Over 20 rockets were fired from Lebanon toward Kiryat Shmona, Matat, Shlomit, and other areas along the Lebanese-Israeli border on Wednesday, according to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Hezbollah took responsibility for the rocket fire toward Kiryat Shmona. The IDF responded to the rocket fire with artillery fire targeting several sites in southern Lebanon, including a Hezbollah observation point. Hezbollah additionally stated that it targeted an IDF post along the border near Mount Dov, another post near Yir’on, another post near Meiss al-Jabal, another post near Rmaych, and an additional post near Boustane on Wednesday afternoon and evening. The IDF has not confirmed the reports as of yet. Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib met with Iran’s ambassador in Lebanon Mojtaba Amani on Wednesday, telling him that “Israel is not defending itself today, but rather its obsession is blind revenge.” On Wednesday, UNIFIL commander Aroldo Lázaro briefed representatives of countries that provided troops for the peacekeeping mission about the situation in southern Lebanon. On Tuesday, Lázaro met with Lebanese Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri and caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, expressing his “deep concern” about the situation in southern Lebanon. NN: As you know my opinion is its only a matter of time until the battle with Lebanon and Syria rages. Every day the number of attacks on Israel increases.
Hamas ‘plan on attacking Israel again’: Joe Biden…. Biden sets no time limits for Israel-Hamas conflict
US President Joe Biden says Hamas “plan on attacking Israel again” and it is “not realistic” they will stop after Israel entered the largest hospital in Gaza which housed Hamas command centres. Israeli troops launched an operation on Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital on Wednesday, which Israel said sits on a large network of tunnels, where they have found weapons and other terrorist infrastructure.
“Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, cutting off babies heads and burning women and children alive,” Mr Biden told a press conference in San Francisco on Wednesday (local time). “
The idea that they’re going to just stop and not do anything is unrealistic. “This is not a carpet bombing, it’s a different thing – they are going … into the hospital through tunnels.”
Biden sets no time limits for Israel-Hamas conflict
United States President Joe Biden said he “does not know” how long the conflict between Israel and Hamas is going to last. “I think it’s going to stop when Hamas no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse and do horrific things to the Israelis,” he told reporters. Biden said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “acknowledge they have an obligation to use as much caution as they can in going after their targets” while occupying hospitals in Gaza. He claimed that “one thing that has been established is that Hamas does have headquarters, weapons, material below [the Al-Shifa] hospital and I suspect others.” He added that he is “mildly hopeful” about the prospect of liberating hostages held by Hamas. NN: You need to take a deep breath here and realize the simmering cauldron the global conflict a clash of civilizations is about to boil over.
Netanyahu says Israel will have security control over Gaza after war
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will have “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip “for an indefinite period”.
Mr Netanyahu’s first comments on Israel’s plan for Gaza after the war came in an interview with the ABC News network in the US. However, he did not elaborate on the kind of security mechanism such a plan would involve. Israel says it aims to destroy Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007. Hundreds of Hamas gunmen burst through the border and attacked Israeli communities and a music festival on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people, Israeli authorities say, in the bloodiest such event in Israel’s history. Hamas – proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel and many Western governments, including the UK – also took 242 people hostage, the Israeli military says. Israel declared war on Hamas the same day and has been attacking Gaza from land, sea and air since then. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more more than 10,000 people have been killed since Israel began its operation. When asked who should govern Gaza – home to 2.2 million Palestinians – after the war, Mr Netanyahu said only “those who don’t want to continue the way of Hamas”. But he also declared that Israel must have security control. “I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, have the overall security responsibility, because we have seen what happens when we don’t have it. “When we don’t have that security responsibility, we have the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine.”
Israeli jets hit Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon
The Israel Defense Forces revealed that its fighter aircraft hit several “terror targets” in Lebanon, including “infrastructure and military posts belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.” The Israeli armed forces also noted that a Lebanon-based Hezbollah group used rockets to target northern Israel. “In response, an IDF aircraft struck the terrorist cell and launch pad in Lebanon,” the Israeli military added. In his most recent public speech, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah vowed that “this front will remain active.” NN: You poke the Lion of Judea enough times and you will get bit. And misguided village people, WHO commies and UN advocates of Plasticineian disinformation social media be dammed.
Hamas antitank strikes show depth of ‘powerful’ arsenal facing Israel
https://youtu.be/CqncA56EzF8
JERUSALEM —The Washington Post. Story by William Booth, Judith Sudilovsky, Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton.
