Israeli independence in recent days, acting without White House approval, is a reminder that Israel will act alone if necessary.
September 27, the Israel Airforce (IAF) eliminated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and a number of other Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leaders while they were meeting in an underground headquarters in the residential Dahia neighborhood of Beirut.
The strike was carried out by a small fleet of F-151 jets from the IAF 69th Squadron out of southern Israel’s Hatzerim Airforce base acting on months of intelligence gathered by the IDF and Israeli Security (ISA). The aircraft flew undetected over southern Beirut and dropped 83 tons of explosives that penetrated the underground headquarters and leveled six buildings. Video footage shows billowing clouds of black and orange smoke covering the entire neighborhood.
“Everything we planned was executed precisely,” noted the commander of the 69th Squadron (known only as Lt. Col. “Mem”), “with no errors, both in intelligence, the planning, with the planes, and the operation itself.”
The airstrike can be viewed as the culmination of Israel’s covert pager bomb episode from September 17. Having successfully dismantled Hezbollah’s wireless communication network, top Hezbollah and IRGC officers were forced to meet in person causing the perfect scenario to locate and eliminate top brass during a single meeting. In addition to Nasrallah, more than 20 other officers have been reported killed, including the commander of Hezbollah’s southern front, Ali Karki, Hezbollah intelligence commander Hassan Khalil Yassin, and a number of IRGC officers including Quds Force commander in Lebanon, Abbas Nilforoushan.
Nasrallah’s death was confirmed by the IDF on Saturday in a statement that ended with a pledge to “operate against anyone who promotes and engages in terrorism against the State of Israel.” The targeted killing ended Nasrallah’s 32-year reign as Secretary General of Hezbollah. He had been hand-picked by Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei in 1992. Under Nasrallah’s watch, Hezbollah effectively built a global network of terrorist proxies and expanded a world view of violent resistance and terrorism beyond the Israeli-Palestinian theater to include anti-US and anti-Western dictators as far as Latin America.
Reckless repercussions to Nasrallah’s death soon followed.
