(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Sept. 29) 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…. [The full column is at this link.]
