Starvation is not just a tactic used by the US in an attempt to starve the ‘axis of resistance’ into submission, it is a foundational tenant of US foreign policy
The recent “attack” on Lebanon didn’t just destroy the port of Beirut, cutting off the main supply line to a country which is reliant on imports for the majority of its food needs, but also destroyed its main grain silos, leaving the traumatized population with only about a month’s worth of food supply on hand.
The AP reported that up to 85% of the country’s grains supply was likely destroyed in the blast:
Drone footage shot Wednesday by The Associated Press showed that blast tore open those grain silos, dumping their contents into the debris and earth thrown up by the blast. Some 80% of Lebanon’s wheat supply is imported, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Estimates suggest some 85% of the country’s grain was stored at the now-destroyed silos.
This outcome conveniently falls right in line with the current Israeli-backed US imperial policy for the region, which is the ongoing attempt to starve the ‘axis of resistance’ - Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen - into submission through economic sanctions and blockades alongside other military actions.
Economic sanctions and military blockades are cruel acts of war that always primarily harm the civilian populations of the target country, while leaving the alleged military ‘targets’ relatively unaffected. Both actions generally tend to deny food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilians who need them most, while crippling the economy which hurts the entire population on all levels.
US sanctions on Iran were admittedly already beginning to starve civilians two years ago, and this sanctions campaign has only been intensified since then. The US has also used a variety of military provocations over the course of the past two years in an attempt to further destabilize Iran and bait its leadership into more open warfare, including the Israeli-backed assassination of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January.
More recently, “Israeli intelligence has been responsible for a series of bombings and fires at Iranian military facilities in recent weeks, including an explosion that destroyed much of a major nuclear centrifuge installation,” Business Insider reported last month.
Syria is similarly under attack by US sanctions, which not only serve to hinder the war torn country’s ability to rebuild its tattered infrastructure, but are also responsible for major oil shortages leading to civilian rationing which often results in many members of the Syrian population not having enough fuel to even cook their food or heat their homes in the winter - as I have documented in the not so distant past.
Exasperating this problem is the illegal US occupation of northern Syrian oil fields, which denies the country access to its own natural resources. At the same time, US- and Turkish-backed al-Qaeda terrorists occupying Idlib and ISIS terrorist cells near the Iraqi border continue to wreak havoc on the country with their regular attacks on that side of the country, while Israeli airstrikes are regularly carried out in the south near the occupied Golan Heights and Damascus.
For its part, the Yemeni population is being starved and denied basic necessities by the ongoing inhumane US-backed Saudi air and sea blockade on the country combined with a bombing campaign which habitually targets civilians with US weaponry - targeting civilian infrastructure, school buses and houses full of children, loaded civilian vehicles, water cleaning facilities, markets, weddings, hospitals, ambulances, and pretty much anything that moves in the city of Hodeida, which hosts the only Houthi-controlled port. The Houthis are the Yemeni resistance group and elected government which overthrew the former Saudi-puppet-president, and which are now fighting the US/Saudi/UAE/Israeli invaders and occupiers seeking to reinstall their al-Qaeda-affiliated puppet president.
Meanwhile the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza is subject to much the same treatment, but at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces, under constant siege by a crippling military blockade and subject to regular Zionist airstrikes carried out on an often almost daily basis.
Lebanon was the most recent to join those countries targeted with crippling US sanctions, at the behest of the Zionist leadership of course, accompanied by more frequent Israeli attacks against the the country (in the name of fighting Hezbollah) and more recent threats to attack Hezbollah.
This was followed by the most recent “attack” on Lebanon, which targeted the Beirut port and left the country in a most severe food shortage situation. Lebanon has now become dependent primarily on Syria, which opened its borders following the blast, for wheat and medical aid; as organic wheat is actually one of Syria’s primary exports. This is also why the US and its proxy forces periodically set fire to Syrian wheat fields, and why from the very outset of its proxy war on the country US airstrikes have targeted Syrian grain silos - just another facet of the imperial strategy designed to starve Syria into submission, or at the least force them out of self reliance and push them to spend their limited funds on food.
To think the same policy wouldn’t apply to Lebanon, which along with Syria was listed among the seven countries a Pentagon memo said the US was going to “take out” after 9/11, is just ridiculous. General Wesley Clark on the “7 Countries in 5 years” memo:
Evidence of an Israeli Attack
That the outcome of this “attack” falls right in line with a decades-long regional campaign to starve US/Israeli targets into submission and/or collapse, is not the reason I am referring to the Beirut port blast as an Israeli attack, although it is certainly evidence pointing in that direction.
Nor is this my conclusion only because it is my personal opinion and the opinion of a great many geopolitical analysts. There are also plenty of the Lebanese people who are calling it out as such, and even the President of Lebanon announced this week that the authorities had not ruled out “foreign interference, through a rocket or bomb or other act,” as the cause of the blast.
That this location was near a site previously identified by the IDF as an “Iranian and Hezbollah accurate missile infrastructure” target is another red flag, but there is more evidence than all this, new evidence that didn’t make it into my previous in-depth post on the subject.
A Saudi intelligence operative speaking on strict conditions of anonymity explicitly stated that this “attack” was an Israeli operation.
All the intel ops I talked to refuse to go on the record, considering the extreme sensitivity of the subject.
Still, it must be stressed that a Saudi intel source whose stock in trade is frequent information exchanges with the Mossad, asserts that the original target was Hezbollah missiles stored in Beirut’s port. His story is that Prime Minister Netanyahu was about to take credit for the strike – following up on his tweet. But then the Mossad realized the op had turned horribly wrong and metastasized into a major catastrophe.
