Swiss Banks: A Repository for Terrorist Funds

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/426801

Helvetian Hypocrisy re Iran- A glimpse behind the “chocolate-box" image

For decades, Swiss banks have served as a repository for funds linked to "rogue regimes", dictators, and corrupt officials

While the press coverage has been focused largely on the kinetic-and lately (since the closure of the Straits of Hormuz) on the sub-kinetic coercive-dimensions of the ongoing conflict in Iran, there is an additional aspect that usually avoids the full glare of media attention.

A repository for funds of "rogue regimes."

This is the financial dimension-in particular, the banking sector, which often undergiths the ability of protagonists in a conflict to sustain their military operations-including payment of salaries to the military, acquisition of armaments, replenishment of ordinance, and so on. In this regard, Switzerland and its banking system hold a place of prominence. The Swiss banking sector is one of the most important in the world and is a central lynchpin of the Alpine nation’s economy.

Specifically for the purposes of this article, Switzerland holds roughly 25% of all global cross-border assets.

While all this speaks to the significance of the banking sector of the Swiss economy, there is a darker side to the picture. Indeed, historically, Swiss banks have served as a repository for funds linked to "rogue regimes", dictators, and corrupt officials, something which, allegedly, continues in various forms, despite significant tightening of financial regulations in recent decades.

Clearly, today, with the conflict in Iran and its indisputably “rogue" regime, this steers attention to the relationship between Switzerland and the theocratic tyranny in Iran.:

Helvetian guardians of the riches of the tyrants

But picturesque Switzerland's murky history with unsavory regimes is not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, it can be traced back as far as the mid-1700s. However, its international attraction began to emerge at the turn of the 20th century, when Swiss financiers became a magnet for foreign investors wishing to stash their increasingly mobile wealth in what was perceived as a politically neutral state.

By 1934, politicians enshrined banking secrecy - the “duty of absolute silence" - into law, making it a crime to share clients’ banking information, particularly with foreign authorities.

This, combined with Switzerland’s political neutrality, made the country a haven for Nazi officials. Swiss bankers collaborated heavily with Adolf Hitler and his regime, offering financial credit and assistance to fleeing Nazis to hide their ill-gotten riches.

In a blistering indictment of past Swiss international conduct, a veteran political journalist made the following assessment regarding Swiss machinations to conclude a deal for the purchase of gas from Iran, which many perceived as undermining the sanctions regime against Tehran, imposed because of its continued nuclear program. Caustically, she wrote: “Switzerland could no more have sold its principles than it could have sold its soul to the devil. For all its syrupy sanctimony, it has no principles - much less a soul. Switzerland is no rookie at playing footsie for profit with genocidal tyrants."

Greed-gratification & banking “hanky-panky".

To back up her acerbic portrayal, she catalogues how, during the Holocaust, Switzerland not only blocked the entry try of Jews fleeing persecution, but actually handed would-be refugees directly back over to their persecutors.

Pointing an accusatory finger, she laments: “…this means nothing less than collaboration in mass-murder [sic]. The Swiss turned away tens of thousands of Jews, sending them to certain, cruel death. Their blood indelibly stains Switzerland's reputation."

She resolutely exposes the blatant Swiss malice and hypocrisy, charging: “Without even touching on the business of banking hanky-panky and greed-gratifying benefits reaped by Switzerland from the incomparable Jewish tragedy, Switzerland did well for itself via exports of war materials to Hitler's Germany, extending it credit, all manner of financial underpinning and loot-laundering services". With scathing sarcasm, she laments “All this time, Switzerland gloried in resplendent neutrality,"

Indeed, it seems Switzerland has some difficulty in relinquishing its penchant for commercial contacts with brutal despots. Although Switzerland diluted its absolute bank secrecy significantly, high-profile leaks such as "Suisse Secrets" (2022) show that tainted funds-including those from sanctioned parties, war criminals, and human traffickers-have prevailed in the Swiss financial system.

