Israel takes the hammer to Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’

A view shows the damage at the site of the Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah on Friday in Beirut's southern suburbs. (Ahmad Al-Kerdi/Reuters)

Israel takes the hammer to Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’

Washington Post-Sept30th2024

Column by Ishaan Tharoor

More than 1,000 people in Lebanon, including at least 87 children, have been killed in Israeli strikes in the space of a week. A million people — close to a fifth of the country — have already been displaced from their homes. Parts of the southern suburbs of Beirut are vast craters of rubble and debris. Aid workers warn of yet another brewing humanitarian catastrophe in the region.

But for many Israeli strategists and Western policy elites, Lebanese suffering seems secondary to the dramatic tactical success of Israel’s ruthless campaign against Hezbollah — the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group and political faction that’s backed by Iran and designated as a terrorist organization in much of the West. Through a stunning series of attacks involving explosive devices in pagers and walkie-talkies, as well as mammoth U.S.-made bombs dropped from Israeli jets, Israel has managed to plunge Hezbollah into disarray and decapitate its leadership. That includes a huge Friday airstrike that killed Hasan Nasrallah, the group’s shadowy leader.

Nasrallah’s killing, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Saturday, “joins the sequence of recent actions echoing all over the Middle East and sends a clear message to those who acted against us and to those who are thinking of doing so now: Whoever starts a war against the state of Israel and tries to harm its citizens will pay a very heavy price.” The war, he added, “does not stop.”

On Sunday, more Israeli strikes rained down on Hezbollah targets in Beirut, Hamas targets in Gaza and on Yemen’s Houthis, who had fired ballistic missiles that set off warnings across central Israel. The three factions are, to varying degrees, part of a network of Iranian proxies arrayed across the Middle East — the “axis of resistance” that has consumed the attention of Israel’s security establishment and animated a generation of think-tankers in Washington.

Now, this Iranian-backed alliance is reeling. Hamas’s military capacity has been steadily degraded over the past year of ruinous war, while Israeli espionage appears to have penetrated deep into Iran, where the Jewish state appears to have been able to carry out the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse. Then, Israel ratcheted up its actions against Hezbollah, long Iran’s most powerful ally in the region and a permanent threat on Israel’s northern flank.