In the hills of northern Israel, a tank emerged from its hiding place beneath the pines, leaving the musk of churned earth hanging in the air.
Here on the border with Lebanon a conflict is brewing, one that the West is so desperate to avoid that President Biden has sent two US aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean.
Hezbollah, the well-organised Shia militia based in southern Lebanon, is under pressure from Iran to join the war that Hamas, the Sunni militia based in Gaza, initiated when it broke out of the territory to butcher Israeli civilians two weeks ago.
Last week Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian foreign minister, met Hassan Nasrallah, the cleric who has run Hezbollah for 30 years.
He warned afterwards of there being more fronts to come and Iran’s allies have appeared to heed his call to join the fight.
Advertisement
For Hezbollah, however, a widespread offensive against Israel is politically risky. The Lebanese economy is in a parlous state with inflation running at over 250 per cent. The group, which has both a political and military wing, could be blamed by voters for exacerbating internal woes.
Nasrallah, a self-styled orator, finds himself caught between the wishes of his Iranian backers and the Lebanese people.
“Like many men of violence, he has a charming side,” said Richard Kinchen, who met Nasrallah when he was the ambassador to Beirut from 2000 to 2003 before the group had been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the British government.
“He loves the sound of his own voice, but he’s perfectly capable of reasoned debate. I think he will be rational in considering the different pressures, but that doesn’t mean he might not come down on the side of trying something.”
On Thursday, the US intercepted three missiles apparently aimed at Israel from Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are engaged in a civil war.
Advertisement
Simultaneously, Hezbollah has intensified its attacks from Lebanon, launching daily barrages of anti-tank missiles, mortar shells and rockets into Israel in the most serious outbreak of violence on the UN-demarcated “blue line” since 2006.
In total, 33 people have been killed in the border clashes: 28 in Lebanon and five in Israel. One of the Israeli soldiers who died was Amitai Granot, 24, who got engaged two weeks before his death.
Hezbollah militants claimed they destroyed Israeli surveillance cameras on the border, blinding the Israel defence forces (IDF) and laying the groundwork for a potential offensive, while five gunmen died in one incident last week, prompting Israel’s top general to rush north. “If Hezbollah makes a mistake, it will be annihilated,” Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff, said on a visit to the IDF’s northern command in Safed.
With the intensity and frequency of the attacks from Lebanon increasing, Israel ordered the evacuation of all Israeli homes under 2km from the border, packing residents onto buses for hotels in the south and setting up an exclusion zone 4km from the fence.
The smoke of a shell recently fired from Lebanon drifted into the air on Thursday from a vineyard inside the cordon. Peering through binoculars close to Dovev, a town under a kilometre from the border, the Hezbollah fighters usually seen taunting Israelis along the length of the fence were nowhere to be seen.
Advertisement
“If they were patrolling today like that, they’d be killed immediately,” said Shadi Khalloul, 47, a Maronite Christian and paratrooper reservist officer in the Israeli army, who lives in an Aramaic-speaking town by the border alone after he sent his wife and four children to Europe.
Hezbollah, with its superior arsenal of weapons, is more feared than Hamas by Israel.
Its fighters are battle-hardened by the Syrian civil war, where they fought on the side of President Assad, and are stockpiling chemical weapons such as sarin nerve gas, according to research by Alma, an Israeli organisation that monitors the tensions along the border.
The militia’s arsenal includes as many as 200,000 missiles, rockets and mortar bombs, including Kornet anti-tank missiles, Iranian-made Mohajer kamikaze drones and Scud ballistic missiles, according to the institute. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has described Hezbollah as “ten times stronger than Hamas”.
The elite Radwan special forces of Hezbollah, believed to number about 2,500, have boasted previously about plans to seize parts of Upper Galilee, and a network of tunnels has been discovered, running up to 80m below the border and 800m long. Six tunnels have been found in recent years but Hezbollah claims many more lie undisturbed, from which they could launch an assault undetected.
Advertisement
“They have been building the tunnels for ten years, digging them from inside factories and homes on the other side,” said Khalloul, who works for Alma. “How can I sleep at night knowing there is a monster just two miles away on the border trying to get across?”
Mike Mazeika, 41, an ice hockey coach originally from Toronto, is one of those who has been evacuated south from the border town of Metula, with his wife and two young children. “In Metula, you become numb to errant gunshots, random explosions and fanatics yelling from the hilltops threatening our people,” he said. But those familiar tensions have erupted into something of an altogether different magnitude following the Hamas terrorist attacks. Last week an anti-tank missile landed on a residential street and injured one of Mazeika’s neighbours who had remained to oversee the town’s security. Intermittent skirmishes have developed into daily exchanges of fire.
“Right now I don’t have a home,” Mazeika said. “I’m doing my best right now to live in the moment and trying not to think too far ahead because I don’t want to get too disappointed. I’m trying not to make any decisions about where I’m going to live just yet but after seeing what happened in the south, you’ve got to think about these things.”
Bulldozers were moving mounds of earth in the valleys of Upper Galilee to create artillery firing positions on Thursday and Merkava 3 tanks were hidden in the forest undergrowth beneath khaki canopies to avoid detection by Hezbollah reconnaissance drones.
“When this is over I’d like to take my children camping here one day,” said one Israeli tank commander, a reservist who had abandoned his middle-class job in Tel Aviv to camp on a bed of pine needles among the wild boars in the hills. “This is a war we have to fight. If we weren’t here, Hezbollah would be. We have to protect our homes and our families.”
Advertisement
Israel is preparing to fight along numerous axes — as it has done previously during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — by stationing two divisions on its northern border.
The defence forces have launched airstrikes against Iranian weapons-smuggling routes in Syria. A plausible response to a Hezbollah attack could lead to Israel bombing targets not just in Lebanon but in Iran itself and a full-blown war across the Middle East that threatens to draw in the various allies of the participants.
“The risk of an escalation into a wider regional conflict — because you get into an uncontrolled spiral of action and reaction — is still there,” said General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of joint forces command, who had extensive British army experience in the Middle East during the Iraq war. “It feels a bit like August 1914 where nobody thinks there should be a war, but they got one anyway. A lot hangs on this [anticipated] Israeli offensive.”
In a sign of the deteriorating situation on Israel’s northern border, Britons in Lebanon were told by the Foreign Office to leave the country. Saudi Arabia and the US also urged their citizens to get out.
The Israeli army, embarrassed and outmanoeuvred by Hamas in the south on October 7, is unlikely to let an even more dangerous foe take the initiative in the north.
“We have a message for Iran and Hezbollah,” said Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, in a speech to the knesset. “Do not test us in the north. Do not repeat your previous mistake, because the price you will pay will be much worse.”
