IDF Races to Conduct Final Missions in Lebanon Before Ceasefire

JERUSALEM, Israel — Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops raced to complete missions Tuesday before the Israeli government accepted a U.S.-brokered ceasefire that Lebanon had accepted on behalf of Hezbollah earlier in the week.

All across the border, from the western Galilee to the Golan Heights, Israeli troops were suddenly redeployed on Tuesday, leaving routine patrols and heading across the border to complete missions before a 60-day pause begins.

Breitbart News learned of redeployments in the Rosh HaNikra area, near the Mediterranean coast as well as in the mountainous terrain near the Golan Heights, one of the flashpoints of the conflict, near both Syria and Lebanon.

In addition to ground assaults, the Israeli Air Force launched several waves of attacks on Hezbollah command infrastructure in the Dahieh neighborhood of Beirut, which has been subjected to repeated bombing attacks.

By contrast, Christian villages in Lebanon have been relatively untouched, apparently due to a policy of the IDF not to target those communities, except in exceptional cases when Hezbollah forces managed to embed themselves there.

As Israel accelerated its attacks, so, too, did Hezbollah, firing dozens of rockets at northern Israel. In one attack, a female Israeli soldier was wounded by a drone in the area of Mount Hermon, where Breitbart News was last week.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.