Elias Karam - occupied Shebaa Farms
The Israeli army organized a tour of teams from the Israeli and foreign press in the occupied Shebaa Farms located on the Lebanese border with the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel.
This step is unprecedented since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon under the cover of darkness on May 24, 2000, and the Shebaa Farms is considered one of the most sensitive areas in terms of security as it is declared by Israel as a closed military zone and surrounded by strict and very strict security measures.
Israel controls the high mountain peaks that control farms and extend over about 25 km, and the height of these peaks exceeds 1500 meters above the sea level, which provides it with superior firepower, as well as its strategic importance as a site to monitor and monitor the movements of Lebanese Hezbollah in the eastern sector of the border With Lebanon, especially in the towns of Adisa and Kafr, both adjacent to the border, in addition to Marj Ayoun, Sahl al-Khayyam, and other large areas.
And the Israeli army is deploying in various locations on the intertwined and intertwined borders that wriggle between the rugged mountains a number of tanks and artillery pieces and advanced military sites, including the visible and secret ones, and one of these summits is also occupied by a radar station for early detection and reconnaissance.
Since Israel withdrew from the security belt in southern Lebanon, this region is the subject of a Lebanese-Israeli dispute, as Israel considered it part of the Golan, which it occupied in 1967, and the United Nations kept it under Israeli control when demarcating the borders after the withdrawal of 2000, or what is known today as the Blue Line.
Lebanon continued to demand the extension of its sovereignty over this area as Lebanese territory, at a time when the Lebanese Hezbollah movement took the scene of operations targeting the Israeli army, the most recent of which was in early 2015, when it launched an attack on an Israeli military convoy with guided Kornet missiles, killing two Israeli officers and wounding a number Another and destroy several vehicles.
This operation came in response to an Israeli bombing that targeted members of Hezbollah at Mazraet Al-Amal in the Quneitra countryside in the Syrian Golan a few days before that, among them was Jihad Mughniyeh, son of Imad Mughniyeh, the general military commander of Hezbollah, who was assassinated in February 2008 in the capital. Syrian Damascus detonated his car.
Hezbollah operations
The Israeli army says that it has noticed recent attempts by Hezbollah to penetrate international borders and carry out operations on the security fence, in response to the attacks attributed to Israel in Syria, which target from time to time Iranian sites and arms and missile storage depots to reach the party.
Lt. Col. Eyal Buzini, deputy commander of the Hiram unit operating in the eastern border sector, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net that it does not rule out that the Shebaa Farms should be a target for Hezbollah to respond to the attacks attributed to Israel in Syria, because Hezbollah gives legitimacy to itself to respond to Israel from This region, because it considers it occupied territory, but Israel is determined to exercise its sovereignty in this region, and to repel any attacks by Hezbollah, as he put it.
Buzini adds that Hezbollah is spreading on the international borders, contrary to the United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the war in Lebanon in 2006. It indicates that there is cooperation between its elements and the Lebanese army forces, except that the party is working under a civilian cover to collect intelligence information about the movements of the Israeli army and its widespread sites. Along the border.
A possible confrontation
The IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi had issued earlier this year instructing all army units to undergo strict and intensive military training, simulating the occupation of villages in southern Lebanon and fighting street fighting with Hezbollah, in a sign of the possibility of this year to witness a new military confrontation.
In this context, the Israeli army revealed that it has set up small combat units in which infantry, engineering, and armored forces and supported by the air and navy forces participate, in order to succeed in coordination between the different Israeli army arms, and subject them under the command of one commander who controls and manages their operations.
These maneuvers actually began in mid-February last on the slopes of Mount Carmel, south of the city of Haifa, a similar area in terms of its geographical topography in southern Lebanon, before these maneuvers stopped for several weeks due to the Corona pandemic, but they resumed two weeks ago in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.
A different war
In this context, Lieutenant-Colonel Eyal Buzini added that the Israeli army is preparing itself for the possibility of a new confrontation with Hezbollah. Saying that the third Lebanon war will be completely different from its predecessors, as this time the Israeli army is determined to resolve it in its favor, and to eliminate Hezbollah and keep it away from international borders, as he put it.
