Hezbollah Doesn’t Want a War With Israel
And the United States Can Reinforce Restraint
By Mohanad Hage Ali
July 26, 2024Over the past few weeks, an all-out conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has begun to appear more likely. In May, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant suggested that the country might use expanded “military means” to quash Hezbollah, and according to media reports, the Israeli military has drawn up plans for a limited ground assault to enforce a buffer zone at its northern border with Lebanon. Both Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, have openly called for an invasion of Lebanon. Outside leaders and analysts tend to focus on Israel as the actor whose policies provoke or avoid war. But given Washington’s limited success in influencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy in the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, those seeking a route to de-escalation must look more closely at Hezbollah’s calculations.
The organization faces a dilemma that limits its choices. On the one hand, it must restore its ability to deter Israel. It lost some of that capacity in the months following Hamas’s October 7 attack. Soon after the offensive, Hezbollah lobbed missiles at Israel in a restrained show of support for Hamas, and Israel responded with an assassination campaign across Lebanon, including in the organization’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Owing to Lebanon’s fragility, however, Hezbollah still wants to avoid a full-blown conflict with Israel.
A permanent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas would likely forestall a war in Lebanon: Hezbollah remains committed to halting hostilities if Israel strikes a cease-fire agreement with Hamas in Gaza. And amid the long war there and increasing tensions in the West Bank, Israel would likely prefer a diplomatic resolution to the tensions on its northern border. A special U.S. envoy, Amos Hochstein, has made a half dozen trips to Lebanon since October to try to negotiate an end to the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. His game plan has been to ask Hezbollah to pressure Hamas to accept a cease-fire to break the region’s deadlock. Although Hezbollah has publicly denied it is acceding to Hochstein’s request, Hamas’s recent flexibility in negotiations with Israel suggests that his proposal has had some impact.
But a cease-fire deal in Gaza is unlikely to come before tensions at the Israeli-Lebanese border rise further. Hezbollah could take a cease-fire deal before Hamas does and avoid an Israeli invasion while restoring normalcy within Lebanon. But that would not be an easy choice. A deal with Israel that disregarded the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank might put a temporary stop to the violence on the Israeli-Lebanese border and Israel’s strikes within Lebanon but would not prevent it from re-emerging in a year or two. Additionally, Hezbollah’s status both within Lebanon and the broader region rests on the leading role it plays in the Iranian-backed “axis of resistance.” It would lose credibility with its Palestinian and other Middle Eastern allies, especially as the Houthi movement—one of Hezbollah’s partners—has endures Israeli air strikes in Yemen. Israel wants to break that alliance.
Credibility would not be Hezbollah’s only loss in such a deal. A cease-fire could highlight the organization’s vulnerabilities. During its conflict with Israel, Hezbollah has deployed new capabilities including drones and precision and antitank missiles to warn Israel against a costly ground invasion. With the right pressure exerted on it by outside actors such as the United States’ special envoy, the group has enough influence to trigger a broader regional conflict—or help avert one.
FLUID BALANCE
Over the course of decades of conflict, Hezbollah and Israel have built a complex set of rules of engagement that have for the most part prevented full-scale war. From 1996 through 2000, the so-called April understanding between Israel and the militant group provided some protection for the Lebanese by establishing that any Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians would prompt Hezbollah to shell towns in northern Israel. These rules of engagement temporarily broke down in 2006 after Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers to force the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel. The resulting war left at least 1,100 Lebanese and 165 Israeli dead.
By mid-2023, Hezbollah had spent years rebuilding its defense and deterrence capabilities. It had accumulated an arsenal of more than 100,000 rockets. A decade of experience fighting in the Syrian civil war (during which the group backed the Bashar al-Assad regime) had strengthened its special forces units. The organization boasted new aerial and naval capabilities and had established a regional alliance with Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, and Yemeni groups to ensure a coordinated response if any of them were attacked, substantially bolstering its deterrence against Israel.
With this alliance—and the relative peace on the Israeli-Lebanese border—Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s eloquent and charismatic leader, became the face of Iran’s network across the Arabic-speaking Middle East. The organization grew into a regional actor, intervening militarily not just in Syria but also in Iraq, where it provided weapons and special operations forces to Shiite militias; according to reports by news media outlets in the United Arab Emirates, it is also supervising some of the budget and the training of Houthi forces in Yemen. These interventions strained Lebanon’s historically cordial relations with other Arab governments, but it appeared that the upside for Hezbollah was worth that price. Since 2019, Nasrallah has forced Israel to stop killing Hezbollah operatives in its Syrian operations by threatening an assault from Lebanese territory, essentially reigniting tensions on what had been a quiet border. Although Hezbollah ranks below Iran in the so-called axis of resistance, Israel avoided attacking Hezbollah members in Syria even as it killed Iranian soldiers there, underscoring the group’s growing regional clout. Lebanon became a headquarters for axis-of-resistance meetings as well.
In the months ahead of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Hezbollah was at the peak of its capacities and seeking to test Israel’s boundaries. In an August 2023 speech, Nasrallah issued a direct warning to Israel: “Any assassination on Lebanese territories that targets a Lebanese, a Palestinian, or a Syrian, or an Iranian would warrant a strong reaction. We will not allow Lebanon to be turned into an arena for assassinations, and we will not accept any change in the current rules of engagement.” Nasrallah was responding to threats by Netanyahu to kill Hamas leaders who were hiding or traveling in Lebanon, including Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau.
