Israel’s genius is rewriting the Middle East.
“Iran is at its most vulnerable that it’s been in 45 years.”
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Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been fighting not just a defensive, multi-front war. It has been fighting a paradigm shift.
What began as a horrific, barbaric onslaught by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists has triggered a historic unleashing of Israeli ingenuity. The Jewish state scrambles not merely to defend itself, but to redefine the rules of warfare, diplomacy, and deterrence in the modern Middle East.
Israel is not just retaliating. It is reinventing.
One of the clearest examples of this reinvention lies in how Israel has integrated artificial intelligence into its wartime operations — not as a sideshow, but as a battlefield multiplier. According to The New York Times, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, working with cyber-reservists from elite tech firms in what is now referred to as “The Studio,” developed AI-powered tools that fundamentally altered the intelligence landscape.1
In one case, they tracked Ibrahim Biari, Hamas’ Central Jabalia Battalion commander, using an AI-infused voice recognition system that geolocated phone calls. In another, they used advanced facial recognition (capable of identifying wounded or partially obscured individuals) to locate targets who thought they were safe.
An Arabic-language chatbot, powered by natural language processing, parsed social media, SMS messages, and intercepted chatter to build dynamic target maps.
This wasn’t just surveillance. It was a fusion of Silicon Wadi and battlefield pragmatism, and it turned Gaza into a laboratory of wartime AI.
Meanwhile, Israel’s psychological warfare operations reached creative new heights with a stunt that would make even Mossad alumni smirk: the “pager attack” on Hezbollah. In one of the most cunning and underappreciated operations of the war, Israeli intelligence reportedly infiltrated Hezbollah’s communication infrastructure — not just digitally, but physically.
According to multiple regional analysts, Israel successfully compromised Hezbollah’s pager supply chain, seeding the devices with vulnerabilities that allowed real-time tracking, signal interception, and even remote activation.
Sky News Arabia quoted sources saying that the Mossad infiltrated supply chains and rigged the pagers with explosives before they were imported to Lebanon some five months ago. Mossad operatives placed a quantity of PETN, a highly explosive material, on the batteries of the devices and detonated them by raising the temperature of the batteries from afar, a source said.
On September 17, 2024, thousands of these pagers exploded in a coordinated attack, primarily in areas with a strong Hezbollah presence. Many Hezbollah members were injured, and the attack caused widespread panic and chaos.
The attack didn’t destroy any weapon depots, but it did something arguably more valuable: It exposed Hezbollah’s vulnerability, injured some 3,000 of the terror group’s operatives, frayed their command chain, and reminded every operative from Beirut to Baalbek that the Israelis are not just watching closely; they’re on the inside.
Following the exploding pager attack, longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah reportedly became depressed and was emotionally changed. His son said Nasrallah was noticeably no longer the same man, and his daughter revealed that he cried after the pager attack.
Ten days later, Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel in Beirut.
Still, the ripple effect didn’t end there.
It is also believed (though not officially confirmed) that one of these compromised pagers was aboard the helicopter that crashed in May 2024, killing Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The presence of the pager on the doomed flight has fueled speculation that Israel’s cyber-penetration of proxy communications may have inadvertently (or perhaps very intentionally) played a role in one of the most consequential political assassinations in the region since Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani.
And that’s not all. On April 26, 2025, a massive explosion rocked Iran’s Shahid Rajaee Port in Bandar Abbas, killing at least 70 people and injuring over 1,000 more. The blast originated from containers reportedly holding ammonium perchlorate, a chemical used in missile fuel.
The shipment had arrived from China in March, ostensibly to replenish Iran’s missile stockpiles. While Iranian authorities attributed the explosion to negligence and mishandling of hazardous materials, the incident’s timing and nature have led to speculation about possible sabotage, though no definitive evidence has been presented to support this claim.
Iranian parliament member Mohammad Saraj openly accused Israel, claiming that explosive materials were either inserted into the containers at their country of origin or during their transport. Saraj further stated that the explosions occurred simultaneously at four different locations.
And yet, perhaps no strike better exemplifies the transformation of Israel’s deterrence strategy than the assassination of top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s sons — and three of his grandchildren — in an airstrike in Gaza just hours after Haniyeh met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran in April 2024.
Though controversial, it was a message written in iron and delivered with chilling precision: If you kiss the ring of Iran, we will cut the hand. This wasn’t just personal. It was geopolitical theater with strategic consequences.
And Haniyeh, by the way, wasn’t in Gaza. He was in Iran, where he was assassinated by Mossad agents.
On the night between Tuesday, July 30, 2024 and Wednesday, July 31, 2024, at 01:14 Israel time — which is 01:44 Tehran time — the signal was given. A few seconds later, the bomb exploded in Haniyeh’s room in the official and well-protected Tehran guesthouse of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The explosion, which killed Haniyeh and his bodyguard, was set off by a sophisticated, remote-controlled bomb smuggled into the Hamas leader’s room. The way the bomb was buried, the angle, and where Haniyeh was in the room, the outcome was inevitable: He had zero chance of coming out of it alive.
