Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, in 2006, was considered a failure within much of the Israeli security establishment.
Its air force had a thin list of targets. Israeli ground soldiers struggled during fighting in southern Lebanon’s rugged terrain. And the war failed to accomplish its stated goals of returning two captive Israeli soldiers and removing Hezbollah from the border region.
“There was a certain degree of trauma from the results of the war,” said Carmit Valensi, an Israeli expert on Hezbollah who served in the military’s intelligence directorate.
Nearly 20 years later, Israel has mounted another assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. This time, a string of successes — attacks that have killed Hezbollah’s leaders, crippled its communication networks and targeted its weapons caches — were a direct result of Israel’s investments in preparing for a future battle with Hezbollah after that foundering performance in 2006, Israeli security experts said.
But as Israeli forces push deeper into Lebanon by land, they will be vulnerable to greater risks, including sophisticated weapons used by Hezbollah. And if the Israeli government fails to develop a clear exit strategy, as it has struggled to do in Gaza, the military could end up fighting a protracted war that stretches its resources to the limit.
Delivering blow after blow to Hezbollah has helped restore Israel’s reputation as a powerful force in the Middle East, but it also has underscored how the country was more ready for war with Hezbollah on its northern border than it was for an incursion by Hamas, which spearheaded the Oct. 7 attacks in the south.
“Hezbollah is 10 times more powerful than Hamas,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Israel’s national security adviser from 2011 to 2013. “But the I.D.F. was 20 times more prepared for Hezbollah than it was for Hamas,” he said, referring to the Israeli military.
Hezbollah was also more ready for a war with Israel than last time, having built an arsenal estimated to contain more than 100,000 rockets and missiles and trained tens of thousands of fighters. And its leaders carefully studied Israel, calculating that Hezbollah could trade back-and-forth attacks with Israel in support of Hamas without setting off an all-out war.
The current Israeli onslaught against Hezbollah showed that was a major miscalculation. Israel escalated its attacks in mid-September, commencing weeks of bombings against Hezbollah and targeting its militants by blowing up their walkie-talkies and pagers. The exploding devices killed or severely wounded both militants and civilians.
Days later, Israel killed several top Hezbollah commanders, including Ibrahim Aqeel, a leader of the Radwan force — elite fighters who Israeli officials had concluded were planning to invade northern Israel.
On Sept. 27, Israel struck an underground compound, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah who turned the group into a powerful political and military force. And on Thursday, Israeli officials said they tried to kill his possible successor, Hashem Safieddine, but as of Sunday, it was not clear if they had succeeded.
At the same time, a wide-scale bombing campaign by the Israeli military struck Hezbollah’s weapons infrastructure and killed its fighters, undermining the group’s ability to respond forcefully. Hundreds of people have been killed in the Israeli airstrikes, including women and children, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry. Its figures do not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
At least four hospitals across southern Lebanon were out of service after Israel’s bombardment, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The St. Therese Medical Center south of Beirut, the capital, also had temporarily suspended services, saying that Israeli strikes in the vicinity inflicted “huge damage.”
General Amidror said a key element of Israel’s intelligence superiority over Hezbollah was its increased deployment of drones that hover in the skies over Lebanon.
An inquiry he conducted into the performance of the military’s intelligence directorate before and during the 2006 war revealed that Israeli drones in Lebanon were being diverted to Gaza, leaving the area with a minuscule number of the unmanned aircraft, he said. The inquiry was at the behest of the Israeli military’s chief of staff, he said.
“I saw that there were very few drones flying over the north,” he said. “I asked myself: Hold on, what’s happening here?”
In the intervening 18 years, the number of drones over Lebanon has grown exponentially,…
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