The Tower:
Hezbollah has embedded its rocket arsenal in villages across Lebanon, ensuring that any Israeli strike on the Iran-backed terrorist group’s military assets will lead to mass civilian casualties, a former Treasury official said on Monday.
Hezbollah has “turned the Shiite villages … into essentially missile silos,” Jonathan Schanzer, now the vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said while speaking on a panel hosted by FDD on the possibility of a future conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.
“This is going to be a huge problem for the Israelis. We have heard it from Israeli leadership. What they said is that all of Lebanon is now south Lebanon,” he added. South Lebanon has traditionally been a stronghold for Hezbollah, where much of the fighting between the terrorist group and Israel took place in previous conflicts.
“What you have is rockets placed under homes, schools, apartment buildings, etc., so when the Israelis need to try to strike these weapons before they’re launched, it will potentially lead to mass casualties,” Schanzer continued. This is when international pressure on Israel to mitigate its military actions generally intensifies, he observed. “Essentially Hezbollah has put Israel in a no-win situation. If they want to win this war, if they want to try to knock out these weapons, it will inevitably bring that backlash.”
Former IDF general Yakov Shaharabani, Schanzer’s co-panelist and a senior advisor at FDD, added that “there are more than 200 Shiite villages that Hezbollah is rooted [in] all over Lebanon.”
If Israel seeks to defeat rather than deter Hezbollah in a future war—a likely possibility, according to Shaharabani—then the result “might be very destructive,” he observed.
A report for FDD written by Schanzer, Tony Badran, and David Daoud explained that Hezbollah deliberately embeds its military infrastructure in civilian areas in order to limit “the IDF’s ability to respond for fear of collateral damage.”
