Although Hezbollah spent the best part of this year shooting missiles and drones at the residents of Northern Israel, many Israelis believed that the government and the IDF were not doing enough to respond to these attacks and to bring the residents of Northern Israel back home.
It's possible that they waited so long to send soldiers into Southern Lebanon on foot for any (or a combination) of the following reasons:
1. They were already fighting Hamas in Gaza and didn't want to risk embarking on a war on two fronts.
2. Biden was trying to get Hezbollah to stop its attacks and to move away from the Litani River using diplomatic efforts
3. After the disastrous 2006 Lebanon War, they were scared of another ground invasion and the high price their soldiers would have to pay.
Eventually, after a year of trying to curtail Hezbollah's attacks by launching counter attacks, Netanyahu and his security council realized that Israel would have to put 'boots on the ground' in Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's terror infrastructure, weapons and tunnels.
On October 1st– and after Hebzollah was weakened as a result of Israel's pager explosions– Israel began its official ground invasion of Southern Lebanon.
Thousands of IDF soldiers are currently operating there, and have already destroyed terror tunnels and found many weapons and rocket launchers that Hezbollah was planning to use to invade the Kibbutzim of Northern Israel and kidnap civilians.
