Netanyahu: Situation in Northern Israel ‘Cannot Continue’

For nearly a year, 60,000 Israelis living in the north have had to leave their homes because of constant rockets and drones launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The social and economic disruption has been considerable, even more than that from the continued displacement in the south of 40,000 Israelis on the Jewish state’s s border with Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that the IDF, having destroyed so much of Hamas, should now turn its full attention to the north, and the threat from Hezbollah. Prime Minister Netanyahu, while recognizing that the situation in the north “cannot continue,” still appears to want to finish the job of dismantling Hamas in Gaza before moving on to deal forcefully with Hezbollah. More on Netanyahu’s view of the northern front can be found here: “Situation in North can’t continue, Netanyahu says ahead of Hochstein visit,” by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2024:

The cross-border violence between the IDF and Hezbollah in the North of the country “cannot continue,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said ahead of a meeting with US special envoy Amos Hochstein on Monday.

What is needed, Netanyahu said at the weekly government meeting, is “a change in the balance of forces on our northern border.” He also pledged to restore safety to that area so that the more than 60,000 residents of the border communities evacuated in October can return home.

“I am attentive to the residents of the North. I speak with them and with the heads of local authorities in the North. I see their distress. I hear their anguish,” he said.

“I am committed to this. The government is committed to this and we will not suffice with less than this,” he stated.

Hochstein, who is also expected to meet with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, is pushing to find a diplomatic solution to the contained IDF-Hezbollah war to prevent it from breaking out into a more wide-scale conflict….

What is now keeping the conflict from becoming bigger is the IDF’s firm response to Hezbollah, launching attacks that are always more devastating than the original attack by the Lebanese terror group. This lesson is one Israel keeps teaching Hezbollah, so that it won’t be tempted to start a major conflict that, the IDF has made clear, it will deeply regret.

Hochstein wants to midwife an exchange between Israel and Lebanon of small parcels of land on the border, which will “straighten it out” and make it less likely to be a source of conflict. It was Hochstein who helped both countries agree in 2022 on a maritime border that would allow both o them to exploit the huge natural gas fields in their territorial waters, without any more anxieties about challenges to their claims. Now Hochstein thinks that some parts of Israel’s territory that Lebanon claims as its own might be traded by the Jewish state for another parcel in Lebanon. But that won’t be enough to mitigate the threat from Hezbollah, which in its 1985 manifesto had clearly stated that “our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated.”

It had also been hoped that a Gaza hostage deal would open the door to a diplomatic resolution along Israel’s northern border, but no such agreement has been forthcoming.

No agreement has been forthcoming because Hamas has continued to add new conditions that are impossible for Israel to agree to. It wants a permanent end to the conflict in Gaza, with all IDF troops pulled out of the Strip. That would leave Hamas still standing, able both to regroup and to enroll new recruits; Hamas would become the instant hero for Arabs everywhere, some of whom would gladly send it money to pursue its war against Israel. Hamas also demands that Gaza “be rebuilt” — presumably it means “rebuilt” by Israel, or America, or the West, not by the rich Arabs of the Gulf. It wants a hostage-for-prisoner exchange on the following impossible basis: Of the 64 hostages still believed to be alive (about 40 are believed to have been killed), about 30 are thought to be male soldiers, 10 are believed to be female soldiers, and 24 thought to be civilians. Hamas wants 500 prisoners freed for every male soldier held hostage, 50 prisoners for every female soldier, and 30 for every civilian. If Israel were to accept Hamas’ terms, it would mean freeing a total of 15,000 + 500 + 720, or 16,220 prisoners, thousands of them terrorists, and thousands of others deemed “security risks.” It’s an impossible number for Israel to agree to; it learned from the swap of 1,027 prisoners for Gilad Shalit that many of those freed prisoners went right back to committing acts of terrorism. Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari has been quoted in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat as confirming that the prisoners released under the Shalit deal were collectively responsible for the killing of 569 Israelis. After what the Shalit trade led to, no Israeli government can possibly agree to setting free 16,220 prisoners, most of them terrorists and “security risks,” or even one-tenth that number. No, there will be no ceasefire-and-hostage-for-prisoner agreement, and Hamas bears all the blame.

If Netanyahu wants to apply maximum pressure on Hezbollah, he is going to have to revise his priorities. Gallant and many of the IDF’s generals think that Hamas has been sufficiently crushed; a law of diminishing returns has set in. They believe it is time to put maximum pressure on Hezbollah by moving large numbers of IDF troops out of Gaza and northward to the border with Lebanon. Then, without waiting for Hezbollah to lobby rockets and drones first, the IDF should launch not just rockets deep into Lebanon, but conduct waves of airstrikes on Hezbollah positions all over southern Lebanon, taking special care to destroy the warehouses full of Iranian-supplied rockets. Hezbollah needs to realize that it is now exclusively in the sights of the IDF, that intends to destroy it unless it pulls back to north of the Litani River, as Hezbollah had promised to do years ago, when it agreed to adhere to the UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Hasan Nasrallah has just seen what the IDF managed to do to Hamas in less than a year, killing more than half of its combatants, wounding another third, destroying most of its vast tunnel network, and seizing huge caches of weapons from their hideouts in schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, and in the network of tunnels. He doesn’t want the same to happen to his combatants, and should agree both to that pullback to the Litani River that he had promised back in 2006, and to fulfill his other pledge, to demilitarize southern Lebanon and let the Lebanese army and UNIFIL take over the area. Nasrallah can’t afford to risk an all-out war with Israel that would inevitably end with the destruction of much of Lebanon’s infrastructure, enraging the Lebanese — Christians, Sunnis, and even non-Hezbollah Shi’a — who will come out on the country’s streets to demand Hezbollah’s disarmament lest they, because of Hezbollah, be made again to suffer as they did in 2006.

Netanyahu has been so fixated on destroying Hamas that he may have lost a sense of proportion. Israel has effectively won in Gaza; Hamas is in tatters, but Netanyahu still persists in putting the IDF’s main effort into what is now a mopping-up operation. Hezbollah is a much more formidable adversary. It needs to be forced to withdraw, Israeli generals have suggested, 18 kilometers north of the Israeli-Lebanese border, and forced by massive waves of Israeli airstrikes to call a halt to its rocket and UAV attacks. And those 60,000 Israelis will at last be able to return home.