A wave of Israeli strikes aimed at dismantling Hezbollah in Lebanon has triggered a cycle of violence and escalation that could result in regional war, sources tell Rolling Stone.
Israel’s military said it has conducted more than 1,600 strikes in Lebanon over the past two days, aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s ability to launch rockets into Israel.
Those strikes have killed 558 people and injured more than 1,800, according to the Lebanese health ministry, and tens of thousands of Lebanese are fleeing north to escape the fighting. International air carriers have suspended many flights to Beirut and Tel Aviv, and the U.S. has warned its citizens to leave Lebanon.
Israel’s decision to open a second front in a war on Iranian proxy groups comes after nearly a year of skirmishes and constant rocket attacks carried out by Hezbollah in support of Hamas, which has been bloodied — but not defeated — in a war in Gaza that may have already claimed more than 40,000 Palestinian lives. But as the conflagration spreads to new fronts, American officials and experts fear Israel may be casting aside opportunities to end the conflict, dragging the United States into a direct war with Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has made a decision to favor military attacks and degrade Hamas and Hezbollah over a cease-fire,” says Frank Figliuzzi, former assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI. “I am looking at this as a precursor. They [the Israelis] have made a decision. I don’t think it’s over — cease-fire talks be damned.”
The campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon accelerated last week, after pagers used by the militant group began exploding on Sept. 17, allegedly at the command of Israeli intelligence. Reuters reports that Israel compromised the devices and loaded them with small amounts of explosives before they were supplied via intermediaries to Hezbollah for distribution to commanders, militants, and support personnel.
That attack was followed by another operation on Wednesday, in which two-way radios — intended as emergency back-up communication for Hezbollah fighters — also exploded, including some at funerals for those who had been killed the day before.
Several civilians, including children, were killed in the two-day operation. Lebanese officials say at least 31 people died in the series of attacks, with more than 3,500 injured. Hezbollah confirmed that the attacks had targeted members of its organization, saying many were wounded and killed during the two days of attacks. It blames Israel, which has not commented on the operation.
Former CIA director Leon Panetta on Sunday described the pager and walkie-talkie attacks as “a form of terrorism,” and U.S. officials have denied that they knew about the attacks beforehand. Several human rights groups have called for an investigation into the attacks, asserting the act may have been a violation of Additional Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Weapons, which regulates and prohibits some forms of booby-traps — and to which Israel is a signatory.
While Israel has not taken credit for those attacks, it became clear that Israel is targeting Hezbollah’s leadership, after it acknowledged carrying out an airstrike in Lebanon on Friday.
That airstrike killed Ibrahim Aqil, a senior member of the group wanted by the United States for his involvement in a series of terror attacks in Beirut in the 1980s. Those included an April 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy that killed 63 people — including the CIA’s top Middle East analyst, Robert Ames — and twin bombings in October the same year, targeting barracks housing U.S. Marines and French paratroopers taking part in a multinational peacekeeping mission to Lebanon. The barracks bombings killed 241 American servicemembers, 58 French paratroopers and six Lebanese civilians.
Hezbollah acknowledged Aqil’s death, along with 45 others — including 16 members of its leadership.
“In just one week, Israel has decimated Hezbollah’s command and control wireless communications systems, incapacitated thousands of its combatants including many in its elite Radwan force, and is now removing its leadership from the battlespace,” says Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and Arab affairs specialist.
Shortly after the airstrike on Friday, the leader of Hezbollah gave a previously scheduled televised speech to address the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.
“[Israel] was intending to deliberately kill 4,000 people in one minute,” Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said. “It is an act of war on the Lebanese people.”
He also promised Hezbollah would respond to the attacks: “The reckoning will come, and it will be severe.”
Over the weekend, Hezbollah sought to make good on those threats, firing rockets against dozens of sites across northern Israel. The targets included the Ramat David Airbase near Haifa, about 30 miles from the Lebanese border, and also the predominantly Arab-Israeli town of Nazareth — perhaps best known outside Israel as the hometown of the Christian messiah, Jesus.
Hezbollah, an extremely well-armed and well-financed Lebanese Shia Islamist paramilitary, is Iran’s most important proxy in the Middle East. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful Iranian military unit that conducts extraterritorial operations, has played a central role in developing Hezbollah’s military capabilities since the 1980s. The IRGC still supplies Hezbollah with heavy weapons, helping it build a formidable arsenal of missiles and rockets capable of reaching deep inside Israel.
When the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas carried out a brazen raid from Gaza that killed more than 1,100 Israelis and took around 250 hostages nearly one year ago, Hezbollah began firing thousands of those rockets into northern Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas.
“Since Oct. 8, over 8,000 rockets have been fired at our people,” Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., told the General Assembly in a meeting in New York on Sunday. “Over 70,000 have been forced to flee their homes, becoming refugees in their own land.”
