At the United Nations last month, Benjamin Netanyahu and Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in person for the first time—an important sign of the gradual thaw between the two countries that began in 2022. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak examines its significance:

The warm hospitality Turkey’s President Erdoğan showed his Israeli counterpart [Isaac Herzog in March of last year], the growing intelligence cooperation, and the following reciprocal ministerial visits—ranging from the foreign, defense, and economic ministries to the Israeli earthquake rescue and humanitarian mission—have contributed to a fragile normalization between the two countries.

The normalization process of 2022 contrasts with the failed 2016 normalization, particularly at the level of bilateral summits, their frequency, and their public style. Notably, in 2022, we saw the Israeli and Turkish flags waving in the most visible way. Normalization was declared by the former Turkish prime minister Binali Yıldırım and Netanyahu in separate locations via video conferences in Ankara and Rome on June 27, 2016. Erdoğan preferred then not to pose next to an Israeli flag and allowed Yıldırım to take credit as the architect of the normalization.

[T]he Netanyahu-Erdoğan summit should be considered a milestone for bilateral relations if the leaderships of both countries display the political will to deepen the ties.

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.