ISRAEL’S pager plot could be inspired by a spy film and the country is goading Hezbollah into starting a war, an ex-Mossad agent says.
Nearly 3,000 people were injured on Tuesday and 12 were killed in the sabotage attack leaving Lebanon in chaos and hospitals full of bloodied and injured.
Avner Avraham claims Israel is directly challenging Hezbollah to start a war in retaliation, so it can then invade Lebanon and wipe them out.
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Avraham says the chess move attack was Israel saying: “Don’t mess with us”.
He said: “The attack on Tuesday was so strong and wide if they [Hezbollah] do start a limited war, they will lose immediately.
“In the north, we have to start a limited war and we prefer that Hezbollah would make the first mistake.
“The response would be a huge damage to Lebanon, it would go 100 years back.”
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But, the 28-year spy veteran says Hezbollah has been left weak with so many people injured and Lebanon plunged into chaos.
“Now they don’t have a different kind of communication system, all their hospitals are full with injured people, this is the best time to attack them.”
Avraham said he believed Israel needed to attack Lebanon and create a “dead zone” inside the country where nobody lived.
That buffer would provide safety for the Israelis living in the north of the country – tens of thousands of whom have been displaced since fighting began last year.
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“To bring back the families to the north, you cannot bring them to the world without destroying and pushing all the Hezbollah from the border.”
Avraham also said it is possible that the attack could have been inspired by gadgets used in spy films, something he did as an agent.
“Sometimes we use examples ideas from James Bond films, we took ideas, I can tell you this for sure.
He said: “No one could write the script for Tuesday. This is the real example of thinking outside the box… All the world saw what happened Tuesday, this is the money time.
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“If Mossad is doing something and wants to declare it, they will declare it… In all cases they just do it and disappear.
“That’s the whole idea, you don’t know who is responsible for this, you don’t have any idea.”
Former President Donald Trump vowed to reinstate his travel ban that barred people from some predominantly Muslim countries and expand it to prevent refugees from war-torn Gaza from entering the U.S.
“I will ban refugee resettlement from terror infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” Trump said Thursday evening in Washington at an event alongside Republican donor and billionaire Miriam Adelson.
“Remember the famous travel ban? We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world,” Trump added “We’re not taking them from infested countries.”
Trump initially put in place a version of his travel ban—one of the signature measures of his presidency—a week after taking office, triggering chaos at airports and sparking protests. Judges blocked the initial ban but changes to the policy eventually led to it being upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected claims that it targeted Muslims.
The Republican presidential nominee’s remarks came at an event focused on combating antisemitism, as he sought to enhance his outreach to Jewish voters before November’s election against Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Throughout the speech, Trump frequently suggested his backing for Israel should result in better political support among Jewish Americans.
He repeatedly complained he had not “been treated right” because polls showed a majority of Jewish Americans supported his opponent, and said that he believed “Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss” in the presidential election.
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“There’s no way that I should be getting 40% of the vote—I’m the one who is protecting you,” Trump said.
Trump at one point suggested that Israel itself should defeat Harris. “More than any people on Earth, Israel has to defeat her,” he said.
The former president added that Israel’s very existence could hinge on the election: “If I don’t win, I believe Israel will be eradicated,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly come under criticism for remarks asserting that American Jews ought to be unquestioningly supportive of the Israeli government.
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In an interview in March, Trump accused Jewish people who support Democrats of hating their religion and Israel. Trump has sought to seize on divisions among Democrats over Israel’s war against Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union.
In a July radio interview, Trump attacked Harris, saying she “doesn’t like Jewish people” and that she had appeared annoyed during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When the radio host criticized Harris’ husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, calling him a “crappy Jew,” Trump responded “yeah.”
Emhoff is the first Jewish spouse of a U.S. president or vice president and has been a vocal advocate against antisemitism, including leading the administration’s strategy on the issue.
After Trump’s speech on Thursday night, Amy Spitalnick, chief executive officer of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs issued a rebuke of his remarks. “Trump continues to label Jews who don’t support him as disloyal and crazy, to play into dangerous dual loyalty tropes, and to blame Jews for a potential electoral loss,” she said. “At the same time, he continues to normalize antisemitic extremism.”
Trump has drawn criticism for interactions with antisemites and white supremacists, including a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted from Aug. 26 to Sept. 2 found 65% of Jewish registered voters support or are leaning toward Harris, with 34% for Trump.
The war in Gaza has presented a political challenge for Harris, with progressives and younger voters critical of President Joe Biden’s support for Israel. Harris, while backing Israel’s right to defend itself has expressed more empathy for Palestinian suffering than Biden during the war.
Government borrowing in August rose to the highest level for the month since the Covid pandemic in 2021.
Official figures show that borrowing – the difference between spending and tax revenue – reached to £13.7bn last month, £3.3bn more than in August last year.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said that tax income “grew strongly” but this was outweighed by some benefits being increased and higher spending public services, including pay.
The figures are released as the government prepares for the Budget at the end of October, which Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has warned will be “painful”.
The ONS said higher benefits spending was largely due to payments being increased in line with inflation. A number increased including the carer’s allowance and the disability living allowance.
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Inflation also pushed up running costs for public services, it added.
Increased borrowing in August means that national debt remained at levels last seen in the early 1960s, with the ONS estimating it to be equivalent to the entire size of the UK’s economy.
Left to right: Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt; Denis Haman, chief executive of Glide Publishing Platform; Barry Adams, SEO consultant, Polemic Digital; Carly Steven, global head of SEO, Mail Online; and Madhav Chinnappa, senior executive consultant. Picture: ASV Photography Ltd
Publishers have been urged to “band together” to challenge big tech’s power over news industry revenues as an executive revealed the impact of recent Google updates at Mail Online.
Speaking at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference last week, a group of industry experts warned there is a mismatch between how the news industry and tech platforms calculate value that means publishers are powerless addressing them alone.
Carly Steven, the global head of search engine optimisation (SEO) at Mail Online, said a June anti-spam update rolled out by Google had hit affiliate revenue from, for example, publisher voucher code and betting offers, which she said “effectively turned off a very significant revenue stream for a lot of publishers”.
“All of that content – that was really valuable, and we genuinely believe our readers find it very valuable too – it was just gone overnight.”
She said it spoke to a broader trend wherein publishers have less control in an increasingly unpredictable online landscape.
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“We used to have a lot of control, as SEO editors or people working in this industry… We used to be able to tweak a headline, add some links and get something back. It used to be so easy… All that control is gone. I could not do that anymore.
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“If an editor says to me: ‘I want this story to rank at the start of the top stories rail’ – I cannot make that happen in the way that we used to do.”
Googe deployment of AI Overviews varies wildly from week to week
“We’ve taken part in studies where we’ve analysed our own keywords and seen that AI Overviews have been present for 23% of all the keywords that drive traffic to our website. And then the next week that’s 5%.
“So it’s very hard to be able to make decisions right now based on the data that we have.”
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AI Overviews concern some publishers because they are displayed above links in Google’s search results, pushing publishers further down the page and potentially answering user enquiries without sharing any traffic.
But Steven said for now their impact on traffic was unclear, asking: “Do people ever click if you have a link within an AI overview? Probably not, but right now, we just don’t know…
“What’s taking up my time at the moment, in terms of trying to understand the AI landscape, is developing the tools to enable us to track it on an ongoing basis.”
SEO consultant Barry Adams said from what he’d seen AI Overviews “don’t really present a threat, yet, to publishers – at least not in the context of news, where AI Overviews are mostly absent from news topics”. He said they are presented more often for “evergreen” information.
