How Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 29 September 2024

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By Adrian Blomfield

LONDON - The plan had been years in the making, the target one of the most famous figures in the Arab world, and one of the most hated in Israel.

In the 11 days before it was implemented, Israel had conducted a military campaign of metronomic efficiency in Lebanon, each phase meticulously and ruthlessly executed, each blow delivered as Hezbollah was still staggering from the one that preceded it.

But then, at dusk on Friday, came the heaviest blow of them all — one that may forever cripple Hezbollah, weaken Iranian influence and potentially even reshape the Middle East itself.

Their detonations echoing across the Beirut skyline, more than 80 bunker-busting bombs pulverised not just four high-rise buildings above the ground but also the subterranean complex that housed Hezbollah’s secret headquarters.

The synchronised sabotage of Hezbollah’s communication devices and other assassinations in previous days had shown Israel was not short of accurate intelligence about a movement that it had clearly infiltrated at all levels.

But this was on a different scale. If previous attacks had systematically severed many of the spokes of the Iran-backed movement, this one was striking at its very hub.

Not only did Israel know the location of the secret bunker of a man who had not been seen in public for two decades, they knew where Hassan Nasrallah would be and that he would be meeting some of the few senior commanders who had survived the assassination strikes of the preceding weeks.

In fact, Israel had known for months, tracking Nasrallah’s every movement until deciding to strike this week after learning that the Hezbollah leader planned to move to an unknown location, according to Israeli officials quoted by the New York Times.

As the plans were finalised, it was decided the operation should be mounted as Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly – something Israel’s military chiefs believed might persuade Nasrallah to lower his guard.

The ruse succeeded. As Mr Netanyahu addressed the press in New York following his speech, an aide whispered in his ear and the Israeli prime minister withdrew to give the command to attack.

For hours afterwards neither side knew Nasrallah’s fate but gradually, amid the chaos in southern Beirut, there was enough intelligence to confirm that he was indeed dead – something Hezbollah itself grudgingly conceded a few hours later.

Sweetening the triumph for Israel, the bomb did not just kill Nasrallah.

A general from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was among the dead, as was Ali Karaki, a senior Hezbollah commander who survived a previous assassination attempt just days earlier.

Mr Netanyahu said on Saturday that Israel had “settled the score” with the killing of Nasrallah.

“We settled the score with the one responsible for the murder of countless Israelis and many citizens of other countries, including hundreds of Americans and dozens of French,” he said, adding that Israel had reached “what appears to be a historic turning point” in the fight against its “enemies”.

The Israeli prime minister also claimed the death of Nasrallah would help facilitate the return of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

“The more (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar sees that Hezbollah will no longer come to his aid, the greater the chances of returning our captives,” he said, adding that Israel was “determined to continue striking our enemies”.

Israel’s military leadership also made it clear on Saturday that this was not the end of the assassinations, with remaining Hezbollah commanders still in their sights.

“This is not the end of our toolbox,” Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top army general, told reporters. “We have more capacity going forward. Anyone who threatens the state of Israel, we will know how to reach them.”

If this was a moment of unalloyed triumph for Israel’s military establishment and, so he hopes, a passage to possible political redemption for Mr Netanyahu, there is no question Hezbollah has suffered the most grievous in a litany of disasters.

Nasrallah might not have been involved in Hezbollah’s day-to-day military operations but he was the centrifuge around which the movement spun. For many in the Middle East, perhaps more than any other of Israel’s foes, he was the embodiment of resistance to the Jewish state.

The son of a greengrocer, he climbed through Hezbollah’s ranks until he reached the top after Israel killed his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi, one of the movement’s co-founders, in a missile strike on his motorcade in 1992.

Nasrallah proved a much more adept leader than Musawi, using his organisational skills and close ties to Iran to turn the movement into a formidable political and military force.

Having waged a guerrilla war that persuaded Israel to end its occupation in southern Lebanon in 2000, he was increasingly viewed as a hero by many in the Middle East.

He burnished that reputation when his fighters battled invading Israeli troops to a bloody standstill in the hills of southern Lebanon in 2006, a stalemate he successfully, if dubiously, portrayed as a great military victory to his fellow Shia Muslims in Lebanon and beyond.

Spinning Nasrallah’s death and the turmoil of recent days will be far harder.

Even before the killing of Nasrallah, a growing number of analysts believed that Hezbollah’s reputation as the world’s most powerful non-state armed group was withering.

Now, with its leader out of the equation, it may quite possibly be facing a slow but terminal decline. As its once formidable reputation shrinks so too might that of Iran, which created, nurtured, funded, armed and trained Hezbollah.

Iran’s ability to project influence through the region by means of proxy militias is now in question.

Despite warning Israel that it had “opened the gates of hell against itself”, Tehran appears to have abandoned Hezbollah to fend for itself, rebuffing calls from the movement to come to its rescue by attacking Israel directly.

“Nasrallah’s killing is going to cause irreversible damage for Hezbollah and I don’t think it will be able to recover from it,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank.

