From where I sit, the war in Israel is nowhere near over. It has simply changed shape. What started as a shock on October 7th has become a long, grinding contest across multiple fronts, and while the headlines may have grown tired, the stakes haven’t shrunk at all.

To understand what’s coming, you have to see the whole board, not just the one square called Gaza.

Five Fronts, One War

Israel is not dealing with a single isolated conflict. It is facing at least five interconnected fronts, each of them fragile and potentially explosive:

1. Gaza

2. Judea and Samaria (what the world insists on calling the West Bank)

3. Lebanon

4. Syria

5. Iran and its proxy network

They overlap, feed into one another, and are all being influenced—directly or indirectly—by Tehran. When people talk about a “ceasefire,” they’re usually talking about Gaza. But if you zoom out, you’ll notice there has never really been a ceasefire at all.

Gaza: A “Ceasefire” in Name Only

Let’s start with Gaza, because that’s where most cameras still point, at least when they bother to look.

On paper, there’s been a ceasefire. On the ground, Hamas has been shooting at Israeli troops almost every day. There have been firefights, mortars, IED attacks, and at least a few IDF soldiers killed since that so-called pause went into effect.

The Israelis have divided the Strip into zones: a red zone where Hamas still controls the ground, and a green zone under IDF control. You’d think the green zone would be relatively stable, but in reality Hamas fighters keep emerging from tunnel shafts inside those areas and ambushing Israeli patrols. More than forty of those fighters have been killed in these incidents alone.

So if you’re picturing neat front lines and a quiet truce, erase that image. Gaza is still a warzone, it’s just a slower, dirtier, more subterranean version of the earlier stages.

The map we’re looking at right now will probably define Gaza for the foreseeable future. Israel is unlikely to pull completely out of the green zone anytime soon. If it did, there are at least nine local militias in that territory—tribal groups that hate Hamas—who would instantly start fighting for control. You’d see a civil war inside a war.

On top of that, Hamas still holds weapons, still has command structures, and still has fighters who believe, very sincerely, that Israel has no right to exist. That’s why Israel’s second war aim—after bringing the hostages home—was to dismantle Hamas as a fighting force. They have not finished that job, and they know it.

The Hostages and the Narrative of “Israel is Losing”

A lot of pundits you see online—especially people like Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, and some of the usual talking heads—keep repeating the line that “Israel has lost this war” and is collapsing from within.

That claim doesn’t hold up.

Israel has managed to secure the return of every single hostage except one. When this war began, I honestly didn’t think that was possible. The chaos in Gaza, the tunnel networks, the sheer brutality of Hamas made it seem almost inevitable that many captives would simply disappear—killed, buried, or used as human shields until the end.

Yet here we are: one hostage still unaccounted for, and even his remains may soon be recovered. That is an extraordinary outcome by any military or intelligence standard, and it is a victory no matter what the doom-mongers say.

At the same time, Israel has been quietly preparing for the next phase. Their defensive capabilities are actually stronger now than they were on October 6th. The Iron Beam laser defense system—something the United States and Russia both struggled to make operational—is finally being fielded. It’s not science fiction anymore; it’s an actual working layer in their air-defense umbrella. That’s going to matter a lot if this war expands into a full regional conflict.

So no, Israel is not crumbling. It is bruised, deeply divided internally in some ways, but militarily more ready than at any time since the fighting began.

If you’re watching from Venezuela, Trinidad, Colombia, or anywhere in the region, you don’t need me to tell you that the temperature is rising. Airspace restrictions, warships in the Caribbean, drug boats getting blown out of the water, and now more details about that phone call between President Trump and Nicolás Maduro—all of it points in one direction:

Let’s walk through what’s really happening, why it matters, and what it might mean for the people who are going to pay the highest price if this goes sideways.

The Trump–Maduro Phone Call: No Deals Left to Make

For several days we only knew that Trump and Maduro had spoken. Now we know a lot more about what was said.

According to Trump, the call was simple and blunt. Maduro wanted a deal: Let me stay in power, let me keep control of the military, and I’ll “help” you fight drugs. In other words: keep the cartel state intact, just rebrand it a bit.

Trump’s answer? No deal.

He essentially told Maduro, You’re out of bargaining chips. You’re not in a position to negotiate. You need to leave.

Whether that was phrased as a formal ultimatum or not, the message was clear: Washington is done pretending Maduro is a normal head of state. He’s a narco-dictator sitting on a collapsing country that has become a forward operating base for Russia, China, Iran, and every Marxist mischief-maker in the hemisphere.

