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Morning Brief: NATO’s Lifeline Runs Through Germany, Venezuela’s State Cartel Now a Terror Target, Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian Men as They Surrender

BY Galen Fries

Germany braces against Russian gray-zone pressure, Washington greenlights action on Venezuela’s state-run cartel, and a filmed killing in Jenin sends another shock through an already volatile region, all signaling how fast today’s conflicts can widen when fragile lines snap. Welcome to Saturday, November 29, 2025. This is your SOFREP Morning Brief.

Wanted "alive or dead". A man outside the Venezuelan embassy in Lima, Peru, holds up a wanted sign for the original $15M amount. The current bounty is $50M. Image Credit: Martin Mejia / AP Photo

NATO’s Lifeline Runs Through Germany

Germany  is taking hits where it’s weakest, and Berlin is finally acting like those weak points are the battlefield.”

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Over the last two years, German rail lines have seen arson, cable cuts, and disruption that domestic services increasingly tie to Russian networks and proxies. Ports, depots, and airspace around bases have been buzzed by drones. None of that is a “prelude to war”, but it is exactly how a peer competitor softens a hub before a crisis. Germany sits at the center of NATO’s reinforcement map, so if you want to slow the alliance down, you don’t start in Poland. You start in Germany.

That’s the backdrop for OPLAN DEU, Germany’s classified national defense plan. As the Wall Street Journal first reported this week, the Bundeswehr has built a full blueprint for how the country would secure itself and, crucially, push allied forces east in a major Russia war scenario. German military material describes OPLAN DEU as a whole-of-government plan spanning peace, crisis, hybrid threat, and war. The aim is deterrence by readiness: prove to Moscow that a strike on NATO won’t succeed because reinforcements will flow.

The stress point isn’t willpower. It’s movement.

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Germany’s roads, rails, ports, bridges, and airfields were built for commerce, not for heavy armor and nonstop military flow under pressure. During the Cold War, “dual-use” infrastructure was normal. After 1990, Europe cashed the peace dividend and let that muscle atrophy. Think-tank and EU/NATO mobility assessments warn that decayed bridges, congested rail routes, and civilian-first regulations can bottleneck reinforcement timelines. That matters because NATO’s New Force Model assumes days, not weeks.

Reality already gave a warning shot. In 2024, two separate ship strikes shut down the rail bridge feeding the port of Nordenham, a key node for munitions shipments to Ukraine. Both were ruled accidents. NATO still had to scramble because a single broken link froze the whole chain. Today, Germany is mapping those links like a combat system, not a public works project.

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Industry is now part of the plan. Rheinmetall has signed a major logistics framework with the Bundeswehr to build and operate convoy support and staging sites along movement corridors. The point isn’t comfort. It’s tempo: refuel, re-arm, re-route, and keep columns moving under pressure.

For SOFREP readers, here’s the take: Germany is trying to become NATO’s “military Schengen” – a country where forces can cross fast, legally, and with protection against sabotage and drones. Berlin is already moving to loosen rules that limit Bundeswehr drone defense and counter-UAS action over critical sites. If they don’t, Russian gray-zone play can paralyze the hub without firing a shot.

OPLAN DEU is not a war plan that Germany wants to use. It’s a plan they need to make visible enough to keep war from happening, and resilient enough to survive the kind of dirty, deniable pressure that’s already on the board.

