With Hezbollah’s missiles still raining down on them, Israelis want military to deliver knockout blow

David Vaknin figures he was about 30 seconds away from certain death earlier this week.

The building supervisor from northern Haifa had been working in a second-storey apartment on Tuesday when the air raid sirens went off. He says he barely had time to get to a safe room before a Hezbollah projectile smashed through the roof, hitting the very spot where he had been moments before.

“My life was saved as a gift to me,” he told CBC News on Wednesday, stepping over the chunks of broken concrete and rebar that littered the apartment’s floor in order to look through the hole in the ceiling to the clear skies above.

“I was saved from the destruction — you can see the missile pieces,” he said, picking up a twisted piece of metal.

Even before this close call, Vaknin said he supported Israel taking the fight to Hezbollah militants on the ground in Lebanon. Now, he’s more certain than ever that Israel must deliver a knockout blow.

“Every week there are injuries, there are deaths. We can’t keep living like this,” he said. “We need to defeat this hatred and those terrorist organizations. We need to deal with them once and for all.”

Praise for Netanyahu

On the ground floor below, fishing shop owner Ginadi Toybis was sitting in front of his store, listening to the recording his CCTV cameras had made of the missile impact the day before. He agreed with Vaknin. 

“If it wasn’t for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, we wouldn’t exist,” he said. 

“How did Bibi say it?” he said, using Netanyahu’s familiar nickname. “This is for generations to come — for our kids, our grandkids, our great-grandkids, so that there won’t be any wars anymore.”

While Israeli society has been wracked by division over how to deal with Hamas in Gaza — negotiate a ceasefire to free the remaining hostages or continue a brutal war to try to vanquish the militant group — there appears to be no hesitancy for most Israelis when it comes to Hezbollah.

The assassination of Hezbollah chief and Israeli nemesis Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27 prompted cheers from Israelis and praise from Israel’s opposition parties.   

In the two weeks since, practically all parties in the Knesset, or parliament, have endorsed sending ground troops into southern Lebanon to bring about what opposition leader Yair Lapid — who’s also a former prime minister — termed “the wholesale defeat” of Hezbollah.

Since Israeli ground forces officially crossed the border into southern Lebanon on Oct. 1, the metropolitan Haifa area, 40 kilometres south of the border, has emerged as a prime target for Hezbollah.

On Tuesday, it fired more than 100 missiles at the city and surrounding areas. On Wednesday, it unleashed dozens more.

An Israeli military spokesperson said more than 3,000 rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon in October alone, although interceptions by Israel’s anti-missile defences have prevented many casualties and limited the damage.

At Haifa’s’s underground emergency command centre, CBC News met the city’s mayor and other senior leaders, who said dealing with increasing missile strikes is a formidable challenge — but manageable. 

Mayor Yona Yahav said people in Haifa have lost faith in the prospects of finding a peaceful resolution. 

“They are losing the confidence in our neighbours,” he said. “And this is very bad for the future.”

“If you want peace in the Middle East, you have to have partners for peace. And every day that you are going through such circumstances, you are losing the faith.” 

Battered, but not beaten

Hezbollah, which Canada and other Western countries consider to be a terrorist entity, released a video from deputy leader Naim Qassem claiming that even after the assassinations of most of its top leaders, the group is in better shape than Israel gives it credit for, and that its ground forces have been successfully thwarting Israeli incursions close to the border.   

Notably, Qassem said he backed a ceasefire deal without any mention of linking it to a truce in Gaza, which had been one of Hezbollah’s main conditions.

More than 60,000 Israelis in the north have been living away from their homes for over a year now, as Hezbollah launched frequent, although limited, rockets across the border since Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.

Since Nasrallah’s death, however, the intensity of the ground and air war has expanded significantly on both sides.

The IDF announced Thursday the death of a twelfth soldier killed in combat with Hezbollah since the start of the ground operation. Dozens of other IDF members have been injured, many critically. The first Israeli civilian deaths since the escalation with Hezbollah also happened Wednesday, when a couple from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, reportedly out walking their dog, were killed by shrapnel. Hezbollah said they were targeting “enemy forces” there.

Israel says in addition to its attacks on Hezbollah’s leadership, it has eliminated hundreds of fighters since the ground operation began. Hezbollah has acknowledged the loss of its senior members, but has not provided any other casualty numbers.

Lebanese health authorities say more than 1,000 non-combatants have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the capital, Beirut.  

Attainable goals?

Despite Israel’s tactical successes against Hezbollah’s leadership, and the enthusiastic public support for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policy of escalating operations, there are larger questions about Israel’s strategic goals.

In a video statement earlier this week, Netanyahu appeared to suggest his broader war aim is to alter the political makeup of Lebanon, by eliminating Hezbollah as a force there.

“I say to you, the people of Lebanon: free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end,” he said, before making an ominous reference to the mass destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza.

“You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Israeli attacks in Gaza over the past year have annihilated more than 60 per cent of the buildings in the territory, left more than 42,000 dead, almost 98,000 injured and 1.9 million displaced from their homes.

The International Crisis Group, an NGO with a focus on resolving global conflicts, sounded a note of alarm in its most recent assessment of Israel’s activities in Lebanon and where the conflict is heading.

​​”Israel has not publicly articulated a coherent plan for converting its recent military achievements into strategic gains,” it said in a report. “In particular, despite having demonstrated battlefield prowess, it is not clear that Israel has a vision for how to prevent a resumption of attacks from Lebanon after the incursions and bombardment end.”

Israel has fought several wars in Lebanon in the past; its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, is the most notable and destructive.    

In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought for a month after former then-prime minister Ehud Olmert ordered ground troops in. He later negotiated a ceasefire that resulted in UN Resolution 1701, which called for Hezbollah to pull its forces back to north of the Litani River, a natural boundary roughly 20 kilometres from the current ceasefire line between the two countries.

Since then, both sides have accused the other of breaking the terms of the agreement, with Hezbollah remaining firmly entrenched in Shia Muslim villages south of the river.

Concerns about escalation 

Olmert, who’s 79 and out of elected politics, is among the few prominent Israelis now cautioning against taking a maximalist position with Hezbollah.

“[Israel] should be very concerned,” he told CBC News in an interview at his office in Tel Aviv. “How are we going to make sure that Hezbollah will not return back from the Litani River to the border and again expose the Israeli citizens?” 

Olmert said, “[if] you don’t have a solution before you enter into Lebanon, why did you enter? I think that we have to have a compromise.”

A longtime foe of Netanyahu, Olmert says Israel’s current prime minister has sent the country down a path that amounts to endless war, because in Lebanon — as with Gaza — Netanyahu has failed to articulate a plan about how the fighting will end. 

“There is one strategy that Netanyahu has, but this is not in any way related to the national interest of Israel,” Olmert said. “His strategy is keep [the war] moving indefinitely as long as [he] can, to be as far away as [he] can from Oct. 7, 2023, so that maybe [he] will be able, somehow, to manoeuvre a larger part of the public opinion of Israel to relieve itself of the burdens of what happened, and [his] responsibility.”

Netanyahu is governing with the support of far-right parties in the Knesset who are pushing to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and even into Gaza.

Olmert says for the moment, Israel has the ability to wage war on multiple fronts. But the public’s patience, and the country’s resources, will not last long.

“I think that there is a certain limit,” said Olmert. “And that we are coming very close to that … limit, which may be very, very significant and very, very dangerous to the safety and the security of the state of Israel.” 

“I’d rather we understand [the strategy] before we have to pay for it.”