Wonder why the Israelis thought their ship had been hit by a drone last week — when it turned out to be a radar-​​guided mis­sile instead? Or why the crew of the Hanit corvette didn’t use their coun­ter­mea­sures to pro­tect them­selves? Simple: the Sabras knew that Hezbollah had been play­ing with drones; they had no idea that the ter­ror­ist group had such a sophis­ti­cated mis­sile in their arse­nal. It’s one of a num­ber of ways that the “power and sophis­ti­ca­tion” of Hezbollah’s arms “has caught the United States and Israel off guard,” the Times reports. “Officials in both coun­tries are just now learn­ing the extent to which the mil­i­tant group has suc­ceeded in get­ting weapons from Iran and Syria.“
The mis­sile that hit the Hanit was a C-​​802, an Iranian-​​made vari­ant of a stealthy, turbojet-​​powered, Chinese weapon. It’s “con­sid­ered along with the US ‘Harpoon’ as among the best anti-​​ship mis­siles” in the world, GlobalSecurity​.org says.
“Iran began buy­ing dozens of those sophis­ti­cated anti­ship mis­siles from the Chinese dur­ing the 1990s,” the Times notes. “Until Friday, how­ever, Western intel­li­gence ser­vices did not know that Iran had man­aged to ship C-​​802 mis­siles to Hezbollah.“
Now that the Israelis know, it’s influ­enc­ing their choice of tar­gets to hit. The C-​​802 was most likely “fired it from a truck-​​mounted launcher cued by a coastal radar instal­la­tion,” Situational Awareness says. So “Israel has stepped up its attacks against coastal radar sites, as any sort of surface-​​search set would be able to pro­vide data for the ini­tial launch.”

After launch, the mis­sile takes care of itself with its own iner­tial guid­ance sys­tem and onboard radar seeker. Since the launch­ers are mobile, the trucks car­ry­ing them could scoot after fir­ing. And we all know how noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult it can be to locate mobile units, even when you have lots of recon­nais­sance assets.

The ter­ror­ists’ more tra­di­tional weapons, like Katyusha rock­ets and Fajr-​​3 mis­siles, have con­tained sur­prises, too. “In the past, wed see three, four, maybe eight launches at any given time if Hezbollah was feel­ing feisty,” one unnammed offi­cial told the paper. “Now we see them arriv­ing in large clus­ters, and with a range and even cer­tain accu­racy we have not seen in the past.“
70 Katyushas were fired at Israel “within the space of an hour” on Wednesday after­noon, Ha’Aretz writes. Israel is respond­ing by send­ing small group of ground troops into Lebanon, and by strik­ing tar­gets in Beruit — includ­ing ones in the Christian part of town.
The Times says that “while Iranian mis­sile sup­plies to Hezbollah, either by sea or over­land via Syria, were well known, offi­cials said the cur­rent con­flict also indi­cated that some of the rock­ets in Hezbollahs arse­nal includ­ing a 220-​​millimeter rocket used in a deadly attack on a rail­way site in Haifa on Sunday were built in Syria.”

Officials have since con­firmed that the war­head on the Syrian rocket was filled with ball bear­ings a method of destruc­tion used fre­quently in sui­cide bomb­ings but not in war­head tech­nol­ogy.
“Weve never seen any­thing like this,” said one Western intel­li­gence offi­cial, speak­ing about the warhead. 

Conflicts Forum’s Mark Perry, on the other hand, isn’t as alarmed as most about Hezbollah’s weaponry. {Joe Katzman says that’s because the guy is a ter­ror­ist shill.} Perry declares that the mili­tia only has a hand­ful of sophis­ti­cated and long-​​range mis­siles. Check out his All Things Considered inter­view here.

UPDATE 1:43 PM: “Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cials have warned that the next Palestinian upris­ing could be ‘a bal­lis­tic intifada,’” the Washington Post reports.
(Big ups: Umansky)
UPDATE 7:13 PM: The Jerusalem Post is report­ing that “IAF fighter jets dropped over 20 tons in bombs late Wednesday night on a Hizbullah bunker, pos­si­bly the hid­ing place of the group’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, in the Bourj al-​​Barajneh refugee camp in south­east Beirut. It was still unclear who was in the bunker at the time and what their fate was, but IDF sources said the bunker was totally destroyed and that all that was left was a crater.”

Watching the news over the last few years, we’ve grown accus­tomed to see­ing ter­ror­ists as a low-​​tech threat — guys who hijack air­planes with pocket knives and make bombs out of left­over parts. And that threat has been plenty scary, on its own.
But in recent days, we’re start­ing to see what hap­pens when Islamic extrem­ists get their hands on the rel­a­tively sophis­ti­cated arse­nal of a coun­try like Iran. Talk about ter­ror.
On Sunday, Hezbollah again struck Haifa — a city untouched by the mili­tia until a few days ago — using its biggest and most pow­er­ful mis­sile yet. It’s one of 800 rock­ets Hezbollah has launched against Israel in the last five days.
The weapon “hit a busy rail­way main­te­nance build­ing, destroy­ing the roof, killing eight, wound­ing more than 20 and leav­ing con­geal­ing pools of blood on the plat­form,” the Times reports. “Israel said [the mis­sile] was a Syrian-​​produced model of a Iranian Fajr-​​3 model, [which Tehran claims can avoid radars and carry mul­ti­ple war­heads — ed.]. [It] has a range of more than 30 miles and car­ries a war­head with about 100 pounds of high explo­sives, which includes antiper­son­nel shrap­nel, a sig­nif­i­cant change from the smaller Katyushas that Hezbollah has mostly been using.“
And there may be worse to come, Ha’Aretz warns.

The fight­ing between Israel and the Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, has still not reached its zenith. The Israel Defense Forces’ oper­a­tional plans against the Shi’ite orga­ni­za­tions have not yet been car­ried out. The next two days are the most crit­i­cal and a lot depends on whether Tehran decides to take a chance and autho­rize Hezbollah to launch long-​​range mis­siles with more pow­er­ful war­heads. This is a capa­bil­ity Hezbollah still retains, despite the heavy blows it has suf­fered in the IDF air strikes.

UPDATE 10:44 PM: Kathryn Cramner has worked some of her Google Earth magic, and come up with a fas­ci­nat­ing pic­ture of how far Hezbollah can now reach.