Israel Cuts Hizballah Down to Size
Israel debilitating thousands of Islamic Revolution jihadists in Lebanon this week without firing a shot provides a chance not only to examine one of the most spectacularly successful counter-terrorism operations ever carried out by any intelligence service, but to assess the broader situation as the one-year mark in Israel’s war with the Revolution’s outpost in Gaza looms.
PARADIGMS AND PITFALLS
Analysis and media coverage of the HAMAS pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023, and the war in Gaza it triggered, has been distorted from the outset by a general tendency to view it through a Palestinian paradigm—as part of the struggle over the unresolved sovereignty of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel took custody of from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, after turning back the second Arab attempt in a generation to destroy her in 1967. This has warped the moral reaction of many in the West, who imagine HAMAS as a vehicle for Palestinian national aspirations, sometimes with lethal consequences. More importantly, it has created immense confusion in Western governments, where the political priority has been to renew the push for a two-State solution, a response that is at best irrelevant to the current crisis and potentially quite dangerous at this moment by giving the appearance that terrorism and mass-murder will be rewarded.
HAMAS’ origins in the Muslim Brotherhood ceased to matter decades ago: HAMAS has been absorbed into Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), something long obvious and now undisguised. Elements that are puzzling under the Palestinian paradigm become easily explicable once it is accepted that HAMAS is a front of the Iranian jihad.
Take the 7 October pogrom itself, which, except for the continued widespread Palestinian satisfaction at the massacre, seemed to offer little even in theory from a Palestinian perspective. There was a risk such gleeful and grisly atrocities would damage the Palestinian cause and increase global sympathy for Israel. It might be said that Palestinians knew from a long record that this was no risk at all, and so it proved. Jews being raped and burned alive proved so exhilarating to large numbers of people in Europe that they have taken it as inspiration to attack Jews wherever they can, a dynamic even the Islamic State—a group otherwise ambivalent over the Palestine issue—could not resist capitalising on. But the devastation of the Israeli reaction was always a certainty. Why would a ruling entity attentive to Palestinian welfare bring that upon them? It would not, of course.1
The 7 October pogrom was an Iranian operation at every level, down to the selection of the date and the orders for its initiation. HAMAS has behaved according to an Iranian design since then. While loudly declaring in public an intention to repeat 7 October “again and again and again”, HAMAS has created a battlespace in Gaza that protects its military forces, while maximising Palestinian civilian deaths. This is puzzling if HAMAS is a “nationalist resistance” faction. If, however, HAMAS is a unit of the IRGC, working within the Islamic Revolution’s strategic concept of an attritional long-term jihad to eliminate the Jewish State, it is no mystery why it makes little effort to militarily confront Israel and instead wages political warfare by using Palestinians as human sacrifices.
This same “nationalist” distortion has crept into the discussion of events in Lebanon in the last few days, and there it is, if anything, even more misleading. There is no ambiguity about Hizballah’s origins, as there is with HAMAS. Hizballah is the IRGC, and always has been. An armed jihadist cadre of hizballahi was forged on Lebanese territory in the mid-1970s by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the PLO’s Syrian and Soviet sponsors. The hizballahi—a transnational movement that absorbed several Lebanese and Iraqi Shi’a groups, adding them to the ranks of Khomeinist Iranians sent for training by the Imam—were used to bring the Islamic Revolution to Iran in 1978-79. For a time after the Revolution, the new Iranian regime called itself “the hizballahi government”. On Iranian soil, the jihadists would come to be called the IRGC or Pasdaran. When operating in Lebanon, the jihadists went under multiple cover names until formally labelling themselves “Hizballah” (Party of God) in 1985.
Iranian regime messaging about Hizballah has been slightly ambiguous: though often frank that Hizballah is as much a part of the clerical regime as the Iranian Finance Ministry, it will at times let stand the idea that the group is “Lebanese” and that it originated as a “national liberation movement” against Israel’s 1982 invasion, which is instrumentally useful in gaining local legitimacy and reducing popular opposition to the Islamic Revolution’s occupation of Lebanon. But most of the obfuscation about Hizballah’s nature has come from Western journalists and academics, not all of them conscious activists, who, as Tony Badran has put it, have created a literature “littered with superfluous, misleading, and false categories”. Perhaps the worst of these is the idea Hizballah has separate “military” and “political” wings, something Hizballah’s leaders, from deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem on down, scoff at publicly.
