IDF creates Hizbullah village, forest
Yaakov Katz , THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 27, 2009

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In the face of Hizbullah's heavy deployment inside southern

Lebanese villages, the IDF is creating a new training regimen for

infantry troops to prepare them for a combination of urban and

guerrilla warfare by building special training centers in military

bases across the country.

Shortly after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF built

a replica of a Hizbullah "nature reserve" - a forested area

where the group had dug bunkers and deployed rocket launchers - to train IDF troops. Now, the IDF is building an urban warfare center -

consisting of a mock Lebanese village - which it plans to connect

to the replica of the nature reserve.

"Hizbullah has created most of its positions inside homes in

southern Lebanon," explained a senior IDF officer last week,

adding that an example of this had been demonstrated two

weeks ago with the accidental explosion of a Hizbullah rocket

cache inside a home in the village of Khirbet Selm.

The home, the IDF later revealed, was also connected to an

underground series of tunnels that led to additional positions in

nature reserves.

In footage taken several months before the explosion, an IDF

aircraft caught several senior Hizbullah operatives entering an

underground tunnel near the house and reappearing from an

exit 700 meters away.

"During the Second Lebanon War, our biggest challenges were the

nature reserves that Hizbullah had created in the open," the officer

said. "Now, the challenge will be to fight against Hizbullah in an

urban setting and then to move through the tunnels into the forest."

In order to meet the operational challenge, the IDF is creating

special training centers like the one at Elyakim, which combine

urban and guerrilla warfare. In the coming months, the IDF will

begin construction of a similar center at the Lachish training

base, near Beit Shemesh.

In addition to constructing the new training facilities, the IDF is
purchasing two rubber urban training centers - each consisting of

18 structures - in which soldiers will be allowed to carry out

live-fire exercises. In the current urban training centers, the IDF can only hold dry-fire exercises, since live fire would generate shrapnel that

could injure the soldiers.

In the new centers, made completely of rubber, the soldiers will

be able to shoot live bullets, since they would be absorbed by the

walls. The new centers also come with built-in camera systems

that enable quick examination of the results of the exercise.

The two rubber centers will be stationed at the Kfir Brigade's

training base in the Jordan Valley and the Golani Brigade's

training base near Binyamina.