Page 245 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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ganization was able to organize, equip, train and deploy a force specifically tailored to stand
against the IDF. Hezbollah wasn’t interested in building a versatile force — it put all of its
energies and thought into fighting a single enemy in a specific manner.
With decades of experience in low-intensity conflict with the IDF, Hezbollah understood its
enemy’s strengths and vulnerabilities. So Hezbollah concentrated on stockpiling the most so-
phisticated defensive weapons they could acquire, such as the Kornet, a lethal late-generation
Russian anti-tank missile, as well as a range of rockets, from long-range, Iranian-made weap-
ons to man-portable point-and-shoot Katyushas. Thanks to the Katyushas, an Arab military
force was able to create a substantial number of Israeli refugees for the first time since 1948.
Hezbollah had no intention of invading Israel and occupying territory — it recognized
its limitations. Instead, it assigned its front-line forces the achievable mission of holding out
in towns and villages, which had been turned into virtual fortresses. Hezbollah structured its
defenses to make it forbiddingly expensive for the IDF to seize, sanitize and hold urbanized
terrain.
Hezbollah recognized that it had several important advantages that favored the defense.
First, late-generation fire-and-forget missiles were faster, more accurate and easier to wield.
Second, the broken, mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon, with its towns and villages
crowded within supporting distance of one another, strongly favored a prepared defense.
Third, Hezbollah’s tactical defense was also a strategic defense, and the terrorist army had
years to prepare fixed bunkers and connecting passages. Designed by Iranian engineers, the
most formidable of the bunkers proved impervious to Israeli precision weapons — and Hez-
bollah also took care to embed its defenses amid civilian populations, preventing the Israelis
from applying devastating area fires.
Hezbollah designed its defenses to kill tanks if the IDF tried armored thrusts along tradi-
tional movement corridors — but also prepared to take on infantry and engineers. Hezbollah
made no attempt to construct a Maginot Line; instead, it built weblike defenses that could
absorb penetrations and continue to fight, harass and hold.
Hezbollah also fielded more trained fighters and auxiliaries than Israeli intelligence pre-
dicted, allowing them to cover secondary and tertiary avenues of approach. Repeatedly, Is-
raeli forces blundered into ambushes, as for example in the last battle of Wadi Saluki, when
eight Merkava tanks tried to negotiate a path through a steep gorge. Hezbollah also achieved
strategic effects with tactical weapons — the Katyusha rockets it rained down on northern
israel.
Armed with excellent strategic targeting data, the Israeli Air Force succeeded in hitting
nearly all of Hezbollah’s long-range rockets on the first night of the war: 18 out of 20 Iranian-
built Zilzal 2 and 3 launchers, as well as virtually all Fajr 4 and 5 weapons, were destroyed,
ensuring the safety of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
But the terrorist army had stockpiled at least 14,000 short- and mid-range rockets. The
rockets gained a new lease on life as terror weapons with strategic resonance in this sum-
mer’s conflict. The higher-caliber rockets were used to strike deep into Israel, repeatedly
hitting and closing down the vital port city of Haifa and landing halfway down the coast to
tel aviv.
Israel had no adequate answer to the problem. Its air force achieved an impressive target-