Aug 28, 2024

Situational Update

  • AIPAC writes: in a complex operation in southern Gaza, Israeli soldiers rescued 52-year-old hostage Qaid Farhan al-Qadi. Qaid is the eighth Israeli hostage to be rescued alive from Gaza, but the first rescued from a tunnel. He has since left the hospital and is returning home.
  • Al-Qadi was found inside a tunnel by commandos of the Israeli Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit and troops of the elite Yahalom combat engineering unit, the military said. The operation was led by the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command, the Shin Bet security agency, and the IDF’s 162nd Division.
  • [WATCH] Body cam footage from the moment Qaid Farhan Alkadi was rescued by IDF troops

The North

  • From FDD: Israel’s military said on August 26 that 90 percent of rockets and drones launched toward Israel by the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah during a massive barrage on August 25 were launched from near civilian areas. The IDF further reported that the Iran-backed group fired a total of 230 rockets and 20 suicide drones during the attack but was planning to launch hundreds more had Israel not preemptively eliminated hundreds of Hezbollah launchers. Infographics published by the IDF showed rockets “fired from civilian areas, nestled next to civilian sites like mosquesschoolsgas stations, and UN compounds,” Israel’s Ynet media noted. In one case, Hezbollah placed dozens of rocket launchers within 500 feet of a United Nations compound in southern Lebanon.
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  • Marc Schulman reports: Within minutes, 100 planes were airborne, targeting predetermined locations in southern Lebanon. Initial intelligence indicated that Hezbollah intended to fire 3,000 rockets at Israel. However, it later became clear Hezbollah only planned to launch hundreds of rockets and dozens of drones. The IDF strikes were highly successful, destroying 6,000 rockets and launchers. Indeed, hundreds of rockets were fired, targeting Iron Dome batteries, among other sites. Hezbollah also aimed to dispatch a fleet of drones toward Israeli intelligence bases near Tel Aviv.
  • Despite our preemptive strike, Hezbollah managed to fire over 200 rockets at various locations in the North, including Akko, where there were direct hits. However, most of the rockets were intercepted. Hezbollah’s rocket barrages did not strike Iron Dome batteries or other critical locations, failing to overwhelm the Iron Dome systems.
  • All of the drones Hezbollah deployed were successfully intercepted. The long-range drones, being larger than those attacking the North, were easier to identify. Their extended flight time to the Tel Aviv area also made it much easier for them to intercept. In this instance, most were downed by Air Force planes, while some were intercepted by the Iron Dome

Rocket Alerts

In the past week, there were 339 red alerts, and a total of 1082 in the past month. Hezbollah has caused 68 new alerts since Sunday’s strike

Source: Rocket Alerts in Israel


The Numbers

Casualties

  • 1,659 Israelis dead (+5 since Sunday) including 703 IDF soldiers (341 IDF soldiers during the ground operation in Gaza: +4 since Sunday)
    • First Sargent David Moshe ben Shittrit (21) was killed on Sunday when
    • First Sergeant Amit Tsadikov (20) was killed died when a group of soldiers entered a booby-trapped building in Gaza City
    • Master Sergeant (res.) Shlomo Yehonatan Hazut (36) was killed during fighting in Gaza City
    • Staff Sgt. Amit Friedman, 19 was killed fighting in the southern Gaza Strip
  • Additional Information (according to the IDF):
    • 2,259 (+10 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured during ground combat in Gaza, including at least 424 (+2 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
    • 4,393 (+17 since Sunday) IDF soldiers have been injured since the beginning of the war, including at least 652 (+2 since Sunday) who have been severely injured.
  • According to unverified figures from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, 40,435 (+170 since Sunday) people have been killed in Gaza, and 93,534 (+390 since Sunday) have been injured during the war.
    • We also encourage you to read this well documented piece from Tablet published in March: How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers
    • The Associated Press, an outlet with a demonstrated anti-Israel bias, conducted an analysis of alleged Gaza death tolls released by the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry.” The analysis found that “9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data” and that “an additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates.”

Hostages (one rescue!)

  • There are currently 108 hostages currently in captivity in Gaza
  • On October 7th, a total of 261 Israelis were taken hostage.
  • During the ceasefire deal in November, 112 hostages were released.
  • 146 hostages in total have been released or rescued
  • 66 hostages have been confirmed dead.
  • This leaves an estimated 108-110 hostages still theoretically in Gaza
    • 36 hostages are assumed to be dead and held in captivity
    • Thus, at most, 80 living hostages could still be in Gaza.

