This is John Batchelor, conversation with colleagues, Seth Franzman of the Jerusalem Post and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy about the war of the North.

Hezbollah, the rocketing of Northern Israel since the beginning of the October 7th war?

Is the IDF ready? Is the IDF going to get the go order? What about Hezbollah's hundreds of thousands of missiles? Will

they rain down on Israel? What about its hundred thousand or more manpower? Will that

IDF be adequate for the challenge?

Unknown.

Seth Franzman has thoughts.

He's covered this work carefully for all 11 months, and what comes next is unknown to everyone.

Here's Seth, more of this tonight.

Well, the latest reports are that, you know, the IDF has continued to tell the government,

basically, we're ready. I mean mean if you give us the green light

we'll go. The IDF has been training non-stop for 10 months. They've been putting different

brigades through training, sending the brigades home because a lot of them are reservists

then bringing them back and rotating them around so the idea of you know the idea if is

ready but the idea was supposed to be ready to defeat Hezbollah on October 6th and that's the you know the tragedy of

October 7th war one one side of it is that the idea of has learned a lot fighting

in him and Gaza but it also has learned about it it's it's lack of of capabilities, the fact that there are a lot of concerns about whether or not the preparations over the last decade to fight a multi-fraud war have actually borne through, and whether or not the IDF, you know, had basically

slim down a bit too much the way Western militaries have as well and focus too much on special forces

and not enough on heavy, heavy things like tanks and masses of artillery and stuff. So that's the big

question about whether the next stage in Lebanon. In the end of the day you know the

IDF can defeat Hezbollah but the concern is Hezbollah will wreak havoc on the home front, because Hezbollah has lots of missiles that can target apartment buildings, airports, refinery, you know, hypoport, refineries, naval bases, whatever.

So that's a big question mark, and also

...