The Israeli army launched a "preemptive offensive operation" in southern Lebanon early on September 23, Israeli Armed Forces’ Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said. According to him, the target was "combat infrastructure that Hezbollah has been building for the past 20 years," the local Times of Israel newspaper quoted the general as saying.
Later in the day, Army Radio reported rocket and bomb attacks by Israeli Air Force warplanes on 1,600 targets in southern Lebanon. The list included headquarters and control points, warehouses with weapons and ammunition, including those concealed under residential buildings.
Amid intensified military operations by Israel, the highest (red) danger level has been declared in Lebanon as Hezbollah is expected to retaliate militarily. So, most government institutions, all the schools and colleges have been shut down indefinitely, with opening hours limited for grocery stores and entertainment events altogether prohibited. Hospitals and clinics have been taken off into wartime operation mode. The civilian population is advised to take refuge in bomb shelters.
In turn, the Lebanese media reported a series of missile strikes against Israel the day before, including naval and air force bases of Haifa and Ramat David, an explosives factory, and personnel deployment locations.
It must be admitted, however, that the massive air raid and the announced "pre-emptive military operation" are evidence of Israeli military and political leadership’s decision to annihilate Hezbollah infrastructure in the southern regions. A significant and fundamental part of warfare means possessed by the Lebanese Shiites was incapacitated in the first strike already, one would better believe it. And the attacks are not going to stop.
Currently, there is no assuming whether the Israeli army command will undertake a ground operation: everything depends on the number of Hezbollah’s equipment and weapons destroyed or disabled, as well as intelligence data on the state of enemy military capabilities. Israeli units and ground formations may well enter Lebanon to sweep the southern territories — provided, however, that Hezbollah armed groups are in a plane of weakness.
Admittedly, the attack carried of September 23 is comparable to those launched by the Israeli Air Force in early June 1982 before the invasion of Lebanon aiming to end the Palestinian Resistance Movement’s military presence there. Which was eventually implemented by late summer of 1985.
Hezbollah will certainly snap back with its remaining forces and means. But without sufficiently effective means of combating enemy aircraft, it is doomed to defeat: Israel did learn lessons from its army’s failed sortie of 2006, and carefully prepared to neutralize military activities of the Iranian-oriented Lebanese Shiite organization.
And the Israelis primarily managed to fully penetrate the Hezbollah leadership to obtain reliable data on its plans of action, the state of armed formations, places of weaponry concentration, control points, movement of convoys with military equipment and ammunition coming from Iran and Syria, and other types of activities.
Cynically as it may seem, the Lebanese would soon find themselves tragically alone, with none of the latter countries eager to engage in a war with Israel. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Iran has been busy holding secret negotiations with the United States on resetting its national atomic energy program that has resulted in the gradual unfreezing of that country’s financial holdings in American or European banks. Syria is meanwhile constrained by domestic challenges, confronting both international terrorism in the north-west and military presence of Turkey, Kurdish armed separatists and, most importantly, the United States.
As for bellicose statements by unknown field commanders of Iraq’s so-called Islamic Resistance Movement about readiness to send 100,000 fighters to Lebanon and thus help Hezbollah, those are worthless. Even if Tehran sends several hundred of them to the war zone, it’s a safe bet that they won’t appear in Lebanon at the end of the day. Some of them will pay the ultimate price already in Syria, but mostly they will scatter and disperse across the region, uniting into small gangs to terrorize locals.
We must frankly admit that Hezbollah’s leaders made a major strategic error of grossly violating the basic principles of internal security, which has been the organization’s repute for many years after its very foundation in 1982.
