The Wider War: Israel, Hezbollah, and the Dynamics of Escalation
Protests concerning the conflicts in Gaza have raged for over a year (OWP)
It was clear that Gaza was heading towards war by the morning of October 8. Hamas’s rampage the day before gave Israel its clearest casus belli since 1973, and IAF warplanes were already pounding targets in the crowded Palestinian strip. But as the battle lines sharpened on Israel’s southern border, a murkier situation was simmering in the country’s north. Hezbollah, already in a low-intensity conflict with the Jewish state, now had a clear opportunity to escalate. Israel had reasons of its own to intensify the war with Hamas. Yet, for months, neither side took that decisive step. Then, in the late summer and early fall of 2024, the situation deteriorated into what increasingly resembles a full-scale war. Why did Israel and Hezbollah hold back from large-scale conflict for so long, and what changed to bring both sides to the brink? This article will seek to answer those questions by examining the diplomatic and strategic efforts of these actors and their allies in the post-October 7th landscape.
For actors with a history of multiple confrontations, each new round of conflict often mirrors the patterns of the past. Therefore, to understand the current dynamics, it is crucial to revisit the most recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which unfolded in June 2006. Nearly twenty years before the horrors of October 7, Hezbollah launched its own explosive raid into Israel, killing eight soldiers and abducting two others back into Lebanon. The group had been trying to kidnap Israeli soldiers for years as bargaining chips, but their sudden success came at a price. Unbeknownst to Hezbollah, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert had pre-planned a massive response in the event of such an abduction. Airstrikes began accordingly, followed by a ground campaign that sent Israeli tanks across the Lebanese border.
Throughout late July and early August 2006, the two sides engaged in fierce combat. Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at Israeli cities, while Israel responded with airstrikes targeting Hezbollah’s military assets as well as Lebanese civilian infrastructure. Despite Israel’s technological and material advantage, its anticipated breakthrough on the ground never materialized. The IDF managed to kill hundreds of Hezbollah fighters, but the group’s effective defensive strategies ultimately hindered their efforts. Both sides came around to a UN-brokered ceasefire by mid-August.
Though both Israel and Hezbollah quickly claimed victory, it was evident which side had suffered more. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah told reporters, “We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude.” It was, in some sense, an apology to his country. For the price of eight dead soldiers and two captives, Israel subjected Lebanon to a month of air raids that caused numerous civilian casualties and billions of dollars in economic damage. Hezbollah could claim victory, but the harm it inflicted paled in comparison to domestic losses.
As Hassan Nasrallah considered his options in the fall of 2023, the costs of the July War could not have been far from his mind. For years, Lebanon has struggled in the grip of a total economic crisis. The combined shocks of COVID-19, the 2020 Beirut explosion, and a global energy crisis pushed the country into currency devaluation and triple-digit inflation. A reported 80 percent of its population now lives below the poverty line, with nearly half of that number at the extreme poverty level. Hezbollah may be labeled a terrorist group, an Iranian proxy, or a malign actor, but fundamentally it is also a governance entity reliant on its constituents' support. Exposing these constituents to months of Israeli bombardment would not destroy Hezbollah, but it would destroy Lebanon to a degree that could permanently harm the militia’s domestic standing. As Israeli general Gadi Eizenkot argued in 2008, “the possibility of harm to the population is the main factor restraining Nasrallah.” In this context, the large-scale bombing of Gaza presents a clear warning to Hamas’s would-be ally: this could happen to your cities, too.
It was therefore incredibly risky for Nasrallah to fully join the war. However, he also faced huge reputational costs in staying out of it. Since Hezbollah’s birth in the 1980s, the group’s legitimacy has rested on its endless war with Israel. This constant “resistance” made Hassan Nasrallah the Arab world’s favorite leader, justifying his repression of the Lebanese people and ensuring a steady stream of assistance from post-revolutionary Iran. The militia’s identity became inseparable from the Arab-Israeli conflict. As this conflict entered a new phase on October 7, Nasrallah found it both unthinkable to stay out and unwise to dive in. So he “joined the resistance” on October 8 in the smallest way possible: by launching sporadic missile and rocket attacks on northern Israel. He addressed Lebanese audiences early in November, stating, “Some claim we are about to engage in the war. I am telling you, we have been engaged…”
With the Israeli military tied down in Gaza, a larger attack in the North would likely have yielded short-term successes. Hezbollah could have deployed its massive rocket arsenal and its highly trained personnel against Israeli cities and military posts, forcing Israel into a two-front war that would have stretched its relatively small army. But the long-term consequences would have been catastrophic. The objectively stronger Israeli war machine, which would enjoy full-throated U.S. support if attacked by Hezbollah, would surely lose soldiers and civilians to the militia’s rockets and missiles, but it would also surely deploy the full might of the Israeli Air Force against both Hezbollah and the derelict Lebanese economy. Nasrallah contented himself with grand declarations and a drumbeat of rocket and missile attacks on northern Israel. He wanted the world to see Hezbollah fighting. He did not want to go to war.
Israel seemed to share this desire in the weeks following October 7. That month, Israeli strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer delivered two messages about a possible war with Hezbollah. The first was that, in his words, “we don’t seek an escalation.” The second was that if such an escalation took place, “the response…will make what happened in 2006 look like child’s play.” In the weeks before Dermer’s remarks, American officials worried that only the latter point was true; it seemed Israel did indeed seek a two-front war, and that it was prepared to unleash a massive attack on Hezbollah to get it. As the war dragged on, and especially as the Gaza war’s drawdown freed up troops for the Lebanese front, the United States continued to wonder about Israel’s intentions with Hezbollah.
