While Israel’s operation targeting Hezbollah operatives with sabotaged pagers was widely hailed as a brilliant bit of spycraft, most of us were left wondering how it fit into the larger strategy. A massive follow-on yesterday may have answered that question.
WSJ (“Israeli Strike Decimates Hezbollah Military Leadership“):
Israel’s airstrike on a building in southern Beirut didn’t just kill a top Hezbollah commander—it took out an entire class of senior leaders of the militant group’s most elite fighting force, as the two foes lurch closer to all-out war.
Hezbollah on Saturday raised the death toll among its fighters from Friday’s airstrike to 16, including top military commander Ibrahim Aqil and many of the senior commanders of the elite Radwan force. The strike on top leadership followed a pair of broad attacks on the group’s rank and file, when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been rigged with explosives blew up roughly simultaneously across the country.
According to the group’s own death announcements, the week’s attacks accounted for about 10% of the 500 Hezbollah fighters to have been killed since the group started firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, said Israel’s string of attacks is aimed at killing the militants who underpin Hezbollah’s ability to fight a war.
“They’re looking to take out people who matter,” he said. “So this is calculated.”
The week has taken an enormous toll. Lebanon’s minister of health said Saturday that doctors had performed more than 2,000 surgeries on people injured in the attacks, primarily from the explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members. Friday’s airstrike left 37 dead, including seven women and three children, he said. The total includes the fighters. More than a dozen people were still missing Saturday morning, municipal official Ali al-Haraka said at the blast site.
One imagines having the leadership’s communications infrastructure destroyed helped make this attack successful and, indeed, may explain why so many were gathered in one place at the same time. If this is “mowing the grass,” it came with a heavy dose of Roundup.
But, of course, this may not be the end of it.
The attacks have also sharpened the already high levels of concern that Israel and Hezbollah were spiraling toward a wider war. Top U.S. military officials are increasingly worried that Israel could launch a major offensive in Lebanon.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled plans for a trip beginning this weekend to Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon announced Friday that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman would head to the eastern Mediterranean on Monday amid the rising tensions. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group is already in the region.
Many of Washington’s closest Arab allies and partners in the Middle East fear a possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon, according to Arab officials, who said it could trigger unrest across the region and an opportunity for extremist groups to harness that anger and regroup.
I’m not entirely sure Israel is prepared to fight a full-scale war in Lebanon at the same time as it’s fighting in Gaza. But they’re certainly off to a good start.
