Trump's warning to Hamas over Israeli hostages

President-elect Donald Trump has warned that "all hell will let lose" if Hamas fails to release all the remaining hostages in Gaza by the time he takes up office on January 20. It has to be said that all hell has already been let lose in Gaza, with thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in Israel in airstrikes and large chunks of urban areas totally or partially destroyed. But Trump has an even greater hell in mind for Hamas in Gaza apparently. It's difficult to see what it could be, apart from the US joining the Israelis in bombing everything suspected of being linked to or associated with Hamas. But what Trump's warning is really about is to apply as much pressure on Hamas as possible to release the hostages in the next two weeks. Hamas has been largely eliminated after relentless bombing and shelling and droning by the Israel Defence Forces ever since Hamas invaded Israel's southern border and killed 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250 on October 7th, 2023. Will the arrival of Trump in the White House and the exit of Joe Biden make any difference to Hamas? One would like to compare the hostage-release drama in Gaza today to the hostage-release drama in Iran in 1981. On the same day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, the 53 American diplomats and other staff who had been held prisoner by armed revolutionaries at the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days were freed. After a disastrous attempt by President Jimmy Carter to have them released by special forces in a mission that ended fatally in a sandstorm in the desert in Iran on April 24, 1980, it looked as if the arrival of strongman Reagan as president persuaded the ayatollahs in Tehran to give in and hand over the prisoners. But it wasn't the case. Carter and his diplomatic team had negotiated a deal through the good offices of the Algerian government. Under the Algiers agreement, Iran had fozen assets released and some sanctions lifted in exchange for the hostage release. Apparently, a bit of cunning persuasion by one of Reagan's envoys during the transition period succeeded in getting the release of the hostages delayed until Reagan had been inaugurated. Perhaps this is what will happen with the Gaza hostages. Biden and his team of negotiators will get the deal with Hamas but no Israeli hostages will be freed until after Trump takes over. Thus, history will repeat itself. Trump of course will take the plaudits because he will say that his "all hell will let loose" warning was taken seriously by Hamas.

Pentagon purge underway

The resignation of a top Pentagon official in the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president, is a warning signal of an expected exodus of career civil servants from the US department of defence. Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of defence for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, played a key leadership role in masterminding the multi-billion dollar military aid programme to Kyiv, following the Russian invasion nearly three years ago. While, unlike political appointees to government departments who are invariably replaced when a new administration takes over, Cooper, as a highly experienced civil servant, would have been expected to keep her job. However, US defence sources said many civil servants at the Pentagon had received phone calls from Trump’s transition team in recent weeks warning that their jobs were vulnerable. One source revealed that a section which Cooper led, liaising with the coalition supporting Ukraine, looked set to be axed because of Trump’s campaign pledge to end the war as soon as he took office. The phone calls, the source said, had created an atmosphere of intimidation inside the Pentagon. The calls made it clear the new president would be seeking officials who could demonstrate their loyalty to him. Cooper, who joined the Pentagon in 2001 and was a former policy planning officer at the state department, had already run afoul of the president-elect. Against orders from the White House during Trump’s first administration to ignore a subpoena she had received from Congress in 2019, Cooper gave testimony to a committee about the president’s suspension of $400 million in aid to Ukraine. The timing of the delay in delivering arms to Kyiv was at the heart of a congressional impeachment investigation into allegations that Trump had abused the power of his office. The impeachment failed to win sufficient votes. Cooper is expected to take up a lectureship role at the National Defence University in Washington, according to Politico. Her departure after more than two decades at the Pentagon comes as Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, has reportedly postponed a planned trip to Kyiv aimed at working out a formula to end the war. Reuters reported that the trip would not take place until after Trump takes office on January 20. Meanwhile, the resignation of the Pentagon’s Russian and Ukrainian expert could lead to other departures of experienced staff. The Pentagon which has a budget of $842 billion and employs about 3.4 million personnel, including more than 2.5 million members of the armed forces, is facing a purge of both military and civilian staff. “People are being identified for cuts and the whole atmosphere is intimidating. It’s causing a real morale slump, everyone is worrying about their jobs, their mortgages and their livelihoods,” the source said. “These are devoted civil servants who want to serve their nation but their jobs now seem to depend on their demonstrating loyalty to the incoming president and not to the constitution as it should be,” the insider said. Among the military potentially facing the axe are three-star and four-star officers considered inadequate for their command posts. Officers known to have been close to General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who had a combative relationship with Trump during his first term, are reported to be on lists drawn up by the transition team. One question being asked inside the Pentagon is whether Trump will try to remove General Charles Q Brown, the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who is an African-American, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations, the first woman to hold this position. “General Brown raised concerns [when he was Pacific Air Forces commander]. about the killing by a white police officer of George Floyd (an African American] in 2020. Will this be considered woke and be held against him?” a defence source asked. `Key to the Trump doctrine for the military will be loyalty to him as commander-in-chief. In his first term as president, he once questioned why he couldn’t have generals like Adolf Hitler, claiming they were obedient, according to Bob Woodward in his book, War. This followed his challenging experience dealing with General Jim Mattis, his first defence secretary, as well as General Milley, and also General John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.

