As such, the threat of sudden, swift cross-border attacks from the Radwan Force persists, albeit at smaller scale.
By Yaakov Lappin, JNS
The Israeli Air Force significantly disrupted Hezbollah’s offensive plans targeting Israel’s northern communities by eliminating the leadership of the group’s elite Radwan Force on Sept. 20.
The strike, which killed the head of Hezbollah’s Operations Unit, Ibrahim Aqil, who also commanded the Radwan Force, and 15 other senior terrorists, including five Radwan sector commanders, targeted a Hezbollah basement in Dahiya, a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
However, despite the success of the operation, the threat posed by the Radwan Force has not been entirely removed.
The Radwan Force’s plan to infiltrate the Galilee and go on mass killing and kidnapping missions served as the blueprint for the elite Hamas Nukhba Force’s mass murder attack on the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7.
Hezbollah’s plan involved infiltrating northern Israel to massacre civilians, kidnap soldiers, and hold territory.
“The senior Radwan terrorists were planning to achieve an attack and to carry out a terror attack on Israeli communities in the north, to massacre, murder, kidnap Israeli civilians. And we prevented that by that attack [on Hezbollah in Beirut on Sept. 20]” said a military official on Monday.
He continued, “We need to make sure that all the infrastructure that those Radwan Force members had built next to the border in Israel that are threatening the Israeli communities are destroyed.”
The IAF’s strike on Aqil and his commanders followed months of systematic efforts by the IDF to weaken the Radwan Force. Since the start of the war in October 2023, the IDF has consistently targeted Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in Southern Lebanon, focusing particularly on Radwan’s military-terror capabilities.
The Radwan Force, which functions as Hezbollah’s special operations unit, was tasked with executing offensive operations, including the planned infiltration of the Galilee.
According to Israeli assessments, this unit had spent years refining its strategy to seize Israeli towns, hold civilians hostage, and massacre Israeli civilians.
In December 2018, the IDF uncovered tunnels running from Lebanon into Israel that were to be used by Radwan to inject thousands of its operatives into the Galilee. Since then, the unit appears to have switched to planning overground attacks.
The IDF’s large-scale deployment on the northern border also helps keep such threats under better control.
Chain of command
On Sept. 22, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, chief of the IDF General Staff, highlighted the significance of the IAF airstrike two days earlier.
“Last Friday, we struck the chain of command of Hezbollah’s elite force—the Radwan Force—and also its senior commander, Ibrahim Aqil, was eliminated. This was a very important capability in the Hezbollah terrorist organization, I know how much it shakes up the organization. For years these commanders had been making plans to conquer the Galilee, and they are responsible for the murder of many Israeli civilians as well as soldiers over the years,” Halevi said.
“They were planning how to execute the next attack, and it is possible that they were working on that very plan in the meeting on Friday afternoon—working on how to infiltrate the State of Israel, murder civilians, kidnap IDF soldiers. We preempted them. It happened through the very good capabilities of the IDF, both in intelligence and in offensive capabilities,” the general continued.
“The IDF’s strike on Hezbollah’s chain of command is a clear message to the Hezbollah terrorist organization, it harms them greatly, and it is also a message to the entire Middle East and beyond it: We will know how to reach anyone who threatens the citizens of the State of Israel,” Halevi said.
Despite the successful elimination of Aqil and his immediate command structure, concerns remain that Hezbollah could still attempt smaller-scale infiltrations using the surviving junior commanders.
As such, the threat of sudden, swift cross-border attacks from the Radwan Force persists, albeit at smaller scale.
Aqil was a long-standing senior Hezbollah commander with a history of leading terror operations against Israel and Western targets.
He was responsible for several high-profile attacks, including the September 2019 anti-tank missile strike in Moshav Avivim on the Lebanese border and the March 2023 IED attack near the Megiddo Junction in the Jezreel Valley.
Aqil was also directly implicated in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people. The United States listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist due to his involvement in attacks that killed American soldiers and civilians, and offered up to $7 million for information leading to his capture.
Aqil had replaced Wissam al-Tawil, aka Jawad al-Tawil, as the commander of the Radwan Force after al-Tawil’s elimination in January this year.
Aqil was in charge of several key Hezbollah units, including its combat engineering forces, anti-tank units and air defense systems. He played a central role in the development of Hezbollah’s military strategy, which aimed to exploit the region’s terrain and population centers for future conflicts with Israel.
Aqil is believed to have been in charge of the plan to conquer the Galilee, which Hezbollah wanted to implement but was derailed by Hamas’s invasion on Oct. 7.
The original invasion plan was revealed by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2012, and further detailed in a 2014 broadcast by Hezbollah’s Al Mayadeen satellite news television channel.
The broadcast outlined the strategy for seizing Israeli territory and presented areas where Hezbollah planned to attack. Aqil played a leading role in the development of this plan, which remains a key part of Hezbollah’s strategic objectives.
The Radwan Force’s training and experience, gained during the Syrian civil war, has made it one of the most dangerous elements of Hezbollah’s military structure. The group’s use of civilian infrastructure to hide its forces and launch attacks poses a continued challenge to Israeli security.