SHORT HISTORY OF HEZBOLLAH'S FIGHT AGAINST ISRAEL
ISRAEL HAS INVADED LEBANON THREE TIMES BEFORE IN ITS HISTORY. HOW THEY DID IT THEN SUGGESTS HOW IT MIGHT DO IT AGAIN NOW
Hezbollah militia at a training site in southern Lebanon, near the Israeli border.
June 25, 2024
Israel is planning to invade Lebanon in the coming weeks. Here’s what its up against.
Since it invaded the Gaza Strip in response to the Palestinian militia Hamas's surprise cross-border raid into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel almost every day. Israel has shot back, assassinating Hezbollah commanders and bombing what they claim are Hezbollah targets inside Lebanon. But they haven't invaded, yet.
"The fact that we have managed to even hold" them off "for this long has been a miracle,” a senior US official told CNN last week.
“We’re entering a very dangerous period,” another senior Biden administration official said. “Something could start with little warning.”
If Israel does invade Lebanon, it won't be the first time—it will be the fourth. There have been more what Israel calls "operations" into Lebanon, but only three full-blown invasions. How it executed them strongly suggests what happens this time.
The battlefield, and Israel's dependence on tanks and troops, remains the same.
Israel's 1947 founding lead to the forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in what today is Israel. They call it the Nakba, or Catastrophe. About 100,000 Paleestinians landed in Lebanon, a multi-religious country about five times the size of Israel sandwiched between Israel's northern border, Syria and the Mediterranean Sea.
Beirut, Lebanon's capital, was called the Paris of the Mediterranean in the 1960s and 70s. That's because its significant Christian population had liberal social mores and laws compared to Muslim neighbors. Swiss-like bank secrecy laws attracted Arab wealth.
In the 1970s, Lebanon was destabilized by an influx of more Palestinian refugees. Militant Palestinian guerilla groups including Fedayeen, Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization relocated there because they lost Black September battles with Jordan's Government and were forced out.
The militant Palestinians' presence in Lebanon unleashed a civil war engineered by Israel to place a right-wing, Christian puppet regime in power. Notwithstanding the civil war, Palestinian militants fired rockets and launched cross-border raids into northern Israel from southern Lebanon.
ISRAEL'S FIRST INVASION OF LEBANON: OPERATION LITANI
One of the raids led to what Israel calls the Coastal Road Massacre, a lethal PLO action that killed 38 Israeli civilians on Mar. 11, 1978. Israel invaded Lebanon, for the first time, in response.
Its stated mission was to destroy militants' bases and deny them freedom to operate directly on Israel's northern border. The army stopped at the Litani River, about 20 miles in. They called it, Operation Litani.
Israeli tank overlooking a valley in the rolling mountains of South Lebanon.
During the invasion, Israel used American cluster bombs. It also gave American weapons to its right-wing militia allies. Both in violation of legal agreements governing their use. According to then-Pres. Jimmy Carter, he told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin he had to inform Congress.
That might’ve caused it to cut off the supply of American weapons.
The invasion was over, was Begin's response. Israel's army mostly withdrew from Lebanon in June, leaving its right-wing militia proxy force in its place alongside a United Nation peacekeeping force between the guerillas and Israel's northern border in southern Lebanon.
Israel says it killed 300 Palestinian militants while losing only 18 soldiers. More than 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed and more than 200,000 refugees were created. 82 villages were damaged and six were almost completely destroyed, according to the Middle East Research and Information Project.
Meanwhile, the 200,000 mostly Shi'a Muslim peasants displaced by Israel's invasion settled in north Lebanon and, in particular, west Beirut. There they joined the Harakat al-Mahrumin, "Movement of the Deprived." The group was led by an Iranian-born Shi‘i religious leader, Imam Musa Sadr. Its armed wing was Amal.
