| DAILY ALERT |
Sunday, September 22, 2024 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
Israel launched another major attack on Hizbullah on Friday, with a strike in the Lebanese capital that killed Ibrahim Aqil, who ran Hizbullah's operations team and its Radwan special forces, and 15 other senior commanders. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called it a "targeted action to eliminate the operational elite of Hizbullah," and vowed that Israel would continue operating until residents can return to their homes in the north. Gallant warned Thursday that "the sequence of military actions will continue" as Israel shifts its focus from Hamas to Hizbullah and brings in new troops to the north. "Ibrahim Aqil is a senior commander, the closest person to [Hizbullah leader] Nasrallah," Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said. (Wall Street Journal) See also Israel Attacks Meeting of Hizbullah Radwan Force Commanders - Lior Ben Ari The Israel Air Force attacked a meeting of more than 20 Hizbullah Radwan Force commanders in the Dahieh district in Beirut on Friday. The IDF said the attack was carried out by F-35 fighter jets. Al-Jazeera reported that four missiles were fired at the location of the meeting, two stories underground. According to the IDF, the Hizbullah commanders who were eliminated were among the architects of the "plan to occupy the Galilee" - to raid Israel, occupy Galilee communities, and murder innocent civilians, similar to the massacre carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7. (Ynet News) See also IDF Names 15 Hizbullah Commanders Killed in Beirut Strike (Jerusalem Post) After months of saying a ceasefire and a hostage-release deal was close at hand, senior U.S. officials are now privately acknowledging they don't expect Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement before the end of President Biden's term. "No deal is imminent," one U.S. official said. "I'm not sure it ever gets done." One problem is that, according to Biden administration officials, Hamas makes demands and then refuses to say "yes" after the U.S. and Israel accept them. The intransigence has severely frustrated negotiators, who increasingly feel the militant group isn't serious about completing an agreement. "There's no chance now of it happening," an official from an Arab country added. (Wall Street Journal) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Hizbullah fired its deepest barrages into Israel since the beginning of the current war, with four rounds of over 140 rockets and drones fired into communities from Kiryat Bialik to the Jezreel Valley early Sunday, wounding six people. (Jerusalem Post) See also Hizbullah Rocket Kills 15 Cows in Moshav Beit She'arim - Israel Moskowitz (Ynet News) See also Israel Destroys 400 Hizbullah Rocket Launchers and Thousands of Rockets on Saturday (Israel Defense Forces) See also IDF Destroys 1,000 Ready-to-Launch Rockets in Lebanon Airstrikes on Thursday - Yuval Barnea (Jerusalem Post) U.S. officials on Saturday expressed approval of the death of Ibrahim Aqil, a top Hizbullah commander responsible for a 1983 bombing that killed 241 Americans in Beirut, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called Aqil's death "a good outcome." "That individual has American blood on his hands and has a Reward for Justice price on his head. He is somebody who the U.S. promised long ago we would do everything we could to see brought to justice." The U.S. had offered a $7 million reward for information on Aqil. (Times of Israel) IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari said Saturday that the two terrorists who likely murdered six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces. Hagari said that DNA findings revealed that the two terrorists were inside the tunnel where the six hostages were murdered, during the murder. (Times of Israel) The IDF intercepted two cruise missiles as well as rockets that were fired from Iraq at the southern Golan Heights on Sunday, Israel's Channel 11 reported. The targets did not cross into Israeli territory. (Jerusalem Post) After identifying Hamas terrorists stealing the contents of a humanitarian aid truck in Gaza on Friday, IDF forces directed drones to strike the vehicles carrying the looters. (Jerusalem Post) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Hizbullah Israel Defense and Security Forum CEO Lt.-Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila told Maariv that Friday's IDF strike on Hizbullah Radwan Force commanders in Beirut sent a message that Israel has decided to "take the gloves off." "There is no intention to continue playing this symmetric game that Israel has been playing with Hizbullah so far, and Israel understands that Hizbullah can respond significantly. For Israel, there is readiness for war, and the center of gravity is shifting to northern Israel....This is not just an empty statement; it's a real, significant one, saying we are entering a campaign, even if it means entering a much tougher war." "We are unwilling to accept what has been. What was will not continue to be....We want to return our residents to their homes safely, without the threat of Hizbullah sitting right on the border. Negotiations have failed so far, and Hizbullah hasn't withdrawn or reached any agreements. As a result, we are prepared to use all available force....Israel