Early in Israel’s invasion of Gaza, an antitank missile fired by Palestinian militants struck an armored personnel carrier, killing — by incineration, concussion, shrapnel — at least nine Israeli soldiers. Other armored assets in the convoy were also hit. That Oct. 31 attack, on Gaza’s sandy northern periphery, represented the single largest cluster of Israeli casualties in the ground war. It also showed the evolution and expansion of Hamas’s firepower. Where years ago Israeli forces faced stones and molotov cocktails thrown by Palestinians, they now confront weapons such as laser-guided missiles and antitank munitions in Gaza. Hamas has been “arming itself to the teeth,” one military analyst said. The Israel Defense Forces is now inside Gaza City, fighting Hamas above and below ground — among civilians, around hospitals, schools and mosques — in areas the IDF says are honeycombed with tunnels. This is still asymmetrical warfare. Israel fields one of the best-armed, most technologically sophisticated forces in the world. Hamas brigades today may have advanced weapons, but they are clearly outmatched. But in the close-quarter fighting in Gaza, Hamas operatives have displayed some of their upgraded arsenal: a large number of shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenade launchers and antitank missiles, military experts say. Many of the weapons have been smuggled into the Gaza Strip via tunnels, land crossings and the sea during the past decade, from the spillover of wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan, and also manufactured by Iran and even North Korea. Variations of these weapons also have been assembled with increasing sophistication inside Gaza in underground factories. Analysts say Israel has been closely tracking the types of weapons held by Hamas: modern sniper rifles, paragliders, RPGs, “magnet bombs,” one-way attack drones, mini-subs, land mines, antitank missiles and the long-range rockets, which now can strike as far north as Haifa near the Lebanon border and as far south as Eilat on the Red Sea, though still without much accuracy. Hamas and its fighters — an estimated force of 30,000 or more — are so fully armed and well-trained that its brigades, designated as terrorist organizations by the United States, resemble “state armies,” said Michael Milshtein, former head of the Palestinian department in the IDF and a senior analyst at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. Watching the first two weeks of the ground invasion unfold, Milshtein said, “There is actually nothing new or surprising in the weapons themselves. The main surprise is the quantity.”
Milshtein said Israel faces “a much more powerful Hamas.”
Though recent days have seen some limited “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting — alongside demands for an all-out cease-fire from regional powers — Israel shows no sign that it is stopping its offensive, as its tanks surrounded hospitals in northern Gaza this weekend and the medical facilities sheltering displaced people say they have come under fire.
(The IDF says Hamas “cynically” deploys clinics and patients as “human shields.”)
Israel security officials say tanks and troops have encircled several hospitals and they are demanding that staff and patients evacuate. Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and the founder of Inside the Middle East, a nonprofit organization focused on education, said Israel will face “very challenging” conditions with Hamas and its armed allies in Gaza. “It is a massively armed enemy,” he said, “not a gang of little kids running around with pistols.” The deployment of large numbers of antitank units by Hamas is especially worrisome for Israeli forces — so much so that the IDF appears to be focusing its intelligence on finding targets for air and ground forces to wipe them out. Every few days, the IDF media office releases information about its troops targeting and killing Hamas antitank commanders. Hamas does not always confirm the deaths of its operatives, making the Israeli claims often impossible to independently verify. Yet it is already clear that this war in Gaza — compared with fighting in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 — is the most deadly. Israeli bombing and ground assaults have killed more than 11,000 people, many of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On Oct. 7, the Hamas assault on farming communities, military bases and a rave concert along the Gaza border, at least 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 others taken hostage.
Since the beginning of the ground invasion, 41 IDF soldiers have been killed in Gaza, Israel’s military said. The IDF says it would have lost more if it had not spent the last decade improving its armor defenses.
In a May 2021 war, primarily between Hamas and Israel, Hamas antitank missile teams were able to launch strikes that killed military personnel and civilians — proving more effective than drone attacks, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank in Washington. “Hamas drones and rockets were intercepted,” he said. “Their unmanned midget subs were stopped. Cross-border tunnel operatives were detected.” But “their antitank forces punched through and landed blows,” he said. The antitank systems deployed by Hamas include the Bulsae-2, a North Korean copy of the Soviet-era Fagot; the RPG-7, also originally Russian; as well as a North Korean version called the F-7, military analysts said. Other systems seen in Hamas videos in the past include the Russian-style Kornet and Konkurs, as well as the Iranian Raad, which is a version of the Soviet Malyutka.