According to one seasoned commentator, such accusations are not new for Swiss banks, particularly when it comes to allegations relating to energy transactions or to attempts by Swiss banks to clean up their reputations for involvement with funds “redirected" from low-income countries, such as Haiti, the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and so on.

Falling afoul of US Treasury

Indeed, more recently, the Swiss banking system ran afoul of the US Treasury when its investigators found that one bank, MBaer Merchant Bank, had allegedly played a part in money-laundering activity related to Venezuela in 2020.

Moreover, according to investigators at the U.S. Treasury’s financial crime unit FinCEN, the bank allegedly then went on to enable financing of the Russian war machine and channeling Iranian oil funds back to the oppressive authoritarian regime-including to the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

This chronicle of dismaying Helvetian misfeasance is sadly not confined to the financial machinations of Swiss institutions. The same spineless display of hypocrisy and double standards extends to the conduct of the International Red Cross (ICRC), the flagship entity supposedly symbolizing Switzerland’s neutrality and humanitarianism, and whose statutes stipulate that its top echelons must be comprised exclusively of Swiss citizens.

These were on stark display during the recent (2023-5) Gaza conflict, when the organization displayed deep concern for the population of Gaza (many of whom openly celebrated the abduction/abuse of unsuspecting Israeli civilians), but was totally useless in doing anything to ascertain the fate or the location of the Israeli hostages, never mind visiting them to determine their well-being under the “harsh" ( to greatly understate the case) conditions under which they were held.

Feigned “neutrality" behind picturesque chocolate-box image

Indeed, it is difficult to detect any effective ICRC measures to exert pressure on Hamas, certainly not-heaven forfend-raise the possibility of suspending aid to a largely complicit Gazan population until access to the Israeli hostages was granted-presenting this equivalence for victims of aggression and those complicit (even if passively) in that aggression as its “neutrality

So, beneath the idyllic chocolate box images of a picturesque Alpine haven, there lurks a far more nefarious and avaricious reality, of which both Israel and the rest of the world should not obscure-or allow to be obscured.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/426801

Example of AI working with drones to neutralize Hezbollah terrorist

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895697

Inside Israel’s AI targeting system: How data from a phone becomes a death sentence

Ahmad Turmus got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through his car.

The buzz of the Israeli drone was constant that day, and every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey.

So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.

What surprised him was the question.

“Ahmad, do you want to die with those around you or alone?”

According to family members interviewed, Turmus answered with one word before hanging up: “Alone.”

The targeting of Turmus, which Israel acknowledged, demonstrates how, time and again, its military has mastered an intelligence war for which Hezbollah appears to have no answer.

Ever since the spectacular pager attacks of September 2024, when Israel remotely detonated explosives hidden in pagers carried by Hezbollah members, foot soldiers, support personnel, field commanders, chiefs of staff, and even a revered secretary general have been felled by a targeting system powered by artificial intelligence.

IDF AI system permits near-omniscient Hezbollah tracking

The system, which fuses data from smartphones, security and traffic cameras, Wi-Fi signals, drones, government databases, and social media, has granted Israel what seems an almost omniscient ability to track Hezbollah cadres’ every movement.

Turmus, 62, was serving as a liaison between Hezbollah and residents of Talloussah, a small village less than three miles from the Israeli border, which had turned into a battlefield during Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024.

Throughout the 15-month ceasefire that followed, he spent his time coordinating with repair personnel and civil defense crews to get the village running, even as Israeli strikes persisted across south Lebanon.

His family described him as a former fighter for the militant Islamist group, but who, in his older age, had taken an administrative role. Israel said it was working on “military and financial matters... to rehabilitate Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure.”

Whatever his role, he too was now ensnared in Israel’s kill chain – the culmination of an intelligence-gathering process that began years ago.

There are multiple ways Turmus could have landed in the military’s cross-hairs – none of them a smoking gun on its own, but all potential grist for the algorithm that eventually picked him to be killed that February day.