will utilize everything at its disposal to strike Hizbullah and restore peace to the northern border." (Maariv-Jerusalem Post) Israel announced on Friday that Ibrahim Aqil, a Hizbullah commander, was among those killed in an Israeli airstrike. U.S. officials said he was a principal member of a terrorist cell that carried out the bombing on the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. service members and 58 French troops; the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that April that killed 63 people; and the kidnapping of German and American hostages in Lebanon. "Everybody suffered these tremendous tragedies that blew their lives apart," said Catherine Votaw, whose father Albert, 57, a housing officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development, was killed in the embassy bombing. "My only question is...How did he get to live 41 years longer than my dad?" Hizbullah was also involved in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984 that killed 23 people, the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, and the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996 that killed 19 U.S. airmen. "We've been engaged with Hizbullah for a very long time," said retired Amb. Ryan Crocker, who survived the April 1983 embassy bombing while stationed there. Of Aqil, he said, "It is still a source of some satisfaction that he finally got it." (Washington Post) With ex-diplomats and academic experts filling the airwaves with warnings against a conflagration in the Middle East, some may believe their claims that Israel is responsible for anything and everything that its sworn enemies inflict upon the region. The truth is more or less the opposite. The Israel Defense Forces are determined to defeat Hizbullah, like Hamas before it, solely because these terrorist organizations pose a lethal threat to their own civilians. Too many in the West have played down the relentless rocket bombardment of northern Israel by Hizbullah, but the displaced populations of entire cities such as Kiryat Shmona cannot ignore it. Would we tolerate the forced evacuation of, say, Dover? Retaliation is necessary to deter such attacks - and it is also legitimate, even under a strict interpretation of international law. Targeting terrorists by detonating their pagers and walkie-talkies is both proportionate and precise. Hizbullah and Hamas are illegitimate terror networks bent on indiscriminate murder. They, like their Iranian sponsors, are driven by a genocidal ideology, one which seeks to transform the ancient religion of Islam into a death cult. Hizbullah is believed to possess 150,000 missiles, enough to inflict mass casualties by overwhelming Israel's Iron Dome defense system. Hence, Israel is quite right to pre-empt such an onslaught. Britain and other allies should applaud Israel's decisive action - for it is the only path to peace. (Telegraph-UK) Recent attacks have left Hizbullah in deep disarray. After a hugely destructive war in 2006, Hizbullah's leaders spent years building military capacity they thought could deter Israeli attacks. However, events of the past few days have suggested that Hizbullah grossly underestimated its adversary. "Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel," said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House. "The facade that Hizbullah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-a-vis Hizbullah." "It has been very clear since the first months of the war that Israel is saying, 'This threat that we lived with for 18 years, we are not able to live with it any more,'" said Paul Salem, vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "'We can't have this massive force on our northern border.'" (New York Times) Instead of tit-for-tat exchanges, Israel is making clear to Hizbullah the damage it will suffer if it continues to fire missiles at Israel. Israel made clear for 11 months that it didn't want this fight with Hizbullah. Even as 8,500 Hizbullah rockets forced the depopulation of Israel's north, Israel limited its responses. But diplomacy went nowhere as Nasrallah tied Hizbullah's actions to a Gaza ceasefire. This has mortgaged the future of Lebanon to the priorities of Hamas's Yahya Sinwar. Even the Biden Administration has now recognized that Sinwar doesn't want a deal. One way or another, Israel is going to return its 60,000 displaced northern citizens to their homes. (Wall Street Journal) UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701 call for Hizbullah to be disarmed. Yet both the Lebanese armed forces and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon have been unable, or unwilling, to enforce these provisions. The Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida reported that "American officials recently proposed, in a virtual meeting with their Israeli counterparts, a land swap between Lebanon and Israel as part of a comprehensive agreement to end the border conflicts and resolve the land dispute between the two countries." In 2022, the U.S. pressured Israel to sign an agreement that established a maritime boundary and exclusive economic zones and regulated rights to gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The White House and State Department hailed the arrangement, saying that the deal would prevent war. Yet less than two years later, Hizbullah began attacking Israel, following the massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. In 2000, the Israel Defense Forces unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon. The Clinton administration cheered the withdrawal, saying that it would lead to peace and a cessation of hostilities. But Hizbullah is not a Lebanese national movement fighting for a Lebanon free of foreign influence. Rather, the terrorist group is itself a foreign influence, the tip of the spear of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hizbullah doesn't want a parcel of land controlled by Israel - it wants Israel's destruction. Slivers of land only whet Hizbullah's and Iran's appetite. What the West takes as a "back and forth" negotiation, Islamists see as weakness: a sign that their opponents lack will. To them, ceding land proves that Israel is easily swept away. For decades, American policymakers have treated the various Islamist terrorists at war with Israel as if they are rational actors who can be induced to make peace if offered land, foreign aid packages, or some other incentive. For their part, the terrorists have been happy to pocket the concessions, ask for more, and then break the promises that they made. Should the U.S. continue to double down on failed policies, it will bring about the very war that it is seeking to avoid. The writer is a senior research analyst for CAMERA. (Washington Examiner) Neither Iran nor Hizbullah has much to gain from a war with Israel in Lebanon, particularly one started on behalf of Hamas. For Iran, Hizbullah is a precious asset not to be wasted. Tehran sees the militia and its missiles as its prime deterrent against an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. To expend this capacity on Gaza would be irrational from an Iranian point of view. In addition, Sunni Hamas isn't nearly as important to Iran as Shiite Hizbullah is. Hamas's inclusion in Shiite Iran's "axis of resistance" is a marriage of convenience. So why doesn't Hizbullah accept a sensible settlement, like the one the Biden administration has spent the past year negotiating? Hizbullah maintains that it must remain in south Lebanon to protect the border area. This is the rather flimsy basis on which the militia group has been permitted to maintain its own army. Any formal understanding that pulls Hizbullah back from the border threatens the rationale for its existence as an armed group within Lebanon. The writer is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. (Atlantic) Hizbullah: The Pager Sabotage This is one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history. It is a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age. In real life, operations like this just don't happen. First, the Israelis thoroughly mapped Hizbullah's supply chain. Second, they invented a special explosive charge small enough to be inserted inside a handheld device, sophisticated enough to be remotely activated, big enough to do real harm, and yet not so prominent as to call attention to itself. It is the first mass targeted killing in history. The great genius of the operation is that the Israelis relied on Hizbullah to select their targets for them. If we map the attacked men, we map Hizbullah's organizational chart, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon who is an IRGC officer. The large ratio of maimings to deaths is a sign of success. In military terms, a maiming is preferable because it ties up more resources and stresses enemy systems to a much greater degree. Operation Grim Beeper is also morally laudable. Hizbullah is a terrorist organization. It is an arm of Iran that has brought death and destruction everywhere it has gained a foothold. Hizbullah worked with Russia, Iran and the Assad regime to flatten large parts of many of the major cities of Syria. Iran and Hizbullah cannot be appeased, they must be deterred. Pressure on Israel to deescalate advances Iran's and Hizbullah's agenda. It was they who escalated on Oct. 8, when, unprovoked, Hizbullah opened fire on Israel. The only deescalation that the U.S. should support is the one that will return Israeli civilians to their homes and weaken Hizbullah's death grip on southern Lebanon. Operation Grim Beeper is the beginning of the Israeli effort to restore deterrence. The writer is Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. (X) From a purely technical view, the blasts of thousands of exploding pagers in the hands of Hizbullah represented an extraordinary piece of sabotage. For Israel to have so penetrated the Hizbullah supply chain on such a large scale is simply astonishing. Will this lead to the cataclysmic battle that many have warned against, with Hizbullah raining down tens of thousands of rockets on Israeli cities while Israeli armored divisions plunge into Lebanon? If Hizbullah is battered the way Hamas has been, Iran stands to lose its most effective ally against Israel. And to seek open war, Hizbullah would have to be willing to sacrifice the population of Lebanese Shia from which it has emerged, as well as its own cadres of fighters. This is a strategic win for Israel. Hizbullah members will now be unlikely to trust any form of electronics. An army skittish about any kind of electronics is one that is paralyzed. From a failure so large, witch hunts will follow - no doubt fed by an information-warfare campaign. With Hizbullah looking for spies and