RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/30/israel-is-demonstrating-how-deterrence-works-in-the-middle-east/

Israel has taken these extreme measures to defend its nation and people against existential threats to its security since last October. It has often acted alone and over the objections of its allies.

As threats to Israel have increased from all sides since the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack and the United States, under the weak leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, has become a problematic ally, the Israeli government has done what it had to do to protect its nation—establish Israeli deterrence.

This was dramatically demonstrated in the early morning hours of August 25, when about 100 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fighter jets conducted a preemptive strike in Lebanon to destroy thousands of rocket launchers and a large number of drones that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah planned to fire a few hours later against Israel.

Hezbollah scaled back its planned attack after the Israeli strike and reportedly did not fire dozens of high-precision missiles because it feared “the Israeli retaliation would be so forceful as to start a far longer and more devastating conflict than the past 10 months have seen,” according to the Times of Israel.

Just as dramatic was an Israeli missile attack on April 19, 2024, that destroyed missile radars deep inside Iranian territory and near a critical facility believed to be engaged in nuclear weapons research. The attack was in retaliation for an April 13 attack on Israel by Iran with a salvo of about 150 missiles and 30 drones. The U.S., U.K., and Jordan assisted Israel in shooting down almost all of these projectiles.  The handful of missiles and drones not shot down did no serious damage.

Although the Israeli attack against Iran did minor damage, it humiliated the Iranian regime because its military forces were unable to detect or intercept the Israeli missiles and drones. The Israeli attack also demonstrated the vulnerability of Iranian military, government, and nuclear sites to Israeli attacks and Iran’s inability to protect them.

https://www.jns.org/the-high-cost-to-the-hostages-of-enlightened-hypocrisy/

The argument over whether there’s such a thing as too high a price to pay for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza continues to rage in Israel unabated. And “rage” is the right word to describe what is rarely a serious discussion on the part of the “Bring Them All Home Now” advocates.

Those whose family members are still languishing in the Strip can be forgiven for seeing the issue from a prism of personal pain. Still, not all the captives’ loved ones agree with their more vociferous counterparts that the government should cave in to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s demands in order to seal a deal that would put an end to the 11-month nightmare.
The latter group grasps that it’s not so simple. In the first place, Sinwar hasn’t consented to free all the hostages, including if Israel withdraws all troops from Gaza and leaves him in power to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 “again and again and again,” as his henchmen have vowed to do.
Second, the hundreds of bereaved families of soldiers who fell in this war to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages are desperate not to have all that loss be in vain. Ditto for the men and women in uniform risking their lives every day in the same pursuit.
The people who deserve no sympathy are the ones who’ve been exploiting everyone’s devastation to fan the flames of the pre-Oct. 7 protests aimed at ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. Indeed, their cynical abuse of the hostage crisis to further a political agenda that got upstaged by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is nothing short of despicable.
Since the bulk of the Hebrew media has been complicit in this effort, it’s often difficult for members of the public to make a distinction between rational debate and “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. Occasionally, though, the disingenuousness gets exposed—and it’s a doozy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/israel-launches-major-operation-against-irans-west-bank-proxies/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

I’ve been contending that, rather than launch a major war it would lose in devastating measure, Iran has been conducting calibrated operations against Israel — trying to terrorize, exhaust, and effectively contract the territory of Israel by a thrum of violence on multiple fronts, knowing the Biden administration’s obsession about avoiding “escalation” of the conflict constrains Israel’s response.

The latest hot spot is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank, in which 3 million Palestinians are governed semiautonomously by the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas (now in the 19th year of his four-year term), and where jihadist Iran backs such proxies as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas (which controls Gaza but maintains a foreboding presence in the West Bank).

Israel has now commenced major combat operations against these jihadist strongholds. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces deployed hundreds of troops, supported by air power, in an effort to dismantle terror platforms.

To recap, on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza in the southwest, where it has been supplied via Egypt and where the fighting continues. Within 24 hours of Hamas’s attack, Hezbollah stepped up strikes across Israel’s northern border from its bases in Lebanon, where Iran has supplied it with over 150,000 missiles, thanks in part to Iran’s long-standing presence in neighboring Syria, propping up the barbaric Assad regime. In the interim, from over the southeast horizon, Israel has been subjected to continuous aerial aggression — hundreds of attacks — by the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen.

Concurrently, Iran has been turning the West Bank into yet another front, this one on Israel’s east, capitalizing on weapons-smuggling routes through Jordan. The Long War Journal reports that at least nine terrorists were killed in fighting that surged on Monday, with IDF forces “dismantling explosives planted under the roads, and confiscating large quantities of weapons.”