For one, he lived in Talloussah, a Shiite-dominated village supportive of Hezbollah. This meant that the movements of Turmus and other residents were constantly under the surveillance of Israeli drones.

According to an AI specialist who worked with defense firms until he raised concerns about the use of such systems in Gaza, the drones’ cameras probably filmed and recorded his face, along with the make and license plate of his car and his home.

The drones could have used cell-site simulators, known as “stingrays,” to masquerade as cellphone towers and trick his smartphone into connecting, granting them access not only to Turmus’s data but his movements in real time.

Even if Turmus had switched SIM cards, he would still have been tracked, said the AI specialist, who was granted anonymity to discuss his work.

“It’s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is ‘scraped’ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground,” the AI specialist said.

Once collected, platforms such as Palantir’s Maven standardize, tag, and score all data, linking it to identities across devices and accounts. Palantir has spoken openly about its work with the Israeli military.

Then AI can build a timeline of a subject’s activity and map their network of relationships.

Turmus could have been flagged there, too: One of his sons was a Hezbollah fighter killed in early 2024, and another was injured in the pager attacks.

Tracking Turmus would have been made easier by Israel’s deep and cumulative intelligence infiltration of Lebanon, said retired Gen. Mounir Shehadeh, who served as the Lebanese government’s coordinator to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

Much of the country’s data infrastructure, including databases with information on mobile phone subscribers or vehicle registrations, has been accessible to the Israelis for two decades. They also hacked into Hezbollah’s terrestrial network and its signal corps, he said.

Hezbollah’s involvement in the civil war in Syria from 2011 to 2024 further compromised the group’s security.

“These factors allowed Israel to construct a precise target bank encompassing both field commanders and high-ranking leadership figures,” Shehadeh said.

The AI comes in at this stage. Rapidly processing terabytes of data, it detects patterns and compares them to the movements of a known threat or someone who has shown up near flagged zones. It also analyzes deviations from a subject’s routine. All this is used to create a so-called threat profile.

The result, according to an Israeli colonel interviewed in a February 2023 Israeli military article on AI in combat, is a system capable of quickly finding targets.

“The system does this process in seconds, while in the past it would have taken hundreds of investigators several weeks to do,” said the head of the Israeli military’s Artificial Intelligence Center, identified only as Col. Yoav.

But one concern, the AI specialist said, is that these systems rely on data rather than logic to determine whether someone is dangerous. If that information is flawed, then it will keep repeating the same mistakes, but “faster and with more confidence.”

“It creates this illusion of certainty, and that’s dangerous because it turns correlation into action without always having context,” the specialist said.

“It’s not like a lab,” he added. “So how does the system know who’s who? And when it flags someone, is it a human decision or just an algorithm flipping a switch?”

Another problem is that such systems rely on tracking mundane, routine activities, such as who is talking to whom, or where and when they’re traveling, to calculate the probability that someone is a combatant, potentially leading to false positives, said Vasji Badalic, a professor at the Institute of Criminology in Slovenia, who wrote a 2023 research paper on the rise of metadata and big-data driven targeting processes.

“Relatives, or people engaging in propaganda or finances – they’re not combatants, but the machine recognizes them as such because they have similar communication patterns,” Badalic said.

“Where do they put the threshold that divides combatants and civilians?”

The effort to deploy machine learning to suss out targets or anticipate events in a war zone is not new. During the Iraq war under former US president George W. Bush, the US military hoovered phone metadata and processed it to look for what it deemed suspicious activity.

The National Security Agency also developed a behavioral profiling program, SKYNET, to identify al-Qaeda couriers in Afghanistan.

By 2019, companies like Amazon and Microsoft had developed sufficient “compute” – computing power – to run the math on more complex scenarios that would improve forecasting.

