Hezbollah Still Can’t Quite Grasp What the IDF Did to It

Israel took to heart the wisdom of a passage in the Talmud.

by Hugh Fitzgerald | Sept 4, 2024

Hezbollah claims that its attack on Israel on the morning of August 25 was a “success.” Hezbollah released a statement insisting  that “by God’s grace, the first stage has been fully completed with complete success. This stage involved targeting Israeli barracks and sites to facilitate the passage of attack drones towards their intended destination deep within the entity [Israel]. The drones passed, praise be to God, as planned. The number of Katyusha rockets fired so far has exceeded 320 rockets directed at the enemy’s positions.”

We all know better. None of the eleven military bases that Hezbollah claimed to have hit, including the headquarters of the intelligence Unit 8200 at Glilot, were damaged in the slightest. That’s because the IDF took to heart the wisdom of the passage in the Talmud, that says “if someone says he is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” That’s what the IDF did, unleashing a terrific preemptive attack on Hezbollah’s weapons before 5 a.m. Instead of the 6,000 rockets Hezbollah had ready to go on their launchers, only about 200 were left intact after the IDF’s preemptive attack, and those few hundred — closer to 200 than to the 320 Hezbollah claimed to have launched — that were let loose on the Jewish state did little damage to Israel. Iron Dome again performed spectacularly in intercepting incoming rockets. The result was that while nearly 5,800 Hezbollah rockets and launchers were destroyed, in Israel only some houses in northern Israel were slightly damaged. As for casualties, one Israeli sailor was killed from shrapnel when an Iron Dome missile intercepted an incoming rocket.

More on how those wonder-workers at the IDF meticulously planned for what they finally did before dawn on August 25 can be found here: “Hezbollah still in shock, assessing damage from Israel’s pre-emptive strike – IDF Col.,” by Avi Ashkenazi, Jerusalem Post, August 27, 2024:

Colonel Anan Abbas, Head of Control at the Northern Command’s central operations room, revealed in an interview with Maariv on Tuesday that the recent operation against Hezbollah required months of meticulous preparation. “Hezbollah is trying to assess the extent of the damage they’ve sustained,” he said.

“We attacked thousands of launchers and crippled Hezbollah’s capabilities, and our operations [haven’t finished yet]. It appears Hezbollah is still in shock. They’re trying to comprehend the extent of the damage inflicted on them, and they’ll fully understand it in the coming days. Right now, they’re just beginning to grasp what happened and how it unfolded,” Abbas explained.

Earlier in the week, the IDF emphasized that while the operation was primarily tactical, it sent powerful signals to Hezbollah—messages that could potentially lead to broader strategic shifts.

“It seems Hezbollah was genuinely surprised,” noted Abbas. “Their shock comes from the sheer number of planes we deployed simultaneously, striking an overwhelming number of targets in a very short time. They’re also astonished by the precision of our strikes—how we managed to accurately hit so many objectives, neutralize their assets, and do so without harming civilians or causing collateral damage.”…

Even now, Hezbollah has still not grasped the full extent of the damage done to it by the IDF. It cannot quite believe that nearly 6,000 rockets were destroyed within an hour; that more than 100 planes managed to fly all at once over Lebanon, conduct their pinpoint-precision airstrikes, and return, without any damage to a single plane, back to Israel. After this colossal defeat, Hezbollah might want to reconsider its policy of send rockets into northern Israel, expecting only a tit-for-tat response, given this display of the IDF’s terrifying prowess and what it may do again. Nasrallah must be thinking, “it makes better sense for us to stop our own attacks, let 80,000 internally displaced Israelis return to their homes in the north, and 70,000 of our own people, who were displaced from southern Lebanon, return to their homes. For now, we can’t afford another massive Israeli attack that could come at any moment. And Israel only wants its people to be able to return home. So let’s give them what they want — trade quiet for quiet. For now, the IDF doesn’t leave us much choice.”