2006 Hezbollah Cross-border Raid - The Attack

The Attack

At around 9:00 a.m. local time (06:00 UTC), on 12 July 2006, Hezbollah initiated diversionary Katyusha rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli military positions and border villages, including Zar'it and Shlomi. Five civilians were wounded

A ground contingent of Hezbollah fighters crossed the border into Israeli territory, taking advantage of a "dead zone" in the border fence not visible from any of the IDF lookout posts, and may have used a wheeled ladder to climb the fence. They hid in a wadi on the Israeli side of the fence, and attacked two Israeli armored Humvees with a combination of pre-positioned explosives and anti-tank missiles as they were patrolling on the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border between the villages of Zar'it and Shtula. The team knocked out the trailing Humvee, killing five soldiers inside, and abducted two soldiers from the first vehicle. Another soldier was severely wounded, another lightly wounded and a third was scratched by shrapnel. The entire incident took no more than 10 minutes.

At the same time, Hezbollah fighters fired on seven army posts, knocking out surveillance cameras and command communications with the convoy. Twenty minutes passed until Staff Sgts. Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26, were confirmed to be missing from the first vehicle. The Hezbollah fighters then escaped through olive orchards to the Lebanese border village of Aita al-Shaab.

The Hannibal Directive is a secret IDF order stating that abductions of Israeli soldiers must be prevented by all means, including shooting at or shelling a get-away car, thereby risking the lives of the captives. The Hannibal directive was invoked and this triggered an instant aerial surveillance and airstrikes inside Lebanon to limit Hezbollah's ability to move the soldiers it had seized. "If we had found them, we would have hit them, even if it meant killing the soldiers," a senior Israeli official said. Lt. Col. Ishai Efroni, deputy commander of the Baram Brigade, sent a Merkava Mark II tank, an armored personnel carrier and a helicopter in pursuit. Crossing into Lebanon, they headed down a dirt track lined with Lebanese border defenses. However, they veered onto a road near a known Hezbollah outpost along the border. The tank was destroyed by an IED with an estimated 200–300 kilograms of explosives, killing the crew of four. One soldier was killed and two were lightly wounded by mortar fire as they attempted to recover the bodies.

Originally Israel assumed that both captives were alive. In the end of July Vice Premier Shimon Peres assured the families of the captured that both were "alive and well".

On 2 August, Israeli special forces raided the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek in the Bekaa valley, believed to be "the place where kidnapped soldiers... were treated after they were abducted". The soldiers were not found at the place. The Lebanese minister Ali Hassan Khalil refers in his memoirs to a conversation he had with Hussein al-Khalil, a senior adviser to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the beginning of August 2006. al-Khalil told him that the two soldiers both survived the capture but were killed weeks later by Israeli bombardment. There were however no suggestions that Israel deliberately had targeted the two prisoners. According to al-Khalil it was Hezbollah's use of heavy rockets and Israel’s response by expanding the area of bombardment that led to the two Israelis’ death. The IDF dismissed these claims as "blatant fabrications" and psychological warfare. An examination of the bodies of Goldwasser and Regev later allegedly determined that the two reservists were killed during the initial cross-border attack and not in captivity. Goldwasser was killed after a rocket-propelled grenade on their IDF Hummer vehicle injured him in the chest. Regev was shot in the head, possibly while he was trying to escape.