Tactics that have kept the Middle East's most powerful army at bay

FOR four weeks Hezbollah’s fighters have defied the might of the Israeli military.

A guerrilla force that was supposed to be crushed in days has prevented Israeli troops capturing more than a handful of villages in southern Lebanon, killed more than 100 Israeli soldiers and civilians and is still raining missiles on northern Israel. In the eyes of Arabs and Muslims Hezbollah has already “won” the month-long war simply because it has not been defeated by the Middle East’s most powerful army.

Hezbollah has made good use of the six years since Israel withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon. With help from Syria and Iran it has amassed large arsenals, laid traps, built an intricate system of bunkers and tunnels, studied Israeli military tactics and developed a well-trained force of highly motivated fighters.

Israeli soldiers have been shaken by the fighters’ skill and commitment, describing them as an army, not a rabble. “Even I have been surprised at the tenacity of these groups fighting in the villages,” Timur Goksel, who served with UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon from 1979 to 2003, said. “They have fought far beyond my expectations and they haven’t even committed all their fully experienced troops yet.”

Here are the keys to Hezbollah’s success:

ANTI-TANK MISSILES

Small teams of trained fighters have used advanced missiles to knock out the formidable Merkava tank, and older versions to punch through the walls of houses sheltering Israeli soldiers.

Most are Saggers, an outdated Soviet wire-guided missile first used in the 1960s. In the late 1990s Hezbollah began firing more accurate wire-guided TOW anti-tank missiles. In this war, Hezbollah has for the first time used the Russian Metis-M, which has a range of a mile and can be fitted with an anti-armour warhead or a fuel-air explosive warhead to use against troops or bunkers. Hezbollah may also be using the laser-guided Kornet-E anti-tank missile, which has a range of about 3½ miles.

Individual Hezbollah fighters carry the shoulder-fired RPG29, a more advanced version of the RPG7 beloved of guerrilla groups since the 1960s. It has a dual-purpose warhead. “The first punches through the armour and the second is aimed at the personnel,” Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general, said.

Hezbollah’s ability to knock out Merkava tanks has frustrated the traditional Israeli military doctrine of rapid armoured thrusts deep into enemy territory.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Hezbollah is thought to have no more than 1,000 elite frontline fighters, with perhaps 3,000 in reserve. They will be drawn from the villages where they are fighting, using their intimate knowledge of the local terrain. They communicate by walkie-talkie, constantly changing the frequency and using a code that draws on their personal knowledge of each other and the surrounding area. Some reportedly used souped-up off-road motorbikes to launch hit-and-run attacks then escape along obscure tracks. Hezbollah also has drones to spy on Israeli movements.

From 2000, Hezbollah developed a secret military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, consisting of tunnels, expanded natural caves and underground bunkers where weapons were stored and fighters could live. Much of this construction work was carried out at night in remote stretches of the border.

Israeli troops have talked of finding bunkers housing command-and-control centres and advanced eavesdropping and surveillance equipment and monitoring cameras. The Israelis speak of battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters constantly popping up from unknown hiding places, firing, and then vanishing again.

MOTIVATION

Israeli officers regard Hezbollah fighters, many trained in Iran, as highly motivated but not careless of their lives in the manner of Palestinian militants often intent on glory through death. Mr Goksel said: “Hezbollah is not afraid of the Israelis. After 18 years fighting Israeli troops, they see them as vulnerable human beings who make mistakes and are afraid like anyone else.”

SNIPERS

Hezbollah marksmen equipped with high-powered rifles lie undercover for days at a time, picking off Israeli soldiers when the opportunity arises. Their marksmanship is impressive. In July 2004 a Hezbollah sniper shot dead two Israeli soldiers from a range of 500 yards.

ROCKETS

Israeli commanders claim to have destroyed many of Hezbollah’s long-range rocket launchers, including the 600mm Zelzal that can reach Tel Aviv. But the standard 122mm Katyushas can be fired more easily by mobile teams without the need for launchers visible to spotter drones or surveillance planes. These rockets are generally fired from multibarrelled launchers on the back of flat-bed trucks, but they can also be fired singly, even from a simple mounting of crossed sticks that is all but invisible to Israeli drones when hidden inside an olive grove. Last week Israeli commandos staged a pre-dawn raid on an apartment block in Tyre housing Hezbollah militants who had been firing long-range rockets into Israel. Two Hezbollah militants were killed, but rockets were being fired from the same location hours later.

