Hello everybody!
‘On popular demand’, here a ‘quick and dirty’ set of answers to questions about latest developments between Israel and Lebanon.
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During the evening of Friday, 27 September 2024, the Israeli Air-Space Force (IASF) flew an air strike against a complex of apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh District of southern Lebanon.
As far as can be assessed from official Israeli releases: the ‘Israeli intelligence’ tracked down a motorcade carrying the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. When this stopped, Nasrallah walked emerged from one of the cars and entered an apartment building. Based on intelligence that the Hezbollah has constructed an underground complex under the much of this area, the Israeli intelligence then gave its ‘go’ for the air strike: this was confirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu (who was underway in New York at the time).
Boeing F-15I fighter-bombers of No. 69 Squadron IASF have released more than 80 GPS-homing bombs. Up to 16 of these were GBU-31 JDAMs, armed with BLU-109 ‘bunker-busting’ warheads.
By now it’s certain that at least four buildings (marked with red arrows on the photo below) were completely smashed: it’s possible that up to four additional buildings in between these four were also demolsihed.
Exact number of victims of this strike is still unclear, but between those confirmed as killed were Nasrallah and Brigadier-General Abbas Nilforoushan. The latter was the Deputy Commander IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), responsible for Lebanon.
A day later, the IASF flew a similar strike against another complex of buildings in the Choaffieh District of southern Beirut, killing Nasrallah’s preliminary successor, Hassan Khalil Yassin. Hezbollah confirmed Yassin’s death, but deined the Israeli report according to which its commander for south Lebanon, Ali Karaki, was killed…
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What do I think about this, and what do I expect?
Up front, Netanyahu is after expanding his ‘war on Hamas’ to all of the Middle East, and can’t care less what might be a good enough reason to do so. He knows he is going to remain in power as long as this war goes on. Therefore, his aim is to continue the war as long as possible.
Much of his government understands itself as on a messianic mission of expanding Israel, and can’t care less about searching for good reasons to fight a corresponding war, too.
As for Hezbollah… well, I still clearly recall the day when, on 16 February 1992, the previous Secretary General of Hezbollah, Abbas al-Musawi, was assassinated by Israel. Back then there was no social media yet, but the mainstream media in Israel and ‘the West’ cheered that action almost as much as everybody is cheering Nasrallah’s death now. (Indeed, I’m sure not just one contemporary Israeli newspaper declared Musawi’s death for, ‘the end of the era of the conflict with Hezbollah’ or something of that kind.)
Eight years later, Israel withdrew from Lebanon – because it couldn’t defeat Hezbollah: to quite some degree thanks to Nasrallah, the organisation improved itself so much, it made the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon untenable.
On the other side, while over the last year Nasrallah was doing his best to ignore Netanyahu-ordered provocations and keep Hezbollah (and thus Lebanon) out of ‘war on Hamas’, I doubt any new Secretary General is going to follow in fashion. Indeed, I expect the ‘Hezbollah’ to undergo a major reform as next.
For the start, I expect the entire organisation to become de-facto assimilated by the IRGC (not only ‘controlled’ by it, like the last 20+ years). AFAIK, the most likely successor to Nasrallah is Hashem Safieddine, current Head of the Executive Council. He’s ‘almost literally in bed with the IRGC/IRGC-QF’: his son was married to the daughter of the late Commander IRGC-QF, Qassem Soleimani (assassinated on Trump’s order in Iraq, few years ago).
As next… while, sure, the Hezbollah and/or IRGC-QF have suffered a lot due to their sloppy internal security (see ‘Pager Massacre’), they’re no General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces: they have a ‘built-in redundancy’ in regards of their command system, and became as powerful as they are because they are experts in internal reforms based on such experiences.
And, contrary to Israel, just for example, both Hezbollah and the IRGC (and thus the IRGC-QF) are rooted in the local population: in Lebanon, they grew out of movements like Amal of the 1970s, originally created as a charity for the Shi’a population when this was massacred in thousands by contemporary Israeli ‘attacks on Palestinian terrorists’…
Indeed, my assessment is that all of recent Israeli attacks and assassinations are playing straight into hands of a younger- and more extreme generation within their ranks: deaths of Nasrallah and his generation of leaders have removed most of the – aging – ‘political’ wing that became reluctant to confront Israel. Thus, I am expecting the Hezbollah/IRGC-QF conglomerate to rapidly re-organise/reform, significantly improve security and communications, and then to hit back in much more aggressive – and far more unpredictable – fashion than under Nasrallah.
With other words: Hezbollah/IRGC-QF’s rockets ‘raining` down on Haifa and Ramat David Air Base in northern Israel, is ‘only the beginning’.
So Netanyahu is killing the "moderates" to get people on the other side to keep him in power. Awful
I can see your point that having an older/wiser patriarchy offers a cooling effect on the younger more fanatical generation, and now that the “old guys” with the most experience gone, means the youngsters are able to rise up in force. However, I think the brands “Hamas” and “Hezbollah” are now not able to recover as before and that the Iranian regime is now the de-facto controller of these brands. I have seen these two groups as “separate” entities, they are not national/legal entities and so Iran can quite easily refrain from escalating as it still has a largely untouched militant base of senior age. If Israel were to flatten the Iranian embassy in Beirut however, Iran being a sovereign country, is almost OBLIGATED to respond, but when its little side-hustle of supporting a militant group is cut down to size, it may have a dented ego but still possesses an excuse not to interfere too much due to the full knowledge it will lose a full scale war. Iran did officially hold back this year, it obviously supported behind the scenes, but I am not convinced this current hunt by the IDF against the terrorist organisations will escalate into a full war. I agree though, the desire to see Israel suffer, has grown and if you look at the footage of scenes of supporters who cheer on Nasrallah during a speech, they look pretty fired up and it will take a little more than a sofa and a hug to soften these lads down.