The assassinations of leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, an invasion of Lebanon and the all-out assault on Gaza beg the question: Does Israel have an end game?
Iranian demonstrators hold posters of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah during an anti-Israeli protest in Tehran, Iran, 1 October 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah last month eliminated one of its most formidable opponents and plunged Lebanon and the Middle East deeper into disarray.
Nasrallah, 64, had led Hezbollah, a powerful Iranian-backed, Lebanese political-military group, for 32 years. He rarely appeared in public, knowing the Israelis were hunting him.
He died in his underground bunker on 27 September, the target of fierce Israeli airstrikes on the mainly Shi’ite Muslim suburbs of Beirut, a bastion for Hezbollah.
Israel had earlier located and killed other Hezbollah commanders and is presumed to have been behind the 31 July killing of Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of the Palestinian militant movement Hamas, in the Iranian capital Tehran.
Hamas fighters mounted a surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 from the besieged Gaza Strip, one of two Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation. The fighters killed nearly 800 civilians, as well as 379 Israeli soldiers and police, and kidnapped about 250 people. Israel has since laid waste to Gaza in a war now in its second year, killing more than 41,000 people in the densely populated enclave.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees the war he has launched in Lebanon, as well as the continuing devastation of Gaza, as part of a far-reaching strategy to “change the balance of power in the region for years”.
Iran responded to the killings of Nasrallah and Haniyeh with ballistic missiles fired at Israel on 1 October. Tehran has repeatedly signalled it does not want an all-out war with Israel or the United States. Netanyahu has promised to punish Iran for the missile attack.
Tail wags dog.
The spiral of retaliation risks igniting a wider regional war with a global impact, especially if Israel targets Iran’s oil export facilities, nuclear sites or senior leaders.
Although U.S. President Joe Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed by rage” after last year’s Hamas assault, he has kept arming, funding and giving diplomatic cover to Israel even as Netanyahu defies his advice and toothless pleas for restraint.
Washington says it wants to avoid a Middle East conflagration, but has quietly approved the Israeli leader’s drive to cut Iran down to size by crushing its militia allies. Iran has been Israel’s long time foe in the region.
Yet grand designs to remodel the Middle East have a way of blowing back with a gale of unforeseen consequences.
The United States discovered this in the Iraq and Afghan wars. So did the Israelis, when they invaded Lebanon in 1982 to drive out Palestinian guerrillas and to turn the country into a client state.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which now has observer status at the United Nations, lost its base in Lebanon. But Israel was disgraced when the Lebanese Christian militia that allied with it massacred Palestinian civilians in Beirut refugee camps as Israeli troops stood by.
Instead of a friendly government in Beirut, Israel found itself faced with the rise of Hezbollah under Iranian backing, dedicated to fight its occupation of south Lebanon.
Under Nasrallah, Hezbollah fighters forced Israel to pull out of Lebanon in 2000, 22 years after its first invasion in 1978. Six years later, Nasrallah claimed “divine victory” in an inconclusive war with the Israelis that won him acclaim across the Arab world.
Israeli policy also produced blowback in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, where it had long sought to sap the nationalist, secular PLO by tacitly encouraging its Islamist rivals. The latter eventually formed the radical Hamas movement. It was behind many suicide bombings against Israelis from 2000 to 2005.
Hamas went on to seize Gaza from the PLO in 2007, cementing Palestinian divisions that Netanyahu could exploit to argue against any peace talks or progress toward Palestinian statehood. Hamas shattered Israeli complacency about its military capacity a year ago.
“Axis of resistance”
In the whirlwind of violence since then, Israel’s use of blistering firepower combined with leaps in intelligence-gathering and technology has shocked and shaken its enemies.
Iran’s “axis of resistance” of allied militias or governments in Iraq, Syria, Gaza and Lebanon, with Hezbollah as the jewel in the crown, has taken severe hits.
However the fighting in the Middle East evolves, Israel’s reliance on unbridled force to deny Palestinians their national rights and to bully and dominate its neighbours cannot give its citizens real peace or security, only a prospect of endless conflict.
Israeli assassinations of senior Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian commanders and political figures across the region have so far drawn only token international protest, even when scores of civilians in Lebanon, Syria or Gaza have been killed or maimed in the process.
