On October 1st, Israel has moved its troops north, finally launching what has been looming over Lebanon for days: a ground invasion. Statements from the Israeli Defense Forces claim that “IDF began limited, localized, and targeted ground raids based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon”. The military operation followed a series of Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, that led to the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. The sudden surge of warfare has triggered the intervention of Iran, that has fired missiles at Israel in response to the assassinations of top IRGC, Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.
Over the course of this year, there have been numerous events that pushed diplomats to urge for de-escalation, in the fear that those incessant sparks may eventually blow up in a regional war. Each time, the attacks and retaliations on each part have grown more serious. Now, the region seems more than ever on the verge of fallout.
In this scenario, Israel keeps switching its targets while increasingly engaging in the conflict, always winning battles but never truly finishing the war. It seems stuck in a series of Pyrrhic victories: they inflict such a devastating toll on the victor that any true sense of achievement is denied and long-term progress is irreparably damaged. Is the Israeli attempt to eliminate and make a clean slate of every enemy -which it’s not even realistic- really enough to finally be reassured? And how can the total destruction of everything around create solid foundations for the future?
Already at the end of July, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran; while Israel did not take accountability for the action, Qatar and Egypt, which have acted as mediators in ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, still declared that the killing of Haniyeh was a serious hurdle in the negotiation process and could jeopardize efforts to secure a truce in Gaza.
On September 15, Iran-aligned Houthis, who control northern Yemen, reached Israel for the first time with what was identified as a new type of hypersonic ballistic missile. The attack was explicitly claimed by the Houthis in solidarity with the Palestinians, threatening that Israel should expect more ahead of the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the attack demonstrated that Israel was in a “multi-front battle against Iran’s axis of evil that strives to destroy us”.
However, it is Lebanon that is now becoming the main front in the war between Israel and the so called resistance axis (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, Iran) supported by Tehran. The focus was shifted from Gaza to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon already this summer, when mutual attacks between Iran-backed group Hezbollah militias and the IDF army were already occurring.
At the end of August, the Israeli military raised the alarm bar by launching what it called “preemptive” strikes against Hezbollah. Israeli sources declared that the preemptive operation was targeted against weaponry that was about to be used by Hezbollah in a major attack on central and northern Israel. Consequently, the Iran-backed militant group carried out its own attacks, firing over 320 rockets and drones at northern Israel in response to the killing of its military commander Fuad Shukr in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut. Last week, thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded in two separate incidents in Lebanon. The coordinated explosions, which targeted Hezbollah operatives not actively engaged in warfare at the moment of the strike, killed at least 37 people and injured thousands.
But the real surge in warfare occurred, as anticipated, these very days.
On September 23, an intense and wide-ranging Israeli air strike hit the Lebanese territory. At least 492 people were killed according to the country’s health ministry. This death toll marks September 23 as the deadliest day in Lebanon in nearly two decades, since at least the 2006 war. As the Israeli military claimed to have struck 1,600 Hezbollah targets, followed by more strikes the following day, in an effort to demolish the infrastructure the armed group had amassed during the 2006 conflict, thousands of families were forced to flee. Benjamin Netanyahu is now explicitly shifting the target towards Hezbollah, believed to be a well prepared, organized and equipped enemy. As the bombing continues and strikes are exchanged by both sides, Hezbollah confirmed the killing of another one of its top commanders, Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, amid strikes carried out by the IDF in Beirut. Now, Israel has managed to take out Nasrallah, accomplishing an undeniable strategic victory, but at the same time has drawn on itself the ire of Tehran, which has sworn to avenge the leader – and has already acted on it.
The escalation has immediately resonated in international councils and high level assemblies.
On September 25, the United Nation Security Council had a special meeting called by France to cover the situation in Lebanon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned members that “hell is breaking loose in Lebanon. As I told the General Assembly yesterday, we should all be alarmed by the escalation. Lebanon is at the brink.”
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati has called on the UN body to take action, condemning the dramatic situation and pleading that the world ‘cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza’. Adding political perspective to the humanitarian one, he also addressed the Israeli attacks as a blatant violation of Lebanon sovereignty. The French foreign minister has taken the opportunity to unveil joint efforts with the United States to reach a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. The joint US-French plan, supported by several nations, including the EU and Saudi Arabia, proposes a 21-day ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel. The reaction from Israel regarding the ceasefire was a blunt rejection, on the premises that a ceasefire would ensure the occurrence of the next “October 7”, recalling what is now perceived in common Israeli feeling as a national day of mourning on which it is impossible to compromise.
The situation is constantly evolving as we write and tensions are rising: hours after refusing the ceasefire, Israel continued its attack in Lebanon, bombing again the capital Beirut. The death toll so far is 600 victims since Monday 23rd. Netanyahu declared that Israel would “not stop” in Lebanon until all of its objectives are accomplished.
As asserted in a previous TNGO article and suggested by a recent analysis by the Foreign Policy questioning the final goal of Israeli strategy, it seems that the continuous escalation seeked by Netanyahu in the attempt to eliminate and make a clean slate of every enemy doesn’t really help their cause; instead, it may just be a constant pyrrhic victory. Every accomplished military operation -the conquest of Gaza, the explosions of the pagers, the attacks on Lebanon-, only jeopardizes ceasefires, puts allies in difficult situations and undermines international efforts working for a de-escalation. That is, if we assume that ceasefires, de-escalation and international consensus – namely peaceful means of resolution of conflicts- are actually worth something for Israel.
But considering the offensive that has been in place for almost a year, it is evident that humanitarian concerns, such as the recovery of the hostages that the Israeli population is still relentlessly calling for, are mere window dressing. Overwhelming and preemptive attacks, military operations that have leveled Gaza and now are shifting to the invasion of another sovereign State: those are absolute confirmations of the Israeli need to do anything to just eliminate the enemies it is threatened by. There is no strategy, only one goal: survival, at every cost. But the pyrrhic victory lies precisely in this: the greater the scale of the conflict, the greater the efforts to destroy the enemies, the greater will be the elastic response of the opponents. Violence calls for violence, every attack calls for retaliation. Israel is not ‘only’ fighting Hamas or Hezbollah: there is a regional concatenation of alliances that is set in motion with every disturbance of the very fragile balance that is the politics of the Middle East cosmos. The dangerous involvement of Iran and the Houthis is the clearest evidence of this: no action comes without a consequence.
So will Israel ever truly stop fighting?
What doesn’t kill you makes you fiercer: Israel should know that it’s practically impossible to eradicate every cell or military organization in the Middle East that militates against them, and every -failed- attempt of total destruction may just radicalize them even further. The list of wrongs and tragedies, done and suffered, is too long to think that one can make desert to have peace.
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