Israel using the ‘Rafah model’ in southern Lebanon as officials pursue scorched-earth policy

The Israeli estimate (for a ground assault into southern Lebanon) is months, not weeks. There are plans for the government to vote on a request by the army to call up 400,000 reserve soldiers.

The idea is that Israel must depopulate the south of Lebanon – 10 percent of the mass of that country – and then occupy it, vacant of its population, and turn it into a so-called buffer zone.

The parallels are being drawn by Israeli officials to the situation in Gaza, to the yellow line, which has managed to take up more than 50 percent of the territory.

The Israeli minister of defence himself has instructed the army to demolish Lebanese homes and villages that are near the border, exactly as he did in Gaza. He is using the Beit Hanoon and Rafah model – those were his own words during those instructions.

So that’s the plan, and it will take months. It does explain why the government also plans to extend the state of emergency until mid-April.

Rockets are not stopping from Lebanon, and missiles are certainly not stopping from Iran. Life, normal life, education, the economy, all of it, cannot resume normally so long as Israel conducts these two wars.


Meanwhile Trump is sending another 3,000 troops to the ME

We are seeing several reports that the military in the coming hours is going to sign orders for about 3000 members of the 82nd Airborne Division to head to the Middle East. This is a growing buildup of US personnel. The US has a huge naval force there. We recently heard that they were going to send 3500 marines and three different ships, and now this additional 3,000 [troops].

‘Establishing deterrence, economic gains’ key for Iran to ending war

Negar Mortazavi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, says Iran would want to end the war that was imposed on it on its own terms.

“One is to establish enough deterrence to make sure that once this war ends, it doesn’t come back like it did last year – that they don’t turn into the next Gaza or Lebanon or Syria, or Bibi Netanyahu potentially with US support can go in and mow the grass, again and again,” Mortazavi said.

In addition to establishing deterrence, Mortazavi said Iran would also need “some form of economic gain”.

“This chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz is now giving them ideas – ‘maybe we can charge passage fees like some other places in the world’ – there are those discussions in Iran,” she said, while also citing sanctions relief and reparations to rebuild the country after the heavy damage inflicted by the US and Israeli attacks.

So Trump has no victory conditions other than winning the war every day. Israel is not going to let Trump pull out and will bomb any attempt at negotiations and Iran will not stop until Israel has been restrained.

Prepare for a long war and world wide recession.

Yeah. And someday, Trump might release the unredacted Epstein files, and the United States Senate might actually grow a set of balls. 

US media’s big revelation; Trump desperately reached out to Iran for peace deal

Hours after Donald Trump claimed Iran was willing to hold diplomatic talks, it has emerged that it was the US president who was looking for an off-ramp to end hostility against the Islamic Republic. Rifat Jawaid analyses the development which has also brought Trump under the scanner for different reasons.

CNN is fully in on it:
US-Iran negotiations: US President Donald Trump said that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are leading negotiations with Iran, expressing optimism that a deal is in sight. An Iranian source told CNN that Tehran is willing to listen to “sustainable” proposals to end the war. 

Also who suddenly sold tons of oil 15 minutes before Trump tweeted the oil price down.

Jeremy Scahill: Iran Negotiations

Btw, the instigator Israel is not part of the fantasy 'negotiations'. 

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, has said his country is not part of alleged talks between the US and Iran that are speculated to be held later this week.

Danon told UN reporters today that the US, along with Israel, was continuing to hit “military targets in Iran, and we will continue to do that”. The strikes first launched by the two allies on Iran have “accomplished a lot”, he said, but not everything.

Danon added that Israel is bent on ensuring Iran has no capabilities for nuclear or ballistic missiles. The envoy further accused Iranian authorities of saying, weeks earlier, that Iran did not have intermediate-range missiles – then allegedly firing a missile 4,000km (2,485 miles) towards the Diego Garcia island, which hosts an important US/UK army base.

Iran denied that it carried out the attack on the remote Indian Ocean location yesterday. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Sunday said the alliance could not confirm Israel’s claim that the projectiles used were Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles.

As long as Trump unconditionally keeps supporting Israel, Iran certainly won't agree to anything.

Iran suggests White House negotiating with itself, as US troops expected to be deployed

We’ve been reporting that approximately 1,000 US soldiers are expected to be deployed to the Middle East in coming days, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

This news comes as President Donald Trump and his administration say that the US is in talks with Iran to end the conflict. Iran’s military has suggested that Washington might be negotiating with itself as it touts talks with Tehran to end the war.

US' 15-point proposal to Iran

The US has shared a 15-point list of expectations with Iran via Pakistan, two regional sources told CNN, who added that among the points included are limits on Tehran’s defense capabilities, a cessation of support for proxies and an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist.

Israel’s Channel 12 released what it said were the components of the plan. Many of the proposals match what the Trump administration has spoken of previously.

