On August 5, 2024, the Secretary General of the Lebanese Shiite political-military group Hezbollah (“Party of God”) tweeted in Hebrew: “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week”. He was referring to the anticipated attack by Hezbollah and Iran on Israel in retaliation for the assassinations of Palestinian Hamas political bureau head Ismail Hanyeh in Teheran and Hezbollah chief of staff Fouad Shukr in Beirut. Some media predicted an imminent conflagration in the region, a regionalization of the Gaza conflict, this time involving Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah militiamen against Israel’s northern border, leading to a potential full-scale conflict between the USA and Iran. On September 27, 2024, Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Shiite group since 1992, was killed in a strike against an underground military complex in Beirut. In short, the conflict between Israel and the Iranian satellite group is certainly deadly and extremely volatile, but the protagonists will have carefully avoided escalating violence until mid-September 2024. How can we understand this balance, which is part of the evolution of the war in Gaza?
The coordinated assassination of Hezbollah’s chief of staff, Fouad Shukr, in Beirut on July 30, 2024, targeted by an Israeli air raid, and that of the head of Hamas’s political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, who was visiting Teheran the following day, had already seriously undermined the credibility of the Teheran-Damascus axis in the Middle East. The assassination of Nasrallah at the end of September 2024 and of his successors a few weeks later further destabilized the Shiite group’s chain of command. But while the assassination of the Hamas leader dealt a symbolic blow to the Palestinian Islamist group’s establishment in Gaza, particularly as regards its links with Iran and Qatar, it did not in itself influence the evolution of the conflict in the Palestinian enclave. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military chief and mastermind of the October 7 attack in Israel, is still nowhere to be found in the terrorist group’s network of tunnels, although these have largely been destroyed. On the other hand, the elimination of Fouad Shukr followed by that of Hassan Nasrallah represents a major symbolic – rather than tactical – victory for Israeli military intelligence against the Shiite group in Lebanon. A military advisor to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Shukr was considered to be one of those primarily responsible for the attack on the multinational force in Beirut, which claimed the lives of several hundred American and French servicemen in the Lebanese capital on October 23, 1983. In Hezbollah’s organization chart, Shukr’s photo was therefore very close to Nasrallah’s. Following confirmation of Haniyeh’s death, the Lebanese Shiite party announced that it would in due course retaliate firmly against Israel. This unequivocal escalation, teleguided by the Iranian Islamic regime to which Hezbollah is affiliated, was a response not so much to the death of the Hamas leader as to the humiliation of having been struck in the heart of the Iranian capital just hours after a summit meeting between Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the head of Hamas’s political wing. After the bombing of the radar defense system of a nuclear facility in Isfahan last April, the elimination of the Supreme Guide’s “special guest” has called into question Iran’s credibility in the region.
This contextualization enables us to grasp the regionalization of tensions between Hezbollah and Israel. It is inaccurate to consider that this conflict depends solely on the war in Gaza. Hezbollah’s existence is part of the Shiite-Iranian regionalist expression following the political vacuum left by the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. It is also part of a response by a fringe of the Lebanese population that led to the end of the Israeli army’s occupation of southern Lebanon, in order to limit the activity of Palestinian groups in the region. To this day, the Lebanese Shiite party is the key element in Iran’s regionalist policy, as part of a project for a “Shiite arc” from Iraq to Syria.
On the other hand, we shall see that the Palestinian cause and, more recently, the war in Gaza fuel the Shiite party’s war rhetoric, as well as a certain vision of Lebanese nationalism. One might have thought that targeting the Lebanese capital, which until now represented an implicit red line between the two belligerents, would have inflamed the conflict. However, the elimination of Shukr in Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs, in response to the drone attack that killed a dozen Druze children in Majdal Shams, in the Israeli Golan Heights, only inflamed the rhetoric of the belligerents. One of the reasons why the Iranian-Lebanese axis persists in its war of attrition in northern Israel is to gain a strategic advantage. Over the past year, this situation has forced 90,000 Israeli civilians to flee their homes, becoming internally displaced persons in the center of the country. On the Lebanese side, several thousand civilians have fled to the center of the country, leaving behind them, like Israel, a land subjected to bombardment from Lebanese militia hideouts.
This context highlights a second problem: the apparent shortcomings of the Israeli war cabinet’s strategic approach. Indeed, despite a series of tactical victories that have significantly reduced Hamas’s capabilities in Gaza and targeted key Lebanese Hezbollah sites and figures, no long-term strategic breakthrough appears to be materializing.
