How will Israel's Invasion of Lebanon Look like in 2024

Referring to the map shown below, the squarish territory bounded by the Mediterranean (west), the Litani River (north) and the Lebanese-Israeli border line is Hezbollah land. It will be the target for the impending invasion of Lebanon by the Zionist army, according to an informed Lebanese military source.

The area in question is one from which the Lebanese army and the Lebanese government have been evicted since the late 1960s. First by the PLO of Yasser Arafat when the Cairo Accord of 1969 was imposed on tiny Christian-ruled Lebanon by the coward and loser Muslim Arab countries, even though Israel at that point had not seized any Lebanese territory, but was controlling the Syrian Golan, the Egyptian Sinai, the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the 1967 war. Lebanon has ever since been the only open war front between any Arab country and Israel. For some reason, the smart and O-so-brave Arab defenders of Palestine felt that closing their own borders to Yasser Arafat’s “resistance”, while forcing tiny and vulnerable Lebanon to open its own borders, was an excellent strategy to “liberate” Palestine. Sacrificing the other “alien” (i.e. non-Muslim) Lebanon to fight Jewish Israel was a deliberate sublimely fanatic way to protect their otherwise Allah-anointed and superior Muslim populations. They funded and armed the Sunni Palestinians in collusion with Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims to wage war on the Lebanese Christians while pretending to “liberate” Palestine.

The PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982, but the Sunni Muslims managed to score a political victory over the Christians (through the Taef Agreement of 1989, which the Sunni Arab-ass-licking Americans crafted with help from such friends of the US as Saudi Arabia, Israel and Syria. The effective executive power typically in the hands of the president in normal democracies was snatched from the hands of the Christian president and given to the Sunni prime minister, which yielded the ungovernable mess that Lebanon has become. Worse yet, the Sunni Muslim victory celebration led by the poodle of the US and Saudi Arabia, one Rafik Hariri, did not last: The Islamic Shiite theo-barbarian revolution in Tehran in 1979 gave an impetus to the Shiites of Lebanon to take over the anti-Christian, Palestine-liberation, and anti-Sunni mission.

So, when the PLO was evicted by the Israeli invasion of 1982, it was immediately replaced with the Iranian-funded and armed Hezbollah terror organization that was freshly hatched by the Iranian Mullahs’ Islamic Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley after they seized power in Tehran in 1979. Hezbollah’s task was to maintain the instability in south Lebanon that was inaugurated by the PLO in the late 1960s under the pretense of “liberating” Palestine. Whereas the Palestinian bacchanal lasted from 1968 through 1982 (14 years), the Shiite debauchery is now in its 24th year (1982-present time) with no end in sight, along with its assortment of traditional Muslim bloodletting, massacres, assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and such activities that can best be summarized as Islamic Holy Fascism.

According to the source, the prospective Israeli push into southern Lebanon in 2024 will have two objectives: 1- eliminate the Hezbollah threat along Israel’s northern and northeastern border AND, 2- dislodge Hezbollah's Shiite majority population that provides it with manpower and safe terrain backing by pushing it north into the other Shiite majority population centers in the Bekaa Valley. Immediately north of the Litani River are Druze, Sunni, and Christian communities unsympathetic to Hezbollah. Yesterday’s attack by Hezbollah (or by a colluding Hezbollah-supplied made-up group that allows Hezbollah to claim deniability) on the Druze town of Majdal-Shams in the Golan is likely to further exacerbate the existing tensions between the Shiite community (led by Hezbollah and seconded by Lebanese parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s Amal organization) on one hand and the other communities of Lebanon on the other hand, particularly the Druze.

The Israeli advance will follow the two red lines shown on the map with the objective of encircling Hezbollah land in a pincers-like movement closing in from the east and from the southwest.

In the east, Israel’s back is protected by its presence in the Golan Heights. In the west, the sea will protect the advancing column. The most difficult and urgent objective is for the two columns to connect somewhere near the city of Tyre, and the advancing columns will have to move at lightning speed in order to minimize the damage that Hezbollah will be inflicting to Israel’s interior by firing thousands of rockets deep into Israel.

Hezbollah has recently made public footage taken by what it said were undetectable drones mapping out all of Israel’s northern military and civilian infrastructure. If Israel decides to launch this invasion, it means it is probably willing to sustain significant damage – assuming an Iron Dome success rate of 90% - for a short period of time, pending the completion of its encirclement of the Hezbollah territory and its significant degradation of Hezbollah’s capabilities by a massive barrage of firepower by land, air and sea. Again, the key to any such Israeli invasion will be its lightning speed and the acceptance of sustaining significant damage to the Israeli interior.

The other significant threat that Israel will be preparing for is Hezbollah’s plans to make incursions southward across the border into the Galilee. Hassan Nasrallah has often spoken about his organization’s plans to do just that. How will Israel prepare for such incursions is unknown, according to the source. Israel’s previous experience (2006) was an abysmal failure of holding territory and eliminating the rocket firing ramps. 

The Syrian Assad regime is all talk but no action. It doesn't even defend itself when Israeli jets bomb targets inside the dislocated Baathist country. It is unlikely that Assad will join the battle, just as he has never done anything to defend Lebanon when Israel invaded (1978, 1982, 1996 etc.) while his 40,000-strong army occupied Lebanon.

Naturally, Israel will try to inflict maximum damage to Lebanon across the board. With Hezbollah controlling the Lebanese State and the Lebanese Army, there will be no red lines for what Israel would be willing to do: Ministries, government buildings, infrastructure (water, electricity, communications, hospitals, schools, airports, etc.), army barracks and even civilian targets like it is doing in Gaza to accentuate pressure against Hezbollah, in addition to Hezbollah's supply lines (bridges, roads, border crossings with Syria, etc.)

The Lebanese fear that, if successful, Israel this time will not relinquish the territory it seizes from Hezbollah. It will annex it , possibly along with the other major southern Lebanese city of Sidon (39 Km or 25 miles north of Tyre) so as to create a buffer zone north of the Litani River. As the map shows, the Litani River makes a sharp right angle northward into the lower Bekaa Valley and this corridor is what will serve to push the Shiite civilian population out of the seized territory.

While in the past Israel never permanently kept any Lebanese territory after its repeated invasions (except for disputed tiny bald patches that Hezbollah uses as a pretext to continue its "resistance"), the fact that Hezbollah now controls the Lebanese State and is effectively the government behind the puppet caretaker government of Najib Mikati is a legal "casus belli" argument it can use to permanently annex the territory in question. In 2006 and prior years, neither Hezbollah (nor the PLO before it) were officially part of the Lebanese government and did not have MPs in parliament.