The Israeli military defended its ground incursion into southern Lebanon, saying it was aimed at preventing attempts to infiltrate Israel. It also said Israeli forces have been conducting raids in southern Lebanon for months. The spokesman released new video footage this morning saying it showed Hezbollah’s underground tunnels. Lebanon Israel says it has destroyed several of them. These details are coming just hours after Israel announced it had launched a ground operation inside Lebanon. Military analyst retired Army Major General James Spider Marks is joining us this morning. We’ve been hearing about this ground incursion. Its ground incursion is limited. Because it’s going in and out and trying not to keep troops on the ground for too long. What’s the definition of limiting an invasion before this operation begins.
It’s a definition that’s very vague, look Hezbollah has a boat. How is that right on the rebels. So the description is limited. It’s pretty precise, which means that Israel hopes to be very precise. What it’s targeting is that they want to go after Hezbollah’s infrastructure. They want to go after storage locations, they’re looking for evidence that they can take to the International Criminal Court. Hezbollah routinely houses its weapons systems there, they use it for storage, not that anybody cares, but at least it helps the world understand what Hezbollah is up to if it’s not clear enough already. But I think it’s important that what Israel is trying to do is that they’re trying to push Hezbollah north of Lehton. So that allows us to do that. The UN Security Council resolution indicates that that should be done. But even now that hasn’t been implemented, a large percentage of Israel is still within range of those ballistic missiles. So that’s a good start. But Israel would really like to move forward, I think it would want to move forward.
Look what they’re doing with the victory from Gaza, they have the capability to do it, they don’t want challenges. So they’re describing this thing as a limited invasion, they want to get some very precise places. They want to push many people like Hezbollah fighters beyond the reach of the law. But I didn’t expect to occupy, they don’t want ownership of that land. They want to push, then I want to get Israel. They’ve said they don’t want to occupy for months, by the way, we want to go through this regional map. Also I want to look at some of the places where Israel has attacked because it’s just love you have Lebanon. When you look at this map of Lebanon, there’s a huge fear of a regional war, because of course you’ve had these shootings. Also about Israel, what do you think about all this, as the Biden ministry has said that we have to have a ceasefire, now they are talking about a ceasefire.
If Hezbollah, you know, is trying to stop this infiltration in Lebanon. Israel was very successful and it killed the political leader or killed the political leader of the first vogue, so it was seen that Israel has an image capability to reach out and operate in these what we call after several lines, which you have described very well on the map. The challenge of a much larger Mideast conflict is with the leadership in Tehran, what they are going to do next, we have not seen it directly. We have seen it through proxies, the proxies have now been damaged, all three of those big guys have been damaged, although if you look at the shell arc from Tehran down to Damascus you have got terrorist organizations that are linked to Tehran through different sources.