--- title: "Israel's Strike on Iran: Operation Days of Repentance and the Widening Middle East War" description: "The war in Lebanon is no longer a war in Lebanon. After nearly a month of Israeli military operations on Lebanese soil, and after nearly two months of sustained, intense hostilities between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah, the boundaries of a single nation can no longer contain the fighting. In the early hours of October 26, 2024, Israeli missiles came crashing down across Iran. Hezbollah, badly wounded but bitterly resolved, has refused to stop fighting. And across the wider Middle East, the warning signs accumulate that the worst of this conflict may still lie ahead.\n\nThis installment of WarFronts' continuing coverage examines Israel's wave of attacks against Iranian sovereign territory, the state of play in Lebanon both on the ground and in the air, and the narrowing prospects for any negotiated peace. It is a portrait of a region balanced on a knife's edge, where a single carefully calibrated strike managed, for the moment, to avert a far larger war, even as the slower violence in Lebanon and Gaza continued to compound by the day.\n\nWhat follows is the fifth chapter of Shock and Awe in Lebanon, current as of the close of October 30, 2024, Israel-Lebanon time.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n- In the early hours of October 26, 2024, more than a hundred Israeli aircraft struck roughly twenty targets across Iran in Operation Days of Repentance — the first strike on Iran that Israel has ever openly acknowledged.\n- The strike was meticulously calibrated to punish without escalating: it disabled missile-production facilities and air defenses while deliberately sparing nuclear sites, oil refineries, and political leadership.\n- US assessments suggest Iran's missile-production capability was crippled badly enough to require a year or more to rebuild, and the destruction of most or all of Iran's S-300 batteries left Iranian airspace broadly exposed to future Israeli strikes.\n- On the ground in southern Lebanon, the IDF broadened a slow, grinding advance through rugged highland terrain, with Hezbollah generally retreating and Israel destroying what it described as the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found.\n- Hezbollah named Sheikh Naim Qassem as its new leader on October 29 after Israel killed both Hassan Nasrallah and his first announced successor; peace efforts continued but faced steep, possibly insurmountable obstacles.\n\n## The Grand Retaliation\n\nIn the early hours of October 26, 2024, the nation of Iran came under attack. In the capital, Tehran, explosions thundered through the streets at approximately 2:15 AM local time, shattering windows and waking countless Iranians from their sleep. There, and in two other provinces, missiles struck roughly twenty targets in a series of airstrikes that arrived in waves rather than all at once. The barrage lasted more than three hours, until dawn, after which silence fell over the city. At half past six that morning, the Israel Defense Forces, three national borders away, made an announcement: the strikes on Iran had officially concluded.\n\nFrom the Israeli side, the operation looked very different. Not long after midnight on Saturday, more than a hundred combat aircraft lifted off from airstrips inside Israel for an action dubbed Operation Days of Repentance. The package included American-made F-15 and F-16 fighters, unmanned drones, and stealthy fifth-generation F-35 Lightnings, known in Israeli service as the Adir. To reach Iran by the most direct route, the aircraft had to cross either Jordanian or Syrian territory and then transit Iraq, all while maintaining a stealthy approach. On the way in, the first wave targeted and destroyed air-defense batteries in both Syria and Iraq, neutralizing any action by the pro-Iran governments of either country and denying Iran early warning before the jets arrived.\n\nOnce the formation reached the edge of Iranian airspace, that first wave conducted precision strikes against Iran's own air-defense systems, knocking out the country's ability to protect itself and clearing a corridor for what came next. Two more successive waves followed, flying into zones now made safe by the destruction of Iran's defenses, launching missiles deep into Iranian territory. Because Israel leaned heavily on long-range weapons, not every missile is believed to have evaded interception. But Israel's human pilots and its expensive aircraft stayed well out of harm's way throughout.\n\nAccording to officials within Israel's defense establishment, the targets were facilities used to produce both long-range missiles and the cheap, unmanned kamikaze drones that Iran has become known for. The strikes were specifically designed to interrupt Iran's means of producing its missile systems, a direct and deliberate answer to the action that had prompted the operation in the first place. On October 1, Iran had launched 180 ballistic missiles into Israel in a major attack, and Israel then spent more than three weeks calibrating its response. While multiple parts of the production chain were hit, the strikes appeared to concentrate on Chinese-made mixers used to produce solid fuel for the missiles. Iran cannot simply replace those mixers; it will have to ask China to manufacture new ones from scratch.\n\nBy the time the dust settled, a veil of secrecy had already descended over Iran, drawn by its own leadership. But at least some elements of the strike are known with confidence. In all, just four soldiers of the Iranian Army were killed, along with one civilian security guard. At least two of the dead had helped operate Iran's air defenses. Roughly twenty targets were struck inside Iran, in addition to the air-defense systems destroyed in Iraq and Syria. According to assessments by US officials shared with global news outlets, Iran's missile-production capability was so thoroughly crippled that it could take a year or more for the country to rebuild enough to resume production.\n\nThe deeper damage went beyond production lines. The first wave of strikes, aimed at air-defense systems, is believed to have destroyed most, if not all, of Iran's advanced Soviet-made S-300 surface-to-air batteries. For Iran and for the rest of the world, the subtext of those losses is unmistakable. Without S-300s guarding its skies, Iran is left badly exposed, and Israel can launch long-range strikes against the country essentially whenever it chooses. The location of those batteries adds a further layer of meaning. Although their effective range stretches dozens of kilometers, the destroyed systems sat not far from oil refineries, gas fields, petrochemical plants, and other energy infrastructure that Israel plainly could have hit but did not. Israel thereby signaled that it spared those sites out of restraint rather than incapacity, and it left them exposed to follow-up attack should Iran choose to retaliate.\n\nIn the grand view, the strike was a landmark moment in the wider Middle East conflict, for several reasons. It was the first time Iran had weathered a sustained assault from a foreign enemy on its own soil since the 1980s and the years of the Iran-Iraq War. When the IDF acknowledged the end of its operation at half past six that morning, it marked the first time Israel had ever openly acknowledged an attack on Iran at all. Israel did conduct a limited airstrike inside Iran in April, but never formally acknowledged it, so by this particular measure that earlier action does not count. The October 26 strike was the latest move in a back-and-forth that Iran had instigated specifically to avenge the deaths of leaders among its paramilitary proxies, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. And it was the strongest sign yet that the parallel Israel-Hezbollah and Israel-Hamas wars are actively making direct exchanges between Israel and Iran more likely.\n\n## A Strike Engineered Not to Escalate\n\nFor most of the world, the strike was a secret until it arrived. The United States, Israel's closest ally, reportedly learned of the attacks only minutes before they began. Iran, by contrast, was given advance warning, and that warning came directly from Israel. According to reporting by Axios, Israel was specific, detailing precisely what sorts of targets it would and would not strike. During that exchange, Israel is said to have explained that any Iranian attempt at immediate retaliation would draw a far heavier second assault, especially if an Iranian counterstrike caused casualties among Israel's civilian population.\n\nThere is no way to confirm it directly, but the low reported Iranian death toll may itself have been a product of that warning. With ample time to clear personnel out of likely target zones, Iran may have ensured that strikes on normally well-staffed military installations would not claim many soldiers' lives. Doing so served two purposes at once: it diminished the apparent effect of the attack for a domestic audience, and it reduced the list of reasons Iran would have to retaliate if a counterstrike could be avoided.\n\nThe early warning was not the only feature that made an immediate Iranian response less likely. For weeks beforehand, Israel had been under intense pressure from its allies, the United States above all, to calibrate its attack carefully so as not to escalate the conflict with Iran any further. After Iran's October 1 barrage, many within the Israeli political and defense apparatus were enraged and intent on destroying high-value Iranian targets in retribution. Those targets could have included Iran's hardened nuclear-enrichment facilities, its oil refineries, its political or military leadership and headquarters, or locations that would have produced large numbers of military or civilian casualties.\n\nInstead of any of that, Israel struck none of Iran's most critical assets, laid waste to no high-visibility area, and dropped no bomb on the Ayatollah. Everything about the operation indicates it was carefully designed to avoid escalation. From the early warning, to the explicit, surgical disabling of the exact assets Iran had used to attack Israel and nothing more, the strike reads as both a warning and a deliberate, voluntary act of restraint.\n\nNow, even with war raging in Lebanon and Gaza, much of the world has fixed its attention on Iran, trying to gauge whether the country will retaliate. If it does, all signs point to a token response at worst. Iran's leaders sit in a genuinely difficult position, especially after losing their best air defenses. Strike Israel in retaliation, and Israel can launch a far worse attack that Iran now has little means to stop. Refuse to strike back, and Iran's leadership risks alienating the hardliners who have been taught for generations to hate their great enemy, by the very people now leading the country, and whose support those leaders need amid a shaky economy and widespread popular discontent.\n\nFaced with the choice between getting kicked in the teeth by Israel or being shouted down by the hardliners, Iran's leadership appears to have chosen the hardliners. In the wake of the strike, Iranian state media moved to downplay it, dismissing the attack as weak, ineffectual, and broadly unworthy of public concern. To limit the release of specifics, the Iranian government threatened ten-year prison sentences for anyone who provides evidence about the airstrikes to media that Iran deems hostile. Foreign outlets speaking with ordinary Iranians across Tehran broadly reported an air of relief and a hope for a return to normalcy, rather than the rage the Ayatollah himself may have feared.\n\nWith the low casualty count generated by the strike, Israel ensured that Iran needed only to help a few families through personal tragedy, rather than answer the kind of death toll that would be perceived as a blow to the nation. Iran's Foreign Ministry did issue a statement asserting that the country \"considers itself entitled and obligated to defend against foreign acts of aggression.\" But Iran's actions have spoken far louder than its words, and even its words pointed in two directions at once. The same statement emphasized that Iran \"recognizes its responsibilities towards regional peace and security.\" And on the night after the strikes, Iran's military suggested that in the event of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, or between Israel and Hezbollah, a retaliatory strike might be off the table altogether. For the regime to say such a thing that very night suggested it would only moderate its response further with time.