Third Lebanon War - Israeli Strike North
In 2006 Israel's then army chief General Dan Halutz boasted that the military would target civilian infrastructure in Lebanon with the aim to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years." In 2024, analysts maintained that there is a possibility of a limited ground invasion or – the more likely scenario – an expanded aerial war in which Israel targets areas that are Hezbollah strongholds, as well as Lebanese infrastructure. By June 2024 there did not apper to be a significant Israeli troop build-up on the border with Lebanon.
Israeli leaders have warned Hezbollah against launching a full-scale attack on Israel, saying it could suffer a similar fate to besieged Gaza. Israel will likely employ what it calls the “Dahiya Doctrine” – named after a civilian neighbourhood and a Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut – which dictates the use of disproportionate force that targets civilian and military infrastructure. A war against Hezbollah could lead to civil strife in Lebanon, which has been passing through economic and political crisis. The migration of mostly Shia Lebanese citizens to majority Christian and Sunni cities in the north may trigger sectarian tensions. Critics and opponents of Hezbollah may also explicitly blame the group – and its perceived supporters – for dragging the already beleaguered country into war.
A report published 03 July 2024 in The Economist magazine highlights the major changes since the July 2006 war on Lebanon. Hezbollah is much better prepared for an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon compared to Ukraine's previous preparations against Russia in 2022, the British weekly magazine The Economist reported, citing an Israeli officer.
The officer pointed out that the locations that the Israeli military believed to be "well camouflaged" were repeatedly discovered and struck by Hezbollah, adding that the only reason the Israeli army has not suffered huge casualties in the North is that its forces "remain out of sight." Tamir Hayman, former Israeli military intelligence chief, considered that if Israel wants to "create a change," it must "destroy all of Hezbollah's system." "And right now I think it cannot be achieved," he indicated.
A former senior Mossad official stressed that the Israeli military is fatigued from Gaza operations and requires at least six months to prepare for another war. According to the report, there have been four major changes since the July 2006 war on Lebanon.
The first is that the Lebanese Resistance group has acquired a wide range of "Iranian-designed kamikaze drones." It noted that, despite many of the Israeli tanks and armored vehicles being equipped with active protection systems that can counter anti-tank missiles, these drones "target weaker points on the top of vehicles."
The second change is that Hezbollah has developed its ground forces, with its elite Radwan force, "intended to strike as far as 20km into Israel." Third comes the combat experience that Hezbollah fighters gained fighting alongside Russian air forces in Syria. Additionally, the report highlighted that Hezbollah's firepower has "become more accurate," as the Lebanese group routinely uses drones to identify direct rocket targets and sends reconnaissance drones to identify targets for highly accurate attacks, according to the Israeli officer. Hezbollah's air defenses have also improved, which might limit the Israeli military's freedom of maneuver, having seven of its large drones shot down by the Lebanese group since the beginning of the fighting.
In the same context, the report pointed to the "matter of scale," where the officer said that Israeli generals "talk optimistically" of a limited ground maneuver to capture a "security zone" to prevent Hezbollah from targeting Israeli settlements along the border with Lebanon. He recalled that the Israeli military needed seven divisions to invade Lebanon in 1982 and used four divisions in the 2006 war. However, today, the Israeli military is preoccupied with the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and at least one of its units dispatched to training bases in the North for drills, in settings simulating Lebanon, has already been sent back to fight in Gaza. "I don’t see where they’re going to bring enough soldiers from," one Israeli reservist who took part in the exercises was quoted as saying.
Touching on the effects of a potential war, The Economist cited an unpublished report prepared by more than 100 experts and Israeli former officials convened by Reichman University and finalized in October. The report warns that Hezbollah might launch 2,500 to 3,000 rockets daily, which is 25 times the rate of rocket fire in 2006, for three consecutive weeks, making it the largest continuous rocket barrage in history. It pointed out that even if US destroyers offshore could destroy larger rockets, Israeli defensive systems would be overwhelmed in many areas, resulting in heavy casualties estimated at tens of thousands.
Brigadier General (Res.) Dr. Meir Finkel, Head of Research at the Dado Center wrote in 2022 "The IDF can and should win such a war, and it will do so successfully provided there is an understanding of what will be considered a victory - in terms of harming the enemy, the duration of the war, and the expected cost of it....
After the Second Lebanon War, a feeling of "sourness" developed, which was the result of the gap between expectations and actual performance. This feeling also accompanied some of the operations in Gaza in the last two decades. This feeling is directly related to the limited nature of these conflicts, which are not fundamentally intended to overwhelm the enemy, and paradoxically precisely in these conflicts the public expects a high achievement and a low price....
Finkel focused on "a situation where, due to an escalation on the northern border, which can happen for a variety of reasons, Israel will decide that it is embarking on a large-scale war or an all-out war in Lebanon aimed at removing the Hezbollah threat for many years.... Israel's goals will be to remove the threat of Hezbollah for many years (a decade or more). ... before the Second Lebanon War ... a key element in the failure of preparations for war was the definition of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization that tries to kidnap soldiers and carry out terrorist attacks abroad, and that the worst-case scenario given such an event would be an escalation into a day of battle. Hezbollah was not associated in the IDF before the war with the word war, and therefore not with the scenario of war, and therefore no preparations for war were made against it.... in a future war against Hezbollah there will be cases in which, despite an overall Israeli superiority, there will be situations in which Hezbollah's force will be able to stop the advance of the IDF in certain areas for many hours. The Israeli force will be forced to retreat, regroup and attack again. When this happens, we should not be surprised."
"I would argue that the desired achievement is about 3,000 enemy dead (from counter-air fire and land battles), and about 12,000 wounded (this is the basic ratio between the two types of casualties). If this is the case, then it will be about half of the enemy's total strength, whose size was estimated in 2016 at about 20 thousand fighters (Harel and Cohen, 2016), and for the purpose of the article I will refer to its current size as an army numbering about 30 thousand fighters."
Colonel (Ret.) Yaakov Amidror, wrote that the IDF's first achievement should be: "Destroy most of Hezbollah's military capability, so that the threat The major response to Israel's action to curb the organization's re-strengthening process will largely disappear, not because Hezbollah will deter or change its mind, but because the ability to carry out the threat will cease to exist" (Amidror, 2021, p. 34).
The "War Month" exercise held in 2022 practiced an escalation leading to an all-out war. It may be possible to rely on its length as a standard for the correct length of such a war. General (Res.) Amidror described the war in Lebanon in two phases. The first - a tree fighting phase that will last for about two to three weeks, to occupy a large area and take control of it, while the air force is engaged in a wide-ranging activity to destroy targets all over Lebanon. The second - a prolonged phase that may last for several months, in which the regular army forces will systematically destroy infrastructure and military personnel of the organization that were not destroyed in the first phase. During the war month exercise in the spring of 2022, when the IDF announced that on the ninth day of the war (in the exercise) the damage suffered by the home front reached: "80 sites of destruction [damaged high-rise buildings with people trapped under the rubble], 300 dead on the front and in the home. Thousands on the Lebanese side" (Zitoun, 2022).
Finkel concluded "The claim that "it is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization" is true in its conceptual-philosophical aspect, but it is completely wrong in the practical aspect. Palestinian terrorism was defeated after a series of operations that began with the "Protective Wall", although the ideas of Palestinian nationalism were not abandoned."
Israeli military leaders say that the war on Lebanon will be a gradual process and will not reach its peak all at once, while the American intelligence community warned that Israel will not be able to phase out the war if it breaks out, and will not be able to control the gradualness, but rather it will escalate very quickly.
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