Nasrallah, like other Lebanese warlords, had much blood on his hands. He joined Iran, along with Russia, in sending forces to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crush mostly Sunni Muslim rebels in the civil war in Syria after an Arab Spring revolt in 2011.
Before Hezbollah formally declared its existence in 1985, affiliates carried out suicide truck bombings against U.S., French and Israeli forces in Lebanon, and played a prominent role in kidnapping foreigners and holding them hostage on behalf of Iran.
Nasrallah’s mixed legacy
Hezbollah may have been complicit, along with Syrian intelligence, in the 2005 car-bomb killing of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, as well as other politicians and figures opposed to Syrian sway over Lebanon, though this remains unproven.
Unlike many Lebanese leaders, Nasrallah did not seek personal gain, as he built Hezbollah into a pillar of political and military power for his once-marginalised Shi’ite community, inspired and aided by Iran’s Islamic revolution.
Conscious of Lebanon’s mosaic of religious sects, Nasrallah reassured other communities he was not seeking to impose an Islamic state. To further his political power, he forged a pragmatic alliance with a party led by former President Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian.
In speeches laced with humour, he denounced Israel, its U.S. patron and anyone who tried to disarm the “resistance”, captivating listeners well beyond Lebanon.
Netanyahu portrays Hezbollah as a catspaw of Iran. The two are integrally linked, but the group has a strong base among Shi’ites, providing social services, jobs and other benefits.
Hezbollah is not above funding itself by illegal means, notably the drug trade. If it has created a state within a (failing) state, many, though not all, of its constituents are grateful.
Yet many other Lebanese, even those who rejoiced when Hezbollah ended Israel’s long grip on the south, resent its political dominance and its links with Iran and Syria.
Ceasefire proposal torpedoed
This week Netanyahu told the Lebanese it was Iran, not Israel that had conquered their country and urged them to “save Lebanon” to escape “a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”. Israeli bombardments have already killed more than 2,000 Lebanese, including civilians and combatants, in the past year.
Nasrallah had trodden a fine line since the Gaza war began, showing solidarity with Hamas with limited rocket salvos on Israel, which for months hit back with some restraint.
But a few weeks ago Israel erased the red lines. It blew up pagers and radios used by Hezbollah members, located and killed Nasrallah, bombed swathes of Lebanon prompting around one million people to flee and once more invaded its southern region.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Hezbollah: An Iran-backed military and political party that controls much of Lebanon.
Hamas: An Islamist political and military group in control of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian Liberation Organization: A political organization that has been recognized by the United Nations and that has been lobbying for Palestinian statehood. In the early 1990s it signed two peace agreements with Israel, known as the Oslo Accords.
Gaza Strip: An area on the Mediterranean Sea bordered by Israel and Egypt that was captured by Israel from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War and has been under Israeli occupation ever since. With five million people, it is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Arab Spring: A series of popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries in the early 2010s.
Shia Islam: A division of Islam that dominates in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Sunni Islam: A division of Islam that predominates in the world, including the majority of people in Saudi Arabia.
The day Nasrallah died it emerged that Hezbollah had told Lebanese officials it had accepted a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon proposed by the United States and France, which Israel rejected out of hand. Hezbollah had previously demanded a Gaza truce first.
U.S. officials have now dropped the ceasefire plan, saying they back Israel’s efforts to “degrade Hezbollah’s infrastructure”. The United States called Nasrallah’s killing “a measure of justice”.
Hezbollah, like Hamas, cannot be uprooted by force. Israel seems to have the upper hand in the latest confrontations, but these will not secure peace for itself or its neighbours — and unforeseen consequences may again lie in wait.
questions to consider:
- What are the limits to military power?
- Can political assassinations be justified?
- What can be done to protect civilians in wartime?
Alistair Lyon is former Middle East diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. During three decades at the news agency, he covered conflicts as well as political and economic news in the Middle East and beyond. He began in Lebanon and headed bureaus in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan/Afghanistan and Egypt/Sudan. He spent five years in London as Middle East diplomatic correspondent and five in Beirut as special correspondent, Middle East.