(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Fifty years after the Yom Kippur War began, Israel is at war again, and preparations are being made right now for an absolutely massive ground invasion of Gaza. According to Google, the Yom Kippur War started on October 6th, 1973. The war with Hamas started on October 7th, 2023, and it could quickly evolve into a major regional war as more parties get involved. Once Israeli troops pour into Gaza, the dominoes will start falling very quickly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be the one that makes the final decision on a ground invasion of Gaza, and he very much sounds like a man that has made up his mind…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday to “change the Middle East” in Israel’s war with Palestinian militant group Hamas, as the army pounded the Gaza Strip with air strikes.
“What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible… we are going to change the Middle East,” Netanyahu told officials visiting Jerusalem from the country’s south, where Hamas militants carried out a surprise attack on Saturday morning.
“This is only the beginning… we are all with you and we will defeat them with force, enormous force.”
At this hour, a siege of Gaza has already begun as the IDF makes final preparations for a ground campaign.
That means that there will be no electricity, no food and no fuel for those living in Gaza until the war is done…
This morning, Israel imposed a “complete siege” on the area – including a sweeping ban on food and fuel moving into Gaza and an immediate cut-off of the water supply.
“There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said.
“We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Needless to say, many of those living in Gaza will soon become extremely hungry.
And the IDF has already been hitting hundreds of strategic targets by air…
Among the 500 targets hit overnight were eight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad war rooms; a building housing Hamas operatives; several high-rise towers housing Hamas assets; a command center used by a senior official in Hamas’s naval forces; an “operational asset used by Hamas” located within a mosque in Jabaliya; an asset used by the terror group for intelligence; and three tunnels in the Beit Hanoun area in northern Gaza.
Of course this is just the beginning.
Hundreds of thousands of troops are being mobilized, and they will possess enough firepower to absolutely flatten Gaza…
IDF are amassing their 173,000 troops including 8,000 elite commandos, along with 300 tanks and plenty of heavy weaponry on the border with Gaza in the town of Sderot.
A further 300,000 reserve troops have been mobilised in an unprecedented move and sent south ahead of the possible invasion.
The Israelis would not be mobilizing all of these troops if they did not plan to do something with them.
According to Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, this is the biggest mobilization that Israel has conducted since the Yom Kippur War…
Regarding the draft of reservists, Hagari said the IDF “has never mobilized so many reservists so quickly — 300,000 reservists in 48 hours.”
This is the largest mobilization since the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Israel called up 400,000 reservists.
Wow.
So this is it.
Inside Gaza, people have already been getting phone calls warning them that the IDF will be coming in…
‘It doesn’t need much thinking about. Israel suffered the biggest loss in its history so you can imagine what it is going to do,’ said a resident of Beit Hanoun on Gaza’s northeastern border with Israel.
‘I took my family out at sunrise and dozens of other families did the same. Many of us got phone calls, audio messages from Israeli security officers telling us to leave because they will operate there,’ he said.
If you were in the same position, would you warn anyone living in Gaza in advance?
Many innocent lives may be saved by these calls, but it also tells the enemy exactly what you are planning to do.
Fox News is reporting that Netanyahu has called Joe Biden to inform him that “a ground operation in the Gaza Strip” is going to happen…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told President Biden that a ground operation in the Gaza Strip is necessary after Hamas launched deadly strikes on his country.
The remark, made in a phone call between the two leaders, came as Biden raised concerns about Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip if a ground operation should commence, three Israeli and U.S. sources briefed on the call told Axios.
“We have to go in. We can’t negotiate now,” Netanyahu told the president, according to the outlet.
But once the Israelis invade, will Hezbollah just sit there and watch Hamas get utterly destroyed?
I don’t think so.
I think that Hezbollah will create a second front in the north, and so I hope that the IDF is prepared for that.
On Monday, there were some very alarming clashes between the IDF and Hezbollah forces…
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a brief statement on Monday that its helicopters are currently striking in Lebanese territory. No further details were provided.
Earlier, the IDF said a “number of armed suspects” who “infiltrated” into Israel from Lebanon were killed, and that IDF soldiers were searching the area.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) peacekeepers said in a statement on Monday that it has reported explosions near Al-Boustan in southwest Lebanon.
Hopefully Hezbollah will not decide to get crazy and launch a full-blown invasion of Israel.
Because if that happens, Israel has apparently told Hezbollah that it will “completely destroy Damascus”…
Israel gives clear warning to Hezbollah:
If Hezbollah joins the war, the IDF will completely destroy Damascus and will directly target the Iran-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, US warships will support Israel in this war. This message was delivered by Israel via France.
Needless to say, that would draw Syria into the war.
Of course the Iranians are unlikely to remain on the sidelines if the Israelis start hitting Syria and Hezbollah extremely hard, and any big move by Iran would draw the U.S. military into the conflict.
What I am trying to say is that this thing could get way out of control very rapidly. For many years I have been warning my readers that a great Middle East war was coming, and now we are here. There will be so much death and destruction in the days ahead, and it won’t just be limited to that part of the world.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.