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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HUGE: Israel has struck Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar! Rumors suggest Khalil al-Haya is among those targeted.
Hamas will be eradicated—its leaders will be hunted down no matter where they are, and no matter how much money their protectors have. Bold stuff from Israel.
I didn't believe Israel would dare attack the Hamas leaders in Qatar, even though they obviously easily could. Qatar alone is defenceless.
I doubt they would have done this without the tacit approval of the Trump admin, and perhaps this was a hint:
Today is Purim. One of the greatest days in Jewish history.
Today—the 14th of the Jewish month of Elul—will be celebrated centuries hence as a festival. At this hour a year ago today, the most effective clandestine military operation was executed. It flipped everything: (1/10)
Hundreds of sworn enemies of the Jews—committed to their genocide—were killed & 1,000s more injured, crippled, blinded—so incapable of realizing their evil plans. For the rest of their lives, they are a living testament to the effects of Jew-hate and the failure of Jihad. (2/10)
I wondered: When is the correct date to celebrate Israel's total victory over the now collapaxd Iranian axis that spent 40 years trying to destroy it, with its final terrorists still hiding in the ruins of Gaza City? What day could that be celebrated on? (3/10)
This is the London Banana. As long as you stay within the Banana, you'll have a great time in London. Almost everything outside the Banana is horrible these days, best avoid. Not clear why, or when this happened. But it is what it is.
The Banana Republic
Here's the London Banana clearly visible on the latest house prices data, proving that as much as people might not like the claim, the Banana is real, and people are proving it with their wallets, and banks are agreeing with it by issuing valuations based on this.
Reality: Israel evacuated a critically ill leukemia patient to Italy in an attempt to save her life. She soon died of her disease, one of the effects of which is malnutrition.
BBC: “Look what the Jews did. They starved her.”
Evil propaganda.
The BBC and its vast staff, including the author, whose name should be firmly engraved in the wall of shame, Rachel Muller-Heyndyk, don't even stop and think for a moment: If there really is a famine in Gaza, why are all the stories of people dying of starvation lies?
The author of this demented libel—which endangers Jews worldwide by radicalizing readers against them, falsely implying that Jews starved this woman to death rather than trying to save her from cancer—is, unsurprisingly, an open anti-Zionist. Apparently, that’s now a requirement for working at the BBC.
Here is Rachel Muller-Heyndyk herself, proudly sharing an anti-Zionist thread from a Bernie bro: the usual protest slop, complete with Intifada bloodied hands and a dose of Yiddish Bundism from a bygone age, when Jews were expected to be perfect, harmless victims.
There’s a special place in hell for the editors & journalists who took Hamas’ photos of children with congenital conditions (and parents with double chins) and broadcast them to their already radicalized audience with the message, ‘Look what the Jews did.’
Remember their names.
One of the many consolations of the demise of the newspaper industry is that this is the last generation of journalists.
This was a coordinated, Qatar-run campaign designed to help Hamas in its bargaining efforts. By spreading these libels, they not only harmed Israel and the hostages, betrayed Trump, and endangered Jews worldwide—they also guaranteed more suffering for the people of Gaza.
It incentivized further immiseration of the Gazans by Hamas.