Tuesday September 17 and Wednesday September 18, 2024 witnessed a surreal bombing campaign across Lebanon and Syria that killed 40 people, including at least two children, while grievously wounding around three and a half thousand.
The first such day seemed relatively normal for the region, per the eleven month status quo of heightened tensions and cyclical acts of aggression between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, until thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously at 3:30 PM local time.
Video of a man walking around a grocery store until a small explosion tore a chunk out of his thigh and knocked him to the floor while other shoppers watched in horror went viral on social media along with scores of pictures documenting the blasts’ bloody aftermath. Some people had injuries to their legs, pelvis, and abdomen while others suffered eye injuries and had fingers blown off when their devices exploded in their hands.
The pager explosions were immediately attributed to the Israeli government–who declined to comment when asked by the Associated Press on September 17 and issued a blanket denial on September 22–and its intelligence agencies, chiefly their foreign intelligence service Mossad.
The first wave of explosions injured at least 2,750 people and killed 12, including two children. Fatima Abdullah, a nine-year-old who had just started fourth grade, was in her family’s kitchen when a pager left on the table started beeping. Her aunt later told The New York Times, “She picked up the device to bring it to her father and was holding it when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood.” There has been much less reported about eleven-year-old Bilal Kanj, the second child killed that Tuesday.
A majority of pager explosions in Lebanon happened where Hezbollah is known to have a strong presence, from throughout the country’s south and Beirut’s southern suburbs to Baalbek and throughout the Beqqa Valley. At least fourteen people were injured in Syria when pagers exploded in and around Damascus as well as Deir ez-Zor, areas where Hezbollah and its state sponsor Iran both maintain a military presence to help keep Bashar al-Assad’s regime in power.
A second wave of small, simultaneous explosions ripped through Lebanon the following day at 5:00 PM local time, injuring at least 750 people. Between 25 to 30 people were reportedly killed, although some may have succumbed to injuries they suffered the previous day.
It was initially unclear which electronics were blowing up–a flurry of confused headlines and rumors on social media claiming everything from ICOM handheld radios known to be used by Hezbollah to cellphones, biometric fingerprint scanners, and even solar panels were detonating. Photographs of destroyed ICOM radios confirmed that much while questions remain over whether the other devices exploded on their own or if they were damaged by a radio blowing up next to them.
Hospitals across Lebanon were immediately overwhelmed by thousands of injured people as well as family and friends of the victims crowding their emergency rooms while state-run media put out an urgent call for healthy citizens to donate blood. At least three victims injured by the explosions later died from their wounds over the following several days, increasing the estimated death toll from thirty-seven to forty.
A deluge of conflicting reports about the mysterious explosions circulated in the days following September 17 and September 18 postulated both how and why the attacks had taken place. Initial speculation about overheated batteries or hacked devices were soon overshadowed by a report from The New York Times describing a painstaking Mossad operation to infiltrate Hezbollah’s supply chain of pagers and radios.
The world’s most heavily armed and technologically advanced non-state actor began downgrading their communications last February to counter Israel’s well-documented ability to hack into smartphones and use them for intelligence-gathering. Hezbollah’s sudden demand for decades-old and rarely-used technology prompted the Israelis to create a network of shell companies in multiple countries who specialized in producing and shipping them in bulk.
These Mossad-owned companies operated like normal businesses and even sold normal products to civilian customers, but their top priority was selling pagers and radios to Hezbollah–devices powered by batteries containing small amounts of PETN explosive material.
“An unprecedented blow”
The pager and radio explosions across Lebanon shocked the entire world, drawing condemnation from Israel’s enemies and even some allies, while heated arguments about the attacks’ legality and morality broke out between lay people and legal scholars alike. The element of surprise enabled Mossad to deliver what Hezbollah’s leader later called, “an unprecedented blow,” against the organization–but it also prevented the intended targets from minimizing harm to civilians, including their spouses and children.
The blasts terrified an already-traumatized population, causing widespread panic about everything from cellphones and solar panels to intercoms and baby monitors. Many Lebanese commentators, including longtime critics of Hezbollah, accused the Israeli government of committing a terrorist attack. Others pointed to the fact that the location of every compromised device could not be reliably known at the time of simultaneous detonation to argue that the explosions were unlawfully indiscriminate.
