As Israel prepared its defense after learning that Iran intended to attack Israel on Tuesday, another news item made very little notice: The IDF called up four more brigades of reservists to the Lebanon border.

The added forces are meant to “enable the continued war effort against Hezbollah and the achievement of the war’s aims, including returning residents of the north home safely,” the IDF said. They were called up less than 24 hours after Israeli soldiers entered Lebanon for what Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesperson, characterized as “limited and targeted raids” in southern Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah shooting over 9,000 missiles into Israel in the past year.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit later described Hezbollah’s plans for an “Oct. 7-style invasion” and to “massacre innocent men women and children.” The Israeli military revealed that IDF special forces had secretly entered Lebanon dozens of times since Hezbollah joined Hamas’ assault on Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, destroying structures in which the Iran-backed terrorist group stored weapons and missiles.

Still, Israeli officials briefed on the operation said that the government really wants to keep it limited, and the security cabinet even added avoiding a regional war to its war aims – without telling the public. Yet questions linger about just how limited the incursion can be, given Hezbollah’s remaining capabilities.

What is now known as Israel’s First Lebanon War, in 1982, was also once “Operation Peace in the Galilee,” a limited campaign into southern Lebanon meant to stop attacks on Israelis in northern Israel that ended up with the IDF reaching Beirut and Israeli soldiers staying in Lebanon for 18 years. The 2006 Second Lebanon War, despite being declared a war in all of Lebanon from the outset, lasted a month. What kind of war Israel’s third in Lebanon will be remains to be seen.

Shira Efron, the senior director for policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, told Jewish Insider, that Israel’s attacks in recent weeks targeting Hezbollah’s upper echelon, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as its missile array “reshuffled the cards with achievements that changed the strategic picture without a devastating war,” she said. “Can we still avoid a devastating, painful war when Hezbollah still has capabilities and is part of the Iranian axis?”

At the same time, she said, a limited ground operation may be what is needed to enable the over 60,000 Israelis evacuated from northern Israel to return home safely, because the decimation of Hezbollah’s leadership and arsenal was “not even close” to eliminating them all.

“This is what I fear most,” Efron said. “There is always going to be another target, another asset, another home with weapons, another hill that overlooks an Israeli town…There’s a risk of greater IDF casualties.” 

Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the Misgav Center for National Security and the former head of research for IDF intelligence, said the war is “limited in at least one respect, which is space…but it’s not clear that we can limit this in time.”

Kuperwasser said he does not think the IDF plans to reach Beirut, and that “the idea is to take control of the areas overlooking [Israel’s] northern border, up to the Litani River. They may have to cross the Litani, but they’ll be around there…We see statements from the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit that no one should cross below the Litani or we’ll strike them. 

“It’s like a lockdown south of the Litani. The idea is to limit operations in the territory until we clean it out, and then no one will be able to go south,” he said.

While remaining in southern Lebanon, the IDF will seek to root out Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, which was trained to invade Israel, Kuperwasser said, and eliminate any tunnels they may have, which may take a long time. 

Efron expressed concern that the campaign in Lebanon, which she said is currently being managed professionally and apolitically, could end up politicized.

“When we look at Gaza, it feels like it’s being managed more politically…I hope we won’t move from the professional management of the war to a more political style. We all support going into Lebanon now, but…the problem is when you have leadership that you feel has a conflict of interests and is seeking personal gain at the expense of national security,” Efron said.

In order to reach the war aim of avoiding a regional war, “they need to make sure to scale up diplomacy at the same time as military action,” Efron said. “A war has a beginning and is supposed to have an end. It’s a means to achieve a diplomatic goal. I fear an endless war.”

Kuperwasser said the operation can end when there is “some kind of an arrangement to ensure Hezbollah won’t go south of the Litani.”

Until then, “the longer it takes to reach an agreement, the more we’ll reduce their capabilities by striking them very significantly,” he said. Hezbollah is already “losing a lot of its capabilities in many areas, though it still has capabilities as we can see with its shooting [missiles] at the north…If we continue not to allow weapons transfers from Syria into Lebanon, not letting planes [from Iran] to land in Beirut, it will be difficult for them to resupply.” 

Kuperwasser was hopeful that “the great military pressure Israel is putting on Hezbollah should make it easier for the Americans to reach an agreement that will fit Israel’s security needs, for Hezbollah to give up on its deployment south of the Litani.” 

However, the experience Israel had with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 – which ended the Second Lebanon War, required Hezbollah to remain north of the Litani and said the U.N Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would ensure the agreement was enforced – shows that Israel cannot depend on anyone else to ensure its continuing security, Kuperwasser said.

“No one really thought relying on UNIFIL would work, and now we know it didn’t,” he said. “We need a different system of Israeli enforcement. The Litani can only be crossed in a few places, so it can be supervised. If we don’t want IDF soldiers there, then we have to supervise from afar…It won’t be simple, but the supervision has to be Israeli because no one else will do it.”

Efron and Kuperwasser both saw military pressure on Hezbollah as a way to also reach Israel’s war aims in Gaza, to remove Hamas from control and free the hostages.

“Israel wanted to disconnect the equation” of Lebanon and Gaza, Efron said, “but maybe this is an opportunity to use this military achievement to link the two things positively…We should use our leverage while we are on top.”

The war in Gaza is at a point where the IDF is mostly conducting raids, but is positioned to ratchet up the intensity if needed after reaching the goals of the campaign in the north, Kuperwasser said.

Citing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address at the U.N. General Assembly last week, Kuperwasser said: “We are still committed to removing Hamas control of Gaza and bringing back the hostages, and that requires a continued effort in Gaza.

“The hope is that a victory in the north will have an impact on Gaza, encourage [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar to give up control and free the hostages. It’s hard to say if it’ll work, but that’s the hope,” he said.