Israeli Peace through Strength!

JEFFREY OWENS

Dismantling Iran’s Axis of Resistance designed to checkmate Israel by surrounding it with militant Islamic militias dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state is essential not only for Israeli security but also for a chance at relative peace in the Middle East.

While the U.S. and many western governments have attempted to restrain Israel throughout the last fourteen months out of fear that Israeli actions would set off a wider war across the Middle East, Israel has aggressively pursued a peace through strength approach by unshackling itself from the pre-October 7 status quo and actively seeking a settlement on Israeli terms and to Israel’s advantage.

A sworn enemy of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran has for decades sought to safeguard itself from direct Israeli attacks by encircling it with its Axis of Resistance, a network of violent terrorist organizations.

These range from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Lebanese Hezbollah in Lebanon, The Lion’s Den in the West Bank, multiple Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. The conduit to arm and supply many of these groups, especially Hezbollah, ran through the “Shiite crescent” north of Israel, which included Iran’s soul state ally of Syria under the repressive Al-Assad regime.

Mounting criticism including international pressure to college campus takeovers have attempted to turn the blame for the war in Gaza and Lebanon on Israel. These protestors, knowingly or not, are promoting and endorsing an Iranian terror network, whose rank and file are filled with criminals, killers, rapists, and would-be suicide bombers; which is far more murderous than any Israeli offensive to dismantle it.

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Mainstream media is hardly an honest broker and has been no friend of Israel by swallowing Iranian propaganda hook-line-and-sinker. Iran will gladly fight to the last Gazan, the last Lebanese and the last Syrian, while absorbing no direct strikes itself and intentionally placing tens of thousands of civilians in harm’s way purely to turn world opinion against Israel.

Hamas is a perfect example of this deliberate strategy. Hamas constructed tunnels under civilian infrastructure and turned operating schools and hospitals into military bases, from where they fired on Israeli forces, intentionally drawing Israeli counter strikes.

The “Gazan Health Ministry” which is actually Hamas, openly does not differentiate between civilian and military casualties resulting from Israeli attacks. They greatly exaggerate death tolls, magically assess the number killed moments after a building is leveled and release all casualty statistics as “civilians.”

Assuming the reported number of roughly 45,000 fatalities in Gaza is accurate, the sheer level to which Hamas brigades have been dismantled over the previous fourteen months by Israel would indicate that a majority of those reported deaths were Hamas militants.

While many thousands of actual civilians have also been killed, nearly all should be attributed to Hamas, which both started the war and intentionally built its military fortifications within, around or under civilian infrastructure for the very purpose of maximizing civilian casualties.

Hamas, a terrorist organization with the destruction of Israel quite literally in its founding charter, was popularly elected to govern Gaza in 2007, but promptly implemented militant rule.

They canceled any future elections, embezzled billions of dollars of international humanitarian funds to construct a network of terror tunnels which rivals the London underground, imported and manufactured massive amounts of weapons and rockets for the purpose of murdering Israelis, and brainwashed its intentionally poverty-stricken population into service to its cause.

October 7, 2023 revealed the brutal terror tactics of Hamas and the very reality Israel would face from all fronts if it did not aggressively defend itself. In a well-coordinated division level attack, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm its counterair defenses while roughly four thousand terrorists stormed into Israel from land, sea and air with the determination of mass-murdering Israelis.

The attack was planned on a Jewish holiday with the intention of catching Israeli security forces and society off guard. Hamas militants deliberately recorded as much of their violence as possible purely for purposes of enjoyment and inflicting fear in the hearts of Israelis everywhere.

Civilians were burned alive, shot in the streets, and terrorists took over victims’ smart phones and social media apps to live stream their own murders to their contact lists.

Hundreds of women and girls were raped, some of whom were paraded in front of cameras with blood-soaked pants, while the broken bodies of murdered victims were literally dragged through the streets.

Hamas took 246 Israelis hostage at gun point, more than one hundred of whom, nearly fifteen months later remain in captivity, enduring inhuman living conditions while their families live on in anguish.

The horrors of October 7 was only the beginning of a war Iran sought to bring upon Israel through its Axis of Resistance.

