Israel moved military forces into southern Lebanese territory Monday, an invasion that marks a major new level of intensity in about a year of conflict with Hezbollah. The paramilitary organization fired rockets at Israeli positions in the Shebaa Farms the day after Oct. 7 “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people after Hamas’ attacks on Israel. (That area is a disputed territory which Lebanon and Syria say belongs to Lebanon, and Israel controls and says belongs to Syria.) Hezbollah, sometimes called a state within a state, is backed by Iran and does not have widespread support in Lebanon.
Then Tuesday, Iran fired about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, citing last week’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and, this summer, the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
The Biden administration has long opposed an Israeli incursion into Lebanon. But in the past year, the administration has also been unwilling to take any meaningful steps to rein in Israel's behavior, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is acting boldly to assert more dominance in the region and degrade Israel’s adversaries — with a continued disregard for civilian lives. Israeli airstrikes have struck medical facilities and already killed hundreds of civilians in Lebanon. The probability of a regional war seems to be growing by the day.
To better understand the unfolding conflict, I called Nick Blanford, a Beirut-based fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of “Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.”
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Zeeshan Aleem: What is happening right now and how do we know when to say whether this is a new war?
Nicholas Blanford: I think you have to put the developments of the last few weeks into some context. One day after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Hezbollah staged a pro forma attack against Israeli positions along the Lebanon-Israel border, and it dedicated this attack to its allies — Hamas in Gaza. But very quickly it turned into a kind of a tit-for-tat, daily attacks. The Hezbollah guys would attack Israeli military positions along the border; the Israelis would retaliate with artillery fire airstrikes into south Lebanon. And this really continued from October almost uninterrupted.
I would say we are in a war but it is not yet full scale.
NICHOLAS BLANFORD
There was a clear moment in September when Israel’s patience ran out. And they escalated in a very dramatic fashion, by detonating thousands of pagers which they’d been able, apparently, to booby trap. The following day, they detonated hundreds of walkie-talkies. That was followed up by intense airstrikes across areas of Lebanon where Hezbollah has a presence. And those attacks have intensified over the past two weeks, climaxing on Sept. 27 with the massive airstrike on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in south Beirut, which killed the veteran Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who has led the group for 32 years. The latest development is the advance of some elite Israeli army units into southern Lebanon where they have reportedly already taken some casualties.
So I would say we are in a war but it is not yet full scale. Both sides are mainly hitting military targets, not infrastructure as well, although hundreds of civilians have been killed in Lebanon.
Could you give us a brief primer on Hezbollah? How it emerged, what it is, what it believes in and its social function in Lebanon?
Blanford: Hezbollah is a Shia Muslim organization that follows the Iranian, theocratic system of rule. Hezbollah has a secretary general — most recently the late Nasrallah — but the true leader of Hezbollah is the spiritual leader of Iran, currently, Ali Khamenei. He’s the ultimate authority and, in general, the Iranians will set the strategic agenda.
Hezbollah emerged after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to kick out the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was deployed in strength in south Lebanon. The Israelis in ‘82 reached all the way to Beirut and then they gradually withdrew. By 1985, they were occupying a border strip along the Lebanon-Israel border and Hezbollah became the main resistance force against that Israeli occupation. Particularly during the 1990s, Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran but also supported by neighboring Syria, was able to deal blow after blow to the Israeli occupation forces, and that culminated in May 2000 with Israel pulling out of south Lebanon.
Hezbollah refused to put down its arms after the Israelis left. They said, ‘We need to keep our arms, our military force, to deter Israel from coming back into south Lebanon.’ But there was also another unspoken reason, which is that Hezbollah gradually became a source of deterrence for Iran — especially after the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 when it expanded very quickly and acquired a great deal of weaponry from Iran, Syria and elsewhere. So, for Iran, Hezbollah has now become a major force multiplier.
Hezbollah has a slightly schizophrenic character, because it is ideologically beholden to the Islamic leadership of Iran, but of course it is a Lebanese organization. It survives or falls depending on the support it gets from the Lebanese Shia community, which is why, since the beginning, Hezbollah has invested a lot in social welfare organizations.
The Shia population of Lebanon tends to be traditionally fairly downtrodden. They live in the poorer areas of the country, traditionally neglected by central governments. And Hezbollah really stepped in with schools, with hospitals, with repairing war damaged houses, even things like helping farmers with agricultural aid. It’s become an indispensable organization for the Lebanese Shia community. So they’ve been able to maintain that support since the early 1980s.
Other communities: the Christians and Sunnis, in particular, the Druze, to an extent, [say] ‘Well, hang on a minute. We do have a national army. Why do we need a Shia militia, armed to the teeth, stronger than many armies around the world, to defend Lebanon?’ So there have been growing calls for Hezbollah to disarm, and this is why Hezbollah has moved deeper into Lebanese politics, particularly over the last 19 years, since the 2005 parliamentary elections.
What are the fundamental dynamics driving how Hezbollah and Israel’s government see each other, both in terms of geopolitical interests and domestic political interests?
Blanford: Ideologically, Hezbollah and Iran want to see the end of Israel, and the restitution of Palestine to the Palestinians. They have in the past assisted Palestinians during the Al Aqsa Intifada. They would help the Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza fight the Israelis. But in the past, they didn’t get directly involved. When they kicked the Israelis out of Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah didn’t immediately rush across the border into Israel and say, “We’re going to go and liberate Jerusalem now.” There’s an acknowledgment that it’s up to the Palestinians to liberate themselves, but Hezbollah is definitely there to help.
When you look at it more realistically, the reason why Hezbollah is so powerful now is because the Iranians want them to be. We go back to this notion of Hezbollah forming a key role in Iran’s deterrence architecture: The stronger Hezbollah becomes, the safer Iran feels.
