Emergency Episode — OPERATION NORTHERN ARROWS — with Nadav Eyal
To help us better understand the escalating war between Israel and Hezbollah, Nadav Eyal joined us for an emergency episode of the podcast.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
NE: A senior security official told me yesterday, in 34 days, we haven't done to Hezbollah what we have done in six hours today in terms of their ability. And this is not even counting the pager operation, which Israel isn't owning up to, right? It's not claiming responsibility for, even now. So this was a tremendous success tactically for Israel. And now I'm going to say, here's the bad news. They can continue on with this, just shooting one anti-tank missile every two days and we're going to still have a war. So we are trying to push them into stopping this war, but we don't know how this will end if we don't have a deal in the South or a clear directive of the Iranians and of Nasrallah that basically admits that they have lost the war.
DS: It's 7:00 AM on September 24th here in New York City. It's 2:00 PM on the 24th in Israel as Israelis continue what appears to be day two of a major escalation in Israel's defensive war against Hezbollah. Once again we interrupt our programming, our special series of one-year anniversary conversations in order to bring you a special episode to cover the major escalation in the North. Nadav, this is becoming a habit.
NE: Yeah, it is becoming a habit. You know, this war, at least we're interrupting your programming because of what looks like Israeli success stories in this war and not because, you know, other developments, which, you know, might occur. But it gives me a limited pleasure to do that when we can report good developments as far as the IDF is concerned in this war.
DS: Nadav, if I get a sliver of upbeatness from you, I'll take it.
NE: Ok.
DS: However we have to get it.
NE: Yup.
DS: So, Nadav, just to go over where we are. Yesterday, from what we understand from public reports, Israel struck Lebanon hitting 1,600 targets, most of which were rocket and missile stockpiles. And what seems like, it has a little bit of a feel, as you and I were discussing offline, of a pre-Six-Day War operation, but we can get to that. And this was followed by mass fleeing of civilians from cities in Lebanon, cities in the North, and a response from Hezbollah in the form of 200 rockets and missiles hitting Haifa and Emek Yizrael, which are about 100 kilometers deep into Israeli territory. So, Nadav, I have a bunch of questions, but just first, what can you tell us about this overall escalation from both sides as of today? What do we know as of today?
NE: This operation was conducted by the Israeli Air Force. And you mentioned the Six Days War, and to an extent, this was the kind of operation that really developed the prestige of the Israeli Air Force. The bottom line is that Israel has reduced, substantially, Hezbollah's strategic ability to hit it with missiles, with rockets, with unmanned drones. And this is important for this war because… look, Hezbollah has developed two strategic abilities in the last 20 years. The first of which was its plans to invade the Galilee and have in the Galilee, within the sovereign State of Israel, what Hamas has done in the Israeli southern border. So to an extent, Hamas took this from Hezbollah and led the way of the Axis of Resistance, the so-called Axis of Resistance, when entering Israel and having its ethnic cleansing in our southern towns and kibbutzim. But this was originally a Hezbollah plan. And that ability to invade the Galilee was led by a force, an elite force within Hezbollah called the Radwan Force, which is really the infantry, a massively important force for Hezbollah. And Israel managed to undermine that ability by Hezbollah. First of all, by managing to push the Radwan Force and its infantry well beyond the Litani River and hitting all of these secret bases that Radwan has been building along the line in order to initiate an invasion. And the fact that Hezbollah was surprised by the timing of the Hamas attack also assisted the IDF because they were exposed. So in these months of the war, in the first year of the war, what the Northern Command, led by a general called Ori Gordin, has been doing is escalating its responses towards Hezbollah after Hezbollah opened fire and initiated war in the North on October 8th, something that we discussed then many times.
DS: Nadav, just for listeners who may not be as familiar with the geography of the North, when you talk about the Galilee, we talk about the Upper Galilee, can you just describe where that is?
NE: Yeah, it's between the Sea and Nahariya area, so the Mediterranean, all the way to actually the Golan Heights and Syria and the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, the Kinneret.
DS: And there are a lot of civilian towns, populations, within the Upper Galilee.
NE: Of course, so you have in the Upper Galilee, it's Kiryat Shmona. In the Western Galilee, it's Nahariya. And in between you have places like Shlomi. You have all of the kibbutzim that were built there really from the inception of Zionism to make sure that this area is controlled by the state-to-be. So the strategic element of Hezbollah managing or planning to invade the Galilee was reduced or maybe erased by the IDF in the first year of the war. And then they had another strategic ability, much more important, and that is to shoot thousands or dozens of thousands of rockets and missiles, mostly short range, but also long range, and very sophisticated guided missiles and rockets into Israel. And this ability by Hezbollah was also assisted by Iran. This was really not only the strategic leverage of Hezbollah, this was the strategic leverage of the regime in Tehran that Hezbollah has been building for the last 20, 25 years. What happened in the last 48 hours is that the Israeli Air Force managed to hit, I don't want to say 50%, although some Israeli sources are telling me even just minutes before our conversation now, that it's about 50%, of the ability of Hezbollah to shoot rockets at Israel. And they did this in one morning. And they have other targets that they didn't hit yet. So they have substantially delimited Hezbollah's ability to strike us with both sophisticated guided rockets and also short range ones. The number that was sometimes used was 140,000 of these either short range, mid range or long range missiles and rockets.
DS: Meaning 140,000 is what they had stockpiled ready to go.
NE: Before the war.
DS: Before the war, yeah.
NE: Now this is really misleading because most of these are really short range. And when I say short range, I mean between one kilometer and four kilometers. So, this is like less than three miles. And you don't go to war with Israel when you have that. And most of these elements, of short range weren't hit. It's the important stuff like mid range, you know, 50 kilometers, long range, 200 kilometers. These things were hit. Now, after I'm saying this, it was a huge success by the IDF. I should also say that Hezbollah still retains an ability to hit Tel Aviv, to hit even southern Tel Aviv. And one of the things that were exposed in the last 72 hours is that they do have a modest version of cruise missiles, which wasn't exposed until now. And the IDF spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, exposed this. And you can see this video if someone wants to Google this. You can actually see a house with a huge cruise missile inside. It's a Soviet version of a cruise missile. And the video actually shows how they drop the wall of the house, which was probably made to be seen as a wall. They drop it to the ground. Then you see the missiles. Then you see the IDF drone or missile hit that cruise missile. The bottom line for the IDF right now, I've spoken with an IDF official yesterday. I've spoken with senior security officials in Israel. The best you can get on these issues. And they were, I don't want to say overjoyed, but they were very content with the results. They were saying this is much more than their optimistic estimate as to what was hit. They were saying that Hezbollah has been surprised again after the pager operation. And they were saying that they are continuing his plan and they will escalate. Israel will continue to escalate. But the person I spoke with yesterday told me, look, I'm not going to say this on the record, but I'm telling you, we have woken up to a different Hezbollah and maybe to a different scenario in the Middle East. Because if they see now that they can be hit in such a massive way, they still can shoot thousands of rockets to Israel and cause us immense harm. But they are also seeing that they are exposed both operationally and both in terms of the intelligence we hold. Look, Dan, what we did, what the IDF, did was to hit inventories of rockets and missiles. And to do that, you need to know where they are stored. So you need to have people on the ground. This is not only about satellite. You need to have intelligence on the ground to tell you that you need to hit this precisely in these places in which they are stored, sometimes underneath the ground, in a way that these missiles would either get hurt or never be salvaged.
DS: That, more than anything, is what I've been blown away, based on what I've been watching and people I've been talking to and learning over the last few days. I don't know what the opposite of carpet bombing is, but this seems like it would be it, because each of those 1,600 precision bombs had a very, very, very pinpointed address. So the intelligence here must have been a whole other level. So, just specifically about the intelligence, what can you tell us about the intelligence and the intelligence gathering over clearly what must have been a very long time in order to enable that kind of precision?
NE: So one of the things that we've been saying on your show Dan is that Israel did not prepare to an invasion of Hamas in the South. Unfortunately, it's a tragedy and it's a huge failure, maybe Israel's biggest failure in terms of security in its history. But it did prepare to the Third Lebanon War. And this is one of the reasons that the defense apparatus in Israel on October 11th was trying to push the war cabinet and Prime Minister Netanyahu to authorize a preemptive strike in the north that would have been even wider than we have just seen with the pagers and with the Air Force. And the reason they wanted that is because the IDF, as armies do, prepared to the last war it had and the last war it had, the previous war, was the second Lebanon war back in 2006.
DS: Which lasted 34 days and it was not considered a success from Israel's perspective.
