I almost feel bad for Hezbollah. They’ve spent the 18 years since the Second Lebanon War preparing for this day.
They dug bunkers and tunnels, turned bedrooms into missile silos, and mosques into fortifications. (1/8)
They concealed firing positions under bushes across Lebanon's hills and in the Bekaa Valley. They carefully distributed their weapons.
But in those 18 years, Israel has been working too, and the technological advances in that time have vastly increased Israel's edge. (2/8)
What the IDF has now confirmed in this video was obvious: there’s no doubt they have centimeter-level 3D models of every building in Lebanon. On lidar maps, the entrances to all of Hezbollah's "secret" hideouts would light up like Christmas trees. (3/8)
It’s trivial to track changes in these maps: when a farmhouse is extended, when new tracks appear in a wood, the changes show up bright.
Like the French in the 1930s, Hezbollah prepared for the last war. It turns out they’ve built a modern Maginot Line. They’re cooked. (4/8)
As their civilian human shields head north, leaving them exposed, Hezbollah's fighters will now be scrambling through the brush and across the hills, unable to safely use roads and with no way to contact each other. They’ll desperately try to reach whatever rockets they can, only to ineffectually fire back at Israel.
But they’ll be tracked by Israel's endless eyes in the sky and eliminated along with their rockets. (5/8)
The question is: Can Israel sufficiently reduce the Hezbollah threat with targeted airstrikes alone and avoid a ground incursion?
In the past, this would have been impossible, even with carpet bombing.
However, with the new technology available and complete air superiority, Israel may be able to keep their enemy pinned down from the air, slowly degrading them into dust. (6/8)
If the Israelis do need to go in, it might be sufficient to cut off Hezbollah's heartland in the south from the Bekaa Valley, and thus from resupply from Iran, just as was done to Hamas at Rafah, sealing their demise. It might even be possible to achieve this from the air alone.
Lebanon's geography makes this feasible, as it is split north-south by mountains and east-west by around 12 large canyons. There are no more than seven bridges across each canyon, and there are minimal passes through the mountains.
(7/8)
Israel would just need to pick a river and make it impassable for Hezbollah with a few bombs. With careful monitoring, Hezbollah's southern activities would dry up and fizzle out.
The Litani River probably isn’t far enough north, as it bisects Hezbollah's Shia heartlands, and parts of it are less than 10 km from Israel.
Don’t be surprised if the bridges on the Awali or Damour rivers go kaboom at some point.
If the Israelis do go in, it might simply be to take up positions on the very lightly populated (mostly Druze) western reaches of Mount Hermon (highlighted). Occupying those heights, with one of the valleys made impassable, would force Hezbollah's communications over a single mountain road—essentially turning it into a shooting gallery.
Based on the number of major ammo cookoffs that people are posting, the IDF claim to have destoryed 50% of Hezbollah's stocks doesn't look implausible. The IDF are unlikely to let up now that even the minority of civilians who remained have fled the battlefield.
Looks like a Hezbollah cruise missile cooking off somewhere in the Bekaa Valley at around 6 pm local time. Dramatic.
@GAZAWOOD1 thank you
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Qatar's Machiavellian schemes have reached a dead end. Can it make a U-turn?🧵
Nobody did more to support Hamas than Qatar—money, propaganda—so when this video of Qataris running from Iranian missiles in terror was shared in a Hamas group, what was the universal reaction? Laughter & joy. (1/7)
Qatar’s strategy was so clever. Whoever thought it up and implemented it is some true genius—or perhaps a very sharp team of Western consultants. They picked every point of influence in the West and made them their dependents.
It's almost as if they read "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", believed it was real, and decided it to try it themselves. Who knows? That might actually be true, since The Protocols is a bestseller across the Arab world. (2/7)
They worked out which colleges fed into critical nodes—like Georgetown and the State Department—and ploughed money in. Many new recruits in sensitive government departments come fresh from the mad rantings of people like Jonathan AC Brown.