\n\nFor now, the Israeli strikes appear to be the last major exchange between Israel and Iran to expect in the near term. Perhaps Iran will mount a token response of some kind, but if so, there are plenty of ways to create the appearance of striking back while actually launching an attack that Israel's air defenses can easily absorb. Most global coverage has rightly focused on the continued potential for escalation between the two countries. But at least in the short term, the verdict holds: crisis averted.\n\n## Movement on the Ground\n\nBack at and above the Israel-Lebanon border, the war between Israel and Hezbollah showed no sign of slowing. IDF troops and Hezbollah's elite Radwan fighters continued to battle on the ground in southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes kept volleying across the border in opposite directions. This account is current through the end of the day on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, Israel-Lebanon time.\n\nOver the preceding week and change, the IDF broadened its advance into southern Lebanon. The majority of the southernmost strip of the Israeli border with Lebanon was closed off, on the Israeli side, as a designated military zone, as were the southeastern corner and a more northerly area where the border runs north and then turns east. In all three areas, Israel had been advancing in a limited fashion for several weeks; now that push had widened. The day-to-day pattern looked broadly similar: Israel moving inward through harsh highland terrain, boxing off small pieces of territory and taking them, while Hezbollah's fighters frequently engaged the IDF in firefights but typically retreated from hard-to-defend positions rather than trying to hold them.\n\nA single day, October 25, gives a sense of the rhythm of the fighting, as catalogued by the Institute for the Study of War. That day, the IDF's 146th Division attacked roughly fifty Hezbollah targets, including an anti-tank emplacement, and moved through the village of Boustane, leaving destroyed buildings in its wake. Another infantry brigade destroyed underground Hezbollah compounds in a separate village and identified a large weapons depot in what was described as a \"rugged mountainous area,\" with the materials confiscated and returned to Israel. The 98th Division destroyed a cell of Hezbollah fighters it said was about to ambush IDF soldiers, while the 91st Division called in an airstrike that killed a local Radwan commander. For its part, Hezbollah claimed to have killed or wounded the crew of an IDF tank and to have targeted Israeli soldiers with guided missiles and unguided rockets in multiple areas, including roughly a dozen attacks against the 98th Division over the course of that single day. This slow, grinding tempo has become the norm at this stage of the advance, with the IDF's broad goal being to dismantle the infrastructure Hezbollah built up to attack Israeli territory.\n\nCasualty counts remain difficult to establish on either side. Like any two parties to a war, Israel and Hezbollah are each incentivized to underreport their own losses and overstate the enemy's, so any figure either side offers should be treated with caution. Still, several notable events stand out. On October 24, one IDF division claimed to have killed about twenty Hezbollah fighters in a single area, an unusually large firefight later explained by the confiscation of a sizable stockpile of rocket launchers, mortars, and ammunition. On the 26th, the IDF used 400 tons of explosives to destroy what it described as the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found, triggering earthquake warnings across Israel with the force of the blast. The complex was large enough to house a company of Radwan fighters and sat about five kilometers from an Israeli town of twenty thousand. On October 30, the New York Times published an analysis of satellite imagery showing that 1,085 buildings had been destroyed across six Lebanese villages since the start of Israel's ground invasion on October 1.\n\nIsraeli losses mounted as well. On the 25th, the IDF announced that five of its soldiers, all reservists, had been killed by a rocket strike, along with twenty-four wounded, the highest toll from a single strike since the ground invasion began. Five more, also reservists, were killed the following day alongside thirteen wounded, in a direct encounter where they were caught by surprise by three militants. By that day, Israel counted thirty-two soldiers dead since the start of the ground operation. Observations from October 28 indicated that a large IDF tank column had pushed several kilometers into Lebanese territory, marking Israel's deepest advance to that point. The objective was the village of Khiam, a lookout point that has allowed Hezbollah spotters to direct rocket fire across much of northern Israel. Hezbollah evidently considered Khiam worth defending: reports from the area described heavy anti-tank missile and anti-infantry mortar fire against Israeli forces as the IDF closed in from all directions. With casualty figures unconfirmed on both sides, the fight at Khiam threatened to become the costliest direct engagement of the ground invasion.\n\n## The War's Widening Toll: Lebanese Soldiers, Peacekeepers, and Journalists\n\nIDF brigades and Radwan cells are not the only groups operating in southern Lebanon, and others came under Israeli fire over the same week. During one set of airstrikes, Israel killed three soldiers of the Lebanese Army, an institution that stands at least nominally opposed to Hezbollah and that Israel is decidedly not trying to fight. The soldiers had been attempting to evacuate wounded people from an area where Israel was raiding Hezbollah positions. It was the fourth time Israel had killed Lebanese soldiers, whether inadvertently or in a targeted strike.\n\nPeacekeepers with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, also came under fire, reporting that they had been forced to withdraw from a watchtower after Israeli troops fired on them. UNIFIL, which Foreign Policy this week described as both ineffective and indispensable to peacekeeping in southern Lebanon, has operated in the area for many years despite persistent Israeli frustration. The withdrawal came on the heels of a leaked confidential report, prepared by a country that contributes troops to the mission, alleging that Israel had launched at least a dozen attacks on UN forces in Lebanon since the start of its ground operations. The report claimed Israel had even used the incendiary chemical white phosphorus close enough to a UN position that fifteen peacekeepers were injured. Israel categorically denies deliberately targeting UNIFIL, while UNIFIL has accused Israel of violating international law. UNIFIL is caught in the crossfire from both sides; on October 29, a suspected Hezbollah rocket attack injured eight Austrian peacekeepers. But it is UNIFIL's animosity with Israel that has dominated the headlines.\n\nJournalists, too, paid a price. On Friday the 25th, an Israeli airstrike came down on a compound in southern Lebanon where more than a dozen journalists from multiple news organizations were known to be staying. Three people were killed, including two camera operators and one engineer affiliated with a Hezbollah-linked media company. At least one vehicle marked PRESS was destroyed, and no warning was issued to the site. The pattern of strikes hitting locations holding civilians, medical staff, and media without prior evacuation orders recurred throughout the week.\n\n## The War in the Air\n\nEven as the ground campaign ground forward, the air war between Israel and Hezbollah continued without pause. On October 23, Israel carried out several airstrikes in the Lebanese port city of Tyre after expanding evacuation orders to cover several neighborhoods in and around the historic center. While no casualties were reported, Lebanese state news described \"massive destruction\" to the areas hit, and video captured smoke rising less than half a kilometer from a UNESCO World Heritage site. Israel said the strikes targeted Hezbollah's Southern Front headquarters and other Hezbollah sites. The city has largely emptied, though it is thought to still hold about fourteen thousand displaced people.\n\nOn the 27th, Israel struck the southern coastal city of Sidon, killing eight and wounding twenty-five. Strikes on Sidon had been rare to that point in the conflict, and the city had become a magnet for displaced people seeking refuge. On the 29th, Israel issued an evacuation order for Baalbek, a city with a prewar population of 82,000 and home to an ancient Roman temple designated as another UNESCO World Heritage site. It was the first evacuation order Israel had issued for Baalbek since the start of the current invasion. Shortly afterward, Israel struck several buildings within the city, with the Lebanese Health Ministry reporting at least sixty injured.\n\nMore consistent Israeli targets remained in the crosshairs as well. In Beirut, strikes on the 23rd targeted weapons storage and manufacturing, according to the IDF, while a pro-Hezbollah television channel reported that its bureau had also been hit. A couple of days later, the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiya was pounded with waves of intense airstrikes, on the same day Israel hit a pair of border crossings between Lebanon and Syria through which hundreds of thousands of people had tried to flee the country. In the neighborhood of Jnah on the 24th, an airstrike killed an unspecified number of people and injured at least sixty. In one southern Lebanese house, an airstrike killed nineteen people, including six women, five children, and a former school principal, wiping out three generations of a single family along with the village imam. Another strike very close to Lebanon's largest public hospital killed eighteen people, including four children. In most of these instances, no evacuation order was ever issued.\n\nThe human displacement underneath all of this is staggering. Current estimates put the total number of people displaced inside Lebanon at 1.4 million, with nearly half a million having crossed into Syria to escape. A majority of those crossing were Syrians who had been sheltering in Lebanon after fleeing the war in their own country, now displaced a second time.\n\nIn the opposite direction, Hezbollah continued to launch barrages of rockets into Israel, causing occasional casualties. On Wednesday the 23rd, Hezbollah claimed waves of rocket fire into Israel, including a salvo against the Glilot intelligence base and strikes toward Tel Aviv that prompted aides to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to shelter in a safe room. Hezbollah notched successful hits on multiple Israeli factories and struck the city of Karmiel, killing two and injuring at least twenty-five. Two more Israelis were wounded in the coastal city of Nahariya, and another was killed in Maalot Tarshiha on October 29. In its public statements, Hezbollah has issued evacuation orders to an ever-expanding list of northern Israeli towns and cities, mirroring what the IDF does before striking targets in Lebanon. On average, Hezbollah is catalogued launching between 80 and 250 rocket attacks per day, plus a smaller number of drone attacks. But thanks largely to Israel's robust air defenses, Hezbollah has achieved a far lower success rate with its air attacks than Israel has with its own.\n\n## A Low-Grade War That Could Still Explode\n\nStepping back to view the conflict in totality, the week revealed limited reasons for optimism alongside substantial cause for concern. The concerns are obvious: both sides continue to attack each other at high volume, Israel continues to grind across southern Lebanon while fighting Hezbollah, and the number of displaced people and civilian casualties keeps climbing. The reasons for hope are more counterintuitive. As experts on the long-running Middle East conflict have pointed out, this stage of violence between Israel and Hezbollah had the potential to be far worse than it has been. Israel has not yet committed the many thousands of troops it would need to take southern Lebanon outright, and Hezbollah has not launched mass counterattacks against the Israeli troops already there. Both facts are surprising, and both are positive signs. Israel and Hezbollah are undoubtedly at war, but not all wars are created equal, and in the grand scheme this one sits closer to a low-grade conflict than many had expected.