The IDF battered Hezbollah with the largest attack since the Second Lebanon War (2006) on Monday. The attack was broken down roughly into four massive rounds of air strikes against rockets and other assets. The Iranian proxy group tried hard to fight back but had very limited success in relative terms.
The figures from Monday’s attacks, along with the days preceding, were staggering and also led to enormous waves of evacuations of Lebanese civilians from both southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley area.
The IDF struck over 1,300 targets in around 650 sorties; the Lebanese Health Ministry estimated well over 1,200 wounded and close to 350 dead.
Military sources refused to speculate on the ratio of operatives to civilians, though they clarified that the targets were all places where Hezbollah had rockets, drones, or missiles located, ready to fire on Israeli civilians. IDF chief spokesman R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari made a general statement, suggesting that many of those killed would be Hezbollah fighters readying to shoot at Israel.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that the military’s continuous strikes in recent days destroyed tens of thousands of rockets, with some commentators noting that the attacks could be impacting aspects of Hezbollah’s strategic capabilities to wage a war against Israel.
Hezbollah fired – almost non-stop – rounds of dozens of rockets across the entire North, over 200 rockets throughout Monday, which extended all the way down to Haifa.
For the first time, Hezbollah fired approximately 10 long-range rockets at the northern West Bank. Some commentators speculated this was a signal of threat to Israel – given that if they could reach there, they could also reach Tel Aviv – if Hezbollah decided to aim that far.
Unconfirmed reports and videos showed a rocket that struck and caused damage to a Palestinian town in the West Bank.
The North and Haifa areas were effectively shut down by these attacks, including all educational frameworks. These areas may remain shuttered for an extended period, if neither side steps back from this developing war of attrition, or is unable to deal a decisive blow.
Areas like Safed began to look more abandoned, much like the areas in the North that had been evacuated. They have looked like that for 11 months, as 60,000 residents were evacuated on Oct. 8.
Late Monday night, the Israel Air Force (IAF) attempted to assassinate Ali Karaki, Hezbollah’s third in command the last remaining living member of a triumvirate of top military advisers to Hezbollah chief Hassan Sayyed Nasrallah. Reports were mixed about whether he survived the strike, but at the very least, he appeared to be wounded, with estimates that he would not be able to act in a command capacity for some time.
Karaki was supposed to replace Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah Radwan special forces chief assassinated by Israel on Friday.
These two key losses to Nasrallah followed the loss of his top military adviser Fuad Shukr on July 30.
And still, by press time, there was still no clear sign that either side was close to accepting the dictates of the other for ending the conflict.
Israel to press forward until Hezbollah stops
Israel has said that it will continue to attack Hezbollah until it stops firing rockets and commits to keeping southern Lebanon clear of its Radwan forces.
Hezbollah has said it will keep firing rockets at Israel until the IDF reaches a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, no matter the consequences to its own home front.
Hagari gave three speeches throughout the day on Monday, signaling the different stages of escalating the conflict.
The first wave of attacks took place around 6:30 a.m. Hagari spoke around 7:50 a.m., summarizing the impact of the strikes to date, and warning Lebanese civilians to leave any structures in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah concealed weapons.
Hagari’s warning was unusual and different from mass evacuation warnings issued to date in Gaza.
On the one hand, it was the first mass evacuation warning to southern Lebanese regarding areas where Hezbollah is operating. Hundreds of thousands of residents in southern Lebanon evacuated on Monday areas where the IDF has been striking for several months. So, the warning would be to those who have not yet left.
On the other hand, the IDF did not say to completely leave all of southern Lebanon.
It was not clear where the IDF would suggest these civilians should go permanently if in fact their homes get bombed due to holding terror assets.
It further differs from Gaza evacuation orders in that Hagari did not suggest a ground invasion. He rather said the military would be striking more intensely from the air, including at civilian locations where terror assets have been located.
To illustrate his point, Hagari displayed an example of a location in southern Lebanon where the IDF, a few weeks ago, witnessed Hezbollah troopers knock down some of the walls to set up a camouflaged civilian location for the firing of a Russian-made DR-3 cruise missile, with hundreds of kilos of explosives.
Hagari said that the missile posed a much larger danger than typical Hezbollah rockets because it flies lower and faster in a line-drive type fashion – as opposed to rockets, which fly slower and in an arch trajectory. He added that this missile had been smuggled to Hezbollah via Syria.
Hagari then showed the IDF watching Hezbollah terrorists exiting the area. Troops then blew up both the cruise missile and the civilian location where it was hidden, along with the Hezbollah terrorists.
Despite not threatening a ground invasion yet, calls for such an invasion have been rising, including from opposition figures such as National Unity chairman Benny Gantz and Labor chairman Yair Golan, while hard-right figures like Religious Zionist Party chairman and Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich, and Otzma Yehudit chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have been calling for such a move for months.
