Pushing Hezbollah a few miles back from the frontier could make a big difference for Israelis.
After a long campaign in Gaza against Hamas, the Israeli military has begun “limited” operations in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah and says it is prioritizing the return of civilians to northern Israel.
Having started its long-planned offensive against Hezbollah on the night of Sept. 30, the IDF is seeking to dismantle the Iran-backed terror group’s “capabilities and infrastructure that pose a threat to Israeli civilian communities in northern Israel.”
Israel’s leaders recently added to their list of goals for the war the safe return of the tens of thousands of Israelis who had to evacuate the north after Hezbollah began their near-daily rocket attacks on Oct. 8 last year.
Israel’s war against the Hamas terrorist group, and now Hezbollah, was in response to the former’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 Israelis were massacred, thousands more injured, and 250 taken hostage.
The ground war then heated up as Israel reported its first fatality of the offensive—Capt. Eitan Itzhak Oster, a 22-year-old commando—and those of seven more soldiers, in two separate fights with Hezbollah fighters.
In one, IDF commandos were reportedly ambushed near Hezbollah tunnels in Odaisseh, a Lebanese village that sits on the Israeli border.
How Far Do They Need to Go?
Hezbollah had joined in attacks on Israel after Hamas’s devastating Oct. 7 attack.Suspecting that Hezbollah had planned a similar attack from the north, Israel evacuated 43 communities with about 60,000 residents within five kilometers of its northern border. Thousands more who lived further from the border evacuated as well, fearful of longer-range rockets.
A year later, they have not been able to return home. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under pressure to show some progress, added the return home of Israel’s northern residents to the country’s formal war goals and now mentions it in his public statements as often as he does the return of the remaining hostages from Gaza.
One factor in delineating the evacuation zone is the anti-tank weapons that Hezbollah fires at structures, including homes, Sarit Zahavi, an Israeli intelligence analyst specializing in the northern frontier, told The Epoch Times.
Unlike missiles fired in a ballistic arc—which allow time for air-raid sirens to warn Israeli residents to seek cover—anti-tank weapons fly in a flat line. They can strike within seconds, with no time to warn civilians, Zahavi said. They can also strike targets up to five kilometers away.
Zahavi said clearing a border zone of that depth would be “a doable objective,” one that would allow Israeli evacuees to return home. It would also allow Netanyahu to show progress toward that goal as the first anniversary of Oct. 7 approaches.
Clearing the zone, she said, was possible now in combination with the IDF’s other recent achievements, including its successful targeting of Hezbollah’s leaders and destruction of so much of its weapon stockpile. Long-time Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed on Sept. 27 in an air attack on an underground bunker as he met there with top staff.
She hedged away from saying that the IDF needed to push exactly five kilometers into Lebanon.
“The terrain is not flat, and I don’t know what [the] IDF planned. We should look at the principal clearing of the areas next to the border from any Hezbollah activity that can threaten our civilians living next to the border,” she said.
“Anti-tank missiles are part of that, but also, it is important to make sure that if terrorists are coming next to the fence, we will be able to see them before they infiltrate and massacre our families.”
The IDF and national leadership have repeatedly used the word “limited” to describe the latest phase of its war with Hezbollah, code-named Operation Northern Arrows.
“IDF troops have begun limited, localized, and targeted raids against Hezbollah terror targets in the border area of southern Lebanon,” the IDF wrote on Sept. 30.
“The Israel Defense Forces is conducting limited and targeted raids along Israel’s northern border against the threat Hezbollah poses to civilians in Northern Israel,” the IDF wrote on Oct. 1.
“These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.”
Posting about the 98th Division, which includes elite paratroopers and commandos that have figured prominently in the Gaza fighting over the past year, the IDF also posted on Oct. 1 that its soldiers “have been preparing for limited, localized, targeted operations in southern Lebanon that began last night [Monday].”
The IDF noted their repositioning to the north from the battlefield Gaza. “They moved north and are now operating in the northern arena after making the necessary adjustments for fighting in Lebanon,” it wrote.
