Expanded aggression of the crazed Zionists and the response of the Resistance
October 7 marked the first anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Flood, the spectacular jail break by the Palestinian resistance, which electrified the entire Middle East, with ramifications far and wide. The Israeli Zionists, stunned by this operation, responded in the only way they know, that is, by indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, killing unarmed civilian men, women, children and babies, which they have been doing non-stop since October 8 last year. They have been flattening residential areas with 2000lb bombs supplied by the US and other imperialist countries, committing genocide. Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, universities, cultural centres, UNWRA facilities, water facilities, sewage systems have been obliterated. Electricity, water, fuel and food have been cut off.
Imperialist media’s complicity in genocide
Faced with this genocide, and wilfully ignoring it, the political, ideological and journalistic representatives of imperialism have been mindlessly repeating ad nauseam the mantra that Israel has the right to defend itself. If ever someone sympathetic to the Palestinian resistance against occupation of their motherland ever manages to appear on bourgeois media, that person is bombarded with just one question: ‘Do you condemn Hamas for October 7, 2023?’ It never occurs to these mercenaries that the Palestinians have a right to resist Zionist occupation of their country, which has resulted in the expulsion of millions of people from their homes, and condemned them to eke out a miserable existence in refugee camps and, in the case of Gaza, confining them to the world’s largest open-air prison, which they cannot leave or enter without permission from the Israeli military, and where they are under a blockade from land, sea and air. This being the case, they have every right to resist – as did the French resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
Continuation of the Nakba
The Zionist occupiers on the other hand have no such right. Far from defending itself, Israel is engaged in a war of expansion and expulsion – a genocidal war of extermination and ethnic cleansing, a continuation of the ethnic cleansing which has been going on since 1948, if not earlier.
In fact, the Zionists are quite open and blatant about their intention, which has been meticulously detailed by South Africa in its case against Zionist genocide before the International Court of Justice, which has declared that there is a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. The ICJ has also declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land to be illegal under international law.
Mad delusions
Emboldened by the successes in their murderous campaign against the leaders of the resistance, Israel’s finance minister, Smotrich, has laid claim to the whole of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and parts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia – without even a murmur of condemnation from Israel’s imperialist backers. Instead, the US has shipped 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel since October 2023 and given it $18 billion in financial assistance. Israel is entirely dependent on US financial, diplomatic and military largesse. With bombs supplied by the US, most of Gaza has been flattened, leaving behind 42 million tons of rubble and 2.3 million Palestinians homeless, as well as 43,000 dead (though the actual death toll will prove to be close to 186,000 after taking into account those buried under the rubble and the victims of the starvation and disease consequent upon the denial by the Israeli fascist regime of water, fuel, electricity, medicine and adequate food to its Palestinian victims.
Imperialism dictates Zionist conduct
No pressure has been brought to bear on Israel by its imperialist patrons to put an end to the continuing genocide and to agree to a permanent ceasefire and to taking its army out of the Gaza enclave. A simple telephone call from US president Joe Biden could accomplish that. Instead we are treated to the charade of Genocide Joe calling, for public consumption, for a ceasefire, only to be frustrated by the stubborn refusal of the Israeli prime minister to comply with this demand. With this, the simple Simons of the world (and not just the simple Simons but also some highly intelligent and well-meaning commentators) come to believe that it is Israel, backed by the Israeli lobby in the US, that controls US foreign policy and not – as is actually the case – the US that funds, supports, and dictates its attack dog in the Middle East, namely Israel, to protect US economic and geopolitical interests in the Middle East. It is not the Israeli tail that wags the American dog. On the contrary, the US dictates Israeli conduct and policy. Israel could not last beyond a few months without US financial, diplomatic and military support. It is by far the cheapest way for the US to protect its interests in the region, i.e., to use Israel as a proxy.
As far as the Israeli lobby in the US is concerned, it is an inextricable part of the country’s imperialist ruling class, which class, almost in its entirety, supports unreservedly whatever infamies Israel commits against the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian people, among others. Israel is the cheapest protection racket for safeguarding especially US interests in the Middle East. It is not for nothing that Genocide Joe declared years ago that if Israel did not exist, it would have to be invented.
