When news broke of the devastating Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in southern Israel, Israeli Defense Forces Maj. (res.) Gilad Ach, 41, raced to the north with his battalion, part of the IDF’s 91st Division, on their own initiative.
“I knew about [Hezbollah’s] Radwan Forces’ plan to conquer the Galilee region, and feared they would burst in and reach Tiberias and even Haifa. When the military gave us the order to arrive we were already there, in the emergency warehouses,” the company commander told JNS.
What followed was a grueling three-month defensive effort. Ach was deployed in the area between Mount Hermon and the Alawite-Arab village of Ghajar on Israel’s northeastern border.
The first thing we did was “break the roads,” he said. Ach and his troops saw footage coming out of the south, with scores of Hamas terrorists running amok on pickup trucks and motorcycles, and took action to prevent similar scenes in the north.
“We took excavators and tractors and blocked and demolished the roads. We were ready for Radwan to enter at any moment,” he recalled.
Due to Hezbollah’s anti-tank missile capabilities, his battalion was not allowed to travel in military vehicles. Most of their movement was on foot and occasionally via private vehicles.
“Ever since Oct. 7, 2023, we were in defense mode, which is very difficult for infantry troops. In the rain, in the cold, we’d be out in ambushes, in rifle pits, waiting for the enemy. And this whole time we’re being targeted with drones, shells and anti-tank missiles,” he said.
Hezbollah began launching cross-border attacks on Oct. 8, a day after the Hamas massacre.
At one point, Ach related, he decided to plant explosives on the border fence. He noted that the life experience Israeli reservists bring to battle helps them find creative solutions to problems such as how to approach a border fence without being detected.
Ach was stationed in the north for 80 days in 2023, from October through December. During that time, the soldiers were frustrated by the lack of offensive operations, he told JNS.
“Despite all of our advanced tools and equipment, we would run to the bomb shelters every time Hezbollah targeted us,” he said. “I believe this corroded the trust between the fighters and IDF command.”
‘The eruption of a dam’
Ach was later deployed to Gaza, but returned to the Lebanese front in October 2024.
“When we finally entered Lebanon it was like an eruption of a dam. The same units that were stationed in the north in October 2023 returned a year later to launch an offensive [ground operation]; so in a sense it was a correction. Inside Lebanon we saw all the places from which they used to fire at us,” he said.
However, not much actually changed with regard to the type of battle they faced, he added.
“From the minute you arrive in the northern region, shells, anti-tank missiles, drones and Burkan missiles [a type of heavy missile used by Hezbollah] are fired at you every few minutes.”
At the same time, Israeli jets and artillery were constantly overhead, he recalled.
At some stage “you get used to it … it’s like rain,” he said.
During the land incursion, Ach’s task was the creation of a buffer zone in Lebanese territory near the border. He articulated the mission as “conducting raids to detect and destroy enemy infrastructure.”
‘This one was much easier’
Compared to the 2006 Second Lebanon War, in which he also fought, “this one was much easier,” Ach told JNS. “At least in the first line of villages, there was almost no enemy presence; they all ran away.”
Indeed, the terror group had left with such haste that they didn’t even have time to properly set booby traps.
“In an apartment in one of the villages, we saw a phone connected to unarmed charges via a wire. They couldn’t even make the explosives operative before they retreated,” he said.
Only a handful of Hezbollah terrorists remained in the border area, mostly hiding in underground tunnels, he said. Direct confrontations here were rare, he added.
This he said, was evidence of the terror group’s disarray following Israel’s decapitation operation against its leadership and heavy air campaign.
“Hezbollah spent years preparing for this war [with Israel],” he said.
The Lebanese border towns had been turned into military outposts, where every house was “a fortress,” he added. Almost every single house had some underground infrastructure, although not all were interconnected, he explained.
He also noted that despite Lebanon’s poverty, many of the houses in the border area were large, featuring private pools, with luxury cars out front. The Shi’ite residents “are getting a lot of money for what they’re doing,” he said.
For the displaced residents
The ground forces’ work in the border territory was arduous, he told JNS.
“We move house to house, capture the area after it has been cleansed, find weapons, stashes of cash, military equipment, underground tunnels in many houses, and then blow everything up,” he said.
And the amount of weapons his company found was staggering.
“Every house had weapons—and I mean every house,” he stressed. “Sniper rifles, Kalashnikov rifles, you name it.”
From Kfarkela, a Lebanese border town just west of Metula in the Galilee panhandle, the IDF seized 20 trucks full of Hezbollah weapons. So many weapons were confiscated, in fact, that it has been suggested the IDF could use them to set up entire new units.
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t use the weapons ourselves; with the amount of Kornet [anti-tank missiles] that we found, we could form new Kornet units in the IDF.”
However, he added, “It’s more complicated than people realize. A lot of arms were booby-trapped.”
According to Ach, his troops didn’t encounter a living person in Southern Lebanon, besides members of the Lebanese Armed forces and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
With regard to the latter, “There’s no chance they didn’t see trucks loading sand from these houses, bringing in weapons,” he said with scorn. “UNIFIL was stationed right inside a terrorist Hezbollah military base.”
Defending the north
With regard to the future, Ach said that to fulfil Israel’s official war goal of returning the country’s northern residents to their homes in safety, what the IDF does next in Lebanon is crucial.
Roughly 70,000 northern residents were evacuated due to the fighting, and many of Israel’s northern towns and villages sustained heavy damage.
“If the evacuees look northward and see that the same villages from which their homes were fired on for an entire year remain intact, many of them will not return,” said Ach. “Kfar Yuval, Misgav Am will remain deserted.”
The only way to ensure their security and thus their return, he said, is for them to look out their windows and see the IDF there, and barren land.
Had Hezbollah’s Radwan Force executed their plan to invade northern Israel, the results would have been catastrophic, he emphasized. In Kfarkela, his company had found explosives, tactical backpacks and weapons ready for instant deployment.
All they had to do was “plant the explosives on the concrete border walls, blow them up and break through,” he said.
‘A historic war’
After his tour of duty in the Gaza Strip, Ach and fellow reservists formed Reservists–Generation of Victory (RGV), a nonprofit organization committed to persuading the public of the need to achieve decisive victory against Israel’s enemies.
The association consists of some 8,000 IDF reservists and has tens of thousands of followers on its social media accounts.
Ach told JNS that Israel now has the opportunity to change the region for decades to come, and cannot afford to miss it.
“The [displaced] residents can now return to their homes. But if we don’t end this war decisively they will find themselves in the same situation in another 10 to 15 years. This is a historic war. The soldiers understand its significance. We can win it,” he said.
RGV was vocal in its opposition to the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon that went into effect on Nov. 27.
“This agreement is a moral fallacy. Soldiers died in this war, lost their friends. To throw their achievements away is a terrible thing,” Ach told JNS.
Hezbollah has already violated the ceasefire multiple times, while Israel has taken a harsh line, vowing to enforce strictly.
The fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria on Sunday has added another source of instability to the already unstable region, with the Israeli Air Force hitting more than 300 Syrian regime targets within two days to prevent strategic weapons from falling into terrorists’ hands.
Ach is adamant that Israel can still achieve its war goals in Lebanon, and that with the Iranian proxy’s supply lines in Syria now cut, this is Israel’s chance to end Hezbollah once and for all.