Associated Press: Trump administration again labels the Houthis a ‘foreign terrorist organization’
The State Department on Tuesday reinstated the “foreign terrorist organization” designation for Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi group, fulfilling an order announced by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the department had restored the designation, which carries with it sanctions and penalties for anyone providing “material support” for the group. “Since 2023, the Houthis have launched hundreds of attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, as well as U.S. service members defending freedom of navigation and our regional partners,” Rubio said in a statement. “Most recently, the Houthis spared Chinese-flagged ships while targeting American and allied vessels.” Besides the “foreign terrorist organization” announcement, the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program announced that it would pay up to $15 million for information that leads to the disruption of Houthi financing.
Reuters: Israel criticizes Cairo Arab summit outcome, Hamas welcomes it
Israel criticized a plan put forward by Arab states for Gaza's reconstruction on Tuesday, while Palestinian militant group Hamas welcomed it. Shortly after a summit of Arab leaders in Cairo, the Israeli foreign ministry said the reconstruction plan "failed to address" the realities of the situation following Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. Hamas' brutal terrorist attack, which resulted in thousands of Israeli deaths and hundreds of kidnappings, is not mentioned, nor is there any condemnation of this murderous terrorist entity," the foreign ministry said. Hamas, however, called for providing the means to ensure the plan's success and considered the summit a "step forward" for Arab and Islamic support behind the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian Islamist group urged Arab leaders to compel Israel to commit to its ceasefire agreement with Hamas. "We value the Arab stance rejecting the attempts to displace our people," Hamas added. Representatives from Arab states met in Cairo on Tuesday and adopted Egypt's plan for Gaza's reconstruction that would cost $53 billion and avoid resettling Palestinians.
Hamas has accused Israel of blocking aid to Gaza to influence ceasefire negotiations, with the militant group saying things were back to square one. Could this derail the whole deal?
The suspected driver in the Mannheim shooting rampage that left two people dead is a German from Ludwigshafen with a criminal record. The authorities are currently assuming that the 40-year-old has a mental illness. Terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler with an assessment.
Phoenix moderator Hans-Werner Fittkau speaks with Hans-Jakob Schindler, terrorism expert at the Counter Extremism Project, about today's incident in Mannheim on March 3, 2025.
This morning we look at this crime - what we know and what is still unclear. We also ask Hans-Jakob Schindler, security expert at the International Centre for Counter Terrorism, why cars are so often used as weapons.
UnHerd: ‘Populism’ isn’t to blame for Britain’s prisons crisis
CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "We’re heading for bust again in our teeming, disordered and unstable prison system. Figures just out show that despite several bursts of emergency releases we are nearly back to square one, with only 1,000 male adult places left. Something needs to be done and the independent review of sentencing led by former Tory Lord Chancellor David Gauke has been tasked to tell us what. The interim report has used December’s prison figures to illustrate how parlous the lack of cell space is. We’re only in the middle of February and already the population is nearly 1,500 higher than it was at the end of last year. A welter of data was deployed to make the case that we are imprisoning more people for longer in awful conditions due to what Gauke calls “penal populism”. This means that there are too many criminals in the UK’s prisons because generations of politicians have wanted to seem tougher than the last on crime. This arms race of “toughness” is “incoherent” and lacks a strategic dimension, says Gauke."
Guardian: Suspect in Kabul bombing that killed 13 US soldiers to face charges in Virginia
A suspected senior planner in the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 US service members during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has been taken into custody and will appear on Wednesday in federal court in the United States to face charges. Donald Trump announced the arrest during his Tuesday night address to Congress, with the White House and the justice department subsequently identifying the suspect as Mohammad Sharifullah.
Deutsche Welle: Mannheim suspect drove into crowd intentionally, police say
The motorist who drove his car into a crowd of people in the southwestern German city of Mannheim, killing at least two, intended to do so, police and public prosecutors said at a joint press conference on Monday evening. The suspect, who is 40 years old, was detained following the incident, the interior minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Mannheim is based, told reporters earlier in the day. Police and prosecutors later added at the news conference that the suspect, a German man, is being investigated for murder and attempted murder in the attack that injured at least 11 others. They said the driver shot himself in the mouth when he was arrested and had to undergo medical treatment at a hospital. He could not yet be questioned. A senior public prosecutor said the man was suffering from psychological problems and that investigators were looking into that aspect more closely.
