Resistance reuses unexploded Israeli bombs, with Jon Elmer

You are watching and listening to the electronic inifat. I am John Elmer. This is the resistance report for day 580. As Nora said, I will be covering Yemen uh in another segment uh later on in the show. Uh but as always, let's begin with Gaza. We're going to pull up this first map that is updated this week. This is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs uh map. And you can see the purple on this map is the buffer zone and the orange is evacuation no-go areas. You combine those two and you get at least at this point 70% of the territory of Gaza is a no-go zone or a buffer zone. that has been consistent um consistently uh climbing each week uh by a small number, but by and large the Israelis have uh op have operated in what are the buffer zones and everything moving forward now is going to be in builtup areas and there's going to be significant resistance in those areas. Um, we are reporting today on day 68 of the total siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip. Uh, Israel has been bragging on their military field report channels about 50 air strikes a day. Norah talked about the carnage that that has created. Those are civilian targets. Um the resistance uh encounters with the Israelis are um a mere uh fraction of the toll um from what we can see right now. um the beginnings of the press uh on the south uh have happened and this week is the first week that we're seeing consistent resistance operations on a day-to-day basis um throughout the south based on the Mor corridor. Also this week, just to say uh the Israeli military chief of staff uh called has issued a call up for tens of thousands of reserves. The Israelis are talking uh about a major operation in Gaza as if that hasn't been going on for 580 days. Um they're calling it operation Gideon's chariot. And the prime minister has made it clear that this plan differs from its predecessors in that we are moving the method of raids to occupying the territories and remaining in them. And there was an interesting report on NPR this week where they had a Harets correspondent on who talked about how the English language uh statements by the Israeli military are completely different than the Hebrew statements. Um so I'm going to skip the English statements and we'll just hear what they're telling their own people in what they believe is their secret language of Hebrew. Um um the main part of this plan is to push the population south into Rafa again which is exactly the same as the uh initial operation that is now in day 580. Um but the goal is to um to permanently occupy according to the Israelis the land and to um evoke the transfer of Palestinians once they reach Rafa. um they will be given the quote unquote voluntary transfer which is of course not a concept. Um it's ethnic cleansing um of the highest order um and a war crime of the highest order after 580 days of these crimes. It's hard to imagine we could get worse, but this plan is worse. But the uh Israeli military, there was a leaked document shown to Harris this week. Um the Israeli military planning document that listed the objectives of the uh a p of the pending uh operation. The first one is defeating the Cassam brigades. So again, they have not defeated the Cassam brigades despite uh reporting on the resistance report for uh 100 plus shows uh talking about how they have not defeated them. They admit, of course, that they have not defeated the Cassam brigades and they must do that in this new operation. Um, they will take uh operational control over territory. Again, we've been hearing about operational control over territory since November 2023. They've had operational control over the Jabalia refugee camp four separate times. None of those times did they have occupation uh operational control. And Beth Hanoon is also the same. We saw over the past three weeks on the resistance report significant resistance operations in Beth Hanoon uh an area that was supposedly uh under Israeli occupation uh operational control and occupation. Um demilitarizing the territory is a new uh a new desire for the Israelis in this one. So this is not just disarming Hamas is disarming the entire territory. um striking government targets. So civilian targets which have also this is none of this is new. None of these are new. Um but of course number five is concentrating and then expelling the population concentrating the population in Rafa and then expelling them. And the number six um uh objective is returning the captives. And that's what caught the uh attention of Israelis was that the returning of the captives was number six. And there was an article about how it was number six. And in that article didn't really talk about uh mass expulsion or uh ethnic cleansing or destruction of all of Gaza as a goal of this war. Um Harets wrote a headline that said the hostages could be abandoned and and would lead to their starvation within days if Gaza operation is expanded. IDF warns government. Uh so the Israeli military is also warning the government about the starvation levels that their captives are starving. So according to army radio this is the key uh point of this operation. The IDF will remain in the areas it takes. The IDF will remain in any area that it has conquered. This is directly from the IDF to army radio and that will be handled according to the Rafa model meaning the destruction of all structures in the area um and the IDF remaining