Lebanese army gives way as Israel chases Hezbollah into Lebanon
Israel said its troops had launched raids inside Lebanon on Tuesday, starting its widely expected ground operations after two weeks of devastating airstrikes against Hezbollah’s command structure and weapons sites.
The Israeli military said the operations in Lebanon began on Monday night and involved paratroops and commandos from the elite 98th division, which was deployed to the northern front two weeks ago from Gaza where they had been fighting for months. It said its air force and artillery supported ground troops engaged in “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon villages that posed “an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel.”
A Lebanese security source told Reuters that Israeli units had crossed into Lebanon overnight for reconnaissance and probing operations. Lebanese troops also pulled back from positions along the border, the source added. A Lebanese army spokesperson did not confirm or deny the movement.
Lebanon’s army has historically stayed on the sidelines of major conflicts with Israel, and in the last year of hostilities has not fired on the Israeli military. The operation into Lebanon represents an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iran-backed militants that now threatens to suck in the U.S. and Iran.
Local residents in the Lebanese border town of Aita al-Shaab reported heavy shelling and the sound of helicopters and drones overhead. Flares were repeatedly launched over the Lebanese border town of Rmeish, lighting up the night sky.
Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah said on Tuesday it had targeted Israeli troops across the border in Metula twice with artillery and rocket fire but made no mention of Israel’s launch of ground operations into Lebanon. An Israeli strike in Lebanon early on Tuesday targeted Mounir Maqdah, commander of the Lebanese branch of the Palestinian Fatah movement’s military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, according to two Palestinian security officials.
The strike hit a building in the crowded Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near the southern city of Sidon, the sources said. It marked the first strike on Lebanon’s largest Palestinian camp since cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel broke out nearly a year ago.
In Syria, three civilians were killed and nine others injured in an Israeli airstrike on the capital Damascus, Syrian state media said on Tuesday citing a military source. Israel’s military said it does not comment on foreign media reports.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has ramped up raids since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel’s southern territory on Oct. 7, 2023.
Hamas killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages in its assault on Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Israel in response launched a massive assault on Hamas in Gaza, reducing most of the Palestinian territory to rubble, displacing most of its 2.3 million people, and killing more than 41,300 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Israel’s ground invasion into Lebanon follows its deadly detonation of booby-trapped Hezbollah pagers, two weeks of airstrikes, and its killing on Friday of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which dealt the group one of the heaviest blows in decades.
The intensive air strikes have eliminated several Hezbollah commanders but also killed about 1,000 civilians and forced one million to flee their homes, according to the Lebanese government.
Overnight, strikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, a security source said. A Reuters reporter witnessed a flash of light and a series of loud blasts about an hour after the Israeli military warned residents to evacuate areas near buildings it said contained Hezbollah infrastructure south of the capital.
In the past 24 hours, at least 95 people had been killed and 172 wounded in Israeli strikes on Lebanon’s southern regions, the eastern Bekaa Valley, and Beirut, Lebanon’s health ministry said early on Tuesday. Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem on Monday said “the resistance forces are ready for a ground engagement” adding that Hezbollah continued to fire rockets as deep as 93 miles into Israeli territory.
“We know that the battle may be long. We will win as we won in the liberation of 2006,” he said, referring to the last big conflict between the two foes.
The White House and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon, but on Monday, President Joe Biden called for a ceasefire.
“I’m more worried than you might know and I’m comfortable with them stopping,” Biden told reporters when asked if he was comfortable with Israeli plans for a cross-border incursion. “We should have a ceasefire now.”
Israel last week rejected a proposal by the U.S. and France calling for a 21-day ceasefire on the Lebanon border to give time for a diplomatic settlement that would allow displaced civilians on both sides to return home.
The UN special coordinator to Lebanon Jeanine Hennis wrote on X: “Amid the firing of missiles and rockets, dropping of bombs, and conduct of raids, the machinery of war fails to address the underlying issues. And thus the risk of dooming another generation to the same fate is very real, yet again.”
Hezbollah may be one of the most well-armed non-state groups in the world, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It has stockpiles of missiles and rockets and its fighters have combat experience in Syria.
Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in recent weeks have appeared to weaken it.
Still, because Hezbollah is a “mass organization” at the center of “a huge network of all sorts of civilian institutions” within Lebanon, destroying it could be extremely difficult, according to Gilbert Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“It is possible, certainly, to weaken them militarily, even weaken them a lot, but that happened already in 2006, and they were able to reconstitute their force at a much higher level,” Achcar said of Israel’s last incursion into the country. As long as the Iranian regime is able to continue funding the group, “Hezbollah will carry on, and they will find ways to reorganize, as they did every time,” he added.
In its 2006, Israel “was met with fierce resistance, much stronger than it expected,” said Achcar. Since then, Israeli forces have not conducted any incursions “without heavily bombing, very intensively, the regions they want to attack and flatten(ing) anything that is there so as to take as little risks as possible,” he said.
This time around, the strategy could have dire consequences for Lebanese civilians, Achcar said.
An Israeli invasion could worsen a situation already made catastrophic by the country’s economic collapse in late 2019, and “a background of political crisis in a country that has been now, for a long time, without a president, without new elected institutions, without a legitimate government.”
“Lebanon is really on the edge of the abyss,” he said.
