JUDITH MILLER
Israel faces a conundrum to which there is no easily discernible, sustainable solution: how best to counter the growing strategic threat posed by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group that runs Lebanon.
On July 4, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets and more than 20 drones into northern Israel—one of its largest attacks to date—after Israel killed yet another of its high-ranking commanders in a drone strike in the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. Lebanon’s National News Agency said that Muhammad Nimah Nasser, aka Abu Nimah, was killed along with two other passengers in the drone strike on July 3. Nasser, the head of Hezbollah’s Aziz unit, was reportedly responsible for military operations in southwestern Lebanon and for firing hundreds of rockets into Israel.
Nasser is the latest senior Hezbollah commander to be killed since Oct. 7, when Palestinian Hamas slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 240 hostages in the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel has killed seven Hezbollah lieutenant generals and some 360 fighters and commanders overall, according to estimates. For its part, Israel has lost at least 19 soldiers and 12 civilians in rockets fired from Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s latest rocket and drone barrage—part of a total of some 7,000 rockets and missiles that it has fired into Israel since Oct. 7—has increased concern about a possible escalation of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza into a full-scale conflict between the two heavily armed foes. With some 45,000 fighters and an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets, drones, and missiles, many of them precision-guided, Hezbollah has always posed a far greater strategic threat to Israel than Hamas, which has been significantly degraded since Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
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