Hezbollah's late leader Hassan Nasrallah himself threatened that it would attack ammonium nitrate storage in Haifa that would kill tens of thousands; Israel's Dimona nuclear facilities intended to cause massive radiation poisoning, and said several times that its missiles could reach all of Israel down to Eilat. Any war with Israel that involved Iran and Hezbollah, Nasrallah said, would end in Israel being wiped out.
Nasrallah reiterated these threats in August 2023:
I say to this enemy, if you go to war against Lebanon, you also will be returned to the Stone Age. Your civilian airports, military airports, air force bases, power plants, the water [desalination] plants, central communication centers, refineries and the reactor in Dimona… Can the enemy calculate how many precise missiles Hezbollah needs to hit all those targets…? Even if you activate the Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Patriots and intercept some of the missiles, [will you know] how many such missiles are necessary?
Even discounting that rhetoric, Western experts also expected that Hezbollah's tenfold increase in rockets and missiles since the 2006 war and increased military capabilities would cause massive casualties and damage in Israel as The Atlantic Council analysis in 2020 said, "On Israel's side, one can expect unprecedented damage to the home front, heavy tolls in blood and treasure, and a predictable political crisis following the national trauma" from a war with Hezbollah.
Nothing like that happened. And it is because of Israel's brilliance in intelligence, its unprecedented effectiveness in wiping out all of Hezbollah's leadership no matter where they hid, and destroying its command and communications structure.
As a Jerusalem Post analysis says,
Major A. (29), head of the C2 section at the IDF Air Force’s operational headquarters, provided rare insights into the IDF’s efforts to disrupt Hezbollah. These operations thwarted massive rocket barrages aimed at Israeli civilians and disrupted coordinated attacks on IDF ground troops.“An organization like Hezbollah is comparable to a human body,” Major A., a combat navigator, explained. “It has a brain—senior commanders—and nerves for communication. Our mission in the C2 division is to disrupt this network. We targeted everything from Nasrallah to mid-level commanders.”The Air Force’s C2 division is responsible for intelligence collection, planning, and precision strikes on Hezbollah’s leadership and operational units.One operation, “Blind Spot,” targeted Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in late September, disrupting its ability to manage activities. Subsequent strikes, such as “Moonlight,” targeted underground command centers thought invulnerable, severely impacting Hezbollah’s operational continuity.“We achieved significant breakthroughs by targeting underground assets and leadership structures,” Major A. said. “This severely diminished Hezbollah’s ability to coordinate against our operations.”The strikes also undermined Hezbollah's morale. “They couldn’t execute large-scale operations, and their leaders were being eliminated,” Officer G., a C2 planning officer, explained. “Our operations left a lasting impact on their capabilities and morale.”As IDF ground forces advanced, Hezbollah struggled to regroup or organize large-scale attacks due to the loss of command centers and leaders. “We impaired Hezbollah’s ability to function as a military force,” the C2 commander said. “Local units were left to fend for themselves.”Reflecting on the operations, Officer G. noted: “After the first wave of strikes, Hezbollah operatives avoided communication devices for fear of being tracked. This chaos rendered them unable to coordinate, further fracturing their organization.”
Nobody predicted that the IDF would, or could, do what it did. Taking out both the enemy's entire leadership and its control systems that had been specifically built to survive any attack is unprecedented.
Hezbollah's promises of a massive attack on Israel in case of another war simply could not happen because Israel crippled Hezbollah in ways that it could not recover from while fighting. Certainly communities in the North suffered greatly, but when the war escalated in September, Hezbollah's capabilities were severelydeminished.
Which makes Hezbollah's current leader Naim Qassem's claim that Hezbollah won the war so comical. Unlike 2006, this is not a draw: Israel did damage to Hezbollah that no one thought was possible, with minimal civilian casualties considering Hezbollah's use of human shields.
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