Why is Israel destroying so many buildings in these border villages? Random vengeance?
The truth is accidentally revealed by anti-Israel researcher Evan Hill: The blank patch (i.e., almost no buildings are damaged) between Ayta al-Shab and Yaroun is Rmaich. (1/4)
Despite the negligence of the Lebanese government and UNIFIL, the citizens of this Christian village fought all attempts to turn the bucolic mountain township into a terror base to destroy Israel. They bravely defied Hezbollah, unlike their neighbors. (2/4)
When a village adjacent to an international border is made into a swiss cheese of tunnels and dungeons filled with weapons—ready for an invasion at the beep of a pager—that infrastructure needs to be destroyed.
Its destruction is good, the tragedy is that it was built. (3/4)
The Lebanese border villages chose: Some allowed Hezbollah encroachment, became terror forts, and are getting wrecked. Some fought Hezbollah—they chose life. I hope Israel offers an olive branch and helps revive them.
The real culprits here are UNIFIL, the UN and Iran. (4/4)
Of course, this is a report for the Washington Post, so even though they evidence clearly shows that as Netanyahu claimed, Israel is attacking Hezbollah, not Lebanon, they quote "analysts" to say the opposite.
(And Hezbollah is merely "showing solidarity" with Hamas. And WaPo, by the way, the use of explosive weapons in empty urban areas, is the only way to remedy the storage of massive quantities of such weapons under inhabited civilians buildings.)
For the curious, here are 2 maps. The first shows the religious breakdown of the villages of S. Lebanon. When the outlines of the Christian villages are drawn on the damage map, the effect becomes obvious. They alone resisted Hezbollah. Sadly even the Sunnis seem to have failed.
Watch this clip from the Druze village of Hasbaya (about 10km from the border) as the locals catch a Hezbollah man ferrying weapons.
A mob attacks and evicts him & they share the video to deter more incursions.
They knew: Hezbollah today means death and destruction tomorrow.
Even as the main story in the Middle East has been the Turkish revenge carpet bombing of Kurds in Syria and Iraq, Sky News' Turkey based "Special Correspondent" Alex Crawford has only been writing about Gaza on X.
In fact, amazingly for a truth-seeking journalist who actually lives in Turkey where 20-25% of the people are from the heavily oppressed Kurdish minority, it's now more than 5 years since she used the word "Kurd" in any over her 1,000s of X post.
Surely she is terribly moved by the plight of the Kurds in the country she calls home, at least as much as she is by the Hamas "fighters" and Hezbollah "activists" she seems to so love?
Imagine a foreign correspondent who lived in Israel, who never managed to find the opportunity to use the word "Palestinian" or "Arab" over 5 years.
Wouldn't that seem odd?
And seeing as Alex Crawford is so agitated about the safety of her fellow journalists in Gaza (even as copious evidence points to them being Hamas terrorists) surely she is equally distressed about the suffering of brave journalists, Nedim Turfent is one of many, persecuted in the Turkey, the state where she lives. Right???
Iran barely failed to assassinate Netanyahu this morning, only because he wasn't where he usually is on a Saturday morning at dawn, in bed at his weekend beach house. If I were a senior IRGC member I know what I would be doing right now: Getting dressed up in my finest burka, and heading across the mountains to Pakistan, because this is what is called a casus belli.
This is the north facade of Netanyahu's Caesarea house, hit by an Iranian drone. Of the five large windows on the upper floor facing the pool, only one has had a steel and blast proof glass contraption added. Why might that be...
This leaked and now widely shared photo is clearly taken from inside Bibi's garden, by somebody with security clearance, which is almost as bad a failure as the fact that this drone got through, despite being tracked by an Apache, and without the local sirens going off.
This is his response to the assassination attempt, without addressing it directly, in a rare Shabbat broadcast:
With Sinwar dead, 31 of the initial 54 "playing card" leaders are confirmed dead (58%), others are undoubtedly dead too, but unconfirmed by Israel.
