The Israeli targeting strategy is constantly shifting on all fronts.
Not long ago, Israel was in a war in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.
But at the moment, there is a broad ceasefire across all these fronts.
Despite the ceasefire, on Sunday, the IDF announced attacks on all three fronts.
What were the differing logic and goals for the attack on each individual front?
In Lebanon near Nabatiya, the IDF killed several Hezbollah terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenades in a Saturday strike, which was confirmed on Sunday.
That part of the IDF’s statement about the confrontation was fairly standard, with Israeli forces firing on any Hezbollah fighters who approached close to them, especially around the IDF’s deepest penetration in Lebanon near Nabatieh.
But it was the second part of the IDF’s update that raised some eyebrows.
According to the IDF, shortly after striking the Hezbollah terrorists, they also hit and destroyed a Hezbollah rocket launcher located in the vicinity.
An IDF spokesman later told The Jerusalem Post that this attack was carried out to remove a threat.
Next, the Post pressed that Hezbollah has not fired a single rocket since last weekend and queried how the rocket launcher could then pose a threat.
An IDF spokesman confirmed, at least in some vague sense, that soldiers saw some kind of change with the rocket launcher, which suggested it might threaten them, despite Hezbollah not having fired rockets for over a week.
The vague answer and the absence of rocket attacks by Hezbollah for an extended period beg the question of whether there really was immediate danger or whether there was enough movement to justify attacking, but that the primary motivation to attack was deterrence and the destruction of capabilities.
In other words, every time the IDF destroys a rocket launcher, Hezbollah has lost a valuable asset that costs money to replace, and is harder to replace than a cell of a few terrorists.
This both takes away a concrete capability to fire on and endanger Israeli soldiers and civilians, and it may deter Hezbollah from staging as many movements of its fighters near IDF soldiers, which led to the initial exchange of fire.
The hard tightrope the IDF and Israel are trying to walk
It also works with the hard tightrope the IDF and Israel are trying to walk right now, where they were forced prematurely by the US to stop attacking Hezbollah without having gotten concrete commitments from the terror group regarding even partial disarmament.
While that reality is holding Israel back from hitting Hezbollah in broader strategic ways, using small-scale violations by Hezbollah fighters as a justification for attacking some other nearby Hezbollah capabilities at least backs a bit of a punch.
It is unclear whether such a single altercation, or a pattern of such attacks if this becomes a pattern, would lead Iran to threaten to pull out of the talks with the US over nuclear issues and the Strait of Hormuz, or whether, as long as the IDF refrains from attacks beyond its immediate vicinity, Tehran will not upset the applecart.
Regarding Syria, the IDF said on Sunday that on Saturday, it had killed several armed terrorists in southern Syria.
According to the IDF, the military's 6th Etzioni Brigade, under the 210th Division, killed the terrorists after they entered Israel's buffer zone.
While the IDF press release was short, laconic, and unremarkable, it obscured the fact that this was a dramatic shift.
In fact, the last time that the IDF announced any kind of attack in Syria was over three months ago, on March 20.
Since then, the IDF has not announced a single attack in Syria.
Even the March 20 attack was exceptional in that it related to Syria’s Druze, a larger geopolitical issue and a problem that has only come a few times since the regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa took over in December 2024.
Put differently, the last time the IDF announced that it had attacked a random group of terrorists in Syria because they entered Israel’s buffer zone was even longer ago.
So why did Israel attack this time?
Here, the IDF was completely silent.
Unlike time periods when attacks in Syria were frequent, and the exact identities of those killed were shared, including whether they were affiliated with Iran, Islamic Jihad, or some other group, here the terrorists were kept anonymous.
Of course, it is possible that the IDF has undertaken many attack operations in Syria in recent months without mentioning them publicly, and it is possible that the military does not know who these armed Syrians were, or that they were not even connected to a major group.
But the fact that the IDF attacked them and made it public was no small event.
Since March, the US has pressured Israel to play more nicely with Syria since Trump views Sharaa not as a problem, but as part of the solution for stabilizing the region.
By announcing the IDF attack in Syria, Israel is risking making waves.
This could be because Syria has been allowing frequent threats to Israel’s border zone, and Israel finally had enough and decided it needed to respond.
If so, there are questions about what has made Syria ready to play with fire.
Alternatively, with ceasefires on all the other fronts, this is the Israeli government looking for places to still attack and flex its muscles, and suddenly, there may be less pressure against it for attacking a few terrorists in Syria than there is for attacking in Lebanon.
Additionally, the IDF announced more attacks on Hamas in Gaza.
However, this time the Hamas fighter who was killed was not a name who was known for having killed or kidnapped an Israeli during the October 7 massacre.
Rather, it was a Hamas operative who stole an IDF vehicle that day.
There is certainly a basis for targeting such a person due to their participation in invading Israel and being part of such a horrid massacre generally.
But in terms of targeting, it is pretty low on the priority list: “terrorist-looter”?
Also, the Hamas fighter was nowhere near the border or Israeli troops, but was driving, armed, around the center of Hamas-run areas.
This shows both that Israel is running out of quality targets in Gaza because it has killed so many senior and mid-level Hamas officials and that it is targeting just about anyone who is connected to Hamas and has a weapon, however low-ranked, and even if they pose no current threat whatsoever.
Of course, such a fighter could pose a future threat, but at the start of the US-brokered Gaza deal in October 2025, Israel was very strict and only targeted Hamas fighters who approached its soldiers, sort of like Lebanon now.
This change is the clearest and most obvious. The Trump administration has given Israel carte blanche to kill Hamas officials in Gaza from the air, as long as it does not lead to large civilian casualties and as long as there is no invasion.
The reason is that Hamas has dragged its feet on even partial disarmament since the beginning of the ceasefire, ignoring the 100-day deadline for progress, which passed in the middle of winter.
When the Board of Peace made Hamas a friendlier offer to get partial disarmament started, the Gaza terror group still played games.
So Israel is hoping more aggressive airstrikes might press Hamas into at least starting a disarmament process.
What all three targeting cases have in common is that none of them are typical, and all of them say a lot about the changing broader strategy on each border.