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After air strikes against Hezbollah, Israel launches air strikes in Lebanon

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After air strikes against Hezbollah, Israel launches air strikes in Lebanon

The military said in a statement it had begun “limited, localized and targeted ground attacks based on precise intelligence” against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon villages near the border.

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This story has been updated with new information.

Israeli troops entered on Tuesday in what the Israeli military called a “limited, localized and targeted” ground operation aimed at destroying Hezbollah's command structures and weapons sites.

The operation follows nearly a year of almost daily rocket attacks by Hezbollah on northern Israel, which the Iran-backed group launched immediately after its ally Hamas' attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel fired back at Hezbollah positions in Lebanon last year. The ground invasion was followed by the detonation of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members, two weeks of air strikes in Lebanon that killed more than 1,000 people, and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

“A huge blow for Hezbollah”: Hezbollah leader Nasrallah dies in Israeli attack that upends region

Israel says its latest attack is aimed at ensuring that some 60,000 displaced residents of Israel's northern areas can safely return to their homes. But it also represents an escalation of a long-simmering conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iranian-backed groups in the region.

These groups – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and various militias in Iraq – have rallied behind Hamas after its attacks on communities in southern Israel last year killed 1,200 people and returned about 250 hostages to the Gaza Strip had.

It was not immediately clear what Israel meant by a “limited, localized and targeted” invasion. Israel says Hezbollah has a large network of tunnels and weapons depots in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah was founded in 1982 with the support of the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran to put pressure on Tehran's arch-enemy Israel. It is sometimes described as a state within a state in Lebanon. Its heavily armed militia is politically represented in the Lebanese parliament and enjoys support as a social movement in the country.

However, Lebanon itself has historically remained on the brink of a major conflict with Israel. This happened in 2006, when Israel fought its last major war with Hezbollah, and again in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and besieged Beirut to attack the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose surviving members now mostly belong to the Fatah political group maintains limited administrative control over parts of the West Bank, a Palestinian territory.

Related: Netanyahu vows to continue Hezbollah attacks and rails against Israel's critics in UN speech

Still, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Makati said his country was facing “one of its most dangerous phases.” He said about a million people had been displaced since Israeli attacks began last month. In Gaza, where Israel launched a massive attack on Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks, most of the Palestinian enclave's 2.3 million people have been displaced. According to Gaza's Health Ministry, more than 41,300 Palestinians were killed.

The White House and the US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Israel's ground operations in Lebanon, but on Monday President Joe Biden called for a ceasefire.

“I'm more worried than you might realize, and I like it when they stop,” Biden told reporters when asked if he agreed with Israel's plans for a cross-border invasion. “We should have a ceasefire now.”

Biden said the US would send “a few thousand” more troops to the Middle East. The Pentagon said these troops would increase the security of the 40,000 U.S. troops already in the region and help defend Israel.

More: The US is sending more troops to the Middle East after Israel targeted Hezbollah in a major attack on Lebanon

Israel last week rejected a proposal from the United States and France that called for a 21-day ceasefire on the border with Lebanon to allow time for a diplomatic agreement that would allow displaced civilians on both sides to return home.

“Edge of the Abyss”

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hezbollah may be one of the best-armed non-state groups in the world. It has stockpiles of rockets and missiles and its fighters have combat experience in Syria.

Israel's attacks on Hezbollah in recent weeks appear to have weakened it.

However, since Hezbollah is a “mass organization” at the center of a “vast network of all sorts of civil institutions” in Lebanon, its destruction could be extremely difficult, according to Gilbert Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations at Lebanon University's School of Oriental and African Studies of London.

“It is certainly possible to weaken them militarily, even severely weaken them, but that already happened in 2006, and they were able to restore their armed forces to a much higher level,” Achcar said of Israel's last incursion into the country. As long as the Iranian regime continues to be able to fund the group, “Hezbollah will continue and find ways to reorganize like it does every time,” he added.

In 2006, Israel “encountered fierce resistance, much stronger than expected,” Achcar said. Since then, Israeli forces have not carried out any incursions “without bombing heavily and very intensively the areas they want to attack and leveling everything that is there in order to take as few risks as possible,” he said.

This time, the strategy could have dire consequences for Lebanese civilians, Achcar said.

An Israeli invasion could worsen a situation already made catastrophic by the country's economic collapse at the end of 2019 and “set the backdrop of a political crisis in a country that has now been for a long time without a president, without newly elected institutions, without…” is legitimate government.”

“Lebanon is truly on the edge of the abyss,” he said.

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