Joe Floto

Israel has certainly been bracing itself and readying itself for this moment. It's called up around 100,000 reservists, and some of that focus has been on the north. But if you take back a bit of context, Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon signed a ceasefire deal about 14 months ago. In that intervening period, there's barely been a day in which Israel hasn't struck Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon, much to the annoyance of the Lebanese government and Israel.

The Lebanese people, hundreds of people have been killed in those campaigns. And when it came to this new front against Iran, well the expectation was that a group like Hezbollah that has been backed to the tune of billions of dollars by Iran, and which is ideologically and religiously close to the Islamic Republic,

would not be able to stand on the sidelines and wouldn't be able to just let this war between Iran and Israel go by without responding. And the death of the Ayatollah appears to have been the prompt here. In their statement they say that he was unjustly martyred, unjustly killed. Interestingly, in the statement it appears that

They're trying to limit their response to this one target near Haifa. Now, the Israeli defense forces are not going to limit their response, it appears. They have for a while been asking for...

The opportunity to attack a wider range of targets and indeed in the preceding week they have struck Lebanon several times attacking the Bekaa Valley which is the headquarters of Hezbollah and seeking to degrade their capacity to strike Israel.