Israel’s broadened focus on Hizbollah in the region was accompanied by a growing, and eventually insurmountable technical advantage — spy satellites, sophisticated drones and cyber-hacking capabilities that turn mobile phones into listening devices.

It collects so much data that it has a dedicated group, Unit 9900, which writes algorithms that sift through terabytes of visual images to find the slightest changes, hoping to identify an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker.

Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials.

Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border. At one point, Israel monitored the schedules of individual commanders to see if they had suddenly been recalled in anticipation of an attack, one of the officials said.

But each one of these processes required time and patience to develop. Over years, Israeli intelligence was able to populate such a vast target bank that in the first three days of its air campaign, its warplanes tried to take out at least 3,000 suspected Hizbollah targets, according to the IDF’s public statements.

“Israel had a lot of capabilities, a lot of intelligence stored waiting to be used,” said a former official. “We could have used these capabilities way longer ago during this war, but we didn’t.”

That patience appears to have paid off for the military. For more than 10 months, Israel and Hizbollah traded cross-border fire, while Israel killed a few hundred of Hizbollah’s low-level operatives, the vast majority of them within a slowly expanding theatre of the conflict, stretching a few kilometres north of the border.

That appears to have lulled Nasrallah into thinking that the two arch-rivals were involved in a new sort of brinkmanship, with well-defined red lines that could be managed until Israel agreed a ceasefire in Gaza with Hamas, allowing Hizbollah an “off-ramp” that would allow it to agree a ceasefire with Israel.

The group had only started this round of fire with Israel on October 8, in solidarity with Iran-backed Hamas, in an attempt to keep at least some Israeli firepower pinned down on its northern border.

“Hizbollah felt obliged to take part in the fight, but at the same time limited itself severely — there was never really any intention of them taking an initiative where they might have some advantage,” said Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

“They seem to have thrown off a few rockets here and there, and taken a few hits in return, and getting lulled into a notion that this was the limit of it — they kept one, if not both, hands tied behind their back and did nothing approaching their own full capability.”

in recent months, if not years, Israeli intelligence had nearly perfected a technique that allowed it to, at least intermittently, locate Nasrallah, who had been suspected of mostly been living underground in a warren of tunnels and bunkers.

In the days after October 7, Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where Nasrallah had been located by Israel’s intelligence directorate Aman. The raid was called off after the White House demanded Netanyahu do so, according to one of the Israeli officials.

On Friday, Israeli intelligence appears to have pinpointed his location again — heading into what the IDF called “a command and control” bunker, apparently to a meeting that included several senior Hizbollah leaders and a senior Iranian commander of Revolutionary Guards operations.

In New York, Netanyahu was informed on the sidelines of his address at the UN General Assembly, where he rejected the notion of a ceasefire with Hizbollah and vowed to press on with Israel’s offensive. A person familiar with the events said that Netanyahu knew of the operation to kill Nasrallah before he delivered his speech.

Israel’s campaign is not over, says Netanyahu. It is still possible that Israel will send ground troops into southern Lebanon to help clear a buffer zone north of its border. Much of Hizbollah’s missile capability remains intact.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) accused the Rwandan government on Thursday of perpetrating “serious human rights violations in the North Kivu region” (eastern DRC), on the first day of a case initiated by Kinshasa at the East African Court of Justice (EACJ).

The court in Arusha, Tanzania, began hearing claims arising from the case filed by the Congolese government against Rwandan for alleged conflicts in North Kivu, as reported on its social media.

In this and other Congolese provinces, the DRC Armed Forces (FARDC) are facing numerous armed groups, including the powerful March 23 Movement (M23), linked to Rwanda.

“The DRC accuses Rwanda of acts of aggression that allegedly violate its sovereignty, territorial integrity, political stability and independence,” added the EACJ in its statement.

On Thursday, the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced repeated and indiscriminate shelling of displaced camps in northeastern DRC by the Rwandan army and the rebel M23.

He also accused the FARDC and its allied militias, renamed ‘wazalendo’ (‘patriots’ in Swahili), of having put the population at risk by deploying artillery around these settlements, located on the outskirts of the city of Goma, Capital of North Kivu.

The full splendor of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock's speech to the UN Security Council cannot be conveyed in German. One would like to sue all the English teachers who taught her for damages. Including the British university where she claims to have studied.

But that is by no means all. If one were to try to convey a physical counterpart to the intellectual and emotional experience, it would be a severe migraine attack, nausea included. Much of it is not Baerbock's doing, but arises from the dissonance between her and the world. And when you look at her face as she recites her strangely soulless English sentences, it is, for the first time, devoid of any childishness, devoid of any coquetry, but what emerges is as evil as the face of a Hillary Clinton (Baerbock would certainly take that as a compliment).

All this girlish posturing has not prevented time from passing her by, as quickly as she is changing. This becomes particularly clear in two moments.

She sticks to the narrative she started years ago and begins with an absurd formulation: "Women areremovedd in Bucha for 943 days." A sentence that does not even make sense in her world; after all, Bucha has been under Ukrainian control since the end of March 2022. She wants to stir up emotions and continues with "tortured people in eastern Ukraine" and deported children.

No one in the German UN embassy or from the staff of the Foreign Office seems to have told her that the world outside the Western bubble has seen the images from Gaza, how torn parts of children are recovered from the ruins of the houses bombed by Israel and collected in bags, because nothing more than these pieces remain. And that the role of the outraged good person now has a simple but insurmountable prerequisite: calling the genocide in the Gaza Strip a genocide.

The accusations she wants to make against Russia, Bucha, the "deportation" of children, the shelling of a children's hospital in Kiev, even if they were true (and they are all disprovable), would pale in comparison to the horrors in Gaza, where even a children's hospital bombed to the ground is just another number on a long list. You would expect a foreign minister to be at least aware enough to avoid an immediate collision. But she is not clever. She did not even notice the ground shifting beneath her feet. It is theoretically possible, the classic argument would be: even if there are worse crimes to deal with, we should not forget... she lacks the maturity and awareness, or perhaps the courage, to create space for her narrative by admitting this other reality.

The second of these moments is an attempt to attack the Russian ambassador. The tweet concerns the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Dmitri Polyansky, on the General Assembly’s decision on Sunday:

"Unfortunately, there is nothing to celebrate about the UN's adoption of the Pact for the Future today. The UN has trampled on its own principles to please a group of delegations from the 'beautiful garden' that usurped the negotiations from the outset. And the majority from the 'jungle', like a simple herd, simply did not have the backbone to protest and stand up for their rights. And they will be the ones who will bear the consequences. The result was that there was no inclusive negotiation process in the normal sense of the word. The new President of the General Assembly tried to save the day, but it was too late.

This Pact is unbalanced and contains very dangerous provisions that will backfire and undermine the multilateralism and intergovernmental nature of the UN upheld by the UN Charter. It is an enormous blow to the organisation as a whole.”

Baerbock, who clearly does not know any better and who has not been told any better (or who may have been told but did not want to listen), tries to turn this comment against Russia:

“Her truth is that the majority from the ‘jungle’ were unable to make the right decision. That is how Putin’s Russia talks about other countries today. The jungle. That is how they talk about Ukraine. A beauty that must beremovedd.”

She does not know that “garden” and “jungle” are a quote. And this despite the fact that the originator of this colonialist metaphor, Josep Borrell, was the speaker immediately before her in this very meeting. She does not know that his statement at the time that the EU is the garden and the rest of the world is the jungle has become a catchphrase for the countries of the Global South, and that the “jungle” necessarily includes Russia. The disparaging look that she, for once correctly, takes from this formulation is not the look of Russia and its deputy UN ambassador, but that of the EU and its foreign policy spokesman, for whom the West was the "beautiful garden" threatened by the overgrown jungle.

