Hezbollah and its intentions and capabilities?

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Others noted that life in Israel is not especially tranquil. Jews die violently in Israel, too. And while the presence of so many Jews in one narrow place has created a dynamic country, it has also created a temptation for those inclined toward genocide. In 2002, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, reportedly said in a speech that if the Jews “all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

[According to] Badih Chayban in his 23 October 2002 article in The Daily Star, Nasrallah said that "if [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." Charles Glass believes that the quotation was likely a fabrication, citing other published accounts of Nasrallah's speech that had no reference to the anti-Semitic comment, and statements by the editor-in-chief of the Lebanese newspaper which published the quotes that questioned both the translation and the "agenda of the translator." Glass also wrote that a Hezbollah spokeswoman, Wafa Hoteit, denied that Nasrallah made the statement.

Hezbollah’s announced long-term objectives—the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon, and the elimination of the State of Israel—have not changed. But it interprets its founding principles with considerable suppleness, as when Nasrallah says he will not sabotage an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. Today it is not only prominent in Lebanese politics; it is also a major provider of schools, where the principles of Islam according to Ayatollah Khamenei and Hezbollah ideology are folded into a normal curriculum that is approved by the Lebanese government. It also provides an impressive range of social services such as hospitals and job training to the Shiite community.

In a country mired in patronage and back-room dealing, Hezbollah is respected for its lack of corruption. Although the party’s yellow-and-green flag—depicting a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov, posed against a globe—still advocates “the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon,” Hezbollah has recently said little about an Islamic state, and begun to build alliances across religious lines, particularly at the municipal level and in professional unions. In 1999, for example, Hezbollah members of Lebanon’s engineering syndicate formed a coalition with the Phalange Party, a rightist Christian group, and the National Liberal Party, both allies of Israel during the civil war. Another change that is impossible to ignore is the growing prominence of female activists in the party, a development that makes the party progressive by Islamist standards. “One would have to be blind not to notice the changes Hezbollah has undergone,” says Joseph Samaha, a secular Christian writer for the daily as-Safir. “Has Hezbollah tried to ban books or impose sharia? Not once. Their electoral program is [an] almost social democratic [one]. So we’re confronting a very different kind of Fundamentalist party.”

Moreover, as Daniel Byman, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, points out in his article “Should Hezbollah Be Next?” in Foreign Affairs, over the last decade Hezbollah’s military wing has concentrated most of its efforts on strengthening its defensive capacity; according to Byman, Hezbollah has not been linked to a “single attack on a US target” since the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers. In its guerrilla war with Israel in southern Lebanon, it targeted soldiers, not civilians, although it is said to provide both financing and training for Hamas.

'Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine,... The Jews who survive this war of liberation can go back to Germany or wherever they came from.' He added, however, that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be 'allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority.'

Israel is "closer to war" with Hezbollah and a possible regional war than ever, a senior Israeli official said.

Israeli and Hezbollah forces have traded fire across the Lebanese-Israeli border for over three months. The violence has killed about 15 Israelis, including both civilians and Israel Defense Forces members, according to The Times of Israel. The Hezbollah terrorist organization claims 171 of its members have been killed since Oct. 8, The Times of Israel reported.

On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces reported they struck Hezbollah infrastructure in at least five locations in southern Lebanon. No deaths were immediately reported. There have since been other strikes back and forth, including one Friday when the IDF said it carried out strikes that purportedly killed four members of Hezbollah, per The Times of Israel.

Israel's north is bristling with tens of thousands of regular troops and about 60,000 reservists, an IDF official told ABC News on Wednesday.

Nearly 100,000 Israelis have evacuated the country's northern towns and tens of thousands of Lebanese living near the border have fled the fighting, according to an Israeli government estimate. An estimated 76,000 Lebanese living along the border have fled, according to the International Organization for Migration. The Lebanese government has also accused Israel of trying to create a de facto buffer zone by destroying tens of thousands of trees to deprive Hezbollah of cover.

The Israeli official also told ABC News that during an Oct. 11 war cabinet meeting, most of the Israeli ministers, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, pressed for a preemptive strike on Lebanon, but that a couple of holdouts, including professional staff and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, dissuaded them.

"Israel has really increased the rhetoric and signals of war recently,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, while Hezbollah, "which used to respond to Israeli strikes person for person, city for city ... has tried to keep a lid on the conflict." She said both Hezbollah and its backer Iran understand a Hezbollah-Israel conflict could quickly explode into a regional war, dragging in Iran, the U.S. and the U.K., among other states and entities.

