Israeli commentator Amos Harel has warned that the image of an Israeli flag flying over Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon is fueling “artificial excitement” that masks a faltering strategy in the current Lebanon war, Haaretz reported on Monday. In a column for the Israeli daily, Harel writes that a single photograph of Israeli and Golani Brigade flags atop the medieval fortress was enough to “completely sideline the necessary conversation about the state of the current war in Lebanon.”
“Instead of raising the questions that must be asked about the dubious strategy of the war in the north and the lack of a solution to the threat of exploding drones guided by fiber-optic cables,” he argues, “we got a nostalgic outpouring about this thrilling return to a historic site.” Hezbollah is launching “dozens every day” of such drones, Harel notes, yet the public debate has fixated on symbolism rather than on how to protect troops and northern communities.
Harel recalls that Beaufort was first seized by an elite Golani unit in 1982 at the cost of six soldiers, including the battalion commander Maj. Giora “Guni” Harnick. “Almost no one is talking about what happened and what we lost there the last time,” he writes, adding that the blood spilled then is “no reason to sacrifice more soldiers, who could almost be the grandsons” of those who fought 44 years ago.
The renewed hype around Beaufort, he says, papers over “a miserable reality” of ideological and political motives driving the campaign. Harel points to what he calls the religious far right’s fantasies about “settlements and a permanent foothold in southern Lebanon,” as well as a government that “with an election in the offing, is struggling to explain its abandonment of communities in the north.”
According to Harel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “spearheading the dominant narrative,” touring frontline headquarters while avoiding battered border towns and boasting that the IDF is “operating in Beirut, in the Bekaa, all across the front and smiting Hezbollah hip and thigh.” In reality, he writes, U.S. President Donald Trump has “greatly restricted Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, for his own reasons.”
Netanyahu’s claim that Israel has “liquidated 8,000 Hezbollah terrorists, including 700 just in the last month” echoes the inflated body counts of the Vietnam War, Harel contends. Missing from the prime minister’s “festive statements,” he notes, are figures showing that 13 Israelis have been killed since a U.S.-announced but unimplemented cease-fire in Lebanon almost a month ago, and that more than 2,000 Israelis have been killed since the war began on October 7, 2023.
Militarily, Harel says, the current campaign exposes the limits of Israel’s success in 2024, when the IDF “stripped [Hezbollah] of a decisive majority of its operational capabilities.” The group has since reverted to guerrilla warfare, decentralizing command and focusing on attrition as Israeli forces push deeper into Lebanon. The capture of Beaufort, part of an effort to tackle Hezbollah forces and infrastructure around the nearby Nabatieh Ridge, will not end the drone threat or stop rocket barrages that have recently reached Acre, Carmiel and Safed, he warns.
At first glance, Harel writes, Lebanon may look like a tactical problem, with Hezbollah weaker than in 2023. But he cautions that a “new strategic problem may yet develop” as the group continues to disrupt life in northern Israel and exact a steady toll in dead and wounded soldiers, while Israeli leaders celebrate territorial gains that help Hezbollah portray itself anew as Lebanon’s defender against Israeli aggression. Hovering over all this, he adds, is the unresolved question of whether Netanyahu wants to leverage a possible end to the confrontation with Iran to secure a deal on Lebanon, or hopes Trump will let him keep fighting Hezbollah “all the way to the election.”
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