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.
What's Iran's strategy here? From the footage I've seen, the bombs that Isntreal drops are at least 3x bigger in terms of destruction and damage, especially when comparing the rising smoke. And of course they've murdered much more civilians. Why is Iran not getting more aggressive? Are they gathering more intel and/or preparing for an actual decisive attack? I know that it's important to keep your capabilities hidden, but they're taking way too much damage already. Why do they keep allowing Pissrael to take out prominent army members or even researchers? Are those people decoys or just not very important?
It seems like Isntreal is going to accelerate and intensify their attacks. Not to mention they'll pull out some unexpected trump cards. Like the terrorist car bombings. There's no level low enough they won't stoop to. Chemical and biological weapons aren't even out of the picture anymore. They are rabid, extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and highly treacherous. There's no room for hesitation here. They are hell-bent on the collapse of the Iranian regime and they will accomplish that any way they can, including completely obliterating Iran from the face of the Earth, as we've seen in Gaza.
And considering how many of their cockroach spies have infiltrated Iran I'm not surprised that other Arab nations have been mostly silent on Gaza. They likely have agents in the highest levels of government in all the surrounding areas, to keep the puppets under threat and obedient. Likely also true for Europe and NA.
Iran does not need to get more aggressive. Their strikes are steadily whittling down critical Israeli infrastructure, heavily demoralizing the settler population (Israel had to BAN citizens from leaving on flights out of the country, all of which sold out completely for the next week as of Saturday), and also whittling away at critical stock of anti-missile defenses. There have been noticeably fewer anti-missile munitions launched at Iranian strikes in the past two waves, meaning Israel likely sees that Iran is ready to keep this up to the point Israel may begin to run out of missile defense munitions.
All of this while Iran has not yet used its most basic missile technology or its most advanced missile technology. There is probably very real discussion within Iranian military planning circles of whether or not to push this to the point that we begin to truly see Israel begin to collapse. Many think collapse has already begun, myself included. Iran has popped the bubble of Israeli invulnerability the exact same way Cuban troops did by defeating apartheid South African forces.
Defeating apartheid is much easier than we seem to think. You don’t have to overthrow the regime, you have to make the small, privileged class truly believe that they are no longer safe from the consequences of their actions.
I've been casually wondering for like two years now what a collapse of Israel would actually be like, because "collapse" is a really abstract word that gets thrown about a lot and can mean dozens of different things. One possibility among many I've imagined (and this might not be the most likely or anything) is that there's some internal coup inside Israel where the capitalist class basically steps in to force an end to the war because of the hit to profitability because of Iranian strikes. Certainly not out of sympathy to Palestinians or anything like that, they're just as hateful as the rest of them, it's just that unlike the relatively powerless bottom-line Zionist settler in some apartment building in Tel Aviv, they have a degree of power and pressure they could exert on the government.
I'm not really familiar with that level of Israeli politics though so idk if that's even possible, let alone feasible. Maybe Israeli capitalists really would just be willing to die and all their property destroyed if it's a step towards the potential destruction of Iran, I don't know what the balance between propaganda and material interests is in their brains
I've been wondering in a similar vein does Israel even have an internal deescalation ability? Once the US supported them full force they adopted a policy of being as heinous as possible until the US would pull on their leash finally, but they've been given proof over the past two years that the US isn't going to do that anymore. It's enough time for an entire generation of politicians to have no institutional power to rein in the genocideers if they even realize they need to pump the brakes. If that's the case then a coup might be the only way to keep the state together but would be instantly subject to a backstabber conspiracy