All the imperialist countries, particularly the US, are totally complicit in the Gaza genocide and war crimes in Lebanon. It is time working people grasped this rather than being misled into believing that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing against the will, desire, and economic and geopolitical interests of the US.
Sabotage of the ceasefire talks and the Zionist murder spree
At every stage of the present phase of the conflict, Israel has sabotaged, not without US backing, attempts at a ceasefire. On 28 July, ceasefire talks collapsed after Israel introduced new demands. On 30 July, Israel murdered Fuad Shukri, Hezbollah’s military chief, in a strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.
On 31 July Ismail Haniyeh, the chief Hamas negotiator in talks on a ceasefire and release of Israeli hostages held by the resistance, was murdered through an Israeli strike on his residence in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where he was staying as a guest of the Iranian government to attend the ceremony for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
On 17 September, thousands of weaponised pagers were detonated by agents of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, which left 40 people dead and another 2,000 injured. The attack was meant to strike at the heart of Hezbollah’s communications network, but this indiscriminate use hurt many other Lebanese unconnected with the resistance movement.
On 18 September, in the follow-up to the above terrorist atrocity, hand-held radios used, among others, by the resistance, exploded in a second day of electronic device detonations, killing 25 and injuring 606 people.
The UN Human Rights chief, Volkev Türk, condemned the assault for its impact on civilians. Even the former CIA chief, Leon Panetta, described the pager attacks as a form of terrorism, with “terror going into the supply chain”, booby-trapping everyday objects on a large scale. Its consequences will unfold over time.
On 19 September, the IDF stepped up bombing in Lebanon, shifting somewhat its focus from Gaza to its northern front. On 20 September, Israel murdered Ibrahim Aqil, the founder of Hezbollah’s Radwan force, in an air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
On 25 September Hezbollah responded to these outrages by firing a missile for the first time at Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial centre. The missile landed very close to the Mossad headquarters.
Heinous murder of Nasrallah and the Iranian response
On 27 September, in a wave of strikes which flattened at least 6 buildings and killed 1,000 people, Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and a few of his senior comrades were murdered. Also murdered was a senior member of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.
Nasrallah was a symbol of national liberation, a fighter for common humanity and decency and against colonialism, Zionist racial supremacy and imperialism. The murder of this iconic figure, while being celebrated by the Zionists and by the likes of Biden, Keir Starmer, and other flunkeys of Anglo-American imperialism, was mourned and greeted with much grief and tears, not only in Lebanon but throughout the Middle East and many other regions of the world.
On 1 October, Israel announced its ground offensive in Lebanon. On the same day, in response to the outrageous murders of Haniyeh and Nasrallah, Iran launched a barrage of 180 missiles at Israel. Most of these missiles, evading Israel’s much-touted Iron Dome, Patriot missiles and other defence systems such as David’s Sling and Arrow system, hit their targets, causing much damage to Israel’s largest airbase, Navatim, and several planes parked there; while another missile exploded 700 metres away from the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.
The Iranian attack shook the Israeli political and military establishment to its foundations, for it showed Iran’s ability to hit back. Unlike the Israelis, who take the greatest pleasure in destroying human life on an industrial scale, the Iranians aim at military, intelligence and suchlike targets, going out of the way to avoid civilian casualties. Israel has been considering launching retaliatory strikes on Iran; Iran in turn has promised to hit back – only this time much more fiercely. Biden, apparently has urged Israel to make a ‘proportional’ response and to avoid targeting Iranian nuclear sites or oil installations. He has, however, made it clear that the US supports Israel’s military response, saying “Israel has every right to respond to vicious attacks on them, not just by Iranians but everyone from Hezbollah to Hamas”.
On Sunday 13 October the US announced the deployment of Thaad (the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence anti-missile battery) ahead of an expected strike by Israel on Iran and the latter’s retaliation, along with 100 US military personnel.
Consequent upon Israeli attacks on Lebanon, over 1 million Lebanese have been displaced and about 2,000 killed. A huge number of buildings have been flattened and several villages in south Lebanon have been forcibly evacuated.
