Archaeologists working in the ancient city of Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel have found a detailed miniature sculpture of a head. Owen Jarus reports:

The sculpture depicts a man with long, black hair and a beard who is wearing a yellow and black headband. He has dark, almond-shaped eyes and a serious expression on his face. Carved in a glazed ceramic called faience, the head is only about 2 inches by 2.2 inches in size and was once part of a small statuette, now lost, that was 8 to 10 inches [high]. . . .

The quality of the carving and its seemingly careful placement inside a possible administrative building at the peak of the city indicate that it depicts an elite person. . . . “We’re guessing probably a king, but we have no way of proving that,” said Robert Mullins, [one of the excavation’s directors].

If this was a king, which one? Radiocarbon dating of organic material found in the same room as the sculpture suggests that the object was constructed sometime between 902 and 806 BCE, Mullins said. At this time, he noted, the borders of three different kingdoms—Israel, Tyre, and Aram-Damascus—were near Abel Beth Maacah. . . . Given the long stretch of time during which the sculpture could have been created and the fact that control of Abel Beth Maacah changed throughout this period, the sculpture could depict numerous kings . . . Three possibilities are King Ahab of Israel, King Hazael of Aram-Damascus, and King Ethbaal of Tyre, but there are many other candidates, [Mullins] said.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.