Bulletins and News Discussion from September 23rd to September 29th, 2024 - The War In The North

Amal Saad, scholar of Hezbollah:

We have to stop calling Israel’s current military-security-terrorist campaign against Lebanon an escalation and start calling it a war. Not total war without ceilings yet, but war, nonetheless. Israel’s “shock and awe” offensive pursues short term tactical gains to make up for its strategic losses, while Hizbullah is aiming for longer term strategic objectives despite some tactical losses it has endured over the past week.

Israel's "fleeing forward" strategy comes with several unrealistic objectives, none of which are likely to be achieved:

• pushing Hizbullah to retreat from the border and end its support front with Gaza
• expel and displace people from South Lebanon to potentially use as a bargaining chip to return settlers to the North
• demoralise and break the resolve of Resistance fighters and the Resistance community
• significantly degrade Hizbullah’s military capabilities

The farcical claim that Lebanese households are harbouring cruise missiles is such a transparently absurd, lazy and crudely constructed Israeli fabrication that it appears to serve no purpose beyond being a tactic of blackmail to pressure Hizbullah into capitulating to Israel’s demands. Thus, when Israel claimed today that it struck a record 1,600+ “Hizbullah sites, mostly weapons stored within homes,” yesterday, this was an admission that it had surgically killed and displaced over 1600 families.

Since Israel’s mass terrorist offensive last Tuesday, Hizbullah’s strategy has been to escalate both horizontally, by widening the scope of attacks across Israel, and vertically, through intensified strikes and the introduction of new weapons, while holding back its advanced missiles for now. In doing so, it has extended the de facto security zone it established in northern Israel, reaching as far as Haifa, and increasing the number of displaced Israelis from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Hizbullah has limited its strikes to key strategic military targets, such as military installations and weapons factories, avoiding civilian targets and infrastructure, even as Israel persists in committing war crimes against Lebanese civilians. While Israel’s approach has been one of displacement and massacre, Hizbullah’s strategy has focused on displacement and paralysis. Its Resistance forces aim to weaken the IDF’s resolve and erode the resilience of Israel's home front through a strategy of combined military and economic attrition. Whether or not Hizbullah will escalate further by targeting civilian objects in Israel and risk unleashing Israel’s firepower against Beirut remains to be seen. This decision will likely depend on Hizbullah’s perception of a strategic need to retaliate rather than a desire for vengeance.

Hizbullah's ability to rebound from the pager attacks and the assassination of its senior commanders is a testament to its operational capability and its resilience in absorbing shocks to its command-and-control structure. Should Israel attempt a ground invasion of South Lebanon to create a buffer zone, Hizbullah will welcome it, as Nasrallah stated in his recent speech. This is where Hizbullah’s true strength lies: in close combat and preventing occupations. IDF troops would become sitting ducks for the Resistance’s advanced hybrid warfare tactics.