The Social World

Tag: Lebanon

  • Israel is turning the screws on Hezbollah

    Israel is turning the screws on Hezbollah

    The killing of Lebanese Hezbollah military chief Haytham Ali Tababtabai by Israel this week reflects how much the balance of power between Jerusalem and the Iran-backed Shia Islamist group has shifted since the year-long war between the two in 2023 and 2024. Yet, paradoxically, Tabatabai’s killing also shows that nothing has been finally settled between the two enemies.

    While Hezbollah has now been shown to be much weaker than Israel, it nevertheless remains stronger than any internal faction in Lebanon, including the official Lebanese government. The practical consequence of this is escalation: Hezbollah is seeking to repair and rebuild its capacities, no force in Lebanon is willing or able to stop this, and Israel, aware of Hezbollah’s intentions towards it, is determined to keep the organization weak and possesses the capacity to do so.  

    This dynamic reflects how much has changed in the Middle East over the last two years. Prior to last year, Lebanese Hezbollah was often referred to as the world’s most powerful non-state military actor. Pundits on sundry television channels would gravely intone that the organization’s capacities outweighed those of many states. This is true: before 2024, Iran’s first and still primary proxy political-military group had enjoyed a three-decade run of near-constant forward motion.

    Hezbollah in its first iteration struck telling blows against US, French and Israeli forces in central Lebanon in the early 1980s. It then fought a successful 15-year insurgency against Israel, which resulted in the unilateral withdrawal of Jerusalem’s forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. In 2006, having declined to end its war following the withdrawal six years earlier, Hezbollah again fought an inconclusive but bloody three-week conflict against Israel. This followed a murderous cross-border incursion by the organization.  

    In 2008, Hezbollah brushed aside efforts by its domestic opponents to curtail its authority within Lebanon. The precipitating factor was the official government’s efforts to assert itself regarding security arrangements at Rafik Hariri International Airport, but the matter soon escalated to a test as to whose word was final in the country.  

    Supporters of Hezbollah and their allies, the Amal movement, quickly occupied west Beirut. The supporters of the rival, pro-western March 14 movement were brushed aside. The matter was settled in Hezbollah’s favor. It still remains settled: witness the frightened official government’s determination to avoid any confrontation with the movement.  

    Its ascendancy in Lebanon assured, and its enemy to the south apparently locked into a pattern of mutual deterrence, Hezbollah was free to engage in campaigns further afield. Between 2013 and 2018 period, its fighters played a central role in defending the Assad regime in Syria.  

    It’s worth noting that by this time, Hezbollah had, at least among many western observers, acquired the mythical status alluded to at the beginning. I remember a European diplomat at a conference in 2015 asking me how it was that the Syrian rebels had until then managed to avoid comprehensive defeat, given that Hezbollah was engaged against them.  

    This long run of success has now been broken. The persons who Hezbollah supporters should hold accountable for this are no longer available for reprimand. They are, firstly, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who chose to launch an assault on Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023 without informing his various allies in the Iran-led regional axis. In so doing, he obligated them to come to his assistance at a time when they neither desired nor were ready for all-out war against Israel. And secondly, Hezbollah’s historic leader Hassan Nasrallah, who chose on October 8 to open a support front against Israel on Hamas’s behalf. 

    Nasrallah, it appeared, had not understood that the rules had changed. He believed his own propaganda regarding Israel’s hesitancy and its fears of losses. He assumed that this would mean that Jerusalem would avoid an all out confrontation with his movement. He was wrong.

    Both Sinwar and Nasrallah died at Israel’s hands in the subsequent war. Israel focused on Hamas and responded only defensively against Hezbollah until the late summer of 2024, then moved on to the offensive. The extent to which intelligence was used to penetrate the organization was revealed in the weaponization of Hezbollah’s electronic devices, which decimated the movement’s mid-level leadership cadre, and in the targeted killings of its top leadership, including Nasrallah. An air campaign destroyed Hezbollah’s long-range missile capacity. A ground maneuver drove it away from the border. Battered, Hezbollah reversed the late Nasrallah’s expressed decision and agreed to a separate ceasefire with Israel in November last year.  

