How Israel could invade Lebanon and wage all-out war with Hezbollah

Even before Tuesday’s exploding pager attack on Hezbollah, war seemed to be looming on the Israel-Lebanon border.

Benjamin Netanyahu began the week promising to return 60,000 evacuees to the north of the country.

After the pager blasts Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, announced a “new phase” of the conflict.

Maj Gen Ori Gordin, head of Israel’s northern command, said he and his troops are “determined to change the security reality as soon as possible”.

So will there be a wider war? And what, if anything, could it achieve?

Days before the pager attacks, Israeli’s security cabinet updated its official war goals to include the return of around 60,000 residents to parts of northern Israel they were evacuated from following Hezbollah’s attacks in the aftermath of Oct 7.

Hezbollah has linked its rocket attacks to a ceasefire in Gaza. So in theory, there is a diplomatic solution: stop the war in Gaza, and the problem will go away.

That is clearly the solution that Israel’s key allies, including the United States and Britain, prefer. They have publicly and privately urged restraint and warned against derailing peace talks.

But rhetoric from Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant, the pager attacks, escalating air strikes, the redeployment of troops from Gaza to the north – and The Telegraph’s conversations with serving and retired IDF officers – suggest an Israeli action in Lebanon is a question of when, not if.

Three options

There are three options for Israeli planners to consider: air strikes; a massive, Gaza-style invasion; and a “limited” incursion to set up a “buffer zone”.

The first is, of course, the safest. Mr Gallant, the defence minister – no dove, even by Israeli standards – is said to have argued for this option.

It does not commit troops on the ground, avoids the risk of a quagmire, and would not require committing ground forces while the main effort in Gaza (and, increasingly, the West Bank) is still under way.

Compared to Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1982, or even its last in 2006, aerial targeting technology has made a quantum leap.

On Friday morning, Israel said its strikes had destroyed 100 Hezbollah rocket launchers. But, as the 11-month war in Gaza shows, even modern, relentless air strikes cannot win a war alone.

In the end it is the infantry who must engage the surviving enemy to take and hold ground.

“There is no scenario where we can bring citizens back to the towns along the border, if Hezbollah is on the border,” said Brig Gen Amir Avivi, former IDF deputy commander of the Gaza Division and founder of Israel Defense and Security Forum.

“This means that if Hezbollah doesn’t willingly withdraw, according to UN Security Council resolution 1701, Israel is left with no choice but to do a ground incursion.”

Opposing forces

But any ground invasion is fraught with risk and overshadowed by the memory of previous bloody, and ultimately unsuccessful, adventures north of the border.

In the semi-desert landscape of Gaza, Hamas has had to tunnel into earth and sand.

Hezbollah’s tunnels are dug into the solid rock of imposing mountain valleys, said Maj Mashiko Giat, an IDF special forces soldier who fought in Israel’s last incursion into Lebanon in 2006.

“So the infrastructure in Lebanon is pretty solid and very, very hard to break into. And that was one of our dilemmas, how we’re going to basically attack all this infrastructure that was built from 1982 to 2006,” he said.

Hezbollah, he added, is a country mile ahead of Hamas in both numbers and military prowess.

Independent observers believe Hezbollah can field between 20,000 and 40,000 fighters.

It is believed to have amassed an arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets and missiles, many of them advanced Iranian designs able to fire deep into Israel.

And it will have massively expanded the minefield, ambush sites and tunnel systems that caused Maj Giat and his troops so much bother 18 years ago.

“They act like an army and we would treat them like an army,” he said.

“They have undergone training, including in Iran, and they have a lot of combat experience, more than they had in 2006, because they fought in the civil war in Syria on the side of the Assad regime.

“We are not going to meet a militia, we’re going to meet a proper force.”

Opposing this force is the IDF’s 98th Division, an elite paratroopers and commando outfit, and the 179th and 769th armoured brigades, which have already been deployed to the border and are waiting for orders.

Mr Netanyahu must now decide what those orders will be. There are two options.

Invasion

A full-scale, Gaza-style invasion, fighting house-to-house and tunnel-to-tunnel in pursuit of the total destruction of Hezbollah and its (supposedly) enormous arsenal of rockets, holds an emotional appeal to Israelis who would like to secure the northern border once and for all.

