2006 Lebanon War

Based on Wikipedia: 2006 Lebanon War

The Thirty-Four Day War That Changed Nothing

In the summer of 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a war that both sides claimed to win, yet neither truly did. For thirty-four days, rockets rained down on northern Israel while Israeli bombs devastated Lebanon's infrastructure. When the dust settled, over a thousand Lebanese and more than 160 Israelis lay dead. A million people on each side had fled their homes. And the fundamental problem that sparked the conflict—Hezbollah's presence on Israel's northern border—remained completely unsolved.

This was not how either side expected it to go.

How It Started: A Morning Ambush

The morning of July 12, 2006, began with a feint. Around 9 a.m., Hezbollah launched diversionary rocket attacks toward Israeli military positions along the coast and near the border village of Zar'it. They also targeted the town of Shlomi. Surveillance cameras at six Israeli military positions went dark.

While Israel's attention focused on these rockets, a Hezbollah ground team slipped through a dead zone in the border fence—a gap in Israel's supposedly impenetrable security barrier. They hid in an overgrown wadi, a dry riverbed thick with vegetation. When two Israeli Humvees came patrolling along the border, the militants struck with explosives and anti-tank missiles they had pre-positioned for exactly this moment.

Three Israeli soldiers died instantly. Two were wounded. And two more—First Sergeant Ehud Goldwasser and Sergeant First Class Eldad Regev—were dragged across the border into Lebanon.

The Israeli response was immediate and disastrous. A rescue force rushed to the area, confirming within twenty minutes that soldiers were missing. A Merkava tank—one of Israel's most advanced armored vehicles—an armored personnel carrier, and a helicopter crossed into Lebanon in pursuit. The tank hit a massive land mine, killing all four crew members. Another soldier died and two more were wounded by mortar fire as troops tried to recover the bodies.

In a single morning, Israel had lost eight soldiers killed, with two captured and several more wounded.

The Calculus of Hostage-Taking

Hezbollah called the operation "Truthful Promise." The name referred to public pledges that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, had been making for eighteen months. He had promised to seize Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips for a prisoner exchange.

This was not new territory. Hezbollah had used the same tactic successfully in 2004. And they had a specific list of prisoners they wanted released.

At the top of that list was Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese citizen captured during an attack in 1979. Israel had convicted him of murdering civilians and a police officer—charges Kuntar denied, calling them Israeli fabrications designed to malign him. Also on the list were Nasim Nisr, an Israeli-Lebanese citizen convicted of spying; Yahya Skaf, whom Hezbollah claimed Israel held prisoner (Israel said he had been killed in action); and Ali Faratan, another Lebanese citizen Hezbollah believed Israel detained, though he was thought to have been shot at sea.

Nasrallah's position was simple. Israel had broken a previous deal to release these prisoners. Diplomacy had failed. Violence was the only remaining option.

"No military operation will result in rescuing these prisoners," Nasrallah declared. "The only method is that of indirect negotiations and a swap."

He was right about the first part. Israel would not rescue Goldwasser and Regev through force. But Nasrallah had badly miscalculated what kind of response his operation would provoke.

Israel Decides on War

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the capture an "act of war" by Lebanon itself—not just by Hezbollah, but by the sovereign state from whose territory the attack had been launched. Never mind that Hezbollah operated independently of the Lebanese government. Never mind that Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora immediately denied any knowledge of the raid and refused to condone it.

Israel chose to hold Lebanon responsible. And the response would be devastating.

"Lebanon will bear the consequences of its actions," Olmert promised. The Israeli military began attacking targets inside Lebanon with artillery and airstrikes hours before the Cabinet even met to discuss a response. Bridges and roads were hit to prevent Hezbollah from moving the captured soldiers. Runways at Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport were destroyed.

Forty-four Lebanese civilians died on the first day alone.

Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff, made the stakes clear: "If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back twenty years." The head of Israel's Northern Command, Udi Adam, was even more expansive: "This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon. Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate."

Everything. Not just Hezbollah positions in the south. Not just the border region. Everything.

