Scott Mail

[Israel Defense Forces @IDF]

‼️EXPOSED: An underground Hezbollah terror tunnel, under the village of Majdal Zoun, containing hundreds of weapons and 4 launch shafts aimed at Israel.

The tunnel is 200+ meters long and 25+ meters deep, and contains 4 launch shafts and 12 rooms, including living quarters and rooms used to store explosive devices, anti-tank missiles and UAVs.

During the operation, 20+ Hezbollah terrorists were eliminated and 50+ terrorist infrastructure sites were dismantled, including observation posts and weapons storage facilities.

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Audio, reportedly recorded earlier today, of Iranian forces warning ships that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@HonestReporting 🎯

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

This is not an argument about Palestinian rights or statehood, rather it is an argument against historical revisionism.

Because there is simply no basis for the claim that Jews are uniquely foreign to the land while modern Arab Palestinian identity somehow represents an unchanged ancient sovereignty. It’s simply not true, and unfortunately, we increasingly see outright historical inventions replacing factual history altogether.

The truth is that the ideology of Zionism doesn’t negate the right of self determination of any other people…but the traditional Palestinian position does deny the self determination of the Jewish people to the land that they are actually from.

We are told Palestinian identity stretches back thousands of years in its modern nationalist form.

We hear claims that Palestinians are direct descendants of the Canaanites while Jews are supposedly European interlopers.

Palestinian leaders have repeatedly denied or minimized Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount which predates Islam itself.

But the historical and archaeological record is overwhelming, and even when it comes to the Torah, the Bible and yes, the Quran — the Jewish people originated in this land.

Their language originated in this land. Their civilization, religion, holidays, literature, and collective memory are rooted in this land.
Jews maintained a continuous presence there for thousands of years despite conquest, exile, massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, and imperial occupation by Arab colonizers…And the reason so many Jews were dispersed around the world was only because invading empires repeatedly drove them out of their indigenous homeland.

Instead of recognizing that the Jewish people are indigenous people to the land and negotiating in good faith for the betterment of both peoples and the establishment of a Palestinian state — decades of Palestinian leadership have opted instead to craft a self destructive, ahistorical, and delusional narrative of replacement, teaching generation after generation a story that they in fact are “indigenous” and the Jews are not...condemning generation after generation to a never ending conflict that they feel is their duty to continue because they have been indoctrinated with a sense of perpetual victimhood where everything is always someone else’s fault, and imbued with the ideology of Palestinian rejectionism.

Despite all of this, Israel repeatedly demonstrated willingness to compromise.

The proposition’s argument collapses under its own historical contradictions. It denies every Israeli concession, negotiation, and peace treaty. Most of all, it denies the repeated refusals by Palestinian and broader Arab leadership to accept Jewish self determination.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The motion before this house claims that Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine…but the historical evidence simply does not support that claim.

The motion is historically reductive, intellectually maximalist, and fundamentally disconnected from the regional reality.

And for that reason, I urge this house to reject it.

3/3

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

Because despite all the rhetoric you’ll hear tonight from the Proposition, Israel has repeatedly shown willingness to accept Palestinian national aspirations and coexistence..even if the trend is downwards in public opinion, even if there are individuals in government who have made distasteful or inappropriate comments.

What has consistently characterized Israel’s decision making from left to right, is an effort to make peace.

In contrast, however, the Palestinian national movement has often defined peace not as coexistence with Israel, but as a world without Israel entirely… and not as offhand inappropriate comments like you see from Israeli extremists, but as a matter of written policy such as the original 1968 Palestinian National Charter, which, even after the Oslo Accords supposedly saw the cancellation of clauses rejecting Israel’s right to exist, a new charter was never published!

The reality is that a state which repeatedly offers negotiations, territorial concessions, withdrawals, and recognition clearly wanted to achieve some form of peace, even if imperfectly or unsuccessfully.
Now let me address another deeply misleading element of the motion itself: the phrase “peace with Palestine.”

In 1948, there was no sovereign state called Palestine. In fact, there has never been an independent Arab Palestinian state in human history.

The war in 1948 was not fought between Israel and a state called Palestine.

It was fought between the newly declared Jewish state and surrounding Arab armies.
Even the term “Palestine” itself did not originate as an Arab national identity. After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century, the Roman Empire renamed Judea as “Syria Palaestina,” widely understood by historians as an attempt to sever the Jewish connection to the land following repeated Jewish revolts against Roman rule.

There was no Arab Palestinian civilization there at the time, and there was no Arab or Muslim sovereign power. In other words, the very name “Palestine” entered imperial usage as part of the erasure of Jewish sovereignty.

