This three-month-old report on Hezbollah’s methodical degradation of the Israeli air defense system may explain why the Netanyahu regime is hell-bent on invading Lebanon and engaging in the sort of ground war that the IDF has been assiduously avoiding for the last decade. Obviously, I can’t verify its accuracy, and it is of a strongly anti-Israel bent, but it does help put the puzzle together.
‘Israel’ has completely lost the north of occupied Palestine. It’s under fire and on fire every day now. Hezbollah has methodically eye-poked ‘Israel’s’ intelligence outposts and is literally blasting them in the nuts every day, on camera. The map above shows the new line of control for occupied Palestine, as reported by the thinking man’s Der Stürmer, Haaretz. ‘Israel’ has lost it.
It’s fascinatingly boring how Hezbollah did this. For months their videos have been methodically mundane, blowing up this communication tower, that building, that listening station. It seemed like a bunch of nothing, but it adds up. Hezbollah had a list of ‘Israel’s’ eyes and ears in the north and has spent months methodically eye poking them, like Odysseus and the Cyclops. Now—however big the IOF might be—they’re effectively blinded.
As Hezbollah opens bigger and bigger gaps in ‘Israel’s’ air defenses, they can send bigger and more missiles in, with better and better penetration. For ‘Israel’, this attrition is a compounding problem. Their air defenses are a connected system and the network is increasingly returning 404… Hezbollah has fire control over the north, while ‘Israel’ is retreating further and further.
Pager bombings and air strikes are insufficient to change the attritional equation here. And Israel doesn’t have the room to retreat much further than it already has, which means that in order to restore its air defense systems to full functionality, it has no choice but to go in on the ground and provide Hezbollah with the invasion that it apparently has been seeking to provoke regardless of what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, or Ukraine.
Which, presumably, is why the USA now has more than 40,000 troops, the 101st Airborne, and several carrier groups in position to reinforce what would appear to be an incipient Israeli invasion of Lebanon. If the report of the systematic degradation of the Iron Dome system and the removal of 60,000 settlers is correct – and I’m confident that the latter, at least, is, on the basis of similar Israeli reports – then I don’t see any way that another war in Lebanon can reasonably be avoided short of a long-term ceasefire that would give the Israelis the time to reconstruct its air defense systems.
UPDATE: The report and the logic that follows from it would appear to be sound.
Israel’s army chief has told his forces to prepare for a ground invasion of Lebanon as the Middle East spirals towards a seemingly inevitable wider war. Herzi Halevi told soldiers during a drill near the Lebanese border in northern Israel: ‘We are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry [into Lebanon], but also to continue striking Hezbollah.’ He added: ‘Hezbollah today expanded its [range] of fire. Later today, it will receive a very strong response. Prepare yourselves.’
UPDATE: An Israeli general says Israel can’t even hope to last as long as Ukraine has in a war of attrition.
The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year.
That would certainly explain why Clown World is apparently going to risk rolling the dice, despite the fact that it’s possible neither Israel nor the USA will survive the consequences. The problem is that the whole strategy for both Ukraine and Israel relies upon somehow getting the US military to fight with and for them, but neither regime fully comprehends that thanks to decades of self-serving foreign rule, the US military is no longer capable of defeating either Russia or Iran, much less both of them at once.