saboteurs, a spiral of accusations, torture, and executions will likely ensue. For Israel's silent partners - including Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan - this coup is confirmation that Israel can be a capable partner. The Israelis have learned the hard way to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, to act on their own when necessary. Ironically, a reputation of that kind increases a smaller partner's leverage with its superpower patron. In 1984, Hizbullah kidnapped William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. For 15 months, they tortured him, before handing him over to a Palestinian group for execution. A tape of his shattered body and mind found its way to Washington. The CIA has never forgotten that. Some will no doubt think that this is another reckless Israeli act, or deplore violence as being ineffective, but they are wrong. By this act, the balance of fear has shifted in the Middle East. For Israel, a country dwelling in a very hard neighborhood, that is a good thing. The writer, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, served as the counselor of the Department of State and in other positions in the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community. (Atlantic) Exploding pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon was one of Israel's boldest feats. There is broad agreement that the deadly sabotage of Hizbullah's electronic communications was a short-term tactical success that sent its foe into disarray and incapacitated thousands of its fighters. Together with the recent killings of Hizbullah and Hamas leaders, it has helped re-establish the fearsome reputation of Israel's military and intelligence services. "This sends a message to Hizbullah that this is going to look ugly for you," said Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin, a former head of military intelligence. "We aren't going only to play with you on the northern border. It will be all over the place with some operations that we never did before." "Israel is restoring its deterrence brick by brick, operation by operation," said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "The message: We've deeply penetrated your systems and networks. We can kill any of you at any time - and will if you continue your war against us." The pager and walkie-talkie attacks, military experts say, exposed undercover Hizbullah members and crippled the group's communications network. It wounded thousands and killed dozens of members, putting many fighters out of commission. It also undermined Hizbullah's sense of security, creating paranoia within Hizbullah's ranks about what else Israel knows about the group's internal plans. (Wall Street Journal) The wave of exploding pagers in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Hizbullah. The sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group's ability to wage offensive action. Moreover, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group's ability to fight. "It promulgates fear," says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. The sudden, simultaneous explosion of thousands of electronic devices is something that has never occurred before and could never be expected; it implies that Israel can strike in ways that are impossible to anticipate, let alone prevent. That may be extremely demoralizing for those on the receiving end. "Israel is demonstrating that it can identify and target members of Hizbullah regardless of their location or position in the organization," said retired Australian Army general Mick Ryan. "When the Israelis do stuff like this, they signal that they're matching [Hizbullah's] level of commitment," Sullivan says, "so there's real informational power in what Israel has done, and that might affect the strategic thinking of not just the terrorist groups but also their supporters in Iran and some of the other Gulf states." Israel made a similar demonstration earlier this year with its targeting of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, whom it blew up using a remote-control bomb it had planted months before inside a heavily guarded guesthouse in Tehran. (New York Magazine) Israel's Channel 12 reported Saturday that "tens of thousands of pagers" were manufactured with the knowledge that they would be checked carefully by Hizbullah. Ronen Bergman, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, said in an interview that the pagers had to work properly and betray no indication that they had been primed with explosives. They needed to be able to pass detection by sniffer dogs. Bergman said the whole scheme was dreamed up by a brilliant female intelligence operative, aged under 30. A factory was set up to build the devices from scratch. The ability to supply the device to Hizbullah was helped by the fact that the group is not able to make purchases on the open market because of U.S. sanctions, and therefore must routinely work with intermediary suppliers. Bergman said that the operation began during a previous government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under the direction of former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen. The report said that Hizbullah bought more pagers after its military chief Fuad Shukr was killed in a targeted IDF strike in Beirut in July, and used pagers even more widely because of its growing wariness