Two Assassinations and a Transformed War

Excerpt

The past 48 hours have been the most dramatic and consequential of any since Hamas’s war against Israel began on October 7, 2023. More than that: they could reverse the momentum of this war which, until now, has been dictated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. 

Let’s review the news:

On July 30, as the sun began to set in Beirut, Israel launched a precision air strike on Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah military commander. The strike took place in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, which is Hezbollah’s stronghold in the city. Shukr was wanted for decades by U.S. authorities for his role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel. But the proximate reason for this hit was Hezbollah’s Saturday rocket attack in northern Israel, which killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field. Milad Bidi, an adviser to the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was also killed in Israel’s strike. 

Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer.