Troubled by Gaza, Israel’s army seems to be alert about the conflict in Lebanon.

Yet, under this stance, there is growing fear inside Israel that its forces are overstretched and its resources depleted by the country’s longest conflict. Nine months of punitive strikes against Hamas in the Gaza Strip have not decimated the gang, and politically embattled Netanyahu has yet to determine an advance strategy. Professionals warn that in Lebanon, Israel will face a larger, better armed and more professional enemy, and the blackmail of a good and deep military swamp.

Israel has been fighting on two fronts since October 8, when militants currently led by Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Within hours, fighters from the militant task force allied with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political movement, and Hamas launched attacks on northern Israel from Lebanon – the beginning of a tit-for-tat border conflict that has escalated, deepening and spreading ever since. With passing time, in both countries.

Israel says it is moving toward a less extensive war zone in Gaza, and has restarted talks in Cairo on a potential hostage-release trade. However Hezbollah says it will not give up now, or even contemplate flight from Israel. limit, unless there is a ceasefire within the strip.

Both Israel and Hezbollah say they want a diplomatic answer, although neither appears willing to make the kind of concessions that such a solution would require. The result is that the situation remains tense and the death toll is rising; The status of border towns was dismissed, their fruit bushes and dairy farms neglected; and power development from Israel’s displaced persons to the federal government’s behavior.

Israeli military leaders had been planning an attack on Lebanon for months. On Wednesday, after two Israeli civilians were killed in a Hezbollah missile attack, former war cabinet member Benny Gantz said he and others had demanded that Netanyahu authorize Israeli incursions into Lebanon in March, but the prime minister “hesitated. ” Was doing. – Refusing to allow Israeli citizens to decide to return to their homes in the North until September 1, the beginning of the unused college year.

Gantz said, “Israel cannot afford for events in the north to continue as they are, losing another year.” “The time has come to pay the price for the military bases and Lebanese infrastructure of which Hezbollah is a part.”

Netanyahu, who once boasted about his ability to ban wars, “knows that the Israeli public is not ready for thousands of rockets on Tel Aviv,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew College.

In lieu of strategizing, he said, he has “alienated” himself, touting dry options for generation and climate change because of his loyalists’ lack of military experience.

Analysts say that after dissolving his conflict cabinet, following Gantz’s recent departure, Netanyahu has distanced himself even further from military officials, with Galant backing the issue of allowing troops into Gaza. Campaigned for months for a ceasefire and hostage trade. Focus on Lebanon.

“These are important days in terms of exercising our power against (Hezbollah), which only responds with force,” Gallant said on Sunday, after dozens of missiles hit Israel, including a strategic military base on Mount Meron.

Some Israelis who stayed in northern Israel on October 8 to guard the border did not expect to meet you later in the dilemma.

“Families are tired,” said Omar Simchi, who has served for nine months in the local security squad of Kibbutz Sasa, a Upper Galilee agricultural commune a mile from the Lebanese border.

Simchi’s wife and two children were among about 100,000 Israelis who evacuated northern Israel as Hezbollah rockets, kamikaze drones and antitank missiles began raining down late last year, turning the pastoral mountainous region into a war zone. had changed. Large numbers of Lebanese were displaced by Israeli attacks in the south of their country.

At least 94 civilians and more than 300 Hezbollah fighters were killed in Israeli operations in Lebanon; At least 20 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed in Hezbollah attacks in Israel.

When Simchi is needed by his community he looks for a substitute on the team, although there are never enough volunteers.

“I don’t know whether there will be a diplomatic settlement or war, but what I do know is that it cannot go on like this,” he said, speaking in the auditorium of a kibbutz university that was destroyed by Hezbollah missiles in December.

Moshe Davidovich, head of the local council, said scores of homes were damaged or destroyed throughout northern Israel.

This is only a small glimpse of the wreckage that Hezbollah could wreak in a full-scale war – rampant energy outages, massive rocket and missile barrages, and fighting against well-trained and well-equipped militias in general. Expect intense farm warfare. Soil. Hezbollah is believed to have more than twice as many fighters as Hamas, and more than four times as many munitions, including guided missiles. Voice is being raised openly on issues for which Israel is not prepared.

“The reserves and the regular army system have been weakened,” Yair Golan, head of Israel’s Hard Work Party and a former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Protection Forces, told an Israeli radio station last week.

“Israel is accustomed to fighting small wars,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former official on Israel’s National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Research. “But after nine months, the IDF is depleted, the equipment needs care, the munitions have been used up, and every family in Israel is affected.”

Even fairly low-intensity fighting on the border has taken a heavy toll on frontline troops. A 25-year-old Israeli reservist, who spoke on condition of anonymity under military protocol, was deployed to northern Israel on October 7. After four months under fire, “burnout” accumulated, he said.

When his tour ended, “it was hard to get back into the routine,” he said. He guiltily requested a separation from his job as a schoolteacher so that he could readjust the civil date.

Now he’s preparing to be called up again, wondering if he’s ready. He says his friends are also struggling with the decision.

Since the start of the operation in Gaza, 325 Israeli soldiers have been killed, more than four times the number since the 2014 war against Hamas. The losses were further compounded by a growing sense of strategic failure. In late winter, Israel returned home most of its reservists without reaching both of its stated war goals: the destruction of Hamas and the return of more than 100 hostages living in Gaza.

More than 38,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza State Ministry, which does not distinguish between warring parties and civilians, but says most of the dead were women and children.

Professionals say the Israel–Lebanon conflict could be devastating for either side.

After publishing drone photos of the port of the Israeli city of Haifa for the last time, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned of a war “without rules and without limits.” On Tuesday, Israeli Diaspora Minister Israel Katz posted on Twitter: “Nasrallah, if you do not stop the threats and violence and do not return to the Litani River, you will be considered a destroyer of Lebanon.”

However, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is generally a “trap,” Guzansky said, drawing Israel into another grueling war with no end game.

“There is a misconception in Israel that the war there could end in a few days or weeks,” he said.

Scenes of devastation in Lebanon will increase global power over Israel and increase tensions with Washington.

At the end of the day, Netanyahu said that “there has been a dramatic decline in arms supplies from the US to Israel,” and that since then there has been only a “slight decline” – a claim that US officials vehemently deny. On Wednesday, US officials said a significant number of bombs planted since May were now headed towards Israel.

To avert a Lebanese war, it is not easy for Israeli officials – through US and EU diplomats – to get Hezbollah to retreat about 10 miles north of the border, from the Litani River, which was at the end of the 2006 war. There was certainly a military demarcation.

Darina Kalabrino, a resident of Kibbutz Sasa, lived in the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona and hid in a bomb shelter in 2006 as her home was hit by a Hezbollah missile. In 2018, the Israeli military said it had uncovered Hezbollah’s plan to “conquer” the Galilee. It discovered several cross-border tunnels, although civilians believe there are many more.

Kalabrino says his greatest concern is the type of mass infiltration and massacre that has occurred in the southern kibbutzim.

“We don’t want to be the next October 7,” he said. “We saw with our own eyes what could have been.”

Suzy Hadamus in Beirut contributed to this file.