Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi has turned the term “lethality” into a central theme of his tenure. Kochavi is investing great efforts in improving the military’s lethal combat abilities — its capacity to hit as many targets as possible in the shortest time by virtue of the IDF’s decisive technological superiority in terms of intelligence, air power and precise “counter fire.”

Kochavi’s goal is simple: inflicting maximum heavy damage and casualties on the other side by stretching the IDF’s military capacity to its limits in order to shorten the duration of the next war. The chief of staff believes that if the damage Hezbollah sustains in its next confrontation with the IDF is unsustainable from the start, its leader, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, would conclude that there was no point in dragging out the confrontation with Israel. In other words, the greater the lethality, the less time it will take to stop the fighting and Israel will save itself a protracted, costly and bloody war next time.

Developments in the Israeli-Hezbollah arena in recent years have been the exact opposite of this scenario — lots of fire and brimstone, smoke and mirrors, bangs and bugles, but very few casualties, enabling both sides to pretend it has landed painful blows on the other, while in fact emerging intact, for the most part.

Such was the case on July 27, when a team of three to five Hezbollah terrorists crossed the international “blue line” border between Lebanon and Israel near Mount Dov (known by the Lebanese as Shebaa Farms), the usual arena of Israel-Hezbollah clashes, on their way to carry out an attack on IDF troops.