An analysis by William H. Boothby for West Point’s Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare notes that the Geneva Conventions prohibits indiscriminate attacks, which they define as “attacks that are not directed at a military objective or that employ weapons or methods that are indiscriminate by nature.” The report goes on to note, “Targeting a device that it is known that the adverse party to the conflict has issued to persons who are lawful targets would not at first glance appear to be an indiscriminate act. The object itself, the pager, if it has been issued for military purposes (e.g. to promote effective communication between commanders and subordinate units and personnel) can be classed as a military objective and thus as a lawful target with the consequence that attacking that pager, destroying it or damaging it are lawful activities.”
“If the target comprises the persons to whom the pagers have been issued, and if they are classed as [combatants]... then again in principle the targeting of those individuals will be lawful. If, however, it is known that the pagers are likely to be in the possession of persons who cannot be classed as fighters, for example because the individuals in question have exclusively diplomatic, political or administrative roles for Hezbollah and have no combat-related function, such persons should be categorized as civilians, and it would not be lawful to target them.”
This last point is important because while Hezbollah is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, and more than a dozen other countries, it has a dedicated military wing along with branches dedicated to political organizing and even social services–which function as a sole lifeline and recruiting tool among impoverished Shia Muslims. This multifaceted approach to interacting with the Lebanese government and society is what keeps the movement in power while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.
It also makes the question of combatant versus non-combatant more difficult to answer when there are politicians, media figures, farmers, construction workers, teachers, and doctors working for a terrorist organization.
The pager and radio explosions stirred mixed emotions and divided opinion among supporters of Free Syria, including the familiar feeling of watching one’s enemies fighting each other from the sidelines.
Hezbollah and Israel have been at war on-and-off since the 1980s, decades before protests against Bashar al-Assad’s regime were met with gunfire, mass-arrests, and mass-torture. The Syrian Revolution is colored by the fact that nearly all Syrians support the Palestinian cause and view Israel as an illegitimate settler-colonial project–regime supporters commonly accuse the opposition of being Israeli agents while the latter accuse Assad of making deals with the Israeli government, selling out his country to their arch-enemy.
Syrians by and large sided with Hezbollah during their recurring conflicts with Israel, especially during the war in 2006 that saw a full-scale invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli military that ultimately ended in a stalemate. The movement was viewed as an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, pan-Islamist resistance movement that Arabs and Muslims around the world could support for reasons ranging from nationalistic solidarity to religious fundamentalism. It was only after 2011 that Syrians witnessed Hezbollah’s sectarian nature when they sided with the Alawite-dominated and Iran-allied Syrian government over the majority-Sunni protesters.
Hezbollah’s betrayal went a lot further after Assad began exterminating pro-opposition Syrians, gradually escalating from covertly supporting massacres to openly intervening against the armed opposition in 2013 and playing a decisive role turning the war in the regime’s favor.
Syrians today largely despise Hezbollah for the multitude of crimes the latter has committed against their people in multiple regions across the country while also opposing Israel for their oppression of Palestinians. This puts them in an awkward position when their two enemies periodically battle each other for regional hegemony, cheering for neither side and praying for the civilians caught up in the middle of it all.
Reactions within the Syrian opposition to the pager and radio explosions were a mixture of schadenfreude for Hezbollah, horror for innocent Lebanese people harmed by the blasts, and outrage at Israel.
“Crossed all red lines”
Wednesday September 18, 2024 was the same day Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant announced the beginning of, “a new phase of the war,” shifting focus from Gaza to Lebanon after skirmishing with Hezbollah almost nonstop since October 8, 2023. The Shia Islamist political party, social movement, and militant group started firing rockets and artillery shells into Israeli-held territory as a show of solidarity with Hamas and other Iranian-backed insurgents at war with Israel in Gaza. There have also been periodic attempts by Hezbollah as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters based in Lebanon to infiltrate Israel’s northern border.
Editor’s note: The following casualty and displacement figures predate the sharp escalation in violence after September 23, which will be discussed in detail further below.
