Monday, January 20, 2020

What is Israel's Larger Plan for Hezbollah?

Israel continues to build a shield on their northern border facing Iran's proxy Hezbollah which has a large arsenal of rockets and missiles to attack Israeli civilians. What sword goes with that shield?

This is prudent but what is the larger plan?

Israel's military said it began construction of an underground defense system Sunday along its northern frontier with Lebanon to protect against cross-border tunnels.

The infrastructure project will identify underground acoustic and seismic activity indicating tunnel digging, accompanied other defensive measures, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman. ...

Conricus said the construction would all be on the Israeli side of the border and that United Nations peacekeepers along the frontier had been notified.

“What we are doing today is part of a larger plan,” he said.

The Israeli anti-tunnel defenses add to past tunnel destruction efforts and above-ground defenses:

The northern shield of walls and the anti-tunnel operation are now joined by personnel trained to hold the walls and stop the tunnels.

Is Israel building a passive wall or preparing to push their sword through the shield wall to gut their Hezbollah enemy before it can return from Syria and reset to face and fight the Israelis on better terms?

But I've long speculated that Israel will deal with the Hezbollah threat by mounting a multi-division, multi-month raid that pushes deep into Lebanon to uproot Hezbollah and really tear them a new one.

That's what my larger plan would be. Who knows if Israel thinks that the lesson of the 2006 war is that they have to improve their aerial attack capabilities.