Israeli Airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon Kill Hezbollah Operatives

On July 29, an Israeli airstrike killed three militiamen in Syria fighting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, according to the Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese news agency Al-Manar.

Other reports indicated that Israel conducted two separate airstrikes, one in Syria and one in Lebanon. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Israeli attack in the Syrian Golan Heights killed two members of Hezbollah in addition to the three pro-Assad militiamen. The Syrian government said that the Israeli aircraft was unmanned and that the attack killed three villagers from Hader, a Druze community close to the site of the strike.

In Lebanon, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said that six people were wounded when an airstrike hit its arms depot in the Qousaya area in the Bekaa region, which is near the Lebanese border with Syria. The group is closely tied to Hezbollah and supports Assad in Syria. The strike was confirmed by the Syrian army.

The Israeli Defense Forces declined to comment.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese terrorist organization that has sworn to destroy Israel. It is an Iranian proxy, and receives much of its weapons and funding from Iranian convoys that pass through Syria and end up in Lebanon. Iran exerts total control over the group, whose ties to Iran have led to its involvement in the Syrian civil war. Thousands of its members fight alongside the pro-Assad Syrian National Army. It is particularly active in the Syrian Golan Heights, despite the region’s lack of strategic importance to Assad and his supporters, due to the area’s proximity to Israel. It is trying to establish a foothold just across the border from the Israeli Golan Heights with the intention of using the region as a staging-ground for future attacks.

Some reports from July 29 indicated that Samir Kuntar, Hezbollah’s commander of operations in the Golan Heights, was killed in the Israeli airstrike in Syria. His family denied the reports on Twitter.

Kuntar’s death would be a huge victory for Israel. Kuntar is a Lebanese Druze who had been serving a life sentence for murdering an Israeli family when he was released as part of the deal that Israel negotiated for the release of the bodies of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in 2008. He established a terror network in the Golan Heights, with assistance from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria, that has attacked Israel numerous times.

Successful Israeli airstrikes in Syria have killed a number of high-level Hezbollah operatives bent on attacking Israel. However, the fact that Israel needed to target Kuntar after they previously released him in a prisoner exchange demonstrates the security risk that accompanies such swaps. Israel has a history of freeing large numbers of prisoners in order to secure the release of just one or two of its own citizens; unfortunately, this has allowed thousands of convicted terrorists, like Kuntar, to resume their attacks on Israel.