Husayn2🔻🇵🇸

[𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 @atlanticesque]

Is “The Party Switch” real?

Yes yes I know it’s complicated but suppose you’re forced to say either “yes” or “no”

Is “The Party Switch” real?

[professional hog groomer @bidetmarxman]

The rise of Trump and Trumpism cannot be fully explained without first recognizing how, over the last two decades, American politics has been shaped by the rise of China. 🧵

[🌬️🏴 @magnxsium]

it is my deepest and most sincere hope that whatever is worst for america, is what happens to it. that's all i have to say abt today.

[ed 🇹🇳🇨🇳🇺🇳 @QuetzaIc0atl]

new shia compass just dropped

[o.g. @twittetrader]

You can either live in the state that teaches your children transgenderism from a young age or fascist Israeli propaganda designed to deceive you. There's no way out of this.

[Homelander MMA @HomelanderMMA]

This can’t be real
This can’t be real
This can’t be real
This can’t be real

[Master Oogway 🐢 | তানবির @theimamibengali]

May God magnify our reward for our grief over al-Husayn (a), and make us and you among those who will seek vengeance for his blood with Imam al-Mahdi (atf), His representative from the progeny of Muhammad (s)

[aya @political_aya__]

Dear God, this is outrageous. We were out of words a long time ago. What more can we say. This is maddening.

[ThatOneCommieYouHate 🪂🔻🚢 🚁 🇾🇪🇨🇩🇵🇸 @Yemeni_Comrade]

Making the Yankees kneel and beg.

[Husayn2🔻🇵🇸 @AlqudsAxis]

@clipzshia bullets a bullet

[Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW]

Let's walk through Iran's strike on Israel two days ago. What's remarkable is much of the battle occurred in plain view but officials are still telling us not to believe our lying eyes.

The strike was much smaller than claimed and largely defeated Israel's missile defenses.⬇️

I'll preface this technical analysis with a political one - the balance of power in the Middle East shifted last weekend. Israeli military primacy has been a cornerstone of the region's politics for generations. That primacy no longer exists following the grinding campaign in Gaza and this Iranian attack. Israel can bleed and its regional enemies are clearly unafraid of its fury.

Now let's figure out what happened. Israeli officials claimed to have shot down "99%" of the attack, claiming to have downed over a hundred ballistic missiles, close to two hundred drones, and thirty-plus cruise missiles with only "trivial" damage inflicted to Nevatim Airfield in the Negev. The United States and Jordan - Israeli allies - echoed these claims. Video circulating online created the impression of ballistic missiles coming in across Israel, none of which seemed to have landed.

The desert can be a strange place. There's a known phenomenon in such hot and dry conditions where people will wildly underestimate how close distant objects are to them. Israel is a small country and atmospheric conditions during the attack were extraordinarily clear, leading to a situation in which observers across the country (and in fact outside it!) filmed a single flock of missiles diving on a target deep in the Negev and reported them as separate attacks across Israel. Burning white-hot from hypersonic reentry, the warheads were effectively large meteors and visible across much of the region. This single group of warheads appears to have constituted most of the ballistics fired by Iran and was the source of most of the extant footage of incoming Iranian missiles.

Don't believe me? Good, I wouldn't expect you to. Believe the videos instead. The stills below are from five separate videos that showed a good view of the missile stream - shot from Be'er Sheva, Shomron, Jerusalem, a location in the Negev, and Amman in Jordan. All of them capture a single moment when one of the rearmost warheads sloughed off a bright piece of material as it reentered the atmosphere at hypersonic speed, creating a distinctive double fireball. You can see immediately how the angle of the warhead stream changes between observers, with the observer in Amman basically looking at it from more of a rearward angle.
When the fog of war cleared there were three target areas identified as having actually been struck - the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and a site in the Golan Heights. What's quite interesting is that this group of warheads was widely - and incorrectly - reported as diving on Nevatim. It actually came in at Ramon, much further south. This can be immediately verified by comparing the frame from Be'er Sheva with those from the Jerusalem area. If this attack had struck Nevatim, observers in Be'er Sheva would have been looking straight at it and instead they saw it from much the same angle as more northernly observers.

