When the Israel Defense Forces assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an underground bunker in Beirut on September 27, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu defiantly claimed reponsibility for the killing. “Nasrallah was not a terrorist,” he boasted. “He was the terrorist.”
Similarly defiant messages came from the White House. The US president, Joe Biden, called the assassination “a measure of justice for his many victims”. Meanwhile a State Department spokesperson called his killing “an unalloyed good”.
Neither Israel nor the US government lamented the fact that as many as 300 civilians were killed in the attack. Perhaps they saw them as acceptable “collateral damage”.
