BEIRUT: While Lebanon and Israel await Hezbollah’s response to Sunday’s deadly Israeli drone strike in the Golan Heights, the motive for the provocative attack, which could yet trigger further violence, remains shrouded in confusion.
The continued silence from the Israeli government and military over the airstrike combined with some ambiguous comments in the media from Israeli security sources have only added to the puzzlement and drawn criticism in Israel.
On Tuesday, Reuters carried quotes from a “senior security source” who claimed that Israel was unaware that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi was on board the two-vehicle convoy that was targeted by a pair of drones, reportedly killing at least nine people including the Iranian officer.
Mohammed Issa, a top Hezbollah commander, was also killed along with Jihad Mughniyeh, son of assassinated former Hezbollah military leader Imad Mughniyeh.
“We did not expect the outcome in terms of the stature of those killed – certainly not the Iranian general,” the source told Reuters. “We thought we were hitting an enemy field unit that was on its way to carry out an attack on us at the frontier fence. We got the alert, we spotted the vehicle, identified it was an enemy vehicle and took the shot. We saw this as a limited tactical operation.”
This statement raises several questions. The source could be lying about not knowing the identity of the passengers in the convoy in an attempt to dissuade Hezbollah from responding too heavily.
But if that is the case, why would the Israelis engage in such a high-risk operation in the first place, knowing it would place tremendous pressure on Hezbollah to retaliate?
If the source is telling the truth, it raises further questions. Israeli troops have in the past opened fire at suspected militants approaching on foot the United Nation’s Alfa Line which marks the western perimeter of the Area of Separation between Israeli and Syrian forces.
But the two vehicles were struck close to the Bravo Line on the eastern edge of the separation area, specifically near a former U.N. Disengagement Observer Force position between Jubata al-Khashab and Khan Arnabeh. That places the convoy at least 4 kilometers from the Israeli fence, therefore nowhere near Israeli troops and not a visibly imminent threat.
If the Israelis believed that the Hezbollah personnel were about to attack the Israeli-occupied area of the Golan, they must have received solid prior intelligence to the extent that they were able to identify and locate the actual vehicles that were to convey the militants and leave enough time to deploy a pair of drones to the target location.
If the intelligence was that good, surely the Israelis would have known of the identity of at least some if not all the high-profile passengers on board the convoy. Furthermore, the fact that these senior personnel were in the vehicles at all effectively rules out the notion that they were about to launch an attack, a task left to more junior militants.
Any intelligence gathered could have been gleaned perhaps by communications interception from the Israeli army’s electronic listening posts in the Golan and on Mount Hermon or from human sources.
According to sources close to Hezbollah, the latter possibility is causing some internal unease with questions being raised as to whether an Israeli agent within the party’s ranks leaked to the Israelis the identity of the passengers in the vehicles.
It is unclear how seriously Hezbollah is taking the possibility of an internal leak or whether it is more illustrative of paranoia about penetration by Israeli intelligence agencies given recent exposures of spies within its ranks.
Still, to underline the unusual nature of Sunday’s airstrike, the last time Israel employed aircraft to assassinate a senior Hezbollah commander (outside of the 2006 War) was as long ago as February 2000 when four Apache helicopters bungled an attempt to kill Ibrahim Aql, a top resistance commander at the time, as he drove through the village of Barish in the south.
That attempt came in the context of the latter stages of Israel’s occupation of the south when Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters were in daily combat.
Sunday’s deadly drone attack also is difficult to place within the “rules of the game” that have in the past defined the limits of mutual aggression and reprisal between Hezbollah and Israel.
Between 2000, following Israel’s troop withdrawal from the south, and the outbreak of war in July 2006, both sides engaged in a calibrated game of one-upmanship along the Blue Line, needling each other with violence while attempting to keep it within limits to avoid an escalation.
Since the 2006 War, however, Hezbollah and Israel generally have avoided clashing directly, wary of another miscalculation that could lead to a more destructive conflict.
While Hezbollah has shown some signs of assertiveness in the past year with a pair of bomb ambushes in the Shebaa Farms and isolated attacks in the Golan, they have all been relatively low key and retaliatory in nature.
Israel in the past two years has struck arms consignments in Syria that were thought to be destined for Hezbollah but has avoided directly attacking Hezbollah personnel or facilities in Lebanon (last February’s air raid against a Hezbollah building near Janta perhaps being the exception that proves the rule).
That forbearance from both sides for over seven years is what makes Sunday’s attack in the Golan so curious.
Questions are being raised also in Israel as to the reasons for staging the attack and the comments made by the security source to Reuters.
“This leak to Reuters broke all the records for ludicrousness,” wrote commentator Ben Caspit in the Maariv daily. “Israel basically admitted that it had not intended to kill the Israeli general in the strike that it did not carry out.”
Yedioth Ahronoth’s Alex Fishman wrote that the “embarrassment” over killing an Iranian general “has turned into panic.”
“One official apologizes anonymously, the other official refuses to apologize anonymously,” he wrote.
“We are talking about a potential war and the heads of state are playing hide and seek.”
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