Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon
An Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens more, Lebanese health officials said. It was the first such Israeli attack on Lebanon’s capital in months and came shortly after Hezbollah pounded northern Israel with 140 rockets.
The Israeli military said its airstrike killed Ibrahim Akil, a senior Hezbollah military official. There was no immediate confirmation of his death from Hezbollah.
Akil (often spelled “Aqil”) wasn’t just a top Hezbollah officer – although he was indeed that – he was also wanted for this:
Israel killed a top Hezbollah figure who was wanted by the U.S. for his role in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and a Marine Corps barracks that killed 300 people, the Israeli military confirmed Friday.
Hezbollah’s operations commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was the subject of a $7 million State Department reward for information leading to his arrest.
The Israeli military said it had killed Aqil and as many as 10 other senior commanders of the movement’s Radwan special forces unit. Twelve people were reported dead and 66 injured in the attack, Lebanese officials said.
“The Hezbollah commanders we eliminated today had been planning their ‘October 7th’ on the Northern border for years,” Israeli army chief General Herzi Halevi said in a reference to the 2023 Hamas rampage that killed 1,200 Israelis.
“We reached them, and we will reach anyone who threatens the security of Israel’s citizens,” Halevi said.
Seems they mean what they say. Then again, it’s probably more difficult to deter Islamic terrorists – who strongly believe they’ll go immediately to paradise – with fear of death than it is to deter those who don’t have that belief system.
More:
Aqil also oversaw the abductions of American and German hostages in Lebanon, the State Department said last year. The department named Aqil a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” in 2019.
That’s back when Trump was president. But I doubt the Biden administration – whoever’s in charge these days – would be particularly interested in saving Aqil’s life, either.
There’s also the fact that US negotiators may have finally caught on to something that’s been apparent for a long time, which is that a ceasefire is a pipe dream:
After months of public optimism about the prospects of a ceasefire, Biden administration officials have soured on the prospects of an end to the war between Israel and Hamas.
“We aren’t any closer to that now than we were even a week ago,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby admitted to reporters on Wednesday. He called the prospects of a completed deal “daunting.” …
For Biden, a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who ran on his diplomacy chops, failure to secure a deal would be a blow to his legacy. It would mean a presidency bookended by a chaotic pullout from Afghanistan at the start and the false hope that peace — and the return of some 250 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 — was just around the corner after the outbreak of war in the Middle East.
Biden’s pre-presidency “diplomacy chops” consisted of lots of experience and mostly bad decisions over many years prior to his bad decisions as president. At least you can say that he’s been consistent in that. Then again, we really don’t know how much he was involved in the foreign policy of his own administration, but I think that until recently he was at least somewhat involved.
The pager attack was the intro to broader war with Hezbollah.
Bob Gates pretty much took care of Biden’s reputation as a foreign policy expert. “Wrong on every decision.”
Does this mean our Israeli allies knew where Akil was all along?
gallchobhair:
I don’t get the impression he was in hiding. But the decision has to be made to kill him before it can be done. There are probably many such terrorists who could have been taken out but were not, because it would have been considered an escalation. That’s my guess, anyway.
He was hiding in damascus, or some place like that where mugniyeh had been hit in 2008 supposedly syrian intelligence gave him up then. However why did it take 40 years to hunt him down
Imagine if we waited till 2041 to take out bin laden
Looks like Israel is serious now about its security, taking on Mama’s, and now striking big blows against Hezbolla. Good for them, and many more successes.
“it’s probably more difficult to deter Islamic terrorists – who strongly believe they’ll go immediately to paradise – with fear of death than it is to deter those who don’t have that belief system. neo
That belief system declares that Allah in the ‘sacred’ Qur’an has proclaimed that a Muslim, who at the time of their death is in an ‘unclean’ state cannot enter ‘paradise’. Any contact with any part of a pig instantly renders a Muslim unclean. Bullets fired from a gun that has been cleaned with gun oil that contains a percentage of clarified pig fat fulfils the means to render wounded and slain jihadists unclean.
Remove the incentive by using their own beliefs against them.
There is precedent. In the Philippines during the Spanish/American war, rendering fanatical jihadists unclean through being buried with dead pigs proved highly effective.
The brutal reality Israel faces is illustrated by the fact that if Israel managed to kill every current member of Hamas and Hezbollah, if Iran’s entire leadership was killed… Islam would simply regroup and raise up another crop of new young ‘martyrs’.
Proven by the fact that Israel is being attacked by the grandsons and great grandsons of the Muslims who attacked Israel in 1948.
In the past 75 years, the only time Israel won a truly decisive offensive victory was in the 1967 Six-Day war. In every other conflict Israel has fought defensively. The fall of Constantinople after centuries of Muslim attacks demonstrates the ultimate outcome when consistently fighting defensively.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Too bad we have an administration on the other side and thats being charitable
In 73 they were caught off guard despite some info from the likes of angleton perhaps the only pro israeli operative in the company they stumbled into lebanon in 82 similar with hamas in 09 and 2014 and 2021