Which againâŚâŚ begs the question how a plan by Hamas on October 7th isnât intercepted.
Iâd be of the opinion that certain hardliners felt the peace for all festival attendees were very much dispensable and a great excuse to clear Gaza out.
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Is a fair percentage of Lebanon Christian
Dunno.
Iâd say a very small percentage are an actual threat to Israeli security but alas they must all suffer.
A third according to the Google machine.
Hezbollah or Hizbollah?
You say Gaddafi, I say Gadafy
I presume theyâll be changing the name of Lebanon to Lebensraum.
The Israelis are bombing Christian villages with no hezbollah presence .
As long as they leave hasbulla alone itllbe okay. I love that little guy
Small ground invasion under way
Lined out wing back for Tipp once upon a time
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1840533128005423613?t=-B4-y_BIFuBKZWWRAg_ykw&s=19
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The Israelis are tracking absolutely everyone. They have some serious tech we donât know about Iâd say
This fella sounds like he was a bad bad bastard. This is some list ⌠remind me again which ones Israel dont do?
is responsible for the massacre of civilians, individual extrajudicial killings, the gassing of Syrians, money laundering, mass displacement, torture and abuse in detention centers,
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They should have deleted Waze from their phones
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They should never have accepted the cookies on that website
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Yet they couldnât muster up a pair of binoculars to see 100 Hamas lads on hang gliders for five hours at the most protected border in the world
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Another Maher. No wonder everyone hates Tipp.
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Interesting article in the FT about it - essentially it seems they spent nearly two decades building an enormous big-data operation and how to interrogate that data. Pasted it below
In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.
One air strike missed â the leader of Hizbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.
âWe will reach everyone, everywhere,â bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.
What changed, said current and former officials, is the depth and quality of the intelligence that Israel was able to lean on in the past two months, starting with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallahâs right-hand men, as he visited a friend not far from Fridayâs bombing site.
These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israelâs intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
For the next two decades, Israelâs sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israelâs ânorthern arenaâ.
Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israelâs will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.
Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iranâs Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallahâs relationship with Syriaâs President Bashar al-Assad.
âYou have to define, in that sense, exactly what youâre looking for,â she said. âThatâs the biggest challenge, and if done well, it allows you to look at this in all its complexity, to look at the whole picture.â
Israeli intelligence had for nearly a decade referred to Hizbollah as a âterror armyâ, rather than as a terrorist group âlike Osama bin Laden in a caveâ, she said. It was a conceptual shift that forced Israel to study Hizbollah as closely and broadly as it had the Syrian army, for instance.
As Hizbollah grew in strength, including in 2012 deploying to Syria to help Assad quell an armed uprising against his dictatorship, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its measure. What emerged was a dense âintelligence pictureâ â who was in charge of Hizbollahâs operations, who was getting promoted, who was corrupt, and who had just returned from an unexplained trip.
While Hizbollahâs fighters were battle hardened in Syriaâs bloody war, the militant groupâs forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors.
âSyria was the beginning of the expansion of Hizbollah,â said Randa Slim, a programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. âThat weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.â
The war in Syria also created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israelâs spies â and their algorithms â to digest. Obituaries, in the form of the âMartyr Postersâ regularly used by Hizbollah, were one of them, peppered with little nuggets of information, including which town the fighter was from, where he was killed, and his circle of friends posting the news on social media. Funerals were even more revealing, sometimes drawing senior leaders out of the shadows, even if briefly.
A former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut said the penetration of Hizbollah by Israeli or US intelligence was âthe price of their support for Assadâ.
âThey had to reveal themselves in Syria,â he said, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.
âThey went from being highly disciplined and purists to someone who [when defending Assad] let in a lot more people than they should have,â said Yezidââââ Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. âThe complacency and arrogance was accompanied by a shift in its membership â they started to become flabby.â
That was a departure for a group that took pride in its ability to fend off Israelâs vaunted intelligence prowess in Lebanon. Hizbollah blew up Shin Betâs headquarters in Tyre not once but twice in the early years of Israelâs occupation of southern Lebanon. At one point in the late 1990s, Israel realised that Hizbollah was hijacking its then-unencrypted drone broadcasts, learning about the Israel Defense Forcesâ own targets and methods, according to two people familiar with the issue.