Adams said overviews did not “seem to be cannibalising as much traffic as maybe some had expected – it tends to be low single-digit percentage traffic losses, which basically makes AI Overviews just another search feature like you had before… So it’ll be just another thing to optimise for. Which means more work for everybody, yay.”
Mismatch between how publishers and platforms assess value
Denis Haman, the chief executive of Glide Publishing Platform, described the relationship between publishers and platforms as “abusive” and questioned whether big tech could ever meaningfully value news.
“We’re not friends, we’re not even frenemies,” he said. “That’s the reality… it doesn’t matter whether you’re exposing corruption or whether you’re telling life stories, the media plays a role in society which has a greater value than what some random number cruncher at Meta will assign to it.”
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Madhav Chinnappa, a senior executive consultant at AI data marketplace Human Native and previously the director of news ecosystem development at Google, said: “The reality is that the tech companies, from their California headquarters, look at the industries that they touch and they value them based on the revenue that they bring in.”
In the news industry’s case, he said “it’s de minimis, right?
“I actually was on a panel with an ex-Facebook person who talked about it, and he said: ‘Look, actually, the value of news to Facebook is zero if not negative, because when they took news off, their revenues went up.’
“So they’re valuing it based on dollars in. But I think the news industry and news people value the news industry on societal value…. I think that’s actually one of the fundamental factors about why this relationship has been so difficult.”
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‘Green shoots’ resulted from collective industry attempts to cajole big tech
On a more optimistic note, Mail Online’s Steven said that “a really positive unintended consequence” of June’s Google spam SEO update for publishers was that “it’s forced us together a lot more”.
“While that was a terrible thing that happened… publishers all came together to put pressure on Google, to insist on having conversations with them.
“I’m not saying that we’ve got the solution that we wanted to, but it was really productive, and not just because it’s a bit of a therapy session.”
She said there had been “green shoots” from those discussions.
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“I feel like, personally, our relationship with Google – while it can be frustrating because we don’t get answers – I feel like there’s been some small victories.
“And maybe I need to be more ambitious with my targets, but on the back of some of the things that we collectively as publishers have raised, Google… clarified things, they tweak the rules.”
Steven said Google is “not really interested in you individually as a publisher”.
“But when you have a whole industry coming together and being able to provide evidence and proof that ‘you made this change, and something collectively happened to all of us, and the consequences of that are really bad for your users who are searching for this information on Google’ – then they pay a little bit more attention.”
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SEO expert Adams said: “You need to hold them accountable, because if you just let them get away with it, they aren’t just going to care about us.”
He added: “It is not true that all of Google search results are purely algorithmic. There are some specific aspects, like for example, around Covid information, where Google will manually whitelist websites…
“We need to lift that veil off of it and understand these are just human-coded algorithms – coded by people who make editorial decisions on what works and what doesn’t work, and it is okay to hold them to account.”
Chinnappa agreed that publishers needed to work together to influence big tech, saying tech companies are “culturally different” from the news industry and that the way to sway them was “at scale, with data”.
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‘Don’t get split up by bits of money here and there’
On the question of whether publishers should licence their content to artificial intelligence companies, Chinnappa noted that away from giants like Google and OpenAI, “there’s actually an entire AI developer ecosystem of small and not so small developers who also need access to content, and they want it for specific reasons, whether it’s niche content or it’s hard to find in a big data set, or, quite selfishly, they don’t want to get sued into oblivion…
“I think we need to be helping get that ecosystem that’s sustainable for both sides. Because I hope that data licensing becomes a sustainable revenue stream for publishers going forward, but we need to push in that direction together.”
And Haman, similarly, said “there’s an opportunity nowadays, with a new crop of big tech companies emerging, where we should come together as an industry and see whether we can influence the governments, band together, don’t get split up by bits of money here and there.
