With Hezbollah missiles still raining down on them, the Israelis want the military to deliver a knockout blow

David Vaknin estimates he was about 30 seconds away from certain death earlier this week.

The supervisor of the northern Haifa building was working in a second-floor apartment on Tuesday when the air raid sirens went off. He says he barely had time to reach a safe room when a Hezbollah projectile ripped through the roof, hitting the spot where he had been moments before.

“My life was saved as a gift to me,” he told CBC News on Wednesday, stepping over the pieces of broken concrete and rebar covering the apartment's floor to look through the hole in the ceiling at the clear sky above. .

“I was saved from destruction – you can see the pieces of the missiles,” he said, picking up a piece of twisted metal.

Even before this difficult situation, Vaknin said he supported Israel taking the fight to Hezbollah militants on the ground in Lebanon. Now he is more certain than ever that Israel must strike a decisive blow.

“Every week there are injuries, there are deaths. We can’t continue living like this,” he said. “We need to defeat this hate and these terrorist organizations. We need to deal with them once and for all.”

Praise for Netanyahu

On the ground floor, Ginadi Toybis, a fishing shop owner, sat in front of his shop, listening to the recording his CCTV cameras had made of the missile impact the day before. He agreed with Vaknin.

“If it weren’t for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, we wouldn’t exist,” he said.

“How did Bibi say that?” he said, using Netanyahu's familiar nickname. “This is for generations to come – for our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, so that there will be no more wars.”

Although Israeli society has been wracked by division over how to deal with Hamas in Gaza – negotiate a ceasefire to free the remaining hostages or continue a brutal war to try to defeat the militant group – there appears to be no hesitation for most Israelis when it comes to Hezbollah.

The assassination of Hezbollah chief and Israeli enemy Hassan Nasrallah on September 27 provoked applause from Israelis and praise from Israel's opposition parties.

Over the next two weeks, virtually every party in the Knesset, or parliament, supported sending ground troops into southern Lebanon to achieve what opposition leader Yair Lapid – who is also a former prime minister – called “the total defeat ” from Hezbollah.

Since Israeli ground forces officially crossed the border into southern Lebanon on October 1, the Haifa metropolitan area, 40 kilometers south of the border, has emerged as a prime target for Hezbollah.

On Tuesday, it fired more than 100 missiles at the city and surrounding areas. On Wednesday, it triggered dozens of others.

An Israeli military spokesman said more than 3,000 rockets were fired at Israel from Lebanon in October alone, although interceptions by Israel's anti-missile defenses prevented many casualties and limited damage.

At Haifa's underground emergency command center, CBC News met with the city's president and other senior leaders, who said dealing with the rise in missile attacks is a formidable — but manageable — challenge.

Mayor Yona Yahav said people in Haifa had lost faith in the prospects of finding a peaceful solution.

“They are losing trust in our neighbors,” he said. “And that’s really bad for the future.”

“If we want peace in the Middle East, we must have partners for peace. And every day we go through such circumstances, we lose faith.”

Attacked but not defeated

Hezbollah, which Canada and other Western countries consider a terrorist entity, released a video of deputy leader Naim Qassem claiming that even after the assassinations of most of its top leaders, the group is in better shape than Israel gives it credit for, and that its ground forces have successfully thwarted Israeli incursions near the border.

Notably, Qassem said he supported a ceasefire agreement without any mention of linking it to a truce in Gaza, which had been one of Hezbollah's main conditions.

More than 60,000 Israelis in the north have been living away from their homes for more than a year, while Hezbollah has launched frequent, albeit limited, rockets across the border since October 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.

Since Nasrallah's death, however, the intensity of the ground and air war has increased significantly on both sides.

The IDF announced Thursday the death of a twelfth soldier killed in combat with Hezbollah since the start of the ground operation. Dozens of other IDF members were injured, many seriously. The first Israeli civilian deaths since the escalation with Hezbollah also occurred on Wednesday, when a couple from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, reportedly walking their dog, was killed by shrapnel. Hezbollah said it was targeting “enemy forces” there.

Israel claims that, in addition to attacks on Hezbollah leadership, it has eliminated hundreds of fighters since the start of the ground operation. Hezbollah acknowledged the loss of its senior members but did not provide any other casualty figures.

Lebanese health officials say close to 2,000 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the capital, Beirut.

Achievable goals?

Despite Israel's tactical successes against the Hezbollah leadership and enthusiastic public support for Prime Minister Netanyahu's policy of escalating operations, there are larger questions about Israel's strategic objectives.

In a video statement earlier this week, Netanyahu appeared to suggest that his broader war aim is to alter the political makeup of Lebanon by eliminating Hezbollah as a force in that country.

“I say to you, people of Lebanon: free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end,” he said, before making an ominous reference to the mass destruction Israel has inflicted on Gaza.

“We have the opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering as we see in Gaza. It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Israeli attacks on Gaza last year annihilated more than 60 percent of the territory's buildings, left more than 42,000 dead, almost 98,000 injured and 1.9 million displaced from their homes.

The International Crisis Group, an NGO focused on resolving global conflicts, sounded an alarm note in its latest assessment of Israel's activities in Lebanon and the direction the conflict is taking.

“Israel has not publicly articulated a coherent plan to convert its recent military conquests into strategic gains,” it said in a report. “In particular, despite having demonstrated skill on the battlefield, it is not clear that Israel has a vision for how to avoid a resumption of attacks from Lebanon after the incursions and bombings cease.”

Israel has fought several wars in Lebanon in the past; its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, is its most notable and destructive.

In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought for a month after former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered ground troops in. He later negotiated a ceasefire that resulted in UN Resolution 1701, which called on Hezbollah to withdraw its forces north of the Litani River. , a natural border about 20 kilometers from the current ceasefire line between the two countries.

Since then, both sides have accused the other of violating the terms of the agreement, with Hezbollah remaining firmly entrenched in Shiite Muslim villages south of the river.

Concerns about climbing

Olmert, who is 79 and out of elected politics, is among the few prominent Israelis now warning against adopting a maximalist stance with Hezbollah.

“[Israel] should be very worried,” he told CBC News in an interview in his office in Tel Aviv. “How are we going to ensure that Hezbollah will not return from the Litani River to the border and expose Israeli citizens again?”

Olmert said: “[if] you don't have a solution before entering Lebanon, why did you enter? I think we have to reach a compromise.”

A longtime enemy of Netanyahu, Olmert says Israel's current prime minister has led the country down a path that amounts to endless war, because in Lebanon – as in Gaza – Netanyahu has failed to articulate a plan for how the fighting will take place. will end.

“There is a strategy that Netanyahu has, but it is in no way related to Israel's national interest,” Olmert said. “Their strategy is to maintain [the war] moving indefinitely while [he] may be as far away as [he] may from October 7, 2023, so maybe [he] will be able, in some way, to maneuver a larger part of Israeli public opinion into relieving themselves of the burden of what happened, and [his] responsibility.”

Netanyahu governs with the support of far-right parties in the Knesset that are pushing for the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and even Gaza.

Olmert says that for now, Israel has the ability to wage war on multiple fronts. But the public's patience and the country's resources will not last long.

“I think there is a certain limit,” Olmert said. “And that we are getting very close to that… threshold, which could be very, very significant and very, very dangerous for the security and safety of the State of Israel.”

“I prefer that we understand [the strategy] before we have to pay for it.”