Some key elements reportedly include:

• A 30-day ceasefire.
• The dismantling of Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow.
• A permanent commitment from Iran to never develop nuclear weapons.
• The handover of Iran’s stockpile of already enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a commitment from Iran to allow the IAEA to monitor all elements of the country’s remaining nuclear infrastructure. Iran must also no longer enrich uranium within the country.
• Limits on the range and number of Iran’s missiles.
• Ending Iran’s support for regional proxies.
• Ending Iranian strikes on regional energy facilities.
• Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
• A removal of all sanctions imposed on Iran, alongside the ending of the UN mechanism that allows sanctions to be reimposed.
• The provision of US support for electricity generation at Iran’s Bushehr civil nuclear plant.

President Donald Trump also shared some specifics on Monday, saying that the US and Iran have reached “major points of agreement.” He also said that the key expectation is Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. The president told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Iran has committed to not having a nuclear weapon, something they’ve said publicly in the past.

Trump added that the US would also insist on taking possession of Iran’s highly enriched uranium.

“They want very much to make a deal. We’d like to make a deal too,” Trump said Monday, adding that there will be an in-person meeting “very, very soon.”

Trump said his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were involved in the discussions, which he said Iran initiated. He did not share whom the US was talking to in Iran beyond specifying it was a “respected” leader who is not Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this post. 

CNN living right along in fantasy land, just copying propaganda. Call it as it is, demands not expectations, not a proposal, that's a lift of conditions for surrender.

Meanwhile sending more troops, it's nothing but a bad attempt at deception for what ever foolish nonsense Netanyahu and Trump have next in mind. We've seen how Israel treats temporary ceasefires, or even permanent ones.

How has Iran reacted?

Iranian leaders have maintained that there are no negotiations taking place between Washington and Tehran at all. Iran’s military leadership says it cannot negotiate with the US, which has attacked Iran twice during ongoing negotiations over the past two years.

“Has the level of your inner struggle reached the stage of you [Trump] negotiating with yourself?” Ebrahim Zolfaqari, the top spokesperson for Iran’s joint military command, said on Wednesday on Iranian state TV, mocking the US president.

“People like us can never get along with people like you.” “As we have always said … no one like us will make a deal with you. Not now. Not ever.” Iran and Israel continued to trade attacks on Wednesday.

While Iran’s IRGC has made clear that it does not wish to negotiate with the US, Iran does have some conditions for peace. On March 11, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian laid out the Iranian terms for ending the war.

In an X post, Pezeshkian wrote that he had spoken to his counterparts in Russia and Pakistan, and had reaffirmed “Iran’s commitment to peace”.

Pezeshkian wrote: “The only way to end this war – ignited by the Zionist regime & US – is recognizing Iran’s legitimate rights, payment of reparations, and firm int’l guarantees against future aggression.”

It is understood that Iran would also want all sanctions against it to be lifted.

Additionally, Iran’s state-owned Press TV quoted an Iranian official as saying over the weekend that Tehran was seeking the closure of all US military bases in the region, and a new legal mechanism to control transit through the Strait of Hormuz that formalises its de facto dominance over the waterway.

Btw US/Israel are not just attacking Iran

Iraq summons US envoy after service members killed in attack on military clinic

Iraq’s foreign ministry has been directed to summon the chargé d’affaires of the US embassy after multiple Iraqi service members were killed in an attack on a health care clinic associated with the country’s defense ministry this morning, a military spokesperson said.

“Despite Iraq’s sustained political and practical efforts to keep the country away from the ongoing regional conflict … the condemned attacks targeting our military units have persisted,” the spokesperson, Sabah Al-Numan, said in a statement today.

Earlier today, Iraq’s defense ministry said that seven Iraqi army soldiers had been killed in an airstrike in Anbar province in the west of the country, without saying who had carried out the attack.

Referencing the attack this morning, Al-Numan said that it “constitutes a fully fledged crime in violation of international law and the established norms governing relations between states, and it undermines the relationship between the peoples of Iraq and the United States of America.”

The country’s foreign minister will reflect Iraq’s “firm and unwavering position on safeguarding its sovereignty and condemning these irresponsible actions” to the US envoy, he added.


Meanwhile Pakistan that wants to negotiate between US and Iran is bombing Afghanistan.

Plenty of asian countries are having a very hard time; worst one for us is Taiwan, the production of Microships can be on hold because the lack of oil/gas etc.

And those already are pretty tight in terms of supply due to AI companies gobbling them all up. Hence why AMD and Intel both announced CPU price hikes of 10-15%. And let's not even get started about memory chips!

With the prices already sky-high for some tyres of chips, production interruptions due to an oil price shock would be the last thing they need.

Usa is now in the era just like when rome was...starting to many wars they cant win and slowly destroying themselves. Only a matter of time, china cant be stopped they are the new world order soon.