National Review Online
Saturday, September 28, 2024
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. They should be celebrated.
No comments:
Post a Comment