Daily News Brief

October 7, 2024

Top of the Agenda

Communities are holding vigils in Israel and around the world today for the people Hamas killed and took hostage in its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Some weekend demonstrations also voiced opposition to the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. A year after the attack, war between Israel and Iranian proxies has expanded across the Middle East, with Hezbollah rockets hitting the Israeli city of Haifa yesterday and rockets from Gaza targeting border communities and landing in Tel Aviv. Israel struck the Beirut suburbs overnight, while its military called for three hundred thousand people to evacuate northern Gaza ahead of a new offensive. 

Inside Israel, some families of hostages captive in Gaza held events separate from those of the government, reiterating calls for officials to do more to bring hostages home. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today praised how Israeli people stood up “like lions” after the Hamas attack, while U.S. President Joe Biden condemned the “unspeakable brutality” of the Hamas attack and said his administration “will never give up until we bring all of the remaining hostages home safely.” (Reuters, CNN, Times of Israel, WSJ)  

Analysis

“The Israeli political, intelligence, and military leadership had accepted for decades the ‘conception’ (as it is now called by the press and public) that Hamas could be satisfied and deterred from a major assault on Israel if the group were allowed to govern Gaza,” CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams writes. “The spectacular failure of that approach led Israelis to look at Hezbollah and Iran differently—to look at capabilities, not assumed intentions.”

"I worry that Israel’s determination to launch a significant retaliatory strike against Iran will not deter Tehran, which may then order another round of (possibly larger) ballistic missile strikes on Israel. If that were to happen, it would be hard to control the spiral, and the Israel-Iran war that everyone has worried about will be upon us," CFR Senior Fellow Steven A. Cook says in a Q&A.

“The latest escalation [in Lebanon] lays bare the reality of a region that has grown profoundly more perilous since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack and the ensuing Gaza conflict. The Middle East is no longer bound by established rules of engagement and modes of deterrence. Assumptions undergirding the behavior and risk calculus of many state and nonstate actors in the region are increasingly obsolete. Clear redlines and mutually accepted rules of the game are glaringly absent. So, too, are reliable channels through which the warring parties can de-escalate,” the United States Institute of Peace’s Mona Yacoubian writes for Foreign Affairs. 

Read the full suite of Foreign Affairs and CFR.org resources on Israel and the current conflict.

One Year After the October 7 Attacks

(AFP/Getty Images)

By Elliott Abrams, Linda Robinson, Ray Takeyh, and Steven A. Cook 

The turbulent year that has followed Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel has been marked by a sharp escalation in conflict between Iran and its proxies and Israel.  Four CFR experts assess the changes since the attacks.

Read the article »

Pacific Rim

The countries boosted their bilateral ties for the first time in seventy-five years during a state visit by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to Manila today. They agreed to cooperate on defense production and maritime security as well as on economic development, with Seoul offering $2 billion in infrastructure funding. (Yonhap)

China: Chinese authorities have intensified state involvement in travel, requiring that public sector employees such as school teachers hand in their passports and seek government permission before going abroad, the Financial Times reports. Public sector employees and retirees said they had been barred from traveling abroad for reasons that were not specified to them. Chinese authorities did not comment. (FT)

South and Central Asia

Upwards of 71 percent of voters in today’s referendum approved the prospect of a nuclear power plant, according to preliminary results. (Astana Times)

At this CFR event, International Energy Agency Director Fatih Birol discusses the current state of global energy markets. 

Pakistan: The federal government banned the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), saying the ethnic Pashtun rights group posed “significant danger” to public order. The group had been planning demonstrations against rising militant violence and the prospect of an operation by Pakistan’s military near the border with Afghanistan. The nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan criticized the ban, calling PTM “a rights-based movement that has never resorted to violence.” (Dawn, NYT)

Middle East and North Africa

Saied said he would wait for official results to declare victory as a pollster with a history of closely matching results said that he earned at least 89 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election. Authorities arrested a string of his opponents ahead of the vote, and Saied said he planned to “cleanse the country of all the corrupt [people] and schemers.” (AP)

Sub-Saharan Africa

The vaccination campaign began yesterday against the Ebola-like virus, Rwanda’s health minister said. Twelve deaths have been reported in Rwanda’s outbreak. (Reuters)

Senegal: Dakar will enact reforms to “significantly reduce” the deficit beginning next year, the finance ministry said after Moody’s downgraded its rating on Friday. The country’s widening fiscal gap led the International Monetary Fund to revise its growth forecast this year from 7.1 to 6 percent. (Bloomberg)

Europe

Pope Francis named twenty-one new cardinals, building on the group that will choose his successor. He continued a trend of diversifying the geographic background of cardinals, choosing five from South America, three from Asia, and two from Africa. He also selected the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Melbourne. (AP)

Netherlands/Ukraine: The Netherlands will invest more than $440 million in drone development with Ukraine, the Dutch defense minister said on a visit to Kyiv. Around half of the amount will be spent in the Netherlands and the other half between Ukraine and other countries. (Reuters)

This Council Special Initiative looks at securing Ukraine’s future in its third year of war. 

Americas

An international security mission aimed at reducing gang violence in Haiti is mostly limited to the capital; gang members killed at least seventy people in a Thursday attack in the country’s west. Prime Minister Garry Conille said he plans to discuss how to speed the deployment of Kenyan officers and funding while on his visits to Kenya and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). (Reuters) 

Brazil: The Negro River, a main tributary to the Amazon River, fell to its lowest water level on record, Brazilian authorities said Friday. The current drought has severely restricted trade and passenger travel on the river. (AP) 

U.S. Campaign 2024

An estimate from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plans would add some $3.5 trillion to the national debt over a decade, while former President Donald Trump’s would add some $7.5 trillion. The group noted the estimates come with a wide range of uncertainty over varying interpretations of the policies. Trump’s campaign did not comment to the Washington Post about the study when asked, while a spokesperson for the Harris campaign disputed the analysis. (CRFB, WaPo)

This episode of the Why It Matters podcast discusses the rising U.S. national debt.

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