A rearmed Hezbollah in Lebanon is top concern for Israel
On a moonlit night, some two dozen Israeli soldiers in full battle gear march near a Lebanese border village with a bomb-sniffing dog, searching for explosives and infiltrators.
Suddenly the force stops. Through night vision goggles, two suspicious men appear over the ridge, holding what looks like binoculars. Could they be undercover Hezbollah militants? Lebanese soldiers on a night patrol? Or perhaps UN peacekeepers?
The men appear unarmed and since they are on the other side of the internationally recognized “blue line” that separates the two countries, Israeli troops move on, completing another routine foot patrol along a scenic frontier that has remained quiet but tense since the bloody battles of a 2006 summer war.
Even with attention currently focused on Gaza militants along the southern front, Israel’s main security concerns lie to the north, along the border with Lebanon.
Israeli officials have long warned the threat posed by Gaza’s Hamas rulers pales in comparison to that of Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group — a heavily armed mini-army with an arsenal of some 150,000 rockets that can reach nearly every part of Israel. It is along this northern front that Israeli soldiers come face-to-face with Hezbollah militants and where any skirmish could spark an all-out war.
“The rules of the game are very clear. They know I’m here and I know they’re there,” said Lt. Col. Aviv, a regional battalion commander. “But if they break that equation, they are going to get hit.”
From his base along the border near the Israeli farming community of Avivim, he can see the hilltop Lebanese village of Maroun Al-Ras, a UN observer outpost and a new square house inside an agricultural field, assumed to be a Hezbollah lookout.
Under the UN-brokered cease-fire that ended the 2006 war, Hezbollah militants are prohibited from approaching the border. But Israeli intelligence says Hezbollah men operate freely, generally unarmed and in civilian clothes. Sometimes they come within just a few meters of the Israeli troops, it says.
When Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu recently decided against a fullscale offensive in Gaza, he cited the current “security-sensitive period” in what was widely assumed to be a reference to the northern front.
Israel has generally refrained from engaging in Syria’s civil war, where Hezbollah has fought alongside Bashar Assad’s men, though it has carried out scores of airstrikes against what Israel says were Iranian shipments of advanced weapons bound for Hezbollah.
Israel flew its jets through Syrian skies with impunity. But that was severely restricted after a Russian plane was downed in September by Syrian forces responding to an Israeli airstrike, a friendly fire incident that stoked Russian anger toward Israel and hastened the delivery of sophisticated S-300 air defense systems to Syria.