Where to in the North?

Tactical Advantage or Strategic Victory?

This has been a week of spectacular tactical victories for Israel putting Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran, on their hind legs as they struggle make sense of a new situation.  Nasrallah is left without his senior commanders after Israel killed most of them in one attack in a building in Beirut.   Around 2,000 fighters were either killed or seriously injured in the beeper-walkie talkie attacks.    Slowly but surely, Israel is eliminating the house-armories that Hezbollah has built up over the last 20 odd years.  Hezbollah actually paid rent to people in order to house ready to launch missiles and other arms and ammunition in their homes.  Videos, taken mostly by Lebanese of a 3-4 story house show explosions going on for a minute or more after the Israeli Air Force hit the house with a bomb.   There are videos of missiles going haywire as they were “launched” due to Israeli bombs.    Reports in Israel are that in some towns and villages 66-75% of the homes have Hezbollah arms stored there. Israel has warned anyone who houses Hezbollah weapons to leave their homes and its vicinity.

Hezbollah is suffering and is losing main assets but, if the pre-war assessments are correct then even the 50% figure that the IDF is giving for destruction of Hezbollah long range  missiles and rockets would still leave them with between 50-100k in their arsenal.  Israel also seems to be able to use GPS blockers along with its regular missile defense to disable some of  these long range rockets but even a 90% success rate could cause major damage to the country.  Hezbollah is down, but not out.

Iran, interestingly, has been holding back.  Hezbollah is their major investment in the world of terrorist organizations and the thought has always been that they will never let it be destroyed. A few rockets have come from Iraq but that is mostly symbolic support from the lesser Iranian proxies.  This can be for a number of reasons.  Either Israel is exaggerating the damage done to Hezbollah, Iran is deterred by Israel’s destructive capabilities, they are waiting until they have the proper forces in place in Syria before they attack or they have just decided to stay out unless Israel invades with ground forces since territory lost is worse than commanders lost.

Iran, from Israel’s perspective, has to be considered a wild card and it should be prepared for their involvement on very short notice.   Pre-emptive attacks seem out of the question as Israel needs American tacit approval. 

Where is Israel going now?  What will it do with these tactical victories and what are its goals?

The best place to look are two statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu and one long statement by the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.  

Starting with Halevi, he made a very forceful speech from the Tel-Nof Air Force base in which he said that Hezbollah is suffering from all the Israeli attacks and if they don’t learn from these we will hit them again and again until they do learn.   To me it seems that this means Israel will continue with its forceful air attacks until Hezbollah says ‘uncle’ and agrees to some political arrangement. 

Netanyahu spoke earlier in the week and spoke about the harsh messages being sent to Hezbollah.  The “sending of messages” is the October 6 way of doing business and it seems that that is the direction he wants to take.   There has been an unconfirmed report by reporter Ariel Kahane that stated that the IDF presented three alternatives to Netanyahu for the fight in Lebanon and he rejected all three and demanded a fourth – which presumably is what they are doing now.  What those other three were – if they were more or less aggressive or included ground troops or not, we do not know. 

What is more cryptic though is a statement to the security cabinet, quoted by Amit Segel, which stated that the goal of the Israeli attacks in Lebanon is to de-link Hezbollah from Gaza.   Hezbollah has stated that they are only firing upon Israel in order to support Hamas in Gaza.   But assuming that Israel would not agree to the status quo regarding placement of Hezbollah forces even if they stopped shooting, what can this mean?  What does Israel have to gain from this goal?  While I understand that destroying Hezbollah’s capabilities could lead to Iran abandoning Hamas and put them in a precarious situation but that does not seem to me what Netanyahu is talking about. 

