Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror: Hizbullah Needs 2 Years to Recover

Hizbullah was badly damaged in the war against Israel and requires at least two years to recover, a leading Israeli military analyst said.

[Res.] Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former senior military intelligence officer, said Hizbullah lost up to half of its combat force in the 33-day war with Israel. Amidror, highly regarded in the intelligence community, said he does not expect Hizbullah to initiate a major conflict with Israel for at least another year.

“It will take Hizbullah at least two years to rebuild its capability, especially to train them,” Amidror told an audience of mostly foreign diplomats at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on Wednesday.

Amidror said Hizbullah sustained heavy losses in the war in Lebanon. He said between 500 and 700 fighters were killed, or between one-third and one-half of the total militia force. The general said the Israeli military has already identified the names and addresses of 444 Hizbullah casualties.

Hizbullah has lost all of its medium- and long-range rocket capability, Amidror said. He said Iranian-origin Fajr rockets, with a range of up to 180 kilometers, were destroyed in Israeli air strikes on the first night of the war, which began on July 12.

Hizbullah’s arsenal of the Iranian-origin Zelzal, a rocket with a range of between 120 and 220 kilometers, was destroyed within the first week. Israel also intercepted two of three Hizbullah armed unmanned aerial vehicles destined for the Tel Aviv area. The third Iranian-origin UAV, identified as Ababil, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.

“Within five minutes, 95 percent of all long-range rockets used by Hizbullah were destroyed,” Amidror said. “This is why they didn’t succeed in launching the Fajr toward Israel.”

During the war, Israel’s military reported more than a dozen Fajr-3 and -4 rocket attacks. Military sources said Fajr and Zelzal-1 rockets struck such cities as Beit Shean and Hadera, between 70 and 100 kilometers from the Israeli-Lebanese border.

“This was the biggest military collapse in Israel’s history,” Israeli Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister, said on Wednesday. “We lost the war. We took the most incorrect path.”

In contrast, Amidror said the army completed virtually all of its ground force missions in Lebanon on time. He said Hizbullah’s use of rockets and anti-tank missiles was largely ineffective.

“The Israel Army said all of the ground forces fulfilled their missions on schedule,” Amidror said. “The problem was that in some cases, the decisions were blurred.”