Israelâs broadened focus on Hizbollah in the region was accompanied by a growing, and eventually insurmountable technical advantage â spy satellites, sophisticated drones and cyber-hacking capabilities that turn mobile phones into listening devices.
It collects so much data that it has a dedicated group, Unit 9900, which writes algorithms that sift through terabytes of visual images to find the slightest changes, hoping to identify an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker.
Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wifeâs cell phone, his smart carâs odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TVâs remote control, according to several Israeli officials.
Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border. At one point, Israel monitored the schedules of individual commanders to see if they had suddenly been recalled in anticipation of an attack, one of the officials said.
But each one of these processes required time and patience to develop. Over years, Israeli intelligence was able to populate such a vast target bank that in the first three days of its air campaign, its warplanes tried to take out at least 3,000 suspected Hizbollah targets, according to the IDFâs public statements.
âIsrael had a lot of capabilities, a lot of intelligence stored waiting to be used,â said a former official. âWe could have used these capabilities way longer ago during this war, but we didnât.â
That patience appears to have paid off for the military. For more than 10 months, Israel and Hizbollah traded cross-border fire, while Israel killed a few hundred of Hizbollahâs low-level operatives, the vast majority of them within a slowly expanding theatre of the conflict, stretching a few kilometres north of the border.
That appears to have lulled Nasrallah into thinking that the two arch-rivals were involved in a new sort of brinkmanship, with well-defined red lines that could be managed until Israel agreed a ceasefire in Gaza with Hamas, allowing Hizbollah an âoff-rampâ that would allow it to agree a ceasefire with Israel.
The group had only started this round of fire with Israel on October 8, in solidarity with Iran-backed Hamas, in an attempt to keep at least some Israeli firepower pinned down on its northern border.
âHizbollah felt obliged to take part in the fight, but at the same time limited itself severely â there was never really any intention of them taking an initiative where they might have some advantage,â said Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
âThey seem to have thrown off a few rockets here and there, and taken a few hits in return, and getting lulled into a notion that this was the limit of it â they kept one, if not both, hands tied behind their back and did nothing approaching their own full capability.â
But even the possibility that Hizbollah would attempt the same sort of cross-border raid that Hamas had successfully pulled off on October 7 â killing 1,200 people in southern Israel, and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza â was enough for Israel to evacuate the communities near its border with Lebanon. Some 60,000 Israelis were forced from their homes, turning the border into an active war zone with Hizbollah.
To create the conditions for their return, PM Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have unleashed Israelâs more advanced offensive capabilities, according to officials briefed on the operations.
That included the unprecedented detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers two weeks ago, wounding thousands of Hizbollah members with the very devices that they had thought would help them avoid Israelâs surveillance.
It culminated on Friday with Nasrallahâs assassination, a feat that Netanyahuâs predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had authorised in 2006 and the IDF had failed to deliver.
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After Nasrallahâs death, the Middle East braces itself
In recent months, if not years, Israeli intelligence had nearly perfected a technique that allowed it to, at least intermittently, locate Nasrallah, who had been suspected of mostly living underground in a warren of tunnels and bunkers.
In the days after October 7, Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where Nasrallah had been located by Israelâs intelligence directorate Aman. The raid was called off after the White House demanded Netanyahu do so, according to one of the Israeli officials.
On Friday, Israeli intelligence appears to have pinpointed his location again â heading into what the IDF called âa command and controlâ bunker, apparently to a meeting that included several senior Hizbollah leaders and a senior Iranian commander of Revolutionary Guards operations.
In New York, Netanyahu was informed on the sidelines of his address at the UN General Assembly, where he rejected the notion of a ceasefire with Hizbollah and vowed to press on with Israelâs offensive. A person familiar with the events said that Netanyahu knew of the operation to kill Nasrallah before he delivered his speech.
Israelâs campaign is not over, says Netanyahu. It is still possible that Israel will send ground troops into southern Lebanon to help clear a buffer zone north of its border. Much of Hizbollahâs missile capability remains intact.
âHizbollah did not disappear in the last 10 days â weâve damaged and degraded them and they are in the stage of chaos and mourning,â said Eisin, the former senior intelligence officer. âBut they still have lots of capabilities that are very threatening.â
Additional reporting by Chloe Cornish in Dubai
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In football terms Hizbollah are Manchester United