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

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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 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 Hezbollah’s most senior and secretive military figures as they held covert meetings near Beirut. And in between those strikes, Israel incapacitated hundreds, if not thousands, of the group’s rank-and-file members by remotely 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, and other ranking Hezbollah militants 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 of 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 to push past that equation 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 Radwan force, an elite combat unit, had been killed in the airstrike on Friday, and Hezbollah on Saturday announced the deaths of about a dozen other fighters, including Ahmed Wahbi, another ranking commander. The Israeli military said that at least 16 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the strike on Mr. Aqeel, but did not identify them.

The attack, in 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 ministry said the toll from the strike had risen to 37 dead, including three children, and 68 wounded. In the aftermath, Lebanese families circulated images of missing relatives on social media, including children. Overall, 70 people have been killed in Lebanon since Tuesday, and about 3,000 injured.

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.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 dragged back to Gaza, damaging Israel’s sense of security and changing how its leaders thought about the threats on their borders.

Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza that aimed to destroy the group. Months of cease-fire negotiations have failed to stop the violence, and the Gaza health authorities say that more than 41,000 people have been killed.

Israel’s tolerance for Hezbollah’s military presence on its northern border has also declined, and even before this past week Israeli officials regularly called for stepped-up attacks on the group.

“It has been very clear since the first months of the war that Israel is saying, ‘This threat that we lived with for 18 years, we are not able to live with it any more,’” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “‘We can’t have this massive force on our northern border.’”

Underpinning the status quo before the Gaza war was an Israeli resistance to risking losses and sustaining damage compared with the professed willingness of Hezbollah fighters to die for their cause, Mr. Salem said. That dynamic, too, has changed.

“The simple threat of Hezbollah causing damage no longer has the same effect on Israel that it had before Oct. 7,” he said.

This past week, Israel dramatically upended how it fights Hezbollah by infiltrating the group’s supply chain to booby-trap thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies, severely disrupting its communications, in addition to conventional airstrikes like the one that killed Mr. Aqeel and other commanders. That combination has constricted Hezbollah’s ability to respond.

“Hezbollah has been backed into a corner by Israel,” said Ms. Khatib of Chatham House. “Even if its military arsenal remains intact, its ability to deploy it has been curtailed.”

On Friday, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said that Israel would continue its “series of actions in the new stage” of its conflict with Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the border area can return home. Some experts view that language as suggesting that Israel’s plans could include a ground invasion.

In a speech on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leaders said they welcomed such a step. Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and fighting on their own turf could give its guerrilla fighters an advantage.

Despite Israel’s superior firepower, it has not managed to defeat Hamas in 11 months of brutal combat in Gaza, whose borders are closed. Hezbollah is widely regarded as a more sophisticated force and could take advantage of Lebanon’s open borders to rearm in a way that Hamas cannot.