But the IDF has still not destroyed the much less formidable foe of Hamas after 11 months of war in the much smaller territory of Gaza.

Trying to do the same to Hezbollah would mean repeating the bloody 1982 march on Beirut. Military casualties would be high, civilian ones probably much higher, and the patience of key allies like the United States tested to breaking point.

And if progress in Gaza is anything to go by, fighting building-to-building for years, and suffering heavy casualties.

The war that began on Oct 7 last year is already the longest in Israeli history. How much longer the economy, and public and international sentiment, can take is now a serious consideration.

Buffer zone

So that leaves the so-called third option. A more “limited” incursion to establish a buffer zone.

Even that would be a major operation.

It would take “several divisions”, or around 30,000 troops, to clear southern Lebanon, said Assaf Orion, a retired brigadier general and former head of the strategy division for the IDF general staff.

That would drop to one or two divisions – between 10,000 and 20,000 troops – to occupy and hold afterwards, he said.

It is not exactly clear how deep that zone would be.

Maj Giat said he understood the objective of any ground offensive would be to clear and hold a buffer-zone 6 to 12 miles deep.

Brig Gen Avivi said the goal would be to “destroy them in South Lebanon and push them north of the Litani river”.

That is only a rough guide: The Litani is 18 miles from the border at its mouth but further inland comes within little more than a mile of the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan heights.

Brig Gen Avivi insisted such an operation would be more than manageable. “Lebanon is not as densely populated as Gaza, and the towns and villages in southern Lebanon are pretty empty. This is not going to be as complicated as what we saw in Gaza.

“I think it can take a few weeks because it’s going to be very, very intensive. And also there will be huge pressure inside Lebanon on Hezbollah to stop, because, obviously, Lebanon is going to pay a heavy price here.

“I would assume that the war is not going to be long.”

Memories of wars past

But the ghosts of the 1982 and 2006 wars loom over any talk of fighting in Lebanon.

The first, also directed at creating a buffer zone, reached Beirut but ended in public disillusionment over high casualties.

It also catalysed the birth of Hezbollah.

The 2006 war, triggered by the Hezbollah abduction of three Israeli soldiers on the border, lasted 34 days and claimed the lives of 121 Israeli soldiers, an estimated 250 Hezbollah fighters, and around 1,200 civilians.

After it was over, a public inquiry concluded that Hezbollah had successfully resisted a superior force; that the war had been entered into without any clear strategy; and that the ground offensive came late, was not completed, and did not achieve its goals.

Another way?

Maj Giat says he’s not worried about repeating the same mistakes this time.

Lessons have been learned, the soldiers have been training hard for the operation, and there will be a greater emphasis on speed, aggression, and precisely identifying and then pursuing targets than in 2006.

“We know what we are doing,” he said.

The infantry battle is one thing though.

It is not clear how, if at all, Hezbollah’s anticipated massive rocket barrage would be dealt with. Another salvo of missiles and drones could be expected from the group’s allies in Syria and Iran.

And there is a strange dichotomy in Israeli rhetoric, and possibly thought. On the one hand, brash confidence in the IDF’s superiority on the battlefield. On the other, a recognition that this is a much more serious and difficult problem than such bravado would suggest.

The bottom line is that from the Israeli point of view, none of the options of invasion are good ones.

And Mr Netanyahu, for all his rhetoric, is considered by observers to be a cautious and even indecisive politician.

That’s led some to conclude that war is not inevitable.

Amos Yadlin, former Israeli military intelligence chief, told The Telegraph: “I am not sure either side wants a full-scale war and there are other ways for Israel to damage Hezbollah. We’ve seen that so far.”

There are those who argue the bloodshed of recent days – the device attacks, air strikes on the border and in Beirut – are meant to achieve something else.

Could the prospect of a full-scale war force Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah chief, to tell his fighters to cool down the rocket attacks?

Could he and his patrons in Iran could even lean on Hamas to sign a ceasefire in Gaza on Israeli terms?

If that is the Israeli strategy, it is a high-risk one.

And it is not – yet – bearing fruit.