U.S. officials said that the shipment of drone components can help Iran to quickly rebuild its UAV arsenal, which has been reduced by roughly 60% in the recent war.

By JNS

Iran is circumventing the U.S. naval blockade by importing supplies from Russia via the Caspian Sea, including drone components, The New York Times reported on Saturday, citing U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter speaking under conditions of anonymity.

With the Strait of Hormuz largely barred for transit by the U.S. Navy, Tehran has been working “rapidly” to open alternative trading routes, the paper reported.

Four Iranian ports along the Caspian, north of Tehran, are operating tirelessly to bring in wheat, corn, animal feed, sunflower oil, and other supplies, according to the officials.

Russia has four main ports on the sea, at Astrakhan, Olya, Makhachkala, and Kaspiysk.

The report noted that Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, head of the Association of Iran’s Food Industries, told Iran’s IRIB public broadcaster that the regime is rerouting essential food imports through the Caspian.

The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland body of water, bigger than Japan.

Unlike in the Persian Gulf, the United States cannot prevent the navigation of vessels on the Caspian, to which only Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have access.

“If you’re thinking about the ideal place for sanction evasion and military transfers, it’s the Caspian,” the Times cited Nicole Grajewski, a professor specializing in Iran and Russia at Sciences Po in Paris, as saying.

U.S. officials said that the shipment of drone components can help Iran to quickly rebuild its UAV arsenal, which has been reduced by roughly 60% in the recent war.

“Russia and Iran have found ways around the sanctions regime,” Anna Borshchevskaya, an expert on Russia’s Middle East policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the newspaper.

“And that’s exactly why the Israelis bombed the port. Because they understood that through this small, very important trade route, Russia can provide a lot of help to Iran,” she added.

The Israel Defense Forces struck Iranian naval infrastructure at the Bandar-e Anzali port on the Caspian Sea in March during “Operation Roaring Lion,” targeting a Russian-Iranian smuggling route, according to The Wall Street Journal. (“Bandar” means “port” in Persian.)

Israeli officials at the time confirmed that the strikes targeted Iranian Navy vessels in the port.

The strike expanded the war’s maritime arena beyond the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, reaching the Caspian Sea for the first time.

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In a targeted operation in Qalqilya, IDF and Shin Bet forces eliminated two weapons dealers—including a senior terrorist—seized a Carlo-type firearm, and arrested two additional suspects for further investigation.


תיעוד – לוחמי יחידת הגדעונים 33 מלהב 433, בשיתוף צה״ל ושב"כ, חיסלו בקלקיליה שני מחבלים

בפעילות ממוקדת הלילה חוסל מחבל מרכזי אשר עסק בסחר אמצעי לחימה. כמו כן, יחד עם המחבל חוסל סוחר אמצעי לחימה נוסף ואותר נשק מסוג 'קרלו' שהיה ברשותם.

בנוסף, נעצרו שני מחבלים נוספים שהועברו להמשך… pic.twitter.com/nsWdENWh0h

— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) September 16, 2025

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IDF forces raided Syrian regime commando posts on Mount Hermon, seizing over 300 weapons and arresting suspects linked to arms smuggling into Lebanon.


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With the renewal of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, the international community can no longer afford to prioritize diplomatic virtue signaling over effective strategies.

By Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum

Ask any diplomat and he or she will tell you that the purpose of diplomacy is to save lives. In Yemen and Somalia, though, the State Department’s policies are getting hundreds of people killed just so U.S. diplomats can promote the niceties that the two countries are unified and should remain so.

Call them the “Axis of the Underappreciated” but there cannot be a solution to the Houthi problem until the United States works separately with Somaliland and South Yemen, or South Arabia as many in the region prefer to call their land, harkening back to a name during the period of British colonization.

Somaliland and South Yemen are countries apart. Both have a longer history of self-rule than unity with the states into which the State Department and the international community seek to subordinate them.

The British formed the protectorate of Somaliland in 1884, co-opting a local tribal system that had governed the region for decades, if not centuries.

In 1960, the United Kingdom gave Somaliland its independence, and 30 countries including the United States and the other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council recognized it.

Within days, though, Somaliland entered a voluntary merger with the former Italian Somaliland to form what eventually would become Somalia. It was a marriage made in hell, and by 1991, Somaliland had enough and ended the marriage.

It has been independent, even if unrecognized, ever since. Even if 1960 is taken as its start, Somaliland has been independent from Somalia longer than it was ever a part. Eighty percent of Somaliland’s population was not alive during the Somalia interlude.

