Israeli forces kill Palestinian man in #west_bank
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/israeli-forces-kill-palestinian-man-west-bank
Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man in the northern West Bank on Wednesday, an Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed on social media. In a misspelled tweet, the social media head of Israeli Occupying Forces Avital Leibovich wrote that Israeli soldiers had “eliminated” a Palestinian man near Ramallah. read more
Israel launches information war against Hezbollah - Israel News, Ynetnews
▻http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4404887,00.html
L’armée israélienne lance un site internet anti hezbollah qui montre ces derniers comme une armée des plus puissantes, avec de sombres desseins maléfiques.
The website is the product of Israel’s new interactive media branch, a spin-off from the IDF Spokesman’s Unit. Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich, the head of the new branch, says some 30 soldiers work there, and put out content in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish and Russian. Two of the soldiers, she says, are native Egyptians who moved to Israel about seven years ago.
“This is the first time a military invests in such a platform using confidential information.” Leibovich told The Media Line. “When information will be interesting and high quality it will create a buzz about Hezbollah, and raise awareness about this organization that is sitting on our border with 60,000 rockets (pointed in Israel’s direction).”
Leibovich said some of the information came from classified sources, including combat intelligence troops based on the Lebanese border.
Anti-Hezbollah propaganda
On the other side of the border, however, Lebanese journalists were not impressed with the website.
“This is the kind of information that any person can get on the web,” Farid Chedid, the editor of Lebanon Wire told The Media Line. “There is nothing new – it’s just a compilation of anti-Hezbollah propaganda.”
Avec des précisions de Jason Ditz
Israel Steps Up Information War Against Hezbollah — News from Antiwar.com
▻http://news.antiwar.com/2013/07/14/israel-steps-up-information-war-against-hezbollah
The efforts to paint Hezbollah as some sort of new “threat” to Israeli interests has led the Israeli military’s “interactive media branch” to launch a new Hezbollah web site hyping the militia’s size and claiming it has plans to destroy all Jews, everywhere, as part of an Iran-backed plot.
Hezbollah - A Profile by the IDF
▻http://www.idfblog.com/hezbollah
IDF Failure Allows Hezbollah-Iranian Drone to Overfly Israeli Cities, Military Bases Tikun-Olam Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם
►http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2012/10/08/idf-failure-involving-hezbollah-iranian-drone
IDF Failure Allows Hezbollah-Iranian Drone to Overfly Israeli Cities, Military Bases
by Richard Silverstein on October 8, 2012 · 0 comments
in Mideast Peace
The IDF displayed yet another embarrassing failure in defending the homeland yesterday regarding the Iranian drone launched under the auspices of Hezbollah from Lebanon. Yediot’s Alex Fishman, one of the few forthright Israeli defense reporters notes (print only) that the aerial vehicle was allowed to fly over Israeli airspace for 20 minutes before it was downed. If you take into account IDF spokesperson Avital Leibovich’s claim that the army was tracking the drone for 20 minutes, that means it hadn’t a clue about the drone until it crossed into Israeli airspace. Imagine the most advanced army in the Middle East cannot track a slow-moving drone launched from Lebanon and flown for a long distance over the Mediterranean. Among the Israeli sites it overflew were population centers and military bases. It was only 18 miles (he calls it “spitting distance”) from Dimona when it was felled. Several years ago, a Hezbollah balloon flew directly over Dimona before it too was shot down. Note that this is supposed to be restricted airspace.
Fishman, whose IDF sources are excellent reports that the drone was manufactured by the Iranian aviation industry and used Iranian technology.
So despite the praise offered by Ehud Barak, reassuring the population that the army had the nation’s back and that there was nothing to worry about–there is very much to be worried about. The IDF, like most armies, isn’t just fighting the last war, it’s fighting the war before that. When Sinai militants attacked Eilat last year, Israeli intelligence hadn’t a clue that this might happen. The only terror attack it planned for was from Gaza. That the attack was launched from Egypt caught the IDF with their pants down. The Israeli response was so haphazard that one of its units invaded Egypt and killed five Egyptian police officers. Similarly, last month’s Sinai attack that killed 16 police officers and brought an Egyptian armored personnel carrier a mile into Israel also represented an intelligence failure.
Israeli intelligence is afflicted with a failure of imagination. It always underestimates the enemy. It rarely anticipates what it will do, where and how it will attack. Israel is so used to fighting battles and wars on its terms, that it has stopped trying to understand the enemy in any more than a superficial way. This failure not only sells the nation’s defense short, it characterizes Israel’s inability to understand the needs and interests of its erstwhile enemies.
Israel is like a fish out of water. It sees itself, in Ehud Barak’s infamous phrase as a “villa in the jungle.” That is, an advanced western country plopped down in the middle of the Middle Eastern jungle. Yet it is nothing of the sort. Israel is rather a schizoid country with an economy that apes the west in some ways, but structurally is closer to that of the oligarchic capitalism of Russia. It fancies itself a western democracy, but behaves little better than the Iranian Islamist theocracy.
Israel as presently constituted can never integrate into the region. In fact, it doesn’t want to integrate. It believes it can maintain this charade of specialness and separateness forever. Until it can’t. These military-intelligence failures are only a symptom of that.