Despite the newly mounted Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire, the IDF will continue to attack fighters of the Lebanese terror group who have remained in the southern part of the country should they not surrender, the IDF said on Friday.
The statement by the IDF was the first aggressive interpretation of the limits of the ceasefire put out by any senior Israeli official.
In addition, IDF sources for the first time gave the unambiguous official commitment that the military will remain in southern Lebanon indefinitely, and view the Litani River as the new security line with Hezbollah, unless the terror group agrees to disarm.
Although Israeli political officials had started to take such a stance in recent weeks, the IDF has been slower to adopt such a consequential long-standing view, given that it could mean that the military may get stuck in a new Lebanese quagmire for years.
In spite of the pessimistic scenario, the IDF had some potential optimism for the current Israeli-Lebanese negotiations, given that Hezbollah is considered even weaker than after the fall 2024 ceasefire.
This is because Hezbollah has lost another 1,700 fighters, another 5,800 rocket launchers, has generally lost another 10-20% of its pre-2023 power (around another 60% of its post-fall 2024 power), and may have much less capacity to rebuild if Iran's economy, its main source of funding, is as shattered as reports indicate.
Separately on Friday, the IDF revealed explicitly for the first time that the security cabinet and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held them back from multiple instances where they had wished to initiate an earlier major operation against Hezbollah.
At least one of these instances took place in January of this year, as the Iranian protests picked up.
The IDF understood the cabinet's wide diplomatic considerations, but some of the military's frustration with being held back against Hezbollah was palpable.
IDF surprised by weak performance of Iran's proxies
Next, the IDF disclosed that it had been surprised by the weak performance in general of Iran's proxies.
It had expected Hezbollah to intervene on the first day of the war and more strongly, not the third day of the war, and with a relatively light performance.
Moreover, the IDF had expected the Yemen Houthis to jump into the war from the start and much more heavily, whereas the Houthis stayed out of the war for weeks, and then intervened so moderately that they were barely a factor.
Finally, under criticism from some Israelis for failing to stop Hezbollah's rocket fire entirely, the IDF responded quite directly that it was not given mission parameters that could have possibly achieved such a result.
IDF sources said that it was well-known that Hezbollah was firing nearly all of its rockets from North of the Litani River, some from as far away as 100 kilometers or more in the Bekaa Valley, and that only if Netanyahu and the cabinet had endorsed invading all of Lebanon, might the rocket fire have stopped.
In truth, almost no top Israeli officials entertained an invasion of Lebanon beyond the Litani River because when Israel did so in 1982, the final outcome was a disastrous quagmire, and heavy Israeli casualties over a long period of time, without succeeding at stamping out anti-Israeli forces.