The Israeli military must believe it has “finished” in Gaza because it could not comfortably fight on two fronts, our defence and security analyst says. 

According to Professor Michael Clarke, the Israeli military has always said that Hamas in Gaza is not their “real enemy” and will have planned to target Hezbollah in Lebanon for years. 

“The real enemy is Hezbollah because behind Hezbollah is Iran,” he says. 

“The plan that they are now implementing must have been put together reasonably recently because… they can only take on one opposition at a time comfortably. 

“Essentially they think they’ve finished off in Gaza for the time being, and they’ll now just bomb and raid Gaza. 

“They’ve only got a couple of brigades there as far as we can see, and they’ve moved a lot of forces to the north, including their best forces, the 98th Division, which seems to be taking the lead in Lebanon.” 

Harder job in Lebanon than Gaza 

Prof Clarke says it is harder in some ways for the Israelis to be targeted and proportional in their attacks on Lebanon. 

This is because parts of the country are very mountainous, so there are lots of tunnels beneath the surface.

“They are rock tunnels, so they’re not in the sand. It’s very difficult to penetrate them, except with bunker buster bombs, and they do an awful lot of other damage” he says. 

“Winkling out Hezbollah or hurting them so much that they have to pull back will be a much harder job in southern Lebanon than it was in Gaza.” 

So far, he says Israeli forces have taken out two top layers of Hezbollah – its leader Hassan Nasrallah and some of his commanders. 

“They’re having to recreate, we would guess, their whole top command while the middle command level is dead or injured or trying to recover from the attack two weeks ago,” Prof Clarke adds. 

“That’s why the Israelis think they’ve got a good moment to catch them.”