Hezbollah fighters. (Photo: YaLibnan)
Marwa Osman
AHTribune
“Netanyahu crawled to Moscow to beg Putin because he fears the defeat of ISIS, since a victory over ISIS would signal a failure for him and victory for the axis of the resistance”. ~ Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance Hezbollah, 15th of March 2017.
You walk across the border line between Occupied Palestine and Lebanon and everything seems quiet and serene, but that tranquility hides a lot of silent buzzing. In fact, the Israeli entity has been working openly and secretly in the land and the sea in preparation for a new Lebanon war and have been acting recently towards that objective.
Israeli war companies have begun testing sea-based drones to patrol regional waters and rain down high-powered missiles against land and naval targets. On March 9, Sputnik reported that the Israeli entity’s Navy had conducted its first testing of a Spike missile from an unmanned surface vehicle. While unmanned aerial vehicles have been increasingly represented across military portfolios, Israel is working now on an unmanned remotely-operated surface vehicle in those Spike missiles.
The heightened Israeli rhetoric soared after the constant Israeli aggression against Lebanese land and airspace urged Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance Hezbollah to warn them that any attack on Lebanese soil will result in a counter attack on new targets within the Palestinian occupied territories including a huge ammonia storage tank in Haifa, and a nuclear reactor in Dimona.
As such, recent op-ed in Haaretz concluded that Hezbollah is Israel’s “real threat.”
Hezbollah’s capability comprises “the greatest challenge facing the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] and its commander,” Moshe Arens writes.
Israel claims that Hezbollah has the capacity to fire 1,500 rockets into occupied Palestinian territories each day, overwhelming Israel’s missile defense systems.
The resistance’s advanced weapons and the systems needed to launch them reportedly are embedded across a staggering 10,000 locations.
As such, Israeli war analysts keep blaming their consecutive governments for “allowing” Hezbollah’s capability to grow to this point, but now that it’s here they believe it to be the greatest challenge facing the IOF (Israeli Occupying Forces) and its commander.
Thus everyone is now preparing for the next big thing: Hezbollah and Israel are headed for war. This notion remained a matter of question until the recent escalations involving an Israeli strike inside Syria reportedly targeted a weapons shipment meant for Hezbollah. Though the desert of Palmyra would be the last route used by the resistance to transfer weaponry and though the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) issued a statement explaining that it was an SAA base that was hit, Israeli officials still insist they targeted a Hezbollah shipment.
This blatant attack by the Israeli entity prompted a long awaited response by the SAA which launched three SA-5 (S-200) surface-to-air missiles, shooting down one of the Israeli jets over occupied Palestinian land and damaging another. Israel remained discreet on the incident and emphasized that no jet was damaged. However, the conflagration was noteworthy enough for several Israeli newspapers to describe it as “the most serious incident” to occur between Israel and Syria in recent years.
As a result for the past couple of weeks, Israel has been intensifying it rhetoric and gearing up for their next battle with Hezbollah resistance forces by conducting multiple drills on several fronts.
It’s a mission the Israeli occupying forces has focused on intensely in the decade since it fought an inconclusive month-long war with the resistance and frantically bombed Lebanon causing more than 2000 civilian deaths.
Despite its military superiority and the immense amount of air raids it conducted, Israel still cannot fathom the thought that it ended the month long war with a crushing defeat. An Isreali commission of inquiry even found the military to be inadequately prepared for the battle, which broke out after Hezbollah carried out a surprise cross-border mission and captured two Israeli soldiers, and many troops acknowledged that they had underestimated Hezbollah’s capabilities.
Those same capabilities have grown massively after the intervention of Hezbollah in the war against terror inside Syria upon the request of their ally President Bashar Assad.
Although Hezbollah appears to be in no rush to engage in battle against Israel, the resistance group has gained valuable battle experience that has vastly worried Israel, which keeps nagging that Hezbollah has significantly built up its weapons stockpile since 2006 and upgraded its arsenal to more than 150,000 missiles, including longer range and guided systems capable of striking anywhere in Israeli held territories in occupied Palestine.
Israel has been, for the past 6 years, continually attacking Syria, at times killing Syrian civilians and Hezbollah commanders even though they’re not attacking Israel. At a time when Israel truly believed that the resistance doesn’t dare bomb Israeli weapons depots or go after Israeli military figures and that Hezbollah and the SAA are well and truly deterred, the precise S-200 reply hit hard inside the Israeli government’s decision making corridors. Israel kept rubbing its nose in what it imagined was the weaknesses of its enemies. Presently, it knows well it will be faced with a map changing battle.
Now there is no doubt that the “inevitable” next war will begin. The only question remaining now is: Who will strike first?
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READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files
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