IDF troops reached the Litani River in their ground invasion of Lebanon on Tuesday, marking the first time since the 2006 Second Lebanon War that Israeli soldiers have reached the area.
The military also announced on Tuesday the deaths of two soldiers: Sgt.-Maj. Yona Betzalel Brief, who succumbed to wounds sustained in fighting on October 7, and Sgt. Tamer Othman, who was killed in battle in northern Gaza.
Reaching the Litani comes after the invasion of southern Lebanon morphed multiple times from its original purpose.At the start of the invasion, top military officials said it would only last two to three weeks and would be confined to one to two kilometers from the border.
By early to mid-November, troops began to proceed as far as 5 km. In recent days, with the ceasefire closing in, troops rushed over 10 km. and further from the border, in some cases reaching the Litani, which has a loop-style shape, such that parts of it are far deeper into Lebanese territory than others.
Following intelligence information, troops carried out raids against a large amount of terror infrastructure sites in the area along with close-quarters combat, demolishing dozens of launchers and thousands of rockets and missiles. The military added that troops destroyed weapons storage facilities hidden within the mountainside.
IDF attacks Beirut
Troops also carried out operations in the Saluki area of southern Lebanon, finding and confiscating weapons along with dozens of rocket launchers that had been ready for use, the IDF said.
In the afternoon, the military launched a “large-scale” attack on Beirut hours before a ceasefire was expected to be announced. Twenty targets were struck across Beirut, including 13 in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold of support, in only two minutes.
These strikes put the IDF’s attacks on Beirut to well over 300 attacks throughout the war, almost all of them carried out since the ground invasion began in mid-September.
The targets included aerial defense units, an intelligence center, command and control centers, weapons storage facilities, artillery storage, and terror infrastructure sites.
The seven targets outside of Dahiyeh were parts of Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure, including headquarters, storage facilities, and branches of al-Qard al-Hassan Association, which Hezbollah uses to collect, store, and launder its funds.
The IDF has stepped up its attacks against AQAH as a means of disabling Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure, crippling their ability to purchase weapons.
The military also struck a Hezbollah commando cell in southern Lebanon through targeted raids. The cell was responsible for launching attacks on northern Israel, including Metulla.
During the operation, troops located, seized, and destroyed long-range anti-tank missiles, a vehicle equipped with a mobile rocket launcher, launchers aimed at northern communities, grenades, and military equipment left behind by Hezbollah. The IDF also launched attacks on around 20 rocket launchers, which fired on the Galilee and Haifa Bay area on Tuesday afternoon.
Overall, Hezbollah fired fewer rockets on Tuesday morning but had fired dozens by Tuesday night, seemingly in response to the attacks on Beirut.
On a different border, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced on Tuesday that he had won a years-long battle to secure the authority to build a new hi-tech border fence with Jordan to block smuggling, especially from Iran.
An announcement said that the fence, which will include a variety of cutting-edge sensors and cost tens of millions of shekels, would be constructed in “a number of months” but did not set a formal end date.
It was unclear at press time how Katz had overcome the alleged opposition of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – and possibly also from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who various defense officials have accused of preventing the idea from advancing in recent years.
The defense establishment has requested a budget to build the wall at various times leading into 2024 and again leading into 2025, and, until now, it has never been approved by the Finance Ministry and the government.
Former IDF central commander Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yehuda Fox had pushed for the fence for a long time and had even sent a formal letter of warning to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi about the dangers of failing to build a fence, before his retirement. Fox had pointed the finger at the Finance Ministry.
However, simply the fact that Katz has entered into office and Netanyahu may have wanted him to get a quick win to move the narrative on from Katz’s recently fired and highly respected predecessor, Yoav Gallant, could have been a factor.
Gallant had publicly pushed for the fence multiple times and had cited that years before, the government had already approved such a fence, only to allegedly be ignored by Smotrich and Netanyahu, even after the public became much more sensitive about border security after Hamas’s 2023 invasion.
Additionally, whereas Gallant had significant political pull with security-minded individuals, he had little to hold over Smotrich politically, or Katz, who is more of a long-time political maneuverer and may have had more to work with when it comes to Smotrich.
Smotrich also was one of the few officials who publicly praised Katz on Friday when the defense minister rescinded any new administrative detention orders against settlers carrying out terrorist acts against Palestinians, though this move was mostly criticized by current and former security chiefs as potentially empowering them instead.Katz may also give Smotrich a freer hand regarding building new outposts in the West Bank despite opposition within the military and from the US and Israel’s EU allies.
A spokesman for Smotrich rejected this narrative, saying he has always supported a new fence on the Jordan border.Pressed on previous statements Smotrich made in favor of the fence, or regarding why such a fence was not built until now, he pointed the blame back at the IDF, saying if it had really wanted to build the fence, no one could really have resisted.
Rather, the spokesman said, the IDF itself likely did not prioritize the issue given the intense war fronts in the North and the South.
The spokesman further noted a tour of the Jordan border in which Smotrich took part in mid-September with Netanyahu, where he discussed the importance of reducing smuggling and fence penetrations. Smotrich did not specifically mention a new fence in his public statement, but he did discuss budgeting new items to protect Israel in a positive way.
It was also unclear what changes would be made to the budget to account for the new spending. A spokesman for Smotrich said this sum was insignificant for the IDF and that it could easily shift funds from one or another project to cover it.
“We see a relentless and institutionalized Iranian effort to establish an eastern front against the State of Israel,” Katz said on Monday.
“I have decided to intensively promote” the fence, he added. “We are going to do it very quickly. We cannot lose in this campaign against the establishment of the eastern front, and we will have to do root cause treatment in some places to prevent the West Bank and the refugee camps from becoming a model for Gaza,” he added.
The Defense Ministry said it was starting to work on producing the new barrier material, as well as the intelligence collection and communication sensors and network that would be integrated into the new fence, along with mapping out the topography.
Defense Ministry Director-General Eyal Zamir said he directed Brig.-Gen. Eran Ofir and the ministry’s engineering and building department to coordinate the project.
It was unclear if the IDF would also increase its border presence with Jordan or rely more on technology – as it did with Gaza leading up to October 7.
Jordan has been traditionally viewed as a quiet and safe border since the peace deal was signed in 1995, and the nations even share high-level terror-fighting intelligence.
But Israel believes Iran is outplaying the Jordanians and sometimes succeeds at smuggling high-level weapons into the West Bank for terror purposes, a phenomenon that even started earlier in 2023 and has only gotten worse.
The IDF announced on Tuesday morning that Brief, who was wounded while fighting in Kfar Aza on October 7, succumbed to his wounds.
One of the fallen soldiers, Sgt.-Maj. Yona Betzalel Brief, 23, from Modi’in, served as a combat medic in the Duvdevan Unit and was seriously wounded in combat while fighting to rescue residents from Kfar Aza on the day of the Hamas massacre. He leaves behind two parents.
Brief’s family called on the public to attend the funeral.
“He deserves it. Everyone who knows him and those who don’t, come tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. to Mount Herzl to pay last respects to Yona; he did not give up; he fought for 14 months until the last seconds,” said the family.
The second fallen soldier, Sgt. Tamer Othman, was 21 and from the Druze village of Kafr Yasif near Acre.