Israeli Counterattack on Hezbollah a Long Time Coming

Israeli Counterattack on Hezbollah a Long Time Coming

The Editors of National Review

An Israeli F-15 flies amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, seen from northern Israel, September 23, 2024.(Jim Urquhart/Reuters)none

Since the October 7 attacks, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has received the bulk of the world’s attention — but now, the focus has turned north, as Israel has launched a series of ferocious attacks aimed at decapitating Iran’s much stronger proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

In an alert about Israel’s defensive campaign, Sky News wrote, “Hezbollah has been provoked like never before by Israel and may be tempted to unleash its firepower.” This is ridiculous to anybody who has actually been following the news. Since the morning Hamas invaded Israel to massacre 1,200 people and take 250 hostages nearly a year ago, Hezbollah has sent thousands of projectiles into Israel, triggering the evacuation of 80,000 residents of northern Israel and putting the major Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv on high alert.

Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran in the early 1980s, has spent decades carrying out terrorist attacks, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. Following the 2006 war against Israel, Hezbollah gained battlefield experience fighting on the side of Iran and Russia in support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The war in Syria also helped clear the way for Hezbollah to import additional higher-range ballistic missiles as well as more-precise anti-tank missiles.

Hezbollah is now widely considered the largest terrorist army on the planet, and it occupies and controls large swathes of southern Lebanon. It has amassed an arsenal that was believed to contain 200,000 rockets, missiles, and drones as of October 7. It is the primary means through which Iran extends a knife to the throat of Israel, threatening devastating consequences were Israel to take preemptive military action against its nuclear program.

Throughout the past year, Israel has conducted targeted air strikes against Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon but has shown restraint — because of both pressure from the Biden administration and a reluctance to fight a full-scale war with Hezbollah at the same time it is trying to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

But it’s clear that this strategy has not effectively deterred Hezbollah from launching rockets at Israel that continue to make the north uninhabitable for tens of thousands of Israelis. No other nation would tolerate this for this long. And so, Israel has decided to take more aggressive action.

Last week, thousands of Hezbollah terrorists were injured (and some killed) when pagers and walkie-talkies they were using to communicate blew up. While Israel has not officially claimed responsibility, the combination of tech savvy, intelligence work, and sheer chutzpah involved in pulling off the attack left little room for doubt. That disruption to Hezbollah’s communications network has been followed up by the most pulverizing air strikes against Hezbollah leaders and their arsenal in the past year. In just the past week, Hezbollah lost several top commanders, including operations head Ibrahim Aqil (who was wantedby the U.S. government for involvement in the Marine barracks bombing) and the leader of the rocket and missile division, Ibrahim Qubaisi.

At this point, it is unclear how debilitated Hezbollah is as a result of the attacks (the IDF has pushed back on some reports that, cumulatively, strikes have cut the terrorist group’s precision-guided missile arsenal in half). It is also unclear whether Israel’s latest moves will brush Hezbollah off the plate sufficiently enough so that displaced Israelis can return to their homes up north and the millions of Israelis who live within the range of the group’s rockets will be able to sleep safely. The early Wednesday firing of a surface-to-surface missile from Lebanon to central Israel that set off sirens in Tel Aviv suggests not. At some point, Israel will have to decide whether it will require a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, which it would certainly prefer to avoid.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s response so far has been more of the same muddled mess to which we’ve become accustomed — empty statements about the right of Israel to defend itself coupled with lectures about avoiding escalation and seeking a diplomatic solution. This is consistent with a fanciful strategy first advanced by Barack Obama, and embraced by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, to pursue diplomacy with Iran in hopes that it will empower ever-elusive “moderates.” Instead, the policies have only encouraged more malign and destabilizing actions from the mullahs who actually run the country with an iron fist.

Yet neutralizing the group that has killed hundreds of Americans and has been designated as a terrorist organization for as long as the State Department has maintained an official list would help defang Iran and bring more stability to the region. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah deserves the full support of the U.S.