Fifteen left at Guantanamo

Eleven more detainees, all Yemeni, have been flown out of Guantanamo Bay detention camp to reside in Oman, leaving just 15 left in the most controverial, notorious, most heavily guarded prison on the planet. There are at least 800 troops and contractors guarding these 15 detainees which include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the al-Qaeda terrorist attack in the US on 9/11. The last 15 will be the hardest to evacuate elsewhere. Even if the trial goes ahead of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators under the proposed guilty plea deal, will anyone want them carted off to their country to serve their sentence? It's more likely the alleged 9/11 gang will stay put in Guantanamo for many more years while negotiations continue into an appropriate place for them to serve out their expected life sentences. This will be a job for Donald Trump as 47th president of the United States but I doubt he will spend much time worrying about it.

Two weeks to go to new Trump era

Just 14 days left before Donald Trump becomes president again. Democrats in the US convinced themslves that it could never happen, that the people of America would have enough sense, knowing what Trump was like, not to bring him back to the White House. But the Democrats had a truly disastrous 2024. They allowed Joe Biden to continue pretending he could do another four-year term for far too long. And then they gave the baton to Kamala Harris when Joe was finally persuaded to drop out only three months before the election. Kamala never really had a chance. The Trump bandwagon was unstoppable. But now two weeks away from Inauguration Day, the reality of Trump in charge again is soon to hit Washington and every capital on the globe. Perhaps the dignity of office will suddenly embrace Trump when he attends the upcoming state funeral of President Jimmy Carter. However, as he stands solemnly in line with other former presidents, I expect Trump will just be itching to get back in control and to use the first days back in power to shower the country and the world with a mass of presidential edicts. He will want to make the maximum impact in the shortest possible time. He has a Republican-controlled Congress to support him. So his first week in office is likely to be a daily show of political fireworks. But even more than Trump, the man to watch out for will be Elan Musk who in his unique role as Trump's government money-saving czar will be eagerly waiting to start slicing spending and making the nation's finances more streamlined. Meanwhile, Musk's car empire, based on the electrictly-driven Tesla, is shuddering with problems. Two weeks to go before the drama begins.

