Israel destroyed a major Hezbollah tunnel in South Lebanon, according to Haaretz, while the IDF also announced attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Gaza on Sunday. The same machinery that calls this a security posture keeps moving across borders, front to front, while civilians on all sides live under the consequences.
The State's Moving Front Lines
In Lebanon near Nabatiya, The Jerusalem Post said the IDF killed several Hezbollah terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenades in a Saturday strike, confirmed on Sunday. The paper said Israeli forces fired on Hezbollah fighters who approached close to them, especially around the IDF’s deepest penetration in Lebanon near Nabatieh. It also said the IDF hit and destroyed a Hezbollah rocket launcher in the vicinity. An IDF spokesman later told The Jerusalem Post that the attack was carried out to remove a threat.
The Post said Hezbollah has not fired a single rocket since last weekend and questioned how the rocket launcher could pose a threat. It said the IDF spokesman gave a vague answer, suggesting soldiers saw some kind of change with the launcher, even though Hezbollah had not fired rockets for over a week. That left the paper asking whether there was immediate danger or whether the main motivation was deterrence and the destruction of capabilities. Every time the IDF destroys a rocket launcher, The Jerusalem Post said, Hezbollah loses a valuable asset that costs money to replace and is harder to replace than a cell of a few terrorists.
The paper said this both removes a concrete capability to fire on and endanger Israeli soldiers and civilians and may deter Hezbollah from staging as many movements of its fighters near IDF soldiers, which led to the initial exchange of fire. That is the language of military management: destroy the hardware, shape the movement, keep the population under the shadow of the next strike.
Ceasefire, Then More Force
The Post said the IDF and Israel are trying to walk a hard tightrope after being forced prematurely by the US to stop attacking Hezbollah without getting concrete commitments from the group regarding even partial disarmament. It said that while that reality is holding Israel back from hitting Hezbollah in broader strategic ways, using small-scale violations by Hezbollah fighters as a justification for attacking nearby Hezbollah capabilities at least backs a bit of a punch.
It also said it is unclear whether such a single altercation, or a pattern of such attacks if this becomes a pattern, would lead Iran to threaten to pull out of talks with the US over nuclear issues and the Strait of Hormuz, or whether Tehran will not upset the applecart as long as the IDF refrains from attacks beyond its immediate vicinity. The diplomacy here is the usual state theater: talks, pressure, threats, and the people below them left to absorb the fallout.
The Post also said the IDF announced on Sunday that on Saturday it had killed several armed terrorists in southern Syria. According to the IDF, the military's 6th Etzioni Brigade, under the 210th Division, killed the terrorists after they entered Israel's buffer zone. The paper said this was a dramatic shift and that the last time the IDF announced any kind of attack in Syria was over three months ago, on March 20. Since then, it said, the IDF has not announced a single attack in Syria.
Anonymous Targets, Public Power
The Post said the March 20 attack was exceptional because it related to Syria’s Druze, a larger geopolitical issue and a problem that has only come a few times since the regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa took over in December 2024. It said the last time the IDF announced that it had attacked a random group of terrorists in Syria because they entered Israel's buffer zone was even longer ago.
This time, the paper said, the IDF was silent on why it attacked. Unlike periods when attacks in Syria were frequent and the exact identities of those killed were shared, including whether they were affiliated with Iran, Islamic Jihad or some other group, here the terrorists were kept anonymous. The Post said it is possible the IDF has undertaken many attack operations in Syria in recent months without mentioning them publicly, or that the military does not know who these armed Syrians were, or that they were not even connected to a major group. But the fact that the IDF attacked them and made it public, it said, was no small event.
Since March, the paper said, the US has pressured Israel to play more nicely with Syria because Trump views Sharaa not as a problem, but as part of the solution for stabilizing the region. By announcing the IDF attack in Syria, Israel is risking making waves, The Post said. It suggested this could be because Syria has been allowing frequent threats to Israel’s border zone and Israel finally had enough and decided it needed to respond. Alternatively, it said, with ceasefires on all the other fronts, this is the Israeli government looking for places to still attack and flex its muscles, and there may be less pressure against it for attacking a few terrorists in Syria than there is for attacking in Lebanon.
Taken together, the reports describe a multi-front Israeli military posture that includes the destruction of a Hezbollah tunnel in South Lebanon, strikes on Hezbollah fighters and a rocket launcher near Nabatiya, and attacks in southern Syria and Gaza. The Post said all three targeting cases are not typical and that they say a lot about the changing broader strategy on each border. The borders move. The armed institutions stay.