Israel's winning from above, as Hezbollah makes a major strategic mistake below
ABC Australia by global affairs editor John Lyons in Beirut 08 October 2024

• The war in Lebanon is asymmetric — Israel's winning from above, as Hezbollah makes a major strategic mistake below

One thing you notice upon arriving in Beirut is the ever-present sound of Israeli drones

One of the first things, I saw when I walked out of Beirut airport recently was a drone hovering above the airport — I could see it glinting in the late-afternoon sun

This means Israeli army officers sitting in Tel Aviv or Haifa can watch every plane arriving and taking off from Beirut airport. With the extraordinary capability of the cameras on these drones, they can study the identities of every person walking from the terminal

They can use facial recognition to try to spot anybody of interest arriving in Beirut
And if it's a senior Iranian or Hezbollah person, they could assassinate that person before they have even had a chance, to put their luggage into a car


Both sides learnt lessons from the brutal 34-day war of 2006 and have been preparing for this new confrontation

Hezbollah learnt that,
1. for all Israel's US-provided weapons and funding, it was not good at fighting a guerilla war
2. amid Hezbollah's home terrain -- the mountains, caves and tunnels of southern Lebanon, the IDF was vulnerable
3. even Israel's own official inquiry into its performance in that war, the Winograd commission, found that Israel performed badly

The Israeli Defense Forces learnt that,
1. it didn't matter how much it trained, southern Lebanon was the home of Hezbollah fighters who knew every metre of terrain
2. and could lie in wait for Israeli soldiers
3. It was a quagmire waiting to happen

What the past three weeks of this new war have shown is that Israel learnt more significantly from 2006 than did Hezbollah

• how does Israel see its role in this neighbourhood in years to come?

But Israel needs to ask itself a longer term question:
— having reduced Gaza to essentially an unliveable enclave, destroyed significant parts of Beirut and southern Lebanon, displaced 1.2 million Lebanese and now on the verge of a war with Iran,