Hezbollah Has Already Opened the Northern Front

The buffer zone has moved south of the border, and the IDF faces daily mortar attacks from Hezbollah.

By Jonathan Spyer, WSJ     Dec. 21, 2023

The Dvoranit outpost on the Israel-Lebanon border PHOTO: JONATHAN SPYER

Will Israel launch a military operation to clear Hezbollah from its northern border? Or is the war there already under way?

“We see a steady escalation in terms of the range and variety of munitions being launched by Hezbollah at Israel,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, international spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces, told a group of foreign journalists at a briefing in northern Israel on Dec. 18. “We can do the same, if we need to, against Hezbollah that we are doing against Hamas in the south. This may be the scenario that we will need to implement.”

The briefing took place at a deserted kibbutz called Rosh Hanikra. Only yards from the border with Lebanon, it once was a flourishing community of 1,400 people but was evacuated, along with 27 other communities, in the days following Hamas’s massacre on Oct. 7. Israel has withdrawn its civilian population 2.5 miles south from its border with Lebanon, obliging 86,000 people to leave their homes. The residents of these border communities have become refugees in their own country.

Amid the deserted houses, fields and farms, the IDF conducts its daily duel with the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia. More than 1,000 Hezbollah attacks have taken place since Oct. 7 as the Lebanese Shiite Islamist group seeks to maintain a controlled second front to aid its Sunni allies in the south.

The undeclared conflict in the north is taking a toll on Hezbollah. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 of its fighters since Oct. 7, according to a tally by Agence France-Presse. Seventeen Lebanese civilians and a Lebanese soldier have also lost their lives. Israel’s losses have been much lighter, thanks in part to the evacuations. Seven IDF soldiers and four civilians have died. Though these figures indicate that Israel has the tactical upper hand, Hezbollah and its patrons in Tehran have the strategic advantage.

Between 1985 and 2000, Israel maintained a so-called security zone north of its border with Lebanon as it pulled back from the full invasion of the country it launched in 1982. Now, ominously, the zone is on the Israeli side of the border. While life on the Lebanese side continues more or less normally, Israel’s border communities are shut down. Col. Conricus and the other senior Israeli military officials I spoke with in northern Israel were adamant that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 situation. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought the 2006 war to an end, pledged to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani River. But Col. Conricus said the resolution “has been gutted.” Hezbollah is deployed all the way to the border.

With the memory of Oct. 7 still fresh, residents of the border communities aren’t ready to return to their homes. Iran’s intention for Israel is a kind of execution in slow motion, in which Israel’s strengths and will are sapped gradually until the final blow can be delivered. If Israel accepts the depopulation of this border area, it would be accepting that Iran’s strategy is working. This means, according to Col. Conricus, that Israel “cannot allow Hezbollah to be deployed along the Blue Line,” the United Nations-demarcated line that constitutes the de facto border between the two countries.

So is an Israeli operation to clear Hezbollah from southern Lebanon imminent? Col. Conricus said there remains a “window of opportunity” for diplomacy. A senior military official with responsibilities in the north told me that “if we need to, we can get from here to the Litani.” And what would come afterward? “Many options, a future security zone could be based on intel and firepower.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has long been a hawk on the issue of Hezbollah and Lebanon. According to Israeli media reports, Mr. Gallant favored a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah immediately following Oct. 7. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been reactive and cautious regarding major military moves throughout his career, demurred.

Visiting the northern border on Dec. 17, Mr. Gallant told IDF soldiers deployed there that “we want to restore peace and we will do it either through an agreement or with forceful action, with all its implications. We don’t want war, but we won’t hold it off for too long.”

In the era that ended on Oct. 7, the consensus of the Israeli security establishment was that it didn’t matter what was on the other side of the border, so long as Israel’s fences were strong. That consensus is gone. It now seems that Israel must choose between a pre-emptive action against Hezbollah and effectively ceding the northern border area to Iran’s proxies.

At the Dvoranit outpost, the IDF’s farthest point forward in the northwest, I witnessed a Hezbollah mortar barrage. They are a near-daily occurrence, the reserve paratroopers deployed at the outpost told me. Ben, a reservist squad commander in the airborne infantry, laughed when I asked him about the possibility of a northern war. “It’s a myth that Israel might open a front in the north,” he said, “because there’s already a front open. Opened by an organization that’s part of the Lebanese government. The front is already open.”

Mr. Spyer is director of research at the Middle East Forum and director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis. He is author of “Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars.”