Isis won't go away

The Isis caliphate in Syria and Iraq was defeated at a cost of billions of dollars and the loss of thousands of lives. And yet the ideology of violence and hatred espoused by the Islamic State lives on and has spread into cities in the West like a poison with no antidote. The black flag attached to the pick-up truck which ploughed through crowds of people in New Orleans celebrating the new year was both a symbol of the Islamic State and a message from the terrorist jihadists that they have ‘sleepers’ ready and willing to carry out atrocities. For western governments this poses a never-ending challenge. Judging by what the FBI has discovered so far, this was not the act of a foreigner breaching US boundaries to kill Americans but a ‘home-grown’, radicalised, Isis-inspired US Army veteran who turned against his own country. To underline the challenge to America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the truck driver, identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was believed to be operating alone. Ever since the forming of Isis – which grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2013 and morphed into an army of well-trained and expertly-led fighters of multiple nationalities – the intelligence services in the West have struggled to keep pace with the spreading of its appeal to disillusioned, angry and vengeful young Muslims. MI5 in the UK had to expand its counter-terrorism department to such an extent that other branches such as those trying to counter organised crime and even Russian and Chinese espionage had to fight for adequate resources. Thanks to a deluge of propaganda put out by Isis and avidly picked up on the internet by sympathisers, the ideology of hate was embedded in people who would not necessarily have resorted to violence without the Islamic State’s persuasive powers. What turned Shamsud-Din Jabbar? What made him offer his services to launch the terrorist attack in New Orleans? One thing that is clear is that the 42-year-old former soldier in planning the terrorist operation had learned from previous ‘comrades’ that one of the most effective modus operandi was to use a vehicle as the weapon of choice to mow down innocent people. There have been too many similar incidents in recent years. What works is repeated. It doesn’t need a self-styled leader of Isis to appeal to potential supporters to drive at speed into crowds of people, although in the past, guidance of this sort has been put out by the Islamic State. The worst of such attacks occurred in Nice on 14 July, 2016, when a man drove a 19-ton truck into crowds watching Bastille Day fireworks, killing 86 people and injuring hundreds more. The driver, 31-year-old Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was shot dead at the scene. But eight others, seven men and a woman, were found guilty of association with the terrorist and supplying weapons and were sentenced to prison terms of between two and 18 years. Though French police never found a direct link with Isis, the Islamic State claimed responsibility and the attack had all their hallmarks. Police discovered images of dead bodies linked to radical Islamism on Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s computer along with searches for jihadist propaganda. On 22 March, 2017, Khalid Masood, 52, born in Kent, drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge. He killed five people including a police officer, PC Keith Palmer, who was stabbed when the attacker left his vehicle. More than 50 people were injured. As the war against international terrorism has shown, military action backed by intelligence can be remarkably successful in eliminating the leaders and lower ranks of jihadist organisations. Al-Qaeda was once the most feared terrorist group. But when Osama bin Laden, its founder, was killed by US Navy Seals in 2011, and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was assassinated by a US weaponised drone at a house in Kabul in 2022, al-Qaeda’s ability to carry out terrorist attacks abroad was dramatically reduced. The new leader, Saif al-Adel, has survived so far by enjoying sanctuary in Iran. Isis, too, has suffered, mostly at the hands of the Americans and coalition partners. Since losing its self-proclaimed caliphate in March 2019, following years of bombings and ground assaults, the US has relentlessly targeted its leaders. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of Isis, was cornered by US special forces in Syria and took his own life in October 2019. A new leader, Abu Yusif, was killed in a US airstrike in Syria on 19 December, 2024. Isis still remains a threat in Syria and in many regions in the world where there are Islamic State factions. And, as the New Orleans attack has demonstrated, its creed of violence manifests itself where and when no one expects it.

New Orleans and Las Vegas incidents have to be linked

The FBI is being positively coy about whether there is any link between the massive terrorist attack with a vehicle in New Orleans and the huge explosion in a vehicle outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas on the same day, and in each case it was a former US Army soldier involved. They are either linked in some way or it's an extraordinary coincidence and I don't believe in coincidences. Of course the FBI have to find the evidence of a link but I imagine even the cautious FBI must be thinking, "if there's no link, my name is Aunty Betty." So, if this is the case, we are talking about a huge conspiracy to cause mass terror on the first day of 2025. And caused by two men who served in the US armed forces, including in operations against terrorists. What on earth happened in their lives to make them want to betray the country they served and to kill people whom they were trained to protect? That's another job for the FBI.

New Orleans, a terrible start to the year

It only takes a madman to remind the world that violence is totally endemic on this planet. The new year has begun with an appalling slaughter of innocent people on the streets of New Orleans. People celebrating the New Year and killed by a man who drove his pick-up truck into them with the intention of killing as many as possible. Ten lives lost and 30 more injured. What gets into the head of men like this just before they carry out an atrocity like this? Are they suicidal and decide to take others with them or are they simply people with ideological hatred inside them who hate to see others enjoying themselves? Whether this was a terrorist attack or a hate-filled attack, we don't yet know. But the FBI are involved, so it's probably terrorism. And that's another reminder, that however successful countries are, notable the US, in trying to eliminate terrorism and terrorists, they will always be there. As their "comrades-in-terrorism" are killed, more step into their shoes. There is no end to terrorism. And 2025 has begun with the grimmest of messages, that innocence is not something sacred. There are always angry and hateful people around in our communities who believe innocence should be punished. I started 2025 with a sense of optimism. It didn't last long.