Top Chinese and Russian military leaders have raised the alarm about foreign forces making efforts to sow the seed of discord and turmoil in Asia and beyond.

Speaking on Monday at the 10th Beijing Xiangshan Forum, vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), General Zhang Youxia, painted a grim picture of the dire straits of present world security.

"Some countries, for fear that the world may stabilize, deliberately create turmoil, interfere in regional issues, interfere in other countries' internal affairs, and instigate color revolutions," Zhang warned without naming any countries.

Russia's president has given an address on the situation in Dagestan in the wake of Sunday's unrest at the Makhachkala Airport, which crowds of rioters attempted to storm after the landing of a passenger plane coming from Tel Aviv.

President Vladimir Putin has given his assessment on Sunday's unrest in Dagestan, saying that it was sparked by social media channels linked to Ukraine and Western intelligence services seeking to take advantage of the crisis in the Middle East.

"The events in Makhachkala last night were orchestrated, including through social media, not least from the territory of Ukraine. By the hands of Western intelligence agencies," the president said, speaking at a meeting with the heads of Russian law enforcement on Monday.

"I'm not certain that Kiev's curators know what their charges are doing by inciting pogroms in Russia," Putin added, pointing to the irony of the fact that Washington and its allies have supported a regime in Ukraine which has openly glorified Nazis and their collaborators while simultaneously touting their support for Israel.

Citing attempts by the West to destabilize and divide Russia's multiethnic and multiconfessional society using informational, technological and psychological aggression, Putin said this is now being done by trying to take advantage of public anger over the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

The Israel vs. Arab Children War, which doubles as the Hegemon vs. Axis of Resistance War, both a sub-branch of the NATO vs. Russia and NATO vs. China War, is veering totally out of control.

By now it's firmly established that with China brokering peace all across West Asia, and Russia-China going all out on BRICS 11, complete with facilitating energy trade settlements outside the U.S. dollar, The Empire Strikes Back would be totally predictable:

Let's set West Asia on fire

The immediate goal of Straussian neocon psychos and their silos across the Beltway is to go for Syria, Lebanon - and ultimately Iran.

That's what explains the presence in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean of a fleet of at least 73 U.S./NATO warships - ranging from two American aircraft carrier groups to 30+ ships from 14 NATO members involved in the ongoing Dynamic Mariner war games off the coast of Italy.

That's the largest concentration of U.S./NATO warships since the 1970s.

Anyone believing this fleet is being assembled to "assist" Israel in its Final Solution project of imposing Nakba 2.0 on Gaza must read some Lewis Carroll. The shadow war already in play aims to smash all the Axis of Resistance nodes in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq - with Iran kept as the culminating piece de resistance.

Any military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those expensive American iron bathtubs are destined to become sub-oceanic coral reef design - especially if visited by hypersonic missiles.

Of course, this could all be just your average American Power Projection/Deterrence Show. The main actors - Iran and Russia - are not impressed. All it takes is a backward glance over the shoulders at what a bunch of mountain goat herders with fake Kalashnikovs did to NATO in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the Hegemon would need to rely on a serious network of bases on the ground if it ever considered launching a war against Iran. No West Asia actor would allow the U.S. to use bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq or even Jordan. Baghdad is already engaged, for quite a while, in getting rid of all American bases.

Israel has conducted a series of ground incursions into Gaza over the course of the past week, each one building on the other, increasing in scope and scale. This appears to be part of an Israeli strategy to lean gradually into an operation that, when finished, falls just short of a general assault on Gaza.

At the end of the day, however, Israel will most likely not be able to defeat the military forces of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance forces defending Gaza. Israel will have to either seek to defeat Hamas by laying siege to the Gaza Strip or commit to a full-scale attack on Gaza designed to clear the territory of all Hamas fighters.

History suggests that any such assault will be extremely difficult to accomplish.

The example of Operation Hubertus, the final German assault on Stalingrad, stands out. The Germans brought in elements of seven elite "Pioneer" battalions — combat engineers with extensive experience in urban warfare, having paved the way for prior German victories in Rostov and Voronezh. The Pioneers were the masters of military demolition, highly trained specialists in house-to-house fighting and the use of explosives and flame throwers. Around 1,800 of these elite assault engineers were assembled for the final drive to push the defending Soviet soldiers from Stalingrad.