Interestingly, the location of the explosion was near but not the exact location of a previously IDF-identified Hezbollah target pointed out by Netanyahu during a presentation to the UN two years ago (top photo).
Many people including myself mistakenly thought this was actually the exact location of the explosion, but that notion has now been obsessively ‘fact-checked’ by the mainstream media. However, it is nonetheless within the 2 mile blast radius
, located just a mile away.
“This picture is worth a million missiles,” the master stage show propagandist said, before pointing directly to “the site at the dock” which was located within the blast radius of the August 4th explosion.
The idea of an “attack” which was explicitly meant to cripple the Lebanese economy and destroy its food supply rather than hit a supposed Hezbollah missile site lines up with the scenario which has played out...
The referenced Netanyahu tweet, which the PM was reportedly about to follow up on before Mossad realized the operation had gone horribly wrong, was written just a few hours before the blast rocked Beirut: “We hit a [Hezbollah] cell” - (past tense, in Syria, the day before) - “and now we hit the dispatchers.” - (present tense, in Lebanon).
This story also seems to line up with Trump’s initial public statement that the Beirut blast was a “terrible attack” carried out with “a bomb of some kind.” And although the President later walked back his statement, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who initially disputed Trump’s claim, himself later admitted that one of the likely scenarios initially being entertained by the US was indeed that it had been an attack on a Hezbollah missile depot.
“On the first day we thought it might have been an attack, some of us speculated it could have been, for example, a Hezbollah arms shipment that blew up, maybe a Hezbollah bomb making facility, he said.
“The problem” with this scenario, Escobar goes on to write, “starts with the fact this was not a Hezbollah weapons depot – as even Israel admitted.”
Indeed:
When weapons depots are blown up, there’s a primary explosion followed by several smaller explosions, something that could last for days. That’s not what happened in Beirut. The initial explosion was followed by a massive second blast – almost certainly a major chemical explosion – and then there was silence.
Israel has blown up weapons depots in Syria before, and they most certainly do not look and act like this explosion did...
However, that certainly doesn’t rule out out that the dock was targeted by Israel for other reasons - those mentioned above - in which case the previous identification of the location at the dock as a Hezbollah missile site may have been nothing more than Israel publicly designating a pre-chosen civilian target as such to create the pretext to bomb it, and to create justification for the attack in the minds of the Israeli population when the choice to carry out such an attack was made.
Escobar’s great piece on the subject also goes into great detail on how this could have just as easily been a Mossad-backed act of sabotage from within rather than an external bombing, and the shady events and characters surrounding the arrival and subsequent storage at the Beirut port for six years of the massive pile of ammonium nitrate being generally blamed for the explosion. I highly recommend you read his wonderful analysis in full. I would only add that remote detonation of a pre-planted explosive is certainly not out of the question, particularly in the context of the recent string of fires and explosions inside Iran, with it being “common knowledge” at least some were carried out by “Israeli intelligence” (Mossad).
Whether by external bombing or internal sabotage, and whether mistakenly targeting a mis-identified “Hezbollah” missile site or intentionally blowing up the dock as the main target, Israel is the prime suspect. That Israel would blow up the Lebanese port with the express intention of cutting off their main supply line and destroying their food supply is certainly not out of the question.
Besides, Israel commonly designates a host of targets in densely populated civilian areas in Beirut as “Hezbollah” missile sites, some of which may in fact be Hezbollah headquarters or operation centers, but all of which are most definitely not ‘missile sites,’ as this “attack” most certainly proves. And that Israel would be willing to carry out such an act, or indeed may have even be looking for an opportunity to cause such massive Lebanese civilian damage, is easily seen by all those who are but willing to listen to the words of Israeli leaders themselves.
In May of 2015, the Israeli Defense Minister expressed the accepted government position that the military would intentionally target Lebanese civilians in any upcoming conflict with Hezbollah and/or war with Lebanon:
“Israel is going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the families. We went through a very long discussion, we did it then, we did it in the Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future.”
And it is true, that they “did it then” in 2006 in the last Israeli war on Lebanon. Not just the targeting of civilians, mind you, but the flattening of an entire village. One prime example is the village of Dahiya, which was completely leveled by Israeli airstrikes. And that such Israeli war crimes would be carried out again, was made abundantly clear by Major General Gadi Eizenkot two years later.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” Eizenkot explained. “We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases…This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
Later, in 2016, an Israeli headline whose author called for genocide, actually openly suggested that Israel flatten the entire Capitol of Beirut, a city of millions; demonstrating that such views are not isolated to an insignificant minority.
So not only is it not at all out of the question that the Zionists would be willing to cause such civilian damage to achieve their goals - to weaken, destabilize and eventually “take out” Lebanon - but the immense civilian suffering and destruction was actually celebrated by some, for whom this tremendous amount of death and devastation actually brought immense “joy.”
“I am happy with the scene at the Beirut explosion,” the leader of the Israeli Zehut party wrote on his Facebook account shortly after the “attack” was carried out. “This joy was given by God to the Israelis on the occasion of the Jewish Valentine’s Day,” he said, in his now deleted post. Whether he deleted it or it was removed by Facebook is unknown, but a copy of the original was archived, and can be seen in my last post.
On the same day, Israeli news was also reporting that the blast would be “felt by Hezbollah for a long time.”
Considering the history of the Jewish tendency to pronounce all military victories as given by God, going all the way back to biblical times, it is not unreasonable to conclude that this “joy...given...to the Israelis” was in reality given by their military and/or the Mossad, especially considering all the evidence pointing in that direction.
No matter the cause, the results are the same. The Zionists are celebrating, the Lebanese are suffering as their country plummets further into chaos, and Lebanon’s entire food supply has been devastated and cut off. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if it was indeed all by design.