The Electronic Intifada Podcast 3 October 2024
On Tuesday night, Iran launched a massive ballistic missile strike on Israel, targeting military and intelligence assets.
Iran’s strike came days after Israel dropped some 80 bombs on the Dahiya, Beirut’s southern suburb, killing the leader of Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah, Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, along with an untold number of Lebanese people in the densely populated residential area.
We were joined by The Electronic Intifada’s contributor Abubaker Abed live from the Gaza Strip right at the beginning of the show.
Abed spoke of the daily massacres committed by the Israeli military across the coastal enclave nearly one year into the genocide, with no end in sight.
The young sports journalist and commentator also spoke about the sense of hope people had seeing the stream of Iranian missiles in Gaza’s sky as they headed towards military and intelligence targets in Israel.
“There is some sort of normalization of the situation right now, but at the same time, people have some hope after yesterday’s attacks,” Abed said.
“It was a sheer sense of euphoria among people here,” Abed reported.
Abed said Palestinians in Gaza are hoping Iran’s attack may “upend the equation, and probably push the Israelis to accept the ceasefire proposal.”
Short-lived confidence
The bombing in Beirut that killed Nasrallah was praised and supported by the United States, and gave Israel a surge of confidence after a year of military failure in Gaza.
But that confidence was short-lived, quickly dissipating with Iran’s dramatic and spectacular strike on Tuesday night.
People across the region watched a “stream of missiles coming across the sky like a river,” traveling east from Iran and heading west towards Israel, The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah said as he provided an eyewitness account from Amman, Jordan.
“Everyone was outside on their roofs and balconies, cheering. And there’s lots of social media showing that people were celebrating all over Jordan, just as they were in Palestine,” he added.
“It struck me that if this had been during the daytime, we probably would not have seen very much because the sky would have been too bright,” Abunimah said.
“I don’t know if there were specific tactical or technical reasons why Iran carried out the attack after dark, but one clear result of that is that millions of people across the region witnessed it with their own eyes,” which contributed to the spectacle of the attack.
Abunimah took a closer look at how the Iranian operation unfolded in a special report on Wednesday’s program, discussing its effectiveness in reaching its targets and what may come next.
Missiles hit their targets in large numbers
Abunimah shared a selection of curated videos verified by experts that show dozens of missiles hitting their targets – disproving American and Israeli claims that the attack was ineffective.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday that in carrying out the attack, “Iran exercised its right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.”
An Iranian retaliation to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in July and Nasrallah last week was widely anticipated by people in the region.
But in recent months, Iran had been restrained, a long-standing policy of “strategic patience,” which Israel has been testing by provoking escalation on various fronts.
Iran reportedly telegraphed the attack to certain Arab states hours before it took place, which gave the US and Israel time to prepare.
This was a shorter warning window than the one before the smaller scale Iranian retaliation against Israel in April, which included drones and other projectiles.
Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder acknowledged that the US military helped Israel try to thwart the attack, but admitted the United States did not know whether the mere dozen interceptor missiles fired by American warships in the Mediterranean had actually hit anything.
“I did see there were clearly attempts at interceptions, or what looked like there could be interceptions,” Abunimah said of what he watched in the skies over Jordan. “But it was very clear that the number of interceptors was tiny compared with the number of incoming missiles.”
The sheer number of Iranian missiles “would have saturated any air defense system.”
Abunimah remarked on how pro-Israeli accounts on social media appeared to be “gloating that no Israelis were killed, at least according to the official story.”
This “reveals that many Israelis measure military success not by whether or not military objectives have been achieved, but by how many people they kill,” Abunimah said.
“It’s clear that Iran’s goal was not to kill people, but to show its capabilities on a scale we have never seen before,” Abunimah added.
“If Iran had wanted to kill a lot of people, it could have done what Israel does, which is to indiscriminately bomb cities and neighborhoods. But it didn’t do that. It fired these missiles at military targets.”
Israel has vowed to respond, but Iran says that if it does, Tehran will launch an even bigger assault.
Since Wednesday’s program, satellite images have started to confirm the accuracy of Iran’s strike against Israeli military targets, the largest of which was the Nevatim air base, home of Israel’s advanced US-supplied F-35 fighters jets.
“Dignity is our currency”
Roqayah Chamseddine, a southern Lebanese researcher and reporter and co-host of the Delete Your Account podcast, joined the program live from Beirut.
Chamseddine spoke about how Hizballah leader Hasan Nasrallah was loved across the region as a towering anti-colonial leader.
“I was in a cafe when it was revealed that he was assassinated,” Chamseddine, describing the reaction in Lebanon, said.
“At first, many people shouted, ‘it’s impossible!’ They would not believe it. And then that soon led to wailing. I’ve never seen men cry as loud.”
Nasrallah’s death was a severe blow to supporters of the Axis of Resistance. Anchored by Iran, and including Syria, it comprises movements in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, all united in confronting Israel as it continues its genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“It’s a testament to how much Sayyid Hasan’s arrival meant to all of us. He was the first to liberate our villages. He helped liberate South Lebanon [in 2000],” Chamseddine said, and then “defeated Israel again in 2006.”
Nasrallah’s son, Hadi, was killed in an Israeli ambush along with three other Hizballah fighters in the southern Lebanese village of Milkh in 1997. He was 18 years old.
Nasrallah “was a father figure. He was a very noble leader, and his sacrifice is a testament that the struggles of the people of Gaza are no different from ours,” Chamseddine said.
She described the situation in Lebanon as Israel escalates its bombardment of the country, emphasizing the resilience among people in the South.
“The fragrance of life in the South is very different than anywhere else,” she said.
“In the South, dignity is our currency, which is something our occupier will never understand.”
She asserted that Hizballah would be ready to defend the country against a possible Israeli invasion.
“I’m confident in our men in [Hizballah], seeing how they’ve united together and come out even stronger after the killing of Sayyid Hasan.”
News highlights
The Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman provided an update on the latest developments in Gaza, and highlighted two stories published by The Electronic Intifada by writers in Gaza.
In “I will never forget you,” Bashaer Muammar recounts the Israeli attack that she survived but her brother Zakaria, who she describes as her closest companion, and Zakaria’s 4-year-old son Ali did not.
And in “Israel killed my brother’s family,” Doaa Salim also recounts how an Israeli airstrike that she survived killed her brother Ahmed, his 6-year-old son Mahmoud and seven other people.
Resistance battles in Gaza
In his report this week, contributing editor Jon Elmer broke down a complex ambush executed by the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, against Israeli soldiers in Gaza’s southernmost Rafah region.
The ambush included the targeting of a D9 armored bulldozer.
“These are American-made, Caterpillar bulldozers that have been wreaking havoc in Rafah for 25 years,” Elmer said.
Footage published by the Qassam Brigades shows an Israeli medical evacuation of injured soldiers, which the Palestinian fighters did not target.
“We’re still seeing, 11 months in, that the principles of the war [for] fighters in Gaza have still not changed. They are not targeting medevac helicopters that are well within their range.”
Elmer reported on multiple drone and rocket attacks by Hizballah on key Israeli military and intelligence bases during the past week alone. He also showed highlights of resistance operations by Yemeni and Iraqi groups against Israel.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
This writer produced and directed the program and The Electronic Intifada’s Maureen Clare Murphy and Asa Winstanley contributed writing and production. Michael Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.
Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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