This week we talk about Operation Iron Swords, October 7, and the International Court of Justice.We also discuss human rights abuses, the Red Sea, and Iran’s influence.Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles StrossTranscriptIn the early morning of October 7, 2023, the militant wing of Hamas—which is also a political organization that has governed the Gaza Strip territory since 2007, a few years after Israel withdrew from the area and then blockaded it, leading to accusations from international human rights organizations that Israel still occupies the area, even if not officially—but the militant wing of this Sunni Islamist group, Hamas, launched a sneak-attack, in coordination with other islamist groups (a term that in this context usually but not always refers to groups that want to claim territory they can govern in accordance with what they consider to be proper Islamic fashion, usually defined by a fairly extreme interpretation of the religion).This sneak-attack was successful in the sense that it caught seemingly everyone off guard, despite the Israeli military&#39;s foreknowledge of this possibility; that foreknowledge only becoming public months after the attack, and the possibility of such an attack dismissed by those who could have prepared for it because it seemed to them to be a sort of pie-in-the-sky aspiration on the part of a group that was disempowered and incapable of putting up any kind of fight beyond periodically launching unsophisticated rockets that could be easily taken out by Israel&#39;s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system.So for more than a year the Israeli government had information indicating Hamas was planning some kind of incursion into Israel, but they dismissed it, and by some accounts they had every reason to do so, as Hamas had seemed to be more chill than usual, pulling back on the overt military activity and lacking sufficient support from the Gaza population to attempt even a tenth of what they had blueprinted.Three months before the attack an Israeli signals intelligence analyst raised a red flag on this issue, indicating that Hamas was conducting intense training exercises that seemed to be in line with those pie-in-the-sky plans, but this flag was ignored by those higher up the chain of command, once again.Consequently, when Hamas launched a huge flurry of rockets, around 3,000 by most estimates, sent drones to take out automated machine guns and cameras placed along the border fences between Israel and Gaza, and sent militants through holes in the fence, in on motorcycles, and over barriers using paragliders, Israeli defense forces were caught flat-footed, taking a surprisingly long time to respond to the incursion and failing to protect a military base that housed the defense division responsible for security in Gaza, alongside several other bases, and the around 1,200 people who were killed and around 250 who were taken hostage.Dozens of nations immediately decried Hamas&#39;s attack as a terror

Middle East Conflicts

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