The Israeli army considers that Operation North Shield in late 2018 had achieved great success in stripping Hezbollah of its most important secret weapon, which is the offensive tunnel weapon, as the Israeli army destroyed six tunnels that penetrated the border into Israel, and the Israeli army claimed that Hezbollah was preparing these tunnels To move its fighters across it and cross the border, with the aim of controlling Israeli towns adjacent to the security fence, arresting hostages from among its residents, and moving the battle into Israel at the first confrontation.
On the other hand, Israel proceeded to erect a fortified concrete wall at two locations on the eastern and western borders, to repel any attacks by Hezbollah and provide protection for eighteen Israeli towns completely adjacent to the border, which extends about eighty kilometers from Ras al-Naqurah to Metulla.
Escape or strategy?
Although twenty years have passed since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, the debate in Israel is still intense between those who considered it a humiliating military escape, and those who saw it as an important strategic step, which injected the blood of Israeli soldiers eighteen years after the first Lebanon war in 1982 that led At least 650 Israeli soldiers were killed and thousands wounded.
At the time, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, decided to withdraw from southern Lebanon, after he made a promise to that during his election campaign that ended in his victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in 1999, but the withdrawal was not only the result of the election campaign, but also was a result of great public pressure exerted on The political level in Israel to withdraw from Lebanon was led mainly by a feminist movement known as "Four Mothers". This movement received political support from the center and left of the party map in Israel.
The consequences of the withdrawal
As the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was not a pure Israeli option, as much as it was a withdrawal imposed by the Lebanese resistance strikes, which daily killed and wounded the ranks of the Israeli army, whether by targeting its fortified military positions with missiles, or with explosive devices during its movement on the roads in southern Lebanon.
Then Israel realized that its occupation had become costly and ineffective, and no longer achieve its goals in protecting the Israeli towns. Barak decided his position to withdraw the Israeli forces out of the dark, dragging the tails of disappointment and defeat, according to some, because the IDF leaders saw this urgent withdrawal as an escape that would severely harm Israel deterred and strengthened the position of Hezbollah, at a time supported by others, because it returned Israel from their point of view to the international borders recognized by the United Nations, and stopped the depletion of the army soldiers on the front where their condition was described in the media like ducks in the range of fishermen.
Dr. says. Roni Shaked of the Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Al Jazeera Net, the most prominent claim in Israel is that Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon without any settlement with the Lebanese government and without any agreement, led to the growing strength of Hezbollah and subsequently dragged the two sides to the 2006 war and eroded Israeli deterrent force.
And the disorganized withdrawal led, according to Shaked, to strengthening the Shiite axis stretching from Iran through Syria and Hezbollah, a threat that Israel continues to suffer from its consequences to this day, through Iran's attempts to militarily station in Syria and Hezbollah's pursuit of establishing a precision and targeted missile base on The Lebanese territories are able to hit strategic targets deep inside Israel with a margin of error not exceeding five to ten meters.
Miscalculation error Shaked added that the withdrawal that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak wanted was strategic because he thought that it would be possible through which a peace treaty with Syria and Lebanon could be reached, but that Barak erred in estimating not because Syria was not ready for peace, but primarily because the right in Israel He thwarted any attempt to withdraw from the Golan and give up in the context of any peace agreement with Syria, and refused to make any concessions to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
In a historical view, Shaked says that Israel made a grave mistake in occupying southern Lebanon in the first place, because this occupation did not achieve any security achievements for Israel, but rather brought successive scourges to it, as it strengthened the Lebanese resistance force, and did not get Syria out of Lebanon at the time, as it came The famous prisoner exchange deal with Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Popular Front-General Command in 1985, in which he released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who subsequently formed the leadership of the first Palestinian Intifada, whose first spark erupted in late 1987, and this occupation also offended, according to Shaked, Israeli-Egyptian relations Fresh Counting the peace agreement at Camp David and make him a cold peace.
Shaked adds that the occupation of southern Lebanon has damaged relations between Israel and several European countries, in addition to that he dispelled the hopes of Ariel Sharon, who believed that the occupation of southern Lebanon might be a catalyst for the annexation of the West Bank to Israel.