Why Nasrallah scaled down his Sunday attack, and why Israel had limited its pre-emption
Hezbollah retaliated for Shukr’s assassination while striving to avoid all-out war; Israel, still focused primarily in Gaza, has the same goal, at least for now
In the wake of Sunday’s round of blows between Israel and Hezbollah, both sides profess to be relatively satisfied. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah essentially drew his bottom line in a speech on Sunday evening when he announced that the operation was “over,” albeit while reserving “the right” to strike again.
Some would define his speech as apologetic – designed to explain to his domestic audience in Lebanon that Hezbollah had not permitted the assassination by Israel of its military leader, Faud Shukr, to pass unavenged, and that it had thus exacted a price from Israel. (Israel killed Shukr in a strike in Beirut on July 30, three days after a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 Israeli children in Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights, in an attack for which Israel held Shukr responsible.)
Hezbollah’s ostensible attack on the Glilot base — which was not in fact impacted — was depicted by Nasrallah as the main achievement of its revenge assault, but with a very specific stress on that base being north of Tel Aviv. His point, and this was for outside consumption, was that Hezbollah had been careful not to fire directly on Tel Aviv, lest the symmetry Nasrallah has himself previously drawn, whereby a strike on Beirut is considered equivalent to a strike on Tel Aviv, would be used against him.
But that was not the only cautious choice made by Nasrallah. It appears that the organization considered firing precision missiles at Glilot, home to the IDF’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit and to the Mossad’s HQ.
The Hezbollah chief ultimately decided not to use this strategic weapon for fear that the Israeli retaliation would be so forceful as to start a far longer and more devastating conflict than the past 10 months have seen.
Intent on avoiding this scenario, Hezbollah instead fired drones toward Glilot, calculating that this would not open the floodgates. After all, Hezbollah has been firing drones into Israel for the whole 10 months, so Nasrallah assessed that this would not be considered by Israel as a cause for escalation. In the event, almost 20 drones were destroyed, with none of them making it further south than Acre.
“Militarily, Hezbollah’s retaliation failed by every parameter: No targeted military site was hit, Hezbollah lost many of its missile setups in Israel’s preemptive strike, and it still hasn’t fully taken stock of the damage we caused,” a senior military official told The Times of Israel.
In this context, Israel would do well to avoid boasting. Nasrallah knows full well what didn’t work for him, as his speech on the purported achievements made clear. Irresponsible Israeli statements run the risk of cornering Nasrallah and prompting him to strike again. Israel should give him some room to take it all in; we have wisely used ambiguity in the past as a means to end a round of fighting.
Israeli assessments suggest one of the reasons for Hezbollah’s relatively diluted retaliation is internal tension in the wake of Shukr’s assassination. He has been replaced as military chief by Hezbollah’s former southern command chief, Ali Karki. And this appointment has in turn created tension with two other senior officials: operations chief Ibrahim Akil and Hezbollah’s head of security, who is known as Mortada.
Shukr was able to navigate between these two centers of power and direct the organization according to Nasrallah’s will. In Shukr’s absence, Nasrallah, hitherto focused on setting policy, has been forced to step in. The rivals are competing for closeness to Nasrallah, and that rivalry projects downward, impacting the management of the war in the south. It is not inconceivable that one of Nasrallah’s considerations for not firing precision missiles at Glilot was a lack of faith in his senior officials.
The IDF’s preemptive attack in southern Lebanon on Sunday targeted thousands of rocket launcher barrels and undoubtedly prevented a significant part of Hezbollah’s planned retaliation, even though it had already been significantly scaled back on Nasrallah’s orders.
Nasrallah was evidently worried by the fact that two rocket volleys hit civilian communities – the town of Acre and moshav Manot – as underlined by the claim in his speech that Hezbollah did not intend to fire at civilians.
Again, his concern was about reverse symmetry — that Israel would react with massive attacks on sensitive Hezbollah targets in the heart of civilian populations. To date, it bears noting, Israel has minimized such attacks.
The question now is where we go from here – and will Sunday’s fighting constitute a watershed moment in this war with Hezbollah?
The fact is that the IDF’s northern command, during the approval phase of the plans for Sunday’s preemptive attack, proposed a far more expansive assault, but the government limited it to southern Lebanon only. While there were still strikes north of the Litani River, they were of a nature designed to avoid pushing Hezbollah into a corner.
As long as Gaza is still considered Israel’s main front, and the one that is drawing the majority of the IDF’s resources, a definitive conflict in the north remains postponed. Even after the heaviest day of fighting across the northern border, Israel evidently still prefers to try to reach a diplomatic arrangement with Hezbollah without the need for a ground operation in Lebanon.
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