The same day, as IDF started its ground offensive against Lebanon, a Palestinian liberation fighter opened fire in a Tel Aviv suburb, killing 6 and injuring another 9.
All reactionaries are fools
Like all reactionary fools, the Israeli Zionists and their imperialist masters believe that by murdering top leaders of the resistance they will succeed in putting an end to the resistance. Time will show that genocide and mass murder, far from extinguishing the bright flames of resistance against imperialism, will only result in starting prairie fires which will consume imperialism and its stooges.
Imperialism is on a downward trajectory, which is accelerating with each passing month. We are in a transition period between one world order that is fading away and another which is in the process of coming into being. No force on earth can stop this shifting of the tectonic plates.
To murder Nasrallah and some of his close comrades, the IDF used 86 2,000-pound bombs. In their smug arrogance, they convinced themselves that they had finished off Hezbollah forever. Yet within days the resistance had chosen his cousin, Hashem Saiftedine, whose son is married to the daughter of the late Kassem Suleimani, the legendary leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, killed on the orders of Donald Trump, as his successor. The Israelis now also claim to have murdered him as well, but so far there has been no confirmation of this from Hezbollah. In its attempt to murder Saifiedine, Israel launched a heavy bombardment of the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh in the early hours of 4 October, killing 37 and injuring 151.
Resistance continues its fight
Be that as it may, Hezbollah’s optic communications remain unaffected, as does it network of tunnels underground and missile sites, as well as its weapons depots.
Hezbollah has repelled several land operations by the IDF. In one ambush the resistance killed 9 Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Hypocrites of the G7 imperialist countries, having gloated over and expressed satisfaction at Nasrallah’s murder, called for restraint and a ceasefire.
Within 72 hours of its incursion into Lebanon, Israel had murdered 50 medical personnel, bombed a mosque, and attacked a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, killing several people, among them two Hamas commanders – Saeed Abdullah Ali, a commander of the Qassem brigades and his family in the early hours of 5 October. A second Hamas leader, Mohamed Hussein al Looise, was killed in an air raid in the Beka’a Valley.
Debunking Israeli boastful claims that the IDF had eliminated Hezbollah as a fighting force, the Lebanese resistance on Friday, 4 October, launched 222 projectiles at northern Israel; and it has kept up that momentum since then.
Hezbollah has demonstrated that it can still strike at least 60 km into Israel despite weeks of Israeli attacks on its commanders and its arsenal. On Sunday 13 October, a Hezbollah drone attack killed four IDF soldiers at a military base in the centre of Israel. The chief of the Israeli armed forces was supposedly among the 70 soldiers in the canteen of the elite Golani Brigade injured in this attack, with further reports claiming that he was killed. Israel has denied the claim.
Hezbollah has not used its full capacity yet. “It has been firing at around one tenth of its estimated pre-war launching capacity, a few hundred rockets a day instead of as many as 2000”, said Asaf Orion, a former Israeli general and head of strategy at the Israeli defence forces:
“Some of that gap is a choice by Hezbollah not to go full out, and some of it is due to degradation by the IDF. But Hezbollah has enough left to mount a strong operation”, said General Orion, adding that “Haifa and northern Israel are still on the receiving end of rocket and drone attacks almost every day”.
More than 20,000 rockets and missiles have been fired at Israel over the past year from Gaza and Lebanon alone according to official Israeli figures. “It is only a question of time before Israel starts to run out of interceptors and has to prioritise how they are deployed”, said Ehud Eilan, a former researcher at Israel’s ministry of defence. It faces a looming shortage of interceptor missiles, and the US is racing to help fill gaps in Israel’s protective shield.
Additionally, with the wars it is waging on several fronts, the ability of the US to supply Israel is not limitless. It cannot continue to supply Ukraine and Israel at the same pace: “We are reaching a tipping point”, said Dana Stroul, a former senior US defence official with responsibility for the Middle East.
“If Iran responds to an Israeli attack [with a massive air strike campaign], and Hezbollah joins in too, Israel’s defences will be stretched”, she said.
