<p >Shortly following confirmation by the Lebanese political party and paramilitary group Hezbollah that its leader Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and multiple other figures in the organisation’s leadership were killed in <a href="https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/hezbollah-killed-strike-underground" target="_blank">an Israeli air strike</a>, Israeli sources have provided further details on the operation. Long considered the Jewish state’s most prominent adversary, Nasrallah had served as secretary general of the Lebanese organisation for over 32 years since February 1992, and oversaw the <a href="https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/how-powerful-hezbollah-trained-nkorea-hardened" target="_blank">first defeat</a> of the Israel Defence Forces its history after Hezbollah caused heavy losses and thwarted an attempted invasion of Lebanon in 2006. The operation to kill the secretary general was confirmed to have levelled multiple apartment buildings and killed over 300 people, the vast majority of them residents. Recent information released from Israel has confirmed that the operation was carried out by F-15 fighters, and that over 80,000 kilograms of explosives were used to penetrate the targeted bunker underneath these buildings.</p><p ><img src="https://militarywatchmagazine.com/m/articles/2024/09/28/article_66f81a9588a706_97409721.png" title="Aftermath of Apartment Complex Bombing"></p><p >Hezbollah has heavily fortified key command centres, arms depots and other important locations underground with <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2024/01/what-hezbollahs-fortifications-teach-us-about-north-korean-defenses/" target="_blank">support from North Korean specialists </a>since the early 2000s, which has posed serious challenges to Israeli forces. Although Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have been complicated due to the use of underground fortifications by Palestinian militia groups, fortifications in Southern Lebanon are far deeper and more complex, and benefit from the much harder mountainous ground. The F-15 remains the most optimal Western fighter class for such a mission due to its much greater ordinance carrying capacity than other Western fighters, with each having a maximum takeoff weight of 31,000 kilograms. For a short ranged mission over Southern Lebanon, which would not require external fuel tanks, this would allow F-15s to allocate all external weight to bombs. A unit of eight F-15s could thus have easily delivered over 80,000 tons of bombs.&nbsp;Israel’s F-15 fleet is by far the oldest in the world, and is considered obsolete for its originally intended primary role of air to air combat, although the fighters are still valued for their combination of long ranges and high weapons carrying capacities.&nbsp;</p>
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