In the decades since the Islamic Revolution captured Iran, it has spread and implanted itself in numerous countries via the “Hizballah model”, often directly utilising the “Hizballah” label in the process. Such was the case with Ansarallah in Yemen, the Afghan hizballahi now flagged as Liwa Fatemiyun, the “Special Groups” or “Shi’a militias” that comprise al-Hashd al-Shabi in Iraq, and the “Syrian Hizballah” set up by the original. These elements are often described as “proxies” of Iran’s. This is misleading.
The reality, exhaustively documented by Oved Lobel, is:
These are not disparate, subordinate, local revolutionary groups allied for a greater cause and supported by the IRGC, but regional names of the same movement with the same leadership and goals that shifts the same personnel and resources to various fronts of its transnational jihad under different aliases.
The truth of this could be seen a decade ago, when the IRGC Network—as it is better described—drew its forces from as far afield as Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast to concentrate them in Syria for an international Shi’a jihad to rescue Bashar al-Asad’s disintegrating regime, and it has been seen over the last year, when the IRGC Network has activated its “ring of fire” around Israel, on the State’s immediate borders (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, increasingly the West Bank), and beyond (notably Iraq and Yemen).
There were hopes the fiery demise of Qassem Sulaymani, the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force, in January 2020, would seriously disrupt the IRGC Network. In fact, the Islamist Imperial architecture Sulaymani was so instrumental in constructing has only become more cohesive since then, with a Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) set up in the summer of 2023 to coordinate what the IRGC calls its external armies—Hizballah, HAMAS, Ansarallah, etc. When Sulaymani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, gave the execution order for “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”—the codename for 7 October—it was at a JOC meeting in Beirut five days earlier, where the other non-Iran-based IRGC units received instructions on the parts they were to play.
ISRAEL STRIKES AGAINST IRAN ON THE NORTHERN FRONT
Aside from the pogrom in Israel, probably the most headline-catching impact of Iran’s JOC orders last October has been Ansarallah’s wave of piracy against international shipping. For Israel, the most important secondary impact of those orders has been the relentless barrage of 9,000 missiles Hizballah has rained down on the north of the country, beginning on 8 October. There were contemporaneous fears in Israel that Hizballah’s attacks presaged “another October 7”: given how HAMAS had sequenced the invasion the day before, and the earlier discovery of a complex IRGC-devised tunnel system from Lebanon into Israel, this was not unreasonable. The spectre of such an eventuality has not completely lifted, and the continuous death toll and injuries caused by Hizballah’s missiles, plus the displacement of 70,000 Israelis in the north, has created an intolerable situation that no State would long endure. To nobody’s surprise, those, like the United Nations, who have been silent about Iran/Hizballah using Lebanon as a launchpad for war for eleven months, found their voice this week to worry about “escalation” when Israel struck back.2 And what a strike it was.
Just after 15:30 on 17 September, about 4,000 pagers issued to Hizballah members began beeping, and seconds later the devices blew up. Ironically, Hizballah had adopted low-tech communications as a defensive counter-intelligence measure because they were aware Israel had compromised the organisation, and Hizballah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah was convinced the problem was the high-tech devices, specifically mobile telephones, his operatives carried.
Nasrallah’s years-long campaign to convert Hizballah communications into a low-tech enterprise was given additional impetus over the last year because Israel has eliminated several senior IRGC Network officials. Two were killed in Beirut, the Network’s most important regional headquarters outside Iran: HAMAS’ deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri was killed in early January for his role in the pogrom, and in late July, after a Hizballah missile massacred mostly Druze children at a football match in Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-held Golan Heights, Fuad Shukr was struck down. Shukr was a hizballahi of the founding generation, a member of the Jihad Council (the highest Hizballah military body), a wanted man in the U.S. for his role in the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, and a close adviser to Nasrallah. In between, in early April, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a crucial IRGC official—the overseer of the Hizballah unit in the Lebanon-Syria theatre, who was steeped in the blood of Anglo-American forces in Iraq, Syrians, and the victims of 7 October—was killed in an Israeli airstrike at Damascus Airport.
After the Shukr loss, in particular, and the “success” of the 7 October invasion—a key reason it remained undetected was that HAMAS installed landlines in their tunnels to communicate during the planning—Nasrallah appeared vindicated. In February, Nasrallah went public with his denunciation of smart phones as the “deadly agent” within. The use of pagers proliferated within Hizballah.
