UPDATED: Hezbollah Confirms Nasrallah Is Dead; Netanyahu Condemned Over Massive Beirut Bombing
Yves here. The latest escalation by Israel in its war with Lebanon is serious bad news. I had started drafting this post when mainstream media sources were denying Israel’s claims that it has killed Hezbollah leader Hassam Nasrallah. BBC is now reporting that Hezbollah has confirmed that he is dead. Alastair Crooke has maintained that every Hezbollah senior officer, including Nasrallah, has trained a successor, although Nasrallah’s was not known. On the Judge Napolitano show on Friday, I believe it was Ray McGovern (who then had informed reports that suggested that Nasrallah had survived) who maintained that any successor would be more hard-line.
Until its terrorism via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, followed by an intense wave of air strikes in Southern Lebanon and attacks on Beirut, Israel and Hezbollah had been engaged in tit for tat, with Hezbollah and Israel confining their blows to particular areas of each country. Hezbollah has attempted to observe a variant of the old normal by extending its target range into Israel to Haifa and environs, still hitting only military targets.
Israel has crossed every conceivable boundary. It keeps blowing up residential buildings, with the pretext that it is out to assassinate Hezbollah leadership. Israel has admittedly had some successes with these attacks, such as the killing of Fuad Shukur, Ismail Haniyeh, and Ibraim Aqil. However, Israel claimed its latest barrage on Beirut, which blew up an entire neighborhood, destroyed Hezbollah headquarters and killed Hezbollah leader Hassim Nasrallah. Whether it did damage or destroy the Hezbollah center remains to be seen. Israel initially claimed it had killed Nasrallah but he is alive. [Update: death now confirmed]
This attack matters for two reasons. First, heretofore, Israel assassination attempts targeted officials who were above ground. By saying it is now seeking to kill Hezbollah officials in underground facilities, it is trying to justify the use of massive bunker-busting bombs in Beirut. We know how well that strategy worked with the Hamas tunnel network. By all accounts, the Hezbollah tunnel system is vastly more extensive and better fortified.
So Israel has now embarked on a campaign to turn Lebanon into Gaza:
After Netanyahu’s speech saying there are no civilian spaces in Lebanon and calling hospitals, schools and every home a legitimate target, Israel attacked Beirut.
He stood at the UN, declared his war crimes and carried them out. This is what total impunity looks like. https://t.co/WiTZj2B85H
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) September 27, 2024
Israel used at least ten 5,000 pound bombs to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a densely populated civilian neighborhood. That’s more than three times Hiroshima.
— Lama Al-Arian (@lalarian) September 28, 2024
I have not found a suitable clip of Netanyahu’s speech on Twitter. However, the bits I saw so exuded preening self regard, wallowed in self-created victimhood, as to be so rancid that the English language lacks sufficiently strong words to vilify them.
Second is that by killing Nasrallah, Israel has violated another tacit understanding, that top leadership would not be targeted. Now, if in matching this escalation, Hezbollah were to succeed in killing a top Israel general or minister, or even Netanyahu himself, Isreal would use that to demand that the US commit forces to defend Israel.
Israel’s apparent attempt to assassinate Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on an underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs marks the most alarming escalation in almost a year of war between the Shia militant organisation and Israel.
Immediately after a highly bellicose speech by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN general assembly – where he appeared to directly threaten Iran as well as promise to continue “degrading” Hezbollah – the first reports of a massive strike began to emerge.
Within less than an hour, Israeli journalists with connections to the country’s defence and security establishment were suggesting that Nasrallah was the target and that he had been in the area of the headquarters at the time of the strike.
That the strike was regarded as highly significant was quickly confirmed by a series of statements from Israel – including an image showing Netanyahu ordering the attack on the phone from his New York hotel room….
For much of the early months of the conflict with Hezbollah, which began on 8 October– a day after Hamas’s attack from Gaza – it was understood that Israel would not assassinate the militant group’s most senior members. But in recent months those “red lines” have increasingly been rubbed away.
By Jessica Corbett, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
Israel’s dropping of massive bombs in Beirut on Friday sparked a fresh wave of global condemnation against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with critics accusing him of trying to drag the Middle East into an even bloodier conflict that could engulf the entire region.
