As Hezbollah Pursued a Limited War, Israel Went for a Knockout

As Hezbollah Pursued a Limited War, Israel Went for a Knockout

The militia group seemed content to trade blows with Israel while avoiding a major conflict. A strike that killed its leader proves it miscalculated.

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By Ben Hubbard

Reporting from Istanbul

Weeks after Hamas launched the surprise attack on Israel that started the Gaza war last October, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, laid out his group’s approach to the war.

Speaking by video link from a secret location, he said that Hezbollah sought to strike a balance between launching cross-border attacks on Israel in support of Hamas and avoiding an all-out war.

“Some in Lebanon say that we are taking a risk,” he said. “But this risk is part of a beneficial, correct calculation.”

That calculation has failed dramatically over the last two weeks, as Israel has launched an escalating series of attacks on the group. The campaign has already incapacitated thousands of rank-and-file Hezbollah members by blowing up their electronic devices and killed many of the group’s senior leaders in airstrikes.

On Friday, Israel’s military targeted Mr. Nasrallah himself, dropping powerful bombs on what it said was the group’s headquarters near Beirut. Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed his death on Saturday.

“Hezbollah believed that the deterrence game with Israel was essentially even,” said Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “And the Israelis have shown that it was not.”

Mr. Nasrallah led Hezbollah for more than three decades, and his death deprives it of an experienced leader who enjoyed nearly mythical status among the group’s Shiite Muslim base.

In deciding to lead Hezbollah into a new battle with Israel, Mr. Nasrallah appears to have assumed that the fighting could be contained, and that Israel’s exhaustion from its war in Gaza and fear of the damage that Hezbollah’s missiles and commandos could cause in Israel would keep it from responding with too much force.

That strategy largely worked for many months, as Israel and Hezbollah bombed and shelled each other across the Lebanon-Israel border but largely avoided larger attacks.

But in recent weeks, Israeli leaders, facing domestic pressure to find a way for tens of thousands of Israelis who had fled the country’s north to return home, swiftly escalated their attacks. The sustained effort has sown disarray inside Hezbollah and hobbled its ability to respond.

Israel had two advantages against Hezbollah. First, its intelligence services deeply penetrated the group, allowing it to track and kill a large number of mid- and high-level commanders.

“They managed to infiltrate Hezbollah very deeply so that they seem to have known everything, where the leaders are and where and when they are meeting,” Mr. Young said.

Even after Israel’s assassinations made clear that it was tracking the group’s leaders, Hezbollah does not appear to have adjusted its security protocols to avoid further targeting. Last week, Israel killed Ibrahim Aqeel, who headed Hezbollah’s elite commando force, while he met with other military commanders. Mr. Nasrallah appears to have been targeted inside Hezbollah’s headquarters during another meeting with other Hezbollah officials.

Israel’s second advantage was that Mr. Nasrallah’s actions showed that he was reluctant to respond to Israel’s attacks in ways that most likely would have expanded the war.

After Israel killed the head of Hezbollah’s military operations in an airstrike near Beirut in July, Hezbollah did not mount a significant response.

The group had long boasted that it had powerful missiles that could hit cities deep inside of Israel, and Israeli leaders worried that Hezbollah could hit sensitive infrastructure with precision-guided missiles or send commandos to storm Israeli communities. But those capabilities, if they had not been disabled by Israel’s attacks, remained largely unused.

“At every level of escalation, Hezbollah was not able to keep up with the Israelis,” Mr. Young said.

So Israel swiftly escalated, stepping up the targeted killings of Hezbollah leaders and intensively bombing Hezbollah strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon, attacks that have killed more than 700 people over the past week, many of them civilians. Israeli officials have said that they are seeking to avoid a ground invasion of Lebanon by significantly degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities and eliminating its leadership.

By going after and killing Mr. Nasrallah himself on Friday, Israel may be hoping that taking out the group’s revered leader would serve as a kind of knockout blow.