Hezbollah kills over a dozen Israelis on just day 1 of their attempted incursion on Lebanese soil
The Egoz unit of 98th Division, which wreaked havoc on the civilians of Gaza during their ongoing genocide, bore the brunt of Hezbollah's firepower.
In what became his last televised speech, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah extended a warm welcome to the Israeli soldiers in preparation of their anticipated ground invasion of Lebanon. “We are searching for Zionist soldiers and tanks to target them with lamp and fuse, day and night, but if they decide to come themselves, we say to them, “Welcome,” said Nasrallah, the greatest anti-imperialist figure of this century so far before his assassination on September 27.
Nasrallah wasn’t there to witness it, but his men did extend the welcome he promised the Israelis when they attempted to set foot on the Lebanese soil on Wednesday.
The Israeli military has acknowledged eight deaths of its soldiers from the elite Egoz and Golani units so far, but those numbers are most likely an undercount. The Israeli military has a well-documented history of hiding the true figures of its losses to keep the morale of its squatter population on historic Palestinian lands. Indeed, Lebanese media have reported at least 14 deaths and over six dozen injuries in the IDF ranks.
Moreover, the Israeli casualties occurred during attempted incursions into the Lebanese territory, not after they managed to get any kind of foothold on it.
These killings of the Israeli soldiers, most of them in an elaborate ambush near the Lebanese-occupied Palestine border, were accompanied with unrelenting rocket and missile barrages on military sites within Israel, a demonstration of Hezbollah’s resilience despite facing a brutal couple of weeks during which it suffered casualties due to the pager and walkie-talkie terror attacks followed by the assassinations of several senior personnel topped by the martyrdom of Nasrallah.
By 8 pm on Wednesday, Hezbollah had carried out a total of 27 operations — including the spectacular ambush, which it listed as the first operation of the day — completely thwarting the Zionist belief that its series of assassinations and the unbridled terrorism via the exploding devices had hampered the operational capabilities of the Lebanese resistance.
The story of Wednesday was the ambush of an IDF troop in Odaisseh.
In an official communique about the operation, Hezbollah said:
In support of our steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and in support of their valiant and honorable resistance, and in defence of Lebanon and its people, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance, at dawn on 2-10-2024, confronted an enemy Israeli infantry force that attempted to infiltrate the town of Odaisseh from the direction of Khallet Al-Mahafer, clashing with it, inflicting casualties, and forcing it to retreat.
“And victory is only from Allah, the Mighty, the Wise.”
A field source in Hezbollah provided the details of the operation to Al Mayadeen. The Lebanese outlet reported that during the operation the Hezbollah fighters allowed Israeli soldiers to come and do their reconnaissance of the area in the wee hours of Tuesday without any disturbance. Based on the movements and behaviour of the Israelis gathered during the reconnaissance, the Lebanese fighters prepared a meticulous ambush in the same area that the Israelis did their due diligence.
Al Mayadeen reports:
At dawn Wednesday, more than 30 Israeli soldiers and officers began a silent advance into the ambush zone. The Israeli force, unaware of the trap, moved closer to the Resistance’s position, the sources said. Once they were in the ambush zone, which was near the Lebanese-Israeli border, the Resistance fighters sprang into action, initiating the ambush with the phrase, “At your service, Nasrallah.”
The ambush started with heavy gunfire and RPGs, with Resistance fighters engaging the Israeli soldiers at point-blank range. The intensity of the attack led to a number of casualties among the Israeli elite troops, whose cries and screams echoed throughout the area, according to the sources.
While the ambush was unfolding, a nearby support group from the Resistance targeted enemy supply lines to prevent reinforcements from reaching the ensnared Israeli force. This secondary operation struck the settlements of Misgav Am, Kfar Giladi, and Metulla with artillery shells and rockets, further hindering any Israeli efforts to back up their forces.
As the situation deteriorated, the Israeli Air Force intervened, deploying helicopters to provide cover fire in the region and assist in the extraction of the casualties. In a desperate attempt to cover their retreat, the Israeli troops began using smoke grenades to obscure their movements and facilitate the recovery of their wounded soldiers, Al Mayadeen’s sources said.
IDF soldiers being evacuated out of the Lebanese border horizontally.
The IDF soldiers in this ambush belonged to the Egoz unit of the Israeli military’s 98th Division, which has now been deployed to the Lebanese border. This division was notorious for carrying out some of the worst war crimes in Gaza during its time there. Two of its most egregious crimes included the siege of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City and the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis.
Both of these sieges ended with the Israeli criminals reducing the medical facilities to being completely inoperable, and their courtyards and surroundings littered with mass graves with bodies of hundreds of murdered innocent Palestinian doctors, patients, their relatives, and the homeless seeking shelter. This same division also carried out the grotesque Nusseirat refugee camp massacre where they slaughtered 276 civilians to rescue four Israeli prisoners of war.
