For weeks, Israel bombarded Bint Jbeil and Khiam, repeatedly attempting to encircle the southern Lebanese towns. Yet neither fully fell to Israel’s invading military.
The survival of these Hezbollah redoubts, which have long carried symbolic and strategic weight, exposed the limits of what Israeli firepower is able to achieve in south Lebanon, and the strategic power the terrain holds for its defenders.
Three sources close to Hezbollah, including one intimately familiar with the battles in the south, described to Middle East Eye how Israel was unable to dislodge the Lebanese armed movement.
They say the Israeli military advance did not just run aground in the face of fierce armed resistance.
Israeli troops were foiled by the terrain itself, the realities of urban warfare and the political and military significance of the targets that their leaders set themselves.
In both Bint Jbeil and Khiam, the issue was not simply whether Israeli forces could advance, but whether they could secure the towns and therefore secure Israel’s border with Lebanon.
That failure poses questions for any long-term Israeli presence in Lebanon’s south.
It also explains why Israel continues to demolish buildings in areas it holds despite the ceasefire that began on 15 April – and broadcasts the destruction it has wrought on social media.
“At every round of fighting, there has always been the question of Bint Jbeil for the Israelis,” a source close to Hezbollah said.
“The city has haunted the Israelis and created some sort of PTSD.”
A symbolic target
Bint Jbeil occupies a singular place in Lebanon’s political imagination.
It was there, after Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000, that late Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah delivered his famous speech describing Israel as “weaker than a spider’s web”.
That appears to have made the town a major target for Israel. In the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, it was a key battleground – one where Hezbollah ultimately prevailed.
And in this latest conflict, the Israeli military again decided to target Bint Jbeil as a major military objective and symbolic prize.
There was a difference to the war two decades ago, however, a visible shift in Israel’s operational aims.
At the outset, the goal appeared broader than simply taking a town.
Israel wanted to isolate the wider Bint Jbeil district by controlling its key approaches, including the roads into the surrounding towns and villages of Qawzah, Wadi al-Oyoun, Haddatha, Aitaroun, Wadi al-Skikiyyeh and Wadi al-Slouqi.
Had that succeeded, it would have cut Bint Jbeil from its surroundings and laid the groundwork for a more durable military occupation.
But repeated Israeli attempts to do this failed. MEE’s sources say that is because Hezbollah studied Israel’s tactics in Gaza and prepared accordingly.
Instead, the operation narrowed. What began as an attempt to isolate an entire area became an attempt to besiege a single town.
That was not a minor tactical adjustment. It pointed to a lowering of ambitions: from controlling open geographic space to targeting a dense urban centre that could be presented as a visible military gain.
Sources close to Hezbollah say the movement views Israel’s inability to cut off the wider Bint Jbeil district as a significant battlefield success.
One source said everything the Israelis claimed about enforcing a total siege on the town was inaccurate.
“There was pressure from several directions, yes, but even in the final moments, supplies and ammunition were still reaching us through the surrounding axes,” that second source said.
The source added that Bint Jbeil remained “an operations hub from which attacks were launched into other areas”, arguing that “no force in the world can impose a total siege on our terrain in this area”.
Geographic puzzle
Bint Jbeil sits at the centre of a geographic puzzle Israel struggled to solve.
The US-Israeli war on Iran expanded to Lebanon in early March, when Hezbollah used rocket fire to respond to the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and pre-empt an Israeli invasion it believed imminent.
Israel advanced into Lebanon from the east and west, reaching about 10km into Lebanese territory.
Any continuous, stable area of control along the border, therefore, required linking the two axes horizontally.
Without Bint Jbeil, the western and eastern sectors remained difficult to connect, leaving forces vulnerable to becoming isolated pockets rather than a coherent strip.
Once the attempt to lay siege to the Bint Jbeil district failed, the Israelis began to close in on the town itself.
Israeli forces advanced from four directions: Ain Ebel, Saf al-Hawa, Yaroun and Maroun al-Ras.
Yet even then, the battle inside the town did not resemble a conventional urban takeover.