The US military in Afghanistan used those advances to develop Raven Sentry, an AI trained on reports of insurgent attacks stretching back to the ‘80s, along with ancillary information such as the amount of street lighting in various areas.

By the time the US pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, the model’s predictions on locations of upcoming attacks achieved a 70% success rate, putting it roughly on par with human analysts, according to Col. Thomas W. Spahr, who wrote about Raven Sentry at the US Army’s War College.

Despite Israel’s success in Lebanon, there are signs that Hezbollah is adapting to being in Israel’s AI-fueled sights.

During the current conflagration, which began after the group struck Israel in response to its killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and repeated violations of the 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah returned to its guerrilla warfare roots, adopting smaller unit sizes with a decentralized structure. It also relied on more secure, albeit less convenient, forms of communication, according to Shehadeh, the retired general.

What action triggered the algorithm to move Turmus from surveillance to the kill list is unclear. In his role as a liaison, he was a noncombatant member of Hezbollah, and family members said he didn’t even bother changing phones.

On February 15, a day before he was killed, he turned off his smartphone and left it at home while he went to a municipal meeting in a nearby village the next day. The phone call from the Israelis came soon after he went home to Talloussah and turned on his smartphone.

When he hung up, his face changed, family members told The Times. He told them the Israelis were after him and that they should leave the house and let him die alone. They pleaded with him to try to escape and to give him some disguise so he could leave.

But Turmus refused. He went to the door.

“They know my face. There’s nothing we can do against this,” he said.

His wife was walking in as he left, but he didn’t acknowledge her, family members said, so she wouldn’t try to stop him.

He got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through Turmus’s car.

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895697

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895553

Norway to buy Rafael's Trophy protection system

APS systems such as Trophy are designed to detect and intercept any anti-tank threats before hitting the platform

Even though Norway is one of the European countries most critical of Israel, what happens in the diplomatic arena is not necessarily reflected in defense procurement. Germany has begun supplying Norway with Leopard 2A8NOR tanks in the first sale of the advanced platform, which also carries Israeli technology.

Each 2A8-series tank has the Eurotrophy system, the European version of Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Trophy, active protection system for military armored vehicles.

Eurotrophy is a joint venture by Rafael, Germany's KMW and General Dynamics Land Systems Europe for the production, marketing and sale of Trophy systems in Europe. Trophy has been operational since 2010. In 2018, Trophy was sold to the US Armored Forces and in 2021, it was selected for the German Leopard and British Challenger tanks.

The system is currently installed on 16 platforms around the world, but it had not been operated on any major scale to protect tanks until the war which began in October 2023, with hundreds of maneuverable systems in the field. In meeting the challenge of anti-tank missiles, which military experts define as unprecedented, the system is successfully withstanding attacks from Hezbollah on Israel's northern front.

Trophy has been operational since 2011 and according to Rafael’s website, the company has sold over 2,000 platforms which have seen over 2 million hours of operations. As threats to armored vehicles evolve, from RPGs to advanced anti-tank guided missiles, the integration of active protection systems like TROPHY is seen as essential for maintaining battlefield dominance.

Installed on the Merkava IV and Namer APC, Trophy was used extensively by the IDF, especially during the recent Israel-Hamas War. The system has also been installed on over a dozen different platforms around the world including the US Army’s Abrams MBTs, the UK’s Challenger MBTsas well as the Boxer, Patria AMV and others.

    Trophy on a Leopard Tank

In January, EuroTrophy GmbH, the German subsidiary of Israel’s defense group Rafael Advanced Defense Technologies, announced that it had signed a €330 million contract with KNDS Deutschland to supply its Trophy active protection system (APS) for the Leopard 2 A8 main battle tank programs of Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Croatia.

APS systems such as Trophy are designed to detect and intercept any anti-tank threats before hitting the platform, including anti-tank guided missiles, RPGs, drones and more. Developed as a result of cooperation between the IDF and Rafael, the company describes it as “the world’s only combat-proven active protection system.”

