Issues With Hezbollah

"We have no issue with the Lebanese people. We have issues with Hezbollah. They are our enemy."

"[The IDF was taken unawares on October 7, 2023, and will not lack alertness]. this is the strongest we've ever been."

"They're [Hezbollah] not defeated, but they're crushed."

"Lebanon is a kidnapped country, it's like a beaten spouse."

Lt.-Col. Jordan Herzberg, Israel Defense Forces (reserves)

 

"[Israel will continue to] weaken [Hezbollah]."

"We will continue to act, remove threats and weaken Hezbollah to protect the northern communities and the State of Israel."

"The Northern Command changed the security reality in the area and strengthened the security on the border."

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir

YNet News

In the battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces discovered the presence of 'fake homes' in Lebanese border communities, with the realization that Hezbollah had displaced the residents of those towns and taken possession of them as command posts overlooking northern Israel, and from which hundreds of rockets were fired down on the Israeli communities below where Druze and Bedouin villages and Jewish farming kibbutzim were located. Because of these attacks, the Israeli communities in the north, vulnerable to Hezbollah rocket attacks had to be vacated and moved to central Israel.

 

Inside those 'fake homes' were missiles and soldiers' rations and uniforms -- their purpose and presence reflected in settlements along the Lebanese border including the Christian towns essentially occupied by Hezbollah. The IDF's crushing assault against Hezbollah last fall in southern Lebanon resulted from the terrorist group's ongoing rocket attacks lobbed into Israel, where much of  southern Lebanon was colonized by Hezbollah. 

Israel's lack of vigilance that made their southern farming communities vulnerable to a massive Hamas attack of thousands of terrorists on October 7, 2023, was a lesson learned with a horrendous toll of human lives; a national trauma that can never fade, one that not only destroyed the lives of the immediate victims in a toll of gruesome savagery and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, but the kidnapping of another 251 children, women and men and foreign farm workers to be incarcerated deep in Gaza's tunnels, tormented, beaten and starved.

 

The experience with Hamas's infamy and brutality taught Israel not to hesitate any longer, and committing to opposing Hezbollah head on, first with a degree of caution when the first rockets were being shot into Israel on October 8, then with increasing pay-back ferocity beginning with a technological shock delivered through the medium of pagers triggering explosives, followed by the pinpoint targeting of Hezbollah leaders, and finally the full invasion of Lebanon to rout out the Hezbollah quasi-military, lethally armed threat.

Troops of the 146th Division operate on the Lebanon border in an undated photo issued on May 28, 2025. (Israel Defense Forces)

 

Two hours following the southern Israel Hamas invasion the IDF dispatched troops to the north to prepare for threats from Hezbollah whose arms caches were far superior to those of Hamas, and its operatives better organized and trained. And much good did it do them; in the final analysis, Israel's military's professionalism and determination far outstripping that of Hezbollah's. At the present time with Hezbollah's strength reduced by 80 percent, pushed back to the other side of the Litani River, its capacity to mount threats has been neutered.

 

What is left of the terrorist group has been removed 27 kilometres from the Lebanese border with Israel. Some of the 60,000 Israelis evacuated from the north over a year earlier are returning. Moving freely now in southern Lebanon, Israel is mopping up. "This is an Israeli village, Pro-Israel", declared a Bedouin leader in Arab al-Aramshe where over a dozen people a year ago were injured by a Hezbollah attack that hit their community centre. There was an initial rocket that destroyed the center, another hit a car and 30 minutes later a drone timed to inflict maximum damage on first responders.

 

Metres from the Lebanese border, Kibbutz Hanita established in the late 1930s, grows bananas and avocados. The kibbutz was targeted three times by Hezbollah in efforts to infiltrate Hanita last fall, aside from the continual rocket attacks. That threat has been well extinguished by the Israel Defense Forces. Abandoned for months, 60 percent of the population has now returned to Hanita. The Jewish, Druze and Bedouin towns still stand, damaged, but they will be reconstructed. "We are here. [Hezbollah] are not here. So I guess they made a mistake", said Yaki Shalom, head of community security. 

Lebanese army forces in Nabatieh; Israel helped locate and destroy dozens of Hezbollah weapons caches and positions     (Photo: Mahmoud Zayyat / AFP)