2024 Secrets Revealed: How IDF Commando Raid Crippled Hezbollah’s Precision Missile Program
A look back at the secret Shaldag commando raid in Syria reveals how Israel dismantled an Iranian factory designed to produce 200 precision missiles a year for Hezbollah.
Day 11 of Operation "Roaring Lion": Yesterday’s launch of precision missiles from Lebanon toward the Israeli home front was a scenario long anticipated by the defense establishment. To understand the true gravity of this threat, one must look back a year and a half to the night between September 8 and 9, 2024.
During that night, a daring commando raid by the elite Shaldag Unit, supported by the Israeli Air Force, targeted the CERS center in Syria, an underground IRGC facility dedicated to manufacturing precision missiles. That operation effectively wiped out an entire production plant and, according to defense experts, may have saved the State of Israel from a far worse reality today.
The Iran-Hezbollah "Precision Project"
For the past two years, Israel has been engaged in a "War Between Wars" to dismantle Iran’s efforts to equip Hezbollah with high-end weaponry. The central threat involves missiles with a range of over 200 kilometers and an accuracy radius of just 10 meters.
The Iranian plan was ambitious:
Mass Production: A factory in Syria designed to churn out roughly 200 ballistic missiles per year.
Variable Ranges: Missiles capable of striking targets between 70 and 300 kilometers away.
Timing: The Syrian plant had just begun experimental production only one month before the Shaldag unit destroyed it.
"We could be living in a completely different reality today," a senior official told *Srugim*. "If we hadn't acted against that underground facility in Syria and other sites, the volume of precision fire we saw yesterday would have been catastrophic."
While Hezbollah successfully launched several missiles yesterday, some of which were intercepted while others landed in open areas, officials describe this as only a small sample of what the terror group originally planned.
Even as the current war rages, the Air Force continues to strike precision missile infrastructure in the Bekaa Valley and Beirut. While Hezbollah’s current capabilities are considered "meager and limited" compared to their original goals, the defense establishment remains on high alert for further launches.
Thanks to the destruction of the Syrian facility and subsequent operations, the quantity and quality of missiles currently in Hezbollah's arsenal are significantly lower than what the Iranian regime had intended for the opening of this campaign.