The Israeli military launched what it described as a “limited, localized” ground offensive into Lebanon on Monday in a bid to dislodge Hezbollah from the country’s south. The operations marked yet another escalation in Israel’s dramatically expanded campaign against the Iran-backed militant group.
In recent weeks, Israel also succeeded in decimating Hezbollah’s communication networks by detonating thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the group, as well as killed several members of the group’s senior leadership, including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday. Iran fired back on Tuesday, launching nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, further heightening concerns of an all-out regional war.
The Israeli military launched what it described as a “limited, localized” ground offensive into Lebanon on Monday in a bid to dislodge Hezbollah from the country’s south. The operations marked yet another escalation in Israel’s dramatically expanded campaign against the Iran-backed militant group.
In recent weeks, Israel also succeeded in decimating Hezbollah’s communication networks by detonating thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by the group, as well as killed several members of the group’s senior leadership, including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday. Iran fired back on Tuesday, launching nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, further heightening concerns of an all-out regional war.
Israel’s campaign in Lebanon has revealed its extensive penetration of Hezbollah, helping to redeem the reputation of the country’s intelligence services, which were left reeling by their failure to prevent Hamas’s bloody incursion on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel has “completely changed the game in their extensive intelligence” on Hezbollah, said Paul Salem, an expert with the Middle East Institute who is based in Lebanon. “This is a new type of warfare, and Hezbollah and Iran did not expect this,” he said, referring to both Israel’s level of intelligence on the group and the attacks on its communication devices. “They were preparing for the 2006 war [between Israel and Hezbollah], which was tanks coming across the border.”
The current outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah dates back to Oct. 8, 2023, when the Lebanese militant group began firing rockets into northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Since then, the two sides have traded near-daily strikes over the Israel-Lebanon border.
Yet experts say the unfolding campaign against Hezbollah and the intelligence underpinning it have been decades in the making and reflect hard-learned lessons from the 2006 war.
Israel launched the 2006 war in haste, hours after Hezbollah militants killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others in a cross-border raid. The country relied heavily on airstrikes against Hezbollah’s infrastructure, but by the fourth day of the war, the military had run through the list of 83 targets compiled by intelligence officials before the war. The conflict, which went on to see Israel send ground forces into southern Lebanon, ultimately lasted 34 days, culminating in a stalemate and the creation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was aimed at bringing an end to hostilities.
More than 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the war, with Human Rights Watch citing indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes as the cause of most civilian deaths.
The conflict was largely seen as an embarrassment for the Israeli government and prompted an extensive period of self-examination within the country’s military and intelligence services.
“They were extremely self-critical of the way they conducted that war,” said Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism and intelligence expert at the Washington Institute and the author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. “I think it’s very clear that they didn’t have enough intelligence as to what Hezbollah’s capabilities were.”
Israel’s military also undertook a reimagining of what a future war in Lebanon could look like, Levitt said.
In 2019, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unveiled a new operating concept known as the Momentum Plan. With Hezbollah regarded as the country’s primary foe, these revised plans envisioned the development of expansive target lists to allow for the rapid destruction of the group’s military capabilities in the event of a future conflict.
Those efforts have been on full display in recent weeks as Israeli forces have launched targeted airstrikes against high-ranking Hezbollah leaders. Extensive intelligence, for example, allowed Israeli forces to pinpoint, in real time, when and where Nasrallah would be meeting other top leaders in Beirut last Friday—leading to his assassination.
Israel’s strikes have “shown that they have a deep understanding of different parts of the organization and are able to target effectively,” said Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
In a little over a week, Israel has killed seven high-ranking Hezbollah commanders in addition to Abbas Nilforoushan, the deputy operations commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official with extensive experience in the Middle East, said former U.S. intelligence officials were “stunned” at Israel’s recent campaign against Hezbollah, a notoriously difficult target to penetrate. “Nobody thought they would be able to do this in such an impressive fashion,” he said.
Israel’s incursion into Lebanon on Monday marks the fourth time the country has invaded southern Lebanon—an area it also occupied for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000. Yet it has failed to dislodge the militant threat from across its northern border.
Under Resolution 1701, Hezbollah was supposed to disarm, and the IDF would fully withdraw from Lebanon. In practice, however, Hezbollah has continued to build out its weapons arsenal, which includes precision-guided munitions and drones.
“They built extensive, extensive infrastructure, tunnels, pillboxes, storage facilities, caches of weapons, rockets, and homes,” Levitt said. They “replenished their rocket arsenal, and then some—not only in quantity but, more importantly, in quality of weapons.”
The group also dug an extensive tunnel system that is thought to be even more extensive than that used by Hamas in Gaza. And although Israel has had rapid success in degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities in recent weeks, Lebanon has historically proved to be a quagmire. Hezbollah has also learned lessons from the 2006 war and gained significant combat experience fighting in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.
After 2006, Hezbollah was crafted to be “more of an army,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias.
Yet even with these expanded capabilities, Israel’s extensive breach of Hezbollah’s communication systems will likely hamper the group’s ability to coordinate a sophisticated and swift military response.
“Any complex military operation will necessarily require the use of communication tools of some sort,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program.
Israel’s breach has rendered Hezbollah “unable to plan such complex operations, and that means that any response that it is conducting or planning in the near future will be limited in geographical scope as well as sophistication,” she said.
Hezbollah is in a “very vulnerable” position, said Byman, the Georgetown expert. “There is a question of, can they respond coherently to this Israeli attack?”