ROADSIDE BOMBS

These killed more Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon in the 1990s than any other weapon, and the technology is now much more sophisticated. Early versions consisted of home-made claymore-style explosive charges that spray hundreds of ball bearings, and were detonated by a command wire or remote radio control.

Hezbollah bombs today include shaped-charge warheads that concentrate the blast in a single direction to punch through the walls of armoured vehicles. They are detonated by infra-red beam.

Military observers believe that Hezbollah long ago planted huge mines under all the roads crossing the border. Israeli tanks have therefore avoided the border roads.

WEAPONS DISPERSAL

Instead of stockpiling its munitions in a handful of arsenals, Hezbollah dispersed them in private homes, garages, basements, bunkers and caves, giving ready access to small Hezbollah units. The group is also thought to have night-vision goggles and a stash of Israeli military fatigues for ambushes.

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halicon said:

1 x hydrogen bomb = crispy Hezbollah’s soldiers.

seriously though Hebollah have had time to prepare which pretty much sums up their terrorist intentions all along.

dunno why they dont just er... crush the Israeli's instead of barking like little pavement specials. oh yeah cuz they using outdated weapons and using civilians as sheilds.

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arf9999 said:

I'm sorry, but I don't understand...
Lebanese citizens arm themselves and set up a defensive strategy, so that they give an invading army a bit of a surprise... which shows that they are terrorists?

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or the fascist zionists

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http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fascist said:

S: (n) fascist (an adherent of fascism or other right-wing authoritarian views)

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist said:

Zionism is a political movement among Jews, although supported by some non-Jews and not supported by some Jews, which maintains that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland. Formally founded in 1897, Zionism embraced a variety of opinions in its early years on where that homeland might be established. From 1917 it focused on the establishment of a Jewish national homeland or state in Palestine, the location of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. ...

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nivek said:

the only reason hezbollahs tactics have been working is because of israel's restraint, they can wipe out the whole of hezbollah in 25 minutes but kill 10 000 civilians with the same blow, but instead they are trying their best to minimize casualties given the situation where u have terrorists firing rockets from the local nursery school

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nivek said:

biased in favour of israel?????

what station have you been watching?

the only reason hezbollahs tactics have been working is because of israel's restraint, they can wipe out the whole of hezbollah in 25 minutes but kill 10 000 civilians with the same blow, but instead they are trying their best to minimize casualties given the situation where u have terrorists firing rockets from the local nursery school

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halicon said:

when they sent human bombs into places like tel aviv and other places in israel and claim it was them?

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Hezbollah has disclaimed the use of some 'terrorist' tactics, particularly those that result in the deaths of innocent people. For example, although the group first became known for pioneering the use of suicide bombings in the region, its clerics have never been entirely comfortable with the tactic,[75] and it has not been directly involved in a suicide bombing since 1999.[76]

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hezbollah condemned Al Qaeda for targeting the civilian World Trade Center, though it remained silent on the attack on the Pentagon, presumably considering it a legitimate military target.[77] It denounced the Armed Islamic Group massacres in Algeria, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya attacks on tourists in Egypt,[78] and the murder of Nick Berg.[79] Nasrallah, in a 2006 interview with the Washington Post, condemned violence against innocent civilians: “If there are American tourists, or intellectuals, doctors, or professors who have nothing to do with this war, they are innocent, even though they are Americans, and it is forbidden. It is not acceptable to harm them.”

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tibby.dude said:

ANTI-TANK MISSILES

Small teams of trained fighters have used advanced missiles to knock out the formidable Merkava tank, and older versions to punch through the walls of houses sheltering Israeli soldiers.

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tibby.dude said:

Most are Saggers, an outdated Soviet wire-guided missile first used in the 1960s. In the late 1990s Hezbollah began firing more accurate wire-guided TOW anti-tank missiles. In this war, Hezbollah has for the first time used the Russian Metis-M, which has a range of a mile and can be fitted with an anti-armour warhead or a fuel-air explosive warhead to use against troops or bunkers. Hezbollah may also be using the laser-guided Kornet-E anti-tank missile, which has a range of about 3½ miles.

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arf9999 said:

Hey hey, keep your yamulke on! I'm not saying that I support Hezbollah, but the IDF must accept their losses as they are the invading force. Hezbollah are Lebanese citizens, in their own country. I don't recall that Hezbollah was targeting Haifa (or any other cities) with rockets until the IDF attacked Southern Lebanon after the "kidnapping" or "capture" (depending whose propaganda you believe) of the IDF soldiers (I may be wrong about this, and I'm sure you'll tell me if I am).

