US prepared to strike Iran as early as Wednesday as Israel faces election chaos, diplomatic crisis

US prepared to strike Iran as early as Wednesday as Israel faces election chaos, diplomatic crisis

Itamar Eichner

As polls close across the United States in Tuesday's midterm elections, the countdown to a possible renewed war with Iran is beginning again. President Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled that he would not resume military action before the vote, but the U.S. military has spent the intervening months reinforcing its presence in the Middle East, preparing attack plans and positioning forces for a possible return to combat.

According to a report published Tuesday by The New York Times, U.S. Central Command has prepared plans that could allow American forces to strike Iran as early as Wednesday, immediately after the elections, with three aircraft carriers deployed in the region. The existence of those plans does not mean Trump has decided to attack. Diplomats are still trying to reach an agreement with Tehran, and the president has previously called off operations that appeared close to being launched.

But if negotiations collapse, the next confrontation could erupt at an exceptionally sensitive moment for both Washington and Jerusalem. Trump is awaiting an election that could weaken his standing in Congress, while Israel is struggling to form a government following an inconclusive election, confronting allegations of foreign interference in the vote and absorbing Trump's unexpected announcement that American military assistance will end.

The American military buildup has accelerated in recent weeks, with additional refueling aircraft, cargo planes and surveillance assets arriving in the region. The combination of operational preparations and ongoing diplomatic negotiations closely resembles the period preceding the previous round of fighting with Iran.

Trump has recently emphasized that Iran does not want nuclear weapons and would prefer an agreement. Reports have suggested some movement in negotiations, but no breakthrough capable of resolving the dispute. For now, the president retains the option of ordering strikes or continuing to pursue a diplomatic settlement.

The political environment in Washington could become more difficult if when Democrats gain control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Even with Republicans controlling Congress, Trump has struggled to secure broad support for the war. In June, four Republican senators joined a vote calling for an end to the fighting.

Democratic lawmakers have promised to challenge any renewed military campaign, but their ability to intervene would face significant limitations. The newly elected Congress will not take office until January 3, leaving Trump several weeks to act under the current congressional balance of power. The president also retains substantial authority over military operations and foreign policy, making it difficult for lawmakers to halt fighting once it begins.

Israel also is preparing for the possibility of renewed hostilities. The IDF is maintaining what military officials have described as maximum readiness for both defensive and offensive operations, while Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir continues security consultations. According to reports, Zamir opposed launching an operation before the U.S. elections.

Netanyahu has not convened the security Cabinet or the full government over the latest developments and has not appeared publicly since Israel's elections last week.

Beginning Wednesday, representatives of the parties elected to the 26th Knesset will meet President Isaac Herzog to recommend who should be entrusted with forming the next government. Yashar! chairman Gadi Eisenkot is expected to receive more recommendations than Netanyahu, although his political bloc has yet to explain how it intends to establish a government without the support of Arab parties or United Torah Judaism.

Opposition leaders have nevertheless said they intend to use their parliamentary strength to advance measures even before a new government is formed. These include replacing Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, appointing a new state comptroller and repealing legislation they describe as anti-democratic.

A renewed war is not expected to halt the consultations at the President's Residence. Officials are preparing alternative secure locations if necessary, while the Knesset has previously continued operating under emergency arrangements during wartime. Political efforts to change the balance of power could therefore proceed even as the military confrontation unfolds.

Complicating matters further is an intensifying dispute over allegations of foreign interference in Israel's elections. Shin Bet chief David Zini is reportedly at odds with Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara over the powers investigators should be permitted to use when examining suspicions that money from Qatar and Turkey financed improper attempts to influence voters.

According to reports, Zini has sought authorization to question senior Arab political figures, including Ra'am chairman Mansour Abbas, Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh and Ta'al leader Ahmad Tibi, along with another senior Arab lawmaker whose name cannot be published. Baharav-Miara has insisted that investigators present evidence establishing the grounds for such questioning before granting approval.

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The Islamic State Threat Against Israel Is Growing — and Much of It Has Gone Unnoticed

The Islamic State Threat Against Israel Is Growing — and Much of It Has Gone Unnoticed

by Ailin Vilches Arguello

While Israel has focused much of its security attention on Iran and its regional proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State (IS) has quietly intensified its campaign against the Jewish state, mounting an unprecedented wave of plots and attempted attacks that has largely escaped international attention.

According to a database compiled by Aaron Zelin, a senior research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Israeli security forces have disrupted more plots by the jihadist terror group since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, than during the entire nine-and-a-half years preceding it.

Between 2014 and 2023, Israeli forces conducted 50 IS-related arrest operations, compared with 46 in the period since the Oct. 7 atrocities, marking a significant surge in the group’s attempted attacks and operational activity.

Even though IS has been more active against Israel over the past three years than ever before, experts warn that its growing threat has been largely overlooked, with government officials concentrating their attention on Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” amid escalating regional tensions.

In his report for MBN Magazine, Zelin explains that IS’s plots have grown increasingly sophisticated, evolving from mostly involving individuals seeking to join the group’s ranks in Syria or disseminating propaganda online to more direct, coordinated, and ambitious efforts to plan and execute attacks.

Before the start of the war in Gaza, just 18 of the documented operations involved suspected attack plots, compared with 28 of the 46 operations recorded since Oct. 7, 2023, reflecting a shift toward planning and preparing attacks on Israeli soil rather than focusing primarily on online radicalization and recruitment.

“Few people have noticed this uptick in activity because almost none of these plots succeeded, which reflects Israeli intelligence successes more than IS restraint,” Zelin writes. “Nor are these plots simply the work of isolated sympathizers. A significant share can be traced back to IS networks abroad, especially in Syria.”

Last year, Israeli intelligence officials warned of a rising threat level linked to IS activity inside Israeli territory following the outbreak of the war, signaling that the group was becoming an increasingly serious security concern even as Israel grappled with threats on multiple fronts.

In one of several thwarted terror plots, Israeli security forces arrested two young men in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras al-Amud after uncovering a plot to pack a truck with gas canisters and blow it up near the Israeli parliament.

In another foiled attack, Israeli authorities uncovered a four-member cell near Hebron, in the southern West Bank, whose leader was in contact with IS operatives abroad and whose members had assembled approximately 100 explosive devices to target Israeli soldiers.

“By stopping these plots, Israel’s security services have kept IS’s campaign largely invisible. That success should not be mistaken for the absence of a threat,” Zelin argues.

The new report notes that approximately two-thirds of the cases recorded since the Oct. 7 massacre involved Arab citizens of Israel rather than Palestinians from the West Bank or East Jerusalem, with at least nine cases involving minors, including a child as young as 14.

As the regional security landscape grows increasingly volatile, Zelin explains that IS’s leadership has sought to capitalize on the escalating tensions to advance its campaign of violence, calling for attacks against Jewish communities, synagogues, and Israeli embassies worldwide while urging Palestinians to abandon Hamas and join the group instead.

For example, IS spokesman Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari previously called on Palestinians to turn against Hamas and fight “the Jews because they are Jews,” while encouraging supporters to kill Jews and Christians “in the streets and alleyways” of the West.

Following the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last year, Zelin notes that IS has sought to present itself as a small but uncompromising force leading the “coming religious wars,” while telling Palestinians that jihad, rather than the “path of national liberation,” represents their only salvation.

“With Hamas bound by a truce, IS has sought to present itself as the group still committed to fighting Israel,” Zelin writes.

He also points to several prominent pro-IS voices who reportedly urged their followers in Gaza to stay out of Hamas’s confrontation with Israel and instead stockpile weapons, establish cells, and pledge allegiance to IS when a broader regional war erupted.

With infiltration into Israel posing significant challenges, the report explains, IS has increasingly turned to recruits already inside the country, relying on overseas operatives to provide the instructions, contacts, and logistical support needed to plan attacks.

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Brussels vs. Warsaw: The Battle for Poland’s Last Line of Defense

Brussels vs. Warsaw: The Battle for Poland’s Last Line of Defense

Paul Dragu

The globalists are making a play to destroy Polish sovereignty, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his pro-European Union political allies at the center of a crisis that erupted Friday.

The ongoing drama began with a “forcible takeover of the seat of the Constitutional Court by the police,” as Warsaw-based legal think tank Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture described it. The move prompted an emergency in-air U-turn by President Karol Nawrocki, who was on his way to a diplomatic visit in Africa. Nawrocki confirmed his turnaround in an X post, saying, “At such a moment, the President must be in Poland. I’m interrupting my flight to Senegal. I’m returning.”

Nawrocki and Tusk are on opposite sides of the political divide.

Nawrocki’s chief of staff, Paweł Szefernaker, issued a statement encapsulating the serious nature of the situation:

Tonight, there has been a breach of the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland and a forcible takeover of a constitutional organ of the state. I call for the restoration of the legal order and for the forces of coercion sent there by the government to leave the Tribunal’s grounds.

Dramatic videos showing Nawrocki essentially forcing his way into the Court after his return have appeared on social media.

 

The Constitutional Tribunal determines if laws, either domestic or international ones adopted by Poland, are compatible with the 1997 Polish Constitution. The fight is for control of the highest court in the country, the institution that yields the power to hold the Eurocrats at bay.