They trained a generation of journalists at their Al Jazeera propaganda network. They bought right-wing and left-wing media, and when they didn’t buy them, they made themselves indispensable—becoming, as with the UK’s failing Sky News, their only major advertising partner. (3/7)
A week into one of the most audacious military operations in history, what is the state of play? Iran is petulantly lashing out, flailing, while Israel is tearing its way through the regime, inflicting 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more damage on Iran than vice versa. 🧵(1/7)
Their attacks are simply depleting their remaining stocks, exposing their launch sites, but doing no damage at all to Israel’s military apparatus. They have killed 22 Israeli civilians, as well as 5 Ukrainians, and done perhaps $50 million worth of property damage.
The cost to them of these attacks, when all is said and done—including the sanctions they forced their people to bear over decades, the R&D, the opportunity cost? Certainly hundreds of billions of dollars. Most of what they built up over 40 years has disappeared in a week. (2/7)
Almost comically, they have sent over 1,000 drones against Israel in the past week, and not a single one has made it through. On their drones, they are zero for a thousand. (3/7)
MEHDI: "Wow! All you had to do to make me like Nazi-apologia fan, & fellow Qatari teet-suckler Tucker, was to stop the IRGC, who promised for 50 years to genocide the Jews, from getting the tools to actually do it! It's almost like a horseshoe!" (1/6)
This is not a coincidence: you can learn a lot about what really matters to someone by what they are willing to compromise on. For example, Netanyahu and Lapid are bitter rivals—but faced with the threat of nuclear annihilation, they come together, because that is the most important issue.
And so too with Mehdi and Tucker: they can also come together around the issue of the nuclear annihilation of Israel. Because that is the true core of their belief systems; everything else is peripheral, secondary. (2/6)
They didn’t realize that their patron in Qatar was just playing a game. Qatar is more threatened by an Iranian nuke than anyone. It isn’t a real country in the traditional sense—it has no real army—and a nuclear Iran would mean the disappearance of the American base that protects it, and the arrival of Shia domination over their Sunni statelet with just 0.5% of the citizenry.
Qatar only wanted Iran to play the bad cop in its great game against Israel, the West, and its Saudi and Emirati rivals. Part of that strategy included Tucker and Mehdi—useful idiots they hired—who genuinely dreamed of a nuclear Iran, not realizing they were merely being used as one of Qatar’s many instruments.
But just as Hamas didn’t realize it was meant to be only a proxy for Iran and went rogue—bringing down the entire Axis of Resistance—the influencers didn’t realize they were just pawns on the chessboard. (3/6)
It's a landscape of broken glass here at the end of my street in Tel Aviv where my friend, the journalist, @ShannaFuld had her apartment trashed by an IRGC missle, as she explains to CNN's Jeremy Diamond. Iran attacks random civilians, Israel eliminates generals.
Some photos from the scene, edited to remove any information about the precise location.
As @ShannaFuld told me, if she hadn't been inside the concrete safe room she wouldn't be alive. If these innacurate terror weapons were fired at the average wood build American city, the devastation would be massive.
Nobody has noticed Netanyahu’s deeply symbolic choice of the name “Rising Lion” for the operation he’s dreamed of for 30 years.
Iran, like Israel, has been a symbolized by a lion for 2,500 years. And now history comes full circle: it was Persia that, after 50 years of Israelite exile, enabled the restoration of Israel in Jerusalem. Now, 2,500 years later, Israel—reborn—repays the favor with perfect symmetry. Persia’s great civilization will be restored, and its occupiers vanquished, after 50 years. Isn’t that beautiful?
So, Sinwar's attack will indeed achieve its stated goal: It will end the occupation... of Iran...
The next domino is the IRGC: Sinwar's folly will end with Reza Pahlavi coronated on his father's throne, returned to the land he was exiled from as a boy, with the Israeli prime minister in attendance. Bookmark this.
What did y’all think "globalize the intifada" meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? 🧵
It meant this sweet young couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, gunned down at an American Jewish Committee event at the Jewish Museum by radicalized monster Elias Rodriguez, chanting “Free, free Palestine.” (1/20)
We need to know how it came to this—how did Jew-hate become so normalized that the killer can be assured of widespread support from certain quarters? And what future awaits Jews in the West? TL;DR: It's grim. (2/20)
Already, voices blaming Jews and Israel, rather than the killer or the people who radicalized him, are spreading across the internet. Naturally, the people spreading these lies are the ones who incited such actions. (3/20)