It happened in August 2006, right after the signing of the ceasefire agreement with Israel at the end of the Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah’s Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, gave an interview to the Lebanese news network New TV—an interview that would be remembered for generations. Sitting comfortably in his bunker beneath the streets of Beirut’s Dahiya, the leader of the terrorist organization admitted that he and the Jihad Council, Hezbollah’s supreme body, had made a serious miscalculation.
“We did not estimate, even by one percent, that the kidnapping of IDF soldiers (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) would lead to a war of this magnitude with Israel,” Nasrallah confessed, adding, “Had we known that the kidnapping operation would lead to such a result, we would not have undertaken it at all.”
Despite this blunder, Nasrallah managed to maintain his reputation for 18 years as the Middle East’s foremost expert on Israeli society—at least until recent months. Then, the tables turned. Nasrallah, along with most members of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, met their fate under Israeli Air Force bombs. They are no longer around to grasp, for a second time, the scale of their error. Perhaps Yahya Sinwar, eliminated this week by the IDF in Rafah after a year-long manhunt, could have enlightened them.
Following the events of October 7, Nasrallah made another poor decision—one that, two weeks ago, became clear as his last major mistake. He tied Hezbollah's fate to Hamas in Gaza and launched a war. This move speaks volumes about the mentality on the Israeli side as well. Over the past two decades, both Israel’s political leadership and the IDF General Staff hesitated to confront the Shi’ite terrorist group, often choosing to delay war or strong retaliation to attacks, even at the cost of allowing Hezbollah’s disproportionate growth and a decline in deterrence.
But more than anything, Nasrallah’s final, fatal misstep reveals a fascinating strategic deception that had been in the works for months, led by the IDF's Operations Directorate. This deception ultimately led to Israel’s official declaration: the Nasrallah era is over.
Nasrallah’s assumption was straightforward: he believed Israel would not expand the war against Hezbollah or launch a ground maneuver in Lebanon as long as Hamas held 101 hostages in Gaza and the 162nd Division was still fighting in the Strip.
It seems Nasrallah thought that if Israel’s policy toward Hezbollah were to change, there would be clear signs, and he would notice them. He believed he could detect early indicators of a ground invasion, such as IDF preparations along the border and movements of Lebanese civilians. But the IDF, understanding his thought process, deliberately changed the sequence of actions to confuse him—a move that paid off.
In recent months, Nasrallah seemed unfazed by the reduced fighting in Gaza and unconvinced by the Israeli government's threats and senior IDF officials' warnings to stop rocket fire on Israel’s home front. What sealed his fate was his speech about a “war of attrition” against Israel.
Like the rest of the IDF General Staff, the Operations Directorate was caught off guard on October 7 and shared in the historic and bitter failure. But this time, they were ready with a detailed, creative operational plan, which included several "ladders" for Nasrallah to climb down from his position. During critical moments, senior General Staff officers exchanged meaningful glances, knowing: if Nasrallah didn’t internalize Israel’s resolve, the IDF's actions against Hezbollah would escalate, leading to increasingly painful blows.
The guiding principle was to proceed gradually but to skillfully expose Hezbollah’s most sensitive areas and destroy them. Security officials explained that such a revolutionary plan required out-of-the-box thinking, relying on high-quality intelligence from the Intelligence Directorate, the precision and timing of the Air Force, and synchronizing all these components with the "war clock" overseen by the Operations Directorate.
The framework, objectives, and thresholds for the operation were set by the head of the Operations Directorate, Maj.-Gen. Oded Basiuk. The responsibility for ensuring the synchronization and accuracy of various strikes was given to Brig.-Gen. R., head of the Attack Division, one of the Air Force’s most experienced fighter pilots. He had previously commanded a fighter squadron and the Fire Center of the Southern Command and had been marked early in his career as a future general.
In the IDF’s target bank were several critical clusters for attack: Hezbollah’s senior leadership, top commanders and field leaders, the organization’s weapons arsenal—particularly its strategic systems—terror infrastructure such as launch sites, warehouses, and command centers, and finally, intelligence and command and control sites. Thus, the operation unfolded, blow after blow:
The deadly domino against Hezbollah
July 30: The operation began with the assassination of Fuad Shukr, also known as Al-Hajj Mohsen—Hezbollah’s de facto chief of staff and member of the Jihad Council, responsible for the organization's strategic systems and its precision missile project. His elimination in Dahiya, Beirut, marked a turning point.
August 25: A broad preemptive strike took place, severely degrading Hezbollah's capabilities in a short period, destroying launchers aimed at central Israel. This attack was made possible by high-quality intelligence from the Intelligence Directorate and precision execution by the Air Force, with seamless coordination through the Operations Directorate’s Attack Division.
September 5: Daily waves of attacks began, targeting hundreds of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers. A critical mass was building, while Hezbollah was left confused and struggling to form a coherent picture of the IDF’s true intentions.
September 17-18: Two dramatic strikes, attributed to Israel, took place. One involved “beepers” exploding in the hands, pockets, and faces of Hezbollah operatives. A similar attack targeted their radios, turning them into bombs in an instant. This neutralized thousands of Hezbollah operatives and left hundreds of commanders blinded.