    Since the ceasefire, a three-way stand-off has been under way. Hezbollah, like the rest of the Iran-led regional axis is, with the exception of the late Assad regime in Syria, down but not out. Massively weakened by the war, the organization is trying to get back on its feet. There are cash injections from Iran and efforts to replace anti-tank weaponry and missile capacity.  

    Hezbollah’s new leader is Sheikh Naim Qassem. Qassem was in the past the lead intellectual and theorist of the movement. He used to be the man tasked with meeting western delegations and explaining the inevitability of Hezbollah’s victory to them. As leader, he is, until now at least, judged to have put in only a lackluster performance. Much of the Iranian monies are going toward compensating the families of dead Hezbollah fighters. Around 5,000 men from the organization are reckoned to have died in these two years of war. Still, the movement’s intention is clear, and it is to rebuild its lost strength.

    Israel is determined to prevent this by all available means. A central lesson of October 7 for the Jewish state is that seeking to achieve quiet through mutual deterrence with the armed Islamist militias on its borders is a fool’s errand. These organizations adhere to a religious and ideological outlook which trumps self-interest and pragmatism. They must therefore be kept physically weak. Since its achievements in the last months of 2024, Israel has been engaged in an active campaign to disrupt Hezbollah’s ability to rebuild its capacities. Around 350 of the organization’s men have been killed in this process. Ali Haytham Tabatabai was the latest of them.  

    The final and least consequential side of the triangle is the Lebanese government of President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. Since August of this year, the government of Lebanon has been committed to disarming Hezbollah. Some progress has been made south of the Litani river. Hezbollah has made clear that it will not allow itself to be disarmed north of the river. No one seriously expects the government in Beirut to confront the organization. Which means that as of now, the largely two-way contest between Israel and Iran’s proxy in Lebanon is set to continue.  

    The ball is currently in Hezbollah’s court. But the movement faces a dilemma. Respond forcefully, and it runs the risk of bringing down a further heavy Israeli retribution before it has had time to prepare adequately. Fail to respond, and it faces the further loss of its prestige, both in the eyes of its own Shia constituency and beyond it. As of now, it looks likely that Hezbollah will bide its time and seek to continue to rebuild. But the contest between Israel and Hezbollah is far from over. Another round of high-intensity combat at some stage remains a probability.  

  • The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire is in danger of shattering

    The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire is in danger of shattering

    It’s been almost a year since Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that arguably held more power in Lebanon than the government itself, signed a ceasefire to end a ferocious two-month long war. The deal couldn’t have come at a better time; thousands of Israeli air and artillery strikes had pulverized southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s traditional base of operations, leading to a displacement crisis and killing close to 4,000 Lebanese. Whole swaths of northern Israel had been vacated due to Hezbollah missile attacks, forcing the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to spend money on tens of thousands of civilians bunking in hotel rooms. But the agreement is wearing thin. The ceasefire is really a ceasefire in name only. Will it hold?

    Israel continues to strike targets in Lebanon, both in the south and above the Litani River, in what it claims is a self-defense measure to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. Last weekend, four people were killed in the southern Lebanese town of Kfarsir. Before that strike, the UN Human Rights office stated that more than 100 Lebanese civilians have died in Israeli attacks since the November 2024 deal was signed. The situation is getting intolerable for Lebanese politicians. President Joseph Aoun, a former army chief himself, went so far as to order the Lebanese army to confront Israel in the event of similar events in the future. The fact that Lebanon’s military capacity couldn’t possibly match up to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is beside the point. The larger issue is that Israel’s military actions are alienating a Lebanese government that is, if not friendly, than at least not adversarial.

    What Hezbollah and Lebanese officials call violations of the ceasefire, Israel calls self-defense. Despite Israeli troops pulling out of the small portions of southern Lebanon they briefly controlled during the war, the IDF still holds five separate points on the Lebanese side of the UN-demarcated Blue Line, which is technically a breach of the terms. The Israelis, however, are tying a full withdrawal from Lebanon to the Lebanese government’s demobilization of Hezbollah. And Israel has no intention of stopping the airstrikes as long as Hezbollah is holding weapons.

