There is a satirical Israeli song from the Second Lebanon War, ‘Yalla Ya Nasrallah’, with the chorus: ‘Come on, oh Nasrallah/We will screw you, inshallah/we’ll send you back to Allah/with the rest of Hezbollah’. The lyrics are doggerel, but I mention it for two reasons. One, it’s an absolute banger of a tune and, two, all that it threatened has now been carried out. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah for 32 years, was killed last night in an IDF strike on the Islamist terror group’s underground command centre beneath a Beirut suburb.
My city my people 😂🇮🇱 Tel Aviv
— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) September 27, 2024
“Yalla ya Nasrallah,
We will f*ck you Inshallah,
We will return you to Allah,
With the entire Hezbollah” pic.twitter.com/bMa6VuQwXH
His death is the latest in a series of targeted killings on the leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force armed and funded to strengthen Tehran’s grip on the region. These assassinations have included Ibrahim Aqil, commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces unit, along with its chief of staff Hussein Ahmad Dahraj, chief of operations Hassan Yussef Abad Alssatar, head of training Abu Hussan Samir, and others. It has included Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of the rocket and missile division, and Muhammad Hussein Srour, chief of drones and aerial defences. To give a sense of the speed and efficiency of Israel’s operations, all of these targets were killed in the last seven days. Hezbollah has terrorised Israel for almost 40 years and now Israel has eliminated almost its entire chain of command in a week. This represents years, probably decades, of planning and intelligence gathering against one of the most heavily armed forces in the region. As daring and improbable Israeli military victories go, it is up there with the Six-Day War.
Nasrallah’s death brings to an end the reign of a brutal butcher responsible for the deaths of many more Arabs than Israelis. Under his command, Hezbollah not only sided with Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war but took part in the large-scale killing of opposition fighters and civilians, including in Aleppo, Qusair, and Daraya. There’s a reason Syrians took to the streets last night to celebrate. They won’t be the only ones. Nasrallah’s death will be welcomed by the Druze of Majdal Shams, a town in the Israeli Golan Heights, where 12 Arab children were blown up by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer in July. It was one of 9,300 rockets Hezbollah has fired at Israel since 8 October, when it decided to join in the Hamas offensive of the previous day. All across the Middle East, in countries where denouncing the Zionist entity is a national pastime, prime ministers and peasants will privately respond to the news of Nasrallah’s demise with the same sentiment: the bastard had it coming.
Not everyone will see it that way, of course. Naturally, Iran won’t be happy. For the past year, it has watched (read: directed) Hezbollah and its other front group Hamas to launch attacks on Israel, only for Israel to respond with overwhelming force and tactical nous, taking out top commanders left and right. The financial cost to Iran in lost investment and hardware must be eye-watering. That will factor into what comes next. If Iran does not respond dramatically — it needn’t be all that effective, it just has to look good on CNN — then it will be a much weakened force in the region. Yet if it does, it risks a spate of targeted assassinations against its own leadership or, if the situation is allowed to escalate, some kind of direct engagement with Israel. Whatever their more hawkish elements say, neither country wants that. Regardless of what Iran does, it will now have to factor in that Israel is a far stronger, much emboldened enemy.
This is a historic victory for the Jewish state and its scale can be measured in the outrage with which it is greeted and the parties expressing it. Israel will be decried at the United Nations and calumnied by the human rights industry. It will be accused of war crimes by law professors from some of the finest universities in the world and charged with dangerous escalation by journalists who consider Israel’s mere existence an escalation. There will be indignation at the US State Department, the British Foreign Office and the European Commission, all of which will now have to spin this latest setback for Iran as another reason to revive the deadly foolish nuclear deal. Rest assured that all the right people are unhappy right now.
Hassan Nasrallah has plagued the Israeli psyche for so long that his death will come as a relief as much as a sense of triumph. But a triumph it is, another reminder that however long it takes, whatever the cost in blood and treasure, Israel always gets its man in the end. Jerusalem has reasserted this message in the most spectacular way. Yalla ya Nasrallah.
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