On the first day of operations, the Pioneers suffered nearly 30% casualties. After several days of fierce fighting, the Pioneers were stopped less than 100 meters from their objective. However, their forces suffered between 60-70% casualties, and could not proceed further.

Operation Hubertus was doomed to fail from the beginning. According to an account of the fighting:

"The constant bombardment and artillery shelling created a battlefield in which the Soviet defenders largely held the advantage over the assaulting Germans. The fields of rubble and craters were perfectly designed for defensive actions and could be improved with relatively little effort. This also provided ample hunting ground for the ever-present Soviet snipers."

The prime minister has retracted claims that he was not warned of the October 7 Hamas attack...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for a post blaming the country's security services for failing to predict the Hamas attack in which 1,200 people lost their lives. The Jewish state's PM was responding to widespread criticism from the country's media as well as members of his own war cabinet.

On Saturday, after a late night press conference, Netanyahu's office wrote on X:

"Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas's war intentions. On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet [security service], assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement."

However, the post sparked a fierce backlash from Israeli officials and politicians.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq targets US forces at Al-Tanf base, and the Pentagon confirms that American and coalition forces were subjected to no less than 20 missile and drone attacks in Iraq and Syria after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced that its resistance fighters targeted the US forces at the Al-Tanf base, located on the border triangle between Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, with two drones.

Sources reported to Al Mayadeen that "a missile also targeted American forces in Kharab al-Jir in Syria."

Earlier today, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced the targeting of US forces at the Ain al-Assad base in western Iraq with a drone, confirming a direct hit.

Sources also revealed to Al Mayadeen that the US military base in the Al-Omar oil field, located northeast of Deir Ezzr Governorate, eastern Syria, was targeted with a missile on Friday.

The plan advocates the forced transfer of the population of the Gaza Strip to Sinai permanently, and calls for the international community to be leveraged to assist the move...

Israeli culture magazine Mekovit published on 28 October a leaked document issued by Israel's Ministry of Intelligence recommending the occupation of Gaza and total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

The document, issued on 13 October, identifies a plan to transfer all residents of the Gaza Strip to North Sinai as the preferred option among three alternatives regarding the future of the Palestinians in Gaza at the end of the current war between Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian resistance.

The document recommends that Israel evacuate the Gazan population to Sinai during the war, establish tent cities and new cities in northern Sinai to accommodate the deported population, and then create a closed security zone stretching several kilometers inside Egypt. The deported Palestinians would not be allowed to return to any areas near the Israeli border.
The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being implemented by Israel's security establishment.

The US and its allies are deliberately eroding global security and risking a nuclear war as they seek to defend their hegemony, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Monday.

Russia and China, meanwhile, are demonstrating a model of cooperation based on equality and agreement not to enhance their own national security at the expense of other nations, he told a regional security forum in Beijing.

Below is a recap of the key points of Shoigu's speech at the 10th Beijing Xiangshan Forum.

Israeli security services warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for months that his domestic policies were fueling dangerous political turmoil, the New York Times (NYT) reported on Sunday. Officials reportedly stressed that internal discord was weakening the country's security and strengthening Israel's enemies.

The report was part of an examination of what led up to the latest hostilities between Israel and Gaza. At one point in July, the prime minister even allegedly refused to meet with a senior general who was trying to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence.

At the same time, the NYT assessed that Israeli security representatives themselves continuously misjudged the threat posed by Hamas, including in the weeks leading up to the October 7 attack on Israeli territory which resulted in the deaths of up to 1,400 people.

The newspaper reported that Israeli military intelligence had believed since May 2021 that the militant group was not interested in any large-scale attacks from Gaza, but was instead plotting an attack in the West Bank, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas.

A new war in Europe is no longer unthinkable and German society must adapt to this reality, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has claimed as he called for increased military spending.

In an interview with Germany's ZDF broadcaster on Sunday, Pistorius insisted that Germans "must again get used to the thought that the danger of a war in Europe could pose a threat." Discussing Berlin's defense capabilities, the minister called on his compatriots to "become war-capable."

The official cited the Ukraine conflict as well as hostilities between Israel and Hamas as proof that fighting could also erupt elsewhere.

Pistorius brushed off criticism that Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government has been too slow to build up the German armed forces, claiming that they are working as rapidly as possible to make up for 30 years of neglect and underfunding. The minister promised that the Bundeswehr would be unrecognizable in three or four years' time, and suggested that the German military is already among the strongest in NATO and Europe.