Terrorist group maintains heavy rocket, drone fire on large portions of country.
YONAH JEREMY BOB YUVAL BARNEA JERUSALEM POST STAFF
OCTOBER 22, 2024 03:12
Israel effectively declared war on Hezbollah’s finances on Monday, continuing air strikes on the group’s key banks which had started on Sunday, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant redefined the banks as terror entity arms of Hezbollah.
The IDF said on Monday that the air force had struck “dozens of Hezbollah facilities and sites” overnight used to finance its activities in Beirut, southern Lebanon, and “deep within Lebanese territory,” with reports saying it was referring to the northeastern Bekaa Valley area.
The Al-Qard Al-Hasan (AQAH) Association, Hezbollah’s primary financial institution, is estimated to manage billions of dollars in funds with over 400,000 accounts.
The IDF had already said Sunday evening that it would begin airstrikes against Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure, which includes numerous money laundering schemes – everything from providing loans to charities to gold mines.
AQAH ostensibly operates as a charitable Islamic banking organization, providing loans to many Lebanese for everything from daily goods to marriage to tuition to housing.
Former senior counter-terror financing Shin Bet official Uzi Shaya told Globes that the association was backed by both the Lebanese and Iranian states. “It has also developed an independent self-financing capacity, supplied mainly by an array of charitable associations, businesses, and a crime network,” Shaya said.
Gallant said that extensive IDF intelligence had proven that AQAH was an arm of Hezbollah and must be attacked both by using military force and financial sanctions and enforcement to bring pressure on the group to rein in its terror activities against Israel and others.
Also late Monday night, the military revealed graphics displaying former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s bunker for keeping significant aspects of his terror funds, established under the al-Sahel Hospital.
Hezbollah-owned Lebanese outlet Al Manar reported on Sunday, following the announcement, that AQAH had gone bankrupt and that the IDF was intentionally targeting the association to disrupt the lives of Lebanese people.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) describes the organization as specializing in “quasi-banking activity, consisting primarily of providing loans and operating charitable community funds by Islamic religious law (which forbids charging interest).”
Part of the goal is to provide Lebanese Shi’ites with strong economic investment to keep them invested in the conflict and willing to cooperate. According to Globes, the association also provides loans to the Palestinian community.
AQAH claims that most funds are provided through lenders, membership fees, and donations.
The ITIC said that it had no way of checking if other funds were being sent by outside actors such as Iran, but its analysis showed that this was indeed likely.
The US Treasury Department sanctioned the association in 2016. However, Meir Amit said that the sanctions were largely ineffective, with AQAH’s volume of loans increasing following them.
“This is one of Iran’s richest terrorist organizations, with an extensive smuggling network in Latin America, [and] with bases in Africa as well,” Dr. Haim Koren told Globes. “Their contacts have agents who move millions of dollars in cash from place to place, all over the world.”
Unspoken in this new war against Hezbollah’s finances is that Israel has run out of many higher quality targets, having killed most of the group’s commanders, and is searching for more ancillary but still effective ways to pressure the group.
Besides this new financial war, the IDF issued an updated assessment on Monday of its operations against Hezbollah since the start of the September 30 invasion, as well as since the beginning of the war.
According to the military, it has killed 1,200 Hezbollah fighters since September 30, and another approximately 800 during the war before that point, for a total of around 2,000.
Adding in some thousands of wounded Hezbollah terrorists, IDF sources said that the organization’s capabilities were being worn down even beyond the three levels of commanders who have been killed.
In addition to having killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and other top deputies, the IDF said it has killed seven brigade commanders, 21 battalion commanders, and 24 company commanders belonging to the terrorist organization.
In April, the IDF said that it had killed six Hezbollah brigade-level commanders and over 30 battalion-level commanders. There was some unexplained discrepancy between those numbers and the updated numbers, which could be due to different unit grouping considerations.
Hamas had five brigade commanders for about 35,000-40,000 of its forces.
Hezbollah was estimated to have between 50,000 and 100,000 operatives when adding together its various weaker militias as well as its elite Radwan force, which had around 6,000 fighters in southern Lebanon alone at the start of the war in October 2023.
This could translate into 10 or 15 brigade-level commanders, with at least one source telling The Jerusalem Post that the number hovers around 15.
However, another source said that Hezbollah is structured differently than Hamas and that its Radwan forces have their own separate structure from the rest of Hezbollah.
All of this means that the IDF’s progress against top-level Hezbollah commanders is still likely more impressive than its progress against mid-level commanders and the group’s overall rank-and-file forces.
The difficulty the military is having in taking down Hezbollah’s lower levels could also explain the consistent trouble the terror group continues to make for Israel with rocket and drone attacks.
Moreover, senior IDF sources said they hoped that the invasion would be wrapped up within a couple of weeks and that the government would push hard to reach a ceasefire with Hezbollah to end the rocket and drone attacks, so that 60,000 evacuated northern Israeli residents could return to their homes.
On Monday, Hezbollah managed to fire over 125 rockets all over the top third of Israel, including areas as far south as Haifa.
Further, the terrorist group was likely responsible for many rounds of drones that threatened Tel Aviv, including a series that briefly brought Ben-Gurion Airport flights to a halt.
In one incident, the IDF says that helicopters and aircraft shot down five drones over the Mediterranean Sea.
In another incident, the military stated that a loud explosion in Tel Aviv was caused by a rocket fired by Hezbollah which landed in an open area.
Although the IDF said that no sirens went off because of its policy not to issue warnings if it is determined that a rocket poses no threat, it is rare to allow one to come so close to Tel Aviv, and it was unclear if some error was made.
Still, no injuries were reported.
In the South, a single rocket was fired from Gaza toward Sderot but was shot down.
The IDF said that its forces continued to fight Hamas in Gaza, though it has remained difficult for the military to find much of Hamas’s remaining forces, other than occasional small pockets of concealed terrorists.
Targeting a Syrian official linked to financing terror
The army confirmed late Monday night that it carried out an attack in Syria targeting a Hezbollah official connected to terror financing.
Syrian state television said earlier that at least one person has been killed in a “guided missile attack” on a car in the Mazzeh area of Damascus.
The attack occurred near the Eastern Roundabout, close to the Golden Mazzeh Hotel, a high-end establishment in the center of Syria’s capital, state media added.
Israel has increased its attacks on weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon since the September 30 invasion.
Reuters contributed to this story.
Content retrieved from: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-825580.
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