Since this analysis was written, the war between Israel and the Shiite group has certainly taken a rapid turn. Now deprived of its chain of command, Hezbollah is losing ground in southern Lebanon to the Israeli army, reinforced by intelligence gathered since the last war in Lebanon in 2006. Nonetheless, the analysis proposed here is still relevant to the perception of the conflict and what is at stake. Above all, it qualifies the systematic link between the war in Gaza and that in South Lebanon, allowing us to grasp local rather than regional issues.
Hamas-Hezbollah: Non-brother enemies
It is important to remember that the war in Gaza is not directly linked to the conflict on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Lebanon has not finished licking the wounds of a civil war which, even before the invasion of its southern border by Tsahal on June 6, 1982, had been the scene of destructive fighting between Palestinian factions of Fatah, the Lebanese army and Christian militias since 1975. Since then, Palestinians have suffered severe discrimination in all strata of Lebanese society. Moreover, the second Lebanon war, which broke out in 2006 following the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers at the border, left deep wounds in both societies. The “just war” principle put forward at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert fractured, paving the way for a disorganized military establishment. On the Lebanese side, Hezbollah capitalized on reminiscences of the occupation of southern Lebanon to accentuate its role as a major player in the “axis of resistance ”. This trauma for both the Tsahal and the Shiite militia is one of the reasons behind the wait-and-see attitude of the two protagonists. Already fragmented by multiple ethnic and religious tensions, Lebanon has gradually become the laboratory of a political hybridity (confessionalism) based on an outdated demographic reality derived from a 1932 census. To speak of solidarity between the two groups, the Sunni Hamas from the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Shiite Hezbollah supported by the Iranian Shiite clergy, is to ignore the regional reality. In reality, Iran has only financed and armed Hamas because the latter predominates in the south of Israel, presenting the only threat to Israel with an opening onto the Mediterranean. As a Sunni organization, Hamas does not share the Shiite religious link with Iran that characterizes Hezbollah and most of Iran’s proxies. Iran would not risk triggering a regional war by using its armed wing in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to rescue Hamas in its war in Gaza. Iran’s doctrine boils down to waging a war of harassment against Israel via its proxies, thus preserving its military component and above all its influence, creating a Shiite arc encircling Israel and Saudi Arabia, the mullahs’ other great rival. Lebanon is thus vital to Iranian influence, and justifies the extreme militarization of southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the Shiite militia that has become a state within a state.
On the other hand, the narrative of the Palestinian cause feeds the rhetoric of Hezbollah, which thus finds an audience in the Sunni world, among others. The large-scale terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, followed by the invasion of the Palestinian enclave by Tsahal, gave the Shiite group the opportunity to strengthen its influence on the Israeli border. Yet it did not take advantage of the stupefaction in Israel to threaten the territorial integrity of the Golan Heights or Galilee, nor did it benefit from the barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones fired mainly from Iran and Iraq on the night of April 13, 2024. In short, the regionalization of the Gaza conflict is not sought by Hezbollah, which is aware of its significant but limited capabilities. This relative restraint also comes from Ayatollah Khamenei himself. As Iran’s third president during the devastating Iran-Iraq war (1981-1988), the Supreme Guide forged close ties with the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s main armed wing. The bloody conflict with Iraq made him a realistic administrator of the facts of war, far from the image of a fanatical ideologue. True to his doctrine of divide and rule, he was the architect of Hezbollah’s establishment in Lebanon and the main instigator of the development of Shiite proxies in the Middle East. In this sense, through Hezbollah, he feeds a vision of Lebanese nationalism specific to the Iranian regional agenda, which sees the Shiite group not as an expression of national liberation, but rather of Iranian control to secure access to the Mediterranean.
Given the nature of the players involved and the regional reality, the conflict on the Israeli-Lebanese border is neither an extension of the war against Hamas nor a new front in the war, but a radically different issue facing both the Lebanese and the Israelis. Gaza is a local war, while the Israeli-Lebanese border is a regional issue. If a peace agreement were to be reached involving the release of the Israeli hostages still in Gaza, it is highly unlikely that a cessation of hostilities with Hezbollah would follow, since Gaza and the Palestinian cause are no more than a rhetorical element in Iran’s regionalist discourse. The conflict of attrition between Iran’s satellite group and Israel is therefore a long-term one, which in practice eludes any breakthrough in the conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It’s a conflict that is maintained by a certain balance of terror, illustrated by the development of deterrents.
