An IDF medical vehicle carrying five soldiers nearly sustained a direct hit from Hezbollah anti-tank fire during Sunday’s attack along the northern border, as it drove along an unprotected road in an apparent breach of army directives — with luck, rather than effective military planning, preventing the death or injury of the soldiers inside, Hebrew media reports said late Monday.
The reports appeared to contradict Israeli military sources’ claims on Sunday that an IDF vehicle that Hezbollah targeted was parked or empty at the time. The reports appeared to tally with footage released by Hezbollah-affiliated TV earlier Monday and with Israeli security camera footage that was published shortly thereafter. That footage showed two anti-tank missiles apparently narrowly missing an IDF vehicle on the road between Moshav Avivim and Kibbutz Yir’on near the northern border.
The footage from Al-Manar TV shows a Hezbollah fighter launching a Kornet guided missile at what appears to be a moving Israeli armored personnel carrier patrolling along the border fence. An additional launch at the APC is seen from further away. While the Hezbollah-affiliated network stated that the two strikes destroyed the APC, the footage does not show that the military vehicle sustained a direct hit; it shows billows of smoke surrounding it as the missiles land.
The APC itself was not in fact hit by either projectile, according to findings from an IDF analysis published earlier Monday. Rather, a piece of shrapnel from the explosion of one of the projectiles hit a tire, forcing the vehicle to stop on the side of the road, the military said.
Amos Harel, a senior military correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote late Monday that the Israeli armored vehicle, of the “Ze’ev” (or Wolf) model, was traveling on a road around 5.5 kilometers (3.4 miles) from the border when it was targeted — not on the front lines, but still within the range of Kornet guided missiles.
The road was one military personnel had been instructed to avoid as part of a restriction on military vehicular travel close to the border that was put in place earlier in the week in expectation of a coming attack.
For some reason not yet clear, the Ze’ev, a medical support vehicle under the command of an army doctor, failed to heed those instructions. The Walla news site said the military was investigating the troops’ actions.
Military officials had indicated following Hezbollah’s attack that one anti-tank guided missile hit an army base and one or two were fired at an armored military vehicle, but that the vehicle was empty and/or parked when it was targeted.
Israel was ready to launch a massive retaliation against Hezbollah’s precision missile system in Lebanon, and only opted against carrying out that plan because no Israeli soldiers were hurt in a Sunday cross-border attack by the terror group, according to a report Monday evening.
“The fact that [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah missed and didn’t kill any Israelis saved Hezbollah from the destruction of its precision missile program,” an Israel Defense Forces source was quoted as saying by Channel 12 news. “The planes were already in the air.”
According to the report, air force jets were flying over the Mediterranean Sea armed with dozens of tons of explosives in preparation for a counter-strike.
The source was quoted as saying the warplanes were ready to bomb many targets linked to Hezbollah’s missile production, and were waiting for a green light from Jerusalem.
The report came shortly after a Hezbollah-affiliated TV network published footage it said depicted the terror group’s missile strike on an Israeli military vehicle the day before, which did not cause casualties and led to a relatively limited Israeli retaliation. The footage showed two anti-tank missiles apparently narrowly missing an IDF vehicle on the road between Moshav Avivim and Kibbutz Yir’on near the northern border.
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