“Together this cocktail of foreign weapons can complicate even the most high-tech of armies in an urban combat scenario,” Taleblu said.
He added: “Expect more, not less, of an emphasis on antitank weapons and antitank warfare by Hamas as the IDF moves further into Gaza.” During the past decade, many of the antitank weapons were smuggled into Gaza, through the tunnels from Egypt’s Sinai Desert into the Gaza Strip and via trucks traveling across the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the analysts said. Yehoshua Kalisky, an arms expert and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said the weapons can be disassembled and the individual parts hidden in food and aid shipments. Among the antitank weapons possessed by Hamas, some are produced inside the Strip, such as the Tandem 85 warhead, said Amael Kotlarski, a senior analyst and weapons expert at the defense intelligence firm Janes. These kinds of projectiles use two charges to punch through modern armored vehicles. They are Iran’s signature weapons provided to allied militants, such as Hamas, and were used to devastating effect against U.S. troops in Iraq. The propaganda arm of Hamas has released numerous edited images of militants firing rockets and missiles at Israeli vehicles. While the videos may show fiery explosions, it is sometimes unclear whether the hits have destroyed or damaged vehicles. Israel has developed a defense to these weapons called the Trophy active protection system, said Ryan Brobst of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It works by using radar to track incoming munitions and then intercepts them with its own defense projectiles. It’s been largely successful. But — as with missile barrages against Israel’s Iron Dome air defense — the Trophy system can be defeated by overwhelming it with large numbers of projectiles or projectiles fired at close range, Brobst said. Notably, Brobst said, the U.S. Army received Trophy systems for its Abrams tanks in 2019 and deployed them to Europe. Kalisky, the Israeli analyst, said that in the 1967 Israel-Arab war, Israel in Sinai needed three divisions to defeat the Egyptian army in six days. Now the IDF has been using the same force for almost a month with very different results in Gaza. “This is a different war. It is a very difficult war,” he said. “They are equipped.”
Nakashima and Horton reported from Washington. Hazem Balousha in Cairo contributed to this report.
Israel intercepts Houthi missile fired from Yemen
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that its air defense system, the Arrow 3, intercepted a missile targeting the country’s southern city of Eilat. According to the military, the missile was launched from Yemen and was intercepted over the Red Sea. “The target did not cross into Israeli territory,” IDF said on its official website. Previously, the Houthis claimed they fired a “batch of ballistic missiles” aiming at “various and sensitive targets” in the south of Israel. NN: The missiles being fired are the the longer range Toufan (Typhoon) ballistic missile reported to be in Houthi hands from Iran capable of striking at distances of 840-1,180 miles (1,350-1,900 km,) derided from Iran’s Ghadr missiles capable of achieving near earth orbit in outer space. The Toufan’s longer range suggests it may indeed be the kind of ballistic missile attacks that will eventually bring a further escalation of middle east hostilities.
U.S. Forces Under Fire in Middle East as America Slides Towards Brink
https://youtu.be/dX23SJR6pLU
WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A defective drone in Iraq may have helped keep America from being dragged deeper into a widening Middle East conflict. The drone, which was launched at the Erbil air base by an Iranian-backed militia before sunrise on Oct. 26, penetrated U.S. air defenses and crashed into the second floor of the barracks housing American troops at about 5 a.m, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. But the device laden with explosives failed to detonate and in the end only one service member suffered a concussion from the impact, said the officials, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the attack. The U.S. had got lucky, they added, as the drone could have caused carnage had it exploded. The incident was among at least 40 separate drone and rocket attacks that have been launched at U.S. forces by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria over the past three weeks in response to American support for Israel in the Gaza war, according to Pentagon data and the two U.S. officials. The bombardment has only caused a few dozen minor injuries so far, with many of the rockets and one-way attack drones intercepted by U.S. air defenses in Iraq and Syria, where a total of 3,400 American troops are based. David Schenker, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think-tank, cautioned that while neither Iran and its allied groups nor the U.S. appeared to want a direct confrontation, the risks were growing. The possibility of a major strike that draws America into a conflict is “a very realistic concern,” he said.”I think they are calibrating the attacks to harass rather than kill en masse U.S. troops,” he said of Iraqi and Syrian militias. “But there’s a lot more they can do.” It’s unclear how President Joe Biden would respond to a major attack that kills a large number of Americans. Struggling in opinion polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, Biden has so far sought to limit the U.S. role in the conflict mostly to ensuring military aid to Israel. The war broke out when gunmen from Hamas – the Iranian-funded militant group that rules the Palestinian enclave of Gaza – burst into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages. Since then, Israel has bombarded the coastal territory relentlessly, killing more than 10,000 people, many of them children. Iran says it had no role in Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid on Israel, though it has welcomed the attack. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Iraq – where most of the attacks on U.S. forces have taken place – to push Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani to crack down on the militias operating there and avert any escalation.
