The current campaign in southern Lebanon is designed to neutralize the most immediate threats – cross-border infiltration and anti-tank missile fire – while containing long-range Hezbollah fire.
Where there are terrorists and rockets, there will be no homes and no residents, Defense Minister Israel Katz said this week, coining a pithy expression for a new Israeli security doctrine along its borders. Katz was referring to southern Lebanon, and he said the model being followed is the one that the IDF used in Rafah and Beit Hanun in Gaza: leveling the cities and moving out the residents to establish a defensive area and push away the threat to Israeli border communities. But there is a fundamental difference between the situation now in Lebanon and that in Gaza.
In addition to leveling Beit Hanun and Rafah and creating a buffer zone over roughly 50% of Gaza, where Israel now controls territory, Hamas retains only a limited rocket capability that it can fire at Israel. Plus, it knows that if it fires what rockets it still has, Israel will move in and hunt down both the launchers and the remaining manufacturing capabilities. So, not only are the Israeli communities on the border safe from October 7 massacre-style penetration and anti-tank missile fire, there is no real threat – at least right now – of high-trajectory fire either.
The same is not true in the North. Since March 2, when Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in retaliation for the IAF strikes against Iran, Israel has launched a significant operation in southern Lebanon – one that has included blowing up five bridges across the Litani River to prevent Hezbollah from moving men and materiel to the southern part of the country. Israel has demolished homes sitting close to the border – what Katz has referred to as “contact-line villages” – and has effectively removed the threat of anti-tank missile fire on Israeli communities in the North, a real danger prior to Operation Northern Arrow in 2024.
Yet Israelis in the north are continuing to suffer – not from direct fire by anti-tank missiles or snipers, but from drones and medium-range rockets being launched from north of the Litani. That the terrorist organization has succeeded in pounding the North relentlessly for three weeks shows that an assumption Israel held – that Hezbollah was severely weakened in 2024 – was overstated. (Read More)