South Yemen’s situation is similar. The British arrived in Aden in 1839 and established control for subsequent decades over what would become South Yemen.

North Yemen, meanwhile, was under the control first of the Imamate, the religious precursor of the Houthis, and then under Arab nationalists; it developed a different identity from the south.

After the British left, communists took over the former British protectorate for just over two decades. They built infrastructure but they imprinted neither their economic philosophy nor worldview.

With the collapse of the Cold War, North and South Yemen unified but their differences were too great, and after just four years, South Yemen sought to reassert its independence.

It lost the subsequent war; southerners consider themselves occupied ever since. But even if the international community considers Yemen whole, Sanaa controlled the south for only 14 years out of more than 140.

Today, diplomatic smoke-and-mirrors or not, the Southern Transitional Council is the government of South Yemen, while the Internationally Recognized Government essentially plays make-believe from Cairo and Riyadh.

The cost to such a fiction measures billions of dollars. The United States (at least until the current Trump administration) and the international community dumped tens of billions of dollars into Somalia and Yemen in failed efforts to buy legitimacy and build capacity, but both Somalia and northern Yemen remain morasses of corruption and state failure, if not hotbeds of terrorism.

With the renewal of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, the international community no longer can afford to prioritize diplomatic virtue signaling over effective strategies.

Draining Houthi supply and protecting shipping need not cost billions of dollars. With a negligible budget, Somaliland’s small coast guard has managed to secure the country’s 500-mile Gulf of Aden coastline to weapons smugglers and terrorists, at least when its few patrol boats have fuel.

South Yemen’s coastline is rugged and often isolated. In areas such as the Hadramawt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has a presence, smugglers can land weaponry and transport it inland to areas of Houthi control.

A few million dollars, training, and perhaps upgraded patrol boats could help the Southern Transitional Council prevent weaponry reaching the Houthis, Al Qaeda, and Islah militants, all of whom increasingly work in concert.

The United States could go further by basing its own patrols in South Yemen’s capital Aden and Somaliland’s commercial capital Berbera, two port cities that would welcome a skeleton U.S. air and sea presence to secure shipping.

The only impediment is self-inflicted reticence from a State Department prone to promoting Mogadishu’s and Sanaa’s interests over Washington’s.

For more than two decades, successive U.S. administrations have ignored the obvious solution.

As someone who prides himself in breaking diplomatic constraints, it is time for President Donald Trump to embrace a simple and inexpensive solution and order Secretary of State Marco Rubio to draw up plans to help train and fund the Somaliland and South Yemeni coast guards.

Delaying will only enable the Houthis and their terror partners to continue to arm and threaten hundreds of billions of dollars of international cargo.

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IDF sources say Iran may seek to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom and transform it into a launchpad for its proxy terrorist operations.

By Hezy Laing, World Israel News

Israel has long faced major threats in both the north (Hezbollah in Lebanon) and the south (Hamas in Gaza).

But could the next major front emerge in the east?

The Jewish state shares its longest border, nearly 200 miles, with Jordan.

Despite a peace treaty and ongoing security cooperation between Jerusalem and Amman, a recent uptick in cross-border terrorist incidents and weapon-smuggling attempts has raised an alarm.

IDF sources say Iran may seek to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom and transform it into a launchpad for its proxy terrorist operations.

In response to the mounting threat, the IDF deployed a newly established division to the Jordanian frontier during the war with Iran – the 96th “Gilead” Division.

Since the recent conflict affirmed Israel’s technological superiority, analysts suggest that Iran could shift tactics, possibly engaging with its standing army.

The threat from the east is more than a geographic shift. It’s a direct line to Iran.

Only two countries lie between Iran and Israel: Iraq and Jordan.

Iran already holds significant influence in Iraq, a fellow Shiite-majority nation.

Only Jordan remains for a direct route from Iran to Israel.

If Tehran succeeds in establishing a land corridor to Israel, it could attempt to overwhelm the Jewish state with the superior manpower of its standing army.

Iran boasts a standing military of approximately 610,000 troops and a reserve force of 350,000.

Is this Iran’s new goal? Time will tell.

The post Is Jordan the IDF’s next battlefield? – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

Installing hundreds of monitoring devices and the establishment of a new Eastern Command are parts of the first phase of the project.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The IDF has developed a detailed plan for fully safeguarding the Jordanian border and will present it to the Finance and Defense ministries in the coming days for funding approval, Ynet reported Tuesday.

In the first, immediate phase of the plan, hundreds of monitoring and observation instruments will be placed along a 400-kilometer stretch from Eilat to Hamat Gader at the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee.

