When the smoke cleared, six buildings in the quarter of suburban Beirut targeted by Israeli warplanes were gone. They collapsed into themselves, subsumed beneath the underground bunker system that housed Hezbollah’s highest-ranking commanders. It will take days, perhaps weeks, to sift through the wreckage. But when the clearing operation is complete, the Israel Defense Forces believe the salvagers will have recovered the body of longtime Hezbollah commander Hassan Nasrallah. The IDF said early Saturday that Israel had “eliminated” Nasrallah and other commanders.
It would be difficult to overstate Nasrallah’s significance to the terrorist organization he led and the blow to it represented by his death. Nasrallah took the role of Hezbollah’s secretary-general following the demise of his predecessor at the hands of the IDF over 30 years ago. He oversaw the terrorist sect’s councils and sub-councils, its judicial, parliamentary, and jihad assemblies. He led an organization estimated to be capable of fielding upwards of 50,000 fighters with around 150,000 missiles, rockets, and drones at its disposal. He was the most reliable of Iran’s proxies, the commander of its strongest militia in the region. And now he’s gone.
Nasrallah was only the most recent Hezbollah commander to face Israeli justice. In June, a sophisticated intelligence operation culminated in the death of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, a figure partly responsible for the Beirut barracks bombing and the deaths of 241 U.S. soldiers. In recent days, he was joined by Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmed Wahbi, senior leaders in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force. Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, the Hezbollah commander responsible for a deadly attack on IDF soldiers in 2000, was “eliminated” in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday. And all this follows the spectacularly successful campaign of sabotage that took hundreds of Hezbollah fighters unlucky enough to have been issued communications devices flagged for use in operations against Israel off the battlefield.
Aided by its remarkable penetration of Iran and its terrorist proxies, Israeli technical superiority and tactical brilliance have Hezbollah on the ropes. Even before the strike that killed Nasrallah, the organization was disoriented — reeling from blow after blow and, leery of relying on mass communication technology, incapable of regrouping. Now it is decapitated. If Israel can degrade Hezbollah’s capabilities to the point that both parties would be open to a negotiated cessation of hostilities, its campaign may have been such a success that it forestalls or even forecloses on the prospect of a ground operation.
This is all good news for the West, but the Biden administration and its European allies aren’t acting like it. From the outset of Israeli operations against Hezbollah — a belated response to the 8,000 rockets that have rained down on Israeli cities from Lebanon since the October 7 massacre, clearing them out and rendering them uninhabitable — Israel’s supposed Western allies have called on Jerusalem to stand down. Israel has refused because it would get nothing from a premature cessation of operations whereas Hezbollah would win a new lease on life. The Israelis are acting fast because they know their supporters in the West, who stand as much to gain from Hezbollah’s decimation as Israel does, don’t have the stomach for a protracted counterterrorism operation. Israel’s victories have come in short succession out of sheer necessity.
For now, Israelis now fear the prospect of direct Iranian retaliation. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly left the United Nations General Assembly gathering in New York to race home, where Israeli reserves are being rapidly mobilized. Whether Iran retaliates and what form it takes will dictate the trajectory this war takes. And Nasrallah’s death does not neutralize the threat posed by Hezbollah. But the devastating blows Israel has meted out against an organization that is an enemy of the West with American blood on its hands are staggering.
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