Israel Was Prepared for a Fight With Hezbollah. Ending It Will Be Harder.

Israel Was Prepared for a Fight With Hezbollah. Ending It Will Be Harder.

Lessons learned from a 2006 invasion of Lebanon have guided Israel in its current one. Security experts say a political deal is needed to restore calm.

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By Adam Rasgon

Reporting from Jerusalem

Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, in 2006, was considered a failure within much of the Israeli security establishment.

Its air force had a thin list of targets. Israeli ground soldiers struggled during fighting in southern Lebanon’s rugged terrain. And the war failed to accomplish its stated goals of returning two captive Israeli soldiers and removing Hezbollah from the border region.

“There was a certain degree of trauma from the results of the war,” said Carmit Valensi, an Israeli expert on Hezbollah who served in the military’s intelligence directorate.

Nearly 20 years later, Israel has mounted another assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. This time, a string of successes — attacks that have killed Hezbollah’s leaders, crippled its communication networks and targeted its weapons caches — were a direct result of Israel’s investments in preparing for a future battle with Hezbollah after that foundering performance in 2006, Israeli security experts said.

But as Israeli forces push deeper into Lebanon by land, they will be vulnerable to greater risks, including sophisticated weapons used by Hezbollah. And if the Israeli government fails to develop a clear exit strategy, as it has struggled to do in Gaza, the military could end up fighting a protracted war that stretches its resources to the limit.

Delivering blow after blow to Hezbollah has helped restore Israel’s reputation as a powerful force in the Middle East, but it also has underscored how the country was more ready for war with Hezbollah on its northern border than it was for an incursion by Hamas, which spearheaded the Oct. 7 attacks in the south.

“Hezbollah is 10 times more powerful than Hamas,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Israel’s national security adviser from 2011 to 2013. “But the I.D.F. was 20 times more prepared for Hezbollah than it was for Hamas,” he said, referring to the Israeli military.

Hezbollah was also more ready for a war with Israel than last time, having built an arsenal estimated to contain more than 100,000 rockets and missiles and trained tens of thousands of fighters. And its leaders carefully studied Israel, calculating that Hezbollah could trade back-and-forth attacks with Israel in support of Hamas without setting off an all-out war.

The current Israeli onslaught against Hezbollah showed that was a major miscalculation. Israel escalated its attacks in mid-September, commencing weeks of bombings against Hezbollah and targeting its militants by blowing up their walkie-talkies and pagers. The exploding devices killed or severely wounded both militants and civilians.

Days later, Israel killed several top Hezbollah commanders, including Ibrahim Aqeel, a leader of the Radwan force — elite fighters who Israeli officials had concluded were planning to invade northern Israel.

On Sept. 27, Israel struck an underground compound, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah who turned the group into a powerful political and military force. And on Thursday, Israeli officials said they tried to kill his possible successor, Hashem Safieddine, but as of Sunday, it was not clear if they had succeeded.

At the same time, a wide-scale bombing campaign by the Israeli military struck Hezbollah’s weapons infrastructure and killed its fighters, undermining the group’s ability to respond forcefully. Hundreds of people have been killed in the Israeli airstrikes, including women and children, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry. Its figures do not differentiate between combatants and civilians.

At least four hospitals across southern Lebanon were out of service after Israel’s bombardment, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The St. Therese Medical Center south of Beirut, the capital, also had temporarily suspended services, saying that Israeli strikes in the vicinity inflicted “huge damage.”

General Amidror said a key element of Israel’s intelligence superiority over Hezbollah was its increased deployment of drones that hover in the skies over Lebanon.

An inquiry he conducted into the performance of the military’s intelligence directorate before and during the 2006 war revealed that Israeli drones in Lebanon were being diverted to Gaza, leaving the area with a minuscule number of the unmanned aircraft, he said. The inquiry was at the behest of the Israeli military’s chief of staff, he said.

“I saw that there were very few drones flying over the north,” he said. “I asked myself: Hold on, what’s happening here?”

In the intervening 18 years, the number of drones over Lebanon has grown exponentially, he said.

Israel has said it scaled up its attacks against Hezbollah in recent weeks to facilitate the return of roughly 60,000 displaced residents of northern Israel to their homes.

Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser from 2021 to 2023, said Israeli forces focused on gathering intelligence on Hezbollah leaders and their movements as well as its communications systems and secret facilities.

While Hezbollah has long been aware that Israel was conducting reconnaissance on its members, the Israeli military’s repeated strikes on the group’s leaders suggest it did not realize how deeply its ranks had been penetrated.

“We are now seeing how this information gave us an advantage,” said Mr. Hulata, who now is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute based in Washington.

Israel’s intelligence operation against Hezbollah was often able to collect information from secretive meetings without Hezbollah’s knowledge, according to three Israeli security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to communicate with the news media.

Still, celebrations in Israel of its recent successes may be premature. The Israeli forces’ ground invasion into Lebanon, only a few days old, has already exacted a price. On Wednesday, Hezbollah fighters killed nine Israeli soldiers during some of the first fights between the sides since the invasion began. Two more soldiers were killed on Friday in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, the military said.

“The ground invasion will be much more difficult,” General Amidror said. “We’re talking about an organization that is more dangerous, prepared and armed than Hamas. It’s in another league.”

Hezbollah was estimated to have 20,000 active fighters and 25,000 reservists in 2021, according to the C.I.A. Factbook. Many of its fighters also have operational experience, having fought alongside the Syrian government during that country’s civil war. Mr. Nasrallah once claimed Hezbollah had 100,000 armed members.

And while Hezbollah has lost about half of its arsenal in airstrikes, according to senior Israeli and American officials, it has access to guided anti-tank missiles, posing yet another challenge for Israeli soldiers.

Even more concerning, most of the Israeli security experts said, was that it was not clear if Israel had a clear exit strategy from Lebanon, raising fears that the Israeli military might become entangled in a war of attrition.

Those experts also said the Israeli government needed to translate the military’s tactical achievements into a political success by striving for a diplomatic agreement that returns security to the north of Israel. Without such a deal, they said it was unclear when the roughly 60,000 displaced residents will be able to return to their homes.

“At the moment, the political echelon isn’t doing enough work on how we can conclude this issue,” said Mr. Hulata, the former national security adviser. “I fear that our successes could be undone without a clear strategy to achieve a political settlement.”

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Natan Odenheimer from Safed, Israel.