September 06, 2019
Over the last several months, the Israeli military has vastly expanded its efforts to destroy Iranian military aid to Hezbollah, with the latest aspect being aimed at bombing sites Israel believes Iran is setting up to help Hezbollah build pinpoint accuracy missiles.
Despite the anti-Iranian rhetoric coming out of Israel, Israel’s main concern has not been Iran, but Iranian aid to Hezbollah. It has admitted to 200 bombing attacks inside Syria in the last few years, but the targets are primarily not Syrian or Iranian but Iranian aid to Hezbollah.
The new concern is that Iran is helping Hezbollah get much more accurate missiles, rather than the aimless rockets with which it has long supplied Hezbollah. In the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Hezbollah fired many thousands of rockets into Israel. They killed only 44 Israeli civilians, because most of the rockets landed far from populated areas. In fact, the main harm done by the rockets was that they started hundreds of forest fires that burned up lots of timber.
The Israeli attacks in Syria and more recently in Iraq have killed a handful of Iranians working with Hezbollah.
The one well-publicized incident was in February 2018 when Israel said Iran had sent an armed drone across the border, which Israel said it was watching and shot down as soon as it entered Israeli airspace. Israel then launched a retaliatory attack on the base from which the drone was launched. Israel lost an F-16 in the retaliatory attack, the first aircraft loss the Israelis had suffered in decades, a fact that brought more attention to the incident.
In that case, Israel said the attack was planned and carried out by the Pasdaran, not by Hezbollah. The targets were Iranian, and not Hezbollah.
The most recent incident was August 24. And in that case, the target again appears to have been Iranian. Israel announced its attack—something it rarely ever does—and said it was another case of Iran planning to send another armed drone into Israel. This time, Israel attacked before any drone was launched.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israeli warplanes hit a base at the Syrian town of Aqraba, between downtown Damascus and the city’s airport, around 11 p.m., August 24.
“If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first,” Netanyahu said on Twitter, alluding to a Talmud passage justifying self-defense.
He said, “In a major operational effort, we have thwarted an attack against Israel by the Iranian Qods Force and Shiite militias. I reiterate: Iran has no immunity anywhere. Our forces operate in every sector against the Iranian aggression.”
The unusual announcement of an Israeli strike inside Syria included word of what the Israeli military described as a new Iranian tactic: kamikaze-style unmanned vehicles designed to hit a target and blow up on impact.
Last month, Israel attacked what it said was an Iranian weapons depot in Iraq, representing an expansion of its military campaign against Iranian targets from Syria to Iraq. There have been three more attacks on targets in Iraq, which are broadly assumed to have come from Israel, though the Israelis have only talked about the one attack.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said the attack on Aqraba was aimed only to destroy offensive infrastructure, though he said fighters belonging to both the Qods Force and Shiite militias allied with Iran were present.
“It is probable that there were casualties, but you will hear that from them,” he said.
The Syrian Army said in a statement that “the majority of the Israeli missiles were destroyed before reaching their targets,” Reuters reported. But Colonel Conricus said the Israeli impact was “significant.”
Colonel Conricus said Iran was “open” about its intent to attack Israel. He pointed to a post on the Telegram messaging service two days before the Israeli attack by a writer he said was “close to the Iranian regime,” Mohammed Imani, who warned, “If, at night and in the coming days, unidentified UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] attacked sensitive security, military and nuclear targets, or major Zionist ports and centers in occupied Palestine, it should not be surprising.”
Colonel Conricus said Iran had actually tried that day to mount an attack against Israel using the drones. “They made preparations that we were following,” he said. “We understood that they were trying to execute their attack. We operated in such a way as to thwart the attack.”