Hezbollah reels but strategy to restore security in the shadows

Family and friends of Captain Eitan Oster — killed in this week’s fighting against Hezbollah — gather at his graveside following his funeral at Mount Hertzl military cemetery this week. Picture: Getty Images

Israel has landed a string of blows in its escalating war with Hezbollah, leaving it shell-shocked and putting its backer Iran in a bind.

It is less clear whether Israel has a workable strategy to achieve its declared war aim: to make the north of Israel safe to live in again.

Although Israel has killed most of Hezbollah’s top leaders and destroyed a significant portion of its missile stockpile, the Lebanese Shia militia still has a large arsenal and tens of thousands of trained fighters. It continues to fire rockets at northern Israel and refuses to contemplate a ceasefire until Israel ends its war in Gaza with Palestinian militants Hamas.

Iran’s large-scale missile attack on Israel on Tuesday, which Israel has vowed to respond to forcefully, showed that the wars around Israel’s borders are already shading into a bigger regional fight as Tehran tries to signal that it won’t stand by while its allies and proxies are pommeled.

Hezbollah weapons seized by the Israeli army. Picture: AFP

But the Iranian leadership’s appetite for an all-out conflagration remains limited, so far, and Israel is showing no sign that Iran’s missile threat is deterring it from exploiting the current opportunity to inflict damage on Hezbollah.

Israel is still far from regaining the security that it lost a year ago when the Middle East’s latest round of war began.

This week’s invasion of parts of Lebanon’s southern border zone by Israeli ground forces puts Israel on the cusp of a dilemma. Airstrikes and limited ground raids on border villages are unlikely to be enough to end the threat from Hezbollah and restore the Israeli population’s sense of security.

But by occupying a buffer zone inside Lebanon, Israel could give Hezbollah the opportunity to fight a protracted insurgency against the Israeli army, while rallying support in Lebanon and rebuilding its own ranks.

Fierce fighting in southern Lebanon has already led to the death of eight Israeli soldiers, the country’s military said on Wednesday, including several members of the elite Egoz Unit, which was founded for counter-guerrilla warfare against Hezbollah.

“The air war the Israelis have fought has been highly successful. If they stay on the ground, it will give Hezbollah the war it wants,” said Hussein Ibish, senior resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a think tank in Washington.

A close up the seized Hezbollah weapons. Picture: AFP

The Lebanese militant group began its barrages on northern Israel on Oct. 8 last year, a day after the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that started the war. Tens of thousands of civilians were evacuated from both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border as Israel returned fire on Hezbollah and limited fighting continued for 11 months.

Last month, however, Israel went for the jugular against Hezbollah, wounding swaths of the group’s leading members by detonating its pagers and walkie-talkies, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top officials in an airstrike last Friday and bombing many of the militia’s missiles and launchers.

Hezbollah has so far not responded by attacking Israeli cities with large numbers of long-range missiles. But Israel’s military believes the militants could still regroup and launch a heavy strike.

The goal of Israel’s ground incursion so far is to destroy tunnels and weaponry that Hezbollah had prepared near the Israel-Lebanon border for a possible attack, according to several Israeli officials informed about the operation. They said Israel’s military didn’t intend the incursion to turn into a large-scale land war in Lebanon.

An Israeli strike on the cross-border Lebanese village of Yaron. Picture: AFP

But, as one Israeli official admitted, events in war can develop their own dynamic. “It is not on our mind,” the official said of an expanding invasion, “but of course we can be dragged into such a scenario.” Israel’s biggest invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, was also supposed to be limited in scope. But Israeli forces ended up besieging Beirut as they chased their adversary, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, deeper into the country. Israeli forces eventually pulled back to a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah fought a drawn-out guerrilla war against them until Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000.

Two other Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon, in 1978 and 2006, inflicted substantial damage on Lebanon but didn’t achieve lasting security gains for Israel.

Rather than repeating those experiences, Israel’s latest war in Lebanon is more likely to resemble its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, said Sanam Vakil, head of the Middle East program at London-based think tank Chatham House.

In Gaza, Israel’s military has used raids and airstrikes to destroy as much of Hamas’s fighting force, weaponry and system of tunnels as it can, while holding two corridors across the strip.

“As in Gaza, I expect they will use the threat of a long-term presence as a bargaining tool in negotiations,” said Vakil. The incursion would easily turn into an extended occupation of a buffer zone, which would help Hezbollah to galvanise its rank and file, she said.

Some Israeli officials say the endgame is to reach a ceasefire agreement that would include Hezbollah’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon and its disarmament, while Lebanese government troops and United Nations peacekeepers take control of the country’s border zone with Israel.

That would spare Israel from a protracted occupation or endless raids. But there are considerable obstacles to such a deal.

Hezbollah has so far defied all Israeli pressure to decouple its rocket fire from the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Talks over a ceasefire in Gaza have fizzled out, despite months of mediation efforts by the U.S. and Arab states, after both Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dug their heels in over the terms.

Another problem for any ceasefire in Lebanon is who Israel could potentially do a deal with. Israel’s elimination of Nasrallah and many other senior commanders has left the Islamist group rudderless and in disarray for now.

“A deal would need a Hezbollah leader who is a credible person — for the Israelis, for the Hezbollah organisation, and for the Iranians,” said Ofer Fridman, a war-studies scholar at King’s College London.

With Iran also stepping up its involvement, how Israel’s fourth war in Lebanon develops depends on many parties’ actions and reactions, said Fridman.

“War is a tango,” he said. “Therefore whatever the Israelis’ plan is, it’s not necessarily what’s going to happen.”

The Wall Street Journal