Redactornalysis: My predictions for the coming days and weeks

It looks like big things are about to happen so I'm gonna write down my predictions so I can say I told you so later.

Gaza

The Israelis are going to go into Gaza and flatten at least the northern zone and try to root out the tunnels there. That will take weeks if not months so I can't predict what they'll do afterward. The Israelis have pretty well accepted that there's no way to get the hostages back.

I expect them to begin in the next couple days, certainly less than a week. They can't just leave their army camped out. The US is begging them to wait since we still have 600 citizens and 10 hostages, but the Israelis have no reason to listen. Biden has no leverage over them.

The West Bank

The West Bank is likely to pop off soon. The Israelis certainly seem to think so as they're making more attacks every night. They resorted to an airstrike in Jenin, which indicates that they were afraid of an ambush if they went in on the ground. The biggest threat I see here is some kind of coup within the Palestinian Authority when their troops can't take it anymore. This could happen very suddenly or not at all.

Lebanon

War with Lebanon seems likely. Hezbollah, Iran, Biden, and Netanyahu don't want it. But allegedly the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant has been saying this is an opportunity to start a war while Israel has international support. It would be far from unprecedented for an Israeli defense minister to ignore orders. And the constantly escalating shelling of Lebanon seems intended as a provocation. Israeli cabinet ministers have been making increasingly bellicose "warnings" to Hezbollah to justify an attack.

Hezbollah has only been shooting a few antitank missiles each day, but eventually they'll have to fight back. Defending against Israel is Hezbollah's whole excuse for having their own private army so they will be totally discredited across Lebanon if they just sit on their hands.

If war does break out, it's unclear if Israel actually has any strategic goals. The attempted invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was a disaster, barely gaining any ground in a month. Trying again while imvading Gaza at the same time seems reckless. I suspect they'll try massive bombing Shia homes and civilian infrastructure like they did in the last war, but the Lebanese don't have much to lose now.

Either way, Hezbollah can fire a sustained rocket barrage far greater than the few thousand Hamas rockets that were enough to saturate Iron Dome. Their rockets are guided so they're likely to hit critical sites: Ben Gurion Airport, military bases, the Dimona nuclear weapons plant, ports, chemical plants.

Yemen & the Gulf

The Houthis launched cruise missiles and advanced drones at Israel recently. This was almost certainly ordered by Iran, as the Houthis only can get them from Iran, and previous similar Houthi attacks before were clearly ordered by Iran. This may have been intended as a reminder to the US of how many troops we have in the Gulf in range of their ballistic missiles. My guess is they're reacting to the threats of war against Hezbollah since Hamas is less important and probably will get wiped out.

The US is deploying more THAAD batteries to the Middle East. These would be useful against higher-end Iranian missiles. Presumably they're going to defend the American military bases in the Gulf. We have thousands of troops strung out inland through Iraq and Syria surrounded by pro-Iranian forces, but apparently the Biden administration is just hoping they'll be okay.