The Israeli sources said that Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was the target. Hezbollah on Saturday afternoon in a statement announced martyrdom of its leader.
The Israeli media said that in this attack, 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs were used and several buildings were destroyed. These sources also say that F-35 fighters dropped the bombs. It is said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered this attack from his hotel in New York. According to Israeli security officials, this was a difficult decision that was approved at the recent meeting of the political and security council of this regime.
An Israeli source told Axios news that when Israel attacked Hezbollah's command center, the party's top officials were present in the place.
With this crime, Netanyahu's cabinet tried to assassinate the top leaders of Hezbollah and improve its precarious position inside the occupied territories. Here a question presents itself: Can Netanyahu achieve his declared aims with this adventure or will the consequences of this escalation go beyond the expectations of the Israelis?
To get a clear picture of this crime, we must first analyze the expectations of Netanyahu's hardline government and then evaluate the reaction of Hezbollah and the Axis of Resistance, and finally see what Tel Aviv has gained in this crime and what it has lost.
Tel Aviv expectations of attack on Hezbollah command center
The Israeli leaders always think that the resistance groups in the region are heavily dependent on their leaders, and if they target the heads of these groups, they can weaken them and guarantee the security of the Israeli settlers. Therefore, Netanyahu's government designed the attack on the suburbs of Beirut with the thought to weaken Hezbollah by assassinating Nasrallah so that it might get rid of the self-inflicted crisis and restore security to northern borders of Israel.
At present, over 70,000 Israeli settlers are displaced from their homes on the border with Lebanon due to Hezbollah's attacks in solidarity with Gaza. Therefore, one of Netanyahu's goals was to restore the security of the settlers by launching attacks on Hezbollah and assassinating its commanders, as continued displaced of Israelis imposed a heavy burden on the government.
In the past ten days, the Israeli army has carried out attacks on the southern parts of Lebanon and claimed to have destroyed half of Hezbollah's arsenal, but the rocket operation using Hezbollah's new weapons against the occupied territories, including Tel Aviv and Haifa, showed that the arsenal of this movement is still firm and the claim of the leaders of Tel Aviv does not match the reality. With the new round of Hezbollah rocket operations, which has reached a depth of 60 kilometers, more settlers are in the fire range of resistance missiles, and according to estimates, 2 million Israelis pass most of their hours in the shelters.
On the other side, Netanyahu, who has suffered major defeats in Gaza and is under the criticism of the opposition parties, intended to promote the attack and assassination of resistance commanders as a great achievement in a hope to free himself of criticism.
The other issue about Israel's adventure is that by assassinating the commanders and weakening Hezbollah, it would lead this movement into a tunnel of internal crisis. From the point of view of the leaders of Tel Aviv, in the absence of Nasrallah and other senior leaders of Hezbollah, the remaining resistance forces will lose the initiative on the battleground and will not be able to reorganize themselves and manage the military formations, and therefore the operations against the occupied territories will scale down.
Hezbollah has a powerful arsenal of long-range and pinpoint missiles that can target all the occupied territories if necessary, and Tel Aviv hardliners think that in the absence of Nasrallah, the resistance fighters, who are less experienced than their leaders, will not be able to use this huge arsenal. The leaders of Israel even think that by using the detailed intelligence Tel Aviv has from the hideout of Hezbollah leaders, with the assassination of Nasrallah and other commanders, the future leaders of this movement will grow conservative for fear of assassination, and the scales of power will be tipped in favor of Israel and the occupied territories will remembrance calm.
Israeli crimes deliver the reverse
Though airstrikes on Lebanon have caused losses and damages to Hezbollah, the consequences of this warmongering outnumber the achievements of the occupying enemy. It is a misconception that with the assassination of the resistance commanders, these groups will be weakened and the Israelis will be relieved of the threats against the occupied territories. The experience of the past two decades has shown that every assassinated commander or leader is replaced by another one firmly pressing ahead with struggle against the occupation.
