Multiple Hezbollah leaders fled Beirut after a joint statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz caused any IDF strikes in the capital to lose the element of surprise, an IDF source said on Monday.
Shortly after the statement, in which Netanyahu and Katz announced intentions to strike terror targets in Beirut, IDF officials said that in order to strike in Beirut, a target bank needed to be prepared so as to hit Hezbollah's center of gravity.
The IDF intended to strike human targets, as well as operations rooms and command centers. However, after the statement, Hezbollah leaders rushed to leave the places where they had been present in Beirut.
Many other residents left alongside them, some of them low-ranking Hezbollah operatives.
According to a source from the IDF, the statement canceled the military plan to surprise Hezbollah and deal a severe blow to its center of gravity in Beirut.
Confusion over ceasefire framework
The IDF may not know all the details of the framework of the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel proposed by the US.
The IDF understands that an agreement in the spirit of Hezbollah's "quiet for quiet" equation is an extremely difficult trap. Such an agreement is expected to restore the strategic reality that existed in the North from the Second Lebanon War until October 8, when Hezbollah joined the war that Hamas had launched the previous day in the Gaza border communities.
The major concern is that Hezbollah has created a dangerous precedent, in which the equation is not limited only to the northern border, but also to the Strait of Hormuz.