What's even the deal with Hezbollah here? I thought they'd be more formidable than *this*, at least, seems like they're pretty close to crippled already, which is kind of nuts.
All the top leadership guys but Nasrallah are basically dead, "tens of thousands" of rockets have been taken out of commission according to the IDF. Any retaliatory missile strikes by Hezbollah have been surprisingly piss-weak, it's kind of curious. What's left, pretty much just the small-arms guys in balaclavas and the dudes in pickup trucks with 50 cals?
Like, what are we thinking here, the communications/pager/walkie fuckery a few days back was just more successful than one could have hoped and it threw off their abilities completely? Or were they really just all bluster from the start? Obviously the rocket caches existed, we see them go up in flames today and yesterday, but like...yeah.
I don't know. Iran must be pretty pissed about now, their top proxy not amounting to all that much more than Hamas. Hezbollah seemed way more effective than this in '06, maybe it was just the "playing defence on Lebanese territory" factor there, the ambushes and stuff were what they trained for and they had the advantage of the IDF way underestimating them that time? It's wild just how easy this one seems for the Israelis, expected way more of a fight here personally. No doubt if it turns to a ground invasion the IDF's going to lose people, urban combat is hell, but in terms of the higher-end rocket barrages and stuff it seems Hezbollah's, in practice, kind of a nothing-factor.
EDIT: US official tells CNN Hezbollah has already "probably been taken 20 years backwards". 48 hours.
sodastream.de
claims to have launched approximately 300 strikes into Lebanon on Saturday. I'll be very curious to see to what degree those strikes (and the ones coming over the coming days) degrade Hebollah's capability to launch vast quantities of missiles and rockets into Israel. Nobody doubts that Hezbollah has access to tens of thousands of medium / long range projectiles. The question is the following? How many launchers do they have and how many can Israel destroy as they're being prepared to fire?