“But what about smaller publishers? Who’s going to compensate them for the content that’s been taken from them without permission?…
“I don’t think that they’re going to have a breakthrough and all of a sudden see the value that that media industry [adds to] society, and it’s something that needs to be protected.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog
Vice-President Kamala Harris and television icon Oprah Winfrey held a star-studded event in Michigan, one of the seven crucial battleground states that will decide the US election on 5 November.
Winfrey, who also spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, asked Harris about what seemed like a sudden burst in confidence, a moment where “a veil or something dropped”, after she replaced President Joe Biden as nominee.
Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Chris Rock, and Ben Stiller joined a live discussion via video chat.
Harris is hoping the A-listers can help her sway undecided voters.
A woman has told the BBC she was subjected to a “sickening” sexual assault by former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed after being invited to his London flat for a work meeting.
The woman, who the BBC is calling Melanie, believes police were close to arresting him over her allegations just days before he died in August 2023.
A BBC investigation published on Thursday revealed that more than 20 women said they were sexually assaulted by the billionaire. Five said they were raped.
Melanie is one of a growing number of additional ex-Harrods employees to tell the BBC they were attacked since the documentary and podcast Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods was released.
The BBC investigation gathered evidence that during Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations.
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Melanie’s testimony comes as new details emerge of failed efforts by police and prosecutors to hold Fayed to account during his life, and a legal team representing many of the women the BBC has spoken to will set out their next steps on Friday.
Warning: this story contains details some may find distressing.
‘Sleazebag… slimy’
Melanie worked at Harrods for a few years prior to 2010. She described being hired there as a 21-year-old as a “dream job”.
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She met Fayed – who was in his late seventies at the time – at work meetings on two occasions, before being summoned to his apartment on London’s Park Lane in late 2007.
Melanie says she went to the evening meeting despite the invitation “ringing the alarm bells”.
She was shown into the sitting room by a housekeeper.
Melanie continued: “He sat down next to me, talking to me for a few minutes, not very long… He had asked that I return a couple of weeks later to stay at the apartments the night before the Harrods sale, and I could go to the Harrods sale with him, and I could meet the celebrity that was opening it.
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“And he would not really let me leave until I agreed to that, so I said yes to be able to leave. I did not go back.
“As I stood to leave, that’s when he put his hands on my breast and said some pretty disgusting things. And I was in complete shock. I just turned around and walked out.”
Melanie told the BBC she did not share the full details of the “sickening” experience with loved ones, and for years “felt it was my fault” because she was “naive enough to have gone”. She described Fayed as a “sleazebag” and “slimy”.
In January 2023 Melanie decided to go to the police. The BBC has seen emails showing the case was passed to the Met’s CID department, which investigates serious allegations.
Melanie says she was later told the Met planned to arrest Fayed that year, and officers tried to arrest him on two occasions.
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But he was too unwell to be questioned, and he died age 94 in August 2023.
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Harrods, in London’s Knightsbridge district, has not been owned by Fayed since 2010
‘Rumours swirling’ on shop floor
Like other women the BBC has spoken to, Melanie said there were “rumours swirling” about Fayed, and described his private office as being like a “modelling agency” full of young women.
She continued: “There was definitely a knowledge, like a secret knowledge, within the company that Fayed likes to have pretty girls in his chairman’s office. And you do wonder what that means.”
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Other women who worked at Harrods have painted a picture of Fayed as a predator who abused his position to prey on staff, and used his power to deter them from speaking out.
Some former employees recounted how he would tour his department store and identify young female assistants he found attractive, before promoting them to work his private office.
Ex-staff told the BBC this abuse was an open secret at the store. One said: “We all watched each other walk through that door thinking, ‘you poor girl, it’s you today’ and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.”
As well as inside Harrods itself and his Mayfair home, women have described incidents involving Fayed on trips to Paris, St Tropez and Abu Dhabi.
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One woman described him as a “monster” who “cultivated fear” among his staff, while the store’s ex-deputy director of security revealed Fayed had phones tapped and secret cameras installed to monitor his employees’ discussions.