In the years that followed, Lebanon's various competing factions groped for a negotiated peace to end their civil war, but Israel—still under the leadership of Prime Minister Begin—sabotaged it with a covert then overt bombing campaign against what James A. Reilly, Professor Emeritus of Modern Middle East History at the University of Toronto, reports were "civilian targets."
The PLO responded by firing rockets and artillery into northern Israel. Israel escalated with airstrikes on PLO targets all across the country and, especially, in and around Beirut. They also hit refugee camps, oil refineries, pipelines and key bridges. The airstrikes killed at least 90 people.
"The bloodshed today will not go unpunished," PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat vowed, "and it will only increase our will to keep up the struggle against the American and Zionist criminals."
But unrelenting Israeli attacks were slowly destroying popular support for the group: precisely as Israel intended. "Without the Palestinians, we wouldn't be killing you," is what Israel's airstrikes told the non-Palestinian Lebanese.
The PLO had their own problems. Amal, the Shi'i militia, was growing thanks to all the refugees from the south displaced by Israel's 1978 invasion. Then a renegade former PLO leader who had been sentenced to death by a PLO court attempted to assassinate Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom.
ISRAEL’S SECOND INVASION OF LEBANON: PEACE FOR GALILEE
Abu Nidal sent assassins to kill Shlomo Argov. They used a 9mm PM-63 Polish submachine gun to put a bullet in his head but Argov lived. To Israel, it was good news. Ariel Sharon, its defense minister, used the attempted assassination as the pretext he needed to invade Lebanon to kill or evict the PLO.
Notwithstanding that Abu Nidal had been exiled from the PLO, was the subject of a standing PLO shoot-on-sight order and the British confirmed the PLO had nothing to do with it.
Because the Israeli cabinet had earlier refused to approve Prime Minister Begin's and Defense Minister Sharon's plan to invade all of Lebanon, they lied. They said their plan was limited to a 40-mile penetration to put PLO artillery and rockets out-of-range of Israel. The called it "Peace for Galilee."
But, once there, Begin and Sharon secretly planned to provoke another pretext to go all the way to the Syrian border and trap the PLO in a siege of Beirut.
Israeli armor and infantry along Lebanon’s coastal road headed to Beirut in 1982.
Israel's cabinet approved the limited, fake plan Begin and Sharon proposed.
76,000 troops backed by 500 tanks raced across the border on June 6, 1982. Israeli forces were divided into three groups or prongs. One moved north on a road up the Lebanese coast. Another moved north just inside Lebanon's eastern border with Syria toward the Bekaa Valley. While a third moved north roughly in the middle between the two.
By sea, Israel launched an amphibious invasion, landing more tanks and troops on the Lebanese coast.
At least 15,000 PLO and Fatah guerilla fighters backed by an entire Syrian mechanized infantry division plus a brigade—25,000 soldiers—waited for them. The Syrians had 600 tanks, 19 anti-aircraft missile batteries and 30 commando battalions.
They were a significant fraction of Syria's overall military force but they did not represent an all-out Syrian commitment. Pres. Hafez al-Assad feared losing in an all-out fight with Israel. His priority was defending his homeland.
Still, Pres. al-Assad appears to have significantly, if not wholly committed his air force.
About 200 Israeli and Syrian fighter jets fought one of the biggest air battles ever fought over two days. In the first three hours alone, American-supplied F-15 eagles shot down 29 of Syria's Soviet-supplied MIGs without suffering a single loss. Altogether, the Israelis shot down 87 Syrian planes—including what was at the time the world's second-fastest combat aircraft, a MIG-25.
The Syrians shot down at least one Israeli plane with a Russian-supplied SAM ground-to-air missile and captured its pilot alive.
On the ground, Soviet-supplied state-of-the-art T-72 main battle tanks slugged it out with Israel's homegrown Merkava tanks. They were badly beaten. Three days into the invasion, Israeli forces were 40 miles deep in Lebanon and still rolling.
Lebanon's Christian civilians welcomed the Israelis.