In response to Hezbollah’s attacks, Israel conducted hundreds of strikes across Lebanon, aimed at dismantling the group’s military capabilities.
“Essentially, we are targeting combat infrastructure that Hezbollah has been building for the past 20 years,” Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top general, said in a briefing with commanders.
Hundreds have now been killed in the worst violence in decades, Lebanese health officials say, prompting officials in Beirut to call for the international community to intervene.
“The continuing Israeli aggression on Lebanon is a war of extermination in every sense of the word,” Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday, urging “the United Nations and the General Assembly and influential countries… to deter the aggression.”
Lebanon’s government itself can do little to stop the crisis, as “Hezbollah has captured the Lebanese state,” says Dr. Lina Khatib, associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a think tank based in London. “The strategy was a gradual one of state infiltration, backed by intimidation and assassination.”
Sectarian division and political instability has long been a feature of life in Lebanon, after a civil war from 1975 to 1990 that killed more than 150,000 and ended with a fractious power-sharing arrangement. Foreign powers occupied much of the country in the wake of the civil war, with Israel controlling portions of the south until 2000 and Syria occupying territory in the north until 2005. Iran — via Hezbollah — now controls Lebanon from behind the scenes.
Since 2008, Hezbollah has become “the de facto ruler of Lebanon, the most powerful political and military actor in the country,” achieving “power without responsibility,” Khatib says. “It’s preferable to actually being in charge. You don’t have to be responsible for the bad governance in Beirut.”
This leaves the Lebanese people without a meaningful voice in what is happening now.
“When it comes to decisions of war and peace, not individual battles, but decisions about whether to engage in war or engage in peace, Hezbollah only acts through agreement with Iran,” Khatib says. “Iran is more influential over these decisions than the Lebanese state.”
Tehran remains the nexus of what is happening in both Lebanon and Gaza. While Hamas gets weapons, financing and support from a range of regional actors, Iran is among the most important of its backers. One of Hamas’ top leaders, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in a guesthouse — allegedly by Israel — while on a visit to Tehran in July.
But it is not accurate to say Hamas and Hezbollah are two sides of the same Iranian coin.
“You can divide Iranian surrogates into four categories,” says professor Robert Murrett, the deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University. “In terms of direct interaction, groups like the Houthis in Yemen are among those Iran has the least control over — they have their own program, and don’t really seem to pay much attention to anyone else.”
“The second category is Hamas, which Iran equips and extensively funds. They pay attention to Tehran, but there is no strict authority or control. The third category is Iranian surrogate groups in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, which Tehran has considerable control over. But Hezbollah is at the top. They are almost directly controlled by Iran,” Murrett says.
Murrett was a career intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, retiring as a vice admiral after 34 years, having served in senior executive roles from 2000 to 2010, including as the Director of Naval Intelligence and Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
In 1983, he was in his ship’s command center when news spread about the bombing in Beirut. “I remember it like it was yesterday. A lot of people are very happy that [Ibrahim Aqil] was taken out of the scene.”
Hezbollah’s close ties to Iran were tacitly acknowledged by the disclosure that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon had been wounded in the pager attacks last week. Amir Saeed Iravani, the Iranian envoy to the U.N., told the Security Council on Friday that Israel had “crossed a red line” with the attacks. Hezbollah, too, shows little interest in backing down.
“The Lebanon front will not stop before the aggression on Gaza stops. The resistance in Lebanon won’t stop supporting and assisting Gaza, the West Bank, and the oppressed people in those holy lands,” Nasrallah said.
Israel’s hope appears to have been that with Hezbollah’s leadership weakened, there would be little appetite to carry on the fight in support of what started, ultimately, as a fight between Hamas and Israel.
But the degree to which Hezbollah is willing to slug it out with Israel will illustrate how far Iran is willing to go, despite assurances Tehran doesn’t want a wider conflict.
“My sense is that Iran does want to have a calibrated but significant response,” says Murrett, citing a large-scale Iranian cruise-missile and drone attack against Israel in April, in retaliation for the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. “They telegraphed it in advance.”
Indeed, most parties to the conflict see reason to escalate at this point — Israel to defend its population, Iran to defend its proxies, and Hezbollah to respond to the attacks on its leadership. But “solidarity” with Hamas is more rhetoric than reality.
“[Hezbollah’s leader] Nasrallah is trying to harvest solidarity among the Palestinians and the Lebanese,” Melamed, the Israeli former intelligence official, says. “Nasrallah plays the card that he’s defending Lebanon. I don’t think the Lebanese buy that.”
Khatib, the Chatham House analyst, agrees.
