Set to a peppy electronic soundtrack, a recent video clip showed what the Hezbollah militia said was a missile-firing drone, a new weapon in its arsenal as it ratchets up its strikes on Israel.
Flaunting a new weapon is the type of muscle flexing that Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s elusive leader, crows about. “What protects you is your strength, your courage, your fists, your weapons, your missiles and your presence in the field,” he said in an address earlier this year.
Hezbollah’s attacks, which started last October in solidarity with Hamas in the Gaza war, have gradually intensified as the group uses larger and more sophisticated weapons to strike more often and deeper beyond the border between Israel and Lebanon. Israel, too, is hitting targets farther into Lebanon.
The latest surge by Hezbollah came this week, with a series of daily drone strikes by the militia hitting some civilian targets well into Israel. Senior officials starting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stoked their rhetorical threats against Hezbollah, suggesting that a day of reckoning was close at hand.
Yet whenever the fighting escalates, both Hezbollah and Israel seem to calibrate their tit-for-tat attacks so that no strike starts a larger conflict. While concerns about a wider war remain, both sides appear hamstrung in different ways that force restraint.
The video clip — released by Hezbollah’s military media office in May — illustrates how in some ways, the group has never been stronger. Its main patron, Iran, has supplied an increasingly powerful range of missiles. Plus Hezbollah gained valuable battlefield experience after years of deploying what is believed to be at least 2,500 special forces troops in Syria to help shore up the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
But Hezbollah is not just a fighting force; it has evolved into a broader Lebanese political movement that must weigh dragging the whole country into another war as the conflict-weary population continues to stagger through an extended economic crisis.
The violence at the border has already cost billions of dollars in tourism and agriculture revenue, Lebanese officials say. The last war, in 2006, left a path of devastation across the country, displacing at least one million people. Arab states and Iran helped pay for reconstruction. It is unclear whether they would do that again, and countless Lebanese have since fallen into poverty as the value of the pound has plummeted from 1,500 per dollar to 89,000.
Hundreds of thousands displaced
Since October, about 100,000 Lebanese civilians have been displaced along the southern border. Many are farmers, who, with harvests aborted, eke by on a $200 monthly subsidy from Hezbollah. Questioning of why the Gaza war should involve Lebanon is widespread.
Khodor Sirhal, 60, a farmer from the border village of Kafr Kila, sells olive oil soap at Souk El Tayeb, the market where Beirut hipsters flock every Saturday for organic produce. He described how last October, he and his wife were harvesting olives when intense explosions nearby forced them to flee to Beirut, where they remain.
“If you ask me why this war happened, I don’t have an answer,” he lamented. He was not sure whether his house or the long-dreamed-of cafe that he opened in the village a week before the fighting erupted was still intact.
One small business owner forced to abandon about 100 jars of olive oil among other goods said the Hezbollah officials he had questioned cannot explain why Lebanon should be involved. “They either speak in poetry or in predictions,” he said, declining to give his name out of fear of retribution. “They themselves do not have an answer.”
Since October, more than 300 Hezbollah fighters and around 80 Lebanese civilians have died, while at least 19 Israeli soldiers and eight civilians have been killed.
The usual bustle of the seaside capital of Tyre was absent, with muffled explosions booming in the distance. Three local schools housed displaced families.
Salwa, 49, said she had abandoned her house for one small room in a school, where 25 families share three bathrooms and one shower. Residents often make lightning visits south to survey the destruction, ranging from flattened houses to furniture gnawed to pieces by rats. One local mayor estimated that 6,000 housing units across the south had been totally or partially destroyed.
On her last trip home, Salwa, who declined to give her full name out of fear of retribution, discovered only one cat still surviving among her 10 cats and 15 dogs. “I asked myself why we are in this war,” she said. “They say it’s because of Palestine, but Palestine will take a long time to be liberated. God help the Palestinians.”
Avoiding a ‘no-holds barred’ war
Israel also has a number of factors holding it back. Its military is already struggling with its stated goal of eradicating Hamas from Gaza, while Washington has warned Israel against inflaming the wider region. The country also has its own population to consider.
