The IDF attacked a series of targets of the terrorist organization Hezbollah in five different areas in southern Lebanon/IDF Spokesman
On October 7 at 06:29, the commander of the Northern Command, Major General Uri Gordin, finished tying his sneakers at home and prepared to go for a run with a friend, but the military cell phone beeped and vibrated abnormally.
Since he was previously the commander of the Home Front Command, he received alerts about the rocket launches all over the country.
Based on his past experience, he understood very quickly that the meaning of launching thousands of rockets from the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem and Dimona is in one word: "declaration of war".
Within a short period of time, his driver was waiting at the entrance to the house, he said goodbye to the family members and knew very well that the next time he would see them it would be a long time, so he added a hug while the driver was already waiting outside on the way to the "bur" in the Northern Command.
Even though it was an attack from the Gaza Strip and without a special decision from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he called the commanders of the divisions Brigadier General Shay Claffer on the Lebanese border and Brigadier General Zion Ratzon on the Syrian border and announced a "national asset": to mobilize all regular and reserve forces to defend the borders as soon as possible For fear of a similar attack in the north. As the minutes passed, the military telephone did not stop alerting of the continuation of the rocket launches, and then it informed Brigadier General Clapper and Brigadier General Ratzon about another step in the plan known in advance about the division of another division in order to insert another division between them under the command of Brigadier General Israel A guard who will thicken the defense and be prepared for attack and maneuver.
Later, officers will say that already in the planning stages of the previous year, the senior officers, to their credit, did not like the new geographical division, "because if there is already a war, they do not want to share responsibility for the areas of attack and destruction of the enemy with additional divisions."
Commander of the Northern Command, Major General Uri Gordin/Official website, IDF spokesman
By 23:00, all the battalions in reserve that were jumped to the border in the first stage were already after receiving equipment and ready to encounter.
Later, officers in the Northern Command will say that General Gordin had a "scratch".
"He took office in September 2022. And since then we trained at least three times on transitioning from routine to emergency. How to jump a lot of forces from home and go north at maximum speed under fire," they said.
"What played into the hands of the Northern Command was the fact that most of the northern roads were empty due to the combination between the holiday and Shabbat and the confinement of the citizens of the State of Israel to their screens in order to keep up to date with what was happening, which allowed for the rapid flow of the forces using various vehicles. The
Hezbollah organization was surprised twice. The timing and scope of the Hamas attack on the Israeli home front and the rapid thickening of the IDF formations along the Lebanese border.
The Organization's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah conducted situation assessments and after two days launched attacks on the Israeli rear. Six terrorist squads were sent one after the other and one of them managed to penetrate, but all of them were thwarted. The movement of forces to hurt and exact a painful price.
In one of the incidents, a squad came to the wall under the cover of dense underbrush, placed an explosive device to bring down the wall.
The first time they did not succeed and the second time when they arrived with additional explosive charges, the "Zik" floated in the sky and attacked the members of the squad who were killed but the missile also initiated the sabotage means and then a secondary explosion event that hit the wall.
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Hassan Nasrallah/documentation in social networks according to Article 27 A of the Copyright Law
Constant surveillance and hundreds of attacks
More than 174 terrorist squads were thwarted along the border line and in the Har Dov sector using diverse methods.
At first we paid a heavy price.
In human life including the killing of a deputy brigade commander.
It hurt a lot," said Lavala! a senior reserve officer in the sector. "But when the military system was established in the area, air, sea and land forces spoke to each other in the same language.
It became something deadly.
The fire centers in the brigades had to decide whether to fire tanks, artillery, Zik, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, or infantry forces from the ground with precision submachine guns and Gil missiles.
Hezbollah did not expect this."
The Northern Command commander's office fears Hezbollah's intentions to expand the fighting against Israel as long as the IDF is maneuvering in the Gaza Strip, and therefore General Gordin made a decision to decentralize authority from the command to the brigades in the field and promote their independence in countering terrorism in the border area.
Gordin is assisted 24/7 by Major General Yitzhak (Jerry) Gershon as the deputy commander of the command who previously experienced the Second Lebanon War and has been in his current position for eight years and in the commanding general by Alon Friedman, Golanchik the man of the north, who is responsible for the home front and knows every nook and cranny At the same time, the top command conducts thorough planning for the possibility of a wide war and a deep maneuver into Lebanese territory. "While the brigades are busy defending and attacking limited to the contact line and succeeding in bringing achievements, the command is busy in depth.
Far from the borders.
in heavy and sensitive infrastructures and senior personalities," explained reserve officials in the Northern Command.
The Artillery Corps in action on the Lebanese border/Flash 90, Yonatan Zindel
One of the senior officials pointed to an operation carried out by the fire center in the Northern Command that included surveillance of Hezbollah's unmanned aerial vehicle unit in the heart of the urban area.
"They know we are following and insist on locating them, so they don't have too much time to take the aircraft to the runway and prepare them for takeoff and when that happened? We attacked and destroyed three together. In other cases, when aircraft attacked the Israeli rear or the bases, we were probably not sharp enough Or not quick enough in response."
