By International Crisis Group
- In the last week, after eleven months of trading blows with Hizbollah, Israel has markedly escalated its strikes on the militant group in Lebanon. A full-scale conflict looms. The U.S. should do everything in its power to head off disaster.
A year into their escalating but contained conflict, Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah are on the brink of all-out war. Israel has intensified its attacks, killing dozens of Hizbollah operatives, as well as some civilians, by apparently detonating communication devices and striking at the group’s elite forces. Hizbollah has responded with a shower of rockets and drones, underscoring that its capacities remain at least partly intact. Israeli officials may believe that Hizbollah, pushed on the defensive, will not retaliate beyond the current level of violence or that if, as Israeli military and political leaders tend to believe, a war will be necessary to push Hizbollah back from the border and allow Israeli residents of northern Israel to return, better to have it now while Hizbollah appears weakened. At some point, though, Hizbollah will respond. A conflagration, which could pull in Iran and the U.S., would devastate Lebanon, and likely Israel, too. The U.S. should press harder for a Gaza ceasefire – not only to ease the strip’s dire conditions but also to calm Israel’s northern front. The Biden administration should strive in the weeks before November’s U.S. vote to end the Gaza war, including by using its leverage – its military and diplomatic support for Israel – to that end. Absent that, it should press Israel to halt its brinkmanship and pursue a diplomatic course to move Hizbollah fighters northward.
The past few days have seen a sharp escalation in the conflict to Israel’s north. On 17 and 18 September, several thousand communication devices carried by Hizbollah rank and file exploded simultaneously, killing dozens and maiming hundreds. Reportedly, Israel had penetrated the supply chain of equipment recently ordered by the group, implanting the instruments with explosives that it later triggered with a coded message. On 20 September, an Israeli airstrike reportedly killed sixteen commanders of Hizbollah’s elite Radwan forces along with civilians (the combined death toll stands at 45 so far) in the Beirut’s densely populated southern suburbs, where the group has many offices and facilities. More airstrikes, apparently aimed at destroying Hizbollah missile sites, rocked parts of Lebanon the next day, and again on the morning of 23 September, reportedly to pre-empt Hizbollah launches. The IDF also warned residents in southern Lebanon to leave homes where weapons are stored. On 22 September, Hizbollah’s rockets fired at Israel’s Ramat David air force base east of Haifa, the furthest the group has reached so far, paralysed northern Israel. Israel’s defence system intercepted most, but a direct hit on a home in Kiryat Bialik wounded three Israelis, caused damage to buildings and set several cars ablaze.
The longstanding enmity between Hizbollah and Israel came to a head after Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, when Hizbollah launched missile strikes in an attempt to divide the Israeli military’s attention and undercut its campaign in Gaza. Hizbollah, which made clear that Hamas had not consulted it in advance of the 7 October assault, did not hit Israel as forcefully as the Hamas leadership appears to have hoped it would. Still, it explicitly linked the northern to the southern front, vowing it would not cease its fire until Israel ended the war in Gaza. The hostilities led to the evacuation of 60,000 citizens from towns in northern Israel, with another 20,000 leaving as well, creating pressure on the government to return them to their homes. More than 110,000 Lebanese have also been forced from their homes in the south since the sides began trading blows.
For Israel, Hizbollah’s missiles are not the only worry. Israeli leaders have been no less concerned by the presence of the Radwan forces near the border, fearing that its fighters could stage the same kind of attack in the north that Hamas pulled off in the south. Israel claims the strike on 20 September that killed over a dozen Radwan members and commanders happened while they were meeting to discuss a 7 October-style plan to penetrate northern Israel. For years, Israeli officials have been signalling that Hizbollah must be pushed away from the border and north of the Litani River in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which marked the end of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. Israel’s political and security elites generally concur that a military operation to force this outcome is, at some point, inevitable.
Over the intervening year, the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border has evolved into a war of attrition, with both sides suffering significant economic damage and social disruption. Even before the attacks of the last weeks – which have likely harmed Hizbollah’s morale, in addition to its military readiness and reputation – Israel was getting the better of the exchange. According to some estimates, of the roughly 8,500 cross-border operations that took place between 7 October 2023 and 31 July 2024, Israel launched more than three quarters. It killed a number of senior Hizbollah figures in these strikes. Still, the sides kept the escalation below a threshold, with both for the most part adhering to geographic and targeting constraints that revealed a mutual preference for avoiding full-scale war.
Israel appears to be trying to coerce Hizbollah to abandon its demand that a ceasefire in Gaza is a prerequisite for quiet in Israel’s north.
