The current reality along the Lebanese border is highly problematic, and Israel is biting its lip. But judging by the way things look, it is only a matter of time before Israel will be forced to change its approach.
In recent days, Hezbollah has been waging the kind of war it believes can challenge the IDF. Several weeks ago, around the time the ceasefire in Lebanon was announced following American pressure, itself driven by Iranian pressure, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said the organization was returning to guerrilla warfare against the IDF.
Qassem and several other senior Hezbollah figures are currently the engine driving the fighting against Israel. Here, it can be said plainly that Defense Minister Israel Katz has proven to be little more than a loudmouth, issuing threats again and again without anything to back them up. He promised to send Qassem to meet Hassan Nasrallah and others, but for now, he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are keeping him alive. They are refraining from using the IDF to strike Hezbollah’s “safe haven cities” in Lebanon.
According to testimony from IDF commanders in Lebanon, Hezbollah is constantly sending forces from northern Lebanon to fight the IDF in the “yellow zone” in the south of the country. Katz, incidentally, boasted that the IDF had destroyed the bridges over the Litani River, thereby cutting off the south from the rest of Lebanon. IDF officials say the water level in the Litani reaches only knee height, meaning that for terrorists, it does not really matter how they cross the river, over the bridge or under it. But fine. Why ruin the victory narrative?
Hezbollah is trying to turn the tables and change the narrative
Hezbollah is certainly taking hits. The IDF has killed more than 2,000 of its terrorists and operatives. It has destroyed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homes belonging to Lebanese civilians who turned their houses into terrorist facilities. The pressure on Hezbollah inside Lebanon is significant and real. Hezbollah is trying to turn the tables and change the narrative. It is doing so with the cheap, simple, and readily available weapons it has, while also amplifying its activity by documenting its attacks, in what appears to be psychological warfare aimed at sowing fear on the Israeli side.
This, incidentally, is not new. This is how Hezbollah operated in the 1990s, when it carried out attacks against IDF forces in the security zone. The video Hezbollah released yesterday, showing a strike on an IDF air defense battery on the northern border over the weekend, an incident in which three soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously, is an example of the organization’s tactics.
But in recent days, Hezbollah has also come to understand something else. Unlike in the 1990s, it is now increasing pressure on the border line and on the communities along the confrontation line. It is building the equations it loves so much: residents of southern Lebanon are evacuated from their homes, while residents of northern Israeli border communities are forced to live under an intense routine of missile and drone attacks.
Yesterday, a figure from the confrontation line described the distress of the area’s residents, a hardship that illustrates how Israel has fallen into Hezbollah’s trap. The organization has shifted to a long war of attrition, whose sole purpose is to harass and disrupt Israel’s security routine along the northern border.
“We are in an impossible situation. The whole country is living normally, and here we are at war. They fire at the communities in the evening or at night, and then expect residents in the morning to send their children to school or go to work, as if there are no security threats. The children here are living in an insane reality,” said a resident of the confrontation line, who is also a senior official in one of the northern local authorities.
The current reality along the Lebanese border is highly problematic, and Israel is biting its lip. But judging by the way things look, it is only a matter of time before Israel will be forced to change its approach. Explosive drones are not rain falling from the sky, and the currently hollow declarations by Defense Minister Israel Katz and his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, must be backed up fully and genuinely.
The IDF will be required to carry out intensive operations in all of Lebanon’s safe haven cities, eliminate the organization’s leadership, strike its drone arrays forcefully, and create a new equation in which Hezbollah is weakened and vulnerable, and is no longer capable of waging a campaign against the IDF, not even a guerrilla war. Incidentally, that was the original objective of Operation Roaring Lion.