Demolishing outposts while internal security fractures

The sharpest disagreement this week is over what it takes to actually hold a line. One argument says the military has to maintain a prolonged physical presence to systematically dismantle underground fortresses, because nothing else works against an entrenched enemy. The other counters that holding a static buffer zone just traps the army in an unsustainable war of attrition, providing a permanent target for dispersed guerrilla strikes.

I'm Yoni.

And I'm Ari. This is another episode of All Fronts, a Daily Lion production, where we put a week of Israel's security into one picture. Israel's military is physically reshaping its borders while struggling to maintain internal cohesion and operational doctrine. Today we are looking at demolishing the Ali Taher ridge, bypassing regional air defenses, funding a war of attrition, and policing the internal vacuum. And then, for our members, we go deep on the Military Advocate General's combat oversight, asking what happens when the legal limits of a war collide with the soldiers actually fighting it.

The military detonated explosives to demolish a massive underground complex, triggering a four point one magnitude seismic event across the border. As we established on September ninth, the siege secured operational control of the ridge without triggering Iranian retaliation. Now the army has physically razed the two kilometers of underground routes.

It's genuinely striking that eleven hundred tons of explosives is what it takes just to clear a single ridge. But this wasn't a peripheral outpost. The complex on the Ali al-Taher ridge was built over two decades with Iranian funding to serve as the central command and control hub for Hezbollah's Badr unit. It gave them a key vantage point overlooking the border just six miles away, letting them manage logistics running into southern Lebanon.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Katz say it was designed as a staging base for the conquest of the Galilee. And that scale is exactly what the writers who support staying on the ground point to. Asher Ben Lulu argues in Ynet that uncovering and dismantling heavily fortified underground positions demands infantry, combat engineers, and above all, time. He says air superiority and intelligence alone can't achieve what a ground presence accomplishes, meaning the army has to stay put.

He's arguing that the infrastructure is too deep for airstrikes. And the Ali al-Taher ridge was under Israeli military control from nineteen eighty-two until the withdrawal in two thousand, making it a historical flashpoint for attrition. That history is why the argument from the right warns against returning to the static outpost deployments from the nineteen eighties and nineties. They argue the military has to maintain continuous dominance of the terrain, because Hezbollah turned the area into a fortified underground redoubt.

How does a cornered organization respond to losing its primary command hub without triggering a regional war?

The analysts studying the group note they're increasingly relying on flexible and dispersed operational patterns that enable them to continue fighting. Back in March, they reopened hostilities with Israel by launching missiles and drones. The argument from the critics is that holding this ground traps Israeli forces in a static posture, which is exactly what Hezbollah wants for a war of attrition.

You're saying Hezbollah just absorbs the loss and switches to dispersed strikes. But that assumes they can afford to keep losing strategic ground without their domestic opponents noticing, and that the domestic pressure costs them nothing. Ben Lulu points out that Hezbollah's inability to rescue its trapped fighters in the tunnels dealt a major psychological blow that exposed their domestic weakness. The real debate is who actually enforces the disarmament if the Israeli military pulls back.

Who steps into the vacuum if the army actually leaves the ridge?

The diplomatic track assumes the Lebanese Armed Forces will do it. But the writers agree that's a complete fiction. An army officer told This Is Beirut that the Lebanese military doesn't have the mandate to take on Hezbollah directly, meaning soldiers facing resistance have to defer to political authorities instead of acting on their own.

And Daoud reports that a Lebanese colonel warned against doing things in violence against their own people. The domestic critics in Lebanon are already asking why Hezbollah refused to hand over the Ali al-Taher ridge and its underground infrastructure to the state army before it was destroyed. Everyone accepts that Lebanese state forces won't forcibly disarm the militias.

Which leaves Israel managing a unilateral buffer zone indefinitely. The military physically erased the invasion infrastructure, but securing the north now means holding the line against a dispersed guerrilla campaign, with no diplomatic off-ramp in sight and no local force willing to take the keys.

The Saudi desert's now testing the limits of regional air defense. Satellite imagery's now verified exactly what happened during the September tenth drone strike on the East-West Pipeline. A report from the right looked at the thermal data and optical frames to separate the actual impact from the kingdom's initial claims. It found seven new fire sites, all on one one-hundred-and-ten-kilometer segment southeast of Medina.

And the visual evidence is incredibly specific. The worst damage is at a pump station in a fenced compound. A soot and burn scar covers the whole compound and spreads about eight hundred meters. The surrounding fires weren't separate strikes. They were emergency relief pits burning off diverted crude to isolate the damaged pipeline. It wasn't a sprawling attack across multiple provinces like the early official statements suggested. It was a highly precise hit on a single infrastructure chokepoint.