According to reporting by the New York Times, Israeli officials began discussing a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah almost immediately after October 7. It was unclear in these early days whether the attack had been the work of Hamas or the larger, amorphous “Axis of Resistance.” If the IDF saw the conflict in the latter light, a pre-emptive strike against the Iranian Axis’s most capable component made sense. Behind closed doors, though, American officials were adamant that Israel did not widen the war. The United States worried that conflict with Hezbollah would mean a regional war involving American forces and Iranian proxies from across the Middle East. Biden could not allow Israel to fight Iran alone, but he did not want Netanyahu to start such a war unnecessarily.
In the months to come, though IDF deployments to Gaza made a new front increasingly impractical, Israeli policy makers continued to contemplate war in the north. Netanyahu’s administration evacuated more than 100,000 civilians from the Israeli side of the Lebanese border in what the New York Times called the “largest internal displacement in Israel’s history.” Without an end to the cross-border skirmishes, these people could not return to their homes. Nasrallah insisted that the cross-border skirmishes would not cease without a broader ceasefire agreement for Gaza, but Netanyahu worked tirelessly to prevent such an agreement, seeking instead to achieve a decisive military victory, insisting on finishing the war by force.
These conflicting interests put Hezbollah and Israel at an impasse, where they remained for months Meanwhile, however, the broader regional context was changing. Hezbollah’s security relied on Iranian deterrence in the wake of October 7 in a manner analogous to Israel’s own partnership with America; if neither Tehran nor Washington wanted a war, and if both Tehran and Washington promised to start one if their red lines were crossed, then uneasy peace could hold. But if Israel would attack Iran and its proxies with impunity, Nasrallah was in deep trouble. He had already shown he didn’t have the stomach to start a real war. Now he seemed increasingly abandoned by the alliance he needed to stop one.
This pattern began in earnest on December 25, 2023, when Israel killed a senior advisor in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with minimal pushback. After four more months of periodic strikes in Syria and elsewhere, the IDF upped the ante, striking the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Falling squarely outside the unwritten norms of Israeli-Iranian conflict, this attack represented a major escalation that invited a major response. When this retaliation came, it only underscored Iran’s weakness; Tehran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, but a U.S.-led regional coalition shot almost all of them down. The feared retaliation of the formidable “Axis of Resistance” ultimately resulted in minor damage to one Israeli base in the Negev. Iranian deterrence was crumbling.
Months later, a crucial mistake by Hezbollah allowed Israel to escalate further. The Lebanese militia killed 12 children at a soccer field in the Golan Heights on July 27. The strike was likely intended for Israel’s nearby Hermon Brigade headquarters, but it didn’t matter; the militia had killed innocent people inside Israeli territory, and Netanyahu would have to respond. IAF warplanes killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military figure, in Beirut three days later. This operation was the clearest signal yet that Israel was unafraid to escalate. Netanyahu made his point even clearer a day later, when the IDF took out Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. These twin killings proved pivotal for the events to come. When Iran declined to respond, and when Hezbollah’s unilateral retaliation did minimal damage, Israel knew it could continue to ramp up the pressure.
The events of September 2024 took this pattern of escalation to its logical extreme. Israel detonated the pager devices of Hezbollah members across Lebanon on September 18, killing few but maiming thousands. The IDF killed nearly all of the militia’s Radwan Force command in Beirut days later. Hezbollah’s response was predictable and ineffective: the group launched rockets deeper than usual into northern Israel. Israeli warplanes launched unprecedented strikes across Lebanon in response on September 23, while Hezbollah fired hundreds of its own rockets over the border.
If Hassan Nasrallah had sought to avoid a repetition of the June 2006 war, the airstrikes on September 23 were unmistakable proof of his failure. Nearly twenty years ago, a provocation by Hezbollah gave Israel cause for a war whose consequences fell overwhelmingly on the Lebanese side of the border. Nasrallah’s rocket attacks and the evacuations they prompted are now providing a similar casus belli for Israel, whose planes are once again dropping bombs on Beirut. Nearly five hundred Lebanese died in September 23s airstrikes (the proportion of civilians to combatants is unclear), while Hezbollah’s rockets resulted in no reported deaths or serious injuries. That same day, Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian told reporters that his country did not want war.
Nasrallah now found himself completely isolated. Nearly his entire chain of command was dead, his only ally had opted to stay out of the fight, and there was essentially nothing he could do to stop further Israeli strikes. The IDF launched a massive attack on September 27 targeting the Secretary General himself, flattening three residential buildings in Beirut to hit a bunker underneath. At the time of this article’s writing, it is unclear whether Nasrallah survived. In any case, his efforts to deter Israel are dead.
The narrative of this war—regardless of what unfolds next—is ultimately one of failure by both Iran and the United States. These two rivals were crucial sources of support for Hezbollah and Israel respectively, and only they possessed the leverage needed to prevent a conflict in the north. Iran had its own motivations for exercising restraint, including safeguarding its nuclear program. However, its inability to deter Israel or stand firmly with Hezbollah enabled Netanyahu to escalate the situation further. On the other hand, despite ensuring a steady supply of military support to Israel, the United States failed to keep Netanyahu at the negotiating table long enough to reach a ceasefire deal that might have halted Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks. As Israeli pressure on Nasrallah mounted, American diplomats were unable to de-escalate the crisis. If Iran chooses not to retaliate in response to recent events, the decimation of Hezbollah’s command structure could potentially serve U.S. interests in the long term. Yet, the ongoing threat of a broader regional war remains, and the Israeli bombing of Beirut—carried out by America’s strongest ally in the region—represents a significant setback for peace and further tarnishes the U.S. image.
Ultimately, this conflict was far from inevitable. Cycles of escalation are not unstoppable forces of nature but rather the result of a series of human decisions. Israeli and Lebanese civilians now bear the brunt of the suffering because the actors involved failed to make better choices.