IDF hits Hezbollah’s weapon smuggling routes, kills terror commander hours before potential ceasefire declaration

Israel Defense Forces continued its airstrikes against Hezbollah forces across southern Lebanon and Beirut on Monday and Tuesday, just hours before Israel’s security cabinet was set to approve a ceasefire with the terror group.

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) conducted numerous strikes over the past 24 hours, including several attacks in the capital, Beirut.

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On Tuesday morning, IDF Arabic Spokesman Col. Avichay Adraee issued additional evacuation notices for residents living close to Hezbollah sites in the Dahiyeh district, the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, before incoming airstrikes.

The day before, the IDF revealed detailed information about the Iranian weapons smuggling routes that run through Syria and include tunnels and other sites that were recently struck by the IAF.

The most recent series of strikes on this network “targeted Hezbollah's ability to expand its weapons arsenal, thereby preventing the terror organization from launching further attacks against Israeli civilians,” the IDF stated.

The strikes on Monday and Tuesday came just hours before the Israeli security cabinet was set to convene in the evening to approve the truce with Hezbollah.

“For decades, the Iranian regime has been acting to fund and supply weapons to its terror proxies across the Middle East, with Hezbollah being its central proxy. Iran cooperated closely with Hezbollah to establish covert routes into Lebanon through Syrian territory, using thousands of trucks and hundreds of aircraft to smuggle thousands of missiles and additional weapon components over the years,” the army said.

“Senior officials in Syria assist in the weapons smuggling effort using two main methods: storing weapons prior to their transfer to Lebanon in Syrian military warehouses, and facilitating transfers through internal crossings within Syria that are managed by the Syrian Military Security Unit.”

Underlining this close connection with the Syrian regime, Israeli soldiers have found large quantities of Russian weapons that were smuggled to Lebanon via Syria.

The Hezbollah unit overseeing smuggling operations since 2000, known as Unit 4400, is “responsible for smuggling weapons into Lebanon from Iran and its proxies, as well as establishing multiple strategic smuggling routes along the Syria-Lebanon border,” according to the IDF.

“During the war, the IDF has conducted extensive intelligence-based operations against Unit 4400 and various weapons smuggling routes. These include the elimination of the commander of Unit 4400, Muhammad Ja’far Qasir, in early October in Beirut, and his designated successor, Ali Hassan Gharib, a few weeks later in Damascus.”

The military also emphasized that the smuggling routes have been targeted for years, in an effort dubbed “Mabam,” a Hebrew acronym meaning, “the war between wars.”

On Tuesday, the IDF also said it killed Hezbollah’s commander of the operations array in its coastal sector in the city of Tyre. Ahmad Subhi Hazima “advanced many terror plans, among them plans for infiltration into the country and anti-tank missile attacks” on Israeli towns.

Additional strikes targeted the command centers of Hezbollah’s Executive Council and other headquarters in Beirut.

“The attacks are another part of the IDF’s actions to damage the Executive Council and the capabilities of the Hezbollah terrorist organization to carry out various terrorist plots against the State of Israel, and of the effort to destroy the headquarters, production sites, and weapons depots that Hezbollah has established over the years in Dahiyeh,” the IDF said.