Israel has begun a military invasion of Lebanon it said would be “limited,” following days of bombing campaigns near and within the capital, Beirut.
The Israeli military said that it had moved one army division, typically numbering around 10,000 troops, to the Lebanese border and told Lebanese civilians in about two dozen villages in the area to move north.
That invasion marks a dangerous new phase in the long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Islamist militant organization and Lebanese political party that has fought Israel since its founding decades ago. Israel has recently escalated its attacks on Hezbollah, assassinating the group’s reclusive leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bombing in a Beirut suburb on Friday after reportedly launching a series of attacks on thousands of mobile devices used by members of Hezbollah throughout Lebanon.
Israel’s latest operations have been costly: More than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed, 6,000 wounded, and as many as a million displaced in recent weeks, according to Lebanese government officials. Hezbollah’s recent attacks on Israel — largely missile strikes — have meanwhile left at least eight people wounded in the last week.
Although the two sides have fought on and off over the decades, Hezbollah has been engaged in more intense fighting with Israel since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas last year. Hezbollah has vowed to continue its missile strikes into Israeli territory until Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza, where at least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed. Israel has shown no sign it is contemplating ending its operations, either. The country’s leaders have said they want to completely eradicate Hamas, and Israel’s defense minister said Monday that the “next stage in the war against Hezbollah will begin soon.”
Key allies also seem unable to end the fighting. The United States reportedly had a Hezbollah-Israel peace plan that it has now abandoned. While the US has publicly told Israel it should try to deescalate the situation, the US reportedly privately offered Israel support for its Hezbollah strategy.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials have responded to Israel’s recent attacks with a ballistic missile strike on Tuesday. Iran’s mission to the UN suggested the country did not have further attacks in store, writing on X that the country’s “response … has been duly carried out,” though it added the threat: “Should the Zionist regime dare to respond or commit further acts of malevolence, a subsequent and crushing response will ensue.”
Here is what we do know so far about what has happened, and what’s likely to come next.
How did we get here?
The animosity between Hezbollah and Israel is decades old; in fact, Hezbollah formed in 1982 in southern Lebanon as a response to Israel’s disastrous invasion, which killed tens of thousands of Lebanese, and subsequent decades-long occupation of that area. Hezbollah waged guerilla warfare against Israeli troops for decades, and Israel finally left in 2000 following years of brutal fighting and a UN resolution requiring it to do so.
The two sides settled into a conflict that simmered until 2006. After Hezbollah killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two others, Israel responded with a counterattack that led to a short, bloody war in which more than 1,000 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were killed. A UN-brokered ceasefire ended that conflict, but fighting continued for years — and it intensified again in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Hezbollah is allied with Hamas, and, starting on October 8, 2023, began firing major salvos into northern Israel, eventually displacing around 60,000 residents there.
Initially, with Israel focused on uprooting Hamas in Gaza, fighting along its northern border with Lebanon was limited to tit-for-tat strikes. But starting in September, Israel escalated the fighting significantly, first by attacking Hezbollah members and leadership with exploding electronics, then bombing Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Lebanon and the outskirts of Beirut.
Ever since the October 7 attack, observers have warned about the possibility that Israel’s war with Gaza might spread to encompass Hezbollah and, perhaps, the entire region.
It’s not clear if that’s what’s happening now or what a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah might look like. Despite Hezbollah’s previous ability to stand up to Israeli firepower, it’s also not clear how it will fare with its communication networks disrupted by the recent pager and walkie-talkie attacks — which Israel has not claimed but is widely assumed to be behind. What’s more, a significant number of mid-level and senior Hezbollah leaders were killed in that attack and subsequent bombings.
What might Hezbollah’s next move be?
Hezbollah is considered the most widely armed and powerful militia group in the Middle East. It boasts a vast weapons arsenal, including as many as 120,000 missiles, and has deployed it with increasing success inside Israel’s borders since the war in Gaza began. Israel claims to have destroyed thousands of the group’s rockets and shells, and Natan Sachs, director of the Middle East policy program at the Brookings Institution, says Israel may have destroyed some of Hezbollah’s precision munitions.
Still, Hezbollah has demonstrated advanced military tactics such as using drones to fire missiles at key Israeli targets and effective intelligence capabilities including digital espionage. And recent Israeli attacks on Lebanese mobile devices and the assassination of Nasrallah haven’t completely wiped out that capacity.
“There was kind of this gleefulness about Hezbollah being completely disabled and destroyed now because all the leadership’s gone,” said Phillip Smyth, an independent analyst focusing on the Middle East and terrorism. “That’s not how it works.”
But the success of recent Israeli attacks has called into question the extent of Hezbollah’s capabilities — and reportedly shaken Iranian leadership. In that sense, Hezbollah may have limited options going forward, even though it had previously pledged not to relent until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached.
“Hezbollah turns out to be less capable, militarily, than I expected,” Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow and director of the think tank Century International, said.
Cambanis and other experts believed that Hezbollah had the technology to effectively strike military targets in Israel, as well as civilian infrastructure in Haifa and even Tel Aviv, a major population center. But if it was willing and able, it seems it would have done so by now.
“It turns out that Hezbollah wasn’t willing to use its most powerful military options, or that it couldn’t because Israel was able to infiltrate or neutralize Hezbollah capabilities,” Cambanis said.
The group’s second-in-command, Naim Qassem, sought to dispel doubts about Hezbollah’s capabilities in a speech on Monday, though he also seemed to suggest Hezbollah is currently on the defensive.
“Israel was not able to reach our military capabilities, and what its media says about hitting most of the medium and long-range capabilities is a dream they have not achieved and will never achieve,” Qassem said. “We will face any possibility and we are ready if the Israelis decide to enter by land and the resistance forces are ready for a ground engagement.”
He added that an announcement will be made in the coming days about Nasrallah’s successor, who Smyth said will most likely be Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s handpicked heir and cousin. Safieddine currently oversees Hezbollah’s political affairs and sits on the council managing the group’s military operations. » …
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