The Theory Behind the Bombing

Why attack all of Lebanon when your enemy was Hezbollah? A retired Israeli Army colonel explained the thinking: the goal was to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by making the Lebanese elite in Beirut pay a heavy price.

The theory went something like this: if ordinary Lebanese suffered enough, they would turn against Hezbollah. If the government in Beirut felt enough pain, it would rein in the militia. International pressure would mount. Hezbollah would find itself isolated.

It was a theory that had never worked anywhere in the history of aerial bombardment, but Israel tried it anyway.

On July 16, four days into the war, the Israeli Cabinet issued a clarification. Israel was "not fighting Lebanon but the terrorist element there, led by Nasrallah and his cohorts, who have made Lebanon a hostage and created Syrian- and Iranian-sponsored terrorist enclaves of murder."

This distinction would have meant more if Israel had not already destroyed the country's main airport and begun systematically demolishing its infrastructure.

The Air War

The Israeli Air Force moved fast. In the first days of the conflict, it targeted Hezbollah's long-range rocket and missile stockpiles, claiming to destroy many on the ground before they could be used.

The most dramatic claim came from an operation allegedly launched just after midnight on July 13. In thirty-four minutes, the Israeli Air Force supposedly attacked and destroyed fifty-nine stationary medium-range Fajr rocket launchers positioned throughout southern Lebanon. The operation, called "Density," was reportedly the result of six years of intelligence gathering and planning. Israeli officials claimed they had wiped out between half and two-thirds of Hezbollah's medium-range rocket capability.

Israeli journalists called it "Israel's most impressive military action" and a "devastating blow for Hezbollah." In the following days, the Israeli Air Force allegedly also destroyed a large proportion of Hezbollah's long-range Zelzal-2 missiles.

"All the long-range rockets have been destroyed," Chief of Staff Halutz supposedly told the Israeli government. "We've won the war."

He said this on approximately day two of a thirty-four-day conflict.

The Reality Gap

American officials were skeptical. They claimed the Israelis had overstated the effectiveness of the air campaign. As evidence, they pointed to the failure to kill any Hezbollah leaders despite dropping twenty-three tons of high explosives in a single raid on Dahiya, the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah was headquartered.

"The Israeli assessments are too large," one American official said.

The bombing of al-Manar, Hezbollah's television station, provided an even clearer illustration. Israeli aircraft bombed the station's headquarters in Beirut. Al-Manar went dark for exactly two minutes. Then it was back on the air. The station would be bombed fifteen more times during the war. It never went off the air again after that first brief interruption.

Military analyst William Arkin went further. He said there was "little evidence" that the Israeli Air Force had even attempted, much less succeeded in, wiping out Hezbollah's medium- and long-range rocket capability in the first days of the war. He called the entire claim an "absurdity" and a "tale."

Other analysts pushed back. Benjamin Lambeth insisted it was "far-fetched" to suggest that authoritative Israeli leadership pronouncements were not based on facts. But even he admitted there was "persistent uncertainty" surrounding the "few known facts and figures" about the alleged attacks.

The truth probably lay somewhere in the middle. The Israeli Air Force certainly destroyed some of Hezbollah's rocket infrastructure. But the rockets kept falling on Israel throughout the war, which suggested that either Hezbollah had far more than Israel knew about, or the damage was not as extensive as claimed, or both.

The Deeper History

To understand why Israel and Hezbollah were fighting at all, you need to go back decades.

The story begins with the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO. After Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War, Palestinian fighters began launching cross-border attacks from neighboring countries. Southern Lebanon became a particularly important base after the PLO leadership and its Fatah brigade were expelled from Jordan in 1971.

These attacks prompted Israel to invade Lebanon in 1978. The invasion failed to stop the attacks. Israel invaded again in 1982, this time pushing all the way to Beirut and forcibly expelling the PLO. But rather than withdraw completely, Israel remained in a "security zone" in southern Lebanon, using local proxy fighters called the South Lebanon Army to help maintain control.

