One might expect that an unpopular leader facing an upcoming election and narrowing diplomatic horizons would bend over backwards to stay in the good graces of an American president who has already remitted $90 million in aid money and promised to be more favorable than his predecessor. But such laws of political gravity don’t seem to apply to the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas, as Ruthie Blum explains:

In mid-February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken personally phoned Abbas, undoubtedly to discuss all the goodies that the PA could anticipate from President Biden and company, and perhaps to wish him well in the upcoming elections. But rather than bask in the attention that he was receiving from America’s top diplomat, Abbas refused to take the call.

Yes, the head of the tiny terrorism-supporting entity was deeply offended that someone of Blinken’s “inferior” stature was on the line. Abbas, after all, had demanded that Biden himself initiate the conversation, “president to president.”

Instead of warning Abbas not to overestimate his standing in the world relative to that of the secretary of state, Blinken accepted the snub. . . . Ramallah and Washington are now discussing the option of Blinken’s holding the chat with the PA prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh or the senior PA official Hussein al-Sheikh.

Abbas’s gall is not new and has served the PA ruler well with the international community, which has elevated him to ill-deserved heights. This is due to an unfounded, knee-jerk opposition to Israel, not to the way in which he rules his own people, who view him with disdain and outrage.

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.