\n\nYet with every step Israel advances into southern Lebanon, a broadening confrontation grows more likely, not less. At this point in the advance, Hezbollah forces are still mostly retreating rather than fighting to the death. Israel is working through rugged highland terrain where such retreats come easily, and where the infrastructure Hezbollah built was meant to be sacrificed if necessary. According to a recent piece by the Atlantic Council, Hezbollah may be defending its current front-line zones with as few as a few hundred fighters. The more important targets lie deeper inside southern Lebanon, along with what is thought to be the bulk of Hezbollah's fighting strength. When Israel eventually advances into those core zones, it will fall to Hezbollah to decide how to respond, and that, viewed from outside, looks like the moment when Hezbollah may make a more definitive stand.\n\nSeveral indicators reinforce that reading. Hezbollah has begun threatening more frequent use of precision-guided ballistic missiles and anti-ship missiles, which would be a dramatic way of forcing Israel to redouble its own efforts. And even if other Iranian-backed organizations do not join directly, their fighters may show up in a larger conflict regardless. Funeral notices are increasingly being issued in Yemen, where the Houthi rebel movement operates, and in Iraq, home to an abundance of pro-Iran militias, to mourn people who died fighting alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon. For now these groups appear to be sending only small numbers of fighters, but those numbers could easily grow.\n\n## Hezbollah's New Leadership\n\nAmid the fighting, Hezbollah underwent a notable leadership change. On October 29, the organization announced that Sheikh Naim Qassem, age seventy-one, had been elevated to its top job. Qassem had served as deputy to longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah for more than three decades, until Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Hezbollah had previously elevated a different successor, a man named Hashem Safieddine, but Safieddine lasted only a few days before he, too, was killed by Israel.\n\nQassem is expected to function more as a coordinating figure for Hezbollah than as a fire-and-brimstone patriarch, and expert assessments of the group's inner workings suggest he was not exactly the first choice for the role. He was selected by a quite literal process of elimination, as few members of Hezbollah's old guard remain alive. On that point, Israel has already made overtures Qassem is unlikely to appreciate. In a social media post about Qassem's ascension, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant wrote: \"Temporary appointment. Not for long.\"\n\n## Prospects for Peace, and Other Factors\n\nThe idea that a further Israeli advance is inevitable if the ground invasion continues is not the same as the idea that the invasion itself is inevitable. Peace efforts have been underway around the world to try to bring a swift end to the conflict, although whether they will succeed is another question entirely.\n\nIsrael is under continual pressure from the international community, and above all from its most important backer, the United States, to avoid being drawn into a long engagement in Lebanon. During a trip to Qatar this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told foreign press that the US was working on a diplomatic arrangement that would allow displaced people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border to return home. In a potentially positive sign, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the IDF's chief of staff, said in a video statement: \"In the north, there's a possibility of reaching a sharp conclusion. We thoroughly dismantled Hezbollah's senior chain of command.\" American negotiators continued to work with Israel toward a possible ceasefire in Gaza, with only limited results at best, an effort that could make a Hezbollah peace easier if it succeeds.\n\nMoney has also flowed toward the humanitarian crisis. On Thursday the 24th, an international conference in Paris raised more than a billion US dollars, predominantly in humanitarian aid, according to France's foreign minister. That total included 100 million dollars from France and 300 million from the US, and far exceeded the 426 million dollars the UN had described as necessary to meet Lebanon's urgent humanitarian needs. Of the billion raised, about 200 million was expected to go toward strengthening Lebanon's armed forces, potentially recruiting up to six thousand new troops and enabling the deployment of eight thousand others to the south. How that money will actually be spent, in a nation notorious for extreme corruption and failed-state conditions, will require great care from those trying to help.\n\nEven so, the signs do not point to an Israel ready or willing to move toward a ceasefire. The context matters. Israel is contending with far more than a retaliatory strike on Iran and its war with Hezbollah. In Gaza, Palestinians and global observers have sounded the alarm that implementation of the so-called generals' plan is now underway. Proposed by a group of retired Israeli generals, that plan called for a complete cutoff of aid to northern Gaza and a substantially tightened siege, forcing civilians to either flee or starve ahead of a phase of the war in which every person remaining in northern Gaza would be assumed to be a combatant. First responders have now paused operations in northern Gaza entirely, while Israel denies carrying out what has been called a \"surrender or starve\" campaign. The UN's leading humanitarian official, Joyce Msuya, has warned that \"the entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying.\" In one notable incident, Israeli forces besieged one of the last remaining hospitals in northern Gaza for several days before withdrawing and taking nearly all of the hospital's male staff away with them.\n\nIsrael has also continued to absorb an increasing number of terror attacks on its own territory. On Sunday the 27th, one man was killed and at least thirty other people were injured when a truck ran into dozens of people who had just stepped off a charter bus. The wounded were predominantly elderly people on a day trip to a museum; the attacker, an Arab Israeli, was shot dead at the scene.\n\nIsrael's pro-ceasefire protest movement remains very much alive. On the 27th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a speech marking the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack disrupted by protesters advocating a stop to the fighting. But in a country where even peacetime protests stood little chance of swaying Netanyahu or his political allies, the current push toward a ceasefire, from Israeli advocates and foreigners alike, appears no more successful. In Gaza, Israel has routinely stonewalled, made false promises to its allies, and refused to compromise whenever a ceasefire seemed within reach. Early indicators suggest its approach in Lebanon will be similar. In conversations revealed to Axios by both US and Israeli officials, Israel relayed a set of demands for a Lebanon ceasefire that the rest of the world would find very difficult to accept. Israel demanded the right to actively enforce anti-Hezbollah rules inside southern Lebanon, operating within the country to ensure the group does not rearm or reconsolidate, and demanded that its air force be able to operate freely over Lebanon. Both requests would constitute fundamental violations of Lebanese sovereignty, conditions that neither Lebanon nor the international community would be likely to support.\n\nThat said, not all signs point to continued escalation. Reporting as of October 29 indicated that there were genuine efforts to establish terms for a ceasefire with Lebanon. According to Israeli sources, the current draft would include a sixty-day acclimation period, a temporary ceasefire to give mediators time to set up a mechanism that would supervise southern Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding there. The IDF would withdraw from most of southern Lebanon, while the Lebanese Armed Forces would deploy thousands of troops to the south, supported by a rapid influx of French, German, and British troops. The problem is that neither Hezbollah nor the leaders of Israel's government had actually endorsed the plan, and with so many moving parts, it inherently contains numerous points of failure. The Israeli government would have to abandon its expectation of active enforcement and its hopes for free operation in Lebanese airspace. Hezbollah would have to consent to Lebanese and international occupation of its key territory. Lebanon would have to figure out how to surge troops, and the international parties would have to put large numbers of their own personnel in harm's way. The existence of a first-draft proposal is not nothing, but the long list of steps it requires, and the enduring failure to find a ceasefire in Gaza, suggest serious problems almost certainly lie ahead.\n\nNor would Israel be likely to enter any negotiations before its critical ally finished a contentious election cycle, culminating in America's presidential and congressional elections on Tuesday, November 5. Netanyahu has been overt in his preference for a Donald Trump presidency over a Kamala Harris one, and will almost certainly wait for the announcement of both a president-elect and a new balance of power in the US House and Senate before discussing any ceasefire terms. Should Trump win, Netanyahu may prove entirely unwilling to engage with the incumbent Biden administration for the rest of its term, pushing any hope of a ceasefire out to January 20, when a leader with no record of serious advocacy for a ceasefire would take office.\n\nWarFronts would be glad to be surprised in the coming weeks by an attempt to negotiate a real, lasting peace in the Middle East, one that would let displaced people return home and save the likely thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost in the months ahead. But while current indicators do not point to all-out war between Israel and Iran, or between Israel and Hezbollah, they do not point to a ceasefire either. For now, the slow march across southern Lebanon is likely to continue at its current pace, and so is the slow march to the brink between Iran and Israel. When this slow rhythm is interrupted, it tends to be because, all of a sudden, things start moving very fast.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was Operation Days of Repentance and what prompted it?\n\nOperation Days of Repentance was the Israeli military operation launched in the early hours of October 26, 2024, in which more than a hundred combat aircraft struck roughly twenty targets across Iran in three successive waves lasting more than three hours. It was carried out in direct response to Iran's October 1 launch of 180 ballistic missiles into Israel, and marked the first time Israel ever openly acknowledged an attack on Iran.\n\n### What did Israel target inside Iran, and what did it deliberately spare?\n\nIsrael concentrated on facilities used to produce long-range missiles and unmanned kamikaze drones, focusing especially on Chinese-made mixers used to produce solid rocket fuel, along with most or all of Iran's advanced S-300 air-defense batteries. On the way in, it also destroyed air-defense systems in Syria and Iraq. Israel deliberately avoided Iran's nuclear-enrichment facilities, oil refineries, energy infrastructure, and political and military leadership — sites it could have struck but chose to spare as a signal of restraint.\n\n### How severe was the damage to Iran's military capability?\n\nUS assessments shared with news outlets concluded that Iran's missile-production capability was crippled badly enough to require a year or more to rebuild, in part because the destroyed Chinese-made fuel mixers cannot be quickly replaced. The loss of most or all of Iran's S-300 batteries left Iranian airspace broadly exposed, meaning Israel can now launch long-range strikes against the country more or less at will. Iran reported only four soldiers and one civilian security guard killed.\n\n### What is the state of the ground war in southern Lebanon?\n\nThe IDF has broadened a slow, grinding advance through rugged highland terrain, boxing off small pieces of territory while Hezbollah generally retreats rather than holding its positions. Israel destroyed what it called the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found using 400 tons of explosives, and pushed a large tank column several kilometers toward the village of Khiam, a Hezbollah observation point commanding much of northern Israel. By October 30, Israel counted thirty-two soldiers dead since the ground invasion began, and satellite imagery showed 1,085 buildings destroyed across six Lebanese villages.