The radars and cameras will be installed on high poles, to detect illicit attempts to cross the border either by terrorists or smugglers.

When such an attempt is detected, fast mobile forces will be sent to the suspicious area. It is “possible,” said the report, that some soldiers will use gliders or other airborne vehicles to arrive and attack quickly.

An upgraded physical barrier is also included in the plan, as currently there is nothing blocking the border in the entire desert (Arava) area, and in other places, such as the Jordan Valley, the barrier consists only of a decades-old, rusty and low fence.

The formation of a completely new, Eastern division that will guard Israel’s longest land border is also in the works.

A unique element in the plan is to have one of the brigades in the division consist of ultra-Orthodox men serving in the Jordan Valley, which would put them in close proximity to their yeshivas (learning institutions) in the Jerusalem area.

This single, unified Command would ostensibly be more effective than the current situation, where a  mix of reservist and regular battalions belonging to two different Commands – Southern and Central – rotate in and out of various domains along the border.

The estimated cost of the project is somewhere between the NIS2.5 billion invested in the high fences strewn with technological means of detection along the Egyptian border that stopped the infiltration of tens of thousands of illegal migrants, and the NIS4 billion barrier down the length of the Gaza Strip, which was built both above and below the ground in order to stop terror tunnels from crossing into Israel.

While the Gaza barrier was largely successful in stopping smuggling attempts, criminals make constant runs at the 220km-long Sinai fence, with the IDF acknowledging that has not been able to stop a majority of them, due to the sparseness of its forces there.

Most, but not all, of the southern gangs are running drugs, not guns. The Jordanian border, however, has recently become a huge conduit for all kinds of weapons, including advanced rifles and explosives.

According to the report, the “regular” smuggling routes have been taken over by the Iranian Quds Force, which is eager to turn Judea and Samaria into a serious terror challenge for Israel as well as a real threat to take over the Palestinian Authority.

The explosives in particular are a worry for the IDF, as the Palestinians in such terror centers as Jenin have mastered the tactic of planting bombs along and underneath streets where they expect IDF forces to travel, and they are much more powerful and deadly than the homemade, fertilizer-based ones of the past.

Over the last three years, the army and police have stepped up their anti-smuggling operations, and hundreds of attempts have been foiled, with the confiscation of thousands of weapons.

“But for every such thwarting, there are at least three to five smuggling operations that are successful, and we don’t know about them,” one security official said.

The post Inside IDF’s plans for tech-heavy border fence on Jordanian frontier appeared first on World Israel News.

Iran is looking to encircle and trap Israel in a web of well-armed terror proxies.

By Johnathan Spyer, Middle East Forum

Iran-supported Islamist militias are currently engaged in war against Israel on two fronts. The main focus of combat remains, of course, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

A “support front,” as is the preferred term, has been maintained by Lebanese Hezbollah since October 8 in the Israel-Lebanon border area.

Iran seeks as a strategic objective to surround Israel with a crescent of active fronts maintained by Iran and supported by Islamist client militias.

As part of this, the regime is seeking to find a way to add an eastern component to this crescent – through Jordan to Judea and Samaria.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its client militias have freedom of action, of course, in Iraq, where they are deeply embedded in government and state.

But further west, two elements stand as barriers in the way of the Iranian desire to begin an armed campaign against Israel in Judea and Samaria and from there into central Israel.

These are the US-supported Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the Israeli security presence in Judea and Samaria.

Tehran is actively engaged in developing a variety of “solutions” to this problem.

The Iranians are not without significant achievements in this area.

Most importantly, Tehran has succeeded in establishing and maintaining an arms route in which military materiel, brought from Iran into Lebanon, is then transported across the Syrian-Lebanese border, via Jordan, into Judea and Samaria.

The maintenance of this route is of strategic importance to Iran.

It is intended, over time, to flood Judea and Samaria with weaponry, and by so doing, to eventually make this area a third front in the ongoing long war against Israel.

How do Iranian arms enter the West Bank?

The following details one of the channels of Iranian arms to the West Bank. There may well be others.

The weapons pipeline from Lebanon and Syria to the West Bank began in 2005.

Syrian Brig.-Gen. Mohammed Suleiman, assassinated by Israel in 2008, was responsible for facilitating the arrival of weapons to Damascus and the Syrian coast, and then managing their conveyance to Lebanon and Jordan.

Lebanese Hezbollah was also involved in this process.

In this period, two brothers, Sami and Alaa al-Bashashbeh from Ramtha in Jordan, were responsible for handling the weapons from their entry into Jordan until their transfer into Judea and Samaria.

