Immense booms in the air. Rockets. Anti-tank missiles. And of course, gunfire.
This was the environment in the North on Tuesday, one of the most violent days of the current war on that border.
In between tours of Kiryat Shmona, the Ramot Naftal/Metzudat Koach police fort area, and the Metula area (as close as reporters could get to the closed military zone), The Jerusalem Post heard it all and felt the intense, rising tension in the air.
It seemed that more people in the area and across the nation were starting to think: Maybe Hezbollah is not just testing the IDF’s readiness and doing public relations stunts to look like it supports Hamas, but is readying itself for a larger and more deadly conflict.
This would be with its 150,000 rockets at ready, a number as much as 10 times that of Hamas, and with more disastrous precision missiles that the IDF is less able to intercept.
Despite those rising dark war clouds, IDF Combat Logistics Officer Maj. Ravid told the Post in an interview on Tuesday in the North that he and his team will make sure IDF forces are sufficiently prepared to present Hezbollah with deadly consequences if it tries to start a larger conflict.
“If Hezbollah crosses the line, it will receive a deadly blow from the IDF’s northern command,” he said.
Ravid’s role in normal time is working with about 50 mandatory or career soldiers and officers to organize training for reservists and maintain a wide range of fighting and logistics supplies for them.
In this war, Ravid, 27, from Tel Aviv, is suddenly commanding thousands of reservists all at once.
On October 7, Ravid was at home in Tel Aviv and only started to hear about Hamas’s 6:30 a.m. invasion at 8:00 a.m. when Col. Eitan Gilad called him.
“We understood that something unusual was happening in the South,” he said. “Also, rockets were being fired on Tel Aviv,” something which has happened more in recent years, but is still viewed as a rare event of escalation.
“I felt like this was something huge. We quickly jumped over to our base at Camp Tavor near Afula, by 10:00 a.m. Many reservists started to come on their own without any summons. We decided to call up all of our unit’s reserves even without a general IDF high command order – which is something which is not normal.”
In addition, they decided on their own “to open the emergency storage units which contain a wide range of items and vehicles.”
He said they immediately started training exercises to get their reserve forces ready for battle as quickly as they could.
Despite pre-war criticism that large portions of the reserves in non-elite units have been neglected, he said training has been strong in recent years, which gave the reservists a running start this week.
Ravid said that Col. Gilad and other sub-commanders have provided “the fighting and leadership spirit; the readiness to make big decisions even when there was great uncertainty. We were the first in the northern command of regular infantry reserves who were ready.”
He added that the current level of fighting spirit “is the most intense I have seen in my almost 10 years in the IDF.”
He said that Division Six, which he is part of, is “ready for any mission, and has all the equipment it needs to be very deadly” against any challenge from Hezbollah in the North.
“We do not know when our mission will be, but we will be able to defend the border and to enable quiet in the North,” he stated.
Variety of scenarios in the North
The IDF has said that it is ready for a variety of scenarios in the North – as if the sides are playing a deadly game of chess.
Despite the confidence, there is no question that Ravid and many of his forces are in the line of fire and danger at a variety of times, whether it is when they are stationed or moving through closed military zones near the border, or in areas where Hezbollah has been regularly firing rockets and anti-tank missiles.
He said that there is no time to really think about such things and that his and IDF northern forces’ confidence about their readiness in general is high.
Moreover, he said that in the last six months, his units had trained heavily in dangerous parts of the West Bank and that his thousands of reservists were all getting high-quality attention in a carefully graphed-out annual plan.
Regarding Hezbollah’s success in damaging several IDF sensors on the border, he said that the military has several classified methods for maintaining its surveillance of the Lebanese-based terrorist group and that this mission goal has not been substantially harmed.
Whether this is based on preexisting redundancies or bringing new drones, satellites, or other surveillance capabilities to play is anyone’s guess.
Further, he said his team “knows how to think out of the box” and can act with tremendous agility in challenging Hezbollah.
Questioned about the tensions over the judicial overhaul that were tearing the IDF apart just a few short months ago, he said, “Now everyone has put on uniforms, and the politics are all behind us. We are here to accomplish our mission – to kill the enemy. That is what we are focused on even in our spare time,” aside from likely discussing the horrors of what Hamas recently did to the South.
In all of this, it is still an open question regarding what the “quiet” is that the IDF wants to achieve in the North.
The Post understands that the IDF does not expect to completely silence Hezbollah during this time period, but by evacuating two kilometers of northern border residents and responding strongly to each provocation, the hope is to deter the terrorist group from joining the Israel-Gaza war in a larger way.
In addition, the IDF is generally focused on confronting any enemy without them being able to get to or harm civilians.