The Christian factions wanted Israel to rid Lebanon of both the Palestinians and the Syrians. After securing a cease-fire with the Syrians, Israeli forces linked up with Christian militia. They surrounded Beirut June 13.
Now Israel openly vowed to kill or capture every single PLO fighter in Lebanon—forever destroying the PLO as a military force.
Like it's doing in the Gaza Strip now, in 1982 Israel blockaded Lebanon and cut-off electricity, water and food. Because the airport was one of the first things Israel destroyed, no aid could be flown in. Israel fired artillery barrages and dropped bombs daily. Its right-wing militia surrogates sent car bombs into Beirut, killing scores of civilians.
About 10,000 PLO and Fatah fighters along with 2,700 or so Syrian infantrymen held out for two-and-a-half months.
Pres. Ronald Regan saved them. He ordered his special envoy Philip Habib to negotiate a truce allowing them to escape.
When an agreement was close at hand, Israel broke a ceasefire and bombed west Beirut for 11 straight hours, killing more than a 100 people on Aug. 12. Famously, Pres. Regan telephoned Prime Minister Begin to demand Israel stop but was kept on hold—for an hour. When Begin finally picked up the phone, Regan accused Israel of committing genocide.
"Menachem," he said, "this is a holocaust." He demanded Israel stop the "needless destruction and bloodshed."
Begin replied he knew “what a holocaust was” but promised to call Regan back in a half-hour to confirm a total ceasefire had been ordered. They blamed it on Sharon and announced Israel's cabinet stripped the defense minister of his power to make unilateral decisions.
Arafat, the PLO leader, left clutching an olive branch on Aug. 30. He went to Tunisia with a big part of his militia, the rest split between Yemen, Jordan and Syria. All the PLO, Fatah and the Syrian soldiers were gone by Sept. 1.
Despite saying it would leave once the "terrorist organizations" left, Israel stayed.
"We'll move immediately back. We don't have any interest whatsoever to stay here—it's not our country," defense minister Sharon claimed on July 16. "We don't need even one square inch of this country."
Israel didn't leave Lebanon until 2000, 18 years later.
Yasser Arafat chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization visiting an anti-aircraft gun during Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982.
Israel did succeed in installing a puppet regime in Lebanon—for 22 days.
Right-wing Christian Phalangist Bachir Gemayel "won" a rigged election on Aug. 23. He was assassinated with a car bomb Sept. 14. Lebanon splintered into more than two dozen fiefs controlled by three Christian factions, two Muslim factions and the Druze.
For opponents of Israel, the departure of the PLO was filled by Hezbollah in 1982. Founded by Subhi al-Tufayli along with Sayyed Abbas Al-Musawi and primarily composed of Shi'a Muslims, the "Party of God" got kick-started by Iran—which sent 1,500 military advisors to train them when Israel invaded.
“When we entered Lebanon, there was no Hezbollah,” Israel's former Prime Minister and defense minister Ehud Barak said. “It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.”
Hezbollah's mission was to evict Israel. Later it pledged to destroy Israel. It started with the US Marines sent to Beirut as peacekeepers. Pres. Regan sent them to make sure Israel didn't kill everybody. They left when the PLO left, at first. Then Israel helped its Christian militia allies massacre 1,319 Palestinians and Shi'ias at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Pres. Regan sent the Marines back.
A suicide bomber drove a truck into the Marine's barracks at Beirut airport on Oct. 23, 1983. The blast leveled the building and killed 241 soldiers—the deadliest single attack on Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II. An attack on French forces minutes later killed 58 paratroopers.
A group calling itself "Islamic Jihad" claimed responsibility for both bombings. The FBI says it was Hezbollah, and Iran. They deny it.
Pres. Regan withdrew the Marines four months later. The last left Feb. 26.
Meanwhile, Israel's military slowly withdrew to south Lebanon and established a "security zone." The zone averaged 15 miles deep and was defended by mechanized infantry and a right-wing Christian militia proxy force called the South Lebanon Army.
