Saying nothing.
There was a time when friends and family who stayed with us
overnight complained about the birds. Our guests were all city dwellers who
managed to sleep through traffic noise and other urban clamour, but not birds
chirping at dawn. For our part, we are used to the birds, they don’t bother us.
However, from time-to-time other flying objects disturb our tranquil locale. I
refer to the IAF jet fighters that thunder through our valley en route to
somewhere north.
This week they have been more than usually active. In an attempt to
account for this sudden surge, I ruled out the possibility of an attack-and-defence
air force simulated exercise knowing that Israel hosted the largest-ever air
force drill last week.
Israel has held these so-termed "Blue Flag" exercises
every two years since 2013 at the Uvda air- force base north of Eilat.
It seems, (according to foreign sources) that the IAF was playing
war games in the south and attacking live targets in Syria simultaneously.
The sites targeted are Hezbollah positions, Iranian munitions
storage facilities and sometimes armaments convoys en route from Syria to
Lebanon. The IDF tries to avoid hitting Syrian army personnel. Nonetheless,
when provoked by Syrian anti-aircraft fire aimed at its planes, the pilots
don’t hesitate to fire back destroying the Syrian positions.
Earlier this week foreign news outlets reported that IAF planes
dropped leaflets, not bombs in an area in Syria bordering on the Golan Heights.
The leaflets written in Arabic were intended as a warning against the Syrian
Army’s continued cooperation with Hezbollah. The texts explicitly named
operatives working for Hezbollah.
Syria’s SANA news agency later confirmed the “strikes” saying that
“Zionist occupation forces committed a new aggression in the southern region as
part of their repeated aggression against the sanctity and sovereignty of
Syrian territories.”
It seems Syria is reprimanding Israel for “littering.” I wonder if
Assad will lodge a complaint with the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Israel has repeatedly warned that it would not tolerate Iran’s attempts to establish a permanent military presence in the Syrian Golan and
has admitted to hundreds of strikes against targets belonging to Iran and its
proxy - Hezbollah.
The “strike” was carried out a few days after Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was assured
that Russia wouldn’t hamper Israel’s freedom of action in Syria. Senior IDF
spokespersons have confirmed the good relations with Russian military personnel
in Syria.
A piece in The Washington Post told of a major cyberattack
in Iran that affected all of the Islamic Republic’s 4,300 gas stations
“No group has claimed responsibility for the attack that began on Tuesday, though it bore similarities to a previous attack perpetrated months earlier that seemed to directly challenge Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”
Abolhassan Firouzabadi, the secretary of the Supreme Council of
Cyberspace, linked Tuesday’s attack to another cyberattack that targeted Iran’s rail system in July.
“There is a possibility that the attack, like a previous one on Iran’s railway system, has been conducted from abroad,” Firouzabadi said,
but didn’t specifically accuse Israeli or US hackers of carrying out the attack.
Farsi -language satellite channels abroad published videos
apparently shot by drivers in Isfahan showing electronic billboards there
taunting: “Khamenei! Where is our gas?”
An Iranian gas (petrol) filling attendant at one of the
malfunctioning stations.
Cheap gasoline is practically considered a birthright in Iran, home
to the world’s fourth-largest crude oil reserves despite decades of economic
woes.
Subsidies allow Iranian motorists to buy regular gasoline at
affordable prices.
There doesn’t appear to be a connection
between the cyberattacks and live-fire attacks on US forces in Syria last week.
Iran carried out a complex and
coordinated attack using up to five
armed drones to strike at the Tanf garrison, a lonely US outpost in Syria near
the Jordanian and Iraqi border.
The assessment by the US is that Iran was behind
this attack. It is the latest of numerous drone attacks on American forces in
the region this year. Iranian-backed groups in Iraq have used drones to target US forces at other places in Syria.
The attacks are also part of the
rising Iranian drone threat across the region. This means the attack
on Tanf is a message not just for the US, but also for Israel, Saudi Arabia and
other countries facing Iran’s drones.
that this week’s cyberattack on Iran appeared to have been carried
out by serious hackers: “We’re not talking about kids, but rather professional
hackers — which doesn’t rule out them being backed by a state government.”
In 2010 the Stuxnet virus — believed to have been engineered by
Israel and the US — infected Iran’s nuclear programme, causing a series of
breakdowns in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
None of the serious observers, commentators
and other Iranian affairs pundits have intimated so far that Israel was behind
the latest cyberattack.
Even if Israel carried out the attack, why
boast about it?
“Saying nothing sometimes
says the most.” Emily Dickinson
Take
care.
Beni 28th
of October, 2021
