Israeli Merkava Mk 4 main battle tank. By Corona Borealis @ Adobe Stock
Over the last few weeks, Israel has crippled Hezbollah with a combination of cunning attacks and more traditional airstrikes. Just how far will Israel go in its efforts to rid itself and Lebanon of the Hezbollah terrorist organization? Charles Lipson discusses Israel’s efforts in The Spectator:
The killing of Hassan Nazrallah is the latest — and most impressive — stage in Israel’s campaign to wipe out Iran’s terrorist proxies on its doorstep. From the Egyptian border to Beirut, the campaign is the most dazzling demonstration of real-time intelligence, high technology and precise military action in the modern era. It will be recounted on screen and studied by military experts for decades to come. James Bond’s gadgets had nothing on the booby-trapped pagers. As the meme put it, “From the liver to the knee.”
The battle started a year ago, when Hamas terrorists in Gaza broke the ceasefire, raped and killed innocent Israelis and took hundreds of hostages for negotiating leverage. It was obvious from the outset that Israel would respond with full force.
What was unclear, at least initially, was how far that “full force” would stretch. Hezbollah itself provided the answer when the Iranian proxy in Lebanon immediately made common cause with Hamas and began firing rockets into Israel. That was a deliberate choice, endorsed by Iran, and has continued for over a year. Hezbollah did not have to begin a relentless barrage, forcing some 60-70,000 Jews, Muslims and Druze to evacuate northern Israel for their safety.
Hezbollah’s goal was both to punish the Jewish state and force it to divert resources from the battle in Gaza. Israel responded by firing tit-for-tat rockets into Hezbollah strongholds while maintaining its focus on Hamas and Gaza.
But that was only a temporary, tactical response. We now see that Israel made a more fundamental strategic choice: it would have to eliminate Hezbollah’s capacity to attack Israel and make a section of northern Israel uninhabitable.
The basic decision, prompted by the twin attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, was that the Jewish state could not survive in relative peace with Islamic terror groups on its northern and southern flanks, determined to keep killing Jews on a regular basis and, if possible, extinguish the Jewish state and all the Jews who lived there.
The mammoth blast that killed Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, reflects Israel’s larger strategic decision.
Read more here.
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