Soleimani strike threatens UK ‘lives and interests’

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain ‘will not lament’ the loss of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, but fell short of supporting the attack. (File/AP)
Short Url
Updated 07 January 2020
Follow

Soleimani strike threatens UK ‘lives and interests’

  • British MP says US failure to share information ‘a matter of concern’

LONDON: When the sun rose on Jan. 3, the world woke to unprecedented contemporary tensions between the US and Iran. 

As an American drone fired missiles at the convoy of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad at around 1 a.m., most of Washington’s allies were in the dark.

British sources said the government was not informed ahead of the strike, despite the heavy UK presence in the region and Iraq.

Washington’s failure to forewarn London amid heightened regional tensions has caused confusion and concern among commentators and politicians. 

“I’ve long believed that the purpose of having allies is that we can surprise our enemies and not each other,” said Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP and chair of the foreign affairs committee in the previous UK Parliament.

The failure to share information has become “a pattern,” and it is “a bit of a shame that the US administration of late has not shared with us, and that is a matter of concern,” he added.

A source close to Downing Street told Arab News that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — who is currently holidaying on the private Caribbean island of Mustique — was unaware that the strike was due to take place. 

As global leaders weighed in on the incident, Johnson remained silent until Jan. 5, when he was careful not to deliver a statement that was overly supportive of US President Donald Trump’s orders.

Johnson said Britain “will not lament” the loss of Iran’s top general, but fell short of supporting the attack.

A surprisingly short statement from Britain’s Foreign Office did not contain a line of support for Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani. 

In a statement, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Britain had “always recognized the aggressive threat posed by the Iranian Quds force,” but he called for de-escalation, adding: “Further conflict is in none of our interests.”

Lucy Fisher, defense editor at The Times, said Iran was “convinced of its status as a world superpower,” and the chance of it launching attacks on British interests was “very possible given the UK is inextricably linked with the US in the eyes of Iran.” 

A senior commander in the Quds Force — Iran’s international military force, responsible for supporting proxy militias — told The Times on Jan. 6: “Our forces will retaliate and target US troops in (the) Middle East without any concern about killing its allies, including UK troops, as this has turned into a fully fledged war with much collateral damage expected.”

The commander added: “We request (the) UK, the key US ally, and other Western allies … to not stand with this Trump regime.”

His inflammatory comments come as Iraqi police confirmed that two rockets had injured six people in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the US Embassy is based.

Iraq’s Parliament has backed a resolution supported by Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to expel foreign forces — including British troops — from the country.

Raab responded by urging Baghdad to abandon the resolution. He told Iraq’s government that an ejection of NATO forces would allow Daesh to “exploit the vacuum” left behind.

Arab News understands that Britain’s Defense Ministry is preparing new plans to secure UK interests and personnel after the resolution. 

The 400 British armed forces personnel based in Iraq have shifted their mission from training local forces to fight Daesh, to defending NATO bases and high-value individuals. 

The Royal Navy now plans to resume its escort of merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz following the heightened tensions. 

HMS Montrose and HMS Defender, a frigate and a destroyer respectively, had ended their escorting duties in 2019, but will now return to their duties. 

But despite the widely perceived threat to British interests, and the predictable trouble this has brought to London, the US failed to consult or even brief
the UK ahead of the attack.

The diplomatic silence over an assassination that has huge ramifications for British security has led to some questioning the value of the “special relationship” between the two nations.

“We pride ourselves on the so-called ‘special relationship,’ yet there’s often little evidence that the US has a special relationship with anyone other than itself,” said Charlie Herbert, a former British Army major general.

Kyle Orton, an independent terrorism researcher, told Arab News: “British interests are at risk, arguably more than American interests if Iran is looking for a calibrated response that doesn’t provoke worse from Washington.”

But he added: “The need for speed and secrecy makes it imperative to keep the circle of people aware small.” 

According to reports from the Los Angeles Times, that circle was small but included Israel. Barak Ravid, a journalist with sources in Israel’s government, said on Jan. 4 that the “US informed Israel about this operation in Iraq apparently a few days ago.”

A well-informed Israeli army officer told the Los Angeles Times that the attack “did not come as a surprise.”

After decades of fighting alongside American troops, and with thousands of British military and governmental personnel deployed in the Middle East to work alongside US forces, many Britons will be wondering what more they must do to enjoy the kind of advance notice afforded to Israel.


Chinese embassy in Israel urges citizens to leave

Updated 7 sec ago
Follow

Chinese embassy in Israel urges citizens to leave

  • The notice recommended Chinese citizens to leave via the land crossing toward Jordan

BEIJING: The Chinese embassy in Israel has urged Chinese citizens to return home or leave the country via land border crossings as soon as possible, on grounds that the security situation has deteriorated and Israeli airspace remained closed.
“At present, the Israeli-Iranian conflict continues to escalate, with civilian facilities damaged and civilian casualties increasing, making the security situation even more severe,” the embassy warned in a Tuesday notice on WeChat.
The notice recommended Chinese citizens to leave via the land crossing toward Jordan.

