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WorldView
Ishaan Tharoor
By Ishaan Tharoor
with Kelsey Baker
Israel takes the hammer to Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’
A view shows the damage at the site of the Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah on Friday in Beirut's southern suburbs. (Ahmad Al-Kerdi/Reuters)
A view shows the damage at the site of the Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah on Friday in Beirut's southern suburbs. (Ahmad Al-Kerdi/Reuters)
More than 1,000 people in Lebanon, including at least 87 children, have been killed in Israeli strikes in the space of a week. A million people — close to a fifth of the country — have already been displaced from their homes. Parts of the southern suburbs of Beirut are vast craters of rubble and debris. Aid workers warn of yet another brewing humanitarian catastrophe in the region.
But for many Israeli strategists and Western policy elites, Lebanese suffering seems secondary to the dramatic tactical success of Israel’s ruthless campaign against Hezbollah — the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group and political faction that’s backed by Iran and designated as a terrorist organization in much of the West. Through a stunning series of attacks involving explosive devices in pagers and walkie-talkies, as well as mammoth U.S.-made bombs dropped from Israeli jets, Israel has managed to plunge Hezbollah into disarray and decapitate its leadership. That includes a huge Friday airstrike that killed Hasan Nasrallah, the group’s shadowy leader.
Nasrallah’s killing, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Saturday, “joins the sequence of recent actions echoing all over the Middle East and sends a clear message to those who acted against us and to those who are thinking of doing so now: Whoever starts a war against the state of Israel and tries to harm its citizens will pay a very heavy price.” The war, he added, “does not stop.”
On Sunday, more Israeli strikes rained down on Hezbollah targets in Beirut, Hamas targets in Gaza and on Yemen’s Houthis, who had fired ballistic missiles that set off warnings across central Israel. The three factions are, to varying degrees, part of a network of Iranian proxies arrayed across the Middle East — the “axis of resistance” that has consumed the attention of Israel’s security establishment and animated a generation of think-tankers in Washington.
Now, this Iranian-backed alliance is reeling. Hamas’s military capacity has been steadily degraded over the past year of ruinous war, while Israeli espionage appears to have penetrated deep into Iran, where the Jewish state appears to have been able to carry out the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse. Then, Israel ratcheted up its actions against Hezbollah, long Iran’s most powerful ally in the region and a permanent threat on Israel’s northern flank.
“The brazen attacks have stunned Hezbollah, humiliating a group whose raison d’être is to fight Israel. But they are also evidence of Israel’s years of preparation, including intelligence collection, military exercises, fine-tuned battle plans and a multilayered air defense system,” my colleagues reported.
Now, Israel is readying for a possible ground invasion to further press its advantage, my colleagues continued: “Hezbollah had assembled its own arsenal of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles over the years, but it is unclear now how effectively the group can use them, with its leadership wiped out and thousands of operatives either killed or injured.”
The Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom drew a comparison to the legacy of the 1967 war, a conflict that proved politically disastrous for Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his brand of pan-Arabism. A similar illusion may be fading now. Nasrallah “spent years talking up the ‘axis of resistance,’ a constellation of Iran-backed militias committed to fighting Israel and America,” Carlstrom wrote. “He said they were strong and united. Then Israel decapitated the most powerful militia in a matter of weeks, while Iran sat idle.”
There are more twists in the tale to come. Israel has invaded Lebanon multiple times in the past decades, presiding over violence and, in some instances, atrocities that in part led to the formation of Hezbollah. The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have “checkmated their opponents,” noted Sanam Vakil of the Chatham House think tank. “History, however, has shown that a military victory has never provided Israel with the security it seeks.”
Still, the Lebanese Shiite faction is in a bind. “Should Hezbollah not respond to Nasrallah’s death, its morale and legitimacy will be further weakened,” Vakil wrote. She added, “this fight will certainly mobilize if not radicalize another generation of fighters.”
In Tehran, officials are coping with blow after blow. Iran has mustered minimal response to Haniyeh’s killing. Earlier in the year, it telegraphed a “retaliatory” barrage of missiles and drones on Israel, which were mostly shot down by Israel and U.S. air defenses.
“Iran’s priority will not be revenge for Nasrallah’s killing, but to preserve its place in Lebanon,” suggested Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Just as it determined not to abandon its place in Syria when [President Bashar al-] Assad looked to be falling, similarly it will do all it can to keep its foothold in Lebanon.”