\n\n### Who is Hezbollah's new leader and how was he chosen?\n\nOn October 29, 2024, Hezbollah named Sheikh Naim Qassem, age seventy-one, as its leader. Qassem had served as deputy to Hassan Nasrallah for more than three decades until Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September; Nasrallah's first announced successor, Hashem Safieddine, was also killed by Israel within days. Qassem was selected largely by process of elimination, as few members of Hezbollah's old guard remain alive, and is expected to function as a coordinating figure rather than a charismatic patriarch.\n\n## Sources\n- [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Iran, Oct 26 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-10-26-2024-9c9f366c71c508e6dd0ee74cff8400d2)\n- [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Iran, Oct 25 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-10-25-2024-0920f63542d158ad5999c481e421da00)\n- [Reuters — Explosions heard in Iran](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/explosions-heard-iran-syria-middle-east-braces-israeli-retaliation-2024-10-25/)\n- [The Guardian — Israel strikes Iran air defence systems, energy sites](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/27/israel-strikes-iran-air-defence-systems-energy-sites)\n- [NPR — Israel-Iran airstrikes, Tehran](https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/nx-s1-5165574/israel-iran-airstrikes-tehran)\n- [BBC News — Middle East](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68811276)\n- [BBC News — Iran strike analysis](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c704w7d3997o)\n- [Axios — Israel strike Iran, missile production](https://www.axios.com/2024/10/26/israel-strike-iran-missile-production)\n- [New York Times — Live coverage, Oct 27 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/27/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza)\n- [WSJ — How Israel pulled off its largest-ever strike on Iran](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-pulled-off-its-largest-ever-strike-on-iran-689022ca)\n- [AP News — Iran-Israel attack satellite photos](https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-attack-satellite-photos-gaza-lebanon-wars-0c6ee6a8544268612cb7d49727d8449d)\n- [Reuters — Satellite photos show Israel hit Iran missile fuel mixing facilities](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/satellite-photos-show-israel-hit-iran-missile-fuel-mixing-facilities-researchers-2024-10-26/)\n- [NBC News — Iran says right to self-defense after Israel attack](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/iran-says-right-self-defense-israel-attack-us-urges-end-missile-exchan-rcna177414)\n- [AP News — Iran-Israel war attack retaliation analysis](https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-war-attack-retaliation-analysis-80a619146abd4f8aee2a7776a8f134d1)\n- [New York Times — Live coverage, Oct 26 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/26/world/israel-iran-lebanon-gaza)\n- [BBC News — Live coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn4v67j88e0t)\n- [CNN — Israel-Iran strikes live news, Oct 26 2024](https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-iran-strikes-lebanon-gaza-war-10-26-24/index.html)\n- [CBS News — Israel strikes Iran, reaction from world leaders](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-strikes-iran-reaction-world-leaders/)\n- [New York Times — Live coverage, Oct 25 2024](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/25/world/israel-lebanon-gaza-iran)\n- [France 24 — Israeli airstrike on Tehran](https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20241026-live-israeli-airstrike-on-tehran-caused-minimal-damage-iran-says)\n- [Reuters — Iran live updates, explosions heard around Tehran](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-live-updates-explosions-heard-around-tehran-2024-10-25/)\n- [The Independent — Israel-Iran attack, Tehran response](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-iran-attack-tehran-response-retaliate-hezbollah-latest-b2636381.html)\n- [TIME — Israel attacks Iran, pre-dawn airstrikes](https://time.com/7099052/israel-attacks-iran-pre-dawn-airstrikes-targeting-military-infrastructure/)\n- [BBC News — Strike coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr0yvrx4qpo)\n- [New York Times — Iran state media plays down Israeli attacks](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/world/middleeast/irans-state-media-plays-down-israeli-attacks.html)\n- [The Telegraph — Iran threatens citizens over Israel strikes](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/26/iran-threatens-citizens-israel-strikes-video/)\n- [WSJ — Israeli strikes on Iran expose gap in prowess](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strikes-on-iran-expose-gap-in-prowess-between-two-arch-foes-aded7cf8)\n- [Axios — Israel-Iran attack warning](https://www.axios.com/2024/10/26/israel-iran-attack-warning)\n- [New York Times — Israeli soldiers killed, Hezbollah, Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/world/middleeast/israel-soldiers-killed-hezbollah-lebanon.html)\n- [Reuters — Five Israeli soldiers killed in southern Lebanon](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-five-soldiers-were-killed-during-combat-southern-lebanon-2024-10-24/)\n- [Haaretz — Four Israeli soldiers killed in southern Lebanon](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-27/ty-article/four-israeli-soldiers-killed-in-southern-lebanon-combat-idf-announces/00000192-cd2c-d628-a9df-fdfef9ec0000)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 25 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-25-2024)\n- [The Economist — Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Iran war map tracker](https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa/israel-lebanon-hizbullah-iran-war-strikes-map-tracker)\n- [Reuters — Israel intensifies offensive in Gaza and Lebanon](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-intensifies-offensive-gaza-lebanon-after-hamas-leaders-death-2024-10-20/)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 24 2024](https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-24-2024)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 26 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-26-2024)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 23 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-23-2024)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 22 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-22-2024)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 21 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-21-2024)\n- [New York Times — Israel strikes southern Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-southern-lebanon.html)\n- [Reuters — Peacekeepers withdrew from post in south Lebanon under Israeli fire](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/peacekeepers-withdrew-post-zahajra-south-lebanon-under-israeli-fire-2024-10-25/)\n- [Financial Times — UNIFIL coverage](https://www.ft.com/content/151eb482-6415-48a8-bf3f-baed00018c4e)\n- [BBC News — Lebanon coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y387ne93po)\n- [Los Angeles Times — Israeli strikes pound Lebanese coastal city](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-10-23/israeli-strikes-pound-lebanese-coastal-city-after-residents-evacuate)\n- [New York Times — Israeli strike, Sidon, Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-sidon-lebanon.html)\n- [CBS News — Journalists killed in Lebanon](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-war-iran-hamas-gaza-hezbollah-journalists-killed-lebanon-kamal-adwan-hospital/)\n- [AP News — Journalists killed in Lebanon](https://apnews.com/article/journalists-killed-lebanon-israel-c89cf1109daaf3e6e7b766584710234d)\n- [BBC News — Lebanon strikes coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvz2rzm4k0o)\n- [New York Times — Israel strikes Gaza and Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-gaza-lebanon.html)\n- [BBC News — Middle East coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr9l4l0xx4o)\n- [Los Angeles Times — Israeli airstrikes destroy cities in Lebanon](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-10-25/as-israeli-airstrikes-destroy-cities-in-lebanon-some-see-echoes-of-gaza)\n- [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah Mideast latest, Oct 25 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-hezbollah-mideast-latest-25-october-2024-6ef9066c9ff9f2d0518e281f3e622df4)\n- [PBS NewsHour — Lebanese healthcare workers in the line of fire](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lebanese-healthcare-workers-caught-in-the-line-of-fire-from-israeli-airstrikes)\n- [BBC News — Lebanon coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxy621qn4eo)\n- [NPR — Israel strikes Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard Al-Hassan](https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/nx-s1-5159600/israel-strikes-hezbollah-banks-al-qard-al-hassan)\n- [BBC News — Lebanon strikes](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93p3g1v1z4o)\n- [CBS News — Israeli forces attack targets around Beirut](https://www.cbsnews.com/video/israeli-forces-attack-targets-around-beirut-while-hezbollah-fires-rockets-into-israel/)\n- [Atlantic Council — Israel-Hezbollah not full-scale war](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/israel-hezbollah-not-full-scale-war/)\n- [Foreign Policy — Where is the massive Hezbollah response?](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/25/where-is-massive-hezbollah-response-to-israels-attacks/)\n- [NBC News — Israel leaves trail of destruction in days-long hospital siege](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-leaves-trail-destruction-dayslong-siege-one-gazas-last-hospital-rcna177474)\n- [ABC News — Israel-Gaza-Lebanon live updates](https://abcnews.go.com/International/live-updates/israel-gaza-lebanon-live-updates-idf-targeting-hezbollah/?id=114980385)\n- [UN News — North Gaza warning](https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1156171)\n- [The Guardian — Israel generals' plan to clear north Gaza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/26/israel-generals-plan-clear-north-gaza-palestinians)\n- [BBC News — Gaza coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdj33rwlyepo)\n- [NBC News — Truck slams into bus stop near Glilot military base](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/truck-slams-bus-stop-near-glilot-military-base-tel-aviv-israel-rcna177476)\n- [WSJ — Truck hits crowd at Israel bus stop](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/truck-hits-crowd-at-israel-bus-stop-injuring-dozens-0e9c69c4)\n- [ABC News — Protesters disrupt Netanyahu's speech](https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/protesters-israel-disrupt-prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahus-speech-115190861)\n- [AP News — Lebanon conference, Paris humanitarian aid](https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-lebanon-conference-paris-humanitarian-aid-30a97f88d2ec8dc138385d18a31dbb69)\n- [Axios — Israel, US, Lebanon end-war conditions](https://www.axios.com/2024/10/21/israel-us-lebanon-end-war-conditions)\n- [The Guardian — Israel-Lebanon strikes, Beirut, US ceasefire](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/25/israel-lebanon-strikes-beirut-us-ceasefire)\n- [Washington Post — Trump, Netanyahu, Gaza, Lebanon](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/25/trump-netanyahu-support-gaza-lebanon/)\n- [Reuters — Netanyahu told Trump Israel will make decisions based on its interests](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-told-trump-israel-will-make-decisions-based-its-interests-his-office-2024-10-20/)\n- [New York Times — Netanyahu, Trump, Harris (opinion)](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/netanyahu-trump-harris.html)\n- [NBC News — Satellite images show damage to Iran military sites](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/satellite-images-show-damage-iran-military-sites-israel-attack-rcna177552)\n- [New York Times — Iran-Israel strikes, Tehran](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/iran-israel-strikes-tehran.html)\n- [DW — Syria's Assad caught between Iran and Israel](https://www.dw.com/en/syria-dictator-bashar-assad-caught-between-iran-israel-conflict-middle-east/a-70632310)\n- [New York Times — Israel-Lebanon border photos and video](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-border-photos-video.html)\n- [Reuters — Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed Nasrallah](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-elects-naim-qassem-succeed-slain-head-nasrallah-2024-10-29/)\n- [CNN — Naim Qassem, new Hezbollah leader](https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/middleeast/naim-qassem-new-hezbollah-leader-israel-war-intl/index.html)\n- [BBC News — Hezbollah leadership coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89vx50g4l5o)\n- [ABC News — Middle East latest, dozens killed and wounded](https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/middle-east-latest-dozens-killed-wounded-israeli-strike-115250589)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 27 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-27-2024-0)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 28 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-28-2024)\n- [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 29 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-29-2024)\n- [Reuters — Senior Biden advisers visit Israel to try to end war in Lebanon](https://www.reuters.com/world/senior-biden-advisers-visit-israel-try-end-war-lebanon-axios-reports-2024-10-30/)\n- [NBC News — Biden officials, Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, Hezbollah, Gaza](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/biden-officials-israel-lebanon-cease-fire-hezbollah-gaza-rcna177977)\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/israel-strike-iran-days-of-repentance-lebanon-part-v.