Hezbollah: Is it time for jihad against Israel?

Israel has deployed around 300.000 soldiers in the south of the country on the border with the Gaza Strip. But a much greater danger for the Jewish state lurks in the north, in Lebanon, where the strongest non-state military force in the world whose strategic goal is the destruction of Israel is located - Hezbollah (Party of God).

For Western military analysts, it is a "terrorist organization", a "militia dressed as an army and armed as a state", as formulated by an American think tank. Center for Strategic and International Studies. It is assumed that there are about 100.000 well-trained, battle-hardened fighters.

In a report prepared for the US Congress, it is written that Hezbollah in Lebanon could dispose of about 150.000 rockets of different destructive power - from small, unguided, short-range missiles based on Russian, Chinese, and Iranian structures, to medium-range guided missiles with explosive charges. from half a ton. He mainly gets money and weapons from Iran, via Syria.

Photo: AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File

Hezbollah has made itself at home in Lebanon. It has its representatives both in the parliament and in the executive branch. Since 1992, the religious, political and military leader of this powerful organization has been Hassan Nasrallah (63), who in the last major conflict between Hezbollah and Israel gained the status of a "national hero" in the Shiite world.

Emboldened enemies of Israel

Israel has not shown this much weakness since the Cyprus War in 1973 - politically it has been torn internally for a long time, and the massacre by Hamas during which at least 1.200 Israelis were killed, the way in which the killers penetrated unhindered from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory, managed to drag away about a hundred hostages back to Gaza, showed the unsuspected vulnerability of a state that emboldens its enemies.

The Israeli intelligence services, which have completely failed in the Gaza Strip, are worried whether Hezbollah will try in this situation to achieve the goal for which it was founded - to give Israel a deadly, or at least paralyzing, blow. President of the USA Joe Biden was primarily referring to Iran and Hezbollah when he threatened that "no one is trying to take advantage of Israel's current weakness" and sent the world's largest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford, with accompanying war cruisers to the eastern Mediterranean. That fleet certainly already provides intelligence to Israel, and its devastating firepower should demoralize Israel's regional enemies to withdraw their weapons.

Photo: AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari

The hatred in one part of the Arab world for Israel, whose mere existence is contested, is so great that even suicidal actions cannot be ruled out. Israel is the most powerful military power in the Middle East, one of the most powerful in the world, and a nuclear power. After the massacre committed by the militant Hamas, which shattered the myth of Israel's invulnerability, the words of Defense Minister Yoav Galant should be taken literally that in the event of an attack, Israel would "bomb Lebanon into the Stone Age". The official government of Lebanon has no influence over Hezbollah.

A real threat

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And Hamas has demonstrated with simple, cheap, unguided rockets how Israel's outstanding missile defense shield can be outwitted.Iron dome" - by firing thousands of rockets simultaneously from different directions at different targets. Military experts believe that Hezbollah ballistic missiles could penetrate Israel's shield if accompanied by cruise missiles and drones.

At the end of 2021, during a military maneuver, Iran simulated a missile attack on the Israeli nuclear power plant near the desert town of Dimona, writes the German "Spiegel". The demonstration showed that the attack should come in two waves - the first would "make a hole" in the anti-missile system, the second should hit the target. From Lebanon, ballistic missiles would only take a few minutes to reach their target.

In such an apocalyptic scenario, Israel would be justified, or could take it for granted, to retaliate with nuclear weapons - which would indeed return some parts of Lebanon to the "stone age".

The birth of Hezbollah

That Israel takes seriously the potential threat in the north of the country is also shown by the fact that the head of the General Shaba, Herzi Halevi, personally went to the border with Lebanon. There has already been a shootout, several Hezbollah fighters have been killed. "Spiegel" writes that several rockets were fired at Israeli tanks, and that the Israeli army raised helicopters.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the opening of a new front in the north of Israel would be a real horror. And there is potential for that as well: the bloody history of Israel and Lebanon, a country that since its foundation was a training ground for the confrontation of regional powers, in which about 1975 people died in the civil war from 1990 to 150.000.

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That was, writes "Spiegel", the time of the birth of Hezbollah - an armed organization to the teeth that became a state within a state. It was founded in the mid-1980s by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with a clear goal: to spread the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini among the Shiites in southern Lebanon - and to fight against Israel.

In 1982, the Israeli army marched into Lebanon, intervened in the civil war, to deal with all the enemy forces present there, the operation was called "Peace for Galilee". She did not succeed in that campaign, but even after the end of the civil war, she remained in the south of the country.

The plan was to secure a "safety zone". There were constant clashes between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers. By 2000, when Israeli troops finally withdrew from Lebanon, around 1000 soldiers had lost their lives.

Israeli-Lebanese trauma

The "second Lebanon war" took place in the summer of 2006. At that time, writes "Spiegel", Hezbollah withstood the attacks of the Israeli army for 33 days and achieved a "stalemate". This Shiite guerilla then managed to stop the Israelis, which all Arab armies failed to do in half a century. The then Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was subsequently hailed as a hero throughout the Arab world.

Nasrallah obeys the orders of the mullahs of Iran. At the behest of Tehran, it had sent its fighters to the war in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad in the fight against the Sunni rebels. Hezbollah lost several of its best fighters on the Syrian battlefield, but it gained great war experience, learned how to capture cities and villages.

Photo: (AP/Hussein Malla

After the intelligence services got so burned in the Gaza Strip, Israel is taking the threat posed by Hezbollah very seriously. That is why, according to "Spiegel", he started the evacuation of civilians from the border town of Metula and sent a part of the mobilized troops to that region. Anti-missile systems intercepted several rockets fired from Lebanon at Israel.

It can be assumed that in the event of a major attack by Hezbollah on Israel, the American war fleet anchored in the eastern Mediterranean would be involved in the conflict. At that moment, the local conflict would turn into a global one.

JH/Spiegel/BBC

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