Much later, the modern Arab Palestinian national movement emerged, primarily through the PLO under Yasser Arafat in the 1960s. Now that doesn’t mean that Palestinians are not a real people today – after all, every national identity evolves over time…But it does expose how much modern rhetoric attempts to invert the historical record by portraying Jews as foreign colonial intruders while depicting modern day Arab Palestinian nationalism as somehow indigenous.

In the early 1900s, the term “Palestinian” referred to inhabitants of the British Mandate, including Jews. The Palestine Post, which later became The Jerusalem Post, was Jewish. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, was Jewish.

The Palestinian football team during the Mandate period was Jewish.

Palestine Airways? A Zionist Jewish airline.

Palestinian passports were carried by Jews, and former prime minister Golda Meir held a Palestinian passport.

Even the coins issued under the British Mandate featured Hebrew saying “Eretz Yisrael” — the land of Israel.

Contrary to modern activist claims, the demographic history of the region is far more complex than a story of colonialist European Jews displacing a static indigenous Arab population.

In fact, you may be surprised to learn that Arabic is not even a native language to the Levant

The largest influx of Arabs into the Levant came with the Islamic conquests of the Levant in the 7th century…and while a limited presence of Arabs existed sporadically prior to that, there was by no means a substantial or a sovereign Arab civilization encompassing the land of Israel before that.

2/3

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

My full remarks at the Oxford Union debate over the motion: “This house believes Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine”

Ladies and gentlemen,

Tonight’s motion is not merely wrong. It is intellectually unserious.

“This house believes that Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine.”

Never.

That single word should immediately alarm anyone who values historical accuracy, nuance, or basic intellectual honesty.

Because “never” is not a casual word. It is absolute, total, and maximalist. To vote for this motion, you are not being asked to believe Israel sometimes undermined peace, or that Israel made mistakes.

You are not even being asked to believe Israel bears major responsibility for the conflict. No, you are being asked to believe that across nearly 80 years of modern history, across every Israeli government, negotiation, territorial concession, treaty, withdrawal, every diplomatic initiative – Israel, as a state, never really wanted peace. Not once.

Clearly, such a claim does not stand under the weight of history.

From the modern state’s inception – Israel accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan despite receiving non-arable land with almost no resources.

The Arab leadership rejected it and launched a war instead. In 1993 and 1995, Israel signed the Oslo Accords, and received an intifada in response.

At Camp David in 2000, Israel offered 94-96% of the West Bank, 100% of Gaza, and a divided Jerusalem.

In 2008, Prime Minister Olmert made another proposal for 94% of the West Bank plus an additional 5.8% more territory in the form of land swaps.

The Palestinian leadership said no to all of these offers.

In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza. The response?

Gazans elected Hamas, and Israel received over 25,000 missiles over the next two decades — plus multiple wars and the October 7th massacre.

You may argue that Israel’s offers were imperfect, or insufficient… but you cannot honestly argue that these are the actions of a state that never wanted peace.

The problem with this motion however goes even deeper. What exactly is meant by “peace”? Peace is not simply the absence of war, it requires two peoples accepting each other’s right to self determination and national existence.

For much of the conflict, major Palestinian factions and surrounding Arab states have and still do reject Jewish self determination outright. In fact, some if not all of the proposition debaters tonight are on record opposing a two state solution…and yet we as Israelis are being asked to prove that it is us who are serious about peace?

On the question of the partition plan, the Secretary-General of the Arab League at the time, Azzam Pasha, warned that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to what he called “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” of the Jews.

Other Arab leaders and factions openly spoke about driving the Jews into the sea, including Haj Amin Al Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who stated in 1948, “Arabs, rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.”

This was never a dispute over borders… rather it was a rejection of Jewish sovereignty itself, even when their rejection ends up harming Palestinian society.

Today, we routinely hear slogans from the Palestinian movement globally, including this week at Oxford — such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a phrase which by definition involves replacing Israel entirely with a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

At protests around the world, including outside Jewish institutions and synagogues, activists have openly declared “We don’t want two states, we want all of it.”

So again I ask: what exactly does “peace” mean when one side refuses to accept that the other has any legitimate right to exist at all?

1/3

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

Two men could have flown to Geneva for this weekend’s peace talks. Only one would have been arrested on arrival—and it isn’t the one who massacred his own citizens. Despite Friday’s flare-up in Lebanon, an Iranian delegation led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has landed in Switzerland for talks with the United States. Qalibaf, his hands still wet with the blood of protesters, will be ushered in to meet Vice President JD Vance. Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC, stayed home.

