Nasrallah Killing Leaves Hezbollah Leaderless And Vulnerable

In July, a Hezbollah rocket attack killed 12 children on a football field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. In response, three days later, Israel assassinated Hezbollah's most senior commander, the head of its strategic unit, Fuad Shukr, in an airstrike in Beirut.

The violence has steadily escalated since. On August 25, as Hezbollah was preparing a major rocket attack on the north and center of Israel, the IDF launched a preemptive strike against Hezbollah missile launchers that were poised to strike targets within Israel. In mid-September, the Israeli security cabinet announced it had added the return of displaced residents from the country's north to its war goals.

Days later, in a highly complex operation, thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded , killing dozens and wounding thousands of Hezbollah militants. The following day, Hezbollah's network of walkie-talkies was targeted in the same way.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for either of these incidents, but what cannot be denied is that they caused considerable damage to Hezbollah's command and control.

Two days after that, on September 20, Shukr's successor, Ibrahim Akil , was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, along with dozens of senior commanders of Hezbollah's elite Radwan force .

Yet all these moves were only the prelude to Operation Northern Arrows , which began on September 23. The Israeli air force attacked 1,600 Hezbollah targets , including thousands of rocket and missile launchers that had been stored among the civilian population throughout Lebanon.

Hezbollah has responded by firing rockets at Israel, most of which were intercepted by Israel's air defense systems. It is estimated that Hezbollah had an arsenal of 150,000 rockets , including medium and long-range missiles. Many of these have now been eliminated by Israeli airstrikes.

Hezbollah still has precision-guided munitions and drones, but recent Israeli strikes have eliminated much of Hezbollah's chain of command and severely disrupted its operational equilibrium. The assassination of many of Hezbollah's senior leadership – and now Nasrallah himself – has all but destroyed the group's military chain of command.

So far there has been no sign from Tehran that Iran intends to intervene militarily to help Hezbollah. This must call into question the advantage of acting as one of the country's most important proxies in the region.

In this context, many in Beirut, Damascus, Sana'a and Gaza are surely asking themselves now what is the advantage of being Iran's emissaries, if the latter leaves them alone to face Israel.

As a result, the main hope for Hezbollah – and Lebanon itself, into whose economic and political structures Hezbollah has become so firmly embedded – is that the international community will impose a ceasefire on both sides in an effort to avoid this becoming a wider regional conflict.

The US and France have pushed for a 21-day ceasefire . But it seems that, like its fight against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is determined to continue the military operation against Hezbollah.

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Now the world is waiting to see whether Israel will send troops into in Lebanon. Already thousands of citizens in the south of the country have fled north . But despite a statement from IDF chief of staff, Maj Gen Herzi Halevi, that the IDF is preparing to launch a ground operation in Lebanon , it is not at all certain that Israel wants to return to Lebanese soil.

In May 2000, the IDF pulled back from southern Lebanon to the international border after 18 years of occupation, and in 2006, it did the same in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701 .

There's also a good chance that, given the success of its campaign of airstrikes in neutralising the military threat from Hezbollah, an actual ground invasion may be postponed for now.

The US and other countries, including the UK, have urged Israel to put a hold on any invasion plans and agree to a ceasefire. It presents the Biden administration, which is keenly aware of the need to keep both Jewish and Arab voters onside, with a tough choice.

But it is hard to believe that Biden, especially during an election campaign and in light of the special relationship between the countries, will put pressure on Jerusalem to stop its fight against Iranian proxy terrorism.

Ori Wertman is research fellow, Faculty of Life Sciences and Education, University of South Wales

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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