Israeli troops push into Lebanon for yet another war with Iran's proxy Hezbollah

Beside Israel's northern border fence, the bursts of machine-gun fire from inside Lebanon are loud and long, as new Israeli forces push in to take strategic positions near the border.

The regular rumble of air strikes echoes over the shattered remains of Shia villages, destroyed during Israel's last ground war there in 2024.

A senior military official said on Thursday that Israeli ground forces were taking additional hilltops inside Lebanon - a defensive operation, he said, to better protect Israel's northern communities.

But there has been a significant military build-up here. On Friday morning we passed dozens of tanks and armoured bulldozers, newly-positioned right by the border, fuelling growing speculation that a full-scale ground invasion is planned.

Israel has issued a massive evacuation order for southern Lebanon, reaching roughly 27km (16 miles) inside the country.

The Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has said the objective in Lebanon is disarming Hezbollah and that he will not let up until that is done.

"We may find ourselves manoeuvring into that area [south of the Litani river] in one capacity or another and we don't want civilians there," said the senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"We have plans to go as deep as needed, including to the Litani River and further, if instructed," he said, adding that forces were in place to move immediately if ordered.

Hezbollah joined the war alongside its ally Iran on Monday and has been launching rockets and drones at northern Israel each day, most of which are intercepted by Israel's air defences.

Residents in one Israeli border community that was hit by a drone on Tuesday told us they had no plans to leave.

"Where would I go?" one neighbour told us, adding: "Jerusalem? Tel Aviv? It's more dangerous there now."

Israel's opposition leader Yair Lapid told a local television channel that Israel would "have no choice" but to create a "sterile zone" in southern Lebanon, similar to the Yellow Line in Gaza that marks the boundary between territory held temporarily by Israeli forces and that controlled by Hamas.

"An area with no Lebanese villages in it," he said. "It might be unaesthetic perhaps, or unpleasant, to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages, but they brought it upon themselves. No-one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organisation."

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians have been fleeing Israeli air strikes in Lebanon over the past few days, less than 18 months after a ceasefire ended the last conflict with Israel in November 2024.

During that war, Israel fought its way house to house through many Lebanese border villages.

Their crushed remains still litter the landscape.

But some Hezbollah fighters have reportedly returned to these areas, and Israel is now fighting its way through the area again.

Without those assaults on Hezbollah in 2024, which left a key Iranian proxy severely weakened, Israel would have found it much harder to launch its current war on Iran – or the previous one in June last year - without a much higher cost at home.

Old tank tracks on the Israeli side of the border still mark the places of that last invasion.

But just days into this latest conflict, the mood in Israel - basking in the military partnership with Donald Trump - is already breathlessly looking to a new future, and a new Middle East, prompting one Israeli commentator, Avi Issacharof, to urge his country to "come down to earth for a moment".

Toppling the ayatollah [Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] might sound "sexy", he wrote in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, "but there are no crowds in the streets of Tehran, no widespread public protests, and as yet no minority militias seizing territory". He added that the end of Khamenei did not mean the end of the Iranian regime.

Hard military might is Israel's edge - but it has already fought many wars with Iran's proxy forces, Hezbollah and Hamas, and returned to fight them again.

Israel's strategy and risk threshold might have changed since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, but without a clear political post-war plan, few here are clear where a new Middle East might be heading.