According to a report on the news website Axios, Biden administration officials held a “high-level meeting” to discuss how to deal with the likely presence of certain right-wing ministers in the new Israeli government. Meanwhile, Washington has been making various efforts to improve relations with the Palestinian Authority. Bassam Tawil comments:

Two . . . Palestinian officials, Majed Faraj and Hussein al-Sheikh, still hold regular meetings with senior representatives of the Biden administration who evidently are not even remotely bothered by their past activities. Faraj, one of the ruling Fatah party’s most prominent activists, was arrested by Israel many times. Altogether, he spent at least six years in Israeli prison for his role in violent activities against Israel and membership in a terror group, especially during the first intifada, which erupted in 1987.

Sheikh, also a Fatah member, spent eleven years in Israeli prison for similar charges. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, he was wanted by Israel for his role in terrorism. In 2005, he was removed from Israel’s list of wanted terrorists, apparently as part of an Israeli-American attempt to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and prevent Hamas from taking over the West Bank. Faraj is head of Palestinian General Intelligence, while Sheikh is considered the number-two in the Palestinian leadership after Mahmoud Abbas.

Recently, Mahmoud al-Habbash, religious-affairs adviser to the Palestinian Authority president, equated the Jews who visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with “those whom Allah has cursed . . . and made of them apes and pigs.” Another senior Palestinian official, Mohammed al-Lahham, recently bragged that 90 percent of the terrorists who carried out attacks against Israelis in 2022 were members of Fatah, headed by the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Lahham also credited Fatah with murdering twenty Israelis, saying this is a source of honor for the faction.

One rarely hears the Biden administration or other Western countries expressing concern over human-rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas against their own people. Many in Washington and other capitals remain obsessed with Israel and refuse to see any wrongdoing on the Palestinian side.

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.