Just inside Lebanon, Israeli soldiers debate how far to go
AS ISRAEL’S invasion of Lebanon rages, amid mounting casualties and fierce missile and rocket exchanges across the border, one issue is becoming clearer: the extent of Hizbullah’s fortifications near the border, and the potential threat that they pose to Israel in the form of an October 7th-style attack from the north. But another looming issue is fundamentally unclear: how deep into Lebanon Israel’s invasion will go, and the extent to which it will devastate and destabilise the country.
Your correspondent was embedded with an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) unit on October 13th. A winding path down the forested mountainside was hard to follow. Only the occasional shrub hacked away with a machete and circles of paint on tree trunks revealed it was manmade. A slit in the earth revealed a subterranean world, one of hundreds of similar hideaways the IDF says it has uncovered since it began operating inside Lebanon on October 1st.
Israel is keen to show that these underground positions are part of a Hizbullah plan to invade Israel. It says Hamas had hoped that Hizbullah would join the assault on October 7th 2023. Hizbullah instead made do with a barrage of rockets on Israeli bases and communities near the border, starting on October 8th. Yet the scale of the facilities is ominous. The underground spaces were intended for thousands of members of the elite Radwan force. In one there were combat fatigues, boots and weapons, presumably for fighters who arrived in civilian clothes. The positions near the border contained explosive devices to breach the border wall a few hundred metres away.
If the nature of the Hizbullah threat close to the border is now more visible, Israel’s strategy is not so clear. It has devastated Hizbullah’s leadership in a series of air strikes, including the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. It has also destroyed much of the movement’s arsenal of long-range missiles that targeted central Israel. The IDF says its ground operations in Lebanon are limited to clearing the area immediately near the border of Hizbullah infrastructure, which may take only a few weeks.
Yet whether that diminishes Hizbullah’s capacity sufficiently is open to question. Israel’s goal is to re-establish deterrence and to allow the return of around 60,000 Israelis who had fled towns and kibbutzim just across the border following Hamas’s attack last year. But Iran’s most potent client militia still packs a punch. The bulk of Hizbullah’s force on the border, tens of thousands of men strong, remains just a few kilometres to the north. Every day small mobile launchers still fire hundreds of short-range rockets into Israel. On October 13th a Hizbullah drone hit an IDF training base 60km from the border, killing four soldiers and wounding dozens.
America and France, along with the Lebanese caretaker government, have been trying to reach a ceasefire agreement. Air strikes and fighting have, in the space of a month, killed over 2,000 people in Lebanon and displaced over 1m, according to the UN. But Israel is unlikely to be satisfied with a ceasefire alone, even if it includes a further retreat of Hizbullah forces.
The previous war in 2006 ended with a ceasefire deal that has never been enforced. UN Resolution 1701 prohibited Hizbullah from maintaining a military presence south of the Litani River, some 30km from the Israeli border. In the 18 years since neither the weak Lebanese Armed Forces nor the ineffectual UNIFIL peacekeeping force has managed to hold Hizbullah to the agreement. At another Hizbullah position, on a hilltop near the border overlooking the Israeli towns of Shlomi and Nahariya, an attack tunnel excavated in the rock is just a 100 metres away from a UNIFIL observation tower. “Digging this tunnel would have taken heavy mechanical equipment and would have been done in clear sight of the UNIFIL position,” says Brigadier-General Yiftach Norkin.
What will Israel do next? Conversations with IDF soldiers who have been in Lebanon bear out the claim that incursions are limited so far. For now, says one of them, “our operations are walking distance, no more than a couple of kilometres from the border.” But according to an IDF planner of recent operations against Hizbullah, “these are just layers of the onion we have peeled away. There are more.”
The four IDF divisions currently on the border are therefore ready for orders to advance deeper into Lebanon, using mountain roads and entering built-up areas. Their commanders are aware this will mean directly encountering or being ambushed by Hizbullah, resulting in much heavier fighting and casualties.
They seem willing to take the risk. Since the early 1970s Lebanon’s weak state has proved unable to prevent Palestinian and Shia militias from using its territory to launch attacks on Israel. Two wars in 1982 and 2006 and countless smaller operations in southern Lebanon over the years have proved that a military solution alone cannot ensure security on the border. This time, Israeli commanders claim they are not leaving unless and until a credible force is deployed in southern Lebanon to keep Hizbullah from coming back. Yet if that credible force never emerges, then the IDF faces the prospect of a partial occupation of Lebanon, far greater levels of civilian casualties and, possibly, another quagmire.■
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