By Howard Bloom
Joe Biden’s nightmare of a wider war in the Middle East is coming to pass. But the war is not widening because of Israel. It is widening because of Iran.
On October 7th, 2024, Hamas broke a cease-fire deal and started the Gaza war with the rape, torture, and slaughter of 1,200 Israeli civilians. On October 8th, the day after the Hamas atrocity, Hezbollah in Lebanon widened the war.
Hezbollah started a war of its own on Israel. Over the course of the next eleven months, Hezbollah launched 8,500 rockets at the Jewish state, hammering Northern Israel while Hamas in Gaza launched 14,000 rockets and terrorized Israel’s south.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen also joined the fray, firing 220 drones and missiles at Israel. Over the massive distance of 1,431 miles. More recently, Iraqi militias, too, have begun to launch drones at Israel.
All of these groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the militias in Iraq– have something in common. They are all puppet armies of a single master, Iran. In other words, Iran has been using its military sock puppets, its proxy armies, to wage a wider war on Israel ever since one of its proxies, Hamas, started that war on October 7th.
But now Israel is striking back against Hezbollah’s 8,500 missile and drone attacks.
On September 17th, Israel blew up 4,000 beepers in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah terrorists and killed or injured thousands of Hezbollah’s fighters. The next day Israel blew up close to 500 Hezbollah walkie-talkies and killed or injured another 450 Hezbollah terrorists.
On September 19th, Hezbollah swore revenge. Hezbollah’s head, Hassan Nasrallah, said Israel had crossed “all the red lines” and called the exploding pagers a declaration of war.
The next day Israel killed Nasrallah’s last remaining top military advisor.
But it wasn’t until this Monday, November 23rd, that all hell broke loose. Hezbollah launched 200 missiles and drones at Israel in a single day. But Israel did more.
On Monday morning Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari explained that for 20 years Hezbollah had been hiding more and more rockets, missiles, and anti-tank weapons in the homes of ordinary Lebanese civilians and in tunnels underneath their houses. In fact, Hezbollah often paid rent to the homeowners. To house weapons. Hagari warned the Lebanese to leave these explosive-laden homes, and the occupants were warned again by cellphone to get out of their houses. Why?
Because Israel was intent on wiping Hezbollah’s military infrastructure off the face of the earth. So on Monday, Israel’s Air Force “struck more than 1,300 targets in Lebanon in less than 24 hours.” On Tuesday, Hezbollah responded by firing more than 300 rockets and drones at Israel. But Israel “fired at more than 1,600 targets in 200 different areas of Lebanon. Including around 400 medium-range rocket launchers, 70 weapons depots, and 80 drones and cruise missiles.”
AIPAC, the Israel lobby, reports that, “Tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets and missiles were likely destroyed, primarily in …civilian homes.”
Yes, in civilian homes. That’s a tip-off to a standard policy of Iran’s proxies, using the civilians of Gaza and Lebanon as human shields. Every death of a civilian is something Hamas and Hezbollah are proud of. “Islam is a tree,” Hezbollah says, “that grows on severed limbs.” And “We love death more than you love life.”
In Gaza, the strategy of hiding behind human shields has killed roughly 40,000 Gazans. But in Lebanon, the human shield strategy has reached a new low.
Remember, according to Israel, Hezbollah is now storing its 150,000 rockets in or under the homes of Lebanese civilians. Not to mention in and under civilian apartment buildings.
On September 20, six days ago, Israeli intelligence found out that sixteen high-level Hezbollah commanders were meeting in the basement of an apartment building in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. The sixteen commanders were planning an attack like the massacre of October 7th, when Hamas invaded southern Israel and raped, tortured, and burned alive 1,200 Israelis.
But this time, the attack would be on northern Israel. Meanwhile, the conference of Hezbollah commanders was using the civilian inhabitants of the seven-story apartment building in whose basement they were meeting as human armor, as living, breathing shields.
Israel bombed the building and flattened it. Killing all sixteen Hezbollah commanders. But by hiding their meeting in the basement of an apartment building, the Hezbollah leaders had deliberately risked the lives of the 29 civilians in the building.
And the Hezbollah human shield strategy led to those 29 civilians’ deaths.
References:
Jake Braunstein, Corey Meyer, AIPAC, Israel At War: Today’s Update, 9/23, 9/24, 9/25, and 9/26, 2024.
https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1b4k50pc
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/25/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-hamas-war-news-gaza
______ Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He has appeared on Saudi and Iranian TV over 40 times. And the sheikh who made Dubai what it is today has named a racehorse after one of his books. Bloom does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on the highest-rated overnight syndicated talk radio show in North America, Coast to Coast AM. Bloom’s next book, coming out in January, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is wrong. For more, see http://howardbloom.net.