This is what everyone expects.
Last night, Israel started the limited ground invasion of Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Interestingly, Hezbollah denies this is happening.
So why haven't there been thousands of rockets from Hezbollah into Israel since Nasrallah was killed?
There have been dozens of rockets to the north, as had been the case every day for months. And Hezbollah sent a few medium range rockets to the center of Israel. But the expected attack of swamping Iron Dome with hundreds or thousands of rockets has not happened yet.
Maybe the IDF has caused far more damage to Hezbollah's weapons inventory than we knew.
Yesterday, Israel destroyed a large cache of surface to air missile launchers near Beirut's airport.
כחלק מגלי התקיפה הנרחבים בלבנון, בתקיפה מדויקת של חיל האוויר, מטוסי קרב תקפו תשתית משגרי טילי קרקע-אוויר שהוצבה בסמוך לנמל התעופה הבינלאומי של ביירות תשתית זו, כמו תשתיות נוספות של מערך ההגנה האווירית של חיזבאללה>> pic.twitter.com/S1Uq7AzcYl
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) September 30, 2024
Or maybe Hezbollah does not have as many missiles at experts have assumed for years.
Or maybe Israel destroyed Hezbollah's command structure, and the communications infrastructure, so thoroughly that a response cannot be panned or coordinated.
Or maybe Hezbollah is still holding back, for some reason, knowing that a major attack would be met with an even more major response. Meaning - Israel has re-established deterrence.
Honor would demand that Hezbollah hit back hard after Nasrallah's death. People who respect or idolize Hezbollah are seeing this lack of response and it is affecting them. More and more of them are almost certainly becoming spies for Israel.
We don't know how much we don't know. But it seems apparent that the IDF and Israeli government know exactly what Hezbollah can do to respond to Nasrallah's assassination, and they included that in their calculus of whether it was worth attacking.
So far, it looks like it is Hezbollah that is the paper tiger.