 


Macron urges end to strikes against civilians, warns against Iran regime change

Updated 5 min 37 sec ago
Follow

Macron urges end to strikes against civilians, warns against Iran regime change

  • Macron called on both Israel and Iran to “end” strikes against civilians and warned that aiming to overthrow Tehran’s clerical state would be a “strategic error”

KANANASKIS, Canada: French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday called for strikes against civilians in Iran and Israel to end, as he warned against forcing regime change in Tehran.
“If the United States can achieve a ceasefire, that’s a very good thing,” Macron told reporters at a G7 summit in Canada, just as the White House announced President Donald Trump would leave the event early due the escalating crisis in the Middle East.
Macron called on both Israel and Iran to “end” strikes against civilians and warned that aiming to overthrow Tehran’s clerical state would be a “strategic error.”
“All who have thought that by bombing from the outside you can save a country in spite of itself have always been mistaken,” he said.

 


Why attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities have placed Israel’s own secret arsenal in the spotlight

Updated 17 June 2025
Follow

Why attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities have placed Israel’s own secret arsenal in the spotlight

  • Estimates suggest Israel possesses at least 90 nuclear warheads, deliverable by aircraft, land-based missiles,
  • Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to place its facilities under international safeguards

LONDON: To this day, Israel maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity in regard to its nuclear capabilities, but it is a fact accepted by experts worldwide that Israel has had the bomb since just before the Six Day War in 1967.

And not just one bomb. Recent estimates by the independent Stockholm International Peace Institute, which has kept tabs on the world’s nuclear weapons and the states that possess them since 1966, suggest Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads.

SIPRI believes that these warheads are capable of being delivered anywhere within a maximum radius of 4,500 km by its F-15, F-161, and F-35I “Adir” aircraft, its 50 land-based Jericho II and III missiles, and by about 20 Popeye Turbo cruise missiles, launched from submarines.

A woman looks at a wall decorated with national flags during the IAEA's Board of Governors meeting at the agency's headquarters in Vienna, Austria on June 3, 2024. (AFP)

While Iran is a signatory to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel is not, which begs the question: while Israel is wreaking havoc in Iran, with the declared aim of crippling a nuclear development program, which the International Atomic Energy Authority says is about energy, not weaponry, why is the international community not questioning Israel’s?

In March, during a meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Jassim Yacoub Al-Hammadi, Qatar’s ambassador to Austria, announced that Qatar was calling for “intensified international efforts” to bring all Israeli nuclear facilities “under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency and for Israel to join the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state.”

Israel refuses to sign up to the NPT or cooperate with the IAEA. Furthermore, it is a little remembered fact that since 1981 Israel has been in breach of UN Resolution 487.

This was prompted by an attack on a nuclear research facility in Iraq by Israel on June 7, 1981, which was condemned by the UN Security Council as a “clear violation of the Charter of the UN and the norms of international conduct.”

Iraq, as the Security Council pointed out, had been a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty since it came into force in 1970.

Like all states, especially those developing, Iraq had the “inalienable sovereign right …  to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation.”

Iran won’t permit the blood of its martyrs to go unavenged, nor ignore violation of its airspace, says Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader

The resolution, which remains in force, called on Israel “urgently to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Israel has never complied with Resolution 487.

That ambiguity extends to Israel’s only officially stated position on nuclear weapons, which it has repeated since the 1960s, that it “won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”

A picture shows the unrecognised Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah, east of Dimona city (background) in southern Israel, on May 29, 2024. (AFP)

Israeli policymakers, SIPRI says, “have previously interpreted ‘introduce nuclear weapons’ as publicly declaring, testing or actually using the nuclear capability, which Israel says it has not yet done.”

In November 2023, about a month after the Hamas-led attack on Israel triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party, said Israel should drop “some kind of atomic bomb” on Gaza, “to kill everyone.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly suspended Eliyahu from the cabinet. Eliyahu’s statements “were not based in reality,” Netanyahu said, while Eliyah himself took to X to say that it was “clear to all sensible people” that his statement was “metaphorical.”

Buildings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters reflect in doors with the agency's logo during the IAEA’s Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria on June 13, 2025. (AFP)

Arsen Ostrovsky, an international human rights lawyer who on X describes himself as a “proud Zionist,” replied: “It is clear to all sensible people that you are a stupid idiot. Even if metaphorical, it was inexcusable. You need to know when to keep your mouth shut.”

Israel has no nuclear electricity generating plants, but it does have what experts agree is a vast nuclear facility.

The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center — built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, allegedly with French assistance, and renamed for the former Israeli prime minister following his death in 2016 — is a heavily guarded complex in the Negev Desert barely 70 km from the border with Egypt.

Iran has ballistic missiles that are capable of reaching the Negev Nuclear Research Center, approximately 1,500 km from Tehran. Why is Tehran hitting Israeli cities in retaliation to Israel’s attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry, when it could attack Israel’s nuclear facility?