Mr. Netanyahu has threatened that Israel would repeat the destruction of Gaza in Lebanon in a full-scale war. In response, Hezbollah has gradually unleashed more sophisticated weapons like that shown in the video.
“The Israelis have made it very clear that they would go in with no holds barred, this would be a massive operation,” said Mona Yacoubian, who heads the Middle East and North Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. “By the same token, this is a much more powerful Hezbollah.”
“This is a conflict that could potentially envelope much of Israel,” she continued, adding, “I think that is actually what has given both sides pause. This would be a conflict unlike any that has preceded it.”
Despite their frustrations at their extended evacuation, residents at the Lebanese border are often loath to criticize Hezbollah, fearing its security apparatus and still grateful that its guerrilla warfare helped to end the Israeli occupation from 1982 to 2000.
Some villagers who have not fled have rallied to try to prevent Hezbollah from bringing the war to them. In early April, a group of men in the mostly Christian village of Rmeish, near the border, rang the church bell to raise the alarm when some Hezbollah fighters arrived with a mobile rocket launcher and were preparing to fire. After a confrontation, the fighters left.
The dizzying, sectarian patchwork of Lebanese politics mirrors the ambivalence on the ground; the fighting has won some new allies for Hezbollah while estranging others. Some Sunni Muslims, who have traditionally supported the Palestinian cause, have endorsed the attacks, for example.
Allegiance to Iran
But Hezbollah has long attracted the ire of other factions for maintaining its own army and for its allegiance to Iran.
“The problem today is that the state of Lebanon doesn’t control its territory, it doesn’t control the decision of war and peace,” said Samy Gemayel, a member of Parliament and the head of a right-wing, mainly Christian political party and whose father, Amine Gemayel, served as president of Lebanon.
Iran built Hezbollah at least partly as a deterrent to Israel’s attacking the Islamic Republic. So Iran does not want to sacrifice Hezbollah in an effort to save Hamas, Mr. Gemayel said, but it can also be cavalier about destruction in Lebanon.
“The militia logic is if they stay alive after the war, then they won — whatever the losses,” he said.
Other border disputes between Lebanon and Israel over land and possible gas reserves in the Mediterranean Sea have aggravated relations. Washington, negotiating indirectly with Hezbollah, had brokered an agreement on the maritime border and was working on land issues, but the group suspended its participation while the Gaza war continues.
Mr. Nasrallah of Hezbollah has repeatedly said since October that “the Resistance Front in Lebanon” is achieving its goal of weakening Israel. “The war of attrition is eating away at the human, security, economic, spiritual, moral and psychological levels,” he said in a recent speech.
Israel has evacuated about 60,000 residents from the north, and senior officials have repeatedly vowed to establish the security needed for them to return, without specifying how.
“This is part of Hezbollah’s aggressiveness, shooting more and deeper into the Israel home front,” Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, told a recent news conference.
In Israel, concern about a northern version of the bloody surprise attack perpetuated by Hamas on Oct. 7 is driving some support for a pre-emptive war.
Security agencies are debating the merits of escalation, said Sima Shine, a former senior official in the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, where she focused on Iran. “People do not feel secure because of what they have seen in the south,” she said. “And Hezbollah is much better than Hamas.”
Discussion in Israel about a possible full-scale war intensified along with the recent daily drone strikes. While such attacks had previously concentrated largely on military targets, this time Hezbollah hit cities that had not been evacuated — like Nahariya on the coast and Katzrin in the Golan Heights. It also ignited wildfires in the north.
The Israeli military said it had responded by hitting Hezbollah positions with artillery and fighter jets.
Ultimately, the border wars have always been freighted with the larger question of who will shape the future narrative of the Middle East.
One vision, inaugurated decades ago by Egypt and Jordan, involves accepting Israel as a neighbor, with Saudi Arabia seen as the ultimate prize. The bloody assault by Hamas, a Tehran ally, derailed that once-accelerating train.
The alternative is Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, the mostly Shiite Muslim alliance of proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that espouse armed conflict with Israel. Hezbollah is the most powerful force that Iran has built toward that end.
“They are contesting the leadership of the region,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Israel.