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, however, upended Hezbollah’s confidence and left the group in a trap. Membership in the axis of resistance obliged Hezbollah to join the war between Hamas and Israel on its second day. The group began launching limited attacks on Israeli forces, hoping not to trigger a full war. Before October 7, Nasrallah had excelled at managing Netanyahu. But Nasrallah’s maneuvering had involved calculated risks designed for facing a rational, cautious adversary, not a traumatized country led by a prime minister suddenly fighting for his political survival. After October 7, Netanyahu’s behavior changed as he faced pressure to win a war against Hamas and as the far-right partners on which his coalition depends gained power. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, Israel broke its typical rules of engagement with Hezbollah by assassinating Arouri in Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing Hezbollah cadres and fighters in major urban centers in southern Lebanon and the northeastern Bekaa Valley, and launching strikes from fighter jets and unmanned drones that reached as far as Lebanon’s northeast.
Hezbollah could not immediately retaliate in kind because of its own uncertain standing at home, where ordinary Lebanese faced increasingly grim conditions. According to estimates by the World Bank, Lebanon’s poverty rate more than tripled from 2012 to 2022. Forty-four percent of the country’s population now lives in poverty. Beginning in 2019, Lebanon’s economy began an even more dramatic downward spiral, with the inflation rate reaching four digits and GDP contracting by more than half. On top of these crises, in an enormous explosion crippled Beirut’s port in 2020, leaving 218 dead and thousands injured and bringing an estimated $8 billion in economic losses— nearly a third of the country’s GDP at the time.
Hamas’s October 7 attack left Hezbollah in a trap.
The subsequent economic meltdown, as well as the impotence and corruption of the Lebanese ruling class, triggered a protest movement against the political elite, including Hezbollah. The group played a leading role in suppressing the protests and in undermining an investigation of the port blast, which led to speculation that the group had the explosion by stashing an ammonium nitrate shipment at the port, drawing an Israeli strike. Public dissatisfaction with Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon has increased, especially among the country’s Christians. Christian leaders have strongly criticized Hezbollah’s recent conflict with Israel; Lebanon’s Maronite patriarch, Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, declared in January that the Lebanese people “refuse to be hostages, human shields, and scapegoats” for “a culture of death that has only brought illusory victories."
But Hezbollah also cannot risk being seen as too weak. Hamas leaders have openly faulted Hezbollah for the limited nature of its participation in the conflict that erupted after October 7, forcing Nasrallah to dedicate portions of his recent speeches to the significance of Hezbollah’s strikes on Israel. To restore deterrence and raise its supporters’ morale, Hezbollah has launched swarms of suicide drones at Israel, used surface-to-air missiles to down Israeli drones in southern Lebanon, and completed two aerial reconnaissance missions over Israel, gathering footage of potential targets in case a formal war begins. These operations restored some confidence among the organization’s popular base. But as Israel continues to challenge Hezbollah’s rules of engagement—for instance, with its recent airstrikes in southern Lebanon—the organization may feel pressure to expand its attacks further into Israeli territory.
Hezbollah also remains concerned with the fate of Hamas in Gaza. From its point of view, the most favorable ending to the Israeli-Hamas war would be the survival of Hamas and the negotiation of a durable cease-fire agreement. Such a resolution would preserve the axis of resistance and might well cause Netanyahu’s government to collapse, drawing the focus of Israeli politics inward. But Netanyahu and his coalition are unlikely to be ousted in the near term.
DIGNIFIED RETREAT
If Israel were to mount a ground operation against Hezbollah to establish a buffer zone and prevent further attacks by the group, the conflict would almost certainly be protracted. Hezbollah, however, knows that a full-scale war with Israel would imperil its future and its regional status, as evidenced in its restrained response to Israel’s recent provocations. A conflict of those dimensions could also further damage Hezbollah’s domestic standing because Lebanon would be hard-pressed to rebuild afterward. After the war in 2006, regional actors such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar aided Lebanon’s reconstruction efforts. These countries’ relations with Lebanon have cooled, however, since a 2021 diplomatic crisis in which Saudi Arabia downgraded diplomatic ties over Hezbollah’s support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is unlikely that Arab countries would provide billions of dollars of aid to reconstruct Lebanon.
In the negotiations to end its standoff with Hezbollah, Israel has asked the organization to withdraw behind a ten-kilometer buffer zone in southern Lebanon. This is a difficult request to meet: Hezbollah members live in these buffer-zone towns, and monitoring such a pullout would be very challenging. Hezbollah seeks concessions such as an end to Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace—also a major ask, given that Israel wants to maintain its ability to spy on and strike Syria. But if the U.S.-backed cease-fire in Gaza is accomplished with the help of Arab states, a middle ground could be found.
As negotiations continue, Hezbollah’s best bet is to refrain from acts that provoke a full-fledged war with Israel. So the group will likely continue to choose restraint and de-escalation, especially as Israeli operations in Gaza become less intensive. Hochstein and other actors must focus on restraining Israeli attacks on southern Lebanese urban centers such as Nabatiyah and Tyre, as strikes on these targets would most likely require Hezbollah to escalate its response in ways it does not really want.
So far, Hezbollah’s restraint has prevented a war. The organization’s calculus is pragmatic, as evident in its October 2022 support for a maritime demarcation deal between Israel and Lebanon. If an all-out military conflict can be avoided in the short term, the same kind of mediation efforts that brought about the maritime pact could open a process to resolve the two countries’ thornier land-border disputes—and potentially bring a more lasting end to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.