The Israeli official also said Israel has used back channels to communicate with the Shiite group's leader in Lebanon, Hasan Nasrallah. The official said he sent messages to Nasrallah through back channels warning Nasrallah he miscalculated when he began attacks on Israel's north on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas' Oct. 7 rampage in Israel that left about 1,200 Israelis dead. The officials said he warned Nasrallah not to provoke Israel, threatening massive retaliation.

Israel's assessment, said the official, is that Hezbollah is desperate to avoid a full-scale war with Israel, as are its Iranian backers. Hezbollah, and the tens of thousands of missiles it has trained on Israel, serve as an insurance policy against Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, said the official.

Hezbollah has said its immediate goal is to stop Israel's military activity in Gaza.

Israel, said the official, is hoping that U.S. Special Envoy Amos Hochstein, who has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy in the region, can broker a deal through the Lebanese government to pressure Hezbollah to pull back from the Israeli-Lebanese border in exchange for small Israeli territorial concessions along the border. But a cease-fire along that border with Lebanon, said the official, is primarily contingent on a cease-fire in Gaza.

“Nothing will be signed until there is a cease-fire in Gaza," the official said. "Even if it’s temporary, like a month-long pause, it would be very difficult to move on a diplomatic solution" while Israel is still focused on fighting a war against Hamas.

The undercurrents of Israeli life at this moment are darker than I’ve ever seen them: the daily photos of smiling young people, taken at some happy moment before their deaths in combat; glimpses of Israeli girls buried alive in Palestinian tunnels, a short drive from our border and utterly out of reach; a geriatric Israeli leadership uninspiring at best, deceitful at worst; devastation in Gaza; a wall of hate in the Middle East and in growing parts of the West.

But a central part of the dread in Israel is the possibility that the real war hasn’t even started.

Since October 7, most eyes have been on Israel’s south, but as the prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah reads, “the evil will come from the north.” The north means Lebanon, a beautiful, tragic shell of a country under the sway of Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” a fanatic Shia army funded and trained by Iran. This is the northern link of the Iranian encirclement of Israel, a strategy that often escapes Western news consumers accustomed to the fiction that the conflict here is “Israeli-Palestinian.”

When I spoke to one veteran military observer of the northern front, he used the term 10X-by which he meant that to imagine an all-out war with Hezbollah, take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by ten.

The Hezbollah strike force, known as Radwan, is bigger, better trained, and better equipped than the Hamas equivalent, the Nukhba, which was responsible for the carnage of October 7. If the Palestinians have fired 9,000 rockets since the beginning of the war, Hezbollah is thought to have an arsenal of 140,000—not including drones and mortars—with all of Israel in range. The army expects more than 4,000 launches a day, a scale Israeli civilians have never experienced. While this is going on, much of Lebanon will be laid waste by our air force and artillery. “If people truly understood what the war with Hezbollah will mean,” one officer told me this week, “everyone would be doing every possible thing in their power to find a diplomatic solution.”

Hezbollah has already lost more than 170 men in cross-border fighting since October 7, compared to 15 fatalities on the Israeli side. But what Hezbollah has already achieved, even without a full-scale war, becomes clear if you drive up to the border.

My parents live in Nahariya, a town on the Mediterranean coast about a two-hour drive from Tel Aviv and ten minutes from the Lebanon frontier. (The distance between Gaza and Lebanon is just 110 miles.) Things feel almost normal here: the local mafiosos convene at the usual café on the main drag; the Russian seniors conduct their weighty dialogues on the benches by City Hall. But as soon as you leave north on the highway, the cars thin out and many of the remaining ones are olive drab. There’s a new checkpoint on the road.

Past this point, nearly all Israeli civilians—more than 60,000 people along the length of the border—are gone, moved indefinitely to hotels and temporary accommodations. They’ve been displaced since October 7 and don’t know when they’ll return, a state of affairs unprecedented in Israeli history. A new report from welfare services warns of “signs of fatigue, impatience, and emotional instability resulting from forced communal living and the lack of private family space,” with rising rates of depression and violence. But you don’t need a report to imagine what it would be like to be stuck with your kids in a hotel room for months, with every other room occupied by people in the same position.

By their empty homes on the border ridge, tanks swivel their turrets on kibbutz lawns. Infantrymen bed down on the floors of deserted kindergartens. Some of the houses are blackened shells. Earlier this month, a grandmother and her adult son were blown up by a Hezbollah missile, a Russian Kornet, in their living room at the village of Kfar Yuval.