Iranian leadership defies threats
Continued Israeli aggression, with its designs on Iran, and the unreserved support given by US to Israel, is forcing Iran’s supreme leadership to reverse its earlier fatwa declaring the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons Haram. Conditions since then have changed and, facing an existential threat, Iran is on the verge of deciding (if it has not already decided) to change its stance on nuclear weapons. Since Israel is on a murder spree, targeting the leaders of countries and liberation movements which are a part of the axis of resistance, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s supreme leader, by way of defiance against Israeli/US threats, attended on 4 October Friday prayers in Tehran to project unity and strength in the face of extreme threats. Millions of Iranians joined him. It is very rare for him to take part in such an event. His last sermon was in 2020, following the murder of the legendary General Kassem Suleiman, one of Iran’s most revered commanders.
On the same day, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi, landed in Beirut in a surprise visit intended to show solidarity with Lebanon and to deliver food and medicine.
Israeli intentions
Israel’s main target in Iran would be Iran’s energy infrastructure and its nuclear facilities. As to the latter, they are spread over several sites and buried deep underground. Israel would need US help and, even with American assistance, it may not be able to reach them. Besides, as Iran is a long way from Israel, its planes would need refuelling, which could only be done with US assistance. On top of this, Israel would require permission from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf statelets to fly over their air space. If these stooges gave permission they would thereby become participants in Israel’s attack on Iran and thus become legitimate targets for the Iranian air force, which has the capacity to cause colossal damage to their energy infrastructure. Precisely for that reason, the Iranian foreign minister has been touring these countries and making them aware of the dangers inherent in their acceding to Israeli and American demands.
However, if they were to bow down to US pressure, Iran would be able to destroy their oil fields and refineries; it would probably close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. All this could, with Gulf oil supply cut off, bring about a global economic meltdown, compared with which the depression of 1929 would seem like child’s play. The Israelis and their American masters are only too aware of it. The unfolding events in the Middle East will reveal how far they are prepared to go.
Iran is a hard nut to crack. Despite draconian sanctions, to which Iran has been subjected by imperialism for decades, it is a country with a strong industrial base and a powerful defence industry, especially in the area of missile and drone technology. It has also been recently supplied by Russia with S400 missile batteries, probably the best in the world for intercepting incoming missiles, as well as some state-of-the-art jamming devices. With Russia backing Iran while Israel has the support of the US, the chances of direct confrontation between the US and Russia cannot be discounted.
23 September was the deadliest single day in Lebanon since the civil war, with the Israeli air force bombing Beirut, Tyre and Harmel. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured. On 24 September, Israeli forces murdered Ibrahim Obeissie, Hezbollah’s head of its missile division.
In response to Israel’s murderous campaign, Hezbollah fighters are firing 300 rockets a day, and deeper into Israel than ever before. Its Qader medium-range missile can carry a 750 kg warhead and hit targets at long distance.
Hezbollah fighters also used Fadi rockets for the first time. Named after a Hezbollah commander killed in 1987, whose brother was also murdered by the IDF in January of this year. These rockets have a range of 70-100km – a range greater than any rockets used by the Lebanese so far in the fighting that has taken place since October 2023. Hezbollah also claimed to have used the more powerful Fadi-3 rocket for the first time on 24 September.
Just by way of a warning to the Zionists that if they can murder the leaders of the resistance, they are not immune from similar attacks, a Hezbollah drone strike on 18 October hit Netanyahu’s weekend residence. That this drone hit its target with such accuracy could only be that the drone had inbuilt image recognition, something which will worry the Zionists sick. The drone flew through a window into one of the rooms. Netanyahu was not in at the time, something which would have been known to Hezbollah. Nevertheless, it served as a clear warning: we know where you are and you can expect a visit from us in the near future.