Yet Sudani has had little luck in persuading the militia groups from letting up their assault, or convincing their bankrollers in Iran to rein them in, according to five senior lawmakers in Sudani’s governing coalition, a security adviser to the premier and a militia commander.
The prime minister and around 10 senior members of his government met with the commanders of about a dozen militia groups in Baghdad on Oct. 23 to press the groups to halt their attacks on U.S. forces, said the seven people, who were either present or were briefed on the meeting.
The plea largely fell on deaf ears, though, with most of the commanders vowing to keep up their assault until Israeli forces ended their siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, they added.
“No one – not the prime minister or anyone else – can stand against our religious duty,” said Ali Turki, a Shi’ite lawmaker in the governing coalition as well as a commander with the powerful Iranian-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia.
Arif al-Hamami, another Shi’ite lawmaker, said the prospects for diplomacy looked bleak: “I don’t think that the prime minister has the power to stop the attacks as long as Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza with American help.”The Iraqi and Iranian governments didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the militia attacks and the risk of escalation. Iraq’s prime minister has limited control over the militias, whose support he needed to win power a year ago and now form a powerful bloc in his governing coalition. The militant groups, which proliferated in Iraq in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein and his Sunni government, are trained and funded by Shi’ite power Iran.
Biden faces his own dilemmas as he receives a steady stream of reports about hostilities in the region. Among attacks outside Iraq and Syria in recent weeks, Iranian-aligned Houthi fighters unleashed 15 drones and four cruise missiles off the coast of Yemen that were shot down by U.S. Navy destroyer with a crew of hundreds of sailors, U.S. military officials say. The present crisis has erupted following years of steady U.S. withdrawal of military assets from the Middle East, including air defenses, as Washington seeks to focus on Russia’s invasion in Ukraine and mounting tensions with China. That refocus accelerated after Biden’s complete pullout from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover there two years ago. The response by Biden has been cautious so far; he ordered overnight strikes on two Iranian-linked arms storage facilities in Syria last month while they were unoccupied, but has not ordered any strikes in Iraq. On Wednesday, Biden followed up with a similar strike in Syria and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cautioned: “We urge against any escalation.” Biden has warned Iranian-backed groups across the region, including the large Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, against expanding the conflict but he and other officials have declined to be explicit about what they would do in response. NN: They are going push this as far as they can. By design they will push things too far and create a humanitarian crises.
Israel strikes Syria in response to drone launch towards Eilat……. Fears of wider regional conflict as tensions grow on Lebanon border
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that it attacked an organization located in Syria, which it holds responsible for launching an unmanned aerial vehicle that struck a school in the southern Israeli city of Eilat. “The IDF holds the Syrian regime fully responsible for every terror activity emanating from its territory. The IDF will respond severely to every aggression against Israeli territory,” the military said on its Telegram account. Previously, the Houthis claimed they fired a “batch of ballistic missiles” targeting the south of Israel.
Fears of wider regional conflict as tensions grow on Lebanon border
It is happening on a daily basis. Hezbollah fighters moving through the hilly shrub lands of southern Lebanon set up and take aim before attacking Israeli positions.
The Israel Defence Forces is responding by striking back at the Iranian-backed militant group, which is designated a terrorist organisation by much of the world. At the moment the violence is relatively constrained but these are worrying times. In the middle UN peacekeepers are still out on patrol monitoring the situation. There are armoured vehicles snaking along the roads but they are very concerned about where the violence is heading. “It is a very concerning moment,” Andrea Tenenti, spokesman for the mission told Sky News.
“… It is a very concerning moment, a very tense moment. But we are still on the ground. Our troops have not left.