Assuming that the Hamas rank and file are dying at the same rate (in truth, they are certainly dying more), and taking the median estimate for Hamas' initial strength at 35,000, we can predict that c. 21,000 Hamas men are dead. At the at least 3,000 captured alive, and a conservative 5,000 severely injured, and we can see that Hamas are down to just a few thousand fighters.
The IDF has achieved this while losing 350 of their own, a kill ratio of 60 to 1, while keeping the combatant-civilian casualty ratio at a record low in modern warfare. Despite the unprecedented civilian setting and the weaponzing of the laws of war agaisnt them.
This is the real reason Hamas are done. Sinwar is just a trophy.
The only "household name" figures that Hamas has left are:
1. Khaled Mashal (in Qatar) 2. Abu Obeida (just a spokesman, a Hamas Daniel Hagari, not a real leader) 3. Mohamed Sinwar 4. Mousa Abu Marzook (in Qatar) 5. Husam Badran (in Qatar) 6. Osama Hamdan (in Lebanon) 7. Zaher Jabarin (in Turkey) 8. Ghazi Hamas (in Lebanon?)
So, with 31 dead and at least 7 in Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey, no more than 16 of the original targets remain in Gaza. Probably fewer.
To not offend some of the 1.5% of Michiganders who are Muslim, Harris picked a dud VP, Tim Walz, instead of Josh Shapiro—who would have sealed PA for her, but alas, is a Jew.
If she loses Michigan or PA by 1-2%—and with it the election—she will richly deserve her defeat.
As this poll shows, it didn't even help her. It was a bad play. As was obvious it would be. Stupid people are advising her.
If she does lose either PA or Michigan, there is almost no way she can win. She would have to win Georgia, or pull some very big surprise out of the bag. If she loses both, as the current polling implies she will do by a very small margin, there is no chance at all.
The NYT reveals why Hamas attacked when they did and how they successfully tricked the IDF into complacency.
The 2023 weekly protests in Israel tricked Hamas into thinking that Israel was on the verge of civil war. It wasn't. The protests were part of the normal democratic process and looked much more dramatic and well supported than they were thanks to friendly press narratives. But Hamas didn't know that.
Hamas tricked Israel, but Israel accidentally tricked Hamas.
The net result of this dual information mismatch was Ocotber 7, and then the decimation of Hamas and now their Hezbollah allies.
Hamas and Hezbollah are both explicitly genocidal groups who had spent 20 years amassing suicide armies on Israel's borders, waiting to attack. Israeli society's inadvertent deception of Hamas, alongside the IDF's laughable credulity to Hamas' lies, accidentally saved Israel from a much worse joint attack that would one day have come.
Ocotber 7 was Israel's darkest day, but in 50 years, it might be seen as the day Israel was saved.
This is from just 4 days before the calamity. Everyone in Israel knew that the pilots were bluffing and would obviously show up to serve in any war. But Hamas didn't know that.
Hamas set a small trap for Israel, and Israel fell into it. But the reason they felt able to set that trap is because Israel had inadvertently set a much greater trap for Hamas, and Hamas fell into that one.
Other nations get to mourn their dead in peace. But Jews mustn't cry: Jewish tears are "weapons of war," explains the Guardian, memorials to Jewish dead are just rallying points for "limitless violence."
Jews don't count—and they don't get to count their dead either.
A new low.
Just imagine the artist designing this sick parody of a memorial to the victims of October 7, with the star-less flag ribbon and the faceless victims. @Freedland stopped writing for the Jewish Chronicle after 25 years over something far more trivial, and wrote a catty letter to the editor, @JakeWSimons . I am sure any day now he will hand in his notice at the Guardian.
It's not entirely clear what point Naomi Klein thinks she is making here.
That colonialism caused the Holocaust, and the Holocaust caused Israel? Is Israel thus just another terrible result of the Holocaust, which was itself nothing special, being just another result of colonialism? What?