It became very popular in Egypt few years ago. Kids called it Sisi’s balls, which angered the authorities that tried to crack down on its sale.
https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2017/11/sisis-balls-gets-confiscated-by-egyptian-police.html
miniflux is great. If you don’t want to self host, the developer offers a hosted version that is very reasonably priced and I like to think it contributes to the development of the software.
A WordPress blog can be setup to use ActivityPub. You can have chronological posts that federate and can be followed on Mastodon et al and the usual website features like about pages, event pages, etc… Additionally you can then create a pixelfed account for Instagram-like presence.
I read they used motorised paragliders to cross over the border fence. The vans may have been captured afterwards. But this is my guess and I have no idea if there were forces that managed to overpower israeli forces controlling checkpoints.