On the night of March 28th a combined force from the 401st Armored and 84th Givati Infantry Brigades embarked upon an operation to infiltrate Aaitana in an effort to flank Bint Jbeil from the northeast. There were two attack vectors, one originating from the border town of Malkiya, and the other from Khallet al-Taruq, south of Maroun el-Ras.
> These forces passed through the Aitaroun-Bint Jbeil road in the al-Khanouq neighborhood within Aitaroun. From there a grouping of at least 4 Merkava tanks, 2 bulldozers, and 1 APC advanced along the rural hill east of Bint Jbeil. Hezbollah claims a total of 25 armored vehicles were involved in this advance, although this sounds very excessive.
> At 1:30am an armored force reached the Ghadmatha heights which directly overlook Aainata from the east. Hezbollah claims they detonated Shawaz IEDs on a Merkava and D9 bulldozer in the area. This halted the Israeli advance throughout the morning/noon of the 29th as they were focused on rooting out forward Hezbollah cells with air/artillery support.
> 401st/Givati resumed their advance at 3pm and reached houses in eastern Aaitana on al-Sidr hill. Hezbollah claims to have detonated Shawaz IEDs on 2 tanks in this area. Despite close-quarters resistance and ATGM fire, the Israeli ground force pushed deeper into the town over the next 7 hours, pushing past the Victory Theater, a sports complex, bakery, football field, school, clinic, and eventually reached Friz Hill in NE Aaitana.
> Overnight there were 15 Hezbollah rocket/ATGM attacks on Israeli forward positions. In the 2 days since, a larger quantity of Israeli soldiers have started amassing in the residential areas of Aaitana, although the central/western parts of the towns haven't been cleared yet.