Whatever the last statement means, it seems that the goals of the current tactical moves are tactical instead of strategic.   At the most it seems that the “message” that both Netanyahu and Halevi want Hezbollah to get is that it is not worth their while to continue shooting at Israel. Maybe it means agreeing, again, to UN Resolution 1701 and their withdrawal to north of the Litani.  However, how can that be policed if there are so many Shiite towns and villages south of the Litani and most of their homes are also ammo dumps or missile launchers?   Will the UN or the French army go house to house and confiscate ammunition, weapons and cruise missiles? 

Three weeks ago I would have thought that the best Israel can do, even in a military operation, would be to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani and control the area to the south at least until it could be demilitarized.   Now, after these tactical victories one would think that the destruction or at least the reduction of Hezbollah’s armed force to irrelevancy would be possible.   That can’t happen from the air no matter how many electrical devices the Mossad manages to explode.  

There are three areas that Israel will need to deal with if it sends in ground forces (besides the obvious issues with dealing with a ground invasion) and that is what to do with Gaza, how Iran itself would react including the threat from Syria and the threat in  the West Bank.   Taking the West Bank first, Israel has been involved in intensive operations there since October 7 as it seems the intelligence there missed the amount of armed terrorists and the type and quality of their weapons.   Israel has used infantry and special forces in attacks to capture and kill terrorists.  Only recently they have started to use air-power in the form of drones to destroy buildings that are known terrorist centers.  Tanks have not been engaged and the thought has been that if things get worse or if they start firing rockets from Jenin, Tulkarm or other Palestinian cities then a more intensive operation would have to be executed. 

Regarding Iran, they can attempt another missile barrage like they did in April. That they might have learned from their failures and this time will have the full Hezbollah arsenal at their beck and call.   Of course, if they become a nuclear power then the game changes entirely.

Syria is a more complicated situation.  While on the one hand Russia and Iran have teamed up to back the Assad regime and are cooperating there and on other fronts – arms to fight Ukraine for example – it is not clear that Russia is interested in Israeli jets, artillery and tanks threatening the Assad regime after they have spent so much effort propping it up.  We wrote in the past that Iran would love to replace Assad with a true Shiite leadership (Assad is an Alawite which, while closer to Shiite than Sunni Islam, is still not pure enough for the Ayatollahs in the Islamic Republic).  Assad himself may not be too keen to risk what he has for the purpose of saving Hezbollah (even though without Hezbollah at the start of the Syrian civil war he would no longer walk amongst the living).  This is especially so if Russia does not support a war against Israel.  If Assad and Russia are in the game that means close to half a million armed fighters there including tanks, artillery and infantry as well as a mediocre air force (I think we can make the assumption that Russia will not participate in a war against Israel unless Israel sought to destroy their naval and air force bases).    Even bad fighters will be a challenge to Israel if it has most of its troops in Lebanon.  If the Syrian army steps aside and lets Iranian proxies attack the Israeli Golan that will pose a challenge but an easier one for the IDF.

Regarding Gaza, Israel is still battling there, destroying tunnels and killing terrorists on a daily basis.   The hostages are still there and without military pressure the chance of getting them back goes to zero.   Israel will have to keep enough troops, at least 2 divisions and air power dedicated to Gaza.

So, what to do?  Does Israel use these incredible tactical victories to further limited  goals or does it leverage them in an attempt to rid Lebanon of Hezbollah once and for all? 

We have to remember that after each diplomatic settlement with Hamas or Hezbollah they come back stronger and better armed.  There may be “quiet” for 5 months or even 5 years but this “quiet” is being used by them to increase their power.  Killing their military leaders in a time of war is a great asset but killing them 5 years before the next war seems irrelevant as new leaders will be appointed.   The same has to do with targeting ammunition.   Do the strikes that Israel did in Syria over the last 10 years that targeted Iranian arms to Hezbollah mean that now Hezbollah is less well armed?   I doubt it.   But destroying their weapons during a war has a great effect on the war effort.

The Israeli press is reporting that everything is going according to plan in Lebanon, but great generals, great leaders, jump on opportunities when they present themselves and change plans when necessary.