That appears to have changed last week. On 16 September, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu elevated the return of the Israeli displaced people to an official war goal. Two days later, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared a new phase in the post-7 October war, in which the centre of gravity would shift to the northern border. Wielding the threat of a ground invasion to create a buffer zone inside Lebanon, Israel appears to be trying to coerce Hizbollah to abandon its demand that a ceasefire in Gaza is a prerequisite for quiet in Israel’s north and also to withdraw its forces from along the frontier. But this pressure could also be a prelude to a broader campaign. Nearly a year into the war in Gaza, with Israel’s military spread thin between Gaza, the West Bank and the north, and with the Israeli economy beginning to feel the impact, some officials see Israel as having growing interest in turning the war of attrition into a short, decisive campaign that changes the “security reality” on the ground, as Gallant has put it, and deters Hizbollah from further attacks.
Israel’s goals are not a mystery to Hizbollah, which tracks Israeli media closely, but the group is unlikely to back down. Hizbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah declared as much in a speech on 19 September, after the communication devices blew up. Since October 2023, Hizbollah has affirmed a Gaza ceasefire as a non-negotiable objective, and hundreds of its fighters have died in pursuit of this cause. Abandoning this stance now would amount to a historic defeat, dealing the group’s credibility an even more devastating blow than its security lapses have. Hizbollah leaders have repeatedly stated that they view the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and their own parallel struggle, as a battle for the strategic balance in the entire Middle East, one they cannot afford to lose. Israel’s recent attacks may well have weakened the group, but its rocket launching capacities – especially of precision-guided missiles – remain intact and it reportedly holds a large arsenal in reserve. It still has tens of thousands of fighters under its command.
It is thus hard to predict precisely how an Israeli ground incursion would play out beyond that it would be devastating for Lebanon. Nasrallah has warned that an invasion would turn southern Lebanon into a death trap for Israeli soldiers, as was the case when Israeli forces moved into the country in 1982 and 2006. Whatever the cost for Israel, the way it has conducted the war in Gaza, and the permissive attitude the U.S. has adopted to date, suggest that the humanitarian and economic toll of an all-out war would be stratospheric for the Lebanese people. Hizbollah sees a bigger clash with Israel as neither strategically necessary nor smart, since such a war would threaten both to deplete the movement’s military strength and to sap popular acquiescence in its claim to be Lebanon’s primary defender, which it would need to subsequently rebuild.
The question now is how far Israel intends to press its advantage, and whether its measures will succeed in securing the border areas to the extent that the displaced can get back home. An emboldened military leadership could well continue to ratchet up strikes on Hizbollah higher and higher, so as to degrade the group’s capabilities and morale. Some Israeli leaders feel vindicated by Hizbollah’s cautious retaliation in late August to Israel’s killing of one of its most senior commanders a month earlier. Some U.S. officials also suspect that parts of the Israeli leadership would not mind baiting Hizbollah into making the kind of attacks they have clearly sought to avoid, which Israel could then present as a cause for escalating operations in a defensive “war of necessity”. With only weeks to go until the U.S. presidential elections, the Biden administration appears intent on preventing such a scenario, declaring on 22 September that Israel should refrain from escalating to the point of rendering a diplomatic solution impossible.
While Israel is understandably determined to restore security along its northern border and push back from the border militants who are, at least according to their public statements, bent on its destruction, the escalation of the past two weeks poses grave dangers. The point may be approaching at which Hizbollah decides that only a massive response can stop Israel from carrying out more attacks that impair it further. While the group has been keen to avert an uncontrolled escalation, and to avoid looking like the party that turned the tit-for-tat into all-out war, it may decide that the line between what it suspects Israel is about to do and such a war is no longer meaningful. It might also decide that it needs to hit back hard as long as it believes it can still manage the fallout of severe retaliation that would disable the group’s command-and-control capabilities. Mid-level commanders also seem unlikely to want to sit on their hands and leave the party’s vaunted missile force idle before Israel takes out that arsenal as well.
[Israeli] systems may have difficulty handling a higher volume of missiles and drones fired at once.