For more than 18 years, Hezbollah waged an insurgency against both. It turned South Lebanon into a death trap for them.
A UN peacekeeping force was there—to protect civilians as much as they could and tally it all up. They kept meticulous records.
For example, in the six months between July 16, 1998 and Jan. 15, 1999, "armed elements" shot at or bombed the Israelis or their allies 666 times, according to a UN report based on eyewitness reports from the peacekeepers. Hezbollah used "small arms, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti tank missiles, recoilless rifles, rockets, and explosive devices." They fired more than 3,000 mortars, rockets and anti-tank guided missiles, ATGMs.
The Israelis and the SLA fired back, "close to 18,000 rounds of artillery, mortar, tank, and missiles." They also executed seven air strikes inside the security zone and 58 outside it.
Israel assassinated Hezbollah's leader, Abbas al-Musawi, in 1992. They used missiles fired by an American-supplied Apache helicopter gunship to do it. They also murdered his wife, his five-year-old son and four others. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's current leader, replaced al-Musawi.
Under Nasrallah, Hezbollah's fighters got very good at killing Israeli soldiers. They got so good that in 1998 they killed more Israeli soldiers, 24, and SLA militiamen, 33, than their own fighters got killed, 38. By 2000, Hezbollah killed more than 900 Israeli soldiers.
Finally, the Israeli public demanded the Government bring their boys home—just like the American public demanded an end to the Vietnam War. Israel had never unilaterally withdrawn from Arab territory without concessions or a peace treaty. Hezbollah—and Iran—notched a huge victory. Nasrallah was a war-hero.
Even though Hezbollah evolved and grew into a political party winning seats in Lebanon's parliament, as well as a social welfare agency, the Party of God refused to put down its guns.
Instead, it has armed itself with ever-more sophisticated weaponry, including an arsenal of missiles provided by Iran. Hezbollah also fortified Lebanon's border with Israel. Directed by North Korean engineers, they built hardened bunkers and dug deep tunnel systems—including one 15 1/2 miles long.
A sophisticated counter-intelligence plan fed disinformation on the bunkers to Israeli spies—keeping Israel guessing as to their true location.
The defensive infrastructure was designed to complement Hezbollah's tactics. The group planned to play zone defense. Each zone had three weapons caches—a primary and two back-ups. The area's mountainous terrain channeled Israeli tanks and troops into corridors that were mined and pre-zero'd in gunners' sights. Elaborate multi-ATGM tank ambushes were pre-planned, pre-placed and practiced repeatedly in advance.
Hezbollah command is decentralized. Instead of 12-man squads, front-line troops are organized in smaller fire teams or "cells." Team leaders are given orders and told their commanders' intent, but generally have the autonomy to execute and defend their zones as they see fit. When its time to quit, they strip into civilian clothes, walk away and crash in safe houses they have keys to.
ISRAEL'S THIRD INVASION OF LEBANON: SECOND LEBANON WAR
In 2006, Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the Israeli side of the border to trade for the release of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. Instead of negotiating, Israel bombed Beirut, sealed the country off with a naval blockade and invaded southern Lebanon for a third time.
"There won't be any mistake," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced. "Our response will be thorough and painful."
"We won't hesitate to take all the necessary action in order to put an end to the terror coming from Lebanon," he added.
One regiment commander translated the Israeli president's order this way to his troops: "there are no rules."
Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 missiles into Israel over the 34-day war, striking cities it had never reached before. Off its coast, it used truck-fired anti-ship cruise missiles to launch a sophisticated, dual-missile, hi-low attack on an Israeli missile corvette. One of the two missiles hit the ship, the INS Hanit, killed four sailors and knocked out power making her dead in the water.
"Now in the middle of the sea in front of Beirut," Hasrallah bragged on the Hezbollah TV station al-Manar, "the Israeli war ship was hit."
