Is Raf OK? -- Installment #86
2024-03-06 -- Tel Aviv
Tags: Video clips; 5 Min Read; Not much analysis
If You Read One Thing: David Grossman
A few days ago, prominent Israeli author David Grossman published an assessment of the situation and a possible future. (PDF Here )
(David Grossman authored one of my favorite books: Someone To Run With -- so good Putin banned it in 2019!)
If time is limited today, skip the rest of this entry and read Grossman.
March 1 IDF Report
In the era of social media, the IDF uses... social media. The IDF Telegram channel has five to fifteen posts a day. Many of the tunnel videos I post come from there. It's a firehose. The clips start to look the same: Soldiers running across fields, warily going into empty buildings, shooting into empty buildings. Drone footage.
A recent sample:
The IDF’s 7th Brigade successfully captured and interrogated dozens of terrorists hiding in a school in the west of the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, the IDF announced on Friday. The IDF also carried out a number of raids on the homes of senior Hamas operatives, venturing into new parts of Khan Yunis.
...
In one targeted raid on terrorist infrastructure, the 7th brigade successfully captured dozens of terrorists who had been hiding in a school. Through questioning the captured terrorists, the IDF acquired key intelligence that was transferred directly to the forces operating in Khan Yunis.
In The North
Documentation from social networks of the interception of the rocket barrage from Lebanon to the Galilee.
Raf commentary: There is a voiced concern that there isn’t enough Iron Dome capacity to manage a concerted attack from Lebanon. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth. From Haaretz on October 23, 2023:
"We are now at the point where Hezbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world," said the U.S. defense secretary in a joint press conference with his Israeli counterpart. It was in 2010 that Robert Gates gave his grave assessment alongside Ehud Barak. Since then, Hezbollah has only gotten stronger.
…
Hezbollah is the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world, concluded researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in an extensive 2018 report on the lethal arsenal stationed just north of Israel.
Did You Know...
Hamas continues to launch rockets from Gaza? Yup.
Not often, but it still happens, five months into the war.
I learned today that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art still has its collection down in its basement. The galleries have skylights and a Ministry of Defense complex is nearby. (There are exhibits up, but something like %90 of the permanent exhibit is in the vault.)
On top of that, I was told that for the past several years, the collection has been taken down a couple times a year... every year... due to rocket threats from Gaza.
Heard
IDF Spokesman
The IDF Spokesperson reveals incriminating tapes of UNRWA teachers who are members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and took part in the kidnappings and the attack of 10/7.
8 Minutes, in English,
In The South (Gaza)
Released by the IDF March 5:
Across from a school, we found this Hamas weapons cache.
Seen
Lupins are everywhere...
Jerusalem
Zichron Yakov
Ducks
On Reddit
Pallywood
Al Jazeera in a "moving article" featuring a mother crying after her children tasted bread, for the first time since the outbreak of the war....
...
A Twitter tweeter wrote in the Arabic language: I believed the mother.. until I saw her neat eyebrows (:
Also... there was no reported shortage of bread in the first months of the war. This only started, in specific spots in Gaza, in 2024.
Conditions are very bad in Gaza. And also: There are no swollen stomachs or emaciated faces.
Relief Area
Alef
Bet
It isn't just flights that are back in operation. Tour buses. Tour groups. My bureka guy in the Tel Aviv Shuk looked idle. It's been a couple months. I walked up and placed an order. But he was in the middle of making 15 burekas for a group! Mine was not delayed (the guy has class). Lunch was had.
Living next to the Shuk, I see fruits I’ve never heard of. Many a shehecheyanu is said. The other day I bought a fruit I know, but ate only as a child. My family arrived in Santa Rosa, CA when I was six. Standing behind the new house were two mature loquat trees. Growing up, we ate them every season, and once or twice my mother made a jam or fruit butter from them.
Because they are %50 (or more) pit, they are not grown commercially in the U.S. But here they are! So I have been munching away. Talk about the taste of childhood.
Stay well,
Raf
(Thank you A.K.)