(Sources: JINSAFDDIDF, AIPAC, The Paul Singer Foundation, The Institute for National Security Studies, the Alma Research and Education CenterYediotJerusalem PostIDF Casualty Count, and the Times of Israel)


Listen

[PODCAST] Call Me Back with Dan Senor: ISRAEL PREEMPTIVELY STRIKES HEZBOLLAH – with Nadav Eyal & Ronen Bergman

  • Early this morning, after detecting preparations by Hezbollah to launch a large-scale attack, Israel launched a powerful preemptive strike on southern Lebanon. Hours after these events took place, I was joined by Nadav Eyal and Ronen Bergman to make sense of what has taken place, and to discuss possible scenarios moving forward
  • Link: ISRAEL PREEMPTIVELY STRIKES HE – Call Me Back – with Dan Senor

What We Are Reading

Israel’s Hunt for the Elusive Leader of Hamas, by Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman in The New York Times

  • Israeli commandos raided an elaborate tunnel complex in the southern Gaza Strip on Jan. 31 based on intelligence that Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, was hiding there, according to American and Israeli officials.
  • He had been, it turned out. But Mr. Sinwar had left the bunker beneath the city of Khan Younis just days earlier, leaving behind documents and stacks of Israeli shekels totaling about $1 million. The hunt went on, with a dearth of hard evidence on his whereabouts.
  • American and Israeli officials said Mr. Sinwar abandoned electronic communications long ago, and he has so far avoided a sophisticated intelligence dragnet. He is believed to stay in touch with the organization he leads through a network of human couriers. How that system works remains a mystery.
  • Communicating with Mr. Sinwar has become more difficult, said Israeli, Qatari, Egyptian and American officials. He used to respond to messages within days, but the officials said that it has taken much longer to get a response from him in recent months, and that some of his deputies at times have been his proxies in those discussions.
  • During the first weeks of the war, Israeli intelligence and military officials believe that Mr. Sinwar was living in a warren of tunnels beneath Gaza City, the largest city in the strip and one of the first targeted by Israeli military forces.
  • Back then, Mr. Sinwar still used cellular and satellite phones — made possible by cell networks in the tunnels — and from time to time spoke to Hamas officials in Doha. American and Israeli spy agencies were able to monitor some of those calls but were not able to pinpoint his location.
  • By the time the Khan Younis bunker was raided on Jan. 31, Mr. Sinwar had fled, Israeli officials said.
  • He stayed one step ahead of his pursuers, who sometimes made boastful comments about how close they were to finding him. In late December, as Israeli military units began excavating tunnels in one area of the city, Mr. Gallant bragged to reporters that Mr. Sinwar “hears the bulldozers of the I.D.F. above him, and he will meet the barrels of our guns soon.”
  • Almost immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli military intelligence and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, established a cell inside Shin Bet headquarters with the singular mission of finding Mr. Sinwar.
  • The C.I.A. also set up a task force, and the Pentagon dispatched special operations troops to Israel to advise the Israel Defense Forces on the looming war in Gaza.
  • The Israelis and Americans have a mutual interest in locating Hamas commanders and the dozens of hostages, including Americans, who remain in Gaza.
  • But one person familiar with the intelligence-sharing arrangement, who discussed it on the condition of anonymity, describes it as often “very lopsided” — with the Americans sharing more than the Israelis give in return. At times, the person said, the Americans provide information about Hamas leaders in the hopes that the Israelis will direct some of their own intelligence resources toward finding the American hostages.
  • He took over as the head of Hamas’s internal security unit, a group charged with finding and punishing Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israeli authorities as well as anyone who commits blasphemy.
  • He spent years in an Israeli prison but was released in October 2011 along with more than 1,000 other prisoners as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas.
  • But Mr. Sinwar’s network of advisers has been steadily shrinking: Some top Hamas commanders have been killed, some captured, and others were outside of Gaza when the war began and have not been able to return since.
  • Mr. Deif was the most senior adviser to Mr. Sinwar, but was less disciplined than his boss. He came above ground far more regularly, allowing Western intelligence agencies to pinpoint his whereabouts.
  • Link: Israel’s Hunt for the Elusive Leader of Hamas: The New York Times

Israel Must Defend Itself on Its Own – While Cooperating with Allies, by Dr. Zalman Shoval with The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies 

