A soldier with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon inspecting a house destroyed last week by an Israeli attack in Yarine, in southern Lebanon. Photo / Diego Ibarra Sanchez, The New York Times
After nine months of low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the risk of all-out war is higher than ever. A cease-fire in Gaza would provide an offramp for both sides, diplomats say.
For nine months, Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia that dominates southern Lebanon, have fought a low-level conflict that has edged closer to an all-out war. Since October, both sides have fired thousands of missiles across the Israel-Lebanon border, wrecking towns, killing hundreds, displacing hundreds of thousands and leading both to threaten to invade the other.
Now, mediators between the two sides hope that a truce in the Gaza Strip could provide the impetus for a similar drawdown along the Israel-Lebanon border, even as the risk of escalation there remains higher than ever.
An ally of Hamas, Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets if Israel halts its war with Hamas in Gaza. If that happens, both Israel and Hezbollah have signalled to interlocutors that they would be prepared to begin negotiations for a formal truce, according to three Western officials briefed on the sides’ positions and an Israeli official. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.
Those negotiations would focus on the withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from the southernmost areas of Lebanon and the deployment of more soldiers from Lebanon’s official military, according to the officials. The talks would also focus on how to demarcate the westernmost parts of the border between the two countries, the officials said; the border has never formally been delineated because the two countries have no diplomatic relationship.
Even if those negotiations ultimately failed, the hope is that their initiation could provide the sides with an excuse to maintain an informal cease-fire and give displaced residents the confidence to return home, the officials said.
Israel and Hezbollah’s openness to such negotiations reflects how, despite their retaliatory strikes and public rhetoric, both sides appear to be privately looking for an off-ramp that would allow them to de-escalate without losing face. Amos Hochstein, a US envoy, and top French officials have shuttled between the two countries in recent months, trying to coax each side toward an informal truce.
Their efforts have failed to stop the fighting, but some diplomats have become more optimistic about the situation since Hochstein’s most recent visit in June. Hochstein built trust in both Israel and Lebanon in 2022 when he successfully encouraged the two countries to delineate their maritime border.
The sides last fought a major land war in 2006, in a monthlong conflict in which Israel devastated large parts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, and southern Lebanon. The scale of the destruction led Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to subsequently concede that his group would not have kidnapped and killed several Israeli soldiers that summer had it known it would set off such carnage.
Another big war would be far more damaging for both sides. Nearly two decades later, Hezbollah is considered one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors. US government experts estimate that Hezbollah has a stockpile of more than 150,000 rockets, drones and missiles. Those could be used to take out Israel’s power grid, according to a recent warning from the head of a state-owned Israeli electricity company.
“Neither side really wants a bigger war because they understand the huge damage that it would cause their countries,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former United States ambassador to Israel. “The problem is that wars are caused by miscalculations. And by trying to deter each other from escalating, they risk making a miscalculation that does the opposite of what they intended.”
Roughly 100,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 in Israel have been displaced, with scores of schools and health centres shuttered in both countries.
More than 460 people in Lebanon have been killed, most of them militants. More than 100 were civilians, including 12 children and 21 health workers, according to the UN and Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Strikes on Israel have killed 21 Israeli soldiers and eight civilians, according to the Israeli government.
The chances of a miscalculation have risen in recent weeks as both sides have tested each other with particularly provocative attacks and statements.
And the threat of a regional escalation was highlighted by a drone strike on Tel Aviv, Israel, on Friday that was claimed by the Houthis, a Yemeni militia backed by Iran. Israel responded by striking the Yemeni port of Hodeida on Saturday, and the Houthis fired a missile toward Israel on Sunday.
Since the start of June, the Israeli military has killed two senior Hezbollah commanders and said it had finalised plans for an “offensive” in Lebanon. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said the country was “very close to the moment of decision to change the rules against Hezbollah and Lebanon.”
“In an all-out war,” he said, “Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be severely hit.”
During the same period, Hezbollah has fired two of its largest barrages since the start of the war, sending hundreds of rockets into Israel. It taunted Israelis by broadcasting aerial footage of the Israeli city of Haifa, filmed from a drone that seemed to have evaded Israel’s air defence system. Shortly afterward, Nasrallah said an invasion of northern Israel remained “on the table.”
So far, the exchange of fire has followed a loose logic: The deeper one side strikes inside the other’s territory, the deeper the response will be. Initially, that allowed for a relatively contained conflict, with strikes limited to a few miles of the border area. But nine months into the fighting, both sides have gradually extended their range of fire: Israel is now striking 60 miles north of the border, while Hezbollah’s deepest strike hit roughly 25 miles inside Israel.
“Both sides are playing on the edge,” said General Mounir Shehadeh, a former liaison between the Lebanese government and UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon. “Any uncalculated mistake could lead to things slipping out of hand into a full-scale war.”
For now, though, their threats can be construed as attempts to deter each other, rather than as cast-iron pledges to invade, analysts said.
For example, Hezbollah’s slick propaganda videos often appear to be directed at making ordinary Israelis understand the cost of an all-out war. The group often posts speeches by Nasrallah and accompanies them with Hebrew subtitles and footage of strikes on sensitive Israeli fortifications.
“Whoever thinks of war against us will regret it,” read a Hebrew caption at the end of a video of a recent speech by Nasrallah.
“Your tanks will be your graves,” read another recent Hezbollah video addressed to Israeli soldiers.
Through articulating such threats, Hezbollah hopes it can avoid having to put them into action, according to Mohanad Hage Ali, a Beirut-based fellow for the Carnegie Middle East Center, an American research group.
“Their focus is showcasing more what they can do rather than actually inflicting harm on the Israelis,” Hage Ali said.
“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war for a reason that is Lebanon’s own fragility,” he said. “Now what remains for Hezbollah is to have a face-saving exit strategy.”
As well as a militia, Hezbollah is a powerful political force in Lebanon. Analysts say that the group fears losing that social influence if it is deemed by the Lebanese public to have dragged the country into an unnecessary and disastrous war.
Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, also fears a major war that could damage its biggest regional proxy, analysts and officials say. To protect Hezbollah, Iran wants a cease-fire in Gaza because it thinks it could lead to a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, according to an Arab official briefed on Iran’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Publicly, Iran has ramped up its rhetoric. In June, it threatened an “obliterating war” if Israel launched a full-scale attack in Lebanon and said that “all options,” including the involvement of Iran-backed armed groups across the Middle East, “are on the table.”
In Israel, the government needs a pretext to return tens of thousands of civilians who evacuated the area bordering Lebanon in October.
A bigger war with Hezbollah could eventually provide that pretext: By invading Lebanon, the Israeli government could tell domestic audiences that it had pushed Hezbollah away from the border, even if analysts are sceptical that such an outcome is possible.
But such an approach is a big gamble. Top Israeli generals privately believe that their forces, though capable of fighting a larger war, are not in an optimal state for one. They are running low on some munitions and spare parts, while fewer reservists are reporting for duty.
Still, the risk of an escalation is so high because both sides have sustained considerable losses, making it harder for either side to back down. And while regional officials remain hopeful that a cease-fire in Gaza can prompt a truce in Lebanon, there is no clear route to de-escalation if the talks over Gaza fail.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patrick Kingsley and Euan Ward
Photographs by: Diego Ibarra Sanchez and Tyler Hicks
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Residential areas in both countries have suffered from deadly strikes in the conflict.