Hassan Nasrallah’s Folly – The Atlantic

Israel mentioned this afternoon that it had carried out an air strike on the “central headquarters” of Hezbollah, within the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah Secretary-Normal Hassan Nasrallah was reportedly the goal of the assault; his destiny stays unclear.

The strike caps a sequence of Israeli assaults over the previous two weeks which have wreaked havoc on Hezbollah as a company. The pager and walkie-talkie assaults that started on September 17—which former U.S. Secretary of Protection Leon Panetta went as far as to describe as “terrorism”—would have maimed portion of Hezbollah’s mid-level management, making it very onerous for Hezbollah to arrange itself coherently in response to the Israeli aerial bombardment, a lot much less put together for a potential floor assault into southern Lebanon.

Armies should all be capable of shoot, transfer, and talk—that’s the blocking and tackling of conflict. By taking away the flexibility of Hezbollah operatives to securely talk with each other on the tactical stage, Israel dealt a critical blow to its adversary whereas little doubt reaping an intelligence bonanza within the course of. By no means earlier than has Hezbollah’s rank and file been so publicly uncovered and, worse, humiliated.

Israel’s relentless air strikes this week, in the meantime, seem to have devastated a lot of Hezbollah’s senior management, to not point out its missile shops. I’m typically skeptical of Israel’s capability to do critical hurt to its nonstate adversaries via air strikes alone, however militarily, Hezbollah is definitely reeling. As Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow on the Malcom H. Kerr Carnegie Center East Middle, in Beirut, noticed, Israel’s “capability to deploy superior army firepower and know-how” may simply render the necessity for a floor assault moot.

Israel has tried to chasten and degrade Hezbollah via the air earlier than—in 1993, with the feckless Operation Accountability, and in 1996, with the Grapes of Wrath marketing campaign—but it surely’s clear that a lot has modified for the reason that Nineties. A lot has additionally modified for the reason that summer season of 2006, when Hezbollah managed to embarrass Israel in 34 days of preventing.

In 2016, I requested Herzi Halevi—now the commander of the Israel Protection Forces however then its intelligence chief—what he most feared. His reply was a floor incursion from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, one during which Hezbollah both quickly seized Israeli territory or kidnapped Israeli civilians and took them as hostages. I’ve typically considered this when reflecting on Israel’s failure to anticipate and put together for the assaults on October 7 of final yr.

However it’s clear now that Israel was making ready for Hezbollah. This—not a battle in opposition to Hamas—was the battle Israel anticipated, and needed. And it was certainly prepared.

The query now, if Nasrallah has been killed, is whether or not Iran feels that it should immediately reply. The Lebanese—not simply Hezbollah’s largely Shiite Muslim constituents, however all Lebanese—can have grimly famous that after Hezbollah despatched a whole bunch of males to battle and die in Iraq and Syria for Iran and Bashar al-Assad’s regime, neither Syria nor Iran has lifted a finger to alleviate the Israeli stress on Lebanon. However Iran doesn’t desire a conflict with Israel, and any response it makes will possible be fastidiously calibrated to keep away from one.

Spare a thought for the harmless Lebanese residing within the high-rise buildings that collapsed in Israel’s air strike. They didn’t ask for Hezbollah to construct its command heart beneath their house following the 2006 conflict. They didn’t ask for any of this.

Hezbollah, which alone amongst Lebanon’s militias saved its arms following the conclusion of that nation’s civil conflict, has all the time claimed that its belligerence is important to guard Lebanon. However Hezbollah’s actions since—which have nearly all the time been within the service of its personal political wants, or these of its ungrateful Iranian sponsors—have introduced nothing however ache for all Lebanese, and significantly for the downtrodden Lebanese it claims to characterize.