At least 25 Israeli soldiers and 27 civilians–as well as 12 Syrian Druze children from Majdal Shams, in the occupied Golan Heights–were killed by missiles, rockets, drones, and guerilla attacks launched by Hezbollah and its diverse array of allied militant groups by September. This coalition ranges from militias affiliated with the Amal Movement–a Shia political party and former rival of Hezbollah–to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), who function as an Assad regime proxy in Lebanon, and even the Muslim Brotherhood’s Lebanese branch. They have also reportedly been joined by volunteer fighters from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen’s Houthi movement, although some analysts remain unconvinced of their involvement in Lebanon.
The pro-Hezbollah side suffered more than 500 fighters killed in action, along with at least 150 Lebanese civilian deaths, prior to the sharp escalation in Israeli military aggression seen in late September 2024. More than 96,000 Israelis and 110,000 Lebanese citizens were also displaced during eleven months of bombing and incursions.
Israel responded to Hezbollah’s bombardment with their own campaign of airstrikes and shelling, which allegedly included the illegal use of white phosphorus munitions to raze villages in South Lebanon. There have also been allegations of journalists, hospitals, and religious sites being targeted by the Israeli military while their government unsurprisingly denies any and all accusations of war crimes.
Hezbollah meanwhile stands accused by Israel, the Lebanese Army, rival Lebanese parties, and UNIFIL–a United Nations peacekeeping operation tasked with the historically futile role of providing a buffer zone between Israel and Lebanon–of storing weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment in civilian areas as well as using ambulances and civilian aid initiatives to conceal military activity near the border.
Thursday September 19 came and went without any more electronic devices mysteriously exploding, although it saw continued exchanges of missiles and drones on the contested border which killed at least three Israeli soldiers and damaged at least 50 houses. Two suspected Hezbollah fighters were shot and killed after planting an explosive device near an Israeli military outpost on the Lebanese border–several Hezbollah fighters were also likely killed when Israel launched more than 70 airstrikes across the South Lebanon countryside that same day.
That evening saw a particularly dramatic moment when Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah addressed the pager explosions, which he said, “crossed all red lines,” and “could be considered… a declaration of war.” The speech, broadcast live from an undisclosed location, was interrupted by Israeli fighter jets flying low enough to the ground over Beirut for residents to hear their sonic boom while they fired decoy flares into the sky. This mock airstrike was timed to take attention away from Nasrallah’s speech and further humiliate embattled militants while Israeli troops gradually massed on Lebanon’s border.
What seemed to some like a frivolous stunt by the Israeli Air Force may well have been target desensitization–a deception tactic intended to lull combatants into lowering their guard, often via the use of frequent flyovers by helicopters and other aircraft which pass by harmlessly. The following day witnessed a real airstrike with deadly consequences in Dahieh, a Shia-majority suburb south of Beirut which has become synonymous with Hezbollah.
Among the dead was Ibrahim Aqil, a militant with decades of battlefield experience who had served as head of the group’s al-Hajj Radwan special forces unit until succeeding the recently-killed Fuad Shukr as head of Hezbollah’s military wing. Other members of the Radwan Force’s leadership committee were reportedly killed, as well as three children and seven women, when an F-35 strike-fighter leveled an apartment building where they were meeting. The estimated death toll, including both militants and civilians, stands at 55 while at least another 68 people were injured in what was then the deadliest airstrike to hit Beirut since the 2006 war.
September 20 also saw Hezbollah fire at least 170 rockets at Israel while the latter conducted further airstrikes across Lebanon throughout the day and even one in Syria that killed a senior commander from Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iraqi offshoot of the Lebanese group.
September 21 and September 22 witnessed Hezbollah firing more than 200 rockets into Israel while the Israeli Air Force conducted nearly 500 airstrikes in South Lebanon, claiming to target insurgent commanders as well as arms caches, rocket launchers, and other infrastructure. The continuous escalation in bombings and rocket attacks sparked widespread fear that a 2006-style Israeli invasion was imminent.
The next day, September 23, took death, injury, and displacement to a whole new level with 1,600 Israeli airstrikes killing 558 people–including at least 83 civilians–and wounding 1,835 more, including women and children. This was Lebanon’s deadliest day since the end of its 1975-1990 civil war, the opening round of a nightmare that locals had feared and predicted for decades. More than 500,000 civilians immediately fled their homes in Shia-majority areas, increasing the number of displaced people by fivefold in a single day, and most remain unhoused at the time of this writing. Their cars flooded the streets burning expensive and increasingly hard to find gasoline as the country sinks closer and closer to a nationwide fuel shortage.
