The response to the “Dahiyeh doctrine”: Rain of fire on Gush Dan
On the third anniversary of the end of the July War, Hizbullah finds itself in a better position than the one it had when the war broke out, for in the event of "Israel" resorting to firing missiles or launching aircraft raids on targets in Dahiyeh Suburbs or the larger Beirut, a few minutes will not have passed before "Gush Dan" sky witnesses a rain of fire.
Ibrahim Amin
"During July 2006 War, a Hizbullah fighter would wake up in the morning, drink his coffee, get out a rocket from his closet, goes to his neighbor's yard, sets a timing device on it, then goes to watch CNN channel to see where the missile landed."
"Gush Dan" or the center of the Jewish state, where the center for political and economic life is, includes a number of main cities, including the city of Rishon Lezion, Herziliya, Bnei Barak, Bat Yam, Holon, Ramat Hasharon, Ramat Gan, Or, Yehuda and others. In the forefront of these cities is the political capital, the actual economic hub, Tel Aviv.
More than 2 million people (Zionist settlers) have taken residence there, making it the most crowded "Israeli" territory, compared to its geographical size, with an area of 1500 km square. The distance between its south and north is 90 km, and 20 km in width. This area is considered the most important in "Israel", cramped with the various types of clubs, bars, cafes, restaurants, hotels, theaters, cinemas, parks and museums, it is where the most important festivals and "Israeli" tourism activities are held. Above all, it is the nerve center of the "Israeli" economy as a whole, and its political center.
■ The declared doctrine and the concealed response
After great efforts were spent searching for ways to force Hizbullah to abandon the use of its weapons or to throw them away, the commander of the occupation Army's northern region came out to talk about what he called the "Dahiyeh doctrine." He explained at length with boastfulness, that his army will flatten any village or town "Israel" comes under fire from. He kept repeating his reference to using disproportionate violence, and that "Israel" will not act as it did in 2006.
The "Israelis" tried to use the war on Gaza, to talk about bombing in the south that must be heard in the north. In recent period they increased their threats by saying that in any future war, "Israel" will not stop at any red lines for the government or the Lebanese infrastructure, while many studies and discussions ended with recommendations to the army and government to punish all of Lebanon to make Hizbullah feel the pain.
Hizbullah's response was limited to stances made by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who said that the party has missiles capable of reaching anywhere throughout the entire area of occupied Palestine. The climax of his messages was that any attack on Beirut or the Dahiyeh means placing Tel Aviv within the target circle. A subject "Israel" takes very seriously, but does not want included as an item on its internal affairs agenda, because being without a cure to such a risk means pushing the public into a sense of frustration to start thinking from now about ways to exit this region.
Furthermore, if "Israel" is quoting its political and military leaders about Hizbullah possessing more than forty thousand missiles today, and an arsenal 3 times what it was in 2006, Sayyed Nasrallah is yet to comment publicly on this matter, but in an undeclared meeting some time ago with the Lebanese expatriates he did mention that the party increased its strength more than 3 fold, and that the only way for it to be tested is in the event of war.
The reality of the situation is to imagine the moment of the outbreak of the confrontation, apart from the element of how the war starts, who decides its timing and for which political or military objective it was started.
But let's say that the war has broken out, and people now live the painful military reality.
In Lebanon, all are waiting for the sky to be full of tens of "Israeli" warplanes carrying out bombing raids on a variety of objectives, civilian or-what their military presumes is-military, destroys and sabotages whatever their arm can reach, to push the public into a state of despair with the aim to drive them from their ‘supporter' or ‘silent' position on the actions of the resistance, to the position of ‘objector' or wishing for a ceasefire.
Then, the "Israelis" assume and hope the people would turn on the resistance to put pressure and force it to surrender.
■ But what of the opposite scenario?
"Israel" says that the resistance increased its arsenal by 3 fold, and Nasrallah responds by saying: "...But even more than that!"
It is not certain nor logical for the resistance to repeat the previous scenario, and in any case, not once has it employed a method it had previously used. But what is nearing on certainty is that the resistance will start from where the 2006 war ended, from the level of hostility and cruelty sensed by the enemy during the last days. Consequently, the "Israelis" must expect the resistance's response from day one, as a rain of missiles, all day and night without stop, hitting every carefully selected target or indiscriminate hits-if this is the decided bombing response.
It is best to imagine that the total missile strikes the resistance delivered in the July war (between four and five thousand missiles) may cross the skies in a shorter time than the 33 days they took back then. An ability to hit more accurately has also been achieved, as is the case for the bank of military, public or strategic targets, which ought not dry up in a few hours, as was the case of the enemy during the July war, which subsequently showed the enemy to be "Old and blind."
■ A ploy cost Halutz the "qualitative weight" night
Until today, there are still some who speak with admiration in "Israel" of what they call Air Force accomplishment of the second night of the July War, when their fighter jets attacked about 54 targets prepared by the strategic weapons centers within a short span of time. Everyone remembers Dan Halutz, the-then Chief of Staff, who did not see any need for non-air weapons, and how he celebrated the victory, saying to his boss, Ehud Olmert: "Stop the war we have won, we have destroyed their stockpile of long-range missiles, and we are now safe!"