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895553

Bombing Railways during WW2

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/426756

They won the war but could the Allies have saved the Jewish people?

For us in 2026, faced with a resurgence of antisemitism and innocent Jews once again being targeted-- by fanatical Muslims and deluded leftists-the lesson of V-E Day must remind us that neutrality in the face of antisemitism is a form of complicity. Opinion.

The world rightfully pauses on May 8, 2026, to celebrate the 81st anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, when the Allies triumphed over the darkest tyranny the modern age has ever known, when an entire continent was scarred by six years of total war.

Yet, for many, the celebration is haunted by the silence of six million Jews who did not live to cheer the liberation, whose ashes were already scattered by the time the first Allied tanks rolled into the killing centers of Auschwitz and elsewhere.

The sad irony is that the Allied powers-primarily the United States and Great Britain-possessed both military intelligence and logistical means to intervene long before the spring of 1945.

By mid-1944, the Allies had achieved air superiority over Europe. Reconnaissance photos taken by the U.S. Army Air Force clearly showed the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Jewish leaders pleaded with the U.S. War Department to bomb the rail lines leading to the camps and to bomb the death chambers and ovens. The requests were repeatedly denied on the grounds that such missions would divert air support from the front lines.

Yet, on several occasions, American B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers, escorted by P-51 Mustangs, attacked the IG Farben industrial complex-less than five miles from the Auschwitz gas chambers.

The potential was there; the political will was not.

In 1940, when Germany invaded France, the German court administrator Friedrich Kellner, under surveillance by the Gestapo for speaking out against Nazi policies, wrote in his diary: “If France and England had destroyed our railway lines and bridges, they could have kept us from transporting our troops from Poland to the French border."

Two years later he returned to the topic: “The Allies could have brought about a breakdown here had they disrupted the railroad lines. There is not enough gasoline or oil for motor vehicles."

Bombing the rails might not have ended the Holocaust, but it would have disrupted the terrifying logistics of mass murder during the peak of the 1944 Hungarian Jewish deportations.

Hungary’s Jewish problem is found in a newspaper clipping in Kellner’s diary, with the headline, Clearing Southeast Europe of Jews: “Hungary, which is especially plagued by Jews, and counts 800,000 Jews, has embarked on a complicated path for gradual expulsion of Jews and has already attained worthwhile results."

Beneath the clipping, Kellner wrote, “This so-called ‘clearing Europe of Jews’ will remain a dark chapter in the history of mankind. If we in Europe are so far gone that we simply eliminate people, then Europe is irretrievably lost. Today it is the Jews; tomorrow it will be another weak tribe that is exterminated."

In the early summer of 1944, Hungarian and German authorities sent 440,000 Hungarian Jews to be murdered at Auschwitz. Over a two-month period they filled 147 freight trains that traveled back and forth upon the undisturbed rails.

One decade before that, a shift in immigration policy could have saved so many lives. Had the Allies signaled a willingness to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930s and early 40s-to suspend the restrictive quotas in the United States and allow entrance into Palestine (despite Arab objections)-thousands could have escaped before the borders were sealed.

In addition, the Allies could have shortened the war by being more flexible with the "Unconditional Surrender" policy established at the Casablanca Conference in 1943.

While the intent was to ensure the total eradication of Nazism, the rigidity of the demand inadvertently incentivized the German military to fight to the bitter end. Providing a more viable path for anti-Hitler resisters-such as those involved in the July 20 plot-might have encouraged more internal coups and even the surrender of individual army units on the Western Front.

Had the war ended even three months sooner it might have saved tens of thousands of lives, including those lost in the death marches of early 1945.

Unfortunately, the Allies viewed the dilemma of the Jews of Europe as a tragic byproduct of war-a humanitarian issue to be settled after the fighting.

But it was a central objective of their enemy and required a specific strategic response.

