Despite some tough rhetoric against Iran and Hizbullah following attacks on Israeli targets in New Delhi and Tblisi, Israel is unlikely to respond harshly, as they were low-level hits that do not warrant strong retaliation, analysts here said.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “continue to act forcefully, systematically and patiently” against ‘Iranian terror’ and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said his country “would not overlook” the attacks, but experts here do not see the attacks leading to tough response for varied reasons.
Reuters
One reason for this is that if, as is widely believed, Israel is behind a recent series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran, government officials presumably knew that revenge attacks were likely and took that possibility into account, an opinion piece in daily Ha’aretz said.
It said though an innocent diplomat’s wife cannot be compared to a scientist directly involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, Monday’s attacks were still limited enough, and did not violate the “rules of the game”.
Indeed, the modus operandi of the New Delhi bombing exactly mimicked that used to kill several of the Iranian scientists, he added, concluding that hence a direct Israeli military strike on either Hizbullah or Iran seems unlikely.
The other explanation put forward in this regard in the local media is that while Iran and Hizbullah have been trying to take revenge for Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination ever since it occurred on February 12, 2008, Tal Yehoshua, the Israeli diplomat’s wife, is the first casualty in a long line of failed attacks.
The previous attacks, which according to international media, have been thwarted by close cooperation between Israeli intelligence and local security services, included attempts to bomb the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan, to assassinate an Israeli consul in Turkey, and, most recently, to bomb popular tourist sites frequented by Israelis in Thailand.
Netanyahu also referred to some of these attacks yesterday in his reaction.
Monday’s targets, two embassy cars neither of which was on mission grounds at the time, were both relatively “low-level” targets located at the outer perimeter of the security envelope Israel provides its overseas embassies and consulates, an analyst said.
“This may indicate that Hizbollah and Iran are having trouble reaching more “prestigious targets”, he inferred.
Moreover, while both attacks attest to careful observation and planning and precise execution, the results were “meager enough that neither Tehran nor Beirut is likely to be rejoicing,” he stressed.
Nevertheless, some feel that the attacks may be the first in a series of such attacks to follow.
These analysts feel that the planners of the attacks deliberately chose to inflict modest damage while they were capable of wreaking greater harm.
They backed the contention by arguing that Israel has repeatedly warned that a mass-casualty Hizbullah attack on Israeli targets overseas would spark a massive Israeli assault on Lebanon, and that is something Iran doesn’t seem to want right now.
Some experts also saw the attacks in the light of surprising comments made last week by Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a speech in Beirut in which he stressed that his faction doesn’t take orders from Iran.
“It could be that Nasrallah already knew of the plans for Monday’s attacks and was trying to portray them as independent Hizbullah initiatives,” an expert said in his opinion piece.
Hizbullah’s interest in distancing itself from Iran, at least verbally, stems in part from the organisation’s difficult domestic situation, he noted.
Tuesday is the seventh anniversary of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination, and despite Nasrallah’s repeated denials, many Lebanese, along with much of the international community, think that Hizbullah was behind that killing.
Adding to Hizbullah’s domestic woes is the fact that one of its key allies, the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, may not survive.
The Syrian opposition no longer bothers to hide its loathing for Hizbullah and Iran, so a new Syrian government would likely be bad news for the Lebanese organisation.
PTI
