Israel's risky new posture against Hezbollah stops short of war

Israel’s shift to a riskier, more aggressive posture toward Lebanon’s Hezbollah — exploding pagers, striking Beirut and targeting commanders — came about both suddenly and gradually.

Suddenly, because there were indications that Hezbollah members had become suspicious about the booby-trapped pagers, so a decision to set them off was made at the last minute, according to people with knowledge of the matter. And gradually, because Israel’s military has been preparing since 2006 for war with the Iran-backed group.

The attacks mark a new approach aimed at pre-emptively degrading Hezbollah’s military prowess so that the group won’t be able to launch an attack similar to the Oct. 7 strike by Hamas on southern Israel, officials say. A second goal is to create the conditions that might drive a hobbled Hezbollah to make concessions about how close its troops and missiles will remain to the Israeli border.

Cease-fire talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and Hamas have been deadlocked for weeks, despite the militia having been largely smashed by a nearly year-long war. Hezbollah has said it won’t stop bombing Israel until the Gaza war stops, which is keeping tens of thousands of northern Israelis as internal refugees. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are considered terrorist organizations by the U.S.

Israel has added the return of those Israelis to their homes as an official war goal, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that operations were shifting from Gaza to the north in what he called a new phase of the war.

“Until two to three weeks ago, Israel thought a cease-fire might be attainable that would offer Nasrallah a ladder to climb down from,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser said of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Now the plan is to step up from retaliating to initiating, but not anything that would be irreversible. But if Hezbollah decides to begin a full war, that will change everything.”

Following the deadly detonation of the pagers on Tuesday, walkie-talkies were also set off. Finally, strikes on Beirut Friday killed Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit and a member of the group’s top military council.

Within Israel, there’s admiration for its intelligence agencies having been able to set up shell companies to sell Hezbollah booby-trapped communication devices and then wounding thousands of operatives. That’s been tempered by concern with the direction of the government’s strategy.

“Kudos for the pager operation, but the euphoria is out of place. Smugness is dangerous. That is what brought about Oct. 7,” Ben Caspit, a Netanyahu critic, wrote in Maariv newspaper on Friday. “Even if we had an excellent week or an excellent two days, our strategic situation has not essentially changed. The residents of northern Israel have not returned home.”

The move also risks sparking all-out war in an already volatile region. Nasrallah vowed on Thursday to make Israel pay through a retaliation that, he said, would come in due course.

“Israel is being dragged toward three alternatives, all of them disastrous: a parallel war of full scale in Lebanon and in Gaza; a regional war without American backing; an ongoing war of attrition with people constantly being killed in all the theaters,” Nahum Barnea, Israel’s pre-eminent columnist, wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. “We have reached the edge of the abyss, Netanyahu is telling us. Now take one step forward.”

Others, however, said the policy seemed sound.

“It gave major points to the prestige of the security and intelligence agencies, which was damaged on Oct. 7. It strengthened its deterrent image, established its equity, restored the initiative to Israel, and boosted public morale,” Meir Ben Shabbat, a former national security adviser, wrote in a column in Israel Hayom newspaper.

Still, even he warned of what Nasrallah may be planning.

“We can assume he will try to surprise and thus reduce the blow to his honor. The greater the success of the operation against him, the more powerful will be his lust for revenge,” Shabbat wrote.