For us in 2026, faced with a resurgence of antisemitism and innocent Jews once again being targeted by Nazi types-led by fanatical Muslims and deluded leftists-the lesson of V-E Day must include a somber reflection on the cost of delay in stopping such irrational haters, reminding us that neutrality in the face of antisemitism is a form of complicity.

At war’s end, Friedrich Kellner wrote something in his diary that we ourselves must somehow achieve: “The once so proud German army was totally beaten on all fronts, and no one can ever dispute it. The enormous defeat of this war will hopefully help to remove the military spirit from the minds of our people."

Robert Scott Kellner, a navy veteran and member of the American Legion, is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A & M University. He is the grandson of the German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner and is the editor and translator of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner--A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2020.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/426756

The Israel-India Counterterrorism Alliance

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895432

Pahalgam to Operation Sindoor: The India-Israel counterterror alliance - opinion

From the person on the street to the highest levels of leadership, Israel understands India’s need for a zero-tolerance doctrine toward terrorism — because Israel has lived it for decades.

In Israel, cross-border terrorism is a harsh and enduring reality in which  civilians are almost always the target. It comes at a high human cost, felt in the sudden rupture of ordinary life. And although Israel faces a uniquely complex security environment, this reality is not confined to the Jewish state.

Just over a year ago, in Pahalgam, India again experienced a similar pattern of violence. Terrorists from across the border in Pakistan infiltrated Indian territory and brutally murdered 26 men in front of their wives and children. It was an act of terror in its most deliberate form.

I remember that I was sitting in a café in Jerusalem last year when I heard the news. As my Israeli friends with me told me about it, their attitudes were not just of sympathy, but also of recognition. They understood instinctively why India would have to respond decisively.

From the person on the street to the highest levels of leadership, Israel understands India’s need for a zero-tolerance doctrine toward terrorism — because Israel has lived it for decades.

India’s response, via Operation Sindoor, reflected that shared reality. Addressing the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it clear that the operation was not just a military action but also a national commitment to justice.

    Indian Security at site of terrorist attack

He outlined a strategy that Israelis would immediately recognize: Every terrorist attack would be met with a decisive response, and there would be no distinction made between terrorists and those who sponsored them. His words captured the shift with unmistakable clarity: “Terror and talks cannot go together… water and blood cannot flow together.”

Surgical strikes and strategic alignment

Operation Sindoor reflected a defense and security policy that Israel has refined over decades — precision over scale, intelligence-led targeting, and a constant effort to minimize civilian harm, even when enemies deliberately operate within civilian environments. 

Rather than broad escalation, India pursued calibrated, high-value strikes against terrorist infrastructure, mirroring the logic behind Israel’s own surgical operations.

This shared operational logic is clearly evident in the depth of India-Israel defense cooperation: Indian forces leveraged Israeli-origin systems central to modern precision warfare. These included the Barak-8 surface-to-air missile system, a jointly developed India-Israel platform that forms a key layer of India’s air defense across land and sea, alongside HAROP loitering munitions manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries.

The HAROP system, often described as a “kamikaze” drone, enabled highly precise strikes against designated targets, reinforcing the military policy that prioritizes accuracy and controlled escalation over indiscriminate force.

Strategic backing from Israeli officials such as Israel’s Ambassador to India Reuven Azar, along with high-level defense coordination, further underscored that this partnership is not just symbolic — it is also operational.

On the other side, Pakistani forces responded to India’s operation with Turkish-supplied systems, including Bayraktar TB2 drones and KORAL electronic warfare platforms, reflecting the deepening military alignment between Islamabad and Ankara.

Under Erdogan, Turkey has been steadily growing its partnership with Pakistan, a state with nuclear weapons. The trajectory of this relationship invites uncomfortable but necessary questions: How might India and Israel reshape regional deterrence? And what safeguards exist to prevent escalation, given the anti-Israel inflammatory rhetoric from both Pakistan and Turkey?

