Bulletins and News Discussion from September 23rd to September 29th, 2024 - The War In The North

Image is of a Hezbollah missile attack on a military camp west of Jenin.

The situation between Hezbollah and Israel is rapidly escalating, with massive bombing campaigns on southern Lebanon by Israel predominantly on civilians (as the tunnels in South Lebanon are mostly unreachable to the Zionists, just like in Gaza), while Hezbollah and its allies respond with missile attacks predominantly on Israeli military facilities. Israel is spreading an evacuation order to the residents of southern Lebanese villages while also bombing their routes of escape and civilian infrastructure, similar to a terror tactic used widely in Gaza.

Northern Israel is currently under military censorship to hide their losses, so we get very little information other than what the Resistance provides and what videos and images get through the censors.

I don't know if Israel will dare a ground incursion soon, but it seems fairly likely in the coming days or weeks.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

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Very conflicting reports on Nasrallah, reuters are saying their Hezbollah source says he's alive. One Israeli report is also claiming that the commander of the Revolutionary Guards in Syria and Lebanon was present at the meeting with Nasrallah.

EDIT: Fed accounts are all saying dead.
- No real way to know until Hezbollah puts out a statement. One way or another we're waiting. Best to prepare yourself for the worst and be joyful if otherwise.
  
  Fed accounts are claiming that a new leader has been chosen already and that a statement is to be made after sunrise. It's midnight there right now so 5-10 hours from now maybe.
  
  Not to be like "If I was in the Resistance I would simply X" but I admit that I've never 100% understood why Hezbollah commanders and leaders get caught in these big bombings relatively often. Like, everybody knows the following is true:
  
  a) Israel will assassinate anybody in Hezbollah regardless of potential civilian casualties; they would kill a thousand civilians to catch a single commander in the blast. Assassination has been a key tool in their toolkit for decades; it is not a new strategy.
  b) Israel generally possesses good surveillance capabilities; these have substantially decreased due to Hezbollah destruction of border infrastructure but even Nasrallah has freely said in speeches that they are perfectly aware that every single cell phone in Lebanon is an informant, which must be countered with leaving them in places where they cannot track or hear you (in a fairly soundproof box at home at all times, for example). There's a famous interview with Assange where Nasrallah says that they don't rely on digital encryption for orders, they rely on local sayings "the chicken is near the well" etc to encode commands that are very difficult for Israeli operators to interpret.
  c) Therefore, being above-ground is putting yourself at severe risk, no matter your location (in the heart of the densest part of a city, or out in the middle of nowhere)
  d) Hezbollah nonetheless possesses underground metropolises that might as well be impregnable to Israeli bombs; during the 2006 war they repeatedly tried to destroy known underground facilities with bunker busters and found no success, and since then Hezbollah must have constructed even better facilities
  
  All those facts combine to suggest to me that you'd want to just stay underground most of the time, especially when doing important work or having important meetings, and take foreign nationals underground with you to protect them rather than meeting them above ground. So I'm always a little confused when Israel bombs a residential building and it turns out that (aside from the heinous murder of hundreds of civilians) there actually was a commander there. Why aren't they underground instead?
  
  Again, not saying that I'm some supergenius that has outsmarted Hezbollah or anything, there's obviously reasons why they do what they do, I'm just having trouble rationalizing it because I'm not an expert in warfare or anything.
  
  I don't think you get involved with a resistance movement if you are afraid to die. They would be bombing civilians either way.
  
  It just happens sometimes, that's war. Hamas does everything underground and still loses commanders occasionally. The Israeli hostages were probably the most well protected people in all of Gaza and some of them still died.
  
  Also, It sounds like the IDF had intel on his general location and carpet bombed the whole area - something they did not generally do in 2006, which is why the death toll has already passed 2006's total. One would imagine that underground bases are harder to construct in urban areas with extensive buried utilities.
  
  I don't have answers to this either. Arrogance perhaps? Might be that people simply do not recognise how unsafe they really are, complacency.
  
  The best two answers I can come up with right now are 1) complacency (as you suggested), because, I mean, every Hezbollah commander reached the current moment that they did without being bombed to death, so there's no immediate suspicion that tomorrow they will be killed, in the same way that going out driving is statistically kinda dangerous but you don't expect to get hit by a car and killed on your daily commute after thousands of days of doing so without being killed, and 2) the knowledge that they have constructed an organization where assassinations aren't terribly meaningful and that martyrdom is another way of serving the movement, so they don't fear death in the exact same way that us Westerners might. Apologies if that second point is a little callous or badly worded, I've seen similar sentiments about martyrdom spread on Resistance media and I don't have the religious knowledge to articulate it properly.
  
  edit: I suppose there's also that classic thing throughout warfare where the leaders should be seen taking similar risks as the soldiers so as to encourage them and promote unity in the army, which seems pretty reasonable too.
  
  The "underground metropolises" could be damaged or unsafe in some way, perhaps due to the pager / walkie-talkie explosions.
  
  perhaps, but they'd have to pack quite a punch to fundamentally threaten the integrity of the structures (and they didn't seem to; there's a reason why most people were injured albeit quite badly in some cases, rather than killed), and the assassinations were happening before the pager attack
  
  Israel waits for them to go into a populated area to assassinate them, trying to separate the people from the resistance by making the resistance be associated with death

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