The Bashashbehs cooperated with smuggling networks on the Syrian side, and with Lebanese Hezbollah.

Their interest, and that of the other smuggling families, was in money, not ideological commitment. The transfer at that time was in small arms – rifles, pistols, and ammunition.

This network broke down with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, and the loss by the Syrian regime and its allies of large parts of the border to Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

With the reconquest by the Assad regime and its allies of the southern border area in 2018, the process began again, on a larger scale, once again managed by Hezbollah, under Iranian supervision, in cooperation with elements of the Syrian regime and local smuggling families.

These activities take place within the framework of Hezbollah’s external security office, headed by senior movement official Wafiq Safa.

Now the arms smuggling process begins in Lebanon. Weapons are transported across the border to a Hezbollah external security headquarters in Qusayr, Syria.

The weapons are taken from there to the Homs area, where they are stored at a farm belonging to Hussein Rahma. The farm has been converted by Hezbollah into a site for the storage of arms.

From there, the weapons are taken to a site at the Sayeda Zeinab area, south of Damascus.

There, a senior Hezbollah official named Zain al-Abidin is responsible for storing them and managing their transfer to southern Syria and Suwayda.

Under his supervision, the arms are taken to remote areas in the Suwayda province on the Syrian-Jordanian border. They are then transported into Jordan, and then into Judea and Samaria.

While light weapons are still being transported along this route, in the post-2018 period and the years prior to the current war, the focus shifted.

The weaponry now trafficked includes C4, TNT, mines, anti-tank mines, RPG launchers, and missiles of various types, including anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles.

On the Jordanian side, two families centrally involved in the transfer of weapons within Jordan and into Judea and Samaria are the al-Saeed and al-Ramthan families.

Muhammad al-Ramthan, the main member of this family involved in weapons transfer, is the brother of Mari al-Ramthan, who was killed in an airstrike by the Jordanian authorities in May 2023 because of his involvement in smuggling across the border.

At the time, regional media reports called Mari al-Ramthan the “Escobar” of southern Syria because of the smuggling of Captagon along the routes he maintained.

Few media outlets at the time noted that the same lines were being used to transport weaponry. The 4th Armored Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, is involved in this process.

Hezbollah Smuggling

Hezbollah also relies on the cooperation of local elements and armed groups to facilitate the smuggling. In this context, Jihad and Mashafi al-Saeed of Sha’ab village play a central role.

A medical facility maintained in Sha’ab village by Jihad al-Saeed has been used by Hezbollah for the storing of arms on the Syrian side of the border.

Regarding the final stage of the network, namely those individuals on the Jordanian side responsible for bringing the weapons into Judea and Samaria, several names can be identified.

Four individuals involved in the process of smuggling in this area are Abu Amar al-Khalidi, Abu Khaled al-Sarhan, Saqr al-Fadous, and Muhammad al-Duaij. All are known arms smugglers.

So far, this has been the route from Lebanon via Syria and Jordan to Judea and Samaria.

What happens when the weaponry arrives in this area? A recent report by veteran Israeli Middle East analyst Ehud Ya’ari suggests that Iran has abandoned efforts to create a unified, hierarchical military command structure in Judea and Samaria.

Such a structure would be too vulnerable to penetration by Israel’s security services because of their tight hold there.

Instead, the weaponry and materiel are made available to any ad hoc armed group that forms itself on a local basis in Judea and Samaria and is willing to carry out attacks on Israel.

Formations such as the now defunct Lions’ Den of Nablus and the Jenin Battalion of that city offer examples of such loosely assembled Ktaeb, or battalions.

Ya’ari refers to this approach as the “Kitaba” strategy of Iran.

In his report, produced for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, he indicates that there are currently 1,000 members in such loosely organized formations.

He also notes that IRGC Quds Force Units 840 and 3900 have established a joint “operations room” for managing this process with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

And the final destination of the weaponry?

On Monday, 22-year-old Sgt. Yehuda Geto of Pardess Hanna and the IDF’s Commando Brigade was killed in an IED explosion in the Nur-a-Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm on the West Bank.

A week earlier, Capt. Alon Sacgiu of the Kfir Brigade died in an IED explosion in Jenin, in which 16 other IDF soldiers were wounded. That’s how it’s meant to end, from Iran’s point of view.

The Iranian arms route from Lebanon, through Syria and Jordan to Judea and Samaria, represents the main flagrant subversion of Jordanian sovereignty so far achieved by the Tehran regime.

It is also a clear, present, and growing danger for Israel.

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