Hezbollah Could Fire 1,200 Rockets Daily into Israel

July 20, 2016

A former IDF general warned Israelis that the next war with the Iran-backed Lebanese terror organization, Hezbollah, would lead to a barrage of rockets into Israel on an order of magnitude higher than anything Israel has yet faced.

Major General (res.) Yitzhak Gershon, who served as the head of the IDF’s Home Front Command during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, told Israel’s Army Radio that the 2006 war featured up to 160 rockets per day fired at Israel’s north. But given Hezbollah’s military buildup, “we need to expect up to 1,200 rockets in a day—it will be a completely different scenario from anything we’ve known.”

“We will need mental fortitude more than physical protection,” Gershon added.

Hezbollah has an arsenal of more than 130,000 rockets, more than all non-U.S. NATO countries combined, Vanderbilt professor, Willy Stern, wrote in a recent analysis in The Weekly Standard. This number includes long-range rockets and M-600 ballistic missiles, a single one of which could “wipe out a good chunk of Times Square and maim and kill people four football fields away from the point of impact,” Stern wrote.

Hezbollah also has approximately 100,000 short-range rockets trained on schools, homes, and hospitals in northern Israel that would unleash chaos and potentially kill. Israeli military officials detailed to The New York Times how Hezbollah has “moved most of its military infrastructure” in and around Shiite villages in southern Lebanon, which “amounts to using the civilians as a human shield.” One official stated that Lebanese civilians are “living in a military compound.”

“We will hit Hezbollah hard, while making every effort to limit civilian casualties as much as we can…We do not intend to stand by helplessly in the face of rocket attacks,” he added.

Source: Excerpt from article, The Tower

Photo Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit