What Happened?
On Sunday, August 25, Hezbollah launched over 300 rockets at targets in Israel, claiming in the first of two communiques that this was a response to the assassination by Israel of senior Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr. The statement continued that Hezbollah had launched a large number of drones “deep inside Israel and toward a qualitative military target, which would be announced later.” In an evening speech, Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, identified the target as the Glilot base of the 8200 intelligence unit, near Tel Aviv. The party also released a second statement in which it affirmed the “full success” of its operation, and listed other military targets it had hit, including four in the occupied Golan Heights. It declared that its operation was “over and completed,” and Nasrallah declared that the Lebanese could now “relax.”
According to the secretary general, the timing of the operation coincided with the end of the 40-day mourning period after Ashoura. What was interesting was that that most Western and Israeli media outlets led with reports that Israel’s air force had pre-emptively struck Hezbollah, something Nasrallah and the party pushed hard against in their statements. Hezbollah noted that the Israeli claims of a pre-emptive strike were “empty and incompatible with facts on the ground.” For Hezbollah, this was important, since it suggested the party’s operation was a success and had not been penetrated by Israel. It also showed how both sides were trying to control the narrative, since the Israeli version, as described by the Times of Israel for example, was that the party sought to carry out “a major attack on central and northern Israel,” or even on civilian targets such as Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. Nasrallah underlined that Hezbollah had no intention of hitting civilian targets or infrastructure, only military bases that had participated in Shukr’s killing. Many observers believed that if Hezbollah limited its retaliation to military installations, this would make it easier to avoid a regional conflagration.
Why Is It Important?
The fact that both sides reportedly expressed a desire to go no further suggests that a major war has been averted. Hezbollah’s operation came several weeks after the Shukr assassination, and that of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Both Iran and the party had delayed retaliating, in part to allow the ceasefire talks over Gaza to proceed, according to Nasrallah; but also perhaps because of the presence of U.S. warships in the region and a fear that Israel was seeking to provoke a conflict between them and the United States. Until now, there are no signs that Iran will repeat what it did in April, when it launched a large number of missiles and drones against Israel.
Indeed, on August 20, the spokesman of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Gen. Ali Mohammed Naeni hinted that the Iranians might react differently to the Haniyeh assassination, stating, “Time is on our side, and it’s possible that the waiting period for the response could take a long time ... [and] will not be a repeat of previous operations.” Meanwhile, Iran’s delegation at the United Nations and a former IRGC commander, Mohsen Reza’i, separately cast doubt on whether the Iranian response would be imminent. The UN delegation observed that retaliation “must avoid any negative repercussions on a ceasefire in Gaza,” while Reza’i stressed that it would be “calculated” and must not allow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “who is drowning in a quagmire, to escape from it.”
Oddly enough, Israel’s claim that it had had carried out pre-emptive strikes against Hezbollah gave it the latitude to avoid a major escalation in Lebanon. At the same time, by allowing Hezbollah to bomb Israel, the Iranians have shown that the so-called Resistance Axis it leads is willing and capable of maintaining deterrence against Israel, regardless of the U.S. naval presence in the Mediterranean. This means that Iran can take its time and prepare other ways of hitting back at the Israelis for the Haniyeh killing.
What Are the Implications for the Future?
One of the first questions after the attack was whether the Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo, also scheduled for August 25, would go ahead. Israel announced that its delegation would be present, indicating that it believed the violence in Lebanon was contained for now. While a new ceasefire proposal was on the table, there was little optimism that this version, which implicitly but not explicitly allowed Israel to maintain troops along the Philadelphi corridor separating Gaza from Egypt, would satisfy Hamas. Hezbollah and Iran are keen to see a ceasefire in Gaza, and it’s possible that the Hezbollah attack shortly before the talks were about to resume was also a means of putting pressure on the United States to raise the heat on the Israelis, at a time when Netanyahu has been adding conditions for a ceasefire agreement, making Hamas’s acceptance increasingly improbable.
Even though Hezbollah’s retaliation is likely to end here, several questions remain unanswered. First, when and how will Iran respond to the Haniyeh killing? Even if Iranian officials hinted that an imminent attack against Israel was unlikely, all agreed that some action was inevitable. By bombing Israel now, Hezbollah has bought Tehran room to maneuver. Iran may, for instance, conceivably decide to assassinate a senior Israeli figure instead of trying to bomb Israel.
A second unanswered question is whether Netanyahu will again try to bring about a confrontation between Iran and the United States, which has long been his objective. The Haniyeh assassination was not the first such effort. Last April, Israel killed several IRGC generals at Iran’s Embassy in Damascus, in what many people, including President Joe Biden, saw as an effort to provoke a war between Washington and Tehran. Netanyahu faced no U.S. pushback for that move, and even less so for the Shukr and Haniyeh assassinations. Therefore, nothing guarantees he won’t try once more.
A third unanswered question is what will it take for the United States to force a Gaza ceasefire on an Israeli prime minister who wants to pursue his military campaign against the Palestinians, and ensure Gaza becomes unlivable? Only such an outcome can guarantee that, in the coming years, Palestinians will slowly abandon the territory and reduce the Arab demographic majority between the Mediterranean and Jordan River. This is taking place at a time when, Israel is also making life very difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank, encouraging them to depart in what is a softer form of ethnic cleansing. Without a ceasefire, the prospect of further escalations in Lebanon will only increase. Yet until now, the Biden administration has shown remarkable tolerance for Netanyahu’s obstructive tactics, with the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, making repeated trips to the region, each one more useless than the last.
