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Israel carried out its biggest assault on Lebanon's Iranian proxy group Hezbollah in 10 months of fighting early Sunday, acting on what an Israeli security source told VOA was precise intelligence to stop thousands of rockets and drones from being launched into Israeli territory.
The Israeli military said about 100 fighter jets struck more than 40 Hezbollah launch sites primed with thousands of rockets and drones in southern Lebanon shortly before 5 a.m. local time. Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terror group and the main regional proxy force of Iran's Islamist rulers.
At around 5:30 a.m., Hezbollah began firing what the Israeli military said were more than 150 rockets and drones into northern Israel. One Israeli soldier was killed, and several were wounded in the attacks, which also caused some property damage.
In a series of social media statements, Hezbollah said it launched more than 300 rockets and drones into Israel at dawn as part of what it described as its initial retaliation for Israel's assassination of its top military commander, Fouad Shukur, in southern Beirut on July 30.
"Our military operation for today has been completed and accomplished," Hezbollah said, asserting that it was targeting Israeli military sites.
Israeli reserves Brig. Gen. Jacob Nagel, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told VOA in a text message that Israel's "precise intelligence worked very well" in detecting Hezbollah plans to strike deep into Israel with the aim of damaging both military and civilian facilities and harming civilians.
The Israeli military said most of the Hezbollah rockets and drones primed for Sunday's predawn assault were aimed at northern Israel, while some also were aimed at the country's densely populated center. The group denied that its planned attack was largely thwarted by a preemptive Israeli assault.
Hezbollah began smaller, near-daily strikes on northern Israel on October 8 in solidarity with Palestinian terror group Hamas, another Iranian proxy, which had started its war with Israel by invading the country's south from Gaza a day earlier.
Speaking to VOA by phone, Israeli reserves Maj. Sarit Zehavi said Hezbollah's early Sunday strikes were "completely different" from those of the previous 10 months because they targeted a wide swath of northern Israeli towns and villages simultaneously, including those that had not been evacuated. Tens of thousands of Israelis already had evacuated communities within several kilometers of the Lebanese border at the onset of the conflict.
Zehavi, president of Alma Research and Education Center that specializes in security challenges on Israel's northern border, also disputed Hezbollah's assertion that it was targeting only Israeli military sites in its assault.
"When you launch these kinds of rockets, they are inaccurate and hit anything," she said.
Nagel, whom Netanyahu appointed to chair a commission on evaluating Israel's security budget earlier this month, said Israel's aim in preemptively striking Hezbollah is not to trigger a full-scale war.
"But we will do what is needed to bring our northern citizens back home safely," said Nagel, who also works as a senior fellow for the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In a separate VOA interview, former Israeli intelligence official Avi Melamed said Sunday's predawn strikes on Hezbollah also highlight the group's increasing struggle with maintaining deterrence against Israel.
Melamed, who runs Inside the Middle East, a U.S. nonprofit research group, said Hezbollah already has struggled with Israel using superior intelligence to carry out strikes killing more than 400 of its operatives in Lebanon in 10 months, among them senior commanders like Shukur.
"Sunday's preemptive Israeli strike disrupted Hezbollah's attack plan [to avenge Shukur], adding to a deterrence problem that also affects its patron Iran," Melamed said.
Nagel said he sees Iran's radical ruling clerics as behind all of the region's terror activity that targets Israel.
"So the time is approaching for Israel to exercise a relatively new national security strategy and punish the terror leaders there," he wrote, referring to Iran.