"We’ve spent more than 200 days in reserve duty," the soldier shouts over the roar of the wind, turning around in the front passenger seat of the open-air IDF Humvee. The vehicle bumps and rattles its way over a broken road leading from northern Israel into southwestern Leb
...an Iranian satrapy until recently ruled by Hassan Nasrallah situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozen flavors of Christians, plus Armenians, Georgians, and who knows what else? It is the home of the original Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
As dust streams in through the open sides, coating the soldiers and journalists within, the Humvee passes a wall marking the Blue Line separating the two countries, exposing a scene of utter devastation.
Burn pits next to the road give off an acrid smell made worse by numerous small fires among the rolling hills as the Humvee speeds along the road, swaying
"We’e now on our third mobilization of the year," the soldier adds as he makes the short drive to the southern Lebanese village where his unit, the IDF’s 6th "Etzioni" Brigade, is involved in sweep and clear operations to uncover and destroy Hezbollah weapons caches and other infrastructure.
Hezbollah began attacking northern Israel a day after Hamas
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
’s October 7, 2023 attacks on the country’s south, saying it was doing so in support of the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
-based terror group.
But after suffering nearly a year of cross-border attacks, Israel struck back in September, with a combination of strikes against commanders in the field and big shots in Beirut which decimated its leadership and crippled much of its capabilities.
But instead of launching a campaign designed to take apart Hezbollah’s powerful military, Israel opted for a limited ground operation against enemy infrastructure, not fighters — of which the IDF says 2,000 have been killed thus far.
The 6th was the first reserve unit to be sent into Lebanon and The Times of Israel, along with other Israeli news outlets, was invited by the Israel Defense Forces to observe its part of the operation on Monday afternoon.
DODGING DRONES
Waiting on the side of the road is Etzioni Brigade’s commander Col. Sarel Sebag, who leads a contingent of officers and enlisted men, many of them masked against the omnipresent dust, down a steep embankment into a small valley pocked by craters of fresh-turned dark soil.
Standing next to a small copse of trees, Sebag begins explaining his brigade’s mission when a flaming drone, trailing a tail of smoke, crashes down around 100 meters away over the crest of a nearby hill — apparently brought down by Israeli air defenses.
Shrugging off the incident, Sebag says that while his troops have established operational control, "destroying all of the Hezbollah positions and storage facilities and tunnels" they can find in their territory just over the northern border, they will still need to stay on their toes.
Soon "we will move to the clearing phase," he continues, indicating the surrounding area with a sweeping gesture of his arm. "Soon there will be nothing here. There won’t be any trees. There won’t be any bushes in this whole area so that in the future Hezbollah won’t be able to approach the border."
And while his mission is assisted greatly by intelligence, the IDF is still going over the terrain "meter by meter," uncovering "weapons storage sites and underground fighting positions near the border" to ensure the safe return of the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the war in the north, he says.
DEFENDING THE NORTH
"We understand the importance of what we are doing. We’ve been guarding the towns behind us since October 7," Sebag emphasized, gesturing behind him toward the nearby Israeli border. "And now we are operating on this side and destroying [Hezbollah]. Only this can bring security to the residents of the north."
Asked in how many homes his men have found weapons, Sebag responds that "in these villages it’s not just one or two houses, it’s all of the village. These are villages that are strongly identified with Hezbollah. In almost every home there are weapons and signs of identification with the organization."
His men agree, with one telling The Times of Israel that they had found rifles on tables in many houses, ready for use, and that weapons were even found in the village’s school and medical clinic.
Driving past a devastated landscape of torn and shattered concrete, one soldier points out sites where there had previously been tunnels, weapons storage depots and other Hezbollah facilities.
The residents of the village, whose name The Times of Israel is not allowed to publish, fled after the beginning of the war, allowing the IDF to pound Hezbollah positions from afar before entering on foot, the soldier notes.
Gesturing toward a lone structure rising like an island from a sea of rubble, the soldier says that this was the site of one of multiple Hezbollah tunnels found in the area.
HEZBOLLAH, IRAN AND HITLER
Descending a set of concrete stairs in a damaged house in the middle of the village, we find the officers of the brigade’s 8103rd Battalion in the middle of a staff meeting.
Seated on comfortable chairs and couches surrounding a low slung coffee table in a basement lined with red and beige wall hangings, the officers give their reports and discuss their units’ dispositions while a group of soldiers lounge in the back of the room.
Dirty and unshaven, they smile and crack jokes as they speak over the repeated booms of outgoing fire, one of which is loud enough to cause battalion commander Lt. Col. Elishama Jacobs to pause in the middle of a sentence.
One of the men sitting in the basement during the briefing is Sergeant First Class Natan, an American immigrant in his twenties.
"We’ve been here for about a week and a half. Before we went in, obviously, there was a lot of air power and artillery that went in. When we came to take the area, we did, obviously, with the help of tanks and combat engineers and a lot of other forces that came to help," he recalls.
"Since we attacked the village we’ve gone house to house looking for ammunition and for weapons. It wasn’t hard to find. We found weapons or other Hezbollah apparel in almost every house that we found. That ranges from mortars to guns, to anti-tank missiles, to everything else in between, [including] intelligence," he describes.
"We found they were ready for another October seventh, and we’re very close to the border, so it’s not hard to imagine that they would have done it."
In addition to the weapons, troops found pictures of the Iranian mullahs and even "Nazi flags and Hitler
...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like...statues" which were passed on to military intelligence, Natan says, a claim that The Times of Israel is unable to verify.
CLAYMORES AND ANTI-TANK MINES
Making their way through broken bits of concrete and masonry and over downed and inactive power lines laying across the road, the troops of the 8103rd Battalion arrive at a shattered building with the words "thank you, my heroic wife," scrawled in Hebrew across the front wall.
Making their way into the darkened structure, they crowd into a small foyer filled with boxes of weapons, beyond which is another room, full of broken glass, where, across from an old-fashioned CRT television, sit green wooden boxes of anti-tank and directional anti-personnel Claymore-style mines.
"They were so scared that they left all of this behind," says one soldier with night vision glasses attached to his helmet.
UNDER FIRE
Leaving the house to the sounds of distant gunfire, the soldiers make their way down the village’s main road when someone yells to take cover and they launch themselves onto the ground next to a low wall.
They barely begin to rise when the call goes out again and they again drop to the ground.
"Rockets fall all the time," one soldier notes casually. "Last week, a rocket fell really close to us, maybe 15 meters (49 feet). We lay down and it was very close but because we were on the ground with helmets nothing happened. There was shrapnel in the air but everything was okay."
Arriving at another command post on a different hilltop soon after the incident, the soldiers start to chat and drink Ottoman Turkish coffee and wait for the evening’s show: the demolition of a group of houses previously used by Hezbollah fighters on a nearby hilltop.
Suddenly, somebody yells for everybody to come outside and an officer begins a countdown, declaring that "this is for the sake of the residents of the north, who will soon return home."
Suddenly the hillside erupts in fire, a searing light reaching the command post just ahead of the sound of a massive explosion and a pressure wave driving the wind before it like a minor hurricane
...as in
blow me down!...
But even as the soldiers erupt in cheers as the darkness of night closes in again, none are able to say how long they will be required to remain at war.