That kind of phone call doesn’t happen unless other pieces are already on the board: intelligence operations, military deployments, diplomatic groundwork. And those pieces are very much in motion.

What Venezuela Looks Like From the Inside

To understand why things feel so volatile, you have to understand what daily life actually looks like inside Venezuela right now.

Hyperinflation has turned the national currency into colorful trash. The nominal minimum wage is about one U.S. dollar a month. Nobody lives on that, of course. People survive on side hustles, multiple family members crammed into one home, whatever odd jobs they can find, and—crucially—remittances from relatives abroad.

It costs roughly $500 a month to feed a family of four decently. The average Venezuelan scrapes together maybe a third to half of that. That gap is hunger. It’s kids fainting at school. It’s medicine you can’t afford and hospitals that demand you buy your own drugs before a nurse will even hang the IV bag.

I’ve been to the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia, many times. At night the streets are lined with Venezuelan women—some as young as 13 or 14—selling the only thing they still have left to sell. Many of them are mothers with husbands back home. They’re not there because they want to be. They’re there because socialism destroyed their economy, shredded the rule of law, and shoved them into a scarcity mindset where survival trumps morality.

That’s what twenty-five years of Chavista “revolution” does. It doesn’t just wreck GDP charts. It corrodes the culture from the inside out.

So when people say, “Hey, if things are so bad, why haven’t Venezuelans overthrown Maduro?”—the short answer is: he kept just enough money flowing to keep people barely alive and too exhausted, too beaten down, and too afraid to rise up.

Which brings us to the money.

Who’s Keeping Maduro Afloat?

At this point, two main lifelines keep the regime from collapsing outright:

1. Oil revenues, especially via Chevron, which pumps roughly 200,000+ barrels a day out of Venezuela under a special license. Under Trump’s terms, that money is supposed to be used mainly to pay down debt, not prop up the regime—but money is fungible. Any debt paid with Chevron cash is money Maduro doesn’t have to spend himself.

2. Remittances, mostly from Venezuelans abroad. We’re talking $4–5 billion a year flowing back into the country. That’s a huge chunk of what keeps ordinary families from starving—and indirectly keeps Maduro in place, because it prevents the kind of total collapse that would spark an uprising.

So you have a regime that can’t feed its people, can’t keep the lights on, and still finds billions for Cuban advisers, security forces, and friendly gangs—colectivos—who do the dirty work: intimidation, disappearances, torture, and political killings.

This is the system Trump is now openly threatening.

The Drug War at Sea—and the Double-Tap Controversy

Layered on top of the political drama is a shooting war at sea that most Americans are barely aware of.

U.S. forces have been blowing up narco-boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific—fast craft with four or five outboard motors or semi-submersibles that exist for exactly one purpose: smuggling drugs. These vessels aren’t 10 miles off a beach; they’re 80–90 miles offshore, running dark, and moving way too fast for anyone to pretend they’re fishing boats.

The Pentagon says they know who’s on these boats, where they left from, where they’re headed, and what they’re carrying. The cartels involved have been designated foreign terrorist organizations. So the U.S. has declared this an armed conflict with those groups.

That’s why they’re using missiles instead of Coast Guard boarding parties.

The problem is the last strike, where a Washington Post story—based on anonymous sources—claims Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered a second hit on a wrecked boat where two survivors were clinging to the debris. If that’s true, and those men were no longer a threat, then under the laws of armed conflict that would cross the line into an unlawful killing.

Hegseth flatly denies giving that order. Congress has launched investigations. Until the classified intel comes out, anyone claiming to know exactly what happened is guessing.

Here’s the key point: finding out what happened, and prosecuting it if necessary, is exactly what differentiates a flawed but functioning republic from a regime like Maduro’s, where crimes by the state are covered up, not corrected.

Which brings us to the speeches.

Russia’s army is bleeding men so fast in Ukraine that the Kremlin is now sweeping the globe for replacements. Ukrainian troops just told me they’ve identified fighters from more than 100 countries on Russia’s side, many of them coerced, trafficked, or duped with phony contracts. These aren’t isolated incidents. This is Russia’s new manpower strategy: replace dead Russians with desperate foreigners.

And now South Africa has delivered hard proof that Moscow is actively recruiting on the continent to feed its war machine.