Repeat of 2006? Why Israel’s ground offensive in Lebanon won’t be easy

The last time the Israeli military had boots on the ground in Lebanon was a debacle.

The monthlong war that began in July 2006 saw Israeli soldiers bogged down in fierce fighting, as Hezbollah fighters led one tank column after the next into carefully prepared ambushes.

At least 20 tanks were destroyed and 121 Israeli soldiers died. The government-appointed Winograd Commission set up to assess the war’s outcome concluded that “Israel initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory”.

That campaign – code named Operation Change of Direction – resulted in what the commission dubbed a failure. “All in all, the [Israeli military] failed, especially because of the conduct of the high command and the ground forces, to provide an effective military response to the challenge posed to it by the war in Lebanon,” it said.

Almost two decades later, the Israeli military on Tuesday announced launching a “limited, localised and targeted” ground operation in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. But the evidence on the ground, based on the nature and scale of troops and tanks mobilised by Israel for the operation, suggests that the country might be preparing itself for a longer invasion of Lebanon.

Hezbollah – which has denied that Israeli troops entered Lebanese territory on Tuesday – began launching rockets into Israel on October 8 in a bid to pressure its southern neighbour into accepting a ceasefire in Gaza. About 60,000 residents of northern Israel have been displaced as a result of the Hezbollah bombardment. The Lebanese group has repeatedly promised to cease all hostilities if Israel ends the yearlong war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack during which nearly 1,300 people were killed in Israel. More than 41,600 Palestinians have been killed in the war on Gaza.

Israel’s missiles into Lebanon over the past year displaced more than 100,000 people. Then, last week, Israel stepped up its bombing campaign with a flurry of aerial attacks on Hezbollah targets – including one on Friday that killed the group’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah. Over just the past week, up to a million Lebanese have had to flee their homes and communities, seeking shelter in schools, camps and on the streets.

The goal set by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a familiar one: ensure that Hezbollah can no longer pose a threat to Israelis, especially to those displaced communities which the government aims to return home.

But analysts say his government may be underestimating the group’s ability to fight on home turf and the risk that Israel could end up bogged down in yet another protracted war in Lebanon.

Combat preparedness

Israeli army chief of staff Herzi Halevi appeared to nod to the lessons learned from 2006 on combat preparedness when addressing the 7th Armored Brigade last week, ahead of the ground incursion.

“[In] your encounter with Hezbollah operatives, [you] will show them what it means to face a professional, highly skilled, and battle-experienced force,” he told a group of soldiers. “You are coming in much stronger and far more experienced than they are. You will go in, destroy the enemy there, and decisively destroy their infrastructure.”

Alongside the 7th Armored Brigade, the Israeli military mobilised its 98th division of combat-proven airborne troops, which had been fighting Hamas for months in Gaza, and activated reservists serving in units belonging to the Northern Command.

Al Jazeera’s Defence Editor Alex Gatopoulos said that in sending out elite units, Israel is conveying to Hezbollah the message that it is serious in its aim to dismantle it.

“The division is about 12,000 to 14,000 elite troops and it will be backed up by dozens of tanks and, of course, artillery as well,” Gatapoulos said. The soldiers deployed in southern Lebanon are also “battle-hardened, albeit exhausted by now, after a year of conflict [in Gaza]”.

Unlike in 2006, when Israel had hastily mounted an operation in response to the killing by Hezbollah fighters of eight of its soldiers and the kidnapping of two more officers, the military has laid the ground for its present military offensive.

On September 23, it launched a barrage of a massive aerial bombardments targeting Hezbollah’s stockpiles, depots and launchers across Lebanon, less than a week after pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploded in an attack the group blames on Israel.

On Friday, Hezbollah’s leader for the past 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli air strike on Beirut – a dramatic breach of security for the secretive Lebanese group. Several other senior Hezbollah leaders and commanders have also been killed in recent days.

Rodger Shanahan, a former liaison officer with the Australian military during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, said the Israeli army has “learned lessons” from the last conflict and has been “degrading” Hezbollah’s capabilities.

“It’s much more planned than it was in 2006, much more preparatory work, and Hezbollah has been degraded to a point they weren’t in 2006,” the Middle East security analyst told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu’s political aim of ensuring the return of displaced Israelis to the north, however, cannot yet be guaranteed. “If you’re Hezbollah, it doesn’t take many rockets to be fired into the north to make that too dangerous for the Israeli citizens to return,” the analyst said.

“It’s very difficult for the military to achieve the political aim. Whether you can make sure the north of Israel is going to be safe for everybody to return is another issue – and that’s a political issue as much as it is a military issue.”

Hezbollah’s response

Hezbollah never ceased training for war with Israel. “Hubris is a dangerous condition,” Gatopoulos said of the Israeli military. “When you don’t think your opponent can fight back, you underestimate them.”

Compared with 2006, Hezbollah has grown from about 5,000 soldiers deployed to the south to tens of thousands of fighters. Fighters in its elite Radwan Force, who “train in the south and know the roads and the terrain like the back of their hand”, are also estimated to number at about 3,000, Gatopoulos said.

Hezbollah is said to possess an arsenal of missiles in the tens of thousands. The group has also gained combat experience in Syria since 2013 when it intervened in support of the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

While the Israeli military can now count on a strong fleet of surveillance drones to ward off Hezbollah’s ambushes, underground combat tunnels are still likely to give the Lebanese group a military advantage on home turf.

“Hezbollah has drones, too, and they can spot Israeli troop movements far better than they could in 2006,” Gatopoulos said. “Both sides have eyes in the battlefield [but] if you have subterranean [capabilities] which the enemy does not know about, it gives you the ability to pop up and fight in a place and direction of your choosing that will surprise the enemy.”

War objectives

Nabeel Khoury, former US diplomat and senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera that Israel is not limiting its goals in its current conflicts to targeting individuals within Hezbollah.

“Militarily, they could select certain targets and kill certain people. But their goals are much broader than that. They are going in with a broad design for Gaza, for the West Bank, and now, clearly, for Lebanon,” Khoury said.

“So I don’t expect this to be a short swing through [Lebanon] and it certainly won’t be a cakewalk for the Israelis. It will be difficult. And the resistance to them in Lebanon will probably cause them to stick around whether they want to or not,” he added.

Ultimately, the Israeli military has set the ambitious aim of conducting a “limited” operation that nonetheless removes Hezbollah’s threat – a goal it has failed to achieve time and again.

Israel’s first foray into Lebanon in 1982 had also been conceived as a brief mission aimed at destroying the threat posed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). However, it resulted in an 18-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon and an unpopular protracted war.

Israel’s ground invasion and massacre of up to 3,500 people in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila also ultimately contributed to the emergence of a new enemy in Lebanon – Hezbollah – whose ideology has endured all subsequent military efforts to dismantle it.

One solution Israel is said to be pondering in order to achieve the political aim of returning its displaced residents is the creation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

The solution, reminiscent of the long occupation that ended in 2000, “is not going to work,” Gatopoulos said.

“If you want to create a buffer zone you need to keep troops on the ground. And they become an ideal target,” he said. Israel would then be acting beyond its “limited” scope and embroiling its military in a new quagmire in Lebanon.

Additionally, Hezbollah has a large arsenal that includes longer-range missiles able to hit Israeli territory from anywhere in Lebanon, making a buffer zone redundant in guaranteeing the safety of the north.

It remains unclear how far – morally and geographically – Israel is willing to go to secure its political goals, said analysts.

If history is anything to go by, Gatopoulos said, “this is going to be a very messy operation”.