What actually changes the picture is where that hit came from, and how it reached the target. The drones traveled roughly eleven hundred kilometers from Maysan province in Iraq. To get to that pump station, the drones flew over or past the Riyadh region—the airspace right around the capital.

Jonathan Spyer argues this tells you who controls that stretch of Iraq and how far Iran’s proxies can now reach. The analysts point out that the Shahed one thirty-six covers that distance with margin and the smaller Shahed one thirty-one doesn't. So we have a proven capability to send low-signature munitions across vast stretches of desert airspace. What does a strike like that test in the kingdom's new defense posture?

It tests the ink on their treaties. The argument from the right is that this deep penetration exposes the hollowness of the Mecca Agreement, signed just a month ago. Saudi Arabia brought in Turkey and Pakistan to build a regional shield. But Pakistan explicitly denied discussing military intervention, and Turkey limited its commitment to passive verbal support. When the drones actually launched, the alliance dissolved.

Right, it assumes regional allies ever intended to fight a proxy war, but the real cost is paid on the border. Baghdad announced an investigation and sacked a local operations commander in Maysan. But the analysts argue that none of it touches the factions. The Iran-aligned militias controlling the border remain completely undisturbed, meaning the launchpad is still active and the pipeline is still exposed.

Which leaves the kingdom sitting on a massive, exposed asset. The East-West Pipeline was built to bypass the Persian Gulf, operating as an overland safety valve with a capacity of about seven million barrels. I'm struck by the sheer geography of this vulnerability. You build a twelve-hundred-kilometer pipe to avoid a maritime blockade, and it just becomes a twelve-hundred-kilometer bullseye.

Exactly. The analysts argue the line relieves pressure without removing risk: it's a fixed target. And this is where the Jerusalem Center sees an opening. Where Saudi Arabia lacks the intelligence and the offensive strike doctrine to stop these proxies, Israel's spent the last year building exactly that. The military established a dedicated department for the Houthi theater.

Where does the analysis see that capability leading?

They argue it creates a strategic window for Israel to step in. Israel recognized Somaliland and secured a foothold overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where its presence there is already an operational reality. The argument is that Israel can leverage this deep operational footprint. It can offer Riyadh a comprehensive security umbrella that none of Saudi Arabia’s other allies currently offers.

And they argue Israel shouldn't offer that umbrella quietly, or for free. The demand should be an open, signed, and immediate Israeli-Saudi peace agreement. No backchannels, no vague promises for the future. The kingdom needs actual defense, and the analysts argue Israel should trade it for formal normalization.

Because the kingdom's rapidly running out of alternatives. A column in Middle East Forum points out that with the Houthis advancing on the Yemeni coast and Iranian forces threatening the Strait of Hormuz, both of the kingdom's export routes are under pressure from Iranian clients at once.

The week's reporting settles one basic reality: Saudi Arabia's entire oil export network's now compromised from multiple directions. The overland bypass that was supposed to save the kingdom from a maritime blockade is entirely exposed to proxy drones, and the defense pacts meant to secure it exist entirely on paper. The question now is whether Riyadh will accept an Israeli security umbrella to replace a broken regional shield, and what diplomatic price it's willing to pay for it.

Ofer Shelah warns that the defense budget's now heading toward a hundred and ninety billion shekels, and points to unending reserve mobilizations across fronts that just stay open. Writing in Mida, Hanan Shai points out that a war of attrition at this scale just burns through manpower, reserve days, and munitions without actually removing the threats. He says Shelah is right that force-building decisions are being made before the military's even drawn its lessons.

It's the mechanical result of how the military is built. Back in September of two thousand and six, the military fundamentally shifted from an army designed for decisive victory into one structured around deterrence and attrition. Because of that shift, enemies survive, rebuild, and dictate the timing of the next round. Reservists were originally meant to serve brief mobilizations to deliver a quick victory.

So they're paying the price for the doctrine. A column in the Misgav Institute argues that instead of keeping wars short, this shift turned the reserves into a de facto fragmented standing army that pays with its livelihood and its families. What actually drove that shift away from ground maneuver in the first place?

The defense establishment started relying on costly intelligence apparatuses to provide early warning, planning to mobilize those reserves only after the alarm sounds. Stagnation's the greatest enemy here, where the establishment stays in its comfort zone and refuses to adapt to how regional warfare's evolving. A lot of this goes back to the Shomron Commission in two thousand and seven, which formally recommended reverting the military back to a decisive force following the Second Lebanon War, but its findings were largely sidelined.

The other side of this debate argues that the shift away from legacy maneuver is exactly what's working. The argument here is that the multi-domain doctrine, which Aviv Kochavi formulated in his Momentum plan, uses mass-precision intelligence targeting to defeat terror armies. It's built for adversaries that have morphed into quasi-states with conventional assets and defensive infrastructure.

