TheAltWorld Hezbollah moves to Stage Two
Israel’s claims to have decimated the Lebanese resistance are risible
By launching 200 missiles in two days on targets in Haifa, Nahariya, and Safad, killing or wounding 30 soldiers, Hezbollah’s new leadership began moving into a second stage of the war. This may involve retaliating in kind to Israeli attacks on urban centres, and using new and more potent weaponry to expand the war of attrition with the enemy and maximise its losses of personnel, material, and morale.
On Saturday, while beating back several infiltration attempts by the Israeli army across the Lebanese border, Lebanese Islamic resistance fighters targeted the occupation’s military concentrations, bases, and settlements in occupied Galilee in a significant escalation of hostilities as part of a carefully laid plan.
Israeli media reported huge fires caused by missile strikes near Safad which defied the efforts of 15 firefighting teams to extinguish, and, more importantly, sent thousands of settlers fleeing for safety further south. That means the war on Lebanon has backfired against Netanyahu. Instead of enabling him to send evacuated settlers back to their colonies in the north, it has increased the number of evacuees and the burden they place on the Israeli treasury.
Israeli war minister Yoav Galant’s claim on Saturday to have decimated Hezbollah and driven it out of the border area is risible and demonstrably false. If it were true, who was it who launched 200 missiles in a single day and forced Galant and Netanyahu to hold their war cabinet meeting in an underground bunker?
Netanyahu does not even dare go back to his home in Caesarea after it was struck by a Hezbollah drone that eluded Israel’s elaborate air defences. How does he expect to send nearly 150,000 settlers to their homes in the north of occupied Palestine?
The war of extermination currently being waged by the Israeli army in the northern Gaza Strip — especially against Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya — killing at least 500 people so far and injuring hundreds more, is not evidence of victory. It is an affirmation that the circle of defeat is expanding on all fronts. Martyrs Husam Abu-Ghazaleh and Amer Qawas, who slipped through the border and wounded two Israeli soldiers, inaugurated the Jordanian front — the occupation’s longest –and paved the way for hundreds if not thousands of others, from Jordan and beyond, to follow.
Thousands of fighters from the Islamic resistance in Iraq are in the process of deploying to Syria and the Golan Front, amid continuing drone and missile strikes on Israeli forces and bases in the occupied Heights. Those manning all the fronts –from Yemen to Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and South Lebanon — may be waiting for the ‘zero hour’ when they unleash a concerted assault using weaponry that has been held back for that momentous day: maybe when Israel launches its threatened attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The retaliation that would trigger would be devastating for Israel.
This week’s visits to Lebanon by US envoy Amos Hochstein and Cairo by fellow Zionist Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, are aimed at rescuing Israel from its defeats, by getting ever-obedient Arab ‘allies’ to exert pressure on the resistance leadership to submit to cease-fires on Israel’s terms.
But after the killing of revered resistance leaders Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Yahya Sinwar in Palestine, the pair will encounter nothing but contempt from the resistance groups. They failed to achieve their objectives in many previous regional tours and rounds of talks over the course of the past year. Why should it be different now that the martyred leaders have been replaced by more hardline successors determined to avenge their blood?
The resistance will not flinch first and will ultimately break the long arm of Israel. It will continue fighting bravely and heroically on its land, while Netanyahu scurries rat-like from one underground shelter to another until he falls into the trap.
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