Killing of Nasrallah shows the IDF reasserting primacy, gradually restoring public trust
A year ago, Israeli complacency enabled Hamas’s horrific slaughter. Now Israel is fighting back, Hezbollah is paying the price of overconfidence, and Iran is on the back foot
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
Almost a year after Israel’s complacency and overconfidence were exploited by Hamas to wreak devastation in the south, and Hezbollah began relentless rocket fire to force the evacuation of a widening swath of the north, the IDF on Friday evening took its most significant step yet toward reasserting its military primacy and reassuring Israel’s battered citizens that it can protect them from its enemies.
Having repeatedly warned Hezbollah in recent weeks that it was stepping up its attacks “step by step” and would continue to do so until the 60,000 displaced residents of the north could safely return, Israel’s political and military leadership showed that, in contrast to previous years of threats and bluster, it meant what it was saying this time.
And unlike the uncertain resort to force against Hamas after October 7, the security establishment demonstrated that, where Hezbollah was concerned, it had developed highly effective, and often unexpected, capabilities.
September 17’s spectacular detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers on their owners — an attack for which Israel has been blamed but has not acknowledged responsibility — was highly significant both practically and symbolically. It had manifestly been planned for years. It required astounding technical prowess. It showed pinpoint intel, extending to the identities and real-time movements of thousands of Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and beyond. And it was carried out to exceptional effect.
After that, as promised, came escalating attacks — targeted strikes that eliminated most of the Hezbollah leadership, a blast that took out numerous key figures in the terror army’s elite Radwan Force who had long been working on a major invasion of the Galilee, and days of raids on Hezbollah’s rockets, missiles and other weaponry, much of it emplaced in the homes of civilians.
Following each new round, Israel paused to hear if Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah would get the message — as in, stop the rocket fire and at least purport a readiness to withdraw his forces deeper into Lebanon. And each time, Nasrallah, fully invested in the goal of destroying Israel and having nailed Hezbollah’s flag to the Hamas mast, chose to keep on firing.
And so, on Friday evening, Israel targeted him. And late on Saturday morning, the IDF confirmed that he was dead.
Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, if he is still plugged into the snowballing consequences of the horrors he unleashed, might well be glorying from an underground hideout in the ostensible advancement of his genocidal dream. As he had hoped, Israel has been drawn deep into a multi-front war, and is fighting with precious little international support.
Israel’s challenge, however, is to ensure that it has the last word.
Another Friday evening headline, almost unnoticed amid the drama in Beirut, saw the IDF asserting that Hamas has now been defeated as an organized military force throughout Gaza, though it remains a dangerous guerrilla-style terrorist entity.
And an Israel that, a year ago, feared to dismantle so much as a tent that Hezbollah had set up at the border, is now deep in the process of demolishing Sinwar’s much stronger partner in the north. It won’t be completed overnight, but it is happening.
In a blistering speech to the United Nations General Assembly, evidently delivered soon after he had approved the strike on Hezbollah’s subterranean HQ and shortly before it was carried out, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Israel “won’t rest until our citizens can return safely to their homes. We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border, able to perpetrate another October 7th-style massacre.”
He also directly warned Iran. “If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place… in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach.”
And it is on Iran, now, that much of the spotlight shines. Does the Islamic Republic watch the Hezbollah terrorist army it nurtured, with its vast rocket and missile capacity, get pulverized by the IDF? Or does it risk further escalation against a revitalizing Israeli military and an Israeli political echelon whose threats it evidently needs to take more seriously?
Almost a year after October 7, Israel has not fully realized any of its declared war goals. The Hamas threat and other future threats from Gaza have not been entirely laid to rest. Ninety-seven hostages remain captive in Gaza, and those who are still alive are in daily peril. Sixty-thousand residents of northern Israel still cannot return safely to their homes.
Any euphoria at Friday night’s events would be premature. The government needs to maintain control over the fast-moving events in Lebanon. There is no clear strategy for the hostages today or for Gaza the day after. The Iranian regime is a cunning, resourceful and amoral adversary.
As IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari stressed when announcing new home front guidelines on Saturday afternoon, “It’s not over. Hezbollah retains… strategic capabilities it built over many years, with Iran’s funding and oversight.” There are “challenging days ahead of us,” Hagari noted, highlighting the plight of the hostages in Gaza and the displaced tens of thousands from the north.
But Israel is fighting back more potently than ever since October 7.
Netanyahu has knowingly elevated the stakes — by killing Nasrallah and targeting Hezbollah with “full force,” and thus directly challenging Iran, even at the risk of regional war.
All of Israel thus depends on its leadership now demonstrating, on any and every necessary front, that the era of complacency is truly over. That it is capable of leveraging its military gains into long-term security and diplomatic achievements. That October 7 was the aberration. That it is Israel’s enemies who, a year later, were fatally overconfident.
As for Israel’s long-time prime minister, the strike on the Dahiyah cannot begin to erase the fact that it was Netanyahu’s policies that enabled Hamas and Hezbollah to build up their strength, and that it was the divisions he relentlessly widened within Israel that emboldened both of them to use it.
Israel has not remotely recovered from the shock, horror and loss of what befell us on October 7. But Friday’s elimination of Hassan Nasrallah underlined that the military, which did acknowledge its failures and investigate them, has learned from them and is recovering its dominance. It is Hezbollah that has proved arrogant and overconfident, and its masters in Iran that are shaken now.
