Yitzhak Vaknin, a former Knesset member, at a center that cooks meals for the Israeli military. He thinks it’s too soon for a ground invasion: “We don’t have to endanger our soldiers if we can exhaust them with our air force until Hezbollah raises its hands,” he said. Heidi Levine/The Washington Post

NORTHERN ISRAEL – The Israel Defense Forces continued to mass troops along the country’s border with Lebanon on Friday in preparation for a possible invasion as they braced for Hezbollah’s response to their massive strike on the militant group’s Beirut headquarters.

The deadly Israeli strike in crowded southern Beirut, the latest in a week of punishing air attacks on Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, targeted the group’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, according to a person familiar with information provided after the attacks by Israel to the United States who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the discuss a sensitive matter.

While diplomats scrambled to avert all-out war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly on Friday that Israel would “fight until we achieve victory.” Herzl Halevi, Israel’s chief of staff, told troops this week to prepare to “enter enemy territory.”

Hours before the strike Friday, morale among the IDF troops along the border was high, though they did not show the posture of previous Israel invasions. Before Israel and Hezbollah’s last war, in 2006, parents came to the border to bid their sons goodbye. In October, rows of tanks formed in southern Israel before invading the Gaza Strip.

But soldiers and residents in the north, an area highly militarized through the past year, told The Washington Post that they were ready for a fight in whatever form Israel’s leaders decide.

“We are prepared for” a ground invasion, 20-year-old Lior Papismadov said during a break with his tank unit in a wooded area near the border. “We don’t know if it’s going to happen, but we are preparing.”

Military traffic has increased along highways to the north and near the border, areas that largely emptied under months of Hezbollah shelling. Trucks haul portable safe rooms and tanks. Military bases and staging grounds have sprung up in the mountains and inside evacuated kibbutzim. On Friday, fresh tank tracks appeared on the roadway closest to the Lebanon border. A crane, escorted by two armored personal carriers, lowered a portable shelter of the kind used to protect soldiers at checkpoints.

The IDF this week deployed two combat reserve brigades, trained and “refreshed on terrain and what it means if Israel were to decide that [ground incursion] is an option to do,” IDF Maj. Doron Spielman told The Post on Thursday.

As he spoke in Kiryat Shmona, the biggest city along the border not officially evacuated, an air raid siren sounded.

“Mobilization opens an option,” said Assaf Orion, a former IDF head of strategic planning. “That allows whoever needs to decide, to take the action – and also sends a signal to the other side that this might be coming.”

A ground incursion would likely be preceded by heavier bombardment in southern Lebanon “than what we see now,” Orion said. “You will see the fence opening and forces moving on.”

The next hours and days will be critical, Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of research in Israeli military intelligence, said after the strike Friday. “If [Hezbollah] retaliate heavily, then Israel is going to have a green light for a ground operation, which is the most dangerous thing from Hezbollah’s point of view.”

In woods not far off a main road Thursday, Papismadov’s convoy of a dozen Israeli tanks and a few armored personal carriers paused for some ice cream after arriving north.

He fought in the Gaza Strip, an urban, coastal enclave where Israel has executed a year-long military campaign to destroy Hamas and has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. The conflict with Hezbollah in the north, Papismadov said, is “a different type of war.”

His unit didn’t pause long. They didn’t want to be targeted by a Hezbollah rocket or drone. Ordered to move out, they crept up the rocky, unpaved road, dust blowing behind.

“Being a soldier on the front line in Israel is a very big risk,” Spielman said. “All the mothers and daughters I know with children up are not sleeping at night because they know Hezbollah is just like five, six kilometers away.”

Emotions are high heading into the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli communities near Gaza. Militants streamed out of the enclave to kill 1,200 people in the surprise assault. Israel responded with a military campaign that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Over the past year, Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, has exchanged cross-border fire with Israel nearly daily and, according to the IDF, tried to plan an attack similar to the Oct. 7 assault.

The latest Lebanon escalation, as well as the war in Gaza, are broadly popular among Jewish Israelis. The country’s leaders say they need to escalate the fight against Hezbollah to enable the more than 67,000 Israelis who have fled the north to return to their homes. Towns and kibbutzim just beyond the evacuation zone remain under frequent fire.

The IDF this week pounded southern Lebanon and Beirut with more than 1,000 projectiles in one 24-hour period. The days-long aerial assault, called Operation Northern Arrows, has killed more than 600 people, among them women and children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Thousands of people have been wounded and tens of thousands more displaced. Israel says it targeted militants and that among the dead are several top Hezbollah commanders. Rights groups accuse Israel of using indiscriminate force against civilians in Lebanon.

Since October, Hezbollah rockets and drones have killed 48 people in northern, most of whom were military troops, the Israeli prime minister’s office said Sunday. Israel’s sophisticated Iron Dome air defense system intercepts most projectiles.

More than 100 Lebanese civilians and nearly 400 Hezbollah members were killed in Israeli attacks as of late August, according to a Washington Post tally.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war and occupied the south until 2000. Hezbollah formed largely to resist that occupation; with the support of Iran, it has grown into a key political player in Lebanon. Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006 that ended with a cease-fire and the creation of a U.N.-monitored buffer zone.

Some people in northern Israel have remained, many for ideological reasons – they refuse to leave the land they claim. They’re aiding the influx of soldiers.

Near the border with Lebanon, pairs of soldiers on Friday loaded large containers of meat, couscous, salads, bread and other traditional Sabbath dishes into white vans and ambulances to deliver to bases. Inside what was a catering firm before the war, local volunteers, some of them armed, counted portions and loaded meals onto trolleys. One soldier wore a shoulder patch: “Hamas hunting club.”

Shelly Liss Barkan said she has been cooking for soldiers throughout the war, but requests now far outstrip what her volunteer group can provide.

“It’s so nice for them to have a home-cooked meal,” she said.

She lives in Shlomi, a town of 8,000 people on the border. Most have evacuated; she and about 300 neighbors have stayed.

Nati Aroush, 27, a reserve paratrooper, said he fought in Gaza before arriving on the northern border a month ago.

Before the war he worked in a pizza shop in Jerusalem. Now, he said, he was ready to fight in the north “as long as needed.”

“We want that it will be finished,” he said. “That there will be quiet. That they won’t have an option to strike back.”

Yitzhak Vaknin, 66, a former member of parliament in the religious Shas party, was among the volunteers. He said it was too soon for a land incursion.

“We don’t have to endanger our soldiers if we can exhaust them with our air force until Hezbollah raises its hands,” he said. “If they don’t raise their hands, then a ground invasion. There’s no other choice.”