Israel was already one step ahead. Speaking to current and former Israeli officials briefed on the operation, The New York Times explains:
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the [pager] devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front … [A]t least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN …
The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones. …
Not only did Mr. Nasrallah ban cellphones from meetings of Hezbollah operatives, he ordered that the details of Hezbollah movements and plans never be communicated over cellphones … Hezbollah officers, he ordered, had to carry pagers at all times, and in the event of war, pagers would be used to tell fighters where to go.
Over the summer [of 2024], shipments of the pagers to Lebanon increased, with thousands arriving in the country and being distributed among Hezbollah officers and their allies …
To set off the explosions, … Israel triggered the pagers to beep and sent a message to them in Arabic that appeared as though it had come from Hezbollah’s senior leadership.
Seconds later, Lebanon was in chaos.
Nor was that the end. The next day, 18 September, the handheld radios or “walkie-talkies” Hizballah had turned to also exploded. There are fewer details available about how this wave of the operation was put together, but the statement from Icom, the Japanese firm that supposedly manufactured the two-way radios, said they had not produced them for ten years and the “hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached”. It does not take much imagination to fill in the blanks.
Twelve people were killed and 2,800 wounded in the pagers attack, and twenty were killed and 450 wounded in the walkie-talkies attack, according to the Lebanese “State”, thus 32 fatalities and over-3,250 wounded. Israel believes these figures are a significant underestimate. Hizballah agrees: they have issued “martyrdom” notices for 58 of their jihadists so far. Western intelligence sources have said the real number of slain hizballahis was 300 to 400, with 600 being blinded and hundreds more losing limbs or having their reproductive organs injured. Three of Nasrallah’s security guards and a senior aide were also reportedly wounded. Ostensible documents from within Hizballah, leaked by Saudi intelligence, put the death toll even higher, nearer 900, and very notably include Iranians and Yemenis among the fatalities. Whether these documents are authentic or not, the transnational nature of the IRGC apparatus was underlined by the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, being injured by his pager,3 and the reliable reports of Hizballah casualties in Syria.4
IMPLICATIONS
One of the less remarked-upon aspects of what Israel did to Hizballah is the goodwill earned from Western intelligence agencies—not bastions of pro-Israel sentiment, in general. Many of these agencies have tangled with IRGC/Hizballah, and the results have not been pretty. This is true above all of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose station chief, William Francis Buckley, was abducted by Hizballah in March 1984, horrifically physically tortured and driven out of his mind over more than a year, and then murdered.5 Israel has partially delivered the retribution the CIA never could. It will be difficult to measure the practical effects of such “soft power” gains, but there it is.
The most self-evident implication is that MOSSAD remains one of the most effective intelligence agencies on earth across the board—recruitment and collection, defensive and offensive counter-intelligence, and covert action. The “MOSSAD myth” is instrumentally important for Israel, providing serious strategic benefits by deterring enemies and aiding recruitment, of officers in Israel and agents abroad. There “myth” sands the rough edges of the Institute’s record, accentuating its successes and minimising its failures, of which there have been plenty, even in an operation as famous as WRATH OF GOD. But the “myth” works because it is based in a reality about MOSSAD’s competence and daring. Almost no Western intelligence service can do what MOSSAD does, and those with the capability, like the CIA, do not have the will.
The complaints about Israel’s actions against Hizballah have revealed a lot about the complainants and little else. The hysteria from the United Nations’ “human rights experts” could not have been a more perfect in demonstrating that such people are neither experts—note the reference to the illusory distinction between “civilian and military” Hizballah operatives—nor do they care about human rights: in their hands, “international law” is merely a political warfare weapon. The objections based around Lebanese “territorial integrity” are ridiculous. To borrow a contemporary phrase, Lebanon is more a concept of a country than a sovereign entity.
It is very unfortunate that at least one of the jihadists allowed his child to handle his IRGC/Hizballah-issued pager and she was killed in the explosions. It does not excuse those who used this to describe Israel’s operation as “terrorism”: they remain among the silly and the sinister.6 There was nothing indiscriminate about this attack. The claims that Lebanese doctors and nurses used the exploding pagers are simply false: Hizballah itself has said these were devices used exclusively by its members. People stood next to hizballahis with exploding pagers were entirely unharmed. You can watch the videos. Israel has a good claim to have carried out the most targeted mass-counter-terrorism operation in history, and one has to suspect that the real motive of people pretending otherwise is a desire to protect Iran’s terrorists and/or to deprive Jews of the ability to protect themselves.