More than 200 square miles of civilian landscape in the north—2.5 percent of Israel’s territory, in addition to an area nearly as large that has been cleared around Gaza—has been evacuated and militarized, and the country effectively truncated by Hezbollah. For an Israeli citizen, Israel ends a few miles short of where it did on October 6.

Inside the evacuation zone, it feels like some kind of strange bomb has gone off, the kind that leaves the buildings intact but vaporizes the people.

In the town of Shlomi, I parked by the always bustling Market Warehouse supermarket, where I went shopping a few months ago. It was shuttered and dark in the middle of the day. So was Cedars, the local Lebanese-style restaurant. When the radio news came on, I heard the head of Northern Command say we’ve hit more than 150 Hezbollah teams and promise that his forces were “more prepared than ever” for war in the north. But from the eerie streets of Shlomi, deserted for more than three months, it didn’t feel like we had the upper hand.

Lieutenant Colonel Dotan is an officer in the 300th Brigade, responsible for the western sector of the border, the part near my parents’ town. (The army asked that I use only his first name.) The soldiers on the Lebanon frontier, almost all of them reservists, have spent the months since October 7 in the bushes and firing positions of the border, facing mortar shells, anti-tank rockets, drones—including one that hit the headquarters of Northern Command—and four cross-border infiltrations on foot, all of which were foiled. “Hezbollah is a serious enemy with advanced weapons,” he said. “They’ve done a lot of training, and not only in Lebanon.”

Israelis like Lt. Col. Dotan, who is 54, and me acquired a healthy regard for Hezbollah during our military service in a swath of south Lebanon that Israel held as a buffer after the Lebanon invasion of 1982, and which we called “the security zone.” At first, the zone was meant to protect people near the border from infiltrations by Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists. But as Iranian power rose the enemy became Hezbollah, which was set up and trained by the Revolutionary Guards. I served in the security zone as a radioman and platoon sergeant.

This overlooked war, which Israelis never even bothered to name when it was going on, was in fact one of the labs that produced what we now think of as “war”—not the movement of divisions across territory or battles between states, but armed groups operating in the ruins of failed states; hit-and-run attacks using IEDs, which Hezbollah did much to pioneer; suicide bombers, which Hezbollah introduced in the Middle East; the use of video as a propaganda weapon, which Hezbollah employed to great effect two decades before ISIS; and the exploitation of the civilian landscape to conceal the military landscape, with all of the consequences for innocent people.

What happened in the security zone isn’t discussed much in Israel but retains a hold on those of us who served there when we were young. We learned lessons about the limits of military power—but also about the limits of our ability to placate our enemies. Many of us also learned, in a strange way, to love Lebanon, which is a bewitching place. The echoes of that experience matter now because it’s men who began their service in the security zone as teenagers who now run the Israeli army, and who confront this new war as generals.

In May 2000, facing rising casualties and a protest movement led by the mothers of Israeli soldiers, the army abandoned the security zone overnight and pulled back to the border. This seemed to me, and to most Israelis, like the right thing to do, but it didn’t end the war. Hezbollah only grew stronger. We let it happen, as we did with Hamas in Gaza, because the alternatives seemed worse. An all-out war would have been so costly, both in lives and in the kind of disproportionate international frenzy that follows any Israeli operation, that we decided to live alongside Hezbollah and tell ourselves we’d contained them.

Fast-forward to early 2024, and Israel has a security zone again—except now it’s inside Israel.

Lt. Col. Dotan’s home is at a kibbutz in the evacuation zone. He remained there after the October 7 call-up, in uniform, while moving his kids farther south. From Hezbollah’s firing positions in the underbrush and the homes of Lebanese villages, the organization controls much of the fence and can fire at will. That means Israelis can’t go home unless the fighters are pushed back, far to the north, by diplomacy or by war. Allowing our civilians to return is the Israeli goal in the north, not destroying Hezbollah—which just isn’t possible, not only because of the group’s military power but because of the way it’s woven into the civil and political life of Lebanon.

Everyone would prefer diplomacy. Things are far too dark here already. But the distancing of Hezbollah by diplomacy was supposed to have happened long ago, by Security Council resolution, after the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, and proved meaningless. The Lebanese Army is too weak to control its own territory, and a United Nations peacekeeping force has been ineffectual.

I’ve been speaking to reserve soldiers, some still in uniform, others newly discharged from the alleys and booby traps of Gaza City. They know what it means if we go to war in Lebanon. But they don’t say “if,” they say “when,” and expect to be there in the spring.

“Israel's assessment, said the official, is that Hezbollah is desperate to avoid a full-scale war with Israel, as are its Iranian backers. Hezbollah,”
Where have we heard that one before? Even after October 7th still apparently overconfident.

