Pointed reminder that Hizballah still holds the cards for making war on Israel

While world audiences were transfixed by the theatrical opening of the Olympic Games in London Friday night, July 27, the ever-manipulative Hassan Nasrallah released a video clip recording his Hizballah militia’s raid in the summer of 2006 which ended in the deaths of eight IDF soldiers and the kidnapping of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Hot military pursuit for their rescue mired Israel in the ill-prepared, misconceived Second Lebanon War.
Six years later, Nasrallah is jogging reluctant Israeli memories with a reminder of the ease with which his raiders carried out their unprovoked incursion of northern Israel and the destructive impact he produced on its society and armed forces by starting a conflict which he also claims to have won. He is saying that his organization still holds all the cards of its “holy war to liberate all of Palestine.” Those cards, he is preparing to slap down at any time now, fully backed by Iran and Syria, and he promises the IDF will fare no better this time than it did in 2006.
The Hizballah leader’s strongest card – then and now – is his ability to keep Israel’s policy-makers in a state of uncertainty or, to put it another way, his successful blocking tactics against Israeli intelligence.
The video shows Hizballah commandos cutting through the Israel fence on July 12, 2006, surging into Israel and jumping an IDF Hummer jeep patrolling the Lebanese border near Zarit after an artillery shelling. They are seen pulling open the car doors. But then, moments before the attackers dragged Goldwasser and Eldad Regev out of the jeep, the tape is cut.
The enigma of whether they were snatched alive or dead remains. Their deaths were only revealed when they were handed back in coffins at the end of agonizing bargaining through international mediators in the hope they were still alive.
Until then, this uncertainty held Israel in a corrosive grip, causing its leaders to lurch from one tactical blunder to another and allowing Hizballah to stage more rocket attacks on northern Israeli towns and villages without an IDF response.
The Hizballah tape had another message, say debkafile’s counter-terror sources: Just as Israeli intelligence was baffled by the 2006 incursion, so too it failed to anticipate the bus bombing of July 18, 2012 in Burgas, Bulgaria, which killed 6 Israeli holidaymakers and the Bulgarian driver.
Therefore, Israel cannot hope to forestall the promised terrorist offensive still in store.
The clip was released by a new HIzballah TV channel established in Beirut by Lebanese sympathizers who quit Al-Jazeera.
As a crafty propagandist, our sources would not put it past Nasrallah to have released – or even fabricated – the 2006 tape, certainly with Iranian and Syria approval, to drive home the lack of progress made by American, Israeli and Bulgarian clandestine and anti-terror services in cracking the Burgos mystery.
Hundreds of their agents fanned out across Europe and in Turkey have failed to turn up leads to the identities of the bomber, his accomplices and the hand behind them.
Probing for gaps in Israel’s military and security defenses is a classical Hizballah method of aggression which has been fine-tuned over the years by Iranian instructors for terrorist and military operations alike.
Two years ago, US and Israeli intelligence discovered evidence that HIzballah was planning to use its next war offensive against Israel to seize and occupy territory before Israeli forces had time to take the battle into Lebanon behind its own lines.

The videotape demonstrates Hizballah’s stealth tactics for an undetected incursion.
Our military sources disclose that two years ago, the Lebanese organization’s war planners established five special forces brigades the size of expanded battalions for the specific missions of capturing parts of Galilee and raising a mutiny against the Israeli government among Arab citizens.
Hizballah has designed strategic maps dividing Galilee into patches, each of which is to be conquered by one of those brigades. Their training has been adjusted to the topography and demography of each of the areas they are intended to occupy and administer.