The Financial Times published a remarkable report about how Hezbollah managed to rebuild its military capabilities after the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2024.
The report starts with reminding that the residents of northern ‘Israel’ were promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2024 that Hezbollah had been “crushed” in its latest war with ‘Israel’, but that a year and a half later, Israeli forces are once again locked in conflict with the Lebanese Resistance Group across the border.
Despite a fresh ceasefire last month, the two sides exchange fire each day, the report added.
According to the British daily newspaper, Hezbollah has proven proficient at targeting IOF soldiers in the “security zone”, increasingly via explosive drones, including first-person-view drones inspired by those used in Ukraine, and has maintained sporadic rocket fire into ‘Israel’. Three Israeli settlers and 17 soldiers have been killed and dozens more troops wounded.
Israeli military officers even admitted that the Resistance group’s lingering military capabilities defied their earlier perception that the group had suffered an hard defeat, FT added.
“There’s a gap between how we finished [the 2024 war] . . . what we understood and thought, and suddenly we still find Hezbollah,” FT quoted Rafi Milo, the general in charge of the IOF’s northern command, in a leaked conversation last month with residents in his area of responsibility, as saying.
“Milo admitted that stand-off fire including rockets, missiles and drones on northern Israeli towns and villages was still a concern.”
“Hezbollah returned to what it used to be — a guerrilla force that tries to strike when it can, using hit-and-run tactics. It’s trying to go back to its old capabilities,” said one Israeli military official.
“At the same time, Hezbollah’s attention was caught by the effectiveness of crude first-person-view (FPV) drones on the battlefields of Ukraine.”
Given those developments and Israeli underestimates of its remaining capacity, “Hezbollah was in prime position to stage its comeback, the report added.
In recent weeks, IOF soldiers operating in the “security zone” have come under regular attack from Hezbollah explosive drones, particularly those controlled by trailing fiber-optic cables that can bypass Israeli electronic jamming.
“In the past month, videos of first-person view attacks have become a staple of Hezbollah’s social media output. The group’s official channel on Telegram, a social messaging platform, posted more than 50 videos of FPV attacks in the first week in May, about three times as many as at the start of April.
Set to dramatic music, the often-repeated videos commonly show drones approaching Israeli vehicles or soldiers.”
FT cited Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier now at the Washington Institute think-tank, as saying that Hezbollah could strike northern Israeli towns and villages, adding, “For Israel, choosing a security zone model in Lebanon, promises continued friction and doesn’t stop the fire on our communities”.
He added: “For Israel the ultimate goal of the war was to return our citizens in the north home securely. Are they secure?”
Source: FT