Important Takeaways:
- US officials believe hostage-ceasefire deal unlikely by end of Biden’s term
- Multiple senior US officials have reportedly acknowledged that a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas is unlikely before the end of US President Joe Biden’s term in office in January, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
- The US officials told the outlet that one of the biggest obstacles to a deal has been the ratio of Palestinian security prisoners Israel must release in exchange for each hostage.
- The US has said publicly that Hamas has raised the number of prisoners it originally asked for, even after executing six hostages earlier this month.
- More broadly, WSJ reported that Hamas has made demands and then refuses to agree to a deal after Israel accepted them.
- “There’s no chance now of it happening,” an official from an Arab country told the newspaper. “Everyone is in a wait-and-see mode until after the [US] election. The outcome will determine what can happen in the next administration.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel and Hezbollah trade intensified fire across Lebanon-Israel border as fears grow of a full-blown war.
- The Israeli military said it has carried out a “targeted strike” in the Lebanese capital, claiming to have hit near key Hezbollah facilities in Dahiyeh.
- “The [Israeli military] conducted a targeted strike in Beirut. At this moment, there are no changes in the Home Front Command defensive guidelines,” it said, providing no further details.
- Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said Dahiyeh is considered a Hezbollah stronghold.
- “This is a major escalation. We are getting reports this could be a targeted assassination,” she said.
- Earlier on Friday, Hezbollah pounded northern Israel with 140 rockets, a day after the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah promised to retaliate against Israel for a mass bombing attack, the Israeli military and the Iran-backed group said.
- Israel’s military said the rockets came in three waves on Friday afternoon, targeting sites along the ravaged border with Lebanon.
- Khan described the overnight attacks by Israel in Lebanon as the “largest” since hostilities began in October, following the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel that triggered its war on the Gaza Strip.
- “We’re not in a tit-for-tat, we’re in an open war.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Hezbollah’s operations commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was the subject of a $7 million State Department reward for information leading to his arrest.
- The Israeli military said it had killed Aqil and as many as 10 other senior commanders of the movement’s Radwan special forces unit.
- “This elimination is intended to protect the citizens of Israel,” an Israeli military spokesman said in a brief statement.
- The State Department has identified Aqil, also known as Tahsin, as a member of Hezbollah’s “highest military body,” the Jihad Council.
- In the 1980s, as different factions vied for control of Lebanon and a U.S. Marine detachment was deployed as a would-be peacekeeping force, Aqil was a top figure in Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization. The organization took credit for the April 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, and the Marine Corps barracks in October of that year, which killed 241 Americans.
- Aqil also oversaw the abductions of American and German hostages in Lebanon, the State Department said last year. The department named Aqil a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” in 2019.
- Israel’s Defense Forces said they struck more than 100 Hezbollah missile launchers as well as a munitions depot Thursday and Friday as well as targets in Beirut.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Israeli strikes targeted infrastructure sites in southern Lebanon, including the areas of Chihine, Tayibe, Blida, Meiss El Jabal, Aitaroun and Kfarkela, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday. Israel also struck a Hezbollah weapons storage facility in Khiam.
- “The IDF will continue to operate against the threat of the Hezbollah terrorist organization in order to defend the State of Israel,” the IDF said in a statement.
- “Yes, we were subjected to a huge and severe blow,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said. “The enemy crossed all boundaries and red lines. The enemy will face a severe and fair punishment from where they expect and don’t expect.”
- “The Hezbollah terrorist organization has turned southern Lebanon into a combat zone. For decades, Hezbollah has weaponized civilian homes, dug tunnels beneath them, and used civilians as human shields,” Israel’s military said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israeli police said Thursday that agents thwarted a recent Iranian assassination attempt, arresting an individual suspected of receiving money from Iran to coordinate an attack on top officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
- The citizen had met with Iranian officials over the spring in Iran and was asked to take photographs of sensitive locations and to transfer money and guns into Israel, according to Israeli police.
- The person was asked in another visit in August to promote an assassination of Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the head of Shin Bet, Ronan Bar.
- Iranian officials also asked the person to look into a potential assassination attempt on former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, officials said.
- Israeli police said the foiled Iranian plot was in response to the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, which Iran has blamed on Israel.
- The citizen requested $1 million to carry out the plots but was refused, police said. He was given more than $5,000 for his work.
- Hezbollah blamed Israel for a deadly wave of explosions in Lebanon this week in which pager messaging devices and handheld radios detonated, killing more than two dozen people and wounding thousands.
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Important Takeaways:
- Just one day after pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded, more electronic devices detonated in Lebanon Wednesday in what appeared to be a second wave of sophisticated, deadly attacks that targeted an extraordinary number of people.
- Both attacks, which are widely believed to be carried out by Israel, have hiked fears that the two sides’ simmering conflict could escalate into all-out war.
- Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Thursday the mass bombing attack on the group’s communications devices was a “severe blow” and said Israel had crossed a “red line.”
- Tuesday’s explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference, several experts told the AP — noting that very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.
- The specifics of Wednesday’s explosions are still uncertain. But reports of more electronic devices exploding may suggest even greater infiltration of boobytrap-like interference in Lebanon’s supply chain.
- An attack of this caliber requires building the relationships needed to gain physical access to the pagers before they were sold; developing the technology that would be embedded in the devices; and developing sources who can confirm that the targets were carrying the pagers.
