Until a year ago the consensus view inside Israel’s security establishment was that Lebanon-based Hezbollah was a much greater threat than Gaza-based Hamas. Hamas was fenced in, launching the occasional barrage of rockets in Israel’s general direction without truly testing its defences. There was even some hope that, frustrated by its impotence, it might be resigned to concentrating on governing the territory it controlled.
Hezbollah, by contrast, was altogether more capable, claiming up to 100,000 soldiers and with an estimated inventory of rockets and missiles normally put at around 150,000, many with precision guidance. The group was only likely to get stronger, as Iran provided it with progressively better equipment. Here the hope was that Hezbollah did not want a new war with Israel. It respected Israeli firepower, particularly after the two had clashed in 2006. In addition, Lebanon was in a fragile state, aggravated by the terrible port explosion that ripped across Beirut in 2020, for which Hezbollah is widely blamed. It currently has a caretaker government as the country’s political parties, including Hezbollah, are divided on a new government. The other potential source of Hezbollah’s restraint was that as an agent of Iranian foreign policy, its military strength was being held in reserve to remind Israel, and also the US, of the risks of going to war with Iran.
All this changed, as with so much else in the region, on 7 October 2023. Hamas found a way to get through the elaborate security barriers surrounding the Strip and conduct its deadly rampage in southern Israel. As Israel began its ruthless military response in Gaza, Hezbollah joined in the fighting, sending missiles into Israel. This was in keeping with Iran’s strategy of the “Unity of Arenas”, according to which all members of its “axis of resistance” (including the Houthis in Yemen as well as Shia militias in Iraq), were expected to support each other if one member got into a fight with Israel or the US.
Israel immediately retaliated, and it appeared quite likely that it would soon be fighting a two-front war. Yet while the fighting continued and occasionally intensified, both Hezbollah and Israel exercised a degree of restraint. For Israel, Gaza was the priority and it believed it could win against Hamas. There was, and remains, less certainty about what could be achieved in a fight with Hezbollah. Hezbollah, for its part, concentrated its missile barrages on the border areas (it has fired some 5,000 missiles and other projectiles since 8 October), while reminding Israel that it could strike a much more extensive range of targets in far greater numbers, potentially overwhelming Israel’s air defences, should it choose to do so. In line with the underlying strategy, it insisted that it would only agree to a ceasefire when there was one in Gaza.
This led to a sort of deadly equilibrium which held despite moments when it looked like a bigger war was unavoidable. In April, Iran attempted a large-scale attack with drones and missiles against Israel, after Israel killed members of its revolutionary guard in Damascus. Most failed to reach their targets, many having been shot down by Israel and Western countries. Israel responded with a largely performative strike of its own. More recently, after Israel assassinated the Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr (in retaliation for the killing of 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights) in Beirut, and then Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran at the end of July, the response was even more muted. The equilibrium appeared to be holding.
But this could not last indefinitely. Early in the fighting, Israel evacuated more than 60,000 people from their homes close to the border with Lebanon because of their vulnerability not only to missile barrages, but also concerns that Hezbollah might mount Hamas-like cross-border raids and take hostages. Up to 100,000 civilians were also evacuated on the Lebanese side of the border.
While in Israel the plight of the evacuated has lacked the emotional charge of getting back the hostages still held by Hamas, the Netanyahu government has been under pressure to create the conditions for them to return home. Once the Gaza campaign wound down, it was always likely that the northern border would become Israel’s top priority. On 21 August the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) announced that it had completed its operations in Rafah, the last remaining Hamas stronghold. The army began to move from the southern to the northern front.
One option was to test Hezbollah’s claim that it would follow a ceasefire in Gaza with one of its own. Neither Hamas nor Israel, however, have shown much interest in compromise. That Hamas is still in a position to negotiate despite its military capacity being so severely degraded indicates that Israel has failed to achieve its goal of “eliminating” Hamas, or at least taking out Hamas’s new supreme leader, Yahya Sinwar.
A ceasefire represents Israel’s best chance of getting back the surviving hostages. The other reason many in Israel’s security establishment might desire a ceasefire is that if Gaza is left in its wretched state, without a proper relief and reconstruction effort and with no one in control, Hamas will be able to recover its position. One view is that Benjamin Netanyahu opposes this because when the war ends, his own political position will become more exposed. Another is that he is waiting for a Trump administration following the US election in November to give him more support. At any rate, the Biden administration has abandoned its regular claim that a ceasefire agreement is imminent. Little progress is now expected before the election.
