The extraordinary rumors going around Arab language T-gram groups are that dozens to hundreds of Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon had their encrypted personal pagers explode on their belts all at once in the last hour.

How did the Israelis do this? Did they hack the network and work out to get lithium batteries to overheat and explode? Did they manage to get an asset in Hezbollah's pager repair center, swithing out the batteries with bombs whenever they were taken in for repair?

Either way, this is a huge psychological blow and Hezbollah will need a new method to keep in touch with each other... not ideal for them in the middle of a war. This looks like the IDF "shaping the battlefield" ahead of something bigger. As usual, the warning is not to film the shabab (i.e., fighters—but translatled here literally as."young poeple") who have been injured or killed. Never show dead fighters, only children. This is the core of the propoganda war.

Hamas Qatar & Iran meticulously executed a hybrid warfare strategy—the goal being to sacrifice its own people just to shower Israel with bad press.

Israel's dismal, disjointed reply is best encapsulated by the firing of its 2 most talented spox for petty personal reasons. (1/4) Sinwar's goal wasn't military, they are not stupid.

They knew they couldn't conquer Israel's 10 million people with 3,000 men.

Their plan was to draw Israel into a war, and then use their carefully built PR operation to isolate Israel, and fracture it internally. (2/4)

Today was a very big day in the ongoing war. Israel’s strategy is suddenly clear and has been vindicated. It was in Israel’s interest to delay the inevitable reckoning with Hezbollah as long as possible, since for Hezbollah, yesterday was always the best day to attack Israel.

For every day that passes since October 7, Israel is freer to focus north and better prepared for the battle, while Hezbollah is being attrited much faster than Israel and cannot rebuild or resupply as fast as Israel. Every day, the balance of power tips towards Israel. This is what we saw last night. (1/11) While Hamas is bleeding out in Gaza, hermetically cut off from resupply, completely surrounded, and even losing the support of their brainwashed population, they are being presented by Israel with the choices of “free the hostages and die next year” or “don’t free them and die this year.”

Israel has presented them with a dilemma, not a problem—both ways they die, individually and as an organization.

Their plan was to force Israel to its knees by attacking, forcing Israel to respond, then presenting dead baby photos to the world via their media and disinformation proxies has failed. (2/11)

In March, after analysing satelite maps and speaking to friends who had been in Gaza, I predicted the IDF plan, which has finally come to fruition today. Israeli tanks are now busy taking control of the port of Khan Younis (red dot) having vacated and cleared the third corridor at Gaza's narrowest point at Kisufim.

Alongside the ever widening Rafah corridor that hermetically cuts Hamas off from resupply, and the now 6km wide Netzarim corridor with its 5 fortified bases that separates Gaza City from the rest of the Strip, Gaza is now cut into three. The humanitarian zone is now also cut in two by the new corridor.

Expect this new corridor to be fortified with bases. I would not be surprised if the IDF decided to form two additional corridors (yellow lines) to separate Beit Hanoun from Gaza City and to separate Rafah from Khan Younis.

The 1km buffer zone along the border looks to also be almost entirely cleared.

There are also a number of other military roads that have had large areas around the cleared of obstacles meaning that the IDF can sit back in their bases but be at any point in Strip with 5 minutes and via unpredictable routes. The point is to make the Gaza Strip strategically controllable by a minimal IDF force.

The only urban areas that the IDF have yet to enter in force (though they are already starting) are the towns in the central portion, Deir al Balah and Nuseirat. Only there can the Hamas infrastructure still be anything like its pre-war level.

It is almost certain that most of the remaining Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, are hiding out there, as are most of the most remaining hostages. They are now surrounded on four sides, with no hope of resupply, totally enemy surveillance as if they were in a fish tank.

The IDF has played this really well. They played the slow game, perhaps against their will and under US pressure, but managed to reduce Hamas from a dug in mighty army able to fire 1,000 rockets at hour to a insurgent rabble who can only fire a rocket on special occasions.

