2006 Lebanon War
On 12 July 2006 Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli border patrol, killing three soldiers and seizing two others, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, in a raid intended to force a prisoner exchange similar to past deals. Israel responded with Operation Change of Direction: a sustained air campaign against Hezbollah positions, Beirut's international airport, bridges, and power stations, followed by a ground invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at pushing Hezbollah back from the border and degrading its rocket arsenal. Hezbollah answered with sustained rocket barrages into northern Israel, reaching as far south as Haifa, and inflicted unexpectedly heavy losses on Israeli armour in villages like Bint Jbeil. Roughly 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon, the great majority civilians, and about 165 in Israel, with a million or more displaced on both sides before UN Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the fighting on 14 August 2006 and mandated an expanded UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Neither side achieved its stated aims. Israel neither destroyed Hezbollah's military capacity nor recovered its captured soldiers by force — their remains were eventually returned in a 2008 prisoner exchange — and the Winograd Commission later criticised the Israeli government's conduct of the war. Hezbollah's ability to survive a sustained Israeli air and ground campaign, despite the devastation inflicted on Lebanon, was framed by Nasrallah and much of the Arab and Muslim world as a 'divine victory' that cemented Hezbollah's domestic political standing and its regional prestige as the one Arab force to have fought Israel to a standstill, cementing the model of asymmetric deterrence it would rely on for the next two decades. Resolution 1701 was never implemented in the sense its drafters intended. Hezbollah did not disarm, the Lebanese army did not control the south alone, and the expanded peacekeeping force patrolled a border that both sides continued to prepare for the next war. What the month did establish, in the region's own reading of it, was that a guerrilla force could absorb a modern air campaign and go on firing, and both Israeli and Arab military planning after 2006 begins from that conclusion.
- Year: 2006 CE
- Category: Military