According to MEE’s sources, the Israeli advance relied on limited military incursions, booby-trapping buildings and torching anything that stood in their way on Bint Jbeil’s outskirts.
They also, the sources said, deployed remotely controlled unmanned trucks packed with explosives – a tactic previously used in Gaza City.
The trucks would draw out Hezbollah fighters for confrontations, before detonating and destroying whole neighbourhoods with the force of their massive explosions.
It was a cautious approach, which MEE’s sources say showed the Israelis were trying to avoid direct, costly close-quarters fighting.
In fact, the Israelis failed to establish permanent positions within the town.
Key landmarks like the “spider’s web” stadium where Nasrallah made his speech, the grand mosque and religious compounds remained outside Israeli control.
Israel was also unable to reach the town centre or eliminate the fighters within it.
The second source close to Hezbollah said the fighting reflected the intensive battlefield planning the movement had done before the conflict broke out.
“To illustrate the level of preparation with which the party fought in Bint Jbeil, the [Hezbollah] units inside the city twice attempted to kill the [Israeli] commander of the 52nd Battalion of the 401st Brigade by targeting his tank,” he said.
“He survived both times by a miracle and is now in intensive care.”
The source said Hezbollah had identified the battalion and its commanders in advance, which he said showed how closely it had studied the Israeli units operating in the battle.
According to the source, during one battle in Bint Jbeil’s al-Awini neighbourhood, the Israeli military carried out the Hannibal Directive, heavily bombing an area to ensure that its soldiers were not captured alive.
“After it lost contact with its soldiers, it began shelling within roughly 20 metres of their position, before eventually managing to retrieve them,” he said.
“We knew that any attempt to capture them would prompt it to shell both its own soldiers and ours.”
Middle East Eye has asked the Israeli military for comment.
Failure to control Khiam
If Bint Jbeil’s symbolism for both Israel and its enemies means the Israeli inability to fully conquer the town is perceived as a failure, the same can be said for Khiam.
While Bint Jbeil could serve Israel as a west-east connector, Khiam acts as a gateway to inner Lebanese territory.
Yet there too, Israel appears to have failed to impose decisive control.
Like Bint Jbeil, the location carries symbolic weight as the place where a notorious Israeli-backed prison was run during the 1982-2000 occupation of south Lebanon, a place where detainees were subjected to severe abuse.
MEE’s sources say Israel was unable to bypass Khiam, fully encircle it or occupy its northern side.
Meanwhile, they say, Hezbollah supply lines from the western Bekaa Valley remained active.
This blocked the Israelis from pushing further inland and frustrated efforts to establish a stable strip along the border.
The three sources close to Hezbollah believe Israel’s difficulties in Bint Jbeil and Khiam suggest the Israelis will struggle to impose a de facto buffer zone in south Lebanon, even one shallower than 10km.
Without full control of Bint Jbeil and Khiam, Israel will face a limit to the depth into Lebanon its troops can advance.
The Israelis will also have disconnected military pockets, with unsecured urban areas nearby.
And they will have failed to sever Hezbollah supply lines.
Sources close to Hezbollah acknowledge that Israel made territorial gains and killed many of the party’s fighters during the latest war.
But those gains did not cohere into the sustainable area of control that it sought, they argue.
The second source close to Hezbollah argued that Israel had an interest in talking up the importance of the battle for Bint Jbeil in advance.
“The Israelis deliberately inflated the importance of this battle so that, if they succeeded in taking the city, it could be presented as proof of achievement,” he said.
As evidence that Hezbollah’s defence of Bint Jbeil was unbowed, the source highlighted how the party’s Radwan force ambushed Israel’s Battalion 101 shortly before the 15 April ceasefire.
“Within minutes, three Hezbollah fighters managed to hit 10 paratroopers, leaving them dead or wounded,” he said.
The incident reflects the extent to which Hezbollah views the conflict not just as a static defence of territory, but as a contest over endurance, mobility and the ability to deny Israel a decisive symbolic breakthrough.
Source: MEE
