The terror units of Hezbollah are donning their red headbands, a sartorial commitment to outright war with the enemy. Their social media accounts brag about 1,500 suicide bombers being ready to storm the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. And since May their rocket fire has pounded Israeli communities over the border from south Lebanon.
The flow of war is shifting in the Middle East and the risk of an expanding, regional conflict is rising by the day. While the Israeli army’s efforts to uproot Hamas networks in Rafah are winding down, its gaze is shifting from Gaza to the north. There, along the borderlands with Lebanon, a battlefield is taking shape that could draw Iran, with a soon-to-be-elected new president, into open rather than proxy war.
The US is jumpy and has sent its special envoy, Amos Hochstein, to Beirut and Jerusalem; this could turn out to be the final dust-up of the present US administration, a high-stakes entanglement. The head of the Israel Defence Forces, Herzi Halevi, has been briefing five moderate Arab states and a US general. They wanted to know: how close is a war with Iran? What common security measures can we put in place?
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Everyone, of course, has been aware of the racing certainty that Gaza will turn into a black hole, defying resolution and radicalising the neighbourhood. Hezbollah, encouraged by Iran, has said it will end hostilities only when an agreement has been reached in Gaza. That would require a hostage release deal and a form of words that allow Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, to declare victory.
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But Netanyahu has yet to publicly engage with the problem of how a future Gaza should be governed. His generals have made it plain they are against a military occupation of the Strip, which could last a decade, drain the lifeblood from the army and, at best, deep-freeze the conflict.
Hamas has been heavily depleted by the fighting but aims to survive, if not as a governing force then at least as a crime syndicate and sporadic guerrilla movement. Its hold on Gaza is sure to weaken — its current threadbare authority depends on the distribution of (often stolen) aid and its plainclothes police, who shoot looters in the legs — but Hamas and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, remain Iran’s placemen. As long as that holds, Hezbollah, Iran’s most loyal proxy, is obliged to put pressure on Israel’s borders.
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The odds seem to be narrowing around Israeli troops being phased out of Gaza. They are exhausted, many of them reservists close to burnout; it has already become the country’s longest military operation. The aim would be to refresh the troops and redeploy them in the north for a short, sharp operation that damaged Hezbollah and got them to withdraw from the borderlands — 60,000 Israelis have fled villages that are in range of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets. A limited operation would get these people home again in time for children to be enrolled for the new school year in September.
That is the folksy way that public discussion about future military ops has to be framed in Israel. It is, however, not very realistic. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth, better trained and better equipped than Hamas. It has been shooting down Israel’s expensive Hermes 900 UAVs and using anti-aircraft weapons against Israeli jets.
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Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, started his diversionary war after the October 7 Hamas massacre but kept it at a modest level until Israel hit Iranian officers in Syria: they were in charge of weapons flow to Hezbollah. Then the gloves came off. There have been 2,100 attacks on Israel so far, just below the threshold of a full-blown war.
If the new Iranian president, likely to be an ex-Revolutionary Guard commander, gives the green light to put maximum pressure on Israel, all hell will break loose. Hezbollah is regarded by Tehran as its forward defence line, the staging post for an attack on Israel should it ever carry out raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities. If a war between Israel and Hezbollah looks like weakening its proxy then Iran will throw everything into the fight.
Three important geopolitical questions will thus be broached in the coming month. First, if Gaza is followed by a Lebanon incursion, would this end up as a forever war for Israel, one that militarises society and cuts it off from potential allies in the Arab world? A war, moreover, that would strain relations with this or the next US administration, neither of whom have a settled strategy on Iran?
Second, what would a Hezbollah war say about the Israeli military, once the outstanding force in the Middle East and now running out of steam? A devastating image appeared on social media the other day of an Israeli army trebuchet, modelled on a pre-gunpowder era catapult, that was being used to hurl fireballs at dry vegetation to expose hidden Hezbollah positions. Israeli ingenuity or a shortage of arms?
And finally, how does the Israeli economy continue to thrive in seemingly endless wars? Some recall how the 1973 Yom Kippur war led to a decade of slow growth, bank failures and a massive surge in inflation.
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The western world has got used to Israel being one of the star performers in the Middle East, a narrative centred on a warrior class, a start-up economy and an open society. What if that falters? Israel’s resolve does us all a favour by keeping Iran at bay — but the price of a structurally weakened Israel is a heavy one. That’s the case for averting a new war, for caution and for solid governance.
