FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
In Israel's most aggressive attack against Hezbollah since the November 2024 ceasefire, an IDF airstrike on Sunday killed Hezbollah's military commander, Ali Tabatabai, in the heart of Beirut.
Hezbollah confirmed Tabatabai's death in a statement on Sunday, saying "they [the mujahideen] will advance with strength and courage to overthrow all the projects of the Zionist enemy and its protector, America."
Four other Hezbollah terrorists were also killed in the attack, the terror group announced on Sunday evening.
Throughout the past year, the air force has been targeting dozens of Hezbollah operatives every week who attempted to sneak into southern Lebanon or were acting to rebuild its missile threat against Israel.
However, these attacks were almost always against lower-ranking terrorists who were “in action,” not against the top military commander who was nowhere near the front line but was more indirectly responsible as Hezbollah’s military brain.
Also, the IDF has rarely attacked Beirut since the ceasefire and not for months.
At press time, there was no sign that Hezbollah would launch an immediate major counterattack on Israel.
However, Israel is concerned that Hezbollah could counterattack in the short to medium term, and the Lebanese terror group retains tens of thousands of rockets and mortars from its pre-war arsenal of 150,000 rockets.
This means that Hezbollah is likely to fire dozens to several hundred rockets a day into Israel, particularly into the northern third of the country, including Haifa, if it chooses to do so.
IDF sources, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz explained that they targeted Tabatabaei because less aggressive measures over the past year had failed to prevent Hezbollah from continuing its rearmament process to threaten Israel.
Furthermore, although IDF officials gave the Lebanese army considerable credit for suppressing Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in early 2025, as the year drew to a close, they found that the army failed to achieve any significant disarmament of the terrorist organization beyond southern Lebanon.
Senior IDF officials are concerned that if they do not draw a line now against Hezbollah's rearmament, the Lebanese terror group will achieve the same massive missile arsenal it had before the war, which is exactly what happened after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when Hezbollah broke the rules by rearming and Israel did not intervene.
Israeli officials indicated that they had no plans to escalate the situation further against Hezbollah, provided Hezbollah did not react. However, given Tabatabai's high rank, it is difficult to imagine that Hezbollah would not react at all, instead waiting for a more opportune moment.
Although Tabatabai was Hezbollah's military chief, he had only held that rank since late 2024.
Until July 2024, for many years, Hezbollah's military chief had been Fuad Shukr.
The Israeli Air Force killed him in July 2024 in response to Hezbollah rockets that killed about a dozen Israeli Druze in Majdal Shams.
In September 2024, the Iranian Air Force also killed Ibrahim Aqil, who was Hezbollah's next highest-ranking military official.
After his departure, and after Hezbollah's decades-long leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was also killed by airstrikes around the same time period, Tabatabai emerged as the next military chief.
Naim Qassem remains Hezbollah's leader, having replaced Nasrallah (after Hashem Saffiedine was also assassinated within days by Nasrallah), but is considered to have less military experience than his predecessor.
The IDF attack on Tabatabai followed a number of Saturday attacks on Hezbollah rocket launchers and military bases in southern Lebanon.
“The IDF struck several Hezbollah launchers that were recently identified and deployed at military sites in southern Lebanon,” the army said on Saturday. “In an additional strike in the Bekaa area, the IDF struck two Hezbollah military sites in which terrorist activity was identified, including weapons storage facilities and other military structures.”
Lini një Përgjigje