Posted on 03/19/2024 6:34:47 AM PDT by SJackson
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.
More on Israel’s war with Hezbollah that becomes more likely every day can be found here:
The few enquiring minds still left occasionally ask me what the most underreported stories of the current Israel-Hamas conflict are. I tend to reply that there are two.
The first is the issue of Israeli refugees. They are not called that inside Israel, where the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘internally displaced people’. But while the world rightly concerns itself with the internally displaced people inside Gaza, the lack of notice paid to this other story is strange.
There are 117,000 displaced Israelis in the south, where they have moved away from the border with Gaza, where Hamas still manages to send rockets hurtling toward Sderot and Ashdod and Ashkelon, while 96,000 have moved away from the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah regularly engages in tit-tor-tat exchanges of fire with the IDF. But these internally displaced Israelis are rarely mentioned in the foreign press which focuses solely on the “more than one million displaced civilians in Gaza.”
What we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish. The real showdown will be with Tehran….
The residents of the north are not so lucky. While Hamas may have been significantly degraded in Gaza (which you can also tell from the fact that what used to be daily sirens in Tel Aviv are now a monthly affair), Hezbollah’s arsenal of perhaps 160,000 rockets remains sitting on the Lebanon border. They are of a higher quality than Hamas’s rockets, longer range and far more deadly. If Hamas was Iran’s Ford Cortina, Hezbollah is its Lamborghini. And there is the question of when Iran wants to use them. It might use them any day, or it might be waiting until the regime in Tehran is on the brink of its long-sought-after nuclear bomb and can then use Hezbollah as a deterrent against any Israeli or American strike.
Which brings me to my second unreported fact. And I hope you’ve had your breakfast before digesting this.
I was on the Lebanon border 18 years ago, during the 2006 war with Israel. I well remember the shelling and the firing. Seeing the activity there in recent months (where it is much more heated than either side wants to admit) has persuaded me of something. The war in the Middle East has not yet begun. Or at least what we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish.
No country could cope with significant swaths of its population being permanently displaced from their homes. But what the world outside the region seems not to realise is that Gaza is a sideshow. The real showdown in the region will be with Tehran.
The war with Hezbollah will be many times more destructive and dangerous for Israel than the current war in Gaza, given Hezbollah’s huge arsenal of precision-guided missiles and the size of its fighting force, which as of now is about ten times what Hamas can count on, after its losses during the past five months of fighting.
When this thing goes, it probably goes nuclear.
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The Pier at Gaza and the “Bloodbath” sure have taken Ukraine off the front page, makes one wonder what is going on behind the curtain...
Be prepared for a mozlumm uprising HERE!
Whether they will actually start an anti-Hezbollah operation is uncertain. They have the current Communist American regime by the short hairs because they could escalate the conflict to include the Iranians at any time, which would embroil the US in another conflict for which the incompetents in charge are unprepared and would cause problems with the Iranian agents embedded in the current admin and the flow of Iranian kickbacks to officials at State and elsewhere.
All the swishes in our new army won't be able to put on their lipstick, wigs and false eyelashes. Oh the humanity!
ping
It won’t go very well for the rag heads here if attempted. Too many guns in the hands of citizens more than willing to dump their government.
does anyone else suspect this could be a “obama sponsored” military outpost for USA and European allies to use in attacking ISRAEL if the Jewish Nation has the audacity to try and preventively defend themselves against Iran, Hezzbulluh or Ham-ass?
Israel is expending a lot of energy on Gaza. Can they put up an extended multi-front defense with no end in sight?
Israel probably doesn’t have as many, but I bet they are REALLY accurate.
And they’ll be aimed at the HEAD of the beast.
It’ll be a ....
you know.
Well; it just kinda depends...
...on what kinda leadership you have, doesn't it.
Some of the victories in Israel’s past (both recent and Biblical) sure seem to show the hand of God when they defeat armies vastly larger than them.
OTOH, when Israel has turned away from God, things don’t go so well for them. I would hope that Israel is still on God’s side.
Bttt
Well, lots of claims and counterclaims, but the one thing for sure is that Ukraine has been popping distillation towers at some Russian refineries, and, Russian refined oil products production and especially export is down, according to the Russians themselves. This may force Pooty to pull some Air Defense assets back into Russia, which has interesting implications.
I must admit that Russia’s inability to intercept moderately large, slow, noisy(!) drones flying in some cases quite long distances into Russia, surprises me a bit. Acoustic detection and triangulation works, and Russia used to have significant such capabilities, intended for use against far tougher bogeys (like cruise missiles). The Ukie attacks were neither swarm attacks nor time-on-target, either.
How this plays out will be interesting. It is somewhat (somewhat) reminiscent of what the Houthis did to Saudi Arabia.
Hezbollah is somewhat constrained by its most major supply lines from Iran passing rather close to some of the US bases in Syria and Iraq. That’s probably the biggest reason we keep those bases there, tho’ that little tidbit is rarely mentioned / discussed. Certainly it is not realized by many who complain about us maintaining those bases. Unless of course they are actually on our foreign enemies’ side to begin with.
If the Hezzy’s logistics were essentially unimpeded, there is a VERY good chance Bibi would have to pull out, oh, hard to say. Maybe 20% of his nukes? Whether THAT can be contained is a VERY big question. I rather doubt it.
Not a chance.
Twice in the sandbox with nothing to show for it except shattered American families and trillions lost is plenty.
Never again.
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