Army reveals 3,000 terrorists were in position to storm Galilee; strikes drove them away; commandos then carried out 70 forays into Lebanon
By Emanuel Fabian and Michael Bachner
The Israel Defense Forces revealed Tuesday that even before it officially launched ground operations in southern Lebanon earlier in the day, its troops had conducted dozens of secret cross-border raids throughout the current war, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and sites. The army also disclosed that days after Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught in southern Israel, thousands of terrorists had been positioned near the Lebanon border in a plan to storm the Galilee and unleash similar carnage there.
The IDF briefed reporters on the new information before IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari held a briefing in Hebrew and in English, presenting images and maps from the foiled mass invasion plan and elaborating on the subsequent covert commando missions in southern Lebanon, which aided the military campaign to dismantle the immediate threat and drive Hezbollah away from the border.
The army said special forces have since then carried out more than 70 small raids, destroying numerous Hezbollah positions, tunnels and thousands of weapons that would have potentially been used in the terror group’s invasion plan.
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 had 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 — had been waiting in southern Lebanon villages to attack Israel in the days after Palestinian terror group Hamas carried out its October 7, 2023, mass invasion from Gaza, in which some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel and 251 were kidnapped to the Strip amid widely documented atrocities and systematic targeting of civilians.