Will Hezbollah and Israel go to war? The Lebanon conflict explained
Lebanon and Israel have so far avoided anything like the 2006 war, but Hezbollah’s latest attack has increased tensions.
Asked how he managed the newly conquered Levant, which included present-day Lebanon, Syria and Israel, the 7th-century Muslim caliph Muawiya responded: “It’s as if I and the people are grasping a strand of hair. If they pull, I relax. When they relax, I pull.”
Hezbollah and Israel will be testing that strand of hair in the coming days. For ten months, they have pulled it back and forth, never to the splitting point of all-out war.
Saturday’s rocket attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 teenagers and children playing in a football field, may appear to be that moment, but the calculations that have so far motivated both sides to avoid a repeat of their devastating 2006 war remain.
Hezbollah, which has studiously announced every cross-border attack on Israel over the past ten months, understands the gravity of the moment. It very quickly denied having fired the rocket. Its protests notwithstanding, the Lebanese Shia militant group that controls the country’s south was certainly the culprit.
Its denial speaks to the so-called Islamic resistance’s embarrassment at having massacred a dozen children belonging to a religious minority that wields power in Lebanon - a massacre on what it considers Israeli-occupied Syrian territory, no less.
It also suggests that the hardened Iran-backed militants, who want to show their solidarity with Hamas in Gaza but avoid devastating Lebanon, experienced a moment of saucer-eyed fear that they had just broken Muawiya’s hair.
Israel will of course respond in a way so far unseen in its low-intensity war against Hezbollah, which has consisted of airstrikes that killed several hundred Hezbollah militants, including senior commanders, and caused dozens of civilian casualties along the way. Hezbollah has emptied out the villages of northern Israel with its rocket and drone attacks, also killing civilians and soldiers.
This is different, however. Saturday’s rocket strike caused the largest single-day civilian loss of life on Israeli-occupied land since Hamas raided Israeli towns and villages on October 7, massacring more than 1,100 Israelis. The attack, which led to the war in Gaza and conflict with Hezbollah, shook Israel’s sense of deterrence, and before Saturday’s attack it had spent ten months trying to restore it.
Israeli leaders have said they will strike Hezbollah hard, and in ways not yet seen. That is probably true, but they also have reason to be cautious. Despite its denials, Hezbollah knows that it has blundered. It had been playing a game of brinksmanship that has probably backfired, and it is now in perhaps its weakest position since the start of the war.
Lebanon’s foreign minister has said the group is willing to pull away from the border if Israel stops its attack and that he has received indications that the Israeli response will be limited, as will be Hezbollah’s.
If this claim is correct, the tragic incident in the village of Majdal Shams may provide - once Israel’s revenge is exacted - an off-ramp allowing both sides to avoid a war that neither side asked for.
For Israel, an all-out war with a militant group that has far superior firepower than Hamas would be challenging after nearly ten months of fighting in Gaza.
Hezbollah holds sway in Lebanon, but it has other powerful factions to manage. Those include the Druze, a minority in Syria, Lebanon and Israel that professes loyalty to each country. Those in Israel serve in the cabinet and have commanding positions in the military, although many of the Druze residents of the Golan Heights turned down Israeli citizenship after Israel occupied the territory during the 1967 war with Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
In Lebanon, the minority is led by Walid Jumblatt, a nimble politician who has, on the surface at least, made his peace with Hezbollah. However, during the 2006 war, Jumblatt told me that he hoped Israel would finish the job against Hezbollah and disarm them - something he no doubt now wishes had happened.
The Times
