’Very challenging’: Israel faces Hezbollah in tricky terrain

A fire rages in the southern Lebanese area of Marjeyoun along the border with Israel on October 12, 2024, amid ongoing cross-border clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters. (AFP)
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Updated 12 October 2024
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’Very challenging’: Israel faces Hezbollah in tricky terrain

  • After “Operation Litani” against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1978, Israeli troops invaded four years later for the wider-ranging “Peace for Galilee” operation, again targeting the PLO
  • Mounir Shehadeh, a former Lebanese government coordinator for the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL, told AFP that Hezbollah had a substantial stockpile of anti-tank missiles and other weapons

PARIS: As Israel undertakes its fourth ground offensive in southern Lebanon in 50 years, its troops again face rocky terrain mined with explosives and full of hiding places that previous generations of soldiers have battled over.
After pounding Gaza for nearly a year, Israeli forces began “targeted” ground raids on September 30 intended to push back Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon who have been bombarding northern Israel over the last year.
The decision has sparked a debate about the wisdom of opening up a second front and presents Israeli soldiers with a different challenge to the flat, densely packed urban environment of Gaza.
Jonathan Conricus, who fought in Lebanon and served as an Israeli liaison officer to United Nations peacekeepers from 2009-2013, said the terrain was “vastly different” and forms a combat zone that is “many times larger.”
“The topography is very challenging for an invading force and convenient for an enemy like Hezbollah,” Conricus, a former military spokesman who now works for the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, told AFP.
“The terrain also allows multiple ways for a defending enemy to use anti-tank missiles and IEDs against a conventional army,” he added, referring to improvised explosive devices.
Miri Eisen, who served as an Israeli intelligence officer in Lebanon, remembers the steep hills and ravines she encountered during Israel’s 1978 invasion.
“As soon as you cross the border, you go down drastically and up drastically,” Eisen, who now works at the Institute for Counter Terrorism at Israel’s Reichman University, told AFP.
“There are boulders that can be used as hiding places and there are areas that you can’t just drive through with vehicles. It is also hard to walk through,” she recalled.
Analysts believe Hezbollah constructed an intricate network of underground tunnels cut deep into the hills, with openings hidden inside homes among other locations.

Israel’s multiple wars in Lebanon have always had the same objective — dealing with a security threat on its northern border — but have produced highly contested results.
After “Operation Litani” against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1978, Israeli troops invaded four years later for the wider-ranging “Peace for Galilee” operation, again targeting the PLO.
That invasion saw Israel briefly lay siege to Beirut, and left about 20,000 people killed by the end of the same year. Israeli troops ended up occupying the south of the country for 18 years.
During this period, the Shiite Islam Hezbollah group emerged under the supervision of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
After Israel’s withdrawal, a series of violent incidents involving Hezbollah followed, culminating in another ground offensive and war in 2006.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated in an air strike on September 27, proclaimed a “divine victory” in that 2006 war which was widely seen as a failure for Israel at a cost of 160 lives, mostly soldiers.
The 33-day war also killed 1,200 mostly civilian Lebanese people.
In his final speech days before his killing, Nasrallah warned his arch-enemy about the dangers of trying to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
“This security belt will turn into a quagmire, a trap, an ambush, an abyss, and hell for your army if you want to come to our land,” he warned on September 19.
So far, after nearly two weeks of combat, 14 Israeli soldiers have died, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Experts say both the Israeli army and Hezbollah have transformed since their last open confrontation.
Israeli military planners pored over the setbacks of 2006 to learn lessons.
“The IDF has been following the threat from Hezbollah for many years and it has had the additional past 11 months to prepare while they were fighting Hamas (in Gaza) before turning to Hezbollah,” said Eisen.
Israel escalated an air campaign against Hezbollah on September 23, targeting senior figures and weapons dumps as it sought to degrade the organization before the ground offensive.
The escalation came just after booby trapped communication devices used by Hezbollah detonated, wounding thousands.
The bombardment has killed more than 1,200 people, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, while the International Organization for Migration says it has verified around 690,000 internally displaced people.
Since 2006, Hezbollah is known to have benefitted from years of weapons transfers from Iran, including ballistic missiles, while many of its troops are battle-hardened after fighting in Syria to support the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Rabha Allam from the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, an Egyptian research institute, stressed that Hezbollah operated in “a decentralized way” like a guerilla army, enabling it to fight back in the south.
“The assumption that striking the (group’s) leadership and communications would paralyze the movement was wrong,” she told AFP.
Mounir Shehadeh, a former Lebanese government coordinator for the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL, told AFP that Hezbollah had a substantial stockpile of anti-tank missiles and other weapons.
“This is what it is heavily depending on to stem the advance of (Israeli) tanks. It is not using them yet. It is relying on ambushes, traps and explosives against advancing forces,” he said.
 

