Israel takes out Hezballah commander
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.
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The push by the Biden administration and allies in Europe for a ceasefire makes no sense. Israel would get no benefit from such a move. Israel should be allowed to destroy the Hezballah and Hamas mass murder organizations. A ceasefire would allow the terrorists to reorganize and rebuild their terrorist operations so they could engage in more mass murder of Jews. The Middle East will be better off if Israel is allowed to finish off the terrorists.
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The IDF is conducting a decapitation campaign targeting senior Hezbollah leadership as part of its air campaign across Lebanon. This campaign could impact Hezbollah’s ability to effectively organize and direct its forces. The IDF reported that its September 24 airstrike which killed Hezbollah’s Rocket and Missile Unit Commander Ibrahim Muhammad Qabisi also killed Qabisi’s deputy Abbas Sharafeddine and a senior commander from Hezbollah’s missile division, Hussein Ezzeddine.[7] Ezzeddine was reportedly close to the former top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, who Israel killed in late July.[8] The IDF has conducted several major airstrikes in recent days targeting senior Hezbollah commanders and their communication networks.[9] CTP-ISW noted that Israel detonating Hezbollah pagers and personal radios disrupted the group’s internal communications and may have prompted the group to begin using less secure methods of communication that Israel could then intercept and exploit.[10]
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And:
The Israelis have had enough. They have had enough of Hamas, had enough of Hezbollah, and they especially have had enough of foreigners bearing cease-fire proposals.
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