After meeting with his military chiefs near Israel’s northern front with Hizbollah late last year, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a stark warning to the Lebanese militant group: if it started an all-out war, Israel would “turn Beirut and southern Lebanon . . . into Gaza”.
It is now Netanyahu who has escalated the conflict with Hizbollah, with Israel launching what it calls “limited, localised and targeted ground raids” against the militant group in its first land offensive in southern Lebanon in 18 years.
Having previously vowed to push Hizbollah back from the border and enable the safe return to northern Israel of 60,000 people displaced by rocket fire, Netanyahu has since spoken of a more ambitious aim to “defeat” the Iran-backed militant group altogether.
“We are in a war for our very existence,” the prime minister said on Monday. “We will unite, go hand in hand and defeat our enemies.”
How Israel will achieve this broad goal without a much deeper land offensive is unclear. While it has devastated Hizbollah targets from the air, many fear the Israel Defense Forces will ultimately push further into Lebanon than during their 2006 invasion, when the militant group fought them to a stalemate.
“It’s going to be deeper, harder and longer than in 2006,” said Emile Hokayem, director of regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It’s going to be ugly, there’s no doubt.”
It also means greater risks for Israeli troops as they become embroiled in ground battles. Eight Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon were killed and several injured by Wednesday.
The offensive also risks igniting a wider all-out war in the Middle East. Iran, which considers Hizbollah its most important proxy, on Tuesday fired about 180 missiles into Israel in what it said was retaliation for the Israeli assassination of the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Netanyahu has vowed that Tehran “will pay”.
Israeli authorities have not yet articulated their ultimate territorial objectives. In Lebanon, there are concerns that the land offensive could require an open-ended Israeli occupation of the border area — and over just how far Israel will go in its quest to destroy Hizbollah’s arsenal of long range missiles far from the border.
“It is difficult [to debilitate Hizbollah] just from the air, and a lot of the sophisticated Hizbollah missiles and precision weaponry is in the north, in the Bekaa Valley, which is a long way to go for ground troops,” said Sir John Sawers, former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6.
There are already significant differences with the 34-day war in 2006, which the foes slid into after Hizbollah launched a cross-border raid and captured two Israeli soldiers.
This time, Israel has spent almost a year pounding Hizbollah targets in southern Lebanon with air and artillery strikes, starting shortly after the militant group began firing on Israel a day after Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The Israeli strikes had forced 110,000 people to flee and caused massive damage to the region, even before Israel escalated the offensive.
Since mid-September, it has also dealt devastating blows to Hizbollah’s command and control structure, assassinated Nasrallah and other senior officials, and sabotaged its communications network.
The IDF has also launched massive air strikes on Hizbollah strongholds in the southern suburbs of Beirut and across Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 people and displacing up to 1mn more over the past two weeks.
But a land invasion on whatever scale puts Israel’s forces in direct battle with Hizbollah’s fighters on their home turf, which would negate some of Israel’s air superiority.
“Hizbollah probably wants Israel to enter because that’s where they have a qualitative advantage, advanced preparations, flexible structure and knowledge of the terrain,” Hokayem said. “Whether they still have the capabilities and command structure in the south to score significant wins, that is the question.”
Even taking and controlling a limited buffer zone in southern Lebanon will be a hard and bloody slog, officials and analysts cautioned.
Israel occupied the southern Lebanon border region for 18 years after invading the country in 1982, and used Lebanese proxy forces for support. But Israeli forces became bogged down by constant attack from Hizbollah, and withdrew in 2000.
Hizbollah has since controlled Lebanon’s side of the border — and has had nearly two decades to develop its defences and tactics since the 2006 war. It has three regional commands, each equivalent to an infantry division, that can operate autonomously, according to Eado Hecht, a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, an Israeli think-tank.
The terrain, which consists of steep, sloping ridges separated by deep ravines, makes military manoeuvres difficult. Hizbollah has heavily mined the passable areas between fortified villages and is believed to have dug a network of tunnels in the border region.
“So far, most of Hizbollah’s casualties have been in the strategic artillery and higher command echelons,” said Hecht. “Its southern command has taken heavy casualties, but not in large numbers relative to their overall size.”
The IDF too has had years to plan for this moment. As well as drawing lessons from 2006, it has built up a deeply detailed intelligence picture of Hizbollah’s command structure and military assets, enabling it to systematically target the group’s fighters, rocket launchers and weapons caches.
Today, however, the IDF is tired after a year of heavy fighting in Gaza, where it has failed to destroy Hamas — a much smaller military force than Hizbollah — despite laying siege to the narrow strip, analysts say.
The IDF says it has only conducted targeted operations near the border in order to destroy Hizbollah infrastructure — such as tunnels, weapons and ammunition caches.
But hours after announcing the raids, Israel warned residents to evacuate almost 30 villages near the border and move above the Awali river, which runs as far as 60km from the frontier.
The military has issued similar warnings during its war against Hamas in Gaza ahead of major offensives in the devastated strip.
One of the IDF’s next possible objectives, officials and military analysts said, could be to capture all areas from which Israeli territory can be seen, so as to prevent the use of direct line-of-sight weapons into Israeli border towns and villages. But doing that would probably only be a short-term solution, analysts cautioned.
“Israel’s stated aim is to establish a cordon of security, and while it can empty that buffer zone, how does Israel then stop it from being repopulated? That is what happened in 2006,” said John Raine, a former British diplomat now at IISS.
Alternatively, “the IDF could establish outposts to feed their intelligence base — imagine a series of forts. But that is high risk as the bases are vulnerable, as the US coalition discovered in Afghanistan,” he added.
Nor would establishing a buffer zone around the border prevent Hizbollah from being able to hit Israel with its mid- to long-range rockets and missiles.
Even if Hizbollah pulled back to the northern banks of the Litani river — as envisaged by a UN resolution passed after the 2006 war — it would still be able to hit Israel with 122mm Grad rockets, which have been supplied by Iran and have a range of 40km, analysts say.
Hizbollah also counts on a considerable stockpile of longer-range Fajr rockets, ballistic missiles and drones. On Tuesday, Hizbollah said it had fired “Fadi 4” missiles at military positions around Tel Aviv, wounding two people, according to Israeli media.
Israeli military officials and analysts often say they learnt multiple valuable lessons from the failures that the country suffered during the 2006 war, which was exhaustively examined by a national commission.
But other countries’ militaries have also studied the conflict — including one US intelligence officer who reached a sober conclusion that has a political aspect as relevant today as it was then.
Devastating air power, comparable to what Israel has unleashed in recent weeks, was not an “antiseptic elixir”, she wrote soon after the 2006 conflict ended. “Only a comprehensive strategy that integrates . . . military force into a broader political strategy will ultimately bring this kind of adversary to its knees.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard and Ian Bott
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