Israeli officials are rejoicing over the progress of the offensive against Hezbollah, the Lebanese military-political organization, which began with pager and radio explosions and continued with heavy and deadly airstrikes.
Defense Minister Joav Galant could not hide his delight after the airstrikes on Monday, September 23.
"Today was a masterpiece... This has been the worst week for Hezbollah since it was founded, and the results speak for themselves."
Galant said that the airstrikes destroyed thousands of rockets that could have killed Israeli citizens.
Lebanon says Israel killed more than 550 people, including 50 children.
That's almost half the number of casualties in Lebanon during the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
Israel believes that a fierce offensive will force Hezbollah to do what Israel wants, and cause it so much pain that the organization's leader Hassan Nasrallah and his allies, like their backers in Iran, will decide that the price of resistance is too high.
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Israeli politicians and generals need victory.
After almost a year of war, the situation in Gaza remains difficult and dangerous.
Fighters from Hamas, the extremist Palestinian group in Gaza, continue to emerge from tunnels and rubble to kill and injure Israeli soldiers and still hold Israeli hostages.
Hamas caught the Israelis off guard last October.
The Israelis did not consider Hamas a significant threat that could cause devastating consequences.
Lebanon is different.
The Israeli army and the Mossad intelligence agency have been planning a new war against Hezbollah since the last conflict that ended in a stalemate in 2006.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the current offensive is making great progress towards achieving his stated goal of significantly weakening the power and capabilities of Hezbollah.
He wants to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets across the border into Israel.
At the same time, the Israeli military says the plan is to push Hezbollah out of the border area and destroy military facilities that pose a threat to Israel.
New Gaza
The last week in Lebanon resembles the last year of the war in Gaza.
Israel has warned civilians, as in Gaza, to move out of the area that will be attacked.
He blames Hezbollah, as he blames Hamas, for using civilians as human shields.
Some critics, as well as enemies of Israel, said the warnings were too vague and were not issued in a timely manner - families were not given enough time to evacuate.
The law of war requires that civilians be protected and prohibits the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.
During some of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, areas where civilians live were hit, violating laws on the protection of civilians.
Hezbollah has also targeted the Israeli military.
Israel and its key allies in the West, including the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
Israel claims that its army behaves morally and obeys the rules.
But much of the world has condemned the behavior of Israeli forces in Gaza.
A larger-scale war along the border will deepen the gap between highly polarized views.
Let's take the pager attack as an example.
Israel says it targeted Hezbollah operatives who were given pagers.
But Israel had no way of knowing where they would be when the bombs inside the pagers were activated, killing and injuring civilians and children in homes, shops and other public places.
This, according to some leading jurists, proves that Israel used lethal force without distinguishing between combatants and civilians, which is a violation of the rules of war.
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The struggle between Israel and Hezbollah began in the 1980s.
But this war along the border began the day after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 last year when Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to launch limited but almost daily attacks on Israel in support of Hamas.
Thus, he tied the Israeli troops to himself and forced about 60.000 people in the border towns to leave their homes.
Shadows of previous invasions
Several articles in the Israeli media compared the impact of the airstrikes on Hezbollah's ability to wage war to Operation Focus, Israel's June 1967 surprise attack on Egypt.
It was a famous attack in which Egyptian planes were destroyed on the ground.
Over the next six days, Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
That victory conditioned the reasons for the current conflict because Israel then occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
It's not a good comparison, because Lebanon and the war with Hezbollah are different.
Israel dealt heavy blows to Hezbollah, but failed to disable it from targeting Israel, nor to deter it from such actions.
Israel's previous wars with Hezbollah have been grueling and exhausting, and none have resulted in a decisive victory for either side.
This one could be the same, but the last week of offensive action has been satisfying for Israel, its intelligence services and military.
The Israeli offensive rests on the assumption - a gamble - that there will come a time when Hezbollah will break down, withdraw from the border and stop firing rockets at Israel.
Most analysts believe that Hezbollah will not give up, because the fight against Israel is the main reason for its existence.
This means that Israel, which also does not want to admit defeat, would have to additionally increase its military operations.