"Desperate" may be too strong a word, but it seems to me that Hezbollah does want to avoid a full-scale war. Otherwise they would have struck a whole lot harder already.

Is Hezbollah really willing to use WMD's in occupied Palestine?

More importantly, do any of us have a right to judge them? The genocide of Palestinians has been going on for decades, it's reached a boiling point in the last four months, and after a certain point... well... At a certain point, you have to accept that the response to genocide is gonna look just as bloody and awful as the genocide itself. What right do I have to judge them, for their ruthless pursuit of justice? What right do any of us have?

Turnabout is, in this exceptional instance, fair play. The Soviets turned Germany's whole entire world upside down and we all agree they deserved it.

do any of us have a right to judge them?

An investigative report in the French newspaper Libération claimed Sunday that Hezbollah has been digging hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels in Lebanon for over 30 years, some of them reaching depths of 40 meters to 80 meters, using North Korean technology. The report noted that the tunnels are more complex and dangerous than those in Gaza, and the explosion of some of the tunnels could cause earthquakes or landslides.

According to journalist Laurence Defranoux, the digging began in the 1980s but accelerated in the late 1990s to accommodate members of the Shiite terror organization in case of an Israeli operation in Lebanon. The report claims Israel dropped white phosphorus bombs in southern Lebanon after the Hamas attack on October 7 to burn vegetation and expose the entrances to the tunnels. According to reports, 12 such shafts were discovered and destroyed.

A military source told the newspaper that the IDF uses motion detectors, optical fibers connected to the 4G network, robots, drones and other sources of information to map the tunnel network.

"The first tunnels were dug by Palestinian groups in the 1960s, and Hezbollah expanded the network in the 1980s and especially in the late 1990s," General Olivier Fasso, who served as a liaison officer for the UN in southern Lebanon and is now a researcher at the French Institute for Strategic and Operational Education (IFESO), told Defranoux. The tunnels developed mainly after the 2006 war, when Hezbollah sought a way to defend itself against an Israeli ground operation.

Tal Beeri, head of the Alma Security Research Center’s research department, told the Times of Israel in January the institute exposed civilian companies dealing with agriculture and construction for the Shiite sector in southern Lebanon, under the supervision of a company called Jihad Construction. These tunnels were dug by Hezbollah operatives manually using air hammers or hydraulic equipment, which is quieter to operate.

It is estimated that each worker can dig about 15 meters per month. The Lebanese environmental organization Green Without Borders has also been included on the U.S. sanctions list, accused of providing a "cover" for digging underground warehouses and tunnels for storing weapons.

The report on the tunnels was published by Alma as early as 2021. The report indicates that some of the tunnels pass through strategic points in southern Lebanon and connect them to Beirut and the Beqaa Valley.
The length of the tunnels is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers long, with one of the largest at 45 km in length. Some of the tunnels are very narrow and intended for infiltrating terrorists into Israel, while others are wider and intended for Iranian ballistic missile batteries such as the Fateh-110.

In the report published in 2024, the Alma center reported on tunnels filled with explosives dug beneath strategic points, which have remained intact and unused for several years. An explosion in these tunnels could cause earthquakes and landslides, a tactic used since the early days of World War I.

Israel has already discovered six such tunnels in 2018 along the Blue Line border (running between Rosh Hanikra and Mount Dov), with a depth of 40 meters. According to Fasso, who visited these tunnels, "it’s reasonable to assume that Israel located them using acoustic and seismic sensors. It would take weeks to dig through the rock to insert cameras inside."

"They were still in the being constructed then," Fasso also said. "We saw drilling machines, electrical cables, and ventilation systems, and it was possible to walk upright in them. They were destroyed by the military by using either explosives or via sealing them with concrete.”

Hezbollah buys land and turns some of them into so-called nature reserves. We believe they set up training camps or weapon caches in them and probably included shafts leading to these tunnels. Israel, which was present in the area, managed to limit this spread until 2000, but Hezbollah reorganized from 2006 and had another 18 years to arrange this territory," Fasso noted.

An Israeli military source told Libération that the IDF, as well as military experts and strategists, oppose operating in Lebanese territory, as they may "encounter a well-prepared underground army”

A colony of fire ants is more dangerous than Hamas. If you are an American citizen then you're statistically far more likely to be killed by an IDF soldier or Mossad agent than any Hamas or Hezbollah fighter. It sounds like Hezbollah are using the same kind of guerilla tactics that saved Vietnam from falling to western rule, so, good for them, I hope that works out.