As Iran war rages, Israel seizes chance to finish the job against Hezbollah

By Oren Liebermann, Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — For the past week, Israel has unleashed a furious assault across Lebanon, targeting the militant group Hezbollah from Tripoli in the far north to the villages along the country’s southern border.

The Israeli military says it has targeted Hezbollah sites with hundreds of strikes. The attacks have killed at least 217 people, wounded nearly 700 more, Lebanese authorities say, with hundreds of thousands displaced. At least 12 Israeli soldiers have been injured in the renewed fighting, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

That strikes will likely only increase in the coming days with evacuation warnings issued for vast swaths of the country, including everything south of the Litani River and densely packed neighborhoods of Beirut. When asked earlier this week if Israel was preparing a large-scale ground invasion of Lebanon, the IDF spokesman said, “All options remain on the table.”

The war started on Saturday morning as the US and Israel launched joint strikes against Iran. But Israel was always prepared for the war to expand to Iran’s regional proxies. And when Hezbollah fired a small barrage of missiles and drones at a military base in northern Israel early Monday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had every reason he needed to resume the fighting at full-scale.

The war with Hezbollah launched in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks never really ended, despite a nominal ceasefire that went into effect in November 2024. Israel has carried out near-daily strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets, accusing the Iran-backed militant group of violating the ceasefire by attempting to rearm and rebuild its forces.

The IDF moved fast in the new campaign, calling up more than 100,000 reservists and seizing more sites along the border in southern Lebanon.

“There were five points. Now these points have expanded significantly,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz on Friday, referring to the observation posts Israel established.

The pieces are now in place for a dramatic Israeli escalation of the fighting in Lebanon, whether it’s a large-scale ground invasion or a massive aerial bombardment.

But Yoav Limor, military analyst for the Israel Hayom newspaper, wrote on Thursday, “Israel does not have the ability to completely dismantle Hezbollah. It is trying to weaken it in a way that will remove the threat from the northern border, deprive the organization of capabilities, delay its rehabilitation for a long time, and most importantly, allow the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army to seize full control of the country.”

Israel and Hezbollah fought an indecisive one-month war in 2006. The conflict left Hezbollah bruised but standing, able to build a massive arsenal of rockets, missiles and drones in the intervening years. Even though the border was relatively quiet for years, Israel also prepared for the next war with Hezbollah, gathering intelligence and building its own fortifications.

Now Netanyahu is pushing for a decisive and final victory in this long-simmering conflict. His military chief said Israel would not stop until Hezbollah was completely disarmed.

Yet surrender by the militant group is unlikely, if not outright unthinkable. “We will not abandon the resistance. We will not abandon the weapon, and we will not vacate the field,” a Friday statement from the group said.

The Lebanese government could be a crucial part of a long-term solution, decreeing recently that Hezbollah’s military activities are prohibited. “We will not allow the country to be dragged into new adventures, and we will take all necessary measures to stop those responsible and protect the Lebanese people,” Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s prime minister, said Monday in a post on X.

“Once again,(Lebanon) is faced with the reality it is so familiar with, in which tens of thousands of its citizens are being forced to flee their homes and move across the Litani (River),” wrote Zvi Barel, Arab affairs analyst for the Haaretz newspaper. “But now Israel may find a partner in Lebanon that is determined to cooperate with it, even if not declaratively, in order to eliminate the organization’s threat.”

But at what point will Israel’s government accept that offer and allow Lebanon to do internally what Israel is doing by force? At the moment, Netanyahu is pursuing an all-out military solution to disarming Hezbollah and eschewing any short-term diplomatic off-ramp.

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