Deutsche Welle: Is there a shared psychology behind car attacks in Germany?
A fatal car ramming in a crowded German city square has refocused attention on the use of vehicles by people seeking to attack the public. The incident in downtown Mannheim took place on the Monday of regional Carnival celebrations. It followed weeks of warnings that potential terror attacks could take place during Germany's pre-Easter festival period. But the attack does not appear to be motivated by political or religious factors, and authorities are exploring the suspect's mental health as a possible factor. Yet the choice of a vehicle as a lethal weapon in this incident and in fatal attacks in Munich and Magdeburg in recent weeks leaves open the question: why the car?
New York Times: Israel Says It Killed Local Hamas Commander in West Bank
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that its forces had killed a Hamas military commander in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank as it expanded on a series of raids that have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians. Israeli soldiers killed Aysar al-Saadi, the head of a local group of Hamas militants, in a shootout, the Israeli military said in a statement. The raid took place as Israeli forces “expanded the counterterrorism operation" in the northern West Bank “to additional areas in Jenin,” the military said. Hamas mourned Mr. al-Saadi’s death, calling him a commander in its armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. It was unclear how far his killing would go to subdue the militants: The Israeli military said late last year that its forces had killed one of his predecessors, Waseem Hazem, only to see the groups persist.
Jerusalem Post: Netanyahu's funding for Hamas via Qatar enabled October 7 invasion, Shin Bet reveals
While the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) took a significant amount of responsibility for the disasters on October 7 in its report published unexpectedly on Tuesday, it also implicated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by implying that his policies regarding the Temple Mount, the treatment of Palestinian prisoners, and the judicial reform led to Hamas’s decision to initiate its long-planned invasion. Other policies carried out under Netanyahu that the agency flagged as problematic and as contributions to Hamas’s decision to invade were his facilitation of Qatari funding to Hamas and his opposition to proposed assassination operations of top Hamas leaders at the time.
Reuters: Suicide bombing at Pakistan military site kills 13 civilians, five soldiers
Thousands of people poured on to the streets of Bannu in northwestern Pakistan for the funerals on Wednesday of 18 people, including six children, killed in a suicide attack on a security installation. Suicide bombers drove two vehicles packed with explosives into the town's military base in an attack staged by more than a dozen militants on Tuesday.
ABC News: US embassy in Somalia issues urgent warning of potential imminent terror attacks
The U.S. embassy in Somalia has warned Americans that they are tracking “credible information” regarding potentially imminent terror attacks “against multiple locations in Somalia including Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport,” officials said. The U.S. embassy in Somalia’s capital city of Mogadishu said that all movements of embassy personnel have been canceled until further notice in a statement released on Tuesday.
Washington Post: U.S. designates Houthis a terrorist organization, reversing Biden move
The Trump administration on Tuesday re-designated the Houthi militant group in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization, reversing a decision made by President Joe Biden in 2021, after more than a year of attacks on U.S. Navy and commercial vessels at sea.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that he was fulfilling one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises after hundreds of Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Houthis have described their campaign of violence as an act of solidarity with Hamas, the militant group whose attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggered a war in Gaza that has upended security across the region.
The US military announced Wednesday that it once again had an aircraft carrier in the Middle East, a day after Washington designated Yemen’s Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. Officials said the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier was back in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility this week.
BBC: The region with more 'terror deaths' than rest of world combined
The Sahel region of Africa is the "epicentre of global terrorism" and now, for the first time, accounts for "over half of all terrorism-related deaths", according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI). Its new report says that in this semi-arid area to the south of the Sahara Desert 3,885 people out of a worldwide total of 7,555 died. The GTI report adds that while the global figure has declined from a peak of 11,000 in 2015 the figure for the Sahel has increased nearly tenfold since 2019, as extremist and insurgent groups "continue to shift their focus" towards the region.
Extremists: Their Words. Their Actions.
Fact:
On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded southern Israel where, in the space of eight hours, hundreds of armed terrorists perpetrated mass crimes of brutality, rape, and torture against men, women and children. In the biggest attack on Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, 1,200 were killed, and 251 were taken hostage into Gaza—where 101 remain. One year on, antisemitic incidents have increased by record numbers.
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