For IRGC/Hizballah, the overwhelming fact of Israel’s pagers and walkie-talkies operation is the humiliation. There is an analogy to be made with the effect the Six-Day War had on Egypt’s ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967. The aura of invincibility around Hizballah has been grievously damaged, if not broken. Hizballah had been able to marginalise its Arab opponents in Lebanon and largely suppress popular opposition in the region, even from Sunnis resentful at Iran/Hizballah’s role in slaughtering their brethren in Syria, because of its “resistance” against Israel. Hizballah had expelled Israel from Lebanon in 2000 and fought it to a standstill in 2006, so many perceived, and kept up the “resistance” afterwards with repeated attacks the Israelis seemed fearful of responding to. The Arab States, meanwhile, failed embarrassingly in the 1948 war to exterminate Israel and in every round of that conflict since—the last of which was decades ago. The most any of the regional governments do now is rail rhetorically against the “Zionist Entity”, and some of them openly cooperate with it. After this week, Hizballah looks much more like the other incompetent ruling authorities in the region—all talk when it comes to Israel and militarily skilled only in repressing a captive civilian population. The roots of this disaster for Hizballah lie in how badly infiltrated it is by Israel.
While it has been obvious for a half-decade and more that Iran’s Islamist imperial project was succeeding in surrounding Israel, advancing the IRGC’s program of phased attritional warfare that makes life in the Jewish State unliveable—abetted by some Israeli miscalculations, especially over Syria—it was equally obvious, as I wrote three years ago, that Israel had penetrated the IRGC Network extensively, including within Iran, gaining an unrivalled visibility into the Islamic Revolution and acquiring a “seemingly decisive capacity to thwart its global terrorist operations”. Israel had provided intelligence that led to Sulaymani’s demise and, on Iranian territory, Israel has been able to eliminate IRGC officers, senior officials in the ballistic missile and nuclear-weapons programs, assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders the clerical theocracy harbours, and so on. Iran’s acknowledgement of the problem in 2021 and 2022 did nothing to stop it. Two months ago, Israel took out HAMAS’ supreme leader Ismail Haniyeh in a fortified IRGC safehouse in Tehran.
The espionage problems for the Hizballah department of the IRGC Network have been evident since at least 2015, when Nasrallah admitted a senior Hizballah member was an Israeli spy.7 In May 2016, Mustafa Badreddine was killed in Syria. Badreddine, a founding generation hizballahi, was a relative of Imad Mughniyeh, the IRGC officer who ran Hizballah until he was assassinated in Syria in a joint Israel-CIA operation in 2008. The subsequent Israeli statement that Badreddine was killed in an “inside job” was very likely black propaganda, and also true, from a certain point of view. It has often been Hizballah-flagged IRGC operatives sent on terrorist missions against Israeli embassies and other Jewish targets around the world over the last decade, and Israel thwarted them all well “left of boom”. When European States want to know about Hizballah activities on their territory, it is to Israel they turn.
Hizballah’s security problems are now much worse.
First, the pager and radio explosions themselves constitute a security breach by unmasking an enormous number of secret IRGC/Hizballah members. From the flood of local media coverage, social media videos, telephone calls, text and WhatsApp messages, and admissions records at Lebanese hospitals, Israel will be able to map the IRGC Network in Lebanon in a far more comprehensive way than before.
Second, there is every likelihood the steps Hizballah takes to rectify the situation will make it worse. The search for internal traitors will sow internal chaos in Hizballah, weakening the group militarily and diverting resources, attentional and otherwise, which would otherwise be devoted to terrorism against Israel. Israel will surely do its best to exacerbate this. One of the most effective ways to destroy a terrorist organisation is to have it consume itself: if a State captures the counter-intelligence apparatus of a group, it can protect its actual agents while feeding disinformation into the system that neutralises dangerous operatives; the continued failure of such a compromised group to execute attacks reinforces the awareness that there are mole(s) and so the witch-hunt cycle continues. Whether Israel has recruited any agents in the IRGC/Hizballah counter-intelligence apparatus, time will tell.
WHAT NOW?
