Israel has agreed to a complete withdrawal from Lebanon and at least a partial withdrawal from Gaza—on the condition that the Lebanese Army curtails Hezbollah in the South and Hamas loses power in the war-torn strip.
"But neither Lebanon nor Hamas appear likely to meet those conditions," our Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem, so Israel is taking matters into its own hands.
The Jewish state "has been secretly building military outposts in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip as part of a plan to create buffer zones along both borders," current and former Israeli officials and reserve soldiers tell Tobin.
The push "is based on an assumption that U.S.-brokered ceasefire deals in Lebanon and Gaza are unlikely to endure," and Israeli officials "believe the two zones—along with a third one that the military openly maintains in southern Syria—are necessary to protect its border communities, which have been devastated by terrorism over the past 16 months of war."
