Human Rights Watch wrote in an extensive report published about a year after the war that "we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets and missiles in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields, forests and valleys,… and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.
"[1] The Israeli special forces unit Maglan stumbled into a Nature Reserve near Maroun ar-Ras and suffered heavy casualties.
"[2][3] After the battle of Maroun ar-Ras, the head of IDF Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam forbade any further attacks on Nature Reserves.
[4] According to Haaretz "[t]hroughout the war the General Staff and the Northern Command restricted offensive operations into these areas, following the initial encounter…[at] the "nature reserve" code-named Shaked near the town of Maroun al-Ras."
The decision not to attack these positions, sometimes only hundreds of meters from the Israeli border, made it possible for Hezbollah to continue firing rockets over Northern Israel throughout the war.
It condemned the senior IDF command in unusually severe terms and said that the army's methods of fighting "played into Hezbollah's hands."
[5] Another Nature Reserve was found at Labbouna, near a forest undergrowth hillside a few hundred meters from the Israeli border and some kilometer from the UNIFIL headquarters at Naqoura.
Israel repeatedly tried to knock out the launch site by the use massive artillery and air strikes, including the use of cluster bombs and phosphorus grenades.
Hezbollah fighters completely commanded the terrain to the south and claimed to have destroyed an armored bulldozer and a tank only 6 meters into Lebanese territory, on August 8, 2006.
[7] Towards the end of the war the IDF "chanced" upon what was then an unknown well-equipped bunker system overlooking the road where the abduction of the two soldiers took place.