"They're going to respond anytime, anywhere.""When the Israelis find these guys, they just take them out, so you have two or three a week that are whacked.""If you're a soldier in the Lebanese army earning $300 a month, you have to have three jobs. You're an Uber drive, a barista and a soldier.""So you go knock on a Shia door on Monday and say, 'I'm sorry, man, can I go into your basement and take out the AK-47s?' And you're risking your life.""[Still], we've got to have just one army."US. ambassador to Turkey/special envoy to Lebanon and Syria, Tom Barrack"We have an unchecked player acting as a hegemon under a leader, Netanyahu, growing stronger by the day.""At the same time there's a new generation across the world that can no longer tolerate Israeli behaviour.""To monitor what goes on around you, you don't need to be on top of a 700-meter hill with binoculars or a Galileo telescope!""Israel has satellite imagery and drones and balloons with the most sophisticated cameras.""The Israelis say they can't leave unless Hezbollah disarms, and Hezbollah says how can we disarm as long as the Israelis don't?"Nawaf Salam, Lebanese prime minister
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Hezbollah
terrorist organization announced the death of its member Hassan Abdul
Karim Shahrour, eliminated in an IAF strike, September 2025, Lebanon strike on Saturday on the Khardali-Marjayoun road in southern Lebanon |
They
prey on Israel, their goal is the Jewish state's obliteration.
Hezbollah is an auxiliary force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps. It is a creature of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one whose
reputation as a formidable foe of Israel was a well-earned reputation.
Iran has quite a number of proxy militias, among them Iraq's many Shia
militias whose fealty to Iran is unquestionable. There is Yemen's
Houthis with their Red Sea exploits in maritime piracy, upending a
significant part of the globe's shipping industry. And there is Hamas,
which though Sunni, is on the same dedicated track of totalitarian
Islamofascism.
At
a time when the Israel Defense Forces were wholly focused on destroying
the attack capabilities of Gaza's Hamas following the mass terrorist
atrocities in southern Israel that devastated kibbutz farming
communities, Hezbollah felt it would be timely to attack on Israel's
north from Lebanon, and the Houthis too felt the time was right to lob
their own missiles into Israel. Missiles from Gaza, from Lebanon and
from Yemen. Oh yes, let us not overlook those that were sent by Iran
itself, which persuaded Israel it was time to give Iran a good drubbing.
One
tiny sliver of a country amidst a wide field of deadly adversaries.
Israeli ingenuity believes in taking its enemies off guard and it did
just that with a cunning scheme of explosive pagers and walkie-talkies
reminded Hezbollah and by extension others hostile to Israel's presence
on its ancestral Judean geography
that
lethality comes in many forms, unexpected and quite effective in
delivering a chastening demoralizing message. When Hezbollah began
lobbing missiles from the Golan Heights into Israeli towns below they
were guaranteed a response and it targeted southern Lebanon held by
Hezbollah.
Iran,
its subsidiaries and its powerfully persuasive, glad-handing ally
Qatar, have been busy frantically plotting the rescue of their partially
emasculated terror groups, anxious to grasp any opportunity to strike
additional blows at Israel. And if Israel is unapproachable, then why
not strike at Jews living in the West whose governments prefer not to
invest themselves in the security of the Jews among them? Islamists are
exceedingly fond of striking Israel and by extension Jews anywhere
during times of major Jewish holidays when attention is elsewhere than
security for the targets.
And
so it was that for Hanukkah of 2025 Australia was the chosen site for
yet another atrocity, killing and maiming and shocking and traumatizing a
population of Australian Jews whose leaders have pleaded with their
government to respond forcefully and within existing laws to ensure
security for all their citizens, Jews included. But then, there is a
problem, one linked inexorably to lax security, indifference to Jewish
concerns and above all, an immigration flood of Palestinians --
including Hezbollah and Hamas operatives and other Muslims from across
the Middle East and North Africa; an experience familiar to all Western
democracies where sheer numbers and politics collide.
Lebanese
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's position on Hezbollah is a disgrace. The
terrorist group has destroyed Lebanon, taking advantage of a bloody
civil war and a weakened alliance between Sunni and Shia Muslims,
Christians and Druze. In the vacuum of the failed alliance, the presence
of Palestinians, the UN peacekeeping mission in the 1980s, Israel's
withdrawal once Yasser Arafat and Fatah were forced to leave and would
no longer attack Israel from Lebanon, the IRGC shaped, trained and armed
Hezbollah whose first suicide mission was to blow up the U.S. marine
barracks in Lebanon.
At
this point in Lebanon's history with a diminished Hezbollah licking its
wounds from its conflict with Israel the opportunity is there for the
Lebanese government to exert itself in the disarming of Hezbollah.
Something that the government has vowed it would accomplish for decades,
with little success. All the more so with Iran steadily providing
greater and more sophisticated munitions to the Shia terrorist group
grasping Lebanon in its stranglehold.
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| U.S. Department of War, photo of 1983 Hezbollah destruction of Lebanone-based marine barracks |
Hezbollah
can still count on tens of thousands of dedicated operatives. Like
Hamas, following its 'peace agreement' with Israel to halt the active
conflict, it has used that time to regroup, recruit and rearm. And like
Hamas, although that peace agreement included the stipulation that both
terror groups disarm, neither has, and neither intends to. In a recent
address by Naim Qassem, the leader appointed to take the place of
assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, he said:
"The enemy is sill the same enemy, and the perpetrator of the massacre
(of his predecessor) is the same. So how can we abandon weapons? How?"
His
followers may be rapt at his presentation, feeling justified in
supporting a group whose purpose is the annihilation of Israel, and
whose rationale cannot stand the scrutiny of cause-and-effect, in that
it is not Israel that attacks Lebanon or Hezbollah, but Hezbollah whose
pledge is to destroy Israel and to that end commit endless attacks. To
which Israel responds as would any country attacked by hostile entities
acting as proxies for the theocratic state of Iran.
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| Foundation for Defense of Democracies |