Israel Plays High-Risk Game With New Hezbollah Strategy

CNN
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Peace wars rarely succeed. They are usually a choice: a preemptive strike to neutralize a perceived threat. Israel and Hezbollah have been locked in the horror of a chicken-and-egg escalation of “revenge for revenge” for almost a year. But over the past week, Israel has clearly decided to massively escalate its attacks on the Iranian-backed militant group, claiming, according to some reports, that it is seeking “escalation for the sake of de-escalation”—to intimidate its adversary into a diplomatic solution.

This is a very risky and probably wrong slogan, perhaps designed to deceive a frustrated ally, the United States, and convince it that the diplomatic solution, into which Washington has already invested an embarrassing amount of energy, is still Israel’s goal.

But the more damage Hezbollah has suffered recently, the more likely Israel will have short-term success. A full-scale war between a tired, divided Israeli military and an experienced, angry Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would likely be disastrous for Israel. That is exactly what the fighters are good at, and what they are waiting for. But it is also something Israel does not have to get involved in for now.

The past week has exposed the technological divide between the two adversaries. One must resort to two-decade-old technology to evade Israeli spyware and surveillance. The other can infiltrate a limited supply chain of the same device—thousands of Taiwanese-made pagers—and implant explosives that maim hundreds of elderly Hezbollah members at a time, killing children and injuring thousands more.

If that brutal clinical attack wasn’t enough, 24 hours later they killed even more fighters by detonating a series of short-wave bombs, even at the funerals of those murdered the day before. In the resulting panic, Israel apparently realized that Hezbollah members were making enough mistakes that more than a dozen high-ranking figures and a very senior commander, Ibrahim Aqil, were assassinated at the same time in a massive explosion in south Beirut on Friday.

And all the while, Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon were under repeated attack by airstrikes. There was significant damage to command, control, morale, and equipment, all without a single Israeli boot on the ground.

It is important not to underestimate the psychological and operational impact of an attack like the pager attack on any adversary. Hezbollah members probably do not know who among them has been contacted or how; they will scatter; they will seek direction; they may not be able to establish a unified response; they may even lose some time in further infighting. In time, they may rise up and strike hard, but for now Israel is ruthlessly exploiting the initial chaos.

Where does “de-escalation” fit into all this? The Israelis are probably hoping that Hezbollah feels so damaged and fears further harm to Lebanon’s civilians that it agrees to withdraw north of the Litani River and bow to its adversary’s demands so that Israeli civilians can return to their homes in the north. It would be hard for Hassan Nasrallah—a measured and focused Hezbollah leader who has also been pushing his men toward smartphone pagers—to project such weakness after the past week. He might be able to sell such a strategy of necessity as one of strategic patience—suggesting that this is their only choice to save Lebanon and that they might live to fight another day—but that would be difficult.

The Israelis, who have apparently infiltrated Hezbollah’s communications, probably have a better view of the fighters’ internal deliberations than they are saying publicly. They may have judged that Nasrallah had to step down eventually because his organization had been exposed as weakened by the sacrifice of so many experienced fighters in the Syrian civil war.

On the other hand, they could calculate that Nasrallah really does have his back to the wall and will have to attack Israeli cities with sustained rocket fire. That would leave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, if a bigger fire breaks out, with an unconvincing, binary justification: “They started it.”

Militarily, the past week has been a disaster for Hezbollah. It risks comparison with the moment Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022—when the revered monolith was exposed as not as modern or powerful. Given the evidence of Hezbollah’s extraordinary weaknesses in recent days, Israel can be confident that it can continue to hit them hard—that its enemy is incapable of responding in a meaningful way. Hezbollah can certainly fire better rockets, but many of them are intercepted, and they do not have an inexhaustible supply. Does Nasrallah think this is the moment to launch his one big barrage? Or would his allies in Iran prefer he wait for another time?

If Hezbollah withdraws voluntarily—or refuses to, and the violence continues—Israel can still strike target after target with its superior air power, apparently unconcerned, for now, that Hezbollah might exact too high a price on its own population centers. Israel has shown in Gaza that it disregards civilian casualties. The impact that the heightened violence has on ordinary Lebanese will be a double-edged sword: it will soothe already-developed hatreds of its southern neighbor, but also stoke hostility to the damage and chaos that Hezbollah’s attacks have brought to Lebanon.

Perhaps Netanyahu – who has seemingly focused exclusively on military solutions over the past year, perhaps for reasons of personal political gain – thinks he can bomb Hezbollah into irrelevance. Israel can, perhaps, do so much damage that it will cause a qualitative change in what Hezbollah can do. But wars never end there.

Hezbollah will rebuild because its cause is grounded in a place and people – Lebanon and its Shiites. The lesson NATO slowly learned in Afghanistan would be wisely applied here – that killing countless mid-level commanders in hour-long night raids leaves you with only angry, radicalized sons to talk to when you want to negotiate. Israel is showing off its war magic and is able to exact a cruel price by turning a blind eye to civilian casualties. But it is not clear what path it sees ahead.

It may matter less to Netanyahu’s war cabinet whether Hezbollah decides to withdraw or is bombed. But the lesson of violence in the region is that it has a habit of reverberating, often in unexpected and more brutal ways, on its perpetrators for decades to come.