Strat­egy was put in motion as Hezbol­lah began gain­ing mil­i­tary strength in Lebanon

Matthew Kalman
CHRONICLE FOREIGN SERVICE

Jerusalem — Israel’s mil­i­tary response by air, land and sea to what it con­sid­ered a provo­ca­tion last week by Hezbol­lah mil­i­tants is unfold­ing accord­ing to a plan final­ized more than a year ago.

In the six years since Israel ended its mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion of south­ern Lebanon, it watched war­ily as Hezbol­lah built up its mil­i­tary pres­ence in the region. When Hezbol­lah mil­i­tants kid­napped two Israeli sol­diers last week, the Israeli mil­i­tary was ready to react almost instantly.

“Of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most pre­pared,” said Ger­ald Stein­berg, pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­sity. “In a sense, the prepa­ra­tion began in May 2000, imme­di­ately after the Israeli with­drawal, when it became clear the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity was not going to pre­vent Hezbol­lah from stock­pil­ing mis­siles and attack­ing Israel. By 2004, the mil­i­tary cam­paign sched­uled to last about three weeks that we’re see­ing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been sim­u­lated and rehearsed across the board.”

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army offi­cer began giv­ing Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tions, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplo­mats, jour­nal­ists and think tanks, set­ting out the plan for the cur­rent oper­a­tion in reveal­ing detail. Under the ground rules of the brief­ings, the offi­cer could not be identified.

In his talks, the offi­cer described a three-week cam­paign: The first week con­cen­trated on destroy­ing Hezbollah’s heav­ier long-range mis­siles, bomb­ing its command-and-control cen­ters, and dis­rupt­ing trans­porta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion arter­ies. In the sec­ond week, the focus shifted to attacks on indi­vid­ual sites of rocket launch­ers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large num­bers would be intro­duced, but only in order to knock out tar­gets dis­cov­ered dur­ing recon­nais­sance mis­sions as the cam­paign unfolded. There was no plan, accord­ing to this sce­nario, to reoc­cupy south­ern Lebanon on a long-term basis.

Israeli offi­cials say their pin­point com­mando raids should not be con­fused with a ground inva­sion. Nor, they say, do they her­ald another occu­pa­tion of south­ern Lebanon, which Israel main­tained from 1982 to 2000 — in order, it said, to thwart Hezbol­lah attacks on Israel. Plan­ners antic­i­pated the like­li­hood of civil­ian deaths on both sides. Israel says Hezbol­lah inten­tion­ally bases some of its oper­a­tions in res­i­den­tial areas. And Hezbollah’s leader, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, has bragged pub­licly that the group’s arse­nal included rock­ets capa­ble of bomb­ing Haifa, as occurred last week.

Like all plans, the one now unfold­ing also has been shaped by chang­ing cir­cum­stances, said Eran Ler­man, a for­mer colonel in Israeli mil­i­tary intel­li­gence who is now direc­tor of the Jerusalem office of the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Committee.

“There are two rad­i­cal views of how to deal with this chal­lenge, a seri­ous pro­fes­sional debate within the mil­i­tary com­mu­nity over which way to go,” said Ler­man. “One is the air power school of thought, the other is the land-borne option. They cre­ate dif­fer­ent dynam­ics and dif­fer­ent timeta­bles. The cru­cial fac­tor is that the air force con­cept is very method­i­cal and almost by def­i­n­i­tion is slower to get results. A ground inva­sion that sweeps Hezbol­lah in front of you is quicker, but at a much higher cost in human life and requir­ing the cre­ation of a pres­ence on the ground.”

The advance sce­nario is now in its sec­ond week, and its suc­cess or fail­ure is still unfold­ing. Whether Israel’s aer­ial strikes will be enough to achieve the three­fold aim of the cam­paign — to remove the Hezbol­lah mil­i­tary threat; to evict Hezbol­lah from the bor­der area, allow­ing the deploy­ment of Lebanese gov­ern­ment troops; and to ensure the safe return of the two Israeli sol­diers abducted last week — remains an open ques­tion. Israelis are opposed to the thought of reoc­cu­py­ing Lebanon.

“I have the feel­ing that the end is not clear here. I have no idea how this movie is going to end,” said Daniel Ben-Simon, a mil­i­tary ana­lyst for the daily Haaretz newspaper.

