How Gaza-made weapons are impacting the battle against Israeli armored vehicles, with Jon Elmer

this map shows the roughly the northern half of the Gaza Strip with Gaz Gaza City in the middle and the shaded areas show the areas which the Israelis are in or have entered from and as we've talked about in recent weeks Israel has tried to enter Gaza from different directions what we saw over the past couple of days coming out of the Kasam brigades the military wing of Hamas was a whole series of videos unfortunately we are not going to show them because our videos get banned when we show them thanks to the censorship uh of social media including the platform we're on currently by the way before I get to to talking about those videos because of the social media censorship which includes clud this platform and the other platforms that we all know and love I really want people to go to electronic in.net and sign up for our mailing list because that is the best way to make sure that no matter what the censorship is we can still be in touch with you now so back to this map of these videos what the videos show in summary is uh Palestinian resistance Fighters continuing to attack and Destroy Israeli armor in the most northern parts of Gaza so we're talking about the areas that would be on that map uh the the sort of the top right shaded area sort of the the Shaded area that is to the right on the screen so we're talking about areas north of bet hanon and bet lahia and they are continuing to destroy Israeli armor using primarily what we're seeing in the videos these yine 105 anti-tank weapons that we're g to get to in a second and also uh attacking there was at least one video of them attacking Israeli soldiers in fact there have been several but I'm just talking about in the last couple of days we'd seen some previously but I think this came out on Saturday or Sunday there was a video of them there were Israeli soldiers who had taken up position inside the building again this is in the northeastern corner of Gaza and they were attacked by the resistance with one of these tbg uh rocket uh grenades I'm going to ask you about that too but my bigger Point here and today they haven't at least before as of the time we started the live stream I haven't checked while we've been on air but uh they had not released videos but Kasam had this morning um issued a whole string of statements about them continuing to attack and Destroy armor and to Target Israeli Soldiers with snipers in different parts of Gaza so again the the point here seems to be or at least what I'm seeing is that even in the areas that are very close to the Israeli border Israel has not been able to establish firm control in other words they have entered these areas but the Israelis cannot let down their God so my question to how is that that after 37 38 days the Israelis still cannot be secure even in these areas that are still very close to their border and what are these weapons that the resistance are using I thought that Israel had the most sophisticated armor in the world they it we've talked about it before it's the thickest armor in the world because they don't have to put it on airplanes like the American do and they also have something called reactive armor which explodes when something hits it the armor actually explodes in order to repel any m munition is this all really happening is the resistance really destroying all these Israeli tanks and by the way as of I think it was Saturday Kasam said they had destroyed over 100 60 Israeli military vehicles in Gaza so John what is going on here what are these weapons is this all real how it must be because Israel hasn't occupied Gaza City yet but what's going on yeah well I mean I think that the longer Israel's in place in these spots the more likely they are to get hit I think that it's important to remember we're talking about a Guerilla army they don't have tanks airplanes uh uh to you know to meet a mechanized invasion of hundreds literally hundreds of armored vehicles the resistance uh the Guerilla resistance isn't um tasked with having their own tanks and meeting that Advance the fact that the Israelis can advance um behind hundreds of Tanks isn't surprising um to me it's more uh normal that they would then be attacked once they have fixed positions which is what we've seen in b hanon um and B lahia in the Northeast and the Northwest their Israeli positions are constantly under attack and the way that Israel's fought this war has been to just destroy everything in front of them and then move up um you know so they weren't they're not going to fight block by block they're going to raise the blocks and then bulldoze um through those spots um the cassan Brigade said that they Abu aeda said on Saturday that they've hit partially or completely destroyed 60 armored vehicles the Israelis um for their part they say that um 10% of their stock is out of service and the other ones are in for repairs um so basically you have abua using a number based on the number of uh armored vehicles the Israelis have basically Abu abeda is talking about a number something around 18% and the Israelis are talking about something around 10% so their numbers aren't that far off the Israelis are not releasing their casualties they haven't been forthright uh releasing casualties they drip them out um sometimes two and three and four days later they haven't given any uh a a number of wounded yet the closest that we have to a number of Israeli wounded was the IDF uh valorized their medivac team their helicopter rescue team uh six days into the ground war they had carried out 200 60 helicopter medevacs from Gaza um and they say that matches with something like 45 dead soldiers at this point um which by the way is a significant number more than the 2014 War um similar to the number in the ground um uh in the week the key week of fighting in the 2006 War but Israel doesn't want to have spectacular numbers come out uh early in this Invasion so it would be interesting to see if those numbers over these weeks rise but what Abu aeda is saying um is that they target these vehicles and partially or completely destroy them um in part because of the re uh the protective armor that you