Round One Goes to Israel

August 28, 2024

by: Ilse Strauss

Wednesday, 28 August 2024 | It was over before we woke up.

For almost a month, Israel was on high alert, waiting for the sirens to start. We waited for the “imminent” revenge promised by Iranian and Hezbollah top leadership for the death of Hezbollah’s second-in-command Fu’ad Shukr in a pinpoint strike in Beirut—which Israel claimed—and the demise of Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in a pinpoint attack in an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stronghold in the heart of Tehran—which Israel neither confirmed nor denied but is blamed for nonetheless.

Hezbollah, the Iranian terror proxy perched on Israel’s northern border, aimed to inflict the opening act of their punishment at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.

In preparation, the terror army embedded thousands of their rocket launchers within villages and towns across southern Lebanon, nestling them next to civilian sites like mosques, schools, gas stations and UN compounds.

Yet things didn’t go according to plan.

Shortly before 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, more than 100 Israeli fighter jets took to the skies, launching over 100 virtually simultaneous preemptive strikes to destroy thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers and over 6,000 missiles and drones across more than 40 launch areas in southern Lebanon—all in under half an hour.

The terror army was still able to fire hundreds of rockets and UAVs on northern Israel, causing air raid sirens to scream throughout areas of the Golan and Galilee. According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Hezbollah’s offensive included 230 rocket launches and 20 UAVs. None of these caused any casualties and only minimal damage was inflicted.

And just like that, the opening act was over, all before Jerusalem even woke up.

Israel used immense intelligence capabilities to preempt the attack, and in the process, thwarted what could have been a significant assault on Israel and the spark that ignited a full-scale war in the Middle East.

“I see this as a miracle,” a veteran journalist confided in me hours later. “God thoroughly thwarts Hezbollah’s plan, delivers his people from a huge attack that easily could have turned into a regional war, and makes a mockery of Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah did take responsibility for Sunday’s attack. Head of the terror group, Hassan Nasrallah, released a formal statement, describing the operation as the first step in avenging his second-in-command and hailing it as a great success. Apart from Hezbollah’s cronies in Tehran, few believed him. In fact, the attack’s rather lackluster performance sparked a wave of online mockery from around the Arab world, focusing on the fact that the only thing the terror group managed to hit was a chicken coop.

There’s a number of takeaways from Sunday morning, especially for the global community who seems poised to point an accusatory finger at Israel.

First, according to the IDF, out of the 230 rockets and 20 UAVs that crossed into Israeli territory, 90% of the launches “were from the heart of a civilian area.” The army backed up their claim by releasing infographics showing sites of rocket launchers in southern Lebanon located a mere 150 meters from a school, 160 meters from a mosque and 160 meters from a UN building. Dozens more were placed nearby.

Hezbollah’s placement was no accident. In fact, the terror group chose their locations with the utmost care, ensuring that if Israel retaliated to the attack, the casualties would be civilians, sparking condemnation and outrage against the Jewish state.

Second, Israel’s preemptive strike prevented a potential large-scale war in the region. Why? Any country calculates the response to an attack on the sovereignty of its people based on factors like the loss of civilian life or damage to infrastructure inflicted. And the higher the civilian casualties, the harsher the response. Israel is no different. Preventing an escalation thus entailed thwarting any strikes on major Israeli population centers or infrastructure—and then retaliating in a way that struck only Hezbollah terror targets while causing minimal damage to the non-Hezbollah Lebanon. The latter was a particularly tall order, seeing that the terror group went to great lengths to embed their infrastructure among civilian sites.

According to the Jerusalem Post’s senior military correspondent and intelligence analyst Yonah Jeremy Bob, Israel’s efforts prevailed. “In the balance of unwritten rules between Israel and Hezbollah, this would be a massive Israeli strike that still showed restraint and was not per se ‘offensive,’ but rather was a preemptive and narrowly tailored defense.”

Third, there’s more to come. For the time being, Iran seems to be steering clear of the frontlines. Perhaps the mullahs have taken the admonitions to heart that a war with Israel would decimate its economy. More likely, Tehran has decided to invest its time, resources and energy into its nuclear efforts, thus posing an existential threat to Israel, the region and beyond.

Hezbollah has continued in much the same way it has for the past 10 months, unleashing what it called a “swarm of UAVs” on the western Galilee.

The attack on Sunday morning amounted to an embarrassment for Hezbollah, and by extension, its terror puppet masters in Tehran. This is not something over which to gloat.

The first round of the battle went to Israel, and more to the point, the God of Israel. But the war is far from over.

Posted on August 28, 2024

Photo Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit photographer/Wikimedia.org

Photo License: Wikimedia