Hassan Nasrallah's Folly – The Atlantic

Israel announced this afternoon that it had carried out an airstrike on Hezbollah's “central headquarters” in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was reportedly the target of the attack; his fate remains unclear.

The attack caps a series of Israeli attacks over the past two weeks that have inflicted devastating damage on Hezbollah as an organization. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks that began on September 17, which former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta even described as “terrorism,” would have maimed much of Hezbollah’s middle management and made things very difficult for Hezbollah must organize coherently in response to Israeli airstrikes, let alone prepare for a possible ground attack on southern Lebanon.

All armies must be able to shoot, move and communicate – this is the defense and management of war. By depriving Hezbollah operatives of the ability to communicate securely with one another at a tactical level, Israel dealt a major blow to its adversary and undoubtedly reaped an intelligence bonanza in the process. Never before has Hezbollah's rank and file been so publicly exposed and, worse, humiliated.

Meanwhile, Israel's relentless airstrikes this week appear to have destroyed much of Hezbollah's leadership, not to mention its missile caches. I'm often skeptical of Israel's ability to inflict serious damage on its non-state adversaries through airstrikes alone, but militarily Hezbollah is certainly faltering. As Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Malcom H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, noted, Israel's “ability to employ superior military firepower and technology” could potentially obviate the need for a ground attack.

Israel has tried to chastise and degrade Hezbollah through the air before – in 1993 with the useless Operation Accountability and in 1996 with the Grapes of Wrath campaign – but it is clear that much has changed since the 1990s. Much has also changed since the summer of 2006, when Hezbollah managed to embarrass Israel in 34 days of fighting.

In 2016, I asked Herzi Halevi – now commander of the Israel Defense Forces, then its intelligence chief – what he feared most. His response was a ground attack from southern Lebanon to northern Israel, in which Hezbollah either temporarily seized Israeli territory or kidnapped Israeli civilians and took them hostage. I've often thought of this when I've reflected on Israel's failure to anticipate and prepare for the attacks of October 7 last year.

But it is now clear that Israel was preparing for Hezbollah. This – not a fight against Hamas – was the fight Israel expected and wanted. And it was actually finished.

If Nasrallah was killed, the question now becomes whether Iran feels it has to respond directly. The Lebanese – not just Hezbollah's largely Shia Muslim voters, but all Lebanese – will have grimly noted that neither Syria nor Iran has rescinded an action after Hezbollah committed hundreds of men to Iran and Bashar's regime al-Assad has sent to fight and die in Iraq and Syria to ease Israeli pressure on Lebanon. But Iran does not want war with Israel, and its response will likely be carefully tailored to avoid one.

Think of the innocent Lebanese who live in the high-rise buildings that collapsed in the Israeli airstrike. They did not demand that Hezbollah set up its command center beneath their home after the 2006 war. They didn't ask for any of it.

Hezbollah, the only Lebanese militia to retain its weapons after the end of Lebanon's civil war, has always maintained that its willingness to fight is necessary to protect Lebanon. But Hezbollah's actions since then – almost always in service of its own political needs or those of its ungrateful Iranian sponsors – have brought nothing but pain to all Lebanese, and especially to the oppressed Lebanese it claims to represent.