The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed on Saturday morning that Hassan Nasrallahthe leader of the Shiite terrorist militia, was killed in the precision attack carried out against his headquarters in Beirut. Nasrallah was inside the bunker when it was bombed on Friday.
With Nasrallah’s death, Israel eliminated all of Hezbollah’s top commanders in just over a week, in a massive military operation that demonstrated Jerusalem’s ability to sustain an offensive on multiple, simultaneous fronts , as well as its superiority in espionage and defense. intelligence on their enemies in the Middle East.
After the bombings, Israel called on Lebanese civilians to evacuate three Shiite sectors of Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, where Hezbollah still maintains terrorist infrastructure, bunkers and weapons warehouses. A sign that the Israeli government has not ended the offensive against Hezbollah with the death of its leader.
In Hezbollah’s chain of command, only the terrorist group’s leader was still alive Friday, along with a handful of junior commanders. By now, and Nasrallah’s predictable successor also died in the attack, Hachem SafieddineHezbollah is a dismantled organization, without a command structure.
Having completed all his high command, Israel can be considered to have defeated Hezbollah. A defeat that began last week with the explosion of thousands of pagers manipulated and distributed by Hezbollah itself to all its members.
The offensive against Lebanon had a similar objective to that of the operation in Gaza. End the paramilitary group Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon under the orders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards since 1982, and responsible for the murder of hundreds of people in Israel and other countries around the world. Their attacks are, for example, against Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, or against the Jewish association AMIA, also in Buenos Aires, in 1994.
Benjamin Netanyahu He thus ignored the invitations of part of the international community to negotiate a ceasefire and not to extend the war to Lebanon. Netanyahu reiterated this Friday in his speech to the UN that Israel will not stop until it completely defeats Hezbollah and Hamas.
The objective seems to have been achieved. This news adds to that of the dismantling of Hamas in Gaza, announced yesterday by the Israeli Defense Forces.
However, Israel has still not recovered its hostages kidnapped in Gaza, who are still in the hands of Hamas survivors. Survivors who have today become, in the words of the IDF, a little more than a “simple guerrilla” terrorist.
The problem is that by ending one conflict, Israel may have opened a larger one. Because Hamas and Hezbollah are just tools of Iran in the region. And the fact that Tehran lost its two main proxies suggests some form of retaliation, since the position of the mullahs’ regime has been seriously weakened in the region against its Sunni enemies. And among them Saudi Arabia.
In fact, Iran responded to the attacks by warning that they “represent a serious, game-changing escalation.” He also assured that Israel “will be punished.” Rhetoric common in Iranian tyranny, but which should not be seen as simple bravado from a regime. which suffered two serious and humiliating defeats at the hands of Israel and is forced to feign a capacity to respond.
It is true that Tehran’s capacity for intimidation was undermined after the failure of the attack on Israel last April. But it is difficult to imagine that Iranian clerics will let the murder of the leader of their main terrorist asset in the region go unpunished.
This was the danger of Netanyahu’s strategy, “from escalation to de-escalation.” By eliminating its two main surrounding threats, Israel guarantees its security zone, but at the risk of starting a war with a larger adversary. A country capable of setting fire to the Middle East.