Conservative Polish lawmakers allege the ultimate point of the current chicanery is to remove the barriers that keep Poland conservative, sovereign, and immune to European Union pressure for laws that undermine national sovereignty and favor globalism. In a social media video, Dariusz Matecki, a nationalistic Polish politician who serves in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, laid out his version of what’s going on:

n Poland we have liberal left government. Tusk, his name is Tusk, he’s a prime minister. And what is happening now with Tribunal Court, Constitutional Tribunal: they want to take over, they want to shove it with their own people. Why? Because they want to get rid of Polish currency, they want to get us into the eurozone here, because they are pushed by Germans. Also they want to get rid of our secure borders, because Germans want to spread illegals and they want to send them to Poland.

So that’s what they want to do. First of all, Polish currency, zloty, by the Constitution is our currency. They have to change the Constitution. Without Tribunal Court, without Constitutional Court, they cannot do it. So number one, they want to get rid of Polish currency. They want us to get euro and get into the eurozone, and then take our gold, the biggest reserve in European Union, to Frankfurt, to European Central Bank, German bank. They want to open the borders, and they want to make sure that when they’re gonna lose, because we’ve got elections next year, Tribunal Court, Constitutional Court will do nothing against what is going to happen.

So there’s much more reasons, but I want you to understand: they are under German influence, they are globalists, and we are fighting not only for Poland, we are fighting for Europe. Be like Poland means be strong, and our nation is strong. We’re gonna win it.

American commentator Jack Posobiec also subscribes to the mass migration angle. “Poland is one of the only EU countries that refused to take Muslim migrants for the last 10 years and rejected the agenda of the globalists to transform their nation,” he wrote on social media. “The globalists are now using state force to open the doors of Poland to mass Islamificafion like Paris and London.”

The Constitutional Tribunal, as made up now, is no friend of internationalism. A majority of the 15 judges who sit on it were appointed, over time, by Poland’s conservative-nationalist political party Law and Justice, or PiS. Most analysis point to 2015 as the genesis of the current crisis, which includes a series of actions that ultimately led to the Court being dominated by more conservative judges. Poland’s oldest daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, regarded as the country’s leading legal paper, explains in detail how the current crisis came to be.

The Tribunal Court has ruled that EU law cannot override the Polish Constitution. In 2021, the Court held that certain interpretations of the EU treaties were incompatible with the Polish Constitution, thereby asserting the supremacy of the Polish Constitution over EU law.

As to the events that unfolded a few days ago, Ordo Iuris laid out the following:

On the night of October 30, police took control of the Constitutional Tribunal’s headquarters in Warsaw. They stopped the Court’s own security guards; the Court’s vice president, Bartłomiej Sochański; and the Court’s director, its top administrator, from entering. One of the newer judges, someone who was appointed when Tusk’s governing coalition had the majority, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, was already inside. She signed an order suspending the Court’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and the vice president.

Ordo Iuris says what Korwin-Piotrowska did was illegal. A new judge needs to take the oath in front of the president of Poland before starting work. Since she hadn’t, in Ordo Iuris’ view, she had no power to give any orders. Moreover, there’s no Polish law that lets anyone suspend the Court’s president this way.

Also, the police had no right to be there. Ordo Iuris points out, “No provision of law authorizes the police or the government directing them to take control of the Tribunal’s headquarters and deprive its organs of access to the building.” In fact, this may very well be a crime. Ordo Iuris says this could count as forcibly removing a constitutional body of the state, which carries up to 20 years in prison. It also says officials may have abused their power.

As Trump ‘Makes Nice’ With Moscow, the CIA Has Other Ideas

As Trump ‘Makes Nice’ With Moscow, the CIA Has Other Ideas

Alastair Crooke

The Atlantic on October 23 published a profile of CIA chief John Ratcliffe. Its subheadline contains the most significant “tell” from the piece—“CIA Director John Ratcliffe leads an agency that’s at war with Russia, even as Trump makes nice with Putin.”

The Atlantic article makes no bones about its ulterior purpose. It is to present Ratcliffe as an even-handed professional who has mastered the intricacies of the Ukraine War and tells it “like it is” to the president, leaving the latter to decide his options.

This panegyric to Ratcliffe, however, hides substantive issues about the probity of CIA intelligence analyses, their impact on policy, and the extent to which the pure excitement of militarized covert action inevitably hobbles intelligence agencies and analytic reporting.

Intelligence is never wholly objective. And its professionalism largely hangs on service culture, which can—and does—change.

As one example, a former head of the IDF’s Military Intelligence research and analysis division, General Itai Brun, warned that Israel’s inability to recognize what Hamas was planning for October 7 resulted, not from a lack of information, but from a failure of culture and approach. Per the Times of Israel’s report of his comments:

Even after the massacre, intelligence didn’t internalize that Hamas believed it could succeed…. The whole military intelligence network “was not listening, because it was convinced it knew…. It could not accept the possibility that it was wrong.

So, when it comes to “culture,” in this sense, two points in the Atlantic piece stand out: First, the article hints that Ratcliffe is seen by his staff to be “clear-eyed about the threat Russia poses not just to Ukraine—but to the United States and its allies.” This suggests that Radcliffe sees Russia as an eternal enemy of the West, or at least a current enemy with nefarious intentions. Secondly, the article emphasises that the CIA is in “the lead” on Ukraine and that its paramilitary wing—Covert Action—is thrilled at being so busy. As Larry Johnson, a former CIA official, outlines:

The CIA helps Ukraine knock out Russian refining capacity. Diesel prices soar. Then… in the middle of peace talks in Miami… President [Trump] announces a deal for Russia to sell its diesel on the world market…. So the United States is simultaneously paying to destroy Russian diesel production and begging Russia to sell it more diesel. You could not design a more incoherent policy if you tried.

The Atlantic piece lends credence to what has long been supposed—that Trump’s attempts to secure a “deal” with Russia (most recently by importing Russian diesel into America to bring the price down for the midterm elections) is a deceit intended to coax Moscow towards making a deal (unfavorable, in the Kremlin optic) with Trump.

It would be a deceit because the CIA pursues its own (militarised) covert action war on Russia. The Atlantic, citing a CIA officer, reports:

Armed with information that the U.S. provides, Ukraine’s military has launched strikes deep inside Russia. And U.S. spy satellites provide early warning about incoming missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground, “the CIA is in the lead,” a retired senior officer who travels frequently to Ukraine told me.

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Food wars heating up: Six more European countries report grocery store cooling systems hacked, food destroyed

Food wars heating up: Six more European countries report grocery store cooling systems hacked, food destroyed

Leo Hohmann

The food wars continue to rage as hackers struck a second time in less than a month against grocery store cooling systems in Europe on Monday.

On October 11, an unknown entity hacked into the refrigeration controllers at up to 700 French supermarkets and set them to defrost mode overnight, causing their refrigerators to overheat. The cold chain disruption forced supermarkets to discard thousands of pounds of spoiled goods, resulting in losses estimated to total tens of millions of euros.

But on Monday, November 2, the attack was more widespread as cyber attackers made sure six countries felt the pain.

The incidents caused temperature spikes and spoiled food in the refrigeration and freezer sections at stores in Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Estonia, according to a report by NBC News.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

In the incident in France, police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, raising temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit and causing fires and food losses.

Authorities have not indicated who could have been behind the incidents. There were no claims of responsibility.

The issues come as the continent confronts broader security fears stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The new cyberattack highlights how digital threats can increasingly affect citizens’ everyday lives, the European Commission said Monday.

The Ahold Delhaize supermarket chain in the Netherlands told NBC News on Monday that it was aware of an “IT incident” affecting the refrigeration systems in a number of its stores. “Our teams are working hard to fully assess the situation,” the company said in an email.

Stephan Moelans, the CEO of Belgian refrigeration company Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s systems, told the Belga news agency that the incident was a cyberattack, in which the units’ evaporators were switched to defrost mode.

In another incident on October 24, a Quaker Oats facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that was world’s largest cereal milling center, processing over 2 million pounds of oats daily, spontaneously exploded.

BOTTOM LINE: These types of incidents are totally preventable. If you’re a private company in the grocery business, stop using internet-connected computerized cooling systems. It’s just that simple. But they won’t do that because businesses are addicted to the ease of efficiency offered by such technology. Instead they will spend millions of dollars trying to find another stop gap “patch” to plug a cyber hole in the system, while the hackers have already moved on to finding the next hole.

This should also be a lesson for homeowners: refrain from buying “smart” appliances, which are easily tracked and hacked. Sometimes, less is better when it comes to technology. And analogue is ALWAYS safer and more secure than digital.

Christian Westbrook, an independent food industry analyst and author of the Substack outlet Unshadowed, wrote in a post:

The Internet of things (IoT) was always a bad idea—now realize they want embedded devices in our BODIES. This is Schwab’s “the 4th Industrial Revolution changes YOU!”

And Kennedy (RFK Jr.) is pushing this from HHS…

As WEF/(Yuval) Harrari said: they want humanity to be “hackable animals.”

When they said you will “own nothing,” they meant it. You will not own anything that you allow into your home, your car, your personal space, your devices, or even your body, when it is connected to the internet. Even if you possess the title or a bill of sale, it can still be controlled from an outside source if it includes a chip allowing connectivity.

Cyberattacks Are Now Destroying Europe’s Food Supply Without Firing a Shot