Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: Iran has brokered ongoing secret talks between Russia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels to transfer anti-ship missiles to the militant group, three Western and regional sources said, a development that highlights Tehran’s deepening ties to Moscow. Seven sources said that Russia has yet to decide to transfer the Yakhont missiles – also known as P-800 Oniks – which experts said would allow the militant group to more accurately strike commercial vessels in the Red Sea and increase the threat…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens…

Read More Read More

Dimi Reider writes: For much of the last year, the prospect of an all-out war in the North was presented to Israelis as a pitfall to avoid. Israel, they were told, doesn’t want a second war – especially not one that could escalate to a regional one with Iran – and neither does Hezbollah. All in all, both parties would prefer a long-term accommodation or regularisation (hasdarah). Israel wants Hezbollah to stop firing and ideally move its forces further north,…

Read More Read More

The Observer reports: In hospitals around Lebanon, ­hundreds of patients were adjusting to a new life, many of them now with permanent disabilities. The pager explosions resulted in many being blinded and losing a hand. The pagers had beeped twice, and then there was a pause, giving people enough time to bring them to their face before they exploded. “Enucleation [removal of the eye] is a procedure that is rarely ­performed these days. One of our senior ­ophthalmologists was saying…

Read More Read More

Ori Goldberg writes: Israel has not claimed responsibility for the rolling “pager attack” in Lebanon. Israeli social discourse, however, is not even debating the issue. It is clear that “we did it” (exclamation point optional). What is it that we actually did? One can surmise that Israeli intelligence established a company that produced pagers and walkie-talkies and managed to pique Hezbollah’s interest in these devices. Hezbollah prides itself on its low-tech approach to communications, assuming that this makes its network…

Read More Read More

Joshua Yaffa writes: Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in central Kyiv. On a recent afternoon, as I sat inside, waiting for Zelensky, I heard his voice—a syrupy baritone, speckled with gravel—before he entered, dressed in his signature military-adjacent style: black T-shirt, olive-drab pants, brown boots. He…

Read More Read More