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Tens of thousands of people have joined a rally in Washington, DC, to voice solidarity with Israel in its fight against Hamas and condemn anti-Semitism.

Tuesday’s “March for Israel” took place on the National Mall under heavy security, with senior members of Congress addressing a crowd of people waving the flags of the United States and Israel.

Many raised placards calling on the Palestinian armed group Hamas to free the at least 200 people taken captive during their surprise October 7 attack, which Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,200 people.

Israel’s response – weeks of relentless attacks on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, which officials there say have killed more than 11,300 people – has exposed deep divisions in the US, Israel’s most staunch supporter.

At the top of the mall, the top Democrats in Congress – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jefferies – stood together on stage with Republicans Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives speaker, and Senator Joni Ernst from the central state of Iowa. They joined hands as Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US, chanted, “We stand with Israel.”

But beneath the projection of unity, Democrats and the US itself are sharply divided over Israel’s course and its treatment of Palestinians.

The country has seen weeks of largely pro-Palestinian demonstrations amid growing calls for a ceasefire and President Joe Biden has toned down some of the full-throated solidarity with the Israelis from the war’s early weeks to urge more restraint.

Hamas a target

A succession of speakers took the stage to condemn the Hamas attack and what they said was the virulent spread of anti-Semitism internationally.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed the crowd via video from the Western Wall in Jerusalem. After “the largest massacre since the Holocaust,” he said, “let us call out together, never again.

“No one will break us,” he pledged. “We will rise again … There is no greater and just cause than this.”

Rachel Goldberg, whose 23-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was snatched by Hamas after the group attacked a music festival, also addressed the crowd, noting those taken captive ranged in age from just nine months to 87 years and were of different religions and nationalities.

“Our hearts are bruised and seeping with misery,” she said. “Why is the world accepting that 240 human beings from almost 30 countries have been stolen?”

Many of the demonstrators wore Israeli flags wrapped around their shoulders or held small Israeli flags in their hands turning their anger on Hamas.

Banners and placards showed the names and photos of people being held captive in Gaza, with the crowd shouting, “Bring them home!”

Other signs read “Annihilate Hamas” and “From the river to the sea, we support democracy.”

Security was tight, with trucks blocking access to the mall and police keeping a close watch on the area.

Melanie Lubin of Olney, Maryland, wore a flag that combined the Stars and Stripes with Israel’s blue and white Star of David.

Asked about the death toll in Gaza and criticism of the way Israel has conducted its military campaign, she said: “I think everyone is concerned about what is happening in Gaza and to civilians in Israel. Israel is doing its best. This is a war. Israel did not start this war.”

Mark Moore, a 48-year-old Christian pastor from Chicago, said he considered Israel “the only bastion of freedom” in the Middle East.

“I’m praying for peace… secured through victory so it does not continue with this endless cycle of violence,” he said.

Iceland, which has 33 active volcanic systems, declared a state of emergency and ordered the mandatory evacuation of the town of Grindavik on Saturday.

Here is what to know:

Where is Grindavik and what is happening there?

Grindavik is a fishing town on Iceland’s southwestern peninsula of Reykjanes. It is home to 3,800 people. Around 900 earthquakes hit southern Iceland on Monday alone, adding to the tens of thousands of tremors that have shaken up the south of the country in recent weeks.

Grindavik residents described being evacuated from their homes by police in the early hours of Saturday as the ground shook, roads cracked and buildings suffered structural damage.

Scientists have linked these earthquakes to the movement and spreading of magma, which is around 5km (3 miles) underground. Land in the region has risen by 9cm since October 27, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

Authorities fear that molten rock can rise to the surface and hit Grindavik. Experts expect an eruption soon since the magma is at a shallow depth.

The Icelandic Meteorological Office said on Monday there was a “significant likelihood” of an eruption in the coming days on or just off Reykjanes, despite the size and intensity of earthquakes decreasing.

What precautionary measures are being taken?

The residents were told to leave Grindavik on Saturday and were allowed to briefly return on Sunday to collect their belongings including documents, medicines or pets, with Icelandic police and civil protection vehicles on standby.

Almost all of the town’s residents found accommodation with family members or friends. Only between 50 and 70 people were staying at evacuation centres, a rescue official told the Reuters news agency.

The Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, a tourist attraction in Iceland also announced its temporary closure until November 16. The spa is located on the peninsula, “amid moss-covered lava fields”, according to its website.

Scientists are monitoring the situation to examine the flow and proximity of the magma to try to predict the likelihood of eruption.

On Tuesday, the authorities were preparing to build defence walls around a geothermal power plant in the southwestern part of the country that they hope will protect it from lava flows in the event of an eruption.

 

What can happen if the volcano erupts in Iceland?

The lava can potentially threaten the town of Grindavik and the Blue Lagoon. Geothermal pipelines that supply hot water to thousands of homes are also under threat.

There also might be a risk of toxic fumes and air pollution as a result of the eruption.

“We have a fissure that’s about 15km [9.3 miles] long, and anywhere on that fissure we can see that an eruption could happen,” Vidir Reynisson, head of Iceland’s Civil Protection and Emergency Management told the AFP news agency.

However, the end of the fissure goes into the sea, which means the eruption can occur on the ocean floor, which would likely cause a large ash cloud.

Volcanic eruptions also pose a serious hazard to aviation because they can spew highly abrasive ash high into the atmosphere where it can cause jet engines to fail, damage flight control systems and reduce visibility.

Has this happened in Iceland before?

Iceland sits above a volcanic hotspot in the North Atlantic and averages an eruption every four to five years.

The 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano was one of the most disruptive eruptions recently, resulting in widespread airspace closures over Europe and costing airlines an estimated $3bn as they cancelled more than 100,000 flights.

After 800 years, three eruptions have taken place on the peninsula of Reykjanes near the Fagradalsfjall volcano: in March 2021, August 2022 and July 2023. Previous eruptions did not cause damage, having occurred in remote valleys.

Volcanologists believe the new cycle of increased activity could last for several decades or centuries.

Is the capital Reykjavik at risk?

Grindavik is around 40km (25 miles) southwest of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, where authorities have not ordered residents to evacuate, indicating that they do not think the country’s biggest city will be impacted by an eruption.

Bill extending funding into early 2024 was passed with Democrat support and needs to be signed off by midnight on Friday.

The United States’s House of Representatives has passed a temporary spending bill to avert a government shutdown that could have left as many as 1.5 million public workers without pay.

The legislation, which would extend government funding until mid-January, now heads to the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority and Republicans have also voiced support.

To prevent a shutdown, the measure must be signed by President Joe Biden before current funding for federal agencies expires at midnight on Friday.

The 336-95 vote was a victory for new House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was forced to reach across the aisle to Democrats when hard-right conservatives revolted against his plan.

“Making sure that government stays in operation is a matter of conscience for all of us. We owe that to the American people,” Johnson said earlier on Tuesday at a news conference.

Johnson was elected as speaker less than three weeks ago, following weeks of tumult that left the chamber without a leader, even as the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war spurred calls for quick congressional action.

With a slim 221-213 majority, he can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes on legislation that Democrats oppose.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said in a statement after the vote that he was pleased the bill passed “with a strong bipartisan vote,” adding that he would work with his Senate Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, to pass it “as soon as possible”.

The stopgap spending bill would extend government funding at current levels into early 2024 in a two-part process that temporarily funds some federal agencies to January 19 and others to February 2, giving lawmakers more time to craft the detailed spending bills that cover everything from the military to scientific research.

The bill passed with 209 Democratic and 127 Republican votes, while 93 Republicans and two Democrats voted against it.

Some hardline Republicans said they were frustrated that the bill did not include the steep spending cuts and border security measures they sought.

Democrats, meanwhile, pressed for their own add-ons – including aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan – but each now looks set to be dealt with separately, with a $61bn request from the White House for Kyiv looking particularly precarious amid conservative opposition.

Johnson’s predecessor as speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was removed by a handful of hardline Republicans after a similar vote in September to avert a shutdown that also relied on Democratic votes.

Kyiv, Ukraine – When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the world’s attention shifted from the Russian-Ukrainian war to the Middle East conflict.

As the new war flared, Ukrainian officials and some observers were quick to accuse Moscow of meddling and even graver allegations – that it was supplying the Palestinian group with weapons.

