From Wednesday, the 17th anniversary of the outbreak of the second Lebanon War, July 12, a relatively new local conflict is threatening the limited stability between Israel and Lebanon.
The events along the border in recent weeks have been somewhat sidelined in light of the Israeli government's judicial overhaul and the protest against it, but additional escalation in the situation is liable to take over the national agenda.
The new tensions have to do with moves by Israel and Hezbollah in proximity to the northern border this past year and a half. Israel is building a defensive wall along parts of the border, instead of the old fence. At several points Hezbollah and the Lebanese government disagree as to the line of the border along which Israel is building the wall. Last September a fence was erected around the northern part of the village of Ghajar, keeping all its houses inside Israeli territory despite the dispute over the location of the border in the area.
Hezbollah, however, has intentionally escalated its activity all along the border, in what is perceived on the other side as calculated irritation.
Initially, in the spring of 2022, an initiative to build surveillance tents and outposts along the border was relaunched, on the Lebanese side. Armed fighters from the organization’s elite force, Radwan, are stationed in the positions, contrary to the Lebanese commitment under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the war in 2006.
Subsequently, there were a number of terror attacks and attempted attacks against Israel, and last week Hezbollah and the government of Israel attacked, belatedly, the Israeli move at Ghajar. With timing that probably was not calculated, an anti-tank missile was fired from Lebanon in the direction of the fence at Ghajar. In the Israel Defense Forces, it is believed that the firing was carried out by a Palestinian organization, and it is not clear whether that was with Hezbollah’s approval.
On Wednesday, IDF forces repelled suspicious individuals who approached the border and attempted to breach the fence, with reports of several casualties circulating on overseas networks. Prior to that, footage emerged of Lebanese residents waving Hezbollah flags and firing flares across the border, which caused a brush fire on the Lebanese side.
However, the most outstanding move by Hezbollah occurred at Har Dov, where two tents were erected inside territory controlled by Israel. Hezbollah disputes the location of the border, called the Blue Line, to which Israel relates, in a place where until now no fence was erected.
At the beginning of July, after considerable pressure from Israel and some other countries, Hezbollah removed one of the tents. A group of armed activists remains in the second tent. The tent was erected about 100 meters (109 yards) southeast of the Blue Line, in a mountainous area to which access from Israel is difficult.
Are all of these events connected? The most belligerent Hezbollah line began back in 2021, when a cell of the organization came close to the Gladiola outpost on Har Dov (and was chased away from there by warning shots, with the top echelons in the government and the military having decide not to harm it). However, the offensive activity and the irritants have increased over the past few months. Israeli intelligence attributes this to the way Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is interpreting what is happening on Israel’s domestic front.
Nasrallah, also according to his public statements, believes that Israel has been weakened by the political-constitutional crisis, that the government’s room for maneuver is limited and that therefore he continued with his offensive moves while keeping the hostilities below the threshold of an all-out war.
The situation became more extreme in the peculiar incident of the tents at Har Dov. Only last year, when the Lapid-Bennett government, with a sweeping recommendation from the military establishment, signed the maritime border agreement with Lebanon, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu furiously attacked it and claimed it was a dangerous and shameful surrender to Hezbollah. Now, when he is once again in power, Netanyahu has been ignoring for months the Shi’ite organization's land incursion into Israeli territory.
The tents' affair as first revealed in mid-June, in a Kan Public Broadcast Corporation report. At first, it was claimed that the tents had been erected on Har Dov, deviating from the boundary line, back at the beginning of the month. However, it has now become clear that the government and the IDF kept the matter secret for more than two months until the briefing given to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, two and a half months after the fact. Thus far, Israel has not deployed force, contrary to Netanyahu’s energetic rhetoric, to remove the tents. It is contenting itself with sending diplomatic messages via the United States, France and the United Nations.
On Monday, the Biden administration's special envoy, Amos Hochstein, arrived in Israel for a visit that was not reported in advance. The Lebanese media reported that on Tuesday that an American envoy would come to Beirut. In the past, Hochstein mediated between the two countries, in the negotiations on the establishment of the maritime border. Presumably, his visit here is also connected to the situation at Har Dov.
On Monday, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Foreign Minister Abdallah Bouhabib met with UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro. At the conclusion of the meeting, Bouhabib said there that UNIFIL would pass along the Israeli demand to remove the tent, but in response Lebanon has demanded Israel’s withdrawal from northern Ghajar. The UNIFIL commander also conferred separately to the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, Nabih Berri.
The army’s assessment is that erecting the tents was a local initiative by Radwan activists in the area, to which Nasrallah gave his backing only in retrospect. This has been a repeated claim by Military Intelligence in recent month, about moves by Hezbollah or Palestinian organizations taken supposedly only at the level of the field, without orders from above.
In any case, Hezbollah is now engaged in reframing the hostilities. It is no longer a matter of tents versus the wall the IDF is building at Har Dov, but rather a demand to remove the fence at Ghajar. Arab sources have report that the Americans have passed along a proposal in that spirit to Israel, ostensibly on their own behalf.
In practice, there are two violations of the Blue Line, one on Hezbollah’s part at Har Dov and another on Israel’s part at Ghajar (a move to which there was no reaction from Hezbollah or from Lebanon in real time last year). The Lebanese effort is two-pronged: military (Hezbollah and Palestinian organizations, in the erection of the tents and the anti-tank fire) along with diplomatic. Israel will have difficulty not reacting to it and leaving the tent in place over time, however small and marginal the issue might appear.
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