Tel Aviv/New Delhi: Israeli government officials are clear about the objective of the newly-launched Operation Northern Arrows—to ensure that the civilians in the north get to return home and have a normal life, free from Hezbollah rocket fire.
Chutzpah is a Jewish word. Like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or not, it takes a lot of chutzpah—audacity, guts, cheek, boldness—to launch a verbal attack on the United Nations, which has been insisting on a ceasefire with the Hezbollah, while he has already ordered the flattening of the headquarters of the Hezbollah in Beirut. And all this while he is at the UN. If the diplomats of the countries that walked out of Netanyahu’s UNGA speech on Friday were hoping to send him a message by protesting the bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, it stayed undelivered, for he couldn’t care less. Instead, Bibi just thundered on: “The singling out of the one and only Jewish state continues to be a moral stain on the United Nations. It has made this once-respected institution contemptible in the eyes of decent people everywhere.” He was categorical that it was the Hezbollah that had declared a war on Israel on 8 October 2023—and not Israel—a day after the Hamas’ genocidal attacks on the Jewish people on 7 October. Ever since “they have fired over 8,000 rockets at our and cities, at our civilians, at our children.” He added that the Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran’s militias in Syria and Iraq, all have been targeting Israel “dozens of times over the past year”. Interestingly, even as he was speaking, the Israeli military was pounding the Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut with bunker buster bombs as the terrorist group’s offices were located underground, below civilian buildings. By the time the speech got over, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done the job it had been given by him and Netanyahu was given the news when he stepped out to speak to journalists. Surprise was the main element of the attack. Hezbollah didn’t think that Israel would launch an all-out attack when its Prime Minister was in New York, where he would face criticism for any military action, but that’s what exactly happened.
Sadly, there would be casualties in this case, even though it was a “precision” strike and had come with a warning to civilians, asking them to vacate the area. On Saturday, after 24 hours, once IDF confirmed the news of Nasrallah’s elimination, Hezbollah, which had gone quiet, too confirmed that their secretary-general had been taken out by the Israelis. Iran too is quiet, with reports coming that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has been taken to a safe location for fear of an attack by the Israelis. The question hovering on Israeli minds now is how Iran will respond to the removal of the “engine” of its terror machine. As some Israelis told this author, while the end of Nasrallah is the best thing to have happened to the tiny Jewish nation, which is yet to recover from the trauma of 7 October 2023, there is a lot of uncertainty in the air. Will there be a full-scale war between Israel and the Hezbollah, and even Iran? Is there any prospect of a ceasefire? Will the rocket and missile attacks on them intensify? No one knows. The only thing everyone knows is that West Asia is at a pivotal moment, where with one fell swoop the direction of its history may have been changed. But then as this author realised while travelling in Israel last week, chutzpah is a Jewish word.
WHO AFTER NASRALLAH?
In a conversation with this newspaper on Saturday, Beni Sabti, an Iranian-origin researcher in the Iran program at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), said that while taking out Nasrallah was a huge achievement for Israel, a lot would depend on whether or not Tel Aviv was willing to keep up the momentum of eradicating the Hezbollah from its roots. He believes that Iran’s generals may already have a replacement, who may not be as “qualified” as Nasrallah—32 years in charge and the single biggest power centre in the Hezbollah—but could be groomed to be much more dangerous than Nasrallah if Israel does not pre-empt the process. He adds that the death of Nasrallah is a very bad hit on the Iranians, on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in particular. Khamenei became Supreme Leader in 1989, while Nasrallah took charge of the terrorist militia in 1992. They were politically and ideologically very close. “He was like a son to Khamenei”, says Sabti. And now Iran has been very badly humiliated. “Iran may target a few missiles at Israel, but the damage to its morale is huge. It is embarrassed and confused. Iran may have gone into a situation where it may have to defend itself now from Israel. It may be wondering if it was right for it to get involved in the 7 October 2023 Hamas massacre; whether eliminating a technological and military powerhouse like Israel was the right goal to set for itself.”
Also on Saturday, in his first public reaction to Nasrallah’s death, Ali Khamenei, from his safe location described the air strikes on Nasrallah as “stupid” and “short-sighted” and added that “The Zionist criminals need to know that they are far too weak to inflict any significant damage on the solid structure of Lebanon’s Hezbollah…all the Resistance forces in the region stand with and support Hezbollah.” But it remains to be seen if his signal to mobilise gets picked up at all by the so-called “resistance” forces that are in a state of chaos and demoralisation. In fact, Sabti sees the rudderless Hezbollah fighters as fleeing rather than holding on to their ground. They may manage to launch a few projectiles towards Israel, but not beyond that.
In fact, the command and control mechanism of Iran’s Quds Force too may have been hurt, with news coming that General Abbas Nilforoushan, commander of the Quds Forces in Lebanon and Syria, has been eliminated along with Nasrallah, with whom he was having a meeting on Friday. Nilforoushan had replaced General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who too was assassinated by Israel in Syria in April 2024. Iran had launched 350 missiles and drones targeting Israel after that, but inflicted zero damage.
