Besides arming terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah to make war in the Middle East, Iran has long had a strategy of arranging terrorist attacks in far away places. These include the murderous attack on the Buenos Aires Jewish center in 1994, as well as the 2012 bus bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists and one Bulgarian, and countless foiled attacks. And Jews aren’t the only target: Iran has tried to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and numerous Iranian dissidents living abroad. To do so, it has taken to hiring criminals. Greg Miller, Souad Mekhennet, and Cate Brown report:

In recent years, Iran has outsourced lethal operations and abductions to Hells Angels biker gangs, a notorious Russian mob network known as “Thieves in Law,” a heroin distribution syndicate led by an Iranian narco-trafficker, and violent criminal groups from Scandinavia to South America.

With hit men it has hired in the criminal underworld, Iran has commissioned plots against a former Iranian military officer living under an assumed identity in Maryland, an exiled Iranian American journalist in Brooklyn, a women’s-rights activist in Switzerland, LGBTQ+ activists in Germany, and at least five journalists at Iran International, as well as dissidents and regime critics in a half dozen other countries, according to interviews and records.

Iran’s turn to criminal proxies has in part been driven by necessity, officials said, reflecting the intense scrutiny that Iran’s own operatives face from Western governments.

In [one] plot, Iran used a German member of the [Hells Angels], Ramin Yektaparast, who had fled to Tehran to escape murder charges, to orchestrate the bombing of a synagogue in Essen. An alleged associate balked at bombing the synagogue but fired shots into its windows.

 In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu pulled out of a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like the IDF’s decision to employ raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—they are offered in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden admin. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.