The Israeli attack supposedly targeted Hassan Nasrallah, head of the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah. Multiple media outlets reported that the leader survived, though hundreds of others are feared dead in the “complete carnage” from the bombing that leveled several buildings. While the death toll from Friday is not yet clear, over 700 people have been killed in Israel’s strikes in Lebanon since Monday.
As The New York Times reported:
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that there had been a “complete decimation” of four to six residential buildings as a result of the Israeli strikes. He said that the number of casualties in hospitals was low so far because people were still trapped under the rubble. “They are residential buildings. They were filled with people,” Mr. Abiad said. “Whoever is in those buildings is now under the rubble.”
Social media and news sites quickly filled with photos and videos of massive plumes of smoke and smoldering rubble.
While attention fixates on the fate of #Hezbollah leader Hassan #Nasrallah, bear in mind that flattening 6+ high-rise apartment buildings, without prior notice/evacuation, means 100s of casualties.
This is a mass casualty event, whatever #Hezbollah losses. pic.twitter.com/s4Plc8Sfka
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) September 27, 2024
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, said Friday that she was “deeply alarmed and profoundly worried about the potential civilian impact of tonight’s massive strikes on Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs. The city is still shaking with fear and panic widespread. All must urgently cease fire.”
However, the bombing is widely expected to worsen this week’s escalation, which came after nearly a year of the IsraelDefense Forces (IDF) trading strikes with Hezbollah over the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 41,000 Palestinians.
“For Israel, it may not matter if Nasrallah was killed. Either way, it believes it’ll get the regional war it has sought,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said of the Friday attack.
Citing an unnamed Israeli official, NBC Newsreported that “Israel expects Hezbollah will attempt to mount a major retaliatory attack” in response to Friday’s bombing of the group’s command center.
As Reuters detailed:
Israel has struck the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut, known as Dahiyeh, four times over the last week, killing at least three senior Hezbollah military commanders.
But Friday’s attack was far more powerful, with multiple blasts shaking windows across the city, recalling Israeli airstrikes during the war it fought with Hezbollah in 2006.
In a video posted on social media, IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari described the Friday attack as “a precise strike” on what “served as the epicenter of Hezbollah’s terror,” adding that the group’s headquarters “was intentionally built under residential buildings.”
During Netanyahu’s United Nations General Assembly speech on Friday—which was met with a walkout from several diplomats and other officials—the prime minister said that Hezbollah has stored rockets “in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon. They endanger their own people. They put a missile in every kitchen, a rocket in every garage.”
In response, Middle East expert Assal Rad said, “So he’s claiming there’s no civilian spaces in Lebanon and Israel has a right to destroy all of it.”
Jason Hickel, who has positions at multiple European universities, also sounded the alarm over those lines from the Israeli leader’s speech.
Netanyahu is “effectively arguing all homes are a military target,” he said. “This is 100% genocidal and this maniac must be stopped.”
The US was reportedly informed of this mass Israeli attack on Beirut in Lebanon shortly beforehand.
Comes just one day after US released $8.7 billion more in aid to Israel & hours after Netanyahu told the UN “Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace.”pic.twitter.com/LW2ST4DixB— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) September 27, 2024
Hours before the attack in suburban Beirut, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) strongly condemned“Israel’s brutal bombardment of Lebanon, another reckless escalation in the Middle East on behalf of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime that risks further destabilization in an already fragile region.”
“The Israeli bombardment of Lebanon is the latest dark chapter in a series of disproportionate displays of force. Its ongoing genocide in Palestine over the last year has proven beyond any doubt that its willingness to commit horrific acts knows no bounds,” DiEM25 said. “Rather than seeking a peaceful and just resolution, Israel’s government has consistently chosen the path of militarism, often with international support from the European Union and the United States.”
“The international community, including the E.U., has a critical role to play in promoting peace rather than enabling violence,” the group added. “Peace and security in the Middle East will not come through bombs and military strength. It will come through diplomacy. We remain committed to working towards that aim and stand in solidarity with the Lebanese people, as well as all others suffering from this violent escalation.”