They provided no evidence for their claims.

“Russia is interested in triggering a war in the Middle East, so that a new source of pain and suffering could undermine world unity, increase discord and contradictions, and thus help Russia destroy freedom in Europe,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the time.

“We see Russian propagandists gloating. We see Moscow’s Iranian friends openly supporting those who attacked Israel. And all of this is a much greater threat than the world currently perceives. The world wars of the past started with local aggressions.”

Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s top intelligence officer, alleged that Moscow may have provided Hamas with arms seized in Ukraine in what would appear as a perfect way to cover Russia’s fingerprints.

“We all clearly see that trophy arms from Ukraine have indeed been passed to the Hamas group. Mostly, it’s infantry weapons,” he told the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper on October 12.

But several experts have warned that despite decades-long amicability between Russia, Hamas, and Iran, there is no concrete proof of Russian arms supplies.

“We don’t see the main thing – a statement from the Israeli military and their demonstration of the Hamas arms they seized,” Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s University of Bremen told Al Jazeera.

“So far, there’s no proof of sizeable arms supplies from Russia to Gaza,” he said. “They may very likely emerge after [Israel finishes] the clean-up of Gaza, but only then it will make sense to talk about them.”

On November 2, Aleksander Venediktov, of Russia’s Security Council, told the Ria Novosti news agency, “Such speculations are an open provocation.”

After the Hamas attacks, Israel began a relentless bombing campaign in Gaza, with the stated aim of crushing the Palestinian group that governs the densely populated enclave.

More than 1,200 were killed in Israel – among them more than a dozen Russian nationals – and more than 200 were captured in the Hamas attacks. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 11,200 Palestinians.

Vera Mironova, a Russian-American security expert and author, has renewed the weapons claim, telling Al Jazeera that a former US senior security official is preparing to release a detailed report on the alleged link between the Hamas attack and Russia.

“It was absolutely coordinated with Moscow,” said Mironova, who is currently a research fellow at Harvard University.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “didn’t say things like ‘attack [Israel], but it was 100 percent coordinated”, she claimed.

Mironova alleged again that Russia supplied arms to Hamas – and did it via Iran and Syria to “distance itself” from the conflict.

“Russia has enough weapons to supply” its war effort in Ukraine and its allies in the Middle East, she claimed.

In return, she said, Iran is providing Russia with more inexpensive kamikaze drones so that their swarms are launched to wreak havoc and overwhelm Western-supplied air defence systems such as the US-made MIM-104 Patriot or the Norwegian-made NASAMS.

Al Jazeera was not able to independently verify Mironova’s allegations.

Undocumented allegations of weapons deliveries go both ways.

Last month, former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suggested that NATO arms sent to Ukraine “ended up” in the hands of Hamas fighters.

“So, NATO friends, game over? The weapons supplied to the Nazi regime in Ukraine are actively used in Israel,” Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on Telegram on October 9.

“It will only get worse. Expect missiles, tanks and soon planes from Kyiv on the black market,” he wrote.

According to Igar Tyshkevich, a Kyiv-based foreign policy expert at the Ukrainian Institute of the Future, Russia might have shipped Western arms seized in Ukraine, but the possible sources of these weapons could have been Afghanistan, where huge amounts of Western equipment were left after “the hurried withdrawal of Americans” in 2021.

Another possible source is Iraq, where Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sided with pro-US Iraqi forces to fight ISIL (ISIS) in 2014, he told Al Jazeera. Syria could have been one more source of weaponry – given the past presence of US troops and President Bashar al-Assad’s political proximity to Iran, he said.

Hamas, for its part, has not commented on the continued claims about its supplies.

On October 26, Russia played host to Hamas leaders, a defiant move against the West likely aimed at demonstrating its diplomatic clout.

Israel decried the meeting in Moscow as “reprehensible”.

Days earlier, Hamas had thanked Putin for his diplomatic support. The Russian leader took days to condemn Hamas’s assault, and in his first comments on the crisis blamed the “failure of the United States’ policy in the Middle East”.

“[We] appreciate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s position regarding the ongoing Zionist aggression against our people and his rejection of the Gaza siege, the cutting of relief supplies, and the targeting of safe civilians there,” Hamas said in a statement on October 15.