Hezbollah responded to this shocking air campaign by launching a barrage of 240 missiles at Israel, which injured five people after the vast majority were intercepted by air defense systems and did little if anything to slow down the Israeli air campaign or alleviate Lebanon’s suffering. Meanwhile the country’s hospitals, already stretched to their limit by an unprecedented number of patients with injured eyes and hands from the pager and radio explosions the previous week, struggled to cope with an influx of wounded and dying unlike any they have seen for decades.
This sharp increase in violence and tension, heightening the risk of a full-blown regional war between Israel’s allies and Iran’s allies, prompted the United States to announce the deployment of more military forces to the Middle East. This was intended to both pressure Hezbollah and Iran to avoid further escalation and prepare for the evacuation of US citizens if all else fails and regional war breaks out.
September 24 started with the Israelis reportedly killing Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of Hezbollah’s missile and rocket force, during an airstrike in Beirut that also claimed the lives of five other people, including two UNHCR staff. This was followed by Hezbollah firing 300 rockets throughout the day, a show of defiance towards Israel that included the use of missiles they had never fired before, and ultimately wounded six people in Upper Galilee and Haifa. Dozens more militants and civilians were killed while several Israeli military bases came under attack from rockets and drones.
The next day was even bloodier with nearly 300 airstrikes conducted across Lebanon, killing at least 72 people and injuring nearly 400. Israel claimed to be targeting sites used by Hezbollah, including sixty offices owned by the organization’s intelligence-gathering directorate. It was also reported that 70 Syrian refugees had been killed by Israeli bombing on September 24 and September 25, including 22 children. This comes after years of xenophobic discrimination against Syrians in Lebanon, culminating in refugees being forced out of shelters for displaced people to make room for now-homeless Lebanese during the week of airstrikes.
The IDF’s chief of staff Herzl Halevi told journalists on September 25 that the air campaign was in preparation for a ground invasion into Lebanon, the first by Israel since the end of the 2006 war.
Hezbollah reportedly broke another precedent that day and fired a Qadr-1 ballistic missile–far more powerful and longer-range than the rockets they had launched for months–targeting nothing less than Tel Aviv, Israel’s financial center and largest city. This was aimed further south than munitions previously launched from Lebanon and residents woke up to the sound of air attack sirens before the missile was intercepted by Israeli air defense systems.
Airstrikes in Lebanon continued on September 26, with 220 bombings killing at least 92 people and injuring 153 according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. One Syrian citizen was killed in Qana by the Israeli air campaign while another 23 Syrian refugees, mostly women and children, and a Lebanese citizen were killed when an apartment building in Younine was destroyed. A bridge was destroyed on the Lebanese side of the Lebanon-Syria border in Hermel while eight people, border patrol and customs officers, were injured on the Syrian side in the same airstrike.
An Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s Dahieh suburb also killed Muhammad Hussein Srur, the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit, as well as three bystanders and injured 15 others. Hezbollah reportedly fired between 45 and 130 rockets at northern Israel, injuring at least one civilian.
But nothing shocked the region and the entire world like the events of September 27, 2024, when an airstrike in Dahieh's Haret Hreik dropped an unparallelled amount of ordinance onto a single target. Somewhere between 80 to 100 bombs–including at least six American-made 2,000 pound “bunker buster” munitions–were among 80 to 100 bombs dropped on a residential block in order to destroy a Hezbollah bunker located 18 meters underground where the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was meeting with other senior commanders. Most people living in Beirut heard and felt the multiple-explosions detonating almost simultaneously, destroying four apartment buildings and transforming the underground headquarters into a pulverized crater.
Speculation about Hassan Nasrallah’s apparent demise immediately circulated across the Internet and world media, buoyed by journalists with decades of experience reporting in the region writing astonished columns and opinion pieces. The exact number of people killed and injured remains unconfirmed at the time of this writing, but Hezbollah eventually confirmed Nasrallah’s “martyrdom” the following day. At least 33 fatalities have been confirmed, including Abbas Nilforoushan–an Iranian brigadier general and deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)–and Ali Karaki, one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders–with nearly 200 more people injured. Israeli media reported at least 300 people were killed, with no distinction made between the estimated number of civilians and militants among the dead.