  • The principle “to defend itself with its own forces” is fundamental to Israel’s concept of national security. Recently, doubts – sometimes tendentious – have been raised about this principle. In the opinion of the late former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyck, for instance, the deployment of American aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and Red Seas shows that “Israel is not capable of defending itself alone”.
  • This is a hasty conclusion, because the carriers serve as second-line defense. There is no contradiction between the basic Israeli principle stated above and Israel’s comprehensive cooperation with the US, which has political, economic, and other benefits for both sides. American military aid constitutes 16% of the Israeli defense budget and about 2% of the general budget. It also entails Israeli access to the American security system, with its wide dimensions and possibilities.
  • Those fears evaporated after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, which opened the door to an ever-expanding military cooperation with the US. Since then, total US aid to Israel has increased to $3 billion a year – originally $1.8 billion in military aid and $1.2 billion in civilian aid, to be delivered partly in credit.
  • An important change was made by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 when he announced that Israel would give up civilian aid and that the entire amount would be directed to security. Civilian foreign aid was unpopular in the eyes of American politicians who had difficulty justifying it at a time when their own constituents were struggling with economic problems. As the Israeli economy was growing at the time, it was unnecessary in any case – certainly in comparison to security aid, which was seen by both the Americans and the Israelis as necessary and justified. It was agreed that the security aid would be a grant, not a loan, and that the full amount would be granted in advance. There has also been an American contractual commitment in place since 2008 that Israel will have military (i.e., weapons) superiority over all its enemies.
  • Calling Israel “America’s continental aircraft carrier” was an exaggeration, but the facts that Israel is the only democratic and stable country in the Middle East and that it has a developed technological, scientific, and military capacity have increased its value to the Americans in a security sense. The operational capability of the IDF in the current war will further strengthen this assessment.
  • “Defense” means the country’s borders will be protected by physical elements, such as civilian settlements and various obstacles, but mainly by the IDF… And as for peace? As Ben-Gurion put it, “Peace is not a goal, and war is not a goal. The goal is the realization of Zionism,  [and peace will come] when the Arabs also want peace.”
  • As far as Israel is concerned, the direct Iranian threat is extremely dangerous because it is a political-ideological entity whose stated and practical goal is the complete physical destruction of the State of Israel, and it is close to equipping itself with weapons of mass destruction that will be capable of accomplishing this. Although the US says it will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, it does not take sufficient measures to convince Iran to stop its efforts. In other words, for Israel, Iran represents a concrete, gravely serious threat that requires consideration from all possible aspects, in terms of both diplomacy and security. “Defending itself with its own forces” is indeed the first line in Israel’s security, but cooperation with others, as much as possible, will complete it.
  • Link: Israel Must Defend Itself on Its Own – While Cooperating with Allies: The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies

After Hezbollah’s Retaliation, All Eyes Fix on Iran: It remains unclear if Iran will use the militant group’s strike as cover to avoid further escalation. By Carrie Keller-Lynn and Dov Lieber in the WSJ

  • Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday told Lebanese people they could “take a breath,” saying that after a salvo of rockets on Sunday, the Iran-backed militant group was done with retaliation against Israel for the July killing of a senior leader in Beirut.
  • Now, all eyes are on Iran, which had said it too would inflict a “painful response” on Israel after the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Tehran hours after the Hezbollah commander’s death.
  • One question is whether Iran will use Sunday’s strike by Hezbollah—which has proclaimed it a success—as cover to avoid further escalation as Tehran looks for a response that would deter Israel from further attacks while also avoiding triggering a regional war.
  • The Pentagon assesses that the decision to boost U.S. military presence in the Middle East over the past few weeks has succeeded in deterring Iran and its proxies from launching a broader attack, Ryder said. The moves sent a “clear message to all actors in the region that we’re serious,” he said.
  • Hezbollah’s attack could provide a way for Iran to de-escalate, said Danny Citrinowicz, who served as head of the Iran branch for the Israeli military and is now a fellow with the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. There would be more pressure on Hezbollah to respond to the killing of Fuad Shukr, since he was a Hezbollah official and he was killed in Beirut. But Haniyeh wasn’t Iranian.
  • Link: After Hezbollah’s Retaliation Against Israel, All Eyes Fix on Iran

