The End of Self-Restraint

As  we all take a deep breath, let’s review some entangling alliances, focusing on Yemen and Russia. Tiny Lebanon is far from alone, and merely the first domino

Triggering a region-wide war

By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm.

Israel’s flattening of a residential building in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, which killed 13 people including senior Hezbollah figures Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmad Wehbeh, will go down in history as the trigger of a region-wide war on multiple fronts.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah was typically candid in his speech on Thursday when he described the earlier Israeli cyber-attack using explosive communications devices as a harsh and major blow. He is sure to see the Dahiyeh bombing two days later, and the martyrdom of the two top commanders of the Radwan Force, as an even graver and more challenging development — not just for Hezbollah, but the entire Resistance Axis and its operational command in Tehran.

If Israeli claims that the targeted commanders were meeting to plan an incursion into the Galilee are true, a combined retaliatory military response by Hezbollah and other allied resistance groups may well be imminent. There are two main reasons to expect this.

First, Nasrallah has previously spoken of a ‘Tel Aviv for Dahiyeh equation’, meaning that any Israeli attack on the southern suburbs would be answered with missile strikes against Tel Aviv.

Secondly, the leadership of the resistance in Lebanon has come to the conviction that its measured policy of self-restraint and strategic patience has reached its limit. They achieved what was intended of them, and the time has come to move to a deterrent response and immediate retaliation for all Israeli attacks and security beaches. That involves striking at the Israeli interior, along with implementing the second option of ground offensives to liberate the Golan Heights and Galilee.

This explains the deployment of US aircraft carriers and warships to the Eastern Mediterranean in readiness for an expansion of the war and the start of the anticipated resistance offensive from Lebanon.

I have said this repeatedly: Netanyahu, defeated on all fronts, wants to expand the war and bring the US into it, especially against Iran as the mover and mastermind of the Resistance Axis and its component groups. His provocative cyber-escalation and continued war of assassinations in Lebanon is in speeded-up pursuit of this strategy ahead of the US presidential and legislative elections.

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Russia arms Ansar Allah against Israel in response to U.S. arming of Ukraine

by Thierry Meyssan at Voltaire Network.

he United States has withdrawn two naval groups from the Near East, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Ansar Allah (the “followers of God”, derogatively referred to as the “Houthis”, i.e. the “gang of the Houthi family” by Atlanticist propaganda) fired a missile at central Israel on 15 September. According to its spokesman, it covered 2,040 kilometers in 11 minutes.

On the contrary, according to the IDF, it was not a hypersonic missile. It was hit by Israeli air defenses, but was not shot down. A fire broke out near Lod, caused by the missile or by debris from it.

Mimicking the IDF’s behavior in Gaza, Ansar Allah issued a notice to the Israelis declaring that Tel Aviv is a “war zone” and that they must evacuate it to the Negev desert which they consider a “humanitarian zone.”

On September 16, Ansar Allah said that the U.S. government had offered to recognize it on the condition that it stop attacking Israel. The State Department denied this.

☞ Let’s look at the change in the rules of the game, not in Israel and Palestine, but on a global scale. The Yemeni missile was not intercepted by the Israeli defense. It was therefore a satellite-guided hypersonic missile, comparable to the seven Iranian hypersonic missiles that hit their target on April 14. Ansar Allah did not have space technology at its disposal, so who provided it with the guidance data? It is unlikely that Tehran has embarked on this adventure at a time when President Masoud Pezeshkian is trying to reconnect with the West.

We have learned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secretly visited Russia last week, for a few hours. The information was strictly censored by the IDF in Israel. His meeting with his former friend, President Vladimir Putin, did not go well.

The withdrawal of the US aircraft carriers indicates that Washington did not intend to get involved in the Russian-Israeli quarrel.

But the most important thing is elsewhere: Moscow had warned that it would respond to the United States, which is giving weapons to Ukraine to attack Russia, by also giving weapons to Washington’s enemies to strike it back. Ukraine has just hit a Russian gas pipeline with US weapons. In response, Yemen hit the Ashkelon-Eilat pipeline with the help of Russian satellite data.

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💠 @Strategika51:
⭕ Washington is investigating who may have supplied Yemen’s Ansar Allah group with a hypersonic missile with a range of over 2,000 km (mach 9), and strongly suspects Russia and North Korea.
This has many implications.
Little by little, it seems that the centerpiece of resistance to the empire is tiny North Korea. This country now acts as a catalyst for the will to resist that China, Iran, Syria and Russia lack. Pyongyang supplies the latter three with weapons and ammos…