The Israelies tried repeatedly to bomb al-Manar off the air but al-Manar never missed a broadcast during the war—despite the scores of bombs Israel dropped on TV studios all across Lebanon. It broadcast every single night, at the same time. The constant flow of propaganda, and their failed attempts to stop it, infuriated Israel’s impotent political leadership.
The had to listen to Nasrallah gloating, every night, from a secret bunker, somewhere. If they missed the original al-Manar broadcast, they didn't have to worry because they could catch up with it on CNN—which conveniently re-broadcast the group's video messages because of the journalist code to tell both sides of a story.
Israel also couldn't stop Hezbollah's missiles. Hundreds of them landed in Israel every day, terrorizing and killing Israeli civilians.
Israel sent in troops and tanks on July 11, but the army was not prepared for what waited for them.
“We didn’t know what hit us,” said one of the soldiers in an Israeli special forces unit that tried to take a village three-quarters of a mile from the border. “In seconds we had two dead."
"We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs—that was the intelligence we were given," he explained. "Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”
They were still pinned down the next morning. The Israelies had to send in a brigade just to rescue them. And even then it took hours of battle just to recover the dead. The Israelies had to try two more times before they took the village.
Hezbollah innovated ATGM tactics. First by coordinating fire—shooting multiple missiles at the same tank simultaneously. Second by using them like artillery to strike massed infantry.
Before Israel gave up, it lost 114 soldiers and 56 civilians. 30 of the soldiers were tank crewmen. Out of the 400 tanks sent into Lebanon, 48 were hit, 40 were damaged and 20 penetrated by ATGMs or IEDs. Five Merkavas were totally destroyed.
Israel killed almost 1,200 Lebanese. It claims 600 of them were Hezbollah fighters.
After the war, Meir Degan, the Mossad Chief, and Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet, told Prime Minister Olmert "the war was a national catastrophe and Israel suffered a critical blow.”
Two years later, Israel traded five prisoners for the two Israeli soldiers Hezbollah kidnapped in 2006—exactly what Hezbollah asked for after it seized the soldiers, before Israel invaded. Still, the war brought Israel, and south Lebanon, years of quiet.
Quiet time Hezbollah used to train even better soldiers, build even better bunkers and acquire even better missiles and bombs.
Hezbollah fire team armed with an ATGM at a dug-in, defensive position in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border. Note the natural-looking fortification and rough terrain.
Today, Hezbollah is the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor with an arsenal of about 130,000 rockets and missiles. Israel estimates Hezbollah strength at 20,000 to 25,000 full-time fighters but Nasrallah said last week it has more than 100,000. Minus armor, the militia has the fire-power of a conventional army while fighting effectively with non-conventional guerilla tactics.
In 2012, Hezbollah deployed soldiers to Syria to assist the regime of Bashar al-Assad put down a combined rebellion and invasion by several factions, including Turkey and ISIS, in the Syrian Civil War. There were three main reasons for this. Syria is a long-time Hezbollah ally. Hezbollah's supply lines to Iran run through Syria. And, if Syria devolved into anarchy, the chaos might spill across the border into Lebanon and shatter the fragile peace the country achieved after its long civil war.
In exchange for helping Syria, Hezbollah received what Nasrallah called "game-changing arms" in 2014. Just as significant, its commanders and soldiers also gained invaluable combat experience in a variety of environments, from mountains to cities. Experienced guerilla defenders, they mastered the complicated skills necessary to mount a modern combined arms military offensive—under the tutelage of Iranian and Russian trainers.
They also learned how to fight with other forces, going into combat alongside not just Syrians but Iranians, Iraqis, Yeminis and more.
With the Idlib ceasefire in March 2020, fighting in Syria slowed. Hezbollah brought some of its soldiers back to Lebanon.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7 strike, Hezbollah recalled 1,500 fighters—and started getting ready for what comes next.