The deeply racist remark that Ukraine is "a beauty that must beremovedd" also brought to mind two associations - the newspaper report that more than half of the prostitutes in Berlin brothels are now Ukrainian, and the disputes in Israel, where there was a serious argument about whether Israeli soldiers should have the right toremoved Palestinian prisoners. The newspaper report may only be known in Germany, and even then only to some people. But theremoved story from Israel is known all over the world.

It almost seems as if everything she says is pages from a script that has been sitting in a drawer for years. As if she had rehearsed everything so painstakingly in advance that there was no longer any possibility of adapting the text and acting to the changed reality. So she stumbles from trap to trap.

The Ukrainian power supply has been destroyed?

"Not by chance, but because winter is coming back. Minus 15 degrees means that the electricity doesn't work, the heating doesn't work, and the water freezes. That is a crime against humanity."

And again and again, that other film runs through my head, from Gaza. Putin bombed a children's hospital in Kiev.

"And that's why we believe we have to send more air defenses to protect children's hospitals."

Is it just my inner eye that sees a German air defense system next to a Palestinian hospital, or at least protecting a Lebanese one? It's not. The whole audience has changed - worldwide.

This hypocrisy, built around the concept of a "just and lasting peace", around this "peace plan" of Mr. Zelensky, who demands a Russian surrender in the midst of his own defeat. Even if Zelensky is a cynical and ridiculous figure, who constantly makes you wonder how he can fit the guilt of having the deaths of so many people on his conscience into his short body, there is still a touch of tragedy about him.

Baerbock, who less than three years ago came into the spotlight with the attitude of going down in history as a world star, who, with the appropriate arrogance, considered neither dress codes nor diplomatic restraint necessary and who believed that the mixture of German economic power and green self-confidence would carry her to the heights of international politics, has overtaken the said economic power and the country's status on the way down. She looks angry, bitter and old in her speech. Almost as if she had understood that she was only representing the discarded mistress of the United States.

"We as European neighbors, we as Germans, my country, what we have heard here from our Polish friends, which was responsible for the worst crime on the European continent, who are lucky to live in peace again - my generation - to live in peace again because others were there for us."

This grammatical and historical confusion is her justification for why Germany in particular must support Ukraine. Perhaps she understands what she means. It's just that she misses the crucial point if she thinks she has to remember historical grace: that it was the Soviet Union that exercised this grace. That it let an open account of 1,100 destroyed cities, 70,000 destroyed villages go, for the sake of a peaceful future. In order to be thanked by her, Baerbock, in two ways, through the constant attacks on Russia, the arms deliveries, and also through "support" of the Kiev Ukraine, which is actually a form of annihilation.

There are some characters who make you wonder whether they don't occasionally have a sudden thought about the guilt they have brought upon themselves. Economics Minister Habeck is likely to become tearful at the latest when he has a blood alcohol level of one per mille and complain about his difficult fate, of meaning so well and yet having failed so badly. And then every now and then he might look uncertainly over his shoulder to see how close the shadow that follows him is.

Baerbock, the comedian? Her role and her acting style have outlived their usefulness. She acts like a silent film actress in a talkie. Every movement, every facial expression seems like a caricature. But she doesn't have what it takes to be a Norma Desmond either; she lacks the authenticity and talent for tragedy. She will perhaps have her memoirs written and spend a while traveling from big city to big city, stumbling through the pre-written text, and maybe she will be allowed to pat a few schoolchildren's heads somewhere. No, she won't even fall, it will be more like a kind of shrinking or drying out. Something banal, like shaking dust out of a blanket.

She complained that the Russian ambassador left before her performance. "I've experienced this several times." Yes, understandable, there is no reason to subject yourself to this torture. Not even the embarrassment that she initially conveyed in abundance is left. Her performances are just a memory of something that is past. As soon as the acute pain subsides, all meaning disappears.