there without allowing the population to return. So the Rafa model is the has been the destruction um of all civilian uh buildings in Rafa and you can see that on this map. If we go to map number two, uh we can focus in on we can see Rafa is a total no-go zone. Um Israel has been cutting the MOG corridor between the two. Um and the Rafa operations just began this week. They were destroying um buildings on the southern edge um along the Philadelphia corridor, which you can see there. The Philadelphia corridor is along the Egypt border. That's the Rafa crossing. the international crossing that has been closed uh for a year now. And then just below that, that crossing is Karam Shalom. That's where the main aid crossing from Israel uh which has also been shut down um for coming up on a year I guess actually the the year was May 7th. So we just passed uh one year of the total closure um of Rafa and the u closure of the Gaza Strip. So you can see the Morag corridor cutting between Kunis and uh and Rafa and these operations that began this week. Um they will be the focus of the show next week. Um we Kasam released a video from um just yesterday that didn't make our uh production deadline. It also didn't make their production deadline because the operation was a week earlier. Um but judging by the resistance field reports that we've heard from this week um we have 15 qualitative operations in Rafa um on the north um on the south side of the Morag corridor and then several more on the northern side in Kununis. Um complex ambushes uh one ambush that's uh on video that we will break down in detail next week is called the operation gates of hell. This is a series of resistance operations. Um, but it was a tunnelbor operation that lured a Yahalom tunnel unit into a building. Um, the tunnel was then detonated on the building and the uh the the rescue forces, the reinforcements, the ones the tanks that come to save the uh troops that have been hammered uh by the resistance. Um, they were attacked by multiple Yasine strikes. And just to give you a sense of some of these other operations, multiple thermmoaric grenade RPG operations against the troops in a building. Um, an IED minefield that was preset in Conunice. Um, F7 RPG attacks uh against troop positions in Conunus. Two tanks and a D9 uh hit by Yasine strikes in Conunus. IEDs and booby traps versus six troops in Rafa. a second home booby trapped in Rafa. Um, and then the gates of hell ambushes is a series of operations that we are we're going to see. And the second uh gates of hell operation was multiple shuad and gorilla action devices against a convoy um of a yahalom unit that's trying to use emulsia to blow up the tunnels. So, um I believe we will be seeing uh video of those operations and we will dig into those deeply uh next week. But again, the Rafa brigade was we were told by the IDF that the Rafa brigade was defeated 10 months ago in the summer of 2024. When the new chief of staff went to Rafa uh a few weeks ago, he said that the goal of the the mission of the IDF is to defeat the Rafa brigade. So, um, these plans, uh, it's difficult to tell what's psychological warfare and what's real and what's different from before. Um, but this, um, the the expulsion of the population is definitely the, um, the high point of the criminal list of objectives for this war. Um, so that is in the south. Um, we're going to focus on the resistance operations today in the north. So we take a look at the next uh map. Same map uh OCA map zoomed in. And again you can see the purple is the buffer zones. Uh the orange is the no-go zones. And I've been reporting for the last 3 weeks on operations that are in the upper right corner in Beth Hanoon. Um the Beet Hanoon battalion said this week that the buffer zones we have shown that the buffer zones will be a target for for our mujahedin. Tell your forces. uh they said uh the occupation army soldiers will feel the resistance fighters will come at them from in front of them from behind them from underground and there is no security in your so-called buffer zones uh the resistance said and again so they will continue to fight in territorial uh brigades and when the Israeli military uh extends from the buffer zone into those areas they immediately uh find the resistance. So if we look at number four, this was a pretty significant op uh unexloded ordinance operation carried out by Saral Kuds. You see a fighter here, apparently a wounded fighter, wiring up uh the line, the main line uh which he's going to set in a unexloded 2,000 lb USbuilt Israeli dropped um Mark 84 uh bomb which we have seen throughout the war. You can see the Syri's um decal there on the front and on the back you can see um a linear shape charge that is being used to uh ignite because the fuse the these dud bombs the bombs that don't go off don't go off because the fuse breaks off or the fuse fails and all of the uh destructive capability as we can see by what we're seeing on the screen here uh remains in the unexloded bomb and can be reused. And that is the case uh that we're looking here on the screen. A massive explosion that looks like what happens when the 2,000lb bombs are dropped on Palestinian civilians. Uh maybe we could loop that one more time tomorrow and uh get a a sense of it while I tell you this article in Harets that came out this week. The Israeli Air Force is aware of at least 3,000 unexloded bombs in Gaza after tens of thousands of air strikes. That number is something