By October 8, Hezbollah, deeply embedded in Lebanon on Israel’s northern border, began launching what would amount to be more than 8,000 rockets into Israel as part of a “unity of fronts” containment strategy of Iran. The logic off the Axis was to compel Israel into ending its offensive action in Gaza by continuously assaulting Israel across multiple fronts until they stopped their campaign.

For nearly a year after October 7, Israel’s public focus remained on Gaza. The Israeli Air Force destroyed a vast amount of Hamas’s command and control, killed thousands of its fighters and commanders, wiped out a majority of its weapons stocks and pummeled its tunnel system with ground penetrating bombs.

Meanwhile Israeli ground forces occupied much of Gaza and city-by-city, rooted out hundreds of Hamas strongholds, including killing its leader, Yahya Al-Sinwar on October 16, 2024 in Rafah.

Hamas however proved to be an incredibly difficult enemy to destroy, as Israel lacked the manpower to occupy and hold the entire enclave which was overwhelmingly urban with a dense population which Hamas was deeply embedded in.

Once Israeli ground forces cleared northern Gaza and began pushing south, small groups of Hamas fighters reinfiltrated northern Gaza, hunted down and executed civilians of suspected collaboration with Israel, robbed humanitarian supply convoys at gunpoint, and reoccupied previously cleared schools and hospitals from where they launched further attacks on Israeli soldiers.

Meanwhile, more than 70,000 Israeli civilians were displaced from their homes in northern Israel from the thousands of Hezbollah rockets fired in “support” of Hamas. Of the various forces involved in Iran’s Axis of Resistance, Hezbollah was by far most well-armed and feared, with an estimated 150,000 rockets in its arsenal, along with tens of thousands of fighters.

While Israel sought to protect its civilians from Hezbollah rocket attacks, it lacked the manpower to invade southern Lebanon while major offensive action was going on in Gaza. Additionally, Israel remained under intense international pressure to wind down the war against Hamas, and to not “provoke” a large-scale conflict with Hezbollah. The U.S. and other partners feared that such a fight would be unwinnable, and likely yield a regional war.

From October 8, 2023 through early September 2024, Israel and Hezbollah publicly engaged in a tit-for-tat campaign. Any significant Hezbollah strike on Israeli infrastructure would result in an Israeli counterstrike on a Hezbollah base or the assassination of a commander.

In late July when a Hezbollah rocket killed twelve Israeli children engaged in a soccer game in the Golan Heights, the Middle East braced for a serious escalation. Israel however responded with the targeted assassination of a major Hezbollah leader Faud Shukr, who was lured to his death by a cell phone call initiated by the Mossad, while an Israeli missile targeted his position.

The killing of Shukr revealed in part a considerable penetration of Hezbollah security by the Mossad. Shukr had evaded the U.S. for four decades following his direct involvement in the Marine Corps barrack bombing in Beirut which murdered 241 U.S. servicemen, by living a highly secretive life involving multiple plastic surgeries to change his appearance. The last known picture of him dated back to the 1980’s.

The situation was however unsustainable. The “ceasefire” crowd around the globe criticizing Israel, knowingly or not, advocated for a permanent continuation of the status quo. This includes Israel forever remaining surrounded by a network of hostile actors dedicated to its destruction and the populations in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran for that matter, indefinitely oppressed by militant Islamic organizations or regimes.

The only nation with the will or the way to break the cycle not only for themselves but also for the exploited populations under the heel of their enemies, was Israel.

Although peace is a wonderful concept, in the resolution of any conflict, both sides have to desire it. This concept is completely lost on anti-Israel protesters, many of whom live in an embarrassingly naive world, masquerading under such banners as “Queers for Palestine” when Hamas would burn alive any such person daring to show themselves in Gaza.

Israel faces a collective enemy which both started the war, and glorifies violence and death as the pinnacle of spiritual and moral achievement. Guided by a superior moral compass, Israel used ingenuity and decisive action, determined to undo Iran’s Axis of Resistance and create a peaceful solution on their terms.

