Historically, Israel has launched some pioneering air campaigns that were unprecedented in their times. These include its devastating surprise attack against Egypt in the June 1967 Six Day War, its bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, and its sophisticated suppression and destruction of Syrian air defenses in Lebanon the following year.
However, beginning in late September 2024, Israel launched three air campaigns in three countries that may exceed these precedents in many ways, including sophistication and scale.
Following the Hamas attack on southern Israel in October 2023, where the group massacred and kidnapped Israeli civilians, Israel launched its most devastating air and ground campaign against Hamas ever carried out in the Gaza Strip. This continued throughout 2024, leading to widespread destruction and the killing of nearly 45,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
One day after the Hamas attack in 2023, Hezbollah also began rocketing northern Israel in solidarity with the Gaza-based group. While Israel exchanged limited tit-for-tat fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, it mainly focused its attention on the Gaza campaign for almost a year. Now, Israel is ramping up activity across Lebanon and Syria as well.
Outside of Gaza, Israel carried out a long-range airstrike against Yemen in July 2024 in retaliation for a drone attack on Tel Aviv carried out by the Houthis. Codenamed Operation Outstretched Arm, it was arguably the longest-ever strike the Israeli Air Force ever carried out (rivaled only by its 1985 Operation Wooden Leg against the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia).
Beginning in September 2024, the Israeli military shifted its primary focus away from Gaza. In shifting focus, Israel injured several Hezbollah personnel using tiny explosives it had planted in hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies.
Then, Israel launched another unprecedented offensive.
Northern Arrows In Lebanon
The opening salvo against Hezbollah by the IAF on September 23 was the most extensive carried out in the air force’s history. Within a day, the IAF struck over 1,600 targets. The Times of Israel reported that the opening of Operation Northern Arrows saw 250 fighter jets dropping and firing 2,000 munitions.
Unsurprisingly, the opening salvos of that operation were described in The New York Times as “one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare,” even compared to the Gaza campaign, by that point already described by experts (who talked to the Associated Press) as one of the most destructive in recent history.
In a truly unprecedented move, the IAF successfully assassinated Israel’s long-time enemy, veteran Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, on September 27, 2024, in an enormous airstrike on Beirut. The IAF most likely used up to 16 U.S.-built 2,000-pound bombs dropped by eight F-15 fighter-bombers to kill Nasrallah and destroy the organization’s headquarters in the Lebanese capital.
In recent years, many noted that Hezbollah, with help from its patron in Tehran, had built up a vast arsenal of surface-to-surface missiles and rockets that could severely harm Israel in the event of an all-out war. The new and improved arsenal was far larger and more sophisticated than what Hezbollah had in its brief conflict with Israel in 2006. Aside from short-range ballistic missiles, the group also boasted precision-guided munitions, undoubtedly making it the most heavily armed and powerful non-state actor on the planet.
However, the Israeli military estimated in early November that its campaign destroyed up to 80 percent of Hezbollah’s rockets with ranges up to 24 miles and reduced its stockpiles of hundreds of PGMs to less than 100. While such estimates are not definitive, the campaign doubtlessly inflicted a significant, if not decisive, blow against Hezbollah’s strategic arsenal.
The campaign also took its toll on Lebanese civilians. In less than three weeks, CNN reported that Israel killed at least 1,400 people and displaced more than a million, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
By November 27, 2024, a ceasefire went into effect, although there are fears that it might break down. As of writing, fresh Israeli attacks on southern Lebanese towns killed at least five people, Al Jazeera reported. At the same time, Israeli forces withdrew from a strategic village in south Lebanon under the ceasefire, and soldiers from the regular Lebanese Armed Forces entered.
How ‘Days of Repentance’ In 2024 Compared To ‘Mole Cricket’ In 1982
It was in Lebanon where Israel carried out a truly game-changing destruction of enemy air defenses campaign, Operation Mole Cricket 19, back in 1982. After Syria established an extensive network of surface-to-air missile batteries in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, Israel devised a daring plan to destroy it during its concurrent 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Not only did the IAF neutralize the Soviet-made batteries with anti-radiation missiles fired from its F-4 Phantom IIs, but it also shot down 82 Syrian fighters using its new F-15s and F-16s. The IAF did not lose a single fighter in any of these dogfights.
One Czech general later recalled that Israel’s performance in that operation made the Soviet Union realize how inferior its technology was to its Cold War rivals.
A year earlier, in June 1981, the IAF destroyed Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor in Baghdad in Operation Opera using a single strike package of F-15s and F-16s.
More recently, on October 26, 2024, Israel executed its most daring suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses since Mole Cricket 19, carried out over a greater distance and against more targets than the sole target of Operation Opera.
Codenamed Operation Days of Repentance, it targeted an estimated 20 Iranian missile production sites and air defenses. Over 100 Israeli aircraft participated, along with an unknown number and type of drones. Several accounts claimed it neutralized Iran’s Russian-built S-300 air defense missile systems, the most advanced Russian system in Iran’s arsenal. These air defenses were far more sophisticated than Syria’s Soviet-made SA-6s, also known as the 2K12 Kub, in the Beqaa 42 years prior.
Then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant compared the night of strikes to Operation Focus, the surprise opening salvos of the 1967 war that saw the IAF destroy most of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground in Sinai.
The Israeli military concluded that the operation and a much smaller pinprick attack against an Iranian S-300 the preceding April markedly improved the likely success of any future Israeli attack on Iran. President Joe Biden’s Middle East advisor, Amos Hochstein, remarked that “Iran is essentially naked” after the loss of its S-300s.
Days of Repentance was retaliation for Iran’s biggest missile attack against Israel to date, the October 1, 2024, ballistic missile barrage against Israel, codenamed Operation True Promise 2 by Tehran. Iran had launched that attack in response to Israel’s earlier assassination of Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024. Even compared to the scale of attacks back and forth over the past 50 years, 2024 stands out as unusually hostile and deadly.
Bashan Arrow In Syria
Tectonic events in Syria would see Israel launch yet another unprecedented air campaign in the final month of 2024.
On December 8, 2024, long-time Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad fled his country ahead of an opposition advance led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group into the capital Damascus. Hezbollah had decisively supported Assad with its fighters since the early years of the civil war. Consequently, the decisive blow Israel inflicted on the group was a boon to HTS and their allies.
Israel welcomed Assad’s ouster but also used it as an opportunity to expand its buffer zone along the Golan Heights. Concurrently, the air force moved to destroy the Syrian military’s remaining heavy and strategic weapons.
Within 48 hours, CNN reported that the IAF carried out 480 strikes, 350 with manned aircraft. These strikes targeted everything from air defense systems, surface-to-surface and ship-to-ship missiles, drones, fighter jets, and tanks. The Israeli Navy also attacked its Syrian counterpart in two coastal naval bases, where 15 Syrian vessels were docked. Israel justified Operation Bashan Arrow as a precautionary measure to prevent these weapons from falling into enemy hands.
As Reuters noted, the scale of Bashan Arrow “echoed a similar wave of attacks in southern Lebanon in September that destroyed a significant quantity of Hezbollah’s missile stocks.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor also recorded at least 352 strikes by Israeli fighters against various targets, including “aircraft, radar systems and military signal stations, scientific research centers and weapons and munitions warehouses,” in 13 of Syria’s 14 provinces.
It will undoubtedly take Syria years or even decades to rebuild its military arsenal. It took Israel mere hours to smash most of what was left of it.
Each of these operations was highly significant, but the fact they all occurred within a mere three months is without precedent in a region that has endured decades of seemingly endless wars.
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