Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative party.
Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Tehran-backed Hezbollah has taken advantage of Israel’s war in Gaza to harry Israel’s north. 60,000 Israelis have been displaced for over a year, and those that are not have come under regular rocket attack, and Israel has replied with air raids and assassinations
Incidents that could have caused the situation to spiral out of control, including the killing of football playing children in the Israeli Druze village of Majd al-Shams, the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus (which killed two senior Iranian generals) and Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Tehran, were contained, not least through intense US pressure, and though Iran having to navigate the replacement of its president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a plane crash in what seems, however improbably, to have been an accident caused by bad weather.
That relative stability to have ended with Israel’s audacious “exploding pagers” attack in which a thousand Hezbollah pagers and 300 walkie talkies blew up simultaneously. One of the pagers even injured Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, an illustration of how close the ties between Tehran and Hezbollah are.
Impressive though it may be as an intelligence achievement, its timing was mysterious. This is the kind of highly disruptive gambit one would expect to be used to maximise the enemy’s confusion right before a major assault – yet Israel followed it up only with some further assassinations of senior Hezbollah commanders.
Whether this was due to American pressure forestalling a full-scale attack; or division within the Israeli government; or even that the attack was triggered because Hezbollah were about to expose it, is likely to remain murky for some time.
Not murky is that Hezbollah, however disrupted its internal communications, had to respond with missiles into Israel, which have in turn led to greater Israeli attacks on Hezbollah positions.
So far this retaliation has been limited. Even if recent Israeli air strikes have taken out some of Hezbollah’s stocks, it still possesses more than enough to overwhelm Israel’s missile defences, but has chosen not to start an all-out war. There is also some evidence that Hezbollah commanders were killed in an air strike while considering a ground invasion of Israel.
Israel, too, is pondering a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, but it would be a very challenging operation, in which Israeli forces would take heavy casualties, and a divided Israeli society would only countenance one were Hezbollah to inflict so much damage Israelis saw no alternative.
As this column goes to press the furthest Hezbollah has gone has been to send a single missile over Tel Aviv. The missile was intercepted, but it was intended to send the message that it could hit anywhere in Israel, so the Israelis had better back off.
Israel however appears confident that this missile will remain an isolated case. It’s continuing its aerial bombardment of Hezbollah sites, which the group deliberately hides among civilian infrastructure, and treating the single missile as a bluff, a conclusion bolsters by what is almost certainly excellent intelligence.
Nonetheless Israel’s difficulty has rarely been in obtaining intelligence, but in its interpretation. Recall that Israel’s mistake on October 7 was not being caught blindsided by Hamas preparations for an attack, but that it dismissed reports of such preparations as a feint.
If Israel continues with its bombardment, will it be able to force Hezbollah to abandon the attacks on northern Israel that have been going on for a year, and so make the north of the country safe enough for its inhabitants to come home – or will it end up provoking a devastating bombardment of major Israeli cities.
Hezbollah’s dilemma will crystallise later. It lacks the precision weapons that would allow it to target Israeli military installations. If a ground invasion is ruled out, its only escalation option is an indiscriminate attack on Israeli cities, because its missiles are too primitive to get around Israeli air defences unless they overwhelm them by sheer numbers targeted at the general area of a city.
But this carries a risk of provoking an invasion, by an Israel in a very different mood from 2006, when Hezbollah’s allies are weak. The support it had gained from fighting Israel in the 1980s has dissipated. Though (insofar as it is possible to poll southern Lebanon accurately) it seems to maintain support among Lebanon’s Shias, the rest of the Lebanese attribute much of the blame for the country’s collapse to Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters.
Its foreign supporters have other calls on their resources: Syria is itself having to deal with a renewed uprising, while Iran is so beset by internal divisions that it is no mood to risk war.
The threat of an all-out attack on Israel might just force the IDF to think twice, but it could also provoke an Israeli invasion far more destructive than in 2006. Despite Israel’s incredibly deep internal divisions, there is little doubt it would respond ferociously to the large-scale bombardment of its cities.
Whether Hezbollah have an accurate sense of Israeli public opinion is another matter. If they had, they might not have begun their bombardment of the north in October last year, which disrupted a ceasefire that had held for almost two decades; or they might have taken advantage of Israel’s disarray to invade when they had the chance, even if that had run the risk of American intervention.
Now they find themselves caught: needing to protect their arsenal from the Israeli Air Force, but being unable to deter Israel except by threatening the kind of destruction that would rally Israelis to support a full-scale war. A far from ideal start for Hezbollah’s new, relatively inexperienced replacement commanders.