Nasrallah’s switch to pagers gave the operation a tremendous boost, of course, enabling Netanyahu to deliver his message, which could be summed up as: We can strike not just your missile and rocket launch sites, your weapons depots with airstrikes and drones, but we can also hit you too — in ways large and small, drilling right down to individual Hezbollah members — and we can turn your communication systems against you. You can’t match us.
And that message was underscored again this week, with a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets, leaving Lebanon with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975–1990 civil war.
However, while Israel is now being accused of escalating the conflict with Hezbollah, the country’s leadership takes a different view. For them, this was an attack to preempt escalation — to emphasize that Israel has many other tricks up its sleeve; that the cost of maintaining rocket attacks on northern Israel, which have forced the evacuation of over 80,000 Israelis, will be high; as will be the price for Hezbollah’s refusal to withdraw from the Lebanese border to the other side of the Litani River, in accordance with the U.N. resolution that brought the 2006 Lebanon War to a close.
According to Israeli officials, they’re the ones who’ve shown patience. They’ve been warning they’ll force Hezbollah, whether by war or diplomacy, to cease firing rockets into Israel and withdraw north of the river since December. Netanyahu’s been under intense political pressure from evacuees to make the northern communities safe for return, and as both sides continue to break the “rules of the game” — informally established to reduce miscalculation by Israel and Hezbollah since 2006 — and hit targets deeper into each other’s territory, patience is wearing thin.
Iran was also sent a “think twice” message in much the same way this summer. It was more subtle and largely missed by commentators, but it likely wasn’t lost on Tehran. Think back to June, when the Islamic Republic launched its unprecedented direct bombardment on Israel, crossing what, for decades, had been an unthinkable red line. At the time, Mohammad Jamshidi, a deputy chief of staff to Iran’s president, had bragged that the “strategic equation” between Tehran and Israel was now changed. But Israel had a quiet and surgically precise response in mind.
Under international pressure to not up the ante and risk a region-wide war, Israel launched a mini-drone strike on targets in Isfahan. Tehran downplayed the incident, claiming the drones had been intercepted and caused no damage or loss of life. Meanwhile, Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, said: “Israel tried to calibrate between the need to respond and a desire not to enter into a cycle of action and counter-reaction that would just escalate endlessly.”