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/israel-strike-iran-days-of-repentance-lebanon-part-v datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/jAQf1Ihh1rk/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 01dd230ed52f3f3f6ae44fcd03fc996ea4afc173b6053e8bb2b34ec4cdcd455d tokens: 12797 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/israel-strike-iran-days-of-repentance-lebanon-part-v.md.summary.md --- The war in Lebanon is no longer a war in Lebanon. After nearly a month of Israeli military operations on Lebanese soil, and after nearly two months of sustained, intense hostilities between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah, the boundaries of a single nation can no longer contain the fighting. In the early hours of October 26, 2024, Israeli missiles came crashing down across Iran. Hezbollah, badly wounded but bitterly resolved, has refused to stop fighting. And across the wider Middle East, the warning signs accumulate that the worst of this conflict may still lie ahead. This installment of WarFronts' continuing coverage examines Israel's wave of attacks against Iranian sovereign territory, the state of play in Lebanon both on the ground and in the air, and the narrowing prospects for any negotiated peace. It is a portrait of a region balanced on a knife's edge, where a single carefully calibrated strike managed, for the moment, to avert a far larger war, even as the slower violence in Lebanon and Gaza continued to compound by the day. What follows is the fifth chapter of Shock and Awe in Lebanon, current as of the close of October 30, 2024, Israel-Lebanon time. ## Key Takeaways - In the early hours of October 26, 2024, more than a hundred Israeli aircraft struck roughly twenty targets across Iran in Operation Days of Repentance — the first strike on Iran that Israel has ever openly acknowledged. - The strike was meticulously calibrated to punish without escalating: it disabled missile-production facilities and air defenses while deliberately sparing nuclear sites, oil refineries, and political leadership. - US assessments suggest Iran's missile-production capability was crippled badly enough to require a year or more to rebuild, and the destruction of most or all of Iran's S-300 batteries left Iranian airspace broadly exposed to future Israeli strikes. - On the ground in southern Lebanon, the IDF broadened a slow, grinding advance through rugged highland terrain, with Hezbollah generally retreating and Israel destroying what it described as the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found. - Hezbollah named Sheikh Naim Qassem as its new leader on October 29 after Israel killed both Hassan Nasrallah and his first announced successor; peace efforts continued but faced steep, possibly insurmountable obstacles. ## The Grand Retaliation In the early hours of October 26, 2024, the nation of Iran came under attack. In the capital, Tehran, explosions thundered through the streets at approximately 2:15 AM local time, shattering windows and waking countless Iranians from their sleep. There, and in two other provinces, missiles struck roughly twenty targets in a series of airstrikes that arrived in waves rather than all at once. The barrage lasted more than three hours, until dawn, after which silence fell over the city. At half past six that morning, the Israel Defense Forces, three national borders away, made an announcement: the strikes on Iran had officially concluded. From the Israeli side, the operation looked very different. Not long after midnight on Saturday, more than a hundred combat aircraft lifted off from airstrips inside Israel for an action dubbed Operation Days of Repentance. The package included American-made F-15 and F-16 fighters, unmanned drones, and stealthy fifth-generation F-35 Lightnings, known in Israeli service as the Adir. To reach Iran by the most direct route, the aircraft had to cross either Jordanian or Syrian territory and then transit Iraq, all while maintaining a stealthy approach. On the way in, the first wave targeted and destroyed air-defense batteries in both Syria and Iraq, neutralizing any action by the pro-Iran governments of either country and denying Iran early warning before the jets arrived. Once the formation reached the edge of Iranian airspace, that first wave conducted precision strikes against Iran's own air-defense systems, knocking out the country's ability to protect itself and clearing a corridor for what came next. Two more successive waves followed, flying into zones now made safe by the destruction of Iran's defenses, launching missiles deep into Iranian territory. Because Israel leaned heavily on long-range weapons, not every missile is believed to have evaded interception. But Israel's human pilots and its expensive aircraft stayed well out of harm's way throughout. According to officials within Israel's defense establishment, the targets were facilities used to produce both long-range missiles and the cheap, unmanned kamikaze drones that Iran has become known for. The strikes were specifically designed to interrupt Iran's means of producing its missile systems, a direct and deliberate answer to the action that had prompted the operation in the first place. On October 1, Iran had launched 180 ballistic missiles into Israel in a major attack, and Israel then spent more than three weeks calibrating its response. While multiple parts of the production chain were hit, the strikes appeared to concentrate on Chinese-made mixers used to produce solid fuel for the missiles. Iran cannot simply replace those mixers; it will have to ask China to manufacture new ones from scratch. By the time the dust settled, a veil of secrecy had already descended over Iran, drawn by its own leadership. But at least some elements of the strike are known with confidence. In all, just four soldiers of the Iranian Army were killed, along with one civilian security guard. At least two of the dead had helped operate Iran's air defenses. Roughly twenty targets were struck inside Iran, in addition to the air-defense systems destroyed in Iraq and Syria. According to assessments by US officials shared with global news outlets, Iran's missile-production capability was so thoroughly crippled that it could take a year or more for the country to rebuild enough to resume production. The deeper damage went beyond production lines. The first wave of strikes, aimed at air-defense systems, is believed to have destroyed most, if not all, of Iran's advanced Soviet-made S-300 surface-to-air batteries. For Iran and for the rest of the world, the subtext of those losses is unmistakable. Without S-300s guarding its skies, Iran is left badly exposed, and Israel can launch long-range strikes against the country essentially whenever it chooses. The location of those batteries adds a further layer of meaning. Although their effective range stretches dozens of kilometers, the destroyed systems sat not far from oil refineries, gas fields, petrochemical plants, and other energy infrastructure that Israel plainly could have hit but did not. Israel thereby signaled that it spared those sites out of restraint rather than incapacity, and it left them exposed to follow-up attack should Iran choose to retaliate. In the grand view, the strike was a landmark moment in the wider Middle East conflict, for several reasons. It was the first time Iran had weathered a sustained assault from a foreign enemy on its own soil since the 1980s and the years of the Iran-Iraq War. When the IDF acknowledged the end of its operation at half past six that morning, it marked the first time Israel had ever openly acknowledged an attack on Iran at all. Israel did conduct a limited airstrike inside Iran in April, but never formally acknowledged it, so by this particular measure that earlier action does not count. The October 26 strike was the latest move in a back-and-forth that Iran had instigated specifically to avenge the deaths of leaders among its paramilitary proxies, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. And it was the strongest sign yet that the parallel Israel-Hezbollah and Israel-Hamas wars are actively making direct exchanges between Israel and Iran more likely. ## A Strike Engineered Not to Escalate For most of the world, the strike was a secret until it arrived. The United States, Israel's closest ally, reportedly learned of the attacks only minutes before they began. Iran, by contrast, was given advance warning, and that warning came directly from Israel. According to reporting by Axios, Israel was specific, detailing precisely what sorts of targets it would and would not strike. During that exchange, Israel is said to have explained that any Iranian attempt at immediate retaliation would draw a far heavier second assault, especially if an Iranian counterstrike caused casualties among Israel's civilian population. There is no way to confirm it directly, but the low reported Iranian death toll may itself have been a product of that warning. With ample time to clear personnel out of likely target zones, Iran may have ensured that strikes on normally well-staffed military installations would not claim many soldiers' lives. Doing so served two purposes at once: it diminished the apparent effect of the attack for a domestic audience, and it reduced the list of reasons Iran would have to retaliate if a counterstrike could be avoided. The early warning was not the only feature that made an immediate Iranian response less likely. For weeks beforehand, Israel had been under intense pressure from its allies, the United States above all, to calibrate its attack carefully so as not to escalate the conflict with Iran any further. After Iran's October 1 barrage, many within the Israeli political and defense apparatus were enraged and intent on destroying high-value Iranian targets in retribution. Those targets could have included Iran's hardened nuclear-enrichment facilities, its oil refineries, its political or military leadership and headquarters, or locations that would have produced large numbers of military or civilian casualties. Instead of any of that, Israel struck none of Iran's most critical assets, laid waste to no high-visibility area, and dropped no bomb on the Ayatollah. Everything about the operation indicates it was carefully designed to avoid escalation. From the early warning, to the explicit, surgical disabling of the exact assets Iran had used to attack Israel and nothing more, the strike reads as both a warning and a deliberate, voluntary act of restraint. Now, even with war raging in Lebanon and Gaza, much of the world has fixed its attention on Iran, trying to gauge whether the country will retaliate. If it does, all signs point to a token response at worst. Iran's leaders sit in a genuinely difficult position, especially after losing their best air