.It is not clear whether Settenbrino personally filmed the videos or was involved in the acts depicted in them, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Settenbrino did not dispute the videos’ authenticity. The videos recently went viral on X, drawing accusations that they showed “war crimes”. Settenbrino wrote in a message to the Guardian that the videos were “taken out of context” but declined to elaborate. “I have not committed any war crimes whatsoever,” he added.After the Guardian reached out to Settenbrino and his family, his father published a response attributed to his son through Arutz Sheva, a news site associated with the settler right. “The machine gun fire video in question was suppressive fire in an area cleared of civilians after my team was attacked by Hamas terrorists from that area. The mosque that was blown up was being used to house armed terrorists and weapons stockpiles and used as a base to attack IDF soldiers.”The soldier’s father said his son had “sent a congratulatory video dedicating a detonation to honor a friend’s new marriage”, and that the family business had received threats since the videos began circulating.Israeli soldiers have shared scores of videos during the 10-month war showing themselves mocking Palestinians in Gaza and destroying Palestinian property. Some have been used as evidence in the genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ). Israeli forces have killed more than 39,000 Palestinians since the beginning of the war, displaced most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents and destroyed more than half of the strip’s structures.With thousands of Americans serving in the IDF, potential misconduct documented by soldiers themselves raises uncomfortable questions for US officials about their willingness to enforce federal law against citizens acting in an overseas war the US government funds and supports.The extensive destruction of property, when “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” is a violation of international law regulating conflict and a war crime under US law.The US has an obligation to ensure respect for the Geneva conventions, a series of international treaties regulating armed conflict, said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the US Department of State. “If US citizens are violating the Geneva conventions or committing war crimes in Israel and Palestine, that implicates the US’s obligations,” he said, adding that under the federal War Crimes Act, the US has the authority to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes when either the victim or perpetrator are US citizens, or when perpetrators of any nationality are on US soil.The IDF did not answer questions about why the mosque and homes in Settenbrino’s videos were targeted but has regularly claimed buildings it destroyed were used by Hamas fighters. Combat engineering corps usually plant explosives inside buildings they identify as targets and detonate them remotely, a more controlled demolition than bombing them from the air or from a tank.View image in fullscreenThe video showing the destruction of the mosque is dated 10 December, approximately when Settenbrino’s unit was deployed in the north of the strip. Israeli forces partially or fully destroyed more than 500 mosques in the strip since 7 October, Palestinian officials said in March.Rights groups have called on the Biden administration to investigate crimes committed in Gaza as potential violations of US law. Ahead of the trip to the US last week of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Center for Constitutional Rights urged the US Department of Justice to investigate him and others responsible for serious crimes being committed in Gaza, “including potentially US and US-dual citizens”.Brad Parker, CCR’s associate director of policy said: “Federal criminal statutes prohibit and criminalize genocide, war crimes, and torture, among other serious international crimes.“US officials, government employees approving or facilitating continued weapons transfers to Israel, and individual US citizens currently serving active-duty roles in the Israeli military should definitely be concerned about their own individual criminal responsibility.”Since the start of the war in Gaza, US efforts to crack down on violence against Palestinians have focused on the West Bank, where officials sanctioned a handful of settlers, freezing assets they may hold in the US and blocking American individuals and institutions from doing business with them. While the sanctions also include a ban on travel to the US, this would not extend to Americans. “But there are other tools available to the US government,” said Finucane, noting that citizens committing