The Beaufort Castle, built by the Crusaders sometime around 1140, commands vital high ground close to the Litani River in southern Lebanon.
From its summit, one can see Metula and other Israeli border communities to the south, and the Lebanese town of Nabatiya to the north. The Crusader knight Reynold of Sidon lost the castle to Saladin in 1189. Since then, it has changed hands regularly between the many conquerors who have passed through this hypnotic, green landscape.
Lebanese sovereignty collapsed into civil war in 1975, leading to the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s capture of the castle the following year.
In 1982, as part of Operation Peace for Galilee, a Golani Brigade Reconnaissance Company fought a hard but ultimately successful battle to take the castle, in the course of which its commander, Maj. Guni Harnik, was killed.
Following Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May, 2000, the Beaufort passed into the hands of Hezbollah.
IDF reclaims Beaufort Castle, May, 2026
Then, on May 31, 2026, in the framework of the IDF 36th Division’s ground maneuver toward Nabatiya, the castle was once more taken by the Golani Brigade, whose banners now fly from its highest point.
In a visit to the castle last week, The Jerusalem Post spoke to senior and mid-level commanders of the 36th Division, and viewed a large, Iranian-built Hezbollah tunnel in the area of Yohmor al-Shaqif, which adjoins the Beaufort to its east, along the Litani River gorge.
When we traveled to Beaufort from the Israeli border, evidence of the depopulation of the Shia villages in the vicinity was immediately apparent. We passed through Taybeh, once a staunch stronghold of Hezbollah and a major source of fighters for the organization. The area now appears entirely in ruins.
Since Hezbollah’s decision to rejoin Iran’s war against Israel on March 1, Jerusalem has pursued a policy of seeking to empty Israeli-held areas in southern Lebanon of the Shia population.
The rationale is obvious: The Chinese leader Mao Zedong compared guerrilla fighters to fish, and the supportive civilian population to the water in which they swim. In southern Lebanon, the IDF appears to be reverse-engineering the principle: no water, no fish.
Speaking to reporters in the castle, the 36th Division’s commander, Brig.-Gen. Yiftach Norkin, described the division’s progress, step-by-step, from the border to the Beaufort Ridge and across the Litani, in the course of May and June this year.
He cited the roles played by various elements under his command in the course of the maneuver: “Golani took the Beaufort, the Givati Brigade was the first to cross the Litani, the 7th Brigade secured the western area and the Saluki.”
The ceasefire came before the IDF could clear the entire Iranian-built tunnel system
Forces of the Commando Brigade were then responsible for clearing out the Iranian-built tunnel system of Hezbollah fighters, while fighters of the Yahalom Unit, the combat engineers’ elite force, took on the destruction of the extensive underground structures built in the previous years between the Litani and the Ali al-Taher ridge before Nabatiya. The fighting took the IDF to the outskirts of Nabatiya.
The ceasefire came before the conquest of the entire tunnel system.
For now, the two sides remain close up against one another. According to unofficial figures, Hezbollah lost around 3,500 fighters at the hands of the IDF’s Northern Command in the recent battles, with 600 killed by the 36th Division alone. In now-deserted Taybeh, in April 2025, the funerals of 32 Hezbollah men took place on the same day.
In the tunnel at Yohmor al-Shaqif, a masked lieutenant-colonel of the Yahalom Unit showed the assembled reporters an array of Hezbollah ordnance and equipment captured during the fighting. The weaponry and equipment are testimony to the organization’s de facto status as a wing of a state army: anti-tank systems, an anti-aircraft gun for use against helicopters, a fully equipped unit for surgery, and, of course, rifles, helmets, uniforms, ammunition.
The tunnel is about a kilometer long, high, and wide enough for a grown adult to easily walk within it. There are fully equipped bathrooms and shower units, and kitchen areas at regular intervals along it.
The atmosphere, as one goes deeper into the tunnel, becomes fetid and close.
The construction of these tunnels, hewn out of solid rock in difficult terrain, was nevertheless a considerable feat of engineering.
While the 36th Division’s commanders and spokespeople refer to them as “Iranian,” it’s interesting to note that North Korean engineers brought their expertise to this area. In 2014, Hezbollah, under Iranian tutelage, signed an agreement with KOMID, the North Korean arms and infrastructure concern, to supervise the building of the tunnel complex. These Hezbollah tunnels rival and resemble the DMZ in Korea. They enabled the organization’s fighters to live, move, and fight underground.
It didn’t help them, of course, when Norkin’s 36th Armored Division came across here in May and June. In what the commander and several of his officers described with pride as “one of the most complicated ground maneuvers conducted in recent decades by the IDF,” the 36th decisively put an end to Iran’s and Hezbollah’s pretensions to challenge the IDF on the conventional battlefield.
The fight is not over, Hezbollah is rebuilding and rearming
Still, no one among the division’s commanders is under the impression that the last word has been said. Hezbollah is rebuilding and rearming just beyond the division’s positions outside Nabatiya.
With the IDF dug in at Beaufort and beyond, the next tactical challenge is how to protect the force from efforts by Iran-backed fighters to revert to the guerrilla and irregular roots that once brought them success against the IDF across this very terrain in 1985-2000.
No one among the commanders we met appeared to have any faith in the projected deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces to replace Hezbollah in the upcoming period.
As D. a company commander from Golani’s 13th Battalion, told us, “To be here isn’t an option. It’s an obligation. Between any citizen and a terrorist, there needs to stand a fighter of the IDF.”
For now, there is planning and watchfulness. The next round, in whatever form it takes, will be engaged across the ruined villages and across this verdant landscape, probably before too long.