The rear front and civilian attrition
August 25, 2024, was the most tense day since the elimination of Shukr in Beirut a month earlier. Like the Iranian missile strikes in April, Hassan Nasrallah’s aim was to saturate Israel’s warning systems in the north, declaring that he was targeting military bases and Mossad headquarters on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Much of the Shiite militia’s planned arsenal was pre-emptively destroyed by an Israeli raid, and most of the missiles fired were intercepted by Israeli air defense. Nasrallah declared that he would not seek further escalation after a “major success” and that his militants “ could rest ”. Once again, this astonishing interruption of what was supposed to be a major offensive to avenge Shukr’s death, with no objective achieved, raises questions, and illustrates a division among Lebanese and Iranian Shiite leaders. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the objective was first and foremost a media one. Hezbollah and Iran occupy the information arena, posing as the only legitimate players in the “axis of resistance” against Israel and flooding the Lebanese media. Here again, Khamenei’s doctrine is illustrated by Iran’s restraint in this conflict to the benefit of satellite groups such as the Shiite militia. “War takes many forms […], it’s about thinking correctly, speaking correctly, understanding things precisely and hitting the target accurately “ The aim is not to move towards open warfare, which Iranian officials know Iran does not have the economic or military capacity for, but to turn to a war of attrition in the North with Hezbollah, which also has to deal with growing resentment against its policies [1].
On the Israeli side, public resentment against the government persists. In addition to a war that is more tactical than strategic, criticism focuses on the lack of conclusive results regarding the return of Israeli hostages, and the impossibility of neutralizing the head of Hamas’s military wing, Yahya Sinwar, who has now succeeded Hanyie. The image of internal refugees fleeing missiles in the North is added to that of hostage coffins returning from Gaza and contributes to undermining the credibility of the Netanyahu government, already embroiled in its own legal difficulties. It is therefore highly likely that the Israeli public’s resentment of the government will push it to break the glass ceiling of Israel’s chain of command, leaving the Kyria (Israel’s defense headquarters) more room to maneuver. Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi has repeatedly criticized the lack of a long-term strategy in Gaza and northern Israel, and the sclerosis of the chain of command in suppressing Hezbollah’s threat to northern Israel.
Temporary conclusion
The war on the Israeli-Lebanese border is not an escalation, but the continuation and reflection of deep-seated regional tensions. Iran, through Hezbollah, has repeatedly expressed its reluctance to escalate violations of Israel’s territorial integrity. For its part, the Hebrew state has asserted its readiness for any type of intervention, including a ground incursion, while stressing that escalating the conflict does not serve its interests. This strategy, however, is double-edged: it leaves the displaced Israeli and Lebanese populations with a feeling of abandonment and jeopardizes the Israeli government more than the conflict in Gaza. This crisis of legitimacy is also reflected in major demonstrations across the country, although these are still confined to the Tel Aviv region, which has historically been left leaning. The Shiite axis will not come to the aid of the Hamas still active in Gaza, as the costs of such an intervention would outweigh the benefits in the context of the conflict against Israel. On the other hand, continued harassment of northern Israel is intended to divide Israeli military resources and prolong the siege feeling on the borders. In the final analysis, while an open war of the same intensity as in Gaza between the Shiite militia and Iran by proxy is likely to take place in southern Lebanon, the objectives remain radically different due to the socio-political environment and the spiral that such a war would represent in the dynamic of rivalry between Iran and Israel. For the time being, the Israeli army’s incursion, which began in October, is intended only to desaturate the border from the threat of militia incursions into Israeli territory, and to neutralize the missile fire aimed at towns in northern Israel. However, the objective of pushing back Hezbollah’s presence to the north of the Litany river (twenty kilometers from the border), although envisaged by the Israeli war cabinet, would imply that Israel would relaunch itself (as it did in the 2006 Lebanon war) in a campaign that would generate a long-term occupation of Lebanese territory and revive the Lebanese and Israeli traumas of a war of position that neither state wishes to relive.
[1] Lebanese journalist Nancy Lakiss, an opponent of Hezbollah, posted a poll conducted by the American magazine Foreign Affairs showing that 70% of Lebanese do not trust Hezbollah. She added the hashtag “#Lebanon_doesn’t_want_war” (X account of Nancy Nessrine Lakiss, August 4, 2024).
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