Middle Eastern officials said the bomb was planted there roughly two months prior to the incident, and that the blast’s precision required months of planning, extensive surveillance, and even artificial intelligence. It was detonated remotely by Mossad operatives who were on Iranian soil after receiving intelligence that Haniyeh was indeed in the room.
The precision of the hit was reminiscent of the remote-operated machine gun that a Mossad team used to kill top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020. There was also Stuxnet, a malicious computer bug developed by the Israelis and Americans that caused substantial damage to Iran’s nuclear program.
And perhaps most astonishing of all: Many of Israel’s once-groundbreaking inventions — technologies that once stunned the world — have now become almost basic in the Israeli arsenal. The Iron Dome, once heralded as science fiction brought to life, is now just the first layer in a growing, multi-tiered missile defense system that includes David’s Sling, Arrow-3, and cutting-edge laser interception programs.
In any other country, these would be the crown jewels. In Israel, they are now the floor, increasingly far from the ceiling. What was once revolutionary is now routine, as Israeli innovation accelerates at a pace that leaves even allies struggling to keep up.
But Israeli ingenuity isn’t just about striking smarter or deeper. It’s also about shifting tectonic plates.
As Iran’s proxies (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others) become increasingly reckless, Arab nations that had once been cautious about warming relations with Israel are beginning to reevaluate.
The Abraham Accords, which brought Israel into a formal alliance with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, are no longer just diplomatic novelties. They are slowly becoming regional anchors of stability. And Iran, despite its boasts, is looking increasingly like the erratic outsider.
Even Saudi Arabia, long a holdout, has inched closer to normalization talks. Why? Because Israel’s war against Iranian proxies has made something clear: There is a future in aligning with innovation, stability, and power — not with chaos and decay. A report on Tuesday stated that the Saudis do not object to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program (especially if it means Israeli-Saudi normalization comes with the U.S. gifting Saudi Arabia a nuclear program).
And Israel could attack Iran’s nuclear sites before the end of the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks currently taking place, according to Israel analyst Dr. Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.2 He added: “Iran is at its most vulnerable that it’s been in 45 years.”
And when one of Iran’s proxies does strike a measly success — like the Houthis did on Sunday when one of their ballistic missiles landed inside the perimeter of Ben Gurion Airport (Israel’s main international airport) for the first time — Israel responded accordingly, using some 20 Israeli Air Force fighter jets to target Houthi infrastructure along the coast of Yemen, some 2,000 kilometers from the Jewish state.
“Everyone knows that if Israel bombs,” said a Yemeni source following Israel’s response on Monday, “it burns everything.”3
This is not the story of a country merely surviving under fire. It’s the story of a nation turning survival into strategic supremacy. What Israel has done since October 7th is nothing short of earth-shattering (no pun intended): transforming trauma into transformation, setbacks into superiority, and ancient threats into modern irrelevance.
“Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns.” The New York Times.
“Israeli security analyst: Iran at its weakest in 45 years, Israel could strike before US deal.” All Israel News.
“תורי ענק לתחנות דלק בתימן, וחשש מעוד תקיפה: ‘כשישראל מפציצה - היא שורפת הכול’.” Ynet News.
Israel has emerged as the new protector/leader of the Middle East. As it should be. Going forward (post-Trump), Israel and the Middle East will never again rely on America; America has proven fickle depending on who is in office (as has most of the Western world) and if a future terrorist entity threatens Israel and/or the New Middle East, it will fall on Israel to eliminate the terrorists quickly and efficiently without counting on Western "allies" (Erdogan, read the room for heaven's sake!). The strong new alliances coming to the Middle East (starting with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan) will support Israel as their protector; the past 19 months have given them confidence that Israel can do the job alone. And they all know Israel will be the leaders in the economic, spiritual and political renaissance coming to the Middle East and will save the M.E. from a nuclear Iran. What will Israel gain for saving the Middle East? The peace and security they have always wanted, which means keeping all the disputed territories. Once all this becomes apparent to the rest of the world--that a wonderful new Middle East resembling the UAE/Dubai is emerging--the haters will STILL hate on Israel and the Jews ("But the Palestinians!!! They need their land back!!!"), even while they witness the Abraham Accords being signed and civilians celebrating in the streets of Lebanon and Iran and Syria (and quite possibly in Gaza). It will be fun to watch the Israel haters in the world try justify their continued anti-Israel positions while peace, prosperity and co-existence start to blossom rapidly in the M.E. There will be no thanks for saving the world from a nuclear Iran coming from the rest of the world (which will, in a few years, have more terrorist problems than the Middle East).
“…a future with stability and power, not with chaos and decay…”. Amen. This is better than Ian Fleming…