Isolating Hamas in Gaza from the Axis of Resistance was essential to peace, but to do so, Israel had to neutralize Hezbollah. Part of Hamas’s “success” in completely catching Israeli military and intelligence off guard on October 7 was that Israel had greatly underestimated Hamas, believing that the group had settled into a governance role in Gaza and moved away from terrorism, while completely overestimating Hezbollah as a major military threat.

Over more than a decade of heavy involvement in the Syrian Civil War in support of Assad, while the Lebanese economy tanked, Hezbollah suffered significant losses and opened itself up to catastrophic levels of penetration by the Israeli Mossad. Seventy percent of the Lebanese population lived below the poverty level, and money is historically the primary recruitment tool for spies, of which Israel found plenty.

In the pre-October 7 days Israel accurately mapped nearly all of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenals and successfully penetrated their communication systems. To avoid detection by the Mossad most cell phone use was banned, as the movement of leaders could be tracked and conversations monitored. Hezbollah leadership turned to the use of low-tech pagers, which communications would be easily disseminated to thousands of members, but were not connected to the internet and couldn’t be hacked by Israel.

When Hezbollah contracted with Taiwanese company Gold Apollo for its pagers, Israel saw an opening by creating the Hungary based shell company BAC Consulting, for their manufacture. While BAC also serviced legitimate clients as part of their front, the pagers manufactured for Hezbollah were each implanted with a few ounces of explosives hidden within their components.

By the summer of 2022, the pagers and eventually walkie talkies, all manufactured by BAC began arriving in Lebanon, thousands of which were disseminated to its agents across all levels of the organization.

Anyone concerned about collateral damage from air strikes should celebrate Israel’s pager operation, as there are few more precise methods of attacking one’s enemies than placing an exploding device literally right in their hands. On Tuesday September 17, 2024 at 3:30 in the afternoon, thousands of Hezbollah pagers dinged as if their recipients had received a new message from its top leaders, but within seconds, each exploded.

By the end of the day a dozen operatives were dead and more than 2,700 wounded, with injuries ranging anywhere from some being left blinded, to fingers and hands blown off, to losing their genitalia from the pagers going off in pockets.

By the following day another twenty operatives were killed and many more injured as exploding walkie talkies blew their users off of bikes and scooters, and sent grown men into walls and through windows.

Panic ensued. Hezbollah leadership was forced to abandon nearly all forms of electronic communication, making coordinating any response to Israel nearly impossible, while a considerable number of their operatives were out of commission.

On September 20, Israel conducted a targeted strike on a senior level meeting in Dahieh neighborhood of Beirut, held in a bunker under a residential building. The attack wiped out nearly the entire command of Hezbollah’s Radwan unit, including the organization’s operations chief Ibrahim Aqil.

Three days later, Israel unleashed a brutal assault upon Hezbollah’s capabilities by launching 1,400 munitions against 1,300 targets and destroyed twenty years’ worth of stockpiled munitions including roughly 80% of it’s arsenal.

On September 27, Hezbollah’s long-time commander, Hassan Nasrallah’s location was discovered, and Israel launched a massive attack against his underground complex in Beirut, taking no chances of missing him. In just ten days, from pagers to precision missile strikes, Israel wiped out nearly the entire leadership structure and arsenal of Hezbollah.

By November 27, Hezbollah entered into a ceasefire with Israel including a sixty-day transition period as Hezbollah and Israel each withdrawal from southern Lebanon, whose security will be handed over to the Lebanese Armed Forces and the United Nations UNFIL organization.

Hezbollah believed themselves to have had the upper hand over Israel; holding Israel at bay with its massive arsenal of rockets as the Israelis were deeply entrenched in Gaza.

Hezbollah however unknowingly created its own demise by linking itself to Hamas. This decision not only drew Israel’s wrath in an existential war which Israel had no intention of losing, but also has now left Hamas isolated in Gaza, opening a path for their destruction, and with any hope, the recovery of the remaining hostages.

31-12-2024

Jeffrey Owens is the Author of the Victory in Europe: A People’s History of the Second World War. He is from Grove City, Ohio, United States. Jeffrey is the correspondent of Mahabahu.