“The majority of the Lebanese people did not want Hezbollah to be involved in the Gaza conflict,” Khatib tells Rolling Stone. “People feel powerless. They are caught between a rock and a hard place. The majority of the Lebanese people are against Israel, but they are also against what Hezbollah is doing.”
“I grew up in Lebanon in the 1980s and 90s. It’s history repeating itself, which it does too often in Lebanon. I think of the older generations, someone like my father, and how many wars he has witnessed in his lifetime,” Khatib says. “It’s a cycle that is self-perpetuating. Every few years, Lebanon seems to go through a cycle of violence.”
Israel believes exploiting divergences of interest between Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran is key to achieving its goals, Melamed says. He has a unique perspective. A fluent Arabic speaker with connections across the region, he worked as a negotiator advising the mayors of Jerusalem during the city’s most violent periods in modern history, the first and second intifada. The intifada — Arabic for “uprising” — saw widespread protests against occupation and violence across Israel and the Palestinian Territories from 1989-1993 and 2000-2005, respectively.
Melamed believes the campaign that started last week is part of a strategy to force Hezbollah — and by extension, Hamas and Iran — to the negotiating table.
“There are people who think this [targeting Hezbollah] is a move toward escalation. But look at it from the opposite direction — that this could be a move to de-escalate,” Melamed tells Rolling Stone.
“Israel is saying ‘We damaged your capacities. You have a window of opportunity to change course to end the skirmish,’” he says. “There are reasons to think Hezbollah will seize that opportunity.”
But any escalate to de-escalate strategy is fraught with the potential for miscalculation, as it requires an extremely clear and detailed understanding of the internal power dynamics, personalities, and decision-making processes among all of the players involved, says Figliuzzi, the former FBI counterintelligence agent.
“I wouldn’t want to be the one tasked with trying to make those calls,” he says. “There’s a lot of risk here.”
If its strategy fails, Israel could decide to authorize a massive ground operation against Hezbollah — as it did in 2006 with a short, sharp war that ultimately ended in a U.N.-brokered cease-fire. That conflict left hundreds dead and wounded, with both sides declaring victory — but little change to the overall situation.
Israel is already signaling its willingness to invade Lebanon, announcing that the elite 98th Paratrooper Division has moved to an area along the border. “The center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Israeli Air Force personnel on Sept. 18, in a statement released by his office.
Israel also says ending Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket attacks is now a direct aim of its war on Hamas in Gaza.
“The Security Cabinet has updated the objectives of the war to include the following: Returning the residents of the north securely to their homes,” Israel’s prime minister’s office announced.
The thinking in Israel is that Tehran will force Hezbollah to stop the attacks if enough military pressure is applied.
“The Iranians, I would say, have no wish to see their biggest and most significant strategic proxy engage in an all-out war with Israel,” Melamed says. “Then they will have to intervene, which means facing not just Israel, but also the U.S., which has a significant deployment of forces in the region.”
But Hezbollah can’t stop fighting, either.
“Hezbollah cannot be seen as accepting defeat, or as abandoning Hamas,” Khatib says, noting that the group “is much more powerful than Hamas militarily. If Israel hasn’t been able to win against Hamas, it’s unrealistic to believe that Israel is going to subdue Hezbollah in a matter of weeks.”
Even as Israel counts on military action forcing Tehran and its allies to back down rather than risk a confrontation with Washington, the U.S. fears the opposite may happen: that too much military pressure on Hezbollah will expand the war.
“At that point, the administration would worry that Iran will feel compelled to act,” Figliuzzi, who is now a national security analyst at NBC News, tells Rolling Stone. “At some point the Israelis would be told: ‘We’re not supporting this any more.’”
Khatib believes Washington’s influence over Israel is essential to bringing down the temperature.
“There is no other actor that is able to stop the conflict other than the United States,” Khatib says. “They are the only international actor able to influence all parties and stop the fighting. But Washington does not appear to want this to end. The only ‘red line’ seems to be full-scale war, another on-the-ground U.S. involvement in the Middle East — the U.S. seems willing to support whatever Israel does short of that.”
The Biden administration believes it is keeping the conflict contained amid its final months of governance.
“So far, we have been successful in keeping it from turning into an all-out regional war,” U.S. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said in a press briefing on Thursday. “And that’s what we’re going to continue to try to pursue.”
But there is little hope that Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s frenetic travel around the region will yield meaningful results any time soon.
“I don’t think we have the conditions for a cease-fire. The U.S. presence will likely need to remain what it is for the foreseeable future,” observes Murrett. “Shuttle diplomacy can’t move people if they have an interest in keeping the hostilities going.”With 40,000 American military personnel now deployed to the region and a second carrier battle-group en route, the Roman adage, “If you want peace, prepare for war,” appears to be undergoing a succinct annotation, revised to simply: “Prepare for war.”