crimes abroad could be prosecuted in US courts.An estimated 60,000 US citizens live in settlements in the West Bank. Many are deeply ideological, inspired by extremist figures like Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was designated a terror group in both the US and Israel. The justice department did not answer questions about whether it is considering any action against settlers who are US citizens.Americans in the IDFAn estimated 23,380 US citizens serve in Israel’s armed forces, according to the Washington Post – a figure the IDF did not confirm but probably includes both Americans traveling to Israel for the purpose of service and Israeli-raised soldiers holding dual citizenship.A spokesperson for the US state department did not answer questions about Settenbrino and referred questions about US obligations regarding its citizens’ actions in Gaza to the justice department. “We do continue to emphasize that the IDF must abide by international humanitarian law,” the spokesperson wrote. The justice department did not respond to repeated requests for comment.A spokesperson for the IDF declined to comment on Settenbrino specifically, citing privacy concerns, but said in a statement that “the IDF examines events of this kind as well as reports of videos uploaded to social networks and handles them with command and disciplinary measures”. The spokesperson declined to say whether the IDF regulates soldiers’ use of social media but said that it refers cases of suspected criminality to the military police for investigation.The state department spokesperson was not able to confirm the number of Americans serving in the IDF, as citizens are not required to register their service with the US government.Settenbrino has been deployed in Gaza since the beginning of the war with the Handasah Kravit, the IDF’s engineering corps. An Eagle scout raised in New Jersey, he moved to Israel as a teenager, becoming one of an estimated 600,000 US citizens who live there. He first joined the Israel dog unit, a civilian group that trains and deploys search-and-rescue dogs, and later enlisted in the IDF.Last year, he received an “Outstanding Soldier of the Year” award from his division, according to his father, Randy Settenbrino, who has written about his son in op-eds for Israeli and Jewish publications.‘Destroying homes is a day-to-day activity’Settenbrino’s videos were first circulated in July by a prominent X account under the name Younis Tirawi that regularly surfaces videos posted by soldiers. Israeli soldiers have also shared videos of themselves playing with children’s toys and women’s underwear, the burning of Palestinian food supplies and rounding up and blindfolding civilians. Another video recently shared by Tirawi and originally posted by a member of Settenbrino’s unit showed the deliberate destruction of a water facility in Rafah.One video by an IDF soldier, depicting a huge explosion in Gaza City as the soldier says “Shuja’iyya neighborhood gone … peace to Shuja’iyya” was screened in January before the ICJ as part of the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel and others were cited during the proceedings.“There is now a trend among the soldiers to film themselves committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, in a form of ‘snuff’ video,” the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said in court. He cited examples of soldiers recording themselves destroying houses and declaring their intent to “erase Gaza” or “destroy Khan Younis” – potential evidence of genocidal intent.Such videos have rarely led to consequences. The IDF spokesperson said that when military investigations determine that “the expression or behavior of the soldiers in the footage is inappropriate […] it is handled accordingly”, but did not offer examples.“The vast number of such videos online demonstrates that the military leadership isn’t even trying to discipline the rank and file,” said Joel Carmel, a member of the Israeli veterans group Breaking the Silence.He added: “More importantly, the issue is less about the videos themselves and more about what it says about the way we fight in Gaza. Destroying homes and places of worship is a day-to-day activity for soldiers in Gaza – it is the opposite of the ‘surgical’ strikes on carefully chosen targets that we are told about by the IDF.”Whether the US would ever prosecute American citizens fighting for Israel is as much a political question as a legal one.“The US government could prosecute these US citizens if they participate in war crimes,” Oona Hathaway, director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School, told the Guardian. “Politically, however, that’s unlikely, for all the obvious reasons.” More

