Experts believe Hizbullah is more interested in perpetrating a terror attack against Israeli and/or Jewish targets abroad than in kidnapping Israelis. Kidnapping people in a foreign country is the most complex of operations and one that does not yield the greatest results.

Abducting even just a handful of foreign nationals, getting them on a plane and smuggling them out of a country is an extremely difficult and complex business. Even in remote and undeveloped locations, a missing foreign national won’t go unnoticed for long, as evidenced in the latest case of the Ra’anana man kidnapped in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Getting hostages through airports and sea ports is also not easy, even under the most lackadaisical port conditions.

Kidnapping or murdering a handful of Israelis overseas is not the kind of response Hizbullah envisions to the assassination of its operations chief Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus last February. One veteran observer of Hizbullah’s activities abroad terms this type of operation “revenge of the poor.” Continue reading →