Israel Matzav

IDF training for war with Hezbullah

The IDF has set up a new training ground for war with Hezbullah. It includes a rubber city in which to practice urban warfare, with tunnels leading to a forest simulating the 'nature preserves' Hezbullah has set up in southern Lebanon.

Shortly after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF built a replica of a Hizbullah "nature reserve" - a forested area where the group had dug bunkers and deployed rocket launchers - to train IDF troops. Now, the IDF is building an urban warfare center - consisting of a mock Lebanese village - which it plans to connect to the replica of the nature reserve.

"Hizbullah has created most of its positions inside homes in southern Lebanon," explained a senior IDF officer last week, adding that an example of this had been demonstrated two weeks ago with the accidental explosion of a Hizbullah rocket cache inside a home in the village of Khirbet Selm.

The home, the IDF later revealed, was also connected to an underground series of tunnels that led to additional positions in nature reserves.

In footage taken several months before the explosion, an IDF aircraft caught several senior Hizbullah operatives entering an underground tunnel near the house and reappearing from an exit 700 meters away.

"During the Second Lebanon War, our biggest challenges were the nature reserves that Hizbullah had created in the open," the officer said. "Now, the challenge will be to fight against Hizbullah in an urban setting and then to move through the tunnels into the forest."

The IDF has clearly learned the lessons of the 2006 war. Especially with a government in power that will not be afraid to fight, a war with Hezbullah now is likely to have very different results than the 2006 war had. Don't expect to see signs like the one at the top of this post after the next war.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:54 PM