Israel’s northern border is ablaze
RED BANNERS that hang across bridges above the main roads leading north in Israel contain one word: “Abandoned”. It is repeated by the few residents remaining in the near-deserted towns and villages near the border, which have been under fire for eight months from Hizbullah, the Iran-backed movement that controls much of Lebanon. It is also an accusation levelled at the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, which has failed to find a way to stop the barrage of missiles and drones that Hizbullah began firing on October 8th, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, recently vowed to continue the attacks, insisting that his group is a “support front” for Hamas.
“We’re like ducks in Nasrallah’s shooting-range,” says Gidi Sayada, a winemaker from Safsufa, a village that has not been evacuated. “My daughters have been sleeping in the safe-room of our house for the past eight months.” Hizbullah has shelled mainly targets close by the border and military bases. Israel has responded with targeted strikes on Hizbullah people, in some cases deep inside Lebanon.
Though neither side has unleashed anything near its full arsenal, the cross-border fire has increased since mid-May and last week reached its most intense level since the start of the war. Using data from a NASA satellite system and a machine-learning algorithm to track war-related fires, The Economist has counted the number of strikes occurring on both sides of the border (see map and chart). In the week ending on June 16th there were 640 such strikes, 254 of them on June 13th alone.
Though a measure of calm has returned in recent days, perhaps due to Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday, the fighting has upended lives in Lebanon and Israel. Early in the war Israel evacuated people living within 2km of the border. Some 60,000 have yet to return. Across the border in southern Lebanon more than 90,000 have also fled.
In numerical terms, Israel has caused more damage to Hizbullah, killing over 300 of its operatives during this period as well as around 100 civilians; 28 people have been killed in Israel. On June 12th an Israeli air strike killed Taleb Sami Abdallah, a senior Hizbullah member in command of its forces in southern Lebanon. But these strikes have not lessened the desperation among Israelis in the north.
The continuing bombardment and the evacuation of civilians in Israel are leading to increasing calls for Mr Netanyahu’s government to act more forcefully against Hizbullah. “It’s hell here right now, so we may as well have an all-out war with Lebanon,” says Danielle Levy, an exhausted police volunteer from Safed. This is a sentiment widely heard in the region. The political pressure on Mr Netanyahu is particularly intense because many of the civilians most affected are among his core supporters. In Kiryat Shmona, the largest border town, three-quarters of the electorate voted for Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s party, or its allies in the last election, but it is now impossible to hear a good word said about the prime minister. “We’re totally abandoned and the government are a bunch of muppets,” says Shimon Maimon, a retired painter. The prime minister is also being pressed by his far-right coalition partners to escalate. But for now the leaders on both sides want to avoid all-out war.
Still, with the fighting in Gaza being scaled down, some Israel Defence Forces (IDF) units have been redeployed to the north where they are preparing for a ground offensive against Hizbullah. On June 18th the idf announced that its general command had “authorised operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon”. In such a scenario Israel would seek to occupy a “security zone” that would put northern communities out of range of some of Hizbullah’s missiles. But a ground incursion would almost certainly trigger a fiercer response from Hizbullah, which would probably launch long-range missiles that could hit targets deep within Israel. To prevent this, Israel might strike the missile-launchers and Hizbullah’s headquarters first, many of which are in civilian areas. Heavy civilian casualties in both Lebanon and Israel are a certainty in such a war.
Israel’s American allies have been urging it to hold fire. Amos Hochstein, an adviser to President Joe Biden, has been trying to craft a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah. Mr Netanyahu seems open to this idea, though he is less keen on agreeing to stop fighting in Gaza.
Israeli generals insist that the IDF can fight on two fronts. But they admit that doing so would drastically stretch the army. “To take over southern Lebanon we’ll need a lot more troops, but meanwhile most of the units are in or around Gaza,” says one reserve commander who has been on exercises preparing for such an operation. “The plans feel incomplete.”
The IDF would like to pause the war against Hamas, preferably through a ceasefire that would also secure the release of the 120 hostages still in Gaza. But a truce in Gaza would probably prompt Hizbullah also to stop firing. That would leave Israel’s leaders with the dilemma of whether to start a new war to push the group away from the border or to allow it to remain in a position to threaten Israeli communities.
The consensus within Israel’s security establishment is that war with Hizbullah is inevitable. But increasingly the view among the generals is that it should not take place soon. Major-General Yitzhak Gershon, who served recently as the second-in-command of the northern front, published an article on June 13th saying that although he had been in favour of attacking Hizbullah immediately on October 7th, he had since changed his mind.
“Israel should be headed to a diplomatic arrangement, not war, at this time,” he wrote, adding that its strategy in the past eight months had amounted to a “mad run with the head into a wall”. The country, he argued, needs a ceasefire in both Gaza and Lebanon in order to take stock, elect a new government and regroup. “We should choose the timing [of any war],” says one veteran intelligence analyst, “and not be dragged into it by Nasrallah.” ■
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