Once, in an interview with "Aljazeera", Sayyed Nasrallah said: "what 'Israel' bombed that night was not what it talked about." His saying this on that day may have given a signal or sent a message to the inquiry commissions in "Israel", whose attention was grabbed, to look more closely in the declaration made by the leaderships of the General Staff and the Air Force Command about having completed a major operation that night, knowing it was not long after, when missiles rained down on Haifa, "Israeli" north, Hadera and Afula.
That day, all the leaders of the enemy started looking ruefully at Halutz, as he forcedly conceded to a land intervention plan to compensate for the failure of the Air force task force -The Crown Jewel - of the "Israeli" Army Forces to end the battle.
A long time may pass before anyone reveals the mystery of what happened that night, or maybe the resistance has no interest in anyone uncovering the "Great secret" behind the biggest security ploy "Israel" was exposed to, over all the many years, before "Israel" bit the bait and fell in the trap to think, disillusioned, that it had actually hit the basic rocket structure of the resistance. It will also take a long time before anyone learns, friends and foes alike, when the first strategic missiles reached the hands of the resistance combatants.
As for the necessary intelligence work to counteract "Israeli" espionage, Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry have previously written under the title "How Hizbullah defeated ‘Israel'" saying that: "Between years 2000 and 2006, Hizbullah mastered, it seems, the precision art of signals-counterintelligence (C-SIGNET ). An ability that may pay huge dividends in future wars with "Israel." In the field of human-intelligence, Hizbullah also demonstrated a very successful ability. Hizbullah was able to work on ‘Israeli' agents in southern Lebanon and dismantle a major ‘Israeli' spy ring. In some important cases, senior intelligence officials in Hizbullah were able to feed back to ‘Israel' false information on the most sensitive sites. The resulting outcome was a full ‘Israeli' bank of key targets, which, in reality, were non-existent."
The shock was not limited to this aspect, but "Israeli" military communications reporting on achieved hits in the resistance ranks was based on traditional calculation standards: ‘The fighter-jet such and such carried out a mission at such and such a point, it destroyed a specific target, removing a rocket launcher in the process, and prevented the enemy from its use again. This or that number of combatants was killed in the process.'
Not a long time had passed when the "Israelis" discovered the working mechanism of the resistance's rocket firing units. How and where the arsenal was, how the targets were determined, who issues the orders and how the order is executed. Later on in the war, the "Israeli" enemy relied on information from Western and Arab press releases to update the picture it was forming from bits and pieces it managed to acquire during the last days of war.
The resistance had singular launch pads and those that had a single-time use only. These launch platforms had a strong effect; the resistance used hundreds of them in this war. This mechanism did not require special additional effort at the moment of confrontation. The platforms were ready before the war broke out, and when the resistance leadership talked about its preparedness, they knew that these weapons were ready to work immediately, only awaiting permission.
This is what happened during the war.
Every sector has its keepers, and every rocket launch unit knows what's in its possession, it knows the list of objectives it is entrusted to hit. These resistance combatants only needed a communication the enemy could not trace or intercept, with an encrypted message, understood by sender and recipient only, after which and within only seconds the platform would be ready for the launch.
Before the rockets go on their flight, the resistance fighter or fighters would have returned to their small homes hidden in the earth's belly or above its surface. Sometimes, they have the opportunity to watch the dust emitted by the rocket launch or the dust left behind by "Israeli" raids on the after-launch tin remains, which no longer fit for use anyway.
■ Does the resistance possess ‘Conquest 110?'
Leaders, security and military personnel, as well as journalists and citizens (settlers) of the enemy are busy trying to learn the size and quality of the existing missile force now possessed by the resistance. They now add to what they had declared after the July war, the presence of other types that are advanced, more destructive with an improved ability to hit targets more accurately. They refer to missiles used to hit land targets, along with anxious questions about the resistance stockpile of anti-armor, aircraft and warships weapons.
A few days ago Alex Fishman wrote that "In southern Lebanon there are missiles capable of covering the entire Gush Dan area: Fajr-3 and Fajr-5, with a range between 70 to 150 km, in addition to 302-millimeter rockets capable of reaching over 220 km, and thousands of short-range missiles up to 40 kilometers in range. 'Zilzaal' (Earthquake) missiles north of the Litani River are supposed to keep 'Israel' busy in the Tel Aviv-Dimona range. Between the open areas there are scattered posts the 'Israeli' army has to cross. There they will run into another type of natural reserves- home to hundreds of Hizbullah of Special Force members, equipped with long-range anti-tank missiles, such as 'Cornett' and explosive devices and booby traps."
In one of the reviews, an "Israeli" expert wrote the following on the rocket-launching process: "Hizbullah established a simple but effective Katyusha rockets launch system. When control watch declared the area free of 'Israeli' aircraft, a unit moves to the launch site, prepares a launch pad then quickly leaves. A second unit comes to move the missile to a launch site then flees immediately. A third small unit comes to the site after that to prepare the rocket for launch, often through the use of remote controls or timers.
The entire operation takes less than 28 seconds, proportional to the large number of rocket launch units that use motorcycles to go to rocket launch sites. Another rocket unit has medium-range 'Fajr' missiles and improved Katyusha rockets placed on the south and north sides of the Litani River. Most of these rockets, if not all, are launched on mobile platforms, in the area between the Litani River and Beirut. Hizbullah added two units to the long range missiles, the 'Zilzaal-2' 610-millimeter, and other long-range missile systems."
Alakhbar, Monday, 17 August 2009