The Institute for National Security Studies, a leading think tank in Israel, has for the past few years described Hezbollah as Israel’s greatest threat, which is quite remarkable in itself, because we’re not talking about a country, we’re talking about an organization, albeit one that is backed by a powerful regional country.
The Israelis have watched Hezbollah grow stronger and stronger. What the Israelis are doing now is something they haven’t dared to do before, and that is to really go for broke with Hezbollah. What’s interesting is I think the Israelis are gambling that Hezbollah and the Iranians do not want a full-scale war with Israel right now. Why? Because if there is a full-scale war, whatever the outcome, Hezbollah will take a huge battering, as indeed we’re seeing now, and there’s no guarantee that Hezbollah will be able to rebuild, rearm and re-equip as quickly as it did after the 2006 war to continue serving as a deterrence for Iran. In other words, if Hezbollah gets engaged in a full-scale war now, Iran could lose its major deterrence factor in that war, and all this would be for the sake of coming to the support of Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is small fry compared to Hezbollah — Hezbollah is much, much, much more important to Iran than Hamas. Which is why Hezbollah is still acting with a certain amount of restraint despite Israel’s escalated action against it. Hezbollah still has not used its arsenal of precision-guided missiles.
In some respects, the Israeli ground maneuver could play right into Hezbollah’s hands, as the Israelis are entering terrain that Hezbollah has had for 18 years.
Nicholas Blanford
It’s a dangerous gamble. It could go wrong. Especially now that Israeli troops are operating on the ground in south Lebanon, Hezbollah’s home turf. The current conflict could spill into a major war. We’re still below that threshold moment, but if it happens, it has a potential to go regional, dragging in Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Can you walk us through the different scenarios you see unfolding here?
Blanford: The least likely one is that a cease-fire comes in. The Americans and the French had an idea for a 21-day cease-fire to calm things down along the Lebanon-Israel border. Netanyahu has rejected it. So that’s not going to happen..
A second scenario is that what we’re seeing now continues. The Israelis haven’t started hitting Lebanese infrastructure, power stations, bridges, roads, the airports, seaports; they are focusing on Hezbollah military targets by using air power and now ground forces, albeit in a limited manner. Hezbollah, by the same token, is striking back at Israeli military targets. They haven’t been hitting Israeli infrastructure. Now this could go on even at this heightened rate. But under current circumstances, I suspect that Hezbollah will continue doing what it’s doing — in other words, absorb these blows that the Israelis have inflicted, and keep firing rockets into Israel.
In some respects, the Israeli ground maneuver could play right into Hezbollah’s hands, as the Israelis are entering terrain that Hezbollah has had for 18 years [and Hezbollah has been able] to prepare for exactly this eventuality. When the Israelis did move into Lebanon in 2006 after two weeks of aerial bombing, they came in for a big surprise. They didn’t understand Hezbollah’s underground bunker networks, its ambush positions, firing positions.
You could have a similar scenario this time round, albeit on a larger scale, where the Israelis, who have a better understanding of what Hezbollah is about these days, could come in in force for what they would describe perhaps as a limited incursion to basically rubble-ize and depopulate this broad strip of south Lebanon. But they risk losing a lot of troops because they’re going to be operating in Hezbollah’s environment. And at the end of it, if the mission is successful, what do you do then? Do you reoccupy south Lebanon? If so, you’ve gone back to the situation between 1978 and 2000 and that didn’t end too well for the Israelis. But if you pull back to the border, then what is to stop Hezbollah basically moving back into the border district and beginning to rebuild?
There could come a point when the Israelis say, ‘We’ve hit all the targets from the air and our soldiers are fighting on the ground but Hezbollah is still firing rockets across the border.’ And this is where perhaps a third scenario can kick in: The Israelis conclude that, well, we’re going to have to escalate this even further by deploying a larger number of troops into Lebanon to expand the target set to include Lebanese infrastructure as well. It could be at that point that Hezbollah, with Iranian blessing, feels it has no choice but to launch its precision-guided systems at Israeli military and infrastructure targets. This is where the conflict could go regional.
What role does the U.S. have in all this, and what advice would you give to the Biden administration on how to prevent a full-scale regional war from breaking out?
Blanford: Yes, a regional war potentially could happen. If the Iranians assess that Hezbollah is about to get bludgeoned by Israel, they may conclude, ‘We’ve got nothing left to lose. We’re about to lose Hezbollah. Let’s go large. We’ll activate all our proxies across the region, and we’ll give it a go and see what happens to Israel.’
I think the Biden administration is in a difficult position. President Biden is enormously frustrated with Netanyahu, partly because of the Gaza conflict going on for so long. But he has been urging Netanyahu since the get-go to not open a second front with Hezbollah. Now you could argue that a second front was open anyway, because of these simmering tit-for-tat attacks that have been going on across the Lebanon-Israel border since October. But these attacks were containable. Hezbollah has said, ‘Look, this is a support front that we’re doing. Once the war in Gaza ends, we’re going to stop.’ So the emphasis has been very much on trying to conclude a cease-fire deal in Gaza, which will then have a trickle-down effect and should stabilize the Lebanon-Israel border. But of course, we haven’t had a Gaza cease-fire. The conflict continues, and now the Israelis clearly have lost patience with Hezbollah and have gone large.
There’s very little that the Biden administration feels it can do, particularly when you’ve got a very close election coming up in just over a month now. So the Biden administration could do what it’s done before, and then suspend arms shipments to Israel, but this time do it properly. Cut off all military support to Israel. That would put a lot of pressure on Netanyahu to start picking up the phone and listening when Biden calls. But I don’t think they’re going to do that because there’ll be a political backlash in the United States, and that could affect Kamala Harris’ chances against Donald Trump. I think Netanyahu is taking advantage of this and is going for it.
