Netanyahu: Security zone in Lebanon to be expanded; there are ‘visible cracks’ in Iranian regime

After a situation assessment at the IDF Northern Command headquarters in Safed with top IDF officers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israeli actions are creating “visible cracks in the terror regime in Tehran.”

“Iran is not the same Iran,” he says, “Hezbollah is not the same Hezbollah, and Hamas is not the same Hamas.”

The three, he insists, are “battered enemies fighting for their very existence.”

“Instead of them surprising us, we are surprising them,” he says. “We are the side that is acting, we are the side that is attacking, we are the side that is initiating, and we are deep in their territory.”

Netanyahu boasts that Israel has created “three security zones deep in enemy territory.”

He says that in Lebanon, he has given the order to “further expand the existing security zone to definitively thwart the [Hezbollah] invasion threat and to push anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”

Netanyahu acknowledges that Hezbollah “still has residual capability to launch rockets at us,” and that he and the IDF commanders discussed removing that threat as well.

“We are determined to fundamentally change the situation in the north,” he says.