Water in a time of terror: The security dilemma

One of the most consequential shifts triggered by Operation Sindoor lies in India’s decision to effectively suspend the functioning of the Indus Waters Treaty, following the Pahalgam attacks. This has marked a profound turning point. 

Within its framework, India had been sharing critical hydrological data, such as river flows, snowmelt, and discharge levels, with Islamabad, concerning the rivers that flowed from Indian territory, waterways that form a vital lifeline for Pakistan’s agriculture and broader economy.

Following the 2025 attacks, India halted this data sharing and is no longer bound by many of the constraints that previously governed its use of these rivers.

In the long term, India could even divert or regulate water through canals, dams, and barrages to serve its own agricultural and strategic needs. While the immediate impact may be limited, the signal is clear: Cooperation cannot exist if it is isolated from security.

Legally, this move finds ground in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties Article 62, which allows for the suspension of treaty obligations in the event of a “fundamental change in circumstances.” Sustained cross-border terrorism fundamentally alters the conditions under which such agreements  — originally premised on goodwill and peaceful coexistence — were signed.

For Israel, this provides a relevant parallel. Even amid conflict, it continues to navigate the complex reality of water supply to Gaza.

Before October 7, only 10 percent of Gaza’s water came directly from Israel, with the rest dependent on desalination and aquifers. Today, despite the conflict, water continues to be supplied through pipelines, even though local infrastructure operates under severe constraints, with the highest risk being to civilians.

This reflects the dilemma facing India after last year’s terror attacks: How long can humanitarian resources remain separate from an ongoing security environment shaped by violence?

Water treaties between unfriendly nations are always complex, but terrorism makes them even more fragile. When life-sustaining infrastructure exists in the same space as groups that deliberately target civilians, governments are forced into difficult and often unfair choices regarding protection, continuity, and risk. Under such conditions, the boundary between humanitarian provision and security vulnerability becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Both Israel and India operate within these realities and are therefore frequently subjected to international scrutiny — not because of a lack of humanitarian commitment but because terrorism embeds itself in civilian environments and therefore complicates military response.

Shared challenges and lessons

Beyond optics, the India-Israel partnership is, most importantly, an operational cooperation that saves lives and enables the dismantling of terror networks. Greater awareness of this reality is essential, because it is often overshadowed by simplified narratives that go unchallenged in global discourse.

Examples are the use of terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or the casual labeling of democratically elected leaders, such as Narendra Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu as “terrorists.”

What we have witnessed in the last two and a half years is a battlefield that is just as powerful as any: the information war.

Despite clear similarities between India and Israel in terms of threats and responses, global reactions differ sharply. Israel faces sustained criticism over the “Palestine” issue, while India’s actions against Pakistan-based terrorism have drawn comparatively less sustained outrage.

As Soraya Deen, a prominent Muslim voice against antisemitism,has argued, the Palestinian cause has now taken on the role of “sixth pillar of Islam,” capable of mobilizing mass sentiment across the world.

But another factor may also be at play: India has been effective in the information domain, communicating the operational success of Operation Sindoor with a focus on strategic outcomes rather than sensationalism, while simultaneously exposing Pakistan-based disinformation networks and strengthening public resilience through media literacy initiatives that help citizens identify and resist fake news.

That is where Israel needs to go next. Intelligence and defense technology are no longer enough if they are not accompanied by clarity in communication.

India and Israel today stand on parallel paths. Both face adversaries that exploit civilians, use human shields, and operate across borders. Both have security and response principles that emphasize surgical strikes, deterrence, and minimizing civilian harm. And both understand that this is not a battle they can fight alone.

Greater intelligence sharing with allies in Europe and the United States, as well as a unified approach to countering terrorism — physically and in the information domain —  are essential.

Ultimately, Modi’s words are not just a statement of policy but a reflection of reality: Water and blood cannot flow together. The real question is whether the world is willing to confront why this happens so often — and why those who fight it are judged by different standards.

https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895432