Interceptions of rockets launched from Lebanon to Israel over the border, 27 June 2024. REUTERS/Ayal Margolin

For now, Israel and Hezbollah are engaged in a subdued conflict. Global Insight assesses the likelihood of a full-blown conflict.

Low-grade hostilities now underway between Hezbollah and Israel may actually be aimed, ironically, at preventing both sides from slipping into a taxing all-out confrontation that could plunge the already fraught Middle East further into a downward spiral.

For nearly ten months now, both Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, who are no strangers to fighting each other, have been trying to demonstrate their military prowess, mostly in the hope of deterring the other party from concluding it has the upper hand or that it can take down the other side.

Hezbollah has targeted northern Israel for months, almost since right after the Gaza-based Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli settlements on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and capturing dozens. Hezbollah’s top leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly said his cross-border hostilities were in retaliation for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has taken the life of more than 38,000 people. They will stop once a ceasefire has been reached, he said. Hezbollah suspended the strikes during a brief ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in November.

Although the two groups have sectarian differences, the Sunni Hamas and the Shiite Hezbollah both are militarily and politically allied to Iran. They view Israel as an occupying power that has no right to exist in the Middle East. Israeli leaders say they face an existential threat and have vowed to take out hostile forces to their northern borders. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, has said Israel is ‘determined to establish security’ and to change ‘the reality on the ground’ in the north.

But, despite their radical rhetoric, both sides now realise they actually face newer and harsher realities than in their previous conflicts.

The Shiite group, which emerged after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, has been displaying unprecedented acumen. Military analysts say that the group has at least 150,000 missiles. Many are guided medium-and long-range and could cover the whole of Israel’s populated territory.

The group’s fighters have proved they can strike deeper into Israel with their new arsenal of sophisticated missiles that many experts in the Middle East believe is one of the largest. At one point, the group even took a rare step and released never-seen-before spy drone footage of sensitive Israeli facilities and instalments that included command centres. The ‘hoopoe footage’, as they called it, was trending on Arab social media for several days and was hailed mostly as heralding a new era.

The militant group has taken down several military surveillance installations in Northern Israel and its attacks have displaced at least 60,000 Israelis while its rocket barrages have gone further than before, often sending settlers fleeing from their homes, setting fires and triggering sirens in areas that were not part of previous conflicts.

In one of his many speeches from his secret hideout since the eruption of the conflict last year, Nasrallah went as far as to reveal that his intelligence has shown that Israel may be preparing to use airbases in Cyprus and went on to threaten the island nation with military retaliation should Nicosia open its airfields for Israeli aircraft to target any part of Lebanon.

On the other hand, Israel, which has invaded Lebanon three times previously, has signalled it is more prepared than ever to tackle the new threats. It, too, took the rare step of targeting leaders of Hezbollah’s military wing, not only by drones or aircraft as has been the case for many years, but by what is believed to be on-the-ground undetected assassination teams that managed to infiltrate Hezbollah’s ironclad security in southern Lebanon.

In most cases, the Israelis made sure they too released footage of those targeted assassinations, particularly those against celebrated battle-hardened Hezbollah operatives who gained valuable skills fighting alongside Russian forces in Syria against a popular uprising. The killings, which aim at dissuading the group from further escalation, included a senior Hezbollah commander, Yasser Qranbash who was at one point a personal bodyguard of Nasrallah himself. Israeli jets struck munitions facilities including in the group’s well-protected stronghold of Bint Jabal in southern Lebanon.

Israeli officials have warned Hezbollah that it will be dragging not only the Shiite population of Lebanon, but all of the country into an unnecessary war, reminding the Lebanese how Israel demolished important infrastructure in its latest war with Hezbollah in 2006 that took years to rebuild. Furthermore, Israel’s newly formed Mountain Brigade have launched drills on invading southern Lebanon and even in Syria, seen as a major supply line for Hezbollah.

But should those attempts at deterrence by both sides fail, the entire region would be plunged into a period of major instability. Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies warned in early July of ‘severe damages’ to ‘Israel’s civilian home front and its functional continuity, and consequently to the resilience of Israeli society and its ability to recover’ from a potential war with Hezbollah. In Lebanon, Hezbollah's political rivals say the country’s fragile infrastructure and already hobbled economy, still reeling from a major financial crisis, will crumble in days in the case of a full-scale attack from Israel. Israel’s last war with Hezbollah caused the death of 160 people in Israel, mostly soldiers, and more than 1,000, mostly civilians, in Lebanon. The war lasted only one month.

Even though Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, would prefer not to, if Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran's proxy instruments in the region, comes under existential threat, Tehran will likely intervene. They have already shown they protect their proxies and influence in the region when they came to the aid of the then besieged Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In the face of mostly Western sanctions and animosity from neighbouring Sunni monarchies, Iran has mastered the skill of developing proxies in different parts of the Middle East. So far, they have militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, as well as their own forces inside Iran. That’s why many expect a future conflict involving Hezbollah and Israel will be regional in nature. Western powers do not want to see another war either. France and the US in particular have been pushing a diplomatic solution and their officials have made numerous visits to the region.

The prospect of a war with such complicated calculations may turn out to be the biggest deterrent to a fully-fledged war. ‘It is clear that both parties do not want to go to war’, says Andrei Bou Moasher, a former Lebanese military pilot who is now an analyst. ‘But both are now ready for it, should it become necessary’.

Emad Mekay is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at emad.mekay@int-bar.org.