 

 


Hezbollah chief says tens of thousands of ‘trained’ combatants ready to fight Israel

Updated 3 sec ago
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Hezbollah chief says tens of thousands of ‘trained’ combatants ready to fight Israel

“We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants” ready to fight, he said

BEIRUT: Hezbollah chief Naim Qasem said Wednesday his group had tens of thousands of combatants ready to fight Israel, in a speech marking 40 days since his predecessor was killed in a strike.
“We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants” ready to fight, he said, adding that nowhere in Israel was “off-limits” to the group’s attacks.

Iran plays down importance of US election, voices readiness for confrontation

Updated 1 min 57 sec ago
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Iran plays down importance of US election, voices readiness for confrontation

  • Arab and Western officials tell Reuters Trump may reimpose “maximum pressure policy” through more sanctions on Iran
  • They fear Trump may also empower Israel to strike Iranian nuclear sites and conduct assassinations

DUBAI: Iranians’ livelihoods will not be affected by the US elections, government spokesperson Fatemeh MoHajjerani was reported as saying on Wednesday after Donald Trump claimed victory in the presidential vote.
Arab and Western officials have told Reuters Trump may reimpose his “maximum pressure policy” through heightened sanctions on Iran’s oil industry and empower Israel to strike its nuclear sites and conduct assassinations.
“The US elections are not really our business. Our policies are steady and don’t change based on individuals. We made the necessary predictions before and there will not be change in people’s livelihoods,” MoHajjerani said, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
The Revolutionary Guards did not directly react to Trump’s claimed electoral victory but said Tehran and its allied armed groups in the region are ready for confrontation with Israel.
“The Zionists do not have the power to confront us and they must wait for our response... our depots have enough weapons for that,” the Guards’ deputy chief Ali Fadavi said on Wednesday, as Tehran is expected to respond to Israel’s Oct. 25 strikes on its territory which killed four soldiers.
He added Tehran does not rule out a potential US-Israel pre-emptive strike to prevent it from retaliating against Israel.
In his first term, Trump re-applied sanctions on Iran after he withdrew from a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and world powers that had curtailed Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for economic benefits.
The reinstatement of US sanctions in 2018 hit Iran’s oil exports, slashing government revenues and forcing it to take unpopular steps, such as increasing taxes and running big budget deficits, policies that have kept annual inflation close to 40 percent.
Iran’s national currency has weakened at the prospect of a Trump presidency, reaching an all-time low of 700,000 rials to the US dollar on the free market, according to Iranian currency tracking website Bonbast.com.


Iranian Revolutionary Court sentences four individuals to death over charges of spying for Israel

Updated 23 min 16 sec ago
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Iranian Revolutionary Court sentences four individuals to death over charges of spying for Israel

DUBAI: Four people were sentenced to death by a revolutionary court in northwestern Iran over charges of spying for Israel, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Wednesday.
Fars said three of the defendants — whose nationalities it did not give — were accused of helping Israel’s spy agency Mossad move equipment used in the 2020 assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Fakhrizadeh was viewed by Western intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons capability. The Islamic Republic has long denied any such ambition.
The Jewish Chronicle newspaper reported in February 2021, citing intelligence sources, that Fakhrizadeh was killed by a one-ton gun smuggled into Iran in pieces by Mossad agents, both Israeli and Iranian nationals.
Israel declined to comment at the time of his killing and on Wednesday an Israeli government spokesman said in response to the Fars report: “We never comment on such matters. There has been no change in our position.”
Fars said the fourth defendant sentenced to death was linked to another unspecified espionage case.


