The Media Line: ‘We Need To Occupy’: Israeli Experts Debate How Far Israel Must Go in Southern Lebanon

‘We Need To Occupy’: Israeli Experts Debate How Far Israel Must Go in Southern Lebanon

Israel’s emerging talk of a security zone up to the Litani River reflects a deeper shift in thinking after October 7, but analysts disagree on whether Hezbollah can truly be dismantled or only pushed back

By Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line

As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continue their ground operations in southern Lebanon, a profound debate is unfolding within the Israeli defense establishment over the ultimate endpoint of the campaign.

The initial objective of pushing Hezbollah forces away from the border is increasingly giving way to discussions of a prolonged military presence. With troops actively reshaping the terrain and historical memories of Israel’s previous 18-year security belt looming large, military strategists are deeply divided over what it will actually take to secure the north.

When Israeli officials speak about holding a security zone in southern Lebanon until the threat is removed, the phrase can sound deliberately elastic. For Dr. Gabriel (Gabi) Siboni, a colonel in the IDF reserves and a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, it is anything but vague.

“Removing the threat means that Hezbollah does not exist in Lebanon as a military organization with military capabilities,” he told The Media Line, offering perhaps the clearest articulation yet of the maximalist school of thought now shaping the debate in Israel over the future of the northern front.

Siboni’s formulation matters because it goes beyond the official language now heard from parts of the Israeli leadership. It is not limited to restoring deterrence, degrading capabilities, or pushing Hezbollah farther from the border. It envisions an end state in which the group no longer functions as an armed force in Lebanon.

In his view, the territorial implication is equally clear. Israel, he said, “has to stay in south Lebanon,” and not merely in a narrow strip along the fence. “My professional view is that we have to stay on the borders of the Litani River, on the Litani River, and in some points on the east side, even beyond the Litani River.”

That position places Siboni close to the most far-reaching voices now speaking publicly about the northern theater. Yet his argument is framed not as a political aspiration but as a military necessity. He rejected the attempt to avoid using the word “occupation,” insisting that “occupation is a military term” and that, in operational language, “we need to occupy, to hold the land” until Israel decides it can withdraw. In the current climate, when the vocabulary used to describe a future Israeli presence in Lebanon carries heavy historical and diplomatic baggage, that bluntness stands out.

Siboni described such a campaign as a sequence rather than a single maneuver. First, he said, Israel would need to “occupy, to take hold of the area.” Then it would need to “purify the area,” by which he meant destroying Hezbollah infrastructure.

After that would come sustained control designed to ensure that Hezbollah does not return. “All these activities take time,” he said, adding that Israel would have to remain in the area “until we think that there is no more threat to our northern villages,” which for him again meant Hezbollah having no remaining military capability.

His reading of the post-October 7 environment is that Israel has already crossed a conceptual threshold. Asked whether this represented a shift in Israel’s northern doctrine, Siboni answered in the affirmative, though with an interesting caveat. “It is a change in comparison to what was before Oct. 6, 2023,” he said. “Now, this is our security strategy, that we are not letting Hezbollah build threats in the north of the country.” A security zone in southern Lebanon, in his view, is not the whole response, but it is now one essential part of it.

Still, the more expansive the objective becomes, the more pressing the question of feasibility. Dr. Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, took a more cautious view.

Speaking with The Media Line, he said any serious attempt to deal with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would likely require a prolonged, multi-phase operation. But unlike Siboni, he drew a sharp line between degrading Hezbollah and imagining its complete destruction. “I don’t think it would be realistic to hope for a full destruction of Hezbollah,” he said.

That distinction is not minor. For Chorev, Hezbollah is not only “an Iranian arm,” but also “a Shiite Lebanese party, movement, mass movement that represents the desires and motivations of the Shiite sect.”

In other words, Hezbollah cannot be understood solely as an external proxy that can be uprooted by a sufficiently forceful military campaign. It is embedded in a community, draws legitimacy from that community, and has a social and political depth that makes the idea of total eradication far more complicated than some Israeli strategic rhetoric suggests. To destroy it outright, Chorev argued, would demand “the lives of many soldiers” and “an operation that would be extremely expensive, long range, unreasonable in any way.”

Even so, Chorev did not dismiss the emerging Israeli consensus that some form of territorial control may again become unavoidable. He said Israel will likely try to destroy as many Hezbollah capabilities as possible, from long-range and mid-range weapons to command and control structures, while also taking “a major part” of southern Lebanon to keep Israel’s border communities safe.

Yet his formulation differs from Siboni’s in tone and in endpoint. “I don’t think it would be in the same pattern as the old security belt,” he said. “I think it would be something different.” He also stressed that Israel “would love to avoid any stay in Lebanon,” but does not currently see another viable option. “None of the Israelis would like a new option of staying in southern Lebanon,” he said. “But the question is always, okay, so what is the alternative?”

