My trip on Thursday to a town in the eastern part of southern Lebanon solidified a few trends that have so far only been implied by what the IDF and Hezbollah have been doing and saying since Israel’s invasion on September 30.
On the one hand, I saw the IDF in a Lebanese town operating with machine-like efficiency in taking apart the military infrastructure, including advanced Kornet missiles, rockets, and anti-aircraft guns, which Hezbollah embedded into nearly every civilian house.
On the other hand, I watched projectiles sail over my head as we entered Lebanon, and in the hours both before and after the visit, Hezbollah fired off around 100 rockets.
Heating up the northern border
Another way to summarize the situation is that until the IDF upped the escalation against Hezbollah some months ago to try to force it into a ceasefire deal, the group was “only” firing rockets on the closest border town.
Since Israel turned up the heat though, it started to fire at larger cities farther away, cities like Nahariya, Acre, and Safed, and eventually expanded to the Haifa area, Israel’s third largest population center.
Throughout the invasion and for some time before, one-third of Israel has been effectively under lockdown, and all of central Israel, including Tel Aviv, has come under new rocket fire from Hezbollah.
If the situation worsened since the invasion, the question arises: Why is the broader narrative still framing Israel’s actions as successful?
First, because as bad as the attacks have been, they have paled in comparison to what was expected.
The casualty count has been relatively low from rocket attacks since the invasion.
In contrast, in any scenario where Israel would be massively bombing Hezbollah, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and carrying out a ground invasion, the Jewish state was expected to have thousands of dead civilians and a ravaged home front, including in Tel Aviv.
This gap between the dark, morbid expectations and the disturbing, but much more minor real-life losses, has given the rocket fire results a positive spin.
Likewise, killing Nasrallah, and so many of his commanders, bombing so many of Hezbollah’s best rockets, and the impact of the beeper and walkie-talkie attacks, have left most Israelis euphoric that it is quickly flattening Hezbollah in a way so unlike Hamas, in terms of speed.
And yet, these reasons pale to the success of the ground invasion.
Since the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Israel and the IDF have had demons in their minds about whether they could pull off an invasion against Hezbollah, or whether they had finally met their match and could only fight it on the defensive.
That war saw Hezbollah take apart Israeli forces with ambushes, and exposed not only the inferiority in IDF infantry training and logistical planning but also a seemingly “weak” commitment to taking the fight to enemy territory – especially compared to earlier generations.
In fact, the IDF’s poor performance against Hezbollah was one in a list of reasons that the military did not undertake serious maneuvering invasions in Gaza – until Hamas forced its hand with its October 7.
What I saw in southern Lebanon on Thursday was complete IDF supremacy on the ground – and in record time.The very fact that the IDF felt it was safe to bring reporters in, and only 11 days since the invasion began, was itself a stunning result that could not have been foreseen in advance – a show of IDF dominance and confidence.
The expected scenarios in the event of an IDF invasion were either a replay of 2006 or the military overcoming Hezbollah better this time, but only after some weeks of very intense fighting, with significant casualties.
As of press time, reported IDF deaths in battle are in the low dozens – an astoundingly low number compared to the several hundred Hezbollah operatives killed and the myriad of weapons the IDF has captured.
In 11 days, the IDF exorcised 17 years’ worth of Hezbollah demons that had plagued it.
My impression from the visit is that the IDF is going to finish all or most of its invasion still within weeks – another reason why there might have been a rush to get journalists in now.
Will that be enough time to bring the rocket fire down from lower than expected, to actually tolerable for the long term?