Rescuers pull 30 bodies from a building in central Lebanon hit in an Israeli strike

Updated 06 November 2024
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Rescuers pull 30 bodies from a building in central Lebanon hit in an Israeli strike

  • The airstrike hit the building in the town just north of the port city of Sidon, an area that has not been regularly targeted by Israeli military operations

BARJA: Lebanese rescuers pulled 30 bodies out of the rubble after a late night Israeli strike on an apartment building in the town of Barja, Lebanon’s Civil Defense service said Wednesday as the Mideast wars press on with no signs of abating.
It remained unclear if there were any survivors or bodies still trapped under the rubble following the Tuesday night airstrike, which came without warning. There was no statement from the Israeli military and the strike’s intended target also was unknown.
Barja, a town just north of the port city of Sidon in central Lebanon, has not been regularly targeted so far in the conflict.
“Something pulled me hard, and then the explosion happened,” said Moussa Zahran, who was at home with his wife and son when the building was hit. He said he couldn’t see but started digging through the rubble until he found his wife and son — alive but injured — and pulled them out. Both are still in the hospital, he said.
Another building resident, Muhyiddin Al- Qalaaji, said he was at work when the strike happened and heard the news from his wife who called him frantically.
“There are many dead and injured,” he said as he carried out what he could salvage of the family’s belongings on Wednesday morning.
Civil defense official Mostafa Danaj said some of the neighbors have reported there are still people missing.
Israeli forces and the Hezbollah militant group have been clashing for more than a year, since Hezbollah started firing rockets across the border soon after the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel sparked the ongoing war in Gaza in October last year.
The war on the Lebanese front has substantially escalated since mid-September, with Israel launching a massive aerial bombardment and ground invasion.
On Wednesday, sirens blared across northern and central Israel, including in the populous metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, as Hezbollah launched 10 rockets toward Israel. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue services said there were no reports of injuries.
A large portion of a rocket slammed into a parked car in the central Israeli city of Raanana. Rockets also struck an open area near Israel’s main airport, Israeli media reported, though the airport said flights were operating as normally.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue services said there were no injuries. Israeli police said they arrested 40 people during protests on Tuesday night when the demonstrators blocked Israel’s main highway in Tel Aviv.
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a surprise announcement that sparked protests across the country. Gallant’s replacement is Foreign Minister Israel Katz, a longtime Netanyahu loyalist and veteran Cabinet minister.
While Netanyahu has called for continued military pressure on Hamas, Gallant said military force created the necessary conditions for at least a temporary diplomatic deal that could bring home hostages held by the militant group.
The Israel-Hamas war began after Palestinian militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and abducting 250 others, taking them back to Gaza as hostages.
Israel’s military response in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 people, Palestinian health officials say. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but say more than half of those killed were women and children.
Since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah erupted in 2023, at least 3,000 people have been killed and some 13,500 have been wounded in Lebanon, about a quarter of them women and children, the Health Ministry reported.
Hezbollah continues to send dozens of rockets and drones toward Israel. The projectiles have killed 72 people in Israel so far, including 30 soldiers, according to Netanyahu’s office.
A report by Lebanon’s crisis response unit said that 361,300 Syrians and over 177,800 Lebanese have crossed into Syria between Sept. 23 and Nov. 1, to escape the fighting.
Another night of protests was planned across Israel on Wednesday evening, over Gallant’s firing.
Netanyahu and Gallant have repeatedly been at odds over the war in Gaza but the prime minister had avoided letting go of his rival before the US presidential election on Tuesday.
By midday Wednesday in the Middle East, Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States in a remarkable political comeback.


Hezbollah says it fired missiles at military base near Ben Gurion Airport

Updated 06 November 2024
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Hezbollah says it fired missiles at military base near Ben Gurion Airport

BEIRUT: Hezbollah said on Wednesday that it fired missiles at a military base near Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main international gateway.
Israeli media reported on Wednesday that a rocket had landed near the airport. The airports authority said the airport was continuing to operate as usual.