“We have over 10,500 troops from 49 different countries… But we need to be very careful because this exchange of fire is going on, on a daily basis, all along the blue line.” Arab countries are warning the longer the bombing of Gaza goes on the greater the chance of a wider regional conflict. The Saudi Arabian foreign minister has claimed what’s happening in southern Israel is a “flagrant and unjustified violation of international law committed against the Palestinian people”. The Israeli military says it does not want to see any escalation on its northern border but its troops are ready if the attacks continue. Already tens of thousands have been displaced from their communities. And in Lebanon it’s the same. People are moving to safety. Families from villages in the south are fearful another war is coming and that it will be even more destructive than what happened in 2006. At a camp for those who have sought refuge from the fighting, Iman Iskandar said there is a lot of anxiety among the displaced. “… We left our homes because of security issues at the borders of the country, because of the bombing and the war that is going on. We are conditioned to this pattern, but we pray that it never expands.”
There Are Many VERY Confused People IN This World
On the morning of the 7th of October, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas orchestrated a multi-pronged assault against Israel from the Gaza Strip. Their fighters breached the heavily fortified border, committing a mass murder of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, including young children. The political discourse surrounding these brutal events and the war that has come in its wake, especially in the West, has been tinged with a misguided transposition of Western identity politics onto the Middle East that collapses all nuance and reduces a complex situation into a simple binary of “oppressor versus oppressed.” As such, leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestine (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This simplistic view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine” brandished at anti-Israel rallies. It’s worth exploring just how incoherent this concept is.
On the surface, “Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlpool of ridicule and criticism due to the fact that LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world, and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized with variations like “Chickens for KFC” or “Blacks for the KKK”, which highlight the basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with the Islamic right they so readily champion. Israel is at the forefront of LGBT rights in the Middle East. In Israel, LGBT people are visible members of society with legal protections, civil rights, and a plurality of public acceptance.
Palestine, by contrast, is quite a different story. The UCLA Williams Institute’s 2021 global report on LGBT acceptance rated Palestine came in at 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in good company with most of the region. Amnesty International’s 2020 report on human rights highlights the criminalization of male same-sex relationships in Gaza, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, with a conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination or harassment.
Another disconcerting element of “Queers for Palestine” is that it popped up in prominent left-wing anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rallies in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attacks. Western support for Hamas, under the guise of Palestinian liberation, overlooks the deep-seated radical Islamist ethos driving the organization, which, if unbridled, would jeopardize the very freedoms cherished by LGBT people across the developed world. Anyone who doubts this should try being gay, bi, or trans in most of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) Muslim-majority countries. Virtually all of these nations have laws that criminalize homosexuality and being trans, some of which carry the death penalty. Human Rights Watch’s “Everyone Wants Me Dead” report succinctly encapsulates in its title alone the perilous environment faced by LGBT individuals in these regions.
US launches airstrike many attacks by Iranian militias
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. carried out an airstrike on a weapons warehouse in eastern Syria used by Iranian-backed militias, in retaliation for what has been a growing number of attacks on bases housing U.S. troops in the region for the past several weeks, the Pentagon said.In Wednesday’s strike, two U.S. F-15 fighter jets dropped multiple bombs on a weapons storage facility near Maysulun in Deir el-Zour that was known to be used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, U.S. officials said. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel, and he directed today’s action to make clear that the United States will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement. A military official told reporters in a call that people were seen at the warehouse during the day as the U.S. military watched the site for hours, but the number decreased to about “a couple” overnight when the strike occurred. The official said the strike triggered secondary explosions, indicating the presences of weapons, but the U.S. believes that no civilians were killed and any people at the warehouse were tied to the Revolutionary Guard or militia groups. The strike, said a senior defense official also on the call, was aimed at “disrupting and degrading the capabilities of groups directly responsible for attacking U.S. forces in the region” by specifically targeting facilities associated with the Revolutionary Guard. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide an assessment of the strike. The precision strike, said the defense official, was deliberate and designed not to escalate the conflict in the region. The military official said a deconfliction phone line linking U.S. military personnel to Russian forces in Syria was used to let them know about the attack. This is the second time in less than two weeks that the U.S. has bombed facilities used by the militant groups, many operating under the umbrella of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which U.S. officials say have carried out at least 40 such attacks since Oct. 17. BlackMask Pod Cast:
Blood Bath Not Our blood