    “The Lebanese government’s commitment to disarm Hezbollah and remove it from southern Lebanon must be implemented,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Sunday. “Maximum enforcement will continue and even intensify – we will not allow any threat to the residents of the north.”

    The Trump administration, which inherited the Joe Biden-era ceasefire agreement, finds itself in a vice. Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey who doubles as Donald Trump’s special envoy for Syria and Lebanon, warns that Hezbollah still has a stockpile of at least 15,000 rockets and is replacing some of the arms it lost during last year’s war. During a conference last week, Barrack advised the Lebanese government to sit down with Israel and work on a normalization pact, as if establishing normal diplomatic relations would magically fix all the problems between these two states. It also happens to be a recommendation that is borderline pointless, since Lebanese officials will find it hard to rationalize normalization talks as long as Israeli bombs are killing Lebanese citizens on Lebanese territory. To do anything less would be to jeopardize the credibility of the relatively new administration in the eyes of the people it’s supposed to represent.

    It’s difficult to see what Washington can do fix things. Hezbollah has no incentive to part with their small arms, rockets, launchers and explosives if Israel continues to attack. Israel, in turn, has no incentive to stop treating Lebanon as its own personal piñata as long as Hezbollah refuses to disarm and transition strictly into a non-violent political party (and that’s even assuming Israel would support Hezbollah participating in Lebanese politics to begin with). The maelstrom is further complicated by the Gulf states, who would normally be called upon to fundraise Lebanon’s reconstruction but aren’t likely to write any checks if they don’t feel comfortable that the war is truly over.

    This is not to say the situation isn’t entirely negative. The resumption of full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, which many observers assumed would occur shortly after the agreement came into force, hasn’t come to pass. Northern Israel has seen a total of one rocket attack from Lebanon. The Israeli population that left for the country’s major cities during hostilities is starting to come back to the farms and small villages that populate Israel’s northern communities. Hezbollah has cooperated far more than previously assessed, and the Lebanese army, constantly strapped for cash and dealing with resource constraints, has proven itself to be a committed enforcer of the deal’s provisions. The writ of the Lebanese state has expanded, and Lebanese troops who previously viewed the southern portion of the country as a no-go zone are now regularly deployed there. Last but not least, the Lebanese government is no longer acting in an interim capacity; its president is a leading promoter of demobilizing Hezbollah and bringing all arms under the state’s control.

    But these glimmers of hope can’t hide the fact that the situation risks spinning out of control. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of the chicken-and-egg problem. Except this time, the answer will determine whether Lebanon stays in a gray zone between war and peace, descends into another cycle of violence or gets the opportunity to rebuild.

  • Iran is down, not out

    Iran is down, not out

    The sirens began at about 5 a.m. A Houthi ballistic missile was on its way, over Jerusalem, in the direction of the coastal plain. After half a minute or so, I began to hear the familiar sound of doors scraping and muffled voices, as people made their way to the shelter.  

    It has become a regular occurrence. No one makes much of a fuss anymore. For most Israelis, most of the last 70 years, Yemen was a remote country on the other edge of the Middle East, the part facing the Indian Ocean, rather than the Mediterranean. What was known about it consisted of a few items of food and folklore that the country’s Jewish community had brought with it to Israel when it fled there en masse in the late 1940s. Now, it has become a strange, uninvited nocturnal visitor, periodically launching deadly ordnance at population centers.  

    Outside Syria, the Iranian losses are decidedly less terminal

    The missile, like the great majority of its predecessors, was quickly intercepted and downed. The Ansar Allah government in Sana’a can’t match the Jewish state in either attack or defense. Still, on the rare occasions when the Houthis have broken through, the results are not to be dismissed. They succeeded in closing Ben Gurion airport for a few days back in May, when one of their missiles landed near the main terminal. And in July, a civilian in Tel Aviv was killed when a Houthi drone penetrated the skies over the city and detonated in a crowded street.  

    Israel’s response to the Houthis’ aggression has been swift and consequential. Extensive damage has been inflicted on the Hodaida and Salif ports, the airport at Sana’a, the oil terminal at Ras Issa and other infrastructural targets. Speaking to me in his offices in the port city of Aden a few weeks ago, Yemeni defense minister Mohsen al-Daeri noted the “huge impact” of the Israeli counterstrikes, describing the airport, Salif and Hodeidah as the “lungs” through which the Houthis breathe.  

