TEHRAN - In response to the July 30 assassination of its senior military commander Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah fired 320 rockets and drones at Israel on Sunday morning. 

In a televised address on the same day in the evening time, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said his troops had targeted a military intelligence base about 110km (68 miles) into Israeli territory, which was only 1.5km (0.9 miles) away from Tel Aviv.

It was the strongest attack by the Hezbollah resistance movement against Israel since the 2006 war.

It is crystal clear that Hezbollah just demonstrated a small part of its military capability. It refused to hit the capital Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, or other hallmarks. 

According to France 24, even the United States helped Israel in tracking rockets and drones launched by Hezbollah. This shows how much Israel is vulnerable without the help of its Western allies, particularly the United States.

The key point is that Hezbollah did not let the cowardly assassination act go unanswered, and it was for about a month that Israel was trembling in fear of Hezbollah’s reprisal.

Of course, it was in Israel’s 34-day war against Lebanon in 2006 that the world realized that the situation had changed and that Israel had lost its military supremacy in the region.

Now, after about 11 months Israel has even failed to defeat a guerrilla group in the Gaza Strip despite committing whatever crimes imaginable against the civilian inhabitants of the enclave. It has just dropped tens of tons of bombs on the small territory.

Imagine that Israel starts a full-scale war against Hezbollah which has about 100,000 spirited, highly-trained and disciplined combat troops and is armed with tens of thousands of missiles, including precision-guided ones.

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), in June 2024 experts speculated that Hezbollah has 150,000–200,000 rockets and missiles of various ranges.

The IISS also estimated in 2020 that Hezbollah had up to 20,000 active fighters and some 20,000 reserves, with an arsenal of small arms, tanks, drones, and various long-range rockets.

Analyst and retired Brigadier General Assaf Orion from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies also says Hezbollah possesses “a larger arsenal of artillery than most nations enjoy.”

Hezbollah has been repeatedly humiliating Israel. In an analysis posted on the CNN website on June 27, the writer Ben Wedeman said

Israeli officials have been surprised by the sophistication of the Hezbollah attacks. Wedeman said these include systematic pinpoint strikes on Israel’s array of surveillance outposts along the border, shooting down high-flying top-of-the-line drones, and hits on Israel’s Iron Dome batteries and anti-drone defenses.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for Israel, however, was the nine minutes of drone footage Hezbollah published online of highly sensitive civilian and military infrastructure in and around the northern city of Haifa, he opined.

Early this year Reichman University released a report entitled “Fire and blood: The chilling reality facing Israel in a war with Hezbollah.” It laid out a grim scenario in which the resistance group would fire 2,500 to 3,000 rockets and missiles a day for weeks targeting Israeli military sites as well as densely populated cities in the center of Israel.

Compared to the 2006 war, Hezbollah is much stronger in terms of weaponry and military force. The strategic balance has changed in its favor. Those days are gone when Israel’s tanks were roaming in the streets of Beirut and manipulating politics in Lebanon.