described the armored vehicles have a system called the trophy system that works on radar uh it detects an incoming round and then launches a counter round that's essentially like a shotgun spray um that attacks the incoming round and that's some of the videos that we've seen um when you see the big large flare of flames that's actually the burnoff of the weapon from the Israeli counter uh measure but the armor only has a shot that shot and then it doesn't work anymore it needs to be repaired so if those are being hit twice in a row um they're penetrating the nammer as it's called armored vehicle that Israel again all of these tools are new the trophy system operated in 2014 during that war but that war was very limited uh in scope this is the first time that the that the active protective armor system that the whole world is watching as a laboratory that the first time that it's been used on these armored vehicles so primarily the Israelis use four armored vehicles they use an armored personnel carrier that you see at the top that they have about 250 of and those hold like 12 or 13 troops and we saw on the 31st of October an ambush by the cassam brigades where they fired two simultaneous anti-tank weapons um the first one sets off the reactive armor and the second one hit inside the nmer and killed 11 soldiers at once that vehicle below it um that's called an A10 it's a wield armored vehicle that's state-of-the-art that's the most defended piece of rolling equipment that's ever been made that's what the Israelis say um it's completely um it has no windows it has no vulnerability points uh in its armor it works by camera that works all the way around the vehicle and you watch on television screens and the troops are in the inside of these vehicles um in part because of what I said the 8,000 the 5,000 air strikes um that have happened in um in the Gaza Strip they are all around their troops Israel is repeatedly when they meet contact when they meet resistance um they call in an air strike and bomb the entire building um that that's that that resistance comes from so those are the two type of armored uh vehicle carriers for troops then they move those vehicles um through the bulldozer that you see at the top there they've built isra Isel um people may remember going back to the second andata because Israel's been using these caterpillar D9 bulldozers um to to create war crimes uh to execute war crimes um this is the buffer zone making tool this is the tool that raised the center of the Janine camp in 2002 um you know this is the bulldozzer that ran over Rachel Corey in Rafa on the Philadelphia Corridor when she was defending civilian homes that were being bulldozed by these bulldozers and then at the bottom there you see that's their vaunted mercava tank which is the strongest tank most armored tank ever built and the thing that they've done with their armored vehicles um previously um so what they've done with their armored vehicles is they've used the hull from the marava tank which has been the most armored vehicle um that any army has had for a number of decades um and and what they've done is taken the hull of that tank and turned those into their armored personnel carriers so essentially Israel unlike any other country in the world has fully armored tank armor on their uh Patrol vehicles um and so you see those are those are what Israel those are the four main tools that were looking at that Israel is using and the Palestinians have countered that um by their own indigenous weapons making uh uh manufacturing capacity they have decided very sensibly to use previously existing launcher systems people are probably familiar with the rocket propelled grenade launcher the RPG um that you've seen on Resistance Fighters for decades these are not new weapons at all but what the cassandre Gades this is a clip from their video when they released this weapon this is called the Yasin and it's an anti-tank uh shell that they've built themselves um in Gaza and to and applied it to an already existing uh weapon system and so what they've done is mass-produced this shell which you can see in that photo that's got a cassam uh manufacturer spray painting them black when we look at them in the videos we can see that they're black back um but what you're seeing there is the Yasin that's the weapon that we've seen be used 160 times plus whatever number was today it looked like dozens um that's the weapon that the Palestinians are using they're using it from a rocket propelled grenade launcher uh apparatus that everyone in the world has um but they've ingeniously created the Warhead um which is the the fat part you see see there um is a second charge so it's called a tandem charge Warhead the top piece that you see there has a charge in it and then the second one the larger one uh below it you fire that from the shoulder uh fired rocket launcher so anyone can just hold it on their shoulder any fighter can use it um and they can mass-produce these and the first charge is designed to set off the reactive armor um and then the idea is is that the second charge um can then penetrate or if there's not reactive armor when these were first invented um it was to break the first one would break the armor and weaken it and the second one would penetrate and so that's what we're israels talking that's what the Palestinians are using they call it a Yasin because they designed it um they designed it as a copy of an already existing weapon but they make it indigenously in Gaza and they named after sh Ahmed Yin who is the founder of Hamas um who incidentally well we have this captive situation was also released in a prisoner exchange like Yahya sinir the leader of Hamas now was um in a prisoner exchange before the first inada so they've named this after uh the founder of Hamas and they've mass-produced these weapons and now we've seen them in various um uses in those videos that it would be good if we could show those videos they're not um you don't see any Carnage there's no reason they're not graphic they're not graphic there's no reason outright censorship yeah there's out censorship yeah it's outright censorship and my and I I have to be honest I avoid to the greatest extent possible