Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday that Israel’s preemptive weekend attack on Hezbollah and the Lebanese terror group’s subsequent missile barrage “is not the end” of their conflict.
Netanyahu said Israeli intelligence discovered a plot by Hezbollah to fire a wave of rockets and drones against the Jewish state, which triggered Israel’s preemptive strike that took out 6,000 pieces of artillery in Lebanon early Sunday, according to the Israel Defense Force.
“We instructed the IDF to carry out a powerful, preemptive strike to eliminate the threat,” Netanyahu said.
“The IDF destroyed thousands of short-range rockets, and all of them were aimed at harming our citizens and our forces in the Galilee,” he added.
After Israel’s assault on its weapons’ munition, Hezbollah said it fired 320 Katyusha rockets at northern Israel, hitting 11 military targets and killing 21-year-old Navy soldier David Moshe Ben Shitrit.
While Israeli and Hezbollah officials claimed the clash, one of the biggest in the history of conflict between the two entities, does not seek to start an all-out war, both agreed that this was just the first exchange of its kind.
“This is not the end of the story,” Netanyahu warned.
Hezbollah echoed the ominous message, calling Sunday’s attack just the “first phase” of its promised retaliatory attack after Israel assassinated one of the terror group’s highest ranking commanders, Fuad Shukr, last month.
Meanwhile, despite Netanyahu’s insistence that Hezbollah was plotting to fire thousands of explosives at Israel on Sunday morning, a senior Israeli defense official acknowledged to Fox’s Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst that the number was exaggerated.
The official estimated that about two-thirds of what was destroyed was actually what was going to be fired Sunday, with former IDF intelligence chief Tamir Hayman also voicing his own skepticism over Netanyahu’s claim.
“If indeed Hezbollah planned to fire 6,000 aerial threats, including to the center, as some reports indicate — then Beirut would be going up in flames right now,” Hayman told the Jerusalem Post.
“There is no way that this was the plan and that this is how the Israeli response looks to such a step, which would mean starting an all-out war,” he added.
While Hezbollah said its attacks were done for the day, the terror group warned that the full scale of its revenge plot would take “some time.”
The terror group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, also claimed that Sunday’s attack had been delayed for almost a month, as the group allegedly wanted to see how the cease-fire talks would turn out in recent weeks.
Hezbollah began firing at Israel nearly every day since Oct. 8 in solidarity with the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which launched a massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, sparking the Mideast war.
With Post wires
