By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

One year after the November 27, 2024 ceasefire brought a formal end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Israel Defense Forces have released striking new figures that reveal the scale of Israel’s ongoing, meticulously coordinated military campaign to enforce the fragile agreement. According to data provided to VIN News, Israeli forces have eliminated more than 370 terror operatives in the twelve months since the ceasefire—virtually all of them Hezbollah members, with several belonging to Hamas and other Iranian-backed factions embedded across southern Lebanon.

The new figures, quietly but deliberately published by the IDF on Wednesday, illuminate a truth that Israeli officials have repeatedly emphasized to VIN News throughout the past year: the cessation of formal hostilities did not spell the end of the conflict, but rather ushered in a new, highly sensitive phase defined by targeted precision strikes, preemptive raids, and constant intelligence monitoring to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting its capabilities.

The IDF confirmed that since last November it has executed hundreds of airstrikes and conducted more than 1,200 ground raids and limited tactical operations in southern Lebanon—an extraordinary operational tempo for a supposedly post-war environment. The tempo, senior officers told VIN News, places an emphasis on the extent to which Hezbollah has repeatedly violated the terms of the ceasefire and has tried to rebuild infrastructure destroyed during the 2023–2024 war.

According to the information provided in the VIN News report, the IDF’s activity has concentrated around five highly fortified strategic positions established just beyond the Israeli border, each serving as a hub for surveillance, engineering operations, and rapid-response raids. These positions function as miniature security zones—limited in geographical footprint but expansive in operational significance.

From these forward nodes, Israeli units have demolished dozens of Hezbollah bunkers and fortified positions, neutralized multiple launch pads used for firing rockets into Israel, seized weapons stockpiles containing anti-tank missiles, small arms, mines, and drone components, and disrupted Hezbollah’s intelligence networks, which attempted to rebuild observation posts and electronic surveillance points in defiance of the ceasefire.

A senior IDF Northern Command official characterized the activity as a “perpetual race against time,” explaining to VIN News that “Hezbollah’s doctrine is to rebuild quickly, embed itself deeper in civilian areas, and manufacture new intelligence infrastructure the moment Israeli pressure loosens. Our operations are designed to ensure that moment never arrives.”

While the November 2024 agreement formally ended the 13-month conflict sparked by Hezbollah’s attacks after Hamas’ October 7 massacre, the IDF’s newly published data confirms what many analysts already suspected: the conflict has shifted shape rather than disappeared.

As VIN News reported, Hezbollah has repeatedly tested the limits of the ceasefire through covert weapons movements, attempts to reestablish forward positions, and low-scale harassment operations. In response, Israel has opted for surgical force, employing the kind of pinpoint airstrikes and small-unit raids that minimize regional escalation while maintaining operational dominance.

In many of these strikes, Israeli aircraft targeted vehicles transporting explosives, drone parts, or mid-level commanders responsible for orchestrating ceasefire violations. According to military sources quoted by VIN News, the decision to avoid high-profile attacks on senior Hezbollah leadership reflects a strategic choice: maintaining the ceasefire’s diplomatic framework while ensuring that tactical violations carry immediate consequences.

Although the majority of the 370 eliminated operatives belonged to Hezbollah, IDF officials confirmed to VIN News that a “not insignificant number” were members of Hamas’ Lebanon branch or operatives tied to smaller Iranian-backed militias. The IDF emphasized that these groups have increasingly sought to embed themselves under Hezbollah’s organizational umbrella as part of Iran’s broader effort to create a multi-layered northern front against Israel.

An IDF intelligence officer involved in northern operations described this reality to VIN News succinctly: “The ceasefire applies to Hezbollah. But it does not apply to Hamas in Lebanon, it does not apply to the IRGC, and it certainly does not apply to the dozens of smaller groups trained and armed by Tehran. We have to manage a battlefield where one organization holds the pen that signed the ceasefire, and ten others are trying to exploit it.”

The war that preceded the ceasefire was one of the most destructive northern conflicts since the 2006 Lebanon War, with Hezbollah firing thousands of rockets into Israeli towns and Israel conducting sweeping air and ground operations across southern Lebanon. By the time the ceasefire was reached, much of the border region lay in ruins, and tens of thousands of Israeli civilians had been evacuated from communities along the northern frontier.

Hezbollah’s motivation for renewing its attacks on Israel in late 2023 stemmed directly from its commitment to Hamas after the October 7 massacre. Hezbollah’s actions forced Israel into a two-front war, one fought in the north often under less international scrutiny than Gaza—but no less consequential.

The ceasefire, brokered by U.S., French, and regional envoys, was intended to create space for diplomatic efforts to constrain Hezbollah’s future troop movements and restore calm. But as the IDF’s newly published data proves, Hezbollah’s compliance has been partial at best.

Several defense officials interviewed by VIN News emphasized that Israel’s heavy reliance on air power—responsible for the majority of the 370 terrorist deaths—reflects both operational necessity and geopolitical calculation.

Airstrikes afford Israel the ability to respond in real time to ceasefire violations, prevent Hezbollah from establishing new fortified positions, neutralize weapons transfers from Iran to its proxies, minimize casualties among Israeli troops and maintain pressure without triggering a full-scale war.

“With air power, we strike what needs to be hit, when it needs to be hit, without returning the region to 2023,” one official explained to VIN News.

What remains striking, however, is Hezbollah’s reluctance to retaliate in large numbers. Analysts suggest several possible explanations including severe operational degradation following the war, pressure from Iran, which is wary of sparking a wider conflict, domestic Lebanese exhaustion, as the country continues to grapple with economic collapse and Hezbollah’s interest in slowly rebuilding beneath Israel’s radar rather than triggering another devastating confrontation

The IDF’s relentless enforcement campaign seeks to prevent exactly that rebuilding process, ensuring Hezbollah’s capabilities remain constrained.

As Israel marks one year since the ceasefire, the situation remains precarious. Senior officers told VIN News that they expect Hezbollah to continue probing, rebuilding, and violating the ceasefire “in small but relentless increments.”

What the IDF has accomplished over the past year—destroying infrastructure, eliminating operatives, thwarting logistics chains—has prevented these efforts from coalescing into a renewed strategic threat. But the task is ongoing.

One commander described the reality to VIN News with stark clarity: “There is no victory parade in this kind of war. There is only what we prevent, day after day.”

The IDF’s newly published tally—370 terror operatives killed, hundreds of airstrikes, and more than 1,200 raids—offers a sobering but decisive portrait of the past year along Israel’s northern border. The November 2024 ceasefire may have ended open warfare, but it did not end the conflict. Instead, Israel has been forced into a continuous, intelligence-driven campaign to prevent Hezbollah and its allies from rebuilding the capabilities they lost during the 2023–2024 war.

The “quiet war” now underway is as complex as the conflict it followed. And while Israel’s operations have succeeded in degrading Hezbollah’s immediate capacities, the strategic environment remains fraught, volatile, and deeply uncertain.

Above all, the IDF’s message—reinforced through a year of relentless action—remains unmistakable: violations of the ceasefire will be met with force, and Israel will not permit a new northern threat to rise unchallenged.