Attempting to avoid further escalation with Hezbollah, the Israel Defense Forces are careful to showcase lots of fire and brimstone, but no casualties on either side.
Jul 28, 2020
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi has turned the term “lethality” into a central theme of his tenure. Kochavi is investing great efforts in improving the military’s lethal combat abilities — its capacity to hit as many targets as possible in the shortest time by virtue of the IDF’s decisive technological superiority in terms of intelligence, air power and precise “counter fire.”
Kochavi’s goal is simple: inflicting maximum heavy damage and casualties on the other side by stretching the IDF’s military capacity to its limits in order to shorten the duration of the next war. The chief of staff believes that if the damage Hezbollah sustains in its next confrontation with the IDF is unsustainable from the start, its leader, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, would conclude that there was no point in dragging out the confrontation with Israel. In other words, the greater the lethality, the less time it will take to stop the fighting and Israel will save itself a protracted, costly and bloody war next time.
Developments in the Israeli-Hezbollah arena in recent years have been the exact opposite of this scenario — lots of fire and brimstone, smoke and mirrors, bangs and bugles, but very few casualties, enabling both sides to pretend it has landed painful blows on the other, while in fact emerging intact, for the most part.
Such was the case on July 27, when a team of three to five Hezbollah terrorists crossed the international “blue line” border between Lebanon and Israel near Mount Dov (known by the Lebanese as Shebaa Farms), the usual arena of Israel-Hezbollah clashes, on their way to carry out an attack on IDF troops.
The IDF had been awaiting such a group attack attempt for days, and had prepared to the hilt to avoid being surprised. A 19-year-old IDF scout identified the Hezbollah fighters crossing the borderline — an area where there is no fence — and raised the alarm. They were carrying personal weapons and heavy bags. “We kept them in our sights and tracked them along several hundred meters,” a senior military source speaking on condition of anonymity told Al-Monitor later that day. “And we opened heavy fire when they drew closer to the IDF position overlooking the slopes of Mount Hermon.”
There remains, however, a niggling question. A beefed-up infantry battalion force, backed by a Merkava tank, aircraft and choppers, awaited the infiltrators — but failed to hit a single one of them at relatively short range and instead allowed them to turn back and cross back into Lebanon without a scratch. In other words, what about the IDF’s famous “lethality” doctrine?
The answer is simple. In the scenarios drawn up in extensive discussions leading up to the incident, the IDF was instructed to try to end the event without casualties on either side in order to avoid setting off a chain of Hezbollah and Israeli responses and counter-responses, possibly culminating in a conflagration at the worst conceivable time for each side. Lebanon is mired in an unprecedented economic crisis, food is scarce, power is limited, Nasrallah is under political siege and is blamed for having dragged Lebanon into the hole in which it now finds itself. The situation in Israel is somewhat similar. While there is plenty of food and electric power, unemployment has surged within weeks from almost none to over 20% and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity is plunging. The last thing he needs right now is a war.
The Hezbollah operation was supposed to avenge the death of one of the group’s fighters — Ali Kamel Mohsen Jawad — in a July 20 strike on an Iran-backed target near Damascus, attributed to Israel. To begin with, Nasrallah was not overly invested in this revenge action although he adheres to the rules he had set out over a year ago. According to these rules, Hezbollah would respond to the killing of each of its fighters, not only in Lebanon but in the Syrian arena, too. Yet this time, Nasrallah sought to ensure a low-intensity revenge operation. He did not express himself on the incident, instead dispatching his deputy Naim Qassem to face the TV cameras and talk with journalists identified with the movement.
Content retrieved from: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/07/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-syria-benjamin-netanyahu-nasrallah.html.