📖 🇺🇸 ☢️ Cheney recollecting the joint staff told him in 1991 it would take 17 tactical nuclear weapons to destroy an Iraqi Republican Guard division. And that's with greater concentration of force than exists in Ukraine today (not that anyone's operating as a division)

🔶️ Cheney: "The nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons option was something I wanted. I wanted to know myself, if something happened, is this an option?...I found out it takes 17 weapons to destroy an Iraqi Republican Guard division...that is what I was told."

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/richard-b-cheney-oral-history

📎 Shashank Joshi

📝 🇵🇸 🇮🇱 Why Samson Doctrine doesn't work in the 21st Century | CIG #commentary

🔶️ In the Bible, Samson the Nazirite toppled the Philistine government in Gaza. He dragged them down along with himself by destroying the pillars of their Temple. "Let me die with the Philistines!" (Judges 16:30). This mindset is mirrored in Israeli strategic policy, where they would launch full-scale nuclear retaliation if they faced destruction. Now, throughout the Oct 7th War, the Israeli Defense Forces have flattened the Gaza Strip through indiscriminate bombardment. The impact on Hamas' military capabilities however, is negligible.

🔶️ Samson Doctrine made sense in the 1960s when politically fragile secular states opposed Israel with conventional militaries. But the math has changed since then. Direct threats to Israel are mainly an amalgamation of various factions, ideologies and non-state actors. Much like Hamas, will bombing cities and deserts militarily defeat them?

🔶️ Whether or not the US prevents Israel from using nuclear weapons, there is no guarantee it would achieve the killing blow. Even worse, an Israel which no longer holds any nuclear deterrence after expending their stocks. Mulling the Samson Option is to acknowledge that Israel is losing the strategic war.

🔶️ It will bloody the nose of the region, with the added effect of uniting neighboring countries against Israel which have been previously divided. Effectively reversing decades of Israeli foreign policy gains. Can Israel survive isolated from the majority of the world? Opposing forces have the capabilities to blockade the majority of goods arriving into Israel along with the destruction of their power grid.

🔶️ The cost so far without nukes has nearly brought about the complete and total destruction of Israel. Their economy is shattered, Israelis are exhausted, the sea blockade lingers and the US military is spread too thin, weary of waging wars for Israel in the middle east while refocusing the majority of manpower & material towards Europe and the Pacific. Leaving Israel to face an unprecedented existential crisis like no other.

🇺🇦🇷🇺 - Incoming missiles alert in Crimea.

— 🇮🇷 NEW: The IRGC Intelligence Apparatus has foiled several terrorist plots and arrested the terrorists behind them, who planned to create an atmosphere of insecurity during the election campaign – IRNA

@Middle_East_Spectator

Reports of 4 Palestinians targetted inside the bombed house.

Hebrew media:
This was a targeted strike using an F-16 fighter that attacked a house occupied by 4 terrorists.

Update:
The discovery of a casualty under the rubble

Palestinian health ministry spokesman : one martyr and five injuries ,amongst them two severely injured, due to the occupation’s bombing of Nour Shams camp in Tulkarm.

Seems like this method is working effectively

🇮🇱- Over the past few hours, Huge demonstrations took place today in Jerusalem following the supreme court's decision of forced conscription for some ultra Orthodox Jews. Ultra Orthodox jews believe they shouldn't be in the army and they have to dedicate their lives to study the Torah.

Ultra-Orthodox demonstrators hung banners in several areas of Jerusalem saying, “We will not enlist in the enemy’s army.”

🇮🇱- One of the signs raised by an anti-zionism ultra Orthodox jew says:

We were here before you and lived in peace with our Arab neighbors. We did not want a state because its existence contradicts the Jewish religion
You do not have the right to demand that we bear the burden to which we objected.