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The homes in Lebanese villages along the border with Israel “will no longer stand” in the event that Hezbollah launches a ground offensive against Israel, a top Israeli military commander told the Jewish state’s Army Radio this week, The Daily Star reported.

Brig. Gen. Moni Katz, the commander of the Israeli Army’s Galilee Formation, said that he anticipated that the relative calm that has taken hold along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier will continue for the foreseeable future.

During Katz’s tenure as the top Israeli military officer responsible for the force alignment near the northern border, there have been isolated cases of violence and flare-ups, though none have deteriorated into the kind of tit-for-tat fighting that led to the summer 2006 war.

On Jan. 20, two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper were killed in an exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel, one of the most violent clashes between the two sides since the 2006 war.

The soldiers were killed when Hezbollah fired five missiles at a convoy of Israeli military vehicles on the frontier with Lebanon.

The attack came in retaliation for a Jan. 18 Israeli airstrike in southern Syria that killed six Hezbollah members and an Iranian general.

Nonetheless, Katz told Army Radio that Israel is ready for any scenario at all.

“[Hezbollah] is certainly planning ground operations,” he claimed. “Perhaps it might succeed at one point or another, but I think what is most important is to gauge these things by how they end, not by how they begin.”

“There’s a dimension of psychology involved here,” he said.

“There’s a need to understand that these events could happen, and we need to look at them with the proper sense of proportion. You can’t defend a 130-kilometer long border and expect that no enemy fighter will succeed in crossing the boundary,” he said.

Katz said that Israel plans to install new fortifications along the border that will impede any Hezbollah attempts to infiltrate and cause havoc. Still, in the event that matters devolve into a wider conflict, the officer said that Israel would evacuate its residents from their homes if need be.

“If the best defense we could provide our citizens entails evacuating them from a number of towns adjacent to the border, we will do it,” he said. “We are prepared for such a scenario. Ultimately, the decision rests with the civilian leadership.”