Shifting rhetoric from Israel’s political leadership and the scale of its military’s evacuation orders in Lebanon have left officials in the region and in western capitals suspecting that its war will be longer and more grinding than the “limited” operation that was announced.
Since soldiers from Israel’s 98th division entered Lebanon in their first invasion of the country for nearly two decades, the scale of Israel’s ground assault on Hizbollah has quickly grown.
Three other divisions have joined the fighting, with thousands of Israeli soldiers advancing into Lebanon from locations ranging from Rosh HaNikra in the west to Misgav Am in the east. Military evacuation orders now cover more than 110 areas in Lebanon, ranging from villages on the border to coastal areas 60km north, according to a Financial Times tally.
At the same time, Israeli leaders have hardened their language about what lies ahead. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday called on the Lebanese to rise up against Hizbollah, warning the alternative was “a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”.
“Two weeks ago the Israelis were talking about a limited ground incursion for a couple of weeks, but that two weeks seems to be extending all the time,” one western official said. “There is little optimism of Israel stopping soon before the US elections [on November 5].”
For now Israeli military officials remain coy about the exact nature and scale of the ground offensive, leaving most of its details shrouded in the fog of war and the directives of the Israeli military censor.
But they insist the operations are targeted, and Israeli forces remain relatively close to the UN-demarcated “Blue Line” separating the two countries that snakes inland from the Mediterranean coast to the hilly terrain around Metula where Israeli troops launched their invasion.
High-resolution satellite imagery of the Israeli advance is not available for the entire 100km border. But images from the area of Maroun al-Ras show Israeli tanks and other vehicles a short distance inside Lebanon, with one group of about 27 vehicles 250m from the border, and another, smaller cluster about 1km into the country.
Other images show tracks at points where Israeli forces have breached the border nearby, including close to the Israeli villages of Avivim and Yiron.
The objective of the offensive, Israeli officials say, is to remove the threat of a cross-border attack by Hizbollah, and to remove the direct line of fire for weapons such as anti-tank missiles towards Israeli communities, allowing Israelis displaced by the fighting to return home.
Many Lebanese worry the US has given the green light to Israel’s stepped-up offensive against Hizbollah. State department spokesperson Matthew Miller this week said Washington supports “Israel’s efforts to degrade Hizbollah’s capability”. “But ultimately we do want to see a diplomatic resolution to this conflict,” he added.
Hizbollah began firing at Israel in the days after Hamas’s October 7 attack last year, killing more than 50 people, and forcing 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north. In the year since, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed more than 2,100 people and displaced more than 1.2mn, most in the past few weeks. The bombardment has also caused huge destruction, laying waste to tracts of villages and towns in the vicinity of the border.
Ehud Yaari, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Israel’s offensive was best described as a “grinder”, using troops to attack targets that were easier to locate from the ground than the air within a 2km-deep strip on the northern side of the Blue Line.
Israeli officials claim 500 Hizbollah fighters, and nine Israeli soldiers, have been killed in the first week of fighting.
Yaari said: “They’re grinding the systems Hizbollah had built up in the border region. The forces are focused on one thing: destruction of the Hizbollah military infrastructure in this area, which has been surprising in its extent — tunnels, bunkers, weapons and ammunition depots.”
“Some of these systems are inside the villages, but others are in rural areas full of thick brush and undergrowth used to conceal these systems,” he added.
The operations along the border have been accompanied by the Israeli military’s efforts to block Iran’s attempts to resupply Hizbollah’s forces. Since Israel expanded its offensive last month, its jets have repeatedly bombed border crossings between Lebanon and Syria, as well as other targets in southern Syria. They have also pounded Hizbollah targets in the Bekaa Valley, where the group has a strong presence.
On Friday, Israeli jets destroyed a 3.5km tunnel between Syria and Lebanon that Israeli officials said was operated by Hizbollah’s unit 4400, which is tasked with carrying out such weapons deliveries. Earlier last week, Israel killed the unit’s commander, Muhammad Jaafar Qasir, in an air strike in Beirut.
“We are cutting the chain of supply from Syria to Lebanon, and from Iraq to Syria,” said Shlomo Mofaz, a former Israel Defense Forces intelligence official who now heads the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.
Given Israel’s history of launching operations that subsequently expanded — including its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which morphed into an 18-year occupation of the country’s south — and the limited losses its forces appear to have sustained, western officials expect Israeli troops will eventually push deeper into Lebanon.
Footage posted on social media on Tuesday showed Israeli troops raising the country’s flag in Maroun al-Ras.
Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that one of their ultimate objectives is to push Hizbollah back behind the Litani river, which runs as far as 30km north of the Blue Line, as envisaged by UN resolution 1701, which was passed at the end of the last war in 2006 but which neither side implemented.
But they have been vague about how this would be done.
The western official said: “I think the Israelis want to do as much damage as possible to Hizbollah and clear as much ground as they can between the border and the Litani river. But after that it’s not clear.”
“We want them to stop now and agree to a political plan which is already broadly agreed. But it looks like, because they’re having such success militarily, they will keep going until they feel they are getting diminishing returns.”
Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu and fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington, said that how the ground offensive unfolded would be a political and military question.
But he said the military “logic” of the operation would be to encircle and destroy Hizbollah’s presence south of the Litani, and then prevent it from returning.
He said: “Can we do it in the present circumstances, when we have other problems on other fronts? What would the reaction be in Israel to a longer war? What would the reaction around the world be when it is clear Israel is going ahead with a plan to crush Hizbollah, at least in the south?”
“[But] from a military point of view this is the only logic that can justify an invasion with ground forces.”
Mofaz said he believed the Israeli offensive was still aimed at weakening rather than eradicating Hizbollah, and then reaching a political agreement — backed by international players such as the US and France — that would ensure the militant group did not return to Lebanon’s south.
But he added Israel’s previous campaigns showed this could change. “For now, it’s a limited operation,” he said. “But in Lebanon, you know where and when you start. But you never know when and where you will finish.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard and satellite visualisations by Jana Tauschinski
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