Hamas are contained and almost totally defeated. Israel did this at a cost of 330 heroes while eliminating 17,000 enemies, taking 5,000 POWs, and taking many 1,000s more out of the fight via injury. In the meantime, the Hamas T-gram groups I follow are ignoring this harbinger of their defeat and instead are laughing about a guy who had to run out of his rocket struck house in a towel in the Golan this morning.

Whatever helps them cope.

I read the New York Times hit-job on Bari Weiss, so you don't have to.

She's a heretic. A witch. Did you know she is a Jew? Her friends are Jews. She is a witch. Actually, she does Jewish stuff. She loves money. Oh, she is rich... and a Jew. Heretic. Burn. The. Witch... JEW. Some selections. The rare gentile to get a mention is as you would expect going to quoted with a snide remark.

Honestly, it's quite balsy on the NYT to print such a catty article about someone that was bullied out of her job at their own paper...

People ask: Why does the UK's Sky News seem to hate Israel, even more than Al Jazeera?

The story begins in 2005, when two things happened:

1. Israel withdrew from Gaza, allowing Hamas, supported by Qatari money, to start a 19 year process of turning the Strip into the most complex battlefield in history.

2. Qatar started sponsoring Sky News, via the hourly weather forecast, to start a 19 year process of capturing the UK news narrative.

Incredibly, Sky News and Hamas are just two Qatar funded operations. No wonder they seem to get along.

(1/6) While reminding potential tourists about your country in the context of "weather" when you have the most appalling climate on the planet, might seem odd (they need to cool pools otherwise they would be giant hot tubs), Qatar's goal wasn't tourism, but influence.

Sky News is a loss making venture, and by becoming its most consistent and lucrative sponsor, the tiny petro-kleptocracy slave-state of Qatar can buy easy influence for a pittance. (2/6)

How is Israel able to act in Iran, assassinating scientists and terror chiefs at will?

How fragile is Iran? (tldr: very.)

One map and one chart explain this and more:

Iran is a patchwork of ethnicities, with 52% of its population being non-Persian. Each of the other groups would rather be self governing, or even part of other states. (1/6) Conveniently for these ethnic groups, there are effectively open borders that link them with their ethnic kin.

The loyalties of Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Balochs, Pashtuns and a dozen others, are to their clan and ethnicity much more than they are to any Persian religious fanatics who have brought them to ruinous poverty.

The Azeris border their homeland of Azerbaijan, an Israeli ally, and are 30% of the population. They have oil, and want to be free; and Israeli-ally Azerbaijan (which unlike Iran, has a real military) is surely waiting for the opportunity to help them. (2/6)

For 2,000 years Jews were pillaged and slaughtered, they couldn't do much. They packed up what remained and moved on to the next place. But this is a new world now, with new rules.

When Ismail Haniyeh grinned as he watched the gore of the Oct 7 pogrom that he orchestrated from Qatar, he didn't imagine his days were numbered, but they were—299 days to be precise. Condolences are due to many many people in the West, not least his dear friend, the former MP George Galloway, who has been losing a lot of friends lately.

All Haniyeh wanted was the genocide of all Juice, is that so unreasonable?

Here they are in happier times:

Look at these shocking images of the deliberate military destruction of Rafah. Mile after mile of rubble. Total systematic carnage. But the military that razed Rafah wasn't the IDF... which is why you probably never knew about it...

Once, Rafah straddled the border with Egypt. There was an Egyptian Rafah and a Gazan Rafah.

I say "was" because, between 2015 and 2020 Egypt systematically and totally razed its half of Gaza, destroyed over 8,000 buildings, homes, shops, mosques, shut down all its farms, and sealed what had once been a thriving town behind fences.

But Jews—I mean Zionists—weren't doing it, so nobody cared. Nobody protested in European capitals, as Egypt committed this crime against humanity.

Not one celebrity shed one measly tear for Egyptian Rafah. Why?


Did anyone call for a boycott of Catapillar because their D9 bulldozers were used to completely ethnically cleanse 8000 buildings in Egyptian Rafah?

Does anyone know?

I read this appalling article in The Times yesterday slack jawed. All decent people should cancel their subscriptions.