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or the fascist zionists (the current Israeli government),

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Skeptik said:

Actually they have been lobbing all sorts of things into Israel for a while now. We won't even count the Hezbollah suicide bombers blowing up buses, weddings, restaurants etc.. This was a 'last straw' situation. I believe they fired rockets in the same action as the kidnapping. The rest was the reaction you see now. Any country would & should have done the same.

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The unguided Katyusha is not intended to strike a specific target. Rather, it is designed to be fired with 16 or more of its kind in a salvo that rains destruction upon a certain area, preferably a troop concentration, massed armor or fortified emplacements. By firing Katyusha-type rockets singly (often into sparsely occupied parts of Israel) Hezbollah has forgone the tactical use of this weapon for strategic purposes. Here Hezbollah signals its mastery of media warfare; the media covers wars like a sporting event, with the scorecard being the most important element in determining who is winning. Besides the daily updates of the number of troops killed, the number of civilians killed and the number of air-raids launched, the media also dutifully records the daily tally of rockets fired. Despite causing insignificant physical damage, each rocket arrives like a message of defiance, a signal to the Arab world that Israel is not invincible. Hezbollah routinely looks for new uses for existing weapons in its arsenal, and in this case they have transformed a battlefield weapon into a means of political warfare.

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On August 3, Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah made a televised offer to Israel to stop firing Hezbollah rockets in exchange for an end to Israeli air strikes in Lebanon. The Shiite leader warned, however, that Hezbollah would fire its rockets at Tel Aviv if the Israeli Air Force attacked Beirut (al-Manar TV, August 3). It is possible that Hezbollah requires Iran's permission to attack Tel Aviv. The largest weapons in Hezbollah's missile arsenal are likely to be at least partially manned by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Grapes of Wrath Revisited

The current Israeli operation bears a great similarity to Israel's 1996 "Grapes of Wrath" operation: a massive military response to Hezbollah's launching of Katyusha rockets into northern Israel despite the occupation of the Israeli "security zone" in southern Lebanon. Proclamations that it was time to end the "Katyusha menace" came to nothing as the offensive had little effect on Hezbollah's rocket capabilities and took few Hezbollah lives at a great cost to Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah rocket launches were carefully tallied by the Lebanese public as a measure of the movement's success on the battlefield. The Shiite movement was strengthened politically through armed resistance to Israel, while the Israeli government of Shimon Peres lost the next election.

Following the 2000 evacuation of the south Lebanese security zone, Israel refrained from responding directly to Hezbollah provocations along the border in mid-2001 and spring 2002. The Israeli government was aware that targeting Hezbollah would bring a flurry of rockets across the border, followed by an inevitable escalation and probable re-occupation of a region that Israel had just evacuated. For a time, at least, renewed war in south Lebanon carried too high a political price.

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Skeptik said:

The Merkava tank cannot truly be described as formidable. It is a derivative if a WWii Churchill tank used by the British

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Skeptik said:

Hezbollah are believed to have some Italian Milan TOW missiles. These are guided in flight by a thin strand of wire over 3000m long. The Russian Metis-M is old technology. A Kornet-E type missile was in use in Iraq but Bush asked Putin to put a stop to that. They have not used it since. This is the one to be afraid of.

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kilo39 said:

I'm really surprised tibby posted that piece of propaganda

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arf9999 said:

The unguided Katyusha is not intended to strike a specific target. Rather, it is designed to be fired with 16 or more of its kind in a salvo that rains destruction upon a certain area, preferably a troop concentration, massed armor or fortified emplacements. By firing Katyusha-type rockets singly (often into sparsely occupied parts of Israel) Hezbollah has forgone the tactical use of this weapon for strategic purposes. Here Hezbollah signals its mastery of media warfare; the media covers wars like a sporting event, with the scorecard being the most important element in determining who is winning. Besides the daily updates of the number of troops killed, the number of civilians killed and the number of air-raids launched, the media also dutifully records the daily tally of rockets fired. Despite causing insignificant physical damage, each rocket arrives like a message of defiance, a signal to the Arab world that Israel is not invincible. Hezbollah routinely looks for new uses for existing weapons in its arsenal, and in this case they have transformed a battlefield weapon into a means of political warfare.

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