Defense Minister Israel Katz said that if the November 26 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah fails, the IDF will be more ready to strike non-Hezbollah Lebanese targets, during a visit to the northern border on Tuesday .
“If the ceasefire collapses – there will not be anymore exemption to the state of Lebanon,” said Katz.
Finally, he said that Israel would never return to the days when it would ignore "minor" rocket fire or a small tent that Hezbollah erected before the war illegally a small number of meters into Israeli territory.
The defense minister added, “If until now we distinguished between Lebanon and Hezbollah – this will not continue.
These statements were the farthest and most explicit a top Israeli defense official has gone toward threatening the wider state of Lebanon, though from time to time, some top officials have made similar implied threats.
Hezbollah violated the ceasefire
The threats come after Hezbollah violated the ceasefire with two mortars fired into the Golan Heights late Monday and with the IDF responding hours later with wide-ranging airstrikes to deter such violations.
Generally, Katz’s statements go against the messaging that top IDF officials have given off, with the military doing all it could over the last 14 months to almost solely target Hezbollah-Shiite areas and not Sunni, Christian, or Palestinian Lebanese areas.
The number of times that the IDF has attacked cities that are predominantly non-Shiite has been extremely small, and each time has involved a warning and a post-attack statement that those attacked were Hezbollah terrorists hiding among the non-Hezbollah sector.
Further, the statement is unusual because there are no signs to date that the Lebanese state has done anything to assist Hezbollah in violating the ceasefire.
Rather, Israel has complained that the Lebanese army has so far failed to contain Hezbollah from violating the ceasefire, but it has been well-known by all parties that the Lebanese army is much weaker than Hezbollah, too much weaker to do so.
Even after a 14-month war and two months of heavy bombing by the IDF, Hezbollah retains tens of thousands of fighters and is still by far the most dominant military force in Lebanon.
Alternatively, Katz's threats may be a warning shot to try to motivate all the parties in Lebanon to strive for a quieter rollout of the ceasefire than has been to date without any real intention of following through on the threat.
If Katz is departing from the IDF’s messaging, this would not be the first time.
Shortly after he took on his role, he was recorded with IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, sitting next to him in which he said that there would be no ceasefire until Hezbollah was disarmed.
This drew a confused look by Halevi, which many media outlets picked up on, since this was not a condition of reaching a ceasefire.
Instead, the IDF was only demanding that Hezbollah withdraw to North of the Litani River and that it retain the ability to attack any attempts from neighboring states to rearm Hezbollah.
Tensions between Katz and Halevi have flared multiple times, including over certain military commander promotions, in the month since he replaced Yoav Gallant, who had much more of the same mindset as the IDF chief on both military and political issues.