Which leaves the question of whether Hezbollah can agree to a ceasefire without one in Gaza, decoupling its fight from that of Hamas. To achieve this, Israel is pursuing a strategy often described as “escalate to de-escalate”, which means ramping up the pressure on Hezbollah in order to persuade it to look for a way out of the war and agree to a ceasefire. This is essentially a coercive strategy, which has the standard problem that it is easier to ramp up pressure than it is to get the desired political results.
The start of Israel’s current offensive in Lebanon came when pagers handed out to senior Hezbollah personnel began to explode on 17 September with devastating effects, followed the next day by exploding walkie-talkies. Exactly how this was done is still being discussed. Most attention has been given to Israel’s ability to anticipate that Hezbollah would become so wary about being tracked through their mobile phones they would turn to pagers and walkie-talkies, and then set up a fake Hungarian company which met a Hezbollah order with doctored devices licensed from Taiwan. (Because of US sanctions, the militia couldn’t buy them on the open market.)
But almost as worrying for Hezbollah is how much Israeli intelligence appears to have infiltrated the organisation. When Hezbollah’s Ibrahim Aqil and his top commanders from the elite Radwan Force decided to meet in person – rather than communicate remotely – in Beirut on 20 September to decide on their next steps, their building took a direct hit from an Israeli rocket. Aqil was killed along with 11 other high-level members of his team. He was one of Hezbollah’s experienced commanders, still wanted by the Americans for his role in an attack on the US embassy in Beirut in 1983.
The loss through death and maiming of so many individuals from their top command echelons (as many as 3,000) is undoubtedly a major blow to the organisation, along with the problems they now face in their ability to communicate and keep secrets. This will affect how well they can control and coordinate their operations, especially if this turns into a battle for territory.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted in a televised speech on 19 September, “We suffered the hardest blow.” Yet, he remains defiant. Revenge was promised and hundreds of rockets, cruise missiles and drones were unleashed on 22 September, a relatively small portion of the numbers it is believed to have available. Most were shot down and the one specific target identified, the Ramat David air base near Haifa, was not hit. Some civilian areas were damaged and casualties reported, largely because of debris. Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Naim Qassem, spoke of “a new stage of open warfare against Israel”, adding: “We will kill them and fight them from where they expect and from where they do not expect.”
The following day, Israel came back harder, first sending messages to those living near Hezbollah’s military assets that they had better leave. After a couple of days of air strikes, well over 1,500 targets had been hit, described by Israel to include the Radwan Force, a special unit, and warehouses holding missiles and rockets. Lebanon reported many hundreds dead and injured, including civilians. Hezbollah again sent its own rockets back in retaliation, but thus far in limited numbers and with limited impact – far from the barrage that had been feared. One argument is that Hezbollah has been deterred from unleashing its most deadly weapons against centres such as Tel Aviv because of the fear of Israeli retaliation against similar Lebanese targets, such as Beirut Airport. Yet this already seems to be an extreme contingency. It may just be that Israel really has severely reduced Hezbollah’s capabilities.
There is apparently developing anger in Lebanon that Hezbollah has involved the country in this war, and yet lacks the ability to defend the Lebanese people and fight back effectively.
Israel is playing down the prospect of a land incursion, but this cannot be ruled out should Hezbollah fail to agree to a ceasefire. In addition, as Hezbollah is in some disarray, the IDF may see this as the optimum moment for what will still be a risky operation. As there are limits to what it can do with its missiles and rockets, Hezbollah may see a land battle as an opportunity to fight on its own terrain and get the population onside as it resists a foreign invasion. After months of fighting in Gaza, the IDF will not want to get bogged down in southern Lebanon in another war it cannot work out how to end. The last time the IDF occupied southern Lebanon in 1985 it got stuck, and when it left in 2000 Hezbollah moved back to the border.
In principle, ceasefire negotiations will be simpler than with Gaza. The issue is one of cross-border fire and not the control of territory, and there are UN resolutions in place that could shape a settlement – although Hezbollah has taken little notice of past agreements to move its forces away from the border. If Hezbollah agrees to a ceasefire and some form of disengagement now it would be seen as a political defeat, including for Iran’s policy of “Unity of Arenas”. But continuing with the fighting threatens a military defeat. The situation brings us back to all the questions about a wider war. Iran must decide whether to insist on Hezbollah sticking with a policy that, at best, will leave it severely weakened and of little value in future conflicts. If Iran does this, then it may need to find some way to join the war to support its beleaguered proxy.
[See also: Is the West poised to enter the war in Ukraine?]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war