Meanwhile, Herzi Halevi, Chief of the General Staff, IDF, sent out a clear message to Iran on Saturday: “This is not the end of our toolbox. There are further tools going forward. And the message is clear—anyone who threatens the citizens of Israel—we will know how to reach them, in the north, in the south, and also farther away.”
THE PEOPLE SITUATION
War in Israel is an everyday reality since 7 October 2023, and as the theatre expands into Lebanon, turmoil sweeps through the north, with an occasional Hezbollah or Houthi missile targeted towards Tel Aviv deeper down. 70,000 plus people have been evacuated from northern Israel and put up mostly in hotels across the country. Rocket attacks have happened in the past, but Israelis say that this is the first time after the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 that the government has evacuated people both from the south, near Gaza, and the north, near Lebanon. So at least 0.8% of Israel’s 9 million population is now classified as “internally displaced”, even as Hezbollah rockets have been raining down on the civilian population as well as on military sites. In one night last week, a military site near Safad in the north was hit by 39 rockets or projectiles. With all buildings in Israel having a “safe place”, spending almost every night there has become a practice for many in the north, unless they have been evacuated and now figure as IDPs.
Israel has started calling its reservists to the north for military duty. The tour guide for the Indian journalists’ fact finding mission invited by the American Jewish Committee to Israel was asked to join military duty, and he left in a matter of minutes. The IDF has escalated its operation against the Hezbollah quite swiftly in a little over seven-ten days. It started with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks of 17-18 September and culminated on Friday with Nasrallah’s death. As experts say, the Israeli military apparatus has been working on dismantling the Hezbollah for years, so a lot of things were already in place. It’s just that they never thought that the attack would come from Hamas—a threat they ignored and hence was taken by surprise last year on 7 October.
However, the war on Hezbollah has resulted in over 600 deaths in Lebanon and mass displacement, causing international outrage. But then Israelis say that the Hezbollah’s strategy, just like that of the Hamas in Gaza, is to use human shields and then cry foul when civilian casualties occur after Israel’s missiles hit Hezbollah launch pads. Most of the launch pads are in civilian homes for which homeowners even get a rent from the Hezbollah. The complaint in Israel is that when coming out in full support of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, the West, including the United Nations, has very little to say about Israeli victims of the worst kind of terror by people who not only hate the Jews, but want them exterminated.
GROUND INVASION?
Government officials are clear about the objective of Israel’s newly-launched Operation Northern Arrows—to ensure that the civilians in the North get to return home and have a normal life, free from Hezbollah rocket fire. As a senior former Israeli government official said, the focus is now on the tactical, with the aim being to ensure that the Hezbollah retreats to the north of Lebanon’s Litani river, which runs parallel to the Israeli border. The distance between the Litani river and the border is around 30 km, so pushing Hezbollah north of the river would create a buffer zone and may ensure a semblance of normality for Israeli civilians. The Litani river was at the centre of the UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which made Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2006 and end the Israel-Lebanon war. The resolution dated 11 August 2006, speaks of the creation of a demilitarised zone between the Blue Line, which is the Israel-Lebanon border, and the Litani river—a buffer zone that will be manned by the Lebanese army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Only these two groups will be allowed to possess weapons in the area, not militia groups like the Hezbollah. But the resolution was never properly implemented and this zone became Hezbollah territory.
When asked if Israel would go for a ground invasion, a senior government official told this newspaper that “all options are on the table”. However, Beni Sabti does not see the need for a ground invasion any longer, as Hezbollah is now decapitated.
NETANYAHU, TRUMP, HARRIS
Before Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was playing cat and mouse with the United States, much to the frustration of the Biden administration, which is pushing him to make peace with Lebanon/Hezbollah. His critics say that Netanyahu, who is not very popular in Israel at the present juncture, has been swinging between “talking” and “not talking peace”, primarily because of domestic political compulsions, as his right-wing allies will leave him if he talks of a ceasefire, and his government, which still has two more years to go, will fall.
Israeli observers had told this newspaper in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that Netanyahu may intensify his war efforts against Hezbollah ahead of the US Presidential election in November, especially since he is not sure if Donald Trump will come to power. He has Trump’s backing, but sees Kamala Harris as adversarial and stopping arms sales to Israel if she ever becomes President. Hence, he may want to achieve the “total victory” he has promised to his people, inside the next two months. Given that he has managed to neutralise the Hamas to a large extent in the Gaza strip—even though the terrorist group is still holding on to at least 100 hostages—a similar outcome with the Hezbollah may also come to be defined as “victory”. But Israel didn’t have to wait for two months to see which way Netanyahu would go. The whole situation changed inside 48 hours.
THE HIDDEN HAND
Amid all this turmoil, the obvious question is from where a sanctions-hit Iran is getting the money to feed its terrorist proxies. Experts say that the unseen hand in the churn that the region is witnessing is that of China, which buys Iran’s oil and has its back. From whatever this author saw in Israel, this is one threat that the Israelis are ignoring completely.