Israel prepared the pagers and radios operation months ago, so the obvious question is why it pushed the “buttons” now. The proximate cause appears evident enough. Hours before the Hizballah pagers exploded, Shin Bet or SHABAK, the domestic Israeli intelligence service, announced that it had foiled an attempt by Hizballah to assassinate former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi. Hizballah made no effort to hide its hand, using the same kind of remote-detonated IED that it planted in Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv a year ago, on the eve of the 7 October pogrom, to try to murder another former Chief of Staff and Defence Minister, Moshe Ya’alon.8 Any attempt to assassinate Israeli government officials clearly has to be met with a quick, devastating response. But there are indications Israel’s purposes were larger than that.
In late August, Israel began indicating that the war aims had expanded from (1) recovering the hostages, (2) destroying HAMAS’ military and governance capacities, and (3) ensuring Gaza would be no threat in the future, to include (4) the return home of the Israelis displaced in the north. Around the same time the attempt on Kohavi was announced on 17 September—about six hours before the anti-Hizballah operation—the Israeli Security Cabinet made it official that the “safe return of the residents of the north to their homes” had been added to the war aims. If Israel is serious about accomplishing this, the logic runs only one way.
Israeli military action in Gaza cannot solve the northern front. The IRGC Network will keep attacking Israel on all fronts for as long as Israel threatens the IRGC base in Gaza, and likely for far longer than that as part of the Islamic Revolution’s attritional jihad against the Jewish State. There is no diplomatic option for the north.9 U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in August 2006 at the end of Israel’s last round with IRGC/Hizballah, called for U.N. peacekeepers (UNIFIL) to patrol a “Blue Line” that kept Hizballah north of the Litani River, “12 miles from the Israeli border”. UNIFIL has barely even pretended to enforce this. If Israel wants Hizballah to cease firing rockets into the north and move its jihadists away from the border, the most evident available method is to compel that outcome by force of arms. There are signs this is the course Israel is set on
“Hizballah continues to tie itself to HAMAS, and refuses to end the conflict,” said Defence Minister Gallant on 17 September. “Therefore, the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action.” After the walkie-talkies attack on 18 September, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a short video statement, “We will return the residents of the north securely to their homes”. Gallant followed up saying, “The ‘centre of gravity’ is moving north, meaning that we are allocating forces, resources, and energy for the northern arena”, repeating a message Gallant had delivered to troops in Gaza on 10 September.
Gallant added on 19 September that a “new phase of the war” was underway: after “important discussions” over previous days, a decision had been taken to continue with “military actions” against Hizballah that exact an “increasing price” until the northern communities are restored. It was reported earlier today that during a discussion with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu rejected the suggestion Israel was responsible for the “escalation”: “Instead of putting pressure on us, it’s time for you to put pressure on Hizballah. We will return our residents home. We made this decision this week, and we will implement it.”
It has not just been words from Israel. This shift of “thousands of [IDF] commando and paratrooper soldiers to the north of Israel from the south” has been documented independently.
Jerusalem believed that Hizballah’s elite Radwan Force had been seriously damaged by the communication device explosions, and yesterday made doubly sure with an airstrike in southern Beirut that killed Ibrahim Aqil, a Jihad Council member and the head of the Radwan Force, as well as at least ten senior Hizballah military commanders. Aqil had been designated a terrorist in the U.S. and a $7 million bounty put on his head for his role in the Marine barracks atrocity and kidnapping Westerners in Lebanon.
Aqil had been meeting the Radwan commanders, possibly having to do it in person because of the distrust of electronic communications, to plan “what they called ‘The Plan to Conquer the Galilee’,” according to IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari. “Hizballah intended to raid Israeli territory, occupy the communities of the Galilee, and murder and kidnap Israeli citizens—similar to what HAMAS did on October 7.” Hagari’s statement is difficult to check, but it is plausible: the 7 October invasion—like almost everything else in the IRGC Network—was first modelled by the Hizballah department, and the fact Israel has been able to kill Shukr and Aqil in such short order adds to the evidence that the Israelis have very good visibility within Hizballah.
The Israeli airstrikes against 400 or more Hizballah targets in Lebanon tonight—“methodically targeting and degrading Hizballah’s launching capabilities, eliminating commanders and terrorists”, as the IDF put it—was presented by the Israelis as a pre-emptive move to derail this planned northern 7 October.
Perhaps all of this has been a bluff: by appearing to prepare to invade Lebanon, Israel is trying to pressure the “international community” into finally doing something to restrain Iran/Hizballah in the north. It seems unlikely anyone in the Israeli government really believes this would work: there is nothing the U.N. or any of its Member States can or will do against Hizballah.
