Israel poised to seize Hizbollah’s ‘capital of liberation’

In May 2000 — as Israeli tanks rolled home to end nearly two decades of occupation in southern Lebanon — Hizbollah’s then-leader stood in the Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil and declared Israel “weaker than a spider’s web”.

The infamous speech by Hassan Nasrallah framed the withdrawal as a defeat for Israel under his group’s armed pressure. It entrenched a narrative of weakness that Israel spent years trying to dispel on the battlefields of the Middle East. Bint Jbeil came to be known as the “capital of liberation”.

But 26 years later, Israeli troops are back. Six weeks into a fresh war with Hizbollah and a deepening invasion of southern Lebanon, Israel’s military said it had surrounded the town and was poised to take it after days of fierce clashes.

Over the past week, Israeli forces of the 98th division — including elite infantry and commandos — have begun targeted ground raids into the village, backed up by heavy artillery and air strikes. 

Capturing the town that has loomed large in the military establishment’s imagination would mark a symbolic victory for Israel. It would also allow the Israel Defense Forces to gain a strategic foothold in the border areas they are battling to wrest from Hizbollah.

The IDF has said 100 Hizbollah operatives have so far been killed, some in close-quarters combat, with “hundreds” of weapons seized and “dozens” of militant sites neutralised. On Monday, the IDF released a video of a drone targeting a person they said was a Hizbollah fighter lying against a tree. Hizbollah has not publicly reported its losses in this war.

For its part, Hizbollah’s official telegram channel has reported 40 attacks on Israeli troops in the Bint Jbeil area since April 9. The statements refer to fighting with Israeli ground forces; seven say they involved assaults on Merkava tanks or Israeli armour. Two-thirds refer to Hizbollah rocket attacks, either alone or combined with artillery and other heavy fire. Four refer to “swooping attacks” by the militant group’s drones. 

An Israeli military official said on Monday that full operational control of Bint Jbeil would be achieved within days, as “only a small number” of fighters remain. Local media have reported fierce fighting across the town.

Boasting of its imminent capture, the IDF posted a drone photograph of the now-destroyed Bint Jbeil stadium from which Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel in September 2024, gave his speech.

“Bint Jbeil in the year 2000: Someone stood here, in this field, and claimed that Israel is a cobweb filled with spiders that must be exterminated,” said Brigadier General Guy Levy, commander of the 98th Division, to his force. “Today, that man is gone, the compound is gone, and his words are worth nothing.”

Surrounded by hills, Bint Jbeil lies in Jabal Amel — a geographic and cultural region of southern Lebanon associated for centuries with Shia religious scholarship, marginalisation and resistance to outside rule. 

But under Israeli occupation in the 1980s, as Hizbollah was rising, nearly two-thirds of the population fled. When Israeli troops withdrew, Hizbollah — which had staged several guerrilla attacks on the IDF over the years — took control, granting the town a sacred symbolism for the militants.

That was threatened in the 2006 war, when a full-frontal assault over several weeks by the IDF led to the deaths of 17 Israeli soldiers and ultimately failed to dislodge Hizbollah before a ceasefire took hold.

A subsequent national commission of inquiry in Israel heavily criticised the senior IDF leadership of the time for the lack of coherent operational planning and its singular focus on achieving what was termed an “image of victory” in the symbolic village.

Before the latest war about 30,000 people lived in the town amid rolling hills in an agricultural area of the country, planted with tobacco crops and olive groves interspersed with small farming communities.

The IDF seemingly learned lessons from the bloody 2006 battle. It bypassed the town entirely in its last war against the militants in 2024. This time around, it chose to enter the town only after methodically encircling it for weeks, rather than rushing headlong into the guerrilla ambushes of two decades earlier. 

Now Bint Jbeil may be not just a symbolic prize but also a key operational stepping stone. Israel is seeking to expand its self-declared buffer zone even farther into Lebanon, up to 10km deep, in what Benjamin Netanyahu is already calling a new “security zone”. At just 4km from the border, Bint Jbeil sits squarely inside it.

“To set up their security zone, Bint Jbeil is important: it opens a path in all other directions, and it is one of the largest towns along that border,” said Michael Young of the Carnegie Centre in Beirut.

Following battles for the strategic areas of Khiam to the north-east and Bayada to the west, “Bint Jbeil is the central axis of the future security zone,” Young said.

Israeli officials had been planning a fresh offensive against Hizbollah even before the US-Israeli war with Iran began in late February, with the goal of driving the militant group back from the Lebanese-Israeli border and preventing it from firing missiles at Israel’s northern communities.

In the five weeks since, some five divisions of Israeli infantry and tanks have pushed northward into Lebanon — clearing out border villages, clashing with Hizbollah militants, and searching for weapons and rockets. Bint Jbeil was apparently left for the later stages of the offensive.

A second Israeli military official said taking the town would have a “major operational effect”. “It’s a big Hizbollah stronghold . . . You still have a Hizbollah presence in the village, and due to its close proximity they wanted to fire on Israel from there,” they added.

The IDF said Hizbollah had planned to infiltrate and carry out a raid from Bint Jbeil into Israeli territory. In one incident in recent weeks, it said, some 20 armed Hizbollah militants were killed inside the compound of the village’s hospital. “Now, the threat of a raid along with the firing of anti-tank missiles has been eliminated,” it said.

The IDF released photos that showed a cache of weapons and launchers typical of guerrilla warfare, which the force claimed had been found at the hospital.

The photos showed 17 assault rifles, an assortment of hunting rifles, a few rusted pieces of AK-47s, and antique-looking pistols. Another image showed RPG launchers, rockets, ammunition and two belt-fed machine guns. No anti-tank guided missiles were seen, however.

Carnegie’s Young was sceptical as to whether Israel taking the town would deal a major strategic, as well as symbolic, blow to Hizbollah, which is still launching rockets at Israel and is entrenching itself for guerrilla warfare.

“I don’t see how this battle is going to fundamentally cripple Hizbollah. It can still remain a potent force,” said Young.

On Tuesday, Israel and Lebanon’s ambassadors to the US will meet in Washington for the first direct talks between the enemy states in more than four decades. Lebanon will press Israel to halt its assault, which has battered the country’s south for weeks and displaced more than 1mn people. The demand is expected to go unheeded.

Under pressure from the Trump administration to enter talks with Lebanon and “scale back” his military campaign there, Netanyahu has stressed to the Israeli public that the war, at least in the south, continues.

For residents of Bint Jbeil, who are once again largely displaced further north, photos of its destruction this week brought painful memories of the past.

“I wept when I saw the stadium, when I saw Israeli boots all over our land once again,” said Mariam Bazzi, 24. “By bombing the stadium, they seem to be saying: we are here to stay. The era of the resistance is over. But they don’t understand us: the resistance will never be over.”

Additional reporting by Chris Cook in London