IDF Remains On High Alert

After 58 days bracing for Hezbollah attack, IDF shows no sign of easing up

JUDAH ARI GROSS

For nearly 60 days, the Israel Defense Forces has been on high alert along the Lebanese border, bracing for the retaliatory strike that the Hezbollah terror group and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had vowed to carry out.

On July 20, a Hezbollah fighter was killed in an airstrike on Damascus International Airport that was widely attributed to Israel. The Iran-backed terror group threatened revenge for his death and, according to the IDF, has attempted to exact it at least twice: once on July 27 when a cell of Hezbollah members crossed the internationally recognized Blue Line border on the contentious Mount Dov and entered Israeli territory before being turned back by with warning strikes, and again on August 25 when shots were fired at Israeli troops near the community of Manara, just missing them.

Nasrallah has made it clear that those failed attempts will not suffice. On August 30, he declared that his group would kill an IDF soldier in order to balance the “equation of deterrence” — a longstanding tit-for-tat policy that is meant to force Israel to think twice before killing its members.

It has been reasonably effective. This can be seen in multiple cases of the IDF deliberately avoiding killing Hezbollah operatives, most recently during the terror group’s failed July 27 attack. To the IDF, entering into such rounds of heightened tensions with Hezbollah only distracts from the military’s higher goal of combating Iran’s efforts to establish a permanent military presence in Syria and transfer weapons throughout the region.

“When Israel kills one of our fighters, we will kill one of your soldiers,” Nasrallah said in a televised address

It is the job of the IDF Northern Command, of the Galilee Division, of the 769th Regional Brigade and of the 300th Regional Brigade, to make sure that this does not happen — or to make Hezbollah deeply regret it if it follows through on its threats.

To that end, the military has deployed additional troops to the area, allocated intelligence and aerial resources to the Northern Command, and drawn up a host of possible retaliations to a Hezbollah attack.

“We are in a much higher level of preparedness than normal,” Lt. Col. Yitzhak Huri, deputy commander of the 300th Brigade, told The Times of Israel this week.

The 300th Brigade is responsible for defending the western portion of the Lebanese border, from the coastal town of Rosh Hanikra to Malkiya.

“We have lots of special forces in the region. Our defensive posture has changed and is changing. We have many new and high-tech capabilities that we are using,” he said.