The combat engineering battalion 603 is blowing up “endless” amounts of Hezbollah’s terror infrastructure in southern Lebanon, Lt. Col. “R,” the battalion commander, told The Jerusalem Post in a recent interview.
R said that his unit has found and destroyed over 1,000 terror infrastructure sites during almost five weeks of service in southern Lebanon.
Originally from Ramat Gan, R is 37 and married with two children. He has served in the IDF for 19 years, including as the combat engineering officer for Division 162 and for the special forces Yahalom unit.
R has been in his current role for around 10 months and expects to continue for another one to two years before moving to any new roles.
The 603rd Combat Engineering Battalion is part of the 7th Brigade and finished a period of combat in central Gaza around six weeks ago.
This followed three months of combat in the Rafah area of Gaza, near the Yellow Line, during which R’s brigade killed 24 Hamas terrorists in a combination of close-up fighting and tank attacks.
His fighters were in a period of refreshing their skills and their training at their home base north of Eilat. One week later, this training was interrupted by a call to mobilize to the border with Lebanon….
R estimated that possibly between 25 percent and 50% of the weapons, along with Hezbollah’s network in the area, have now been cleared.
But to fully clear these threats, he said, the IDF would need at a minimum a period of additional months.
Addressing the problem was a dilemma of legitimacy, R explained. If Israel achieves more global legitimacy, then, if the IDF gives him the time, his and other military units have a plan for continuing to work to clear these items over a period of months.
So far, it looks as if R and his fellows in the 603d battalion will be given the time — some months — to complete their task of clearing the remaining terror sites. Right now, the world is focused on the war in Iran, on the Strait of Hormuz and the price of oil. There is no longer a focus on Hezbollah, and there may be none for some months, while the Israelis can drag out the ceasefire talks just underway in Washington, to allow them to keep exploding terror sites. Given Hezbollah’s maximalist position in the talks so far, they may well go on for months, allowing the 603rd Combat Engineering Battalion to finish its mission.
In just five weeks, R’s 603rd Combat Engineering Unit destroyed 1,000 terror units that had taken Hezbollah many years to build, at a cost of several billion dollars supplied by Iran. The hardest to locate and destroy were the tunnels build deep underground, where weapons were stored. And if Hezbollah continues to hold out and refuses to agree to disarm at the negotiations currently being conducted with Israel in Washington, that will give R and his men, his “great and brave soldiers,” the time they need, having already destroyed half of Hezbollah’s terror infrastructure, to destroy the other half.
To which, by way of a Shakespearean coda, we can add: “Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the earth so fast?”
Photo Credit: News Agency reporter, Creative Commons.
God Bless and good hunting.
it wont matter how many they kill , the ranks of hezbollah will continue to reproduce . carpet bombing of southern lebanon would slow them more effectively . but no one has the courage to do it . as long as the cult of the barbarians exist their will be terrorists . with 2 billion on the planet your chances of eliminating them are non existent .
Fair point, but Israel needs to eliminate these structures and should maintain a Security presence indefinitely! But what would be a better solution would be for the UN to do its JOB and begin condemning the terrorists and their ideologies! But we know that’s not going to happen either so the safest option would be to find and destroy the tunnels and with Iran’s mullahocrazy’s demise, the funds won’t be there to pay the terrorists nor fund the rebuilds!
The UN sees their job in Lebanon as protecting Hezbollah, which is why there are Hezbollah units in UN bases, entrances to Hezbollah’s tunnel networks in UN bases, and why Hezbollah uses UN bases to observe what is happening across the border in Israel.
They even fly the bloody Hezbollah flag from them alongside the UN one.
Israel doesn’t need “global legitimacy” to defend itself. The purpose of sovereignty is so that Jews are no longer at the mercy of others. Israel does not need permission from the world. The world needs to get used to that.
Congratulations to, and awed admiration for, the IDF and their superb combat engineers and EOD techs on their success in destroying so many of the terrorist tunnels and the terrorists hiding in them.
Now, may I make a suggestion for the Next (or, ahem, “Final”) Step? After the explosions and collapses, flood each of the tunnels and other terrorist hideouts with a few hundred kilos of Zyklon-B to finish the job, and as a matter of appropriate, well-deserved “poetic justice.”
The terrified death-screams of any surviving terrorists still hiding in the rubble and refusing to come out and surrender will be heard, even from deep underground, as soon as the blue-green crystals sublimate directly into deadly gas. And then, after about 20 minutes or so, silence. Mission accomplished.