A year of war and bloodshed

The situation in the Middle East is only getting more dangerous.

In the early hours of 1 October, Israel confirmed that its troops had entered Lebanon. The Israeli military described the offensive as “limited, localised and targeted”, with ground raids focused on villages close to the country’s southern border, where civilians have been ordered to evacuate. The stated aim is to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure in order to remove the “immediate threat” from the Iran-backed group to northern Israel. Israel’s fourth major invasion of Lebanon in 50 years had begun.

The rationale is familiar. In 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon under the codename “Operation Peace for Galilee” with the objective of pushing Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) militants out of striking distance of Israeli settlements in Galilee. But the mission soon expanded, with the then defence minister Ariel Sharon intent on removing the PLO from Lebanon altogether and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) seizing control of southern Lebanon and laying siege to Beirut. The offensive forced the PLO to relocate its headquarters and the bulk of its forces to Tunisia, but the outcome was not peace for Galilee. Instead, what followed was an 18-year bloody occupation, which brought international condemnation for Israel, forced Sharon from office, and led to the creation of Hezbollah. The conflict came to be known as “Israel’s Vietnam”.

The enduring lesson from every one of Israel’s past wars in Lebanon – in 1978, 1982 and 2006 – is that what starts as a limited operation rapidly develops a momentum of its own, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties. Each time, Israeli forces have succeeded in achieving a number of their tactical objectives and inflicting damage on the enemy of the day – whether that is Palestinian militants or Hezbollah – but these victories have proved Pyrrhic. All too often the formidable Israeli military has found itself trapped in a quagmire and forced into ignominious withdrawal. As the US and its allies in the “war on terror” can attest, it is all but impossible to defeat an insurgency through military force alone, and all too easy to generate new enemies in the process.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, believes that this time will be different. Ahead of this invasion, Israel has systematically targeted Hezbollah’s military commanders, degraded its communications infrastructure with an extraordinary series of attacks that detonated the group’s pagers and radios, and penetrated the militia’s ranks. On 27 September, Israeli jets dropped more than 80 bombs on a residential area of Beirut, killing Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Shortly before that strike, Mr Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York and insisted that Israel was “winning”.

But this is a conflict in which everyone loses. After 12 months of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza – provoked by the militant group’s horrifying assault on Israel on 7 October 2023 – Israeli forces have laid waste to the densely populated Strip, with large numbers of civilian casualties, including more than 10,000 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which is an agency of Hamas. But Hamas has not been defeated and 97 hostages are still unaccounted for. Mr Netanyahu has yet to articulate an exit strategy, let alone a plan for a durable peace that allows Palestinians to live in dignity. He may yet succeed in dealing a further blow to Hezbollah, but any victory will be temporary. New enemies will appear to Israel’s north. Civilians in the already failing state of Lebanon will suffer more.

The Biden administration’s efforts to restrain Netanyahu in his assault on Gaza, and now Lebanon, have failed. US officials had spent weeks negotiating a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, insisting that a deal was close, even as the Israeli military had received its orders to kill Nasrallah. The British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has warned Israel to heed its past mistakes and avoid getting “bogged down in a quagmire” in Lebanon. But the UK and the EU have no influence over Israel.

Hezbollah owes its existence and its arsenal of rockets and missiles to the regime in Tehran. The group has long been the backbone of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, which includes Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and other Shia militant groups in Iraq and Syria. On 1 October Tehran launched a missile attack on Israel. The crucial question now is whether it is willing to plunge the region into an all-out conflict. History cautions against optimism.