Category: Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs

Humanitarian aid cannot be weaponized. Gazans are depending on it.

On October 13, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—an impartial, neutral humanitarian organization key to the origin story of the Geneva Conventions—issued a rare and exceptional public statement reminding parties to the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict of their obligations under international humanitarian law. After first condemning Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, ICRC stated that “[t]he

Experts react: What did Biden achieve in his visit to Israel?

“You are not alone.” In Tel Aviv on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden shared this message of solidarity with Israel, a country at war with Hamas following harrowing attacks by the terrorist group on October 7. He had the US ally’s back in several ways: Biden pledged to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge and to

Dispatch from Abu Dhabi: Do the Israelis know about the Basus War?

ABU DHABI—My route out of Israel in the days after Hamas’s terrorist attack drew the country into war took me from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Abu Dhabi, where I had the opportunity last week to speak with senior government officials about the unfolding war. (In the interest of disclosure: The Emirati government is a

Hamas’s attack on Israel was straight out of Hezbollah’s playbook

Israel is a country tragically all too familiar with violence and warfare. But even in the bloody annals of the Jewish state, October 7, 2023, is and will likely remain a unique wound. The images of murdered civilians strewn in the streets of the towns surrounding the Gaza Strip intertwining with the cries of abducted