The IDF battered Hezbollah with the largest attack since the Second Lebanon War (2006) on Monday. The attack was broken down roughly into four massive rounds of air strikes against rockets and other assets. The Iranian proxy group tried hard to fight back but had very limited success in relative terms.
The figures from Monday’s attacks, along with the days preceding, were staggering and also led to enormous waves of evacuations of Lebanese civilians from both southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley area.
The IDF struck over 1,300 targets in around 650 sorties; the Lebanese Health Ministry estimated well over 1,200 wounded and close to 350 dead.
Military sources refused to speculate on the ratio of operatives to civilians, though they clarified that the targets were all places where Hezbollah had rockets, drones, or missiles located, ready to fire on Israeli civilians. IDF chief spokesman R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari made a general statement, suggesting that many of those killed would be Hezbollah fighters readying to shoot at Israel.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the military’s continuous strikes in recent days destroyed tens of thousands of rockets, with some commentators noting that the attacks could be impacting aspects of Hezbollah’s strategic capabilities to wage a war against Israel.
Hezbollah fired – almost non-stop – rounds of dozens of rockets across the entire North, over 200 rockets throughout Monday, which extended all the way down to Haifa.
For the first time, Hezbollah fired approximately 10 long-range rockets at the northern West Bank. Some commentators speculated this was a signal of threat to Israel – given that if they could reach there, they could also reach Tel Aviv – if Hezbollah decided to aim that far.
Unconfirmed reports and videos showed a rocket that struck and caused damage to a Palestinian town in the West Bank.
The North and Haifa areas were effectively shut down by these attacks, including all educational frameworks. These areas may remain shuttered for an extended period, if neither side steps back from this developing war of attrition, or is unable to deal a decisive blow.
Areas like Safed began to look more abandoned, much like the areas in the North that had been evacuated. They have looked like that for 11 months, as 60,000 residents were evacuated on Oct. 8.
Late Monday night, the Israel Air Force (IAF) attempted to assassinate Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s third in command the last remaining living member of a triumvirate of top military advisers to Hezbollah chief Hassan Sayyed Nasrallah. Reports were mixed about whether he survived the strike, but at the very least, he appeared to be wounded, with estimates that he would not be able to act in a command capacity for some time.
Karaki was supposed to replace Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah Radwan special forces chief assassinated by Israel on Friday.
These two key losses to Nasrallah followed the loss of his top military adviser Fuad Shukr on July 30.
And still, by press time, there was still no clear sign that either side was close to accepting the dictates of the other for ending the conflict.
Israel has said that it will continue to attack Hezbollah until it stops firing rockets and commits to keeping southern Lebanon clear of its Radwan forces.
Despite not threatening a ground invasion yet, calls for such an invasion have been rising, including from opposition figures such as National Unity chairman Benny Gantz and Labor chairman Yair Golan, while hard-right figures like Religious Zionist Party chairman and Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich, and Otzma Yehudit chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have been calling for such a move for months.
Hezbollah still retains most of its long-range precision rocket capabilities for striking Tel Aviv and central Israel, as well as the vast majority of its pre-war 150,000 rocket arsenal – not to mention its retro-technology drone fleet – which has thrown the IDF’s advanced defenses for a loop.
No comments:
Post a Comment