Israel Releases Footage of Naval Exercise Near Lebanon as War with Hezbollah Looms

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released footage Friday of naval exercises it conducted in the Mediterranean Sea near Lebanon — a warning to Iranian-backed Hezbollah that Israel intends to strike from the sea, air, and land if it does not stop firing rockets.

IDF: Israeli Navy Missile Ship Flotilla completed a wide-scale exercise this week

The exercise simulated wide-scale and multi-branch combat in the northern naval arena and involved cooperation between the Missile Ship Flotilla and the Israeli Air Force pic.twitter.com/N7107LAx0G

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) February 23, 2024

Clashes along the Israeli-Lebanese border have intensified in recent weeks, as Hezbollah has continued firing rockets and drones at Israel — including one drone that crashed into the back yard of an Israeli civilian in the northern Arab-Jewish city of Acre.

Hezbollah began the confrontation in October, when it began firing sporadically at Israel in support of the Hamas terror attack on October 7. Though Hezbollah did not launch a full-scale attack — much to Hamas’s chagrin — it disrupted life in northern Israel.

Tens of thousands of Israeli residents have been evacuated from towns along the border, such as Kiryat Shmona, since October. Farms have been abandoned and crops have been lost — or burned by fires ignited by Hezbollah missiles falling in open areas.

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

The situation is one that Israel cannot tolerate. Israel has limited its responses — thus far — to responding to each incident of fire from Lebanon, but Israeli leaders have said clearly that if a diplomatic solution cannot be found, they will go to war in Lebanon.

They have the strong support of the Israeli public, even though a war with Hezbollah would probably produce more casualties than the war in Gaza. A recent poll showed that 71% of Israelis favor attacking Hezbollah to push it back from the border area.

Hezbollah is not supposed to be anywhere near the border, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006. However, the United Nations has failed to enforce the resolution, allowing Hezbollah to dig in.

The irony is that ordinary people in Israel and Lebanon do not want to go to war with one another. Many Lebanese people feel that Hezbollah, a Shiite militia, is dragging the country into a conflict to serve the interests of Iran, the local colonial power.

The U.S. is trying to bring about a compromise. U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein is reportedly trying to forge an agreement under which Israel would move its forces back from the border if Hezbollah does the same. After October 7, such a deal is very unlikely.

Hochstein mediated an indirect deal in 2021 between Lebanon and the previous Israeli government in which Lebanon gained access to a newly-discovered Israeli offshore gas field. That deal was meant to prevent a war; it has obviously fallen far short.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.