Since its creation in 1948, Israel has been a highly effective practitioner of targeted elimination. Thanks to the development of military technology and its intelligence agencies, including Mossad, over the years, Israel has perfected an assassination machine unrivaled in the Western world. The two strikes that targeted Fouad Shukur, one of Hezbollah's most important military leaders, on Tuesday, July 30 in Beirut, and Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, a few hours later in Tehran, are further proof of this – even if the condition of the former has not yet been fully established.

In the intermittent war that Israel and Hezbollah have been waging for over 40 years, the taking out of political and military leaders is an old story. In 1992, Abbas al-Musawi, a charismatic leader of the Party of God, was killed by a missile strike from Israeli helicopters while driving with his wife and 6-year-old son on a road in the Bekaa region of eastern Lebanon. In 2008, Imad Mughniyeh, a military leader and mastermind behind several attacks, including the one against the American embassy in Beirut in 1983 at the height of the civil war, was killed in a car bomb explosion in Damascus, where he was residing.

These spectacular attacks, which highlighted the movement's internal security flaws, had a destabilizing effect in the short term. But they did not weaken Hezbollah in any significant way. Al-Musawi was succeeded by Hassan Nasrallah, a leading strategist immensely popular with his followers. Under his leadership, Hezbollah stood up to Israel in the war of summer 2006. Then, from its intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2012, alongside Bashar al-Assad's regime, it became a regional non-state player, a key link in the pro-Iranian "axis of resistance."

In every confrontation with Israel, the Shiite movement sees its base tightening around it and rediscovering its raison d'être, the fight against the "Zionist entity." The militia party was born in the wake of the Islamic revolution in Tehran in 1979 and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It fought the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon until Israel withdrew in 2000.

Since the start of fighting on the Lebanese-Israeli border in October 2023, several leaders of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah's military wing have been eliminated in southern Lebanon, confirming the extent of Israeli intelligence. "Hezbollah has been weakened a little by the series of targeted strikes, but it remains a powerful organization, and its military arsenal is intact," said a Western diplomatic source before the attack on Tuesday, July 30, speaking from the southern suburbs.

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