Hezbollah’s “implosion,” Nasr added, “could plunge Lebanon into civil war as other militias with or without Israel’s encouragement or help try to take advantage of the current vacuum.”
Western leaders, including President Joe Biden, are still hoping to ward off a full-scale war in Lebanon and are calling for restraint. But the horse may have already bolted the stable. Lebanon is in profound crisis, Netanyahu’s government is emboldened by recent successes and poised to expand the arc of the conflict, and Iran may be rethinking some of its fundamental strategic calculations.
The leadership in Tehran is “deeply shaken” by Nasrallah’s killing, said Meir Javedanfar, an Israel-based Iran expert, speaking on Israeli television, suggesting that Iranian officials may be reckoning with the stark reality that there are “no red lines” Israel is unwilling to cross in its shadow war with Iran.
Iran’s avenues for response may include a particularly dangerous one. “Will the Resistance Axis alongside Iran respond to Israel directly, or will Iran practice strategic patience?” wrote Holly Dagres, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “One thing is certain: With the clerical establishment feeling exposed as its proxies in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip take such detrimental blows, the notion of Iran’s going all the way in its nuclear program is becoming increasingly likely.”
In Lebanon, Gaza and Israel’s other battlefields, the fires of war still burn. “Confronting this enemy is not as simple as pulling a radish from the ground — it will grow back,” wrote Lebanese novelist Dominique Eddé. “The real challenge is to systematically dismantle the reasons they claim to be a resistance movement. This means striving for peace.” Those efforts look dismally stalled.
1,000 Words
On Monday, the very last coal-powered electricity plant in Britain is closing.
The coal age is over in the country that sparked the industrial revolution 200 years ago — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.
Now, Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources. (Gabriella Demczuk/The Washington Post)
Talking Points
· Austria’s anti-immigration Freedom Party was on track Sunday night to win the Austrian parliamentary election in an unprecedented victory. If projections hold up, it would be the first national victory for the country’s far right since World War II.
· The city of Lviv in Ukraine has been inundated by families fleeing violence in the rest of the country. But now, Lviv has come under attack. Our colleagues Lizzie Johnson and Kostiantyn Khudov report on how the city once thought to be one of Ukraine’s safest suddenly isn’t — and the devastating toll the war has taken on one man.
· In the years since Hezbollah fought Israel to a draw in their last war in 2006, the militant group accumulated such a vast arsenal of weapons that it was widely assumed by its supporters that Israel would not dare wage war on Lebanon again. But the scale and severity of recent attacks have called into question the very reason for Hezbollah’s existence, which was predicated on its ability to deter Israeli attacks against Lebanon.
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People gather in Beirut’s southern suburbs. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Israel probably employed U.S.-made 2,000-pound munitions in its strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, according to a review of visuals released by the Israel Defense Forces.
Analysts who examined videos of the strike and its aftermath at The Washington Post’s request said the damage was consistent with the use of multiple 2,000-pound bombs.
Three analysts who reviewed a video shared by the Israeli air force on Saturday said it showed fighter jets carrying multiple 2,000-pound-class bombs, at least some of which were U.S.-made BLU-109s and JDAM guidance kits.
In the video, eight F-15 planes carrying at least 16 2,000-pound bombs take off. “Air force planes eliminating Hasan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon,” reads the descriptive text accompanying the video. Photos released by the IDF showed individual planes fitted with at least three and as many as six BLU-109s each.
The warheads are designed to penetrate up to six feet of reinforced concrete, according to a former explosive ordnance disposal technician for the U.S. Army. The attack leveled at least two large buildings and caused heavy damage to an area spanning 1,000 feet.
“Initial available videos of the strike show that numerous large air-delivered bombs were used,” N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, wrote in a message to The Post. Jenzen-Jones added that the repeated impacts from multiple munitions suggests they were aimed at penetrating a heavily protected space.
This kind of quick succession of munitions is often referred to as “daisy chaining,” a Department of Defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss targeting strategy, told The Post. He added that daisy-chaining with 2,000-pound bombs is a common tactic in decapitation strikes: Drop the building with the bunker-buster bombs and then deploy a high-explosive demolition charge. — Abbie Cheeseman, Meg Kelly and Imogen Piper
Read on: Israel likely used U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs in Nasrallah strike, visuals show
Afterword
This photo on the National Mall captivated the country decades ago. The real story behind it remained a mystery — until now.
(Harry Naltchayan)
By Marissa J. Lang
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