Official: With strike on Nasrallah, Israel hopes to avoid ground op in Lebanon
Senior Israeli official briefing reporters argues that Hezbollah leader is ‘lynchpin’ that has been keeping together an Iranian plot aimed at destroying Israel by 2040
By targeting Hezbollah’s leadership in a major Beirut airstrike on Friday, Israel is hoping to avoid launching a ground invasion in Lebanon, a senior Israeli official told reporters on Friday.
The strike targeting Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and other top officials in the terror group huddling at a main command center in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb was aimed at breaking Hezbollah, the senior official explained during a briefing with reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address there earlier in the day.
The official claimed Israeli intelligence had uncovered an Iranian plan to encircle Israel and eliminate the Jewish state by 2040. However, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar jumped the gun by ordering the October 7 terror onslaught before other Iran proxies were ready.
Israel has been working to fend off this Iranian plot since October 7 but understood that Nasrallah was the “lynchpin” who could not be ignored.
Nasrallah has led Hezbollah for 32 years, and since October 7 has directed the terror group’s near daily cross-border attacks against Israel that have forced tens of thousands of civilians to evacuate border towns.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “We cannot survive if we don’t stop this and reverse it,” he said, referring to the threat to Israel from Iran-backed militia in the region.
“It’s impossible to reverse it without a general war. That was the assumption — a general war with Hezbollah, which entails the possibility of a broader war with Iran,” he surmised.
“The other way to do it was to take him out. If you take him out, you not only neutralize that front — because nothing else will — but you also break a lynchpin. You break a central axis of the axis,” the senior Israeli official claimed.
Nasrallah became secretary general of Hezbollah in 1992 at just 35, the public face of a once shadowy group founded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982 to fight Israeli forces who were then occupying southern Lebanon.
Israel killed Nasrallah’s predecessor, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, in a helicopter attack.
The official defended Israel’s action when asked why killing Nasrallah would change the threat from Hezbollah when earlier assassinations of terror leaders had not hobbled their organizations.
“I think it’s different,” the official said. “In many ways he keeps this thing focused, alive and kicking.”
“Some people are irreplaceable. It happens. Some people do not have a substitute. That’s one of the cases, there’s no question,” the official said.
“About 10 days ago or two weeks ago, the cabinet made a decision that we cannot have – after a year – Israelis who are basically refugees in their own land,” the official said.
“So we added a formal war aim to bring our people back, to degrade Hezbollah’s power, to be able to push them back from the border, to destroy the infrastructure along the border, to change the balance of forces.”
“The most important thing that we did was to try to take out about half of the missile and rocket capabilities that he built up over the last 30 years with Iran and to take it out in a few hours. And we did,” the official said.
“I can’t tell you what will evolve, but I can tell you that this could be a pivot. We don’t seek a broader war. In fact, we seek not to have a broader war and Iran has to consider what it does now,” the official said.
Israel has intensified its strikes against Hezbollah in recent days in order to ensure that the terror group doesn’t set a precedent by having forced tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate their homes for such a long period of time, the official said.
He added that Israel now has momentum against Hezbollah and must keep acting forcefully in order to capitalize on recent gains.
While initial Israeli security assessments indicated that Nasrallah did not survive Friday’s strike, the senior official said it could take weeks for Israel to confirm his death.
“I think it’s too early to say, but, you know, it’s a question of time. Sometimes they hide the fact when we succeed,” the official told reporters.
“Certainly if he’s alive, you’ll know it very immediately. If he’s dead, it may take some time,” he added.
Asked whether Israel would now consider a ceasefire in Lebanon following Friday’s strike, the senior official was non-committal.
On Thursday, Israel shrugged off a US-led attempt to implement a 21-day ceasefire.
“We are further along than we were, but [Hezbollah] still [has] thousands of rockets,” the official said, adding that it would consider itself even closer if Nasrallah was killed in today’s strike. “But in war, when your guy is down, you keep moving.”