“I think we are seeing both a historic shift in Hezbollah’s power and a historic shift in the trajectory of Iran’s influence in the Middle East.”

Israeli soldiers raid and shut down Al Jazeera bureau in occupied West Bank

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 22 September 2024

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BY OLIVER BROWNING

RAM ALLAH, Israeli Occupied West Bank - Israeli troops raided the offices of the news network Al Jazeera in the Israeli-occupied West Bank early on Sunday 22 September, ordering the bureau to shut down amid a widening campaign targeting the Qatar-funded broadcaster as it covers the war in the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera aired footage of Israeli troops live on its Arabic-language channel ordering the office to be shut for 45 days.

It follows an extraordinary order issued in July that saw Israeli police raid Al Jazeera’s broadcast position in East Jerusalem, seizing equipment there, preventing its broadcasts in Israel and blocking its websites.

The move marked the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet operating in the country.

At least 29 killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 17 September 2024

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BY LORENZO TONDO

JERUSALEM - At least 29 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across central Gaza on Sunday night and Monday morning, including five women and four children, Palestinian health officials have said.

Rescuers said an airstrike early on Monday destroyed a residential building in the densely populated Nuseirat refugee camp in the heart of central Gaza, killing at least 10 people, including four women and two children.

The al-Awda hospital, which received the bodies, confirmed the deaths and said another 13 people were wounded. Hospital records quoted by local media show that the dead included a mother, her child and her five siblings.

In a separate strike targeting a building in Gaza City, six people died. A woman and two children were among the dead, according to the civil defence, a team of emergency responders working under the governance of Hamas.

Israel says its military operations exclusively target combatants and claims Hamas and other armed factions place civilians at risk by operating within residential areas.

Eleven months into the Gaza war, the death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians and the total is nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or equal to one in every 50 people. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people died and about 250 were taken hostage.

On Sunday evening, a senior Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that new generations of fighters had been recruited since the 7 October attacks, less than a week after the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, told journalists that Hamas “no longer exists” as a military formation in Gaza.

During an interview in Istanbul, Osama Hamdan claimed that the militant group “has a high ability to continue”.

He added: “There were martyrs and there were sacrifices … but in return there was an accumulation of experiences and the recruitment of new generations into the resistance.”

The Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, congratulated the Yemeni Houthi group for reaching central Israel with a surface-to-surface missile for the first time on Sunday, causing a fire near Kfar Daniel.

“I congratulate you on your success in reaching the depth of the enemy entity,” Sinwar said in a letter to the Houthi leader, Abdulmalik al-Houthi. “I assure you that the resistance is fine. We have prepared ourselves to fight a long battle of attrition,” he said.

This is reportedly Sinwar’s third public message in the last week, after he congratulated the Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, on winning the “renewed trust” of his people in the election on 9 September, and showed gratitude for Hezbollah’s continuing fight against Israel on Friday.

Before then Sinwar, who is believed to be hiding underground in Gaza, had made only one other official statement since the war began, in late October, when he offered the immediate release of Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Israel is conducting an extensive manhunt in Gaza for the man responsible for the 7 October massacre.

The Israeli military is investigating whether the fire near Kfar Daniel was the result of falling fragments caused by interceptor missiles launched at the projectile, or if the missile successfully penetrated its air defences, as the Houthis have claimed.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the Houthis would pay a “heavy price”, while the Houthi leader warned of bigger attacks to come.

On Monday, the Houthi military spokesperson, Yahya Saree, said the group downed a US MQ-9 drone in Yemen’s Dhamar province.

In a separate development on Monday, Gallant told the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, that time was running out for an agreement with Hezbollah to halt the fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border, where on Sunday the Israeli military reported that approximately 40 projectiles had been launched, with the majority being intercepted or landing in uninhabited regions.

“The possibility for an agreed framework in the northern arena is running out as Hezbollah continues to ‘tie itself’ to Hamas,” Gallant said, “The trajectory is clear.’’

Hezbollah said it would halt its attacks if there was a ceasefire in Gaza, but months of talks brokered by the US, Qatar and Egypt have repeatedly stalled.

Gallant told Austin that “in any possible scenario, Israel’s defence establishment will continue to operate with the aim of dismantling Hamas and ensuring the return of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza – by any means”.

Meanwhile, media reports in Israel suggested Gallant’s position could be under threat, with sources in the prime minister’s office saying Netanyahu was considering appointing the New Hope chair, Gideon Sa’ar, as Gallant’s replacement.

After the report, the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said on X: “The time has come to [fire Gallant] immediately.”

Rumours that Netanyahu would replace Gallant have been circulating for months. The already strained relationship between the two has been tumultuous since Netanyahu’s sudden decision to dismiss Gallant in March 2023 because of his vocal disapproval of the government’s judicial changes. However, the prime minister’s move was later rescinded after public outcry.

Some in Netanyahu’s administration have called for Gallant’s removal, citing a range of grievances including his stance against a government-supported ultra-Orthodox enlistment bill and his public disagreement with the prime minister on matters such as a hostage negotiation and Israel’s presence in the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.