Hezbollah’s ineffective response to Israel
Nicholas Blanford/Now Lebanon/January 07/16
Despite two weeks of warnings and threats traded by Hezbollah and Israel following the December 19 assassination of Samir Kuntar, the latest escalation between the two enemies appears to have fizzled out with an anti-climactic and bloodless retaliation in the Shebaa Farms.
The unspoken, but well-understood, rules of the game of brinkmanship played by both parties granted Hezbollah some latitude to exact a deadly price against Israel for assassinating Kuntar. Irrespective of pledges by Israeli officials to “aggressively retaliate” against any Hezbollah revenge attack, Hezbollah’s leadership knows that the Israeli government will not go to war over a couple of dead soldiers. That reality was confirmed a year ago when two Israeli soldiers died in a Hezbollah anti-tank missile ambush in the Shebaa Farms. Israel responded with customary artillery shelling opposite the ambush location and nothing more.
The powerful roadside bomb detonated on Monday by Hezbollah on the patrol road near the Israeli army’s Zebdine outpost in the Shebaa Farms was intended to inflict casualties. But there are no guarantees of success in such operations despite all the prior planning and years of experience that went into it. From Israeli accounts, casualties were spared partly because one of the vehicles struck was a well-protected D9 armored bulldozer.
The lack of follow-up comment by Hezbollah officials warning Israel that the account with Kuntar remains open, suggests that as far as Hezbollah is concerned, the episode is concluded. Israel can consider itself lucky that no blood was spilled this time.
The Israeli military undertook extensive security precautions along the Blue Line in expectation of a Hezbollah retaliatory attack following Kuntar’s death in an airstrike in Damascus. Troop movements were restricted, civilians were warned to stay away from the border with Lebanon and in the days ahead of the roadside bomb ambush, Israeli artillery shelled the outskirts of the Shebaa Farms in an attempt to deter Hezbollah infiltration.
Additionally, Israel operates a sophisticated surveillance and monitoring system along the border to check for approaching threats and infiltrations. The system in place since around 1999 was called “Solid Mirror,” developed by Israel’s state-owned defense company Rafael, which used ground and air-based sensor and surveillance technologies to grant the Israeli military a “virtual security zone” extending up to eight kilometers into Lebanese territory. Around two years ago, Solid Mirror reportedly was replaced along the Lebanon border with the Elbit Systems Multi-Sensor Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (MRSS) in a $60 million security enhancement package. MRSS coordinates an array of daytime and thermal cameras, laser rangefinders, ground radars, and small pilotless drones with data feeding into a command and control center to provide 24-hour, all-weather surveillance along the entire border with Lebanon.
Nevertheless, the system failed to detect the approach and infiltration by the Hezbollah bomb squad for a distance of about 500 meters into the Shebaa Farms. Furthermore, this is not the first time that Hezbollah has chosen to plant roadside bombs in this location.
Between October 2000 and the outbreak of war in July 2006, Hezbollah launched 23 separate attacks against Israeli targets in the Shebaa Farms. (The figure excludes the 12 attacks Hezbollah waged in the Shebaa Farms during a two-week escalation in April 2002 coinciding with Israel’s “Operation Defensive Shield” invasion of the West Bank). Most of the attacks consisted of rocket and mortar barrages against Israeli army compounds. Hezbollah only carried out four roadside bomb attacks in the Shebaa Farms before 2006. Two of them were in October 2000 in the early stages of the campaign before Israel began tightening its security in the area and building new supply roads hidden from the Lebanese side of the Blue Line to protect vehicles from Hezbollah’s line-of-sight anti-tank missiles.
Hezbollah carried out an audacious roadside bomb attack in May 2004 when it ambushed a unit of Israeli Egoz commandos with an explosive device planted at the entrance of the Roweisat Allam outpost above Kfar Shuba village. Eight months later, Hezbollah detonated another roadside bomb, this one on a patrol road some 900 meters northwest of the Zebdine outpost on the lower slopes of the Shebaa Farms mountain, the same location as Monday’s operation.
Hezbollah abandoned its Shebaa Farms campaign following the 2006 war but it has used the occupied mountainside in the past two years as a locus of retaliation for unusual Israeli attacks. In March 2014, Hezbollah targeted an Israeli patrol again on the Zebdine road with two roadside bombs, causing damage to a vehicle but no casualties. There was no immediate claim by Hezbollah for the attack (Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah confirmed Hezbollah’s responsibility in an interview some months later), but it came in the context of a flurry of minor anti-Israel attacks in the Golan Heights following Israel’s air strike against a Hezbollah weapons storage facility near Janta in the eastern Bekaa Valley.
In October 2014, Hezbollah wounded two Israeli soldiers in a double roadside bombing near the Roweisat Allam outpost in response to the death a month earlier of a Hezbollah engineer.
Therefore, of the seven roadside bombs detonated by Hezbollah in the Shebaa Farms in the past 15 years, three of them were in exactly the same location, a hairpin bend on the Israeli patrol road 900 meters from the Zebdine outpost.
How the Hezbollah bomb team evaded the Israeli surveillance blanket along the Blue Line is unclear, although the bad weather at the weekend would have helped. In the 1990s, Hezbollah fighters occasionally outwitted Israeli thermal imaging cameras to infiltrate the occupation zone by wearing neoprene diving suits to mask their individual heat signatures. Whether such measures are still adopted or whether Hezbollah has a more sophisticated means of bypassing Israeli sensors is unknown. But one would imagine that the Israeli military from now on will treat that remote hairpin bend near the Zebdine outpost with a good deal more caution during future periods of tension with Hezbollah.
**Nicholas Blanford is Beirut correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and author of Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.
