Israel Brief: Friday, November 28
The tunnels are collapsing, Lebanon is cornered, and every institution that failed two years ago is being forced to face itself.
Shabbat shalom, friends.
Rafah’s tunnels keep spitting out starving Hamas fighters. The Yellow Line hums like a tripwire. In the north, Hezbollah is pretending patience is a strategy, even as its arsenal shrinks and its rhetoric cracks. Judea and Samaria feels less like “the West Bank” of diplomatic fantasy and more like the ridge it has always been — the place where Iran hopes to build the next Gaza and where Israel is finally starting to treat it like a combat zone with towns that anchor the country’s depth.
Inside Israel, the old avoidance culture is breaking. Katz and Zamir are fighting about who gets to define the October 7 reckoning. The tech front is being treated like a border. And the courts, the security barons, and the political system are now colliding over who actually runs this republic when the rockets fly.
Here’s the 90-second map before we drill down.
⚡️Flash Brief: The Day in 90 Seconds or Less
Rafah: IDF located nine more terrorists killed in the eastern tunnel grid as the last serious Hamas pocket collapses; heavy equipment is staged for “Green Rafah.” See The War Today.
Northern Front: IDF hit Hezbollah launch sites; Beit Jinn op left seven Israelis wounded but disrupted a jihadi hub 8 km from the Hermon line. See The War Today & DTW.
Judea & Samaria: Jenin “execution” videos exposed as edited composites; IDF presses multi-brigade raids across the Tubas–Tammun belt. See The War Today.
Iran / Axis: Mossad foils IRGC plot in Senegal and Uganda; Houthis threaten Golan infiltrations; Iran–Russia cooperation deepens. See Developments to Watch & Israel and the World.
Inside Israel: Bismuth’s Haredi draft bill ignites a bench-vs-government clash; AG blocked police access to MAG investigation; Morpheus social-media surveillance goes live. See Inside Israel.
Abroad: UN declares Western sanctions “human rights violations” while Iran demands sanctions on Israel; Turkey courts a terror-supporting Pope; Europe tightens its soft-hate grip on Jews. See Israel and the World.
Economy & Tech: Finance Ministry pivots to long-term rental reform; Israeli startups debut hydrogen drones and 3D-mapping robot dogs for emergency response. See Inside Israel & Briefly Noted.
The full brief and analysis continue below.
Israel is living in the real world, and everyone else is performing nostalgia. Rafah is no longer behaving like a “phase” of anything. The north is a countdown. The ridge continues to heat up. And inside Israel the old bureaucratic shields — the lawyer-barrier, the “professional echelon,” the committees that never met a delay they didn’t love — are being peeled away one by one.
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