Israel takes its conflict with Hezbollah to the brink of war

As Israeli jets continued to pound Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, and Hezbollah extended its barrage of rocket fire ever deeper into Israeli territory, concerns grew that brinkmanship could tip the Middle East into a wider regional war.

For the time being, Hezbollah appears unwilling to raise the stakes. The heavily armed militia “is ready” for an all-out war, says one of its fighters in Beirut, but is “trying to avoid” such an outcome for fear of heavy civilian casualties. “But if we are pushed into a corner, yes, we will fight,” he says.

Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, also appears cautious. “We do not want to be the cause of instability in the Middle East,” Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian told reporters in New York on Monday. “Its consequences could be irreversible.”

But he pledged that Tehran would “defend any group that is defending its rights and itself,” and later told CNN that “Hezbollah cannot stand alone against a country that is being defended and supported and supplied” by the U.S. and Western countries.

Israel, meanwhile, is acting unusually belligerently, stepping up hostilities last week with two mass attacks on Hezbollah communications networks. In the most lethal day of conflict in Lebanon for decades, on Monday, 558 people died as Israel struck 1,600 targets and claimed to have destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rockets.

“Israel is on the fast track to war, even if the public has not been told,” military analyst Amos Harel wrote in Tuesday’s Ha’aretz newspaper.

Who wants war, who doesn’t?

This has put Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an awkward spot, as he seeks to maintain his group’s credibility while avoiding all-out war that could leave Hezbollah in shreds. Balancing those two considerations will not be easy in the middle of such a swift spiral of escalation, this time driven by Israel, after a year of carefully calibrated increases in Hezbollah rocket fire.

“It is evident from Hezbollah’s [limited] actions that they still don’t want a war and won’t be goaded into it,” says Nicholas Blanford, author of “Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.”

“I think the Israelis have concluded that, because Hezbollah does not want a war, because Iran doesn’t want a war, it gives them more leeway to escalate, in the knowledge that there is little risk of a major blowback,” Mr. Blanford suggests.

Notably, in a bid to find an acceptable balance, Hezbollah has shown no signs yet of being ready to use its high precision long-range guided missiles that could wreak havoc on Israeli cities. Nonetheless, warns Mr. Blanford, “The intensity of fighting on both sides has risen much closer to that threshold which, when crossed, will lead to war.”

The two sides last waged an all-out conflict in 2006, for 34 days. Since then, mutual deterrence has prevailed, as each side has spent the intervening years preparing for a decisive, final fight against the other – while also avoiding such a costly and destructive battle.

Those calculations may now be changing, after a year of ever-widening regional conflict triggered by Hamas’ cross-border attack from Gaza on Oct. 7 last year, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and 250 hostages.

What’s it all about?

Israel’s declared goal for its current wave of air raids on Hezbollah rocket installations is to “change the security balance, the balance of power in the north” of Israel, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s words.

That would then make it safe for the region’s 60,000 residents to return home, after having been evacuated last October when Hezbollah, in support of Hamas in Gaza, began rocketing Israeli towns and villages in the area. Hamas is a member of the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance against Israel.

Some observers, however, see a broader aim behind the stepped-up Israeli operation than ensuring security for Israeli citizens in the north of the country.

“There appears to be a change in the Israeli approach … for something deeper – breaking down the Axis of Resistance that supports one another,” says Ehud Eiran, a professor of International Affairs at Haifa University. “If Israel can take Hezbollah out of the equation, that’s a big statement on the limitations of the [anti-Israel] alliance.”

Such an effort, though, would almost certainly provoke an Iranian response in support of the most powerful arm of its Axis of Resistance. It would likely also prompt Mr. Nasrallah to play his trump card – the precision guided missiles – in a last ditch effort to force Israel to back down.

In the meantime, says Mr. Blanford, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, “the Israelis are now intensifying, presumably in the hope that Hezbollah will say ‘OK, we give up, we’ve had enough, stop.’”

“That’s never going to happen,” he predicts. “That is not in Hezbollah’s DNA. They will not stop because that would be tantamount to surrender and defeat, and then they would face a massive backlash from the Lebanese … for dragging Lebanon into a costly war without getting anything out of it.”

Special correspondent Dina Kraft contributed reporting to this article from Tel Aviv, Israel.