The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah announced on the afternoon of the 20th that it had launched a large-scale rocket attack targeting military facilities in northern Israel.
Shortly afterwards, the Israeli military (IDF) said Hezbollah had fired more than 130 rockets into the country’s north.
Hezbollah’s rocket attacks against Israel began the day after the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7 last year, and have been carried out regularly three to four times a week. Hezbollah has over 150,000 rockets.
The Hezbollah rocket attack this afternoon is noteworthy as it is Hezbollah’s first official retaliation since the remote-detonation attacks on Hezbollah-used pagers and radios on Tuesday the 17th and Wednesday the 18th. Following Gaza, the standoff between northern Israel and southern Lebanon, which has been a passive second front, could quickly escalate into a full-scale war.
Hezbollah said the rocket attacks on northern Israel on Tuesday were not retaliation for a remote attack on a communications aircraft two days earlier, but rather an attack on a southern village.
However, Israeli forces struck an additional camouflaged military facility in a small town in southern Lebanon later in the day, following an attack on a Hezbollah rocket facility the previous night.
In an attack on primitive communication equipment that appeared to have been carried out by a long-term plan by the Israeli intelligence agency, 37 people were killed and nearly 3,500 were injured. Most of the people with communication devices who had their limbs amputated and their eyes and faces injured were known to be Hezbollah members, but many of their family members and acquaintances also had Hezbollah-distributed communication devices, so there were many innocent civilian casualties. Two children were among the dead.
Hassan Nasrallah, the supreme leader of Hezbollah, was the victim of a modern-day “Trojan Horse” attack in which a small amount of explosives were secretly placed in pagers ordered overseas and detonated remotely, and he declared war in a televised speech on the 19th, vowing certain retaliation.
But the Israeli military was quicker to act, and after midnight on the 19th, Israeli warplanes struck 100 Hezbollah rocket launch sites in southern Lebanon, destroying more than 1,000 launchers.
Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 after 15 years of occupation, and the UN’s Blue Line was later established there. In 2006, Hezbollah attacked Israel first, and a month-long war ensued, but Hezbollah suffered heavy casualties and was defeated.
After the Gaza war, when Hezbollah harassed Israel as a second front, its main weapon was rockets, and Israel responded with air strikes from fighter jets. As a result, Hezbollah said that 587 people, including 137 civilians, had been killed in Israeli attacks by early September.
On the Israeli side, only 25 civilians and 21 soldiers were killed. However, Israel evacuated more than 100,000 residents from the northern border. Israel’s remote attack on Hezbollah’s communications was carried out as the return of its own people to their northern homeland was being promoted.
Israel killed Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr with a drone six hours before killing Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyah in Tehran, Iran, in the early hours of July 31, in a secret compound outside Beirut, Lebanon. Unlike Haniyah’s killing, Israel made this killing official.
Hezbollah, which had declared retaliation, fired about 300 missiles and rockets at northern Israel on August 25. However, Israel said it had launched a preemptive strike with 100 fighter jets 30 minutes earlier, destroying about half of Hezbollah’s attack preparations. Hezbollah emphasized carrying out a large-scale missile attack, but Israel’s actual damage was small.
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2024-09-20 16:42:32