Quando Nasrallah promette vendette, Israele dovrebbe credere alle sue parole
The Israeli defense establishment waited Monday, almost the entire day, for the speech by Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Since the aerial attack attributed to Israel, in which the arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar was killed near Damascus,
the media affiliated with Hezbollah have published announcements of
mourning and sympathy. Nasrallah, who started to speak Monday evening at
the scheduled time, made do with a general statement about the Druze
terorrist being “one of us,” and made a promise to extract revenge for
his death, at a time and place Hezbollah chose.
The
Hezbollah leader did not supply further details, and did not define the
guidelines for the planned operation. Will it be revenge of a scope
that could spark a new war with Israel? It is reasonable to assume not,
but it is better to take his statements seriously. In most cases, when
Nasrallah threatens Israel, in the end his organization provides a
response, even if it is carried out with limited force.
This
is the second time the northern front has heated up this year because
of a killing attributed to Israel. In the previous round, it happened in
January as a result of the slaying of Hezbollah militant Jihad Mughniyeh,
an Iranian general and five other militants in a bombing on the Syrian
side of the Golan Heights. At the time, Nasrallah avoided appearing in
public immediately, but his organization threatened to take revenge on
Israel – and carried out the threat days later in a missile ambush on the slopes of Har Dov in which an officer and soldier from the Givati Brigade were killed.
Kuntar
is not Mughniyeh. Despite the praise heaped at the moment by Hezbollah
on its dead hero, it seems Kuntar was not even operating under the
umbrella of Hezbollah over the last year. According to various sources,
the Shi’ite organization preferred to minimize its contacts with the
Druze terrorist a year ago, after the network he headed found it
difficult to deliver successful operations on the Golan.
Since
then, Kuntar has been operating under the direct sponsorship of the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria and Lebanon, through an Iranian
officer with the rank of colonel. In Israel, Kuntar has recently been
called a “ticking bomb,” based on the plans of the network he heads. If
he was killed by Israel, it seems this is the basis for the decision.
At
the same time, Hezbollah is not avoiding being identified with Kuntar.
His release from an Israeli prison after 29 years, which came in the
2008 swap of prisoners and bodies after the Second Lebanon War, was
presented as a big achievement for Hezbollah, and was wildly celebrated
in Beirut.
Past
experience teaches that Hezbollah takes questions of honor and image
quite seriously in its balance of terror with Israel. That is why it is
hard to believe that the organization will completely avoid any military
response to the attack.It is doubtful if the firing of the rockets at the western Galilee on Sunday evening,
less than a day after Kuntar’s death, will end this chapter of revenge
for Hezbollah. The firing of the three rockets from a location south of
Tyre was announced as the responsibility of a pro-Syrian Palestinian
group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command, founded by Ahmed Jibril. Kuntar carried out his first terrorist
attack, in which a policeman and the father and 4-year-old daughter of
the Haran family were murdered in Nahariya in 1979, on behalf of the
Palestine Liberation Front, which split off from Jibril’s group. It is
possible that the rockets were a kind of sign of solidarity with the
slain veteran terrorist. It is still not clear if the rocket attacks was
even coordinated with Hezbollah.
The
response from Lebanon and Syria depends, it seems, chiefly on Iran.
Whether the revenge mission is assigned to Hezbollah or the remains of
Kuntar’s organization in the northern Golan Heights, it can be assumed
that the final decision will be made in Tehran. First of all, Kuntar was
their agent in the last few months of his life, and second, the
response depends on the complex fabric of Iranian interests in the
region: Iran’s relations with the Western powers based on the nuclear
agreement they signed in Vienna; the effort to keep the Assad regime
alive in Syria; and the contacts surrounding the election of a new
president in Lebanon. All these issues are more important to the
Iranians than the attack on Kuntar.
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