With Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the wars in the Middle East have hit a turning point—though it’s hard to say what direction they’ll now take: toward some uneasy equilibrium or an escalation in the fighting.
Historians and strategists disagree over whether a “decapitation” attack—the assassination of a leader—has much effect on the course of a war. But Israel’s recent tactics have gone well beyond decapitation. As a prelude to the bombing of an apartment complex just south of Beirut, beneath which Hezbollah kept its secret headquarters, Israel detonated booby-trapped pagers held by thousands of Hezbollah military higher-ups, then did the same with their walkie-talkies and followed up with airstrikes on weapons caches and other infrastructure targets.
In other words, in the course of one week, through a combination of attacks, some of them planned over the past several years, Israel not only killed Hezbollah’s leader but severely injured many of its fighters and weakened Hezbollah itself as a military force—and perhaps an effective political organization.
And the operation is not over.
Israeli special operations troops have reportedly crossed into Lebanon and burrowed into Hezbollah’s network of tunnels—similar to those that Hamas has built in Gaza. This in turn may be followed by a much larger incursion by regular army troops to clear out a swath of southern Lebanon—and possibly occupy it, if necessary.
Hezbollah militants have been firing rockets into northern Israel from this area for many years—and increasingly so in recent months. Over the past year, the group has fired at least 8,000 rockets toward Israel, the country’s U.S. ambassador said this month. As a result, 65,000 Israelis have evacuated their homes near the Lebanese border. The main objective of Israel’s counterattacks has been to pacify the area so its citizens can return. One question Israeli leaders are now asking is how to keep the area safe for years to come. Do they need to wipe out Hezbollah altogether—and if so, what does that require?
In retaliation to last week’s attacks, Hezbollah fired several rockets and missiles at targets much deeper than usual into Israeli territory, hitting Haifa and Tel Aviv, though doing little damage. There has been little follow-up since—and no response, other than rhetorical, from Hezbollah’s main ally and putative protector, Iran.
The big question is what they, particularly the Iranians, do next. Hezbollah has been the main spoke on Iran’s “axis of resistance,” a network of terrorist militias—including Hamas, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad—that have served as Tehran’s proxies in various Middle Eastern conflicts against Sunni Arab countries and especially against Israel. (These proxy wars have had the unintended effect of drawing Israel and some Sunni Arab nations, which were once enemies, into an alliance.)
Hezbollah still has tens of thousands of rockets and missiles (they had at least 100,000 before the volleys intensified this past year), but it’s unclear whether the group can launch coordinated attacks, given the destruction of its command-control systems—and there’s also the question of whether it wants to launch large-scale attacks, given Israel’s demonstration of its destructive power.
Which raises still more questions about Iran. Tehran’s leaders have waged their battles through proxies precisely to keep their own territory and survival at a far distance from the fighting. Now they face a dilemma. On the one hand, they do not want to fight a war against Israel directly—much less against the United States, which would probably get involved if Israel were attacked. On the other hand, they can’t sit passively after the pummeling of their main ally, lest their other allies start to doubt Tehran’s reliability—in other words, lest the entire axis of resistance begin to fall apart.
Debates are reportedly raging within Tehran’s ruling circles. The hard-liners urge fierce retaliation against Israel. The more moderate factions, including the new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, counsel restraint. Pezeshkian campaigned for office on a platform of reaching out to the West for much-needed investment and the lifting of sanctions; in his speech last week at the U.N. General Assembly, he said Iran wishes to play a “constructive role” in world affairs. He brought with him to New York a large delegation of experienced diplomats, including Mohammad Javad Zarif, who as foreign minister negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (which President Donald Trump scuttled three years later).
After the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, President Joe Biden, along with some European allies, proposed a 21-day cease-fire in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would give it serious thought, but it’s clear now he must have dismissed the idea out of hand. He flew to New York, gave an unabashedly hawkish speech to the General Assembly (many of whose members left the hall when he started speaking), then ordered the attack on Nasrallah’s bunker—or, rather, affirmed it, as it had been planned well in advance—before boarding the plane back to Tel Aviv.
Biden is still pushing for a diplomatic solution before the war widens to engulf the entire region, though probably to no avail. Netanyahu is ignoring these urgings for two reasons. First, he has learned, from 11 months of negotiations over Gaza, that for all of Biden’s vocal pressure on Israel to adjust its war tactics, the American president has done little or nothing to compel Israel’s obedience.
Second, and more to the point, Netanyahu seems to have concluded that it’s better for Israeli security, and his own political standing, to brush aside this external pressure, a stance that he tends to take anyway. He did not inform any U.S. officials of the pager operation, nor did he notify them in advance of the bunker bombing, knowing that they would probably discourage both—and yet, he must be thinking, look at what successes they have reaped! Nasrallah, one of the world’s most powerful terrorists, responsible for deaths and misery not just in Israel but also in Syria, Lebanon itself, and countries around the world—suddenly, in one fell swoop, dead! Hezbollah: all but destroyed! Iran: seriously weakened!
Now Netanyahu is pushing what he sees as his strength. On Monday, he even suggested he was plotting a policy of regime change in Tehran. “When Iran is finally free—and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think—everything will be different,” he said in a video directed to the Iranian people, many of whom do detest their rulers. “Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace. Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.”
Was Netanyahu goading Tehran into war—daring it to attack Israel and thus provoke catastrophic retaliation?
The prime minister—whose ruling coalition holds the barest minority in Israel’s parliament and who has provoked mass protests by his failure to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza that would free the 100-plus Israeli hostages who remain under Hamas’ control—has seen a spurt in popularity since the decimation of Hezbollah.
Still, the killing of Nasrallah and his entourage does not necessarily mean the end of Hezbollah or other groups like it. As Robin Lustig, a former longtime Middle East correspondent, noted in his Substack on Monday, Nasrallah became Hezbollah’s leader after his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Similarly, Yahya Sinwar became the leader of Hamas after Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an Israeli-planted bomb. Further back still, Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987, was killed by an Israeli missile attack in 2004, then succeeded by Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who was killed by another Israeli missile two weeks later.
“Israel has a long history of assassinating its adversaries,” Lustig wrote. “Whether it is a policy that has diminished the threats to the country’s security is, I would argue, arguable.”
The prime minister is aiming for “total victory” in his wars—to the north and the south—as a way to hang on to power. The temptation is clear, but the risks are terrible.