By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

   

It is now sixteen years since the shattering of the myth of military might of the illegal Zionist entity during the 33-day war by Lebanon’s legendary anti-terrorist movement, the Hezbollah, which today, as the pivot of the Resistance Front, wields a formidable arsenal of sophisticated drones and missiles in addition to a force of battle-hardened combatants who have proven their mettle in defeating the world’s most macabrely murderous terrorists in the 10-year Syrian crisis that followed, and are now fully capable of leading the march for the liberation of Islam’s third holiest site, the al-Aqsa Mosque in Occupied Palestine.

This is not an exaggeration but the plain truth as usurper Israel knows very well and in sheer desperation to avert the inevitable has stepped up its cowardly attacks on Syria on the “Day of Islamic Resistance” – as the anniversary of the August 14 UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is celebrated to signify the Zionist regime’s conceding of victory to Hezbollah’s victory in 2006, 

If the Zionists think that today there are no heroes of the 33-day war, such as Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, who according to Hezbollah Secretary-General Seyyed Hassan Nasrollah, masterminded the Lebanese retaliation to inflict significant casualties on the aggressors, they are in for a rude shock.

There is no dearth of brilliant military strategists either in Iran or for that matter in Lebanon, which may have lost Imad Mughniyeh – another hero of the 2016 war – to the cowardly CIA-Mossad assassination in Damascus in 2008.

This has been proven on the battlegrounds of Syria by a new breed of Hezbollah commanders, now eager to accelerate the end of Israel if that spurious entity makes one wrong move, whether from the occupied Shebaa Farms or in the offshore oil/gas field in the Mediterranean Sea.

Israel is a spurious state, without any past in Palestine and certainly no future, in spite of its assembling of nuclear weapons and the massive military/financial support provided by the mother of all terrorism, the US.

Even its current phase of forcing the unrepresentative oil rich Persian Gulf Arab states – its allies in the 33-day war against Lebanon –to openly kowtow to Israel, will neither guarantee its survival or that of its accomplices in their crimes against the Palestinian people.

It is worth noting that in the 2006 July/August confrontation Israel’s 10,000 heavily armed soldiers whose number swelled to 30,000 towards the end of the 33- day war, were no match for the thousand-plus Hezbollah defenders. 

The result speaks for itself. Israel admitted that 20 of its famous armoured Merkova tanks were destroyed beyond repair by Hezbollah, in addition to 121 soldiers killed and 1,244 other military personnel injured. It also lost a helicopter gunship, while its corvette class battle cruiser was severely damaged off the coast of Lebanon.

Of course, these are censored figures, and the exact number of tanks and armoured carriers destroyed as well as the Israeli soldiers killed, is far greater.

Even the dropping of tens of thousands of anti-Hezbollah propaganda leaflets in Lebanese towns and cities by the Israeli aircraft failed to dent the national of the country’s Christians, Druzes, Sunnis and Shi’a Muslims.

This is the reason, the Zionist entity, which killed over a thousand Lebanese civilians in its cowardly bombing of urban centres in 2006, thinks twice before igniting any confrontation with Hezbollah.

It is also worth noting that Israeli lies in killing leading Hezbollah commanders such as Jaafar, and Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, were fully exposed when these and others publicly appeared in the victory celebrations in southern Beirut and later earned distinctions on the battlefields of Syria against the takfiri terrorists that were supported by the US, the Zionist entity, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf Arab regimes.  

Thus as Iranian President, Seyyed Ibrahim Raisi, emphasized at ceremonies marking the “Day of Islamic Resistance” in Tehran, “historical experience indicates that whenever freedom-seeking nations of the world took the path of resistance in confronting the current of domination and arrogance, they succeeded and achieved dignity and independence.”

He also said that resistance is the only influential and effective way to overcome the problems facing the Islamic world especially the issue of Palestine.