Israel and the IDF have a new security doctrine in Lebanon: it is called keeping Hezbollah crushed.
Not deterred, but crushed.
What is actually the smaller piece, if still important, is what just happened over the weekend.
Some small cell of terrorists, so far it seems from sources who are themselves not 100% certain that it was very likely a Palestinian terror group and not Hezbollah itself, tried to fire six rockets at Metulla.
Three fell within Lebanon and three were shot down by Israel’s air defenses.
Not a single Israeli was hurt and not a single structure was hit.
Pre-October 7 Israel would have highlighted that Hezbollah was not involved, that no one was hurt, and would have threatened Hezbollah that if they did not keep a lid on the rockets, there could be trouble in the future.
But there would have been either no military response or at most very proportionate counter-fire on the areas which attacked Israel.
Under the new post-October 7 doctrine for Lebanon, Israel not only counter-fired at the source of the attack, but also engaged in multiple rounds of dozens of airstrikes on Hezbollah targets across Lebanon.
The message: anytime you fire a few measly rockets on Israel and hit nothing, you will pay 10-20 fold with attacks that will actually hurt.
So that piece of crushing, and not just deterring Hezbollah (deterring would have been a slightly disproportionate response), is important, but again is only a small piece of Israel’s strategy and tactics.
The larger piece is that after vanquishing Hezbollah’s leadership, including its chief Hassan Nasrallah, killing 3,851 Hezbollah of its broader fighters, and wounding 9,000 of its fighters during the war, Israel has killed over 100 Hezbollah fighters since the November 27 ceasefire.
The IDF has attacked over 120 Hezbollah assets since the ceasefire.
While many of these attacks were lower rank and file fighters in southern Lebanon, a bunch of them were senior Lebanese officials deep into Lebanon, including in Baalbek, 100 kilometers in.
At times the IDF has struck Iranian-sponsored convoys trying to smuggle weapons from Syria to Lebanon, at times it has forcibly turned back Iranian aircraft with supplies, and at times the navy has turned back ships at sea.
Although the IDF was supposed to withdraw from all of southern Lebanon on January 26, it obtained two delays of that deadline and did not actually withdraw until February 18.
On February 18, the Middle East appeared to transform overnight when the IDF withdrew after four-and-a-half months, but it still left several hundred soldiers at five outposts a few hundred meters from the border.
They remain there to this day and all indications from the IDF are that they are due to remain there for the foreseeable months and maybe much longer.
What all of this means is that four months after a nominal ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Jerusalem has continued to pulverize the terror group right and left, anytime it has shown its face in public or in a sensitive area, let alone in southern Lebanon.
The new policy
But what if Israel would kill a Hezbollah fighter and this could lead the group to fire rockets against in large numbers on Israel?
The new policy is: we dare you to try, and if you do, we will start leveling Beirut again and kill the second replacement for Nasrallah (the first replacement was already killed during the war) and further decimate Hezbollah.
In other words, Hezbollah has taken hit after hit and not responded. It knows that if it would respond, the contest would be unfair by multiple levels of magnitude.
Old Israeli deterrence would be slightly disproportionate about Hezbollah violating the quiet between the sides and would almost never dare to proactively go after Hezbollah for war preparations in Lebanon that fell short of an actual attack.
Crushing Hezbollah continuously means making sure to strike it to remind it that Israel no longer turns the other cheek and that any provocation will immediately lead to a much worse situation for it.
It also means keeping several hundred soldiers in Lebanese territory who were not there before Hezbollah screwed up and dived into a war that had nothing to do with it.
These outposts both are a front deeper into Lebanese territory to stop an invasion before it can get to Israeli villages and a glaring reminder that adventurism against Israel now could come with long-term strategic prices.
There may be some point when Israeli attention and persistence with Hezbollah fails.
But four months after the ceasefire, when Israel bombed dozens of targets in Lebanon twice because of three measly rockets which hit nothing and may not even have been fired by Hezbollah, Hezbollah did not make a sound and is just praying that Jerusalem stops the retaliation there.