around 70,000 air strikes. Um, they don't put that in the article. They say tens of thousands. Um, the IDF ran low on reliable fuses and turned to outdated ones, some decades old. Um, tens tens of tons of explosives are lying in Gaza waiting for Hamas, one officer said. According to internal military figures, the Israeli Air Force is aware of at least 3,000 such duds. I think the number is far higher than that uh based on the number of air strikes and the dud rate. Um back to Haratz, they say the reason for the surge uh in unexloded munitions, according to defense sources, lies in supply issues. The massive number of air strikes depleted Israel's stockpiles of of reliable bomb fuses and trigger components. In response, the military used outdated uh fuses that have a dud rate that go from 2% in normal times, which is where they're getting those numbers of 3,000, um to jump as high as 20%. So, if you take 70,000 air strikes, um you're getting a dud rate far over 3,000. Um, and using them the bombs to uh to rewire and explode the bomb itself is only one way that these are reused. I've told you many uh times over the course of this war that the the principal thing that the resistance does is they harvest uh the TNT, the Tritonol that's inside uh the ex inside the bomb, which is about 50% um of its uh weight overall 2,000 lb weight. about half of it is explosive material that could be harvested and then redistributed and made into all of the uh famous Cassamu built weapons that we've been watching on this program for uh coming up on two years now. Um if we look at the next slide, you can see that the um this is a theme that has been carried out in number five. Uh the theme that's been carried out is that the spring growth the the spring concealment that the uh has led to these operations which we saw in Bay Hanoon the fighters using the spring concealment to hide uh beside the highway that the Israelis were using to strike their convoy after they came out from a tunnel. Then the Israelis got upset and I reported that uh last week and they started burning the field so that you couldn't see so that the thicket would burn and that didn't work. just showed uh that the thicket turned uh and the thistle just turned darker. Um so these are operations that are uh guerilla operations that are using the spring growth in Gaza to carry out operations that couldn't have been carried out in the middle of winter. Um so this is Gaza's uh natural environment fighting back and giving the gorillas something uh to use as concealment which is something to note. We look at the next slide here and you can see the way that the uh Mark 84 bomb. You can see the first of all the size of it with the soldier in the upper right corner. We can see that cuz we see the soldiers uh the Kasam soldiers standing beside them. Um but if you look at the bomb at the top, the two main things that are off it are the nose fuse and the tail fuse and the tail attachment breaks off. Um, and then the metal piecing that you see around the bomb, that's the JDAM kit. So, when you hear people talking about JD dams being dropped, um, that all they're talking about is the guidance system. The bomb inside the JAMM guidance system is the same standard 2,000lb bomb that goes back to the days after World War II. Um, and you can see in the bottom left of this uh a graph about how devastating these explosions are based on a soccer field. Uh we know it based on Norah's uh news reports at the top of the show. This is how civilians are being killed because they have a massive blast radius. Um but you can see the weight. 97 kg um of the 2,000lb bomb. 429 of those kilograms, almost exactly half um are uh explosive material. And so what we saw in that what we saw that resistance fighter do was take a linear shape charge and place it in the tail fuse. And all that does is relight the tail fuse and detonate um that bomb. So we've shown you a bunch of times these bombs be used. Of course they were used spectacularly in Beth Hanoon before the ceasefire when they separated a tank uh turret threw it uh dozens of meters and flipped the tank over. Um these are devastating weapons when they're used in their entirety, but they can also be harvested and uh used one by one. And if we look at the next slide, you'll see the impact of using that weapon. It's massive explosions. Um that is from Saral Kud's operation in Tufa. That's east of Gaza City. And you can see again in these footage um and you can see it in the next one, number eight, um that these operations are still in the buffer zone. You can see the fighters operating in the buffer zone. This is Saral Kuds wiring another IED uh here in the buffer zone in Tufa east of Gaza City. Um so they're not even in the builtup areas. They're still being hit. And in the south in Rafa where they're moving into builtup areas, they're being hit at 10 times the rate that we're seeing um of the buffer zone operations. This is a US Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer um that's about to get blasted. can clearly see it is inoperable after being hit by that IED. Um they show it back twice to us so that we could see it from uh from the two angles. And after this one I I have a still image of the uh disabled D9 Caterpillar bulldozer um that is on the boycott divestment and sanctions list of course uh built in Poria, Illinois. Okay, there you can see the destroyed uh D9. So that is the resistance report from Gaza for this week for day 580. [Music]