'There's No Plan': Israel’s Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon Is More Overconfidence Than Strategy
Israel's claim that it stopped the launch of 6,000 Hezbollah rockets into Israel can't be taken seriously.
BEIRUT – Hezbollah’s long-awaited response to last month’s assassination by Israel of a top military commander arrived Sunday to broad relief across Lebanon and the region, which had feared an escalation in the low-intensity but nasty conflict that’s raged in parallel to the war on Gaza for more than 10 months.
The relief is likely to be short-lived, as few think a widespread, incredibly painful (for both sides) war can be avoided indefinitely, but after almost a year of strikes and counter-strikes forcing over 100,000 civilians in the two countries to flee the border area, civilians on both sides seemed content to go to bed Sunday night without fear of a regional war arriving in the morning. Regardless, there’s little reason to believe Sunday’s carefully calibrated escalation has solved anything.
The confidence of Israeli officials and the public in the wake of Sunday’s extremely limited response is alarming. Thinking the most ruthless and competent enemy the Israeli military has ever faced is afraid or lacks the ability to cause widespread damage reflects an arrogance developed over decades of occupying the captive Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. It’s this arrogance that leads Israeli officials to conclude that they know how to fight ‘Arabs,’ while failing to note nothing that works in the West Bank has ever succeeded in Lebanon.
A New War Beckons
The Lebanese militant group patiently waited weeks before attempting to strike, according to the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a speech Sunday night. Hezbollah, he said, wanted to cause anxiety for Israel, while giving the ossified ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas time to make progress (they have not). Hezbollah carefully selected the targets: key Israeli intelligence bases just north of Tel Aviv, with an eye to avoiding civilian casualties that might cause an uncontrollable escalation.
Israel, however, accurately predicted the attack and managed to strike first at 5 am local time (02:00 GMT) with air strikes on about 40 of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile launch sites spread throughout South Lebanon’s rugged hills and vegetation-tangled valleys. About five minutes later, Hezbollah launched its attack anyway, sending about 300 unguided short-range rockets at Israel’s missile defense system in an effort to clear a path for an unknown number of longer-range drones, apparently targeting Mossad headquarters and a base of the signals intelligence agency, Unit 8200.
For its part, Hezbollah seems content with its shot at revenge for the killing of Fuad Shukr, the commander killed in South Beirut in late July, saying it targeted the intelligence agencies that conducted the operation without killing Israeli civilians, which might have forced an unwanted escalation. A typically understated Nasrallah explained that the group would study the operation to determine the damage and reserved the right to strike again. But for now, he said, the Lebanese people could exhale and start living their lives normally.
The initial Israeli statements, however, were typically hyperbolic: Military officials told the Israeli press that Hezbollah’s long-range guided missile systems – as opposed to the short-range unguided rockets used Sunday morning – had been wiped out. They also claimed it prevented the launch of 6,000 rockets into Israel, a number that can’t be taken seriously. The Israeli strikes actually targeted about 40 of Hezbollah’s well-protected launch sites south of the Litani River, and Hezbollah reported a handful of casualties as Nasrallah claimed the Israeli pre-emption had no effect on the subsequent operation.
The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.
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