An Israeli security official said Friday that any ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon would be swift, as tensions rapidly escalate after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges of fire.
The comments come after top Israeli ministers rejected a truce plan proposed by Israel’s key backer the United States and its allies, seeking to prevent all-out war.
The security official, briefing journalists on condition of anonymity, said Israeli forces were “preparing… every day” for a potential ground invasion.
“We will try to do it as short as we can,” said the official, without providing a clear timeline or specifying what would be the objectives of a ground campaign.
The goal of Israeli military operations in Lebanon is to downgrade Hezbollah’s capacity to fire on Israel, eliminate the group’s military leadership and “clean” the border areas from fighters, he said.
Hezbollah fighters began firing on Israel shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attack that triggered the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, in what the Iran-backed Lebanese movement says is in support of its allied Palestinian group.
Israel earlier this month announced an expansion of its war goals to include the safe return of residents displaced by the fighting along its border with Lebanon, and some ministers and other officials have called to push Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon altogether.
The security official said that Israeli air strikes in recent days had killed many Hezbollah militants and significantly curtailed the group’s military power.
“I think that they lost many capabilities,” the official said.
Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, raised the possibility of a ground operation against Hezbollah this week, and the security official said on Friday that “all options are on the table”.
Since Monday, Israeli warplanes have bombarded Hezbollah strongholds around the country, sparking an exodus of about 118,000 people, the UN says.
Lebanon’s health ministry said hundreds of people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli strikes this week.
The security official pushed back on accusations that the Israeli strikes were killing civilians in large numbers, calling the campaign “very precise, very accurate”.
“Many of them (the dead) were Hezbollah,” he said, also accusing the armed group of using civilians as human shields and “putting ballistic missiles inside an apartment”.
On Thursday several Israeli ministers rejected a 21-day truce proposal put forward by the United States and its allies.
The spotlight is now on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has pledged to keep fighting Hezbollah and is due to address the UN General Assembly later on Friday.
Hezbollah has said it would stop firing on Israel once there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
But the security official said Israel would like to “de-link” the two fronts and avoid giving its enemies “the leverage of (a) coalition or axis”.
The official also stressed that Israel’s ties with “our best partner” the United States remained strong, despite increasingly vocal opposition from Washington to Israel’s war policies.
“After a very tough year… still I think that they are with us,” he said.
And, the official added, other countries in the Middle East — which have also criticised Israel’s actions in Gaza and more recently in Lebanon — were in fact backing it.
“From a strategic point of view, the first thing our neighbours want to see is that we are strong enough that we can hold those threats that also threaten them,” the official said.
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