Editor’s Note: Between Ukraine and now the Middle East, there is definitely a sense of fatigue setting in among America First patriots who just want to ignore the rest of the world and focus on our own issues at home. I’m one of them. But unlike Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East is going to draw us in no matter what we do. We can call our representatives or protest the administration all we want, but they seem dead-set on getting involved. This is why I will continue to post updates about the situation. As much as I wish we weren’t getting involved, we are and that means it needs to be covered. With that said, here’s Michael Snyder…
There have been some major developments in the war in the Middle East. Fighting is heating up along Israel’s northern border, and the Biden administration has decided to bomb facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for a third time in retaliation for new attacks on U.S. forces in the region.
This war threatens to spiral out of control at any moment, but there is no turning back now.
On Sunday, the IDF continued to tighten the circle around the Hamas headquarters that is located directly beneath Gaza’s biggest hospital…
Israeli ground forces on Sunday battled Hamas militants near Gaza’s largest hospital, where health officials said thousands of staff, patients and displaced people remain trapped with no electricity, dwindling supplies and some gunfire coming inside.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed growing international calls for a cease-fire unless it includes the release of all the nearly 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas in its bloody Oct. 7 rampage that triggered the war, saying Israel was bringing its “full force” with the aim of ending Hamas’ 16-year rule in Gaza.
The IDF has been making steady progress, and it is being reported that they have even killed the Hamas commander that was keeping staff and patients from leaving the hospital…
Israeli forces on Saturday night claimed to have killed a Hamas commander who held 1,000 Gazans “hostage” in a hospital as human shields.
The Israel Defense Forces said that Ahmed Siam, a leader in Hamas’s al-Furqan Brigade, had blocked civilians from evacuating the Al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza City earlier this week.
Meanwhile, fighting continues to intensify on the northern front.
On Friday, Hezbollah admitted that seven more of their fighters had been killed, and that brings the grand total to 68 since the war started…
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has issued a rare announcement Friday, saying that seven of its fighters have been killed, describing that they were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem” – which is code for fighting Israel.
But it’s being widely reported that at least some of the slain Hezbollah members were killed inside Syria, after a new Friday Israeli airstrike on central Homs. In total on Friday, Hezbollah released seven death notices.
Hezbollah as well as international sources have cited a death toll of at least 68 Hezbollah fighters since the Oct.7 conflict began, centered on southern Israel and Gaza.
Then on Sunday, an IDF drone hit a target 40 kilometers inside the Lebanese border…
Earlier this morning, Lebanese media outlets reported that an IDF drone struck a truck near the coastal village of al-Zahrani, some 40 kilometers from the Israeli border, just south of Sidon.
There were no reports of injuries in the strike.
The IDF had said it had carried out a strike on a site from which surface-to-air missiles were fired at military drones over the Israel-Lebanon border, without specifying the exact location.
The fact that this strike happened so deep inside Lebanon has greatly infuriated the Islamic world.
But if Hezbollah does not stand down, much worse is coming.
On Saturday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant specifically warned Hezbollah that what the IDF has done to Gaza it can also do to Beirut…
“If it (Hezbollah) makes this kind of mistake here, the ones who will pay the price will be first and foremost Lebanese citizens,” Gallant told soldiers on Israel’s northern border in remarks relayed by his office.
“What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.”
Needless to say, Damascus could potentially get flattened as well.
In fact, IDF warplanes just hit “terror infrastructure in Syria” in response to rocket fire which had come over the northern border…
Israeli warplanes struck terror infrastructure in Syria a short while ago, the Israel Defense Forces says.
The IDF says this is in reaction to rocket fire several hours ago from Syria toward the Golan Heights.
Of course this is just the beginning.
During a major speech on Saturday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made it abundantly clear that his forces are not going to stop hitting both the U.S. and Israel…
The leader of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group said Saturday his fighters have introduced new weapons, including a missile with a heavy warhead in the ongoing fighting along the Lebanon-Israel border, adding that they will keep using the tense frontier to pressure Israel.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah also blasted the United States over the Israel-Hamas war, saying it is the only country that can stop Israel’s wide offensive on the Gaza Strip but doesn’t do so. He said attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, that Washington says have reached more than 40 rockets and suicide drone attacks, will continue until the war in Gaza comes to an end.
So the clashes between Israel and Hezbollah will continue. And the clashes between the U.S. and Hezbollah will continue too.
On Saturday morning, more suicide drones targeted U.S. troops in Syria…
Armed suicide drones have targeted US forces in Syria, in the latest sign that Iranian-backed militias in the region could try to widen the Israel-Hamas war by striking American troops.
A Pentagon official told DailyMail.com that ‘multiple one-way drones’ were launched on Saturday morning against US and coalition forces stationed at Rumalyn Landing Zone in northern Syria.
In response, the U.S. has bombed two facilities in Syria that are used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This was the third such attack since October 27th…
The U.S. military retaliated over recent attacks on American bases by bombing two facilities in eastern Syria, a senior U.S. official tells Fox News.
Two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stations in the Middle East were hit on Sunday night. One was an IRGC training facility, while the other was used by IRGC proxy forces.
Sunday night’s airstrikes were the third set of retaliatory attacks against Iranian proxies on behalf of the U.S. since October 27.
The U.S. is already at war with both Iran and Hezbollah.
Most Americans don’t realize this, because the Biden administration doesn’t want to admit it and the mainstream media doesn’t want to admit it.
But if someone attacks your troops dozens of times and you keep bombing them in response, you are at war with them.
This war is going to get extremely intense, and it is setting the stage for some really bad things that will happen after the war is over.
We really have reached one of the most important turning points in the entire history of the Middle East, and nothing will ever be the same again from this point forward.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.