The likelihood that Hezbollah will start a major war against Israel increased significantly in the wake of its missile attack last week.
Hezbollah attacked Israel with twenty missiles because the outcome of Hamas’s offensive against the Jewish state in May convinced Iran’s foreign legion in Lebanon that it would only gain from aggression.
Three months ago, Hamas opened an unprovoked missile assault against Israel and incited Israeli Muslims to launch pogroms against Israeli Jews in cities across the country.
Israel responded to Hamas’s aggression with pinpoint airstrikes that targeted Hamas’s military infrastructure and command and control mechanisms and bases.
For its painstaking efforts to limit its strikes to specifically military targets, Israel was pilloried as a racist, illegitimate state and threatened with an arms embargo by progressives in the U.S Congress. Jews were attacked on the streets from Los Angeles to New York to Paris and London. On the other hand, Hamas was celebrated. Even as its rained down missiles on Tel Aviv, led by the Biden administration, the international community pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid,” to Gaza. To date, Hamas has received nearly a billion dollars in pledges and the money is already flowing in by the tens of millions.
Before it launched its offensive against Israel. Hamas was on the economic ropes. It had squandered the resources, destroyed the infrastructure and sucked dry the earning capacity of the denizens of Gaza, which it has controlled since 2007. But now, thanks to its latest illegal war of aggression against the Jews, it has the economic wherewithal keep its terror fiefdom afloat.
For Hamas, its Iranian controllers and its fellow Iranian proxy Hezbollah, the lesson of May’s terror offensive is that attacking the Jewish state is the best economic development plan. It rendered sanctions relief for Iran unnecessary.
Iran can keep spinning its centrifuges and the U.S. and Europe will fund its terror arms for it.
Like Hamas, since Hezbollah seized control over the Lebanese government through elections in 2007 and military force in 2008, the Iranian group has turned what was once the banking capital of the Middle East into an economic death trap. Lebanon defaulted on its loans. Its infrastructure is destroyed. Its people are going hungry and living without electricity or fuel, or prospects for earning a living. Last week, Hezbollah decided to test out Hamas’s economic plan with a limited missile stroke to see what would happen.
And it worked. All Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah needed were 19 measly missiles to hit the jackpot.
Tuesday the Lebanese media reported that the Biden administration intends to transfer $100 million in aid to the Lebanese Health Ministry for assistance in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Notable, although left unsaid in the report was the fact that Hezbollah has controlled Lebanon’s Health Ministry since 2019.
The Lebanese Armed Forces are also set to receive a boost in U.S. support following Hezbollah’s attack. In testimony before the Senate this week, Mira Resnick, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State for Regional Affairs gushed that the LAF “is one of our most competent partners in the Middle East.”
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