BEIRUT: Coming just days after Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah warned Israel of his party’s military strength, the Israeli airstrike Sunday against a convoy of senior Hezbollah and Iranian officers in the Golan Heights was unusually provocative.
The brazenness of the airstrike, in which Hezbollah field commander Mohammad Issa and Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of slain military leader Imad Mughniyeh, were killed along with four other Hezbollah cadres, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general and reportedly several other Iranians, leaves Hezbollah little choice but to mount a retaliation. Still, Hezbollah’s leadership must tread a very fine line in delivering a response that is sufficiently strong to signal the party’s displeasure and possibly deter Israel from a repetition but not to the extent that the party and Israel lead each other into an escalation that results in a war that neither currently seeks.
Contrary to widespread reports that it was a helicopter that carried out the attack, international security sources told The Daily Star that the Hezbollah convoy was targeted by a pair of missile-firing pilotless drones instead. The drones crossed the United Nations line of separation shortly before midday Sunday before returning to the Israeli side nine minutes later having carried out the attack.
Israel has officially stayed quiet on the airstrike, leaving it unclear why the attack was carried out at this time, particularly in light of heightened rhetoric over the past two weeks emanating from both sides. Some have linked it to the Israeli electoral campaign, an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bolster his security credentials.
But the elections are not for another two months and if all remains calm along Israel’s north border, the electorate will have forgotten this little display of resolve by the time they head for the polls. If, on the other hand, it triggers a war, Netanyahu will face the wrath of the Israeli public as Hezbollah’s ballistic missiles smash into Tel Aviv.
The claim that it was a helicopter that carried out the attack appears based on comments from an Israeli security source widely quoted Sunday by Agence France Presse as saying the strike was intended to thwart an attack against the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan.
Israel has in the past directed fire at suspected militants approaching the separation fence. But Issa and Mohammad Ali Allahdadi were not on the way to plant bombs beside the fence or launch Grad rockets at Israeli settlements. They were senior commanders, which makes this airstrike less of a pre-emptive raid to prevent an attack and more like a carefully planned targeted assassination in the full knowledge that it would likely provoke a retaliation from Hezbollah.
It is also debatable that the group was putting in place the nucleus of a future resistance campaign against the adjacent Israeli-occupied territory.
The Golan has witnessed a fierce struggle in the past four months between the Syrian regime and rebel forces, the latter having gained some ground in the Qunaitra province. Mounting a new and sustained resistance campaign against Israeli occupation would be a luxury neither Hezbollah nor the Assad regime can afford at present.
Nevertheless, whatever the Israeli motive for the airstrike, the deed is done and now the ball is in Hezbollah’s court.
The obvious means of retaliation are staging roadside bomb ambushes or anti-tank missile strikes anonymously from the Golan or openly in the Shebaa Farms.
Hezbollah and its allies staged four attacks in the Farms and the Golan almost a year ago in response to Israel’s airstrike against a facility near Janta in the eastern Bekaa used for the transfer of weapons from Syria. Hezbollah carried out another attack in the Shebaa Farms in October in retaliation for the death of a technician who was killed while dismantling a booby-trapped tapping device on a communications cable in Adloun.
But for such an act of retaliation this time around to carry weight commensurate with the loss of the senior cadres, Hezbollah cannot settle for wounding Israeli soldiers (as in the previous reprisals) but will have to inflict fatalities. Depending on the number of dead soldiers, Israel will then have to calibrate the strength of its counterretaliation.
Perhaps, instead, Hezbollah this time will choose a less orthodox manner of retaliation to send the requisite message to Israel.
Hezbollah possesses the technological and military means to inflict various degrees of pain openly or deniably. Could it make use of its fleet of weaponized pilotless drones to strike a military target inside Israel, a suitable tit-for-tat for Israel’s raid?
How about targeting an Israeli naval vessel with one of its anti-ship cruise missiles? Could Hezbollah’s amphibious warfare unit slip silently into the Israeli naval base in Haifa to attach limpet mines to ships? Apparently, they tried it once before.
Alternatively, Nasrallah has referred lately to his fighters invading Galilee in the event of another war. Could a small team infiltrate Israeli territory to conduct a sabotage operation against a military target a few kilometers south of the border? All highly speculative, of course, but if Hezbollah is to deter Israel from repeating its assassinations of top commanders in Syria or elsewhere, it may require some creativity in selecting an effective response.
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