FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM — It took Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant three days to keep his promise. «Wherever they hide we will find them, including in very distant areas. As in Damascus and beyond » he said on Friday. Yesterday, April 1st, a missile strike crumbled the consular section of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital. The target is the chain of alliances that links Iran to the Lebanese Hezbollah movement.
It doesn’t matter if the Jewish state does not admit responsibility. His hand is evident. Since October 7, the Jewish State has been engaged in the invasion of the Gaza Strip in the South, but at the same time it must also stop the low-intensity war that Hezbollah has unleashed against it from Lebanese territory in the North. Hezbollah’s declared aim is to commit part of the Israeli armed forces to prevent it from using its full force on Gaza. Rockets, mortar grenades, nothing sophisticated, but enough to evacuate around 70,000 Israelis to areas far from the explosions.
For 5 months Israel responded by targeting launchers in Lebanon, the bases near the border and even then around 80 thousand Lebanese civilians are displaced. Hezbollah has not yet deployed the valuable pieces of its arsenal. These are thirty thousand missiles capable, according to experts, of piercing the Israeli defense dome of Iron Dome. Israel, however, has raised the level of conflict in recent weeks. First it went to strike Hezbollah bases far from the border, as far away as the Beqa’ Valley or areas of northern Lebanon that had never been hit even in other wars. Then it bombed the crossings between Iraq and Syria where the weapons convoys that Iran sends to its Lebanese allies pass. Then he destroyed Hezbollah weapons warehouses in Iraq and Syria. Massive explosion at Aleppo airport. Finally, yesterday this raid in a country not involved in the conflict (Syria) and against a diplomatic building (by convention a free zone).
The shot was very precise and appears to have been successful. The consular section of the Iranian embassy was closed between two buildings, an Iranian diplomatic building and the Canadian embassy, no more than ten meters away. The consulate was pierced by the bomb and killed all the participants in the meeting. Only the wing where the meeting took place was crumbled. The ambassadors of Tehran and that of Ottawa, a few meters away in their offices, did not suffer even a scratch. The two policemen who were guarding the door of the consulate were only injured. For Israel this is both a military and intelligence success because a meeting between military leaders was supposed to be taking place in the consulate. Israel had to have both the time and the exact location. For the moment the Iranian Revolutionary Guards have conceded the death of seven of their members, including General Ali Reza Zahedi, a man who has always been committed to building forces allied to the Revolution of the Ayatollahs throughout the Shiite crescent: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. Among the victims also Reza Zahedi’s deputy, General Mohammad Hadi Haj Rahimi with 5 other Pasdaran. Syrian government soldiers or intelligence officials also died. Numbers and identities are not yet clear.
The surviving Iranian ambassador, Hossein Akbari, immediately pointed the finger at Israel and promised revenge “of the same magnitude and severity.” Tehran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling for condemnation from other countries. The Jewish state limited itself to reporting that it had repelled an attack with a swarm of drones on its base on the Red Sea “conducted by the Yemeni Houthis with Iranian advisors”. The challenge between Israel and Iran has been dormant for decades. For the Jewish State, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia as well as the Houthis of Yemen or the Iraqi Shiite militias are instruments in the hands of the ayatollahs. In the entire Middle East, only Iran insists on the rhetoric of the “destruction of Israel” and the ideology of resistance to the Zionist occupation is a powerful glue. Iran has already suffered hard blows like this. First of all the killing of General Soleimani by an American drone in 2020, but he never allowed himself to be dragged into an escalation, preferring to strengthen military influence and capabilities
