Israel Defense Forces/Reuters
- Hezbollah took a heavy toll on Israeli armor the last time they fought on the ground in Lebanon.
- Its fighters wield even more advanced anti-tank weapons and know how to exploit the hilly terrain.
- If Israel decides to go to war with Hezbollah, it will likely have to send tanks into Lebanon.
In a recent warning to Israel, Hezbollah's leader said his Iran-backed militia group would destroy all of Israel's tanks if it launches a ground invasion in southern Lebanon to try to stop its barrage of northern Israel. That's not an empty threat.
Hezbollah took a heavy toll on Israeli armor the last time they fought on the ground in Lebanon and have since acquired a larger arsenal of more advanced anti-tank guided missiles.
"If your tanks come to southern Lebanon, you will not suffer a shortage of tanks, because you will have no tanks left," Hezbollah's secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel on July 17.
Israel has a tank shortage from the nine-month Gaza war that may complicate preparations for a ground offensive into mountainous southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters have readied to ambush them with mines and guided missiles as they pass through steep-sided valleys.
"Hezbollah has put considerable energy into developing a 'kill team' approach of using small, highly mobile groups of fighters that can deploy quickly to confront and attack Israeli armor in southern Lebanon," Nicholas Heras, senior director of strategy and innovation at the New Lines Institute, told Business Insider. "The hilly terrain in Hezbollah's home turf in southern Lebanon favors defenders and Hezbollah has developed innovative uses for the Kornet anti-tank missiles to strike at Israel's heavily armored Merkava tanks."
Hezbollah has engaged Israel in border skirmishes since the day after Hamas's 10/7 terror attacks that have forced thousands of civilians from their homes on both sides of the border, with growing fears these increasingly deadly clashes could ignite an all-out war. On Thursday, Hezbollah claimed its forces targeted an Israeli Merkava main battle tank near the Lebanese border in one of these exchanges of fire.
Hezbollah has improved its anti-tank capabilities since its 2006 war with Israel and is likely to use the favorable terrain to threaten even the most advanced Israeli tanks and armored vehicles.
Towards the end of their 34-day war in 2006, the Israeli Army sent tanks into southern Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters armed with Russian-made 9M133 Kornet anti-tank missiles ambushed several. For example, of the 24 Israeli tanks deployed in the Battle of Wadi Saluki, also known as the Battle of Wadi Hujeir, Hezbollah anti-tank missiles hit 11.
"Out of the 400 tanks involved in the fighting in southern Lebanon, 48 were hit, 40 were damaged, and 20 penetrated. It is believed that five Merkavas were completely destroyed," noted a 2008 military analysis of that war.
"Clearly, Hezbollah has mastered the art of light infantry-ATGM [anti-tank guided missile] tactics against heavy mechanized forces," it added. "Hezbollah also deserves high marks for its innovative use of sophisticated ambushes and the clever use of both direct and indirect fires."
GALI TIBBON/Getty Images
Israeli armor has improved since 2006 with the introduction of upgraded Merkava main battle tanks and the heavily armored Namer troop carrier based on the Merkava chassis. Many of these vehicles also have the sophisticated Trophy active protection system that tracks and counter-fires at incoming projectiles.
While Israeli armor losses in Gaza are difficult to accurately gauge, they are likely substantially less than previous conflicts the Israeli military has fought since 1982, the year it launched a large-scale invasion of Lebanon.
"In 1982, Israel faced foes with similar equipment, like the Syrian army and various Lebanese factions, that also had their own main battle tanks, heavy weapons, and air forces," Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, told BI. "Hamas had little of that — and certainly no armored vehicles."
"Hezbollah, too, has no conventional heavy weapons besides its limited artillery and rocket supplies."
If Israel decides to go to war with Hezbollah, it will have no choice but to send tanks over its northern border into Lebanon, according to Nicholas Blanford, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the 2011 book Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.
"The 2006 war demonstrated that air power alone is insufficient to neutralize Hezbollah. But the Israelis cannot get away from the fact that South Lebanon is not tank country," Blanford told BI.
"The main lines of communication run from west to east, which is not helpful for an invading force wanting to move north," Blanford said.
"Furthermore, the northbound routes tend to run through steep valleys, which makes armor particularly vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank missiles, IEDs, and belly charges as we saw in Wadi Hujeir at the end of the 2006 war."
Any cross-border incursion by Israeli armor would undoubtedly have cover and protection from accompanying infantry, artillery, aircraft, and drones. However, some of these forces could also find themselves exposed to Hezbollah's large missile arsenal, which include surface-to-air missiles.
"The IDF will likely focus not just on force but also on material protection because of these threats, however, as losing tanks to Hezbollah will constitute a political problem for a campaign there," RANE's Bohl said. "Therefore, the IDF isn't likely to carry out a massed assault against Hezbollah, but rather narrow ground incursions that would limit the amount of Israeli armor that could be struck by Hezbollah."
"The last thing the IDF wants is to give Hezbollah a target-rich environment."
Most of Hezbollah's new anti-armor capabilities come from Iran, including the Almas anti-tank missile it has used in recent clashes, which Iran reverse-engineered from Israeli Spike ATGMs captured by Hezbollah in the 2006 war.
"They certainly have acquired new systems since 2006, as we have seen in the current conflict. The Almas being one," Blanford said.
The group also possesses extended-range AT-14 Spriggans, the NATO reporting name for the laser-guided Kornet that has a six-mile range, and an Iranian reverse-engineered version of that Russian ATGM.
"They have also developed the Tharallah system, which has two AT-14 launchers side by side which fire two missiles in quick succession," Blanford said. "The idea is that the first missile is taken out by an Israeli tank's Trophy defense system, but (that active protection system) doesn't have time to counter the second missile.
Armed with these weapons, Hezbollah's "kill team" approach outlined by Heras could prove deadly for Israeli armored units in a future war.
"Hezbollah's introduction of the Almas system provides it with a ranged strike capability against Israeli armor, which can allow the organization to have multiple kill teams to engage against the IDF in the battlespace, both from range and in close combat," Heras said.
"Despite its ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities that it can bring to bear in the battlespace in southern Lebanon, it is highly likely that the IDF would suffer significant casualties in conflict with Hezbollah."