Since last October, the choice of whether or not to escalate the tit-for-tat clashes along Israel’s northern border has been Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s: and at every point, he has chosen to. Now, having spectacularly decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership, and wrought an unknown level of havoc among the group’s junior commanders through both boobytrapped communications devices and airstrikes in southern Lebanon, the ball is firmly in Israel’s court.

Perhaps the only thing that can restore Hezbollah’s initiative is an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon, which would play to the militant group’s advantages. Hezbollah has spent nearly two decades preparing for an even more sophisticated layered defence of its core territory than it mounted in 2006. As the regional analyst Michael Young observes, “Israel has not won yet, and the Israelis have a way of allowing their brutality to undercut their political gains. If they decide to invade Lebanon, this may provide a valuable lifeline to Hezbollah, which is at its best when acting as a resistance force on the ground.”

Yet even here, it is unclear how much organised resistance Hezbollah is currently capable of mounting. The group’s command and control networks have clearly been heavily compromised, seemingly by both signals and human intelligence, and its morale is surely heavily dented. Israeli special forces have carried out raids in southern Lebanon in advance of a ground incursion, most likely with the intention of pushing Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River, permitting Israeli civilians to return to the northern border regions from which they have been exiled for a year. But an Israeli ground invasion would also introduce an unpredictable element into the equation: while Lebanon’s de facto rulers are now on the back foot, Lebanon’s notional government is weak and incapable of imposing its writ in the south. Indeed, the combination of invasion and the country’s dysfunctional sectarian politics offer a range of potential outcomes, few of them good for any party involved.

Israel’s Sunday airstrike on Yemeni port facilities, presumably a response to the Houthi targeting of Netanyahu’s plane with a ballistic missile, indicates a willingness to expand the war still further. Indeed, Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi’s statement that “we know how to reach very far, we know how to reach even farther, and we know how to strike there accurately,” is surely a direct warning to Iran.

For the Iranian leadership, Israel’s bold few days of sudden escalation present a major quandary. Until now, both Iran and Hezbollah have been engaged in a carefully-calculated campaign of brinkmanship, with the United States engaged in limiting Iran’s military responses through both quiet diplomacy and the public deployment of naval aviation. But the game’s rules have now changed entirely: the United States is revealed as either unable to restrain Israeli escalation or tacitly in support of it. Iran’s doctrine of utilising Hezbollah to exert its power in the Levant now risks total dissolution, and its policy of “strategic patience” and a long campaign of attrition, playing to the country’s strengths, appears overtaken by events.

Whether the rapidly moving situation in Lebanon will strengthen hardline voices within the Iranian leadership — perhaps forcing a retreat from nuclear diplomacy and a hurried move towards obtaining a nuclear deterrent — or whether Tehran will use the setback to bide its time and reassess its broader strategy is unknown, perhaps within the Iranian leadership itself. Through its caution over the past year, Tehran has found its entire decades-long regional strategy suddenly at risk: yet it is also clear that Iran does not wish to directly enter a war in which the United States would almost certainly enter on Israel’s side. As Tehran wrestles with an appropriate response, what happens next is entirely in Netanyahu’s hands.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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