Israeli strikes on Lebanon are fiercest yet but Hezbollah is armed for a long war

Israel's military says its air force struck 1,600 Hezbollah targets on Monday alone – close to levels last seen in the 2006 war

Civilians search for their belongings in a damaged building after Israeli strikes in the village of Al Aqbieh near Sidon, south Lebanon. EPA

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Israel's intensive round of air strikes against Hezbollah on Monday was the heaviest attack on Lebanon since the devastating month-long war between the two sides in 2006, but the impact on the paramilitary group's capabilities remains to be seen.

The Israeli air force claimed to have struck 1,600 targets, with Lebanese health authorities saying at least 558 people were killed, including 50 children and 49 women, and 1,835 injured. By comparison, the so-called shock and awe air strikes conducted by the US and allies during the 2003 Iraq invasion comprising 3,000 bombs were delivered across a much larger area over 48 hours. In Gaza, Israel said it bombed about 7,000 targets in the first 20 days of the war there.

Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure in attacks that continued on Tuesday. Hezbollah responded with rockets and missiles that struck deep within Israel, sending tens of thousands of residents to bomb shelters, where they spent much of Monday and Tuesday morning, with a number of civilians injured by shrapnel.

Nearly 600 people in Lebanon had been killed in nearly a year of cross-border attacks before Monday’s escalation - nearly 500 of whom were Hezbollah members. The spike in deaths is set to raise the overall death toll beyond the 1,200 Lebanese – mostly civilians – killed in the 2006 war. About 44 Israeli civilians and 121 soldiers were killed in that conflict.

Thousands of people flee Israeli bombardment in Lebanon

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About 100,000 Lebanese and 70,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in border areas since Hezbollah initiated the cross-border exchanges on October 8 to open a new front against Israel in support of its ally Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that killed about 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage in raids on southern Israel a day earlier, triggering Israel's war on Gaza.

Experts note that Israel and Hezbollah have long had an understanding not to escalate beyond a certain point. That collapsed last week after thousands of pagers and hand-held radios used by Hezbollah were rigged with explosives and detonated, killing 34 people and injuring thousands. The blasts, blamed on Israel, came after the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government declared the return of people displaced by Hezbollah's attacks as one of its war goals.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said the group will not stop firing on Israel until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, where more than 41,400 people have died since October, while Israel’s chief of staff Herzi Halevi insists air strikes on Hezbollah will persist until the group withdraws from the border to north of the Litani river, placing Israeli communities out of range.

“Israel supported the efforts of the Americans and the French to reach a diplomatic agreement that will take us back to UN Security Council resolution 1701, which was never realised,” said Kobi Michael, an analyst at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. "According to this resolution, Hezbollah was not supposed to be in the area between Litani river and the border of Israel but unfortunately they're there and very fortified and they're threatening the security of people in Israel in the north."

Mr Michael, a former Israeli government official, says Hezbollah could conduct an October 7-style raid from its border stronghold.

Worse than the 2006 war?

The 2006 Lebanon-Israel war lasted 34 days and involved a ground invasion of southern Lebanon by up to 30,000 Israeli soldiers. Israel claimed to have struck about 7,000 targets during the conflict, devastating parts of Beirut and wrecking energy infrastructure and roads across the country.

Analysts say the Israeli air force's ability to inflict destruction has surged since, highlighting an exercise conducted in 2021. In the three-day drill, the air force simulated an attack on Hezbollah using its entire fleet of nearly 300 fighter-bombers to hit 3,000 virtual targets in 24 hours.

Hezbollah, too, is far better armed today. In 2006, the group was thought to have had about 15,000 rockets and missiles, firing most of them in the conflict or losing them to Israeli air strikes, along with several thousand core fighters, as well as networks of bunkers and hidden firing positions. Its drone capabilities were basic and few in number, while it had few precision-guided missiles.

Today, it has up to 50,000 fighters and somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 rockets and missiles. It has “squadrons” of Iran-supplied drones that can strike deep into Israel, some capable of firing missiles, in addition to more common variants that fly directly into a target and explode. In 2006, its infantry forces had powerful Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missiles and damaged or destroyed about 20 Israeli Merkava tanks. Today, that capability has advanced.

The group now uses so-called non-line-of-sight missiles such as the Almas, which can be guided by camera directly into a target up to 10km away. The group also makes extensive use of explosive quadcopter drones, as well as drones that can drop grenades – ubiquitous and deadly weapons in the Ukraine war that are extremely hard to defend against.

Hezbollah firepower

Experts say the group could fire at least 1,000 rockets and missiles a day, overwhelming Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system and devastating its power grid. Some estimates put that figure as high as 4,000 – entirely plausible considering that Hamas, with a much smaller arsenal, was able to launch a barrage of about 5,000 rockets and missiles on October 7 alone.

From October until the latest escalation, Hezbollah has fired 8,000 rockets, according to the Israeli government. Its recent barrages have been far smaller than analysts expected, numbering in the hundreds, raising the question of what has happened. On Monday, the group fired about 250 rockets and missiles into Israel.

“One hopes the Israeli defence forces truly damaged the rocket arsenal in the past few days,” said Samit Zehavi, founder of Alma, an Israeli defence think tank. "This could be one reason for the lower number of rockets and missiles fired; and a second reason is that it damaged the capability to launch by military operatives who are trained at using longer-range or more sophisticated weapons."

However, there is a strong chance that even Israel’s considerable air power has not been able to strike most of Hezbollah’s arsenal, Ms Zehavi says.

“With regard to the Grads, which are simple rockets, I think that maybe Hezbollah is saving them for the next part of the conflict. There are different reports here in Israel about the scale of damage that was caused to Hezbollah. It's too soon to evaluate.

"But in any case, Hezbollah is a pragmatic organisation. It was prepared for a long war. And I think that the strategy of their Iranian boss is a strategy of a war of attrition rather than quick war. And that's why Hezbollah is not rushing to spend all its cards, and the majority of it rockets, very quickly.”