Nor is it clear how well Israel can defend itself from a barrage of Hizbollah missiles. Israel may bank on the efficiency of its sophisticated air defences, but unlike the Iron Dome that has effectively intercepted the unguided, short-range projectiles that Hamas and Hizbollah have been firing to date, its systems may have difficulty handling a higher volume of missiles and drones fired at once, including hundreds Hizbollah has apparently fitted with Iranian-made precision guidance systems, which it has not used yet. Hizbollah’s drone operators have on occasion shown themselves adept at outsmarting Israel’s air defences, and some Israeli military experts worry that the conflict of the past eleven months has given the party opportunity to study these systems and figure out ways to evade them. The consequences for Israel may well turn out to be far more severe than those from the devastating Hamas attack on 7 October. If Iran, alongside its non-state allies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, decides to join the fray and protect Hizbollah, an asset that it has built up over decades, not least to deter Israel from attacks on Iran itself, such a confrontation could spiral into a regional war that would almost certainly draw in the U.S.
Washington’s approach to the Israel-Hizbollah exchanges of fire over the past year has been to try to keep the temperature down, while pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza, hoping that such a truce will pave the way for a new understanding in the north that, among other things, sees Hizbollah pull its forces back 7-10 km north of the border. Often behind the scenes, U.S. officials have exhorted Israel not to escalate, while more openly seeking to deter Hizbollah, including by deploying aircraft carrier groups to the region. Months of U.S. efforts, together with Egypt and Qatar, to secure a Gaza ceasefire and release of the Israeli hostages held there have failed, due to intransigence on both sides and the Biden administration’s refusal to use Washington’s main source of leverage with Israel, namely its military and diplomatic support, to push Netanyahu into the ceasefire and hostage deal that the majority of Israelis and the country’s military and security chiefs say they support.
Only weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential vote, the White House confronts a disaster that is at least partly of its own making. U.S. officials, now seeing no hope of a Gaza ceasefire, have in their latest diplomacy tried to decouple the two theatres – Gaza and the northern border – by pushing for an outcome in Lebanon that is not contingent on Gaza. That appears bound to fail, given Hizbollah’s refusal to budge from its demand for a Gaza ceasefire before stopping its rocket fire. Pulling back its forces may require a separate deal, but a ceasefire in Gaza remains the surest path to stabilising the north and allowing Israeli citizens to return home. Even some former Israeli security officials who support Israel’s escalatory steps in Lebanon still emphasise the importance of using these to leverage an offramp that would enable a ceasefire and hostage deal.
The White House is likely warier today than before of threatening to withhold aid to Israel, only weeks from the election, and at a time when the country could face an all-out war from the north. Nor is Netanyahu the only obstacle; Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has a veto, too. Yet by giving up on the ceasefire, the Biden team may leave Democrats entering November’s vote with the U.S. entangled in a full-scale war between Israel and Hizbollah. Some Democrats suspect that Netanyahu may be dialling things up in the north precisely to undermine Vice President Kamala Harris’s prospects in favour of those of Republican candidate Donald Trump. But the White House’s nearly unconditional support for Israel since the 7 October attacks has helped empower Netanyahu at the expense of the country’s more pragmatic political forces. The past year has also demonstrated the domestic political costs to Democrats of evincing insufficient concern about the price the war has exacted on civilians in Gaza – and now Lebanon.
Absent a stronger push for a Gaza ceasefire, Washington has few cards to play beyond leaning further on Israel to take a step back in the north. A war with Hizbollah would likely cause more displacement from the north and probably end in Israel striking an agreement similar to the one already on the table, only at a higher price; it is hard to see how Israeli residents will be able return to the north absent a deal. The U.S. could perhaps communicate through channels it has to Hizbollah that Israel may be prepared – if, indeed, Israeli leaders are – to scale down attacks to their intensity at an earlier stage of the conflict if the militant group reciprocates. This step might at least arrest the upward escalatory trajectory. It would not allow the displaced to return, but neither would all-out war – not any time soon, anyway.
Still, the Biden administration’s better course would be to make a last push for the ceasefire in Gaza that remains the surest way to inch back from the edge. While Biden’s record since the Gaza war began suggests little willingness to change course, he is no longer the Democratic nominee for president, and he may perhaps have greater flexibility to deal with the crisis. While a more reasonable stance from Netanyahu might not guarantee a deal, it is surely necessary to get one. There is no obvious answer as to how best to reconcile the use of U.S. leverage on Israel, which to stand any hope of working must include conditioning military aid and diplomatic support, with the exigencies of U.S. domestic politics, all while encouraging pliancy from an Israeli premier who believes he can wait Biden out. But none of that justifies resignation. The window to head off the Middle East war Biden has spent much of the past year working to avert may be closing. He risks a legacy in the region stained not only by the appalling suffering in Gaza and the hostages’ continued detention but by failure to prevent a conflagration that draws in U.S. forces.
@International Crisis Group (ICG)