Israeli troops bleed as US report finds Hezbollah now more capable than when invasion began
Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement says it has inflicted heavy blows on Israeli forces in the southern Lebanese town of al-Bayyada amid mounting failures in Israel’s military invasion and growing vulnerability of its troops to advanced resistance tactics.
Hezbollah announced on Wednesday a series of attacks against Israeli forces in al-Bayyada in southern Lebanon, saying its fighters targeted an Israeli military command center with a barrage of rockets.
The group also reported striking an Israeli military unit stationed in the town with missiles and said the same unit was targeted again in a separate operation.
In additional attacks, Hezbollah said it also destroyed two Israeli Merkava tanks in al-Bayyada using guided missiles.
The battlefield developments came as an analysis by The New York Times on Tuesday described Israel’s invasion of Lebanon as increasingly stalled despite months of fighting.
According to the report, Hezbollah’s widespread use of fiber-optic first-person-view drones has caught Israeli forces off guard and severely undermined their ground strategy.
The drones, controlled through cables that cannot be disrupted by conventional electronic jamming systems, have turned Israeli soldiers into vulnerable targets while exposing major weaknesses in the Israeli military’s preparations and tactics, the report said.
While Israeli military sources said that drone attacks on Monday just killed two soldiers and wounded ten others, according to the report, Hezbollah released videos showing its drones tracking and striking Israeli troops and commanders in both Lebanon and Israeli occupied Palestinian territories.
The analysis stressed that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent threat to bomb Beirut’s southern suburbs and his subsequent retreat from those threats reflected growing failures on the battlefield.
When Israel’s prime minister and minister for military affairs warned on Monday that the air force would soon bomb the suburbs of Beirut, it wasn’t just a threat, the Times wrote. “It was an admission that Israel’s strategy in that fight was falling short,” it added.
Israeli forces had initially sought to establish a buffer zone in southern Lebanon and push Hezbollah farther from the border, but the analysis said that the resistance movement appears not only intact but more capable than when the invasion began.
Hezbollah vows to hit back deep inside the Israeli-occupied territories if Beirut
Israeli commentator Boaz Haetzni commented on the new drone potency, “The drone is the technological knife. It costs almost nothing, can be bought in parts online, and the operator does not even need to approach the victim because he can see him from kilometers away.”
Israeli officials and military analysts acknowledge that there is still no effective answer to the growing use of fiber-optic drones.
“There is no real solution to fiber-optic drones, other than protection, alongside very limited success in early detection and interception,” Haetzni said.
“The criticism of the defense establishment is not that it failed to invent a solution in advance. The criticism is that soldiers did not already have the equipment and defensive drills for an unsolved problem that has been known for years.”
