Israel has a tricky decision regarding Hezbollah. What will she do?
Israel has the same plague as does the United States: former high-ranking military officers who get analyst gigs on television. Some are apoplectic that a war with Iranian-backed Hezbollah will be a disaster, with destruction of Israel’s electrical grid, lots of buildings in Tel Aviv and Haifa damaged, and the populace living in bomb shelters until further notice. Others, like Benny Gantz, claim that Israel can destroy Hezbollah’s military capabilities in a few days and finally be done with this headache on the northern border. So who is right?
There is no question that Hezbollah is a serious military outfit. They claim to have 100,000 rockets, some percentage of which have accurate guidance. They have, unfortunately, been using suicide drones and anti-tank missiles to attack Israeli positions, with the result being both dead and injured soldiers and civilians. Their fighters are experienced, with much practice in Syria against the civilians there. Iran is its sugar daddy and provides money, weapons, and logistical information. Their tunnels are supposed to be significantly more sophisticated than those of Hamas. Their leader is a very wily and intelligent rat; he has run the organization since his predecessor received a free helicopter-fired missile courtesy of Israel.
Hezbollah came into being after Israel’s first war in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Palestinians, via the PLO, do what they always do: ruin any place they come to in numbers such as Jordan and later Lebanon, where 15 years of civil war ensued after the arrival of Arafat and his men. Do you now understand why no Arab country wanted to take in a single Gazan refugee? The Palestinians used southern Lebanon as a firing and attack point against northern Israel. Katyushas and terror attacks made life there difficult. Israel entered Lebanon, and in one of the worst decisions ever, Arafat and his guerillas were allowed to leave Lebanon by boat. Israel should have sunk them. Israel set up the South Lebanese Army and Hezbollah was a response to both the local army and Israeli presence. Infamously, Israel cut and ran under Ehud Barak in 2000, leaving many of its allies behind to suffer their own fate. A second Lebanon War in 2006 was inconclusive.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether Hezbollah was supposed to be an active part of 10/7 or just joined in afterwards in a somewhat weak show of support for its Hamas “brothers.” When there was a ceasefire for hostage release, Hezbollah immediately announced its own ceasefire. It has also stated that when there is a cessation of fighting in Gaza, it will stop as well. On the other hand, it has threatened to fight any war that Israel enters with it and has posted videos of potential targets in Haifa and elsewhere, made from multiple drone incursions apparently over some period of time. So does Hezbollah want to fight or not? To date, by its own admission, Hezbollah has lost over 350 members, from foot soldiers to very high-ranking leaders. Israel has been attacking infrastructure as well as human assets throughout the country.
My impression is that neither side really wants a full-out war but apparently there will be one anyway. Israel has a very serious problem: 50,000-60,000 residents of the most northern towns have been staying in hotels in the center of the country for nine months. They will not go back if there is any reasonable chance that Hezbollah can attack them or pop up through tunnels, some of which residents for years claimed to hear being built under their feet. The IDF was much more concerned with Hezbollah rather than Hamas coming down and taking multiple towns, thousands of hostages and holding Israeli land for weeks or months. A recent story claimed that if there is some diplomatic solution to the standoff in the north, half of the residents will not go home. Who can trust Hezbollah any more than Hamas to honor a piece of paper? So Israel needs its residents safely back home. But how?
Because of this latter point, Israel has almost no choice but to undertake total warfare with Lebanon once Gaza is considered militarily under control. What Hezbollah does not admit is that Israel has already mapped (and published) the positions of its rocket storage sites as well as other positions of critical communications and infrastructure. Also, nobody is going to make protests for Lebanon. The whole Western system was geared for supporting the Hamas rapists and murderers; they cannot turn on a dime and start yodeling about genocide in Lebanon. Israel is supposed to receive 50 advanced F-15 fighters in the very near future. Israel will use its hundreds of fighter/bombers with tanker support and drones to pummel Hezbollah into submission. Beirut will become the world’s most beautiful parking lot, and Israel will not have to supply food, water, or electricity. It will not have to worry about civilian casualties as in Gaza. Those who claim that it will be over quickly might be overly-optimistic but I don’t think that Israel plans to move troops into southern Lebanon. They will bomb Hezbollah and Lebanon relentlessly. The large Christian population hates Hezbollah for its control of the government and its destruction of Lebanon's economy. If Christians join the fight against Hezbollah, that may make it a two-front war for the terror group. Israelis might lose electricity; Hezbollah stands to lose everything—including its control of Lebanon.
I still do not think that either side wants a full-blown war, but the issue of Israelis living safely in northern communities cannot be ignored. There was a US proposal to move Hezbollah around 10 kilometers from the border, but it was rejected by Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah. Many residents of the south have returned home, while others wait for destroyed communities to be rebuilt. The north has to be quiet, and now that Hezbollah has chosen to join genocidal Hamas, it has probably signed its own death warrant. Hezbollah is professional and well-armed. That said, it will be reduced to rubble from the air, and Israel will not risk soldiers on the ground to hold land in Lebanon or dance around concern for civilians. If Israel can defang Hamas and Hezbollah as fighting forces, then it will have done much to blunt Iran’s malignant influence in the region. In the future, it will have to either destabilize or destroy the Iranian regime.