This is a war of minds between the commander of the Northern Command and Hassan Nasrallah, but amidst this tension, General Gordin insists not only on preparing his forces for war, but also on denying Nasrallah the ability to assess the nature of the IDF's reactions and initiatives. "The Northern Command tries to be unpredictable," said a source A senior military man in the reserve and added, "There are no fixed equations.
Every day a division or command can have a response or initiative of a different kind.
There is no way that Hezbollah will understand that there are rules of the game.
That's why they destroy infrastructure and kill commanders and operatives."
As of this writing, more than 220 terrorists have been killed by IDF fire, 176 of them Hezbollah terrorists and a third of them fighters from the Radwan force, defined as the organization's elite force.
In addition to this, more than 450 terrorists were injured and weapons were released, more than 45 Hezbollah operatives just since the beginning of January.
In addition to this, the IDF attacked more than 650 terrorist infrastructures of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which include air-to-surface missile components, positions, military bases, weapons depots, command and control centers, rocket launch pits and hiding apartments.
Smoke billows in Lebanon after IDF strikes/Flash 90, Eyal Margolin
"The actions of the Northern Command in southern Lebanon keep Hezbollah operatives away from the border line. They reduce its ability to carry out a surprise attack on settlements near the fence, but do not completely prevent it. From Hezbollah's point of view, this is very significant," explained a senior reserve officer and emphasized that the missions are becoming more Complexity because the enemy is studying the IDF's operations and the weather is very difficult and complex.
A week and a half ago, at night under a very thick fog, with the inability to see two meters ahead, and intense cold that kissed the ground zero, a force from the Oded Brigade under the command of a deputy company commander who is already In the reserves for more than two and a half months, he went on patrol after receiving indications of suspicious movements in the Mount Dov area. The force recognizes the movement, calls on it to identify itself and opens fire on it. The force charges and kills the squad that intended to penetrate the outposts. General Gordin praised them not only for the initiative and the results in the encounter The accumulating snow around Mount Dov, and the ability to maintain high operational discipline even after a very long period of reserve service in the face of uncertainty about the future.
Hezbollah does not stand by and conducts two main efforts: the first is attempts to penetrate Israeli territory and fire rockets, some of which are high in explosives up to about 700 km "C, missiles, mortar bombs, attempts to place explosive charges along the settlements, including the operation of unmanned aircraft and drones.
The various operations include not only attempts to harm civilians and soldiers, but direct attacks on residents' homes on the northern border.
The result of all the terrorist acts resulted in the massive evacuation of more than tens of thousands of citizens from the northern region and the paralysis of routine life.
The second effort includes readiness for a broad ground attack on the Israeli rear.
Wissam al-Tawil, a senior Hezbollah official who was killed in southern Lebanon about a month ago/documentation on social networks according to Article 27 A of the Copyright Law
Today the war is closer
"The destruction in the settlements, the empty streets, the uncultivated areas - are only part of the story of this limited campaign," said a reserve company commander who "got off" the line and was on his way to a short vacation at home.
"All that has been at the border until now is the promo, we all know that beyond the border line, thousands of trained and equipped Radwan force fighters are waiting for the order to go to war. Is the IDF in my sector capable of repelling them?
Obviously.
Will there be prices for this on the Israeli side?
It's also clear."
As the officer adorned with stubble holds the first cappuccino in his hand and arranges his weapon in the other hand, he explains that there is no stable border line with Lebanon for many reasons and also because of the weather, which only complicates the task of defense because you can hardly see anything. According to him, the big question is Not how do you repel the Radwan force during the attack phase, but how do you return the residents to their homes in the north knowing that in a moment Hezbollah could arrive and try to kidnap children and murder families like Hamas did on October 7. The
officer said that he saw General Gordin once from a distance, but heard the content of his conversation from commanders in the sector and was comforted by one clear statement of his. "When he was asked if he was preparing for war against Hezbollah, he said 'Commanders.
For those who didn't understand: I, we, are already at war' with all that that implies.'" Then General Gordin explained to them that every night a practical thought is carried out between the top of the Northern Command and the top of the Air Force about how war will look the next day and the types of goals that have joined The target bank thanks to a supreme intelligence effort by all the collection agencies in the intelligence community. All this in order not to lose a moment of readiness while the IDF continues to accumulate capabilities along the northern border.
In the background, the harsh and justified criticism of the citizens of the North against the state is heard and it is appropriate at the doors of the office of the commander of the Northern Command as someone who trusts their security, but it is important to emphasize that the reserve commanders who met General Gordin in the field talks, some of which were accompanied by heavy rain, drops the size of a fist and a lot of mud, came away convinced that he wants to expand the limited campaign into an aggressive war deep in the territory of Lebanon in order to remove the threat of Hezbollah and keep them away from the border and not be satisfied with a collection of tactical operations in the area kilometers from the fence.
All the forces in the field estimate that the Northern Command is closer today to the war against Hezbollah than it was on October 7 and it is only a matter of time before it develops into a tree maneuver.
More on the same topic:
Lebanon
Lebanon border
Hezbollah
Hassan Nasrallah
Uri Gordin
Gaza war
War of Iron Swords
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