Ali al-Taher Hill does not disappear from the Israeli agenda even with the military escalation on the Iranian front that erupted with the American bombing amid the tightening of the siege and the imposition of sanctions. The issue today appears to be an extension of the confrontation between Israel and Iran, just as southern Lebanon is a front of conflict with regional ramifications, as if it has turned into a bargaining ground at the table, if matters move toward a settlement or if the existing deadlock closes negotiations and opens the way toward a battle that Israel wants to control the hills and heights of Jabal el-Rihane all the way to the outskirts of Iqlim al-Tuffah.
"Hezbollah" sees Ali al-Taher only as a title of confrontation and preventing Israel from occupying it, and therefore refuses to hand it over to the Lebanese Army on the pretext of the possibility of its occupation.
It presents its narrative of steadfastness by preventing Israel from reaching Beirut, according to Sheikh Naim Qassem. But reality indicates that, if Qassem were interested in knowing his enemy's plan instead of reading into the unseen, Israel today controls the movement of people and life through bombardment even without occupying it, and this control gives it the ability to oversee a wide area in Nabatieh and its surroundings, just as it is working through explosions and bulldozing to build foundations for occupying it on the ground.
After occupying the border area, displacing people and destroying villages, and the Israeli army reaching the outskirts of Nabatieh and the approaches to the Ali al-Taher hills, and taking more land, the Israeli plan to keep the south, particularly the villages surrounding the areas of the strip, in a state of war becomes clear. It is practicing a policy of taking territory through depopulation, and it does not need to occupy every town as long as it is capable of preventing the residents from returning and settling there. Therefore, it keeps wide areas extending from Mansouri in the west to Nabatieh al-Fawqa in the east within the range of targeting, bombardment and explosions, and prevents people from practicing their normal lives in many surrounding villages, but it wants Ali al-Taher Hill for security and military reasons. If "Hezbollah" does not find a settlement to hand it over to the Lebanese Army amid its inability to confront inside the occupied areas, we will be facing a phase of fighting and more losses, regardless of the legitimacy of resisting the occupation and the options that allow the recovery of the land.
It is now difficult to return to the occupied areas in the south, as long as Israel establishes the buffer zone and changes all its features in a way that is unfit for life, and this is what it is doing to make the return costly and dangerous. "Hezbollah" must realize that slogans are one thing and reality on the ground is another. It escalates against the state, rejects negotiations and links its fate to the Iranian course, while Israel, when it takes additional territory, tightens the siege on negotiating Lebanon and restricts it. Every point it occupies turns into a card with which it imposes new conditions on Lebanon, including bargaining over its withdrawal from every new position in exchange for what it wants in terms of disarmament, freedom of movement, and even in the details of the verification, monitoring and security coordination mechanism, thereby extracting more concessions from Lebanon.
Perhaps this shows the limits of the state's ability to negotiate after it bet on the Americans to pressure Israel to withdraw, or at least to give it cards against those objecting, only for the state to move at a slow pace amid additional pressures, and not even be able to extract a demand to stop the Israeli escalation. The Secretary-General of "Hezbollah" therefore accuses it of "negotiating under war and siding with Israel," invoking the November 27, 2024 agreement, which, in his view, imposed Lebanon's conditions on Israel, but he forgot that the negotiations that preceded the agreement took place under fire, and that Israel imposed its conditions in the provisions of the agreement, which the party agreed to after reaching the point of suffocation.
The confrontation is not by jumping over the facts, invoking the unseen and illusions of victory. And when Qassem says that Israel is facing pressure and a crisis because of emigration, and builds on this matter, while the Israeli electoral struggle is taking place between the most extreme in Israel, then he does not know his enemy well, or he knows and escapes into the unseen, which is what we are witnessing in the approach to the Ali al-Taher issue, which the occupation has reached the doorstep of.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar
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