Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy
September 25, 2024
Israel is gambling Hezbollah will crumple but it faces a well-armed, angry enemy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93pg1qpxxzo
Posted by cdnhistorystudent
10 comments
Submission statement: An opinion piece written by Jeremy Bowen, who has reported from the Middle East since the 90s for BBC News. Israeli leaders are happy about their overwhelming attacks on Hezbollah so far, but the group is unlikely to stop fighting back. It’s unclear if Israel is willing to risk a ground invasion of Lebanon, which would be very costly and unlikely to put an end to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
>A few voices in the Israeli media have compared the impact of the air strikes on Hezbollah’s capacity to wage war to Operation Focus, Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt in June 1967. It was a famous raid that destroyed the Egyptian air force when its aircraft were lined up on the ground. Over the next six days Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The victory created the shape of the current conflict as Israel captured the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
Talk about counting all your chickens before they hatched. Not only was Egypt an actual state actor i.e with people that had to worry about continuing to exist as a country, the impact was also far more visible to everyone and had an immediate and lasting effect. Hezbollah runs duct tape and prayer-powered missile spam rather than relying on an actual air force. The net effect is far from as clear cut.
The IDF are not strong on the ground, so if they invade as it looks like they are about to then I am expecting pretty significant losses for them. That is, if Hezz have enough soldiers left with fingers.
Fundamentally, Israel is fighting with a conscript immigrant dual-citizen army, full of people just doing their one year and trying not to die.
Getting into multiple prolonged engagements is the best way to make those people go back to their original countries.
Which is exactly whats happening to the Israeli population, economy and military. Israel is full of people with the ***option*** to leave. Lebanon is…not.
>Israel’s leaders are jubilant about the progress of the offensive against Hezbollah that started with the detonation of weaponised pagers and radios and moved on to intense and deadly airstrikes.
>
>Defence Minister Yoav Gallant did not hold back his praise after Monday’s air strikes.
>“Today was a masterpiece… This was the worst week Hezbollah has had since its establishment, and the results speak for themselves.”
>Gallant said airstrikes destroyed thousands of rockets that could have killed Israeli citizens. In the process Lebanon says Israel killed more than 550 of its citizens, including 50 children. That is almost half Lebanon’s dead in a month of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
>Israel believes that a ferocious offensive will coerce Hezbollah into doing what it wants, inflicting so much pain that its leader Hassan Nasrallah and his allies and backers in Iran decide that the price of resistance is too high.
Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980’s, I honestly don’t see how another invasion would weaken them. At least in the long term, the Israeli army is giving them a reason to exist
Israel’s goal is to make sure that it is clear that Israel will extract a 100x cost on anyone who attempts to harm them. Hence we have the war in Gaza as a response to October 7. The attack on Hezbollah is a response to firing rockets at Israel for almost a year.
The name of the game is *not* victory but deterrence.
I doubt Israel ever expected that
Come on, they are attacking a fucking actual country, not a struggling-to-be one.
And more than that, they are targeting a group that is stronger than said country itself.
Of anyone expected it to be easy, it was a moron with delusions of grandeur
Eh. The most hezbollah can do is shoot a few unguided rockets at some parking lots. They don’t have the ability like Israel does to fly a fighter jet and blow up a building block.
Hopefully Hezbollah are to Zionist Israel what Russia was to Nazi Germany.
>~~The top-level comment you have submitted is shorter than 150 characters and has been removed. Per Rule 2.4.3, top-level comments must be at minimum 150 characters long.~~
What kind of world do we live in where we see a country bombing very clear missile sites (with secondaries going off and exploding) and think that Israel is intentionally escalating the conflict? I get that it could easily turn into a protracted conflict, especially if they go for a ground operation, but we just saw some very targeted strikes that destroyed infrastructure and a huge amount of their personnel and the BBC is arguing this may make it worse? I haven’t read the BBC in a while, and this is a good example of why. It went over every recent Israeli operation and listed condemnation from various sources, but when it came to Hezbollah, all they said was
> Some of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel have hit civilian areas, breaking laws designed to protect civilians.
I’d be so upset if my tax dollars were responsible for this sort of apologism and denial.
