The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (Left), killed by Israeli air strikes on Sept. 27, was for years allowed to build up Hezbollah’s military capacity on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Right) approved plans for taking out Nasrallah.
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In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the IDF spokesman’s office issued a laconic statement, according to which Israeli forces have commenced ‘raids… based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon. These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.’
With this terse announcement, Israel signalled that its 18-year policy of restraint and reaction on its northern border was definitively over, and that the door has been opened to something new.
How did we reach this point? The last war between Israel and the Iran-supported Shia Islamist Hezbollah organisation came to an official end on August 14, 2006. UN Resolution 1701, which ended the war, forbade Hezbollah from any armed presence south of the Litani river.
It is likely that Hezbollah assumed that difficulties in Gaza and/or the fear of casualties would prevent a determined Israeli response to their daily missile and drone attacks.
For most of the intervening years, Israel pursued a cautious, even hesitant policy on the border. It made no serious attempt to intervene as Hezbollah rapidly brushed aside the terms of 1701 and the UN force detailed with implementing it, and began to construct a fearsome, open military capacity extending down to the Blue Line of withdrawal and the border fence.
Without the 7 October attacks from Gaza, and Hezbollah’s decision to join Hamas’s war effort on October 8, it is likely that this situation would have been maintained. It has taken a year of fighting to destroy Hamas’s conventional military capacity in Gaza. Even now, the organisation is still able to launch sporadic attacks on Israeli forces. If the northern border had been quiet, it may be assumed that any calls in Israel for opening a ‘second front’ would have been quickly dismissed.
It is likely that Hezbollah assumed that difficulties in Gaza and/or the fear of casualties would prevent a determined Israeli response to their daily missile and drone attacks. Hezbollah takes a particular pride in its claimed deep knowledge of and understanding of Israeli society. In reality, however, this supposed knowledge mainly consisted of the conceit that Israeli society’s (undoubted) sensitivity to casualties would prevent it from launching a determined response.
This perspective is based on a long-standing Arab nationalist and Islamist view of Israel. It may have its roots in a traditional Islamic disdain for the Jews as a defeated and for a long period non-martial people. In the case of Hezbollah, the theory that Israeli sensitivity to casualties could lead to military results was applied in the insurgency of the 1985-2000 period and produced the desired result – the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Israel’s ‘security zone’ in south Lebanon, in May 2000.
This success has led to subsequent miscalculation. In 2006, a Hezbollah raid led to a three-week war and large-scale destruction in Lebanon. Subsequent to that war, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said that had he known in advance of the Israeli response, he would never have ordered the initial attack. This did not, however, prevent him from ordering the ‘support front’ on October 8, a decision which cost him his life, led to the severe degradation of his movement, and may now have triggered a renewed Israeli land invasion.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant is the main driving force behind the current government’s uncompromising stance toward Hezbollah. Gallant’s own involvement with Lebanon goes back to his own experiences as a naval commando in operations in the country in the early 1980s.
A couple of years before he became defence minister, I participated with Gallant in a delegation from Israel to meet with officials in France. I still remember the suddenly electric atmosphere in the meeting room on a sleepy Paris afternoon, as the future defence minister began to lay out his views and plans for the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the bluntest and starkest terms. Gallant has been the most determined voice for a wide-ranging operation into Lebanon since October 8. He was blocked from ordering such an operation, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the very first days of the war. Now, largely thanks to the miscalculations of the deceased Nasrallah, he has the chance to apply his plans.
We are witnessing the opening of a new chapter in the year-long war between Israel and the Iran-supported Islamist militias deployed around it.
What has happened so far? There are currently two regular IDF divisions poised for action on the northern border. These two divisions have different capabilities and job descriptions and it is worth paying close attention to who is doing what, in order to keep a sense of the unfolding operation. The two divisions are the 98th airborne, and the 36th armoured. The 98th brings together Israel’s airborne, reconnaissance and commando units, including the regular 35th (Paratroopers) Brigade. As its name suggests, its specialties include rapid, pinpointed actions. It has been a central force in Gaza in recent months, engaged in the clearing out of remaining Hamas resistance.
The 98th appears to have been the force responsible for what the IDF describes as the ‘limited, localised, and targeted ground raids’ against Hezbollah positions along the border which have so far taken place.
The stated purpose of the IDF’s mission is to create the conditions which will enable the return of the over 60,000 Israeli internal refugees displaced from their homes along the northern border since 8 October. The dimensions and extent of the unfolding Israeli action have not been revealed and are not currently clear. It is doubtful, however, that Israel will suffice with clearing Hezbollah positions from the immediate border area.
The 36th Armored Division, whose components include the First (Golani) infantry brigade and the 188 Armoured Brigade, was one of two regular divisions which took part in Israel’s initial, rapid thrust into Gaza. It has been in the northern border area since early 2024, training for operations into Lebanon. Its presence implies that a broader and deeper push into Lebanon is a distinct possibility.
It remains to be seen what arrangement might follow the Israeli manoeuvre – whether it will mean the establishment of an Israeli controlled buffer zone in the area south of the Litani or (as currently appears more likely) some new power dispensation involving the return of the Lebanese Armed Forces and perhaps a new international force. What is clear is that we are witnessing the opening of a new chapter in the year-long war between Israel and the Iran-supported Islamist militias deployed around it, and in the long and tortuous saga of Israel’s relations with its northern neighbour.
