Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that
a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,
b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and
c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.
It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
Israel tankers are already adding diy cope cages to their Merkavas
To be fair, I would add one too. The calculation I would make however is that when the drone operator sees our tanks they'll go for the one without a cope cage first.
Is that to protect against drones dropping grenades?
Yepp. We've seen tankers adding them to tanks in Ukraine as well.
This is the craziest one I've seen. Not just a cope cage but also explosive bricks added to it.
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1654930572463026179
Damn. Maybe this is why they delayed the offensive.
lol I doubt it, just some tank crews doing what they can to protect themselves, clearly they don't feel very safe.
Tank crews have - in their short history thus far - have always added on extra shit onto their tanks to try and improve their survivability.
Famously the 3rd Army tank crews got their asses chewed out by general patton for putting tree logs and bags of dirt or sand on their Sherman tanks as extra padding to try and prevent the crew from eating nazi AT shells because they looked "unprofessional" but later compromised on letting the tankmen up-armor their tanks with additional steel plates because the soldiers understood the reality that their tank armor was insufficient against axis anti-tank armaments and understandably didn't want to eat shrapnel for lunch.
Patton was such a fucking ghoul.
There are a lot of pictures of armored vehicles padded with logs and other random salvage from battles a few years ago against ISIS in I want to say Indonesia. The ISIS faction there dug-in to urban areas forcing horrible house-to-house combat, Stalingrad style, and the Indonesian armored vehicle crews did what they could to add protection.
Patton's basically like if Trump was one of the big beautiful generals he admires but even more narcissistic and less catty bitch
That's called ERA - Explosive Reactive Armor.
Shaped Charge Warheads are the most common form of anti-tank and anti-armor weapon. They use precisely engineered explosives to turn a cone of copper sheet in to a jet of super-heated fluid metal with enough energy to cut right through the armor of many tanks.
For the jet of metal to form correctly the shaped charge warhead has to detonate at a very specific distance from the armor of the target vehicle. Too close, it doesn't form properly. Too far, it splashes on the surface of the tank. If the cone is disrupted in any way the jet won't form properly.
ERA works such that when the anti-tank weapon with a shaped charge warhead hits the ERA the ERA explodes. The explosion disrupts the formation of the shaped-charge warheads cutting jet of metal, defeating the incoming round. It's quite effective but has the nasty side effect of being hazardous for nearby infantry. ERA is commonly deployed on tanks all over the world.
In the 80s a new kind of anti-tank weapon called a tandem warhead began to come online. Tandem warheads have two explosive charges spaced some distance apart on the rocket. The first small explosive charge is designed to detonate ERA armor. The second charge is a shaped charge that detonates a moment afterwards, exploiting the gap left by the destroyed ERA. Tandem warheads are somewhat finnicky given that a number of things have to happen with very precise timing for them to work, but when they do work they're very effective against all but the most heavily armored vehicles. And they have scored mobility kills against Abrams in the field.
A mobility kill is when an armored vehicle is damaged in such a way that it can no longer move. While it's still quite dangerous it isn't going anywhere until it is rescued and is an easy target for further attacks.
Wiki links
Slat armor
shaped charges
tandem warheads
spaced armor is another kind of defense against shaped charge warheads
Interestingly Hamas has posted videos that purport to show home-made tandem warhead weapons. Shaped charge technology dates to WWII and the mathemtics and engineering are well established and widely known. With the right machine tools it's plausible that the weapons could be manufactured within Gaza. the hardest part would be the precise timing required for the fuses and detonators. Fuses and detonators are very tightly controlled for that reason - it's easy to make a simple HE bomb, but the precisely designed fuses and detonators for more sophisticated weapons are hand to make with craft production.
I made a whole write up summarizing modern anti-tank weapons and defenses last year when the Ukraine war kicked off but it's lost in the depths of ancient megas. I really should start saving my big posts.
Also top attack munitions, like Javelin.
Imagine: the most powerful cope cage in the world vs one paint can full of thermite.
Cant a drone just be flown beneath the cage?
I think it would be very difficult to do that in a battlefield situation. Double so now that the Israeli's have been forced to acknowledge that their tanks can be killed by an RC plane with a mortar round from the stone age. If i was an israeli tank platoon commander I'd have my vehicles spread enough enough that the commanders could cover each other with their turret machine guns and be ready to fire the tank's defensive smoke screen if they suspected they were being targeted.
Afaik know, though, Merkavas are not equipped with remote-controlled machine guns that can be operated from within the safety of the tank. If they want to shoot down incoming drones the commander will, I presume, need to open his hatch and use the commander machine gun to try to shoot them down manually. They could in theory use the coaxial .50 bmg aligned with the main cannon buy I'm not sure how good that would be for tracking a small flying drone.
And once that hatch is open, the commander is vulnerable to small arms fire and the tank to a well lobbed grenade.
What do you suppose is a goid counter for those cages? 2 bombs?
I don't know. A lot of modern tanks have the option to use kinetic penetrators, smallish rods of tungsten (or uranium) that are fired at enormous velocity and punch through even heavy armor, but I don't think you can mount that on a drone.
Lot easier to notice then I think
I don't think i've ever seen slat armor or cage armor on a Merkava. How the mighty have fallen.