NE: It was not considered a success and then, you know, years later, Israel has changed gear on that saying maybe it was a success because Nasrallah said if I would have known that the kidnapping, the killing of those soldiers, those IDF soldiers, would lead to this kind of war, I wouldn't have opened it. So, Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister, is still saying, you know, this is like the Olmert doctrine. You do even a small thing for you tactically, we’re going to react the way that we did. And there's a big conversation about that. But the bottom line is that the IDF wasn't happy with its own results. And they felt that this was a miss and they felt that they should have given a better result. And they were preparing for this war together with other elements within the Israeli defense apparatus like the Mossad for so many years gathering intelligence, infiltrating the Hezbollah systems, you know, like we have seen, basically putting booby traps within the entire sphere of the Hezbollah command. And Hezbollah again and again is being surprised by the level of the Israeli exposure to what it's been doing from within its ranks. And this is one of the reasons that we're seeing these types of success. And I want to tell you something that a senior security official told me yesterday. He said, in 34 days, we haven't done to Hezbollah what we have done in six hours today in terms of their ability. And this is not even counting the pager operation, which Israel isn't owning up to, right? It's not claiming responsibility for, even now. So this was a tremendous success tactically for Israel. And now I'm going to say, here's the bad news from the same security sources. When I ask them, what are we going to do now, beyond continuing on hitting them? And what both IDF sources I've spoken with and security officials I've been speaking with and the government are saying is, look, they can continue on with this, just shooting one anti-tank missile, one every two days, and we're going to still have a war. So we are trying to push them into diplomacy. We're trying to push them into stopping this war. But we don't know, we don't have a clear horizon how this will end if we don't have a deal in the South or we don't have a clear directive of the Iranians and of Nasrallah that basically admits that they have lost the war. So I asked them, is this plausible? Is there a chance that they will just say, look, we have taken too much. We don't want Beirut to be bombed. We don't want our high command centers that, by the way, the IDF hasn't bombed yet. The high command centers of Hezbollah, they're still, I think they're empty, but you know, there are many targets that the IDF didn't touch yet. So I asked them, is this plausible that they'll just surrender to an extent or at least disconnect the Northern front from the Southern front and say, we're willing to stop shooting in Israel. And right now the intelligence assessment in Israel is that Nasrallah is not going to budge.
DS: Not going to budge, meaning not going to say you win, I lose. I agree with that. But is that what you mean by budge or he's not going to budge in terms of figuring out a way to de-escalate, agreeing to pull Hezbollah back? I spoke to one Israeli official who said if we, the IDF, can get Hezbollah to move just 10 kilometers north, this doesn’t have to go all the way to the Litani River, but just 10 kilometers north of the border with Israel, that would create a sufficient buffer to bring us some quiet.
NE: So first of all, as far as the IDF is concerned, a 10 kilometer buffer is a bluff. And this is something that the Israeli political leadership is willing to live with, but the IDF is much more aggressive about this.
DS: Hold on. So the Israeli government is willing to live with 10 kilometers, but you're saying the IDF is saying it's not enough.
NE: Exactly. Look, there is a difference between the South and the North as to the IDF position. The IDF doesn't think that Hamas today, after what we have done in Gaza, is a strategic threat to Israel. And this is the reason why the IDF has been pushing to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire that will also allow Nasrallah to climb down the tree without having a war in the North, which is, by the way, also the position of the US administration. And the reason that the IDF has been pushing for that is because they are saying, and people might not agree, we have disintegrated the Hamas high command. They are no longer of a threat to Israel on two basic senses. They cannot launch any more rockets… you know, people in the South have returned. Many of them have returned to their houses. Those who didn't live in those kibbutzim that were completely destroyed, returned to their houses in the South and they simply cannot launch. They want to launch, but they're not launching as they would have wanted because Israel has destroyed much of their capabilities, over 90% of their capabilities. And also if you look at Hamas regiments, most of them don't exist anymore. And also the IDF is in Gaza. So the IDF is there saying in Gaza, think about the day after, go for a ceasefire, get our hostages back now. This is what the IDF is saying. And then the political leadership in Israel is saying, you know you have the Philadelphi Corridor, there are many things that, you know, we can't do that. And basically the defense apparatus in Israel is saying, this is a bluff, right? This is not because of Philadelphi. And that's the big confrontation about Gaza. And as to the North, it's exactly the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. In the North, the government is saying, it’s actually Bibi, you know, if they redraw for, you know, 10 miles, that's enough because we know that most of the Hezbollah forces are already beyond the Litani River, north to the Litani River. And because of that, if they redraw from the line, we can stop. And what the IDF is saying, no, Hezbollah has not lost its strategic threat leverage on Israel. And we're not, we don't want this bluff. We want them to actually comply with the 1701 UN security decision that we achieved after the Lebanon war.
DS: UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was passed after the last Lebanon war in 2006, which created a buffer zone, required Hezbollah to go all the way north to the Litani River, which is about 25 kilometers. And they would have that buffer zone secured effectively by UNIFIL, UN forces, peacekeeping forces, and the Lebanese Armed Forces. And that completely failed. Hezbollah was supposed to stay out of that area. Those forces did, they basically fled the peacekeeping forces and allowed Hezbollah to come back over the last number of years. Over the next few days, I think our listeners will be hearing this UN Security Council Resolution 1701, bandied about a lot. That's what it refers to.
