The Times reported spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mark Regev, stated, “Government buildings had been targeted because Hamas ‘makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure…We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons.”

Under this concept, it is hard to see how Israel would not be able to justify hitting any part of Gaza and killing any person inside or nearby that infrastructure. Saturday morning, according to Haaretz, Israel’s air force targeted Gaza’s police headquarters, other government buildings and a mosque in Rafah. It also is impossible to see how a cease-fire can be brokered if Israel is going to destroy the offices of political leaders elected in disputed or undisputed Palestinian elections.

As the Israeli state mobilizes 75,000 reservists, that country’s active military units are building staging areas quite close to their Sinai border with Egypt.

Early Saturday Joseph Dana tweeted:

“The south of Israel is transforming from civilian areas in a sea of military bases to one large military base.”

This must concern the Egyptian government, which, by its peace treaty with Israel, is limited to what kinds or quality of military forces it can station in the Sinai peninsula of its own country.

In the aftermath of the assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmad Jabiri, Israel has escalated its attacks on the Gaza Strip. At least 19 people in Gaza have been killed.

Iran will not submit a film for Academy Award consideration because of “an intolerable insult to the Prophet,” culture minister Muhammad Hosseini told INSA news.

❖ Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi “Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties”.

Protests and attacks continued at Western embassies across the Middle East and North Africa today, and at this point they have little relationship to the anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims.” A reporter for the Times of London asked protesters outside the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday if they watched the clip of the film online, and to a man all of them said they hadn’t. The film is a pretext to stir up sentiments among a small but determined band of agitators. I’m not sure we can say too much about the sentiments of the populations of these Arab countries as a whole, but we can say that they contain at least an element of anti-Westernism.

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lively before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do now that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to the US Embassy in Yemen and possibly Iran.

We are in an election year, and the actions of the Presidential candidates matter at a time like this. And so Mitt Romney’s doubling down on a false claim about “apologizing” for violence, based on a dubious ordering of the events in Cairo and Benghazi, should strike anyone interested in fewer unnecessary wars and senseless deaths as deplorable.

A tragedy in Libya provoked by a film insulting Islam has turned into an attempt by Mitt Romney to take umbrage with the White House. The US Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi at an attack on the US consulate, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade as they tried to flee. The attackers in Benghazi followed the lead of protesters at the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, who pulled down the US flag and tried to burn it.

A variety of links to articles/interviews/speeches/videos on current issues that may be of interest.