So serious were the exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah this weekend, it is hard to be sure that the two sides have not already crossed the threshold of “all-out” war.
Israel’s air force said it had struck 290 targets in southern Lebanon on Saturday, killing at least three. Hezbollah responded by launching 150 missiles, rockets and drones into Israel overnight, the deepest attack since violent hostilities broke out when the Iran-aligned group began launching rocket attacks in support of Hamas after 7 October.
Missiles reached the suburbs of Israel’s northern city of Haifa, and while casualties were modest – rescue teams treated a number of wounded – residential buildings were hit in Kiryat Bialik. Thousands of civilians were forced to seek shelter.
Hezbollah said it had used short-range Fadi 1 and 2 missiles for the first time, weapons said to have a range of 50 and 65 miles respectively. They were aimed, the militant group said, at Israel’s Ramat David airbase, 15 miles south-east of Haifa, though their impact on military operations appears slight.
Though the number of missiles fired was said to be small, and mostly intercepted, images of the damage to homes suggest that some nevertheless breached Israel’s much-vaunted air defences – a troubling sign.
It has been five long days since the extraordinary plot to blow up pagers and then walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, killing 42 and wounding more than 3,000, an attack for which Israel is widely believed to have been responsible. On Friday, an Israeli airstrike killed the veteran Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil in Beirut and 37 others.
The growing intensity of the Israeli attacks appears to suggest that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is willing to accept whatever Hezbollah does in response. “If Hezbollah didn’t get the message, I promise you – it will get the message,” the prime minister said on Sunday after the latest exchanges.
It is dangerous thinking to rely on the belief that Israel will decisively come out on top if the fighting escalates. But it also comes as Israel’s leaders have decided that months of tit-for-tat responses to Hezbollah attacks across the northern border have not brought about peace. About 65,000 Israeli civilians remain displaced from their homes (similar numbers are also displaced from southern Lebanon) as Hezbollah attacks have continued on a daily basis.
An escalation of some sort from Hezbollah in response to the pager plot and the Beirut strike was inevitable, and was always likely to see the group reach into its arsenal of anywhere between 120,000 and 200,000 unguided missiles and rockets. On Sunday, Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, said that the group had entered a new phase in its struggle with Israel – ominously described by him as an “open-ended battle of reckoning”.
If the rhetoric is anything to go by, neither side appears willing to back down, raising the question of where the higher tempo of cross-border bombing will lead. A Hezbollah missile that causes a significant number of civilian casualties in Israel, whether deliberately or through a miscalculation, would probably prompt an even more intense Israeli response, and risks more civilian casualties in Lebanon in return.
The hope is that both sides want to avoid an even more deadly ground war, though such is the environment that even that cannot be certain. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said on Sunday that when Aqil was killed, he and other leaders from Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit were discussing a surprise cross-border attack into Israel – “the same horrific, horrendous attack that we had on 7 October by Hamas”.
Though the Israel Defense Forces has been engaged in nearly a year of constant fighting against Hamas in Gaza, the conflict is not as intense as it once was. Last week Israel redeployed its 98th Division from Gaza to the north, and the country’s leaders may yet reach the conclusion the only way to halt the missile and rocket attacks is to enter southern Lebanon, though that is fraught with risk.
Even allowing for the exploding pager attack, Hezbollah is estimated to have between 30,000 and 50,000 fighters available and a similar number in reserve. It is a larger and more capable military force than Hamas, which is still fighting on despite nearly a year of bombardment in response to the assault of 7 October.