NE: Yeah. And of course, Lebanon is going around in international institutions and everywhere together with a pro-Hamas choir that we hear from time to time now blaming Israel because hundreds of Lebanese died yesterday in that attack, which was the most lethal for Lebanon since the Second Lebanon War. But what the Israelis are saying is most of these Lebanese who died are Hezbollah operatives to begin with. And the reason that this war is happening in the North, and this is something I have been underlining on your show again and again and again, we talked about this so many times, is that everybody knows around the world that Hamas opened fire against Israel and had this series of massacres within Israel on October 7th. But very few people actually recognize that on October 8th, Hezbollah made a decision to open war against Israel together with Hamas. And there is no excuse in the North. I'll say this again. There is no occupation in the North because Israel left Lebanon in the year 2000. And the only reason for them joining is not also, you know, there's no excuse of the Palestinian suffering because on October 8th, Israel wasn't doing much, right? It wasn't doing much. It was still reeling from the massacres, from the series of massacres and attempted ethnic cleansing on the southern border. It was still clearing terrorists from its southern towns when Hezbollah decided to join this war. So there's absolutely no international excuse. And there is a UN Security Council decision. And unlike with the disengagement from Gaza, the pullout from Gaza, there is also a UN Security Council decision acknowledging that Israel has withdrawn from Lebanon. So there is absolutely no excuse there. This is a complete failure of the international system that they have been allowing Hezbollah to do so. By the way, with all kinds of countries like France, I've seen, you know, Manuel Macron with statements about his empathy to the people of Lebanon. These difficult times. So he wasn't saying that he's supportive of Hezbollah. I didn't see his French announcement about his empathy to a hundred, between eighty to a hundred thousand Israelis that are displaced persons, according to every international law, that have lost their homes. And their homes are basically meticulously destroyed by Hezbollah all across the borderline between the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee. And this is what they've been doing. This is the reason that Israel has been escalating. And let me tell you something, Dan, if Nasrallah is going to not climb down this tree and he's not going to use the ladders he's offered to stop the war, from what I'm hearing from Israeli sources, this escalation is going to continue. So this is not over yet.
DS: Ok. Iran's president said that the strikes on Lebanon are an Israeli quote unquote trap to draw Tehran into the war. What does that tell us?
NE: That tells us that Iran doesn't want to join the war and that the Iranian president, the new Iranian president, is trying to strike a different tone. We are seeing this again and again, and we should listen to what he's saying very carefully.
DS: To be clear, it's not like he speaks independently of the Supreme Leader of Khamenei. So if you're saying he is trying to strike a different tone, it's not like he's going rogue. I mean, that may be a regime decision.
NE: There are different tones within the Iranian regime. Not everything is in tandem between the Supreme Leader and the president. The president is a reformist or considered a reformist for whatever that means in Iran. But basically, he also said, and we should hear that, we should listen to that, we cannot allow ourselves to have Lebanon turn into Gaza, which is another way to say that Iran might interfere with this war. And there were reports today from the Saudi Elaph newspaper saying that there are some kind of negotiations or contacts between Lebanon, Iran, Hezbollah, and Israel to try to de-escalate. So if this would lead to your original question to Hezbollah pulling its forces 10 miles from the border, I think Israel's political leadership is going to take it, even if the IDF is not going to be too happy about it. And that will be considered for the Israelis a win. And it's also a win after the IDF can now say what they wanted to say on October 11th, we have managed to substantially reduce Hezbollah's strategic ability and to hit them, hit them hard, hit them where it hurts with the pager operation, probably done according to foreign sources by the Mossad. So now, as far as the Israelis are concerned, now if they want to stop, Israel is very ready for them to stop this war. But if they're not going to stop, you know, Beirut is next. The prime minister was quoted as saying that Israel might hit Nasrallah or has the ability to hit Nasrallah himself, to take out Nasrallah. So that's probably on the table. So we have here different options of escalation. And the most important thing I'm going to say after a success, we should always remember that Hezbollah has this option of escalation, of shooting, still, thousands of rockets and missiles to Israel and changing the landscape in many areas in Israel and causing a lot of harm. So Hezbollah still has this option even after the successful IDF operation in the last few days.
DS: So Nadav, what can you tell us about this ground invasion or no ground invasion from the IDF?
NE: The security officials that I've been speaking with are saying they're going to be extremely cautious before they order a ground incursion into Lebanon. They think that this might be something that Hezbollah is waiting for, but this is definitely on the table.
DS: Ok. Nadav, we will leave it there. Thank you for doing this emergency episode. And for our listeners, one housekeeping note, if you're listening to this today on September 24th, you can still attend our event tonight at the Stryker Center with Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon on the release of his new book. And we'll be talking about these developments as well.
NE: This is a fantastic book. And Amir Tibon is a fantastic correspondent. And it's a tremendous story. And if you can be there, be there.
DS: Yeah, it is a riveting book. And we'll be talking about a lot of issues. That's tonight. We’ll put a link to the event in the show notes, you can still register. Nadav, I'm sure I'll speak to you soon. Thank you for doing this.
NE: Thanks very much. Thanks, Dan.
DS: Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our Media Manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional Editing by Martin Huérgo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.