Thursday’s clashes in south­ern Lebanon occurred near an out­post aban­doned more than six years ago by the retreat­ing Israeli army. The place was iden­ti­fied using satel­lite pho­tographs of a Hezbol­lah bunker, but only from the ground was Israel able to dis­cover that it served as the entrance to a pre­vi­ously unknown under­ground net­work of caves and bunkers stuffed with mis­siles aimed at north­ern Israel, said Israeli army spokesman Miri Regev.

“We knew about the net­work, but it was fully revealed (Wednes­day) by the ground oper­a­tion of our forces,” said Regev. “This is one of the pur­poses of the pin­point ground oper­a­tions — to locate and try to destroy the ter­ror­ist infra­struc­ture from where they can fire at Israeli citizens.”

Israeli mil­i­tary offi­cials say as much as 50 per­cent of Hezbollah’s mis­sile capa­bil­ity has been destroyed, mainly by aer­ial attacks on tar­gets iden­ti­fied from intel­li­gence reports. But mis­siles con­tinue to be fired at towns and cities across north­ern Israel.

“We were not sur­prised that the fir­ing has con­tin­ued,” said Tzachi Hanegbi, chair­man of the Knes­set For­eign Affairs and Defense Com­mit­tee. “Hezbol­lah sep­a­rated its lead­er­ship command-and-control sys­tem from its field orga­ni­za­tion. It cre­ated a net­work of tiny cells in each vil­lage that had no oper­a­tional mis­sion except to wait for the moment when they should acti­vate the Katyusha rocket launch­ers hid­den in local houses, using coor­di­nates pro­grammed long ago to hit Nahariya or Kiryat She­mona, or the kib­butzim and villages.”

“From the start of this oper­a­tion, we have also been active on the ground across the width of Lebanon,” said Brig. Gen. Ron Fried­man, head of North­ern Com­mand head­quar­ters. “These mis­sions are designed to sup­port our cur­rent actions. Unfor­tu­nately, one of the many mis­sions which we have car­ried out in recent days met with slightly fiercer resistance.”

Israel didn’t need sophis­ti­cated intel­li­gence to dis­cover the huge buildup of Iran­ian weapons sup­plies to Hezbol­lah by way of Syria, because Hezbollah’s patrons boasted about it openly in the pages of the Ara­bic press. As recently as June 16, less than four weeks before the Hezbol­lah bor­der raid that sparked the cur­rent cri­sis, the Syr­ian defense min­is­ter pub­licly announced the exten­sion of exist­ing agree­ments allow­ing the pas­sage of trucks ship­ping Iran­ian weapons into Lebanon.

But to destroy them, Israel needed to map the loca­tion of each missile.

“We need a lot of patience,” said Hanegbi. “The (Israeli Defense Forces) action at the moment is inca­pable of find­ing the very last Katyusha, or the last rocket launcher primed for use hid­den inside a house in some village.”

Moshe Marzuk, a for­mer head of the Lebanon desk for Israeli Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence who now is a researcher at the Insti­tute for Counter-Terrorism in Her­zliya, said Israel had learned from past con­flicts in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza — as well as the recent U.S. expe­ri­ences in Afghanistan and Iraq — that a tra­di­tional mil­i­tary cam­paign would be counter-effective.

“A big inva­sion is not suit­able here,” said Marzuk. “We are not fight­ing an army, but guer­ril­las. It would be a mis­take to enter and expose our­selves to fight­ers who will hide, fire off a mis­sile and run away. If we are to be on the ground at all, we need to use com­man­dos and spe­cial forces.“
Since fight­ing started

– Israeli air strikes on Lebanon have hit more than 1,255 tar­gets, includ­ing 200 rocket-launching sites.

– H
ezbol­lah launched more than 900 rock­ets and mis­siles into north­ern Israel.

– At least 330 Lebanese have been killed, includ­ing 20 sol­diers and three Hezbol­lah guer­ril­las. Lebanese Prime Min­is­ter Fuad San­iora says 1,100 have been wounded; the police put the num­ber at 657.

– 32 Israelis have been killed, among them 17 sol­diers, accord­ing to Israeli author­i­ties. At least 12 sol­diers and 344 civil­ians have been wounded.

– For­eign deaths include eight Cana­di­ans, two Kuwaiti nation­als, one Iraqi, one Sri Lankan and one Jordanian.