Hezbollah Launches Deadly Drone Attack as IDF Renews Push in Gaza

Happy Tuesday! You know you’re really growing two-ton pumpkins for the love of the game when you’re spending thousands of dollars on gas to lug one from Minnesota to Northern California yourself. 

Good thing Travis Gienger’s 2,471-pound pumpkin, Rudy, brought in $9 a pound for being the heaviest gourd at the Half Moon Bay World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The man arrested on Saturday at a checkpoint outside former President Donald Trump’s rally in California’s Coachella Valley said Monday that he is “100 percent a Trump supporter,” and never intended to hurt the Republican nominee. The man, Vem Miller, was arrested for reportedly being “illegally in possession of a shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine,” according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office. Miller—who said he works in the media—claims he started carrying the guns after receiving anonymous death threats. He was released on a $5,000 bail shortly after his arrest.
• China on Monday conducted a full-scale military drill simulating an assault on Taiwan that Chinese military spokesman Li Xi said was a “stern warning to the separatist acts” in Taiwan. The exercises seemed to be retaliation for Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s remarks last week, in which he promised to “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller condemned the drill, and said China’s behavior was “unwarranted and risks escalation.”
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that North Korea is sending troops to Russia to assist in its invasion of Ukraine, though independent authorities have been unable to verify his assertion. Unnamed Ukrainian and South Korean officials told several outlets late last week that North Korean soldiers had already been deployed in the Russian-Ukraine war, including military engineers. North Korea has been providing Russia with ammunition, and in June, Moscow and Pyongyang agreed to a defense pact that Russian President Vladimir Putin said assured “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against” either country, though specific terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. 
• Ukrainian authorities on Monday said that a Russian missile strike on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa killed one person and injured eight others after the missile hit a grain storage facility and two foreign-flagged civilian cargo ships from Belize and Palau. The same Palau-flagged ship, Optima, was hit with Russian missile fire just last week, killing one Ukrainian and injuring four foreigners. The attacks add to the growing list of foreign-flagged commercial ships from small countries Russia has attacked in recent weeks, threatening a valuable maritime corridor for exports from Ukraine.
• The Canadian government on Monday expelled six Indian diplomats—including Indian High Commissioner to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma, equivalent to ambassador—who allegedly targeted Indian dissidents and Sikh separatists living in Canada. The move comes one year after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of complicity in the June 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh separatist. Canadian police said the six officials were directly implicated in intelligence-gathering against Sikh separatists who were subsequently targeted by India’s proxies. The Indian government claimed it had actually recalled the expelled diplomats due to an “atmosphere of extremism and violence” and later also expelled six of Canada’s diplomats from India. 
• Lebanon’s health ministry said on Monday that an Israeli airstrike on the northern Lebanese village of Aitou struck an apartment building, killing 21 people. Israel has not confirmed the alleged attack, though Hezbollah-affiliated media reported the attack resulted in 18 “martyrs.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did confirm on Monday morning that an IDF airstrike in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed Muhammad Kamal Naim, a Hezbollah anti-tank missile commander. Later on Monday, the IDF and Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet jointly announced that last month Israel killed Hamas’ air formation commander in Gaza, Samer Abu-Daqa, who had helped plot the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 
• The IDF and Shin Bet also announced on Monday that an Israeli citizen, 30-year-old Vladislav Victorson, was arrested and indicted for allegedly plotting to assassinate an unspecified, high-profile Israeli public figure at the direction of an Iran. Israeli authorities said Victorson received orders—including acts of arson—via social media from an Iranian agent with the online name “Mari Hossi,” which Victorson carried out with his 18-year-old Israeli girlfriend, Anna Bernstein. She was also indicted Monday on vandalism and security charges. The agent, who later told Victorson he was Iranian, had asked him to assassinate the prominent Israeli by throwing a grenade into his house. 
• The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.
• NASA on Monday launched a probe bound for one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, in search of conditions necessary to sustain life in what scientists believe is an ocean beneath the moon’s icy exterior crust. The Europa Clipper probe will travel for five and a half years before it reaches Europa. The launch for the $5 billion project was delayed ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall last week but the probe took off without problem on Monday. 
• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” The trio’s research focused on how differing societal institutions impact a country’s wealth over time, comparing inclusive institutions, which are associated with long-term benefits, and extractive institutions, which enable short-term gains for a powerful and select few.