According to CBS, first on the agenda is the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. That placement is no accident: Iran’s stated purpose is to “demand the fulfillment of the [United States’] obligations,” according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, arguing that Washington has failed to implement the MoU’s first clause—a ceasefire on all fronts, Lebanon included—and that nuclear negotiations cannot even begin until it does. In effect, Tehran is holding the entire process hostage to a Lebanon ceasefire it expects the U.S. to impose on Israel.

Beyond Qalibaf and Araqchi, the delegation includes Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati and oil chief Hamid Bord, an inclusion that signals Iran intends to frontload the economic side of the deal: sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets, likely early in the 60-day window to blunt U.S. leverage on the nuclear file later. It’s worth remembering that neither Israel nor the terror group has a seat at the table—in part because, had Benjamin Netanyahu hitched a ride with Qalibaf, it’s the democratically elected leader who would have been arrested on the tarmac, while the speaker who presided over the massacre of his own citizens is ushered in to meet Vice President JD Vance.

On the ground in Lebanon, the IDF is pressing to seize the strategic Ali al-Taher Ridge and the subterranean network beneath it. The IDF assesses the complex to be the “nerve center” of Hezbollah’s Badr Division—the formation regarded as the organization’s primary force on the southern front—with dozens of operatives holed up underground as fighting plays out above and below the surface. The facility is of such vital importance that the organization reportedly planned to blow the Qaraoun Dam and flood the Litani River basin to halt an IDF advance toward it—even at the cost of a national disaster in southern Lebanon. This is a facility unlike anything Israeli soldiers have encountered elsewhere. Built over more than a decade with Iranian funding and planning and carved deep into the rocky terrain across multiple levels, it served as the command post from which Hezbollah directed its fight against IDF forces and its attacks on Israeli territory. The terrain is what makes the difference: unlike in Gaza, where tunnels could be dug back out of the sand, here the rock works against reconstruction—destroy the headquarters, and rebuilding it will be nearly impossible.

That operation has come at a steep price. Overnight Thursday into Friday, four soldiers from the 401st Brigade’s 52nd Battalion were killed when a Hezbollah anti-tank missile struck their tank and an explosive drone penetrated the vehicle and detonated inside. Among the fallen were the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dor Gedalia Ben Simhon, along with Staff Sgts. Yoav Klein, Liav Kababia, and Nave Habshoosh.

The fighting only intensified from there. Pressing the operation forward, commando forces moved on the ridge overnight Friday into Saturday under a barrage of rockets, mortars, and explosive drones. Sgt. 1st Class Nir Ben Ari was killed in the assault, and 13 other soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously. The volume of incoming has been heavy: Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter reported Hezbollah fired 147 rockets, 20 drones, and nine anti-tank guided missiles at Israeli forces and into Israel over 24 hours. In response, the IDF unleashed waves of strikes across southern Lebanon through the night and into the morning, hitting dozens of Hezbollah sites and operatives—rocket launchers, weapons depots, and command centers—with Lebanese media reporting at least 27 killed. Netanyahu’s office put the two-day tally at more than 300 Hezbollah targets struck and more than 100 fighters killed.

Tehran seized on the strikes, declaring them a violation of its memorandum of understanding and announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz until Israel halts its operations in Lebanon. The move is better read as economic leverage rather than a literal blockade: Iran has worked throughout to keep oil prices high, and simply announcing a closure spooks shippers and lifts prices regardless of whether traffic actually stops. In fact, U.S. Central Command reported that 55 commercial ships had transited the strait; its spokesman flatly insisted “Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz” and that “traffic continues to flow.” Iran, MoU grievance notwithstanding, still dispatched its senior delegation to Switzerland all the same.

By Saturday afternoon, against the backdrop of those Iranian threats and subsequent American pressure, the order came down for the IDF to stand down. A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office and the IDF Spokesperson confirmed the military was halting its fire and remained committed to the ceasefire, though it would continue dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure inside its security zone, the Ali al-Taher Ridge included. Netanyahu, for his part, was unambiguous that Israel will remain in the security zone “as long as necessary to defend [Israel’s] northern border,” and his office warned the IDF would continue to strike “forcefully” if Hezbollah keeps firing.

As it stands, Israel has the facility besieged with dozens of Hezbollah forces still trapped inside—entrances surrounded, the rest under aerial overwatch.

In the Israeli memory of Lebanon, the imposing Beaufort Castle was termed the “monster on the mountain,” while the base on Ali al-Taher Ridge was given the relatively benign name of Pumpkin. Twenty years later, Pumpkin, it turns out, has grown a monster of its own—15 stories down.

