The party has spent almost two decades building up a deterrence capacity, and now may be its prisoner.
Since Hamas’ attack against Israeli towns on October 7, and the ensuing Israeli bombardment and military operations in and around Gaza, Hezbollah’s response in southern Lebanon has been mostly restrained. The party is expected to escalate if or when Israel begins its ground invasion of Gaza in order to achieve its objective of eradicating Hamas. However, given Hezbollah’s recent history, this escalation may be more forced than intended.
Since 2019, the party has reinforced its alliance with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Iran-backed groups in the Middle East, to strengthen its deterrence capacity against Israel. Wider coordination among these groups means engaging in a multifront conflict if Israel crosses certain “red lines.” The first of these is violating the sanctity of religious sites in Jerusalem, notably the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Hezbollah is also helping its partners to develop their military capabilities, such as perfecting their use of drones and ameliorating their military tactics. At face value, the Hamas attack of October 7 affirmed the success of Hezbollah’s threat to occupy Israeli towns in a future war with Israel. The party’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened as early as February 2011 to attack Israeli towns, although the tactic was more confidently put forward in 2019.
While Hezbollah must have realized that Israel would be vulnerable to such attacks, what happened on October 7, with the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians, must have provoked a feeling of entrapment in the party. Hezbollah has demonstrated that it understands the power balance in its conflict with Israel, after four decades of experience and the high cost of the 2006 war. The party’s interaction with Israel has relied on a careful calibration of Israeli political calculations, Hezbollah’s military capabilities, and geopolitics. A sign of this has been the party’s effective acceptance and lack of response to years of Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah positions in Syria. As the conflict in Syria subsided in 2017, it was the party’s understanding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s risk-averse approach and polarizing internal behavior that led it to try to rework the rules of engagement with Israel, by playing a wider role in supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Only time will tell the extent of Hezbollah’s knowledge of the details of the Hamas attack. Yet the scale of the operation and its high civilian death toll are anomalies in the recent record of Iran and its allies, who tend to progress slowly and carefully, as if weaving a Persian carpet. Definitely, some elements of the attack were highlighted previously by Hezbollah, and were featured in its rhetoric and as part of its deterrence options. Even the operation’s security aspect, with Hamas switching to a more secure mode of communications within the network of participants, showed signs of cooperation with Hezbollah, which has expertise in this field.
Since 2006, Hezbollah has worked meticulously on building up its military capabilities through a manifold increase in its firepower, by developing a precision-guided missile and drone capacity, and by adopting naval tactics. The party has added layer upon layer of deterrence capabilities, while becoming much more of a regional player, for instance by participating in the Syrian conflict on the side of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. For Hezbollah, the alliance with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad under the “unity of the fronts” strategy, represented yet another layer of deterrence and a manifestation of its regional role.
In this context, Hezbollah relied on Netanyahu’s willingness to accept shades of violence on his northern border to shift the rules of engagement in southern Lebanon. For instance, Palestinian factions have launched limited rocket attacks and infiltrated Israeli territory in the past year, and Israel has time and again responded with restraint. It did so both to respect these evolving rules of engagement and avoid a wider conflagration. This came at a fairly low cost.
Politically, Hezbollah’s alliance with Hamas and Islamic Jihad became a part of the party’s rhetoric, giving Nasrallah and Iran a front seat in the battle to protect Al-Aqsa. This presented Iran and its allies with an opportunity for redemption after their more sectarian approach during the post-2003 period in Iraq, and during the Syrian conflict. Hamas, which fought on the rebel side in Syria and fell out with Hezbollah and Iran, is now underlining Iran’s role in protecting Al-Aqsa. The alliance is also a political response to the Abraham Accords and its promise to reshape the Middle East and redefine the region’s geopolitics.
Allowing the demise of Hamas in Gaza would be costly for Iran and Hezbollah in terms of morale, and would redefine them as being primarily centered on Shiite interests, with a strictly sectarian agenda. Hamas is already showing signs of distress over Hezbollah’s relatively limited response to the bombings in Gaza. But more importantly for Hezbollah, a Hamas defeat would not only destroy the “unity of the fronts” strategy, which is already a burden, but also expose the limits of its deterrence capabilities, which would effectively bring Hezbollah back to where it was in 2006. Added to this, the October 7 attacks might push Israel to again adopt preemptive military action as a central feature of its defensive strategy, which means that a crushing conflict with Hezbollah may only be a matter of time.
In spite of this, Hezbollah still wants to avoid an all-out conflict in Lebanon over Gaza, given the implications for its political standing in a crisis-ridden country. Rather, it prefers a gradual escalation, with the now difficult objective of halting an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. However, the party knows that it cannot control the outcome of its actions, as the wars of 1993, 1996, and 2006 were all Israeli operations aimed at deterring Hezbollah or destroying it. A widening of the Gaza war to Lebanon is ultimately an Israeli decision.
Today, Hezbollah is caught in a trap largely of its own making, with high stakes that can bring potentially devastating consequences. The party’s alliances, which were designed to act as another level of deterrence, have instead exposed it to levels of military escalation that it has sought to avoid since 2006.