This occupation gave birth to Hezbollah.

The Birth of Hezbollah

Hezbollah—the name means "Party of God" in Arabic—emerged from Lebanon's Shia Muslim community in the early 1980s. The group formally established itself in 1985 with a straightforward mission: end the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

When Lebanon's long and bloody civil war finally ended in 1990, various armed factions agreed to disarm. Hezbollah refused. So did the South Lebanon Army. For another decade, the two fought a grinding guerrilla war in southern Lebanon while the rest of the country tried to rebuild.

In 2000, Israel finally withdrew from Lebanon, pulling back to the United Nations-designated Blue Line—the internationally recognized border. The South Lebanon Army, which had depended entirely on Israeli support, immediately collapsed. Hezbollah quickly took control of the vacated territory.

This was supposed to end the conflict. Israel was out. Hezbollah had achieved its stated objective. Peace should have followed.

It did not.

Unfinished Business

Hezbollah found new grievances to justify continued hostility. There were Lebanese citizens still held in Israeli prisons. There was the Shebaa Farms region, a small strip of land that Israel had captured from Syria in 1967 but which Hezbollah insisted was actually Lebanese territory. These became the new justifications for continued attacks.

Cross-border skirmishes continued. In 2004, Hezbollah successfully used captured soldiers as leverage to secure a prisoner exchange, proving that the tactic worked. This encouraged them to try again.

Over the twelve months before the July 2006 raid, Hezbollah made three unsuccessful attempts to abduct Israeli soldiers. In November 2005, Hezbollah fighters attacked an Israeli outpost in Ghajar, a village straddling the border. The outpost had been evacuated after an intelligence warning. Israeli snipers killed four of the attackers.

In June 2005, Israeli paratroopers near the Shebaa Farms engaged three men identified as Hezbollah special forces, killing one. Videotapes recovered from the scene showed the men had been conducting detailed reconnaissance of the area.

Both sides were preparing for a confrontation. The July 2006 raid was not an isolated incident but the culmination of months of escalating tension.

The Question of Premeditation

How surprised was Israel, really, by Hezbollah's attack?

In August 2006, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the White House had given Israel a "green light" to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to Hersh, communications between the Israeli and American governments about this began as early as two months before the capture of the soldiers.

The Winograd Commission, an Israeli government inquiry into the war, later leaked testimony from Prime Minister Olmert suggesting he had been preparing for such a conflict at least four months before Hezbollah's raid provided the official justification.

If true, this meant the capture of the soldiers was not so much the cause of the war as its trigger—the event that provided political cover for a military operation that had already been planned.

This helps explain why Israel's response was so immediate and so extensive. The Cabinet authorized military action within hours. The bombing campaign had clearly been prepared in advance. Operation Density, the alleged thirty-four-minute strike on Hezbollah's rocket launchers, was reportedly the product of six years of intelligence work.

None of this happens spontaneously.

A War About Proportionality

The question that dominated international reaction to the conflict was whether Israel's response was proportionate to Hezbollah's initial attack.

Prime Minister Olmert had an answer ready when asked about this in August: "The war started not only by killing eight Israeli soldiers and abducting two but by shooting Katyusha and other rockets on the northern cities of Israel on that same morning. Indiscriminately."

He added: "No country in Europe would have responded in such a restrained manner as Israel did."

Whether bombing Beirut's airport, destroying bridges throughout Lebanon, and killing more than a thousand people constituted "restraint" was a question many observers answered differently than Olmert.

The Human Cost

The war killed between 1,191 and 1,300 Lebanese people. Most were civilians. On the Israeli side, 165 people died, including both soldiers and civilians.

Perhaps more telling than the death toll was the displacement. Approximately one million Lebanese fled their homes—roughly a quarter of the country's population. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Israelis evacuated from the north.

Lebanon's infrastructure was devastated. Bridges, roads, power plants, the international airport—Israel targeted anything that could be characterized as supporting Hezbollah's operations, which meant nearly everything.

