JERUSALEM — The Israeli Army has warned citizens that in a future war with Hezbollah the country might be hit by hundreds or thousands of rockets a day and that hundreds of civilians could be killed.
The warning was included in a brochure recently distributed to all local authorities calling on them to ensure that the basic functions of daily life in their communities—such as garbage collection, replacing cash in ATMs, and stocking grocery stores—can continue if war breaks out.
Beyond the message sent to local authorities, the outgoing senior officer of the Army’s Home Front Command, Maj. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg, said in a parting address this week that Israel must be prepared for a "blitz" of rocket attacks, but that the country can withstand it.
Security analysts in the Israeli media have suggested that the warnings were intended to wean the public from unrealistic expectations in the wake of the success of the Iron Dome anti-rocket system last summer in intercepting rockets fired from Gaza. There were only six civilian fatalities caused by the approximately 4,000 rockets that were fired.
Hezbollah has a much larger rocket arsenal, and many of the rockets carry heavier payloads than the rockets fired last summer from Gaza. Hezbollah also has hundreds of missiles with GPS capability that can make precision hits.
There are no signs that Hezbollah is planning an attack, particularly since its fighters are presently occupied in supporting President Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, but the widespread unrest in the region has raised concerns that the fighting could affect Israel.
In any future conflict, the country’s 10 Iron Dome batteries will have to be split between protecting civilian areas, military instillations and strategic targets such as power stations.
Neither the message to local authorities nor Gen. Eisenberg referred to what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would do in the event of rocket attacks by Hezbollah, but senior officers have in the past indicated that Israel would retaliate with airstrikes in Lebanon. In addition, they raised the prospect of deep incursions by ground forces.
In the last round of fighting with Hezbollah in 2006, the Shiite militia fired approximately 4,000 rockets into Israel in the course of 34 days, killing 43 civilians. Close to half of the civilians killed were Israeli Arabs whose villages in northern Israel were indiscriminately hit. Some 120 Israeli soldiers were killed, and there were reportedly 1,700 dead on the Lebanese side, of whom between 600 and 800 were combatants, according to the IDF. Hezbollah said it lost 250 fighters.
Three quarters of Israeli homes and apartments have "security rooms" of reinforced concrete capable of withstanding blast and shrapnel. Civil defense officials advise residents of buildings that do not have such rooms to wait out any attack in their stairwells or in the public shelters that are widespread throughout the country.
Mayors in the country’s interior have been asked to receive residents evacuated from border areas for the duration of the fighting. They are to prepare places in their towns and villages that could shelter the equivalent of four percent of their population, presumably in schools and other public buildings.
In last summer’s war in Gaza, residents of kibbutzim bordering the Gaza Strip were not evacuated, and a number of residents were killed not by rockets but by short-range mortar fire.
In the 2006 war, there were no official arrangements to evacuate residents along the northern border where most of the Hezbollah rockets hit, although private philanthropists did set up temporary camps.
In a future conflict, temporary housing will be made available to evacuees in army bases and other locations by the Home Front Command.