    But with due acknowledgement to Israel’s response, it should be noted that while the Houthis’ lungs may be damaged, they are clearly still breathing. Their continued ability to lob occasional missiles at Israel goes together with their ongoing and far more consequential terrorizing of shipping seeking to pass through the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route. In the last two months, they have sunk two Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned ships. Traffic through the area remains down by 85 percent compared to the pre-October 2023 period.  

    In June, I visited the frontlines in Yemen’s Dhaleh province, where the Houthis face off against UAE supported fighters from the Southern Transitional Council. The discrepancy in capacities between the sides was immediately apparent. The STC fighters are well organised, highly motivated and able to hold the line. But in weaponry and in particular in the crucial field of drones, the Iran-supplied Houthi fighters have the clear advantage.  

    The evident durability of Iran’s Yemeni allies raises a larger question. In Israel (and in the West, in so far as the west pays attention to such things), a trope has taken hold according to which the successful campaign fought by Israel and the US against Iran in June, along with Jerusalem’s mauling of Hezbollah in 2024 have effectively put paid to Tehran’s regional ambitions and broken the Iran-led regional alliance. The very coining of the term “Twelve-Day War” to describe the June fighting is clearly intended to recall Israel’s triumphant Six-Day War in 1967, in which the Jewish state vanquished the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The 1967 victory broke the forward march of Arab nationalism. The 2025 war against Iran, implicitly, is deemed to have achieved something similar with regard to Tehran’s Islamist regional bloc.  

    The achievements of the US and Israel against Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere were without doubt impressive and demonstrated a vast conventional superiority. There are reasons, however, to temper the euphoria and take a close look at the current direction of events. This is important not only or mainly because modesty is a becoming virtue. It matters because failure to note how Iran and its proxies are organizing in the post-June 2025 period runs the risk of allowing them to regroup, rebuild and return.  

    Of the defeats and setbacks suffered by Iran in the course of 2024 and 2025, only one element is almost certainly irreversible. This is the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Assad’s toppling has removed Syria from the Iranian axis and turned it into an arena of competition between Israel, Turkey and the Gulf countries.  

    Elsewhere, however, the Iranian losses are decidedly less terminal. In Yemen, as we’ve seen, Tehran’s Houthi clients have yet to suffer a decisive blow. They have managed effectively to close a vital maritime trade route to all but those they choose to allow to pass. The West and the Gulf are not currently engaged in equipping their own clients to give them an offensive capacity against the Houthis. Unless and until that happens, Iran’s investment in Yemen is set to continue to deliver dividends.  

    In Iraq, largely ignored by western media, the Iran-supported Shia militias remain the dominant political and military force in the country, commanding 238,000 fighters. They prudently, and apparently on Iranian advice, chose to largely sit out the war of the last two years. But the current ruling coalition of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani rests on the support of the militias, in their political iteration as the “Coordination Framework.”

    The ruling coalition is in the process of advancing legislation that will make permanent the militias’ status as an independent, parallel military structure. In Baghdad in 2015, a pro-Iran militia commander told me that the intention was to establish the militias as an Iraqi version of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. The current legislation would go far toward achieving this aim.  

    In Lebanon, too, despite its severe weakening at the hands of Israel, the Hezbollah organization is flatly rejecting demands that it disarm. The government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has made clear that it has no intention of seeking to use force to induce the movement to do so. Given Hezbollah’s infiltration of state institutions, including the Lebanese armed forces, it is not clear that the government would be able to employ coercive measures even if it wished to. The continued Lebanese dread of civil war also plays a role here. Only Israel’s ongoing campaign to prevent Hezbollah’s rebuilding of its forces is likely to be effective.  

    So taken together, what this picture amounts to is that Iran has suffered severe setbacks on a number of important fronts over the last 18 months. But in none of them, with the possible exception of Syria, is it out of the game. The sirens in the Jerusalem night sky are a fair indicator. Complacency would be a grave error. Reports of Iran’s demise have been much exaggerated.