Attacks on Hezbollah Alter Balance of Power in Long-Running Fight

Attacks on Hezbollah Alter Balance of Power in Long-Running Fight

A focus on mutual deterrence had kept intermittent clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border from spiraling into a major war. That equation changed this past week.

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By Ben Hubbard

reporting from Istanbul

For the second time in less than two months, Israel located and killed one of Hezbollah’s most senior and secretive military figures as he held a covert meeting with his comrades near Beirut. And in the days before his death, Israel incapacitated hundreds, if not thousands, of the group’s rank-and-file members by blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies.

Hezbollah’s response so far: calls for vengeance and routine rocket fire into northern Israel.

The assassination of the senior military leader, Ibrahim Aqeel, on Friday capped a week that threw Lebanon’s most sophisticated political and military force into deep disarray and appeared to hail a stark shift in the calculations that had long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Since the two forces effectively fought each other to a standstill in a hugely destructive war in 2006, Israel and Hezbollah have been arming up and preparing for the next major confrontation, feeding a situation of mutual deterrence that kept intermittent clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border from spiraling into another big war.

Israelis feared that a new conflict could include Hezbollah’s targeting sensitive infrastructure inside Israel and well-trained Hezbollah commandos rampaging though Israeli communities. Hezbollah knew that Israel’s air force could swiftly cause extensive destruction in Lebanon, especially in the communities from which the group draws its support.

This past week, however, Israel’s leaders decided that pushing past that equation was worth the risk and crossed what had been unofficially considered red lines. So far, it appears to have worked.

“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”

Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed that Mr. Aqeel, whom Israel described as leading Hezbollah’s elite combat unit, had been killed in the airstrike on Friday. The Israeli military said that about 10 others from Mr. Aqeel’s unit, the Radwan force, had been killed, but did not identify them.

The strike, on a densely populated area south of Beirut known as the Dahiya, brought down two eight-story buildings and terrified people across the Lebanese capital.

On Saturday, Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said the toll from the strike had risen to 31 dead, including three children, and 68 wounded. In the aftermath, Lebanese families circulated images of missing relatives on social media. Some of the missing were children.

Friday’s strike followed 11 months of tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel across the Lebanon-Israel border that killed people on both sides and forced about 150,000 residents to flee their homes. Hezbollah began striking northern Israel after the start of the war in Gaza last October, saying that it was seeking to bog down Israeli forces in support of Hamas, its ally in Gaza.