Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada / September 30, 2024
In a televised address on Monday, Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Hizballah, said that the Lebanese resistance group was prepared for a long fight with Israel, which it would win.
This comes as Tel Aviv has informed the United States it is “planning a limited ground operation in Lebanon that could start imminently,” as reported by The Washington Post.
“We will not waver from our true and honourable positions,” Qassem said. “The Islamic resistance will continue to confront the Israeli enemy in support of Gaza and Palestine, while defending Lebanon and its people.”
Speaking three days after Israel’s assassination of Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, the group’s legendary leader of three decades, Qassem offered his condolences to the Lebanese people.
“We lost a brother, a beloved [comrade], a father, a commander,” Qassem said.
He added that Hizballah had the structures and processes in place to select a replacement for Nasrallah, and would do so as soon as possible.
“We know that the battle may be long, and the options are open before us,” Qassem said.
He asserted that Hizballah is “ready if Israel decides to enter by land” and “confident that the Israeli enemy will not achieve its goals and we will emerge victorious from this battle.”
Qassem stated that his organization had only deployed a fraction of its military capabilities.
“I would like to inform you that what we are doing now is the minimum, as part of our battle plan,” Qassem said.
Shaken confidence
Israel’s ability to wage the pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed dozens and injured thousands nearly two weeks ago, then to assassinate numerous senior Hizballah figures, and to follow with the apocalyptic attack that killed Nasrallah along with perhaps hundreds of civilians in Beirut’s Dahiya suburb, is being seen as a triumph by Israel and its backers.
This “shock and awe” campaign has left people in Lebanon and across the region dazed and demoralized.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby gloated on Sunday that Israel’s attack had “nearly decimated” Hizballah’s leadership and destroyed thousands of the group’s drones and missiles.
“There’s no question that the Hizballah of today is not the Hizballah that was even just a week ago,” Kirby told ABC News.
Washington, which provided the warplanes and bombs Israel used, welcomed the attack, with President Joe Biden praising it as a “measure of justice,” while making no mention of the Lebanese civilians vaporized in the multiple high-rise residential buildings destroyed by the Israeli bombing.
Meanwhile, Israel’s wide scale bombing campaign has killed more than 800 people over the last week, injured around 2,500 and displaced an estimated one million more from their homes across Lebanon – a humanitarian catastrophe.
While supporters of the resistance will welcome Qassem’s resolve, they will want to know if Hizballah can translate its vows of steadfastness into a convincing and effective military response to Israel’s barbaric attacks on civilians, a repeat of the atrocities it has been perpetrating against Palestinians in Gaza for a year.
Experts on Hizballah say that the group’s deep roots and resilience will carry it through an extremely difficult phase.
“It is difficult to quantify the magnitude of Nasrallah’s loss for Hizballah and the Axis [of Resistance] as a whole,” Amal Saad, an academic expert on Hizballah at Cardiff University, wrote on Twitter/X, on Monday. “However, this does not mean Hizballah is anywhere near the verge of collapse.”
She added: “To think the group would crumble without Nasrallah is a fundamental misreading, and a racist assumption that reduces Hizballah – a complex and deeply-rooted movement – to a single individual, reinforcing a stereotype that such groups in the Middle East rely on charismatic ‘strongmen’ rather than institutional strength, resilience or popular grassroots support.”
“It’s important to recall that Hizballah was born out of war and invasion, shaping it into an organization with built-in resilience. It’s designed to continually regenerate its leadership, producing new generations of military commanders,” according to Saad.
Veteran war correspondent and analyst Elijah J. Magnier offers more insights on the most pressing questions, in a wide-ranging interview with Rania Khalek on her BreakThrough News program Dispatches.
How did Israel kill Nasrallah? How much damage has Israel done to Hizballah? Is the resistance group capable of regrouping and fighting back? What will the war look like and will Iran get involved directly?
It’s a must-see, and you can watch it in the video above.
How did Israel manage to pull off the assassination of Nasrallah and other Hizballah leaders in spite of the organization’s near legendary operational security?
The short answer, as Magnier asserts, is that Hizballah’s engagement in the Syrian war a decade ago, to prevent US-backed al-Qaida and ISIS-linked groups from taking over Damascus, exposed the Lebanese resistance organization to a host of sophisticated surveillance methods from Israel and its allies.
In a recent article, the Financial Times has made similar claims, stating that, “The war in Syria also created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israel’s spies.”
Hizballah’s capacities are intact
As Israel escalates its bombing of Lebanon, Hizballah has continued to pound settlements and military bases in northern Israel with barrages of rockets. But the group’s more powerful weapons – a strategic deterrent it developed over years – seem to be nowhere in sight.
Does that mean that Hizballah has been effectively disarmed, leaving Lebanon defenseless and the so-called Axis of Resistance totally exposed before a resurgent, all-powerful US-backed Israel?
Has the military prowess that enabled Hizballah to defeat Israel in 2006 evaporated?
Magnier says it would be an enormous mistake for anyone, especially Israel, to believe that.
For all Israel’s tactical successes in the last two weeks, it has barely scratched Hizballah’s operational capabilities and arsenals.
Magnier asserts that if Israel has really dealt a death blow to Hizballah’s capabilities, then in the next few days, the Israeli military “will walk into Lebanon and then can occupy the area that it wants.”
But Magnier points out the Hizballah’s ground forces have not been engaged at any time since 7 October, and they remain formidable, even if they are only half of the 150,000 fighters that Hizballah claims.
Similarly, Hizballah’s naval unit is still intact, as are its long-range strategic missile units that can hit any part of Israel. These have yet to be used on any scale.
Only three of Hizballah’s missile units have been engaged, according to Magnier, two south of the Litani River and one north.
While Israel has managed to destroy some of Hizballah’s arsenal on the surface, “everything that’s under the ground is still intact.”
In Israel, Magnier says, they “feel the victory, and feeling the victory is deadly when the Israelis are not really estimating the strength of the enemy.”
“Hizballah has received a hit, that is true,” Magnier says. Hizballah “has failed in several small tactical battles, but the war has not started yet.”
“The strength of Hizballah has not come out yet,” he asserts.
Iran’s role
As for Iran, Magnier estimates that it will continue to provide full support to the resistance, but will not get directly involved, because to do so would be to admit that Hizballah is too weak.
Moreover, supporting the resistance from a distance gives Iran the freedom to act without triggering a full-scale direct war with Israel, and thus with the United States.
Whether Magnier’s predictions will bear out, time will tell. But he offers strong counterpoints to the triumphalist narrative that Israel has already won.
After all, Israel has not even won against the resistance in Gaza, a territory a fraction of the size of Lebanon.
Only one thing is certain: No matter how it fares against the resistance in Lebanon, Israel will continue its usual criminal strategy of deliberately targeting and massacring civilians – at least until it pays a price high enough to force it to stop.
Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada
