The Israeli army is carrying out a “Gaza variant” in Lebanon, i.e. destroying buildings used as Hezbollah's military infrastructure using bulldozers and explosives, the Walla website reported on Monday, according to a high-ranking officer in the Israeli general staff.
The UN estimates that between the outbreak of the war in the Gaza Strip in October 2023 and the ceasefire concluded between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, over 80% of development in this Palestinian territory.
During the three months of the truce, Israel additionally demolished over 2,500 buildings. buildings in the area outside the so-called yellow line, covering more than 50 percent territory of the Gaza Strip and under its control – the New York Times reported in mid-January.
Israel's goal is to occupy the so-called buffer zone in Lebanon
An officer speaking for Walla, the second most popular Israeli website, confirmed that engineering battalions are carrying out a large-scale operation in Lebanon aimed at eliminating the infrastructure of Hezbollah, which – according to him – has already been pushed out of southern Lebanon towards Beirut and the north of the country.
The goal of the Israeli army is to occupy the so-called a buffer zone in Lebanon from which it will not be possible to conduct anti-tank fire towards Israeli towns. The northernmost towns in Israel were evacuated shortly after Hezbollah attacks began in late 2023, and to this day most residents have not decided to return.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday evening that he had ordered the army to expand the buffer zone to the Litani River in Lebanon, where the Israeli military has already blown up four major bridges.
Conflict in the Middle East. A soldier is dead
One Israeli soldier was killed and four seriously injured in several attacks by pro-Iranian Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Monday. In turn, the Lebanese army reported that one soldier was killed and five were injured in the Israeli attack.
According to the IDF, an anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah on Sunday hit an Israeli tank, killing 19-year-old Sergeant Liran Ben Zion and seriously wounding another soldier. In another incident, an anti-tank missile seriously injured two Israeli soldiers, and in yet another, a Hezbollah-launched drone struck nearby Israeli soldiers, seriously injuring one and slightly injuring another.
According to the Times of Israel website, Ben Zion is the sixth Israeli soldier to be killed since March 2, when Israeli troops launched an armed operation in southern Lebanon targeting the pro-Iranian organization Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese army said one of its soldiers was killed and five wounded on Monday in an Israeli attack on a military checkpoint in southern Lebanon. The exact circumstances of this incident are not known yet.
War in the Middle East. Resettlement in Lebanon
After the killing of Iran's supreme spiritual and political leader Ali Khamenei in a US-Israeli attack on February 28, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah joined the war, declaring that it would avenge the ayatollah.
According to Lebanon's health ministry, at least 1,238 people have died since March 2, when the country was drawn into the conflict. The UN says more than 1.2 million of Lebanon's 6 million people have been displaced.