Nasrallah’s 38-year-old daughter, Zeinab Nasrallah–a longtime spokeswoman for Hezbollah and probably one of the most powerful women associated with the organization–was also rumored to have been killed when the bunker was destroyed. Several other high-ranking Hezbollah members and IRGC personnel were reportedly killed, but the massive bombardment of a residential area makes it almost certain that civilians were among the dead and wounded.
One significant but widely-overlooked detail about this decapitation strike was that it occurred on a Friday, when Muslims traditionally go to mosques or elsewhere for communal prayers. This may explain why Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah commanders took the seemingly irrational risk of gathering in a single location amid a campaign of airstrikes and assassinations by Israel. It could also be the reason why surprisingly few civilians have been confirmed among the dead, because they were away from their homes attending Friday prayer services at their mosques.
Lebanon boasts a remarkable array of religious diversity, from Christians who make up roughly a third to half of the population–the largest such community in the Middle East–to Sunni and Shia Muslims as well as the Druze–an esoteric ethnoreligious group found mostly in the Levant region–and even a comparatively tiny Jewish minority. But the country has been divided on sectarian lines since the 1975-1990 civil war, when it became standard fare for a majority of one neighborhood or region to massacre their neighbors from different religions. Dahieh became a Shia-majority enclave when peasants displaced by Israeli invasions into South Lebanon fled their rural villages to join relatives already living in the area.
The killing of Hassan Nasrallah overshadowed other events of September 27, from an Israeli airstrike on Shebaa that killed nine members of a family–including four children and a pregnant woman–to another airstrike that killed five Syrian soldiers on the Syrian-Lebanese border as well as Hezbollah firing 75 rockets into Israel–10 rockets aimed at Tiberias and 65 at Safed. More airstrikes across Lebanon killed more civilians and Hezbollah militants, including one that destroyed three buildings in Dahieh reportedly storing anti-ship missiles–Hezbollah denies this claim.
September 28 saw Hezbollah fire more than 90 rockets, drones, and missiles at different towns and cities across Israel, as well as Palestinian villages in the West Bank–a bizarre move for a militant group who claim to fight for the liberation of Palestine–while one errant rocket landed in an uninhabited area in Jordan close to the capital city, Amman. Meanwhile Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed the head of Hezbollah’s rocket unit, Muhammad Ali Ismail, and the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence directorate, Hassan Khalil Yassin.
Another 105 people were killed and at least 359 in Lebanon were injured by 120 Israeli airstrikes conducted on September 29 while the conflict expanded even further when American bases in Iraq and Syria were hit by rockets launched by Iranian-backed militias. The latter development prompted the US military to conduct an airstrike near Abu Kamal in Deir ez-Zor Governorate, targeting a base used by Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada and similar groups.
Drone strikes were also reported across Deir ez-Zor, though it remains unclear if which country was responsible for those attacks. But Israeli media did report an airstrike in al-Qusayr, a strategically-located city on the Syria-Lebanon border where Hezbollah has maintained a large presence after helping the Assad regime recapture it from Syrian rebels in 2013.
September 30 witnessed more airstrikes by Israel–including one targeting an apartment in central Beirut that killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They are one of the oldest Palestinian militant groups, who reached their zenith in the 1970s before fading into obscurity and splitting into multiple factions backed by different regional powers, subservient to newer organizations like Hezbollah.
Artillery shelling by Israel was also conducted across the Lebanese border while multiple news outlets reported on Israeli special forces launching raids in preparation for a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, during which time Hezbollah fired 35 rockets into Israel and the Golan Heights.
Hassan Nasrallah is dead and Hezbollah is severely wounded
Reactions to Nasrallah’s death have ranged from public, perhaps even performative, bursts of despair from Hezbollah supporters to jubilant, irrelevant celebration among those who have suffered at the hands of the Iranian-backed militant group.
Some Lebanese commentators such as Elia Ayoub have explained the unreserved outbursts of grief and sorrow by Hezbollah supporters as stemming from their view of Hassan Nasrallah as something akin to a demigod. This was especially due to his religious credentials as a Shia cleric and his uniquely charismatic speeches–even Arabic speakers who despised Hezbollah always noted his command of oratory. HIs tenure as the group’s leader since 1992 saw the withdrawal of Israeli military forces from South Lebanon in 2000 after 15 years of occupation and guerilla warfare, an unprecedented success that made Hezbollah a major regional power.