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— Boris Alexander Beissner (@boris_beissner) November 28, 2025 Venezuela’s State Cartel Now a Terror Target The Trump administration just crossed a line that matters. On November 24, 2025, the State Department designated Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. That label is not symbolism. It reframes the Maduro-linked drug pipeline as a terrorist enterprise and signals that U.S. forces may be ordered to hit it on land inside Venezuela, not only at sea. FTO status by itself doesn’t equal an automatic invasion, but it is how Washington builds the runway for raids, partner-enabled strikes, and direct action if the White House decides to pull that trigger. Washington’s case is blunt. U.S. officials say Cartel de los Soles is run from inside the regime, with senior military and intelligence figures moving cocaine through Venezuela and north into the U.S. The cartel’s name comes from the sun insignia on Venezuelan generals’ uniforms, and it refers to a protected alliance of officials who turn state territory, ports, and airfields into a trafficking corridor. Maduro denies the network exists and calls the designation a pretext for aggression. Analysts note this is less a classic, independent cartel and more regime-embedded corruption. That distinction matters because the U.S. is saying the state apparatus is the network. FTO status comes with teeth. Any “material support” becomes a felony. Assets that touch U.S. systems get frozen. Prosecutors gain wider authority to chase facilitators worldwide, and partner nations get clearer legal cover to detain, expel, or seize cartel-linked infrastructure. Treasury already tagged the cartel as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in July 2025 for allegedly backing groups like Tren de Aragua and Sinaloa. FTO status is the next rung up the ladder. The operational context is the tell. Trump’s administration has been running Operation Southern Spear, a SOUTHCOM surge in the Caribbean tied to repeated strikes on suspected smuggling vessels. Public reporting puts more than twenty strikes since early September and a death toll of over eighty. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the FTO label “opens up a multitude of new options.” Translation: battlespace prep and authority-building. Bottom line. This is about more than drugs. It is a pressure campaign on Maduro’s inner circle and a warning that U.S. action can shift from maritime interdiction to land-based missions fast. For U.S. troops, the legal locks are now off, so the mission set can expand quickly if Washington chooses.   🚨Update: Justifications for War!! President Trump is OFFICIALLY designating Dictator Maduro-led Cartel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization today!! That means that the Venezuelan government is a Narco terrorist criminal group! Strikes will follow. pic.twitter.com/i5F67gyAUS — US Homeland Security News (@defense_civil25) November 24, 2025 Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian Men as They Surrender Two Palestinian men were shot dead by Israeli troops in Jenin on November 27, 2025, and there’s a video, which creates big problems for Israel. Footage aired across Arab outlets and circulated by Israeli rights group B’Tselem shows both men outside a building with hands up, shirts lifted to show they were unarmed. An Israeli officer gestures them back inside. Seconds later, gunfire erupts. Both men drop and do not move again. Eyewitnesses and journalists on scene say the men were trying to surrender when they were hit. Israel’s security forces say the men were linked to a terrorist network operating in Jenin and that fire was directed toward “suspects” after they exited the building. The IDF and border police have opened an internal investigation to determine what happened and whether rules of engagement were violated. That investigation is now unavoidable, because this wasn’t a fog-of-war rumor. It was filmed in broad daylight. Palestinian officials and human rights groups are calling it a summary execution. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says the killings are a blatant breach of humanitarian law. Mustafa Barghouti described it as a shocking crime carried out in front of cameras. The men were identified as Youssef Asasa, 37, and Mahmoud Abdallah, 26. Palestinian sources say Israeli forces took their bodies from the site, which is standard practice in many West Bank raids, but always pours gas on the fire afterward. Context matters here, because Jenin is not a quiet neighborhood getting surprised by a one-off raid. It is one of the hottest nodes in the northern West Bank, and Israeli operations there have been escalating for months. The Israeli military says the goal is dismantling militant infrastructure and preventing attacks. Since the Gaza war kicked off in October 2023, Israeli forces have detained tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, expanded checkpoints, and run near-continuous arrest and strike cycles in places like Jenin and Tubas. Those operations are paired with drones, helicopters, and covert units, and Israel says they are driven by a sustained rise in attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers. That still doesn’t answer the central question this video raises. If suspects are surrendering and unarmed, the standard is custody, not the trigger. This isn’t theoretical. Israel has faced international blowback before in cases where Palestinians were shot while incapacitated or after surrender attempts. What makes this case different is the clarity of the tape and the speed at which senior Israeli political figures praised the killings. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir publicly backed the shooters, saying terrorists should die. The UN’s human rights office called the incident “summary execution” on the face of the footage and condemned the minister’s remarks as abhorrent. Bottom line. Israel says these were terrorists. Palestinians say this was an execution. The camera shows two men trying to give up, then getting cut down anyway. The investigation will decide what the Israeli system does with that reality. The rest of the world is watching because Jenin is already a pressure cooker, and incidents like this are how you turn heat into an explosion.   This is not Gaza. This is occupied West Bank. On Nov 27, 2025, the so-called “world’s most moral army” executed 2 unarmed Palestinians who had surrendered. This is text-book definition of a war crime and harkens back to many such incidents during the Nazi Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/BkaQgoltMF — Dani Fethez (@DaniMet1) November 29, 2025
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