Ignoring the Israeli spin about its invasion of Lebanon, the actual distance covered by the IDF has rarely gone further than towns on the border. Contrary to the claims made under duress by a kidnapped Lebanese before the cameras, the resistance has not fled the border and deadly skirmishes with the IDF are a daily occurrence, with five Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting only a few days ago. In fact, Israel is losing more soldiers in south Lebanon than the resistance. Hezbollah has widened the scope of its operations, with drones striking IDF soldiers deep into Israeli territory, including, as mentioned above, an attack on a military base near Haifa on 13 October which killed 4 IDF soldiers, injuring another 70. Missiles weighing as much as 3 tons are being fired at Tel Aviv. Despite assassination of Hezbollah’s top leadership, the organisation, its military command and its fighting capacity remain intact. The fairy tales about Hezbollah’s demise are just that – fairy tales.
Murders won’t extinguish the resistance
Just as the murder of Ismail Haniyeh did not put an end to the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation and genocide, so the murders of Hassan Nasrallah and his comrades have not put an end to the Lebanese resistance against Israeli aggression and Israeli designs on Lebanon.
Frustrated with its progress thus far, and mauled in daily fights in the Lebanese border towns, Israel has doubled down and on 24 October sent a larger force. This larger force will fare no better than previous exercises in subduing the Lebanese resistance. Israel’s only hope is to incite a civil war in Lebanon, but in the present-day conditions, this attempt is unlikely to succeed.
IDF returns to north Gaza
Turning to Palestine, on 16 October, Israel murdered the Gaza chief, Yahya Sinwar, as a result of a routine patrol and a chance encounter in the southern Gaza city of Rafah – not some clever intelligence. Israel has intensified its terror bombing campaign in the West Bank, killing dozens of innocent people. As for Gaza, having previously declared that northern Gaza had been cleared of Palestinian resistance, it finds that the liberation fighters are very much alive, fighting and inflicting casualties on the IDF occupiers and regularly destroying Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles.
Recently, the IDF has returned to the north of Gaza and is busy subjecting the Palestinians there to starvation. The so-called General’s Plan, created by the former national security adviser, Giora Eiland, calls for Israel to order civilians to leave north Gaza for other areas of the enclave and declare the north a closed military zone. Those who do not leave are to be considered military targets and totally cut off from supplies of food, water and medicine. As Israel’s assault on Gaza has been a failure so far, sheer desperation has driven Israel to try this Plan as the last hope of the doomed.
This Plan affects 400,000 people who have been ordered to leave for the south to a zone in al-Mawasi on the coast in southern Gaza. The evacuation order is backed up by a sharp reduction in aid deliveries – less than a quarter of the amount delivered per day in September which itself was totally inadequate.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said that the UN had “not been allowed to provide any assistance including food” to northern Gaza since 30 September. Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza has had no food or medicine deliveries, said Abu Safiyeh, director of this hospital.
Defying Israeli threats, the people of northern Gaza refuse to leave as there is no safe place in Gaza for them to go to. Besides, they will be blown to bits on their way by Israeli bombers. And if they manage to reach the south and put up some tent to sleep under, they are only too likely to be burned alive under their plastic coverings by Israeli bombardment, as recent experience has shown. (For information in the preceding three paragraph, see the Financial Times of 15 October 2024).
Zionists aim at total ethnic cleansing
Basically, the Zionists want Gaza, as indeed the whole of Palestine, emptied of Palestinians. Their present actions are a continuation of the 1948 Nakba, and in pursuance of their mad dream of creating Eretz Israel. In the name of security, they have occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, the Lebanese Sheba Farms, and are now busy trying to occupy south Lebanon, and have designs on Jordan, Syria, Iraq, part of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But they won’t succeed, for in the memorable words of Karl Marx:
“If limits are to be fixed by military interests, there will be no end to claims, because every military line is necessarily faulty, and may be improved by annexing some more outlying territory; and, moreover, they can never be fixed finally and fairly, because they must be imposed by the conqueror upon the conquered and consequently carry within them the seed of fresh wars”.
By the very logic of its existence, Israel is bound to disappear. A colonialist, racist and reactionary tool of imperialism, founded on ethnic cleansing and stealing other people’s land, it has no long-term future. By its continuing genocidal activity and its wars of aggression, it is rousing the wrath of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern people and hastening the day of its destruction.
