Wednesday, August 7, 2024

A preemptive strike on Iran and Hezbollah - the strategic vs the tactical - analysis

There is non-stop talk of Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran and on Hezbollah, given that Jerusalem has been waiting since the July 31 killings of Hezbollah’s military chief and Hamas’s political chief (while he was in Tehran) for an expected massive retaliation from Lebanon and from the Islamic Republic.

As time has dragged on and the certainty of retaliation also grows, more and more analysts have asked why Israel should wait to be hit with unprecedented power from these two enemy states if it can instead hit them first and reduce the effectiveness of the expected attacks.

With rife speculation about what preemptive strikes might look like, The Jerusalem Post dug into the issue and found that a variety of factors must be treated differently in the IDF’s thinking, rather than be lumped together.


First, there is much more IDF support for preemptively striking Hezbollah than for preemptively striking Iran.

Many IDF officials have wanted to strike Hezbollah since October 11, and Lebanon is a much smaller and closer territory, and one that the IDF can relatively easily enter with ground forces simultaneously with a massive air attack. READ MORE