defenses. Strike Israel in retaliation, and Israel can launch a far worse attack that Iran now has little means to stop. Refuse to strike back, and Iran's leadership risks alienating the hardliners who have been taught for generations to hate their great enemy, by the very people now leading the country, and whose support those leaders need amid a shaky economy and widespread popular discontent. Faced with the choice between getting kicked in the teeth by Israel or being shouted down by the hardliners, Iran's leadership appears to have chosen the hardliners. In the wake of the strike, Iranian state media moved to downplay it, dismissing the attack as weak, ineffectual, and broadly unworthy of public concern. To limit the release of specifics, the Iranian government threatened ten-year prison sentences for anyone who provides evidence about the airstrikes to media that Iran deems hostile. Foreign outlets speaking with ordinary Iranians across Tehran broadly reported an air of relief and a hope for a return to normalcy, rather than the rage the Ayatollah himself may have feared. With the low casualty count generated by the strike, Israel ensured that Iran needed only to help a few families through personal tragedy, rather than answer the kind of death toll that would be perceived as a blow to the nation. Iran's Foreign Ministry did issue a statement asserting that the country "considers itself entitled and obligated to defend against foreign acts of aggression." But Iran's actions have spoken far louder than its words, and even its words pointed in two directions at once. The same statement emphasized that Iran "recognizes its responsibilities towards regional peace and security." And on the night after the strikes, Iran's military suggested that in the event of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, or between Israel and Hezbollah, a retaliatory strike might be off the table altogether. For the regime to say such a thing that very night suggested it would only moderate its response further with time. For now, the Israeli strikes appear to be the last major exchange between Israel and Iran to expect in the near term. Perhaps Iran will mount a token response of some kind, but if so, there are plenty of ways to create the appearance of striking back while actually launching an attack that Israel's air defenses can easily absorb. Most global coverage has rightly focused on the continued potential for escalation between the two countries. But at least in the short term, the verdict holds: crisis averted. ## Movement on the Ground Back at and above the Israel-Lebanon border, the war between Israel and Hezbollah showed no sign of slowing. IDF troops and Hezbollah's elite Radwan fighters continued to battle on the ground in southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes kept volleying across the border in opposite directions. This account is current through the end of the day on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, Israel-Lebanon time. Over the preceding week and change, the IDF broadened its advance into southern Lebanon. The majority of the southernmost strip of the Israeli border with Lebanon was closed off, on the Israeli side, as a designated military zone, as were the southeastern corner and a more northerly area where the border runs north and then turns east. In all three areas, Israel had been advancing in a limited fashion for several weeks; now that push had widened. The day-to-day pattern looked broadly similar: Israel moving inward through harsh highland terrain, boxing off small pieces of territory and taking them, while Hezbollah's fighters frequently engaged the IDF in firefights but typically retreated from hard-to-defend positions rather than trying to hold them. A single day, October 25, gives a sense of the rhythm of the fighting, as catalogued by the Institute for the Study of War. That day, the IDF's 146th Division attacked roughly fifty Hezbollah targets, including an anti-tank emplacement, and moved through the village of Boustane, leaving destroyed buildings in its wake. Another infantry brigade destroyed underground Hezbollah compounds in a separate village and identified a large weapons depot in what was described as a "rugged mountainous area," with the materials confiscated and returned to Israel. The 98th Division destroyed a cell of Hezbollah fighters it said was about to ambush IDF soldiers, while the 91st Division called in an airstrike that killed a local Radwan commander. For its part, Hezbollah claimed to have killed or wounded the crew of an IDF tank and to have targeted Israeli soldiers with guided missiles and unguided rockets in multiple areas, including roughly a dozen attacks against the 98th Division over the course of that single day. This slow, grinding tempo has become the norm at this stage of the advance, with the IDF's broad goal being to dismantle the infrastructure Hezbollah built up to attack Israeli territory. Casualty counts remain difficult to establish on either side. Like any two parties to a war, Israel and Hezbollah are each incentivized to underreport their own losses and overstate the enemy's, so any figure either side offers should be treated with caution. Still, several notable events stand out. On October 24, one IDF division claimed to have killed about twenty Hezbollah fighters in a single area, an unusually large firefight later explained by the confiscation of a sizable stockpile of rocket launchers, mortars, and ammunition. On the 26th, the IDF used 400 tons of explosives to destroy what it described as the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found, triggering earthquake warnings across Israel with the force of the blast. The complex was large enough to house a company of Radwan fighters and sat about five kilometers from an Israeli town of twenty thousand. On October 30, the New York Times published an analysis of satellite imagery showing that 1,085 buildings had been destroyed across six Lebanese villages since the start of Israel's ground invasion on October 1. Israeli losses mounted as well. On the 25th, the IDF announced that five of its soldiers, all reservists, had been killed by a rocket strike, along with twenty-four wounded, the highest toll from a single strike since the ground invasion began. Five more, also reservists, were killed the following day alongside thirteen wounded, in a direct encounter where they were caught by surprise by three militants. By that day, Israel counted thirty-two soldiers dead since the start of the ground operation. Observations from October 28 indicated that a large IDF tank column had pushed several kilometers into Lebanese territory, marking Israel's deepest advance to that point. The objective was the village of Khiam, a lookout point that has allowed Hezbollah spotters to direct rocket fire across much of northern Israel. Hezbollah evidently considered Khiam worth defending: reports from the area described heavy anti-tank missile and anti-infantry mortar fire against Israeli forces as the IDF closed in from all directions. With casualty figures unconfirmed on both sides, the fight at Khiam threatened to become the costliest direct engagement of the ground invasion. ## The War's Widening Toll: Lebanese Soldiers, Peacekeepers, and Journalists IDF brigades and Radwan cells are not the only groups operating in southern Lebanon, and others came under Israeli fire over the same week. During one set of airstrikes, Israel killed three soldiers of the Lebanese Army, an institution that stands at least nominally opposed to Hezbollah and that Israel is decidedly not trying to fight. The soldiers had been attempting to evacuate wounded people from an area where Israel was raiding Hezbollah positions. It was the fourth time Israel had killed Lebanese soldiers, whether inadvertently or in a targeted strike. Peacekeepers with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, also came under fire, reporting that they had been forced to withdraw from a watchtower after Israeli troops fired on them. UNIFIL, which Foreign Policy this week described as both ineffective and indispensable to peacekeeping in southern Lebanon, has operated in the area for many years despite persistent Israeli frustration. The withdrawal came on the heels of a leaked confidential report, prepared by a country that contributes troops to the mission, alleging that Israel had launched at least a dozen attacks on UN forces in Lebanon since the start of its ground operations. The report claimed Israel had even used the incendiary chemical white phosphorus close enough to a UN position that fifteen peacekeepers were injured. Israel categorically denies deliberately targeting UNIFIL, while UNIFIL has accused Israel of violating international law. UNIFIL is caught in the crossfire from both sides; on October 29, a suspected Hezbollah rocket attack injured eight Austrian peacekeepers. But it is UNIFIL's animosity with Israel that has dominated the headlines. Journalists, too, paid a price. On Friday the 25th, an Israeli airstrike came down on a compound in southern Lebanon where more than a dozen journalists from multiple news organizations were known to be staying. Three people were killed, including two camera operators and one engineer affiliated with a Hezbollah-linked media company. At least one vehicle marked PRESS was destroyed, and no warning was issued to the site. The pattern of strikes hitting locations holding civilians, medical staff, and media without prior evacuation orders recurred throughout the week. ## The War in the Air Even as the ground campaign ground forward, the air war between Israel and Hezbollah continued without pause. On October 23, Israel carried out several airstrikes in the Lebanese port city of Tyre after expanding evacuation orders to cover several neighborhoods in and around the historic center. While no casualties were reported, Lebanese state news described "massive destruction" to the areas hit, and video captured smoke rising less than half a kilometer from a UNESCO World Heritage site. Israel said the strikes targeted Hezbollah's Southern Front headquarters and other Hezbollah sites. The city has largely emptied, though it is thought to still hold about fourteen thousand displaced people. On the 27th, Israel struck the southern coastal city of Sidon, killing eight and wounding twenty-five. Strikes on Sidon had been rare to that point in the conflict, and the city had become a magnet for displaced people seeking refuge. On the 29th, Israel issued an evacuation order for Baalbek, a city with a prewar population of 82,000 and home to an ancient Roman temple designated as another UNESCO World Heritage site. It was the first evacuation order Israel had issued for Baalbek since the start of the current invasion. Shortly afterward, Israel struck several buildings within the city, with the Lebanese Health Ministry reporting at least sixty injured. More consistent Israeli targets remained in the crosshairs as well. In Beirut, strikes on the 23rd targeted weapons storage and manufacturing, according to the IDF, while a pro-Hezbollah television channel reported that its bureau had also been hit. A couple of days later, the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiya was pounded with waves of intense airstrikes, on the same day Israel hit a pair of border crossings between Lebanon and Syria through which hundreds of thousands of people had tried to flee the country. In the neighborhood of Jnah on the 24th, an airstrike killed an unspecified number of people and injured at least sixty. In one southern Lebanese house, an airstrike killed nineteen people, including six women, five children, and a former school principal, wiping out three generations of a single family along with the village imam. Another strike very close to Lebanon's largest public hospital killed eighteen people, including four children. In most of these instances, no evacuation order was ever issued. The human displacement underneath all of this is staggering. Current estimates put the total number of people displaced inside Lebanon at 1.4 million, with nearly half a million having crossed into Syria to escape. A majority of those crossing were Syrians who had been sheltering in Lebanon after fleeing the war in their own country, now displaced a second time. In the opposite direction, Hezbollah continued to launch barrages of rockets into Israel, causing occasional casualties. On Wednesday the 23rd, Hezbollah claimed waves of rocket fire into Israel, including a salvo against the Glilot intelligence base and strikes toward Tel Aviv that prompted