Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.
The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.
Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.
I don’t know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Rybar on today’s events on the Lebanon-Israel border, extremely pessimistic
spoiler
🇮🇱🇱🇧 Situation on the Lebanon-Israel border: IDF announces air operation in Lebanon Situation as of the end of September 24, 2024
The Israeli Air Force continues to carry out massive strikes (https://t.me/rybar/63773) on the territory of the neighboring Republic of Lebanon. Against this backdrop, the Israel Defense Forces have announced the start of Operation “Hetzei ha-Tzafon” (“Arrows of the North”).
📌 Due to the peculiarities of translation from Hebrew to English and then to Russian, as well as in attempts to catch the “wave”, some resources reported about the start of the advance of Israeli units in southern Lebanon. In reality, the actions of the Israelis are so far limited to air strikes.
▪️ Today’s hits by the Israeli Air Force affected not only the border areas of Lebanon: populated areas located more than 100 kilometers from the border with Israel, including Ain Al, were also attacked.
▪️ In addition, the Ad-Dahiya district - the stronghold of Hezbollah in Beirut - was struck again. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stated that the commander of the missile unit of the Shiite group, Ibrahim Muhammad al-Kubaysi, was eliminated. At the same time, the Arabic-language media have not yet commented on this message.
According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, the victims of the IDF’s actions since yesterday have been 558 killed and 1,853 wounded. There is also a mass exodus of Lebanese from the southern part of the country: they are fleeing to the cities of Tripoli and Beirut, as well as to the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic.
▪️ Hezbollah fighters also continue to retaliate by shelling Israeli territory: more than 100 rockets were fired in the morning. Most of them were either intercepted by Israeli air defense systems or fell in open areas. Only a small number of projectiles managed to fall within the boundaries of populated areas, causing minor damage.
Based on the reported hits, the forces of the Lebanese group have also expanded the shelling zone to more than 100 kilometers. This is also confirmed by the yesterday’s impacts of the rockets launched by Hezbollah on the territory of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
🔻 Despite the rather tense situation, the parties are so far limited to massive strikes on each other’s positions. At the same time, the current ultra-Orthodox authorities of Israel do not stop their attempts to provoke the Lebanese into a more serious response.
Until then, Hezbollah is trying not to give the ultra-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu a reason to unleash a full-fledged Third Lebanese War. Despite the accusations of Israeli propaganda, it is by no means the Shiite group that will be the beneficiary of such an escalation.
I’m not quite sure if Rybar understands what military censorship is.
“As we can clearly see, our enemies have incredibly bad aim and aren’t hitting the parts of our planes (Israeli military structure) that cause them to be destroyed. Every plane (video/photograph) that we’ve ever seen return to us is like this, proving that their attacks are ineffective. Very discouraging for them.”
It’s incredibly negative, surprised me actually. I wonder if Rybar’s general internal calculus is that if they only ever say negative things then if things turn out positive they don’t matter but if they turn out negative - they were right.
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That is a pretty good strategy. People will forgive pessimism when things go well but they never forgive optimism when things go poorly.
It’s also pretty spineless. Nobody likes a bets hedging negative Nancy.
Yeah it’s a good strategy if you’re a social media blog that relies on not upsetting the audience or they might go elsewhere and make you lose your income. I can see it evolving naturally after having one or two controversies that make someone operating this kind of thing think carefully about avoiding those dramas in future.
I don’t read Rybar regularly (pretty much just when people repost it here), but I recall the same thing after the ground invasion of Gaza. Extremely pessimistic maps demonstrating the IOF bisecting and choking off sections of the strip. But these maps truly failed to capture the situation. Resistance fighters would regularly pop up out of the ground, or out of the rubble in areas the IOF “controlled” and pull off ambushes. Neighborhoods the IOF had “cleared” would be full of militants weeks later.
The situation in Gaza in particular was very three-dimensional, and I think Rybar’s perspective suffers from the same problems as Seymour Hersh covering this conflict, where they have good intelligence, sources, and a fundamental understanding of one situation, but due to a variety of factors, those sources and analytical tools don’t measure up when applied elsewhere.
I expect anybody just taking news reports and painting a map to spell doom. As far as I know, this is the contingency plan for an invasion, after all. To draw the IOF into southern Lebanon and engage them on their own territory, where they are prepared and dug in. If you paint a map of that, it’s going to look like a crushing defeat. It is going to look like the IOF is gaining a lot of territory. It is going to look like they are actually approaching their objective of establishing a “buffer region” inside of Lebanon. The question is, what will it cost them? Will the IOF be able to effectively clear it? Or will they end up in the same situation as Gaza? Another Pyrrhic victory where they blow the place to hell, kill an untold number of civilians in their tantrum, but do not come one step closer to controlling it.
Yes I agree. They’re good at mapping and discussing a 2 dimensional war with conventional fronts.
This guerilla war that’s more comparable to an urban vietnam is not something they seem to understand.
It seems like all the Russian-Ukrainian war analysts are terrible at understanding what’s going on in occupied Palestine to the point where I begin to question whether their Russian-Ukrainian war analysis is actually that good.
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I’d frame it as more realistic than incredibly pessimistic. Hezbollah are outgunned in a direct confrontation with Israel, there is no denying that. That doesn’t mean that Hezbollah cannot win of course, it just means that the reality is that warfare against Israel will be asymmetric and have a high casualty rate as Hezbollah do not have the capability to go toe to toe with the Israeli Air Force.
So far Hezbollah have fired unguided Fadi rockets of the 1, 2 and 3 series against Israel. These rockets are not comparable to the advanced guided missiles Iran and Yemen possess. They are unguided, cannot change course mid-flight, and rely on a large number being fired to land impactful hits, as many will be intercepted to miss the target. This is why Rybar calls it a “shelling zone”, comparable to long range rocket artillery. Hezbollah of course knows this of course, it’s why they fire hundreds of rockets at a time.
The attacks by Hezbollah so far have been carried out well from a tactical perspective as expected, for months Hezbollah have been targeting Israeli signals intelligence and Iron Dome launchers. This is what has allowed their recent attacks on military bases and infrastructure to get through. Also, Hezbollah is firing hundreds of rockets at a time, not thousands, which is a sign that they a settling in for a long fight and not panicing after Israeli strikes. Israel would want them to panic so that they can “justify” further aggression. Hezbollah are easily the most well equipped force to fight Israel in the region, as shown by 2006 and the defeat they inflicted on Israel. But direct confrontation will be extremely bloody, especially for Lebanese civilians.
Says who? Hezbollah is way bigger and better equipped than they were in 2006 when they beat isisrael. isisrael has only stagnated since then till 2023 and now have been engaged in a quagmire in Gaza for almost a year. Like yeah isisrael has more planes but Hezbollah have more missiles same as it was in 2006 but the “more missiles” has grown substantially while the “more planes” hasn’t really changed much. isisrael has more tanks but its become quite clear from the fighting in Gaza that their tanks aren’t very effective.