He Called Israel a Spider’s Web. Then Israel Dropped 83 Bombs on Nasrallah’s Beirut Bunker

For a quarter-century, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah built his legend on a single insult: Israel, he told his followers, was “weaker than a spider’s web.” On September 27, 2024, the Israeli Air Force answered that line with more than 80 heavy bombs dropped on the underground headquarters beneath Beirut’s southern suburbs where Nasrallah was meeting his commanders, and the man who coined the taunt did not walk out.

The strike is now two years old, but the story behind it keeps resurfacing, and it is worth telling straight, because the real history is even more striking than the version that circulates on social media.

The speech that became Hezbollah’s creed

Nasrallah delivered the line in May 2000 in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, after the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from southern Lebanon. (It is sometimes misdated to 2006; the speech came six years earlier.) Standing before a celebrating crowd, he argued that Israel’s strength was a facade. His thesis, as Israeli analysts have long summarized it, was that Israeli society looked strong but was too war-weary to endure a bloody conflict or absorb casualties.

That idea became more than rhetoric. It shaped Hezbollah’s entire strategy for the next two decades: dig in, arm up, and wait for Israel to lose its nerve. By 2024, according to the Associated Press, Israel estimated that Hezbollah had an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, including precision-guided missiles. Hezbollah ran that force from an underground command center beneath the residential towers of Dahiyeh, Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Friday, September 27, 2024

The operation, which the IDF named “New Order,” began at 6:21 p.m., according to an IDF account published on the strike’s first anniversary. Israeli military intelligence had learned that Nasrallah would be meeting with Hezbollah’s senior chain of command in the underground headquarters. “We had real time intelligence, an opportunity, an operational opportunity that allowed us to carry out this attack,” IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said the next day.

The secrecy was extraordinary. The commander of the squadron that flew the mission, identified only as Lt. Col. M., told Israel’s Army Radio: “The pilots did not know what the target was in the days the (strike) was being planned. We exposed the teams to the target only a few hours before carrying it out and they understood what they were going for.”

The payload was enormous. The IDF said the Air Force dropped more than 80 tons of munitions on the bunker. When it released footage of the strike in February 2025, on the day of Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut, the IDF said its jets had dropped 82 heavy bombs; an IDF account issued on the first anniversary put the figure at 83, dropped simultaneously. Brig. Gen. Amichai Levin described it more simply: “dozens of munitions hit the target within seconds.”

According to the IDF, the strike killed Nasrallah along with more than 20 Hezbollah commanders, among them Ali Karaki, the head of the group’s Southern Front. Hezbollah confirmed its leader’s death the following day. Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar told the pilots: “You brought victory.”

The intelligence behind the bombs

The bombs were the visible part of the operation. The harder part was knowing exactly where, and exactly when, to drop them. The IDF credited “the precise intelligence information that the Intelligence Branch had collected over the years.”

On September 2, 2025, Israel recognized that work with its highest defense honor. At the Israel Security Prize ceremony, held at President Isaac Herzog’s residence in Jerusalem, a joint team from the Mossad, the IDF, Rafael and Elbit was honored as being “responsible for unique technologies that led to the elimination of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024,” according to The Times of Israel. A Mossad officer identified only as “G.” told the audience that “Mossad agents operated with courage and determination under fire in the heart of Beirut.” He added: “Breakthrough technology alone is not enough. Precise intelligence and bold operational capabilities are required.”

Back to Bint Jbeil

The spider’s-web speech got one more answer this year. In April 2026, Israeli forces took control of the Bint Jbeil stadium where Nasrallah had delivered it. Brig. Gen. Guy Levy wrote to his troops: “Bint Jbeil 2000: There was someone here who spoke and boasted about webs and spiders.” The man who said it, Levy told them, no longer exists, the stadium is gone, and his words are worth nothing. “Bint Jbeil 2026: Our forces control the area.”

That is the real lesson of the strike. Nasrallah bet that a democracy that mourns every soldier was too soft to fight. He confused moral restraint with weakness. Israel spent years gathering intelligence, kept the secret even from its own pilots until hours before takeoff, and then acted with precision against the man who had spent two decades threatening its cities. The spider’s web turned out to be a net.

Nasrallah spent twenty-four years calling Israel a spider’s web, and it took Israel one Friday evening to prove which of them was hollow.

Editor’s note: This article covers the September 27, 2024, Israeli strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah, which drew renewed attention in October 2026, following the second anniversary of the operation.

More from The Rothman Report

Lifelong Democrat Sheriff Quits the Party After Locals Told Him to Leave for Backing Rogers and JamesTaco Bell Coworker’s Tip Stopped a Self-Described Neo-Nazi’s Alleged Plot Against an Aurora Hindu TempleParalympian Veteran Waited 5 Years for a Wheelchair Lift. She Says Canada Offered Her Assisted Death.