Israel and Hezbollah Flirt With Dangerous Mideast Escalation

Israel and Hezbollah are locked in an escalating cycle of violence that risks spiraling further in the aftermath of an unprecedented exchange of direct fire between Israel and Iran.

Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and political party closely allied with Iran, has engaged in a slow-burning conflict with Israel since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with the militia launching missiles and drones into Israel and Israeli forces countering with airstrikes, artillery and tank shells into Lebanon.

Israel and Iran’s most powerful client militia have intensified their conflict in recent days, heightening fears that one or the other could miscalculate and trigger a more intense confrontation. Such a scenario could result in widespread death and destruction in both Lebanon and neighboring Israel.

Avoiding a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah has been a priority for Western governments including the U.S. since the war began, with the Biden administration sending a senior White House official on several trips to the region in an effort to calm tensions. Western efforts to delink the two fronts haven’t worked. Hezbollah has halted fire only during a weeklong cease-fire in Gaza in November.

Hezbollah launched its deepest attack into Israel since Oct. 7 on Tuesday, saying it targeted an infantry brigade headquarters in the coastal city of Acre, 20 miles from the border, in retaliation for Israel’s killing of one of its engineers. The Israeli military said its air defenses intercepted two aerial targets along the country’s northern coast. The next day, the Israeli military said its warplanes struck 40 Hezbollah targets in the southern Lebanese town of Ayta ash-Shab.

A week earlier, Hezbollah targeted an Israeli site in Arab al Aramshe, a village in northern Israel, employing guided missiles and drones in what the militant group called a complex attack in retaliation for Israel’s killing of two of its members. The Israeli military confirmed that several antitank missiles and drones were fired from Lebanon toward a community center where soldiers were sleeping, wounding more than a dozen soldiers, one of whom later died. The military said it returned fire and later launched airstrikes on Hezbollah targets.

“This is the highest-risk point in terms of the Hezbollah-Israel front since the initial weeks after Oct. 7,” said Rym Momtaz, a Paris-based security analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is a lot of reconnaissance-by-fire happening, which is each side testing the limits of the other through attacks like live fire attacks.”

Israel and Iran traded direct airstrikes on each other’s territory earlier this month for the first time in a confrontation that raised concerns of a full-blown regional war. Both countries stepped back from open war after Israel chose to launch a limited strike on targets near Isfahan in response to an Iranian attack that included more than 300 missiles and drones launched at Israel.

Neither attack did heavy damage. Having avoided a direct conflict, both countries returned to their long-running shadow war, in which Iran’s approach focuses on arming militia groups such as Hezbollah. The proxy conflict is at risk of escalating across the region, including on the Israel-Lebanon border, according to security analysts and regional officials.

Significantly heightened conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could be catastrophic for both sides. During the last war between the two in 2006, Israel bombed Beirut’s civilian airport, and Hezbollah fired missiles deep into Israel. More than 1,100 people were killed in Lebanon including both civilians and combatants. About 120 Israeli soldiers were killed during the war, which included a ground incursion into southern Lebanon. More than 40 Israeli civilians were also killed.

Both sides have bulked up their military forces in the nearly two decades since, with Israel acquiring new air defenses and advanced warplanes from the U.S., and Hezbollah acquiring new missiles and other weapons from Iran. Hezbollah also has thousands of battle-tested fighters who backed Syria’s government during the country’s civil war, and a system of tunnels in southern Lebanon that is thought to rival Hamas’s own underground network in Gaza.

Hezbollah had about 150,000 artillery rockets and ballistic missiles in 2015, according to an Israeli estimate, and security analysts believe that number has risen since then. Hezbollah obscures the size of its arsenal as it tries to maintain a strategic advantage in any confrontation with Israel, analysts say.

The threat of extensive destruction has given both sides an interest in keeping the conflict from spinning out of control. That, however, has led both sides to believe they can ratchet up the intensity of their conflict without triggering an all-out war.

“Since both sides understand that they want to avoid war, they actually allow themselves more and more room to escalate over time,” said Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion, a senior researcher with Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “So as long as there’s fighting in Gaza, Hezbollah will continue with its attacks, which enhances the chances for miscalculation.”

Alongside the war in Gaza, the conflict on the Lebanon-Israel border has unsettled both countries for months. Since Oct. 7, Israeli strikes have killed at least 276 Hezbollah fighters, according to a count of their obituaries—a number comparable to those killed in the 2006 war. Tens of thousands of Lebanese and Israeli civilians have been pushed from their homes. Israeli airstrikes have hit in the capital Beirut, where a strike killed a senior Hamas leader in January, and as far north as the Bekaa Valley, about 60 miles northwest of the Israeli border.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday that the Israeli military had eliminated half of Hezbollah’s commanders in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah acknowledged the deaths of some commanders but said it wasn’t half and that they were quickly replaced. “Gallant is only selling a fake victory to the Israeli public,” said Ali Mattar, an academic and political analyst close to Hezbollah.

The killings of its members along with the displacement of large numbers of Lebanese civilians has put Hezbollah in a dilemma, analysts say. Lebanon, a country reeling from a five-year-long deep economic crisis, can ill-afford a war. Hezbollah must balance conflicting political pressures within Lebanon and a complex relationship with its patron, Iran.

“There are several interests here, and they are not necessarily compatible, although Hezbollah presents them to its audience as if they are all one coherent thing,” said Heiko Wimmen, the Beirut-based project director for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon for International Crisis Group.

Hezbollah’s leadership has pointed to the unusual pressure on its military organization. In February, the group’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, advised his fighters to throw away their smartphones, saying that they could be used by Israel for surveillance and even to pinpoint strikes.

“This phone is in our hands. What is in your hand? I do not have a phone in my hand,” he said.

Hezbollah has resisted U.S. and French efforts to de-escalate its conflict with Israel while the war in Gaza continues, arguing that it needs to put pressure on Israel to aid the Palestinian people during the war. France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, is expected to visit Lebanon this weekend in an attempt to continue mediation efforts.

A person familiar with Hezbollah’s internal thinking said the group is trying to implement a strategy of “escalation to de-escalate”—demonstrating an appetite for risk to ultimately achieve calm. A part of that policy involves gradually revealing some of the group’s long-hidden military capabilities.

A senior Israeli military official said Israel also needed to intensify the conflict to eventually reach calm.

“There is a way out and it’s to escalate,” the official said. “Israel cannot stop right now. It’s dangerous for the whole region.”

Hezbollah also told Lebanese officials that it was prepared to escalate further after Prime Minister Najib Mikati held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron on April 19, where the leaders discussed ways to de-escalate Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, according to officials with the Lebanese prime minister’s office.

After Mikati relayed messages from France, including a call to cease fire against Israel despite the continuing war in Gaza, Hezbollah responded by saying that the group was prepared for further escalation “should Israel choose that path,” according to an official familiar with the conversation.

Anat Peled in Tel Aviv contributed to this article.

Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected]