Hezbollah fired a missile at Mossad’s headquarters on Wednesday.

Write your own jokes. Suffice to say they weren’t going to hit it. In fact, they probably would’ve been horrified if they had. Because that would’ve been the beginning of the end, assuming we’re not already witnessing the early stages of the group’s dissolution.

The point wasn’t to blow up the Mossad break room. Rather, the point was to trigger the air raid sires in Tel Aviv and, more importantly, to make a show of truculent insolence in the face of an unrelenting Israeli bombing campaign which claimed another commander, this time a second-tier somebody. Like Kim Jong-Un, Ibrahim Qubaisi was a rocket man. A missile guy. On Tuesday morning, he was hanging out with a couple of buddies on the top floor of an apartment building in Dahiyeh. 24 hours later, he was hanging out with Ibrahim Aqil and Fuad Shukr.

Next up’s Ali Karaki. I guarantee it. He’s a dead man walking, just like everybody else on Hezbollah’s Jihad Council. I don’t know if Hashem Safieddine — Hassan Nasrallah’s bloviating cousin — still has an official seat on the military panel. If he does, he might get a temporary pass from the IDF given the overlap with Hezbollah’s “political” bodies and also with the Shura Council, which Israel doesn’t appear to be targeting. Yet. (Fun fact: Hashem Safieddine’s son is married to Zeinab Soleimani, who looks just like her dad.)

It’s important to note that a lot of these people — top commanders like Aqil, Shukr, Karaki and, on the Hamas side, Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa — were eidolons. In some cases they hadn’t been seen in years, or even decades. Your average foot soldier wouldn’t have recognized them if they were standing in line together at a local market. But what’s become readily apparent in recent days is that Mossad knows where the Hezbollah military lifers are. All of them, probably. People like Safieddine aren’t nearly as evasive, which means they’re counting on not being targeted. But as Ismail Haniyeh will attest if you can get ahold of him, being nominally political won’t save you anymore. (Historically it hasn’t saved you anyway.)

My guess is that the IDF intends to eliminate Hezbollah’s entire military command structure which, again, means killing everyone on the Jihad Council, everyone in line to fill a newly-empty seat and everyone three tiers down too. So, basically, the caporegime and all captains-in-waiting, leaving only legions of inconsequential soldiers. Of course, Hezbollah will still have a sprawling political machine and a vast bureaucratic apparatus. The jury’s still out on whether that remains, and in what form, once the dust settles.

Karaki’s all that’s left of the capos on the military side. And, as noted above, he’s as good as dead. His portfolio is southern Lebanon, which is to say the area under heavy Israeli bombardment. Of course, he’s not there. He’s almost surely in Beirut and just as surely in Dahiyeh. Like Shukr and Aqil, he’s sneaking around the suburbs and also like Shukr and Aqil, he’s destined to be “breaking news” sooner or later, probably sooner and maybe imminently.

I assume this is obvious by now, but: Nasrallah doesn’t have a “plan.” Lobbing missiles and rockets into Israel knowing they’re going to be intercepted while IDF warplanes incinerate the top three layers of your military command and Mossad’s pager bombs blind and blow off the hands of your rank and file, isn’t a plan. Maybe he can draw Israel into another ground war that ends in a bloody stalemate, but at what cost? Everybody who’s anybody in the military ranks is already dead for Nasrallah. Now he’s going to what? Fight the IDF on the ground so he can lose thousands of nobodies too? That’s pointless, but it’s also hopeless.

Theoretically, Hezbollah could go all-in on the rockets and try to overwhelm Israel’s air defenses, but that probably (definitely) won’t work, particularly given that the US and the UK will come riding in to intercept whatever the Iron Dome doesn’t catch. And besides, what happens if you’re Nasrallah and Allah decides to smile on you by sneaking a few of your missiles through and they land in heavy-populated areas of Israel, killing a bunch of people? And what happens if this time, the dead are Israeli Jews instead of Druze children? I’ll tell you what happens: You’re dead the next day, and that’s if you make it out of the next hour.

As far as Iran itself’s concerned, Israel demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt in April — when Mohamad Reza Zahedi was killed in a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus — that the IDF can and will target IRGC and Quds officials directly. Without mincing words, Esmail Qaani — Qassem Soleimani’s somewhat hapless successor — needs to keep his happy ass in Iran. Because if Mossad catches him in Beirut on a day when Benjamin Netanyahu’s in a bad mood, he (Qaani) is going to meet his legendary predecessor.

On Tuesday, Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the UN General Assembly. He’s what counts as a moderate and to call the balance he’s trying to strike difficult would be a laughable understatement. Ostensibly, Pezeshkian’s interested in restarting talks around a nuclear accord. Emmanuel Macron’s ready to chat, but nobody else is because Iran’s de facto at war with Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, with the US in Iraq and with — I don’t know — boats, I guess, off the coast of Yemen.

You almost feel bad for Pezeshkian. What’s he supposed to do? Even if he wanted to engage in good faith discussions — about anything — with the West, he couldn’t. He’s just some guy in a suit. The only opinion that counts is the one that comes from the beard wearing the robe and the spectacles. He’s not one for conciliatory rhetoric, and you can’t reason with him. If you’re a Western leader or diplomat, you’d have better luck scheduling an interview with the Easter Bunny than you would getting a meeting with Khamenei.

This is all very, very sad for any number of reasons, the most immediate of which is the mounting body count in Lebanon. The country’s paying a very high price for this insanity, and the human toll there is quite likely to increase in the days and weeks ahead. The IDF’s Daniel Hagari said the plan is to keep the bombing campaign “as short as possible,” but in the same breath, he cautioned that Israel’s “prepared for it to take longer.”

There are now an estimated 500,000 displaced people in Lebanon. In a testament to just how dangerous the locals believe the situation to be, they’re lining up to go hang out in the failed state next door. “Families that fled southern Lebanon flocked to Beirut and the coastal city of Sidon, sleeping in schools turned into shelters, as well as in cars, parks and along the beach,” the AP wrote, adding that “some sought to leave the country, causing a traffic jam at the border with Syria.” You know it’s bad when the grass is greener in Syria.

On Wednesday, Herzi Halevi spoke to Israeli soldiers on the border. “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day,” he said. “This is to prepare the ground for your possible entry.”