Unprecedented intel. penetration: How the IDF blocked Hezbollah's doomsday attacks on Tel Aviv

Unprecedented intel. penetration: How the IDF blocked Hezbollah's doomsday attacks on Tel Aviv

YONAH JEREMY BOB

The IDF disclosed on Wednesday that its decapitation of Hezbollah from mid-September until the November 26 ceasefire was not luck, but based on an unprecedented level of infiltration.

According to the military, its intelligence branches spent years separately diagnosing each level of Hezbollah’s firepower: mortars, short-range rockets, medium-range rockets, and precision and long-range rockets.

Further, military intelligence identified where these items were located and how to strike them, or follow their movements if they were mobile.

The IDF added that it performed an unprecedented diagnosis of Hezbollah’s command structure.

The fact that the top three full tiers of Hezbollah’s commanders were all eliminated in a matter of weeks was not luck, but a measure of the long term investment in intelligence collection, analysis and precision by the military.

All of this led to the IDF preventing Hezbollah from being able to carry out its own doomsday plans of cutting Tel Aviv skyscrapers to pieces with its 150,000 rocket arsenal.

If defense officials and analysts had warned that the Azrieli Towers, the Kirya military headquarters’ tall buildings, and other major tall landmarks in Tel Aviv could be wrecked by Hezbollah, potentially killing thousands, the Lebanese terror group did not manage to do any such major damage in the center of the country.

Hezbollah did destroy large portions of villages on the northern border and also caused some wider damage to the northern third of the country from September-November, including to Haifa, but even there failed to cause enough strategic damage to pressure Israel into giving in to its terms.

Instead, the IDF killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, his first successor Hashem Safieddine, military chief Fuad Shukr, top Radwan commander Ibraham Aqil and all of his top sub-commanders, and countless others, and did not stop until Hezbollah agreed to a withdrawal beyond the Litani River and to drop any involvement with the war conflict in the South.

Following the IDF’s success in Lebanon, its intelligence and operations apparatus performed a similar destruction of the Syrian army’s main power centers, while avoiding killing Syrian army forces since the goal was to reduce the future potential threat and not to start a new active front.