What Israel has done in the recent months is the slow raising of temperature in the pressure cooker we call Lebanon. Indeed, they did it so slowly and quietly that we didn’t even notice it – but it happened. In the first few months of the war, the IDF’s strikes concentrated in the area of southern Lebanon, with the only exception being the elimination of Al-Arouri in Beirut in January, and he was a Hamas man.
The IDF devoted most of its resources to Gaza, fearing a full-scale war in Lebanon. This is why it took care to maintain symmetry with Hezbollah: attacks across the border were answered with counterattacks across the border, without either side going any deeper.
Slowly but surely, forces and resources were diverted from Gaza to the north, and the IDF began to allow itself to break the symmetry. Strikes into areas such as Baalbek and Hermel have now become routine. These two areas reside in northeastern Lebanon, dozens of kilometers from the border. They are primarily populated by Shi’ites and are considered rear bastions of Hezbollah. In addition, in the last two months, the IDF has struck twice in Beirut itself.
But the water boiling was not just about expanding the geographic scope of the strikes, but also their targets. From attacks on weapons storage sites, military infrastructures, and junior operatives, Israel has now graduated to eliminating senior commanders: Taleb Sami Abdullah, commander of the Nasser unit, was eliminated in June. Then two additional hits came in July (Mohammed Nasser and Fuad Shukr), followed by the wholesale elimination of the Radwan force senior command on Friday. Obviously, the pager and walkie talkie mass attacks is an important part of the matter.
And you know what’s the most interesting part of all this? Hezbollah has remained determined to avoid escalating in return.
The weapons Hezbollah has used in this war until now are effectively identical to the ones it used in its very first month: rockets, drones, anti-tank missiles. The range is very much the same: rockets are fired up to 25 km from the border, with very few exceptions of salvos towards Haifa and beyond here and there. Very few drones have passed this range and most of those that did, did so at the beginning of the war and not in the last few months.
We all know Hezbollah is capable of much more than this. We could have expected them to create a new equation per which any air strike in Baalbek would be met with a heavy salvo against Haifa, just 35 km from the border. We could have also expected the elimination of its senior leaders to be met with heavy long-range salvos against Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. But it hasn’t happened, yet. Hezbollah has very openly tried to avoid broadening the conflict.
I don’t know if Hezbollah’s response to the latest series of disasters will end with the rockets fired last night and this morning on the north. But even if not, this doesn’t change the fact that Israel has greatly expanded the range of aerial attacks since March, begun to directly target very senior Hezbollah leaders since June, and despite this, Hezbollah has not seriously stepped up the range or power of its attacks in response.
What does all this mean?
Well, we already know that low-level war is far from being ideal for Hezbollah. The ratio of dead between the IDF and the terrorist organization now stands at 1:23, and I’d guess that things are even worse when it comes to weapons and infrastructure. You don’t need to be a military genius to see that they can’t go on like this forever.
Despite this, Hezbollah still preferred this state of affairs over a much broader war, even as the IDF kept increasing the pressure. As bad as things were for them in the beginning, they’re worse now.
The conclusion from all this is simple: It’s good that the IDF has turned up the heat, and maybe they should increase it even further.
Elad Nahshon is a PhD student at Bar Ilan University, studying the political and social history of Zionism and the State of Israel.