With dozens of Hezbollah fighters killed in three weeks of border clashes with Israel, the Lebanese group is working to stem its losses as it prepares for the possibility of a drawn-out conflict, three sources familiar with its thinking said.
The Iran-backed group has lost 47 fighters to Israeli strikes at Lebanon's frontier since its Palestinian ally Hamas and Israel went toon Oct. 7 - about a fifth of the number killed in a full-scale war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.
Hezbollah had made "arrangements to reduce the number of martyrs", the source said, without offering further details. In border clashes since Oct. 7, Hamas, which also has operatives in Lebanon, and a Lebanese Sunni Islamist faction Jama'a Islamiya have both fired rockets from southern Lebanon into Israel.
Hezbollah's television channel, Al-Manar, has regularly replayed footage from the latest clashes showing what it says are strikes on Israeli military installations and positions visible across the border. "The technical superiority of the Israeli drones is making Hezbollah pay the price of this number of fighters," Nabil Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief at Lebanon's Annahar newspaper, said, in reference to Hezbollah's hefty death toll.Clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have broadly stayed contained in a narrow band of land that runs along the border, generally staying within three to four kms of the frontier.
Hezbollah lost 263 fighters in the 2006 war, when Israel hit sites all over Lebanon during a more than month-long conflict. The war erupted after Hezbollah launched a raid into Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.
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