Nasrallah Dead?
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The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, in an airstrike on the organization’s underground headquarters near Beirut on Friday. Hezbollah has not commented on the Israeli claim.
The announcement came after Israeli forces launched a series of new airstrikes in the same Hezbollah-dominated area, known as the Dahiya, sending more residents fleeing for safety. Israel’s military said the strikes were intended to destroy Hezbollah weapons caches.
If confirmed, the death of Mr. Nasrallah would be a major escalation in Israel’s rapidly expanding campaign against the Iran-backed group, two weeks of back-and-forth attacks that have threatened to spiral into an all-out regional war.
In the statement announcing Mr. Nasrallah’s death, the Israeli military also said the strike had killed Ali Karaki, the commander of the southern front in Hezbollah, along with several other Hezbollah leaders. Mr. Karaki survived a previous attempt on his life earlier this week.
If it’s true Nasrallah will not be mourned by any sensible human. The question of whether this is a long-term W for Israel is completely separate from the question of whether it’s a short-term win for Bibi; the answer to the second is quite obviously “yes.” From an operational perspective you have to wonder whether the campaign against Hezbollah was building to this particular outcome or whether the Israelis just got lucky; there’s surely some of the latter but the campaign against Hezbollah’s command and control was certainly going to put the organization’s senior leadership at risk. At the same time Hezbollah’s strategy of getting “kinda involved but not super-involved” in the Hamas War by bombarding northern Israel appears to have failed in catastrophic ways. Iran also has to be asking itself some tough questions this morning, as its ability to inflict any serious damage on Israel seems quite limited at the moment.
…Hezbollah has evidently confirmed.