Katz says capture of Ali al-Taher ridge completes Israel's hold on its south Lebanon zone

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on 4 September that the capture of the Ali al-Taher ridge marks the completion of Israel's hold on what it calls the security zone in southern Lebanon. The ridge lies about ten kilometres from the border, close to Nabatieh and the Litani River. The New York Times put it at roughly six miles inside Lebanon, above a large Hezbollah underground base.

The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had operational control after an operation that began in June, when thousands of troops surrounded the complex and trapped fighters inside. Soldiers cleared two underground routes, the army said, killing some of the men and driving the rest out. Katz said the next work is to neutralize the tunnels and deploy around the ridge so Hezbollah cannot return. He said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not withdraw from the zone until Hezbollah is disarmed across Lebanon and the threat to the Galilee is gone. Israel holds an election on 27 October.

Hezbollah said Israel had exaggerated the ridge's importance. The group did not immediately confirm or deny the loss of the position. Le Monde reported that Hezbollah treated the announcement as an electoral move by Netanyahu. A ceasefire reached on 20 June through U.S. and Iranian mediation reduced the intensity of the fighting. It did not stop it. The ridge became the main remaining argument on that front.

Israel says Hezbollah used the high ground to fire into Israel and spent more than two decades building tunnels, command rooms, stores and living quarters under it. Katz's phrase, security zone, refers to a strip the army now occupies, about 6 percent of Lebanese territory on Le Monde's figure. Completing control of that strip is a political claim as much as a map claim. It tells Israeli voters the northern border has a new depth. It tells Beirut and the UN force in the south that the occupation has a finished shape.

The wider war supplies the context. Fire between Israel and Hezbollah resumed in early March after Hezbollah launched rockets in response to the killing of Iran's supreme leader in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Lebanon's health ministry has previously put the death toll in Lebanon since March in the thousands. Those earlier tallies sit behind Saturday's ridge announcement even when they are not repeated in Katz's statement.

What the capture does not settle is duration. Katz tied withdrawal to a condition, full disarmament, that Hezbollah has never accepted. If that condition is real, the zone is a long stay. If it is campaign language ahead of 27 October, the ridge can still be traded later. The tunnels under Ali al-Taher will take weeks to map and collapse either way. That work, not the press statement, is the part that will still be running after the Israeli election.