Israel ’s counterterrorism actions against Iranian -backed Hezbollah terrorists in the past fortnight have been among the most brilliant, the most precise, and the most well justified in history. Let’s hope Israelis can finish the job with the same level of highly targeted effectiveness.
Remember how Israel reached this point: Nearly a year ago, last Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists crossed Israel’s southern border from Gaza and murdered some 1,200 innocent people in a heinous, unprovoked massacre. Hezbollah operates from Israel’s northern border, in Lebanon and Syria. Hamas and Hezbollah are sponsored by the same evil regime in Iran, but they are two separate organizations. Hezbollah is Shiite, and Hamas is Sunni. Hamas claims, absurdly, to represent the interests of a historically nebulous group called Palestinians. Hezbollah is only secondarily or even tertiarily interested in the “Palestinian cause,” instead being a more broadly Islamist movement against the West.
The war in Gaza is not Hezbollah’s battle, and Israel did nothing to make it Hezbollah’s fight. But Hezbollah chose to enter the fray without any provocation or pretext of Israeli perfidy. Almost immediately after last Oct. 7, Hezbollah began firing missiles from Lebanon into Israel. In the 51 weeks since then, Hezbollah has launched more than 8,000 rockets and drone attacks, with its most infamous killing 12 children of the Druze people , who are an offshoot of Shia Islam, who live as Israeli citizens and protected residents. As a precaution, more than 70,000 Israelis have been relocated from their homes in Hezbollah’s target zone.
This is the context of Israel’s now-famous booby-trapping of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. The pagers allegedly were sold by an Indian-born agent through either a Bulgarian or a Hungarian shell company (reports differ) from a manufacturer based in Taiwan but which says it didn’t actually build the devices. Whoever organized such a supply chain has taken intelligence-craft to an ingenious level.
Even more brilliant was how precisely targeted this was. For decades, every time Israel acted in self-defense, international critics accused the Jewish state of indiscriminate bombing of civilians, no matter how carefully Israel worked to attack only identifiable military assets. This time, it was known that these electronic devices were ordered by Hezbollah for Hezbollah. If you weren’t part of the terrorist organization, you didn’t have one of the devices. While an explosion might also injure someone nearby, the proportion of terrorists to innocent victims in this assault surely set a record for precise targeting and civilian safety. For so effectively minimizing collateral damage, Israel merits admiration for its ethics and skills.
Once it began this round of self-defense, Israel worked to make it really count. Rather than stopping at neutralizing thousands of Hezbollah rank and file, it also struck the heads of the murderous group and the sites from where missiles have been fired. A Sept. 24 airstrike killed Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, head of the group’s rocket division. A Sept. 20 strike killed Ibrahim Aqil, a member of the Jihad Council whom the United States has blamed for four decades for organizing a truck bombing that killed 63 Americans at a Beirut embassy in 1983.
Earlier in the summer, in response to other Hezbollah rockets fired into Israel, Israel had taken out Hezbollah leaders Taleb Abdallah, Mohammed Nasser, and Fuad Shukr.
The usual suspects spout all the antisemitic accusations that Israel’s strikes on these leaders and on the missile sites were deliberate destructions of civilian homes and people. This is tendentious nonsense. Again and again, Israel has released videos showing secondary explosions at the target sites, eruptions of the sort that can come only from weapons stashes.
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For all of this, the world should be grateful to Israel. It is Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, not Israel, destabilizing the Middle East. Israel is not the aggressor but an aggrieved and righteous defender of its people and territory. In justified retaliation, Israel keeps improving its already admirable record of minimizing civilian damage while eliminating terrorists. It should keep up its good work.
The way for peace in the Middle East is for the rest of the world to pressure Islamists into leaving Israel alone.
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