Hezbollah’s ‘settlement-clearing’ weapon

Israel has two options in Lebanon: one unthinkable, the other ruinous

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah seemed to touch a raw nerve by threatening to wield the ‘evacuation weapon’ and expand the targeting of Israeli settlements and settlers in northern Galilee to new, previously untouched, locations if Israel continues attacking civilians in southern Lebanon.

The immediate Israeli response came from war minister Yoav Galant during an inspection tour of his forces on the northern front. He warned of a swift and dramatic shift of focus onto a major war that would devastate Hezbollah and Lebanon, and said a decision on the matter could be taken at any moment

Threats like these are nothing new, of course, and do not trouble the young cubs of the Lebanese resistance let alone its lions and commanders who have been dealing daily blows to the Israeli enemy for months. Repeating them in response to Nasrallah’s warning in his latest Ashoura speech reflects a state of alarm, confusion, and haplessness, and deep trepidation about the grave and inevitable consequences.

The use of the settlement-clearing weapon in occupied northern Palestine is deadly for Israel’s political and military leaders. Its careful and calculated application by Hezbollah so far has been highly effective. It has already compelled 200,000 settlers to flee to safe areas further south or abroad. Their temporary relocation has lasted nine months and is becoming permanent, imposing a heavy material and psychological toll on the entire Zionist enterprise and perhaps hastening its ultimate demise.

In his speech, Nasrallah specifically threatened to expand the use of this weapon as a deterrent against Israeli airstrikes on the resistance’s support-base in the villages of the South Lebanon border area and the Baalbek and Hermel districts. “If you attack our public and kill our civilians we will respond in kind, if not more, meaning kill your civilians and destroy your settlements,” he said. “You know well that we have weapons, missiles, and drones that can achieve these goals with very high capability, and you have seen some evidence of this in Safad, Kiryat Shmona, and Nahariya.”

Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals now face two options in South Lebanon.

One is to promptly and permanently cease air-strikes against border villages in South Lebanon, halt the campaign of assassinations against resistance leaders and their allies, and immediately end the war of annihilation on the Gaza Strip. Otherwise, there will be retaliation in kind, or an even larger scale.

The other is to ‘reluctantly’ send the tanks in for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at destroying the resistance in the hope of restoring lost security in northern occupied Palestine.

The first option would be less costly for the Israeli leadership in material and human terms. But it would see it as an act of surrender and submission to Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s terms. That may be unthinkable given its unwarranted state of high hubris — the same arrogance that prevents it from absorbing the lessons of its defeats in the Gaza Strip, South Lebanon, and Red Sea, and from comprehending that the Resistance Axis is unlike any other Arab leadership they have seen past or present, including those that fought it and those who didn’t dare.

Resorting to the second option — the all-out assault threatened by Galant — would amount to leaping out of one trap into another, far deadlier, one. Unlike the resistance groups in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah is not besieged, but has open bridges to Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It has an arsenal of missiles, drones, and mini submarines far surpassing anything Gaza could dream of, and ten or more times the number of fighters.

There are also tens of thousands of volunteers from further afield who would flood in to join a long-awaited war to liberate Palestine. Although Nasrallah has repeatedly said that Hezbollah does not need more fighters and already has a surplus, what would prevent them storming across the borders in their droves once the hour has struck and the barriers are down?

https://www.raialyoum.com/hezbollahs-settlement-clearing-weapon/