Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based senior nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs.
BEIRUT — As Israel embarks on what looks like ground incursions into the Gaza Strip, the country’s northern border with Lebanon has been heating up.
Since Hamas launched its devastating assault on southern Israel on October 7, Hezbollah and Palestinian militants have been carrying out a spate of small-scale attacks from Lebanon, putting the people of both Lebanon and Israel on edge, fearful of a broader conflict engulfing the region.
So far, Hezbollah has remained relatively coy about its intentions. However, Sheikh Naim Qassem — the organization’s deputy leader — said in a speech on Friday that it was ready for action.
“The question being asked, which everyone is waiting for, is what Hezbollah will do and what will its contribution be,” he said. “We will contribute to the confrontation within our plan — when the time comes for any action, we will carry it out.”
Hezbollah’s initial on-the-ground reaction was to stage a mortar attack against Israeli military positions in the Shebaa Farms — a mountainside occupied by Israel since 1967 and claimed as Lebanese territory by Lebanon.
Then, on October 9, an Israeli lieutenant colonel and two other soldiers were killed when confronting a group of Islamic Jihad fighters who broke through the border fence. Israel’s retaliatory shelling — heavier than usual — killed three Hezbollah fighters, and Hezbollah responded with mortar and anti-tank missile strikes against Israeli border positions, killing at least one Israeli soldier.
These pinpricks are intended to maintain pressure on Israel as it carries out its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, but they fall far short of the opening of a second front.
For now, Israel appears uninterested in tackling Hezbollah in the north while it has its hands full with Hamas in the south. But whether that calculus changes may depend on how quickly the Israeli military is able to successfully crush Hamas in Gaza.
Some Israeli hardliners may feel the time is right to deliver a decisive blow against Hezbollah while the West is fully behind them in the wake of the Hamas massacres, and with the deployment of a United States carrier group in the eastern Mediterranean as a deterrence against Iran and Hezbollah. Nevertheless, while striking its Lebanese enemy may be tempting for more hawkish members of the Israeli government and military, going to war with Hezbollah is a very different prospect than going to war with Hamas.
Hezbollah is a far larger and more capable military force. It waged a resistance campaign against Israeli troops, occupying a border strip in south Lebanon from the mid-1980s to 2000. Hezbollah and Israel then came to blows again in the summer of 2006, with the two fighting a brutal month-long war, which left the Israeli military humiliated by its poor performance and Hezbollah boasting of “divine victory.”
Since then, the Lebanon-Israel border has remained tense but generally calm, as Hezbollah has been busy making plans for its next war with Israel. The organization has undergone a rapid expansion from a few thousand combatants to a full-scale army with tens of thousands of fighters, many of whom have been battle-hardened by a decade of war in Syria to safeguard the regime of President Bashar al-Assad — a Hezbollah ally.
Hezbollah has also used the last 17 years to amass an impressive arsenal, including a large stockpile of rockets and guided missiles — some of which carry 500-kilogram warheads for a distance of over 300 kilometers and can strike within 10 to 20 meters of their target.
In addition, Hezbollah possesses anti-ship cruise missiles that could allow it to mount a coastal blockade of Israel, if a full-scale war ever broke out. It also has air defense systems to challenge Israel’s air superiority, as well as a fleet of reconnaissance and combat drones. And its elite units, such as the Radwan Brigade, have been training since at least 2007 to conduct the exact same kind of large-scale cross-border incursion as Hamas did on October 7.
The rocket attacks against Israel by Hamas since October 7 would be a light summer shower compared to the deluge Hezbollah could bring down on towns and cities across Israel. The country would be in lockdown for the duration of the conflict: There would be no civilian maritime or air traffic; schools and universities would have to close; most of the population would have to sit out the war in bomb shelters; and as Israeli infrastructure is included in Hezbollah’s target set, it could lead to power cuts and water shortages.
A full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah would almost certainly turn regional as well, with likely attacks by Iran’s allies across the region in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and possibly even intervention from Iran itself.
Israeli military planners have long understood that defeating Hezbollah cannot be achieved by air power alone. There would have to be a significant ground force deployed to destroy the organization’s military infrastructure, including its missiles, and to inflict as many casualties as possible among its rank and file. Given that Hezbollah has had 17 years to prepare its defenses in Lebanon, an attacking Israeli force would suffer severe casualties.
While all this may dampen enthusiasm in Israel for an attack on Hezbollah, the organization also has its own domestic interests, which should make it think twice about embarking in war.
A war would be devastating for Lebanon, which is about to enter its fifth year of crippling economic collapse and an ongoing political crisis with no president and a caretaker government operating at limited capacity.
The economic crisis in Lebanon has impoverished Hezbollah’s support base within the Shia community, along with most other Lebanese who saw their life savings disappear when the banks collapsed in 2019. If Hezbollah was to initiate a war against Israel, the post-conflict backlash against the organization would likely be profound, as a sizable percentage of the Lebanese population already bitterly oppose Hezbollah’s power and resent its armed status. A war with Israel would only further aggravate this sentiment.
The country would also be left in ruins, and few nations would be willing to step in and offer billions of dollars for reconstruction like they did after the conflict in 2006. Irrespective of the war’s outcome, Hezbollah will receive a battering, with no guarantees that it would be able to rebuild and rearm as quickly and efficiently as it did after the 2006 war.
This is perhaps the crux of the matter. Hezbollah is a key component of Iran’s deterrence architecture. The Iranian leadership has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building Hezbollah into its most effective external asset, helping Tehran project influence across the Middle East. If Iran instructed Hezbollah to open a second front in northern Israel, the organization would comply. But the end result would be a grave weakening of Hezbollah, which would erode its deterrence value to Iran — should Israel or the U.S. one day decide to stage an attack on the country’s nuclear facilities, or seek regime change.
The fact that Hezbollah didn’t commit to a large-scale attack against Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas assault suggests caution and patience are determining Iran’s policy choices as the war unfolds. However, the organization’s attacks along the Blue Line have intensified by the day, suggesting that the situation could become far more critical in the days ahead.
With the scale of the Hamas assault on southern Israel, the Israeli war on Gaza and the prospect of the crisis widening, this is the most serious development in the Arab-Israeli conflict for half a century. But even if neither Israel nor Hezbollah seeks a full war, one could yet arise from miscalculation — especially as the tit-for-tat blows along the Blue Line escalate.
