Hezbollah avenges its top commander with attacks on military base in Israel

The Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah on Sunday launched its promised response to the assassination of its top commander, Fuad Shukr, which came in the form of hundreds of rockets and drones against a military intelligence base near Tel Aviv, among other targets.

The retaliation included the launching of 340 projectiles against eleven different military installations to mislead anti-aircraft defenses and facilitate the passage of drones towards the main objective of the operation: the Israeli military intelligence base in Gilot, near Tel Aviv.

Specifically, unmanned aircraft They headed to the base of Israel’s main military intelligence departmentAman, and Unit 8,200, where they managed to make an impact, according to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a televised speech.

“We controlled our response in such a way that the target was not civilian or infrastructure belonging to the enemy, and so that the target was military and had a connection to the assassination operation” against Shukr, Nasrallah stressed during his speech.

Just an initial response

The Lebanese party said it would assess the effects of its response to the assassination of its top military commander, the highest-ranking casualty in ten months of clashes, who was hit by an Israeli bombing of the southern suburbs of Beirut on July 30.

“If the result is satisfactory and the intended objective has been achieved, We consider the response operation as finished“Hezbollah’s leader said this afternoon, helping to further calm fears that his revenge would unleash a spiral of cross-attacks and lead to open war.

The response came after 72 particularly intense hours of attacks by Israel, which had already anticipated that it would take place shortly after almost a month of delays.

Amid an intensification of its campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, The Jewish state killed seven of the group’s fighters in five targeted strikes on Friday. in a single day, which also ended with air strikes against targets linked to Syria.

In fact, just hours before Sunday’s response, more than a hundred Israeli fighter jets bombed several points in southern Lebanon, in what the Jewish State’s army described as preemptive strikes to thwart an action by Hezbollah that it already anticipated was “imminent.”

In doing so, it claimed to have destroyed thousands of shuttles targeting the north and center of its territory.

However, Nasrala argued that the campaign only targeted “empty” valleys and that “none of the platforms that were designated to launch projectiles were hit before the operation,” although two of them were attacked afterwards by Israeli forces.

Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health confirmed three casualties in two airstrikes in the southern areas of Al Tiri and Khiam, two of whom were Hezbollah and one of its Shiite ally Amal.

De-escalation efforts

The past nearly four weeks of waiting for a response to Shukr’s killing had already sparked intense international contacts to prevent further escalation, the suspension of a large number of flights to Beirut and calls from embassies for their citizens to leave Lebanon.

All of this was renewed on Sunday, with companies such as the Jordanian Royal Jordanian announcing new suspensions on their routes to the Lebanese capital and the cancellation of a series of flights mainly from cities in the region and its surroundings.

However, Lebanese Civil Aviation has assured that, despite this, operations continue normally at Rafic Hariri International Airport, the only one in the country.

Meanwhile, Contacts have been accelerated to try to contain the situation and calls for de-escalation, including from the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the United Nations office in the country.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati also confirmed during an emergency ministerial meeting that he was “holding a series of calls with friends of Lebanon to stop the escalation,” according to a government statement.

He also reaffirmed his support for the negotiations underway in Cairo to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, seen as the only way out of the violence in Lebanon and as the key to avoiding potential conflict which has been hovering over the Middle East for a month