When the Israelis assassinated Seyed Abbas al-Mousawi, the former Secretary General of Hezbollah in 1992, they thought that this movement reached its end, but in the past thirty years, Hezbollah, under the leadership of Nasrallah, transformed from a guerilla group to a well-equipped and powerful army. The Israelis themselves have admitted that if they knew that Hezbollah would become so powerful with the assassination of al-Mousawi, they would not have committed such an act. Under Nasrallah's leadership, Hezbollah expelled the occupation army from southern Lebanon and in the 33-day war in 2006, inflicted fatal blows on this regime, and these great victories will be repeated under the future leaders of this movement.
This is true of other regional resistance groups. The US and Israel thought that with assassination of Iran's Quds Force Commander General Qassam Soleimani and Iraq's Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis they can undermine Iran and the Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and guarantee Israeli security, but these crimes backfired and now Iraqis strike all the American bases in Iraq and Syria and the occupied territories.
About Yemen's Ansarullah, though a number of its leaders and commanders were assassinated by the US and its allies, these cowardly actions not only have not weakened this movement, but also it has now developed capabilities to build hypersonic missiles and unmanned submarines that target Israel unchecked.
So, now that Nasrallah is confirmed martyred, Hezbollah has no concerns since the movement has commanders in several security and leadership layers that can act to turn the tide in favor of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has a modern organization and has trained many commanders in the past two decades to solidify its political and security body, and Israel's crimes cannot weaken this movement. The fact that Hezbollah relies on local capabilities to produce precision missiles shows that the two decades of Israeli push against this movement have gone nowhere.
The destruction of Hezbollah's missile launchers and arsenal is nothing but an allegation, and the leaders of Tel Aviv through this psychological warfare are trying to force Hezbollah to de-escalate and to convince the settlers of the army power to defend their security. However, expanding the scope of Hezbollah's operations deeper into the occupied territories invalidated Israeli claims and sent a clear message that Hezbollah is at peak and the desperate attacks by the Israelis cannot disrupt its military power.
Hezbollah will maintain its military power and political structures even without Nasrallah, and under its new leader, it even can make huge gains and make the enemy regret its crimes. After all, resistance groups are not individual-reliant and after assassination of their leaders, they will impose high costs on the Israeli occupation.
Escalation does not serve Israeli interests
All the analysts and political officials across the world admit that new Israeli actions in Lebanon are pushing the region to a major war.By assassinating Hezbollah commanders, Netanyahu's government has crossed the red lines of the Axis of Resistance and these actions will certainly escalate the tensions. Although the leaders of Tel Aviv threaten Iran and the resistance groups every day that the attack on the occupied territories has a heavy price, this regime is now caught in a vortex of internal crises that make it far from capable of fighting in multiple fronts. This is what Israeli officials admit.
The resistance groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen have warned that in the event of Israeli warmongering, they will give a painful response to Tel Aviv, and with the coordination of the joint operation room of Resistance camp, the occupied territories will grow more insecure.
Now, the occupation army is exhausted due to the conflict in Gaza and Lebanon, and resorting to airstrikes, which is the only tool of Tel Aviv's power, shows that this regime does not have the ability to directly confront Hezbollah. Otherwise, it would have started the ground invasion by now.
As a conclusion, it can be said that in case of war
prolongation, the Axis of Resistance can step up its missile and drone
attacks to put psychological and military pressure on Israelis and make
huge gains in the occupied territories. Israel has proven that it only
knows the language of force and tolerance of this rogue regime only
makes it daring to continue their crimes. So, the Resistance camp in the
coming days will take hard decisions against the Israeli massacre
machine that can change the fate and future of the region. Additionally,
experience of the past year has shown that in case of destabilization
of the occupied territories, the Israelis will have no choice but to
flee, and the reverse migration is the biggest nightmare of Tel Aviv
leaders that can deal an unrepairable blow to this regime amid the
security crises that are rattling Tel Aviv.
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