aides to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to shelter in a safe room. Hezbollah notched successful hits on multiple Israeli factories and struck the city of Karmiel, killing two and injuring at least twenty-five. Two more Israelis were wounded in the coastal city of Nahariya, and another was killed in Maalot Tarshiha on October 29. In its public statements, Hezbollah has issued evacuation orders to an ever-expanding list of northern Israeli towns and cities, mirroring what the IDF does before striking targets in Lebanon. On average, Hezbollah is catalogued launching between 80 and 250 rocket attacks per day, plus a smaller number of drone attacks. But thanks largely to Israel's robust air defenses, Hezbollah has achieved a far lower success rate with its air attacks than Israel has with its own. ## A Low-Grade War That Could Still Explode Stepping back to view the conflict in totality, the week revealed limited reasons for optimism alongside substantial cause for concern. The concerns are obvious: both sides continue to attack each other at high volume, Israel continues to grind across southern Lebanon while fighting Hezbollah, and the number of displaced people and civilian casualties keeps climbing. The reasons for hope are more counterintuitive. As experts on the long-running Middle East conflict have pointed out, this stage of violence between Israel and Hezbollah had the potential to be far worse than it has been. Israel has not yet committed the many thousands of troops it would need to take southern Lebanon outright, and Hezbollah has not launched mass counterattacks against the Israeli troops already there. Both facts are surprising, and both are positive signs. Israel and Hezbollah are undoubtedly at war, but not all wars are created equal, and in the grand scheme this one sits closer to a low-grade conflict than many had expected. Yet with every step Israel advances into southern Lebanon, a broadening confrontation grows more likely, not less. At this point in the advance, Hezbollah forces are still mostly retreating rather than fighting to the death. Israel is working through rugged highland terrain where such retreats come easily, and where the infrastructure Hezbollah built was meant to be sacrificed if necessary. According to a recent piece by the Atlantic Council, Hezbollah may be defending its current front-line zones with as few as a few hundred fighters. The more important targets lie deeper inside southern Lebanon, along with what is thought to be the bulk of Hezbollah's fighting strength. When Israel eventually advances into those core zones, it will fall to Hezbollah to decide how to respond, and that, viewed from outside, looks like the moment when Hezbollah may make a more definitive stand. Several indicators reinforce that reading. Hezbollah has begun threatening more frequent use of precision-guided ballistic missiles and anti-ship missiles, which would be a dramatic way of forcing Israel to redouble its own efforts. And even if other Iranian-backed organizations do not join directly, their fighters may show up in a larger conflict regardless. Funeral notices are increasingly being issued in Yemen, where the Houthi rebel movement operates, and in Iraq, home to an abundance of pro-Iran militias, to mourn people who died fighting alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon. For now these groups appear to be sending only small numbers of fighters, but those numbers could easily grow. ## Hezbollah's New Leadership Amid the fighting, Hezbollah underwent a notable leadership change. On October 29, the organization announced that Sheikh Naim Qassem, age seventy-one, had been elevated to its top job. Qassem had served as deputy to longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah for more than three decades, until Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September. Hezbollah had previously elevated a different successor, a man named Hashem Safieddine, but Safieddine lasted only a few days before he, too, was killed by Israel. Qassem is expected to function more as a coordinating figure for Hezbollah than as a fire-and-brimstone patriarch, and expert assessments of the group's inner workings suggest he was not exactly the first choice for the role. He was selected by a quite literal process of elimination, as few members of Hezbollah's old guard remain alive. On that point, Israel has already made overtures Qassem is unlikely to appreciate. In a social media post about Qassem's ascension, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant wrote: "Temporary appointment. Not for long." ## Prospects for Peace, and Other Factors The idea that a further Israeli advance is inevitable if the ground invasion continues is not the same as the idea that the invasion itself is inevitable. Peace efforts have been underway around the world to try to bring a swift end to the conflict, although whether they will succeed is another question entirely. Israel is under continual pressure from the international community, and above all from its most important backer, the United States, to avoid being drawn into a long engagement in Lebanon. During a trip to Qatar this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told foreign press that the US was working on a diplomatic arrangement that would allow displaced people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border to return home. In a potentially positive sign, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the IDF's chief of staff, said in a video statement: "In the north, there's a possibility of reaching a sharp conclusion. We thoroughly dismantled Hezbollah's senior chain of command." American negotiators continued to work with Israel toward a possible ceasefire in Gaza, with only limited results at best, an effort that could make a Hezbollah peace easier if it succeeds. Money has also flowed toward the humanitarian crisis. On Thursday the 24th, an international conference in Paris raised more than a billion US dollars, predominantly in humanitarian aid, according to France's foreign minister. That total included 100 million dollars from France and 300 million from the US, and far exceeded the 426 million dollars the UN had described as necessary to meet Lebanon's urgent humanitarian needs. Of the billion raised, about 200 million was expected to go toward strengthening Lebanon's armed forces, potentially recruiting up to six thousand new troops and enabling the deployment of eight thousand others to the south. How that money will actually be spent, in a nation notorious for extreme corruption and failed-state conditions, will require great care from those trying to help. Even so, the signs do not point to an Israel ready or willing to move toward a ceasefire. The context matters. Israel is contending with far more than a retaliatory strike on Iran and its war with Hezbollah. In Gaza, Palestinians and global observers have sounded the alarm that implementation of the so-called generals' plan is now underway. Proposed by a group of retired Israeli generals, that plan called for a complete cutoff of aid to northern Gaza and a substantially tightened siege, forcing civilians to either flee or starve ahead of a phase of the war in which every person remaining in northern Gaza would be assumed to be a combatant. First responders have now paused operations in northern Gaza entirely, while Israel denies carrying out what has been called a "surrender or starve" campaign. The UN's leading humanitarian official, Joyce Msuya, has warned that "the entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying." In one notable incident, Israeli forces besieged one of the last remaining hospitals in northern Gaza for several days before withdrawing and taking nearly all of the hospital's male staff away with them. Israel has also continued to absorb an increasing number of terror attacks on its own territory. On Sunday the 27th, one man was killed and at least thirty other people were injured when a truck ran into dozens of people who had just stepped off a charter bus. The wounded were predominantly elderly people on a day trip to a museum; the attacker, an Arab Israeli, was shot dead at the scene. Israel's pro-ceasefire protest movement remains very much alive. On the 27th, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a speech marking the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack disrupted by protesters advocating a stop to the fighting. But in a country where even peacetime protests stood little chance of swaying Netanyahu or his political allies, the current push toward a ceasefire, from Israeli advocates and foreigners alike, appears no more successful. In Gaza, Israel has routinely stonewalled, made false promises to its allies, and refused to compromise whenever a ceasefire seemed within reach. Early indicators suggest its approach in Lebanon will be similar. In conversations revealed to Axios by both US and Israeli officials, Israel relayed a set of demands for a Lebanon ceasefire that the rest of the world would find very difficult to accept. Israel demanded the right to actively enforce anti-Hezbollah rules inside southern Lebanon, operating within the country to ensure the group does not rearm or reconsolidate, and demanded that its air force be able to operate freely over Lebanon. Both requests would constitute fundamental violations of Lebanese sovereignty, conditions that neither Lebanon nor the international community would be likely to support. That said, not all signs point to continued escalation. Reporting as of October 29 indicated that there were genuine efforts to establish terms for a ceasefire with Lebanon. According to Israeli sources, the current draft would include a sixty-day acclimation period, a temporary ceasefire to give mediators time to set up a mechanism that would supervise southern Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding there. The IDF would withdraw from most of southern Lebanon, while the Lebanese Armed Forces would deploy thousands of troops to the south, supported by a rapid influx of French, German, and British troops. The problem is that neither Hezbollah nor the leaders of Israel's government had actually endorsed the plan, and with so many moving parts, it inherently contains numerous points of failure. The Israeli government would have to abandon its expectation of active enforcement and its hopes for free operation in Lebanese airspace. Hezbollah would have to consent to Lebanese and international occupation of its key territory. Lebanon would have to figure out how to surge troops, and the international parties would have to put large numbers of their own personnel in harm's way. The existence of a first-draft proposal is not nothing, but the long list of steps it requires, and the enduring failure to find a ceasefire in Gaza, suggest serious problems almost certainly lie ahead. Nor would Israel be likely to enter any negotiations before its critical ally finished a contentious election cycle, culminating in America's presidential and congressional elections on Tuesday, November 5. Netanyahu has been overt in his preference for a Donald Trump presidency over a Kamala Harris one, and will almost certainly wait for the announcement of both a president-elect and a new balance of power in the US House and Senate before discussing any ceasefire terms. Should Trump win, Netanyahu may prove entirely unwilling to engage with the incumbent Biden administration for the rest of its term, pushing any hope of a ceasefire out to January 20, when a leader with no record of serious advocacy for a ceasefire would take office. WarFronts would be glad to be surprised in the coming weeks by an attempt to negotiate a real, lasting peace in the Middle East, one that would let displaced people return home and save the likely thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost in the months ahead. But while current indicators do not point to all-out war between Israel and Iran, or between Israel and Hezbollah, they do not point to a ceasefire either. For now, the slow march across southern Lebanon is likely to continue at its current pace, and so is the slow march to the brink between Iran and Israel. When this slow rhythm is interrupted, it tends to be because, all of a sudden, things start moving very fast. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was Operation Days of Repentance and what prompted it? Operation Days of Repentance was the Israeli military operation launched in the early hours of October 26, 2024, in which more than a hundred combat aircraft struck roughly twenty targets across Iran in three successive waves lasting more than three hours. It was carried out in direct response to Iran's October 1 launch of 180 ballistic missiles into Israel, and marked the first time Israel ever openly acknowledged an attack on Iran. ### What did Israel target inside Iran, and what did it deliberately spare? Israel concentrated on facilities used to produce long-range missiles and unmanned kamikaze drones, focusing especially on Chinese-made mixers used to produce solid rocket fuel, along with most or all of Iran's advanced S-300 air-defense batteries. On the way in, it also destroyed air-defense systems in Syria and Iraq. Israel deliberately avoided Iran's nuclear-enrichment facilities, oil refineries, energy infrastructure, and political and military leadership — sites it could have struck but chose to spare as a signal of restraint. ### How severe was the damage to Iran's military capability? US assessments shared with news outlets concluded that Iran's missile-production capability was crippled badly enough to require a year or more to rebuild, in part because the destroyed Chinese-made fuel mixers cannot be quickly replaced. The loss of most or all of Iran's S-300 batteries left Iranian airspace broadly exposed, meaning Israel can now launch long-range strikes against the country more or less at will. Iran reported only four soldiers and one civilian security guard killed. ### What is the state of the ground war in southern Lebanon? The IDF has broadened a slow, grinding advance through rugged highland terrain, boxing off small pieces of territory while Hezbollah generally retreats rather than holding its positions. Israel destroyed what it called the largest Hezbollah complex it had ever found using 400 tons of explosives, and pushed a large tank column several kilometers toward the village of Khiam, a Hezbollah observation point commanding much of northern Israel. By October 30, Israel counted thirty-two soldiers dead since the ground invasion began, and satellite imagery showed 1,085 buildings destroyed across six Lebanese villages. ### Who is Hezbollah's new leader and how was he chosen? On October 29, 2024, Hezbollah named Sheikh Naim Qassem, age seventy-one, as its leader. Qassem had served as deputy to Hassan Nasrallah for more than three decades until Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September; Nasrallah's first announced successor, Hashem Safieddine, was also killed by Israel within days. Qassem was selected largely by process of elimination, as few members of Hezbollah's old guard remain alive, and is expected to function as a coordinating figure rather than a charismatic patriarch. ## Sources - [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Iran, Oct 26 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-10-26-2024-9c9f366c71c508e6dd0ee74cff8400d2) - [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Iran, Oct 25 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-10-25-2024-0920f63542d158ad5999c481e421da00) - [Reuters — Explosions heard in Iran](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/explosions-heard-iran-syria-middle-east-braces-israeli-retaliation-2024-10-25/) - [The Guardian — Israel strikes Iran air defence systems, energy sites](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/27/israel-strikes-iran-air-defence-systems-energy-sites) - [NPR — Israel-Iran airstrikes, Tehran](https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/nx-s1-5165574/israel-iran-airstrikes-tehran) - 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[The Independent — Israel-Iran attack, Tehran response](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-iran-attack-tehran-response-retaliate-hezbollah-latest-b2636381.html) - [TIME — Israel attacks Iran, pre-dawn airstrikes](https://time.com/7099052/israel-attacks-iran-pre-dawn-airstrikes-targeting-military-infrastructure/) - [BBC News — Strike coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr0yvrx4qpo) - [New York Times — Iran state media plays down Israeli attacks](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/world/middleeast/irans-state-media-plays-down-israeli-attacks.html) - [The Telegraph — Iran threatens citizens over Israel strikes](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/26/iran-threatens-citizens-israel-strikes-video/) - [WSJ — Israeli strikes on Iran expose gap in prowess](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-strikes-on-iran-expose-gap-in-prowess-between-two-arch-foes-aded7cf8) - [Axios — Israel-Iran attack warning](https://www.axios.com/2024/10/26/israel-iran-attack-warning) - 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[Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 24 2024](https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-24-2024) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 26 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-26-2024) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 23 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-23-2024) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 22 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-22-2024) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 21 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-21-2024) - [New York Times — Israel strikes southern Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-southern-lebanon.html) - [Reuters — Peacekeepers withdrew from post in south Lebanon under Israeli fire](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/peacekeepers-withdrew-post-zahajra-south-lebanon-under-israeli-fire-2024-10-25/) - [Financial Times — UNIFIL coverage](https://www.ft.com/content/151eb482-6415-48a8-bf3f-baed00018c4e) - [BBC News — Lebanon coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y387ne93po) - [Los Angeles Times — Israeli strikes pound Lebanese coastal city](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-10-23/israeli-strikes-pound-lebanese-coastal-city-after-residents-evacuate) - [New York Times — Israeli strike, Sidon, Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-sidon-lebanon.html) - [CBS News — Journalists killed in Lebanon](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-war-iran-hamas-gaza-hezbollah-journalists-killed-lebanon-kamal-adwan-hospital/) - [AP News — Journalists killed in Lebanon](https://apnews.com/article/journalists-killed-lebanon-israel-c89cf1109daaf3e6e7b766584710234d) - [BBC News — Lebanon strikes coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvz2rzm4k0o) - [New York Times — Israel strikes Gaza and Lebanon](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-gaza-lebanon.html) - [BBC News — Middle East coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr9l4l0xx4o) - [Los Angeles Times — Israeli airstrikes destroy cities in Lebanon](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-10-25/as-israeli-airstrikes-destroy-cities-in-lebanon-some-see-echoes-of-gaza) - [AP News — Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah Mideast latest, Oct 25 2024](https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-hezbollah-mideast-latest-25-october-2024-6ef9066c9ff9f2d0518e281f3e622df4) - [PBS NewsHour — Lebanese healthcare workers in the line of fire](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lebanese-healthcare-workers-caught-in-the-line-of-fire-from-israeli-airstrikes) - [BBC News — Lebanon coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxy621qn4eo) - [NPR — Israel strikes Hezbollah-linked Al-Qard Al-Hassan](https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/nx-s1-5159600/israel-strikes-hezbollah-banks-al-qard-al-hassan) - [BBC News — Lebanon strikes](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93p3g1v1z4o) - [CBS News — Israeli forces attack targets around Beirut](https://www.cbsnews.com/video/israeli-forces-attack-targets-around-beirut-while-hezbollah-fires-rockets-into-israel/) - [Atlantic Council — Israel-Hezbollah not full-scale war](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/israel-hezbollah-not-full-scale-war/) - [Foreign Policy — Where is the massive Hezbollah response?](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/25/where-is-massive-hezbollah-response-to-israels-attacks/) - [NBC News — Israel leaves trail of destruction in days-long hospital siege](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-leaves-trail-destruction-dayslong-siege-one-gazas-last-hospital-rcna177474) - [ABC News — Israel-Gaza-Lebanon live updates](https://abcnews.go.com/International/live-updates/israel-gaza-lebanon-live-updates-idf-targeting-hezbollah/?id=114980385) - [UN News — North Gaza warning](https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1156171) - [The Guardian — Israel generals' plan to clear north Gaza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/26/israel-generals-plan-clear-north-gaza-palestinians) - [BBC News — Gaza coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdj33rwlyepo) - [NBC News — Truck slams into bus stop near Glilot military base](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/truck-slams-bus-stop-near-glilot-military-base-tel-aviv-israel-rcna177476) - [WSJ — Truck hits crowd at Israel bus stop](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/truck-hits-crowd-at-israel-bus-stop-injuring-dozens-0e9c69c4) - [ABC News — Protesters disrupt Netanyahu's speech](https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/protesters-israel-disrupt-prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahus-speech-115190861) - [AP News — Lebanon conference, Paris humanitarian aid](https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-lebanon-conference-paris-humanitarian-aid-30a97f88d2ec8dc138385d18a31dbb69) - [Axios — Israel, US, Lebanon end-war conditions](https://www.axios.com/2024/10/21/israel-us-lebanon-end-war-conditions) - [The Guardian — Israel-Lebanon strikes, Beirut, US ceasefire](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/25/israel-lebanon-strikes-beirut-us-ceasefire) - [Washington Post — Trump, Netanyahu, Gaza, Lebanon](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/25/trump-netanyahu-support-gaza-lebanon/) - [Reuters — Netanyahu told Trump Israel will make decisions based on its interests](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-told-trump-israel-will-make-decisions-based-its-interests-his-office-2024-10-20/) - [New York Times — Netanyahu, Trump, Harris (opinion)](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/netanyahu-trump-harris.html) - [NBC News — Satellite images show damage to Iran military sites](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/satellite-images-show-damage-iran-military-sites-israel-attack-rcna177552) - [New York Times — Iran-Israel strikes, Tehran](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/iran-israel-strikes-tehran.html) - [DW — Syria's Assad caught between Iran and Israel](https://www.dw.com/en/syria-dictator-bashar-assad-caught-between-iran-israel-conflict-middle-east/a-70632310) - [New York Times — Israel-Lebanon border photos and video](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-border-photos-video.html) - [Reuters — Hezbollah elects Naim Qassem to succeed Nasrallah](https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-elects-naim-qassem-succeed-slain-head-nasrallah-2024-10-29/) - [CNN — Naim Qassem, new Hezbollah leader](https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/middleeast/naim-qassem-new-hezbollah-leader-israel-war-intl/index.html) - [BBC News — Hezbollah leadership coverage](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89vx50g4l5o) - [ABC News — Middle East latest, dozens killed and wounded](https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/middle-east-latest-dozens-killed-wounded-israeli-strike-115250589) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 27 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-27-2024-0) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 28 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-28-2024) - [Institute for the Study of War — Iran Update, Oct 29 2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-october-29-2024) - [Reuters — Senior Biden advisers visit Israel to try to end war in Lebanon](https://www.reuters.com/world/senior-biden-advisers-visit-israel-try-end-war-lebanon-axios-reports-2024-10-30/) - [NBC News — Biden officials, Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, Hezbollah, Gaza](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/biden-officials-israel-lebanon-cease-fire-hezbollah-gaza-rcna177977) <!-- youtube:jAQf1Ihh1rk -->