Russia’s relationship with Palestine, Israel

Russia’s current ties with Israel and Hamas are predated by decades of Soviet relations.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin welcomed the establishment of Israel in 1948, hoping it would become a pro-Moscow socialist nation.

But after Israel aligned itself with the West, Soviets began forging ties with Palestinian leaders – and trained hundreds of fighters in KGB schools.

Thousands more Palestinians studied in universities all over the USSR, from Tallinn to Tashkent – and one of them was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

He wrote a PhD dissertation titled “Hidden Face: a connection between Zionism and Nazism” in Moscow in 1982 under Yevgeny Primakov, an Arabist and then director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.  Primakov, a spy, would go on to become post-Soviet Russia’s foreign minister and then prime minister in the 1990s.

In 1967, the Kremlin called Israel a “Zionist warmonger” and severed diplomatic ties over the Arab-Israeli war.

But after millions of post-Soviet Jews moved to Israel, Israel began forging closer ties with Moscow.

According to Chatham House experts Nikolay Kozhanov and James Nixey, it is “likely that the Hamas–Israel war means the end of Russia’s decades-long policy of balancing between different players in the Middle East”.

In a recent article, they wrote that given Russia’s welcome of a Hamas delegation in Moscow in October, its refusal to condemn the initial Hamas attack, and its close alliance with Iran, “Tel Aviv no longer considers Russia an ally and would probably reject it as a mediator.”

As the war enters its 630th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, November 15, 2023.

Fighting

• Russia intensified air bombardments and ground assaults around the ruined eastern town of Avdiivka, 20km (12 miles) from the Russian-held Ukrainian city of Donetsk. Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Shtupun told national television that Ukrainian forces had repelled eight attacks in the previous 24 hours on Avdiivka, known for its vast coking plant. “Fighting is still going on. Over the last two days, the occupiers have increased the number of air strikes using guided bombs from Su-35 aircraft,” Shtupun said. “The enemy is also bringing in more and more infantry.”
• Separately, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s ground forces, said that Russia continued to launch simultaneous assault attempts on Ukrainian positions around Bakhmut and Kupyansk, and had stepped up their use of kamikaze drones.
• In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also focused on Avdiivka, saying Russian forces were losing men and equipment faster there than they did during months of battles near Bakhmut earlier this year. Zelenskyy said that the greater losses inflicted on Russian forces near the town, the worse would be Moscow’s overall position.
• Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who is in the United States, told the Hudson Institute think tank that Ukrainian forces had “gained a foothold” on the east bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine in the first official acknowledgement of the breakthrough in the Kherson region. “Our counteroffensive is developing,” he said.
• The Landmine Monitor said the number of civilians wounded or killed by landmines and explosive remnants of war in Ukraine soared to 608 in 2022, compared with 58 the year before. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
• Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences destroyed four Ukrainian drones over the Moscow, Tambov, Orlov and Bryansk regions. There were no reports of casualties or damage.

Politics and diplomacy

• Former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov was pardoned over the 2006 killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya after enlisting with the Russian military in Ukraine. Politkovskaya, who investigated abuses in Russia’s Chechen war and was a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block. Khadzhikurbanov was found guilty in 2014 of organising the killing and jailed for 20 years.
• Russia jailed a man for six years after he was found guilty of  “discrediting” the Russian military for defacing posters of Russian soldiers decorated as “heroes” for fighting in Ukraine. The man was identified only as a 46-year-old “local” to the central city of Tolyatti, where the posters were damaged. Human rights group Memorial named him as Alexei Arbuzenko, a teacher.
• Oleksandr Dubinsky, a Ukrainian lawmaker who was formally notified this week that he was suspected of treason for allegedly cooperating with Russia’s military intelligence, said a Kyiv court had ordered him detained for 60 days. He did not say why. Dubinksy was put on a US sanctions list in 2021 when he was expelled from Ukraine’s ruling party.

Weapons

• Speaking at a European Union defence ministers meeting, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius admitted the bloc would miss its target of supplying Ukraine with 1 million artillery shells and missiles by next March because of production issues. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the bloc had provided more than 300,000 artillery shells and missiles under the first track of the scheme, which involved EU member states delivering from their own stockpiles.