Israel’s Divided Attentions

On Sunday night, Hezbollah launched a pair of drones targeting an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base near Binyamina, a town south of Haifa. Israeli air defenses successfully intercepted one of the drones off the coast, but the second dropped from Israeli radar before striking a dining hall as troops were eating. Four soldiers were killed and nearly 60 were wounded in the deadliest attack since Israel ramped up its strikes against the terrorist paramilitary group last month.

Even as the IDF has in recent weeks trained most of its fire on the enemy to the north, airstrikes and ground operations in Gaza continue to prevent Hamas from regrouping. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has relaxed its calls for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, backing Israel’s current efforts against Hezbollah. The new tack is likely a reflection of the hope that degrading the group militarily will push it toward a diplomatic solution and possibly shrink its hold over the government of Lebanon. 

It’s been nearly a month since the IDF announced it was shifting its focus to Hezbollah in the north. Beginning in mid-September, the Israeli military executed a series of extraordinarily successful operations, including the pager and walkie-talkie attacks; a massive air operation, “Northern Arrows,” that destroyed possibly as much as half of Hezbollah’s significant rocket and missile launching capabilities; and a rolling campaign against the group’s leadership, which included the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The IDF also announced Monday that it had killed …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,680-word item on Israel’s multifront military operations is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Can either major U.S. political party build a majority coalition again? “What the Republican and Democratic coalitions have in common is enough strength to stalemate the other party but not enough to dominate,” Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin wrote in their latest report for the American Enterprise Institute. “As a result, a noxious back-and-forth has defined American politics for a generation. … In this era, both parties play the minority party’s traditional role. Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach. Each offers itself fundamentally as an alternative to the other, even if it has the incumbent majority in Congress or holds the White House. And neither offers a clear or broadly compelling vision of the country’s future,” the pair observed. “Can this stalemate be broken? It can, but that would require one party to go outside the comfort zone of appealing to its base supporters and aim directly at the broad center of American politics.”
• The results of the 2020 election were contested with a galling vigor, but as the 2024 election nears, it’s worth remembering that 2020 was not the only U.S. presidential race in history to be disputed. Joined by our friend Megan McArdle, Andy Mills and Matthew Boll took a look back at contested elections throughout the years in the podcast episode, “No, You Stole The Election!” “There are a number of Republicans who still feel like the election in 1960 was stolen by the Kennedy team,” and perhaps not without some merit. Nixon nevertheless conceded the 1960 election to Kennedy. “He does so graciously and here is an interesting twist,” McArdle said, “he becomes only the second person in American history who has to certify his own election loss.”

Presented Without Comment

Philadelphia Inquirer: Trump’s Montco Town Hall Turns Into Playlist Party After Medical Emergencies: ‘Let’s Just Listen to Music’

Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: Tensions Rise Between Harris and Biden Teams as Election Nears

Biden’s team wants Harris to win the election, but many senior Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid and are still adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.

Also Also Presented Without Comment 

Washington Post: Michigan GOP Candidate’s Ad Aimed At Black Voters Has Wrong Election Date

In the Zeitgeist

Rebecca Ferguson seems to have found her groove in futuristic, apocalyptic landscapes, considering the last time we saw her on screen it was as Paul Atreides’ jihad-encouraging mother in Dune 2. Now—in season 2 of Apple TV+’s Silo—she’s trying to understand the secrets of an underground grain silo that contains the last 10,000 people on Earth.

Toeing the Company Line

• It’s Tuesday, which means Dispatch Live (🔒) returns tonight at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT! And it will be an extra special edition, as Steve and Jonah go live to discuss the state of The Dispatch after we marked our fifth anniversary last week. Keep an eye out for an email later today with information on how to tune in.
• In the newsletters: Kevin reminded readers (🔒) that bad elected officials are a product of American voters and the Dispatch Politics crew reported on the race to win over Pennsylvania suburbanites in their last dispatch from the Keystone State. 
• On the podcasts: In a live recording of Advisory Opinions from Columbia Law School, Sarah and David break down two cases from the Supreme Court’s recent oral arguments. 
• On the site: In the latest installment of our Dispatch symposia, our contributors weigh in on what a Trump and Harris domestic policy agenda would look like, Stirewalt looks back at the 1840 election and how it compares to 2024, and John Gustavsson explains why the U.K.’s release of the Chagos Islands is a bad idea.