Yahya Sinwar, an icon and a hero
Finally, a few words about the murder of Yahya Sinwar. His death was greeted with joy by the Zionists and leaders of the tiny group of G7 imperialist countries. Matthew Miller, the moronic and despicable spokesman of the US State Department said that Sinwar was a brutal dictator who ruled Gaza with an iron fist, terrorised Israelis and Palestinians alike, and whose actions were responsible for the deaths of more than 40,000 Palestinians. It is as if Sinwar had gone around killing 40,000 Palestinians instead of the non-stop year-long indiscriminate bombardment by Israel. Miller’s brainless and stupid assertion deserves to be treated with contempt; no-one possessing at least two brain cells would accept this assertion.
The truth is that Sinwar was a heroic figure who had dedicated his entire life to the cause of the liberation of the Palestinian people; he was a person of the refugee camps whose family had been expelled from its home to Gaza; he served 22 years in an Israeli dungeon, during which time he learnt Hebrew – all the better to understand his enemy. From his prison cell he is reported to have masterminded the kidnapping of an IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit. In the prisoner swap that followed he was one of the 1100 Palestinians whom Israel was forced to release in return for Shalit’s release. Precisely for that reason the IDF has been practising the so-called Hannibal Directive under which the IDF kills its own soldiers rather than let them be taken prisoner by the resistance. Half the Israelis who met with their death on 7 October were killed by the IDF, a fact which was revealed by Max Blumenthal’s Gray Zone, and about which Israel and its imperialist patrons maintain a deathly silence.
Israeli and imperialist media had been doing their best to portray Sinwar as a coward, hiding in tunnels to save his skin. The facts have given lie to this malicious calumny. He was living in an apartment above ground, leading his men in the combat against the Zionist murder squads known as the IDF. At the time of his death he was carrying an AK47 with two other fighters. In shells fired by an Israeli tank, the two others were killed and Sinwar was badly injured, sitting on a chair in an apartment room. He threw two hand grenades at two IDF soldiers who came in; when a drone made it towards him, he attempted to hit it with an ordinary stick, the only ‘weapon’ to hand. He was thereupon killed by a shell from an IDF tank.
His martyrdom, the bravery with which he faced his death, his last few moments, were captured by an IDF camera on a film which it released to the public in its moment of exhilaration at having killed a figure like Sinwar. The impression on the public was not quite what his murderers had expected: as a result, this footage was immediately deleted from Israeli official sites. But too late! The damage was done. The image of Sinwar dying such a heroic death electrified not just the Palestinians but also the wider Middle East and far beyond. All people on the right side of history mourn his death and celebrate his life. He has become an iconic figure who is bound to inspire Palestinian youth to carry on the fight for which he lived, and for which he died. He will live long in people’s memory, while his denigrators, the despicable Millers and their ilk, will be deposited in the dustbin of history with effortless ease.
Glory to Hassan Nasrallah!
Glory to Yahya Sinwar!
Death to imperialism!
Death to Zionism!
Victory to the Resistance!
POSTSCRIPT
Since the writing of this article, just as we go to press, the news has come through that Israel has launched air strikes on Iran, including targets in Tehran, claiming that it had struck military facilities such as missile manufacturing plants and air defences in the early hours of Saturday 26 October.
Iranian defence headquarters said Israel had targeted military bases in Tehran as well as in the southwestern province of Khuzestan and western province of Ilhan, adding that Iranian air defence systems “successfully confronted the aggression” and that there had been “limited damage” at some sites.
Iran’s foreign ministry called the strikes a “blatant violation of international law”, adding that the Republic “considers it its right and duty to exercise legitimate self-defence against foreign acts of aggression”.
Many Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, condemned Israel’s attack as a “violation of international law”.
A sense of normality prevailed in Iran after the Israeli strike, with state television broadcasting images of various cities and towns returning to routine activities on Saturday morning. The sports ministry announced that scheduled events would proceed as planned while privately owned businesses opened and schools welcomed students.
All this would indicate that the attack was by no means the devastating response Israel had been threatening after Iran’s 1 October attack on Israel. Obviously the Zionists have been sobered by Iran’s military capabilities since the 1 October Iranian attack.