Mehul Srivastava, James Shotter, Charles Clover and Raya Jabali
Financial Times, Sept. 29, 2024
“Hizbollah did not disappear in the last 10 days — we’ve damaged and degraded them and they are in the stage of chaos and mourning. But they still have lots of capabilities that are very threatening.”
In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times. One air strike missed — the leader of Hizbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.
On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media. “We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.
But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide. … [To read the full article, click here]