watching Western media mainstream media so I don't know I but I don't think they show them very much on on Western media either because because the they the impression they give is really quite damning in terms of the effectiveness of the resistance and the ineffectiveness of the Israeli Army again when I say ineffectiveness let let me be clear the Israeli Army is absolutely the best army in the world at Mass murdering children they and in fact the statistics that come out have come out in in recent days we mentioned this previously that the number of children excuse me I should cover this this uh logo that's not that was not intended but uh the the uh the uh the number of children killed in Gaza in the last month by Israel exceeds the entire number of children killed in all armed conflicts in the world since 2019 they're just absolutely horrific uh numbers so Israel hands down world champions world champions at child murder that's not what I'm talking about when I say they're ineffective what what I say is that that they have not been able to establish military control over even the edges of the Gaza Strip where we're seeing these videos that are undeniable they're undeniable when you look at the videos that the Israeli Army cannot sit securely in any part of Gaza without being subject to these devastating attacks by theen uh uh anti-tank grenades that you just mentioned but also John tell us about these tbg grenades because they look the same from the outside as far as I can tell but they are different and they're used for different purpose and again the reason we're going into this in detail is because I think it it's important that people understand because on paper you would think well the Israeli Army it's overwhelming it's so Superior resistance has no chance and I think the reason we need to get down into the weeds a little bit is so that people understand that it's not quite as simple as that so tell us about this this this tbg grenade and what that is John so they basically used the same model that they created these shells and they have multi-purpose to the shells we've seen the Yassin shell be dropped from um from a quadcopter we've on top of a tank so that it hits the the the top um turret and they also and they hand deliver them we've seen videos with Palestinian Fighters literally holding the yine Warhead and placing it into the weak spot on the mara above the um above the protective armor which we we talked about last show um so the theyve also made in that same Warhead they made uh a thermobaric grenade which is a a fuel bomb which is an intense um intense fuel bomb that we saw them use against an Israeli troop position on Saturday in banon which surely um surely killed both those soldiers but again when you look at the IDF reporting they never reported uh two soldiers killed in a b hanon house so it's not clear exactly what's going on we're definitely seeing uh many armored vehicles being hit because the active protection system also uh if you're close to it it doesn't work as well and we've seen some really Point Blank including literally putting it with your hand we've seen some point blank um attacks that look like the uh reactive armor wouldn't have an opportunity from that from that closeness um to hit and so essentially the Israelis are afraid to come out of their vehicles um because of these indigenously produced weapons that we don't we don't know about these I've studied this for my whole life we knew that the Yasin which started as a a normal uh rocket propelled grenade and had in 2003 and it has been built over the years to improve it um based on the improvements of Israeli armor so when they invented the AR the nammer armored vehicle that had a thicker um skin on it of armored skin the previous rocket propelled grenades um weren't effective against it so they the Palestinians have adapted in their own indigenous weapons industry to make a a shell um that that upgrades based on the upgrades to Israeli armor and they appear to be working very effectively they can be mass-produced and given to all their Fighters we don't know they only first announced the existence of this weapon uh we saw it in a parade U before but the actual announcement of this weapon was at the beginning of this war and they showed us the underground uh man manufacturing facility um where it's made and they've shown us the capacity to use that same shell size and Manufacturing guideline to also create secondary weapons like a thermobaric grenade which is um a more of an anti-personnel type weapon that will be used I think you'll see used a lot against these Israel troop positions that take up buildings so essentially Israel's Warf fighting method is to move heavily um with their armor in large numbers um and take the area and move into the buildings that's what we've seen in the West Bank that's what we saw in South Lebanon um that's been the tactic and then once they're in those buildings and once their positions are fixed um it serves that the Guerilla Army um would attack more once those positions are fixed than they would of the advance and so we're literally just seeing the first stages of this war um and in the first stages of the war the Israelis admit so the Israelis admit to having 700 of these armored vehicles and they're talking about more than 10% being completely out of service they also have at least a third of their army in Lebanon so you can cut that 700 by a third um and then you talk about more than 10% around 10% are out of service basically the IDF numbers are pretty similar to what Abu obeda is saying even though the Israelis are clearly understating their numbers um it's possible the Palestinians are as well because there they've been really remarkable discipline in the resistance communic they res they release these communic all day long often 25 30 in a day they tell you what axis that it fought on the main axis are in the Northwest B lahia Northeast in banon and then they've pushed over from the East um around juhar Al dick which is in the Southeast um in the southeast of Gaza City and each of those advances that we've seen um the Israelis have been met um by videos that we've seen that Mark in the dozens so we can match these videos to these reports but they aren't they they aren't giving away operational Security in these reports if anything the Israelis actually say more in their reports about how long the gun battles are because you know the Israelis will report an eight hour they reported an eight hour gun battle in uh jabalia last week before they massacred hundreds of people by dropping bombs on top of them the cber gates don't say it was an eight- hour gun battle they say where it happened they say what weapon was used um and so they're able to tell us what's happening without giving away operational security and I think that's one of the things about those videos as well is that they don't give away their positions um because that's very dangerous for one thing um it's already a dangerous job the drones are in the air constantly so any firing position is at risk um we saw nasala give a speech um on Saturday where he talked about the uh the drones that Israel has that are new to the war fighting we haven't there hasn't been a war when Israel has had access to these weapons there's a lot of new weapons for the Israelis and for the Palestinians because the Yasin um anti-tank shell is just one of a number of weapons that the indigenous Palestinian resistance has created including attack drones um we saw last week they released a torpedo um that they built um on their own building Under Siege um you know abua called you know called it an impossible situation that they live in um but they've built with their own hands the tools to fight these most sophisticated tens of millions of dollar um you know Israeli weapon systems billions of dollars total on October 7th they burst through a billion dooll wall to to start all of this um and they're doing it with this like very modest uh indigenous capability to create to mass produce it's not they didn't create this weapon to show it on a video um and to fire it off uh once in a video and to brag about it they're showing it being used hundreds of times in all different circumstances so they've essentially created a light infantry weapon Under Siege in the Gaza Strip um that has been effective now for uh two plus weeks um of constant Invasion by hundreds literally hundreds we saw one satellite photo uh showed almost a 100 Israeli armored vehicles at just one of those staging points and there's they showed them and and that one of those videos which was absolutely spectacular uh showed it it was filmed from a drone again this is a Kasam video so it's filmed from the sky and it shows these armored vehicles at a distance you know as if you're looking down towards a parking lot but instead of being cars on asphalt it's tanks on you know a dirt field and two of the tanks just explode and I assume that that was done maybe with air dropped Munitions but John I know that we're going to we're we're we're about to wrap up so just very quickly I wanted to ask you just very briefly to give a comment about what you're seeing on the Northern front with Lebanon because that has heated up today uh there has been Hezbollah has responded to Israeli attacks uh that had killed civilians over the last few days and uh hisbah of course doesn't operate under the same Siege conditions as Israel as as excuse me as Gaza even though of course hisbah is still under under siege in a certain way they have more access to the outside world so presumably they have more access to sophisticated weapons than in Gaza yes they do they absolutely do and I think that's why you see two aircraft carriers from the United States floating off the the coast is is because of U hezbollah's capabilities um we've seen in the north Hezbollah has been very measured um very um disciplined um in the way that the escalation has has happened but the escalation is continuing there's bigger weapons being used today than um two weeks ago three weeks ago a month ago um they're now firing Buran missiles that um nsta confirmed uh in his speech on Saturday which carry 3 to 500 kilograms of explosives so were one of these missiles to be used on an Israeli position um they would be significant consequences absolutely um I think that from on the Lebanon front you know nasella gave that the speech on Saturday and I think he he touched on it he said that the Israeli that the back channels of the Americans he didn't talk to the Israelis again um the back channels of the Americans are threatening um are threatening Lebanon are threatening has bolla are threatening the regional um Arab states um with total Destruction if they join this war and that hasn't uh stopped them it hasn't stopped holla escalating um it hasn't stopped the the houthis in Yemen the yemeni Army um is launching ballistic missiles and drone swarms um the houthis downed uh an mq9 Reaper which is the the sort of uh the pride and joy of the American um hunter killer drones um the houthis shot one down um so Nala talked about that he talked about the multiple fronts right the Americans are being hit in Iraq um and Syria as well um and then there's a Lebanon front and of course there's a West Bank front as well so it's a multi-front war I think a lot of people are really expecting Hezbollah um to carry out some kind of spectacular attack um to come to the defense of of people in Gaza and I think that's a fair uh feeling to have the resistance has the capabilities um but I think that it's important and we're probably going to be talking about this for a while on this show that it's very difficult um and it's important not to talk about a war as if it's like a football game that has a clock and there's a certain score at a certain moment in the game um it doesn't work it doesn't work like that and so it's difficult in any given moment um to just give a snapshot of exactly what is happening um but yeah in the north uh you know something approaching 80 Hezbollah Fighters have been killed um that war at any other time um we would call probably call it a war that would be that that's right thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our YouTube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the YouTube algorithm and it helps us to get around Silicon Valley censorship as much as 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