In the war in the Middle East, which will be one year old on October 7, up to 71% of the troops that make up the Israeli army – among the 20 most powerful in the world – are reservists. This means that, faced with the enormous military deployment that the invasion of Gaza has entailed, the regular army could not cope with the operation with ordinary personnel and has had to resort to some 360,000 professionals who before the offensive in the Strip were dedicated to other tasks and have been mobilized in haste. Despite these difficulties, the Armed Forces are trying to close ranks these days, without showing signs of fatigue or demoralization.
The Jewish state has seven fronts open: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, according to the assessment of the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. In recent weeks, the main theater of war has shifted from the Palestinian Strip, where they are fighting Hamas and where their attacks have killed more than 41,000 people, according to local health sources, to the northern neighbor, where Hezbollah forces are a militia better prepared and armed than many armies and, of course, more than the Palestinian resistance. Thousands of Israeli soldiers, many brought from Gaza, await an eventual order for a ground invasion of Lebanon.
There is no expectation that a ceasefire will be reached in the near future. Nor does anyone know how long a conflict that few imagined would last so long and bloody a year ago can continue. Can the so-called Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withstand the pressure? Do they have enough soldiers, weapons and a budget to last for a long time? Will they limit their pressure on the Lebanese Shiite group to air strikes and artillery or will they end up entering by land?
Israeli military sources are trying not to show any signs of weakness and insist that they are prepared morally, humanly and materially. They do not want to give the impression of weakness or fatigue. “If we have to be in this situation for 10 years, we will be in this situation for 10 years,” says one of the military spokesmen, Roni Kaplan, one of these reservists, without offering details or figures beyond stating that there are hundreds of thousands of people currently involved in the armed forces. His country, he explains, has invested heavily in defence and secret services. “We are ready for whatever is necessary and for as long as it is necessary,” he stresses.
There is, in any case, a key to maintaining the army and defending the country: the direct support of the United States, Israel’s main ally, which is measured not only in political and diplomatic support on the international scene, but in several billion euros each year. “The Americans are helping them with money, as well as with ammunition and material,” admits retired Lebanese army general Elias Hanna, who does not believe that the problem for the army of the Jewish State is economic. But he understands that, with these seven fronts, Israel “has no choice but to fight,” he explains in a telephone conversation. The retired military man adds that fighting Hamas or Hezbollah, immediate neighbors, is not the same as fighting the Houthi guerrillas in Yemen, more than 2,000 kilometers away.
Washington’s refusal this year to send 1,800 1,000-kilogram bombs and 1,700 500-kilogram bombs for fear that they might be used by Israel against Gaza civilians was, in fact, a gesture to the gallery. Despite the differences that have arisen during the conflict, the close collaboration between the two partners has not been damaged, even under the shadow of the upcoming US elections in November.
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Hanna, a professor at several institutions and an expert in security and defence, has no doubt that the Israeli army is now “weaker” than when the war began a year ago. He alludes to the number of dead soldiers, more than 700, the wounded – some permanently out of combat – as well as the psychological damage. He estimates that, under the current situation of increased tension with Lebanon, the Israelis may end up having six to seven divisions deployed on the border with between 15,000 and 30,000 troops each, awaiting a possible invasion. In any case, this would be an operation that he considers “very risky” and he does not know if Israel will take the step given the high price it will pay.
Technological dependence
“If Israel wants to achieve its goals, it must wage a ground war” in Lebanon, something that is keeping the military establishment of the Jewish state at odds, says Wasef Erekat, an analyst and former Palestinian soldier, referring to the “inability of the army to fight on several fronts at the same time.” His opinion is that Israel is overly dependent on its weapons and technology, which does not translate into capable soldiers on the ground. This is demonstrated, Erekat believes, by the fact that they have not been able to put an end to the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, which has much more “modest” weapons.
Meanwhile, the Israeli parliament is currently debating whether to increase the state budget by 3.4 billion shekels (about 850 million euros) with the burden of maintaining hundreds of thousands of reservists who have left their jobs and the cost of supporting tens of thousands of displaced people from the towns attacked by Hamas around Gaza and the approximately 60,000 evacuated from the border with Lebanon. The vast majority of reservists who have joined the Armed Forces these months took up their uniforms after the massacre led by Hamas on October 7, when some 1,200 people were killed in Israeli territory and 250 kidnapped, according to the authorities of the Jewish State.
In just a few hours, Israel spent between 4 and 5 billion shekels (between 1 and 1.25 billion euros) when, in the early hours of April 13, Iran launched some 300 missiles and drones, according to an estimate by a military officer interviewed by the newspaper Yediot Ahronot. Although the Jewish state had the help of allies such as the United States and Great Britain, a large part of this weaponry was intercepted by the Israeli anti-aircraft system. It is a sophisticated system made up of a triple shield at different heights above the airspace. It is this same system that on Tuesday prevented Hezbollah from hitting the Mossad headquarters in the Tel Aviv area with a missile for the first time in this war.
“Is the Israeli army strong enough to do almost anything it wants in Lebanon and Gaza and wherever else? Yes,” argues Dan Schueftan, director of the Center for National Security Studies at the University of Haifa. He bases his argument on the power of “deterrence,” instilling fear in the enemy so that it refrains from attacking Israel, which claims to have used only a “small” part of its weapons.
Surrounded by the damage still visible after a missile hit from Lebanon on Sunday in Kiryat Bialik, on the outskirts of Haifa, one of the most populated and protected areas of the country, Roni Kaplan acknowledges that the Lebanese militia is expanding the radius of its launches, but insists that this will not alter the army’s plans. “We are witnessing an attempt by Hezbollah to reach further away places and a huge attempt by Israel to prevent it,” he said, referring to the more than 1,300 targets of that group hit in the last few hours.
In cases like Kiryat Bialik, where the interception system is not accurate, what Kaplan calls early warning is essential, as is the habit of the population of seeking safety in the shelters available in almost all homes. This, together with the fact that the rocket hit several buildings without directly hitting any, meant that there were no fatalities.
Under the pressure of the current conflict, Israel “will try to mobilise the whole of society”, says retired Lebanese general Hanna. In this regard, some within Israel have been warning for months about the need to swell the ranks in an extraordinary way as the conflict has spread. To this end, touching on a highly sensitive issue, a law has been passed requiring ultra-Orthodox men, who until now had been exempt, to join the troops. A measure, in any case, imposed in a low-profile manner so as not to incite a community that represents almost 15% of the population, of 10 million inhabitants. Nor are Israeli Arabs, around 20%, obliged to do so, although that can of worms has not been opened.
In contrast to the optimism of the “constant reinforcement” of the Israeli army, Dan Schueftan is pessimistic during a telephone conversation about achieving peace because he believes that everything revolves around “civilization”, represented by Israel, and “barbarism”, represented by the Arabs, two “irreconcilable” worlds. Asked about the fact that in 76 years of the history of the State of Israel the country has hardly had any periods of peace, he replies: “There are earthquakes in California, tornadoes in Oklahoma, tsunamis in Japan and Arabs in the Middle East.”