That reluctant logic may be the most revealing element in the differing viewpoints. Neither analyst presented a renewed Israeli presence in Lebanon as desirable. Both described it as the product of accumulated strategic failure and the intolerability, after October 7, of allowing Hezbollah and its Radwan forces to remain near the border.

Chorev, who served in the security belt in the early 1990s, was especially emphatic on this point. “No one wants to go back there,” he said. “They are forcing us to go back there because we cannot bear a situation where Hezbollah and Radwan forces are hanging on our border, threatening our settlements, sharpshooting anti-tank missiles into our settlements.”

That memory of the old security zone is unavoidable in any Israeli discussion of southern Lebanon. For years, the withdrawal in May 2000 was widely treated as the end of a costly and unsustainable chapter. Siboni challenged that perspective directly.

Asked what needs to be different this time to avoid a similar outcome, he countered that the cost of the earlier presence was “not high compared to what we had to pay after October 2023,” arguing that the real strategic failure came later, when Hezbollah was allowed to build up its strength.

He said the next security zone would be different because the civilian population in the relevant area had been told to move north, reducing the kind of embedded village-based environment that complicated Israel’s previous presence. “Now there will be no population in this area,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be different than before.”

Chorev suggested that one lesson from the old security zone was the need to remain mobile rather than static, avoiding the kind of fixed outposts that can turn soldiers into “sitting ducks.” He said that if there is ever an agreement that actually works, Israel should not assume it has to stay in Lebanon forever. Still, he does not trust those arrangements. In previous rounds, he noted, Hezbollah used the quiet to rebuild.

On Lebanon itself, the two analysts reached similar conclusions, but framed them differently. Siboni dismissed the idea that the Lebanese state or army could disarm Hezbollah by force. “I don’t think the government of Lebanon is able to do it by force, or the military of Lebanon is able to do it by force,” he said, concluding that no actor other than Israel can dismantle Hezbollah’s capabilities.

Chorev also described the Lebanese government and army as “totally incapable” of confronting Hezbollah militarily. But he gave greater weight to the political shifts now visible in Beirut, including Lebanon’s recent expulsion of Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Reza Sheibani. He called such moves “supplementary,” reflecting a “shared interest and perception of the conflict with Hezbollah,” even if Lebanon remains unable to impose disarmament.

Striking a blunt note, Chorev said that as long as Israel does not endanger Lebanon as a state, many in the Lebanese establishment “enjoy it” and “encourage it” because Israel is doing “the dirty job for them.”

Siboni was more concise, but he too saw the expulsion of Iran’s ambassador as meaningful, saying that any Lebanese government action directed against Hezbollah and Iran matters, “because Hezbollah is Iran.” For him, the Lebanese move was a positive step, but not a substitute for Israeli force. He also rejected the notion that a wider confrontation with Iran remains hypothetical. “Iran is involved,” he said. “We are fighting.”

The differing perspectives of Siboni and Chorev do not reflect a simple split between hawk and moderate. Both men accept the premise that the old model of deterrence on the northern border has failed. In practice, the gap between them is not about whether Israel needs to act, but about what that action can realistically achieve.

Chorev does not see a scenario in which Hezbollah disappears as a military force, while Siboni defines that as the only meaningful outcome. For Siboni, anything short of Hezbollah’s disappearance as an effective military organization leaves the threat fundamentally unresolved. For Chorev, that ambition is probably unrealistic, and the more credible goal is to destroy as much of Hezbollah’s operational capacity as possible while physically pushing the danger farther from Israeli communities.

That difference matters because it speaks to how long any future Israeli presence in Lebanon might last and what political language will be used to justify it. A mission defined as temporary prevention can end when the threat is reduced to a manageable level. A mission defined as the elimination of Hezbollah may have no obvious endpoint at all.

For residents of northern Israel, the urgency behind the debate is immediate, not theoretical. Siboni acknowledged that even if Israel takes control of parts of southern Lebanon, “it will take time” before Hezbollah’s short-range threat is neutralized, and longer-range capabilities remain a problem. But he argued that the alternative, another cycle in which Hezbollah survives, regroups, and threatens the north again, is worse. “We need to finish the job with Hezbollah and not leave Hezbollah intact so they can recover,” he said.

Chorev ended on a more sober note. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as final,” he said, warning against fantasies of definitive closure. Hezbollah, though damaged, remains functional, decentralized, and capable of coordinating fire and operations. The issue, in his view, is not whether Israel likes the situation. “None of us would like to be in it,” he said. “But they left us no choice.”

For now, Israel is already on the ground and moving forward in southern Lebanon. The outcome will not be decided in advance. How far the IDF goes, and how long it stays, will take shape in real-time in the field.