It might be that Israel sees its actions this week as, so to speak, direct negotiations with Hizballah—escalating to de-escalate, as one Israeli official suggested to Axios. There is no doubt that even if Israel opts against a major offensive on the northern front, and even if the Gaza war ends, as seems quite likely, in the way all the others have—inconclusively, with a ceasefire that preserves HAMAS in some form—the terms between Israel and the Islamic Revolution that controls Lebanon have been somewhat reset. Hizballah has been badly humbled, its mystique and prestige tarnished. For all of the strategic munitions Iran has stockpiled on Lebanese territory, it has shown a marked disinclination to use them, and Hizballah now has to wonder which of its operatives would obey orders to fire them even if Israel invades. Hizballah very clearly does not want another conventional war with Israel—the IRGC Network is not built for such things—giving Israel “leverage” by threatening one. Israel might also assess that the Islamic Revolution is wary the enthusiasm for its hold on Lebanon would wane if it is left holding the bag for reconstruction after dragging the territory into yet another war its residents have no obvious interest in.
By this reasoning, if Israel inflicts enough pain on Hizballah with the spectre of full-scale war at the end of the “escalation ladder”, Israel can get the group to back down and “agree” to return to a version of the pre-8 October status quo. The problem with this is that such an “agreement” would rely on the Israeli government trusting that Hizballah will respect the prior “red lines”, and even if by some miracle Netanyahu’s Cabinet could bring themselves to believe that, in the shadow of 7 October, most Israelis will not. The displaced people in the north are not going to return home in range of Iran’s missiles and pogromist death squads. More to the point, as previously mentioned, Iran is not going to stop attacking on the northern front. So if Israel chooses to go down this road, it will either result in the revelation that the invasion threat was a ruse—a loss of credibility that will be spun as another Hizballah “victory”—or an invasion of Lebanon in a few months.
If, on the other hand, events this week really have been a prelude to an imminent anti-Hizballah invasion of Lebanon, then the pagers and radios operation was not meant as a reprisal and political warfare, but as the mother of all shaping operations: at one stroke, thousands of Hizballah jihadists were taken off the board and Hizballah’s communications were disrupted, making it difficult to coordinate and control troops against any Israeli attack. The “command” side of Hizballah’s command-and-control structure was already fraying because of the scale of Israel’s decapitation strikes, which have eroded the group’s military leadership, and that has got worse since Tuesday. Added to that, Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes since 8 October have destroyed thousands of Hizballah missile launch sites, and the wider airstrikes tonight look suspiciously like the kind of aerial campaign to suppress enemy missile capabilities that would precede a ground operation. Even without any further Israeli “surprises” before the onset of an invasion, the IRGC Network on the northern front is in a militarily vulnerable state.
There are reports that the pagers and radios operation was intended as the “opening blow in an all-out war” against Hizballah, but Israel was forced to execute early because Hizballah was close to uncovering the “planted” devices. If true, Israel will have had to decide between sticking with the original plan for an invasion rapidly following the operation or adapting the plan to delay the invasion, but there are contradictory reports that Hizballah trusted the devices enough it was still handing them out to its operatives in the hours before they exploded. If the latter reports are true, and if blowing up the communications devices was intended as the opening shot of an invasion, then Israel has already decided to invade.
The next few days will likely furnish answers. It is difficult to imagine that Hizballah does not respond militarily to the humiliation of the past week, and while the group might wish to avoid a provocation that leads to all-out war, the attack will also have to be significant enough to salvage some pride. If the Hizballah attack is as massive as Israel is expecting and preparing the home front for, a casus belli will have presented itself. What Israel does at that point will be the best indicator of Jerusalem’s thinking.
There will be an inevitable outcry if Israel moves into Lebanon, but, if it follows a visible large-scale Hizballah attack, it will be ameliorated to some degree, and politically that is as good as it gets for Israel.10 Militarily, it is possible Israel has prepared the ground so thoroughly that Hizballah buckles quickly and by next week we are talking about a 1967-style lightning war that reveals a seemingly menacing foe as hollow. The record of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon suggests not, and beyond the political and human cost of any new venture, there are serious practical questions about Israel’s ability to fight on two fronts, certainly in any sustained sense. As outlined above, though, it is not as if there is a lot of options if allowing the people of northern Israel to return home is now a core war aim, and it will be a long time before Hizballah is in this much disarray. If Israel has concluded an invasion of Lebanon is the only way to manage the Hizballah issue, now is the moment.