10 comments
Submission statement: An opinion piece written by Jeremy Bowen, who has reported from the Middle East since the 90s for BBC News. Israeli leaders are happy about their overwhelming attacks on Hezbollah so far, but the group is unlikely to stop fighting back. It’s unclear if Israel is willing to risk a ground invasion of Lebanon, which would be very costly and unlikely to put an end to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
>A few voices in the Israeli media have compared the impact of the air strikes on Hezbollah’s capacity to wage war to Operation Focus, Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt in June 1967. It was a famous raid that destroyed the Egyptian air force when its aircraft were lined up on the ground. Over the next six days Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The victory created the shape of the current conflict as Israel captured the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
Talk about counting all your chickens before they hatched. Not only was Egypt an actual state actor i.e with people that had to worry about continuing to exist as a country, the impact was also far more visible to everyone and had an immediate and lasting effect. Hezbollah runs duct tape and prayer-powered missile spam rather than relying on an actual air force. The net effect is far from as clear cut.
The IDF are not strong on the ground, so if they invade as it looks like they are about to then I am expecting pretty significant losses for them. That is, if Hezz have enough soldiers left with fingers.
Fundamentally, Israel is fighting with a conscript immigrant dual-citizen army, full of people just doing their one year and trying not to die.
Getting into multiple prolonged engagements is the best way to make those people go back to their original countries.
Which is exactly whats happening to the Israeli population, economy and military. Israel is full of people with the ***option*** to leave. Lebanon is…not.
>Israel’s leaders are jubilant about the progress of the offensive against Hezbollah that started with the detonation of weaponised pagers and radios and moved on to intense and deadly airstrikes.
>
>Defence Minister Yoav Gallant did not hold back his praise after Monday’s air strikes.
>“Today was a masterpiece… This was the worst week Hezbollah has had since its establishment, and the results speak for themselves.”
>Gallant said airstrikes destroyed thousands of rockets that could have killed Israeli citizens. In the process Lebanon says Israel killed more than 550 of its citizens, including 50 children. That is almost half Lebanon’s dead in a month of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
>Israel believes that a ferocious offensive will coerce Hezbollah into doing what it wants, inflicting so much pain that its leader Hassan Nasrallah and his allies and backers in Iran decide that the price of resistance is too high.
Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980’s, I honestly don’t see how another invasion would weaken them. At least in the long term, the Israeli army is giving them a reason to exist
Israel’s goal is to make sure that it is clear that Israel will extract a 100x cost on anyone who attempts to harm them. Hence we have the war in Gaza as a response to October 7. The attack on Hezbollah is a response to firing rockets at Israel for almost a year.
The name of the game is *not* victory but deterrence.
I doubt Israel ever expected that
Come on, they are attacking a fucking actual country, not a struggling-to-be one.
And more than that, they are targeting a group that is stronger than said country itself.
Of anyone expected it to be easy, it was a moron with delusions of grandeur
Eh. The most hezbollah can do is shoot a few unguided rockets at some parking lots. They don’t have the ability like Israel does to fly a fighter jet and blow up a building block.
Hopefully Hezbollah are to Zionist Israel what Russia was to Nazi Germany.
>~~The top-level comment you have submitted is shorter than 150 characters and has been removed. Per Rule 2.4.3, top-level comments must be at minimum 150 characters long.~~
What kind of world do we live in where we see a country bombing very clear missile sites (with secondaries going off and exploding) and think that Israel is intentionally escalating the conflict? I get that it could easily turn into a protracted conflict, especially if they go for a ground operation, but we just saw some very targeted strikes that destroyed infrastructure and a huge amount of their personnel and the BBC is arguing this may make it worse? I haven’t read the BBC in a while, and this is a good example of why. It went over every recent Israeli operation and listed condemnation from various sources, but when it came to Hezbollah, all they said was
> Some of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel have hit civilian areas, breaking laws designed to protect civilians.
I’d be so upset if my tax dollars were responsible for this sort of apologism and denial.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1fnp81m/hezbollah_rocket_goes_stray_after_cookoff_in_an/?share_id=UhhVD7p7ctNbAFBgIuxik&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1