Now they are being hunted down by the men of Hezbollah. Turns out training guns at 3-year-olds and their mothers isn’t the same as fighting a well-equipped and trained militia. Who would have thought?
IDF wants you to believe it found these weapons and other equipment in a Hezbollah tunnel.
Interestingly, and in a copy of the modus operandi during the early days of their genocide in Gaza, the Zionist military published a video purportedly showing weapons haul that it said was ceased from a Hezbollah tunnel. (Recall the time when they showed us a bunch of weapons supposedly found in the MRI room of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.) The story is preposterous on many levels, the first of which is that the Israelis are yet to get a stranglehold on the Lebanese soil, let alone being brave enough to go through Hezbollah’s fortified tunnels. (They have dared not set foot in the much weaker Hamas tunnels inside Gaza despite wreaking havoc for a year in the besieged enclave.)
It’s another propaganda operation by the Zionist regime to tell its squatting public that their army is in control of the situation in Lebanon — and provide the Zionist Western media with favourable talking points.
Rubbishing the Israeli claims, Hezbollah’s media relations team issued a statement, calling the stunt an “overt psychological and propaganda war”:
The Zionist enemy army published pictures and videos from inside what it called Hezbollah’s warehouses and tunnels, as part of the overt psychological and propaganda war. Therefore, it is important for us to emphasize that these films and pictures are very old and have no relation to any current military action on the Lebanese border with occupied Palestine.
In their operations through the day, Hezbollah also scorched multiple Israeli tanks. Months ago, the Zionist media acknowledged that the Palestinian resistance fighters had made Gaza into a graveyard for its tanks, leaving them with barely any to prepare for the planned assault on Lebanon.
In a televised address in July, Nasrallah mocked the Israelis for intending to invade Lebanon while getting their tanks reduced to metal husks in Gaza. He said: “If your tanks come to Lebanon and southern Lebanon, you will not suffer from a shortage of tanks. Because you will have no more tanks left.” In another address from a couple of days earlier, Nasrallah said: “When your tanks appear on our borders, you know what awaits them. Our gunners are skilled, our fists are many, and our rockets are even more.”
Nasrallah’s men are proving him to be right on multiple counts in the still very early days of what looks to be a long, attritional battle on the Lebanese front for the genocidal Zionists.
The Israeli leadership has said that its operations against Hezbollah are directed with the aim of returning hundreds of thousands of settlers displaced from northern Israel due to the constant barrage of rocket fire from the Lebanese resistance, which opened a support front for the Palestinian resistance on October 8.
Hezbollah has repeatedly stated that it will cease its operations as soon as the Israelis stop their genocide in Gaza. “The Lebanese front will not stop until the aggression on Gaza stops,” Nasrallah said in his last address. “You will not be able to bring the northern settlers back to the north, do whatever you want. If you want to bring the settlers back, the only way is to stop the aggression on Gaza.”
But the Zionists have shown no appetite for shutting down the Gaza slaughterhouse of the innocents and have now started slaughtering innocent Lebanese by the hundreds a day.
For all their bravery against unarmed civilians, the Israeli soldiers are certainly finding out that the aims of their political leadership will be hard to achieve without a ceasefire in Gaza, just like Nasrallah warned them.
This Substack wouldn’t be possible without your support. Please consider a paid subscription here or on Patreon or Ko-fi. You can also make a one-time contribution on Ko-fi. Thank you.
An extraordinary lineage of resistance
Last week marked the third anniversary of a heroic resistance operation dubbed the Freedom Tunnel in Palestine. On September 6, 2021, Zakaria Zubeidi along with five fellow prisoners made a daring escape from the notorious high-security Gilboa prison in Israel by digging a 20-metre tunnel using only a spoon (thereby adding the humble cutlery to the many…
The IDF are cowards and soulless beasts
What a desperate move by Netanyahu. His vaunted IDF has learned the same lesson the SS did once upon a time--it's HARD to exterminate an entire ethnic group of people. Hard work of the most soul-sucking kind that just never runs out of both victims and complications.
They were unable to ethnically cleanse Gaza in over 11 months of horror, against an opponent armed mostly with IED's. Now they're up against Hezbollah, which is an opponent a couple of orders of magnitude better trained, disciplined, and equipped than Hamas.
The IDF can wreck Lebanon, and kill tens of thousands of its people if it goes all-out, but it can never conquer even southern Lebanon, much less hold it.
Netanyahu is trying to provoke a full-scale war between the US and Iran. His biggest enemy there is the unwillingness of both parties to fight each other. The Pentagon knows that any attack on Iran would be an imperial disaster on the scale Salamis was for the Persians or Midway for the Japanese, and the Iranians know that the damage America could inflict on its infrastructure would be massive.
Israel, or the Arabs for that matter, are not worth the cost for either power.