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      Assassination again shows Netanyahu’s disregard for US-Israel relations

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      Standing alongside Donald Trump in Florida a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was vague on the latest prospect of a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.“I hope we are going to have a deal. Time will tell,” the Israeli prime minister said, two days after his controversial address to a joint session of the US Congress.Throughout his three-day visit to the US, Netanyahu was careful to avoid making any commitment to the deal Biden unveiled on 31 May. While the US insisted publicly that the onus was on Hamas to accept the plan, the administration knew it also needed to pin down Netanyahu personally over his reluctance to commit to a permanent ceasefire.Yet, according to US reports, it now appears that at the very time Netanyahu was publicly speculating about a deal, a remote-controlled bomb had already been smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, awaiting its intended target: Ismail Haniyeh, the senior Hamas leader who was assassinated on Wednesday night.Haniyeh, reported the New York Times and CNN, was killed by an explosive device placed in the guesthouse, where he was known to stay while visiting Iran and was under the protection of the powerful Revolutionary Guards. Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the attack, which Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. It fits a pattern of previous Israeli targeted killings on Iranian soil.If the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is to be believed, Netanyahu never divulged any such plan to his American allies. The first Blinken knew of the assassination was when he was told in Singapore, after the event. Later that day he insisted he had been left blind-sided, almost as badly as Iranian intelligence.In Netanyahu’s defence, Israel has not confirmed the US media accounts, nor has it ever made any secret of its intention to kill the senior Hamas leadership as a reprisal for the 7 October attacks. And even as he spoke to Congress, the prime minister could not have known that the reported plan would work so well, or have such a devastating impact.However, the potential consequences of such an assassination were clear to all. It took the frustrated Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, to accuse Netanyahu of sabotage. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” he asked.In Washington, the national security council spokesperson John Kirby put on a brave face, claiming the ceasefire process had not been “completely torpedoed”, and insisting: “We still believe the deal on the table is worth pursuing”.The assassination underlines how the US is often left looking like the junior partner in the relationship with Israel, observers say. Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, said: “It is another case of Netanyahu putting up two fingers to Biden. There has been month after month after month of these just repeated affronts and humiliations from Netanyahu, culminating in this ridiculous moment last week, where he came and spoke in front of the Congress yet again, to undermine Biden’s ceasefire proposal. Yet Biden, who sets such store by personal relations, refuses to change course.”Duss has said that by refusing to control the supply of US weapons as a means of leverage with Israel, Biden has left Netanyahu free to pursue the war. Biden was left to ring Netanyahu two days after the assassination, and to promise to defend Israel from any threats from Iran and its proxy groups. If there was any private admonition or disapproval, the public read-out of the call concealed it.Biden later expressed his frustration, telling reporters: “We have the basis for a ceasefire. They should move on it now.” Asked if Haniyeh’s death had ruined the prospect of a deal, the president said: “It has not helped.”The killing is a further indicator of how the Biden administration cannot capitalise on a security relationship with a politician whose methods and objectives it does not share, and who it suspects wants its political rival to triumph in November’s US election. Moreover, both Trump and Netanyahu share a common goal – having political power to stave off criminal proceedings against themselves.At issue, too, is the effectiveness of Israel’s long-term military strategy for dismantling Hamas, including the use of assassinations on foreign soil.Haniyeh is the third prominent member of Iran-backed military groups to be killed in recent weeks, after the killing last month of the Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza and the strike on the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, in turn a response to the killing of 12 children and teenagers in the Druze village of Majdal Shams.In total, according to ACLED, a US-based NGO, Israel has mounted 34 attacks that have led to the death of at least 39 commanders and senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran in the past 10 months.Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, describes the killings as a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat. “Haniyeh was a proponent of Palestinian reconciliation, and of a ceasefire. So taking him out of the equation has an impact on the internal power dynamics within the group by strengthening the hardliners, at least in the current term,” he said.Netanyahu, Lovatt added, was undermining Haniyeh “by going back on agreed positions and by being very vocal in saying as soon as the hostages were released we recommence fighting Hamas”.Nicholas Hopton, a former UK ambassador to Tehran, said he feared the assassination was part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the hopes of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to rebuild relations with the west.“You can overstate what a reformer means in Iran – he went to the parliament wearing an IRGC uniform – but he was going to give relations with the west a go,” Hopton said. “I think the supreme leader is deeply sceptical it will lead anywhere but thought it was worth an attempt. Pezeshkian may now be stymied right away, and I think that’s what the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran was partly designed to do.”Inside Iran, Mohammad Salari, the secretary general of the Islamic Solidarity party, said the killing should be seen as more than the removal of one political figure. The hidden purpose was to overshadow the new government’s policy of engagement and de-escalation, he said.“Netanyahu will use all his efforts to lay stones in the path of realising Iran’s balanced foreign policy, improving relations with European countries, and managing tension with the United States, just like during the nuclear negotiations.”So when the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah,threatened an open battle on all fronts, he probably meant, according to Lovatt, a multi-pronged response designed not to trigger a regional war, but to go further than the retaliation mounted by Iran alone in April. It was notable that Nasrallah added a plea to the White House: “If anybody in the world genuinely wants to prevent a more serious regional war, they must pressure Israel to stop its aggression on Gaza.”At the moment that plea lies unanswered. More

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      Shapiro’s College-Era Criticism of Palestinians Draws Fresh Scrutiny

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      Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, wrote in his college newspaper three decades ago that Palestinians were “too battle-minded” to achieve a two-state solution in the Middle East, prompting criticism as Vice President Kamala Harris considers him to be her running mate.Mr. Shapiro, 51, has embraced his Jewish identity and been one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel at a moment when the party is splintered over the war in Gaza.But he says his views have evolved since publishing an opinion essay as a college student at the University of Rochester in New York, when he wrote that Palestinians were incapable of establishing their own homeland and making it successful, even with help from Israel and the United States.“They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own,” he wrote in the essay, published in the Sept. 23, 1993, edition of The Campus Times, the student newspaper. “They will grow tired of fighting amongst themselves and will turn outside against Israel.”Mr. Shapiro, who was 20 at the time, noted in his essay that he had spent five months studying in Israel and had volunteered in the Israeli Army.“The only way the ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it,” Mr. Shapiro wrote, adding, “Palestinians will not coexist peacefully.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Families of Hostages in Gaza Despair As Assassination Halts Talks

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      Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, said he left a meeting last week with President Biden more optimistic than he had felt in months that a deal to free his son could be close.But in the intervening days, a new crisis has unfolded with the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political branch, and Fuad Shukr, a senior figure in Hezbollah. The negotiations, which already appeared to have reached an impasse, appear to have halted for now.Reached on Thursday, Mr. Dekel-Chen sounded far less hopeful as tensions spiked across the region. His son was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a community devastated by the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7; roughly 100 of its residents were either killed or taken hostage.“It seems like it will delay any possible resolution, cease-fire or hostage release,” said Mr. Dekel-Chen, referring to the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh, who played a key role in cease-fire talks. “It could very easily mean that revenge, retribution is taken against our loved ones.”In a speech on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the decision to press onward with the war effort, including by striking senior Hamas leaders, was bringing Israel closer to a deal to bring home the hostages. Some, particularly the families of the remaining hostages, appeared unconvinced.“I don’t see the straight line that goes from that assassination to the release of the hostages,” said Mr. Dekel-Chen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iran’s Options for Retaliation Risk Escalating Middle East Crisis

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      The killing of Hamas’s political leader in Tehran was a humiliating security failure for the Iranian government.Most new Iranian presidents have months to settle into the decades-old cadence of gradual nuclear escalation, attacks against adversaries and, episodically, secret talks with the West to relieve sanctions.President Masoud Pezeshkian had 10 hours.That was the elapsed time between his swearing-in and the explosion inside an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse, at 2 a.m. in Tehran, that killed Ismail Haniyeh, the longtime political leader of Hamas. Mr. Haniyeh had not only attended the swearing-in, but had also been embraced by the new president and met that day with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, making the assassination a particularly brazen act.Now Mr. Pezeshkian — along with Ayatollah Khamenei and top military generals — will be immersed in critical choices that may determine whether war breaks out between two of the Mideast’s most potent militaries. He spent his first day in office in national security meetings. The final decision on how to retaliate rests with Mr. Khamenei and on Wednesday he where ordered Iranian forces to strike Israel directly for what appeared to be its role in killing Mr. Haniyeh.But how that retaliation unfolds makes a difference. If Iran launches direct missile attacks, as it attempted for the first time in 45 years in April, the cycle of strike and counterstrike could easily escalate. If Hezbollah, its closest ally in the region, steps up attacks on Israel’s north or the Houthis expand their attacks in the Red Sea, the war could expand to Lebanon, or involve the need for American naval forces to keep the sea lanes open.Mourners for Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s longtime political leader, in Tehran on Wednesday.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesBehind all of those options is perhaps the riskiest choice of all: whether Iran decides to take the final step toward building an actual nuclear weapon. For decades it has walked right up to the line, producing nuclear fuel and in recent years enriching it to near bomb-grade levels. But American intelligence assessments say the country has always stopped short of an actual weapon, a decision Iranian leaders have publicly been reconsidering in recent months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Says It Killed Hezbollah Commander in Airstrike Near Beirut

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      The strike was in retaliation for a deadly rocket attack this weekend in the Golan Heights. At least three civilians were killed and 74 others wounded on Tuesday, Lebanese officials said.Israel launched a deadly strike in a densely populated Beirut suburb on Tuesday in retaliation for a rocket attack in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights that it blamed Hezbollah for and that killed 12 children and teenagers on a soccer field.The target of the Israeli strike in a southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital was Fuad Shukr, a senior official who serves as a close adviser to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, according to three Israeli security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.The Israel Defense Forces later said in a statement that its fighter jets had “eliminated” Mr. Shukr, but there was no confirmation from Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed group, and the claim could not be independently verified.Hezbollah has denied carrying out the attack in the Golan Heights on Saturday. The latest strikes were likely to fuel concerns that Israel’s long-running conflict with the group could escalate into a full-blown war even as Israel wages a military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after that group led a deadly assault in Israel on Oct. 7.The attack on Tuesday is believed to be the first time since the war with Hamas began that Israel has targeted Hezbollah in Beirut. In January, an Israeli airstrike in a Beirut suburb killed Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.The strike on Tuesday killed at least three other people — a woman and two children — and wounded at least 74 others, five critically, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health. Officials were still searching the rubble for other victims, the ministry said. More