A Hostage Rescue and a Reality Check in Gaza by Seth Mandel in Commentary

  • It is also a moment for sober reflection; more than 100 hostages remain in Hamas’s bloody hands. Finally, it’s a moment for a reality check. Those Hamas tunnels aren’t for show; they remain operational and must continue to be a focus of the war and its attendant diplomacy. Pundits and commentators have had particular trouble with this one.
  • Former British paratrooper Andrew Fox recently embedded with an IDF division in Rafah. The soldiers of that division alone, he recounts, “have found ten tunnel-hidden rocket launching sites, 21 subterranean weapons production sites, and they have destroyed 200 tunnel entry shafts.” Unsurprising, but still notable, “each one of those tunnel shafts led to a mosque; a school; a person’s home
  • The entrances to those tunnels are booby-trapped; the IDF has to enter with drones first, then dogs, then small groups of soldiers. Because Hamas can still remotely detonate IEDs and has cameras in the homes, the IDF often must destroy the structure once it discovers that live IEDs have been left behind. Hence the high level of damage above Rafah despite the low level of fatalities. (The population has been moved so Rafah can be cleared.) Fox sums up: “Hamas has turned the whole place into one giant booby trap.”
  • But the tunnels aren’t only for hostages. The tunnels, in fact, are at the center of the ceasefire negotiations. Israeli troops have secured the Gaza side of the Philadelphi corridor and the tunnels leading from Rafah to Egypt. It is not hyperbole to say that those specific tunnels are the reason for the perpetual state of hostilities and the regularity of war between Israel and Hamas. Without them, Hamas would be unable to rearm and resupply in perpetuity, to say nothing of the opportunity the corridor presents to move terrorists into and out of the war zone.
  • Leaving the corridor in the hands of Hamas and Egypt means war; sealing the corridor is the only possible path to peace.
  • So let’s put in plain English what the fight over the tunnels is really about. Israel is asking for a commitment to long-term peace, and Hamas and its patrons are proposing permanent war. We can attempt to elide those differences all we want, but it won’t change the fundamental issue of these negotiations—and of the wider war.
  • Link: A Hostage Rescue and a Reality Check in Gaza

Antisemitism

Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges? Yup. The Washington Monthly runs the numbers and explains the results. By Robert Kelchen and Marc Novicoff in the Washington Post

  • Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankingsOf the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.
  • Protest activity has been common, however, at elite schools with both low acceptance rates and few Pell students. You can see these findings in the chart below.

When you separate out private and public colleges, the difference becomes even more stark, as the next chart demonstrates. At private colleges, protests have been rare, encampments have been rarer, and both have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuition and fees are exorbitantly high.

  • Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment, as the chart below illustrates.
  • What, then, does explain why colleges with large numbers of students of modest means are far less likely to have had protests and encampments? Our best guess is that poorer students are just focused on other concerns. They may have off-campus jobs and nearby family members to see and take care of. They might sympathize with the protesters—a nationwide poll of college students in May found that 45 percent support the encampments, 24 percent oppose them, and 30 percent are neutral. But in the same poll, only 13 percent rated conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them. That was well behind health care reform (40 percent), educational funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). Students burdened with multiple responsibilities—like having to work a low-paying job to pay for college to get a better-paying job—are unlikely to devote what little free time they have to protesting about an issue they don’t see as a high priority.
  • There could be other reasons. Some colleges have more of a history and culture of campus protesting, and while colleges are generally left-leaning, some are more so than others. At Columbia, for example, there are 5.6 liberal students for every one conservative student, whereas at the University of Texas at El Paso (where there have been no pro-Palestinian protests or encampments, and 58 percent of students receive Pell Grants), there are only 2.3 liberal students for every conservative student.
  • Link: Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?

Just How Much Support Is Iran Giving to Campus Protesters? Danielle Pletka, distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in the National Review

  • On July 9, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a statement assessing that the Iranian regime is “providing financial support to [American] protesters” against the war in Gaza. The extensive network organizing the eruption of antisemitic and anti-American encampments across U.S. campuses is well documented. Haines’s statement is a bleak warning about Iran’s ability to manipulate American civil society and underscores the imperative to declassify intelligence about Iran’s influence operations in the United States.
  • Defenders of the antisemitic outpourings on elite campuses last spring insisted that the protest movement was wholly “organic” in nature. Far from it. Rather, the protests that emerged ostensibly to object to the war in Gaza quickly became antisemitic breeding grounds, backing U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and parroting Iran’s call for the elimination of the Jewish state. With the war in Gaza likely to continue into 2025, virulent Iran-backed antisemitism is primed to resurge once students are back on campus.
  • White House spokesman John Kirby, who acknowledged that Iran has been funding “some of the protest activity,” similarly maintained that “there’s a lot of organic concern.” If protests are, as they claim, truly “organic,” the Biden administration can authorize and build on strategic declassifications.
  • Certainly, many protesters are naïve students manipulated by a TikTok algorithm that disproportionally platforms pro-Palestinian content and inundates users’ feeds with antisemitic content. But neither Chinese TikTok nor Iranian financing constitutes an “organic” anti-Israel movement in the United States.
  • If the intelligence community identifies individuals or nonprofit organizations that have received Iranian funding to support campus protests, the Department of Justice should follow with indictments.
  • Link: Iran Supports Campus Protesters: Will Biden Administration Make Intelligence Public?

