Fighting is underway between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters along the Israel-Lebanon border, and the IDF has begun a limited ground incursion.
What is yet unclear: How many will fight, how long they will stay there, how many people will be killed and whether the blazing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, after a year of bloodshed, will cross the tipping point into a broader regional conflict. Also unclear is what it will take to secure Israel’s north enough that civilians who have been evacuated from the region for a year can safely return.
What is clear is that Israel seems intent on striking a decisive blow against a terror group that has, for decades, posed a formidable threat — even in the face of potentially steep costs.
Over the past year, Hezbollah has rained missiles on Israel on a near-daily basis, with Israel returning fire. For most of that time, the conflict seemed like a sideshow compared to the focus of Israel’s military campaign: the grueling war against Hamas in Gaza. But over the past two weeks things have changed: Israel has killed Hezbollah’s leader and many of his deputies; killed many key figures in the terror group’s elite Radwan Force; depleted the terror group’s missile stock; and girded its own population for yet another war on its border.
Israelis appear to support a war in Lebanon. But previous incursions into the country have had inconclusive results and cost Israel in terms of soldiers’ lives and international standing.
The first few decades of Israel’s existence saw it fight repeated wars against Egypt and Syria. The past few decades have seen it fight repeated wars against Hamas and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah was founded in the wake of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. That invasion was aimed primarily at another erstwhile foe — the Palestine Liberation Organization. But soon Israeli soldiers found themselves fighting Hezbollah, an Islamist terror group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Hezbollah also killed hundreds of American soldiers in two attacks in 1983, on the US Embassy and a military barracks.
Israeli soldiers occupied the so-called “security zone” — a strip of southern Lebanon — until 2000, to try to keep terror groups from the border, and primarily faced attacks from Hezbollah. Six years after a hurried, unilateral Israeli withdrawal, the two sides clashed again when Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid. Israel invaded Lebanon again, but the war is widely considered a fiasco in Israel: More than 100 Israeli soldiers and hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were killed, as were dozens of Israeli civilians and more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians.
Most importantly, Hezbollah remained intact. The terror group has ignored United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 — the diplomatic move that ended the 2006 war — which required it to withdraw to north of the Litani River and would have created a buffer in southern Lebanon.
Since then, Hezbollah has been Iran’s most well-funded proxy, a force estimated at as many as 100,000 fighters (but with perhaps less than half that number) and hundreds of thousands of missiles. Its rockets and precision-guided missiles could reach virtually all of Israel.
Over that time, Israel has regularly bombed weapons shipments to Hezbollah, and it has upgraded its rocket and missile defense mechanisms. But until last fall, the two sides had refrained from another major conflict.
One day after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, Hezbollah started shelling Israel’s north. The missiles have continued unabated for nearly a year, aside from when Hezbollah abided by a weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas in November.
Israel has bombed Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, and altogether, hundreds of the group’s fighters have been killed, as were dozens of civilians on both sides and more than 20 Israeli soldiers. The border area in both countries is a no-man’s-land. And with tens of thousands of Israelis from the north living as evacuees in hotels for nearly a year, support for striking a harsher blow against Hezbollah has risen.
A survey last month found nearly two-thirds of Israelis overall supported fighting Hezbollah, while only about a quarter supported a ceasefire deal with the group.
And Israel seems like it’s heeding that call. The last few weeks have seen a series of eye-popping operations from Israel’s military and intelligence systems: exploding pagers that wounded thousands and killed dozens (in an attack not claimed by Israel); strikes on Hezbollah leaders; explosions of Hezbollah weapons depots. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to authorities there whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and gunmen.
Then, over the weekend, Israel killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. He was the face and embodiment of Hezbollah — its head for more than 30 years and an arch-nemesis of Israel. An analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations concludes, “The group has likely been rendered operationally inert — at least for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Nasrallah has no clear successors given his unique and unrivaled stature at the top of the movement.”
Yet the group is signaling that it has a lot of fight left. In a videotaped address released Monday, a top Hezbollah official said all of the slain members could be replaced and said the attacks on Israel so far represented a “minimum” effort for the group.
Israel isn’t stopping with Nasrallah’s assassination. On Monday, Israeli forces and artillery were fighting on the border and troops were massing for an invasion. Israel notified the United States of its plans for a ground operation, and limited ground incursions began overnight.
Israeli soldiers have been conducting training exercises on Lebanon’s border for months, in anticipation of a war to clear Hezbollah out of a range where it can shoot anti-tank fire at Israeli towns, removing a major threat. The pager operation also revealed that Israel has been tracking and plotting against the terror group for a long time. So in a sense, as opposed to when it was caught flat-footed by Hamas on October 7, Israel’s military may be prepared for fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But as many Israeli combat veterans know from previous conflicts, Lebanon is an unforgiving terrain. It’s mountainous, and, even leaderless, Hezbollah has long been entrenched there. Southern Lebanon is much larger than Gaza, where Israel has been fighting a difficult war for a year — though it has many fewer residents.
“Hezbollah today is far more formidable [than in 2000], and even if it suffered more losses than it felt it could handle, the bulk of its forces could retreat away from the border region and simply return when Israel left, or conduct regular guerrilla attacks at a time of its choosing should Israeli forces stay,” an analysis in Foreign Policy concluded.
There is also the question of what another war will do to Israeli society. Israel sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the southern front after October 7, with many men spending months away from family and work. Hundreds have been killed in Gaza. While there is broad Israeli support for increased fighting in Lebanon to end the missile fire from the north, it also means another massive call-up of already exhausted Israeli reservists — just as Israelis had hoped to carve out a measure of solace during High Holiday season.
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