If Hezbollah attacks continue to make northern Israel too dangerous for Israeli civilians to return, Israel will have to consider launching a ground offensive, possibly with the goal of seizing part of the country to serve as a buffer zone.
Israel has previously invaded Lebanese territory.
In 1982, Israeli troops reached Beirut in an attempt to stop Palestinian attacks on Israel.
They were forced into an ignominious retreat amid outrage at home and abroad after Israeli troops secured the area while their Christian allies in Lebanon massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabri and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
A wide swath of Lebanese territory along the border was under Israeli occupation until the 1990s.
Today's Israeli generals were then young officers who fought in endless skirmishes and firefights with Hezbollah, which was growing stronger in battles aimed at expelling Israel from those territories.
The then Prime Minister of Israel and former Chief of General Staff of the Israeli Army, Ehud Barak, withdrew from the so-called "security zone" in 2000.
He believed that Israel was not safer because of it and that it was costing too many soldiers' lives.
In a Hezbollah incursion across the tense and heavily militarized border in 2006, Israeli soldiers were killed and captured.
After the end of the war, Hassan Nasrallah said that he would not have allowed the attack if he had known what Israel's response would be.
Ehud Olmert, then Prime Minister of Israel, started the war.
Israel initially hoped the air force would stop rocket attacks on Israel.
When he failed to do so, ground troops and tanks crossed the border again.
The war was disastrous for the civilians in Lebanon, but even on the last day of the war, Hezbollah fired many rockets at Israel.
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Current and future wars
Israeli commanders know that entering Lebanon under fire would be a much greater military challenge than fighting Hamas in Gaza.
Hezbollah has also been making plans since the end of the 2006 war and would fight on home soil, in southern Lebanon where many areas are rugged and hilly, suitable for guerrilla warfare.
Israel failed to destroy all the tunnels that Hamas dug in the sand of Gaza.
In the border areas of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has spent the last 18 years preparing tunnels and rock positions.
It has a huge arsenal of weapons supplied by Iran.
Unlike Hamas in Gaza, it can be supplied by land via Syria.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, estimates that Hezbollah has about 30.000 active fighters and up to 20.000 in reserve, mostly trained as small mobile light infantry units.
Many have war experience that they gained in the battles in which they supported the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
According to most estimates, Hezbollah has between 120.000 and 200.000 missiles and rockets, ranging from conventional to longer-range rockets that could hit Israeli cities.
Israel may be gambling that Hezbollah will not use all the missiles for fear that the Israeli air force could do to Lebanon what it did to Gaza, where they reduced entire cities to rubble and killed thousands of civilians.
Iran may not want Hezbollah to use weapons it would like to keep as insurance in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
That's another gamble.
Hezbollah may decide to use more weapons from its arsenal before Israel destroys it.
With the war in Gaza continuing and violence escalating in the occupied West Bank, Israel would also have to consider a third front if it decides to enter Lebanon.
Israeli soldiers are motivated, well-trained and equipped, but the reserve units that provide the bulk of Israel's combat power are already feeling the fatigue after a year of war.
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Diplomatic impasse
Israel's allies, led by the United States, did not want Israel to intensify the war with Hezbollah and did not want it to attack Lebanon by land.
They insist that only diplomacy can make the border secure enough for civilians on both sides of the border to return to their homes.
The US envoy drafted the agreement, which is partly based on United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the war in 2006.
But diplomats' hands are tied without achieving a ceasefire in Gaza.
Hassan Nasrallah said that Hezbollah will stop attacking Israel only when the war in Gaza ends.
At this point, neither Hamas nor the Israelis are ready to make the necessary concessions that would lead to a cease-fire agreement in Gaza and the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
As Israel continues to launch airstrikes against Lebanon, civilians already struggling to support their families in a devastated economy face excruciating pain and uncertainty.
Fear spreads beyond the front lines.
The Israelis know that Hezbollah could do much more damage to them than they have suffered in the last year.
Israel believes that the time has come to be aggressive and bold and push Hezbollah from its borders.
But he faces a stubborn, well-armed and angry enemy.
This is the most dangerous crisis during the long year of war that began with the attack of Hamas on Israel, and which currently nothing prevents it from turning into something much worse.
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