Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said.
Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years.
His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since October last year.
Photo: AFP
However, Nasrallah’s killing in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut bastion known as Dahiyeh was the culmination of two weeks of unprecedented blows to the Iran-backed group either claimed by Israel or blamed on it.
“If, at this point, Hezbollah does not respond with a strategic strike using its arsenal of long-range, precision-guided missiles, one must assume they simply can’t,” said Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria and Lebanon at the International Crisis Group.
“Either we see an unprecedented reaction by Hezbollah… or this is total defeat,” he said.
Hezbollah has been the most powerful group in Lebanon for decades and the only one that has kept its arms after the end of the Lebanese Civil War which lasted from 1975 to 1990.
However, after nearly one year of low-intensity cross-border fighting, Israel has shifted the focus of its operation from Gaza to Lebanon, where heavy bombing since Monday last week has killed hundreds of people and displaced about 118,000.
This week’s air assault followed pager and walkie-talkie blasts that targeted operatives of Hezbollah, killing 39 and wounding nearly 3,000.
In the past week, Israeli strikes on southern Beirut have killed one top Hezbollah commander after the other.
Sam Heller, an analyst at the New York-based think tank Century Foundation, said a lack of deterrence after such an important leader’s killing could encourage Israel to press on even further.
In nearly a year of cross-border fighting with Israel, Hezbollah “haven’t mustered the more dramatic capabilities that most of us had assumed it held in reserve,” even as its foe intensified raids and conducted sophisticated operations, he said.
Hezbollah’s capabilities might have been “oversold” or completely obliterated by Israel, he added.
Since the 2006 war in which Hezbollah “defeated the Israelis,” the group had “maintained this long-time deterrent equation,” Heller said, adding that “now, it seems evident Hezbollah cannot protect... itself.”
Amal Saad, a Lebanese researcher of Hezbollah and lecturer at Cardiff University, said that after the enormous blow to the now leaderless group, it would need to strike a delicate balance in choosing a response.
On the one hand, Hezbollah would seek to avoid triggering an Israeli “carpet bombing campaign against Beirut or all of Lebanon,” while “at the same time raising the morale” of its supporters and fighters, she said.
Hezbollah would need to show it can protect its own people, exact revenge on Israel, but also keep the peace among Lebanon’s diverse religious communities, she added.
Shiite Lebanese, which constitute the group’s support base, are among the tens of thousands displaced from Lebanon’s south, east and Dahiyeh by Israel’s bombardment — seeking shelter in areas where other religious communities live.
Mohanad Hage Ali, deputy director of research at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Hezbollah had been “paralyzed” by its recent reverses, but warned against writing the group off for good.
“It requires new leadership, a system of communications and to restore its narrative and speak to its support base,” he said.
However, “it will be quite difficult to imagine the organization wither away that quickly,” he added.
Saad said that Hezbollah as an underground armed group was “designed to absorb shocks like this,” citing the killing of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh killed in a 2008 Damascus car bombing blamed on Israel.
“When the dust settles Hezbollah is not a one-man show,” she said.
Nasrallah “is not a mythological figure. He’s a person,” she added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS