However, calls to refrain from killing Nasrallah: ‘He lives in a basement. Why eliminate him?’
The IDF will eventually need to destroy Hezbollah, former National Security Council adviser Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror said Wednesday.
At the same time, he vehemently rejected a suggestion from an audience member that the IDF carry out a targeted killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Speaking at a panel before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, Amidror, who is also a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said: “There is no way to balance Hezbollah [within Lebanon]. If we don’t want them to get precise weaponry in the future, we will have to find a solution to the existence of this beast in Lebanon.”
“How and when, I don’t have a good answer,” he said. “But we need to remember their over 100,000 rockets can reach everywhere from the nuclear reactor in Dimona to Kiryat Shmona in the North… In the end, we will need to destroy Hezbollah by force.”
However, Amidror’s aggressive perspective on Hezbollah does not extend to its leader.
With the panel universally supporting the US targeted killing of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3, an audience member asked why Israel was not doing the same to Nasrallah.
Amidror responded: “Nasrallah is the most cautious leader in the Middle East. Why eliminate him? He understands the situation. He is living in a basement and is not going out. He is having a very positive role now” in preventing the outbreak of a larger war with Israel.
Moreover, he said, Israel had tried this with Hezbollah before and failed when it assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi.
“Hezbollah found a good successor,” Amidror said. Many historians argue that Hezbollah became a far bigger threat to Israel under Nasrallah than it had been under Musawi, meaning that killing Musawi might have made things worse, and so killing Nasrallah might also.
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