Israel is gambling that Hezbollah will shrink but face a well-armed, angry enemy

Israeli leaders are pleased with the progress of Hezbollah’s offensive, which began with the detonation of pagers and armed radios and progressed to heavy and deadly airstrikes.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant did not hold back his recommendations after Monday’s airstrikes.

“Today was a masterpiece… This was the worst week Hezbollah has had since its founding, and the results speak for themselves.”

Gallant said the airstrikes destroyed thousands of rockets that could have killed Israeli civilians. In this process, Lebanon claims that Israel killed more than 550 of its citizens, including 50 children. That’s about half of the Lebanese who died in the month of war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Israel believes that a brutal attack will force Hezbollah to do what it wants, causing so much pain that its leader Hassan Nasrallah and his supporters and allies in Iran decide that the price of resistance is too high.

Israeli politicians and generals need to win. After almost a year of war, Gaza has turned into a quagmire. Hamas fighters are still emerging from tunnels and ruins to kill and injure Israeli soldiers and are still holding Israeli hostages.

Hamas surprised Israel last October. The Israelis did not see Hamas as a serious threat, with devastating consequences. Lebanon is different. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad spy agency have been planning the next war with Hezbollah since the last war ended in 2006.

Israel’s leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believes the current offensive is a major step forward in achieving his stated goal of demobilizing Hezbollah.

He wants to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets over the border into Israel. At the same time, the Israeli military says that this plan is to force Hezbollah to return to the border and to destroy military facilities that threaten Israel.

The last week in Lebanon brings back echoes of the last year of war in Gaza. Israel has issued warnings to people, as it did in Gaza, to leave the areas that will be attacked. He accuses Hezbollah, as he accuses Hamas, of using civilians as human shields.

Some critics and enemies of Israel say the warnings are vague and do not give enough time for families to evacuate. The laws of war require civilians to be protected, and prohibit the indiscriminate, unequal use of force.

Some Hezbollah attacks in Israel have targeted residential areas, violating laws designed to protect civilians. They also target Israeli soldiers. Israel and major Western allies, including the US and the UK, classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Israel insists it has a moral and law-abiding army. But much of the world has condemned its behavior in Gaza. The burning of a wider border war will deepen the rift at the heart of the highly polarized debate.

Take the pager attack. Israel says it was targeting Hezbollah operatives who were issued pagers. But Israel did not know where they were when the bombs inside the pagers were detonated, which is why civilians and children in houses, shops and other public places were injured and killed. That, some leading lawyers say, proves that Israel used lethal force without distinguishing between combatants and civilians; violation of the laws of war.

The war between Israel and Hezbollah began in the 1980s. But this border war started the day after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, when Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to start a limited, but almost daily border crossing to support Hamas. It has arrested Israeli soldiers and forced about 60,000 people from border towns to leave their homes.

A few voices in the Israeli media have compared the impact of the airstrikes on Hezbollah’s fighting power to Operation Focus, Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt in June 1967. It was a famous attack that destroyed the Egyptian air force when its planes were deployed. above the ground. In the next six days Israel conquered Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The victory set the tone for the ongoing conflict as Israel captured the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.

It’s not a good comparison. Lebanon, and the war with Hezbollah, is different. Israel has dealt heavy blows. But so far it has not stopped the power or the will of Hezbollah to shoot at Israel.

Israel’s previous wars with Hezbollah were grinding, crushing and never produced significant victories for either side. This may go the same way, however the last week of offensive action has been pleasing to Israel, its intelligence services and its military.

Israel’s attack rests on the assumption – a gamble – that there will come a point when Hezbollah will cower, retreat to the border and stop firing on Israel. Most Hezbollah watchers believe it will not stop. Fighting Israel is the main reason Hezbollah exists.

That means that Israel, as reluctant to admit defeat, will have to escalate the war. If Hezbollah continued to make northern Israel too dangerous for Israeli citizens to return home to, Israel would have to decide whether to attack on the ground, perhaps occupying an area to serve as a buffer zone.

Israel has attacked Lebanon before. In 1982 its forces went up to Beirut to try to stop Palestinian attacks on Israel. They were forced to return to a shameful retreat in the face of hostility at home and abroad, after Israeli forces seized the border as their Christian Lebanese allies killed Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut.

In the 1990s Israel still controlled a wide strip of Lebanese land along the border. Today’s Israeli generals were young commanders at the time, fighting endless wars with Hezbollah, which was growing in power as it fought to oust Israel. Ehud Barak, Israel’s prime minister at the time and former IDF chief, withdrew from the so-called “security zone” in 2000. He decided that it was not making Israel safer and was costing Israel too many soldiers’ lives. .

In 2006 an unprovoked attack by Hezbollah across the tense and war-torn border killed and captured Israeli soldiers. After the end of the war, Hassan Nasrallah said that he would not have allowed the raid if he had seen what Israel was going to do. Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister of Israel, went to war.

Israel initially hoped that air power would stop the rocket attacks on Israel. When it didn’t, ground troops and tanks again rolled over the border. The war was a disaster for the people of Lebanon. But on the last day of the war, Hezbollah was still firing many rockets into Israel.

Israeli officials know that entering Lebanon under fire would be a greater military challenge than fighting Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah has also been making plans since the end of the 2006 war, and will be fighting at home, in southern Lebanon that has plenty of rugged, hilly terrain that suits the insurgents’ tactics.

Israel has not been able to destroy all the tunnels that Hamas has dug in the sand in Gaza. On Lebanon’s southern borders, Hezbollah has spent 18 years preparing tunnels and positions in the hard rock. It has a formidable arsenal, supplied by Iran. Unlike Hamas in Gaza, it can also be given land through Syria.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington DC, estimates that Hezbollah has approximately 30,000 combat troops and up to 20,000 reservists, most of whom are trained as small light mobile units. Many of its men have experience fighting in support of the Assad regime in Syria.

Most estimates say that Hezbollah has between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets, ranging from anti-target weapons to long-range missiles that can attack Israeli cities.

Israel may be gambling that Hezbollah will not use them all, fearing that the Israeli army will do in Lebanon as it did in Gaza, turn entire cities into ruins and kill thousands of people. Iran may not want Hezbollah to use weapons it would like to keep as insurance in case Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities. This is another gamble. Hezbollah may decide to use most of its weapons before Israel destroys them.

As the war continues in Gaza, and the rising level of violence in the West Bank, Israel will have to think about a third part if it attacks Lebanon. The troops there are motivated, well-trained and armed, but the reserve units that provide most of Israel’s combat power are already feeling the strain after a year of war.

Israel’s allies, led by the United States, did not want Israel to escalate the war with Hezbollah and did not want it to invade Lebanon. They insist that only diplomacy can make the border safe enough for citizens on both sides to return to their homes. The US envoy brokered a deal, partly based on UN Security resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war.

But diplomats have their hands tied without ending the fighting in Gaza. Hasan Nasrallah said that Hezbollah will only stop attacking Israel when the war in Gaza stops. Currently neither Hamas nor Israel are willing to make the necessary agreements that would produce an agreement to end the fighting in Gaza and the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

As Israeli airstrikes continue to hit Lebanon, citizens who are already struggling to support their families in a broken economy are facing great pain and uncertainty. Fear crossed the front lines. The Israelis know that Hezbollah can do more damage than last year.

Israel believes that the time has come to be aggressive and bold, to blast Hezbollah far from its borders. But it faces a stubborn, well-armed and angry enemy. This is the most dangerous situation in the long year of war since Hamas attacked Israel and there is no stopping it from getting worse.