One of the purposes of Hagari’s public statements, which included Arabic subtitles, was to broaden the warning to civilians in southern Lebanon to leave such areas. Another purpose was to preempt Western criticism for targeting civilian areas and to explain the IDF’s justification.
Under international law, civilian areas can be targeted – if warnings are provided beforehand, and if those areas have been used for military purposes. They effectively become military targets.
The second wave began at around 11:00 a.m. Video footage showed many people and vehicles attempting evacuation.
After reports that UNIFIL had evacuated southern Lebanon as well, a spokesperson for the organization clarified to The Jerusalem Post, “Ensuring the safety and security of our personnel is important. While many of our civilian staff have been operating from various parts of Lebanon, as a precautionary measure, those remaining in the south have been advised to relocate to safety in the north.”
They added that its peacekeepers and a few civilians “will remain present and continue the mission’s essential work… No evacuation, but relocation for staff that can work from home. Critical staff will stay south.”
Hagari gave his second speech at around 2:45 p.m. This time, he warned civilians to evacuate Bekaa Valley areas. He said that Hezbollah hid rockets, drones, and long-range strategic weapons there. Bekaa is farther from the border with Israel, which means that collecting intelligence about the weapons and targeting them is more difficult for Israel.
While the impact of Hagari’s warning seemed to be to cause a mass evacuation, the IDF did not confirm that it had been fully evacuated, rather it again focused on residences where weapons were hidden.
However, given that the IDF has accused Hezbollah of hiding weapons in every three to five houses in various parts of Lebanon, Hagari’s threat appeared to cause another mass evacuation.
He further pushed back on global criticism of rising casualties in Lebanon due to the IDF’s decision to target civilian areas, saying that the videos of large explosions circulating on social media prove that Hezbollah hid powerful weapons in these areas, causing secondary explosions.
He showed a video of an attack on a structure at Jabal al-Butum with what appeared to be tremendous secondary explosions. If the IDF had bombed a house that did not contain weapons, the secondary explosions wouldn’t have occurred.
Moreover, he said that the goal of the third wave of attacks would be to stop what the military viewed as an imminent decision by Hezbollah to fire on Israel, using some of its strategic weapons in the Bekaa Valley area.
Despite the more sensitive Bekaa Valley attack, Hagari did not change the status of Home Front restrictions, which currently only apply to the Haifa Bay Area and northward.
At around 4:45 p.m., the IDF started another wave of strikes on the Bekaa Valley – as Hagari had warned.
The mass evacuations from there caused a new dilemma for Nasrallah, as it is unclear if the economically weakened Lebanon – stuck in a political and economic crisis long before the war – could manage running large refugee camps for its people caused by the evacuations. It is also possible that some of these refugees in Bekaa are Sunnis and Christians, as opposed to southern Lebanon, which is virtually all Shiite.
Shortly after these attacks, Hezbollah responded with one of its largest salvos of rockets, leading to the IDF’s fourth wave at around 5:45 p.m.
The IDF’s air defense seemed to successfully shoot down the vast majority of aerial attacks which risked hitting populated areas, while the military appeared to allow a significant number of rockets to land in open spaces, at times causing fires and damage.
There also appeared to be around a dozen or more instances of rockets landing in populated areas or on important roads.
Late Sunday, Hagari said there were no changes to the home front situation. While many analysts have marveled at the IDF’s ability to prevent scenes of mayhem and mass destruction which defense officials consistently predicted in any all-out conflict with Hezbollah, former IDF air defense chief Brig.-Gen. (res.) Ran Kochav voiced caution.
Kochav noted that Hezbollah still retains most of its long-range precision rocket capabilities for striking Tel Aviv and central Israel, as well as the vast majority of its pre-war 150,000 rocket arsenal – not to mention its retro-technology drone fleet – which has thrown the IDF’s advanced defenses for a loop.
Hagari gave his third speech at 8:45 p.m., flagging a number of specific threats that the military struck on Monday. He noted the destruction of many cruise missiles, which could fly hundreds of km. and carry as much as 1000 kgs. of explosives.
Hagari said that one such missile – which the military destroyed on the ground before it could be fired – was identical to the kind that killed 12 Druze children playing in a soccer field in Majdal Shams at the end of July.
He added that the military destroyed another category of mid-range rockets, which could have flown around 200 km., along with short-range rockets that could travel 50 km.
He said that the IDF also destroyed large attack drones – such as the Sayyad 107 – highlighting that all of these weapons were found and blown up in the heart of civilian villages, where Hezbollah hid them. He showed a large Hezbollah rocket in an attic in a residence in Domain al Tahta ready to fire on Israel.
Another example he showed of hidden Hezbollah weapons in a civilian residence displayed not only secondary explosions but showed a hidden rocket accidentally firing off at a next-door neighbor’s house and destroying it.
According to Reuters, At least 492 were killed and 1,645 wounded in Israeli strikes on Lebanon since Monday morning, citing the Lebanese health ministry. The health ministry added that 35 children and 58 women were among those killed.