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@robsatloff @IsraelKidon @nytimes 🎯

[Robert Satloff @robsatloff]

Sadly, @nytimes misses a critical angle here when it says “#Israel has demanded that the group (#Hezbollah) disarm before it will consider withdrawal,” implying that it alone makes this demand.

In fact, the government of #Lebanon has itself accepted the principle that Israel’s withdrawal is conditioned on the disarmament (and even the dismantlement) of Hezbollah. These commitments were made both in 2024 and 2026.

Indeed, the Lebanese government has promised/agreed to disarm or dismantle Hezbollah not once but at least FIVE times:

- Ta’if accords (1989)
- UNSC 1559 (2004)
- UNSC 1701 (2006)
- Lebanon-Israel ceasefire agreement (2024)
- Lebanon-Israel statement of intent issued during Washington talks (2026)

I believe a correction is warranted.

Lebanon Emerges as Weak Link in U.S.-Iran Deal to End War https://t.co/mq2PG7mWpq via @NYTimes

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@yechielleiter @AmyGuterman 💯👀

[Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter @yechielleiter]

In case you forgot who actually brought war into south Lebanon, let's dig deeper:
This is a Hezbollah command and control room in one of the tunnels under the Beaufort Ridge. It outlines locations of Israeli communities.
Why do you think they need it?

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@JewsFightBack 🎯

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

I lived in Lebanon for 15 years, and in all those years I never missed a speech by Hassan Nasrallah.

I read the Iranian-funded Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar every day.

I met with people who personally knew Nasrallah and heard directly from them about the man.

After all these years, I came to one conclusion: Hassan Nasrallah was honest when he said in an interview on Al-Mayadeen TV in 2022: ‘The wishes of the Ayatollah are my commandments.'

Hezbollah would never do anything if Iran didn’t command it.

What David is saying here is 100% true.

[Embassy of Israel to the USA @IsraelinUSA]

Ask yourselves: why would Hezbollah need stockpiles like this in South Lebanon?

💥 5 tons of explosives
💥 Dozens of killer drones
💥 Land mines and IEDs

This was all meant to be used against the people of Israel, and our northern cities and villages.

This is what we're defending ourselves against.

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@BillAckman @josh_hammer 🎯

[Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter @yechielleiter]

Imagine how long it takes to carve a tunnel network like this into a mountain.

Don't be fooled - this is who Hezbollah is - terrorists occupying Lebanon at the behest of Iran in order to attack Israel.

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@marklevinshow @Eyalo365 🎯

[Scott Mail @scottmail]

@MosabHasanYOSEF @TWreninator 🎯

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

This is a huge underground terror tunnel built by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, around 2 km long and only 10 kilometers from Israel's border.

Israel is fighting a death cult on its borders.

Stand with Israel against terror.

[Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter @yechielleiter]

It takes two to cease fire. Here’s what Hezbollah has done in the last couple of days:

💥 June 18th:
10:06 - 1 Explosive UAV
10:56 - 4 Rockets
11:49 - 4 Rockets
11:58 - 13 Rockets
12:18 - 1 Explosive UAV
12:24 - 2 Rockets
17:04 - 1 Rocket
17:13 - 1 Explosive UAV - 4 injured
17:37 - 1 Rocket
17:38 - 6 Rockets
17:42 - 2 Rockets
17:46 - 2 Rockets
17:48 - 17 Rockets
17:55 - 2 Rockets
18:02 - 2 Rockets
18:07 - 1 Anti-tank missile
18:13 - 3 Rockets
18:26 - 3 Rockets
18:27 - 3 Rockets
18:34 - 2 Rockets
18:50 - 5 Rockets
18:52 - 2 Rockets
18:58 - 3 Rockets
19:16 - 5 Anti-tank missiles
19:36 - 2 Rockets
19:38 - 45 Rockets
19:53 - 1 Anti-tank missile
19:56 - 2 Explosive UAVs
20:14 - 1 Explosive UAV - 1 Injured
21:22 - 1 Explosive UAV - 4 killed
21:28 - 1 IED
22:27 - 1 Rocket
23:36 - 2 Explosive UAVs
23:36 - 2 Explosive UAVs

💥 June 19th:
00:03 - 1 Explosive UAV
04:09 - 3 Rockets
04:40 - 1 Rocket
05:01 - 1 Anti-tank missile
08:33 - 2 Rockets
09:55 - 2 UAVs crossed into Israeli territory
10:53 - IED found in vicinity of forces