IDF: Hezbollah was ready to invade en masse after Oct. 7; we covertly raided 1,000 sites
Army reveals 3,000 terrorists were in position to storm Galilee; strikes drove them away; commandos then carried out 70 forays into Lebanon to seize weapons, raze sites and tunnels
The Israel Defense Forces revealed Tuesday that even before it officially launched ground operations in southern Lebanon earlier in the day, its troops had conducted dozens of secret cross-border raids throughout the current war, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and sites.
The army also disclosed that days after Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught in southern Israel, thousands of terrorists had been positioned near the Lebanon border in a plan to storm the Galilee and unleash similar carnage there.
The IDF briefed reporters on the new information before IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari held a briefing in Hebrew and in English, presenting images and maps from the foiled mass invasion plan and elaborating on the subsequent covert commando missions in southern Lebanon, which aided the military campaign to dismantle the immediate threat and drive Hezbollah away from the border.
The army said special forces have since then carried out more than 70 small raids, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and thousands of weapons that would have potentially been used in the terror group’s invasion plan.
According to the IDF, troops in the raids over past months silently reached around 1,000 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, some of them several kilometers from the border fence, including tunnels and bunkers where the terror group had stored weapons. The IDF said the sites were located both inside Lebanese villages and in forested areas.
The raids have been carried out since early in the Israel-Hamas war, after the IDF said it managed to push back Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force from the border area, enabling Israeli commandos to enter Lebanon with almost no detection. There were no direct clashes with Hezbollah operatives amid any of the raids.
According to IDF assessments, some 2,400 Radwan terrorists and another 500 Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists — trained by Radwan — had been waiting in southern Lebanon villages to attack Israel in the days after Palestinian terror group Hamas carried out its October 7, 2023, mass invasion from Gaza, in which some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel and 251 were kidnapped to the Strip amid widely documented atrocities and systematic targeting of civilians.
In his briefing, Hagari showed a map showing Hezbollah’s alleged “plan to occupy the Galilee.”
The IDF Northern Command had expected an invasion from Lebanon at the time and bolstered its defenses. In the following weeks, it carried out numerous strikes on Hezbollah operatives and sites along the border, causing the thousands of Radwan terrorists to withdraw several kilometers back.
The subsequent raids carried out by the IDF commandos, including combat engineers, sometimes lasted three to four days, according to the military. In all, 200 nights’ worth of operations had been carried out.
Hagari said dozens of tunnels meant for use during the invasion plan have been destroyed, though he noted that none had crossed into Israeli territory.
“Our soldiers entered Hezbollah’s underground infrastructures, exposed Hezbollah’s hidden weapon caches, and seized and destroyed the weapons — including advanced Iranian-made weapons,” Hagari said, adding that “there’s a lot more work to do.”
The IDF spokesman said that “Hezbollah has built, prepared and equipped this infrastructure over many years in preparation for the day that it would carry out an invasion into northern Israel,” a plan similar to the October 7 massacre.
The military showed reporters dozens of weapons recovered by the commandos from within Hezbollah tunnels and bunkers, including assault rifles, machine guns, RPGs, anti-tank missiles, explosive devices, mines, mortars, and equipment such as walkie-talkies — some of which were the same model as the terror group’s devices that were detonated last month in an operation widely attributed to Israel, though the devices displayed Tuesday by the IDF had not exploded back then.
Addressing reporters at the site of the displayed weapons captured by the commando forces, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “everything you see here — weapons, missiles, explosives, RPGs — these are things found by the IDF, from where the Radwan force planned to attack Israeli citizens, kill them and kidnap them.”
Military officials said that the recovered weapons were less than 1 percent of what had been found in the Hezbollah sites. Practically, it was difficult for the soldiers to lug dozens of heavy weapons back to the country through the difficult terrain, but some soldiers still took on the challenge.
The IDF said that while its commando operations had been successful, they were not yet enough to be able to achieve the newly added stated Israeli war goal — enabling the safe return of tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel to their homes.
Therefore, the IDF has now launched what it described as “limited, localized, and targeted raids” in southern Lebanon, carried out by an entire division, with the goal of demolishing Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the border area.
The operation has much of the same goals as the commando raids, but now the army can be less silent with its activities, destroying tunnel networks and other sites that normally can’t be razed by small forces that are operating quietly. Previously, the IDF would strike the raided Hezbollah sites from the air after troops had withdrawn.
Military officials have said the IDF plans to bolster its defenses and surveillance on the border following the ground operation against the terror group, and make sure Hezbollah does not return to the area.
IDF ‘not going to Beirut’
In his briefing, Hagari, the military spokesman, said that IDF troops would not be entering Beirut or any major cities in Lebanon, adding that the ground operation would be as brief as possible.
Speaking in English after a similar briefing in Hebrew to reporters, Hagari said Israeli forces “are not going to Beirut. We’re not going to the cities in southern Lebanon. We are focusing on the area of those villages, the area next to our border. We will do in this area what is necessary to dismantle and demolish Hezbollah’s infrastructure.”
Asked how long the ground operations were likely to continue, Hagari said: “I will not reveal to the enemy, but we are doing it as short as we can, days, weeks… We will do the necessary thing.”
Hagari said the IDF was acting “to enable all 60,000 [displaced] Israelis to safely return to their homes in northern Israel.”
The army said later that following an assessment, it was calling up four reservist brigades as well as other forces to take part in ongoing operations on the northern front. An Israeli brigade is generally made up of several thousand soldiers.
The military said calling up the additional reservists “will allow the continuation of the fight against the Hezbollah terror organization.”
The IDF sees a chance that its recent major strikes on Hezbollah, killing its entire top leadership, could lead to a power balance change in Lebanon, with the government regaining control of areas in the country, especially the south, from the hands of the Iran-backed group.
However, the IDF has assessed that Hezbollah still possesses rocket and missile fire capabilities, highlighted by Tuesday morning’s barrage on central Israel in which two people were wounded. Military officials said the army does not aim to “drain the ocean” and destroy every last rocket, but will work to disarm the terror group as much as possible.
“We are expanding the IDF operation in southern Lebanon,” Gallant, the defense minister, told reporters. “We are eliminating the Hezbollah organization in southern Lebanon and cutting off its arm, the Radwan force, along the entire line of contact.
“What we will do here is an expression of the meaning of returning the residents of the north to their homes safely,” he promised. “We are changing the security situation, from start to finish.”
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
So far, the skirmishes have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Before the escalation of the last two weeks, Hezbollah had named 516 members killed by Israel during the skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. Another 92 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have also been killed.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without specifying how many were civilians. Israel has said that many Hezbollah operatives are among the dead. One million people — a fifth of the population — have fled their homes, the government says.
