Image is of destruction and damage inside Israel, sourced from this article.
Iran and Israel have struck each other many times over the last few days. There has been a general focus on military facilities and headquarters by both sides, though Israel has also struck oil facilities, civilian structures and hospitals, and in return for this, Iran has struck major scientific centers and the Haifa oil facilities.
Israel appears to have three main aims. First, to collapse the Iranian state, either through shock and breakdown by killing enough senior officials, or via some sort of internal military coup. Second, to try and destroy Iranian nuclear sites and underground missile cities, or at least to paralyze them long enough to achieve the first and third goals. And third, to bring the US into a direct conflict with Iran. This is because the US better equipped to fight them than Israel is (though victory would still not be guaranteed depending on what Iran chooses to do).
Iranian nuclear facilities are hidden deep underground (800 meters), far beyond the depth range of even the most powerful bunker busters (~70 meters or so), and built such that the visible ground entrances are horizontally far away in an unknown direction from the actual underground chambers. Only an extremely competent full-scale American bombing force all simultaneously using multiple of the most powerful conventional (perhaps even nuclear) bunker busters could even hypothetically hope to breach them (and we have seen how, in practice, American bunker busters have largely failed to impair or deter Ansarallah). There are several analysts on both sides who have concluded that it is entirely impossible to physically prevent Iran from building nukes.
I fully expect the US to join the war. I believe the current ambiguity is a deliberate invention of the US while they work to move their military assets into position, and as soon as they are ready, the US will start bombing Iran. After that, Iran's leadership must - if they haven't already - harden their hearts, and strike back with no fear, or risk following the path of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, either into either surrender, occupation, or annihilation. Every day where they do not possess a nuke is a day where lives are being lost and cities are being bombed.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
El País: In a surprising maneouver, the Spanish government rejects the NATO amendment to rise military expenditure to 5% of GDP (article in Spanish). As of the time of the publishing of this article, it's the only government that openly opposed this amendment, claiming that fixing the expenditure to a percentage of GDP is "unreasonable", and that fixing the military capability objectives first and then allocating the funds is "counterproductive".
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, proposes instead to either make a "more flexible formula" that allows to opt out of the 5%, or to allow for a mechanism allowing Spain to reject this 5%. The prime minister reminded Rutte that deciding over the defense budget is each country's own ddecision.
In my opinion, this is a very rare socdem W, probably tied to try and divert progressives in Spain from the corruption scandal unveiled last week affecting some of the closest members of PSOE to Pedro Sánchez. I want to believe that Sánchez is an infiltrated Xi agent, which would explain his massively intelligent maneouvers to not only overcome previous political problems within the PSOE and accusations from the right wing in the country, but to actually come out reinforced (I beg everyone to read the "letter from Pedro Sánchez to the Spaniards" in which he proclaims to be deeply in love with his wife, and the effects it had on public opinion towards the most handsome European president).
Additionally, and more seriously, the PSOE government hinges on a multi-party coalition with parties such as Sumar, Podemos or Bildu, further left than the PSOE, which are more reluctant to accepting the military budgets, and whose few seats are important to maintain stability in the government. Serious disappointment (not surprise though) at Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and their most popular face Gabriel Rufián for adhering to military budget increases using phrases such as "leftism also means order".
Even for a NATO member that is actual sensible military industrial policy. Making expenditure the target is how you get super expensive equipment that exhausts its capabilities within a few months.
Though Im sure the real policy is just to keep up with the expensive military equipment but have less of it instead.
To be fair, Spain has a comparably low military budget for an EU country, in 2024 it was less than 1.5%. It will surely raise over the following years, but yeah, the 5% goal is just NATO bootlicking to show servility to the USA, and with Spain being the second furthest country to Russia in the EU, the Spaniards really aren't afraid of Russia, and socdem citizens have a quite strong anti-militarist viewpoint due to the recent memories of fascism and the literal millions who went to the streets to protest during the invasion of Iraq in the so-called "no a la guerra", which was promoted heavily by socdem PSOE as a way to harm the right-wing PP then in government.
I think it's the reverse: these scandals are coming out now, just when it became clear that the Spanish government was considering not agreeing with the 5%-rule.
They need unanimity to decide that 5% becomes a NATO-rule.
5% for several large european economies means having a massive army sitting around and doing nothing. Very much counterproductive when there is a lack of young people in general.
I guess having them undertake public works as part of military service, like the DPRK, would step on Porky's toes too much
Its not like spain is suffering from increasing desertification, wild fires and decline rural infrastructure! Not even during the spanish empire did they actually use all that gold & silver to build productive forces.
Funnily enough Spain has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe, it's a serious problem in the country. Not that there's not better things to do with such labour pool