Posted on 10/01/24
| News Source: Times of Israel
Jerusalem, Israel - Oct. 1, 2024 - As the Israel Defense Forces officially launched ground operations in southern Lebanon early this morning, the military is now disclosing that it has already carried out more than 70 small raids with special forces since the beginning of the war, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels, and thousands of weapons that would have potentially been used by the terror group to invade Israel.
According to the IDF, troops in the raids over past months silently reached around 1,000 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, some of them several kilometers from the border fence, including tunnels and bunkers where the terror group stored weapons. The IDF said the sites were located both inside Lebanese villages and in forested areas.
The raids have been carried out since early in the Israel-Hamas war, after the IDF said it managed to push back Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force from the border area, enabling Israeli commandos to enter Lebanon with almost no detection. There were no direct clashes with Hezbollah operatives amid any of the raids.
According to IDF assessments, some 2,400 Radwan terrorists and another 500 Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists — trained by Radwan — were waiting in southern Lebanon villages to attack Israel in the days after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught.
The IDF Northern Command had expected an invasion from Lebanon and bolstered its defenses. In the following weeks, it carried out numerous strikes on Hezbollah operatives and sites along the border, causing the thousands of Radwan terrorists to withdraw several kilometers back.
The raids carried out by the IDF commandos, including combat engineers, sometimes lasted three to four days, according to the military. In all, 200 nights’ worth of operations had been carried out.
The military showed reporters dozens of weapons, including assault rifles, machine guns, RPGs, anti-tank missiles, explosive devices, mines, mortars, and equipment such as walkie-talkies (which did not explode) that had been recovered by the commandos from within Hezbollah tunnels and bunkers.