Last week I drove from the Hermon, the tallest mountain in northern Israel, to the border with Gaza. During the trip, which took place over the course of three days, I visited both IDF units guarding Mount Hermon and Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutz communities devastated by the October 7 attack.
The contrasts are stark. Up North, the Hermon is cold; Hezbollah continues to fire rockets at Israel every day, and soldiers are ready for any eventuality on the border. Meanwhile, on the border of Gaza, things are relatively quiet, a sign that the war against Hamas has defeated a swath of Hamas battalions across the border.
Despite the quiet on the Gaza border, and despite the harsh conditions on the Hermon – Israel is now deep into a five-month war that has no clear end in sight.
Hezbollah's threat to Israel
The enemy on both fronts continues to pose a threat. Israel has launched thousands of strikes on Hezbollah but the Iranian-backed terrorist group feels impunity to fire rockets at Israel.
It also uses anti-tank missiles, mortars, and drone threats. Further, Hezbollah is willing to openly brag about the types of threats that it manifests, such as claiming to use drones to strike deeper into Israel, or strike at sensitive military sights.
For the optimist, this is fine. Hezbollah is just doing tit-for-tat strikes to show it supports Hamas. Hezbollah doesn’t want a major war. In this interpretation of events, Hezbollah is just doing the bare minimum.
“The bare minimum” has forced 80,000 Israelis from the border, has often targeted IDF bases and other infrastructure, and has damaged 500 homes.
Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, the optimistic says. They are of the opinion that Israel’s brilliant military strategy here has prevented a major war and that one day an agreement will be made with Hezbollah. Both will save face. Each – Israel and Hezbollah – will declare victory, and all will be fine.
But these are the same optimists who believed up until October 7 that everything was fine in Gaza because they thought that Hamas would not embark on a game-changing massive attack. You can chalk this up to “game theory,” or maybe “realism” or pragmatism, or whatever theory one wants to inject into it. This mentality posits that Hezbollah is a rational actor and that Iran doesn’t want to lose the Hezbollah “property” it has created in Lebanon.
For others, the Hezbollah attacks represent a severe problem. The attacks mean that Hezbollah’s terror army has carved out a kind of “security zone” on the Israeli side of the border, essentially translating to Israel being forced to evacuate the North due to Hezbollah threats.
In essence, Hezbollah now determines the fate of northern Israel. This is a strange position for Israel to be in, since there was a time when Israel was able to defeat enemies on multiple fronts, but now can’t seem to defeat Hamas, let alone Hezbollah.
The pessimists wonder if Israelis will ever return to the northern communities and they wonder why Israel didn’t deal Hezbollah a major blow early in the war. Their doctrine might boil down to the Frank Pentangeli line in The Godfather when he tells Michael: “let’s hit them all now, while we still got the muscle!”
The question, of course, is whether Israel today is being run by those with the long-term “wait and then revenge” style of Michael Corleone, or whether it’s being run by the likes of Tom Hagen or some other character.
My experience on the northern border was that the IDF is still waiting and it is preparing. The IDF is also rolling out a new Mountain Brigade which is supposed to guard the Hermon and Mount Dov. This area is a triangle basically of mountainous terrain and it presents unique challenges in the north. The enemy is also trying to create various fronts and arenas to strike Israel from up there in the mountains. What that means is that Hezbollah seeks to expand the threat to Syria – and so does Iran and its militias.
Meanwhile, on the southern border with Gaza, a different kind of war is playing out. At Kfar Aza, the community itself is still evacuated. Kfar Aza is full instead of groups that come to see and learn about what happened on October 7. As such, it is a kind of living museum for the massacre. However, Israel has always learned that it can’t be a living museum of the horrors of the past. It has to be a country that defends its borders and enables life to thrive within its defensive lines. Today, that is not fully possible on the border of Gaza. The scars of October 7 are clear. What is not, is when children will again be heard playing here in the South.
Inside Gaza, the IDF executed an important raid last week into Shifa Hospital, where some 800 suspected terrorists have been detained. This is important and is a setback for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
However, it raises questions about how almost 1,000 terrorists felt free to reconstitute themselves at Shifa. This area was cleared back in November. The IDF has spent the last month returning to neighborhoods in Gaza and re-clearing them. This includes Shati near the beach and also Zaytun, and now – Shifa. Is this the tip of the iceberg? Are there another 5,000 or 10,000 terrorists in Gaza City today? They may not have the weapons they had on October 7, yet if there are thousands of them, they will continue to be able to exert control.
What is the plan for Gaza?
One can’t help but wonder if the policy in Gaza has shortcomings. Clearing an area and then giving it back to the enemy reads a lot like what the US did in Vietnam, sending in infantry and marines to search and destroy targets and then handing the land back to the Viet Cong.
Indeed, no plan for the day after in Gaza and no local partners present hurdles. Some have compared Gaza to the war to liberate Mosul from ISIS. However, six months into that battle, the Iraqi army had taken eastern Mosul. It did not hand it back to ISIS. The Iraqi army held it and kept moving. Sitting on the border of Gaza, seeing how quiet it is, makes one wonder about what is happening on the other side. Has Israel basically consented to a ceasefire in most parts of Gaza, without saying it, while carrying out precise raids? If so, this leads to questions about what comes next.