about using cellphones. A foreign security source said Israel has spent years developing far more extensive capabilities for use against Hizbullah and Iran. The source said that Israel has much more dramatic capabilities and that those used thus far in Lebanon are "relatively low-level." (Times of Israel) Orna Mizrahi, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, said losing the ability to communicate through pagers is a "dramatic blow," but Hizbullah has other communication methods and will rebuild their communication network. The bigger damage to Hizbullah was psychological, she said. "It's the humiliation of having such an operation, it shows how much the organization is exposed to the Israeli intelligence." Amal Saad, a lecturer in politics and international relations at Cardiff University in Wales who researches Hizbullah, said much of the attack's impact was the "demoralization and the fear" it sowed. "Hizbullah's entire society is going to be extremely concerned because everything is liable now to being hacked and rigged," she said. The group will "be rethinking many things now, not just the pagers." (AP) After Israel pulled off a covert operation against Hizbullah that ranks with the Trojan horse, the terrorist group's apologists are crying foul. Israel simply isn't allowed to fight back. Israel didn't tamper with civilian objects like smartphones. It sabotaged Hizbullah's secure military communications. While UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday said he was "deeply alarmed" by the operation, his "alarm" is highly selective; Hizbullah's takeover of southern Lebanon and daily attacks on Israel didn't trigger it. But Hizbullah can't be allowed to preserve its status quo of attacks that make Israel's north a no-man's-land. (Wall Street Journal) After the initial shock generated by the waves of explosions, Hizbullah needs time to recover. Beyond the harm done to its clandestine means of communication and to its command and control system, a crisis of confidence among the operatives has been created, because from their perspective it's the organization that supplied them with the devices that killed and maimed their friends. The Lebanese public, too, is further alarmed in light of the danger inherent in Hizbullah's deployment of command posts in the hearts of villages and cities. (Ha'aretz) The pager attacks have provided a rare window into the inner workings of Hizbullah, an organization that is notoriously secretive. Most of the 37 people killed are believed to have been fighters, based on death notices posted by the group. Joseph Bahout, director of the Institute of Public Policy at the American University in Beirut, said the attacks have left Hizbullah exposed, as open source information about those killed and injured is swept up by foreign intelligence networks. (Washington Post) The Gaza War Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Badr Abdelatty said on Sep. 18 that his country will never accept any Israeli security presence at the border between Egypt and Gaza, during a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Cairo. The Egyptians are actually saying that they prefer to have Palestinian terrorists on their border rather than Israel. After the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, control over the Rafah crossing and Philadelphi Corridor was handed over to Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA), who became responsible for preventing smuggling of weapons from Egyptian territory into Gaza. In 2007, Hamas staged a coup against the PA and seized full control of Gaza. Following this, Hamas and other terror groups increased their smuggling activities through the border and the dozens of tunnels they dug beneath it. Egypt failed to stop the flow of weapons from its territory into Gaza for two decades. The Egyptians are apparently worried that Israel's presence at the border with Gaza would deny them the opportunity to continue making a huge profit from bribes. If the IDF leaves, Hamas will swiftly return to the border, and the Egyptians will continue looking the other way. (Gatestone Institute) Other Issues The World Peace Foundation (WPF) at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University is a very visible example of exploiting the facade of peace to fuel conflict and promote false accusations that contribute to hatred and violence. WPF has joined the intense propaganda war accompanying the Gaza conflict. Its head, Alex de Waal, has amplified the accusations that Israel was deliberately using starvation as a weapon against Palestinians in Gaza. However, as the evidence was carefully examined, it became clear that there was and is no famine or food shortage in Gaza. Despite the ongoing attacks by Hamas and the devastating torture and point-blank murder of hostages, Israel has maintained a steady flow of vital supplies. The writer is emeritus professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University and founder and president of NGO Monitor. (Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Observations: Israel's Retaliation Against Hizbullah Is Completely Lawful - Peter Berkowitz (Washington Post)
The writer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and was director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department (2019-2021). |
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