Hezbollah

How Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah and crippled the terror group on its border

The plan had been years in the making, the target one of the most famous figures in the Arab world, and one of the most hated in Israel.

In the 11 days before it was implemented, Israel had conducted a military campaign of metronomic efficiency in Lebanon, each phase meticulously and ruthlessly executed, each blow delivered as Hezbollah was still staggering from the one that preceded it.

But then, at dusk on Friday, came the heaviest blow of them all — one that may forever cripple Hezbollah, weaken Iranian influence and potentially even reshape the Middle East itself.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", "Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

IDF confirms Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah killed in Beirut attack

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was killed in the IDF’s strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut on Friday, the IDF announced Saturday morning.

Almost 32 years after co-founding the Lebanese terrorist organization, Nasrallah was killed, alongside Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s commander of the southern front, and other Hezbollah commanders.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

What will replace Hezbollah?

In the summer of 2019, I took one of Beirut’s vintage Mercedes taxis to the city’s southern suburbs. I was in Dahieh to meet Lokman Slim, a prominent Lebanese researcher and fierce critic of Hezbollah. Slim, together with his German-born wife, lived and worked in a villa right under the group’s nose. I, like many locals, wondered how Slim was tolerated amid Dahieh’s rows of dense beige apartment blocks, less than a mile away from the infamous auditorium where Hezbollah broadcasts Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches to the world.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah

Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon has strangled a nation ravaged by chaos and in-fighting

Lebanon was once so accustomed to the sounds of war that its parrots learned how to imitate the whistle of incoming shells.

An African Grey called Coco, which inhabited the lobby of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, was so good at making the noise that unwitting guests would fling themselves under tables to take cover.

Lebanon’s civil war ended 34 years ago and with it the days when the Commodore’s deadpan receptionist asked new arrivals if they preferred a room “on the car bomb side or the rocket side” of the hotel.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

Joly says about 45,000 Canadians in Lebanon; she’s concerned about Hezbollah pager explosions

Joly says about 45,000 Canadians in Lebanon; she’s concerned about pager explosions

OTTAWA – Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says close to 45,000 Canadians are in Lebanon, months after warning there is no guarantee Ottawa can evacuate them if the situation deteriorates further.

She is also expressing concern that attacks like exploding pagers are only making the situation worse.

I wonder how many of those so called “Canadians” are Hezbollah members?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Hezbollah, Lebanon, WTF?

After humiliating pager attack, what is Hezbollah’s next move?

For decades Lebanon’s Hezbollah had cultivated the aura of a formidable, tech-savvy guerrilla force.

There was the time they hacked an Israeli surveillance drone, giving them advance warning of a special forces operation they then ambushed. Or when they sent their own surveillance drones over Israel, bypassing aerial defences and taking footage of some of the country’s most sensitive sites.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

How Israel Killed a Ghost

Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr lived a life so secret few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war

BEIRUT—Fuad Shukr had eluded the U.S. for four decades, ever since a bombing killed 241 American servicemen in a Marine barracks in the Lebanese capital, which it says he helped plan. At the end of July, an Israeli airstrike found him on the seventh floor of a residential building not far away.

The militant was one of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah’s founders and most senior operatives, a longtime trusted friend of the leader Hassan Nasrallah who played a key role in developing the missile arsenal that has made Hezbollah the world’s best-armed nonstate militia. For the past 10 months, he had commanded the group’s increasingly intense cross-border skirmishing with Israel.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

Gaza War: Only the Harbinger of a Bigger War to Come

Hezbollah, the terror group made up of Lebanese Shi’a, is a far more formidable fighting force than is Hamas. It has a vast armory of 160,000 rockets and missiles, many of them precision-guided, supplied by Iran, as compared to fewer than 10,000 much cruder rockets now possessed by Hamas after five months of war. Hamas had 30,000 troops on October 6, before the Gaza war began, and now has about 15,000 fighters still alive, with many of them having been wounded. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has at least 100,000 well-trained and well-armed troops, thanks to the backing, in weapons and money, that it receives from its indispensable ally, Iran. And it is Hezbollah’s constant bombing of the Galilee in northern Israel that has forced more than 96,000 Israelis in the north to be displaced, having had to move out of their homes near the northern border with Lebanon for their own safety, in light of constant Hezbollah bombardments. Most generals in the IDF, and the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, believe that war with Hezbollah is inevitable; the only question is whether it will start while the Gaza War is still on or will Israel, when that war with Hezbollah comes, be able to concentrate all its efforts on its enemy to the north. Even now, Israelis worried about Hezbollah damaging Israel’s electricity grid have been buying generators in anticipation of what will come.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah

German police raid suspected pro-Hezbollah Islamist groups

German authorities conducted nationwide searches of 54 locations across seven federal states connected to the Islamic Center of Hamburg (IZH) on Thursday morning, the Interior Ministry said.

In a statement, the ministry said the IZH was suspected of “acting against constitutional order” and of “supporting [the] terror organization Hezbollah.”

No arrests were made during the raids, which were carried out to secure evidence on the suspicion that the Hamburg center and affiliated groups back the activities of Hezbollah.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah

Hezbollah is staying out of the Gaza war — for now

Nasrallah’s speech has only delayed a regional catastrophe

After a week of tense anticipation, in which the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah had trailed short promo clips of their leader Syed Hassan Nasrallah like a Marvel supervillain, his long-awaited speech today came as an unexpected piece of good fortune for Israel. PR stunts such as the mutual pledging of eternal solidarity between Hezbollah and Palestinian fighters — as well as the escalation of cross-border shelling deeper into both Israel and Lebanon — had hinted that Nasrallah might be ready to announce Hezbollah’s entry into the conflict. Such a statement would have practically ensured a regional war.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah

What is Hezbollah? The group backing Hamas in war against Israel

In the hills of northern Israel, a tank emerged from its hiding place beneath the pines, leaving the musk of churned earth hanging in the air.

Here on the border with Lebanon a conflict is brewing, one that the West is so desperate to avoid that President Biden has sent two US aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean.

Hezbollah, the well-organised Shia militia based in southern Lebanon, is under pressure from Iran to join the war that Hamas, the Sunni militia based in Gaza, initiated when it broke out of the territory to butcher Israeli civilians two weeks ago.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

U.S. and Israel Focus on Hezbollah’s Next Move After Hamas Attack

U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies are working to determine whether Israel’s expected ground offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip could prompt Hezbollah to launch a large-scale military campaign against Israel from Lebanon, American and Israeli officials said.

American officials said they believe the deployment of two carrier strike groups, each of which consists of an aircraft carrier, its planes and several escort warships, has — for now — appeared to deter Hezbollah from attacking Israel in a major way. Israel has also reinforced its northern border after the attack on Hamas on Oct. 7, in which 1,400 people were killed.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Hezbollah

Hizbollah stages show of strength as stark warning to Israel

The militia welcomed its VIPs and journalists with a fanfare from its band.

But the atmosphere quickly changed when their fighters started jumping through hoops of fire, shooting off the back of motorbikes and roundhouse-kicking terracotta pots to pieces.

On the hillside backdrop, Israeli flags were blown up and explosions boomed across the mountain filling the air with dust and smoke, as they simulated storming a settlement.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah, Israeli - Islam Conflict