I've prepared a graphic illustrating this - compare the angle at which observers in Be'er Sheva, Jerusalem, and Amman would have seen warheads diving on Nevatim vis-a-vis Ramon.
There's more footage out there showing multiple warheads hitting Ramon despite intense fire from anti-missile batteries (I'll post one of the videos in a reply), and it's very telling that we haven't actually gotten any satellite photos or firm announcements about damage at that base. If Nevatim was struck by ballistics at all it was by one of two warheads that attacked south of Jerusalem in a separate, smaller group from the one pictured above - the same ones, I believe, that were dramatically photographed over the Knesset.
The Israelis released a small amount of footage from Nevatim. Given the limited cratering observed at the base it's likely a cluster warhead of some kind was employed. US officials have claimed a C-130 was damaged on the ground, again suggesting something of a shotgun blast that peppered the ramp and which was not visible on the low-quality satellite photos released yesterday.
Now let's work through what else happened that night that we could observe. There was a large Grad volley from Hezbollah in Lebanon, leading to Iron Dome firing in the north of the country, and Iron Dome fired in Ashkelon for reasons unknown despite a lack of reported fire from Gaza. An Israeli corvette in Eilat harbor engaged and shot down a drone (probably launched from Yemen), and video of a single target being destroyed in outer space by an Arrow III interceptor emerged (I suspect this was also against an older ballistic missile on a lofted trajectory fired from Yemen). A small amount of debris fell, injuring a civilian in Israel and killing three in Jordan.

There were also serious reports that the Golan Heights was hit, although no footage seems to have emerged of a strike there and - significantly - no footage of highly visible incoming ballistic warheads. The Iranians subsequently came out and stated they had targeted an Israeli surveillance site in the area. There have been rumors of significant damage and a press blackout.

The IAF subsequently released a video showing them downing eight Iranian drones (of a mixture of Shahed and Ababil types), although it's unclear from the footage if they were all actually shot down. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. For their part, the IRGC released three videos showing their end of the attack - one showing 22 ballistics launched, one showing eleven drones flown off, and another showing 22 cruise missiles launched. Observers in Iraq posted videos of a handful of ballistics moving out, and a single drone and cruise missile were filmed en route at treetop level, but there was no evidence on the "near" side of huge ballistic volleys or drone swarms.

So what are we to make of this? Well, here's one final data point - there were no reports, and no footage, of massive Israeli air defense launches with heavy missiles before ballistics appeared in the sky over Israel. This indicates that there was little in the way of a "midcourse" interception effort before the warheads became visible during reentry - most if not all of the battle was fought during the "terminal" phase against diving warheads. And, most significantly, most of what was launched from Iran arrived over Israel and dove on targets.

That defensive fire was spirited but unsuccessful - only a small number of the warheads filmed reentering appear to have been intercepted, with multiple confirmed hits caught on camera.

The conclusions to be drawn from the evidence are clear:
- Iran launched a few dozen missiles and drones, not hundreds
- Most of the ballistics fired penetrated air defenses
- Most of the ballistics fired were targeted at Ramon AB
- Nevatim AB was a secondary rather than primary target
- The Golan site was likely struck with cruise missiles
- It is unclear if a large number of drones were even launched
- Israeli "outer-layer" defense systems (read: Arrow) may be ineffective against modern Iranian missiles attacking on depressed trajectories
- Israeli claims about the size of the attack and the success of their defensive effort should not be taken seriously
- Iranian claims about their operational goals and targets should similarly be taken with a large grain of salt, a lot of what has come out of their camp seems to be supposition and speculation

With all of this in mind - and also bearing in mind that the Iranians seem to have little appetite for another round - the obvious path forward for Netanyahu is to declare victory and go home. He can spin the results of this strike into a victory via control of a pliant Western media apparatus, an obvious offramp crafted by the Iranians and being pushed by the US. What he should not do is seek further confrontation, because the Iranians have, I believe, now proven quite decisively that they can break Israeli missile defenses.

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

BREAKING: ABC News reports US official saying that Iran has launched another wave of 70 missiles