Israel can handle the military wing of Hezbollah, and continue to weaken it, but to remove Hezbollah as a civilian presence will require the cooperation of the Lebanese government. That government needs to wage not just a propaganda campaign, correctly describing the terror group as an Iranian proxy, willing to drag Lebanon into yet another war with Israel at the behest of Tehran. Two-thirds of the Lebanese population — the Christians and the Sunni Muslims — have no love for Hezbollah, and even many of the Shi’a, who have seen the disastrous effect Hezbollah has had on Lebanon, dragging it again and again into its conflict with Israel, caused great damage to the country’s infrastructure, are now willing to abandon it.
Yet the problem is not restricted to Lebanon alone. Hezbollah has provided ideological training to similar terror groups outside Lebanon, including the Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and — even though Assad was toppled and a Sunni regime now rules in Damascus — in Syria, where there are still some Hezbollah-allied groups among the Alawite population.
Hezbollah relies on Iran for both weapons and for money. If the Islamic Republic falls, whether as a result of American and Israeli military action, or because the Iranian people come out to protest yet again, but this time in numbers so large that the regime can no longer suppress them, then Hezbollah will have no access to either. It’s hard to see how it can then continue to resist the combined power of the IDF and the Lebanese National Forces.
Hezbollah is now weaker than at any time in its history, thanks to the IDF. But it still has about 40,000 combatants (down from a high of 100,000), while the Lebanese Armed Forces have 85,000 men under arms, but Hezbollah’s men are battle-hardened and the LAF soldiers are not.
Also, Hezbollah is not just a military force; it is a state within a state, with its own civilian infrastructure. That infrastructure needs to be dismantled, so that everything Hezbollah now supplies to the Shi’a community will become part of what the Lebanese state provides.
Ceasefires with Hezbollah have come and go, and Israel cannot keep accepting these temporary and makeshift arrangements. Not just Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, a Christian, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a Sunni Muslim, desire peace between Israel and Lebanon — a real and permanent peace, and not a temporary cessation of hostilities. At least two-thirds of the Lebanese — the Christians and the Sunnis — are as eager as Israel to see Hezbollah’s combatants disarmed and its “state within a state” dismantled, so that it cannot be resurrected.
The IDF will have to continue for an indeterminate time to occupy and hold the area between the Israel-Lebanon border and the Litani River, and from that redoubt, take on the task of defeating — crushing — Hezbollah as a military force. The Lebanese must do their part, to track and seize Hezbollah’s money, interdict Iranian weapons shipments to the terror group, and monitor, in order to undermine, Hezbollah’s machinations within Lebanese civilian society.
It’s not the time to turn the temperature down — to “de-escalate” the conflict with Lebanon and hope that this latest ceasefire will hold. As soon as Hezbollah senses that the IDF may be turning more of its attention back to the continuing challenges of war in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, and in Iran, it will be back launching more missile and drone attacks on Israeli civilians from Lebanon. For Zehavi, this result is intolerable. There will likely not be a better time for the IDF to finish the job it started in Lebanon, with Iran now reeling economically, and thus ending forever both Hezbollah’s military threat to the Jewish state and its threat to the cohesion of the Lebanese nation.
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