Nadav Pollak
It started with the famous “pagers attack” on Sept. 17, which injured thousands of Hezbollah fighters. Then came the walkie-talkie attack on Sept. 18, which also inflicted significant damage. Two days later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took out Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s operations unit, along with the entire command of the Radwan unit, which was planning to conduct another Oct. 7-like attack against Israel. A few days later, on Sept. 23, Israel bombed more than a thousand military targets belonging to Hezbollah. Later that week, the IDF took out the commander of Hezbollah’s strategic missile units, Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, and the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, Muhammad Hussein Srur—both top-level commanders in Hezbollah’s ranks.
Then, on Sept. 27, came the attack that shocked the region: The Israeli air force bombed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s bunker, killing him and other senior Hezbollah and Iranian commanders.
For many longtime Hezbollah researchers and analysts, the speed and destruction of these strikes was a remarkable surprise. For years, Hezbollah has had a reputation for both its immense power relative to other terrorist groups—primarily through its large arsenal of rockets and missiles and tens of thousands of trained fighters—and its tight operational security standards, which made it difficult for Israel to target these strengths.
Hezbollah has experienced something very similar to what Israel experienced on Oct. 7—a devastating intelligence failure. Hezbollah, which for years thought it understood Israeli officials’ decision-making and operational conduct, not only missed key signals that indicated Israel had changed profoundly after the Oct. 7 attack but also failed to see that Israel’s leadership was willing to take risks it was not willing to take in the past. Israel’s adversaries would do well to update their assessment of Israeli strategy and its new tolerance for escalation. Hezbollah paid a high cost for not understanding that Israel was no longer deterred by its arsenal; Iran could make the same mistake.
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