Hezbollah no longer strategic threat, but Israeli determination key By David Isac
https://www.jns.org/hezbollah-no-longer-strategic-threat-but-israeli-determination-key/
Badly battered by Israel’s military operation in Lebanon, Hezbollah has been beaten, but not eliminated, analysts tell JNS. They paint an optimistic picture, saying that Hezbollah’s days as a strategic threat to Israel are over.
Within 24 hours of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel’s south, the Shi’ite militia launched a rocket strike on the Jewish state. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the group’s goal was to stretch Israel’s resources and force it to fight on two fronts.
Seeking to avoid that scenario, Israel played defense for nearly a year as Hezbollah fired more than 10,000 missiles from Lebanon, forcing 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes in the north for temporary shelter elsewhere. (Residents are expected to return in early March.)
Israel finally struck back in a series of remarkable operations starting on Sept. 17 and 18, 2024, detonating explosives hidden in pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Iranian-backed terror group. On Sept. 27, Israeli airstrikes killed Nasrallah. On Oct. 1, Israel invaded Lebanon, laying waste to much of Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure.
“Hezbollah has been hit dramatically. Its leadership has been toppled, its command structure decimated. Seventy percent of its strategic capabilities have been destroyed,” IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi told JNS.
Hezbollah had been a serious threat, but in two weeks Israel brought it to its knees, he said. Hezbollah was further weakened when Sunni Islamists took over Syria, depriving Hezbollah of a major resupply route from Iran.
“We have been talking for years about the fact that Hezbollah can shoot 2,000 to 3,000 rockets a day at Tel Aviv. It didn’t happen, not because potentially they couldn’t do it. It didn’t happen because Israel hit their capabilities in such a way that they lost their ability to make decisions. They literally lost their heads. They couldn’t announce a full-scale attack. There was nobody to announce it,” Avivi said.
The maintenance test
Daniel Schueftan, chairman of the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa, agrees. “The most important change that happened, and this is really dramatic, is that Hezbollah stopped being a strategic threat to Israel. It’s still a major nuisance, but that is of a profoundly different order of magnitude,” he told JNS.
The test now is whether Israel will perform the necessary “maintenance” to keep Hezbollah down. “Namely, can we continue to kill them and destroy them regardless of their attempt to embed themselves more deeply in the Lebanese state and in the Lebanese population,” Schueftan said.
Completely eliminating Hezbollah isn’t realistic, he added. “The same way you can’t eliminate cockroaches under your sink. You can only, from time to time, kill enough of them so that they will not disrupt your life and they will not take over.”
To keep Hezbollah from rebuilding, Israel must be ready to defy not only radicalism, but radicalism’s abettors in the Western world, from media outlets such as the BBC and The New York Times, to world bodies such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the Vatican, which under Pope Francis has espoused anti-Israel positions, he said.
Israel must also withstand pressure from its chief ally, the United States, should the new administration continue with the misguided approach of the last, Schueftan said.
The Houthis in Yemen are perhaps the best illustration of the “Biden approach,” he said.
The Houthis had for years threatened vital U.S. interests, as when they attacked Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities in September 2019, cutting its production by half. Biden’s administration responded by delisting the Houthis from the U.S. terror list in February 2021. The Biden team was forced to backtrack in January 2024 after the rebels targeting shipping in the Red Sea, and relist the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity—less severe than listing it as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling on the U.S. secretary of state to designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization within 30 days.
“Their [the Biden administration’s] idea was that if somebody is trying to kill you, bring him a banana and then he will become your friend. It is an unbelievable misperception about practically everything that has to do with radical forces,” Schueftan lamented.
“Maybe it will not be misguided under Trump. We don’t know yet,” he added.
Avivi agrees. “The challenge for Israel is to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its power. The big question is what will happen after the 60-day ceasefire [with Lebanon].” Avivi expressed optimism that Israel will show the necessary determination, having done so since the ceasefire went into effect on Nov. 27.
Avivi said that while Israel is required to vacate Southern Lebanon, it is maintaining a perimeter—“an area that it will flatten completely two to three kilometers inside Lebanon. Israel doesn’t intend to let people go back to this area.”
He doesn’t see any impact of the recent Hamas ceasefire on Hezbollah. The two issues are decoupled. Hezbollah had vowed to attack Israel so long as Israel fought Hamas, but the terror group’s resolve quickly dissipated under relentless Israeli attack. Hezbollah sued for peace even as Israel continued its war in Gaza.
Still, Schueftan warned that Hezbollah doesn’t consider itself defeated, only beaten. The terror group will attempt to rebuild back in a better way, one that affords it Western protection, particularly from the progressive left, “because what the progressives are all about is to make self-defense impossible under the banner of human rights.”
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