How It Ended

On August 11, 2006, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1701. The resolution called for a ceasefire, the disarmament of Hezbollah, Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, and the deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces along with an enlarged United Nations peacekeeping force in the south.

The ceasefire took effect on the morning of August 14. The fighting had lasted thirty-four days.

Lebanese Army troops began deploying to the south on August 17. Israel lifted its naval blockade on September 8, formally ending the war. By October 1, most Israeli forces had withdrawn, though troops continued to occupy the border village of Ghajar.

Who Won?

Both sides claimed victory. Neither was telling the whole truth.

Hezbollah could credibly claim to have survived. The organization had fought the Israeli military to a standstill. Its leadership remained intact. Its rocket arsenal, while depleted, had never stopped firing. In the Arab world, standing up to Israel and not being destroyed counted as a significant achievement.

Israel's claims to victory were harder to sustain. The Winograd Commission, established to investigate the war's conduct, concluded that Israel had squandered a "missed opportunity." Hezbollah had not been disarmed. The captured soldiers had not been rescued. The organization remained entrenched in southern Lebanon, its political position arguably stronger than before the war.

The two captured soldiers, Goldwasser and Regev, were never rescued. Their fates remained unknown for two years. On July 16, 2008, their remains were returned to Israel as part of a prisoner exchange. Both had died, though exactly when and how was never made public.

In exchange for their bodies, Israel released Samir Kuntar—the prisoner at the top of Hezbollah's list—along with four other Lebanese prisoners and the remains of Lebanese fighters. Hezbollah got exactly what it had demanded from the start.

The Names of the War

Even what to call this conflict reveals the different perspectives of its participants.

In Lebanon, it is known as the July War—Harb Tammuz in Arabic. The name emphasizes its brevity and its timing, a summer catastrophe that came and went.

In Israel, it is called the Second Lebanon War, placing it in the context of Israel's earlier invasions in 1978 and 1982. This framing positions the conflict as part of an ongoing struggle rather than a discrete event.

International observers sometimes call it the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006, a name that emphasizes the actual combatants rather than the countries nominally involved.

What It Meant

The 2006 war demonstrated several uncomfortable truths.

First, air power has limits. Israel's air force was among the most capable in the world. It struck targets throughout Lebanon with precision. Yet it could not destroy Hezbollah's ability to launch rockets, could not kill the organization's leadership, and could not force the militia to surrender or even significantly degrade its capabilities.

Second, holding civilian populations responsible for the actions of militant groups does not work as a strategy. Lebanese public opinion did not turn decisively against Hezbollah. If anything, the destruction Israel inflicted strengthened Hezbollah's position as a defender of Lebanese sovereignty.

Third, guerrilla organizations that have time to prepare can impose significant costs on conventional militaries. Hezbollah had spent six years since Israel's 2000 withdrawal building fortified positions, stockpiling weapons, and training fighters. When the war came, they were ready.

Fourth, tactical victories do not automatically translate to strategic success. Israel won nearly every engagement. Israeli forces killed far more Hezbollah fighters than they lost. Yet at the war's end, Israel had achieved almost none of its stated objectives.

The Echoes Forward

The 2006 war did not end the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. It was a violent interlude in an ongoing confrontation that continues to this day.

Hezbollah rebuilt its rocket arsenal, eventually accumulating far more missiles than it had possessed before the war. The organization remained a dominant force in Lebanese politics. The Shebaa Farms stayed in Israeli hands. The underlying issues that had fueled decades of conflict remained unresolved.

The war served as a template for future conflicts—not just between Israel and Hezbollah, but in Israel's subsequent wars in Gaza as well. The pattern of massive firepower, high civilian casualties, international condemnation, inconclusive results, and eventual return to the status quo would repeat itself again and again.

In 2006, both sides learned lessons. Israel concluded that it needed to be more effective in future ground operations. Hezbollah concluded that its strategy of fortification and rocket warfare could survive an Israeli onslaught. Both sides prepared for the next round.

The thirty-four-day war settled nothing. It merely set the stage for conflicts to come.