Israel in 'Ali al-Tahir' and Lebanon faces a question... What comes next?
What comes next after the fall of the strategic Ali al-Tahir hill, located north of the Litani River, into the hands of the Israeli army after approximately 82 days of exhausting dozens of Hezbollah operatives through a siege and battle dominated by remote technologies and the use of toxic gases for an “unconventional” exploration of what lay beneath it, before deploying the “robot battalion”?
This question has been the preoccupation of Beirut since Israel revealed on Thursday night its “operational control” over Ali al-Tahir hill, “the area above and below ground,” while continuing to destroy facilities within the tunnel network that Tel Aviv had previously described as a main command center for Hezbollah’s “Badr” force.
The fall of the hill acquired special significance, not only because of its strategic location overlooking Nabatieh, the Apple Region, Mount Lebanon’s Jbeil area, and Jezzine, but also because Israel’s “seizure” of it, described as “completing the phase of ensuring control over the security zone in southern Lebanon,” came at a highly sensitive time on the Iran–United States front, and amidst the backdrop of Tel Aviv’s release of five prisoners of war from 2024 and 2026 to Hezbollah.
While the “neutralization” of the Ali al-Tahir mine through its fall and the preceding handover of the five prisoners (on Thursday and Friday) was treated as a “liberation” of the direct Lebanese–Israeli negotiation track from obstacles that had prevented the eighth round in Rome—which is expected to be scheduled in the coming days—several conclusions and paradoxes characterized what resembled a “dustless battle” fought above and below the hill, the most prominent of which are:
- The declaration by Benjamin Netanyahu that the heights no longer constitute a “threat to Israel,” and the confirmation by his Defense Minister, Israel Katz, that this marks the “end of the phase of consolidating Israeli control over the security zone (southern Lebanon),” reflect that the Israeli prime minister now realistically holds the “golden card” for next month’s elections, and that Lebanon has become his “passport” to the “Rome 3” negotiations, sealed with the achievement of releasing the first batch of prisoners under the umbrella of the trilateral “Framework Agreement” signed between the two countries and the United States on June 26.
- Hezbollah, which attempted to mitigate the impact of losing the hill by raising questions about the reality of Israeli control and asserting that such an event “is not a disaster in military terms, nor is it the final outcome,” displayed, according to its opponents, a stark readiness to allow Israel to occupy strategic positions (after most of southern Litani) before handing them over to the Lebanese army. This was done to “protect” the narrative that doing so would grant Tel Aviv the “right” to designate other points to be relinquished in favor of the Lebanese military institution, thereby placing its weapons north of the Litani under Israeli control and the “Framework Agreement.”
Opponents of the party argue that, through this “logic,” it is merely attempting to delay the “domino effect” of the collapse of its positions, which it is no longer capable of balancing against Israeli protection, as acknowledged by some of its MPs who have promoted the theory of “relative deterrence.” This is done to keep the Lebanon and Iran fronts interconnected, even at the cost of allowing Tel Aviv to occupy more points, and perhaps towns, which have now realistically become subject to the equation of “handing them over or falling by force.”
In this context, it appears difficult to determine Israel’s next step after Ali al-Tahir, amid concerns from military experts that the “next” item on Netanyahu’s target list could be a series of “height battles,” particularly toward the Apple Region and Mount Lebanon’s Jbeil area, extending to the Western Bekaa, thereby practically establishing a buffer security strip geographically connected to the buffer zone in Syria.
While Israel’s Friday night raid on Western Beqaa (Ain al-Tineh) was viewed as a demonstration of the “next front” on the military front, as well as the strikes on Nabatieh and the Sidon district (which resulted in four deaths, including a young woman, and 30 injuries, including women and children)—which its army said were in response to Hezbollah firing drones at its forces in the security zone and aimed at “eliminating an immediate threat” to its citizens—it remains difficult to determine whether Tel Aviv will feel free to escalate in such a “spontaneous” manner, going beyond the “surgical operation” it carried out in Ali al-Tahrir and has continued since mid-June.
In this context, political circles believe that the United States, which has managed the Israeli escalation southward to prevent the collapse of direct negotiations between Beirut and Tel Aviv or to avoid triggering an explosion that would dissipate the “zero-leakage siege” it has imposed on Iran, would find it hard to approve any move by Netanyahu that disrupts this delicate equation. This does not, however, preclude the possibility that he might repeat the “Hill scenario” in other highlands, adopting a strategy of gradual encroachment and siege if the current standoff with Tehran persists until the US midterm elections in November.
The attempt by figures close to the Iranian axis to frame the fall of Ali al-Tahrir within the context of US-Iranian arrangements or understandings contributed to calibrating the escalation so as not to provoke Tehran’s entry into the Hill battlefield, after it had warned through intermediaries that a comprehensive attack on these heights would force it to respond. According to Hezbollah’s opponents, this effort falls under the category of “beautifying a bitter reality” shaped by the occupation of these heights and Israel’s launch of an operation that will be completed to fully dismantle their infrastructure, by implying that what occurred was the result of a “balance” established by Iran, which practically led to imposing that “Tel Aviv eats the hill with fork and knife, rather than tearing at it.”
According to these observers, such dynamics essentially mean that Iran, which tried to “extract offers” from the United States via the Lebanese front to break the US “negotiating silence” and elevate President Donald Trump’s slogan that “no voice is louder than the voice of the siege,” now has no choice in Lebanon but to give and give, both to Washington and from Hezbollah’s own purse.