Suspected – but never charged
Melanie was not the only woman who tried to bring Fayed to justice.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed it was “aware of various allegations of sexual offences made over a number of years” against Fayed.
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It said each of the allegations reported to the force had been “investigated and, where appropriate, advice from the Crown Prosecution Service was sought”.
But Fayed was never charged with a crime.
The closest he came to being uncovered appears to have been in October 2008, when he was questioned over allegations made by a girl who he first met when she was 14.
Ellie – not her real name – told the BBC that Fayed personally offered to secure her a job despite her still being a teenager, and she started working at Harrods when she had just turned 15.
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She recounted how in May 2008 she was told to go to the Harrods boardroom, where she said she was attacked by Fayed.
“He started…hugging me and [getting] touchy feely, and rubbing himself against me, and then he just grabbed my face and tried to… put his tongue in my mouth.
“I mentioned that I was 15, and [said] ‘what are you doing?’, and he said I was turning into a beautiful woman and grabbed my chest.”
She said Fayed flew into a rage and started screaming at her when she pushed him off.
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Ellie went to the police and Fayed was questioned by detectives – news which became public in October 2008.
Reuters
On Thursday, the Met confirmed it had spoken to more than one witness and analysed telephone data in Ellie’s case. The force said it handed a file of evidence to the CPS – but prosecutors decided no further action should be taken.
The Met has declined to say whether Ellie’s case was the only one where Fayed was formally questioned, though the BBC has seen no evidence he was ever quizzed over any other allegation.
The BBC understands Ellie’s case was the only time when a file of evidence was handed to the CPS, a step which has to be taken before an individual can be charged.
On four occasions, police investigations into Fayed were advanced enough for police to consult prosecutors for legal advice.
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The CPS advised the Met in 2018, 2021, and 2023 – but in those instances, police did not provide prosecutors with a full file of evidence. It is also not clear if all of those investigations relate to separate women.
It means Fayed was never forced to answer claims against him in court during his lifetime.
Melanie described the feeling of discovering Fayed had died and would never be taken in for questioning over her 2023 report as “gutting”.
But asked what she would say to Fayed if he were still alive today, Melanie told the BBC: “That you didn’t get away with it. That everybody out there knows what you’ve done… and money can’t get you out of this.”
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Hiding in plain sight
The claims against Fayed have not come out of the blue.
The Egypt-born businessman owned Harrods between 1985 and 2010 and became a well-known figure through other high-profile acquisitions, such as the Ritz hotel in Paris and Fulham Football Club.
He came to further public prominence when his son Dodi died alongside Diana, Princess of Wales – with whom Dodi was romantically involved – in a Paris car crash.
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Despite chat show appearances and his associations with celebrities and public figures, suspicions about Fayed’s predatory behaviour were investigated during his life – including by Vanity Fair in 1995, ITV in 1997 and Channel 4 in 2017.
It was only when Fayed died that many of his victims felt able to come forward.
On Friday, details of new claims are expected to emerge.
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Through his business ventures, Fayed became a public figure with several celebrity associations, including singer Michael Jackson
Members of the UK legal team representing many of the women featured in the BBC documentary “Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods” are to hold a news conference on Friday morning.
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The legal team will outline the case against Harrods. They will be joined by the US women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who has represented victims of high-profile offenders in the past.
Fourteen of the women the BBC has spoken to have brought civil claims against Harrods’ current owners for damages.
Harrods said it has a process available to women who say they were attacked by Fayed, adding “it has been our priority to settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved”.
Harrods reiterated its apology to its former staff after the BBC investigation was published. A spokesperson said: “We have now had the opportunity to watch the programme and once again express our sympathy to the victims featured.”
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The Met said it was committed to investigating sexual offences and encouraged victims to speak to police.
It also said any new information about Fayed would be “assessed and investigated accordingly”.
Fayed’s family did not provide a statement when asked for comment.
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