Post has been updated
NOTES
The official propaganda of the Palestinian movement and its radical chic allies, particularly in the Western “human rights” NGOs and the United Nations, has been for many years that Gaza is “the world’s largest open-air prison” or even “concentration camp”. This narrative was tacitly admitted to be a lie when it was replaced with a new message (at least for a time) earlier this year: Gaza had been a “beautiful” place where happy people gathered for dinner in “spacious family apartments or villas by the Mediterranean Sea”, it was now said, and all this had been tragically destroyed by Israel’s wanton onslaught. Call it the compliment that vice pays to virtue. (Seth Mandel discussed this issue at greater length in Commentary Magazine in February.)
The nearest the U.N. has come to even mentioning—never mind condemning—the IRGC/Hizballah missiles fired into Israel was at the end of August, when a Security Council Resolution called on the “relevant actors” to restore “calm, restraint, and stability”.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon is always part of the IRGC Network, sometimes an actual IRGC officer. The Iranian ambassador in Beirut at the time of the Marine barracks bombing was Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, who barely disguised his role in that attack. Mohtashamipur had been the man to make contact with the PLO in 1973 on Khomeini’s behalf to begin training what came to be the IRGC.
There were less certain reports that Iranian IRGC jihadists were killed in Syria by the pagers.
There are at least two other particularly horrific murders of Americans by IRGC/Hizballah.
First, Robert Stethem, a 23-year-old U.S. Navy diver, who was aboard TWA Flight 847 when it was hijacked by Hizballah on 14 June 1985. Stethem was savagely beaten and tortured for a full day by Mohammed Ali Hamadi, the hizballahi leading the operation, and his accomplices. On 15 June, Hamadi forced the plane to be landed at Beirut Airport, “dragged [Stethem] to the opened aircraft door, [where he] was shot point blank in the head, and was thrown onto the tarmac”.
Second, Colonel William Richard Higgins, a Vietnam veteran who had become a senior Pentagon official—the Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense—before being sent to oversee the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon in July 1987. Higgins was abducted on 17 February 1988 and a statement was issued to Reuters two months later, along with photographs clearly showing Higgins had been extensively tortured, in the name of “The Organisation of the Oppressed on Earth”, a known cover-name for the IRGC in Lebanon. (The other most well-known IRGC cover-name was “The Islamic Jihad Organisation” (IJO), the Hizballah body later identified as Unit 910 or the External Security Organisation (ESO).) IRGC/Hizballah announced on 31 July 1989 that Higgins had been “executed” by hanging. The video released around the world showed Higgins had been slowly strangled to death.
Democratic Congressmen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman avoided the word “terrorism”, but did claim Israel’s operation against Hizballah had caused large-scale civilian injuries and violated “international (humanitarian) law”. As with all the above cases, this tells us nothing about the Middle East. It reflects a problem in America of very low quality individuals being able to obtain elected office.
Nasrallah has made general references to “security” issues since then, but doubtless it is unhelpful for morale to dwell on specifics. For example, when dozens of “Israeli spies” were rounded up in Lebanon in January 2022, the Hizballah dimension was only obliquely alluded to by saying one was from Dahiyeh, the IRGC headquarters in Beirut.
The Israeli reports about the IRGC/Hizballah agents behind the attempt on Ya’alon’s life said eight Israeli Arabs and a “resident of East Jerusalem” had been indicted. It is not clear if this phrasing is meant to draw a geographic, ethnic, or national distinction. That it could be any or all was highlighted on 19 September 2024, when Shin Bet arrested Moti Maman, a 73-year-old Israeli Jew, who was a spy for Iran. Recruited in Turkey, Maman had been paid by the Iranians to discipline their agent network in Israel and plan assassination attempts against senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, or Shin Bet head Ronen Bar. What is notable, yet again, is that Israel detected Maman’s activities very quickly—probably because of Israeli agents in the IRGC Network—and was able to track not only the fact of Maman’s two trips to Iran this year, but his movements and meetings once he was in the country.
There is no diplomatic or negotiated solution for Gaza either, come to that.
In the media war, if you are explaining, you are losing, as the adage has it: retaliation after a large-scale missile attack on Israel’s civilian population is much easier to grasp than the justification provided by the less visible toll of eleven months of Hizballah missile and artillery attacks, the needs of tens of thousands of internally displaced people, and the “international law” complexities related to the terms of a flouted U.N. resolution.