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Important Takeaways:
- How do we know that the coming days, weeks, and month or two before winter are potentially explosive?
- It is not just Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who told US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Monday, that the possibility for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah in the North is running out.
- It is not just the rumors that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to replace Gallant with Gideon Sa’ar as defense minister in order to have greater support for a major operation against Hezbollah.
- Throughout, the main reason not to enter into war with Hezbollah was to avoid distractions that might handicap the IDF from its goal of taking apart all 24 of Hamas’s battalions in Gaza.
- Gallant declared Hamas’s last battalion in Rafah defeated on August 21, nearly a month ago.
- Despite Netanyahu’s publicly threatening words and tone, another major reason that war has not broken out is that the prime minister was privately terrified of how many Israelis might die from an estimated Hezbollah onslaught of 6,000-8,000 rockets per day.
- August 25 is when all of that changed – radically.
- On that day, Hezbollah planned to launch several hundred, possibly up to 1,000 rockets on Israel, including on critical intelligence headquarters bases north of Tel Aviv.
- Yet, on August 25, the IDF did not just beat Hezbollah – it cleaned house.
- The military blew up the vast majority of the rockets and drones with which Hezbollah had intended to attack Israel before these threats could even be launched.
- Suddenly, Netanyahu has a newfound confidence: that he actually can afford a major operation against Hezbollah – with much fewer losses to the home front than he had expected.
- So, what if – instead of 5,000-10,000 dead Israelis from tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets over several weeks – he could hit Hezbollah harder than it’s ever been hit before and destroy so many of its rocket launchers on the ground that Israeli casualties might not be just smaller but exponentially smaller?
- Finally, the winter factor comes into play.
- Sources have told the Post that if more than 4-6 weeks pass without an operation, it may be impossible – or much harder – to carry out such an operation until Spring 2025.
- This would mean condemning the northern residents to another 6 months outside of their homes, something becoming increasingly untenable domestically in Israel.
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Important Takeaways:
- Making deals with Islamic terrorists doesn’t work
- “In its boldest move, Hezbollah sent four drones toward the Karish platform several weeks ago, all of which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces,” reported The Times of Israel on July 31, 2022.
- This was exactly what surrendering part of the gas field to Hezbollah was supposed to prevent.
- “The proposal for this point involves recognizing it as part of Lebanon, with UN forces deployed there as a neutral party for both sides.” — The Jerusalem Post, September 8, 2024.
- United Nations forces are absolutely useless and pull back whenever there’s any conflict. (Nor is the UN remotely neutral.)
- Hezbollah will claim any territory it gets and attack anyway because that is what Islamic terrorists do. Hezbollah is backed by Iran. It’s going to attack when Tehran tells it to. As an Islamic terror group, attacking non-Muslims and dominating them is a fundamental religious obligation. So making deals with it won’t work.
- Just like making deals with Hamas doesn’t work.
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Important Takeaways:
- Yemen’s Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack that reached central Israel for the first time on Sunday, saying the group employed a “new hypersonic ballistic missile” in a “specific military operation” targeting the Tel Aviv area, in a statement from the group’s military spokesperson.
- The Iranian proxy falsely added that Israel had failed to intercept the missile. While the IDF’s Arrow system failed to bring the missile down before entering Israeli airspace, it did ultimately intercept it.
- “It crossed a distance of 2,040 km in 11 and a half minutes and caused a state of fear and panic among the Zionists, as more than two million Zionists headed to shelters for the first time in the history of the Israeli enemy,” the military spokesperson added.
- The spokesperson continued saying that the attack came as the result of the group’s efforts in developing missile technologies capable of bypassing naval, ground, and aerial interception systems.
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Important Takeaways:
- There were three other ways besides the recent smuggling of weapons through the corridor that were likely responsible for the vast majority of Hamas’s massive weapons buildup, the sources said.
- Although these points were made in a technical and professional context, they could also have significant implications for the ongoing debate within Israel over how crucial it is for the IDF to hold onto the Philadelphi Corridor or whether it can be temporarily given up as part of a deal for the return of dozens of Israeli hostages.
- According to people familiar with the matter, it could take Hamas years to rebuild its cross-border tunnel network, meaning certainly not during the 40-plus days Israel would theoretically leave the area during Phase I of one of the proposed hostage deals.
- Regarding the use of the tunnels for long-range rockets, IDF sources said Rafah, in general, and the corridor, in particular, had turned out to have one of Hamas’s largest long-range rocket arsenals that the military found, compared with any other part of Gaza.
- Hamas’s strategy was to place the long-range rockets and their launchers next to the border with Egypt to deter Israel from striking them and risking an international incident with Cairo, either by accidentally hitting Egyptian soldiers or merely causing explosions so close to another sovereign nation’s territory, the sources said.
- Furthermore, Hamas rocket teams would hide in the large tunnels, which had launchers and inventories of rockets connected to them via their extensive space and storage capabilities, they said.
- The Hamas rocket teams would briefly pop out of the tunnels at selected moments, only meters from the Egyptian border fence, and then either fire the rockets or set timers for them to launch, IDF sources said.
- After a brief time of being exposed and in an area in which Israel would be very worried about attacking, even if it had much time to calculate a precision strike carefully, the rocket teams would rapidly disappear back into the cross-border tunnels, they said.
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