The answer, most likely, comes down to the “Samson Option.”

The Samson Option is a protocol for mutual destruction, the existence of which Israel has never admitted, but has never denied.

As Arab News reported in March, Israel is believed to have twice come close to using its nuclear weaponry.

In 2017, a claim emerged that on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 Israel had been on the cusp of unleashing a “demonstration” nuclear blast designed to intimidate its enemies.

The plan was revealed in interviews with retired general Itzhak Yaakov, conducted by Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American historian and leading scholar of Israel’s nuclear history, and published only after Yaakov’s death.

In 2003, Cohen revealed that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when it again appeared that Israeli forces were about to be overrun, then Prime Minister Golda Meir had authorized the use of nuclear bombs and missiles as a last-stand defense.

This doomsday plan, codenamed Samson, was named for the Israelite strongman who, captured by the Philistines, pulled down the pillars of their temple, destroying himself along with his enemies.

Mordecha Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician and peace activist, revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets back in 1986.

Ensnared in the UK by a female Israeli agent, Mordechai was lured to Rome, where he was kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken back to Israel on an Israeli navy ship.

Vanunu, charged with treason, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, much of which he spent in solitary confinement. Released in April 2004, he remains under a series of strictly enforced restrictions, which prevent him from leaving Israel or even speaking to any foreigner.

“We all believe that Israel has a nuclear capability,” Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London’s Institute of Middle East Studies, told Arab News in March.

“The fact that Israel found it necessary to catch Vanunu and put him in jail, and continues to impose strict limitations on him, just proves that it has probably got it.”

The emergence of another Vanunu, especially in the current climate, is highly unlikely.

“Israelis are scared,” said Bregman, who served in the Israeli army for six years in the 1980s.

“Even if you believe it is a good idea to restrict Israel’s behavior and make sure it doesn’t do anything stupid, you are scared to act because you know they will abduct you and put you in jail.

“Israel is very tough on those who reveal its secrets.”

 


Gaza marchers retreat to western Libya after being blocked

Updated 16 June 2025
Follow

Gaza marchers retreat to western Libya after being blocked

  • The ‘Soumoud’ convoy — meaning steadfastness in Arabic — decided to fall back near Misrata, about 200 km east of Tripoli, after being stopped by the eastern authorities

TUNIS: Pro-Palestinian activists on a march aiming to break Israel’s Gaza blockade have retreated to the Misrata region of western Libya after being blocked by the authorities in the country’s east, organizers said on Sunday.

The “Soumoud” convoy — meaning steadfastness in Arabic — decided to fall back near Misrata, about 200 km east of Tripoli, after being stopped by the eastern authorities.

Misrata is administered by the UN-recognized Government of National Unity based in Tripoli, while military commander Khalifa Haftar controls the east.

The convoy of more than 1,000 people from Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia had been under a “military blockade” since Friday at the entrance to Sirte, a Haftar-controlled area.

Organizers said they were subjected to a “systematic siege,” with no access to food, water, or medicine, and communications severely disrupted.

They also denounced the arrest of several convoy members, including at least three bloggers who had been documenting its journey since its departure from Tunisia on June 9.

In a statement cited by Tunisia’s La Presse newspaper, the Joint Action Coordination Committee for Palestine — the group behind the convoy — demanded the immediate release of 13 participants still held by eastern Libyan authorities.

In an accompanying video, it reaffirmed its intention to continue the mission to Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, with the aim of “breaking the blockade and ending the genocide of the Palestinian people resisting in Gaza.”

In Egypt, a separate initiative — the Global March to Gaza, intended to bring together participants from 80 countries — was halted on Friday by authorities en route to the city of Ismailia, east of Cairo.

Dozens of activists were intercepted, reportedly beaten, had passports confiscated, and were forcibly loaded onto buses by police at multiple checkpoints, according to videos shared on social media and with AFP.


Bahraini crown prince affirms strategic ties with US in meeting with congressional delegation

Updated 16 June 2025
Follow

Bahraini crown prince affirms strategic ties with US in meeting with congressional delegation

  • Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa reiterated the country’s commitment to resolving crises through dialogue and diplomatic efforts

LONDON: Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa affirmed the importance of Manama’s strategic partnership with the US during a meeting with a congressional delegation at Gudaibiya Palace on Monday.

During the meeting with the delegation, led by Representative Bradley Schneider, the Bahraini crown prince, who is also the prime minister, said that the ties between Manama and Washington are built on mutually beneficial cooperation and longstanding agreements.

He referred to the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement, which was signed in September 2023, as an example of the importance of further strengthening the two countries’ partnership.

During the meeting, recent regional and international developments, including the conflict between Israel and Iran, and their implications for security and stability, were discussed.

The crown prince reiterated Bahrain’s commitment to resolving crises through dialogue and diplomatic efforts, including the continuation of US-Iran nuclear negotiations.

He stressed the urgent need to resolve regional conflicts and highlighted the crucial role of the US, along with allied nations, in maintaining global peace and security, the Bahrain News Agency reported.