By: Yaakov Lappin and Sarit Zehavi
Almost a year after Hezbollah began bombarding Israel’s north, the security situation in the Middle East is changing dramatically, and four different scenarios could play out going forward. .
First, it is worthwhile taking stock of critical recent events.
On September 17th, a wave of explosions occurred within pagers used by thousands of Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon and Syria. This significant and widespread event in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, assuming that Israel is indeed involved in this event, severely impacted Hezbollah’s operational, intelligence functions and landed a severe cognitive blow on the organization. This marks a historic event in operational capabilities, demonstrating the new ability to harm thousands of enemy operatives without firing a single bullet or dropping a single bomb.
Three days later, on September 20, a meeting chaired by Ibrahim Aqil tool place in the basement of a 7-story building in Dahiyeh, Beirut. Ibrahim Muhammad Aqil, aka Hajj Abdul Qader (born 1962), one of the founders of Hezbollah’s military force. Aqil was a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council and, in his last position, served as head of the operations division and of the elite Radwan Unit.
The meeting that Aqil attended that was targeted included 15 other senior commanders from the Radwan unit’s chain of command and operations system. Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi, aka Abu Hussein Samir, the former commander of Radwan, was the most prominent among them.
As Hezbollah prepared to respond, the IAF struck approximately 290 Hezbollah targets on September 22, including thousands of launcher barrels, alongside additional terrorist infrastructure in multiple areas in southern Lebanon. On September 23, after warning the population of southern Lebanon to move away from Hezbollah military sites, the IDF attacked some 800 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Since then, the Israeli Air Force has continued to detect and preempt Hezbollah firing systems in an unprecedented manner. On September 23, Defense Minister Gallant confirmed that the IAF has taken tens of thousands of rockets and precise munition out of commission, stating, “What Hezbollah has built over a period of 20 years since the second Lebanon War, is in fact being destroyed by the IDF.” On September 26, the IDF confirmed that over the past three days, it struck over 2,000 terror targets, including launchers, and Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.
The first use of this aerial mass strike capability occurred on August 25, when the Israeli Air Force launched a preemptive strike on Hezbollah, using some 100 fighter jets, which it said struck thousands of Hezbollah rocket launch barrels, including those that were designated to fire on northern and central Israel. Immediately afterwards, Hezbollah targeted northern Israel with some 300 projectile attacks.
In general, Hezbollah’s attacks in recent days and weeks appear to be significantly less than what it would have wanted to unleash, meaning that its capabilities are being severely degraded.
In the background are ongoing vows by Iran to respond to the killings in Tehran on July 31 of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau. On July 30, the IAF struck and killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s late military chief of staff, which is why Hezbollah had attempted to strike Israel and was largely thwarted by the pre-emptive Israeli attack.
More broadly, Iran has been activating its multiple proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen to attack Israel from October 8 onwards, a day after Hamas’s mass murder attack on southern Israel, for the purpose of creating a long war of attrition.
Iran has been ordering Hezbollah and its other proxies to wage a war of attrition on Israel in order to extort it into withdrawing fully from Gaza, which would save its ally, Hamas. Israel, on the other hand, appears to be signaling to the Iranian – Hezbollah axis that the time of attrition is over, and that the only two choices on the table are either a diplomatic arrangement and enforcement of Resolution 1701, or an escalation of the already escalating conflict.
With this in mind, the four possible scenarios going forward are:
- Hezbollah and Iran decide to enter into a mutual truce with Israel, and the conflict ends at this stage. If this occurs, three follow-on possibilities arise:
- Israel enforces UN Security Resolution 1701 on its own and continues to target Hezbollah’s force build-up and recovery efforts that would follow a diplomatic arrangement that will try to prevent Hezbollah from recovering.
- An enforcement mechanism made up of Western powers or another arrangement is found to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its capabilities in southern Lebanon.
- The status quo that existed for the past 18 years, in which Hezbollah rebuilds its capabilities and UNIFIL fully fails in its mission to enforce Resolution 1701, continues.
- The war expands further, with Hezbollah insisting on continuing to fire, perhaps with Beirut and Tel Aviv absorbing more fire, and the IDF sends ground forces into southern Lebanon for the purpose of uprooting Hezbollah’s entrenched capabilities across hundreds of southern Lebanese villages and towns. In this scenario, Iran would likely try to support Hezbollah by activating additional regional proxies, especially from Syria.
- This next scenario could develop out of the second scenario, and in it, Iran would join the war directly, and not just rely on its proxies, and Israeli strikes could, in theory, expand to target Iran’s nuclear sites, missile bases, and critical dual use civilian infrastructure in Iran.
This scenario is the reason that U.S. forces have flooded the region, and Iran’s ability to make dramatic gains by directly attacking Israel have been severely restricted. But the scenario cannot be totally ruled out, due to the basic inability to predict the intentions of adversaries that do not share any of the Western cost-benefit analysis, and which are motivated by radical religious ideology.
- Under a fourth scenario, a ceasefire in Gaza successfully negotiated, which would result, in turn, in a de-escalation in the northern arenas. This scenario does not appear to be materializing at this stage.
In this case, the first three scenarios would become irrelevant, as a fragile truce would take hold, and Hezbollah would hold its fire in the north.
The three questions that appear at the end of scenario one would be equally relevant at the end of the other three scenarios as well.
The question of under which scenario Israel’s government would seek to return some 60,000 displaced civilians to the north is still unknown.
What is certain is that Hezbollah would seek to rebuild its military capabilities under all scenarios, and placing itself in a position where it can again threaten the Galilee with a ground invasion by Radwan death squads in the future.
The international community is obligated to guarantee to Israel that this will not happen.
Lt. Col. (ret.) Sarit Zehavi is the founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center, which specializes in Israel’s security challenges on its northern borders.
Yaakov Lappin is an Israel-based military and strategic affairs analysist and a research associate at the Alma Center