It is a masterpiece in modern yellow journalism, with quotes from activists (who have now come out swinging at the writers) woven together with anecdotes and baseless aspersions to present a subtextual "narrative" to the reader that no person could ever say out loud:

Don't believe these hysterical liars, they are just exaggerating and whining as usual so they can justify their slaughtering.

Yes, that is actually the message it wants the reader to take away—in The Times.

While the article itself is sickening just in terms of the Soviet style mendacity (and should end the careers of the journalists and editors involved), the headline and banner image used are simply beyond belief.

To print a headline with a question, "Does the evidence of r*pe add up?" (remember, the writers want you do go away with the message "No, it doesn't") above a photo of Amit Soussana, who bravely and heroically told her story of how she was chained in a dark room for weeks and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint, is so depraved that it should take anyone's breath away.

The Haredi heroes of Zaka and United Hatzalah who risked their lives to save others and identify bodies are cast as primitive, uneducated yokels (they are trained medics) incapable of identifying the female anatomy, since they only know their wives...

In the end, it hardly makes a difference. Would a pogrom (calling it a pogrom is just more Jewish propaganda as the article snidely hints) with 1,200 murders and 250 hostages but only "marginal" sexual violence be much better? Does throwing shade on r*pe victims really make Hamas look better?

Murder is just fine for the far-left and Islamists alike. Both groups have spent centuries advancing their causes by piling up the bodies by the tens of millions, what's another 1,200 on the pile?

But rape? How to argue that rape helps the cause? Just murder the kulak oppressor/colonialist occupier devils and take their land, it shouldn't be fun.

It's awkward, so must be denied, "Believe All Women" be damned. And yes, @thetimes, you probably do want to do an "Investigation."

Why is the UN a swamp? A moral abomination where October 7 can't be officially condemned but the death of a genocidal medieval murderer inspires paroxysms of ostentatious mourning? Flags at half mast, minutes of silence?

The UN is a swamp because the world is a swamp: (1/9) At the UN, deranged oppressive dictatorships like Eritrea and North Korea are held up as moral equals to Greece or South Korea.

You can hold millions as slaves in concentration camps making toys, as China does, or invade neighbors in wars of conquest, as Russia does, and still hold a veto. (2/9)

Watch this timelapse of Rafah carefully and you might notice something that almost nobody, even Middle East experts like Gary Lineker, never knew about.

Rafah straddled the border with Egypt. There was an Egyptian Rafah and a Gazan Rafah.

I say "was" because, between 2015 and 2020 Egypt systematically and totally razed its half of Gaza, destroyed over 8,000 buildings, homes, shops, mosques, shut down all its farms, and sealed what had once been a thriving town behind fences.

But Jews—I mean Zionists—weren't doing it, so nobody cared. Nobody protested in European capitals, as Egypt (which has now ironically joined in the ICC claim for Israel's much less damaging, and much more justified, attack on Gazan Rafah) committed this crime against humanity.

Not one celebrity shed one measly tear for Egyptian Rafah. Why? The timeplace is from Ggl Earth and goes from 1984 to 2023

What does the death of Ismail Haniyeh's 3 sons in Gaza City tell us about the state of the war, about Israel's achievements thus far, and what the plan appears to be? (my 1st ever🧵)

While underground infrastructure is found throughout the Strip, it is dense in 2 places: (1/9) Two reasons:

Firstly, these areas, under Gaza City and Khan Yunis/Rafah, are the two large urban aeras, it is easiest and most critical to have such infrastructure.

Second, only in those areas is the water table deep enough to make the basic Hamas tunnels sustainable. (2/9)

The Jews have been much more alone before (in truth, they have never been less alone), but this time, they have tanks, nukes and 600,000 fighters defending them.

This is the sweet fruit of Zionism, which is why bigots hate Israel—they like their Jews, subservient, scared, dead. For certain types of Christians it is critical to isolate and pillory Jews because the very existence of Jews reminds them constantly that Jesus' co-religioinsits, rejected his leadership.