Israel did not take responsibility for the pager attack that crippled Hezbollah’s comms and took out a chunk of their officer corps. It certainly did not go ahead and describe how it was done for the media. That’s tradecraft. And you don’t reveal it.

But the New York Times had a report detailing how it happened that same evening. I won’t link to it as it carries the byline of fake news fabulist Sheera Frenkel who had previously carried water for Hamas and lied that the Islamic terror group had not kidnapped and killed three Israeli teens.

The report is described as being based on briefings received by American officials.

The material leaked to the Times comes from “American and other officials briefed on the operation” and the “American and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the operation.”

Is this classified information? Sounds like it. If we were involved it certainly would be.

The official American position was that we were not aware of the attack beforehand.

A U.S. official said that several minutes before the pagers started exploding across Lebanon, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant called U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and told him Israel was going to conduct an operation in Lebanon soon, but refused to give any specific details.

The U.S. official said the Israelis didn’t tell the U.S. about the specifics of the operation, but added that Gallant’s call was an attempt to avoid keeping the U.S. totally in the dark.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials said they didn’t see Gallant’s call as a serious prior notice. “We were not aware of this operation and were not involved,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Tuesday.

Assuming that’s true (and considering the pro-terrorist and foreign regime figures in this administration, including in the Pentagon and NSC, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Israelis held back their plans) then the Israelis held a briefing afterward.

And then the officials turned around and leaked it all to the New York Times.

Did they do that on their own? Maybe. D.C. is notoriously leaky. But still leaking details of an op a few hours after a briefing is a bit much even by D.C. standards. Unless it was administration policy to leak it.

Under Obama, leaks of Israeli operations were standard procedure. But if this was Biden-Harris admin policy, it doesn’t just hurt Israel, it hurts America. The leak undermines claims that we didn’t know about it beforehand. And encourages Hezbollah to target our people as the weaker link in the Oct 7 war.

Some officials in this administration clearly don’t care, but they could also find themselves in the line of fire.

The Biden-Harris admin follows the Obama policy of stabbing allies in the back. But the back it stabs could end up being its own.