According to the Lebanese journalist Hanin Ghaddar, Iran has succeeded in its decades-long attempt to turn Lebanon into a colony, and its main tool for doing so has been Hizballah:

Hizballah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, declared victory in Lebanon in his last speech. And he’s right. Hizballah won Lebanon and no one seems to care. . . . Political opponents of the Party of God and its hegemony over Lebanon lost the battle a long time ago, when they compromised [their] values for political gains. The state is increasingly weakened by the void in its institutions . . . and petty individual interests.

Regional powers are busy in Syria and Yemen while the international community seems to have given up on Lebanon. As long as Hizballah’s involvement in Syria is not challenged by the international community, it means only one thing for Lebanon: that Iran has been given a free hand to take over. . . .

To protect Hizballah’s arms, Iran will do anything, whatever it takes and no matter how many people and lives are sacrificed. . . . Today, there is no one to challenge Hizballah’s arms in Lebanon. To guarantee that [this will continue to be so] for the longest time possible, Hizballah will need [to foster the further] disintegration of state institutions, which will intensify and become worse. . . .

[T]he Party of God is steadily moving to take whatever is left of Lebanon. If no one stops it, Lebanon will be a state-within-Hizballah’s-state, not the other way around.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.