The older generation, who founded or later joined the group in the 1980s, saw Nasrallah as the leader who turned their rag-tag militant group into a professionalized fighting force capable of challenging both Israel and the United States. It was under his watch that the organization developed support networks around the world that continue to funnel billions of dollars to the group via a mix of legal business ventures and organized crime ventures–this includes money laundering, drug trafficking, and gun-running. Meanwhile younger members of Hezbollah born during and after the 1990s have only known Nasallah as their leader, entire lives spent inundated in a cult of personality that portrayed him as their brave, wise surrogate father.
But a similar number of people in the Middle East and around the world celebrated Nasrallah’s death, especially supporters of the Syrian opposition who experienced massacres and displacement by Hezbollah, or had friends and family who suffered this fate.
The killing of Hassan Nasrallah, after the pager and radio explosions followed by weeks of relentless Israeli airstrikes, has severely wounded Hezbollah on an organizational level–experienced commanders, highly-trained fighters, Iranian-supplied weapons, cannot be replaced overnight.
At least 800 people were killed during seven days of Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon, while more than 5,000 were injured and a further 500,000 were displaced. Thousands of Lebanese citizens streamed across the border into Syria from Shia-majority regions suffering the brunt of Israel’s wrath. A small number of Syrian refugees also joined the caravan of cars and buses, but most preferred to take their chances in Lebanon than face arrest in Syria for participating in anti-Assad protests or avoiding mandatory military service. The regime for its part announced a general amnesty for all crimes committed before September 22, 2024, but they soon broke this promise and started detaining young men accused of dodging conscription.
But xenophobia against Syrians in Lebanon has only worsened after two catastrophic weeks for Hezbollah, with everyone from Al-Jazeera commentators to local street thugs baselessly accusing refugees of spying for Israel and enabling Hassan Nasrallah’s death–evidenced by multiple videos of Syrians in Lebanon being beaten in the streets. Scapegoating foreigners and other marginalized people with a “stabbed in the back” myth is typical behavior for fascists desperate to maintain their strong, superior self-image after a series of embarrassing defeats.
Airstrikes by Israel were followed by a long-expected ground invasion of South Lebanon in early October, with infantry and tanks pushing north across the border into territory where Hezbollah has been launching rockets and building tunnels. The Israeli government accused the militant group of planning to commit an October 7-style terrorist attack via the use of those tunnels–they also acknowledged casualties on their side, at least nine soldiers killed in action and 18 wounded at the time of this writing.
Iran found itself in a difficult position after Hassan Nasrallah’s death and Israel’s escalating military action in Lebanon, torn between the need to retaliate–doing nothing would have risked alienating their networks of Shia extremist allies across the region–while wanting to avoid sparking a full-scale regional war. Their retaliation for the airstrike that killed Nasrallah and General Nilforoushan came in the form of 180 to 200, medium-range, hypersonic ballistic missiles fired at Israel in two waves shortly before dawn on October 1. A majority of the projectiles were intercepted and shot down by Israeli, American, and Jordanian air defense systems–they managed to kill one Palestinian Arab and wound several others near Jericho while two Israeli civilians and two Jordanian civilians were also reportedly injured.
A mass-shooting was also carried out by two gunmen in Tel Aviv the following night at 7:00 PM local time, killing five Israeli civilians–including three foreign tourists–and wounding 16 more, before the two perpetrators were shot dead by a security guard and an army reservist. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack and confirmed the shooters, a 19 and 25-year-old, were members of their armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
The Israeli and US governments are now threatening to respond to the ballistic missile strike with “severe consequences” while Iran has vowed to carry out “crushing attacks,” if such a response comes to pass. The risk of multiple simultaneous conflicts raging across the Middle East merging into one massive war is now higher than ever, raising tensions to levels unseen for more than half a century. It will be civilians who suffer the most in an all-out conventional war between countries allied with Israel and the United States versus Iran’s Axis of Resistance coalition of rogue states and militant groups.
Syrians in particular will be one of the worst-hit populations, as the favored human shields and geopolitical punching bags of competing imperial powers.