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      Netanyahu Vows ‘Severe’ Response to Deadly Rocket Attack Tied to Hezbollah

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      Fears linger among Lebanese civilians after a strike killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.Tensions were high on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border on Monday as Israeli leaders vowed to deliver a significant military blow against the armed group Hezbollah in response to a deadly rocket attack over the weekend.The attack on Saturday killed 12 children and teenagers in the Druse Arab village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia that dominates southern Lebanon and that has been firing rockets into Israel for months, denied responsibility for the strike. But Israel and the United States blamed the group, saying it was Hezbollah’s rocket that had been fired from territory it controls.Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the site of the attack on Monday, said, “Our response is coming, and it will be severe.” Local residents heckled Mr. Netanyahu, telling him they had no security and chanting, “Murderer! Murderer!” videos posted on social media showed.Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Majdal Shams came the morning after Israeli cabinet ministers authorized him and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to determine the nature and timing of the military response. The strike and Israel’s expected counterattack have raised fears that nearly 10 months of armed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could spiral into an all-out war.Hezbollah began firing rockets, antitank missiles and drones into Israel in solidarity with Hamas after that group, which is also backed by Iran, led the deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden administration blames Hezbollah for ‘horrific’ Golan Heights rocket attack

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      The Biden administration formally placed blame on Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah for the rocket strike that killed 12 children and teenagers on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Sunday.National security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the attack was “conducted by Lebanese Hezbollah. It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control. It should be universally condemned.”The spokesperson described the attack as “horrific” and said the US is “working on a diplomatic solution along the Blue Line that will end all attacks once and for all, and allow citizens on both sides of the border to safely return to their homes”.The statement added that US “support for Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah”.The statement was issued as the Israeli government announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing David Barnea, Israel’s foreign intelligence chief, from cease-fire negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the US over the Israel-Gaza war.The day-long talks in Rome were convened to negotiate an Israel-Hamas truce that would see the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians jailed by Israel. Israel did not offer a reason for withdrawing its top negotiator.The attack on Majdal Shams village has intensified fears that without a ceasefire in Gaza of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is drawing closer and could draw the US deeper into a regional conflict.Senior US political figures on Sunday looked past the immediate responsibility for attack to blame Iran for escalating regional unrest.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, emphasized Israel’s “right to defend its citizens and our determination to make sure that they’re able to do that”.But, he added that the US “also don’t want to see the conflict escalate”.“Iran, through its surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, is really the real evil in this area,” said Democrat Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on CBS’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.“Israel has every right to defend itself against Hezbollah like they do against Hamas. It’s sort of – it shows you how bad Iran and its surrogates are,” Schumer added, saying that the Hezbollah attack had hit “Arab kids”.“They don’t care – they sent missiles at and they don’t even care who that is. But having said that, I don’t think anyone wants a wider war. So I hope there are moves to de-escalate.”Schumer, the most senior Jewish-American politician in Congress, was part of the controversial bipartisan invitation to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress last week, which led to accusations that US politicians had allowed the body to be used as a stage prop for Israel’s nine-month offensive in Gaza.Schumer, however, did not shake Netanyahu’s hand. “I went to this speech, because the relationship between Israel and America is ironclad and I wanted to show that,” Schumer said, adding that he also has “serious disagreements” with the way the Israeli prime minister “has conducted these policies”.The former house speaker Nancy Pelosi later tweeted that Netanyahu’s “presentation in the House chamber was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with that privilege in American history”.On the other side of the political spectrum, Republican senator Lindsey Graham predicted that US and Lebanese efforts to cool tensions between Israel and Hezbollah would not be successful because “Iran is behind all of this” and warned of possible nuclear concerns.Speaking with CBS’s Face the Nation, Graham blamed the Biden-Harris administration for “a colossal failure in terms of controlling the Ayatollah. They’ve enriched him and Israel is paying the price.”Republican congressman Michael McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, which oversees all US foreign military sales and transfers, accused the Biden administration of intentionally delaying weapons shipments to Israel in order to have “leverage” over Israel’s decision-making processes.McCaul said “daylight” between the US and Israel was “very dangerous, especially right now, for us to somehow put daylight between us and our most important US ally democracy in the Middle East.“We don’t want escalation for sure,” he said, describing Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi rebels as “proxies of Iran”. He said Iran doesn’t want Saudi-Israel normalization, “so it’s not in their interest to have any cease-fire.” More