Thread by @ThetiMapping

Hezbollah's large-scale rocket salvo on Northern Israel pushed a strategic crossroads to the forefront. Short thread on Hezbollah's capabilities and Israel's changing security conception. 🧵👇

Hezbollah still possesses over 23,000 missiles/rockets/mortars of all kinds. Many thousands can reach Israeli towns along the border with Lebanon, and several thousand can penetrate all the way to the Lower Galilee and Haifa. And that's keeping in mind the fact that most Hezbollah rocket launches are now occuring north of the Litani River, largely east and south of Nabatieh.

The fact they were even able to launch 100 rockets is a failure on Israel's part, as their goal is to preemptively suppress the launchers before that's possible. Of course keep in mind that 80% of Israel's intelligence and air force wherewithal is concentrated on Iran. This also means Israeli infantry lacks the same degree of close air support that it enjoyed during the 2024 invasion.

Since the November 2024 ceasefire, Hezbollah's been able to reconstitute much of its drone arsenal (Unit 127) and this time around a much larger proportion of the total Hezbollah attacks are conducted via UAVs, of which they have over 1,000.

Hezbollah's ATGMs are still potent and can be fired from ridges between Nabatieh and the Litani River border towns in the Galilee Panhandle. Over the past week Hezbollah has used 4 Almas ATGM variants, with the Almas-3/4 having a range of up to 16km!

Israeli infantry, tanks, armored vehicles, and bulldozers can't even cross the Lebanese border being targeted. And given the current Israeli approach being extremely casualty-averse, the mere threat of getting struck is enough to drag out the fighting for an extended period of time out of caution.

Hezbollah still fields a significant ground force. There are over 20,000 core-fighters in addition to over 20,000 reservists. Since the resumption of hostilities, Hezbollah has deployed the elite Radwan Force to the border with Israel. During the ceasefire they'd been located north of the Litani and in Baalbek.

But now they've been given instructions to defend each town within 10km of the border to a teeth. These 3,000 Radwan operatives will be supported by the Aziz and Nasser geographic divisions.

Regardless of tactical successes, Israel's policy of overwhelming bombardments of Hezbollah's support bases in Shia-majority regions, coupled with limited ground incursions with an emphasis on casualty avoidance clearly has its limits.

Now Israel is considering a much more forceful entry into Southern Lebanon. Israel is in the process of fully deploying the 36th, 91st, 146th, 162nd, and 210th Divisions to the Lebanon border. Today the Golani Brigade was deployed to the eastern sector of the border.

So one proposed solution is significantly escalating ground manuevers. The other proposal is to extoll such as high cost on Lebanon as a whole such that internal pressure forces the LAF to take the disarmament process more seriously, even if it means directly clashing with a political party that is literally in the governing coalition.

Also consider a wildcard scenario where Syria tries establishing a buffer zone in the Bekaa-Hermel region, or Israel convincing America to strike Hezbollah's underground missile storage facilities in northeastern Lebanon.

But the bottom line is that a ceasefire now would simply kick the can down the road. Even with limited Iranian support and compromised supply lines, Hezbollah's ability to rebuild post-2024 proves that they'd be able to do the exact same thing once again.