September 20: The IDF eliminated Ibrahim Aqil, Hezbollah's head of operations and de facto chief of staff after Shukr’s assassination. Several senior members of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force were also killed in the strike.
September 23: Operation Northern Arrows was launched across Lebanon, which the IDF General Staff described as a groundbreaking campaign. So far, the IDF has demonstrated intelligence and aerial superiority, but the Attack Division faced significant challenges in synchronizing such a massive operation. During one dramatic strike, Hezbollah was bombarded from the air for 15 continuous hours, targeting strategic capabilities such as surface-to-surface missiles, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, and drones.
September 27: In a targeted killing that shook the Middle East, Israel settled the score with Hassan Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah leaders. Nasrallah, who failed to grasp Israel's accumulated achievements and insisted on pushing forward, met his end.
Despite these heavy blows, and perhaps because of them, Hezbollah did not remain idle. In response, it expanded its rocket range and drone operations to the Haifa area and, after a period of adjustment, began focusing its efforts on central Israel. At the same time, the impact of the strikes could not be denied: a turning point in the war forced Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah to refine their arms smuggling routes to Beirut.
According to Israeli estimates, Hezbollah now has only a fraction of its 122mm rockets, capable of reaching Haifa, and a similar percentage of rockets that can reach Tel Aviv. It is believed that Hezbollah now holds less than a third of its stockpile of precision missiles and long-range rockets, which cover the entirety of Israel.
Security officials praised the multi-stage plan of the Operations Directorate, which prevented Nasrallah from predicting where the next blow would come from or estimating its scale. This element of surprise allowed Israel to achieve significant progress against the terrorist organization, which now feels exposed and hunted. Above all, the plan deprived Nasrallah of the ability to detect early signs of what was coming. As one security official put it, “Hezbollah can still challenge the IDF and Israel’s home front, given the organization’s 30-year buildup, but it’s too late for Nasrallah to understand what we’ve done. Out of the 12 members of the Jihad Council, only two remain.”
Big and convenient targets
In Israel, it is estimated that IDF operations over the past six months led Nasrallah to relocate advanced military capabilities from southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley to Beirut, mistakenly believing that American and European pressure would protect Beirut from Israeli airstrikes. This turned out to be a double error: not only did it expose Hezbollah’s systems to Israeli intelligence, but it also concentrated most of them in a single area, making it easier for the IDF to strike them.
“I still have great respect for Hezbollah’s capabilities, backed by Iran,” a senior security official added, “but there’s a significant leadership crisis there. Field commanders in southern Lebanon don’t really know the commanders in Beirut who are giving them orders, because most of them have been killed, and the others are just replacements. Hezbollah’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, both along the contact line and in-depth, are severely challenged due to the relentless strikes.”
Officials close to the decision-making process in the General Staff shed light on the differences between Nasrallah and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—differences that may have contributed to Nasrallah's downfall. According to these sources, Nasrallah managed the war against Israel with an extremely centralized approach, which required his physical presence at Hezbollah’s command centers, making his elimination all the more impactful. In contrast, Sinwar, unlike Nasrallah, only sets broad policy and then disappears from the radar for about a month at a time.
The series of strikes by the Operations Directorate’s Attack Division did not end there. Last Monday, at exactly 2:30 p.m., the IDF attacked more than 100 Hezbollah targets with hundreds of munitions, killing commanders of Hezbollah’s operational systems, acting brigade commanders, chiefs of staff, artillery commanders, and 200 senior operatives. The before-and-after images of the attack sites, collected by Unit 9900 in the Intelligence Directorate, were presented to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a professional debriefing. The footage left no doubt about the quality of the strikes and the number of casualties.
The IDF clarifies that Hezbollah is deeply entrenched in Lebanon, and it will be very difficult to completely defeat the group. However, over time, it will be possible to degrade its capabilities, reduce its influence, and shrink its power. To achieve this, the IDF explains, Hezbollah must be viewed as a single system, and the military must continue to strike it as methodically as they have done so far—with sophistication.
There is also a personal element to this strategic closure: reservists in the Operations Directorate say that Maj.-Gen. Basiuk, who pushed for this series of sophisticated actions, was the one who laid the foundations for the “Thunderbolt” plan in Gaza. This plan, as remembered, was supposed to eliminate more than 1,000 Hamas operatives in an airstrike, while also damaging the organization's “metro.” However, the plan was executed during Operation Guardian of the Walls, without the initial complex maneuver, under the direction of then-IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi. Basiuk also led, as the commander of the 82nd Armored Battalion during the Second Lebanon War, a ground maneuver in closed areas—contrary to orders and IDF doctrine—to prevent Hezbollah’s anti-tank squads from hitting the tanks, which were under intense fire in the Saluki Valley, Bint Jbeil, and other sectors.
Now, in the shadow of the deep scar left on the entire General Staff by the failure of October 7, the Operations Directorate must lead and synchronize precise and painful strikes within the ground maneuver in Lebanon, which may expand. The mission is to intensify the damage to Hezbollah’s weapons depots, rocket, missile, and drone launch sites, prevent smuggling into Lebanon, and continue targeting its commanders and operatives. The horrific tragedy in the dining hall of the Golani Brigade Training Base this week, where four soldiers were killed and more than 60 were injured, proves that the fight against Hezbollah is far from over.