(Daily Caller)—U.S. spy drones have been flying over and near the Gaza Strip to search for hostages since the Hamas terrorist group infiltrated Israel and took as many as 240 people, including Americans, hostage on Oct. 7, The New York Times reported.
The flights suggest that the U.S. is playing a more active role in hostage recovery than was previously known, as the Pentagon has tasked military personnel with advising and providing intelligence support to Israeli hostage rescuers. That intelligence support may also include MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drone flights conducted in hopes of finding roughly 10 remaining Americans held hostage, the NYT reported, citing a NYT analysis of public flight data and two defense officials who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity.
Analysts first spotted the Reapers reporting their status and altitude on Flightradar24, a commercially-available flight tracking website, on Oct. 28, according to the NYT. But, U.S. Special Operations forces began conducting unmanned aircraft sorties within days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, the officials said.
The U.S. has never before flown reconnaissance missions over Gaza, the defense officials said, according to the NYT. Israel regularly conducts surveillance in the airspace above Gaza.
U.S. surveillance flights are not supporting Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military operations in Gaza, the officials told the NYT. Rather, their objective is to identify hostages, determine their status and provide information to Israeli forces.
Several dozen American Special Operations forces have arrived in Israel since Oct. 7 to advise on hostage recovery efforts. It was not clear if these are the same personnel manning the spy flights; analyst Amelia Smith first spotted an unmanned aerial vehicle flying from the coast of Crete to Gaza, where it loitered for several hours, on Oct. 29.
Earlier today, a drone that was tracked from a position off the coast of Crete loitered over Gaza for just under 3 hours.
What wasn't visible on flight trackers were two MQ-9A Extended Range Reaper drones also in the area: REMIX22 & REMIX55 from NAS Sigonella. #ADSB #E9D001 1/2 https://t.co/wtqFbS6CQe pic.twitter.com/rbN4etxf4F
— Amelia Smith (@ameliairheart) October 29, 2023
Israel’s military has surrounded Gaza City and is in the beginning stages of military operations in the city itself, the NYT reported. One of the IDF’s war aims is to rescue hostages; as time progresses and Israel’s military presses further into Gaza, it may become more difficult to ensure hostage survival.
Most MQ-9 flights center around areas in southern Gaza, away from the primary thrust of IDF operations, the NYT reported. Smith told the outlet she identified at least six distinct MQ-9 drones involved in the effort. Several hovered over Gaza for about three hours at altitudes of 24,000 to 26,000 feet.
Hamas militants threatened to kill hostages if Israel does not stop launching airstrikes on Gaza.
While the MQ-9 was first designed as a “hunter-killer” drone, the U.S. military gives it surveillance missions due to its ability to loiter for as long as 20 hours and advanced sensors and radars, according to the NYT.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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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.