The Truth About Iran’s Efforts to Promote Gaza Protests by Jason M. Brodsky is the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute’s Iran Program in Time

  • The truth is, the Islamic Republic has multiple nodes of influence that it uses to interfere in Western democratic policy debates. Iran’s Foreign Ministry cultivates relationships with media outlets and think tanks in the United States and Europe, to influence policymaking in directions that serve its interests. It mostly does this through promises of engagement and offering access to individuals and entities it assesses as well-placed to echo its narratives.
  • Like Russia, Iran has a long track record of attempting to create societal fissures in its adversaries. Many of these efforts are clumsy—and easily thwarted by the security services—but can be lethal. In July, three Israeli citizens were arrested on suspicion of operating on behalf of Iranian intelligence in exchange for money. The paid missions ranged from storing cash in different locales to directives to commit arson and murder. In one particularly disturbing incident, an Iranian handler urged an Israeli to deliver packages, one containing the severed head of an animal, to private homes inside Israel. The Iranian handlers camouflaged their identities to make it appear they were Israelis themselves; payment was made in cryptocurrency.
  • In the U.S., the Iranian leadership long has courted groups which share a similar anti-Israel ideological mindset. One such group is Neturei Karta, a fringe ultraorthodox Jewish sect, whose leaders have been regularly hosted by Tehran.
  • Iran has also built an extensive online disinformation apparatus that is used to both amplify content promoting its anti-American and anti-Israel worldview and aggravate political and social tensions in democratic societies.
  • They have employed sockpuppet accounts which are fake online personas. For example, the IRGC cyber group Cotton Sandstorm (which is operated by under Emennet Pasargad, a company sanctioned for attempting to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election), ran an X account branded as “Jewish Peace Advocate,” according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence. MOIS also runs a series of cyberwarfare teams in support of Hamas.
  • During the campus encampments, a pro-IRGC Telegram channel called “Resistance News Network” regularly shared posts from channels linked to U.S. college campus demonstrations. In turn, some of those accounts promoted content from the Resistance News Network.
  • Link: Iran Really Is Trying to Boost Gaza Protests

Pro-Hamas protesters are heirs to decades’ worth of anti-West propaganda by Dr. Ruth Wise in the New York Post

  • Campuses that should have protested the mass murder, rape, infanticide, torture, beheading and kidnapping of peaceful civilians rallied instead against Israel, home to almost half of the Jews left in the world.
  • It was the same antisemitism we have seen for more than a century — so no surprise — but a shock to many when the rhetoric came from the political left.
  • In the early 20th century, fascists won American adherents by appealing to ultra-nationalism, the same impulse that brought Hitler to power and made him chancellor of Germany in 1933. Antisemitism, an anti-liberal movement conceived in the 1870s, accused Jews of exploiting emancipation and citizenship to “conquer Germany from within.” It blamed Jews for corrupting German culture, dominating the professions, exploiting the economy as capitalists and ruining it as communists. Nazism added another thread: that they polluted the Aryan race.
  • Antisemitic coalitions powered the rise of Nazism. For the past half century, anti-Zionism has done even better forging Pan-Arab-Islamist coalitions in the Middle East, at the UN and within the Western democracies themselves. This ideological war against the Jews and Israel differentiates it from other current conflicts, like the equally evil Russian invasion of Ukraine: Little Israel is the proxy for mightier America.

    No intersectional campus coalitions celebrate Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine; no Russian thugs pursue Jews in Brooklyn, or burn Ukrainian flags with America’s. That’s because anti-Zionism is the ideological arm of the civilizational struggle against what is left of the free world, with the United States as its ultimate target.

  • Link: Pro-Hamas protesters are heirs to decades of anti-West bile