The Israel Antiquities Authority recently announced the discovery of a variety of everyday objects in a drainage channel that, 2,000 years ago, ran under the Jerusalem marketplaces. Gavriel Fiske writes:

This channel was usually cleaned regularly by municipal authorities, but the archaeologists found that it was half-filled with silt, indicating “a gradual neglect of city maintenance. And indeed, this very neglect and abandonment that we witness here corresponds to the story of the process of Jerusalem’s destruction,” said Ayelet Zilberstein, who directed the excavation.

Among the discoveries were a delicate glass vial, nearly perfectly preserved, several small oil lamps with soot still in them from use, various coins and beads, and a collection of ceramic vessels used to hold perfume and oil.

Also uncovered were a “large variety of pots and dishes” representing “nearly the complete tableware set of Jerusalem’s residents,” Zilberstein said, a collection “drawn from many houses and from different streets in town, thus presenting us with examples of almost all wares the city’s merchants had to offer.”

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.