Jonathan Spyer
Middle East Forum, Aug. 26, 2024
“Tehran’s desire now to preserve its assets and return the focus to the campaigns of attrition it prefers will have been well noted by both friend and foe.”
Hezbollah’s response to the killing of senior official Fuad Shukr, when it finally came, was a more minor event than anticipated. For weeks, both the Lebanese Shia Islamist group and its Iranian patron have been threatening a terrible revenge for the recent assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. It is now clear, however, that neither Hezbollah or Iran wishes to risk a descent to all out war at the present time. Iran appears to have relegated its response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran to some point in the future. Hezbollah, meanwhile, sought to target two sites of high significance – the Mossad headquarters, and the HQ of the IDF’s signals intelligence unit, 8200. Both are located close to Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, in central Israel. In the event, Hezbollah failed to strike either target. Some 230 rockets and 20 drones were fired at Israel’s north. There was some damage to houses, and one Israeli sailor was killed, apparently by debris from an interceptor.
Simultaneously, 100 Israeli jets struck at Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. Six Hezbollah fighters were killed in the course of the day’s exchanges of fire. In a speech given in the evening, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared to hint that the organisation may consider the day’s rocket launches sufficient to constitute revenge for the killing of Fuad Shukr. The group was waiting to see the ‘results’ of the attack, Nasrallah said. If these were found to be ‘satisfactory,’ then the matter would be considered closed.
It appears likely that Hezbollah will indeed conclude that sufficient revenge has been exacted for the loss of Shukr. This is because, as is becoming increasingly clear, the movement and its patrons in Tehran very much wish to avoid being drawn into a conventional conflict with Israel and its allies at the present time. The killings of Haniyeh and Shukr, indeed, appear to have constituted a kind of bluff-calling by Israel, in which the Jewish state sought by escalation to break the pattern of slow attritional warfare preferred by Iran and its allies. … [To read the full article, click here]