Hezbollah has made a fatal mistake Officials within the IDF are calling for escalation

A miserable stasis held. Until now.

Israel has seen civilians killed once more; and once more, it is enraged. Saturday’s rocket strike on a football pitch in the Golan Heights killed 12 Druze Israelis, all aged between 10 and 20. In response, the Israeli security cabinet has given authorisation to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to decide when and how Israel will retaliate. Matters are not helped by the IDF’s conclusion that Hezbollah struck using an Iranian Falaq-1 rocket. Tehran cannot be divorced from the 12 Israeli deaths over the weekend — the crisis is regional.

In committing this atrocity, Hezbollah has made a big mistake, not least because it upended its own long-standing strategy toward Israel. Broadly speaking, Hezbollah bases its policy of force on a so-called “deterrent equation”. This is, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center, built on four objectives: one, proactive attacks on Israeli targets; two, attacks in response to IDF offensive operations; three, attacks on key Israeli targets and infrastucture; and four, increasing the range of attack in response to Israeli attacks. The idea, outlined in May by the head of the Hezbollah faction in the Lebanese Parliament, is to keep Israel from “deluding itself into thinking it was capable of attacking Lebanon”.

Above all, the “deterrent equation” is based on rules around the use of force, which primarily limit attacks to those on Israeli military targets within a range of 3-5km from the border. They also seek to kill soldiers and destroy military capabilities, while trying to avoid harming civilians. This preference, of course, exists only in theory; when Hezbollah fires rockets into Israeli cities, it knows that civilians are likely to be struck — especially given the sheer amount of ordnance it sends in.

As the fighting between the two sides has continued, Hezbollah has sought to tweak the “equation” by gradually escalating when it deems the situation appropriate — either through longer-range weapons during, say, a peak in the Gaza war or following the killing of one of its commanders. With regards to Gaza, its official position is that it will only stop attacking Israel when the war ends.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s response had gradually taken shape in recent days. Reports on Monday claimed that two people died and three were injured in an Israeli drone strike outside the southern Lebanese town of Shaqra. Another was also killed and four wounded in Israeli airstrikes on a car and motorcycle driving between the towns of Mays al-Jabal and Shaqra. Netanyahu, for his part, has promised “harsh” retribution.

Strip away much of the geopolitical and strategic rhetoric and Hezbollah’s “equation” comes down to a simple tactic: mirroring. If Israel attacks deeper into Lebanon, Hezbollah will strike deeper into Israel. If Israeli strikes hit Lebanese civilians, Hezbollah will do the same south of the border. Indeed, Lebanese institutions demand it. Following an Israeli strike that killed three militants at the start of the war, Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated daily al-Akhbar, wrote that the group should reasonably expect to act according to the “equation of symmetry”, which required it to carry out a military operation that would result in the death of at least three Israeli soldiers.

Yet now, Hezbollah finds itself in a deeply precarious situation. The group initially denied Saturday’s strike — perhaps unsurprisingly given that they killed not Jewish soldiers but Druze children. They realise that this is bad for them. Nasrallah must also know that the blame for further escalation now lies with Hezbollah: the consensus is that the group fired heavy rockets at an IDF base on Mount Hermon, above Majdal Shams, but that one of the rockets overshot the target.

During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, which began after a cross-border Hezbollah attack led to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others, Israel devastated large parts of south Lebanon. Afterwards, Nasrallah declared that, had he known that Israel would have reacted so ferociously, he never would have countenanced such a raid. Yet he also repeatedly boasted that Hezbollah had “won” the war. (As a friend in Beirut later remarked to me: “Any more ‘victories’ like that and we won’t have a country left.”)

More than anything, the conflict taught Hezbollah one overarching lesson, and it is the bedrock of the “deterrent equation”: do whatever you can to deter and inflict pain on Israel — but always keep it below the threshold of all-out war, because that you cannot win.

Today, however, that strategy is now at risk. When I returned to Israel early in the year, a government official told me that the elements within the IDF leadership were keen to take out Hezbollah. No longer, they reasoned, could they allow the northern part of their country to be held hostage to a terror group. No longer would they accept the north being emptied of its people. They understood the scale of the worldwide opprobrium that would follow. But the alternative — to live with a terror army perennially on your border — is, they concluded, worse. What other nation would accept that? And besides, the world has already turned against Israel — so why not take the opportunity to try to remove the country’s greatest terror threat?

One might think that the trajectory of the war against Hamas would give the IDF pause for thought. But this is post-October 7 Israel: an even angrier and traumatised nation. And the threat is undoubtedly very real. How many rockets should a country “accept”? How many civilians should be killed, before it responds with full force?

On Saturday, Hezbollah may have given them the green light they need. And if Israel escalates, Hezbollah — by its own doctrine — will be forced to escalate in turn. Then there is probably only one way this will end: in catastrophe, for Israel and Lebanon, and for the civilians on both sides.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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