The sheer scale of the damage stops you. By September of twenty twenty-four, that sequential operational plan had degraded three-quarters of the Hamas brigades and severed their supply corridor at Rafah. The military also killed much of the senior leadership of both Hamas and Hezbollah, along with thousands of their militants.

Right. They inflicted severe damage across multiple fronts, decapitated Hezbollah, and degraded Hamas. The argument is that this multi-domain approach broke the old narrative that conventional armies are doomed to fail against decentralized networks. It tests the idea that deep intelligence penetration and precision strikes can actually dismantle entrenched systems.

How does that actually solve the problem on the borders?

It doesn't solve the border problem if the borders are static, and that's where both sides of this argument actually align. A column in JPost Opinion argues the fatal assumption before October seventh was relying on walls, sensors, and technological barriers that allowed adversaries to mass on the borders and wage gray-zone warfare. The argument is that fortresses just invite siege, and complacency's a mortal vice.

Instead of relying solely on intelligence and a flimsy border fence, the military was obligated to dig a deep, mined anti-tank ditch and set up infantry-grade standby platoons in those border towns.

That brings us back to the budget. Pouring a hundred and ninety billion shekels into the military won't close even a single combat arena if that money's channeled into an army of attrition. Force design and strategy have to come before budget allocations. As a column in the Misgav Institute argues, you can't just substitute diplomatic agreements for military power, because diplomacy only locks in results already achieved on the ground by force.

That's where the week leaves it. The money's flowing, but until the doctrine decides whether it wants to manage endless conflict or actually end it, the procurement surge just funds the same exhausting loop. The state has to choose between building a decisive force and maintaining a massive standing army of reservists.

We're looking at a severe collapse of the internal front today, exposing a dangerous security vacuum where the homicide rate in Arab society has surged past two hundred and fifty cases this year.

That number lands incredibly hard when you look at the history. The traditional mediators who handle these disputes say they used to resolve one isolated killing every fifty years, and now the murders are a daily occurrence across the north, south, and central regions.

Civic analysts argue this violence isn't just a policing failure, but the result of a deformed citizenship model. On the Local Call podcast, policy expert Reda Jaber argued that the authorities don't view an Arab victim as a citizen deserving protection, but as an outsider. He insists this isn't some hidden government conspiracy, but the natural outcome of systemic state structures that intentionally walk away from positive civil governance.

So modernization dismantled the old patriarchal structures that used to regulate behavior, and the state stepped back rather than providing modern legal institutions to replace them. Which leaves the community relying on traditional sulha mediators who step into the vacuum to save lives, but have absolutely none of the powers of police, intelligence, or judges.

And what that lack of authority actually costs is that these mediators are forced to negotiate blood money just to prevent retaliatory killings. They intentionally push the financial sum down so the perpetrator's family isn't driven into ruin or the black market, which would only expand the cycle of bloodshed and destroy the future.

The writer, Tamer Nafar, argues it leaves them operating like a child trying to hold back a deluge with ten fingers, working as a fragile dam against a state that refuses to let them build real institutional protections. When the state completely abandons its civil enforcement mandate, how's the security establishment treating the weapons pouring into the area?

Hardliners are treating it as an acute national security threat, arguing that this lawlessness easily crosses from street crime into ideological terrorism. We saw a clear example with an indictment in August for a nineteen-year-old from Haifa who swore allegiance to the Islamic State and allegedly planned to attack a military base in the north.

There was another charge that same month for an operative from Segev Shalom who allegedly planned a car bomb attack against a Beersheba nightclub. That tracks with what we said last week about wartime mobilization paralyzing state enforcement in the Negev. But the threat landscape isn't just smuggled rifles anymore. The head of the Shin Bet, David Zini, stepped in to warn that unregulated commercial drones now pose a strategic threat directly harming national security.

Because the technology has completely outpaced the law. The argument from the right is that since these civilian drones can deliver lethal payloads, legislation has to define them as weapons, requiring police point-of-sale licensing and individual registration. Does the government actually have the capacity to regulate an off-the-shelf commercial market that way?

Not while they're struggling to control the ground. While the establishment debates emergency flight bans, organized crime syndicates have already evolved from marginalized individuals into sophisticated businesses that replace privatized state services and offer social status.

Which is why Jaber insists that halting these syndicates requires building organized, independent community institutions at the neighborhood level, rather than relying solely on parliamentary lobbying. The state systematically abandoned the internal front, and criminal cartels filled the governance void. What the security establishment is testing now is whether Shin Bet interventions and emergency anti-terror statutes can actually reclaim a basic monopoly on force that the government gave away years ago.